The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • Security malaise and post Covid-19 Nigeria

    Security malaise and post Covid-19 Nigeria

    Jide Osuntokun

     

     

    Anybody who says things are alright in Nigeria today is being dishonest. If the truth must be told, we are going through a difficult period of our national life now compounded by the coronavirus pandemic. The level of disenchantment and disillusionment is very high. This is caused by the general insecurity in the land of which the campaign against the Boko Haram insurgency is just but one. No area of Nigeria is secure, from the Northwest to the North-central, the Southwest to the South- south and the Southeast to the Northeast. Only intrepid travellers dare moves anywhere in Nigeria without armed escort. Having an armed escort is no guarantee against attacks by one type of marauders or the other. They range from bandits, cattle rustlers, ethnic militants bent on seizing other people’s lands after slaughtering the men and raping their women and children. There are even instances of men and women being raped which for us Africans is an abomination.

    Complaints from governors about paucity of policemen and other security men in their states fill the press every day. As citizens, we are stuck and marooned wherever we are and we can no longer perform family responsibilities such as burying our dead ones in our towns and villages or visiting the graves of departed souls. This is because we are usually advised not to take the risk of coming home and to avoid compounding the losses when one is killed or kidnapped by bandits on the roads.

    What is most agonizing is that if one is killed, there is just no one to run to for justice. The police appear incapable or incapacitated because they lack the elementary and rudimentary tools of investigation and even when investigations are completed, the ethnic origin of the killers may prevent police from following through the prosecution of the offenders.  It seems some people have become sacred cows in Nigeria. With justice and punishment not sure and immediate, the offenses are repeated ad nauseam. Many people are taking laws into their own hands in reprisal and self-help attacks and retribution thus compounding our security problems. With this kind of situation foreign and domestic investments are drying up. Some of the retail sector dominated by South African businesses are gradually winding down and folding up with thousands of Nigerians thrown out of employment.

    Many Nigerians are hunkering down in the apparently secure few towns and administrative capitals of states thus abandoning the rural countryside, farms and villages to their own devices. There is a looming famine if farmers cannot safely till the land, plant their seeds and harvest their crops. We are gradually losing the joy of having a big country and the pride that goes with it. We are now looking forlornly at small countries that are well run and where there is security of life and limbs. I watched with horror a Ghanaian politician running for office and telling his audience not to vote the kind of politicians running our country into power in Ghana. He had absolutely no respect for us. He kept saying “Nigeria is dead”. Perhaps this explains the recent humiliation of Nigeria when a part of our embassy in Accra was demolished by an irate Ghanaian!

    The unsuccessful campaign by our military against Boko Haram for almost a decade has sapped the power of our armed forces as well as undermined our economy. The amount being spent on the campaign is what would have been available for building some regenerative infrastructure for the country. Yet this war has to be fought to the bitter end until it is won. But one is afraid that there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. We had the embarrassing situation in which the young governor of Borno was nearly killed in an ambush between Monguno and Baga after security had said the road was clear. In justified anger, the governor accused publicly the military of sabotage. The Shehu of Borno reechoed this by saying nobody in Borno is safe. Yet a whole division of the Nigerian Army and a squadron of the Nigerian Air Force are based in Maiduguri. There are also mobile police force and other support armed groups all trying to secure the state. Then there is the so called civilian armed group made up of hunters. The governor in exasperation asked the army to tell him if it was impossible for them to secure the place so that he will deploy local people to secure at least Baga and environs because he wanted to return displaced civilians back to their homes in Kukawa local government area. This may sound fanciful but it has happened before when Sir Kashim Ibrahim was Waziri of Borno in the 1950s and was faced with an incendiary movement of opposition militants. He dealt with them by calling on his people to rise against banditry.

    One can only hope that our situation is not so hopeless that we will not be able to defeat a local insurgency even though aided by Islamic fundamentalists from outside. This campaign against the Boko Haram and the affiliate of the Al Qaeda in West Africa has become a matter of honour which our military must face squarely. This is because it has raised the question of a levee en masse or citizen army which the governor of Borno has posed to the Nigerian military.

    The general insecurity has also again brought back the discussion whether Nigerian citizens should be allowed to legally carry concealed weapons. This may sound crazy but why should it? I know that many people will say the freedom will be misused. In the USA where ownership of guns is permitted, there are conditions attached to it. One must of course be of age and must hold a responsible job and of fixed address and possibly own a property.

    No matter what conditions are attached to it, gun violence kills many more people in the USA than coronavirus will ever kill. Obviously, no one in his real senses will advocate freedom to carry concealed weapons in Nigeria. But if it can be properly organized, I am in favour of some kind of citizen army which we can start from the level of the National Youth Service Corps. This is not a revolutionary idea. We used to have this in government colleges and secondary schools and at the University of Ibadan in colonial Nigeria. Whatever option that may be deemed possible is worth exploring. In France and the USA, citizen army is regarded as a bulwark for democracy. It is inconceivable for the army in those two countries to stage a coup d’état because it knows it will be met by armed resistance.

    I find it galling that some ragtag militants and armed bandits will be running all over our country maiming and raping the people indiscriminate of gender. The picture of an elderly man in Southern Kaduna pouring, in biblical fashion, ashes of his destroyed home on his head leaves an indelible impression on me and should keep men of conscience awake all night. It is time to stop all these tragedies and ethnic shenanigans. What then should we do as a people and as a government?

    We should invoke the War Act to declare a state of siege in the country, suspend habeas corpus and give large powers to a war cabinet to put the entire country on war footing with the president and the governors given executive powers to put an end to banditry, brigandage, cattle rustling, ethnic cleansing and armed militancy by all means possible within six months. During the period, all strikes and industrial actions shall be suspended. Parliament shall be suspended while a committee set up to reduce parliamentary representation to one chamber House. The committee shall also reduce by half, local governments in the country and all funds of local governments transferred directly to the states so as to eliminate the idea of three tier government because our federation is that of states and the federation as exists all over the world. Money saved from suspended federal and state parliaments shall be mobilized for expanded police force to take care for adequate policing of the country. During this period, all previous “constitutional” conferences reports shall be studied by a committee of former heads of state,  former chief justices of the Supreme Court, leaders of Trade Union Congress, representatives of Christian and Islamic leadership and six deans of faculty of law from the six zones of the country and presidents of the various academies in Nigeria.

    The idea is that the group should not be unwieldy. Whatever they agree upon shall be presented to the president to be presented to a constituent assembly of not more than 100 people. Its resolutions shall become the grundnorm or Basic law of the country. The aim will be to produce a devolved and lean government of the people by the people not a government of politicians for politicians as we currently have.

  • The Akpabio papers

    The Akpabio papers

    By Lawal Ogienagbon

    Since the nation’s return to democracy in 1999,  the relationship between the executive and the legislature has been uneasy. Right from that day on May 29, 1999, that the military handed over to civilians till today, it has been a love-hate relationship. They are friends today and foes the next day. Most often, money is at the root of their altercation. It is either the executive is accusing the legislature of demanding bribe or using its oversight powers to plunder the resources of parastatals.

    The Constitution grants the legislature immense powers to enable it act as check on the executive. It is the powerhouse of constitutional democracy; the cornerstone of the house which a nation represents. Without the legislature, democracy is at peril because the nation will be without laws. A society without laws is toying with anarchy and waiting to explode. For a society to progress,  there must be synergy between the executive and legislature. They must work in sync for the common good. This Ninth National Assembly headed by Senate President Ahmad Lawan has a lot to do in this regard.

    Unfortunately, we have not witnessed such relationship between these two arms of government in the past 21 years. On the rare occasions that they see eye to eye, the people wonder. It should not be so. Being a minister in the Federal  Executive Council (FEC) or a legislator in the National Assembly is a privilege which should not be abused under any guise as some of these people are doing. They are custodians of a public trust, so their conduct must be civil and decorous.

    In the past few days, we have been treated to another drama between these institutions, as the Niger Delta Affairs Minister Godswill Akpabio and the National Assembly are at each other’s throat.  The lawmakers’ probe of  the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) which Akpabio supervises is at the centre of their rift. The public is faced with a twist in the probe,  so to say, as focus has shifted to Akpabio’s allegations against some lawmakers. The leadership of the National Assembly is riled by the allegations that Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila on July 21 rose up in arms against the minister. He gave Akpabio 48 hours to substantiate his allegations that 60 percent of NDDC contracts were awarded to members of the National Assembly.

    While appearing before the House of Representatives Committee on Niger Delta on July 20, Akpabio said: “Who are even the greatest beneficiaries of NDDC contracts? It is you people. If you look at your chairman, your chairman…! Are you asking me the beneficiaries in the National Assembly? I just told you that we have records to show that most of the contracts in NDDC are given to members of the National Assembly but you don’t know about it. The two chairmen (of Senate and House committees on Niger Delta) can explain to you. I was a member of NDDC committee. I know what was going on”.

    Of course,  as a senator in the immediate past National Assembly,  he was an insider who saw everything. But he kept quite then because it paid him to do so. Akpabio is opening a can of worms because his position as a minister is being threatened. This is how our leaders, be they in the executive or legislature,  have been shortchanging us. NDDC was established to address the backwardness of the region, which is the goose that lays the nation’s golden eggs.  We derive our wealth from the region, but the area knows no development. Its people and environment are in a pitiable state, while their so-called representatives in the National Assembly are living big.

    They are cocooned in posh mansions in Abuja while their people live in squalor back home. Rather than vent their spleen on these lawmakers when they come home, their poor constituents flock around them for crumbs from the masters’ tables. They are more at home with pittance from their representatives than with enduring assets befitting of the Niger Delta as the sustainer of the common weal. Why will Niger Delta lawmakers be more interested in their pockets than in the development of their region? Are they not ashamed that their region remains poor and deprived despite its status as the nation’s major revenue earner?

    The people too! Why do they allow their leaders to steal their common wealth and blame others for what they brought upon themselves? Since they seem satisfied with what their leaders are doing, they should just remain silent forever and stop whining over the underdevelopment of their region. If they cannot take up their lawmakers for not showing interest in the region,  will it be proper for them to challenge leaders from other areas over the matter?

    Akpabio has, following Gbajabiamila’s challenge, released the names of lawmakers who got NDDC’s contracts. They are mainly from the Niger Delta. These lawmakers have been fighting tooth and nail to exonerate themselves. Akpabio appears to be a reluctant squealer though. He spilled the beans because he was seemingly forced to. It is hard to discountenance what he said no matter how strong those he accused deny the allegation. Akpabio and these people know themselves and he won’t have accused them for the fun of it, knowing the consequences of such action. Things would not have come to a head, if the lawmakers had not attempted to remove the speck in Akpabio’s eyes without first attending to the beam in theirs.

    Now, the lawmakers mentioned in the bulky document he sent to Gbajabiamila to buttress his claim are fighting to clear themselves. But, the House, rather than face reality and do a soul search is bleating for nothing. It said it did not ask Akpabio to write to it, but to release the names of the legislator-contractors. Are some of those names not in the Akpabio papers? The public awaits the next round of the battle.

    As mentioned in this space last week, there is no difference between our ministers and lawmakers. What is happening in NDDC is what obtains in other ministries,  departments and agencies (MDAs). The lawmakers will look the  other way as long as they are carried along. But where they are not, all hell will be let loose. For the National Assembly to maintain its integrity, it should not turn the power of oversight which it wields over the executive to one for coralling contracts and public funds.

    If it continues to abuse or misuse this power,  it will continue to run into this kind of Akpabio storm. The outcome is obvious: it will distance itself  from the people whose support matters most in such times of trouble.

  • The alpha and the chameleon patriot

    The alpha and the chameleon patriot

    By Olatunji Ololade

    The people’s patriot is often a victim of his own love. Love for others’ well-being. His body is sculpted tilth and his soul unfurls as a humid bower. He radically bleeds body and soul to seek and fulfill his people’s voiced wishes and unarticulated simple lusts. He studies communal silence in order to speak it.

    Eventually, he finds that he had squandered rhetoric and spunk on the perfidious. He is hung out to dry by the populace whose interests he sought to protect. Never inclined to be apostate, his passion dries out. Where it doesn’t, he is dismissed as a ‘noise-maker’ as Nigeria’s political class, partisan press and treacherous segments of the citizenry eventually labelled foremost patriot, late Gani Fawehinmi.

    In Fawehinmi’s wake, successive “patriots” have embraced the wisdom of keeping quiet. They scoff at the romanticized clamour to topple the oppressive oligarchs knowing Nigerians would yet sacrifice them and settle for an opportunistic contract between their exploiters (the government), and a part of the exploited (labour and youth leadership), at the expense of the rest of the exploited (you, me and everyone) – something Noel Ignatin aptly identifies as “the original sweetheart agreement.”

    Enter the chameleon patriot: having witnessed the tragedy of his martyred peer, he seeks self-preservation. Every thought and action of his, is a frantic swerve to advance personal interests. He is also a victim of his own lust; he feeds flesh and soul to the dark fangs of its vampirism. His obsessive lust steals his years and drains his lusts but he hardly cares as he laughs all the way to the bank.

    The chameleon patriot is more delicately constituted than the people’s patriot. He is sensible to pain and pleasure but trades and profits on collective miseries. He is the gubernatorial or presidential Chief of Staff, the Presidential Adviser/Assistant on Media Affairs, Attorney-General. Sometimes, he is the Governor, the President, dishonest bank chief, or Chief Justice.

    Of course, there are always a few men and women, who are heroic indeed and candour but they hardly survive power’s serpentine corridors.

    Thus the chameleon patriot dissolves into multiple identities characterised by the political arena’s familiar bogeys. His transformation is akin to Fagunwa’s mythical forest ghommid’s. Other beings pass through him as if he were a wraith; he mutates into a creep, a scalawag, dream-killer, and intellectual thug. He is the menacing snake in Nigeria’s green pasture.

    He is the product of a moral void; the casualty of a system that bullies the populace to pacify and please authority. For education, he is taught to cheat the system and applaud financial theft as a shrewd corporate strategy.

    He is unaware, writes Deresiewicz, that, the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. During the lockdown, for instance, when panic and states’ defensives against the COVID-19 were intense, several youths posted on social media, pictures of their newly acquired certificates. So doing, they rebuked with glazed contempt, those who hadn’t seized the benefits of the “free time” and acquired one or two certificates courtesy the numerous free professional courses online.

    Oftentimes, such posts revealed the depth of the poster’s ignorance or the poverty of his or her mind. One such self-identified “over-achiever, sapiosexual and alpha-female” admonished her peers to quit reading “useless novels” and instead commit to more beneficial exploits, like earning a certificate in “coding” or “digital influencing.”

    She shouldn’t be blamed for being so “practical” and “deliberate” to “make cheddar (money),” to borrow her words; many like her responded to her post, sharing pictures of their newly acquired certificates in fresh, tactual, vocational competencies that would supposedly improve their lot in the labour market for supposedly practical, futuristic jobs.

    The poor missy and her ilk forget that even the fanciest certificates have expiration dates in the dynamic technological world. Only “useless novels” offer timeless nourishment of minds and souls.

    The anomaly reflects a grievous affliction of Nigeria’s labour sector where individuals are propelled into trendy specialties. The frenzy to acquire fancy, professional certificates aids a retreat of supposedly productive segments into specialized ghettos spanning the range of vocational and academic disciplines.

    Of course, there are gifted, evolved individuals who read to expand the life of the mind and ask the big questions but they are often a negligible minority.

    Nigeria had brilliant geophysicists, accountants, and engineers working for multinationals and banks, but it was the Awolowos, Soyinkas, and Achebes that set Nigeria on the global map as a nation of genii and vast talents.

    While the multinational staff clocked lucrative colossal hours and faithfully managed systems, it was the authors of what the misguided “alpha” missy called “useless literature” that inspired decisive national debates on crucial issues like the civil war, policy failure, foreign relations, political ethics, and the nationhood question.

    For Socrates, all virtues were forms of knowledge thus to train someone to manage a business account for PWC is to educate him or her in a skill. To train them to debate the ethics of a business venture is to educate them on values and morals. A culture that disregards the vital interplay between morality and power writes Hedges, condemns itself to death.

    Such existential truths are scorned by the modern fortune-hunting professional. This disconnect subsists across professions, government, and academia. Nigerian economists, for instance, chant elaborate theoretical models yet know little of how their fancy, soulless economics impacts on rural poetry and suburban lives.

    The core of our education and politics is driven to replicate American values or secure a seat at Europe or Asia’s table. We must shun such colonial mentality and take visionary steps to build our own table and craft seats for our own table.

    This would be asking too much, however, of the digital alpha breed, who see novels as “useless literature” ill-suited to nation-building and money-making ventures.

    Their fancy certificates and futuristic competencies may earn them money in the short-run but they will lose it all in the long-run to the same system that taught them to be soulless savages.

    Many of them study to obtain perfect grades in tedious economic classes and stirring literary lessons. But while they may know the plot and salient details of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, they are unable to tell why the story was revealing of colonial insolence or why Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was worthy as a bristling response.

    Writers from Euripides to Banks, Soyinka, Achebe, and Fagunwa have used literature as both a mirror and a lens, to reflect society’s hypocrisy, moral corruption, and injustice.

    It was Charles Dickens who directed the attention of middle-class readers to the slums and workhouses of London. Honors de Balzac ripped open France’s callous heart through the volumes of his Human Comedy.

    And it was Fagunwa who took us all on a philosophical adventure through The Forest of a Thousand Daemons to uncover hard, immutable truths about life, spirituality, self, and wisdom. The messages resonate in the discerning heart and forelock, long after the last page has rustled shut.

  • Unending war of Fulani and Tiv Bantu immigrants

    Unending war of Fulani and Tiv Bantu immigrants

    By Jide Oluwajuyitan

    With scores killed during the violence that broke out in in Kajuru Local Government last Friday and renewed Sunday killings in Zikpak, about two kilometres from Kafanchan which host a large consignment of soldiers, it was yet another dark week in besieged southern Kaduna. The renewed violence came shortly after the killing of 21 people during a wedding ceremony in Kukum-Daji village in Kaura Local Government Area.

    Garba Shehu in his July 21  statement issued on behalf of the president saw ‘the problem in Southern Kaduna as an evil combination of politically-motivated banditry, revenge killings and mutual violence by criminal gangs acting on ethnic and religious grounds’, while Kaduna State governor, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai who had during his first term attributed the crisis to ‘the refusal of past governments to implement recommendations on security  which in turn encouraged perpetrators of nefarious act to continue’, now says ‘the attacks, were laced with ethnic and religious colourations’.

    But there is more to the southern Kaduna age-long violence. Absence of justice and fairness are potential sources of hate, violence and resistance by marginalized people.  Instead of playing the ostrich, many believe the president and the governor are uniquely positioned to address issues of justice and fairness in order to end a regime of hate and violence that have defined their tenure since 2015.

    Victims of herdsmen violence finger government as the problem. For instance, Saleh, member of federal house representing southern Kaduna, during Channels TV’s Morning Ride programme last Monday, ‘blamed federal government security forces who instead of bringing the perpetrators of violence to face the law’ only emerge after each killings to arrest local youths.  Chawangon Nathan, secretary of CAN, Godogodo zone, blamed the federal government for ‘over 102 people’, he claimed  “have so far been killed, 50, 000 houses burnt, the over 10, 000 displaced people and over 30, 000 hectares of land destroyed deliberately by Fulani herdsmen within six months”.

    The Southern and Middle Belt leaders Forum, (SMBLF); the coalition  of labour and over 80 civil society groups;  Zamani Lekwot, chairman and Peter Buba, the secretary, Southern Kaduna Elders Consultative Forum (SKECF)  all put the blame squarely at the doorsteps  of Kaduna State and federal governments.

    Sa’ad Abubakar, Sultan of Sokoto, at a meeting of the Northern Traditional Rulers Council (NTRC) and Northern States Governors’ Forum (NSGF) insisted violence has continued to thrive in northern Nigeria and Middle Belt because ‘no one is punished for the criminal doings they commit’. Just as John Onaiyekan, a cardinal and Catholic archbishop of Abuja diocese, warned of a situation where  those who have been badly damaged and who are being killed daily “will organise themselves, not because they are Christians but because they are human beings, who cannot sit down and allow themselves to be killed”.

    Both the president and the governor are not seen by victims as impartial arbiters. The fixation with the use of the military as against community policing universally acceptable approach to fighting crimes at the community level only increases suspicion of the governed.

    Buratai’s “We are here to keep the peace, we are not here to take sides in the conflict…we want to ensure that there is peace so that people will go about their normal businesses” pledge during the establishment of a military formation remain a mere wish after three years of increasing violence.

    Garba Shehu’s ‘Southern Kaduna enjoys comprehensive security deployments, including the Army, Special Forces of both the Army and the Air Force, surveillance aircraft by the Air Force and mobile police units that are on the ground on a 24-hour basis to forestall criminality and keep the peace” remains a forlorn hope.

    And Buratai’s “There is a long historical connection, you cannot separate the herders from farmers. It is a long-time history, the better we live in peace, the better for all of us” during his establishment of yet another military base in Jema’a Local Government Area, was part of the reasons military approach will always fail.  Statements that insist on status quo and seal the hope of the aggrieved only strengthen the will to resist injustice.

    Unfortunately, successive Nigerian leaders have continued to play the ostrich instead of addressing the quest for self-actualization of the people of the Middle Belt region. With the conquest of the Hausa states by Uthman Dan Fodio Jihadist between 1803-1808, Fodio confiscated Hausa lands and installed 12 of his Fulani kinsmen and one Hausa as emirs. However, the defeated Fulani lost their claim to the Hausa land with Frederick Lugard’s 1903 declaration that “the power once exercised by the defeated caliphate had reverted to the British” after sacking of Sokoto Sunni Muslim Caliphate founded in 1804.

    And just as Herbert Macaulay did when he took Chief Oluwa’s case against government to the Privy Council in London which upheld Chief Oluwa’s appeal over the acquisition of his family land and compelled the colonial government to pay him full compensation  of 22,500 pounds, Macaulay also in 1908 successfully launched a campaign against the Hausa Land Ordinance which gave the colonial power  an unlimited right to acquire any land.

    But unlike the  Hausas that allowed their Fulani overlords to hold their land in trust for them,  the native Tiv, Idoma, Berom, Angas, Kwalla and Taroh people  of Benue and Plateau states and Southern Kaduna took  ownership of their  land following the collapse of Sokoto caliphate they had sustained with slave labour of about  two million slaves.

    They have continued to fight descendants of Uthman Dan Fodio that lust after their land including Ahmadu Bello, the Premier of the north who according to Alfred Rewane told Awolowo who was fighting for the creation of a Middle Belt region that “those whose freedom Awo sought were his great grandfather’s slaves.”

    President Buhari’s pan-Nigerian agenda has never been in doubt.  But his ‘delegation by abdication’ approach to governance has allowed some of his political appointees and Fulani kinsmen who according to his wife, neither supported his election nor understood the APC manifesto to hijack his government in the service of other tendencies.

    It was too much a coincidence that the desperate battle for the luxuriant Benue /Plateau Southern Kaduna land became intensified after Buhari’s 2015 victory with the war according to El Rufai being viciously waged not by our Fulani compatriots but by Fulani immigrant herdsmen from outside Nigeria.

    And by strange coincidence, the President’s Fulani minister of defence blamed victims of herdsmen killings with the excuse that colonial grazing routes were blocked by farmers; the open encouragement of Fulani herdsmen by Lamido Sanusi, the deposed Emir of Kano, to disobey Benue State grazing laws; Myetti Allah cattle breeders  rejection of  modern  grazing methods while insisting that open grazing  is part of Fulani culture and then the midnight attempt to illegally erect a RUGA settlement in Benue without  consulting the governor.

    All these fitted well into the conspiracy theorists’ claim that the president is providing a shield for Fulani land grabbers as well as the apparent false narrative by his political enemies –Afenifere, Ohaneze, the Middle Belt Forum and the Ijaw National Congress  that he is the big masquerade behind the surreptitious move by migrant stateless  Fulani to take over Nigeria.

  • My forecast on the coming US Presidential Election

    My forecast on the coming US Presidential Election

    By Jide Osuntokun

    The coming presidential election in the USA in November, barely 96 days to come is for President Donald Trump to lose and not for former Vice President Joe Biden to win. I say this because as the incumbent president, Trump packs a lot of power and punch in his hands that he can use to the disadvantage of his opponent. He can for example rush through Congress ,where his party the Republican Party, has control of the all-powerful Senate, legislations to make lives of  the economically bedraggled Americans better such as the trillions of stimulus dollars that are being given out to individuals and companies to lessen the impact of the Covid-19. He can change his attitude and strategy to combat the coronavirus pandemic by listening more to physicians and scientists than by second guessing them. He can even suddenly reach a modus vivendi and a rapprochement with China that will lead to a spike in the stock market and give a feel good excitement to investors. He can also fight a short war with a weak country like Venezuela or begin some bombing raids of Iran that will raise nationalist feelings in the USA and call for a patriotic support for a president at war. Since it seems Trump will do anything to retain power, I will not put anything beyond him.

    I have just read two books one by the irascible and aggressive Dr. John Bolton titled The Room Where it Happened.. Bolton was until recently Trump’s National Security Adviser. The other book by Dr. Mary L. Trump with the forbidden title – Too Much Never Enough: How My Family Created The Most Dangerous Man in the World.  This is a book by the president’s niece who is a professor of clinical psychology.

    The two books make it clear that America made a mistake by electing Trump. Both books took off from two different directions of policy and psychology. Dr. Bolton feels Trump is totally uninformed and he is not ready to listen to expert advice and he is given to making decisions on the spur of the moment which is dangerous in a nuclear age where a wrong decision could possibly lead to human annihilation. For example Trump does not even know that Great Britain is a nuclear power. If he does not know the strength of his partners and allies, how can he know those of potential adversaries?

    Bolton feels that Trump is apparently beholden to Vladimir Putin who has been allowed to get away with murder thus destroying the basis of deterrence on which post Second World War global peace rests. To make matters worse, he has weakened and undermined important allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to the extent that support for Trump’s America in time of crisis is not guaranteed. Read along with Michael Wolf’s earlier book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump’s White House, one gets the impression that Trump is not averse to using nuclear weapons against a foreign enemy.

    Writing from the advantage of a family member who is also a clinical psychologist, Mary Trump says the man is morally flawed. Donald Trump is the junior brother to Freddy Trump who is Mary’s father. Their unscrupulous father, Fredrick Trump, heavily accented German English-speaking American who was not totally accepted in respectable circles wanted his son Freddy Trump to be what the old man couldn’t be so he pushed the young man until he couldn’t cope and he succumbed to drinks and drugs. Rather than show sympathy and understanding, Freddy’s younger brother Donald cashed in on the disillusionment of their father to do his brother in.

    After his father began to dote on him, he then began to manipulate his father who could not allow his younger son fail like his older sibling. Whatever he wanted his father gave him running to hundreds of millions in his real estate and gambling casino business. Just like his father had done, Donald manipulated the system and the banks to his own benefit and throughout the years his father before him and himself avoided paying taxes. By the time the senior Trump died, he had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and didn’t know too much again and Donald was able to manipulate the situation to his own advantage. The old Trump’s estate valued at about a billion dollars was declared to be just about $30 million to avoid taxes and the two children of Donald Trump’s brother Freddy were simply thrown under the bus, so to say. Mary Trump’s book is obviously written with bitterness. But discounting the motive, Mary Trump paints the picture of a man who is totally morally flawed. She narrated an event in Florida where she was a guest of her uncle. When she came out of the swimming pool she said her uncle looked at her breasts ravishingly and said “Mary you are stacked”! The same Trump while admiring his own daughter said he would probably be dating her if she were not his daughter!. Mary Trump says the man never accepts any fault and lacks the milk of human kindness and uses people for his personal pleasure after which he disposes of them as filthy rags. She says Donald Trump only cares for himself alone and would use anything or anybody or the national interest to satisfy his ego and does not have the ability of human sympathies.

    Some other close associates have written more damning books about Trump than these two and yet it seems Americans who support Trump will always be in his corner. The main reason for this is that he has persuaded most of the petit bourgeoisie who are white people that he is fighting to make America great for them. These are people who are not too educated and whose only advantage they have over others is the colour of their skin. He appeals to these people who think the blacks are coming to rape their daughters and their wives! Eldridge Cleaver‘s book Soul on Ice, is about the attraction of black men to white women and whether this is true or not is in the psyche of white American men. Apart from the white petit bourgeoisie, the military-industrial complex which is benefiting from bellicose and jingoistic vituperations of the president about building up American forces to confront any enemy are also quietly supporting Trump. So also is Wall Street and others benefiting from stock market bubbles.

    Now if all these disparate groups hold together, then Trump will be unbeatable. The big but is that Trump is becoming an embarrassment even to some of his ardent supporters. His open racism does not go well with some of his evangelical supporters who though racist themselves, would rather that it remains closet. His handling of the coronavirus pandemic has not gone down well with older Americans in places like Florida and Arizona which were previously Trump country. His refusal to disclose his tax status and his pro-business policies and anti-universal healthcare is beginning to affect poor white Americans and not just the poor blacks.

    All that Joe Biden has to do is avoid his usual gaffes and occasional misstatements. It is a pity he committed himself to choosing a female running mate. But he better make sure he does not choose a black female running mate. At 77, any vice president to Biden is a potential president and I do not think America is ready yet for a black female president or any female at all after eight years of Obama which was the reason this bull in a China shop, Trump was elected in the first place. A black female running mate will be a kiss of death to the Democratic candidate. He should be advised to find a white governor or former governor or senator of a middle or western American state like Michigan, Indiana, California, Minnesota or Iowa. America will just be too happy to have such a combination and quiet time after the tumultuous years of Donald J. Trump.

    If Joe Biden becomes president, he will have the advantage of the liberal intelligentsia on his side and he certainly will have a more representative cabinet. If the Democrats win the two Houses of Congress then he as a white man who is known as a moderate middle of the road politician and a consensus-builder may be what America needs to reset itself for a brighter future of prosperity, reconstruction and reconciliation necessary to guarantee their preeminence in a world where it will increasingly be challenged by resurgent China.

  • President Buhari needs new hands

    President Buhari needs new hands

    By Jide Osuntokun

    I voted for President Buhari in all his presidential elections since 2003 because I felt he has the sense of urgency and will power needed to tackle the multifarious problems of our country.

    How did I come to this conclusion? I was in the University of Maiduguri from 1982 to 1984 as Professor and Dean of Faculty of Arts straight from Washington DC in the United States where I had lived for about three years.

    In early 1983 or thereabouts, Chadian forces invaded some parts of Nigeria near Doro/Baga across the rapidly drying Lake Chad and inflicted some casualties and pain on Nigerians on our own soil.

    General Muhammadu Buhari was then General Officer Commanding the armoured division in Jos.

    He ordered the 23rd Brigade based in Maiduguri to pursue the Chadian army across the border into Chad and to give the Chadian army a bloody nose so to say.

    My friend the then Colonel Joshua Dogonyaro was then in command and the orders were carried out to the letter.

    The action was condemned by the government of President Shehu Shagari and the army’s action was said to have had no approval of the government.

    The government may have been right  to  have suggested that a prior permission from civil authorities should have been sought before crossing an international border with military forces, but so  also was the man on the spot  right who had to respond to armed incursions immediately especially from the chaotic situation in Chad Republic.

    When the Shagari regime was overthrown and replaced by the duo of Brigadiers Buhari and Tunde Idiagbon in December 1983, they immediately said their regime was a continuation of the no-nonsense Murtala Muhammad/Olusegun Obasanjo regime.

    They acted as such by imposing draconian discipline on the country and attracting respect for us externally. A manifestation of their aggressive response to events was the attempt to kidnap Umaru Dikko, erstwhile corrupt trade minister under Shagari who was calling for Buhari‘s overthrow from his safe abode in London.

    When in reaction to the failed Dikko kidnap attempt, the British government seized Nigerian Airways plane, Nigeria retaliated by seizing a plane of British Airways.

    One may not agree with the modus operandi of Buhari’s government in the Dikko affair, but as a nationalist, one would somehow be happy that Nigeria had come a long way from being subservient to foreign powers to being an important player in international politics.

    These were the reasons that made me prefer Buhari over others when he entered presidential politics. Having studied and worked abroad and suffered from racism and humiliation, I was not ready to see my country kowtow before any western country.

    The Muhammed/Obasanjo, Buhari/Idiagbon in varying degrees fitted my picture of a progressive government. So when Buhari offered himself for the post of a democratically elected president, many of my kind looking back decided to bet on him.

    In 2015 his choice was made more attractive by the hopeless and pervasive corruption and drift of the Goodluck Jonathan government.

    By 2015, Buhari was like a cult figure among the poor in the North but to us academics in the south in particular our support was based on realpolitik because he was the better of the two main contenders.

    When he was elected, he made the right kind of statements like he belonged to no one but to everybody. Some members of his party did not quite like to hear that.

    But the statement was presidential. He could not be president of only his political supporters but of everybody in the country.

    Then he said if we don’t kill corruption, corruption will kill the country. This was spot on the problem. Then he took six months to form his cabinet.

    When the list came out it was a disappointment. We did not see those who could help him carry out a root and branch revolution in government.

    It was the same tired old political war horses with the exception of a few people who were well known for their knowledge and competence.

    Later on, Buhari himself said he did not know most of them. His wife concurred. But he has kept this cabinet virtually unchanged for five years.

    This I must say is not the spirit of presidential system of government where the president has the whole country from which to recruit his cabinet unlike in the parliamentary system where the cabinet is made up of party leaders in parliament.

    We then had the curious situation in which the Chief of Staff to the president took pre-eminence over the vice president.

    This was an anomaly of a situation of a personal staff of the president calling foreign ambassadors, military commanders, ministers, governors and issuing orders and directives as if he were the president.

    The president’s final acquiescence with this anomaly was when he said all his ministers who want to see him should see the Chief of Staff for clearance.

    His government was further hijacked by ethnic, religious and regional jingoists who now occupy all important ministries, parastatals and security organizations in the country.

    We now have the unfortunate global coronavirus pandemic‘s complication of a serious problem of governance. This plague is not only killing thousands of Nigerians, but also killing our fragile economy and eroding the worth and value of our national currency.

    This has further undermined our prestige, respect and leadership role in our West African region and on our continent and the world at large.

    As if this was not enough, we now have two problems that the president must urgently solve. The president must change the entire security architecture and scaffold.

    The war against the Boko Haram he inherited is destroying the country. His military commanders have failed to deal decisively with the Boko haram problem and festering insecurity all over the country.

    This is the time the president has to say thank you and good bye to the military leadership in the country. This is the normal practice everywhere and Nigeria should not be an exception.

    We cannot be doing things the same way forever and expecting different outcomes. A situation in which hundreds of rank and file in the army are saying they want to leave because they are dissatisfied with their kits and weapons and welfare are alarming and constitutes signs of failure of the higher hierarchy of the armed forces.

    Tied to this is the failure of intelligence to ferret information to the security forces so that rebellion and violence can be nipped in the bud.

    This is not good enough. It seems to me that the police and other forces lack morale due to poor pay and career advancement.

    Now we have a situation where the flagship of this regime the anti-corruption war has been dealt a death blow by fifth columnists and enemies within the government.

    In the last five years, the anti-corruption corps led by the EFCC was perceived as having performed creditably. At least this was the public perception and we had no way of thinking otherwise.

    The opposition kept making noise that its activities were coloured by political partisanship. This was however to be expected.

    It is only those who were in positions to embezzle government funds that were being asked to disgorge what they had illegally eaten.

    There were also spectacular successes at home and abroad and stolen money by Abacha were being returned. Never mind the attorney-general instead of calling it the” Abacha loot” was calling it “Abacha assets” until there was an uproar against him.

    President Buhari had foreign support in his campaign to recover this loot. He even suffered the humiliation of being introduced to Queen Elizabeth of England as “President of a fantastically corrupt country” until the Archbishop of Canterbury interjected that Buhari was not in power when Nigeria became “fantastically corrupt “and that poor Buhari has a mission to change the situation.

    Then with a bang, the whole anti-corruption edifice appears to have collapsed like a house of cards when Ibrahim Magu the anti-corruption Czar was arrested like a common criminal on the streets of Abuja and dragged before a presidential panel to face charges of corruption levelled against him by the attorney-general.

    If truth must be said, the attorney-general lacks public high regard arising from his handling of the  Abdulrashid  Maina case. Whoever comes to equity must come with clean hands.

    Then we have the unbelievable sleaze going on in the NDDC in which an Acting Managing Director claims she slapped her minister because of sexual harassment.

    The management of the NDDC arrogantly said they shared N40 billion to its staff as palliative against Covid-19.  When one of them was being quizzed by a committee of the House of Representatives, he conveniently collapsed to avoid embarrassment.

    This is happening in  a ministry set up to rapidly develop the Niger Delta – the goose that lays the golden eggs so to say .

    Mr. President, borrow a leaf from President Donald Trump who had no problem getting rid of an unreliable FBI Director, James Comey and a friend and loyalist Attorney General, Senator William S. Sessions.

    Do likewise and more. Send back Akpabio to Akwa Ibom and change your entire cabinet and the higher hierarchy of your security organizations.

    It is you history will judge and not those you appointed and who have let you down.

  • Breaking the NDDC yoke

    Breaking the NDDC yoke

    By Lawal Ogienagbon

    For a region which produces the nation’s wealth, the Niger Delta should be an Eldorado, a place that people will yearn to see and visit.

    But the region is an eyesore despite the vast wealth it holds in its bosom. Its environment is despoiled, its water polluted and its farms ravaged.

    Its people can no longer farm or fish, the two occupations for which they are known. They cannot even enjoy the sweet bliss of nature in their beautiful environment.

    Everywhere is virtually covered in soot because of the activities of oil companies which have turned the Niger Delta, where they make trillions in hard currency year in year out, into hell on earth for its people.

    Niger Deltans are pained by what has become of their land. You can feel the pain in their hearts when they talk about the things going on in their region.

    They point fingers at the oil firms and the government, which they accuse of deliberately neglecting the area in favour of other regions, especially the north, which has produced most of the nation’s leaders in its almost 60 years of independence.

    Niger Deltans are eternally at war with the state. Can we really blame them? Which region will keep quiet when it produces the nation’s wealth, yet remains underdeveloped?

    Why has the region remained in a state of flux despite being the nation’s goldmine? In 2016, the nation celebrated 60 years of the discovery of oil in Oloibiri in present day Bayelsa State.

    But the state remains in a pitiable state today despite housing our first oil well.

    Rather than be in a symbiotic relationship with the people of Oloibiri in particular and the state in general, Shell British Petroleum, which struck that oil gold in 1956, has remained in perpetual warfare with its host community, which is embittered that it has been badly treated by the multinational company over the years.

    Shell has taken much out of the Niger Delta and by extension Nigeria, but the firm has not given much in return. While the region has given the nation and Shell much, it has virtually nothing to show for it except for its despolied flora and fauna.

    To give the region a sense of belonging,  the Babangida junta created the Oil Mineral Producing Areas Development Commission (OMPADEC) in 1992 for the growth and regeneration of the Niger Delta.

    That was the first conscious effort ever made by any government to deliberately oversee the development of the region.

    By 2000 when the Obasanjo administration established the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), OMPADEC had outlived its usefulness.

    Before the coming of NDDC, the public hardly remembered OMPADEC again because it had gone into oblivion and  left the region high and dry.

    NDDC was expected to be different, having seen how OMPADEC ended, without achieving much. As an intervention agency, it was empowered to do its job, with successive governments doing all they could to provide for it.

    Oil firms, the major beneficiaries of the oil wealth, were brought on board under the agency’s establishment law, to be part of its funding.

    Money was, therefore, not NDDC’s problem, its problem was how to use the funds. It is now 20 years that NDDC was established.

    Unfortunately,  at a time it should be celebrating its 20th anniversary, it is embroiled in a financial sleaze.

    The NDDC had been spending money as if it was going out of fashion. Money meant for the development of the region and its people ended up in private pockets.

    The agency turned itself into a Father Christmas, the way it disbursed money meant for the region’s development to  its staff, friends,  fronts, firms and lawmakers.

    No amount was too big to share under the claim of awarding one contract or the other. The forensic audit ordered by President Muhammadu Buhari should have come before now,  going by some of what is coming out of the National Assembly’s probe of NDDC.

    Yet, the probe does not cover the two decades of the agency’s existence. It borders only on the N40 billion spending by the Prof Kemebradikumo Pondei-led NDDC Interim Management Committee (IMC) between last January and May. The IMC took over from the one led by Gbene Joi Nunieh in February.

    Last Thursday, Chairman of the House of Representatives Investigation Committee Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo said documents at the panel’s disposal showed that the agency spent N81.5 billion and not N40 billion during the said period.

    Whether N40 billion or N81.5 billion, can the NDDC management justify the spending? If it can, it will be money well spent, but if it cannot, the money should be refunded and all those found culpable prosecuted.

    This is an interim committee, which is expected to oversee the forensic audit of the agency. If the IMC itself is not accountable, how well can it be expected to discharge the onerous task of looking at the books of NDDC?

    By its action in five months, the IMC has shown the public the kind of forensic audit to expect.

    Mercifully,  the IMC is being audited before it does its job. But the hitch is,  it seems to be a matter of six and half a dozen.

    The IMC is insisting that it cannot be probed by the lawmakers, accusing Tunji-Ojo of being an interested party in the case. Tunji-Ojo has withdrawn as the panel chairman to ensure fairness and probity.

    Still, the word out there is that many of our lawmakers are on the take at NDDC. Some lawmakers, an IMC member, Dr Cairo Ojougbo, said had been collecting contracts from NDDC on behalf of their colleagues.

    These are weighty allegations, which would not have come to light if not for this probe. The IMC is thus unhappy that people who should defend it are on its trail.

    It is too late in the day for either side to hide now. The matter is in public domain, with the President demanding “speedy and coordinated investigation”.

    For the IMC and the lawmakers, the die is cast. The outcome of the probe at which Pondei fainted on Monday while being questioned by the lawmakers will determine what happens next at NDDC.

    As things stand now, the IMC has no moral right to continue to run NDDC. Its integrity has been called to question and until it is cleared,  it should no longer be in charge of the agency.

    What is going on at NDDC is beyond someone having “four husbands” or being “sexually harassed”.

    The ongoing searchlight on the agency should not be reduced to  lewd matters. Niger Delta Minister Godswill Akpabio and Nunieh can sort that out at the appropriate forum.

    What is at stake is more serious than that. If an interim management can squander billions of naira, including “N1.5 billion” or “N1.35 billion” on COVID-19 palliative for staff,  within five months, only God knows how much would have gone down the drain in the years of its substantive managers.

  • The curse of Niger Delta

    The curse of Niger Delta

    By Jide Oluwajuyitan

    Niger Delta leaders are the curse of Niger Delta- a region blessed by God but cursed and turned into a scotched land by her privileged leading lights.

    The ongoing probe of Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) opened with the incredible story of its immediate past Acting Managing Director, Dr. Joy Nunieh about how pressure was mounted on her to give out Christmas palliatives to the tune of N10 billion package covering among others an emergency consultancy contract to “construct Infant Jesus”.

    Then the incredible story by its Acting Managing Director, Prof Kemebradikumo Pondei of how N81.5 billion was frittered away between January and May under various headings- ‘COVID-19 palliatives for NNDC staff’ (N1.3 billion); media support for forensic audit (N641m); travels (N85.6m); condolences (N122.9m) etc. all at a period of COVID-19 lockdown.

    Senator Godswill Akpabio who claims to be on a mission to change the narrative fingered corruption as the bane of NNDC  which according to him once spent N4.2b in one day and yet  ‘could not even buy a house they could use as an office after 19 years”.

    But he has also been fingered by Peter Nwabaoshi, chairman of Senate Committee on Niger Delta Affairs of collecting contracts worth N500 million from the NDDC in 2017 alone without execution, a charge he denied saying the contracts were never awarded let alone paid for.

    He however did not deny lobbying Nwabaoshi for the contracts.  Akpabio for now has the last words.  Nwabaoshi, along with lawmakers from the Niger Delta states according to him cornered over 60% of NNDC contracts.

    But the rain started beating the helpless and impoverished people of Niger Delta long before the warring Nwabaoshi and Akpabio.

    The region’s traditional rulers,  military stars,  celebrated politicians, thorough intellectuals,  journalists, and the business elite have all betrayed the poor people of Niger Delta that look up to them for direction.

    Ken Saro-Wiwa, who told us Africans kill their own “sun” was consumed by Niger Delta traditional rulers he had described as “vultures” for collecting bribes from multinational oil companies polluting the rivers, the air and the land.

    But there are other more vicious blood-feeding vultures-the successive Niger Delta governors. Diette Spiff was a governor under Gowon at about 25.

    His only legacy was scraping the head of Journalist Amakiri with a broken bottle for reporting a strike threat by unpaid River State teachers, a report he regarded as an embarrassment on his birthday.

    The young governor who could not pay teachers was missing during Murtala Muhammed 1975 change of government and was to be located on the high seas days later carousing with women inside his private ship, later seized by Murtala Mohammed along with some 16 ill-acquired properties in Port Harcourt.

    Peter Odili, accused of financial infractions against his own people by EFCC secured a notorious  perpetual court injunction, conferring immunity on him even out of office.

    And but for the British intelligence, we would never have known how much Alamieseigha the self-styled ‘Governor General of Ijaw” squandered on properties in France, Britain and German Town, Maryland in USA.

    It was also a British Southwark Crown court that “on April 17, 2012  jailed James Ibori for 13 years after he ‘pleaded guilty to 10 counts of money laundering and stealing $50m from the Delta State treasury’.

    Intellectuals and journalists from the Niger Delta have similarly failed the Niger Delta poor. The former after providing intellectual support for the region’s quest for bigger portion of the national cake often end up joining the thieving politicians in government.

    The latter control the commanding heights of the print and electronic media but it took the intervention of CNN after Obama’s stiff penalties for multinational oil companies responsible for oil spillage in South America, to call the world attention to pollution and degradation of Niger Delta environment that had gone on for over 50 years.

    Niger Delta business elite are unarguably among some of the most accomplished business men in Nigeria. Yet while the Benin – Warri portion of Benin – Port Harcourt road contract awarded in the early 80s to one of their members remained unattended to until the 90s, all they did was to fly their private jets from Lagos to Warri from where they connected their various villages.

    Even with the already toxic Niger Delta rivers, air and land, it was a Niger Delta businessman that imported toxic waste that Europe didn’t want to bury in Europe because of its effect on human lives and the environment to Koko, a remote village in Niger Delta.

    If the north as it is often claimed, controls more oil wells in the Niger Delta than the rest of the country, it is probably because there have been many Niger Delta petroleum ministers ready to sell their birthright for a pot of porridge.

    Apolitical Tam David-West as petroleum minister tried to be more Nigerian than Ijaw forgetting that charity begins at home.

    All he got for his pains from Babangida, was a jail term for a gift of wristwatch. Dan Etete was a ‘true son of the soil’.

    He secured for himself a very lucrative oil well and kept his peace while Abacha continued from where Babangda stopped.

    The status quo remained under Diezani Alison-Madueke as petroleum minister under a Niger Delta president.

    She however took care of her close associates and family members that, according to EFCC, own multi-billion-naira prime properties in Britain and Dubai.

    Unfortunately even Pa Edwin Clark who has spent all his life serving the Niger Delta  people – Mid-West Commissioner of Education (1986-710) Bendel State Commissioner for Finance and Establishment (1972 –75), Gowon’s Federal Commissioner (1975) and a Senator (1979-1983), has paid attention more to external enemies than looking inward to see the real curse of Niger Delta.

    He not too long ago in a reaction to critics of endless looting by Niger Delta politicians angrily queried: “Who are they to tell us how to spend our money?”

    On the other hand, few initiatives to improve the lots of Niger Delta poor that can neither fish nor farm due to polluted rivers and scorched land have come from outsiders.

    While Niger Delta politicians were trying to outdo themselves in sponsoring  militants and oil bunkerers specializing in vandalisation of oil pipelines with its negative effects on the environment, it was Obasanjo who in 2000 set up the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) with the mandate of ‘developing the Niger Delta and ameliorating the suffering of the poor’.

    And it was President Umaru Yar’Adua who, while retaining the NNDC, created in September 2008 the Ministry of Niger Delta.

    But for Pastor Tunde Bakare and civil society groups that embarked on Abuja demonstrations that forced the National Assembly to come up with ‘the doctrine of necessity’, Jonathan who was fiercely opposed by the Yar’Adua mafia headed by James Ibori would never have become an acting president. He was to later ride on the back of Obasanjo who after outwitting the north over PDP rotational policy, carried him on his back around the country to become the first minority elected president.

    Niger Delta however is a metaphor for Nigeria which Awolowo had likened to a fattened cow held down by some while being milked by a few powerful individuals.

    The curse of Nigeria are Nigerian leaders who as a result of the benefits they derive from our current lack of direction, out rightly rejected “the path to Nigeria’s freedom”.

  • Rebirth (3)

    Rebirth (3)

    Olatunji Ololade

     

    THE moral nihilism espoused by the Nigerian elite would terrify shayateen. Treasury looters orchestrate violence, feign a sickness, a handicap, or faint outright, in frantic bid to escape public inquiry and answer for their misdeeds.

    Such comical jaunts have attained a pedestrian taste of the splattering caper. It’s gross buffoonery yet a pagan rite of worship in Nigeria’s sorely spiritualized and prejudiced political space – some rogue pastor or alfa, religious and ethnic group eventually issues subtle or fiery threats to perceived “detractors” of their corrupt but favoured son or daughter.

    Thus any blockhead or egghead may attain public office, loot the coffers and collapse during public inquiry, guaranteed prejudiced support. It never gets old. Its a purely radical evil that eroticizes the horror banished by law and the moral parliament.

    But how has a nation of 200 million people or thereabouts sustained her subservience to a predatory political class? By sheer ignorance and Stockholm’s syndrome.

    Acquiescence to the tyranny of corrupt leadership is a betrayal of humanity and national ethics yet several Nigerians choose emasculation in quest of national spoils. Some embrace their oppressors for a sentimental token hence the preponderance of voters who squander mandate on a crafty bum simply because they are of the same tribe, religion, or political turf.

    Morality gets smothered in their marriage to chthonian nature. But in such bestial union, who is the giver of pain, and who receives it? Who becomes the teat by which the other suckles nourishment? The citizenry, of course, always suffer the rusted end of the verminous spigot.

    Wordsworth assailed the delusions and folly of men, who thrust themselves upon the passive world as dictators or tyrant democrats – for every system of government, democracy inclusive, is a tyranny, I would say.

    Mankind thrives by repression and social hierarchies, and tyrannies nourish by feminizing victimhood and rationalizing oppression. Thus Hitler said, the masses are feminine, and like Wordsworth’s thrusting, tyrant rulers, the Nigerian leadership rapes the populace, impaling their passive void with sadistic totems. Like enfant terrible rapists, the political class reduces its victims to tools and possessions, passive objects that must be plowed and plundered in fulfillment of savage lusts.

    Corrupt leadership breeds bad government and bad government ruins nations. A manipulable citizenry, however, repulses nature. In Wordsworth’s play, The Borderers, “the tyranny of the world’s masters” lives only “in the torpid acquiescence of emasculated souls.” Dominance requires submission. And if political power ultimately asserts its fangs with pain, like sadomasochistic sex, as Paglia would say, then Nigeria must wean her heart from emasculating food. If she fails to do that, she would remain on her knees, eternally, pleasuring a bestial ruling class, and sucking from the wrong spigot.

    Gelded passivity manifests negatively when a nation acquiesces to the tyranny of a dominant, evil minority. Adorno understood that radical evil was possible by only the collaboration of a timid, cowed, and confused population, manipulable by a system of propaganda and mass media offering spectacle and entertainment as news, and an educational system incapable of transmitting transcendent values and nurturing individual conscience. He feared a culture that banished the anxieties and complexities of moral choice and embraced a childish hyper-masculinity, writes Hedges.

    These are, no doubt, the afflictions of modern Nigeria. Thus to attain political and socio-economic freedom, Nigerians must seek first, mental freedom, and a new class of citizenship and political leadership must emerge to actualize this.

    Revolutionary movements like the Presidential Aspirants Coming Together (PACT) have failed because its leadership spoke in a selfish, private dialect that obscured meaningful communication with the citizenry segments whose votes and support they needed to upset the status quo and gain a foothold.

    Greed and covetousness stifled rationality and judgment among their elitist divide. Eventually, they failed to convince the people, let alone inspire their mandates.

    To rescue Nigeria back from the vice-grip of its plunderers and oppressors, the new class of political leadership that I advocate must insert itself in the lives of the ordinary people, including street urchins, commercial transporters, the armed forces, students, shanty communities and the unemployed, whose votes and base sentimentality the ruling class consistently exploits at election time.

    The ongoing pandemic provides this new breed of ‘elite’ aspirants ample opportunities to woo the people, the voter segment, in particular, but as usual, they have retreated into their fancy fortresses, deigning contemptuous glances at the boondocks.

    How visionary it would be for the PACT collective, for instance, to launch a humanitarian effort to distribute justifiable palliatives directly to the citizenry segments impoverished by the pandemic, among other efforts. This, of course, could be misconstrued as a variant of the manipulative character often deployed as part of the political class’s artifice but it would be of a disarmingly milder tenor.

    There is still time for the self-styled “disrupters” and “people’s liberators” to upset and re-order the political space. Most successful revolutions are fundamentally non-violent. The Russian Revolution was victorious once the Cossacks refused to fire on the protesters in Petrograd in 1917 and joined the crowds. And the clerics who overthrew the Shah of Iran in 1979 won once the Shah’s military abandoned the collapsing regime.

    The superior force of despotic leadership is disarmed not through violence but through conversion. The electoral ideal by which many vote for a candidate without reflecting over the import of their votes, is utterly wrong and must be repudiated. In Nigeria’s case, the revolution must be achieved via the ballot box.

    There must be a renegotiation of norms and concessions around Nigeria’s nationhood. In the new deliberations, negotiating parties must come to the table as equals. Those human segments usually exploited as pawns by the incumbent political class must be wooed by offering them more dignified and pivotal positions at the table. This would excite their confidence in the hypothesized epoch where the government is humane and leaders truly serve the interests of the citizenry.

    Then, there is the conundrum of Nigeria’s severely tribalized politics. The north of course, given its mythical expanse and population, may loom larger, casting a shadow over the sunny hopes of its ‘rivals’ and contenders to the spoils of the Nigerian enterprise. To this intimidating reality, the southwest, south-south, and south-east regions must unite and speak with one voice.

    Come 2023, the southern regions must unite behind joint candidates, on one platform, driven by unity of purpose and enlightenment. To achieve this, however, the southerners must attain internal harmony and neuter all Judases. They must bury the hatchet, forgive old rivalries to birth a new trust, and the greening of their stakes within the Nigerian enterprise…If they could achieve this, they would earn the respect of their northern kin

    Perhaps seeds of such giant elms may sprout by Nnamdi Kanu’s recent admonishment to his Igbo/IPOB brothers to stop insulting and alienating the Yoruba. Nigeria’s southern regions must thunder as one voice in the political arena.

    So doing, they would earn the respect of their northern kin; the latter will grudgingly show them regard at first, then as reality dawns that their southern relatives are determined to renegotiate their stakes in the Nigerian enterprise as equals, they will learn patience and humble commitment to resolving Nigeria’s resource and nationhood rhetoric.

     

  • Magu’s war

    Magu’s war

     By Lawal Ogienagbon

    WHAT some, especially his colleagues in the security agencies saw long ago, many of us seemed not to see until the bubble burst last week. It was a matter of time before it happened and when it did, it was with a bang. Many of the stories we are being told today about him, we heard them then too. But, the tales were waved aside because many believed they were meant to stall his confirmation as chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).

    The EFCC job comes with its own troubles. No matter what its head does, he is in the midst of enemies. It does not matter whether he has done anything wrong. The only wrong he might have done if one can call it that is accepting the EFCC job. Having seen what happened to all his predecessors, Ibrahim Mustapha Magu was expected to know better and so exercise utmost caution in the discharge of his duties. He came to the job highly recommended. He was said to have been the linchpin of the agency under Mallam Nuhu Ribadu and Ibrahim Lamorde.

    When he was named acting chairman in November 2015, some who knew him lauded his appointment; while some cautioned against expecting too much from him. From afar, many Nigerians perceived him as doing a good job despite cries in political and business cycles that he was overreaching himself.  Besides, he, like his predecessors,  also had inter-agency rivalry to contend with. The EFCC was not seeing eye to eye with the Department of State Service (DSS), Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB), National Intelligence Agency (NIA) and other allied agencies. These are agencies that should work together for the betterment of the country and collaborate in the anti-graft war. But they were and are still working at cross purpose irrespective of what they want the public to believe.

    So, the issue of Magu’s confirmation became a problem following a damning report on him by the DSS. Whether the report was informed by inter-agency rivalry or was a product of good intelligence work the public does not know up till today. The picture is becoming clearer by the day, though. The DSS and the Senate,  which rejected his nomination twice based on that report were called names. The senators, in particular, were attacked by those rooting for Magu. They said they never expected the senators to confirm Magu since many of them were being probed or tried by EFCC. The problem with us as a people is that we like to beg the issue rather than address it frontally when it is still hot. This instant case is a ready made example.

    It took almost four years after the EFCC report for the government to come to terms with some of the things contained therein whether true or not, at least for now.  Basically, the report, which followed the Senate’s request for Magu’s security screening before his confirmation,  said he “lacks integrity” to lead EFCC. The report detailed some of the ‘sins’ of Magu, warning that he could only be made EFCC chair at the nation’s peril. Rather than take a critical look at that report, which the DSS reaffirmed on March 14, 2017, about six months after the  first one it issued on October 7, 2016, the government turned a blind eye to the document. The government insisted on Magu for the job. That is why Magu acted for almost five years as EFCC chair without confirmation.

    Sadly,  many of those who believed that it was “corruption fighting back” so that Magu would not be confirmed are distancing themselves from him now. Magu has become an outcast who should face whatever has come his way alone.  This speaks volume about us as a people.  Why are those friends and institutions abandoning Magu today when he has not been found guilty of any offence? The Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption ( PACAC) carried the Magu-must-be-confirmed mission virtually on its head.  The Senate, it said, was only afraid of its shadow, insisting that whether confirmed or not, Magu would continue to act as EFCC chair at the pleasure of the President who appointed him. Many renowned lawyers too spoke in the same vein and with their words encouraged Magu to ‘carry on the good job’ he is doing.

    The President too left Magu to be as he is the ‘anti-graft czar in whom the administration is well pleased’. To the Presidency, PACAC, the rights community and civil society organisations, Magu could do no wrong. What happened between then and now that the Presidency is no longer for Magu? Is it that he stepped on powerful toes? Is it possible to fight corruption without stepping on toes? Why did the Presidency not consider the EFCC report which indicted Magu in 2016 and 2017? Where is that report? Is it not worth revisiting in light of what is happening to Magu today? What are the new things contained in the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice Abubakar Malami’s allegations against Magu that are not in that report? What are the findings of the committee said to have probed EFCC activities under Magu’s watch? Did he appear before the panel?

    Those findings are now before the Justice Salami panel before which he was bundled on July 6. Since then Magu has been in detention. The Magu matter is becoming worrisome because of the way part of the report of the first panel is being leaked to the media. Does this not say something about his ongoing probe by the Salami panel which came into being like the first one unannounced?

    That Magu is entangled in corruption allegations today is of his own making. He, of all people, should know that those who live in glass houses do not throw stones.  I pity him because he has become an orphan today. All those goading him on, making him believe that they are always there for him have thrown him out. Until he ran into trouble, PACAC and some lawyers  could swear by him. PACAC has since denied a “preliminary reaction” by a member, accusing “Malami’s power bloc” of being behind Magu’s travail.

    If it were to be those days when Magu was the apple of their eyes, PACAC and those lawyers would be falling over themselves, defending him and threatening those against him with  fire and brimstone. Yet, these were the same people who said he could act in office for as long as the President wished despite the Senate’s rejection of his nomination. They refused to acknowledge that the Senate’s action was based on the report of DSS, an organ of the executive. Can it be said that the Senate and DSS have now been vindicated? The outcome of Magu’s ongoing probe will tell.

    For now, Magu is on his own. But some believe he is lucky that he is appearing before a panel headed by former Court of Appeal President Justice Ayo Salami. They say the jurist, from his antecedents, is not someone that can be used to deal with others.  Magu is therefore expected to get justice before Salami, but the former EFCC chief would have disappointed his admirers,  if at the end of the day, the allegations against him are proven. With the way he was going, his admirers never expected him to be anything but above board. They will be heartbroken if the DSS’ prediction that “he will eventually constitute a liability to the anti-corruption war of the government” comes to pass.

    • Magu was released from custody on Wednesday.