The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • June 12 1993: What it means to me personally

    I was Nigeria’s Ambassador in Germany when the June 12, 1993 election took place. As would have been expected, my staff and I watched the results with anxiety and bated breath, afraid that something may go wrong, because we believed that the military under President Ibrahim Babangida was genuinely interested in peaceful transfer of power to an elected government after a tortuous transition that seemed to have no end. President Babangida had also made highly successful state or official visits to Great Britain, France and Germany during which the president made solemn pledges that he was committed to peaceful transfer of power after a long period of military rule interspersed with short civilian interludes since 1966. It was our duty as ambassadors to continue to reassure our European trading and economic partners that Nigeria was committed to democracy. Wherever Nigeria goes, so goes Africa was the feeling in those days when Nigeria had serious and solid leverage in Africa unlike nowadays when we seem to have muffled voice in the affairs of not only our sub region but of Africa as a whole. The Boko Haram tragedy and the campaign of destabilization mounted on the country by terrorists of different types, be they herders, kidnappers, cattle rustlers and brigands of every hue and colour have huddled us.

    When the results of the 1993 presidential elections filtered in, we were surprised about what then seemed to be the triumph of nationalism over the divisions of religion, region and ethnicity. Abiola and Baba Kingibe his running mate were Muslims and Christians, even though not comfortable with Christians being excluded, still went ahead and voted for the ticket. Not only did Abiola win in the Southwest but also in the North and also in the South-south. He also defeated Alhaji Bashir Tofar in Kano and in his ward. Abiola was a phenomenon who appeared to have prepared well for a day like we all witnessed during the election. For years he had used his vast wealth to build mosques and churches for communities all over Nigeria that asked for his favour. He had also established local vernacular newspapers in the north, southwest and the southeast and given employment and scholarships to thousands of Nigerians from all over the country. His promise that he would make Nigeria rich also resonated with many people especially when he told the rags-to-riches story of his life. He also touched many Nigerians by championing the cause of sports in Africa. He was also financing the movement for a demand of reparations from the West for slavery and colonialism. In this regard, he was also financing the US Congressional Black Caucus in its activities as a pressure group in the United States. These twin concerns of his may have sealed his fate in the West which must have considered it dangerous for an African with the kind of resources Abiola had to also lead the most important black nation in the world and also having tentacles in the United States and the vast Islamic world.

    Read Also: Many sides of June 12

    I remember him at a time phoning me in Germany asking me to put together whatever information that I had on the episode of Yemen sinking the boats of Somali immigrants fleeing across the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula. He said he was going to personally take up the issues with the king of Saudi Arabia on the obligations of all Muslims to one another.

    Abiola also once called me to collect from Daimler Benz the cost of an armoured Mercedes 500. He said he wanted to give it to General Obasanjo. He said Obasanjo was waylaid on Oyo-Ilorin road in a Peugeot by robbers and he said how disgraceful it would have been if he had been killed in such a flimsy car. I sent the invoice as requested. This is the kind of large heart Abiola had. His generosity was legendary. It is a pity that when it was time for people to reciprocate his kind and generous gestures they let him down. When he won the election Obasanjo was one of those who undermined him by saying he was not the “Messiah Nigeria was waiting for”.  When the National Assembly unanimously voted to name the National Stadium in Abuja after him for his contribution to sports in Africa, Obasanjo did not carry out the wishes of the National Assembly. Both Babangida and Abacha had benefited from Abiola in their professional progress and in other ways during the Second Republic. Abiola probably got too close to the military since the days of General Murtala Muhammad as Army Director of Signals. He was like riding the back of the tiger and eventually finding himself inside it.

    When the results of the election became obvious to Babangida, he found himself threatened by his colleagues in the top hierarchy of the army who were hostile to an Abiola succession. Colonel David Mark allegedly threatened to shoot Babangida unless he cancelled the result of the election. Spurious reasons such as the government owing Abiola’s companies were alluded to and that Abiola’s government would be put in an invidious situation of paying Abiola’s companies. Sultan Ibrahim Dasuki was said to have supported Abiola’s succession to the post of president after winning fair and square an election adjudged to be the best organized in the history of the country.

    In order to nullify the election the North-South dichotomy in the politics of Nigeria came in handy. The visceral hatred of the Igbo political leadership for the Yoruba was exploited. This involved getting Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu to say he was not in politics because of Abiola. Even before the election, Arthur Nzeribe had formed what he called Association for Better Nigeria ( ABN ) which took the government to court over the election and got a midnight judgement by one hapless  lady, Justice  Bassey Ikpeme, to suspend the transition programme. If Babangida had stood his ground, the politics of the country may have changed forever. At least we would not have been visited by the financial fiend that Abacha turned out to be. His looted monies hidden all over the world are still being discovered in several offshore islands and small principalities and major countries and financial centres all over the world. Most of these monies will be lost for ever and the ones being discovered are not easily surrendered by countries keeping stolen money.

    To cut a long story short, Babangida surrendered power to Abacha who was first hiding behind the camouflage of an Interim National Government headed by Ernest Sonekan while Abacha was conveniently left behind purportedly to stiffen the back of the Sonekan regime. All the other military men in Babangida’s government were retired. But in actual fact, it was a premeditated plan to wait and temporise a little while the electoral rumpus died down before Abacha the “Khalifa” moved in. Abiola himself was naive enough to think that Abacha would hold power for a while before surrendering it to him. He therefore seemed to have supported some of his supporters like Alhaji Lateef Jakande, Dr Onagoruwa and Ebenezer Babatope who found himself serving in the Abacha government with Dr Ofonagoro with whom he had exchanged threats on national television when both were on different sides in the 1979 elections. The leader of Abiola’s party, Tony Anenih and Abiola’s running mate, Babaagba Kingibe were also in the government. It turned out Abacha had no plan to hand over power to anybody and certainly not to Abiola. After holding on to power from 1993 to 1998 during which time he robbed the country blind, he set in motion the process of transferring power to himself as a civilian. He formed five parties which Chief Bola Ige described as “five fingers on a leprous hand”.  He was promptly nominated by all the five parties as their presidential candidate. Chief Ebenezer Babatope was scheduled to move a motion pledging the support of all Yoruba people for Abacha even though he was killing many of them in politics and those of them who had retired from the military. Sadly, the Clinton administration in the USA gave Abacha the nod that if he changed from his uniform to Babanriga, America would have no problem with him. By this time Nigeria had been kicked out of the Commonwealth particularly after the hanging of Ken Saro Wiwa, the activist Ogoni politician and environmentalist. Other civilized organisations like the Organisation of African Union also ostracized Nigeria.

     

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  • Legacy of Saraki’s 8th Senate

    Senator Aliyu Sabi Abdullahi, the 8th Senate chairman, Committee on Media and Public Affairs, last Sunday said their 8th Senate “remains the highest performing senate in the history of the country”. Abdullahi, who probably forgets that in an age of internet and social media, history as the past expressed with written documents cannot be shaped by temporary political office holders, wants the 8th Senate, Saraki and his ‘like-minds’ senators judged not by sentiments but by their achievements. He listed them as including “128 bills in 26 months weighed against the 5th Senate that passed 129 bills in four years; the 6th Senate that passed 72 bills in four years; the 7th Senate that passed 128 bills in four years.”; clearance of 82 petitions ‘juxtaposed against the 6th and 7th Senates’, the ‘review of the Public Procurement Act and the passage of one out of the three Petroleum Industry Governance Bills (PIGB). Beyond this, he also wants the 8th Senate given credit for the 2017 derailed constitutional review exercise.

    Since not all Nigerians suffer from collective amnesia, I am not sure many Nigerians share Abdullahi’s sentiments. Indeed many, including Prof. Itse Sagay (SAN), chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption believes “the 8th Senate is by far the worst in Nigerian history”. He justified his position by what he described as its attempt to “grab executive powers; it’s confrontation with the president and vice-president as well as love of self-serving legislation and total insensitivity to the common interest of Nigeria”.

    But first, what are the documented facts of history? Nigerians still remember Saraki secured the leadership of the senate through a civilian coup described by Sagay as “‘a victory for impunity, a victory for fraud and a victory for political desperation and indiscipline”.

    Read Also: 8th Senate adjourns indefinitely as Saraki bows out

    To pull off the fraud, it is also on record that an interim police report confirmed that the senate standing papers were forged.   And to sustain the fraud, Saraki and his ‘like-mind’ senators adopted self -help tactics that reduced the senate to a house of deals where majority had their say and minority carried the day.

    The result of this was that as against a senate as a chamber of “sober second thought” populated by  men of honour, saddled with making laws, amending budget or repealing public policy and guaranteeing  freedom and preventing tyranny, Saraki’s  8th Senate  gradually descended into a chamber of corruption, greed, treachery impunity and vileness.

    At the end, Saraki’s 8th Senate served none but its members. First, the senate ignored the recommendation of the Revenue Mobilization, Allocation and Fiscal Commission, RMAFC to fix for themselves outrageous salaries. Senator Shehu Sani’s revelation that members of the 8th Senate earned N13.5m monthly immediately made Saraki’s Nigeria’s 8th senate a record breaker as the highest paid lawmakers in the world. Sagay who claims “What they are earning “exceeds the minimum wage by 1,666 percent” could not help dismissing the lawmakers as “all ‘come-and-chop’ characters, with no sense of service” or thoughts for the country.

    Their periodic padding of budget seems to further validate Sagay’s thesis. In fairness to Saraki’s 8th Senate, budget padding did not start with them. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former Minister of Finance under the Jonathan administration had told Nigerians how National Assembly during the David Mark/Ekweremadu 7th Senate coerced the Jonathan administration to part with an additional N17 billion before passing the 2015 budget.

    But despite the 2016 Technology Organisation-BudgIT’s revelation that about N350billion appropriated by the National Assembly in respect of about 2,516 projects spread across the country in the last five years never took off even after full payment had been made, Saraki’s 8th Senate according to Audu Ogbeh, the agriculture minister, returned the 2016 budget to the ministry after five months with 386 “strange” projects worth N12.6billion inserted by the National Assembly after reducing the ministry’s budget proposals from N40,918 billion to N31.618 billion to accommodate their own constituency projects. The Minister of Transport raised similar alarm about the cancellation of the Lagos –Calabar rail project to accommodate N3b National Assembly constituency projects such as provision of tri-cycles, town-halls and bore-holes.

    In the 2018 budget, the National Assembly, according to President Buhari, had made cuts amounting to N347 billion in the allocations to 4,700 projects submitted to them for consideration and introduced 6,403 projects of their own amounting to N578 billion.

    Not a few respected Nigerians also believe the 8th Senate was driven by greed. For instance, Col. Dangiwa Umar (rtd) in fact believes the 8th Senate, besides being driven by greed, was also “on a mission to crash the federal government’s war against corruption using the power of ‘oversight’ as cover.” As proof, he cited the case of a powerful senator whose company imported 1,200 metric tons of rice in 30, 40-foot containers, fraudulently declared as yeast to evade payment of appropriate duties. There was also a parallel to this when an imported SUV jeep which carried forged papers to evade tax payment was traced to the senate president by Customs.

    It is also a documented fact of history that out of sheer greed, some members of the 8th Senate, especially former governors, for a period earned double salaries according to EFCC. The testimony of the Secretary to the Kwara State Government, Alhaji Isiaka Gold, during court proceedings that Senate President  Saraki was only collecting a pension of N578, 188.00 which increased to N1, 239,493.94 monthly from October, 2014 as other past governors in the country did not invalidate such fact as such practices is against public service rules.

    Obasanjo, who was godfather to leading members of the 8th Senate including Senate President Saraki and Dino Melaye who at different times worked for him as special assistant on budgeting and on youths have the final verdict on the 8th assembly. According to him: “The National Assembly stinks to high heavens. It needs to be purged. The National Assembly cabal of today is worse than any cabal that anybody may find anywhere in our national governance system at any time…The National Assembly is a den of corruption by a gang of unarmed robbers.”

    And now as for the 8th Senate’s celebrated achievements, what Abdullahi did not tell Nigerians was that most of the bills including the one that attempted to change the sequence of the 2019 elections were self-serving. While Nigerians had thought the 8th assembly will advance the course of federalism through the 2017 constitutional review by ensuring LGAs become responsibilities of their states, they were more interested in promoting injustice in the name of equity with Sokoto which once enjoyed the same status with Lagos but now carved into four states with about 87 LGAs drawing revenue from the federation account as against Lagos’ 20.

    Some of the 8th Senate’s other self-serving  bills include Bill No. 4 – Financial Autonomy of State Legislature which allows states houses of assembly to be funded directly from the Consolidated Revenue Fund. Bill No. 5 – Distributable Pool Account for Local Governments which abrogate the State Joint Local Government and Bill No. 8 – Immunity for Legislators for Acts in Course of Duty. These along with their other selfish anti-people proposed alterations of the constitution, according to Sagay, “demonstrate their contempt and disdain for federalism and women, and their inordinate self-love and self-indulgence, amounting to narcissism, at the expense of all other Nigerians”.

  • Your plague is worse than mine

    If prejudice is a disease of the human mind, it intensifies in the Nigerian, whose perception of others coerces the eye to make the mind a connoisseur of debauched reality and random, bestial stereotypes.

    Prejudice sprouts invasive wiles; it fosters disruptive points of view, and reduces human beings into nouns and adjectives, and pliable, sacrificial epithets.

    Sometimes, it resonates primal style and radically deactivates the humane, to nail the world against a picture plane. The prejudiced eye deploys vision like a sword; it dismembers and hacks, until its blinded by an excess of bias.

    In Nigeria, the prejudiced eye becomes tyrant and the act of seeing is fanatically inflamed. Thus the Hausa-Fulani, subjected to pictural filter, disintegrates. As a man, he must “possess the sensibility of a cow.” If a woman, she must be a poor, helpless “child bride.” Together, they fulfill contemporary society’s random stereotypes of villiany a la murderous herdsman, almajiri, Boko Haram (BH) terrorist and suicide bomber.

    The Igbo man must be an “armed robber,” “money ritualist,” “baby factory operator” and a “drug dealer”; if a woman, she must be a “brothel vixen.” The Edo female must be “Italy-bound and a prostitute” and if a male, “a notorious cultist” or “an armed robber.”  The Niger Deltan must be a “kidnapper,” “greedy militant,” “murderous pirate,” “armed robber.”

    The Yoruba must be a “sellout” or “indefatigable Judas,” if you like. He must be a “kidnapper,” “juju ritualist” or “prostitute” too.

    Each ethnic group suffers an ugly, frantic streotype thus collapsing our world into a heap of visual objects coveted by the bigoted for their morbid decay.

    Of these random stereotypes, however, a common narrative runs through as the thread of bias; that of the north as a haven of homicidal almajiri, BH terrorists and Nigeria’s most backward region. The almajiri conundrum resonates, quite jarringly, against the backdrop of BH insurgency, armed banditry and herdsmen’s bloody incursions into Nigeria’s southeast, southsouth, and southwest regions.

    “When I drive round the country, what upsets me most is the status of our poor people…You see the so-called Almajiris wearing torn dresses with plastic bowls. I think we the Nigerian elite; we are all failing,” said President Muhammadu Buhari, in while acknowledging northern Nigeria’s almajiri crisis, few months ago.

    Predictably, Buhari’s confession triggered yet another debate, which was wildly marred by cold, sentimental claims and counterclaims.

    While it is alright to pillory a system that condemns millions of vulnerable children to the streets thus denying them rights to parental care and decent schooling, it would be duplicitous to claim that the almajiri system constitutes the greatest impediment to national progress, as some columnist recently intoned.

    A parallel monstrosity subsists across the country’s supposedly evolved and sophisticated southern regions. The latter, despite their haughty, hieratic claims to literacy and higher evolution, merely reinvent terror; they make violence hip and experimental.

    The statistics, of course, hardly resonate the darkness and virulence characteristic of northern mayhem.

    Very few people would forget in hurry, how Lagos State cringed from the bloodlust of the infamous Badoo gang. The group of serial rapists and murderers carried out ritual killings of entire households: families of four and five, and newly married couples among others, in Ikorodu.

    Unofficial sources claimed that more than 30 persons were sent to their early graves while the Badoo horror lasted. Eventually, in joint operations by the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC), the Onyabo, a local vigilante group, and the police, many of the culprits were allegedly caught.

    Lagos still cowers from the ravage of teen gangs including the Awawa cult and the One Million Boys; Imo, Anambra, Enugu, Delta, Bayelsa, Ogun, Oyo, Ondo and Edo among others, pulse with mayhem and murderous exploits of teen and campus confraternities.

    Lest we forget the terror personified by the internet fraudster aka Yahoo Boy, kidnapper, the ritualist cum pant bandit; the corrupt civil servant, banker, teacher, street urchin, commercial transport union worker, politician and journalist, whose perpetration of official corruption, hate-speech, armed violence and intellectual hooliganism, to mention a few, glorify the predatory manifestations often attributed to the northern almajiri and the terrorist.

    That these southern plague are supposed beneficiaries of advanced forms of learning, representative of Western education, professional and religious scholarship, emphasises an ugliness homogenous to Nigeria’s disparate ethnic groups and regions.

    Pseudo-psychology goads us to believe that the northern almajiri is Nigeria’s greatest albatross thus the argument within southern elitist circuits, that, until the northern elite terminates the almajiri system, terrorism, child marriage, illiteracy and underdevelopment will continually hinder the region’s bid to match the rest of the country in literacy and development.

    Those who defend and condemn the almajiri culture are undoubtedly at odds over matters of cause and context, definition and politics; many of them suffer from grave epistemological and data blind spots, a condition Pinker would blame on availability and negativity biases.

    Both northern and southern apologists rationalise the backwardness pervasive of their regions, where different forces of terrorism hold the people to ransom. Rather than admit the truth, they choose to create semblances of reality, that serve, in a wider sense, the same role that perverse pleasure serves the sexual delinquent and moral degenerate.

    Their bigotries destabilise the truth, goading all to manufacture and project alternate realities as replacement for their world’s uncomplimentary truths.

    Ultimately, we project such relative reality to justify our feelings and perceptions of each other as inspired by mirages generated by pseudo-sensibility and events.

    The sad reality of this ignorant state of mind, is that, it is mostly an affliction of the electorate. Politicians are hardly on the receiving end of such blind illusion.

    Consider for instance, the curious camarederie of successive ruling class: the Presidency, Governors, State and National Assemblies conveniently maintain a sturdy bridge, by which they navigate through shoals of inter and intra-party conflict, political brigandage, and institutionalised corruption, to attain harmony in misgovernance. Sublime, isn’t it?

    It is always the electorate, the breadlines, who get blinded by the illusion of pseudo-events and inflammatory politics. Those who slip into the mirage are eventually consumed in pursuit and perpetuation of a myth built around the presumed “cruelty” of “others.”

    The passion we commit to tiresome bigotries and inter-tribal conflict should be redirected to more productive endeavour, like value reorientation, the elevation of norms and the training of thoroughbreds habituated to reason, catholicity of depth, scholarship and culture.

    Scholarship should be geared to discourage the prejudices that bulwark society, and stamp out those that in sheer barbarity of intellect and ideology, deafen all to the wail of reason and matchless patriotism.

    Such measures are best begun from our homes; the value of the family as a crucial social unit and building block of society must be re-asserted, even as we undertake the crusade in our worship houses and schools.

    The Igbo man is hardly the enemy. Neither is the Yoruba, Hausa, Fulani, Ibibio, Itsekiri native among others. Nigeria’s mortal enemy subsists in the incumbent ruling class.

    It’s about time we took our country back from them.

     

  • MKO Abiola’s beatification

    MOVE over May 29. The authentic Democracy Day is here. June 12.

    Nigeria was in holiday mood yesterday. It was a feast of honour; the commemoration of the June 12,1993 election, Nigeria’s fairest and freest ever, won by frontline businessman Moshood Kashmawo Olawale Abiola, who died in a desperate bid to revalidate his mandate. That election, which was a major landmark in resolving some of the thorny issues of the Nigerian question, was annulled for no sensible reason by the military, led by General Ibrahim Babangida, who superciliously adopted the title “president”. Dubious.

    It was a big party in Abuja. President Muhammadu Buhari, who proved bookmakers wrong by honouring Abiola, the symbol of our democracy, stood at ramrod attention, as members of the Armed Forces in their colourful ceremonial dresses marched past. Cultural dancers displayed their skills, watched by an army of dignitaries, including presidents, diplomats, party leaders, lawmakers and many others who came to be part of history.

    The Abiola family was there. So were ordinary folks whom the late Abiola loved with great passion. Millions watched on television as the ceremony went on at the prestigious and expansive Eagle Square. It was no doubt the triumph of truth over falsehood, of loyalty to a noble cause, of integrity amid daylight crookedness and of light over darkness and its fiendish agents. The National Stadium was renamed after Abiola, in whose rich kitty of titles there was the prestigious Pillar of Sports in Africa.

    Babangida, the architect of the crisis that almost brought Nigeria to her knees, said to have been humbled and hobbled by old –age related ailments, was not at the Eagle Square. Nor was Ernest Shonekan, the deluded boardroom expert who headed the misbegotten Interim National Government (ING), the emergency contraption the military deployed to subvert the popular will, but which collapsed like a house of cards that it was. Nor was former President Olusegun Obasanjo, arguably the biggest beneficiary of the June 12 crisis, who refused to recognise Abiola, obviously for sheer egoism, and became part of the crisis. Nor was former President Goodluck Jonathan, who a source said was either busy on the lecture circuit or in the creeks, trying to revive the long-abandoned family business of canoe making.

    Were they missed? No. Not at all.

    If only the dead could talk. What could the man of the moment have said on all this? How would Abiola have reacted to the recollections of his heroism? A newspaper baron, he was fond of calling his editors to catch up on the news of the day and make some comments. Let us have a suppositional account of his call to the Concord newsroom. Here we go:

    “Hello… this is MKO. How’re you?”

    Ah! Fine; thank you sir (the reporter is shocked).

    “Good. I trust all is well with you. What’s going on in town?”

    “It’s Democracy Day to mark your historic election as President.”

    “Ah! Thank you. I aaam…mmm .. I am grateful. Mo dupe pupo. But let me tell you, I knew this day would come. Nigerians, 14 million of them, came out to vote for me. From the east, west, north and south; everywhere. It was a sunny day; I remember. Even nature was behind us. Oh yes! You’re right. Then the military…no, a clique in the military annulled the election. They said if I was sworn in I would be killed. Did I look like a commander-in chief who would be afraid to die?

    “Some of our elders even said I should surrender and go home because  Ile san mi dun j’oye lo (a title’s joy and the glory of a good home are not comparable). Of course, I didn’t listen.

    “And, young man, aburo, you may recall that I told them clearly that a student who has passed an exam does not need to repeat it. Yes. I said so. You cannot make the sun to rise twice in one day, even in Africa. No.”

    “It was a colourful ceremony at the Eagle Square sir. President Buhari  addressed Nigerians. Your comrades were there. Your family was well represented.”

    ”Really? That’s great and I thank them all. Mo dupe. And I praise Buhari for his courage; that is how how… how… how… how it should should be. Those who were afraid of their shadow now know on which side of history they are. Men of no principles, no character and mere weaklings who were not worthy of the uniforms they wore. Shame.”

    “Unfortunately, Obasanjo could not attend. He was away on an international engagement.”

    “Obasanjo. Eh en; Obasanjo was invited? Ah …ah… ah …ah (he laughs).He would not come. Was he not the one who said I wasn’t the messiah Nigeria needed? He’s a master of intrigues and obfuscation, full of foxy ideas and pure ego. After I had made the supreme sacrifice, he became the biggest beneficiary of it all. I was even told that he planned to stay on in power and all that. He came to me in July 1994 with 26 traditional rulers. I told him off. I told him it was a battle between God and a few powerful elements. The voice of the people is the voice of God (Vox populi vox dei), a popular maxim long before Jesus Christ arrived.

    “Chief Emeka Anyaoku and the Ghanaian Kofi Annan also came. I stood my ground. All my life, I worked for the result which the merciful God gave us on June 12. Didn’t Jesus say in Luke 9 that no man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God?, The spiritual consequence of my desertion of a sacred cause like June 12 is hell, which God forbids. Yes. I told them so.”

    “Babangida, your friend, was also not there sir – for some health reasons.”

    “Hmmmm. Ibrahim. I didn’t expect him to come. He caused it all by not behaving like a true General. His courage -I doubt if he had any- failed him. He said his boys vowed to kill him if he handed over to me. And I asked him if he was ready to relinquish power before I contested the election; he swore with the Holy Koran that he was. That was why I told them when they mounted pressure on me to surrender my mandate: The mandate is not just mine; it belongs to 14million Nigerians. I am only a custodian of this sacred mandate. And you can’t shave a man’s head in his absence. Nigerians, 14 million of them, will be here if I must give up. They didn’t find it funny. And remember that I once said ‘with a friend like Babangida, nobody needs an enemy’. That is the truth.”

    “Chief, there are people who believe that if you had agreed to rerun the election, you would have been alive for your family and business today.”

    “Looook, my dear, doooooon’t, don’t talk like that. You can’t abort a pregnancy after the child has been born and people are already congratulating the mother. No. It’s too late. And I…I… I …I told them so. How can you be running and at the same time you are looking backwards? “

    “Shonekan was also absent, chief. I don’t remember the reason he gave.”

    “Shonekan; why should he be there – to collect another Greek gift? He reminds me of the elephant’s story. They told the elephant that he was going to be king. They dug a big hole and covered it with a beautiful carpet and put a throne on it. On the day of the elephant’s inauguration, there was a huge party. Women were singing, A o merin j’oba…(We shall install the elephant as king). They put the elephant on the throne. He crashed into the deep pit. He was deceived. He was used. I won’t say more than that. I won’t – for now. What Chief Shonekan failed to realise is, ‘the bigger the head, the bigger the headache’. Yes.”

    ”As for those who are saying that I should have surrendered to stay alive, I thank them. That is human. But you know me; I am a man of the people. I can die for anything I believe in. Nobody can piss on my back and tell me it’s raining. Besides, I stated clearly when the struggle began that on this matter, one of three things would happen. ‘I have never been dead, I have never gone to jail and I have not been dead before. One will surely happen.’ No regrets at all. An Are Ona Kakanfo must be ready to die fighting; he must never run away. It is a taboo, eewo.”

    “There is also the debate about the kind of president you would have made – a president of his friends or of all Nigerians?”

    You see, aaah…aaaah (Abiola laughs),let them read Farewell to Poverty, my economic blueprint in which I said by the grace of God in five years, no Nigerian child will go to bed hungry. And that is the truth. We can do it. I have to go now, aburo.

    “Thank you and God bless.”

  • Ganduje and the emirate of Kano

    I write as a professional historian and a concerned Nigerian who would like to see our civilization preserved for  the present and the future.  I am also the Baapitan of Oyo and therefore interested in the preservation and sustenance of our traditional institutions. Kano as a kingdom has existed at least for over a thousand years ruled first by the Habe (Hausa) and for the past two centuries by the Fulani.  Fighting under the flag of revolt raised against the Habe rulers  by Usman Dan Fodio allegedly for their unIslamic practices, Kano was conquered in 1807 and the first Fulani ruler was Sulaimanu, one of the lieutenants of Usman Dan Fodio.  Sulaimanu’s successor was Emir Ibrahim Dabo who founded the current dynasty in Kano. By the 14th century, Kano was so important  as a centre of commerce and trade in the Central Sudan (i.e land of the blacks ) that it attracted Dyula/Mandingo Wangarawa  traders from Mali who came in large numbers to the city. The city state became an Islamic state with the conversion of its ruler,  Yaji Dan Tsamiya (1344- 1385) and was attracting Islamic scholars from other parts of West Africa including the celebrated Abdurrahman Zaite, a Wangara from Mali but more important was  Muhammad al-Maghili(1440-1505), a berber scholar  from Tlemcen in North Africa who visited Kano and lived there for a while in the 15th century and wrote a book  for the emir on the “Obligations of Princes”, a book that has been compared to the much more famous “The Prince “ written in 1532 hundreds of years later by that Italian diplomat, politician, philosopher, historian, humanist, writer, playwright and poet, Niccolo Machiavelli.

    When the British conquered  northern Nigeria at the turn of the 19th century and throughout the imposition of the British imperium, Kano was the most important emirate in northern Nigeria. During the governor-generalship of Sir Fredrick Lugard, Kano was considered so important that the emir earned more salary than the governor -general. When Nigeria was amalgamated in 1914, the emir of Kano, Sarkin Abbas and Alaafin Gbadegesin Ladigbolu of Oyo represented native opinion and interest in the Nigerian Council, a talking shop created by Lugard to hide his untrammeled power as a British Poobah in Nigeria.

    Traditional institutions in Nigeria fared better under British colonial rule than they did when politicians emerged in the political space of Nigeria.The first assault on the institution was struck in Oyo when Alaafin Adeyemi  II,  the father of the present Alaafin of Oyo, Lamidi Olayiwola Adeyemi III, was deposed in 1955 by the Action Group government of Chief Obafemi Awolowo following a clash  in 1954 between  the elected local government chairman of Oyo, Chief Bode Thomas who was the deputy leader of the Action Group, central minister and chairman of Oyo Local Government  Council. Heavens did not fall as was expected and the soft underbelly of traditional institutions was exposed. In 1963, Muhammadu Sanusi I, the grandfather of the current Emir Muhammadu Sanusi 11 was removed from office by the government of Sir Ahmadu Bello, a scion of the Sokoto Caliphate, over trumped  up charges of maladministration of the emirate. Muhammadu Sanusi had been emir from 1954 to 1963 and he was a very powerful emir and an Islamic scholar and a supporter of the  Tijanniyya tariqa,  a modernizing and egalitarian Sufi order headquartered in Senegal. Sir Muhammadu Sanusi’s imperious ways did not quite go down well with Sir Ahmadu Bello who felt as a prince of Sokoto and head of government, he deserved unalloyed loyalty from Sarkin Kano who also did not defer to anybody. When Sanusi was removed, one or two emirs came after him before the situation was stabilized when  Ado Bayero, a son of a previous emir, Abdullahi Bayero and a nephew of Sanusi was recalled as Nigeria’s ambassador in Senegal and crowned the emir of Kano. The children of Muhammadu Sanusi who were well educated found their ways into diplomacy with three of them at different times rising to the position of ambassador and representing the country in such places like Canada, China, Malaysia, Indonesia  Sudan and possibly Saudi Arabia. Alhaji Aminu Sanusi, the father of the current emir after representing Nigeria in Canada and China among other places  became Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He retired suddenly over policy and protocol disagreements with late Major General Shehu Yar’ Adua  and returned to Kano as Ciroman  Kano ( heir apparent).

    I first met Alhaji  Aminu Sanusi In 1968 when I was a post-graduate student in Canada and he was High Commissioner Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Nigeria in Ottawa. This was during the Nigeria-Biafra civil war when most of us Nigerians were going through the trauma of seeing our country torn apart and brothers  were killing brothers with indescribable civilian suffering and kwashiorkor pandemic in the war affected areas. As if this was not enough to upset  us, a South African  sponsored Italian film with the title “Africa adios” was being shown all over Canada as the most authentic film from Africa. The film showed the contrast between  peaceful Southern Africa under white settlers rule  while wars were  being waged in the Congo, Nigeria, Burundi and Rwanda thus implying that Africans were better off under white racist rule. This was at a time when Africa was struggling to consolidate its independence.  I wrote to all ambassadors of African countries in Ottawa  to express our unhappiness at the directive of the African Students Association of which I was Secretary General. It was only Ambassador Aminu who flew to Halifax Nova  where the film was being shown and saw to its withdrawal from Canadian screens. Needless to say we were all very grateful to him. Many years later, I met him when he was a private man and having read my yeoman effort to rescue Sir Kashim Ibrahim  from obscurity by writing his biography he asked me if I would want to write his father’s biography. I said I would be too glad to do this if he could guarantee me access to  archival and private sources in Kano.  I had written Chief SL Akintola’s biography and I wanted to write the biographies of Obafemi Awolowo and Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa as well. I only succeeded in writing those of Chief Samuel Festus Okotie-Eboh, Soun Ajagungbade 111, Augustus Bandele Oyediran and my autobiography before I moved on to other intellectual pursuits. Unfortunately Ambassador Aminu Sanusi died rather prematurely.

    The current Emir Muhammadu Sanusi, the erudite and accomplished son of Ambassador Aminu Sanusi who rose to the  position of governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria  became emir of Kano after the death of his uncle Ado Bayero. While he was  governor of the CBN, he was not afraid, following the old tradition of good central bankers  of holding contrary opinions to that of the government that appointed them. It was in this circumstance that President Ebele Jonathan sacked him when he complained that crude oil sale proceeds were not  being credited to the CBN and that $20 billion were unaccounted for. Perhaps the figure he mentioned may have been exaggerated but the revelations of sleaze and corruption in recent times have proved him right that something untoward was happening in government.

    Muhammadu Sanusi represents the coming of highly educated persons into traditional governance in Nigeria particularly in northern Nigeria. Beginning with Asaba in Delta State where a professor of medicine has been its ruler for decades and now spreading all over the country, where we now have  as rulers retired generals, high ranking police officers, retired permanent secretaries, ambassadors,  top civil servants, successful business men and academics, it is inevitable that there is bound to be a clash between the traditional and modern rulers and unless disagreements are rationally and reasonably managed, there is the possibility of break down of law and order. In the 1980s, this kind of scenario led to much violence in Kano leading to  many fatalities  including that of a distinguished colleague who was special adviser to our friend Alhaji Muhammadu Rimi who was then the Governor of Kano.

    Obviously the present governor of Kano and perhaps most of the governors  in the North are not  too happy with the criticism of their misrule by Emir Sanusi and even by the Sultan of Sokoto Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar, the latter being more diplomatic than the straight-shooting Muhammadu Sanusi. The point is that truth is bitter but somebody must be able to speak truth to power before we are all swept off by the rebellion of the talakawa protesting against grinding poverty and poor governance. The collapse of state institutions in Zamfara is a graphic case of the kind poor governance complained by the emir. Signs of people’s impatience are already manifesting in the herders, kidnappers and cattle rustlers disturbing the peace not only of northern Nigeria but of Nigeria as a whole where the rich can no longer sleep because the poor are awake because of hunger. This is not the time to pick a fight with a traditional ruler who  commands a lot of respect and large followership because of his position as an arbiter in  inter and intra communal disputes and his reputation as an Islamic scholar.

    Cutting the Kano emirate into five is totally uncalled for. We must never destroy the legacy of the past because Africa is a continent struggling to establish  and reassert a legacy comparable to those in other parts of the world on which a confident present and future can be built. Governors would come and go; so also will mortal man come and go. The emirate will remain after we would all have gone. The governor of Kano should restore Kano emirate to what it was and how he met it. If the emir must suffer, the emirate does not deserve dismemberment and liquidation. Political power must not be used to commit acts of illegality and everyone including the emir of Kano should be allowed the freedom of expression.

  • Getting it right

    NATION building, a joint task. This was the catch phrase of the Gbaja/Wase Campaign Organisation.  Indeed, nation building is a joint task. We do not need to be reminded of that by any campaign organisation. It requires the contributions of every citizen to develop a nation. It is not a job that should be left to only those in power. By adopting this slogan, Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila and his deputy Ahmed Idris Wase were not only sending a message to their colleagues in the House of Representatives, but to the whole country.

    As citizens, we all have a stake in the Nigerian Project. If things go well, it will be for the good of all and if they do not, we will bear the brunt jointly and severally. Now the campaigns for the leadership of the National Assembly are over, with the emergence of Ahmad Lawan, Ovie Omo-Agege, Gbajabiamila and Wase as Senate president, deputy Senate president, Speaker and deputy Speaker, on Tuesday. These men will in the next four years pilot the affairs of the Senate and the House of Representatives.

    It is a job that comes with enormous responsibilities. So, these men have a great task ahead of them. They have told us that they have what it takes to preside over the Red and Green Chambers. Their colleagues believed in them and so gave them their mandate. The National Assembly got it right in picking its leaders. But, that is just the tip of the iceberg. The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) did its homework well on the matter to avoid what happened in 2015. Much of what we witnessed on the floors of both chambers on Tuesday were settled outside those houses.

    Part of the spade work was done by the party, which quickly retraced its steps after initially making some false moves. The greater job was done by the candidates who brought in their colleagues from the other parties into their campaigns. This bipartisan approach saved the APC from the 2015 horror which we all saw when the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) contested and won the deputy Senate president’s seat four years ago.

    APC learnt its lesson the hard way. But the major task for the party, President Muhammadu Buhari and the assembly leadership lies ahead. They have scaled the first hurdle by getting the National Assembly leadership elections out of the way. What comes next now is governance. How can the people feel the impact of government? This is what should engage the minds of the party and its leadership. As a party, APC no doubt means well for the people. It seemed it could not do much in its first four years in office between 2015 and May 2019 because of what the President called the ‘unpatriotic’ National Assembly leadership he worked with.

    The party claimed that it was hamstrung by the leadership of the eighth National Assembly. Also, APC spent its time, blaming the party in power before it for every ill that befell the country, even in its own time. It was the PDP this or PDP that, whenever there was any problem in the polity. The people are tired of hearing the party talk like that. Their desire is to see the party working for their good. APC did all the talking as it should have done when PDP was in power. It was proper then to criticise PDP because it was in power.

    But having left office for four years now, will it still be proper to blame the party for anything? What APC owes Nigerians is to find solutions to the problems of poverty, insecurity, unemployment, economic and social imbalance plaguing the country. The problems are rising by the day because of our growing population. APC has its hands full for it to waste precious time, blaming PDP for everything under the sun. For 16 years, it talked and talked about PDP’s bad governance. The people applauded it because things were bad, damn bad, under PDP between 1999 and 2015. And they compensated the party with their votes in 2015. What they expect in return is good governance.

    So, by now, they expect APC to be done with the talking. They waited patiently for four years, but there was no dice, and now they have given the party another four years to bring the change it promised them. It should no longer be time to talk; it is time to do. There is no better time to do what is expected of the party than now that it has another four-year mandate from the people. The party has got the National Assembly leadership right. As its Chairman, Adams Oshiomhole said on Tuesday, “we can no longer say we are blocked by the parliament’’. Now that it has the parliament it wants, what is left for the party is to get governance right too.

    If the President needs to “shake the table”, to borrow the words of Speaker Gbajabiamila, to do that, he should not hesitate to do so. The buck stops at his table and at the end of the day, he will carry the can if the APC does not deliver. But if the party does well, the glory will, of course, be his. To mean well for the people is good, but to do well for them, is better. May the next four years be better than the last four.

  • June 12: Triumph of truth over forces of evil

    “The truth”, Irish playwright Oscar Wilde once wrote “is rarely pure and never simple”. But as the Austrian-born philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein however pointed out, “truths are facts that have no spatial locations”. They remain the same. President Buhari’s statesmanship and courage in the historic institutionalization of June 12 as against Nigeria’s forces of evil’s June 29, as democracy day in honour of MKO Abiola’s heroic sacrifice that democracy may thrive in Nigeria, confirms a similar Yoruba saying that “Bi iro ba lo logun odun, ojo kan lotito yoo baa (No matter the quality of an untrue account, the truth shall always prevail”. All those that have tried to replace the truth of June 12 with falsehood have either ended up in grief or have continued to be haunted by their inglorious past.

    But first, for the sake of our youths who were not born 26 years ago, the diary of the debacles: (apology to Olatunji Dare). Babangida, the self-styled ‘evil genius’, after toppling Buhari in a palace coup, set up in January 1986 a Political Bureau of 17 accomplished Nigerians to ‘search for a viable political future and provide guidelines for attainment of this objective’. At the completion of their work after 15 months, he, in July 1987, inaugurated his transition programme. He first decreed two parties, National Republican Convention (NRC) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP). Although the two parties conducted their primaries on February 6, 1992, it was not until November 18, 1992, few months to the end of his “transition without end” that Babangida cancelled the results claiming ‘stability of the nation cannot be sacrificed on the altar of time’.

    Following  pressure from respected Nigerians including chief Anthony Enahoro and Obasanjo who warned that  “any attempt to prolong military rule will not only bring the armed forces into disrepute but will be a declaration of war against the sovereign right of the people of Nigeria to choose their own leaders and conduct their own affairs in accordance with the constitution”, Babangida, from his bag of tricks, brought out  option A4  which against all expectations, produced two of his friends Bashir Othman Tofa and Moshood Kashimawo Abiola as presidential candidates.

    Two days to June 12, 1993, the rescheduled date of the election, Arthur Nzeribe and his ABN, which had earlier unsuccessfully campaigned for “four more years for Babangida” as military president, secured a midnight interlocutory injunction from Justice Bassey Ikpeme’s Abuja High Court, to stop the election despite Decree 52 of 1993 that protected the election against court injunctions.

    Humphrey Nwosu, on the strength of the said Decree 52, went on with the election as scheduled. But less than 12 hours after the election, Nduka Obaigbena, the publisher of defunct This Week magazine and a failed NRC Senate candidate from Delta State was on CNN, calling for the cancelation of the election because   MKO Abiola, contrary to the provision of the electoral act, wore a dress with party logo to the polling booth on election day. In less than 24 hours and with the announcement of results in 14 states, Dahiru Saleh, Chief Judge of Abuja (FCT) in response to Arthur Nzeribe’s new prayers, stopped further announcement – an illegal order Attorney-General Akpamgbo ordered NEC, the electoral umpire to obey.

    On June 23, the forces of evil prevailed with the federal government’s cancellation of  the presidential election, suspension of  NEC and  repealing of the laws on which the eight years transition was anchored through an undated and unsigned statement read by Nduka Irabor, press secretary to Vice President Admiral Augustus Aikhomu,  claiming the decision was to “ensure that a judiciary that had been built on a sound and solid foundation was not tarnished by the insatiable political desire of a few persons”.

    Obasanjo who had during an earlier Council of State’s meeting informed Nigerians that “under Babangida, all the values we hold dear are under assault; the nation is racked by tension and despair; hope has become a scarce commodity and fear a constant companion”, made a 360 degree U-turn to join him in imposing an illegal Interim National Government, to be headed by Ernest Shonekan, Abiola’s fellow Egba compatriots. And wearing the borrowed robes of John the Baptist, he announced self-conceitedly that ‘Abiola was not the messiah Nigerians were waiting for’.

    The Guardian, in an editorial, posited that the “interim national government was an aberration, entirely without legitimacy and therefore lacked the authority with which to govern”. Justice Dolapo Akinsanya of Lagos High Court lent credence to the paper’s claim when she, shortly afterwards, declared the ING contraption illegal.

    Abacha seized power on November 17, 1993. He clamped MKO Abiola into prison on June 11, 1994 following his self-declaration as president at the famous Epetedo declaration. He went on to declare war on Nigerians with state sponsored assassination of Alfred Rewane, Kudirat Abiola among many others and the chasing of NADECO opposition members into exile. He then designed his own four-year transition programme to terminate in October 1998.

    He registered five political parties, described by Bola Ige as ‘the five fingers of a leprous hand’ viz Democratic Party of Nigeria,( DPN); Committee for National Consensus, (CNC); Grassroots Democratic Movement, (GDM); United Nigeria Congress Party, (UNCP) and National Centre Party of Nigeria( NCPN), with all of them adopting Abacha as their sole presidential candidate. Amidst sycophants’ songs such as “Abacha today, Abacha tomorrow and Abacha forever’, and Daniel Kanu-led one million Abuja match christened ‘Nigerian Youths Earnestly Yearn for Abacha”, the man died a miserable death allegedly eating apples with Indian prostitutes inside the presidential palace he illegally seized and immorally occupied.

    General Abdulsalami Abubakar succeeded Abacha.  Abiola who was said to have collapsed and died on June 7, 1998, in the presence of Thomas Pickering, visiting United State under-secretary for foreign affairs, died under his nose. Haunted by MKO Abiola’s ghost, as against Babangida’s eight years transition and Abacha’s five years’, Abubakar packed his own transition into a tight eight months, September 24, 1998 and May 25, 1999 at the end of which he and his distrusted ‘army of anything is possible” released Obasanjo from prison and imposed him on Nigeria to operate a military-midwifed constitution neither he nor Nigerians had seen. Obasanjo, the major beneficiary of Abiola’s tragedy spent eight years in office dancing on his grave. His fellow PDP members betrayed the spirit of June 12 by stealing the country blind in the name of democracy for another eight years.

    Yesterday’s final triumph of truth is but a confirmation of time tested aphorism of Uthman Dan Fodio, the late spiritual leader of the 19th century Fulani Jihad, (1754-1816) that ‘conscience is an open wound that only the truth can heal. As it was in the first republic, all those who elevated falsehood above truth, dead or alive, have all come to grief. Babangida the evil genius who tried to set the country ablaze by fraudulently claiming he annulled June 12 to please northern political elite opposed to Yoruba presidency is today a shadow of himself. Abacha died a cheap miserable death inside Aso Rock Presidential palace he immorally occupied. With anarchy let loose on the land, Obasanjo is today a witness to the ruins of the ‘mainstreaming’ efforts he first embarked upon in  1976, all through second and fourth republics when he tried hard to obliterate the legacies of his more illustrious Yoruba compatriots  in order to please those he today accuses of planning to ‘Fulanise’ and ‘Islamise Nigeria. Danjuma, David Mark and their fellow Christians without the spirit of Christ who ran and ruined the country for 15 years in denial of what June 12 represents are in the United Nations accusing those on whose back they rode to into prominence of ethnic cleansing.

  • Nigeria’s new prodigals

    the governors’ forum staged its opening act on a tableau of presumed impotence. Yet from the pack, each governor emerged breathing spunk and fire, setting in motion, sporadic outbursts of a feigned vigour.

    Each governor would insist that his vigour is real as lackeys and aides caress the swollen belly of his lies; the charade will persist until fabricated repute splits to reality’s vengeful lashes.

    Until then, he remains self-embowered, dour and stuck in mental indolence. His passion pales to the spunk of classical Athens’s ephebic youth, thus he is persistently impaled by his alter ego, the colossus which infects him with a crooked sense of the reality of things around him.

    Eventually, like the proverbial prodigal, he assumes bestiality of self, squandering goodwill, misappropriating trust and state funds. Such is the disposition of the incumbent governor.

    Last dispensation, his personality was regressive, an artifact of aggressive forging.

    In time, he would face his nemesis, the conflict between good and evil; right and wrong; savagery and humaneness; definitiveness and dissolution of self.

    Rather than strive to become a national treasure, he mutates to become a national terror, smothering hope and siring strife across gubernatorial wastelands.

    Power grants the governor a dangerous freedom. That savage streak supposedly consigned to religion’s medieval hell, now sprouts in the palatial glade of the State House and the soggy crevices of the governor’s psyche. Ultimately, it returns to its old place in nature; the abyss of the misguided functionary’s tyrant mind.

    Power intoxicates and corrupts. Thus under its influence, the governor’s mauls and steals. Paid sophists and the now ubiquitious media attack dogs attempt to rationalise his coarse boundaries of selfhood, claiming he is hopeless before the ravages of power or that he is lured into acquiescence by its sensual beauty.

    These are the voyeurs and errand boys of power. Those who like to slave and watch. They are the cohorts and lackeys of powerful governors – even among these, we have social hierarchies, a totem pole by which status, favours and privileges are dispensed. They are the ‘Yes-men.’ I would call them ‘associate savages,’ and they include the so-called captains of industry, journalists, non-profits, law enforcers, political party chairmen, to mention a few.

    Together, they pervert the provisions of the constitution; the 1999 Constitution – the fourth since independence – imposed by previous military government, increased states’ responsibility to provide social services and infrastructure.

    Perhaps intended as an interim document, the constitution was deliberately vague about demarcation. Thus while Nigerians clamour for a more realistic and humanely wrought constitution, overlap and ambiguity of responsibilities across government tiers persist with intense debate and confusion.

    Education governance, for instance, is split across the three levels of government (federal, state and local), but the collapse of primary and secondary schools nominally run by local or state governments forced the federal government to intervene through the Universal Basic Education (UBE) programme to reduce illiteracy.

    Transparency is equally lacking in state fiscal governance, something the Africa research Institute (ARI) attributed to unclear definition of responsibilities; ARI findings revealed that no state government has issued verifiable audited accounts since 2013 while there is little public scrutiny of state revenues and expenditure.

    Many state governors lack character, managerial expertise and tact thus they negotiate and grab power through fraud, bribery and brigandage; oftentimes, they flood state assemblies with lackeys, who will never hold them to account.

    And while the federal allocation is meant to supplement the revenue state governments generate from taxes on personal income, property and other sources, in several states, the federal allocation provides over 80 per cent of the total revenue; states’ internally generated revenue (IGR) often fall short of personnel costs.

    Consequently, some governors have resorted to frantic measures to improve the fortunes of their states. For instance, Ondo governor, Rotimi Akeredolu’s recent decision to foster the farming of indian hemp on a commercial scale and as a major revenue earner without viable economic and social safety measures betray a pathetic lack of practical, developmental ideas.

    A governor’s character and intentions are crucial to his state’s performance but in Nigeria, “Many elected governors have no programme or blueprint at the start of their tenure and instead of working out a few priorities that the state can afford, they set up expensive projects which they pass on to the federal government to fund, or abandon them when the funding runs out, according to Yussuf Tuggar, a 2011 governorship aspirant in Bauchi.

    True, in Ogun State, the immediate past governor, Ibikunle Amosun, in flagrant disregard of reality and managerial wisdom, initiated an international cargo airport project, which has rendered over 5,000 farmers landless and incapacitated in a severely depressed agricultural economy. And just recently, Amosun’s successor, Governor Dapo Abiodun, bemoaned the heartrending condition of the state’s major health facility, the Olabisi Onabanjo University Teaching Hospital (OOUTH). He decried the rust and mould-ridden wards, decrepit operating theatres and collapsed ceilings.

    At this juncture, you could be forgiven for seeking the wisdom in ex-governor, Amosun’s noisy celebration of a “250-bed” hospital complex at Oke Mosan, while the only university teaching hospital in the state and several Primary Healthcare Centres (PHCs) fell apart.

    Ill-conceived and moribund state-funded projects are found throughout the country, from Cross River’s failed plan to rival Dubai as a global tourist attraction to a former governor of Jigawa’s scheme to turn his Sahelian state into an IT hub, Nigeria seems beset by impractical governors.

    Lest we forget the sad case of a former governor of Katsina, who ignored infrastructure woes in his state to build and commission a new residence for the governor of Niamey Region in Niger Republic, valued at N60 million few years ago.

    Four years ago, oil rich Akwa Ibom equally derived almost all of its N462 billion (US$2.3 billion) budget from the federal “handout.” The handout covered only a fraction of its recurrent costs and when receipts from the federal revenue pool in the first nine months of 2015 halved compared to the previous year, due to the collapse in global oil prices, most states rapidly became insolvent.

    Thus one of Buhari’s first decisions as president was to authorise a bailout fund for 27 indebted states endowed with N338 billion (US$1.7 billion) of federal government funds. In addition, the Debt Management Office converted N324 billion (US$1.6 billion) of state debt to long term bonds.

    A former state finance commissioner told ARI, “Even when the oil price was high, virtually all the states were spending more than they earned,” adding that Buhari, “could have imposed conditions – revenue and spending targets – on the states before agreeing to bail out their debts and approve new money.”

    The federal government, in effect, he said, refunded the costs of state mismanagement and profligacy.

    It’s 2019 and Nigeria’s newly elected governors have begun what is known in street parlance as “Initial Gra-Gra” (IGG). On their watch, the states will manifest as a sick rose even as they wildly paint alternative portraits of their domains as a bower of bliss. The governors’ frantic art of concealment necessitates that truth’s approach must take the form of a raid. The press and civil society must rise to the challenge.

     

  • Let’s save our countryside

    WE all thought it was some mythical construction. Fiction. Some contrivance to stop us from visiting our beautiful countryside. Or the product of the fecundity of some people’s minds. How wrong we were.

    From the ever-busy Lagos – Ibadan Expressway – of sweating road builders, whose work seems to be going on for eternity, long fuel trucks parked on both sides of the road in a big community of vices (drug peddlers and their clients, women of doubtful virtues, diesel thieves siphoning their stock from the vehicles) and an army of hawkers pushing their wares of  bread, biscuits, apple and all sorts of edibles at your face. There are also officers stopping vehicles to remind motorists that “your boys dey here o”.

    Turn off the road to hit the Ibadan-Ife section and in a few minutes you are confronted with the majesty of nature. Beautiful green forests of tall trees (teak, gmelina, cassia and others), singing birds, grazing cows and the rumbling Asejire dam. Women are hawking bush meat. Some are roasting their stuff, the aroma harassing the nostrils and tempting you to stop for a quick bite. Corn farms and women offering farm-fresh corn on the cob.

    You wind down the car’s glasses and soak in the fresh, clean air that the city lacks. There are road-side canteens offering fresh palm wine, pounded yam and, of course, bush meat.

    All these are threatened now. The Southwest countryside is being ravaged, not by some strange locusts or rebellious farm hands. No. Some malapert rogues, implacable and deadly criminals have seized this seductive land by the jugular– from Ibadan-Ife to Ilesa and Akure and Akungba. Iwaraja-Efon and Ado-Ijesa-Isu. They are snatching motorists off their vehicles and herding them into bushes, demanding hefty ransom for their freedom.

    The stories are touching – torture, rape and death. And payment of hefty ransom in a society where many find feeding a herculean task. Nobody is immune to this madness. The rich are not safe; the poor are in panic. Security agencies seem to be helpless, but I won’t join the thinking in some circles that they are part of this game of death. No. They may not seem to be doing enough, but the conspiracy theory, plausible as it may seem, isn’t that straightforward.

    A woman told of how she and her family were tortured for six days. The family lives overseas. Dad, mum and daughter were on holidays. Their heart shattering account , which has been trending on the social media, is titled, “Horror in the kidnappers’ den”. They had travelled from Auchi to Akure.  They planned to stay a few days in Lagos before returning overseas. The journey turned a nightmare on the Akure – Ilesa road. Shortly after the Ijare Junction, they had a flat tyre–apparently contrived to get them stuck.

    The driver parked to change the tyre. That was the beginning of six days of horror and bestiality that sounded so incredible, like a scene from a movie. They were hit with guns and blood was all over their bodies. That, in any case, was just a tip of the iceberg of madness the family experienced. The daughter was screaming.

    Wrote the woman: “ ‘Mummy, daddy, what’s going on’? There was no time to say a word. They marched us into the bush, firing into the sky. They hit me on my chest. They hit my daughter on her head, blood oozed. At this time, it was better to kill me. I shouted at one of the armed men. His response was hell. He went straight for my private part, tore my dress with his gun. The others ripped my dresses. I was left with my undies. My husband and daughter started crying. Two of them dug their teeth into my breasts.”

    One of the gunmen removed the girl’s dresses and carried her on his head as she struggled. The woman said the gunmen were from a certain part of the country; going by their language. How did she know? She said she school in that part of the  country.

    After being herded into a forest for nine hours, they were asked to choose who should be raped between mother and her nine-year-old daughter. The father protested that he was a moslem and his religion abhors homosexuals. He was punished for his effrontery in telling them who a true Moslem is. They took turns in raping the poor woman for days.

    In the madmen’s den, according to her, were “two women, two ladies and three men”. There were some people whose legs were chained to trees, she said. At the camp were traditional medicine men, a big kitchen and some other things of comfort. “I was not allowed to put on any additional clothing on my body for 24 hours. The rain fell once. I became the relic and a sexual museum for the armed men who in turn addressed me and asked questions about my financial standing. New men joined the camp. They organised military training for the men, teaching them how to shoot and walk through circles of glowing fire,” she said.

    The family was released after paying N8million. They are now back overseas, swearing never to visit Nigeria again. She concluded her terrifying story with an admonition for the people to rise against these monsters. She said: “I pity Yoruba people… I worry about the conspiracy of silence by the people themselves, the ignorance, the treachery and the illusion that one day things will get better… .”

    A few weeks ago, former students of Christ’s School, Ado – Ekiti were raising money to free one of them who was abducted in Efon-Alaye by some criminals. With him were two boys; twins. Well built and strong, one felt it was not proper to be grabbed like chicken and led away by some tiny ruffians. He challenged them. They slit his hand with a machete.

    A bus carrying some church members of a Lagos church was attacked on the Ife-Ilesa expressway by armed men who suddenly jumped onto the road. The driver almost rammed the vehicle into the intruders, who jumped off and opened fire. Luckily, nobody died. That was on June 1.

    There is also the audio of a man negotiating ransom with a kidnapper, who spoke smattering pidgin English in a tone that sounds like that of a man struggling to beat a terrible hangover.

    Kidnapper: Boy how are dey?

    Victim’s relation: I’m fine

    Kidnapper: How much dey ground now?

    Victim’s relation: Emmm, as in cash, let me explain to you because every member of the family is running up and down. In cash now we have N285, 000 but the person that bought the car (the man on the other end is grumbling). Wait o! Listen to me, the person that wants to buy the car, he wants to buy the car for N385, 000. He said he will bring N200, 000 by 5 o’clock. So, please hold on… . That means if we add this one, it will be 580,000 or so… Now, I am going to the family house. I want to see how much they have gathered there because…every member of the family is donating money. So when I get to the family house now, I will call you.

    Kidnapper: Listen to me. You dey hear wetin I tell you now

    Victim’s relation: Eehn, go ahead. What did you say?

    Kidnapper: I dey tell you; you wan talk now.

    Victim’s relation: Okay, go on.

    Kidnapper: Even na 50 million you gather now, you no go fit comot this man for my hand.

    Victim’s relation: Okay. Well, I will relay your message to the family.

    Kidnapper: You hear?

    Victim’s relation: Because even me as I am talking to you, I am not well, I am receiving treatment. But let me go to the family, we will call you.

    Kidnapper: Why you go call me? I say even na 50 million you gather now, that money, you no go fit comot this man for my hand. You dey hear that?

    Victim’s relation: So what do you want us to do now?

    Kidnapper: Go find flenty money.

    We must do away with the ethnic profiling. Criminals do not operate by tribe. Besides, these gangsters could not have found their evil trade so easy and lucrative without collaboration with some dirty indigenes of their areas of operation.

    Who are their collaborators? Who runs their chain of supplies? Where are their guns coming from? Are the security agencies doing enough? Why can’t the states in the Southwest form joint patrol teams to man these roads until these crooks are flushed out?

    What are our traditional rulers doing? Who owns the farms from which the hoodlums operate? How do they keep the cash they collect? Are they invincible and invisible? I think we should not leave it all for the government. Every community should organise its own security within the confines of the law. Why not a Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) to save our countryside that will love to visit quite often?

  • Buhari and the Economist: Between Growth and Development

    By the law of Mother Nature, the strong survives and the weak dies. It is the survival of the fittest wherelife is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. This was what forced men out of hostile European environment to Africa in search of food, gold and glory. With superior fire power, they soon forcefully integrated African society into the world economy by shipping 12.5 million Africans to the new world between 1525 and 1886, out of which 10.7m survivedto lay the foundation forwestern Europe’s prosperity. From slavery to globalization, it is all about law of nature-the strong feeding on blood of the weak. The agreement to substitute natural law with international law after 67 years of brutal European wars did not change the narrative.

    International organisations such as World Bank, World Trade Organisation and International Monetary Fund (IMF) formed after the Breton Wood conference in 1944 to foster global growth and economic stability by working with developing nations toachieve macro-economic stability and reduce poverty only consolidated the mindset. Help comes  only after vulnerable help-seekers have met the IMF ‘conditionalities’or what is also known as ‘Washington consensus’, whichinclude austerity measures (to further impoverish the people), devaluation of currencies, trade liberalization or lifting of import and export restrictions and of course privatization or divestiture of all state-owned enterprises.

    Even with the assault on the economyby President Shehu Shagari, party-chairman Meredith Adisa Akinloye and their NPN between 1979-1983, our economy was still resilient with our naira as strong as the pound sterling and twice as strong as the US dollar.But that all that changed with Babangida’s ill-advised IMF inspired Structural Adjustment Programme, earlier rejected by Muhammadu Buhari but vociferously championed by Olu Falae and Kalu Idika Kalu.  As demanded by IMF, our market was opened to manufactured goods from Europe and America leading to instant collapse of our budding industries including the vehicle assembly plants, electronics, and shoe, battery, tyre and textile industries among many others.For instance, theKano Gaskiya textile factory commissioned in 1985 by Muhammadu Buhari with staff strength of 4000 was about thelargest in West Africa.It finally collapsed in 2005. In all, over 300,000 jobs were lost in the textile industry alone.

    With no lesson learnt from Babangida failed commercialization rip-off, President Olusegun Obasanjo between 2003-2007, also embraced the IMF inspired privatization programme. But despite meeting IMF deregulation, liberalization and privatization conditionalities’, the National Economic Empowerment Development Strategy (NEEDS) and the State Economic Empowerment Development Strategy (SEEDS).,its related initiative at state level, designed to raise the standard of living of Nigerians failed. Other objectives such as rebuilding decaying infrastructure, creation of 7 million new jobs, diversification of the economy, boosting non-energy exports, increase industrial capacity utilization, and improve agricultural productivity were never achieved.

    But there was growth. In 2013, our economy was ranked as the largest economy in Africa, the 27th-largest economy in the world in terms of nominal GDP, and the 22nd-largest in terms of purchasing power parity. Nigerian GDP at purchasing power parity (PPP) was said to have almost tripled from $170 billion in 2000 to $451 billion in 2012. Indeed, Citigroup report published in February 2011, predicted Nigeria will have the highest average GDP growth in the world between 2010 and 2050. But it was growth without development. The multinationals and their local representatives were the major beneficiaries. Unlike development, growth had no positive impact on quality of education, health services, infrastructural development, communication, political participation and overall quality of life of the ordinary Nigerians.

    As it was in 1984, Buhari in 2015 decided to change the narrative by rejecting the Breton Wood growth-focused economic policies (Lamido Sanusis, Emir of Kano also recently expressed regret for his blind faith in Breton Woods Economic policies as CBN Governor) which serve only the interest of multinationals and their local representatives. For the nation’s decayed infrastructures he sought help from China for support. And since, the nation could not feed herself in spite of the celebrated growth between 1999 and 2015, he deployed huge resources into the agricultural sector to ensure self-sufficient in food production.

    But perhaps because The Economist of London only uses growth as index of measurement of prosperity, it says Nigeria has become the poorest nation on earth in the last four years of Buhari, predicting more misery for Nigerians in the next four years.In its May 31 edition, it also says ‘with 94m Nigerians surviving on less than $1.90 a day, a quarter of very poor people in the whole world would be Nigerians by 2030. It criticized the federal government’s social investment programmes (SIP), and government school-feeding programmes. For the nation to escape the terrible fate that it believes awaits her,The Economistpredictably recommends further assault on the poor through the devaluation of the naira and raising the pump price of fuel.

    But since it is often difficult to serve two masters with equal fervor, TheEconomist cannot be expected to be an unbiased umpire. It is therefore not unexpected that it has not taken notice of government efforts at changing the focus from growth to development.In any case, a news magazine which oncedescribed itself as “a product of the Caledonian liberalism of Adam Smith and David Hume” and has remained an unrepentant promoter of classical and economic liberalism that supports free trade, globalisation, immigration and cultural liberalism was only being true to itself.

    It was, for this reason, Karl Marx, the socialist theorist dismissed The London Economist “as the European organ of the aristocracy of finance, (which) described most strikingly the attitude of this class”, and the reason the Guardian concludes “its writers rarely see a political or economic problem that cannot be solved by the trusted three-card trick of privatisation, deregulation and liberalization. Others who question the impartiality of  the news magazine include  John Raston Saul, who says it is a “magazine which hides the names of the journalists who write its articles in order to create the illusion that they dispense disinterested truth rather than opinion” and Edward Baptist the author of‘slavery and American capitalism’ who attributed the news magazine’s harsh review of his work to its adherence to “free-market fundamentalist” theories, “the idea that everything would be better if measured first and last by its efficiency at producing profit.

    Of course questioning the neutrality of the London Economist is not to say many Nigerians including those who had no choice but to vote for President Buhari in the last election are satisfied with his below-average performance during his first term. That will amount to living in denial. Many are still angry with the president’s handling of herdsmen siege on the middle belt food region of the country, the endless reprisal  killings in southern Kaduna, the take- over of Kaduna-Abuja road by hoodlums, the reign of terror by cattle rustlers, banditry and illegal gold miners in Zanfara and kidnapping for ransom across the nation.Unfortunately, until the President’s last Monday reported approval of state and LGA policing, the cheapest way to tackling insecurity, many Nigerians believe, because of his disregard for public opinion, he and those terrorizing Nigerians are jointly responsible for holding Nigeria hostage.