The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • Noble profession and its ignoble actors

    John Austin defines law as ‘a rule laid down for the guidance of an intelligent being by an intelligent being having power over him’. In other words, the law by the privileged few is the law of society. It is an instrument for the protection of their disproportionate share of the national resources. Although the constitution says we are equal before the law, but as George Orwell reminded us a long time ago, ‘we are equal but some are more equal than others’. This is why human laws have been said to be the expression of political relation of the individual within society. Plato says ‘they are like spider’s web which catches the small flies but the great break through’. In Nigeria as elsewhere for the underprivileged and disconnected, ‘equality before the law’ is a myth. If those assigned the ignoble role of perpetuating injustice whimsically call theirs a noble profession, I don’t think we need to begrudge them for dressing themselves in borrowed robes. We know who lawyers are and they know themselves.

    But as our noble Itse Sagay pointed out last week, what makes the difference in all societies are the few noble men among those destined by virtue of their profession to perform ignoble role. Unfortunately, the current Supreme Court judges by virtue of their recent bizarre judgment in Rivers and Akwa Ibom, in which they pretended not to understand the difference between authenticating voters through accreditation with card reader machine and actual voting, do not in his view belong to this few gem of society.

    For him, the ‘perverse verdict’ reached by the Supreme Court judges through an application of technicality that is in conflict with justice, in Rivers and Akwa Ibom are ‘a major setback to democracy and the rule of law’, especially when according to him, ‘everybody knows that there were no elections in those two states and “that people like Wike climbed into the governorship seat over dead bodies and over blood of human beings’. He seems to be saying such verdicts have parallels only Plato’s ‘forest of monkeys rather than habitable place for men’. Sagay, a very decent man is concerned about the pursuit of justice.

    But Wike and his group did not approach the Supreme Court to seek justice. They were out to protect their resources. In the pursuit of their objective they have also demonstrated they are not afraid of blood. In fact they had threatened more blood in case the Supreme Court upheld the Appeal court’s verdict of a re-run. Wike spilled the beans with his reaction to Sagay’s attack. ‘The people of Rivers State’, he said will ‘never give up their sovereignty’ and ‘will prevent APC desperate attempts to politically dominate our people and plunder the resources of [our] land’. He made it clear ‘Niger Delta states would prevent outsiders from having a foothold on their land in future’. Having earlier narrated how he secured his victory, he declared with an offensive finality that Sagay cannot ‘re-litigate a settled matter’, because his victory was settled. The not particularly distinguished Supreme Court judges gave Wike and his group what they wanted.

    Sagay also spoke so passionately about  the Nigerian judiciary as if we do not know it has been  largely dominated since independence by those driven by greed to pursue justice by juxtaposing lies with truth as if both are complimentary and judges whose verdict sometimes give an impression they are anarchists. In an attempt to destroy the Action Group (AG) in 1961, the judiciary supported the illegal probe of the National Bank which was a ‘regional issue over which the federal government had no power’. Following the intra-party AG feud in 1962, it shamelessly ruled in favour of S. L. Akintola, the embattled premier of the west, a verdict later upturned by the Privy Council in London, the then highest judicial body. In 1962, it colluded with NCNC/NPC coalition to illegally declare state of emergency on the West.

    The Nigerian judiciary also in 1962 demonstrated its bankruptcy through its ignoble role in the Balewa-contrived Coker Commission of Inquiry into Statutory Corporations in the Western Region and the prosecution and conviction of Awo for treasonable felony.

    Those allegedly driven by their greed or ambition to serve as government lawyers were Chief Michael Okorodudu who had just decamped from AG following the loss of his contract as Western Region commissioner in London, Kehinde Sofola, NCNC member and opponent of Awo in his Ikenne town and Sobowale Sowemimo, who till them worked as a junior under Fani-Kayode who upon becoming leader of opposition after decamping from AG started calling for the declaration of state of emergency in the west.

    In 1963, the judiciary betrayed the NCNC and the Igbo by claiming the census crisis was ‘a political issue’. Realising that there was no way they could achieve power constitutionally with the census returns, the East lost faith in the country and started thinking of secession.

    In 1966, the self- serving judiciary advised Ironsi to take over power instead of swearing in the most senior surviving minister following the disappearance of the Prime Minister Balewa. In May 1967, the leading members of the judiciary drafted the Unification Decree 34 with all its known consequences for a heterogeneous and multi-ethnic society.

    In 1993, the judiciary was used by Babangida to justify the annulment of the 1993 election. For a prize, it provided an escape route for a totally discredited Babangida regime by crafting an Interim Government decree which paved the way for the installation of Ernest Shonekan to spite MKO Abiola another Egba man who had won a national election. In 1994 when Justice Dolapo Akinsanya threw out Babangida’s interim contraption along with Shonekan, the judiciary rallied round Abacha who ruled with iron fist for five years.

    If PDP has ravaged the nation these past 16 years, it was not without the support of the judiciary. It supported vote rigging. (Mike Igini, a former Edo Resident Electoral Commissioner told Channel Television last week how some SANs claimed improvement in our electoral system will deprive them of easy source of money). Its senior members supported those who wrecked the banking sector. They feature prominently in the privatisation programme and the fuel subsidy scam. They shielded many lawbreakers who have since moved from desecrated Governors’ lodges to the hallowed chambers of the National Assembly as lawmakers.

    All our woes stem from the greed and ignoble actions of men of the noble profession. In office, ex-President Jonathan claimed he was not to be held responsible for the slow pace at which the wheel of justice grinds in our country. Last week, President Buhari identified the judiciary as the only threat to his war against corruption ‘because of long adjournments currently being imposed on all cases of corruption’. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has called for the reform of the judiciary and in fact canvassed for the establishment of special courts to try corruption cases.

    Unfortunately, unlike the other arms of government, the executive and the legislature, that periodically test their legitimacy through elections, the judiciary is answerable to none. In fact we have been warned of a possible descent into chaos and anarchy if those performing ignoble acts are sanctioned. Last week, scores of Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SANs) followed their colleague detained for an ignoble act to court to sue EFCC. Chief Kehinde Sofola a second Republic Attorney General and one time vice president of the Body of Benchers during the June 1993 crisis issued a statement saying Nwosu’s NEC ought to have obeyed Justice Bassey Ikpeme’s unpatriotic ruling. He has elsewhere expressed the view that the executive cannot probe the judiciary because ‘the executive, the legislature and the judiciary are equal’. Yet he is on record as having declared that ‘the primary duty of the judiciary is to protect the judiciary’. It will appear our nation is at the mercy of those who perpetrate ignoble acts under the cover of a ’noble’ profession.

  • A revised Electoral Manual

    A revised Electoral Manual

    The Nigerian political scene is a pundit’s nightmare, with its immense capacity to shock. Consider the Ekiti State scenario. Many months after we all had concluded that the governorship election had been won and lost, a fellow showed up on television the other day to spill the beans, relaying graphic details of the plot that gave Ayo Fayose the governorship mantle. It all sounded so incredible, like a story in the hands of a master fiction writer, but the Fayose camp, which could have debunked Tope Aluko’s facts and figures, abandoned the message and went after the messenger. Now, the author of “the Great Confession” says his life is under threat.

    More shocks were to follow, with the Supreme Court nullifying the positions of the lower courts in the Rivers, Akwa Ibom and Taraba governorship elections, among others. Many politicians, exasperated and perplexed by their perception of justice in contradistinction to judgment, have contacted “Editorial Notebook” for advice, paving the way for that bestseller, “An electoral Manual”, which has been revised at least twice, to undergo another makeover.

    Here then is another revised edition of the manual, which will, no doubt, be of great help to those who intend not just to contest an election but to win and defend their hard earned victory.

    Always remember that every election is a war. You need an army of yours – well funded. If you have a President who cares little about the  ambush-and-finish-off politics that is common here, the better for you. The Armed Forces will simply look the other way as your troops make mincemeat of your opponents on the eve of the election.

    How? Simple. Get your boys (your opponents will scorn them as thugs and roughnecks and bad boys and criminals and hoodlums; never mind; the end, as they say, justifies the means) to visit the homes of some key members of the opposing party, fire some shots and spill as much blood as possible. You will be surprised that the next day, only a few stubborn supporters of your  opponents will have the guts to come out for voting.

    The field is, automatically, open for you and all your agents to manipulate the accreditation – card reader or no card reader–, stuff the ballot and award the votes in the score forms you must have kept in a secure place for this great day. Some of your opponent’s supporters will complain that the card reader is not working and, in frustration, walk away. Better for you.

    At the end of it all, reporters will seek your view on the exercise. You will, of course, praise it as the best in recent times. “Kudos to INEC; they have really improved. Materials arrived early and accreditation was orderly. Voting was peaceful,” you will tell the nosey fellows.

    Your opponent will cry like a baby whose lollipop has been snatched by an inconsiderate elderly fellow. He will scream murder and say that the ballot was rigged and that his supporters were murdered. Be calm.

    In no time, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) will declare you winner of the election. Your opponent will, naturally, disagree. His supporters will mount some street protests and malign INEC and its ever-dutiful officials, who will, of course, stand their ground and ask the aggrieved party to go to the tribunal – the only organ that can change the verdict.

    Go to church for thanksgiving and testify to how faithful the Almighty has been to you. After you have been sworn in as governor, do not abandon the path of rectitude. Go from one church to another, praying for victory in the upcoming legal battles. Your opponents will say you have turned yourself into a prayer project as Pentecostal giants lay hands on your balding head. Never mind. All is well.

    Then build up an unassailable war chest. Get the House of Assembly to approve that you borrow some billions – for what you will call some esoteric names, such as “Operation Zero Tolerance for Potholes” and “No More Refuse”. Critics, those idle fellows who abuse the rights of others by insisting that all behaviours must conform with their narrow standards, will call you reckless and spendthrift. Don’t reply. Afterall, the House is behind you.

    Head for Abuja to tidy up that end. Then there will be so much noise about you being found loitering around the office of the Chief Justice. Yes. Don’t you have the right to movement? Isn’t that office a public place? Don’t you have some issues the CJN ought to have settled and what is wrong in a reminder?

    Go back home and get set for the tribunal. You can cause panic in the camp of your opponent by threatening to unleash on the tribunal 10,000 witnesses who will testify that your election was free, fair and credible.

    Hire an army of good lawyers, those called SANs, who will storm the tribunal with facts and figures and summon witnesses to swear that you were indeed the people’s choice. Your opponent may call hundreds of witnesses; don’t be intimidated. If you can get 10, that is okay.

    At the end of it all, the tribunal may, in its limited wisdom, call your witnesses a bunch of liars and declare that you failed to prove beyond doubt that the trophy was rightly handed over to you and that a new election should be organised within 90 days. Don’t be downcast. Reject the judgment and head for the court of Appeal.  It is, after all, a marathon and not a dash.

    The SANs, aforementioned, will rise to condemn the tribunal and tell the court how it erred in law a thousand times to nullify your election, how it failed to prove that you cheated, how you perpetrated no violence (even if there was violence, weren’t you and your supporters the victims?), how some of your votes were unjustly cancelled and how you believe the court will play its role as the last hope of the common man by restoring the mandate , which thousands of your people freely gave you.

    But a note of caution: even the best of lawyers know that Homo proponit sed Deus disponit (that is to say, “man proposes, God disposes”). The Court of Appeal may find no merit in your lawyers’ fine arguments, their marvelous erudition and impeccable logic. “The appellant has not convinced this court that his case has merit and the appeal fails and I so declare,” His Lordship may say.

    Be courageous. Nothing good comes easy. To the Supreme Court you head. Again, your lawyers will deliver your case, deploying all manner of syllogisms, obfuscations and verbosity to impress their Lordships. By now, your opponent and his supporters should be thinking that it is all over, signed, sealed and waiting to be delivered. But for you, it has just begun. Go round and throw in everything.

    Thereafter, relax. You can even boast a little by saying you are sure the Supreme Court will right all the wrongs against you. After all, by now, you know what many do not know- that not all legal battles are won in the court room. Tell your supporters to get set for a carnival.

    To the consternation of all, including your opponents and all those legal giants who had predicted your fall, the Supreme Court will pronounce your election  valid.

    It will say that the card reader, one of the  planks on which your opponent’s case was built, is a stranger to the Electoral Act and that he failed to prove the allegation of rigging as he did not bring witnesses from all the polling units where the so-called irregularities took place.

    Besides, the eminent jurists will say the allegation of violence holds no water. Where are the victims who claimed to have had their heads smashed? People died; yes, but where is the proof? How many died and where are their death certificates, which must be authenticated by a certified forensic expert. Where are the doctors, nurses, morgue attendants, ambulance drivers and all others who can help the court determine that indeed there was violence? Was the violence substantial enough to affect the outcome of  the election? Whose fault?

    These allegations are criminal and must be proven beyond reasonable doubt. The court cannot do this for the party making the allegations as it is trite in law that El incumbit probation qui dicit, non qui negat. That is to say “he who asserts must prove”.

    Disenfranchisement? This allegation must also be proven polling unit by polling unit and the police report must be consistent with that of the witnesses.

    Now you can mount a road show, revealing how the long and tortuous journey ended the way it did. At a thanksgiving service, you can dance, raise  your hands and sing:

    He has given me victory, I will lift Him higher

    Jehovah, I will lift Him higher

    The Lord has given me victory, I will lift  Him higher,

    Jehovah, I will lift Him higher

    You can then reveal how you have enjoyed the fruits of obedience, how an elder statesman would wake you up at night and tell you who to visit and you obeyed without questions. “I took all the advice and here we are today,” you will gleefully tell your excited audience. Applause. Applause.

    Your opponents will claim that, going by your utterances, you had foreknowledge of the judgment. In fact, some people will say that you “climbed onto the governor’s seat over bodies” and that you swam in blood to the Government House. Such hyperboles are common at  times like these. Just ignore them all.

    If you have suspended any member of your team who you are afraid could spill the beans, as Aluko did, quickly recall the fellow.

    So dear all, “here we are”. One more word. All rights reserved. No part of this manual may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in a retrieval system in any form or by any means without the permission of the copyright holder.

  • If Buhari is frugal, he should learn to lead like José Mujica

    If President Muhammadu Buhari, his executive cabinet, the judiciary and eighth National Assembly possess the capacity to be truly humane and progressive, they would seek greater understanding of their role as Nigerian public officers and more importantly, attain true purpose and direction by the wisdom and example set by former Uruguayan President, José Mujica.

    Mujica, 77, served as leader of Uruguay between 2010 and 2015. He was elected in 2009 but he had no interest in taking on the grand presidential lifestyle. As president, he reportedly donated 90 percent of his salary to the impoverished and small scale entrepreneurs. He scorned the vulgar opulence characteristic of contemporary presidencies like Nigeria’s, to live in a farmhouse, off a dirt road in Montevideo; there he and his wife worked and still work the land themselves, cultivating chrysanthemums for sale, having declined to live in the opulent presidential palace or use its staff. He also scorned the official presidential motorcade.

    The austere leader earned $12,500 a month but reportedly kept only $1,250 for himself. “I do fine with that amount; I have to do fine because there are many Uruguayans who live with much less,” Mujica disclosed in a newspaper interview.

    While in power, he rode a 1987 Volkswagen Beetle car. In 2010, the value of the car was $1,800 and represented the entirety of the mandatory annual personal wealth declaration filed by Mujica for that year. In November 2014, the Uruguayan newspaper, Búsqued, reported that he had been offered $1 million for the car; he said that if he did get $1 million for the car, it would be donated to house the homeless through a programme that he supports.

    Mujica was able to improve quality of life for the citizenry via populist economic policies. Uruguay thus enjoyed an impressive GDP considering it’s the second-smallest nation in South America. He was known for speaking his mind, defending basic human values and attacking the dark sides of modern life. He did so in a remarkable speech at the sustainability summit in Rio de Janeiro four years ago. In September 2013, Mujica reiterated his philosophy of leadership and humanity to the United Nations General Assembly, with a very long discourse devoted to humanity and globalization.

    The speech called on the international community to strengthen efforts to preserve the planet for future generations and highlighted the power of the financial systems and the impact of economic fallout on ordinary people.

    As a Colombian newspaper said, it was ‘the speech world leaders did not want to hear, but is shared by the rest of the world.’ The speech has been called poetic, prophetic, romantic, lyrical and flat out weird. It’s not exactly your 16-minute TEDtalk, but it definitely projected ideas worth reliving.

    Excerpts of the speech:

    “We have been talking about sustainable development, about rescuing the masses from the claws of poverty…What is it that flutters within our minds? Is it the model of development and consumption, which is shaped after that of affluent societies? I ask this question: what would happen to this planet if the people of India had the same number of cars per family as the Germans? How much oxygen would there be left for us to breathe?

    “More clearly: Does the world today have the material elements to enable seven or eight billion people to enjoy the same level of consumption and squandering as the most affluent Western societies? Will that ever be possible? Or will we have to start a different type of discussion one day? Because we have created this civilization in which we live: the progeny of the market, of the competition, which has begotten prodigious and explosive material progress. But the market economy has created market societies. And it has given us this globalization, which means being aware of the whole planet.

    “Are we ruling over globalization or is globalization ruling over us?…Today, man does not govern the forces he has unleashed, but rather, it is these forces that govern man and life. Because we do not come into this planet simply to develop, just like that, indiscriminately. We come into this planet to be happy. Because life is short and it slips away from us. And no material belonging is worth as much as life, and this is fundamental.

    “But if life is going to slip through my fingers, working and over-working in order to be able to consume more, and the consumer society is the engine-because ultimately, if consumption is paralyzed, the economy stops, and if you stop economy, the ghost of stagnation appears for each one of us, but it is this hyper-consumption that is harming the planet.

    “And this hyper-consumption needs to be generated, making things that have a short useful life, in order to sell a lot. Thus, a light bulb cannot last longer than 1000 hours. But there are light bulbs that last 100,000 hours! But these cannot be manufactured, because the problem is the market, because we have to work and we have to sustain a civilization of “use and discard”, and so, we are trapped in a vicious cycle. These are problems of a political nature, which are showing us that it’s time to start fighting for a different culture.

    “I belong to a small country well endowed with natural resources for life. In my country, there are a bit more than three million people. But there are about 13 million cows, some of the best in the world. And about 8 or 10 million excellent sheep. My country is an exporter of food, dairy, meat. It is a low-relief plain and almost 90% of the land is fertile.

    “My fellow workers, fought hard for the 8 hour workday. And now they are making that 6 hours. But the person who works 6 hours, gets two jobs, therefore, he works longer than before. But why? Because he needs to make monthly payments for: the motorcycle, the car, more and more payments, and when he’s done with that, he realizes he is a rheumatic old man, like me, and his life is already over.

    “And one asks this question: is this the fate of human life? These things I say are very basic: development cannot go against happiness. It has to work in favor of human happiness, of love on earth, human relationships, caring for children, having friends, having our basic needs covered. Precisely because this is the most precious treasure we have; happiness. When we fight for the environment, we must remember that the essential element of the environment is called human happiness.”

    Mujica is a farmer. Buhari is a farmer. The difference between both men’s touted simplicity is that, while Mujica practiced what he preached by scorning the trappings and vulgar luxury of presidential office, President Buhari curiously, is unable to do so. Nonetheless, Buhari represents Nigeria’s best hope at the moment, amid the pack of hounds masquerading as ‘Change Agents’ in the presidential cabinet and National Assembly.

    In these hard times, Almighty Eledumare help Buhari navigate his way through the luxury-traps and political landmine hindering him from steering the nation’s ship to the promised land. If he could truly aspire to a simple life like Mujica’s, he may enjoy the citizenry’s unflinching support at taming the gluttony and alleged excesses of his colleagues in the National Assembly.

    And let’s hope the younger generation of Nigerians are able to present worthier replacements for the Buhari generation or what Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, aptly described as the ‘Wasted Generation’ come 2019.

  • Nigerian press, anti-graft war and rule of law

    Nigerian press, anti-graft war and rule of law

    The Nigerian press has an impressive record of which it can be justifiably proud. In the colonial era it was in the vanguard of the long and difficult struggle to rid our country of the degradation of colonialism. This era produced such fine writers and editors as Ernest Ikoli of the then Daily Times, owned then by the Alakija family, Anthony Enahoro of the West African Pilot, owned by Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe and S.L. Akintola of the Daily Service, of which the Doherty family were the proprietors. The latter eventually became a politician and controversial premier of the old Western Region. A succession of bright, fiercely independent and determined journalists has since maintained this fine tradition of the Nigerian press.

    In those early days, the Nigerian press and journalists were united in their opposition to colonial rule and to any form of social injustice in our country. Later, after independence, they helped define the political and economic challenges facing the country, and fought hard in defence of the liberal values they believed in, such as democracy and respect for the rule of law in our country. Much more importantly, they mobilised the people and the country against any form of authoritarian rule and political excesses by those in authority. Some Nigerian journalists have paid a heavy price for their determined opposition to the excesses of our rulers, particularly during the long period of military rule in our country. Under military rule many of them were detained, and some actually jailed. One can easily recall how Messrs Tunde Thompson and Tony Irabor of The Guardian were tried by military tribunals and sent to prison by the military government. As may well be expected, independent journalism, the freedom of speech and the rule of law suffered terribly during the long period of military rule in Nigeria. Our nation owes them a debt of gratitude for their dogged fight against any form of arbitrary rule. We owe the limited freedoms we enjoy today to their eternal vigilance.

    Today, the political situation in Nigeria has changed largely because of their tenacity in defending personal freedoms. The press is certainly freer. It is more robust in its defence of the democratic process and the rule of law in our country. The political space is freer and journalists are now less likely to be hauled off to jail for expressing views and opinions that the authorities may not like. There is also a far greater variety of news media and views than ever before. Most of the newspapers are now privately owned and there is a healthy rivalry and competition among them for circulation. All this augurs well for the future of the Nigerian press and the rule of law in Nigeria. Altogether the press in Nigeria represents a countervailing force that cannot be ignored for too long by those in authority. It is playing a leading role in exposing and fighting public corruption in Nigeria. To a large extent, it was responsible for the defeat of the Jonathan PDP federal government by exposing the corruption of leading members of that government. President Jonathan lost the presidential election because of his failure, or inability, to take urgent action against some of his ministers known to be corrupt. For this, the nation remains grateful to the Nigerian news media.

    But the enormous power and influence currently being enjoyed by the press impose on it some obligations and responsibilities as well. It must continue to uphold and defend the basic freedoms of our people from any unwarranted assaults by those in authority. It should remain committed to the defence of the rule of law in our country. Whatever else may divide us as a people and a country; we must collectively uphold the rule of law. This is what binds us and our country together. Without it our country and people will not have any future of which we can be proud. So, the defence of the rule of law and basic freedoms in Nigeria is paramount. It is a value that the press should continue to uphold for the good of our country. Without it our country can easily fall apart.

    However, we do not do the rule of law any good when we use it to try and restrain, or impede, the government from discharging its responsibilities to the nation, particularly on such an aggravating issue as the fight against the widespread public corruption in our country. The entire nation is behind President Buhari and his APC federal government in its efforts to stamp out public corruption in our country. The social and economic consequences of corruption for our country are so grave that we should all, including the press, continue to support the government fully in its efforts to stamp it out and restore financial accountability to our country. There will always be some irritations about this but we must keep the goal clearly in our sights. President Buhari should not be blamed for fighting corruption in our country. He has the mandate to do so and he knows that if he fails to tackle this evil, the defeated and corrupt PDP may regain power in the next election.

    President Buhari was elected primarily because of his pledge to rid the country of public corruption. He has the support of the entire people of our country to take urgent and practical measures against public corruption in our country. In fact, most of our people feel he has been too slow in tackling public corruption. They want those suspected of corruption to be tried swiftly. But this is not a military regime and President Buhari is obliged to follow due legal process in his fight against public corruption. If this were a military regime, many of these people suspected of corruption will be in detention already. In Ghana, four former military rulers were once executed by Jerry Rawlins, then Ghana’s military ruler, on charges of public corruption. We must condemn such a crude and extra judicial method in our country, but it rid Ghana of corruption.

    Now, President Buhari is being unfairly criticised by some sections of the press and newspaper columnists for complaining that undue delay in the legal process is a major hurdle in the fight against corruption. In fact, his resolve to fight public corruption in our country is admirable and should earn him our full support. He has not in any way interfered directly with the independence of the judiciary, which has often been accused of corruption… As I write this, the media has reported that an Abuja High Court has ruled that the re-arrest after bail of Dasuki, the embattled former NSA, does not in any way amount to a breach of the rule of law. The country has persistently asked for a massive reform of the criminal justice system in our country. Every Chief Justice of Nigeria has had to complain publicly about corruption in the Judiciary and the delay in the delivery of justice in Nigeria. This is the point that President Buhari tried to make. The press has often taken the lead in attacking the Judiciary for its massive corruption. It has exposed many corrupt judges and some of these have been retired. Corruption in the Judiciary is so bad that many suspects, except the poor, escape trial and convictions in the courts by resorting to all kinds of legal subterfuges, including, contrived delays and frivolous injunctions in the courts. In most cases, the trial of suspects takes years and is often inconclusive. Both Ibori and Alamieyeseigha, two former governors, escaped conviction here in Nigeria for massive corruption, but were subsequently convicted in Britain for money laundering. Is that not a clear indication that the Nigerian Judiciary cannot be trusted to dispense justice swiftly where the suspects are leading public figures? Is this not a clear case of double standards in the Nigerian criminal justice system in which the rich are treated differently from the poor, a negation of the basic principle of the equality of justice for all people in the courts? Is this not a breach of the rule of law by the few bad eggs in the Judiciary?

    There is a pervasive and justifiable feeling in our country that the political elite enjoy some kind of immunity from prosecution for public theft and corruption. Our prisons are full of convicts, usually poor people, rightly jailed, for minor criminal offences. Some are detained in the prisons for years while still awaiting trial, often deliberately delayed. They are hardly ever granted bail by the courts. In the case of the rich and powerful, the courts tend to treat them with kid gloves by granting them bail capriciously. This is morally unacceptable and reprehensible, as many of them who were granted bail by the courts fled the country and have refused to return home to face trial for public theft and corruption. There must be scores of these public officials abroad who fled the country after securing legal bails.

    The Nigerian press must remain committed to its defence of the rule of law. This is in the interest of the country. But it must be careful enough to avoid, or create a situation, in which the fight against public corruption is unwittingly turned into a fight against the government. This can only give comfort to those being tried for looting the national treasury. Is corruption not itself a breach of the rule of law? Is that not why it is a criminal offence against the state? Does it not undermine the basic freedoms of the people and their inherent economic rights to decent living standards? If there is any breach of the rule of law, those standing trial for public theft and corruption are rich and powerful enough to contest such alleged breaches of the rule of law in court.

    These people are enemies of the state and, if found guilty after a fair trial, they must pay the full legal penalties for their crimes against the nation. They should not be allowed to use the press to bail themselves out of the financial mess created by them. There is no need to call into question the motives of a few columnists and journalists who, in this grave matter, have written very passionately about possible breaches of the rule of law. They fight for a lofty and noble ideal. But the evidence that President Buhari has interfered or plans to interfere with the Judiciary, as claimed by some journalists, is weak and untenable in present circumstances.

  • Presidential or parliamentary system: Which is better for Nigeria?

    There is a subject which is very crucial to the well-being of Nigeria, but which we Nigerians never give the seriousness it deserves. I refer to the question whether our country should be governed under a presidential or parliamentary system. From time to time, someone raises this question and a few other citizens respond to him, but then the debate quickly dies down. Yet, as a citizen with experience of Nigerian politics and government since the 1950s, I cannot get rid of the feeling that we will, someday, have to resolve this question quite definitively.

    We Nigerians have experienced two different systems of government since our country began to have a constitution in the early 1950s. We started off in 1952 with the British Parliamentary System. In this system, the members of parliament were elected by us citizens at the General Elections. From 1952 to 1966, we had a total of five parliaments, that is, a federal parliament, and a regional parliament for each of our four regions – East, North, West and Midwest.On the floor of each parliament, the parliamentarians then elected the Prime Minister (in the case of the Federal Parliament), or Premier (in the case of each Regional House of Assembly). The Prime Minister or Premier then nominates his ministers for his colleagues in parliament to accept.

    In this system, a minister is responsible for the management of his ministry, the council of ministers is jointly responsible for the direction of affairs, and the chief executive (Prime Minister or Premier) is just first among equals. The council of ministers considers and approves the plans and programmes of ministers, and ensures the place and harmony of such plans and programmes in the over-all direction of the government.  Each minister presents and defends his plans and programmes (that have been approved by the council of ministers) on the floor of parliament, usually with additional backing by the Prime Minister or Premier.

    The Prime Minister or Premier, as well as the ministers, are responsible for making programmes and plans acceptable to the legislature, and are usually subjected to questioning by the legislators trying to satisfy themselves before giving approval. The Prime Minister, the premiers, and the ministers are also responsible for presenting the reports of the executive government to the legislature. To ensure success in parliament, the Prime Minister or Premier and his ministers must keep their party members in parliament well informed about, and satisfied with, their plans and programmes. On the whole, this is a system characterized by joint responsibilities, systemic accountability, copious informing and persuading. In such a system, the Prime Minister or Premier was very far from being a “Sole Ruler”, and could not easily give vent to his whims and caprices.

    But in the 1970s, under the thick shadow of military rulers and heavy influence of military rule, Nigeria’s leaders gathered in Lagos and chose the American Presidential System for our country. We did not know the nuances and possible pitfalls of this system then; but now we know them – and they are many and serious. For one thing, the presidential system makes the political process, with countrywide presidential elections and statewide gubernatorial elections and senatorial elections, far too expensive. No Nigerian who (like me) has taken part in the system, who has been through its heavy expenses and usually heavy debts, can deny that these enormously expensive elections have been a major factor in the boosting of corruption in our country’s political life.

    For another, the system concentrates power and responsibilities too heavily in the hands of the President or Governor. It has had the effect of turning our presidents and governors into virtual autocrats, their colleagues in the executive arm of government into mere waiters-on, and our legislators into glorified outsiders. Some Nigerian intellectuals have just completed a joint book in which they have pooled together their various and widespread studies of the steadily growing impotence of legislatures, the growing dictatorial tendencies of presidents and governors, and the enormous influence of the whims and caprices of presidents and governors in our governmental system. Because presidents and governors tend to view their administrations as their exclusive personal mandates, our country has been sustaining heavy financial losses through poorly digested, unreasonably chosen, and inadequately discussed programmes and projects, through presidents’ and governors’ tendency to insist on having their own ways in the making of government policies, and through thoughtless abandonment of programmes and projects initiated by predecessors.

    Furthermore, the system has made the position of president or governor so insanely desirable to our politicians, that the quest for it has become a major source of conflicts and confusion in our political system. And finally, on the whole, the system has contributed greatly to the destruction of the professional quality of our civil service and bureaucrats – and this has been a major factor in the general decline of the quality of governance in our country.

    This concentration of power in the hands of chief executives has proved culturally difficult for some Nigerian peoples to live happily with. Left to choose their own system of government, there are Nigerian nationalities that would hardly ever choose the presidential system – peoples (like my own Yoruba nation) who are used, in their history and political traditions, to shared responsibilities, mutual respect, and accountability, among the rulers of society.

    The generally arrogant and thoughtless directions given since the 1960s to the ordering of the governance of our country have dragged our country down in many directions. It is my considered opinion that the choice of the presidential system has been one of the worst steps we have ever taken, and I humbly propose that Nigeria should return to the parliamentary system.

    However, if any state in our federation chooses to run its affairs by a presidential system, it should be free to do so. The fundamental philosophy behind the whole idea of a federation is acceptance of, and respect for, difference. For some historic reason, a number of nations, living in their different homelands, find themselves joined together as one country, sharing one sovereignty.  To be able to relate to one another harmoniously, they evolve a federal system of government – in which each nation governs itself in its own way, in the general context of their whole country. There are variations in system among the states of the United States of America, the states of the Indian Union, and the cantons of the Swiss Federation. Even in such a minor particular as traffic regulations, there are differences from state to state in the United States of America.

    In the matter of mode of government, there might be differences in the ways in which our states would design their constitutions. For instance, even if there continue to be a president in Abuja and governors in some states, I seriously doubt that we Yoruba will ever have governors if we are allowed to choose our own system of government. For years now, we have seen what governors look like – and the general Yoruba opinion is that being ruled by governors is quite ugly. It is not so much our men that are ruling in this ugly way, it is the system that is ugly and warped in nature. We Yoruba as a people throughout our history have been very good at structuring and managing the principle of balance of powers in government in order to prevent the abuse of power. We would rather be ruled by a council of ministers, in which a Premier is only first among equals, in which each minister or commissioner bears definite responsibilities, and in which all are members of our elected legislatures and are responsible, on a daily basis, to our legislatures. That’s the kind of people we are. That is the kind of system charted for us by our political history and culture. And that is the kind of system I would strongly recommend for our country.

  • Beauty, the beholder and the beast

    Beauty, the saying goes, is in the eye of the beholder. How true this aphorism is can be seen from the different ways we react when we see a thing of beauty, particularly a woman. Most men drool over a beautiful woman. Those specially crafted by God earn our compliments because whether we like it or not they  are irresistible, be they men or women.

    As much as we appreciate beauty, we are not always in one accord in picking a thing of beauty.  What is beautiful to one may not be beautiful to the other. Some will see an ugly woman and scream ”what a beauty” to the amazement of onlookers. Others may see an acclaimed beauty like Miss World and not take a second look at her. What do you make of that? Can we then say that a woman chosen as the most beautiful woman in the world is not pretty?

    She is,  at least to those who chose her, but to other beholders, she may not get a second look.  This is why beauty pageants are always dogged by controversies, with the panellists and members of the audience disagreeing, in most cases, on whoever is eventually picked as winner. But no matter how a woman looks, her head will swell to hear a man say to her ”you are beautiful”.

    Though those three words look simple and ordinary, they have a magnetic effect on women. Many women are known to have taken offence because they do not get such compliments from their men even after taking all the time in the world to look nice for them. Some men do not know how to sweet talk their women to get them, speaking figuratively,  eating out of their hands. And women, no matter how hard hearted they may be, want to hear words that will make their heads spin. It is an age-long practice to appreciate a thing of beauty. There is nothing bad in telling a woman that she is beautiful even if you know she is not. Such compliment is the first step to opening up conversation with her in order to know her better.

    Many men have hit the bull’s eye with that opening line as they have gone to build a lifelong relationship with those complimented women. For trying to use that line on a female cadet officer, a man almost paid with his life, according to a video now trending on social media. He was beaten black and blue sometime in 2014 in Kaduna by the woman and his four male colleagues. They recorded the show of shame on their phone from where it found its way to social media.

    This beauty was not impressed by the compliment of her beholder. And her colleagues, who in this instant can be referred to as beasts because of the way they behaved, descended on the man. The Beast in the fairy tale titled Beauty and the Beast did not behave like that. The Beast appreciated the beauty of Beauty, the last daughter of the widowed wealthy merchant, that it fell ill when Beauty was away from their home in the forest for long. In that tale, we saw the power of love and care, which turned the Beast into a charming, handsome prince.

    But in this true life story, the female cadet officer did not appreciate the language of love. She seems to understand only the power of force, which could be linked to her military training. Does military training preclude a woman from accepting such compliment as ”you are beautiful”? Is there any harm in telling a female cadet officer that she is beautiful? Was that the first time the officer is being told she is beautiful? Was that why the compliment sounded strange to her? Does it not show that something is wrong with her if she can flare up over such innocuous compliment? Does she have the temperament for the military job she is being trained for?

    Who knows the kind of training our cadets are receiving these days. Last December, two Air Force cadets also displayed the beast in them when they locked a porter in the trunk of their car for breaking the windscreen. It was not an intentional act by the porter, but the cadets did not see it as such. They decided to teach the “bloody civilian” a lesson by first dragging him on the ground after which they dumped him in their car trunk. Their plan was to take him to the Air Force Base at Ikeja, Lagos, where he would have seen hell.

    He was saved from these power-drunk cadets by Governor Akinwunmi Ambode, who was passing by Mile 12 market, where the incident occurred. The governor directed the police to take over the case. It will be interesting to know what has become of the matter. Have the cadets undergone orderly room trial for public misconduct? When will the police charge them to court for conspiracy, assault occasioning body harm and disturbing public peace? It is when these cadets are tried for their disgraceful public conduct that they will know that their uniform does not confer on them the power to misbehave and terrorise civilians at will.

    The military is an hallowed institution and those who wish to join it must be levelheaded people that will not abuse its might. What is bad in telling a female cadet officer ”you are beautiful”? Even if she is not beautiful, that should not lead to a quarrel. By her training she should have acknowledged the compliment by simply saying ”thank you” and go her way;  or better still she should have kept quiet and moved on. But to now descend on the man with her colleagues, cursing and swearing, is barbaric. It is unbecoming for military cadets to use foul words like “Am I beautiful? Idiot. Describe me, how beautiful am I? This bastard is not responding. See this idiot. Squat down…”

    It is a shame that these cadets are the future of our military. What will they turn to when they become officers? Brutes? The military will be failing in its duty if it does not re-orientate these cadets before they become terrors. The military, whether of now or of the future, must be people-oriented and should not be constituted by officers who run on short fuse.

  • Ekiti tragedy as Obasanjo’s legacy

    The sickening confession by Dr. Tope Aluko that in effecting what he described as a coup against the people of Ekiti, they “went into the election with 1,040 recognised soldiers and another batch of 400 ‘unrecognised soldiers’ brought from Enugu by a serving senator from the South-East;  raised 44 special strike teams brought in (with) Toyota Hilux buses from Abuja and Onitsha and made special stickers for the vehicles that conveyed members of the strike team with  each of them given a black band for identification” was but a confirmation  of the hijacking of our nation by PDP brigands. For 16 years, PDP and its leaders operated with impunity, engaging in war of attrition and assassination of their members over the sharing of offices and our resources.

    Fayose said we should look at the messenger and not the message. But there are compelling reasons to believe Aluko is a witness of truth. First Aluko confessed he and Fayose have been friends for 40 years. The closer we therefore look at these two friends, the more the possibility of agreeing with the saying by our people that ‘‘it’s only a thief who can accurately identify the foot print of another thief on a stone”.  For lying under oath at the tribunal claiming ‘the election was free, fair and credible’, Fayose wants Aluko committed to prison for three years for perjury. That Fayose’s Freudian slip, in itself, is all that is needed to confirm Aluko’s claim that the election was sham. But Fayose himself is no less guilty of perjury according to his political detractors who reminded us he claimed in his nomination form that he had never been indicted by any panel of inquiry. If the Supreme Court ruled he was not properly impeached, that came eight years after the event and long after filling the nomination form.

    There are other compelling reasons why we cannot doubt Aluko’s claim that Fayose, after purchasing his victory in the primary with Jonathan misapplied $2m state funds, went back to tell the president that there was no way he was going to win the election without the use of the military.  Here was an impeached former governor, chased from pillar to post by EFCC for alleged financial and murder charges and who in his own words, “flee (sic) with all (his) property left in the Government House, and taken to court about 59 times aside the 45 days (he) spent in detention”, pitched without an agenda against a performing incumbent few months after losing a senatorial contest. Little wonder, Fayose was to describe his victory “a rare miracle” and his “return to government as not common in history”.

    But Obasanjo is the source of Ekiti people’s nightmare. Precisely because of his contempt for them and their pursuit of academic excellence to advance in the social ladder, Obasanjo who self-conceitedly claimed he achieved on a platter of gold what Awo could not achieve through a life-long struggle, probably saw imposition of Fayose, considered half-literate by his people, a way to humble the Ekitis. In total disrespect of the feelings of the people, Obasanjo also sent Brigadier Olurin his kinsman to supervise the rigging of the 2007 election. The task was made easy with the exploitation of the intra-party feud in ACN by Obasanjo and PDP. Dissident ACN members, misled to believe they were out to prevent Tinubu from cornering the resources of the state  were armed with large sums of money, vehicles, communication and logistics to aid the rigging of the 2007 election later nullified by the courts. By the time Fayemi retrieved his stolen mandate, nearly all the legacies of Awo and his successors had been erased. The state College of Medicine which professors Oyebode and Oyebola tried to nurture had been traded for Fayose’s fraudulent poultry project. Christ School, one of the earliest and best secondary schools in Nigeria secured less than 30%success in WAEC examination. Other public schools suffered worst fate. This is the genesis of the present generation of Fayose’s area boys, ‘okada’ riders and political thugs. After four years of valiant effort by Dr Fayemi to prevent a repeat of the tragedy that befell a whole generation of our children, Dr. Aluko has now confirmed how he along with Fayose and some other Ekiti people colluded with outsiders to sabotage that effort.

    But Obasanjo and not Jonathan, a master of political subterfuge who merely used Fayose to settle scores with his estranged godfather, should be held responsible for the coup staged against our people. He set the precedent during his 2007 ‘do or die’ Ekiti battle and its rerun supervised by another spineless Egba woman. Jonathan alleged commitment of $37m to his own variant of ‘do or die’ 2014 pacification of Ekiti by all means was only an improvement on the unspecified massive deployment of funds through ACN dissidents in 2007. If  Jonathan and PDP subdued Ekiti with 1,040 recognised soldiers and another batch of 400 ‘unrecognised soldiers’ brought from Enugu in addition to  44 special strike teams brought in (with) Toyota Hilux buses from Abuja and Onitsha in 2014, Obasanjo and PDP in 2007 provided ‘security, logistics and communication’ to break the will of Ekiti people.

    Aluko was only confirming what we all heard and saw on national television when he said ‘we used the military to block all routes in the local governments and prevented APC chieftains, including former Rivers State Governor, Rotimi Amaechi from coming into Ekiti. So we ensured that no APC chieftain was in sight on Election Day. We provided polling agents for the APC in most of the polling units so we had no problem getting them to sign election results in the units’. It was a known fact that Fayose, Obanikoro, Adesiyan and Chris Uba reduced Ekiti to a conquered territory on Election Day in 2014.

    But as said on these pages two years ago, weep not for Ekiti but for the nation.  Bode Thomas in the fifties canvassed for regionalism in order to save the Yoruba country from the rule of a one-eyed king. The tragedy is that the whole country has been afflicted by a spectre of one-eyed king, a euphemism for incompetent leaders since independence. While the west burned in 1966, Balewa waited patiently for Ahmadu Bello who returned too late from his pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. The bungling after the failed 1966 coup by ill-equipped Ironsi led to the civil war. The destruction of the bureaucracy and the university, the two major institutions that sustain the survival of society by Murtala Mohammed and Obasanjo who were ill-equipped to manage society is responsible for today’s corruption in the civil service and the collapse of our university system which once ranked with the best in the world. In 1979, Obasanjo who claimed the best didn’t have to win the election supported Shehu Shagari whose only ambition was to become a senator. Shagari smoked away while the economy of the nation was wrecked by his NPN led by Akinloye. We have had an Ibrahim Babangida whose regime Obasanjo dismissed as a government ‘deficit in honour’. Babangida destroyed all our values and institutionalised corruption.   We have had Abacha, a common thief whose obsession seemed to crudely ferry raw cash with boxes from the central bank. We have had Obasanjo, widely regarded and rejected as a one-eyed king by the Yoruba but wildly celebrated by the rest of the country as messiah. His legacy in the last 16 years is the seizure of our country by PDP brigands headed until recently by Goodluck Jonathan, his godson.

    The way forward is restructuring of our multi ethnic and multicultural society so that each group can decide who manages its affairs. Ekiti must be allowed to decide if it wants to be ruled by Fayose, his thugs and ‘okada’ riders just as Delta should be allowed to choose if they want to be ruled by militants led by Government ‘Tompolo’ Ekpemipolo. The beauty of federalism is that it liberates groups and individuals from the tyranny of the state.

  • Akintola, 50 years after assassination – 4

    The Oyo-Yoruba people, the group from which Chief Akintola hails, are now Oyo and Osun states and one wonders how Chief Akintola would have greeted this news. For in spite of all the efforts made by Alhaji Adegoke Adelabu to persuade the Oyo-Yoruba to demand the creation of this state in 1957, Chief Akintola seems to have been vehemently opposed to the idea of fragmentation of the Yoruba. But by 1965 when he was already under the strain of violent opposition to his regime from Ijebu, Abeokuta and Ondo provinces, he started making insinuations about the traditional hostility of these groups to the Oyo-Yoruba. What has happened since the end of the Civil War, particularly the fact that the federal cabinet has within it representatives of every state and therefore of the major and minor ethnic groups, has confirmed Chief Akintola’s belief that there can be no peace until there is a feeling of belonging to a ‘Commonwealth’, in which every group has a share, even though his party, the NNDP, never managed to rise above its origins as an opportunistic amalgam of personalities and power blocs. Akintola in a brutally frank way made it quite clear that Nigeria belonged to all of us and that a policy of exclusiveness and nepotism manifested by one group could not help but draw appropriate reaction from those who feel shut out of the normal run of things and the attendant ethnic or regional benefit accruing from shared revenue and shared risks and responsibilities of living together in a federation.

    The constitution of the Second Republic which came into force on October 1, 1979, has further confirmed Akintola’s belief in team work by the fact that the constitution makes it obligatory for the President to see that cabinet members represent all the states and reflect the federal albeit ethnic structure of Nigeria. Nigerian leaders have learned from the lessons of the Action Group crisis and the Civil War. The present constitution and the built-in clauses emphasizing that the essence of the federation is cooperation and compromise attest this fact.  It is clear to me that the issues raised by Akintola’s later years are to a large extent being resolved. No single party can dominate Nigeria, and Nigeria is unlike a good number of other African countries in the sense that control of the visible apparatus of state does not necessarily ensure that there will be peace or that the populace will acquiesce in what is patently wrong.

    The Yoruba as a people suffered between 1961 and 1966 because of lack of unity. It is one of the ironies of modern Nigerian politics that the most culturally homogenous people lack any semblance of political unity. The fact that political unity has eluded the Yoruba for so long reminds me of General Charles de Gaulle’s statement that if you ask two Frenchmen to form a political party they will probably emerge with three! This characteristic of the French applies to the Yoruba. It is not clear whether this is a weakness or an element of strength in a federation. The ideal of course is that political parties should cut across ethnic or regional lines, but when, in a pluralist society such as Nigeria, only one group believes in this idea, the tendency is for that group to become a pawn in the hands of others. Akintola’s championship of the cause of Yoruba unity was based on the above premise and analysis. It is only when Nigerians can rise above the primordial ties of ethnicity and language that Akintola’s idea of an “Ethnic Commonwealth” would lose credibility. But until that time, it would be foolish and unrealistic not to face the fact that Nigeria is a country of diverse peoples, each with clearly distinguishable strengths and weaknesses and that the only way to take in stride our diversity is not by forceful integration but by accommodation and cooperation through mutual respect of one another.

    One thing that has emerged through the study of the life and times of Chief S. L. Akintola is that despite the fact that many Yorubas believed in what he stood for, particularly his idea that culturally Yoruba people have many things in common with the Hausa-Fulani, and that this should be translated into political cooperation, the Yoruba people have always drifted away from cooperation with the Hausa-Fulani. The reason for this has been historical. In the first place, the AG leadership, including Akintola himself, always saw Hausa-Fulani leaders as obscurantist oligarchs who had no idea of democracy and who were hands in glove with British imperialists during the colonial days. The second and perhaps most fundamental reason was the impact of the Usman dan Fodiyo’s Jihad of the 19th century which led to the forcible incorporation of Ilorin province into northern Nigeria. Until Ilorin is seen to be absolutely out of northern political control, the Yoruba are likely to continue to develop a revanchist tendency towards the Hausa-Fulani, which will make cooperation very difficult. The Yoruba, even though they lack political unity, are an extremely historically aware people and the Ilorin seizure by Alimi from Afonja more than a century and a half ago is still a vivid part of Yoruba modern-day political awareness, an awareness which, to put it mildly, immediately leads to a lowering of the group’s ethnic self-esteem. This fact has admittedly been exploited by politicians for their own ends, but the sore point remains and in any policy of political accommodation between the Hausa-Fulani and the Yoruba, this is a fact that must be taken into account. Finally, it is hoped that Nigerians will soon begin and continue to respect the feelings of one another, and in the words of Chief Akintola, Nigeria must strive to remain a “commonwealth, its resources must be accessible to all its citizens regardless of creed, clan or tribe …”. This will continue to be necessary until such time as Nigeria will have developed to such a level that the question of which ethnic group one comes from would only be of academic and not of political interest. This goal is not to be confused with any long-range attempt to obliterate our distinctive cultures and ethnic characteristics with the idea of super-imposing a national culture. Nigeria’s ethnic groups, some of which are “nations”, need not be made to face obstacles on the way to normal “national” evolution and development. In fact a conscious effort must be made to build the idea of a unified nation in diversity by encouraging each group’s cultural development and identity while fostering the idea of Nigeria as one multi-national state, where each group can contribute in a meaningful way to enhance the strength of Nigeria. This indeed is and should be the basis of an enduring federalism. The idea has been a factor in the organic growth of countries such as the Canadian Federation, the Swiss Confederation, and recently the Belgian State. These are three examples of countries wherein local, ethnic, or “national” specificities are being reconciled with the desire and need for an indivisible state in which particular groups can still realise their freedom and full cultural development. Akintola ab initio recognised that the most fundamental problem in Nigerian politics stems from the rivalry of the country’s great ethnic groups or nations. Lack of a resolution to the conflictual competition among the major ethnic groups and the breakdown of law and order in western Nigeria following massive rigging of elections in 1965 led to the coup of January 1966.

  • Beasts of no gender (3)

    To be a feminist, if not a defect, is at least a fetish; like porn. The feminist is that woman who dulls down to an artificially created set of sexual-political sensibilities, in order to satisfy her emotional lust for being perpetually ‘oppressed.’

    Like porn addicts, paedophiles, rapists and racists, such woman is an emotion junkie – infinitely handicapped yet propelled by her lust for unearned benefits. And when she seems truly deserving of sought benefits, gluttony and wile pervert her claims until her agitation attains the tenor of a ruckus, much like the ghastly cries of feral cats jostling for the largest chunk of carrion flesh.

    To do American feminists justice, many of them have publicly repudiated the ideas they once held: Betty Friedan now talks of the importance of the family. Judy Goldsmith (former president of NOW) deplores the feminization of poverty due to easy divorce laws, and Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, laments the effects of sexual liberation and the feminist adoption of the lesbian cause: “We tried to make people proud of who they were” says Brownmiller, “…but then the sadomasochists came out of the closet and became proud of themselves.”

    Unfortunately, Nigerian feminists, always five leap years behind the American sisterhood, have not seen the light yet and attempt to pervert State and Federal policies even as they lay to waste, the traditional family. Feminists, without doubt, should not enjoy the natural ‘privilege’ of having children. They are taking care of that anyway – as you read; the “Free the Nigerian Woman” movement is working assiduously to achieve total liberation from patriarchal fetters for the Nigerian woman and girl-child.

    However, like their foreign feminist heroes, the feminism they propagate presupposes and necessitates male blame. It espouses man-hating as an intrinsic part of its modus operandi thus institutionalizing misandry as a central tenet of its crusade. Although, many a Nigerian feminist will contend that “the feminism we espouse does not require man-hating, we simply choose to liberate the Nigerian woman from servitude and patriarchal dominion…”; reality tells differently. Feminism cannot exist without man-hating and that is the cold-hard truth.

    Blaming socialization for women’s predicament constitutes the worst of feminist claptrap.

    The socialization-learned roles-sex stereotyping feminist argument to excuse feminists’ claim to  perpetual victimhood has no basis in fact. If social forces and upbringing have such a profound effect and influence on women’s choices then they must also have a profound effect and influence on men’s choices – if considered within the feminist parameters that both male and female gender are created as equals. This means that nobody, anywhere, under any circumstances, is capable of making a ‘free choice.’

    The concept is arrant nonsense; if it had any validity then none of us could be held morally or personally responsible for the consequences of our actions. Picture a society that operates by this belief system: thousands of men locked up in prisons could use the same defense for shooting, robbing, raping, drug dealing and so on. Why not argue for example, that the culture of masculinity, a background of poverty, and a materialistic and religiously intolerant family  makes them behave in anti-social ways? Individual men are held responsible for their decisions and actions, so how can feminists legitimately claim that women should be exempt from personal responsibility?

    Misandry and demonization of men, has devalued men’s worth to the extent that it has made society blasé about the disposability of men and the boy-child. This is responsible, for example, for the shocking bias in the lack of attention to men and boys’ health in general while the mass media and health advocacy groups perpetually obsess about women’s health and the girl-child’s.

    The idiocy of this mindset is that while girls are badgered with crucial health information even before puberty, boys, with whom they engage in random acts of sexual misdemeanor and experimentation are virtually ignored.

    The cultural and institutional misandry perpetuated by the feminist aggravates the destruction of the family system and denies the boy-child the comfort of an external role model especially when he has to seek outside his family for his role models.

    This is one reason boys are perpetually in trouble; due to the lack of positive male role models in their lives, they would get what they could from TV, violent films and video games. All they need is someone whose exemplary footsteps they could follow but the society provides them only men they could dumb down to.

    A recent analysis of 2, 000 mass media portrayals of men and male identities, found that men were depicted mostly as villains, aggressors, perverts, and philanderers. From this stock-pile of anti-heroes, the boy-child is expected to navigate for a good male identity. Promoting the image of men as juvenile, mean and stupid is cynical and exploitative; which makes the tide of inverse sexism that has swamped out television screens for instance, even more appalling.

    In modern Nigeria, boys and young men have a dire lack of good role models; especially if they are raised in a single-parent home, as one in eight children now are. The situation is worsened by the lack of positive role models in government, and the perpetuation of overwhelmingly negative images of men by the media and feminist scholarly research. Ultimately such portrayals lead to negative social costs for society in areas such as male health, rising suicide rates and family disintegration.

    Women need to be thought of as ‘victims.’ Without the banner of victimhood to rally around, feminist coffers would run dry, career feminists would be unemployed and mortgages would go unpaid. Hence thousands of professional feminists can’t just declare victory and go home, because without the feminist movement they would have no homes to go to; they would have no jobs, no families and no job prospects. And neither would they have a platform from which to pound their ideological drum.

    The irony of feminism’s ‘forever feminism’ is that the sense of perpetual victimhood precludes the concept that the members of the victimized group, women, could actually rise above their assigned position in society and meet that society, and be part of that society, on equal terms. To do that would mean taking personal responsibility for their choices and the condition of their own lives. Instead, feminism has designed an ideological crutch to serve as the average woman impediment to self-actualization.

    Feminism has gained a monopoly on the subject of gender studies.  Men don’t have a gender identity anymore, only women have a gender identity and an intrinsic value to society and this sentiment is perpetuated by carefully articulated propaganda and research.  The concept of authoritative, strong, independent, passionate and intelligent manhood is persistently repudiated except it exists to serve the feminist cause. So when a young boy reaches the age where it’s appropriate for him to be initiated into manhood, we find the whole idea of “reaching manhood” laughable.

    On the flip-side, a new womanhood is fast evolving. Stripped of its swathe of fortune and status symbols, it reveals a kind of corpse in future argument with itself, a dead voice hollering and bearing witness to its own achievement, passionate in self-love and incest with its past.

  • Obasanjo and his PDP children

    Once again, Obasanjo did what he does best. Adorning a toga of the conscience of the nation, he embarked on a crusade on her behalf. In a  letter dated January 13, he wanted  Bukola Saraki  the Senate President and his counterpart in the Lower House to look into  ‘the mind-boggling expenditure going into cars, furniture, housing renovation which he said were ‘veritable sources of waste and corruption’; the ‘different disingenuous ways and devices the legislature employed to overturn the recommendation of the RMAFC in order to hike up for themselves that which they are unwilling to spell out in detail’; and challenged them to “have the courage to publish its recurrent budgets for the years 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015 to enable comparisons made between their emoluments and those of their counterparts in Ghana, Kenya, Senegal and even Malaysia and Indonesia who are richer and more developed than we are.

    Many have wondered what qualified Obasanjo for this periodic crusade which he first embarked upon shortly after handing over power voluntarily to Shehu Shagari in 1979. Fate ceded that role to Obasanjo.  For instance others fought the civil war, he took the glory. The assassination of Murtala Mohammed in 1976 threw him up. He faithfully implemented the transition programme and thereafter became a respected international statesman. He was to later exercise tremendous influence on the administrations of Shehu Shagari, Ibrahim Babangida and General Abacha who sent him to Gashua prison.

    Our country is also unique in many respects. Nigeria is the only known federation where you could become an elected president twice without being sponsored by any of the federating building blocks. With such a feat, akin only to climbing the palm tree from the top, leaders like Obasanjo can, in defiance of all known sociological state model builders’ postulations that a man is first a product of a family before becoming a member of a group, believe he can indeed climb the palm tree from the top by being a Nigerian first and Yoruba as an afterthought. Obasanjo probably actually believes he is ‘Mr. Nigeria’. Not his wife’s book that detailed his humble beginning or his dearest daughter, Iyabo’s public chastisement about thinking he owns Nigeria could cure him of the illusion that without Obasanjo, there will be no Nigeria.

    And by virtue of being PDP leader in and out of office since 1999,  Obasanjo can lay claim to the title of ‘ father of all the corrupt elements that have held our nation to ransom since 1999’. After all, the 22 elected PDP governors in 1999 out of which 17 were indicted for corruption by 2008, all the successive PDP chairmen, senate presidents and speakers of the lower house  between 1999 and 2015 address Obasanjo as ‘Baba’. Of course Saraki and Dogara of the Senate and the House of Assembly are Obasanjo’s PDP grandchildren. His house was Saraki’s first port of call after trading off the victory of his party in order to usurp the senate presidency.

    Obasanjo, knows Saraki the target of his crusade this time around like the palm of his hands in the same manner he knows his other illustrious, some will say notorious, children such as Diepreye Alamieseigha, Odili, Ibori, Igbinedion, Okupe, Fayose, Daniel, Jolly Nyame, Joshua Dariye,  Boni Haruna, Mu’ azu, Chris Uba who locked up governor Chris Ngige, like a common criminal over the sharing of confiscated Anambra government funds and ex-president Jonathan who says stealing was not corruption. But does Obasanjo expect Saraki to give what he has not got?

    Well, Saraki also seems to know his father and how to massage his ego.  Like a son who knows how to manipulate his father, Saraki praised President Obasanjo ‘for his consistent role in always reminding those of us in government about our responsibilities to the general public and offering timely advice where necessary’. He was however silent on his father’s accusation of  massive corruption, greed, impunity and lawlessness at the National Assembly  as well as his claim that most members of the 469-member assembly were receiving constituency allowances without maintaining constituency offices as the law requires of them.  Saraki then went on to speak vaguely about the senate’s commitment ‘to good governance, transparency, accountability, due process and responsiveness to the economic reality of our nation’.

    On his part, Dino Melaye’s reaction to Obasanjo’s letter seems to reflect his special endowment-capacity to play the clown and the reflective. Unfortunately most people who watch his theatrics on television trying to justify abandoning his senate duties to accompany Toyin Saraki to EFCC’s office or to justify his role in the invasion of CCT along with 84 senators during the senate president’s arraignment for false declaration of assets will most likely associate him with the former. Few remember Melaye had the presence of mind during the obscene N8.64b National Assembly wardrobe allowance controversy to tell his colleagues ‘they cannot be talking about change and this kind of money in this country now when people are hungry.’

    But tragically, following Obasanjo’s warning that ‘‘it will not only be insensitive but callously so for leaders, who call for sacrifice from the citizenry to live in obscene opulence’, the same Senator Melaye, like a clown comically says: ‘Our leader has mistaken the 8th National Assembly as the same National Assembly that defrauded him in 2007; that is those who collected his money and refused to implement the third term agenda… I appeal to Baba that we are not the ones please. After nine years of that bribery saga, the first of its kind, I expect forgiveness to have taken place”. He also said: “There was the case of bribery introduced by the Obasanjo regime in the desperate attempt to remove Speaker Ghali Umar Na’Abba from office then. In fact, there was an open display of that bribery money on the floor of the House”. Concluding, Melaye asks; “I hope this is not in an attempt to cover up and distract attention from the Halliburton and Siemens corruption allegations?’’ But if one may ask the irrepressible Melaye, what has this clowning got to do with the massive corruption Obasanjo claims is going in the National Assembly?

    The truth however is that slippery Saraki, clowning Dino Melaye along with cunning Obasanjo, their father, are all parts of the problem and can therefore not be parts of the solution. The challenge before our nation is how to move beyond the baleful legacies of Obasanjo and those of his PDP children that breed nothing but corruption.

    The starting point is for APC oligarchy to take control of their party and use it as weapon for development as has been done in all developed democracies. Nigerians voted for APC because it promises change. Their job will be made easier if they allow all the senators that do not share their party’s world-view to join PDP.

    Now with the success recorded with the card readers, politicians now know Nigerians don’t actually suffer from collective amnesia as they had made us to believe. Those greedy clowning senators who want Nigeria taxpayers to cough out N8.64b as wardrobe allowance and the Saraki ‘like mind’ senators who think Saraki as number three citizen of the country owes Nigeria no explanation as to the source of the massive wealth he allegedly amassed between 1990 and 2009 should be given a choice to re-join PDP and await the verdict of voters in 2019.