The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olakunle Abimbola

  • Electoral savagery

    PDP, Nigeria’s leading opposition party, craves sympathy — drip! drip! — over Bayelsa and Kogi.  Not from these quarters!

    Whatever its present angst, it merrily inflicted such on others, in those halcyon days of dreaming power, in the first instance, for 60 uninterrupted years — and was beastly about it.

    It’s grim to see the crude also cry!

    Power without conscience does neither the aggressor nor the victim any good.  In politics as in other spheres of life, that famous saying is trite: as you lay your bad, you lie on it.

    After 16 years as Nigeria’s ruling party, PDP grates from a bed of spikes; to which it condemned the opposition, during its high power days.

    APC, the current central lord of manor, is only in its fifth year.  But whatever holds true for PDP holds true for APC too: whatever APC does as a ruling party would also be its lot as future opposition.

    That is the ultimate lesson from the November 16 elections; and that is why APC must think more, and joy less, over the Bayelsa and Kogi polls.

    Kogi, particularly, leaves a bitter taste in the mouth — the violence, the thuggery,  the general election-day anarchy, in some voting precincts.

    True, the violence may have been both ways.  But the Kogi meltdown would appear the greatest threat, thus far, to President Muhammadu Buhari’s solemn pledge to bequeath Nigeria a saner electoral system than he met it.

    Bayelsa, despite allegations from the losing camp, followed its normal poll pattern since 1999.  If there was any fraud, as the PDP claims, it wasn’t more — or less — than frauds in the past, which the PDP rapturously claimed.

    To now howl, simply because it’s no beneficiary of the latest “fraud”, is the height of cant and hypocrisy.

    Which takes the discourse to what, beyond partisan fealty, really shaped the November 17 elections: the triumph and defeat of clannish politics.

    In Bayelsa, the tribes — or more accurately, the clans — gathered, with a vengeance, to hand APC’s David Lyon a rousing upset: the political equivalent, to echo Reggae great, Bob Marley, of Exodus, movement of Jah — sorry Ijaw — people!

    The Zionist rime, in this showdown, appears manifest: David, Lyon, lion, Zion — a study indeed, in scorched earth clannish mobilization, for a devastating election victory!

    But in Kogi, the tribes — Igala, Ebira and Okun Yoruba — scattered, to hand a rather desperate Governor Yahya Bello (GYB) victory, which optics nevertheless weren’t pretty!

    Even now, Kogites would appear in a bind: which is more tolerable — a GYB victory, with all its warts?   Or a Musa Wada one, with its spectre of umpteenth Igala hegemony, simply because the Igala are the “insensitive” majority?

    On this question alone, Kogi politics is ruptured, far more ruptured, beyond mere partisan differences.  That needs urgent fixing.

    But back to Bayelsa.  Governor Henry Seriake Dickson, in the PDP camp, provoked the angry banding of the clan, by his pre-election Nebuchadnezzar complex.

    Remember the biblical Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, felled by the hubris of own glory, but who ate crow, en route to redemption?

    Perhaps only Dickson would feign ignorance on the disaster that struck his party.  Barely one week to the polls, the new Bayelsa Speaker from Southern Ijaw, imposed after a gun clatter deposed the former Speaker, quit and defected to APC.

    Read Also: Electoral Act Bill scales Second reading in Senate

     

    Before then, the PDP suffered a gale of high profile defections, from high officials of state, almost on a daily basis.  Of course, there was the little whispering campaign of former President Goodluck Jonathan’s alleged entente with APC, over Dickson’s alleged intransigence.

    Then, horrors of horrors!  The outgoing governor had “imposed” an Urhobo, as PDP deputy governorship candidate!  But pray, isn’t the Urhobo a Bayelsan?  It’s the making of the political Osu (Igbo for outcaste), in an Ijaw state!

    The PDP lost the Bayelsa election simply because almost all critical influence centres left the party in the lurch — Exodus, movement of Bayelsa people!

    And if you jeer, that Lyon, the governor-elect and proud lion of that Zion train, is rather grammatically challenged, these good people had it all figured out, right from the feverish campaign stump: who grammar help?

    The PDP is clearly peeved that Bayelsa, it’s South-South pearl, is in “enemy” hands, just as APC would grimace at the PDP gubernatorial capture of Oyo, its South West political capital.  But both “outrageous” feats have been achieved more by elite gang-up, than ideological shift.

    Still, with Bayelsa, the ultimate loser would appear outgoing Governor Dickson.  His humpty-dumpty crash, though induced by a Nebuchadnezzar complex, appears bereft of that post-fall Nebuchadnezzar humility, that Dickson needs to grasp a ticket to redemption.

    But then, it’s early days yet; and politics is all so fluid!

    Now to Kogi, the ultra-violent face of November 16.  The true tragedy of Kogi would appear a macabre post-election victory dance, with partisans grooving and singing their opponents would “hear am ta-ta-ta-ta-ta”! — an onomatopoeia for raking gunshots!

    Such glamourization of electoral savagery must never be tolerated, for elections are no wars!  The government must start by rounding up and prosecuting all those involved in the Kogi violence.

    Still, Kogi might be the latest of such election barbarity.  But it’s certainly not the worst.  Indeed, the Kogi violence rubbed shoulders with the electoral massacre of Osun, in the 2007 election, which the then outgoing President Olusegun Obasanjo christened “do-or-die”.

    Even if it was worse than Osun 2007, it certainly held no candle to the free-killing and maiming Rivers fields of 2015, complete with election-time opportunistic rape.

    A Rivers State Commission of Inquiry, chaired by Prof. Chidi Odinkalu, then chair of the National Human Rights Commission, put the figure of slaughter, between 15 November 2014 and 11 April 2015, at 19 daily.

    The murder of Mrs Salome Abuh, the Ochadamu PDP women’s leader, burnt while locked up in her home, headlined the Kogi gory counts.

    But even that pales into relative insignificance, compared to the fate of the tragic Adubes, in Rivers’ Ogba/Egbema/Ndoni LGA.  Patience Adube told the Odinkalu Commission how partisan thugs massacred her husband, three sons, Ikechukwu, his son-in-law and one of the deceased’s security guards — all six, for their APC sympathies!

    There is no evidence that those killers, among others, have been brought to book — or will ever be brought to book.

    The fact is since the 1st Republic when Chief Remi Fani-Kayode, Deputy Premier of the West, told folks his Demo party would win — and they did — whether voters voted them or not, provoking the “we tie” protests; to the Ondo anti-rigging “war” of 1983 that signalled the beginning of the end for the 2nd Republic, to Obasanjo’s do-or-die show of 2007, and the Rivers killing fields of 2014/2015, electoral savagery has always threatened to hallmark Nigeria’s voting culture.

    Kogi is only the latest reminder of that nightmare.  That is why concerted efforts must be made to uproot the menace.  No democracy thrives by thuggery and allied election-time brigandage.

  • Hate speech? Not part of the hysteria

    Trust Nigeria: that well-hyped, well-crafted liberality, may well be well-shrouded, self-serving impunity!

    After former CJN Walter Onnoghen’s scandal broke, what gored a SAN most was not a judicial high priest that allegedly smudged his immaculate cloak, but  the “outrage” of docking a sitting CJN.

    “How can they,” he fumed, “dock the CJN?”

    “Why not?” Ripples countered. “Is he above the law?”

    That brought the learned SAN thudding hard on grim reality.  But it never cured him of his professional conceit that the CJN should be above the law — the same law that created his office and, by that special grace, vaulted him over and above every other citizen, when interpreting the law was the question.

    That hubris all but played out thereafter, with the futile legal rally that the CJN should shun appearing before the Code of Conduct Tribunal, until its chairman read the riot act and things got rather nasty.

    ASUU, the Academic Staff Union of Universities, just essayed its own grandstanding; pushing a divine right to decide how its employer must pay it, because thanks to “university autonomy”,  its members are exceptional minds, too superior to be paid, from the same salary framework, as other plebs!

    What’s that — liberal fascism?

    A similar conceit is playing out in the media, regarding hate speech; and the clearly draconian bill, now in the mill, to stamp it out.

    Forget the pro- and anti-hate speech bill arguments, the opening gambit by the ace democratic liberals and champions of free speech, would appear media exceptionalism — not unlike the legal exceptionalism that landed the former CJN in so much grief.

    But again, beyond ideological passion, which many times is herd mentality rather than hard, rigorous reason, such exceptionalism is clearly illogical.  You cannot claim because you distil free speech, you are free of the laws that guide that territory.

    Even with celestial perfectness, isn’t order the first law in heaven?  How much less then on earth, with folks’ penchant to bait the extreme?

    Make no mistake: the hate speech bill is following all the wrong path, in tackling a serious problem.  No matter how grievous a matter is — and hate speech is grievous — you don’t frame law, or any public policy, on sheer emotions.

    If you did, you risked not giving it the full, rigorous and concentrated thinking it deserved, since anger or outrage tends to freeze your thinking.  That is the flaw of the sponsor of that bill.  His anger tends to consign it to death on arrival.

    But that a bill’s sponsor is clinically challenged does not vitiate the need, nay the imperative, to deal with the problem.  Indeed, resorting to media hysteria to push “free speech” at any cost, is no less critically challenged as the bill itself is.

    There certainly can’t be free hate speech!

    So, the drama playing out is emotion versus emotion: Sabi Abdullahi, senator and sponsor of the hate speech bill, is so incensed he wants to play the Nigerian modern day legislative Draco — death for hate speech, well, if it causes the death of another!

    But his critics too are in a huff, too incensed by his draconian temper; puffing hot smoke, in a fit of democratic rage!

    Both sides betray different sides of patriotic arrogance that leaves the pressing problem unsolved.  That, for the polity, could be fatal.  That is why there must be a third way, rooted in cold reason.

    At the end of the day, the starting point is taking responsibility.  That is trite in speech; as it is in every other sphere of life.

    In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a voice in the epic poem grumbled that God ought to have willed Adam from straying from Eden and dooming mankind.  But another voice countered: God has given Man free will.  Still, however Man exercises this will, he must stand by the consequences.  That also goes for free speech.

    That is the point the willy-nilly champions of free speech are fleeing from, flaunting the rich lather of ideologue sentiments, hoping that would cover the void.  It won’t — at least with the acute.

    Indeed, taking responsibility for his freedom is what Man has fled from, since the fall of Adam.

    Read Also: ‘Hate speech death penalty antithetical to development’

     

    Sigmund Freud, in psychoanalysis, demonstrates the uneasy balance between the “id” (the raw intent to do anything), the “ego” (the inherent check against raw intents) and the “super ego” (societal sanctions against misbehaviour, should self-restraint fail).

    Even the Social Contract, the basic theory undergirding the pristine state, is also a bulwark against man’s seeming natural extremity, in his relationship with peers.  The threat of the mighty crushing the weak made the state imperative — an agency to moderate behaviours and impose order.

    But again, in a modern democratic state, the debate is not about free speech.  That is settled, with any democratic constitution, worth its name.

    What is not settled is possible abuse — by the state, particularly by its unscrupulous agents, pushing back the frontiers of citizen liberty.  That appears the angst of the media and other free speech champions, in this present push, to tackle hate speech.  That fear is real, particularly with Nigeria’s past nasty experience with military rule.

    But ample abuse also comes from citizen beneficiaries, who hide behind free speech to press their democratic right of pushing out free hate speech!

    That is clear from too many social media posts. That free speech champions are deliberately coy about this menace shows the deliberate fraud in their own impassioned campaigns, for the so-called “free society”.  That is nothing but tragic romance — at least from the Rwanda experience.

    Rwanda!  Had the Rwandan genocide of 1994 come some 20 years later, Ripples wagers, with the present social media penetration, Rwanda would perhaps have become the first modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah — completely razed by hate, if not by sexual decadence.

    Which country could have survived the Rwanda “cut down the tall trees!”, pass through the cold and ubiquitous social media, and yet live to tell the tale?

    Just as well: Rwandans appear less gung-ho about democratic rights, which President Paul Kagame abuses with gusto!  Hutu-on-Tutsi hate, which snowballed into genocide, left a harsh existential mark: you must be alive, before claiming democratic rights!

    Still, many in the Nigerian rights lobby still tingle with philosophical anarchy — limitless rights and zero government control — much as the English metaphysical poet, John Donne, announced his triumphant shutting out of the sun, “with a mere wink”, in his poem “Sun Rising”.

    Intellectual anarchy is gripping and exciting.  It makes the mind soar!  But physical anarchy is sobering stuff: the unbridled push of rights that alters the societal balance and peaks in avoidable tragedy.  That starts with hate speech.

    Hate speech is an existential menace.  Not even media hysteria can wish away that acute danger. Which is why the state and the rights lobby must partner to get rid of it.

    The earlier both sides quit grandstanding and got to serious business, the better for everyone.

    At least, Nigeria has Rwanda’s experience to learn from.

  • BOS and fickle Lagos

    L’ojo Monday, Eko o ni gba-gba-kugba [On Monday morning, Lagos takes no nonsense] —  Fela

     

    Babajide Olusola Sanwo-Olu (BOS), who now wants to be called “Mr. Governor”, dropping the conventional prefix of “His Excellency”, seems condemned to the fickleness of Lagos.

    That fickleness is rooted in the city’s proud impatience, as noted in Fela’s famous lyrics; itself drawn from a popular street lingo, with which the denizens of the fast-paced commercial hub serenade selves.

    Lagos, a hustler’s paradise, simply brooks no sme-sme — the Lagos lingo for slackness!

    Still, the ever busy traditional Eko isn’t quite the crazy sprawl of present Lagos: a tiny space hurtling with boisterous hustlers; pushing their democratic right to rudeness and petulance, in their zero tolerance for pain and allied discomfort.

    When economic migrants from all over Nigeria rumble with the traditional Eko impatience, that impish fickleness is never far away!

    Besides, it’s the season of the social media, at its anti-social worst!  In that all-comer’s party, millions of voices rumble with irreverent thunder: from the honest, the earnest and the reasoned; to the bilious, the bigot and the diabolically partisan.

    Poor BOS is caught in this fearsome flak — basically on the generally sorry state of Lagos roads — and it all appears to get to him!

    This irreverent army has dismissed the governor as “point and kill” — the very caricature of his gubernatorial exertions and gesticulations, to fix the very problems they rage about.

    But BOS need not be fazed.  The fickle are driven by extremes.  The one that rails loudest today will praise loudest tomorrow, when the problem is history; and is seen to be so.

    Besides those who condemn first and think later, always belong to the garbage of history.

    From 1999 to 2001 or thereabouts, when Governor Bola Tinubu and his cabinet were fixing the Lagos ruin, left behind by the departed military, they were not short of  traducers.

    Even further back, while working those epochal social and physical wonders, that made the pre-independent Western Region a clear Nigerian pacesetter, the great Chief Obafemi Awolowo was never short of caustic naysayers.

    That is why the governor should take this solace: the offspring of those that rushed to mock Awo in the old Western Region, and even Tinubu back in 1999, are among those who sing the fulsome praise of both today.

    BOS should, therefore, fix his eyes on the ball.  Those who nail him today would, with equal zest, hail him tomorrow.  But that is if he gets the job done.

    Still, though not apparent to many, BOS appears to have imbued a vital lesson — how a governor relates with his predecessor.  Akinwunmi Ambode was not that endowed.  But see his comeuppance today, on that score?

    Ambode’s predecessor, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, now Works and Housing Minister, left a far better Lagos for Ambode, than Ambode bequeathed BOS.

    Fashola earned high — and fair — praise for his high intellect and high-mindedness.

    His parting records too were sparkling: the roads, which have all but gone to seeds, four years after his departure, were much better.  The Okokomaiko-Mile 2-Orile-CMS light rail corridor seemed coming to life.

    Under him too, Lagos thought it had won its notorious refuse war, a combat which Tinubu had fiercely launched; and which Fashola zestfully pushed, in the best tradition of continuity.

    Even the Okada menace, Fashola seemed to have had under control, and would probably have won; had his tenure not been terminated, after his two constitutionally allowed four-year terms.

    His only Achilles heels, however, was the legitimate charge that he was more elitist than populist, a charge that resonated with the bulk of the Lagos hoi polloi, in their Alagbado, Alakuko and Tabon-Tabon redoubts, even if they still revered the governor — and, of course, some intra-chamber rumblings, within the Lagos ruling bloc, as stalwarts push and pull to corral influence.

    But despite all of Fashola’s parting goodwill, Ambode decided to throw him under the bus, on some state government-commissioned website, on alleged high costs.

    Though the issue would appear more phantom than real, the ever distracted media, particularly the social media segment, ever sniffing for salacious tales, lapped on to the alleged rot.  All, however, would peter out, after the initial, impassioned nosing for sleaze.

    Read Also: Lagos seeks CBN partnership to boost SMEs growth

    Still, see the tricks Karma is playing on Ambode today?  No thanks to his kerfuffle with the Lagos legislature, the one that wanted to throw his predecessor under the bus, is being thrown under a moving train, but for a legal freeze!

    Ay, many have claimed whatever is happening in Lagos is less Karma, and more of in-fighting within the ruling order, simply because Ambode has been, by far, the most disruptive in that chamber, since 1999.  Maybe.

    But the moral is clear: Ambode that assayed roasting another, is himself being badly roasted by others!  This is rather unfortunate.  Even with all his fair short-comings, Ambode appears condemned, at least for now, to being painted blacker than he really is.

    That is neither fair to Ambode nor good for the Lagos ruling order.  Despite some rotten personal choices, Ambode still chalked spectacular legacies in rural infrastructure upgrades: witness Epe and rural Alimoso. He therefore ought to get his due plaudits, even as he reels from fair knocks.

    The good thing here though, is that BOS has refrained from undermining his predecessor, even if not a few feel much of his present challenges are due to Ambode’s tragic distraction.

    Ambode’s shock of not nailing a second term, which should have been routine, led to a clear de-motivation, which has now put his successor in the hole.

    That all but explains the governor’s present bind, and the roasting from his fickle traducers — hardly surprising!  As ace musician Tu-Baba would croon, no paddy for (Lagos) jungle!

    But that granite challenge also presents granite opportunities, for BOS to come good and earn his own pips.

    The roads, of course, are the immediate focus — enforced low hanging fruits denizens of Lagos can’t wait to pluck and savour, now that the rains are abating!  Ridding the streets of refuse is another.

    Then, the light rail.  That would take some tough cobbling together of scarce cash! But rail might well be the organic answer to the Okada and Marwa tricycle shuttle challenge, which should never have been part of the transport mix, in a bustling 21st century Lagos.

    Of course, BOS must learn from the Ambode pitfall: always maintain a cool head; and, from fleeting power, learn to be least disruptive.

    If he gets it right — and he has little choice — Lagos wailers will turn hailers; and in their hearts, don BOS in the garb of “His Excellency”, which he just shunned, in the searing heat, of the executive kitchen.

     

    ‘It’s the season of the social media, at its anti-social worst!  In that all-comer’s party, millions of voices rumble with irreverent thunder’

  • Atiku agonistes

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    Atiku Abubakar, former Vice President of the Federal Republic and squelched PDP candidate in the 2019 presidential election, is in agony.

    But that agony, pathetic and bathetic, issues from phantom hope, soaring on wilful delusion, driven by the most stubborn strain of self-deceit and galloping conceit.

    Indeed, how do you describe a loser, hands-down in an election, who nevertheless declared himself a soar-away winner; quoting some comic server, as real in common sense and in law, as a mirage in a sweltering desert?

    Whoever readies a parched throat, to drink from such vanishing waters?

    It’s the peril of Atiku-lated mirage in full technicolor! Yet, Atiku and his Atiku-lated crowd appear too dazed to readjust themselves to the arid reality.

    For starters, eminent jurist, Prof. Ben Nwabueze, SAN, leads the nay ensemble, over the 7-0 Supreme Court verdict, that gave the Atiku challenge the judicial short shrift.

    Now, you can’t doubt the forensic skills of Pa Nwabueze. He is among the best, if not the very best, in his area of legal expertise. In the Atiku legal misadventure, however, the political partisan would appear to have trumped the forensic genius in our good professor.

    Maybe it’s just honest mistake, or even partisan chutzpah gone awry? If either or both were the case, then Atiku would appear only the latest of Prof. Nwabueze’s chequered historical faux pas.

    In 1966 Nwabueze, as a young Turk, was among the principal advisers of Major-Gen. Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi, Nigeria’s first military head of state, over the promulgation of the Unification Decree of that year.

    In 2019 Nwabueze, now old and frail, appears condemned to righting the wrong of that “original sin”, in his umpteenth restructuring campaign; to which the old man has given his all, since the dawn of The Patriots, under the leadership of the late Frederick Rotimi Alade (FRA) Williams, Nigeria’s first SAN. Tough luck in a karma war!

    Between that knowledge of history and the secrets of the future, poor Atiku is, at present, left to lick his wound!

    The PDP is not helping matters, by its comical reactions.

    Uche Secondus, its national chairman, does a comic appeal to the supernatural, resigning he, and his political household, to the court of God; a sentiment our loquacious FFK echoes, in his ubiquitous tweets, yammering about Egyptians you see today you’d see no more!

    Pray, is FFK now among the prophets, even if he claims to be a pastor?

    Read Also: What next for Atiku?

    A “shocked” Kola Ologbondiyan, feisty soul and PDP spokesperson? He drones on and on, about how “the distinction of our case remains for Nigerians, including generations yet unborn.” Seriously? Indeed, nothing is more lethal than wilful self-delusion!

    Old man Buba Galadinma, zesty neophyte if there was one, in blaring support of his new partisan friends, darkly weighed in, with the dire security implications of the Atiku failure!

    But it’s the candidate himself, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, that seems stuck by a most devastating strain of bluff and bluster!

    First, he declared himself unbroken by the judicial shellacking. Then, he consecrated himself as Nigeria’s democrat-in-chief, a thankless chore he claimed to have imposed on himself, these 20 years past, and is not willing to surrender, no matter what!

    Curiously, in that patriotic bragging, he sounds eerily close to former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s too well known rich lather of patriotic narcissism.
    Strangely, however, mum has been the word, from the Ebora Owu, to Atiku’s present travails.

    Before the election, the Ebora had assumed the pious role of the grand democratic Pardoner. Like the old Catholic hustler in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Prelude to the Canterbury Tales, he had attempted to cleanse Atiku of his “sins”, all frozen for history, in My Watch, Obasanjo’s presidential memoirs.

    As it turned out, Atiku, ashen, crushed and desperate, had through a crony, donated N50 million to the political cathedral of grace, the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL) — first in Africa! What is unclear, however, is whether there was established quid-pro-quo, for the most sacred of political transactions, on the eve of a most crucial presidential election!

    Still, the slightest of doubts negates Julius Caesar’s rigorous integrity test: Caesar’s wife must not only be above board, she must be seen to be so! Are those high standards, of probity qua probity, gone with the classical epoch?

    That brings the discourse to Atiku’s comic epiphany, of declaring 1999 to 2015, the first 16 years of returned democracy in which the PDP rammed itself out of power, as the apogee of Nigeria’s democratic ideals!

    How so? By its overweening conceit and overarching sleaze, which plumbed the very nadir under President Goodluck Jonathan, but which strong foundation was laid under the Obasanjo-Atiku presidency?

    By its brazen writing of electoral figures, which started as a moderate pour with Obasanjo’s re-election of 2003; but hit the monsoon in the late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s “election” of 2007, an exercise in which the colluding INEC never even bothered to serialize the ballot paper, which the president-elect was utterly ashamed of, but which the Supreme Court nevertheless certified as okay?

    Indeed by 2015, after Fall Guy Jonathan had added his own effete stumbles, a PDP re-presenting its candidates for re-election had become the Achebean rogue who had stolen too much for the owner not to notice!

    Yet, it’s the same PDP and its misdeeds that Atiku was trying to re-canonize, just as Obasanjo had tried to re-beatify Atiku, before the 2019 presidential election, after all the complete demolition job contained in My Watch!

    Any surprise both not only fell flat but were sweet butt of jokes?

    Aside from this Atiku-lated epiphany, Atiku’s severe post-defeat syndrome also entailed a Samson complex, of pulling everything down and libelling the courts, because he lost a bad case!

    Well, was this a former Vice President of the Federal Republic, or some callow political hustler, new on the block, blindly lashing out, in insane rage?

    With Atiku’s rather funny lionization, PDP appears set to gamble away its time in opposition, as it did in power. Unless it changes tack, it risks a stiff drop: from power, to opposition, to irrelevance.

    If that happened, the peripatetic Atiku, everything to everybody so long as he sniffs a power deal, would move elsewhere to pursue his fixation: power. If you doubt, check his partisan wandering: PDP to Action Congress (AC), back to PDP, then to APC, and now back to PDP!

    Even now for the former Vice President, it could well be morning yet on migration day! But then, it’s his democratic right.

    Still, Atiku could put up such a show because the general society itself is tragically distracted. The masses proudly lack institutional memory. The elite — merrily selfish, parasitic and unconscionable — are a classic example of how not to be an elite!

    A section of the media has even traded healthy skepticism for sickening cynicism! At a critical juncture of Nigeria’s history, what appears to matter is the institutional ego of those media — and the sacred arrogance of their reporters and columnists — and not honest duty to a country, trying to find its feet again.

    Let’s just hope those involved won’t gamble away their market relevance, as some parties and politicians have blown away their political essence — and become the future media equivalent of Atiku agonistes!

    Quote: “Atiku’s patriotic bragging sounds eerily close to former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s too well known rich lather of patriotic narcissism”

  • Nnamdi Kanu and royal pleaders

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    Does a fugitive have any leverage under the law?

    Nnamdi Kanu, the controversial leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and a coterie of royals in Orlu, Imo State, appear to think so.

    Kanu’s mother, Sally, just died in Germany after an illness.  As a fellow human, your heart must go out to him and his family, especially to Kanu as the first son.  A mother is an indescribable pearl no one wants to lose, no matter how old they grow.  And when they pass, the ultimate duty and joy, for the child, is to bury them.

    That, however, is in the realm of sympathy and empathy; a manifestation of our common humanity.  Mixing that with the complications of the law, especially the consequences of its disobedience, is pushing raw sentiments too far.

    Which was why it was rather rich, when Kanu was reported thinking aloud, wishing he be allowed to come home, bury his mother and quietly fizzle out.

    Well, since when did a democratic order, driven by due process, start stopping a law-abiding citizen from coming in to bury his or her mother?

    Of course, the key word is “law-abiding”.  If the law is ruptured, that equation changes.  But shouldn’t that be trite?

    That is why the Orlu monarchs’ take on the matter is rather amusing.  It started with a plea and ended with a veiled threat.  But its soul and driving spirit is emotive blackmail.

    Speaking through Eze Gideon Ejike, the royals wanted President Muhammadu Buhari to allow Kanu to come into Nigeria to bury his mother “without molestation”.  Then the not-so-subtle threat: the United Nations should prevail on Nigeria to grant Kanu the coveted passage.

    Read Also: Nnamdi Kanu: A continuing tragedy

    Then the doting endorsement: “Kanu is not a terrorist.  Terrorists kill but we are yet to see any bloodshed by Kanu,” Ejike declared. “He is our hero and should be allowed to bury his mother before the beginning of next year.  He deserves the honour and right as the first son to bury his mother.”

    Now, that’s very interesting — a royal diktat, huffing with entitlement, rogue and royal; ringing with an impatient deadline, severe scolding and hot lecture on citizens’ filial rights, to a savage and insensate order, dead to basic norms, tradition and culture!

    Nice try!  For all you know, the camp of the converted is already berserk with incestuous roar and delirious cheer!  Still, until these royals set up their own democratic feudalism in which their whims are law, all these bombast would remain within the confines of royal delusion.

    How all of these would help Kanu’s case (if anything can), under a democracy structured on law, is difficult to see.  By first routinely flouting his bail conditions, then eventually jumping bail and fleeing the land, Kanu has mocked and baited that same law.

    So beyond emotions really, how can his case be helped, even under common sense, other than returning to, like a man, face the consequences of cheating the judicial process, instead of resorting to a lather of sentiments?

    Still, the royal fathers are no fools.  They follow a well-beaten Nigerian track: start a whispering campaign hinged on scalding emotions; ensure it gathers traction as full blast propaganda; then adroitly wheel it as the latest manifestation of the much lamented ethnic victimhood!

    But before folks start running ahead of themselves, the fact is the federal executive need not lift a finger in Kanu’s case.  If he sets foot on Nigeria, the judicial process would auto-trigger.

    If you jump bail, it is ultimate folly to expect the same law you played for a fool would wrap you in a warm embrace.  The law may be an ass but it’s doubtful if it’s that asinine!

    So, maybe the Orlu monarchs should spare the president their sweet jeremiad and zoom in on the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), in whose court (every pun intended!) the ball is.

    Even then, how would the poor CJN handle it all?  Pass a judicial decree ordering the judge handling the Kanu trial to annul, from his records and from public memory, that Kanu jumped bail, and bragged he wasn’t bound by the law trying him?

    After that, how does he, open sesame-wise, blot out the notorious facts of Kanu’s poor sureties left in the lurch, when the judicial prodigal took off?

    O, maybe the CJN would even enlist the help of the Senate president, to help placate Ike Ekweremadu, the former deputy Senate president, who went to Germany to savour iri-ji (new yam), only to be pelted and almost lynched with the same treasured tuber, for which his throat tickled?

    Well, maybe this particular one is a family affair, to which others should not poke their nose!  But the fact is it all happened in the Nigerian space, which that kind and loving family shares with others!

    What a peculiar mess!

    Peculiar mess!  That about captures what Kanu has made of himself, the crude and uncouth way he prosecutes his IPOB campaign; and how he has soiled — nay, poisoned — Igbo relations with other ethnics in the country.

    At the zenith of his campaign of sweet hate and crispy bile, the Fulani were the very Satan; the Hausa the grand fools to have suffered, so gladly, the tiny Fulani; the Yoruba were supine slaves, lost under the peonage of the so-called Hausa-Fulani; and the Igbo reasonable and moderate are the scorned Okoro-Awusa, as former Rochas Okorocha, the former Imo governor, was scornfully dismissed in the safe and secure ethnic laager IPOB had erected!

    Things got to a head when some equally hot-headed northern “youths” read out the riot act — all Igbo must leave the North, with a deadline to boot!

    But just as the Orlu royals now remember that Kanu has the “right and honour” to come bury his mother, even when they kept loudly mute as Kanu made mincemeat of others’ rights and honour, his elders never cautioned him, when he was launching unprovoked and combustible slurs against other ethnic groups — until the innocent Igbo in the North were about becoming scape goats, of a  tongue-loose, hate-filled prodigal!

    That was a very dangerous juncture, that nearly brought Nigeria back to the tragedy of 1966.

    Whereas the terrible pogrom forced the Easterners East-ward in 1966, in a last-ditch effort at self-preservation, Kanu was jeopardizing the Igbo in the North: belching ethnic hate and courting needless disaster.

    Talk of history nearly repeating itself as farce!  But thank God, reason prevailed.

    Every part of the country have their own “Kanu”, a high priest in the tabernacle of the reckless, bordering on the insane, spewing ethnic poison.

    The South West has a relay of leaking mouths, dedicated to spewing nonsense. A bloc, in the North, even calls itself elders.  But they are so juvenile and reckless, they would put callow youths to shame.

    Still, both regions have succeeded in rendering these lobbies veritable nobodies, hankering after recognition that would never come. The Igbo elders should do the same.

    Yes, Kanu has the right to come bury his mum.  But by making himself a fugitive from the law, he has all but ruptured that right–and no sentimental rapture can put that right.

    His elders should bluntly tell him that, rather than start a campaign that is a clear and wilful insult to the rest of law-abiding Nigerians.

  • Of border closure and belly analyses

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    Much of the response to Nigeria’s current border closure touch on the tummy.  So, it’s little surprise that rumble is well echoed in impassioned belly analyses.

    Yet, what is called for is clinical thinking, with clear eyes on the strategic plane.

    The border closure is not sustainable — beyond the short run.

    But neither, even in the very short run, should the vicious but unprovoked economic hostility towards Nigeria, by these subversive neighbours.

    On this score, Benin Republic has, for too long, proved a hung-ho enemy; and Nigeria, for too long, has been meek and long-suffering.  The time for turning the other cheek is over.

    Of course — and is anyone surprised? — from within Nigeria, partisan bile has weighed in, on the anti-closure front.

    On the closure, the political opposition and their media confederates have  drawn a line in the sand; and fled the policy plain to spew personal abuses, expletives and even curses.

    It would appear the perfect blackmail mix, at least to the obtuse and excitable  — rumbling tummies keying into “hunger”, to harvest cheap partisan points!  Rice o compatriots!  It’s free-wheeling thunder and anger, as price of rice shoots through the roof!

    Yet, it’s nothing but sweet mischief.  Economic survival is nowhere to play cheap belly politics.

    Even then, each passing day, the likes of Benin, Niger Republic and Cameroon, seem to realize the huge cost of sabotaging the Nigerian economy; and undermining the general welfare of the majority of Nigerians, who have done these economic adversaries no harm. The not-so-involved Ghana is also caught in the warp.

    But of course, without in-house Judases — Nigerian smugglers that trade with these foreign parasites — that illegal market ring won’t be there.

    So, it’s quite an interesting scenario: in-house Judases bad-mouth the closure within; their confederates-in-trade-crime buffet it without, with an eye for international blackmail, to pressure Nigeria, to continue undermining itself.  Why, there even appears a muted ECOWAS institutional blackmail, not to see things in Nigeria’s way!

    In other words, slay it with “hunger” within; buffet it with “trade” without! Nice try but fond hope — at least, so far!  What Nigeria cannot afford is succumb to this blackmail.

    What did the bible say about love?  Love your neighbour as yourself; not love your neighbour more than yourself.  In any case, to love or to hate, you first must stay alive.

    Nigerian neighbouring leeches have for too long played the reckless parasite, eyes jammed in sheer delirium, sucking away in sweet comfort.  It never occurred to them that should the host die, the leech perishes with it — such self-eradication greed!

    If Nigeria therefore rallies not to be sucked to death, it is as much grim redemption for the host, as it is painful wake-up call for the leech.  A new, mutually beneficial trade engagement could be win-win for everyone.

    Still, should there persist a trace of parasitism, at least the parasite is now much smarter to keep its host alive, vibrant and healthy!  In that common sense, lies its own self-preservation.

    That about sums up the IMF’s take on the matter: inasmuch as trade is good for the international economy, illegal trade, fired by wanton smuggling, is ruin for all.  Still, it wished all the parties would dialogue, iron out the issues and settle the dispute.

    Conventional wisdom would have wagered IMF would wax poetic on “trade” and pummel Nigeria for blocking it; so much so when Nigeria just signed the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) protocol.

    It was tactical support from the most unexpected of quarters.  Still, the key word is “tactical”.  On the strategic plane, the IMF would much sooner go back to its gospel of trade, no matter what.

    For now, however, the IMF’s take would appear a logical response. Still, no country can sustain a closed border for too long. So, dialogue is it: so all sides can come to party in licit trade.

    What then are the core issues, beyond sentiments and emotive grandstanding?

    First: food and energy security.  On both fronts, Benin has proved reckless and insanely unabashed, in economic hostility.

    Nigeria, since 2015, has made a forceful push for food security.  Audu Ogbeh, former Agriculture minister, had pushed the new government’s credo of “grow what you eat and eat what you grow” with rare passion.  That had produced near-revolutionary results in local rice cultivation (for local consumption) and tuber exportation (for forex, from local excess).

    But all Benin has done — its economy being driven by large-scale smuggling into Nigeria, after collecting port duties on rogue imports — is frustrate Nigeria every point of the way.

    If rice paints the picture of rotten imports, petroleum products paint the picture of rotten exports.  Again, Benin makes hay with petrol and diesel smuggled from Nigeria, so much so that it sits pretty retailing fuel smuggled from Nigeria in peculiar bottles, while the pumps in its fuel stations stay proudly dry.  That appeared the most thriving household sales.

    Talk of the leech sucking its host to death!

    Yeah, Benin deserves all the conking it has earned, to reset its brain, to be less parasitic and be less subversive, to Nigeria’s legitimate trade interests.

    Also note: rice and petrol are only twin-metaphors for Benin’s trade crimes against Nigeria.  It cuts across many sectors: tyres, automobile, poultry, etc — and even illegal small arms, that have devastating crime and security implications.And yes: the likes of Niger, Chad and Cameroon also savour the illicit gravy, at Nigeria’s expense.

    Still, as in the case of Ghana, many involved in legit trade are also caught in this bind.  That has led a Ghana trade group to, in anger, call for the boycott of Nigerian goods.

    Honest Ghana traders have a right to their ire.  But their patriotic anger hardly considers Nigeria’s own bind.  Without that, the problem won’t be solved.  So, it would pay both sides to be less emotive and be more logical.

    Even in Benin, a booming export of vegetables to Nigeria — tomato, lettuce, carrot, etc — is in jeopardy.  A sickening picture of these farm produce, perishing  by a roadside farm, in Benin’s Grand Popo area, is well and truly sickening.

    To stop this bleeding, dialogue is the key.  Nigeria must extract tough and firm commitments from Benin and allied saboteurs, now that it is clear the opportunity cost of building their economies on illicit trade is hefty and nasty.

    After that, Nigeria must deploy technology to clip the wings of corrupt state troopers that operate at the border.  Besides, Nigeria must make stern scapegoats of as many smugglers and colluding Customs troopers as are caught.

    After all that, the next logical step is to reopen the border.  Though the closure is not sustainable, illicit trade, that mushrooms poverty and kills Nigeria’s dream, is absolutely unacceptable.

    After this shock therapy, it shouldn’t be too difficult to navigate a mutually beneficial trade course that makes Nigeria and its neighbours happy.

  • Was Dogara there?

    Olakunle Abimbola

    Was 8th House of Representatives Speaker, Yakubu Dogara, in the Green Chamber when President Muhammadu Buhari came delivering the budget estimates?

    Everyone knew Dino Melaye was there: that loud mouth from the 8th Senate, with much diminished tantrums in the 9th.  A photo, in which Dino the excitable tried to serenade PMB, with a rankadede pose, went viral on the social media.

    A few days later, the valedictory symbolism of that photo would become pungent.  The president presented the budget proposals on October 8.  On October 11, the Court of Appeal booted out Dino, from his Kogi West senatorial seat.  Unless Dino won at the ordered re-run, not later than 90 days from verdict time, he would have kissed the Senate a final bye-bye.

    Again, that would be a crushing blow for the Bukola Saraki-led powers and principalities that held the 8th National Assembly in thrall; but that somewhat miscarried, in spectacular version, at the 2019 general polls.

    Saraki himself was nailed in battle, felled by the fearsome hail, from the  Kwara “O to ge” (Enough is enough) war.  That war utterly consumed Saraki, his entire political dynasty, and his routed O tun ya (Let’s do it again) troops: all penned and swept into electoral Siberia; not unlike Lucifer and his fallen angels — those tragic folks, in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, that would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven!

    Still, as the Yoruba would say, “Baba ku, Baba ku” — the patriarch is departed; the patriarch is very much alive!

    Saraki, the puppeteer, may have fallen in electoral battle.  But Melaye, the unfazed Saraki puppet, in senatorial rascality and allied ribaldry, somehow stole into the 9th Senate — Baba ku, Baba ku!

    But with this latest judicial yellow card — to borrow that famous football-speak — even that is turning into a grand illusion, for an ancien regime, with its dying ashen glow, in the new parliamentary order.

    Still, where the hell was Dogara, Dino’s twin apparition from the old order, during the budget presentation excitement?

    Was he in the chamber?  Was he without?  His quiet presence, if he was, clearly equates a loud absence!  That was a stark departure from the Saraki-Dogara glory days of legislative infamy!  How time changes!

    If Saraki was Brutus sans the post-mortem nobility ascribed to him after the anti-Caesar conspiracy had come a sad cropper, Dogara wasn’t exactly the “such men are dangerous” Cassius, with the “lean and hungry look”, who the tragic Caesar himself spotted, before the curtains fell.

    Yet, Dogara was no less potent in the 8th National Assembly’s anti-PMB legislative conspiracy, than Cassius was to Caesar’s.

    Saraki might have been the unfazed, gargoyle-like scowl of that conspiracy.  But Dogara was its smooth Jerkyll and Hyde — the day-time friend, the night-time fiend, in the anti-people legislative push, even if the primary goal was to cripple the PMB agenda.

    Just as well Saraki got “slain” in battle!  But Dogara stole back into Parliament as virtual prisoner of war (POW) — or how else would you describe his present status as ultra-mute floor member, from the zenith of swashbuckling, gavel-banging Speaker?

    Would Dogara remember the wild tantrums, the last time he and Saraki perched over the Green Chamber, to receive the budget estimates?  Boos and jars, in a free cascade, from a crude and ill-tempered chamber, fired at the president?

    Still, if the president was fazed by it all, he didn’t show it.  He responded instead with that four-plus-four finger signal that instantly went viral!  Talk of icy chutzpah as parliamentary riposte!

    Less than one year down the line, with Ahmed Lawan-Femi Gbajabiamila at the saddle, the mood was much changed, with even Dino coveting positive presidential attention!

    How did Dogara feel, observing the new temper at close quarters — and with painful anonymity?

    How would he squirm at Senate President Lawan’s resolution to pass the budget by December, firmly warning ministers to be prompt at budgetary defences or take whatever comes their way, against the Saraki-Dogara era’s drawn out late passages, to sabotage budgetary goals, because of partisan differences — partisan differences not fired by any noble dissent but by crass perfidy?

    Better a gone Saraki, fallen in electoral battle; than a Dogara parliamentary prisoner of war (POW), captured and condemned to witnessing that nightmare, perhaps?  How time changes!

    Still, are all these tailored to kick folks who are already down?  Absolutely not!

    However, whatever political comeuppance Saraki and Dogara now suffer for a past rotten parliamentary conduct, it can’t still compare to the pains their wilful actions and stealthy inactions have inflicted on voters that voted them.  Because the 8th National Assembly was busy cannibalizing the budget and diverting estimates for core infrastructure, to atomistic personal projects in the so-called constituency projects, vital arteries like the Lagos-Ibadan expressway and the 2nd Niger Bridge have had their completion time rolled back by at least two years.

    Travellers from the Lagos to the Sagamu interchange segment of that road (easily the busiest in the country) can feel the Saraki-Dogara parliamentary bad faith in real time travel pains; for the reconstruction, which should have be nearing completion, appears dreadfully slow.

    Even then, that pales into nothing when you calculate the multiplier effect, of that slow-down, in aggravated poverty — faster road travel, of people and goods, should normally give the economy a jab in the arm.

    But the political dangers were even direr.  After Saraki had traded off the APC right of deputy Senate president to PDP, and Dogara had annexed basically PDP votes to become Speaker, the duo attempted to invent a new though satanic realpolitik: the majority having its say but the minority having its way!

    So potent was this new “way” that even after the opposition’s National Assembly electoral hiding of 2019, not a few feared the opposition wizards could still conjure the Saraki-Dogara 8th Assembly encore.  But alas!

    Still, the win or loss is not personal glory or infamy.  It is rather the voters’ collective loss of four years: the polity badly bled, while Saraki, Dogara and confederates gamed!

    Ay, not a few would insist the problem was never one-way; and that the PMB Presidency and the ruling APC had own issues — true.  Still, that is as good as putting Judas in the clear for betraying the Christ, since he only fulfilled a dire divine decree!

    The Dogara debacle should be a clear and crystal lesson to the 9th NASS, both as a collective and as individual senators and Reps.  When you have a sacred historic opportunity to make a difference, don’t blow it on crass profanity.

    It is to Karma’s glory that Dogara may be stranded in the House, to shamefacedly observe the prompt correction of his Speakership’s deliberate bad faith — the prompt passage of the 2020 budget, for instance.

    On this score, Saraki would appear to have claimed the better deal, though he fell, not unlike Absalom, that grand Biblical rebel, in electoral battle.

    To return to that John Milton imagery: it is indeed better to be as dead as dodo in political hell, than a Dogara enduring the living dead, in parliamentary heaven.

     

     

  • General of all seasons

    Lt. Gen. Ipoola Alani Akinrinade (rtd) always reminds you of pleasant deja vu — didn’t  we experience something this pleasant before?

    For Ripples, growing-up times were dominated by Awo and his wondrous deeds: the magical strides in the pre-independent Western Region; the fiscal rectitude as Gen. Yakubu Gowon’s federal commissioner for Finance, and Spartan aura as the first vice-chairman of the Gowon-era Federal Executive Council (FEC).  Besides, there were the great expectations — twice dashed — of a glorious 2nd Republic Awo presidency.

    Still, Awo belonged to the partisan political plain, with its contrasting passion of extreme love and extreme hate.

    But outside that scalding lane straddled a pair of non-partisan but progressive minds: Prof. Wole Soyinka, the famed intellectual that needs little introduction; and Dr. Tai Solarin, he of blessed memory: no less famous educationist, religious iconoclast and founder of Mayflower School, Ikenne, Ogun State.

    In Ripples’ rather impressionable young mind back then, nothing could possibly go wrong, so long as these two were around!

    That is the pleasant deja vu — though the times are now much diminished and the mind no longer that impressionable — can things really go wrong, as long as this progressive-minded General is still around?

    That is a big deal in these stark and troubled times — as the flower of the Yoruba and the pride of contemporary Nigeria gathered to celebrate General Akinrinade at 80, on October 3, in Ibadan, the Yoruba scholarship, culture and political capital.

    In a Yorubaland riven by peer envy and partisan bile; and in a Nigeria where partisan opposition has plumbed into scalding hate and rabid resentment, it’s good to see the General, self-effacing and generous of spirit, tower above the abiding toxin as a credible soul.

    It’s the making of the General as a man of all seasons, the durable Omulabi of the finest crust and the quintessential Nigerian patriot.

    Indeed, a man of all seasons is apt summary, for the General’s rich and illustrious life.  Somewhat he is always there, at critical junctures of Nigerian history, with its many tragedies.

    He joined the Army as cadet trainee in 1960.  But when he was coming of age as a young officer, Nigeria’s first post-independence power pact had come a sad cropper, with the former sweethearts from North and East falling upon themselves, in a fight-to finish.

    The politicians, less focused on nation-building, more driven by ruthless peer destruction, had made a mess of the new dominion.  The naive Army stumbled into the fray; and as E. M. Forster quipped in A Passage to India, the military got a problem fixed but created a thousand others!

    Thus a bloody coup fetched an even bloodier counter-coup.  In-between were the pogroms in the North.  The malady peaked with a Civil War that was anything but civil, in its sheer scale of destruction.

    It fell on Akinrinade and his fellow corps of young officers to make a sense of the mess.  The General, then as a lieutenant-colonel, was an alpha and omega, of sorts.

    When Benjamin Adekunle’s 3 Marine Commando Division (3MCDO), in a military rapid fire, prised the eastern-most fringe of the segment now known as the South-South from the old East, he was there.

    But when things appeared stalled, in the Igbo heartland of the East, he was also there. After a transition from Adekunle to Olusegun Obasanjo as 3MCDO boss, he somewhat authored, with Godwin Alabi-Isama, also then a lieutenant-colonel, the final manoeuvres that extracted the instrument of surrender from the opposing camp.

    All these war exploits, with pictures and maps to boot, were captured in Alabi-Isama’s The Tragedy of Victory, even if they were somewhat blacked out from My Command, Obasanjo’s rather narcissist Civil War account. Ay, the defeated camp sucks some cold comfort from Alabi-Isama’s intriguing title.  But there are hardly any saints in a war of kill or be killed!

    Still, the war done and dusted, the military started falling upon themselves — and again, Akinrinade was at the thick of the theatre.

    When the Dimka coup despatched Murtala Muhammed, Akinrinade was part of the counter-manoeuvre that not only foiled the coup but also ensured no harm came to the No. 2, Obasanjo, who then became Head of State.

    When that regime vacated power for the civilians in 1979, Akinirinade was left behind, by the exiting junta, to stabilize the Shehu Shagari elected presidency — until the new president committed the tactical blunder of kicking his chief of Army staff (COAS) “upstairs” as Nigeria’s first chief of defence staff (CDS).  Akinrinade’s six months as COAS is the shortest-ever by any holder of that post.

    But Shagari would reap the strategic ruin of his tactical blunder — the military comeback, though fully goaded by the media and the losing segment of the political elite, after the travesty of the 1983 general elections.

    By then Akinrinade had long left that government.  Still, what would have happened had the General remained, till 1983, as COAS?  Would he have tried to steer the military away from poisonous power, no matter what — and probably lose his life in the process?  Only God knows!

    Even when Ibrahim Babangida came, and started profaning everything, Akinrinade was one of the credible figures that did honest work for that regime — he with the incomparable Prof. Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, who left a shining legacy of primary health care that, if followed through, would have made a great difference.  The General said he quit when the IBB dog was becoming stone deaf to the hunter’s whistle.

    Of course, the June 12 validation war and the Sani Abacha tragic intransigence, sparking the NADECO-Abacha epochal confrontation was an out-and-out classic: the making of the general as a daring democrat, giving his all!

    That titanic battle consumed MKO, the legit mandate owner and Abacha, the tragic usurper; aside from condemning IBB, the cunning annuller-in-chief to the status of the living dead — at least from the point of view of those that felt short-changed.

    To the General, however, the thereafter was yet another battle.  Though “democracy” had come, the national question remained unsolved.  So, as President Obasanjo was playing to the gallery to please his electoral sponsors, at the expense of his own people — and other Nigerians — the General was marshaling the Agbajo, to work hard at settling the national question.  Even as he clocks 80, he is still hard at work on that, without favour or malice to anyone.

    An intimate window into that Agbajo battle was opened by Dr. Femi Orebe, in his weekly column, in The Nation on Sunday of October 6.

    So, if the General drew both the Ooni of Ife (the spiritual head of the Yoruba) and the Alaafin of Oyo (the imperial head) to sit on the same table without ruffling feathers, aside from gathering an A-grade unpretentious crowd, all come to testify to his generosity of spirit, you know it is a man condemned to high honour and celebration, even if he would rather remain self-effacing.

    At 80, the only thing missing for Gen. Akinrinade is writing his  story.  We would have gauged the true temper of the age — for he won’t paint others bad to make himself good!

    But that trove might be lost to history, because Abacha-era vandals razed the Akinrinade personal library of Alexandria.

  • El-Rufai and f(r)iends

    El-Rufai, the son, arriving a public school, provokes a storm. El-Rufai, the father, faces the resultant blitz, of praise or blame.

    It’s the making of El-Rufai and f(r)iends!

    The governor may have bucked a sickly trend — of the Nigerian ruling elite keeping own children off the leprous public schools they run.

    That ought to come with some well-earned praise — for the governor’s action is welcome pinch, on the conscience (or lack of it) of his ruling peers.

    Yet, reaction has focused less on the action per se — noble, if you ask Ripples.  El-Rufai’s fiends would rather raze him for their perceived colour of his politics; and their sworn evil of his motive.

    It’s all perfectly contemporary Nigerian: it’s not enough to do good or evil.  What matters is the perception of friend and foe.  Donald Trump’s alternative facts syndrome is finding safe local anchor.

    Strictly, it’s ugly to fair-minded eyes.  Facts are nothing. Bias is everything.  It’s the paramountcy of shadow over substance.

    Yes, it’s true: Nasir El-Rufai, governor of Kaduna State, does not suffer fools gladly, as the Brits say, of that clinical putdown.

    Some say that is because he has a sharp, acute, piercing mind that is rather impatient with those who waffle and dodder, no thanks to a wobbling and blunt mind.

    Others spurn that as crap.  El-Rufai, they insist, is just a brat with zero emotional intelligence. That dire challenge, they add, clothes him with combative and arrogant pride.  So, he holds others — particularly those who disagree with him — in contempt.

    He may indeed be brilliant — they reluctantly concede his razor-sharp mind — but it’s brilliance without humility or charity, which is a waste, they jeer in final triumph!

    Indeed, if you have read El-Rufai’s The Accidental Public Servant, you would marvel at his self-projection as clinical and severe, battling against all environmental odds to do good!   You then wondered if blood flowed in his veins!

    Now, was this a mind courting controversy as a political weapon?  Or just a single-minded dynamo determined to do his bit, whether anyone liked it or not?

    So, when the news hit the waves, that El-Rufai just enrolled his son Abubakar, 6, to start primary one in a public school, Capital School, Malali, in Kaduna, with the camera in tow, all hell simply broke loose, among friends and foes!

    In all the hullabaloo, however, some salient points got conveniently glossed over.

    To start with, the entry age into public primary schools.  To many parents today, it’s infra dig to enrol a six-year old — too old for primary one, they would bawl! — even if that is the entry prescription; just as a holiday is inconceivable without the so-called “summer classes.”

    The all-knowing, all-busy adults have decreed childhood and its sweet pleasures out of their children; the career-pushing parents have expunged play, fun and spark from their kids’ holidays!

    Therefore, it is rather refreshing that a governor, in 21st century Nigeria with all its empty conceits and grand pretences, is using his own blood to reiterate this sanity.

    Yes, little Abubakar is a product of some elite pre-primary schooling.  But that his father isn’t leveraging that for a higher class would appear total, solemn submission to the rules.  That is a leadership model that should excite everyone.

    Then, the inviolability of promises, by public servants.

    For whatever reason, the governor made a solemn promise: when his son turned six, whether he was still governor or not, he would enrol him in a public primary school.

    Everyone moved on. Not a few forgot. Most probably would not have remembered, had the governor played dumb, and allowed his promise to quietly slide. But should anyone dare remind him, to walk his talk, he would probably have put out some cant.

    But again, El-Rufai remembered — and kept his word.  That ought to earn due praise.  Leaders’ words ought to be their bond.

    Indeed, Olusegun Obasanjo always brags: my  word is my bond.  Let’s just say, El Rufai has just acted that, with little or no fuss — though the cameras were in tow, which seem to have enraged not a few!

    Obasanjo!  That name echoes the many battles of El Rufai in the public space, birthing a hardy and controversial public figure, more feared than loved!

    In The Accidental Public Servant, El-Rufai’s Obasanjo years ministerial memoirs — and a high-flying and very visible minister at that — the future governor gave his president the short-shrift: Obasanjo’s denial, of an attempt at an illegal “third term”, was a fib!

    “No third term – no Nigeria”, he quoted the president to have bragged inside Aso Rock, in February 2006.  Raising that “smoking gun”, El-Rufai declared, with utter irreverence, the president had tumbled, from the high pedestal he once held him!

    Not a few thought that was harsh — and brash.  Others felt it was plain ingratitude — to a president that offered El-Rufai the world.  Yet others craved more grace, no matter what.

    But an unfazed El-Rufai won’t waffle: it’s honour or nothing! Your word ought to be your bond!

    In another high-octane war, a Pentecostal cleric, the Edo-based Johnson Suleman, once crossed swords with El-Rufai, over some religious edict, in Kaduna State.

    When the push came to the shove, the pastor threatened a pastoral fatwa — a holy curse that threatened the governor with near-instant death!  It was a new low in ecclesiastical rascality!

    But it was the pastor that ate crow.  El-Rufai has not only lived, he had gone on to claim a second term!  But the man of God, it was, hobbled and humbled by a scandal!  See how the holy stumble?

    Of course, “second term” reminds you of Shehu Sani, the former Kaduna Central senator that also rumbled with the governor — but lost out on second term (replaced by another Uba Sani), even after the ruling party tried a stalled cohabitation.  El-Rufai could prove a formidable, unforgiving adversary!

    Poor Shehu Sani!  He has been apoplectic, since the El-Rufai-son-goes-to-school story broke; spinning tales of alleged deceit; of how the governor allegedly spent “N195 million on a particular school … take your son and the media to that school and think you have done anything different.”

    Sani went on Kaduna’s gubernatorial binge of worthier governors: a Balarabe Musa that shunned Government House, during his short governorship in the 2nd Republic; and an Ahmed Markarfi, whose children, he claimed, also attended that same school, without Markarfi bringing down the media roof!  Nasir’s was all comical stunt for 2023, see?

    But as poor Sani fumed, it was clear who stole the thunder; and who harvested the anger!  A grape never tasted so sour!  El-Rufai and fiends!

    Indeed, El-Rufai is as controversial — and combative —  as they come.  He especially loves to shut up the hyper-educated southern loud mouths, who sadistically glory the North is dumb; so it ought to listen, while they thunder!

    Nor does he necessarily hide the political Machiavelli in him.  He once rued the North as comparable human development laggard; but also relished its blind advantage as captive voting bloc, warts and all!

    Yet, on this one, El-Rufai has earned due and legitimate praise.  If every governor takes his cue, and enrol their children in public schools — primary, secondary and tertiary  — there would be added vim to fix crumbling public education.

  • Much ado about new economic team

    Between lawyers and economists, there is a certain swagger.

    The lawyer quips, not unlike the tortoise in the Yoruba folktale, he had stuffed all learnedness inside a gourd, leaving only himself “learned”; and others merely “educated” — sweet delusion, to be sure.

    The public economist is well-nigh the unquestionable policy czar; because he bristles with arcane theories.  Still the economy is trite: when two or three are gathered, an economy dawns.  To survive, one needs the services of the other.

    Nevertheless, this economic oracle’s word must be law.  At the mention of his name, all plebs must kneel and bow!

    The New Testament may claim the ripping of the tabernacle’s holy-of-holies; and the gospel exposed to all, since Christ had paid the price.

    Not here!  The severe temple stands; its holy-of-holies holds, its immaculate creed, which only the sacred economic theory-priests understand, reigns!

    So, if not a few swoon and bow, at the advent of a new Buhari Economic Advisory Council (EAC), to replace the administration’s Economic Management Team (EMT) that Vice President Yemi Osinbajo chairs, you should know where the votaries are coming from.

    For one, the EAC is not so-called.  It boasts, in its ranks, among the most alluring minds in the land: Chair, Prof. Doyin Salami, of the Lagos Business School (LBS); Prof. Chukwuma Soludo, Obasanjo’s national economic adviser and Yar’Adua/Jonathan era Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor; and Bismarck Rewane, boss at Financial Derivatives Company Ltd, a Lagos-based financial consultancy firm.

    The others in the team: Dr. Mohammed Sagagi (vice chairman), Prof. Ode Ojowu, Dr. Shehu Yahaya, Dr. Iyabo Masha and Dr. Mohammed Adaya Salisu, the senior special assistant to the president on development policy, who will serve as secretary.

    Unlike the VP-chaired EMT which cuts across disciplines, the EAC is an all-economist redoubt, with members boasting expertise in varied areas in that field.

    Salami, EAC chairman but a member of the old EMT, is clearly the link between the old and the new; and therefore offers some continuity.

    A PhD graduate from Queen Mary College, University of London, his research areas include characteristics of small and medium enterprises, macroeconomic policy and the economic management of business, his forte at LBS.  He has also served as member of the CBN Monetary Policy Committee.

    Rewane struts his stuff at Financial Derivatives, a regnant Lagos financial analysis company, with more than 30 years’ experience as a banker, economist and financial analyst.

    Prof. Ode Ojowu, though little media-driven, is a veteran in the economic advisory corridor.  He was Obasanjo’s chief economic adviser (2004 and 2005), before the Soludo-Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala era, aside from being former boss at the National Planning Commission.

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    Dr. Iyabo Masha, immediate past IMF country representative in Sierra Leone, had a stint in the CBN research department (1998-2003).  From there, she has bloomed as an international economist, with a rich career in central banking, specializing in financial markets, economic management, international lending, finance and development and microeconomic stabilization policy, research and implementation.  She also boasts a strong Breton Woods culture, having worked for both the World Bank and the IMF.

    The triad of Sheu Yahaya, Mohammed Sagagi and Salisu Mohammed, from their CVs, could well be described as still waters running deep — all boasting PhDs; with Sagagi and Mohammed also earning a B.Sc. first class in Economics.

    Yahaya, current chairman of the Development Bank of Nigeria (DBN) board, was a one- time executive director at the African Development Bank (AfDB).

    Sagagi, aside from his PhD and other rich career strides, holds a certificate on how to make the market work for the poor, from the Springfield Centre, Durham University, UK.

    Mohammed’s thesis, en route to earning a PhD from Lancaster University, UK, was “Oil Exports and the Nigerian Economy: An Econometric Study.”

    Clearly, among the EAC members, Soludo most epitomizes the Obasanjo-era economic thinking (1999 to 2015).  But all that, with its surfeit of theories, crashed with the recession of 2015, prompting the Buhari-era new pitch: grow what you eat and eat what you grow.

    That pitch signalled new activism in agriculture, now resulting in increasing local rice mills, away from the old days of near-wholesale rice imports.  But the new spirit would appear more of praxis than theory.

    Indeed, it was a radical shift, in economic philosophy, from the Okonjo-Iweala ethos of rebasing of numbers, to signify economic growth, to tilling the land and firing the local furnace to enlarge and deepen the Nigerian real sector.

    As Obasanjo’s chief economic adviser, Soludo theorized on NEEDS — the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS), with its SEEDS (states) and LEEDS (local governments) coordinates.

    It was a brilliant and comprehensive charter.  But it was shackled by over-centralized, trickle-down thinking; when what Nigeria needs is federalized, bottom-up thinking.

    As Yar’Adua’s CBN governor, Soludo also theorized with what he called the Strategic Agenda for the Naira, a re-decimalization strategy, which he had hoped would make the Naira lean but strong, at least in parity with the American dollar.

    That strategy was ingenious, for by switching decimals — and not strengthening the local real economy — it had hoped to strengthen the flabby Naira against the dollar!

    That created quite a public uproar; and elicited a turf war between the CBN governor (Soludo) and attorney-general and minister of Justice (Michael Kaase Aondoakaa) who belched fire and threatened a legal Armageddon, should Soludo not eat crow and retract his fancy Naira policy.

    That was how the decimalization policy collapsed.

    Earlier, Soludo had implemented a banking recapitalization, if controversial, policy; which ensured banks with poor capital bases merged, to avoid the collapse of the banking system.

    Some hailed it.  Others rammed it.  It did what it had to do. But it didn’t prevent the Sanusi Lamido Sanusi CBN era from bailing out some banks with public money.

    It is unclear how Soludo’s theory activism would fit into the new structure.

    Still, it is good the EAC is a conclave of minds that can grapple with the latest economic theories, and show the way forward for the economy.

    But all that would be naught, if it can’t increase the stock of local rice; birth policies that  ensure the full firing of local factories; without abandoning the key pro-poor programmes of the last four years, viz: the school feeding scheme; and access to cheap credit by the most humble of Nigerian ventures, epitomized by the Tradermoni loans.

    If their efforts bolster these schemes, then the Nigerian economy would have been on the way to genuine deepening, starting with food security; and agro-allied processing to feed local factories and provide jobs.  That would be the making of true legacy.

    But if it alters that course, it would be back to the old days of rich theorizing but arid concrete results.

    Nigeria is not bereft of theories.  What it lacks is the political will to make those theories work for its people.

    Nigeria must build an economy that works for Nigerians; not the structured outpost of some foreign metropole, which must continue to grow, even as Nigeria eternally shrinks.