The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olakunle Abimbola

  • Ekiti on the move again

    It’s rather exciting that the authors of the Ekiti debacle are regrouping to fix their mess.  Is July 14 then redemption day — or yet another hope deferred?

    At the very Genesis in 2007, Dayo Adeyeye stormed out of the old Action Congress (AC), the vibrant part of the comatose Alliance for Democracy (AD), and forebear of the legacy Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), that fused with other legacy parties to form APC.

    Prince Adeyeye’s protest was on Ekiti gubernatorial nomination matters.  His exact ire was this same Kayode Fayemi, who he alleged the AC top hierarchs had given undue edge.

    Though Adeyeye was a dashing progressive and, as the nimble national publicity secretary of the then formidable Afenifere, a veteran of the NADECO-era anti-Abacha war of attrition, he felt piqued enough to jump in with the relatively conservative PDP.

    Besides, at Ayo Fayose’s second coming in 2014, while others were still disputing his nomination, Adeyeye was the first to strike a deal with him.  That took the wind out of that protest, and sort of cemented the Fayose encore.  But it’s good Adeyeye is back, and is part of the salvage mission.

    The same, with former Governor, Segun Oni.  Chief Oni, a quintessential gentleman if ever there was one, was another former progressive that found warmth in Ekiti conservative duvet.

    Oni was part of the Ekiti elite that fought Fayose to a standstill, at those ultra-dangerous times, of free-wheeling killing and maiming, of Fayose’s first coming.  But somewhat, Fayose had fled town, on account of a controversial impeachment, so rife during President Olusegun Obasanjo’s second term, of organized anomie.

    Somewhat still, Oni popped up, as gubernatorial candidate for the same party, on whose behalf Fayose had run down Ekiti.  Like Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, who claimed he didn’t hate Julius but loved Rome for partaking in Caesar’s murder, some folks claimed Oni didn’t hate Fayemi but just loved himself more!

    So, he rode to office with a huge dose of perceived opportunism.  Not only that, his “progressive” whiff watered down the AC Ekiti progressive franchise.  So, when that election was comprehensively stolen, no thanks to the 2007 Obasanjo do-or-die electoral salvo, the Ekiti progressives were bitterly divided.

    Well, after more than three years, the court ruled Oni’s win was a heist; and restored Fayemi’s mandate.  One thing led to the other, including PDP’s self-destruction and Oni’s defection.  Now, Oni is back “home”, among the Ekiti salvagers.

    Now MOB — Michael Opeyemi Bamidele — who almost became victim of a policeman with a mob mentality, at Fayemi’s campaign launch on June 1, no thanks to a reported accidental discharge that hit him and others.  May the Almighty grant them all complete healing.

    Were it not so tragic, MOB’s shooting could pass as a heroic spilling of blood, for a very grim rescue mission, which success or failure could make or mar Ekiti.

    Yet, both MOB and Dr. Fayemi must take the full blame (aside from the Goodluck Jonathan Presidency that cashed in, with rogue “federal might”), for Fayose’s second coming.

    MOB insisted on challenging Fayemi for governor, despite a sitting governor’s right to second term.

    His grouse?  Fayemi allegedly failed to consummate agreed political trade-offs, which led to MOB giving up his Senate aspiration (which Femi Ojudu eventually got, incidentally defeating Fayose in that election), and Jimoh Ibrahim, an Ado-Ekiti politician, who ran a joint campaign with MOB — MOB for Senate, Jimmy for Reps — to give up his Federal House ticket (which MOB got) for promised party patronage, that allegedly never came.

    Aside, asked why he couldn’t just wait till 2018, MOB claimed he had cause to believe Fayemi had zoned him out; and parcelled the governorship to another.  So, he exited to Labour Party (LP) to stake his claim.  Needless to say, the ACN in-fighting back then gave Fayose the edge, aside from Jonathan’s “federal might”.

    Well, again MOB is back in the house, to join in the Ekiti rescue — and again, may God grant him fast and full healing from his gunshot wounds.

    Fayemi’s contribution to the Ekiti debacle was his rather perplexing gubernatorial medley of brilliant policies and toxic politics.

    Dr. Fayemi achieved unprecedented developmental strides in Ekiti.  His urban upgrade lifted Ado from at best a big rural town, at worst a sprawling big village, to a modern metropolis.  His street-lighting gave security a healthy jab in the arm, aside from boosting night city beauty.

    His education policy would mature and yield wonderful fruits, ironically during Fayose’s second coming, thus acting as an oasis of Renaissance in a desert of unbridled barbarism.  His N5, 000 payout to the poorest and most vulnerable Ekiti elders was the most ambitious in Ekiti’s history, despite the state’s humble purse.

    His tourism policy, trying to transform the Ikogosi Warm Springs into a hub of nature leisure all-year and a summer scholarship retreat, to rebrand Ekiti, was a serious study in structured development.

    But not all these would appear to matter, as his perceived toxic politics turned almost every developmental asset into an electoral albatross.  Though Fayemi always insists he didn’t really fairly lose the 2014 polls, a good segment of Ekiti, with zest, embraced Fayose’s manic gallop into the past, than Fayemi’s carefully calibrated path into the future.

    Even if Fayemi wins on July 14, he must fundamentally revamp his politics to earn the plaudits his policies deserve.  Otherwise, his political future could be bleak.  But again, it is good too that he heads the salvage mission, for a debacle he helped to create.

    Before you charge Ripples with stark Manichaean presumption — Fayemi is good, Fayose is evil; progressives are good, conservatives are bad, etc — let it be known this column is driven by the ideology of development.

    And if you want to know how bad Ekiti is faltering on that scale, just contrast how Ekiti has regressed under Fayose with the advancement the neighbouring Osun has chalked under Rauf Aregbesola.  Yet Ekiti, under Fayemi, had a few months head start, retrieving its stolen mandate than Osun, in 2014.

    In eight short years, six of which were economically lean, if not outright perilous, Aregbesola has primed Osun with the critical infrastructure — physical and social — needed to modernize its economy, propel productivity and earn genuine prosperity: futuristic schools, critical and ultra-modern road networks Osun had never witnessed, and the signal schools feeding programme, so beneficial the Federal Government has copied and implemented it in 24 of Nigeria’s 36 states.

    Ekiti?  It’s the direct opposite.  Fayemi’s four development-savvy years have been blown away by Fayose’s four of the barbarians — barbarians of cascading backwardness, in almost every sphere of life — with the empty whoop of “stomach infrastructure”

    Imagine what Ekiti would have been today, if Fayemi, warts and all, had secured a second term, based on his developmental agenda?

    That is the race against time Ekiti faces on July 14.  But it’s good the authors of the debacle are back, in a tough battle, to make good.

    It’s all left to Ekiti to, four years after Fayose, yet again choose salvation or perdition.

  • Lagos, refuse and legacy

    Just as well, Visionscape Sanitation Solutions (VSS) and Waste Collection Operators (WCOs), the old PSP operators, have reached some detente on the refuse war.

    The Lagos prisoners of war (POWs), victims of the resultant environmental blight, can  now heave a sigh of relief, hoping the refuse siege would lift soon.

    Yet, after all said and done, Lagos is clearly dirtier than three years ago exactly today, when otherwise high-flying Governor Akinwunmi Ambode took over.

    Indeed, many a harsh critic would gloat — and not without basis — that Lagos is dirtier today, than during Governor Bola Tinubu’s second term (2003-2007); and the eight-year stretch of Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola (2007-2015).

    That is, on the refuse cum environmental wellness front, hopping back 12 clear years!

    Quite a looming legacy — and it’s not pretty!

    Yet, it is a rather stiff blight, for the governor has performed superlatively on other fronts.

    But no matter how derisive or biting the refuse criticism becomes, it wouldn’t matter if it is fixed.  That is what the governor should focus on.  That is what would determine his legacy.

    On the surface — and this resonates in the street — Ambode met a working system, and for whatever reasons, crippled it.  Proof: refuse heaps, the ugly signposts of old Lagos, circa 2001, are back with a vengeance!

    But looked at more closely, that conclusion doesn’t tell the complete story.

    Yes, the PSP system had a good hang on refuse collection.  But how sustainable was that system for a mega-city state, with fresh garbage from a thumping population, swollen daily by economic migrants nationwide?

    That made imperative the Cleaner Lagos Initiative (CLI) — in any case, in the opinion of the Ambode government.

    The CLI high point was the prospect of fresh capitalization, in waste clearing hardware: 600 brand new compactors and 900, 000 electronically tracked refuse bins, secure in the streets, being less prone to theft.

    The advent of the enabling law, the Environmental Management and Protection law (now being reworked by the Lagos House of Assembly, because of the fierce opposition to CLI), was to signal a new dawn.

    But it all ended a still-birth — or nearly so.  The old PSP veterans, now dubbed WCOs, resisted their perceived elbow, by VSS, with alleged conspiracy by the Ambode government, out of the household waste segment.

    VSS itself, overwhelmed as much by the fierce resistance as by the late delivery of its hardware — mainly the 600 brand new compactors — which were to be the market game-changers, looked far less nimble under pressure.

    Then, uproar from shocked citizens.  Suspected sabotage, as refuse piled up — in Malthus-speak — in geometrical proportions, while the refuse breakdown was still elementary in scope. Of course, the PSP also launched a legal challenge to VSS market entry.

    The Lagos garbage war had broken out, with rare savagery — and Akinwunmi Ambode was the villain-in-chief!

    The refuse-assaulted citizens — sight, smell, hearing and touch — were captured POWs, even as car tyres squelched heaps of spilled garbage from road medians; and stretched out skeins of sickening and smelly mats, on the road!

    But even as affronted Lagos groaned under refuse, some new order was taking shape, though with barely anyone in the mood to notice.

    From its mandate, VSS is charged with infrastructure upgrade, even as it competes with the WCOs on the refuse clearance front.

    These core refuse chores include constructing more transfer loading stations, recycling facilities, biomass plants, leachate and waste treatment schemes, waste to energy plants, dumpsites and land-filled remediation.

    That innovation points to the future of waste management in Lagos — an integrative process, which goal is to turn Lagos waste into wealth, doing that by best global practices.

    With the present confusion and resentment, that might sound as arcane as they come.  But it is the future of any modern city-state, intent on turning wastes into recycled  assets, creating jobs along the way, in the best tradition of government-private sector partnership.

    Still, between that future waste management utopia and the present grim challenges, there appears a gulf.

    So, what should the Lagos government do, now that the rains are coming, to avert city-wide piles of uncleared refuse, becoming some push for water-borne epidemics?

    Simple: accelerated clearance of refuse and faster turn-around of compactors, doing the rounds — some sort of refuse clearance emergency.

    While city-wide feedbacks tend to suggest reduced piles, the situation is still far from what it was before the system broke down.

    But that is little surprise.  For starters, the WCOs are not as near-equipped, in sound compactors, as they should have been, which in the first instance, necessitated the CLI reforms.

    Then, VSS’ anticipated new compactors are arriving in bits.  Worse for capitalist morale: WCOs are infringing on VSS’ former household waste monopoly, in the spirit of the new waste entente.

    Still, it is a thing to cheer that the government would appear getting a hang, once again, on the refuse situation.  What to do now is fasten, by whatever means necessary, the turn-around time.

    But something must be done — and done urgently: get rid of illegal dumpsites, particularly on medians, roundabouts and road junctions.  These sites flared during  the VSS-WCO turf war.

    Now that there have been some operational agreements, the government should ensure they vanish, even if it means drafting security agencies, on a 24-hour surveillance, to arrest those responsible for these dumps.

    Still, a lasting lesson from the refuse crisis: never take anything for granted; for the best systems often collapse with the least but routine neglects.

    The strength of Lagos State, since 1999, has been its continuity — laudable and effective continuity, of winning policies, of which waste management was only a part.  But see what havoc CLI’s sudden shock has caused!

    Henceforth, Governor Ambode would do well to secure stakeholders’ consensus — or near so — before moving in to implement any policy, no matter how good on paper.  This refuse fiasco teaches that stiff lesson.

    As for political adversaries, hoping to cash in on Ambode’s refuse slip for negative electioneering pitch, all is fair in war!

    Still, the governor, like 2nd Republic Alhaji Lateef Jakande, and immediate predecessor, Babatunde Fashola, SAN, before him, would appear to have done enough to earn re-election.

    Even, after the first two years, Governor Bola Tinubu, who like the Biblical King David fought all the battles to establish the Lagos “kingdom”, was already showing enough fox-trot, to secure a second term. The refuse reforms, aside from massive infrastructure upgrade, topped in his golden score card.

    For Ambode, therefore, failure on the refuse front is a dire legacy stain.  It is absolutely no option!

  • Gowon, ouster and corruption

    Open confession: I doubt if I can ever be critical of Gen. Yakubu Gowon, former military Head of State (1966-1975).

    As a pupil of St. David’s Anglican School, a public primary school in Okesuna-Lafiaji, on  Lagos Island, Gen. Gowon, with his Lagos Governor, then Lt. Col. Mobolaji Johnson, did what Osun Governor, Rauf Aregbesola, now does for Osun’s most vulnerable families — school feeding.

    True, the Gowon-Johnson mid-day meal programme, for Lagos public schools, was not entirely free.

    But for a termly token, the government blessed the pupils with delicious and nutritious food, some of which — like Semo: vita and lina, barley cooked like jollof rice, stuffed with corned beef, spice and dried fish, and other staples, superbly cooked — most of us first sampled, and thoroughly enjoyed, in school.   Why, generous fruits and chilled fan milk came with the treat!

    That proved superb bonding, with impressionable minds, by a caring state!

    So, when by October 1974, the inimitable Dr. Tai Solarin started writing his “Beginning of the end” letter (because Gen. Gowon reneged on a 1976 promised return to civil rule); and other heavyweight moulders of opinion then were calling Gowon the worst to have happened to the Nigerian humanity, a bit of my child’s mind balked — what the hell are these adults talking about?

    Though almost a secondary school graduate at Gowon’s 1975 overthrow, and replacement by Brig. Murtala Muhammed, my teenage mind felt something close to personal grief.

    Fond recall of the Gowon regime, seeping with child-like innocence and naivety!  Even then, Gen. Gowon’s May 15 Abuja recollection of that ouster evoked that same deep pathos, echoing a long lost age, of child-like military innocence!

    At his ouster in 1975, he told the 8th AGM and Conference for Heads of Anti-Corruption Agencies in Commonwealth Africa in Abuja, that he had no dime, save his salary savings.

    It was a Monday morning, away at Kampala, Uganda, heading the Nigerian delegation to the summit of the Organization of African Unity (OAU, now rechristened African Union, AU).

    Even worse: his tearful delegates had to contribute part of their estacodes to fly him to London, UK, his new home in exile.  Otherwise, he would have been stranded in Uganda.  Yet, he had been military Head of State for nine years, superintending Nigeria’s first Oil Boom!

    Gen. Gowon’s conclusion?  That big-scale corruption came after his regime, since his military successors were scared stiff of ending up kobo-less like him.

    With all due respect to Gen. Gowon, that conclusion cannot be right.

    For starters poverty, real or feared, cannot be basis for stealing.  If stats shows Nigeria’s rich elite are more vicious thieves than the vulnerable poor, it logically follows that those who steal are driven by base instincts, just as those who don’t are driven by high principles.

    Besides, there was that “You-Tarka-me-I-Daboh-you” scandal, broken by the old Daily Times.  Godwin Daboh (now dead) accused the late Joseph Tarka (Benue co-native and Federal commissioner — minister — under Gowon) of corruption.  The crusading media back then accused Gen. Gowon of alleged cover-up.

    And, after Gowon’s overthrow, the Murtala regime indicted 10 of Gowon’s 12 state governors for corruption (Lagos’ Mobolaji Johnson and Western State’s Oluwole Rotimi were the two exceptions); and ordered seizure of their assets.

    So, for Gen. Gowon to claim corruption came after him would sound rather rich.  Yet, there is a sense that hyperbole could make some sense, when you compare the modest Gowon-era military office holders, with the Murtala-Olusegun Obasanjo set of successors.

    The mercurial Murtala boomed and roared and kicked against “indiscipline and corruption”.  In fairness to his memory, he walked his talk for the six months he ruled (29 July 1975-13 February 1976).

    But that cannot be said of his successors, despite projecting empty exceptionalism.   The ex-general as a super-rich citizen, bristling with an offensive sense of entitlement, dawned after the Obasanjo handover to civil rule in 1979.

    Gowon’s “corrupt” governors included names like Bendel’s iconic Sam Ogbemudia (God bless his soul!), Kano’s Audu Bako, Rivers’ Alfred Diette-Spiff (now a king) and even Kwara’s David Bamigboye.

    Though tarred by Gowon ouster probes, their achievements and regime conduct still loom large in their respective states, so much so that the late Ogbemudia, aside from rallying back as elected Bendel (now Edo and Delta states) governor (1 October-31 December 1983), died a hero among his people.

    In contrast: former army generals, morphing into emergency, much sought-after boardroom czars, just to pimp illicit influence to corner public sector contracts, was basically a post-Obasanjo affair.

    While Gowon, as ex-Head of State, exited as a golden pauper, Obasanjo exited the same position, even after a shorter duration, as a big-time farmer.

    Obasanjo’s deputy, the late Maj-Gen. Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, that regime’s Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters, exited as big-time investor with niche interests in banking, shipping, publishing — the so-called commanding heights of the economy.

    Contrast that to Gowon’s No. 2, Vice Admiral Joseph Edet Akinwale Wey (1918-1991), and you’d probably figure out Gowon’s claim that corruption came after him.

    Besides, though not many noticed it back then, a more noxious strain of systemic corruption, tailoring public policy to private ends, if not entirely novel, would appear to have luxuriated.

    Take Obasanjo’s laudable Operation Feed the Nation (OFN) campaign, of household food gardening and mass farming.  That birthed the Land Use Decree (now Land Use Act).  But that access to land on the cheap — courtesy that law — created many ex-army general farmers, including Obasanjo himself.

    This clever ploy of self-settlement, hiding behind the veneer of productivity, would decay into the subversive generosity, aka ”settlement” and sweeping sleaze of the Babangida regime; and hit the nadir of brazen heist, of the Sani Abacha era.

    Why, even Obsasanjo’s second coming, as elected president (1999-2007), boasts its own holy acquisition: when a “blind trust” saw clearly enough to suborn the flower of Economic Nigeria, to “donate” to a sitting president’s exit library!  The result today is the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL), first in Africa!

    Not even the vilest of the Gowon era boasts such audacity!  Yet these military regimes, starting with the Muhammadu Buhari junta (January 1984-August 1985), were proud “off-shoots” of the Murtala-Obasanjo regime!

    But the spartan Buhari, now sitting president, would appear the only refreshing difference, from that post-Gowon era of holy venality.   That clearly explains his missionary zeal to risk all to kill corruption.

    But Prof. Wole Soyinka, our own WS, has nailed the anti-corruption argument: until EFCC brings thieving past leaders to justice, there would be little dent on that nation-slaying monster.

  • Revisiting: AAA, 10 years after

    How might the late Senator Abraham Aderibigbe Adesanya (AAA) have assessed the May 2 Lagos gathering in his honour?

    Beam with his familiar smile of utmost satisfaction?

    Or throw in a wry smile, mocking the Nigerian penchant for willy-nilly consensus — even on a regnant buzz like “restructuring”?

    A nation does not yoke together and develop on the easy diet of self-serving consensus — just a heartbeat from cant.

    It rather achieves both on rigorous ethos, tough principles and lasting values, universal, shared and beneficial, to every age.

    That would appear absent from that Lagos pot-pouri; and that would jar on AAA’s fealty to principle.

    Which was why a mocking irony, like an apparition, hung over the gathering, but was hardly noticed: MKO.

    MKO Abiola was the martyr of the June 12, 1993 presidential election.  The MKO/NADECO resistance to that annulment re-calibrated the ethnic given in the Nigerian political power calculus; and roused others’ dream to the Nigerian presidency.

    It also vaulted AAA to the summit of influence, in Yoruba progressive politics; and drove the supremacy of Afenifere, at the turn of 1999.

    So, without MKO, not a few would have legitimately argued, AAA wouldn’t have unfurled, in his purest and most glorious form, in principled and trusted leadership.

    Yet, all through the ceremony, no one seemed to remember MKO — not even his widow Dr. Doyinsola Abiola, one of the symposium speakers, who nevertheless made a passing reference to her husband’s attempt at the presidency — enough to warrant a minute’s silence in his memory!

    Still, that gathering teemed with those that sustained the June 12 annulment crime, which led to the death, after four years of detention, of a man whose “crime” was winning a free election.

    On MKO, even while celebrating AAA, Nigeria had moved on!

    Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar was chairman of the occasion.  After MKO’s sudden death, he worked closely with AAA to midwife the return of civil rule in 1999.

    But Gen. Abubakar has an epochal query to answer: how did MKO suddenly expire  under his care?  For all of Sani Abacha’s villainy, that never happened under his charge.

    But you can’t really strafe Gen. Abubakar, for he carries himself with exceedingly good grace; flaunting neither virtue nor villainy.

    That cannot be said of Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, who was also there; as boss of AAA’s only daughter, Dupe Adelaja, one of his first-term ministers.

    So far, there is no proof Obasanjo was part of the Babangida annulment.  But he would appear part of its criminal sustenance, from the Interim National Government (ING) early days.

    Obasanjo’s prime contribution was eternal intrigue, if not outright perfidy.  He never, even for a second, acknowledged MKO — not before, not after his presidency.  Yet, he was chief beneficiary of MKO’s martyrdom.

    Even appointing Mrs Adelaja, as minister, was to undermine her father, who saw the treachery and instantly balked.  That would signal the opening salvo, aside from the Bola Ige entrapment, to subvert the AD.  It climaxed with the 2003 vile double-cross of the party’s South West governors, despite AAA’s strident warning.

    When the smoke cleared, Ige had lost his life; AD had become comatose; and Obasanjo’s Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), by stealth, had taken over the South West, with disastrous consequences.

    Why PDP, Obasanjo’s former battering ram, the old fox is now busy buffeting, in favour of new toy, African Democratic Congress (ADC), in his latest racket!  Whoever haggles with the Ebora Owu and heads home with a bargain?

    Also at the AAA symposium was John Nwodo, president of Ohanaeze Ndigbo, who launched a rather wild attack on Chief Bisi Akande, for “not telling President Buhari the truth”!

    Suffice to say: that attack was completely indecorous.  You don’t attack a man who couldn’t — or wouldn’t, because of his breeding — respond in kind, more so when that person is a respected elder.  Besides, what is Nwodo’s definition of “truth”; and what is his proof of Akande’s “guilt”?

    Yet, Chief Nwodo made a forceful pitch, as a passionate “restructuring” neophyte.  Even then, his regale, as a youth national executive of the Second Republic National Party of Nigeria (NPN), teemed with self-indictment.  If the bid for Nigeria’s re-federalization is not new, what was the young Nwodo’s take, as an NPN rising star, back then?

    Perhaps his Saul, over the years, turned Paul?  That’s not to be decried.  A fairer federal Nigeria is, after all, a win-win for all.

    Still, by Nwodo’s rather impassioned take on the security appointment imbalance and the IPOB “terrorist” status question, you could tell he was pushing a specific agenda — no crime, though — from the prism of newfound “restructuring”.

    Security appointments, with no Igbo input, may well be skewed.  But whoever heard Nwodo’s voice when, under President Goodluck Jonathan, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, made the Federal Ministry of Finance and its parastatals an impregnable Igbo fort, and when confronted, declared the Igbo could “rather compete”?

    Perhaps, Nwodo wasn’t Ohanaeze leader then.  But he was all through the Nnamdi Kanu IPOB lunacy; and no one heard him raise his voice until Kanu’s madness attracted counter-madness from ”Northern youths”: their ultimatum for the Igbo to leave the North.

    Even, back to the MKO annulment saga.  Wasn’t it Nwodo’s brother, Okwesilieze, as then sitting Enugu governor, who swore to sentence himself to self-exile, should MKO’s mandate be revalidated?

    The moral from all these?  Simple.  Genuine fighters for justice don’t make it just about themselves.  They rally for everyone, every time.  So long for Nwodo’s “restructuring” high horse!

    Surprisingly, even Prof. Banji Akintoye, famed historian of the best cut, made an uncharacteristically rash attack on those who claimed “Allah” had given them divine rule over Nigeria.  Seated in that hall were invited friends that could rile to no end.

    Besides, who doesn’t know such claims belong to the lunatic fringe — and which ethnic group lacks its own lunatic fringe?  So, how fair is using the fringe to tar the whole?

    Though Afenifere lugs little record of selective crusade for justice, that such incongruous voices resonated at an AAA show, appear proof of Afenifere’s plummet from its pristine high ideals, to base irredentism, while hectoring “restructuring”.

    True, restructuring is a win-win for all, but not as an all-comers’ cant that means different things to different people.  Besides, pushing it without fixing the current oozing national moral rot could be counter-productive.

    What does it benefit restructuring, and its resultant re-regionalization, if the central parasites of today become the regional parasites of the future?

    That is the danger of willy-nilly consensus on “restructuring”.  Nigeria’s future must be anchored on a more rigorous base.

  • Benue: ‘Fulani herdsmen’ come of age

    An April 24, the ubiquitous, all-slaughtering, “Fulani killer herdsmen”, the sweet headline invention of Nigeria’s southern media, struck again in Benue.

    In Ayer-Mbalom community, in Benue’s Gwer East local government, the “killer herdsmen” attacked St. Ignatius’ Catholic Church, killing two Catholic priests: Joseph Gor and Felix Tyolaha, among the 17 that lay dead.

    But when on April 27 preliminary arrests were made, the attack’s alleged mastermind, Aminu Yaminu aka Tashaku, was neither Fulani nor herdsman.

    Neither was he even Muslim at birth.  Security sources say he is a Tiv Muslim convert, with core Boko Haram records.

    Tashaku was among those original disciples, detained with Mohammed Yusuf, pristine Boko Haram leader, that survived Yusuf’s murder in police cell; and most probably a hardened veteran of the first wave of Boko Haram terror, in a blitz to avenge the killing of their master.

    Tashaku’s probable conspiracy dawned, even more, with the profile of his arrested “army”, armed to the teeth: again neither Fulani nor Muslim; nor even farmers or herders.

    The bulk were Benue youths, somewhat linked to the Benue government’s anti-open grazing enforcement militia.  Tashaku, said to be close to Benue Governor, Samuel Ortom, is a big player in that “people’s militia”.

    Said Olabisi Ayeni, an assistant  director, Army Public Relations, 707 Special Forces Brigade, on the Tashaku arrest: “Following an intelligence report, it was gathered that Aminu [aka Tashaku] had concluded plans with his cohorts in Bauchi, Borno, Yobe and Nasarawa states to lunch a major attack on innocent citizens in Benue State.”

    What was April 24 then?  A Muslim-Christian slaughter, as now being falsely trumpeted by many “men of God”, who should know better?

    Or a Christian-on-Christian, Benue-on-Benue massacre, coldly planned to further hang the omnipresent “Fulani killer herdsmen”, in the great southern media gallows?

    Besides, did anyone notice how fast the media drumming for another round of “public burials” quietened, the moment the Benue government realized this latest violence might just be home-brewed?

    Benue’s necromancy, for whatever end, appears unravelling!  But after how many wasted lives?

    So long for a media, led more by emotive, explosive clichés, than by even-handed treatment of news!

    But if you think Tashaku’s was a one-off or novel allegation, just consider this 24 July 2017 petition to the security agencies, by the Shitile community, in Katsina Ala local government of Benue State.

    According to Premium Times that reported the story, complete with a full copy of the petition, that community accused the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF), allegedly sponsored by the Benue government, of ethnic cleansing and sundry human rights abuse.  CJTF is allegedly headed by one Aondona Ishenge aka Tor-Abaji.

    But guess who is also named as a local CJTF enforcer in Shitile?   See an extract from the petition, which alleges the CJTF: “is supervised and armed with sophisticated automatic firearms through the office of the Security Adviser, Edwin Jando (rtd) and commanded by one Aliyu Tashaku, who enjoys the ignoble fame of having been an operative of the Boko Haram terrorist group.”

    By the Shitile petition, the terror in that community started in November 2016, with the alleged murder, by CJTF, of two lads, Wangyo Mbatsav and Orkar Galgbom, in Utyondu village of the Mbayondo district.

    Again, a rather extensive quote from the petition, on how the Shitile terror flared and spread; citing dates, casualties and modalities:

    “In January 2017, there were many killed at Tse-Igbe, while on the 18th, 25th and 26th days of June, 2017, Tor-Abaji, dressed in military uniforms and armed with sophisticated automatic rifles, together with his horde of heavily armed gang, moved through Abaji settlement on a spree of destruction, burning down houses and brutalising women and children, after which he arrested some targeted persons whom he took away to an undisclosed location and subjected them to severe torture, resulting in scores of deaths.”

    Do a little content analysis of newspaper reports of these killings.  You bet they would all be belching: “Fulani herdsmen”!

    Aside from the recurring Tashaku, you probably have noted the eerie similarity between the Shitile attacks and the recurring Benue attacks, by their media reportage.

    That’s just a snippet of how the preening fourth estate has let down the realm in a period of dire need!

    Yet, these vile, one-track reports are not limited to Benue alone.  It’s the same in the extensive killing fields, spanning most of the Middle Belt and North East.

    July 2017, for instance, witnessed the great Taraba massacre, allegedly by a local “Christian” militia, with alleged Taraba government sympathies.

    The Nation, back then, reported the visit of Major-Gen. Ben Ahanotu, GOC 3 Division, Nigerian  Army, Jos, which security jurisdiction covers the Mambilla Plateau area, with its gory and heart-rending massacre: mangled were over 600 helpless Fulani villagers, including pregnant women, whose unborn babies were hacked off their womb.  Later Emir Muhammadu Sanusi would put the gory tally as no less than 800 slaughtered.

    Yet, this crime never grabbed screaming headlines.  The great southern media, that always bristles, over alleged Fulani “Christian massacres”, suddenly went blind, deaf and dumb.  Blessed are those whose sins are covered — by the media?

    This clear media conspiracy notwithstanding, one Kefas Dauda, a Junkun from Taraba, did an open letter to Governor Jonathan Ishaku, that alleged the Taraba government’s complicity in killings in the state.

    Part of that letter reads: “It is now indisputable that the youths allegedly armed by you are emboldened by General Danjuma’s persuasion of self-defence to commit more heinous crimes against our innocent people,” it charged, “by killings, maiming and destructions, which is erroneously but deliberately attributed to Fulani herdsmen.”

    Like Benue, like Taraba, then?

    But absolutely nothing in this piece has exonerated the criminal elements among the Fulani herdsmen.

    Or even the stark, daft and garrulous, among the Fulani, vomiting rubbish about some delusional divine right to subjugate others, fired by a so-called right of conquest.

    These are the stark lunatic fringe that give their kind a bad name.

    Still over all, the southern media has proved a millennial disgrace, sexing up doomsday news along North-South, Christian-Muslim divides; and furiously spurring this country, towards the ruinous cliff of Mogadishu and Kigali combined, by its criminal one-sided reportage.

    But since Rwanda had its consequences, these media and their editors had better brace themselves.

    Those Rwanda editors that drove their country to the abyss, later faced their own abyss in International Criminal Court (ICC) gaol houses.  The Nigerian editors, whose media daily belch emotive mischief, should be prepared for no less.

    Perhaps Nigeria would never hit such a tragic nadir?  Still, it’s good to appreciate how close our media are goading it towards that pit.

    Maybe that realization would force a change for the better before it’s too late.

  • AAA: ten years after

    Politically, AAA — Abraham Aderibigbe Adesanya (1922-2008) — was “born” a progressive. He died a progressive.

    He stepped into the Western Parliament in late 1959, a progressive. He died in 2008, as Yoruba and Afenifere Leader, a progressive.

    Not everyone, among the progressive clan, bore that gold standard. Examples, of fallen angels, abound down the line.

    Baba Adesanya fully understood the Yoruba political fiat: who is not for us is against us — “us”, meaning Obafemi Awolowo’s brood of progressive disciples.

    The Yoruba might have fought the Kiriji War (1877-1893), a civil war that brought down Ibadan hegemony, and sprung their various ethnic groups from internal imperialism.

    But Awo’s ideological hegemony, with its alluring mass development and rapid social-economic advancement, proved a hit with the Yoruba majority.

    So, as the Yoruba fawn over their political princes — beatified by the glow of Awo’s progressive ideology — they are especially severe with progressive-turncoats.

    Down the ages, Chief Adesanya, contrasted with other “fallen angels”, provide excellent examples.

    From the 1st Republic: Dr. (later Prof.) Sanya Onabamiro (1912-1985), famed scientist, brilliant academic and high flying politician, native of Ago-Iwoye, Ogun State, just across the road from Adesanya’s native Ijebu Igbo.

    During the Action Group (AG) schism, Onabamiro joined the Samuel Ladoke Akintola (SLA) bloc.  Akintola was sitting premier of the Western Region.

    Not only that: Onabamiro was a star prosecution witness, at the Treasonable Felony trials, which not a few believed was factory-forged to kill Awo as a political force.

    In contrast, even as a young and fledgling parliamentarian, Adesanya stuck to the Awolowo bloc and AG mainstream.

    Meanwhile, the irate electorate, in Adesanya’s Ijebu North and Onabamiro’s Ijebu West constituencies, were taking dire notices. They would later vent their spleen, in the 1965 West regional elections.

    While Adesanya romped home, in a landslide of 16, 307 to 3, 091 votes, polled by  Demo’s (Nigerian National Democratic Party) Akinola Adaramaja, Onabamiro, regional minister under SLA, got hammered with 2, 149 votes to AG’s Esther Sosanwo’s 18, 222.

    The minister not only lost his deposit, it was his baleful constituents’ ultimate pleasure that he lost to a “mere woman”! So implacable is the Yoruba electorate on the ideological turncoat!

    In the Second Republic, Chief Adesanya (Ijebu East and North senatorial district) was among the Western parliamentary 1st Eleven that made the Senate, all under Awolowo’s Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), led by Senate Minority Leader, Senator Jonathan Odebiyi (of blessed memory), Adesanya’s co-Ogun senator.

    Others in that galaxy included Prof. Banji Akintoye (old Ondo), Senator Lere Adesina (old Oyo) and Senator Sikiru Shitta-Bey (Lagos), just to mention a few.

    But as it was with AG, UPN suffered its own crisis, in the spoil for 1983 governorship slots.  Like the SLA bloc before, Shitta-Bey, and other notable Awoists like Akin Omoboriowo, Olaiya Fagbamigbe (both from old Ondo) and Sunday Afolabi (from old Oyo), among others, fell by the way side.

    These fallen Awoists got herded into the hellish ideological pen, in the iron-clad Yoruba cosmos of political saints and sinners. But Adesanya emerged from it all, a more toughened Awoist progressive.

    Then came the June 12, 1993 presidential annulment crisis and the resultant National Democratic Coalition (NADECO)-Committee of Afenifere-Campaign for Democracy (CD) challenge, which raged from 1993 till the restoration of democracy in 1999.

    Indeed, that challenge not only humbled Gen. Ibrahim Babangida’s wayward military “presidency”, it also fought, to a standstill, Gen. Sani Abacha’s iron dictatorship; and eventually forced the return to civil rule.

    Now, Awo was long dead, but Titans of his era, like Chief Michael Adekunle Ajasin, were still alive.  He promptly took his place as Afenifere Leader and local NADECO chairman, after Abacha’s goons had forced NADECO chair, Chief Anthony Enahoro, abroad, with the likes of Prof. Wole Soyinka.

    Even at that latter stage, many an Awoist would still fall by the way side, Chief Ebenezar Babatope, the famous Ebino Topsy, Nigerian Tribune columnist and former UPN director of Organization, for example.

    Ebino had parted ways with his progressives family, over the NADECO diktat that all progressives quit the Abacha formative cabinet; the moment it was clear the goggled one wasn’t about revalidating MKO Abiola’s June 12 presidential mandate.

    Yet, a pang of conscience later made him renounce his Abacha-era United Nigeria Congress Party (UNCP) senatorial “win”, during that “democratic” transition from military rule to military rule.  Still, he ended up with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

    The great Ebino still thunders as he is wont.  But unappreciated by his new conservative company and excommunicated from his natural progressive habitat, he is a lone but ringing voice in double wilderness!

    Yet, another celebrated progressive plumbing the Yoruba political Hades.

    Not so, Chief Adesanya!  The ultra-dangerous IBB-Abacha period was no more than a fiercer crucible to re-forge his progressive essence.

    When therefore in 1998 — 10 years before he eventually died — Abacha goons made to snuff out his life, the Apamaku (Yoruba for Invincible) that survived, unscathed, had passed the ultimate Awoist test, with added garlands and charisma.

    Staying on the right side of history, despite the tempest of the times, would earn him coronation as Yoruba Leader in 1998, after the Abacha dark years.

    But that itself was a glorious historical parallel to the coronation of Chief Awolowo, as Yoruba Leader in 1966, after his triumphant march through the eclipse of prison. Both coronations held in Ibadan, the Yoruba political capital.

    Still, the Yoruba progressive-glory-to-ash cycle would seize his tenure. The Alliance for Democracy (AD) shadow election, that picked Chief Olu Falae over Chief Bola Ige, as AD presidential candidate in the 1999 polls, would for Afenifere mark the beginning of the end, as a political force.

    After Adesanya’s death, Afenifere would fissure into Afenifere (Classic), led by the old Awoists; and Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG), peopled by the younger Turks.

    The Afenifere old guard have continued to push the Awo franchise, to the point of Yoruba irredentism.

    ARG, no less proud of their Yoruba legacy, have gifted the former Western Region the Yoruba Academy, which conceived the Development Agenda for Western Nigeria (DAWN) policy document, which has birthed the DAWN Commission, headquartered at the iconic Cocoa House, Ibadan.

    That integrated policy clearing house, for an integrated Western Nigeria, has been a net gain, despite the fierce intra-Afenifere struggle for political relevance.  But it is to Baba Adesanya’s sweet memory that Afenifere never split under him, even if the tell-tale tension was already there.

    Tomorrow, May 2, in Lagos, the cream of Nigeria would gather for a symposium, titled “Leadership and the future of Nigeria”, in honour of AAA, 10 years after his passage.

    It’s a fitting tribute to a great progressive, who despite the twists-and-turns of his lifetime, lived and died on the right side of history.

  • Between Sani and Omo-Agege

    Consider the differing fates of Shehu Sani (Kaduna Central) and Ovie Omo-Agege (Delta Central); and you’d probably put your finger on the moral sewers in which this eighth Senate proudly wallows.

    Sani ratted on his colleagues — a very good ratting, if you ask — of a N13.5 million monthly “running costs”, in a season of economic angst and pan-Nigeria hunger.

    That alone symbolizes unconscionable greed; and perhaps the greatest concentration of senatorial parasites, on a vanishing national purse.

    Indeed more ruinous, for the reckless assembly’s health: it is suicidal hubris for the parasite to care less about its host.  If its host drops dead, is it not kaput too?

    The great Awo resonates, from the world beyond, on his iron clad classification of the politicians of his day: the “Oselu” (Yoruba for politician) versus the “Ojelu” (Yoruba for parasite).  No prize for guessing where the Senate, under Bukola Saraki, falls!

    In spite of his ratting however, Shehu Sani sits pretty and dainty.  No one could touch him.  The assembly just licks its wound in seething but impotent rage.

    Not so, with Ovie Omo-Agege.

    Omo-Agege never ratted on anyone.  And even if he did, it was never on nation-threatening greed, on which this Senate and the House of Representatives stand fairly accused.

    He only blew the whistle on what everyone already knew: that this Senate had developed a sickening pleasure, of turning public estate, into private treasure.

    The exact “satanic verse” that sent the senatorial cabal hopping mad?

    “The President has not done anything to warrant the deliberate provocations being directed at him by this Senate.  It is callous and unacceptable to me,” he told the media, of the Senate attempts to reorder the sequence of elections. “We cannot make a law just to fight one man. I will not be part of it, 59 Senators have said that we won’t be part of that act of vindictiveness, put it into vote, we will defeat it…”

    Indeed, illicit advantage never had higher parliamentary representation in Nigerian history!  A Senate never looked more like a coven of powers and principalities!

    But after all that, the dam broke!  The guilty may well be afraid.  But when, in Chinua Achebe-speak, a coward sights a person he can maul, he becomes hungry for a fight.

    A Senate that cowered before Shehu the Impregnable — his hard moral punch so stunning and so devastating — rashly rushed for the scalp of Ovie the Vulnerable, alleging an abuse of parliamentary privilege.

    Dino Melaye put Omo-Agege in the dock.  Bukola Saraki handed down the final judgment, albeit with perverse mercy — the “convict” would endure 90 days suspension, half of the original “ sentence” of 180 days!

    In-between, members of a tiny clique testified why open truth and notorious facts are dire threats to them on their senatorial street!  It’s the making of a Senate as a democratic farce!

    When the dust cleared, even a greater farce had seized the horizon.  Some alleged louts stole into the Senate-at-plenary, grabbed the mace and vanished — rippling security be damned!  Whodunnit?

    “You, Omo-Agege!” a furious Senate barked.

    “Not me!” Omo-Agege counter-hissed.

    As patriotism is often the last bastion of the scoundrel, the Senate dived into its umpteenth frenzy of empty cant — Saraki in America and Ike Ekweremadu in Abuja — mouthing beatification everyone knows is the exact opposite of what this Senate is.  Reminds you — doesn’t it — of Wole Soyinka’s Beatification of the Area Boy?

    Still, even as the farcical drama plays out and the polity vibrates with excitement, it is clear to everyone, not the least the hypocritical Senate, that its crude impunity is the architect of its crude invasion of April 18.

    Its self-imposed nemesis is its so-called “suspensions”, which vault group rights over and above the constitution-enshrined right to constituency representation.  As The Nation argued in its editorial of Sunday April 22, how can the 1999 Constitution say yes, but its mere creations say no?

    In this eighth Senate, it would even appear worse: that “group right” would appear no more than the oppressive whims and caprices of a clique, carving the assembly out in its reactionary image.

    Of course, a telling riposte to this impunity was the Omo-Agege stunt — no, not the criminality of alleged louts making away with the mace — but of defying the so-called suspension and attending plenary, Senate integrity be damned!

    A case of jungle resolutions earning civil defiance, all in the hallowed chambers of the Senate, now turned completely hollow?  It never gets more bathetic — and pathetic.

    Still, this fumbling Senate ought to have armed itself with little history, of how parliamentary rascality had, in the past, earned Nigeria sundry grief.

    On 25 May 1962 — 56 years ago by May — some rascals in the Western Region House of Assembly orchestrated the chaos that led to the declaration of emergency in the Western Region.  That would push Nigeria to destructive military rule.

    But that was the age of naivety when, for the reckless rascality of a few lawmakers, conceited soldiers presumed they could sack the republic.

    As E.M. Forster quipped in A Passage to India — and Nigeria has been eminent proof — soldiers could indeed put one thing straight.  But they’ll set tens of others awry.

    Luckily, that age of innocence is gone.  Now, come Election Day, every senator must pay for his own insouciance — or be rewarded for his own diligence.  It’s all about the grim majesty of democracy.

    For the decent souls in the Senate, this isn’t the best of seasons.  Aren’t they even stunned at the gargoyle their chamber has turned?

    The Senate president, for personal hustle, sold his party cheap.  The deputy, happy, merry and cheerful, received the “stolen good” — for where else, in a sane democracy, does a man, for personal gain, pawn his party’s birthright to the opposition?

    It’s epochal perfidy — the making of the eighth Senate as a moral howler.

    With such a dangling moral albatross, it is doomed with fatal distractions.  That is why it would tarry to pass the budget — and it’s near-end April — but hurry to impose farcical suspensions.

    That is why it would cannibalize the 2017 budget, and cream off crucial votes for the Lagos-Ibadan expressway — among other key arteries nationwide — for useless porks that pass for boreholes, Marwa tricycles and allied nonsense, as “constituency projects”.  Yet, that was an economy wrestling with recession!

    In ancient Athens, the Areopagus — supreme legislative and judicial council — teemed with seasoned minds.

    In its Sparta equivalent, the famed elders of the state that existed for Spartans passed laws that ensured the coming generations also lived — and died — for Sparta.

    In ancient Rome, the Senate was the bastion of critical thinking and provocative debates.  So, is it in present day United States.

    Why does this eighth Senate glory in nothing but frivolities, sundry humbug and illicit self-help?

    Nigeria needs servant-senators that would serve the people, not errant hustlers that spur them like a mule.  It’s time for a complete clear-out in 2019.

  • Value-laden

    Saul has slain his thousands and David his tens of thousands –  1 Samuel  8: 7

    This biblical quote (above) epitomizes the subversive praise of Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, as he acted for ill President Muhammadu Buhari, in those testy times of the administration.

    Tiny David had just slain Giant Goliath, the Philistinian.  Sensation-craving Israelites, like present-day Nigerians, just went berserk!

    But that was subversive in King Saul’s troubled ears, and the resultant David-induced paranoia would prove fatal for the eventually ousted king; and near-fatal for the young man, David, himself.

    Like the Jews of old, many aNigerian just yakked, with impressive innocence, at the great vice-presidential strides — no crime.

    But with some spiteful lobbies, that praise was a deliberate ploy, to goad Prof. Osinbajo into new vanity, and put a wedge between him and the president.

    That would have re-played the ugly Obasanjo-Atiku presidential feud, that all but crippled their second term (2003-2007).

    Was Osinbajo taken in by all the razzmatazz, friendly or fiendish?  If he was, he didn’t show it.

    Besides, watching President Buhari and Vice President Osinbajo at the 10th Bola Tinubu colloquium in Lagos on March 29, the body language was clear: neither Saul nor David; absolutely no vanity or paranoia — just one seamless, self-reinforcing “kingdom”, primed for, in Jeremy Bentham-speak, the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

    Indeed, the duo would appear the political equivalent of another famous scriptural quip: Paul planting, Apollo watering, grace sprouting!

    At that colloquium, Osinbajo-in-Buhari established a clear nexus between fighting corruption and freeing hitherto stolen resources for human development — and gave logical reasons why folks must continue to talk about it.

    Geez, could leadership be so simple and unobtrusive, when not poisoned by empty conceit and tragic ego; and when the thrust is the people’s welfare, not the crust of personal glory and solo riches?

    Perhaps if President Olusegun Obasanjo and Vice President Atiku Abubakar had struck such a working ethos and work chemistry; and if both were perceived non-venal and as clean as the whistle, the decayed polity wouldn’t have logically metastasized under President Goodluck Jonathan, which made the Buhari Presidency such an imperative.

    That returns the subject to the nexus between corruption and crippling under-development, with its attendant mass poverty.

    Prof. Osinbajo made a graphic and telling point, citing the Jonathan-era  ”strategic alliance” heist at the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), from which Nigeria allegedly lost US $3 billion (about one trillion Naira).

    From the equivalent of that trove, allegedly pocketed by the thieving lobbies that cut the deal, the Buhari presidency is now proposing to fix the following ongoing crucial roads nationwide: Abuja-Kaduna-Kano road, 2nd Niger Bridge (which a NAN source says is now over 40 per cent completed), Enugu-Port Harcourt road, East-West road, Sagamu-Ore-Benin road (though in all fairness the Jonathan government fixed a stretch of that road), Kano-Maiduguri road, Abuja-Lafia-Akwanga-Keffi road, and the old Lagos-Abeokuta expressway, passing through Ota-Ifo-Wasimi, all in Ogun State.

    But the occasion was not really for physical infrastructure, which stats nevertheless the vee-pee’s speech ran through.  It was rather to showcase the Buhari government’s comprehensive investment in social infrastructure, despite depleting resources.  That policy is driven by the Vice President.

    The theme, “Investing in the people”,  was therefore a vivid feedback on the state of the Buhari social safety net programmes, to a select gathering, with the president himself in-situ.

    Personal testimonies, which often pushed the house into a frenzy, underscored how those social infrastructural stats had positively impacted on citizens — the lowly, the vulnerable, the disinherited and the abandoned, for whom “government” had for too long been nothing but a loud abstraction.

    The social investments are captured under a quad of programmes, being implemented concurrently: Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT), Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP) with the street lingo of “market moni”, the N-Power Programme, split between graduate volunteers and trainees, all aimed at stemming high unemployment and the National Home Grown School Feeding Programme (NHGSFP), which beneficiary testimonies sent the hall thundering with cheers.

    CCT — of N5,000 monthly — is for the society’s poorest and most vulnerable.  It is a classic welfare state’s direct intervention in cash; and it is on in 21 states so far (with the remaining 16 waiting to follow, if you add the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja).

    Thus far, 297, 973 households, harbouring 1, 033, 294 Nigerians are current beneficiaries, according to Dr. Temitope Sinkaye, the national coordinator of the programme.

    GEEP is in the realm of entrepreneurship, driven by a hub of trade cooperatives.

    Of GEEP, Mrs Toyin Adeniji, its coordinator quipped: “GEEP is the largest and most ambitious microcredit scheme in the history of Nigeria, providing interest-free loans of N50, 000 to N250, 000 to over 300, 000 Nigerian micro-enterprises (market women, traders, artisans, youths and farmers).  It is a direct effort of the Federal Government to break the multi-decade jinx of economic growth without shared prosperity at the base of the pyramid.”

    A couple of “market moni” beneficiaries were also there to testify to its impact on their business bottom line.

    The most graphic testimonial of the day came from the NHGSFP, the school feeding programme, with one of the beneficiary pupils, a girl from Akwa Ibom, cooing “O, my God! O, my God!”, to show her relish for the daily menu, again sending the house into a rapture.

    As at February 2018, 7, 487, 441 pupils in 22 states have been beneficiaries, 75, 333 cooks have reportedly been empowered and 26 states “have completed food safety and hygiene training, as well as medical screening for cooks.”

    But the most telling, in terms of tactics and strategy against joblessness, would appear the N-Power Programmes.  N-Power volunteers, with a stipend of N30, 000 a month, are an immediate counter to graduate unemployment.  N-Power volunteers are integrated, as quality manpower, into CCT, GEEP and NHGSFP.

    N-Power training, code-named “N-Power Build”, is a strategic programme to train top-notch artisans, in seven key areas: automobile, carpentry and joinery, welding and fabrication, electrical installation, masonry, plumbing and pipe-fitting, and painting and decoration, vital areas where current skills levels are at best sloppy.

    A corollary, N-Power Junior, is being grafted into the regular school system to target young Nigerians from ages 6 to 18 in skills like coding and computer programming, computer hardware repairs; and 2D and 3D animations, including scriptwriting for films.

    As the Vice President proudly rendered his account, in front of his beaming and cheering principal, something was crystal clear.

    If the Nigerian top two had always reinforced themselves, in integrity and brilliance, our country would never have been in this hole.

    It’s all about value-laden leadership.  That is the sane path to tread.

  • Neo-new breed from IBB

    There is strutting deja vu, in Gen. Ibrahim Babangida’s call for power gerontocrats to quit.

    That one-black-brush-tars-all is aimed at President Muhammadu Buhari — hardly a democratic crime, even if its ultra-base motive is glaring.

    It is IBB’s latest, to shoo President Buhari from a legitimate second term; even as the old soldier from Minna hides behind a finger, of newfound love for the “youth”.

    Yet, that deja vu would appear completely lost, on the opportunistic brood that clambered to his Minna hill top mansion, like vultures swooping on a thick ooze of carrion — political carrion of lazy and illicit advantage.

    If these youngsters were not residents of Mars all this while, they ought to have asked themselves what became of IBB’s first push at “new breed”.

    It was during IBB’s halcyon years, of military power without responsibility; and endless wayward experimentation, that his junta dubbed political transition.

    Still new breed, old or neo, the IBB principle is constant: eternally butting citizens off their legitimate rights.

    The old experiment was, for personal glory, to elbow off the 1st and 2nd Republic political Titans; and make way for IBB as transmuted president.  That failed, following the fiasco that forced, then issued from, the annulled June 12, 1993 presidential election.

    This new gambit is, for class envy, to gyp an old man of his constitutional right to second term.

    Then, IBB was young.  Now, he is old.  But again, the motive remains constant, which again underscores the fallacy of young-old dichotomy in politics.

    It was Karl Marx who quipped: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.”

    In his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (published 1852), he was contrasting the farce of Louis Napoleon’s French dictatorship (as Napoleon III, 1851) to Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s real power and glory (as Napoleon I, 1799); after the tragic mimicry of Napoleon Francois Charles Joseph Bonaparte, as Napoleon II, Emperor-without-Empire of France, after his father, Bonaparte’s abdication in 1814; and from birth, titular Prince Imperial and King of Rome).

    Did the great Marx ever put any thought to farce repeating itself?  He probably never envisaged the Nigerian situation.  Yet, that is what is opening before our very eyes.

    IBB, seized by the hubris of his military power and glory in 1989, decreed the old “new breed”.  That ultimately turned a farce.

    Now in 2018, even as his old power is gone, and his influence appears waning, he pushes another farce in “neo-new breed”!

    Talk of farce — not history — repeating itself!  What a polity!

    But history or farce, there are always consequences — and dire ones for a country that rushes into fresh blunders, because it proudly lacks institutional memory.

    The collapse of the political party system is one of those telling consequences, for a fledgling democracy.

    There is this penchant to rhapsodize the 1st Republic, as some lost utopia, compared to today’s ruin.

    That is not totally incorrect, so long that romanticization is limited to the operating regional structure.  Truly, that spurred the federal system into high inter-regional competition, dizzying productivity and promising development, all-round.

    Even then, arbitrary power, and its reactionary use, came with that pristine territory.  That was why, as early as November 1960 — one month after independence — North and East lobbies, in the federal Parliament in Lagos, were already dizzy with reckless talks about “abolishing” the West, because they hated Obafemi Awolowo’s politics.

    That of course sent that republic to early grave, and heralded military rule with its best-forgotten abuses.

    Still, something survived the military hurricane, that would rage for the next 29 years (1966-1999) — with a civilian interregnum of four years under 2nd Republic President Shehu Shagari (1979-1983) — getting most destructive under Gen. Babangida, and his Khalifa, Gen. Sani Abacha.

    That was the party system.  Between the 1st Republic (1960-1966) and the 2nd Republic (1979-1983), the party system somewhat held.

    Conservatives banded together from the old Northern People’s Congress (NPC), to new National Party of Nigeria (NPN).

    So largely did the progressives: from the old Action Group (AG) to the new Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), under Chief Awolowo, though some of his key 1st Republic allies, like Anthony Enahoro and Joseph Tarka, crossed over to the NPN.

    The other three parties, registered for the 1979 elections, were variants of these two major planks: the Nigerian People’s Party (NPP), under Zik; its offshoot, Great Nigeria People’s Party (GNPP), under Waziri Ibrahim, and the People’s Redemption Party (PRP), under Mallam Aminu Kano, still bore ideological fealty to tendencies in the 1st Republic.

    Indeed, so strong was the party system that President Shagari, though an executive president, attended party caucuses under party chairman, Adisa Akinloye; and was bound by party decisions.

    So did the UPN maintain a stranglehold on its governments, made easier by its rule that its governors, or governorship candidates, were state chairmen of the party, while Awo, as presidential candidate, was national president.

    But in 1989, IBB’s “new breed” truncated all that — and the disaster today is the collapse of the party system, the recession of the party as an ensemble of shared values and the rise of the one-man financier, instead of the collective levy of old.

    That was also why, within two years of his presidency, Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo would pounce on the PDP that propelled him to power; and with apostolic frenzy,  got rid of its more decent minds: like Sunday Awoniyi, Solomon Lar and Audu Ogbeh.

    By the time he settled for Ahmadu Alli, as his “garrison commander” into the 2007 “do-or-die” election, the PDP goose was cooked, though its members were too full of the delicious gravy of power to notice a thing.

    Enter then, the era of the president as “party leader”, which instals the president as some emperor over the party that fired him into power.

    That absurdity is replicated in states too, where the governors also fancy themselves as strongmen, before whom other party hoi polloi, including even elected collectives as the House of Assembly, must bow and worship!

    Apologists of this humbug quip that is how America does it — America, whose presidential system we copy.

    Ay!  But does Nigeria boast the robust conventions, of party checks and balances, spanning over 200 years, that make the American system work?

    Even the ruling APC is hit by this plague, of president as party emperor.  PMB might be a decent fellow, who commands moral authority.  But how would APC cope, with its rainbow coalition yet to fully gel, when hit by its own “Obasanjo”?   Can the party stand the storm?

    That is the systemic ruin, all for selfish ends, IBB’s old “new breed”, has wrought on the political party system.

    Pray, what more future ruin, does IBB’s new farce, the neo-new breed, hold for the polity?

    Of course, that is totally lost on the history-vacuumed youth, dancing around his subversive flame, like doomed moths.  Pity!

  • Between PMB, Obasanjo and Danjuma

    The triad of Muhammadu Buhari, Olusegun Obasanjo and Theophilus Danjuma number among that post-Yakubu Gowon military elite, gathered behind the short-fused but short-lived Murtala Muhammed (1938-1976).

    They prided themselves the post-Gowon military’s golden reformers, on account of Gen. Gowon’s failure to deliver civil rule, which they did under Gen. Obasanjo.  With that, however, they awarded selves a huge dose of patriotic entitlement, which an uncritical media parrots as sacrosanct.

    Still, as a class, but with different degrees of culpability, they delivered more tinsel than gold.

    Despite that shortfall, as a collective, they are loudest in trumpeting a monopoly of public sainthood; with the hollowest grating the loudest, of the holy noise.

    On this scale, Gen. Obasanjo is clearly first. Under that dynamics, he has grossed a two-term elected presidency, essayed a disastrous third term, and canonized himself Nigeria’s No. 1 public conscience — at least, among the obtuse, the gullible and the naive.  That was aside from becoming accidental military head of state, after Murtala’s assassination in 1976.

    President Buhari, clearly with the most reasonable claim to decency in the public space, even after tenure as military head of state, is clearly last.

    That virtue, of personal probity, propelled him to a democratic era presidential encore in 2015, after the accumulated decadence of his peers almost crashed the republic, under the effete President Goodluck Jonathan.

    Gen. Danjuma, taciturn and respectable, is in-between.  As chief of Army staff, he was military enforcer of Obasanjo’s tenure as military head of state (1976-1979).  Also, as Defence minister, a key player, during Obasanjo’s first term as elected president (1999-2003), though the two would later fall out, in a bitter public spat.

    To this triad, you might add a fourth: Gen. Ibrahim Babaginda who, as self-named “military president”, spawned the most decadent government in Nigerian history.

    This brief background is imperative, for the triad of Obasanjo, Babangida and Danjuma are involved in some media grandstanding of late, with the usually taciturn Danjuma’s the latest rally.

    It is nothing but an elite gang-up, which again the unwary, among the deprived public, is programmed to cheer as some redemptive push.

    There is nothing redemptive about it all — just another selfish gaming, to clothe base, selfish interests, in immaculate public-spirited garb.

    Why, the empty racket is even aided and abetted by a sensational media, bawling: the generals are speaking!   Which generals?

    It is the tragic hysteria of a howling media, that boasts no institutional memory; nor is guided by history, the rich fount of that memory.

    But more tragic: the most decadent segment of former military plutocrats are on the war path; and, as of right, decree thunderous public applause.  What hubris!

    They hide behind the present challenges under PMB to goad an unwary public into rebellion.  What conceit!

    In a high season of high cynics, even IBB saw no irony in his so-called letter to PMB.  Well, he first wrote.  Then, he didn’t.  Finally, he did, but …!

    It was the classic IBB hee-haw!  But it was enough.  There is nothing more telling than opportunistic grief, in a land of piercing pains!

    Of course, IBB clambered on the back of Obasanjo’s “press release”, excoriating PMB, strafing both the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the doomed Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) which, by the way, he thoroughly ruined during his presidential years.  He now  pushes yet another racket, in his so-called Coalition for Nigeria (CN).

    It is the latest Trojan horse: the Hobson’s choice from Obasanjo’s hypocritical stable of holy mischief, to which the gullible have a democratic right to embrace.

    But then, this caveat: the self-consecrated holy pope of Nigerian politics — and governance — has a clear, demonstrable record of nexus between public strain and private g(r)ain.  Whoever trades at his stall and goes home with a bargain?

    Still, folks are entitled to their democratic follies and foibles!

    That brings the discourse to the Danjuma put down — a ringing denunciation of the security forces under PMB, that must be taken seriously.

    After accusing the security forces of siding with “Fulani herdsmen” to kill his Taraba locals, he slammed the military as a “Fulani” hegemonic army and called on the Taraba people to “defend” themselves.  He spoke at the inaugural convocation of the Taraba State University.

    These are grievous allegations, made even more thunderous by Danjuma’s natural taciturnity.  Might there be any truth in it all?  The Buhari Presidency must get to the root of the matter fast.

    Even as a mere allegation, any supposition that the Nigerian military is beholden to any ethnic group is explosive enough; and should worry everyone.  Like Caesar’s wife, the security forces must be absolutely without slur.

    Still, why is Gen. Danjuma projecting the Taraba conflict as a one-way killing spree?  The objective situation on the ground negates that claim.

    The whole swath of Taraba, Adamawa, Benue, Plateau and Kaduna are a near-eternal belt of conflicts, with the Fulani taking on the Junkun, the Junkun taking on the Tiv, the Tiv taking on the Fulani, and the Christians and Muslims, of southern Kaduna, sizing up one another for combat.

    In this explosive vortex, fired by mutual hate and mass poverty, the politics of religion often ruthlessly imposes the religion of politics; with zero-sum winners and losers pushing aside present fate to plot future wars for dear faith!

    Incidentally, Kaduna and Danjuma’s Taraba provide the latest spooky examples.  Under Jonathan in December 2012, Patrick Yakowa, Kaduna’s first Christian governor, died in an air crash.  The Muslim lobby could not wait to correct that historical blip.

    In Taraba, in October 2012, Danbaba Suntai (now dead), the state’s umpteenth Christian governor became gravely ill, from another air crash.  But the Christian lobby there dug in, stonewalling any prospect of a first Muslim governor for the state.

    In the politics of religion and religion of politics, therefore, there appears no love lost between both divides: in Kaduna (tilting Muslim) and Taraba (tilting Christian).

    So, that is why Danjuma’s one-sided killing theory can hardly stand logical scrutiny.  And the general himself, with all due respect, cannot claim total neutrality in the matter.

    The patriotic love that drove him to cry out for his people also drives the Fulani to look out for their own.  But what is bad — and must be condemned — is the wilful spilling of blood on both sides.

    It is on this high pro-life principle that both sides must unite and force a stop to the carnage.  That cannot, however, be with Danjuma’s Taraba call to “defend yourself”.  That borders on the anarchic, a perfect recipe for more bloodshed — of the poor and the vulnerable.

    Though PMB’s profile doesn’t quite fit into that devious fellow that would turn the Nigerian security forces into a Fulani ethnic army, the government should look out for such rogue elements in the security forces and root them out fast.