The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olakunle Abimbola

  • The media and road to Kigali

    The media and road to Kigali

    When the Rwanda madness boiled over, a local radio it was that directed the grim orgy of point-and-kill.

    Here, “point-and-kill” is leisure lingo for local pepper soup gourmets.  But the Kigali party was a grisly affair.

    So, when Radio Mille Collines belted out the order, “Cut down the tall trees!”, “Crush the cockroaches!”, the globe was awake to perhaps the greatest horror since Hitler.

    The “tall trees” were the tall, gangling Tutsi, who though a minority, monopolized political power.  Their hunters were the Hutu, the bitter majority, bent on throwing off the Tutsi yoke.

    When the smoke cleared, on the Rwanda genocide of April-July 1994, Radio Television Mille Collines rebranded the media as nation wrecker, from nation builder.

    Yet, its hate  broadcast lasted one year: July 1993 to July 1994.

    The Rwanda genocide would be 24 years this year.  But the Nigerian media appears to have learnt nothing from the Rwanda media’s road to catastrophe.

    This is clear from the base role the media had played — and continue to play — in the crises, real or contrived, that have faced the Muhammadu Buhari presidency.

    For President Buhari, it has been one year, one major crisis: Niger Delta Avengers bombing expedition (2015/2016), Nnamdi Kanu IPOB’s ferocious harvest of hate (2016/2017) and the herdsmen killing spree (2018).

    In all of these, the media would appear bent on stoking the fires, than snuffing them out.

    The especial grouse appears the president’s Fulani nativity; which a hysterical segment — more or less the bulk of the southern press — appears determined to scapegoat and demonize to the hilt.

    Media-bred hate can only build a road to Kigali, paved with innocent skulls, blood and gore.  After Rwanda, should any country ever traverse this route?

    Still, make no mistake.  Nigeria is a federation of many ethnic nations, each with its cherished world views and idiosyncrasies; not to talk of mutual but thick prejudices, fanned by ancestral feuds, real or apocryphal.

    Such feuds and prejudices, therefore, bob up in the media, no matter how careful the gatekeepers are.

    Besides, all politics is local.  So, it is a function of the willy-nilly federalization of the Nigerian media that Daily Trust, for instance, would push for northern interests, just as The Punch would for the West, Daily Sun for the Igbo South East; just as Vanguard would cast its lot with the southern, oil-rich minorities, in the fierce contestation for plums, in the Nigerian space.

    The media, as traditional champion of local rights, fits pat into that fray, in the best tradition of crusading journalism.

    But crusading for rights is one thing.  Recklessly baiting catastrophe, is another.  In handling these crises, the media has tended towards the second than the first.

    The result is a media roaring as rabid ultra-nationalists and ethnic chauvinists; spreading hate, baiting doom and pushing a poisoned pool of bigotry, to the unwary, as an immaculate spring of fairness.

    Take the opener of the crises, the bombing spree of the so-called Niger Delta Avengers.

    Now, this was a criminal gang drafted — or which drafted itself — into the political space, following the the loss of presidential power, by local boy, Goodluck Jonathan; and resultant loss of gravy, by local parasites.

    That appeared the make-good of the threat to make Nigeria ungovernable, should President Jonathan be voted out.  The tragi-comedy, of one government becoming a fugitive to another, added to the suspect Avengers campaign.

    While the bombs boomed, Government Ekpemupolo aka Tompolo vanished, a fugitive from the law, wanted for alleged jumbo sleaze. It would appear a legitimate supposition, therefore, to claim that the Avengers bombing had more to do with covering Tompolo’s tracks, than fighting for Niger Delta rights.

    Yet, much of the South-South media, with most of the southern media in tow, framed this ultra-dangerous precedent as some Niger Delta liberation struggle. It was not.

    Now, resorting to violence, just because you lost a free election, is an atrocious precedent, which an enlightened media ought to slam as a concerned and concerted bloc.

    If today, a southern group resorted to bombing just because it lost an election, what stops a northern group following the same formula tomorrow?

    After the Avengers, came the IPOB campaign — a rabid, hate-filled denunciation of the rest of Nigeria.  Though popular among the plebs in South East streets, it put the Igbo and their interests at loggerheads, with other parts of Nigeria.

    Again, the southern media cheered on this madness, until another lunatic fringe from the North gave the Igbo residents there an  1 October 2017 exit deadline — or else!  That triggered a chain of events that eventually turned Nnamdi Kanu a fugitive from the law.

    The herdsmen killings, that broke with the new year, put the president exactly where his traducers want him — the hysterics against Fulani criminality, with not a few even suggesting presidential complicity and sweeping ethnic guilt by association!

    Again, no pity for killer herdsmen.  Killing is a grievous crime that must be stiffly punished by the state.

    But to now frame it as an exclusive Fulani crime is the apex of stupidity.  Yet, that’s the line much of the southern media push — and with such hate, rabidity and brazenness.

    But the terrible news just broke that Islamic State (IS) fanatics, with their penchant for vicious killing, may just be operating in Nigeria.

    That doesn’t automatically put in the clear, the criminal colony of herdsmen.  But it shows the folly — and danger — of a one-track media criminalization of a group, when others could well be the culprit.

    Besides, in the present seasonal hate-for-hate orchestra, the herdsman and the media could well be two sides of the same hateful coin.

    The herdsman unleashes terror in the grisly field.  The media counters, with own fervency, in the air, in the press and, of course, in the (anti)social media.

    It is terror for terror (just like an eye for an eye that makes everyone blind), that dooms all.

    Such rabidity should be infra-dig for the media, except Nigeria is doomed to the road to Kigali.

     

    Between Fafowora and Opaleye

     

    Last week was, for Ripples, a sumptuous feast in humanity, from a young old man; and an old young man.

    Young old man, Ambassador Oladapo Fafowora, 77, consultant to The Nation Editorial Board, retired — and was his sent-forth an event to remember! That was January 17.

    Old young man, Abolade Opaleye, Esq., maritime lawyer and family man extraordinaire, turned 60.  It was January 19, and all roads led to the Oriental Hotel, Lekki, for a sumptuous birthday bash, with class and glitz.

    But what made it for Ripples was the gush of testimonies, about the duo, on their humanity, their decency, their hearts of gold!

    Ambassador, happy retirement sir.  They don’t make them that suave any more.  To Opaleye, old young man, well, life begins at 60 — so no retirement for you yet.

    Thank you both for being a riveting tutorial in basic humanity. Would sure love to be like you when I grow up!

  • Beyond outrage

    Beyond outrage

    Good old outrage is alive — and the nationwide uproar, over the Fulani herdsmen Benue killing, is proof.

    What routinized sleaze had numbed, shocking gore just woke — and just as well!

    A nation, in search of the right soul, must develop a Mannichaean ethos — that stark awareness of good and evil: the one to fulsomely praise; the other to utterly raze.

    It is the narrow and winding way to equity and justice for all.

    Still, outrage must be well calibrated, so that it doesn’t become a regular catharsis for avoidable tragedy.

    No sympathy for the killer herdsmen; and their alleged sponsors.   The Nigerian state must ensure the Benue 73 get justice.

    Still, that should not equate a blanket condemnation of the entire Fulani, just because a segment of their stock is criminal and murderous.

    Nor should the present wailing lay the foundation for future tragedies — just as past wailings appeared to have laid the foundation for this one — by adopting the sweet tragedy of wailing without thinking.

    Unfortunately, that ruinous pattern is emerging yet again.   It’s time to break that tragic cycle.

    For starters, avoid over-simplifying the problem, just because such inanities thrive in the heat of the moment.

    Take the Fayose Ekiti elixir.  With anti-Fulani hysteria flaring, Ayo Fayose, the majestic master of vacuity and merry poster-boy of gubernatorial vacuum, has come up with a winner!

    He just drafted a colony of Ekiti hunters, with their Dane guns and assorted charms and amulets, to the defence of Ekiti farmers.  The same media that thrust his tragi-comic derring-do upon their readers, report that the “Fulani killer herdsmen” prowl with AK-47 and other sophisticated arms and ammo.

    “Shakabula” (Yoruba pejorative term for crude arms) versus AK-47?  If that’s not another avoidable tragedy loading, kindly point to a worse threat!

    Then, the law as swashbuckler!  Again, Ekiti is prime example.

    Ekiti’s anti-open grazing law, against rampaging herdsmen, was a great hit, with many an editorial comment recommending it to others.  But no thanks to simplistic thinking, what has worked for Ekiti has proved sheer catastrophe for Benue.

    Simon Lalung, Plateau governor, claimed he warned Samuel Ortom, the Benue governor, about the dangers of an anti-open grazing law.  Ortom has countermanded this claim.

    What is important, however, is not the controversy, or even the justness or otherwise of that law.  It is rather how the local dynamics fated it to catastrophe.

    Still, the point here is not to romanticize outlawry or rationalize brazen slaughter.  It is rather to ask: could that law have better served everyone, if it had been more sensitive to every stakeholder’s perceived rights — native or settler, farmer or herdsman — than in its present form of perceived championing of the right of farmers against pastoralists?

    Ay, every farmer needs protection against the plague of rampaging herdsmen.  But the problem is not even this basic fact, which is commonsense enough.

    It is rather the combined pathology of ethnicity and politicking, in a vast territory of native communities, which federal system is not robust enough to come to terms with the dynamics of its rippling settler communities, driven by sheer economic push.

    So, the Benue crises — and those of the contiguous Plateau, southern Kaduna, Taraba and even Adamawa — are, at the roots, neither communal nor ethnic.  They are economic.  Therefore, it all boils down to perceived threat to livelihoods — and its fatal consequences.

    That must underscore the Lalung claim that he “warned” Ortom against the dangers of the Benue anti-open grazing law.  Both states face similar dynamics in itinerant livestock farming, itinerant crop farming (rotational farming in basic economics), as well as native-settler landholding tension  — a dangerous cocktail that is always political volcano waiting to explode.

    But the same dynamics that make the Benue anti-open grazing law so dangerous also doom the so-called “grazing colonies”, which the Federal Government is currently floating.

    So, averting these tragedies demands you plot the economic rights of farmers against the economic rights of herdsmen; and work out a mutually beneficial compromise.

    That could result in a much more equitable law,  even if less popular with both economic partisans.  But it guarantees the livelihood of all.  It is a simple solution from complex thinking.

    Such, more than ever now, is needed to stop these periodic orgies of gore, of which the Benue massacre is the latest, but not necessarily the last.

    Talking about pastoral rights: has anyone deeply interrogated the morphing of the stick-carrying Fulani cattle boy of yore to the AK-47 dreaded killer of today?

    Here is a quotation straight from the Christmas 2017 double issue of The Economist: “When you have cows, the first thing you must do is get a gun.  If you don’t have a gun, people will take your cow.”

    Straight out of the Benue, Plateau, southern Kaduna and Taraba axis, the vortex of herdsmen’s killing in Nigeria?  No.  That was from a herder from Wau, a city in South Sudan.

    In Wau, just as these blighted areas of Nigeria, cattle rustling is a big rural crime.  So, the state must find an antidote.

    But as the herder has resorted to self-help, to secure self and asset, the criminal-minded among the lot have left heinous killings in their trail.  Sad!

    To be sure, that criminality must be condemned and stiffly punished — which is the angst not a few have against the Buhari Presidency.

    But the  solution is simple(?): the state must secure the herdsmen’s cattle asset; as well as his personal safety to tend his cows — a standard demand by other citizens, in other far-flung sectors as banking, manufacturing, IT, transport, trade and commerce, and even crop farming.

    It is under the rubrics of this trade security that modernization of the process, via ranching, must be comprehensively discussed; and fashioned out over a target period of time.

    That way, itinerant cattle herding can be gradually phased out.  But in the interim, the available land can be carefully tracked, thus limiting farmers-pastoralists clashes, and the attendant blood-spilling crises. Any other way is baiting needless tragedy.

    But even as this process evolves, the Federal Government must not fail in its duty of law and order.  Criminal elements among the cattle-herding community must be caught and swiftly brought to justice.

    So should rogue elements of the state, that for ethnic and religious reasons, aid and abet the criminal segment of the cattle lobby. Such intra-government criminals would appear to fire the rising notoriety of a faction of the Miyetti Allah cattle lobby.

    To solve this problem, the state must think clearly, while the media must be less hysterical, even when expressing understandable outrage.

     

    Happy new year! 

    It’s nice to be back after a period of rest, even if that, with the present tension in the land, near-equates breezing into Dante’s inferno. But the media must be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

  • Straight-and-narrow

    Nigeria perpetually treads the wide and merry way, which the bible says, leads to destruction.  The result is the present sorry state, which everyone hates.

    But each time it makes for the straight-and-narrow, which leads to salvation, these same people kick and scream and bellow and holler and screech!

    It is the children of Israel all over again.  For their foul-tempered bedlam over short-term pains, they prolonged a 40-day breeze through the wilds, to a 40-year odyssey to their promised land.

    Will Nigeria replicate the manna-gobbling, do-nothing, ever-grumbling ancient Israelites?  Or seize the times and bite the bullet that comes with harsh rectitude, after merry, free-wheeling turpitude?

    Golden dreams!  But the prognoses are dire.

    Opinion shapers, piqued by some short-term hurts, have turned the media space into a plebeian din, condemning everything under the sun.

    Yet they, at this delicate and decisive historic juncture, ought to be tempered patricians, countering the plebeian babble, explaining issues with rare wisdom and illuminating insights.

    Pray, which country ever gets it right, when its media is the unfazed redoubt of plebeian screeches?  That about approximates the present Nigerian situation.

    Yet if education is expensive, goes the saying, try ignorance.  If rectitude is expensive, try turpitude.

    Fortunately, between rectitude and turpitude, Nigeria has had two excellent examples, with Muhammadu Buhari ironically at the vortex of both.

    Between 1984 and 1985, a certain Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, with grim and dour lieutenant, Major-General Babatunde Idiagbon (now dead), was at the centre of a brave attempt to pull Nigeria off self-induced catastrophe.

    President Shehu Shagari’s 2nd Republic had just collapsed in the throes of a rigged election and unprecedented decadence.

    It was a historic prelude to the immediate post-Goodluck Jonathan era: the national wealth was gone, no thanks to unconscionable and thieving politicians.

    So was the national pride.  Indeed, it was vaunted patriotism to flee from the Nigerian debacle.  Remember the (in)famous Andrew, in the NTA commercial, who strutted like a peacock, while piping his decision to “check out”?

    Besides, it’s tribute to the shallowness of the Nigerian media that the present salary crisis is reported as if it were something novel.  No, an earlier version came with the pitiful collapse of the 2nd Republic.

    Now, the Buhari-Idiagbon regime stands condemned for its general high-handedness; unprecedented brutality and queer ethnic-equalization formula to democratize punishment, even if that meant punishing the innocent, if only to tar all the ousted politicians.

    That was an eternal blight, especially on the all-important front of fairness and fair play.  But even that, history might excuse as nothing but a draconian method to tackle a most daunting decadence.

    Look no further for proof: the Buhari regime was succeeded, via a palace coup, by far the most decadent and most wayward — perhaps bar the Jonathan meltdown —  regime in Nigerian history.

    The way became giddily wider; the party recklessly merrier; and a fun-loving people, who grumbled all through the Buhari cramp, cheered full-throat, at the dawn of the Ibrahim Babangida era.  It was, indeed, a sweet and intoxicating path that led nowhere but unqualified perdition!

    But after the stark Sani Abacha, he of jumbo sleaze; the giddy but empty messianism of Olusegun Obasanjo’s second coming and the ill-fated Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, the tragic chicken finally came home to roost in Jonathan-era ruins.

    Then a dazed and raped nation finally came to its senses and zeroed in on a superman to bale it out of its own self-induced folly — Muhammadu Buhari!

    But why this hated nemesis-turned-doted-messiah tale?  While others thoroughly messed themselves up during the wild, partying years, Buhari kept himself whole and sane.

    Enter then, Buhari’s second coming, courtesy of the epochal 2015 elections.  But it is clear the president himself didn’t reckon with the Nigerian Israelites’ syndrome — do nothing but demand instant manna — even if the situation is not helped by Buhari’s own natural tardiness.

    But as it was during Buhari’s first coming, there are more fundamental problems beyond speed or tardiness.  It was the morning after the wild party; and the head-splitting hangover would naturally slow things down.

    Besides, some gluttons of the present have gobbled up the future.  The economy was not only in ruins, it is structured towards eternally boosting already thriving foreign economies but sapping the Nigerian real economy.

    So, a ringing re-thinking was called for.  Though the administration captured it in “make what you eat and eat what you make” — a catching phrase, if any, towards agricultural renaissance and re-industrialization — the Nigerian mind would appear firmly hooked in the slovenly past of little work, bountiful manna.

    Factor in the paralyzing corruption — and how the Church generally turned a deaf ear — the electricity power conundrum and the sundry telling distractions: Niger Delta Avengers, wild Islamization allegations by CAN, Nnamdi Kanu’s IPOB’s cacophony of searing ethnic hate, etc, and you’d realize how almost everyone has been tragically distracted.

    Of course, all of these would not have been if the media had not devoted itself to chasing the mundane, thus shunning fundamental issues a citizen-media should tackle, at a crucial historic juncture.

    It became the merry voices of ethnic champions, and the lionization and demonization that come with that.  It also became the unfazed ombudsman for appointment equalization — no crime, to be sure, and quite legitimate.

    But in its howling jeremiads, it hardly has time for a concerted anti-corruption push — except when arguing forcefully why it would not work — which could make or mar Nigeria’s future.

    Goading itself to pushing a bigoted agenda, it all but blinded itself to vital developments that could sweep away the present mess: in less than three years, terror-induced slaughter was down by 90 per cent.  So is Nigeria’s importation of rice, with a bright prospect of 100 per cent local rice sufficiency by 2018.

    In Nigeria’s greatest hour of need, its media, self-trapped in ethnic laagers, is too distracted to focus on the real issues.  If therefore the country breaks a new mould, it would be in spite of the opinion moulders in the media.

    If it fails, the nihilistic media would have preserved its niche — like the Israelites, eternal lamentation in the eternal Nigerian jungle — even as the whole world moves on to things new.

  • Tisa, no teach me nonsense

    In periods of national foibles, the immortal lyrics of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, himself the Abami Eda (strange creature), comes to mind.

    In one of his vintage numbers, he was at his irreverent best: “Teacher, don’t teach me nonsense”!

    That, to be sure, was brash.  But at least the Fela persona, even if a pupil, knew enough to rebel and challenge his teacher.

    The poor Kaduna children, whose teachers the Kaduna government accuses of dispensing ignorance, might not have been that lucky!

    That generational evil is, therefore, the tragedy.  Whoever now cares about the half-baked children, grinded out under the tutelage of these teachers (?), but consigned to a bitter future of half-education, which the popular idiom says is dangerous?

    For that blighted generation, there is no union to plead their cause.

    On the contrary, it is the wrong and the faulty now playing the victim.  That is the long and short of the orchestrated wail of the teachers and allied unions.

    They have — is there no more shame in this land? — launched an emotive blackmail to retain a name — teacher — they never deserved; and a pay they never earned, simply because — a harvest of whimpers and a bucketful of tears — they must “feed their family”.

    Some satanic feeding there, after pumping other families’ offspring with thumping ignorance!

    Of course, for Nigeria, where a sense of right-and-wrong appears to have vanished, this is yet another controversy.

    That would appear the lot of the country since 1993, when a reckless cabal in the military cancelled the June 12 presidential election; but sustained the crime because all it evoked was, not bristling outrage at a monumental injustice, but a sterile controversy to justify the unjustifiable.

    That loss of innocence Nigeria still battles till today, despite the return of democracy since 1999; and a deliberate ploy to placate the South West, with an Olusegun Obasanjo presidency, for the MKO Abiola injustice.

    But that is one direction the Kaduna teachers affair must not be allowed to head.  Education is just too important to be sorted out by political compromises.

    Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), the British clergyman and Industrial Revolution-era economist it was, that raised the spectre of wealth growing at arithmetical proportion; but population booming at geometrical proportion, thus forecasting mass misery and anguish.

    That didn’t come to pass, because the Industrial Revolution (1760-1840), as well as the discovery of the so-called new world (America, Brazil, Australia, etc) drew not a few Brits away, whether as outlaws shipped off as punishment; or just adventurers looking beyond the tiny British isles.

    But Malthus could also be applied to a looming tragedy, if this Kaduna case is not rightly resolved, without recourse to any sick political compromise.

    The 1999 Army Arrangement (again, apologies to the Abami Eda), which compensated the South West with an Obasanjo presidency, looked like political retardation, in “arithmetical proportions”; until the 2015 elections halted the Obasanjo era descent at its very nadir, the Goodluck Jonathan years, during which everything was going to crash.

    So long for political compromises, with neither soul nor equity!

    But the Jonathan-era political collapse would appear a child’s play with the current education debacle.

    Indeed — and back to Malthus — if politics and governance had collapsed by “arithmetical proportion”, education would appear collapsing by “geometrical proportion” — and the root is a rotten foundation, as exemplified by the Kaduna teachers scandal.

    That is why those who cry and wail about giving the quacks who claim to be teachers in Kaduna some soft landing entirely miss the point.  Indeed, such a stand would appear insensitive, if not outright unconscionable.

    Yet, there is a lot to be said about the rotten processes that installed these quacks; and the imperative of dealing with the rot from the fundament.

    For starters, how could the Kaduna teacher recruitment system be riddled with so much self-ruin, to the extent that those that lexically challenged end up as “teachers”?  And their victims, young impressionable minds, whose families are probably the society’s most vulnerable, given their lowly demographics?

    But before you point fingers at Kaduna, that state might well point to a nationwide rot.  That is why the Kaduna government should spare nothing to get to the root of the problems and ensure any racket in the teacher recruitment system is smashed; and there are vibrant checks-and-balances to henceforth continuously sanitize the system.

    All these point to a past where the abnormal had been so brazenly pushed it has now become the norm.  The Nasir El Rufai governorship holds it a sacred duty, to the coming generation, that the rot is completely reversed.

    Then the below-par teachers and their so-called welfare, on which the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) and the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), have screamed and bawled, in the mistaken belief that you win a discourse by raising your voice, not your logic.

    Strictly speaking, if welfare is linked to work privileges, any Kaduna teacher deemed to have failed so dismally in his or her teaching duties is not entitled to work-related welfare.  This is trite: for you to enjoy, you must deliver value.

    Besides, it is not charity.  Indeed, in this very case, to resort to an appeal to charity is nothing but double jeopardy, for such failure ought to attract stiff sanctions, not reward, given the harm it has done to the victim-pupils.

    Still, in dealing with citizens, hardly any government would want to, Draco-wise, strictly apply the law, without mercy or compassion.  That would appear the only pillar on which the Kaduna teachers, with proven dereliction of duties, can access any favour.

    But whatever happens, present and future generation of public school pupils should not be made guinea pigs, in that laboratory of mercy.

    Except for the few that can be retrained, the others should be shipped off to that segment of the civil service, where they would cease being a menace to the future generation.

    To this legion, teaching must be strictly off-limits, more so with the evidence that there are qualified teachers ready and willing to fill the vacated positions.

    For those who could neither be retrained as teachers nor fit into other areas of the civil service, however, the Kaduna government should end their appointment but promptly pay them their dues.  That way, they can get on with their lives, with little or no dislocation of the lives of their equally innocent dependents.

    That is the line the teachers union and organized Labour should push.  Otherwise, NUT would be fairly charged as undermining its own professional essence; and organized Labour legitimately charged with, by its empty grandstanding, pushing no dignity in honest labour.

  • Media under-developing Nigerian politics?

    Remember Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, that seminal work first published in 1972, which audacious thinking set the academia on fire?

    In the Nigerian university campus of the 1980s, you didn’t belong if you hadn’t read the book; and pressed, into service, its enchanting quotes.

    Given the current media temper, marked by slanted stories, unfazed finger-pointing and pseudo-analyses, perhaps a Rodney follow-up is due: How the Nigerian media underdevelop Nigerian politics!  Is any media scholar game?

    Were you to transpose media fare today back to the 1980s, the unceasing stream of jeremiads, on the alleged  hopelessness of the Nigerian situation, would probably have inspired another band of military pseudo-saviours to storm the Bastille.

    But maybe the media had always misled the polity with sensational reactions, when a reflective, introspective and well-reasoned option would do.

    Maybe that had always helped to derail the state, and feed it to a military train, clanging and chugging to nowhere.

    And maybe, present media howling aren’t producing past follies simply because the media, in its fatal hubris, is blissfully shackled to the past — far behind the society it has thrust itself to lead!

    That’s why its havoc on politics — and the polity — would appear humongous indeed; but which the fourth estate, in its holy rage, appears to least appreciate.

    Ringing renunciation from within?  Perhaps!  But maybe ringing media naivety, always passing the routine as the novel, explains why.

    Take the hysteria over the so-called “cabal”.

    The word cabal crept into pubic consciousness, during the Goodluck Jonathan presidential cause of 2009-2010, when a Katsina power bloc tried to stonewall the then Vice President, in the name of fatally ill President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.

    It was a battle well fought and won, in the best tradition of Nigerian media crusading; dating back to the era of the old masters: John Payne Jackson and his son, Horatio (Lagos Weekly Record), George Alfred Williams (Lagos Standard), James Bright Davies (Times of Nigeria) and Herbert Macaulay (Lagos Daily News) to mention just a few Titans in the early Nigerian press.

    Since then, however, no thanks to analytical naivety, if not outright analytical corruption, “cabal” has seized a section of the southern media.

    From Yar’Adua’s “Katsina cabal” to Muhammadu Buhari’s so-called “Daura cabal”, you would think a governmental inner caucus was novel.  It isn’t.

    Indeed, between 1967 and 1983, approximating early military rule and President Shehu Shagari’s 2nd Republic, the southern media was fixated with the so-called “Kaduna mafia”.  That was at the apex of the northern power hegemony.

    Even if “Kaduna mafia” was justifiable southern angst against blatant northern political domination, a “mafia” or “cabal” is a harsh power reality.

    Indeed, where two or three are gathered to form a ruling bloc — over an association, town’s union, government or even churches and mosques — there probably is a cabal.

    Why, even President Jonathan, of the minority of minorities, had his “Ijaw cabal”! So did the all-powerful Afenifere of old.  Or why did some peeved Oyo-speaking partisans back then rail at the so-called “Ijebu mafia”?

    But make no mistake: a cabal or mafia that skews public policy, in favour of its narrow clan, deserves ringing condemnation.  Thus, the Yar’Adua era “Katsina cabal” deserved all its knocks.  So does the Buhari “Daura cabal”, if charges are proved.

    What is not right is freezing extant cases — proven or speculative — hold them up as novel but eternal and proceed to approach every matter, no matter how harmless, from that skewed prism.

    That is the cul-de-sac much of the southern media have run themselves into. At best, it is analytical mischief.  At worst, it is analytical fraud, which full wages may yet, in future, plague a southern president.

    After all,  no section of the country boasts a monopoly of terrorism — media or otherwise.

    Take the needless controversy over the reported Buhari instruction to the World Bank to concentrate developmental efforts in the “North”.  In a media driven by good faith, that should sound asinine to anybody.

    For one, Nigeria’s North East, scene of Boko Haram’s humongous destruction and grave human misery, couldn’t have been in the “South”, whether by Nigeria’s politics or geography.  Are fellow Nigerians up there not entitled to some quick relief?

    For another, the statement clearly issued from the naivety of the World Bank president,  Jim Yong Kim, whose honest statement was wilfully slanted to suit Nigeria’s explosive political geography.

    The controversy raged nonetheless, with full venom, based on the faulty premise — but sweet emotions — that  a northern cabal, with full presidential charter, was there, at the ready, to do in the “South”!

    A fierce, anti-south northern cabal must also have driven the sensational report, by a business newspaper, that President Buhari’s “appointments” were skewed eight-to-two, in North’s favour.

    It was a scandalous stacking of cards, toward a preconceived direction, to suck in the unwary.  Brandishing a “fact-check”, its skewed “facts” indeed “proved” Buhari’s presidential appointments were 81 per cent “northern”.  But arrayed against fairer parameters, one-sided cynicism never barged so loud!

    Incidentally, the report excluded — cleverly? — ministerial appointees, perhaps because that did not paint the one-sided picture it was pushing.  Yet, that opened a more even vista into the subject.

    From the breakdown later given by presidential sources, the South West got the highest (40, after delivering 15.7% of presidential votes), even above the president’s native North West (30, which nevertheless gave him 46% of the votes).

    The newspaper’s mischief, if not outright malice, was even more manifest from the South East tally.  For 1.3% of the vote, that region got 22 ministerial appointments, only two less than North East’s 24 (18.5% of the vote), but one more than North Central’s 21 (for 14.7% of the vote) and a clear two above the South-South’s 20 (for an equally lowly 2.7% of the vote.)

    So long for reportorial fiction from a southern media, unfazed about cutting its nose to spite its face!

    Still, the ever ready riposte — where are the “juicy” portfolios?  Simple: if you want “juicy” portfolios (whatever that means) deliver juicy votes.

    Frankly, it is dishonourable and unconscionable to deliver minuscule vote but insist on ministerial juice!  The juice is no manna from heaven. Some citizens put it there by their votes.

    Still, this is no ringing endorsement of the Buhari presidency.  For its blunders, it must take adequate knocks, if only to show that the people are the masters in a democracy; and that the media is their chief agent to assert that right.

    But in seeking to chase a northern cabal, the southern media has itself developed a cabalistic mindset, which spews nothing but hate, malice and bigotry.

    That is a self-imposed tragedy — which shows how it might be under-developing Nigerian politics — and polity.

  • Good product, bad pitch

    Good product, bad pitch — that, in marketing terms, about captures the current “restructuring campaign”, to correct the anomaly of Nigeria’s “unitary federalism”.

    Sure, other things being equal, Nigeria needs to urgently re-federalize to development and prosperity; from the current unitary illusion of mass stagnation and poverty.

    And yes, all things considered, the most promising elixir would appear “restructuring”.  That tool is essentially economic.  But like everything Nigerian, it has been corrupted — one hopes not irredeemably? — by crass politics.

    Indeed worse: corrupted by the dross of other impurities that can only imperil its much desired realization.  Yet, without it, Nigeria appears fated to just wilt away.

    In the South West, its pristine forte, restructuring is polluted by the unfazed pushers of Yoruba nationalism, if not outright irredentism.

    To this insensitive lobby, restructuring is yet another umpteenth proof of a Yoruba superior world view, before which every other part of the country must crouch and bow!  It is pure manifest goodness, other fears be damned!

    But that is even the purest of this impure motive. When you mix this relative “purity” with the harsh campaign of the electoral losers of 2015, savagely spurring the stallion of “restructuring” to thrust themselves back where they once lost face, you can appreciate the harm they do to the cause.

    In the South East, the howling neophytes out there, as new converts bawling the sheer beauty of their new faith, have infected the cause with Biafra and allied malcontents.

    But their tactics to cope with the present pathology of losing power would appear without  prejudice to future strategies of a changed equation of power (or lolly) re-gained — restructuring be damned!

    So though for “restructuring”, the mythical “South” — for while Nigeria surely has a geographical South, it hardly has a political South — appears to band together, that sweetheart alliance is unlikely to hold, if the power calculus changes.

    Pray, if the South-South (the eternally cheated and disadvantaged minorities), under Goodluck Jonathan completely forgot “restructuring”, just for a few years of presidential glory, what is the assurance that “restructuring” won’t vanish, from the South East front, for a few years of Igbo presidency?

    Ay, President Jonathan staged a last-minute national conference towards some re-federalization.  But who doesn’t know that was cynical fobbing to fend off a looming defeat at the polls, after a most catastrophic tenure?

    Even in the South West, pristine home of restructuring, the dominant elite appears now split: between the brutal, self-serving activism by the Afenifere old guard, operating from the core philosophy of post-defeat sour grapes; and the new-found moderation of the triumphant bloc, that with Muhammadu Buhari’s North West in 2015, sent Jonathan and his court to presidential purgatory.

    But even with the purest of motives, selling “restructuring” in the current stentorian tones, which suggests a plus for the South but a minus for the North, is set to send the North stonewalling.

    Yet, the North is no god to be propitiated, by retaining a nation-wrecking unitary federalism — whatever that means — that thrives on rent to a few; but death to the majority.

    Indeed, if it quakes with fear, that comeuppance would appear well earned.  For all its dominance of the political space since independence, and its monopoly of the military era (save the Obasanjo accidental interregnum from 1976-1979), the northern dominant power elite has had little to show — not to their long-suffering masses, not to Nigerians as a whole.

    Still, comeuppance or no, the North is unlikely to just roll over, if it fears the new order might fairly dominate it, as by the present order, it has unfairly dominated others.

    It’s a perfectly normal human reaction.  Yet, the present order could lead nowhere but collective death.  That’s why the “restructuring” pitch must change tack.

    “Restructuring” is not necessarily against the North for its past dominance.  It is rather for a future Nigerian renaissance, that is a win-win for all.

    Clinical thinking therefore demands a change of message, which aim is to secure a pan-Nigeria consensus.  The North and the South must therefore talk to each other, instead of yelling at each other.

    That brings the discourse back to the “mythical” South, politically speaking.

    It is good the “South” is developing some consensus over “restructuring”. But it would even be better for it to first explore and cement confidence and trust-building core principles.  Otherwise, that alliance could vanish at the very first show of storm.

    The old West (now South West) and the old East (now South East and South-South) had always drifted apart, vis-a-vis their political engagement with the North.

    The last Southern Governors Meeting, before this year’s, was in 2005.  Shortly after, everything fizzled out.

    It was the high noon of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) hegemony, and the whole swathe of the old East was too busy enjoying federal power, to pay attention to any “southern” distraction.

    At the beginning of the 2nd Republic (1979-1983), the Nigeria People’s Party (NPP), which won in the old Anambra and Imo states — and also in Plateau State — opted for an alliance with the North-led National Party of Nigeria (NPN), as against the West-led Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN).  The two minority states back then in the old East, Rivers and Cross River, were NPN states.

    At its end, even after the NPN-NPP alliance had collapsed, the Progressive Parties Alliance (PPA), supposed to fuse UPN, NPP, Great Nigeria People’s Party (GNPP) and a faction of Aminu Kano’s People’s Redemption Party (PRP), could not agree on a common presidential candidate between Zik and Awo.

    They went into the 1983 election separate; and got all roasted by the NPN formidable rigging incinerator.

    The 1983 experience was a near-encore of the tail end of the 1st Republic, when the United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), between the rump of the West’s Action Group (AG) and the East’s National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC).

    That, too little, too late, came after the Northern People’s Congress (NPC)-NCNC power alliance had crashed.  An ill-fated boycott ensured the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) — NPC plus Ladoke Akintola’s Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) — romped into a crushing victory, that nevertheless crushed the 1st Republic.

    Could the AG’s offer to NCNC, for an alliance that would have crowned Zik as prime minister at independence, in exchange for Awo as Finance minister, have made a difference in East-West entente, and therefore better southern solidarity?  That is pure conjecture now.

    But the notorious fact of history is that rapprochement never came to be.  Nothing, in the present, suggests the ancient feuds that drove that development have disappeared, especially with the raw pathosis  that oozed from Nnamdi Kanu’s scalding Biafra campaign.

    This foray into history is not to prove an intra-South entente is impossible.

    Rather, it is to show it would be a hard road to travel — like any other good thing.

    Therefore, the geographical South must first morph into a cohesive political South, before it can pull off a pan-Nigeria consensus on “restructuring”.

    Even then, “restructuring” must be served as win-win, not win-lose.  That is the logical way to earn a pan-Nigeria consensus, to productively re-federalize Nigeria.

  • BudgIT and stats for stats’ sake

    BudgIT and stats for stats’ sake

    BudgIT’s dire verdict, on states and their debts, made sensational headlines.  But it was hinged on two suspect premises.

    One, the delegitimization, if not criminalization, of debts.  That premise is arch-conservative, if not outright archaic.

    Good old usury is at the core of any financial system, international or local — barring the alternative Islamic banking.  It makes the big difference between working for money and money working for you.

    Besides, with the neo-con unrelenting screeds about smaller government and more private sector participation, the debt market gathers more fillip.

    BudgIT’s second suspect premise is a fixation with growth without development.  Its analyses gripe at “heavy” debts.  But it freezes its mind to whatever developmental goods such “heavy debts” could do.

    That rings true of Lagos (which BudgIT canonizes as the best) and Osun (which BudgIT demonizes, using its one-track technique, as the worst).  It would appear not completely right, if not outright wrong, on both scores.

    But there is a valid fact that appears to drive BudgIT’s fear — and dire verdict: both the Federal Government and the states have a parlous record of misapplied debts, thus causing socio-economic troubles for the future generation.

    Still, not even legitimate fears should cripple financial creativity, in the grim reality of vanishing resources.

    If you don’t have the cash to stimulate economic growth and midwife development by providing social infrastructure, and you still shun the debt market, all you are running is a voodoo economy that, sooner than later, would collapse on you.

    That is the point BudgIT missed; but which Lagos and Osun excellently push.  That has helped to revamp the Lagos economy as a national model.  It may yet push the Osun economy outside the perpetual woods.

    Ironically, the statistical nay voices, that back then told Lagos it was heading for doom, when the Bola Tinubu governorship started the financial revolution way back in its first term (1999-2003), is now telling Osun it’s on a scary journey to nowhere.

    Yet, linked to its meagre earnings from the Federation Account, Osun would appear to trump every other state, in the quality of infrastructure it has birthed.  The creative use of debt did the seeming magic.

    Now, how can that be bad for anyone — the Osun economy, the Osun people or even the Osun future generation, on whose behalf BudgIT’s ringing stats yelp, in an amusing irony of statistical hysteria?

    But back to Lagos and BudgIT fears.

    When Lagos embarked on massive urban infrastructure renewal, most — if not all — of the roads were not tollable: Kudirat Abiola Way (old Oregun Road), Awolowo Road, South West Ikoyi, Yaba-Lawanson-Itire road, Ikotun-Igando road, LASU-Iba road and the Lagos Business District, complete with the renovation of the Tinubu fountain and statue, finished at the tail-end of the Tinubu government in 2007.

    Yet, all the roads gave business and commerce a fillip, boosted real estate value and enhanced the state’s ability to expand its tax net and boost internally generated revenue (IGR).

    Lagos couldn’t have achieved this great infrastructural upgrade by depending on conventional sources of funding, with an IGR of N600 million a month as at May 1999.

    Yet, when Lagos started its financial activism, getting into the bond market and approaching international finance agencies for developmental loans, the emotive lobby wept and howled and whimpered that Lagos was shackling its future generation to soulless peonage.

    The present realities have debunked that.  Lagos, by those very actions, has become a model economy among Nigerian states.

    But if Lagos continues to borrow — by BudgIT’s stats, at 24.2 per cent of states’ total debt, the highest borrower — it is because the job is not yet done; and it’s still in the throes of expanding its economy to suit its sweet-sour bill as the country’s foremost land of opportunities, not because its managers are reckless or soulless.

    Yes, a bit of caution would do — everything after all, no matter how well done, can be improved upon.

    But that caution should come with empathy — empathy, springing from thorough understanding; not statistical stacking of cards that spreads needless alarms.

    Back to Osun, and BudgIT’s penchant for stats for stats’ sake, flowing from a wilful lack of appreciation of the complete picture, is well and truly alarming.

    Here is Osun, in BudgIT’s dock, verbatim as reported by Premium Times:

    “Osun’s spending plan over the years came with the borrowing of N18.38 billion to build six mini-stadia to amuse, and at best make its youthful population active.

    “Also borrowed was N30 billion at a lending rate of 14.75 per cent, for roads and waterworks infrastructure which generate no income and therefore cannot provide for long-term sustainability repayment plans.

    “Another N11.4 billion was borrowed at a 14.75per cent lending rate to build schools, which would also unfortunately bring in no income into the State’s coffers. Even more debilitating to Osun’s economic prospects was that the repayments for all these debts ran concurrently, and deductions were made out of whatever revenue was to accrue to Osun State.

    “Taking these loans which did nothing to improve internally generated revenue amid large Overhead costs means the bulk of the State’s existing revenue is instead diverted into debt repayment.”

    Running through the BudgIT “charge sheet” is the craven worship of capital; and abject contempt for human development — hence the gratuitous lines about building mini-stadia to “amuse” Osun youth (so, you can’t boost the economy through sports?); and waterworks not fetching cash.

    Yet, the human is the most critical in the developmental mix.

    Indeed,  BudgIT’s claim that borrowing to build schools is wasted investment, simply because it doesn’t translate to instant cash, is nothing but ringing fallacy.  Behind every investment is the concept of delayed gratification.

    Besides, between Osun and Ondo, two neighbouring states, with two parallel situations, history beckons.

    Two governments, at very early stages in their lives, staged educational summits.  While Osun used its to revamp and radically modernize education, and still preserve Awolowo’s most vital developmental legacy of free education, Ondo, by vibes coming out of its summit, appears preparing to wriggle out of it.  Yet, Ondo grosses some coins from oil, Osun doesn’t.

    If these “expat experts” (with apologies to Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters) cannot appreciate the sacrifice to the future generation that went into Osun’s thinking, they can at least save the empty statistics that not only suggests the contrary but also helps to mislead the unwary.

    The penchant to mislead also applies to BudgIT’s claim that because some roads are not tolled, they don’t — or can’t — contribute to IGR.  That is another fallacy; as the Lagos experience has shown.

    Lagos and Osun are battling the odds in the worst of economic times. The least they deserve is misleading stats, that shut from its sight the complete picture.

  • Gani and the curse of Aole

    Gani and the curse of Aole

    Gani Adams’ thirst for the controversial Aare Ona Kakanfo title, is clearly  a push for self-actualization, after attaining the basics of life.

    But given the jinx that comes with the deal, a yearn for societal recognition never comes with more baleful sweepstakes.

    Ola Rotimi, in Kurunmi, put the ruin of Kurunmi of Ijaye, yet another Kakanfo, in the tale of the tortoise and his doomed travel.

    Mr. Tortoise, the playwright teased, when would you return from your journey?

    When I am disgraced, disgraced, disgraced, the tortoise chanted, as if stung and frozen by hubris, when I am disgraced!

    Mr. Tortoise was the powerful Kakanfo Kurunmi of Ijaye, for picking war, when he could have chosen peace, against the equally formidable Ibadan army, led by Basorun Ogunmola.  At the end, Kurunmi perished, with his five sons; and his city lay in ruins.

    That was 1861, when the Oyo Empire was on a crumbling run.

    Shortly after, Latoosa, the Ibadan war general, had a crack at the Kakanfo title.  Baited to mount the Olubadan stool, he balked:  the Olubadan was a “woman”, since by the Ibadan constitution, he was forbidden from going to war. But he, Latoosa, was a man of valour!

    His wish, unspoken but loud enough, was to annex Olubadan to his Kakanfo title.  But at the end, not even the mighty Latoosa could push his wish through.

    Latoosa fell ill and died during the Kiriji campaign (1877-1893); forcing a constitutional stalemate.  That merged into a hideous stalemate the Kiriji War had become, against the Ekiti Parapo, under the hardy Ogedengbe of Ilesa.  Latoosa, history records, was the last general to lead Ibadan’s last war as a military power.  But he didn’t conquer.

    Still, Kurunmi and Latoosa were latter-day victims of the Kakanfo jinx.  The jinx itself originated from the ancients, marked by the dreadful Aole curse.

    Alaafin Aole so wanted to get rid of the powerful Kakanfo Afonja, the Ilorin warlord and most dreaded war general in the Oyo Empire of his day, who without much ado, annexed the Kakanfo title, after Kakanfo Oyabi died.

    Alaafin Aole didn’t like that one bit.  So, he saddled Afonja with an un-winnable war, such that after 90 days, and the Kakanfo didn’t triumph, he would commit suicide, by the severe code of his office.

    But Afonja and war confederates somewhat penetrated the plot and hatched a counter-plot.  From the battle zone, they sent the king an empty but covered calabash — a grim symbol of total rejection, at which the Alaafin must end his life.

    Aole did.  But he laid a curse — the dreaded curse of Aole — which doomed the Yoruba country to endless wars, plunder and capture; by kith-and-kin and by aliens.

    Afonja of Ilorin, true enough, was the first victim of that curse.  He not only died in his final battle with his Fulani usurpers, under the treacherous Alimi, he also lost Ilorin, his city, to them.

    Thus began the Kakanfo jinx — which seems to have endured, with its latest victim the late MKO Abiola, who died in detention in 1998.

    That is the title Gani Adams just inherited.

    But as the Kakanfo of the ancient era was soaked in jinx, the Kakanfo of the modern era is drenched in the fierce politics of the Yoruba progressive/conservative divide — one, bowing to the moral majesty of the Ooni of Ife (custodian of the Yoruba cradle); the other, holding fealty to the imperial supremacy of the Alaafin of Oyo (proud inheritor of the Oyo Empire, the sole imperial state in Yoruba history).

    Under the British colonial order and Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Action Group (AG) government in early independence years, the Ooni of Ife, Oba Adesoji Aderemi (reigned 1930-1980), had scaled unmatched ascendancy, which climaxed in his appointment as Western Region governor (1960-1962), and re-established his post-empire preeminence in Yorubaland.

    In contrast, no thanks to Alaafin Adeniran Adeyemi II’s squabble with the AG establishment (deposed in 1955 after mounting the throne in 1945), the Alaafin had sunk in the opposite direction.

    So, when as Regional Premier, Samuel Ladoke Akintola (SLA) became the Aare Ona Kakanfo (the first in the modern era) in 1962, it was in the thick of the AG schism and regional crisis.

    It was also a rally, by the Oyo-speaking Yoruba, for one of their own, against the Awo AG establishment.  It was Yoruba neo-civil war under high-wire politics, with high calibre casualties.

    Awo went to gaol.  But SLA also perished in the 15 January 1966 coup, to sustain the jinx that the Kakanfo seldom ended well.

    The MKO Kakanfo story also followed the same pattern.  Abiola’s Kakanfo path was the Yoruba conservatives’ challenge to Awo’s post-2nd Republic (1979-1983) progressive mainstream.  MKO had led a futile charge, from the conservative National Party of Nigeria (NPN), to uproot that hegemony.

    Though MKO was named Kakanfo in 1988 (three clear years after the fall of the 2nd Republic and one year after Awo’s death), it was in the context of the Ooni-Alaafin tango for supremacy in the old Oyo State (now Oyo and Osun states).  Abiola, a Gbagura man from Egbaland, had an Oyo ancestry.  His father was Balogun of Ojoo, Ibadan.

    Still, 10 years later in 1998, the Kakanfo jinx struck again.  MKO died in the Abacha gulag, after languishing there for four years, for challenging the lawless annulment of his presidential mandate.  Cold comfort, though: MKO died a martyr of Nigerian democracy.

    Ironically, Gani Adams is blundering on the Kakanfo title, after the rather rash politicking of 2015.

    The South West progressives had split, with the old Awoists supporting President Goodluck Jonathan, simply because they detested the other faction, under Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, doing an electoral entente with Muhammadu Buhari’s North West.

    Adams, with Dr. Frederick Fasehun, threw their Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) lot with the Afenifere grandees, but in exchange for electoral lucre — a controversial oil pipeline contract.

    OPC also later rallied for their commander-in-chief with a Lagos show of brazen outlawry, just to press their loyalty.  They lost the election but OPC gained fresh notoriety, derision and contempt from civil and polite society.

    Ironically, with his Kakanfo announcement, Gani’s old allies in the Afenifere camp have thumbed it down  as rash, callow and over-ambitious.  But the other camp has given him qualified encouragement.

    Is this then the birth of fresh electoral alliances for 2019?

    Adams himself has been rather excitable over the Kakanfo jinx — who wouldn’t? — telling anyone he would buck it by not dying young.  That is no illegitimate wish, and his lovers would say amen to that.

    But the Kakanfo is not unlike fearlessly treading where angels dread.  Still, however his tenure ends nestles in the womb of time.

     

  • CAN of cant

    CAN of cant

    CAN, the Christian Association of Nigeria, could easily have played Immanuel Kant, pushing the tenets of the faith as Cthe categorical imperative for salvation.

    But instead, CAN has embraced cant.  By that, it shuns the severe majesty of its faith; and waddles and waffles in empty controversy.

    Kant (1724-1804) was the German philosopher, whose famous “categorical imperative” was about the most sweeping, the most vigorous and the most robust in moral philosophy.

    To Kant, there is absolutely no cant; absolutely no waffling.  Man has no choice but to follow, as duty, the severe code to do good and shun evil.

    That moral duty is imperative.  It is the strict dictate of reason.

    Imagine CAN following this Kantian philosophy? It would push, as own initiative, the war against corruption with Christ-like zeal.  Instead, CAN is neither-nor, to the gravest moral crisis of this generation!

    Like Christ Himself, it would epitomize the straight-and-narrow.  But it pushes its democratic right to the wide-and-merry.

    The result? CAN hustles and bustles in the sewers, just to be seen to fight “Islamization”, real or phantom!

    The latest, in that quixotic quest, is the CAN fiery campaign against Sukkuk, the Islamic development bond; and its ferocious war against Islamic banking.

    How did CAN come to this sorry pass?  It is dross of carnal preferment, dating back to the Goodluck Jonathan years, when CAN President, Ayo Oritsejafor — somebody shout hallelluyah! — appeared not unlike that regime’s Rasputin.

    Remember Grogori Yefimovich Rasputin (1869-1916)?  He was the Russian self-proclaimed mystic, who had more than decent spiritual influence on the doomed family of Czar Nicholas II of imperial Russia, on account of his grip on Czarina Alexandra.  Rasputin was assassinated in 1916, aged 47.

    Save the Olusegun Obasanjo years, the Muslims had been in charge so long that the Christians, in any case under CAN President Oritsejafor grabbed, with two hands, the rare chance to corral high state influence.

    The politics of South-South solidarity, under a minority southern president, all put it together for Pastor Oritsejafor.  Before long, CAN’s influence was vice-like in the Jonathan court.

    But what CAN forgot was that the organized Muslim Umma themselves, under the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA), had also run themselves into a ditch, on the annulled 12 June 1993 presidential election.

    Again, the NSCIA tormentor-in-chief, at that great fall, was politics-induced cant.  This was spectacular because the chief dramatis personae, in that gripping, dirty drama, were fellow Muslims.

    MKO Abiola, a Muslim from Western Nigeria, was the victim-in-chief.  So was Baba Gana Kingibe, MKO’s running mate, another Muslim from the North East.

    Ibrahim Babangida, self-named “military president”, another Muslim, from North Central, was the “annuller-in-chief”.  Yet another Muslim, from the North West, the late Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, former No. 2 to Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, when he was military head of state (1976-1979), headed the rally to sustain the annulment.

    Yar’Adua caused his faction of the victorious Social Democratic Party (SDP), led by Tony Anenih, SDP national chairman, to conjure up the so-called Interim National Government (ING), pending the re-run of an election pundits back then declared was the fairest and freest ever in Nigerian history.

    The NSCIA President, Ibrahim Dasuki, then Sultan of Sokoto, also hee-hawed, instead of arming himself with the moral courage — Kant-speak, the categorical imperative of Islam — to proclaim good and condemn evil.

    Base ethnic solidarity, therefore, trumped the high ideals of Islam.  Muslim-on-Muslim injustice triumphed; ethnic fealty was supreme lord and master over fidelity to faith.

    Well, God would not be mocked — and most of those involved in that manoeuvre ended in grief.  What is more?  The illusion that the North had a near-spiritual hold on national power and leadership vanished — like a mirage in the desert.

    That is a warning of history to CAN, for in the name of Christianity, it treads a path to perdition, fanning inter-faith hatred along the way.

    That brings the matter back to the Sukkuk question, Islamic banking and allied matters.

    CAN’s constant ”Islamization” screech, under current president, the Baptist Supo Ayokunle, is another Islam-Christianity ding-dong to shape Nigeria in own images.  It has nothing spiritual to it.  It’s just holy cant to corner carnal influence.

    Even on that score, Christianity holds the edge.  Thanks to the colonizing British, governmental business, the schools system and uniform, the working week, routine rest days, and court procedures are clearly Judeo-Christian.

    Indeed, such is the total British (read Christian) stamp on the courts, with its wig-and-gown, that the Alkali, Sharia and other courts are portrayed by a section of the media as a near-savage bastion.

    On their own part, the Muslims (thanks to northern domination of the federal executive since independence) have somewhat projected Islam as the ruling faith.  A few scribbles of Arabic on the currency has underscored that.  Also, some Arabic scrawls, on some military insignia, also register early Muslim influence.  But that would appear because northern elements were the first the British drafted into the Nigerian Army.

    Still, to drag this influence ding-dong into the Sukkuk debate, as CAN is hysterically doing, is rather rich.

    When Rauf Aregbesola, the Osun governor, pioneered Sukkuk, as cheap instrument of developmental funding, a lobby went berserk with ludicrous allegations.  Yet, that was a classic example of thinking outside the box, for a resource-challenged state, to build infrastructure, grow its wealth and enhance its internally generated revenue (IGR).

    Now, the Federal Government has adopted such smart thinking, and the best CAN can offer is infantile whining over “Islamization”!

    Of course, there is always a trade-off — are we not all supposed to be wary of the Greek and his gifts?

    Even Christianity was validly charged, as the deceitful vehicle of European colonization!  Yet, warts and all, pristine Christianity made its social marks, in education and health, to retain its pull and lustre.

    Sure, the Sukkuk would win Islam a few souls, just because of its social capital.  So would Islamic banking, which shuns the usury in conventional banking — which by the way is heavily Westernized (read Christianized — if not by tenet, then by culture).

    Therefore, except CAN can prove Sukkuk-funded roads are Muslim–exclusive — and they are not, as the Osun case has shown — then its case is pathetic.

    But CAN can counter this “onslaught” by championing corresponding “Christian” developmental finances, and usury-free “Christian” banking.  That way, it would have matched the Muslims in social capital, and returned Christendom Nigeria to its pristine straight-and-narrow way.

    In Kant-speak, that is the categorical imperative of the Sukkuk challenge.

  • Ajasin legend

    Ajasin legend

    Twenty years ago, Michael Adekunle Ajasin (1908-1997) died.

    Twenty years later, a yearly conference, in his name, has debuted; to be alternated between the University of Ibadan (UI) and Adekunle Ajasin Univeristy, Akungba-Akoko (AAU).  The first, of this conference, just held at UI, from October 3 to 4.

    Chief Ajasin was, pre-1st Republic, the primal brain behind Western Region’s epochal free primary education policy; 2nd Republic governor of old Ondo State (now Ondo and Ekiti states); and local chair of the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), to revalidate MKO Abiola’s annulled presidential mandate.

    Thus, across three epochs — pre-independence/1st Republic (1955-1966), the 2nd Republic civilian interregnum (1979-1983), and virulent military rule, under the duo of Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha (1985-1999, though Ajasin died in 1997), he stood by his sterling beliefs.

    These are developmental politics via free education; sane governance, birthing total service, unstinted sacrifice, and unimpeachable integrity; and the sanctity of the vote.

    He fought — and won — the Akin Omoboriowo Ondo gubernatorial heist of 1983.  He died fighting the Abiola presidential robbery of 1993.

    Indeed, in everything good, principled and noble, Chief Ajasin was a man of all seasons.

    But there is another man of all seasons, in Nigeria’s wide and merry way: two-time elected president and former military ruler, Olusegun Obasanjo.

    In the 20 years after Ajasin, Chief Obasanjo has done two presidential terms (1999-2007), emerged the first to rule Nigeria as a junta head and elected president, and erected the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL), of suspect moral progeny.

    On the literary plane, Ajasin was far less fecund, having to his quiet name, the rather deep Ajasin Memoirs and Memories, an autobiography, first published after his death in 2003.

    Compare that with Obasanjo’s slew of “My-s”: My Command, Not My Will, My Watch, et al, not to talk of This Animal Called Man, you could easily figure out who is the more fecund.

    Still, while Ajasin, in his quiet, candid way, espoused his life philosophy and how it fired his rich public service ethos, Obasanjo pushed his myriad of “My-s” to excoriate real or imagined foes, daft enough to want to share the spotlight.  Baba Iyabo shares his glory with nobody!

    Between Ajasin and Obasanjo, there are more parallels yet.

    Ajasin was primal brain behind the Obafemi Awolowo Western Region free primary education policy, that thrust the West ahead of other parts of Federal Nigeria.

    Obasanjo, on the other hand, as military head of state, introduced nationwide, the Universal Primary Education (UPE) policy; and, as elected president, the Universal Basic Education (UBE), covering the first nine years of formal education.

    On character building, vis-a-viz responsible citizenship, Ajasin and Obasanjo approached this task in their different ways.

    Ajasin as Awo, his friend and ideological soul mate in unrepentant social democracy (progressive politics, in Nigerian lingo), believed in man as the centre of development.  Pre-politics, Ajasin, as a teacher, used the classroom to unleash, in the lucky tender minds under his charge, his solid personal examples of honesty, integrity, discipline, sacrifice, service, community value and hard work.

    Obasanjo,  perhaps because of his military training, and conservative temper, adopted a more mechanistic approach.  As military head of state, he changed the National Anthem and introduced a National Pledge to boot.  He also brought back the comatose Nigerian National Honours, just to reward responsible citizenship.

    Yet, for all Obasanjo’s striving, the best he could bequeath Nigeria, after his first coming, was a corrupt civilian order, that buckled in just four years and three months, in the sorry 2nd Republic (1979-1983).

    Muhammadu Buhari was the cleansing rod, back then.  But his regime hall-marked the dawn of the grimmest era of Nigeria’s military rule, which Babangida and Abacha drove to the very sewers.

    In his second coming?  His best legacy, after two presidential terms and two successors, in who he had a rather heavy hand, is another cesspool of sleaze, though he insists on his personal probity.  Again, Muhammadu Buhari, now as elected president, is the fall guy to clean up the Obasanjo era dirt!

    But on Obasanjo’s personal probity, no one can say no: the man is no convict of sleaze.  Yet, no one can say yes either, for it is his golden word against others’ wooden — these others, to be sure, no best friends of his.

    Still, Obasanjo sounds too eerily like the Soyinka tiger (with all due respect to our own WS), that proclaims his own tigeritude!  And from his ready torrents, the former president appears self-condemned to shrieking for attention, as long as he lives; and after that, maybe his OOPL would mouth his mechanical legacies.

    Contrast this to Ajasin, absolutely under no such pressure.  In life, he was taciturn as Obasanjo is boisterous.  In death, even quieter.  Nevertheless, he earned his legend in spectacular fashion.

    Proof?  The Ajasin Conference, organized by the Ajasin Foundation, in conjunction with UI’s Department of Arts and Social Science Education and the Adekunle Ajasin University (AAU), Akungba-Akoko’s Department of Arts Education.

    The chairman of the first day, Prof. Eyitope Ogunbodede, vice chancellor of the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, was Ajasin’s student at Owo High School, a 1975 product who, in his words, “retired with Papa” that year, from the school in which Ajasin was proprietor-principal.

    Ajasin didn’t name AAU after himself.  It was a grateful people who did — and that, after his death.

    UI’s Prof. Clement Kolawole, one of the brains behind the conference, was Ajasin’s chief typist when he was chairman of Owo Local Government till 1978.  By 1988, he with his AAU counterpart, Prof (Mrs) Nireti Duyilemi, Dean, Faculty of Education, AAU, Akungba, were course mates at AAU.  Both are personal testimonies and proud products of the Ajasin government’s free education policy.

    The old Yoruba intelligentsia rose to honour one of their own: Prof. Banji Akintoye, ace historian, with his brilliant lecture in Ajasin’s memory; Prof. Emanuel Babajide Lucas, retired UI professor of Mechanical Engineering,  Davidson A. Adeniyi, first chartered accountant in Imeri, Ondo State, even Afenifere chieftain, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, who — Yoruba political pathosis! — even dismissed a contributor, at one of the close sessions, as a member of the “Afenifere Rebel Group” (read Afenifere Renewal Group, ARG)!

    Also, there were Honourable Wale Oshun, ARG chairman, as reticent, soft-spoken but granite-principled as Papa Ajasin himself, Chief Ayo Afolabi and Prof. Adebayo Williams, prodigious academic-in-exile and heavyweight columnist of The Nation.

    Spice these personages with the young Turks — undergraduates, fresh graduates and post-graduate students that graced the occasion, and you’d understand true legacy.  Yet, Ajasin needed no bully commentaries or a gubernatorial shrine to push his case!

    That, is the making of true legacy.  And Nigeria, under Muhammadu Buhari, plodding the bog back to the straight-and-narrow, from the ruinous wide-and-merry, would do well to study the Ajasin essence — conquering self, mastering the non-material and dissolving the ‘I’ in the collective.

    That earned Ajasin his legend.  It may yet bale Nigeria out of its current moral woods!