The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olakunle Abimbola

  • Ondo and the tinder that wasn’t

    Ondo and the tinder that wasn’t

    The November 26 poll in Ondo State is just another ritual, in the cycle of gubernatorial elections.

    But its build-up is cresting in some high-octane action cinema sans the celluloid, with no less than three riveting plots rolled into one.

    Part of the sub-plots is history repeating itself without exploding in a farce.  But already, one historical parallel has popped up in smoke.

    The fate of the other is left in the womb of time.  Delivery date?  Latest November 26.

    Governor Segun Mimiko, undisputed master of political gaming for ultra-selfish ends, was the first to tempt fate.  He wanted history to repeat itself, in a classical study of the gambit as political grandstanding.

    No sooner had the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) replaced Eyitayo Jegede, SAN, with Jimoh Ibrahim, as the Ondo Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governorship candidate, than, open sesame, Ondo “burnt”!   At least, that was the media cliché, reporting the Akure dawn excitement of burnt tyres and ruptured transit.

    That was enough motivation for Mimiko, doting and patriotic governor, to scurry off on a presidential mission to save Ondo State: Muhammadu Buhari, the commander-in-chief, must ensure Ondo didn’t burn.

    Mimiko’s sinister reference was the 1983 gubernatorial-robbery-gone-awry gambit of the late Akin Omoboriowo and his National Party of Nigeria (NPN) doomed apostles of federal might. That set the old Ondo State (now Ondo and Ekiti states) ablaze, and eventually torched the 2nd Republic (1979-1983) to hell.

    Perhaps the dramatic gamer in Mimiko was even posturing with the classics of Nigerian electoral mayhem, the 1964/1965 “Operation Wetie”, in the “wild, wild West”.   That checkmated the Demo (Nigerian National Democratic Party) electoral robbers. But it also took down the 1st Republic (1960-1966) with it.

    But alas!  It all ended a damp squib — tinder that never was.  Somewhat, the intelligence agencies busted the blaze; and claimed it was allegedly contrived, by the same patriots frantically calling the fire service!

    History just repeated itself as farce!

    Incidentally, Mimiko is also embedded in the second essay at history repeat, this time by Olusola Oke, ex-PDP, ex-APC but now proud Alliance for Democracy (AD) candidate.

    When in 2007, the 2003 Mimiko-Agagu sweet song of political treachery turned hideous proverbs, Mimiko annexed the Labour Party (LP) as electoral platform.

    With that, he sacked the late Segun Agagu from the Alagbaka State House, despite a hideous rigging, even if that victory came only after months of fierce legal battles.

    Now, with Oke dumping the All Progressives Congress (APC) and birthing in AD — no thanks to a disputed primary where Oke came third behind winner, Rotimi Akeredolu, SAN, and runner-up, Segun Abraham — Oke is somewhat hopeful of replicating the Mimiko 2007 formula, of mounting a Lilliputian platform, to trounce mighty Gullivers, just to make the point treachery-induced doom is no respecter of party might.

    You could even add: AD, Oke’s pick, is at best a sleeping volcano, much potentially stronger, in the Yoruba South West, than an LP would ever be.  Everything: Action Congress, Action Congress of Nigeria and APC, started here from AD.

    So, might Oke be playing the AD card, as alpha-and-omega, to thrash Jegede, Mimiko’s protégée and Akeredolu, the scion of the federal ruling APC?

    An Oke triumph comes with rich symbolism.  For starters, an AD victory would eternally mock Mimiko’s perfidy against the late Adebayo Adefarati, the Ondo AD governor (1999-2003), who had Mimiko in his cabinet as Health commissioner.

    Mimiko broke ranks to cut a better deal for self, by defecting to Agagu’s PDP, to become Agagu’s secretary to Ondo State Government.  But by 2007, that sweetheart deal had turned ashen, replicating Mimiko’s umpteenth betrayal of former collaborators for personal gains.

    Again, an Oke triumph would push the narrative that even Abuja bows, when there is a South West resolve.  The AD symbolism, in it, would be especially sweet for South West ultra-nationalists.

    They would crow that the tactical AD routing of 2003 (no thanks to Olusegun Obasanjo’s well reported electoral double-cross of the then AD South West governors) is, in 2016, resulting in a strategic triumph, with the Ondo AD vanquishing both APC and PDP — one, the current federal ruling party, the other, the former one.

    In Oke, is Mimiko’s history about to repeat itself against Mimiko?  Wait until November 26 to be sure it’s no farce!

    That brings the discourse to the last of the triple plots in this engaging gubernatorial drama: Akeredolu, the APC candidate.  Even in this third leg of the plot, the Iroko is rooted!

    The last time round, Akeredolu aka Aketi, was the chief beneficiary of a process at which he now rails and howls — that little matter of intra-party candidate imposition, by which he clinched the  2012 Ondo ACN ticket.

    Back then, this same Mimiko proved his nemesis by playing the primordial card, of some fictive foreign marauders coming to corner the Ondo treasury, should Akeredolu win.  But with the Iroko’s terrible devaluation in street value four years later, what happened?  Did Ondo native marauders clean out the Ondo exchequer?

    The Ondo APC crisis, you must recall, started with Bola Tinubu’s reported “endorsement” of Segun Abraham (hardly a crime, but clearly impolitic).

    Aketi screamed “imposition”, which it was not, though the Abraham campaign received a clear boost, and the Akeredolu camp felt disadvantaged.  Then came insane threats and juvenile boasts, from the Aketi camp, that would almost always win the war but never secure the peace.

    Then the Aketi primary election triumph, which soon turned ashen, no thanks to allegations of delegate fiddling — allegations strong enough to warrant a reported 3-2 split decision, by the APC appeal body, to order a fresh re-run, which the APC National Working Committee (NWC) vetoed.

    That made Oke to scurry to AD.  Although Robert Borrofice, another top primary contender has reconciled with Aketi, Abraham maintains a no-retreat-no-surrender posture.  That can hurt no one but his APC.

    And horror of horrors!  The Ondo imbroglio triggered the Tinubu riot act — sack John Odigie-Oyegun, APC national chairman, or else!  But that threat Abuja seems to have rebuffed, leaving the ruling APC in a present limbo of what it was against what it would be.

    Meanwhile, Akeredolu has an election to win.  And he would appear well and truly fortified by his coalition.

    Snag is, with the Jimoh Ibrahim aka Atiba threat to the Jegede PDP candidacy, a desperate Iroko is back to his default setting of cutting a deal with just anyone, including Lucifer!

    Meanwhile, the ideological-neuter Oke goes on a grand blitz of milking AD’s primordial “progressive” value, in concert with his own reportedly rather high street presence.

    So, to win, can the Aketi coalition hold — or will they melt, when the chips are down, not unlike the three witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, whose solid-seeming assurances went up in pure smoke, as Birnam Wood “moved” to Dunsinane; and Macduff, not “born of woman”, eventually emerged to slay Macbeth?

    Ripples is back at the observatory, watching this gripping movie.  Game on, folks!  Absolute silence and no disturbance, please!

  • From Awo to Tinubu

    From Awo to Tinubu

    It has been unceasing bedlam from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) — unceasing bedlam that suggests unceasing dissonance.

    A grave dissonance that paints two armies, locked under the same command, but sworn to a fight-to-finish, from which no soul might survive.

    But that ode to unbridled anger automatically shutters the grand significance of the electoral breakthrough of 28 March 2015, starting from the North Vs West no-retreat-no-surrender temper of the Obafemi Awolowo era; to the hideous stalemate of the June 12, 1993 presidential election annulment.

    That annulment consumed both MKO Abiola (the winner) and Sani Abacha (the usurper); but relegated Ibrahim Babangida (the “annular”) into something of the living dead, in Nigeria’s hurly-burly politics of endless conspiracies.

    Such muddying up of waters is fine by the heinous characters, plotting and scheming to ship-wreck the state for personal fortune.

    But it would be plain catastrophe for those in the opposite camp, clearing the perpetual mess, a camp which incidentally both President Muhammadu Buhari and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu belong.

    So, if the APC work themselves into an explosive emotional lather, that suggests intra-party reasoning has imploded.  That is bad news; which sketches a party on a merry voyage to self-ruin.

    But make no mistake.  Were Ripples to weigh in, on any side of the reported principal disputants of Buhari and Tinubu, his sympathies would be with Tinubu.

    The reason is simple.  Given the stupendous powers of the Nigerian presidency, Tinubu is the clear underdog.  Besides, a detached interpretation of the emerging facts, about the dispute, shows Tinubu as the wronged party.

    Worse: most of the wrongs would appear to stem from the sheer ingratitude to deny and undermine Tinubu his true place in the APC triumph, and the subsequent sharing of political spoils.

    Yet, Ripples’ thinking would be much more strategic than raw anger, to willy-nilly tear down the 2015 alliance. Neither Buhari nor Tinubu would benefit from that.

    Of course, when unflagging emotion rules, mischief and sheer folly leap in.  That perhaps explains why a Bukola Saraki lobby would, in a piece written by Abdulwahab Oba, chief press secretary to Kwara Governor, Abdulfattah Ahmed (‘Many troubles of the ruling party’,  The Nation,  October 27), would equate Saraki’s perfidy against his party for personal gain, with Tinubu’s intra-APC odyssey.

    An enemy of my enemy is my friend may well be an unfazed Machiavellian quip.  But the Oba piece was amity-in-grudges pushed too far.

    While the Saraki misadventure draws odium to itself by its sheer perfidy, the Tinubu challenge draws sympathy by the essential fairness of its claim.  Let no one mix up the two.

    The emotive opportunism from the Saraki camp also draws attention to the rather revealing profile of Tinubu’s latter-day supporters in this new campaign: the Afenifere old guard, the Femi twain of Fani-Kayode and Aribisala, a pair that guns for raw emotions, doubly sure their victims are unthinking robots, if not outright zombies; and of course, the unfazed champion of gubernatorial push-and-shove, Ekiti’s Ayodele Fayose, who with every second, continues to blight the high office of governor.

    Of these latter-day Tinubu friends, perhaps only the Afenifere old guard could claim something of a Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, who committed himself to slaying Caesar not because he hated his bosom friend, but because he loved Rome!

    Even then, Afenifere would appear driven by the same philosophy as the so-called Buhari cabal: primordial distrust, ogling ethnic nationalism, bordering on ethnic irredentism. That is bad for all.

    The others in the assemblage?  Equal-opportunity mischief merchants, that thrive only in confusion.  Throw in the vitriol the Fani-Kayodes, the Aribisalas and the Fayoses hauled at the enterprise of 28 March 2015, and you probably would figure out their base motives, by this new-found solidarity.

    Which is why the Buhari and Tinubu camps must pause, eschew whatever bitterness plaguing their hearts and constructively engage each other.  This battle is theirs to lose — and lose they will, if they don’t immediately wear their cap of vigorous thinking.

    That brings the subject back to the Awo and Tinubu era in Nigerian politics, using June 12 as mid-point.

    To start with, June 12 demonstrated — and conclusively too — the utter futility of any segment of Nigeria essaying a domination agenda. Yes, Babangida pulled off his annulment crime. MKO — and wife, Kudi — died without consummating his presidency.  And Abacha perished in sleaze.

    But what did that yield those rascals that hid behind the ‘North’ to perpetuate that evil?  A capitulation six years after in 1999, that returned Olusegun Obasanjo, defeating another Yoruba son, Olu Falae, just to appease the MKO injustice.

    That should be serious food-for-thought for the so-called cabal allegedly hiding behind Buhari to clip Tinubu’s wings; and erecting malicious blocks between the two, for personal and ethnic gains.

    By the way, that experiment from 1999, no matter how imperfect, has not only birthed Nigeria’s first minority President, Goodluck Jonathan, whose presidential ruin is best forgotten; it has also delivered the defeat of a federal ruling party, in the landmark election of 2015, despite the unconscionable dollar-rain and sundry subterfuge, by the then extant powers.

    However, the alliance lined up behind Tinubu, eager to smash the progress he and Buhari have chalked, also needs some historical checks.

    Sir Ahmadu Bello, the late Sardauna of Sokoto and premier of the 1st Republic Northern Region, was quoted to have sworn to dip the Koran into the Nigerian southern sea.  Even if that quote was apocryphal, conquest was perhaps the only world the Sardauna knew, being the scion of the Usman Dan Fodio Islamic conquest of the much of Nigeria’s North.

    But he was historically matched by Chief Obafemi Awolowo, whose counter-world was freedom, since bar slave trade and British colonization, his  Ijebu people were never captives to any other peoples.

    That shaped the Awo no-retreat-no-surrender temper of the 1st Republic.  The tragic push to alter that balance, by a parliamentary forgery that created a phoney Western emergency, led to the crash of the 1st Republic.

    Now, that collapse offers two valid lessons.  First, the Tinubu protégées in Abuja, and top APC hierarchs, friends turned alleged foes, would do well to remember the tragic fate of Chief SLA Akintola.

    The Yoruba world may have changed drastically between 1962 and 2016. But little has changed in the Yoruba psyche’s zero tolerance for perfidy, particularly when the victim is perceived right and just.

    That canonized Awo.  It may yet canonize Tinubu.  But the Yoruba can do without new age SLAs, for aside from his rankling political memory, SLA was among the brightest and best of his era.

    Then, the Afenifere foes-turned-friends.  They were so bitter about Tinubu’s bold entente that made APC a reality, and landed Buhari the presidency.  However, they now are near-rabid in their Tinubu support.

    Still, they must admit some fixation with the past, which Tinubu broke to achieve the 2015 breakthrough — an entente that, other things being equal, promised some pan-Nigeria rapprochement.

    Buhari and Tinubu must lock themselves up somewhere and talk.

    Lest the ongoing conspiracies, of subversive love and base motives across the aisle, smash what they have worked extra-hard to build.

  • NBA, NJC and the burden of history

    NBA, NJC and the burden of history

    From an initial thunder of “judicial emergency”, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) is softening its war cry.  It now wants judges, accused of corrupt practices, to recuse themselves, until they clear their names.

    That is tribute to common sense.

    But not so from the National Judicial Council (NJC) war room.  That body seems fated, with all due respect, to that cynical old quip: those the gods would destroy, they first confound!

    In that rarefied NJC chamber, scoffing down from the clouds at the unlearned hoi polloi on the dusty streets, stubborn procedure must trump common sense.

    That fixation with technicality is clear hubris, which may yet prove fatal for the  NJC brand integrity.

    That was clear from its stonewalling — not entirely unreasonable — of the Department of State Services, DSS’s rather cheeky call on NJC to “suspend” judges it is accusing of sleaze.

    NJC was right to bristle: if DSS could go solo, and with satanic gusto, jettisoning constitutionally stipulated procedures on disciplining errant judges, why doesn’t it complete its solo demolition run?

    The DSS Leviathan doesn’t need NJC’s puny powers to suspend anyone, does it?  Perfect sarcasm!

    Still, it would be extremely reckless, with all due respect, for NJC to spurn the NBA-offered soft-landing.

    For one, the NBA suggestion gives the judiciary the opportunity to regain a moral high ground.  What is more?  NJC would suspend nobody; and would continue to hold DSS in high judicial contempt its hurt soul now needs for mental balance.

    Yet, the accused judges would graciously stay off, pending their days in court, as they would in any civil community.  The onus would now be on DSS to prove its allegations, thus defanging the so-called trial by the media.

    For another, the initiative would have been the judiciary’s.  That would send the message that though it would resist — to the death, if necessary — the DSS’s alleged jungle methods, it would not condone any judicial corruption.

    But by its response to the NBA pitch, it would appear clear the NJC would rather, parodying English Poet, John Milton in Paradise Lost, rule by its stubborn procedure in hell, rather serve with it in heaven!

    If you think the heaven-hell comparison is extreme, just take a glimpse at the judicial netherworld NJC, by its stubborn insistence on procedure, is pushing.

    It would not suspend judges, because DSS usurped procedure by its sensational arrests.  Neither would it hearken NBA’s plea that the accused judges recuse themselves.

    So, blimey!  His Lordship, accused of graft, arrogantly sits in judgment over others, in a sensational case of an alleged felon trying another alleged felon!

    If that is not the eminent judicial disgrace — and ruin — NJC is fleeing from, it is hard to contemplate a worse equivalent!

    Adegoke Adelabu, had he lived in these troubling times, would simply have snorted:  a judicial peculiar mess! To which his doting Ibadan country yokels would have roared, “judisia pen-kele-meeesssssiiiiiiiiii!”, with a few even attempting a yodel, in the hilarious hubbub of the moment!

    It is that peculiar mess of history that the contemporary judiciary (perhaps without fully realizing it) is grappling with.

    If the NJC must be fair to themselves, they must ask when the Nigerian Judiciary cascaded from the Mount Olympus of honour, to the Hades of disgrace, to borrow an illustration from Greek mythology.

    A proud national institution that earned near-universal acclaim with the likes of Taslim Elias, Chukwudifu Oputa, aka Socrates, Kayode Esho, Daddy Onyeama, Udo Udoma and Akinola Aguda (all of blessed memories) now diminuted to the grim conclave of what Justice Esho called “billionaire judges”, allegedly trading Justice — or more correctly, injustice — to the highest bidder!

    Remember that biblical racket, that riled the meek Christ Jesus to ire?  My father’s house of worship has become a den of thieves!

    Just replace, with the NJC, Pharisees and Sadducees and the colluding high priests feeding fat from that holy racket, and contemporary Nigerian judiciary may well find itself in that holy company of the Jews of yore!

    Yet, let no one, in romanticizing the past, be deceived that the judiciary had always been perceived spotless — at least by those in the unlearned streets, that neither knew law nor procedure.

    CJN Adetokunbo Ademola virtually made the law an ass for the ruling establishment to spur as they wished.   So,  when in 1967, he championed a National Conciliation Committee to fend off war — a noble enterprise — voices across the Nigeria-Biafra divide rejected him as a credible voice for mediation.

    Forty-nine years later, his grandson is one of the judges in the eye of the DSS storm.  If the allegations are proved, would it be from alleged personal failings? Or the case of the Biblical fathers eating sour grapes but setting their children’s teeth on edge?

    Justice Elias was razor-sharp, both as lawyer and CJN.  But as Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa’s attorney-general and Justice minister, he midwifed, on 29 November 1960 in the House of Representatives,  the parliamentary canonization of the legal voodoo that in 1962 supplanted the West, under the guise of a dubious emergency.  That proved the beginning of the end for the 1st Republic.

    Ironically, the “Elias solution” — searching for CJN, outside the Supreme Court’s present hierarchy, hangs like a sword of Damocles.

    The “weight of evidence” himself, the irreplaceable FRA Williams, SAN, would at dawn take a brief from Satan but balance it out at dusk with a brief from Christ and claim, in all honesty and integrity, he was bound by the lawyer’s creed!

    His opponents, particularly the equally irrepressible Gani Fawehinmi, SAN, SAM, did not like it.  But almost everyone agreed his motives were anything but robust fidelity to the law, even it became a bully crushing morality.

    That was the law yesterday, warts and all.  Still, the public perception of it was a great national enterprise which though imperfect, held humanly promises — profound promises founded on robust erudition and near-celestial integrity.

    The law today would appear the diametrical opposite.  Despite stellar though quiet work by probably a majority of Nigerian justices and lawyers, the overwhelming public perception is the Bench is yet another conclave of hustlers.  And that the Bar is not exactly aghast at that unholy racket.

    Help, the ghosts of Esho’s “billionaire judges” are haunting the hallowed chamber, and are fast turning it a hollow shell!

    That is the heavy burden of history the present generation NJC and NBA carry.  You don’t discharge that by instinctively raising a flag of solidarity, and stonewalling grave allegations with “defending the judiciary”.

    Corrupt judges are a scourge to justice, much more than any arbitrary DSS action, no matter how brazen.  And if justice departs from the judiciary, what is left?

    If that thinking necessitated NBA’s softening rhetoric, it is hugely welcome — but much more to the judiciary themselves.

    But when would the NJC wake up and, as the Americans would say, smell the coffee?

    Maybe when, to parody Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the hurly-burly is done, when the battle is lost and won!

  • Between Edo and Ekiti

    Just as well Edo has spurned a return to Eygpt, typified by the Lucky Igbinedion rot years (1999-2007); for a promise of Jerusalem, founded on the Adam Oshimhole years (2008-2016).

    That is what it ought to be — for the electorate, if they were not to embrace self-ruin, must exercise the vote with reason.

    The Edo electorate, by voting Godwin Obaseki, the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, over Osagie Ize-Iyamu, of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), seemed to have done just that.

    But that is not always given, with the Ekiti experience.

    Ekiti purportedly — purportedly because, latter information suggests that  poll was manipulated by the then extant powers — jettisoned the noble exertion of the Kayode Fayemi years, for a journey to nowhere, which Ayodele Fayose’s present government-by-impulse suggests.

    Indeed, between Adams Oshimhole and Kayode Fayemi, there are many parallels — beyond the fact that the one was pushing a protégée to succeed him after his constitutional limit of eight years; the other was seeking reelection after a first four-year term of hard and noble work.

    Like Fayemi, Oshiomhole was adjudged, at least going by disinterested verdicts, to have done stellar work, after previous years of uninterrupted ruin — good work that presaged exciting new promises.

    But like Fayemi too, Oshiomhole had an Achilles’ heel.

    In Fayemi, it was a distant, elitist persona that, though taciturn, hardly suffered fools gladly.  With razor-sharp intellect, he was Plato’s philosophical king looming over his commune of bemused country yokels.

    On the eve of a crucial election, therefore, he got a millstone of “arrogance” hung on his neck.  He was fated to sink in the electoral stream — and he did.

    In Oshiomhole, it was a razor-sharp tongue and devastating wit that took no prisoners.  Though puny of frame, not a few perceive him as the human equivalent of the belching battle tank, firing from all cylinders; and mowing down whoever is on its way.

    And you can’t even bet which is more lethal: his prowess-at-war; or the ultra-painful sting of his post-war whoops!

    To the Tony Anenihs and Igbinedions — father and son — of this world, the post-victory whoop was ringing and clear: we have tamed, slain and buried the godfathers!

    To Osagie Ize-Iyamu, a former protégée turned opponent, a most provocative challenge: hurry to court so I can prove your purported vote tally is a grand farce.  You’re just incapable of harvesting such number of votes!

    The outgoing Comrade-Governor is a great talker, to whom piercing wit and searing gloating are game. But while people in his camp lustfully roar as he lands his verbal bazookas, those at the receiving end resent him to the death; and are sworn to unhorsing him as spectacularly as he had verbally bombarded them.

    That was the grim danger in the Edo election.  At a point, like Fayemi in Ekiti, Oshiomhole’s great strides (in stark contrast to the near-paralysis of the Igbinedion years) was counting for near-nothing on the explosively emotive street.

    That suited the Edo PDP fine — anything that would divert attention from their own ruinous rule, when state resources were the exclusive pleasure of godfathers and their cronies.

    Like Ekiti too, Edo was almost condemned to a wilful embrace of its political nemesis, so much so that, at a point, Lucky Igbinedion, convicted for sleaze, was even bragging the next governor (read Mr.Ize-Iyamu) would emerge from his political family!

    If that had happened, that would have replicated Ekiti, where the people, at least by the result of that controversial election, merrily re-embraced Ayodele Fayose, a past ruin come to plague the present, and poison the future.

    You doubt that claim?  Just review Fayose’s infantile stunts since his second coming, the latest of which is his no-brainer that the 21 Chibok girls, just released from Boko Haram captivity, werePresident Buhari’s perfect ploy to deflect attention from the pains in the land!

    But Edo didn’t choose the Ekiti option.  By voting Godwin Obaseki, they chose the Lagos option of sustained development, that could only lead to prosperity.

    The Lagos experience started in 1999, under Governor Bola Tinubu. Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, built on that foundation.  Now, Akinwunmi Ambode is doing so.

    So, 17 years down the line — and still counting — the Lagos experience has become a national showcase.

    That could be the fate of Edo, but only if Mr. Obaseki stays focused on a strict and rigorous developmental agenda.

    For the first time in Edo history, a “progressive” agenda would power the state for at least 12 years, and if Mr. Obaseki wins reelection, 16 years.  That has never happened.

    In 1963, when the then Midwestern Region (now Edo and Delta states) was carved from the old West, the progressive Action Group gave way to the centrist National Convention of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC).  That was a development stall, for the new NCNC government could not match the old AGgovernment’s huge investment on social and physical infrastructure.

    In 1983, the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) electorally torpedoed the Ambrose Alli Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) governorship (1979-1983).

    And in the aborted 3rd Republic, Social Democratic Party (SDP) Governor John Odigie-Oyegun (now APC national chairman) left office in November 1993, after the Babangida transition programme collapsed, under the weight the June 12, 1993 presidential annulment crisis.  That was just 22 months, out of a 48-month tenure, barring reelection.

    Indeed, before the Oshiomhole years, conservative or centrist-leaning parties (witness NCNC, NPN, National Republican Convention and PDP) had cumulatively exercised power longer than progressive-leaning parties (AG, UPN, SDP, Action Congress of Nigeria and APC), with PDP’s Igbinedion enjoying the longest stretch of eight straight years; plus 17 months of illicit rule before the election tribunals voided Prof. Oserheimen Osunbor’s election in November 2008, to make way for Governor Oshiomhole.

    Contrast that to Lagos’ near-uninterrupted progressive rule: AG, UPN, SDP, Alliance for Democracy, Action Congress, ACN and APC and it could be validly argued that Lagos has gained far more from its progressive-leaning parties than Edo, with its centrist-conservative-progressive mishmash.

    Indeed, Asiwaju Tinubu’s reengineering of the Lagos government, with all its proven developmental wonder, was built on the earlier foundation of the Lateef Jakande years, and the AG thinking that weaned Lagos from NCNC dominance, in the Lagos Town (later City) Council politics.

    It could be validly argued that Nigeria is evolving into an ideological-neuter zone, with little definitive difference between political parties.

    That might well be. But that is strictly from an ideologue’s point of view. From a pragmatist’s perspective, progressive-leaning parties (cant and all) would appear more development-savvy than their conservative and centrist-leaning cousins.

    That is the legacy Mr. Obaseki is buying into.  That is why he must, in policy, be even morerigorous and focused than Mr. Oshiomhole; but in politics, much less controversial.

    Lest again, in the next season of elections, his opponents try to beam more on his perceived personal failings, in the cynical hope that would eclipse his stellar work as governor.

    He owes Edo that much, if he performs well in his gubernatorial tour of duty.

  • His Lordship, the rogue?

    His Lordship, the rogue?

    It doesn’t get more chastening — does it? — the portrait of a justice of the law as an alleged rogue!

    That jars on the very fundament of cultured society.

    And it doesn’t get more damning for civil society architecture — herding justices of the courts (including the Supreme Court) into detention, with alleged smoking guns, after a sting operation, by the secret police.

    Neither does it get more troubling: a governor — and a lawyer to boot! — dramatically speaking, hopping off the bed to block the arrest of a judge, alleged to have soiled his hands; and judge and governor allegedly conspiring to trot away vital evidence!

    His Excellency and His Lordship at a conspiracy?

    Besides, what is the nexus between the two — the one, enjoying legal immunity because his high office is supposed to be above board; the other, enjoying other constitutional privileges, because he is deemed an immaculate priest in the temple of justice?

    Did one illicitly aid the other, the past favour the beneficiary now returns, in his benefactor’s day of woe?

    So, if both shirk their responsibilities, can they, in all good conscience, hold on to the privileges, despite extant laws?

    The extant laws!  Yes, for that is where a party, in the emerging macabre drama, could be accused of resorting to self-help.  In arresting the judges,  DSS has been accused of “Gestapo tactics”.

    On this score, the gubernatorial case is clear-cut.  So long as he is in office, a governor enjoys immunity against criminal prosecution.  But does that allow him the laxity to indulge in alleged criminal behaviour?

    The judge’s?  Less so.  True, there are stated procedures to discipline an erring judge; and in fairness, the National Judicial Council (NJC) has latterly gone on the offensive to discipline some of such judges.

    Still, is there anything in the law that expressly forbids arresting and docking a judge, beyond the constitutional refinements of channelling grievances through the NJC, the Areopagus of judicial cleansing?

    Experts must provide specific answers to these questions to guide the polity, in these very unusual times!

    Jesus, the Christ, famously rued: my father’s house of worship has become a den of thieves!

    With this alleged governor-judge conspiracy, therefore, has Nigeria’s shrine of government become captive to a concert of executive and judicial rogues?

    And why a sting operation?  Is the Nigerian judiciary so much beyond redemption, in its alleged gobbling of sleaze, that even constitutional provisions to punish judges are so effete and ineffectual, hence this shock therapy?

    Shock therapy!  Will it achieve the desired purpose, teach the right lessons and send errant rats scampering into the hole?

    Or will it develop a life of its own, like some earthquake that could swallow the society, as we know it today?

    Questions, questions, questions!

    But instead of clear and dispassionate answers, it is the tragedy of contemporary Nigeria that everyone is diving into this troubling pool of high scandal; and pressing their constitutional right to an emotional splash.

    For starters, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) is flexing what its president calls a “judicial emergency”.

    There are also threats.  Thundered Abubakar Mahmud, SAN, NBA president, backed by a “war council” of four former NBA presidents, Wole Olanipekun, SAN, Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, J.B. Daudu, SAN and Augustine Alegeh, SAN: “I’ll be meeting with the CJN later tonight or tomorrow. There will be consequences,” he warned, “if these demands are not met.”

    The NBA stance is understandable, given the Bar-Bench esprit de corps.  However, whether it should be less combative and more calculative boils down to tactics and strategies it has decided to apply.

    Since it has first-hand information about the matter, at least much more than the general public whose sympathy it is trying to rally, it is only reasonable to respect its stance.

    Still, that bit on later meeting with the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), and threatening “consequences”, should the government not accede to its demands, border on the reckless, with all due respect.

    For starters, that puts the CJN on the spot.  However the NBA wants to engage the CJN, it should have kept to its chest; and not blabbed to the public.

    The NBA is, of course, entitled to its formalistic and legalistic view, which from its tone, presumes the arrests were to “intimidate the judiciary”.  But shouldn’t it have been a bit more nuanced about it all?

    What if DSS’s claims are proven, that the arrested judges were caught with some humongous cash in varied currencies, after a sting operation possibly after a tip-off, would the NBA not draw the CJN into unfair controversy, about using his office to shield corrupt elements in the judiciary?

    Would that not eventually weaken the CJN’s position, in the delicate balance of state power?

    The late Sabo Bakin Zuwo was a 2nd Republic Kano governor, accused of criminally warehousing public funds.  The press, ever so mischievous, dubbed him “Banking Zuwo”, after a devastating pun of his name.

    So, with alleged “Banking Zuwo” judges, can the NBA, or the CJN for that matter, beyond obdurate legalism, defend the conduct of judges allegedly warehousing huge cash at home, when they are not some illiterate Idumota traders mortally scared of the banking system?  What, by the way, might their motive be?

    Bakin Zuwo, of course, echoes a parallel in 1984, after the Buhari military regime had overthrown the Shehu Shagari 2nd Republic presidency (1979-1983).  It clamped most of the politicians in detention, and set up special tribunals to try the “corrupt” politicians.

    Just like now back then, NBA kicked — and to be fair, there were genuine fears those tribunals would not dispense justice.  Even then, the late Gani Fawehinmi broke ranks.

    Now, Femi Falana, SAN, is breaking ranks (claiming NBA, by its stand, risks protecting “corrupt judges”) — and, truth be told, the NBA would appear on more slippery grounds than it was in 1984.

    With all of these, can the NBA really afford to go toe-to-toe with the state, without risking its own integrity?  That is why NBA should show more wisdom than bellicosity.

    Of course, the human rights army has also weighed in with the ogre of looming dictatorship, claiming humiliating judges was tantamount to endangering democracy.

    That might well be.  But what if the judges first humiliated the law, by betraying their sacred oath?  Besides, “humiliating the judiciary”, on account of a few indicted judges, is hot but empty  gas.

    A few illicit judges cannot seek licit cover under the decent majority.  Indeed, keeping those bad judges humiliates the good ones.

    However, even the  Buhari Presidency must admit the sting operation, against the  judges, was nothing short of revolutionary.  So, DSS had better possess the evidences it claims it possesses.  Otherwise, it just might be the government’s last-ever romance with civil society.

    However the case pans out, the roiling notion of his Lordship, the Judge, as a thief should churn the tummy of everyone.

    So, whatever the posturing and counter-posturing, as both sides bluff and bluster, such a decadent judiciary should worry everyone.

    This is why Nigerians should navigate this sorry pass with more sobriety, and less grandstanding.

  • Samson in the House

    Samson in the House

    There appears a Samson in the People’s House, a people’s house with nary any people’s sympathy.

    And indeed, his warning is dire: if — or more chilling, when — I go down, you all go down with me!  That reminds you of the Samson complex, doesn’t it?

    The Biblical Samson, after fondly betraying himself to the sweet laps of Delilah, and got his locks — his power joker — cropped, requested of Jehovah to grant him a last burst of energy, with which he, with his Philistine traducers, would perish.

    Jehovah granted his wish.  So, Samson paid for his uxorious folly, while treacherous Delilah and fellow Philistines paid for their perfidy.

    Well, embattled Abdulmumin Jibrin was, on September 28, suspended as member of the House of Representatives. Before, as the Yoruba would say, melodious tunes turned subversive proverbs, he was chairman, House Appropriation Committee.  But now, in a testy atmosphere of legislative combat, he recalls that Samson misadventure.

    And the legislator,  from Kiru/Bebeji federal constituency of Kano, doesn’t seem to particularly care if the House — which appears rather to stink — sinks with him: he that openly admits he is no moral paragon!

    Talk of a neo-Samson of the House of Representatives power politics!

    You still doubt?  Then, just listen to these rather damning allegations, against the House leadership, majority and minority — all have sinned, and fallen short of the glory of God fashion!  It had to do with alleged “running costs”.

    If Jibrin’s allegations are true, it would appear a rather sickening bazaar out there, in the people’s house — even as the people themselves pine.

    It would appear a legislative equivalent of a fattening pastor tending a wilting flock of congregants!

    The allegations, with ‘Samson’ Jibrin first admitting his own folly.  As chair, House Appropriation Committee, he admitted collecting N650 million as “running costs”.  His committee is accused of orchestrating the alleged padding of the 2015 federal budget, by the House of Representatives.

    On that, however, Jibrin would appear in vile but unfazed company, given the running costs attached to the offices of the principal officers.

    The specific allegations, on alleged “running cost” payouts, are the following:  the Speaker (N1.5 billion), Deputy Speaker (N800 million), House Majority Leader (N1.2 billion), Deputy House Majority Leader (N1.2 billion), House Whip (N1.2 billion), Deputy House Whip (N700 million), House Minority Leader (N800 million), House Minority Whip (N700 million) and Deputy Minority Whip (N700 million).

    But as the mind tries to fend off the shock, as too surreal to be true, Jubril enters a most chilling sign-off: “I have documents to back up all these”!

    Now, could these allegations be true?  The investigating authorities have to find out.

    But even at this preliminary stage, Ripples cannot escape that disturbing feeling of a schizophrenic administration: a disciplined and earnest-sounding presidency that wants to make things right; but a wayward and greedy legislature, that won’t lose its sleep, it appears, even if things go awry.

    Throw in a neither-nor judiciary, of which some key members, even by National Judicial Council (NJC) findings, are nothing but abominable soldiers of fortune bivouacked on the Bench.  What you get is a most unflattering situation of contemporary Nigeria!

    Yet, it would be fatal to just fold hands and continue lamenting in despair.  Something urgent — and tough — must be done to stop these alleged misconducts.

    That brings the discourse to the House of Representatives’ reaction to the Jubrin allegations.

    It is rich indeed, that a House, which risks ripping, almost beyond repair,  whatever remains of its corporate image, if Jibrin’s allegations are true, has reacted with a fist of mail.

    That would appear an institutional equivalent of one person shouting the other down and threatening to destroy him, simply because he risks losing a well-marshalled argument.

    Indeed, suspending the crusading member,  would not banish the damaging allegations.  It would only give them a life of their own, as too many Nigerians — poor folks —are just too ready to believe the worst about their own government.

    So, the mail-fisted approach would only lionize Jubrin but demonize the House as an entity.  And if the allegations are empty?  That would be double jeopardy!  People would ask, and not without reason, why was the House cracking down, if it had nothing to hide on those allegations?

    Why, by moving fast to lock up Jubrin’s office, someone, somewhere had a satanic sense of humour — for the abiding image appears barring the doors, when the damning facts had escaped!

    You could, of course, say the House suspended Jubrin after due process, the member having shunned the Ethics and Privileges Committee, set up look into his alleged conduct.

    But even that would appear to smack of cover-up, since the Committee’s terms of reference was clearly Jubrin’s audacity to accuse the House of wrong-doings, not looking into the alleged misconducts, from a neutral and dispassionate point of view.  But all that is sub-judice now, since the member has sued.

    Still, another matter ought to be tested in the courts, the bit of suspending erring House members, with all due respect to  rights and privileges of members.

    Where does the House’s privileges end, as against the right of an erring member to represent his or her constituents?  And which of these two chain of rights is more basic — the one, an institutional convention; the other, a constitutional mandate?

    In other words, can a legislature legally and legitimately banish constituency representation in parliament, simply because it found a member guilty of some affront against the House?  Can it do this without breaching the grund norm, on which itself is hinged?

    In this specific case of Abudlmumin Jibrin.  The man was elected to represent the  Kiru/Bebeji federal constituency of Kano.  Now, for alleged slight against the House, he has been suspended for 180 legislative days — a whole legislative year.

    For allegedly breaching “the practices and precedents of the House of Representatives”, he is even sentenced to apologizing to the House — failure of which could mean another extension of the ban?

    So, for Jibrin’s alleged offences, a House which is essentially a chamber of equals, can deny Jibrin’s constituents their Constitution-guaranteed representation, while preserving the rights of other constituents nationwide?

    Where indeed does the right of the House stop and where do citizen’s right to be represented in parliament, as stipulated by the Constitution, begin?  And again, which of these two rights is more basic?

    This polity sure needs a legal interpretation on this matter.

    Meanwhile, the Samson shake-down in the House of Representatives is not necessarily bad for the polity.  Indeed, for a jurisdiction struggling to regain its moral compass, it is good.

    So, Ripples would not be fazed, were Jubrin to politically perish with Speaker Yakubu Dogara, and others mentioned in the alleged insensitive scam.  If the National Assembly had bred itself on wrong political socialization, of unconscionably gulping the people’s money, this collapse is as good as any to wean it to the straight-and-narrow path, of national salvation.

    That is why the Jubrin suspension grandstanding would just not do.  What to do is thoroughly investigate the charges and punish the guilty.”

  • This way for editorial terror?

    there is an intriguing paradox in the control mix — of power, authority, legitimacy and influence.

    Power barks and growls.  Yet, it is the most impotent, of all four, especially  when misapplied.  Influence, on the other hand, is muted.  But when deftly applied, it is the most potent.

    Authority and legitimacy, mid-points in the continuum, belong to the realm of delegations.

    Authority is the formal seal to wield power, which the ruled invest in the ruler.  Legitimacy is the “holding brief”, which the ruled retain, but are content to lend the ruler, until (s)he starts acting outside the agreed brief.

    So, what’s this — some Tuesday morning voyage in power philosophy?

    No.  Just clear though disturbing musing on emotive framing of media investigations, when the subject is safeguarding media power and influence.

    The specific object of musing is “Recession: Governors lavish billions of Naira on bulletproof cars for selves, wives,” a story published in the Saturday Punch of September 24.

    With all due respect to the conceiving and publishing editors, that was one story that could do with more clinical detachment, against base emotional outpouring.

    The culprit, it is clear, is the editors’  failure to distinguish between the legitimate duty of the state to secure whoever is governor; and wayward governors that misapply public funds.

    “Pouring editorial fire on crooked politicians”, may well be a laudable tradition with the crusading press, dating back to the evolution of the press, as a social cleanser, in the United States and Europe.  But such crusades are driven by facts — hardly on rumours and hearsay.

    So, proceeding from a conceptual mix-up to build a sensational reportage on what, at best, even from the story’s offering, was glorified hearsay, borders on nothing but editorial terrorism.

    Editorial terrorism abuses public and sacred trust to injure fellow citizens. It is bad for the polity.  It is bad for the media.  It is bad for everyone in the democratic space.

    But why this seeming column excoriation of a rival newspaper?  Peer envy, aimed at de-marketing a competitor?  Certainly not.

    Abuse of column space, just as Ripples claims the editors did of a sacred trust?  Neither!

    The reason, however, is simple, even if the chore is unpleasant: to protect a polity and preserve a legacy.  More presently, on preserving a legacy.

    Now, protecting a polity.  In February 1976, a certain Murtala Muhammad, then military head of state, was shot dead in cold blood, at Ikoyi, Lagos. Even with the instinct of a callow secondary school boy back then, Ripples scoffed at Murtala’s rashness as an impulsive messiah.  But many Nigerians roared their approval.

    Forty years down the line, Ripples remains unconvinced — and with good hindsight too!  Indeed, even as Murtala’s tactical manoeuvres elicited roaring approval, they condemned vital institutions of state — especially the civil service — to strategic ruin, still plaguing the polity.

    Still, Nigerians back then approved, in their thousands.  So, what then might have happened, had the Murtala government taken Gen. Muhammad’s personal security much more professionally?

    Perhaps the brave soldier would not have fallen by Buka Sukar Dimka’s subversive bullets.  Perhaps the story of Nigeria would have been entirely different.  Perhaps the present ruins would have been averted.  Perhaps …

    A thousand perhaps — and to safeguard only one life — whether in prosperity or adversity!

    That single fact underscores the conceptual naivety, with all due respect to the editors, of this Saturday Punch story.  And the ringing illogic: because hunger rules the land, the state must shirk its duty to its high officials!

    Besides, which loyal servant of state would disclose strategic information about its fleet of armoured vehicles?

    And with scant any authoritative voice, do you now build your story on the soto voce — a story that clearly attempts to criminalize legitimate security spends, on the altar of cheap populism; and demonize governors, many of whom, even among the mentioned, may well be innocent of the charges?

    Talking of gubernatorial demonization, the case of The Punch versus Osun Governor, Rauf Aregbesola, bobs up again!  For the umpteenth time, Aregbesola is leaping off the Punch black books!

    Now, is the newspaper in earnest this time round? Or is this yet another example of a disturbing pastime of editorial terrorism, against Aregbesola and his government?

    When Osun declared the Islamic New Year as work-free — a lawful and legitimate action by the 1999 Constitution — The Punch, in no time, dubbed the governor a gubernatorial mullah.  So did it when Christian-Muslim dispute arose over the hijab, as school uniform complement.

    When it was time to demonize a few over the salary crisis — a mere symptom of a grave economic meltdown — the newspaper led the virtual Aregbesola lynch crowd.

    Why, even Ben Murray-Bruce, the “common sense” senator from Bayelsa, drove himself into a falsetto, chirping merrily about donating part of his National Assembly bounties to feed starving Osun civil servants!

    Now, it so happens: Murray-Bruce’s Bayelsa can’t pay its workers, but good old Benny has lost his sweet voice!  Are there no “starving” civil servants in Bayelsa, and shouldn’t charity begin at home?

    Still, in the midst of the economic crisis, it is the much-lampooned Osun that sets the pace for others in social and physical infrastructure, a feat seemingly beyond the reach of even oil-rich Bayelsa!

    Now, it is the gubernatorial armoured car campaign!  But given the story’s watery conception, with all due respect, would it be right to suppose it is yet another mega-garb, for the newspaper’s ready victims of editorial terror, among whom Aregbesola is prime candidate?

    But why is even this a columnist’s headache, since Ripples is no spokesperson for any of the governors, even if he is, for the umpteenth time defending Aregbesola’s right to media fairness?

    That returns the discourse to preserving a legacy.

    Since 1859, the Nigerian press has earned a reputation for speaking out against any form of oppression, no matter the Leviathan from which it comes.

    James Bright Davies, owner-editor of Nigerian Times (later Times of Nigeria) went to prison twice, for crusading against British colonial greed. That was in the 1910s.

    Herbert Macaulay leveraged his Lagos News (later Lagos Daily News) as Lagos natives’ bulwark against colonial oppression, in land and water rate affairs, among many other agitations.  Its audacity soon earned the newspaper the unflattering elite moniker of “Lagos Daily Rag”!  That was in the 1920s.

    Much closer, the military era stiff media challenge, against military feudalists, starred the likes of The News, Tell, The Guardian, The Punch itself and National Concord, among others.  All these were well acclaimed epochal feats, for which the Nigerian press earned due plaudits.

    It is under this rubric of editorial crusading that The Punch may have positioned its armoured car story — no crime!

    But to preserve this great legacy, the newspaper must strive at hard facts.  Otherwise, it risks chipping away at a reputation, built on patent good faith over 157 years, because of conceptual haziness.

    Otherwise, the Nigerian press may well resign itself to thrusting raw power but losing real influence.

  • Before Edo decides

    Before Edo decides

    There is an eerie parallel between 14 February 2015 and 10 September 2016.

    The presidential election was fixed for 14 February 2016, until Sambo Dasuki, then President Goodluck Jonathan’s National Security Adviser (NSA), went to Chatham House, London, to launch the plot that would climax in the postponement, till 30 March 2016, of the polls for alleged security reasons.

    Now, the Edo gubernatorial polls were fixed for September 10.  All was set, until the Police and Directorate of Secret Services (DSS), clamoured for a postponement, for security reasons.  The new date is September 28, a Wednesday.

    Not unlike in 2015, INEC first resisted.  Then, it capitulated.

    But that has sent tongues wagging.  Just as it was alleged that Jonathan and co panicked, many are now swearing Oshiomhole and co are panicking, because of fear of defeat.

    Still, for all you know, it could well be fib and counter-fib.    The PDP that pushes the panic theory could well be planting grand disinformation, and amplifying it among its own.

    The APC that floats a counter-narrative, of alleged Nyesom Wike and Ifeanyi Okowa-aided PDP importation of a violent band to rig, could also be counter-fibbing.

    Fair is foul and foul is fair in a fierce electoral contest!

    Yet, the reason the security agencies gave this time would appear plausible: that on the virtual eve of Sallah, they could expose the general population to soft terror attack, by pulling out Police units outside Edo, to secure the Edo polls.

    Given the history and profile of terror attacks, that would appear more plausible than Dasuki’s Chatham House reason: that the armed forces, hitherto snoozing before Boko Haram, just sprang awake to face down their nemesis, with putative electoral defeat facing the president!

    Still, there are always grounds for doubts, plausible or cynical, simply because institutions of state are just not strong enough.  Why, the same security agencies merrily corralled into doing PDP’s alleged bidding only last year, are now being accused of doing APC’s bidding!

    But beyond conspiracy theories and rather feeble state institutions, on what basis might PDP triumph in Edo polls, so much so that its formidability would cause so much panic, to suggest skewing, against it, the security infrastructure?

    The party’s stellar records during the Lucky Igbinedion gubernatorial days?  Or, the superlative competence of the Jonathan presidential years?  Even to the most romantic of PDP fanatics, their inner voice would scream and screech: these eras were unmitigated disasters!

    Then, the growing whispering campaign that neither Godwin Obaseki (GO) nor Osagie Ize-Iyamu (OII) is of any good?

    Incidentally, that same neither-nor condescension crept up between Jonathan and Buhari last year; and, in the looming US presidential election, is creeping up between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

    But look closely.  It would appear to emerge from elements that have closet issues with Oshiomhole but are not gutsy enough to root for Ize-Iyamu, with his terrible Edo PDP baggage.  So, the contrived hee-haw may just shadow that abject lack of moral conviction!

    Indeed, by the sheer force of Oshimhole’s achievements, guilt-by-association ought to have condemned Ize-Iyamu to irredeemable electoral slaughter, while galvanizing  Obaseki to a soar-away win.

    But the Comrade Governor’s alleged manipulation of the APC ticket, pulling all the stops to push protégée GO; and coupling him with alleged alter ego, Phillip Shaibu, now in the House of Representatives, virtually from his own clan, seem to have infuriated not a few, and gifted PDP a new lease.

    Now, the new war cry, bawled with all musterable partisan roar: Shaibu means Oshiomhole quits, yet Oshiomhole retains power!

    Now, that can be explosively emotive!  A people terribly injured, on the eve of a major election, could indeed engineer an electorally sobering result!

    Still, must Edo, in the expression of unrestrained rage, cut its nose to spite its face?  Electorally, it can.

    But then, its long-suffering people, not the flighty politicians, always on the lookout for the best of deals, will bear the scar.

    The Ekiti experience, that propelled Ayo Fayose to power, for fury against Kayode Fayemi’s person, if not policy, is a living example, of rash electoral choices.

    But more on that presently!

    Meanwhile, not a few have also direly warned, hinting at some electoral Armageddon to come: Edo (and possibly Ondo) gubernatorial polls would be plebiscites on the Muhammadu Buhari presidency, by a baleful people, grappling with excruciating pains.

    For the excitable, fiercely riveted on only the present, that would appear hot electoral scarecrow, before which the Oshiomhole camp must crouch and mutter their last prayers!  But for the more perspective, history and institutional memory dictate otherwise.

    At the onset of Obafemi Awolowo’s Free Primary Education programme in the old Western Region, which the opposition National Council of Nigerians and the Cameroons (NCNC) sold as some blight set to wipe out the people’s agrarian wealth, the Action Group (AG) lost in the next round of polls.

    But two years later, the electorate got wiser, by the sheer developmental beauty of that programme.  Though free education demanded some taxation — to which the opposition incited the people to growl — it assured the populace a better strategic deal.  That was 1955; and present-day Edo, where NCNC was very strong, was in the Midwest segment of that region.

    The moral?  That the present bites hard does not preclude a golden future.  That was Awo’s compass to greatness; and that may well be replicated again, if the Buhari reforms succeed, even if Buhari is no philosopher king in the mould of Awo.

    But he is as much an ascetic as Awo; and like Awo too,  he towers above his contemporaries with sheer moral authority, powered by unchallenged integrity.

    Still, back to the Ekiti-Edo parallel.  In the course of the GO campaign, Lagos Governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, told the story of Lagos; and how everything it has achieved, as the most economically vibrant state in Nigeria, dated back to a solid foundation laid in 1999; and sustained ever since.

    Edo, unfortunately, is a diametric opposite.  Under Lucky Igbinedion (1999-2007) there was no foundation.  Just ruthless, ceaseless, soulless looting — so much so that the former governor was tried and convicted for sleaze.  However, in the corrupt spirit of times, he only got a slap on the wrist.

    So, if Igbinedion is rightly quoted — that the next Edo governor would emerge from his “political family”, then it is a monumental battery on Nigerians’ collective psyche.  But if Edo, on the eve of a major election, on account of some rage tolerates such tomfoolery, who are outsiders to cry more than the bereaved?

    But suffice it to say: with such permissiveness, Edo would appear fated to the Ekiti model of ruin (no thanks to electoral folly); than the Lagos model of boom (thanks to electoral wisdom).  Whichever choice Edo makes would have clear-cut consequences.

    Indeed, a politician like Fayemi, victim of bad electoral choices, only grieves for days, or months.  But the people, like the Ekiti, who wilfully bring such choices upon themselves, condemn a generation to avoidable doom.

    So Edo, which would it be?

    September 28 beckons!

  • Season of anomie

    Season of anomie

    There is a creeping contest in the land.  Whoever howls most, about the nation’s present woes, appears sure of some Nobel Prize in mass melancholy!

    But isn’t Tiger Woe — whose devastating spring pushes pan-Nigerian wailing to a crescendo — obvious and gut-tearing enough?

    Must folks fall over themselves to screech its cruel “tigeritude”, in the very words of our own WS, the very tiger of progressive populism himself?

    O, you must have noticed!  This headline is straight from the mouth of our esteemed Nobel Laureate, the title of the second of his two novels, the first being The Interpreters.

    In Season of Anomy (1973), Wole Soyinka painted the anomie of military rule, and the parasitic (un)civil class that, with the soldiers, conspired to rape and plunder their country.

    Why, at that nadir, Anomy even creatively foretold the Sani Abacha horror, at the tail-end of military misrule.

    Any citizen that stood against that stark dictator was doomed to slaughter!  That was the fictional Zaki Amuri, in Anomy, feudal lord of Cross-River!

    Between Abacha and Amuri, can you spot a difference — or, for that matter, between feudalism and military rule in Nigeria?

    But all those latter-day ruin had their roots in early-day politics-driven anarchy of 1st Republic Western Nigeria.

    Back then, the vote-heisting Demo (formally named: Nigerian National Democratic Party, NNDP), of Samuel Ladoke Akintola and Remi Fani-Kayode, gloried in brazen political turpitude.

    The ruling Northern People’s Congress, NPC’s decision to condone Demo’s electoral rascality, for short-term political gain, sparked the first coup d’état.

    From WS, more facts on that troubling period of Nigerian history would come with autobiographical memoirs: Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years, and later, You Must Set Forth At Dawn.

    That then, was the rotten foundation of the present mess.

    Of course, the military’s wasted years — that useless god that left its votaries much worse than it met them — worsened the situation.

    Add Olusegun Obasanjo’s empty but doomed swagger, in the first crucial eight years of this republic.  Add too, Goodluck Jonathan’s near-undertaking business, in the last six years of the ancien regime.

    Now, even factor in the notorious Nigerian amnesia, natural or wilful, when the subject is institutional memory.  But could anybody have forgotten, so soon, the havoc of the swamp criminals, euphemistically called militants — walking their talk to sabotage and ground the economy, by bombing oil installations?

    All these would appear doom — wilful doom — foretold!  Yet, for this countrywide wailing orchestra, sweet din blissfully swallows any foreground history of reason.

    Their grouse? That  Muhammadu Buhari, struggling with his braves to fix the millennial mess, has no magic fixes!

    Still, this anomie is especially devastating because the pocket hurts; and the stomach rumbles.  You don’t reason with the hungry, do you?

    Even then, it is tanking to corrode the basic norms, fast becoming value-neuter:  the problem solvers are the new devils; while those that led us to perdition are newly consecrated saints, in a new national cathedral of unrestrained grief and explosive passion!

    That, by the way, cuts through the sectors: ecclesiastical, political and even the media, now wearing plebeianism, as some unfazed badge of honour!

    From the ecclesiastical front, the goodly Anthony Cardinal Olubunmi Okogie, retired Catholic Archbishop of Lagos, warns: Buhari, Nigerians are hungry, in much the same snappy voice as Oby Esekwezili and her BBOG crusaders, virtually holding a gun to the President’s head to, willy-nilly, produce the Chibok girls, or else!

    Yet, beyond cheap populism, that inflames passion sans solving any problem, His Lordship owes the Catholic faithful that dot on his very words, the moral duty of preaching understanding in these delicate and perilous times.

    The intervention, from the political front, would appear even worse, with the immaculate Shehu Sani, senator of the Federal Republic from the ruling APC, playing the ostrich; declaring all would have perished before Buhari finished his reforms!  Pray, should the president then fold his arms — and join the lamentation gang?

    Yet, this senator is part and parcel of Bukola Saraki’s National Assembly, legislative children of perdition, that have shown little affinity with — or sensitivity to — the pains in the land.

    On the other side of the aisle, the doomed PDP grandstands over the magical clearing of the debacle its 16 years of ruins piled up.  And to underscore this audacity, Her Audaciousness, Dame Patience Jonathan, just laid claim to some US $31 million in frozen cash deposits!

    Need we forget — her husband, President Goodluck Jonathan, practically sold the last national family silver to feed the crave of the criminal ring, clamped round him in power?

    But perhaps the most asinine intervention, so far, has got to come from the media.  A columnist, of some repute, put the rhetorical question: Buhari, the worst president ever?  That was enough signal for his votaries of hate and bigotry to do their thing, eye-blazing and mouth-foaming!

    Another reduced the new “Change Starts with me” campaign to a personal tussle between the column — if not the columnist — and a minister, in a column codification of the market-folks’ whims and caprices!

    Want to feel the scandalous lack of empathy with whatever the Buhari government is doing to fix the problems?  Just pick up the papers, with their sensational headlines, and hysterical columns!

    The issue, mark you, is neither the democratic right to report; nor the people’s right to know.  It is rather  the Fourth Estate’s lack of emotional intelligence to push empathy, even while at its critical duty, in times of extreme national angst, as now.

    So, the Nigerian media, after 157 years of practice, cannot still summon that?  Shame!

    This media resort to culpable hysteria may well become veritable embarrassment, when these hard times are gone and done with!

    Predictably, like a people blinded by too much of their own tears, the whimpering party can’t even see the early lights, now piercing the dank clouds.

    In the North East, a joyful company drummed through the streets, announcing its homecoming, after years of Boko Haram sack.  But to the howling, cynical assembly, “nothing is happening”!

    Progressively, if creeping, power is getting better, with many neighbourhoods in Lagos, reporting no less than 15 hours a day.  Even then, Babatunde Fashola, SAN, former high-flying Lagos governor, remains their “minister of darkness”!

    On the food front, there are already talks about Kebbi rice, Anambra rice, Ebonyi rice, Dangote rice, etc, which, when they fully hit the market, may force prices down from N20, 000 a bag to N8, 000 — or even less!

    But the moral here is not even the putative tumbling of rice prices, to tame the rumbling tummy.  It is weaning Nigerians from that grand folly  — that their palate is just too delicate for local rice!  That is the mind-restructuring only temporary adversity can force down.

    To be sure, the Buhari government still has a lot to do, if it must deliver on its promise.  But given this dire historical juncture, the people should acknowledge little gains, while awaiting the big ones.

    That would be far better than the present distracting bedlam.

  • His Lordship, the mariner

    Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the English Romantic poet it was, who wrote, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, poetic tragedy of a sailor, assailed by the albatross of a past misdeed.

    Were Nigeria to boast a contemporary equivalent of Coleridge’s mariner, it would sure be Justice Dahiru Saleh; for his infernal role in the voiding of the June 12, 1993 presidential election victory of Basorun MKO Abiola.

    MKO would die five years later in the Abacha gulag; but under the watch of Gen.  Abdusalami Abubakar, self-decided stop-gap head of state, after Sani Abacha himself had sensationally expired, in rather strange circumstances, that many Nigerians happily hooted was “divine intervention”.

    That crisis cost MKO his life.  But it also consigned most of the principal plotters as living dead.

    Justice Saleh appeared dead in limbo — until he bobbed up, via some newspaper interview.  Still, he cut the sorry picture of the Coleridge ancient mariner, with the June 12 albatross hanging heavy on his neck!

    The big difference though is that whereas Coleridge’s mariner got redeemed for his crime, after enduring the emptiness of the living dead, this unfortunate Nigerian version appears beyond redemption.  Even from his limbo, he grandstands in provocative vacuity!

    He voided June 12, he claimed, out of the best of intentions, fired by a fair and forensic mind.  He can tell that to the marines!

    Psychoanalysis, in basic psychology, dubs it ‘Freudian slip’.  But the scriptures insist such slips could either edify or mortify, warning however that what destroys you is not what you eat, but what you say.

    His Lordship, the Mariner, therefore, tries himself so mercilessly in the court of his own words, even 23 years after the judicial crime.

    You could feel the full sear of his juristic(?) mind: combustible power politics laced with ethnic animosity, to brew a subversive verdict that ignited a fire that almost consumed the polity.

    “The Yorubas wanted Abiola to become president …” Justice Saleh claimed, sounding as if he had a problem with such a proposition. “But he couldn’t be,” he crowed — in triumph?

    “While the political blame must be on President Babangida,” he admitted, “Babangida did nothing of the sort to stop him [Abiola], using my court.”  Maybe.  Maybe not.

    But did a Yoruba legitimate yearning jar against Abiola’s lawful mandate, a resounding  pan-Nigeria one that cut across tribes and tongues, to necessitate a criminal annulment of the freest and fairest election ever in this country?

    His Lordship would appear to think — and merrily brag so.  Hear him: “I have no regrets; none whatever. No regrets. I would repeat the same thing now.”

    His Lordship clearly relishes playing the judicial Judas, despite the ruin his verdict brought upon his country.  Still, such unconscionable crowing, over glaring injustices, has been Nigeria’s bane.

    But from His Lordship, the Mariner, to His Excellency, the General, another spinner of long-running marine tales: first naming himself “military president”; then ruining himself with the annulment; and now, in his winter years, warring in vain against himself, just to validate those marine fibs!

    After all the power, and all the glory, and all the vanity, and all the vacuity, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, who Justice Saleh fondly hid behind a finger to cover his June 12 transgression, would appear a much subdued man.

    Unlike Justice Saleh who still appears unfazed by his judicial villainy, self-abnegation appears IBB’s 75th birthday wish, after the bluff and bluster of his earlier years, starting with his ‘Evil Genius’ moniker, much relished in those halcyon days of untrammeled authority, courtesy of not only being in government but also in power.

    “I am not the evil genius that quite a lot of people consider me to be.” IBB deserves congratulations, for that glorious epiphany!

    Still, given his self-crowed love to dominate his environment, as a master in the theory and praxis of violence, laced with his sheer Machiavellian tactics, not a few would be stunned by this disclaimer.

    Nevertheless, IBB sounds positively downbeat, from known obscurity, in his commemorative interviews at 75.  Alas! Everyone knows IBB is still there.  But no one seems upbeat about him!

    Yeah, his Maradona-speak appears intact — that bit about making legislation a part-time job: coming from a man whose government was clearly the most spendthrift, after President Goodluck Jonathan.

    And, of course, the old fox’s last-minute essay at defiance: that bit about being misconstrued, but choosing not to worry.

    Still, there is a certain yearning for reconciliation and understanding playing out in the new IBB persona.

    Now, what is that?  An albatross of guilt over MKO, pretty much like the Coleridge mariner that wilfully killed the albatross that piloted him and his crew from a storm?

    Or, an old man, after the follies and bombast of youth, finally readying himself to meet his maker, in his best possible conduct?

    Only IBB knows!  However, it appears a classic case of public guilt weighing heavy on private conscience, in a milieu where apologies, even from flagrant wrongs, appears a sign of weakness.  That would explain Saleh’s shameless bragging.

    That is why that judge, after a fleeting bobbing up from the limbo of the living dead,  promptly returned there.

    Even while still living, he appears a complete reject of history, if good conscience, justice and fairness, which ought to come with the judicial territory, are the issues!

    Well, if Saleh appears beyond redemption, given his posturing at his interview; is that what IBB also wishes?  That is doubtful, given his rather conciliatory posture at 75.

    That is why he should shun needless pride and apologize to Nigerians that voted on June 12, for purporting to cancel their will, though criminally sustained.

    Then, he should apologize to the MKO Abiola family, for the grave injustice his annulment did to their patriarch, MKO; and matriarch, Kudirat; who both died in the heat of the crisis.

    MKO perhaps would stand as eternal witness against contemporary Nigeria, the military segment of which IBB dominated like no other.  Though he was no angel, all he did was show compassion to his compatriots, Christian, Muslim or traditional worshipper.  He made as many as possible happy.

    Yet, all he got paid was death, in detention, after five years; for winning a free election.

    But MKO’s memory left nothing but love and awe: for by his wealth and association, he was the least candidate for political heroism.  Besides, he has found peace with his maker.

    Not so, the June 12 conspirators, living or dead!   By their terrible deed, they cloaked themselves in disgrace and disdain.  And each time the June 12 anniversary echoes, their villainy  ricochets anew in the polity.

    IBB is the best known of this unenviable company.  But he can still mitigate the harsh verdict of history, by penitence followed by a public apology.

    As for His Lordship, the Mariner, he was simply a happy pawn in villainy.  Just as well he is unrepentant.  He deserves his place of rot in history’s dustbin.