The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olakunle Abimbola

  • Opposition by ambuscade

    Opposition by ambuscade

    The people have a right to a compassionate government.

    But does the government too, have a right to an empathetic people, particularly when things are tough?

    This thoughtful newspaper cartoon, which, by the way, Ripples stumbled on, on Facebook; so is unable to make a fuller credit, inspired these twin-questions.

    By it, President Goodluck Jonathan handed President Muhammadu Buhari a Nigeria as once-upon-a-car; not even fit for a decent junkyard.

    One year after, Buhari is hard at work, fixing that car.  Sure, it is nothing close to zooming around.  But given the original junk that it was, you would admit a lot of work had been done.

    That more or less captures the reality on ground, this last one year.

    Yet ambush, from a seeming unfeeling people, about captures opposition tactics against the Buhari Presidency, in its first year.

    But it is instructive that the chief partisan driver of this ambuscade, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), just crashed, like a miserable, whining dog — with all fours up!

    From one ‘M’, two others have stormed the bastille,  in a fierce turf wrestle, to corral a crashing castle: Modu, Mantu, Makarfi!  It is the fearsome fire of M raised to power three!

    One party, three helmsmen!  Marvelous  in the eyes of those PDP’s impunity has beggared for too long, isn’t it?

    But that tactic is hardly illegitimate — politicians, after all, would play politics.

    Still, ambush as opposition has been most potent from seeming non-partisan players, who ought to be natural partners of a reform-minded government, in times of dire moral abyss.

    Take Catholic Bishop, Matthew Hassan Kukah, who had built a reputation, over the years, as some conscience of the nation.

    When the issue became unearthing Jonathan-era sleaze, however, the priest’s pious advice: forget the graft and move on!  Jonathan had, after all, lost at the polls and promptly given way!  Should he have stayed on, Your Lordship?

    Another Catholic high priest, Anthony Cardinal Olubunmi Okogie, former Archbishop of Lagos and people’s hero during military rule, thundered in holy rage — not against those who had stolen the commonwealth blind, but against those who were sweating to bring them to heel!

    What had changed: was corruption bad under military rule, but tolerable under democracy?  Perhaps because a Christian brother headed the regime under fire?

    That moral ambush, for whatever motivation, gave the ancien regime the false hope they could pull off their diversionary tactics.  A much raped people were the worse for it.

    Then came another ambush: from media corruption champions.  Sure, this ensemble would insist they never endorsed corruption — and they wouldn’t be wrong, per se.

    Still, while the criminal elements went on an over-drive to arrogantly subvert the courts to escape justice, this lobby went on an overdrive to push a most grotesque crusade for “human rights”.

    The long and short of that campaign: the state should self-castrate, under a weird “due process”, while these rogues rigged and raped the judiciary to escape with their loot!

    Yet, this same lobby shrieked loudest, almost to the point of manic celebration, that the Buhari government, to echo their preferred cliché, could boast “no single conviction.”

    This loud orchestra would also boom loudest, claiming the government has not delivered on its promises, mostly on the economy — which, in truth, given the level of pains in the land, it has not.

    But pray: how do you secure convictions when putative felons subvert the judicial process; or rev up the economy when rogues had cleaned out the public till, of otherwise investible funds?

    It is this blanket criticism, with scant institutional memory, a wilful disregard of the shambles the Jonathan government left behind — even after a year — that passes Nigerians as unfeeling; and not able to appreciate the epochal chaos that Buhari and his government are battling with; from which they hope to rebuild the commonwealth.

    This moral-neuter zone, where the clergy and the media heavily descend on those trying to fix things but gift the execrable crooks fresh life, would appear the most unflattering portraiture of the Nigerian, during the first year of the Buhari Presidency.

    However, many a Nigerian, appreciative and empathetic, appear miles ahead of these rarefied institutions, which alas ought to be the true mirror of society.

    That, perhaps would be the ultimate redemption, when the worst is over, and history of this putative iron-to-gold era is written.

    That is a distinct possibility, if the Buhari government remakes this economy as a productive hub; and purges public service of its ruinous greed.

    Meanwhile, back to the present, old decadence would embolden a Bukola Saraki and his APC rebels to play Judas with PDP ambushers, to push the PDP agenda of past ruin, as some new pseudo-salvation.

    That decadence would push an Olisa Metuh to preen and strut in court, as if being docked for alleged sleaze deserved some gold medal.  Even after being cut to size, his family would wilfully dub a duly constituted court process as “persecution”, not prosecution.  Well, the joke is on them!

    This last year, Buhari has not exactly come out flying.  But it is doubtful if anyone in his circumstance would.

    Ambode’s Lagos?  Sure.  But that is because, since 1999, Lagos has become more and more settled.  Compare that to Jonathan’s central rubble, and the difference is clear.  Even then, Ambode suffered some opening months of utter demonization!

    President Buhari has his job cut out for him; for in this second year, he would rise or fall.

    But to get the best, Nigerians must learn to understand and appreciate little gains.  Such guided praise motivates a conscientious government to feel treasured, challenge itself, and do more.

  • Grim numbers, even grimmer pains

    Grim numbers, even grimmer pains

    Caveat Emptor: Ripples believes in the Buhari Presidency; and feels structural  pains are inevitable to wean us from the degeneracy of the Obasanjo-Jonathan Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) era.

    So, this is no “wailing wailer”, bleating uncouth and bad-tempered blues.

    Still, it is hard to gulp down the stiff increase of the pump price of petrol, from N86.50 to N145 a litre, despite the grim economics that has made it inevitable.

    It is fruitless arguing with the grim numbers, particularly coming from Vice President Yemi Osinbajo.

    Sure, neither Mr. Osinbajo, nor his principal, President Muhammadu Buhari, is an economist, as their opposers would trumpet with glee.  Still, it is arguable if any pair, at the helm the Nigerian state, ever boasted a higher personal credibility rating.

    That high integrity quotient would appear to have helped to deflect part of the anger, and the sense of betrayal, not a few feel, with the hike.

    Still, neither the harsh numbers nor ode to integrity could take away the pains.  Just too many are hurting, simply because the pocket has simply vanished, under terrible economic blizzards!

    The starkness of the vice president’s jeremiad-by-numbers leaves everyone numb; even number by a combined presidential earnestness, never before marshalled in this land.

    The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) could supply no more than a half of local petrol consumption.  The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) doesn’t have the forex to feed oil marketers to import the balance.  In fact, by the Vee-Pee’s figures, CBN must fork out US $225million, from the US $550 million crude oil earnings in April, to do that!

    So, something just has to give — the exponential rise in price; and the marketers can source forex from outside CBN, and still cut a deal.

    “We expect,” the vice president reasoned, “that foreign exchange will be sourced at an average of about N285 to the Dollar, (current interbank rate) and importers will then be restricted to selling at a price between N135 and N145 per litre.”

    But the only hope, from the forlorn economic chambers, is the promise of local refining.

    The Vice President wagers: with more private refineries competing with NNPC’s, which capacity, even at optimal production, can only meet  two out of every five litres consumed, “our target is that, by fourth quarter of 2018, we should be producing 70 per cent [seven out of every 10 litres] of our fuel needs”.

    That sounds heart-warming, especially since the Dangote refinery is expected to come on stream, around that period too.

    But that is precisely the point.  The stiff hike is as much the removal of the much-ballyhooed “subsidy”, as it a stiff price to pay for President Olusegun Obasanjo’s wrong-headed energy policy of deregulation by importation.

    Unfortunately, the hapless people, eternal experimental guinea pigs, not the ever-preening Obasanjo, or the effete Goodluck  Jonathan Presidency, under which subsidy corruption careened beyond control, are paying this stiff price.

    Well, the Buhari government too pays part of it: branded deceitful, harsh and heartless, for bringing forth further pains on the people; and breaking faith with its pro-people “progressive” credo.

    So, if the people thunder, and the defensive government dither, for felt policy incoherence, you should understand the basis.

    If a defensive Vice President says it’s no subsidy removal but dire forex arithmetic; Information Minister, Lai Mohammed, says Nigeria is broke; other party chieftains celebrate the “removal of subsidy” and the capitulation of Labour, President Buhari himself maintains a loud silence, while the opposition mocks the Babel of voices around a funeral presidential quiet, it is simply because you don’t slap a child and expect it not to shriek!

    So, the shriek in the land is healthy.  It is from raw pain — after all, the stiff hike is a thunderous economic slap, from which many would not recover in a hurry!

    But the refinery bit nails the point — and points the way to new hope. Vice President Osinbajo reiterates the Buhari government’s commitment to local refining, eyeing no less than 70 per cent by 2018.

    That is a radical departure from the Obasanjo-Yar’Adua-Jonathan era, which magic formula was full downstream liberalization by importation.  True, these governments gave out licences for so-called Greenfield refineries.  But from their body language, you could tell: it was just justifying all righteousness — or, more appropriately, all unrighteousness!

    That was tragedy foretold — and the present crash of that mis-policy is clear evidence.

    But what if 100 per cent local refining is achieved, the excess is exported, but pump price still stays up?  That would be unlikely, for the production mix would have been without the transport cost of imported cargo.

    But even with that unlikely possibility, Nigeria would still have been better off.  Other things being equal, downstream petrochemical spin-offs would have delivered a far better deal for Nigerians in terms of jobs, a more grounded economy and other opportunities.

    See why the Obasanjo-era policy was hare-brained?

    But still, the troubling question: who pays for the pains for that policy wrong?

    Not the people alone!  The present government should bear part of it.  That is why the N58.5 a litre jack should have been shared between the government and the people, between now and 2018, when the projected substantial local refining target is attained.

    Another subsidy, did you gawk, now that “subsidy” is pure policy heresy?  Too bad!

    In any case, in a democracy, alternative views in public policy cannot be heresy.  Let’s just call it some “parting costs”: to ginger the government to aggressively implement its local refining policy; and to put the people on notice that full deregulation is nigh.

    Labour’s self-slaughter, on the altar of a rash strike?  The Labour aristocrats (to borrow the mighty tag of Tatalo Aremu, the formidable columnist of The Nation on Sunday) had it coming.

    But to celebrate the demise of Labour, just because of the cumulative errors of its leaders, is akin to abandoning the Presidency, simply because Goodluck Jonathan messed up, big time.  Dumb!

    A vibrant organized Labour is vital to democratic deepening, now that the leading opposition, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), appears still too dazed to play vibrant opposition, on reason, not hysteria.

    But beyond Labour’s gloom or glory, political scientists must worry about high capitalism, that flaunts the death of the compassionate state, as some regnant high philosophy.  Beyond corruption, that pretty much explains the demonization of subsidy.  It could have grave implication for capitalism and the state as we know it.

    If the current pricing regime stays — as it appears it would — it would have been due to the President’s perceived personal integrity, added with the Vice President’s candour; and to the economic structuralists, the prospects of local refining.

    It could well mark the president’s last point of fidelity with economically pressured Nigerians.

    If Buhari delivers on refineries, he would harvest reverence, bordering on idolatry.  But if he fails, his words would mean absolutely nothing to anyone.

    It’s a pretty huge gamble with his trademark integrity and honesty — even stiffer than the price hike.

    So, see why Buhari must deliver on local refining?

     

  • Avengers, scavengers, disaster

    Avengers, scavengers, disaster

    Trouble sleep, Yanga go wake am, wetin e dey find o?
    Palaver, e de find; palaver, e go get … — Afrobeat King, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti

    When do “Avengers”, of felt injustices, become scavengers for trouble?

    When self-ruin and needless disaster beckon!

    That would appear the long and short of the latest unrest in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region, with a group that calls itself the Avengers blowing up key economic infrastructure and getting a kick out of it.

    When the Avengers get kicked, as viciously as they are kicking — and enjoying it — now, what happens?

    Perhaps then, the one-shoe-fits-all human rights muses, the lucrative NGOs, their media siblings and allied romantics, conveniently dumb right now, would find their voice in a rush.

    Then, agitated and animated, lyrical and poetic, they would drone the alchemy and metaphysics of citizens’ rights, the manifest evil of a hard crackdown in a civil jurisdiction, and the bogey of “dictatorship” in a democracy!

    But who dictates what?  If the Avengers dictate, from the blues, unforced violence (like  “unforced errors” in tennis), should the state just buckle over and surrender its legitimate rights?

    Legitimate rights?  Yes.  This might sound trite but it bears restating.

    At the basis of the modern state and government, its chief agent, is the Social Contract.  That contract presumes everyone in a jurisdiction agreed to forgo parts of their rights to a central Leviathan, in exchange for general security.

    That Leviathan is the government. The jurisdiction is the state.  The contractees are the people.  So, between the people and trouble, the Leviathan interfaces as a shield.

    That is why the Police are there to protect the people from everyday criminals.  That is why too, the government usually has a standing army, to shield citizens from enemy bullet, in case of war.

    And that is why, by the way, the state has a monopoly of lawful force.  Anyone that contests such with the state strays into outlaw territory; and faces the full and devastating consequences.

    So, if a body that calls itself Niger Delta Avengers starts blowing up oil installations; and causing innocent citizens needless pains, sabotaging gas-powered electricity supply nationwide, it is infringing on the legitimate right of the state to care for other lawful citizens, who have committed no crime.

    Only a castrated state would take that lying low.  But then a state castrated, to the point of not imposing its will, is technically no state.

    So, beware of sowing the wind.  You just might reap the whirlwind!  That is what the so-called Avengers should take home — if they are not too far gone!

    Still, a state is inviolate only when it obeys its own laws.  If it does not, the cheated and infuriated may just risk taking up arms to contest its monopoly of legal coercion.  It is called loss of legitimacy.

    Somalia is the contemporary classic on this sad score, resulting in equal-opportunity anarchy.  The Somali government raped and raped its own laws until a virtually mono-ethnic state convulsed and collapsed under rival arms.

    Rwanda (which melted under a hideous genocide) and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (within which murderous ISIS fanatics now roam free), groaned under minority domination:  the Rwanda Tutsi dominating the majority Hutu; and the minority Sunni, the slightly majority Shiite.

    In pre-Civil War Nigeria (1960-1966), ethnic tension was it.  A so-called Igbo officers’ coup that toppled a corrupt civil order, led to ethnic triumphalism, which provoked the heinous Igbo pogrom in the North and a revenge coup and killings of Igbo officers in the Nigerian Army, which ignited Igbo insecurity and anger, and climaxed in the Civil War, and a defeated Biafra (1967-1970).

    Stretch this unfortunate history further and reach for the tail end of cruel military rule, and the unconscionable devastation of the Niger Delta; so much so that that region “died”, so the greedy oil hustlers, in cahoots with greedy elements of the Nigerian state, could live and wallow in conscienceless money.

    That was the moral justification for the first wave of Niger Delta militancy, which President Umaru Yar’Adua ended with the Amnesty Programme.  But that is if you discount the Isaac Adaka Boro 12- Day Revolution, which birthed on 23 February 1966, but collapsed 12 days later.

    Ironically, however, what Yar’Adua’s amnesty has delivered is stupendous wealth to the so-called militancy “generals” — smart alecks that milked their people’s collective misery for private treasure! —  with their obscene mansions scowling down at shanties; not a better deal for the majority, who still grind in pre-militancy penury!

    Indeed, the way these over-fed “generals” growled and barked of the Armageddon to come, should “our son”, Goodluck Jonathan, lose the presidential election, and how they would take “our oil”, you could feel their divine right of the minority, to trump the majority, in a democracy!

    Gentlemen, that Armageddon is here!

    Still, if a few rogue elements could launch an Armageddon, why not a counter-Armageddon from the state — if only to assert itself, and wean these criminals from their grand delusion?

    The so-called return of Niger Delta militancy, through the so-called Avengers, is history repeating itself as farce.  That is clear from their rather infantile charter of demands.

    But the Avengers are only one side of that farcical coin.  The other side is Nnamdi Kanu and his Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) project.

    Kanu throatily campaigned for Jonathan, a sentiment awesomely popular in his native South East.  That is democracy.

    But when Jonathan lost, he launched his IPOB project, assured of the infinite gullibility of many a Nigerian — or, as he would prefer in his grand reverie, Biafran!  That is criminal mischief, bordering on treason.

    So, the difference between Kanu’s IPOB and the so-called Avengers: the one launched its own stampede very early; the other delayed its until now.  Talk of two sides of the same farce!

    Still, between history and farce is the cold motive.  Pray, if Biafra 1 went to war on the soulless Igbo pogrom, what excuse would Biafra 2, of Kanu’s IPOB, give?

    If Niger Delta Militancy 1, romanticized by the likes of the late Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, and given muscle by Tompolo, Asari Dokubo and co — a trio that by the way, bloated while their people wilted — what reason would the Avengers’ Niger Delta Militancy 2 give?

    That Goodluck Jonathan lost an election he lacked the numbers to win?

    And didn’t these blokes boast they would ground Nigeria should their own lose, even when clear Jonathan’s was fast becoming an undertaker presidency, by that government’s sheer incompetence and abominable corruption?

    In terms of equal opportunity justice and fairness, Nigeria is no model.  Almost every section of the country has its own grouse.

    But what concretely did Jonathan, Nigeria’s first minority president, do to forge structural corrections, along minority aspirations?  His election-eve Constitutional Conference?  That was a laughable Trojan horse!

    So, criminal bands playing to the gallery, hunting for personal fortune hidden behind collective good, are execrable.

    That is what the so-called Avengers epitomize — and they represent no one but their greedy selves!

    That is why the Nigerian state must assert itself, and spare no effort to bring these criminals to heel.

     

  • Herdsmen and specialists

    If this headline echoes Wole Soyinka’s Madmen and Specialists, fulsome apologies to Africa’s first Nobel Laureate in Literature.

    Still, can you differentiate the “sane” and the “insane” between these two : the homicidal herdsmen, a band of criminals that must be condemned by all;  or the torrent of no less irrational reactions, to this national tragedy of monumental proportions?

    The grisly murders, on an impunity beyond scale, and the grim reactions, on an emotiveness beyond measure, speak of equal-opportunity insanity, in a vast, vast sanatorium.

    Yet, the answer to the problem is simple: crime and punishment, to borrow the title of Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s classic.  The state must punish every crime.  When it fails, it fosters the impunity to commit more.

    That is the long and short of the herdsmen madness.  The moment the Nigerian state cracks down, and brings to book the criminals, this crime, of wilful murder of innocent citizens, would vanish.

    The killer herdsmen are mad — and it wouldn’t matter whether they were Fulani, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Itsekiri, Ijaw or Berom.  However, a clinical execution of the law will, posthaste, cure them of their madness.

    But so too are the specialists (again, apologies to Prof. Soyinka) — the Fulani of the cattle herding lobby, that tend to push odious cultural chauvinism, if not outright imperialism; and rationalize the wilful massacre of innocent citizens, simply because the killers are kith-and-kin.  Such obduracy hardly edifies their civilisation.

    No less so are the other specialists — Igbo, Yoruba, Ijaw, Edo, etc, with a shrill media: the southern cauldron seething with understandable rage and hurt, given the gruesome and soulless killings.

    But what is not understandable — nay, should be intolerable if the motive is to solve the problem — is the emotive criminalization of every Fulani, starting with the president of the Federal Republic; and the demonization of Fulani culture, on account of a few Fulani criminals.

    Trading mutual hurt and exchanging mutual insults would grab sensational headlines.  Pushing savage reprisals would milk explosive passion, guaranteed to end in mutual ruin.  But  to solve the problem, just go after and punish the criminals.

    Crime, after all, has no ethnic coloration!

    Indeed, it is commonsense to de-ethicize criminality: you don’t attack a person’s treasured essence, and yet expect that person to listen to you.

    Take President Muhammadu Buhari.  Criminals, allegedly of Fulani stock, have gone on a binge of killings — utterly condemnable and despicable.

    But then, the mass anger in the land illogically suggests the killings are a Fulani project, to which the first citizen may well be complicit!  If a man is unfairly tried and practically found guilty, how would he be primed to do his duty by law?  And that job he must do, if the menace must vanish!

    Besides, would any Nigerian leader, past or present, merrily hug an unfair slur on the essence he holds dear?

    Obafemi Awolowo?  Awo declared he was Yoruba first before he was Nigerian.  So, if you attack his Yoruba essence, you can predict how far you would go with him.

    Ahmadu Bello and Tafawa Balewa?  The duo were, not unfairly, accused of being champions of northern interests — hardly illegitimate — to stave off southern domination at independence.  Therefore,  their northern core was manifest. Attack that, and you are almost always sure of a negative reaction.

    Nnamdi Azikiwe?  Zik was born in the North, of Igbo parentage, was a smooth and lovable “Lagos boy” for much of his adult life and was an unfazed champion of the “Nigerian”.  Yet, when broke out in 1967, and until Zik made a dramatic appearance in Lagos in 1969, he could not pull himself off the trauma of his Igbo people.

    Sure, Olusegun Obasanjo, in his Not My Will, mocked Zik’s alleged “descent”, in old age, from the Zik of Africa to the Owelle of Onitsha.  But with all due respect to the former president, that attack was offensive, immature and baseless. Zik followed a natural progression from cradle to grave, which neither diminished his “Nigerian-ness”, nor compromised his Igbo-ness.

    In other words, his Igbo nativity only complemented his Nigerian nationality.  That is how it should be.  The two need not be mutually exclusive.

    Obasanjo?  Perhaps only Chief Obasanjo would entertain that grand delusion: that his Nigerian-ness is everything; but his Yoruba-ness is nothing.  Yet, even Obasanjo, the ultra-nationalist, would appear to enjoy his bitter-sweet moniker of Ebora Owu!

    As Awo would say, you need to be first a good Yoruba man before you are a good Nigerian!

    But the point in all of these is simple: Nigerians, even in times of extreme national crisis, must learn to be cautious, polite and clear-headed.  The ethnic profiling of tarring everyone with the criminal brush of a few, only compounds the problem.  That is manifest in the herdsmen killings.

    The result is silly and over-generalized accusations — from the enraged; but equally asinine and bland rationalization of criminality, by victims of such ethnic profiling.  It is a shame.

    How much simpler would it have been, had crime been isolated and condemned by all!  How much simpler, had the ethnic bogey, by accusers and defenders, not cropped up, to create a needless but costly distraction!

    Still, it must be declared that this extreme reaction has resulted from a Nigerian state that has, for too long, abandoned its sacred duty of citizen security and protection.  That must stop.

    Besides, the notoriety and hostility that have greeted Fulani herdsmen come from perceived unevenness, over the years, in the government’s handling of inter-ethnic matters; so much so that some feel so privileged they could virtually do and undo; while others feel so brow-beaten they can only gawk at injustice.

    If the so-called Fulani herdsmen have been so unconscionable in their killings, it is because they have permitted themselves the delusion that they could always get away with crime because of their ethnic connections with the powers-that-be.

    Too bad — and just as well the president has told the security agencies to swoop on the killers, even if that order appears rather superfluous.  The Police and others should need no especial orders to crack down on criminals.

    But then, so skewed is contemporary Nigeria that, without that presidential order, not a few would swear, if not at presidential inactivity, then at presidential complicity!

    Still, it is high time the Nigerian state exploded that costly illusion, bring these criminals to book and be clearly seen to have done so! The state’s primary function is citizen security.  That is the basis of the Social Contract, which itself is the basis of government and the modern state.

    Let the Nigerian state, therefore, use the killer herdsmen to reassert itself, and give anyone or group that threatens Nigerian life a bloody nose.

    That is the only way to show these criminals that crime attracts serious consequences.

  • War and love

    War and love

    War and Peace, Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, entitled his historical classic.

    It called to the honour, and the glory and the folly of war in Czarist Russia; with the young and vain Czar Alexander locked in mortal combat with peacocky French Emperor, Napoleon, and his formidable La Grande Armée.

    That was the first two decades of 19th century (1805-1813).

    Sam Omatseye’s fiction, based on the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), he called My Name is Okoro.  But Omatseye may well have called his own novel  War and Love.

    It was war, all right: a Nigeria, under Yakubu Gowon, fending off secession from a Biafra, under Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu.  War — the celebration of the most pernicious hate.

    Yet, from the coupling characters, Okoro, the protagonist, and Clara; Abdullahi and Nkechi; and Nneka, Okoro’s war-lost wife and Captain, came something tender.  Terrible beauty of wartime liaisons?

    Okoro, went in search of Nneka, his pregnant Igbo wife, in her native Umueze.  But he got trapped in Umunze, a captured territory, with a camp for war refugees, under the command of Lt. Abdullahi.

    Fate pushed Okoro into the bosom of Clara, another war refugee, from riverine Okolu, near Port Harcourt, in the aborted Republic of Biafra, but outside the Igbo heartland.

    Clara lost, to the war, her sister’s tot, Florence; with her when she fled, with Nigeria fiercely battling Biafra, in Okolu.

    Florence was  smothered.  With a Nigerian battalion nearby, and insect-bitten Florence screeching, the rattled adults decreed the baby must die, for them to live!  Cruel logic of war?

    But Clara found another abandoned boy, 10 months old.  With the boy, named Victory, Okoro and Clara made a war “family”, though initially, they were no more than co-refugees.

    With bouts of coitus wetting their perched bodies and gnarled soul, however, they would became a war couple.  That was an open secret in their Umunze camp.

    Meanwhile, Nneka had, with her mother, fled Umueze.  That drove her into the arms of a man Nneka, only in passing, called Captain.  But even with the war-time anomie, Nneka’s pregnancy for a man, not her husband, sounded her mother’s death knell.

    The moment her daughter told her about the pregnancy, she died; and was hurriedly buried in a bush grave, never to be identified again.  Yet, it was doubtful if Nneka and Ifeanyi, her son by Okoro, would have survived the war without Captain’s protection!   Another painful wartime pathos?

    Meanwhile, as Okoro eventually united with his wife and son, he also got gifted Precious, his wife’s love child with Captain.  Even though the author was coy about it, creatively floating the idea, Okoro too probably had a love child with Clara; for when Clara re-joined her folks, she was also vomiting, a sign of morning sickness and putative pregnancy!

    A two-some that would never know their two parents, as hundreds of other wartime babies?

    But the most dramatic of the war love stories would appear that of Abdullahi and Nkechi.

    The story opened at the height of the pogrom in Kano, with Abdullahi leading a prowling band, hunting down the Igbo in the North.  The band ordered Okoro to pronounce Toro, three-pence in the pre-Civil War Nigerian currency of Pounds, Shillings and Pence.

    Though Okoro sounds a generic, if pejorative, name for the Igbo of the defunct Eastern Region, this Samson Okoro (pronounced differently) was Urhobo from the defunct Mid-West (now Edo and Delta states).

    His Toro was linguistically permissible — it didn’t sound Igbo — since Okoro’s American accent came to his rescue.  He had an American foster father and had just returned to Nigeria to invest and re-settle shortly before the war.  He escaped with a savage slap from Abdullahi.  But he retched at the slain and gorged all around him.

    Okoro’s lot was the tragic neither-nor that plagued many Midwesterners during that war.  Abdullahi’s mob could easily have killed him for being Igbo, if he had not claimed he was American, supported by his sweet accent.

    But even in Igboland, in search of his wife, he was fair game for Biafrian brutes.  The first time, a Biafra band rid him of his car and fulsome provisions for darling Nneka.  The rascals said they needed everything for the service of Biafra!  Much later, another band seized his haul of roasted python meat, which he and Clara had hoped would give them animal protein for weeks!

    Brig-Gen. Godwin Alabi-Isama (rtd) echoed a similar identity crisis in his own Civil War account, The Tragedy of Victory.  Born of a Midwestern father but raised by a Yoruba mother from Ilorin, Alabi-Isama could probably have been neither-nor in both Nigerian and Biafran camps — but for his Yoruba acculturation!  He was raised in Ibadan.

    Between the pogrom and Okoro’s second meeting with Abdullahi in Umunze, the lieutenant  had morphed from the brute of the pogroms and merciless rapist of the early seasons of the war, to something close to the quintessential officer and gentleman.

    He could have had Nkechi, 19, the Umunze belle before whom every man literarily drooled, since he ruled over her village.  But instead, he  professed to her his undying love.

    With that package came generous provisions and protection for the Nkechi household, comprising Ngozi, her mother, Chioma 17; and Ifeoma 15, her no less ravishing sisters, all living in the household of Chief Agwudagwu, Nkechi’s father’s friend; who was out at war, and no one knew if he was alive or dead.

    Why, Abdullahi even agreed to circumcision, to prove his good faith.  But all came to tragic naught, for Nkechi took her own life on the eve of consummating his love for the love-torn soldier, who she often humoured as “My General”.

    She was too much of a Biafria patriot, a proud Igbo girl who would not pawn her innermost treasures for any subversive generosity.  But Abdullahi was something close to Barnabas, the tragic hero in Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta.  He was disappointed, the only time he was earnest.

    My Name is Okoro speaks to collective and individual tragedies.  Take Udeze, Nneka’s younger brother.  He symbolized the sudden flicker, and even more sudden extinction, of the Biafra flame.

    He piloted his mother to safety from Kano, even when younger brother, Okey, was martyred by cruel Hausa weapons, bent on looting his family’s patrimony.  He was there, in those halcyon days of Biafra’s group-think, when emotion rushed to war but reason, viciously shouted down, dictated otherwise.

    He was there at Ore, when disillusion started setting in; and even had to shoot Chukwu, a friend who had boasted  he would rather take his own life, than fall to the bullets of Ndi Hausa.

    His last gambit was a failed spyng mission, to poison the water supply of the dreaded Third Marine Commando, under Benjamin Adekunle. Yet, at the end of it all, all he felt was emptiness!

    War is no tea party.  But for man’s seeming eternal insanity, it is best avoided. That is the grand message from My Name is Okoro.

  • Two chambers, two spirits

    Two chambers: one, a putative pointer to a redemptive future; the other, a snarling mirror of a decadent past.

    That is the stark choice before a nation at a terrible crossroads — between an executive of rectitude and a parliament of turpitude.

    Which would it be?

    That is the harsh story behind the trial of Senate President, Bukola Saraki.  But Saraki himself, seeming unfazed poster boy of public notoriety, is only a fitting metaphor for the rotten chamber he heads.

    If the Saraki bloc wins, it would be back, full gallop, to the cumulative rot that brewed this present mess.

    If that bloc loses, Nigeria may well be on to some redemption; for the state would have institutionalised punishing prebendal sleaze, more or less a sickly norm, evidenced by Saraki’s continued resent of his lawful trial for alleged sleaze.

    Of course, neither the Buhari Presidency nor Saraki-headed National Assembly is a wholesale chamber of saints and sinners.  Indeed, the executive is no more an exclusive chamber of saints any more than the legislature is an exclusive chamber of devils.

    Still, between President Muhammadu Buhari and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, and Senate President Saraki and House of Representatives Speaker, Yakubu Dogara, it is obvious which side inspires public confidence, when the issue is decent governance.

    And, as if to bare their fangs, up has come a so-called Senate G-77, reported junior senators bent on cutting their teeth in infamy, who, even with all the issues on ground, have passionately committed themselves to warring for own share of “juicy” committees — and, of course, defending Saraki!

    Who might they be levelling their angry guns at?  Ranking senators, whose alleged humongous appetite for “juicy committees” rankle!   Some juice!

    Between Saraki and this venal brood, therefore, would appear the all-too-common story of senatorial children of perdition — a doomed ensemble finding a ruined leader!

    But that is as true of G-77, as it is of the self-destruct 8th National Assembly, that would fully pay for its public service crimes at the fullness of time.

    But as much as Saraki (using the Senate to play the Samson, that would rather take everybody down for his personal foibles) kids himself he is the real deal, he is only a tool in the crafty and evil hands of the electorally vanquished, up in their fond game of blocking positive change in the lives of the people.

    Indeed, it doesn’t require any especial acuity: Saraki is only a poor puppet in the power game of the defeated PDP.  No crime — if the subject is political contestation, where fair would appear foul and vice-versa.

    But when the issue transcends petty political rascality, and becomes a vicious war to roll back gains against corruption, corruption that has, for too long, under-developed the people, resulting in mass anguish and pains, then it is nothing but capital crime of political hue: one side must die for the other to prevail.

    That is critical juncture Nigeria is right now.  Unfortunately, the ever sloppy Nigerian ruling elite, who got a historic second chance with the Goodluck Jonathan defeat of March 2015, are dozing through it all.

    They have forgotten, doomed souls: had Jonathan triumphed in 2015, with his spectacular personal incompetence and the monumental rot that had accrued under his watch, it is doubtful if, by now, they won’t all have been buried under its un-mourned rubble!  But doomed souls, they have forgotten!

    That is why the losing camp would plot, to the death, against the tackling of corruption, corruption whose roaring ocean may yet bury them all!

    That is why the winners’ camp would quake with savage growls over undelivered pork: who gets what in electoral war booty, after a thumping victory, resulting from spectacular electoral slaughter!

    As for the judiciary, it is the season of playing Pontius Pilate with the soiled hands of a sea pirate.  Nigeria’s judicial establishment, under CJN Mahmud Mohammed, make a great show of due process.

    But their body language would appear to  betray un-due process — or, in any case, if they had their way, illicit process in favour of corruption.  The only thing hindering them right now, it appears, is a hostile public opinion, which sits in merciless judgment, daring them to show their true colours.

    As for lawyers, the so-called priests in the temple of justice, from the courtroom rookie to the silk, they are the contemporary equivalent of Eli’s wayward sons, Hophni and Phineas, who turned their father’s noble ministry into a heinous swindle.  So, no matter the outrage from anywhere, there is no stopping this racketeering, under the guise of due process!

    Still, for all his personal failings, Jonathan became presidential flotsam and jetsam, to be thrown overboard for the power vessel to remain afloat, because of cumulative atrocities under previous PDP administrations from 1999.

    For all his anti-corruption affectations, President Olusegun Obasanjo (1999-2007) erected a stout pillar of corruption, political and governmental, on which subsequent PDP federal administrations built.

    Even in trying to find for transparency, Obasanjo’s simple minority impeachment code corrupted and corroded Nigeria’s nascent parliamentary processes.  It took the yeoman efforts from the now self-besieged courts to clear Obasanjo’s mess.

    But even then, at the apex of his hubris, he suborned the cream of Business Nigeria, extorted “donations” as sitting president and Oil minister, and with the proceeds, built himself a self-indicting temple of corruption, in the so-called Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library!

    Umaru Yar’Adua’s fault — goodly soul! — was allowing Obasanjo to talk him into accepting a job his failing health could not cope with.  But that fatal error heralded the ascent of Jonathan, whose tragic misreading of the situation, with his merry corruption-as-usual credo, resulted directly into this present mess.

    If Saraki, indeed, is the unfazed face of unrepentant sleaze in the public space, it should surprise no one that the alleged gross misdemeanour, for which the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) is trying him, started during Obasanjo’s second term.

    Any other proof that Jonathan, despite his personal fecklessness, was only the logical victim of an irredeemable system of corruption and rot fated to collapse, sooner than later?

    It is this putative collapse, and the resultant grief to all, that the Buhari Presidency is trying to avert.  That is the long and short of the epic war against sleaze, of which Saraki’s CCT case is only a grotesque metaphor.

    But it is also this epic but noble battle that Saraki’s Senate — the most diminished in the democratic history of Nigeria since 1960 — is trying to constitute a foolish bastion against.  Even then, Saraki and his vile senatorial hosts are only merry puppets in the cynical finger of PDP, which grand survival strategy is stalling on its old evil ways, in its deluded logic that evil would always trump good.  Still, that thinking, the last time round, fetched it an electoral bloody nose!

    But again, this is crunch time.  And there can be no sitting on the fence.  It is either you are for light or for darkness.

    Ripples casts his lot for light.  Where do you and yours stand?

  • Senatorial rascality

    Senatorial rascality

    “Stealing, stealing, stealing, o stealing,

    Stealing in the name of the Lord,

    My father’s house of worship has become a den of thieves,

    Stealing in the name of the Lord …” — Max Romeo, reggae artiste

     

    There is an ongoing rascality in the hallowed Senate of the Federal Republic.  It is nothing but brazen institutional subversion, criminal breach of trust and monumental breach of faith.

    It is akin to what doomed Luficer from the brightest son of the morning, the most beautiful of the archangels and beloved of God Almighty, to Satan, the eternally damned prince of darkness.

    Dr. Bukola Saraki, the president of the Senate, is all but doomed — no thanks to his free choices.  All his present troubles — his trial before the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT), the Panama Papers where his name isn’t exactly written in gold, et al — stream from conscious and deliberate choices he made in the past.

    Even the alleged trigger of his Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) debacle, viz the accusations of dodgy declaration of assets to defraud the state — Saraki’s controversial emergence as Senate president — was a conscious and deliberate choice.

    When it was time to duel for the Senate presidency, every fair mind agreed it was Saraki’s constitutional right to run.  Besides, if his new-Peoples Democratic Party (nPDP) faction warred to gain the presidency for the All Progressives Congress (APC), it was only fair they were duly compensated in the new government.

    Now if, among the APC legacy parties, Muhammadu Buhari (Congress for Progressive Change) was occupying the presidency and Yemi Osinbajo (Action Congress of Nigeria) had landed the vice-presidency, it was only fair that nPDP be allowed a share of the victory spoils.  If that translated to the Sente presidency, so be it.

    All that was still within the confines of democratic equity, decency and fairness. But Saraki’s resort to outright perfidy changed that equation.

    You don’t betray your party, sell its due, the Senate deputy presidency, to the PDP, arrogantly shun intra-APC rapprochement to fill the other party positions, and expect not to murder sleep!  Remember the tale of Macbeth?  Glamis has murdered sleep, so Cawdor shall sleep no more!

    That is the long and short of Saraki’s current odyssey.

    Even the fuel for his judicial roasting (if you prefer the emotive bleat trending in the embattled senate President’s camp), Saraki merrily provided.

    His alleged dodgy declaration of asset, which will form the pillar of evidence against him in court, would appear a clear-eyed decision to cheat.

    So, is his newly exposed Panama Papers misadventure, in which he was alleged, as Kwara governor, to have bought a shell company off his wife for £3 million sterling.  Now, where did that huge dough come from?

    Which patriotic citizen would confect £3 million, from virtual nowhere, to consummate such an ultra-secret deal, as sitting governor?  Meanwhile the law was clear: such opaque business was absolutely forbidden.

    Did Saraki, in his high conceit, think impunity would last forever?  Did he think secrets would stay buried for aye?  Again, a clear, conscious and deliberate choice.

    But as Saraki made noxious past choices that now blight his present, he and his confederates, are making present choices that may yet blast their future.

    These devious Senate manoeuvres are a parliamentary equivalent of the Biblical money changers and other petty criminals turning the temple of the Most High into a filthy mart, from which the venal chief priest made a hefty kill.

    That inspired the Max Romeo number quoted above.  But so offensive was the original deed that even the meek and gentle Jesus was riled into his most ferocious bout of anger the Bible recorded.

    For Saraki’s sake, Senator Peter Nwabuoshi (PDP Delta) — this Peter seems founded on the quicksand of legislative cant not on the rock of fair legislation — is pushing a bogus amendment to the CCB&T Act.

    For Saraki’s sake, Senator Isah Misau (APC Bauchi) has launched a most cynical amendment to the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) 2015.  Because that law exempts the court martial from its coverage, and CCT is not listed under section 6(6) of the 1999 Constitution as amended, stating the courts under ACJA purview, ACJA, posits Misau’s amendment, should be made not to operate in CCT!

    Disingenuous, isn’t it — so that Saraki can continue to dodge and hedge and stall, instead of grabbing legitimate opportunity to prove his innocence?

    For Saraki’s sake, Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, presides over the provocative defilement of the grandest legislative portal in the land.  But who does not know the embattled Ike is also playing a vicious game of self-survival, being also doomed by the Senate rule forgery that catapulted Saraki and Ekweremadu into office?

    Help, legislative barbarians and Talibans, on a crude, pre-historic mission, are at Nigeria’s parliamentary gate!  But we would be damned if we just laid down to be slaughtered!

    But for these legislative dark angels who would, willy-nilly, fall with their Lucifer, Saraki’s comeuppance, based on a grating sense of entitlement, is long overdue.

    When Saraki the Father “ported” from the All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP) in 2003, to teach then sitting Governor Mohammed Lawal (now dead) some harsh lessons in realpolitik, Saraki the Son was the joker.

    If I make others governor and they all prove ingrates, Baba Oloye mused, why not my own son?  Meanwhile, Kwara, the feudal colony, had no say at all.  It merrily acquiesced.

    That same sense of ernest and transparent entitlement would spur the Son to unhorse the Father.  After brother Bukola’s tenure, it was sister Gbemisola’s turn, in the Saraki Turn-By-Turn Kwara Unlimited!

    But he did right — for Baba Oloye’s hubris would probably had laid waste the Saraki dynasty enterprise, particularly in a conservative state with a sizable, if not predominantly, Muslim population.  But by handing his father filial humiliation, instead of honour, Saraki the Son doomed himself.

    Could that be the cause of the present Saraki troubles?  Maybe.  Maybe not.

    But one thing is clear: the Sarakis are in the second generation of democratic feudalism (never mind the contradiction in terms), where Kwara is only a vassal state.

    It is the same sense of feudal lordship that Saraki has brought to the Senate.  First, he emerged with a suspect rule the police have found to be pure forgery.  Then, he won’t exit until the laws are skewed, in the most bizarre of manners, so he can evade the law, to retain his Senate presidency.  What hubris!

    From the Evan-Evans tale of the late Evan Enwerem, first Senate president of the 4th Republic, the Senate has had its fair share of charlatans as leaders.

    But it is doubtful if the Senate has ever been put through a worse grill of muck, as Saraki and his band of desperadoes are now doing.  It is legislative gangsterism writ large!

    That is why Nigerians must take note of all the senators involved in this grand outrage. We must scour the law books to make them pay for their heinous rascality — after all, that a cleric enjoys ex-cathedral immunity does not shield him from crime he commits at his job.

  • Budget 2016: Saboteurs within?

    Budget 2016: Saboteurs within?

    The Muhamadu Buhari Presidency is alleging hideous “mutilation” of Budget 2016, just passed by the National Assembly.

    That is delaying the presidential assent to the Appropriation Bill; and the frenetic economic activity, with the probable money ease, expected to follow.

    The alleged “mutilations” affect key infrastructure proposals, including the coastal Calabar-Lagos standard gauge rail project.  Nigeria’s N60 billion counterpart funding, a crucial component of a proposed $2 billion (N400 billion) loan from China to implement the project, was allegedly expunged from the document.

    But that claim has drawn fierce legislative-executive  exchanges.  The National Assembly has riposted, through Abdulmumin Jibrin, House Approximation Committee chair, that the so-called Calabar-Lagos rail wasn’t originally part of the budget.  Ay, admitted the executive, but it was in the amended estimates the president re-submitted.

    According to a report in The Nation of Sunday of April 10, the parliament allegedly made a complete mess of estimates to complete crucial road arteries nationwide.  Instead of endorsing that spending plan, it shovelled funds for new roads, such that, at the end of the day, neither the old nor the new would have been completed.

    So did it make an alleged mess of the bulk of the health components of the social infrastructure the budget was designed to fund. Alleged over-provision for rural health facilities and boreholes, already provisioned for; and alleged scrapping of funds to buy drugs for major public health campaigns, like HIV/AIDS and Polio.

    But again here, the National Assembly balks.  The Health mix-up arose from the original padding, with the Health minister, it recalled, spectacularly disowning his ministry’s estimates.

    Now, after all the see-saw, what really is happening?

    Is this a case of a careless executive, pushing its fault on, and infernally scapegoating an already notorious National Assembly, which has not, for once, fired popular imagination?

    Or, internal sabotage, by an anti-development (if not outright anti-people) National Assembly, wilfully abusing its powers of budgetary oversight?

    Or just infantile politics by an errant ensemble, the supposed bastion of the people’s democratic dreams, hopes and aspirations, bent on turning all to a hideous nightmare?

    More worrisome: the news that the Lagos-Kano modern rail project was left intact but the Calabar-Lagos project was scrapped, introduced a noxious regional politics into the whole mix.

    If true, why would northern national legislators band together to pass the Lagos-Kano rail project but the southern ones, in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, conspire to let go of a key infrastructure thrust, that could change the face of the South East and South-South economies for good?

    For the South-South and South East representatives, could it be a case of mindless spite, the political equivalent of cutting your nose to spite your face?

    For the South West ones, a case of culpable indifference that damned the politically grumpy South East and South South to stew in their perceived spite?

    If that were true, wouldn’t the South-South, despite its huge oil resources, no thanks to its own lawmakers, make itself Nigeria’s political Tantalus?  Tantalus (from which came the English word “tantalize”) was the Greek wretch, fated to eternally gawk at choice fruits and sparkling water, but never tasting neither!

    Indeed, if South-South parliamentarians share the mentality of Rivers Governor, Nyesom Wike, who because of political differences with his predecessor would abandon the state’s monorail project, then they would have put the South-South in further developmental bind.

    And is the South East, due to nothing but bad politics, resigned to its perennial anthem of “marginalization”, when its representatives could make a huge difference by playing the politics of development, as opposed to politics of spite?

    But at the end of it all, isn’t everyone in a lose-lose situation, further  deepening the intolerable mass poverty and lack of opportunities in the land?

    O, could this “dummy” be why the National Assembly wanted to blind-sight the president into signing the bill without providing him with the detailed breakdown?

    That the president wouldn’t give the National Assembly the benefit of the doubt — doesn’t that raise a big question about the legislature’s trust quotient?

    Questions, questions, questions!  But at the end of the day, the answer lies in the National Assembly leadership.

    Since 1999, when President Olusegun Obasanjo roasted the National Assembly in the furnace of the controversial furniture allowance, the national legislature has never really recovered its image.  So, should there be any controversy, not a few would rather pronounce it guilty, before it proves its innocence!

    With the current 8th National Assembly, that perceived integrity gap even got worse.

    To start with, the rule by which the Bukola Saraki-led leadership in the Senate emerged was a forgery.  The Police already investigated and established that forgery.  But somehow, the Federal Attorney-General, for curious reasons, would not press a charge, as required under the law.

    Then, there are the many troubles of Senate President Saraki, all hinged on alleged lack of basic integrity in government and scant regard for public morality.

    The ongoing Code of Conduct Tribunal trials and the newly brewing Panama papers scandals have cast a serious pall on the corporate integrity of the legislature — if the fish’s head is rotten, isn’t the body dead? — and its leadership’s likely temptation to fudge and block, just to have one back on the executive, allegedly orchestrating the CCT trials.

    The putative motive to stall even gets starker, when the subject is political nitty-gritty.  The trade-off to make Saraki senate president changed the power calculus. Rebel APC legislators banding with the PDP, which strategic interest is seeing the APC government fail, further points in the direction of plausible sabotage of the budget, to settle political scores.

    Is Budget 2016, programmed to reflate the economy and give Nigerians a new lease of economic life, a victim of political war gaming?  No conclusive proof.  But there appears a disturbing pointer.

    That is why Nigerians must rise and rally against any such negative manifestation.  With the current pains in the land, this budget is too important to be left to the whims and caprices of degenerate politicians.

    So, the executive and legislature must make a success — and fast — of their ongoing palaver to sort out the mess.

    As for probable saboteurs, that is a grand betrayal of sacred trust.  A legislator is to make laws for the good of his polity, not to play politics to inflict more pains on his electors.

    That is why the electors, betrayed and hurt, must take specific notices of such errant and irresponsible behaviour; and punish hard, whoever is culpable, at the next electoral cycle.

  • A birthday, an anniversary and the crunch

    A birthday, an anniversary and the crunch

    Birthday boy”, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, was right, at the 8th Bola Tinubu Colloquium in Abuja: the stunning All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential win of 2015 was a fitting birthday gift.

    But that connect, between personal bliss and group glory, underscores the thin divide between triumph and failure in politics.

    One year ago, the land was upbeat with renewed optimism.  Right now, it is downcast with yet unrealised hope.

    It’s the ancient children of Israel out there again in the jungle, out of Egypt but yet to reach the Promised Land; bawling, yelling and screaming at Jehovah to clear off his celestial high horse and return them to Egypt fast, since his Canaan promise was nothing but holy smoke!

    The triumph of March 2015 has turned the crunch of March 2016!

    To be sure, most of the shrieking and screeching and squealing has come from the defeated class, praying and fasting that the Buhari administration fails.

    Even then, Nigeria has more than its fair share of the fickle, the simplistic, the gullible, and the outright vacuous, ready victims of the nay orchestra.  Besides, when the pocket hurts, cold reason melts in hot passion.

    Still, Tinubu’s personal triumph, in the context of the opposition’s victory, is a salute to an individual’s total devotion to a cause, no matter how lonely or chilly.

    Indeed, were history to record Nigerian political evolution from 1993 till now, it could well tag this epoch Tinubu Era (TE); the era before, Before Tinubu (BT) and the epoch after, After Tinubu (AT).  Such has been his grand impact on Nigerian politics (and governance) between the still-birth Third Republic (1992-1993) and now.

    Here is why.

    1993: After joining the conservative progressives in Shehu Musa Yar’Adua’s People’s Front (PF) faction of the victorious Social Democratic Party (SDP) to sack the classical Awoists of the Lateef Jakande school in Lagos, Tinubu balked at PF trading off Moshood Abiola’s June 12 presidential mandate, after Gen. Ibrahim Babangida had annulled that election.  Dapo Sarumi, the Lagos PF leader then, kept faith with PF.

    Between Tinubu and Sarumi, that made the difference between political life and death.  Though Sarumi would briefly buoy up as one of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s first set of ministers, his political career would fizzle out.

    But Tinubu’s would bloom — thanks to standing on the sanctity of the vote, with NADECO fighting the annulment, and helping to birth the current democratic order; rather than pally with intra-party reactionaries for short term selfish pleasure.

    2003: After Obasanjo’s grand electoral invasion of the South West, following the controversial 2003 general elections, Tinubu’s Lagos remained the sole state to escape the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) capture.  Talks then were rife: the then Lagos governor should dump the progressive shipwreck and join federal power.

    Not Tinubu.  He instead rallied the dejected progressive troops, even with savage plots and hideous intrigues from the Obasanjo presidency; and its crass executive bullying.

    Two election seasons after in 2011, most of the South West was back under the progressive fold, if not as one party then as ideological soul mates, notwithstanding the Olusegun Mimiko political prostitution and ideological subversion that careened him from Alliance for Democracy (AD, 1999), to PDP (2003), Labour Party (2007) and back to PDP (2015).

    Again like Sarumi, comparing Mimiko to Tinubu is a harsh study in unprincipled wheeling-and-dealing, which leads to eventual ruin (Mimiko); and staying steady on a tough and difficult turf, which leads to ultimate triumph (Tinubu).

    2015: That was the blessed year the Afenifere grandees finally got their deserved comeuppance; but again, Tinubu was their battling ram.

    Even when clear Goodluck Jonathan was running everyone into a ditch, the Afenifere divine, Kabiyesi (the Unquestionable) of the Awo progressive franchise, that reserve the right to bestow or withdraw it from mere mortals, located their own good fortune in Goodluck.

    Since their personal good equalled the Yoruba comfort (so went their tragic conceit which really was hubris), they all zoomed off to their personal ruins, expecting the fond Yoruba collective to follow.

    But again, as in 2003 when the five other AD governors fell for the Obasanjo deceit, backed by this same Afenifere grandees, apart from the late Chief Abraham Adesanya, Tinubu charted a radically different path.

    For one, the opposition alliance APC was gathering traction.  For another, the PDP was unravelling fast, with a president doing all the wrong things in electoral desperation; and Patience, his spouse, mouthing all the wrong things on the stumps, to further bury hubby without trace.

    But to the Afenifere, old or young, nothing drove them but concentrated Tinubu spite.  To this well-funded conspiracy of demonization and blackmail, the Odua People’s Congress (OPC) duo of Fredrick Fasehun and Gani Adams — one, an old man bordering on political senility; the other, a callow youth punching above his weight — were merry recruits.

    Add the AIT hate documentary, and feel anew the full venom of Operation Total Demonization!  Still, AIT has since gobbled its vomit; and some news media, merry echoes of those hate messages, now fall upon themselves to make Tinubu their man of that same year!

    At the end, the impossible, on which the spiteful Afenifere and confederates hedged their bet, despite the clear balance of demography and political power, happened.  For the first time in Nigerian history, a federal ruling party got electorally toppled and cobbled by the opposition!

    Again, Tinubu is flush with victory; and his traducers are whining in defeat!  For the Afenifere, the age of innocence, the halcyon paradise of integrity, is over.  They not only lost an election, they lost their brand integrity.

    Chief Olu Falae, who spearheaded the anti-Tinubu army, spurring the Trojan horse called SDP, is now freely cited for alleged obtainment with established political crooks in the land!  How many of the other grandees savoured Jonathan’s sweet electoral dollars, now turned poison to all?

    It doesn’t get more tragic!

    But as it often happens in politics, tragedy and victory comingle, with a rapidity faster than even the flux of Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher that posits change is the sole permanent thing in life.

    So, for Tinubu himself, this is as much victory time as it is crunch time.  The victory whoops of 2015 only echo at a distance, with its hangover.  One year later, it is crunch time; and the groans, the pains and the angst in the land aren’t pretty.

    From that terrible din, come taunts of the electorally vanquished; the shriek of the fickle; and the occasional jeer of the alienated, even from the victorious camp.

    From the media come the obtuse, the acute, the reasonable, the outright malevolent and hostile and the grand conceit of the brilliant but unwise, all staking their republican claim to tutor their government the ABC of winning policy.

    But the Buhari administration need not be frazzled.  It is only a grand reminder its work is well cut out; and that failure is no option.  So, it must work its butts out.

    Indeed, if Tinubu’s personal triumph is to last, and not buried in the present crunch, APC must fulfil its historic mission of changing Nigeria for good.

  • El-Rufai and Kaduna’s antichrists

    El-Rufai and Kaduna’s antichrists

    For daring a bill to regulate religious practice in Kaduna State, Governor Nasir el-Rufai’s explosively intolerant opponents, reading religious chauvinism into it all, have tagged him “antichrist”.

    But from their hysteria, not the governor, but they, sound every decibel the antichrist.  By their deeds, declares the Bible, the divine Christian constitution, we shall know them!

    For starters, an Auchi, Edo-based Pentecostal pastor, Apostle Johnson Suleiman, let fly his own version of Christian fatwa: the governor must withdraw the bill or he dies!

    Is that the good pastor’s interpretation of Christ’s turn-the-other-cheek doctrine, in this blessed season of Easter — Christ, that was divine, yet meekly submitted to be mauled and crucified, just to cleanse humanity of sin?

    Or, given the Islamic ring to the pastor’s surname, is it a neophyte getting too excitable for his own good, preaching hate instead of love, just to score one for Christianity against its great “enemy”, Islam?

    But even if Islam is Christianity’s enemy (which it is not, though their doctrines differ), didn’t Christ insist you must pray for your enemies?

    Besides, the irate apostle (didn’t the Bible say be angry, but don’t sin?) must be told that theocratic arrogance — which is what his show of ire amounts to — doesn’t excuse the breach of the law in a secular republic.

    Threatening a sitting governor with death, for whatever excuse, could well amount to treason, if the affected high official of state decides to press charges.

    Another piqued Christian brother, on his facebook wall, gleefully posted an el-Rufai picture defaced with a giant X, in red.  His furious and sweeping verdict: “This Uncircumcised Philistine!  Cannot stop the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ in Kaduna State!!!”

    But pray, is the proposed  “Bill for a Law to substitute the Kaduna State Regulation of Religious Preaching Edict No. 7 of 1984” targeted solely against Christians?  Hardly, though this emotive reaction would suggest otherwise.

    Just as well it is nothing but hot fallacy.  Calling a fellow citizen “uncircumcised Philistine” could satisfy religious bile.  But if you distil history from theology, that phrase clearly belonged to the pre-Christian era, the Judaist era, when the ancient Israelites fought turf wars against virulent opposition in the Promised Land which, by the way, belonged to some people before they got there.

    Judaists, if they wish, could luxuriate in such cavalier bigotry.  Not Christians.  Though Christ talked of Jews and Gentiles, there was nothing chauvinistic about it: just a realistic aggregation of humanity, beyond just Jews, since all, according to the Christian creed, are entitled to Christ’s redemption.

    Anyway, applying psychoanalysis to Nigerian users of facebook would appear a disturbing but penetrating beam into the innermost crevices of their soul: the ultra-dirty id, without the restraining strictures of the ego and super-ego.

    It is the classical Freudian slip, a raw exposé into the thick jungle of the soul, where unfettered savagery reigns.

    Still, nothing from this discourse presumes el-Rufai a saint; and his opponents, irredeemable devils.

    Indeed, from his tenure as Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) director-general to Abuja minister, both stewardship he proudly rendered in Accidental Public Servant, his Obasanjo-era public service memoirs, the not-so-accidental elected governor of Kaduna assaults you with his in-your-face manifest goodness of his intentions, no matter how controversial.

    That enlists him needless enemies, especially among those who feel he is too proud, too huffy and absolutely insufferable.  An acute mind that does not suffer fools gladly, and who gets irritated and shows it when folks are not making sense, not a few dismiss him as “arrogant”.

    He may well need to seriously work on his emotional intelligence.  But his mark on the public space, both at BPE and as Abuja minister, would appear indelible.

    But if the new law is targeted at both Christians and Muslims, why is it that, apart from a few Muslim lobbies, only Christians foam in the mouth, rave and mouth threats?

    Well, maybe for too long, religion has had too unfettered a rein in a secular republican state. In Kaduna, the dominantly Christian southern Kaduna vs the Kaduna establishment, which leaning is clearly Muslim, appears a crusade of all seasons.

    Generally in the North, Islam appears the faith of power, which has the effect of radicalising the Christian swathe of the populace, with their penchant for ultra-sensitivity in faith matters.  But then whoever is not feeling their pinch can’t teach them how, or how not, to yelp.

    Even at the federal level, with the northern domination of power for a long time, Islam has had its fair share in Nigerian power metaphysics and imaging.

    But that has been a rogue balance of a sort, since the departing British colonising powers had already codified the Christianisation of government business.  That is why Sunday (when Christians go to church), not Friday (when Muslims observe their Jumat), was the original civil service rest day.

    Which is why Governor el-Rufai and the Kaduna legislature must ensure the proposed legislation goes through the grill of public hearings and other legislative in-built devices to ensure the law, when passed, is fair, just and equitable to all.

    But one thing the state must not do: surrender its constitutionally given powers to legislate for the good of its people, just because of some religious hysteria.

    That would be succumbing to theocratic outlawry — which really is a contradiction in terms because both Christianity and Islam clearly define their relationship with secular powers: and every true Christian and Muslim must be bound by that.

    Besides, the 1999 Constitution, as amended, fully empowers the state to regulate religious practice.  While section 38(1) guarantees religious freedom, section 45(1) mandates the government to make “reasonable justifiable” regulatory laws “in the interest of public safety, public order, public morality or public health or for the purpose of protecting the rights and freedoms of other persons.”

    People easily forget that Kaduna used to be a cauldron of faith riots and killing; until Governor Ahmed Makarfi (1999-2007) somewhat found an antidote.  Even then, that did not avert the Shiite crisis, which recent tragic escalation a judicial commission of inquiry is still trying to sort out.

    So, if el-Rufai decides to be pro-active, so long as he is fair and equitable to all, what’s wrong with that?

    Apostle Suleiman’s boast that he needs no licence to preach anywhere is not only hot gas to his revved up congregation, it is also akin to theocratic outlawry.  If the Kaduna law is passed and he breaches it, he risks a gaol term, pure and simple.

    It is the same outlawry that, with due respect to genuine Shiite grievances, would make that commune pledge allegiance to Iran, while the Nigerian state secures and guarantees its members; with the practice of their faith.

    Now, see what tragedy that privilege without responsibility has caused everybody?  Don’t such misguided notions negate the Social Contract?

    Let lawful and responsible religious communes, Christian and Muslim, rally to ensure the proposed Kaduna law is fair and equitable to all.  Religious hysteria can’t strip the government powers the constitution has granted it.