The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olakunle Abimbola

  • Buhari, NA and race against time

    To the conscientious analyst, neither Tambuwal nor Ekweremadu holds any appeal.

    Tambuwalisation,  which romped Aminu Tambuwal to the speakership, despite the ire of his ruling party, suited fine the opposition Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), during the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) hegemony.

    Yet, it has come back, in the new order, to plague the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC); with the loss of the Senate deputy presidency to the opposition PDP.

    Many would, of course, enter the softener: the Tambuwal-led House of Representatives proved much more people-centred; than the reactionary House expected under Mulikat Adeola-Akande, the PDP choice for Speaker.

    Yes — and the polity would appear not ungrateful.  But even that noble accident hardly vitiates the vile principle of rebellion against party.

    Now to Ekweremadu-isation, which has fired PDP’s Ike Ekweremadu to retain the senate deputy presidency, despite his PDP losing power.

    Indeed, it’s a real laugh seeing Godswill Akpabio, former Akwa Ibom governor and now a senator, wax lyrical on cant.  He claimed Ekweremadu was a product of some gobbledygook bi-partisan entente, involving public-spirited APC and PDP senators.  Nice attempt at deodorisation of a clear and brazen parliamentary coup — with even Akpabio hardly convincing himself!

    Of course, it was nothing of the sort.

    Rather, it was two blocs of colluding legislators — a minority, from the APC side, for strictly personal gains, stabbing their own party in the back; and a majority, from the PDP, attempting an obstructionist vanguard, to stall a clear mandate for change, hoping therefrom, to reap some future group political salvation.

    But as everything karma-like, and not unlike the eye-for-an-eye Mosaic law that soon leaves everybody blind, the Ekweremadu phase of this bad politics is even worse than the Tambuwal original.

    For all his rebellion, Speaker Tambuwal conceded the House Leader to Ms Adeola-Akande, his party’s original Speaker-designate.  But Ekweremadu is living example that Bukola Saraki, senate president, will make no such concession!  If he did, the deal would be off.  If Ekweremadu is in peril, the deal would be in danger.  That puts Saraki too in peril!

    Again, while the Tambuwal concession did not nullify the original rebellion, the Saraki intransigence portends a worse parliamentary plague next time.

    So long for a political class that thrives on expediency, and hardly on principle!

    But ethical or ruthless, life goes on.  President Muhammadu Buhari (PMB) demanded and got a mandate for change.  So, he is condemned to delivering on that mandate.

    The snag, though, is: even if his party has a healthy parliamentary majority, the Saraki-brewed Ekweremadu-isation tends to have vaporised all that.

    Right now the National Assembly appears fractured into three camps: the majority APC, who appear loyal to their party and the PMB agenda; the minority PDP, poised to play the opposition, by hook or by crook; and the penumbra of two minorities: the bulk PDP and APC rebel elements that cooked Saraki’s senate presidency, which could band together to eclipse the PMB plan, particularly if the group perceives it a threat to its own agenda — and political survival.

    Yet, fast-tracking such initiatives appears the badly needed redemption for a fast decaying polity.

    But bad news for PMB: when the chips are down, these two minorities could forge an illicit majority, filibustering against, if not terminally blocking legislative support for popular initiatives.  That simply means PMB may face more difficulties than anticipated, to garner legislative support for his programmes.

    That, indeed, would be very bad news for everyone.  This is because to put things right for Nigeria is a desperate race against time, where even a second’s delay could be serious, if not outright fatal.

    From the 2015 election, the partisan winners were from the North (North East, North Central and North West) and South West, where APC swept the polls.  The losers were from the South East and South-South, where PDP won.

    So, virtual partisan political warfare, at least in the next four years, would be between the North/South West (to further press their electoral hegemony) and the South-East/South-South (to defend their turf).

    But overall, all of the geo-political zones were losers on the developmental turf, according to findings from a new poverty study on Nigeria from Oxford University (mentioned on this page last week), known as the Oxford poverty and human development initiative (OPHI), and formally cited as OPHI 2015, with the latest stats from as late as June 2015.

    OPHI does not measure poverty as just “no money”; but more rigorously as conditions precedent: either to reinforce poverty; or break that yoke to deliver development.

    So, by its 10-point indicators, broken down into three major planks, a state might be flush with cash, yet work to deepen poverty by its low infrastructure (social and physical); or be low on cash, but high on infrastructure, to dislodge poverty.

    Trite: presidential mandates are national.  But if all politics is local, PMB has extra motivation to push pro-people, anti-poverty initiatives, needing urgent legislative support.

    From the OPHI data, the 10 poorest states, with corresponding destitution, are from the president’s home region: Yobe, Zamfara, Jigawa, Bauchi, Kebbi, Sokoto, Katsina, Taraba, Gombe and Kano — in that order.

    On this list is Katsina, PMB’s home state, Kano, the North’s commercial dynamo and Sokoto, the North West’s spiritual headquarters.  So, if he desires his presidency to be impactful, PMB must, against poverty, race against time.

    The top 10 states least affected by poverty and destitution are a mishmash: Lagos, Osun, Anambra, Ekiti, Edo, Imo, Abia, Rivers, Kwara and Akwa Ibom — in that order.

    Still, that four states, Lagos, Osun, Ekiti and Edo, dominate the top five tends to underscore the development bent of the states ruled, or once ruled, by the defunct ACN.  It also appears in the presidential camp, in the intra-APC parliamentary showdown.  More: the group should be zealous PMB partners, in a fierce anti-poverty war  — lest their areas slip back into the poverty mash, in this period of national economic angst.

    South East did far better than the South-South on the OPHI scale, despite SS’s relative bigger share of the central cake. On the other hand, Kwara, at spot 9, sits at the apex of all the northern states.

    Given the balance of the power in the National Assembly, and balance of fortune on the OPHI scale, could Saraki’s rebel APC legislators then team up with PDP-dominated SE and SS to block PMB and legislatively frustrate his initiatives?

    Sans bad politics, there is no sense in that, since no state or geo-political zone is immune from poverty.  But bad politics makes it a possibility, especially if collective good threatens to turn individual ruin.

    That is why, to succeed, PMB must marshal a strong coalition in parliament — with enough grassroots developmental carrots as drivers, to build a bi-partisan progressive vanguard.

    But if this commonsense viewpoint falters?  Then, he must build a media-people coalition outside parliament to enforce parliamentary common sense that, in Jeremy Bentham-speak, pushes the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

    That is the only way the change mandate of March 28 won’t end yet another grand betrayal.

    ‘If he desires his presidency to be impactful, PMB must, against poverty, race against time’

  • Osun’s politics of the belly

    It had got to be the limit — Bayelsa senator, Ben Murray-Bruce’s attempt at wannabe activism.  He had “donated” his anticipated wardrobe allowance to feed hungry Osun workers — and a few Bayelsa widows.

    Hare-brained activism never made a more hare-brained start!

    Homeboy, Iyiola Omisore, also made a quiet rumble: doing his little bit to feed the hungry Osun multitude.  However, had he wanted to cause a stir, he would have parked trailer load of grains at the Osun Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) secretariat in Osogbo; and invited the starving plebs of Abere, the state government’s secretariat, to come have their fill!

    In Mr. Omisore’s world, charity and politics co-mingle for devastating effects!

    Why, the controversial Buruji Kashamu, Omisore’s deep ideological soul mate in democratic feudalism, also sent in his own words of hope: trailers, creaking under loads and loads of victuals and myriad provisions, were snailing and snaking into Osun!

    Has the SOS caravan arrived?

    O, the media also weighed in; in the Osun wage hysteria.  Abimbola Adelakun (The Punch, June 11) intervened with a piece that betrayed structural split-personality. The headline, “Ogbeni Aregbesola, pay your workers” was a cynical taunt, in the classical Yoruba traditional sense.  But it ended with basic reason and admission that Osun’s problem stems from a national systemic failure. In-between were emotive and neo-liberal snarling against “populist” policies.

    Ms Adelakun’s newspaper would later pour cold water on efforts, at the end of June, to start paying the salary arrears, suggesting, by its cynical angling of the news, that the efforts were too little, too late.  Of course, between The Punch and Aregbesola’s government, there appears no love lost.

    Still, the very limit would come with a crusading jurist, ensconced in the Osun judiciary, inflicting great violence on judicial reticence and the separation of power doctrine.

    Justice Oloyede Folahanmi, an Osun high court judge, wrote a petition calling on the Osun legislature to impeach Governor Aregbesola, over the salary arrears.  Her tone suggested the governor wilfully held salaries back to punish and intimidate workers.  But logically, why might he do that?

    A few have defended Justice Folahanmi’s unprecedented conduct, insisting she wrote in her personal capacity; and not as a judge.  Still, the notorious fact (as her constituency would say) is that she is a sitting judge, sworn to some service ethos and etiquette!

    Besides, if that apologia held, then the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), writing as a citizen, could  well gift himself the liberty to write the National Assembly for the president’s impeachment, should the Federal Government falter on salaries!  You see how misguided judicial activism could easily court anarchy?

    But something should be clear.  Between friendly and hostile camps to the Osun governor’s salary odyssey, there is no high moral ground.  Both are driven by the logic of public policy analysis, a media activity critical to democratic deepening.

    So, what is Ripples’ angst at the stand of Justice Folahanmi and co?  Good question; but before an answer, another caveat: other things being equal, salary delays are degrading and indefensible.  Their ripple effects can make a family really, really miserable; and it is a path no self-respecting adult wants to tread.  Besides, even a month’s delay is bad enough.  For months’ delay, one can imagine the anguish on the affected families.

    So, what is wrong with telling it as it is — as Aregbesola’s media critics have done — and reading out the riot act to the governor: pay or quit?

    The approach.  While compassion is noble, emotion-milking is vile, wilful and cruel.  It can only create two victims: the governor as demon, useless and uncaring; and hurting workers, fed on the daily diet of gubernatorial loathing.  Both can only work up emotions; but hardly solve the problem.

    Besides, the skewed attention on Osun, when more than a half of the 36 states are involved in the salary meltdown, suggests a media roasting most bizarre, with the media becoming part of the problem, instead of navigating the polity towards a solution.

    Of course, such unconscionable muddying of waters suits nicely Aregbesola’s political traducers.  That is where Omisore and co belong; and to the amoral political class, all is fair in war.

    But the media, becoming ready and merry tools to fight these unholy wars, is tantamount to the media becoming smashed mirrors, from which only skewed images of society can emerge.

    And for a serving judicial officer to unthinkingly barge in, is the judicial equivalent of dancing naked.

    But the most tragic consequence of this politics-of-the-belly approach to a serious crunch, which calls for radical financial restructuring, is deliberate misdiagnosis, which has nothing to offer but mischief.

    In the heat of the crusading passion, Aregbesola became the irredeemable Satan, not Goodluck Jonathan; under whose presidency the national purse became a sieve, putting most states in the present bind.

    For instance, the Jonathan presidency declared daily stolen 400, 000 barrels, from the 2.6 million produced each day.  Though that should have translated into some 15 per cent reduction, states suffered a 40 per cent drop from Federation Account (FA) takings — without any cogent reason.

    Then, the global oil price crash.  The cumulative effect of Jonathan’s leaking purse and the price dip, crashed Osun’s revenue by some 55 per cent.  Now, Aregbesola’s only blame here appears his huge appetite for developmental projects, financed with sundry loans and bonds,  invested in social and physical infrastructure.  That tenuous balance left the state heavily leveraged.  The shock, from this sudden financial storm, smashed Osun’s monthly FA taking below the N3.6 billion monthly civil servants’ wage bill.  That explains the salary default.

    Even then, Osun’s internally generated revenue (IGR) for 2014, from National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) figures, was N8.5 billion, placing 11th out of 25 states.  Compared with Akwa Ibom’s N15.6 billion (seventh placed, though Nigeria’s highest FA drawer), it would appear Osun is using its meagre resources to deepen its local economy, while Akwa Ibom, flush with oil derivation cash, seems largely content with its FA takings.

    Besides, a global multidimensional poverty index (MPI) survey of Nigeria, with 100 other developing countries, has introduced a fresh perspective to Osun and poverty.

    The MPI is based on a 10-point indicator, based on three broad poverty criteria: education (years of schooling and school attendance), health (child mortality and nutrition) — both gauging the meeting of a child’s social infrastructure needs  — and a six-point indicator under “standard of living”: assets, cooking fuel, floor, water, sanitation and electricity.

    Under MPI, quoted from an Oxford University document called Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (2015), Osun placed second, only to Lagos, among Nigerian states least affected by poverty, via a pile chart tagged  ”Headcount of the ratios of MPI poor and destitute”.

    That means that despite all the salary hoopla, Osun has somehow devised ways to improve its poverty level.

    Still, many newspaper commentators thunder, from their Olympian heights of raw passion, that Aregbesola should scrap his high impact developmental programmes, because of the salary hoopla.

    The Ogbeni, to his peril, would listen to such Mephistophelean counsel; though he should try his best possible to clear the salary arrears.

    ‘Many newspaper commentators thunder Aregbesola should scrap his high impact developmental programmes. The Ogbeni, to his peril, would listen to such Mephistophelean counsel’

  • NASS: Between legacy and careerists

    NASS: Between legacy and careerists

    In “Between APC and SDP” (June 16), Ripples noted the tactical error of trying to keep at bay, the New-Peoples Democratic Party (nPDP) bloc of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).

    That sparked the Bukola Saraki-led parliamentary coup of June 9.

    But with the turn of events, and the nPDP elements now attempting to impose their own image on the National Assembly, has it transformed into a strategic blunder that could, in due course, nullify the Change Nigerians voted for on March 28?

    That chilling question is imperative because two grim dramas are unfolding from the APC crisis: the fierce struggle for the party’s soul (the subject of “Between APC and SDP”); and the emergence, from inside the ruling party, of two different blocs: the Legacy bloc (most likely to drive Change) and the Careerists (most likely to, all-movement-no-motion wise, leave things as they are).

    Gunning for the soul of APC, that boasts at best an ideological bric-a-brac, is neither unexpected nor illegitimate; and one dare says, the internal business of the varied tendencies in the party.

    But whichever faction ascends is the business of the polity; for Nigeria would rise or sink by it.

    If the pro-Change bloc wins, and radically pushes policies that would deliver a legacy of change for the better, Nigerians would have won with their March 28 heroics, that powered Muhammadu Buhari to the presidency.

    But if the Careerists win — careerists that jostle for self-political offices, without a corresponding improvement in the collective welfare — it would be much of the old same.  The March 28 mandate would then have been in vain; and millions of longsuffering Nigerians would, yet again, have lost.

    Given the vengeance and passion, with which Nigerians voted in March and April for change, that would be highly risky, if not outright fatal, for Nigeria — both for the entrenched establishment, and the  distraught rabble.

    Because Nigeria perches at a delicate historical juncture, that is the correct prism to view the high-voltage drama from the APC front — and not necessarily from the relative loss or win of the individuals involved in the combat.

    That, of course, throws the discourse right back to the dramatis personae.

    By rebelling against his party, and having bulk PDP votes with a smattering of his own APC’s elect him as senate president, what was Saraki guilty of?

    Realpolitik, his friends would coo: whatever lobby for influence that availed Ahmad Lawan his party’s backing also availed Saraki the push for support, inside and outside his own party.

    Treachery and perfidy, his foes would roar: even the best of individual intents should be subjugated to the collective good; and party discipline.

    That thrust-and-fence would perhaps do, particularly in a value-neuter milieu, where the vilest of conducts and the noblest of behaviours, on a single cause, are just two sides of a bloody controversy.  If in doubt, recall how the clear crime of annulling the free election of 12 June 1993 became the holy banner of anti-June 12 elements.

    With the media itself ever ready and willing (for whatever motive) to spin even the most abhorrent of conducts, the society’s value-blindness and deafness become even more alarming.

    Still, beyond contrived controversies, Saraki’s emergence as senate president; and his bloc’s spurning of rapprochement in the filling of other principal officers — winner-takes-all fashion — throw up troubling questions.

    Needless to say, the attempt by Saraki’s confederates in the House of Representatives, which Speaker Yakubu Dogara leads, to replicate a similar ploy, led to the June 25 uproar in the lower house.

    If APC’s nPDP bloc pressed their legitimate right to land vital positions in the new government (as reward for their electoral labour), why might they block the party’s bid for legitimate balancing, particularly after a sharp dispute, for the sake of peace founded on equity and fairness?

    That has exposed them to a not altogether illegitimate web of conspiracy theories, which clearly conflicts with President Buhari’s clear mandate for change.

    For starters, Saraki’s real blunder in the June 9 parliamentary coup was less in rebelling against his own party (as dire as that was for party discipline; in a new party elected on the mandate of urgent change in awful times); but more in selling out his party to PDP elements — PDP, with clear motives to block that change; and ensure APC’s utter failure.

    A fall-out of that sell-out was the emergence, as senate deputy president, of PDP’s Ike Ekweremadu.  Though an embattled Saraki has denied Ekweremadu’s election was a logical quip-pro-quo (which sounds disingenuous, to say the truth), the charge of treachery and perfidy is not helped by the grim prospect that when Saraki is not around, Ekweremadu bosses proceedings.

    Ekweremadu can be counted upon to stall the APC agenda.  Besides, by further defying their party and rejecting its preferred candidates for other APC National Assembly principal officers, outside senate president and deputy, the Saraki bloc would further split the party.

    Saraki would, therefore, find it hard to throw off the charge of playing an alleged Judas out to halt the APC momentum of change; and haul Nigerians’ future right into the dark past of careerists and soulless power adventurists.

    That, in Nigeria’s troubled political history, would dovetail into the decision of the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua faction of the defunct Social Democratic Party (SDP) to trade off the late MKO Abiola’s presidential mandate of 12 June 1993, for a sterile Interim National Government (ING) — with disastrous consequences, which the birthing of the current 4th Republic was programmed to correct.

    Other conspiracy theorists have even claimed Senator Saraki is only the visible face of an alleged northern irredentist bloc, trying to push yet again an alleged “born-to-rule” project.

    Ripples would find this claim rather implausible though, given the trouble June 12 (which tried to push this calamitous doctrine) caused the country; and the historic North-South West political entente that delivered the famous March 28 APC presidential win, to save the country from ruin.

    But whatever the facts or fiction, Senator Saraki, by his somewhat legal but hardly legitimate emergence as senate president, finds himself at the cusp of a cruel historical pigeon-hole — the man that arrested change, when change was imperative for a sinking Nigeria!

    That is why he must accommodate efforts at fair balancing by his party, in filling the remaining Senate principal offices.  On this score, the claim about stalling to avoid cohabiting with his “enemies” is balderdash.  Balancing senate principal offices is no ancestral feud.

    But history and judgements are in the long, long run.  Right now, there is a government to run; and our people to bail out.

    That is why President Buhari must step out and resolve this logjam — not necessarily for his feuding party, but for Nigerians who gave him a clear mandate for change.

    After due diligence, the president should weigh in on the side of the forces of legacy, against the careerists. That is his covenant with Nigerians; and that is what he should do.

    To do that, however, he might have to take the case directly to Nigerians, away from the feuding parliamentarians.

    ‘The president should weigh in on the side of the forces of legacy, against the careerists. That is his covenant with Nigerians’

     

  • To President Buhari

    Good day, Your Excellency.

    I’m sorry, I have to dispense with long protocols in opening greetings.  But Mr. President, it is not for lack of respect.  It is rather due to the urgency of the situation.

    Besides, it is only the unthinking, in today’s Nigeria, that would not respect you.  In the midst of seeming paralysis, you appear the near-sole moral palladium, by whose name anyone can swear.  That is no mean feat, in the mass turpitude of contemporary Nigeria.

    Moral authority helps when in the midst of teeming amoral Lilliputians.  That comes handy to keep everyone in check.  But it hardly guarantees you a great presidency.

    So, allow me to ask: do you want to be a great president?  If you want to, please take your mind from the distracting drama swirling around you, especially from the National Assembly front.  Instead, x-ray your presidential predecessors, all fortunately members of the National Council of State (NCS).

    I mean no disrespect, Your Excellency.  Neither do I intend any malice towards any of the ex-leaders, now proud NCS members.  But if you must achieve change, the electoral mantra that romped you into power, against all establishment odds, you must make a clean break from how they ran affairs in their time.  Otherwise, Mr. President, you would end up like them: personages barely tolerated by their people but nevertheless propped up by the establishment.

    Take former President Olusegun Obasanjo, incidentally the closest of the lot, to your power trajectory.  Mr. President, only you and Chief Obasanjo have the distinction of ruling Nigeria, both as military heads of state and elected presidents.  Indeed, the Murtala-Obasanjo government, you will recall, was the one you traced your power DNA to, at your first coming on 31 December 1983.  But inasmuch as Gen. Obasanjo promised change, he delivered little of that.

    Proof?  Gen. Obasanjo attained distinction as the first African military strongman to hand over to an elected president as promised.  But what all that achieved was the collapse of the Shehu Shagari Presidency after only four years and three months, logging at its exit an egregiously rigged 1983 general elections.  You took over back then to, in your own very words, “clear the Augean stable”

    President Obasanjo’s second coming hardly fared better, though after his two-term, eight-year presidency, the present 4th Republic is hitting its 17th year, the longest democratic season in Nigeria’s history.  But that is about all the high point.

    The 2007 election, the transitional one from Obasanjo’s presidency to the late Umaru Yar’Adua’s, was even more soullessly rigged than 2003’s.  So, the cumulative crisis of illegitimacy, a combination of phoney elections and soulless governance, would produce Goodluck Jonathan, under whom the Nigerian state, from cumulative decay, was collapsing fast.

    But again, as it was in 1983, it is now your hard luck to clear the debris: the collapsed economy that has led most states to fail in their salary commitments; and even a more collapsed value system, with the Leviathan, Corruption, in your own words, set to “kill us, if we don’t kill it first”.

    Indeed, it is your pledge of David, to slay Corruption the Goliath, that rekindled the masses’ hope; and romped you into power on March 28.

    The other former helmsmen contributed their respective quotas to Nigeria’s woes.  Gen. Yakubu Gowon belonged to the military age of innocence.  Though he was a gentleman of gentlemen, his youthful mistakes continue to plague the country.

    Gen. Ibrahim Babangida’s power waywardness cost Nigeria dear.  Apart from the mass corruption his tenure enthroned, his unprecedented annulment of a free election almost torpedoed the country.

    Chief Ernest Shonekan is dear to his family and relations.  But in Nigeria’s power matrix, he continues to symbolise provocative subversion, of both the democratic principle and of fairness and equity, by accepting to head the so-called Interim National Government (ING) — which a court declared illegal — to wilfully subvert Abiola’s presidential mandate.

    Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar would probably bear on his conscience, to his grave, Chief Moshood Abiola’s sudden death in detention.  But he saved the military from further humiliation by, post-haste, leading them back to the barracks; and handing power to an elected presidency in 1999.

    As a unit then, this is an undistinguished group of leaders, even if, as individuals, they may be distinguished Nigerians.

    So, Mr. President: do you, at the end of your tenure, want to join this undistinguished group, barely tolerated by a longsuffering people? Or you really want to make a difference, as the Nigerian leader that finally made the long awaited change?

    From your exertions during electioneering, you would appear to want to make a difference.  If so, then you should, post-haste, jettison how they did things.  If they had acted right, you probably, at 72, would be enjoying sweet retirement and not worrying yourself about Nigeria’s eternal problems.  But now that you are out there, it would be double jeopardy indeed, should you fail — God forbid!

    That is why, Your Excellency, you should seize the moment.  Many are already saying you are slow.  I don’t buy that tale.  It is nothing but the Nigerian penchant for speed, even if it is brainless, rash and ultimately counter-productive.  Still, I just hope your so-called “slowness” is methodical — the hallmark of wisdom,  which abhors rashness.

    The mention of wisdom brings to mind the unsavoury drama playing out at the National Assembly, since the seeming rupture in your ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), since the election of the Senate president and House Speaker.

    Ostensibly to stanch the crisis, you have been swarmed by all sorts: former leaders desperately seeking relevance, professional sympathisers, eternal do-gooders and even mischief makers.  Phew, the din of the market must be ear-shattering!

    Still, after all the din, you have a government to run, a government that promised change; and a people impatiently waiting for that difference.  Failure is, therefore, not an option.

    That is why, Mr. President, you must maintain a clear head.  No matter what happens, you must not surrender your presidency to anyone.  You should also not allow anyone to come between you and your vice president.

    Despite the excitement in the Senate and House of Representatives, a united presidency, with the president seeing to politics; and the vice president bossing policy and getting his hands real dirty with bolts and nuts, may well be the key to your success.

    Please, please Mr. President, don’t let anyone give you the business-as-usual fable that the veepee is only a spare tyre. Everyone on your ticket must add value — and your veepee is nothing but solid gold.  So, mine it!

    If you succeed, Mr. President, you would have imprinted yourself in the hearts of Nigerians.  Not only that: you would have ennobled NCS as a true Areopagus: a heroic chamber of genuine Nigerian heroes, not a barely tolerated group of establishment drafts.

    May God gift you the wisdom and temperament to act right, Mr. President.

  • Between APC and SDP

    The June 9 National Assembly showdown, in which All Progressives’ Congress (APC) rebel elements routed the party’s official choices, underscores the eerie parallel between the defunct Social Democratic Party (SDP) of the still-birth 3rd Republic and APC.

    In the face of conservatives’ clear failure in governance, SDP and APC dangled the progressive charm (Nigeria-speak for left-of-centre welfarist ideology); and both struck a chord among the longsuffering electorate.

    Both were cobbled together, but in different circumstances.

    SDP, by a hectoring Ibrahim Babangida military presidency, which sly transition programme wanted to sell Nigerians a pig in a poke.  With the IBB junta rejecting all freely formed political bodies as registered political parties, but imposing own SDP (“a little to the left”) and National Republican Convention (NRC — “a little to the right”), the legacy People’s Solidarity Party (PSP) and People’s Front (PF) forged a somewhat forced union.

    And APC, by a sinking but arrogant ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which forced a free merger, among no less than four opposition political parties — the first successful fusion (as distinct from electoral alliance) in Nigerian political history.

    Coming together were Bola Tinubu’s Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), Muhammadu Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), much wilted All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP) and a faction of All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), led by Imo Governor, Rochas Okorocha.  A faction of the disintegrating PDP, which dubbed itself the New PDP (nPDP), would later join the merger, with the defection of five PDP governors.

    What happened on June 9 was, therefore, the legacy segments fiercely battling for the APC soul.

    At SDP, the wrong elements captured the party’s soul.  This was clear from how the SDP national executive traded away its 12 June 1993 presidential mandate, which Chief MKO Abiola won.  The crisis that followed the reckless annulment of that election forced Nigeria to its knees.

    Has APC made a better choice than SDP, with the extant balance of forces?  Time will tell.

    But back to SDP.  PSP, a bastion of Western Nigeria Awoists with friends nationwide, fused with PF, the late Shehu Musa Yar’Adua’s sole power machine.  Though PF had cells nationwide, it was fiercely supported too by young, upwardly mobile professionals from Western Nigeria.  In this group was a certain young Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

    Though these “new breed” politicians shared the Awo progressive ideals (as reportedly Gen. Yar’Adua; as he was reputed to have initiated an Awo-Northern elements rapprochement for the 1983 presidential election), they were loath to queue behind the ageing Awo establishment, with their alleged penchant to impose candidates.

    So, when elections into SDP offices came, the richer and more cohesive PF swept the posts, even if, to PSP, they were the smaller partners.  That in itself was not bad.

    The tragedy, however, would come with the June 12 annulment crunch.   Yar’Adua, the PF leader, must have felt MKO’s mandate annulment (though after a presidential election) had cancelled out his own putative SDP presidential candidacy (a process IBB also arbitrarily cancelled), so SDP could start on a clean slate by embracing IBB’s dubious Interim National Government (ING), pending the conduct of another election!

    Though Yar’Adua would die in prison from the political complications that arose from the June 12 crisis, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar would carry on the PF banner, albeit under another name, People’s Democratic Movement (PDM).  But in parting ways with PF during the June 12 crisis, Asiwaju Tinubu would find his own political life.  Ironically, both Atiku and Tinubu were involved in the June 9 showdown.

    So, was the APC’s then an eerie reincarnation of the SDP power struggle?  Not exactly.  Yes, June 9 was a fierce struggle for APC’s soul.  But no, the details were much different.

    For starters, SDP self-aborted after winning power, but before forming government.  The APC excitement is coming after it has formed government, but before delivering on its campaign promises.

    Still, the root would appear a tactical mistake of not appearing to accommodate elements of the nPDP and Governor Okorocha’s APGA faction, in sharing the National Assembly offices.  Heretofore, ANPP provided the chairman in John Odigie-Oyegun (though popular sentiments have it that he got the post less because of his party but more by his personal integrity), CPC produced the presidential candidate in President Buhari and ACN, the vice-presidential candidate in Vice President Yemi Osinbajo.

    Somehow, Tinubu’s hands were seen in all three; as in the party’s endorsement of Ahmad Lawan for Senate president and Femi Gbajabiamila, as House of Representatives Speaker.  Mr. Gbajabiamila though, as former minority leader, had built a robust pro-people profile, at the height of PDP rule.

    The Tinubu camp maintains, with the SDP experience, the former Lagos governor only wanted APC legislative chieftains to be trusted hands; to deliver swift legislative support for the party’s campaign promises.  Even then, the APC preferred candidates both belonged to the CPC/ACN tendencies.  That not only united Tinubu’s enemies, inside and outside APC, it also lent the APC national leader to combustible allegations of wanting to “corner” the party and “encircle” the president.

    At the end, the nPDP bloc installed their own as parliamentary chiefs: Bukola Saraki as senate president and Yakubu Dogara, as Speaker.

    But that came at the hideous allegation of treachery — Saraki virtually trading off his own APC faction for bulk PDP support, that somewhat echoed the 19th century Ilorin Alimi-Afonja betrayal; and even Senator Saraki’s own political regicide with his late father, the Oloye.

    What is more?  The emergence of Ike Ekweremadu, totem of the Saraki-PDP trade-off as deputy senate president, has given the South East a toe-hold in a government they massively voted against.  Though that might gall emotionally,  it is not necessarily bad, with good faith.

    But from Senator Ekweremadu’s triumphalist crowing after, that seems unlikely.  Besides, any attempt to tell loyal South East APC elements that in Ekweremadu they have had their quota, would lead to massive restiveness and discontent.   Both might, in due course, come back to haunt Saraki — and the ruling party.

    The APC balance of forces right now?  It is a CPC/ACN executive versus an nPDP legislature, with ANPP as party chair!  For institutional check-and-balances, that would appear not so bad — again, if there is good faith.  But why would a wounded PDP want APC to succeed?

    If the APC threat to “deal with” rebel elements drives the Saraki coalition further into the subversive warmth of the old PDP, then the Buhari Presidency could not have made a worse start. But with good faith and common sense on both sides, the party’s tactical error need not lead to strategic doom.

    Unfortunately, common sense is not so common — not among emotive and feuding politicians!

    Still, let both sides of the divide know.  After June 12 and the hash the PDP made of the post-1999 Army Arrangement, the Buhari Presidency is the best electoral recipe to get Nigeria back on track, sans a radical constitutional re-tinkering to reconstruct Nigeria, on radical federal lines.

    If Buhari fails, it would be more than a failed government.  Indeed, it would be the final failure of a troubled country — with all the dire consequences.

    ‘After June 12 and the hash PDP made of the post-1999 Army Arrangement, the Buhari Presidency is the best electoral recipe to get Nigeria back on track’

     

  • Ambode and King Solomon’s complex

    Akinwunmi Ambode, the new Lagos governor may, Bible-speak, have gained a “settled kingdom”, where much seems to work.

    Everybody perhaps would remember Babatunde Fashola, SAN, immediate past governor, who bolted off the starting blocks, zoomed through an eight-year gubernatorial marathon like a sprint, and breasted the tape hardly betraying any fatigue.

    But perhaps a little less would remember Bola Tinubu.  Back in 1999 and 2007, Asiwaju Tinubu’s power advent and exit were much less dramatic — and much more traumatic.

    In 1999, he was transitional governor from the military, that collapsed about everything.  True Buba Marwa, Tinubu’s immediate predecessor and retired Army brigadier-general, proved his own mettle.  But all was ad hoc, “military standard” that could hardly be built upon.  So, Governor Tinubu’s starting point was much slower and less dramatic.

    In 2007, Tinubu’s exit was no less sluggish.

    On the politics front, he was emerging from the bruising battle with a bully Federal Government, under President Olusegun Obasanjo.  Obasanjo illegally seized Lagos council funds, to bring Tinubu’s government to heel, over its creation of additional 37 local governments.  But the council funds battle was under a wider war, by the then ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), to crush the opposition, of which Tinubu was chief irritant.

    On the policy front, the Lagos metropolis was a vast work-in-progress.  Yes, much of the Lagos Business District (LBD) infrastructure renewal had been completed, with the out-going Governor Tinubu commissioning the Tinubu Square fountain and adjoining works, at the very dusk of his governorship.  But much of Lagos was still dug up for the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) tracks.  From exiting Tinubu to Lagos then, it was a trauma of rebirth.

    And with trauma, there is less drama.

    But the BRT offered Mr. Fashola his proverbial low hanging fruits, with which he hit the ground running.  In virtually no time, he would make his signal presence on the environment, greening the hitherto grey Lagos Marina; and in the night, dressing it in a blaze of lighting, to Lagosians’ lusty cheer but criminals’ dire gripe.

    He would later stamp his inimitable persona of governor as rigorous thinker: lighting up major highways at night; birthing a landmark public-private sector security innovation that made Lagos a safe haven, in a desert of violent crimes; spearheading the Ebola rapid response and curtailment that earned global applause; orchestrating the swift reaction to the Dana Air crash, gifting victims immediate relief; imposing the governor as passionate environmental freak, creating numerous gardens and parks all over the metropolis; staging the yearly Lagos Black Heritage Festival — on the surface a Brazilian-like carnival, but really a practical report card of state-trained artisans in varied skills, who design and sew the carnival costumes; and near-magically reclaiming Oshodi from a den of traders, staking their democratic right to corner a major highway as illicit mart.

    You bet nobody now remembers the notorious Oshodi gridlock, that virtually closed down the vital Agege-Motor road — pit black at night, where muggers, petty robbers and pickpockets made hay!

    Just as even less remember those bad, bad days, back in 1999, when Lagos was a mountain of refuse, a rubble of broken infrastructure, a bastion of crime and epitome of sheer paralysis, which former President Obasanjo once infamously dismissed as a “jungle”!

    Why, a populist attempt at security almost backfired!  The new Tinubu government changed the Marwa elite crime busting squad from Operation Sweep to Rapid Response Force, only for somebody to realise you could not have another force inside the police force!  So, the new name became Rapid Response Squad (RRS).

    That prompted many an impatient media analyst to dismiss the Tinubu government — just as not a few, even in the informed media, are already dismissing the new Buhari presidency — as long in sloganeering but painfully short in innovative ideas.

    Even, Tinubu’s starting billboard ad, likening him to the Indian Mahatma Gandhi and the great Chief Obafemi Awolowo, playing on the similar shape of the pair of glasses the trio wore, became a butt of jokes.

    That jeer would last for no less than two years, during which the Tinubu government dug deep and came up with new sustainable developmental paradigms: the Oracle computerisation to plug leaks in the salary bill, the public-private-participation model in waste management and, of course, the revolutionary tactics to drive up internally generated revenue (IGR), that would lay the foundation for Lagos’ partial financial independence, while most other states succumbed to the financial profligacy of the Goodluck Jonathan presidential years.

    Between Tinubu and Fashola then, a biblical parallel.  Tinubu was the David that built the kingdom from scratch: and fought all of the wars, politics and policy.

    Fashola was the near-Solomon.  A relatively settled polis provided a launch pad for his brilliant policies, vaulting Lagos as a national poster boy of sane governance, though Fashola’s Solomon-like policy harshness, in some areas, would make many wish he was imbued with higher emotional intelligence.  Still, he brilliantly fulfilled his moniker of the “Actualiser”.

    So, where comes Mr. Ambode in all of this?  That is a tough one.

    Not for him the strategic lethargy of Tinubu’s entry and exit.  Not for him the blistering brilliance of Fashola’s gubernatorial sprint.  Just a humdrum entry — less to do with his own putative brilliance, but  more with the joyful sadness that things appear settled and placid.

    Just as well Mr. Ambode has prayed for the wisdom of Solomon during his tenure.  Indeed, he would need some Solomon complex to make his own mark in post-1999 Lagos.

    Still, a Solomon syndrome is a double-edge sword.  Solomon was the wisest man in history, who drove unprecedented prosperity in a secure Israel.  But his idolatry and policy harshness also tore up the kingdom of David.

    The comfort though — and that comfort is not at all cold! — is that Ambode has been pretty much an insider, in the renascent post-1999 Lagos.  As Lagos accountant-general, he was key to the financial re-engineering of the Bola Tinubu years.

    Indeed, during the fierce council funds war, he was there, a dutiful civil service technocrat, helping his political masters to create an adequate fiscal response to the dire emergency.

    But there is a gulf between stepping out to call the shots and orchestrating things from the hot comfort of the policy room.

    So, Mr. Ambode’s power-entry strategy could well be ensuring those Fashola-era policies click even more tick-tock: inviolability of BRT tracks, keep suicidal Okada riders off the highways, a zero tolerance for crimes, a special eye on Oshodi and its traffic-subversive traders, further greening and clean-up of Lagos —  generally consolidating the old order.

    Then, an aggressive tackle of inner-city roads, an area many a critic insists Fashola did not do so well.

    But Ambode’s entry big-bang may well be the delivery of the light rain mass transit, which Tinubu conceived and Fashola had been working on.

    On that, President Muhamadu Buhari owes Lagos.  His first coming as military head of state scrapped the Jakande-era Lagos Metroline project.  Governor Ambode must leverage on party amity and Lagos’ special status to ensure Buhari’s second coming rights that historic wrong.

  • Nigeria and the snag of false steps

    From flag independence in 1960, Nigeria has been plagued by a series of false steps — the wrong set of people taking over affairs at crucial junctures.

    Is that about to change?

    In a multi-national, multi-cultural state like Nigeria, history is often laced with ethnic pride, rationalisations and justifications.  So facts, notorious facts, appear to become first and grand victims.

    Still, some hardy facts manage to shine through.

    At independence, at least in popular-speak, the South fought more for independence.  But the North, with conspiratorial, if not outright subversive, nudge from the departing British, gained power.

    That, of course, was the simple “truth” from the surface.  But it was far more complex.

    The British were loath to quit Nigeria.  They were even more loath to hand over to a set of radical and irreverent successors who, with dispatch, would render them absolutely irrelevant to their old dominion.  The South rippled with such.  For a foothold on independent Nigeria, therefore, they found the North’s “reverential advocacy” most appealing.

    The North, at a disadvantage almost on every count on the development index, was scared stiff of southern domination.  With the South sneering at the North’s laggardness in western education despite its Arabic and Quranic scholarship, only political power would give it life in independent Nigeria.

    Also, only a skewed political geography, of the Northern Region bigger than its two co-federating units, Eastern and Western regions, would sustain that power.  So, quid-pro-quo, the North and Britain cozied up to a sweetheart deal: power to the North, in exchange for continued relevance to Britain in independent Nigeria.

    But the South, to paraphrase Thomas Hardy in Tess of the d’Ubervilles, was far from being sinned against than sinning.

    Nnamdi Azikiwe, acclaimed father of Nigerian nationalism after Herbert Macaulay, would appear not averse to shaping independent Nigeria in his own worldview.  In a 1948 speech at the Ibo State Union gathering in Lagos, Dr. Azikiwe declared the gods of Africa had destined the Ibo to lead.

    To be fair, Zik made this statement in the context of ethnic solidarity and romanticisation, not necessarily in bad faith.  Still, though Zik was born in the North, schooled in the United States and was well and truly cosmopolitan, the Igbo culture was the only one he knew.  It was a crucial mark of identity, in an emergent state of conflicting and competing cultures.

    Obafemi Awolowo, on the other hand, made his own push for the Yoruba worldview as the dominant ethos.  Awo’s push came from his well articulated doctrine of cultural federalism, in which he pushed the tongue as a potent force for development; and called for Nigeria’s three regions to be further pared into “states”, with minority blocs, in all regions, balancing out the majorities’.

    So, he argued, independent Nigeria should be carved into cultural blocs as states; and each area should leverage on its tongue and cultural affinity to develop its own area — and may the best bloc, equal-opportunity wise, push its magic to the centre, so other Nigerians could drink from its developmental genius.  That was clear from his trend-setting government in the old Western Region; and his attempt to move to the centre to replicate those development wonders.

    So, Nigeria at independence lacked a Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, a Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika (later Tanzania) or even a Sekou Toure of Guinea, forceful characters that approximated, for good or for ill, the collective vision of a new nation-state.

    At that crucial start, it lacked a Zik that had the panache, an Awo that had the rigour or even an Aminu Kano that typified the talakawas (common masses).  All it had was Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa, he of the golden voice and reported even temper.  But even he was viceroy to Sir Ahmadu Bello, the powerful northern leader, bent — not without good reasons — on keeping the rude southern barbarians from his idyllic realm.

    That false start had been replicated at every crucial juncture, since the collapse of the 1st Republic (1960-1966).  But if the 1st Republic continues to be the reference point in development, it is simply due to two reasons: the apogee of regional federalism; and the progressive rot, for most part of corrective (which turned out, defective) military rule.

    After the first military coup of 15 January 1966, Chukwuma Nzeogwu and co that plotted that putsch were not the ones that gained power.  Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi, a conservative general, was chief beneficiary of a radical coup — another critical failure at a crucial juncture.

    If Nzegwu and co had gained power, would Nigeria’s story have been radically different for the better?  Legitimate conjecture, there!

    Even with the re-advent of democracy in 1979, it was another tale of unprepared leadership.  All Alhaji Shehu Shagari wanted was to be a senator.  But the reluctant politician would end up the first and only president of that republic, of four years and three months.

    But President Shagari was only, back then, the last in a relay of reluctant leaders: Gen. Yakubu Gowon became head of state after the counter-coup of 29 July 1966, not because he led the putsch but because he was the most senior — and most likely acceptable — Northern officer around.

    Before President Shagari, Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo had, after Murtala Muhammad’s assassination, taken over, as another reluctant leader, “against my wish and personal desire”.  But Alhaji Shagari’s 2nd Republic failure would unleash a more virulent strain of military rule (1984-1999) which ironically, Muhammadu Buhari, new elected president, pioneered.

    With Gen. Ibrahim Babangida and the late Sani Abacha, the military-in-power would drag both itself and Nigeria to the very nadir: between them, IBB and Abacha annulled Nigeria’s freest and fairest election ever on 12 June 1993; and ensured that the winner, Moshood Abiola, exercised his mandate in gaol — before dramatically dying in detention, for winning a free election.

    Even the return of the current season of democracy, in 1999, was marked by an Obasanjo theatrics of “reluctance”: “How many presidents do you want to make out of me?” he asked his lobbyists, with the body language of the great Julius Caesar who, though his whole sinews rippled to grab the Roman crown, still rejected the offer.

    Eventually, Obasanjo didn’t.  But see where the 16 years he pioneered, as first president of the  4th Republic, has led the country — its knees; with his estranged protégé, former President Goodluck Jonathan, almost supervising a total collapse.

    So, will the second coming of Muhammadu Buhari — only the second after Obasanjo to rule Nigeria as both military head of state and elected president — veer from this perennial curse of false steps, and for once be the long-awaited blessing for long-suffering Nigerians?

    For one, Buhari is no reluctant leader.  He chased power for 12 years, and only got it at his fourth try.  It is, therefore, his bounden and patriotic duty that Nigeria veers from that perennial curse.

    But the time to make that clean break is now, at the very beginning.  That is why the Buhari government must hit the ground running — in the right direction!

    Anything contrary is just too grim to contemplate.

    ‘Will the second coming of Muhammadu Buhari veer from this perennial curse of false steps?’

  • Cry, his beloved country

    “You see this card [PVC]? It is what we shall use to sweep out this government of thieves. If the coming government is not better, we shall use it to sweep them away too” — Two unlettered Nigerian female voters, as captured in Prof. Niyi Osundare’s May 17 lecture in Lagos.

    It wasn’t quite Alan Paton in his 1948 classic, Cry, the Beloved Country; on his native South Africa, soon to formalise apartheid, to which, though White, he was uncompromisingly opposed.

    It is a big irony though, that South Africa survived apartheid, only to convulse in murderous Black-on-Black xenophobia.

    It was rather Niyi Osundare, professor of English, ace poet and 2014 Nigerian National Order of Merit (NNOM) laureate, rhapsodising Nigeria’s new-found voting power, which the two unlettered women quoted above enthuse.

    But even as the rest of Nigeria rejoice, can Osundare’s native Ekiti, in all good conscience, join them?

    That was why, even with his Nigeria civil rhapsody, Osundare decried the haunting evil, gripping Ekiti under Ayo Fayose.

    Cry, his beloved country!

    Prof. Osundare’s lecture was in 21st century Lagos.  Yet you could swear Plato, the old Greek and democracy cynic, was ensconced, having a wry laugh, in that Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) hall, that Sunday evening.

    Plato, the philosopher, had no faith in democracy.  He would rather have philosopher kings, high in wisdom and deep in knowledge, rule over the rabble.  To him, the borderline between electoral sovereignty and electoral captivity was a spider’s web too thin to risk!

    Contemporary Ekiti provides both the Plato dream and Plato nightmare.  That would appear glaring — at least to the perceptive — at that May 17 lecture.

    Osundare, himself an alumnus, spoke to the cream of Ekiti, distinguished alumni of the elite Christ’s School, Ado Ekiti and friends; men and women of solid achievements and refinement.  They would have been Plato’s contemporary dream crowd: philosophical kings — and queens.

    All too fitting, Kayode Fayemi, former governor of Ekiti, was among the high table.  When called to make a brief remark, his elocution, poise and gait were simply imperial — and Plato would have cheered, despite his grim misgivings about democracy.

    But Fayemi’s imperial governorship only grated as imperious, on the Ekiti electorate; hence the Fayose comeback.  So came Plato’s worst democracy fears: a rude mob just sacked polite government, simply because they had the numbers!  It is the fatal cross-over from electoral sovereignty to electoral captivity.

    Anytime that happened, as Plato feared, the first scalp the mob claimed was polite society.

    That would explain Ekiti today.  In Fayose’s Stone Age “democratic” empire, Okada riders, burly transport union stalwarts, with weather-hardened denizens of the street and allied muggers, not coffee-sipping policy geeks of Fayemi’s ilk, rule the roost.

    In Osundare’s own words, it was “ruling one of the nation’s most enlightened states like a medieval jungle”!

    The pro-Fayose lobby would scoff: despite Dr. Fayemi’s much vaunted policy brilliance, his politics, to both friend and foe, was toxic.  Anti-Fayose forces would gamely counter: despite the Osoko’s brilliant demagoguery, all is assured is Ekiti’s future toxicity, the Ekiti electoral captives with it!  So, the proverbial slip from fry pan to fire?

    The paradox of the putative regress of his native Ekiti, even while hailing the probable advance of Mother Nigeria, both hinged on conscious and deliberate electoral choices, was not lost on the distinguished lecturer and stubborn believer in Ekiti as “one of the nation’s most enlightened states”.

    But again, to him, it’s all a throwback to the basis.  An illegitimate foundation, even with the mediation of the vote, seldom anchors a legitimate fortress.

    “When the governorship race was about to start in Ekiti and Osun states, and the ruling party’s field was swarmed by all manner of gubernatorial hopefuls,” Prof. Osundare delved into very recent political history, “the largest political party in Africa reached out for the most tainted of the lot and told the bewildered world: these are the two sons in whom we are well pleased.”

    These two sons, also named in the Ekitigate audiotape rigging scandal, were Ayo Fayose (Ekiti: who won) and Iyiola Omisore (Osun: who lost).  So stunning was Fayose’s grand winning philosophy of stomach infrastructure that corn-grubbing Candidate Omisore presented himself as the ultimate cynical man of the people.  Still, Osun rejected him.  Now, Ekiti and Osun live with the consequences of their electoral choices.

    But that is cold comfort to the Ekiti Plato philosophical school, to which the professor counts himself an esteemed member, who believe — and rightly too — that “stomach infrastructure” maroons you in the past, even as “mind infrastructure” catapults you into the future.

    That probably explains Osundare’s pithy wailing of the dire symptoms of Fayose’s pact with the past and the conspiratorial support from the Jonathan Presidency, with uproarious cheer from Fayose’s Ekiti electoral captives.

    “Today, one of those two sons is living out the vote of confidence … There is no crime of his that is wrong in the president’s eye, no violation by him is considered outrageous,” he rued in his lecture.  “As governor-elect, he led a crowd of ‘party faithful’  (called thugs by some ignorant opposition media), beat up judges, tore up their robes, destroyed their dockets, trashed the proverbial temple of justice, and got all the workers fleeing in different directions”.

    Even as governor, Fayose has moved from outrage to outrage, sacking parliament and even suborning a segment of the thinking class and elders, royal and common, to cohabit in his Mephistophelean empire.

    Even the bluest of Ekiti blue bloods and most iconic of its legal icons, appear more impressed with “amicably settling the problem” than lambasting Fayose’s constitutional outlawry”!

    But again, Ekiti would follow the natural order: stimulus and response, acts and consequences, crime and punishment.

    Goodluck Jonathan exits in a haze of total paralysis: no fuel, no electricity, no movement, no nothing — a complete gridlock!  It’s the telling result of a daft electoral choice, four years ago.

    The poet was right: “Every thinking and feeling human being knew for sure,” he said in his lecture, “that four more years of the PDP government would reduce Nigeria to a state more horrifying than the one the world had ever witnessed in the failed states that litter the African landscape.”

    But the pan-Nigeria electorate has at least made amends for its gargantuan mistake of 2011.  Yet, it is still conked by Jonathan’s gargantuan exit paralysis.

    The reverse, however, would appear the Ekiti case.  While Nigeria, ceteris paribus, has tried to negotiate itself out of a cul-de-sac, Ekiti appears to have rammed itself straight into one.

    Pray, ace poet: will Ekiti still be “one of the nation’s most enlightened states”, after four years of Fayose?

    Cry, his beloved country!

    “Goodluck Jonathan exits in a haze of total paralysis: no fuel, no electricity, no movement, no nothing — a complete gridlock! It’s the telling result of a daft electoral choice, four years ago”

  • When comes a federalist Buhari?

    Between his first and second coming, Muhammadu Buhari’s conversion from the martial man of steel to a self-confessed democrat of reason is quite dramatic.

    It is the political equivalence of the rabid, anti-Christ Saul turning the zestful, pro-gospel Paul, on the way to Damascus.  But the democratic General’s life-changing journey to Damascus took no less than 13 rigorous years.

    Within that short period, he ran for the Nigerian presidency four times, got marooned at the courts thrice, while his rivals savoured, with reckless abandon, the fruits of his quest.

    Why, his party even once abandoned him for opportunistic appointments from the rival party, which purported victory he was challenging, in a marathon court process!

    Gen. Buhari told his own tale, when a delegation from Taraba State paid him a courtesy call in Abuja.

    By the president-elect’s own account, his democratic evolution took a whole of 24 years — from 1991 when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) collapsed; to 2015, his year of presidential triumph, after three failures.

    Though the president-elect spoke strictly in the context of the sanctity of the vote, as the basis of democracy, it is instructive that his democratic epiphany came with the USSR collapse.

    Lack of democracy may well be one of the complex reasons the USSR collapsed.  But beyond ideological colouration and ethnic domination, the USSR (1922-1991) fell because it was a faulty federation — a grave similarity it shares with Nigeria, which even after the proliferation of “states”, remains an ultra-centralised entity.

    Now, no two situations are exactly alike.  Whereas USSR’s centralised planning delivered rapid industrialisation, Nigeria’s version has delivered the exact opposite — de-industrialisation: for varied reasons, of course.

    Still, not even USSR’s material prosperity could save it from its dire structural deficiency.  Again, this plague it shares with Nigeria, though with double jeopardy.  Though USSR collapsed even if it was one of the globe’s accomplished scientific and technological leaders, Nigeria would take its survival chances, even as a global scientific and technological laggard!

    One final comparison, on the ethnic plane.  The USSR was a federal union of “republics” — Ukraine, Byelorussia, etc, even if every inch of that vast territory  was ruled by the local communists.  But the ruling temper was decidedly Russian, the clear majority in the union.

    Nigeria too stumbled into independence as a Federal Republic of three, and later, four regions.  That federal essence has since been whittled down with a progressive fissuring into states, the latest number of which is 36 — with the elite still calling for more!

    But from the very beginning, and till now, even with the 12 June 1993 presidential election annulment fiasco, the ruling temper is perceived to be northern.

    Indeed, that anti-North sentiment, triggered by the late President Umaru Yar’Adua’s Katsina Cabal that tried to stonewall the then Vice President Goodluck Jonathan from the Presidency, helped to propel Dr. Jonathan to the acme of Nigerian power.

    But no sooner did President Jonathan attain that height than he himself attempt a Niger Delta hegemony, in which the South East sentimentally tagged along.  Again, that triggered a rare North-South West entente, which drove the All Progressives Congress (APC) though, to be fair, the South East political elite enjoyed a right of first refusal, as it were, in that political alliance.

    But the South West-North entente, without a formal political restructuring, only alienated the Afenifere segment of the Yoruba dominant political temper.  That put them at cross-purpose with Bola Tinubu, the basic driver of the political accommodation.

    Indeed, Sir Olaniwun Ajayi, in his latest book, Nigeria: Political Power Imbalance, and earlier ones like Nigeria: Africa’s Failed Asset? had railed at a certain northern power hegemony treacherously packaged — to eventually undermine Nigeria — by the exiting British colonialists.

    Though not a few have hinted at Sir Olaniwun’s own perceived Yoruba irredentism, his thoughts continue to gather suction, particularly with the ideologues of restructuring as the very minimum basis for Nigeria’s survival as a prosperous nation-state.

    But why all this hard analysis?  Simple.  The whoop of election victory is gone.  So, is the terrible moan of defeat.  Now, comes the brass tack.

    Gen. Buhari would appear the best deal, by miles, for now.  For one, he is no reluctant leader.  He chased power the hard way; and is tempered by the gall that getting power — democratic power — is very difficult.  So, he is likelier to exercise it responsibly.

    For another, he is a self-confessed new democrat.  Being a neophyte in that peculiar temper, all glory to democratic redemption, he is likely to dazzle the polity with his new essence, much more than “seasoned democrats”, who take their essence so much for granted that all they hit the polity with are anti-democratic acts!

    Besides, contrasted to two of his three immediate predecessors, he speaks of further reassurance.  An unprepared Jonathan got power by accident.  He dissipated it without much ado.  Olusegun Obasanjo was a power megalomaniac, too convinced of his own inherent goodness to fully grasp his place in history.  Muhammadu Buhari, thankfully, appears to differ from the two.

    Still, all these would count for little, if the president-elect does not get right the structural angle of the immense problems.

    Even right now, delegations have been pouring into his door stead; and their pleas are near-uniform: O, presidential emperor and magic worker, only you can solve our problems, as they tender their shopping lists!

    But structurally, that should not be so.  If you operate Federal Nigeria as it should be, the president and his federal government should not be mythical magicians.  Indeed, the federating regions will solve most of the problems, leaving pretty little for Abuja to worry about.

    Ripples believes Buhari would be fair to all.  But again, that would be resorting to the default-setting of the president as some benevolent emperor.  He is nothing of the sort.  In any case, he should not be.

    What Nigeria needs is a fair and equitable federal system, under which every part of the country works hard and be fair to itself — instead of looking up to some central dole.

    Besides, that Nigeria has fallen on bad times pushes the imperative for a paradigm shift.  Right now, the federal government is the sole giver.  But what the Buhari government must do is open up the revenue-driving base, taking advantage of the federal doctrine, and amending extant laws for every part of the country to drive its own resources.

    To do that, Buhari must develop a federalist mindset.  That would be a pleasant combo for the latest democrat on the block.

    That is why the APC South West caucus must not be coy, pushing restructuring as the ultimate correction to Nigeria’s deficient and defective federalism.  If this coalition fails, they would be the first to be conked.

    Besides, it would be a travesty to gain democracy and federal power; yet lose sight of restructuring, Federal Nigeria’s potent tool to deliver development.

    ‘Buhari must develop a federalist mindset.  That would be a pleasant combo for the latest democrat on the bloc’

     

  • Fayose’s devil on the cross

    To Ayo Fayose, Adamu Mu’azu, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) national chairman, is a devil that must be nailed on the cross — and nailed hard.

    And trust the Ekiti abrasive one (not famed for any deep thinking, lay or intellectual, but only a relay of reflex thought bounces), to make a facile comparison between election fortunes and misfortunes in Nigeria and the United Kingdom.

    “Haven’t we now seen what operates in saner climes, with the resignation of the British Labour Party and Liberal Democratic leaders?” he roared, referring to the duo’s crushing election losses to the ruling Conservatives in the May 7 general elections.  “Shouldn’t our party national chairman also take a cue from this and allow for fresh minds to steer the ship of the party at this difficult time?”

    Of course, Burlesque Fayose would be incomplete without Trademark Fayose: graceless gloating.  “I am … not operating here on empty boast because Ekiti State was delivered to the PDP 100 per cent. …” he further growled.  “Imagine the PDP not getting up to five per cent … in Bauchi State, the national chairman’s home state, and someone is still not being honourable enough to resign”.

    Honourable enough!  Saner climes!  The grave irony of this twain clearly is lost on Triumphalist Fayose!

    Saner climes!  Did Ed Miliband, the British Labour Party leader, have in his camp a Mr. No Apology, with a penchant for insane adverts, that coarsely projected a principal opponent’s sure death, and harvested for his party mass hatred, among those who had the putative electoral numbers?

    And honour!  What has been honourable in Mr. Fayose’s conduct since his unfortunate second coming in Ekiti?  Besides, is it not tragic narcissism, powered by unconscionable villainy, to work on over-drive to lose northern votes, yet crow over delivering Ekiti votes 100 per cent — Ekiti votes, the minority of minorities of electoral numbers in the South West?

    Ripples would not be bothered by whatever pains bickering Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) hierarchs inflict upon themselves, in their post-defeat feuding.  For all the havoc they socked on the country, they sure had it coming.

    Besides, the recrimination is almost spiritual.  You don’t mess up millions of longsuffering Nigerians and exactly expect to live blissfully ever after!

    But it is a conceptual matter.  PDP may well have been a useless ruling party, that has led Nigeria to nowhere but perdition.  By the way its partisans fall upon themselves, it could even be a far more useless opposition prospect, since its only glue is power without responsibility; its only life, humongous greed for the common wealth.

    That seems to explain the mutual allegation of soulless money sharing, between party and presidency, with each combatant in each camp grossing no less than N30 million each. And the more that illicit pork appears slipping away, the more hysterical and distracted PDP is likely to become.

    Still, we have a democracy to run.  On May 29, roles would change, with the All Progressives’ Congress (APC) becoming the new federal ruling party.  But the PDP meltdown is self-evidence that a multi-party democracy, without vigorous opposition, is nothing but an endangered species.  So, for the polity to develop, and democracy to deepen, there must be a strong and vibrant alternative.

    PDP appears best suited, if not most suitable, to play that role.  But with its emotive in-fighting, it is fated to lose focus even more.  So, it is in the polity’s enlightened self-interest to try to refocus this stranded, bad-tempered giant, lest it becomes the polity’s collective burden.

    Chairman Mu’azu may have led his party to electoral slaughter.

    And the quad of First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan, Governor Fayose, Femi Fani-Kayode, and Doyin Okupe may well be the real devils to be nailed hard on the cross, for strafing and bombing their party with reckless electioneering.

    But they all were a symptom of President Jonathan’s sickening craving for power — power to which he had proved most inept and sorry; but to which he must, do-or-die, reclaim for four more years.

    Never, in the history of Nigeria, even with its serial disappointment in leadership, has any leader manifested such crassly inordinate hunger for power .  Not Ibrahim Babangida, not Sani Abacha, and certainly, not Olusegun Obasanjo, even with his doomed attempt at third term.

    The trio of Babangida, Abacha and Obasanjo were certainly no saints where Jonathan was the very devil.  But under none of them did the Nigeria virtually collapse as a state, with Boko Haram bombing at will, capturing territories and kidnapping citizens, and Jonathan having absolutely no solution.  Yet, the president, and his deluders, were adamant he had earned a second term!

    This single-minded hunger for power, if not for service, was what induced old man Bamanga Tukur to risk a PDP collapse on his head, rather than confront Jonathan’s power demands.  Alhaji Bamanga ended up the fall guy, but not before the Governors-7 had rebelled, and the Governors-5 defected, thus sending a collapsing PDP on a journey of no return.

    This tragedy also hall-marked the emergence of Adamu Mu’azu, hailed then as “game-changer”, for somewhat helping to stanch the bleeding.  It is ironic now that he is being nailed over an electoral game-change, that nailed the PDP coffin and snapped it out of its grave hubris.  He likely would get the sack as Alhaji Bamanga before him.  But that would just be chasing shadows.

    In all of these though, Goodluck Jonathan is the mathematical constant.  Fortunately, Nigerian voters have given him the tortoise treatment — wasn’t it the tortoise, in Yoruba folklore, that swore not to return from his trip until he was disgraced?

    Still ironically, Jonathan was only the victim of past excesses of the Obasanjo era.  His chief offence is nothing but rank opportunism.  To cast PDP in his own image, Obasanjo created the rather fraudulent title of party “national leader” — a euphemism for being over and above the party that nominated him for presidency.

    Jonathan inherited this fraud and decided to milk it to the hilt.  On that, he spurred old man Bamanga like a wild horse; and savaged Chairman Mu’azu with the embarrassment of making his gutless National Working Committee (NWC) claim the party only printed one presidential nomination form, and the sole form had been annexed by the national leader — so paranoid was Jonathan to coral the PDP presidential ticket!

    Jonathan, the party leader, badly wanted that form — and before that request, every party knee must bow!

    Unfortunately, Jonathan lacked neither the brutal savvy nor the native intelligence — or even the routine policy bragging rights! — to impose his will.  The result was the crashed PDP humpty-dumpty; and the evaporation of its dream of ruling in perpetuity — 60 years to start with!

    So, the Fayoses of this world, who bay for Mu’azu’s blood, only savage the puppet.  But the puppeteer is their real quarry.

    The Jonathan debacle must teach the Nigerian party system a stiff lesson.  Never again must a president be so powerful to subvert collective party interest.

    APC must put a president on its platform under some form of party leash, if it must escape the PDP fate.

    ‘The Fayoses of this world, who bay for Mu’azu’s blood, only savage the puppet.  But the puppeteer is their real quarry’