The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olakunle Abimbola

  • Restructuring or sour grape?

    Restructuring or sour grape?

    Two different but related events prompted this piece.

    One was Willie Obiano, the Anambra governor’s widely reported visit to President-elect, Muhammadu Buhari.

    Forget voting, forget parties, forget everything, the governor pleaded, but don’t forget to gift Ndigbo appointments!

    Is it then what it is all about — after voting, parties, vile electioneering, hate messages, even killings and maiming on e-day — just appointments, whoever wins?  Geez!

    The other was the April 20 call for Nigeria’s restructuring, by a body that calls itself the Lower Niger Congress (LNC).

    Declared LNC: South East and South-South want Nigeria restructured, pronto; and its 75 million denizens would soon declare, by democratic referendum, whether they still want to be part of Nigeria, and under what terms!

    It isn’t clear if LNG wants restructuring for real; or was just moaning attention-grabbing moans, driven by bitter election loss!

    Still, it’s a worrying déjà vu. Pre-Abacha times, both South East and South-South were the 1st Republic Eastern Region — and post-1st Republic (1960-1966), the old East Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu and his secessionist braves re-christened Republic of Biafra, sparking the tragic Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970).

    Might the Civil War still be raging in another guise?

    To be sure, LNC spokesperson, Tony Nnadi, at the body’s press briefing in Lagos, rippled with sour grape and bad faith.  He claimed Gen. Buhari’s victory was a “conspiracy” between the North and the South West, against the old East.

    Even if that were true — and it certainly is not — he conveniently forgot that everyone, including the South East and South-South, had a chance to be part of that “conspiracy”, but decided to spurn it.  So, it is voodoo logic: to exercise your constitutional right to differ, lose out in the electoral sweepstakes but turn round to wail about “conspiracy”!

    Both South East and South-South backed the wrong horse, no democratic crime!  But they must live with their choice, sans any dishonourable bleating.

    Besides, how is the 2015 “conspiracy” different from its 2011 cousin, when Southern Nigeria, with the Middle Belt, ganged up against the core North?

    Ironically back then, this same Buhari was the “victim”, this same Goodluck Jonathan was the “victor” and this same Attahiru Jega was the electoral chief!  If roles are now reversed, is it not legit democratic change?

    LNC Chairman, Fred Agbeyegbe’s contribution, adds more interesting perspectives to the debate.

    For one, Elder Agbeyegbe has earned his stripes, over the years, as a champion of minority rights and unfazed advocate of a politically restructured Nigeria; from its present central parasite to a federal productive hub, fired by ethnic nationalities creating — and spending — own wealth.

    For another, despite the whoop of victory and moan of defeat, nothing has negated Mr. Agbeyegbe’s stand.

    Still, Mr. Agbeyegbe’s rhetoric is all too familiar.    Hear him: “…We, the ethnic nationalities, minorities, owners of the resources, victims [italics mine] of and for whose sake the Nigerian brand of democracy was wrought, are aware that their [foreign powers’] commercial interests in a peaceful Nigeria, overrides any pretended interest in democracy.”

    That was Fred Agbeyegbe, reacting to Goodluck Jonathan’s loss in 2015.

    But flip back to 2012, when Annkio Briggs, Niger Delta environmental campaigner, had this take, during the Occupy Nigeria national strike and protests against a hike in fuel pump prices. “If Jonathan, a Niger Delta son is not good enough to govern Nigeria, the oil in his Niger Delta is not good enough for Nigeria,” she said in a communiqué she signed on 15 January 2012 [exactly  42 years  to the day the Civil War officially ended!], on behalf of a body she called Niger Delta Occupy Niger Delta Resources, (NDONDR).

    But she still wasn’t done: “We call on Niger Delta peoples, for the sake of our future, to look to our nearest neighbours, the Igbo, for immediate and strong alliance to enable the Niger Delta nations and the Igbo nation to face the obvious change that will come to Nigeria, in strength, justice, brotherhood and truth.”

    Now what is this — a call for “democratic” secession?  That would go a tad too far.  But certainly, some democratic gang-up — which played out in the 2015 elections, as the old East made its emphatic choice.  Does its loss then cancel out the majority’s win — and the “majority gang-up” morally inferior to the “minority gang-up”, thus earning the losers the moral right to threaten the winners?

    And don’t forget: the original Annkio Briggs’s threat came because the rest of Nigeria had the temerity to tell a Niger Delta president, now backed by his newfound majestic minority, to up his act!

    Indeed, link up the LNC sour-grape and Madam Briggs’s bile, with the Niger Delta former militants’ virtual oath to war, should Jonathan lose, and you see a familiar, if contemptible, pattern of emotive threats.

    Some comfort, though: before the polls, it was a threat to war-war.  Now, after, it is a threat to jaw-jaw.  We thank God for small mercies!

    Still, if LNC and allied lobby were to be less emotive and more clinical, the disastrous Jonathan tenure was the umpteenth proof that Nigeria would unravel, without restructuring into a productive federation.

    Jonathan, as president, came from a minority bloc.  Yet, in his near-six years in office, he didn’t radically restructure to underscore economic equity, and structurally cement minority rights.  All he did was play age-old majority game of president as patronage King-Kong!

    Then LNC was blissfully quiet — vicarious power must have been sweet!  Old man Edwin Clark even played, to the annoying hilt, the power godfather!  Now, Jonathan is out in the cold and these folk suddenly re-found their federating voices!  Seriously?

    But just as Jonathan has delivered under-development to his region as lollies for vicarious power, Olusegun Obasanjo too delivered under-development to his native South West, in his eight-year presidency.

    The North?  It is the very epitome of political power as potent tool for arrested development!  If you doubt, just check the havoc Boko Haram has caused the region.  Could that devilish group have recruited and brainwashed northern youth, if past dispensations headed by northerners had given the mass northern poor some hope to live for?

    Gen. Buhari, no doubt, towers with moral integrity.  That, with his sound mandate, will combine to forge a formidable tool for the arduous tasks ahead, in post-Jonathan Nigeria.  But even this is no magic wand, as he, with his winning coalition, must know!

    Restructuring is imperative — to both unleash regional talent and genius; and eliminate wanton waste at the irresponsible and unresponsive centre.  Yeah, Buhari’s vaunted integrity would help clean up the system.  But even that prospect is still not good enough.  This deep rot calls for a fresh and radical paradigm — restructuring!

    That is why the likes of LNC, that continue to munch sour grapes over elections won and lost, should further push their advocacy to fix the fundamental problem of Nigeria’s federal power — but not as infantile threats.

    That fixed, Governor Obiano and his people can vote whoever they want in their enclave, without giving a damn (apologies to Jonathan) about whoever gets what at Abuja!

  • So long, Abba

    “Ema ba won wi o, funra won no ma funra won loogun je! [Never mind them, they are fated to self-destroy] — Yoruba cynical saying

    Impunity makes, impunity takes, chikena!

    That appears a fair epigram on the eight-month tenure of Suleiman Abba, the briefest-serving Inspector-General of Police (IGP) in Nigerian history.

    But mocking Mr. Abba’s fall, as sweet, tempting or even well deserved as it is, completely misses the point.

    Well deserved?  Yeah.  More than any other, IGP Abba epitomised the visage of the security forces as shameless conspirators in looming fascism, with his invasion of the House of Representatives for crass partisan causes.  But he, as a responsible Police officer, ought to have been sworn to neutrality and strict legality.

    He not only abysmally failed on that score, with hubris, he armed himself with power he never had by law.

    One, he summarily stripped Speaker Aminu Tambuwal of his security details.  Two, he bragged  before the very committee of the House of Representatives — incense upon incense! — that he (and who the hell was he — the  courts?) did not recognise the Speaker because Mr. Tambuwal had defected from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the All Progressives’ Congress (APC).

    That was not only a rude affront to the House, by the Constitution an independent branch of government.  It was also a violent rape of the doctrine of separation of powers, on which presidentialism is anchored.

    That, of course, was profitable careerism gone sour.  That bravado, after all, seemed to have earned the ousted IGP, then acting, a confirmation.

    Nevertheless, Mr. Abba soon ended with pelted eggs on his face.  The rotten morality of the National Assembly, shortly after, resolved itself against PDP, its chief promoter.  A gale of house defections — which PDP had soullessly pushed all its power years to subvert the opposition and the Constitution — made Alhaji Tambuwal Speaker, de facto and de jure, when his APC gained the majority.  Mr. Abba therefore ate bitter crow, and restored the Speaker’s full security.

    But make no mistake.  Mr. Abba was no devil any more than any of his predecessors was — or indeed, any of his successors would be — a saint.

    His action — silly then, silly now and silly if repeated in future — was only driven by the bad power socialisation of Nigeria’s extant orders, to make an ass of the same law that temporarily propelled over and above fellow citizens.

    Not for them that flat dismissal by Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (God bless his rebellious soul!), which reeks of the lean-and-mean wit of John Donne, the English metaphysical poet: Uniform na khaki, na tailor dey sew am!

    Which brings the discourse to the fable that Nigeria’s president is the most powerful in all of the universe.  That could be true by the way of hyperbole, to capture the sheer depth and breadth of the Nigerian president’s powers under the Constitution.

    But to every power, there is a limitation — except you want to breach the law.  The Constitution says so.  The presidential system, on which the Constitution is built, with its rigorous checks and balances, also says so.

    But all too often, most of Nigeria’s extant orders believe that costly power illusion, and expect their poor appointees, especially top dogs in the security agencies, to read their body language and merrily conspire to subvert the law.

    That was the Genesis to Revelation of Mr. Abba’s loud thud of a fall, in the presidential court of Goodluck Jonathan.  Abba’s tragic grandstanding to please raised him.  But it also smashed him.

    Now, to the main point that must not be missed.

    The cruel joke may be on IGP Abba for earning a sack from vile careerism.  But the overall shame is on a manipulative President Jonathan, who shopped around for a pliant hand to skew an election he knew full well, from his rotten performance record, he deserved to lose — and with ignominy.

    While Jonathan eyed four more years of undeserved presidential power, Abba eyed no less than four years as IGP.  If  that meant helping Jonathan to achieve his goal, it was only a blissful marriage of two sweet dreams.   Even if Mr. Abba’s police would lose respect as a vicious PDP rod, the end would justify the meanness (apologies to Prof. Wole Soyinka) in career sweetness!

    The gamey IGP proved his commitment to this dubious cause, when he half-appealed, half-threatened voters to depart the voting zone immediately after voting, despite INEC’s countermand that such a directive was alien to the Electoral Law.

    But as Jonathan lost, the tactics exploded in Abba’s face — and strategies must logically change.    But too bad, Abba trundled on a presidential snake that though scorched, was neither dead nor defanged.  Hence, the fatal final bite!

    But in this brutal swish of instant punishment for perceived treachery, Fate played a terrible double.

    President Jonathan, still savouring his newfound toga of “global statesman” for conceding an election he soundly lost, by firing Abba, relegated himself to yet another grumpy, vindictive African Big Man, unwilling to expire without the last ugly roar.

    But the more profound anti-Abba comeuppance was the emergence of Solomon Arase as acting IGP.  Reportedly Mr. Abba’s senior, by year of entry (Arase’s 1981 to Abba’s 1984), Mr. Arase’s putative reluctance to be engaged for dubious causes reportedly led to his sidelining when Mr.  Abba got the job. Now, see who is going home earlier!

    Yet, it is unclear if Mr. Arase should laugh or cry over his temporary triumph.  By virtue of his late emergence in an outgoing administration, his career too could have been adversely affected.

    What if the new government decides to sweep away all the service chiefs, and start on a clean slate?  Perhaps the reported lobby in his favour, by past IGPs, could somewhat come to his aid?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  He is due to retire in 2016, anyway.

    But the moral here is less for President Jonathan and more for President-elect Mohammadu Buhari.  Impunity almost always comes back to haunt its perpetrator.  Jonathan, for all his advertised meekness, was not shy of playing God.  Yet, his own hand-picked IGP ditched him the moment he became lame-duck!

    Therefore, Gen. Buhari cannot, like most of his predecessors, afford to play the misguided but tragic Leviathan that, at whims, twists and turns the Constitution to partisan and self-serving ends.

    Let security chiefs be appointed solely on merit; not on their perceived duplicity to subvert the law against the political opposition.  Jonathan and Abba fell flat on their faces — good!   But they were not the first to attempt such.  Neither will they be the last.

    But Gen. Buhari must strive for a radical and positive change in attitude.  That is the surest way to deepen our democratic institutions.

    “Let security chiefs be appointed solely on merit; not on their perceived duplicity to subvert the law against the political opposition”

     

     

  • Ekiti, sick boy of Yorubaland?

    As long as the Constitution lives, Ayo Fayose is doomed.  But Ekiti must make up its mind, if it wants to sink with him.

    Which makes it very infantile, the Ekiti opposition’s hope that somewhat, the Supreme Court would help do the job on April 14, driving up media adrenalin to that end.

    And no less childish, the Fayose post-verdict Ado-Ekiti road show, that suggested a Supreme Court okay of his election had saved his doomed governorship.

    Or even more childishly asinine, the Fayose electoral stacking of cards, which suggested that since the enfant terrible had “swept” the Ekiti legislative polls of April 11, making it 3-0 against his alleged traducers, his constitutional crimes had automatically vanished!  Fond hope!

    All three were just perception games that changed nothing.  Fayose, as a constitutional bandit, leper in decent society and gubernatorial scum, has damned himself — almost  beyond redemption.  But again, it is left to Ekiti to play the stubborn fly that will, against all common sense, follow the corpse to the grave — or steer a wiser direction.

    Many a Fayose sympathiser, or even the unwary public, could whimper and wail, claiming calling a governor constitutional bandit, social leper and scum is vulgar abuse.  It is not.  It is rather truth brutally told!  And Fayose and his deeds are living and damning evidence.

    Fayose, as constitutional bandit: It is only a bandit that would forge a quorum of seven rogue legislators — with two ghosts to boot! — to sack a legislative majority of 19.  It is only a bandit that would claim the Rogue 7 had sacked the legitimate Speaker; and proceeded to instal one of them, a perverse caricature, whose starkness violently negates Ekiti’s Fountain of Knowledge moniker!

    And it is certainly a constitutional bandit, of no mean notoriety, that would present his budget to a phantom house; and claimed authority to spend the people’s money, knowing full well what the Constitution says about the Appropriation Bill.  Still, this bandit does have a perverse sense of humour: presenting and having this illusory house approve his “Attorney-General”, who at least ought to know the fine points of law!

    Fayose, as gubernatorial scum: If the office of governor is created by law, it is a gubernatorial scum that would wilfully overthrow the legislature, a constitutional check in the presidential system of robust checks-and-balances, and presume to rule happily ever after!  Need anyone say the Fayose travesty is only a relic of the executive outlawry of the extant Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) order soon to go extinct?

    Fayose as social leper: For starters, only a social leper would run puerile adverts, suggesting that since some previous heads of government from the North had died in office, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari would meet with that fate.  And certainly, only a person of suspect progeny would mock his own mother’s health at old age, just to score vulgar political points — and lest we all forget: he is Mr. No Apology!

    But while the Fayose decadence is beyond pardon, it issued from the notorious penchant of the so-called Ekiti progressives to mismanage success.

    Fayose’s first coming, with the war cry of “Fayose ooo!”, and the plebeian counter-whoop of “Yes oooooooooooooo!” issued from the crisis of expectation that near-wholesale, with Lagos Governor Bola Tinubu’s exception, swept out the South West Alliance for Democracy (AD) gubernatorial class of 1999-2003.  That bid ended in controversial disgrace.

    His second coming issued from Governor Kayode Fayemi’s alleged failure to share legitimate pork among his own party members, despite his government’s massive developmental strides.  The face of that internal convulsion, emanating either from the governor’s own party members growling over pork or bristling against alleged suppression of legitimate political ambitions, was the Fayemi vs Opeyemi Bamidele tango.  As the progressives fought to the death, Fayose stole in and grabbed the prize!

    Indeed, when the history of Fayose’s political savagery is written, Fayemi’s name would merit a special mention.  For starters, his mass demonization, much of it coming from disgruntlement inside his own camp, coupled with his politically fatal war with Bamidele, would directly trigger Fayose’s second coming.  How could Fayemi’s stellar developmental achievements wear such a hateful face of gargoyle?

    Then much earlier, disputes over his 2007 Action Congress (AC) gubernatorial nomination drove the likes of Ayo Arise, Dayo Adeyeye, Caleb Olubolade, Dare Babarinsa and others to PDP.  Though Mr. Adeyeye now strikes the John Milton Paradise Lost pose of rabid zest to rule in hell than serve in heaven, the Ekiti unfolding tragedy, without that dispute, would perhaps have taken a different trajectory.

    Then, there is the question of self-destruct politics of party machine.  A case in point is Ayodele Adu, a chartered accountant and Lagos-based Omuo native, who tangled with sitting Senator Anthony Adeniyi, an Ikere native, for the APC senatorial ticket for Ekiti South.  The party machine claimed Senator Adeniyi won. Mr. Adu alleged brazen manipulation, even with the open secret that Mr. Adeniyi was allegedly unpopular in the senatorial district.  Result: another wilful loss of political territory.

    From Fayose’s power savagery to Ekiti progressives’ power blunders, a historical retrogression, of monumental proportions, looms over Ekiti.

    In one generation, Obafemi Awolowo, with his free primary education policy and creative secondary and tertiary scholarships, vaulted Ekiti as the Yoruba future; as Ekiti Kete, with acute thirst for knowledge, catapulted themselves into the very front of Nigerian scholarship.  That would earn the Fountain of Knowledge pet name.  That was the 1950s, in the 20th century.

    But another generation in 2015, second decade of the 21st century, a regression is afoot.  Fayose and his barbarians are in town, and Ekiti is about cementing its pact with the past, as socio-democratic laggard; and sick boy of Yorubaland.

    So, what Awo made, Fayose wilfully destroys; and the Ekiti elite, traditional and modern, many of them busy rationalising Fayose’s executive outlawry, appear comfy with this historical reversal!

    That is why Ekiti must be wary of the Adagun Odo (stagnant water) complex, the same syndrome that spectacularly undid Somalia.  Ethnic homogeneity is as much a strength as it could be a weakness.

    Like Ekiti, Somalia is ethnically homogeneous.  As Ekiti indulges Fayose, Somalia’s elite looked askance while the likes of Siad Barre started bombing their people with brazen injustices.  That was the wide and merry way to Africa’s first failed state!  Ekiti appears following this self-destructive path, even as its elite play the ostrich in homo-ethnic cocoon.

    In Achebe-speak in A Man of the People, Fayose has stolen too much for the Constitution not to notice.  So, let the law come heavily down on him.

    Fayose is dead meat, whether or not the APC Legislative 19 succeed in impeaching him.  Even if he survives the present gale, it is clear that by May 29, the rogue federal security cover, under which Fayose perpetuates his outlawry, would have vanished, leaving him stark naked.

    But again, it is Ekiti’s choice — to sink with this prodigal or throw him to the sharks.

     

  • Okonkwo in Lagos

    Okonkwo in Lagos

    Just as antiquity was enthralled by the real-life glorious tragedy of the Spartan King Leonidas and his 300 in 480 BC, the modern literary world has been gripped by the wilful tragedy of Okonkwo, Chinua Achebe’s fictional creation in Things Fall Apart, his 1958 classic.

    As Leonidas and his men fought to the last man at the pass of Thermopylae, in a Greco-Persian War, the fictional Okonkwo sacrificed self to resist creeping Christian (read European) incursion into his pristine Igbo world.

    Many say Okonkwo was rash and brash.  Others say he, as a rule, acted first, thought later.  Still, others insist his tragedy was avoidable, had he been less impulsive.

    But after all said, Okonkwo hanged, so his Igbo essence could live.  Indeed, the Okonkwo mystique was chaffing at the living dead, making shameful peace with the new “abomination” — for what is a people’s life sans their culture?

    Given how some Igbo leaders in Lagos played their numbers game in the March 28 presidential/National Assembly and April 11 gubernatorial/state legislature elections, it was as if Okonkwo leapt from his pristine Umuofia, landed pat in the Igbo dominant areas of 21st century Lagos, and hollered: “meeennn, a new sheriff is in town”!

    The only difference though, was that while the original committed self-martyrdom over a just cause, this grotesque, Lagos Okonkwo manically launched into a dubious one; suggestive of rank covetousness of Lagos, that instantly brought out the virtual beast in their Yoruba hosts.

    Brash, rash and impulsive, the war-cry of this herd was spewing fictional history, bawling dubious statistics plus insensate boasts, and threatening, in concert with a pressured Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), orchestrating a hateful campaign of opponents’ demonization and ethnic baiting as own survival strategy, to take over Lagos!  One, Tony Nwulu, now an Oshodi-Isolo House of Representatives-elect was even quoted in the media as threatening that, should he lose, he and his group would make Lagos ungovernable!

    Yet, at the end of it all, it turned a damp squib.  When the dust cleared, both at the presidential and gubernatorial elections, all the bragging about making up 30% of Lagos could only notch a win in five out of 20 constitutionally recognised local governments!

    Though this “win” fetched the Igbo in Lagos a couple of seats in both the House of Representatives and the Lagos House of Assembly, that such was attained by perceived ethnic gang-up makes such gains pyrrhic, given the rupture of an age-old Yoruba-Ndigbo amity, despite that ethnic tensions were never too far from the placid surface.

    Besides, it takes no especial acuity: an Igbo representative in Lagos, propelled almost solely by the votes of fellow ethnic Igbo, to the chagrin of their ethnic Yoruba hosts, is a journey to nowhere.

    The reason is simple, even if unpalatable to dreamy-eyed democrats, or even worse: the so-called “de-tribalised” (whatever that means!) Nigerians.  Unlike the United States, which is a settler community, Nigeria is a country of indigenous peoples, with each passionate about its own space.  Besides, before democracy, there was sociology; and before sociology, there was anthropology.

    So, it is patently shallow to claim playing democracy, without grasping social formations and showing acute sensitivity to the indigenous people’s aspirations, mores and values, especially in  indigenous communities like Nigeria’s, no matter how big or cosmopolitan, as is the case with Lagos.

    In the Lagos case, it was especially politically costly.  Aligning with PDP which had ruined the central government, against APC, which had built Lagos was, to many Lagosians, brazen betrayal.

    Which brings the matter to the Oba of Lagos, Riliwan Akiolu’s alleged Lagoon fatwa — alleged because the Eko Palace had tried to tone down its menacing import — which generated quite a huff.

    On the political/democratic plane, the threat was awful — and you could tell by the way it immediately put the Lagos All Progressive Congress (APC) establishment on the back foot, disowning the royal and placating the hurting Igbo; and the way the Lagos PDP latched onto it, like some Deus-ex-machina making a divine appearance, to breathe fresh life to a doomed project.

    But not so, on the sociological/anthropological plane.  When Jimi Agbaje, the Lagos PDP gubernatorial candidate told cheering Igbo traders at the Lagos Trade Fair complex to, with their votes, drive the rival APC into the Atlantic Ocean, it was a devastating and recklessly irreverent pun, telling his own Kabiyesi to himself go jump into the lagoon!

    That moment, his bid probably received a fatal kiss.  For one, the Oba in Yoruba culture is Kabiyesi — he who cannot be questioned.  For another, Nigeria is a democracy that cohabits with feudalism, in delicate dialectics.  After all the excitement on the campaign stumps, and all mythical claim to free speech, you would still go prostrate to your monarch in private — so decrees culture!

    But the most lethal of the Agbaje gaffe was setting himself up as putative Afonja of Lagos — a toxic tag.  Afonja was the personage in Yoruba history, whose treachery helped the Fulani to put Ilorin, hitherto a Yoruba town in the Oyo Empire, under Fulani suzerainty.

    The Trade Fair charge bolstered the cheering but obviously distraught Igbo, despite their overt braggadocio.  But it also galvanised a piqued Yoruba population, furious at “Jimi’s [alleged] conspiracy to gift Lagos to the Igbo”.  So, while comparatively the Yoruba appeared to have come out in their numbers, the Igbo rather seemed to recede.

    In three short months of electioneering — or even less — Mr. Agbaje had, therefore, morphed from the decent and avuncular neighbour next door, to a putative betrayer of his own people!  But that cannot be true!  Mr. Agbaje needs urgent help to throw off this unflattering, if not fatal, tag.

    The fact, however, is that, for the umpteenth time, the swashbuckling Ndigbo in Lagos blundered into the maelstrom of a brutal power play, both nationally and in Lagos.  But they ended up as merry fall guys.

    President Goodluck Jonathan started the noxious campaign, way back in 2011, when he suggested in Lagos that if Lagos non-indigenes banded together, they could politically usurp the native Yoruba.  Pre-2015 election,  he followed that up with campaign stops to churches, posturing as an endangered Christian president, waiting to be undone by vicious Muslims.  That was the long and short of Lagos PDP’s electoral strategy: ethnic baiting and religious divisiveness.

    On the Lagos front, not a few business gentries and free-wheeling political aristocrats, progressive, conservative and reactionary, who hate the guts of Bola Tinubu, the APC national leader, cooked their own plot.

    Mr. Agbaje, always hinting at “vested interests”, was the smiling, brilliant and decent face of that ugly plot.  A more discerning Okonkwo in Lagos should have seen through the booby trap, and not recklessly blundered into it, as if it were its own.  But alas!

    This is no triumphalism — no!  It is rather truth, frankly and painfully told.  The Ndigbo, for too long have been mixed up in needless crises.  The Lagos debacle is the latest.

    It is high time their leaders had some introspection, if they must attain their ultimate in the context of a just, fair and equitable Federal Nigeria.

     

  • Next stop, Lagos

    Next stop, Lagos

    After the stunning triumph for Abuja on March 28, the next stop is Lagos — Lagos, the South West super-mart and the crown jewel of the Nigerian economy.

    And all the arguments that compelled the federal ruling party’s debacle of March 28, also compel the Lagos ruling party’s triumph on April 11.

    But first, some dues.  In “So long, Goodluck” (March 24), this column hinted at President Goodluck Jonathan’s impending defeat and, likening him to the departing expatriate that spitefully defecated on his seat, feared the president would exit in a huff.

    Regular readers also bear witness that Ripples had always opposed President Jonathan, with the sole exception of his aborted attempt to rename the University of Lagos (UNILAG), Moshood Abiola University, Lagos (MAUL).

    Given the cavalier conceit that suggested Unilag was too “tush” for  MKO’s “bush” name, even if the university gladly enjoyed his charity in the past, and the democratic republic owing its essence to MKO’s martyrdom, Ripples insisted President Jonathan, as visitor to the university, reserved the right to rename Nigeria’s first federal-owned university, subject to amending extant laws, of course.

    It is from this point of eternal critiquing that Ripples happily eats crow on how President Jonathan gracefully conceded defeat.  His defeat acceptance speech, both in rendition and sentiments, would appear his best ever.  The great irony: Jonathan sounded more presidential in defeat than he ever sounded throughout his troubled tenure!

    This beatification does not, of course, wipe clean the president’s dangerous pre-election manoeuvres: on the explosive fronts of combustible religion, divisive regions and ultra-dangerous ethnic antipathies.  But that Jonathan knew when he was licked, and pulled off a dignified bow-out was, indeed, a thing of cheer.

    On that score, he towers above former President Olusegun Obasanjo, his estranged godfather turned bitter enemy, who executed a most frenetic dance after Jonathan’s unhorsing.

    But it is to Nigeria’s hefty luck that Jonathan abandoned Obasanjo’s do-or-die ethos just at the nick of time!  That, of course, was because Attahiru Jega was no Maurice Iwu (President Obasanjo’s remorseless election fixer); and, for that matter, when the chips were down, Jonathan was no Obasanjo!

    By conceding defeat in an election he could not have won, President Jonathan hall-marked the long-awaited transition from civil rule to democracy in Nigeria’s 4th Republic.  By the defeat of Nigeria’s ruling party — arrogance, warts, hubris and all — the Nigerian voter would never again crouch before an extant order!  Welcome, sweet democracy!

    It is in this new democratic spirit that Ripples navigates the April 11 gubernatorial and state legislature elections in Lagos — and other South West states of Ogun and Oyo, though no thanks to past electoral heists and judicially reclaimed mandates, only legislative elections would hold in Osun, Ondo and Ekiti states.

    Ripples’ grouse with Jonathan and his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was simple: Nigeria needed the very best; and service delivery at the centre, despite all the din and threat, was far from the best.

    In 1999, we knew what Nigeria was.  In 1999 too, we knew what Lagos was.

    Between 1999 and now, Abuja had embroiled itself in so much chaos that all it can show is net-retardation, taking down so many states with it.  No thanks to shambolic management of the Federation Account, most states, not excepting the Federal Government itself, cannot pay monthly salaries.

    Even humble but rapid infrastructure-developing states, like the State of Osun, have taken a terrible hit, from the Jonathan Presidency’s terrible mismanagement.  Osun today, therefore, stands a mere shadow of itself; with the freezing of many futuristic roads, a gargoyle of what might have been, had the state received its due from the federal purse!

    Lagos, on the other hand, despite being in political opposition, had not languished in its 1999 mountain of refuse, arrested growth and generally bad infrastructure.

    Instead, thanks to the Bola Tinubu-led order from Alliance for Democracy (AD), to Action Congress (AC), to Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and to All Progressives’ Congress (APC), a renascent Lagos has come into its own; developing decent infrastructure within its comparatively puny resources — in comparison to the humongous but largely wasted resources at the centre — secured for itself financial independence and, in 16 short years, rose from being among the dirtiest cities on the globe to one of the cleanest in the West African sub-region.

    What is more?  The gospel according to rapid infrastructure development, driven by focused governance, spread to Ekiti (under Kayode Fayemi, which, unfortunately Ayo Fayose is busy undoing now), Ogun (under Ibikunle Amosun), Oyo (under Abiola Ajimobi), Osun (under Rauf Aregbesola) and even Edo in the South-South (under Adams Oshiomhole).

    Indeed, the stark difference, in infrastructure development, between Fayemi’s Ekiti (one of the poorest Nigerian states) and Mimiko’s oil-bearing Ondo (the richest in the South West, outside Lagos), shows the difference in contrasting vision.

    Besides, the South West-North West political entente that drove the APC historic presidential win of March 28 issued largely from the same Lagos thinking.

    That is why it is preposterous, nay fraudulent, to suggest that because there has been Change at the centre, Change must be in Lagos — or, for that matter, in Oyo or Ogun State.

    If Lagos, even under the most inclement of political weathers, had got it relatively right; and its success has influenced the change at the centre, why would Lagosians want to vote the dying federal (dis)order?

    Akinwunmi Ambode comes from the Lagos camp, whose idea has made the difference.  Jimi Agbaje comes from a discredited federal order, that not only ruined itself, but nearly ruined Nigeria. Can anyone truly imagine four more years of a PDP federal government?

    Let Lagos, and the rest of the South West in Oyo, Ogun, Ekiti, Osun and Ondo vote a new federal order they have helped to midwife.  That is the most logical way to work the work, before savouring the sure prosperity, to follow from sure hard work.

     

    Adieu, Pa Paul Oni Meduna

    The Oni siblings, on April 2 and 3, at Iyamerin-Okeri in Kogi State, treated friends, well wishers and guests to a most befitting funeral rites for their patriarch, Pa Paul Oni Meduna.  And boy, was it a funeral to remember!

    Pa Meduna must be smiling in his grave.  Reason?  Given pre-election tension, it was a journey to dread, into the bowels of Kogi, the southern swathe of the North. What if the election had gone nasty?

    But it became a celebration of newfound democracy — with the officiating priest, at the funeral service, saying the locals voted with anger borne out of hunger!  Sweet indeed, is the memory of the just!  Rest in peace Pa Meduna, and congratulations, the Oni siblings: Sanya, Tope, Toso and Comfort.

  • Abobaku!

    The Yoruba concept of the Abobaku (literally, “fated to die with the king”) came into full dramatic flourish with Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman.

    The play is the tragic tale of the Elesin, the pampered king’s horseman who savoured, to the full, the lollies of his calling; but balked at his grim duty — dying with the king!

    Though the Elesin sought comfort in the British colonialist, Simon Pilkings’s decision that ritual suicide to “follow the king” was “barbaric”, the Elesin eventually killed himself after his son, riled by his father’s “cowardice”, committed suicide to save the “family honour”.

    Elesin’s son was a medical doctor trained in the West — and the big irony was that though he had acquired western exposure, the African ethos in him would appear to run deeper than his father’s.  That was double tragedy for one — just because someone tried to evade grim responsibility.

    The concept of the Abobaku has come in handy with the behaviour of some top political elite in the South West, in the build up to the March 28 presidential election.

    Of the lot, the grim fate of Segun Mimiko, the Ondo governor, is the most dramatic; for despite his huffing-and-puffing, in support of President Goodluck Jonathan’s second term bid, the president lost in Ondo State.

    Dr. Mimiko’s war haemorrhaging include, apart from the presidential tally, two senatorial seats (out of three) to the All Progressives Congress (APC) and five House of Representatives seats (out of nine).

    For the South West coordinator of the Jonathan presidential campaign, that was quite some bleeding.  Even more: for an ambitious political personage who even postures at some political force in Yorubaland, if not some alternative Yoruba leadership on the political front, it would appear morning yet on political decline day.

    In the words of Thomas Malthus, the Mimiko defeat, given its narrow margin (299, 889 to 251, 368) may well be “arithmetical”.  But whether it would signify a geometrical decline in Mimiko’s political fortune is buried in the womb of time.  For now, however, the Mimiko magic and cunning appear waning.

    Still, Governor Mimiko is a politician.  If he “dies” with his principal, he knows, unlike Soyinka’s Elesin, that he rightfully commits “ritual suicide”, in exchange for the rare political lollies he had savoured.  Satanically noble!

    Junking his Labour Party (LP) — to be sure, an act of political treachery — for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), after all came with great benefits.  For one, the Jonathan presidency gifted him the Ondo PDP structure, pitting him against the PDP old guard.  As it would later turn out, that would work against his success.

    For another, he landed the billion naira South West presidential campaign coordination job — surely another poisoned chalice.  Again, between him and the PDP old guard — the very same that stole his LP gubernatorial vote, under the ancien regime of the late Olusegun Agagu — opened another battle front.  The old guard feel they more eminently deserve the coordination job.  Mimiko himself has a swagger and gubernatorial chip on the shoulder.  Result: working at cross purposes, which leads to brilliant failure.

    Besides, Mimiko as political schizophrenic is quite an exciting sight!  By wholesale taking LP to PDP, he became the proverbial bat — neither bird nor mammal.  His old LP comrade regard him with contempt.  The PDP he wants to take over regard him with resent.  Something, of course, would have to give.  That would seem to explain why the all-mighty South West coordinator failed to win his own polling unit for his principal!

    Still, Mimiko is only a politician who, win or lose, is working hard for the money!  Pray, what can otherwise respectable Yoruba, particularly the Afenifere elders, say on their Goodluck Jonathan campaign, curling up snugly in Mimiko’s pseudo-paradise?

    Would Jonathan pass as the most brilliant and incisive president Nigeria has ever had?  Would he pass as the president who has done the most for the Yoruba nationality, in the context of a federal Nigeria?  Would he pass as a moral Palladium, of which Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the avatar of these elderly Awoists, would eternally be proud of?

    If the answers to these questions are negative, why would the likes of Pa Ayo Adebanjo, Chief Olu Falae (though a latter-day Awoist), Dr. Femi Okunrounmu and Pa Reuben Fasonranti, the factional Afenifere leader, clamber on the Mimiko gravy train, with hardly any regard for their hard earned reputations?

    Why would they, by sheer guilt by association, be mixed up in the atavistic display of Gani Adams’s Odua People’s Congress (OPC), in its shameful invasion of Lagos streets, on behalf of President Jonathan?  If Adams, with his rather limited exposure and exaggerated self-importance, does not understand the full implication of his actions, particularly the oil-pipeline-in-exchange-for-muscled-protest, should we say the elders too do not?

    Of course, their reason is the Jonathan pledge to, should he win, “implement” the recommendations of the National Conference that he staged, but which recommendations had been gathering dust in his office, until the season of the elections.

    But how primed is Jonathan to do that?  The implementation requires constitutional amendments; and such amendments require both inputs from the National Assembly and also no less than two-thirds of the legislatures of the 36 states?

    No prize for guessing right: the real reason is these gladiators, young and old, callow or wizened, are united in hate and spite against Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the APC national leader.  Not only that: so searing is the spite that they appear to have assumed Tinubu’s progress in politics automatically translates into their own retrogress.

    Well, they are entitled to their choices.  But there is something patently unwise in cutting your nose to spite your face.  You still get to bear the brunt of the ensuing ugliness!

    For starters, the Afenifere grandees, particularly those the late Chief Bola Ige used to call the  Ijebu Mafia among them, already bear vicarious, if not real responsibility, for electing into the Senate the controversial Buruji Kashamu, an alleged fugitive from US law.

    Now, politics is not about electing popes or saints.  But it was exactly because Awo insisted on such rigorous standards, of looking out for saints in the public space, that Awoists developed their swagger in Yoruba politics!  So, what would Awo say from his grave by his living apostles’ crass lowering of their own rigorous ethos — and for political convenience as cheap as hating the guts of another?

    But back to Mimiko, the chief Abobaku!  If after all these his political fortunes head south, it would only teach the lesson that there is a limit to spite, particularly in politics.  Since his split with Tinubu, his chief strategy has been intrigue, cunning and spite, to corral primordial advantage.  But alas!  How long can that last in the politics, which is a marathon?

    The eventual victim though, is the Yoruba motherland.  A land once known for quality representation in parliament is now open to some riff-raff, simply because some leaders go on ego-tripping.

    If the Yoruba must maintain their famed sophistication, though their political parties may differ, there must be a consensus on quality.

  • So long, Goodluck

    So long, Goodluck

    “B’Oyinbo nlo nlu, a su s’aga” [A fleeing expatriate defecates on his seat] — Yoruba saying

    Almost like yesterday, the 16 April 2011 presidential election.  “It takes patience to get Goodluck,” punned a voter in the scorching sun, in a Lagos voting precinct.

    Neither Patience nor Goodluck now appears worth all that trouble!

    Not long after the deed, Goodluck Jonathan having romped to victory, it was standard fare to crow, not without a mighty sense of pride and fulfilment: “We voted Jonathan, not PDP”.

    Again, neither Jonathan nor PDP has proved a good deal!

    Why, not a few back then christened their new-borns Goodluck!  It was the sunny and halcyon days of Goodluck Jonathan, the adored president of the Federal Republic.

    Not anymore!

    Ripples wished he could swagger and say, “I told you so!”

    But that would be insensitive — not after Chibok and the missing 219; and Buni-Yadi and the doomed 29: school girls and boys consumed by terror, while the commander-in-chief practically dosed; the ill-fated Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) 16, youths that perished in legitimate search of jobs, because the sitting government could not curtail soulless racketeering; and civil servants nationwide, federal and state, now tasting the bitter novelty of salary yo-yo, because the Jonathan Presidency could not account for Nigeria’s oil receipts.  That has led to astronomical slashes in states’ monthly Federation Account takings, without any cogent reason.

    Still, yours truly saw through President Jonathan, even when he was Prince Charming — and raised alarm.

    Late 2010 in New York, the new President Jonathan was asked: will you contest in 2011 [given the circumstances of President Umaru Yar’Adua’s exit and the North’s bitterness about its loss of power]?

    Simple question.  But Jonathan launched into a rigmarole: well, I might still contest as vice-president; I might contest as president; I might just conclude Yar’Adua’s tenure and quit; in fact, I’ve not really thought about it — I’m still busy with my current assignment!

    Ripples saw through the sophistry; spotted a devious power schemer and raised an alarm.  Even when people were celebrating Jonathan’s “pan-Nigeria mandate”, Ripples declared it was no more than a regional gang-up, which conspiracy produced a “pan-Nigeria mandate of Southern Nigeria and the Middle Belt.”

    Indeed, Lagosians and other southerners now howling about a disastrous Jonathan should own up to their own share of the mass conspiracy that created him.  By, for southern solidarity,  acquiescing to the expedient scrapping of electoral zoning, they joyfully created the monster that would later gobble them.

    Glorious irony: former President Olusegun Obasanjo, chief and happy cheer-leader of that expediency, despite himself being a zoning beneficiary, has become the bitter jeer-leader of Jonathan!

    But just as Gen. Obasanjo, in 1979, handed Second Republic President, Alhaji Shehu Shagari, a legitimacy grave in the twelve-two-thirds controversy, which Chief Richard Akinjide, SAN, baked, Chief Obasanjo handed Jonathan a serious legitimacy crisis in the zoning controversy, with a cheated core North screaming blue murder.

    Still, the Jonathan debacle was at best a blissful marriage between the duplicity of the power elite and Jonathan’s own crass opportunism.

    Because he had a legitimacy baggage — the guilty are afraid, after all! — Jonathan fretted and lingered, while Boko Haram made hay, thinking he was appeasing the North.  That way, he thoroughly demystified the once and supremely proud Nigerian military.  A commander-in-chief never ended a more tragic fall guy!

    In terms of concrete-and-mortar, Jonathan never achieved much, never mind all the crowing about antiquated coaches and pre-historic rail tracks, that his lobby credits him with.

    But it is in the area of intangibles, democratic, normative and lawful, that Jonathan has proved an unmitigated disaster, almost without any redemptive value.

    Indeed, in both governance and politics, Jonathan brought the Presidency to nadirs unimagined; and manically worked — and is still working — a divided Nigeria; and wilfully creating mutually loathing Nigerians, along explosive religious and ethnic lines; more than any other government in Nigeria’s painful history.

    Besides, though he boasts a PhD, his grasp of issues is pitiably childish and pedestrian.  The president parrots, in 2015, his e-payment anti-corruption “achievement”.  But e-payment, for the Lagos State government, has been standard fare since 2002!

    The less said about Dame Patience Faka, the presidential spouse, the better.  Suffice it to say she has brought that usually classy office to great disrepute by her gross insensitivity, galloping lexical challenge and unapologetic vulgarity.  All these will return, with a vengeance, to wreck her husband on March 28.

    In presidential imaging, Jonathan also plumbed new lows.  Proof? Just listen to his reckless presidential canvassers, sounding off like all-muscle-no-brain bouncers: Edwin Clark, Ayodele Fayose, Doyin Okupe, Femi Fani-Kayode, Olisa Metuh, Fredrick Fasehun, Gani Adams and Dame the Game, herself!  Now, garnish all that with Jonathan’s atavistic crusaders: MASSOB, OPC and Niger Delta militants.  Pray, how can a president sworn to law and order, court so much anarchy, for wishful electoral gains?

    Mention institutional wrecks, and Hurricane Jona has been hyper-active, starting with his ruling Peoples Democratic Party.  Despite the bluff and bluster, a hugely divided PDP goes into the polls — and even that is a rump, following the split and exit of the Governors-5.  Even then, a paranoid Jonathan still subverted his party’s nomination process:  PDP claimed, even after aspirants had paid the due fees, that it only printed one presidential nomination form — and the president had got it!

    What other areas has Jonathan’s locusts not eaten: respect for electoral laws — which Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) brazenly breached, organising pro-Jonathan rallies, thus undermining INEC?

    Or, the PDP shameful campaign to prematurely sack Prof. Attahiru Jega, the INEC chair, for having the temerity to insist on innovations like permanent voter cards (PVC) and smart card readers, to authenticate genuine voters?

    Or, Jonathan as author and finisher of hate campaigns, in lieu of hardly any concrete achievements, erected on brutal demonization of political opponents, and explosive Christian-Muslim, North-South and petty ethnic divides, all served in the most incendiary, hateful and vulgar of languages — not to mention the cavalier ploy to politicise the security and armed forces!

    Lest we forget: the unprecedented Police invasion of the House of Representatives, all in a bid to forcefully change the Speaker, after Aminu Tambuwal’s defection to the opposition APC!  It is tribute to the triumph of reason over brute force that both the Police and DSS have eaten crow and restored the Speaker’s full security, after an initial shameful romance with state outlawry.

    Jonathan’s supporters, just like his opposers, have their democratic right.  But four days to the presidential election, it is clear which of the two are upbeat, and which are downcast.

    Take the media.  The pro-Jonathan This Day deviated from its tradition of electoral mapping to predict putative winners and losers.  Could it be that This Day editors have seen the handwriting on the wall; and instead, settled for an advert form of a Richard Grenell Armageddon scarecrow, written for Washington Times, suggesting should Buhari win, Nigeria risks Islamization?  But why is no one surprised at the green Mr. Grenell?  Didn’t Islamization scare run through the Jonathan campaign?

    O, Sunday Vanguard too, on March 22, ran a front-page advert predicting Jonathan’s “victory”.  But even a casual look at it shows the parameters are highly suspect.  But maybe they tell Jonathan what he wants to hear!

    In contrast, The Nation (pro-Buhari) and Sunday Punch (neither friend nor foe) ran a electoral map that tilted towards Buhari, with accompanying detailed analyses.  Well, it is all in voters’ hands now!

    In Ripples’ view however, it would take a most egregious rigging for Jonathan to prevail in this election.  That is clear from the geopolitical balance of numbers and spread.

    That is why INEC must stand firm and do its duty to motherland: credible, free, fair and transparent election.  The security forces too must resisit any partisan temptations, that runs contrary to their oaths of service.

    So long, Mr. President.  One just wished your outgoing activities would not earn the portraiture of the exiting white man that soils his high seat, just because he is skipping town!

  • Jega: making of a new demon

    Jega: making of a new demon

    Attahiru Jega, Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) chairman, and Nigeria’s 11th chief electoral umpire, is the latest demon on the political horizon.

    But he is a demon with a difference — at least from the colourful prism of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

    Not long ago, he was Goodluck Jonathan’s proud mascot of clean elections.  Under Jega’s watch, PDP had lost elections: in Edo, Ondo, Anambra and Osun.  Only in Ekiti did it “win” — and Nigeria’s ruling party loves to flaunt that “democratic” record!

    So, what has changed — with Prof. Jega porting from the mascot of electoral rectitude to the demon of electoral turpitude?

    Not much. But again, a lot.

    Not much, because the chief electoral job, right from the pioneering headache of the late Eyo Esua (who chaired the first Electoral Commission, 1960-1966), always came with demonising.  Since the electoral chief was always perceived to lean toward the ruling party, he was fated to being savaged by the opposition.

    But not without cause.  Everybody knew — the ruling party, by its body language; the opposition, by its iron conviction; and even the people, by their fatalistic acquiescence — that the chief electoral referee is the sitting government’s 12th player: if you would permit a football metaphor.

    Any electoral chief too thick-skulled to get that ended with unimaginable ignominy.  Witness: Humphrey Nwosu.  He gamely delivered June 12, the cleanest election in Nigerian history.  But on his way to declaring the wrong winner in MKO Abiola (God bless his kind soul!), the Ibrahim Babangida junta socked Prof. Nwosu so hard!

    For starters, they annulled Nwosu’s rude call.  Then, there were reports of alleged slaps, fearsome threats and allied personal humiliation.

    Is Jega treading Nwosu’s dreaded path?  It would seem so!

    If indeed that were so, then it would appear a lot has changed.  Still, Jega’s demonization is strange, coming from the sitting government.  It used to be the exclusive preserve of the howling opposition!

    But even that is very nuanced — for the opposition itself had damned Jega to the lowest pit of hell, when it had cause to.

    Good old Comrade-Governor, Adams Oshiomhole, then the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) candidate, berated  INEC, after noticing some early polling zone shambolic display, early on re-election day, in 2012.   But as the Edo governor later coasted to victory, the morning jeers segued into evening cheers.  The fulfilled Edo electorate exploded in sheer ecstasy!

    In the mouth of Chris Ngige, candidate of the defunct ACN, the 2013 Anambra gubernatorial election should still leave a bitter taste.  The senator had genuine cause that a good number of his supporters were disenfranchised.

    But All Progressives Grand Alliance’s Willie Obiano, the winner, got away with it; since the courts had since okayed Mr. Obiano’s election.  But INEC got the full lash of Senator Ngige’s tongue.

    Yet, even with opposition scalding, Prof. Jega had managed, somewhat, to keep his personal integrity — which makes very surprising, all the muck and darts and poisonous arrows that the PDP now throws his way.

    From his premium throne as presidential godfather, Pa Edwin Clark has roared: sack Jega!  In his auspicious company, of base but baseless partisan manoeuvring, are a medley of otherwise respected elder citizens, turned unfazed fronts for a suspect campaign: Senator Femi Okunrounmu and Dr. Chukwuemeka Ezeife, aborted 3rd Republic Anambra governor; and seasoned rabble rousers like Gani Adams (who weighed in with some bit of carpentry logic: Jonathan must sack Jega, if he wants to win!) and Ralph Uwazurike, leader of the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), whose cadres even staged anti-Jega road shows on South East streets, just as OPC did its equivalent violent orgies on Lagos streets!

    This strange ensemble threatened that should Jega not be sacked, they would mobilise Southern Nigeria to boycott the election.  Some bluff!

    But from fronts, the PDP itself, given the combined gratings from Femi Fani-Kayode, Ayodele Fayose and Oliver Metuh, has tarred Jega and his electoral household, with everything in its partisan sinews: Jega is a fraud; PVC is a racket; smart card reader (for pre-vote accreditation and authentication) is a crime!

    What has Jega done to earn all these?  Simple: he has been too thick-skulled to read the body language of the president, zestfully backed by his power party — any result, that doesn’t return Goodluck Jonathan as re-elected president, cannot be free and fair!

    That might sound asinine to those who indulge in reason.  But for those locked in the language of power?  It is de-rigueur of thinking!

    Indeed, in Jega, Jonathan would appear the grand victim of his own cunning.  In 2011, he showed off the INEC chair as the epitome of electoral fairness.  After all,  Jega’s much vaunted credibility, in lieu of the Lawal Uwais’s Electoral Reforms Panel’s recommended rigorous strictures to make INEC truly independent, delivered Jonathan the presidency in a “free and fair election”.

    In the intervening years, the same “credibility” ensured PDP lost every election (in Edo, Ondo, Anambra and Osun) but one (in Ekiti) — never mind the Ekiti rigging tapes, which the president has dismissed as a “fabrication”, though he didn’t listen to it; and the fingered dramatis personae have owned up, even if they plead a different motive.

    Still, the PDP election losses would appear a devious scam: Edo, to set the template of Jonathan’s dummy.

    Anambra (won by APGA) and Ondo (won by Labour): a cynical president sacrificing mere pawns for the big one.  Proof?  Both winners,  Mr. Obi, ex-APGA and Dr. Mimiko, ex-Labour, are now ecstatic PDP barons — in grateful quid-pro-quo to the president for “allowing” them to win, back then?

    Ekiti: in retrospect with the rigging tape, a brazen test-running of scientific rigging (though aided and abetted by former Governor Kayode Fayemi’s spectacular blunders, epitomised by his “civil war” with Opeyemi Bamidele), to be fully unleashed on Osun three months later — which, however, got aborted.

    So, the Jega “credibility” that, “free and fair”, made Jonathan president in 2011 is about to, “free and fair”, make Jonathan ex-president in 2015!  That prospect is scary — and you could tell by a panic-gripped president running from pillar to post; and a ruling party, bitterly orchestrating hate campaigns, all over the place!

    But that is even on the surface.  Viewed deeper, in the context of Jonathan Vs Muhammadu Buhari, Jega is trapped in the tempest of the Nigerian ruling class, at a terrible crossroads.  To these wayward children of Lord Lugard, with their cherished ethos of power without responsibility, these are indeed trying times!

    Jonathan epitomises a decayed agency, at its most vulnerable.  Still, Jonathan pitches his class to, through him, at least for four more years, play in the wide and merry way, the big bazaars from the wild festivals of rent, which however might end in sure perdition and class death.

    In Buhari, however, the choice is no less stark: take some galling home cure.  Though that cure could gore a few, it might just save the whole clan!

    Either way, Jega is fated to midwife!

    That seems to explain all the Interim National Government conspiracy theories, and alleged  cloak-and-dagger manoeuvres allegedly involving Jonathan and some former military rulers, with the fond hope of shutting out Buhari.  Well, their problems, not the people’s!

    Let the people look out for themselves in this election.

    Let Jega too, do his duty as a patriot; no matter the high-octane distractions.

    If the people vote right and Jega holds true, Jonathan will be put out of his misery — and Nigeria, with Nigerians, handed a new lease of life.

  • This way for presidential sewers

    This way for presidential sewers

    That the Jonathan presidential court is deep in the sewers, when it should epitomise rarefied refinement, is underscored by the crude electioneering outbursts by First Lady, Patience Jonathan.

    It is damning symbolism, showing how low the high office of the Nigerian president has sunk under President Goodluck Jonathan.

    In a clearly unprecedented fashion, Mrs. Jonathan claimed Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential standard bearer and her husband’s top challenger in the March 28 presidential election, was “brain-dead”.

    True, the context of the statement, the giddiness of the campaign stump, was not quite as clinical and as foreboding as it appears in cold print.  Besides, the First Lady is notorious for her lexical challenges.

    So, beyond demonstrable bad grace and undisguised spite, she might not have fully understood the full impact of her blurting.

    Still, what offence, beyond legitimately running for president, has Gen. Buhari committed to earn personal insults from Mrs Jonathan?  Or is the Nigerian presidency the exclusive preserve of the Jonathan clan?

    Thank God she didn’t — and, from her conduct and comportment thus far, she could not have.  But what if Mrs Aishat Buhari, the General’s wife, had responded, tit-for-tat?  So, Nigerians would have witnessed the unflattering sight of, if Gen. Buhari wins, an in-coming First Lady trading insults with the outgoing one?  What lessons would that have taught the Nigerian youth?

    Aside, Mrs Jonathan was also quoted to have told Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) supporters to “stone” whoever shouted, to their hearing, Change, the APC electoral slogan; apart from thoroughly insulting the North, saying some families over there produce more children than they could ever care for.

    So, would the insulted trot to the polls on March 28 and happily gift her husband the vote, for which she was campaigning?

    When a First Lady, who ought to be the quintessence of poise, dignity and grace, perennially embodies unrepentant coarseness, to the captive cheer of her unfortunate aides, then something fundamental is wrong!

    Meanwhile, mum is the word, from her husband, for whose cause she unleashed such unmitigated crudeness.  The president, the quintessential gentleman, sees no evil, hears no evil!

    Still, if Nigeria is organised on the basis of families — as indeed, it is — there is something notoriously amiss with a man who seems unwilling or unable — or both! — to control his family, on which his spouse is perched, asking to lead 160 million Nigerians made up of composite families.

    Still, if Mrs Jonathan could plead campaign giddiness, what might Femi Fani-Kayode, the president’s chief campaign spokesperson plead, by insisting that, indeed, Buhari was “brain-dead”?  It was additional evidence, if any were required, to confirm that President Jonathan’s campaign messages came brewed in the gutter!

    Mr. Fani-Kayode, is well and truly quixotic, in his bid to sell a winning campaign with a tongue that sears, a voice that barks and a mouth that mocks and lies — all on overdrive from a mind that merrily libels.  But he is only the most grotesque face of a hugely cynical, devil-may-care, campaign din: Doyin Okupe, Olisa Metuh, Asari Dokubo and Ayo Fayose — he, the perfect living example of how not to be a governor.

    Add Pa Edwin Kiagbodo Clark to this list, and you won’t be wrong.  Even an otherwise classy Reuben Abati appears thoroughly enjoying his first sweet lessons in vulgar abuse — judging from the memorable echoes of his latest letter, challenging the APC candidate to a presidential debate.

    After lustily orchestrating a certificate non-issue, proudly announcing political opponents with bad breath and bawling about another allegedly wearing pampers, Mr. Fani-Kayode, the Don Quixote of the Jonathan presidential campaign, is now pushing, full gallop, for war reparations against Candidate Buhari, for his anti-Biafra exploits in the Nigerian Civil War!  It is his latest elixir to further warehouse Igbo votes!

    The others in the din ensemble have not be idle, either.  Dr. Okupe, ever charging, ever growling, ever battering, has barked at anyone who cares to listen: mark my words, he growled, Muhammadu Buhari is not electable!

    Mr. Metuh, fresh from the crushing success of christening the APC opposition an “Islamic party”, has rushed post-haste to declare the INEC card reader (no friend of his party, for no mysterious reason) an irredeemable failure, even if concrete evidence suggests otherwise

    Asari has been a bit quiet, since declaring war against the rest of Nigeria, should they make the fatal mistake of not re-electing his Ijaw kinsman.

    Elder Clark is still quite sprightly.  Still at the ferocious war front, of the sack Jega campaign, this respected Nigerian patriot and alter ego of the commander-in-chief, is already belting out a diktat: no matter what the law says, soldiers would be used for election duties, to the raucous applause of trillions of PDP members nationwide!

    Ayodele Fayose?  That one does nothing at half-measures!  With the prodigious gift of treading where angels dread, he has hollered, what the hell: sack Jega, and heavens won’t fall!  It is the final declaration of the self-named Irunmale (spirit) that snacks on jollof rice!  Fayose has spoken!  Which unfortunate law of the land dares demur?

    Still, the in-the-sewers-we-trust orchestra is not limited to middle-level officers alone, in the Jonathan presidential army.  Vice President Namadi Sambo too would trade his proud place for no one!

    After rejecting Olisa Metuh’s branding, and repositioning PDP as “Islamic party” in the North (because Alhaji Namadi is Muslim and is a northerner) but “Christian party” in the South (because President Jonathan is Christian and a southerner), he now flails and wails against the odious idea of a 72-year old becoming president.  That is the latest sagacity from the ultra-loyal deputy, even if it is un-African to mock old age.

    President Jonathan?  He is the proverbial grand masquerade that claims the final flourish!

    After, for Christian votes, posing in churches nationwide (most latterly in the South) as perhaps more Christian than any other; swaggering out, as all-conquering commander-in-chief in the victorious Baga road show (to convince the troops he is more general than General Buhari that quit the army some 28 years ago, and perhaps make a sweepstakes of barrack votes nationwide), the president, at the weekend, scaled new heights: the sporty president is sportier than any other — so, the Nigerian sporting universe must reward him with their grateful votes!

    If the blessed president made a good campaign surge of politicising churches (never mind that religion is dangerous tinder), shows off the army as one in which he is especially well pleased (even if it is a collective bastion that must never suffer politicisation), why should he not claim sports at his exclusive, partisan ally (even if sports is Nigeria’s most unifier, defying any partisan affiliation)?

    Well, for holier-than-thou Christians who have developed dissonance at the president’s latest harvest of traditional blessing from a section of Yoruba Obas from Nigeria’s South West, it is the realpolitik of hardball electioneering: the end justifies the meanness, apologies to Prof. Wole Soyinka!

  • So frank a letter

    So frank a letter

    Your Excellency, Mr. President,

    I respect your high office.  But I insist on my republican right to engage you and ask questions, no matter how unpalatable.

    Nigeria is no monarchy: some form of cultural impunity, where some nobles seize power and lord it over the rest.  Neither is it a theocracy: some ecclesiastical impunity, where some religious order seizes power and claim they rule on behalf of God.

    It is rather a republican democracy, in which everyone is equal before the law.  It goes from there to codify that the majority of votes, of these equal citizens, determines whoever would be president, the chief servant of state.  To be sure, I didn’t vote for you, back then.  But my “no” vote, only validated the “yes” of the majority.  That is the majesty of democracy!  Besides here, law rules; not arbitrary power or impunity.

    So, Mr. President, you are there today.  I could be there tomorrow.  Another citizen, the day after.  So, republican democracy is nothing but citizen mutual respect, under the operative laws of the land.

    You may wonder why the title of this letter, “So frank a letter” echoes so much So Long a Letter, a fictional work by Mariama Ba, that dead Senegalese brave.

    Don’t wonder far, Your Excellency.  Madame Ba’s “letter”, with pathos, reflected the throes of the educated, modern African woman, operating under the strictures of ancient African matrimony!

    My own letter also bears the throes of modern Nigerian voters.   We voted you in as democratic president.  But we are pained at your ardour for an ancient African potentate — no disrespect intended.  This is no citizen “abusing the president”!  More worrying, you seem to be flirting with shredding our law-bound covenant of periodic elections.

    Would you, by any means, Your Excellency, be dodging elections, for fear of defeat, as former President Olusegun Obasanjo has alleged?  He claimed you were trying out the Gbagbo formula.  Laurent Gbagbo, former president of Cote d’Ivoire, postponed elections many times for fear of defeat.

    Eventually, he met his nemesis — no dishonour.  But the villainy was that he stonewalled after the people had withdrawn their mandate.  He had no right to do that.  He was no monarch.  He was an elected president — who voted in, could be voted out.

    So, please, please, don’t go the Gbagbo way!  There is no dishonour in losing elections.  If you in 2011 enjoyed the joy of victory, you can in 2015 endure the gall of defeat.  In any case, that is the lawful thing to do — and Your Excellency, law rules in a democracy.

    But many of your opponents have alleged you were planning to go a wee smarter than Gbagbo; that your camp was perfecting its rigging plot.  Indeed, they swear the last-minute postponement of the February 14 election; the initial whoops of hysteria, at that coup, by your campaign platform; your hyper-activity at the Boko Haram front thereafter, where you were busy playing the all-conquering commander-in-chief, complete with military camo and chutzpah; your camp’s scaled-up demonization of Attahiru Jega, the chief electoral umpire, for no noble cause; your camp’s campaign for the junking of permanent voter cards (PVCs) for temporary voter cards (TVCs), your campaign’s seeming fixation with using the military for electoral duties, when the courts have demurred; and your alleged dollar-blitz visit to Lagos, are all tell-tales of softening the grounds for a most horrendous rigging your camp is allegedly planning.

    I hope, Your Excellency, these are just mere speculations.  If they were not, you would have set in motion a chain of reactions you yourself cannot comprehend.  If in doubt, Your Excellency, read Nigeria’s contemporary history books.

    Since I’m hoping for the best, while I prepare for the worst, I wish to discuss your electioneering.  Even before formal electioneering, Mr. President, you were in churches, from which pulpit you launched subtle political bazookas.  Since formal electioneering, you have visited about every church worth its name.  Mr. President, what’s the idea — that you are a Christian president about to be unhorsed by ravaging Nigerian Muslims?

    Even at that, you were on the stumps when Namadi Sambo, your running mate and sitting vice-president, said in Dutse, Jigawa and Minna, Niger, that yours was the “Muslim” party, while the opposition was the “Christian” party.  So, in the South, your party is “Christian”, but in the North, “Muslim”?

    Sambo’s proof?  Yemi Osinbajo, the All Progressives Congress (APC) vice-presidential candidate was a pastor, who boasted 5,000 churches!  Sure, he reportedly spoke in Hausa, which you probably don’t speak.  But I have not read anywhere, Mr. President, that you rebuked your deputy against such rabid and vile campaign lines.

    There are also these allegations that the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) had received, from your campaign, between N6 billion and N7 billion to help purchase Christian votes.  Governor Rotimi Ameachi (no friend of yours) claimed it was N6 billion.  But Maiduguri-based Pastor Kallamu Musa-Dikwa (no foe of yours) also alleges it is N7 billion!  Any truth to these allegations, Mr. President?

    Whatever the truth, two things should worry you.  That a sitting president is alleged to spray about money-for-vote gives your image, and your government’s, no spruce; particularly with the not unfair allegation that yours is about the most corrupt government Nigeria has ever had.

    Then the Christian-Muslim divide, which no government before has ever inspired, or even wilfully promoted, more than you. Even if you win, you want to rule over a bitter, religiously divided country?  And if you lost, and your creek militants walked their talk on their threatened war, and an ethnic quarrel degenerated into a religious inferno, can you honestly live with your conscience as the man under whose presidency Nigeria finally unravelled?  Think of it, Mr. President!

    And while at it Mr. President, I must say your desperate ethnic divisive strategy is working wonders in Lagos!  No one is discussing your glaring deficiencies as president again.  Everybody is rather receding to their tribal laager, either for or against you.  But as you know, Your Excellency, there is life after election.  O, lest I forget: those South West hustlers who are promising you Yoruba votes.  They love you not, they only hate another!

    By the way sir, congratulations on your successes against Boko Haram.  That is good news! I wish though you could follow that up with the rescue of the Chibok girls.  Their parents, and we, traumatised co-citizens, would be very pleased.  Success is sweet, Your Excellency, so I won’t begrudge you your new-found derring-do, as all-conquering commander-in-chief.  But take it easy on the drama.  It is our military, and you are just the extant commander-in-chief.  Don’t act as though it was an Ebele Army, which some of us are against, simply because we have principled disagreement with you.

    Until we meet at the polling zone on March 28, please stay well.  I won’t vote for you.  But others will.  All I want from you, as a civic and law-abiding citizen, is to make every vote count — and let the lawful majority win.

    Yours patriotically,

    Lawful Citizen.