The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olakunle Abimbola

  • Puppet quits, puppeteer remains

    Puppet quits, puppeteer remains

    Puppet quits, puppeteer remains. Open sesame: Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) problems vanish? Not by any chance!

    Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, vanquished PDP national chairman, may be the ultimate fall guy in the 2015 presidential chess game. He has been sacrificed as any pun would.

    But the game is far from over, for the puppeteer is still alive and well; and ready to tangle! So are his opponents: flush with Tukur’s unceremonious junking!

    Still, you’ve got to feel for Alhaji Bamanga, the way he seems to make a hash of things. Sure, the cards are almost always stacked against him. But his Achilles’ heel would appear his political antenna, too blunt to pick up danger, even if his nose is on fire!

    As 2nd Republic governor of defunct Gongola State (1 October – 31 December 1983), his three-month gubernatorial reign came with the ruling National Party of Nigeria (NPN)-confected electoral landslide, moon-slide, and space-slide, that left everybody, victor and vanquished, numb.

    Sure, his political amorality of, in months, transiting from the boss at Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) — almost always the electoral cash cow of Nigeria’s federal ruling parties — to a winning opposition candidate in Gongola (now Adamawa and Taraba states), did not help.

    Yet, perhaps only the likes of Tukur believed the house of fraud the NPN built was not about to crash. He would therefore go ahead, pretending to play “His Excellency”, on the basis of that “space-slide”. He lasted all of three comical months!

    This same costly naivety (more aptly, happy opportunism?) would drive his PDP chairmanship odyssey, for the PDP house of fraud that Olusegun Obasanjo, former president of the Federal Republic, built was cracking and creaky all over. He lasted 18 turbulent months!

    Indeed, since President Obasanjo decided the late Solomon Lar, first PDP national chairman, was no longer a Solomon the party needed; and PDP elders back then endured Obasanjo’s muscling by presidential might, the PDP national chairmanship had become one long, slippery “banana peel”.

    “Banana peel” were the picturesque words of Chuba Wilberforce Okadigbo, late colourful politician and former president of the Senate, as he described the high attrition rate of Senate presidents of his era, in eternal feuding with an insufferable President Obasanjo, who made little secret of wanting to corral the National Assembly as executive sidekick and rubberstamp, despite the presidential system’s rigid separation of power.

    Indeed, since Obasanjo stonewalled the late Sunday Awoniyi, the Kogi giant, for Barnabas Gemade, the Benue not-so-known, every Tukur predecessor had come to grief: Audu Ogbe, Vincent Ogbulafor, Okwesilieze Nwodo and, of course, Tukur.

    The only exception, of course, was Ahmadu Ali, who proved a merry Obasanjo puppet just as Tukur proved a merry Jonathan one. He got away with his bully principal; but left his party dazed and stunned.

    Mr. Ogbe’s own call was holy rebellion against presidential complicity in the Chris Ngige Police-aided kidnapping in Anambra, at which the Obasanjo presidency sided with the constitutional bandits. He got tossed out all right, but with his honour intact as the party’s smothered conscience.

    In contrast, Tukur fell as wilful party collaborator in the Jonathan Presidency’s Police-aided serial subversion of the Rivers Government, issuing from partisan bile against Governor Chibuike Amaechi — unhorsed by PDP changing dynamics, which not even the manipulating hands of his principal and puppeteer could steady.

    The pair of Messrs Ogbulafor and Nwodo — with all due respect to them, for excellent citizens they are — are no more than blips on a party consumed by its own hubris. Mr. Ogbulafor once blurted his “largest party in Africa” would rule the roost for 60 years! It is ode to hubris that Mr. Ogbulafor himself lasted just over two years (March 2008-May 2010) as chairman!

    Indeed, the PDP conundrum would appear the real-politik equivalent of the Parmenides-Heraclitus philosophical see-saw. Like Heraclitus’s flux, the PDP chairmanship is a yo-yo. But again, not unlike Parmenides’ staid permanence, the constant change in PDP underscores how unchanged the party remains!

    The Obasanjo-Ali pair is therefore no different from the Jonathan-Tukur pair. But while second-term President Obasanjo had the gravitas to muscle Ali a safe landing, first-term President Jonathan lacks neither the tact nor the balls to hand Tukur one. Besides, Jonathan lacks the brawn to maintain, without blinking, the odious, in-your-face-impunity as party subversion tactics, of the Obasanjo era.

    Tukur, therefore, became an issue only because his principal was. He is gone now, but his principal is still on. So, those who suggest his exit will bring entente to the troubled party blow hot air!

    It is, therefore, in the 2015 presidential sweepstakes that the post-Tukur pitch battles would be fought. Jonathan still makes a fetish of hiding, behind a finger, his 2015 ambitions. But his intra-PDP foes have already cut the chase, and are dug in at the battle zone.

    Northern anti-Jonathan PDP elements have always regarded the president as some harbourer of “stolen good” — the presidency, on account of PDP’s aborted zoning, at the death of President Umaru Yar’Adua. And they chafe at the spectre of a Jonathan presidential encore in 2015.

    That was the genesis of the not so incredible claim that, to assuage the “North’s” hurt, Jonathan had pledged himself to a one-term presidency. So is it, the root of the pressure on the president to oust himself from 2015, the refusal of which birthed the defunct “New PDP”, and inspired the defection, into the All Progressives Congress (APC), of five of the G-7 PDP governors, aside from the Rivers impunity mess, in which Tukur also played the zestful party collaborator.

    In all of these Tukur, with his poise of a school headmaster taking no nonsense from uncouth urchins, did not help matters. Tukur was asked to jump and his uncritical question was “how high”? No surprise there, that he broke his back!

    He probably richly earned his demonization as some Judas to some “northern” cause. But much of that derring-do must have come at the promptings of a president, probably only too happy to unleash him on his northern brothers.

    But no tears for PDP. Its goose is cooked. The tears, rather, are for a fledgling democracy with a suspect party system.

    No matter how visible the ruling party’s crisis is, it is only but a symptom of the disease: the fraud of electing a president on a platform, only to declare him supreme to, and untouchable by, the party on which he rode to power!

    That is the fraudulent concept of “party leader”, that makes the PDP president some Leviathan over and above a party that made him a candidate.

    That was what Obasanjo brewed and bequeathed. That is what Jonathan has spectacularly mismanaged. And that is what even APC, on the rise now it may be, must watch, if it is not to blunder into the PDP pit.

    If this democracy must deliver development and prosperity — and not waste itself in the dissipative manoeuvres of intra-party war puppets and puppeteers — there is urgent need to fix the party system.

     

  • Fatal attractions

    Fatal attractions

    Since his “original sin”, of opportunistic suspension against Justice Isa Ayo Salami, retired president of the Court of Appeal, President Goodluck Jonathan appears continuously drawn to the fatal attraction of essaying constitutional impunity; and see if it would stick.

    It stuck with Justice Salami, though since the jurist retired with his honour intact, the president should have known his victory was pyrrhic.

    This is because perpetrators of injustice almost always fall victims of their own machinations. Take the president’s collapsing Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

    Time was, when PDP would actively lure sitting governors and legislators from other parties, and declare the illicit lure the height of patriotism and political nobility, since the “biggest party in Africa” was the law, and the law was the “biggest party in Africa”.

    But the same PDP is now whining like caned dogs, after being forced to swallow its own specially brewed impunity!

    Or take the president’s estranged godfather, former President Olusegun Obasanjo. At the height of his presidential impunity, PDP was Obasanjo and Obasanjo was PDP.

    After the collapse of the third term gambit; and after the imposition, willy-nilly, of the health-challenged Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, the czar got his party to purposely amend its constitution to make the chair of the PDP Board of Trustees the exclusive preserve of former presidents from the party — a euphemism for Obasanjo himself!

    But see how the old lion has now turned prolific public letter writer, just to retain a toehold on the party! Verily, verily I say unto you, to parody that famous Biblical phrasing, impunity all too soon consumes its own children!

    Still, neither PDP’s plight nor Obasanjo’s would appear to have weighed much on the president’s mind, in his tango with Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi.

    This Day reported President Jonathan phoning Mallam Sanusi; and literarily barked that he resigned his office forthwith, for allegedly leaking, to the former president, the letter alleging US$ 49.8 billion “missing” from the Federation Account.

    An apparently miffed Sanusi reportedly called the president’s bluff; adding that only a presidential request, backed by two-thirds majority of the Senate, could abridge his fixed five-year term.

    Again, the president had blundered into the myth that the Nigerian president was the globe’s most formidable Leviathan. He could well be. But anytime he strays outside the law, he becomes a Samson shorn of his divine locks!

    If the President-CBN Governor face-off is a short-and-sharp defeat of impunity, the recurring Rivers crisis is a chain of defeats, but with impunity, fired by “federal might”, always bouncing back.

    Is it then a case of the proverbial tortoise in the Yoruba folklore, that swore never to return from a journey until he was disgraced?

    Ironically, the Jonathan Presidency’s apparent fixation with the Rivers crises bears uncanny resemblance to Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa’s fatal attraction to the Western Region crisis in the First Republic.

    By precipitating anomie in Rivers, maybe to politically profit from the ensuing anarchy, might the Jonathan presidency be working towards imposing a state of emergency to get rid of Governor Chibuike Amaechi, just as the Balewa government contrived one out of nothing to politically liquidate Chief Obafemi Awolowo and the rump of his Action Group (AG)? And after emergency, what?

    Of course, President Jonathan denies everything. Even his spouse, Dame Patience Jonathan, denies all. But incontrovertible facts point to presidential complicity, by commission or by omission, in the sordid affair.

    For starters, how come Mbu Joseph Mbu, the commissioner of Police (CP) whose tenure the Rivers looming anarchy birthed with, appears untouchable? Neither the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) nor the president is willing or able to touch him, despite his politicising the police, and baiting anarchy in the state he is paid to secure.

    Then, Evans Bipi and his claim as “Speaker” — a claim so comical, if it were not so tragic! But then if in the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) election, the president of the Federal Republic could declare 16 greater than 19, what stops Bipi from declaring six greater than 26?

    And to think the so-called “Speaker” was product of a failed legislative coup which main victim, the battered Michael Okechukwu Chinda, is still probably abroad on medical tourism! Where is Bipi getting his Dutch courage from?

    And then, the Rivers chief presidential storm trooper, Nyesom Wike, Jonathan’s minister, with his Grassroots Development Initiative (GDI), fighting for every inch of the political space, with a colluding police behind him. All three, Mbu, Bipi and Wike, are unfazed Jonathan sympathisers and votaries of his wife.

    Incidentally, Mbu just claimed his latest scalp in Senator Magnus Abe, a Save Rivers Movement (SRM) kingpin, sitting senator and Amaechi sympathiser, shot by Mbu’s police on January 12 and flown abroad for treatment. Hear Mbu crow on the senator’s felling: “If we used live bullets,” The Nation quoted him, “you know the implication. If a live bullet hits your hand, it will shatter the hand and if it hits the neck, the person is gone.”

    Abe and co should learn the grim lesson: while Wike’s GDI has an unfettered charter to prowl, SRM, in Mbu’s police state, would do so at fatal risk! And for starry-eyed Amaechi supporters, it could be worse next time round — when rubber bullets become real ones!

    That goes back to the Balewa-Jonathan parallel: how the one misused, and the other is misusing, state coercion for partisan ends.

    In Sir Abubakar’s case, the late prime minister had ethno-political motives to run Awo and his AG out of town, though the famed “golden voice” was himself regarded a gentleman. But all that nobility vanished with his Northern People’s Congress (NPC) agenda to crush Awo and his AG. But the principal federal players back then got buried under their own impunity.

    In Jonathan’s case, it would appear some strange spousal fealty, that seems to have dimmed presidential faculty on how far the impunity can go.

    Still, spousal folly has buried many. The fearsome Samson became a Philistine jelly because he ensnared himself with Delilah. The wise Solomon, in uxoriousness, ploughed the ultimate in folly. The Roman Mark Anthony, for Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, forfeited his life and share of the Roman Empire.

    And in 1936, British King Edward VIII abdicated his throne for the warm bosoms of American Wallis Simpson, a serial divorcee. He enjoyed that warmth for 35 years. But the stiff price was his and his descendants’ renunciation of the British throne.

    To be sure, the Jonathan camp are no devils any more than the Amaechi camp are saints. But to unleash state organs as political vendetta, especially on a state government constituted by law in a federation, is tantamount to treason.

    Dr. Jonathan is a learned man; a logical adult who knows the consequences of his choice. Still, the easy attraction of impunity in Rivers is dangerous. It might yet turn fatal!

    On Rivers then, Jonathan has the First Republic Western Region misadventure to profit from. He can learn from history — or be consumed by it!

  • Anambra 2013, Ekiti, Osun 2014

    Anambra 2013, Ekiti, Osun 2014

    No matter the partisan fealty, ethnic grandstanding or media posturing, the Anambra gubernatorial polls of 2013 did not pass the muster of a clean poll.

    However the courts decide the case, Willy Obiano, the declared winner, is not about to play Umaru Musa Yar’ Adua: clutching his controversial prize, if he wins at the courts, but conceding his victory is near-fatally tainted. That would be too stiff an admission for the nasty realpolitik that propelled Mr. Obiano.

    Still, there is gripping moral from vote fiddling — and Mr. Obiano need not look far: Governor Peter Obi, his benefactor and former Governor Chris Ngige, his electoral rival.

    Indeed, the contrast between Mr. Obi and Dr. Ngige is stark, bordering on the dramatic. From the stigma of a court-nullified poll, former Governor Ngige emerged the face of sane governance in Awka, a fresh liberating force from the ruthless clamp of Anambra election fixers.

    It was the political equivalent of a Saul turned Paul, so much so that Ngige’s gubernatorial exploits provided him the spur to romp to senatorial victory a few years later.

    On the other hand, Governor Obi, acclaimed beneficiary of a court-reclaimed mandate, should have been an uncompromising ambassador of clean polls. But his unabashed association with the abjectly flawed Anambra 2014 vote — that was the near-unanimous verdict of poll observers — may well be the electoral equivalent of a Paul turned Saul!

    Still, in Nigeria’s polity of convenience, ideals might indeed be desirable, but what rules the roost is crass expediency. So, it is with Governor Obi, proud prince of electoral rectitude unfazed by electoral turpitude, and Mr. Obiano, his protégé!

    But let no one think Anambra 2013 was a one-off accident or debacle; particularly with Prof. Attahiru Jega, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) chair, entering his usual post-debacle default setting of piping INEC would use lessons learnt to improve on future polls. If you believe that, you probably would believe anything!

    Indeed, Anambra 2013 was a dress rehearsal for Ekiti/Osun 2014, just as Ondo 2012 prepared the grounds for the Anambra manipulation. Any wonder then that like Rotimi Akeredolu, SAN, in Ondo, Dr. Ngige, the major opposition candidate in Anambra came third, not second, at the polls?

    The parallels are just too stark to ignore! The constant, of course, is an ultra-desperate Jonathan Presidency.

    In Anambra, the win of Obi’s protégé was absolutely strategic for Jonathan’s lifeline in the 2015 sweepstakes, even if Obi is an All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) member, and a PDP candidate was in the race.

    In Ekiti/Osun gubernatorial polls 2014, Governor Olusegun Mimiko, another Jonathan ally, would labour (every pun intended!) to deliver for presidential protégés (Labour candidate in Ekiti and PDP candidate in Osun), to return an earlier presidential favour; and gift himself life after two gubernatorial terms.

    Again, with a crumbling PDP, such foothold in the South West would give the troubled president a bounce in his desperation to remain president post-2015 — at all cost, if necessary. Again, it is no coincidence that Mimiko belongs, not to PDP, but to Labour.

    Labour! At best a platform of convenience, at worst a platform of perfidy, and in-between a platform of vacuity, Mimiko’s LP has perhaps the worst brand equity in Nigeria’s troubled democratic polity.

    Both party and leader perfectly fit each other though, for Mimiko’s opponents would swear — and not without good reasons — that he is unrepentant master of the political self, in which serial perfidy is a ready political tool.

    Still, Jonathan’s impunity-powered political manoeuvring and Mimiko’s predictable perfidy would not have mattered much, if the South West progressives-in-government had not manifested, yet again, that penchant to self-destroy. The Ekiti/Osun elections ought to have been a breeze, given the admirable toil of the sitting governments. Yet, they are condemned to toiling hard for victory, especially in Ekiti. Should Ekiti fall, the spectre of an illicit “bandwagon” is real.

    In Osun, the Ogbeni-Governor, Rauf Aregbesola, has his own challenges; and the opposition strategy would be to drum up the religious divides, insisting the Mullah of their malevolent imagination was bent on some Islamist agenda; and calling the other side to electoral arms.

    But it is doubtful if the gambit would work. For one, the governor works hard and hollers even louder about it. For another the projects are so groundbreaking even the sensory-challenged can feel them, not to talk of citizens endowed with full faculties. Besides, whatever Osun PDP would offer, with balance of forces on ground, are likely to be no more than lambs led to the electoral slaughter.

    Then, the governor mobilises, mobilises and mobilises, starting with incessant fixing of the infrastructure of the mind, apart from touching grassroots flesh with his monthly walk-for-life manoeuvres. He calls it health walks. But old Action Group (AG) veterans could well call it “Gbogbo Igba, E stand by” — “On the ready, always” in straight English! Those who claim “federal might” would try, but Osun may well be a suicide mission for any electoral hanky-panky!

    Ekiti, unfortunately, would appear less clear cut. And The Punch solid interviews with Governor Kayode Fayemi (7 December 2013) and budding challenger, Opeyemi Bamidele (28 December 2013), underscore the quagmire: why is Ekiti so blest that the ruling party there had to invent credible electoral opponents where there was none?

    Beyond demonisation and lionisation, the bastion of the emotive, Mr. Bamidele could have played for painful patience, thus playing Pericles, the wise Greek who endured forced banishment to later trump his foes to become the greatest Athenian lawgiver ever. By defecting to Labour however, he appears to have played Coriolanus, the rash Roman, who allowed his traducers to push him into fatal enemy embrace, and ended in abject ruin.

    Should Mr. Bamidele fail, he faces possible political destruction. Should he win, he would engineer a further South West progressive fissure, the nemesis of sane governance and sustainable development in the region. Either is no flattering epigram to a promising political career.

    But the Fayemi gubernatorial court is no less indicted in this sorry pass. For tact, they embraced swashbuckling spin and media demonisation, bordering on wilful denial. For clinical thinking, they embraced emotive grandstanding that worsened the conflict. Now, those hawks in Fayemi’s court have to walk their talk!

    Again, deja vu, ala 2003: gifting the Ekiti opposition life they don’t deserve! The definitive difference though, is that whereas the South West Gubernatorial Class of 1999-2003 were perceived to have generally underperformed, the present breed are perceived general high performers.

    The Ekiti electorate would probably be loath to waste their vote for another Fayose-era paralysis. But you can bet the opposing column to give it their best shot, cook the vote and claim illicit victory from the Ekiti progressives’ “civil war”!

    If that spectre is real, then the Ekiti warriors have not learnt from history. That is a big shame.

    Even then, before any desperado blunders into skewing the vote: in the South West, electoral robbers always pay hefty prices!

  • Centenary fixations

    Centenary fixations

    At last, comes tomorrow, 1 January 2014: the centenary of Nigeria’s amalgamation by the British Lord Frederick Lugard!

    And come 4 February 2014, a 20-month chain of activities would kick off, with “legacy projects” nationwide, led by a new Abuja city gate and a Centenary City in Abuja, modelled after the likes of Dubai, Monaco, Shenszhen, Singapore and Songdo (in South Korea), which will gulp a cumulative private sector investment of US $15 billion of which, according to Anyim Pius Anyim, secretary to the Federal Government, the Jonathan Presidency would not spend a kobo.

    “We must celebrate Nigeria”, former Senate president Anyim had declared on 24 January 2013 at a press briefing in Lagos, “because if we cannot underscore the essence and advantages of our unity, it means we plan to promote disintegration.” How about that for some mechanical piece of thinking!

    While a good number of Nigerians are nonplussed by the Lugardian patch-patch, even if not a few think it would have been a fantastic rainbow if it had not been so hugely dysfunctional, President Goodluck Jonathan, the latest beneficiary of the toxic Lugardian court, and his coterie of revellers, would rather celebrate!

    Such is the Jonathan Presidency’s fixation with Nigeria’s centenary celebrations.

    Lugard, of course, was a patriot. From Asia to Africa, from India to Nigeria, Lugard was a thoroughbred poster child of empire building — empire, that political euphemism for economic banditry. The Brits themselves picked no bones about such banditry, Pax Britannica!

    The marauding, might-is-right logic that made Queen Elizabeth 1 (1533-1603) to knight Sir Francis Drake (1540-1596), the patriotic pirate, because his sea-crested loot redounded well with home country, was the mandate that powered Lugard, et al: go forth, plunder and pacify the natives in the name of home country; but sell the pacified natives the dummy of a superior religion and culture! Pax Britannica!

    Lugard did his duty to his country. But in doing that, he created another headache: the Nigerian conundrum, that would be 100 years tomorrow.

    This centenary, therefore, is a toast to British greed. But it is also sobering juncture for a political amalgam that seems incapable of gelling into a harmonious compound; a supposed federation that spectacularly miscarried, a beacon that became a mirage: leaving the people distraught, disoriented and near-hopeless!

    The snag is: all these appear lost on the Jonathan Presidency.

    Or could the centenary fixation be some expensive escapism, the Jonathan government’s fond hope of burying the unwholesome fundamentals under a din of pomp?

    If so, it would be hardly surprising. The Nigerian people can gnash their teeth all they want. But for their rulers, it has been a ceaseless party, from the time of Lugard till now!

    Indeed, the Lugard spirit — that grim plundering ethos of a soldier-ruffian — never left the Nigerian power court. But whereas Lugard patriotically plundered, as Drake patriotically pirated, for Mother Britain, his Nigerian relay of successors have often fended for themselves. That tradition was well established before Goodluck Jonathan, the man from Otuoke, the minority of minorities from the Niger Delta, became president.

    Of all Jonathan’s predecessors, there appears no exception: not the sanctimonious Olusegun Obasanjo; not the charming but power wayward Ibrahim Babangida; not the stark and grim Sani Abacha.

    That feisty, borne out of self-help, appears the logical explanation for the centenary pomp in the ruling court, when the majority of Nigerians continue to agonise over 100 years in the wilderness, and how to break out of the cul-de-sac, and build a vibrant and vigorous Nigerian federation, that can deliver development and prosperity, from the present retardation and corruption.

    Still, no matter how conceptually flawed the centenary programme is perceived, there would appear some sweeteners.

    For starters, the promise of 15, 000 jobs in public works, to be generated in building the new Abuja gate and the Abuja Centenary City, would be more than welcome to the large army of Nigeria’s jobless youths.

    No less tantalising are the projected ICT centres in all Nigerian universities that do not have one, a modern library in a university in each of the six geo-political zones, one police crime laboratory in each of the six geo-political zones, building and renovation of sports facilities in each of the federal universities and the renovation, naming and renaming of colonial sites in the country.

    Also on the cards is a dialysis centre in each of the six geo-political zones; and renovation and upgrade of the National War Museum in Umuahia, Colonial History museums in Lokoja and Aba, and the National Museum inside the Old Residency in Calabar, Cross River State.

    But underpinning the projects is Nigeria’s ever-recurring nemesis: over-centralisation in a supposed federation. By the centenary plans, each state would be proud host to a Unity Square. Did the idea emanate from the states themselves or was it a central agenda, in the federal government’s mechanical fixation with “unity”?

    And how much evidence is there that the states would go with “unity squares” and not some other investments in schools, hospitals and roads: other more pressing areas where the locals feel their shoes really pinch?

    Besides, how much of it was driven by a contract-award mentality, itself driven by illicit money to be skimmed from the projects; and how much by the actual needs of the beneficiary communities?

    But beyond rectitude and turpitude, the Centenary programmes reek of misplaced priorities. It is surprising, really, that a government that would endure closing down Nigerian universities for nearly six months, because it claims it had no money to meet the demands of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) had, long before, proclaimed the projected centennial budget a done deal, even if many of those projects, to be fair, are nothing but white elephants.

    Besides, Budget 2014 estimates shows a Jonathan Presidency clearly in centennial spending mood!

    First, our zoologist president would, according to newspaper reports, blow N14.5 million on two brand new animals for the Aso Villa zoo! Then our nomadic president has proposed N2.3 billion for local and international travels 2014. To make these trips as comfortable as possible, the presidency is shopping for a new jet — the 11th in the fleet — for which some N1.5 billion would be deposited in the next financial year!

    Lord Lugard wired Nigeria together, not to develop the territory, but to empty it for the voracious British Empire. That is no event to celebrate, except to forge a counter-paradigm to develop Nigeria; and deliver happiness and prosperity to its people. But the Jonathan Presidency clearly thinks otherwise!

    Despite the promise of a national dialogue (hailed by presidential sympathisers but slammed by the opposition as another Jonathan dissembling antic), Nigeria moves into its centenary in a din of confusion, its structural problem getting more acute, and the state itself wobbling under its patent contradictions. Again, that is hardly anything to celebrate!

    Who will save the Lugard patch-patch from its modern day Nero, salivating for a big party, when there is virtual fire on the roof?

     

    • Despite everything, a happy new year to readers of this column.

  • Omoluabi!

    Omoluabi!

    Omoluabi — the Yoruba ethos of good breeding, nobility, robust conscience, selflessness and integrity — has been the consuming passion of an artiste; and the equally zestful crusade of a governor.

    The paradox was most striking: it was no free gig, yet the gates were wide open!

    That was Beautiful Nubia’s September 22 show, at the artiste’s EniObanke Cultural Centre, GRA, Ikeja, in Lagos.

    How could a show not be free and yet the gates were wide open?

    The patrons, to be sure, were not a mighty crowd. They were, rather, a select few; the deep that could call to the deep: the few that could connect with the umpteenth musical campaign, by Beautiful Nubia and The Roots Renaissance Band, for a culture-driven ethical reformation, to fix a rotting country; and give the society a glorious rebirth.

    In Biblical parlance, it was those who had ears and could still hear!

    So, as the Beautiful Nubia faithful trooped into the unpretentious yard, dominated by a lawn, and on the fringes, a tree or two, a car park, a bungalow at the far north-eastern end that serves as office and artistes changing rooms, with its adjoining male and female conveniences, it was clear that the paradox of wide open gates and ticket sales appealed to some core values of yore.

    Indeed, as the patrons took their seats, facing the mat-decorated stage at the south-western end of the yard, and its adjoining tree or two, and without any fuss paid for their tickets, even if they had gained the concert venue, the whole exercise spoke of immaculate integrity of the Yoruba traditional market.

    That market need not be manned. The stock was there. And the number of cowries, beside each good, was the price tag. So, all the buyer needed do was to pick what he wanted and deposit the price. Though no one was watching, woe betide that rogue who bought something without paying! It was pristine honesty before the advent of urban moral pollution.

    Beautiful, as Nubia (real name, Segun Akinlolu, hitherto based in Canada) calls himself, is appalled at the moral sewer of contemporary Nigeria; and would appear determined to, by his music, do something drastic about it.

    The laudable obsession dominated his display that early Sunday evening as he sang, and danced with his musical acolytes: life, he declared, was simply too vital to be ruled by the politics of the belly! But that is the tragedy of contemporary Nigeria, with its mass turpitude and venality.

    In Irinajo, his 2009 album, Beautiful Nubia feasted on this theme of moral regeneration, when in the track, “Kurunmi”, he juxtaposed the current leadership fakery with the solid gold of the tragic Kurunmi, who fell in battle in 1861.

    Kurunmi, old Ijaye warlord and tragic hero of the Ijaye-Ibadan War (1859-1861), lost his five sons in that war, triggered by his refusal to recognise the new Alaafin of Oyo in Aremo Adelu. But till the bitterest end, he stood true to his principle.

    To Nubia, the spotless Kurunmi spirit, like some metaphorical crusading angel, is the elixir to clear the present moral rot. He sings in that track:

    “Here comes the fire-eating guy/My Lord with arrows in his eyes and burning anger/Let no one stand in his way/This life will never be the same again, yeah/Here comes the fire-splitting guy/Aare Kurunmi is on his way with his sword of justice/Call all the liars and pretenders/The day of reckoning is here, beware!”

    For Nubia, only the rectitude of the Omoluabi (and its equivalent in other cultures in a federal Nigeria) will save the polity from assured self-destruction.

    Nubia appears to have a comrade-in-arm in moral crusading in Rauf Aregbesola, the Osun governor, who has launched similar campaigns in two projects: Osuwon Omoluabi and Omoluabi Boys and Girls Clubs, both aimed at building the infrastructure of the mind, and strengthening the people’s moral fibre.

    Osuwon Omoluabi is standardised scales, by the Osun market folk, to infuse honesty and transparency in trading, dissuade them from the easy temptation to resort to cheating to make the quick buck and sell the markets in Osun, to other Nigerian traders, on the sheer strength of integrity, hoping that such a positive branding would help to grow the market and transform into legitimate profit for the market folk.

    How this campaign would pan out is in the belly of time, for it is not easy to part with profitable greed! Why, even the Miller, a character in The Canterbury Tales of Englishman, Geoffery Chaucer (1342-1400), crowed about how his golden thumb — turned golden from stealing clients’ grains — had catapulted him to wealth, showing greed is as old as the ages! But there is no doubt: that is the direction to go.

    But the more exciting project, it would appear, are the Omoluabi Boys and Girls Clubs, in Osun communities and schools, which the governor launched to mark his third year in office.

    Again, by this move, the governor appears to have been swayed by a fragment of the Beautiful Nubia lyrics in “Kurunmi”: “Children you will learn and you must never forget/The past is full of heroes from who we can learn/And real lessons to guide us today/Many, many stories to make us proud too.”

    In other words, the grand paradox: to fix a troubled future, you must resort to a glorious past!

    Boys Brigade (founded by Scot, Sir William Alexander Smith, 1854-1914), an interdenominational Christian youth organisation, formed to blend drill and fun with Christian values, Boys Scout (founded by English, Robert Baden-Powell, 1857-1941) and its female follow-up, Girl Guides (first under the direction of Agnes Baden-Powell, 1858-1945), younger sister of Baron Baden-Powell), to develop character, citizenship and personal fitness, were all western concepts, with the consequent cultural imperialism, no matter how latent or benign.

    The Omoluabi clubs, therefore, are exciting because they will do all the age-old western variants have been doing, in patriotism, propriety, character building and allied traits. But their guardian heroes would be authentic African heroes and heroines.

    In a globalised world, skewed against Africa and Africans, character building, anchored on pristine African mores, could well be the elixir the country needs to get out of its current morass. That’s the Omoluabi spirit!

    For the modern African, it is also the needed cultural anchor to compete in a globalised but westernised globe.

    At Christmas then, it is good news from Osun and from Beautiful Nubia, with their collective gospel of Omoluabi! To recapture our country’s soul from leadership fakery and allied power banditry, other governors and artistes should follow the example of the duo.

    Merry Christmas: to all you esteemed readers of Republican Ripples!

  • So long a letter

    So long a letter

    The Senegalese, Mariama Ba (1929-1981), wrote So Long A Letter, a semi-autobiographical novella, that chronicled the plight of the African woman, under the combined pressure of African and Islamic cultures.

    The male chauvinists that dominate both worlds would scoff at the late Madame Ba’s “ranting” against the marital status quo, so violently skewed against the woman in both cultures. But her 1980 classic has provided gender rights activists, determined to right these age-old wrongs, an evocative literary tool.

    On December 12, former President Olusegun Obasanjo made public his own long letter, not for any overriding public good, but a litany of woes against his estranged protégé, President Goodluck Jonathan. Obasanjo played his usual grandstand as some self-appointed overseer of Nigeria; and postured without end as the all-consuming patriot.

    Yet, it was nothing but another unabashed glorification of the Obasanjo self — that ever intrusive persona that, on the balance of fair evidence, can’t even pass the muster of the model citizen.

    Like most of Obasanjo’s hyper-reported public interventions, it was another grand show of a show-actor craving a stage and cheap applause — cynical applause at the expense of some political foe. The former military head of state (1976-1979), two-term elected president (1999-2007) and fundament of the Nigerian problem is crying wolf!

    Yes, there is indeed some “wolf”. But Obasanjo himself was its author and finisher: Goodluck Jonathan, after all, was Obasanjo’s political creation. But the creator would rather Jonathan was some tabula rasa — on which he could write and erase at will — which the protégé has resisted.

    Godson cannot, therefore, hear the godfather. Things have fallen apart, so mere anarchy, to paraphrase the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, is loosed upon their once cosy world! But how is that a problem of Nigeria and Nigerians as Obasanjo now trumpets?

    Indeed, Yeats in his poem, “The Second Coming”, somewhat echoes the loud but empty Obasanjo interventions: “The best lack all convictions, while the worst are full of passionate intensity!”

    That brings the discourse to Obasanjo’s “permission” to share the Jonathan letter with the quad of Generals Theophilus Danjuma, Ibrahim Babangida, Abdulsalami Abubakar and 2nd Republic Vice President, Alex Ekwueme — to earn some high profile sympathy? Ah!

    But which of these, aside from Abubakar, has not tasted Obasanjo’s rather crude tongue, in his endless playing to the gallery?

    Is it Danjuma who, not long ago in a fit of media anger, dismissed Obasanjo as “Aremu of Ota”?

    Or Babangida, who earlier as self-proclaimed “military president”, endured the Jonathan treatment, the same grand hypocrisy the grim Sani Abacha could not stand and, before the infernal theatrics started, despatched the grand dramatist to gaol on phantom coup charges?

    Or is it Ekwueme that Obasanjo muscled into silence while, as president, he started destroying the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the logical conclusion of which he now, ironically, accuses and ridicules the luckless Jonathan, though his name be Goodluck?

    If Jonathan has his Bamanga Tukur, didn’t Obasanjo have his own Garrison Commander, Ahmadu Ali, both relentless presidential puppets that smashed the ruling party so a bully president could stand tall, like some Gulliver in Lilliput?

    Yet, no tears for President Jonathan. He plunged his knife into a dead hippo, fallen by the pool; and he richly deserves his running diarrhoea. There is always a stiff price for crass opportunism!

    Besides, despite being the first Nigerian president to bear the academic prefix of PhD, Jonathan’s actions have no rigour, no grace, no gravitas, just plain humdrum! Indeed, by his actions and inactions he has, perhaps more than any other, afflicted his presidency with a rare pull him down (PHD) complex.

    His is a grand study in wilful conspiracy against self; and the resultant harsh wages of promotion beyond competence. His presidency is therefore a grand let-down, right from the beginning — and there appears no redeeming factor.

    Indeed, as one contemplates the Jonathan Presidency, with its welter of terrible constitutional infractions and heinous allegations, and the man at the vortex of it all feigning none the wiser, the disturbing image of the Biblical wolf in sheep’s skin floods the mind.

    But even as the president sweats under the crushing weight of his elephantine troubles, his feet, in fatal distraction, appear still foraging for needless troubles with ants.

    The induced Rivers crisis is an abiding case in point, with the Police not even hiding their hideous partisanship; and rogue legislators, backed by rogue “federal might”, threatening to plunge that state into anarchy.

    Then there are opposition allegations of Jonathan turning the Ecological Fund into some crony gravy — allegedly rewarding friends, punishing foes.

    Of course, there is also the abiding allegation, supported by CBN Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) is undercutting the country and the president doesn’t appear to have a clue about it all.

    That these allegations are made at all show the near-hopeless depth the Nigerian presidency has plumbed under Jonathan. That is unfortunate. But even more grievous is Obasanjo’s allegation that Jonathan is arming snipers to despatch political foes.

    Though the now crusading Obasanjo had more than a fair share of unresolved politically motivated killings during his presidency, this is one allegation Jonathan must deal with, if only to clear his presidency’s sagging reputation.

    But aside from this alleged killer squad, most of Obasanjo’s charges, in his long epistle of lamentation, were pure gas. There was nothing Obasanjo accused Jonathan of that he himself did not do during his best-forgotten presidency.

    NNPC is opaque. But how open was it during Obasanjo’s term, even when he was his own oil minister?

    On corruption — what has Obasanjo to teach, after his Obasanjo Presidential Library’s bared-faced extortion? If Jonathan responded with a contractor building his village a marvel of a church, it is evidence that Jonathan is master of his political father’s rotten tactics, corruption be damned!

    Jonathan wants to run for second term — and so what? Didn’t Obasanjo do two legal terms and was plotting an illegal third? Fortunately, Jonathan is doing more than enough to be guillotined at the polls. So, let the people decide his fate.

    Therefore, to now grandstand at some ogre, hinting at some non-democratic change, under some pseudo-messianic complex, is not only cheap but outright subversive. But it is another cynical drama, for Obasanjo knows that he too would vanish without trace, should Jonathan meet his electoral waterloo. So, would his and Jonathan’s credo of power without responsibility; and lollies without service.

    Obasanjo and Jonathan are an inglorious past and ignoble present that must be electorally swept away, from polluting the future. The Ebora Owu’s long letter of tumbling adjectives, and buzz words like honour and credibility that, from Obasanjo’s own conduct in office hardly meant anything, is his way of buying time and shopping for new puppets.

    He fails — except, of course, with the gullible and the excitable!

  • Mandela: Life walk to legend

    Mandela: Life walk to legend

    Long Walk to Freedom, that is the title of Nelson Mandela’s definitive autobiography that captures his life odyssey: a classic of exceptional suffering that cleared the Mandela essence of any dross of bitterness; and left only the purity of exceptional grace and magnanimity.

    Was Mandela human or divine? Were it to be the medieval ages in Europe, this question would have earned the asker a charge of apostasy, and probably a one-way ticket to damnation.

    Indeed, were Mandela to be native of the Yoruba nation in Nigeria, instead of his Thembu nation in South Africa, his deification would only be a matter of time.

    He would therefore be in the class of Ogun, Oya and Sango – phenomenal humans deified after their death for their great deeds, as distinct from Olodumare, the Yoruba Supreme Being, Obatala, god of creation and Orunmila, god of divinity: godheads, according to Yoruba cosmogony, that existed with Olodumare from the beginning; and Olokun, Osun, Olumo rock, Idanre hills etc, awesome natural phenomena that provide their communities with spring of life and security.

    Indeed, such is the infectious beauty of greatness that, at Mandela’s passage on December 5, the Nigerian ruling elite have joined, with their empty rhetoric, the band wagon to share in the matter of the moment.

    Doyin Okupe, the peculiar master of Okupe-istic cant, has swiftly canonised his boss, President Goodluck Jonathan as “Nigeria’s Mandela”! Even for the un-rigorous Jonathan presidency, that claim sounded particularly comical.

    And their Baba, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, weighed in with stunning self-indictment. He had gone to Mandela, he read out a statement with graveness and piety peculiarly Obasanjo’s, and urged him to go for second term.

    But Mandela had told him “Olu” [pronounced with distinctly un-Yoruba accent], “have you ever seen a nation where an 80-year ran the show?” – or something to that effect. Yet, Obasanjo did two terms and was plotting an illegal third, before political realities stripped him of the costly illusion! Of course, he denied the third term gambit. But he should tell that to Nasir El-Rufai, the no-nonsense, all-conquering hero of The Accidental Public Servant!

    Okupe’s roguish canonisation of his boss and Obasanjo’s holy self-indictment just prove one point: greatness is sweet. But only a few are willing and ready to pay the price.

    The Mandela-Obasanjo parallel is a classic study in greatness and non-greatness.

    The one went to jail for 27 years, under apartheid, perhaps the most evil political system ever imposed on any people, yet as president, after helping to kill that system with rare grace, he felt he owed his nation!

    The other went to jail, for a few years, despatched by the same post-12 June 1993 presidential election political contraption of convenience he helped to erect, but as president after, felt his country owed him!

    The one endured the harshest of cruelties to, with near-divine grace, forgive and forget. The other never lets pass a slight, with his graceless vindictiveness.

    As for Okupe and his laughable canonisation, it is the same story of court zealots leading their principals down the road of perdition. In the Nigerian power cosmos, so was it at the beginning, so is it now and so it ever shall be, except of course some drastic change happens. If Nigerian leaders cannot pay the price for greatness, how can they lead their country to greatness?

    Nelson Mandela never bothered about the trappings or gravy of power, the Genesis to Revelation for our leaders here. All he went for were fundaments of common humanity: irrespective of race, creed or colour. And that he did it as the most globally acclaimed victim of a hideous system that dignified or criminalised strictly on the basis of one’s colour, without betraying any bitterness, was the stuff of which legends are made.

    Mandela was such a force for universal good in the 20th century and beyond simply because he shattered the ingrained Western racial bigotry of the Joseph Conrad school: Africans were savages and Europeans were the guiding angels divined to bring — by cruel force, if necessary — Africans and other Black peoples of the world out of their savagery.

    Though the Afrikaner overlords of Apartheid South Africa would later develop Afrikaner Calvinism, a rogue theological ideology on the pedestal of the Dutch Reformed Church to justify their evil, anti-Black racial discrimination would appear to stem from sentiments from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which bigotry Chinua Achebe, in his famous 1977 essay, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” took apart.

    Though racism predated Conrad’s 1899 work, Heart of Darkness would come as noxious understanding, if not outright justification of the evil, with the matter-of-fact rendition style of a not altogether unsympathetic narrative voice.

    But even with all of these, Mandela’s sheer humanity and political sagacity came across with two principal statements, among others. He declared, in his post-Robben Island prison years, that never in South Africa would one race oppress the other. He also declared that what he fought for was not majority, but democratic rule.

    The race-neuter quality of the first statement was not lost on many, for it insisted on equity and mutual respect for all races, in South Africa’s rainbow coalition, which Mandela would inspire from 1990, after apartheid as state policy since 1948.

    The equity and justice of the second statement is even more telling. Majority rule would have consigned South Africa to reverse apartheid: perpetual Black rule, which nevertheless would not be undemocratic, for democracy, in its most cynical form, is a game of numbers.

    Still, Mandela’s stress on democratic rule, as against majority rule, is a muted promise that one day, even a white South African, hopeless minority though he might be, could rule the rainbow nation, so long as he gets the go-ahead of the Black majority.

    No wonder then that while other African leaders would virtually invest anything to get photo-ops with American, European and other global leaders, it was the other way with Mandela, as who was who in the world happily scrambled to land a photo-op with him.

    The African, hitherto a savage in the bigoted White eyes, had in Mandela turned a global icon, without whose aura none of these world figures was complete! An armada of these leaders would also be at his funeral on December 15.

    Nigerian leaders that fatally distract themselves with the dross of office, instead of seeking greatness, have the Mandela story to seek redemption and change their ruinous ways. But perhaps they are beyond redemption?

    In that case, Nigerians must seize the moment and stop suffering fools gladly, by ending the relay of selfish, arrogant and incompetent leaders.

    Meanwhile, Madiba’s was a glorious life walk to legend — and you could feel that the way common South Africans trooped to Mandela’s Johannesburg home, at the announcement of his passage, to celebrate his life. How many Nigerian leaders would enjoy such privilege after their passage?

    Adieu Madiba. When comes another?

  • Good luck for him, bad luck for PDP

    Good luck for him, bad luck for PDP

    Scratch Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, the embattled national chairman of the crumbling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and you probably would find, in his DNA, traces of a political undertaker.

    Back in the Second Republic, Alhaji Bamanga, fresh from a high-flying stint as top dog at Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), Nigeria’s national ruling parties’ cash cow, recorded a landslide to sweep into the Government House of the defunct Gongola State (now Adamawa and Taraba states), as National Party of Nigeria (NPN) gubernatorial candidate.

    Alhaji Bamanga’s landslide was part of the general electoral typhoon that shellacked the opposition; and which Alhaji Umaru Dikko, then President Shehu Shagari’s Transport minister and awesome man Friday, in roguish humour, christened a “moon slide”.

    That “moon slide”, by another election in 1987 the wise Dikko proclaimed, would explode into a “space slide”, by which time Dikko’s beloved NPN would have gobbled up the whole country (opposition be damned!), even if its incompetence was as clear as the moon at night.

    Compare NPN then to PDP now, and it is clear the PDP journey to perdition, under President Goodluck Jonathan, is not novel.

    Incidentally, there was no “1987”. The violently raped 1983 election rigged out the Second Republic. Three-month Governor, Tukur’s landslide mandate vanished under that republic’s rubble.

    Incidentally too, Alhaji Umaru is now chairman of PDP’s disciplinary committee, under the troubled national chairmanship of Alhaji Bamanga. Might the duo be comparing notes, with shared hindsight from the Second Republic crash, that might yet save their crumbling PDP?

    They had better! Otherwise, Alhaji Bamanga would yet earn another stripe as party undertaker – but this time, an hyperactive one. PDP’s crumbling fate is as much a result of past unconscionable impunities as it is Alhaji Bamanga’s reckless power grab, even with his suspect “election” (read presidential imposition) as PDP national chairman, after losing among delegates in his Adamawa base.

    Ironically, Chief Ebenezer Babatope, the much beloved Ebino Topsy of Awoist fame, is busy roaring like a lion in a new jungle, among PDP disciplinarians under Dikko – to underscore the neophyte progressive is in town to fix the conservative (if not reactionary) camp?

    Is he then fulfilling the post-1983 election Awo prophesy that after a political thesis and antithesis, a synthesis would align Nigeria’s political forces, such that those with Awo’s progressive inclination would ascend? Is Ebino then the Khalifa the PDP needs to set things right and yet triumph? Perhaps!

    Still, the Tukur mess is only a culmination of far too many bad calls. To start with, Tukur is only the party face of a dissembling president and a desperate Presidency, whose and which attitude to 2015, like that of former President Olusegun Obasanjo in 2007, is do-or-die.

    So, Tukur was supposed to do the dirty job and take the flak; while the real McCoy, the president breezes in, as prim and proper electoral statesman, to take the glory. It is the classical cant of Goodluck!

    Or why else would Chairman Tukur remain in charge, even if his party must become history? Unfortunately for Tukur and his principal, the “presidential chairman”, like the Achebe thief in A Man of the People, grabbed too much power for the owner not to notice – hence the PDP schism.

    Before the Jonathan-Tukur power show was the Obasanjo pious profanity of repudiating the PDP zoning arrangement – the same principle that propelled him to power – all in the bid to make Jonathan president, so he could be Baba’s poodle (Baba, that craved relevance at all cost), which Jonathan has not exactly been.

    Even before that was Obasanjo’s blatant subversion of party democratic principles, curling PDP round his fingers as first president of the Fourth Republic, ruthlessly purging those who might challenge him; and imposing on the party an unconscionable ethos of dog merrily eating dog; carefully veiled by a gruff military temper.

    And before all that was the grand subversive genesis: the Army Arrangement, (AA, apologies to Fela) that, in illicit concert with the North’s top political elite, imposed Obasanjo as Hobson’s choice, if only to impress upon starry-eyed democracy agitators the reality of Greek philosopher, Parmenides: nothing ever changes – departure from military rule must be a return to military rule, even if the starched khaki gave way to flowing agbada or babariga!

    Of course, there was Election ’99, but only to ratify Selection ’99 of AA and allied power plotters!

    Well, everything worked perfectly, except that Obasanjo proved no poodle of the North, any more than Jonathan has proved his own poodle! Indeed, things have turned full circle: the “North” finds itself at the receiving end of its own plot, and Obasanjo is threatened by the putative irrelevance he so mortally feared!

    This play of power giants has landed the country with an umpteenth mess: a clumsy Jonathan, a clumsier Jonathan Presidency and the meltdown of the federal ruling party in the clumsiest of ways!

    But having served as undertaker to his PDP, no thanks to unbridled desperation to remain president, Jonathan may yet serve as undertaker to his country. If the Anambra poll is anything to go by – and if that was aimed at securing an ally for 2015 – Jonathan may well press to that extent to make something give.

    Now, flash your mind back to 1983 and Umaru Dikko’s “moon slide”. Back then, the Shagari Presidency was the most incompetent in the country’s history. Now, the Jonathan Presidency would appear to have beaten that record. Yet, Jonathan, at all cost, wants an encore!

    So, if Umaru Dikko’s “moon slide” rigged the country out of democracy, a “space slide” by 2015 might just slide Nigeria into worse. For a country touted to kaput by 2015, these are indeed perilous times!

    The All Progressives Congress (APC) will therefore do well to learn from the PDP pitfall. PDP, ab initio, prided itself an all-comers’ affair. So, it can contemptuously thrust its jaw at any charge of harbouring strange bed fellows.

    APC has no such luxury. It has committed itself to a “progressive” ideology. Yet, not every strand in its rainbow coalition is “progressive”. But it can overcome these teething problems by federalising and being task-driven.

    It can do this by submitting itself to local tendencies, while committing to some pan-Nigeria goals. Then, it must rein in party barons, beyond offering leadership to rally members to the party’s cause, and educating fellow Nigerians on the difference the party can make.

    It should also sort out the very peculiar problem of internal democracy, the main driver of the PDP split, from which none of the APC legacy parties was immune.

    But most importantly, it must work out a restructuring agenda for the country. Without proper federalism, the collapse of Nigeria is only a matter of time.

     

  • Osun: three years after

    The November 16 Anambra election echoes the Uba brothers’ Anambra selection of 2003.

    That itself echoes the Ekiti Ido-Osi electoral rerun travesty of 2010, which ties back to the “original sin” of 2007: the most audacious electoral heist in Nigerian history, in which Osun, with other states, fell to brazen electoral robbers.

    On Anambra, a later revisit; since the children of electoral perdition are still at their game. Emotions run sky high; and the jury is still out on how the self-destruct game would end.

    But a grand irony seems to have escaped the dramatis personae: the champions of impunity in 2007, now scamper to the courts as victims of impunity in 2013!

    But thanks to the Court of Appeal, under Justice Isa Ayo Salami. From the ashes of that electoral nadir of Osun 2007, with all its self-assured paralysis, sprung new hope three years later in 2010, boasting legitimacy-fired vitality.

    Another grim irony: Justice Salami, for the temerity to save, from themselves, non-democrats in Nigeria’s troubled democracy, was conked with heinous conspiracy that challenged his honour and integrity. But he triumphs today by the notorious fact that yesteryear emperors of impunity now cower before the courts – Justice Salami’s sacrosanct instrumentality to bring felons of all hues to book – for protection!

    The Rauf Aregbesola government in Osun, child of judicial integrity, birthed on 27 November 2010. That government would be three years tomorrow.

    Like the famous 7up radio commercial, the difference would appear clear: paralysis from electoral robbery versus release from sound electoral mandate. Again, that difference appears lost in the present Anambra imbroglio!

    On the Osun story, two personal reminiscences. In 2008, Sola Fasure, then The Nation Editorial Page editor, lost his dad. At the funeral reception at Ilesa, it was a tug of war between beggars, hungry, aggressive and cheeky, and guests; with the beggars at the ready to sweep the remnants off the guests’ table! That was paralysis ala the ancien regime!

    This year, 2013, Bolade Omonijo, a member of The Nation Editorial Board, also lost his mum. Destination: the same Ilesa. Sure, there were still beggars. But that desperation to snatch the guest’s plate at the burial reception was gone. Between the ancien regime and the present order, the difference is clear!

    That, of course, should be the trite: a government with legitimate mandate, after a free and fair poll, knows it floats or sinks on the strength of its service to the people. That would appear the hallmark of the Aregbesola government, as it goes on an overdrive to make up for the paralysis of the Olagunsoye Oyinlola era.

    Yet, the governor has not been without controversy, most of it tantamount to what is called “unforced error” in tennis; or “own goal” in football, despite his wide canvass of near-excellent service delivery.

    The governor’s “principal sin” is zest for his Islamic faith, hardly a crime! Many growl his beard is shaggy and rather un-gubernatorial. Others in pious rage point at his going for sukuk, the Islamic loan, as evidence that Mullah Rauf wouldn’t rest until he had Islamised Osun. Others foam in the mouth at his penchant for donning the Islamic skull cap, even at official functions.

    Indeed, a particular commentator, playing the prescriptive emperor, virtually ordered the Ogbeni (a moniker which, by the way, many deem too plebeian for high gubernatorial office!) to go shave his beard since, according to him, it robs negatively on people; and also told him to junk his school reclassification policy and go hand over schools back to their missionary “owners”, in proud and combative ignorance of extant situation in Osun.

    Another bellyached over the metaphysics and alchemy of governance and concluded, rather sadly and gravely, that though no Islamisation “smoking gun” existed, the governor remained legitimately charged, by his body language!

    Of course, all these are happy ammo for the governor’s opponents who, mercilessly routed at the realm of ideas, have happily embraced the high passion of lies and blackmail as their last stand.

    But the governor need not bother about columnists as Rip Van Winkles. The original Rip snored for 20 twenty years only to jerk awake, and find things irreversibly changed! Merchants of lies and blackmail too are fated to irrelevance.

    The inevitable is that many years hence the Aregbesola government would be remembered by generations, many of them not even born now, for its ambitious infrastructure programmes and projects, aimed at vaulting Osun from the socio-economic backwaters it had sunk into, after years of neglect, from the pristine hub of commerce in the Yoruba heartland.

    The tell tale of such stunning modernisation is already on and will, as day follows night, signal the political death and un-rued burial of many.

    But what would really stand Aregbesola out in Osun, as did the legendary Chief Obafemi Awolowo in the old Western Region, is his audacious bid to fix the Osun infrastructure of the mind.

    In a state hitherto regarded, by many, as the rumour capital of the globe (a euphemism for mass ignorance and susceptibility to mindless elite manipulation), an “Islamist-governor” has given everyone, Christian, Muslim and African traditional adherent, a sense of religious projection, in the best tradition of religious equity.

    Not only that: he has attacked educational reforms in Osun with a revolutionary zeal, second only to Awo’s much-abused free primary education policy turned much-revered development elixir, that earned the modern Yoruba paterfamilias the moniker of Ebudola (Yoruba, for scorn-turned-praise).

    Now, if Mullah Rauf wanted to Islamise his state, why would he give Osun children and youth the key to unlocking their minds with sound education, and making their own informed choices, like the odyssey of the cave man in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave? A mind hitherto chained to darkness in a cave, got exposed to lamp light, then to electricity and finally to the full grandeur of the sun! What release!

    So long for the manifest idiocy of emotional Islamisation!

    The glaring fact: Aregbesola has the courage to take risks on the strength of his conviction. The sukuk as developmental loan is a good case. The emotional army was priming their big guns until Westminster that brought Christianity to Nigeria, as part of its own cultural imperialism en route to colonisation, announced with glee that London was ready to be sukuk’s global leading mart!

    Sukuk would not turn Canterbury into Mecca any more than it would Islamise Osun roads, bridges, power plants, hospitals and other developmental projects it is put to. It is only an investment window!

    So far, so good – and the Osun renaissance could not have come at a better time, after nearly eight years of paralysis. But it is time the governor also tampered risk-taking with tact, by shunning needless controversies.

    The last three years have been nothing short of phenomenal. But Osun needs no less than eight years – and more of progressive tinkering – in its developmental race against time

    Ogbeni Aregbesola can achieve this by staying focused and shunning needless controversies.

  • This way to Nigeria’s rebirth

    It is the season of football glory, with the November 8 Golden Eaglets’ fourth triumph at the FIFA U-17 World Cup at UAE 2013; and Super Eagles’ fifth qualification, beating Ethiopia, to the FIFA World Cup in Brazil 2014.

    So, a bit of football imagery is apposite.

    Right now, there is a hat trick of coincidences: a weakened presidency, a ruling party in disarray and a “North” in political retreat, despite all grandstanding to the contrary.

    These coincidences look like setbacks – great setbacks, almost tragedies – for critical segments of the Nigerian state. Yet these setbacks, if well handled, could well earn Nigeria a rebirth from its unending season of anomie; and halt its perennial crisis of nationhood.

    Never in history, perhaps, has the Nigerian Presidency been so weakened; and the Nigerian president so vulnerable to political pressure.

    In 2011, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, Nigeria’s first president from a minority bloc, rode to stunning pan-Nigeria presidency. But two years down the line, due to presidential commission or omission, grafted with stark contradictions in the polity, the presidency is looking increasingly frail.

    Presidential royalists continue to kid themselves the president is all-powerful. But it is clear that office is, right now, far from the constitutional Leviathan power romantics claim it is.

    Linked to that presidential meltdown is the meltdown of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the federal ruling party.

    In Jonathan’s emergence, and by violently abrogating its own zoning principle, PDP overreached itself, even by its own accustomed impunity. The ensuing bitterness, from a “North” that felt cheated, is the basis of cascading bricks in the PDP house.

    Of course, the “North”! It is central to the present distemper. As that Yoruba saying goes, the consummate executioner finds no mirth in someone fumbling with a sword near his neck!

    A region versed in power dominance, if not outright domination, certainly finds it extremely reprehensible to feel dominated! So, it screams, it yells, it bawls; warning at the apocalypse to come, should such a situation continue.

    That would appear the chief driver of the North’s bid for power in 2015, aside from its not illegitimate growl of being cheated of its due in 2011, with the abandonment of PDP’s zoning formula, simply because President Umaru Yar’ Adua died in office.

    As it happens, therefore, there is a hat trick of angst, sweeping through the ruling office, the ruling party and, if not chastened by current developments, a region by its power log in Nigeria, that could easily have regarded itself as the ruling region!

    That is just as well!

    A hitherto Leviathan presidency is feeling the blues of impotence, particularly when the subject is influence (aka ‘soft power’), to change things; and not the near-brutal presidency that Olusegun Obasanjo bequeathed. Those who misinterpret Jonathan’s fascist bent for power are grandly mistaken: a dog barks out of fright, not out of power.

    A hitherto impregnable PDP is feeling real threats of collapse, simply because having rigged things against others for too long, it is now rigging things against itself and, by so doing, rigging itself out of cohesion. The ensuing schism is well and truly earned!

    And a hitherto all-conquering “North” – in any case, the tiny cabal that commits political murder in its name now endures the bitterness of feeling dominated!

    Not unlike the Achebe tortoise in Things Fall Apart, that renamed itself “All of you” to corner everything, leaving its shocked benefactors in the lurch, this power cabal raised political domination to a sickly art, while leaving their impoverished people with an empty illusion of might. Now that the chips are down, this same cabal is screaming “northern domination”!

    So now, what? A bitter fight to the end, even if Nigeria goes kaput? Or a reasonable retreat to reason, to rework Frederick Lugard’s unworkable contraption, even in the run-up to the final month of its centenary?

    There lies the way from the hat trick of present chaos to the hat trick of future opportunities.

    Indeed, in a troubled federation battered by decades of military rule, and labouring under an emerging democracy, the presidency as unquestioned and unquestionable Leviathan is as much a danger to itself as it is to the democratic republic.

    The highest office in the land, therefore, needs a tactical pare-down to ensure its strategic relevance. For Nigeria to survive despite its present challenges, a key demand is a federalism-compliant presidency. A polity reconfigured on strict federal principles holds the ace to future development and prosperity from the present retardation and chaos. A sovereign national conference could fix this nicely, if only Nigeria’s power blocs would stop playing games!

    The PDP meltdown is a metaphor for the rotten party system. That is a clear and present danger to Nigerian democracy. Parties are key drivers of democracy. So, a democracy with sick parties is itself sick, by simple logical extension.

    The hubris now consuming PDP must impress it on its members the limits of a ruling party, no matter how powerful or invincible it once felt it was. But that message is as valid for the PDP as it is for new parties hoping to kick it out of power. It would be a tragedy, indeed, to kick out the PDP and replace it with PDP with another name.

    The message for the North’s political elite, so gung-ho about 2015, is clear. The North once dominated. Now, it is being dominated, at least going by its shrill complaints. So, domination is bad for everyone. Every country should be erected on an equal-opportunity ethos, fired by equity, fair play and justice.

    So, while it is legitimate for northern lobbies to fancy their chances by 2015, it is imperative to drum it loud that the pre-12 June 1993 Nigeria, in which some miscreants, acting in the name of the “North” to cancel a valid presidential election, and sustain that high treason, is gone and gone forever. Any attempt to dream such subversive encore could well sound the death knell for the country.

    So, as political alignments are afoot, two crucial messages must be clear. One, the North, if it is really interested in Nigeria’s survival, must shun any penchant to dominate. It has enjoyed and endured domination; and can tell the honey and gall of both!

    And two, whoever are negotiating with the northern lobby must never surrender the long-term chore of building a just, fair and equitable Nigeria to the immediate gravy of winning federal power. The North must not dominate. But it must not be dominated either.

    That template should apply to every part of the country. Indeed, after walking in the wilderness for nearly 100 years (53 years of this under flag independence), with the Lugard contraption always threatening to abort, that should be the template on which sustainable Nigeria must be erected.

    Any other way would be tempting fate. If the regnant power folly continues, the tip-over point cannot be far away!