The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olakunle Abimbola

  • Fascism ala Jonathan?

    There is a myth that the Nigerian president is the most powerful of his kind in the world. That could be true. But only if the president wilfully breaks the law, and hopes he can get away with it.

    That is because for every power the president has, there is a check: in the best tradition of the doctrine of separation of power, on which the presidential system of government is built.

    What has been happening, since the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency (1999-2007), is that the president would essay a constitutional infraction, but flex his presidential muscles to dare anyone to challenge him, since democratic institutions are still rather weak.

    That worked ruinously during Obasanjo’s presidential monarchy, so much so that it gave birth to that myth: the Nigerian president is all-conquering and all-powerful; that it could even challenge the law that gave it life to a wrestling bout – and prevail!

    But isn’t that constitutional harakiri tantamount to the folly of the Achebe wrestler, quoting Igbo folklore, who figured he was so powerful he could challenge his chi (personal god)?

    Indeed, presidential conceit Nigerian style, and its concomitant reckless power play, contrasts the poetic conceit of John Donne (1572-1631), the English metaphysical poet in “The Sun Rising”, one of his famous sonnets, a fragment of which is quoted, prelude to this piece.

    In “The Sun Rising”, the protagonist, one of two lovers, lampooned the early morning sun for its intrusiveness, on the lovers’ nest. The “Busy old fool, unruly sun,” the angry lover fumed, could well make the difference between night and day; between sleeping and waking hours.

    But with a mere wink, he insisted, a man could shut it and its all-mighty rays from sight!

    From the rarefied world of poetry to the brick-and-mortar plain of politics, this translates to the fact that a citizen, relying on the law, could easily damn the most menacing of governments. So long for the myth of the all-mighty powers of the Nigerian Presidency!

    That leads to the delicate mix of power, authority, legitimacy and influence. Power is the most visible but the least potent. Influence is the least visible but the most potent. Authority, in a democracy, is delegated electors’ power to the elected. Legitimacy is the electors’ retentive power to periodically choose, thus guaranteeing regular elections.

    Trouble starts in a democracy when the elected project power as if it were absolute. But every student of Politics 101 knows that once power is challenged, even by the weakest and most abject in the polity, it is defeated. That is why smart governments never rely on brute force, but on legitimacy and influence.

    That is the tragic undoing of the Goodluck Jonathan Presidency and its creeping fascism. It must be checked right now; or the democratic republic will live to rue such tardiness.

    President Jonathan put the wrong foot forward when he assumed the conceit that he, because he was president, could dictate who would or who would not become the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) chair.

    Rivers Governor, Chibuike Amaechi, defied the president as meddlesome interloper in NGF matters. He needed no especial courage to do so. All he needed was to insist on his right under the law, like the lover in Donne’s poem, winking to shut out the sun.

    A similar piece of power illogic caused the split in the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Instead of sensitivity to democratic dissent in the federal ruling party, the president and his advisers reached for a fist of mail.

    Again, all the dissenting lobby, led by the G-7 Governors, needed was to stand their grounds, and take their chances against the all-mighty presidential machine. Again, that machine unravelled. But even if it had crushed the “rebels”, that they had defied the president and his awesome powers would have been enough victory – for the myth would have vanished.

    Still, instead of the Jonathan presidency taking the cue and beating a tactical retreat, it has embarked on an ill-advised, if not outright unthinking attack, which has further compromised the authority of the president and the dignity of the presidency.

    Indeed, it is from this attack that putative fascism would appear to be creeping in. An irate president appears on the offensive to politicise, if not personalise, crucial state agencies and apparatuses.

    The sheer misuse of the Police in Rivers, under the command of CP Mbu Joseph Mbu, is well and truly reprehensible. It is the unflattering paradox of an outlaw police! First, Mr. Mbu fancies himself some Abuja-anointed viceroy, contending every inch of space with Governor Amaechi. This is a constitutional infraction deserving of the harshest censure.

    Then, the police under Mbu’s command are so partisan, a bloc of governors has dubbed them the PDP armed wing – and they sound very credible! Indeed, the police ought to be so embarrassed at their own gross misconduct. They would manufacture the most absurd of reasons to push back the governor’s supporters. They would manufacture even more absurd reasons to aid presidential sympathisers, in their war against political enemies.

    Do these corps of misguided officers realise their sympathy is to the Constitution and not to any individual no matter how powerful they feel he is? But the futility of such impunity was borne out of the Amaechi march with his supporters to welcome his All Progressives Congress (APC) guests.

    The sheer dignity of the gubernatorial office reduced Mbu’s men to a contemptible rabble, lobbing tear gas canisters at a trek they could not abort! So, so disgraceful!

    But the most alarming sign of putative fascism is the crude attempt to stop the G-7 governors at all costs: now threatening to demolish buildings associated with them, then violently abridging their constitutional rights as citizens and as governors. Imagine a lowly divisional police officer (DPO) arresting governors, constitutionally immune from arrests!

    Obasanjo, during his imperial presidency, viciously manipulated state legislatures to criminalise their governors, on the suspect motive of fighting corruption, and sending the EFCC after them.

    But never in his imperial conceit did he dare to threaten governors with summary arrest – no matter how rabidly convicted they were in the media!

    But the Jonathan Presidency – or whatever “powers from above” gave that DPO of Asokoro the instruction to bound into the meeting of governors in the Kano State Governor’s Lodge and threaten them with arrest – is already crossing that Rubicon.

    All that remains, it appears, is for the threatened arrest to be effected. Fancy an almighty DPO, lobbing tear gas canisters, and sitting governors running helter-skelter to avoid arrest? It just might not be too far off!

    But then, it would be welcome, fascism!

    This polity would not triumph over vicious military rule, only to succumb to civilian fascism. But what audacity, for a common columnist to warn the almighty powers-that-be!

    Again, like Donne and his intrusive sun: it does not take any especial courage – just an insistence on the law. The rule of law is the straight and narrow path to nurture our democracy.

  • Confab excitements

    No doubt about it: Col. Tony Nyiam (rtd), member of the Presidential Advisory Committee on National Dialogue/Conference, which former senator, Dr. Femi Okurounmu chairs, ought to fall on his sword, for his October 29 spat with Edo Governor, Adams Oshiomhole.

    This is, of course, without prejudice to the rightness or wrongness of his motive; or the nobility or otherwise of his action.

    By that public spat, Col. Nyiam badly compromised the position of his committee. His passion – unfortunately – got the better of him, thereby reinforcing cynicism in some quarters (not by any means received wisdom, but widespread enough) that the Okurounmu committee could be a Jonathan presidential dummy, working towards a preconceived answer. This is despite its official mandate of no “no go” area.

    The colonel’s outburst gifted the committee the intolerant toga – intolerant to any view outside the approved official lines. The potent blackmail that Nyiam tried to shut up a sitting governor in public, aside from the legalistic fuel that he tried to abrogate an elected governor’s democratic right to contribute to national discourse, paints him as an anti-democracy demon of sorts, to be shunned, lampooned and excoriated by all!

    Nothing he will say, it appears, would ever mitigate that dire sentence.

    That is why the colonel should step down: to save the honour of the committee, recharge its credibility that it is no Jonathan’s poodle and perhaps take the wind off the sail of the confab’s opponents.

    Still, the colonel’s sacrifice, because of the political incorrectness of his action, does not necessarily equate public good, in the all-important issue of a national conference.

    Sovereign or no, the conference is to restructure Nigeria, from its present destination of self-destruction, to a country that gives its longsuffering citizens development and prosperity, en route to morphing into a nation, from a mere geographical expression of mutually antagonistic nationalities.

    On the Nigerian crisis, Col. Nyiam is no neophyte. In the grand anarchy of the military era when the most audacious brute was king, he was linked to the Gideon Orkar coup. The putschists not only claimed they had overthrown the extant power bully, they also claimed to have excised some northern parts of the country from the Federal Republic!

    What provocation could have driven that lunatic attempt? Those caught paid with their lives. But the survivors would appear to have continued living with the bile of the dead.

    Besides, the tragic annulment of the 12 June 1993 presidential election and the even more tragic death, in detention, of MKO Abiola, winner of that election, further fuelled the open secret that Nigeria was indeed in the vice-grip of hegemonists.

    That, with post-1999 Obasanjo era power rascality, including the Jonathan Presidency’s craving for a lawless presidency (witness events in Rivers State), which borders on creeping fascism, has snowballed into the clear lack of unanimity on retaining Nigeria as presently structured.

    The result is a pre-anarchy season of anomie that now beclouds the country. That urgently suggests some national dialogue to fix things.

    The big question: can you trust President Goodluck Jonathan on this one? Ripples would not wager for Jonathan. He may well be playing games. But others have put their faith in him, claiming he means well. Yet, others are ambivalent, deciding to play along, thinking the perilous objective situations on ground would force his hands, whatever his original motives, to do good by the republic.

    Ironically, that would appear where the likes of Nyiam come in. From the ill-fated passion of the military era, Col. Nyiam has articulated his thoughts, on the Nigerian question, in his book: True Federal Democracy or Awaiting Implosion? An Aide-Memoire for Makers of the Nigerian Constitution.

    A citizen that has gone through the rigour of putting pen to paper on the Nigerian question, after the miscarriage of the Orkar coup and its tragedies, would appear ardently committed to the restructuring school, against the establishment school that baits open catastrophe, by hoping to take their chances on Nigeria’s extant structure.

    Indeed, apart from Senator Okurounmu (at least going by his pre-2003 stance as an SNC purist) and Prof. Ben Nwabueze (who excused himself from the committee on health grounds), Col. Nyiam would appear the only other known member that clearly belongs to the pro-change lobby.

    That would appear the full tragedy of the colonel’s emotional blunder. In his spat with Governor Oshiomhole, and his looming sacrifice (self or forced), the sovereign national conference movement would appear fated to lose a key ally. That might prove even more devastating for the country, for Nigeria as presently constituted would appear a journey to nowhere.

    That brings into the fray the Oshiomhole intervention. Did the governor have a right to air his views? No doubt. Did Nyiam have a right to obstruct him in any way, even if the governor, in his view, was playing to the gallery? Definitely not.

    Does the governor have a right to overplay his own opinion, even after the visiting committee had listened to him, for 40 minutes, as Nyiam claimed, in his office? No law says he shouldn’t, though decorum demands the governor also cedes space for other opinions.

    But one thing is sure: if there was a time limit for contributions, then the governor ought to have stuck to that time limit. If he did not, then the governor erred. In a republic, every citizen should subject themselves to rules: and a governor or president is first a citizen, before his catapult to high office. But all that is in the realm of controversy!

    What is well and truly amazing is the manifest illogicality of the argument of Organised Labour (first put across by Isa Aremu, NLC vice president and also amplified by Oshiomhole at the confab Edo town hall meeting) that the Nigerian question is settled. It is not.

    Comrade Oshiomhole feels “Nigerian” because he was “Kaduna boy”, who made good over there, even if he was from Edo. His view should be applauded and respected. But to dub as “tribalists”, other citizens with diametrically opposed experiences, is plain conceit with nary any logical merit.

    Bola Ige (of blessed memory) was another Kaduna Boy (his childhood biography), his Esa-Oke folks teased as “Gambari”, because he could not even at first, speak his native Yoruba tongue. Yet, he scurried down South because he found he couldn’t enjoy educational privileges other “Kaduna boys” were enjoying!

    In any case, if “Kaduna boys” had all morphed into “Kaduna men” and lived happily ever after, why didn’t the comrade governor consider running as Kaduna governor? So long for the annoying sweeping finality of Organised Labour’s argument!

    Nigeria needs restructuring to earn a rebirth. Jonathan may or may not be sincere. But that does not eliminate that notorious fact; or that the Nigerian state is at its weakest in history for change. This is the time to remould – or die.

    It is imperative this toxic structure be done away with, whoever takes over by 2015.

  • Ekiti ronu

    Ekiti ronu

    If Ekiti ronu [Ekiti think] echoes Yoruba ronu, iconic caution as mass protest music by late dramatist, Hubert Ogunde, during the 1st Republic’s political storm, it is simply because a storm of similar magnitude is hovering over Ekiti.

    Should this storm dawn and thunder break, as the pan-Yoruba one did in the 1st Republic Western Region, Ekiti people would be the grand victims in the present South West.

    Indeed, in Ekiti, the third generation of Obafemi Awolowo’s developmental politics are about to fall upon themselves, ironically as the paterfamilias and his policy greats did; making hideous political killing fields of the same Western vista in which they had showcased startling policy wonders; and birthing the first generation of Yoruba political sinners and saints!

    Now what is this: history inevitably repeating itself or plain hubris, pushing towards avoidable ruin?

    Enter Samuel Ladoke Akintola and his fallen angels, among the brightest and best in the old Action Group (AG), the first generation of Yoruba political sinners versus Awo and faithful disciples, the first generation of Yoruba saints; then Akin Omoboriowo and pals, among the brightest and best in the 2nd Republic Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), second generation of Yoruba sinners versus Michael Adekunle Ajasin and brood, second generation of Yoruba saints.

    Now, is the black-or-white, famously unforgiving and notoriously ancestral-feuding Yoruba political clime ripe for a third generation of sinners and saints, in the looming Ekiti toss-up between Michael Opeyemi Bamidele (MOB) and John Kayode Fayemi (JKF)?

    Both lead feuding blocs of the All Progressives Congress (APC), present South West political lords of the manor, and closest articulators of Awo’s development politics, among the varied groups laying claim to the Awo legacy.

    Indeed, Awo political descendants are no united phalanx. From the very genesis, even with Awo in charge, the ranks had always fissured. So, it is with the present generation.

    For starters, a bloc insists it is Awo natural franchisers, to be disputed by no one. This class comprises the living Awolowos, the Afenifere grandees, Awo-era battle-hardened but ageing veterans and other Awo ideology coterie and family friends, in the clergy and other fields.

    This group considers itself the Areopagus, apex chamber of wise elders in ancient Athens, from which the Awo franchise must be cleared. But aside from holding this virtual “spiritual brief”, to use legal-speak, they have done pretty little to concretise the Awo developmental essence.

    Indeed, it is not illegitimate to charge this bloc with illicit doctrinaire trade-offs, for immediate but eventually ruinous political gains (as the Afenifere grandees did with Ogun’s former governor, Otunba Gbenga Daniel, OGD, and his Ogun Peoples Democratic Party, PDP; and currently with Olusegun Mimiko and his Labour Party in Ondo), when faced with political pressures from rival claimants to the Awo legacy.

    Then there is the Bola Tinubu group, from the Alliance for Democracy (AD) at the start of this 4th Republic, to Action Congress (AC), Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and now All Progressives Congress (APC). Though the Afenifere bloc regards Asiwaju Tinubu and his younger Turks as a breed of upstarts (and on both sides, the contempt is mutual), the Tinubu bloc has done more than any other to actualise Awo’s developmental vision.

    Indeed, what the AD class of 1999-2003 miserably flunked, the Tinubu current brood in the South West is doing with panache: in Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Osun and Ekiti states, with the South West boasting robust development makeovers, reminiscent of the golden Awo days, in stark contrast to the abject developmental puddle of the Olusegun Obasanjo mainstream era.

    But aside from the Afenifere and Tinubu blocs, there are the Awo ideological fair weather friends, exemplified by the Mimikos and OGDs, who nibble the Awo rhetoric for political sustenance, but are political Machiavellis, sworn to the end justifying the means – or “meanness” to parody Prof. Wole Soyinka.

    Since every Tinubu gain necessarily translates into an Afenifere loss (and probably vice-versa), the Mimikos and OGDs are in booming business, entering sweetheart partnerships with Afenifere, as the unending battle flares, to control of the soul of the South West.

    It is to this vicious vista, therefore, that the looming MOB-JKF battle royale for the capture of Ekiti is opening. But that is not the only danger. Lurking in the wings, and waiting for carrion, are the federal political vultures of Goodluck Jonathan, a presidential camp desperately craving a second term (after making a hash of the first), and for whom a fissured Ekiti APC would be virtual gift from the gods!

    If all these would not jolt into sense the Ekiti gladiators, behaving as children without a sense of history, then it is plain hubris, the good old Yoruba eedi, at play!

    MOB, rumoured to be lining up joining forces with Labour Party (LP) would probably destroy himself. That is trite, but if only conventional wisdom holds right.

    So, after Akintola and Omoboriowo, is MOB bracing up to lead the latest generation of progressives-turned-demons in Yoruba politics? But what if conventional wisdom turns grand folly and MOB turns the table? Or worse: the federal reactionaries cook up the vote and bolt with the prize, while MOB and JKF, in progressive feuding, mutually self-destroy?

    But why would a man take such a perilous path? Why would MOB eye possible glory but probable doom, and yet develop a Samson’s complex to stake it all? That is what is not trite!

    That would suggest an intolerable political situation in his APC, that makes coexistence mutually unbeneficial. So, if a man cannot legitimately actualise his dreams in a union, why should he invest his time and loyalty in it? Vaulting ambition? Maybe. But ambition is no crime, and “vaulting” is only an adjective!

    That takes the discourse to the Fayemi side, now posing as saints in the divide. They are not. MOB and his coalition of the aggrieved accuse the governor of bad faith and of use-and-dump tactics.

    These allegations could be right or wrong. But the reality is that one side is incensed enough to torpedo the whole house. That cannot be good for a sitting governor that even the aggrieved admit – even if in private – has done enough to earn re-election.

    MOB must, therefore, beware of the Coriolanus syndrome. Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, in a fit of fatal anger, joined the Volscians against his native Corioli. He lost his life in the gambit.

    But JKF too must be wary of the hubris of gubernatorial conceit to crush a comrade turned foe. And those bent on media demonization of MOB are tragically mistaken. He who is down need fear no fall!

    Whatever it takes, the APC leadership must tweak the ears of both combatant camps, and bring both to reason – whatever it takes! On the basis of equal opportunity membership, they must hand each side mutual, cast-iron guarantees to build confidence and fend off the looming disaster.

    Each time the South West advances, reactionary forces gather to scuttle the efforts, using feuding progressives themselves as fuel.

    Should such happen again in Ekiti, MOB and JKF would take the flak. So, they had better both jerk awake before earning themselves a harsh verdict of history.

    Ekiti ronu!

  • His blood on his hands

    He nailed an innocent man on the cross. So, his blood is on his hands.

    That would be history’s damning verdict on President Goodluck Jonathan, when the odyssey of eminent jurist, Justice Isa Ayo Salami, former president of the Court of Appeal, suspended for the past two years, is written.

    For fleeting partisan glory, the Jonathan Presidency has earned itself eternal stain. It is odium well earned, for a reckless campaign against justice and electoral sanctity.

    If this appears a tad too hard, a refresher on the Justice Salami story will do. His “capital crime”, to the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), particularly its reactionary bloc in the South West, was that the Court of Appeal, where Justice Salami was President, flushed out election robbers in Edo, Ondo, Ekiti and Osun states.

    That the robbers stole the vote was beyond question. That the Court of Appeal, after the earlier tribunals, found enough evidence to confirm a heist and kick out the robbers was not in doubt.

    The problem was the powers-that-be would rather have a quisling – like Justice(?) Thomas Naron, already dismissed for his judicial malfeasance in the Osun gubernatorial judicial challenge – do bare-faced injustice, which Justice Salami was not.

    For that, they swore to “deal” with him. But the jurist took all of their vicious punches, and still remained on his feet of honour, until he bowed out at the statutory age of 70 on October 15.

    Salami left in a blaze of glory, his integrity undiminished and his place secure among the pantheon of the brave, the committed and the principled, in Nigeria’s often troubled judiciary.

    But his traducers are covered in the odium of their own plotting and conspiracy, so much so that the tattered umbrella is now home to ferocious and conflicting old and new power rascals, dancing naked in the market place.

    Live by injustice, die by injustice! Gather by injustice, scatter by injustice! That would appear a fair epigram to PDP, now in the throes of breaking up.

    It is instructive that a party whose South West rascals swore to destroy Justice Salami is, before our very eyes, itself self-destructing!

    It is sobering lesson, if ever there was one! Live by intrigue, die by intrigue!

    The anti-Salami campaign was started by a newspaper advert by Iyiola Omisore, a former senator and post-Olagunsoye Oyinlola Osun gubernatorial hopeful, in which he made uncouth and reckless allegations against Justice Salami and his Court of Appeal, suggesting the then Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) partisans had allegedly compromised the court in their party’s victorious appeal.

    To be sure, Omisore was hardly neutral in the matter. For one, he had just been electorally pulverised in the 2011 senatorial race. For another, his bid to succeed the judicially sacked Oyinlola had turned a pipe dream. For the incoming Rauf Aregbesola, he knew, it would not be business as usual.

    Heraclitus-speak, there was no stepping in the Osun river twice. Osun’s political dynamics had changed forever! From politics of rumour-mongering and blackmail, it was morphing into politics of development. In other words, Omisore saw stark political death staring him in the face! That advert was, therefore, a death spasm of sorts; hence it was a study in wildness and recklessness.

    But that spasm sparked other high-tension conspiracies from even higher places. Pronto, came former Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Aloysius Katsina-Alu’s strange “promotion” of Justice Salami, a sitting president of the Court of Appeal to a non-ranking member of the Supreme Court!

    Salami rejected the Trojan horse, only to be swarmed by other conspiracies. That climaxed in his suspension, which the National Judicial Council (NJC), through E. I. Odukwu, announced on 18 August 2011. The NJC charge was that Salami had “perjured” Katsina-Alu, simply because Justice Dahiru Musdapher, next in line for CJN Katsina-Alu’s job but alleged witness to Salami’s claim that the CJN asked him to pervert justice in the Sokoto gubernatorial case, would not confirm – nor rigorously deny – the allegation.

    But the same NJC, but now under CJN Musdapher, on 10 May 2012, lifted Justice Salami’s suspension and asked President Jonathan to reinstate the jurist. Was that CJN Musdapher’s brave but nuanced effort to salve his conscience, after opting not to confirm Justice Salami’s allegation? No one is sure now!

    Before this decision, however, the Retired Justice Bola Babalakin Reconciliation Committee had put Salami in the clear. It had also cleared the justices involved in the Osun and Ekiti gubernatorial appeal cases of all wrong doings; but indicted former CJN Katsina-Alu, for going beyond his brief in the Sokoto gubernatorial case.

    For “peace”, however, Justice Salami and indeed all of the parties were advised to withdraw their respective cases on the matter. Inasmuch as Justice Salami’s camp were not averse to withdrawing the cases, they insisted on reinstatement first – and soundly so, if you were dealing with a treacherous presidency.

    It was at this juncture that President Jonathan, himself a beneficiary of justice in his battle against the Umaru Yar’ Adua presidential cabal, decided to vote for injustice, clinging to the cant of sub-judice. He would not reinstate Salami because of cases in court!

    Perhaps, President Jonathan had emotional attachment to the injustice Salami’s Appeal Court was fobbing off? Indeed, during the Ekiti re-run, its Ido-Osi abracadabra and the fleeting heroism of Mrs Christian Conscience, there were media speculations that since President Yar’Adua had grave issues with his health, it was a certain Vice President, hitherto scorned, by the Yar’ Adua cabal as “spare tyre”, was the one flexing his muscles and giving the Ekiti vote robbers the Dutch courage to essay such in-your-face electoral robbery.

    This remains an allegation yet to be proved. But not so, the president’s anti-Salami scheming, using every trick in the book, to stone-wall Justice Salami’s reinstatement, until his statutory retirement.

    But as it happens, injustice and impunity have started consuming their own children.

    Oyinlola, who sat on Aregbesola’s mandate for nearly a whole electoral term, has had his own mandate as PDP national secretary annulled. Even his “election” as “New PDP” national scribe has been judicially pulverised, on account that “nPDP” was unknown to law.

    Olusegun Oni too, gubernatorial impostor in Ekiti, was also shoo-ed off his purported PDP office of South West national vice-chairman. Earlier, Don Quixote Oni had journeyed to nowhere, asking the Supreme Court to rule on a case Salami’s Appeal Court had already concluded. He fell flat on his face.

    And Jonathan himself? He is now undertaker-in-chief of his PDP, the electoral rogues of which he scandalously lent the dignity of his presidential office. Yet, it’s morning yet on comeuppance day, for direr judgments are bound to follow!

    But even as Jonathan and his PDP roil in the cauldron of impunity, it is a case of “two presidents”: one Jonathan, of the Federal Republic, who used his high office to attempt to crush an innocent jurist; and two, Salami, of the Court of Appeal, whose sheer integrity has turned the high-wire plots against him to glory.”

    Jonathan nailed an innocent jurist. Not even all the waters of the Atlantic can clean his hands of his career blood.

  • The Oba, his libido and the law

    On October 8, an Osun high court discharged and acquitted Oba Adebukola Alli, the Alowa of Ilowa-Ijesa, Osun State, of rape charges. But the same court lampooned the accused for sexual rascality that brought shame to himself, his family and his kingdom.

    The court said the Oba was morally culpable. But by law, he was in the clear: it had insufficient evidence to nail him for rape. If indeed the law is codified morality, then that “dual” judgment leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.

    The court lamented the absence, as damning evidence, of stained bed sheets (which the accused would have gleefully surrendered?), torn underpants and medical reports confirming forced penetration – and possible bruises – to prove rape. It then heavily descended on the Police, accused to have bungled the investigation.

    So, after all said and done, much less have been said than done. The alleged rapist is in the clear. The alleged victim is far from justice, rocked by emotional trauma, even after the rigour and humiliation of trial, at a stage during which the accused camp gleefully asked her to expose (if not to the open court, then to the judge in chambers!) her private part, to prove she was bruised! How callous can a judicial system be!

    What next then: is the coast clear for the next royal rapist – or any rapist at all – on the prowl? Or is the Nigerian court system still captive to the Kabiyesi syndrome of the Yoruba feudal era?

    The Kabiyesi, in Yoruba culture, is he who cannot be questioned. Indeed, he is next only to the gods, who themselves are next only to Olodumare, the Almighty.

    But, of course, that is the problem with feudalism! How can frail humans be invested with god-like privileges without something terrible giving?

    Indeed, history is replete with many a royal “unquestionable”, whose inability to question their libido landed them and their peoples in soup.

    In Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, Anthony lost his half of the Roman Empire – and his life – virtually on the laps of Cleopatra, the bewitchingly beautiful queen of Egypt.

    Loose libido was also central to the destruction of ill-fated Troy. A Trojan prince, Paris, had seduced Helen (some sources suggested he actually raped her), wife of Spartan King Menelaus and most beautiful woman in antiquity; and eloped with her to his native Troy, sparking a Greek military expedition that eventually erased Troy.

    The whole of the Yoruba country quaked with Kiriji War (1877-1893) because someone exercised his libido with impunity. Ajele Oyepetun, the sitting Ibadan viceroy at Okemesi, had raped the wife of Fabunmi, an Okemesi son and intrepid warrior, who promptly beheaded the Ajele for the forced cuckoldry and its terrible stains. That baited the Ibadan imperialists to war. Though that war ended in stalemate, it put an end to Ibadan military hegemony in Yorubaland.

    Oba Alli’s alleged rape mess therefore falls squarely within the compass of royal licentiousness. But the difference between then and now is that the law tries to avail every citizen – king or commoner – justice; and avert collective catastrophe from individual recklessness. It is doubtful, however, if the Osun judgment, in this rape case, has served anyone justice.

    Oba Alli was alleged to have raped Helen Okpara, 23, a youth corps member, posted to his Ilowa-Ijesa community on National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) assignment, on 25 March 2011, at the Oba’s Osogbo residence, at Rasco Housing Estate, Osogbo.

    The young woman alleged it was rape, since the Oba had allegedly been making passes at her. Besides, when the Oba started pressuring and threatening her, prelude to alleged rape, she sent panic text messages to her NYSC employers and her pastor, who also alerted the Police. The Police, however, declared the time too late to do anything. By the time the Police jerked themselves awake, the following morning, the poor girl’s goose was cooked. The errant Oba had had his way.

    But the Oba countered it was consensual coitus, since both allegedly consenting adults were lovers. He even claimed the girl enjoyed it while it lasted!

    The court believed the Oba. But even at that, its heart quaked with moral guilt, as it railed at the Oba’s immoral and disgraceful conduct. That was enough stain; for a royal father should protect every member of his community.

    But rape or not, the Oba’s conduct is most reprehensible. Helen was a youth corps member from another part of the country, the South East. Aside from the Federal Government and the NYSC, Oba Alli, as traditional ruler, should have been her closest protector. Yet, his loose libido led him to embrace the infamy of alleged rape. How would the Oba and his community have felt if the reverse had been the case; and an Ilowa-Ijesa daughter, at the receiving end?

    Even if the Oba was sexually wayward, how does one justify his Ilowa-Ijesa community’s callousness during the trial? Newspapers reported a segment of the community mobilising pupils to demonstrate, near the court premises, in Osogbo: demonising the alleged victim, lionising the alleged rapist. How low can a community sink! And to think all that was done to intimidate the court!

    Just as well the Osun government frowned at that gross misconduct, threatening to punish the irresponsible teachers and community dealers (sorry, leaders!) behind that outrage. It should walk its talk; and do just that in full public glare.

    Oba Alli may not have been found guilty of rape. But the court proved and rebuked his sexual irresponsibility, which, to say the least, is a blight on his throne, which like Caesar’s wife, should be beyond reproach. If his community would tolerate such turpitude, then it is the bounden duty of the surrounding communities, nay, other Osun traditional rulers, to ostracise this monarch whose un-royal behaviour gives the Yoruba monarchy a bad name.

    The Osun government, on its own part, should appeal the case to secure justice for all. But even as the process is on, it should formally apologise to, and compensate Miss Okpara, on Oba Alli’s hideous behaviour. This is imperative to distance the state from this un-royal scandal.

    The NYSC authorities, on their own part, should insist on formal apology, from the Ilowa-Ijesa community; and a written commitment that no corps member would ever, in that community, suffer Miss Okpara’s trauma. Until these are done, it should not send new corps members to Ilowa-Ijesa.

    As for the law, it should shape up. A monarch with rampant libido is no roguish but fictional Baroka outwitting Lakunle for village jewel, Sidi, in Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel. He is rather a real danger to himself, his throne, his people and his culture.

    Such putative rapists should be nailed and thrown into the slammer where they belong. It is not enough for the court to morally wring its hands, while a probable rapist escapes the law.

     

  • SNC: Still gaming?

    Femi Macaulay, a colleague on The Nation Editorial Board, wondered if Ripples was prescient, since “SNC: Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” (last week’s offering, October 1), hit the column space the same day President Goodluck Jonathan announced a presidential advisory committee on national dialogue/conference, headed by Senator Femi Okurounmu.

    Femi even literally growled about “fixation with SNC”, to which Ripples promptly riposted he should, if he had any, offer a superior suggestion on fixing Nigeria’s peculiar mess! Such has been the reaction to the prospect – or spectre – of a national political dialogue.

    Sule Lamido, Jigawa governor and rumoured presidential hopeful (in the putative ticket putting Rivers Rotimi Ameachi in Jonathan’s presidential okro soup!) has dismissed it as “illegal”. Reuben Abati, presidential spokesman, has added his own sop: the envisaged dialogue will have no “no go” areas. Both however, would appear grandstanding!

    Though Governor Lamido could be rightfully riled if he detected, in the crafty move, a Jonathan manoeuvre against his native North, he cannot afford to cut his nose to spite his face, the way he threatened that his state would not attend such an “illegal” confab.

    Indeed, Lamido’s stance ironically echoes the jeer at the Yoruba, of the late Abubakar Rimi, Lamido’s political mentor, on the eve of Sani Abacha’s National Constitutional Conference “with full constituent powers”, that the train was zooming off and would leave the Yoruba stranded, if they did not jump on board! Would it now be the turn of the North: jump on board Jonathan’s train or get stranded? Allah Akbar!

    If clear thinking were to hold sway however, Lamido should know that his native North is both chief beneficiary and most worsted, by this parasitic structure. It is in everybody’s strategic interest, therefore, to fix it, once and for all. But that is if Jonathan is not playing games!

    Dr. Abati’s counter name-calling is neither here nor there. If he calls those opposed to his principal’s national dialogue “selfish”, the same tar applies to his boss – for many have, not unjustifiably, questioned the president’s sudden volte-face. As to the fib that the confab would have no “no-go” areas, Abati can tell that to the marines.

    To start with, such sure-footedness is not his prevaricating and dissembling principal’s forte. Besides, Abati had before told the country one thing – for example, Dame Patience Jonathan’s illness – only for his boss, and the dame herself, to counter his claims. And that matter of personal health was in no way as weighty as this matter of corporate, national health.

    Can President Jonathan be trusted on this one? Hardly, from past conducts; though change is always a possibility.

    As he did in 2010, the president has a penchant, at crucial junctures, to throw up ostensibly popular issues; which nevertheless would peter out to mere boondoggle, just to position him for electoral sweepstakes.

    In 2010, the president went to the United States, never telling anyone he would run or not in 2011. When pressed to commit, he went into a rambling story: he could run as vice president, he could run as president, he could decide not to run – in fact, he was too busy on his new job then bother about running or not!

    Just last month, at the same United States, he went into a lecture binge on the constitutional right to two terms by the president and governors. Yet, mum was the word on his 2015 plan!

    When he came back home in 2010, the president orchestrated the drama of firing Maurice Iwu and appointing Attahiru Jega as Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) chairman. He made such fetish of conducting clean elections, while positioning himself as the chief beneficiary, that Ripples, in a 29 June 2010 piece headlined “Jonathan’s metamorphosis”, wondered at the president’s motives.

    “What is not all right,” that piece insisted, “is the president’s current charm offensive, using the imperative for clean and transparent polls as shaft, exploiting the revulsion over the rotten 2007 elections and the urgent need to make amends, but at the same time positioning himself to be the prime beneficiary of the so-called clean polls to come.”

    If you think the 2011 election was without blemish as orchestrated, then read Nasir El-Rufai’s The Accidental Public Servant. He claimed, in that book, that a PDP apparatchik from Kaduna State confessed to him that his party, in the state, added a whopping 800, 000 votes to Jonathan’s tally, just to make the 25 per cent mark!

    That sparked off the post-poll violence, for which Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, on account of his pre-poll outburst, became the ready and convenient scapegoat!

    By that parallel, is a national dialogue, sovereign or no, the new shaft of Jonathan’s electoral scheming? Maybe; maybe not. But it is an interesting and legitimate parallel to probe.

    As it was in 2010, it is now: general elections are due in 2015, while gubernatorial elections are due in Ekiti and Osun in 2014. Like clean elections, the long discussed but long repressed national conference is becoming some open sesame to make or mar Nigeria – and that from Jonathan’s official quarters!

    A national conference, particularly the sovereign national conference (SNC), is a solid idea this column has always pushed. But Jonathan’s move is open to grave suspicions, least of which is positioning himself for a second term, just as the INEC boondoggle of 2010 earned him a first term. But if an SNC is done well, the restructuring would be so far-reaching anyone would think twice to be president, because it would entail a lot of hard work, but far less lollies.

    The traditional North would feel especially hard done by. Just as Jonathan’s clever clean poll campaign of 2010 portrayed his cheated pro-zoning opponents as some backward ethnic, power-greedy retards, Jonathan’s dialogue would portray this same lobby as ancients trapped in their ethnic laager, while a modernist president canters away to give his country a new lease.

    Besides, the Jonathan move would appear a clever but direct jab at the heart of the putative South West-North West entente, on which the new opposition seems to have laid much store. While South West’s default setting embraces SNC, North West’s default setting repels it! Talk of throwing a cat among pigeons!

    Yet, all sides must come to some accommodation to save Lugard’s troubled amalgam from violently unravelling – o, for a tinge of trust!

    Still, those focused on short-term political goals will do well to see the big picture. But the buck stops with President Jonathan to demonstrate good motive. On this indeed, he has no choice.

    Gen. Abacha had the conspiracy of treacherous power elite, not unhappy with MKO Abiola’s presidential mandate annulment. Gen. Obasanjo had the benefit of a wearied country, after the wasted years of the military, while both were gaming over their versions of national talks.

    President Jonathan has no such luxury. He could either be Nigeria’s undertaker (as he is appearing, for his splitting party right now), or the hand to push his country from the brink.

    His choice is stark. It’s no time for gaming now!

  • SNC: Beware of Greeks bearing gifts

    The war to reclaim from Troy, the beautiful Helen Paris the Trojan had stolen from Sparta, had lasted 10 years. Yet, the Greeks could not sack Troy.

    Achilles, the charmed Greek with the fatal heel, had died in battle. So had Hector, the bravest of the Trojans, defending their city from the besieging Greeks. It was fated to end a bloody stalemate – until Odysseus sold perhaps the greatest war dummy in all of antiquity: the Trojan horse.

    Odysseus contrived to be built a gargantuan wooden horse, on which was etched: “For their return home, the Greeks dedicate this offering to Athena.” It was a sacred gift to Athena, the sea goddess, to pilot home the retreating Greek navy. But in its cavernous interior were hidden soldiers.

    The Trojans fell for the trick and pulled the horse inside their city. Once inside, the crafty Greeks wasted no time: Troy became history.

    Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!

    This is no foray into the Classics and its enchanting stories. But David Mark, senate president of the Federal Republic’s sudden conversion to the idea of a national conference – like some Saul turning Paul on the way to Damascus – is somewhat reminiscent of the Trojan dummy.

    Even more surprising has been the almost uncritical zest with which the traditional advocates of the Sovereign National Conference (SNC) have rushed at Senator Mark’s seeming conversion. The prodigal has finally come around; their body language seems to scream, so it’s time to celebrate that landmark!

    That, to be sure, is not completely out of place. For one, Mark was simply one of the most notorious anti-democracy elements of the military era, particularly after the annulment of MKO Abiola’s 12 June 1993 presidential mandate; with even some literature alleging that he threatened to shoot MKO should he become president, a charge the former army brigadier-general has denied.

    For another, Senate President Mark is one of yesterday’s many democracy anti-heroes that nevertheless sit pretty in today’s democracy. So, literally eating their cake and also keeping it, such scions of impunity, for whom “democracy” is just a continuation of perpetual power gravy in another guise, have no need to stomach any gobbledegook some quaint political geeks call SNC.

    So, maybe for a Mark to even acknowledge a national confab, under any guise, is a thing to cheer!

    Still, in fairness to Mark, even as a national conference seeming convert, via his September 17 speech welcoming the Senate to a new session, he has maintained his centralist essence.

    While the romantics talk of an unfettered talk of “ethnic nationalities” to chart a future for Nigeria – with the people through a grand referendum endorsing or rejecting their decisions, and not some dissembling parliament cherry-picking these decisions – Mark has insisted on a limited palaver with no-go areas.

    But that very preference ought to have triggered the alarm, immediately awakening a sense of the déjà vu.

    Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, the greatest dissembler of them all, probably has the patent for “no go areas” when, during his imperious military reign, he declared the Nigerian national question as settled. Of course, he fancied himself some Juan Domingo Peron of Nigeria, who would march from martial rule to democratic triumph; and under his blissful suzerainty, everyone would live happily ever after! That was some dream – until it all blew up in his face!

    Then came Sani Abacha, the most virulent of them all, gifting a naive country some “National Constitutional Conference with full constituent powers”. All Abacha wanted was to buy time, get rid of the likes Shehu Musa Yar’Adua and consolidate his power. He succeeded more than he ever dreamed. But Nigeria went further down the mire, as a developmental disposition that should spawn prosperity for its longsuffering citizens.

    Olusegun Obasanjo too, during his second coming, in 2005, staged his own gambit, which he called National Political Reform Conference, not programmed for any fundamental change.

    It is the turf of centralist gamers, gaming away while their country sinks further in the mire!

    Even current national conference converts are not unlike a cluster of the blind, arrayed around an elephant. Some feel its tusk, and swear indeed, the elephant is as smooth as ivory. Yet, others feel its limb and swear, with equal vehemence, the mighty beast is as gross and coarse as they come!

    Indeed, aside from military-era centralist gamers, a southern lobby has of late been championing SNC, with Awo franchise-seeking elements from the South West, teaming up with Ijaw nationalists from the South-South. While the one seeks relevance in rapidly changing South West political equations, the other evinces a more civil approach to the Goodluck Jonathan presidential cause, beyond insane threats from the creeks.

    Only the SNC classicists, however, would appear clear in their mind, on what they expect of a grand national talk; and how its decisions must be handled. It is to see how Frederick Lugard’s amalgam of 1914, always threatening to abort at the slightest pressure, could somewhat be re-processed into some more enduring compound, that could stand the test of time.

    But even these classicists are no united phalanx. They are more like voices of Babel, which din somewhat drifts toward the same direction. In contrast, the confab gamers, with their perennial see-saw, appear committed to causing maximum distraction to buy time. The snag, however, is: time is running out!

    For the umpteenth time, SNC is no game. It is a last-ditch effort to restructure Nigeria – potentially great, but perhaps fated to carry its greatness to its self-dug grave, without ever actualising its potentials, unless something drastic is done – into a productive and prosperous entity.

    That is a much better and brighter vision than the present parasitic state, at war with itself; and its citizens, tragic sacrificial lambs on the altar of self-caused chaos – the latest being the September 29 Boko Haram slaughter of 40 students at the College of Agriculture, Gujba, in Yobe State.

    Incidentally, today is the last October 1 before the centenary of Lugard’s troubled amalgamation. But from shortly after 1 October 1960 independence when the young country ran into political storm, the initial duo of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe (President) and Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa (Prime Minister), had been succeeded by a relay of others on the anniversary dais: Yakubu Gowon, Murtala Muhammed, Olusegun Obasanjo, Shehu Shagari, Muhammadu Buhari, Ibrahim Babangida, Sani Abacha, Obasanjo (second coming), Umaru Yar’Adua and now, Goodluck Jonathan.

    Each year, aside from plastic celebrations by those in power, the National Day almost always provokes a lament on the Nigerian question. This lamentation cannot go on much longer, with Lugard’s amalgam unravelling with avoidable tragedies.

    For gamers buying time, the game is well neigh over. Nigeria cannot afford a Troy-like dummy, though self-sold, that could consign it to history.

    To the establishment playing for time, therefore, the choice is stark: embrace SNC or go bust.

    That is the peaceful way to salvage Lugard’s patchwork – or lose everything.

     

  • ASUU strike and its many ironies

    The on-going Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) strike, already in its third month, has come with grand ironies.

    These ironies are grand enough to evoke that famous personal rebuke from the straight-as-pin Parson, among wide-and-merry co-pilgrims to St Thomas Becket shrine at Canterbury, England, in Geoffery Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: “If gold rusts, what would iron do?”

    The Tales of Chaucer (c. 1343-1400) was a biting sarcasm of the grand hypocrisy of Middle Age Catholic England. The goodly Parson, a humble priest with modest parishioners, found himself in the midst of the flower of the English Roman Catholic, laity and clergy: the Miller whose thumb was golden with stealing his customers’ grain; the Summoner, spiritual thug and bully who made corrupt living as local papal police; the Pardoner, another unfazed spiritual racketeer who claimed he had, in his pouch, papal pardon “hot, fresh and smoking from Rome”, available at the right fee; and of course the handsome Wife of Bath, whose chaste exterior was not unlike the Biblical white sepulchre: glittering outside but rotten within.

    In the midst of such mass degeneracy, the Parson, though a moral icon, always cautioned himself, against skidding into the wide and merry way: “If gold rusts, what would iron do!”

    That was in 14th century England.

    In 21st century Nigeria, the Parson-spirit would appear totally non-existent.

    Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, PhD, was an academic totally made in Nigeria – BSc (Port Harcourt), MSc (Port Harcourt), PhD (Port Harcourt). To boot, His Excellency even reportedly had a teaching stint in a tertiary institution, before succumbing to graver matters of state: Deputy Governor, Governor, Vice President, Acting President, President to complete the ill-fated Umaru Yar’Adua’s term and now President on his own first term, ogling a second!

    Yet, His Excellency cannot defend the integrity of the system that made him. He would appear not to “give a damn” about the anguish of millions of Nigerian youth, out of school for three months and still counting; simply because they have an unfeeling, insensitive and irresponsible government, which does not seem to care about their future; about the throes of former colleagues in the Academia, condemned to scrounging water from stone because the Nigerian state simply doesn’t regard education as priority; about the collapse of the university system, acutely distressed and seriously creaking!

    Indeed, how the president has handled the ASUU strike, vis-a-vis the implosion in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), paints the iron-clad difference between the politician and the statesman: Jonathan the politician would rather worry about the next election by focusing on PDP troubles, than on the next generation by suffering distractions from the ASUU strike!

    If gold rusts, what would iron do!

    Of course, if the fish is rotten in the head, what there is left of the body? Prof. Ruquayyatu Rufa’i, sacked former Education minister – sacked not for the tardy handling of the ASUU crisis but because she is an ally of Jigawa Governor, Sule Lamido: no friend of the president ahead the 2015 electoral sweepstakes – promptly declared she would head back to her desk at Bayero University, Kano (BUK).

    That prompted Citizen Obo Effanga to ask on his facebook wall: will she then join the ASUU strike? The irony was apparently totally lost on the former minister! Minister yesterday; lecturer tomorrow! Not even enlightened self-interest could make the minister defend the essence of her profession, when she had the opportunity! See, how far gone are the Nigerian state and its high officials?

    If gold rusts, what would iron do!

    You can dismiss Nyesom Wike, Education minister of state and current supervising minister. He is no gold in that sector, just a Rivers political battler moonlighting in the crucial Education ministry. No wonder: the rambler has since gone on the rumble in the Rivers jungle! Education, ASUU and allied distractions are all but fading echoes! That is proof of Jonathan’s regard for education!

    But there is every reason to worry about Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Finance minister and coordinating minister for the economy, who snorted her finance ministry had no cash to pay ASUU, even if the Federal Government had earlier signed an agreement to that effect. So, what does her ministry have cash for?

    How a brilliant woman with startling degrees from America’s Ivy League schools would volunteer such is well and truly amazing. If America had not invested in its own education, would she be so proud of her American training? And is it taboo for Nigeria to invest in its; so that its future graduates too would be a toast of the world, as America’s is today?

    But that is the point! Mrs Okonjo-Iweala would rather count the beans and declare “economic growth”, while local development indices roll back by the second. It is tribute to fuzzy thinking in high quarters that it isn’t glaring that Dr. Okonjo-Iweala’s economic policy is, in real terms, tailored towards underdevelopment. It must have the approving smack of Breton-Woods – and these blokes share their glory with nobody! Remember Kwame Nkrumah’s 1965 timely early warning: Neo-colonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism?

    If gold rusts, what would iron do!

    It is amazing how hyper-educated Nigerians, at the acme of the Nigerian state, are education philistines; though they are living witnesses to other countries’ glorious investment in their own educational system; or even Nigeria’s past investment in this crucial sector.

    It is even more amazing that past beneficiaries of the golden age of Nigerian education, before the locust years of the military, have almost all drifted abroad for daily bread, giving their host countries a surfeit of their silky skills, while their own country bleeds – and future generation acutely thirsts.

    But the most amazing perhaps, are products of Nigerian universities who have bought into the philistinism of their misguided rulers. To them, there is absolutely no reason to fix the problem. Public universities are sheer poison; and lecturers there are nincompoops: nincompoops that drilled the now cocky former students into the present Socrateses, who now regard their former lecturers (read ASUU) as hare-brained!

    Their credo: amass enough cash, send your children or wards abroad, or to local private universities; and consign ASUU to rust with its umpteenth campaign for better funding of universities! Their Socratic formula: Flee! Typically Nigerian. But sorry, your problems will not run away from you!

    Besides, technology is not machines; but a way of life. So, if you are not in full control of your education, how do you forge a winning technology – your own niche to compete in the very unequal market the West fraudulently brandishes as “globalisation”?

    Those who abandon public universities to rust, because their children are not there, are as guilty as Jonathan’s gang of philistines. The mass thorns from public varsities will choke their own fanciful flowers from avant-garde schools here or abroad – except of course, the hope of a future Nigeria is the Diaspora!

    Nigeria has no choice but to fully fund university education. The time to start is now.

     

  • Awo: the unlearned lessons

    September 11, 1963 was, for Chief Obafemi Awolowo (1909-1987), programmed to be the beginning of the end. That was the day, 50 years ago, he was sentenced to 10 years gaol, with hard labour, for treasonable felony. But instead, it turned the end of the beginning for Awo’s political traducers.

    If it had ended that way, it would have been just as well. Unfortunately, that patent injustice, with its integral core of destroying Awo as a person and as a potent political force, has sentenced Nigeria to unending political wilderness from which, even with 53 years of flag independence, it is yet to emerge.

    The result: political retardation, economic stagnation in real terms and cumulative underdevelopment, with its all too glaring mass poverty bordering on penury, mass anger, mass disorientation and mass alienation.

    But even with all the meltdown, portraying Nigeria as a country in perpetual crisis of nationhood, like the Heraclitus state of flux, the first lesson from Awo’s political persecution and eventual triumph has remained unlearned: that political persecution and brazen attempts to destroy political opponents are ill winds that blow no one no good.

    Indeed, Nigerian leaders would progressively appear combatively proud of their patent lack of a sense of history – particularly that segment that avails them the tragic results of past partisan political crimes; and therefore arms them against falling into the same trap.

    In his My March Through Prison (Adventures in Power, Book One), Chief Awolowo told a chilling tale of a twin attack on him, at a cocktail marking Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe’s appointment as Nigeria’s governor-general, by two key officials of state: Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Adetokunbo Ademola and Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. Both attacks belied a shocking contempt for the office of Leader of Opposition, a creation of the Parliamentary Constitution at independence.

    In the alleged attack, Awo quoted Sir Adetokunbo as dismissing a certain villager (read Awo) who opposed for opposing sake until he had nothing left to oppose; and lost the sympathy of his fellow villagers. Sir Abubakar, on his own part, pummelled a certain brat, “who called himself Leader of the Opposition”!

    Just imagine the constitutional travesty of the Head of the Judiciary (CJN) and Head of Government (Prime Minister) dismissing with scorn, in the presence of the Head of State (Governor-General) and other dignitaries, local and foreign, a constitutional creation, just because they did not like the face or the guts of the then occupier of the post!

    At that very beginning, it was the making of a bandit state! Though that banditry torpedoed the civil democratic order, condemned, for donkey years, the polity to military rule and now presents an uncivil civilian administration posing as a democracy, the ruling political mindset would appear not at all cured of that banditry!

    For starters, how was the Adetokunbo Ademola-Tafawa Balewa partisan rage different from the Jonathan brazen constitutional infractions in Rivers, the latest of which is the reported Police blocking the Rivers governor’s path into the Rivers Government House in Port Harcourt – just because the Jonathan Presidency neither likes the face nor the guts of Rotimi Chibuike Amaechi, the sitting governor?

    Now, if the “ancient sins” of high officers of state in the 1st Republic sentenced us to subsequent military and post-military political paralyses, what constitutional torture is the present Jonathan Presidency consigning the future generation to by its umpteenth constitutional recklessness in Rivers?

    Is Nigeria then fated to be the proverbial barber’s chair, painfully going round and round on a spot? And how long will that go on – already it is on for 53 years! – before something tragically gives?

    So long for reckless political behaviour! But that does not exhaust the unlearned lessons from Awo’s political troubles.

    This second segment comes with a thesis: that both the old Northern and Eastern regions, for political expediency, ganged up against Awo’s Western Region to subdue a perceived constitutional irritant in Awo and establish political suzerainty over his peacocky people – with collaboration, of course, from the old Yoruba conservatives (at loggerheads with Awo’s social welfare ideology and progressive politics) and perfidious former Action Group (AG) elements in the wake of the party’s schism.

    But even if this thesis is generally debatable, the creation of the Midwest Region in 1963 lends it credence. As at that time, agitations were for the creation of minority regions: the Middle Belt in the North, the COR (Calabar-Ogoja-Rivers) in the East, the Midwest in the West.

    But the coalition of Northern People’s Congress (NPC) and National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) collaborated to deliver Midwest Region; and also collaborated to forestall the creation of a Middle Belt Region in the North and a COR Region in the East, even as every regional government was, in principle, opposed to creating minority blocs from their regions.

    So, courtesy of political expediency, only the Western minorities in today’s South-South (Edo and Delta states) secured a region in the 1st Republic. The Eastern minorities (today’s Cross River, Rivers, Bayelsa, and Akwa Ibom states) did not.

    Even after the 15 January 1966 coup (that threatened the North-East power cohabitation in perceived favour of the East) and the 29 July 1966 counter-coup (that re-established North’s hegemony), the 2nd Republic still followed a North-East collaboration, with Alhaji Shehu Shagari as president and Dr. Alex Ekwueme as vice-president, though the dominant Eastern party back then was the Nigerian People’s Party (NPP). As in the 1st Republic however, NPP formed a federal alliance with the ruling National Party of Nigeria (NPN).

    A politically weakened post-Civil War East (read Gowon-era East Central State, now the five Igbo states) appeared to have found its salvation in the centre, whoever is there. That tradition appears on course, with its sympathy for the Jonathan Presidency, even as the polity buzzes with alignments and realignments.

    For the first time in Nigeria’s history, however, there appears on the horizon an alliance between the old West and the old North. That appears the new political map in which the All Progressives Congress (APC) is birthed, with today’s South West going with today’s North West and the North East, seeking allies in part of the Middle Belt, part of the South-South and part of the South East, in that order.

    That appears to fulfil Awo’s post-1983 presidential election prediction of a progressive-conservative thesis, antithesis and synthesis theory, resulting in new political alignments in the polity.

    To the extent that nothing is permanent and the old political alignment had been basically ruinous, the brewing development might just be a thing to cheer.

    But that is only if the new arrangement is used to forge, across the board, a fair and equitable new deal for every segment of the country.

    The APC must therefore guide against any political gang-up to dominate persons or subdue any part of the country. Otherwise, it too would have fallen into the Awo era grand mistake still plaguing thispolity.

  • Of Rehoboam and Jonathan

    David had fought all the wars and secured the kingdom. Solomon had taken the kingdom to its zenith, a pearl among nations. All Rehoboam needed was a little wisdom to “possess his possession”.

    Yet, he blew it with folly as profound as the wisdom of Solomon, his father. No thanks to bad advice, a royal fool was soon rid of his Israel.

    The odyssey of Goodluck Jonathan and his crumbling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is not unlike that of the grandson of the Biblical King David.

    All Rehoboam needed was a little concession, over forced labour, to an angry but still loyal people. All Jonathan needed was a little wisdom to manage the poisoned chalice of his presidency, given his controversial emergence.

    But instead of stooping to conquer, as counselled by Solomon’s wise advisers, Rehoboam succumbed to the empty power conceit of bad advisers his age, who a version of the Bible dismissed as “worthless young men”. He lost everything.

    Much the same way, President Jonathan is courting ruin by over-relying on a conceited presidency, almost shorn of all its glory and majesty.

    Even then, there is a big difference: Rehoboam was done in by callow advisers. Jonathan may yet be done in by callous advisers, young and old.

    The general madness in the Abuja power house is symptomatic of fated collective madness before the final, irredeemable crash! But it is early days yet.

    Still, on one point, Jonathan is spot on: former President Olusegun Obasanjo cannot be part of the solution to the roiling PDP problems. The man who now craves relevance as fish craves water, rather conveniently absent at the convention bust, re-appeared all too suddenly: like some happy vulture sampling sweet carrion!

    It is perhaps too creative to suppose, as the Presidency is doing, that Obasanjo and former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, would gang up to unhorse Jonathan, no matter how permanent interests always trump permanent friends or enemies, in soulless politicking. Both would appear too much of chartered political enemies and mutual-nemesis to fit in that bill.

    Still, it is grand immorality for Obasanjo to posture to be settling a PDP crisis of which he could easily have been the mastermind. But then, morality and legality are no strong points of the PDP!

    Indeed, the president as party outlaw was what Obasanjo bequeathed his party. That grand fraud labelled “PDP national leader” is ostensibly after the American system in which every successive president, or governor, assumes the role of party leader after election.

    But Obasanjo’s peculiar invention neither boasts the presumed good breeding of the normal American president nor brooks the conventional but rigorous checks and balances inherent in the American system.

    Indeed, it is the president as the unconscionable party bandit, before whom party laws and every member must bow and tremble. Just as Obasanjo’s imperial presidency affected the conceit to soar above the Constitution that gave it life, the party variant affected the conceit that a president was supreme to the party that gave it a platform.

    It was this subversive conceit that consumed Audu Ogbeh, the last PDP national chairman that had any character; and set PDP on a journey of no return. Ogbeh’s successors, Ahmadu Ali, Vincent Ogbulafor, Okwesilieze Nwodo and the latest poodle, Bamanga Tukur, were merry and eager rods in the hands of a bully president.

    All the same, Jonathan has himself to blame for the grave turn of events. The Christ was divined to die, so humanity would live. Still, woe begot Judas: that human scum that made that divine decree happen. PDP would sooner than later unravel, given its reckless and undemocratic ways. Still, history will damn Jonathan for making it happen in his own Presidency!

    Jonathan as presidential fall guy for past presidents’ PDP excesses, is a study in tragic flaws, bordering on wilful folly. Obasanjo had enough satanic gravitas to thump his nose at the law in bare-faced impunity. The ill-fated Umaru Yar’ Adua had a golden quietude about power that earned him respect, if not awe, before he passed on.

    But Jonathan, in fits and starts, reminds himself he is president; and would appear to act on that whim. He projects power – and crudely too – when he should not. But when he legitimately should, he clams up. He is the sorry study of a president as serial loser. But instead of pulling back to think after each avoidable loss, he plunges further in search of further disaster!

    That tragic streak he demonstrated in his Nigerian Governors Forum (NGF) election debacle, when he permitted himself the hubris of dictating which candidate should and should not run for NGF chair; but earned nothing but disgrace.

    Even after his horse, the jangling Jonah Jang had lost, he flexed presidential muscles in a laughable bid to crown a loser as winner. Huffing and puffing, he blundered into Rivers, in hot pursuit of the victorious Chibuike Amaechi: his minister Nyesom Wike, talking wike, wike, and generally making a fool of himself; his police commissioner, Mbu Joseph Mbu, shackling his presidential principal in a futile bid to police a sitting governor; and even his Dame, in an insufferable projection of power, earns the highest office in the land nothing but scorn.

    Yet, Amaechi, the object of all this naked dance in the market, would appear always a step ahead!

    The undertaker in Jonathan has condemned him to using Obasanjo-era bully tactics. Yet, the equation has drastically changed, except that only he won’t see it. That explains why the party is going kaput.

    From Jonathan, the Tukur mandate is clear: deliver 2015 PDP ticket, even if the party collapses. Well, it appears Tukur would get his crude mandate. But it would come with a collapsed party.

    Still, in impotent rage, the Jonathan PDP faction would illegally conscript the Nigeria Police as partisan rod to seal off rival camps, just as the Mbu Police in Rivers routinely aid and abet Jonathan’s local faction.

    Even, pro-Jonathan voices from the South-South couldn’t be more “Rehoboamic”: the ancient Pa Edwin Clark, with his utterances, is busy manufacturing vicious presidential enemies for his godson. Asari Dokubo, from the militant class, is mouthing his usual trashy talk.

    Even from the intellectual front, at the height of the oil subsidy strike of January 2012, the best the normally cerebral minority rights advocate, Annkio Briggs, could offer, as convener of Niger Delta Occupy Niger Delta Resources (NDONDR), was some South-South/South East Alliance that sinisterly suggested secession – and that on January 13, the anniversary of the day the tragic Civil War ended in 1970!

    Why is Jona so blest!

    The PDP goose is probably cooked – and Jonathan appears on his way, other things being equal, to be the first Nigerian president voted out of power.

    That would be good for Nigeria’s democracy. But it wouldn’t amount to much if whoever took over still repeated the PDP hubris. This polity must learn from the looming PDP meltdown – or it is doomed.