The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olakunle Abimbola

  • This way for necrolatry

    This way for necrolatry

    Eze Igbo gburugburu, the inimitable Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, must be smiling in his grave.

    The handshake across the Niger he canvassed in life, between Nigeria’s often mutually antagonistic East and West, might just be flourishing – in morbid romance with the dead, with the Ikemba himself as the undisputed godhead!

    It is the age of political necrolatry. Necrolaters, across the Niger, rejoice!

    The other day, Peter Obi, the Anambra governor, went to Ojukwu’s graveside and declared the Ikemba – dead or no – remained national leader of his faction of All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA). The humble governor dutifully queued behind the Ikemba, perhaps awaiting sacred instructions from the land of the dead!

    Not long after, after the judicial restoration of Victor Umeh as APGA national chairman by the Court of Appeal sitting in Enugu, Emeka Ojukwu Jr, staked a rightful claim to the Ojukwu godhead, as a political franchise. He said with Umeh’s reinstatement, his beloved father would be happy in his grave, knowing all was well with the party he left behind.

    Now, some political analysts are wondering: is this the opening skirmish in the APGA-PDP Vs APGA-APC war to come? Whatever it is, the Ikemba as a political franchise remains potent and undiminished.

    Step across the Niger then, to Oodualand, where Dr. Fredrick Fasehun, the Odu’a People’s Congress (OPC) leader, is mounting his own romance with dead ideas.

    With full flourish and even fiercer conviction, Dr. Fasehun is breathing new life into Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Second Republic party, presumed long dead with that republic (1 October 1979-31 December 1983).

    But maybe it cannot, in all good conscience, be said UPN is dead.

    As The Nation columnist, Mobolaji Sanusi rightly argued in his “Steps without imprint” piece (April 12), the UPN mutated from Awo’s First Republic Action Group (AG); and has itself mutated into aborted Third Republic’s unregistered People’s Solidarity Party (PSP), which became a major partner in Social Democratic Party (SDP), the IBB-imposed party that clinched MKO Abiola the presidency.

    In this Fourth Republic, the UPN mutants are the Alliance for Democracy (AD) and its variants, Action Congress (AC), Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and even (but Bolaji did not include this in his analysis) Democratic People’s Alliance (DPA), formed by some disaffected Lagos AD members, made up of Awoist old guard and young Turks, in the run-up to the 2003 elections in Lagos State.

    Indeed, but for the Ibrahim Babangida “new breed” experiment that somewhat cut the inter-republic umbilical cord, the AG regnant credo would even have been more pervasive in the South West political mainstream.

    So, the UPN could not have been said to be “dead”. But that cannot be said of Pa Fasehun’s latest political gambit, after the Hamza al-Mustapha campaign.

    Like the looming APGA-PDP vs APGA-APC battle in the East, could the coming ACN Vs UPN battle be one and the same proxy battle, but fought under different colours, at the behest of the same desperate forces, digging in for 2015?

    Look, politicians would be something else, if they didn’t play politics – and the meaner, the more cynical and the more sinister, the better perhaps. The kingdom of politics suffereth violence; and the end always justifies the power meanness!

    There are speculations, of course – true or untrue. There is talk of Fasehun’s OPC faction pitching the Jonathan Presidency for South West oil pipeline security gravy. What is sauce for the goose, is it not sauce for the gander?

    And there is also talk of the mudunmudun (Yoruba for finger-licking gravy) from the pitched gravy train coming in handy for Fasehun’s quixotic UPN resurrection. And why not? As the Yoruba say, the drunkard is no fool; he only blows his cash on his passion! It is good old utility in basic economics.

    Even outside the Fasehun gambit, Olu Falae and the Afenifere old guard are stirring, smitten perhaps by the ongoing APC merger, to rally a “third force” of Labour Party and other partisan bric-a-bracs to also essay a merger.

    “Me-too” syndrome is a legitimate political aspiration – for in partisan politics, driven by eternal push for relevance, a plus for one is always a minus for the other! So, let the politicians play their game.

    But not so the people, the umpteenth victims of these rogue games. That is why the discerning must ask hard questions; and the people themselves never surrender their thinking process to demagogues, especially where development is the issue.

    There is a radical difference between Lagos of 1999 and Lagos of 2013. That did not just happen. It was product of deliberate and painstaking efforts. Perhaps with the Federal Government achieving a similar transformation nationwide, Nigeria would not be the anarchist’s haven it has become.

    Now Ogun’s Ibikunle Amosun is thinking of light rail to link his capital, Abeokuta, to Lagos, by the Lagos-Ibadan expressway corridor. If that happens, South West economic integration would receive a big boost.

    Ibadan, hitherto so glum and comfy in its muck and rot, is suddenly making a dash for one of the cleanest cities around, just as Lagos has made that transition. Is Ibadan that same place as Adedibu’s garrison headquarters, where satanic chefs served life-scalding amala and gbegiri, in unbridled anarchy?

    Osogbo, Ilesa and other Osun towns are receiving a boost, after years and years of politically induced coma, the Oyinlola years being the latest excursion in the desert of misrule and stasis.

    After the tragically hilarious years of Fayose’s juvenile rule, climaxed by Oni’s mimic rule of progressive reaction, Ekiti appears settling down to deliberate and systematic development, which could well be sustainable.

    Again, all these are no partisan accidents. They are the work of those who want to make a positive difference.

    Wale Oshun, chairman of Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG), hit the nail on the head in his interview in The Nation (‘Oshun: Don’t extend amnesty to Boko Haram’, April 16): Each time Yorubaland appears on track for sustainable development and the prosperity that comes with it, noxious forces, internal and external, move to truncate the move.

    That macabre drama appears unfolding in Pa Fasehun’s curious UPN resurrection campaign – and every discerning mind must see through it, even if the old man is entitled to his avowed nobility of motive.

    Awo, the UPN and all he stood for are ever-living winning ideas that need no recall to life by cheap demagoguery. Awo is too saintly to be an ogre for anyone’s dirty, private political wars. Ojukwu probably is too; but only the Igbo can tell.

    Besides, with the likes of Bode George pushing Fasehun’s brand of UPN, Awo unlike Ojukwu, is probably sadly turning in his grave.

    Dr. Fasehun is, of course, entitled to his latest whim of political necrolatry. But Awo’s lifework of enlightenment and development would have been undone if anyone took him seriously.

    His is a final flourish of dead ideas before they are interred with the scorn they deserve.

     

  • Forget amnesty, try amnesia

    Forget amnesty, try amnesia

    Whatever spurts from Goodluck Jonathan’s blood-soaked power canvas is due to crass opportunism.

    He latched on to a “soft” presidency; blissfully forgetting the high folly of plunging your knife into a hippo someone else had hunted down. It is bound to cause life-threatening, if not life-claiming, diarrhoea!

    But the man of suspect luck is not the only culprit. No less guilty are his godfathers who conspired to vault him beyond his competence.

    Guiltier still, than these opportunistic political godfathers, are the giddy executors of Jonathan’s much-vaunted pan-Nigeria mandate of Southern Nigeria and the Middle Belt. In the ultra-reckless electoral ardour of the moment, they blithely proclaimed: we vote Goodluck, not PDP!

    Now, Goodluck is bad dream; and PDP no less a nightmare. There is no waking up from both!

    It is endgame, indeed, in self-induced political perdition! Welcome, poor souls, to the desert of slaughter, where Boko Haram is evil lord and master!

    In the rising appeasement hubbub, Boko Haram has declared it needed no one’s amnesty because it did no wrong! On the contrary, it was Its Murderous Majesty that must be begged to pardon the Nigerian state which, it claimed, had been wronging Muslims! Talk of the tail wagging the dog!

    But perhaps that would chasten the vocal minority, which stamps its often insensible holler with high wisdom; and dubs the dignified silence of the quiet majority as quintessential folly.

    But wait a minute! Where is Malam Adamu Ciroma? While everyone was betide themselves to make Jonathan president at all costs – let the heavens fall! – Malam Ciroma it was that maintained that dire warning: there would be consequences!

    Now before your fecund imaginations start linking the good malam with political Boko Haram, which Goodluck Jonathan has claimed is his major traducer, think hard and straight. Boko Haram might be the most explosive of President Jonathan’s many disasters. But it is not the worst.

    With absolutely no idea what to do with power, but straining every sinew to keep himself in the presidential saddle, the man of good luck brings with him multi-layered bad luck that would continue to haunt the country, even after he, and his nemesis, Boko Haram, would have become bad history.

    That Boko Haram may well score the double of being Nigeria’s nemesis as well should open the eyes of those who can’t see beyond a present power racketeering: that the House of Lugard is crumbling; and that, if care is not taken, there might soon be no territory over which to grab power and loot resources!

    Chronic, programmed and systemic underdevelopment is the wages of presidential incompetence. And Jonathan, with all due respect to his person and due reverence to his high office, is gold standard of that incompetence.

    Sure, Jonathan is not the first of these presidential incompetents. But when a presidential undertaker acts as though he had the latitude of the very first of those whose cumulative misdeeds have brought this country to this sorry pass, then the alarm bells must start clanging!

    That lack of rigour defines Jonathan’s flip-flops on Boko Haram; and allowing himself to be muscled into granting amnesty to a deranged and blood-thirsty band.

    Boko Haram is too deranged to recognise its all-too-obvious lunacy, talk less of showing penance and atoning for its high crime against millions of innocent Nigerians: in lost lives, hacked limbs and permanently shattered psyche!

    Indeed, what President Jonathan needs right now is amnesia, not amnesty. Amnesia would completely blot out all past crimes, no matter how wilful or heinous; and prepare the state for even more heinous future crimes, assured that future amnesties would wipe out future crimes, until the sick joke collapses in a heap!

    To start with, amnesia helps the president to forget, with bliss, that the impunity of his own rigged emergence, against his party’s zoning policy, may have birthed the so-called political Boko Haram.

    If indeed there is political Boko Haram, and it and its religious evil-twin had not been clobbered to seek a soft landing, why should they, for “amnesty”, hand over their ace to their writhing victims; taking a part when then could take the whole? And then what: cohabitate with Jonathan as they erect their beloved Islamic republic? Please!

    Whichever way you look at it, amnesty for now is a no-brainer. But the impasse that has forced it thunders a dire warning to future players in power and impunity: powerless is power acquired by dodge!

    Still, not even amnesia can excuse the shallow linkage between amnesty for Niger Delta militants and the one being proposed for Boko Haram.

    Turai Yar’adua has proffered a simplistic, exchange-is-no-robbery theory: her late maigida had granted amnesty to Jonathan’s creek anarchists. Why couldn’t Jonathan, court to court, just return the favour, to the militants’ Sahel cousins-in-terror? Jonathan, Hajia Turai seems to cry, bring this feudal transaction to closure!

    Gen. Muhammadu Buhari has also chipped in his own bit: amnesty for Boko Haram, as anything that can promote peace, should be encouraged. What of justice, the first condition for sustainable peace?

    Still, the Niger Delta case was different from Boko Haram, aside from the fact that the militants basically targeted oil-pipelines in the creeks, while Boko Haram killed with venom a defenceless urban population, even if there is clear criminality in both campaigns.

    But the most important difference: at amnesty time, the Niger Delta militants had been clobbered enough that the terror party seemed over; and the creek boys badly needed some soft landing; which their political leaders secured, in exchange for the free flow of crude.

    Boko Haram is different: a murderous, cocky, boastful and implacable foe, still flexing muscles and daring the state. What does anyone gain by granting such dogma-stoned anarchists amnesty – to turn the crumbled House of Lugard into the Taliban theocratic republic of their sick dreams?

    Jonathan and his traducers had better wake up. Nigeria, as structurally constituted, is close to end times. Restructuring for development is therefore the key. It is a stark reality: restructure or perish!

    After six years of blood and gore, Jonathan should take a bow, and quit his eternal scheming for power, even when it is clear he cannot add any value. He should therefore perish any thought of running in 2015.

    But his recommended exit does not obviate Nigeria’s structural debacle; which has made the country a developmental grave. So, whoever takes over from him, who blissfully forgets about this structural challenge, only plays with fire.

    That is why Jonathan must table concrete proposals on political and economic restructuring to give this polity a rebirth; and also propose a Nigerian Marshall Plan for the impoverished North East, which basically produces the wretched of the earth that sign up for Boko Haram and its evil campaign.

    Restructuring, along productive federal lines, would stop future Jonathans from seizing poisoned chalices coated with power; and condemning the rest of Nigerians to bloody trouble.

    That’s what the country needs – not some amnesty powered by amnesia!

  • The regime denuded

    The regime denuded

    Perhaps the only accident about Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai’s The Accidental Public Servant is the author developing a Samson complex; that seemed to care less if the tinselled edifice crashed on him –and the rest of the establishment. So brutally candid was the exposé!

    Such is the angst of a court revolutionary!

    No surprise there – that the gadfly denuded Olusegun Obasanjo and his “democratic regime” (crazy oxymoron, to be sure; but all-too-grim reality of the Nigerian polity). At the end of it all, Holy Sege, the pope of the Lugard establishment of his era, did not appear so pious after all!

    In contrast, Holy Sege’s No. 2, ab initio no hero of the gadfly, did not (at least in El-Rufai’s fierce opinion) levitate above his presumed moral universe; where scandals and rumours of scandals are allegedly fair fare. Still, both President Obasanjo and Vice President Atiku Abubakar have made their stands, for good or for ill; and await the verdict of history.

    But for this polity, for the umpteenth time, a single personage has succeeded in turning a putative democratic republic into a monstrous regime. A single man has moulded a country in his own image; and all the rest could do is gawk at the monstrosity!

    Now, is it just déjà vu, or an outright jinx – 1960, 1966, 1983 and 1999: important junctures that threw up inadequate personages, and changed for the worse the course of Nigerian history?

    1960: under Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, it took less than three years for Nigeria, putative model of African democracy, to abort into fascism, anomie and eventual anarchy.

    1966: Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi inherited a coup he knew nothing about, and was consumed by its violent contradictions, leaving behind the northern anti-Igbo pogroms and Civil War (1967-1970).

    1983: lieutenants of Shehu Usman Shagari, trophy of the Obasanjo junta’s manipulation, rigged out the Second Republic only after four years and three months.

    1999: Obasanjo, another trophy of Army Arrangement (apologies to Fela Anikulapo-Kuti) has turned this democracy into a burlesque, with dire consequences of its high-stake tragi-comedies.

    El-Rufai might come across to many, after reading his book and its comments on his fellow- establishment men and women, as rather too clinical, too antiseptic, too spick-and-span; as he galloped from victory to victory; solving one problem after another with near-divine aplomb and moral panache.

    Doesn’t blood flow in his veins, many are wont to ask? Was he living in Jupiter before he swooped in, like some super-human UFO, to salvage the Nigerian establishment, teeming with moral savages?

    These, to be sure, are tough questions to chew for Malam El-Rufai and his friends; even as his foes – and of those he has quite a myriad, who dismiss him as a maverick – as the debate on how Pentascope killed Nitel, and who was and was not responsible for it rages on.

    Still, in his book, El-Rufai, despite the cockiness of one cantering away on a moral high horse, trailed by a dust of self-praise, came across as a witness of truth: named names of his benefactors, his traducers and those in-between; and provided, in the appendices, letters, memos, facts and figures to back his claims.

    That leads to his take on his fellow “reformists”.

    Nuhu Ribadu: a fierce and volcanic anti-corruption crusader who nevertheless was no less fierce and volcanic in court politics and intrigue.

    Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala: the Breton Woods expat expert (apologies to Wole Soyinka’s biting sarcasm in The Interpreters) who, next to spreading the gospel of IMF and World Bank, logs fierce political ambition, far beyond the narrow prism of finance, debt forgiveness and allied affairs.

    Chukwuma Soludo: adept orator, dashing power dresser and dazzling intellectual showman who nevertheless was not averse to executive kowtowing to claim a coveted Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor trophy, when Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala, head of Obasanjo’s Economic Management Team, would not share her glory with anybody!

    The words above were not exactly Mallam El-Rufai’s. But they pretty much summarised his portraiture of his co-technocrats and flower of the Obasanjo administration. So, why would El-Rufai want to paint his friends in such not-too-flattering though apparently honest and candid view?

    He wanted to knock off everyone and, like his sweet-sour benefactor, Obasanjo, become the last man standing? Or because, even with the best of brains, Nigeria still had not found the right mixture of brilliance and character to become a model country?

    Only El-Rufai can pronounce on El-Rufai’s motives. But from the malice-less portraiture of these “reformists”, among whom El-Rufai was a prime member, the second supposition would appear more probable.

    It, of course, shows the futility of pushing personal daring to correct a systemic problem, as this column has always held. It was always going to end up in fiasco.

    Obasanjo came with a messianic air, built on nothing but personal daring, hung on personal rectitude and piety. But all too soon, it became clear that perhaps both traits were, for their Baba, a bridge too far!

    That seems to have bred the dissonance that made El-Rufai dismiss, with flat contempt, Obasanjo’s collapsed third term project and other presidential malfeasance like the presidential library moral swindle.

    But then, the harm is done. As it was in the Bible, Saul had killed his thousands and David, his ten thousands. Obasanjo, piety and all, got away with his presidential library extortion. So, why shouldn’t Goodluck Jonathan, following Obasanjo’s pious profanity, get away with his own presidential extortion in the name of God?

    The harm is done – and permanently perhaps: and not even El-Rufai’s moral outrage in his book could change that. But by trying to push himself as the exemplar of what Nigeria needs to succeed – intelligent, competent, fearless and daring – without addressing the systemic flaws that aided Obasanjo’s fiasco, El-Rufai appears fated to the same mistake.

    Nigeria needs competent and brilliant and resourceful and fearless and upright leaders to save her. But even more, Nigeria needs a structure that would build on Nigeria’s multi-national reality; and somehow weave, from this salad, a strong national fibre that proclaims a Rainbow Nigeria but does not decry the different colours that make up that brilliant rainbow.

    That is the point El-Rufai’s brilliant book missed as it went in quixotic search of the “de-tribalised Nigerian” – whatever that means.

    It is restructuring, stupid!

     

  • APC vs. APC vs. APC

    APC vs. APC vs. APC

    Lack in the formative years of the Second Republic (1979-1983), when parties were being formed; and old political war horses being lobbied to join new parties, there was so much pull on Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nigeria’s first – and last – ceremonial president.

    So enchanting was the lobby that a famed cartoonist hit on an even more enchanting cartoon, depicting a beaded Dr. Azikiwe, in feminine make-up, bejewelled, and perhaps perfumed – doesn’t perfuming come with the bridal territory? – as “Bride of the Year”!

    Now, the Great Zik appears resurrected in the fierce partisan attention for APC, the hottest acronym in Goodluck Jonathan’s Federal Republic. Indeed, APC would appear the bride of the century, in a political wedding conceived in intrigue and sponsored by millennial mischief.

    What really is hot about APC, hitherto some popular but innocuous drug; or, in security-defence circles, some motorised hardware called armoured personnel carrier? Nothing really, except high-stake politicking.

    Realpolitik? Maybe: for in a prebendal Nigeria where loss of power is tantamount to loss of everything, it could be extreme folly, indeed, for the regnant power holders to let go of their trove without a fight.

    That is clearly the contrived APC drama, no doubt orchestrated by a panicky Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), scared stiff of a looming opposition merger; but casually waved on by many Nigerians as “politics”.

    Here, a brief back-grounding is apposite. With fan fair, merging Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), All Nigerian People’s Party (ANPP), Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and a faction of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), announced All Progressives Congress (APC) as their new name, complete with symbol and slogan, en route to formalising the fusion after each party’s respective conventions, as prescribed by law.

    Then, from the blues, came the APC scramble: first, African People’s Congress, which request application came from a naive but pathetic young lawyer who reportedly got N30, 000 and a telephone handset as initial payment; and later, All Patriotic Citizens.

    Somehow, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) kept the dirty drama under wraps until it tried to suggest the merging parties change their new name from APC because, it claimed, some phantom bodies had staked a claim to the acronym. Then, all hell broke loose!

    To be sure, the INEC suggestion was hardly a language of reason or logic. It was rather a language of power and impunity, carefully coated in cunning, suggesting a ruling party proxy-INEC conspiracy to scuttle a putative merger.

    Indeed, Prof. Attahiru Jega, INEC chair, was quoted on a radio programme to have suggested the merging APC consider a name change; while denying INEC had registered any APC; and that the electoral umpire would strictly follow the laws guiding party registration.

    Also, many a Nigerian, quite adept at abandoning their viewpoints, even if the other party is so cavalier with bad faith, had started parroting the crass legalism: whoever raced first to INEC owned the acronym, even if common sense could conclusively prove it was stolen property!

    Many even accused the legacy parties of “carelessness”, meaning they should either have kept their new name like a lamp under a bushel, or rush post-haste to INEC to announce it, despite legal provisions that merging parties may not approach INEC until the legacy parties’ national conventions endorsed the exercise. Great indeed is the ardour of those who base their conviction on getting wise after the fact!

    That was the stage before INEC declined one of the APC wannabes registration, on the pretext, quoting Section 222 of the 1999 Constitution (as amended), that names and addresses of the party’s national officers were not registered with INEC. But is this legal deus-ex-machina, fatal to the case of one APC, a dummy to alert its phantom cousin to perfect its act, and only postpone the final registration crunch?

    That decision has expectedly sent one Onyinye Ikeagwuonu, pro tem chairman of the putative party, into a lather of cant. He railed of a “brewing storm”; and an alleged conspiracy against his party.

    With all due respect to the man and his holy rage, his rant only reinforces the déjà vu – that the subversive political pond that bred the likes of Arthur Nzeribe, Abimbola Davis and Daniel Kanu, notorious anti-democratic elements of the Babangida-Abacha era, is not about to dry up! What is not clear is if the citizenry would allow such rascality to snowball into a needless crisis, the end of which no one could predict.

    What might be INEC’s motives, by legally clobbering a phantom APC? A genuine effort to ensure good faith, common sense and good conscience, without which even the law is nothing but an empty code? Or a foxtrot off a partisan dais, to which it had inadvertently (?) been drawn?

    Whatever the motive, Prof. Jega and his INEC should pick up the history books and behold the self-imposed odyssey of the Michael Ani Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO), that mid-wifed the Second Republic.

    Chief Ani was doing just fine as a seeming independent arbiter until Richard Akinjide, SAN, national legal adviser to the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) soon to become the ruling party, proffered the controversial twelve-two-third legal joker, which FEDECO avidly accepted, just to escape a looming electoral run-off.

    Sure, NPN won that electoral trick; and even the highest court in the land endorsed that “victory”. But the Second Republic vanished in that bog of legal rascality, before it physically collapsed some four years and three months after.

    That brought the most virulent strain of military rule ever unleashed on this country. Should anyone essay 1979-era pranks, this polity might just lose more than a legal republic. The House of Lugard could come crashing down!

    To avert this tragedy, the opposition must press their right to APC, no matter the level of official plotting and subversion. That is the only way to subdue the bully tactics.

    Also, with this APC skirmish, it is clear INEC alone cannot be entrusted with clean elections in 2015 – such is the panic, paranoia, desperation and cunning of the Jonathan Presidency.

    Even with Jonathan’s good luck charm in 2011, Nasir El-Rufai claimed in his book, The Accidental Public Servant (page 466), that a PDP hierarch in Kaduna State “confessed” that 800, 000 phantom votes were added to Jonathan’s tally, just to make the 25 per cent requirement.

    If Jonathan and allies could pull such alleged stunts when the good luck man was riding high, and Jega was the exemplary electoral arbiter, what would a desperate president not do in these rapidly diminished times?

    Eternal vigilance, they say, is the price of freedom. Rigging – and a serious, soulless one at that – would come with the electoral territory from 2014. The opposition must seriously mobilise to make such venture hugely risky and unprofitable.

     

  • Plagued past Vs blasted present

    Plagued past Vs blasted present

    What Reuben Abati, ex-The Guardian and current presidential spokesman and Femi Fani-Kayode, former Aviation minister and Olusegun Obasanjo’s irreverent presidential gadfly, would openly tangle is the stuff of a very pleasing – and biting –irony: as shown in Abati’s “The Hypocrisy of Yesterday’s men” and Fani-Kayode’s counter, “The Delusion of Today’s men”.

    When Fani-Kayode was in power and in government (apologies to Ibrahim Babangida and his infamous post-12 June 1993 presidential election annulment bragging), there was no personage, no matter how hallowed, this gadfly could not sting, all in the service of his imperial president.

    Now, Abati has given the Obasanjo ancien regime a bit of the Fani gadfly dose and all Fani Power junior could do is whine and drivel; and deliberately mix up the valid corporate paralysis of the Federal Aviation ministry, with showcasing a claimed personal glory as aviation minister! That is perfect sophistry – but if reader is dumb!

    But even in his lachrymose riposte, Fani-Kayode dropped a useful Freudian slip, when he prayed with all his soul that yesterday’s men may yet be future occupants of power.

    The question is: power for what? Power for power’s sake, which epitomised the empty snorting, and even emptier grandstanding, of the Obasanjo era that Fani-Kayode served; and which has made it susceptible to Abati’s biting fusillade?

    Or power for positive change, which moral authority would have shut Abati up, even when, for the umpteenth time, his prostrate principal is barbed on account of his glaring incompetence?

    But this Abati vs Fani-Kayode media show also echoes an earlier intra-power bickering, even when Nigeria was far saner.

    When the Great Zik of Africa crossed the path of the then East Central State Administrator, Ukpabi Azika (Judas among his Igbo people but hero in Nigeria, for standing resolute against Biafra), Azika launched into a verbal poetry of “ex-this and ex-that”. The Great Zik kept his peace but got his pound of flesh when Azika fell with the Gowon regime in 1975. He fired back in sagacious triumph: “no condition is permanent”!

    Now, that was biting wit and counter-wit. But it did not leave Nigeria better than it met it, given the progressive decay of leadership, which may yet land this land in a ditch. Neither will this Abati/Fani-Kayode spat. It is yet another costly distraction from proxies of failed and failing leaders.

    Indeed, both Abati and Fani-Kayode produced another stunning metaphor in their debate on how, or how not, a certain Obasanjo aviation minister allowed the Port Harcourt International Airport “to grow grass”, while a Jonathan minister has not only fixed airports nationwide but is busy upgrading them.

    But really, that these proxies of a plagued past and a blasted present are allowed much media space, with all due respect to democracy and its tenets of free speech, is indicative of how the public space has been overgrown with grass, with wilful thorns of a horrible past and a disastrous present choking the imperative for radical change to salvage a clearly troubled future. It is mere empty noise that distracts the mind from clear thinking.

    But if Fani-Kayode and his Obasanjo class of 2003-2007 got so hit the best Fani could produce is a pathetic self-glorifying riposte, Abati is no less tragically misguided. The problem with Abati is that he is tragically trapped in the past. Besides, he is putting his head in a battle he does not understand: for Jonathan, his boss, is an Obasanjo creation.

    In his well primed verbal shellacking, he wrote with the aplomb, the glory and the majesty of a verbal royal; and of a wordsmith that takes no prisoners, the ruthless way he hit home!

    But alas! It was all authoritarian wordplay without moral authority. Like the Biblical King Saul, the moral glory of his Guardian column-writing days is departed from Dr. Abati. All that is left is a naked and hollow language of power – power his pathetic principal, neither a thinker nor a doer, but a gnome wanting to cling to power, even if he does not seem to know what to do with it, projects rather pitifully!

    Still, despite the glaring limitation of the Jonathan presidency, the Obasanjo crowd had it coming; and in the Abati shelling, got their due comeuppance.

    First, it was Obasanjo who, despite being a former president, would go and publicly run his mouth on the incumbent, despite a Lugardian power convention that demands otherwise. He easily forgets it was this same empty grandstanding for relevance that landed him in hot soup with the grim Sani Abacha, who unlike IBB before him and Goodluck Jonathan after him, did not suffer fools gladly.

    Then, an Obiageli Ezekwesili and a Femi Fani-Kayode would come, lobbing into the fray stupendous figures in alleged wasted “savings” for the gullible and excitable to chew, go ga-ga and foam in the mouth – a squandered US $67 billion here, a US 100 billion there from alleged oil sales for two years, query allegedly courtesy of David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, and another N350 billion allegedly shelled on dubious security vote.

    But why is Obasanjo and his gang getting self-righteously livid now? When they knew security was not assured, why did they hoard money as “savings” when they could have invested it in physical and social infrastructure, which would not have been stolen but would also have resulted in multiplier effects for the prostrate local economy and provided jobs for the millions of jobless?

    Was it the perfidy in the Yoruba tale: of prodding robbers to plunder (inviting alleged incompetents to an unstructured national treasury) only to tip off the owner of the property (the present Obasanjo and co jeremiad in the Nigerian media)?

    And why the lament on a spendthrift Yar’adua and Jonathan presidencies when Obasanjo had all the time to erect a robust check-and-balance system structured on genuine federalism, but instead opted to push himself as the strongman Nigeria would perpetually need? That perhaps was why he so desperately wanted a third term!

    Besides, did he not actively campaign for Yar’adua, his darling Umoru? And did he not junk Yar’adua on his sick bed, just to crown Jonathan as his new prince, zoning be damned?

    After all said, all the cacophony is nothing but unlamented civil war in the unravelling power caste Obasanjo tried to erect for his sole pleasure, masquerading as national interest. So, let the Obasanjo crowd maul themselves. It is pure Karma at play!

    Meanwhile, let Nigerians think: a plagued past and a blasted present only assures a torrid future that Nigeria would have only at its peril. So, instead of being sucked into this worthless in-fighting among useless power prodigals, Nigerians must get rid of them all in a clean sweep – and 2015 is another opportunity.

    The Obasanjo crowd, past and present, are the one who trouble Nigeria’s Israel. The power chamber – and the polity – is better without them.

     

  • For the North

    For the North

    Three events happened last week that, if explored, could lead to useful talks on a Nigeria structured on productive federalism.

    On January 28, Boko Haram, like a bolt from the blue, declared a unilateral ceasefire, on the condition that its destroyed mosques are rebuilt, the state pay compensation for past alleged abuses on its members and a general amnesty is declared, setting its members in gaol free.

    The pronouncer of the “ceasefire” was one Sheik Abu Mohammed Abdulazeez Ibn Idris, self-announced Boko Haram “second commander” for north and central Borno (Borno is the epicentre of the insurrection), who claimed a (divine?) charter from Abubakar Shekau, his leader, to announce the “ceasefire”. He spoke in Maiduguri.

    On the same day, a conclave of “northern elders” under the aegis of the Northern Development Focus Initiative (NDFI), met in Kano to throw their weight behind the Boko Haram offer. Now, was this support a coincidence? Or was it choreographed to hustle the polity into some Boko Haram soft landing, despite the heinous crimes its members, particularly the hiding and cowardly ring leaders, have committed against innocent citizens?

    Certainly, the way NDFI glibly talked of post-Boko Haram “restoration, reformation and rehabilitation” (hardly a crime), and quickly linked that proposal to amnesty for Niger Delta militants, was highly suspicious of a well-crafted script to push the sop of convenient “peace”; over the rigour of justice that insists on punishment following crime.

    So, the Jonathan Presidency must not allow itself to be bustled into another classic Northern entitlement (that sickly rationalisation that the polity must always accommodate northern excesses) in the name of easy peace that would come back to plague everyone.

    Get this clear: when a deranged group of citizens slaughter others as Boko Haram is doing, there must be dire consequences to avert a future recurrence. But that piece of common sense appears lost on the NDFI amnesty orchestra.

    Nevertheless, it is not lost on victims whose blood and gore Boko Haram has wilfully spilled on a fraudulent creed. Neither is it lost on any putative lunatic fringe sure to plot their own mass murder, for whatever vacuous doctrine, should Boko Haram get away with a slap on the wrist.

    The third event happened the next day, January 29.

    At Enugu, the political capital of the old Eastern Region, a body that calls itself the Southern Nigerian People’s Assembly (SNPA) gathered to push for a restructured Nigeria, a national conference to bring out that restructuring along productive federal lines, fiscal federalism to form the basis of the new federation, recognition of the six geo-political zones as Nigeria’s new federating units, and shutting out the meddlesome interloper that is the Federal Government in local council business, which ought to be an exclusive state affair, among other demands.

    The triangular chair of SNPA appears credible enough: Alex Ekwueme, elder citizen and Second Republic vice president of the Federal Republic, Bolanle Gbonigi, fiery cleric and unfazed Yoruba nationalist and Edwin Kiagbodo-Clark, another elder citizen and Ijaw nationalist.

    Pa Clark is though, right now, burning nationwide bridges he built over the years in the cause of his underwhelming godson, President Goodluck Jonathan, all in the cause of the 2015 Ijaw presidency project; down from the pan-Nigeria mandate of Southern Nigeria and the Middle Belt that propelled Jonathan to power in 2011.

    But the amalgam of SNPA members would appear far less credible, with many of the hoard clambering on the southern unity campaign and the push for true federalism as a last straw to clutch for political relevance. Nevertheless, gunning for relevance in a political quicksand is no crime!

    Still, this pot-pourri of divergent interests, and the penchant for each to clutch at some gains no matter its absurdity, would appear to explain the patent contradiction in the SNPA demands. The body calls for a restructured federation. Yet in another breath, it wants additional two states, with one in the South East, to bring the South at par with the North.

    While creating additional states makes sense with the present parasitic unitary system masquerading as a federation, it makes absolutely no sense in a restructured Nigeria SNPA is pushing for – except as a Freudian slip that suggests that structure or no structure, the parasitic Nigerian power elite have a sickly consensus on feeding fat on the system!

    Or how else does one explain the multiplication of wasteful bureaucracy, which new states epitomise, when it is proved beyond any doubt that many of the so-called states are a drag on real development but only a sop for elite greed?

    But to juxtapose a body grandstanding for change with another grandstanding for the status quo, just consider the Arewa Consultative Forum, ACF’s response to SNPA’s call for two additional southern states. ACF, in a February 1 communiqué in Kaduna dismissed the call, noting rightly that it would only be wasteful bureaucracy. But if new states must come, ACF insisted, they must be based on population and land mass. How convenient!

    Still, many positives can be taken from these developments. The SNPA must avail itself sharper conceptual clarity on its mission, if it is to escape a harsh historical judgment of empty posturing for relevance, when it had the chance to push back the country from the precipice. ACF must manifest less of the sickening sense of northern entitlement. That has put both the North and the whole country in this present bind.

    But the more exciting chimes have come from the NDFI, notwithstanding its shopping for subversive sympathy for Boko Haram. The body is talking of a pan-northern free primary and secondary education. That is highly welcome, for it is telling the North to abandon its age-old system of elite education hinged on native feudalism and embrace mass education, to build a future equal-access and equal-opportunity society. That is strategic thinking.

    But in a not-so-shocking relapse into that notorious northern sense of entitlement, NDFI called on northern states to compute their Boko Haram security spends; and pass the bill to the Federal Government, since the 1999 Constitution charges that government with security. Excellent sophistry!

    Maybe Governor Babatunde Fashola and other southern governors, busy equipping the central police even when they are not effective chief security officers of their respective states, should forward their own bills to the Inspector-General of Police for settlement!

    But maybe the polity should indulge these northern states. Maybe the Federal Government should settle the bills. Surely, Nigeria needs a Marshal Plan for Northern Development, after its thieving elite had misused federal power and had beggared their region for eons.

    But that should be the final settlement in exchange for a trade-off for rigorous restructuring of Nigeria along productive federal lines. That way, the North – and the rest of the country – can look after its own interest and develop at its own pace.

    That may well save the contraption of Lord Fredrick Lugard, and its ever present threat of collapse, as it lumbers to its centenary.

     

  • Jona e don come again

    Jona e don come again

    Here lies our mutton-loving king,
    Whose word no man relies on,
    Who never said a foolish thing,
    And never did a wise one – John Wilmot (1647-1680), Earl of Rochester, on Charles II (1630-1685)

    Jona e don come again – what does that remind you of? Afrobeat legend, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and his immortal number, Fela e don come again? Fela, that with his stinging lyrics and brash irreverence whipped wayward Nigerian leaders, military and civilian, into line?

    And who does the Wilmot quote above, on King Charles II of England, remind you of? Change “mutton-loving” to “cassava bread-gobbling”, and you would probably see Charles II leap into 21st century Aso Rock; and our own Goodluck Jonathan dive into 17th century Court of Saint James!

    There are differences in specifics, of course. While Charles II loved his mutton and Goodluck Jonathan loves his cassava bread, the jury is still out on whether or not, like Charles II, no one ever relies on Jonathan’s word, whether Jonathan never said a foolish thing or ever did a wise one – since his first term is still counting; and he is busy, very busy, ogling a second!

    What is without controversy, however, is that like Wilmot’s rather unflattering impression of Charles II (who should have been wiser, for his father Charles I – 1600-1649 – was executed by the Oliver Cromwell mob), Nigerians are nervy about the their president’s lack of verbal rigour, since they hold their breath anytime the president speaks extempore – and he never disappoints by the seeming sheer shallowness of his thinking; and the seeming eternal grudge in his psyche!

    It is true: Ibrahim Babaginda peppered us with subversive slipperiness, Sani Abacha sapped us with Stone Age starkness, Olusegun Obasanjo bombed us with empty superiority complex, and Umaru Musa Yar’adua (Allah rest his soul!) teased us with health-challenged taciturnity.

    Might Goodluck Jonathan be adding a lack of gravitas and executive inferiority complex to the mix? That brings to the fore the president’s latest gaffe, during his surprise visit to the Police College, in Ikeja, Lagos.

    Now, without reference to the merit or demerit of the president’s points, that outburst followed a disturbing pattern, which always sends many a concerned Nigerian reeling.

    As a dutiful president, highly paid and generously maintained by the citizens, his job was to go there, after the Channels TV expose, to find out the level of the rot and fix it.

    But alas! The president, from his comment, was sadder at the PR disaster the decaying Police College was giving his government than at the scandalous decay of Nigeria Police’s premier training college! How can a president justify his keep with such grudge reasoning?

    O yes: a committee has been set up to probe the rot and make recommendations and all that “Jonathanistic” predictable! But by that tragic Freudian slip, of a president fishing for motive when the reality of the situation was sobering enough, most would continue to doubt the appropriateness of Jonathan’s temper for leadership; and even his competence to analyse problems and solve them.

    So, Jonathan is more interested in smashing his self-conceived agent provocateurs who allowed “penetration” into the sorry college than he is in fixing the mess. Now, what sort of self-misguided president is that?

    But that was not the first time President Jonathan would evince such abhorrent traces. In January 2012, after the “fuel subsidy” removal ill-advised by his Breton-Woods radicals, bent on making Nigeria the eternal peon of their Western metropolitan masters, Goodluck Jonathan fumed without end on how his enemies sponsored the protests; and how these presidential traducers provided Lagos protesters with choice victuals and bottled water; that even his own presidential villagers of Otuoke could not afford!

    To start with, such un-presidential whining was absolutely uncalled for – both as private riposte and public presidential counter. In a democracy, the legitimate job of the opposition is to paint government black to ease its own way to power, just as the government, if it falls into opposition, is perfectly entitled to same tactics, to claw its way back from power wilderness.

    But the disturbing pattern then – as now in the Police College case – was that the president would blame people protesting a heinous policy rather than rebuke himself that pushed that policy. As it has turned out, the so-called “subsidy” was partisan election gravy which Jonathan wanted Nigerians to, willy-nilly, pay back. What if those protests had not partially checkmated that unconscionable plot!

    To compound the Jonathan presidential tragedy, he has surrounded himself with “elders” pushing his cause who nevertheless are no more than juveniles – and wilful, misguided ones at that!

    The other day, Elder Godsday Orubebe, minister of Niger Delta affairs, pounced on Rivers Governor Rotimi Amaechi, for no crime than a rumoured aspiration for presidential ticket 2015; and for not “respecting” the president – as if Jonathan were a god to be worshipped willy-nilly and not a republican chief public servant to be judged, rewarded or punished strictly by the worth of his work.

    Then on January 24, Edwin Kiagbodo-Clark, Ijaw nationalist, took up the president’s case, descending on the PDP Governors’ Forum for not bowing and trembling before his protégé; and former President Olusegun Obasanjo for subverting the PDP party order.

    To be sure, Clark’s attack on Obasanjo is not unjustified, for Obasanjo really ruptured the PDP hierarchy by amassing both presidential and party powers. But is Pa Clark piqued because Obasanjo grabbed power or because Jonathan has the governors to contend with, in his own sorry attempt to repeat Obasanjo’s power-grab rascality?

    Pa Clark, with all due respect to him, speaks like one without a sense of history. As a younger man, he served under the young Gen. Yakubu Gowon (1966-1975). Sure, Gowon back then, had his own share of gaffes, like the claim that Nigeria’s problem was not money but how to spend it.

    Still, Gowon boasted no doctorate when he ruled (though he earned one later); and was far more callow than Jonathan. But was Gowon a tell-tale of fumbling, and lack of rigour and wisdom like Jonathan, with his PhD, now? Yet, Clark would bad-mouth anyone saying Jonathan is unfit for second term, as his disastrous first-term record is clearly showing – just as he libelled anybody that opposed Jonathan’s presidential bid in 2011.

    Well, there is news for Pa Clark and his protégé. A time was, when some power brokers thought you just needed a stamp of the North, no matter how defective you were, and you were as good as president. That prompted the disastrous Bashir Tofa-Sylvester Ugoh 1993 presidential ticket.

    Now, Clark and co think if only Jonathan can muscle the PDP nomination (like Obasanjo before him), his presidential encore is assured. Let Pa Clark, and his ilk, dream on. Someone needs to be sacrificed, anyway, to clear the illusion that only the worst is good enough as president for Nigeria.

    Jonathan, with his utterly uninspiring present term and clearly illogical fixation with a fresh term, has done enough to earn that electoral disgrace.

     

  • Oyinlola taku

    Oyinlola taku

    Oyinlola taku [Oyinlola stays put] – that resonates well with “Akintola taku”, that 1962 Daily Times immortal headline that captured the constitutional crisis in the First Republic Western Region. This was after Premier Samuel Ladoke Akintola (SLA) had rebuffed a parliamentary sack by the Western House of Assembly.

    The resulting impasse, and the contrived state of emergency piously orchestrated by the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa federal government, was the beginning of the end for that republic. But the Balewa government’s contrivance had the fond hope of nailing, once and for all, Obafemi Awolowo, officially the Federal Opposition Leader, but the central government’s Political Enemy No. 1. It ended up nailing that republic.

    Nevertheless, like history repeating itself and petering out into a farce, the present Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) power in-fighting is a poor copy of the original.

    To start with, Olagunsoye Oyinlola, embattled PDP national secretary, has not, in the classical sense of the word, “taku”. After initial threats to ‘storm’ his office, after his latest court-ordered sack, the man the Court of Appeal had earlier booted out from the Osun governorship, after illegally occupying the post for more than three years, beat a tactical withdrawal.

    If he is staying put at all, it is more de jure than de facto. De jure [in the eyes of the law], he insists he is still PDP national secretary. That is the long and short of his appeal, now before the Court of Appeal. But de facto [in reality], at least for now, he is out in the cold – and that is where the rich stream of ironies surrounding Oyinlola’s present odyssey is so sweet and refreshing.

    For some three-and-a-half years, Oyinlola was de facto governor of Osun, while Rauf Aregbesola, the de jure governor, languished in political wilderness. How long will Oyinlola languish before he gets justice, one way or the other?

    Then Kunle Kalejaiye, SAN, the attorney alleged to have engaged Justice Thomas Naron, chairman of the first Osun State Election Tribunal, in allegedly indecent telephone text exchanges, is also the attorney leading Oyinlola’s cause at the Court of Appeal, to over-turn his client’s sack by the verdict of Justice A. Abdu-Kafarati. It is a grim irony that both client and attorney, on the attack to save Oyinlola’s illegal rule as governor, are now on the defensive to save an ill-fated job as PDP national secretary.

    Again, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, the do-or-die electoral philosopher of 2007, is reportedly in the checkmated Oyinlola camp. Though Obasanjo’s ancien regime offered Oyinlola the pad to launch his ruthless gubernatorial heist 2007, both philosopher and acolyte would appear fated to languish in the evolving Goodluck Jonathan PDP hell. The allegation is rife that Oyinlola’s ouster is to clip the wings of Obasanjo, in the hot proxy war for the soul of PDP, en route to 2015 presidential candidacy.

    Indeed, if the allegations that the legal instrument PDP chairman, Bamanga Tukur, used to post-haste oust Oyinlola is skewed, is it not sweet irony that the grand philosopher of do-or-die politics and one of his foremost acolytes are seeping the bitter taste of their own galling brew, before the judiciary clears the wilful mess, if it ever does? Ah! So the rich also cry?

    To be sure, no one can be sure how the Oyinlola conundrum would pan out. Though the Bamanga Tukur camp appears set to consign the embattled Oyinlola into the dustbin via a legal technicality, with the announcement of Onwe Onwe as acting PDP national secretary, another faction of the party has propelled Victor Kwon, PDP national legal adviser, to ask a federal high court in Abuja to stay execution on the verdict. It is instructive that a counter-manoeuvre is on to replace Kwon with a “more experienced” lawyer.

    Still, if the status quo remains and Victor is victorious, Oyinlola gets a breather. If not, it is sure political Golgotha. Some lobbies, perhaps with a morbid sense of humour, are even proposing Obasanjo – Obasanjo, a principal part of the hurt Oyinlola party – to meet with Tukur to resolve the crisis! Some resolution!

    Why, even Jonathan, on January 19, offered his own flattering sop, claiming his administration was building on Obasanjo’s legacy! Some building! Reminds one of a certain pounded yam feast before the final, ruthless daggering!

    This is cynicism of the highest order, even if there is a surfeit of bad faith in both warring camps.

    But the sweetest irony may well be this – and Justice Isa Ayo Salami, the sacrificial lamb to appease the PDP gods, for abject failure to sustain their brazen gubernatorial robbery in Ekiti and Osun, must love it: a petition alleging probable miscarriage of justice has hit the Court of Appeal, Lagos, causing an indefinite adjournment.

    Ironically, on this one, Tukur and Oyinlola are in the same corner, against the Adebayo Dayo-led Ogun State PDP executive committee, which had earlier in a Lagos federal high court, kayoed the Tukur PDP national executive committee, on a case to determine the lawful lord of the manor in Ogun PDP. But an allegation, rather wild, had popped up that Justice Amina Augie, head of the appeal panel, was likely to be biased, since some highly placed personages had allegedly bragged she was in hock with them.

    So, to preserve justice, Justice Zainab Bulkachuwa, acting president of the Court of Appeal (PCA), had frozen the process, pending the investigation of the allegations – right step.

    Still, how can Goodluck Jonathan’s latest Trojan horse against Justice Salami’s legitimate return as PCA, no matter how well meaning the Honourable Justice Bulkachuwa is, be perceived as guarantor of justice? How can the Court of Appeal, under its present contrived presidency, deign to push for justice and fair play when it is itself a sorry captive to, and culpable conspirator with, the Jonathan Presidency against justice for its own rightful president?

    This streak of ironies and its current victims are a lesson to all – which, however, is not saying much. The Nigerian political class, as Socrates said of the Athens of his day, is such a slow-witted mule, almost unable to learn any lessons, even if it is always stung by a gadfly. The people themselves have a terrible penchant to suffer fools gladly.

    If Obasanjo, now a putative victim if not an actual one, had scaled the Mandela heights during his presidency, instead of roughing it up in the power trough, he would have bequeathed this republic with high ideals, below which his successors would find difficult to levitate. But alas! So, why would his successors not, with his own patented impunity, splatter his face with executive mud?

    As for Oyinlola, it is sweet irony to taste a long agonising wait for justice, as Aregbesola did, if indeed he was rightfully picked as PDP national secretary. But if he wasn’t?

    The collective tragedy is, of course, that these are costly distractions for a country that needs more than its fair attention span in the race against time for development. Pity!

  • One bad term …

    One bad term …

    Clearly the most damning irony about the controversial Goodluck Jonathan 2015 campaign poster, which copies flooded Abuja, is its claim that “One good term deserves another”. But even the most rabid of Jonathan supporters would concede his has been a bad, nay, terrible term.

    So, what does a bad term deserve? A re-sit, as Gabriel Igbinedion, the Esama of Benin, reportedly quipped in pleading the case of his son, Lucky? Lucky’s 2003 “re-sit” and the subsequent 2007 vote-fiddling meant to block positive change, only made Edo a near-total paralysis before the redemption of the Adams Oshiomhole era. Lucky for Lucky. But absolutely terrible for Edo.

    Yet the Edo paralysis was nowhere near the chaos and gridlock that is the Federal Republic under Goodluck Jonathan. Yet, the good luck president ogles a second term!

    If free and fair election were guaranteed, it would have been electoral suicide for President Jonathan to seek a second term; and supreme electoral folly for his party to present him.

    Indeed, so sure would have been the electoral rout to come that the opposition would have flocked into churches, mosques and traditional shrines for pre-election thanksgiving, doubly assured that the sitting president was a lamb being led to the slaughter, by virtue of his woeful performance.

    But alas! Nothing is assured, not the least free elections, in Nigeria’s peculiar politics. That is why a personage that logs the record of perhaps the most incompetent president Nigeria has ever had would deem to flex muscles and yearn for a second term! It is a salute to the contempt with which the ruling racket holds the Nigerian people, as well as the electoral process.

    Still, to be fair to the president, he has denied authorship of those posters – fair enough.

    The snag, however, is there is a feeling of déjà vu over the incident: a very vivid sense that we have seen all this dissembling before.

    Under Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, the self-made “military president” would say something and his alter ego, the trinity of Dr. Aitkins, Arthur Nzeribe and Abimbola Davies’ Association for Better Nigeria (ABN) would canvass the exact opposite, with sickening patriotic piety.

    Under Gen. Sani Abacha, Daniel Kanu’s phantom Youths Earnestly Ask for Abacha (YEAA!) urged a thoroughly hated iron dictator and power usurper to go ahead and transmute, prompting The Economist, the London weekly, to write, in its 23 April 1998 issue, a tongue-in-the-cheek article it entitled, “Abacha, for ever, and ever”. Only “divine intervention” put paid to the Goggled One’s inordinate dreams.

    President Olusegun Obasanjo, after hiding behind a finger over a botched term elongation gambit, invoked Diego Maradona’s “Hand of God” cheeky nonsense; declaring that if he really wanted a third term, and had asked his God, his God would have given it to him. In Nigeria’s political jungle, Obasanjo had found his own variant of Maradona’s Hand of God!

    And even Goodluck Jonathan, in his caretaker presidency days, was asked whether he would run for president, during the raging zoning controversy. Instead of a simple and straight answer, he lurched into a long and winding story of how he could run for president, or team up with someone as vice president, and how, in mid-sentence, he suddenly realised he was not even thinking of such things!

    Can someone please compare and contrast Jonathan’s answer back then to his current refrain that he is too busy on his job right now to be messing around with 2015 posters?

    Of course, the unsure caretaker president later became absolutely sure he would be real president for only one term – the one term he is making a hash of. Though now he disowns these satanic alter egos pasting Abuja with his campaign posters, he is now even more unsure whether to stop them or tell them to continue, because he is too busy with state duties! It is the making of Goodluck Jonathan as a presidential dissembler!

    It is clear therefore that, despite the empty anti-corruption posturing of the Obasanjo years, little has changed in Nigeria’s sick power chamber. And President Jonathan: his might have been a shifty, parlous and near-hopeless tenure. But the president has been clear-eyed and sure-footed in the power lessons he has allowed himself to learn. To the chagrin of long suffering Nigerians, he is no different from his far-from-illustrious predecessors.

    That is why Jonathan’s pre-election dissembling could well have been from a manual straight out of the Obasanjo, or Abacha or Babangida years. When IBB was swearing for the sanctity of this so-called transition programme, state money was being funnelled to his alter ego trinity to create so much chaos that, at the end of the day, a brow-beaten nation would “beg” the military president to please exchange his uniform for baba riga and continue his good work. Fortunately for Nigerians, the IBB scheme collapsed on his head.

    Everyone, of course, knew state money was responsible for Kanu’s thunderous YEAA for Abacha; and also behind the cacophonous racket by the musical soldiers of fortune that were part of the gravy. Goodluck Jonathan spawned his own musical mercenaries with his Eagle Square Abuja Goodluck Nigeria concert, which has turned nothing but bad luck for Nigerians. Obasanjo, to this day, denies the alleged hefty money that changed hands for his term elongation gambit. He can tell that to the marines!

    Not surprising, therefore, pre-election manoeuvring are afoot – again, straight from the IBB/Abacha/Obasanjo-era ignoble books.

    Up, from nowhere, has popped a 10 million cell phone-purchase programme for farmers. Ibukun Odusote, permanent secretary, Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, disclosed N60 billion (about US $384 million) would be blown on this sweetheart deal. Akinwunmi Adesina, Agriculture minister, claimed otherwise after a public uproar.

    The making of another scam? Might this sudden quixotic love for Nigerian farmers be to 2015 what the oil subsidy voodoo payment was to 2011?

    Inside the PDP, a civil war has broken out – and not unconnected with 2015, even if the theatre of war is the party’s Board of Trustees (BOT). President Jonathan wants his man to head the BOT and help storm-troop delegates; and harvest nomination. Obasanjo, doomed to life-long political hustling when he could have earned post-presidency authoritative influence is, Don Quixote-wise, throwing his hat into the ring for a laughable candidate. To these party bosses, intra-party manoeuvres to skew the nomination process are even more vital than the long-suffering electorate!

    And outside, the cement cartel, unfazed poster children of Nigerian crony capitalism that reached its zenith during Obasanjo’s era of transparent corruption, is staging its own civil war! Might this high-stake manoeuvre be a bid to extract concession from a government whose party would soon come, cap in hand, for election donations?

    These bewildering dramas, not what the incumbent has done or not done, are why Jonathan could deign to dream of an encore, when his present tenure is nothing but disaster. But it is also left for Nigerians to counter: one bad term begets absolute electoral rejection.

    But will they? The day they do, all this rascality will stop.

     

  • Cement armada? No, just drama

    Cement armada? No, just drama

    The theatrical-minded may well dub the trade tiff between Ibeto Cement Limited and the Dangote Group a play called Cement Armada.

    It is a grim drama all right, being a real-life trade scuffle between an entrenched interest and a competitor that wants to break in but feels illegitimately blocked.

    But there is certainly no armada, for if there were, cement prices could have come crashing. They have not. That therefore locates the trigger of this grim drama beyond the two corporate gladiators; and right in the other-things-being-unequal extant business atmosphere which, if not corrected, is fated to cripple everyone in the long run.

    That is the correct interpretation of this drama, which the powers-that-be must address. But first, the claims and counter-claims.

    The Dangote Group, heavy player and clear market leader in essential consumables like cement, sugar, salt, flour and pasta, fired the first salvo on 6 December 2012, when it announced it had shut down its Gboko, Benue State, cement plant; on alleged glut resulting from “dumping” of cheap cement imports, contrary to the Federal Government’s policy of complete local manufacture of cement.

    Lafarge WAPCO Cement, a co-player and once-upon-a-time market leader, has weighed in on Dangote’s side, affirming indeed imported cement was hurtful to the local manufacturers; and therefore to Nigeria’s long-term economic survival. Is this the hand of Esau and the voice of Jacob?

    Lanre Opakunle, Lafarge’s plant manager for its Ewekoro II, Ogun State, plant, certainly does not think so. He said 60, 000 tonnes of cement remain unused in the plant’s silos while 220, 000 metric tonnes of clinker, an intermediary cement product, literally chokes its factory, just like Dangote Cement’s woes of a glut of 38, 000 tonnes of cement, and lots and lots of clinker.

    Like Dangote Cement, Mr. Opakunle lamented the high energy costs, with low pour fuel oil, which has jumped from N25 a litre in 2009 to N107.76 a litre by November 2012; making a 331 per cent leap. High haulage costs, in the absence of efficient rail to truck the cement bulk, add another 20 to 25 per cent, to the price of cement, therefore pricing the product out of the reach of most.

    The dire situation could well threaten no less than 46, 000 jobs from the Dangote end alone, if Joseph Makoju, ex-WAPCO, special adviser to Aliko Dangote, president of the Dangote Group and president, Cement Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (CMAN), is to be believed. That would be horrible indeed, were it to happen, in a country already crippled by mass joblessness.

    Musibau Lawal, Lafarge WAPCO’s production manager, not unfairly links the current local cement challenges, vis-a-vis imported cement, to the comatose Nigerian local textile industry, perennially at the mercy of imported fabrics.

    With alleged cement glut in China finding a haven in the Nigerian market, he argued, a “paltry” duty of 20 per cent and a levy of 15 per cent make imported cement not only very cheap, but also an open tomb for local cement manufacturers. So? The government, he clearly suggested, must jerk up these duties.

    Fine and legitimate argument – until, of course, you ask the question: how much of cement is imported? Ibeto Cement, on whose neck the local cement manufacturing lobby is about hanging a charge of cement-import Judas, has provided an answer: 1.5 metric tonnes yearly; which it claims is less than five per cent of the Nigerian cement market.

    Again, if cement is a regional business because of its bulk, can sole importation into the South-East/South-South market, where Ibeto plays, lead to a “glut” in the whole of the country? That is doubtful, by the very illogicality of the argument. Ibeto’s import could not therefore have caused it, even if rival local manufacturers in the South-South, and to some extent, the South East, would feel short-changed by its “cheap” imports.

    So, what did? Cement is most probably over-priced because the industry is an oligopoly; and the local producing cartel is, at worst, blaring a business nationalism orchestra to keep prices up; or at best, reeling from the inclement local production weather.

    If the problem is the first, then it is most regrettable and unpatriotic, even if ironically, the cartel plays on a high-pitch patriotic orchestra. If it is however the second, that is for the government to sort out: radically improving on those key indices – power, rail, policy inconsistency, financial infrastructure – that make local production sheer hell.

    It is certainly not by goading the government to go back on its commitment to Ibeto, to rectify the 2005 unjust closure of its Bundu Ama, Rivers State factory, canonised by a judgement order of court, after free and unfettered negotiations.

    That is what WAPCO’s Mr. Lawal seems to suggest. But changing the cement-import template, from the Ibeto agreement, would do no one no good. Hiking the import duties would push up prices, and make cement even more unaffordable, with disastrous consequences for local cement. Besides, it would put the Federal Government in hot legal waters.

    Dangote and Ibeto, in the trade tiff, have stacked cards on each other to win an argument. Dangote tried to paint Ibeto as the import Judas standing between Nigeria and self-sufficiency in cement production. It also threw in the scarecrow of factory shut-downs and loss of jobs. Ibeto counters by painting Dangote as a monopolist leading a local cement cabal of oligopolists to elbow out legitimate competition. All is fair in a trade war, as Dangote is no devil any more than Ibeto is a saint.

    Ripples’ interest is strictly for upholding the right of law-abiding citizens to legitimate business opportunities in a republic erected on law. Much too long, this Federal Republic has been captive to business lobbies, and would appear quite adept at conspiring with powerful interests against the legitimate interests of other citizens who, though less powerful and influential, the government, by its oath of office, is sworn to protect.

    That would explain the Obasanjo Presidency’s reckless shutdown of the Ibeto factory in 2005 and the concerted current campaign against redressing that injustice. But at least Ibeto spoke out and decided to fight.

    Not so the late Captain Israel Ademola Haastrup, patriot and sundry investor, who quietly bore his own scars to the grave, when he died late 2012. His Haastrup Jetty in Port Harcourt, got shut down only after two years of operation in 1982 and his interests in Omega Bank got lost in a troubled Spring Bank after consolidation – because the captain believed, according to his biography Captain in the Storm of Life, authored by yours truly, that the government wanted to get at specific powerful interests which it was not man enough to face. Also his Spaceworld Airline business collapsed in the hysteria of dropping planes, while Eagle Cement, in which he had substantial interest, was also clobbered by the local cement cartel.

    Now what is a Federal Republic if it cannot guarantee its citizens equal and equitable opportunities under the law? That is the crux of this cement drama.