The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • Their Lordships v The State

    Their Lordships v The State

    When justices of the Supreme Court unanimously served notice the other day in the manner of shop-floor trade unionists that they would have no alternative but to embark on an industrial action unless their grievances centring on pay and conditions were addressed to their satisfaction, even those who thought that no development in Nigeria’s political firmament could surprise them had to concede that this was altogether a singular event.

    Even those who allowed that “anything can happen” in Nigeria’s public sphere: this, surely was not the kind of thing they had in mind.  They would have dismissed the mere thought of it as a joke taken too far.

    The only thing the justices left out, probably for strategic calculations, was the date the action would commence.  Its duration would of course depend on how the authorities responded.

    The public imagination went astir with images, on the one hand, of their bewigged lordships in their ermined raiments, picketing the courts like actual trade unionists, and on the other, of the police standing ready to prevent a breakdown of law and order.  And, of course, television cameras capturing the spectacle, live.

    In this electronic age, they still had to take down depositions in longhand.  Their access to the internet so vital for instant research and acquiring facts and data at the touch of a button or a screen was not guaranteed beyond office hours.  The electricity supply was epileptic even during office hours.

    Some of the justices live in official accommodations that do not reflect their status and dignity.  They go about their official duties in vehicles that often break down and expose them to ridicule and danger.  Funds earmarked for hiring bright minds from the universities to do legal research and draft opinions have been swallowed up in the maws of the bureaucracy or disbursed improperly.  The medicine chests in their Clinic were empty.

    And so on and so forth.

    Their petition has great merit, even without relating it to what obtains in other institutions of the public service.  If you compare it to what obtains, say, in the National Assembly, you have to commend their lordships for their restraint.

    Officially, it is the Revenue Mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission that determines the compensation of public officers.  But every ministry, department, or agency tweaks the scheme, oftentimes in ways that distort it beyond recognition.

    The National Assembly has turned this practice into an art.  It is the only institution of its kind in the world that regards law-making as a hardship that must be handsomely compensated.  Its reward scheme is so padded with “allowances” that you wonder what they need salaries for.  In the absence of verifiable audits, guesstimates of what a lawmaker takes home every month range between N30 million and N50 million.

    So steeped in this practice is the National Assembly that it is often seen more in caricature than in perspective.  According to the caricature, it even gives its members cash allowances for sleeping or staying awake during debates and for everything in between; for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and for newspapers.  One account has it that members are even recompensed for belching, which one of its eminent members once characterized approvingly on the floor as “evidence of good living.”

    It can thus be said without exaggeration and without doing violence to the facts that, in Nigeria, no business succeeds like law-making.  The rewards are instant, overwhelming, and guaranteed by the Exchequer.

    On the other hand, justices of the Supreme Court, beg your pardon, the Apex Court, seem to have been denied sufficiency while less consequential officials in other arms of the public service are basking in superfluity.

    Amici curiae who are concerned that it will be infra dignitatem for their lordships to resort to the tactics of shop-floor trade unionists to press their case for better pay and conditions have vowed that they will never let will let it come to that.

    And they are taking no chances.

    Several weeks ago, the well-known senior advocate, Sebastine Hon, urged the National Industrial Court of Nigeria, the Honourable Justice Osatohanmwen Obaseki-Osaghae presiding, petitioned the courts, locus standi be damned, to raise the salary of justices of the Supreme Court from a measly N3.7 million a month to N7 million, and that of the chief justice to N10 million a month, with corresponding raises across all levels of the court system.

    And in double quick time, the court obliged.

    The judges were victims of “great injustice,” and their pay and conditions, which had not been reviewed since 2008, were “a national shame, shame,” Mr Justice Obaseki-Osaghae held

    Those who want to keep their lordships in acute deprivation are saying that the court has made a mockery of the hallowed doctrine of nemo judex in causa sua; that the ruling is at bottom an exercise in self-dealing, not an instance of judicial activism.  For, sooner or later, the judge stands to profit from his own ruling.

    Those given to aridly legalistic disputations will debate and discuss the court’s ruling till the end of time.   What really counts is that the court has introduced a dynamic new element into our system of jurisprudence in general, and our system of conflict resolution in particular.

    Shop around for a court or judge whose sympathy you can count on, press your claim, and have it translated into an injunctive relief that cannot be readily secured through negotiation or arbitration.

    The process is quick, simple, and inexpensive.

    Under such a system, could the strike begun six months ago by university lecturers have metastasized into the bottomless mess it has become?

    It will be objected that such proceedings will result in judicial anarchy. What would happen, they demand, if two or three courts of co-ordinate jurisdiction were to hand down different rulings on the same matter?

    The pat retort is this:  Would the result be any more anarchic than what obtains now, where lawsuits on significant issues can get mired in technical minutiae for decades, and where the system is so susceptible to gaming?

    It will be objected further that the remuneration of judges or public servants for that matter is   a political matter and therefore not justiciable.  In reality, only a thin line separates the one from the other today.

    Those who find the present system too stuffy and burdensome are saying that it would profit society much more if it is made more elastic, and more responsive to the demands of justice.

    Meanwhile, learned articles for submission to the most reputable law journals must be shaping up in the minds and heads of those law teachers and graduate students who are not too weighed down by the acute existential issues spawned by the ASUU strike to think of such things.

    To them, I humbly proffer the following suggestions.

    A research essay titled “Locus standi:  Adesanya revisited” could bring new perspectives to that important and timeless subject.

    In his monumental “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville noted that every political issue or problem in that country soon morphed into a legal one.

    Following the French savant, a researcher seeking an assured standing in the community of scholars can examine anew the whole question of justiciability in a world in which the political and the social – not forgetting the cultural as well as the spiritual — have become almost inseparable.

  • IBB: A bequest so baleful

    IBB: A bequest so baleful

    Former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, vacated office hugely discredited. As he turned 81 last week, his one-time acolytes and confederates sought to portray him as a great statesman and his tenure as Nigeria’s golden age. I remember it differently. What follows is how I memorialized that era for The Guardian (September 14, 1993).
    *

    Within 24 hours of seizing power on August 27, 1985, General Ibrahim Babangida unwittingly provided two ominous indications of what his rule would be like.

    First, he chose the title of “president.”  This was a clear signal of a will to dominate, to lord it over everyone else, including his colleagues in the military.  He was not going to be merely first among equals, he was going to be the undisputed boss.

    Second, when asked why he chose the title of president, he said it was because the Constitution of Nigeria required it.

    Now, this was the Constitution he had just overthrown, a Constitution which stipulated that power shall be exercised only in the manner provided by the fundamental law.  A coup was not one of the means sanctioned by that law.  So, here was Babangida using the Constitution to justify an unconstitutional act.

    I knew then that this was a person to watch.  And, for the next eight years, everything he did fell into this pattern.

    It was entirely in character that he chose to stage his exit on August 27, 1993, the eighth anniversary of the coup that brought him to power.  Since his coming, the State House historians have invested that day, as well as his birthday, with far greater significance than October 1, the National Day.  The projected August 27, not merely as the anniversary of a Glorious Revolution but more fundamentally as the beginning of Nigeria itself.

    His official birthday of August 27 was made to rank just as high in the national consciousness. It quickly grew into a date on which news was squeezed out of the newspapers by congratulatory messages from grateful contractors, fawning courtiers, supplicants, influence peddlers and all manner of persons.  In retrospect, it is surprising that October 1 was not annulled and August 27 decreed to replace it as the National Day.

    When juxtaposed with his record at the end of his tenure, Babangida’s maiden broadcast contained within it the seeds of his own damnation

    He had said that, unlike his predecessor, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, he would not rule by force.  Again, unlike Buhari, he would be sensitive to individual and cultural differences.  And he would not arrogate to himself “absolute knowledge of problems and solutions.

    He would not act “in accordance with what was convenient” only to himself,” using the machinery of government as his tool.   He repealed the obnoxious Decree 4 saying he did not intend to lead a country where individuals are “under the fear of expressing themselves.”

    But he spent his entire period in office repudiating those vows, sometimes subtly, sometimes brazenly, but always without remorse or twinge of conscience.  For the most part, he carried on as if he regarded inconstancy as the greatest virtue.

    Decree Four was repealed all right, only to be replaced by the no less obnoxious Decree 2.  Politicians were banned, only to be unbanned, re-banned, and banned all over again, in a manner that defied all reason.  Political associations seeking official recognition were dissolved only to be replaced by formations that were for all practical purposes government parastatals.

    The nation was turned into one vast political laboratory for crackbrained experiments, all in the name of a “learning process,” masterminded by the Great Teacher who knows it all.

    Shadowy organizations playing to the basest instincts of the populace sprang up all over the place, their subversive work to do.  The Ministry of Justice became a factory for manufacturing and promoting tyrannous and unjust schemes.  A propaganda machine was set up to proclaim even the most incoherent intent as a solid accomplishment and to advertise a house of cards as a fortress.

    Babangida and his State House professors left nothing to chance.  They never missed any opportunity to declare that they would be content to be judged by history. Yet they sought to write that history themselves in books, or rather, compilations, the titles of which are a testament to the delusion of greatness with which the master and his minions were afflicted.

    In Babangida’s farewell broadcast on August 26, the official chroniclers, obviously with his approval, sought to capture all over, lest we forgot, the most recondite of his monumental achievements. including the creation by decree of states, local government areas and all manner of bureaucracies and institutions that are financial sinkholes.  They even recorded it as a feat that they were able to pay government employees regularly.

    In the beginning, the teaching hospitals were mere “consulting clinics.” Today, they are just clinics, the consultants having gone to Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.  Then there were long queues for scarce consumer goods.  Now, the goods exist in superabundance, but only a few consumers can afford them.

    Then, they unleashed a messianic drive to root out corruption.  Later, corruption, to quote Femi Falana, became “a fundamental objective and directive principle of state policy.”  Then, the universities and other institutions of further learning were thriving, even if not blossoming.  Now they stand on the edge of ruin.  Then, the Naira was said to be overvalued.  Now it is almost worthless.  Then you could still afford to buy brand-new goods.  Today, the Tokunbo culture reigns supreme.

    Then, there was no pretense that a democratic culture was a desirable goal.  Now, eight years later, we have in place what the distinguished political scientist and author of a seminal work on Nigeria’s Second Republic, Dr Richard Joseph, has called “one of the most sustained exercises in political chicanery ever visited upon a people.”

    When their new breed politicians are not fighting pitched battles on the floor of the legislature, they are selling their votes like so many shares on the Stock Exchange, without the least regard to the sensibilities of their constituencies. And between then and now, a collapse of values so comprehensive and destruction of the sense of community so complete as to be virtually irreversible.

    This, alas, is the baleful bequest of a man who proclaimed himself a “visionary relist.” Could the nation have been worse off under a leader who could not see beyond his nose?

    One of the volumes of Babangida’s collected speeches is titled For their Tomorrow, we gave our Today.  It is probably truer and certainly more fitting to say of the man and his Administration that, for their today, they annulled our tomorrow.  For reasons borne of fear and guilt, they turned what should have been the nation’s finest hour into its darkest, employing the most desperate tactics that a street mugger’s imagination ever devised.

    When leaving office on the eve of the inauguration of the Second Republic in 1979, General Olusegun said it was his hope that, within the next ten years, Nigeria would be ranked as one of the ten leading democracies in the world.  A tall dream, to be sure.  But what is heaven for if you cannot strive for more than you can grasp?

    On the eve of his own departure in far less glorious circumstances, Babangida made a great point of stressing that only 25 countries in the entire world practiced anything that could be called democracy, the implication being that, if Nigeria does not belong in that group, it is in excellent company all the same.

    So much for his vision.

    May his like never come this way again.

     

  • At the passport office

    At the passport office

    Visit any passport-issuing office in Nigeria and you will find a seething, murmuring crowd of applicants who had been on the scene every working day during the previous week, the week before that, and in all likelihood, the week preceding that, and are yet no closer to obtaining the prized document than they were the day they first set foot on the precincts.

    It is not a task for the faint of heart, or the go-it-alone individual, no matter his or her dexterity in navigating all the bureaucratic hoops. Nor does it matter how diligent he or she is in filling out the application form.

    It helps if you have a powerful sponsor, know, or can relate to, a key official in the chain who can see the matter through.  If you don’t, the next best thing is to hire a consultant – pardon this necessary dignification – a riff on James Thurber, by the way —who knows the territory inside out:  how the place works, who reports to whom, which palms to grease and how to grease them without leaving fingerprints, and whom the officials trust to deliver without fuss and without ceremony.

    You are virtually guaranteed to obtain your passport within the week.

    If you don’t have a powerful sponsor and cannot hire a consultant, then you will need luck of the rarest kind or spiritual intervention from on high or both to obtain a passport months after filing.

    Your application may be unexceptionable in every material particular, but what if the official who should handle it is perpetually not “on seat,” or is on leave of absence for the next three months and nobody else in the house can handle your application, since it belongs in a very special category and only an officer who belongs in that rarefied rank can handle it.

    Unfortunate indeed, but the application cannot move until the officer returns.  You understand, Madam?

    Another scenario:  Everything is shipshape, Madam, as shipshape as can be. There is just one little problem.  Fewer than 100 passport booklets are available at this time, and the office has to practice extreme rationing until a new consignment arrives.  It may happen tomorrow or next year, we just don’t know.  These days, nothing is certain anymore.

    Contemplating these prospects, delivered with critical solemnity by the contractor, the applicant reduced to asking rather diffidently whether it meant that nothing would avail.

    But contractor and applicant know deep that in Nigeria, something always avails.  They strike a bargain, and the passport that had at some point seemed like a forlorn quest becomes a splendid possibility, just a tad short of an actuality, to the satisfaction of all the parties.

    To return to my theme:  Obtaining a Nigerian passport on foreign shores is just as fraught.  The process is clean – antiseptically so.  There is almost no human contact until you are required to appear for the “interview” for “biometric capture.” Filing is electronic.  In the United States, they seem to have farmed it out to an Indian-owned entrepreneur who apparently runs some other business or businesses on the side.

    You wish they had contracted such a sensitive matter to a Nigerian, and that the site was not so eager to lure you to some dodgy sites to purchase some junk merchandise or service.  But that is a small matter compared to the unhelpfulness of the Chancery in Atlanta, Georgia.  But no matter.

    For a passport application filed in January against a trip to Nigeria in March, they give you an interview date for April at the earliest.   They say you can ask for another date, but when you do so on a dedicated email platform, they tell you only that your request has been received.

    You follow up and call a number indicated on the Chancery website.  The phone rings and rings and rings, until a recorded voice tells you that the official you want to talk with is not available and that you should please leave a message.  But before you can do so, the same recorded voice tells you that the mailbox is full and is accepting no new messages.

    You call every day for one week running: same result.

    When I found myself thus circumstanced some two years ago, I took a chance.  I wrote a courteous letter to a senior official at the Chancery introducing myself and asking if he could kindly help sort things out.  He did not accord me the courtesy of an acknowledgment.

    The only human contact I made at the Chancery was with a clerk at another service unit.  He told me courteously that I had called the wrong number, but seemed eager to help.  Then, he launched into a long lecture on how the Mission was overwhelmed and why the waiting time was so long, and how an appointment date could be changed only in the event of a death in the family, which, kindly added, God forbid.

    But in that event, a death certificate backed by a sworn affidavit and duly authenticated by a designated authority had to accompany a request for the change.

    Seriously.  I am not making this up.

    Previously, to obtain a passport, you only needed to attach two copies of your picture to the application form and sign on the dotted lines.  They said the arrangement made it all too easy for persons engaged in syndicated crime to obtain multiple passports and to give Nigeria a bad name.

    By requiring applicants to appear in person for “data capture” at the point of issuance, the authorities could be sure that the passport belonged to the person whose name and picture appear on it and to no other, the authorities claimed.

    Nigeria is the only country I know that insists on this arrangement.  In this electronic age, it makes no sense.  It serves no useful purpose.  It only inflicts needless financial, physical and emotional pain on applicants.  That is reason enough for discontinuing the policy.

    But there is more.  The stipulation does not work.  You can still have as many Nigerian passports as you can pay for, and under as many names as you fancy if you went by well-trod unofficial routes.  And these routes are well known to those patrolling the issuance of official passports.

    It is at the appointment for interviews and data capture that applicants suffer wanton abuse.  Nigerians who have left their far-away homes in the early hours of the day or booked hotel rooms for the previous night just to keep the appointed hour are kept waiting for hours outside, their presence barely acknowledged.

    In summer or winter, the Consulate makes no effort to shield them from the harsh elements, or even to keep their exposure as brief as possible.

    Three women I know were given this unholy baptism in the depth of last winter when they went to Atlanta to renew their passports. Their father, a retired career diplomat, had served as Nigeria’s ambassador at key posts in Asia and South America, with stints in between.  They were kept waiting outside the Consulate for hours before the officials inside deigned to attend to them.

    The women said after their ordeal that they almost felt ashamed to be Nigerians. Over the years, thousands of Nigerians must have come away from that chancery feeling like that.

    Next perhaps to the $20 bill, the United States passport is the most widely confected document in the world.  Yet, you need only supply two pictures with your completed application and sign on the dotted lines before an official at the local post office to obtain a passport. You are not required to travel outside your place of residence.  And the document is mailed to your home within weeks.

    Our level of organization, I grant, is not cohesive enough to permit that kind of arrangement.  But an arrangement that inflicts wanton financial, physical and emotional pain on passport seekers is a cruel abuse of Nigerians and their citizen rights.

    The quest for a document designed to affirm one’s Nigerian identity need not be so alienating,

    Comment: 08111813080

  • As they muddle through

    As they muddle through

    The left them last week where they were “unveiling” those personages who had slogged it through the primeval forest of Nigerian politics and “emerged” into broad daylight in fairly good shape, needing only to have the detritus of that environment scrubbed off them. Others in the attentive audience were making the direst predictions about the 2023 General Election and the future of Nigeria.

    They are still where we left them.

    The unveiling has continued apace.

    This week, Governor Ahmadu Fintiri of Adamawa State and PDP gubernatorial candidate, is scheduled to unveil Professor Kaletapwa Farauta, vice chancellor of Adamawa University, Mubi, as his running mate.  About time they unveiled a woman, for a change.

    First-time visitors to these parts who are hoping that the unveiling will satisfy their kinkiest fancies will be disappointed.  There is nothing in it for voyeurs of any stripe.  The good lady, a professor of agriculture technology education, is only being formally presented to the Adamawa electorate, sir.

    She will be lucky to be spared the sniggering to which academics in the bureaucracy are usually subjected.

    I am thinking of Professor Essien Essien-Udom, the noted University of Ibadan political scientist and pioneer vice chancellor of the University of Maiduguri, who went on to serve as secretary to the old South Eastern State Government and Head of Service under the military administration of Jacob Esuene, from 1973-75.

    On his last day on the job, they rounded up the staff for a farewell party, an afterthought, at which they gave him high praise for bringing an academic mindset to practical problems of administration. As he made to speak, thinking that they would accord him the privilege of making brief remarks as is the custom on such occasions, the police band cued in the National Anthem, and the event was over.  So was Essien-Udom’s unhappy stint in the bureaucracy.

    I have it on good authority that Vice President Yemi Osinbajo is endlessly derided in Aso Rock as VP (Academic), riffing on a familiar designation in the university system from whence he came.  They snigger and titter about his predilection for whipping out his iPad to take notes or trotting to the overhead projector at the slightest provocation or no provocation at all to make a PowerPoint presentation.

    The sniggering can only have grown more corrosive, I suspect, following the unceremonious collapse of Osinbajo’s quixotic quest.

    Add to this the sexism that also pervades the political and cultural landscape, not forgetting the patriarchy, and you have some idea of what awaits Professor Farauta if she becomes Deputy Governor of Adamawa.  Don’t put her down as DG (Academic), please.

    It is a measure of the frenetic pace of the political process in Nigeria that many can be forgiven if they no longer remember a good many of the persons involved, nor the particulars thereof.

    I was particularly bemused by the case of the quester for a Senate seat from Ondo who took things into his own hands concerning the rank inconstancy, nay the brazen duplicity, that has been ingrained in the body politic.

    This is the way it operates:  A quester approaches a person whose vote at some crucial stage in the political sweepstakes could make or mar the quester’s fortune: give him one huge leap closer to the Senate and great expectations, sentence him to a despondent return to the Ekiti interior.

    The quester knows this, and so does the person with the vote. They strike a bargain.

    For casting the vote for him, the quester covenants to give the owner of the ballot a house, an undeveloped parcel of land, a sports utility vehicle in good working order, or some other valuable item, depending on how desperate the parties are, or how much “juice” the position being sought can reasonably be expected to yield.

    Read Also: Yoruba elders to Tinubu: your victory in 2023 certain

    Quester and voter shake hands and part, quester looking forward to E-Day with great expectations, and voter buoyed by his good fortune.  But there is more for the voter where that came from; much more.

    Soon enough, others come calling and the voter pledges his ballot to another quester, for a richer harvest.

    The man with the vote pledges it to five different questers and “obtains” appropriately from each There is more than a hint of skullduggery here, but not to worry.  At least one, perhaps several of the obtainers will deliver for the quester, and he will never know who among them has flagrantly breached the protocol.

    In the Senate primaries from Ondo State, it turned out that an aspirant who had given out a car in exchange for a vote got no vote at all.  Nought.  Zilch.  Nada.   Meaning that not even the obtainer cruising around town in his car had bothered to vote for him.

    As soon as the results were announced, quester rented a team of policemen and headed for the home of the voter who had obtained a car from him grimly resolved to take the car back, since the fellow had failed to keep their bargain.

    This was not a singular case. I should report. Questers who have been swindled are moving to recover.  It has been a time of reckoning for disobliging obtainers and great is the fear that is sweeping their ranks.

    All this has raised an intriguing question.  Now, according to the best authorities, vote-selling and vote-buying are illegal and punishable.   When a disobliging voter refuses to hand back items obtained in consideration of voting for a quester, what is the quester to do?

    Is the deal legally enforceable?

    Watch out for the case of Quester v Obtainer coming soon to a court near you.

    The race is not for the swiftest, it has been said.  Nor is it for the first to plunge into it.  Otherwise,  Kogi Governor Yahaya Bello (GYB) would as of now be the prohibitive favourite to win the presidency.

    He was the first to make an earnest bid for the crown.  He turned the most routine event on his schedule into a presidential campaign event.  A GYB presidency, he proclaimed on billboards, was “God’s plan for Nigeria.”  He brandished his age as his principal qualification for the post.  He proclaimed at every chance that it was the turn of youths, with himself as their symbol and avatar, to rule Nigeria.

    He would guarantee safety and security and vanquish banditry in any guise.  Hadn’t he single-handedly barred the intractable Covid-19 from his domain even as it ravaged the nation-space and the world?

    Streams of “Youths for GYB” flocked week after week from the creeks of Bayelsa to the Kogi capital, Lokoja, to express solidarity with their hero and champion.  They returned to base heavily laden with cash and went back again and again for more.  Women, teachers who cannot remember when they last received their salaries in full;  even journalists, rallied for GYB and drew copiously on his war chest, said to be almost inexhaustible.

    Kogi bubbled with political activity while GYB was pursuing his flight of fancy.  By comparison, Lagos was sedate.  And Lokoja became the mecca of obtainers. But in the presidential primaries.  GYB barely registered.

    Today, Kogi has become a theatre of the banditry, the kidnappings and the killings he said could never occur in Kogi because of his expertise in national security issues.  GYB continues to tout that alleged expertise.

    Meanwhile, skepticism about 2023 continues to grow.  The misbegotten Constitutional Review embarked upon by the National Assembly is grounded.  Only eight of 36 states had voted on the more than 40 proposed amendments.  The chairman of the National Assembly’s Constitution Review Committee, Senator Ovie Omo-Age, says nevertheless that the review is still on course.

    A constitution that requires 40 amendments is not worthy of that name.  It is a document calling for comprehensive re-writing.  That task belongs to the people as constituent public, and must be done before everything else.

    For how much longer can they dodge it?

  • Back on the beat

    Back on the beat

    Laid low since last February by major spinal surgery, the second in four years, I had all the time to attend closely to Nigeria’s unfolding political drama.  From the moment it was unveiled, or rather, from the moment it unveiled itself, since it is hard to say exactly when the veil was lifted, it bore the markings of a silly season to beat all silly seasons.

    More about the veil, shortly.

    From a cornucopia of media outlets, Nigerian and foreign, I was guaranteed the kind of access that only a few of those “on ground” could claim: a ring-side seat as it were, day after day.

    The news from home was almost always disconcerting, but I did not have the energy to be angry or mad.  Nor did I have the stamina to keep track of the shifting political alliances and the dizzying personnel changes. Yet, indifference was out of the question.

    It seemed best, under the circumstances, to while away the time taking note of some of its more diverting aspects, lexical and dramaturgical.

    Where to start?

    The point of departure has to be the opening act itself, the unveiling.  On any given day, a proposal, programme, project, or institution, is being unveiled in Nigeria.  It helps if the matter under reference is new, but a tweak here and a transposition there is all that an unveiling requires, plus all the pomp and circumstance that attended the original unveiling.

    The practice has now been extended to actual persons, especially persons of consequence. The APC presidential candidate, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, is set to inaugurate a 40-member Think Tank to, well, unveil his Election Manifesto.  He had spent much of the preceding weeks unveiling his running mate Kashim Shettima before the APC National Executive and a conclave of priests, now alleged to have been rented for the purpose.

    Is it so hard these days, pardon the digression, to find the genuine article that fake priests decked out in the most ludicrous costumes have to be pressed into ecclesiastic duty?

    Something tells me the PDP presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar will jet in from Dubai any moment from now to the Osun State capital, Osogbo, to unveil Ademola Adeleke, following his recent “emergence” as the state’s governor-elect. The unveiling should be quite a spectacle, especially if Adeleke gets a chance to show off his nerve-wracking choreographic prowess.  Just watching him do an impromptu jig from his vast repertoire is sure to drive many in the audience to the edge of exhaustion.

    Meanwhile, Adeleke is set to unveil this week his Transition Team headed by Professor Meyiwa Oladejo, a Doctor of Nuclear Medicine and a Fellow of the Euro(pean) Institute of Reticulo-endothelial Biology and Medicine, no less.

    The professor will need some unveiling of his own.  But the joke is on you, those who continually regard Adeleke as if there is nothing to him but those dancing feet.

    “Consensus” has made a spirited return to the grammar of politics, I can report.  Not since the manufactured debacle around “June 12” 1993 has that term resonated powerfully in political discourse.  Back then, Champion newspaper and its constituency never tired of calling for a “consensus candidate,” to supplant President-elect Moshood Abiola who won 19 states out of 30, as well as the Federal Capital Territory.

    This translates to 58 percent of the ballot and remains the clearest, cleanest and widest mandate that Nigerian electors have ever conferred on a presidential candidate.

    Still, they clamored for a “consensus candidate.”

    In the run-up to the recent party primaries, the call for a consensus presidential candidate issued loudest from some fringe aspirants who knew they had no chance of clinching the prize.  l am thinking of former Kwara Governor and more recently Senate president Bukola Saraki, now looking like a hustler on the sideline rather than a powerbroker, and Aminu Tambuyal of Sokoto State, his eyes forever trained on the main chance.

    None of the apostles of consensus was prepared to yield.  Each saw himself as the Consensus Candidate.  Meanwhile, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, up and running comme d”habitude, locked up the nomination, despite his former principal’s excoriation heard around the world.

    One of the most treacherous locutions in Nigeria’s political sociology bobbed up early in the silly season.  No prizes for figuring it out.  It is “third term,” whether actually proposed, casually insinuated, or merely whispered.  It is the political equivalent of a torpedo.  Ask former President Obasanjo.  Ask former President Goodluck Jonathan.

    Even President Buhari, usually so slow in reacting to political developments as to be practically lethargic, sensed the dark portent of that term when they said his “body language” suggested not merely that he might not be averse to a third term but that he was positioning himself for one.

    Buhari forcefully denied nurturing any third-term ambitions, and the matter ended there.

    But Jonathan, having learned nothing and forgotten nothing, allowed himself to be insinuated, in the eleventh hour as it were, into the process of crowning the presidential candidate of the major political parties.  He kept everyone guessing as to his political affiliation.  Apparently, they had led him to believe that Nigerians were yearning for him to return to power under any flag.

    Like Barkis, Jonathan was willing.  Sources close to the family said Herself the former First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan was more than enthusiastic to return to the chair of the African First Ladies Peace Mission that ended when her husband lost his re-election bid.

    The parties have since chosen their presidential candidates, But so what?

    Nigeria being Nigeria, anything can happen during the inordinately long pause between the party primaries and the elections. So don’t be surprised if the ever-obliging Dr Jonathan is trotted to the national political stage again, this time with Dame Patience up close.

    If Jonathan’s entry into the presidential race was puzzling, that of Central Bank governor Godwin Emefiele’s was mystifying.  Jonathan was at least a politician, though a largely ineffectual one.

    Emefiele had served as CBN Governor for some ten years and had seemed totally, if unsuccessfully, immersed in the task of general overseeing the economy

    If he had any political inclinations, he had kept them severely to himself.  Suddenly, his name found its way into the register of presidential aspirants.  And he was so coy about it.  No one knew for sure under which political platform he was making his quest.  He did not resign his position as required by law but sought to continue being the principal regulator of the economy, while at the same time being a major player in the overarching political game as a presidential aspirant.

    When challenged, Emefiele headed to the courts for injunctive relief.

    He has not been heard of in political circles since the primaries. The word out there among the conspiracy theorists is that he is being held in strategic reserve (no pun intended), to be sprung on the public when, not if, the 2023 blueprint will have collapsed.

    They also said the urbane and high-achieving former Lagos State governor and Minister for Housing, Babatunde Fashola, SAN, was especially favored to emerge as consensus president-in-waiting.  He would draw on the mass support the APC enjoys in the South-west while attracting little of the antagonism that trails it elsewhere.

    At some point, it almost seemed as if we were back in 1993, in military president Ibrahim Babangida’s transition programme, according to a noted analyst, “one of the most sustained exercises in political chicanery ever visited upon a people.”  They said the APC frontrunner Tinubu was going nowhere.  He would be disqualified on any number of vulnerabilities and technicalities.

    In whatever case, the elections would never hold, they said.  If they ever held, they would end in confusion.  No clear winner would emerge, and the result, in a clime perfused by malignant anti-social media platforms, would be sheer anarchy.

    And so on and so forth, only they didn’t say what would fill the void.

    Borrowing from the PDP’s playbook, a faction of the APC, with Buhari’s implicit support, launched a secret search for a consensus presidential candidate under a suffocating deadline.  And, presto, the party’s national chairman, Senator Ahmed Lawan, “emerged” as that candidate, just like that.

    You could almost hear the air being sucked out of Tinubu’s buoyant campaign for the APC ticket.  The rumor mill buzzed with reports that Tinubu was set to walk away from the party that he took a part that was second-to-none in forming and nurturing into the dominant force in Nigerian politics.

    At that point, moment executed a strategic counter-move that stunned everyone.  Going off-script        at a rally in the Ogun State capital, Abeokuta, and rebuking the state governor for inconstancy, he  recounted his labours for the party and asserted a claim to its presidential ticket.

    That performance breathed new life into Tinubu’s campaign.   He would go on to win the ticket by a landslide.

    But as his campaign gained new life, Atiku’s chugged on and an improbable wave of support for latecomer Peter Obi swept the social media, the violence that has been convulsing the country — the murderous zealotry of Boko Haram, the banditry, the savage killings, the kidnappings and general outlawry that had been convulsing the country went several frightful notches higher.

    The state has lost its primacy in the control and use of lawful force.   President Buhari seems listless, disconnected.  So self-assured and contumacious are the purveyors of terror that they openly taunted him and served notice the other day that they were coming to get him.

    Nigeria is not working.  This soulless federation is not working.

    A wave of pessimism is washing over the country demanding urgent, sincere and sustained efforts            to grapple with the crippling discontinuities of daily life in Nigeria.

    The country is awash in illicit arms. The enthusiasm that should undergird the General Election is eroding, to the point that many are questioning whether it is the answer to our woes.

  • An editor’s valedictory

    An editor’s valedictory

    Other than professional entertainers, Nigerian journalists constitute in my estimation perhaps the most self-absorbed occupational group in the world.  And I am not talking only about the tabloid press, or the misnamed social media.  They write so much about themselves and their work that it is a wonder they get to report the news at all when they aren’t for all practical purposes the news.

    If you stripped the day’s intelligence of their pet concerns and the predilections, it will hardly qualify as an account that defines the day and gives it meaning.

    I exaggerate of course, but never trust me again if you don’t find in any day’s paper several headlines similar in substance or tenor to the following, which are not entirely my fabrication:

    “Editor for Afro-Caribbean Summit.”

    “Editor’s car snatched at gun-point”

    “Reporter’s memoir for launch.”

    “Top newsman’s home burglarized.”

    “Editor-in-chief loses mum, a community leader.”

    “Editor’s wedding brings city to standstill.”

    “News anchor’s family welcomes twins.”

    “Buhari honors editor’s aunt.”

    “Editor’s brother graduates at Oxford.”

    “Top TV presenter loses dad.”

    “Pope blesses editor’s mother-in-law at The Vatican.”

    In and of itself the event may be newsworthy, but it is almost as if what best defines it is its association however vicarious, with a media person or institution.

    I was myself caught up in this manner of seeing and reporting the world when Wole Soyinka was named recipient of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African and the first Black.  Back then, he was writing a fortnightly column for the struggling newsweekly, The African Guardian, courtesy of Dr Yemi Ogunbiyi, a senior executive of the parent organization.

    This was a world historic event, to be sure.  But it was also in a real sense The African Guardian’s story.  It is not every day that a person associated with a newsmagazine is awarded a Nobel.  So, how do we frame the story, our story?

    Various formulations were canvassed at the meeting of the board of editors.  The one that resonated the most was “African Guardian columnist wins Nobel Prize in Literature.”

    Seriously.

    Soyinka was a columnist for the magazine all right, and had just been awarded the Nobel in Literature.  However, to reduce Soyinka to an African Guardian columnist would be to indulge in an absurdity without parallel.  Cooler heads prevailed, and we settled for reporting the news in the proper context.

    Something tells me that this kind of debate takes place in newsrooms across Nigeria not infrequently.

    I was brought to these ruminations last January, following the retirement from Punch Newspapers of the chairman of its Editorial Board, (Olu)Segun Adediran, after 11 years in the post.

    In the valedictory, he recalled how he had arrived at the Punch some 22 years earlier via two Lagos-based magazines, The Nigerian Economist, and Policy Magazine, both now distant memories, intending that his sojourn in journalism would be “short and snappy.”

    But it went on for 22 delightful and fulfilling years, throughout which the paper offered him a “most “auspicious platform” to commit to serving God and humanity through advocacy and with an “uncommon passion for truth and a better Nigeria.’

    “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit,” he once espied on a plaque on former U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s desk in the Oval Office. He parlayed the inscription into his guiding principle and inspiration in journalism.

    It served him well.  For he rose from member of the Editorial Board in 1999 through the ranks as it were to senior member, deputy chair and finally chair, the post from which he retired last January.  It was there he wrote, that he found personal and professional fulfillment.  He flourished.

    He led its Editorial Board of “passionate, bold, courageous professionals to win awards in editorial writing year after year. “We studied very hard and researched harder. We engaged, dared, and challenged the powers-that-be, but never compromised on integrity. We were never given to the syrupy sentimentality of ‘Big Men’ and untouchables,” he wrote of his team.

    They defended human rights unequivocally in Nigeria and everywhere, championed good governance,” true federalism,” and sought to advance the cause of democracy.

    Tellingly, he wrote: “Most importantly, we never used the platform for the furtherance of any pecuniary interest or hidden agenda. We never pandered to any sectional political interests or whims of any Nigerian Big Men. We believed that as ‘societal judges,’ journalists should not have a cosy relationship with power holders. We took heed of the saying: “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”

    Surely, it cannot be that he never wrote anything memorable nor launched any crusades in all that time, for as he stated in his valedictory, one of the reasons he entered journalism was to help make Nigeria better.  And he had every opportunity to pursue that goal at PUNCH.   Nor can it be that I missed virtually everything that he wrote.

    Yet, apart from the January 13 article announcing his resignation, I do not recall reading any of his articles, meeting him, or hearing his name or authority invoke in a discussion of public affairs.

    I had resigned my position as chair of the Editorial Board of The Guardian some three years before Adediran arrived at the Punch, and had relocated to the United States to take up a journalism faculty appointment.  And I lived there for practically all of Adediran’s time at PUNCH time.  While that may account for my not having met him, it does not account for nor excuse my not being familiar with his work.  Yet I have always prided myself on being very attentive to editorial content in the Nigerian news media!

    Was he too invested with the collective editorial product and consequently so burned out that that he had no time for signed articles, or cared not in the least for the vainglory of writing a column?

    Throughout his PUNCH sojourn, Adeniran seems to have bee impelled by a clear-eyed view of editorial writing and the imperatives that should guide it. Here and there, his valedictory may smack of grandstanding.  It is almost as if the Editorial Board over which he presided was composed entirely of perfect men and women actuated by the purest of motives.  He displays no battle scars; it is almost as it there were no costs to the paper’s many battles.

    He is too well-tempered to settle scores here; he is generous to PUNCH Newspapers and his colleagues. Some aspiring editorial writer reading his valedictory might well conclude that that is the place to work.

    Editorial writing is one of the most coveted positions in Nigerian journalism today.  It was not always like that. It used to be an adjunct of the of the production until the unforgettable Stanley Macebuh institutionalized an editorial board and recruited some of the brightest persons he could find to run it,  first at the Daily Times, and later at The Guardian.

    It is exciting and fulfilling work. You get to write a column in which you can sound off to your heart’s content on any issue.  You get to be known to large sections of the public. You get to be courted by policy-makers, especially if you are the board chair.  You get to rate a place in the social register and to meet persons of consequence.  You get to be talked about.

    The attention is flattering; seductive, even.  It takes a firmly grounded person, a person of character, not to let it get into his or her head. From his valedictory, I would say that Olusegun Adeniran fits that bill.

    Here’s wishing him a happy and contented retirement.  Having cultivated a life away from the limelight, he should suffer no withdrawal symptoms.

     

    A Note to Readers

    This column it taking a medical timeout.

    Our regular Tuesday Communion will resume as soon as circumstances permit;

    My grateful thanks to you all for your attention over years.

    Best.

  • A voyage around rice

    A voyage around rice

    Even more than petroleum, rice has for decades been the most discussed commodity in the Nigerian news media, and the most talked-about.  Wherever two three Nigerians are gathered, you can be sure that rice is on their minds; that they are comparing notes and exchanging intelligence on where rice of good quality can be obtained with dispatch and at an affordable price.

    The evidence for this large claim is anecdotal, I grant.  But I have a hunch that a longitudinal content analysis of news and features in the print and electronic media, not forgetting the social media, will bear out my hypothesis.

    There should be a surfeit of research support for such a study from the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Central Bank of Nigeria and the African Development Bank, all of which have with uncommon commitment concentrated the nation’s mind and resources on the attainment of self-sufficiency in the production of the commodity in the near term and global ranking in the medium term as a major exporter.

    The wonder they have wrought was on spectacular display in Abuja the other day.

    Residents woke up one morning only to behold in the skyline a vast colony of pyramids stretching as far as they could see.  Rice pyramids.  Somewhat squat; nothing like the sleek, tarpaulin-draped pyramids that    rose unpretentiously from the railway shipyard at Kofar Nassarawa,  gravitated majestically toward the skies and could be seen from just about point in the metropolis.

    Fifteen rice pyramids in Abuja by one count, configured from one million sacks of paddy rice trucked from fields across the country and painstakingly stacked one bag at a time to produce a visual delight and excite the appetite all at once.

    As a schoolboy vacationing in Kano in the late fifties and sixties, I used to so spend my idle afternoons watching men carrying groundnut sacks on their backs or on their heads build a large rectangular base more than a storey high and covering an area larger than a soccer pitch, and then proceed therefrom to sculpt the iconic shape that has evoked wonder and mystery down the ages.

    The aspect to which I looked forward the most was the placing of the last groundnut sack at the apex of the pyramid.  Much folklore and ritual surrounded the event.   It was said that only a few men were chosen for the task. The prize was a princely sum of one guinea, or one pound sterling and a shilling.  For comparison, a brand new Raleigh, Rudge or Hercules bicycle sold for about 17 pounds.

    The reward for placing the last sack atop the pyramid also included a bolt of white linen that was for whoever performed the feat to employ as he chose on returning to base.  If he lost his footing and fell to his death, it would serve as his burial shroud.  That, any rate, was the lore.

    Much to my disappointment, I never witnessed that final act.  Weeks before a scheduled consummation, it would be time to return to Zaria, and to school.

    Behind the Abuja pyramids, however, there was no tradition of any kind. The situation allowed for none; hunger was ravaging the land. On the lips of folks in the bustling cities and townships and the hardscrabble, countryside, the insistent question is:  How soon can my family sit down to a meal of rice?

    But a government committed to changing the national conversation and to inaugurating a paradigm of         food self-sufficiency must take the longer view.  It must memorialize for posterity the key moments in this paradigm shift, if only as an answer to those who would deny that there was ever such a breakthrough.

    The construction of the rice pyramids Abuja marked such a moment.

    The conversation on rice, it needs to be remembered, goes back to the time of President Shehu Shagari. The appetite for rice of the imported variety which Nigerians had developed in the oil-boom years continued to grow long after the boom had turned into gloom and long after that prodigal government had dissipated the nation’s massive foreign reserve.

    Rice became, first, a scarce commodity, and then a hard currency in itself.   A smugglers’ market in the commodity flourished but most homes could not afford it.  Shagari responded by setting up a Presidential Task Force on the Importation of Rice, and named one of his most powerful cabinet ministers, Umaru Dikko, as chair and chief executive.

    Dikko was warming up when the military struck.

    The balance-of-payments problems of the Exchequer worsened, leading to tighter import controls even for basic necessities. Officially, rice importation was banned, but smugglers kept the traffic thriving through the port of Cotonou in neighbouring Benin Republic.

    Military president Ibrahim Babangida’s structural adjust programme (SAP) further tightened import controls. But the regime’s attention shifted from rice to wheat, the importation of which they said was gulping an unwholesome chunk of the nation’s lean foreign reserves.  They branded wheat bread an acquired taste that had no place in Nigeria’s culinary history, and a degenerate one of that matter, sustained by an unpatriotic elite.

    Degenerate or not, the taste had become so entrenched that it could no longer be curbed, much less stamped out.  So, the regime decided that the unpatriotic elite, aforementioned, could continue to have their bread so long as it was baked from locally-grown wheat.  That was how the National Accelerated Wheat Production Programme came into being, under which every parcel of land, from the desiccated Sahel to the mangrove swamps of the delta, claimed to be specially suited for growing wheat.

    Federal funding was lavish, as was publicity.  Kano soon emerged as the epicentre of wheat production in Nigeria.  Wheat fields stretching as far as the eye could see featured daily in television news.  So promising were the early reports it was projected that Nigeria in another two or three years, would rival, if not supplant the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil and Australia in wheat production and exports.

    Season after season, wheat growers in the North announced super-bumper harvests.  The only trouble was that millers could find no wheat to buy to put back on stream the plants that had lain idle since wheat imports were banned.  After the Kaduna State government announced the figures at the end of one season, the millers association offered to buy up the entire crop.

    Their representative, the late and much distinguished public servant and administrator, Ahmed Joda, was told that it had already been sold.

    Well before then, Babangida had stopped launching the wheat harvest.  He too had finally seen through the scam.  Since then, the national the accelerated wheat production programme rarely gets mentioned except as an emblem of a costly misadventure.  Babangida’s subsequent campaign to produce bread from cassava flour never got off the ground.

    Nothing daunted, cassava bread came to be canvassed again as a patriotic, healthy local alternative wheat bread most strenuously by President Goodluck Jonathan, who claimed that no day passed without his having that delicacy and fish pepper-soup.  It was even rumoured at the time that they had in residence at Aso Rock, a cabinet-rank officer with the title of Senior Special Assistant on Cassava Bread and Allied Products to cater to Dr Jonathan’s special needs.

    The project died well before Jonathan left office.  He may yet revive it if, or more likely when, as is widely being speculated, the people in their unwisdom recall him in 2023 to come and finish his presidential mandate that was so brusquely terminated seven years ago.

    And so we are back to the on-going rice campaign.  In Nigeria, whenever they say that something has come to stay, you can be sure it is on the way out.  The rice campaign is different.  Something tells me it will endure.

    But not in bags stacked in pyramids stacked in distant places.  It belongs in the warehouses and in the markets and the stores and the shops and the roadside kiosks and in the pantries and in pots and pans     steaming and sizzling on kitchen stoves.

    It belongs ultimately in the dishes in which it will be served for the nurture of starving consumers.

    Get it there fast, while the massive subsidies last.

  • The Bashir Tofa we never knew

    The Bashir Tofa we never knew

    In formal terms, Bashir Tofa was one of the principal figures in the June 12, 1993, presidential election debacle. As candidate and standard-bearer of the National Republican Convention (NRC), one of the two recognised official political parties, he shared the spotlight with the candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Bashorun MKO Abiola.

    Few outside Kano and the business community knew much about Tofa until he was catapulted to head the NRC ticket by the not-so-hidden hands of the grand manipulator in Aso Rock and his proxies, as an element in their secret agenda. The intelligence at the time was that military president, Ibrahim Babangida would seize on some gaps in Tofa’s résumé to void the election if, as per his calculation, Tofa won. And Tofa would not be in a position to cause a stir.

    Secret agenda or no secret agenda, foil or no foil, Tofa grew quickly into the role of presidential candidate, crisscrossing the country in a spirited campaign. One element of that campaign clings in my memory. It was a television commercial in which a man decked out as an ordained priest  led an energetic crowd whose attires reflected the nation’s ethnic diversity in chanting “Tofa is the answer, Tofa.” Billboards dotting the landscape carried the same message.

    Even more memorable was the televised debate between Tofa and Abiola, staged by the NTA and moderated by its senior programme executive, Dr Biodun Sotumbi. Oil pricing came up, naturally, in the wake of yet another threat to cut a phantom gasoline subsidy. Tofa, it turned out, did not even know the pump price of a gallon of petrol.

    There was always something flighty about him. But his performance was on the whole passable. Among major commentators, only MCK Ajuluchukwu thought Tofa had “won” the debate.

    For Nigerians weary of the bitterness and the stubborn refusal to accept defeat that had been prominent features of Nigerian politics, I suspect that the high point of the debate came at the very end. Abiola and Tofa shook hands and pledged to abide by the result of the election, no matter how it turned.

    This, then, was going to be a different election. The political transition programme, despite its manifest flaws, might yet inaugurate a new political era.

    It was not to be.

    Abiola won outright in 18 states, including Tofa’s home state, Kano. He also won more than one-fourth of the votes cast in all but two or three of the remaining 14 states.

    This was the most decisive victory in Nigeria’s history, in what local and foreign observers ranked among the cleanest they had witnessed anywhere and also, I fear, the fairest and freest my generation will ever know.

    The National Electoral Commission had named a chief returning officer, a signal that it was           set to declare a winner.

    In keeping with Tofa’s pledge, his camp had assembled to put the finishing touches to a statement conceding defeat when, according to Dr Doyin Okupe, NRC’s national publicity secretary, Tofa’s cell phone rang. Tofa responded in Hausa to the call, which he said was from “the Villa,” and then retreated to a private room where he and the caller continued their conversation, in Hausa.

    Emerging some 30 minutes later, Tofa was a changed man, Okupe told me in an interview for my book, Diary of a Debacle.  Gone from his countenance was any trace of a willingness to concede, or even compromise. In its place, defiance, and grim determination.

    The concession was never made. Instead, calls for voiding the poll, for reasons ranging from the infantile to the spurious, poured forth from the NRC camp.

    Babangida gladly obliged.

    Abiola’s camp, propelled by the umbrella organisation NADECO, mounted a campaign of protest and resistance that shook Nigeria to its fragile roots.

    Tofa slunk into the obscurity from which he had been plucked. Never has a principal actor in an epic drama faded so quickly from the scene, unremarked and barely remembered.

    Sometime in 1997, Tofa’s handlers inveigled or bribed some rogue elements in the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations into inviting him to address that prestigious bastion of America’s foreign policy establishment.

    Compounding his fecklessness with mendacity, Tofa declared with a straight face that he, not Abiola, had won the election – a claim Tofa had never made at home — and that he had accepted the annulment in the national interest.

    Year after year, as those who hold that governance should be based on the consent of the people rather than the caprice of a cabal celebrated the June 12 anniversary, Tofa kept denouncing the occasion.

    He was at it again in 2013, on the 20th anniversary of the historic poll.

    The brutal and thieving dictator, Sani Abacha, of frightful memory, had called the election a “watershed.” In a shameless and self-serving retreat with few parallels here or anywhere, the annuller himself, General Babangida, had called the election “the best” in Nigeria’s history and claimed the credit for organising it.

    Fifteen years after the election, its chief umpire, Humphrey Nwosu, freed finally from the oath  of silence the annullers had sworn him to, published the official results.  Abiola had won, in the manner the election returns awaiting official certification had indicated.

    As if to secure his place in the hall of infamy even as other authors and enablers of the annulment were seeking desperately to extricate themselves from that gallery, Tofa declared, on its 20th anniversary that “June 12” was dead, that its celebration “a fiction.”

    “I am not one of those people that celebrate fiction that is the more reason why I don’t like to be talking again on June 12 presidential election,” he told journalists in Kano.

    “Only those who don’t have anything to offer to this country to move forward can still be talking about June 12 presidential elections.

    “If you have learnt any lesson out of it, well; if you have not, keep quiet, let this country make progress. But for one to still be talking about something that occurred 20 years ago, is colossal waste of time.”

    This is the quality of mind of a man whom the manipulators of the transition program judged fit to be president, the man who had a statistical chance of being elected to that office but chose to connive in the annulment of the election.

    Yet, when he died on January 3, aged 74, unless you belonged in the attentive audience, you would have been led to believe that Tofa was “a patriot to the core,” the quintessence of statesmanship, and a democrat of the deepest hue.

    President Muhammadu Buhari eulogized him as “a true nationalist that would be difficult to replace” and for good measure dispatched a delegation to Kano with a message of condolence to            State Governor Abdullahi Ganduje.  Yobe State Governor Mai Mala Buni lamented that Tofa departed when Nigeria sorely needed his wise counsel.

    And so on and so forth.

    But their Tofa is the Tofa we never knew.

    As I stated earlier, there was always more than a touch of flightiness to the Tofa persona.  That flightiness was on full display on June 12, 1993, as he traipsed from one voting booth to another in his Kano constituency in vain hope of casting his ballot. His name was not on any of the books.

    Apparently, the man who would be President had not even bothered to register to vote.

    History will remember him all right, but mainly as a contemptible footnote to “June 12.”

     

  • Shonekan: The collapse of a tragic delusion (2)

    Shonekan: The collapse of a tragic delusion (2)

    In the first part this submission, I set out to demonstrate that Ernest Shonekan and the Transition Council were little more than deluded baubles in military president Ibrahim Babangida’s programme of democratization that the noted scholar Richard Joseph, author of a seminal work on Nigeria’s Second Republic, called “one of the most sustained exercises in political chicanery ever visited on a people.”

    Professor Ben Nwabueze who, even while serving as Education Secretary on the TC mandated to supervise the terminal phase of Babangida’s transition programme and ensure a smooth transfer  of power to a democratically-elected government, morphed into a legal strategist for eviscerating it, has made the point more tellingly.

    Apart from two or three exceptions, Nwabueze has written, none of the 106 Decrees enacted during the tenure of the TC (Jan- Aug 1993), including the controversial decree that annulled the June 12 election and decrees designed to fustigate the news media ever passed through the TC for discussion, comments or even for its information.  The TC members, Nwabueze said, “learnt about them from the pages of the newspapers or from other sources, just like the rest of the Nigerian citizenry.”

    He concluded:  “The sidelining of the TC in the process of law-making reduced its role in government to almost total irrelevance and insignificance.”

    The TC was the deus ex machina that Babangida conjured up to shore up his tottering transition programme.  With the annulment of the presidential election and the dismantling of the institutions that had undergirded it from its inception, the programme was for all practical purposes dead.

    But Babangida had to keep up the pretence of desiring to vacate power.  He corralled the two official political parties – the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the National Republican Convention (NRC) into agreeing to the formation of an Interim National Government to hold power until democratic elections could be held three months down the line, or in March 1994 as was later proposed.

    He needed a public figure of some gravitas to front as Head of the Interim National Government – they later added Head of State.  He did not need to look far and wide.  Shonekan was only too willing.  His acceptance reeked of careerism in its rawest form.  Moshood Abiola, winner of the annulled election, came from the same town as Shonekan, and was a friend to boot, but such considerations did not trouble Shonekan.

    In his acceptance speech, Shonekan gushed with gratitude to Babangida.  Amidst the carnage on the streets, the protests and the strikes and the boycotts that paralyzed many cities, he declared that Babangida was the one Nigerian leader who was leaving the country in a better shape than he had found it.  Shonekan evinced nary a hint of those characteristics that had for decades projected him as an iconic figure in corporate Nigeria.

    At his swearing in, he could have been mistaken for just another hustler.

    He was no puppet, Shonekan said.  He had accepted the position, not out of a desire to kill anyone’s joy, but as “a personal sacrifice” and to avert bloodshed.  The ING was “a child of necessity.”  The annulled election,” he said with breathtaking insensitivity, should be accepted as having passed into “the dustbin of history.”  Nigerians must put June 12 firmly behind them and work with him “to move the country forward.”

    His reward was a booby-trapped perch.  In the version I sighted of one several draft decree purporting to set up the ING (several were in circulation!), there was a blank where the name of the head of the ING should have been entered. The deputy head of the ING was unnamed.  The appointing officer was unnamed.  The names were penciled in later.

    The draft contained the curious provision that if the head of the ING resigned or could not continue in office for one reason or another, the most senior military officer would take over.  This was an open invitation to General Sani Abacha to move to unseat Shonekan whenever he pleased.

    Even more curious was a provision that no part of the law could be challenged, varied, altered or modified, by any other law.  Shonekan’s hands were not only tied; he was trussed up, blindfolded, gagged and deafened. He did not see the ING’s enabling decree before he took office.  He did not know what powers he would be able to exercise, and apparently did not care. To him, the position was everything.

    The draft was above all a damning indictment of Shonekan.  It said that the Federal Military Government decided to annul the June 12 election and processes leading to it out of “an abiding concern for national security, law and order, enduring democracy, and the provision of effective economic direction” for the nation and “because the processes had been marked by “grave electoral malpractices.”

    In short, Shonekan had brought it upon the nation, himself, and the TC.

    The indictment was gratuitous.  In the scheme of things, the TC was not even a consultative arm of the government.  It had no legislative or executive power.  But Shonekan took the indictment in his stride, moved on to the ING, and to his final humiliation.

    Shonekan was hobbled by problems of legitimacy from the outset, not least on account of his rather ambiguous title. What manner of animal is that, many were left to wonder?

    The concept was novel, to be sure; not all Nigerians literate in English grasped its essence.  In Nigeria’s indigenous languages, it was unfathomable.

    In the Yoruba-language media, it translated into a government perched precariously on the edge, one that could be dislodged with the slightest shove. `The government promptly banned the term.

    To generate a semblance of legitimacy, Shonekan embarked on a trip to the northernmost parts of the country the week after he took office.  He went, first, to Sokoto, to greet the Sultan, Ibrahim Dasuki, on the occasion of Prophet Mohammmed’s birthday and to express a hope that Allah would intervene mercifully in Nigeria’s troubled affairs.  From there, he flew to Kano to greet the Emir, Ado Bayero.  Finally, he headed to Maiduguri to pay homage to the Shehu of Borno.

    The motive and the geopolitics of this excursion were puzzling.

    First, the motive:  was it confidence building, or was it appeasement? Then, the geopolitics.  Whatever the motive, why concentrate the effort in that particular zone?

    It was only weeks later that Shonekan sneaked into Ondo State in the dead of night on an official visit lasting several hours in a state where, under normal circumstances, he should by right have expected a rousing welcome.  But he was taking no chances.

    At the palace of the Oba of Lagos, he got a frosty reception. The palace handed him a letter containing a message that would have been considered indelicate had it emanated from the royal father’s mouth.

    Shonekan willingly served as head of a government in a regime that issued decrees which formally and deliberately denied Nigerians the protections of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the African Charter of Human and Peoples Rights.  If he was not part and parcel of a conspiracy to annul the sovereignty of the Nigerian electorate, he was incontestably one of its prime beneficiaries.

    Yet in an act of perjury heard and seen around the world, he told the United Nations with a straight face that his government subscribed unambiguously to the Universal Declaration Human Rights.  Four of the nation’s most vibrant newspapers were banned; yet he claimed that the news media in Nigeria enjoyed unfettered press freedom.

    Even after the Lagos High Court declared the ING illegal and the instrument setting it up an inept forgery, Shonekan soldiered on for 83 days, putting up with the kind of rejection that would have discomfited a hippo.

    Until Sani Abacha terminated his misbegotten errand and put him out of his misery.

    The story line was that Shonekan had resigned.  But he was not even accorded the courtesy of reading his letter of resignation in real time.  He could never shed the label of quisling that a great many of his kin in the Yoruba country pinned on him.

  • Shonekan: The making of a tragic illusion

    Shonekan: The making of a tragic illusion

    As 1992 drew to a close, it had become clear that military president, Ibrahim Babangida’s political transition programme had lost its momentum, and with it much of the credibility it once possessed.  It needed a new face and fresh voices.

    A Transitional Council (TC) was the answer Babangida conjured up.  Its remit was to supervise what remained of the much-revised transition design and ensure a smooth handover of power to a democratically-elected government in August 1993.  In its many emendations, the transition blueprint had given no hint of this innovation.

    The TC was made up entirely of civilians, most of them technocrats and distinguished professionals, though two of them, Matthew Mbu and Dr Christopher G. Okojie, were figures from the from the late colonial and immediate post-colonial era.  Ernest Shonekan, most recently chairman of the United Africa Company of Nigeria (UACN), a component of the British multinational Unilever, was named chair of the Council and “Head of Government.”

    That designation was intended to create the impression that the military and Babangida were disengaging and that the Federal Government was now being run by civilians.  But it was a false label. The Armed Forces Ruling Council made all the laws, controlled the armed and security services, and its appointees ran the federal bureaucracy.

    In a speech at the opening session of a Conference on Federalism and Nation-Building, in Abuja in January 1993, Shonekan came in sixth in Babangida’s order of precedence, behind members of the Armed Forces Ruling Council, former head of state, General Yakubu Gowon, members of the Diplomatic Corps and behind Dr Iyorchia Ayu, president of a senate that had virtually no lawmaking powers.

    Nor did Shonekan in office play the part of “head of government.”

    Uche Chukwumerije, Secretary for Information in the TC, told me that, in its early days, members sent memos meant for Babangida’s attention to Shonekan.  But on discovering that Shonekan merely initialed the memos and forwarded them without comment, they bypassed Shonekan and sent their memos directly to Babangida.

    But Shonekan, who died last Tuesday aged 85, was content to live a lie. And not just once, as I will argue in this column and the follow-up.

    Rumours of the coming of the TC had been circulating for months.  Babangida, so went the rumours, would name the head of the TC from a shortlist of five prospects – Dr Pius Okigbo, the distinguished economist and public intellectual; Bashorun Moshood Abiola, publisher of Concord newspapers and business mogul; Joseph Wayas, Second Republic senate president; Cornelius Adebayo, Second Republic senator and executive governor of Kwara State, and Shonekan.

    I saw it as a thinly-veiled scheme to extend Babangida’s tenure for as long as possible.  Whoever   agreed to serve in that post, I felt certain, would come to grief and that I had a duty as a public affairs analyst of the “participant-media” school to point out the dangers ahead.  Back then, whenever I felt I was embarking on an errand that was too big for my shoes, I usually turned to General Olusegun Obasanjo, respected statesman-at-large and chairman of the African Leadership Forum for help and advice.

    I knew Okigbo and Adebayo well enough to conclude that they would reject Babangida’s proposal    on the threshold.  Something told me Wayas would get no such offer.  That left Abiola and Shonekan. Could Obasanjo, for the reasons I had advanced at a private meeting at his Otta Farm House, dissuade Abiola and Shonekan from consenting?

    A week later, Obasanjo told me that Abiola needed no dissuading.  Abola had indeed been offered the position but had garnished his rejection with a judicious Yoruba proverb.

    “What of Shonekan?” I asked.

    Obasanjo said Shonekan told him he had accepted the offer based on Unilever’s assurance that it would use its influence with the British Government to ensure that Shonekan made a success of it.

    Did Obasanjo warn Shonekan that he might unwittingly be lending his name and reputation to the  prosecution of a dark agenda?”

    Obasanjo said he did, and that Shonekan had assured him that if Babangida sought to prolong his tenure beyond June 27, 1993, Babangida would get know the stuff Shonekan was made of.

    Did Obasanjo believe Shonekan?

    “Let us just say that Ernest is naïve or ambitious or both,” he said.

    During the week Shonekan took office, I reached out to his Special Adviser, Isaac Aluko-Olokun, who had served as UACN’s chief economist when Shonekan was chairman. The whisper in UACN’s corridors was that Aluko-Olokun was Shonekan’s “brain” and that not even an inter-office memo could emanate from the chairman’s office unless the chief economist had cleared it, assuming that the chief economist was not its author.

    I had met Aluko-Olokun not infrequently in media circles and on public discussion forums, and I felt I could take a chance on him.  I told him I was sure his boss had got himself into a situation he had not bargained for and from which he was unlikely to emerge undamaged, but that all was not lost.

    If it ever occurred to Aluko-Olokun that his boss had been recruited merely to serve as cover for a hidden agenda, I would gladly serve as a backchannel through which he could communicate his fears to the public under deep cover and protect his reputation.

    “You would do that?” Aluko-Olokun asked excitedly.

    I assured him that I would.

    One week passed, but no word came from him.  Then, two weeks, and three.  So I called Aluko-Olokun again.  He apologized profusely, saying that he had been tied up in Abuja.  He said he was about to leave for the airport to board a flight to Lagos and would definitely see me that weekend.

    He never did.  And I never raised the matter again.

    Even as Election Day June 12, 1993 approached, there were few indications that the nation was about to reach, finally, the culmination of a transition that had been eight years in the making.  In contravention of decrees stipulating stiff penalties, all manner of persons, many of them widely believed to have been sponsored by the government, called for the scrapping of the transition programme, and for Babangida to continue in office.

    The TC seemed helpless.  It could not even warn that such advocacy was subversive of the transition and stood to be punished by fine and imprisonment.  And yet it was squarely on the shoulders of the TC that Babangida had placed the responsibility for completing the programme.

    Yet, at some point, it was almost as if Clement Akpamgbo was chief counsel and strategist to those elements bent on scuttling the transition programme, and not the nation’s chief law officer.

    A week to the poll, I learned from Information Secretary Uche Chukwumerije on deep background that the election was unlikely to hold.

    In the end, what forced the military authorities to go ahead with the election was a statement by the United States Embassy in Lagos on the eve of the poll that its postponement would be unacceptable to the U.S. Government.

    They went ahead with the election, only to annul it.  Shonekan and the TC were not privy to the annulment.  None of the members demanded an explanation.  None felt that they owed the public an explanation. None resigned.

    They stood by, unquestioning, as Babangida scrambled to confect another duplicitous formula to continue the aborted mission of the TC:  a so-called Interim National Government, with the obliging Ernest Shonekan cast again in the fictional role of “Head of the Interim National Government” for 83 days that even he must have counted among the most miserable in his long and eventful life.

    • The second and concluding part, to be published in this space next Tuesday, will review Shonekan’s tenure as “Head of the Interim National Government.”