Category: Olatunji Dare

Instead of bemoaning how singularly horrible the past year was, or engaging in the dismal task of delineating a hierarchy of horribleness in the events thereof, would it not be healthier, certainly more respectful of the reader’s equanimity in particular and the temper of these times in general to dwell on matters more diverting and perhaps in some respects even more illuminating?

Such as, well, Matters Miscellaneous?  Why not?

That, any rate, is the mission of the column today, the first in 2022.

Who has not by now had a surfeit of the litany of bad news, more bad news and very bad news that has suffused the airwaves, the headlines and the front pages of the news media.  You cannot get away from them.  They pursue you insidiously and relentlessly.  Who would not welcome a respite, however brief, from such suffocating attention?

You don’t have to look hard to find them. To even mention them, however obliquely, is to ruin the spirit of the occasion; hence, this miscellany, starting with a lexical concern.

To preserve the purity of the language, the lexicographers at the English Oxford Dictionary (OED) periodically cast shadows on the legitimacy of some words in current usage.  Bless their fairmindedness, they scour the lexicon for some terms that are widely employed in current usage but had not been accorded formal entry into the language.

It was in one such review in early 2020 that many terms that were formerly dismissed as “Nigerianisms” were formally incorporated into proper lexicon – terms such as barbing, bukateria, ember month, flag-off, non-indigene, next tomorrow, gist, guber, rub minds, sef, and K-leg.

Whatever the rank OED now accords them, I would hesitate to use them when writing for foreign audiences   or the newly literate in English.

To update its review, OED should next look at terms that are not widely used and in fact may not be a candidate on any protagonist’s list for promotion but nevertheless have such a powerful ring on the ear that you have to wonder what they are doing outside the league.

I am thinking of the term “byforce,” verb.

It won me over the very first time I heard it used in the pidgin, as in Dem byforce you? And since then, I have never missed a chance to use it myself.

It is felicitous, it is direct, it is vigorous, and it admits of no ambiguity, it is as sharp as a command.

Rendered in Standard English, it would come out in the interrogative as:  Were you forced? Did anyone force you?  Or as “Did they force you?

That sentence has nothing of the vibrancy, the vigour, the directness, and the immediacy of “Dem byforce you?”

So that if and when you finally accord the term its proper place or set out to translate into Standard English, take special care, ladies and gentlemen, to preserve those elements that make it so finely wrought.

Who would have thought that, even in Nigeria, being referred to as a former holder of an office you have  long ceased to hold can cost a third party more than a little inconvenience?  That was what happened at the Kaduna Investment Summit last September, when the master of ceremonies introduced the Man of the Moment, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, as the “former Emir of Kano.”

The former emir’s countenance changed as he rose to speak. “Next time don’t call me a former Emir of Kano,’’ he said gravely. “There is nothing like that.”

If anyone in that august assembly was steeped in protocol, it would have to be the master of ceremonies, Muhammad Sani Abdullahi, chief of staff to Kaduna State Governor Nasr el Rufai.  So, what went wrong?

Would Sanusi have preferred to be called a former governor of the Central Bank, at the end of which controversial tenure he was named emir of Kano in contentious circumstances?

For good measure, Sanusi hinted before resuming his seat that that he too might soon have to call Abdullahi a former Chief of Staff. Three weeks later, the former emir’s prophecy came true.  Abdullahi had indeed become former chief of staff.  Substantively, he had been reduced to an ordinary permanent secretary, following a cabinet shuffle.

Observers are still puzzled as to the cause of the former emir’s umbrage.  Was it because the title was not prefaced with “His Royal Highness”?  Would he have preferred to be called “the deposed former emir of Kano, or even more truthfully “the deposed emir of Kano”?

Since the former emir whose attendance is so much in demand at home and abroad, and since he still dresses the part, san the staff of office he used to cradle so fondly, he should clarify matters to save his hosts future embarrassment.

The Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, had cause to rebuke the media lately for, among other crimes, holding the government hostage.   I am surprised that he has not urged the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice to comb the statute books for laws prohibiting and punishing that kind of rascality.

The charge seems to me to be based on a misreading of the evidence. If anything, it is the media that are forever investing President Muhammadu Buhari with powers he does not possess, thus seeking to hold him hostage to their fancies.

Thus, hardly a week passes without encountering newspapers headline such as the following:

Buhari orders power agencies to double output by March.

Buhari orders NUC to produce Nigeria’s Nobel Prize winner in Physics.

Buhari orders NNPC to double oil exports to meet demand.

Buhari to Army Defence Chiefs:  Crush Boko Haram and ISIS Now.

It is also only in Nigeria that you have the media reporting all kinds of persons, most of them insignificant, “dragging” the eminent persons of the realm to court, among them, the President, the Senate President, state governors cabinet ministers, and just about anyone who wields a rubberstamp.

One crucial issue at the recent Glasgow Conference on Climate, COP 26:  What to do with coal, a leading source environmental pollution, beg your pardon of greenhouse gas emissions. Phase it out, some countries submitted.  Phase it down, others said.

Those in favour of phasing down said it was the first crucial step toward phasing out; that you cannot phase out without first phasing down.  Those for phasing out could not but agree that phasing down was a good start toward that goal.  They debated targets for phasing out or phasing down.

Each side went home with sense of accomplishment.

A nice dodge, until they meet again.

To the National Assembly: 

Before you engage in another public spat with the executive branch again over legislative jurisdiction, make sure you do your homework.  You cannot afford anytime soon the kind of dusting you suffered last week.  It wasn’t pretty.

In the aftermath of the Presidential election crisis of 1993, discussions between me and Dr Doyinsola Abiola, wife of president-elect Moshood Abiola, publisher of the opposition Concord Newspapers, strategic thinker and discreet mobiliser for “June 12,” invariably devolved into a comparison of our notes on the unfolding situation in South Africa and its implications for Nigeria.

Each of us had made three separate but overlapping visits to South Africa during which we met and held discussions with many of the leading political officials and non-state actors.

At our meetings back home in Nigeria, we would in the light of what we had read about them and our interactions with them, weigh the personalities we had met, dissect them, and delineate their dominant characteristics so as to gain their support and understanding on the “June 12” debacle.

At such sessions, it was Dr Abiola who provided the sharpest insights and the summative judgements.

When you met Nelson Mandela, she would say, you knew that you were in the presence of greatness.  It flowed from every pore of his skin, from the simplest gesture, or act, to pronouncements requiring the most profound deliberation.  It seemed so effortless.

With Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Dr Abiola would say, you knew you were in the presence of goodness.  You almost couldn’t imagine him committing any wrongdoing.

Desmond Mpilo Tutu, Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town,  recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, leader of the anti-apartheid struggle, moral voice for global civil and human rights and one of the most influential theologians of our time, died on December 26, 2021, at the Oasis Care Centre, in Cape Town, aged 90.

Tutu rose from humble beginning and the fraught circumstances that the racist White minority apartheid rule reserved for the Black majority to become, by sheer force of will, determination and steadfastness to principle to become one of the most influential voices of this century.

For his generation, the clergy was one of the few routes out of the daily grind of apartheid.  Law and teaching were open, but only up to a point.  The system was designed to make it well-nigh impossible for Blacks to reach their potential.  As Hendrik Verwoerd, Minister of Bantu Education and later prime minister articulated it, the goal was to equip the natives to function at a level no higher than that of domestic servant.

There clings in my memory a 1961 TIME magazine story in which a white policer espied a black man sprawled across the floor in a Whites-only church.

“What are you doing there?” demanded the scandalised police officer.

“Cleaning the floor, bass,” came the tremulous reply.

“Good that you are only cleaning the floor,” the officer said, as he caressed his sjambok. If you had been praying, you would have needed help from above.”

Even if the story is apocryphal, it captures eloquently the essence of the apartheid spirit:  Blacks may worship or claim to worship the same God as their superiors, but they must do so in separate, water-tight compartments.

Oliver Reginald (OR) Tambo, a founder and later president of the ANC, grew up dreaming of becoming a medical doctor.  He had the best result in the qualifying examination held throughout the country.  But under apartheid rules, that was forbidden territory. Faithful to Tambo’s unfulfilled dream, the South African government named the country’s largest hospital complex after him. It also renamed Johannesburg’s international airport in his memory.

So, like millions of Blacks before him, Tutu had to settle for a future not of his own choosing but one charted by others.

That future, the priesthood, was one for which Providence seemed to have prepared him in diverse ways.  He was enormously gifted in empathy and sympathy.  He could feel the pain of others.  He could identify with other people and insert himself in their circumstances. He could communicate eloquently and relate to audiences large and small in ways that made them feel that their privations were also his own.   And, oh, he could sing, and he could dance!

He had the gift of spontaneity.  Words, gestures and symbolic action came naturally to him.  He was a true believer. With him, there was no playacting, no faking.  His strictures on the bestialities of apartheid were heartfelt; his moral revulsion, eloquent.

Yet, even in that miasma, he often found cause for joy and laughter in little things.  That laughter was infectious, and so was his effervescence. It dispelled the gloom of the moment and the awkwardness of the occasion. He led by example, not precept. He was an apostle of nonviolence, but acknowledged the limit of that doctrine when he declared that he was not a pacifist.

At the height of the carnage in South Africa’s townships and in the 1980s, he was moved to declare that if he belonged in the generation of the young men and women stirring the urban revolt, he would have rejected the leadership of Tutu’s generation because it was producing no meaningful change, only ever more brutal reprisals.

Still he never lost faith that the struggle could be won.

And when it was won, there was no happier person in the world than Desmond Tutu. I can still see him on the long, snaking queue as he waited to cast his ballot in South Africa’s general elections for the first time in his life. Even now, I can still see him holding up his ballot in triumph at the point of casting it and having done so, burst into his trademark dance, chirpy and engaging as ever.

When apartheid fell and the new Black majority government that took over from Mandela departed from the core principles that had animated[OD1]  the anti-apartheid struggle and undergirded the new dispensation, Tutu was unsparing.  He rebuked them just as fiercely as he had disavowed the apartheid regime.

He reminded the new people at every opportunity that the basic task of government was to serve the people and improve their living standards.  Catering principally to the privileges of the elite, he stated, again and again, was a betrayal of the struggle.

Tutu’s outspokenness irritated the governing elite and their allies in the new oligarchy.  They called him all manner of names and sought to discredit him.  But because he was anchored in what he believed to be the word of God and the purpose for which he was called to the Ministry, he never wavered.

His close friendship with Nelson Mandela never had him flinch from disagreeing with him on matters of strategy while holding fast to fundamental principles.  He was a democrat’s democrat.  The protests he led were lessons in civic engagement and participation.

No greater testament to Tutu’s greatness can be found anywhere other than in his lived example and in comments that have poured forth from across the world since his passing.  They bespeak genuine affection and appreciation from across the world for his life of service, truth and honesty.

He held no elected office and wielded no political power.  Yet he parlayed the role that his calling imposed on him into statesmanship of the rarest kind.  It should indeed be said of Desmond Mpilo Tutu that he gave statesmanship itself a whole new meaning.  His life was untainted by scandal.

May his vision of justice based on restitution rather than retribution grow and thrive, and may his idea of South Africa as a Rainbow Nation count for more than a slogan.

By any reckoning, the Osborne Towers Haul has got to rank among the top 10 stories from Nigeria in 2017, given the way it broke and has continued to unfold, its many turns and twists.

It remains, without question, the largest fortune any person or institution ever chanced upon in a single location since Shell Darcy struck oil in Nigeria in Oloibiri, in present-day Bayelsa State, 61 years ago.  And it transformed one of the most exclusive addresses in one of the most opulent neighbourhoods in Nigeria into a crime scene.

Footage of the unearthing of the haul, some $43 million stacked in packs of mint-fresh $10, 000 bills, in a fire-proof steel cabinet in Flat 7B at the Towers, not forgetting small change in hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling, made the headlines and front pages of the news media across the world.

Early reports claimed that the haul was part of the “security” money former President Goodluck Jonathan had squirreled away for fighting the 2015 presidential election that he should have known he could not win.  He had been so crushed by his defeat, they said, that he forgot the money.

Even if Dr Jonathan remembered, how could he have come forward to claim the money, especially when his wife, the formerly excellent Dame Patience, was fighting desperately to re-possess some N54 million in bank deposits that the courts had ordered forfeited on the suspicion that it was the fruit of crime?

Those who expected his consort, the formerly excellent lady aforementioned, to weigh in with an affidavit that the money at issue was her birthday gift to him when he turned 59 the previous  November must have been disappointed.   Give it to The Dame:  she knows that there are only so many fronts on which even a person of her omnivorous appetite can fight.

EFCC operatives who had swooped on Apartment 7B following a tip-off from a whistle-blower were still totting up the haul when Governor Nyesom Wike declared that it belonged without question to the Rivers State Government, being proceeds of assets his predecessor and current Minister of Transport, Rotimi Amaechi had “fraudulently” auctioned.

“We will follow due process of the law to get back the money found at the Ikoyi residence, he told Channels Television. “This money belongs to the Rivers State people. We have conducted our checks.’’

“We will stun Nigeria with this matter. We will come out with our evidence at the appropriate time.”

Wike’s plan was at full throttle when the Director-General of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), Ambassador Ayodele Oke, a spook whom few outside the community of spooks had ever heard of, stepped forward to claim that the money belonged to the NIA.

The fund, he said, was duly appropriated by the Federal Government at the time of Dr Jonathan for projects that could not be named, that Oke had periodically reported on those projects to the complete satisfaction of the authorities, among them National Security Adviser Babagana Monguno, and by extension President Muhammadu Buhari.

Premium Times (May 5, 2016) confirmed that much in a painstakingly documented piece that has not been rebutted as far as I know.  The editors tell me they stand “perfectly” by their reporting.

In 2013-2014, the paper reported that Ambassador Oke’s immediate predecessor, Olaniyi Oladeji, had proposed to the Jonathan Administration an upgrade to NIA’s intelligence-gathering capability. On taking over from Oladeji, Ambssador Oke had fleshed out the proposal in a memo he submitted to Dr Jonathan on Feb: 14, 2015.

Goal: to “upgrade and professionalize agency operations” in order to “engender an effective clandestine communication systems central to the working of an intelligence service.”

Project Schedule: 2015 – 2018.

Price tag:  $89, 202, 282, to be expended on 12 high-level projects.

According to the report, Dr Jonathan approved the request February 16, 2015 and directed the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Allison-Madueke to release the funds.  Several weeks later, the NIA received the full amount in cash from the Central Bank.

Eleven months later, in January 2016, the report continued, the NIA submitted progress reports on the projects and a detailed breakdown of expenditures in a letter to NSA Monguno.

Thereafter, Premium Times continued, a three-man panel from the National Security Adviser           went to inspect the projects.  In its February 29, 2016 report, the team expressed satisfaction with the way the $289-million operation was being implemented.

Some ten weeks later, on May 5, 2016, Mr. Monguno visited the NIA Headquarters for the  first time since he assumed office in July 2015 and, according to Premium Times, wrote in the Visitors’ Book:

“On the occasion of my maiden visit to the NIA since assumption of official duties as NSA, I am extremely delighted by the warm reception and hospitality shown to me by H.E. Ambassador Ayo Oke, DG, NIA, the quality of works in progress is notably breathtaking but very inspiring also.

“All the facilities being constructed have demonstrated that the NIA is far ahead of its sister agencies in terms of foresight and dealing with 21st Century intelligence issues.

“It is my fervent prayer that the NIA achieve all the goals it has set for itself so that all other institutions of government, particularly the intelligence community, will bring about the desired change for this great country.”

Two weeks later, on May 17, 2016, the NSA informed the NIA that President Buhari had been briefed about the ongoing projects and that the president expressed his gratitude to the NIA personnel, the paper reported.

Roughly a year later, the EFCC recovered $43,449,947, £27,800 and N23,218,000 from Flat 7B at Osborne Towers.  Oke would be suspended from office, and dismissed subsequently by President Buhari, following the unpublished report of a panel headed by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, tasked with establishing the “circumstances in which the NIA came into possession of the funds, how and by whose or which authority the funds were made available to the NIA, and to establish whether or not there has been a breach of the law or security procedure in obtaining custody and use of the funds.”

The Osborne Towers haul has since been forfeited to the Federal Government, on the orders of the Federal High Court, Lagos. But the ownership of Flat 7B remains disputed.

The EFCC says is it was purchased by Mrs Oke in the name of a company, Chobe Ventures  Ltd, of which she and her son, are the directors.  But Union Bank plc claims that it holds the mortgage to the property.

In a bizarre turn, Ambassador Oke was set to face trial, most likely in secret court, because of the sensitive nature of the office he once held.

But how did matters come to this tawdry pass?

How did it come to pass that Oke’s request for the vast sum at issue was approved in just two days, and apparently without discussion or debate at the National Security Council?  How come the money was released to the NIA in one fell swoop, and in cash?   How did a project that had reportedly earned high praise from the National Security Adviser turn into a national scandal with hardly any redeeming grace less than a year later?

Was the NIA dissembling all along?  Was the Office of the National Security Adviser also dissembling? Was the National Security Adviser merely being collegial in its effusive report?  Or was his team caught up the NIA’s web of deception by its own credulity or worse, gullibility?

Was Oke being made a fall guy?

Because the matter centres on national security, we may never know the answers.  Yet the questions are worth asking.

Matters got even murkier regarding the identity of the whistleblower who stood to receive,  by way of gratuity, one-tenth of the recovered haul, which would make the person an instant millionaire.

At first, there was only one whistleblower.  The EFCC said the person had been identified and handed his reward.  Then they said the person would soon be paid.  Later reports said the person was undergoing psychiatric evaluation, for fear that the person might lose his or her mind on account of coming so suddenly into a vast fortune.

They were still wrestling with these issues when a rival claimant to the title of whistleblower and the fortune that goes with it surfaced.

This being Nigeria, a third is guaranteed to surface shortly.  And a fourth.  And a fifth. . .

But the whistleblower’s identity almost pales into nothingness (no pun intended) compared to the mystery that has since enveloped Ambassador Oke and his wife, Folashade.  Weeks after they were arraigned, the twain, almost in the manner of lovers embarking on a honeymoon, boarded an international flight to parts unknown.

Since then, nothing seems to have been heard from or about them.  No requests seem to have been made for their extradition to answer the crime they were alleged to have committed, which is one for the annals.  Recovering the Osborne Fortune seems to have been considered  a satisfactory end, with Ambassador Oke’s honour as collateral damage if he is not guilty as charged?

Where are Ambassador Oke and his wife now?

 

Republished with minor revisions, this piece first appeared in this space on December 5, 2017

Correction

On December 14, this column misstated total Covid deaths in the United States as approaching 800.  The actual figure should have been 800, 000, which translates into one of every 100 stricken  persons dead.

A merry and safe Christmas to all.

 

 

 

My dear Aburo:

It seems only several weeks ago that what our inventive compatriots inscribed into the English Language as the Ember Months crept in upon us.  And lo, they have almost run their course, bar the dark portents.

I thought I should touch base with you before they pass ineluctably into history.

I am sure you will have discerned that the scarcest resource these days is not food or money or clean water or clean air or shelter, hard as they are to come by.  Even good old-fashioned equanimity is in retreat.  But the scarcest commodity of all is Optimism.

As I write these lines on Monday, December 13, this is the headline that greets me from my favourite newspaper: “U.S. Nears 800,000 Virus Deaths, 1 of every 100 Older Americans Has Perished.”

It adds, in a kicker: “People 65 and older are still falling seriously ill in great numbers, particularly if they are unvaccinated, and U. S. hospitals have been strained his month.”

“Particularly if they are unvaccinated,” the report points out carefully with regard to those 65 and over.  But not exclusively, it is necessary to add.  Hundreds of deaths have also been recorded among the vaccinated.

Across the Atlantic, the figures only a shade less grim and the prospects just somewhat less dire.  In the UK, the frolicsome prime minister, Boris Johnson, has warned the public to be prepared for a “tidal wave” of new coronavirus infections of the hardy strain the world has been battling for some two years, the new Omicron virus, and the variants it is spawning even as scientists worldwide struggle to understand its insidious and ravenous ways and contain it.

As the director-general of the World Health Organisation, Dr Tedros Adhanon Gebreyesus has warned, Covid-19 is “not yet done with us.”

I do not mean in the least to alarm you, my dear aburo.

But tell me:  Have you and your household been vaccinated?  Or you an anti-vaxxer, or someone who does not believe at all in viruses, or believed that if they exist at all, they are not beyond the powers of our forebears to subdue and banish to the infernal world they came from, without recourse to needles and the mysterious potions they deliver into the bloodstream?

In your communion with them on this subject, what insights and revelations have the ancients vouchsafed   you?

Regardless of where you stand, Osahon, it must be jarring, scandalous beyond belief even, to learn from the very officials charged with protecting public health that one million doses of Covid-19 vaccines expired in storage in Nigeria, before they could be administered – vaccines in all likelihood provided by foreign donors and philanthropists.

And yet, there have been no resignations, voluntary or forced.  They are instead saying that such things are not uncommon.  It is almost as if they expected to be congratulated on keeping the loss to only a million doses.

This loss could have resulted from many factors, among them limited capacity for proper storage, tardiness in rolling them out, poor logistics and insufficient personnel.  But none of them, nor even all        of them together, can explain, much less excuse how one million doses of vaccines that could have made the difference between life and death for perhaps even thousands, of our compatriots.

The thing was compounded by Covid denial.  In many states and within communities, political officials who should lead the campaign against the disease actively denied its existence and suppressed efforts to tackle it.  It was in this context that health facilities that should protect were not built and those that exist by default are rendered inoperative.

According to federal health officials, Covid situation reports were coming in only from only 10 percent  of field offices nationwide.  There was little testing, and hence no detection.  From there, it was but a short step to conclude that there was no Covid manifestation whatsoever.  Better to face malaria fever.  But if and when the malaria vaccine comes on stream would they behave any different?

It is a matter of attitude as it is of impunity.  There are grave consequences for the collectivity but none for the official.

Time to turn away from this funereal subject of pathogens and talk instead of the imminent return of politics in its more exciting manifestation.  Recall, aburo, that we were treated to a titillating foretaste of this during the PDP’s National Convention in Abuja the other day.

The public must be growing impatient with the APC in this regard.  Rumours mount on rumours that the APC is about to stage its own show in a manner that will be membered long in the annals of political choreography in Nigeria.  But it just rumour after rumour.  Nothing happens.

What is going on, Osahon?  Why is the APC finding it so hard to hold its national convention?

Technically, the General Elections are just some 15 months away.  But once we emerge from the Ember Months into the New Year, politics will be the only game in town, and the issues now being addressed only cursorily will take an insistent turn.

In the broadest sense, will the president come from the North or the South?  Will he be a Christian, or a Muslim?  Where will the running mate come from?  Will that person be male or female?  Are we on the cusp of the Igbo Presidency?  Or the Edo Presidency?  Or the Tiv Presidency?  Or the Idoma Presidency  for that matter?

How will the principal offices of the state be distributed across zones and states and local government areas?  Will the rail link from Katsina to Maradi, in Niger Republic, be fast-tracked?

These are nuts and bolts to which the political class has reduced issues of governance in Nigeria.  Rarely are the overarching issues, the fundamentals, being addressed.  They talk endlessly about Nigerian unity and how it is non-negotiable.  They talk about it as if it already exists.  They rarely talk about what it should consist in, and how best to cultivate it.

Should Nigeria continue to exist in its present form?  If so, with what adjustments?  What should be  the agreed mechanism for making such adjustments?

Who needs a sybaritic National Assembly?  How will the country fulfill its obligations to its citizen instead of expending three-fourths of its resources on what is at bottom the administration of administration?  How can Nigeria find, claim and uphold is so-called “rightful place in the global community?

You have to be skeptical about whether they really mean what they say – that the future belongs to the youth.  Current policy does not accord with that pietism. What is to be dome about the millions of well-educated young men and women pounding the streets year after without finding work or any prospect thereof – where all they can expect are palliatives in the form of very temporary jobs in the performance of which they are cruelly exploited?

It especially is among that latter that Optimism is the scarcest resource.  The most urgent task for now is to give them reasons for Optimism.  The task will not be easy, I fear.

I have no doubt that your response will be as thoughtful and constructive as always.

All the best, Osahon, for you and yours at Chrismas and throughout the coming year.

Judging by the shellacking that the ebullient Chief Joseph Wayas received from sections of the news media when he was Senate president, the press obviously did not regard him as a friend.  To be sure, some of his friends in the good old days when he was Nigeria’s Number Three citizen were journalists, on whom he reportedly lavished precious gifts and favours, not for services rendered or expected to be rendered but as a matter of disinterested habit.

But he was also a friend of the press as an institution.  During the debate on the 1979 draft constitution at  the Constituent Assembly, he spoke eloquently, even forcefully, for a clause that would formally guarantee the freedom of the press, even as former journalists such as Adamu Ciroma, Turi Muhammadu and Olabisi (Aiyekooto) Onabanjo, among others, opposed such a measure.

Wayas, together with the protagonists of a constitutional guarantee of press freedom, lost the battle.  But what had he to show for his exertions in that epic struggle, and what was his reward for his great personal kindness to many a journalist?

Calumny and coarse abuse about his deportment, his comportment, his taste, his women, his wines, his education, and even his munificence.

On learning that Wayas regarded it as the ultimate humiliation to be called Mr Wayas and not Dr Wayas, one journalist actually resolved never to prefix that distinction to his name again.

His reason?

The doctorate was honorary, not earned and was, the journalist claimed, conferred by a little-known college in the United States in recognition of something the recipient had practised more abroad than at home:  public philanthropy.

Yet the journalist did not apply the same rule to dozens of other Nigerians of lesser specific gravity who, on the strength of doctorates awarded by obscure foreign universities for even more obscure attainments, demand to be held in awe.

Not even Wayas’s authorship of a thoughtful book, Nigeria’s Leadership Role in Africa, despite his crippling Senate schedule, to say nothing of his endless social engagements, could move the press to recognize his stature as a person of intellect.

It was bruited that his Higher National Diploma in Business Administration could not have equipped him for such an undertaking.  Some self-styled insiders even claimed that the book was written for valuable consideration by a professor in one of the first-generation universities, a compulsive gambler who had fallen on hard times.

The Senate over which Wayas presided was likewise and object of derision.  No sooner had it commenced business than the leading national newspaper alleged that, rather than face the serious business of law-making, senators busied themselves chasing contracts.

The Senate was scandalised.

Wayas needed no tutoring on his duty to protect the dignity and integrity of the institution. He promptly dispatched the sergeant-at-arms to fetch the newspaper’s editor to come reveal his sources.

Compounding calumny with contumacy, the editor spurned the summons.  Then, he dragged the Senate to court and sought an injunction restraining it from demanding his sources.

Wayas could have regarded this developments an affront and cited the editor for contempt.  He did not, thanks to his overarching commitment to upholding the rule of law.  Still, the press was not impressed.  It continued to berate him, thus undermining the authority of the Senate.

Wayas would have been more than human if his patience and his well-known commitment to due process had not snapped.   They did.  He came to favour former Rivers State military governor, now King Alfred Diete-Spiff’s, principle:  “Spare the rod and breed ill-tempered and disrespectful journalists.”

To take a journalist to court, he came to believe, was to confer unmerited dignity on the fellow.  Flog the daylight out of him, and he will shape up.  To his credit, Wayas never personally flogged any journalist.  Nor did he even go so far as to wrest the microphone from a reporter in earnest or in jest as a former Head of State once did.

The military coup of December 1983 terminated Wayas’s colourful career at the summit of power, which he had attained at age 38.  You hear that, Governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi State. Only 38.  He was only 43 when the colonels came calling.

Wayas returned to Nigeria in mid-1987, ending some 42 months of penurious exile in foreign lands. But his diminished circumstances did nothing to mollify the press.  They said he had been eking out a meagre existence as a house salesman in the United States, and had even been seen at a party dangling from the arms of two women.

They made snide remarks about the time when he strolled majestically through the precincts of the National Assembly, fawning aides tow, to approving chants of “Black Velvet,” his favourite beverage, an exotic brew of black beer and Champagne for which they said he was about to seek a patent when the colonels struck.

Wayas tried to re-enter the political waters during military president Ibrahim Babangida’s fake transition programme.  But with all the banning, unbanning and re-banning of aspirants, he made little headway.  In the end, he settled for being a political consultant where his immense mobilising skills and grassroots touch were said to have spelled the difference between the success and failure of an aspirant or a cause.

Contrary to what the foregoing might suggest in parts, Wayas was no cartoon character.  He was much beloved and commanded a mass following in his Cross River State redoubt.  Whenever and wherever a political fix was needed, he was the one to whom everyone turned.

A grateful political class kept faith with him, showering him with high praise at his death last week, aged 80.

Even President Muhammadu Buhari who had as a major-general led the coup that toppled the Second Republic, a byword for excess, praised him for his leadership of the Senate, his grasp of parliamentary procedure, and for nurturing a younger generation after he retired from party politics.

Obasanjo went one better, declaring Wayas a great patriot who “lived for the welfare and security of the common man.”

Professor Ben Ayade, Governor of Wayas’ home state, Cross River, said Wayas “left indelible footprints on the sands of time” and brought “robust and vibrant leadership” to bear on Nigeria’s quest for democracy.

Few will dispute that overall, Wayas was a jolly good fellow.  Among political figures of this generation and the previous one, he ranked with the most clubbable.

 

The #EndSARS Report

I am a third of the way through a close reading of the 309-page submission of the Lagos State Judicial Commission of Inquiry on the Lagos State.  The Commission is to be commended on executing a tough assignment under the gun, literally.  Final judgement will have to await a full reading, but even at this stage, it seems to me that it deserves much of the criticism that has greeted it.

It appears to me to have generated more heat than light.  Its characterization of the unfortunate deaths as a “massacre,” howsoever qualified, was insensitive and incendiary.  Where are the bodies? Instead of the sobriety that should perfuse the document, the reader is here and there treated instead to hyperbole, to proof by assertion.  Some vocal elements on the panel seem to have been seized more by a theatrical impulse than by a duty to ascertain facts and establish truth.

“Muscle velocity” appears repeatedly as “muscle velocity.”  One hopes that this solecism and others will not find their way into the permanent record.

Prefacing the report is this unattributed declaration:

“Between the agitation and the state’s political-cum-belligerent reaction to lawful dissent, there is a space, and in that space is our power to choose to engage responsibly in the spirit of unity, equity, and fairness toward winning the peace.”

If “the state’s political-cum-belligerent reaction to lawful dissent” is not the Commission’s phrasing, it ought to be properly attributed.  If the phrasing is the panel’s, it will be seen as prejudicial to its remit.

It was in Windhoek, Namibia, on March 31, 1990, that I first shared the same space with Frederick Willem (FW) de Klerk, at ceremonies marking Namibia’s independence from South Africa which had ruled it as a mandated territory of the United Nations since the end of World War II when Germany forfeited it.

“Misruled” is a better term here, for the change brought no relief to the territory, formerly formerly known as South West Africa. South Africa simply incorporated the territory into its apartheid system, which was just as brutal and degrading as German rule. Some five decades later, the territory’s last colonial authority was departing and handing over power to the new nation.

It was a triumphal lap for de Klerk. Two years earlier, despite rumours and murmurs of change, in South Africa, the visit would have been fraught, if not inconceivable.  But on February 2, 1990, at the opening of Parliament, he had stunned the world with a speech that had a tectonic reverberation not just in South Africa but across the world.

The African National Congress and other anti-apartheid political organizations were going to be unbanned.  After 27 years in prison, Nelson Mandela was going to be freed.  The state  of emergency that had given cover to the most horrid human-rights abuses in recent memory was going to be ended.  And the death penalty, which the apartheid regime had employed with cold-blooded casualness to stifle Black resistance, was going to be ended.

In the wider world, de Klerk was hailed as the Gorbachev of Africa.  The accolade was apt, but only that time. Mikhail Gorbachev, remember, was the leader who, to the drumbeat of glasnost and perestroika, restructured and reformed and restructured the Soviet Union unto death and was reduced in the end to a pitchman for Pizza Hut and luxury travel baggage.

Fate has been kinder to De Klerk. The reviews since his passing two weeks ago have been mixed but positive overall. The reforms he instituted reforms laid the foundation for transition from apartheid to a democratic society, which has perhaps the world’s most liberal constitution.

At his press conference before departing the Namibian capital Windhoek for the last time as suzerain, he stuck a friendly note, promised cooperation on a wide range of issues and pledged that South Africa would be a good neighbor.  He responded to barbed questions with a deftness and forthrightness that impressed the assembled international press.  A statesmanlike outing, overall.

Some three months later, I would have a close encounter with de De Klerk.

First, the back story.

General Olusegun Obasanjo, then a statesman-at-large, had served as co-chair of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group that had recommended economic sanctions and other measures that, together with the altered international environment and black insurrection in South Africa, moved the ruling regime to abandon petty apartheid and to begin seriously to contemplate a future without that pernicious doctrine.

During the EPG mission, in 1986, he had struck a relationship with Nelson Mandela, then languishing in prison.  He had strengthened the relationship when he hosted Mandela and his wife Winnie to a rousing reception at his farm in Otta when they visited Nigeria in May 1990.  Some two months later, Obasanjo was headed for South Africa, on a mission “to listen, learn and encourage” the transition then slowly unfolding.

I had asked to accompany him on the trip to get the kind of access that an earlier visit did not provide

Within an hour of our landing at Jan Smuts International Airport, in Johannesburg, on July 25, 1990, well before General Obasanjo could brief Nelson Mandela and the ANC leadership of his mission, state radio had broadcast the news

Then, early on July 26, 1990, the first full day of our visit, official state radio announced that a plot by the South African Communist Party and some elements of the African National Congress to overthrow the government by force had been uncovered.  Specifically, it reported that Mac Maharaj, a member of the ANC National Executive, had been arrested in the investigation of  the alleged plot.

To underscore the gravity of the situation, the government had detailed its intelligence chief, the intense and precise Dr Neil Barnard, to brief Obasanjo and his team on their arrival in Pretoria to  meet with senior government officials.

Barnard and other spokespersons were careful to point out that Mandela was not personally involved in the plot, which they characterized as a “betrayal of trust” that could undermine the peace process “before any significant milestone” was reached and, perhaps more ominously, “threaten the fragile peace in the sub-region.”

As a condition for restoring trust, they demanded that Mac Maharaj, Mandela’s fellow prisoner on Robben Island and Joe Slovo, leader of the SACP, be dropped from the ANC’s negotiating team.

This was the unpromising backdrop to our meeting with Mandela at the ANC’s headquarters in downtown Johannesburg later that day – a day on which state radio announced repeatedly and  to the ANC’s consternation, that Obasanjo had arrived to listen, learn and encourage.

We were ushered into Mandela’s cluttered office as senior members of the ANC were dispersing after concluding a strategy meeting at which they issued a defiant rebuttal to the government ‘s claim that the SACP and ANC were plotting for overthrow it

Mandela would debrief Obasanjo and his team several hours later in the house that Winnie built, in the West Orlando neighbourhood of Soweto, while her husband was in prison – an elegant affair but by no means the most elegant in the vicinity, and far from opulent.

“Whom have you been talking with?” Mandela began, notepad before him and pen in hand, like   a lawyer deposing a witness or client.

As Obasanjo told him about what had transpired in our earlier appointments, you saw Mandela the patient listener, the meticulous note-taker and the skilled interrogator all rolled into one.

Earlier, we had met de Klerk in the Cabinet Room in the Union Buildings in Pretoria.  He sat in his accustomed place at the head of a long of rectangular table, with Obasanjo to his immediate left and me to his immediate right.  He had remarked jokingly that I was sitting in the chair usually occupied the Defence Minister, General Magnus Malan.

I had asked De Klerk to sketch a time frame for the transition democratic rule.  Flipping the pages of              my notebook, I relayed his response to Mandela.

“Difficult,” de Klerk had said.  That year -1990 – and the next would be crucial and dynamic.  “Certainly, no new election would be held under the present (apartheid) constitution.  We are in a hurry.  We are not playing games.  We are not looking at ten or even five years from now . . .”

“No new election will be held under the present constitution?” Mandela repeated slowly and deliberately.

“Exactly what he said, sir,” I replied, looking toward Obasanjo for confirmation.

Obasanjo confirmed that I had correctly reported De Klerk.

All this was news to Mandela.  He had never been told that much by De Klerk, who kept his cards fairly close to his chest, and may indeed have used our visit to telegraph to Mandela and the ANC that he was a person with whom they could do serious business.

Four years and thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands of lives lost in so-called Black-on-Black violence instigated by elements of the security services, Black majority rule finally supplanted white minority rule following elections held under a new constitution.

FW de Klerk stayed on for some two uneasy years as one of two vice presidents — the other was Thabo Mbeki –in an arrangement designed to dampen white fears of revenge and dispossession,   faded away.

His videotaped apology released shortly after his death apologized for the hurt and pain and indignity caused by apartheid sounded sincere and contrite.  But can any apology ever assuage  the sustained barbarous cruelty that apartheid engendered, the ghastly consequences of which South Africans live with to this day?

An apology might perhaps have mitigated the horrors of apartheid if De Klerk had delivered it shortly after taking the reins as president of the apartheid state and signaled an intention to change course.

Still, there is no denying his essential courage and his place in history.