Now that the patronage organisation that used to call itself the largest political party in Africa has successfully conducted its national convention, its members must be resting and breathing easier, if not rejoicing and dancing in the privacy of their homes or at ceremonies bankrolled by the power-brokers in and outside the fold.

And to think that it almost never happened, this harbinger of a return to happier days of dining and wining and wenching that were supposed to go on for 60 unbroken years until it was rudely terminated, beg your pardon, interrupted, some six years ago!

Yes, it almost didn’t happen.

 

Former national chairman Uche Secondus, leader of a faction of the party, had petitioned the courts to block the convention, on the ground that the party was under his control and that there was no vacancy for another leader.  Only when the courts denied his petition some 24 hours to the scheduled beginning of the convention, was it certain that it would indeed hold.

There they were at any rate, counting the days to the 2023 General Election when they will wrest power from the governing APC.  Many of the hardy perennials were either missing outright from the Southwest contingent or deliberately stayed in the shadows.

I am thinking in particular of Ebenezer “Ebino” Babatope and his Mainstreamers Group.

 

Ebino was the much-admired, sure-footed director of Organisation of Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s  Unity Party of Nigeria and a close aide of the Sage himself.  You could say that he stood higher than most Nigerians than in terms of name recognition.   At that time Olagunsoye Oyinlola was probably a cadet in the Military Academy. Outside that institution, nobody knew him.  And yet decades later, Olagunsoye worsted Ebino in the race for PDP National Secretary.

Something told me then that Ebino was politically finished.  Washed up.  Some would date his fall to the time he nominated the brutal dictator Sani Abacha to run as the sole presidential candidate of five political vehicles fabricated for that purpose, a contraption that Chief Bola Ige put down for the ages as “five leprous fingers of the same hand.”

Oyinlola, aforementioned, was of course at Eagle Square, brooding and raring to duel it out with Taofeek Arapaja, an alumnus of Lamidi Adedibu’s school of garrison politics, for the post of Deputy Chairman (South) of the PDP.

 

The post was to be filled by consensus, like all other posts.  The cards were stacked against Oyinlola, but he refused to yield and carried the contest right down to the wire.  He lost. But he took it in his stride as befits a gallant soldier and graciously congratulated Arapaja.  “Politics without bitterness” is not quite dead yet in Nigeria, contrary to the lament that has been in the air for decades.

In my book, Oyinlola’s encounter with Arapaja has got to be the high point of the convention.  Each went to the Eagle Square with a retinue of minstrels and drummers and praise singers belting out songs and chants and slogans laced with snide remarks, salacious abuse, delicious gossip and biting sarcasm reminiscent of the good old days in Western Nigeria when politics was also a spectacle.

 

At Eagle Square, it is necessary to repeat, candidates had to emerge through consensus.  Why engage in a brutal, no-holds-barred contest to pick a candidate when you could with some negotiation, the path of which may lie through a network of shrines, some blackmail, and a promise of patronage to sugar the pill, get everyone else to stand down for a preferred candidate.  That is the game they call Consensus.

Since politics is among other things the art of building consensus to achieve a common purpose, there can be no politics without consensus.  But that is not the sense of consensus that has come to dominate Nigerian politics since the June 12 1993 presidential election.

 

Bashorun MKO Abiola had run through dozens of contests to clinch the Social Democratic Party (SDP) ticket.  In the substantive election, he garnered more than one-third of the votes cast, and more than one-fourth of the votes where he fell short of the one-third benchmark. He had won the race decisively.

Consensus never came in finer robes.  Nigerian politics had never witnessed this margin of victory and probably will never see it again.  Yet, they wanted the contrived annulment of the election resolved by Consensus – in the form of a contraption that claimed to be a government when it wasn’t, and national when it was anything but.

The only truth in its advertised label was that it was interim; mercifully so, too, lasting all of 93 inglorious days, most of it wobbling, with no sense of direction.

Since then, at every stage of the political process, be it local, state, or national, one is assailed by loud and insistent calls for “consensus” candidates.

 

Consensus seems to have served the PDP very well, at any rate.  It knocked out former Senate President David Mark, who was angling to be national chair; it eliminated Oyinlola even before the race had begun, and catapulted Arapaja over him in the race for deputy national chair Consensus produced 17 of the 21 offices filled in at the convention just ended.

We will see more applications of this winning formula.

If many of the hardy perennials were missing in Eagle Square, it was not all gloom. There was a judicious sprinkling of relatively new faces, many of them relatively unknown.  They will come of age literally on television.

Atiku Abubakar, more a candidate of habit than conviction, was on hand.  They thought they had neutered him when they employed consensus to zone the Presidency to the North the calculation being the national chair and the presidential candidate cannot emerge from the same zone.

Nonsense, says Atiku.  Only party offices were zoned, not elective offices.  To zone the latter would be unconstitutional, he maintains. As I see it, Atiku is going nowhere, consensus or no consensus.  They are going to have to reckon to wish him until the very last act.

 

Bukola Saraki, candidate of opportunity and entitlement was there, carrying himself like a king in exile poised to make a glorious return to his domain to claim his throne, and o to gee be damned.  His gleaming luxury Sarakiya buses were not just for conveying his supporters to the convention grounds.   I suspect they are designed to awe the o to gee group and lead them to believe that there is more, much more still in the till that financed the munificence of the era before o to gee and that a return to that era is imminent.

Following a gale of high-value defections from the PDP to the APC, with more expected in the aftermath of the convention, Saraki, who knows a thing or two about such matters, has warned the APC that it is deluded if it believed even for a moment that it could retain power by inducing opposition elements to break ranks.

I see a roaring defection market opening up shortly.  I see disaffected members in one camp threatening to defect to the other camp.  If the members are considered valuable assets, the party asks them to name their price for staying.  The disaffected members will ask the other camp to match the offer or top it.  And since politicking is not a game of charity, the camp that offers the best inducement wins.

 

Even former Senate President and more recently secretary to the Government of the Federation, Anyim, Pius, Anyim, is threatening to run for president, and to dragoon Oyinlola along as his running mate.  Poor Oyinlola.  Maybe it will never come to that, but if it does, many are going to be asking:  How did Oyinlola’s political fortunes fall so precipitously?

But whether it comes to that or not, Anyim, who has no known political constituency has said that even with the presidency zoned to the North, nothing precludes an aspirant from the Southeast from running. The political convention signalled the start of political activity.  He had received the calling back in 2020 when his supporters flooded the nation with his banners and posters but had decided that the time was not ripe.  Now is the time to go and the EFCC be damned with its nebulous and unfounded charges of graft.

The silly season is now well and truly upon us.  Let us savour it unencumbered by Boko Haram and ISIS and bandits and cattle herders and marauders of whatever stripe, not forgetting Covid-19, the epileptic power and water supply, the slaughter slabs that pass for highways and inflation and climate change and all such irritants.

We have learned to live with them anyway.

 

My account of how Durojaiye Amos Gabriel Olukato, an electrical engineer and kinsman I thought I knew well enough to entrust with the purchase of a heavy-duty electric generator with a sticker price of N3.1 million, less incidentals, scammed me with a brazenness that almost took my breath away (“Scammer on the Lam,” The NATION, October 10, 2021, back page) drew many sympathetic reactions from readers – friends, acquaintances and total strangers who have been swindled in like manner and suffered far greater loss.

A story I have told on this page before leapt to my mind when one of Nigeria’s most accomplished diplomats and technocrats now in retirement called to commiserate with my recent experience.

At its centre is an eminent Nigerian, a person of great consequence and enormous wealth withal, who had just entered or was about to enter the eighth decade of his illustrious life.

He fell suddenly ill, and was ferried abroad on an air ambulance.  News of his incapacitation spread far and wide.  Treated by some of the best doctors in some of the finest medical facilities in Europe, he was slow to mend. In the absence of a bulletin of his condition, folks back home feared the worst.  If he returned at all, they were saying, it would be in a horizontal posture.

Return he did, his bearing as erect as ever.  After a period of rest and recuperation in, he decided to pay a visit to his sprawling upcountry estate, the custody of which he had entrusted to his protégé, a young man of scholarly promise whom he had sponsored for advanced study culminating in a doctorate from a well-regarded university in the UK.

He called his protégé and told him of his impending visit.

“But where would you sleep, sir?” the discombobulated protégé blurted out after a long pause.

While his patron was fighting for his life in foreign hospitals, the protégé not only believed that the worst   had happened, he actually acted out his belief on a wide canvas, starting with the patron’s baronial home.  He had stripped it of everything except the drapes, reducing it to an unsightly construction site.

The ambassador who had called to commiserate with me then told me his own story.  It is a story, pardon my anticipation, that must take the cake for sheer audacity and brazenness combined.

Because of the hazards of road travel and the infestation of the countryside by bandits and kidnappers, the ambassador’s visits to his home upcountry were few and far between.  He had hired a maiguard to look after it.   Once in a while, he would send a friend or relation to go look over the premises.  About      the only thing they reported was that the grass needed to be cut.

Then, one day, he sent a friend to go and inspect the house.

As the emissary made to unlock the door and enter the house, the maiguard fled.

The house had been stripped bare.  Everything – well, almost everything, had been carted away – furniture and fittings and fixtures and artifacts he had acquired during his diplomatic career.  Not even the sanitary ware was spared.  Each such item was ripped off the concrete.

But they spared his books.  There they were, strewn all over the floor in dusty, disorderly heaps, prised from the book cases that had housed them for decades.

One day, months after the looting of the house was discovered, the ambassador got a phone call from somebody in one of the Northern states.  It was his old maiguard.  He said he would be glad to come down to explain what had happened to all the stuff in the house if the ambassador would be so kind as to             advance him N2,000 for transportation.

The ambassador also told me a similar story that had a tragic ending.  It was about an accomplished professional resident in Lagos who had not visited his country home for quite a while because of the state of the nation.

One weekend, the gentleman set out for the place, venue of many a magical evening spent in the delightful company of family and friends and professional colleagues and business partners, hoping the memories would come flooding back and lift him out the pervading malaise.

He found only a vast, dusty, empty space; nothing that evoked the beautiful memories he was hoping to recapture, only the opposite.

Utterly dejected, he entered his car and headed back to Lagos.  Not until they got destination did the driver realize that his boss had died, most likely from shock.

Many correspondents told stories of how the recipients of funds Nigerians abroad sent to trusted friends and relations on ground to help build or buy homes to which the plan to retire had used such assets to build or buy homes for themselves.  One of them told me I should consider myself fortunate that I did fall victim to that kind of heist, which had led many to foreswear returning to Nigeria.

“We were never like this,” the ambassador said in a funereal tone.

Not that folks never helped themselves to stuff that belonged to others, it is necessary to make clear.  They never did so in this “in your face” manner.  For the most part they helped themselves to stuff belonging to the government, which they regarded as a remote, alien and unfriendly institution.  In that sense, they did not consider that taking stuff judged to belong to the government was not stealing.  Such conduct did not evoke powerfully the moral sanctions that helping oneself to community assets did.

Back then, the common wisdom was that the best way to protect your money and prized belongings was        to entrust them to a friend or relation for safekeeping.  The glue that that held society together; trust in the basic goodness and decency of those in your circle, the belief that there were certain things they simply not do.

That was before rapid urbanization, politics, easy money and the commodification of culture in its widest sense destroyed the system of values so comprehensively that today, there is no longer a sense that some things are intrinsically wrong and should not be done or tolerated.  If you can get away with it, it must be right, or at least permissible.

Think of how many politicians against whom prima facie evidence of what Fela called “original stealing”     or ojukoroju stealing” has been established, nevertheless having the time of their lives in the National  Assembly “making laws for the good governance” of Nigeria, clinging to high office or even seeking higher positions.

Back then, their persons, names and company would have been anathema.

Right now, amidst the banditry and kidnapping and sectarian bloodletting, amidst all the uncertainty about what lies ahead, the country is convulsed with scheming as to which geographical area the next president will “emerge” from, whether he – there is no talk of a “she” even in the ranks of those who have given “progressives” a bad name -what competencies he will have demonstrated or accomplishments he will have chalked up.

Nor is there concern about the collapse of the system of values, and how to begin the difficult task of rebuilding it.

It is in this void that one 47-year-old local despot who can conjure up no stronger selling point for his presidential quest than his vaunted youthfulness, to which he has lately added his “agility,” that is surely not of the mental kind, has been advertising himself in sophomoric billboard campaigns as “God’s plan for Nigeria.”

His God does not love Nigeria.

 

 

I first encountered Obadiah Mailafia’s writings in the now defunct newspaper NEXT that I once described (“What next for NEXT,” The NATION, February 21, 2012) as “the boldest and most ambitious experiment in Nigerian journalism since the founding of The Guardian in 1983.”

Shortly after its launch, the journal was parading some of the finest writing in contemporary Nigerian journalism.  It soared like a rocket at its debut in December 2008 but fell like the stick after a run of almost three years that was for the most part enchanting.

Mailafia’s column was one of its captivating staples.

I fell in love with it at first reading. It was lively, witty, urbane, and unfailingly engaging, and I looked forward eagerly to the next instalment. You always learned something new from it – some illumining fact or factoid that you did not know previously, a new word or expression, or a familiar term used in a refreshingly different way.

“In between diverting accounts of his peregrinations,” I wrote of the column on the paper’s demise, “Obadiah Mailafia drew on his prodigious learning to provide first-rate analysis on global politics and economics and society.”

It came as no surprise, then, that of the many columns that endeared NEXT to the attentive audience, Mailafia’s was among the few that found a new berth in extant publications when the paper folded up.  It flourished. So wide and appreciative was its audience that it had the singular distinction of being syndicated to five newspapers across the length and breadth of Nigeria.

Not bad for a man who was reared in the bucolic communities North Central Nigeria.  He showed early scholarly promise, leading his elementary and secondary school classes and  graduating at the top of his class in the highly regarded politics, economics and sociology Tripos at the Ahmadu Bello University, in Zaria.

The Sorbonne and Oxford followed almost as a matter of course. Fluent in English and French, he once wrote that he was never so much at his element as when ensconced in his  vast library reputed to hold more volumes than the libraries of some institutions that pass for universities in Nigeria and communing with some of the finest minds that ever lived, classical  music wafting from the sound system.

All in all, a cultivated and refined person.

Had he belonged in the core North, or had the core North embraced him however grudgingly as one of its own, his life story would probably have been different.

It is indeed a standing rebuke that in his country, this accomplished scholar and policy wonk who had served as chef du cabinet of the Brussels-based 79 member-nation African, Caribbean and Pacific Group and chief economist at the African Development Bank with responsibility for strategic planning and corporate reporting rose no higher than deputy governor of the Central Bank, and was not pressed into service thereafter.

Nigeria lost that clear, steady, confident and conscientious  and patriotic voice when Dr Obadiah Mailafia, died three weeks ago, not from his political activism championing the cause of his much-neglected people as he had expected or feared, but from a Covid-related conditions, according to the authorities.

He would have been 65 years old on December 24.

Mailafia’s compelling analysis of ethnic relations in the North, in particular relations between the dominant Hausa-Fulani and minority groups, especially in Kaduna State where he hailed from, and the corrosive influence of religion and sectarianism laced him in conflict with the Establishment.

Mailafia had grown up seeing his people, Christians and animists, incorporated into the emirate system, the territory they called southern Zaria.  They were loath to grant it any other identity. The arrangement was a byword for internal colonialism.

He lived most of his adult life seeing that system consolidated and his people entrenched             as permanent, disadvantaged minorities even when the political space in the domain  was supposedly widened with the creation of Kaduna State.

Boko Haram’s depredations, and the unending campaigns of murder and mayhem perpetrated in the area by marauding herders and bandits stirred to their depths the nationalist, the man of conscience, in Mailafia.  But that made him increasingly a target of the North’s pushback.

Mailafia was not the first nor the last person of note to state that he had learned that some serving military officers were enlisted with Boko Haram, providing logistic support and leading field operations.

But when he gave voice to that allegation, they almost issued a fatwah on him.  State security officials detained him three times, subjecting him on each occasion to long, adversarial interrogations.  The custodians of Northern hegemony denounced and derided him. Colleagues who had cultivated him for his great learning set out to disparage his intellect.

His situation seemed fraught.

It was at that point that I urged General TY Danjuma in a text message, followed by a phone call, to use his immense influence and connections to ensure that Mailafia came to no harm.

The harassment continued and Mailafia’s voice grew increasingly strident, culminating in the widely discussed statement he issued on September 11, in which he seemed to be anticipating his own death.

I regret that I never met him; that I never had a chance to compare notes with him on Chief Obafemi Awolowo whom he admired enormously, the future of the African Union, and Nigeria without restructuring, among other matters.

On one issue I would have remonstrated with him:  his unrestrained support for Israel and what seemed like a lack of empathy for the Palestinian cause.  It seemed so out of character.

The Nigeria of Obadiah Mailafia’s dream was a country that served as a beacon to black humanity, a land where justice and humaneness would reign.  The nation he served so brilliantly and committedly owes it to his memory to embrace that dream.

 

Scammer on the Lam

To readers who may construe this publication as an abuse of forum, I plead guilty.  But the character involved, Durojaiye Amos Gabriel Olukato, left me no other choice.

It is the substance of a two-part complaint I filed through my attorney, Dr Mike Obamero, with the Nigeria Police Area Command and Office, in Kabba, Kogi State, on August 23, 2021.

I engaged Duro Olukato, an electrical engineer and native of Kabba based in Abuja, to advise me on the purchase of a diesel engine generator for my residence in Kabba.  I did so based on his excellent professional work in wiring the house in the final stage of its construction some ten years ago, and on the impression he created that he was an official of Julius Berger.

I was counting on him to guide me to secure the best generator for the amount I was willing to spend.

Olukato later informed me that he had sighted a decommissioned 24 KVA Caterpillar generator that would serve my purpose very well.  It had been used only briefly; it was as good as new, sound-proofed, and would come with a one-year vendor’s guarantee, plus a personal guarantee of one year as an indication of his good faith.

He said he had pleaded with the chief sales manager at Julius Berger, from where he was making the purchase, that he was buying it for a person who was like a father to him, and that they had as a result agreed to sell it to me heavily discounted for N3.1 million.  Transportation to Kabba from Abuja would cost N60, 000.  To allow for contingencies, I wrote him a cheque for N3.2 million.

On August 17, a truck ferrying a cargo of tomatoes and pepper to Lagos dropped off the generator in my compound in the dead of night.  It was accompanied by one of Olukato’s assistants, who had taken my cheque to him in Abuja.

The paint had not fully dried on the generator.  It had no ignition and no kick-starter.  The fuel tank had no cover. Far from being sound-proofed, it was noisier than my 6 KVA petrol engine generator when we finally got it to run.  One problem surfaced after another, necessitating purchase after purchase and fix after fix.

The set came with no invoice, no purchase receipt, no guarantee, no documentation of any description, and no manual.  Fuel had to be siphoned to the tank from a jerry can.

As at this moment, Olukato is yet to deliver those materials.  He has not even deemed it fit to come and see the generator and attend to its deficiencies.  What he had done, I have reason to believe, was to salvage a generator from Berger’s junkyard in Abuja, retouch it here and there, and rush it to me as the genuine article.

After a great deal of pressure and charges of betrayal of trust, he offered via text message to come to pick up the junk engine and refund my money.

 

At this writing, he has done neither

And now, the gravamen of my second complaint:  A threat to my life.

When Olukato was not forthcoming, I served him notice via text message that I would have to report the matter to law enforcement unless he committed within 72 hours to a firm deadline for refunding my money.

His verbal response, on August 16, 2021, was that he would advise me not to follow that route because no one could tell where it might lead.  He said he knew the kind of people he was working with and what they were capable of doing.

Given the current wave of banditry and kidnapping in the country, I perceive his response as an unsubtle threat to my person and my well-being,

Until that moment, Olukato had never told me that there were any third parties to the transaction.   The cheque I wrote was in his name.  He was the one who cashed it.  And now, he is warning me about what third parties might do if I reported the matter to the police.

I am writing to bring this threat to the attention of law enforcement and to request to be accorded every protection under the law.  I would also like Olukato to be warned that he stands to be held personally responsible for any harm that might befall me.

 

Update:

The police have been on his trail, but there has been no significant movement on the matter.

Durojaiye Amos Gabriel Olukato is on the lam, incommunicado.  I should add that, in law enforcement records, he is profiled as a serial scammer.

In Nigeria, the list of the unthinkable grows shorter with every passing day.  The unthinkable happens with such regularity and frequency that we must now, as a lexical imperative, establish a gradation or hierarchy of such things.

On that scale, the merely unthinkable event would occur routinely.  The highly unthinkable would occur more sparingly.  The prohibitively unthinkable would occur more sparingly still, and the most unthinkable would be one for the ages.

Going by that metric, the most unthinkable happened last week at Nigeria’s premier military institution, the Nigeria Defence Academy, near Kaduna, in Kaduna State.

“The security architecture of the Nigerian Defence Academy was compromised early this morning by unknown gunmen,” said Major Bashir Muhammad Jajira, a spokesman for the institution.

“We lost two personnel and one was abducted.”

By “security architecture,” Jajira was referring to the Academy’s brick-and-mortar perimeter fence, topped with razor wire and doing so without fear, in the age of surveillance cameras and drones and satellites.  Some security!  Some architecture!

The language compounds the disaster – a disaster not just for the military but, more tellingly, for the nation.  It reveals a mindset that is not fully seized of the peril confronting the country from the combined assault of armed bandits, terrorists and fanatics, and of the fundamental imperatives of national security.

If the military cannot secure its own premier institution and personnel, how can it secure the nation against clear and present danger?

Days before the brazen assault, President Muhammadu Buhari appeared to have lost patience with the military in the war on the insurgents and warned that its high command might have to be re-organised again.  Previous efforts in that regard produced no significant results, he needs to be reminded.

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Then, in what came across as an unwitting admission that the military were not up to the task, the Chief of Defence Staff, General Lucky Irabor, said retired officers might be pressed into service to help.

As Boko Haram militants were knocking the counter-insurgency forces of the army around and about in encounter after encounter, it came to light that the national defence budget had been turned into a slush fund from which senior generals, political and media figures and all manner of careerists drew again and again to gratifying their private needs and fancies.

Back then, I asked one of the finest officers who ever donned a Nigerian military uniform whether he could still recognise in that structure the institution to which he proudly gave his best years.  The word that best expressed his feeling is the opposite of “pride.”

Funds for military equipment are probably no longer being squirreled away in faux septic tanks and in burial plots in cemeteries.  But the armed forces – not forgetting the police – are still notoriously under-equipped and poorly motivated.

The institution is broken.  It needs a radical overhaul.

 

Ahmed Joda (1930 – 2021)

Ahmed Joda earned and deserved the tributes that have poured forth since he died last week, aged 91.

He has been called a brilliant administrator, an accomplished technocrat, and a statesman.  He was all of these, and more:  He was a decent man.

The awesome power he wielded and the enormous influence he exercised in the public sphere for more than four decades never got into his head.  He was unobtrusive, yet engaging.  He was distinguished by his quiet efficiency, and by his capacity for friendship across Nigeria’s treacherous fault lines.   On account of this latter predisposition, he has been called “de-tribalised.”

He was Fulani to the core and proud of his heritage, as indeed he should have been.  By his bearing, his comportment and deportment, he would have belonged to the nobility and the aristocracy in any culture.

He was quintessentially cosmopolitan.

In how many Nigerian homes would you find the great sculptor and artist Ben Enwonwu, the filmmaker Ola Balogun, the noted columnist and editorial writer Sully Abu and the present writer as lunchtime guests?  That was the kind of company Joda kept at his modest Temple Avenue residence in Southwest Ikoyi, with his elegant wife, said to be a close relation of former Cameroun President Ahmadou Ahidjo, superintending with regal ease.

And how many eminent Nigerians would you find journeying to the Mbaise country, in Imo State, with a large retinue of friends and well-wishers, this writer among them, to take, in all humility, the title of Ebube dike?

I first met Joda in 1989, at one of Olusegun Obasanjo’s Farm House Dialogues, and was impressed by his succinct, informed and disarming interventions at critical stages of the weekend parley.  Weeks later, I met him again, in the Beninois capital Cotonou, at a conference convened by the Africa Leadership Forum for entrepreneurs — they called themselves “economic operators” – in that country.   The encounter was brief but warm.

Some three months later, sighting him on a Nigeria Airways flight from Lagos to Maiduguri, I walked down the aisle to pay my respects.  Where was I going?  Yola, I answered.    What was the occasion?  To present a paper at the National Conference of Auditors, courtesy of the Administrative Staff College of Nigeria. Was anyone meeting me at the airport?  No, I said.

Not to worry, came his reassuring reply.  His welcoming party would drop me off at the hotel where conference participants were billed to lodge.

On the tarmac, disembarking passengers milled with those who had come to welcome them as well as passengers who were about to board for Maiduguri, not forgetting the usual sprinkling of hustlers.        Among the former was Adamawa’s State Commissioner for Finance.  Joda introduced me to him as a journalist from Lagos on assignment to cover the Auditors’ conference.  Was the stage set?

From the commissioner’s puzzled look, I sensed that something was not quite right.  Going by protocol,          he would have had to be a major player in the event, possibly the designated chief host.  Now he seemed unaware of its status.

My disquiet deepened when we arrived at the hotel.  The place was eerily quiet.  Nothing suggested that a national conference or any conference for that matter was scheduled to commence there the next day.

The lone clerk at the front office said he had only just learned that the event had been cancelled or postponed, and that one would-be participant who arrived early had been marooned in the hotel for days.

“Come and be my guest, then,” Joda said, as he picked up my bag and led the way back to his car.  And for the next four days, I was his guest at his modest but tasteful bungalow in Yola.  And what a solicitous host he was!

The next day, he took me at the back of an open pick-up truck on a tour of his sprawling farm on the outskirts of the town where, falling back on his earlier training as an agronomist at the Moor Plantation, in Ibadan, he grew grains and other food crops.  There, the aristocrat in him also bred horses for his polo-playing son and for whomsoever might want to acquire then.

By the time we were done in the late afternoon, I was tired and longing to get back to the house and have a long siesta.  Not Joda, my senior by more than a decade.  He was as sprightly as he had been on our setting out. On dropping me off, he set out again on errands that were no less exacting, returning late in the evening.

That trip made us more than mere acquaintances.  Thereafter, I visited him now and then, and became a sounding board of sorts, especially on a possible presidential run at one stage of military president Ibrahim Babangida’s duplicitous political programme, goaded on like countless others by Babangida himself or his proxies.

Joda had neither the money nor the political constituency, nor yet the temperament. He once recalled with disgust how the consensus at one of the constitutional review conferences he participated in was that no political party or candidate could win a national election without rigging, and how nocturnal deliberations had centered on how to rig or outrig the opponent unto victory, not how best to serve the people.

If Joda ever seriously considered running for president, that experience must have dissuaded him.

To the end, he lived a life of service and commitment to the betterment of Nigeria.   It was an exemplary life, untainted by scandal.  May his legacy endure.

In journalistic folklore, no country was ever more remote than Afghanistan.

So remote, it was believed, that you could write or say anything about it without fear of being contradicted by anyone, for the simple reason that nobody in the attentive audience had the faintest idea of whatever was going on there or cared about it at all.

For all practical purposes, it might well be the farthest corner of the world. You could thus with little effort and even less imagination build a journalistic reputation as an authority of Afghanistan.  You ran virtually no risk of being found out.

Building on that iconic status, the famous political theorist V. O. Key coined the term “Afghanistanism” to denote the journalistic habit of writing candidly and stirringly about remote places.  If  Sonala Olumhense was not the Guardian columnist who injected that term into news reporting and commentary in Nigeria, he certainly is the one with whom its entry came to be most widely associated.

That was back in 1984, when newswriting and reporting in Nigerian took on almost every aspect of the clime described in George Orwell’s haunting, eponymous novel.  Reporting actuality became so fraught under General Muhammadu Buhari that writers and speakers had to devise new ways of telling the stories that needed to be told.

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Cartoons blossomed.

From a sound instinct for self-preservation, one editorial cartoonist came up with 43 seemingly innocuous terms for a certain receptacle, 43 units of which, not forgetting their well-connected owners, were implicated a controversial luggage transfer at the Murtala Muhammad International Airport.

Satire proliferated, and so did platform oratory as well as pamphleteering. Many a newspaper made a virtue of blandness.  Some learned to carry sanitized headlines and to bury the juicy stuff deep inside copy.  Some stopped publishing editorials altogether, or instinctively avoided running any story that could give the military authorities any cause to move against them.

Some wrote earnestly about tyranny and human-rights abuses in virtually every part of the world except Nigeria, but it was always clear that the subtext was Nigeria.  One newspaper spoke of a Third World “enveloped by a strong, anti-liberal spirit whereby, with few exceptions, reason is subjected to unreason and democracy to tyranny.” It cited Zia’s Pakistan, Pinochet’s Chile, Mobutu’s Zaire, Sudan’s Nimeiry and Marcos’s  Philippines as “pictures of oppressive dictatorship and subjugation of voices of dissent” and called for a “determined and relentless” struggle to oust such regimes.

The State Security Service was not amused.  A senior official wrote to the editor of The Guardian warning darkly that the authorities had taken note of the editorial.

Seminars become a growth industry.  “Every day, rain or shine,” Nigeria’s pre-eminent newspaper columnist Stanley Macebuh wrote: “There is almost certainly a seminar is going on somewhere.”  At such gatherings, he wrote, “all manner of subjects were discussed, unprintable views were sometimes expressed, and the seminar papers were fully publicised.”

The authorities soon got wise to such tactics and made the staging of seminars hazardous.   They warned universities and higher institutions to expect grave consequences if they leased their conference halls and meeting rooms to groups that might try to engage in subversive pontification.

By then, “Afghanistanism” itself had lost much of the conceptual clarity it once had.

The 1979 Soviet invasion and international television rendered the Afghanistan splendidly visible, even if not wholly accessible.  You could locate the country on the map and follow the changing fortunes of the doomed invaders and the derring-do of the Taliban, mere students who fought them to a standstill with nothing more lethal than their antiquated weapons and the Islamic fundamentalism that animated them.

Growing military assistance from the United States which saw the territory as a new theatre of a hot war and Taliban zealots as allies in the battle against godless communism locked Afghanistan into the front pages and headlines across the world.

Just as the average American family could on the television networks literally see its beloved son Johnnie killed in the jungles of Vietnam where America was waging a misbegotten war against native insurgents, the more privileged Russian family could watch Ivan done to death by the resistance and the Taliban in the forbidding deserts and mountains of Afghanistan.

That country became real in the hearts and minds of the attentive news audience, a place where world powers and their proxies fought real battles that resulted in real deaths on an industrial scale on real battlefields.  Unable to sustain the human and material cost of the invasion, Russia retreated in ignominy from Afghanistan, which then became ripe for the taking by an assortment of feudal lords, foreign powers and their local proxies, and the unyielding Taliban.   Or so the contending forces thought.

The result was a stalemate that secured for decades a place in the international news net for Afghanistan as a bastion of violence, narcotics, and fanaticism.

Until, that is, the November 9, 2011, attacks on the United States by Osama bin Ladin and his brethren in  the al Qaeda terrorist network who had, since the end of the Soviet occupation watched with growing disquiet as the United States established itself as an anti-Islam hegemon in the area.

Afghanistan became the frontline in America’s and the Western alliance’s War on Terror, with corrupt feudal lords as their allies and the Taliban, their former ally during the Soviet occupation, cast as agents of terror.

As that war raged, the United States and the Western alliance launched a massive invasion of Iraq, claiming falsely that its leader, Saddam Hussein, had masterminded the 9/11 attacks and that Saddam had stockpiled “weapons of mass destruction” with which he was planning to bring the world to ruin.

Osama bin Ladin and his followers who carried out the 9/11 attacks were not Iraqis but Saudis, and Saddam would not have tolerated them on Iraqi soil for a single day.  But why let the facts get in the way of the biggest project of imperial subjugation in recent memory?

They made relatively short work of Iraq but are still mired there a decade and thousands of American deaths and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties later – and counting.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the Taliban ran the clock on the Americans and their allies.  Emerging from the mountains and rural redoubts after the Americans and their allies had exhausted themselves in a brutal war that had alienated them from the people they said they had come to protect, and on which the American people had soured, they overran the country in a matter of months, with no credible resistance from the Afghan National Army and other elements that the occupation promoted as a bulwark against the Taliban.

In scenes evocative of Americans ragged retreat from Saigon at the end of its misadventure in Vietnam scrambled atop planes taxiing the runway at Kabul Airport or latching themselves to to the landing gear in a desperate bid to get out before the Taliban took full control.

It has been a nightmarish fortnight for America.

They may well now be wishing they had paid closer attention to the lessons of history, summed up succinctly by General Nguyen vo Giap, the tenacious commander of the North Vietnamese and Vietcong guerrillas who swept through the South and routed the American forces in 1975.

Asked by an American television reporter accompanying Bill Clinton on a visit to Vietnam, the first by a U.S. President since the end of hostilities; what had kept the Vietnamese going despite the fiercest and most sustained aerial pounding since World War II, a pounding that had stopped just short of the deployment of nuclear weapons, Giap smiled.

“It is not your country,” he said.

There is a limit to how many casualties you can put up with or continually abrorb just to sustain an occupation on foreign soil.  The United States crossed that limit in Vietnam in 1975, as the French had done before them in the same country two decades earlier.   Israel would learn that lesson in Lebanon.

America crossed that threshold again recently in Afghanistan.  And it is fast approaching that treacherous marker in Iraq.

Meanwhile, Afghanistanism is dead.  They will have to invent another term to replace it.

Nothing warms the heart of a member of Nigeria’s political class like the prospect of carving more states out of the 36 that now constitute the Federal Republic.

You could almost hear that organ pounding and racing in every politico’s chest the other day when a leaked report said the Senate Committee reviewing the Constitution has recommended the creation of 20 states and upgrading the Abuja Federal Capital Territory which had been functioning as if it were a state’ into the real thing.

Not every petition for a state was granted, to be sure.  And some states seem to have been insinuated into the project not because of any credible demand, but merely because some influential political figure wants a territory in which he can wield greater power than the present arrangement allows.

Some of the proposed states make sense.  A good many of them defy all logic.  Given the passion that governs debate and discussion on the creation of states, I do not intend to court mortal danger by identifying those that belong in the latter category.  Lessons from the Babangida era still cling in my memory.

Back then, military president Ibrahim Babangida re-drew the political map of Nigeria in accordance with his personal fancies to reward his friends and confederates, to punish adversaries, and to discomfit rivals real or perceived, and to cut them down to size.

Illustrative of the perversity that he usually brought to state creation is the case of a very senior military figure, a recurring decimal in Nigeria’s power calculus.  Babangida had assured him with that contrived earnestness of which he is a master that his locale of origin would be constituted into a state where he would be able, at long last, to call the shots, without having to reckon with the overbearing potentate who was forever lording it over the entire region

The senior military figure, usually a picture of reserve and calm self-possession, could hardly contain himself.  He shared the intelligence with all the persons of consequence in the territory that would be proclaimed a state in a matter of days, in a special presidential broadcast.  He relocated to his country home where he was to host the multitudes who had converged there to watch the historic proclamation live and thereafter celebrate their great fortune.

Their state was not among the three announced.

For weeks thereafter, fearful that the senior military figure might fall on his sword, friends and associates had to keep a tight, round-the-clock watch on him.  The state he had been promised later materialised, in spite Babangida and the potentate who had reportedly vetoed its creation at the time.  But today it is a haven for bandits and a hotbed of by factionalism.

Not that the senior military figure and others who campaigned for the creation of the state have any regrets anyway.  In this matter, the prevailing wisdom was, and remains: Just give us the state. We will deal with any problems as and when they arise.

The existing states may be functioning only marginally.  Most of them would have gone into liquidation if they were commercial entities.  Even if current resources grew substantially, the new states are unlikely to fare better.  Maybe that is why the jubilation in the locales of the proposed states is somewhat restrained, plus a stout official denial of the leaked report.

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It has also to be said that the promoters of the new states have been remiss in educating the public on the tantalizing opportunities that the creation of new states will unlock.

For a start, 20 new state governors will take office, from the Sahel to the creeks of the Atlantic shoreline, each with a deputy and a retinue of commissioners, special advisers, special and not-so-special assistants, chief press secretaries and security personnel, among a warren of other officials.

Twenty new first ladies will also come on board in the new states, along with their advisers, ladies-in-waiting, special assistants and other aides.

I will not be surprised if the new dispensation provides for the establishment of the office of the deputy first lady, to be occupied by the wife of the most senior commissioner as determined by His Excellency the Executive Governor or the State Executive Council.

Twenty new state assemblies will take their place beside the existing 36, and so will 20 new House Speakers, Majority and Minority leaders, House Clerks, and other functionaries and no fewer than 20 lawmakers, not forgetting personnel for each legislature’s secretariat.  The new lawmakers will hire a retinue of aides and draw the existing wardrobe, hardship, duty, constituency, entertainment, newspaper, and vacation allowances,

A career executive officer who has been grinding away at some terminal post in the civil service of Abia State will see his prospects of upward mobility brighten with the creation of Abatete State.  With the right connections and some luck, he could rise to head of service, or permanent secretary, director of administration and finance or other top-flight position, with a chauffeur-driven car, official quarters, and the statutory and under-the-table perks that often come with such stations.

What or who, pray, is to stop “charge-and bail” lawyers and supernumerary state counsel from envisioning themselves thrust out of their humdrum routines to the very top of the Bar and the Bench?  Each new state will of course have its own chief judge, plus a complement of officers of the judiciary. And its quota of Senior Advocates.

The long-suffering catechist at the local church can at last entertain the hope of being translated to  full vicar in the parish, now upgraded in accordance with the new reality.  The state will be constituted into a diocese, or perhaps two such entities, the smaller one presided over by a full bishop, and the larger one by an archbishop, with a long line of prelates in between.

A broadcast outfit has become a de rigueur emblem of statehood in Nigeria.  Nothing stops the resident disc jockey or continuity announcer in the local night club from aspiring to become director  of music programming or Head of Presentation in the new Labalaba State’s broadcasting corporation.    The Head of Programmes in today’s Otutu State will be a hot favourite for director-general in the broadcast corporation of tomorrow’s Atata State.

Like a broadcasting outfit, the university has become a glittering symbol of statehood in the Nigerian political system.

The new states will throw up 20 new vice chancellors and the same number of deputy vice chancellors, registrars, deputy registrars, bursars, librarians, plus the usual complement of deputies, senior deputies, principal assistant deputies, senior assistant deputies, ordinary assistants, and so on and so forth.   University lecturers in the existing system can become professors right away in the new universities without the harrowing experience of grinding out those tedious papers that only few ever read.

Each new state will of course get a hefty take-off grant, plus a guaranteed monthly handout from Abuja, in addition to a representative quota in every federal establishment.

I have saved the best for last.

Probably the biggest single problem facing the nation now is mass unemployment across the younger population. With the millions, nay tens of millions of jobs that will now open up, the creation of states might just be the final solution to that problem.

Who still says our National Assembly is self-absorbed and lacking in vision?

 

By Olatunji Dare

These days, the former self-anointed president, General Ibrahim Babangida, makes news by default, usually when he is rumoured dead again.  Perhaps to break this macabre cycle, he took matters into his own hands the other day, in an interview on Arise Television, during which he went again into a labored justification for the annulment of the 1993 election, of which Bashorun MKO Abiola has since been declared the unequivocal winner.

Since 1993, Babangida has been deploying a raft of pathetic lies to explain away the annulment, scrambling, shuffling, re-working and re-issuing them in a futile bid to make peace with his tortured conscience.  Not for him even the pretence of remorse for plunging Nigeria into a crisis that claimed thousands of lives and drove the polity to the edge of collapse.  More than three decades on, the polity is still tottering, its survival far from assured.  But Babangida soldiers on, duplicitous as ever.

There he was again, peddling the preposterous fib that he saved Abiola’s life by annulling Abiola’s election victory.

How so?

Because, said Babangida, Abiola would have been killed if the election was allowed to stand.

By whom?

By the monsters Babangida had created and nurtured in the military and security services to perpetuate himself in office and in power.  One of them, Colonel (as he then was) David B. Mark, later president of the Senate (ha!), publicly threatened to shoot Abiola to *death if Abiola was allowed to take office.

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“If it materialized,” Babangida said with reference to Abiola taking office, “there would have been a coup d’état, which would have been violent.  That is all I can confirm.”  The violent uprising, he added for effect, could have been staged by the military, because they had the weapons, or by disaffected groups in civil society.

It is all of a piece with a version of the same tale that Babangida’s son Mohammed – the annulment morphed into a family affair of sorts -used to peddle.  In it, Sani Abacha, the debauched chief of Army Staff, virtually held a gun to Babangida’s head and threatened to blow it off if he allowed Abiola to take office.  By then, Abacha was conveniently dead,

A military regime was in power, of which, ever so calculating, Babangida designated himself “president, commander in chief.”  This was no twin designation you could bifurcate but one solid, indivisible and irreducible title. At the slightest provocation, and oftentimes with none, he reminded his hapless compatriots – nay, subjects – that he was not merely in office but also in power, and that he was in full control of an institution trained to deploy power according to its own fashion to secure its own ends.

Babangida’s military government and a posse of political scientists had micromanaged the transition that culminated in the election and signaled the end of eight years of military rule and the inauguration of democratic rule under a president elected with the kind of plurality Nigeria had never seen and probably will never again witness.  Accredited international are local observers certified the election as free and fair and fully reflective of the choice of the people.

A band of insurrectionists nevertheless vowed to kill the person who emerged victorious from the process if he was allowed to take office.  The “president, commander-in-chief,” obsessed as he was by what he and his palace intellectuals called “his place in history,” could not rally the troops to crush the mutineers and set a new standard for the conduct of political business in Nigeria.

Instead, he cowered abjectly, scuttled a transition that had been eight years in the making, turned soldier against soldier, soldier against civilian and civilian against civilian, and kinsman against kinswoman, all in a desperate bid to hang on to power.

Since then, he has been executing one somersault after another to explain away or justify the annulment.

His 1993 speech defending the annulment two weeks after decreeing it could have been titled “With malice toward all.”  The election, he said, was neither free nor fair; that it had been corrupted by “tremendous negative use of money” and by subversive inducements, and that the outcome did not represent the “uncoerced expression” of voters’ preferences.

The outcome, Babangida continued, was not informed by respect for the electorate as the final arbiter in elections, nor by “decorum and farness” on the part of electoral umpires.  On the contrary, the entire nation and the political process were manipulated by an “over-articulate section” of the elite; the election was vitiated by “conflict of interest” between the candidates of the two political parties and the government, by the intimidation of the judiciary, and by other deficiencies Babangida dredged up in his desperation to cling to office – deficiencies that only he and his confederates could see.

It is almost as if Babangida was a helpless spectator throughout, with no power and no responsibility.

Easily the most bizarre of Babangida’s post-election stunts is the claim that he organised and supervised the freest and fairest election in Nigeria’s history and that he deserved to be honoured for that feat.

No, he is not talking about another election.  He is talking about the June 12 1993 presidential election that he had claimed was so shot through and through with irregularities, corruption, and fraud that annulling it came as the logical response, and election he had declared illegal. Yet he seems to experience no mental discomfort in harbouring and publicly canvassing these irreconcilable positions.

This phenomenon belongs in the realm of absurd psychology.

No amount of fudging and fabrication will erase the fundamental truth that Babangida annulled the election for one reason and one reason only:  to hold on to power indefinitely.

In the Arise interview, he reveled as usual in inconstancy and invested slipperiness with political virtue and wisdom, hence his childlike delight in being called Maradona, after the late Argentine soccer maestro, he of the preternatural dribbling skills. He conveniently forgot that he had in a moment of supreme hubris crowned himself an “evil genius” and now attributes the dubious title to his detractors.

In whatever case, Babangida’s claim that he supervised the freest and fairest election in Nigeria’s history does not square with his sweeping rejection, nay demonization, of the June 12 1993 in his post-election broadcast.

The legal titan Professor Ben Nwabueze, who doubled as a strategist in the evisceration of the June 12 1993  election even while serving as Secretary for Education in Babangida’s Transitional Council that was charged with successful completion of the transition programme, provides an important clue to Babangida’s disposition at that critical time.

“His behavior in the last days of his regime, “Nwabueze wrote of Babangida in June 12, 1993 Election:  Problems and Solutions, “left a rather strong impression of a man forced to quit against his will, of one un-reconciled to quitting in the last days of his rule and in the face of defeat, he cut a figure of someone unwilling to reconcile himself with composure to the adverse torrent of events, of an angry and bitterly disappointed man.”

More tellingly, Nwabueze said of Babangida in the volume, an aridly legalistic apologia for the annulment, “His mind, his motions and his actions seemed to have become somewhat disoriented, and no longer governed by disinterested, patriotic considerations. In the event, he quit office in a rather undignified, unceremonious manner.”

Now holed up in the opulent sterility of his Minna Hilltop Mansion, grateful for the occasional visitor, Babangida probably never imagined that he would see the day he had sought with manic desperation to eviscerate consecrated as a national holiday, a point of reference and a goal of our collective aspiration.

He could never have imagined that he would be reduced to an object lesson in the delusion of power.

When Babangida says he saved Abiola’s life by voiding his election, I can almost hear Abiola quip: “With a saviour like Babangida, who needs a tormentor unto death?”