Category: Olatunji Dare

By Olatunji Dare

The downing last week of a Nigeria Air Force (NAF) Alpha jet on a combat mission in the ungoverned and increasingly ungovernable space in the Zamfara/Kaduna area of northern Nigeria by disparate armed groups battling the Nigerian state and traditional institutions has introduced a new, frightening element into the conflict that has overwhelmed that zone and is threatening to spill over.

Many military planes have crashed there in the recent past, but this is the first to be attributed to what the NAF’s director of Public Relations and Information, Air Commodore Edward Gabkwet, in a statement giving details of the incident, called ‘enemy fire.’

Not for him the fashionable dignification of those who downed the combat plane and their allies as ‘bandits.’  They are waging a war of attrition and the armed forces will by their orientation regard them   as enemies and engage them as such.

Nigerians are increasingly unsafe in their homes, at work, at leisure, in the streets, and at worship.  And this situation is largely accepted as normal.  The New Normal.   Now, pilots are not safe in their combat planes.  The recent downing is one development that must not be normalized.

Chibok was a national outrage when it occurred, despite former President Goodluck Jonathan’s best efforts, ably complemented by his wife, Patience, to downplay the horror when they could no longer deny that it happened.  It made the headlines and front pages for months on end, and then its salience diminished in accordance with the perverse calculus of journalism, where the accent is on recency and immediate impact.

Since then, countless Chiboks have occurred in substance if not in scale.  Hardly a fortnight passes without reports of multitudes of students abducted from their schools and marched to forests where they are held under brutal conditions for huge ransoms.  Now such abductions are more likely to draw a yawn than a howl of outrage.  They have become normalised in the public consciousness.

That was how ‘armed robbery’ was normalised.  People were killed in their homes or on the streets in broad daylight or in the dead of night.  In many instances, nothing was taken from the home or the body of the victim.  The police routinely record each incident as a case of ‘armed robbery’ and thereafter make only the most perfunctory investigations, if any.

It is as if armed robbery is not a crime and the victim and indeed society does not deserve to have the perpetrator identified and brought to justice.

Herders carry out their barbarous escapades on such a scale and with such frequency that their outings have become more or less normalised in our workaday life.  Outside the communities that bear the brunt of the rampage, they have come to be regarded as facts of life.

But combat planes being shot down by rogue elements cannot be accepted as a fact of life.  If it is, what  stops the rogue elements from setting their sights on bigger trophies — passenger planes, with all their vulnerabilities, for example?  Might these be their next target?

The public needs to be reassured that the so-called bandits will never be allowed to constitute a clear and present danger to civil aviation.

It would be the height of perversity to state that the national leadership is not seized by a sense of urgency regarding the daily bulletins of kidnapping, laying entire communities to waste, rapine, brutal killings, unsolved murders, and many more pathologies of a society mired in insecurity on virtually every front.

President Muhammadu Buhari told visiting 12 governors and federal lawmakers who paid him a visit at his home in Daura, Katsina State, during the Sallah holidays that he found in the situation in the Northwest “most disturbing and a source of concern.”

“The lingering development in the Northwest,” he told them with reference to the marauders, “is the most amazing because of the fact that they are the same people, the same religion, but they keep on killing and stealing each others’ cattle and burning their own villages.”

They may well belong in the same ethnic group and practise the same faith, but do they also have the same interests — interests that transcend kinship and religion and unite them in grievance against the existing order?

Rejigging the security apparatus and deploying soldiers out there to restore peace and order, as the Buhari Administration has done, is unexceptionable.  Force has to be met with force – overwhelming force if necessary.  But force alone cannot restore lasting peace and amity.

It must be grounded on a clear understanding of the forces at work and a willingness to address them forthrightly – the interests at play, the deep-seated grievances, the fears, as well as the aspirations.  Suppressing them can only drive them inward, there to fester.

Such an understanding is lacking right now, and so is a commitment to multi-dimensional engagement.

Nor can an end to the armed uprising in the Northwest be decreed.  When Buhari “directed” the Northwest governors to end the banditry in the zone, he must have known that the order was futile.       If the governors could end the bloodletting and the carnage, they would have done so long ago, unbidden.

Better to provide the military muscle that would enable the beleaguered governors stand up to the bandits, and to provide a forum for negotiation and reconciliation in the zone.

A broad sociological approach will also have to be followed in addressing the issues subsumed under the National Question.  The issues are real; so are the passions they generate.  You may refuse to recognize them, and you may even deny their existence or their legitimacy, but they will not go away.  Rather, they will grow in intensity.  The stakes get higher and higher, and a lasting resolution becomes less and less attainable.

The circus atmosphere of the National Assembly and its snail-speed approach to doing business render it less than a proper forum for addressing the National Question.  Given the rate at which the 9th National Assembly is proceeding with its misbegotten task of reviewing the Constitution to address issues relating only peripherally at best to the National Question, it is clear it is labouring under a misapprehension.

It is a case of an institution being misdirected or misdirecting itself to pursue a quest all parties to the transaction know to be unattainable.  The charade has gone too far.

 

By Olatunji Dare

Every government that has held power in Nigeria since independence has sought overtly or covertly to stifle freedom of speech and of expression even while solemnly vowing to uphold it, the lonely exception being General Muhammadu Buhari who, on taking power in 1984, declared that he was going to “tamper” with press freedom.

He was as good as his word.  Barely three months after that blunt declaration, he promulgated Decree Four, under which The Guardian’s journalists Tunde Thomson and Nduka Irabor were jailed and the newspaper was made to pay a heavy fine for a publication that was not accurate “in every material particular.”

Intimations of the fortunes awaiting the media in a post-colonial Nigeria were already discernible on the eve of independence.  The Eastern Nigeria Newspaper Law of 1959, shoehorned through the Eastern Nigeria House of Assembly by the region’s Premier, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, the pre-eminent newspaperman of his era before he entered politics, made it an offence to publish in any newspaper a statement, rumour, or report, knowing or having reason to believe that the statement at issue was false unless the reporter proved that he or she took reasonable steps to verify the statement before publication.

The enactment was the template for the controversial Newspapers (Amendment) Act of 1964 of Tafawa Balewa’s Government.  Though it was never directly enforced, the 1964 law had a chilling effect on newspapering.

In the period between the 1964 General Elections and the military coup of January 1966, a number of local governments passed laws banning designated newspapers from their areas of jurisdiction because of their perceived partisanship.  Ironically, one of the first acts of the military following the coup was to invalidate these restrictions.

It must be accounted one of the most poignant paradoxes of Nigeria’s recent history that a regime that had on seizing power won popular support by abolishing Decree Four of 1984 and promised  to uphold fundamental human rights ended its tenure with Decree 43 of 1993, an enactment straight out of Tudor England.

In that year, in the heat of the debacle precipitated by the annulment of the presidential election, the culmination of a political transition programme that had been eight years in the making, the regime of military president Ibrahim Babangida issued a decree setting up a Media Council, the remit of which was at once unexceptionable and disquieting.  It sought in one and the same breath to “promote high professional standards,” and “to deal with complaints emanating from the public about the journalists and in their professional capacity.”

It sought to balance the latter mandate by also empowering the Media Council “to investigate complaints emanating from the media about the conduct of persons or organisations toward the media.

But the real intendment of the decree was never in doubt.

At the heart of the scheme was a Registration Board appointed by the government and vested with sweeping powers to licence newspapers.  Government-sponsored newspapers were exempted.

The Board was not obliged to explain its decisions, nor could it be challenged at law.  One of the conditions for registration was that an applicant must be of “good character.”  Since the government vested itself with the power to appoint a majority of the Council’s members, it could in effect determine what constituted “good character” and also identify those who possess it or lack it.

The requirement that all journalists hold diplomas from institutions approved by the Council stood to eliminate one-half of the journalism workforce, but no matter.

Registration was to be secured every year, and could be withdrawn at any time.   The entire premises of any newspaper that continued to do business after being denied registration would be shut down.  It was of no consequence that other businesses unrelated to journalism were conducted there.

For contraventions of any provision of the decree, everyone involved in the business from the publisher right down to the janitor would be held to strict liability as if he or she had personally published the material at issue.  For good measure, the decree stipulated a 10-year jail term for publication of “false news.”

Nor was that all.  Decree 43 was a fresh assault on the Federal Principle.  Previously, newspaper registration was vested exclusively in the regions, and later the states.  It was usually granted as a matter of course, and for only a modest fee.  Now it was to be the means by which newspapers that had not been arbitrarily shut down by the military authorities during the election annulment crisis could be banned through the back door as it were, without courting adverse reactions at home and abroad.

In these and other ways did a regime that had set out promising a reprieve from the policies of its predecessor ended its tenure actually tightening the screws of repression.

The saving grace was that no newspaper applied for registration.  The Guardian successfully moved the courts to void the decree.  The verdict hung on a technicality. At the time Babangida issued the decree, the Lagos High Court held, that by a previous decree, he had divested himself of law-making powers.

From the foregoing, it can be seen that Nigeria’s media history consists by and large in attempt after attempt by the political authorities emasculate the news media, regardless of whether the military or elected officials held the levers of power.  The route was familiar and much travelled.

Even those we call the political class have not stood up to be counted as allies in the struggle for freedom of speech and of press.  They see the media not as an indispensable vehicle for the promotion and sustenance of democracy and as a bulwark against arbitrary rule, but as an irritant, a menace that must             be kept on a tight leash

Thus, in 1976 and 1998, they voted down spirited attempts to entrench a press-freedom clause in the new constitutions being discussed on the ground that to guarantee freedom the press was to confer a special privilege on an occupational group, namely journalists.  The elementary truth is that freedom of the press belongs to the public, to the entire society; those who make and those who consume the news, no less than to those who report and comment upon it.

We come, finally, to the present conjuncture, where the National Assembly charged with making “good laws” for the governance of Nigeria has gone through a second reading of a draft enactment with this seductive and beguiling title: “A Bill for an Act to Amend the Nigeria Press Council to Remove Bottlenecks Affecting the Press and its Performance and to Make the Council in Tune with the Current Realities in Regulating the Press and for Related Matters.”

This Bill is the latest in a long line of legislation aimed at emasculating the news media.  It reinforces some of the most objectionable aspects of the 1992 law it seeks to amend, combines them with the most repugnant aspects of Decree 43, and gives the product additional teeth.

The Council is mandated to ensure, among other things, “truthful, genuine and quality services” by media houses and practitioners.  The penalty for publishing without the Board’s approval is a fine of N5 million, or a jail term of three years, or both, plus a fine of N20,000 for each day the offence subsists.

It may direct the media to publish an apology or correction.  Failure to comply will attract a fine of N250,000 and suspension from journalistic work for six months.  In “extreme cases,” the Council can strike a reporter’s name off the register it is mandated to maintain.  Vendors of publications not licensed by the Council stand to pay a fine of N250,000 or to be sentenced to a jail term of one year, or both.

Publication of “fake news” is punishable with a fine of N5 million or a two-year jail term or both, plus payment of monetary compensation to injured individuals or groups.  The issuing house stands to pay a fine of N10 million and to be shut down for a year. In addition, it would be required to pay a compensation of N20 million to an injured party.

That, in essence, is the thrust of a Bill that seeks to “remove obstacles affecting the media and its performance” and has a chance of passing, admittedly now slender in the wake of the national uproar it has generated. The uproar has been so resonant that all the officials without whose initiative, encouragement or support the proposal could not have gone this far in the legislative process have disavowed any part in its making, leaving it standing in the name of its sponsor, Olusegun Odebunmi (APC, Iresaadu  Surulere, Oyo State).

Odebunmi has no journalism background of any kind, nor has he suffered any injury from the media. One is therefore led to ask:  What is his locus standi in the matter?  For whom is he fronting? Are the laws of defamation no longer operative?

Who stands to profit from this proposed law?

Certainly not a society aspiring to belong in the community of democratic states, a society in which the media are enjoined by the Constitution to hold the government accountable to the public.

It is tragic indeed that Odebunmi’s Bill advanced this far in the legislative process.  It should have been dead on arrival.

 

By Olatunji Dare

What were former military president Ibrahim Babangida’s thought and preoccupations as the events memorializing June 12, 1993, the day of promise he turned into a nightmare, unfolded?

Remorse? Contrition? Vindication?  Fulfillment?  Triumph?  All of the above?

We may never know until he releases his much-postponed memoirs.

Why, in any case, did Babangida annul the 1993 Presidential election, the anniversary of which was marked last week under the rubric of Democracy Day?

Twenty-eight years later, he has not been able to give a coherent answer.  Rather, he has been fudging and dissembling as is his wont.  He has said, among other things, that he annulled the election as a favour to Abiola, because Abiola would have been overthrown and probably killed if Abiola was allowed to take office.

Colonel (as he then was) David B. Mark, is on the public record as having stated that he would personally shoot – and presumably kill — Abiola if Abiola was installed president.

The closest Babangida ever came to laying out his regime’s case for the annulment was his            June 23, 1993 broadcast.  But as I will try to show presently, the case falls apart under the most cursory of readings.

Those, it is necessary to recall, were desperate days in Abuja – days of wild improvisation and frenzied experimentation.  The scheduling of the broadcast reflected that much.

It was to be made at midday, according to an official statement.  It did not take place.  It was rescheduled for an hour later.  Still, no broadcast.  The broadcast would now take place at 7 p.m, they said.  That hour came and passed, without the broadcast.

It took place, finally, two hours later, at 9 pm.

It was a sprawling, laboured speech, some 2,700 words long.

The first part was an exercise in self-glorification.  Babangida said that the policies and programmes he had pursued -SAP, for example? — were sound “in understanding, conception, formulation and articulation,” and “comparatively unassailable,” and that history would certainly score the administration high in its governance of Nigeria.

Twenty-eight years later, the widely-held verdict is that Babangida is the prime architect of the nation’s current woes.

So much for the testimonial he issued himself.   The concern here is with the rest of the speech, in which Babangida laid out his reason for annulling the election.

In implementing its reform programmes, he said, the regime had to contend with social forces that had in the past impeded national growth and development, as well as new social forces that the programmes spawned. To resolve matters, he said, the regime was constrained to tamper with the rules governing the transition.

Here, one positively must interject: Whatever happened to the “in-built” corrective mechanism that the regime and its palace intellectuals had forever advertised as a unique feature of the transition design?

To return to the speech:  Tampering with the rules out of sheer necessity unwittingly attracted “enormous public suspicions” of the regime’s intentions and policies.” Translation:  The attentive public came to the conclusion that Babangida was nursing a secret agenda, the object being to perpetuate himself in office and in power.

The transition programme, Babangida continued, was about building a lasting foundation for democracy.  But “lasting democracy,” is not a temporary show of excitement and manipulation by an over-articulate section of the elite of the whole nation and the political process; lasting democracy is a permanent diet to nurture the soul of the whole nation and the political process.”

A further interjection, the last.  Democracy as “soul food?” As “stomach infrastructure,” in other words?  Shades of Ayo Fayose.

The June 12 election, like the presidential primaries that were cancelled the previous year, Babangida said, did not meet the basic requirements of democracy:  free and fair elections, un-coerced expression of voters’ preference, respect for the electorate as final arbiter in elections, decorum and fairness on the part of electoral umpires, and absolute respect for the rule of law.

But because the administration was determined to keep faith with the deadline of 27th August, 1993 for the return to civil rule, it overlooked the reported breaches. The breaches continued into the June 12, 1993 on an even greater scale, but Humphrey Nwosu’s National Electoral Commission went ahead and cleared the candidates.

There was also a conflict of interest between the government and both presidential candidates that would have compromised their positions and responsibilities were they to become president.

The courts had been intimidated and had been subjected to “the manipulation of the political process by vested interests, to the point that the entire political system was endangered.  Under these circumstances, the National Defence and Security Council (NDSC) decided to annul the election in the supreme interest of law and order, political stability and peace.” (emphasis added,)

Resting his case, Babangida declared: “To continue action on the basis of the June 12, 1993 election, and to proclaim and swear in a president who encouraged a campaign of divide-and-rule among our ethnic groups would have been detrimental to the survival of the Third Republic.” (my emphasis.)

Despite all the fudging, it is beyond dispute that the NDSC approved holding the election. Babangida admitted that much in the broadcast, perhaps unwittingly. In any case, the NDSC in whose name he claimed to have acted was for all practical purposes a phantom of his own making, whose authority he invoked whenever it suited him.

It was Babangida’s proxy, Arthur Nzeribe and his so-called Association for a Better Nigeria that, to use Babangida’s words, “intimidated and manipulated” the courts.  In that subversive undertaking, they were aided and sheltered by the regime’s Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Clement Akpamgbo, and Babangida’s retinue of shysters and forensic cardsharpers.

The alleged breaches of the electoral laws that vitiated the election, as Babangida claims, furnished an opportunity to disqualify and prosecute the perpetrators and clean up the process.  Why did he put up with them for so long?

The public was well primed to vote on June 12.  That date had been seared into its consciousness.  It was Babangida’s regime, not NEC, that created a climate of uncertainty around it.  Even so, 15 million Nigerians came out to vote.

To invoke the “rule of law” to justify the annulment as Babangida did, was to stand that concept on its head.  How can a regime that promulgated retroactive laws and routinely ousted the courts of jurisdiction claim adherence to the rule of law with a straight face?

Who among the candidates, by the way, encouraged “a campaign of divide-and-rule” among Nigeria’s ethnic groups, as Babangida claimed?   A candidate for national office employing such tactics would have known that he was committing electoral suicide.  The public would have rejected him emphatically.

The resident court never missed an opportunity to tell the public that Babangida’s “place in history” was assured.  They pontificated that Nigeria’s history would be divided into two epochs:  the pre-IBB Era when all was dark and void and formless, and the IBB Era, when light and progress supervened and reigned.

Recognising at last that his case for the annulment was always threadbare at best, and seeing June 12’s salience wax year after year even as whatever was left of his reputation waned,  Babangida changed tack.

Now, he has been saying that he presided over the freest and fairest election ever held in Nigeria, and should be accorded the fullest credit for that distinction.

This schizophrenic claim does not square with his sweeping rejection, nay demonisation, of the June 12 election.  Men -and women – in public life rarely set out to quarrel with and reject their own signal achievements so viscerally.

The legal titan Professor Ben Nwabueze, who served as Secretary for Education in Babangida’s ineffectual Transitional Council while doubling as a strategist in the evisceration of the June 12 election that was supposed to be the culmination of the transition provides an important clue to Babangida’s disposition at that critical time.

“His behavior in the last days of his regime, “Nwabueze wrote in the inelegantly titled 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 wrote of Babangida, “His mind, his motions and his actions seemed to have become somewhat disoriented, and no longer governed by disinterested, patriotic considerations. . .”

It remains to add that Babangida has lived to see the day he sought to eviscerate with manic desperation become a national symbol, a point of reference and a goal of our collective aspiration, holed up in the opulent sterility of his Minna Hilltop Mansion, grateful for the occasional visitor, an object lesson in the delusions of power.

By Olatunji Dare

I am writing these lines at 7:30 in the evening of Thursday, June 10, 1993, just 48 hours to the presidential election.  But it is by no means clear that the election will actually take place.

The High Court in Abuja is yet to determine whether the National Electoral Commission (NEC), Federal Attorney-General (Clement Akpamgbo) and military president Ibrahim Babangida have furnished compelling reasons as to why the election should not be stopped, as demanded by Arthur Nzeribe’s Association for a Better Nigeria (ABN).  The Association has followed up its petition with a huge demonstration in Kaduna, urging Babangida to stay on for four more years.

S. G. Ikoku’s self-styled Council of Elder Statesmen is still busy calling for what amounts to a scuttling of the transition process, Curiously, its advocacy, dripping with contempt for the two official political parties and their presidential candidates and indeed for the entire political class, is described not as a proposal but a “Report.” The “Report” is received in Abuja with all the pomp and circumstance of a commissioned job.

Newspapers are awash with unsigned advertisements excoriating the SDP candidate, Moshood Abiola, and the NRC candidate, Bashir Tofa, for all manner of misconduct, ranging from alleged purloining of an opponent’s letter to religious fanaticism.  The country is awash with rumours of dark plots and dire warnings.

From his base in London, fugitive Second Republic minister Umaru Dikkko, no longer fearful of being shipped home in a crate, is reported to have written to the Kaduna Mafia warning that under no circumstance should a Southerner be allowed to win power.

As if to add poignancy to the rumoured Dikko epistle, allegations surface that Abiola and a conclave of Yoruba elders have completed plans to transfer the federal capital back to Lagos if Abiola won the election.  And if he did not, Igbo property in Yorubaland was marked for destruction.

Such were the doubts and distrust sowed in the week before the election and watered assiduously every passing day.  Long and disorderly queues formed by panic-stricken motorists in the wake of a strike by petroleum workers strengthen doubts about the election.  A breakdown in electricity and water supplies further reinforces the doubts.

NEC chairman Humphrey Nwosu comes on the television screen as I write these lines, ebullient as ever, and reeling out in a sing-song, combative voice, a trainload of things that must not be done on election day and assuring a national audience that all was set for the historic poll.

I am immediately reminded of what someone who should know told me long ago:  Never mind the histrionics.  Good old Humphrey is not actually in charge, and does not know what is really going on.

At any rate, no polling booths have been erected, and no voters’ list has been put on display in Lagos 48 hours to the poll.  It requires a degree of credulity bordering on naiveté to wager that the poll will indeed hold on June 12.

NTA’s network news has just ended.  There is no indication at all of developments in the ABN’s legal battle to scuttle the election.  The doubts remain.  The electoral laws state categorically that no court action can stand in the way of the election.  If this means anything at all, it means that no court can entertain any petition that seeks to stop he election.  The Abuja High Court has not only entertained the petition, it allows it to drag on for one full week, and to cast grave doubts on whether the election will be held.

At this point, I break off and go to bed, hoping to complete this piece the next day, Friday,   June 11, to meet my copy deadline.

At 11:05 p.m., the doorbell rings.

Who can it be at this late hour?

It is Femi Kusa, The Guardian’s director of publications and editor-in-chief.  He has a message, and it is for my ears only, the night guard tells me.  I go downstairs to meet Kusa.

Without the slightest trace of agitation or surprise, Kusa tells me, first, that the Abuja High Court has ruled that election scheduled for Saturday, June 12, must not hold as demanded by the ABN; second, that the court has reserved ruling for one month on NEC’s counter-motion, and third, that the police had granted the ABN a permit to stage a Babangida-Must-Stay rally in Abuja.  He says he thought I should not have to read the newspapers the next day before learning of these developments.

Even those of our countrymen (and women) who have maintained all along that the transition programme bears the markings of a cruel hoax and of a prologue to tragedy could hardly have believed that matters would come to such a desultory pass. But such, alas, is the level of triviality to which the final phase of the transition programme has been reduced.

No sooner were the presidential primaries concluded than rumours spread that the candidates of both parties would be disqualified.  Damning dossiers on both candidates were said to have been compiled, with generous help from the intelligence services of Western nations. Since then, it has been one dark hint of gloomy portents after another.

Was this the ”hidden agenda” finally unravelling?

A hidden agenda exists all right, weighs in Vice President Augustus Aikhomu.  But it belongs to the self-appointed messiahs and their confederates who held a widely publicized meeting at General Olusegun Obasanjo’s farm the other day, not to the Babangida Administration.

As I conclude this piece at 1:05 a.m. on Friday, June 11, 1993, NEC has not indicated whether it will go ahead with the election as planned, the Abuja injunction notwithstanding.  The authors and managers of the transition programme have made no statement.

Perhaps they are satisfied that the transition is still ”on course,” and that the ”solid foundation” they have been laying for democracy these past seven years is, if anything, stronger than ever. Or it may well be that they regard the latest developments as just another phase of the “learning process” that is the transition.

Others of a different cast of mind cannot be blamed if, on waking up today and hearing the news, they felt, like Jacob in the Old Testament, that they had for seven years been sleeping with an illusion.

For the next 16 hours or so after Justice Bassey  Ikpeme’s ruling, there is no clear indication that the election will hold.  It is well past lunchtime on Friday, June 11, when NEC finally announces that the election will go on as scheduled, Justice Ikpeme and the ABN notwithstanding.

The Federal Government’s affirmation that the election will hold comes only indirectly, in response to a statement issued by the United States Government through the United States Information Service in Lagos to the effect that any postponement of the election would be “unacceptable” to Washington.

The election holds as scheduled.  Minor hitches are reported here and there, the type that can be expected even in the best-ordered poll.  For the most part, NEC and everyone connected with the election gets high praise for a job superbly executed.

Nine days later, when results already proclaimed or authenticated and only awaiting official release, indicated that the SDP ticket of Moshoold Abiola and Babagana Kingibe had swept the poll, the regime of military president Ibrahim Babangida which had been thrown into panic by the returns, finally drops all subterfuge to announce through an unsigned and undated memo issued on plain paper by Nduka Irabor, chief press secretary to Vice President Augustus Aikhomu, that it had annulled the election.

Why?

“To rescue the judiciary from inter-wrangling . . . to protect our legal system and the judiciary from being ridiculed and politicized both nationally and internationally,” according to the memo, and to ensure that a judiciary built on sound and solid foundation was not “tarnished by the insatiable political desire of a few persons.”

By that instrument, the Babangida regime summarily terminates all court proceedings on any matter touching on the June 12 1993 presidential election, and for good measure repeals all laws relating to a political transition programme that had been eight years and some N40 billion in the making.

The consequences of this brazen evisceration of the sovereign will of the Nigerian people, executed with the active connivance of the political class, sections of the judiciary and the news media, political merchants, revanchists, and quislings, live with and haunt us still.

• Adapted from my book Diary of a Debacle: Tracking Nigeria’s failed Democratic Transition (1989-1994),this piece was first published on June 11, 2012. It appears today with minor revisions.

 

By Olatunji Dare

Scarcely a week after it was revealed that national security had uncovered a plot by some “disgruntled elements” to stage a conference of sorts for the express purpose of supplanting the existing national order as by law established, it is deeply to be lamented that the plot has thickened.

Those disgruntled elements sef!

Since independence, they have been stirring things up and growing only more disgruntled in the process, and more brazen.  This is what happens when you uncover a sinister coup plot and do not proceed immediately to invoke the full authority of the Nigerian state to contain and smash it.

Now, see how the whole thing has ramified.

Instead of closing shop, the plotters closed ranks and came out in much larger numbers, virtually daring the authorities to come get them.  And far from being the flotsam and jetsam that the security people had profiled, they turn out to number in their ranks many of those we have been conditioned to regard as persons of great consequence.

They comprise, to cite one metric, elected governors of 13 of Nigeria’s 36 states and two deputy governors thereof, accounting for more than one-half of the national population even after due allowance has been made for the  usual jiggery pokery of the Census Office.

This is a far more dangerous group than the disgruntled elements, aforementioned.  They control vast personal fortunes and huge official resources. They preside over sprawling bureaucracies.  The can buy whatever authority the Constitution does not expressly grant them.  They are for the most part no respecters of the rule of law anyway.

From their huge stockpiles, they can dole out essential commodities to sustain a prolonged sit-in or sit-out.  They are backed in varying degrees by political parties that can put boots on the ground and stalwarts in the streets.  Being denizens of the system, they know how it works or does not work.

It must be hoped that the true identity of the plotters has not surfaced too late to give the constituted authorities a tactical and strategic leg-up in the war for the soul of Nigeria.  For, make no mistake about it:  What is at stake is nothing less than the soul of our country and the future of Black humanity.

Time and again, we have failed to produce, enlist and mobilize enough citizens of the gruntled variety to put them out of their nefarious business permanently. Regardless of how it is resolved, the present crisis must come up with a formula that will alter the balance of forces permanently in favors of the gruntled ones.

Enough of the coddling.  It has not worked, and it will not work.

The task is not going to be easy.  Just consider the intimidating calibre of the new, expanded disgruntled elements and for the moment forget their numbers.  Serving and former state governors.  Former and serving Senators and National Assembly representatives. Former and serving members of state assemblies.

Current, recurrent and former Chairmen of Traditional Councils, not forgetting members of local government councils.  Current and former political appointees, from special assistants at large to cabinet-rank officials

Their ranks include senior lawyers and seasoned bureaucrats, former commanding officers in the armed forces.  Barons and captains of industry.  Chieftains of labour.  Leading educators and generations of students under their charge. Artisans, traders, market men and women, clerics of the fire-and-brimstone school of proselytizing.  Former presidents and former presidential candidates again aspiring to the top job.

Imagine the punch a body thus composed will register when acting with a single aim – that goal being the reshaping, the restructuring and the repurposing of Nigeria in the widest sense of those terms even if the body excludes the disgruntled elements aforementioned.   But that is impossible for they constitute nucleus, the base of the larger group that has now surfaced.   Was it not a mere hint of the stirring of that nucleus that threw the Centre off kilter the other week?

The larger group did not just burst upon the scene.  It has been operating under the radar for quite a while.  That is has operated in this mode for so long  but as it were for so long must be accounted a monumental failure of intelligence. But to what do we attribute the fact that they have not been read the Seditious Offences Act and ordered to cease and desist, or face the undiscriminating wrath of the law?

Certainly not to a failure of nerves, I can tell them before they start gloating in the conceit that they now have the momentum on their side.  The authorities are considering a raft of options.

Will it be containment? Co-optation?  Infiltrating the body and neutering it from within? Confrontation? Setting up and equipping rival bodies to keep it so busy defending itself that it has no time to pursue its agenda? By permutations and combinations of the strategies?

No option is foreclosed, I gather.

When the disgruntled elements were content to talk in vague generalities, the authorities could perhaps look on with benign bemusement.  Now that the expanded ranks of the malcontents have come out of hiding and laid out their comprehensive agenda on the national and global platforms, the authorities will have to engage them in concrete terms.

Nothing is to be gained now by admonishing them to take their case, if they have any, to the National Assembly which the Constitution has in its omniscience and omicompetence has made the final arbiter.

Leaving nothing to chance, they have now articulated their case in the clearest terms possible. In the communiqué issued at the end of their conference in Asaba, Delta State, 13 southern state governors and two deputy governors called on the Federal Government to convene a “national dialogue” to address the agitations roiling the polity.

They called for a new revenue allocation formula weighted in favour or the subnational states, and for the creation of other institutions that would undergird a re-commitment to the practice of federalism in its truest sense.

They called attention to the fact that, because of marauding cattle herders who have turned the entire country into one huge grazing reserve, citizens and farmers can no longer live safe and productive lives.  They demanded an end to open-grazing.

They called a review of appointment into federal agencies, including the security services, to reflect the Federal Character principle. They also demanded better federal coordination in dealing with the Covid menace.

Thus did the state governors meeting in Asaba thrust in the national limelight issues that the Federal Government has always dismissed as the talking points of idle agitators.  And they made clear that the initiative belonged with the Federal Government, not a National Assembly concerned more to expand the obscene privileges of its members than to advance the will of the people.

And they urged President Muhammadu Buhari to address the nation on those pressing issues and others.

At this writing, he is away in Paris, France, attending the African Financial Summit.  On the side, he is expected to discuss bilateral security issues with French President Emmanuel Macron and visiting African leaders.

Macron’s most valuable contribution would be to urge Buhari to listen to his people.  These days, Buhari rarely does that. He seems distracted, perhaps even resigned. You certainly cannot accuse him of being engaged.

As the ship of state teeters, buffeted by ripples set off by pressing issues, the least he can do is to engage and stay engaged.  The issues will not go away.  If not addressed forthrightly, they can only fester.

By Olatunji Dare

When the history of this epoch in Nigeria comes to be written, this past week is sure to register as an inflection point.

Not on account of the apparent flight of the virus from Nigeria, thanks in no small part to Governor Yahaya Bello who has made the Kogi clime so inhospitable to the virus that it has fled from the entire country. Nigeria thus appears to have been spared the Covid conflagration sweeping India and turning the subcontinent into one roaring funeral pyre and hospitals into theatres of unspeakable suffering and misery in which death lurks in every corner.

But there is no room for complacency.  Covid-19 is nothing if not cunning.  See how it assumes different forms and shapes, each deadlier and more intractable than the strain that preceded it, and roars back when you think you have subdued it or forced it to retreat to its infernal habitat, there to hibernate for up to a century before making its insidious re-entry into human society.

The horror unfolding in India should therefore serve as a cautionary tale. One hopes devoutly that we have seen the worst of Covid in Nigeria. But that cannot be assumed.  This is the time to build capacity, to stockpile vaccines and oxygen tanks and ventilators and build field hospitals and re-imagine social life in anticipation of a possible recrudescence.  Temporising, or “waiting it out” to conserve resources that may be needed elsewhere is not the best strategy.

Nor does the past week stand out in terms of the fatalities – policemen and women, students, farmers, passengers on the highways, etc — from the  depredations of herdsmen, bandits, ritualists, jihadists and others actuated for the most part by ignoble causes.  It was just another week in the carnage that now defines Nigeria.

It featured the usual mix of riots, strikes, rumours of riots and strikes, horrific accidents, crippling deprivations, syndicated and freelance fraud, patently fake news and news that is neither fake nor true, rumors that the long subsisting subsidy on petroleum products was set, finally, to be revoked completely and forever.

Not an exceptional week overall, certainly not in a sense that would qualify it as an inflection point.

I count that week an inflection point because it jolted Nigerians to a reality they we had long forgotten – the ugly reality of coups.  For nigh on 25 years, they had luxuriated in the comforting certainty that the government of the day, established by law, could be changed only law; that government derives its power only from the consent of the governed as expressed in elections in which the people vote their un-coerced choices.

They had successfully established, funded and organised political parties and conducted elections in which not a few limbs were broken and not a few heads were bloodied, to set up precisely a government so contoured.  They were never going back to that dark era when some inebriated soldiers could just amble out of a pepper-soup joint, seize the nearest radio station, declare that they had taken over the government, and proceed over the next seven or eight years to fill in the gaps.

The nation had been labouring under a delusion, it learned that week from its vigilant and usually discreet security forces, which had uncovered in the nick of time, a dastardly plot to overthrow by force the government of the day, recognised under the Law of Nations as the organ in which inheres the sovereignty, unity and indivisibility of Nigeria.

And this was not going to be your run-of-the-mill military coup.  No martial music.  No tanks rumbling through the streets and quiet neighbourhoods. No decrees. No curfews.  No new Saviour in uniform.

The putsch was going to be executed by an unruly assemblage of civilians – disgruntled politicians who had given up on the ballot box, knowing that they can never win free and fair elections, their misguided collaborators, religionists, ethnic jingoists masquerading as champions of the people, desperate grifters, faded and jaded statesmen and women united by one thing and one thing only:  the lust for power and its unearned rewards.

Nor was that the only novelty.  The vehicle the coup makers had chosen for executing their plot was a grand assembly of these malcontents at which they would excoriate the legitimate government of the day, declare that they had lost the last iota of confidence in it, proclaim a new order, and assign to themselves and their confederates the principal, secondary, subsidiary and ancillary offices of state.

Just like that.

As if Nigeria were a banana republic or, changing metaphors, a pepper-soup federation.  They were hoping to ride on the crest of the seething, murmuring discontent that had perfused the country for several years now, bubbling to the surface every now and then.

Among the perceived causes: the privatisation of government and its instrumentalities by entrenched interests, and their deployment to serve those interests, and all others be damned.  The willful contempt for the imperatives of the nation’s geopolitics by those enjoined to uphold them.  Application of the law in a half-heartedly, if at all.

And among the manifestations: Rampant insecurity of lives and property. The Boko Haram insurgency in the Northeast that has now made its way to the outskirts of Abuja Federal Capital Territory, if Niger State Governor Sani Bello is to be believed.  The sacking of Lagos in the so-called anti SARS protests. The war on police personnel and formations.

Relentless extraction of and trafficking in precious minerals by local and foreign cartels in brazen defiance of the las and the constituted authorities.  The relentless pillaging of public assets, and not just in the oil industry.

Not to be discounted is the widespread perception that those at the top lost the plot a long time, in rhetoric as well as in remedial and self-redeeming action. Those trained to divine such matters say that their body language bespeaks complete resignation.  Many in the attentive audience say that for the first time, they cannot with confidence, name more than a few members of President Muhammadu Buhari’s cabinet –  four or five honourable exceptions who are executing their remit with quiet commitment.

Also not to be discounted is the absence of common purpose up there — apart from announcing yet another raft of contracts at their periodical meetings.  In daily transactions, those who regard themselves as the true custodians and legatees of the system dismiss Vice President Yemi Osibajo contemptuously as “the VP Academic” is a mark of his relevance to their scheme, rank outsider that he is considered.

It will come as no surprise if, in the same vein, they deride the president’s Chief of Staff, Professor Ibrahim Gambari, as the “CoS UN,” having regard to his previous job as high official of the United Nations, even though he shares their privileged pedigree.

And yet, the government has been sitting pretty, confident that the public appreciates its good intentions, understands the challenges of the moment and has been willing to put up with them.  It has been resting secure in the knowledge that any attempt to supplant it by persons who have serially been rejected at the polls and cannot lay any credible claim to influence is sure to collide with the law of the land, the will of the people, and the preferences of the international community.

It has remained in power and in office despite the foregoing calumnies and insurrections.

Why is it then so jittery at the prospect that a resolution for its ouster may be passed at an illegal assembly of some busybodies accountable to no one?

By Olatunji Dare

The last time they talked him into bidding for the PDP ticket in Anambra State’s gubernatorial race, the quest almost ended before it got under way.

The “him” in this case, was Charles Chukwuma Soludo, decompressing in London, still not fully recovered from being edged out of his perch as Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria.

The “they” comprised an amorphous group, but the principal figure was President Umaru Yar’Adua, who had signed off on Soludo’s defenestration from the CBN, with other persons of consequence in the PDP who were forever scheming to “capture” those states not governed by the biggest party in Africa.

In his revealing January 21, 2013, Op-Ed piece for THISDAY (“What Obasanjo and Yar’Adua told me”) Soludo recalled how, on inquiring about him, Yar’Adua had been told that he was holidaying abroad and how he had been told that Yar’Adua would like to meet with him on his return.

Their goal, Yar’Adua told Soludo when they finally met on July 26, 2009, was to get him elected governor of Anambra State in the election scheduled for February 2010 so as to finally endow the state with the leadership it had never had the good fortune to enjoy – the kind of leadership encapsulated in the technocratic skills Soludo had applied to nation’s economy and financial system, as well as his accomplishments in those fields.

Why then was he denied a second term at the CBN?

But I digress.

If Soludo thought this was a fanciful goal, considering the power of incumbency in Nigerian politics and the rugged tenacity that the incumbent, Peter Obi, of the APGA, had displayed over the years, not forgetting the malignant influence of the Ubah clan on the political life of the state, his diffidence must have dissolved there and then.

Himself The Fixer, Tony Anenih, he was told, had been mobilised for the project and could hardly wait to go into action, if only to demonstrate that, recent setbacks notwithstanding, he was still a past master at turning losers into winners and winners into losers.

Soludo did not have to make any commitment then.   He should go discuss the matter with his family and associates.  But if he decided to run, he would enter the race knowing that Yar’Adua would “come out fully” to ensure that he won the prize.

His wife stood resolutely against the idea, but Soludo felt sufficiently buoyed by his consultations with friends and associates to tell Yar’Adua one month later that he would enter the race, but with preconditions.

The Federal Government would have to build an airport and dredge the River Niger to enable medium-sized ships sail all the way to Onitsha, where an international seaport would have to be constructed.  The Anambra-Kogi road would have to be upgraded to a dual-carriage highway. Because one-third of its land mass was threatened by soil erosion, Anambra would have to be given special drawing rights from the Ecological Fund.

Nor was that all.

The Federal Government would also have to complete the Greater Onitsha water scheme, designate Anambra an oil-producing  state, and as a “pilot state” for large-scale commercial agriculture.   Finally, it would have to speed up construction of the second Niger Bridge.

With these things in place, Soludo said, he was confident that, after two terms of working 24 hours a day, he would have transformed Anambra to the point that Federal allocations would be devoted wholly to capital projects.  Re-current expenditure would be wholly internally generated.

But with all these things in place, who needs Soludo’s intimidating antecedents and credentials to transform Anambra into “an international city”?  And why would the Federal Government do those things for Anambra and not for other states?

But I digress again.

The important thing is that Yar’Adua agreed to all these demands, according to Soludo, who then asked for four more weeks for wider consultations.  The deal was sealed.

Thereafter, the waters got muddied.

Yar’Adua fell ill, went to seek treatment in Saudi Arabia, and was never in control again. Soludo’s 78-year-old father was kidnapped. His captors demanded a ransom of N500 million, but later reduced it to N300 million, warning darkly that “the worst” would happen if the  demand was not met promptly. They freed him unharmed after six weeks, under terms that were never disclosed.

Soludo’s opponents sought to envelop him in scandal, charging that he had profited from improprieties in the printing of small denomination polymer banknotes handled by an Australian company when he was CBN governor.  More than 1,300 petitions were filed, their major contention being that “outsiders,” were trying to impose Soludo on the Anambra State branch of the PDP. The petitions moved the PDP to suspend the party primaries indefinitely.

When the process finally got under way, party officials had to be imported from Benue State to conduct the election of delegates.   Following a shuffling and reshuffling of the delegates, the PDP and the Independent National Electoral Commission declared Soludo winner of the ticket.

The high court voided the outcome.  That verdict was affirmed on appeal, but reversed by the Supreme Court, just in time for the election proper.

In the event, Peter Obi was reelected governor.  Soludo placed third, with just under 20 per cent of the vote, behind second-place winner Chris Ngige.  The Fixer apparently went missing in action, or was thoroughly out-fixed.

Given the circumstances, running for governor of Anambra again after this ordeal should have been the last thing on the mind of the average political aspirant.  No outcome was guaranteed, what with the predatory Ubah clan lurking in the shadows.

But Soludo is not your average aspirant.

With one deft stroke, he served notice of his intent to re-enter the fray. “The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs,” he wrote, echoing Plato, “is to be ruled by evil men.

He was as good as his word.

When Anambra’s gubernatorial space opened up in 2013 as Obi was completing his second term, Soludo entered the race, this time on the platform of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), having fulfilled all requirements

They were waiting for him in a well-planned ambuscade.  Citing all kinds of rules and regulations   and applying them in the most tendentious manner conceivable, they eliminated him on the threshold. The party’s grandees and fixers simply declared him unqualified for the race.   And that was that.

Undaunted, and politically much wiser after a cooling-off period of eight years, Soludo has recently renewed his gubernatorial quest, still on APGA’s platform, to replace William Obiano who is not eligible for re-election.

Again, they were waiting for him, this time with deadly force.

Soludo was returning from a parley with youths in Isuofia, in Aguata Local Government Area on April 2, when unidentified gunmen attacked his entourage, killing three police and abducting the state’s Commissioner for Public Utilities.  He was released several days later, on terms that were not disclosed.

For a while, the whereabouts of Soludo, the gunmen’s principal quarry, were unknown. Then, he surfaced in Lagos, to much public relief.

His fighting spirit, I wager, is urging him not to submit to such tawdry tactics, and so are his teeming supporters.  His sworn adversaries, on the other hand, are probably daring him to return to the turf and suffer even grimmer consequences.

What to do?

Not being a grass-roots politician, Soludo cannot campaign effectively for the November 6 poll from exile.  I doubt whether any authority, local, regional (think Ebube agu) or federal, can guarantee his safety on the stump.   If they can, will they be available to protect him and his administration in the event of his winning the election?  Will they let him govern?

Contemplating the Soludo saga, even the most seasoned professional students of Nigerian politics who think they have seen it all must be scratching their heads in puzzlement.

In this corner, the question of the moment is:  Who is afraid of Dr Soludo?