By Olatunji Dare

As I watched the lead attorney Eric J. Nelson grind out before a Minnesota court his case for exculpating  his client police officer Derek Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd two weeks ago, my mind flashed back and forth to a passage in Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s classic memoir AW0, published some six  decades ago.

Awolowo, who had given up legal practice for a political career that culminated in his premiership of Western Nigeria and Leader of the Opposition in Nigeria’s first post-colonial government, was reflecting rather nostalgically, on the joys of lawyering.

Here is the passage:

“To engage , without bitterness or animosity, in the fiercest contention; to cultivate the habit of always examining  both sides of a problem, and to present the side you espouse with forensic forcefulness and assuredness; to identify yourself with your client and to enter into his feelings as if you were the plaintiff or the defendant or the prisoner at the Bar; to propound and urge points of law which are sometimes difficult, sometimes not all too tenable, or sometimes so fine and abstruse that it is not at all easy to distinguish one point from another; to be utterly fearless and unsparing in combat; to acquire an independence of outlook in all things and to enjoy immunity in all you say and do as long as it is legitimate and within the bounds of professional etiquette; to take part in fostering the cause of justice  and equity in their total impartiality before the very bulwark of the citizens’ liberty and individual freedom – all these and more are the inherent and distinctive attributes of a noble profession  which I love and will forever cherish.”

That is a whale of a sentence, but also a beauty.  Only a gifted writer could have pulled it off.

In writing classes, student are admonished not to write sentences that contain more than 25 words, or more than 40 if the teacher is the indulgent type.  It is a useful rule, but it is not iron-clad.  The best test in these matters is clarity, and one cannot err by following Anatole France who, when asked to state the three most important characteristics of French prose, replied:  First, and above all, clarity.  Second, clarity.  And finally, clarity.

On that score, the passage from Awo is a model of clarity.

But I digress.

As he laid out his case for his client, Nelson was a picture of imperturbability, even as witness after witness presented in chilling detail, evidence that pointed unwaveringly to his client’s culpability.  But Nelson would not to allow the facts get in the way of the most far-fetched improbabilities.

Forget the knee that Chauvin pressed and pressed on Floyd’s neck as Floyd lay prone on the tarmac handcuffed,  with one officer sitting on his back and another holding his feet together.  Forget his heart-rending cries that he could not breathe.  Forget his writhing, his pathetic plea for his mother who had been dead for four years to come deliver him.  Forget those bulging eyes that seemed in imminent danger of popping out of their sockets.

Forget the tongue hanging out like that of a parched animal.  Forget the anguished entreaties of passers-by watching in horror what seemed like an execution in progress. Forget that Floyd’s neck remained jackknifed by Chauvin knee even after his accomplices reported that Floyd’s pulse had stopped.  Forget that Chauvin, striking a pose not unlike that of a game hunter in a safari posing triumphantly with the prostrate body of his trophy, kept his neck grinding into Floyd’s neck for nearly five minutes after Floyd had stopped showing any signs of life.

Forget that, in their official account, Chauvin and company had reported tersely that Floyd had died from a “medical incident,” following his arrest for purchasing cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill.  Forget that there was not the slightest indication in that account of any physical encounter with Floyd. Forget police testimony that Chauvin’s conduct violated the official rules through and through.

Forget a young Black woman’s plea to Chauvin to “get off of” Floyd’s neck, a woman who realised that the Black man pleading for his life to the extent that he could still draw some air into his lungs, could have been her father or uncle or brother or neighbor.  Ignoring that plea would seal Chauvin’s doom.

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That young woman Darnella Frazier, 17, who was going to a candy store with a younger relation, had  the presence of mind to set her camera rolling to record live in chilling detail, all nine minutes and more of it, what is likely to go down as one of the most gruesome pictures of our time.   The video constituted perhaps the decisive piece of evidence in the trial.

But Chauvin’s counsel urged the court to discount it.  Chauvin’s knee lay on Floyd’s collar bone, not on his neck as the video would seem to suggest, he contended; plus, Chauvin’s foot was resting on the tarmac, so that his body weight was not actually impressed on Floyd’s.  Again, Chauvin weighed a mere 144 pounds.  So, how much damage could that weight have done to the neck of a giant possessed of super-human strength?

Forget appearances; forget even commonsense, Nelson urged the court.   The knee locked on Floyd’s neck for almost ten minutes had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with Floyd’s death.  Floyd was a notorious drug user.  Even at the time of his arrest, illegal drugs had been found on his body.  His dissolute lifestyle also contributed mightily to his fate.

He was overweight and diabetic; he smoked, and he was not in the habit of exercising regularly. Because of these and other pathologies, he had an enlarged heart that made him a candidate for premature death, regardless of what Chauvin and company did or failed to do.

There was also the carbon monoxide factor, remember?  Floyd was held down on the tarmac close to the exhaust of a motor vehicle that was belching out a mixture of toxic effluents.  It was this mixture  that poisoned the very air Floyd was breathing.  Throttling him with a knee to his neck for almost 10 minutes had nothing to do with the difficulty of breathing, the asphyxia that was alleged to have resulted in Floyd’s death.

Nor should the jury set any store by the so-called video evidence, which can be manipulated and was in all likelihood heavily doctored.  When the prosecution urges you to believe only your eyes, they are asking you in effect to believe in doctored evidence.  Remember: not everything that happened that day could be seen or heard or even remembered.

Thus did Nelson the lead defense counsel grind on poker-faced, and relentlessly and unflappably.  The way he carried on, a person unfamiliar with the actual circumstances might have been led to conclude that Floyd had somehow connived in his own death and that Chauvin was the wronged party, to whom society owed an apology.

It required just one person among the 12-member jury to embrace Nelson’s theory, and his client would have been pronounced not guilty.  All the posturing, all the appeal to racial tropes and caricatures, was designed to appeal to the one juror who might be of a prejudicial cast of mind.  Chauvin was only doing his job, as the law  prescribed.

It did not work.  The jurors chose to believe what they had seen in vivid, excruciating detail.

I doubt whether Nelson ever came across the passage I quoted from Awolowo, on the joys of lawyering.  He was hewing to the tested courtroom strategy spelled out by Awolowo: “to present the side you espouse with forensic forcefulness and assuredness; to identify yourself with your client and to enter into his feelings as if you were the plaintiff or the defendant or the prisoner at the Bar; to propound and urge points of law which are sometimes difficult, sometimes not all too tenable. . .”

Chief Richard Akinjide (SAN) employed it successfully in the 1979 presidential election case.  Johnnie Cochran relied on it in part in the OJ Simpson’s case until the glove that didn’t fit cast a grave and indissoluble doubt on the prosecution’s case.

Nelson failed in his attempt to press it into Chauvin’s service.  But as they say here, you can’t blame a guy for trying.

By Olatunji Dare

Kogi, the Confluence State, is beckoning earnestly, and not just to those seeking to breathe its invigorating Covid-free air, or would-be tourists who have fallen on hard times and cannot afford to vacation in Europe.

It is today’s mecca for obtainers.  Sambo Dasuki’s Office of the National Security Adviser is dead; long live the Office of the Executive Governor of Kogi State, perceived as the Interim National Office of Obtainment.

Those well-versed in the practice have been all over the place doing what they do best, that is, obtaining.  Lately, they have stepped up the tempo, following broad hints from local and foreign intelligence sources of a severe slump in the official resource allocation.

It is not that they fear a run on the system, much less expect the bottom to fall off anytime soon. The system is nothing if not resilient, as those who have been predicting its collapse must have learned to their chagrin.  Those who have moved to ramp up the tempo, I am told, are simply being proactive.  They have learned to strike before anxiety turns to panic.

Still, I will not be surprised if they – the accomplished obtainers, that is — ratcheted up the tempo still in the coming weeks and months.  Time, it is hardly necessary to stress, is of the  essence.

So, let me stop dancing around the issue and come right out with it.  But before then a preface to the column, in which I will try to define the operative term and furnish the context in which it arose and is now being employed, assuming the allusion to Dasuki’s ONSA has not done that.

The term, if not the practice, goes back, to military president Ibrahim Babangida’s political transition programme, for which he conjured up two “mass, grassroots” political parties, one  a little to the Left and the other a little to the Right, and in which money would play no part whatsoever.

With politics de-monetised, every participant will have the same weight in the political calculus, and each will have an equal chance of attaining whatever office he or she chooses to vie for, from President of the Federal Republic, to local councilor.

That, at any rate, was the theory.

In practice, the whole thing turned out to be an excellent example of how a beautiful theory  was murdered by a gang of brutal facts.  Never had money – or “tremendous negative use of money” played such a central role in a political campaign, as a distraught Babangida would lament when the experiment blew up in his face.

In Warri, Delta State, the so-called primary contest between the two leading contestants for the gubernatorial candidate of the party that was a little to the Right was essentially a matter of cash and the contest was reduced to a bazaar.

Per Akpo Esajere, political editor for The Guardian, electors laden with cash they had obtained from one camp sashayed to the other camp to obtain even more cash, solemnly and solicitously  accosting everyone they encountered en route: “Ol’ boy, you never obtain?”

To return to Kogi:  Yahaya Bello, Kogi’s accidental governor, set the wheels of obtainment spinning from the moment he divined that his next career destination would be Aso Rock, as president, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.

Nigeria’s next president, he had intuited, would have to emerge as they say, from the ranks of state governors.  He is far and away the youngest of them all.  Not the wisest, he would be the  first to admit.  Not the most accomplished.  Nor yet the most brilliant.

But whatever he may lack in those departments is more than made up by Bello’s youthfulness and the daring and the sense of adventure that come with it.  Besides, although he has not projected himself as such, he is seen as President Muhammadu Buhari’s favourite governor and governor of governors.  By one account I have not verified, he has been received in audience at Rock more frequently than any other state governor, if not more often than all the other 35 combined.

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For obvious reasons. Buhari cannot be indifferent as to who will succeed him. That being the  case, who fits the bill better than Bello?  Moreover, come 2023, the presidency has been assigned to the North Central zone.  Seriously:  Which of the six states in the zone is best     suited to host the post -Buhari presidency?

If Bello had been too modest to parlay these in-built advantages into a winning formula for the 2023 presidential race, the new crop of obtainers have been far less restrained.   They have been trooping to Lokoja, the Kogi capital, to assure Bello that he is not merely the favoured candidate, he is the anointed one, to whom every other aspirant must yield or be swept away.

This is the only conclusion to which an objective, unsentimental and dispassionate examination of the matter leads, they have assured him.  It is not conjecture; it is backed by hard data, having been confirmed in a string of computer simulations.  It is the verdict of realpolitik.

What is even more remarkable, they have fanned all over the country sensitising the public to Bello’s epochal achievements — the modern highways and waterways and transportation network and latest-generation computer network and round-the-clock security that have been – magnet for foreign investors, and the technologies of the future.

I understand that they have even set up bureaus of the Nigerian Youths United for a Yahaya Bello Presidency in key Western and Commonwealth  capitals, and of course in Addis Abba, the headquarters of the African Union.

From the creeks of the Atlantic coast to the forests of Zamfara and Jigawa and Sambisa and the desiccated Sahel, Nigerians on waking up each day find themselves literally swamped by Yahaya Bello’s campaign posters.  His protagonists are leaving nothing to chance.

Have you wondered why Yahaya Bello has made a habit of decking himself out every passing day in the wardrobe of each of Nigeria’s ethnic groups for media advertorials?  I can now reveal that it is to drive home his acceptability nationwide, as counselled by the Youths United for Bello, aforementioned.

Probably the latest and most consequential addition to the group is Olujonwo Obasanjo, who assured Bello in Lokoja the other day that he would mobilise 30 million Nigerians across the country to deliver the Presidency to him in 2023.  He not only has a name behind the claim, he has the experience, too.

When the Youths United point out that Yahaya Bello single-handedly conquered the dreaded corona virus disease and rendered Kogi a no-go- area for the plague; when they add that he also in like manner pulled the country back from the brink of civil war by ending the food blockade of the Southwest by some northern merchants, they will have established his credentials and his qualifications even beyond the most unreasonable doubt.

Youths United activists who have made the pilgrimage to Lokoja returned to base amply reimbursed for the costs they have incurred. They have demanded nothing over and above that. That is not obtainment.  They are in it not for what they can get, but because they believe in Yahaya Bello and are persuaded, based on his unparalleled achievements and promise, that he is the man for 2033.

It is of course possible, likely even, that in the fullness of time, and after he would have clinched the Presidency, Yahaya Bello would compensate them with lucrative oil and gas and construction deals, not forgetting juicy appointments.

Even if he doesn’t, the stalwart assured me, Youths United will take it in its patriotic stride.  For their only concern is that Nigeria should finally get it right.

Those planning to head to Kogi on a mission of obtainment are courting disappointment.

By Olatunji Dare

Given Dr Goodluck Jonathan’s improbable path to power, his unremarkable performance in office and the tentativeness that was his trademark, his life out of power seemed guaranteed a rapid descent into the obscurity from which he had been thrust into celebrity.

But time, it seems, was preparing him for a wholly redemptive second act, stripped of the starchy diffidence of the preceding act, the lexical infelicities, and the delicious locutions that a leading scholar has called “Jonathanisms.”

The Jonathan in this second act is new, contemplative and vastly improved.  He is also liberated, freed from the sharp politicos and the hard men from the creeks whose shabby company he was constrained to keep back then, and in whose false adulation he was forced to bask during drinking orgies that continued far into the night, not in some seedy guest house, mark you, but right there on site.  Or so they said, who claimed to know the habit of the house.

Nor did Mama “Dearis God o” Peace help matters.

Today you are more likely to find the new Jonathan in the exalted company of seasoned statesmen, authentic celebrities, top executives of corporations, think-tanks and foundations with a global reach, men and women who shape the policies that influence the course of events listening attentively to his every word and nodding appreciatively as petals of wisdom drop from his lips.

You are more likely to find him adjudicating in election disputes, chosen because of his reputation for fairness and even-handedness.  Whether that reputation was earned or merely ascribed is of little moment.  What counts is that his ls credited with that reputation, and that he has been deploying it in ways that confirm it.

Some of the old starchiness lingers, but on the whole, he is more relaxed, even jaunty on occasion.  His delivery is crisp.  In vain do you scour it for traces of the false equivalencies and analogies, and the breathtaking leaps of logic with which his speeches were strewn back then.

No wonder they want him to return to power for a third term that eluded his predecessor, President Olusegun Obasanjo and doubtless lies far beyond the reach of his successor, Muhammadu Buhari.

The transition from the old Jonathan to the new one was far from seamless, however.  He experienced the kind of loneliness that only those who have held and lost high office in Nigeria know.  It can be brutal and disorienting.

The phone that used to ring nonstop now sputters only intermittently.  After a while, it goes silent for days on end.  A ghostly silence pervades the house.  The visitors who once thronged the living room and even the family quarters have all found better use for their time.

Invitations to all kinds of ceremonies dry up.  Full-page congratulatory adverts  that used to crowd out news content in the better newspapers on birthdays and wedding anniversaries all but vanish.  Unsolicited gifts no longer arrive at the gate by the truckload.

For old times’ sake of just to kill boredom, you call up a former supplicant who would have stopped whatever he was doing back then and report immediately if you summoned him.  Now he will not even take your call, or take it and without even pretending to be the steward or a guest and tell you that he is not at home.  If he is in a foul mood, he might actually tell you gruffly that you have the wrong number and must never dial it again.

Ingrates, all.

Jonathan has been there; he knows the special loneliness that comes with being not just an ex-this or an ex-that, but of being an ex-president. From the way he narrated his experience the other day, loneliness after the Aso Rock years, is almost sepulchral.

His speech recently in Bauchi, as the special guest of Governor Bala Mohammed, at the commissioning of the governor’s first legacy project, the 6.25 km. Sabon Kaura-Jos bypass, was only too evocative of that experience

Hear him:

“I have been in government for a reasonable time, I have attained a number of levels starting from deputy governor and most of our experience is that after leaving office, some of the people you think that if they don’t see you will not eat, will just forget that you even exist.”

He could have said of such people that they would give you impression that they would have no intimacy even with their wives unless you approved it.  But once you leave office, they forget that you exist.  Liars, and bootlickers

His host, Governor Bala Mohammed, was not that kind of person, Jonathan told his audience.  Unlike those aides and allies who had deserted him after he left office, the Bauchi governor was a trusted “son” and a person of unparalleled loyalty

“Today,” Jonathan went on, “is a very big day for me, and you know why, because it is not easy for somebody to work with you in Nigeria then, even after leaving office, that person still continues with that kind of strong relationship with you.”

Governor Mohammed, who once served in Jonathan’s Administration as a minister from the ranks of the Opposition was even more effusive. He gratefully acknowledged Jonathan as his mentor, and as a person who had made a great impact on his life.

Jonathan had every right to regard that day as one he would never forget.  To immortalise the guest, the new bypass was named the Goodluck Jonathan Road.  It was also perhaps the first time anyone would in public acknowledge the much vilified former president as a mentor.

All in all a fine outing for Dr Jonathan,

There is a larger point that I would like to make here about the sociology of leadership and followership in Nigeria.  Dr Jonathan spoke of Governor Mohammed’s unparalleled loyalty. He would seem to imply that those who deserted him after he left office were deficit in loyalty.

Loyalty is not a one-way affair.  There are those who would be disloyal, no matter what.  But as a rule, loyalty begets loyalty. How many of Jonathan’s aides and allies could count on his support when they needed it?  How many of them count on his standing by them?

The relationship between boss and subordinate In Nigeria seems for the most part transactional.  It endures so long as it is profitable to either party. Or so long as there is a reasonable expectation of profit.  If no profit is guaranteed, each goes his or her separate way.

This formulation seems to break down when applied to the APC National Leader Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and his associates.  Most of those who marched on the streets with him during the June 12 protests or waged the struggle from exile in the United States or immersed themselves in the progressive cause he has been championing have not deserted him, even though they have little to show for their steadfastness.

Officials from the time he was governor of Lagos can be seen or heard today representing him and speaking for him at events in Nigeria and abroad.  His  concerns have largely remained their concerns.

His legendary munificence helps, to be sure, but it does not explain everything.

On both sides, it is a matter of character.  I suspect that it also has much to do with Tinubu’s large-heartedness, his willingness to forgive wrongs for the sake of a larger cause and move on.  We saw that large-heartedess on display during his visit to the home of the departed Afenifere spokesperson, Yinka Odumakin, to condole with his widow.

Odumakin’s unprovoked, full-bore tirade last year against Tinubu, his one-time patron, has gone down even by Nigeria’s tawdry history as something of a milestone in political obscenity.

And yet, it is from Tinubu that the most eloquent tribute to Odumakin has come.  This large-heartedness I believe, is a major source of Tinubu’s teeming and enduring followership.

By Olatunji Dare

Just a little more than 15 years ago, the British All-Party Parliamentary Group, issued a report on the Nigerian oil industry that exposed the essential falsity of the claim by a long line of Nigerian rulers from 1985 to the present that the government has been paying out colossal sums of money to shield Nigerians from having to pay the real cost of their prodigal consumption of petroleum products.

Quoting documents supplied by Shell, the British All-Party Parliamentary Group stated in a report prepared for the Blair Commission (Guardian, January 23, 2006) put the “technical costs” of extracting a barrel of crude at $ 4.00, and the “industry margin” at $1.87.  The balance, the report  said, went to the government in equity and taxes.

This meant, the report added, that if crude sold for $30 a barrel, the government was taking $24:13, or 80 percent of the total cost.  At the $50 dollar per barrel that ruled the market at the time of the report, the government was hiving off $44.13, or 88 percent, of the total.

With crude selling at an average of $120 per barrel thereafter for the better part of two years until the price fell by more than one-third, the government had literally been gorging itself on cascading oil revenues.  Even when the cost of refining and distribution ws factored into the equation, oil revenues accruing to the government could be reckoned only in stratospheric figures.  And the more the government earned, the more it sought to appropriate.

Employing typical British understatement, the report said that some N625 billion was lost every year through “organized pilfering” from the sprawling pipeline network and from bunkering on the high seas.  The team said it gathered that “senior military and political personnel” were involved in the theft, as well as their collaborators in neighbouring countries.  It said it learned that “no serious attempt” was made to prevent stolen oil from being transferred from land to sea and traded in international waters.

It was “impossible,” the report said, “to be certain how much the government actually receives and where the money is spent.” It should have added that it is also almost impossible to be certain how much oil is actually lifted or sold.

Yet, another round of “subsidy” removal or reduction was to have been instituted in June 1998

But President Musa Yar’Adua had “graciously consented” to hold off the measure, the Minister of State for Petroleum, Odein Ajumogobia, assured his anxious compatriots.

After decades of denial, deception and obfuscation, the Federal Government in a statement finally confirmed the damning report of the British All Party Parliamentary Group.  The statement painted a picture of racketeering, incompetence, inefficiency and sabotage almost beyond belief.  It spoke of refined petroleum products being shipped from local refineries, emptied into other tankers at sea and then returned to shore as imported stuff qualifying for hefty subsidies

Yet, the Federal Government would claim the following year that, in the face of the global economic recession, it could no longer afford to underwrite the “subsidies” to the tune of N640 billion a year.   Was it pure coincidence that the alleged subsidy was just N15 billion higher than the amount lost to the Nigerian oil industry through fraud every year, according to the British All-Party Parliamentary Group?

That was then.

A study researched by Professor Gbenga Oduntan of Kent University for the anti-corruption group Human and Environmental Development Agency HEDA, and published in this newspaper yesterday, found that Nigeria’s oil and gas sector accounted for roughly 93 per cent of Nigeria’s illicit financial flows.

Between 2011 and 2014, $12 billion of the flows went to the United States, $3 billion to our arch- creditor China, and some $800 million to Norway – yes, Norway, the poster-nation for international best behavior.

The study also confirmed anew a notorious fact of the industry — under-reporting of oil lifting of production and lifting volumes by the NNPC and the Department of Petroleum Resources.

Once again, as happens whenever the government is experiencing balance-of-payments difficulties, the first expedient it can conjure up is abrogating or reducing alleged subsidy on petroleum products.  Now, as before, the existence of the ‘subsidy’ is merely asserted, never demonstrated.

They had begun the campaign to end the alleged subsidy in 1985 by declaring that a situation in which a gallon of petrol cost far less than a bottle of soda was pernicious and unsustainable. But     so did the cost of a daily newspaper at that time as well as a family-size loaf of bread, to continue the false comparison.

When this line did not work, they came up with the argument that if they sold the products in Europe or the United States, they stood to get higher prices than they were getting in Nigeria. The difference, they said, was a ‘subsidy’ that had to be eliminated if the oil industry was to be saved from imminent collapse.

Opponents countered that the difference being claimed as a ‘subsidy’ was really an opportunity cost, and that a subsidy would be operative only when a product sells for less than its cost.

How much did it really cost to produce to gallon of petrol and deliver it at the pump, then?

The unspoken answer of the authorities was that the question was irrelevant, because even if crude oil was delivered to the refinery free, the retail price of petrol would still fall far below the production cost.  The situation was that dire. Nor was the question any longer merely a eliminating a subsidy on petroleum products; it was now a matter of subjecting them to “correct pricing.”

Higher prices, they said against all human experience, would curb adulteration and hence end the explosions that resulted from using such doctored products in kerosene lamps and stoves and the horrific, oftentimes fatal, injuries they inflicted on innocent consumes.   It would also serve they said, as a disincentive to cross-border smuggling into neighbouring countries where they were traded for windfall profits.

The smuggling was real, to be sure.  But as the Yar’Adua Administration was moved to admit, it was an inside job, carried out by persons within the system, who were in turn protected by the system. That explains why no big-time smuggler has ever been caught or prosecuted.

Eliminating the subsidies now reckoned in the trillions, they said further, would generate revenues that would be more productively invested in refurbishing the obsolescent oil refineries, expand their capacities and even build new ones to produce for export.  Everyone would be a winner.

Yet, as they stripped away the alleged subsidy and reaped enormous revenues, they never built a single refinery.  Year after year, they spent fortunes carrying out Turn-Around Maintenance (TAM) on the broken refineries.  Nothing was turned around except the pockets and fortunes of officials and their proxies.

Today, it is the same old, tawdry game, with the Federal Government set to spend billions of dollars on refurbishing those same refineries again, when it could build several state-of-the-art facilities for the same amount.  Given the rot, the pervasive corruption in the system, it is a bet that in another year or two, we would be refurbishing the refurbished refineries again.

There is no longer any question that what successive governments since 1985 have claimed to be subsidising has never been the consumption of petroleum products but racketeering, fraud, sabotage, inefficiency and incompetence on a scale beyond belief.  The entire industry is as transparent as a black hole.

It is almost as if a malignant hypnotist has, since the discovery of oil in Oloibiri in 1956, cast a spell on Nigeria’s  industry policy-makers and rendered them impervious to all that is decent and honourable.

It is time to break it.

By Olatunji Dare

If I had chanced upon the document without the benefit of its heading and the identity of the issuing authority, I would have sworn that it came straight out of the National Publicity Bureau of the PDP.   It seems to have been forged in the combative, sledge-hammer tradition of political pamphleteering that is the hallmark of the former largest political party in Africa.

Like almost everything else in Nigeria, the Civil Service is no longer what it used to be.  But I thought you could still look up to that institution as an exemplar of bureaucratic good manners in style if not in substance, and of linguistic restraint even when matters that lie at the very core of national existence are at issue.

Not anymore, I fear, going by the Kogi State Government’s widely distributed advertorial which appeared in major newspapers several weeks ago, and signed by the Secretary to the State Government.

Its very title, “Kogi State Government’s Response to the Reckless Comments credited to the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID in Respect to Kogi State” gives the game away on the threshold.  No fancy footwork, no fake modesty or courtesy, no pretence that the scene is being set for a parliamentary discourse.  From there, the language gets only more unseemly, more scurrilous even.

The PTF, whose National Incident Manager the advertorial dismissed contemptuously as “one Dr Mukhtar Mohammed”, had reported on February 1 that Kogi stood atop the high-risk states for COVID because it was not testing for the virus, because it had built no isolation facilities and because it does not even  acknowledge it that the virus exists.  Therefore, said the PTF, give Kogi a wide berth.

Its report, it is necessary to state, was based largely on the evasiveness, dilatoriness and outright dissembling of the Kogi State Government on all matters COVID.

The PTF report, rejoins the advertorial is “callous” and based on “fabrication,” and qualifies that body for “immediate dismemberment.”  Kogi had done everything expected of it, only for the PTF to cast aspersions on it.  Kogi had never denied the existence of COVID.  What it had “resisted and vehemently opposed” was “the early ascription of fictitious cases to Kogi,” suggestive of an agenda to chalk up bogus casualties in the state “by all means possible.”

Far from being indifferent to the fact of COVID, Kogi had taken immediate measures to sensitize residents to the scourge and was one of the earliest states to order a             lockdown; it had also set up a 29-member “Squadron” to ensure prevention or containment not just COVID but Lassa fever as well.

According to the advertorial, the Kogi State Government also purchased Rapid Test Kits and conducted “thousands” of tests and provided “testing services” to persons recommended by health professionals.

More concretely, said the advertorial, the Kogi built “fully equipped isolation centres” in “strategic locations” – not just anywhere in the state, please note — ready for use, not forgetting a molecular lab for COVID testing and treatment at the Kogi State Specialist Hospital in Lokoja.

But rather than ask to see those facilities, the PTF was more interested in “unilaterally manipulating the entire process to suit its sinister purposes.”

Kogi’s strategy, explained the advertorial, was based on an “admixture of science, common sense, medicine and governance,” and constituted a call on government at all levels to prevent citizens from being “plunged into extreme poverty”  and the economy from being damaged by “implementation of imported strategies.”

And whereas Kogi developed COVID protocols suited to its “uniqueness and peculiarities,” the PTF adopted “foreign protocols” that “backfired.”

In any case, said the advertorial, why the “mad rush” to squander one billion Naira to procure vaccines when COVID could be treated with zinc, Vitamins A and D, hydroxychloroquine and non-pharmacological measure?

Besides, it was not as if COVID posed a clear and present danger to the national population. It posed no threat whatsoever to people aged 45 and under.  For persons aged 60 and above with no co-morbidities, the threat was “close to zero.”  And, based on the PTF’s own claim, 96 per cent of COVID patients survived.  So, why the panic?

The funds budgeted for COVID could have been spent more profitably on preventive health care.  But then, there would be no “quick cash” for the boys.

And so on and so forth.

After a cursory reading of the advertorial, anyone unfamiliar with Kogi’s record of obfuscation on COVID might judge the state the wronged party, victim of bullying by the malicious agency of the Federal Government

But a contextual reading would suggest otherwise.

The advertorial was silent, fatally silent, on some key issues.

Why would the PTF set out to fabricate COVID data on Kogi alone among the 36 states of the country and the Abuja Federal Capital Territory?  Is it not on record that Bello ordered the deportation of  PTF officials on an inspection visit, claiming that they had come to plant the virus in his domain?

The advertorial claimed that thousands of COVID tests were conducted.  Since it harped again and again on matters of transparency, it may well be asked:  Where were the tests conducted, when, by whom, and with what results?  The Rapid Test Kits allegedly used for the tests:  Who supplied them, when, through what process, and at what cost?  Where is the surplus stored?

The Kogi State Government, the advertorial said, purchased and distributed face masks to residents of the State “free of charge.” Not one among some 20 Kogi residents I interviewed for this piece, recalls being given a face mask.  In any case, when was the exercise conducted? How were the face masks acquired, and at what cost?  By what mechanism were they distributed?

And where precisely in the state are Bello’s “fully equipped isolation centres” located?  What is their operational record?  Why were PTF officials not taken to the facilities?

There is no mention in the advertorial of the premier medical institution in Kogi — the Federal Medical Centre, Lokoja – the omission was not accidental.  The Centre was raided in broad daylight and vandalised by hoodlums on a mission to obliterate records of COVID treatments administered there, for the sole purpose of sustaining the official fiction that the disease does not exist in Kogi.

It is instructive that no arrests and no prosecutions followed this wanton destruction of federal property. And yet Bello continues to parade himself as a law-and-order governor whose record in ensuring security is unequalled in the annals of the state.

If, as claimed, Kogi’s vaccine storage facility in Lokoja was destroyed during the #EndSARS protests, why has another one not been built?  How have the vaunted “intensive care facilities” been functioning without it?

While the controversy raged, the public has been permitted to hear only from Governor Bello,  and occasionally his Commissioner for Information.  The Commissioner for Health has been missing in action. So have Kogi’s top medical officials.

Where are they? Where are the accomplished professionals who can speak with the authority of expertise and with the credibility that can inspire public trust and confidence?  They should be the public face of the war on COVID.  Can it be that they have been sworn to a code of silence?

Though a medical scientist in the broadest sense of the term, the official who signed the advertorial did so not in that capacity, but by virtue of holding the office of Secretary to the State Government.

In sum:  the advertorial is not a credible response to the PTF’s charges and the facts on the ground in Kogi.  It is at bottom an excellent instance of repeating the offence instead of refuting the charge.

Yahaya Bello must understand that COVID cannot be wished away with tawdry stunts, nor contained by treading the ruinous path of the execrable former guy, Donald Trump.

•For comments, send SMS to 08111813080

By Olatunji Dare

Precisely a fortnight ago, I availed myself, not for the first or even the second time, of the instrumentality of this public platform to dispatch a personal epistle to Osahon (Patrick) Obahiagbon, a friend of this space and its curator, asking if he could kindly share with the attentive audience a distillation of the insights from his cogitations, meditations, reflections and ruminations on a latitudinous range of national, regional and global issues.

The time seems eminently propitious for his sagacious intervention, when everything is in a state of total disarticulation, the resolution of which has confounded the best minds.

Ever so punctilious about his obligations, he commenced the necessary exertions almost as soon as what he graciously adverted to as “my summons” reached him.  His perspicacious response came a few days later, marked by his wonted lexical dexterity.

His predilection for sesquipedalianism may turn off, even infuriate or exasperate, those who have jettisoned their dictionaries or abjured the habit of consulting them.

That is their loss.  For his submission is at once engaging, recondite, didactic, incisive, enthralling, edifying, and entertaining.

Enjoy.

My dear Senior Brother,

It was with bated breath and a palate well titillated and titivated that I perused your coruscating and usually didactic epistle after an entr’acte brought about not out of communicative ennui but arising from de die in diem existential mandates.

You can therefore conjecture how delighted it was hearing from you again, my senior brother, and also suo moto putting at my disposal your seminal and encyclopedic ex cogitations on both national and international polyvalents.

Since I am an apostle of the apothegm by The Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare, to the effect that what concerns us most, we lastly attend to, permit of me in the circumstance, to venture an opinion ab ovo, on some global Kantian categorical imperatives, hoping that we will learn utilitarian lessons therefrom.

As sardonic, lugubrious and sepulchral the Covid discombobulation has become (and am in a state of lachrymoseism for all those that have yielded and transited under its quietus jugular), the lessons inter alia that The Great Architect and Geometrician of the Universe is teaching humanity here, boils down to the unipolar and sacrosanct fact that “sceptre and crown shall tumble down and in the dust be equal made with poor crooked, scythe and spade.”

In fact, the Covid incubus and succubus has pulverized the earlier assumptions that “when beggars die, there are no comets seen but heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”

Indeed, princes and kings and every political, social and economic strongman the world over have bowed and submitted to the pandemic.  It’s my sincere hope that political and economic strongmen all over the world and particularly in Africa and Nigeria are imbibing the necessary lessons which is the desideratum for a national rebirth on governance issues.

But it does not appear to me that the spiritual lessons have been particularly impactful on our political leadership here in Nigeria against the backdrop of the way and manner they are still plying their asphyxiating prebendals.

Need I say how democratically satiated I was when I watched with delight and glee how Uncle Sam cornucopiously and ebulliently showcased itself to the world as the bastion and bulwark of democracy?

True, former President Trump made the point that it’s not yet eureka for America when it comes to sit-tightism, political strongmanism and governance megalomania verging on monomania as is characteristic with Africa but Americans made the point in caboodle that their democratic institutions were resilient enough and have been sufficiently forged in the furnace of a democratic salamander to resist political strongmen.

What a political lesson again for Africa and Nigeria!  I would asseverate from mountain Olympus that the triumph of American democracy over Trumpism was SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS.

Now to the elusive Pax Nigeriana of our dreams.

A poetic and philosophical homo sapiens was once quoted as saying, “…See me lakayanalakaboy, shokolokobangoshe….was the language of the white man to abuse our colonial mentality and our lifestyle still sustains that abuse.”  How very true.

I have bestirred and ensconced myself in my mystical and alchemical laboratory, preferring to engage on matters that redound and conduce to the evolution of my soul personality in this incarnation because Nigeria is fast becoming a damnosa hereditas-God forbid — peregrinating the trajectory of a FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION by the purposeless purposelessness, conscienceless consciencelessness and directionless directionless directionlessness of its largely supine, indolent, philistine, somnolent and rudderless political leadership.

How can we ever justify the sheer criminal lawlessness, arrant banditry and deprecable brigandage openly perpetuated by pastoralists against farmers all over the country and with harum scarum bravado and recusant braggadocio?

Farmlands are being daily ravaged, pillaged and farmers kidnapped and eviscerated by herders and yet the response of the coercive apparatus of state is one of Olympian aloofness, lackadaisical complacency and shilly-shally predilection?

In the midst of this seeming state of anomie, a state governor is regaling himself with incendiary rhetoric and verbally hurling combustible projectiles. And yet we are being told that these are no incipient signs of a failed state, especially when various geo-political zones and states now have to resort to self-help?

It is on public record now that the former Chief of Army Staff, General Tukur Buratai, pontificated only a few weeks ago that it would take an aeon to defeat Boko Haram and its dastardly activities in our country.  So, what about the tales by moonlight from the arm’s propagandic orifice that Boko Haram has since been militarily defenestrated?

Goebbellian hogwash and putrescent legerdemain.

l have said for the umpteenth time that Boko Haramism, more formally known as Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’Awati Wal-Jihad, has transmogrified into Nigeria’s gorgon medusa (it predates this government) is itself a manifestation of governance fiasco over the years, especially in northern Nigeria where majority of successive governors like their southern counterparts have been inebriated in their narcissistic aqua rather than delivering the dividends of democracy to their people.

Are we out of economic recession? For me, the answer is a very simple one and it can be found in how our ragged among us and the proletariat and lumpen proletariat are interfacing with the day to day economy and not in the gobbledygook from the air- conditioned offices of official high priests.

In the midst of all these security challenges, there has been a new outcry for state police.  That appears very attractive, especially since the federal security agencies seem to have been overwhelmed by their constitutional duties.

But I hold the view with a sense of deep reflection that state police at this point in time would tantamount to the apple of Hesperides.  One federal Gordon medusa is still certainly better than adding another 36 state gorgon medusas to it.

Looking forward, it appears to me very clear and settled that whoever takes over as President of Nigeria in 2023 is what is largely going to determine the survival of this country.

His character, bridge-building capacity, ideological grasp of issues, sense of local, national and international dialectics and more will count heavily.

I assure you that God and the Cosmic giving me life and health, I will be at the frontline of the political barricades for that struggle, for this country belongs to all of us.

Permit of me my senior brother to retire back into the cocoon of my alchemical and mystical laboratory from whence your avuncular and patriotic concerns roused me with the sui generis privilege of feasting with you on very high and noble matters pertaining to our nation-state.

I hope that through your kind graces, our soulmates you eloquently spoke about will have the opportunity as usual of knowing that your younger brother has dutifully responded to your patriotic summons.

• I remain yours truly,

Osahon Obahiagbon.

By Olatunji Dare

My dear Osahon:

Fraternal greetings.

It has been a long intermission.  The hiatus that this epistle is designed to interrupt has far exceeded in duration any we had known previously. But need I assure you that “out of sight” has not been “out of mind?”

Whether contemplating developments at home or abroad, it is almost as if the world we once inhabited has passed on irretrievably, and we have been thrust into a strange new one without the wonted delineations of the old one, and almost without anything that can be called a compass.  The concatenation, I find, grows more unfathomable and more stultifying with each passing day.

Incidentally, it is one year to the day that the first Covid death was reported in the United States.  Since then, 500,000 lives have succumbed to the virus that the disgraced and discredited former American strongman Donald Trump dismissed as a minor irritation that would soon expend itself, failing which it could be eviscerated with a judicious ingestion of any off-the shelf disinfectant.

This figure is more than the combined American death from Word War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War.

Worldwide, the virus has consumed some 1.5 million lives, blighting the prospects of those who survived         its infernal visitation.  This latter figure does not include fatalities from the so-called Third World, where testing for the virus is sparse at best, and vital records are notoriously unreliable.  To take a familiar case: No more than 10 per cent of births and deaths ever enter into Nigeria’s official records, according to the best authorities.

Can you imagine for a moment, Osahon, how many vacancies this cumulative toll has created in the hearts and hearths and homes and beds and dining tables of individuals and places of work worldwide; how much misery and agony and despair the virus has loosed on the world?

But that is only a partial measure of the devastation the pandemic has wrought in the short term.  It has changed the meaning of work and worship and learning.  It has constrained living, leisure, commerce,    travel and social interaction in ways few could have imagined. And it may well be that, when it is all over, everything will have changed so profoundly that the way we now calibrate time will amount to a distortion and a denial of the present discontinuities.

The calendar will have to be recast in pre-Covid and post-Covid terms.

But despite the cataclysm, millions are still in denial, not merely of a virus they cannot see but whose depredations are nevertheless all over the place; they deny science itself, armed with their private arsenals of alternative facts and trapped in the most inane conspiracy theories.

Do you know, Osahon, that despite the lush television coverage and copious documentation of the event and the moon samples ferried home by the visiting earthlings, 10 per cent of Americans still believe that the moon landings were faked?  To them, astronaut Neil Armstrong’s “one giant step” was nothing but “one giant hoax.”

They will most likely refract through the same distorting mirror last week’s landing with pinpoint accuracy on a predetermined spot on the planet Mars by the spacecraft Perseverance with its payload of a robotic rover and a helicopter, in the most sophisticated exploration of the red planet yet.  The news that China and the United Arab Emirates also landed separate probes on the red plant that very week can only lead the usual suspects to gin up new conspiracy theories.

But enough about America, Osahon.  Being a pertinacious but discriminating consumer of international news, of which there is always a superfluity, thanks to the plethora of media outlets, you probably can tell me more about America than I can tell you.

Shifting gears, I will now advert my mind to the homeland.

From what I read daily, it has been bad news, bad news and more bad news over there, despite recent intimations of what officials are trumpeting as the end of the recession.

Do you believe them, Osahon?  Especially given the serial lockdowns to mitigate the propagation of the coronavirus and the attendant contraction in economic activity, to say nothing of the closure of the nation’s land borders, the policy somersaults, and the mixed fortunes of oil in the international market?

To those who have enjoyed no respite over the years from the deprivations that have been their constant companions, the news must seem a cruel joke.  Have they not always lived in a recession?

But their deprivations, I gather, are nothing compared to the security situation.  I am told that farming, the country’s lifeblood, has become the most dangerous and least rewarding occupation.  Farmers have been forced to abandon their farmlands to pastoralists, for fear of being killed or kidnapped for hefty ransoms. Their holdings have become free grazing grounds for cattle and homesteads for their herders.

Just last week, women in the Esan country of your great Edo State took to the streets in protest against the insecurity that now governs their lives.  They can no longer work their farms because of well-founded fears of being raped by armed pastoralists. Marauders have set up camps not only in the ungoverned spaces that perfuse the country; they have also forcibly taken over forest reserves, ecological treasures controlled and maintained by state and government and local authorities for posterity.

The herders and their enablers are asserting a constitutional right, without any corresponding obligations, to graze their cattle wherever they please, and the rights and privileges and economic interests of those who own the land be damned.

To travel outside one’s immediate locale is to court danger, as hundreds of motorists and passengers have found to their grief.  Inter-city and inter-state vehicles are seized at gunpoint and diverted to God-forsaken forests where their occupants are stripped of their possessions and subjected to horrific abuse, before being freed on payment of ransom.

These occurrences, plus the unending barbarities of Boko Haram, and the country’s shambolic response              to the coronavirus pandemic interspersed with stories of actual or looming hardship and compounded               by continuing and new instances of brazen inequities in the allocation of federal resources, I find, are the narratives that dominate the headlines and the front pages and discussion programmes on radio and television.

The civility and restraint that should undergird the national policy dialogue, especially at times like these, have been supplanted by demagogic posturing and opportunist vigilantism.  Wherever you turn there is seething discontent, and even from this remove, you get the sinking feeling that this path can only lead to national tragedy.

Where are the statesmen?

The bonds of nationhood, tenuous at the best of times, are fracturing with each passing day.  But the response at the highest level has been much talk and very little consequential action that does not invite charges of appeasement, if not complicity.  They are carrying on in the belief that the country will muddle through as usual.   But that very belief is what landed us in our present predicament.

Can that be the way forward, Osahon?  Can continuing yesterday’s failed policies with half-hearted adjustments here and there conduce to building a country whose unity is rooted in justice, equity, empathy, and brotherhood?

It is less than reassuring that the same old faces and their predilections are astir again and regrouping to perpetuate the status quo, content to have Nigeria remain a land of great potential.  There is little fresh thinking up there, only how to keep an utterly dysfunctional system going.

The foregoing, Osahon, represent my fears and prejudices.  I thought I should share them with you.  Being    of a younger generation, engaged, and withal “on ground,” you will probably have sharper insights and consequently a more nuanced perspective.

Your friends and admirers nationwide, among whom I am glad to number myself, will be greatly enriched by your cogitations on these momentous issues and others I have not raised in this epistle.

Until then, Osahon, stay engaged, stay well, and stay safe.

Fraternally

Olatunji Dare