The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • A passage in the fraternity

    A passage in the fraternity

    Olatunji Dare

     

    IN the past three weeks, the fraternity of Nigerian journalists has lost two of its ablest and most accomplished practitioners ever.  One of them, Bisi “BizLaw” Lawrence belonged in the older generation. The other, Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, belonged in mine, and was withal a friend.

    In keeping with the custom of our people, this piece is for Bisi Lawrence.  A separate tribute to Gbolabo Ogunsanwo will come later.

    At 87, Lawrence, was among the oldest practitioners still in active service and easily the most versatile, turning out sparkling columns week after week,  often twice a week, on subjects ranging from sports, politics, society, the scriptures, the human condition – indeed, on just about every subject under the sun and beyond for Vanguard Newspapers.

    His range was truly encyclopaedic.  In a way he was the archetype of the journalist of a bygone era, who was expected to know a little about everything, with the difference that Lawrence expected much more of himself and prepared himself intellectually to meet the changes of the eras through which he lived

    When you read his sports columns, you knew immediately that you were in the hands of an expert.  Whether he was writing about cricket, soccer, boxing or athletics you had not the slightest doubt about his firm grasp of the material, the analytic rigour from which his conclusions flowed.

    Every word fell in place, woven seamlessly into the tapestry.  He possessed and valued that sense of craft that distinguishes the master craftsman from the journeyman.

    Long before joining Vanguard Newspapers, Lawrence had plied his trade on radio and television in Nigeria, and on the global scene as a sports administrator and consultant. In each setting, he acquitted himself with high distinction.

    Having lived so long and functioned on so many platforms across the world, he had plenty of stories to tell about journalism and about the human condition.  And he shared them with his colleagues, they said, for their entertainment and even more for their edification.

    I never met Lawrence, not in a professional scene nor in social context.  For reasons I cannot fathom, our paths simply never crossed.   What I know about him derives from his Vanguard columns, of which I was an admirer and student, and from the post-humous tributes of his friends and colleagues at the paper.

    Now, sports writing, like sports casting, is probably the most cliché-ridden journalistic form.  String a few stock phrases together; garnish it with some atmospherics; deliver the product with breathless excitement, and you were well on the way to a career in sports journalism.

    The resulting narrative was predictable.  But it was rarely remarkable or memorable.

    Lawrence was different.

    Whenever he reported on tennis, for example, he made you see the flow and ebb, the crosscutting currents of play. He made you know not just the player but the person behind the racquet.  He made you feel the atmosphere.  He situated the game in its political and commercial context, He made you see the bigger picture.  He transported you to the scene of action.

    And he did so in graceful, riveting and uncluttered prose, and in a context that gave the event full meaning, with allusions from literature and the arts   and history, a world he knew so well, You knew you were in the hands of an expert guide and a craftsman who cared deeply about words, chose them with precision, and deployed them with telling effect.

    Those who hold that such elegant wordsmanship should be reserved for more important subjects must have been nurtured in the tradition of that earlier era.

    The formula then consisted in stringing a few stock phrases, garnishing it with some atmospherics and delivering the package with breathless excitement, the purpose being to wow the audience.

    But there is a richer and nobler tradition — one that elevates sports writing to the status of serious literature, even great literature.  Here I am thinking of the writings of AJ Liebling and Grantland Rice in the first half of the last century, and their American compatriot Red Smith, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the third Mohammed Ali – Joe Frazier fight,  “The Thrilla in Manilla.”

    I am thinking of Frank Deford, the late National Public Radio personality who parlayed sports writing into an art form. I am thinking especially of Ernest Hemingway’s gripping writings on bull fighting

    On this side of the  Atlantic, I am thinking of Peter Wilson of The Mirror, called by avid sports fans “the world’s greatest sports writer,” on account of his great mastery of that form, and High McIlvanney, the Scotsman, who has written for a string of British publications with enchanting facility on soccer, boxing, and horse racing.

    On our own shores, intimations of that tradition of sports writing as literature perfused the work of Bonar Ekanem and Peter “PECOS” Osugo, and is stamped splendidly on the commentary of Ayo Ositelu and the unfailingly delightful Bisi Lawrence.

    I regret never meeting him.  I kept nursing the hope that I would meet him one day, introduce myself and tell him how much his writing and a long and distinguished career unspoiled by scandal has meant to me.

     

     

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  • A passage in the fraternity

    A passage in the fraternity

    Olatunji Dare

     

    IN the past three weeks, the fraternity of Nigerian journalists has lost two of its ablest and most accomplished practitioners ever.  One of them, Bisi “BizLaw” Lawrence belonged in the older generation. The other, Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, belonged in mine, and was withal a friend.

    In keeping with the custom of our people, this piece is for Bisi Lawrence.  A separate tribute to Gbolabo Ogunsanwo will come later.

    At 87, Lawrence, was among the oldest practitioners still in active service and easily the most versatile, turning out sparkling columns week after week,  often twice a week, on subjects ranging from sports, politics, society, the scriptures, the human condition – indeed, on just about every subject under the sun and beyond for Vanguard Newspapers.

    His range was truly encyclopaedic.  In a way he was the archetype of the journalist of a bygone era, who was expected to know a little about everything, with the difference that Lawrence expected much more of himself and prepared himself intellectually to meet the changes of the eras through which he lived

    When you read his sports columns, you knew immediately that you were in the hands of an expert.  Whether he was writing about cricket, soccer, boxing or athletics you had not the slightest doubt about his firm grasp of the material, the analytic rigour from which his conclusions flowed.

    Every word fell in place, woven seamlessly into the tapestry.  He possessed and valued that sense of craft that distinguishes the master craftsman from the journeyman.

    Long before joining Vanguard Newspapers, Lawrence had plied his trade on radio and television in Nigeria, and on the global scene as a sports administrator and consultant. In each setting, he acquitted himself with high distinction.

    Having lived so long and functioned on so many platforms across the world, he had plenty of stories to tell about journalism and about the human condition.  And he shared them with his colleagues, they said, for their entertainment and even more for their edification.

    I never met Lawrence, not in a professional scene nor in social context.  For reasons I cannot fathom, our paths simply never crossed.   What I know about him derives from his Vanguard columns, of which I was an admirer and student, and from the post-humous tributes of his friends and colleagues at the paper.

    Now, sports writing, like sports casting, is probably the most cliché-ridden journalistic form.  String a few stock phrases together; garnish it with some atmospherics; deliver the product with breathless excitement, and you were well on the way to a career in sports journalism.

    The resulting narrative was predictable.  But it was rarely remarkable or memorable.

    Lawrence was different.

    Whenever he reported on tennis, for example, he made you see the flow and ebb, the crosscutting currents of play. He made you know not just the player but the person behind the racquet.  He made you feel the atmosphere.  He situated the game in its political and commercial context, He made you see the bigger picture.  He transported you to the scene of action.

    And he did so in graceful, riveting and uncluttered prose, and in a context that gave the event full meaning, with allusions from literature and the arts   and history, a world he knew so well, You knew you were in the hands of an expert guide and a craftsman who cared deeply about words, chose them with precision, and deployed them with telling effect.

    Those who hold that such elegant wordsmanship should be reserved for more important subjects must have been nurtured in the tradition of that earlier era.

    The formula then consisted in stringing a few stock phrases, garnishing it with some atmospherics and delivering the package with breathless excitement, the purpose being to wow the audience.

    But there is a richer and nobler tradition — one that elevates sports writing to the status of serious literature, even great literature.  Here I am thinking of the writings of AJ Liebling and Grantland Rice in the first half of the last century, and their American compatriot Red Smith, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the third Mohammed Ali – Joe Frazier fight,  “The Thrilla in Manilla.”

    I am thinking of Frank Deford, the late National Public Radio personality who parlayed sports writing into an art form. I am thinking especially of Ernest Hemingway’s gripping writings on bull fighting

    On this side of the  Atlantic, I am thinking of Peter Wilson of The Mirror, called by avid sports fans “the world’s greatest sports writer,” on account of his great mastery of that form, and High McIlvanney, the Scotsman, who has written for a string of British publications with enchanting facility on soccer, boxing, and horse racing.

    On our own shores, intimations of that tradition of sports writing as literature perfused the work of Bonar Ekanem and Peter “PECOS” Osugo, and is stamped splendidly on the commentary of Ayo Ositelu and the unfailingly delightful Bisi Lawrence.

    I regret never meeting him.  I kept nursing the hope that I would meet him one day, introduce myself and tell him how much his writing and a long and distinguished career unspoiled by scandal has meant to me.

     

    • For comments, send SMS to 08111813080

  • Between June 12, 1993 and November 3, 2020

    Between June 12, 1993 and November 3, 2020

    By Olatunji Dare

    June 12, 1993 and November 3, 2020, are destined to endure as milestones in the history of Nigeria and the United States, respectively.

    The one was designed to launch Nigeria on a new socio-political order with the election of a president under a new democratic constitution, ending 10 years of military rule diluted with token civilian participation.

    In the normal run of things, the other would have registered as just another election held every four years to re-elect a sitting president or to choose a new one.  But there was nothing ordinary about Donald Trump, the candidate of the Republican Party, who was seeking re-election.

    Trump’s first term has been riotous, and polarizing; an exercise in chicanery and mendacity. He carried on like a modern-day emperor with all the trappings, accountable to no laws or institutions. To re-elect him would be to empower him to indulge even more egregiously in his ill repute.

    Yet, this was the choice before the American people:  to re-elect the repellent Donald Trump who cannot fake empathy even if his life depended on it, or vote for Democratic candidate Joseph (Joe) Biden.  At 78, Biden is four years older than Trump, and a tad slower.  On every other political metric, he was consistently rated higher in the polls than Trump, whose ineptitude and venality alone contributed hugely to the deaths of more than 250, 000 Americans from coronavirus disease,

    Trump dwells in an alternative universe, governed by “alternative facts” of his own fabrication that could mean one moment, the precise opposite the next moment, and something else in between.  Biden projects stability and steadiness, a world rooted in verifiable facts and governed by ascertainable laws.

    Given the damage Trump has wrought on the American political landscape, Biden was right to insist that nothing less than decency itself was on the ballot for the election. And by any rational measure, an election between Trump and Biden, the outcome should not even be close. I will return to this theme later.

    In the 1993 Nigerian election, there were no major issues.  The contending parties, the Social Democratic Party (“a little to the Left) and the National Republican Convention (“a little to the Right”) were decreed into existence by the military government.  Their constitutions and emblems and anthems were of the provenance.

    In the American election, the contending parties go far back far more than 200 years ago, to the founding of the Republic. But the Republican Party that entered the 2020 election has very little in common with the GOP.

    GOP had transformed to the party of Donald Trump.

    In the 2016 election, he ran on, and pursued policies and programmes that scandalised its grandees, and the majority of the electorate, but had gone on to win. By his second coming, its platform, it declared, was “to support the President’s agenda,” pure and simple

    In Nigeria’s 1993 election, candidates ran under the constant threat of being banned or disqualified at any time before, during or after the election if they ran afoul of the rules              laid down by the military.  And it was no idle threat.  Many indeed were the candidates who were disqualified, banned, un-banned and re-banned, for the flimsiest of reasons, or for no reasons at all.

    Dates and other signposts kept shifting, even as the rules kept changing.  Until the eve of the presidential election, no one knew for certain that it would take place, including officials of the body supposed to administer it, the National Electoral Commission.  What saved the day was a not-so-subtle warning by the United States Government, per its embassy in Lagos, against further postponement.

    The American election was not subject to the whim or caprice of any individual or institution, Still, it was conducted in an atmosphere that was flagrantly incompatible with democratic principles. You had the incumbent president calling for his opponents to be jailed, turning the machinery of justice against them, and seeking desperately to limit the franchise and to suppress popular participation. You had him ceaselessly impugning the legitimacy and subverting the operational capability of crucial public institutions of which, he was in the final analysis, the chief custodian.

    Against a raft of contrived odds, the Nigerian election held as scheduled.  The authorities had calculated that no clear winner would emerge, and that massive confusion and disenchantment would ensue.  But it would last only a few weeks; law and order would be restored by force or co-optation, and the country would move on.  That, at any rate, was their expectation.

    But it all went awry.  A clear winner emerged.  But before his victory could be announced officially, they annulled the entire election, citing irregularities for which they could produce not a shred of evidence.  Protests broke out in major cities of the country, in ways and with an intensity the military could not easily contain.

    The military did not allow the people’s will to prevail.  But it exhausted itself in a crisis of its own making and was forced to vacate the civic space severely discredited.

    In the United States, the competent authorities determined with nary a murmur that Joe Biden was the clear winner of the presidential election just concluded.  But Trump was waiting for them. It was not nothing that he had for nine months employed his bully pulpit and the twitter handle that was in his hand an instrument of terror to vilify them, cast grave doubt on their competence, their good faith and their decency.  He had left nothing to chance.

    He was going to win, Trump declared at every stop.  The declaration did not spring from mere wishful thinking or even the optimism that animates every political candidate. It has behind it force of certainty.  He could not lose.  If he did, that result could only have flowed from election rigging and corruption of the foulest kind.

    Trump’s last act of desperation was to seek out pledged electors who would abandon Biden at the Electoral College and cast their ballots for Trump instead.  He found none.

    In Nigeria, he would have succeeded with the right combination of bribes, cajolery, threats, and blackmail.  It was this combination that turned winners into losers and losers into winners in the 1993 election.

    By any rational consideration, a contest between Biden and Trump was not supposed to be close.  Even viewed through the distorting mirror of the Electoral College, this one isn’t.  But politics is not a rational pursuit.  And so, here we are, with the deluded Donald Trump grasping at every straw, real or imagined, in a craven bid to invalidate the election outcome, the merest assertions on which he had relied to peddle his smears and his crack-brained conspiracy theories, now of no avail.

    Until they happened, Nigerians never believed that the events subsumed in the “June 12” debacle could ever happen in their country. Such events took place in those lands near and far they had come to regard as “unfortunate,” or only as the wildest aberrations.

    Until Donald Trump came along, few Americans believed that a person of his record and predilections could win election as president; the system of political recruitment and promotion would eliminate such a person on the threshold and clear the deck for those who could be expected to pursue the quest with honour and moral purpose.

    Nothing in the constitution, history, political structures, laws or institutions of Nigeria operated as a bulwark against the depredations of the military, just as nothing in the laws and institutions of the United States nor in its vaunted exceptionalism, foreclosed the rise of Donald Trump.  And nothing would stand in the way of his political resurrection in an unaltered form.

    Here and yonder and everywhere, eternal vigilance remains the price of liberty.

  • Remembering Leke Salaudeen

    Remembering Leke Salaudeen

    Olatunji Dare

     

    LATE in the evening of October 5, 2020, well past my usual bedtime, I received a text message from Barakat Salaudeen, informing me that her father Leke had been taken to Gbagada General Hospital, in Lagos.  Her tone was subdued. It betrayed not the slightest indication of panic.  But there was no mistaking the urgency of the situation.

    I wrote back immediately to ask for details.

    Apparently he had been ill for some time and had been receiving medical treatment for a heart condition until he was diagnosed with kidney disease and rushed to Gbagada General Hospital.  She promised to keep in touch.

    When her text message bobbed up early the following day, I sensed that the worst had happened.  It had, indeed.  Leke had died less than 24 hours after his admission to Gbagada General Hospital, reputed to have one of the best dialysis facilities in Nigeria.

    I knew in my heart that I would have to enter a tribute to his memory.  But I was conflicted.  It is  not the custom of our people for a much older person (I am 76) to join in the public mourning of a much younger person (Leke was 62).  If the younger person was your student as undergraduate and graduate, he looked up to you as confidant and counselor, the challenge becomes all the more formidable.

    But Leke was more; he was a friend; he was a professional colleague, and he was family more or less.

    He entered the BSc programme in mass communication in the late 70s, then and even now among the most competitive in the University of Lagos.  In the year-long Advanced Reporting class I taught, Leke’s diligence and painstaking attention to detail stood him out.  Not for him the shortcuts, the expedients many a student contrive to dodge the hard work of ferreting out the facts and presenting them in a context that gives them meaning – the qualities that separate the perfunctory                  or merely competent from the truly remarkable.

    I recall taking the class on a field trip to the old Parliament Buildings in Lagos where the Constituent Assembly was debating the draft of the Constitution for the Second Republic that was to come into force in 1979. Each student was required to interview at least one member of the Assembly for a profile, an update on its deliberations, especially the constraints; prospects for the Second Republic, and matters relating to the on-going debates and discussions on Nigeria’s future.

    Leke’s doggedness landed him a great catch:  Shehu Shagari, who went on to become Nigeria’s first elected president the following year.  His submission was one of the most illuminating.

    During his National Service year with the New Nigerian in Kaduna and later employment with the Triumph Newspapers, in Kano, and this newspaper, his last stop, where he served as an Assistant Editor on the National Desk, he scored exclusive interviews with many of the leading personalities of the time, among them Lagos State Governor Lateef Jakande, in whose home he was always welcome.

    His final year project was a magazine-length feature on traditional healers in Lagos, and how leading medical scientists have sought to incorporate them and their work in mainstream medical practice.  A great deal of legwork went into the project, one of the best-executed by the graduating class.

    In this age of cut-and-paste journalism, Leke remained wedded to shoe-leather reporting.  He used online resources and worked the phones.  But he remained at heart a shoe-leather journalist, doing the rounds, tending old sources and cultivating new ones

    Leke was unobtrusive, unpretentious, and unthreatening.  You felt as ease with him.  I suspect that these characteristics contributed significantly to his success as a journalist.  Gaining access to news sources came easy to him, and so did gaining their confidence. You had no reason to suspect, much less fear, that he would give you away. And so, he filed story after exclusive story with all the newspapers he worked for.

    One particular story that landed him in trouble and in detention during the time of General (as he then was) Muhammadu Buhari bears out his faithfulness.  It centred on the crash of a training flight of a sophisticated jet in the fleet of the Nigeria Air Force.  Leke had reported it exclusively, much to the embarrassment of the authorities who wanted to keep it a secret.

    They demanded that he disclose his sources.  He refused and was clamped into jail under Decree Four.

    Seeing him pecking his laptop keyboard in his marked-off space in the newsroom at The NATION or in a setting where colleagues talked about their journalistic escapades, you would never suspect that “he has been there, seen this, or done that,” pardon the cliché.  He was self-contained, introspective, almost inscrutable.

    Leke was an embodiment of decency and decorum.  Even when he had ample cause to feel aggrieved or resentful, he just shrugged his shoulders and moved on.  Yu could not engage him in gossip or unseemly talk.  His life was anchored securely on his Muslim faith, which he practiced with his accustomed obtrusiveness.  Until I asked him several years ago, I did not even know that    he had performed the holy pilgrimage.

    Not many can recall him raising his voice, or putting down another person.

    Whenever he called, he never failed to ask after my younger brother Kolade, who was his colleague at the New Nigerian.  When Kolade died last May, I was sure Leke would call to offer condolences.  When a decent interval had passed and I had still not heard from him, I called him.

    “How is Kola?” he asked, prelimaries over.

    Kola, as Leke called him, died about a month ago, I told him.

    The cell phone he was clutching fell on his table.  For one full minute he said nothing.   Then, he said, ever so plaintively, that he was only just learning of Kolade’s death.  I told him it was reported in The NATION and other media outlets, print and electronic.  He said he had not been attending to the media.  He apologized profusely and said the usual prayers.

    I believe him. His illness was probably well advanced at that time.  He offered an explanation.  He did not seek to parlay in into an excuse.

    Leke left one unfished business that was dear to his heart.  His youngest daughter who holds a degree in the biological sciences, desires to pursue a doctorate in molecular biology, preferably in the United States.  Could I help find a good school and explore scholarship opportunities?

    That was his dream for Barakat.  I hope it will not die with him.

    May Leke’s gentle soul rest in peace.  And may Allah abide with his widow, Barakat, and her siblings.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Beyond Donald Trump

    Beyond Donald Trump

    Olatunji Dare

     

    DURING the Trump Presidency, on which the sun thankfully set last week, the news often got so depressing that I wished I could escape from it.

    That wish was almost overpowering during the week of September 3, 2018, barely two years into what will surely go down as the most tumultuous presidency in American history in recent memory.

    Prominent in the news cycle that week were excerpts from Bob Woodward’s book – he, with Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame – chronicling the chaos and dysfunction in the White House, the erratic and often alarming behavior of its occupant, and the abysmal disesteem in which he is held by key aides and senior staffers.

    The attentive public was still digesting the snippets from Woodward’s book and the shady manner  in which Republican majority in the Senate was conducting the confirmation hearings for the dissembling Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh when The New York Times, which no one has ever accused of recklessness, came out with an unsigned Op-Ed piece that raised anew, and with insider knowledge, grave and disturbing doubts about Trump’s mental, moral and intellectual fitness for his high office.

    The writer, identified simply as a “senior official” of the Trump Administration, qualified himself or herself as part of a “resistance” within the White House laboring behind the scenes to save America from Trump and thwarting Trump’s “more misguided impulses” until he is out of office.

    “The root of the problem,” the writer declared, “is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision-making.”

    He described Trump’s style as “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.”  He spoke of Trump’s “preferences” for autocrats and dictators, and of his “anti-democratic impulses.”

    He spoke of how senior officials, from the White House to Executive branch departments and agencies, ”would privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander-in -chief’s comments and actions,” and how “most (of them) are working to insulate their operations from his whims.”

    Meetings with Trump “veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back,” the writer added.

    Given this instability, the writer said, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment that spells out how to remove a president from office.  But rather than precipitate what was sure to be a long-drawn constitutional crisis, he and the resisters within would do everything to steer the Administration in the right direction “until – one way or another – it’s over.”

    He indicted American society of complicity in Trump’s desecration of the nation’s values.  “The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility,” he wrote.

    That publication in what Trump reflexively calls “the failing New York Times”, the article became   the talk of the political class.

    Trump almost blew his top.  He said the whole thing amounted to treason pure and simple, and demanded that the author be turned in immediately for prosecution under the espionage laws.  His volcanic rage confirmed virtually everything the writer and many others had said about him.

    Mary L. Trump, a niece of Donald Trump and a noted clinical psychologist has since confirmed and amplified the submissions of the anonymous New York Times correspondent, in a book titled “Too Much and Never Enough:  How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” The slim volume bristles with penetrating professional insight and the informed judgment of an insider, even if a disaffected one.

    In recent memory, The New York Times has been known to grant anonymity to Op-Ed contributors in only two instances.  In both instance, publication of their identities would have gravely imperiled the contributors.

    In the latest instance, the paper explained, anonymity was granted because the writer would face certain dismissal and other reprisals if identified.  The writer had approached the paper through a person known to the house, and the paper had satisfied itself and the intermediary and the writer’s good faith.  Besides, the article contained important insider knowledge that might not otherwise reach a public that had the right to know – the public Trump took an oath to serve diligently, honestly and faithfully.

    What good faith, some have sniggered.  If the writer was not a showboat and a coward to boot, what was he still doing in the Trump White House?  If he had the courage of his conviction, why did he not resign, and then publish the piece under his name?  How senior was the “senior official” anyway?

    The New York Times would not tell, saying merely that the writer’s identify was known only to the Editor of the Editorial Page and a few staffers of the Op-Ed section.

    The paper has this bifurcated existence whereby the Editorial Page is separate from the newsroom and The Editorial Board represents the opinions of its members, its editor and the publisher.

    So, even the executive editor of the larger paper does not know the identity of the writer.  But the larger paper, not being privy to the confidentiality agreement between the Op-Ed section and the writer of the explosive article, is not obliged to respect it.  Nothing in the set-up of the paper precludes it from seeking and revealing the identity of the writer.

    I will not be surprised therefore, if it is The New York Times that finally reveals in its news section   the identity that its Editorial Page has vowed to keep secret — until it is released from that pledge.

    As the attentive audience worldwide breathed easier this past weekend, relieved that it is not doomed to put up with Donald Trump’s grating voice and nonstop plying for, I went back to read the piece from the anonymous Times correspondent that I had quoted more liberally than some might judge proper.

    I found buried there this indictment pf American society’s complicity in Trump’s desecration of the nation’s values. ”The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.”

    Whether celebrating their deliverance from Donald Trump or bemoaning his defeat and imminent departure from the White House they should pause and reflect on that assessment.

    The election was framed as a referendum on Donald Trump and Trumpism.  The outcome was not entirely approving, to be sure.  But not even the most unyielding detractors can celebrate it as a repudiation of Trump and Trumpism.

    He garnered some 70 million votes to President-elect Joe Biden’s 74 million.  However you construe it, that is a great deal of following. Trump is venal through and through, but as this election has shown, he is no aberration.

    On the contrary, he is almost mainstream, this demagogue who waged a relentless assault on decency and decorum, turned The White House into a crime scene, played the basest human emotions, set the rule of law at nought, goaded tens of thousands to ghastly and untimely deaths by repeated assurances that Covid-19 is a hoax, an irritant not more bothersome than the common ‘flu; a leader to whom empathy, justice and honour are alien concepts.

    These characteristics have been on stunning display every day since he took office in some four years ago.  Yet, at least two of every five Americans cheered him on as the embodiment of their hopes and aspirations and their values,  Even today, as he flails in every direction, pouting petulantly and claiming without a scintilla of evidence that he was robbed of victory, the 40 per cent are standing resolutely with him.

    You have to ask: What did they vote for last week, the 70 million Americans who cast their ballots for Donald Trump?

  • A tale of two elections

    A tale of two elections

     Olatunji Dare

     

    See who has been denouncing the conduct and outcome of Tanzania’s recent elections, citing “credible allegations” of fraud and intimidation?

    Guess who has been chafing at “the systematic interference” of Tanzania’s authorities in the “democratic process, “or has warned severely that the United States would “hold accountable those responsible for any use of force against unarmed civilians” protesting the elections, in which the incumbent President John “The Bulldozer” Magufuli, of the ruling party Chama Cha Mapunduzi, blitzed his opponents by winning 12.5 million (or 89.2 per cent) of a total 14 million valid votes?

    The one is a U.S. assistant secretary of State in its Bureau of African Affairs, and the other is a State Department spokeswoman – a distinction without a difference.

    There was indeed a time when such warning, even without the threat of sanctions, would have sent the authorities at the receiving end scrambling desperately to assure Washington, through their paid lobbyists and consultants, of their unshakeable and ineffable commitment to free and fair elections, rule of law, inclusive government, transparency and accountability – the usual catchphrases to which democracy has been reduced  by the calculations of its merchants, foreign and domestic.

    Not anymore.

    But the State Department seems wholly innocent of the disesteem into which the United States has fallen under the Trump Presidency, an Orwellian world in which up is down one day, and down the next; up again as that day wears on, down the next day, and sideways later that day.  And throughout the whirligig, the very concept of up and down is perpetually shifting, as is the concept of virtually everything else under the sun and even beyond.

    Even those who are prepared to allow that a penumbra of uncertainty of what Humphrey Nwosu, the vanishing chief empire in the 1993 presidential election called wuruwuru and magomago with unassailable authority will always surround elections in Africa will be troubled by this one.  Landslide victories of such magnitude invariably evoke suspicions of ballot stuffing and other irregularities.

    Nor did the East African Community 59-member Observer Team’s preliminary report calm such doubts.  The team, led by Sylvester Ntibantunganya, former President of Burundi, arrived on October 21, and set up shop on October 26 to observe the final stages of the elections scheduled for October 28.

    That period was far short for investigating whether everything was in place to ensure a free and fair place, to ascertain that all the rules and regulations have been complied with, and to meet with all the political parties and address their concerns

    No wonder its interim report is strewn with the usual platitudes:  The election was conducted in a peaceful environment; political parties and their candidates were able to conduct their campaigns across the country in accordance with the existing laws; voting proceeded smoothly in the voting stations; officials demonstrated competence and compliance; the proceedings were professional.

    In sum, said the Observer Mission, the election was “credible.”

    Not so, reported the Tanzania Election Watch Group, a consortium of unattached observers from the region and South Africa.  In language reflecting the Opposition’s complaints, it submitted that the poll was conducted “in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation” and media restrictions.

    The ringing endorsement of the poll by the Community Observers practically ends the matter.  Even without it, the Electoral Commission has the last word. Its verdict cannot be challenged in any court of law.

    To return to America:  The plebiscitary stage of the U. S. General Elections ended yesterday – dare we hope? The Presidential Election that lies at its core has been one long, tortuous, nasty, and formidable obstacle course.  Given the Administration’s endless tinkering with the electoral process with the aim of gaining advantage or stripping it of any claim to legitimacy unless he wins, one might reasonably assume that Trump and his enablers would show some humility in discussing election arrangements elsewhere

    But that is not the style of the house.  America’s Strong Man does not do humility; neither do those who work for him.

    Tens of thousands of Americans were killed, maimed, beaten and jailed in the epic struggle to secure the right to vote, once regarded as the most fundamental of all rights.  Clause by clause, laws in which that right is consecrated has been whittled down by elected legislatures and with the imprimatur of a partisan U.S. Supreme Court which increasingly regards the constriction of fundamental human rights as its remit.

    The right to vote has been eviscerated by act after insidious act at practically every stage, among them proof of eligibility that places costly or inconvenient burdens on the citizen; reduced in-person voting hours resulting in long, winding queues; discouraging voting by mail even in the face of a raging pandemic; crippling the postal system so as to undermine its capacity to process election mail quickly, and as just reward for those stubborn elements who insist on voting by mail despite all the discouragement, sharply reduced collection centres for drop-in mail.

    The Houston metro, in Atlanta, Georgia, is probably the most notorious example of the probably the most notorious example of latter. After completing your ballot you have to circumnavigate the county of some 4.7 million residents to find the one box where you can drop it, or travel long distances in search of other centres.

    Nor do these exhaust the egregious by which the will of the people is being subverted by a desperate White House.

    Trump’s acolytes have filed thousands of lawsuits to challenge outcomes that do not favour them. The larger purpose is to tie up the entire process and render it inconclusive.  Their plans for voter suppression – in this case, vote erasure — include suborning the state delegates who actually elect the president in the Electoral College system to cast their ballots not for the candidate who won the state but for Trump.

    He has vowed to insinuate supporters carrying unconcealed weapons into voting centres to look out for persons with fraud on their minds.  Knowing how easily the most innocuous act or statement serves as a pretext for shooting to kill, many a potential voter may choose to stay home rather than risk their lives.

    To Trump’s most ardent supporters, Voting While Black is provocation enough.

    The threat of violence is palpable.  Lethal ordinance has been flying off the shelves, with a record sale of 17 million guns in 2020, 1.2 million in September alone. Trump has warned that he cannot guarantee what his supporters will do if he loses.  The stark message out there is:  Be afraid; Be very afraid especially it Trump loses.  Be very, very afraid.

    The State Department’s warning that it would hold “accountable” those responsible for the use of force against unarmed protesters in Tanzania is admirable.  But what has it done to help hold accountable law-enforcement responsible for the barbarous murders of unarmed and innocent American Blacks, a good many of them mere children.  Here I have in mind the bestialities that spawned Black Lives Matter.

    Has it pointed out to the White House their foreign policy implications?

    The foregoing is the context in which the State Department is presuming to lecture Tanzania and will doubtless presume to lecture other countries on how to conduct their elections.   Tanzania at least had the humility to invite foreign observers to monitor and report on its General Elections.  Will the United States ever cultivate that kind of humility?

    Every country, to riff on Leo Tolstoy’s immortal opening and over-invoked opening lines in Anna Karenina, is exceptional in its own way.  American Exceptionalism derives its appeal from the force of America’s ideas, ideals and institutions.

    Trump has done incalculable damage to those ideas, ideals and institutions.  Time to return to basics, to the things that made America truly great.

  • Mayhem and after

    Mayhem and after

    Olatunji Dare

     

    The week before last was one of those rare moments in a columnist’s life when a topic literally lands on the computer screen, demanding elaboration, elucidation, contextualization, analysis, and all the other processes through which the editorialist is supposed to subject the news of the day so as to make it intelligible.

    Tens of thousands of young men and women in many Nigerian towns had set out to protest, not on account of the usual bread-and-butter issues, but against the police Special Anti-Robbery Squad, which they accused of brutality, extortion, and extra-judicial killings.  Even so, with a high- mindedness rare in these parts on such occasions, they demanded better pay and conditions for the object of their protests.

    This development was going to be subject of my submission for this column last week, provisionally titled “O to gee goes digital.” The whole thing struck me as the digital equivalent of the movement that culminated in breaking the hegemonic hold of the Saraki family on Kwara politics.  But I could not finish the piece to my satisfaction before my deadline, which was just as well. For it would have seemed stale by the time it was published.

    The protest was remarkable in several ways.  It had no identified leadership.  So, you could not, it was said, co-opt, bribe, suborn or otherwise compromise it.  Nor could you, in confronting it, follow the old boxing maxim:  Kill the head, and the body will die.  The closest thing to a brick-and-mortar facility you could garrison was perhaps the tollgate on the Lekki Expressway.

    If you disrupted their communication, they simply shifted to another location in ethereal space.  The country has gone past the time when Sani Abacha’s terror squad was paying out good money to all manner of diviners to help find the locale from which Radio Kudirat was broadcasting to opposition elements.

    With each passing day, the crowds grew larger and larger, and new crowds sprang up in other cities across the nation.  Eschewing violence, they presented their grievances with eloquence before a largely sympathetic public.  Expecting no quick results, they had come prepared to dig in, to “occupy” some strategic locations until their goals were met.

    To everyone’s surprise, the Federal Government acceded to their requests and it was expected that the protesters would disperse just as peaceably as they had conducted themselves.  They expanded their list of demands.  A stalemate was brewing.

    But everything about the protests, from motive to execution, pointed to a higher level of social consciousness and maturity. Their vision was inspiring, and their conduct drew high praise, even from the authorities.

    Here, before our eyes, the beautiful ones were being born, if I may riff on the title of Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah’s great novel.  Fed up with the fecklessness of the older generation, they were taking matters into their own hands to arrest the drift and chart a future rich in promise and possibilities.

    That dream was shattered last Friday night when gunshots rang out at the Lekki tollgate, lights turned off, during a misbegotten curfew. By the time the guns fell silent, an unspecified number of persons were believed to have died. The shooting set off an orgy of violence, arson and looting that went on for two full days.  By the time it was over, Lagos had been reduced to a vast theatre of carnage, and a traumatised public was almost yearning earnestly for SARS.

    It was as if the city had been specially marked for destruction.  Its fragile infrastructure lay in ruins. The city’s rapid transit buses, court houses, local council offices, City Hall, and many other state assets were put to the torch and pillaged.  So were shopping malls, hotels, banks, and two of the leading media outlets.  So also were assets identified with some eminent persons of Lagos descent.

    One of the questions that will have to be thoroughly investigated is how a protest against a unit of the police under the control of the Federal Government resulted in such colossal damage to the infrastructure, the economy, the wellbeing and the prospects of Lagos residents.  Was this happenstance or calculation?

    How did a protest against police brutality and extortion morph into an invasion of the palace of the Oba of Lagos and the looting and trashing of its irreplaceable artifacts and archives?  This has to be an act of premeditated cultural violence, an attempt to erase the history of the institution and wound the pride and self-esteem of the people.

    It is hard to believe those who had carried out their protests peaceable and civilly for more than a week were also responsible for such barbarous conduct.  Their ranks, as many had feared even as they praised their conduct, had been infiltrated by criminal elements, and by persons whose agenda has nothing in common with that of the protesters.

    And, irony of ironies, the acephalous character that had been advertised as the movement’s major strength became in the end a liability. When violence erupted, there was no one to issue directions, to urge restraint or even to provide basic information on what was going on and on the next move.

    The actual number of persons killed may never be known, nor their names and the circumstances of their death.  Eyewitness accounts and ballistic evidence point strongly to persons dressed in Nigeria Army uniforms as the shooters. If that is confirmed, who dispatched them on that murderous mission?

    #EndSARS, it is plain, is but a summation of the malaise in which Nigeria has been mired, a condition from which, on present evidence, it seems the nation’s leaders are incapable of extricating it, despite its almost prodigal endowment in human and material resources.  Its roots lie far deeper than mere rejection of police brutality

    As a rule we hardly keep records.  But those that we do keep are far from reliable. Few will contest that at least 30 per cent of those graduating from our universities, polytechnics and institutions of further learning over the past five years are unemployed or underemployed.  The vast majority are for the most part eking out a precarious existence.

    Opportunities for actualising the dreams that had led them to seek higher education and further training are few and far between.  And their ranks swell with each passing day.

    Trained teachers who should be teaching in understaffed schools or engaged in running adult and non-formal education schemes roam the streets, unable to find work.  Those who have jobs are not paid for months on end, or are paid only a fraction of their statutory emolument.  The same is true of other professionals and members of occupational groups.

    Protesters see their parents who had given the best years of their lives to serving the public pine away on long, winding lines and often at the mercy of the elements, collapse from sheer fatigue  and sometimes even drop dead waiting for their meagre pensions.

    All this is happening in a country where elected officials, to cite only a few of their perks, receive raft of special allowances every month for their wardrobe, newspapers, entertainment, and “hardship” – yes, the unspeakable hardship of lawmaking.  Each of these allowances is several times bigger than the national minimum wage.

    At N60,000 a month, a Senator’s “wardrobe allowance” is twice the national minimum wage, which some employers, taking a cue from state governments , say they cannot pay.  The senator’s “furniture allowance’ for a four-year term is more than 80 times the minimum wage earner’s cumulative pay over the same period.

    The protesters see monumental waste in every corner; they see serious fraud and misconduct go unpunished, if not actually rewarded; they see public officers flaunting their illicit wealth and the totems thereof without fear of the tax man or the magistrate, and without qualms.  It is as if they  are taunting the public, daring it to do its worst.

    These are just some of the festering issues that exploded into anarchic violence on the streets of Lagos last week.  For now, the streets are quiet. The protesters have left to mourn their dead, tend their wounds, savour their loot, and contemplate their unending woes.

    They will be back, bigger, better organised, more resourceful and more resolute, unless the issues of which #EndSARS is but a rubric are addressed forthrightly.

  • FFK: Trump set to bring joy to all

    FFK: Trump set to bring joy to all

    Olatunji Dare

     

    I cast my ballot in the 2020 United States General Election last Friday, some four weeks ahead of the official Election Day, November 3.

    It took me seven uneventful minutes.  I lined up behind 12 other voters, all masked and socially distanced, as enjoined by a notice on the large glass door leading to the spacious hall of the Peoria County Election Commission Office in Peoria, Illinois.

    As if on cue, all eyes turned to, and settled momentarily on the white woman standing directly behind me.  She wore no face cover.  It was as if she had come there to advertise, Trump-style, her indifference to, if not contempt for, the resurgent coronavirus disease, Covid-19.  Something about her suggested powerfully that anyone who might be thinking of challenging her would find her not unwilling or unprepared to mix it.

    Much to my relief, the line moved rapidly, almost like an automated operation, and soon it was my turn.  A clerk asked for my date of birth.  I tried rather clumsily to extract my driver’s licence from my cluttered wallet.  Not necessary, she said.  Then she asked for my home address.  She cross- checked with the master register, and handed me a registration card to sign and date. Another clerk assigned me a computer-generated number and waved me to a vacant voting machine, one of the 12 in the hall.

    By the time I was done, I looked at my watch.  Only seven minutes had passed since I stepped into the hall. In that period, I had marked my choice for president and vice president, two U.S. senators for Illinois, one Congressman, several county offices, as well as some referendum issues, one of which proposes to make the wealthy bear a more equitable share of the tax burden.

    Finally, I reviewed a printout of the entire transaction to be sue that my fingers had not raced ahead of my intentions.  Best of all, I had put a safe distance between me and the woman who would not protect herself or those around her by the simple expedient of wearing a face cover.

    I had been warned that I might spend the better part of a day on the line if I chose to vote in person,  and that it would help to take a folding chair along in case the whole thing was too much for my superannuated legs.  In the end, it was nothing like the obstacle race that voting in person has been turned into in the so-called “battleground states.”

    Voting by mail has been a long-established practice, and Trump has done so time and again.  But in this particular season, he has railed endlessly against it, claiming that it will promote fraud on a scale that only a few can even begin to imagine; that counting will take so long, that the results will not be known for weeks or months or forever.

    But if he can foresee such discontinuities, why can’t he prevent them, especially since the election is taking place under his watch? Better to sow the seeds of confusion and do everything possible to undermine confidence in the outcome – unless he wins.

    O man of little faith!

    In case the Trump camp has never heard of the Faithful Messenger, Fani-Kayode, he was Minister  of Aviation under President Olusegun Obasanjo, and later director-general of the failed re-election campaign of former President Goodluck Jonathan.  As of now, he has had no fixed address or designation.

    Not a few Nigerians were mightily relieved when, after three (four) unsolicited visitations, he  abruptly terminated his self-assigned mission of inspecting public works projects in the PDP-controlled states, assessing their impact on the lives of the residents and evaluating the performance of the governors of the states he had honoured with his attention.

    What the public remembers most about those visitations was his indignant refusal, laced with scorn and abuse, to answer the simple question: Who is bankrolling the junkets, with all the dining and the wining and the wenching?

    Some five weeks later, he has embraced a divine mission:  To commend Donald Trump to the world ahead of the November 3 poll as the Elect of God Almighty and his divine instrument for delivering humankind from the darkness that Bill Clinton and Barak Obama and their infernal collaborators and their undiscerning acolytes had clamped on it.

    Better to hear FFK’s testimony in his own words concerning the Anointed Candidate: as reported on Facebook:

    “The mainstream media can scandalise and demonise him all they like and they can even get some of his friends, associates, relatives and colleagues to blacklist, fabricate stories and lie about him just to destroy his credibility and stop him but it makes no difference.”

    “All of them put together coupled with all the forces of hell and their master Satan cannot stop a man who has been anointed and chosen by the Living GOD to lead a nation and the free world. It is what God purposes that matters and nothing else.”

    You hear that, CNN, The New York Times, MSNBC, The Washington Post, Fake News, The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Black Lives Matter, Al Sharpton, Michael Moore, Mike Bloomberg, and fellow-travelers.  You hear that?

    “Do you think that it is by accident that Trump has overcome every obstacle that has been placed in his way by the Dems over the last four 4 years?

    “Do you think it is by accident that he emerged, against all odds, as the Republican Party candidate in 2016 even though all former Republican presidents and most leading Republicans were against him?

    “Do you think that it was by accident that he kept bouncing back in business over the years even though he was declared bankrupt several times and had numerous failures?

    “Do you think that it was by accident that throughout his life when he had financial problems the banks kept bailing him out and giving him another chance and his friends kept supporting him?

    Ponder those questions, all ye NeverTrumpers.  Search your wicked souls. And ye gullible Nigerians, probably the most gullible creatures on God’s earth, consider this:

    “Do you think that it was by accident that (Trump) spoke out more than any other American President in history, living or dead, about the killing and persecution of Christians all over the world and particularly in nations like Nigeria?”

    “God uses whom He deems fit to restore and to effect His purpose and it ends there. If you have a problem with His choices then blame Him and not the object of His love or the person He chooses.”

    Ask them Faithful Messenger, ask the NeverTrumpers slowly and deliberately:  Have they forgotten, that Obama paved the way for Satan’s New World Order, introduced the most ungodly and anti-Christian practices in the history of America and sought to legitimise them in the name of ‘yes we can’, made same-sex marriage commendable and even admirable, and approved abortions in the millions.

    Didn’t the self-same Obama not also declare America a non-Christian nation, denigrate the Church, mock the scriptures, desecrate Christian values, change the name of Christmas to “holy day” and ban Christmas from the White House and impose those demonic values and anti-Christ philosophies to much of the rest of the world?

    Hear it loud and clear, then, from the Faithful Messenger: Trump will win the presidential election in November, after which he will usher in a great era of restoration of prosperity, decency, virtue and good old-fashioned Christian values in America.

    And in the fullness of time, the Lord will raise a Trump-like figure for Nigeria, too, and all things will be made beautiful.

    So, despair not, fellow Nigerians.  Help is on the way.

  • Here, and on the home front

    Here, and on the home front

    Olatunji Dare

     

    AS befits the age of instant global communications, most of those who belong in the attentive audience for what is now fashionably called “breaking news” – news as it happens – can easily recall where they were when they learned that U. S. President Donald Trump and his wife had tested positive for Covid-19, the exact manner in which they had learned it, what they were doing, and of course, their immediate reaction to the news.

    The event lacks the galvanic register of the assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, the civil rights leader Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, and the breakaway leader of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, or the landing on the moon, the time and circumstances of which are seared into the memory of those who lived through them.

    I suspect that, in the public consciousness, the news of Trump’s diagnosis was largely accorded about the same degree of salience as the events cited above but measure negatively, given Trump’s pernicious deceptions about the disease that had killed more than 200, 000 Americans and afflicted six million more, leaving them in various degrees of incapacitation, even as it upended the economy and social life, with no end in sight.

    Trump has waged a ceaseless war against epidemiology and epidemiologists, against any form of expertise and against prudence; he derided those who wore face masks and other protocols as enjoined by science and common sense, encouraged young and old alike to follow his perverse example, and promoted false and harmful cures.

    Not a squawk of regret did he utter about the thousands he had goaded to premature deaths, and not a word of empathy did he tweet or otherwise express as the casualties mounted.  Had he acted less decisively and resolutely, he said, four million Americans would have died, as against the 200, 000 on record.

    In the end, “it is what it is,” he said of that figure. He might well have asked Americans to count their blessings and shut up.

    Given the foregoing, it is not an idle venture to ask: How did the attentive audience react to the news that Trump and the First Lady had been diagnosed with Covid-19?

    One instructive indication is provided by the American dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster, which has reported that, within hours of the news breaking, the search for the word “schadenfreude” had spiked 350, 000 per cent.  Originally German but now part and parcel of English language, it means literally, “taking joy or pleasure at the misfortune of others.”

    No other word that was looked up around that time up came close in frequency.

    Could it be that those looking up the word wanted an elegant and evocative term that captures but masks their feeling, lest they be judged cruel or bereft of empathy like Trump, perhaps in kind if not in degree – a term that connotes “serves him right” or “good for him” or “about time” or “better late than never,” or “he had it coming,” or “he ain’t seen nothing yet,” or “what comes round goes round?”

    Harvard Law professor and stern Trump critic, has warned that this was no time for cruelty, schadenfreude – that word again– or any other form of small-mindedness. But somebody who was probably having a great time celebrating the news with a glass of his finest claret enquired in earnest: “Can you die from schadenfreude?”

    You do not have to be cruel, snarky or unfeeling to engage in that kind of conduct Tribe decried. Do the Jesuits not hold that there is no obligation to keep faith with heretics?  And Trump is nothing if not a heretic, and not just on matters epidemiological.

    Those who looked up the word were amply rewarded this passage concerning a man “who, three years ago, entered so quixotically upon the task of Government, believing in his heart and soul, that he had a kind of divine mission, and that all the difficulties and obstacles that beset the path of men and women of common clay would be consumed in the fire of his own personality.”

    The passage seems to have anticipated Trump by some 85 years.  But it is an excerpt from the 30 May 1935, editorial of the Irish Times, courtesy of Merriam-Webster, and it centred on Irish President Eamon de Valera’s confession of what the paper described as “abject failure” in some political venture.

    The confession might move cynics to experience a feeling of schadenfreude, continued the editorial.  “But the honest citizen, regardless of party and creed, will feel sorry for the man.”

    It is almost sacrilegious to mention De Valera and Donald Trump in the same sentence.  In whatever case, they wait in vain who expect Trump to confess to any failing whatsoever regarding anything he has ever touched or contemplated

    To him, the death under his watch of more than 200,000 Americans – the largest number for any industrialised country and one-fourth of the world’s total from Covid-19 — is what it is. Get over it. Stuff happens.

    Back in Nigeria, the circumstances were less grim but bothersome nonetheless.  To no one’s surprise, the 60th Independence Anniversary was again little more than an orgy of lamentation and recrimination.  The verdict in many a commentary is that, instead of lifting the despondency perfusing the country, President Muhammadu Buhari’s national broadcast to mark the occasion may have deepened it.

    Blame it not on the man but on his speechwriters, however, or on the shadowy operators who routinely interpose themselves between the President and the speechwriters. For if that was the best text the speechwriters could turn in, if that was what they actually turned in, they do not deserve that appellation.

    My colleague Idowu “Palladium” Akinlotan (The NATION, October 4, 2020) has as he is wont, subjected the text and the delivery to unsparing criticism, and it seems best to leave matters there.  But I feel obliged to call attention to a curious omission here, a faulty thesis there, and a beyond them a scary declaration.

    The omission:  There is no mention of the word “justice” in the entire text.

    It spoke about the imperative of unity of purpose and effort, about the primacy of democracy and the rule of law, about how we can find strength in diversity, about the need to commit to peaceful coexistence a united, indivisible country shorn of those pesky artificial “fault lines,” et, etc.

    But it spoke not a word about justice, without which these grand objectives are but empty dreams.

    It all reminds me of the June 12 debacle that military President Ibrahim Babangida and his cohorts proposed to resolve using every formula under the sun and beyond – every formula except justice.   Nigeria was gripped then, as it is now, by dikephobia, or fear of justice.

    One way of addressing this malady frontally is to inscribe “justice” in a revised national Coat of Arms.  As national goals, “Unity and Faith; Peace and Progress” are unexceptionable.  But justice  is the foundation on which they must be erected.

    Next, the thesis: “Our founding fathers understood the imperative of structuring a National identity using the power of the state (my emphasis) and worked towards unification of Nigerians in a politically stable and viable entity.”

    Without justice?

    No wonder they failed. They set themselves an impossible task. You cannot legislate or decree unity any more than you can power your way to forging a national identity.

    Finally, the declaration:  “Democracy, the world over and as I am pursuing in Nigeria, recognises the power of the people. However, if some constituencies choose to bargain off their power, they should be prepared for denial of their rights.” (emphasis added.)

    However one construes this sentence, it is a negation of democracy and a travesty to boot.

    Did the President’s Chief of Staff, Professor Ibrahim Gambari, a global citizen who is seized of   spirit that animates the United Nations where he served with great distinction for some three decades get a chance to clear the text for broadcast?

     

    •For comments, send SMS to 08111813080

     

  • Facing another October One

    Facing another October One

    Olatunji Dare

     

    THE run-up to the National Day, October 1, is usually filled with so much kvetching about the state of the nation, about what might have been, the road not taken, opportunities missed, fortunes squandered, wise counsel spurned, constructive alternatives ignored and best practices discountenanced, that the event it heralds might as well be called National Lamentation Day.

    It is as if the nation has by common resolve entered into an orgy of self-pity, with a searing indictment of leadership failure as drum-beat.

    Media fare this past week suggests this year will be no different.  It is going to be another sombre milestone. It would be strange indeed, unsettling even, if this 60th Anniversary Independence were any different.  For there is so much to kvetch about in a year marked by heightened insecurity, deepening privations, and growing lack of faith in the Nigerian enterprise.

    But why rehash the litany of woes that have virtually become Nigeria’s constant companions, a litany as familiar as the sudden interruptions of electric power, and apparently just as inexorable?

    Nigerians have a right to feel disappointed that so little has been fashioned from the country’s abundance of human and material resources; that Nigeria has remained the country of great potential it was a decade ago and the decade before that; that services and utilities that are taken for granted in far less endowed societies operate here fitfully if at all, and that there does not appear to be a sense of urgency in fixing it.

    The remedies are so obvious that it requires no great genius, no administrative wizardry, to figure them out.

    Take water, for instance.

    Some three decades age, Afro-beat King Fela Anikulapo-Kuti lamented in a hit tune that, three decades after independence, Nigeria was borrowing from the World Bank to build municipal water schemes. That practice has continued to this day.   Surely, Nigeria should be able to provide water to its teeming population without World Bank or IMF loans?  All it would take is a re-ordering of national priorities.  Any rational re-ordering would have to accord clean water a priority.  The case for it has never been more compelling.

    Clean water would greatly enhance the primary health environment since, according to the best authorities, about one-fourth of the more common diseases afflicting the population results from contaminated water.

    This is the context in which the Federal Government is seeking to establish authority over surface and underground water it does not already control throughout the country, allegedly for better management  and more efficient utilization.

    This move is misconceived.  It is an overreach, and a subversion of the federal principle at a time of general clamour for loosening rather than tightening the federal reins, to free the constituent states to run at their own pace and according to their own priorities.

    In whatever case, the Federal Government’s record in managing the water resources it controls does not inspire faith in its ability to manage a larger portfolio.

    Take, as a second example, electricity.

    Nigerians born within the present generation may not know that there was a time when the country enjoyed an interrupted supply of electricity.  But the more the nation invested in power generation, the more epileptic the supply became.  Then, they hit on what seemed a formula that cannot fail to turn things around:  Privatization, and its twin brother, de-regulation.

    Applied to other sectors of the economy, the formula has been a failure.  Where it did not constitute a brazen transfer of national assets to privileged persons at a huge discount, it produced no improvement in the delivery of good services.

    But the fixation on the twain continued.  The Power Holding Authority was too big to function effectively and efficiently.  Un-bundle it, hand over the components to private entities in transactions reminiscent of a fire sale and strip away the regulations that had undergirded it.

    The day its privatization was formally consummated, you would think from reactions in some sections of the attentive audience that the national soccer team had won the World Cup.   One commentator – I single her out only because she was the most effusive- wrote breathlessly that the days of darkness and blackouts and kerosene lanterns candles and oil-wick lamps were gone forever; welcome, finally, to the technetronic age

    The celebration was premature. Privatization left no “stakeholder” satisfied.

    Those vested with power distribution complained that not enough power was being generated, that the network was being constantly damaged by vandals, and that consumers were not paying up.

    Those charged with power generation said enough gas was not being supplied to power turbines.  Consumers complained that they were being landed with exorbitant bills for power not supplied.

    Meanwhile, the Federal Government approved, after a waiting period, hefty increases in electricity rates and tariffs, in keeping with privatization and deregulation.

    In all this, the only thing that is certain is that disruptions in the supply of electricity will not end anytime soon, nor will the resultant discontinuities in economic and other activities.

    If constant electricity is assured, the boost to manufacturing, agriculture and small-scale industry will be incalculable.  The effect on employment and productivity will be enormous.  Add a constant supply of clean water, and the combined effect will be transformative and make easier the achievement of other goals.

    Perhaps even more corrosive of the fabric of national life is the pervasive environment of fear and insecurity. The war on insurgency is being waged on a compartmentalized, bureaucratic model, encompassing the government and the armed forces on the one hand, and the insurgents on the other, and the wounded and the displaced as casualties.

    Even as the conflict ramifies, there has been no sustained effort to mobilize the population, to get them to embrace it as a war for their survival and their future.  Federal messaging in this regard has been inept.

    To squelch another source of national angst, much greater attention will have to be accorded the distribution of public offices and goods in Nigeria.  Justice should be the key consideration.  Justice unites.  Without justice, there can be no unity, and no common purpose to which a critical mass of the people will subscribe.

    It has been said, and nowhere is this truer than in the realm of public policy, that what touches one must come last.  Public officials who have cornered more public resources than their numbers and contributions    to national life warrant, are forever appropriating even more and doing so as of right, without remorse or twinge of conscience.

    To cite one pernicious example, top officials from the Executive and Legislative branches cannot even keep their sticky fingers off the 1,000 temporary positions created by the Federal Government for disconnected and unemployed youths in each of the 774 Local Government Areas.

    Have they no shame?

    The war on corruption is faltering big-time.  Prosecutions take far too long to complete, and the outcome often turns out to be a travesty that can only encourage and perpetuate the tendencies they were designed to punish.  Executive tolerance for official malfeasance is still much too high.  The war on corruption should proceed with greater vigour.

    It is not enough to roll out contracts for new projects following meetings of the Federal and State executive councils.  How are the projects for which contracts were awarded five, 10, or 15 years ago faring?  How thoroughly and effectively are they being monitored?

    When they retire at night, those into whose hands fate has placed the destiny of Nigeria should in all sincerity ask themselves:  What did I do for the people today?  When they get up the next day, they should ask: What can I do for the people today?

    On this Independence Anniversary, they should think on these things.  The answers will determine how history remembers them.

     

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