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Category: Olatunji Dare

  • African Observers for the U.S. election

    African Observers for the U.S. election

    By Olatunji Dare

    There was a time in recent memory when the United States was the ultimate, the final arbiter on the worth of elections held in countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia, Central Europe, and the Soviet Union.

    Were they free and fair?  Did the results accord with the wishes of the electorate?  Were they vitiated by coercion, corruption, ballot-stuffing and by other malpractices small and large that cast a shadow of doubt on the outcome and thus bring into question the legitimacy of the government that derives its power from such a poll?  Were the contending parties afforded equal media access?  Were all persons eligible and willing to vote afforded every opportunity to do so?  And so on and so forth.

    Generously-funded Election Observers and monitors from leading public and private institutions are parachuted into the country weeks before the poll to seeking answers to these and other questions.  Usually, the teams are led by persons of consequence.

    It is a gamble, this visitation by international election observers and monitors.    They flock in not just from the United States, but also from the European Union, the United Kingdom, the African Union, and other state and non-state actors.  Their reports vary in tone and substance and even nuance, but they carry some weight.  That of the United States is usually the most consequential.

    If the United States is persuaded that the poll was by and large free and fair, and the outcome credible, that becomes in effect the view of the State Department and helps shape U.S. policy toward the country concerned.

    If on the other hand the election observers and monitors reported that the poll left much to be desired, the governing authorities know that they would have to work hard to win the good graces of the United States.

    Now that Donald Trump has devalued every canon of political practice and engagement in the United States, it is the United States that needs a visitation by international observers, especially from the African Union, to monitor and report on its presidential elections scheduled for November 3 and determine just how much faith the rest of world should invest in it.

    Fresh from its successful supervision of the gubernatorial conduct in Edo State this past weekend, not forgetting its acclaimed handling of the 2019 presidential election, Nigeria’s highly regarded election umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) seems to me best placed to provide the nucleus of a powerful team that will monitor the U.S. Presidential race on behalf the African Union.

    Its point of departure will have to be the American election machinery.  That machinery is desperately and comprehensively broken.  It did not start with Trump.   But under him, the system has in operation been corrupted to the point that it has ceased to keep faith with its remit and with the Constitution of the United States.  Today, it serves mainly as a bad example for the world.

    Voting, the fundamental act and affirmation of citizenship, has been turned into a formidable race in the United States.  Thousands of Americans were killed on home soil in their struggle to claim that right; thousands of them died in wars fought to confer that right on peoples in other lands.  But that right is now gravely and constantly threatened by various acts of voter suppression.

    Registering to vote has been made contingent on showing various forms of identification that many citizens cannot easily obtain.  Voter rolls are purged routinely, to eliminate persons who may have changed residence or relocated altogether.  For those thus eliminated, getting back on the voters register is not easy.  In many a jurisdiction, convicted offenders are not permitted to vote, even though they have served their prison terms.

    But voter suppression does not end there.

    Polling centres are often not assigned in sufficient numbers, or are located far away from residential areas.  The consequence in the one case is that there is much crowding around the few centres, and a long waiting period.  In the time of COVID-19 and social distancing, such crowding is dangerous.

    Voting by mail is a long-established alternative to spending the better part of a day at a the polling centre, especially for persons who cannot afford to lose their wages for the day, but Trump now says, without a shred of evidence, that it is a proven recipe for fraud on a monumental scale.

    The consequence in the other case is that those who have no personal transportation may be discouraged from going outside their neighbourhood to vote.  The combined effect of both instances is to keep thousands of eligible voters away from the polls by design.

    And just in case some voters still have enough faith in the postal system to cast their ballots by mail, the Trump Administration has set out to constrain its capacity to deliver. His proxy at the United States Postal Service (USPS) has culled the number of postal boxes brutally nationwide and taken out of commission thousands of sorting machines that speed up delivery.  To ensure that they cannot be restored, he has smash up the machines.  And his Administration has filed dozens of lawsuits seeking injunctions against voting by mail.

    The stubborn voter hacks his or her way through all the contrived odds, but will the ballot count? That is far from guaranteed. For, discounting the ballot is yet another method by which the Trump Administration is planning to suppress the vote.

    Deliberately sending misleading information to Black and other minority voters is another method of voter suppression.  On Election Day, automated calls go out saying that the election has been postponed, or that the polling centre where one was supposed to cast one’s ballot has been moved to the edge of town, if not scrapped altogether.

    Or dark hints are broadcast on the eve of the election and throughout the following day that the police were standing by at voting centres with instructions to arrest and take to the nearest jailhouse so-called “deadbeat dads,” absentee parents who have not been keeping up with financial support for the child or children left in the care of their estranged spouses.

    Blacks belong disproportionately in this group and need no further disincentive from voting.  Call it voter intimidation.

    How much electoral advantage did any candidate gain by lying – by telling outright falsehoods of the most brazen kind about the other candidate or their party or their policy, and about what to expect should the other side prevail, and telling lies not occasionally but in one constant, reckless, uninhibited stream?

    Should it be allowed to become an acceptable feature of the electioneering, the plebiscitary equivalent of real politik?

    Donald Trump has said for the record that the only way he can lose the election is if it is massively rigged by the combined Opposition (ha!), and that he would not yield office under that circumstance. Fortunately for the AU’s Election Observer and Monitoring Team, it will be embarking on its task fully cognizant of the  stratagems by which incumbents back home seek to cling to power and office even after suffering an electoral rout.

    How that possibility can be averted will be one of the team’s main challenges.

    Nigeria, I insist, is uniquely qualified to supply the officials that will constitute the nucleus of the AU’s team to observe, monitor and report on the U.S. Presidential election.  And it has a surfeit of leading characters to choose from.

    I humbly nominate as chair of the team former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who can look Donald Trump in the face and tell him that he is a loudmouth and a reprobate with no redeeming grace, and Humphrey Nwosu, former chair of the National Elections Commission, who can sniff the merest whiff of electoral magomago or wuruwuru from a galaxy away.

  • Lexical and other matters arising

    Lexical and other matters arising

    Olatunji Dare

     

    IN the three decades that have passed since the William Keeling incident, public commentators and indeed the general public may have forgotten how much trouble can result from the casual use of a word that in other contexts seem not only appropriate but perfectly innocuous.

    This realisation came as a jolt, following the verbal pummeling the South-south correspondent for Daily Trust, Eyo Charles, suffered the other day, at the hands of Femi Fani-Kayode, the unavoidable public figure with a brittle temperament and a reputation for bad manners.

    But first, a refresher on the Keeling Incident.

    William Keeling was a Lagos-based correspondent for the Financial Times (UK).  Analyzing data from the Central Bank and other financial institutions, he calculated that Nigeria hauled in $5 billion over and above budgeted expectations from oil export receipts following the disruption in global oil supplies arising from the 1991 Gulf war.

    Keeling called this surplus a “windfall.”  One-half of the amount, he wrote, went into sustaining ECOMOG’s misbegotten intervention in Liberia’s civil war, staging a lavish – even by Nigeria’s standards — OAU Summit in Abuja, and making a down payment on an aluminium smelting plant that was sure to end up as a monument to folly, as the best authorities had warned.

    Who remembers ECOMOG today, apart from the families and comrades of fallen soldiers whose bodies  were ferried home in the dead of night and buried secretly?  Nobody knows their names or their numbers.  No monument stands in their memory.   The aluminium smelting plant sputtered back to life last year after lying comatose for some ten years.  As for Abuja Summit, it remains to be said of the OAU leaders and their spouses that they came, they ate, they departed, and they savoured the experience long thereafter.

    But I digress.

    The Federal Government forcefully denied Keeling’s report.  But the matter did not end there.  Security agents seized him in his office several days later and put him on the next plane to London, ending his Nigerian assignment.

    The Minister of Information, Chief Alex Akinyele, since deceased, said the Administration would at the appropriate time provide facts and figures that would refute Keeling’s charges.  Soon thereafter, Akinyele was reassigned to the National Sports Commission as executive chairman.  And the matter went cold.

    But “windfall,” in any language, and in any connotation or denotation, became the most treacherous word in the lexicon of public commentators, mentioned only in whispers among trusted friends and colleagues but never invoked nor implied.  The term was not banned, but who wanted to be given a local variant of the Keeling Treatment that was certain to be far less benign?

    Even today, you will not find that term in news or editorial copy.  From a healthy instinct for self-preservation, journalists and the media have had to cultivate a long memory.

    Some 30 years later, “bankroll” now nestles beside “windfall” on forbidden ground.

    Daily Trust correspondent Eyo Charles did  not get the Keeling Treatment  for asking Femi Fani-Kayode who  is “bankrolling” his new pastime of gallivanting all over the country in confected grandeur “inspecting” development projects and grading government performance in PDP-controlled states, amidst the wining  and dining and wenching that often go with that kind of enterprise.

    What Charles got instead was a litany of threats and a torrent of abuse interspersed with a gratuitous tutorial on the genealogy of the Fani-Kayode clan, a lecture that served only to underscore his own boorishness.   But that is only because Fani-Kayode wields no power of any kind today. It will be a different matter of course when he becomes President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, per the auguries of the high priests of Archbishop Benson Idahosa’s Church of God Mission International

    Still, I doubt whether any journalist will in the near future ask who is bankrolling whatever errand Fani-Kayode or any person of greater consequence might  be running.  That would be a pity indeed, for that question goes to the heart of the matter. Fani-Kayode still has not deigned to answer it. But it will not go away.

    Watch this column for occasional updates of the glossary of treacherous words – words you employ in media work at your own peril.

    This column also takes lexical notice of many abuses with which news reporting is riddled.  Not treacherous, but irritating to the cognoscenti.

    In many a profile, we often read that Chief Ajayi A. Ajayi “joined” politics when he was barely out of his teens. No, he did not.  And he could not have.  He joined a political party, or entered party politics.

    In an age of deregulation and privatisation and globalisation, it is perhaps inevitable that managerial skills and functions have come to count more than vision and imagination.  In many a sphere, the manager/managing director now towers above almost everyone in the firm.  “Management” is what makes the organisation tick, and virtually every institution has been reduced to a firm more or less, with a manager at the helm.

    And so, we read of how “the Management” of the beleaguered University of Lagos, has done this or failed       to do that; how it has decided on a certain course of action or put off a decision.  But the university is not a firm, not even in a sociological sense.   It is fundamentally an academic institution rooted in collegiality and shared governance, with members enjoying a high degree of autonomy in their work.  It is headed by a vice chancellor as chief academic and chief executive officer.

    The Registrar is the chief administrative officer.  That office in itself or together with the Office of the Vice chancellor does not constitute “the Management” of the university.  It serves mainly to provide bureaucratic support for the university to carry out its main functions of research, teaching, and public service.   You may have designated managers in service units of a university, such as the bookshop or Guest House.  But at the institutional level, there are no managers.

    Any action taken by a university, any statement it issues, emanates from the university, not from a phantom Management.  That term only stultifies the institution.  You cannot talk of a university’s Management.

    “Palliative” is not a word you encounter often in news copy.  Editors of the old school shun it because of its polysyllabic structure.  You cannot fit it easily into a headline where short, action words are preferred. Back then, the average reader would have had to look up its meaning in a dictionary. Even today, the average reader in societies we consider advanced cannot tell you its meaning with confidence.

    But is has long entered into common usage here to signify a gesture designed to provide short-term relief from some hardship or inconvenience

    A palliative is no small-bore intervention in Nigeria, however, and you don’t have to be in distress to qualify. You have only to be a person of consequence, and you can assign yourself as large a palliative as public funds at your disposal can support.  In fact, I offer it as a testable hypothesis that, for persons of consequence, the smaller the actual distress, the larger the palliative.

    I can already offer empirical, albeit anecdotal, support for that hypothesis.  At the Niger Delta Development Commission, the top man took N10 million home as COVID-19 palliative, the next two in the hierarchy took N7 million.  So it went down the line, the amount varying according to rank and seniority.

    But give them full marks for keeping in mind the wisdom of our people that those who eat alone are doomed to fight alone. The least person in the organisation bagged a COVID-19 palliative of N600, 000.

    The National Assembly says it cannot disclose how it handled that challenge within its ranks without gravely undermining the peace and security of the nation.

     

     

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  • Desperate days in Washington

    Desperate days in Washington

    By Olatunji Dare

    Yesterday (September 7) was celebrated in the United States as a public holiday to mark Labour Day, previously the capitalist world’s answer to May Day to honour and celebrate the working people whose exertions built and sustained that mode of production.

    With the triumph of Capital, and with it the evisceration of trade unions and union right in the United States, Labour Day signifies, for the most part, the end of the summer holiday season and the official start of the Presidential election campaign.

    I can almost hear the reader ask with more than a hint of incredulity:  What of the re-election campaign blitz Donald Trump launched the day after he took office, and the frenetic tempo of which he had maintained even in the face of a raging coronavirus pandemic?

    His opponent Joe Biden entered the fray much later and has been much more deferential to the Covid-19 protocols but are his sallies from the basement of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, not also the stuff of electioneering campaigns?

    All that was just the scrimmage, the sizing up and the probing for the opponent’s vulnerabilities, the testing of attack lines and slogans and political advertisements in preparation for the real engagement that will go on for some 55 days (ha!) before the election.  Remember that in America, politics is a contact sport that has much more in common with mixed martial arts than with the art of persuasion.

    Trump has been rhapsodizing so much about all the great, wonderful, amazing, unprecedented things he would do if re-elected, as against the carnage he said Biden would bring upon America if Biden prevailed.  But elements of that carnage, which Trump had described as the hallmark of the preceding Obama/Biden  Administration, are strewn all over the four years of Trump’s presidency.

    So are the shards of broken promises, in the face of which his riffs on his campaign slogan, “Promises made, promises kept,” like every Trump assertion, cannot stand close scrutiny.

    To grasp the essential malignancy of his campaign, you only need to go back to his acceptance speech before the 2016 Republican National Convention and his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2017, and compare them to his declamations at every stop in the on-going campaign.

    Hear him, accepting the Republican ticket on July 12, 2016:  “I have a message for all of you. The crime and violence that today afflicts (sic) our nation will soon—and I mean very soon, come to an end.  Beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored.”

    And this, from the same speech:  “The first task for our new administration will be to liberate our citizens from the crime and terrorism and lawlessness that threatens (sic) their existence.  When I take the oath of office next year I will restore law and order to our country.”

    Four years on, and without any mental constipation, he has been repeating that vow at every opportunity.  It is as if someone else has been President during those four years.

    Guess who is talking here:

    “I have embraced crying mothers who have lost their children because our politicians put their personal agenda before the national good.  I have no patience for injustice. No tolerance for government incompetence.   When innocent people suffer, because our political system lacks the will, or the courage, or the basic decency to enforce our laws, or worse still, sold out to some corporate lobby for cash, I am not able to look the other way.  And I won’t look the other way.”

    Bernard Sanders?  Trump’s opponent in the 2016 presidential race, Hilary Clinton?  His opponent in the 2020 race, Joseph Biden?

    It is Trump himself, no less, a character so schizoid that he can’t even fake empathy.  And he is not talking about those Americans who have died from Covid-19, 189, 000 at this writing – a scourge he first dismissed as a hoax, later as an irritant that would vanish in days, and later still in a macabre joke, turned into the ailment that could be flushed out the system with just about any disinfectant.

    He was talking about white people who had died from street violence, and white law and law-enforcement officials who had fallen in the line of duty – not the Black victims of rampant police brutality.  They are legion, but Trump cannot even bring himself to mention those among them done to death with brutishness that horrified the world.  To him, the Black-Lives-Matter response is the really hateful thing.

    Rather than confront it as he has been claiming, Trump sabotaged the war on the pandemic by not providing the requisite facilities and equipment, by openly and defiantly flouting the Covid-19 protocols, by constantly denigrating the leading experts in the field, by mocking the science, and by bullying cities and states into ending the lockdowns prematurely for the sake of his reelection primarily, and the economy secondarily.

    It is for the same reason he is now dangling before a weary populace an October Surprise in the form of a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine that would be administered all over the country to put an end to all the misery, starting from the week before Election Day, if not earlier.

    The best authorities say that this is wholly improbable.  But who is to say that Trump does not know more about vaccines than the most accomplished epidemiologists?

    Trump’s 2017 Inaugural Address is of the same vintage.  That day, he said, would be remembered as “the day the people became the rulers again.”  Proclaiming an end to “the American carnage,” saying of Americans traumatized by it:  “We are one nation and their pain is our pain.  The dreams are our dreams and their successes will be our success.  We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny.”

    He even made a paean to solidarity and to honesty.  “We must speak our minds openly, debate our disagreements honestly, but always pursue solidarity,” he declared.

    One more quiz and I am done.  Who spoke these evocative words:

    “And whether a child is born in the urban sprawl of Detroit or the windswept plains of Nebraska, they look up at the same night sky they fill their hearts with the same dreams, and they are infused with the breath of life by the same almighty Creator.”

    The Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.?  Jessie Jackson?  Al Sharpton? Barrack Obama?

    Hard to believe, but they were spoken by Donald Trump, the birther high priest, with no sense of irony or shame, at his Inaugural, with Obama whom he had almost ran out of town with false claims that he is a  foreign-born impostor right at his side.

    I have saved for last this priceless gem, a classic instance of what psychologists call projection, whereby a person attributes to another his or her own unedifying impulses.  It is from Trump’s 2016 Acceptance Speech:

    “The irresponsible rhetoric of our president who has used the pulpit of the presidency to divide us by race and color, has made America a more dangerous environment than, frankly, I have seen and anybody in this room has ever watched or seeing (sic).”

    Don’t be surprised if he says that again tomorrow with no sense of irony and with no shame, this man who has resorted to the most blatant form of racial demagoguery to keep his campaign afloat, now that his pandering to patriotism and his frequent invocation of the honour and sacrifice of the military have been shown to flow from rank insincerity, if not studied mockery.

    Trump no longer makes the pretence of campaigning to be president for all Americanns  His is the most tribalistic presidential campaign in recent memory, with the tribalism masked as dedication to law and order, and everything else be damned.

    Meanwhile, seeing his chances of winning receding, he is doing everything he can to delegitimise the election and to ensure that it ends in confusion.

    These are indeed desperate days in Washington.

  • Eyo Charles: A reporter’s unholy baptism

    Eyo Charles: A reporter’s unholy baptism

    Olatunji Dare

     

    I MEAN no disrespect, but just one week ago, the name Eyo Charles would have been a head scratcher to all but the most avid consumer of the news.

    “Who is Eyo Charles?” I can almost hear a good many of them murmur, deterred from flipping the page only by the titillating prospect of being regaled with details of the unholy baptism.

    Journalists often talk of the hazards of the profession – even those of them who have no stripes to show for their sojourn in it, only  a fleet of late-model cars, elegant homes in the best part of town, thriving businesses on the side, and robust bank accounts, domestic and foreign.  Could this perhaps be a real, contemporaneous enactment or variation of the kind of baptism visited on Minere Amakiri in 1973?

    Amakiri was the Port Harcourt-based reporter for The Nigerian Observer. It all began with a news story with his byline, factually and accurately reporting a threat, made at a press conference by state-employed teachers, to embark on a strike over their unpaid salaries going back several months.

    Even by the standards of those days, this was a ho-hum story.  But it was published on the most hallowed day in the Rivers State calendar, the birthday of His Excellency Alfred Diete-Spiff, the state’s military governor, with the sole purpose of subjecting him and the government and the good people of the state to scorn, odium, ridicule, and contempt.

    Whereupon they seized Amakiri, shaved his head with the jagged, razor-sharp edge of a piece       of glass from a broken beer bottle and flogged him almost insensate, Diete-Spiff’s chief security officer presiding.

    Perhaps because it occurred at the hands of an ordained priest, Eyo Charles’s advertised “unholy baptism” did not even come close to what they did to Amakiri.  Yet, today, you have to be practically unconscious not to have heard of Eyo Charles.

    Eyo Charles is a reporter who covers for the Abuja-based Daily Trust, the so-called South-south States.  And he would have remained just that if he had assigned to a junior reporter the coverage of a press conference by a notoriously foul-mouthed political brawler and opportunist craving the bright lights and the fawning adulation he once enjoyed as a minister of aviation, and later as head of Goodluck Jonathan’s publicity campaign team in his doomed re-election bid.

    There was nothing significant or challenging about the news conference.  The scheduled newsmaker, it is true, was one of yesterday’s men seeking to insinuate himself into the moment.

    It had been called to provide Femi Fani-Kayode a platform to brief the public through the media about the wonders he had seen in a guided tour of Cross River State and to issue a report card on the government projects, as he had done at the end of an earlier excursion in beleaguered Zamfara State, where Muslim insurgents control a swathe of the territory.

    At the end of the dining and wining and – I can’t vouch for this one – the wenching, that is the standard agenda for such visits, he was conferred with a prestigious title dating from the time Usmanu dan Fodiyo established his Caliphate in Sokoto.  He even got to parley with His Eminence the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar, on matters of mutual interest.  Throughout, he carried himself like visiting potentate from distant lands.

    After that heady triumphal tour, Cross River State was his next port of call.  The stage was set   for a reprise of the Zamfara report – the wonders the state government has wrought across every aspect of human existence and experience, despite lean and declining resources, the stratospheric level to which the people’s government in the state had raised its Human Development Index in just a year or two in office, etc., etc.

    The news-starved area press corps had gathered in eager expectation.   For security, Fani-Kayode had a man standing behind him in military camouflage keeping an eye on the proceedings, and two other men in rear, probably officials from the Governor’s Office.

    In Zamfara, they had asked Fani-Kayode who was funding his trip.  He had batted the question away, without profoundly alienating his audience.  Apparently he had not anticipated such a basic question.  Or perhaps he had reasoned that no reporter would be temerarious enough to ask him a former minister, a lawyer, a fourth-generation alumnus of the University of Cambridge, such a question.

    But that was precisely the question Charles put to Fani-Kayode shortly after he began his news conference: Who is bankrolling the junket?

    Whereupon Fani-Kayode blew his top.  There is no point recalling here the torrent of insults, the inelegant putdowns, the coarse and vulgar abuse that he rained on Charles.  Among his sundry talents that we have since come to know, he can divine a person’s intelligence even before setting his eyes on that person.  Let us just say that Charles did not rank high on his divination board.  So he had known what kind of interviewer Charles would be.

    And yet, when Charles asked his question, Fani-Kayode was caught utterly unprepared, flummoxed. He replied with a tirade, and served notice that he was going to report Charles to his publisher, who happens to be his good friend.  If Charles did not get the message, most of his colleagues in an endangered industry did.  One of them was heard rebuking him:  “See what you have brought upon yourself?”

    After an explosion of rage that would have left a person of lesser stamina breathless, it would have been  a wonder if Fani-Kayode had continued his press conference.  He gathered his papers and walked out.

    At the prompting of his advisers, he has since apologised, saying he failed himself, his family, his friends, his political associates, and his mentors, among whom he named former President Olusegun Obasanjo, of whom he used to say the most spiteful things until he gave him a cabinet post.

    It cannot have been easy for a person of Fani-Kayode’s leviathan ego to make a public apology in such stark terms.   His friends must hope that it was born of contrition.

    If his conduct was scandalous, that of the press corps at the event was shameful. Instead of walking out on Fani-Kayode while his tirade was in progress, they tried by sundry gestures to placate and mollify him, and even rounded on their colleague Charles for bringing a promising outing to an unrewarding ending.  Instead of applauding his professionalism, they rebuked him.

    This was a great chance to take a collective stand and tell the attentive audience they would no longer submit to being ill-used and insulted. They blew it.

    Charles’s professionalism is indeed to be commended, but I do not absolve him from blame for participating in what amounted to a reflex submission to wanton ridicule and disrespect.  He was probably too star-struck, like his colleagues.

    Nigerian journalists are disrespected largely because they do not respect themselves by and large.  They pander to crassness and are all too willing to bat on any winning side.   Instead of holding officials to account, they confer all manner of dubious honours on them and importune them for favours.

    The media have been infiltrated by persons who have never taken a course on Media Ethics nor imbibed the letter and the spirit of the Nigerian Press Organisation’s Code of Ethics.  Even on issues over which they should assert autonomy, they defer all too willingly to the authorities.

    Publishers and proprietors who do not pay their staffers regularly and expect them to fend for themselves as they see fit invariably set them forth on the path of journalistic perdition.

    Until the media critically review their own internal operations and professional standards to make them safe and healthy for the practice of good journalism, they will never command the respect the media are accorded in other climes.

    Meanwhile, the question lingers:  Who, just who, has been bankrolling Fani-Kayode’s travels?

     

     

     

  • The ECOWAS’s failed mission to Mali

    The ECOWAS’s failed mission to Mali

    By Olatunji Dare

    The Africa Leadership Forum (ALF), one of the continent’s best known and most influential non-governmental organizations, stood on the brink of dissolution. Though not formally banned, it was finding it well-nigh impossible to operate at its base, the Obasanjo Farm Complex, in Otta, Ogun State.

    Security officials had brusquely terminated its most recent outing at the Gateway Hotel, Otta, an international conference on accountability in governance in Africa. It was only a matter of time before         it would be slapped with a banning order and crippled.

    Its founder and chairman, General Olusegun Obasanjo, the former head of state and statesman-at-large,    was languishing in prison, jailed by the brutal dictator Sani Abacha on false charges of plotting to overthrow his benighted regime.

    The ALF outsmarted Abacha and relocated, overnight as it were, to Accra, Ghana, before Abacha’s agents could move to seal up and occupy its premises.

    It was from there that it organised an international conference titled Africa on the Eve of the 21st Century, in Maputo, Mozambique.  From September 9-11, 1997, policy-makers, scholars, and political figures from Africa and the wider world reflected on the African Condition in the millennium that was about to end, and its prospects in the one about to commence.

    One of the more engaging discussions at the conference centred on a paper on Integration in Africa.  More than three decades after the inauguration of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the evidence of continental unity was sparse and the evidence for integration was even sparser, its presenter contended.  Although cross-border trading counted for much more, official trade among African countries accounted for less than 5 per cent of the total transactions for the continent.

    In education, development planning, transportation, manufacturing, and in virtually all fields, every country carried on almost as if it were an island unto itself, with scant regard for the choices their neighbours were pursuing and the advantages that might be gained by an integrated approach.

    “African leaders are well integrated, but African peoples are not,” the presenter said to general applause. The OAU, he reminded the assembly, was for African peoples, not just their leaders, and it was time to make it work for the people and not just their leaders.

    It came to light at the conference that only Senegal had a designated Department for cooperation and  regional integration, headed by an official without cabinet rank. So, when Obasanjo went from prison to power scarcely two years later, I drew on the communiqué for a memo urging him to appoint a minister of cabinet rank to take charge of those twin subjects.

    “An appointment at that level would be a strong indication of your Administration’s commitment to advancing the cause of cooperation and integration of the continent,” the memo said.

    I cannot claim that it played any part in his naming Dr Abimbola Ogunkelu Minister for Cooperation and Integration in Africa.  Obasanjo has always regarded the pursuit of these goals as an imperative, and the memo may well have seemed to him like an epistle to the choir.

    I was led to these reminiscences by the Economic Community West African States (ECOWAS) recent “peace mission” to Mali. Its doom was foreseeable. The peacemakers, led by our own Dr Goodluck Jonathan, were acting more like shareholders concerned to preserve their stock in a tottering holding company at all cost rather than return to basics, question fundamental assumptions, and set the organisation on a new path.

    They seemed more concerned to preserve the rule of President (as he then was) Boubacar Keita than to aassuage and reassure Malians who had been saying in one strong, united voice, that they had had more than enough of him. Citing rigged elections, official corruption, deepening deprivations and general insecurity, the Opposition demanded that Keita step down.

    But the mediators would countenance no outcome that did not leave Keita in power. Little surprise there; most of them have dubious legitimacy at best, and a tenuous hold on power.  Each of the countries most of them preside over is a Mali waiting to happen.  They were not going to commit class suicide by abandoning one of their own who had been rejected by the people.

    Even after the military moved in and ousted Keita, and Dr Jonathan and his team, parroting France and its allies whose overbearing presence in Mali’s affair has been cited as one of the reasons for the seething popular discontent on the streets of Bamako, urged them to go back to their barracks.  Keita has since bowed to necessity and accepted his fate.

    The mediators too seem to have recognised the facts on the ground and are now urging a speedy return to constitutional rule, as if it was not the brazen manipulation of that hallowed principle that has lain at the bottom of virtually every political crisis in Africa.

    In its formative years and indeed well into its second decade, the OAU would have been loath to intervene in the crisis, even for the sake of mediating.  “Non-interference” in the affairs of other member-states was one of the bedrock principles of its Charter, and African leaders interpreted that term liberally to cover their sins and to preserve themselves in power.

    It was indeed a sign of progress when the OAU, bowing to the growing salience of human rights in the conduct of national and international affairs, tacitly abandoned that standard in the 1990s.  Its successor,            the African Union, went one significant step better to set up a novel institution, the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) to enable member-states carry out self-monitoring and self-assessment on all aspects of governance, the type that would have anticipated, and perhaps even forestalled, the convulsions that rock African countries all too often.

    But the ARPM is grossly under-funded, and stands today as aspiration rather than actuality.  If the African Union is to attain the goals for which it was founded, it must as a priority, empower the ARPM to function smoothly and continuously.  The political fortunes of the African peoples and solidarity with them must be grounded on institutions, not on personalities whose own fortunes are as evanescent as rainbow gold.

    So also must the pursuit of cooperation and integration in Africa.

    Back in the 1960s, President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana was calling insistently for a continental government.  Deeply suspicious of his alleged ambition to dominate the continent, and despairing of discounting or trading in their newly won sovereignty, showed not the least enthusiasm for it.

    Even today, Nkrumah’s proposal seems starry-eyed.  The idea of European Union must have seemed just as fanciful when it was first mooted in a continent laid prostrate by Word War II when it was first mooted.  But behold the transformation, the idea and its faithful pursuit, have wrought on the European landscape and indeed on global geopolitics today.

    It came to life as a small-bore operation, based on common trade in coal among three relatively small countries – Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg, the so-called BeNeLux nations.  It expanded to six members and acquired a new momentum when France, Germany and Italy entered.  The rest is history.

    History suggests powerfully that African cooperation and integration can only spring from such small beginnings.

    I am thinking of a proposal made by the Beninoise intellectual and statesman Professor Albert Tévoédjrè more than two decades ago.  He called it un jour sans frontiers – a day without boundaries, allowing for free movement of goods and persons across West Africa to begin with, not just cattle and their murderous minders.

    Drawing on the lessons learned, the period of free movement can be raised to two days a week, a full week, a month, and so on, until the borders literally collapse under their own contradictions.

    This is the kind of arrangement ECOWAS leaders should be thinking about, not propping up yet another member of their discredited club.

  • The envoy Abacha couldn’t settle or scare

    The envoy Abacha couldn’t settle or scare

    Olatunji Dare

     

    FOLLOWING the official acknowledgment of Chief MKO Abiola as winner of the 1993 Presidential election and the proclamation of June 12 as “Democracy Day,” former United States Ambassador to Nigeria Walter Carrington figured prominently practically on every roster of persons deemed worthy of being officially honoured for their momentous contribution to the struggle to re-establish legitimate rule in Nigeria.

    Carrington’s tour of duty coincided with a period when all the things Nigerians said could never happen in their country happened time and again, routinely. There was, first, the contrived confusion in the run-up to the presidential election, the capstone of a transition that had been eight years in the making.  Then the annulment; then Ernest Shonekan’s Interim farce, and then the infernal Sani Abacha.

    In that time of tyranny, Carrington never flinched from speaking truth to power; he never shied away from identifying with the democratic yearnings of the Nigerians. Until his death last week at age 90, he stood as a pillar of inspiration as Nigeria faltered and stumbled on its journey to democracy and development.

    It says a great deal about his faith that we would get it right that he spent much of his final years in Nigeria.  He had come to Nigeria as the representative of a foreign power that recognised and admired Nigeria’s great potential but also felt curiously ill at ease with prospect of that potential translating into actuality.  He never shared his country’s ambivalence, however.

    Carrington pined for a Nigeria that would take its place as one of the world’s leading nations, a spiritual home to Black humankind. The tributes and the outpouring of grief that followed his passing bear powerful testimony to the respect and affection he commanded among the attentive audience.

    Among my many interactions with him, one in particular clings in my memory.  It was the Fourth of July reception in 1997, marking the 221st independence anniversary of the United States, an account of which had appeared in this space.

    Even for a time of year when the skies parted without ceremony and seemed in no hurry to close, the rain that fell that Friday morning was unusually heavy.  And it threatened to wash out the most eagerly awaited event on the diplomatic calendar.

    Then, it lifted just as suddenly as it had begun.  The clouds dispersed, and bright sunshine suffused the landscape.  A cool, crisp wind wafting across from the sea that provides a stunning backdrop to the official residence of the Ambassador of the United States dissolved the muggy heat of the preceding days.  Nature in its mysterious ways had turned a looming washout to a soothing prelude.

    By 4:30 p.m., the grounds thronged with guests.  Virtually everyone who was somebody, thought he was somebody or aspired to be somebody was there.  Stewards in their starched, snow-white uniforms drifted with clockwork precision from one cluster of guests to another, offering trays of tantalizing snacks. Other stewards followed with cocktails.

    In groups small and large, long-lost friends and comrades and colleagues carried on animated chatter about – what else – the latest barbarities that Sani Abacha and his confederates had visited on the people, the general hopelessness to which they had sentenced their compatriots, and the indifference of an international community held hostage by Foreign Minister Tom Ikimi’s gangsta diplomacy.

    Free at least for the moment from fear of being abducted, kidnapped, disappeared, mugged, or killed in a drive-by shooting, they compared notes, reviewed strategy and tactics, and contemplated the way forward.

    Not a few secret and not-so-secret agents of the Abacha regime had infiltrated the reception in one guise or disguise, but it was easy to keep them at bay or avoid them altogether.

    All too soon, it was time for the main event.

    Carrington took his place at the podium.  One step behind him stood his elegant Nigeria-born wife, Arese.  To his right, a United States marine stood at ramrod attention, cradling the Stars and Stripes.

    On the occasion of his country’s independence anniversary, Carrington began, nothing would be more fitting than revisiting  the circumstances that had led  British colonies in the New World to renounce foreign rule way back in 1776, and the very words that had inspired and sustained the struggle unto victory.

    Whereupon he began to read in that resonant and sometimes haunting baritone, the storied text of the (American) Declaration of Independence.

    “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with rights that, among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among them, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter it, and to institute a new government.”

    The authors of the Declaration never held these propositions to be truths, of course, much less self-event truths. Theirs was a slave society.  Even today, America has to be reminded that Black Lives Matter.

    But in that place and at that time, the lofty ideals of the Declaration counted for much more than its contradictions.

    A hush fell upon the assembly.

    “All experience has shown,” Carrington continued, his voice precisely modulated, “that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while the evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.  But when a long line of abuses and usurpations evince a desire to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such a government, and to provide new grounds for their future security.”

    It was as if time itself and indeed all the elements stood still,  The only thing astir was that haunting, almost taunting, baritone, projected far and wide by the public address system and the wind.

    But Carrington was only warming up.

    “The history of the present king is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States. . .

    “A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. . .”

    The hush had deepened with Carrington’s rendering of each line of the litany of woes residents of the American colonies suffered during British rule. But virtually every line reflected the barbarities the loathsome General Sani Abacha and his regime were visiting upon the Nigerian public.

    By the time Carrington was done, the atmosphere had taken on an unsettling resemblance to the proverbial calm before the raging storm. The assembled guests looked nervously at one another, shook their heads in sorrow and sighed deeply in despair and unspoken rage.

    If Carrington had ended this command performance by saying nothing more electrifying than “Eminent sons and daughters of Nigeria, the future of your country lies in hour hands,” I suspect that most of the guests would have yanked off their ornately embroidered apparel and fancy suits and stormed Bonny Camp and Kam Selem House.  And the revolution would have begun in earnest.

    Abacha never forgave Carrington.

    His propagandists put it out that Carrington was embittered because the regime had refused to grant him a lucrative oil concession.  If he had ever made such a request, they would have used it to destroy him.

    Abacha sent his goons to invade a private residence where a reception was being held for Carrington on the eve of his departure from Nigeria, claiming “intelligence reports” that an armed robbery was in progress in the neighbourhood. When the guests relocated to another venue, the regime’s goons followed them there and dispersed them.

    The regime celebrated Carrington’s departure at the end of his tour as signal achievement of Tom Ikimi’s gangsta diplomacy.

    Today, Abacha and his enablers are justly held in loathing abhorrence.  But Walter Carrington stands splendidly venerated.

     

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  • Blues for a COVID-skeptic sista

    Blues for a COVID-skeptic sista

    In the future,” the American artist, film director and producer Andy Warhol is reported to have stated in the programme for a 1968 exhibition of his work at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, “everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

    Those 15 minutes became splendidly real for Dr Stella Immanuel some two weeks ago.

    There she was, a physician who had transcended the suffocating humbug of the coronavirus epidemic and the sterility of thought that its prevention, diagnosis, management, treatment and cure have spawned.

    There she was, a bevy of acclaimed physicians in their snow-white laboratory coats and their stethoscopes dangling from their necks, all of them standing one respectful step behind her as she excitedly but authoritatively exploded the myths and superstitions that had held humankind captive for the better part of the past six months

    In that period, the world woke up every day to grim bulletin of fresh outbreaks of the plague that the world has come to know as Covid-19, the latest number of infections, the most current number of patients successfully treated, and those who perished in a battle in which human ingenuity and the latest advances in the medical sciences have proved no match for the virus.

    And the depredations just multiplied from one day to the next, with no end in sight.

    In that period, the world embarked on a desperate race to produce what will certainly qualify as the Holy Grail of the ages – a vaccine or some other remedy that will inoculate individuals against the virus and restore the rhythm of life that it has so cruelly dislocated in some areas and destroyed in others.

    It is a race against time, in which colossal amounts of money and time and energy are being poured in the hope – and it is only a hope, according to the best authorities – that a remedy of sorts will be found. The smart money is on a vaccine that will serve only for a brief while as an inoculation against Covid-19.  Not as a prophylactic.  And certainly not as a cure.

    Against this dispiriting prospect, Dr Stella Immanuel, a physician born in Cameroun and trained at our own University of Calabar, burst sensationally upon the scene in Houston, Texas,  to provide the reassuring clarity that the best authorities in the best universities of the world working in the best endowed labs have failed to achieve and will never achieve unless they put away their microscopes and test tubes and go back to basics.

    Unlike other investigators at the spearhead of the war against Covid-19, Dr Immanuel has not caged herself with the self-imposed inhibitions and protocols – the so-called scientific method — that have vitiated their research constricted their vision. Just because you cannot observe something under a microphone or in a test tube does not mean that it does not exist.  Is it not a notorious fact that so-called para-normal phenomena often contain far more normality that we can apprehend?

    In keeping with the Holy Scriptures, she has been content to rely on “the evidence of things not seen.” And see what spectacular insights this singular approach have yielded!

    Covid-19 is a hoax.  It is a fake disease.  Even its name is a fake, for there is nothing novel about it.  At bottom, it is malaria fever that celebrity-seeking scientists and their sensation-crased collaborators in the media have blown up into an invincible force, before which the whole world must bow and tremble.

    It can be prevented, and it can be cured.  Dr Immanuel knows because she has been preventing and treating it long before it was foisted on the world as the all-conquering disease that it is not.  And she has more than 300 living, thriving former patients to prove it.

    And there is nothing wondrous about the hydroxychloroquine she has been using with such stunning success as prophylactic and curative well before President Donald Trump’s personal physician insinuated it into his daily repast of hamburger, without having the grace to acknowledge that it was from her that the White House had learned of the drug.

    It has the great merit of being available for the asking.  Just stop by the patent medicine store at the corner.

    Forget the billions that have been ploughed into or pledged for developing a vaccine and the unseemly race to clinch the patent and win the manufacturing rights.  Even if the cost were not so prohibitive, why seek a vaccine when a cure already exists?

    But Big Pharma would hear nothing of it.  If they cannot kill such an initiative outright, they will denigrate and pooh-pooh it and assail the integrity and expertise of all those promoting it until it fizzles, not minding the consequence for public health even as the pandemic ramifies.

    Any wonder, then, that they have spared no effort and held back no resources in their desperation to take out the one person standing between them and their nefarious plot to keep the world safe for Covid-19 and  the stock market booming for their stakeholders?

    They are putting it about that, assuming but by no means conceding that Dr Immanuel is variously a trained radiologist or paediatrician, she is nevertheless an intruder and a dangerous one at that.  If she is the one or the other, how come she had taken it upon herself to treat with the same drug all sorts conditions of people supposedly afflicted with Covid-19, a good many of them children and some in the ninth decade of life?

    They are also pointing to what they say is a toxic blend of pseudo-science, religious fundamentalism and mediaeval superstition in her approach to medical practice.  She is alleged to hold, for instance, and to dispense from the pulpit of the church of which she is the resident pastor in a strip mall next door to her clinic, that aliens from invisible worlds have been sleeping with female earthlings, causing them to be infertile and to suffer from gynaecological problems.

    And so on, and so forth.

    The vast majority of those making these slanderous charges are no doubt actuated by envy, a rampant phenomenon in American society.  Who among them will not not give a limb or an eye to be noticed by Donald Trump? Being God’s own “battle axe,” Dr Immanuel has little to fear from them.

    The people she needs to fear in the main are her former patients with eyes on the main chance. Her treatment has saved their lives, but instead of showering her with gratitude, they will blitz her with malpractice lawsuits.

    They will invent, contrive or confect any condition known or unknown to medical science and claim that it was brought upon them by the hydroxychloroquine she had prescribed, totally unmindful of the side effects documented copiously in the scientific literature.  They will assert that the medication inflicted on them unspeakable mental and emotional distress, to say nothing of acute pain that led them to resort to dangerously addictive analgesics.

    They will demand compensation commensurate with the injury.  And they will not stop until they have sued her lab coat off her back and her stethoscope off her neck.

    If her premium is fully paid, her medical insurance will avail, up to a point.

    Meanwhile, I can report that the usual people are busy poring over the records of her sojourn in the United States, from her immigration application to her compliance to her medical license and everything in between, not forgetting her marriage licence and her federal tax returns.  The most insignificant spelling error will be construed as evidence of intentional deception and hence sufficient cause for immediate deportation unless she can prove the contrary to their complete satisfaction

    I can also report that there is little sympathy for her among Cameroun nationals here. One of them told me he would not be surprised to find that the people back home had placed a curse on her – a punishment they reserve for those who don’t send money home regularly.

    “What else would lead a person to do such wanton damage to herself?” he asked.

     

     

  • A misbegotten re-christening

    A misbegotten re-christening

    Olatunji Dare

     

    WHEN I learned that the Nigerian Press Organisation, of all, had re-named the NIJ House on Victoria Island, Lagos for Isa Funtua barely a week after his death, my heart sank.

    Have the inversion of values and the failure of leadership so characteristic of our national life that the news media are forever lamenting:  have these same ailments finally caught up with the media as an institution and emasculated them a time when their critical insights and capacity for fine discrimination have never been in greater demand?

    This was the thought that raced through mind, followed quickly, intuitively even, by the judgement that they might have, in effect robbed some very emiment stalwarts of journalism in Nigeria to pay Funtua, the spectral business mogul, media entrepreneur of a bygone era and a person who wields enormous but unaccountable power as PresidentMuhammadu Buhari’s in-law, counselor and confidant.

    Lateef Jakande, who turned 91 three weeks ago, came immediately to mind.    More than anyone alive or dead, Jakande has in a life dedicated to the journalism of the highest standard as reporter, columnist, editorial writer, media educator, administrator, and entrepreneur, and as a crusader for press freedom on the national and global stage, seemed to me to have earned the naming rights to the NIJ House.

    It was through Jakande’s agency that the Nigeria Institute of Journalism came to Nigeria with assistance from the Zurich-based International Press Institute, of which he was for many years vice president and subsequently president, and in which latter capacity he hosted an Assembly of the global body in Nigeria in the 1907s.

    Jakande secured temporary housing for the institute on Breadfruit Street, in downtown Lagos, until it moved to the building named for it, and from there uptown to its present location in Ogba, in the Ifako/Ijaye LGA of the state. As Governor of Lagos State, he had expanded the strategic site earmarked for construction of the NIJ House, thus endowing it with the capacity to become a prime  commercial asset

    The directing faculty, whose services Jakande secured with the help from the IPI, laid good foundation for the institute and gave it high visibility.  From time to time, Jakande himself  served as visiting faculty.  When asked what he would be doing after he lost office following the overthrow of the elected civilian government in 1983, he replied, with not a little delight, that he would be teaching at the NIJ.

    In the many influential and demanding positions he occupied in public life, Jakande maintained a constant interest in the NIJ.  He followed its fortunes and occasional upheavals, offering advice and guidance, and ensuring that it strove to live up to its founding ideals.

    Against this dazzling record, one blemish stands out.  Never had the Nigerian press witnessed the kind of repression it suffered under the regime of the loathsome Sani Abacha, in which Jakande was the senior cabinet minister.  Independent newspapers were banned, editors were assassinated or hounded into exile, kidnapped and detained in squalid conditions, or jailed in proceedings that were a manifest travesty.

    Those who expected Jakande to resign in disgust – I count myself among them – were disappointed.

    I recall that Dr Doyin Abiola, managing director of MKO Abola’s Concord Newspapers and I, from The Guardian but without the paper’s formal authority, held a long meeting during one environmental Saturday in December 1994 with Jakande in his Ilupeju home and challenged him on this point. How could he, a pillar of the Nigerian press, serve in a government that visits such barbarities on the media?

    Jakande listened attentively and patiently, never once interrupting us.  He said we were mistaken in our judgement of his role.  Then he advised us to go talk with General Oladipo Diya, Sani Abacha’s nominal deputy.  The meeting, with Yemi Ogunbiyi, ex-officio member of the Newspapers Proprietors Association (NPAN) in tow, served only to reveal how very little Diya knew of the working of the government.

    But this blemish of Jakande’s pales beside his transcendent contributions to journalism in Nigeria and the collateral respect that flowed to the profession from his performance on so many fronts as a public administrator, innovator and achiever of the first rank, arguably the ablest of his contemporaries.   And he was never one to draw attention to himself; never one, as far as the records show, to seek to enrich himself through “public service.”

    It is in recognition of these contributions that the NIJ Complex in Ogba is called Lateef Jakande House. It is an honour richly deserved.  Naming the NIJ House on Victoria Island for Jakande would have been gross, and Jakande would have been the first person to say so.

    There are so many deserving candidates for the honour.  What qualified Isa Funtua above them all?

    I never met the man. They say he was very personable, that he always played for results, and that his interventions were usually decisive.  Though better known as a business mogul and influential insider, he was not altogether a stranger to the media scene.  More than two decades ago, he was co-promoter of a Kaduna-based newspaper that called itself The Democrat.

    But neither in spirit nor in content nor yet in aspiration did the paper even pretend to live up to its name. It railed endlessly against privately-owned newspapers that questioned government policy and pronouncements and generally asked questions the authorities found inconvenient.

    It enthusiastically called for the banning of such newspapers, and suggested in earnest that it would not be a bad idea to bash a few heads in the process.  It considered it unpatriotic for any individual or body to demand a review of the annulled 1993 presidential election.

    It backed a decree setting up a so-called media council that was at bottom a licensing authority and a press court, with powers ousting the jurisdiction of national and international courts.  You had to go back to medieval times to find a parallel.

    There was nothing “Democratic” in or about The Democrat.

    Funtua’s subsequent service as chair of the NPAN may well have converted him to a believer in press freedom, to the point of wiping out the sins of his earlier foray.  But does that qualify him  to be called an “icon” of journalism, that Jabberwock that has now come to denote the ultimate status especially when, as in this instance, it does not flow from solid and enduring accomplishment.

    Those defending the renaming of NIJ House for Funtua say that he fully deserves the honour and the citation that prefaced it.  Unknown to the querulous commentators, they say, NIJ House was falling apart and was in need urgent repairs. The NPO – to its shame, it is necessary to insist –could not raise the funds.

    Then, Isa Funtua stepped in.  Drawing on his vast business connections, he came up with the N200 million needed for the job.  But for his decisive intervention, the NIJ House may well have collapsed, as so many buildings and structures do in any given month, with considerable loss of lives and damage to property.

    It is a noble gesture to be sure, and eminently deserving of memorialisation.  But this particular memorialisation breaks faith with the storied history of the NIJ.   Plus, it occurred within a week of Funtua’s passing.  Why the haste, which some have, not without justification, called unseemly?

    Even at the best of times, a week would hardly have sufficed for the wide consultation and discussion – and research — that such a momentous renaming would have entailed among the rank and file of the journalists, editors and publishers who constitute the NPO.  Given the dislocations caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the responses they call forth, it seems unlikely that the task could have been completed inside that period.

    Indeed, questions have been raised about whether such deliberations were ever held in the first place.  The NPO has not been forthcoming with an answer, thus lending wings to rumours that the renaming was done by only a handful of officials and presented to the rank and file as a fait accompli.

    Please, tell them it ain’t so, Prince Nduka Obaigbena.

     

     

     

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  • Matters miscellaneous

    Matters miscellaneous

    By Olatunji Dare

    It is miscellany time again, when this column tries to attend, with broad strokes and in short takes, to a glut of occurrences, lest those who make the news and those who consume it feel ignored.

    The point of departure has got to be the death, at the unripe age of 25, of Flying Officer Tolulope Arotile, the first Nigerian female helicopter combat pilot, in a freak accident heard around the world.

    Accidents are formidable things. They happen even to the most cautious and the most prepared, at the least likely moments and in the least likely places. A person who can swim across a river churned by strong currents may drown in a bathtub.

    I know a man who ran over and killed his young son while backing his car out of the garage, unaware that his little boy had followed him out of the house. Thousands of children are killed in this manner every year in the United States and across the world.

    From the official account, the accident that claimed Tolulope Arotile’s life would seem to belong in this category.  She was walking along a road at the Air Force Base in Kaduna when her high school contemporary driving in the opposite direction – with two other contemporaries of Arotile’s as passengers — suddenly recognised her.

    Excited at seeing a former school mate who had succeeded so admirably in a rarefied field, he put the car in reverse gear and revved up with the aim of catching up with her and giving her a befitting Nigerian greeting.

    In the event, the car struck and killed her.  The reader deserves to be spared the numbing details.

    At first blush, the account seems too pat.  The sequence of events cannot easily be dismissed as trifling coincidence.  Yet, there is plausibility in that account – much greater plausibility, it seems to me,  than in the conspiracy theories that have been woven intricately around the matter, some of them grounded on the wildest conjectures and going back to the dawn of creation.

    Beyond stirring ethnic passions and animosities, they serve no purpose.

    But the account also raises some troubling questions.

    It has been established that Arotile had been summoned by phone, barely two hours before her tragic end, to the Air Force Base, in Kaduna.  She had the day off, and was reluctant to go to the Base.  But her sister encouraged her to go, and personally dropped her off there.

    Who was the caller?  Where was the caller at the time of the accident?  Why did he or she summon Arotile?

    To what particular facility was Arotile headed at the time of the accident?

    Was the area monitored by CCTV or other electronic security device? Where are the tapes?

    Besides the persons named in the official account, were there other persons – eyewitnesses in particular?  What was their recollection?

    Did the authorities make a map of the accident scene, a first crucial step in such circumstances?  Why was no such picture furnished with the official account of the incident?

    What the public has been told so far points to an instance of culpable homicide.  But given the unsettling gaps in the narrative, the authorities must pursue every lead to unravel that matter and squelch the conspiracies swirling around it.

    Anything less would be unworthy of Flying Officer Tolulope Arotile who, by her courage, skill, valour and commitment in a field dominated by men, wrote herself into our hearts and minds, and into Nigeria’s history.

    In other news: 

    Ever since Senator (as he then was, and has since ceased to be) Dino Melaye threatened on the floor of the National Assembly to ravish a fellow distinguished Senator and wife of one of the nation’s leading political figures and was not called to order nor censured, that body has come to be regarded as a place where anything is not merely possible but everything is actually permissible.

    Recent disclosures before the Assembly’s oversight committees suggest powerfully that it is not about to turn its back on its well-earned reputation.

    A Minister who couldn’t keep his hands to himself gets by way of reward a “dirty slap,” presumably on one of his fattened cheeks, from the object of his concupiscent desire, the winsome chief executive of one of the parastatals under the Minister’s portfolio.

    The scorned Minister strikes back in an ad hominem riposte – or in justification — disclosing that the lady in question has, or has had, four husbands, the implication being that she must be fair game.

    To do maximum damage, he leaves entirely open the matter of whether the marriages were consecutive or concurrent. If consecutive, nothing in our laws forbids them.  If concurrent, that would constitute polyandry, which our laws and custom categorically forbid.

    I gather that the nation’s chief law officer Abubakar Malami (SAN), not one to allow the most tangent breach of the law to escape his watchful attention, has set up a special investigation panel to look into the matter with a view to bringing charges.

    The Assembly abruptly closes shop, and the presiding officer has the mic turned off when proceedings reach the point at which the harried Minister was going to reveal the true names and identities of members of the Assembly who had plundered through unfulfilled or partially fulfilled sweetheart deals the resources of an intervening agency under its supervision

    “It is okay.  It is okay,” the Assembly chorused.   Okay not to reveal the names, that is, and conflict of interest be damned.

    Since the return to a species of democratic rule in 1999, the oversight function of the National Assembly consecrated in the Constitution has morphed into a form of racketeering, a cover for extortion and manipulation.

    During one of  the re-run gubernatorial elections in Ekiti State, the chair of the Assembly’s oversight committee on elections and a ranking senator from one of the political parties contesting the race was found directing operations in the collating room of Independent National Electoral Commission.  Asked what he was doing in such a sensitive setting and at such a sensitive time, he replied calmly that he was performing oversight duties on behalf of the National Assembly.

    If the chair or any member of the Senate’s oversight committee on banking and finance were to be found today lurking in the vaults of the Central Bank or the Mint, you can be sure that he will have a ready answer: oversight duties

    They are already richly rewarded for a raft of duties, pseudo duties, and non-duties. To them, too much is never enough.  They believe, with Oscar Wilde, that nothing succeeds like excess.

    Still in the news:

    A great many of our compatriots, among whom I count myself, have been skeptical of Kogi Governor Yahaya Bello’s proclamation that his domain has been, and remains, a no-go area for the malignant coronavirus.  It can never touch him nor anyone in his domain, he has been insisting.

    It is true that you cannot be in the same space with him (they call him “little napoleon” behind his back, I gather, more in derision than admiration) unless you are decked out like Lagbaja.  It is time to drop our knee-jerk skepticism and take him at his word.  After all, he has been nothing if not unyielding.

    Since Kogi State is now and forever hermetically sealed to the corona virus, it does not need the N100 million grant that the Federal Government is set to award each state to contain and combat the pandemic.

    Bello has accused other states of conjuring up cases of coronavirus disease for the purpose of fraudulently collecting federal money and is on record as having vowed not to follows their despicable example.  So, why pile him with money he has not asked for and does not need?

    We are confident that His Excellency the Valiant Conqueror of the coronavirus, and withal a man of honour, will forcefully reject the blandishment.

  • At the passport office

    At the passport office

    Olatunji Dare

     

    EVEN without the discontinuities spawned by the Covid-19 pandemic, obtaining a Nigerian passport through the prescribed procedure was always fraught.

    Visit any passport-issuing office in Nigeria, and you will find a seething, murmuring crowd of applicants who had been on the scene every working day during the previous week, the week before that, and in all likelihood the week preceding that, and are yet no closer to obtaining the prized document than they were the day they first set foot on the precincts.

    It is not a task for the faint of heart, or the go-it-alone individual, no matter his or her dexterity in navigating all the bureaucratic hoops. Nor does it matter how punctiliously he or she is in filling out the application form.

    It helps if you have a powerful sponsor, know, or can relate to, a key official in the chain who can see the matter through.  If you don’t, the next best thing is to hire a consultant–pardon this necessary dignification – a riff on James Thurber – since we are discussing a momentous issue – who knows the territory inside out:  how the place works, who reports to whom, which palms to grease and how to grease them without leaving fingerprints, and whom the officials trust to deliver without fuss and without ceremony.

    You are virtually guaranteed to obtain your passport the very next day.

    If you don’t have a powerful sponsor and cannot hire a consultant, then you will need luck of the rarest kind or spiritual intervention or both to obtain a passport months after filing.

    Your application may be complete and valid in every material particular, but what if the official who should handle it is perpetually not on seat, or is on leave of absence for the next three months and nobody else in the house can handle your application, since it belongs in a very special category, and only an officer who belongs in that rarefied rank can handle it.

    Unfortunate indeed, but the application cannot move until the officer returns.  You understand, Madam?

    Another scenario:  Everything is shipshape, Madam, as shipshape as can be. There is just one small problem.  Fewer than 100 passport booklets are available at this time, and the office has to practice extreme rationing until a new consignment arrives.  It may happen tomorrow or next year, we just don’t know.  With Covid-19, nothing is certain anymore.  Nothing is given.

    Contemplating these prospects, delivered with critical solemnity by the contractor, the applicant for a passport is reduced to asking rather diffidently whether it meant that nothing would avail.

    But contractor and applicant know deep down that, in Nigeria, something always avails.  They strike a bargain, and the passport that had at some point seemed like a forlorn quest becomes a splendid actuality, to the satisfaction of all the parties concerned, visible and invisible.

    Why do passport seekers submit to this ordeal when they could head to a certain locale within shouting distance of Lion Building in central Lagos and within hours, obtain, on their own terms, no questions asked, and no “go come,” official passport as genuine as any such document ever issued by the Nigeria Immigration Service?

    Because they know no other route?  From lack of capacity to embark on that route?  From an abundance of patience?  From respect for the law and due process? From fear of the consequences if the whole thing came unstuck?

    On to you, graduate students in sociology and social psychology. Something tells me that if you explore these questions with the rigour they call forth, you are more than likely to add a footnote – or even change one – in the literature on the Nigerian character.

    To return to my theme:  obtaining a Nigerian passport on foreign shores is just as fraught.  The process is clean – antiseptically so.

    There is almost no human contact until you appear for the “interview” for “biometric capture.” The process is electronic, online.

    In the United States, they seem to have farmed it out to an Indian-owned entrepreneur who apparently runs some other business or businesses on the side.

    You wish they had contracted such a sensitive matter to a Nigerian, and that the site was not so quick to lure you to other sites to purchase some junk merchandise or service.

    But that is small matter compared to the unhelpfulness of the Chancery in Atlanta, Georgia.  For an application filed in January, they give you an interview date for April.

    They say you can ask for another date, but when you do so on a dedicated email platform, they tell you curtly that your request has been received.

    You follow up and call a number indicated on the Chancery website.  The phone rings and rings and rings, until a recorded voice tells you that the official you want to talk with is not available and that you should please leave a message.  But before you can do so, the same recorded voice tells you that the mailbox is full and is accepting no new messages.

    You call every day for one week running: same result.

    In desperation, you take a chance and write a very courteous letter to senior official at the Chancery telling him of your experience and asking if he would kindly help sort things out.  He does not give you the benefit, nor the courtesy of a reply.

    I was about to write to the Head of the Chancery when the Covid-19 conflagration paralyzed virtually all transactions of an official or commercial nature.

    On the Mission’s website, the April interview date has now been replaced by “Not available.  Please contact Embassy/Mission.” But the Chancery has remained singularly unresponsive.

    The only human contact I have had at the Chancery was with a clerk with another service unit.  He was courteous, told me I had called the wrong number, but seemed eager to help.

    Then, he launched into a long lecture on how the Mission was overwhelmed, and why the waiting for passports was so long and the appointment date could be changed only in the event of a death    in the family, which, God forbid.  But in the event, a death certificate, duly authenticated by a designated authority, had to be attached to the request for the change.

    Seriously.  I am not making this up.

    Previously, to obtain a passport, you only needed to attach two copies of your picture to the application form and sign on the dotted lines.

    They said the arrangement made it all too easy for persons engaged in syndicated crime to obtain multiple passports and to give Nigeria a bad name.

    By requiring applicants to appear in person for “data capture” at the point of issuance, the authorities could be sure that the passport belonged to the person whose name and picture appear on it and to no other, so the authorities claimed.

    Nigeria is the only country I know that insists on this arrangement which inflicts needless financial, physical and emotional pain on applicants.

    That is reason enough for discontinuing the policy. But there is more.  The stipulation does not work.  It serves no useful purpose.

    You can still have as many Nigerian passports as you can pay for, and under as many names as you fancy.

    The United States passport is, next perhaps to its $20 bill, the most widely counterfeited document in the world.

    Yet, you need only supply two pictures with your completed application, and sign on the dotted lines before an official at the local post office to obtain a passport.

    You are not required to travel outside your place of residence.  And the document is mailed to your home within weeks.

    Our level of organisation, I grant, is not cohesive enough to permit that kind of arrangement.

    But an arrangement that inflicts wanton financial, physical and emotional pain on passport seekers is a cruel abuse of Nigerians and their citizen rights.

    Now is the time to end it, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, Honourable Minister of Internal Affairs.