Category: Olatunji Dare

By Olatunji Dare

“We have been there before,” not a few Nigerians would have said with more than a touch of cynicism, having regard to the dismissal of Ibrahim Magu, most recently chair of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).

Weren’t his predecessors in that office – Nuhu Ribadu, Ibrahim Lamorde and Farida Waziri – hounded out in roughly the same circumstances by panicked political officials concerned that the threesome were pursuing their remit with an excess of zeal and fearful that the layers of protection they had woven over the decades to  cover up their corrupt dealings might be yanked off?

So, they struck first.

From their strategic positions in the legislature and the higher bureaucracy, they waged wars of attrition to frustrate, distract and undermine the EFCC.  With help from compromised media outlets, they planted in the public consciousness and embellished at every iteration and reiteration information designed to discredit its chief executive and its key operatives.  It is as if they were following the old boxing maxim that if you kill the head, the body will die.

None of the officials left the agency on his or her own terms.  None received even a grudging commendation for achievements ranging from the modest to the substantial on a mission ranked among the most dangerous of national assignments.  Each departed damaged by a trainload of scurrilous allegations – the more scurrilous, the better; let them prove the charges false, or shut up and put up.

Magu’s on-going predicament is at bottom a variation on an old theme. Even so, the differences between how his predecessors were sent packing and the bureaucratic cum pseudo-judicial torture to which he has been subjected, especially this past fortnight, are startling.

I exaggerate, but not by much, when I compare the manner of his arrest to a kidnapping.  He was on an errand when security officials, armed for lethal combat, besieged his convoy, re-routed it to the Presidential Villa and hauled him before a Presidential Investigation Panel (PIP) which immediately slapped on him a battery of charges ranging from criminal breach of trust to incompetence and “insubordination.”

His trial had begun in earnest, before a panel assembled in secrecy by the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami (SAN), reportedly with the backing of President Muhammadu Buhari.  Since his arrest, he has been held in detention by the police.

It is notorious that Buhari had been under tremendous pressure from key figures in the National Assembly, business barons who operate on the principle that nothing succeeds like wheeling and dealing in public contracts, and by some so-called politically exposed persons who command vast wealth of dubious provenance.

Buhari appeared to be resisting these loud, well-orchestrated demands.  When Magu’s term ended, he did not name another official to replace him. But he did not nominate Magu for fresh term nor extend his tenure, perhaps fearing certain defeat in the National Assembly.  And so, by design or default, Magu remained in office, lulled into a false sense of security – until they came for him.

The trial, beg your pardon, investigation, is being conducted in an atmosphere of intense prejudicial publicity.  Hardly a day passes without some new elements added to the Magu’s alleged misdeeds in office.  A visitor to Nigeria might indeed be led to believe that Magu has been the trouble with Nigeria since he took office if not much earlier, a personification of the corruption that is synonymous with Nigeria’s international profile; an official who, given a remit to check official corruption, turned it into a licence to transfer public assets to himself and his cronies on a scale almost beyond belief.

There is something almost Kafkaesque about some aspects of the proceedings.  Effectively in captivity, Magu has had no access to material witnesses and documents that would enable him respond to the charges he is facing.  Even Magu’s attorney, Wahab Shittu, has complained that he has had no access to the panel’s terms of reference, without which he cannot represent his client robustly.

As I have noted, the battery of charges is truly formidable.  It is not a rushed job, and certainly could not have been prepared overnight.  The attentive public has a right to assume that the allegations would have been painstakingly investigated before they were parlayed into substantive charges.  And from there, the logical recourse would be to a court of law.

Instead, we have a panel whose brief, it must be supposed, is to investigate the allegations and determine their validity.  And then, what? Recommend a substantive trial if it is satisfied that the established facts warrant prosecution, or in the absence of such a determination, dismiss the charges.

In the United States, it belongs in the province of a grand jury that makes this kind of determination. Our body of laws makes no provision for such an institution.  But I have it on the authority of the Attorney-General that the special investigation panel is fully backed by our laws.  That may well be the case.

But is the whole thing, not just another judicial fudge, one of the many that have dogged the tenure of one of most inventive and intensely political attorneys-general (shades of ROA Akinjide, without the forensic brilliance) of the federation ever.  Making sweeping, categorical charges first and investigating later does not accord with the spirit of our laws.

Nor do our laws permit any official to be a judge in his or own cause, as the Attorney-General appears to be doing.  Of the six members of the investigating panel, two are from his office and report directly to him.  At least one other, is a department over which he has jurisdiction.

One cannot assert categorically that the panel is rigged, despite Malami’s scarcely-veiled resolve to see the back of the former EFCC chief.  But the whole thing raises questions of fairness, and of due protection under the law.

Nor does the appearance of a conflict of interest end there.  One of the charges levelled at Magu is “insubordination” to the Attorney-General.  That makes the whole thing appear personal – and petty, too, it is necessary to insist.  Even in the elastic mandate Malami claims, at what point did Magu’s “insubordination” to a superior in a bureaucracy governed by the General Orders and administrative rules morph into a penal crime?

As the Bard might have said, the man doth complain too much.   And he doth overreach, too.

To lend a veneer of respectability and legality to the proceedings, they trotted one of Nigeria’s most respected jurists, the Hon Justice Isa Salami, out of retirement, and named him chair of the investigative panel – the same jurist that a posse of powerful political figures who share Malami’s world view had tried to destroy in a sustained campaign of calumny, besides which Magu’s current ordeal almost seems like a compliment.

It is with great pride that I number myself among a handful of influential media figures and well-regarded legal scholars who defended Justice Salami’s honour and integrity at every point, culminating in his rehabilitation and in his being restored to his rightful place in our judicial history.

Something tells me that Justice Salami will have satisfied himself that the panel has proper legal standing, and had agreed to serve from a sense of duty.  But there are duties and there are duties, and I must say, with all due respect, that he should have in this matter exercised a finer sense of discrimination. He should have advised that Magu be brought to trial before the regular courts based on the indictment, without the mediation of an investigative panel.

We must hope that this troubling expedient does not go on to constitute a precedent.  The panel is not exactly a kangaroo court but in concept if not in practice, it bears striking resemblances to one. Magu should be granted bail and, together with his attorneys, granted access to all the human and documentary material he needs to respond to the grave charges he faces.

Nigerians, even those suspected of high crimes, deserve better.  So does our fledgling democracy.

Olatunji Dare

See how they have been tumbling, like ninepins.

Across the United States and Europe, monuments erected often in mythic proportions over the centuries to men regarded as heroes not just of the epoch but of History have come tumbling down in the past three weeks, felled by those who had looked on them with indifference or had in silence felt taunted, haunted, cruelly violated even, by the presence of those images in those spaces.

Men who held other men, women and children as common property, yet composed some of the noblest literary monuments to human freedom. Generals who fought gallantly and tenaciously in epic battles to preserve the right to enslave fellow humans. Absentee kings who stole entire countries and drove the indigenous people to near extinction through brute labour

Merchants who built untold wealth through trafficking men and women and children of the darker races across the oceans to be traded like merchandise, with one half of the cargo  perished in the horrors of the so-called Middle Passage and dumped in the ocean.  The traffickers were nevertheless canonized as genuine philanthropists, for bequeathing a tiny portion of their profit from this pernicious trade to worthy causes.

Scholars and statesmen whose enduring fame rests in part on denying the humanity of others or rejecting the claims of such persons to being humans.

Washington DC. protesters pulled down and burned the statue of Confederate General Albert General Albert Pike. The police in the city had to intervene to save the statute of Andrew Jackson, the 8th president of the United States, who instituted policies that resulted in the forced migration of tens of thousands of Native Americans.

In Maryland, they brought down the statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and dumped Christopher Columbus’s statute in the sea, perhaps so that his admirers would not feel neglected.

In Charleston, South Carolina, the statue John Calhoun, arch-defender of the plantation system of enslavement and former U. S.  Vice president, John Calhoun, was dismantled overnight and the pieces carted away to storage, following a vote by the City council.

Princeton’s Trustees said Wilson’s racism was “significant and consequential” even by the standards of his own time, adding that “his racist thinking and politics made him “an inappropriate namesake for an institution whose scholars, students and alumni must stand firmly against racism in all its forms.”

Across the Atlantic, the sun was about to set on Winston Churchill’s statute on Parliament Square in London when the police intervened. Protesters were set to tear it down and dump it in the Thames, on account of his blatant racism.

“I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas,” he said in 1937, in a speech before the House of Commons.  “I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilised tribes.”  No prizes for figuring out those the original British Bulldog he had in mind.

He was reviving a train of thought he had voiced some twenty years earlier as president the British Air Council.  “I do not admit… that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia… by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race… has come in and taken its place,” he had said then.

When British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan made his historic “wind of change” speech before South Africa’s parliament in 1964, Churchill criticized him roundly, saying he should not have gone to the apartheid bastion “to encourage those blackamoors.”

His coarse and ingrained racism came to the surface when he wondered aloud how black people could know that they had the measles.    They not only knew when they had the measles, it should be said for the benefit of Churchill’s fellow travelers, they devised long, long ago, an effective remedy for containing and curing it, 100 per cent local content, and no harmful side effects.  They should go check it out

Not since the collapse of the Soviet Union when jubilant citizens across the world tore down statues of Lenin and other leaders of the communist world and heaped all manner of indignities on them has the world witnessed the rejoicing of recent weeks.

Why now?

The contributory factors are legion, dating back from the enduring memories of the era of enslavement and time of Jim Crow, to the present age of systemic racism in which, according to the influential New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, who was reared in apartheid South Africa, in which “a black life is worth less than a white life,” and the calculus is so woven into the national consciousness that people hardly remark it.

I would argue, however, that more than anything else, the barbarous murder of George Floyd in police custody on suspicion of making a purchase with a fake $20 bill, in Minneapolis, in the American Midwest, was the fuse that lit this conflagration.

Even now, I can see him in my mind’s eye, both hands cuffed behind his back, the left side of his face grazing the tarmac and secured firmly there by the left knee of officer Derek Chauvin  resting resolutely on his neck while two officers hold him down by force and a fourth, unperturbed, makes small talk with horrified bystanders.

The world literally heard Floyd begging for his life, summoning his waning strength to tell his executioners over and over that he cannot breath, and to call out to his deceased mother.  The world saw his life snuffed out on that tarmac, just like that, as the Afrobeat legend Fela Anikulapo-Kuti would say.

Even for the generations that have grown used to seeing such casual barbarities and unconscionable cruelties visited on black persons, this was too much.  The revulsion was compounded by the release of videos showing a father-and-son team hunting down and killing Ahmaud Auberry for the atrocious crime of jogging while black. And of Rayshard Brooks, 27, who dozed off in the driveway of a fast-food restaurant only to end up dead, just like that, when the police moved to arrest him in the manner they know best.

It is undeniable that while much has changed in America, the essence has remained the same. Throughout American history, Roger Cohen wrote two weeks ago, “white cruelty in keeping blacks down has been backed only by white ingenuity in finding new ways to do so.” For the foreseeable future, America will continue to operate as it always has:  in the belief that a white life is worth much more than a black life.

It was no aberration that when they went to arrest the white supremacist Dylann Roof whose hand was literally dripping with the blood of nine black men and women he had just killed as they were studying the word of God in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, they didn’t rush him.  They didn’t shackle him.  They went about it with the utmost courtesy, even buying him lunch at a fast-food restaurant.

Smashing monuments here, renaming institutions elsewhere and consigning into disesteem, if not villainy, those who had for centuries enjoyed a gratuitous reputation for nobility, is not going to change in the condition of black people in America. But even it only serves to alert the public to alternative narratives, especially the narratives of victims, it would be an enduring turning point.

Not least among the likely consequences of the movement that has recently seized the global imagination is a heightened demand across nations for a re-examination and revaluation of those the public has been conditioned to regard as heroes and makers of history

Military president Ibrahim Babangida did more than any other person to destroy higher education in Nigeria.  Should the university named for him in Lapai, Niger State, get to keep its name? Should other Nigerian universities named for odious characters get to keep their soiled identities? Should the reputations of native monarchs of old who delivered their people into enslavement survive the critical interrogation already afoot elsewhere?

Should the sports stadium, the military barracks and a raft of other facilities named for Sani Abacha continue to be saddled with his loathsome identity?

Let the debate begin.

Olatunji Dare

 

 

EACH year, as the approaching anniversary of “June 12” gathers momentum on the way to becoming an iconic event in Nigeria’s political history, I often contemplated the state of mind  for those who would have been canonised by it but chose to enter into desperate conspiracies with others to emasculate it.

Military President Ibrahim Babangida is languishing in his malignant lair in Minna, grateful for the occasional visitor.  He needs the visitor more than the visitor needs him anyway.  Arthur Nzeribe is sharing the same fate on the Oguta Lakeside, in Imo State.

The last time we heard from David Mark, three-term senate president and owner of two golf courses in Europe, was trying to corral the National Assembly into building, equipping and naming a medical university of medical sciences for himself in his hometown Otukpo, in Benue State.  “From those to whom much has been given, nothing is expected” may well be his personal philosophy.

Professor Ben Nwabueze, our own Lord Dicey, who staked his matchless reputation on defending, if not justifying a brazen assault on democracy and the rule of law with few parallels, and has denounced attempts to right that historic perversion just as zestfully, seems to have been holding his fire lately.  He knows a lost cause when he sees one.

Humphrey Nwosu is still trying to perfect the supreme illogic of holding himself up as the epitome  of rectitude in conducting the election and at the same time holding up the military ruler who annulled it as a courageous and committed patriot.

On this anniversary, I have been reflecting on the roles of two of them, Nwosu and Shonekan, in the drama, beginning with Shonekan.

In December 1992, it was being bruited that military President Ibrahim Babangida was about to set up a Transitional Council, mandated to complete what remained of a transition programme that has been twisted out of shape by a canny military ruler bent on holding on to power.   The major items on its remit were the presidential election, and arrangements for a smooth transfer of power.

Four eminent figures were said to be under consideration to head the Council:  business mogul MKO Abiola, the renowned economist and public intellectual, Dr Pius Okigbo, Second-Republic Senator, Cornelius Adebayo, a person of impeccable progressive credentials, and Ernest Shonekan, recently retired chairman of the Unilever affiliate, the United Africa Company of Nigeria (UACN) plc.

What I knew about Okigbo and Adebayo told me that they would reject the offer on the threshold.  Of Abiola and Shonekan, I was not sure.  But something had told me long before Babangida made a virtue and an art on inconstancy that the programme would come to grief, and with it all those who embraced it.

So I asked retired General Olusegun Obasanjo to intervene and save Abiola and Shonekan from themselves.  Abiola, it turned out, had needed no dissuading.  But Shonekan said Unilever had advised him to accept, and that the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office would deploy its influence to ensure his success.

If Shonekan found that what he was getting was not what he had bargained for, what would he do?  Did Obasanjo put that question to Shonekan?

Shonekan had replied, Obasanjo told me, that he had made it clear to Babangida that he would not stay in office beyond the advertised term of the Council, and that if Babangida chose to stay in office beyond then, Bagbangida would then know the stuff Shonekan was made of.

Did Obasanjo believe him?

“Let us just say that Ernest is naïve or ambitious or both,” he said.

Shortly after Shonekan took office, I called his chief of staff, Isaac Aluko-Olokun, a holdover from his UACN Days.  I told him I was persuaded that Shonekan would find out that he had painted himself into a corner.  But Shonekan need no suffer in silence.  If he was concerned to signal to the public that his name was being taken in vain, he could detail Aluko-Olokun to brief me in confidence from time to time, and I would use my column in The Guardian and other assets to do the job.

Aluko-Olokun was ecstatic.  He said he would be flying in at the weekned to meet with me to discuss a discreet contact mechanism   Two weeks passed, and he had not called.  I reminded him that the offer remained open.   Another two weeks, and still, he had not called. He never did.  Shonekan soldiered on grimly as head of the doomed Interim National Government, until Sani Abacha ended his pretence and his misery.

Months later, when I ran into Aluko-Olokun at a diplomatic event, he tried to turn the tables on me.  Each time my column appeared, he said, Shonekan literally pulled him up and queried:  “But you told me this man is our friend?”

Humphrey Nwosu had a reputation for brilliance and volubility and the dramatic flourish.  Reporters soon learned on account of the latter to keep measured distances from him whenever he was giving a news conference.  He spoke with his arms and his feet, and as he lurched from one side to the other and leaned to and fro in the manner of Ray Charles at the keyboard, they feared that he might inadvertently kick someone in the groin or give someone a black eye, administer a head butt.

For 20 years, Nwosu had harboured, at great cost to his body and mind the dark secrets of the election saga.  Then in early June, 2013, he announced sensationally that he would launch a no-holds-barred book on the 20th anniversary of the historic poll.

Anticipating the event, I had speculated that Nwosu must have decided to unburden himself of those dark secrets for one of three reasons, or a combination thereof:

One:  Those who had sworn him to secrecy on pain of the direst consequences might have freed him from the pact.  If there was no such pact, why would the usually voluble, combative and self-righteous professor clam up for 20 years, on a matter that raised fundamental questions about his probity and integrity?

Two:  Those who had sworn Nwosu to secrecy had vetted the book thoroughly.

Three:  Nwosu had decided to renounce the pact and damn the consequences.

It was puzzling that Nwosu had chosen to launch his book not in Lagos, the bastion of the progressive democratic alliance that had kept the resistance alive, but in Abuja, the base of the annulment’s enablers. Even more puzzling was his giving places of honour to Ibrahim Babangida, and to Shonekan, the naïve and conniving beneficiary of the annulment

Still, I allowed that Nwosu’s book was likely to constitute “more than a footnote” to the June 12 saga, the 20th anniversary of which was being celebrated that day.

In the book, with the ponderous title, Laying the Foundation for Nigeria’s Democracy:  My Account of June 12 Presidential Election and its Annulment, Nwosu delivered far less than he had promised.

The suspicion endures to this day that he had entered into a pact with Babangida and his wrecking           crew to tell only so much of the story and tell it in a way that glories the process the led to the election, without fixing any blame for its perfidious culmination.  And, as a bonus, Nwosu was free to praise himself to his heart’s content.

During the two weeks between which Babangida stopped further announcement of results, and then    voided them, and thereafter scrapped the election laws and their machinery, Nwosu had gone missing.  Whereabouts unknown.

When the security people finally produced him, a mystery lady by his side told the media that they had  been away at a secret rendezvous enjoying a second honeymoon.    Amid the wreckage and ruins of her husband’s professional career and reputation?

Nwosu has never addressed this yawning gap in his biography.

Nwosu revealed little that the public did not know.  He provided no critical insight.  For such, he drew on a memoir by another principal actor in the drama, Omo Omoruyi, director-general of the defunct Centre for Democratic Studies, and rather too liberally on a 1998 Tell magazine interview with Colonel Abubakar Dangiwa Umar, the dissident officer who stood militantly against the annulment.

Based on his account, Nwosu might as well have been an indifferent spectator in the rafters, not a ring-side observer, much less a major participant-observer.

 

 

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By Olatunji Dare

Even after the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the National Republican Convention (NRC) had chosen Bashorun MKO Abiola and Alhaji Bashir Tofa, respectively, as their presidential candidates, few among Nigerians who had followed the labyrinthine path of General Ibrahim Babangida’s transition programme could state with any confidence that the election scheduled for June 12, 1993, would indeed take place.

The Association For a Better Nigeria (ABN), a rootles organisation led by the maverick politician and former arms dealer, Arthur Nzeribe, and an assortment of shadowy characters that went by such names as “Dr Keith Atkins” and “Dr Ahmed Farouk” were campaigning enthusiastically for Babangida to remain in power for at least four more years, in clear breach of a decree prohibiting such advocacy.

The regime’s Information Secretary, Comrade Uche Chukwumerije, told me in a private conversation that when he sought to turn the artillery of the federal propaganda machine against Nzeribe and company, he was told to hold his fire.  Those organisations, he said he was told from on high, were merely exercising the fundamental human rights that the regime itself had vowed to uphold.

On the eve of the election, S.G. Ikoku, the First Republic left-wing politician and socialist theoretician who had swung to the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, submitted to Babangida, on behalf of the no  less spectral “Council of Elder Statesmen” a “Report” — not to be confused with a mere proposal — on a presidential government modelled on France’s  Fifth Republic, long after the constitution that was supposed to govern Nigeria’s projected Third Republic which, had been signed into law.

Babangida received the “Report,” which dripped with contempt for the two official political parties with the solemnity befitting a commissioned job.

Babangida himself was setting up and equipping a special strike force, the Republican Guards, on the model of Iraq President Saddam Hussein’s outfit of the same name.  If he was truly set to go, many were asking, why would he be embarking on such a project?  Why not leave it to the in-coming president to decide whether such a unit was warranted, and then to fashion it in his own image?

The newspapers were awash with unsigned advertisements excoriating the two presidential candidates for all manner of misconduct, ranging from alleged purloining of the opponent’s private documents to religious fanaticism.  Dire warnings and rumours of dark plots perfused the country.

From his home in the UK, Second Republic fugitive minister Umaru Dikko, apparently no longer fearful of being shipped home in a crate, was said to have written a letter to the Kaduna Mafia, an inchoate assemblage of Northerners credited with enormous influence and power, warning that under no circumstances should a Southerner be allowed to win power.

As if to add poignancy to Dikko’s rumoured epistle, allegations were swirling that Abiola and a conclave of Yoruba elders had completed plans to move the federal capital back to Lagos from Abuja if Abiola won.  And if Abiola lost, Igbo property in the Yoruba country was marked for destruction.

Panicked motorists formed long and disorderly queues everywhere in the wake of a petroleum and gas workers’ strike.  A breakdown in electricity and water supplies added to the general confusion and reinforced doubts about whether the election would hold

Given these and other signals, to say nothing of Babangida’s own record of inconstancy, it required a  huge leap of faith to believe that the presidential election would hold.  Not only those the regime had denounced time and again as “sceptics and cynics” entertained strong doubts about the election; senior diplomats in the embassies of the United States, Canada and major European nations with whom I compared intelligence from time to time had all but concluded that the election would not take place.

To resolve my own doubts, I asked my friend and veteran journalist, Dr Dokun Bojuwade, to tell his principal,  Uche Chukwumerije, that I would like to meet with him at his earliest convenience.  Based on previous interactions, I felt I could claim a kindred spirit, with the Secretary, if not a thriving friendship.   We met at his residence in Ikoyi, Lagos, on Friday, June 4.

Dispensing with the usual preliminaries, I asked him pointedly whether the presidential election would hold.

He said he could not answer categorically, but the indications were that it would not hold.  He said he would be flying to Abuja the next day, to return to Lagos the following Tuesday and would be in a position to tell me categorically whether the election would hold if I looked him up

Chukwumerije did not return to Lagos that Tuesday.  Major developments were unfolding. That very day, the Abuja High Court, Justice Bassey Ikpeme presiding, ordered National Electoral Commission (NEC) chairman Humphrey Nwosu, Federal Attorney-General Clement Akpamgbo and military president Ibrahim Babangida to appear before her on Wed, June 8, to show cause why the presidential election scheduled for June 12, should not be stopped.

Ikpeme, it would turn out, and had only recently been appointed a judge, and was in fact handling her first case on the Bench.  Previously, she had practised in Akpamgbo’s law offices, and was widely reported to be romantically linked with him.

Ikpeme’s order stemmed from a petition by Nzeribe’s ABN.  The suit had been filed on May 18, but as Nwosu would reveal some 16 years later, it was not served on NEC until four days to the election. Two days later, on June 9, in the dead of night, Justice Ikpeme issued an injunction restraining NEC from conducting the election.

But, this was no blanket injunction, for Justice Ikpeme noted that as the law stood, the court lacked jurisdiction in the matter.

The law was indeed clear.  It had been invoked in 1992 by the Court of Appeal, a superior tribunal, to deny a petition, Komolafe v Omole (1 NWLR 213 1993), through which a candidate sought to restrain NEC from conducting an election into the Senate.

For the next 16 hours or so, there was no clear indication that the election would hold.  It was well past lunchtime on Friday, June 11, that NEC finally announced, with the eleventh-hour approval of the Armed Forces Ruling Council, that the election would hold, Justice Ikpeme and the ABN notwithstanding.

Earlier that day, the United States Government had issued, a statement, per Michael O’Brien, director of the United States Information Service at the Embassy of the United States, that it would consider any postponement of the election unacceptable.  The tone was watered down later, but the import was clear:  Postponement of the election would not bode well for relations with Nigeria.

Two days to the election, no polling booths had been erected in Lagos or the nation’s major cities; no voters’ lists were on display.  It required a degree of credulity bordering on extreme gullibility to wager that the election would hold as schedule.

The regime’s plan was to seize on Justice Ikpeme’s ruling and the contrived, lavishly-rewarded “solidarity” visits that were sure to follow, as pretexts for holding on to power.  With that option now foreclosed, a new plan had to be devised.

Stage the election, confident that in the prevailing climate of uncertainty, it would end in massive confusion or fail to win general acceptance.

Or hold the election and cancel the results.  The professional agitators and rabble-rousers would stir things up, to be sure.  But,  it would all fizzle out within two weeks.  Two weeks at most, Babangida reckoned.  He knew  his Nigerians, he had boasted.

This choice would sweep him out of power, consign him to one of the most ignoble places in the nation’s history, plunge the country into an abyss from which it has not wholly emerged, and secure Abiola’s place as a martyr for the democratic struggle in Nigeria.

 

 

By Olatunji Dare

Rest easy, friend.

Coronavirus 419 is not a new, deadlier and more insidious strain of the coronavirus Covid-19, the ravenous predator that has carved a trail of blight and despair and desolation and misery on a Biblical scale, claiming as of last week some 400, 000 lives worldwide, among them 342 Nigerians, the latter probably a gross undercount, given the nation’s notoriously shabby recordkeeping.

Coronavirus 419 is not even a virus in the epidemiological sense. Drawing on the familiar meaning of the suffix in our statute books and in our common usage, I coined the term to subsume the scams, the swindles, the knavery and the buffoonery that have coalesced into a growth industry around COVID-19.

Hereafter, we shall call that industry COVID-419, to distinguish it from the epidemiological manifestation.

No prizes for figuring out the undisputable runaway winner of COVID-419 sweepstakes in the global category:  Donald Trump, the man-child who wears the garb of president of the United States, a disgrace to that office and withal a person who defiles everything he touches and brings into disrepute every cause he embraces.

He denies its existence, plays down its menace, blames everyone except himself for the heavy toll it has taken on American lives – 110, 000 at the last count; peddles sham cures, prescribes junk but life-threatening medication, raises false hopes that a sure-fire vaccine is on the threshold, bullies medical experts into silence or hounds them into retirement.

Having run out of stunts that it would be courteous to call infantile even as the coronavirus tightened its malignant grip on America and widened its destructive path, Trump declared victory and turned his ever- fleeting attention to reopening the greatest economy in the world that it had taken him just three years in office to build, only for it to be pulverized by the Coronavirus.

Last week, he was declaring victory on that front as well, based on a phenomenal job growth that defied rhyme and reason.  The aftermath of the gruesome murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minnesota was still roiling more than 175 cities in the United States and dozens more across the world but Trump thought nothing of invoking Floyd’s memory to celebrate a phantom uptick as a happy development for everyone, Floyd especially.

Nobody has ever accused Trump of decency.

The first-place prize for COVID -419 in the African category will have to be awarded to President Andry Raejolina of the Indian Ocean nation of Madagascar.

No sooner had the coronavirus attained pandemic status than Madagascar announced sensationally that it had developed a herbal medicine cure for coronavirus.  He had challenged experts in his country to produce a local remedy and they had delivered in record time.

At the colorful product launch, Raejolina had gulped down a judicious amount of the bottled drink, COVID-Organics, and authoritatively pronounced it safe for all, including children.  He said it had been tested certified by the Malagasy Institute of Applied Research.

Two individuals had participated in the test, and the concoction had flushed out their bodies whatever was ailing them in three short weeks.  And the tests had produced clear and unassailable evidence of the efficacy and safety of the medicine in just seven days.  Nor was that all. It has the unique merit of doubling as prophylactic and curative for coronavirus disease.

The packaging, from the elegant bottle to the arresting label, was slick.  I have no doubt that when the medicine becomes available shortly as an injection, the presentation will be no less captivating.  Full marks to the product managers on those scores which have been the bane of Africa’s export trade.

Rajoelina had a word, a preemptive blow of sorts, for the doubters and denialists whom we shall always have amongst us:  Do not denigrate this pharmaceutical breakthrough just because it is from Africa.  Had it been produced in France or Germany or even Korea, would they turn their noses at it?

In the spirit of African brotherhood, Rajoelina ferried shipments of COVID Organics to some key African countries.  Nigeria’s allotment was presented to President Muhammadu Buhari at a solemn ceremony in Abuja by the visiting President of Guinea-Bissau, Umaru Sissoco Embalo.

Even in Africa, there is no free lunch these days.  And so, the bill arrived shortly thereafter:  $170, 000,  or about N68 million, for a product that Nigeria had not asked for, and the efficacy and safety of which                  are yet to win iron-clad international certification.  That amount, by the way, is enough, to build and equip a primary healthcare facility in a rural area, even allowing for the usual shenanigans, I gather.

And, mind you, not a whiff of the concoction had yet titillated the nostrils of the principal officers of state;  not a drop had landed in the test tubes of the certifying authorities before the bill collector came calling.  That is un-African, sir.

This marketing by ambush, not COVID Organics and the properties claimed for it, is what has earned Madagascar’s President Rajoelina the first-place prize for Coronavirus 419 (or COVID 419) in the African category.

The first-place winner in the Nigerian category, I can now report, is by the grace of Attorney-General Abubakar Malami (SAN) and our wayward courts, the Executive Governor of Kogi, the Confluence State, Alhaji Yahaya Bello.  Why, by the way, does he have that startled look of a deer caught in the headlights  of a vehicle at night in the stock picture that runs with stories about him in the media?

Bello, it is hardly necessary to recall, had without fear and without research, declared his domain impregnable to the coronavirus and off-limits to the disease it spawns, though it has a common border  with 10 of Nigeria’s 36 states and is the gateway to the nation’s capital Abuja and the North.

Other than a special app he implausibly claimed to have developed and distributed throughout Kogi, he has been unable to furnish any reason for Kogi’s special dispensation in the matter. It is as though he regards it as an abomination for any state to harbor a single case of the affliction that kills far fewer people than malaria fever does.

To mention Coronavirus disease and Kogi in the same breath almost renders him apoplectic. To Bello, that is the epidemiological equivalent of treason.

Then, last week, the bubble burst.

A case of the affliction was reported in my hometown Kabba.  Bello went ballistic, placing the entire area in a “total lockdown,” effective immediately, for the next two weeks.

While it lasted, no movement would be permitted even from one house to the next, for any purpose whatsoever.  No movement of vehicles would be countenanced. Medical personnel would go from house to house to administer tests for Coronavirus.  Relief materials, alias palliatives, would be distributed in like manner.  The police would flood the area to enforce strict compliance, and the media would furnish in-depth reports.

In a moment of sobriety, Bello announced that the total lockdown would now start the day after, to allow residents to stock up on food and supplies and withdraw money from the banks, and conclude transactions  in progress.

In the event, the lockdown ended the day it began.  The alleged index case has tested negative, and so had members of his family.  No other persons were tested.  The state had neither the personnel nor the equipment.  It had no palliatives to distribute.  The whole thing was bluff and bluster.

Nevertheless, case proven beyond a reasonable doubt:  No coronavirus in Kogi, officials exulted.

Bello must be running out of stunts. But his first-place prize in the race so far for Coronavirus 419 (or COVID-419) in the national category was well and truly earned.

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By Olatunji Dare

When President Olusegun Obasanjo named retired General Abdullahi Mohammed his Chief of Staff shortly after taking office in 1999, the event caused hardly a stir.

It was a carryover from Obasanjo’s military days and stemmed from a desire to have as his gatekeeper a fellow military man who would control access to his principal, organize his workload and workflow with the discipline and efficiency Obasanjo had, according to his contemporary General TY Danjuma, brought to his duties as Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters, when General Murtala Muhammad was Head of State,

Before his retirement, General Abdullahi was the well—regarded director-general of the National Security Organisation. That position may also have informed his selection as Obasanjo’s chief of staff, with a remit to keep a watchful eye on the shop, monitor and keep a tight rein on official communications, and help manage efficiently what may well be a president’s most precious asset: his time.

Considering the myriad of issues competing for the president’s attention at any given moment, that was no easy task.

Nevertheless, the position was that of a factotum. It had no place in the Constitution. It was a creation of the president and existed at his pleasure.   Gen. Abdullahi performed only such tasks as Obasanjo assigned him, and Obasanjo left no room for any of his appointees to entertain any doubt about who was in charge.

There is a school of thought that sees the chief of staff as a fixer-in-residence for his principal, the fellow who does the dirty work or absorbs the blame. That is not Obasanjo’s conception of the role. Obasanjo needs no fixer.  Wherever any fixing is warranted, he does it himself and moves on.  Tony Anenih was the PDP’s fixer, not Obasanjo’s.

Gen Abdullahi certainly knew his place.  His modest, self-effacing persona perfectly complemented that of his principal’s hand-on, often-in-your face style. It is a measure of his suitability and Obasanjo[s judgement thereof that he lasted so long in that office without stirring controversy and without scandal

Nor did the attentive public entertain any illusions as to the place of the president’s chief of staff in the scheme of things.  There was no dancing, no rejoicing in the streets on Gen Abdullahi’s appointment and no newspaper advertisements congratulating him on the occasion. After all, Obasanjo’s predecessor as elected president, Shehu Shagari, also had a chief of staff, but the fellow is remembered today mainly for changing his name from Michael Prest to Mikhail or Mukaila Prest.

The usual stakeholders placed no notices in the media remarking Obasanjo’s patriotism, wisdom and commitment to national unity in appointing their illustrious, dutiful, high-achieving son, daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, course mate, club member, to the exalted position and pledging in consequence their unalloyed loyalty, unflinching support, and wholehearted cooperation.

Obasanjo’s laid-back successor Umaru Yar’Adua had no chief of staff, only a (chief?) private secretary, the spectral David Edevbie, planted in the Presidency by the calculating former Governor of Delta State, James Ibori, later a model inmate and now global chair of the alumni of Her Britannic Majesty’s Correctional Facilities System.

Edevbie had served as a commissioner for finance in Ibori’s Administration with great distinction that few were surprised at his promotion to the strategic post of private secretary to the President.  Edevbie’s orders, it was rumored at the time, included monitoring closely and reporting on the status of the EFCC’s ongoing case to bring Ibori to justice on charges of larceny on a scale almost beyond belief, and on Ibori’s counter offensive, aided by police Inspector-General Mike Okiro to take the EFCC’s chairman, Nuhu Ribadu, out of reckoning.

President Goodluck Jonathan had two chiefs of staff, Mike Oghiadomhe, a former deputy governor of Edo State, and retired Brig-Gen Jones Arogbofa.  Neither of them made a difference in his bumbling performance.  I have it on the highest authority that Jonathan rarely mastered his briefing papers and often dozed off at meetings he had himself convened to discuss important issues.   Too much carousing the previous night with characters who had no business being in such a hallowed space, I was told.

President Muhammadu Buhari revived the office of Chief of Staff on taking office, and it quickly became perhaps the most powerful position in the cabinet.  Kyari was not just chief of staff to the president, he was chief of the President’s cabinet.  Buhari himself indicated that much when he directed ministers wishing to see him to clear first with Kyari.

A chief of staff with that kind of remit certainly suited Buhari’s laid-back approach and what some have interpreted as his predilection for reigning rather than governing. But could Buhari have set out to create another locus of power beside himself?

Or did Kyari, seeing an opening, accumulate so much power to himself that, at the time he died last month from coronavirus disease, not a few Nigerians blamed the country’s woes on him, believing that he was for all practical purposes the one minding the shop?

To reframe the matter:  Does the office make the holder, or is the holder that makes the office?

Chief Ernest Shonekan was the designated “Head of Government” in military president Ibrahim  Babangida’s Transition Council, charged expressly with completing what remained of the stalled transition to democratic rule.  Even under a military rule reputed for its duplicity, and despite its contrived ambiguity, the remit was elastic enough for a creative and well-meaning incumbent with an eye on history to pursue faithfully.

Not Shonekan.  Soon after the Council went into business, its members discovered that Shonekan merely initialed their memos and forwarded them to Babangida without comment, Information Secretary Uche Chukwumerije, told me.  Subsequently, they sent their memos directly to Babangida.  Shonekan had in effect consigned himself to irrelevance in the scheme of things.

On the other hand, there have been unelected officials who, operating within the most circumscribed framework and holding unremarkable positions, gathered by accretion a great deal of power to themselves – power and influence well beyond what they most liberal remit could have sanctioned – and deployed it to change the entire landscape for better or worse.

One of the best illustrations of that phenomenon is the subject of Robert Caro’s 1974 engrossing biography, The Power Broker:  Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.  Robert Moses, a city planner, served as Parks Commissioner and in several identical posts in New York for more than three decades.     By means subtle and brazen, he outmaneuvered City Hall, elected mayors and state assemblies and state governors in making metropolitan New York what it is today for better and for worse.

All of which brings us to the appointment of Professor Ibrahim Gambari as Chief of Staff to the president, to succeed Abba Kyari.

From much of the commentary that has followed, and I suspect from his personal correspondence, you would think that Buhari had abdicated and yielded the office to Gambari.  Even the Ilorin Royal Court, of which Gambari is a scion, has weighed in, congratulating Buhari on the wisdom of the choice.  Great things are expected of him.

Personally, given his dazzling résumé, I think the genial professor is overqualified for the position.  He has no business being anyone’s chief of staff.  He should have thanked the president and declined.  But he probably subscribes to the tradition that if the president asks you for a lawful and not unreasonable favour, you should not refuse.  Plus, he probably sees it as the latest in a very long line of calls to service.

Those who expect him to work miracles will be disappointed.  From his media interview, it is clear he regards the office as one of modest possibilities.  He will probably have to work around the edges to invest the Presidency with firmer purpose, clarity and direction, especially as regards domestic policy.

That would be no small achievement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Olatunji Dare

In the time of virtual reality, alternative facts and a raging pandemic fueled by an infodemic of like intensity, it is no surprise that denialism is also on the ascent.

Not skepticism, which is a healthy antidote to dogmatism, but flat-out rejection of evidence and experience, of probability and possibility, and of the manifestation of things.  Skepticism is often rooted in superior knowledge.  The denialist disdains knowledge and mocks expertise.

According to a recent survey of some 20,000 subject across Africa conducted by a public-private outfit, one of every 25 respondents stated categorically that the coronavirus could not touch them. There is doubtless a hint of denialism in this, but I would rather put it down to fatalism and superstition, or sheer conceit.

I am here reminded of the fellow who used to be my driver.  He never tired of declaring that “disease no dey kill African man.” Not once did I hear him say “disease no dey land African man for hospital,” though I always had to pay his medical bills.

For the sign of these times, look no farther than the on-going coronavirus epidemic.

The denialist-in-chief is of course Donald Trump, president of the United States.  With the coronavirus claiming more than more than 2,000 lives every single day in the United States and counting, and with hardly any let-up in the rate of transmission, Trump has all but proclaimed victory and moved on, with all the instrumentalities of his mighty office, to his reelection campaign.

Now, the really compelling task is to make America greater still and to build in place of the depredations wrought by the coronavirus the greatest economy the world has ever seen and will ever know, far surpassing the one he had built in just three years in office – two years actually, allowing for the distractions of the bogus Russian election interference probe, and the impeachment farce, and much more.

There is also the challenge of getting the numbers up again for the stock market that its envious detractors call a casino.  They say it is driven, as all casinos are, by fear and greed.  They are welcome to their ignorance, but what would America be without a super-heated stock market and a runaway Dow Jones index?

Trump has not been peddling quack remedies lately, nor has he been trumpeting the imminence arrival on the scene of a vaccine that will cure coronavirus disease or protect people from its insidious trajectory.  The malignant disease, he has assured us, will vanish even without a vaccine.

This, however, is not another excoriation of Trump whose response to the epidemic was characterized this past weekend by his predecessor, the unfailingly even-tempered Barack Obama, as “absolute chaotic disaster.”

Rather, I am thinking of his Nigerian executive disciples in denialism.  I am thinking of Kogi State Governor, Yahaya Bello, and the Cross River State Governor, Ben Ayade.  I was going to join to the duo the hysterical Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike.

But I see that he has since lurched to the other extreme, chasing out of town persons he suspects to be potential transmitters of the disease and personally leading a wrecking crew tear down any dwelling in which such persons may have spent some time.

Wike is a class act in perversity.

To be fair, Bello and Ayade are probably not the only coronavirus denialists in Nigeria’s executive ranks. There are those who acknowledge that some “mysterious” deaths are occurring in their domains all right  —Bauchi, Yobe, Zamfara and Kano come to mind — but are loath to accept that the deaths resulted or could have resulted from coronavirus disease.

But Bello and Ayade are different.  Both are frank, matter-of-fact, denialists. But Ayade, a former university professor (microbiology, just imagine!) manages to come across as someone with whom you could have a polite conversation about the virus.  Not so, Bello, his Kogi counterpart, a trained accountant.

And although each is unyielding that the coronavirus has no business sneaking into or being detected in any form or shape or manifestation in his domain, Bello’s denialism is the more arresting.  It is in-your-face, militant and uncompromising, as officials of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and Prevention discovered during an inspection visit to Kogi last week.

In the state capital, Lokoja, the team’s leader, Dr Andrew Noah, had allowed professional courtesies to prevail over strict compliance by shaking hands with the state’s protocol chief who had welcomed the team and passed on the microphone to him after a brief welcome address.

That slip sent Bello into a rage.  He ordered Noah to be quarantined for 14 days, failing which Noah and his team should depart the state immediately and head back to their base.  And to make sure that they did not further compromise Kogi’s environmental immunity, he detailed security officials to escort them into the territory of state across the boundary.

The quarantine order did not apply to the state protocol chief since he, being a Kogi resident and an official of the state’s government to boot, could not possibly harbor the coronavirus or be susceptible to it.

Bello explained that he was taking that step to ensure that “the laid down procedure for checkmating the scourge” was strictly followed.  Kogi did not want to be accounted among the states that have corona cases when it had none.  Those states that wanted the benefits accruing from that status were welcome to their harvests of death and misery, but please count Kogi and its executive governor out.  They have nobler ambitions.

But why would the virus that spares not princes, prime ministers, emirs, nor yet principalities and powers:  why would it exempt Cross River State and Kogi?  This is no idle question. For the answer may well point the way forward and help avert a recrudescence.

What is it, then, about Cross River State, it is necessary to ask, that has made it impervious to the virus?  Is it Tinapa?  Or the Calabar Carnival?  Or the Obudu Ranch Resort, the retreat in the skies? Or Mary Slessor’s long shadow?  Or Calabar’s storied place in Nigeria’s colonial history and politics.   Or its famed cuisine (think edikan ikong).  Or its languid clime? Or the spirit of the ancestors?

What has kept the ravenous, equal-opportunity predator at bay in Kogi State?  Mount Pate?  Frederick Lugard’s long shadow? Echoes of Samuel Ajayi Crowther’s benedictions?  The confluence of the Niger and Benue rivers? The ghost of the Royal Niger Company determined to keep Kogi safe for commerce and investment?  Or the Ajaokuta steel plant rearing to go into production after so many sputtering starts?

It may well be that the virus has decided to stay severely away from Kogi, knowing that it has no chance against the fortifications the dynamic and far-seeing authorities have erected, and that the testing centres, isolation wards, containment rooms, and the stockpiles of ventilators and personal protection gear already in place, will render it dead on arrival if it has the temerity to even sniff the Kogi environment.  I say nothing, of course, of the most formidable array of medical expertise ever assembled in one place.

But if, despite all this, and despite Bello’s grandstanding the coronavirus, being no respecter of persons, systems or structures, were to insinuate itself into Kogi, dealing death and misery in its wake, Governor Yahaya Bello will have a great deal to answer for.

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