The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • ROA Akinjide: What legacy?

    ROA Akinjide: What legacy?

    Olatunji Dare

     

    FROM time to time, this page offers a retrospective (“Where are they now?”) on persons who were once prominent and frequent newsmakers, but about whom one now scours the news media almost in vain.

    The last instalment (October 8, 2019) featured, among other lapsed newsmakers, the legal titan, Chief Richard Osuolale Abimbola Akinjide.  He belonged in the second set of attorneys conferred with the rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and was one of a dozen or so who held the prestigious rank of QC (Queen’s Counsel), a colonial-era preferment that the indigenous distinction of SAN supplanted.

    In the colonial and postcolonial policy dialogue, Akinjide’s contribution was unfailingly informed and incisive, a product of his fecund mind and omnivorous reading.   Even when you disagreed with his point of view, you could not but admire his eloquence, his mastery of the material, and the cut and thrust of his argumentation.  You always learned something new from his submissions.

    Shortly after President Goodluck Jonathan’s misbegotten National Conference in which Akinjide was a delegate, his interventions in debates on national issues became few and far between, then ceased altogether.

    Nothing called attention to his withdrawal from the public sphere more poignantly than his daughter-politician Jumoke Akinjide’s misfortunes.  A former Minister for the Abuja Federal Capital Territory during the Jonathan Administration, she had been having a running battle with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission over an alleged misappropriation of some N650 million, little more than pocket change to minor functionaries in some federal establishments.

    She paid back the sum at issue, but the prosecutors would not drop the charge.  And yet, when it seemed to matter most, her father, the legal colossus, did not come up with some recondite forensic doctrine to put an end to all that nonsense.  Where was he, I had asked in the column under reference?

    A relation of his by marriage told me on reading the piece that Akinjide was too frail to engage in such theatrics anymore.  Akinjide died last week, aged 88 years.

    A lawyer’s lawyer, Akinjide was perhaps best known for the disingenuous formula which moved the Federal Electoral Commission to hold that by, winning the most votes in 12 of the 19 states and in one-half of two-thirds of a 13th State, the NPN candidate, Shehu Shagari, had won a majority “in each of at least two-thirds of the states of the federation” as stipulated by the Constitution, and thus the 1979 presidential election outright.

    The Supreme Court affirmed, and the joke was on those who had dismissed Akinjide’s formula as crack-brained.   In the legal battles that pitted the Federal Government against the states controlled by the Opposition in the Second Republic, Akinjide was a constant figure as Minister of Justice and Attorney-General, smirking as the courts did the government’s bidding in case after case.

    The calculus that a faction of the Oyo State legislature employed to impeach Governor Rasheed Ladoja in January 2006 called to mind Akinjide’s “Twelve two-thirds” formula that had clinched the Presidency for Shehu Shagari in 1979.  Like that formula, the Oyo calculus was so contrived that one was almost certain that the courts would dismiss it as a brazen assault not merely on the law but on common sense.

    The most senior judge in Oyo thought nothing of playing major enabler in a so-called  impeachment produced by, among sundry illegalities, disobeying a court injunction, and gratuitously stripping elected members of the State Assembly of their rights and privileges.

    Akinjide nevertheless endorsed the arrangement stoutly and gibed that it was a fait accompli the courts would be loath to reverse if precedent and the “doctrine of efficacy” still counted for anything.  The courts were not impressed.

    Some commentators went so far as to insist that the Oyo calculus, represented Akinjide’s investment in a scheme that would have seen his son installed deputy governor of Oyo State after the purported impeachment, with the blessing of the area godfather himself, Lamidi Adedibu.

    I prefer to believe that Akinjide was just being Akinjide, and would have gladly served, if asked, as a legal strategist for Christopher Alao-Akala, the new governor thrown up by the impeachment, or entered an amicus curiae brief.  It was all so troubling in a figure who should by right be numbered unequivocally among Nigeria’s pre-eminent statesmen.

    Akinjide was elected into the House of Representative during the First Republic at the relatively tender age of 28, on the platform of the NCNC and quickly attracted notice as

    one of its ablest parliamentary debaters.  When the ruling federal coalition partners, the NPC and the NCNC, took advantage of a rift in the Opposition Action Group to smash it and take over Western Nigeria where it was firmly entrenched, Akinjide was in the vanguard.

    The union collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. Chief S. L.Akintola’s UPP morphed into the NNDP with none other than Akinjide as its general secretary, kicked out the NCNC, appropriated the spoils unto itself, and nailed its sail to the NPC’s mast.

    This arrangement redounded mightily to Akinjide’s benefit.  He was appointed Federal Minister of Education. But it ended all too soon.  Within a year, the military struck and toppled the government.

    Akinjide returned to his law practice and was doing so well that when military governor Adeyinka Adebayo named him commissioner of finance for the former Western Nigeria, apparently without first consulting him, he declined on the threshold, to the admiration of  Nigerians already chafing at the brusque ways of the military, this writer included.

    They thought that he was in effect saying a farewell to all the self-inflicted injuries that were part and parcel of politics and governance.  That, alas, was a misreading of the man and the moment.  Akinjide re-entered the fray as soon as the ban on party politics was lifted in 1978 and ran for governor of Oyo State the following year on the platform of the NPN, now home to his former NNDP associates.

    In a desultory and ill-tempered campaign, he berated the “free education” policy of the Action Group that had transformed Western Nigeria, village for village, into perhaps the most literate territory in Africa south of the Sahara.  That policy, he snickered in a television debate with his UPN opponent Chief Bola Ige, had produced only “letter writers” and armed robbers.

    Ige, a master or repartee, thereupon challenged Akinjide to identify for the public benefit those members of the Akinjide family who, having profited from the “free education” policy of the Action Group, subsequently became armed robbers.

    Enraged, Akinjide demanded that Ige withdraw the imputation. Ever so sedately, Ige repeated the challenge.

    Akinjide stomped out of the studio, knowing that he had done lasting damage to his person and to his chances of winning the election, which were never more than slim. He would take his revenge several months later when, as chief legal strategist for the NPN, he deployed the deus ex machina that clinched the presidential election for Shehu Shagari on the first ballot.

    That contrivance, I have it on good authority, was not fashioned from a sudden flash of inspiration, nor from a serendipitous moment. Akinjide, as was his wont, had for months x-rayed the electoral laws, probed their interstices for any weak spots, and detected every lacuna.  His labours were rewarded by the discovery of what he called “a joker,” an ace that he kept up his sleeve until the right moment, and then used it to stunning effect.

    Akinjide’s accustomed forensic legerdemain failed him in the Shugaba case, however.  The case centred on the kidnapping and deportation to Chad, in the dead of night, of the Majority Leader in the Borno House of Assembly, Shugaba Abdurahman Darman, based on a claim that he was Chadian, as was his father.  They produced as their star witness a woman who claimed that she was Shugaba’s mother and was, like Shugaba’s father, Chadian.

    For the Federal Government, Akinjide cited to no avail a dazzling array of foreign authorities, leaving out, as Shugaba’s leading counsel, the sedate GOK Ajayi (SAN) reminded the court again and again, the only document that really mattered in the case: the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

    In a lawyer concerned merely to win cases, such conduct is unexceptionable, admirable even.  But law is not just about winning cases. Nor is it principally about manipulating technicalities to gain forensic advantage.  When the letter of the law is wrenched from its spirit, when the desire to win cases supplants the need to do justice, the law becomes a mere tool, bereft of any redeeming social purpose.

    That is the context in which Akinjide’s 1979 “joker,” his advocacy in Shugaba’s case, his intervention in the Oyo debacle and in other contentious issues of Nigeria’s political history must be weighed. And the question that follows is this: What is the legacy?

    I suspect that, by and large, it will be judged as a legacy of artfulness; that Akinjide will be remembered more for being clever for brief, shining, opportunistic moments than for seeking to make his society wiser and more just.

  • Abba Kyari: Encounters

    Abba Kyari: Encounters

     Olatunji Dare

    To him, I was always “Senior Dare.”

    President Muhamadu Buhari’s powerful chief of staff, Malam Abba Kyari, who died of the coronavirus             last week aged 67, imbibed this mode of address from our alma mater, St Paul’s College, Wusasa, in Zaria.

    Departing upper classmen rarely retain lasting memories of the freshmen or sophomores they left behind, unless these juniors were particularly troublesome.  Two decades went by, and my path and Abba Kyari’s did not cross until sometime in the late 1980s when my colleague Sully Abu and his contemporary at the New Nigerian brought him to my office in Rutam House for an “introduction” or, more appropriately, a re-connection.

    Since then, Abba Kyari and I have maintained a relationship that was more pragmatic than close. Whenever he thought I might have some insights he could profit from, and wherever I happened to be, he reached out to me.  In turn, I reached out from time to time with suggestions on how he might best pursue some broad as well as specific goals he often shared with me.

    These goals were never about him.  They always centred on how Nigeria could achieve the greatness he believed was her destiny, and on his unshakeable belief that the project could be realized under – perhaps only under — a Buhari Presidency.

    He outlined his thoughts on this project in a paper he sent to me for comment and criticism, and published subsequently in on ThisDay on October 1, 2012.

    Nigeria, the paper began, was the only country on the African continent  (I would add South Africa) with all the attributes of a great power – size, population, arable land, water, forests, hard minerals, tourism potential  — indeed everything required for a major modern economy.  “Yet . . . here we are!” it said plaintively.

    Nigeria’s “all-powerful Centre,” it continued, was weak and confused; the periphery was doing all the running.  Separatists, secessionists, nihilist, anarchists and even bandits were having a field day.   The majority were just “onlookers,” despairing and even losing hope and faith in Nigeria as a federation and        in its existence as a nation.  Pessimism about its future was pervasive, deep.

    As a result of current difficulties, the paper went on, Nigeria tended to forget its wider responsibility to  the African continent – the only continent, the majority of which was stricken with poverty. That responsibility was to “knock Africa into shape.”

    But first, Nigeria had to get its act together, solve its local difficulties and face its wider responsibilities. “The future prosperity of Africa,” it declared, “is directly linked to the prosperity and stability of Nigeria.”

    The immediate challenge, as Kyari saw it, was to integrate Nigeria’s plural society at the political level where more than 90 percent to the population was already socializing, integrating and living in peace; lift the entire population out of poverty into relative prosperity, and create conditions for true representative and accountable governance.”

    These reflections could only have stemmed from a patriotic and cosmopolitan mind, not from the parochial provincial mindset that Abba Kyari’s critics thought he represented.

    The rest of the 14-page paper is a blueprint of how these objectives might be realized, illustrated with theoretical underpinnings and empirical evidence.

    The ingredients were already in place.  What remained was the man who would bring them together, create the spark that would light the flame and set Nigeria off on it mission to greatness and prosperity not just for its citizens but for all of Africa

    Abba Kyari apparently saw that man in Muhammad Buhari.

    In his marathon election quest, Buhari had much going for him. His Spartan discipline, his asceticism, his steadfastness in pursuit of his goals, and his perceived integrity had seemed to be what Nigeria needed to arrest the drift and decay of the Shagari era.  Some two decades later, those same qualities appeared to be what Nigeria needed to get out of the cluelessness and the unfettered corruption driving Nigeria into a ditch, with Goodluck Jonathan at the steering wheel.

    But Buhari’s terrible human rights record constituted a major obstacle. Kyari woo had been at his side through thick thin, went to work.  Drawing on his cosmopolitan credentials, and aided by hundreds of Nigerians who had suffered harsh penalties under Buhari’s military regime, helped cultivate a more nuanced perception of Buhari.  They persuaded some of Buhari’s most implacable adversaries in the civil society to look more at the man’s strengths than his weaknesses.  Together, they helped widen Buhari’s narrow circle of friends and sympathisers.

    Few of them expected any reward or preferment.   It just seemed the right thing to do.

    Finally, on his fourth quest for the top job, Buhari’s perceived strengths conflated with the public yearning for change to deliver the Presidency to Buhari and the APC.  To hardly any surprise, he named Abba Kyari his chief of staff, in the first round of appointments Buhari made.

    The Administration took off to a ponderous start, not on the swift, sure-footed note sketched in the manifesto of the winning APC coalition.  As it unfolded, its agenda showed little in common with the progressive blueprint Abba Kyari had set out in the 2012 paper cited earlier.

    Instead of taking full advantage of its sweeping majority to launch its agenda of change, Buhari declared that he belonged to no one and to everyone, even as a faction of the APC hijacked the National Assembly and deployed its powers to subvert rather than advance the government’s agenda.

    Charges that public appointments were made with scant regard to the federal character principle pervaded the news.  Lassitude thrived at the top, and the Presidency often seemed like a house divided against itself.  Nigeria could not “knock itself into shape,” any more than knock Africa into shape, as Abba Kyari had proposed in his visionary paper.

    At the time Buhari took office in 2015, the defeated PDP had all but ceased to be an effective political party.  Having been beaten comprehensively, it seemed marked for terminal collapse.  At a point, it could not even pay the salaries of its headquarters staff.

    But at the next election four short years later, the PDP had bounced back.   Not because it came up with superior programmes and policies, nor because it had mended its calamitous ways; it was enjoying a revival of sorts because, in the public perception, there was little to choose between the APC and the PDP.

    The close outcome of the presidential race reflected that perception.  Few of the ideas and projects Kyari advocated in his paper gained traction.  And the remaining tenure of the administration promises more of the same, even without the hobbling impact of the coronavirus pandemic and the economic meltdown, the tempo of which it quickened.

    In the end, it will probably be said that Kyari’s strictures against the “all powerful” but “weak and confused Centre,” the frenetic but directionless running in the periphery, and about the majority that has been reduced to onlookers in a system that is neither representative nor accountable; it will probably be said that they apply with almost equal force to the Buhari Presidency.

    It will be said that concern for these and other issues remained largely unaddressed by an administration of which Aba Kyari was perceived to be the driving force, the agenda-setter.

    It will be said, finally, that few among those whose two reel who have strong feelings about governance and the public good have Abba Kyari’s golden opportunity to operate at the very intersection of policy and execution, with access to resources and other assets to help translate vision into actuality.

    It is no disrespect to Abba Kyari’s memory and legacy to state that he did not succeed on these scores.

    The question for us, then, and especially the other Abba Kyaris among us is:  Why not?  What forces were at work?

    May his patriotic soul rest in peace.

  • On the trail of the coronavirus

    On the trail of the coronavirus

     

    Olatunji Dare

     

     

    THE coronavirus is a historic phenomenon.

    So thoroughly has it upended the world as we knew it, our comforting verities, that barely two months into its outbreak, the usual people are dividing History into two distinct epochs.  Everything that came prior to that global conflagration belonged in the “Before the Coronavirus Era” (BCE).  Everything that came with or after it belongs in the “Coronavirus Era” (CE).   By that reckoning, last year was 1999 BCE, and this year is 1 CE.

    This division is arbitrary, to be sure; fragrantly impractical even.

    Upheavals came in spasms, shook large portions of the world to the roots, and ran their destructive courses; the world adjusted and returned to functioning more or less as before.  In this respect, the corona virus shall pass, too.  And there is no reason to call these disarticulated times the Coronavirus Era.

    But the coronavirus is different.  It is more ravenous and more intractable; it is spread by the most reflexive of gestures, such as touching one’s face or sneezing, and by the most innocuous, such as touching surfaces we encounter all the time – tabletops, doorknobs, elevator buttons, light switches, computer keyboards, cell phones, or telephone receivers.  Even the ubiquitous paper or plastic bag, we have learned lately, can transmit the virus.

    It is not a death sentence.  Most of those it afflicts survive it.

    It has been called a “boomer remover,” because it has proved especially deadly for the elderly, those born in the post-World War II baby boom.  And the black columnist Charles Blow has called it a “brother killer” because, although blacks constitute only 13 per cent of the United States population, they account nationally for more than 30 per cent of the coronavirus fatalities.

    By now, practically everyone can recite its symptoms – the fever, weakness, headaches, the wracking body aches and pains, shortness of breath, and loss of the sensation of taste or smell, all of which may dissipate within a week of isolation, or lead rapidly to organ failure and agonising death even in the face of the most attentive medical treatment.

    And now we learn that it can enter the system not only through the mouth and nostrils, but through the eyes as well.  Who knows whether a later mutation may be able to enter the body through exposed skin, in which case a body tent maybe the best precaution.

    Testing positive is a sure sign that you have the coronavirus.  Only a definitive test can determine that. The frightfully insidious aspect of the matter is that you may carry the virus and yet not manifest the symptoms of the disease, and go merrily about business transmitting it unwittingly to unsuspecting persons in the briefest of encounters.

    When it first broke in Wuhan, China, some three months or so ago, it was thought to be a local affliction.  U.S. President Donald Trump, in whom inheres a noxious combination of ignorance and arrogance, dismissed it as hoax that would “wash over” and end just as suddenly as it had begun.

    Give the dozen or so instances reported in the United States then just one week, and they would be down to zero, said Trump; the great economy emblematised by the stock market would roar back, breaking all records and securing for the American people the kind of prosperity that only his genius could have wrought and sustained.

    He even threatened to end the ongoing lockdown to enable Americans fill the churches at Easter, a transparent sop to the complaisant evangelicals from someone in whose life religion plays no part as precept or practice.

    Scarcely six weeks later, the coronavirus was winning big-time.  Hospitals were running out of vital supplies that were never stockpiled in sufficient quantities for a start.  Medical personnel managing daunting caseloads raced against the clock in crowded rooms, clad in assortment of apparels that guaranteed little protection against lethal infection.

    Chastened, but still somewhat in denial,  Trump would later ask Americans to brace for bulletins even more grim than those that were coming out daily from Italy, Spain and Iran – chronicles  of hundreds who had died overnight from the coronavirus.

    But that was well before the grim harvest from New York matched, then topped those from Europe and even China, from where the pandemic had originated. That was before the hospitals ran out of body bags, before the morgues filled up and had to be supplemented with refrigerated trucks, and before fatigued hospital personnel were dying in alarming numbers.

    And now, for the better part of a week, some 2,000 persons have been dying every day in the United States from the coronavirus.  Each morning, residents hold their collective breaths as they scour media outlets for the overnight death totals, hoping for some respite, however slight.

    Behind those frightful numbers are men and women and children – fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, lovers, sons and daughters who, only a few weeks or a few days earlier, nursed hopes, loved and yearned to be loved, and made plans for themselves, their loved ones, and their communities.

    They died in lonely agony, without the comforting farewell of loved ones.    Too risky to allow relations within viewing distance of the figure battling for his or her life strapped to a hospital bed, or to take a last  peep at the face of the shrouded figure being wheeled to the refrigerated truck.

    And yet, the coronavirus has not even run its course in what they say is only its first wave, with the Southern Hemisphere set to experience its own visitation as it enters winter, and the Northern Hemisphere, still reeling from the first wave, braces for a fresh visitation.   So fraught and uncertain           has the coronavirus rendered living and communing that the whole thing leaves you exhausted.

    Amidst the uncertainty, all kinds of conspiracy theories are thriving. Donald Trump calls it the Chinese virus, but only in retaliation, he says, for the Chinese claiming that it was developed by the U. S. military.

    Shamans peddling all manner of quack remedies, among them garlic, bitter kola, lemon, ewuro (bitter leaf) in various preparations, steam inhalation, etc., etc., are doing brisk business. An American family rigged up a  roadside clinic to administer bogus coronavirus tests at $400 per crack and moved to another location when dislodged.

    Chloroquin, abandoned long as a malaria fever medication when Nigerian mosquitoes neutralised it, has come roaring back on the strength of Donald Trump’s advertised belief that it the sure-fire answer to the coronavirus.

    One American woman who took a quinine product used for cleaning out fish pond believing that it was the stuff prescribed by Dr Trump, died from the ingestion. In Nigeria, those who dosed copiously on chloroquin ended up in Emergency Room.

    The engineers sold 5G to the world as the next generation of mobile internet connection that will offer much faster data download and upload speeds and make more devices compatible with the mobile internet though greater use of the radio spectrum.  Don’t believe it for a minute, say the peddlers of conspiracy theories.   By the time the engineers are done, the world would be a barren wasteland.

    And the quarantine is just a convenient device for authoritarian regimes and tyrants to put away their opponents without having to entertain pesky questions about the rule of law and all that mush.   Sooner or later, they will revert to its original meaning of a 40-day sequestration, renewable.

    Yet, in this calendar of woe, there is something heartening.  It is almost an article of faith in our age that compassion and solidarity are passé.  I am heartened to report that accounts of the death of compassion and solidarity was vastly exaggerated.

    Nothing was more ennobling than watching hospital staff high and low casting aside personal fear and and danger and thoughts of family and fortune to work round the clock, in the most enervating conditions, to try to save those who could be saved, nor to see those who had long enjoyed the comfort of retirement voluntarily put their lives at risk to tend the afflicted.

    I include in this group hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens who ran crucial errands for, or otherwise attended to the needs of the quarantined and the infirm.

    It is solidarity, an organic sense of community, that can see society and indeed humankind through looming perils.  Not greed.  Not tribalism. Long live solidarity.

  • Obahiagbon writes back

    Obahiagbon writes back

    Olatunji Dare

    First, a preface to the epistle.

    Four columns ago, I dispatched from this platform an open letter to my aburo and kindred soul, (Patrick)  Osahon Obahiagbon, Esquire, attorney-at-law, former federal lawmaker and most recently Chief of Staff to the former Comrade Governor of Edo State, Adams Oshiomhole, desirous of communing with him after a prolonged intermission that had eventuated against my best will, no less against his.

    Because of the constraints of space and time, and even taking into account his capacious mind, his fecund imagination and his capacity for throwing up the most penetrating insights, to say nothing of  the amplitude of the lexical arsenal with which he expounds his thoughts, one can go only so far in wantonly inflicting one’s reminiscences on him, though I must hasten to insist that even at that conjuncture, you will find no one more accommodating, more obliging than Himself the Igodomigodo.

    Challenges bring out the best in him, as his reply to the dispatch aforementioned, issued under his own hand within 48 hours of receiving it, not through an amanuensis, indicates powerfully.  He never disappoints.

    I have not sought his permission to share it with the public.  Something tells me that he will welcome my doing so, in the hope that it might generate some mirth that could dispel, however slightly and fleetingly, the foreboding loosed on the land by the malignant novel coronavirus.

    It is certainly to be preferred to the inane conspiracy theories and the quack remedies being peddled by shamans decked out in various guises and disguises.

    It is especially gratifying that no one has invited the researcher Professor Maurice Iwu to the miracle drug he claimed to have devised many years before the virus even had a name.

    Better to allow him to prepare his legal defence against sweeping allegations by the EFCC that he misallocated billions of Naira in public funds during his last outing as chair of the Independent National Electoral Commission.

    Over.

    *

    My Big Brother:

    I must pontificate with humility, abovo, that your usual generous coruscating panegyrics as to my humdinger abilities where I senatorially perched, this time got me inebriated in an aqua of salubrious narcissism and thanks for it, because emanating from your very fastidious, critical philosophical and encyclopedic observatory, it was indeed a refreshing anodyne from the epicaricacy that malodorously swamps the political atmospherics.

    But rest assured that we are consensus ad idem with Professor Wole Soyinka when he asseverated that “man shall achieve his authentic being through confrontation with the vicissitudes of life.”

    Is it not bewildering that at the time of your excogitation arising itself from your seminal and ceaseless lucubrations, Muhammadu Sanusi 11, may have been skedaddled out of the throne of his forebears and that is because Nigeria unravels de die in diem?

    I certainly didn’t find comfort in his alleged luxuriating in partisan ensconcement, but he has my imprimatur in his feisty and quixotic reformatory and sometimes revolutionary temper in speaking truth to power over time in spite of his own hedonistic and epicurean privileges. No doubt he exhibited some traits of intellectual and ideological megalomania but it always found anchorage in a genuine utilitarian

    And transformational desire.

    What rankles is that if he was dethroned for his “bad verses” and because the system could not be latitudinarian enough to accommodate his gadfly proclivities, must he be banished against the backdrop of section 35 of our Constitution that guarantees personal liberty and in view of the Court of Appeal’s sacrosanct position in the case of Attorney General Kebbi State versus Alhaji Al Mustapha Jokolo, in which the court unequivocally affirmed the illegality and unconstitutionality  of such archaic practices?

    My verdict is that citizen Muhammadu Sanusi should be accorded all his constitutional rights and privileges going forward.

    I continue to remain an advocate for true federalism as a passe-partout in part resolution of our National Question. It is indubitable that the National Question has gnawed at Nigeria’s solar plexus and threatened its existence at various times. It was not hyperbolic when Suberu and Agbaje stigmatized Nigeria’s federalism as being plagued with “paradoxes, pathologies and irregularities.”  I only need to add that we are a “federation without federalism,” apologies to Jan Erk.

    The Nigeria federal system exhibits a high ossifying and asphyxiating degree of centralization that has occasioned eschewable roforofo between the component units and the Centre and among the component units themselves that we can do with some restructuring that broadly accommodates the creation of a federation which efficaciously enhances our collective identity and distributive political economy and addresses a system that promotes equity, justice and equality amongst the multinational and ethnic groups.

    It is within this context that I perceive the audacious and laudable attempt by the Southwest state governors to berth AMOTEKUN under the auspices of the Western Nigeria Security Network and also the initial furore it generated. What gives me the heebie jeebies, I must admit just now, is the fact of the political class now deploying the fight for restructuring as a smokescreen for elite politics and objectives.

    My joy was boundless when 29 new words that were either borrowed from Nigerian languages or are “unique Nigerian coinages” that have been in circulation for a period of aeons got cosmopolitan canonization in the trusted bible of the English language, the OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY.

    If etching some of our colloquialisms in the Oxford English Dictionary invests upon us some positive world attention of which we are in humongous deficit, then we can pro tempore bask in the sunshine of Nigerian colloquialisms but not without observing that they did not get it right in my opinion with the meaning ascribed to chop chop.

    I am also to add that I will invite you my Senior Brother to a bacchanalian party if someday the Oxford English Dictionary decides to smile on me by also adding my own special coinage of the type of government we have run in Nigeria since independence which I stigmatized elsewhere as KAKISTOMOBOPLUTOCRACY.

    My worry about our electoral jurisprudence in caboodle which gives me mental pabulum is the judicial coup d’état of if you like call it coup de grace where the judiciary can by sheer judicial deus ex machina foist willy-nilly an electoral state of affairs violently antipodal to the electoral verdict of the people as we have seen in Zamfara, Bayelsa and some other states in all the categories of elections without limiting it to the governorship elections.

    The extant laws and our Constitution need a rejiging to accommodate this anti-democratic gorgon medusa.

    The concatenation of events both in the national level and in Edo State that has brought the APC National Chairman under bold relief is a combination of our prebendal politics, crass perfidy, impunity and revanchism which must be deprecated.

    Whereas certain political power centres are fighting back the intrepid and pertinacious iron-will determination of Comrade Adams Oshiomhole to stop the reign of impunity and thus restore party discipline and supremacy which are the hallmark of party democracy no matter whose ox is gored, and substantially removing the party levers from the suzerainty of strong individuals back to the rank and  file of party members, others are also apprehensive  of the fact that the  APC National Chairman may not lend himself to malleable manipulations of 2023 presidential and power calculations.

    There was no way Oshiomhole was not going to have obstreperous, raucous and riveting resistance from the power behemoth steeped in the reign of party capture before he became National Chairman of the APC. What is happening in the Edo home front is regrettable, opprobrious and sardonic because there is no basis for it at all.

    All Comrade Oshiomhole said, advised and insisted on was the need to run an all-inclusive government capable of delivering the dividends of democracy to the people and at the same time strengthening the party. How this position became anathematous to the extent of subjecting him and his loyalists to state terrorism, political pugilism, obscurantism and pariahism leaves a caustic taste in the buccal cavity of any objective bystander.

    Let me again thank you immensely from the bottom of my heart for finding time to tickle my sensibilities and sensitivities, in spite of your crowded intellectual engagements. You make me feel important even when I’am conscious of the fact that I am just a student.

     

    Thanks Sir, and best.

     

    Sincerely

    Osahon Obahiagbon

     

     

     

     

  • Obahiagbon writes back

    Obahiagbon writes back

    By Olatunji Dare

     

    First, a preface to the epistle.

    Four columns ago, I dispatched from this platform an open letter to my aburo and kindred soul, (Patrick)
    Osahon Obahiagbon, Esquire, attorney-at-law, former federal lawmaker and most recently Chief of Staff to the former Comrade Governor of Edo State, Adams Oshiomhole, desirous of communing with him after a prolonged intermission that had eventuated against my best will, no less against his.

    Because of the constraints of space and time, and even taking into account his capacious mind, his fecund imagination and his capacity for throwing up the most penetrating insights, to say nothing of the amplitude of the lexical arsenal with which he expounds his thoughts, one can go only so far in wantonly inflicting one’s reminiscences on him, though I must hasten to insist that even at that conjuncture, you will find no one more accommodating, more obliging than Himself the Igodomigodo.

    Challenges bring out the best in him, as his reply to the dispatch aforementioned, issued under his own hand within 48 hours of receiving it, not through an amanuensis, indicates powerfully. He never disappoints.

    I have not sought his permission to share it with the public. Something tell me that he will welcome my doing so, in the hope that it might generate some mirth that could dispel, however slightly and fleetingly, the foreboding loosed on the land by the malignant novel coronavirus.

    It is certainly to be preferred to the inane conspiracy theories and the quack remedies being peddled by shamans decked out in various guises and disguises.

    It is especially gratifying that no one has invited the researcher Professor Maurice Iwu to the miracle drug he claimed to have devised many years before the virus even had a name.

    Better to allow him to prepare his legal defence against sweeping allegations by the EFCC that he misallocated billions of Naira in public funds during his last outing as chair of the Independent National Electoral Commission.

    Over.

    My Big Brother:

    I must pontificate with humility, abovo, that your usual generous coruscating panegyrics as to my humdinger abilities where I senatorially perched, this time got me inebriated in an aqua of salubrious narcissism and thanks for it, because emanating from your very fastidious, critical philosophical and encyclopedic observatory, it was indeed a refreshing anodyne from the epicaricacy that malodorously swamps the political atmospherics.

    But rest assured that we are consensus ad idem with Professor Wole Soyinka when he asseverated that “man shall achieve his authentic being through confrontation with the vicissitudes of life.”

    Is it not bewildering that at the time of your excogitation arising itself from your seminal and ceaseless lucubrations, Muhammadu Sanusi 11, may have been skedaddled out of the throne of his forebears and that is because Nigeria unravels de die in diem?

    I certainly didn’t find comfort in his alleged luxuriating in partisan ensconcement, but he has my imprimatur in his feisty and quixotic reformatory and sometimes revolutionary temper in speaking truth to power over time in spite of his own hedonistic and epicurean privileges. No doubt he exhibited some traits of intellectual and ideological megalomania but it always found anchorage in a genuine utilitarian
    And transformational desire.

    What rankles is that if he was dethroned for his “bad verses” and because the system could not be latitudinarian enough to accommodate his gadfly proclivities, must he be banished against the backdrop of section 35 of our Constitution that guarantees personal liberty and in view of the Court of Appeal’s sacrosanct position in the case of Attorney General Kebbi State versus Alhaji Al Mustapha Jokolo, in which the court unequivocally affirmed the illegality and unconstitutionality of such archaic practices?

    My verdict is that citizen Muhammadu Sanusi should be accorded all his constitutional rights and privileges going forward.

    I continue to remain an advocate for true federalism as a passe-partout in part resolution of our National Question. It is indubitable that the National Question has gnawed at Nigeria’s solar plexus and threatened its existence at various times. It was not hyperbolic when Suberu and Agbaje stigmatized Nigeria’s federalism as being plagued with “paradoxes, pathologies and irregularities.” I only need to add that we are a “federation without federalism,” apologies to Jan Erk.

    The Nigeria federal system exhibits a high ossifying and asphyxiating degree of centralization that has occasioned eschewable roforofo between the component units and the Centre and among the component units themselves that we can do with some restructuring that broadly accommodates the creation of a federation which efficaciously enhances our collective identity and distributive political economy and addresses a system that promotes equity, justice and equality amongst the multinational and ethnic groups.

    It is within this context that I perceive the audacious and laudable attempt by the Southwest state governors to berth AMOTEKUN under the auspices of the Western Nigeria Security Network and also the initial furore it generated. What gives me the heebie jeebies, I must admit just now, is the fact of the political class now deploying the fight for restructuring as a smokescreen for elite politics and objectives.

    My joy was boundless when 29 new words that were either borrowed from Nigerian languages or are “unique Nigerian coinages” that have been in circulation for a period of aeons got cosmopolitan canonization in the trusted bible of the English language, the OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY.

    If etching some of our colloquialisms in the Oxford English Dictionary invests upon us some positive world attention of which we are in humongous deficit, then we can pro tempore bask in the sunshine of Nigerian colloquialisms but not without observing that they did not get it right in my opinion with the meaning ascribed to chop chop.

    I am also to add that I will invite you my Senior Brother to a bacchanalian party if someday the Oxford English Dictionary decides to smile on me by also adding my own special coinage of the type of government we have run in Nigeria since independence which I stigmatized elsewhere as KAKISTOMOBOPLUTOCRACY.

    My worry about our electoral jurisprudence in caboodle which gives me mental pabulum is the judicial coup d’état of if you like call it coup de grace where the judiciary can by sheer judicial deus ex machina foist willy-nilly an electoral state of affairs violently antipodal to the electoral verdict of the people as we have seen in Zamfara, Bayelsa and some other states in all the categories of elections without limiting it to the governorship elections.

    The extant laws and our Constitution need a rejigging to accommodate this anti-democratic gorgon medusa.

    The concatenation of events both in the national level and in Edo State that has brought the APC National Chairman under bold relief is a combination of our prebendal politics, crass perfidy, impunity and revanchism which must be deprecated.

    Whereas certain political power centres are fighting back the intrepid and pertinacious iron-will determination of Comrade Adams Oshiomhole to stop the reign of impunity and thus restore party discipline and supremacy which are the hallmark of party democracy no matter whose ox is gored, and substantially removing the party levers from the suzerainty of strong individuals back to the rank and file of party members, others are also apprehensive of the fact that the APC National Chairman may not lend himself to malleable manipulations of 2023 presidential and power calculations.

    There was no way Oshiomhole was not going to have obstreperous, raucous and riveting resistance from the power behemoth steeped in the reign of party capture before he became National Chairman of the APC. What is happening in the Edo home front is regrettable, opprobrious and sardonic because there is no basis for it at all.

    All Comrade Oshiomhole said, advised and insisted on was the need to run an all-inclusive government capable of delivering the dividends of democracy to the people and at the same time strengthening the party. How this position became anathematous to the extent of subjecting him and his loyalists to state terrorism, political pugilism, obscurantism and pariahism leaves a caustic taste in the buccal cavity of any objective bystander.

    Let me again thank you immensely from the bottom of my heart for finding time to tickle my sensibilities and sensitivities, in spite of your crowded intellectual engagements. You make me feel important even when am conscious of the fact that I am just a student.

    Thanks Sir, and best.

    Sincerely

    Osahon Obahiagbon

  • Where was the President?

    Where was the President?

    Olatunji Dare

     

    FULL disclosure:  I was juggling the words in what was supposed to be the opening paragraph for this week’s column provisionally titled “Ina mai gaskiya?” when the news flashed across my laptop screen that President Muhammadu Buhari was to broadcast to the nation several hours later.

    At last, I sighed, relieved.

    Mai gaskiya — the Truthful One —is of course the name by which his adoring multitudes call the president.

    Since the coronavirus took on the shape of an incipient pandemic, he had for all practical purposes been missing in action. Nor was he any more visible when the pestilence was thus officially certified, and it was no longer if but when it would land in Nigeria.

    The question on the lips of Nigerians yearning for leadership – forthright, hands-on and reassuring  leadership at a time of national uncertainty and threatening doom was:  Where is Buhari?  In the North, that enquiry translated into: Ina mai gaskiya?

    Where, indeed was the Truthful One?

    Were lesser officials who issued statements from time to time speaking for him, or were they taking his name in vain?

    When facts are unavailable, rumour will proliferate.  In the absence of facts concerning Buhari’s whereabouts and his condition, the rumour mill went into overdrive.  He could not address the nation, it was bruited, because a sudden ailment had rendered him permanently speechless.  Otherwise, they said, why would he not talk to the nation and rouse it to great endeavour in the face of imminent peril?

    “We are at war,” French president Emmanuel Macron had declared forcefully at the earliest manifestation of the virus on French soil.  “Nous sommes en guerre,” he said over and over again March 16, while announcing a two-week lockdown in France to prevent the spread of the dreaded virus.

    Never one to let a disaster go to waste, U.S. President Donald Trump, who had waived off the roaring menace as something that would wash off just as suddenly as it had appeared, declared himself a war-time leader two days later. Even he finally accepted that the coronavirus was for real.

    But in Abuja, it was business usual – minus Buhari.  The Presidency was in lockdown, or so it seemed.

    A picture of Buhari in media outlets with the Minister of Health Dr Osagie Ehanire and the Director-General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu in the foreground — the one to his left and the other to his right, separated by the length of a basketball in keeping with the distancing that has become the iron law of social relations in the age of the coronavirus, was hardly reassuring.

    It could have been produced by anyone who has basic familiarity with the computer application programme PhotoShop.

    In the circumstance, the best thing, it seemed, was to wait for the promised broadcast.

    It was Muhammadu Buhari all right, not the spectral Jubril Al-Sudani whom the fugitive Biafran leader and his deluded followers claim is ruling Nigeria, the real Buhari having departed this realm long ago.  But don’t count on Kanu and his crowd ever emerging from their crazy world of alternative facts.

    Buhari wasted no time in debunking the insinuation that he had been missing in action.

    The moment it became clear that COVID-19 was metastasizing into an epidemic, he said in his televised address, the Administration, proactive as ever, had begun devising prevention, containment and curative measures in the event of the coronavirus hitting Nigeria.

    Apparently while they were kvetching and wallowing in fear and anxiety and grim foreboding, Presidential Task Force was already at work devising a National Response Strategy that was being reviewed on a daily basis.  Nor was that all; the government had been monitoring the situation closely and studying the various responses adopted by other nations.

    People of little faith!  This is what you get when you do not trust your leaders and institutions even while they are striving mightily to save you from the dreaded coronavirus, hunger, poverty and insecurity.  It must be accounted a thing of joy that the authorities have never allowed and will never allow such ingratitude to stem their determination to take the country to The Next Level.

    In his broadcast, Buhari dwelt on what was already well known about the coronavirus, its ominous arrival on Nigerian soil with 97 victims and one fatality at the last count, its lethal and as-now incurable nature, the standard precautions for reducing the risk of contracting it – precautions that cannot be repeated too often.

    He announced a sharp curtailment of movement in Lagos and Abuja, and also in Ogun State because of its contiguity with Lagos, and perhaps more importantly because it was in the state that the first case of the coronavirus was detected in Nigeria.  He also announced sweeping restrictions for two weeks, apparently in the first instance, on inner-city and interstate travel to contain the spread of the disease.

    Also, no movement over the same period of commercial passenger aircraft and private jets without special permit, which will be granted only under the most stringent terms consistent with the emergency.  Message:  those thinking of hopping into their private planes and chartered jets with their families and streaking across the south Atlantic for some exotic enclave in the Caribbean or South America that has been spared the ravages of the coronavirus:  perish the thought

    No such escape will be allowed, gentlemen.  We are all in this together.  This being the only country we have, we must stay here and together salvage it.

    Whatever happened to the speechwriters who composed those immortal and inspiring lines for Buhari’s maiden broadcast on assuming power following the military coup of 1993?  What became of the Buhari who had delivered them with such passion and conviction?

    The verdict, I fear is going to be:  Too little too late.

    To frazzled citizens who had felt abandoned and were fearful that they would be left out to their own devices in the face of the problems the coronavirus would pile on the existential issues they grapple with day after wrenching day, the President had words of comfort.

    Supply lines for basic necessities would be kept open.  The pump price of gasoline had already been slashed.  Even with educational institutions closed, the school-feeding programme would be sustained.            A three-month moratorium on repayment of government loans would come into immediate effect.

    Conditional transfers to the most vulnerable in society for the next two months would be furnished immediately just as food rations for two months would be delivered to persons in the camps for the internally displaced persons

    In the face of the privations Nigerians face daily, the 2.5 per cent increase in Value Added Tax allegedly mandated by ECOWAS was and remains a provocation.  This is the time to abolish it.

    It remains to say that what runs through Buhari’s broadcast is a bureaucratic mindset, not a sociological spirit. It was not entirely lacking in empathy, but it hardly connected with the listener.  The personal pronoun that establishes a relationship between the speaker and each person in the audience figured infrequently and almost imperceptibly in the text.

    That is not the way a father would talk with his beleaguered children gripped by fear and uncertainty.  It wasn’t exactly cold, but little in it could move the listener to believe that he or she could face the future with confidence.

    The president’s speechwriters should have done better.  Given the unpredictable properties of the virus and its utter contempt for walls and deadlines, they will have an opportunity soon enough to help the president deliver the kind of speech that these challenging times demand.

     

  • Dis coronavirus sef

    Dis coronavirus sef

    Olatunji Dare

     

    LIKE most institutions of higher learning in the United States, Bradley University, in Peoria, Illinois, where I was a professor of journalism until I retired in 2015, closed two weeks ago for a weeklong spring break.

    Students and faculty alike look forward to the break, a respite from the daily grind of learning and teaching and research  and the relentless stream of assignments and projects to be completed under deadline, to say nothing about tests scheduled and unscheduled.  Without it, they would be teetering    on the brink of nervous exhaustion well before the semester ends some seven weeks later.

    For students especially, it is time to fan out to the warmer climes of the southern United States and the Caribbean to “make out” with friends from college, chance acquaintances or outright strangers with the minimum of inhibitions, confident that “what happens on spring break stays with spring break.”

    One week later, they would go back to the usual routine.   The library, the labs, term papers and all-nighters.

    Many of them were probably still on the way to their spring-break destinations when the University announced in a mass mailing and on its website that they could add another week to the vacation, in   view of the developing situation regarding the coronavirus outbreak.

    The more perceptive would have seen this unsolicited additional timeout as ominous.  Most will have welcomed it.  I can tell you from personal experience that nothing gladdens a student’s heart as a break from schoolwork.

    Scarcely 48 hours later, the university announced via a video posting on its website that formal instruction for the academic year was ended.  Lectures would now be imparted online.  Commencement – Convocation, as we call it in Nigeria – had been cancelled.  Students living on campus should await instructions regarding when to return to collect their personal effects from the dormitories.

    That was it.

    For thousands of students here, and tens of thousands on other American campuses, Commencement, perhaps the most significant event of their education, their preparation for life and living, came to an abrupt end.  They will not know the joy of marching attired in their academic costumes, of the photo-op and congratulatory handshake with the university president, the gifts from friends and relations that usually pour in on such occasions, and the pride of the parents and guardians who had supported them all along, expressed most eloquently in their collective attendance.

    Perhaps most painfully in a tight job market, they will miss out on a last chance to meet recruiters looking to hire from the graduating class.

    This is not how college was supposed to end.

    But in the time of the coronavirus, that is the way it is ending.  Nor does the disjuncture fall on graduating students only. Previously, returning students and freshmen could count on starting new academic year in August.  In the time of the corona virus, that too is not guaranteed.

    If the foregoing seems like sentimental mush in the grisly manifestations of these times, take the setting and stretch it across every platform of life – the office, the playground, ball park, the assembly line and shot floor, the mall, the retail shop, the theatre, the airport, the bus terminal, the train station, the home and indeed wherever two or more persons are gathered in cities across the world, and you have perfect calendar of human misery unfolding on a scale almost beyond imagining.

    The grisly bulletin of deaths from the virus issuing from China, Italy, Spain, Iran, the UK and the United States, the thousands receiving treatments in hospitals where doctors are often forced to engage in the macabre calculus of rationing care between those who have a chance of surviving and those who are too far gone to deserve the attention that has become a scare resource, the exponential spread of the infection, and the tens of thousands in voluntary or forced quarantine across the world are but the horrid indications of the coming cataclysm.

    A virus that has been traced to stalls selling live rodents in a market in China and dismissed blithely at its onset as a hoax by U.S. President Donald Trump who sets a greater store by blind and stubborn belief than by the scientific evidence has given a whole new meaning to globalization.

    It has been said the September 11 2001 terrorist attack on the United States “changed the world forever.”  The same claim can be made now with greater truth for the ongoing pestilence.  Under its brutal regime, the only certainty is that nothing is guaranteed.  And according to the best experts, we have not seen the worst yet.

    A great many of the students whose college careers have been peremptorily foreclosed will not return to school.  Many of the restaurants and bars and hotels and establishments now shuttered will not reopen.   Thousands of employees now forced to work from home may never return to their previous work routine.  Hundreds of athletes, performers and entertainers will not return to form.  Thousands of literary, artistic and musical works in progress will not be finished.

    Our social and cultural life (No Owambe!) and our culinary habits will change markedly, and so will our modes of production.  For better and for worse, many a political career will founder and die, just as many will flourish.  The severe downturn in the economy will bring the depredations of the corona virus up close  and personal.

    On the whole, according to the best sources, things will get worse before they get better.

    As casualties mounted and deaths piled upon deaths and patients in varying conditions of distress spilled over from hospital wards into corridors and waiting rooms and all evidence pointed more to deterioration than respite, I sought refuge in the disorganized book cases in my study.

    There, I fished fish out The Plague (La Peste in the French original) Albert Camus’s haunting and evocative 1948 novel about the bubonic plague that ravaged the city of Oran, a port on Algeria’s Mediterranean coast.

    I had read the book back in 1967, and my recollection of the men and women and prevailing circumstances chronicled in it has been dimmed by the passage of time.

    But not its horrors, understated though they were, nor its ironies, especially the fact, as I remember             it,  that the plague afflicted with devastating consequences the stronger, more virile persons in the community and generally spared those with weak constitutions.  Nor the atmosphere, of which our  unfolding circumstances are eerily reminiscent.

    The coronavirus, on the other hand, they say, spares the young and persons of sturdier constitutions for the most part, while felling older persons and those whose immune system has been compromised by preexisting conditions.

    Neither the one was to be preferred to the other, to be sure; nothing indicated that dying from the one would be less horrific that dying from the other.  Still, if you belonged in my age group — I am four months shy of 76 years — you surely suffer from one preexisting condition or more unless you are a freak of nature.  You are therefore bound to take note of the especial malignancy of the coronavirus toward our group, unless you are past caring.

    In this viral conflagration, what are our prospects?

    Nobody knows for sure.  To paraphrase the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, coronavirus is in the saddle and rides humankind.

    In the days ahead, I will be rereading The Plague with painstaking attention.  Illinois, my state of residence, has gone into lockdown in response to the rapidly escalating menace of Covid-19, the killer disease spawned by coronavirus.

    Then, like millions of other residents, I will be watching and trusting that hope will triumph over the experience of those who also waited and watched and took the right measures but are unfortunately no longer with us.

    What are Nigeria’s prospects?

    If through Abuja’s acts and omissions coronavirus brings avoidable suffering and death on a staggering scale, thus compounding the Nigerian condition, it may well strengthen the desire and growing resolve of some of the constituent units to take their destinies into their own hands and seek their fortunes in a different setting that could hardly be more stultifying than the present one.

  • Prickly governor, haughty emir

    Prickly governor, haughty emir

    Olatunji Dare

     

    “He had it coming.”

    “It serves him right.”

    “About time”

    “De man too do, sef”

     

     

     

    The subject of these sentiments and many more of like vintage, expressed again and again across media platforms, is of course Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, who was sent packing from the gubernatorial suite at the Central Bank of Nigeria last week by President Goodluck Jonathan.

    Sanusi had planned to leave that powerful office on his own terms.   In the manner of royals used to determining when they come and when they go and how long they stay, he had served notice that he would not seek an extension of the statutory term of five years.

    He might well have thought that, by that single stroke, he had at once positioned himself  to assert the autonomy that goes with the position and insured himself against the abject groveling and the shabby compromises that public officials often have to make to hold on to their jobs.

    He did not grovel.  But he carried on in the manner of someone who could not be touched, said his numerous critics.  He was all too ready to express an opinion on every subject under the sun and even beyond.  He talked far more than he listened.  It was as if he was conducting a crusade against the Establishment of which he was a part.

    He turned a purely technocratic job into a political forum and invested it with power and authority that went far beyond what its creators envisaged.  He reveled in controversy.  He dispensed public funds as if he was stricken with the Mansa Musa syndrome.   Sometimes, it was as if he saw the CBN and its sprawling bureaucracy as an extension of the Kano Emirate Council.

    All in all, his numerous admirers countered, he has been a breath of fresh air in the mouldy corridors of high finance.  He called attention to issues the authorities would rather conceal, such as the extortionate salaries and allowances legislators appropriated unto themselves under the table, and the opacity of the reporting system on oil export earnings.  He spent public money judiciously, for beneficent ends.

    Above all, his numerous admirers said, he had rescued the banking from the grip of a powerful mafia that had since the time of military president Ibrahim Babangida turned the industry into an organised racket.

    Sanusi had three months left on his term. To Abuja which had been chafing under his searing strictures, three months seemed like an eternity.  If he could not be removed, surely he could  be neutralized and kept so busy fighting for his name and honour that asking inconvenient questions would be the last thing on his mind?

    So, they got the Department of Dirty Tricks to work up to the most intrusive and titillating detail an alleged dalliance between Sanusi and a female executive at CBN they said he had employed without following the rules.

    From published text messages the twain were alleged   to have exchanged after a tryst at a five-star hotel in Lagos you could literally hear the moan of ecstasy and the joy of conquest.

    The Department of Dirty Tricks blanketed the media with these salacious reports, hoping that the public would rise in indignation, declare any public official involved in such conduct guilty of “moral turpitude” and unfit to hold high public office.

    There were indeed those who reacted in exactly that manner.  Some even went one better, demanding that Sanusi be hauled before the nearest Sharia court, tried summarily and sentenced to public flogging on his concupiscent butt.

    But by and large, the stories gained no traction in the media or in public discourse.

    So, the authorities fell back on the bureaucratic expedients of audits and queries. Those didn’t work either.  With his accustomed hauteur, Sanusi disputed the competence and authority of the sources of the queries and refused to respond to them. Nor would he resign, as President Jonathan requested.

    But Abuja had had more than enough.  It was time to unsheathe the sword of presidential power; time for the formerly shoeless boy from the creeks to teach the haughty prince from Kano who has never lacked for anything a lesson in realpolitik he seems to have forgotten: Power will always find a way.

    Didn’t Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna Sokoto and premier of Northern Nigeria depose and banish to Azare, in what was then Bauchi Province, the now former CBN governor’s iconoclastic grandfather, Muhammadu Sanusi, who served as Emir of Kano between 1954 and 1963?  Did the heavens fall?

    So who or what can stand in the way of a President vested with the powers of a leviathan in his resolve to dismiss an official he can no longer work with?  The Constitution only says the official cannot be dismissed without the consent and approval of the Senate.  It does not say that you require any such approval to suspend him.

    So, go at him, and do so with petulant vindictiveness. Humiliate him on the world stage; suspend him from office while he is conducting business in Niamey, in Niger Republic, on the nation’s behalf.

    In the foregoing narrative first published in column (“Desperate president, haughty prince” February 25, 2014), substitute President Goodluck Jonathan with the prickly Kano State Governor, Dr Abdullahi Dangoje and replace Sanusi, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria with an unreconstructed Sanusi as emir of Kano, self-absorbed and indelicate as ever, and you have the setting for a perfect storm.

    That storm rocked Kano last week and by the time it was over, Sanusi had become a forme emir, banished for the rest of his life, said the State government, to a rustic community in Nassarawa State, as far away a place as conceivable for re-creating the splendor and opulence  to which Sanusi had felt so entitled.

    Within 24 hours, Sanusi’s powerful friends, aided by a restraining order against the banishment, plucked from that desolate setting and whisked him to the more familiar ambience of Lagos.

    Whatever may have been Sanusi’s acts and omissions, the banishment must be seen in today’s circumstances as a cruel and unusual – nay, impermissible — punishment, and the Abuja High Court was right to grant him an injunctive relief.  That anachronism must be expunged from our body of laws.

     

     

     

    Odia Ofeimun @70

     

    For a year before joining the Editorial Board of The Guardian in 1985, I had read with profit and pleasure Odia Ofeimun’s weekly Op-Ed pieces for the paper as well as his frequent contributions to its Literary Supplement, then premier platforms for informed discussion and debate on ideas, public affairs, literature, and the arts.

    Odia OfeimuN @70
    Odia-Ofeimun

    I would get to know him much better in the five years we served together on the Editorial Board and subsequently. I found him enormously well informed on an astonishingly wide range of issues.  He was no showboat.  He was not in the least pretentious.

    But when the occasion called for it, you saw him at his most erudite, ranging seamlessly from one issue to another, domestic and foreign, from broad policy to the minutiae of governance, from personalities to the programmes they pursued and what became of those exertions.  He recalled facts and figures with stounding facility.  His grasp of philosophy, history, literature and the arts was immense.

    There are scholars who are everywhere and nowhere. Odia is everywhere all at once in the world of scholarship.  Sometimes, you wondered whether there was a book he had not read, or a subject he was totally unfamiliar with.

    Meetings of the Editorial Board sometimes took on the tone of a post-doctoral seminar, but Odia, who held only a first degrees from the University of Ibadan, more than held his own.

    Few encounters at the meetings were more enthralling than watching Stanley Macebuh, the urbane scholar and chair of the proceedings, and Odia debating some arcane point of literature, poetics or aesthetics. The point counterpoint, the cut and thrust of argumentation was truly edifying.

    Moved by his great learning on the one hand and the sparseness of his formal academic qualifications on the other, I said to him what an admirer once said to the novelist and social philosopher Arthur Koestler, a person of catholic intellectual pursuits like Odia:  “If you don’t take your degree, they’ll always find out the tramp in you wherever you go.”

    His peripatetic engagements contain a hint of the tramp, but Odia is no tramp. More than 40 books on various themes, four poetry collections, two anthologies and dance-drama bear testimony to his prodigious scholarship

    His natural home, it seemed to me, was a great university or institute of higher learning.

    But he has shunned all such affiliations, preferring to eke out a precarious existence as an independent scholar in the Max Weber mould. That is the true measure of his commitment to scholarship and ideas.

    Finally, in this short tribute, a word about character.

    One of the most searing events in Odia’s life was his dismissal from his highly influential post as private secretary to Chief Obafemi Awolowo, on account of someone else’s betrayal of trust.

    A highly confidential letter from Awo to his great contemporary, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, in the manoueverings that followed the controversial 1979 presidential election was leaked to the  media even before it had reached Azikiwe.

    Suspicion fell on Odia as private secretary, and soon hardened into certainty.  It did not matter that Odia had not for a moment set his eyes upon the letter in question.  He was sent packing.

    To this day, Odia would only say that he had nothing to do with it.

    It can now be revealed that the correspondence was leaked by, or with the connivance of MCK Ajuluchukwu, the director of research and publicity at the national headquarters of Awolowo’s Unity Party of Nigeria, who was privy to it.

    Aiming to cash in on the rupture, Chief MKO Abiola, Awolowo’s implacable adversary, sought out Odia and offered him a job at his Concord Newspapers on terms that it would be an understatement to call generous.

    Odia thanked him politely and declined, though he didn’t know where his next paycheck would come from, or when.

    Such nobility is rare in these parts.

    Happy Birthday, Odia, and welcome to the Club.  Get Femi Osofisan to impart to you our secret handshake, if he has not done so already.

     

     

  • Touching base with Patrick Obahiagbon

    Touching base with Patrick Obahiagbon

    By Olatunji Dare

     

    MY esteemed Aburo:

    It has been quite an intermission.

    Where to start, having regard to all that has transpired since our last correspondence, a determination rendered  especially fraught by the paucity on the one hand of the ennobling and uplifting, and on the other by the surfeit, the superabundance, of the stultifying and the soul-destroying?

    Best, perhaps, to dwell on what I perceive as some of the most consequential developments of the period under review, but in no particular order.  No hierarchy of significance, consequence or impact is here implied.

    Before we get into all that, let me say that I was profoundly discombobulated on learning that a good many of those you had counted as progressive elements and whom you had courted assiduously turned out to be political laggards, the type we shall always have among us, unfortunately.

    With consummate self-abnegation, you offered to place at their service as a Distinguished Senator, your great learning, your vast experience in the legislative and executive branches at the national and sub-national levels, your immense knowledge of human affairs and statecraft, your firm grasp of the history, culture and diplomatic sophistication that have sustained the Benin Kingdom for millennia

    You offered to deploy these sterling attributes to serve them, plus the attendant exertions and a judicious infusion of the usual resources, to say nothing of your legendary lexical dexterity.  But the resonance was lost on them.

    Were the whole thing not so lamentable, one might give in to not a little schadenfreude.  In place of the learned discourse, the incisive analysis and the stirring perorations that would have flowed seamlessly from you, we have elected officials advertising their sexual prowess on the floor of the House.  And Dino Melaye is even no longer in that conclave, being content these days to peddle his tinseled acquisitions on social media.

    Instead of coming up with proposals that will enhance the quality of life of the average Nigerian, their preoccupation is life more abundant for themselves.  And so, like underprivileged children loosed on an unprotected toy shop, their first order of business is to acquire new motor cars for each member, as they had done four years earlier, and four years before then.

    It serves your constituents right.  Next time, it must be hoped, they will make a wiser use of their opportunities.

    Of the many troubling political developments in Nigeria, I make bold to asseverate that none is more confounding than the bitter falling out between your former principal the former governor of Edo State, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, and the incumbent, Godwin Obaseki.

    It now seems almost beyond belief now that Obaseki had served loyally and dutifully in the Comrade’s second and final term as his hand-picked deputy, and had as a consequence been anointed by his erstwhile principal as his successor.

    The bequest contained more assets than abilities.

    Consider for a start the Comrade’s credentials as an authentic progressive, a results-oriented negotiator who knows when to float and when to sting and when to mix things.  Add to these a predilection for cutting through contention and concatenation to get things done.  And should his protégé ever be buffeted by the treacherous winds of Edo politics, the watchful Comrade stood ready to ride to the rescue.

    Few, then, could have imagined that one day, the tempestuous Comrade who had almost single-handedly forced a fearsome political fixer and his band of freeloaders into retirement, would himself         be declared a prohibited person in the domain of which he was lord and master scarcely two years ago by his former associates, a good many of whom he had lifted from obscurity to prominence and renown.

    Greater indignities followed.

    The Etsako branch of the ruling All Progressives Conference, of which Comrade is national chairman, stripped him of party membership, effectively rendering his position at the national level untenable.   His implacable adversaries – yesterday’s collaborators – pressed ahead and secured a court injunction barring him from representing the APC in any capacity whatever.

    Within minutes, Oshiomhole found himself locked out of the APC Secretariat, his redoubt.

    Who would have thought that many in the Governors Forum, of which he was once the livewire, would turn willing participants in what is looking increasingly like a political lynching?

    Another court has found for the Comrade.  I suspect the matter will now go all the way to the Supreme Court, as if that body were not sufficiently beleaguered already and in urgent need of rescue.

    As jurist and legal scholar, you will have taken more than a cursory interest in in the issues surrounding  the last gubernatorial elections in Imo and Bayelsa.  In the latter, based on authenticated results, INEC declared Emeka Ihedioha, of the PDP, winner.  Ihedioha had settled nicely into the gubernatorial perch when his opponent Hope Uzodinma, who had placed a distant fourth in the race, was proclaimed winner.

    Uzodinma had produced from literally nowhere some hitherto uncounted votes from some 380 polling units which, if added to his goal, would erase Ihedioha’s margin of victory and vault him to the winner’s pedestal.  The tribunal of first instance rejected this deus ex machina.  But the Supreme Court fell for it peremptorily, in what seemed like an instance of judicial magical realism.

    Then, on a mere showing of inconsistencies in the certificates submitted to INEC by Biobarakumo Degi-Eremienyo to back his candidacy for deputy governor under the aegis of the APC, the Supreme Court voided the entire poll literally hours away from the inauguration.

    Encouraged by these developments, some litigants have even sought to move the Supreme Court to reverse itself not only on these but on previous adjudications as well.  I have heard it said that the Supreme Court brought this upon itself by its timidity, its prevarication, and by the high susceptibility of some of the justices to unwholesome influences. Perhaps so.

    What is your learned and informed juristic opinion on these matters, Aburo?

    How has your thinking evolved on restructuring, which recently won a prized convert in former President Olusegun Obasanjo, zoning, and related matters? What have you made, if anything, of the Southwest’s security network AMOTEKUN and Abuja’, effort to smother it?   The sustainability of sealing Nigeria’s land borders to curb smuggling and promote agricultural self-sufficiency?  The insolent audacity of Boko Haram and its confederates?

    The nation is still grappling with the detritus of the apparently unfinished 2019, but they are already talking excitedly about 2013. But they are for the most part not talking about the policies that can sustain Nigeria as a going concern until then and well beyond.

    They take it for granted that the policies will shape, and then sell themselves to the people, and Nigeria will live happily ever after. Such optimism runs deep among the political class, in contra-distinction to the pervasive pessimism of our quotidian experience.

    Again, I would be highly gratified if you could favor me with your thoughts on these issues.

    Finally, and on a brighter note, l must enter an adumbration with regard to so a subject dear to your heart and mine.  You must have paid more than cursory attention to a recent bulletin of the Oxford English Dictionary (your inseparable companion) admitting into hallowed company, finally, some locutions previously abjured by the most fastidious users of the English language, domestic and foreign.

    Some people are celebrating “mama put” and “majorly” as an advance.  But some are denouncing them as ungainly intrusions.  What do you think, counsellor?  How far is the progressive in you willing to travel to accommodate new usages that gnaw at the stability of the lexical order?

    That would be all for now, my esteemed Aburo.   Eagerly anticipating the recondite response that is your trademark.

     

  • Two defining speeches

    Two defining speeches

    Olatunji Dare

     

    WHEN the history of these troubling times in Nigeria is written, two speeches are guaranteed to be counted among the most consequential of the era.

    The first is the oration of the Most Rev Matthew Hassan Kukah, Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Sokoto, delivered some two weeks ago in Sokoto, at the funeral mass for the  18-year-old novitiate Michael Nandi, who was plucked from the Good Shepherd Seminary in Kaduna last January 9 by gunmen dressed in military uniforms and killed in cold blood.

    The second is former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s address at a ceremony last week inLgos to mark the first anniversary of the passing of the founder of the Oodua People’s Congress and medical philanthropist, Dr Frederick Fasehun.

    Dr Kukah’s presentation is the stuff of Vital Speeches. Comprehensive in its sweep, magisterial in its scope, arresting in its delivery, it was delicately balanced between hard thinking and strong feeling, and withal between despair and hope on the national scale. The expository quality accords with what the attentive audience has come to expect from the learned theologian.

    If the governing authorities heed his admonition and embrace his message of love and human solidarity, they may yet be able to steer the country away from the path of perdition.

    Obasanjo’s address is a product of nothing less than an epiphany.  Over the years, whether he  was in office or a statesman-at-large, few would have counted him even as a sympathiser of the movement to restructure Nigeria.  He held so tenaciously to a view of the inviolability of Nigeria as concept and practice long after his peers and cohorts and many in his inner circle had virtually given up that they called him “the last Nigerian” behind his back.  It was not an approving label.

    He had pitched his tent in the camp of those who believed that there was nothing wrong with Nigeria that a little patching of the framework here and a little tweaking there will not fix.

    Five years ago I doubt whether Obasanjo would have attended a ceremony with which the irredentist OPC is remotely associated, concerned that it would have sullied his credentials as an authentic Nigerian and apostle of the country’s indissolubility.  I doubt whether he would have fraternised with its founder

    But there was Obasanjo the other day finally acknowledging at a ceremony honouring Fasehun’s memory that the 1999 Constitution on which he was sworn into office at his Inauguration that year and at the start of his second term four years later is not working and will not work, and that nothing less than a “new order” based on a restructured polity can take Nigeria out of its present predicament.

    One must be careful not to make too much of Obasanjo’s apparent conversion to the cause of restructuring and all that it implies.  He may yet tamp down expectations flowing from what the public is entitled to interpret as his new stance.  But there is no reason to doubt that it is borne of experience and conviction, not convenience.  Not opportunism.

    And those who have been preaching the gospel of restructuring must embrace him, cultivate him and draw on his knowledge and wisdom.

    This page for its part welcomes the former president on board.  Better late than never.  By his belated awakening, he has redefined and clarified the debate on Nigeria’s future.  Henceforth, no one calling for bureaucratic amendments or revisions to the Constitution can expect to be taken seriously.

    The debate must encompass a restructuring of Nigeria to address the National Question forthrightly in the broadest sense, with justice for all as the primary goal of society and “national unity” as a means, not as an end in itself.

    Like Bishop Kukah’s, Obasanjo’s address is a timely summons to the governing authorities to think new thoughts, dream new dreams  and contemplate new directions that can lead Nigeria to security and prosperity.  There is where their real self-interest and the future of their progeny lie.  The safety of the present course is at once illusory and unsustainable.

    Together, Obasanjo and Kukah have defined anew and clarified the Nigeria Condition and its challenges.

    The 1999 Constitution was conceived in secrecy and written in unseemly haste by the rearguard of the Abacha regime following the dictator’s sudden death.  It was never vetted.  At the time it came into force, many of the political officials and bureaucrats who were supposed to operate it had not set their eyes on it.  Its preambular claim that it derived from “the people” was a brazen lie.  Some commentators have even gone so far as to call it a forgery.

    Forgery or not, a cursory review led the legal titan Gani Fawehinmi  to conclude that it would not work, riddled as it was by studied evasions, contrived ambiguities, and by all manner of obfuscation resulting from less than competent drafting. The only remedy was to write it anew, Fawehinmi insisted.

    It was not from collective resignation, however, that the 1999 Constitution has endured so long, despite its manifold flaws.  Citizen-led efforts were either criminalized, suppressed, or fatally undermined.

    Every effort by the governing authorities to tinker with, modify, alter or otherwise review the document that stands as the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria  has been misconceived from the outset, and then mired in false starts.  Thereafter, it has ended in futility.

    The misconception begins with the assumption that it is somehow the province of the National Assembly to review or revise the Constitution.  That is not the case.  The National Assembly’s remit is to amend the Constitution. This latter involves making piecemeal, incremental changes, in keeping with new realities, not a wholesale break with the founding document.

    It is a slow, evolutionary process.

    That is why in its 229 year history, the Constitution of the United States has undergone only 27 Amendments — or 17 if we discount the first ten Amendments that were grafted on to the original document at its ratification as the Bill of Rights.

    Revising or reviewing the Constitution is a different matter.  That is not what you do when you identify 43 matters warranting consideration in a review as the Emeka Ihedioha’s House of Representatives Committee did in its failed 2012/2013 effort.  Nor is it what you do when you have identified 50 elements that needed to be “reconsidered” in a new constitution, among them creation of states, devolution of powers, revenue allocation, and state police, as the Jonathan Presidency did.

    To do so is to seek to write a new constitution through the back door.

    The National Assembly has no mandate to write a new constitution.  That task belongs to a Constituent Assembly convened expressly for that purpose; one truly warranted by the preface, “We, the People . . .

    From this fundamental misconception, it has been but a short step to the false starts, the jiggery-pokery and the bad faith that have doomed previous efforts to give Nigeria a viable Constitution.

    If the latest initiative is not to suffer the same fate, Buhari must abandon the view that the task at hand is one of the reviewing or revising the existing constitution, and that the task belongs in the National Assembly.

    There may not be another chance.