The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • The return of a hustler

    The return of a hustler

    In a curious failure of judgment that almost ruined the epochal event, former British prime minister Tony Blair —  Phony Tony or Tony Bliar (rhymes with Liar) to most of his countrymen — was invited as keynote speaker at ceremonies to herald the inauguration of Muhammadu Buhari as Nigeria’s 15th president.

    On the eve of his scheduled outing, he scurried out of Nigeria, and his one-time secretary of state and ideological soulmate, Peter Mandelson, was ferried in to take his place.       

    Last May, he hustled his way into Abuja, wangled an audience and a photo opportunity with President-elect (as he then was) Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, and offered gratuitously to help the in-coming Administration launch Nigeria on the path of democratic governance and development at home and as a respectable international actor. 

    Granting Blair an audience was a misstep in an otherwise calibrated countdown to the Inauguration that culminated in yesterday’s inspiring rite of renewal. 

    He has no core convictions.  He has no political or moral capital that he can deploy for Nigeria’s benefit.  President Bola Tinubu and his Administration must not allow him to indulge in that pretence again.  But there he was in Abuja again last week in an audience with Tinubu, unctuous as ever, as Tinubu marked the anniversary of his administration. 

    Abuja is one of the few capitals where Tony Blair can still count on a polite welcome.  His 2015 visit was the third in just a little over four years.  Since then, by my count, he has visited Nigeria twice. What about Blair guarantees him a hospitable official reception in Nigeria, whereas he is much despised in his own country and elsewhere in the world?

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    I was reminded the other day that it was my column for May 19, 2015, “An unwelcome visitor,” that scuttled Blair’s scheduled presentation before Buhari’s inauguration.  I would like to take the liberty to draw substantially on it for this.

    In February 2010, his hands still wet with the blood of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis he liberated from this world and from their relations in a military invasion that he helped gin up with a raft of lies, he was invited – along with fellow war criminals former U.S. president George W. Bush and his former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice – by one Nigerian newspaper proprietor basking in the illusion of influence and affluence to speak at a ceremony in Abuja purportedly honouring distinguished Nigerians past and present.

    On a different occasion, Blair even got to meet a star-struck acting President Goodluck Jonathan, as he then was, to discuss “matters of mutual interest” between Nigeria and Britain, and his desire to keep that relationship strong.

    Nine months later, declaiming with the unctuousness that becomes him so well, he claimed that the “international community” was nursing a great deal of interest and excitement in Nigeria’s elections scheduled for 2011.

    More to the point of his new career as a money-grubbing influence peddler, he declared, with JP Morgan chief executive officer Jamie Damon in tow, that the global financial giant’s decision to upgrade its Nigerian office to a full branch was a demonstration of confidence in Nigeria and in President Jonathan’s effort to transform the economy.

    Shortly after that visit, JPMorgan bagged a huge chunk of Nigeria’s controversial Sovereign Wealth Fund, even as it recorded huge losses resulting from reckless transactions.

    Blair’s 2015 visit was no accident.  It was designed to secure future access in the Buhari dispensation for the major players in international high finance, for which he is a well-paid lobbyist

    It was entirely in character that Blair should have presumed at every stop to speak for the “international community,” though he held no public office and was in fact a hugely discredited politician who, in a just world, should be in prison serving time for war crimes.

    So resented and discredited had he become at the end of his record tenure as prime minister that he could not embark on a farewell tour of Britain, where he was sure to be greeted with shouts of “Liar, Liar” and pelted with tomatoes and eggs. They even re-christened him BLIAR, And so, he went instead to bid farewell to British troops in Basra, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan.

    Blair’s quest to become president of the European Council ended in humiliation. The British Government withdrew its backing when it became clear that member-states wanted nothing to do with him.  The Middle East for which Blair was designated international mediator has rarely witnessed greater turmoil. 

    When Blair went to testify before the Chilcot Inquiry into how the UK entered the unholy alliance that invaded, occupied, and destroyed Iraq, he had to be smuggled into the Committee Room through a back door, to save him from the wrath of protesters.

    More recently,  I should add,  more than one million Britons signed a petition against his being conferred with a knighthood by King Charles the Third.

    This was not the way the script was supposed to end for the youngest prime minister of the UK since 1812, the skilled politician who rescued Britain from the exhausted Tories, redefined its place in world politics,  and led his Labour Party to three back-to-back election victories.

    He seemed destined for greatness.

    But hubris and delusion soon set in, and glory turned to ashes.

    Blair seized the  September 1,  2001 terrorist attacks on the United States as a lifetime opportunity to project himself as a statesman of global reckoning.  The United States would not fight alone, he assured Americans.  Britain would stand “shoulder to shoulder” with America as it confronted the terrorist threat.

    -From then on Blair made it his business to confect a casus belli, just in case the United States could not come up with a compelling one.  First, he published a dossier on what he said was Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-production programme.  It was a “dodgy” document, copied in part from a sophomoric doctoral dissertation that an American university had rejected.

    Next, he put it out that Iraq had sought to buy uranium cake from Niger Republic.  The document detailing the alleged transaction was a transparent forgery.  The minister who purportedly signed on behalf of the Niger Government had left office at least eight years earlier.   It is as if Federal Government documents dated May 2014 were to surface today bearing the signature of Olu Adeniji as Nigeria’s foreign minister.

    Blair also claimed, again falsely, that Iraq had developed nuclear weapons that could be assembled and deployed for combat within 45 minutes — the same Iraq that could not shoot down a single plane from the armada that had been patrolling its air space and since the end of the Gulf war and bombing military and non-military assets at will.

    The United States quickly latched on to the document as proof that its homeland was imperiled and that it could not afford to have its skies darkened by a mushroom cloud before striking.

    For his domestic audience, Blair declared that Iraq had developed missiles capable of hitting British forces in Cyprus. Why Iraq would want to attack British troops that had been garrisoned in  Cyprus since the 1970s.

    So determined was Blair to take Britain to war that even when Bush offered him a chance to change course, fearing that the British parliament might not share America’s enthusiasm for war, Blair deployed his forensic skills to stay the course, with no consideration for the massive anti-war demonstrations in London and around the world.

    Whenever he prefaces a statement with “to be perfectly honest” or “to be absolutely candid,” which he does very often, you could be sure that he was going to zap you with a falsehood, a barefaced lie.

    He did just that when he claimed in a debate in the House of Commons that “weapons of mass destruction” would be found in Iraq within two weeks.

    Contrived earnestness, evangelical fervour, and the ability to tell a blatant lie with a straight face: That is the quintessence of Tony Blair.

    No weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq.  But by the time British forces pulled out, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had been killed.  Hundreds of thousands more had been displaced, and Iraq lay in ruins.  Hundreds of British soldiers had also been killed – all for a lie.

    Blair says he is not sorry for that lie because other countries – Australia is the example he and George W Bush frequently cited — also believed it.  True, Britannia no longer rules the waves.  But when did Britain become just another country?

    Germany did not believe it.  France did not believe it  China did not believe it.  Russia did not believe it.

    Blair compounds his war crimes each time he asserts that removing Saddam from power was “the right thing to do.”  But at what cost?

    The hundreds of thousands of Iraqis whom Blair’s warmongering removed from this world, and the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis it turned into refugees or otherwise brought to ruin have no place in Blair’s consciousness.

    He condoned or turned a blind eye to torture.  To head off trials that would have embarrassed the authorities, the British Government in 2011 paid out millions of pounds to persons tortured by officials in parts of Iraq occupied by British forces.

    No wonder, then, that when Blair offered to donate the earnings from his memoir to the families of British troops killed or wounded in Iraq, they rejected it angrily, calling it “blood money.”

    In a just world, Tony Blair would be serving a long jail term — my aversion to capital punishment is total and unconditional, unlike his — for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

    In the meantime, the Federal Government and other institutions must stop inflicting this hustler on the Nigerian public.  He needs them more much more than they need him. They must realize that he comes here for one purpose and one purpose only:  To obtain.

  • A year later

    A year later

    The day they said would never come passed, and the event they said would never take place was staged in a grand style. On May 29, 2023, Bola Ahmed Tinubu was inaugurated as Nigeria’s 16th President.

    They said he was too old, physically depleted from life on the miliki lane, bereft of mental energy, and too far gone in cognitive decline to be trusted with any public office, let alone that of President of Nigeria, home of every fourth African, the world’s largest Black nation, and a global power-in-waiting.

    They said he had to be sandwiched between trusted stalwarts at public events to keep him from tumbling over, or to catch him as he fell.  These aides had the additional task of folding the capacious sleeves of his agbada over his shoulders, lest they tripped him.  He could not be trusted to do the flipping himself because he did not have enough muscle power to lift his arms.

    Tinubu was not, as the counter-social media and its denizens had predicted, seized as he arrived at the parade ground in Abuja and whisked to prison to await the grim fate reserved for grand impostors, and replaced immediately at the seat of honour by Peter Obi, to whom it belonged by right, serenaded by the triumphal chants of the Obedients.

    He did not collapse halfway through the ceremony, as had been bruited by those who wagered that the no amount of steroids pumped into his bloodstream from vials sewn into the sleeve of his buba could keep him on his feet for more than one hour.

    Even at his best, you could never accuse him of crisp delivery. Given his consuming stupor, expect a performance that it would be courteous to call Jabberwocky – in the unlikely event of the day’s schedule getting that far that stage.

    Just about the only thing that Nigerians agreed on in the run-up to the General Election was that it was going to be the “most consequential” in the nation’s history. Just how consequential it would be, they had not the slightest inkling.

    In the event, many a rampart fell; verities that had endured for ages collapsed, and the political map of Nigeria took on a new shape.

    For political advantage, desperate actors invested sectarian religion and ethnicity with far greater salience than they had ever possessed, corroding both factors in the process and setting up the country for an implosion.

    Never had the country been so divided, in the home and in the workplace. Civility became a stranger, and yesterday’s neighbour became an object of suspicion, if not loathing. A return to anything resembling amity was unlikely to occur anytime soon, I feared.

    Resentments hardened and deepened, and everyday language coarsened in private and public intercourse. It was a far cry from the carnival atmosphere that had characterized the election season, especially from the party conventions to the post-election jubilations of those who had cause to celebrate.

    And what a jolly time it was, and how rich its sartorial heritage, not forgetting its symbols. Even in the present distemper, I can still see much of it with my mind’s eye. I can still see the blizzard of brooms fashioned from palm fronds, held aloft by the APC party faithful, their ends dipping and cresting and swaying as their handlers desired – handlers who, at the end of another long, tumultuous rally, showed nary a sign of fatigue nor a loss of enthusiasm.

    It was not inconceivable that an object designed to symbolize the party’s commitment to sweeping the dirt-strewn landscape clean could in a moment be turned into a weapon of brutal offence, given the intended or accidental provocations that occurred at such events.

    But it never happened. The crowds were too disciplined for that.

    The greater surprise was that none of the other 17 registered parties said a kind word about the palm trees whose branches were hacked down for the brooms, nor about the ecology, the sustenance and health of which the trees are a crucial factor.

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    More surprising still, in retrospect, is that none of them sought a court injunction restraining the APC from hacking down palm tree fronds to knit into brooms just to gratify the party’s iconolatry. None among them invoked national or international environmental law to move the APC to cease and desist.

    Three months after he was sworn in, the future of Tinubu’s presidency, no less than the destiny of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, hung precariously on a verdict expected from a federal court in Chicago.

    At issue was whether Tinubu had truly earned a degree in Accounting from Chicago State University, as he had indicated in election filings going back to 1999 when he first ran for Governor of Lagos State, or he had been using another person’s identity and credentials to advance his political fortunes, at the expense of candidates who had duly complied with all the rules and regulations.

    Since then, the issue has dogged Tinubu like a shadow.  And there it was, more menacing than ever, when he made his biggest political move career, declaring that it had been his ambition since childhood to serve as President, and that the time had come.

    The verdict:  Not proven.

    The issue was laid to rest, but there was no respite for the new administration, no honeymoon.  Lifting the subsidies on petroleum products without planning for the consequences deepened the distress into which the fraud-ridden currency reform of the former Central Bank governor, Godwin Emefiele, had plunged it.

    To this day, the consequences of both measures haunt the waking moments of most Nigerians.

    Tinubu’s “Emi lo kan,” or “It is my turn” declaration at a difficult time in his campaign for the APC ticket left no one in any doubt that his resolve was unshakeable, despite dark whispers that he was in poor health and probably terminally ill.

    The significance of that locution was lost on most analysts as well as his teeming supporters in the Yoruba country.  He did not say Awa lo kan, meaning “It is our turn” but “It is  my turn.”  He framed his quest not as a group, ethnic or sectarian project, but as a dream he had nursed from childhood. 

    He was seeking consummation of that dream, not for its own sake, as he had pointed out again and again, but to serve the public; hence the pacts and alliances he had built in his career.  He was making it clear that he was running not as a candidate of an ethnic or religious group but as a builder, and unifier.

    Those who accuse him of paying scant heed to the Yoruba cause, however it is defined, must understand that he did not run on that platform.   They diminish him and subvert his national stature when they measure him, based on the extent to which they think he has upheld or deviated from that platform.

    One year later, no one can in good conscience call Tinubu’s a do-nothing administration.  If anything, it is doing too many things and pursuing too many goals at the same time.  Given the parlous state of the economy and the infrastructure, that approach is understandable.  But in the process, the administration is spreading itself too thin, with the risk that results will be distributed in the same manner even where a radical transformation in some key areas is indicated.

    In our circumstance, this scatter-shot approach simply will not do. 

    Going forward, an urgent re-ordering of priorities is imperative. A quantum leap in electricity supply is the one measure that can bring about the quickest and most far-reaching change in the economy and in the quality of life for the vast majority of people.   

    Give them electricity, and their lives will for the most part no longer be defined by privation.  New technologies have made it possible to generate electricity more cheaply and at a faster rate than the obsolescent practices Nigeria’s electricity industries are mired in.  The key is to invest in new technologies rather than patching up junk equipment.

  • Of airports, visible and invisible                            

    Of airports, visible and invisible                            

    If asked to name their favorite public space, I doubt whether any person, indigene or foreigner who has travelled to or within Nigeria in recent years, will in good conscience cite an airport within its shores.

    The best among the airports are clean and render service briskly but in operation, they are just as chaotic and riotous as the rest.  The architects who designed them seemed to have been sworn to an inviolable oath: Make them as passenger-unfriendly as possible. 

    Hence, in the absence of security fences, cattle grazing in the area have been known to take over the tarmac.

    The airports make no concession to seating and relaxing in the arrival hall.  Passengers and their escorts have to stand for all the time to clear passengers for the flight, the firm and the infirm, the old and the very old.  Areas provided in the seating design have been sold to corporate bodies, demarcated clearly and reserved for their top executives.  Hence, making the least concession to seating in whatever passes for a general lounge.

    It is no accident that parking is like an obstacle race; that access to Arrivals and Departures is fraught and cumbersome; that checking in is flagrantly disorderly, and gets truly menacing when uniformed officials inspecting your baggage request that you “appreciate” them.

    After running the gamut of obstacles, of which I have mentioned just a few, the passenger runs the risk of taking a taxi cab that would take him to a quiet corner where the driver’s accomplices, toting real handguns, would emerge, rough him up, strip him of everything except his clothing and, if he is lucky, leave him to his devices while the taxi cab heads back to the airport in hopes of picking up another luckless fare. 

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    The shadowy accomplices retreat to the dank, unlit brush from where they had emerged, there to await the next catch.

    I have said nothing about toilets that don’t flush, electronic walkways that don’t work, climate control devices that spew out hot air, and sudden power outages that plunge the entire facility into darkness.

    Some of them are mockeries of the real thing.   Monuments to delusions of grandeur,         they lie in various stages of incompletion or abandonment.  But they pretend to be the complete package, even when they have no control tower, and no passenger halls.

    They call themselves cargo terminals but have no cargo to haul anywhere. Commissioned with a great deal of fanfare and merriment, they lie idle. Many a commentator, including me, had warned that this would be their fate, at least in the short and medium term.

    The warning went unheeded. 

    Imagine my discomfiture then, when my assistant informed me that one of the founding grandees of Ekiti State (name withheld) had asked to talk with me.  I knew instinctively that it must be about my column obliquely dismissing the Ekiti Cargo Airport project as misconceived

    “Professor,” he began, dispensing with pleasantries.  I held my breath and steeled myself for the worst.  “I have read and reread your column for today and sent copies to some of the naysayers.  I am calling to thank you for endorsing the project so forthrightly.  It is a magnificent piece.”

    He went on to congratulate me on my perspicacity, a quality lacking in many of my peers  who, he said, were too far gone in their negativity to recognize a laudable scheme even if they saw the blueprint in broad daylight.  I have paraphrased him here to strip his actual expression of its colour,  this being a newspaper for the entire family.

    Despite their many dysfunctions and sketchiness, the cargo terminals have one thing in common with the fully operational airports strewn all over Nigeria from Birnin Kebbi to Calabar and Lagos to Maiduguri:  They exist, in time and space.  You can experience them, navigate them, and transact business with them.

    Unlike Abia International Airport which, after five years of frenzied construction and N8 billion, could not be traced on any map, ordnance survey, by reconnaissance flights, spy satellites, or by any known system of divination.

    This was the ghost airport Abia Governor Alex Otti says his predecessor, Okezie Ikpeazu, bequeathed to his administration.

    Ever so dutiful, the Abia State Assembly decided to take up the challenge of locating the missing airport.

    Pursuant to a unanimous resolution, all members present and voting, The Assembly solemnly resolved to set up a high-powered committee to search for, locate and identify the airport by all means necessary and, sparing no expenses or exertions, ascertain its condition, and enunciate the strategies and tactics by which it may be speedily repossessed by its rightful owners, the government and the good people of God’s Own State.

    No precedent was required for this exploration, but one Honourable Member supplied one all the same,  He recalled that when a Nigerian communications satellite designed and positioned by China went missing from its geostationary orbit, the National Assembly in a unanimous resolution set up a committee with a sweeping mandate to go anywhere to locate and retrieve.

    The Honourable member could have cited an earlier precedent. 

    When Radio Kudirat burst upon the June 12 scene and shattered the complacency of Sani Abacha and his killing squads, the authorities explored every means that could help locate and destroy it.  According to friendly sources in Aso Rock who tipped us off regularly about the regime’s plans and proceedings,  such was their desperation that the authorities even recruited the leading marabouts of the time and paid them hefty retainers to help in the search.

    I lost a good friend, a prominent broadcaster with the NTA, when I asked him testily at a diplomatic reception how the marabouts were doing.  I will never forget the scowl on his face.

    To return to the vanished satellite:  It was only when the complexity and the cost implications of the quest were spelled out in plenary that the Distinguished Senators and Honourable Members decided to shelve the project, pending further studies to be conducted by three sub-committees, and a Public Hearing in each of the nation’s six geopolitical zones.

    Back in Abia:  Just before the crack team of seasoned explorers appointed by the State Assembly set out on their expedition to locate and retrieve the missing airport, the former governor, Dr Ikpeazu, clarified the state of play.  He said N10 billion was voted for the project, but not a shishi went into executing it.

    Leaders of Thought and Royal Fathers had at various fora counselled that it would be more judicious to spend the money improving and expanding the road network to serve the less privileged than to spend it building an airport that would cater only to the elite, who were already well served by airports in neighbouring states.

    Being a listening Administration dedicated to serving the best interests of the majority of Abians, the government had decided to plough the funds into the massive construction and rehabilitation of the road network recommended by the Leaders of Thought and Royal Fathers.

    And the wisdom of it all, the result, could be seen in the beautiful, multi-lane highways, inter-city and inner-city roads on which Governor Otti and his entourage zip through the state at every opportunity without knowing how they were built, and without showing any gratitude to the previous government, Dr Ikpeazu remonstrated.

    Something tells me that we have not heard the last word about the National Assembly’s plan to conduct a comprehensive search for the missing Nigerian satellite, and about Abia Assembly’s determination to locate, at the very least, the site for the proposed airport and to determine whether its disappearance resulted from force majeure or other attrition.

    The team’s remit was recently widened to include an exhaustive inquiry into whether the  airport was requisitioned by extra-terrestrials to test the efficacy of their brand of Artificial Intelligence as astrophysicists at the Abia State University are reported to have postulated in a confidential memo to Governor Otti.

    Expect updates as they become available.

  • The coming injunctions  

    The coming injunctions  

    How did we arrive at this point where the judiciary, or at least some sections of it, consider it a proper exercise of their remit to restrain the police or law enforcement from interrogating, arresting, or detaining a suspect in a criminal matter, or taking the preliminary steps on which a prosecution must be grounded?                   

    I ask this question in light of the ongoing standoff between Yahaya Bello, the fugitive most recently governor of Kogi, and the EFCC, which sought to question him on charges that he bilked the state’s exchequer of some N80 billion in the eight years he held that office.

    Yahaya Bello rushed to court to purchase an order restraining the EFCC from performing its constitutional duties, though not before going into hiding.  At this writing, he is holed up in parts unknown.

    I used the word purchase advisedly, and I use it in all its connotations and denotations, not unmindful of what the writer Humbert Wolfe (1885 – 1940) said of the British journalist of his time.

    You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God, the British journalist, he noted sardonically, adding:

    But seeing what the man will do Unbribed.

    There is no occasion to.

    There is some redemption in this.  If supplicants know what Nigerian journalists, judges, and other meditators in the socio-political process will do unbribed, there would seem to be no occasion to do so.  If they know that they can achieve the same outcome without bribing anyone, why take the trouble?

    To get away from the rhetoric and get back to the concrete business of the flight from justice and from reckoning of the heedless and power-besotted Yahaya Bello:  the court, knowing what he would do if it denied his quest, dutifully assented.

    The EFCC appealed but kept the heat on Yahaya Bello.   Out of the blues, Yahaya became a convert to and a fervent apostle of the rule of law, especially in practice.   So, he headed to the court again in a bid to arraign the EFCC for disobeying the court’s order, convert to the rule of law and its primacy.

    There is compound irony here.  Yahaya Bello, taking cover behind a court injunction of dubious value,  makes it impossible for law enforcement to serve him with court papers. Yahaya Bello removes himself from the reach of the law, and asks the court to commit the EFCC for contempt. 

    For sheer temerity, it would be hard to beat this, which meets the definition chutzpah.

    Chutzpah, remember, is when a person who killed his parents begs the trial judge to be lenient because he is an orphan.

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    A different court that refused to be suborned has denied Yahaya Bello’s request, and the standoff continues between a resolute EFCC and an inventive fugitive.

    I return now, pardon the long digression, to the question I posed at the beginning:  How did we arrive at the point where the courts can lend their authority and majesty to block law enforcement from carrying out their legitimate duties, absent a breach of due process duly established, and absent a showing of probable cause?

    Its genesis is usually traced to the time of Peter Odili, governor of Rivers State, whose two-term tenure ended in 2007.  The EFCC moved to arrest him in the investigation of charges that he diverted a humongous amount of public funds to build and equip a private teaching hospital and medical school.

    They say his wife, a judge of the appellate court at the time, played a part in fashioning  his response:  Seek a perpetual order to restrain the EFCC and the police and any of their agents from arresting him and, it must be supposed, interfering with his enjoyment of his well-earned peace of mind.

    The injunction stands to this day.  Curiously, it was never appealed. Was that part of the bargain negotiated in the dark and dank recesses of the judiciary? We may never know.

    What we know is that the implications are far-reaching.  From restraining the police and law enforcement from carrying out their lawful duties, it is but several small steps away from restraining the courts from functioning.

    With Odili as precedent, the journey has begun here in earnest.  It remains to imagine or contemplate its probable course.

    One day, the dispossessed could seek an injunction restraining the Fire Service from combating a conflagration in the luxury estate in the neighbourhood on the ground that it was built with stolen funds.

    A litigant could seek an injunction blocking the establishment of new universities because the existing ones are ill-equipped, poorly funded, cater only to the elite, and stand to fall into utter decrepitude if scarce funds were to be used to build to recreate them instead of refurbishing those on the ground.

    A case like that could drag on for years, with untold consequences for higher education in general and the educational industries in particular.

    It could get worse. 

    One day, Boko Haram and its affiliates will seek a permanent court injunction restraining the government as well as voluntary agencies from imparting Western education in any guise or disguise in any institution, saying that it corrupts the mind and the body politic.  If its forum shopping is halfway diligent, it will find a court willing to grant its prayer.

    Being a creation of the law, the best authorities say, the courts positively must obey the injunction restraining the government.  If, by act or omission, the ruling is not appealed, it becomes the law of the land and remains as such until and unless it is set aside by a superior court.

    The case could go all the way to the Supreme Court and drag on for years, given the interminable delays the judicial system itself condones.  And while all this is going on, who can tell what might happen to the education industries?    

    Obtaining justice at the level of interpersonal relations will also be fraught.  It is not hard to imagine the usual people disinterring the musty archives and presenting as a binding precedent a court ruling from the Babandiga era, in which it was implied that a father could not bring a wrongful-death suit against the police when they killed only his litigious self.

    That day cannot be long in coming when, finally, the long-suffering United Litigants will petition the courts for an injunction restraining the National Assembly or a State Assembly in perpetuity from enacting laws designed ostensibly to promote good governance in Nigeria, whereas they only advance the good fortunes of the lawmakers and their fellow-travellers. 

    Leaving nothing to chance, United Litigants will, through the instrumentality of the same petition, seek to have declared null and void and of no consequences whatsoever any law or measure purported to have been enacted by the bodies aforementioned or their proxies.

    For good measure, they will ask the courts to commit to prison the President, the governor or any official who purports to sign into law any such measure purporting to issue from any source whatsoever.

    The foregoing has sought to explore only a few of the issues that are likely to surface, mutatis mutandis, from the ruling in Odili.  The surprise is that they have not yet surfaced. 

    The possibilities are, of course, endless.                                       

  • On the trail of a fugitive

    On the trail of a fugitive

    The hegemonists must be ruing the day they dragooned Yahaya Bello, an obscure former chief accountant at a ho-hum federal parastatal, into the Kogi State gubernatorial race.
    The race had been determined more or less. The APC candidate, Abubakar Audu, a former governor of the state, and his running mate, Abiodun Faleke, won. In an uncanny turn of fate, Audu slumped and died before he and Faleke could be declared the official winners.
    In the perception of the public, no knotty legal or political issue was thrown up by Audu’ssudden death. It did not invalidate the fact on the ground: The Audu-Faleke ticket won the election. So, recognize Faleke as governor-elect, and leave it to the APC to produce a deputy governor-elect according to its own rules and usages
    This, at any rate, was what commonsense dictated. But in Nigerian politics, commonsense has no place.
    The APC’s national chairman, John Oyegun, allowed himself to be inveigled into referring the matter for resolution to Abuja, where an arch-hegemon was firmly in the saddle. It would be hard to find a more preposterous legal interpretation than what came out of the office of the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, SAN.

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    Discountenance the election entirely. Stage a fresh gubernatorial primary and a re-run. Faleke declined to partake in the travesty, from which Yahaya Bello, who had been clobbered in the primary that had produced Audu, was declared winner.
    A reptile judiciary steeped in obfuscation and perjury would endorse the sophistic claim that the Audu-Faleke ticket belonged to the APC. If this is true, why stage costly, elaborate primaries to winnow the field of aspirants? Why not put forward the contending parties themselves as candidates, and leave it to them to designate whomever they please as the candidate for the position at issue?
    All that fudging was in aid of an objective dear to the heart of the hegemonists: Kogi, being a “Northern” state, must remain in the North’s orbit by all means. Allowing it to be governed by a Christian and a person who cannot pass the “northern” test, would pluck it from that orbit and eviscerate the North’s agenda.
    From that epic sleep of reason and judicial legerdemain was born and bred a monster that today haunts not only Kogi but Nigeria’s body politic.
    Nobody who has followed Yahaya Bello’s brutal and capricious tenure in Kogi will be surprised at the corruption that has lately been documented about his time in office, and which I had remarked in four previous columns for this newspaper.
    His tenure is a study in gangsterism. Who else but a gangster would at every turn employ the pa pa pa rhythm of automatic gunfire to dare anyone to transgress his gubernatorial will?
    That was Yahaya’s standard practice whenever he deigned to address the people directly – the very people he took a solemn oath to serve.
    Yahaya Bello’s contemporaries are learning to cope with life after office and life out of power. But he is basking in what has eluded every elected president or governor in Nigeria since the return to party politics in all its confections: A third term.
    He bequeathed to his handpicked successor, Usman Ododo, his entire cabinet and personal staff and has for good measure remained holed up in the official residence. It is a measure of Bello’s continuing grip on power and of Ododo’s fealty that Ododo has solemnly declared that wherever and whenever his command conflicts with Bello’s preference, Heaven forfend, Bello’s will automatically supervene.
    Until Ododo was thrust into office in an election that will not stand the most cursory examination, Ododo was chief accountant in the bankrupt Kogi Local Government Service, where employees were paid, not their statutory salaries, but whatever Yayaha Bello deigned to dole out to them, a practice Bello instituted shortly after he took office eight years ago.
    Not knowing what they stood to receive at the end of each month, public servants were at the mercy of Yahaya Bello’s caprice. Even at its most generous – I employ that term advisedly – it was never more than 60 percent of their statutory entitlement. Employees’ unions that were not conscripted to sing Yahaya Bello’s praise learned not to stir things up.
    Fear of the little Napoleon was the constant companion of public servants in Kogi, from the highest rung of the judiciary and the administrative class down to the lowliest functionary.
    It was the same hegemonists who led Yahaya Bello to believe that the Presidency was his for the bidding. The office had been “zoned” to the North Central, and no one among the sitting northern governors favoured for the position was better qualified than he. It was not for nothing, they assured him, that he was President Muhammadu Buhari’s favourite governor.
    Having no superior qualifications nor achievements to flaunt, Yahaya Bello parlayed his age — a youthful 47 years – into a unique selling point. He then placed the Kogi exchequer at the service of his quixotic quest to become President of Nigeria.
    The Kogi State capital, Lokoja, became a Mecca for obtainers. One week, Bayelsa Youths for Yahaya Bello would bob up at a well-publicised ceremony to endorse Bello for president, based on his youthful vigour and unparalleled achievement in transforming Kogi from a backwater into the Dubai of Africa and destination of foreign investors flocking to the state with their footloose in numbers that could not be contained.
    The following week, officials claiming to represent teachers would embark on a pilgrimage to Lokoja to proclaim him the best candidate for president, given the mouth-watering pay and conditions he instituted for them. It made no difference that when Kogi teachers were paid at all, they were paid only a fraction of their entitlements.
    Hard on their heels would follow officials claiming to represent journalists, there to pay homage to Yahaya Bello for making media practice a soul-uplifting delight, shorn of the arbitrariness that constrained it elsewhere, and for making Kogi a land where the rule of law reigned supreme.
    The week after, Zungeru Youths would surface in Lokoja to proclaim their solidarity and unflinching support for a Yahaya Bello presidency. The following week, Kaura Namoda Youths would storm Lokoja to declare their support for Bello, the only presidential aspirant capable of lifting Nigeria from the doldrums into a global power with immediate effect.
    In subsequent weeks, Sambisa Youths, Okirika Youths, and Agbanikaka Youths, to mention only a few of those proclaiming support for a Yahaya Bello presidency, would converge on Lokoja to press their advocacy.
    Youths for Yahaya Bello from Kogi were missing in the parade.
    To supplement these carnivals. Yahaya Bello sponsored all manner of conferences,organized by entities of dubious provenance.
    They came, they obtained, and they went back laden with bounteous rewards. And they deluded Yahaya into believing that he was the Great Khalifa Nigeria was waiting for.
    In the presidential primaries, he was handed a shellacking that would have sobered the most obstinate creature. Not Yahaya Bello. Instead of elbowing him out as a bad advertisement for its cause, the APC humoured him by designating him its emissary to Nigerian youth and pressed his successor Ododo into service to supervise the party primaries for the gubernatorial race in neighboring Ondo State.
    Ododo’s attempt to import into Ondo the tactics that his principal Yahaya Bello had employed to win every election in which he figured in one guise or disguise collapsed spectacularly, just when the EFCC was closing in on Bello.
    Yahaya wangled an injunction from the compromised state judiciary restraining the EFCC and the police from summoning him for interrogation or arresting him, as well as his appointees. Just as he had dismissed as enemy agents visiting officials from the Federal Centre for Disease Control and Prevention and expelled them from Kogi, he denounced the EFCC as a cesspool of corruption out to besmirch the rectitude that pervaded official transactions in Kogi and sought to restrain its officials with a bogus injunction from a kept judiciary.
    Posing as a champion of states’ rights, he dismissed the agencies as interlopers barred from operating outside federal territory.
    Every bully is at heart a coward. Yahaya Bello, the arch-bully, is at this writing in hiding,a fugitive from the law.
    The EFCC chair, Ola Olukoyede, is to be commended for his determined pursuit of the former governor. His iron resolve to bring the fugitive to justice is admirable. But zeal is no substitute for due process, which presumes every individual innocent until proven guilty. He should allow the process to work itself out, using every lawful means in his remit.

    –

  • Electricity, like gasoline, like food

    Electricity, like gasoline, like food

    When the Minister of  Power, Adebayo Adelabu, revealed the other day that mindless consumption of electricity was to blame for the perennial shortfalls that have in turn necessitated an upward review of tariffs by more than 200 percent, many an outraged consumer must have dismissed him as flippant, if not downright petulant.

    The Honourable Minister may not have realized or intended it, but he was following a long line of political officials and policy-makers who reflexively blamed the hapless victims for the privations their acts and omissions occasioned.  He is likely to go down as a successful politician.  For, in politics, nothing sanctifies like self-exculpation.

    At a time of disquiet unlike the present one in the Babangida era, his nominal deputy, Vice Admiral Augustus Aikhomu blamed urban consumers for the high food prices.  They were too lazy to repair to the rural areas where costs were lower, Aikhomu said.  And unlike that feckless breed, he volunteered, he returned to his ancestral village in the Esan country of Edo State ever so often to replenish his supply whenever he ran out of gari.

    The Minister of Agriculture, the usually well-tempered and solicitous General Alan Akinrinade, explained that the problem was not that food supplies fell short of demand but that consumers were too picky.  They would rather have a bowl of imported oatmeal than a bowl of our own home-grown, healthier, ogi or akamu.  And if the oatmeal is not available, they will carp endlessly about a shortage of breakfast cereal.

    If the same over-pampered, spoiled elite cannot snack on grilled Cornish hen, if they cannot get their favourite cuts of beef from cattle reared in Australia or Argentina, or mushrooms from the Iberian peninsula, or fish from the South Atlantic, they will be in a sour mood.  Do not even tempt them with the local equivalents or substitutes.

    Their bread has to be baked with imported wheat.  Not for them bread baked with cassava flour which one administration after another in the past three decades has designated the National Loaf. And if canned baked beans is in short supply, nothing can induce them to make a meal of the wholesome, unbaked variety that is available all-year-round here.

    Some of them are so discriminating that they will not touch lager beer unless it is brewed with water from the melting glaciers of the Arctic Circle.

    No government, not even one sworn to uphold the human rights of all citizens as Babangida’s was, could cater indefinitely to the degenerate taste of a parasitic elite, Akinrinade could have added were he not an Officer and a Gentleman.

    Much the same reasoning was advanced to justify the cutting of alleged subsidies on petroleum products.  Gasoline was obscenely cheap, so much so that you could obtain one gallon of that precious combustible for less than the price of an 8-oz bottle of soda or filtered water.  When it          was not being mindlessly wasted, it was being smuggled on an industrial scale to other climes where it was guaranteed to earn windfall profits that belong by right to Nigeria’s exchequer

    Because gasoline was so cheap, consumers purchased and pressed into service far more motor vehicles than the road network could accommodate.  The resulting wear and tear cratered the roads and the highways, endangering the lives and property of innocent road users.

    Gasoline was cheap because it was so heavily subsidized that the authorities might just as well have given it out free, especially since, as we learned only recently, the cost of producing one gallon of gasoline was $3.40, whereas the pump price was at the material time about a tenth of that amount.

    The subsidies deprived the government of the funds it could have invested in building more oil refineries, prospecting for more oil, expended on research and development, and propelling Nigeria to the ranks of the G-20.

    The remedy, they said, was to cut the subsidy bit by bit until there was nothing left to cut.  But the more they cut the subsidy, the bigger it grew., and the more remained to be cut.  The more they patched up the clunky refineries of the analogue era, the more dysfunctional their performance. But new refineries never got built.  There was only scant investment in the new technologies.  They unbundled the government-sponsored oil behemoth, the NNPC, but its spirit and its proclivities continue to animate the parts.

    Importation of refined petroleum products became the main vehicle through which the politically well-connected amassed huge fortunes by dirty tricks until President Bola Tinubu declared that enough was already too much.

    Read Also: Simple ways to check your electricity tariff Band

    Even now, they are hinting darkly in fiscal circles that those insidious subsidies have crept back into the industry again, and that they will have to be rooted out very soon.

    The narrative has now shifted to the troubled power industry that has long been notorious for  what it doesn’t supply:  electricity. 

    Those who snagged bits and pieces of the old NEPA when it  was unbundled in the hope of making fortunes have proved no more adept at generating and  distributing electricity,  Not even the most generous stakeholder will rate the industry as a supplier of light.

    The Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, says the fault is in the consumers, not in the corporate providers.  Mindless, wasteful, reckless consumption is their defining attribute.  They keep their freezers powered when the contents are frozen rock-hard and will remain so for days if the power is turned off.  Their empty offices must be chilled hours before they arrive at work.

    Ditto their homes when they are away at work or out of town for the weekend.

    Even when hurricane lanterns, candles and oil-wick lamps can provide adequate illumination,            they must light up their homes with fancy light bulbs.  They have consigned the good old coal-fired pressing iron to the junkyard, and would rather use the electricity-powered variety that is a relentless juice guzzler.

    Not for them those efficient kerosene-fuelled cooking stoves, much less those squat and sturdy locally-fabricated stoves which impart the unique flavour of the blazing firewood under the pot to whatever is cooking, and can get the job done much faster than any electric variety.

    The Honourable Minister almost forgot to mention their washing machines, dishwashers, carving knives, blenders, mixers, toasters, shavers, and all such appliances powered by electricity and to insist their use carries the grave danger that indigenous expertise in performing chores in our traditional ways traditional may be lost irretrievably.

    These unconscionable habits persist, says the Minister of Power, because electricity is too cheap.  It is that cheap because it is heavily subsidized. For that same reason, there is not enough electricity to go around.

    The subsidy will therefore have to be cut and the proceeds invested in generating and distributing more power to those who claim that they cannot live without it, so long as they are prepared to pay the real cost as dictated by market forces.  Current practices, he has warned, are simply unsustainable.

    The common denominator in these three-fold crises, not forgetting the looming water crisis, is the consumer.

    Why don’t we abolish the pesky lot?

  • Obasanjo@87: A celebration and a lament

    Obasanjo@87: A celebration and a lament

    Former President Olusegun turned 87 on March 5.  

    Ordinarily, an 87th birthday seldom ranks high on the calendar of a person or organisation. But Obasanjo is no ordinary person, and his birthday was marked with a strong national and international flavour and a touch of scholarship, all emblematic of his statesmanship and abiding concern with issues of leadership.  And there was great merriment.

    The occasion featured a lecture on governance by a most unlikely personage: former President Goodluck Jonathan whom Obasanjo, perhaps forgetting that he had foisted him on the nation, repeatedly characterized as inept and ineffectual, and who had in turn compared Obasanjo’s tactics to those of a motor-park tout.

    It also featured the inauguration of the Leadership Academy at the Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL) and a book on leadership, the latest volume in Obasanjo’s expansive bibliography. 

    Even without the grand party that followed on the Library’s grounds, it would have been a memorable Obasanjo outing.

    There he was, in baggy shorts, at an informal gathering in the foyer of the OOPL dancing in measured steps to the beat of talking drums and sekere and other traditional instruments suffused with praise songs; there he was sallying forth now only to retreat deftly, deflecting slightly to the right and to the left moments later, turning and twisting in perfect synch with the beat.

    But that was only the preliminary.  Obasanjo seemed to have reserved the most intricate elements of his choreography for the grand party on the Library’s grounds, where Ebenezer Obey and his band serenaded guests, men and women of yesterday mostly, and a good number of today’s people as they arrived on the scene or circulated in the crowd.

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    Decked out in a designer outfit – unlike some two decades ago when he seemed to have had a carpenter for his tailor, he took his place on the floor, weaving, swaying, crouching one moment and springing upright the next moment, a veritable past master.

    I mean no respect to the women present, least of all to the sedate Mrs Bola Obasanjo, but if there was a competition for the best dancer of the day, Obasanjo would have won outright.

    Not bad for an 87-year-old man.   He sure has the moves, as they would say here in America.   And he has the vigour as well as the spirit.  Age has not slowed him down.  He spoke off the cuff on leadership for some ten minutes with nary a miscue, a testament to his mental acuity.  As to his agility, look no further than his moves on the dance floor.   

     He seems set to go on and on with the years.

    After he came out of General Sani Abacha’s infernal prison with his mind and body unimpaired, whereas his friend and former deputy, General Sheu Yar’Adua had perished in another Abacha jail, Obasanjo used to trumpet his Born Againism.  But not for long.

    As the story went, an aide who was on bantering terms with Obasanjo tugged at his agbada to pull him out of his revelry at an event in his first term featuring some damsels wiggling to the pulsating  rhythm in a mesmerizing dance.

    “But sir, you are a Born Again,” the aide remonstrated gently.

    “Born again my foot.  It is only from the waist up,” Obasanjo reportedly replied, in what may well be an apocryphal story.  But I digress.

    It was an added delight to see Dr Matthew Hassan Kukah, Archbishop of the Catholic Archdiocese of Sokoto, on the dance floor not doing a perfunctory shuffle but “digging the show,” to employ the local parlance.  Always, engaging, Archbishop Kukah.

    But there were some notable absences, two of which struck me the most, the first being that of Aremo Olusegun Osoba who, as APC Governor of Ogun State, had assigned the site of the Presidential Library to Obasanjo, only to be schemed out of a second term by the PDP’s Fixing Machine controlled by Tony Anenih, he of the fearsome reputation of turning winners into losers and losers into winners.

    There is corroborative evidence of fixing in the 2003 gubernatorial race in Ogun but it is not iron-clad.  The defenestration rankles to his day nonetheless, and I doubt whether any development can move Osoba to attend any ceremony Obasanjo is staging.

    The second absence would have been more telling if Dr Onaolapo Soleye, Obasanjo’s friend and confidante since their days at the Baptist Boys High School, Abeokuta, had not died some 10 weeks earlier, on November 15, 2023, four days after he turned 90.

    You could hardly find two public figures who enjoyed a closer relationship.  Most times when I was visiting Obasanjo at the Farm House in Otta, in the eighties and nineties, I would find Dr Soleye had preceded me or learn that he had just left or was being expected.

    He was a fixture at various fora organized by Obasanjo’s Africa Leadership Forum.  An exemplar of temperance and modesty, his wardrobe consisted almost entirely of clothes made from local fabrics, as Professor Babafemi Badejo of Chrisland University, Abeokuta noted in a fine memorial tribute in the online newspaper Premium Times. From his casual, avuncular bearing, you could not tell that Soleye was a well-regarded associate professor of sociology at the University of Ibadan.

    He was a good listener, and came across as a person with whom your secret was safe, and whose goodwill you could take for granted.  He was never one to raise his voice, however heated the discussion.

    Soleye came into the limelight when he was appointed Commissioner for Finance at the creation of Ogun State in 1976, due largely, it was said, to the influence of Obasanjo, who was second-in-command in the ruling military regime led by General Murtala Muhammed.

     Obasanjo is also widely believed to have influenced Soleye’s appointment as Minister of Finance during the first coming of General Muhammadu Buhari as Head of State, at a time not unlike the present, where consumer goods were scarce, foreign exchange was scarcer, and prices were steep.  The administration steered the economy out of the doldrums.

     Soleye was there at Obasanjo’s side during Obasanjo’s two presidential terms, unobtrusive as ever, but playing supportive roles.  His membership of the Board of the NNPC was perhaps the most substantive.  He figured prominently in the founding and running of Obasanjo’s Bells University of Technology, Ota. Their friendship and collaboration continued long after Obasanjo left office. 

     Then something snapped.

     What snapped, and when it snapped, have remained mysteries.  One no longer saw them together at ceremonies in which their presence would have been taken for granted.  Those who confirmed my observation had no answer to my questions.

     Not being “on ground” as the saying goes, I could not pursue the matter diligently.  I did not know how to reach Soleye.  The last time I had any direct interaction with Obasanjo was 2020 and was not sure how he would react to questions about what happened between him and Soleye. 

     He would have answered my questions in broad terms, I suspect, but would have held back on the most salient issues, being the very discreet person he is, especially on matters touching official secrets and national security, however tangentially.

     When Soleye died, I scoured the media for a tribute by Obasanjo, and a letter of condolence to, if not a visit with, Soleye’s family.  I did not see any gesture reminiscent of their decades of friendship that I had found exemplary and inspiring. 

     Maybe I missed it.  But persons who should know confirmed my observation.  I should add that, were Soleye alive, he probably would not have attended Obasanjo’s birthday bash.

     When my relationship with someone I will always regard as my brother from another mother and who more than reciprocated in the same manner broke up suddenly and inexplicably, I sank into a deep funk, distressed that our relationship did not have the enduring quality of the Obasanjo-Soleye model.  I grieve even today, years later.

     That model served the Owu people, Ogun, and Nigeria well.  I mourn its demise even as I rejoice with its surviving exponent.

     Many happy returns of March 5, Mr President.

  • The First Lady and a neo-Ayatollah

    The First Lady and a neo-Ayatollah

    Oluremi Tinubu, wife of President Bola Tinubu, and most recently a three-term lawmaker as a Senator in the National Assembly of the Federal Republic, is probably the demurest First Lady Nigeria has ever had, a distinction she shares, in my judgement, with Turai Yar’Adua, late President Umaru Yar’Adua’s widow.

    Not for her the meddlesome obtrusiveness, the showy arrogance, the delusion of consequential presence, the exhibitionism, the feigned compassion, and the tinselled glamour of some former first ladies.  Nor could anyone accuse her of the crassness and the boorishness of one first lady that still rankle a decade later.

    In the eight years that her husband served as Governor of Lagos State, she went about quietly supporting his administration with her own outreach programmes that touched every segment of society.

    As a three-term senator representing Lagos Central, she marshalled her official grants, plus funds from her well-endowed family, to run some of the most effective intervention programmes in the nation.  Her Constituency Office in Lagos was a meeting point for residents seeking grants for education, small business, skills acquisition, housing, and relief from myriad dislocations of life in the megalopolis.

    She was often there in person, listening attentively and sympathetically to, and learning from, her visitors.  When they reached some milestone, won some award or attained some distinction, she celebrated and rejoiced with them.   Her personal touch brightened many lives and contrasted sharply with the practice of some of her colleagues who think that distributing some household items at noisy ceremonies is their highest obligation.

    She has carried on in this manner for some two decades without scandal, a rarity in a country where hardly a day passes without someone in her position of privilege being caught in conduct unbecoming, or being profiled in high scandal.

    All this makes it the more unfathomable that a Muslim cleric from  Bauchi State or a pretender to that title, identified as Idris Tenshi, decreed a fatwah – a death sentence, no less – on her the other day.

    Her crime?

    The unforgivable sin of being a Christian, an arna, Hausa for “unbeliever,” in the world of the cleric and his fellow travellers, the most loathsome animal in all of creation.

    He had not judged her guilty of blasphemy or of impiety or of any conduct deemed to be in flagrant conflict with  Islamic doctrine as the novelist, Salman Rushdie was adjudged to have done when Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on him and the publishers of The Satanic Verses in 1989.  

    In whatever case, the cleric is no Khomeini.  Even if he is a latter-day Khomeini, 2024 is not 1989.  And Nigeria is assuredly not the Islamic State of Iran.

    But it is an ominous development all the same, and should be viewed with the utmost seriousness. It will not do to dismiss the cleric as an attention-seeking fanatic of little or no consequence.  For it is often from such obscure provenances that the seeds of murderous fanaticism are propagated.

    It is doubly disquieting that there has been no resounding condemnation of the fatwa in the ranks of the Muslim faithful, which would at least have made it made it clear that the cleric spoke for nobody but himself, and that those who might be inclined to heed his morbid edict are on their own, and that there is no tolerance whatsoever for that kind of conduct.

    Silence is not to be mistaken for endorsement, to be sure.  But an unequivocal condemnation of the fatwa and a repudiation of its author would have served society much better than silence. 

    Nigeria, it is necessary to insist, is a nation of many religions, many faiths, and many deities. One symbol is as good as another provided everyone attaches the same meaning to them. The Constitution guarantees freedom of worship, as well as freedom to abstain from religious worship.

    Nigeria has no official state religion, and any effort to decree one into existence or to creepily insinuate it into the polity will never succeed

    From pronouncing a fatwa on Oluremi Tinubu for being a Christian, it is but a short step to pronouncing a fatwa on all Nigerians who are not adherents of Islam. It is an act of incitement pure and simple.

    It is no answer to this charge that Mrs Tinubu has come to no harm thus far, or that the issuer of the edict is a person of little or no consequence in the scheme of things.

    Her reaction in the face of primal threat bespeaks her quiet grace and faith, in contradistinction to the cleric’s hysterical rant.

    “I am not afraid of death,” she said defiantly during a visit with Bauchi State Governor, Bala Mohammed.  “I want to say that I am too old to be afraid. If God has granted me more than 60 years on earth, I shouldn’t be afraid of death.”

    Read Also: First Lady seeks stiffer penalties for  kidnappers

    Governor Mohammed stands almost alone among influential Muslims in his ringing condemnation of the fatwa and its proponent, describing the whole thing as “a national embarrassment” and assuring the First Lady that its proponent would be punished.

    It is worse than a national embarrassment, Your Excellency.  It is an incitement to murder and a solicitation of murder.  And it is not the governor’s province to punish Idris Tenshi. He has no such power.  The power belongs in the office of the chief law officer of Bauchi State, the attorney-general. 

    Tenshi has reportedly apologized, but an apology for an offence of that enormity cannot be an indemnity against prosecution.  The lesson has to be taught that such conduct will not be tolerated.

    Karl Marx wrote somewhere – and I am paraphrasing – that a moribund society produces its own morbid gravediggers. There are already too many of this tribe in Nigeria: bandits, kidnappers, cultists, ritualists, herders, peddlers of fake medications – the whole desperate lot.

    To add to this catalogue those who claim a divine mandate to order the killing of fellow humans who believe differently or worship differently makes Nigeria a far more dangerous place still.

  • Governance and palliatives

    Governance and palliatives

    Palliative.

    When that word entered the vocabulary of social discourse, and of news writing and reporting in Nigeria, I was not a little disquieted.

    For one thing, it is not easy on the tongue.  For another, it is not a headline word. Old-school editors back in the days before offset printing would have blue-pencilled it out of news copy reflexively and upbraided whoever cleared it for publication.

    Even in this digital age, editors concerned more with serving the public than taking advantage of the ease of formatting would hesitate to use it in a headline. They would look for a shorter, simpler, word.

    But Nigerians, right down to those inhabiting the remotest village, have come to acquire so much familiarity with the word that only the most pedantic of editors would now regard it as a red signal. 

    You hear it rendered in local and regional tonal variations in boardrooms and in the market square, the motor park, at festivals, at naming and burial ceremonies, and indeed wherever two or three Nigerians are gathered.  You hear it come off the lips of the old and the young and the very young, the well-schooled, the not-so-schooled, and the totally unschooled.

    I cannot with confidence dat   e its precise entry into our lexicon, but am almost prepared to assert that it graduated into a staple of social and political commentary in the time of former President Goodluck Jonathan.  

    These days, no discourse on the Nigerian condition passes muster unless it is perfused with details of palliatives currently on offer, the ones that preceded them, how they had been hijacked or misappropriated, and how they have on the whole failed to meet the ends for which they were designed.

    In whatever context, the Federal Government is the primary actor, with state governments playing a secondary role.  A visitor to this clime might well report to the audience back home that, in Nigeria, they are running a government by palliatives.

    “Social media” outlets, pardon the oxymoron, are awash in portrayals of the palliatives in theory and practice.   In one, masquerades, regarded in folk culture as creatures from the other world, are asking for their share of the palliatives being distributed or announced every passing day.

    They didn’t look famished and didn’t sound angry.  Perhaps that is the conduct their abode enjoins.  Still, it must be asked: What is going on there? Is it also riven by politics, propaganda, inflation, hoarding, profiteering, shortages, empty silos, epileptic exchange rates, and Boko Haram’s depredations?

    In another depiction, the national mood is set to the stirring tune and resonant cadences of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” from Messiah.   Here are the opening lines in Pidgin English, riffed appropriately:

    I deh hungry/Me dey hungry/I dey hungry/I deeh hungry . . .

    Then, these lines, addressed directly to the president, the vice president, senators, ministers, governors, and the government:

    Belle dey worry me/Make you give me chop. . .  

    And then, the explosive clincher:

    We–dey/Hun–gry          

    The performance was the work of a professional or practiced amateur choir, their trained, voices ringing out loud and clear and touching the soul, as in the great Chorus, of which the rendition is a parody.

    No assemblage of hungry persons could have sung with such gusto, such vitality, and such vibrancy.  Nor was there the merest whiff of anger in their voices.  On the contrary, their voices radiated joy, ecstasy even, and contentment.  The voices did not reflect what is conveyed in daily discourse as anger.

    But the hunger out there is real enough, even if anecdotal.  The anger seems sporadic and, in part, engineered.  Still. It will not do to say that it is all a matter of perception. They need to be addressed with concrete, targeted, and well-delivered measures. For, as sociologists tell us, if a situation is perceived as real, it is real in its consequences.

    The authorities must start by asking the right questions.  What exactly is the problem, or combination of problems convulsing the polity?

    To a good many of our compatriots, these questions have a simple, one-word answer:  Tinubu.  If only President Bola Tinubu had installed the right people in his cabinet and executive agencies and pursued the right policies, the country would not have found itself in this parlous state, they insist.

    Their solution?  Tinubu should resign and make way for a more competent chief executive. They are silent as to who should replace him, and how that person should be chosen.

    Others are calling for a military coup to sweep Tinubu off the political platform and supplant the entire governing apparatus.  It is as if a cabinet shuffle with tanks will turn things around.

    Many of his appointees would not have passed the merit test, it is true.  They owe their jobs to political, regional, ethnic, and religious balancing.  But even if he had picked the ablest persons in the land, they would still not have made much difference in the nine months they have been in office.

    The problems have deep roots. 

    Just a few years after independence, the Balewa Government launched an Austerity Programme.  It was his answer to some of the very problems confronting the nation today.  The temper of the times was memorialized in a hit tune by the late high-life maestro, Victor Olaiya, and by other musicians. 

    The times are hard, they crooned.  There is no money in town, no jobs, prices are high, and everyone is yearning for money.

    At his first coming as Head of State, General Muhammadu Buhari inherited an economy driven to the brink of collapse by the depredations of the Shagari Administration.  Money and basic commodities were rationed; imports were controlled by a regime of licensing,

    Military President Ibrahim Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) was advertised as the perfect answer to Nigeria’s political and economic problems.  On paper, it seemed to fit that bill.  In practice, however, it cemented the foundation of our present woes by turning the country into a laboratory for crackbrained experiments in economics and politics.

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     It was he who introduced the two-tier exchange rate mechanism that enriched him and his cronies, bled the treasury and pauperized the general public. That mechanism is at work today in a more vicious form.  It was under his regime that banking became a racket, a proving ground for syndicated swindlers.

    President Olusegun Obasanjo came into office full of ideas and goodwill at home and abroad.  He believed, and many shared the belief, that he could move mountains.  He spoke the language of reform and, to his credit, transformed the broken telephony system, and gave public servants a living pension. 

    He got rid of public enterprises that were a drain on the nation’s finances. But they ended up, heavily discounted, in the pockets of the well-connected.  The purposes they served, however patchily, were lost to the public.

    More out of loyalty to his departed former deputy, General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua than from a sound assessment of his record and potential, he foisted the terminally ill Umar Musa Yar’Adua on the nation as president.  A cabal seized the space, and the nation drifted.

    Goodluck Jonathan, whom Obasanjo again foisted on the nation, was no improvement. He was called “clueless” so often that a visitor to these parts might have thought it was his middle name.  It was in his time, I think, that Nigeria slid down so precipitously on the International Misery Index that it came to be regarded as the world’s “poverty capital.”  Oil smuggling and oil importation intensified; national refining capacity collapsed.

    Buhari 2.0 made no pretence about managing the economy.  He simply got his obliging, or rather, conniving Central Bank governor, Godwin Emefiele, to print billions upon billions of Naira to keep the government running.  Potemkin rice plantations littered the countryside, of which the rice pyramids that sprang up overnight in Abuja and vanished just as suddenly were a product.

    The value of the Naira dropped steadily and forecasts of an exchange rate of N1000 to one U. S dollar that many dismissed as apocalyptic became a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Buhari’s so-called reform measures knocked the bottom out of the economy.

    To compound matters, as Boko Haram and murderous herders and freelance bandits made farming a dangerous occupation, harvests dwindled steadily, over the years, resulting in food shortages.

    The foregoing is the baleful bequest President Tinubu was handed nine months ago.

    After a slow start, he has launched policies and programs designed to turn adversity into advantage.  It is not going to happen overnight, and things may even get worse before they get better.  Policies and programmes are not self-executing.  They need to be implemented and monitored by competent, conscientious, and committed officials.

    To effect a lasting change in the nation’s fortunes, Tinubu needs cadres of such officials. He must not tolerate the fecklessness and lassitude that now parade some important corridors of power.                                                                                            

  • As they prepare to write a new constitution

    As they prepare to write a new constitution

    The National Assembly, relying on a provision in the 1999 Constitution whose legitimacy is widely disputed, is set to embark on yet another attempt to produce a new constitution for Nigeria.

    Previous attempts by former leaders, from Muhammadu Buhari in his first and second coming, to Ibrahim Babangida, Abdulsalami Abubakar, Olusegun Obasanjo, and Goodluck Jonathan, to change the Basic Law produced minimal changes or ended in futility. They all sprang from questionable motives.

    The extant constitution, foisted on the nation by General Abubakar, was kept closely guarded              until it came into operation in 1999.  It came so freighted with misimpressions of the nation’s problems, culture, needs, and egregious drafting errors, that there have been loud and insistent calls for its abrogation and replacement.

    Perhaps the best effort by the House of Representatives in addressing that need occurred in 2012-2013.  But the present legislature must resist every effort to follow the path trod then. 

    Reviewing that path, House Deputy Speaker, Emeka Ihedioha and chair of the review committee, was all over the place congratulating himself and his colleagues on executing what by his reckoning was one of the rarest political feats ever wrought in this clime.

    “We have kept faith with Nigerians,” he proclaimed, in an article detailing the exertions the House of Representatives put itself through in its self-serving and utterly misconceived task of fashioning a new Constitution for Nigeria (ThisDay, April 19, 2013).

    He recalled how, on December 10, 2012, all 360 members of the House fanned out across the country to their constituencies to stage town hall meetings at which various “stakeholders” deliberated on a 43-item template of issues they would like to see amended in the 1999 Constitution.

    Discussions at the sessions were not merely free and robust, Ihedioha wrote, they were resoundingly “participatory.” Thereafter, votes were taken and recorded in full view of all the participants. Each member of the House then presented a report, incorporating voting results from his or her constituency and backed by video evidence, to the secretariat of the ad hoc Committee on the Review of the Constitution.

    The reports were then deposited at the secretariat of the Constitution Review Committee, which again invited representatives of “stakeholders” to join with its staffers to collate the results.

    According to Ihedioha, the outcome, presented to the House of Representatives the previous week, categorically represented “the voice” of the Nigerian people regarding what changes they would like to see in an amended constitution.

    The process was nothing of the sort. In conception and execution, it is as incurably flawed as the 1999 Constitution it was supposed to modify. It is certainly not an improvement.

    What the nation needed then and needs today is not a trainload of amendments to a constitution that is so shot through with errors and omissions, and so constricted in its underlying assumptions, that it cannot serve as a useful guide for resolving the conflicts convulsing the country.

    The people had no hand in preparing the agenda. They took no part in designing the “43-item template” that constituted the substance of discourse – assuming it is not a case of unnecessary dignification to call what took place a “discourse.”

    Those whom House members railroaded from their constituencies into attending the town meetings were for the most part self-selected or induced by the prospect of free food and drinks and gifts the Honourable Visitor from Abuja was expected to provide. In no sense could they be said to represent the political tendencies or shades of opinion in their constituencies, much less in the country.

    There was no independent verification of the “collation” that followed each town meeting. The House member who staged the meeting and had a vested interest in showing that it was a “robust” grassroots deliberative forum, the kind of which Nigeria had never witnessed, was responsible for the “collation.”  The “video evidence” presented to authenticate the proceedings showed, if anything, that they were at bottom a mockery.

    Or “a sham and a monumental failure,” as High Chief Rita Lori-Ogbebor, the influential minority-rights activist called it, in a withering critique (ThisDay, November 13, 2012) of the town meeting held in her Delta State constituency of Warri. The exercise, she said, was “nothing more than a ploy to rubber stamp the selfish agenda of those who organized it.”

    The Warri Town Hall meeting took place the day President Goodluck Jonathan was visiting for the birthday celebrations of the televangelist, Ayo Oristsejafor.  Scheduled to start at 9 a.m. it did not begin until 4 p.m. By then, many of those who had gathered for the event had left.

    Only one minute was allowed for indicating “yes” or “no” to 43 questions on the template. That was the sum total of the “discussions.”

    But even where they were better organized, one cannot term them “consultations.” Asking members of the audience to answer “yes” or “no” to the questions on the template cannot be called “consultations” without doing great violence to language. Nor can it be honestly claimed that the outcome represented the “voice” of the people.

    What a good-faith exercise requires is a forum at which persons elected for the purpose of re-writing the constitution meet over a period of time to deliberate, no options foreclosed, on a wide range of significant national issues in a spirit of give-and-take, and come up with a document reflects a broad national consensus on which a healthier union can be founded.

    One of the issues that have been convulsing Nigeria is that federalism – the bedrock principle on which the nation was established — has over the years been abandoned, to the point that Nigeria today is more or less a centrally administered state.

    The so-called public hearings evaded the problem altogether, or sought to perpetuate it.

    One of the items on their template required the audience to indicate by yes or no whether the electoral commissions in the states should be abolished, leaving it to the Independent National Electoral Commission to conduct all polls. 

    No one desirous of restoring true federalism would ask a question like that.

    And in Lagos State of all places, a majority of attendees – the very people who stand to lose the most – reportedly voted to deny federal funds to local governments allegedly created outside the framework of the1999 Constitution.

    That outcome seems wildly implausible.

    The more fundamental question was, and remains, whether Kano State, which allegedly has roughly the same population as Lagos State, should have three times as many local governments as Lagos State, and three times as many representatives in the lower House of the National Assembly.

    The foregoing, in sum, was the process Emeka Ihedioha and his colleagues in the House of Representatives advertised as a great breakthrough. This was the doom-laden product they wanted Nigerians to accept as an unprecedented act of keeping faith with the public. 

    A re-structured federation, based on a new constitution truly warranted by the preface “We, the People,” has been the recurrent demand of recent times.  Toward this end, it has

    been proposed  that the six so-called geo-political zones first canvassed at the Constitutional Conference convened by General Sani Abacha be recognized as the federating units. 

     But it should be remembered that the Conference was confected as a way of avoiding coming to terms with the problems arising from the annulled 1993 presidential election.  Besides, if implemented, it would for the most part create six smaller versions of Nigeria, reproducing in the smaller units the very problems it was designed to solve. 

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     At any rate, that is what is most likely to happen if the dozens of ethnic nationalities inhabiting Niger State, Kogi, Kwara, Benue, Nassarawa, and Plateau, all in the Northwest Zone, are corralled into a federating unit?

     Creating yet more states, it has also been urged, is the best answer to Nigeria’s problems.  Most of the existing states are barely viable, and creating more will only strengthen the centre.  Besides, even if every city in Nigeria were constituted into a state, there would still be elements within it demanding a separate state of their own.

     The structure most likely to make for the greatest happiness of the greatest number of Nigerians, as I see it, is one in which state boundaries would be coterminous with ethnic and linguistic categories.

     Some denounce such an arrangement as a surrender to what they call “primordial instincts.”    The departed eminent political scientist Claude Ake, and one of the most cosmopolitan Nigerians ever, saw it differently. 

     Calling such an arrangement “ethnonationalism,’’ he argued that it provides a people a chance            “to affirm their humanity against the forces of homogenization, and to claim a social space and a cultural milieu in which they can feel at home, assert their cultural identity and self-determination for their ethnicity or nationality.”

    Any restructuring that ignores this fundamental truth can only perpetuate the agonies Nigeria’s nationalities.