Category: Olatunji Dare

By Olatunji Dare

About ten years ago, Steve Ballmer, co-founder with Bill Gates of the information and communication technology (ICT) giant Microsoft, said the state of the industry vis-à-vis its capability was about as advanced then as the 1947 Ford motor car compared to what were then the latest automobiles.

Just to give you some idea of how advanced that car was: Henry Ford, its proud manufacturer, said you could have it in any colour so long as it was black.

Today, thanks to advances in ICT, we have self-driving vehicles, robots that perform tasks previously performed by humans and perform them without the errors to which humans are prone, the most notable examples being in manufacturing and surgery.

Through our smart phones and other devices, the internet has become extensions of ourselves, for better and for worse. We can employ them to cause pleasure or inflict pain, to mobilise for worthy causes as well as ignoble ones, to spread knowledge and enlightenment or ignorance and prejudice, to torment or to comfort.

ICT has abolished distance and constricted time itself, but it has also abolished privacy and instituted voyeurism of the most pernicious kind. It has created a parallel world, and alternative universe, in which many now insist that there are no facts, no objective reality. You create your own reality, your own alternative fact, and anyone who doesn’t like it can go create his or her own The only reality that matters is what you believe to be real; everything else is a fake or a hoax.

It used to be said that foto no dey lie: A photograph does not lie. It is as good as the actuality and as reliable a substitute for it. Not in the age of Photoshop and other computer applications. What you see in a picture many be nothing more than what the person who made it wants you to see .You can manufacture opinion pro or contra any issue

No one know what will come next. The possibilities are not even limited by human imagination if, as has been hypothesized in some circles, that machines or systems created by humans drive this mesmerising new world could one day assert their own autonomy and become more intelligent than humans. But all this probably lies in the long run, when we have the comforting assurance of John Maynard Keynes, we all are dead.

Meanwhile we will have to find ways of addressing with the social fragmentation actual or potential, the deception, the manipulation, the growing difficulty of building consensus and finding common purpose that the deployment of some of the most basic manifestations of ICT, the so-called social media about which very little is social, has wrought.

I was moved to think on this matter last week by a statement credited to General TY Danjuma which a subscriber to WhatsApp brought to my attention.

The statement was seditious and incendiary through and through. It was calculated to stir up hatred, set tribe against tribe, tongue against tongue, creed against creed, and to incite an armed uprising. In my line of work, I have come across and even endured some of the most scurrilous pieces that a crackpot ever conjured up, but the one credited to Danjuma takes the cake.

It is probably just as well that its author has as no familiarity with the phenomenon known as Deep Fake, in contradistinction to the now well-worn ordinary fake.

An ill-intentioned promoter puts out a video that purports to show a particular person purportedly making a statement in a voice purportedly his or her own, with the person’s lip movements in perfect synchrony with the words he or she appears to be uttering. The physical resemblance of the person seen depicted in the video matches so closely the appearance, the voice, the gestures and the speaking style of the person it purports to depict, that all but the most alert would fall for the fakery.

If the author of that satanic post had used that technology to promote his odious tirade, fires would have been raging all over the country before the whole thing was seen for the hoax that it was. Had people not seen Danjuma with their own eyes and heard him with their own ears urging them to spread his message, arm themselves and take to the streets?

The fellow who had sent me the post apparently believed it. I told him in an email that that Danjuma did not issue and could not have issued that statement.

“How do you know?” he queried.

“Because, to start with, Danjuma is no agitator. He is outspoken, blunt sometimes to a fault, but he is no agitator. The statement contained no indication about where it was issued, and when. It was not signed.”

“The General may have omitted all those niceties deliberately, to give himself deniability,” he countered. “Is he not a politician?”

“Not your typical politician,” I said. “His interventions in public discourse are few and far between, measured but never ambiguous. No equivocation. He leaves you in no doubt as to where he stands on the key issues of the day. And he always takes responsibility.”

I cannot confidently assert that my correspondent went away persuaded that Danjuma was not and could not have been the author of the hateful WhatsApp post attributed to him.

And the encounter set me thinking about an issue that society will have to face squarely in the years ahead. In an era of media saturation, an era in which anyone who can work a mouse can post just about any material on the Internet anonymously to a global audience, how do you ensure that the fountain of public information is not fouled up?

The problem ante-dated the internet to be sure, going right back to the advent of mass circulation newspapers and yellow journalists The great journalist and philosopher Walter Lippmann was lamenting back in the 1920s that those “pictures in our heads” with which we navigate “the world outside” were incapable of helping us understand that world. So, leave that task to experts trained in information gathering and verification, who would then tell the general population the actual state of things.

Experts could be just as credulous and prejudiced as experts, argued the education philosopher John Dewey. Educate citizens to their highest capability, and they would be able to judge for themselves what is fit to believe want what is fit only for the trash can. What Dewey argued for was education in its broadest sense; education that focuses on how to think, not what to think.

That is the kind of education I have in mind, specifically, media literacy, to foster informed reading and understanding of media content and presentation.

To evaluate the post attributed to General Dajuma, for instance, the reader who has taken a basic course in media literary would ask the questions I raised earlier, namely: When did Danjuma issue the statement? Where? What was the occasion?

Beyond that, the reader would seek corroboration. How many other news outlets carried the statement?

The reader would be alert to the use of vague generalisations, nebulous terms such as “several” in place of specific numbers, take note of attributions and other vital information missing from the story, of false inferences and non sequiturs, and of dozens of other factors that usually point up the inadequacies, and hence the believability, of a story.

The reader will also be more discriminating in choosing web sites. Of the lot, commercial (dot. com) sites are the least reliable. Sites promoted by colleges and universities (dot.edu) and research and allied institutions (dot. org) bent to be more reliable.

In the years ahead, fostering media literacy is going to be one of society’s most important tasks, given the vast and growing reach of the so-called social media, starting from the home and continuing through an individual’s lifetime.

 

By Olatunji Dare

 

There was a time, not too long ago, when no policy statement, no plan or programme, and no proposition was considered adequate unless it was dedicated to some virile end.   More often than not, no greater end than virility itself was desired.

Virility, the writer and feminist scholar Jane Bryce observed at the time, had become a national pre-occupation if not an obsession. So often was it invoked as a desideratum, a magic wand, that if Archimedes had been a Nigerian, he would have demanded not a lever but virility to move the world.

Our agriculture had only to be virile, imbued with rugged masculinity, that is, and all our problem would be solved.  Without a virile educational policy, Nigeria’s march to greatness would be imperiled.  A virile policy on technology and technical training, it went without saying, was inevitable if Nigeria’s much-postponed technological take off was ever to leave the launch-pad.

Only a virile population policy could guarantee that there would be more than standing room only for the hundreds of millions that will inhabit Nigeria by 2050.  And only a virile foreign policy could lead Nigeria to take its foreordained place in the community of nations.

It came as no surprise that General Murata Muhammed enjoined the Constitution Drafting Committee in 1976 to produce nothing less than a virile draft.   But it was a surprise that in its submission, military president Ibrahim Babandiga’s Political Bureau recommended some measures designed to bring virility to, wait for it, the Executive Branch!

Back in 2005, those who claimed to know why President Olusegun Obasanjo replaced the much accomplished Foreign Minister, Olu Adeniji, with finance minister Dr Ngozi   Okonjo-Iweala, said it was to “inject” some virility into the making and execution of Nigeria’s foreign policy.  They could not have been thinking of Obasanjo who, to give him his due, is nothing if not virile. As for Adeniji, we will learn one day from his biographer what he made of the innuendo.

At any rate, that was 15 years ago.  In the intervening period, paeans to virility have been sparse in public discourse.

Until the Majority Leader in the House of Representatives, Alhassan Doguwa (APC Kano Tudun-Wada) brought the matter up dramatically in that hollow – I take that back — hallowed chamber the other day.  He brought it up just like that, apropos of nothing; gratuitously.

Read Also: Doguwa threatens columnist for display of four wives

It was not for nothing, he said to vehement cheers, that he was called a “powerful parliamentarian.” And for the benefit of his colleagues who might be thinking that his power was limited to the House and circumscribed by the rules of order, he added: “I am also powerful at home.” By “home,” Doguwa meant the place which President Muhammadu Buhari referred to with touching delicacy the other day as The Other Room.

He asked his four wives whom he had ferried in for the occasion to stand up for recognition, which they did dutifully. Together, Doguwa told his colleagues, amidst raucous laughter and subdued jeers, that the foursome had given him 27 children.  And the pipeline (pun intended, courtesy of Chinua Achebe, in Anthills of the Savannah) was in no danger of drying up.

He earned no rebuke for subjecting his wives to wanton ridicule.  He was not censured for conduct unbecoming of a person of his status.  He was not suspended, for bringing the House into odium and disrepute.  It was just another day in an Assembly steeped in scandal.

Why not?

Because, in that gathering, there were probably not a few members who have more wives and more children than Doguwa and can lay claim to greater prowess in The Other Room, only they were too discreet and discerning to advertise their crassness.

None of them wanted to cast the first stone.

 

Bamidele Adeboye Adepoju (1949-2019)

Family, friends, associates and a generation of students he had taught and mentored and whose careers he had guided and shaped, gathered at  ECWA Chapel, Ilorin, in Kwara State, last Saturday to celebrate the life of Professor Bamidele Adepoju

Until his retirement at the end of the 2018/2019, was a professor of Business Administration at Bayero University, Kano.  Apart from the years he was away on leave of absence taking an MBA at Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana, and a Ph.D. at the University of Lagos, he spent his entire academic career spanning some 40 years at BUK.

Freed at last from the demanding schedule of teacher and researcher and the call of public service, he and his wife Bolaji set out to visit their children abroad.   There, unencumbered by the discontinuities of life in Nigeria, Dele would continue his convalescence from a prolonged illness that had vitiated his last year in service, and plan for life after retirement.

But it was not to be.

They were visiting with their son Tolu, a business intelligence consultant, in Phoenix, Arizona, when the end came on December 19, 2019.

Dele had called us several weeks earlier to tell us he was in town, and that he would be around for a while.  He spoke of his recent medical history, and how he was thankful to be alive. I shared my own  identical story with him. We reminisced on our days at Indiana, and about those of our contemporaries we had encountered since we parted, what they were doing, where, and so on and so forth.  And we agreed to resume the retrospective — which we did when I called him at Thanksgiving.

And that was it.

In a chance phone conversation, my wife had asked a former schoolmate resident in Ilorin teasingly to guess whom she had been talking with a few days earlier.  None other than Bolaji Adepoju, their fellow alumna of St Clare’s Grammar School, in Offa, Kwara State.

“You haven’t heard what happened to Bolaji’s husband, then?” the schoolmate asked.

That was how we learned of Dele’s passing.  We had called on Christmas Eve, not knowing that he was no more.

Dele was gregarious, expansive and solicitous. He was ever cheerful, as if he had not a care in the world. You felt you could always take his goodwill for granted.  And he never let you down.

At Indiana where we first met, the Nigerian student community was large, second only to the Saudi community.  It was during the Oil Boom years, and most of the students had one kind of government scholarship or another.  A good many of them had their wives and children with them, and rare was the weekend during which one family or another was not celebrating a birth, a christening, an anniversary, or some event.

You not only found yourself taking the same courses with other Nigerians, but also living next-door to them in the dorm or hostel or family housing.  We not only marked Nigeria’s independence anniversary on a grand scale; we also celebrated Nigeria’s Children’s Day.

Sometimes, it got too oppressive, since you were more or less constrained to associate with some people you would have preferred to keep at a distance.

But Dele was different.  Our relationship was sealed when they learned that Bolaji and my wife were alumnae of St Clare’s, and that Bolaji’s nephew (or brother) Abimbola Adesoye had been my student at Oro Grammar School, in Oro, Kwara State.

He had come to Indiana with a First in Business Administration from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, but that distinction never got into his head.  In fact, he rarely mentioned it.  He let his scholastic record at Indiana reflect his pedigree.

Dele was born and reared in Erin-Ile, Kwara;  Bolaji (née Adesoye), in Offa.  Before urban sprawl swallowed it, the distance between the two towns was never more than three miles, four at most.  Now the two communities have virtually merged.

Yet their relationship, such as it is, is marked by strife and mutual loathing.  They have had so many bloody clashes and fought so many legal battles on their disputed boundary.  One of them has only to embrace a course of action, only for the other to reject it angrily.

How was it that Dele, a son of Erin-Ile, and Bolaji, a daughter of Offa, were able to share a life of love and respect and harmony for some 40 years while Erin-Ile and Offa have remained at daggers-drawn?

The answer may well help illuminate the path to peace and amity for the two communities.

Bolaji, their children, and those Dele left behind, will draw enormous comfort from knowing that he lived a fulfilled life, a life of accomplishment, service, duty, devotion to worthy causes, and abiding concern for others.

• For comments, send SMS to 08111813080

Olatunji Dare

 

IF Dr Jerry Gana or his friends are reading this piece, they should rest easy.  It is not about him.

Since his most recent presidential bid failed, the genial former academic who has logged probably a great deal more mileage across political territory and political appointments than most Nigerians living or dead has barely registered in the news.

He always kept a low profile anyway in his many manifestations as a professor of geography, senator, director of the agency for food and rural development DFRRI, chief of the agency for social mobilization MAMSER, minister of agriculture and national resources, minister of information and culture, minister of information and national orientation, minister for cooperation and integration in Africa, and in his several runs for president.

These appointments encompassed the era of military president Ibrahim Babangida, the interim administration of the deluded Ernest Shonekan, the brutal regime of Sani Abacha and Olusegun Obasanjo’s two terms.  But Gana never lost his equanimity, his even temperament.  More importantly, he was never tainted by scandal.

This piece is about Jeremiah Useni, or Jerry as he likes to be called, another perennial presence in the political firmament who has been around for so long and held so many political appointments on so many fronts that even members of the attentive audience might be forgiven if they have forgotten that he was a military officer for practically all those years, more so, since along the way, he took the evocative title of Sardauna of Langtang and became chair of the National Council of Traditional Rulers.

Few Nigerians have been given as many opportunities as Useni to serve the public and make a difference in the lives of his compatriots and the fortunes of his country – minister of transport and aviation, military governor of the old Bendel State, minister for Abuja Federal Capital Territory, and member of the Senate, the only position he won through an election rather than preferment.

Somebody once said that they just kept moving him from one gold mine to another

When Useni was appointed Minister of Transport Aviation, he was assigned the house formerly occupied by Umaru Dikko, who was well know known for his aristocratic taste.  A former student of mine, a senior official in that ministry, was assigned to get the house ready for the incoming occupant.

Virtually everything had to be upgraded.  Appliances had to be the latest.  Furnishings, crockery, flatware and stemware had to be the finest.   Taking a cue from mai gida, the mai guard said the black-and-white television in his post was outmoded.  Pronto, the mai gida ordered that it be replaced with the latest, in living colour.  And so on and so forth.

One day the supervising official, my former student, came to my office at the University of Lagos, utterly dejected.  He said he was scandalised by the cost of getting the house ready for Useni and was going to ask to be transferred to another department or ministry.  He said he feared that if it became public, the whole thing was going to stir up public outrage and that there         was no way he could defend or explain it away.

Today’s civil service, it is necessary to interject, is governed by a different ethos.

From Useni’s profligacy regarding the furnishing of his official residence, it was but a natural progression to the acquisition spree he embarked upon when he was named minister for the Abuja Federal Capital Territory.

That portfolio made him sole administrator and dispenser of prime real estate worth at least as much as Nigeria’s oil fields.  And you needed no oil rigs, no pipelines, foreign technical partners, no syndicated loans, and no long wait to cash in.  All you needed was access to Useni, and you emerged clutching a piece of paper allocating a piece of the choice land to you.

It was a fail-safe transaction, translating into instant wealth, in cash.

Useni cornered a vast swath of the estate for himself, not forgetting his friends and cronies.  With funds of dubious provenance, he acquired and acquired more, on a scale beyond belief:  shopping malls, warehouses, residential homes, office blocs, undeveloped parcels of land all over the country.  When a man celebrates his 17th wedding anniversary on a lavish scale as Useni did, you know that money is no longer his problem but how to spend it.

To be specific, his acquisitions confiscated by the Federal Government, apart from the N4 billion reportedly recovered from one of his homes, N2 billion of it in foreign currency, included a terminal in Jos, from where he operated a transport service with a fleet of 20 buses;  controlling shares in a bank, two shopping malls in Abuja, 40 lock-up stalls in Garki and Wuse districts of Abuja, more than 70 undeveloped plots in Abuja, more than 30 houses in Langtang and Abuja, and 43 personal cars.

Not even the “special oil allocations” he said he had enjoyed “along with others” for three years as a member of the Armed Forces Ruling Council can begin to account for his sprawling portfolio, of which the foregoing is but an abbreviation.

It is as if Useni had, well before his first public appointment, taken a vow to compensate himself over and over again for, and insulate himself from, the material deprivations of his childhood years in his native Langtang.

Before then, he had been unmasked as the official who procured the women and manned the gates while his friend and principal Sani Abacha indulged himself in orgies of debauchery that eventually claimed his life.

For a time, Useni vanished from headlines and the footnotes.  Not even his comprehensive notoriety, it seemed, was enough to earn him the attention of the junk press.  So they left him severely alone, thinking that he was finished.

But Useni is nothing if not durable.

He would bob up among the unrepentant enablers of Sani Abacha’s brutal dictatorship parading themselves as apostles of democracy, and even emerge as a chieftain of the ANPP, and later chair of its breakaway faction, the Democratic Party.

Losing his bid for election to the Senate on the platform of that party in 2011, Useni defected to the PDP and was four years later elected to the Senate on that platform.  Not one to settle for mere “distinguished senator” when he can return to being “His Excellency,” and “Executive Governor” as a civilian, he entered the race for Plateau State governor, against Simon Lalong, the incumbent and his daughter’s former classmate.

On every lip, the question was:  What does Jerry still want? He lost.

Useni’s latest quest ended last week when the Supreme Court affirmed the verdicts of the lower tribunals and held that his appeal lacked merit.  And now, Useni finds himself in the unusual position of wielding no authority from an appointive office and no influence from a political perch.

In the decades of his immersion in Nigeria’s public life, it is doubtful whether he has ever had a chance or an inclination to reflect seriously on his career and what it all means.

This is perhaps Useni’s best chance to do so, forthrightly.

What are his signal achievements in the ministries and agencies over which he presided? Where are the monuments he built? What marks did he make on public policy, and on the lives of his compatriots?  How is he going to be remembered?  In short, what is his legacy?

He should not leave the answers entirely to history.

Olatunji Dare

 

 

FINALLY, finally, the best authorities on the English language have decided to enrich it by yielding to some of the more creative and distinctive locutions that have emerged from Nigeria over the decades and will no doubt continue to emerge.

In its latest update, the Oxford English Dictionary catalogues a number of Nigerian English words make it into the dictionary for the first time, most of them borrowings from Nigerian languages, or unique Nigerian coinages that entered English in the 1970s and 1980s.

This development is liberating.  One can now use terms such as buka, or its more gentrified form bukateria without having to explain their meaning to the uninitiated, or even mama put, which at first blush seems incomplete, an expression arrested mid-way. Mama put what? But its apparent incompleteness, I suspect, is what really distinguishes it.

I suspect that it originated from the average Nigerian’s disdain for standard measures. The food vendor (mama) dishes out food worth in her judgment the exact amount the buyer has indicated, but the buyer will have none of it.  So, the buyer implores the vendor, mama to put more, (shades of Oliver Twist) for the same price.  From this, it was but a short step to mama put as entreaty and  destination.

Danfo makes the cut as a no-frills form of urban transportation; mass transit without the mass.  Perhaps much more than the defunct Okada Airline whose rutted remains now lie on the fringes of many airports in Nigeria, much more than its proprietor Gabriel Exemption Igbinedion and probably at least as much the university the named for himself, okada will now resonate across the English-speaking world as a motorbike taxi.

Let us face it:  gubernatorial, of or pertaining to governors, is an ugly word. It is also not a word for headlines, where short but bracing terms count for the most. So Nigerians clipped it to guber.  Now everyone understands what it means.

Agric has been with us for a long term as an abbreviation for agriculture, hence School of Agric, or BSc (Agric).  As in agric chicken, however, it is now used pejoratively to denote the brittle, commercially reared chicken, in contrast to the much tastier and probably more nutritious ‘native’       or traditionally reared) chicken.

I used to think that K-leg, was a wholly Nigerian locution for a condition in which    a person’s knees turn inward, resembling the letter K.  Its history, I gather, goes back to 1842.  But its usage to denote a problem, setback, obstacle, or impediment, has been overwhelmingly Nigerian.

I searched in vain for bow-leg, a condition in which the legs bend outwards, like a bow.  When I was growing up, the thinking was that you had to have bow legs to become a fine footballer, like the great Stanley Matthews and many of our contemporaries who excelled in the beautiful game.  And so, we walked on the edges of our feet, hoping to induce our legs to bend outwards.

It never worked.

Purists often frowned upon the use of next tomorrow to designate the day after tomorrow as an especially coarse indication of a poor education, if not outright illiteracy.  Now it is legit.  Eat your heart out, all ye stuffy purists.

I was pleased to see Kannywood there, depicting the Hausa-language film industry based in Kano.                I hope Nollywood, the much larger English-language move industry, has won recognition, too.  No surprises at the legitimation sef for self nor with chop, which has long stood for food or eating,

A young man who thought I should know much better once queried my using the terms “barbing” and “put to bed” on this page.  They had sneaked in at time of diminishing returns.  I admitted my error, and he and I became good friends.  Now the venerable Oxford English Dictionary says the usage is permissible.

When a Nigerian speaks of qualitative education, he or she will be understood to be speaking of education of very high quality, rather than about the quantitative variety.  And when he or she has a gist for you, or has been gisting with another person, it means he or she has some rumor, gossip, or intelligence for you, or has been sharing same with another

I must say I was disappointed not to find the popular uniquely Nigerian locutions on ground and not on ground in the OED update.  To say the former of a candidate for political office is to say that he or she has good prospects.  To say the latter is to pronounce the candidate politically dead.

Maybe these terms will appear in the next update, as well as “majorly,” meaning “for the most part,” and others the attentive audience are sure to bring up.

 

Of chutzpah and irony

You will have heard the perhaps apocryphal story of young man who killed his parents and at his trial asked the judge to show mercy because he was an orphan.

That trope is the classic example of what is called chutzpah (hootspah) in the Yiddish.  It means overweening impudence, unexampled temerity, in-your-face brazenness, outrageous effrontery, presumption of the most brazen kind, and like conduct.

I was reminded of that term and conduct bordering on it the other By Orji Uzor Kalu, who used to be the executive governor of Abia State and until recently the Majority Whip in the Senate as well as the Senator representing Abia Central in that body.

In the former office, he was presumed Excellent; in the latter, he was deemed Distinguished.  The titles came with the territory. He was nothing of the sort, of course, but he was never in the least embarrassed by the titles. Instead of striving to earn them, he disgraced and betrayed them through and through.

For each of the eight years he spent in the Executive Mansion, he virtually carted home Abia State’s statutory appropriation from the Federal Exchequer and turned it into his personal portfolio of assets without the least regard for the consequences.

Drawing on his mastery of stunt and subterfuge, he evaded justice for almost a decade.  But the law finally caught up with him, and he was sentenced to 12-year term in jail — beg your pardon, in a correctional facility.

It was from there that he filed for release the other day, on the ground that, for every day he was kept there, the good and deserving people of Abia would be denied effective representation in the Senate and a voice in the governance of Nigeria, contrary to the Constitution’s express stipulation that all States shall be treated equally.

The same Abia State he had sucked dry year after year without remorse or twinge of conscience.  The same Abia he had pillaged to build a personal business empire.

And now, irony in the United States, where race colours everything and reflected daily in the lived experience of black people, making their very existence fraught.  This condition is amply reflected in their language.

Driving while black.  Shopping while black.  Dining out while black.  Teaching while black.  Walking the streets while black.  Being ambitious while black.  Stepping out of line while being black, and so on and so forth.    Sometimes, just being black can create difficulties.

Banking while black is one of the oldest constraints that black people live with the States, was shown dramatically on the floor of a bank the other day.

A black had gone went to his bank to deposit a substantial sum of money won in a wrongful-dismissal lawsuit against his employers, whom he had accused of racial bias and do some transactions based on the cheques.

A bank official took a look at the cheques and immediately radioed the police, who stormed the banking hall in a patrol vehicle, with another as back-up.  They were heavily armed.

The bank’s officials said they suspected forgery and fraudulent intent.  It is doubtful whether they would have harboured such suspicions if the client was white.

And now, irony of ironies, the black man who was trying to deposit the money he won for termination of appointment on racial grounds has served notice that he is going to file a lawsuit against the bank that worked an embarrassing racial fuss over his own money.

Olatunji Dare

 

IT is perhaps just as well that the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Malam Abubakar Malami (SAN), peremptorily declared dead on arrival the security network, codenamed Amotekun, or Leopard, that state governments in the Southwest recently inaugurated to complement the federal law enforcement agencies that have proved supinely remiss in containing the menacing bands of marauders and their cattle herds that have virtually upended the way of life in their jurisdictions.

The project is unconstitutional through and through, Malami declared ex cathedra, literally moments after the scheme was unveiled in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital, by governors or their representatives from the six states, with leading traditional rulers and prominent indigenes of the Southwest in attendance.

No state government, whether acting singly or in a group, Malami went on, has the legal right or competence to establish any form or organisation or agency for the defence of Nigeria or any of its constituent parts.

“Security,” he declared with no sense of irony, “is the exclusive preserve” of the Federal Government.

He seems totally innocent of the fact that it was precisely the Federal Government’s inability to discharge that fundamental responsibility that led to the setting up of Amotekun in the first instance. But he was not yet done.

To leave its sponsors and supporters in no doubt about what they were bringing on themselves, Malami warned gravely, in the manner of a colonial officer reading the riot act to natives who have stepped out of line, that “the law will take its natural course in relation to the excesses associated with the organization, administration and participation associated (sic) with it as an association.”

For some five years, the Southwest has been under the siege of shadowy elements who carry out their grisly business in different guises and disguises.  They and their cattle herd devastate farmlands. They have been known to expel entire communities from their farmsteads, and to put to gruesome deaths those who dared to resist.  They have ambushed unwary travelers on the highway, kidnapped them for ransom, and subjected to horrible ordeals those they do not kill.

This campaign of murder and mayhem and arson and rapine, which cannot be attributed to the Boko Haram insurgency in the Northeast, has a longer, and some would even say, more barbarous history in parts of the North, notably Plateau, Kaduna, Adamawa and Taraba.   The Federal Government condemns each gruesome episode, rigs up some desultory resettlement centres for the displaced, and vows that the perpetrators would be brought to justice.

But few of the perpetrators are ever arrested; fewer still are ever charged or prosecuted, and the number of convictions must be one of the best-kept secrets in the country.

If the victims of the marauders can look forward to occasional material succour from the federal authorities, they cannot depend on Abuja for their safety and security even in the short or medium term.

That is the grim reality that led the Southwest state governments to organise Amotekun.

And yet, the nation’s chief law officer, at who bears no small responsibility for the pervading failure of law enforcement warns petulantly that they cannot do that, and reads them the riot act.  Haba!

The marauders, many of them their national origin unknown, enter and reenter Nigeria at will. But there is no record and thus no monitoring of their movements.  They roam the countryside dealing death and destruction with Kalashnikov assault rifles and other lethal ordinance that should be registered by law.  No record exists of their compliance.  Precious little has been done to dispel the widespread impression that they have powerful friends in high places.

If the Attorney-General and the establishment over which he presides had spent much more time enforcing the law than in spelling out its letter, perhaps the nation would not have descended into the lawlessness that now threatens the safety of citizens and the nation’s corporate existence

It is not even clear that Malami has the law entirely right.  For the law that makes security and safety the “exclusive preserve” of the Federal Government also confers on the people the right to organise to pursue and protect common interests and common purpose, of which safety and security are the most important.

In whatever case, to vest the overarching issues of safety and security exclusively in the Centre in a country that purports to be a federation is an aberration with few parallels.

But as I was saying, it is probably just as well that, at least in the matter of Amotekun, Malami is relating officially to the Southwest as if it is Abuja’s internal colony.  From reactions across Nigeria to his provocative utterance, he will have realized that those Nigerians who have experienced the mindset he represents feel deeply insulted, as indeed they should.

It is more; it is a calculated slap in the face of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, to whose political wizardry the APC owes in no small way its existence and ascendancy.

And it brings to the fore with greater urgency the demand for restructuring, or call it whatever you will: an arrangement that will honour Nigeria’s essential diversity even while striving to promote its unity, not one that seeks unity for its own sake, nor unity that brings grief of the constituent parts.

The stiffest opposition to restructuring has always come from those Malami represents and speaks for, and for whom the present arrangement is but a cloak for preserving their hegemony. They automatically conflate any talk of restructuring with secessionism.  They do not see it as springing from a yearning for justice and equity.  To them, unity is everything.

The ruling APC promised change to the constitutional order.  That was the platform on which it was elected in 2015 and reelected in 2019. But since then, it has carried on business as usual.  You cannot even accuse it of pursuing constitutional change at a glacial pace.

Raise constitutional issues requiring urgent attention, and Abuja says it is a matter for the National Assembly, which is only too glad to arrogate that overarching task unto its dilatory self. It is charged  with making laws for the good governance of Nigeria, but the vast majority of the laws that emerge   from that institution, even house-keeping rules, are initiated by the Executive Branch.

Any meaningful move to review the Constitution must therefore begin at and be driven by the Presidency.  There is no shortage of ideas on the issues that must be addressed to make for a more equitable and more workable design – the size and structure of the federating units, the relationship between them and the Centre, devolution of powers, and so on and so forth.

A first step would be to synthesize the ideas and solutions that have been proposed over the decades to address some of the most glaring deficiencies of the constitution.   The emerging document will then be discussed and debated in an assembly comprising no more than 10 representatives from the states, duly  approved by the state legislature.

This assembly will have three months to come up with recommendations, including whether a referendum shall be held to give effect to a reworked constitution.  It will then be the President’s duty to parlay the recommendations into a Bill for the National Assembly to enact.

By his ill-tempered intervention in the Amotekun issue, the Federal Attorney-General has given a fillip  to a cardinal issue in restructuring: the desire of a good many the federating units to set up their own police establishments. Opponents say the arrangement will be used to persecute political opponents.  But is the present arraignment not also abused?  And is federal abuse more acceptable than abuse at a lower level?

The remedy is to make and enforce laws that will keep abuse to a minimum and punish it wherever it occurs.

Whether Amotekun has come to stay and growl and rumble as its protagonists across the country maintain and as the marauders fear, or is dead on arrival as Malami has declared, one thing is clear: the clamour for Nigeria’s federating units to set up their own police force can only grow louder and more insistent.

 

By Olatunji Dare

 

The piece below first appeared on this page on October 22, 2013. It is being republished, slightly revised and updated.

Philanthropy runs deep in the Saraki family.

Its patriarch, Himself the Oloye, Dr Abubakar Olusola Saraki, was a legendary giver.  You always knew when he was in his country home in Ilorin GRA, to take a break from his endless trips abroad in search of new deals, to nourish and consolidate old business, or to undergo medical treatment.

Large crowds would gather on the precincts of the expansive villa – old men, old women, young men, young women, pregnant women, women carrying their babies on their backs, children, people in all sorts and conditions of distress, some of them from the crack of dawn – waiting for the man they reverentially called Oloye to emerge from the innards, hold court, and hand out gifts as was his habit.

They would go home with all manner of gifts – cash, food parcels, painkillers, soap, and fabrics.  The next day the crowds would gather again, and the next, until Oloye left town to attend to his sprawling business interests across the globe.

This philanthropy was the root of Saraki’s phenomenal success as vote harvester and political king-maker in Kwara State.  If you agreed to his terms, he endorsed you for whatever office you were seeking, even if you did not belong in the same political party. And at election time, he delivered far more votes than you needed for victory.

The formula failed him only once, when he tried to make his daughter Senator Gbemisola Saraki state governor, just as his son Bukola was completing his second term on the job and had positioned himself to succeed the sister, aforementioned, in the Senate.

To be fair to Bukola Saraki, he had stated for the record that it would be “immoral” for his sister to succeed him as governor.  Still, it would be hard to praise him for high-mindedness.  For, if it was immoral for his sister to succeed him as state governor, what made it moral for him to succeed her as Senator representing Kwara Central

In the end, it was not morality that settled the matter, but biology and sociology.  Oloye Saraki’s deeply conservative base, Ilorin Emirate, was simply not ready for a woman governor, even if that woman was his daughter.  Her candidature never got off the ground.  The philanthropy did not flag.  But this time, the votes were just not there for the harvesting.

His failing health deteriorated, and he died without enthroning another king, and without knowing for sure whether what happened to his daughter’s governorship bid was merely a setback or the end of his hegemonic hold on Ilorin politics.

It may well be, as some detractors have been saying in light of the collapse of the family’s Société General Bank and with regard to some other financial transactions under investigation, that much of what was fuelling Oloye Saraki’s philanthropy was OPM – Other People’s Money.

Even if this is indeed the case, we must still give him high praise. For, how many of the tens of thousands of Nigerians living the good life on OPM ever think of giving back anything, much less giving back on such a large and sustained scale as the Oloye?

Senator Bukola Saraki has been carrying on in the tradition of his father, handing out gifts to the less-privileged, especially during Muslim festivals.  But in his hands, what used to be an orderly occasion, festive even, has turned not merely riotous but positively lethal.

Not once, not twice, but three times have such occasions degenerated into primal stampedes in which dozens were trampled to death or suffered grave injuries.

Last week, 20 persons were reported to have died in the stampede for a piece of the Sallah gifts the Senator was handing out at his residence in Ilorin. At least as many persons were injured or fainted.

This macabre spectacle was a reprise of a similar occurrence on May 27, 2011.  By one estimate no fewer than 10 persons died in Ilorin in the stampede for rice and other items Dr Saraki was distributing at Mandate House, his campaign headquarters.

In November 2010, at least 11 persons had lost their lives in similar circumstances.  The State Government had swung quickly into damage-control mode and put the number of fatalities at four. But that is still four persons too many, for an occasion designed to provide succour to those in distress.

Ours is not yet a litigious society, the type in which a man who crashed the car he had stolen from a parking lot sought damages from for his extensive injuries from the car’s owner on the ground that if the owner had kept the car in a good working condition, the accident would not have occurred and the petitioner – the car thief – would still have the use of his legs.

Or the type in which the driver of a recreational vehicle that crashed sought compensation from its manufacturers on the ground that nowhere was a warning displayed that you could not leave the steering wheel to make coffee in the kitchenette at the rear while the vehicle was in motion.

In such a setting, Senator Saraki would now be drowning in an avalanche of wrongful-death lawsuits brought by relations of the casualties demanding hefty damages on the perfectly reasonable ground that he knew or should have known from experience that a stampede was likely to occur for the gifts he was dispensing, but had failed to take measures to forestall it; in short, that the deaths and injuries had resulted from his negligence.

• Postscript: The dark side of Ile Arugbo

Seven years have passed since the foregoing was published.  Saraki has lost the family’s hegemonic grip on Kwara politics, and his transactions while he was in office and in power are being scrutinized.

That is the context in which the Kwara State Government sent in the bulldozers last week to clear the space lying across from the residence of the late Dr Olusola Saraki along Iloffa Road, in the Government Reservation Area, Ilorin, saying that the site was long ago earmarked for a car park and staff clinic for the State Secretariat complex, but had been appropriated by the Saraki family.

Dr Bukola Saraki, for the family, says it is part and parcel of the family’s estate, duly acquired, and vested in a corporate body that goes by the name of Asa Investments. To clinch the point, they revealed their evocative name for the place:  Ile Arugbo, a Home for Old People

That name conjures up a residential facility where the elderly poor received caring, life-sustaining attention.  Its demolition has consequently been portrayed by some as an act of preternatural wickedness directed at the elderly poor by a soulless government vengefully pursuing a vanquished political opponent.

Ile Arugbo was not by any stretch a home.  Nor did it cater only to the elderly. It was a vacant lot across from the family house that the  government says had been aside for public purposes when the younger Saraki was probably still in his teens.

But on becoming state governor several decades later, Saraki had, without formally acquiring it, proceeded -thoughtfully, it should be remarked– to erect a shed on it to protect the habitués from the elements, and a storage for the materials they were going to receive.

His claim to the property, the authorities maintain, rests on no firmer ground than that.  But that is a matter for the courts.

Whatever the status of its disputed site, there is no denying that a great deal of philanthropy did take place at the so-called Ile Arugbo.

But there was also a dark side to the business.

Many who went there seeking relief were trampled to death in the stampede for the stuff on offer – 97 persons in three years, according to the best authorities, more than twice as many souls as I had reported in this space seven years ago.  I say nothing of those who suffered horrific injuries.

In that respect, Ile Arugbo will also go down as a crime scene – a scene of wrongful deaths, the circumstances of which the authorities never made even a pretence of investigating.

 

Back in the 1980s, military president Ibrahim Babangida’s palace intellectuals proclaimed with accustomed arrogance that Nigeria’s evolving history was going to divide neatly into two epochs: the Before Babangida Era, when it was all darkness, with nary a shaft of illumination, and the After Babangida Era, which was going to be all sweetness and light, the dividing line being 1985, the year General Babangida seized power.

Others, habituated to marking time off in decades, as if historic events paid the slightest respect to our penchant for organising our experience according to a decimal calendar, looked beyond Babangida’s time to the year 2000, the intersection of one millennium and another, one decade and another and one year and another.

This triple conflation vested the year with special significance. It had the great merit of being far off enough to give planners and policy makers some breathing space to meet long-proclaimed but unmet outcomes, and to set new targets that would fire the public longing for better conditions of living.

Who can be against “water for all,” not just for the few, by the year 2000? Or “electricity for all?” Or food for all? Or education for all? Or housing for all? Or transportation for all? Or health for all? Or “money for all,” assuming money would not have not become an anachronism under those circumstances?

No sooner had the last decade of the 20th Century dawned than they began to rewrite the future. The year 2000 was no longer going to be an anno mirabilis without parallel. It was going to be just another year: an upheaval here, a remarkable advance there, but altogether nondescript.

Water and electricity and housing and food and shelter and all the good things that were supposed to have become would now have to wait until 2010. But paradise had only postponed, and remember, people, that everything comes to those who wait. So, patience.

Next to outright forgiveness, time is a debtor’s best succour. But only for a while. The deadline for payment may seem like eternity. But it marches on inexorably until, voila, the creditor is at the gate. So, 2010 arrived, and the outcomes laid out without the slightest diffidence a decade earlier were no nearer fulfillment. It some cases, what the intervening period witnessed was a regression, not an advance.

But hope springs eternal. And as has been said down the ages, what is heaven for if our reach does not exceed our grasp?

The target years, it is necessary to concede, were set with no machinery in place to achieve the expected outcomes. It was as if the important thing was to decree the year, and everything else would follow.
A different strategy was therefore devised for 2020, the new magic year when water, food, shelter and all the other good things of life would be available. Rather than leave matters to chance, A National Conference enlisting some of the most enlightened Nigerians was charged with articulating a more encompassing Vision for Nigeria.

The Visioners, as the appointed delegates called themselves, met in Abuja for several weeks, all facilities provided, including a well-staffed Secretariat to coordinate the visioning and the follow up.
They did not disappoint.

They came up with Vision 2020, later named Vision 2020/20, the key goal of which was to transform Nigeria, already the largest re-based economy in Africa, into one of the 20 largest economies in the world by the target date.

Whether any of the countries in that elite league would allow itself to regress to the point that Nigeria would come from the 50th place, if that, to displace it was another matter. Nor was Nigeria the only country seeking to move up in the league. But the Vision was at least much clearer and more focused than “water and food and housing for all” in 2020.

That year has finally arrived. But the goals of Vision 2020 are not a whit closer to fulfillment than they were in 2000 or 2010. And it may well be that Nigeria will have to do all the running it can just to keep its place in the global economic order.

Turning away from Nigeria for a moment for some self-interrogation, I suspect that a great many among us have, over the decades, fallen far short of our goals and our potential. I certainly have. I never pass up an opportunity to put off until tomorrow a task I should perform today. Like the British writer Jerome K. Jerome, I love work so much that I always save some for the next day.

Dozens of books lie unread on the shelves, or read only in part. The memoir is yet to take a coherent shape. Losing weight has been easier, just as Mark Twain said of giving up smoking: I have done it a thousand times. Moments of clarity and focus dissipate, yielding to languor. A stubborn illness probably had something to do with that, plus advancing age. But that is not the whole story.

It is therefore a salutary thing to look in the mirror when excoriating Nigeria for all the dilatoriness, the discontinuities, and the missed opportunities that has marked its post-colonial history.

But Nigeria is a different proposition altogether. It represents our place in the world. It is home to the largest aggregation of black people anywhere. More than any other country, it qualifies to be regarded as their spiritual home, the place they should turn to in affirming their humanity in a world that denies and denigrates it, a voice for their collective aspirations and hopes, a guarantor of their place in the scheme of things, a refuge in times of trouble; in short, a beacon.

Sadly, Nigeria is none of these things. It is almost as if it has given up even trying.

Muddling through might have worked in an era that did not have to reckon with the profound challenges of climate change, growing population in the face of dwindling resources, artificial intelligence, deep-fakes, galloping unemployment, cyber wars, ethno-religious conflict, and so on. Today, that path is simply unsustainable.

In the midst of these challenges, they are talking animatedly about the next General Election due in 2023. They are doing so when the Buhari Administration has indicated no major policy departure from a preceding term that hardly lived up to the Change that the ruling All Progressives Congress had led Nigerians to expect—an administration in which only a few of the key policy makers and political officials inspire trust and confidence, judged by their expertise or integrity.
Politics in its rawest form is the only thing on their minds. From which zone will the next president “emerge”? And who will be his or her running mate? Who will hold what office in which party, and so on and so forth? These are the issues that are likely to consume the rest of Buhari’s term.
Meanwhile, they are not talking about restructuring. Yet, without it, Nigeria will continue to go back and forth in an ever-shrinking circle. It will carry on like a stalled caterpillar, its antennae probing furiously in every direction, its body inert.
Restructuring goes beyond tinkering with a Constitution made for an era that time and tide and circumstance have overtaken. Nor can it be vested in a National Assembly that would be loath to dilute, much less abolish, the obscene package of remunerations its members bequeathed to themselves.

If Buhari is minded to build a lasting legacy, this is the time to mobilize the entire country and the National Assembly where his party holds a controlling majority, to take the necessary steps to give Nigeria a new, truly federal Constitution rooted in unity, not uniformity, and above all, in justice.

Seize the day, Mr President.

Olatunji Dare

 

In the mid-80’s, there was a young man, one of a crop of enterprising reporters at Rutam House, university and polytechnics graduates who competed fiercely from day to day for coveted bylines to Page One stories in The Guardian.  He covered the education beat.  His principal source was the Minister of Education, Professor Jibril Aminu, not a great friend of the media and no admirer of the progressive-radical journalism the paper espoused.

The young man ranked among the most productive and most engaging of the lot, soft-spoken, exuding a quiet confidence and unfailingly respectful. I doubt whether his colleagues or supervisors ever remarked it, but he had in common with military president Ibrahim Babangida a pronounced diastema that always made it seem as if a smile was playing around his mouth.

He never flaunted his professional relationship with, and access to, Aminu, one of the influential members of Babangida’s cabinet.  He was just as discreet about his access to other powerful political officials that redounded from his covering the Minister of Education.

Once a week, usually, on a day when the Editorial Board had no scheduled meeting, I used to invite The Guardian’s field correspondents to my office to debrief them for my own orientation as chair of the Editorial Board, and for my personal education. I would ask them about the major developments of the previous week, current issues the authorities were grappling with, and how those issues were likely to shape future policy.

Goddy Nnadi was always on top of his brief. He knew who was who at headquarters and at various departments and agencies as well the forces and tensions at work. I came away from each session with a better understanding of the education landscape.

It was during one of those debriefings that he spoke of how the Minister had told him that he found my columns intriguing and would like to meet the personality behind them. I demurred on the threshold and at every subsequent reiteration of the request.  One day the request took on an urgent tone.  If I would not meet with the Minister, I should not be surprised if the Minister turned up in my residence.

Having not the slightest inkling of how to play host to a Minister I settled for the approaching 1998 Salah as an unexceptionable occasion as any, to visit him at his residence in Ikoyi, Lagos, with Nnadi as my escort.   That way, I could partake in the feasting on the Sallah lamb into the bargain.  He received me very warmly. Perhaps to maintain the spirit of the occasion, he did not bring up my column which had often been critical of his official conduct.

That task was taken up enthusiastically by another guest, Chief Ita Ekanem-Ita, registrar of the University of Ibadan.  He was still chafing from a piece, “The vanishing Calabar man,” I had written in 1987, following the creation of Akwa Ibom from the old Cross River State.  It turned out, I had written, that virtually every person one was used to regarding as a “Calabar man” was actually from Akwa Ibom, and that you would have to conduct a diligent search to find the real thing.

Aminu and Nnadi bonded and developed the kind of mutual empathy not unusual among news sources and reporters in Nigeria, a relationship that often creates a dilemma for the news firm.  Media sociologists have observed that after a while, the reporter covering a beat develops sympathies for the organisation.  Its point of view and its problems come to shape the reporter’s perspectives. The reporter loses the “objectivity,” that is supposed to undergird news work.

It is then time, it would seem, to deploy the reporter to another beat.

The trouble is that it will take the new person quite a while to report with the savvy and the surefootedness that his or her predecessor had developed over years of patient cultivation. For the news firm, the outcome of such move is a loss, with hardly any mitigation in the short term.

The rapport between Aminu and Nnadi was not of the dysfunctional kind, however.  On Aminu’s part, it was driven largely by altruism, the goal being to help Nnadi prepare for a better future.

He used his good offices to arrange a special scholarship for Nnadi, who held an HND from Anambra State Polytechnic, to study for a BS in mass communication, and thereafter an MS, at Indiana State University, in Terre Haute, Indiana, in the United States.  To ensure that his successor would not scuttle the arrangement, Aminu ensured that Nnadi’s tuition and fees and stipends were paid in full before Nnadi commenced his studies at Indiana State.

Nor was that all.  Later, on a visit to the United States as Minister of Petroleum Resources, Aminu would turn up at the Indiana State campus asking to see Goddy Nnadi.

The last time I talked with Aminu when he was serving as Nigeria’s Ambassador to the United States, I asked him about Nnadi.  “He is somewhere in Abuja making money,” he said.

Nnadi, it turns out, had indeed been making money, but not in the way Aminu meant or thought.

Last week, The Abuja Federal Court ordered the final forfeiture to the Federal Government some N2 billion, in Nigerian and foreign currencies in a bank account the EFCC said it had traced to Nnadi, plus a swank hotel in Owerri, the Imo State capital, and four pieces of real estate in Abuja, proceeds of the corrupt enrichment and abuse of office Nnadi allegedly committed while serving as general manager for corporate services at the Petroleum Equalization Fund.

As I reflected on the matter, one question kept tugging at my mind:  What will Aminu say?  Did that question ever cross Nnadi’s mind?

The piece below was submitted for my December 17 column.  Its publication was mutilated, however, due to production errors.  The original copy is hereby restored, for the record.

Tejumola Olaniyan (1959 – 2019)

Sometime in 1985, I received in the mail a letter from Tejumola Olaniyan.  The name sounded vaguely familiar, and I had no idea of his identity.  It seemed just like any other fan mail commending me for some column I had written for The Guardian, or, very rarely, excoriating me for one column or another

The outrage-manufacturing and multiplying machine called the Internet was still restricted to military usage, and its offshoot, the much-misnamed social media were distant dreams.  Writing even a short “Letter to the Editor” was a serious, deliberative act.  You thought through what you wanted to say and phrased it to the best of your ability, unlike now when composition is instant and outrage or vulgar abuse takes the place of reasoning.

I would discover that my correspondent was then finishing his MA at the University of Ife, later Obafemi Awolowo University, or was set to take up a junior faculty position. What I found even more reassuring, he said he was well acquainted with my younger Emmanuel, sadly deceased, although he did not state where or in what circumstances they had met.

Any anxieties I might have harboured up to that point dissolved.  My correspondent, I perceived, was clearly a well-bred young man, an omoluabi worth treating with.  He would not call you Uncle and then go on to give you a sandbagging.

I can still visualize his letter covering the front and one-half of the back of lined, white foolscap paper, in script that would have won a handwriting contest. He talked admiringly of my work, but dwelt on one in particular, a piece on the retirement of former Chief Justice Ayo Irikefe.  The “satirical thread” was “too thin,” he said.

My Guardian colleague then, the playwright and literary scholar, Femi Osofisan, had made the same point by way of admonition, concerned that I might inadvertently get myself misunderstood or targeted unfairly for vengeful reprisal.

“Bold exaggeration,” Olaniyan counselled in the letter, “is the heart of satire.”

I wrote back to thank him, promised that I would look him up if work or pleasure took me to  Ife, and urging him to feel free  to stop by at Rutam House whenever he was in Lagos and had some time on his hands.

He left Nigeria not long thereafter, and unfortunately, I never got to meet him.

If I have not always delivered on the satire I had set out to write – and the “Buhari Double” episode proves conclusively that I have not — it is not for lack of instruction from a solicitous tutor whose scholarship cuts across an astonishingly wide range of issues in the arts and humanities and popular culture.

Tejumola Olaniyan, The Louise Durham Mead Professor of English and Wole Soyinka Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, died on November 30, aged 60.

May his example continue to inspire us.

Olatunji Dare

 

To its critics, probably the overwhelming majority of Nigerians, the whole thing is an unmitigated swindle entrenched in the scheme of governance by the National Assembly to indulge the sybaritic proclivities of its members.

They see it as springing from the mindset that regards being a lawmaker as a hardship that must be assuaged by an obscene reward system rooted in rampant and flagrant disregard of the nation’s economic reality and the pervading poverty.

To give a notorious illustration: The N30,000 that the labor unions are demanding as minimum monthly wage is just one-half of what senators receive every month as “wardrobe allowance.” And that is by no means the most preposterous aspect of the reward system the lawmakers have designed specially for themselves.

To members of the National Assembly, however, the “constituency project” is a noble scheme that provides funding for beneficent interventions that stamp the federal presence on their constituencies and give those who dwell there a sense of belonging to a whole that values and treats each part equally.

Speaking for them, Senator (Princess) Stella Oduah (PDP, Anambra North) whose scandal-scarred tenure as Minister of Aviation in the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan is still engaging the attention of the anti-corruption agencies and is still held up as an example of how not to conduct oneself in ministerial office, says the projects constitute “one of the unique features” of Nigeria’s democratic journey so far.”

So unique that she has introduced a Bill that would henceforth earmark at least 20 percent of the federal budget, or N2.1 trillion at current estimates, to the scheme, to ensure that “good governance” is delivered to the majority of Nigerians who constitute, according to her, some 70 percent of the national population.

The last figure, pardon the digression, has remained probably the most durable statistic about Nigeria. Despite the rural-urban migration that began in the decades before independence, exploded during the oil-boom years and continued at a relentless pace thereafter, the ratio of Nigeria’s rural dwellers vis-a-vis urban dwellers has stood officially at a stubborn 70: 30.

Senator Oduah’s advocacy for greater funding of the controversial constituency projects is coming barely two weeks after the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) delivered a scathing report on the scheme at a National Summit (another one, again?) on Diminishing (sic) Corruption in the Public Sector.

The report, based on field work conducted by the Commission’s Constituency Project Tracking Group, between June and August 2019 covered 424 projects from 2015-2018 across 12 states and Abuja Federal Capital Territory.

It speaks of how federal lawmakers collude with executing agencies to pocket millions of Naira under the scheme. It details how contracts awarded by the same agency, are duplicated using the same description, same narrative, and valued at the same amount. It remarked how vast sums expended on nebulous interventions described as “capacity building and empowerment projects, some involving cash transfers, all of them difficult to verify.

It noted that embedding constituency projects in Border Communities Development Agencies and in Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency makes those bodies especially prone to the corrupt practices detailed in the report.

The Monitoring Group says it located some footloose money in the amount N3.9 million in the 2019 budget, funds not earmarked for any project or sector. It reported recovering diverted assets such as equipment for schools, hospitals, farms, water and energy projects, and from over-valuation of projects, abandoned projects, or projects shoddily executed.

All in all, the report is a veritable catalogue of malfeasance.

The report is not all gloom, however. It confirmed that 255 of some 373 projects inspected were “healthy” and 108 were “on-going,” which could mean that a site had been cleared or that the foundation was being laid, or that funds had run out. Only five project were reported actually abandoned, and eight lawmakers were recommended for prosecution, apparently one who converted his constituency project fund into building a hotel in his own name.

Nor is it entirely the case that lawmakers regard the funds as free money, to be spent as they please on themselves and their pet fancies. Hardly a does a fortnight pass without some lawmaker staging a carnival to present “dividends of democracy” such as sewing machines, bicycles, pepper grinders, portable electric generators, school stationery, and other items. But they present these as “personal donations” and often stamp them with their names and pictures, lest the recipients forget where the stuff came from.

But it is more than enough to confirm the worst fears of Nigerians who have been conditioned by experience to expect only the most scandalous conduct from their leaders and representatives.

Senator Oduah says her Bill before the National Assembly is designed to provide an “institutional framework” for the implementation of constituency projects as in other places where they operate, Kenya being her example. It must be accounted a scandal that the scheme has operated here for nearly 20 years without any institutional framework.

Still, better to fix it now than never.

Tejumola Olaniyan (1959 – 2019)

 

Sometime in 1985, I received in the mail a letter from Tejumola Olaniyan. The name sounded vaguely familiar, and I had no idea of his identity. It seemed just like any other fan mail commending me for some column I had written for The Guardian, or, very rarely, excoriating me for one column or another.

The outrage-manufacturing and multiplying machine called the Internet was still restricted to military usage, and its offshoot, the much-misnamed social media were distant dreams. Writing even a short “Letter to the Editor” was a serious, deliberative act. You thought through what you wanted to say and phrased it to the best of your ability, unlike now when composition is instant and outrage or vulgar abuse take the place of reasoning.

I would discover that my correspondent was then finishing his MA at the University of Ife, later Obafemi Awolowo University, or was set to take up a junior faculty position. What I found even more reassuring, he said he was well acquainted with my younger Emmanuel, sadly deceased, although he did not state where or in what circumstances they had met.

Any anxieties I might have harboured up to that point dissolved. My correspondent, I perceived, was clearly a well-bred young man, an omoluabi worth treating with. He would not call you Uncle and then go on to give you a sandbagging.

I can still visualize his letter covering the front and one-half of the back of lined, white foolscap paper, in script that would have won a handwriting contest. He talked admiringly of my work, but dwelt on one in particular, a piece on the retirement of former Chief Justice Ayo Irikefe. The “satirical thread” was “too thin,” he said.

My Guardian colleague then, the playwright and literary scholar, Femi Osofisan, had made the same point by way of admonition, concerned that I might inadvertently get myself misunderstood or targeted unfairly for vengeful reprisal.

“Bold exaggeration,” Olaniyan counselled in the letter, “is the heart of satire.”

I wrote back to thank him, promised that I would look him up if work or pleasure took me to Ife, and urging him to feel free to stop by at Rutam House whenever he was in Lagos and had some time on his hands.

He left Nigeria not long thereafter, and unfortunately, I never got to meet him.

If I have not always delivered on the satire I had set out to write – and the “Buhari Double” episode proves conclusively that I have not — it is not for lack of instruction from a solicitous tutor whose scholarship cuts across an astonishingly wide range of issues in the arts and humanities and popular culture.

Tejumola Olaniyan, The Louise Durham Mead Professor of English and Wole Soyinka Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, died on November 30, aged 60.

May his example continue to inspire us.