The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • Waiting for the next list

    Nothing concentrates the mind of a Nigerian wannabe better than a list believed to be in the making  and scheduled to be released soon.

    The expectation, whether rooted in fact or merely conjectural, sets the entire country atwitter.  Not merely the world of wannabes, but also the lives of their sponsors, lobbyists, patrons, marabouts, prophets, traditional rulers, acolytes, hangers-on, and of course, adversaries.

    It’s an endless expectation, since there is never a shortage of appointments to be made, honours to be conferred, contracts to be awarded, university places to be filled, and projects to be sited.  Expectations dashed with the release of one list roll seamlessly into the new list being awaited.  In fact, it can be said that a good many of our compatriots literally live from the publication of one list to the next, nursing great expectations all the while.

    Is their candidate still on the list?  The last time they checked, he was.  They had been assured that the candidate was a sure bet.  But this being Nigeria, the candidate may have been supplanted by the ward of a more influential sponsor. A name that was a certainty at dinner time may have been scrubbed by breakfast the following day, never to appear again.  Or a name that was never in anyone’s reckoning  has shot to the top of the list

    Whose list, anyway, and which list?

    For there are so many people peddling one list or another.  Everyone who can peddle a list does so, from the office messenger in a ministry, department or agency, to the resident chief of staff, each insisting that his is the authentic original and that any other document purporting to be the much-awaited list is fake. 

    It is a thriving, high-stakes industry, powered by rumour, gossip and information.   But whereas rumour and gossip are free, information does not come cheap.

    Friendly advice: Do not scoff at a list just because it comes from a lowly source.  An alert office messenger may well be more attuned to all the happenings in a ministry than many of the senior officials.  For one thing, he is ignored for the most part by senior officials.  So, he can operate unobtrusively. 

    For another, whereas senior officials are warring over territorial turfs, the messenger can compare intelligence with his fellow messengers and thus obtain the latest and most reliable version of developments.

    Plus, whereas the senior official usually wants to make a killing on the information he is dispensing, the lowly messenger will give you the tidbit at a discount.  He has not been corrupted by free money.

    Some wannabes have been known to fabricate their own lists, and to place themselves right at the top. Then, they would procure some starving reporters and, in the manner of someone imparting a profound secret and, of course, always on condition of anonymity, reveal that the wannabe ranks very high on the list of those being considered for minister, senior advocate, permanent secretary, ambassador, chief executive or member of the Board of a corporation, or an oil concession.

    The very next day, the story dutifully appears on every media outlet that the wannabe is indeed a hot candidate for a major preferment.  By that simple expedient, the wannabe obtrudes his private ambition not just on the official and freelance compilers of lists, but also on the public consciousness.

    And he, for it is usually a man, can parlay that new status to obtain bank loans, take a chieftaincy title, or another wife, and to get the social attention that always passed him by.

    Like no other leader before and after him, military president Ibrahim Babangida understood the average Nigerian wannabe’s ravenous appetite for inquiring into who is in line for what position, and was adept at exploiting it for his private amusement.

    He would scribble some names of military officers and positions on a nondescript piece of paper and plant it in a conspicuous place in his bedroom or among his laundry where a domestic aide was sure to see it.

    And Babangida would chuckle to no end several days later when the papers, as if on cue, published the script he had planted. Yes indeed, Officer X might well be slated for Position Y.  But it was more likely the military high command had been instructed to de-commission Officer X.

    In the hands of the Establishment, the list also serves as an instrument of control.  I came to understand this when a senior aide drew a friend of mine aside at a gathering one day and asked him pointedly: “Don’t you guys ever admonish your friend, Olatunji Dare?”

    “About what?” my friend asked, taken aback.

    “Whenever we are about to give him a major appointment, he goes on to write something foolish,” the solicitous aide said. “What does he want?”

    “Tell him I want to remain free to write foolish things,” I replied.

    That was in the time of Babangida.

    The moral:  If you don’t want to be stuck forever in the ranks of our professional wannabes, you have             to exercise a great deal of self-censorship, especially if you sound off frequently in the media on all manner of subjects.

    A perceptive colleague of mine back in Rutam House understood this unwritten rule only too well.  Trained as an economist in the 1960s, he was steeped in the orthodoxies of the Bretton Woods institutions.  Giving “market forces” free rein was his solution to every problem Adam Smith and JM Keynes and Karl Marx ever grappled with.

    While other analysts were knocking Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme, he embraced it enthusiastically and even wrote a book about it without using that jarring term, and keeping the discourse as anodyne as possible.

    Word soon got to him that, of all the writers on the Op-Ed The Guardian regarded as its cranium,  he was far and away Babangida’s favourite columnist, principally on account of his “mature” and “constructive” approach to issues, unlike – well, you know who and who and who.

    Then, Babangida dissolved his cabinet.  And the word was that his favourite Guardian columnist had been penciled down for a senior cabinet appointment – Minister of Finance, or Minister for Economic Development.

    Weeks passed.  Then months; yet no new cabinet.  No cabinet of any kind.

    It took roughly one year for Babangida to effect what turned out to be only a minor cabinet shuffle.  His favourite Guardian columnist did not figure in the new team.

    For the one year that Babangida kept the entire nation in suspended animation and the usual wannabes close to nervous exhaustion, his favourite columnist never wrote another Op-Ed piece, fearing that he might inadvertently say something that would take him out of favour. 

    The nation lost a fine columnist but never gained a good minister.  By way of compensation, Babangida made him chair of one of the mushroom financial institutions that were an integral part of his structural adjustment programme. But he never returned to columnism.

    I must not omit a slight variation on this theme.

    After receiving intimation from the highest source that he was going to be appointed minister, one notorious dandy-about-town and industrialist of sorts to boot paid a farewell visit to his cosmetics factory in Ilupeju, Lagos.  The next time they saw him on the premises, he told the assembled managers and staff solemnly, it would be in the capacity of an Honourable Minster of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

    He was appointed minister all right, but only one full year after his farewell visit to his factory.

    Not a few wannabes will have been disappointed that they did not figure in President Muhammadu Buhari’s cabinet, those who had been assured categorically that they were ministers-in-waiting, no less than those who thought that their merits qualified them for a seat on what the presidency had said was going to be a cabinet of technocrats.

    But that is only one list, out of the thousands in the pipeline. There may be a dearth of technocrats on the cabinet list, but despair not, o ye long-suffering technocrats.  I have it on the best authority that subsequent lists will be made up almost entirely of crackerjack technocrats and policy wonks.

  • A burial to remember

    Keeping an eye all the time on the Rolls Royce, the Jaguar, the Bentley, the Maybach, the Lamborghini, the Alfa Romeo and the custom-built Mercedes Benz, the Cadillac and their lesser cousins, to say nothing of a collection of prizeless gold jewelry and the finest time pieces watches ever made, to say nothing of  proceeds from his money-spinning compilation on anti-corruption and his chart-bursting album, must be stress enough even for the zestful Senator Dino Melaye (PDP, Kogi West).

    To this vast acquisition, his fellow lawmakers, political associates, grateful contractors, diverse supplicants in one guise or another, and his teeming supporters, have now added 104 cows, their contribution, they said, to the burial expenses for his mother, Deaconess Comfort Melaye, who passed away recently.  I suspect the number will have since multiplied.

    Only a dozen or so of the cows are of local breed, I gather.  The rest are imports from Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, Botswana and New Zealand, prized for their milk and their fecundity, and even more so their meat, always finger-lickin’ delicious whether boiled, roasted, fried or barbecued.

    But in most communities in Nigeria today, and certainly in Melaye’s constituency, cows are not exactly the most welcome of animals, no matter their pedigree or the culinary pleasures advertised for them.  A cow or two might be tolerated.  In larger numbers, they are considered a menace to agriculture, and a good many of their minders have given herders a very bad name.

    But don’t pity Dino.  And don’t blame the donors.

    From direct as well as incidental experience that, on an occasion of that kind, there would be tens of thousands of mouths to feed from near and far, for an entire week or longer.  Beef may have become a vanishing commodity in many a home, but the burial of a senator’s mother should serve as an occasion to remind the public of the good old days that would be brought back if only they would vote wisely in the next election.

    Still, there were formidable issues of logistics to resolve.  Where would the cows be kept until they were ready for slaughter?  You couldn’t slaughter all of them anyway, even if residents of the entire local government area descended on Aiyetoro Gbedde.  So, what would you do with the rest?  How do you ensure that they did not stray onto adjacent farms and devour all the crops?

    The gifts that poured into Aiyetoro Gbedde did not consist entirely in cows, as Melaye, who enjoys a reputation for transparency and full disclosure, will reveal at the appropriate time.  Hundreds of sacks of rice and beans and gari and yam flour and cans of cooking oil jostled for storage space with thousands of cartons of beer and crates of soft drinks and boxes of pasta.  Goats and sheep and turkeys and hens came in even richer profusion.

    How they ferried in all that stuff through some of the worst roads in Nigeria is a well-guarded secret.  Sorting that vast array without the benefit of a mainframe computer or a computerised warehouse would have fazed even the chief of logistics of any army at war.

    Not our Dino. He rose magnificently to the occasion, drawing on his vast experience in the National Assembly.

    Indeed, there is no greater attestation than the occasion of the respect, love, esteem and affection his people have been showering on the distinguished senator and best-selling author and composer.

    Those who are forever denigrating and vilifying him now know better.  If ever there was a man of the people, that man is Dino.

    And yet, it was not long ago that some misguided people were gullible enough to allow themselves to be recruited into a plot to recall him from the House of Representatives, alleging that he was incurably delinquent and lacking in all the parliamentary arts.   The plot failed miserably.  Now the joke is on the plotters.

    Ensuring that everyone in that vast assemblage of sympathisers ate and drank as much as they wished was no easy task.  But it was accomplished with nary a hitch.  There was no limit to the number of servings they could have, nor the quantity the usual suspects could take home by the bucketful.

    To ensure that there was no stampede, the type that could be expected in a parlous economy in which yesterday’s necessities have become luxuries, food service was decentralised.  I gather that the uncompleted stadium built by his predecessor Smart Adeyemi in Kabba, 13 miles away, served as one of the reception centres.  That is an uncommon instance of political reconciliation.

    From mobilisation to superb execution, one shrewd observer noted, the whole thing had about it the aspect of a Constituency Project, the controversial undertaking that the National Assembly has enshrined in its manual of operations. All that remains, the fellow said, is a joint resolution of the House and the Senate to accord the burial of a parent, wife or husband of a lawmaker the status of a Constituency Project. He says he is almost certain that it will enjoy the unanimous support of the entire Assembly.

    The querulous in our midst will kvetch as is their wont.  Let them chafe.  One day, they will finally grasp the elementary truth that those who sacrifice so much to make laws for the good governace of our country ought to have their every need met by society.

    In the countryside, churches are usually just one short step away from insolvency.  So, burials of well-connected notables are propitious events, more so since they occur infrequently. Church officials have learned how to mine them to the last Naira.

    I recall the burial of the mother of an officer from the most lucrative of the para-military services at a nondescript village church several years ago.  Colleagues of the bereaved officer descended on the village in numbers that practically overwhelmed it.  Inside the church, it was standing room only.  There were more people outside than inside.

    Crisp banknotes, sometimes bundles of them, filled the collection plates during the thanksgiving, only to be emptied into more commodious receptacles for a fresh collection.  At the invitation of the officiating priest, friends, relations, associates, former classmates, in-laws, former golf partners neighbours, anyone who could be linked to the bereaved, however tangentially, were invited, one group at a time, to head to the altar to give thanks.

    Then it was the turn of those who had come from Lagos, from the state capital, from Abuja and points in between, not forgetting those who had come from abroad and were expected to express their thanks in foreign currencies.

    When he had exhausted every possible combination and permutation of those in attendance (algorithms had not come into popular use back then), the officiating priest gently urged all those who wanted the work of the Lord to prosper to proceed to the altar with their offerings.

    I will be surprised if the commemoration service at Aiyetoro Gbedde, did not follow that pattern. Given the roll call of those attending, their status and their power and their wealth, and the sheer splendour of the occasion, the Apostolic Church of the Lord (Oke Ayo Assembly) and indeed the town will never be the same again.

    I can almost hear the reader asking:  What is going to happen to all the cows and sheep and goats and turkeys and hens that were not slaughtered, and to the food items that were not cooked?

    Dino said in one facetious moment that he might have to join the Myetti Allah Cow Breeders Association so as to profit from the Federal Government’s projected RUGA project.  Don’t believe him.  The future of the project is uncertain in any case.

    He has since decided to enter the impending race for governor of Kogi to take out the bumbling incumbent, rather than bide his time and win back the presidency for the PDP in 2022.

    The surplus from the burial could spell the difference between victory and defeat.

  • Marauders on the march

    In retrospect, it has taken the killing of a daughter of the prominent Afenifere leader, Chief Reuben Fasoranti, in an ambuscade that has become tragically all too familiar, to move the Federal Government and its security apparatus to ratchet up their condemnation, if nothing else, of the spate of kidnapping and the armed pastoralist invasion that have turned vast swathes of Nigeria into killing fields and ungoverned spaces.

    Funke Olakunri, 58, may not be the latest casualty of this barbarous conflation.  But she ranked among the most politically connected. She was travelling to Lagos when gunmen ambushed her vehicle and others near Ore, Ondo State, killing her on the spot and wounding her female aide.

    Victims of this pernicious traffick in the Ondo-Osun-Ekiti axis, which now enjoys the dubious distinction of being Nigeria’s kidnap corridor, have included prominent academics, Christian clergy, Nigerians visiting from abroad and casual travellers.  Many of them survived to tell harrowing stories of their ordeal.

    Some of the accounts seem vastly exaggerated, and some may well be outright fabrications.   But there is more than anecdotal evidence that something sinister has been going on largely unchecked in that corridor. Those who must ply that route now do so in convoys, or with private security guards, and always with a prayer on their lips.

    The police have blamed Funke Olakunri’s killing on kidnappers, in a bid that went tragically awry.  But residents of the area have blamed it on “cattle herders” who frequently employ the same tactics but may be pursuing different goals.

    In whatever case, the incident has heightened ethnic tensions and spread fear and loathing in an area that first attracted notoriety some four years ago when Chief Olu Falae, a former secretary to the Government of the Federation, and one-time presidential candidate, was abducted from his cocoa plantation by herders and subjected to abject torture.

    Even in areas of national life more amenable to data collection, guesswork of the most uninformed kind often takes the place of vital statistics.  So, it is hardly a surprise that the number of deaths inflicted on innocent citizens by kidnappers and herders cannot be stated with certainty.  Estimates for the past two years range from the high hundreds to the low thousands.

    Whether it is the one or the other, the figure is unconscionably high, more so when, outside the areas of the Boko Haram insurgency, the nation is not technically at war.  A sub-regional and even international dimension has rendered the insurgency more intractable outside a sub-regional and international framework.  Although that dimension also obtains in the carnage that now defines herder-farmer relations in Nigeria, it is less constraining.

    What was regarded as an economic issue in the country’s Middle Belt has now burgeoned into a geopolitical issue that threatens to shake Nigeria right down to its fragile roots.

    At its most elementary, it is a conflict between sedentary farmers seeking to secure their crops and farmlands and nomadic herders roaming all over the place in search of increasingly scarce grazing lands for their herds.

    But in many parts of the Middle Belt where the conflict has been at its most  convulsive, the herders are for the most part ethnic Fulanis and Muslims, whereas the famers are for the most part members of other ethnic groups which subscribe largely to different religions or belief systems.

    So, there you have it:  a highly combustible mix of economics, religion, and ethnicity, and politics.

    As the herders moved southwards in search of more pasture and ever more disposed to employing deadly violence, these cleavages grew sharper, to the point that some have charged that Nigeria is witnessing nothing less than a campaign of “Fulanisation and Islamisation,” though it is far from established that all the herders are Fulanis and Muslims to boot.

    The violence the herders often visit on farming communities and rural dwellers is totally at odds with the character of the Fulani herders that many Nigerians have lived with peacefully for decades.

    There was indeed a time, not too long ago, when herders carried no lethal weapons.  Now, the sticks they slung across their outstretched arms then to fend off predators threatening their herds have been replaced by deadly weapons.  And the weapons are not just for deterrence; they have been employed again and again to lay waste many villages and sack entire communities.

    The brazenness, the impunity with which they go about their grisly business is hard to fathom. They operate as a law unto themselves, with scant regard not just for consequences, but for the very concept of civil authority.  The safety and well-being of their herds is their greatest concern, and nothing appears too precious to be sacrificed to that end.

    In many parts of Nigeria today, the fear of the armed pastoralist is the beginning of wisdom and Heaven help those who discountenance it, for they can expect little help from the Government.

    In the midst of this slaughter of innocents, the authorities are yet to ask some fundamental questions.  Who are these marauders without borders, and where do they come from?

    It is no answer to say that they are citizens of the Economic Community of West African States, and that its governing protocols guarantee the free movement of persons and goods within the zone.  Or that they are stragglers from Muammar Gaddafi’s defeated army.

    Are their entry into and movement within Nigeria documented as required by law? In the case of ECOWAS citizens, does “free movement” imply the free flow of arms and the right       to trample with impunity on the laws, the property and the sensibilities of the host communities?

    Deadly assault follows deadly assault on unarmed populations with benumbing frequency.  The authorities vow again and again to apprehend the perpetrators and bring them to justice. Most suspects escape arrest and prosecution.

    This lassitude accounts for the widely-held view that the marauders enjoy protection in high places.

    Even where it has been recognised that the unchecked activities of the herders constitute a clear and present danger to national peace and security, thinking on the way forward has been woolly, to say the least.  Though commendable in its sweep, RUGA, the latest proposal to deal with the menace, partakes of this woolliness.  In vain does one search the blueprint for the rigour of thought and of painstaking implementation that should inform it.

    A new approach is clearly indicated.

    A preparatory committee of accomplished agronomists, agricultural economists, veterinary scientists, rural sociologists, working with representatives of pastoralists, farmers, and farm labour should be set up to define the situation and prepare within six months wide-ranging   papers to guide discussions among the relevant audiences at a national summit that should conclude its deliberations and submit recommendations within six months.

    The recommendations will be embodied in a Bill to be submitted to the National Assembly for ratification within six months.

    The chances seem unpromising; yet, we must hope that it can bestir itself and accord any proposals before it great urgency even as its new members, with the backing of the Senate Chief Whip,  Dr Orji Uzor Kalu {APC (ha!) Abia North} carp about their poor – indeed penurious — compensation well before they can find their way around the precincts.

    Meanwhile the beleaguered areas should be placed under a 24-hour joint military-police patrol as well as electronic surveillance.  Nothing less than that will assure traumatised residents that the authorities are looking out for them.  Given present circumstances, it might not even be out of place to declare a state of siege in those areas.

    Time is of the essence.  That much is clear from the sabre rattling, the bellicose rhetoric that has been issuing lately from the Southwest, the Southeast, and the Delta, not forgetting the provocative taunts from sections of the North. There must be an unambiguous demonstration of political will at the top to end this national nightmare.

  • Back on the beat

    My weekly contribution to this newspaper last appeared in this space on January 8, 2019.  It ended with a terse announcement that the column was taking “a long break,” and that I was looking forward to resuming my communing with its teeming followers “in due course.”

    Now, vagueness is unlikely to be counted as one of the failings of the column in the four decades or so that it has appeared in many guises and on different platforms.  What was the reader to make of “a long break” and “in due course?”

    The vagueness was deliberate.

    I was guided by the experience of an eminent compatriot, a person of great consequence and very high net worth and of exquisite taste to match, who was flown abroad for medical treatment. He recovered, and after a period of rest and rehabilitation, he called the agent looking after his home in the village and informed him that he would be visiting shortly.

    The person of consequence could hear the silence at the other end of the line, a silence that seemed as if it would never end.

    “But where are you going to sleep, sir?” the agent finally blurted out.

    The agent, a relation whom the person of consequence had given the best education that money           can buy at home and abroad and established in a well-paying executive position, had sold off or otherwise disposed of every movable item in the house and the adjoining store – beds, sofas, settees, furnishings, light fixtures, appliances, crockery, matching flooring tiles to replace broken ones.

    Everything.

    My assets are puny compared with that of the person of consequence, aforementioned.  Even so, some people might try to take liberties with them if word got round that I was critically ill in America.  Or they might begin relating to me as if I no longer belonged in the world of the quick.

    Better to give them no lead, then; better to take refuge in vagueness.

    Returning to the beat has been marked by self-doubt. Wasn’t I misjudging the level of my recovery?  What if I could not summon the old magic? Would I be able to sustain the effort?  In a way, it was like taking an examination.  If one waited until one was fully prepared, one would never take the exam.  In the circumstance, you went with what you had and hoped for the best.

    Nothing is more distressing to political journalists than being consigned to watch from the sidelines instead of charting from a position of privilege the ebb and flow and the sheer drama of politics, the fortunes and misfortunes of major political actors, who is up and who is down. and pronouncing on the mystery of things as if, to quote the Bard, they were “God’s spies.”

    For me, it was the closest thing to professional death.

    So, here I am six months later.  If two weeks is a long time in politics as a British statesman once observed, six months in Nigerian politics has got to be nothing less than a millennium.

    Where to start?

    Mark Twain’s counsel came to mind:  Start at the beginning.  But where is the beginning?

    The situation provides a perfect setting for Matters Miscellaneous, the rubric which I employ to deal in broad strokes and short takes with a the glut of occurrences I deem newsworthy  But it is impossible to account for a hiatus of six months in this manner.

    Let me just say, then, that I missed the highs and the lows of the general elections and their aftermath.  One moment, it seemed as if the APC had again pulverised the PDP.  The next moment, the PDP turned out to have fought a closer race than it was given credit for, buoyed no doubt by  the unfailingly regaling literary pyrotechnics of its national publicity secretary, my aburo Kola Ologbondiyan.

    It is a measure of the fabled durability of the Saraki dynasty that it was swept off the political chessboard by a group of amateur activists wielding nothing more lethal than a slogan that summed up brilliantly the depredations which père and fils had visited on Kwara and the nation at large for four decades.   And the new people are uncovering new depredations with each passing day.

    I do not envy Saraki’s media adviser, Yusuph Olaniyonu.

    “June 12” lived up to its reputation as arguably the most consequential day in Nigeria’s post-colonial history.  Its official canonisation as the nation’s Democracy Day, and the tacit recognition of Bashorun Moshood Abiola as president-elect, set off the usual reminiscences and recriminations.

    The revisionists went into overdrive.  By one Northern account, the North, despite being cheated out of producing the president in the pre-Option A4 primaries, championed the cause of June 12 relentlessly and single-mindedly until the Southwest “hijacked” it and turned it into a Yoruba issue.

    Not so, countered one Southeastern account.  The Southeast was the true, actual, authentic and indefatigable protagonist of “June 12” until the Yoruba in the Southwest hijacked and perverted it.

    You have only to consider the names of the principal actors in the cast, pro and contra, the rewards that flowed to them or the privations they suffered, and the geography of June 12 activism to see through the revisionism.  It was so brazen that I had to consult Diary of a Debacle, my contemporaneous account of the developments subsumed under “June 12,” to be sure that I had not lost my mind.  Silence or indifference would have served the revisionists better.

    Kogi State seems set to compensate me with compound interest for all the thrills I missed during my timeout. Those who have been petitioning the APC hierarchy to deny him the nomination for a second term have it backwards, Governor Yahaya Bello has said.  Whoever heard of mere tenants evicting the landlord, even in Nigeria?

    Senator Dino Melayo, who has never missed an opportunity to initiate or participate in a brawl, and who is forever executing one sophomoric stunt after another to score cheap political points or for sheer fun, is threatening to run for governor, vowing, as is his custom, to inflict ajekun iya (punishment most abundant) on anyone who dares to confront him.

    And Idris Wada, who contributed mightily to running Kogi aground as governor from 2008 through 2016, is threatening to return to finish the job.

    Despite the apparent widespread rejoicing over the scrapping of the RUGA scheme before it took off, I can report that some entrepreneurs with eyes on the main chance are grieving inconsolably.

    They were scheming to buy two cows and four goats and thereafter pass themselves off as herders so as to partake of the free land, free water and electricity, free security, free grazing, and free veterinary care for their herds, to say nothing of free housing, free medical services for themselves and free education for their children and dependents.

    Implementation would have witnessed the greatest urban-rural migration since Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge forcibly emptied Kampuchea (Cambodia) of its urban dwellers in 1975.  The federal authorities saw through this southern conspiracy and wisely scuttled the project.

    Finally, a word in defence of Senator Ishaku Elisha Abbo (PDP, Adamawa North) whom everyone has been pillorying for allegedly physically assaulting a female clerk while shopping for sex toys in Abuja recently.

    Insinuations of the darkest kind have been swirling since then.

    Easy, ladies and gentlemen.  The distinguished senator, I gather, is chair of the Sexual Deviancy and Related Matters Sub-committee of the Senate Committee on Family Values, Family Health, and Family Wellbeing.

    I can report that he was exploring the sex toy shop in keeping with his oversight duties.

     

    With gratitude

     

    I was deeply touched by the get-well messages and gifts that reached me directly or through the office from friends and from fans of the column.

    To you all, my grateful thanks for your kindness and thoughtfulness.

     

  • The war on Boko Haram comes to the newsroom

    It was as unusual for that time of year as it was ominous, the December 31, 2018, warning, from the Nigeria Army high command, that it would begin “to monitor and take actions against masterminds of subversive propagandists for their false publications designed to dampen the morale of troops on the war fronts.”

    Issued by the Army’s Director of Public Relations, Brig.-Gen Sani Usman, the statement spoke of “attempts to politicise and derail the ongoing fight against terrorism and insurgency” by “disgruntled elements” recycling video clips and old interviews of “disgruntled soldiers,” as well as inaccurate reports on the ongoing operations “to create sense of insecurity in the country.”

    The statement evoked the dark days of the loathsome goggled dictator, General Sani Abacha, or from the more distant but no less frightful era of Decree Four of the Dour Duo of General Muhammadu Buhari and Brigadier Tunde Idiagbon, with the difference that the military were a law unto themselves back then. Now, in a democratic dispensation under which power is vested in elected officials, the military take their instructions from the civil authority.

    The line is somewhat blurred when the civil authority has as its head a retired army general, or where the Minister of Defence is also a retired general. But the principle is well established:  Under our Constitution, the military has no independent power. Even when performing its assigned duties, it is subject to legislative oversight.

    It was somewhat reassuring then, that later in the statement under reference, Usman retreated from this disquieting proposition and warned that the law would take its course against those behind “concerted efforts to ridicule the efforts of the military in ensuring peace and security of the country.”

    The law is the final arbiter. Let every aggrieved party submit to its jurisdiction and its reasoned pronouncements.

    But any hope that the Army would follow the path of law rather than resort to self-help to settle its claim against unnamed “detractors” has proved illusory.

    Barely a week after Usman’s warning, armed soldiers raided the offices of Daily Trust newspaper in Abuja and Maiduguri, Borno State. According to the online newspaper Premium Times, the soldiers, backed by operatives of the Department of State  Services (DSS) and the Civil Defence Corps, sealed off the Daily Trust’s regional office in Maiduguri and arrested its regional editor, Uthman Abubakar, and one of the paper’s reporters, Ibrahim Sawab.

    In Abuja, more than two dozen armed soldiers in five pick-up trucks sealed off the main office of the paper in the Utako District and seized computers and other items, said Premium Times, citing eyewitness accounts. The military authorities then followed up with yet another raid, on the newspaper’s Lagos offices.

    The Maiduguri, Abuja and Lagos raids were carried out hours after Daily Trust published a news story detailing the military’s preparations for a massive operation to retake Baga and the neighbouring towns of Doron-Baga, Kross Kawwa, Bunduran, Kekeno and Kukawa in Borno State that a faction of Boko Haram affiliated to the Islamic State in West Africa Province had overrun some two weeks earlier, according to Daily Trust.

    These raids call to mind the time when military president Ibrahim Babangida closed down some of the nation’s leading newspapers for asking hard questions and reporting the inconvenient truths about his duplicitous transition programme.

    Unlike the publications that had moved Babangida to shut down major media houses, the Daily Trust’s story violates a cardinal principle of journalism and news reporting.

    In times of war –and the nation is at war, according to the best authorities – you cannot publish information on the location or movement of troops of the national army. Doing so can put their lives at risk and their mission in danger.  Loose lips, it has been said, sink ships.  Even if the national audience has a right to know, the enemy certainly has no such right.

    The Trust’s publication, it is necessary to insist, was unprofessional through and through.

    But the military’s brusque show of force against an unarmed quarry was unnecessary. A police search with a warrant, followed by prosecution by the appropriate authorities for any established breach of the law, would have served the purpose the Army said it set out to achieve just as effectively, and much more reassuringly.

    Here, it is instructive to recall an incident from the Gulf War.

    While reporting for the Fox News Channel from Iraq in 2003, the excitable Geraldo Rivera, who was a fine reporter before he morphed into a showboat and a tabloid character, broadcast a report that virtually gave away the position and movement of the invading U. S. troops he was embedded with.

    The publication consisted of nothing more elaborate than a map Rivera drew in the desert sand indicating, on camera, the location of the troops, and the likely route of their advance.

    The American military authorities lifted his accreditation immediately, abridging his bragging rights to the status of a war correspondent. In another clime, Rivera probably would been charged with lending aid and comfort to the enemy, and prosecuted. Any other recourse would have been lawless.

    The Nigerian military are waging a war of resistance against fanatical, well-equipped forces arrayed in the country’s northern fringes and along its open international borders stretching across three countries – barbarous forces that have no respect whatsoever for human life. It is not surprising that they would bristle at criticism, whether it is coming from Nigeria or outside, and that they would consider it unhelpful.

    Sadly, the fight against the Boko Haram and its confederates has tended to be perceived hitherto as a matter between the armed forces and Boko Haram. It is a national assignment. Nothing less than the future of Nigeria is at stake in the war.  Yet, no sacrifice has been demanded of the national population. Maybe that is why the public hardly feels involved, except those who have experienced first-hand the war’s depredations.

    This failure of mobilisation must not endure.

    Publication of classified material can undermine the morale of troops just as military raids on media houses can undermine support for the war effort from critical sections of the populace. Everything must be done to avert both.

    The media will have to engage in self-censorship in matters relating to the war.  Journalists do this on a far wider scale than is generally realised. From an abundance of caution, they publish only a fraction of the material they gather or stumble upon.  That is what the present situation calls for.

    Senior editors will have to bring their experience and expertise to bear on the processing of material that touches on national security.

    The military authorities should be more engaging. They should cultivate editors and the leading commentators, give them background briefings, and seek their cooperation in the management of sensitive information. I am thinking of the ‘D-Notice’ system in the UK, under which the authorities voluntarily supply classified information to the media, with the caveat that it is for their information only, not for publication.

    That system is of course open to abuse. It can be used to block publication of material obtained from independent sources.  But it is rarely used in such a manner. It helps build trust.

    Also as a way of building trust, the military should conduct at least a weekly press briefing on the war effort, with ample opportunities for reporters to ask questions. Weekly bulletins on the war effort will also help. Meanwhile, the military should vacate Daily Trust’s premises and return all the equipment it carted away during the raids.

    The war against Boko Haram is among other things a contest for the heart and minds of the Nigerian public. The military authorities must wage this aspect of the war with professionalism.

     

    Leave of Absence

    This column is taking a long leave of absence, starting next week.

    I thank its teeming followers who have kept faith with it over the decades, and I look forward to resuming our communing in due course.

  • An evening with Shagari

    “If you choose to head an article ‘An Inquiry into the Conditions of Mycenaean Civilization in the Heroic Epoch with Special Reference to the Economic and Domestic Functions of Women Before and After the Conjectural Date of the Argive Expedition against Troy,’” the British critic and philosopher GK Chesterton once wrote, “you have no right to complain if a newspaper alters it to ‘How Helen did the Housekeeping.’”

    The Helen here, in case you are wondering, is Helen of Troy.

    Former President Shehu Shagari must be wishing that he had come across this piece of advice before he wrote his paper for the Abuja conference on Federalism and Nation-Building in Nigeria, in late January, 1993.   The title of the paper is nothing nearly as abstruse as and pedantic as the one manufactured by Chesterton.  Indeed, it is a model of clarity.

    “The Power and Limitation of the Executive and the Legislature in the Presidential System of Government: A Personal Experience” is surely an unexceptionable title for a conference paper.  But by the time the headline writers were finished with it, Shagari must have felt an even greater sense of betrayal than he did when the soldiers picked him up ten years earlier, on the night of December 31, 1983, at Abuja, and told him the game was up.

    “Why I failed, by Shagari,” was the banner headline in virtually all the newspapers the day after his speech.  From that headline, nobody could have known that the address had been greeted with a prolonged standing ovation.

    The best way of coping with an after-dinner speech, it has been said, is to give the speech yourself.  That way, you are guaranteed not to fall asleep even if everyone else does, as is most likely to be the case.  But there was not the slightest indication of somnolence among the more than 200 people who listened to the speech at the Banquet Hall of the Abuja Sheraton and Towers.

    Shagari was wearing a white embroidered baban riga with his trademark one-gallon cap tilted backwards from the skull at an obtuse angle.  He is perhaps the only major figure who still wears a cap of such dimensions.  Former Plateau State Governor Solomon Lar used to sport a two-gallon variety of the cap, but he has now replaced it with a much more modest purple fez, and you might mistake him for former Imo State Governor Sam Mbakwe without the rambunctiousness unless you looked very carefully,

    On this night, Shagari was sprightly as usual.  His voice was a little strained from a harmattan-induced cold, but it was resonant and penetrating.  The forum presented him with the first opportunity since his ouster to explain the constraints under which his Administration had labored, and to put his leadership  in the proper perspective.  He clearly relished the chance and was determined to make the most of it.

    The charge of “ineptitude” has followed him everywhere like a shadow. Even ten years after he was ousted, no reference in the media to him or his Administration is complete unless it is prefaced with the term “inept.”  Right from the opening paragraph of the 14-page speech, Shagari sought to contest that evaluation.

    The checks and balances in the 1979 Constitution, he began, rendered the president helpless in many circumstances.  But no such checks and balances were prescribed for the legislature which, enjoying enormous powers but lacking any executive responsibility, became some kind of Frankenstein (sic) “which tended to destroy what it could not create.”

    His problems, Shagari continued, had begun even before the National Assembly had commenced sitting.  Word had reached him that “the so-called Progressive Alliance” was planning to take over “absolute control” of the legislature where the NPN was the single largest party.  By postponing the Inauguration of the Assembly and entering into a pact with the NPP, he frustrated the designs of the plotters.

    Even so, Shagari said, legislators engaged in all kinds of blackmail to win favours for themselves.  They even went as far as to purchase an airplane for the Senate President without the consent of the Executive Branch.  The so-called Progressives, aforementioned, thwarted government plans and programmes at every opportunity.  In fact, but for the Presidential system which made that kind of thing impossible, the combined Opposition would have voted the President out of office.  Resolutions emerging from the legislature were either frivolous or totally divorced from reality.

    But the National Assembly had its own problems, too, Shagari said.   Most of its members were inexperienced.  There were too many political parties.  The presidential system itself was a novelty that posed many problems.  It provided no room for interaction between the Executive Branch and the legislature , and when such interaction did occur, the legislature seized upon it as a chance to show a cabinet minister just who was in charge.  Nor were matters helped, he said, by a vociferous press that claimed to be the voice of the people, even though it had not been elected by anyone.

    But as the Administration neared the end of it first term, Shagari went on, things were beginning to improve; rapport and accommodation were beginning to replace rancour and recrimination, and this would no doubt have continued into his second term if the military had not struck again.

    African countries, Shagari warned, would never be able to develop along democratic lines until the shadow of “military paternalism” disappeared.  Elected officials and accredited servants of the people must be allowed unfettered freedom to continue where they left off in 1983.  Nigerian rulers must be allowed to correct their own mistakes themselves.

    Then, reaching his peroration, he declared, “The tools of nation-building must not be associated with lethal weapons but in future, we should use pen and paper and the art of reason as opposed to that of treason.”

    It was this last sentence that brought the audience to its feet and to rapturous applause.  And Shagari savored every moment of it.

    Senate President (in military president Ibrahim Babangida’s misbegotten transition) Iyorchia Ayu would remark in a vote of thanks that Shagari’s speech was rather “strident” and totally out of character for the speaker whom everyone, friend and foe alike, held up as a first-class gentleman.  Another Babangida-era senator, David Iornem, would dismiss the speech as sanctimonious mush.

    Mush or no mush, Shagari had a lot to be strident about.

    When you are accused in and out of season of presiding over an inept and corrupt Administration and of superintending a period of drift and decay, and when a decade later those who supplanted you have not posted any superior performance, a little stridency might not be a bad thing.

    The foregoing was my February 2, 1993, column for The Guardian.

    Shehu Aliyu Usman Shagari, Nigeria’s first elected president, died on December 28, 2018, aged 93, at the National Hospital, in Abuja.  He died as he had lived.  Not for him the crass ostentation, the delusion of grandeur, the overweening sense of entitlement, and the rapacious self-dealing that are the defining characteristics of today’s lesser officials, especially those populating the National Assembly.

    It remains to thank those who visit this column week after week, be they admirers or provocateurs, and to wish them a fulfilling and abundant New Year, the unsettling auguries of the General Election and its aftermath notwithstanding.

  • Benito Aderemi: A Christmas essay from 1986

    It is that time of year again, of peace on earth – as an aspiration, that is – as goodwill toward men or to us men.  Apparently, the precise rendering of that phrase is one of the overarching issues in Christian theology.

    About 20 harmattans ago – make it 52 – I worshipped at a Christmas service at an Anglican church during which the vicar, probably the most learned venerable gentleman in these parts never to have been translated to the episcopacy, discoursed on the matter at great length.

    He had studied and no doubt perfectly understood the original Greek text and was thoroughly dissatisfied  that the conflict had not been resolved definitively.  The way he proceeded, one was almost led to think that the law of gravitation would suddenly cease to operate and the earth would be plucked from its orbit, depending on whether that phrase was translated as goodwill toward men or to us men.

    That was many years before Gloria Steinem and the women’s liberation army launched themselves on the popular consciousness in the United States.  And if there was any woman in that Christmas Congregation who felt that her gender could do with some goodwill as well, she did the proper Nigerian thing:  she kept her views severely to herself.

    That we are once again in the season of aspirational goodwill was brought home to me the other day by the rousing strains of O Come, All Ye Faithful, wafted across by the harmattan wind from one of the kindergartens that dot our neighbourhood.  The children sang it with the kind of innocence that only the pure at heart can muster.  There was not the slightest trace of anxiety about the future in their voices about an economy that seems determined not to recover, whatever anyone may prescribe.

    Few of them, I am sure, are aware that this may be the last Christmas at which they can have bread from wheat flour for breakfast.  In such an eventuality, history is unlikely to repeat itself.  There will be nobody who, on being told that children are grumbling because they have no bread, will retort:  “Let them eat cake.”  For there may be no cake to cut on birthdays or to eat just for the fun of it. And there will be no  cookies.  These items may vanish from grocery shelves at the end of the year when the ban on wheat   imports comes into effect.

    Wheat imports are being stopped to conserve foreign exchange and to encourage us all to structurally adjust our tastes in line with contemporary reality.  Besides, there are adequate local substitutes that are just as good as, if not actually better than wheat flour for making all those foods that children love for their taste and adults cherish because it keeps them out of the kitchen.  The ban will create an opportunity to present the Nigerian people and indeed the entire world a unique, all-Nigerian bread made entirely by Nigerians, from Nigerian raw materials, with machines fabricated or adapted entirely by Nigerians.

    In the end, instead of wasting billions of Naira every year importing wheat, the nation stands to generate a great deal of foreign exchange from the export of the all-Nigerian bread which the entire world has been waiting for.  If the protagonists of the wheat ban have not put forth its advantages actually in these terms, it is because they are exceedingly modest people, seldom given to stating the obvious.

    Yet, if the nation’s experience in banning the undesirable or unaffordable is any indication, the wheat ban, if not deferred or rescinded, will in operation be a farce.

    About this time last year, a ban on rice imports was announced, to much popular and editorial acclaim, as part of yet another new beginning, a determined effort to “look inwards,” and “to use what we have to get what we need.”  Barely five months later, rice shipments worth an estimated N40 million surfaced at Lagos port.  Who placed the order, when, and how, remain mysteries to this day.

    It was speculated, when nobody would openly claim ownership, that the rice was part of international relief material being sent to Chad.  If so, why was the shipment not marked as such? Why had Chad not stepped forward to claim it?

    Part of the shipment later turned up in Benin Republic from where, according to newspaper accounts, it later found its way back to Nigeria overland, and in much less contentious circumstances.  And so, despite the official ban on its importation, there has never been so much rice in the country since Shehu Shagari and Umaru Dikko launched their rice armada six years ago.

    All this should bring some cheer to bread addicts.  There will be bread and cake and and cookies, for there will be wheat flour, somehow.  And only an insignificant part of it will be produced locally.  I doubt whether it will ever come to a stage where those who cannot live without bread – the real stuff, that is, not the Akinloye speciality — will ask friends and relations travelling abroad to be sure to bring back or send some bread, as villagers used to demand of their kin visiting from the cities.

    As for the all-Nigerian bread that is supposed to replace wheat flour bread, I frankly cannot vouch for its future if I were to judge only from personal experience.   I recently had the displeasure of having a bite of the stuff made from corn or cassava or a blend of the two.  It looked like caked, high-grade animal feed and tasked like sawdust.

    It could not have been the same stuff that was served as lunch to members of the Armed Forces Ruling Council (AFRC) the other day and praised by some of them as being just as finger-lickin’ good as the Colonel’s chicken.  Perhaps after the Federal Institute for Industrial Research, Oshodi, will have reaped a fortune from imparting to bakers the secret formula for this most wondrous loaf, lesser Nigerians will be allowed  to partake of it, if only as a matter of human rights.

    The pupils in the neighbourhood preparatory school are still where we left them, singing.  Had the song   not been familiar, I would have wondered what was going in that schoolroom as Benito Aderemi, Benito Aderemi drifted through the harmattan wind.  They had completing adoring Him in English and had switched to the Latin.  In their charmingly Nigerian minds, Venite adoremus had become Benito Aderemi.

    I wonder whether there was a pupil called Benito Aderemi in the school and what he thought about it all. I wonder what those innocent would think of the all-Nigerian bread if and when it materialises.  Who knows, but that they may actually come to prefer it to cake, being the “new Nigerians” that members of my generation are not?

    They may even come to prefer oil-and-wick lamps to light bulbs, and the village announcer to John Momoh and Hauwa Baba Ahmed on television.

  • Why count when you can fudge?

    Stripped of its many connotations and significations, “democracy,” so goes its Nigerian working definition “is a game of numbers.”

    Stated differently, democracy is a matter of counting. The party with the most seats in the legislature controls the legislative process. Just count the numbers.

    The political party, contestant, or proposition that can muster the most votes carries the day. Just count the votes, pro and contra.

    Can anything be more straightforward, more empirical and more democratic, assuming there is a will to determine what the numbers are and to determine them accurately, to take guesswork out of the whole thing and ensure, among other outcomes, an equitable sharing of national assets?

    Where that will is lacking, or where working with the actual numbers may be politically inconvenient, there is always an aversion to counting. Here, I am

    thinking of Lebanon, where no population census has been conducted since the 1930s and the proportion of Muslims to Christians is fixed by national policy for all time at 54: 40.5 percent, in the interest of national stability.

    But in a polity that defines democracy as a game of numbers, you would expect that everything that can be counted will indeed be counted, and the numbers publicised and stored for easy retrieval. Even if the national population cannot be ascertained to the nearest 25 million, you would expect that six months after a realignment of forces that made the political landscape almost unrecognisable even to the most practised eye, the makeup of the legislature would not be a matter of guesswork.

    Not in Nigeria.

    In the Senate, where sheer numbers may determine whether a Bill passes or fails, they do not know which of the two dominant political parties, the APC and the PDP, is in control. The National Assembly, remember, was shut down to pre-empt a showdown that would result in such a determination.

    Months after the Senate returned to business, they have still not bothered to find out the balance of forces in that chamber, and most likely in the House of Representatives as well. The issue seems to have become irrelevant, and would have remained so if a spat had not arisen last week between Senate Majority Leader, Ahmed Lawan (APC-Yobe), and the Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu (PDP-Enugu) on a newspaper report on the Senate’s proceedings.

    The newspaper, according to Lawan, had stated that the APC senators numbered 56 as against PDP’s 57. The truth of the matter, Lawan said “for the record,” was that the APC had 54 senators, as against 46 for the PDP.

    But Ekweremadu (PDP-Enugu) countered that there were no particular figures in respect of the number of APC or PDP members in the Senate.

    The Senate does not know its own composition, the balance of forces on which its deliberations often turn. Its majority leader cites figures that its deputy president disputes, without citing any figures of his own, and is apparently content with the situation.

    There you have it.

    “As regards the party configuration, I want to say there is no particular statistics for now,” Ekweremadu said, to remove all doubts on the matter. “We cannot talk about the figures that each political party has because there is no such statistics. So, let it be on record that we have no such record now.”

    He made this declaration without embarrassment, without feeling in the least scandalised. And his colleagues in the Senate received the intelligence in the same manner, and have continued business as usual.

    Why count when you can get by with a voice vote that means wherever the presiding officer says it means – the presiding officer who controls the allocation of juicy positions in the Assembly?

    I suspect that, just as no record exists of the balance of forces in the Senate, no record also exists of how many persons are on the National Assembly’s payroll as aides and other support staff, the group now threatening to shut down the Assembly over unpaid salaries and other benefits stretching back six months or longer.

    Without records, no meaningful audit can be conducted

    But who needs an audit?

    Why count when you can fudge and muddle through?

    ‘Buhari’s Double’: A reprise

    I had intended the postscript I did for this newspaper two weeks ago (“Buhari’s Double: A postscript,” December 5, 2019) to be my last word on the kerfuffle arising from one David Oyedepo’s egregious misreading of an entry on the same subject in my November 27, 2018, miscellany.

    But I must now reprise the matter, following the intervention (TheNEWS, December 5, 2018) of Professor Sheriff Folarin, chairman, Media and Editorial Board, Living Faith Church Worldwide, in defence of his principal, the aforementioned David Oyedepo.

    Here, in summary, is Folarin’s submission:

    Oyedepo is the wronged one, the misunderstood party. He knew all along that the material at issue was a satire, and had even privately expressed surprise at its “weakness.”

    Oyedepo felt that President Muhammadu Buhari should have laid the matter to rest long before it became “cancerous and embarrassing.” At no point, however, did Oyedepo “admit belief” in the story; rather, he made “measured submissions,” chose his words “intelligibly and without ambiguity to be misunderstood (sic.)”

    Oyedepo, being an “elder statesman” and a stakeholder in the Nigerian project, could not afford to keep quiet in the face of the “odious turn of tide” for the country. He and other well-meaning Nigerians “could not be working so hard to build a great image for the country and others, including the government, are destroying what such people labour hard to build.”

    Therefore, unlike others, Oyedepo chose not to fold his arms, mindful of Professor Wole Soyinka’s warning that “the man dies in him who keeps silent in the face of tyranny,” tyranny being, among other things, “insensitivity to issues of national concern.”

    social
    Buhari

    “Dare’s “satire” failed if it could not achieve its purpose and could be understood so literally,” Folarin concludes. “If the likes of Animal Farm’s George Orwell and Voltaire had written such flat satires and had later done postscripts explaining their works were satires, the way Dare has done, how could the satirical genre of writing have been popular?”

    Well, well, well!

    Folarin’s submission is a classic instance of repeating the offence instead of refuting the charge. Invoking Soyinka’s authority to justify his principal’s egregious misconstruction of my article is the height of cynicism. The entire response is emblematic of the profound lack of humility in an establishment where the leadership never admits error and is above criticism.

    If Folarin’s principal knew that my piece was a satire, albeit a “weak one”, but still went on to expound it in a solemn homily before his worldwide congregation, not as an example of a poorly-executed satire but as an authoritative revelation of unrighteousness and conspiracy of the foulest kind at the highest levels of government, he cannot blame those who have charged that he acted from impure motives, and with un-statesmanlike disregard for consequences.

  • Election 2019: Whose verdict?

    With each passing day, it looks as if the outcome of the General Election scheduled for February 2019 will be shaped more by external influences than by Nigeria’s internal dynamics.

    By this, I do not mean that it will be a throwback to 2015 when the combined forces of former U. S. President Barak Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, former UK Prime Minister David Cameron, former French president Francois Hollande and others former president Goodluck Jonathan did not name in his unprepossessing memoir, ensured that he did not return to power, regardless of his record of performance and how Nigerians judged it.

    Nor do I have in mind the intelligence services of those countries, most notoriously the US Central Intelligence Agency, with their record of skullduggery in the internal affairs of countries they believe have strayed beyond their assigned places in the international order.

    The external influences I am referring to do not possess that kind of power.  They cannot stir things up even if they were minded to do so.  They lack the capacity to translate their preferences into action except perhaps in the most indirect of ways.

    To come right out with it, I am thinking of the International Monetary Fund, the Bookings Institution, The Economist magazine, Transparency International and similar establishments in the West that from time to time pronounce magniloquently on the condition of things in the poorer countries and, as if they were “God’s spies,” to quote The Bard, spell out what fate has in store for them.

    And I am thinking of the foreign audiences which, more often than not accept and internalise as Holy Writ, whatever images these establishments in the metropole put forth, however mutilated. They invoke them uncritically, enthusiastically and approvingly.

    This was the context in which Nigerians woke up one morning only to learn that their country, having been declared winner of the global poverty sweepstakes, had been transformed into the world’s poverty capital, a dubious distinction that previously belonged to India.

    By whose authority?

    The Brookings Institution.

    The Opposition was ecstatic.  The report, it said, confirmed what discerning and long-suffering Nigerians had known all along, namely, that the ruling APC, which had promised to bring prosperity to Nigerians,  had brought only mass pauperisation.   The remedy was to throw it out at the next election.

    I do not mean to make light of the phenomenon of poverty, a blight on a world that privileges superfluity for the one percent over sufficiency for the rest.  But the aggregate numbers of persons living in poverty in a given country, however that term is defined, is only one indicator of the state of poverty in a given country, and not even the most critical.  Rarely, in any case, are those numbers captured in National Accounts.

    Nor do the compilers take into reckoning the unofficial safety net provided by remittances and handouts from family members, friends and relations, and from solicitous others.  Such reliefs are largely unknown in the West.

    Besides, any scheme that characterises India, a nuclear and space power and cyber power, home to the world’s largest pool of English-speaking engineers and scientists and computer programmers as a citadel of poverty does not deserve to be taken seriously.

    Nigeria is not in the same league, despite its oil wealth.  Still, any foreigner hoping to see hordes dying on the streets from starvation, malnutrition or disease, is sure to be disappointed.

    During its time in power, the PDP and corruption were inseparable.  The Opposition looked forward every year to the bulletin of Transparency International, hoping that the PDP would at least maintain its  ranking on the Corruption Index, if not slip several notches.  Now it is the other way round, with the PDP in jubilation, ecstatic that corruption in Nigeria has spiked under the APC’s watch, going by the latest bulletin of the corruption monitors.

    Several months ago, the Economist, the newsmagazine that prefers to be regarded as a newspaper, wrote in a forecast that the coming elections in Nigeria would be closely fought but that the APC stood to be ousted on account of widespread dissatisfaction with its performance in the three years it had been in power and that the PDP’s presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, would be Nigeria’s next president.

    The forecast set off exuberant rejoicing in the PDP camp.  It accorded with the perspicacity and the analytical insightfulness that had earned the journal global renown, and confirmed the PDP’s rigorous assessment of the state of play, a gloating party spokesperson said.

    The way the PDP carried on, you would think that the election had actually taken place and that the party had been swept back to power.

    Meanwhile, the APC camp squirmed but kept up appearances.  It took consolation from being an incumbent that had spent only three years in the saddle, not long enough to earn the kind of public disapproval that undergirded the PDP’s ouster in 2015.

    Two weeks ago, The Economist followed with another forecast that was the opposite of the previous one.  Yes, the race would be tight, but the APC would not only prevail, the PDP might disintegrate before the event!

    All hell broke loose in the PDP camp.  They cried “betrayal” and worse.  In its rank and file, The Economist now came across as a journal utterly lacking in principle and ethical conduct, a practitioner par excellence of chequebook journalism.  The journal, they said, had fallen on hazard times and had decided to sell its editorial pages to the highest bidder, leaving the attentive audience readers to wonder whether the PDP had paid hard cash for the paper’s earlier forecast that had the PDP winning the presidential election.

    In the APC camp, the reaction was:  “We told you so.  The PDP is going nowhere.”

    And all this hubbub because of a foreign newspaper’s forecast that lays no claim to scientific rigour.

    Finally, Atiku’s bid for an entry visa to the United States.  How that became an issue in Nigeria’s presidential election is puzzling.  Indeed, given the frenzy the matter has generated, you would think that it is the single most important issue in the race.

    First, some context.

    About a decade ago, an associate of Atiku’s was questioned in the United States the investigation of some financial transactions.  Allegations swirled that Atiku was implicated in the investigation, and stood  to be arrested anytime he stepped on American soil – assuming he could secure an entry visa, the previous one having been lifted on account of the investigation.  Whether on account of that incident or for unrelated reasons, Atiku has since then given the United States a wide berth.

    The Opposition took note.  Since Atiku clinched the PDP ticket for the presidential election, the APC has been taunting him.  He wants to be Nigeria’s president?  Let him visit the United States first, as proof of his fitness for the office.  If he survives it, then we can begin to entertain him as a candidate in good standing.

    Tired of the taunts and the jeers and the goading, Atiku decided to embark on a trip to the United States and touch base with his old taunts.  Demonstrations erupted in some cities, urging the U.S. Consulate to deny him a visa, and all manner of persons from all manner of motives joined in the petition.  The U. S. Consulate would not confirm nor deny that Atiku had been given a visa.

    But an online source reported that Atiku had indeed secured a visa and was already in London, en route the United States.  The APC exploded in righteous indignation, saying that, by its action, the United  States was setting morality in public life at nought.

    As for Atiku, instead of hopping across the Atlantic from the UK, he flew across the Sahara back to Lagos  to witness the official launch of the PDP’s campaign for the General Election.  He had merely interrupted his trip for that purpose and would resume it at the earliest opportunity.

    Baloney, his opponents snickered.

    The wily, world-wise PDP presidential candidate, they said, knew a trap when he saw one.  Even if  he arrived on US soil armed with a State Department-issued visa in the highest classification, nothing prevented the Department of Justice from plucking him off his jet and marching him to the nearest interrogation centre, for a start.

    That was exactly what the APC and those Atiku defeated in the race for the PDP ticket wanted, they said.

    Amidst all the speculation and the scheming, it is as if the Nigerian electorate is irrelevant.  It is as if the outcome of the General Election will be determined by the Brookings Institution, The Economist, and the Visa Section of the U. S. Consulate.

     

     

     

     

  • Another yuletide, another looming fuel crisis

    If there is anything one can predict unerringly in Nigeria, it is that yuletide will bring with it crippling fuel shortages and disruption in the movement of persons, goods and services and in social intercourse on a  scale that only a civil war or major natural disaster can fully explain or justify.

    The signs that we are again headed that way are in the air.  In anticipation of their seasonal kill, oil suppliers are already whetting their voracious appetites. How they relish holding Nigeria over a barrel,   pun intended!

    Last week, the Lagos State chapter of the Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (IPMAN) threatened to cripple some 900 filling stations in the Lagos and parts of Ogun from December 11, accusing the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) of undersupplying its members with petroleum products and frustrating them on an earlier agreement to supply to them at N133 per litre.

    Only yesterday, MOWMAN, the umbrella organisation of importers and marketers of oil and petroleum products entered the fray, warning that it would paralyse supplies nationwide unless the Federal Government cleared an outstanding N800 billion debt within seven days.

    No promissory notes, please; only cash, the type you can feel and count and put away in and retrieve on demand from one of the better banks, not those shady banks that cannot account for the humongous deposits in their vaults nor even make a pretence, however shambolic, of justifying them as proceeds of legitimate business.

    It is that time of year again, when the only thing guaranteed is a gnarling of fuel supplies.

    Contemplating this perennial dread, a concerned citizen has suggested in earnest that we suspend yule-tide for a few years to begin with, and abolish it subsequently.  With yuletide out of the way, there would be no need for millions of Nigerians to embark on the obligatory migration to their hometowns only to rush back to base scarcely a week later, and no need for marketers to manipulate fuel supplies to create an artificial scarcity.

    With yuletide out of the way, the fellow said, all those horrific road accidents that proliferate during the so-called ember months and reach their climax around yuletide, earning another discomfiting entry for Nigeria in the international misery index, would be distributed equally throughout the year.

    The fellow was obviously not reckoning with the National Assembly.  What made him think that the members would for any reason in the world forgo yet another recess and the hefty grants and bonuses, statutory and contrived that go with it?

    That, at any rate is the kind of desperate solution to which the perennial fuel crisis has driven even  some usually serious people to embrace.  The redeeming grace is that it has also bred a great deal of creative entertainment.  I missed out on much of fuel crisis art of the last yuletide, but among the few that came to my attention, there is one that is simply unforgettable.

    A riff on the refrain of “The First Noel,” one of the best-known Christmas carols, it goes thus:

    No fuel, No fuel

    No fuel, No fuel

    There is no fuel, Buhari.

    There you have it – a hilarious instance of the capacity of Nigerians to defy adversity, and of Nigeria’s fabled resilience.

    In the more than 30 years that Nigerians have lived with crippling fuel shortages, the authorities have never been short on excuses.  At first, it was turn-around maintenance (TAM) of the local refineries.  While the exercise lasted, petrol had to be imported to bridge the gap.  But more by design than co-incidence, TAM was for the most part carried out at the end of the year, the peak travel season.

    Despite its huge cost, TAM maintained nothing and turned nothing around, except the fortunes of complicit contractors and their local supervisors. If they produced at all, the refineries were producing at far less than full capacity, the gap between supply and demand widened, and more and more fuel had to be imported to fill the gap. Oil supplies grew more and more unstable, and so did pricing.

    Since then, virtually every measure trumpeted as a solution to the problem has been a swindle.

    Like most swindles in Nigeria’s recent history, it began during the era of military president, General Ibrahim Babangida.   The country was set to take a loan from the IMF, and as a sop to that latter-day Cerberus, the currency was to be devalued, import restrictions were to be lifted, and anything remotely suggestive of a subsidy was to be abolished immediately.

    Gasoline came to be identified as the scapegoat for Nigeria’s under-performing economy. It was grossly underpriced, they said, because it was heavily subsidised, with the pernicious result that a gallon of gasoline cost less than a bottle of soda or milk.  One image that clings in my memory of that time is of the engaging news correspondent Chris Anyanwu, now a Senator, peddling that false equivalency night after night on national television in her smooth, silky delivery.

    The subsidy, was the difference between the price of a gallon of gasoline in Lagos and the same gallon of petrol in Fargo, North Dakota, they said.

    Wasn’t that what economists call an opportunity cost? If the cost of getting a gallon of gasoline to the pump exceeded the retail price, you could perhaps talk about a subsidy. What were these relative costs?  And whatever happened to comparative advantage and all that if Nigerians were to pay for gasoline produced on their soil the same price as consumers half a world away were paying for it? Was the whole thing not at bottom a tax?

    Shifting gears, they said gasoline was so cheap that it was being mindlessly wasted.

    How so?

    Were Nigerians washing their hands with petrol after a meal, or to prepare their vegetable stew in place of regular cooking oil, or as a beverage to entertain their guests, since it was so much cheaper than Coca Cola?

    Shifting gears still, they said because gasoline was so cheap in Nigeria, it was being smuggled to neighbouring countries to reap windfall profits.

    Now, you could not do that on any meaningful scale by lugging 50-litre petrol cans through bush paths.  Only motorised tankers driving on paved roads across international frontiers manned by immigration and customs and security officials had that capability.  Those vehicles had to be owned or controlled by political and military officials with guaranteed access to refined petroleum products.

    Why was it, then, that not one operator of those vehicles had been arrested and charged with this illegal traffick, only a few stragglers transporting smuggled gasoline cans in leaky dugout canoes or in rickety trucks across the border?

    Nor were the authorities done yet.

    Gasoline was so cheap, they said, that it was being adulterated.  When substituted for kerosene in hurricane lamps and stoves, the adulterated mixture caused horrific explosions that maimed and sometimes killed entire families.

    Why not make kerosene cheaper than gasoline, then?  In any case, why would anyone adulterate a product that was already obscenely cheap?  Whoever heard of adulterated zinc?

    Then they tried to sugar the pill.

    From the funds to be realised by abolishing the subsidy, the existence of which was never proven, new oil refineries would be built not merely to satisfy growing domestic consumption but also for export, to generate foreign exchange.  Those long, snaking lines at filling stations would be things of the past.

    They conjured up in galactic figures the revenues that would accrue to the exchequer from abolishing    the subsidy.  They set up committees to manage the expected cash inflow and to ensure it was put to the most judicious use.  They came up with palliatives to cushion the average person from comprehensive      price increases that would follow.

    In less than two years, the “mass transit” buses charging subsidised fares vanished from the roads.  A striking project here, a thriving scheme there, but much of the money went the way of other state interventions –SURE-P being the latest example, to satisfy the awoof proclivities of political officials high and low,- and their confederates.

    The one thing that never got built is a new refinery.

    When the refineries produce at all, their output is shipped several hundred miles from the loading platform and returned as imported fuel to reap windfall profits in “subsidy” reimbursement for an untouchable criminal syndicate.

    It must stop, this syndicated fraud that has and brought great pain and misery to the many while enriching the few.

    Your move, President Muhammadu Buhari.

     

    • Revised and updated from January 2.