The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • Matters miscellaneous

    “Matters miscellaneous,” as many a fellow commentator has graciously acknowledged, is the platform I patented back in my days at Rutam House for attending to a glut of occurrences in broad strokes and short takes, lest the people who make and the people who consume the news feel neglected.

    Here, in all its eclecticism, is the bulletin du jour.

    “Buhari’s Double”

    In journalistic reckoning, the case of Buhari’s Double has to be the top item.

    Since 2017, so goes the tale reportedly originated by the fugitive leader of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) Nigeria has been ruled by a Buhari look-alike, Jubril al Sudan, a native of Sudan — or Niger, take your pick. Buhari had died in the UK in 2017, where he was undergoing medical treatment.  Notwithstanding the fact that Queen Elizabeth had sent a message of condolence to the Nigerian government, the entrenched Cabal in Aso Rock had procured a Buhari double in Sudan, and pressed him into service as Nigeria’s president.

    Despite occasional stumbles and apparent loss of memory, the transition had gone so smoothly that the only tell-tale sign of the infernal switch was a scar on Jubril’s left earlobe that was not a part of Buhari’s profile.

    Kanu, or whoever began the tale, and those who have been peddling it, should update their material.

    I can report authoritatively that representatives of the Jubril family, having discovered the gigantic swindle, suddenly showed up in Abuja the other day and demanded to be compensated with a power-sharing arrangement at the federal level in perpetuity, plus 50 percent of Nigeria’s oil revenues for ten years in the first instance.   Failing this, they warned, they would tell their story to the whole world.

    I can also reveal that the Nigerian authorities have entered into frantic negotiations with Jubril’s family to head off what is sure to earn a double entry in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s Dirtiest and Worst-kept Secret.  The UK authorities are mediating.

    Meanwhile, dependable sources tell me that Abuja is close to unraveling the true identity of the fake Jew parading himself on faked foreign soil as Nnamdi Kanu.

    Vast Estates, Ghost Owners

    Of the developments that have trailed Ayo Fayose’s lachrymose exit from the gubernatorial mansion in Ado Ekiti, none perhaps has been more mysterious than the discovery of a vast portfolio of valuable real estate with no owners.

    The sprawling estate covers some of the choicest areas of Ado Ekiti, stretches to the most opulent turfs of Abuja, and then to the finest residential neighbourhoods.  And that is just its Nigerian aspect. In its larger aspect, it is reported to stretch all the way to the most affluent settings in the Arabian Peninsula.

    The EFCC has impounded them, saying that they all belong to Fayose, and that they are the proceeds of official corruption.  Fayose says he knows nothing about the properties and that the EFCC is wantonly infringing the rule of law and undermining the fundamental rights of the actual owners.

    But the “actual owners” seem to be in no hurry to stake any claim on the properties.  They have sought no court orders restraining the EFCC from alienating their property.

    Surely, it cannot be that they are willing to forfeit their hard-earned holdings to the EFCC without a struggle?

    It is more likely the case that they are not aware of the EFCC’s proceedings.  In which case, this piece should serve as an alert

    Between giver and receiver

    If you were to ask the embattled Comrade, I suspect he would tell you that he has found one year as national chair of the aggregation of strange bedfellows that calls itself the All Progressives Congress (APC) far more stressful, more soul-destroying than eight years as governor of Edo State.

    His negotiating skills, honed in hundreds of acrimonious labor disputes, seemed tailored for the job. He would bring them to bear in reconciling the various factions and groups into which the APC had splintered, and tease out a coherent, unifying message out of the many discordant tunes claiming to speak for it or act in its name.

    Not even a thousand Oshiomholes could have stopped Saraki and his camp followers from defecting.  Nothing short of President Buhari forswearing a second term and anointing Saraki the APC’s presidential ticket for next year’s presidential election would have kept Saraki and his followers in the fold. I doubt whether even that would have sufficed.  He would have laid down further conditions.

    The party primaries that should have united the party as it approached the general elections generated far more recriminations than even this fractious clime is accustomed to.  Calculating party barons or local kingmakers set aside rules and procedures designed to impart at least a veneer of credibility and democratic choice, selected themselves or their proxies as candidates, or tried to rewrite the rules all over again in their favour.

    Oshiomhole and the APC leadership vacillated for a while, then insisted that the party’s candidates were those chosen under the rules and procedures the party had established.

    Then began, first, a whispering campaign, which soon grew into a roar heard across the county and  even abroad, that Oshiomhole had received as much as N500 million from some state governors in consideration for validating the results of the primaries conducted under their self-serving rules rather than under the APC’s rules.

    The Naira has fallen on very hard times, but N500 million is still a lot of cash, even with inflation running in double digits. That offer would be a mark of great desperation indeed, by governors who have fallen several months behind in paying public servants in their domains and have made it clear that they cannot pay the minimum monthly wage of N30, 000 being negotiated.

    But the charge soon took on in many minds the force of gospel truth. It had, they said, rendered Oshimohole morally unfit to remain party chair, and that he should resign immediately.

    Even Senate President Bukola Saraki who should be the last person to talk of morality in public life, given his ghastly record, seems to have suffered no qualms in demanding Oshiomhole’s resignation.  On moral grounds, no less.

    Others are demanding that Oshomhole face criminal prosecution.

    But in all this, those who allegedly offered the bribe have not been identified.  They have not been censured. The prosecutor has not been asked to round them up and bring them to justice.

    It is as if, even if proven, receiving a bribe is the crime to be punished.  Offering a bribe is not.

    Shades of Haliburton, Siemens, ITT, Kellog Brown, BAE System and other bribery scandals involving foreign companies doing shady business in Nigeria and other offshore destinations!

    GEJ is back

    At his book launch last Tuesday, Dr Goodluck Jonathan must have felt transported back to the glamour and glitz of his days in Aso Rock, and his wife Dame Patience must have been delighted to step once again into the limelight in a way she was accustomed to, not shuttling from one tribunal to another answering charges of serious sleaze.

    His detractors had peddled the libel that Jonathan didn’t even bother to read his briefing papers when he was in office. To damn them, he has actually written a book, and the cream of society had all flocked there to witness the launch.

    And it wasn’t only grateful contractors, former staffers, hangers-on and the usual influence peddlers what were on hand.  Even Jonathan’s most trenchant critics were there, including former President Olusegun Obasanjo who had lifted Jonathan from obscurity to celebrity only to regret it in a devastating screed and whom Jonathan had in turn compared to a “motor park tout.’’

    The enduring lesson that has come out of the book so far is that Dr Jonathan is still Dr Jonathan.

    The reviewers are unanimous that he blames everyone but himself for his defeat in the 2015 presidential election.  He blames it on former U.S. President Barak Obama and his secretary of state John Kerry, on UK Prime Minister David Cameron, on former French President François Hollande, and  on former INEC chair Professor Attahiru Jega, based on non sequiturs that it would be courteous to call sophomoric.

    It would be hard to imagine a greater insult to the intelligence of Nigeria’s electorate.

    Jonathan is no longer in denial about the abduction of the Chibok girls, but he remains implacably in denial about the circumstances.  He joins issues with those uncultivated minds who could not make the elementary distinction between ordinary stealing and corruption.

    I was hoping he would put to rest the controversy over his dodgy doctorate. The quality of reasoning in published excerpts from My Transition Hours is sure to revive and even deepen it.

  • The Fixer departs

    Based on media reports on the build-up to the 2012 gubernatorial election in Edo State, as well as reports on the poll underway at the time, I was almost swamped by that sinking feeling summed up by the expression, “Here we go again.”

    Or, to borrow from the vast repertory of legendary Yankees baseball player and manger Yogi Berra’s felicitous locutions, “It is déjà vu all over again.”

    First, the build-up.

    In the heat of a rancorous campaign, the Federal Government, which had a vested interest in the outcome, flooded the state with soldiers in numbers not seen in the killing fields of Jos, nor in vast swathes of territory in Borno, Yobe, Bauchi, Gombe, Kaduna and Kano that Boko Haram had turned into no-go areas.

    For whose benefit was the atmosphere of fear and intimidation being confected?

    The resident police commissioner was replaced by an officer from another command, ostensibly to create a more level playing field, in case he had developed some sympathy for the incumbent governor.  But that high-minded precaution was neutralised by the possibility that the new man could just as well be coming in with his own marching orders.

    The election umpire INEC was of course not obliged to grant accreditation to all seeking election observer status.  Still, it should be able to explain clearly and convincingly why it granted some applications and denied others.  It couldn’t.

    Most worrisome, there were reports of fake voters’ cards all over the place, a development that had been brought to the attention of the INEC chair. Would INEC, or more likely the courts, have to decide the outcome on the basis of forensic evidence again, as was the case in the Osun and Ekiti gubernatorial elections?

    Then, the field reports on Election Day.

    Of election materials arriving late in many precincts, delaying accreditation, reducing the window for voting, and generally exacerbating anxieties.

    Of the incumbent, Governor Adams Oshiomhole, who should by rights be looking forward to the outcome with confidence, fretful instead, charging that INEC had failed on the threshold to conduct a free election.

    In contrast, his opponent, the PDP candidate Charles Airhiavbere, was jaunty, saying that reports reaching him from “his people” indicated that the voting has been largely favourable, and that “corrections” would be made where the voting had not gone his way.

    Then, rather ominously, the man on whom I had bestowed the accolade of “The Fixer” (someone who is skilled at arranging for things to happen, especially dishonestly. managing and organising; not to be confused with Mr Fixit, denoting a person who characteristically tinkers with or repairs things) during the presidential election debacle of June 1993, started playing coy, saying that it was too early to pick a winner.

    That was not the Tony Anenih we knew, the canny political operator who had declared shortly  after the purported election in 2007 of his candidate Oserhiemen Osunbor — subsequently voided  by the courts – not merely that Osunbor would win the next gubernatorial election due in four years, but had already won it.

    The new diffidence hardly became the sure-footed operative who had declared at the time former President Umaru Yar’Adua was barely four months in office that there would be no vacancy in Aso Rock, come the next election cycle.

    He was wrong, but no matter.

    When the man who bargained away the victory of his party’s candidate in the 1993 presidential election for a misbegotten “interim national government” and declared the day that treacherous bargain was struck the happiest day of his life – when that man was saying that it was too early to predict the outcome of an election on which he was staking his well-earned notoriety, you had to pinch yourself just to be sure you were still conscious.

    It was not for nothing, then, that in the weeks leading up to the 2012 gubernatorial election, it often seemed as if the contest was between Governor Oshiomhole and Tony “The Fixer” Anenih, who had made a career and a vast fortune out of turning winners into losers and losers into winners.  When these proclivities were backed by the Federal Might, those against whom they were deployed could hardly be blamed for getting jittery.

    The Oshiomhole Campaign, propelled by the awesome political machine of the ACN, seemed  to have anticipated this, and more.  That much was clear from their newspaper advertisement declaring categorically that its publicity machine would end all electioneering at the time stipulated by law and disavowing any campaign material published in its name after that hour.

    They must have remembered how Chief John Odigie-Oyegun’s election as SDP governor of Edo State was nearly torpedoed by one claim, among others, that he had continued to campaign right up to the poll.

    True, a tribunal had upheld the election, ruling that a candidate could not be held liable for material put out by a third party on polling day. Still, why take a chance, especially when, in these matters, precedent counts for little, as the Opposition had learned at great cost?

    Even in the Department of Dirty Tricks, those who had vowed to “re-capture” Edo State    were not found wanting.  They plastered one of the precincts in the PDP’s candidate’s constituency with pictures purporting to show Oshiomhole in a compromising posture with a teenage girl — the very picture that had been doing tawdry rounds weeks before the election, and in respect of which Oshiomhole had filed defamation lawsuit.

    And then, there was the alarming report that, weeks before the poll, the results had already been collated, showing – no prizes for making the right pick – the PDP candidate, whoever he was, the runaway winner.

    So, could the report that the result of the Edo gubernatorial poll was already signed and sealed and only waiting to be delivered be more revelation than rumour?  Was this déjà vu  all over again?  Would The Fixer show that he was still on top of his game despite some  recent setbacks, or would The Comrade take The Fixer out of political reckoning in Edo once and for all?

    The result was a rout.

    The Fixer could not even fix his own ward, much less that of his candidate. While the outcome did not signal the end of election fixing, it more than presaged the twilight of the career of the most fearsome practitioner of perhaps the darkest of political arts.  He never fixed another election.

    Fittingly, his lucrative career ended in the Edo country, where it had begun in the run-up to the 1983 General Elections.

    Just as he could not fix the nation’s decrepit road network when he was President Obasanjo’s Minister of Works, he could not fix the Nigeria Ports Authority, a task he was given as a consolation prize.

    When Anenih turned 82 three years ago, former military head of state General Abdulsalami Abubakar raised grave doubts about own political judgement and moral standing when, in a full-page newspaper advertisement, he eulogised the former chairman of the PDP’s Board of Trustees as “a national icon” and “keeper of the peace of the nation. . . a mentor to the upcoming generation.”

    Withal, a personage who had lived a life of “total commitment to the higher principles of unalloyed loyalty to the national cause,” and one whose life was “an eloquent testimony to a life  of discipline spent in sacrifice and sincere devotion to a nation . . .”

    And when Anenih died three weeks ago, aged 85, Obasanjo memorialised him in identical terms.  Anenih’s death, he said, marked the end of an “inspiring chapter of Nigeria’s history.”  Anenih’s life, he continued, was an “archetypal lesson in public service and leadership at its best.”  In the course of a lifetime of “remarkable contributions to the political sector of the nation, Obasanjo declared, Anenih became “a national icon and authentic role model.”

    A man of great personal charm the Iyasele of Esanland may well have been in some of his private relationships, and a person of great personal kindness to boot.

    But a “national icon?” An authentic role model?  “A patriot” who, according to House Speaker Yakubu Dogara, “gave his all for the unity” of Nigeria?

    Any wonder, then, that Nigeria is in a morass?

     

  • Again, Buhari’s School Certificate

    President Muhammadu Buhari’s West African School Certificate – or lack thereof –has got to be the most stubborn issue in recent Nigerian politics.

    Its durability is all the more puzzling because the issue never came up during the first three times he ran for president.  Then, all of a sudden, it bobbed up as he closed in on the ACN’s presidential ticket in 2015 and, together with a lingering, life-threatening illness, dogged much of his campaign and threatened to render him hors de combat.

    Now, on the threshold of another presidential election, the matter has taken on a new, more insidious aspect.  Not because any earth-shaking revelations or new facts for that matter have surfaced.  Rather, the manufactured controversy has been raked up anew; unsupported assertions are being peddled with scarce regard for the rules of evidence, and conclusions      that cannot stand close scrutiny are being propagated with the solemnity of holy writ.

    We have been there before.

    First, a recap:

    At the time of filing his 2015 election papers, Buhari had indicated that his School Certificate, or high school diploma, was in the possession of the military authorities and could be obtained from them.  The military authorities had said at one point that they were indeed in possession of the certificate, only to recant later in a sensational press conference.

    In a disavowal heard around the world, a military spokesman virtually put the contents of General Muhammadu Buhari’s personnel file on global display.  It contained no evidence, Brigadier Oladele Laleye said for the military high command, that Buhari obtained the requisite West African School Certificate, merely a letter from his school principal recommending him for admission to the Nigeria Defence Academy and expressing confidence that he would obtain a Division II in the WASC examination.

    The way the military spokesman carried on, you would think that he was the chief prosecutor at a court-martial.

    By then the Goodluck Jonathan Campaign had worked itself and the PDP crowd into a froth.  They launched a made-for-the-Internet “Buhari, Show Your Certificate” Campaign, hashtag and all.  General Buhari, the most desperate elements in this group said, had been smuggled into the Officers’ Corps on quota, with total disregard for the rules.  In the normal run of things, he would have rated no higher than a sergeant, they said.

    All manner of experts on the Nigerian Constitution hopped from television station to television

    station, declaring that all the credentials Buhari had earned in prestigious foreign military academies could not make up for his not having the WASC.

    “You cannot build something on nothing,” one of them said sententiously, quoting that epigram in the original Latin for added effect.  The same fellow went on to declare that, by laying claim to a qualification he did not possess, or by falsely claiming that his credentials were in the possession of   the military authorities, Buhari had committed perjury.  The penalty for         that crime, he hinted darkly, was imprisonment for 14 years.

    The implication was clear:  Buhari was more likely to end up in Kirikiri Prison than in the Presidential Villa.

    It was at this point that the GMB Campaign which had refused to be drawn into the contrived controversy — some were already calling it a scandal —and chosen instead to absorb the jeers and the taunts and the innuendos and the coarse abuse in the finest rope-a-dope tradition came out swinging.

    Buhari authorised Government College, Katsina, the successor of his alma mater, the Katsina Provincial Secondary School, to release an authenticated statement of result in the WASC.

    The transcript shows, as Buhari had earlier disclosed, that he had passed the examination in Division Two, a respectable achievement back when examination leakages were almost unheard of, and the industrial-scale cheating that today marks most public examinations was inconceivable.

    You would think that its functionaries would now cease and desist, if not admit error.

    No chance.  They called the document furnished by Buhari’s school a fresh forgery.  They claimed that Buhari could not have passed Hausa at the WASC exam in 1961 because that subject was not offered then.

    They even trotted out an “expert” in “curriculum studies” from one of the universities who declared without fear and without research that no indigenous-language examinations were conducted on that platform in Nigeria until the 6-3-3-4 formula was introduced.

    God help his students.

    Back in Buhari’s schooldays, Hausa was already being offered even at the Advanced Level, and one of the set books was Shaihu Umar, a well-regarded novel in that language by Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, later Nigeria’s prime minister.

    They also claimed that Buhari had gone straight from secondary school to the NDA, without the benefit of a School Certificate.  But that was the trajectory for all candidates.

    On finishing the School Certificate examination in December, applicants for admission to the Defence Academy headed straight for the recruitment test. If they passed the tests, they commenced their training immediately.  They would have been told to bring along their equipage, since they could not go back home once the tests began.

    When the School Certificate exam results were released the following March, cadets who passed continued their studies at the Defence Academy.  Those who failed the WASC had to drop out. You could not get past that obstacle.

    Now, four years later, Buhari has in his filing for the presidential election stated again that his WASC is in the possession of the military authorities.  His determined opponents have resurrected the manufactured controversy over the certificate, declaring the authenticated statement from his former school an outright forgery.

    Buhari’s school certificate, it has to be said, has had a dodgy life.  However, if it cannot be produced, does it follow that it never existed?  Why can’t it be presumed lost or missing?

    That is what the West African Examination Council has now done.  This past weekend, its registrar Dr. Iyi Uwadiae, presented Buhari with a document attesting and confirming that Buhari did earn the West African School Certificate in 1961.

    Dr Uwadiae said WAEC recognised that candidates could lose their examination certificates through fire and other kinds of attrition.  In such cases, WAEC issued attestations or duplicate copies.

    Hear it from Dr Uwadiae:  “Whoever sat for WASC exams in whatever year, we have the records in our database, and Mr. President, we have the records of the examinations you sat in 1961. We have the attestation of results which we issue to candidates who lost their certificates and confirmation of results.’’

    Whether Buhari had solicited the intervention or not is beside the point.  In a rational debate, the intervention should put the matter to rest, unless one takes the inane position that WAEC, a regional examining body of five member-states, is complicit in a forgery, and that its officials are accessories after the fact.

    Those who have made an obsession of Buhari’s school certificate have in fact made that charge.  According to a PDP spokesperson, “A check on the attestation clearly shows that it does not have the “Original Certificate Number,” the key authentication feature in all genuine attestations by WAEC.”

    “Instead,” it added, “a ‘non-applicable’ is entered, indicating that the beneficiary does not have a certificate to be attested to, thus rendering the said attestation unauthenticated, fake and of no effect.”

    But what the PDP said it found “most appalling” was that “Mr President’s handlers have succeeded in dragging a reputable institution as WAEC into public disrepute and opprobrium, as Nigerians are quick to demonstrate marks of forgery in the attestation issued by the examination body.”

    There you have it.

    By the way, I had no idea before now that the PDP was also in the forensics business.

    Others are disputing the attestation on grounds less recondite.  They say that, unlike the statement of results issued by the Katsina Provincial Secondary School – which they had all along disputed – it does not list Woodwork and Mathematics which Buhari had failed in the examination.

    Again, there is a simple explanation.  According to WAEC, subjects a candidate failed have long ceased to be entered on a certificate or attestation.

    One of Buhari’s most implacable traducers maintains all the same that “the evidence suggests that what Buhari asked Government College, Katsina to present to INEC as evidence of his credentials was a forged certificate.”  Buhari should therefore resign because “he does not have a school-leaving certificate and also submitted a forged document.”

    And in case you thought the law is not on his side, the fellow cites Section 137 (10) of the 1999 Nigerian Constitution, to wit: “A person shall not be qualified for election to the office of President if he has presented a forged certificate to the Independent National Electoral Commission.”

    Is it on such drivel, such chicanery, that the 2019 presidential election will be fought?

  • The NYSC as nemesis

    Something revivifying has happened to the National Youth Service Scheme (NYSC).

    Just when it was being canvassed that the scheme no longer served any useful purpose beyond supplying cheap and largely indifferent labour and should be scrapped, it caught up with a senior member of the Federal Cabinet and threw the future of another one into uncertainty.

    All of a sudden, a beleaguered bureaucracy became the nemesis of the unwary and the wayward.

    It began when the online newspaper Premium Times reported that the Minister of Finance (as she then was), Kemi Adeosun, had not fulfilled the one-year mandatory service for graduates under 30 years old, and had secured exemption from it with a forged document.

    Repeated day after day with slight variations, the story soon took on the manner of a crusade, especially when Mrs Adeosun declined to be goaded into responding, and President Muhammadu Buhari appeared to show no interest in the matter.

    Then, more than a month after the story broke, she resigned, after a full day in the office, and headed straight to the UK, where she had lived for more than 30 years before taking up an appointment in Nigeria.

    Unsure as to whether the NYSC law applied to her or not, she explained in her resignation letter, she had turned to those “on ground” for advice.  They had assured her that they would take care of the matter.  Thereafter, they had handed her a certificate of exemption from the NYSC which she had, in  her guilelessness, filed with her confirmation papers as Commissioner for Finance in Ogun State, and later as Minister of Finance.  And in both instances, the authorities had not disputed its authenticity.

    From the assertion that the document was a forgery, it was but a short step to declaring that Mrs Adeosun was at least complicit in, if she had not actually committed, a forgery.   And to leave her in      no doubt about the gravity of the situation, they hinted darkly that the penalty on conviction was imprisonment without an option of fine, or both imprisonment and fine.

    Her refusal to be drawn into a discussion on the issue was taken as proof of her guilt.  If she was not guilty as charged, it was said, why would she not affirm her innocence?  In the face of such a damning charge, why would she remain silent?

    And when she finally explained how she came about the disputed Certificate of Exemption from the NYSC, public condemnation — if one judged by the volume and intensity of reactions in the so-called social media — was so unsparing you would think she had embezzled the nation’s Gross Domestic Product for an entire year.

    “She is a hardened criminal,” many proclaimed.  “She must be brought back from the UK and jailed,” others chorused.  The woman who had only 24 hours ago been acknowledged as Minister of Finance of the Federal Republic of Nigeria suddenly became a “Yoroba (sic) thief,” a “Yoro-robber.” The more courteous among her calumniators called her “Calamity Kemi.”   And “Adeosun-gate” became the         latest entry in Nigeria’s bourgeoning vocabulary of corruption.

    Yet her explanation is entirely plausible, and not least because it is so artless.

    The average Nigerian has been conditioned to believe that he or she cannot get anything done by himself or herself; that, to accomplish anything worthwhile, one has to go through someone who knows the system and how to work it.  The result is what counts.  How it was achieved is the last thing on the mind of the person who stands to profit from the intervention.

    Why go through all trouble and the endless wait with no guaranteed outcome when you can engage someone to pursue the matter for you?  And sometimes, it is not even a matter of cash, at least, not upfront.

    And so, we turn to agents to help us obtain or renew vehicle licences, passports, driver’s licences, and many other documents that the law obliges us to have.   And we may be landed with fakes without knowing it.

    We turn to people within the system and outside to help our children and wards secure admission into secondary school, to meet or exceed the benchmark for matriculation, to secure employment in the banks and oil companies, to be recruited into the armed services, and so on and so forth.

    In the process, we have conditioned our children and wards to believe that they do not have what it takes to get anywhere without our intervention. Other parents are intervening for their children in various ways anyway, we reason.  So, why place our children at a competitive disadvantage?

    This was precisely the reasoning of the authorities in one of the states who suspended a secondary school principal for preventing his students from cheating in the West African School Certificate Examination.  By that action, they said, he was putting their future at risk.

    I am here reminded of the Owosho Certificate Racket that rocked the University of Lagos in the 1973/74 academic year.  Hundreds of students were sent packing overnight, some plucked out of halls where they were writing their final exams and served expulsion notices.  This followed the discovery of discrepancies between their A Level results issued by the West African Examinations Council and the results on which their admissions were based.

    How the discrepancies came about puzzled many of the victims of the scam.  Many of them had followed up their applications with visits to the Admissions Office, where they had entreated the Admissions Officer, one Mr Owosho, to help.

    He did help, and many of them became undergraduates, with bright and privileged futures ahead of them.  What the help consisted in they did not know.  Perhaps a bending of the rules, a manipulation the deck, but none of them had the faintest idea that the whole thing was criminal through and through.

    What happened was that Owosho had pulled out their result slips on file and replaced them with new result slips bearing inflated grades that had been supplied by a confederate at WAEC Headquarters. For candidates awaiting results, the duo just manufactured the grades.

    In many cases, it turned out that the grades the applicant subsequently earned at WAEC were superior to those Owosho and his confederate had ginned up.   But students in that category were expelled all the same, on the ground that they had manifested an intent to cheat.

    But that intent could not be read into the conduct of all who had gone seeking Owosho’s help.  They had no inkling that his intervention would take the form of a crime.

    Until then, I did not even know that one could gain admission to the university by any means other than pure merit. You wrote your exams, mailed in your application from your rural outpost, up-dated it when your exam results were released, and waited for your admission letter to arrive in the post.

    But that was long, long ago.

    I do not believe Mrs Adeosun had set out deliberately to procure an NYSC Exemption Certificate to which she was not entitled.  I believe she was a victim of her own innocence.  If she knew it was fake, I doubt whether she would have submitted it as part of her confirmation package before the Ogun State Assembly and the Senate, at the risk of being found out.  She stood to lose so much.

    In whatever case, the coarse abuse and vulgar name-calling were unwarranted.

    These days, thousands merely go through the motions during their service year.  The calumniators should reserve their ire for those corps members who pay their local supervisors to look the other way while they hold down full-time jobs in the cities and show up at month-end to collect their statutory stipends, those who serve out the year in self-employment or family business, those who do not report at all, and the thousands — corps members as well as administrators – who have by their conduct over the years emptied the NYSC of the idealism in which it was conceived.

  • Ekiti: After a dark interlude

    “What has a beginning must have an end.”

    This banality is probably the greatest truth, the most profound insight Ayodele Fayose uttered in his combined public career as governor of Ekiti State and certified nuisance-at-large.  And it came to him at a moment that must have concentrated his mind like no other:  the last state Executive Council meeting over which he would preside.

    No stunt, no tantrum, no alchemy whatsoever could alter the fact that the end of impunity and immunity from consequences had well and truly arrived for one of the most disreputable political figures of our time or any epoch of Nigeria’s troubled history.

    Yes indeed; whatever has a beginning must have an end.  His barbarous rule is over.

    Measured entirely on Fayose’s terms, i.e., by “the quantity and quality of achievements,” and even allowing for the usual constraints, Fayose’s political career will have to be judged a comprehensive failure.  At the end of four years during which he was the executive, legislative and judicial authority in Ekiti, he could only point with confidence to a hideous, over-priced flyover in the state capital, Ado-Ekiti and one or two very ordinary official buildings as his signature achievements.

    The airport project he touted so much never got off the bush-clearing stage.  He could not even cite the so-called “stomach infrastructure” initiative to which his 2015 electoral victory was attributed for want of any plausible explanation, and which he had promised on a whim to elevate into a cardinal programme of his Administration.

    The public has since learned that the election that brought Fayose to power was rigged on a scale beyond belief by the Jonathan Administration, with plenty of help from the army, the national security apparatus, the national treasury, and their combined assets.

    Measured by how much he inspired the people to nobler ends, the vision he applied to the formulation and execution of public policy, by his decency and civility, by how judiciously he husbanded resources he held in trust for the public, and by the integrity he brought to bear on the conduct of public policy, he would have to be adjudged a disaster.

    Fayose’s career is a study in political brutalism.  To him, noblesse oblige might well be a French delicacy. Driven by instinct, he showed no capacity for introspection.   He lied like a flute.  In word and in deed, he contradicted himself at so many points and every so often that his must be a case of extreme attention deficit disorder.

    For four years, he held Ekiti State in thrall.  His word was law. In his valedictory, Fayose declared, shades of Julius Caesar reporting his quick victory at the battle of Zela to the Roman Senate, that he came, he saw, he conquered.

    Fayose conquered all right.  He conquered the proud Ekiti people and reduced them to whimpering subjects.  He conquered their value system.  He conquered honour.  He conquered integrity.  He   conquered decency.  He conquered truthfulness. He conquered the law and the courts.  He conquered the state legislature, reducing it to a reptile assembly.  He conquered the bureaucracy.  And yes, he conquered democracy.

    Fayose holds nothing sacred, not even the most intimate details of his mother’s health. He profaned everything he touched and brought every cause he embraced into disrepute.

    He came, he saw, and he plundered right up to the eve of his departure, awarding himself a severance pay of N60 million while unpaid civil servants and teachers starved.  For good measure, he corralled the state’s anaemic exchequer into buying a luxury SUV reportedly worth some N70 million as parting gift.

    Despite these depredations, Fayose declared that history will be kind to him.  Who knows?  In the fullness of time, History may well unearth some redeeming attributes that would cast him in an entirely different light, some compelling evidence that would place him squarely in the league of the omoluabi.

    But History is not blind. Fayose and his proxies cannot hold it in thrall.  They cannot bend it to his capricious will.  They cannot frighten or coerce it into doing his bidding.

    He is already experiencing first-hand the instability of human greatness, real or perceived.   And that is just for starters.  In the twilight of his tenure, his confederates in the legislature were ousted by a faction of the assembly. Virtually all the guests, the high and mighty of Ekiti society from far and wide expected at an elaborate state banquet to mark his departure stayed away.  The ambience was funereal.

    The fiasco calls to mind the biblical parable of the rich man who invited all the wealthy men in the town to a banquet.  When none of the guests showed up, the wealthy man sent his servants into the town to bring just about anyone they could find, regardless of their condition, to the feast.

    But “Peter the Rock” and Bible puncher made no recourse to the okada bikers who had been his administration’s enforcers.  He no longer needed their riotous support.

    History will certainly ask and ask insistently:  How did a people so well educated, so principled, a people who set so much store by fair play and justice and honour and uprightness — how were such a people landed with a character like Fayose, a repudiation of everything they are reputed to stand for, as governor?  Why did they put up with him for so long, to the point that they almost voted into office a proxy through whom he would have continued his barbarous rule?

    But enough.

    This day belongs to Dr John Olukayode Fayemi, who takes office today, for the second time, as Governor of Ekiti State.  I do not envy him.

    Arresting the drift and depredations of the Fayose years will be hard enough.  Restoring the momentum  Ekiti lost when Jonathan and the PDP foisted Fayose on Ekiti is going to be harder.

    The economy can be rebuilt.  In the end, it always recovers.  The infrastructure can be patched now and rebuilt as time goes on. But rebuilding the value system that Fayose destroyed is going to take a longer time and much more effort.

    This is where Dr Fayemi must lead by personal example.  And the example must be complemented by his entire leadership team.  Together, they must strive to rebuild the value system of the Ekiti people.

    During his previous coming, they said Fayemi was aloof, donnish.  Then they got an impetuous populist         and demagogue who kept things perpetually on the boil. Perhaps they will now appreciate the value of deliberation and introspection.  Fayemi must now seek to be more engaging, without getting caught up in populist posturing.

    As the last gubernatorial election shows, Fayose still commands a core of passionate followers in Ekiti.  Fayemi must try to win them over, or at least enlist their support, with superior argument and superior programmes.  They are part and parcel of his constituency, which is the entire Ekiti State. They should be accorded equal treatment.

    Fayemi is on a rescue mission all right.  But a rescue mission is not a revenge mission.  Eschewing revenge in any guise or disguise is one of the building blocks of the new value system that should now inform politics and public affairs in Ekiti.

    Throughout history, periods of regression and steep decline, the type Ekiti experienced under Fayose, have usually been followed by a rebirth – a revival of the arts and culture, of learning and values:  in short, a renaissance.

    That is what the post-Fayose Ekiti calls for, and there is none more qualified to lead it than Dr John Olukayode Fayemi.  Getting our much-acclaimed Poet Laureate and literary scholar of global stature, Niyi Osundare, to present an Inaugural Lecture to usher in the Administration was an inspired move and a signal that a new order has arrived.

    Welcome back, Your Excellency, and good luck.

  • After the winnowing

    Last week’s threshing and winnowing of a vast field of aspirants to elected office restored some order to the landscape, and one can now step outside without fear of tripping over a desperate striver claiming to be the divine answer to Nigeria’s problems  and asking to be  given a chance to perform the necessary wonders from a well-remunerated elected position.

    The biggest and most-watched event of the process was of course the pruning in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, of 12 aspirants down to one candidate for the biggest prize of all, the PDP presidential ticket.

    Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar  and serial contender “emerged” as the PDP’s standard bearer, having polled 1,532 of the 3,206 valid votes, or more than twice the score of his nearest rival, Governor Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto State, and nearly five times the score of the putative “front runner,” the embattled Senate President Bukola Saraki, who came third.

    Individuals no longer win elections here.  They are no longer elected.  They just “emerge”, like apparitions. Even President Buhari, probably the most visible and most reported public figure in Nigeria, had to “emerge” from the APC Convention as its presidential candidate, though he was the sole candidate and the event was more managed coronation than contest.

    Even First Lady Aisha Buhari was not impressed.  And, as usual, she would not confine herself      to “the other room” nor keep her views severely to herself.

    In many contests across the country, the nation’s motley political parties acted as if it was not enough to allow the candidates to “emerge”; they had to “unveil” their  gubernatorial, senatorial and House of Representatives standard-bearers, to lend colour to their “emergence.”

    Nor is the emerging limited to actual persons.  “Facts” and “indications” have also developed the habit of “emerging,” and not just from the archives.

    A first-time visitor to Nigeria would have been led to think that the personages aforementioned, had been hiding behind a curtain that was suddenly lifted, or in caves from which they had they had just been disinterred.

    In the run-up to the Convention, pardon the detour, Saraki was prefacing his speeches at each campaign stop with “When I become President.”  To get there, he was going to concede the Northwest and the Northeast to Buhari, and “lock down” the votes in the rest of the country

    Apparently the assembled delegates, being for the most part analog persons, did not want a “digital president” any more than they wanted a “youth-driven” government, being for the most part middle-aged or superannuated.

    For practically all the 3,274 delegates at the Convention, the weekend will probably go down as the most rewarding – but not on account of the three-minute floor speeches the aspirant was allowed.  They were in the main perfunctory, laced here and there with the sardonic and the piquant

    Gombe State Governor Ibrahim Dankwabo said he was the best person for the job, “not too           old to retire and not too young to run.”  David Jang said he would not stand by and watch “returnees” snatch the main chance.  Sule Lamido staked his claim on helping rebrand the PDP and transforming it into a “beautiful damsel.” David Mark said he was the only candidate with       a female campaign director, and withal a man of courage and honour, who would keep his promise to the PDP.   Those who “absconded” should not get the party’s blessing.

    Reacting to rumours swirling at the Convention that he had stood down for a certain aspirant, Kabiru Tanimu Turaki (SAN) pointed out through his spokesperson that “”Luckily, his integrity, credibility, knowledge, intellectual experience, competence and dynamism had never been questioned.”

    “May be there is wisdom after all in the position of some of the resilient members who later became Presidential Aspirants that those who once tried to destroy the party should not be allowed to harvest where they did not sow, to the extent of trying to destroy the common ‘farm’ ( the PDP),” he added.

    He added for good measure that he was the only aspirant not living in daily dread of a visitation from the EFCC.

    Whom do you think Turaki had in mind?

    Given centre stage, former President Goodluck Jonathan would have been impolitic to openly endorse any of the candidates.   With touching candour and to no surprise, he confessed that he was “confused.”  GEJ:  He never disappoints.

    Though few of the delegates can recall anything that any speaker said on the convention floor, none of them will ever forget the “dollar rain” that drenched them.

    One aspirant, it was said, was handing out $1, 000 to each delegate by way of mobilisation fee.  That, people, adds up to $3, 246, 000. Or N1, 168 billion and plenty of change.  Other candidates ponied up, to the best of their ability.

    By one account, each delegate grossed mobilisation fees ranging from $9, 000 to $2, 500.  They just sat tight in their hotel rooms, waiting for the aspirants to come mobilise them.  And even when it seemed the aspirants were done mobilising, the delegates still remained in their rooms, expecting that some straggler would show up.

    They had to be literally dragged out of their rooms to the convention venue.

    A source who was present at the convention said he overheard many a jubilant elector saying that it was far better to be a delegate than a candidate, and that they could hardly wait till 2022 for the next harvest.

    Did the aspirants shell out all that money without exacting an iron-clad guarantee that the obtainer would deliver?  There must be hundreds who obtained from every source available only to vote for one aspirant.

    Back when politics was politics, you could not try that kind of rascality with Arthur Nzeribe,            he who never embraced any cause without bringing it into disrepute; the con artist whose depredations litter the landscape from South Africa to the UK through Ghana and Nigeria.

    It was said that he led you in the dead of night to the shores of Lake Oguta.  You stood in an open coffin and swore to deliver whatever political favour he wanted, and you got your fee.            By that action, you also covenanted to end up in a casket if you betrayed him.  From his days            as Ogun State governor, Gbenga Daniel, Atiku’s campaign director, also knows a thing or two about such pro-active measures.

    No sooner had Atiku emerged as the presidential candidate than Saraki, realising that he would be bereft of an elected position scurried back to Ilorin in a desperate bid to wrest back the PDP Senate ticket for Ilorin Central from a flunkey to whom he had assigned it for safe-keeping.

    Rabiu Kwankwaso, who also ran in Port Harcourt, rushed back to Kano with the same objective in mind.  Expect a big scramble to regain lost territory by other figures for whom politics is a business.

    Four state governors — Ibikunle Amosun (Ogun), Abdulfatah Ahmed (Kogi), Isiaka Ajimobi (Oyo) and Rochas Okorocha (Imo) ­—are looking forward to opulent retirement in the 9th Senate, in the excellent company of a dozen former governors who went from being excellent to being merely distinguished.  But what’s in a name when the rewards are just a shade less bounteous?

    If the transition from the one to the other continues at the present rate, at least one-half of      the 108-member chamber will be made up of former governors in the next four or five election cycles, mostly through self-help.   Of what use is it to be not too young to run when the political space is blockaded by those who control it, or reserved only for their relations and proxies?

    There is no sterner critic of the PDP and its way of doing business than this columnist.  But it is meet and proper to give it high praise for its surefootedness in the conduct of the Port Harcourt Convention.  The event was widely expected to end in confusion, with aspirants and their camps crying foul and demanding its cancellation or challenging the outcome in court after court.

    It is to the PDP’s great credit that none of this has happened.

  • Stalemate in Osun

    Given the PDP’s record of epic misrule of Nigeria and Governor Ayo Fayose’s evisceration of Ekiti State on the platform of that entity and with its tacit approval, I confess to entertaining hopes that last July’s gubernatorial election in Ekiti would sound its death knell in that part of the country, and that the projected poll in neighbouring Osun State would finish the job.

    Fat chance.

    Though the PDP lost the Ekiti gubernatorial election, its robust showing revealed just how passionate its followers are, despite its record being an almost perfect catalogue of depredation.  And far from burying the PDP, last weekend’s gubernatorial election more than revived its fortunes.  It pipped the ruling APC which had held sway in  Osun for eight years, in what the national election empire INEC has declared an inconclusive poll.

    Election Night was indeed a nail-biter for the ages.

    As between the APC and its main challenger the PDP, ward-by-ward returns posted contemporaneously by online media swung to and fro, the gains of APC in one ward erased or turned into a deficit in the very next posting for another precinct, and so it was for most of the night.

    The big lead the APC was widely expected to open up never materialised. At the time I retired for the night, the returns were incomplete.  But from my mental juggling of the available returns, I sensed that the poll was headed more or less for a stalemate, with the APC or, more likely the PDP, eking out a plurality so slender that a recount would be required to validate it.

    In the end, it was the PDP that squeaked through with a plurality 353, out of 509, 043 votes cast.

    The elections umpire INEC has declared the poll inconclusive, since the plurality falls far short of the 3, 489 ballots voided in seven polling centres across four local government areas because of irregularities, and has scheduled a rerun in those precincts for Thursday in the expectation that it will produce a clarifying outcome.

    Since then, attention has been concentrated on those seven polling centres, and not just by the two camps, but also by candidates who fell by the wayside in the first ballot and now see in the re-run an opportunity to play kingmaker and make a huge pile in the process.

    The principal contenders, Gboyega Oyetola, of the APC, and Abiola Adeleke, of the PDP, have been reduced to  mere ciphers in a larger, vastly more complex game of strategic calculations concerning next year’s General Elections and the implications of the outcome for Nigeria’s future.

    Rarely has the political future of Nigeria hung so delicately on the choices that the 3,489 electors will  make in the re-run scheduled for Thursday.  And by the time it is over, it will be said, even without a formal audit, that rarely in Nigeria has so much money been spent per capita to “mobilise” potential voters.  It will in fact be asserted, I wager, that never in the annals of plebiscitary contestation has a vote or the promise thereof cost so much to obtain.

    Trust the voters.  They will obtain and obtain, and obtain yet again, until voting starts and perhaps even thereafter.  And in keeping with dictum that emerged triumphant in the last Ondo State gubernatorial election, never will so many pots of choice Nigerian soups fortified with orisirisi have been prepared and consumed per household anywhere than in those seven voting centres.

    A sales audit of chickens, goats, sheep, cows, yams, rice, gari, cooking oil, tomatoes, onions, peppers and other condiments should confirm this hypothesis.

    Lucky voters!  This is their chance, and no one should blame them for seizing it.  They may not get another until the next election.  And if they do, it certainly will not be as juicy as the present one.

    Why should they leave all the juice to politicians?

    All manner of reasons are being adduced by experts and dilettantes alike for what must for now be called the Osun stalemate.  The PDP has understandably disputed this characterisation.  At the very least, it is entitled to feel that it has won a psychological victory that may yet translate into actual victory worthy of being celebrated with convulsive dancing to the most mesmerising rhythms that a juju band ever created.

    As befits a master dancer, Adeleke has promised to take his jaw-dropping dancing prowess from his home in Ede all the way to the Osun capital, Osogbo, for his Inauguration — the rhythmic heaving of his hefty frame, the stomping and twisting and gyrating and wiggling with which he entertained an audience in the United States to mark his election to the Senate several months ago, plus some more absorbing choreography he has since perfected.

    Residents of Osogbo must hope that by the time he arrives there, he will not be too foot-weary to treat them to a captivating Inaugural Dance.

    As I was saying, all manner of reasons are being canvassed to explain why the election outcome trumped conventional wisdom, which is more often than not a reliable guide in matters political.

    All things considered, outgoing Governor Rauf Aregbesola has done well.  In terms of infrastructure and innovation, especially in education, his record is nothing short of outstanding.  His austere lifestyle grated  on aides and their hangers-on who were forever lamenting that their appointments did not translate into an invitation to come and eat.

    But the APC’s surprisingly weak outing cannot be attributed to his lack of performance.  Nor am I aware that Aregbesola has personally been accused of corruption, or of running a corrupt government.

    Debating skills, which reveal mastery of detail and the capacity to think on one’s feet, hardly entered into the people’s choice.  Adeleke spurned every debate, thus denying the public a chance of gauging his electability.  He did not even deign to send his running mate to stand in for him, unlike President Muhammadu Buhari, who has pro-actively deputed Vice President Yemi Osinbajo to represent him in next year’s election debates.

    Some disaffected party insiders are blaming it all on APC National Leader, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, saying that he “imposed” Oyetola on the electorate.  If this were the sole reason for the party’s present grief, Oyetola should have suffered a rout.

    Some again claim that it resulted from untrammeled use of money.  But every political party spent to the extent of its resources, and some.

    Others blame it on Nigeria’s Pentecostals who allegedly urged their followers to throw their support behind the PDP candidate because Governor Aregbesola, in whose Administration the APC candidate served as a principal officer, had engaged in creeping Islamisation of Osun.

    But the PDP’s candidate is also a Moslem. Has he entered into an agreement to dismantle the alleged project?  Besides, it is doubtful, despite all the posturing on all sides, that religion holds that kind of salience in Osun.

    Still others say that Osun yearns for change, not the continuity Oyetola promised.  But this sounds like change for its own sake, not the qualitative change that the PDP has rarely delivered anywhere.

    And then, there are those who insist that Adeleke profited hugely from a sympathy vote on account of the police attempt to arrest him in the on-going investigation of his academic qualifications.  The move was misguided, smacked of desperation and reflected poorly on the APC-controlled Federal Government. But was the sympathy vote large enough to tip the scale in his favour?

    To a greater or lesser degree, these factors and others I have not remarked probably influenced the election outcome.  But none of them determined it.

    By the way, in case the police still don’t know Adeleke’s academic standing, I can reveal with the highest confidence that he failed the only subject he sat for in the West African School Certificate – English Language.

    But that is a matter for the looming post-election legal war.

  • See how they run

    Some nine months to the presidential election, the race for the top job is almost at full throttle.

    At the last count, 62 aspirants, ranging from the deluded to the desperate have declared interest. Fortunately for most of them, there is no price tag for being an aspirant.  They can go on aspiring for as long as they wish.

    Being a serious quester is a different matter, however.

    Unless you can cough up N45 million just for the application material, don’t even think of declaring interest in the APC ticket.  Better to remain an aspirant – a designation that attracts some notice without carrying a hefty price tag.  That is no small privilege.

    Even those we are used to regarding as well-off, if not prosperous, are having a hard time coming up with the APC’s application fee.  President Muhammadu Buhari, the party’s putative nominee, has had  to be bailed out by a group of admiring young professionals and tens of thousands of their peers who presented him with the application package, gratis.

    In keeping with its new, austere way of doing business, the PDP has put a price tag of only N12 million on its application package for president.  But Abubakar Atiku’s teeming supporters and admirers took exception to his being burdened with such a trifling transaction.  Accordingly, they went ahead to purchase the application package for him.

    Atiku was so moved by the gesture that he wept.  Surely, there is no greater love than this, that struggling young men and women, unbidden and in expectation of no returns, put themselves to  great exertions to help a billionaire seeking to actualise his dream.

    It cannot be long before the youths of Benue mobilise themselves to purchase application papers for another billionaire, David Mark, the former Senate David president.  They would be continuing a practice they began three years ago when they presented him with an application form for his Senate re-election bid.

    You can count on the youths of Ilorin not to be left out in this matter.  They regard the race for the presidential nomination, I am told, as an opportunity to give back to Dr Bukola Saraki, who has given so much to community and indeed to Nigeria and the wider world, in the tradition of his family.

    Many of those hoisting the banner of “Not too young to contest” have been heard complaining that the high cost of seeking elective office has left them exactly where they were before the qualifying age for a presidential run was lowered to 35 years.   To which one older aspirant has quipped:  It is good not to be too young to run.  It is much better not to be too poor to run.

    It reminds me of the time of military president Ibrahim. Babangida. At every opportunity, he denounced “moneybags” and the old breed and vowed that they would never inherit the new political kingdom he was building for a new breed class.

    The only problem was that the new breed were looking up to the old breed money bags to bankroll their quest. One resentful old breed moneybag after another told them to go breed their own money.

    That dark era notwithstanding, Babangida has become a fount of wisdom for all manner of aspirants, and his Minna Hilltop residence has become a mecca of sorts.  They troop there, seeking his blessing, which he dispenses generously.  He does more:  He assures them that he is available anytime to provide counsel and guidance.

    Every caller leaves, fully satisfied that he has won Babangida’s endorsement.  Former governor Sule Lamido of Jigawa departs, assured that the Aminu Kano tradition of politics, of which Babangida canonises Lamido a holdover, is just what Nigeria is yearning for.

    Saraki departs, buoyed that his outstanding record and experience as lawmaker, governor and Senate president remarked so eloquently by Babangida were just what Nigeria needed.

    Nor is Babangida’s endorsement limited to political figures in the mainstream parties. He poured his  blessings on the Social Democratic Party, telling its visiting leader Olu Falae, a former presidential candidate and before that, secretary to Babangida’s military government:  ”If I hadn’t been too old, I would have loved to join the youths vanguard of your party. I have faith in the political party, for what it is and what it stands for.”

    There is never a dull moment at IBB’s Court on the Minna Hilltop these days.

    All of this brings to mind a presidential aspirant in the Babangida era with whom I used to compare intelligence.  One day he sent word that I should visit at my earliest convenience. Arriving at his home that Sunday, I found him in high spirits.  There was a radiance on his face and a swagger in his gait that I had not noticed before.

    He went on to narrate with breathless excitement how he had been the president’s breakfast guest for four consecutive Sundays, how they had compared notes on the unfolding transition, and how the president had more or less assured him that if he maintained his momentum, he was well on course to becoming Nigeria’s next president.

    “Do you know which presidential aspirant he invites for lunch?  And dinner thereafter?” I asked him.

    “Oh, prof, you are too far gone in your cynicism,” he remonstrated. “Why can’t you look on the bright side for once?”

    Some three weeks later, he asked to see me. That day, he was glum, saturnine.

    “How did you figure it out, prof?” he asked.

    “Figure out what, Chief?”

    “Babangida,” he said bitterly.   My host had found out that Babangida had been administering the same treatment to another aspirant over lunch, and to yet another over dinner.

    To return to jostling for the presidential tickets:  How are the aspirants faring in the field?

    Atiku seems desperate.  He has been going round urging younger PDP aspirants to stand down for him, since tradition demands that the young defer to their elders.

    One of them, the aforementioned Jigawa governor, Sule Lamido, shot back with Shavian repartee. In the matter of politics, he said, he was Atiku’s elder, having served as parliamentary secretary in the First Republic while Atiku was an officer in the Customs.  So, Atiku should be the one standing down.

    “When I become president,” not “If I become president,” is now the refrain in Saraki’s speeches at every stop.  He says he has given up hope of carrying the Northwest and the Northeast and would be content to secure 25 percent of the poll in the States constituting that zone.  But he will “lock down” the votes in the rest of the country on his way to becoming president.

    Saraki has even threatened to bring “integrity” to bear on the governance of Nigeria when he becomes president.  Yes, integrity, of all things.

    There is hardly any sign of David Mark on the turf.  Where is Omoyele Sowore?

    The televangelist Pastor Kris Okotie, of the FRESH Party and the Household of God is waging his field campaign through sesquipedalian epistles urging the major political parties to adopt him as the consensus candidate, the one person who has the vision and the judgment and the wisdom to take Nigeria to the Promised Land.

    That is God’s will for Nigeria, he has been saying.  Not having received that command from above, no other aspirant apparently feels obliged to heed it.

    Former deputy governor of the Central Bank Kingsley Moghalu, who had entered the race full of promise, failed to win the backing of Presidential Aspirants Coming Together (PACT), a coalition of 16 aspirants.  He promptly declared for the Young Progressive Party and now holds its presidential ticket.

    The great surprise in all this is that nothing has been heard lately of Obasanjo’s mega movement, the Coalition for Nigeria that was going to re-define power, leadership, service and governance and establish a new and enduring order, has been swallowed up by the African Democratic Congress (ADC).

  • Exhausted in America; well, almost

    If you are a member of the attentive audience in the United States, you must be teetering on the edge of exhaustion by now, driven thither by the diurnal circulation of President Trump’s twitter tantrums, reports from the Special Counsel’s investigation of the Trump Campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia in the 2016 presidential election and related shenanigans.

    This news this past week featured, among other riveting developments, wall-to-wall television coverage of confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s second pick in two years, to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, the so-called swing associate justice, whom Trump hustled out of the Court to make way for a more conservative judge.

    Trump’s first pick was a brazen theft.  The death of the arch-conservative Justice Antonin Scalia and exponent of a soulless legal doctrine called originalism, threw up a vacancy in the final year of the Obama Presidency.  Obama nominated the courtly Merrick Garland to fill the slot.

    The Republican majority in the U. S. Senate, per the dour Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, would have none of it.  They would not even accord the nominee the courtesy visits that usually preface confirmation hearings.  The nomination was killed on arrival.

    On being elected president, Trump moved swiftly to nominate Neil Gorsuch, a judge whose conservative bona fides had been established to his complete satisfaction to fill the vacancy that had been Obama’s to fill.  The Senate dutifully steamrollered the confirmation through.  It is an indication of Trump’s brand of politics that he lustily advertises this heist as one of the signal achievements of his Administration.

    With the not-so-voluntary resignation of Justice Kennedy less than four months to an election that is likely to change the architecture of Congress, Trump is set to pull off another heist.

    In justification of the earlier heist, Senate Republicans majority Leader McConnell had insisted that confirmation hearings must await the outcome of the presidential election – some nine months away — to give “the American people” a chance to participate in the process.

    But they would not apply the same reasoning to a judicial nomination made four months    to an election that could upset their applecart.  Now, “the American people” no longer deserve a chance to participate in the selection of a justice of the Supreme Court who can be relied on to harbor little consideration for organised labour, consumers rights, voting rights, human rights, and women rights, while tightening the corporatist grip on America.

    Few surprises there. The Republicans don’t do logic and they don’t play nice.  Theirs is a brass-knuckle approach to politics, and was on full display at hearings for Kavanaugh last week.

    Then there were in the news cycle the excerpts from Bob Woodward’s  — he of Watergate fame, with Carl Bernstein – book chronicling the chaos and dysfunction in the White House, the erratic and often alarming behavior of its occupant, and the abysmal disesteem in which he is held by key aides and senior staffers.

    The attentive public was still digesting the snippets from Woodward’s book and the shady manner in which Republican majority in the Senate was conducting the confirmation hearings for the dissembling Supreme Court nominee when The New York Times, which no one has ever accused of recklessness, came out with an unsigned Op-Ed piece that raised anew, and with insider knowledge, grave doubts about Trump’s mental, moral and intellectual fitness for his high office.

    The writer, identified simply as a “senior official” of the Trump Administration, identified himself or  herself as part of a “resistance” within the White House laboring behind the scenes to save America from Trump and thwarting Trump’s “more misguided impulses” until he is out of office.

    “The root of the problem,” the writer declared, “is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision-making.”

    He described Trump’s style as “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.”  He spoke of Trump’s “preferences” for autocrats and dictators, and of his “anti-democratic impulses.

    He spoke of how senior officials from the White House to executive branch departments and agencies,  “would privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander-in -chief’s comments and actions,” and how “most (of them) are working to insulate their operations from his whims.”

    Meetings with Trump “veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back,” the writer added.

    Given this instability, the writer said, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment that spells out how to remove a president from office.  But rather than precipitate what was sure to be a long-drawn constitutional crisis, he and the resisters within would do everything to steer the Administration in the right direction “until – one way or another – it’s over.”

    He indicted American society of complicity in Trump’s desecration of the nation’s values.  “The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility,” he wrote.

    Since its publication in what Trump reflexively calls “the failing New York Times, the article has been the talk among the political class.

    As might be expected, Trump almost blew his top.  He said it amounted to treason pure and simple, and demanded that the author be turned in immediately for prosecution under security laws.  Trump’s volcanic rage confirmed virtually everything the writer and many others had said about him.

    The White House launched an internal search for the author, leading virtually all members of the Cabinet to declare publicly that none of them was the author.  Even Vice President Mike Pence and First Lady Melania Trump felt obliged to distance themselves from the article.

    In recent memory, The New York Times has been known to grant anonymity to Op-Ed contributors in only two instances.  In both cases, publication of their identities would have gravely imperilled the contributors.

    Anonymity was granted in this instance, the paper explained, because the writer would face certain dismissal and other reprisals if identified.  The writer had approached the paper through a person known to the house, and the paper had satisfied itself and the intermediary and the writer’s good faith.  Besides, the article contained important insider knowledge that might not otherwise reach a public that had the right to know – the public Trump took an oath to serve diligently, honestly and faithfully.

    What good faith, some have sniggered.  If the writer was not a showboat and a coward to boot, what was he still doing in the Trump White House?  If he had the courage of his conviction, why did he not resign, and then publish the piece under his name?  How senior was the “senior official” anyway?

    The New York Times would not tell, saying merely that the writer’s identify was known only to the Editor of the Editorial Page and a few staffers of the Op-Ed section.

    The paper has this bifurcated existence whereby the Editorial Page is separate from the newsroom and  The Editorial Board represents the opinions of its members, its editor and the publisher.

    So, even the executive editor of the larger paper does not know the identity of the writer.  But the larger paper, not being privy to the confidentiality agreement between the Op-Ed section and the writer of the explosive article, is not obliged to respect it.  Nothing in the set-up of the paper precludes it from seeking and revealing the identity of the writer.

    I will not be surprised therefore, if it is The New York Times that finally reveals in its news pages the identity that its Editorial Page has vowed to keep secret.

    Meanwhile, a frenzied search continues for the writer.  The suspects have been narrowed to twelve. One desperate Republican senator has nevertheless suggested that the entire corps of White House “senior officials” be rounded up and given a lie detector test.

    Even at its best, that is an unreliable method of ascertaining truth.  It is unscientific.  Military and intelligence operatives who might fall into enemy hands know how to beat it.

    I have a better idea, from one of the entities Donald Trump dismissed with accustomed vulgarity as “shit-hole countries.”

    Make all your “senior officials,” not forgetting Vice President Pence and the First Lady Melania, swear  by Soponno or Amadioha.

    But get the caskets ready first.

  • Matters miscellaneous

    Between Trump and Buhari

    Donald Trump never met a person he could not put down in the coarsest manner conceivable by word, image, or deed, and the person does not have to offend him to be at the receiving end of his vile tongue or his splenetic tweets.

    Except Russian President Vladimir Putin, dating from 2016, and for good reason, as I will explain shortly.

    Last week, the Financial Times (London) reported that, after his meeting with the visiting President Muhammadu Buhari, he warned his aides never to inflict such a “lifeless” person on him again.

    The report sent Nigeria atwitter.  Opposition elements latched on to it as the ultimate validation of what they had been saying about Buhari – that he lacks the robust health the job of president demands, among other qualities.

    Those on the other side said Trump was acting in character and that he was not morally qualified to pass that kind of judgment on anyone, let alone a fellow president he interacted with for only an hour or two.

    To be sure, Buhari is unlikely to be acclaimed the world’s most spontaneous statesman.  But there are things far worse than a lack of spontaneity, and the foul-mouthed, prurient occupant of the White House possesses them in superabundance.

    What is responsible for Trump’s fawning adulation of Putin?  The word in intelligence sources on both sides of the Atlantic is that the Russians have him “over a barrel.”

    Nothing to do with inordinate consumption of alcohol, I should explain.  They say he does not drink beer, wine or any liquor for that matter.  Trump drinks only diet coke, and that beverage does not come in barrels.  So, how can Putin have Trump over a barrel?

    Translated into plain English, the evocative idiom means that the Russian authorities have him in a situation where he has little choice but to do their bidding; that they have him completely at their mercy.  I hear the Russians are very good at that kind of thing.  They call it “kompromat”.

    What might have landed Trump in this highly compromised situation remains a matter of speculation.

    Some financial dealing, perhaps. Or some sexual indiscretion. Or both, all videotaped.  But the smart money is on sexual indiscretion. Remember how Trump boasted that he often grabbed women by an unmentionable part of the anatomy that they never protested, because he was rich.

    Trump could well have forgotten that he was no longer in the United States. Or probably thought that Russian women would regard it as the ultimate compliment that Himself the Donald, the billionaire business mogul from glittering New York, was paying them that kind of attentio”.

    Whatever it was, the truth will out.

    Oh no. Not again

     Just as he was emerging from Trump’s vile chastening, Buhari worked up a kerfuffle of his own.  In a prepared speech, he declared before a grand assembly of Nigeria’s jurists that the national interest was superior to the rule of law, and that in any conflict between the twain, the rule of law would have to yield.

    The law was settled on that matter, he said.

    The jurists shook their heads in disbelief.   The attentive audience in Nigeria and abroad was aghast.  Was this Decree Four being litigated anew? Had our officials not abandoned that treacherous path?

    The critiques were so withering that Buhari, who is widely credited with having an iron will, backed off, pledging that his commitment to the rule of law was unwavering.

    But how did a postulation so subversive of democracy get into the speech?  Those who prepared the speech did Buhari a bad turn and should be punished for wantonly bringing him into public ridicule.

    “National interest” is a vague concept, a Jabberwock that means whatever a speaker or writer wants it to mean, no more and no less, in the manner of Humpty Dumpty.  It has been invoked to justify colonial subjugation, to wage wars of aggression, to justify the slaughter of innocents, to dispossess other peoples of the land and to desecrate their culture, to jail political opponents, to justify “preventive detention,” as a pretext for abandoning the Constitution, and to put in abeyance those checks on power that undergird a community.

    The rule of law – as opposed to what has been called rule through law — stands as a check on arbitrary power in its many guises and disguises.  Where the rule of law operates, no one can be punished except for a specific breach of the law. You can be punished only for what you do if it is against the law; you cannot be punished for what the authorities think you might do.  Judicial review is guaranteed.  It is the province of the courts to say what the law is.  Government at every level obeys the courts.

    To avert the embarrassment spawned by the speech at issue, Buhari’s close advisers should ensure from now on that every draft is circulated among the persons most knowledgeable in the subject matter inside and outside the Presidential Villa.  It says a great deal about how they operate at the Villa that the draft was not cleared with the Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo (SAN), a legal scholar of the first rank.

    Hijackers at work, again

     In making the much-expected public announcement of his decision to enter the presidential race, the embattled president of the Senate, Dr Bukola Saraki, lived up to his reputation for opportunism.  When former Kano State Governor, Dr Rabiu Kwankwaso was denied the use of Eagle Square for the event, he staged it at a private hotel in Abuja. Other aspirants made private arrangements.

    Not so, Saraki.

    He had attained his present status through a grand and audacious hijack. One hijack begets another, and another.

    Over the weekend, he hijacked a public dialogue which he was invited to chair by the #NotTooYoungToRun Movement, a non-partisan organisation, to indulge his tiresome grandstanding and to serve as a platform to announce his presidential bid.

    “Your generation does not deserve to live in the poverty capital of the world,” he told his audience, totally oblivious of his role in aiding and abetting the condition he was deploring.

    “GDP growth rate has declined,” he continued. “Diversification remains an illusion. Unemployment is at an all-time high. Businesses are shutting down. Jobs are being lost in record numbers, and the capital needed to jumpstart our economy is going elsewhere.”

    There was nary an indication that he has been in the front ranks of those who created the dystopia he was describing.

    “I am determined to grow Nigeria out of poverty,” he continued.  “We will stimulate the growth of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) as one of the ways of energising the economy and to create wealth for our people, especially the youth.”

    Saraki revealed that he was only answering the call of the “teeming youth” who had asked him to run for president – the youth whom he had always regarded as his primary constituency, and so on and so forth.

    He assured them that they would be given all the opportunities to realise their potential to the full within a national framework that guarantees inclusiveness.

    The man just can’t stop hijacking, appropriating and grandstanding.

    As usual, his fellow highjacker and deputy, Ike Ekweremadu, was on hand to lend support.

    “I’m in total touch with my people and that is why if I want to remain in the Senate forever, I will.” Ekweremadu told the audience.

    God help his constituency.