The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • As Donald Trump unravels

    There was always something unsettling, repellent even, about Donald Trump.

    The liberal activist and film-maker Michael Moore has called him “a wretched, ignorant, part-time clown and full-time sociopath.”  Mitt Romney, the GOP 2102 presidential candidate described him as “a fraud and a “phony” who is “playing the American public for suckers.”  Trump lacks the temperament and judgment to be president, Romney said, adding:  “Dishonesty is his hallmark.”

    Trump as president-elect would later play Romney for sucker when, for his own private amusement and with Romney’s enthusiastic connivance, he carried on for several weeks the pretence that he was seriously considering Romney for appointment of Secretary of State. Trump even made sure that Romney’s wife and daughter were on hand to witness his humiliation.

    Why Romney would want to serve in any capacity whatsoever in the Administration of a president he had rightly excoriated in the most abhorrent terms says at least as much about Romney as it says of Trump.  But I digress.

    Trump had framed bigotry, xenophobia, demagoguery and misogyny and vulgar name-calling as nothing more than a rejection of the political correctness that was choking American society. He had for 18 years run a bogus university awarding fake diplomas upon payment of fees that it would courteous to call unconscionable.  He had waltzed unscratched through a trail of bankruptcies even as his business partners and shareholders faced certain ruin.

    He regularly stiffed his workers.

    On his way to the nomination and The White House and subsequently, he broke virtually every rule in American political practice. He called the U. S. military “disaster.”  He derided Senator John McCain, the naval aviator who was shot down over Hanoi during the Vietnam War and held captive for five years, saying he preferred soldiers who were not captured.

    McCain, who died last weekend, declared that under no circumstance should Trump attend his burial.

    Against photographic evidence, Trump maintained that he had a much larger crowd at his Inauguration and the one that had filled Washington DC to  overflowing for President Barack Obama’s.

    He denigrated women, mocked the handicapped, and fanned the embers of racism and religious intolerance.  He declared the news media America’s public enemy.

    In his angry, embittered speech that passed as his acceptance of the nomination,  Trump situated America in a frightful dystopia of strife and violence, decay, and decline. Police officers were being killed in the line of duty while chasing down illegal aliens. Radical Islamists were overrunning the country.

    “I alone can fix it, “he said of the dystopia he had conjured up.

    Trump was going to build a wall across the border with Mexico, and Mexico was going to pay for it.  He was going to bar Muslims from some nine countries from entering the United States.  He was going to bring China to heel for cheating on trade rules and currency valuation.  No agreement, domestic or foreign, was sacrosanct.  If it could not be re-negotiated to meet his objections in every material, the United States would pull out.

    He has not shot anyone on New York’s Fifth Avenue yet, but he has been busy undoing decades of ameliorative work on the environment, education, trade, commerce, mining, pollution, and water and air quality.  He has undermined NATO and other alliances, humiliated his foreign hosts on their own turfs, unilaterally repudiated multilateral treaties, forcibly separated babies and children from their migrant parents and detained them in cages.

    He has made the world more dangerous.

    Trump is no respecter of law or morality or tradition.  He is a law unto himself, abusive, vindictive, vulgar, and given to lying uncontrollably.  He would not submit his tax returns for public scrutiny, claiming that they were being audited.  His lack of transparency led to widespread suspicion that he might have paid no income tax for 18 years and counting.

    The conventional wisdom, with which I allied myself, was that a person with such a tawdry political baggage and a threadbare résumé of public service to boot had no business seeking to be president of the United States, and that a critical mass of Americans who believe that decency and integrity and  trustworthiness matter in public life would see through the bluster, the bombast, the mendacity and the megalomania and send Trump back to the world of Reality TV for which his talents are best suited.

    Even the Trump Campaign was bracing itself for the worst, despite polls suggesting that the race had tightened almost to a statistical dead heat in the face of the controversy surrounding his opponent Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server when she was secretary of state.

    Trump defeated Hilary Clinton in the Electoral College to win the presidential race, even while trailing her by more than three million votes in the popular poll.

    It was an upset for the ages.  Never in the history of public affairs had so many people — experts, pundits, and laity – been so perfectly wrong.

    These were the recollections that flashed across my mind this past week as Donald Trump’s tawdry past finally caught up with him and he went unravelling before a global audience.

    He had set out shortly after taking office not merely to undo everything President Obama had done, but to cast his immediate predecessor in the most damaging light.

    Obama, he claimed, had placed him under security surveillance and spied on an official of the Trump Campaign.  But the table soon turned on him. Allegations that Russian hackers operating at the behest of the Kremlin  had compromised his election swirled, raising questions about his legitimacy.  Opposition research by a former British spy which had gained no traction during the election campaign bobbed up with compelling salience.

    These and other developments led to the appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate allegations of Russian meddling in the election.  That investigation spawned other lines of inquiry, which in turn spawned other lines of inquiry, all culminating in the perfect calendar of scandal in which the Trump White House is now inextricably enmeshed.

    Last week, Trump’s long-term counselor and fixer Michael Cohen in sworn testimony implicated him in criminal activity.  His former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted on eight of 18 charges of financial crime.  Only one dissenting juror from a pool of 12 stood between Manafort and conviction on the remaining financial fraud charges.

    Whereas some former presidents have been unscrupulous in certain areas—infidelity, lying, dirty tricks and financial misdeeds– Trump, said an influential commentator, is “the most thoroughly and comprehensively corrupt individual ever to be elected president.”  Others, remarking how he talks like one and acts like one, have likened Trump to a mob boss.

    Robert Mueller, the Special Counsel whom Trump has denigrated endlessly along with the Department of Justice and the CIA and the FBI in tweet after tweet, is yet to report on his findings on Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia in 2016 U. S. presidential election.  But already, there is talk of impeachment in the air.

    Don’t even think about that, Trump has warned.  If he is impeached, the stock market would crash, and everyone would become poor, and his extraordinary brain that has wrought all the wonders America had witnessed since he took office would no longer be at the service of society.

    It may never come to impeachment. But Trump is going to find it well-nigh impossible to tweet  himself out of the mess in which his hubris and his unbridled sense of entitlement have landed him.

    Within months of taking office, and with almost no achievement under his belt except a stolen Supreme Court seat and hefty tax cuts for high-income income earners and the wealthy, Trump launched a campaign for a second term.

    The best he can now hope for is to serve out his current term, hobbled and much diminished.

    Whoever succeeds him has the daunting task of making America decent again.

  • Back to compassion and empathy

    You would have to be stone-hearted not to be deeply moved by the following story that appeared as the tailpiece to deputy editor Lawal Ogienagbon’s column for this newspaper on July 26, 2018.

    Titled “Agony of a dad,” it captures the lack of compassion, the cold application of rules that admits no exceptions even in the most compelling of circumstances, with which the bureaucracy in Nigeria is shot through and through.

    At the center of this tale is a distraught man whose wife and only daughter suffered hideous burns in the Otedola Bridge tanker explosion of June 28.  He had spent N4 million on fees in a private hospital in Lagos where they were receiving treatment before he transferred them to the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH) in Ikeja, Lagos.

    Persuaded that they could receive yet better treatment abroad, he sought to fly them out.  Money was apparently no problem.  The problem was that his daughter’s passport had expired.   To get it renewed, officials said, he would have to take his daughter, third-degree burns and all, to the Passport Office for electronic capture of her biometric data.

    That was the law, they told him. There was no alternative.

    That was the story the distraught man took to an assembly of transport operators convened by the Lagos State Ministry of Transportation at the Bagauda Kaltho Press Centre at the State Secretariat at Alausa, Ikeja, to figure out the actuarial implications of the disaster and their responsibility to the victims.

    The crowd listened in hushed silence, the tension heightened, I gather, by the distraught man’s refusal to disclose his identity or to have his photograph taken.

    He was not asking for financial help, the distraught man.  He was there to solicit Governor Akinwunmi Ambode’s help to move the Passport Office to take their equipment to LASUTH for the biometrics, since it was not possible to transport his daughter there in her condition.

    The Commissioner for Transportation, who stood in for Ambode at the session, asked the distraught man to see him privately after the meeting.

    I do not know how the meeting ended.  I hope the Governor acceded to the distraught man’s request, and that his wife and daughter are now abroad receiving the kind of treatment they could not get in Nigeria.

    Ordinarily, the distraught man should not have found it necessary to seek Governor Ambode’s intervention.  The supervising officer of the Passport Office should have been vested with discretionary powers to waive, in exceptional circumstances, the law mandating a passport applicant’s physical presence for biometrics.  Plus, the equipment is portable and can function just about anywhere there is an electrical outlet.

    But in Nigeria, nothing is ever ordinary.

    The system operates on the assumption that exceptions will be abused.  Therefore, it admits none, not even on the most compelling of reasons. To render the system impermeable to corrupting influences, they enact rules that drive frustrated patrons to the criminal embrace of syndicated hustlers operating a parallel system that delivers quickly, and with the minimum of fuss.  You pay the fee, and you get the document – almost any document — and it is just as good as the one issued by the bureaucracy.

    But because the system admits of no exceptions, patrons are forced to devise all manner of schemes for obtaining whatever services they require.  And the more unlawful, the more assured.

    Apparently the distraught man, bless his innocence, had never heard of “Oluwole.”

    The whole thing is self-defeating.  Government loses vital revenue and erodes citizens’ faith, shaky at the best of times, in the system.  Nigeria is one of the few countries in the world to require a passport applicant’s physical presence for biometrics, an anomaly in this age of information technology.  But the requirement has done little to curb the fraffick in Nigerian passports

    The United States Passport is probably the most valued in the world.  To obtain it, you have to sign the application form in the presence of an official; yet, it remains the world’s most trafficked travel document.

    The point is that the kind of stringent controls I have been describing rarely work.

    Yet, illustrations of their application abound in Nigeria.

    Issuance and renewal of drivers’ and vehicle licences should be routine.  But the officials vested with the authority have insinuated so many obstacles into the process that motorists and vehicle owners are often forced, after an interminable wait, to seek these documents from touts who care nothing about driver competence or the condition of the vehicles plying city roads and inter-state highways.

    The high volume of road accidents and the mounting death toll are attributable, at least in part, to the ceding of this vital function to touts, by the very officials entrusted to safeguard it.

    To ensure that nobody can vote at multiple centres, restrict movement on Election Day from home to voting booth and back, shut down the airports and seaports, lock down the country, and virtually place the population under house arrest.

    Otherwise, some people can vote in Lagos in the early morning, drive to Abeokuta to vote two hours later, fly to Kano to vote around lunchtime, hop to Makurdi to cast yet another vote, and land in Port Harcourt just before the polls close.  And they can do so in numbers large enough to subvert the popular will.

    The loss to the economy from this misapprehension is incalculable.   I say nothing of course about the disruption to arrangements long made, contracts long sealed, and to the rhythm of life.

    To take an example from the banking sector:  Because of the high level of money laundering and other syndicated crimes in the system, depositors are required to obtain a Bank Verification Number (BVN) that will help officials keep track of customer transactions.  To obtain the BVN, depositors have to report in person at banks or designated centres to register, within a specified period.

    Patrons who fail to furnish the BVN before the deadline have been warned that they stand to forfeit their deposits, on the presumption that they are money launderers.   No account is taken of the inconveniences, the costs, and the risks to which depositors residing in far-flung places have to subject themselves to register for the BVN.

    And yet, all manner of technological tools are available for verifying the identity of depositors in the comfort of their homes, or without requiring them to travel far from wherever they live. When banks and other institutions fail to avail themselves of these technologies, they unwittingly retard Nigeria’s digital advance.

    Consider, finally, the matter of policing the country.  It is feared that if each state is allowed to run its own police force, as is the case in every federation, the force will be used to persecute the political opposition.  That has happened before in Nigeria, and could well happen again.

    But instead of making laws to curb and punish such abuse, constitutional provision is made only for federal only.   Now, is the unified police command not often used today to persecute political opponents?  Or is it the case that persecution by the federal police is to be preferred to persecution by state police?

    Even in the best-ordered societies, laws, rules and regulations will be abused.  That is a fact of human society.  But since they are made for people and not the other way round, they must admit of exceptions, and must be executed with compassion and empathy.

    It used to be said that Compassion and Empathy are Africans.  It is time to reclaim them in the making of public policy.

     

    Correction

    In my column for August 14, I mischaracterised the PDP as the majority party in both Houses of the National Assembly of the Second Republic.

    That status belonged to the NPN.  The PDP did not exist then.

    I regret the error.

     

  • These disarticulated times

    Beleaguered Senate President Bukola Saraki surpassed his own notoriety for inventiveness and grand-standing last week in various statements explaining and justifying his recent defection from the ruling APC to the PDP, from which he and his supporters had bailed out in 2015 when it        was clear that the biggest party in Africa was doomed to go down to historic defeat.

    There was nothing high-minded about it.  It was a career move pure and simple.

    It did not follow from ideology, much less conviction.  To leader and follower alike, one political party is as good as another as long as it delivers the juice.  Once its ability to deliver the juice in the usual quantities seems threatened, or it is time seek another party that can gratify their overweening sense of entitlement.

    This scenario is all the more likely to occur when the party of their current sojourn develops vulnerabilities that might imperil its chances of re-election, as the APC is now circumstanced.

    Four issues have above all made the Buhari administration especially vulnerable.

    The first is the narrow base from which President Muhammadu Buhari makes some of the most important federal appointments.

    The second is the murderous reign of cattle herders from the Sahel to the Atlantic coast.  Each day brings with it blood-curdling tales of murder, arson, devastation, rapine, and displacement. For the most part, the government wrings its hands in abject befuddlement and promises to bring the marauders to justice.  The very next day, the marauders strike on a more brutal scale.

    The third is the dilatoriness with which urgent national issues are being handled, at a time that demands decisiveness.

    The fourth is the gloomy atmosphere across the country, the pervasive feeling that things aren’t improving or improving fast enough, despite the Buhari Administration’s best effort.

    The PDP, which took Nigeria to the edge of economic ruin and set the value system at nought has skillfully exploited these vulnerabilities to cast itself as the deliverer Nigeria is waiting for.   Last week’s defections from the APC into the welcoming embrace of the PDP was supposed to signalise its resurgence and its unstoppable march back to power.

    Regardless of the balance of forces in the Senate, it now has in its collection Saraki, who has always had one foot in the PDP where his soul belongs, and the other in the APC. For deputy Senate president, thanks to the self-same Saraki, it has an entrenched PDP stalwart, Ike Ekweremadu.

    These are no minor trophies.

    The Senate president used to be little more than a ceremonial office, but Saraki has parlayed it into an independent centre of power to delay, disrupt and obstruct Buhari’s agenda.  No other Senate president in the world exercises the kind of power Saraki has arrogated to himself; none draws nearly as much on the public purse.

    Saraki has vowed to remain president, a position he had usurped by fraud and kept by dispensing patronage, thanks to Buhari’s vacillation in enforcing party discipline – a vacillation that doubtless haunts him today.

    Meanwhile, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, another PDP crossover who was also set to defect, has been hedging his bets – in case he finds his position unviable – further evidence, were any needed, that the defections were never rooted in conviction.

    Saraki’s proxies are claiming that, even in Nigeria, there is precedent for members of the Opposition holding key positions in the legislature.  As examples, they cite Ume Ezeoke of the NPP who served as Speaker in the NPN-dominated House of Representatives, and John Washpam, also of the NPP, who functioned as deputy president in the NPN-controlled Senate.

    This brazen revisionism should not pass unchallenged.

    The arrangement was a product of negotiations between the two parties.  It also included allocation of cabinet positions to the NPP.  Though the largest single party in the National Assembly, the NPN lacked an overall majority that would have enabled it to govern effectively, what with the strong UPN presence in the legislature.

    When the marriage of convenience collapsed, each party went its separate way. It cannot therefore be cited as a precedent for Saraki’s tenacity of office.

    Last week’s armed siege on the National Assembly was barbarous through and through.  It is indefensible. Those who planned and staged it must be identified and brought to justice, and there should be no prevarication in the matter.

    But that intrusion hardly justifies Saraki’s heated rhetoric and his grandstanding.

    Hear him, at his chaotic “world press conference”:

    “. . .The legislature, more than any other institution in this country, more than any other arm of government, represents the will of the people. We are elected by the people, and an assault on the legislature is an assault on the people of Nigeria. The forcible shutdown of the legislature was an unconscionable assault on a national institution, and thanks to all your efforts, the aggressors have been put to shame. . .”

    In what ways, it is necessary to ask, has the legislature over which Saraki has presided in the past three years and run as a fief represented the will of Nigerians?  And isn’t it rich that a person impervious to shame and noblesse oblige should talk of putting others to shame?

    And this from the same press conference, about the siege and its masterminds:

    “. . .They attempted to execute an illegal impeachment of the leadership of the Senate without the backing of the law, but they faltered. We are confident that, together, we shall always defeat acts of unconstitutionality. The rule of law shall always prevail. . .”

    Saraki’s new-found belief in the rule of law – if belief it is indeed and just another instance of his accustomed posturing – is hollow through and through.  Whether in his political career or in his business operations, he has always lived under the penumbra of the law.  Ilorin and Kwara State,  not forgetting Lagos and Abuja, are littered with the evidence.  I say nothing of the Cayman Islands and other foreign shelters for wealth of dubious provenance.

    In case Saraki has conveniently forgotten the underhanded, insidious and smart-alecky path he trod to “emerge” Senate president, how he conspired with all 49 members of the PDP and nine renegade members of the APC to wrest the position for himself and assign that of deputy president to the minority PDP, the APC be damned, here is a reminder.

    When the 7th Senate was prorogued, the law in force was the Senate Standing Orders 2007 “as amended,” according to the best authorities.  And until the Senate convened to elect new officers for the 8th Senate, it transacted no official business whatsoever.

    So, how did Standing Orders 2007 (as amended), which required all members of the Senate to participate in the nominating and voting for the Senate president and deputy president morph into House Standing Orders 2015 “as amended” which states rather limply that members of the Senate are entitled to participate in voting for Senate president and deputy president?

    Back in July 2015, the police had determined that the document at issue was a forgery.  The Director of Public Prosecutions of the Federation, Mohammed Diri, issued a legal opinion concurring in that finding and recommended that those behind it be identified and charged with criminal conspiracy, forgery, breach of official trust, and unlawful assembly.

    Toward that end, the legal opinion also set forth some questions the police should answer definitively, namely:  Who authorised promulgation of Senate Standing Order 2105? Who published it? Who approved it?  Who paid for its publication?  Who distributed it?

    The Ministry of Justice, then headed by immediate past Solicitor-General of the Federation and permanent secretary of the Ministry of Justice, Abubakar Yola also concurred in the legal opinion and stated that the Senate leadership election, based as it was on forged documents, was null and void.

    But the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami (SAN) who took office four months after the legal opinion was issued has, without formally issuing a nolle prosequi, discontinued the case.  Nor has he deigned to explain why.

    The police seem just as disinclined to pursue investigations to answer the questions formulated by the DPP.

    That is the background to the making of Senate President Saraki.  Those who are now lionising him as a champion of democracy and the rule of law care little about his personal history.

    They care even less about democracy and the rule of law, and about integrity in public life.

  • Dino: A lawmaker’s travails

    Poor Dino Melaye.

    Given the unremitting bad press he gets each passing day, you would think that “Delinquent Senator” better describes the Senator for Kogi West than “Distinguished Senator.”

    It is almost as if he cannot do anything that is not delinquent, no matter how hard he tries.

    They said he did not earn the degree he claims from Ahmadu Bello University.  He proves the contrary.  To leave no one in doubt, he decks himself in doctoral regalia to attend a session of the National Assembly, only to be denounced afresh as an impersonator on the insidious ground that he holds only a bachelor’s degree of the third rank.

    When did a degree cease to be a degree, pray?

    He writes a best-selling tome on the nation’s most pressing problem “Anti-corruption,” and instead of applauding his scholarship, some career calumnists dismiss it as a desultory pastiche riddled with grammatical errors, starting from the title page.  It matters not in the least to them that the entire membership of the National Assembly individually and collectively witnessed the historic launch of the volume and supported it with googols of Naira.

    I wonder what the calumnists aforementioned will do when the senator emerges (I use that word advisedly) as a frontline member of the Association of Nigerian Authors or as an Honorary Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, if not the short list for a Grammy – remember he is also a best-selling recording artist – or the National Order of Merit.

    Rest easy, contenders for the prizes endowed by the oil companies and the finance houses for fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama.  The Senate’s literary crackerjack is not coming after you.  He doesn’t need the piddling cash prize, which amounts to a little more than a month’s takings from his day job of making laws for the good governance of Nigeria.

    Still on the book: They say they can’t find it in any reputable bookstore.  Why don’t they check out the disreputable bookstores, then?

    Dino invokes the Senate’s oversights power to compel an obdurate chief of Customs to appear in uniform to testify on some important national security issues, and they say he over-reached.  If he, a distinguished senator – let them lump that if they don’t like it — if he can voluntarily appear before the most distinguished Upper Chamber in his academic robes, why should an ordinary chief of Customs countermand orders to wear his official uniform on a summons from the Senate, not once but three times?

    Where, pray, is the over-reaching?

    Through frugal spending and judicious husbandry of his emoluments from the legislature, he acquires a fleet of some of the finest automobiles ever built.  The collection includes a Lamborghini, Alfa Romeo and a Bentley for sure, and may also boast a Rolls Royce, a Maybach, and some motorcars said to have been specially manufactured to meet his exacting standards.

    Elsewhere, they would be celebrating his nice sense of discrimination.  Here they dismiss him as a playboy and a showboat inebriated with hot new money and all the crassness and vulgarity associated with it.

    A senator can’t spend his own money as he pleases?  What is the country coming to?

    Unarmed, the senator single-handedly faced down in his hometown a squad of assassins that couldn’t even shoot straight. That, I would argue, is the stuff of heroism.  In a land so bereft of heroes, the event should have been memorialised with a public holiday.

    Not in a land smothered by Dinophobia.

    At his first coming as a member of the House of Representatives, the future senator displayed such versatility and prowess in the martial arts on the floor that it was widely believed that if he was minded to set up a Kick-boxing Academy in Abuja for the benefit of his fellow lawmakers and others who may need such skills, it would be a roaring success. He was the complete package.

    When his constituency would not return him to the House and he was literally down and out, he carried out feasibility studies on the project.  He concluded that a Senate seat would serve him much better.

    The rest is history.

    Now his prowess is reserved exclusively for the protection of his patron the irremovable president of the Senate, in the capacity of personal bodyguard.

    Nobody is applauding his loyalty and sense of sacrifice.  Undiscerning as always, the usual detractors see in the Kogi Senator’s relationship to his principal only grovelling subservience.  Some of them, I bet, can’t recognise nobility of character even if it were to kick them in groin.

    It was prowess in the martial arts that the Senator deployed in executing a Houdini-style escape from the police when they were taking him in an armoured vehicle to Kogi to face spurious criminal charges. To cover their embarrassment, the police charged him with “attempted suicide.”

    First of all, whose body is it?  Second, why would he attempt to kill himself when he has so much to live for – those mansions in Abuja and elsewhere, those luxury cars, money in the better banks and in the hardest currencies, with much more to come?

    Dinophobia is a terrible affliction, believe me.  As if that is not bad enough, recent events have, if anything, further compounded and raised it to a national malady.

    The other day, as the good senator was heading to Kogi to commission blocks of classrooms, the latest addition to his impressive portfolio of constituency projects, some hoodlums with murder on their minds emerged from the bush somewhere on the Abuja-Lokoja stretch, intercepted his car, and immobilised it.

    They struck it viciously and relentlessly with their cudgels but could not make a dent on its armoured frame.  Nor could they shatter the glass windows.  They tried to flip the vehicle on its side.  No luck.  They tried to flip it on its back; same result.   The senator just looked on, bemused.

    The hoodlums then scampered away in search of disused tyres or some highly combustible material  with which to set the senator’s car on fire. The senator knows their type all too well; no need to take further chances.

    So he bolted out of the car into the bush and ran as fast and as far as his sturdy legs could carry him, his assailants in hot pursuit.  By then, it was dusk, and visibility was diminishing.  In the distance, he could just make out the hazy outlines of a huge, solitary tree. He raced to it, wrapped his arms and feet around its trunk and with practised movements lifted himself three feet at a time until he reached safety some 120 feet above ground.

    With danger lurking everywhere – from his nonplussed assailants, hunters who might mistake the bulky object high up the tree for some exotic game and shoot at it, denizens of the bush bristling at the invasion of their habitat, and from cattle herders who might perceive whatever was up there as a threat to their priceless herd, he decided that the tree was the safest refuge.

    And there he stayed until daybreak, fighting off insects and sleep and hunger and thirst and creatures of his own imagining.

    By any standard, this was a feat of extraordinary daring, valour, and resourcefulness.  But they are not cheering.  Instead they are calling it a stunt, a tawdry tale designed to shore up the image of a senator who has become a byword for delinquency.

    In his ordeal, they won’t even accord him the empathy we owe one another.

    Dinophobia, I tell you one more time, is a terrible affliction.

  • Echoes of Decree 43 of 1993

    Nigeria’s recent history is rich in paradox.

    Nowhere is the paradox richer than in legislation on the media, especially since 1984.

    A regime that had on seizing power won wide popular support by abolishing the execrable Decree 4 of 1983 and asked to be judged by its respect for fundamental human rights ended its tenure with Decree 43 of 1993, an enactment so thoroughly subversive of freedom of expression that one would have to go back to Tudor England to find a parallel.

    Designed purportedly to protect public officials against false accusations, Decree 4 made publication of the embarrassing truth a crime and demanded of journalists a greater level of exactness scarcely attainable even in the physical sciences.

    Its protagonist, the dour General Muhammadu Buhari, who suffered no delusions of grandeur and no obsessive concern about his place in history, had said at his very first press interview on taking power that he would “tamper” with press freedom.  And he kept his promise, with the making of Decree 4 and the prosecution and jailing of two Guardian journalists.

    Fast forward to Decree 43 of 1993, eight years into the tenure of General Ibrahim Babangida, who had abolished Decree 4 peremptorily and asked to be judged by his regime’s human rights record.

    Despite the draconian provisions of Buhari’s Decree 4, that enactment is almost benign compared with Babangida’s Decree 43, which sought to return Nigeria to the era of newspaper licensing that even the colonial authority had terminated some 70 years earlier.

    A Newspaper Registration Board, to be established by the Federal Government and having as its members some superannuated, out-of-work individuals who had at various times been engaged in  some form of journalism, was the vehicle with which this sordid task was to be accomplished.

    Every newspaper title was to be registered anew with the posting of bonds and fees as huge as king’s ransom. The Board could grant or deny registration without having to state any reason.  Its decision could not be challenged in any court.  Registration was to be carried out every year.  Publication without prior registration could result in a fine of N200, 000 in the currency of that era, or imprisonment for seven years, or both fine and imprisonment.

    However, successful registration did not guarantee uninterrupted operation.  The Board could void registration at any time, without having to state any reason, and its decision could not be challenged at law.

    The entire premises of any newspaper which continued business after being denied registration would be shut down, together with other businesses operating there.  Collateral damage, you know.

    For publication of any material the authorities deemed disagreeable, the proprietors and directors and every employee right down to the janitor would be held to be just as culpable as if they had personally published the material at issue.  The penalties included a 10-year jail term for publication of “false news.

    To quality for registration as a business or to have one’s name inscribed in the official register of journalists, applicants must be persons of “good character.”  What constituted “good character” was left entirely to the discretion of the Board freighted with government appointees.

    Perhaps the only aspect of the Decree that did not smack of malign intent was the designation of the Council as an accreditation body with powers to ensure that journalism training institutions in Nigeria   conformed to the highest standards.

    It is a measure of the collapse of values Nigeria suffered in the Babangida era that finding some ex-journalists who were only too ready to carry out what was at bottom an undertaker’s job was no difficult task.  To cite an example, Clarkson de Majomi, the fawning publisher of one fringe newspaper was named to represent “the public interest” on the Board.

    That alone was a telling indication of the chicanery of the authors of Decree 43.and of the character of some of the members of the Board and withal a measure of the extent to which institutions and individuals were suborned or cowed during that era that very few voices were raised against Decree 43, even within the press.

    It was understandable that newspapers owned and controlled by the government could not bring themselves to say anything critical of Decree 43.  But even some supposedly independent newspapers could not acknowledge, much less denounce, the danger the enactment posed to Nigeria’s long tradition of press freedom.

    And so, not only was criticism of Decree 43 muted at best, even most of the publications that stood to be wiped out if the decree was rigorously enforced refused to be drawn into an action to challenge it at law. Invited to join in such an action, one newspaper’s chief executive replied curtly that he was for “dialogue,” not “confrontation.”  The way he said it, you would think that Decree was a product of the  most elaborate dialogue ever staged.

    In the end, it was The Guardian which took on the fight.  On November 18, 1993, the day after General Sani Abacha ended Ernest Shonekan’s interim delusion, the Ikeja High Court, Mr Justice S. O. Ilori presiding, declared Decree 43 null and void and of no consequence whatsoever, holding that Babangida had by an earlier decree divested himself of any law-making power.

    Maradona had dribbled the ball irretrievably into his own goal.

    For good measure, the Ilori Court discharged The Guardian and by extension other newspapers form any obligation to comply with it.

    Who would have thought, then, that Babangida’s long, malignant shadow would pursue the news media into the chambers of the National Assembly and even find comfort there some 16 years after he was forced to beat a ragged retreat from Abuja, and then again some nine years thereafter?

    But that is precisely what has happened.

    The Press Council Bill now under discussion in a democratically elected Senate determined so see it through is a rehash of Decree 43 in one guise or another.

    Its intendment is clear.  But who are its sponsors?  Is this the Assembly’s idea of “making laws for the good governance” of Nigeria?

    Cui bono?  For whose benefit is the law being enacted?

    The Ikeja High Court that voided Decree 43 twenty-five years ago did so on narrow, technical grounds.  It did not pronounce on its content, nor its spirit, nor yet its constitutionality.

    It now belongs to another court to perform that urgent task on that enactment’s transparent reincarnation.

    Well before Decree 43 was voided by the Ikeja High Court, the Nigerian Press Organization (NPO) had rendered it inoperable by the simple expedient of refusing to nominate representatives to the Press Council.  It would have to invoke that strategy again if the Assembly endorsed the bill now before it.

    The NPO and the liberal community cannot stop the National Assembly from following the treacherous path the Assembly has chosen. But it can head to the courts if the National Assembly pressed ahead to clear the bill, despite its flagrant breach international norms and usages, and its evisceration of Nigeria’s much-admired tradition of press freedom.

    For President Muhammadu Buhari, the wheel has turned full circle. Paradox of paradoxes, the author of the infamous Decree 4 now has an opportunity as an elected chief of state to save the polity from the even more toxic Babangida-era bill being debated in the National Assembly.

    He should make it clear, even now, that he will veto it if it ever reached his desk.

    It is time to exorcise Babangida’s malignant spirit from our laws and institutions.

  • Mandela@100: Beyond freedom

    Amidst the shouts of Amandla that perfused the cities and the townships and the streets and shacks of South Africa and the clenched-fist salutes that projected into the air like a vast forest of black bulbs the day Nelson Mandela took the oath of office; amidst the encircling euphoria, you could hear, if you listened closely, a still small voice tinged with reproach, saying “Madiba gave away too much.”

    That voice belonged to the generation of urban youths who drew their inspiration and motivations from Umkhonto (MK) Chief of Staff Chris Hani rather than from Mandela.

    At the celebration of the centenary of Mandela’s birth last week, that voice had become loud and insistent.  Nineteen years after the great man vacated power and five years after his death, he continues to enjoy public esteem on a scale that at times seems like hero worship. But more and more and more black South Africans who have seen little or no change in their circumstances since the fall of apartheid are questioning some of the choices and compromises he made in the negotiations that led to majority rule.

    Like Nkrumah, Mandela prized the political kingdom above all else.  Secure that kingdom, and everything would follow thereafter, Nkrumah had declared.  Political independence was secured in South Africa, but except in a few cases, it has not translated into significant black empowerment.

    Whites have retained the obscene privileges that apartheid conferred on them and even wangled some measure of power-sharing in the political realm.  In the economic realm, however, there was no talk of sharing, and scant recognition of any obligation to do so.

    It is fashionable and convenient for the white population and commentators to blame the situation in South Africa today on majority rule.  Not a few even take perverse satisfaction in it.  “We told you so, that South Africa will gradually go the way of Zimbabwe,” where the black majority wrested political control but the economy or what remains of it stayed firmly in white hands and the country descended into turmoil

    As in Zimbabwe, and indeed throughout sub-Sahara Africa, those who took over in South Africa after the collapse of apartheid bear not a little responsibility for the discontents of independence.  They failed to translate promise into performance on a significant scale.  For the most part, they did not practise accountability and transparency. Under their watch, the South African state was “captured” by a cabal of corrupt barons.

    But the blame has a much deeper root:  the economic structure that came with independence, a structure designed to perpetuate the inequities of colonial rule and apartheid.

    Nowhere are these inequities starker than in landholding.  Whites constituting just 25 percent of the population of South Africa hold 87 percent of the most productive land, leaving scraggy, barren patches to the majority.

    But this statistic does not tell the story adequately.

    A 1990 journey through southwestern Africa by this reporter and Dan Agbese, Haroun Adamu, Felix Adenaike, and Onyema Ugochukwu provided a vista that has not changed much. From the Namibian capital, Windhoek, where we had witnessed ceremonies marking that country’s independence, we embarked on the road trip to Johannesburg in a Volkswagen Kombi, with two chaperons whose task was to shield us from the indignities of “petty apartheid,” especially in the countryside.

    Our mission was to report on South Africa’s political transition to the attentive audience in Nigeria, and for the benefit of a government that had no diplomatic mission in South Africa.

    Nine hours into the trip, we stopped for the night in Upington, in the semi-desert karoo, home to the author and playwright Athol Fugard, and half-way between our point of departure and our destination.

    For those nine hours, we drove through parcel after parcel of uncultivated grassland that stretched as far as the eye could see, fenced in with razor wire.  Our chaperons said it was not unusual for individuals to own a million hectares of such land.  You paid a fee to the owner to hunt game (bush meat); for all practical purposes, the land was otherwise fallow and might as well have been abandoned altogether.

    It was the same story on the second half of our journey:  vast stretches of uncultivated but demarcated land, owned exclusively by absentee whites.

    On assignment in Kwazulu-Natal the following year, I brought up the land question with the Chief Minister, Mangosuthu Bethelezi.  How could so few whites have so much land unto themselves when the black majority has so little?

    He replied that he had been appealing and would continue to appeal to white landowners to release on negotiated terms parcels of land they do not need for distribution to land-starved blacks.  That approach has not worked.

    That is the pernicious legacy of apartheid, a legacy that they have not decisively addressed in South Africa.  Land redistribution, to call it by its proper name, is something the authorities will have to undertake if South Africa is not to go the way of Zimbabwe where Britain reneged on a promise to provide funds to help purchase land back from whites, and blacks had to resort to seizing white-owned farms, with the encouragement of a beleaguered President Mugabe.

    Mugabe is gone, but land remains as central to the fortunes of Zimbabwe as ever.  Campaigning last week in Zimbabwe’s presidential election, Mugabe’s successor, Ernest Mnangagwa, promised to follow a different tack.  He assured an assembly of white famers that they would be allowed to keep their farms.  He said Mugabe’s land reform had empowered influential politicians, soldiers and tribal chiefs who know nothing about farming and urged members of his audience to work together with the government to rebuild the country and restore its status as the region’s food basket.

    He will discover sooner or later that this policy will do little to keep in check Zimbabwe’s large army of land-hungry citizens.

    For the sake of future stability, if not equity and justice, some land distribution will have to take place in South Africa.

    To be sure, ownership of land alone does not make for success in agriculture.  Possession or acquisition of specialised knowledge and skills is essential.  Access to credit is essential.  A system of supports is essential.  Training will have to be reinforced with re-training.

    Any meaningful land reform must be informed by this strategy.

    White farmers and landowners in South Africa who have profited so much from the system have an obligation to give back by releasing land they do not need, and by equipping aspiring farmers with the skills and knowledge they require to make an impact on the economy.  They owe nothing less than that to Nelson Mandela who, to the disenchantment of a growing number of South Africans “gave away too much.”

    The international community should not just issue ringing condemnations of the seizure of white-owned farms by desperate, dispossessed blacks.  It should help mobilise funds to purchase land for redistribution, acquisition of knowledge and skills that will enhance production on new farms, and for a comprehensive review of apartheid-era pensions and other entrenched privileges.

    If at Mandela’s birthday anniversary next year the voices of the disenchanted grow louder and more insistent still, it will be because of the indifference of the white minority to the deepening privations of the black majority, and the fecklessness of the ruling authorities.

    Even if only out of enlightened self-interest, they must strive for a happier and more optimistic anniversary.

  • Ekiti: The morning after

    It is all over now in Ekiti, bar the sulking and the wailing and the gnashing of teeth in Governor Ayo Fayose’s camp, and the exuberant rejoicing in Governor-elect Kayode Fayemi’s circle — a mirror image of the outcome of the 2014 Ekiti gubernatorial election.

    When one placed Fayemi and Fayose on the scale in that contest, one saw in Fayemi an incumbent whose record spoke eloquently for a second term, as did his overall approach to the business of governance:  urbane, deliberative, steeped in the detail and nuance of policy, goal-oriented, and unobtrusive for the most part.

    In Fayose one saw a brash challenger who had had his chance as governor and blown it spectacularly, a bumptious con-artist whose idea of governance consists in staging stunt after tawdry stunt, given to cheap populism and not a little demagoguery, and withal not foresworn to violence as a means of winning and retaining support.

    Fayose’s scandal-plagued first term had ended after only two years in impeachment and self-imposed internal exile.  Politically, he was washed up.

    Given a choice between Fayemi and Fayose, surely, the learned and discriminating people of the “Fountain of Knowledge” who know only too well the antecedents of the twain, would heartily renew the mandate of the one and indignantly reject the advances of the other.

    So went the conventional wisdom.

    The outcome is history.  Fayemi took a comprehensive shellacking, winning none of the 16 local governments in contention.  Eight years after being disgraced out of office, Fayose returned in one of the most amazing political comebacks in Nigeria or anywhere.

    The Nobelist, Professor Wole Soyinka, was one of the few who questioned the outcome of the election sharply, saying that it was a mystery and that the truth would be known one day. But his skepticism was drowned in the schadenfreude that pervaded the corridors of Federal Might.

    Fayemi also had his doubts.  But “the people,” he said, “had spoken.” And that was what counted.

    Thanks to Captain Sagir Koli of the Nigerian Army, who had witnessed the entire scheme from inside and secretly recorded it, we now know that “the people” had played no part in that outcome.   The election had been rigged with scientific precision on a scale almost beyond belief, and the result was fake through and through.

    Thanks to the perversity of the Constitution, Fayose kept his gubernatorial perch.

    But instead of parlaying his comeback into an opportunity to redeem himself and atone for the depredations of his first coming – a murder rap, and a poultry project that gulped more than N2 billion without producing an egg, to mention just two such — Fayose waged war ceaselessly on all that is honest and just and decent and wholesome and of good report, and kept Ekiti permanently on the boil.

    He governed on the Caligula Principle:  “You can hate us, so long as you fear us.”  High court judges failed to do his bidding at their peril.  Bank managers soon learned that to carry out his instructions without fuss was the beginning of political wisdom.  Serving civil servants and eminent sons and daughters of Ekiti who dared to criticise him and traditional rulers who refused to genuflect before him learned a bitter lesson.

    He sank deeper and deeper into infamy, bringing into disrepute virtually everything he touched and every idea he embraced. The “stomach infrastructure” agenda that was thought to have blinded the electorate to his unsettling inadequacies became an empty slogan, then vanished altogether.

    Following a re-match this past weekend, it is in Fayose’s camp that they are sulking and wailing and gnashing their teeth. In Governor-elect Fayemi’s camp, there is exuberant rejoicing and a triumphal air.

    What a difference an election cycle makes.

    Fayose, it is necessary to state, was not an official candidate in the election just concluded, but you could not tell from the way he carried himself.  He had framed it as a contest between good and evil, as a test of strength and power and will between himself and President Muhammadu Buhari, between  the APC and the PDP, and finally between himself and Fayemi.

    Fayose’s lackluster deputy governor, Professor Kayode Olusola whom he had foisted on the PDP as the party’s candidate for the election might just as well have been a poodle.  If he had any ideas of his own, he never gave them utterance.  He was content to tag along and nod in consonance with his principal’s inanities and profanities du jour.

    He was at bottom a prop for Fayose’s third-term gambit. He would be practically unconscious not to know that.  But he went along all the same. They went into the election with little to show for Fayose’s four years in office, only stunt after harebrained stunt.

    This time, there was no Jonathan, no PDP machine, no rogue senior military and police officers, no contractors in hock to the establishment, no fixer to turn loser into winner and winner into loser.

    The figure from the spirit world who feeds on jollof rice has been demystified.  A return to political office now seems unlikely for Fayose.  But it would be unwise to count him out.

    Look closely at the results.  The Fayose/Olusola ticket took 47.4 percent of the vote, to Fayemi’s 52.5 percent, the precise margin by which NOIPolls had called the election for the  Fayose/Olusola ticket.  In plebiscitary terms, that is a decisive loss.  But the ticket won in the state capital, Ado-Ekiti, and scored impressive victories in four of the 16 local government areas.

    It was probably not true then and certainly not true now, contrary to Fayose’s claim at his post-election news conference four years ago that if he raised his hand high, “the people” would cheer vehemently, and that if he lowered it, the cheering would subside. Or that if he pointed in one direction, they would go in that direction.

    But he has a significant base that makes up in what it lacks in numbers with passionate intensity.

    The challenge before Governor-elect Fayemi is to strive to unite Ekiti; to cater not just to his own base, but the entire electorate.  He must see his return to power as a mission of reconciliation, not revenge.  Without resorting to his predecessor’s cheap populism, he must be engaging.

    It is no surprise that the PDP has vehemently rejected the election outcome.  Weeks before Election Day, its well-oiled propaganda machinery had asserted over and over that the poll would be rigged by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for the benefit of the ruling APC and the Federal Government.

    It even went so far as to alert the “international community” to that prospect, and to paint before the world an apocalyptic future for democracy in Nigeria. Having boxed itself into a corner, it has no alternative than to insist that the election was indeed rigged.

    Now it claims, with a fringe advocacy group, that it has iron-clad proof of election skullduggery that it will set out before the courts at the appropriate time.

    To which the APC and the Governor-elect and his supporters rejoin:  Bring it on.  That is to be preferred to Fayose’s lawless announcement of fake results of an election in progress.  That which could have plunged Ekiti into turmoil, or was most likely designed to achieve that very end, if the National Broadcasting Commission had not moved quickly to terminate broadcast.

    Even in the face of bitter disappointment, Fayose can still render a lasting service to the Ekiti people whose name he has taken in vain, and whose values he has desecrated with impunity, by ensuring a peaceful and orderly transfer of power, and by creating a climate in which Ekiti State can realise its potential and pursue its destiny.

  • The pollsters are back

    You know we are waist-deep in the silly season when, as now, pollsters who have been in hibernation burst upon the landscape purporting with the least diffidence to be ascertaining or to have actually divined what Nigerians want or don’t want, what they are thinking or not thinking, how they feel about a certain issue, who in their estimation is up or down in the political sweepstakes, and how they plan to vote on Election Day.

    And yet, as I have argued on this page more than once, Nigeria remains the pollster’s worst nightmare.

    Nobody knows the country’s population to the nearest 25 million.  Nobody knows with confidence the demographic make-up of that population, nor its spatial distribution.  Some 50 years after the economist Wolfgang F. Stolper published a book on Nigeria with the felicitous title “Planning without Facts,” there is still no reliable body of facts on which public policy or the measurement of public opinion can be grounded.

    Because we do not know the size of the population or its characteristics, it is impossible to draw a probabilistic sample, one in which every member of that population has an equal chance of being selected.  And because it is impossible to draw such a sample even with the best effort, it is unsafe to invest poll findings in Nigeria with the authority they have ceased to command even in better-ordered societies.

    And so, anytime I come across yet another poll setting out to gauge or purporting to have ascertained the state of public opinion on one aspect of Nigerian life or another, I approach it with a judicious dose of skepticism.  When it claims to be scientific and comes seductively dressed up in the jargon of psephology, I am doubly sceptical.

    I find myself inclined that mode now regarding the findings recently issued by NOIPolls on the state of play in the Ekiti gubernatorial election scheduled for Saturday.  More on that later.

    But first, it is necessary to recall some polls conducted in the unpromising atmosphere I have described, and to explain why they lacked the ring of plausibility.

    In the run-up to the 2007 General Elections, one newspaper reported in mid-February 2007 that the PDP’s candidate Umaru Yar’Adua was ahead of the ANPP’s candidate General Muhammadu Buhari, and Vice President Atiku Abubakar, who was fighting for his political life.

    The evidence?

    An internet poll in which 2,085 surfers of the newspaper’s web site indicated whom they would vote for among the three candidates.  The group was self-selected.  It did not represent the population, nor even that substratum that had access to the Internet.  It represented only itself.  The outcome applied only to that group.

    Projecting the outcome to the general population is impermissible.  Nor was that the only flaw.

    In the poll, 764 respondents (37 percent of the total) said they preferred Yar’Adua; 752 respondents (36 percent) picked Buhari, and, 592 respondents, constituting 26 percent of the total, picked Atiku.   Between Yar’Adua and Buhari, the result is a statistical dead heat.

    There was no basis, therefore, for asserting, as the newspaper did, that Yar’Adua was “ahead” in the polls. To say that he was “marginally” or “slightly” ahead would have been just as inaccurate, more so when no margin of error was stipulated.

    Much more egregious was the case of another newspaper which published with the authority of Holy Writ what it called “exit polls ” for elections due to be held some three weeks later.  As a rule, exit polls are conducted while an election is in progress.  Voters emerging from the polling booths in key precincts selected scientifically are asked whom they voted for.

    Based on their responses, the pollster can project with confidence the likely winner.  But what the newspaper at issue published had nothing in common with an exit poll.

    By its own account, the newspaper “randomly” selected a sample of 3,700 respondents nationwide, 100 from each of the 36 states and another 100 from Abuja, drawing on a list of 10,000 mile phone subscribers furnished by an unidentified source  Then, it “mined” the data to reflect the “psychographics imperatives” of Nigeria’s voting patterns and trends.

    The respondents were then asked by phone whom they would vote for as president or governor if the election took place that day, and which party they would vote for. Their responses provided the data for the poll the paper was reporting.  The research design stipulated a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent.

    The poll was an improvement on the one I cited earlier. And yet, it was riddled with methodological shortcomings.

    The sample was in no way representative of the population. Kano and Lagos have more than twice the population of, say, Osun, Ekiti, Kogi, Kwara, and Abuja FCT. But in the poll, all of them were assigned the same sample size. Women constitute a far greater proportion of the national population than the 30 percent they were assigned in the poll.

    The sample size for some if not all the groups also raised some questions.  Did youths, howsoever defined, make up only 30 percent of the Nigerian population?  If so, that would be anomalous, as I will explain presently.

    GSM phone penetration in Nigeria was already substantial at the time of the survey.  But the cell phone was not so widespread that any person who owned one could be classified as a typical member of the Nigerian population. Nor could it be assumed that the respondents were registered          to vote and were likely to vote.

    All of which brings us to the first major poll on the Ekiti gubernatorial elections scheduled for next Saturday, July 14, released by NOI (as in Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala) Polls, which advertises itself, not without some justification, as “Nigeria’s premier public opinion polling institution.”

    Between June 18 and June 23, 2018, investigators interviewed 1,000 randomly-selected residents   of the state, aged 18 and above, who owned mobile telephones, were registered voters and fully intended to vote in the contest.  The sample, comprising 52 males and 48 females, was drawn to reflect population size, the distribution, and employment status across its three senatorial districts.

    NOIPolls is reporting that the PDP candidate, Kolapo Olusola, is leading in the race with 34 percent, trailed by the APC candidate, Kayode Fayemi, with 26 percent, with the remaining 30 contestants having virtually no prospects. More than one of every five respondents (23 percent) said they had not yet decided or were not prepared to reveal their choice.

    Based on its findings, NOIPolls concluded although Olusola “currently leads the race with a significant 8-point margin, we opine that the election remains a keenly contested race between the two leading candidates . . .”

    But do these findings really point up an 8-point margin for Olusola?

    With a margin of error of plus or minus three percent, Olusola’s 34 percent could translate into a low of 31 percent or high of 37 percent.  By the same reckoning, Fayemi’s of 26 percent could translate into a low of 23 or a high 29 percent.

    The margin of error could operate in such a way as or erase what had at first blush seemed an advantage or disadvantage.  We do not know for a fact how the margin of error will operate here. But it is statistically impermissible to claim, as NOIPolls has done, that Olusola was leading Fayemi by 8 points at the time of its survey.

    The sampling raises some questions as well.

    To remark just one:  Young persons, defined as adults aged between 18 and 35, were grossly under-represented (35 percent) in the NOI survey.  According to current projections, Nigeria’s population stands at 182 million.  More than one-half of this figure is aged less than 30 years, a threshold that accords with Third World demographic trends.

    Nor is it plausible that persons aged 61 and above constitute only 8 percent of the population of Ekiti State.  I intuit that this is another instance of under-representation.

    However, nothing in the foregoing should dampen the PDP’s giddy excitement that it is on the cusp of keeping its beloved Ekiti State in the fold, nor lead the APC to grieve that bringing Ekiti back into the progressive community is a will-o’-the-wisp.

    Five days henceforth the situation will be clearer.  Hold your peace, Ayo Fayose.

  • Once upon a Fourth of July

    Following the official acknowledgment of Chief MKO Abiola as winner of the 1993 presidential election and the proclamation of June 12 as “Democracy Day,” Walter Carrington, former United States ambassador to Nigeria, has figured prominently on practically every roster of persons who deserve to be honoured for their momentous contributions to the struggle to re-establish government based on the consent of the people.

    Carrington’s tour of duty coincided with a period when all the things Nigerians said could never happen in their country happened time and again. There was, first, the contrived confusion in the run-up to the presidential election, the capstone of a transition that had been eight years in the making.  Then the annulment, the Interim farce, and the infernal Sani Abacha.

    Through it all, Carrington lived up the title of his collection of his speeches, “A Duty to Speak” he released to mark his to 80th birthday.  In that time of tyranny, he never flinched from speaking truth to power.

    Among my many interactions with him, one in particular clings in my memory.  It was the Fourth of July reception in 1997, marking the 221st independence anniversary of the United States.

    Even for a time of year when the skies parted and seemed in no hurry to close up, the rain that fell that Friday morning was unusually heavy.  And it threatened to wash out the most eagerly awaited event in the diplomatic calendar.

    Then, it lifted just as suddenly as it had begun.  The clouds dispersed, and bright sunshine suffused the landscape.  A cool, crisp wind wafting across from the sea that provides a stunning backdrop to the official residence of the Ambassador of the United States dissolved the muggy heat of the preceding days.  Nature in its mysterious ways had turned adversity to advantage.

    By 4:30 p.m, the grounds thronged with guests.  Everyone who was somebody, thought he was somebody or aspired to be somebody, was there.  Stewards in their starched, snow-white uniforms drifted with clockwork precision from one cluster of guests to another, offering trays of tantalising snacks.  Other stewards followed with cocktails.

    In small and large groups, long-lost friends and comrades and colleagues carried on animated chatter about – what else – the latest barbarities that Sani Abacha and his confederates had visited on the people, the general hopelessness to which they had sentenced their compatriots, and the indifference of an international community daily terrorised by Foreign Minister Tom Ikimi’s gangsta diplomacy.

    Freed at least for the moment from fear of being abducted, kidnapped, disappeared, mugged, or killed in a drive-by shooting, they compared notes, reviewed strategy and tactics,, and planned the way forward.

    Some notorious secret and -not-so-secret agents of the Abacha regime had infiltrated the reception in one guise or disguise, but it was easy to keep them at bay or avoid them altogether.

    All too soon, it was time for the main event.

    Carrington took his place at the podium.  One step behind him stood his elegant Nigeria-born wife Arese.  To his right, a United States marine stood at ramrod attention, cradling the Stars and Stripes.

    On the occasion of his country’s independence anniversary, Carrington began, nothing would be more fitting than revisiting  the circumstances that had led  British colonies in the New World  to renounce foreign rule way back in 1776, and the very words that had inspired and sustained the struggle unto victory.

    Whereupon he began to read in that resonant and sometimes haunting baritone, the storied text of the (American) Declaration of Independence.

    “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with rights that, among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among them, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter it, and to institute a new government.”

    The authors of the Declaration never really held these propositions to be truths, of course, much less self-evident truths. Black people did not count as men and women, only as property to be bought and sold and put to the most brutal exertions. They had no rights whatsoever.  More than There has been great progress. Carrington is himself a symbol of that progress. But in the daily lives of a great many black Americans, the “color line,” as Du Bois, called it, remains almost as formidable an obstacle in the 21st century as it was in the 20th.

    On that day, however, in that place and at that time, the lofty ideals of the Declaration counted for much more than its inconvenient truths.

    A hush fell upon the assembly.

    “All experience has shown,” Carrington continued, his voice precisely modulated, “that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while the evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.  But when a long line of abuses and usurpations evince a desire to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such a government, and to provide new grounds for their future security.”

    It was as if time itself and indeed all the elements stood still,  The only thing astir was that haunting, almost taunting, baritone, projected far and wide by the public address system and the wind.

    But Carrington was not yet done.

    “The history of the present king is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States.

    “To prove this, let the facts be submitted to a candid judge.

    “He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions of the right of the people

    “. . . He has incited domestic insurrection among us.

    “A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

    The hush had deepened with Carrington’s rendering of each line of the litany of woes residents of the American colonies suffered during British rule. But virtually every line reflected the barbarities the loathsome General Sani Abacha and his regime were visiting upon the Nigerian public.

    By the time Carrington was done, the whole thing had taken on an unsettling resemblance to the proverbial calm before the raging storm. The assembled guests looked nervously at one another, shook their heads in sorrow and sighed deeply in despair and unspoken rage.

    If Carrington had ended this command performance by saying nothing more electrifying than “Eminent sons and daughters of Nigeria, the future of your country lies in hour hands,” I suspect that most of the guests would have yanked off their ornately embroidered apparel and fancy suits and stormed Bonny Camp and Kam Selem House.  And the revolution would have begun in earnest.

    Abacha never forgave Carrington.  The regime’s propagandists put it about that Carrington was embittered because the government had refused to “settle” him with a lucrative oil concession.

    In reprisal, Abacha renamed Eleke Crescent, which threads the embassies and missions in Victoria Island, Lagos, for the Rev Louis Farrakhan, America’s bête noire and leader of the Nation of Islam.  The official address of the U. S. Consulate, previously 2 Eleke Crescent, became 2 Louis FarrakhanCrescent.

    To spite Abacha’s confederates, and in grateful acknowledgment of the ambassador’s support  for the democratic forces at a crucial moment in Nigeria’s history, Lagos State Governor Bola  Tinubu re-branded the road Walter Carrington Crescent, the name it bears to this day.

    In the back and forth, a bit of national history was erased.  I gather that Eleke, for whom the street was originally renamed, was until his retirement a highly-regarded official who had served as a pillar of the Ministry of External Affairs in the years following independence.  Curiously,  no one seems to remember his first name.

    But I digress.

    As further reprisal, Abacha’s goons invaded a private residence where a reception was being held for Carrington on the eve of his departure from Nigeria, on the preposterous pretext that they had received reports that “armed robbers” were operating in the neighbourhood. When the guests relocated to another venue, the regime’s goons followed them there and dispersed them.

    While all this was going on, the regime celebrated Carrington’s departure as a signal achievement of Ikimi’s “area boy” diplomacy.

    Today, Abacha and his enablers are justly held in loathing abhorrence.  But Walter Carrington who spoke truth to power in the time of tyranny stands splendidly vindicated.

    Whatever the flaws of the men who wrote the American Declaration of Independence, its noble sentiments have inspired a nobler vision and animated struggles for freedom and justice across continents and generations.

    Its words have not changed.

    But on this Fourth of July, with Donald Trump in the saddle – Trump, the demagogic, xenophobic, race-baiting repudiation of almost every noble sentiment espoused in the Declaration, their resonance is much diminished.

     

    • This is an expanded version of a previous column

  • A legal Titan, June 12, and other matters

    One of the more puzzling aspects of the debacle the annulment precipitated is how Professor Ben Nwabuewe,  Secretary for Education – yes, Education – in the Transitional Council mandated to oversee the successful completion of the final phase of the transition programme, morphed into a legal strategist for shaping the instruments by which military president Ibrahim Babangida eviscerated it.

    That mandate was just one of the many fictions that undergirded Babangida’s hidden agenda.  As Nwabueze himself has noted, no more than two of the 106 decrees churned out between January and August 23, 1993 were ever referred to the Council for discussion, comment, advice, or even for its information.

    The two, we learn from Nwabueze, did not include the decree that annulled the June 12 1993 presidential election and the one that sought to emasculate the news media. Council members had learned of them from the news media and other sources, just like the rest of the public.

    “Judged by its exclusion from law-making,” Nwabueze has written, the Council’s role in government was one of “almost total irrelevance and insignificance.”

    My own reporting at the time, and the reporting of The Guardian’s correspondents in Abuja, had led me to the same conclusion. Concerned as a long-standing admirer that Nwabueze’s reputation as a legal scholar of global stature and distinguished public servant might be damaged by his involvement in the juristic and political travesty unfolding in Abuja, I sent him a note expressing my fears about where it was all leading and how it might end.

    Despite his busy schedule, he replied promptly, saying that events had indeed taken a turn that the nation did not expect, and that the only thing left for us was to pray.

    I was expecting him to resign.

    I did not know that he was busy preparing, with help from the Federal Attorney-General Clement Akpamgbo, chairman of the Law Reform Commission Justice P. K Nwokedi, and two members of the Commission, Dr Epiphany Azinge and Professor Egerton Uvieghara, the instruments for consecrating the annulment.

    Even so, it is to Nwabueze’s penetrating insights that we owe what we know of the military president’s   state of mind and behavior as the house of cards he had spent eight years constructing and promoting as a fortress was collapsing all around him.

    Babangida, he wrote, “left a rather strong impression of a man forced to quit against his will, of one un-reconciled to quitting in the last days of his rule and in the face of defeat, he cut the figure  of someone unwilling to reconcile himself with composure to the adverse torrents of events, of an angry and bitterly disappointed man.”

    More tellingly, Nwabueze wrote of Babangida:   “His mind, his motions, and his actions seem to have become somewhat disoriented, and no longer governed by disinterested patriotic considerations.  In      the event, he quit in a rather undignified and unceremonious manner. . .”

    Paradoxically, it is also to Nwabueze that we owe “June 12, 1993 Election:  Problems and Solutions,” probably the most sustained, even if tortuous and aridly legalistic defence of the annulment. Because that book furnishes the context for deconstructing his recent stricture on the Federal Government’s recognition of Moshood Abiola as winner of the 1993 presidential election and proclamation of June 12 as “Democracy Day” in place of May 29 that had been conscripted for that purpose, I will deal with it at some length here.

    Nwabueze’s point of departure is the strange proposition that justification or condemnation of the annulment must be based on the “officially announced reasons” for the annulment and nothing else.  The great English jurist JL Austin who defined law tersely as the command of the sovereign could not as subscribed to this instance of forensic brutalism.

    At any rate, here, as I understand it, is what Nwabueze calls a formal or “lawyer’s case” for the annulment.

    The election was annulled because it was held in violation of a subsisting restraining order. “A pronouncement of the courts, no matter how perverse, or blatantly wrong,” he states grandly, “establishes the law unless it is and until it is reversed on appeal.”

    “The rule of law required,” Nwabuze continues his lawyer’s case, “that the Federal Government obey the order of June 10 stopping the election, and of June 15 suspending announcement of results, and June 21 declaring the election illegal.”

    The decision of the Ikpeme court was clearly wrong, he grants, its jurisdiction having been ousted in unequivocal terms by decree.  The affidavit deposed by Abimbola Davis for Arthur Nzeribe’s Association for a Better Nigeria contained no substance that warranted such an order, most of the averments being “sheer irrelevances and frivolities.”

    Still, Ikpeme’s injunction was the order of a superior court of record while it subsisted, and neither the National Security and Defence Council nor the National Electoral Commission had a right to disobey it. The proper thing was to comply while taking steps to have it vacated on appeal.

    Two principles, Nwabueze said, were in conflict in the election debacle:  the rule of law, and the right of the electorate to choose those who would govern the polity, and the Federal Military Government was “justified in observing the former to ensure the full realisation of the latter.”

    He joins issues with the High Court of Lagos State, Justice Dolapo Akinsanya presiding, which voided the Decree 61 setting up the so-called Interim National Government, on the ground that at the time he signed it into law, Babangida had by the earlier Decree 59 divested himself of the power to make laws.

    Then, a Decree 62 suddenly emerged, purporting to have restored Babangida’s law-making power of which he had divested himself through Decree 59.  The courts held that the decree was a forgery.  Not so, argues Nwabueze; the decrees were intended to come into effect at the same time, and their numbering was “wholly immaterial.”

    He concedes that the “lawyer’s case” is not one the ordinary man can accept.  He acknowledges the need to go behind the formal reason to seek other factors that might have led to the annulment, whether they were corruptly or perversely contrived, and if so, by whom.  And he accepts the burden of doing so.

    But he does not deliver.

    He merely distributes blame, asserting that the crisis was caused by the political class jointly with Babangida, the judiciary and some members of the legal profession, and that its prolongation had resulted from “sheer blind intransigence on the part of the “political class,” especially Abiola, and his supporters in NADECO, the labour movement, and other civil society organisations.

    Nwabuze’s “lawyer’s case” case rests on the assumption that there were no reasons for the annulment other than those dredged up by Babangida.  However, given the foul distemper in which Babangida retreated from Abuja, “the impression of a man forced to quit against his will, of someone unwilling to reconcile himself with composure to the adverse torrents of events,” to quote Nwabueze himself,” it is plain that Babangida annulled the election because he did not want to quit, and that all the rhapsodising to the rule of law was just a fudge.

    If fidelity to the rule of law was what concerned the authorities above all else, why were the decrees annulling the election and voiding the final phase of the transition not open to legal challenge?  How did observing the rule of law by voiding the election help ensure “full realisation” of the right of the people to choose those who would govern them, as Nwabueze has asserted?

    Nwabueze claims that Babangida had left it to Nwosu to decide whether to proceed with the election or not.  He goes on to echo insinuations that Nwosu had a vested interest in the election because he and the National Electoral Commission had been compromised, adding that if the allegation was true, “the desire for self-enrichment led to a string of measures that plunged the nation into chaos.”

    But was it true?

    Here, Nwabueze’s characteristic grace, generosity and even-handedness are conspicuously missing.  He drops grave allegations deftly, recycles gossip and moves on quickly, without asking the hard questions  that should be asked under the circumstances.

    Here is one such question that was screaming to be asked:  If indeed, as Babangida claimed, he had “proofs” and documented evidence” of offer and acceptance of bribes that compromised the election, surely that would have constituted iron-clad evidence for moving the courts to void the election and punish those involved in its execution. And that recourse would have accorded eminently with the  regime’s avowed commitment to the rule of law.

    Why was that path not followed?

    “Justice” hardly figures in Nwabueze’s “lawyer’s case,” which is pivoted entirely on the rule of law, as if that is an end in itself.  He dismisses the annulment as just one instance in a long line of injustices that would have to be addressed together, which is at bottom a recipe for doing nothing.

    Like that personage of whom it has been said that he loved humanity but could not stand humans, it is almost as if Nwabueze loves the rule of law so much that he will not allow its march to be interrupted by justice.

    Nor does Nwabueze even stick with his lawyer’s case in support of the annulment.  He availed himself of the opportunity to settle ethnic score.  Outside the Yoruba areas, he writes, most people who voted for Abiola in the South did so to end the North’s monopoly on power.  The annulment was therefore seen in the South, rightly or wrongly, as lending aid and comfort to the North’s monopoly on presidential power.

    The monopoly of presidency by the Muslim ethnic group of the North has as its correlate, Nwabueze continues, “the ambition of the Yoruba to monopolise other positions in the federal establishment.” That ambition, he continues, poses a serious danger to the good government and unity of Nigeria.

    The Yoruba man may seem nice and friendly, but “they have no sense of fraternity with other groups in Nigeria when it comes to federal appointments,” according to Nwabueze. “They see nothing wrong in monopolising all positions in federal establishments, from messenger to chief executive.  To them, that is as should be, the natural order of things.  Any other non-Yoruba in their midst in such an establishment is considered an intruder. Yoruba becomes a medium of communication in which government business is conducted.

    Continuing his race-baiting, Nwabueze said June 12 made Nigerians outside the Yoruba West fearful that after two terms – or eight years – of a Yoruba president, many federal establishments would have become thoroughly “Yorubanised.”

    “The Yoruba,” Nwabueze warns darkly, “must make up their minds whether they really want the various ethnic groups to continue to be (sic) together under a federal arrangement with its implication that federal appointments should be equitably distributed among the component groups as equal partners in the federal union.  They must give up their monopolising ambition, for it is subversive of true federalism.

    It is almost as if, in his mind, the Yoruba are the trouble with Nigeria.

    In contrast, Nwabueze says of his Igbo kinsfolk that they are “truly a democratic and fair-minded people, always prepared to concede to others the right to share equitable what belongs to all.  Their sense of fraternity and fairness always inclines them to consider others in the matter of federal appointments and the distribution of common benefits

    Even when articulated by the usual ethnic warriors, this kind of jingoism is reprehensible.

    When espoused by the nation’s pre-eminent legal scholar, an intellectual of global stature, leader of a public-spirited and well-respected group that calls itself rather portentously “The Patriots,” withal a personage a person who should rightly be regarded as an elder statesman, at a time the Yoruba were under siege and the country was teetering on the brink of violent dissolution, it would be courteous to    call it odious.