The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • How much is a tooth worth?

    How much is a human tooth worth?

    Call it a trick question. It has no obvious answer, for there are teeth and there are teeth, and at least in material terms, a gold or platinum implant, digital or analog, is probably worth much than an enamel tooth.

    Any answer will also depend on what functions a given tooth performs. Can we objectively rank an incisor, a canine, a pre-molar or a molar in terms of utility?

    Plus:  are we talking about a solitary, stand-alone tooth, or a tooth securely embedded in the mouth?  If it is the former, was it dislodged by surgical extraction, by violent assault, or by natural attrition?

    At the time it was plucked from its natural habitat, what was the condition of the tooth?

    Without knowing the person behind that solitary tooth – lifestyle, eating habits, attitude to oral hygiene, age, gender, etc– we cannot even begin to assess the worth of human teeth.

    So, we are dealing with a trick question all right.

    If put to the test, I cannot answer the question with respect to my own teeth.  Rather, I will refer you  to my dentist. He never fails to send me a birthday card every year, with a subtle reminder that it was about time I made an appointment for a comprehensive check-up.  I take it that he is saying, in effect,   my teeth are worth much more than I realise.

    By definition, a trick question has no answer, as I stated out the outset.  Yet the trick question I posed above was what a judge of the Lagos High Court had to wrestle with, not as an abstract problem but, in real human terms.  Even when due allowance has been made for the usual delays arising from power outages as well as real and contrived objections,  I am not surprised that it took the court all of six years to tackle the matter with some confidence.   Indeed, the surprise is that the court did not take at least seven years longer.

    Here is how the matter arose.

    Word went forth from the well-appointed offices of an evangelist revered by his teeming followers as an authentic Man of God, inviting the general public to what could well turn out to be the mother of all harvests of miracles.

    Billboards providing details of the event were erected at strategic points.  Attendance was of course voluntary, as should be in such matters.  If you don’t attend, you cannot receive the miracle designed especially for you.  And to make sure that everybody had an equal opportunity to receive his or her special miracle, admission was free.

    You could not ask for a more level playing field, pardon the cliché.

    Venue was the National Stadium, in Surulere, Lagos, not some hideous structure that had been erected in violation of the building code and environmental law. To be sure, the place had seen far better days, but it is centrally located, and the rent is affordable.

    Now, nothing concentrates the mind of the average Nigerian like the prospect of experiencing a miracle: miracle deliverance, miracle cures, miracles in their finances, examinations, jobs, business, well-being, marriage, miracles in the lives of their children and friends and relations and indeed in every department of life.

    You may be a person of no fixed address but if you can show up at a bus-stop or road-side market and merely hint that you are a miracle worker, you are guaranteed a sizeable crowd wherever and whenever  you choose to perform.

    But the man in this tale was not an itinerant evangelist and faith healer.   Back in 2010 at the time the events here narrated took place, he served as the Presiding Pastor, Registered Trustee of Manna Miracle Mountain Ministry, and publisher/writer for the highly-regarded devotional guide, “Our Daily Manna.”

    It was therefore no surprise that thousands of miracle-seekers flocked that day, January 10, 2010, to  the stadium where the Man of God was scheduled to stage “the mother of all miracle harvests.”  What New Year present could be more precious than a miracle designed especially for the worshipper?

    Among the faithful worshippers nursing great expectation that day was Tamara Egbedi, a lawyer.

    As the congregants positioned themselves to receive their miracles, or as the miracles rained down on them from on high, the kind of pushing and shoving and jostling that was to be expected in such a setting ensued.

    In the process, court filings show, the winsome Ms Egbedi fell into an uncovered concrete gutter running between the seats, lost seven teeth from her comely dentition and suffered other injuries that left her severely traumatised.

    But that is only a partial picture.  Consider also the loss of business she must have suffered to boot:  No court appearances until surgical reconstruction has been carried out; no speaking engagements from her huge clientele of reputable organisations and institutions.  To this, add involuntary withdrawal from the social circuit.  And a sharp diminution in romantic attention from men on the prowl.  The cumulative is incalculable loss.

    Fortunately, Ms Egbedi knew her rights at law.  She demanded compensation from Manna Miracle Mountain Ministry, the organisers of the event that had brought her so much grief.

    The organisers responded with bracing petulance.

    Neither the Ministry nor its Presiding Pastor, The Rev Dr Chris E. Kwapovwe, they said, bore any responsibility for what happened to Ms Egbedi; they had merely rented the venue.  However, actuated by Christian charity, the Ministry had offered her the princely sum of N100, 000 to take care of her injuries, persuaded that any reasonable person would have accepted it with gratitude.

    But Ms Egbedi, the Manna Ministry said, had turned out to be no such person.  As they saw it, she came across more as gold digger than as a person seeking legitimate compensation for injury.

    Satisfied that they had done more than duty required, they had accordingly terminated negotiations and dared Ms Egbedi to seek legal redress.

    In a judgement laced with stern rebuke, the court held that the Manna Ministry and its Presiding Pastor had the duty and obligation to ensure the safety of those they had invited to their crusade, and that  failure to do so amounted to culpable negligence.  Consequently, the court awarded Ms Egbedi the sum of N9, 454, 000 as compensation.

    This outcome does not answer the trick question we posed at the start.  Since the compensation is for a raft of injuries, we still do not know exactly how much a tooth is worth.  But it seems clear that when teeth are dislodged from their natural habitat in circumstances not entirely of the owner’s volition, damages could start from N1 million apiece if you are a person of consequence. For average persons, court-ordered compensation could start at N500, 000.

    So beware, organisers of owambe parties, religious revivals, weddings, and all manner of ceremonies and festivities.  Providing food and drinks and entertainment is not enough.  You have also to ensure that your guests come to no harm through your acts and omissions.

    Which brings me to the 40 persons who were trampled to death or seriously injured at three separate events during which a prominent public figure indulged his fabled philanthropy by handing out bolts of ankara, food parcels, cooking oil and sundry gifts of middling value to surging crowds that had gathered at the venues well before dawn.

    If the first lethal stampede was an accident, the second and the third were foreseeable and preventable. All it required was a change in logistics.

    Yet the philanthropist was never charged with any offence. Not even negligence.  No lawsuits for compensation were filed by the aggrieved or their relations.  The philanthropist, who has mercifully stopped this annual cull, offered the victims of his lethal practice only messages of condolence and sympathy.

    But something tells me that many other victims or their proxies, not forgetting enterprising lawyers, are studying the case of Ms Egbedi versus the Manna Ministry with a view to discovering how it might      apply to instances in which philanthropy went horribly lethal.

  • Honour, at last, for a hero of our time

    “Perhaps one day,” I signed off on my column “Abiola, the martyr they would not honour” published in this space on July 11, 2017, “the feckless beneficiaries of the struggle that had cost Abiola his life will rouse themselves to accord him posthumous recognition as President-elect, with all the rights and privileges of that position going back to 1993.

    “Therein lies the path of honour.”

    President Muhammadu Buhari did not go that far.

    But he moved decisively in that direction when he surprised tenacious “June Twelvers” and confounded its entrenched opponents by proclaiming June 12 the new Democracy Day, and by announcing that he would be conferring the nation’s highest award, the GCFR, on Abiola and honouring his family and some of those whose pivotal contributions had, against formidable odds, memorialised that historic day.

    I have no quarrel with President Buhari’s motives or motivations.  Whatever they might be, he did the right thing, with uncommon courage.

    To be sure, the honor roll cannot be all-encompassing.  But some omissions are more significant than others.  I am thinking in particular of Rear Admiral Ndubuisi Kanu, General Alani Akinrinade, Colonel Abubakar Umar, Chief Cornelius Adebayo, Dr Arthur Nwankwo, Chief Ralph Obioha, Omo Omoruyi, Ayo Opadokun, Dapo Olorunyomi, Maj.-Gen Ishola Williams, Madam Rita Lori-Ogbebor, Sully Abu, Babafemi Ojudu and Odia Ofeimun.

    It remains for the Administration to complete Abiola’s restitution and honour other valiant contributors to the historic struggle. It remains also for Buhari to govern Nigeria henceforth in the June 12 spirit.

    For perspective, what follows is a profile of Abiola.  It is the concluding chapter of “Diary of a Debacle”, my 2010 book on the June 12 crisis.

    MKO Abiola, man and martyr

    Moshood Abiola was an unlikely candidate for political martyrdom or indeed for martyrdom of any kind.

    He had entered politics almost as a pariah who regarded money as the measure of all things.  He had everything that money could buy.  And he was not apologetic or coy about it. He flaunted his wealth even when putting some of it to serve beneficent ends.

    But his compassion was genuine.  He held it as article of faith that anyone who was in a position to show compassion but failed to do so would never find favour with Allah.  He would recite in English, Arabic and Yoruba, passages from the Bible and the Quran to that effect.  And he lived every day by that creed.

    Abiola’s compassion and public-spiritedness won him a great deal of public attention, even respect, but not much love nor significant following, as he discovered when he entered politics in 1978 as a card-carrying member of the National party of Nigeria (NPN) and entered his senior wife Simbiat as   candidate for a Senate seat from Ogun on that party’s platform, in a state that was fanatically loyal to Obafemi Awolowo’s Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN).  She lost by a huge margin.

    Abiola’s position as chief executive of ITT in Nigeria did not help matters, given its notorious complicity in the overthrow of the democratically-elected Socialist government  of President Salvadore Allende Gossens in Chile, and its notoriety for unsavoury business practices, which led the contrarian Afro-beat king Fela Anikulapo-Kuti to mock the global brand as “International Thief-Thief,” or global robber..

    ITT had won huge telephony contracts in Nigeria and its contractors had dug up all major streets in Lagos for telephone cables.  The work was moving at a very slow pace, putting residents, especially motorists, to great inconvenience.

    Abiola himself seemed to have compounded matters by distributing to members of the Constituent Assembly debating the draft Constitution for the Second Republic a sophisticated, multi-function ITT  electronic calculator.  Not a few Nigerians interpreted it as an attempt to buy influence.

    But what galled teeming supporters of the  UPN, which governed the Yoruba States and Bendel—what used to be the Western Nigeria during the First Republic but was in the Opposition in the Second Republic—was the virulently anti-UPN stance of Abiola’s Concord newspaper group.

    It was as if those newspapers had it as their goal to take Awolowo and the UPN out of political reckoning.  Even if they had been set up by the NPN and not by one of its well-heeled members, they could not have been more pro-NPN.  A large portrait of President Shehu Shagari graced the lobby, next to a portrait of Abiola’s, in the editorial offices of the Concord Press, in Ikeja.

    In short order, they published a sensational story claiming that Awolowo had improperly acquired vast landed property in Maroko, Lagos, while falsely and hypocritical parading himself as a Socialist devoted  to the public welfare.  They followed with another story, about another allegedly improper acquisition of landed property in Lagos, by Lateef Jakande, the UPN Governor of Lagos State, who enjoyed a reputation for probity and an a Spartan lifestyle.  Then they took on the UPN Governor of Ogun State, Chief Olabisi Onabanjo, claiming that he had improperly dipped into the public treasury for a lavish private vacation in the UK.

    These stories delighted Awolowo’s political opponents in the NPN and other parties and infuriated the UPN’s teeming supporters.  In court hearings, the stories on Onabanjo and Jakande were held to be false and defamatory, and both plaintiffs were awarded substantial damages.  Awolowo’s lawsuit was still wending its way through the courts when Awolowo died in 1987.

    Abiola’s romance with the NPN did not survive the 1983 presidential election.  In keeping with its claim  to having a “national outlook,” the party had at its inception adopted a policy of “zoning” the presidency.  In practice, this meant that if a president from one zone had served his term, the party would give its ticket to a candidate from another zone.

    Abiola had sought the NPN’s ticket for the 1983 presidential election.  A stalwart of the party from the North, Umaru Dikko, declared with petulant scorn that the presidency of Nigeria was not “for sale.”

    The NPN could draw on Abiola’s wealth, but would not countenance his seeking its presidential ticket?

    That was it.

    Abiola stomped out of the NPN and never looked back.  He also tried to mend fences with individuals and groups from whom he had been estranged by his exertions in furthering the NPN’s cause. Public  appreciation for his philanthropy turned to respect for his person, and the respect turned into admiration.

    But it was when Abiola declared for the Social Democratic Party (SDP) on the return to party politics in 1987 – when he finally got his politics right by embracing the progressive political tradition of the states carved out of the former Western Nigeria – that he began to attract the devoted following that translated into the massive electoral support so crucial to his victory in the 1993 presidential election.

    It was this mass support that animated the struggle for the actualisation of Abiola’s electoral mandate  and kept alive much of the passion surrounding the events subsumed under the evocative label of “June 12.”

    If Abiola had not got his politics right, if he had for example cast his lot with the National Republican Convention (NRC) and run on that platform, it is doubtful whether he would have enjoyed that kind of electoral support.

    This massive support, it is necessary to insist, has less to do with his being Yoruba than with his being the standard bearer of the party that was “a little to the left,’ one whose ideology accorded with that of the Yoruba.  After all, Ernest Shonekan, whom Babangida foisted on Nigeria as Head of his “Interim National Government” is Yoruba.  But the Yoruba rejected him roundly.  General Olusegun Obasanjo, who is also Yoruba, earned the fewest votes in Yorubaland when he ran for president in 1999 under             the banner of the conservative PDP.  Running as an incumbent four years later, he hardly fared better.

    We will never know whether Abiola would have made a good president.  After Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) that decimated the middle class and pauperised the mass of the people, expectations ran high that an Abiola Presidency would improve the lot of the ordinary citizen in the short term, if not immediately.  Abiola had pivoted his campaign on Hope—hope for a better future, at a time when hope was in short supply.  He was going to tackle poverty frontally and help eradicate it.

    In the popular consciousness, he seemed uniquely qualified for the task.  Born into and reared in dire poverty, he had become a multi –billionaire, with business empire spread across the world.

    By a curious coincidence, the price of imported milk and rice and tomato puree had come down substantially in the weeks after the election. Around town, the word was that, as a gesture of goodwill to mark Abiola’s coming, importers had decided to reduce the prices of some commodities.  Whether      this was true or not, the average consumer took the price reductions as a sign of the good times that would roll in when Abiola took charge.

    The quest for the Presidency changed Abiola in significant ways, according to some members of his campaign team and senior aides. Gone was the brashness of those days when he regarded money as              the measure of all things.  He learned to stoop to conquer.  He became a good listener, and a patient conciliator.  He encouraged those around him to tell him what he needed to know rather than what they thought he would like to hear.  He became less impulsive and more deliberative. Worldly pleasures counted for less and less in his preoccupations.

    Before he secured the SDP ticket, so un-organised was Abiola it was a surprise he ever got anything done. The campaign imposed some order and discipline on his proceedings, and he seemed to have embraced this new approach as a better way of carrying on in the public realm he was about to enter.

    Before 1993 and subsequently, the legitimacy of persons elected to the political leadership of Nigeria was always disputed.  In the 1964 General Elections, the first after independence, the ceremonial president, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe was loath to invite the incumbent Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, to form a new government, persuaded that the outcome of a poll boycotted by the Opposition for the most part could not be said to reflect the true wishes of the people.

    In 1979, it was a mathematical sleight of hand that awarded the presidency to Shagari.  Throughout his first term, his legitimacy was always in contention. The NPN went on to rig Shagari into office in 1983, in a manner so brazen that the military had to step in to stave off violent protests in many parts of Nigeria.

    The 1999 General Elections that produced General Obasanjo was held under a Constitution that had been kept a closely-guarded secret. The 2003 sequel was, according to local and international observers, the most fraudulent they had ever witnessed. The 2007 contest was more of the same.

    The 1993 election delivered a clean, pan-Nigeria mandate and conferred on Abiola a legitimacy that no Nigerian president before or since has been able to claim or enjoy.  Abiola showed that, in Nigeria, elections can be won without the organised rigging that has been the bane of Nigerian politics.

    To the very end he resisted every pressure, discounted every threat, and spurned every blandishment  the military regime and its foreign collaborators contrived.  His tenacity surprised the vast majority of Nigerians who did not know him well and those who knew him only in caricature.

    They thought that, faced with the prospect of being put to the slightest inconvenience, to say nothing of being jailed, losing his vast financial empire and perhaps his life, Abiola would cut a deal, put the best face on it and move on.

    Even some of those close to him thought him feckless, like the Concord editorial writer who told me on the eve of the 1993 election that, even at that stage, Abiola could still be bought or bribed off the race.  Abiola, he said, saw the election as nothing more than an opportunity to add one more feather to a cap that was already chockfull of feathers, and would gladly drop the idea if the price was right.

    The fellow was wrong, as was everyone who thought likewise.

    Abiola had entered Nigerian politics almost as a pariah.  He departed the political scene and the world almost sainted by his teeming supporters, with whom he refused to break faith.

  • A scholar and a gentleman departs

    Two weeks ago, they buried the remains of the University of Ibadan historian, Dr Gabriel Akindele Akinola, in Ugbole, in the Ekiti country, the hometown of the legendary Daniel Ojo, who through sheer mental prowess and uncommon doggedness, rose through the grinding poverty in which he was reared, made his way to Cambridge, earned a doctorate in physics, and became, reputedly, the first African professor of geophysics.

    Akinola would have been embarrassed, scandalised even, to be mentioned in the same breath as Ojo Ugbole, for he was the quintessence of modesty and self-effacement.  But he was a first rate scholar in his own right, and a gentleman to boot.

    It is necessary to dwell on those twin attributes, because there are scholars, even great scholars, who cannot be called gentlemen.  There are also gentlemen who labour in the academy and other knowledge-production centres who cannot be called scholars.  Akinola belonged in the select breed of outstanding scholars who are also fine gentlemen.

    It was my good fortune to encounter him in 1971, in a section of the General African Studies course he was teaching at the University of Lagos.  The class met in a large, windowless room, at the basement of the Main Library.  It usually overflowed with students, scores of whom would have arrived some two hours earlier to start class at 8 o’clock in the morning.

    The entire setting was a fire marshal’s nightmare.  The hall had only one exit.  Once in a while, I would entertain the scary thought:  What if a fire broke out?  The University did not even have a fire service back then.

    Akinola stepped into the lecture room that morning, a box containing pieces of chalk and a duster in one hand  (ah, those analog days!), a sheaf of papers in the other, walked with quiet dignity to the front of the room and took his position at the lectern, and introduced himself.

    There were no airs about him.  On the contrary, it was as if he had set out deliberately to carry no airs about him.  He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt tucked into a pair of knee-length khaki shorts, and could easily have been mistaken for an older student.

    His crisp, precise and cultivated elocution immediately endeared him to me. His mastery of the material and the verve with which he imparted it showed that the man at the lectern was no accidental teacher but a scholar.  When the lecture was over, I could hardly wait for the next one.  And so it was for the six weeks or so that he taught the African History section of General African Studies.

    He transferred to the University of Ibadan shortly thereafter. I never forgot the man, and I never forgot the material that transported us the class to exotic places like Kush and Nubia and Meroe and Axum.  These places would come vividly to mind some two decades later when I was on assignment in Ethiopia.

    Sometime during the mid-80’s a submission signed “G. A. Akinola” arrived at my desk at The Guardian, where I was Editorial Page Editor.   I recognised the name instantly, and literally devoured the piece.  The elegant phrasing, the scholarly exposition that had endeared its author to me back at the University of Lagos perfused the article.  It was impeccable through and through, an editor’s delight.  I scheduled it for immediate publication.

    Then I followed up with a letter to Akinola introducing myself as his grateful admirer and former student at Akoka, and asked if he would be kind enough to favour The Guardian with his occasional interventions in the national policy dialogue.

    That was when I discovered the Gentleman in the Scholar.

    His response overwhelmed me.  You would think I was the former teacher, and he the grateful student             and admirer.  Such humility; such solicitude for my progress and well-being, and so many words of encouragement and support at every turn, laced with wisdom and uttered with deep feeling.

    Every so often, he would send me articles for publication.  The last one I recall receiving from him at The Guardian before I left Rutam House, following the paper’s banning by the Abacha regime, was in 1994, and it was titled “Lest we regret.”  Full of historical insight, it was a brilliantly prophetic piece about Nigeria’s future under Abacha.

    Subsequently, he forwarded his contributions to me for publication in The NATION.  Over the years, his submissions never lost his graceful exposition and compelling logic.  Every word was in place.  You could not take out a phrase or paragraph without ruining the architecture.

    Not once did Akinola ask for the modest honorarium we pay for each article.  The desire to share his knowledge and advance the public good was what animated him.  These are the marks of a true public intellectual.

    When Akinola discovered that his friend and confidant, the celebrated poet Niyi Osundare, is also a close friend of mine, his solicitude turned into doting affection.  Whenever I was visiting from the United States, he kept track of my movements.  In this age of kidnappers, please do not take your personal safety for granted, he would counsel, especially whenever I was going to my hometown Kabba, in Kogi State.

    He made contact invariably by telephone.  He never cottoned on to the Internet and all that.

    In a moving tribute, the historian, Emeritus Professor Akinjide Osuntokun remarked that if Akinola’s published scholarship was not voluminous, it was largely because Akinola did not subscribe to the “publish or perish” code of the university system, which often privileges sheer plenitude over quality.  Akinola set          his own targets and strived to attain them to the best of his great ability.

    Dr Akinola paid me what I regard as the ultimate compliment when, in 2014, he journeyed from Ibadan             with Professor Osundare to Lagos to attend events marking my 70th birthday.  He looked rather frail.  I would gather later that he had been ill, but had insisted on making the trip.

    He died three weeks ago, aged 82.

    Farewell, sir, and thank you, sir, for your great personal example and your public spirit. You have left us, but that example endures, and guides us still.

     

     

    The State and Dr Saraki

    Senate President Bukola Saraki has no sterner critic than this column, right from when he was Governor of Kwara State.

    It has remarked his overweening sense of entitlement, his predilection for cutting corners, his disdain for rules and process, and his serial disregard of the precept of noblesse oblige.

    Saraki’s proxies have in return threatened the column with defamation lawsuits and dismissed it as a front for the APC leader Asiwaju Bola Tinubu.

    I thought I should state all this upfront.

    As I was finishing this column on Sunday night – six hours behind Lagos time — to meet a Monday morning deadline, the usually sedate online newspaper Premium Times flashed this headline:  “IGP Idris gets Buhari’s nod to arrest Saraki over murders.”

    This has got to be one of the most dramatic newspaper headlines in recent memory.  And it raises a troubling:  question:  With whom does the power to authorise prosecutions lie, based on the evidence available:  The President, or the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice?

    At this writing, the details are sketchy.  The whole thing centres on the recent robberies in Offa, in Kwara State, during which nine policemen and 26 other persons were killed.  Some of the suspects reportedly claimed in confessional statements that the arms found on them were handed to them by, or purchased with help from, Saraki.

    Saraki seems to have anticipated this development when he announced sensationally two weeks ago on the Senate floor that IGP Idris was set to frame him on a murder charge, mobilised the Senate to denounce the alleged scheme, led a Senate team to brief President Buhari and urge him to step in.

    Recall that the Senate had engaged in a running battle to get IGP Idris to come testify on issues related to law enforcement, notably the recent arrest and detention of the dissolute Senator Dino Melaye (nPDP/APC Kogi West).

    Recall also, that following the IGP’s refusal to honour the invitation, the Saraki-led Senate declared him “an enemy of democracy” and a person “unfit to hold any public office within Nigeria and outside.”

    Saraki’s followers must have been stunned by the latest development, especially coming when elements of the nPDP, of which he is the arrowhead, are set to defect to the rump of the PDP ahead of the 2019 General Elections so as to wrest power from the APC and stop Buhari from clinging to power.

    Saraki’s sworn opponents, on the other hand, as well as those envious of his political profile, may well be gloating, saying that he had it coming and that it serves him right.

    That would be wrong, and egregiously prejudicial.

    Only the courts can pronounce one way or the other on the issue, and they must be allowed to do their work without any interference.  Any prosecution arising from this matter must be transparent and expeditious.  And the end must be what all judicial processes worthy of that designation seek in the final analysis:  Justice.

  • Democracy Day: A balance sheet

    They are celebrating their Democracy Day in the face of a huge democracy deficit.  It may even be said, without doing great violence to the facts, that what they are celebrating in Nigeria today is a regression of democracy.

    The evidence is all around us.

    The trappings of democracy are there all right.  A written Constitution stands as the supreme law of the land, pillar of the rule of law and a bulwark against arbitrariness.  General elections are held every four years into national, state and local assemblies which meet regularly, their broad mandate being to make laws for the good governance of Nigeria.  Each of them has a Mace, the symbol of its authority. The  judiciary, independent of the Executive and Legislative arms, mediates disputes among the state, institutions, groups, and individuals.

    We have all these institutions and observe these rituals in common with other democracies.  But that is where the similarities end.

    A Constitution drafted in secret and sprung on the people has in operation turned out to be more a source of frustration than fulfillment.  Its provisions are often flouted, and its spirit is seldom honoured.

    Voting is rarely an exercise in choosing.  Each election, be it local, statewide or national, is like a civil war.  Fighting breaks out, shots are fired, and people get killed.

    It is not about winning a contest to serve the public.  It is about joining the ranks of the thousands who have acquired great wealth simply on the strength of being declared winners in a plebiscite.  That declaration is a ticket to gratuitous wealth and life most abundant.  Winning by any means is the only thing.

    Even on the most important issues, deliberations in the legislative assemblies rarely rise above the jejune and the perfunctory.  The Mace doubles as a handy cudgel or missile when what passes for debate gets heated.  Withal, the Senate has been turned into a platform for bullying, humiliating and reigning in officials performing their lawful duties whenever such duties collide with the lawless conduct of its manipulative, self-entitled and scandal-plagued leadership and its enablers.

    The Senate routinely violates even its own laws with impunity, invoking powers it does not possess, to “suspend” dissident members for as long as six months instead of the maximum of 14 days stipulated by its own rules.

    At its most basic, democracy has been defined as “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” The first two clauses of this tripartite definition find some expression in the representative institutions of government.  But democracy as government for the people?  In Nigeria?

    That is a stretch.

    This past weekend, the news media published Finance Minister Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s revelations from her time as Finance Minister under President Olusegun Obasanjo and President Goodluck Jonathan, in the life of the 7th Senate.

    According to her, the operational budget of the National Assembly rose steadily over the years to the point where, in 2015, it stood at N150 billion — 16 percent or just a little under one -seventh of the  Appropriations, and more than three times  the entire budget for 2006.  Former Central Bank Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, as he then was, had it right.

    Oil prices had crashed from more than $100 per barrel to $58.  Yet the National Assembly not only refused to accept any cuts in its own “standard” (read “sacrosanct”) budget; it actually piled another N20 billion on the appropriations, agreeing only after a great deal of haggling with the Executive Branch to slice just N3 billion off the spending bill.

    There is no saint in this matter. The Executive goes to the legislature with a bloated spending bill, in which durable goods – computers, kitchen ware, etc. — purchased the previous year and the year before are set to be purchased all over again, in greater quantities and at far higher prices.

    This self-aggrandising permeates the entire machinery of government at all levels, with not more than five percent of the population gulping the about 90 percent of the operational budget.  A sprawling  presidential system of government that its beneficiaries are loath to modify or replace, keeps this pernicious arrangement in place.

    There was a time when various governments presented various schemes as “dividends” of democracy. Lawmakers who present articles purchased from their trainload of allowances to their constituencies no longer dress them up as dividends of democracy.  Rather, they call them “donations,” handouts from their abundance of kindness to the less privileged in their community.

    The judiciary is a kept institution where timidity, perjury and susceptibility to unwholesome influences come panoplied in ermined robes.  The evidence on which a court discharged and acquitted a political baron in Nigeria was used to convict the baron in a foreign court.  Only in a setting such as ours can a court issue an injunction restraining the police in perpetuity from investigating allegations of serious fraud against a political official.

    It will come as no surprise if, one of these days, a court restrains the National Assembly from passing a bill, and the president from signing it into law.

    As the General Elections loom larger, Nigeria stands at a crossroads.  In a formal sense, the APC is in government, but whether it is also in power is debatable. Its legislative prerogative in the National Assembly has been usurped by rogue elements whose defection from the Opposition PDP helped the APC defeat the PDP which had held power for 16 years.  Now set to return to their natural habitat, these elements calling themselves nPDP, have meanwhile joined forces with the stragglers in the defeated Opposition to seize that initiative.

    The Change that the core APC promised has been rather slow in coming, in a polity that has seen its patience betrayed so often by the ruling class that it now demands rapid results as the price for its support and loyalty.

    Sensing an opening, the PDP has been pillorying the APC for failing to achieve what the PDP could not deliver in the 16 years it held power.  To keep up the presence of still belonging in the APC, the nPDP  has  presented the APC core leadership a portfolio of grievances they want redressed, failing which they will formally return to their natural habitat.

    That portfolio reeks of the fixation on self, the utter self-absorption that has been the standard conduct of the lawmakers.

    Three years during which it was an integral part of the Establishment, they claimed, falsely, that their bloc in the APC had been sidelined, accorded no ministerial slots, denied patronage as well and executive positions on boards of government institutions and parastatals.

    They said their members were subjected to “vicious and relentless” political attacks when they “showed interest” in running for Senate President and House Speaker. They did not mention, however, that they  had settled the matter by self-help, using methods that the best authorities have characterized as a criminal breach of the law.

    They regard investigation of their members by the anti-corruption agencies as official harassment.  They have since added to their portfolio of grievances the staging of parallel state congresses in which their faction lost out big-time.

    These grievances, if addressed, the faction said, “will lead to a harmonious APC where justice, equity, fairness and peace will reign and enable APC avoid rancor, reinvigorate the pace of national development and face the 2019 General Elections as one united party.”

    When the splinter group meets sub rosa with the leadership of the APC, it will probably demand that on-going corruption investigations and prosecutions of its members be discontinued to keep them in the fold.

    Even if the APC now develops the spine to call the nPDP’s bluff — realpolitik suggests the contrary — the balance sheet on this Democracy Day, judging from the promise and spirit of 1999, will remain in deficit.

  • As OBJ’s Third Force enters the fray

    The last thing you could ever charge former President Olusegun Obasanjo with is languor.

    Walk some distance with him, and he leaves you panting even if you are much younger, unless you are exceedingly fit.  Do not enter into project with him unless you are prepared to go to work immediately and to deliver your own end of the bargain at the appointed time, if not earlier.

    It is therefore no surprise that barely four months after he issued a bristling criticism of the Buhari Administration and announced that he was starting nation-wide consultations to establish a broad coalition to rescue Nigeria from the dysfunctions into which it had been driven by the governments that followed his tenure, the initiative has gone from proposal to actuality.

    Conceived as a popular grassroots movement to stimulate the interest and participation of youth and women in the political process and thus force “power addicts” to make way for new entrants in Nigeria’s power structure to sanitize the system, the Coalition for Nigeria Movement (CNM) has found a new home in, and reinvigorated, the previously moribund African Democratic Congress (ADC), Obasanjo announced last week at a news conference

    Nigerians in their millions, comprising individuals, groups, social, cultural and political formations, had registered in the CNM, desirous of fostering a “new dawn,” a real one, unlike the type Nigerians had been promised with every change of the baton since 1960, he could have emphasized.  And with the transition from the CNM to ADC, the first phase of the initiative to set up new platform,  turn a new page and inaugurate a “paradigm shift” in the country’s political history had been completed.

    The second phase, Obasanjo said, would involve “the galvanization” of all like-minded forces to work together to enthrone a new order.

    Key elements of that order would include curbing elitism, promoting inclusiveness, reforming the electoral system to lower the cost of entry, with one national agency supervising all elections; setting  new rules for funding of political parties and meaningful participation; empowering 25 million Nigerians living with disabilities to contribute to social discourse and development; fostering internal democracy, and curbing corruption drastically.

    Under the new order, the National Assembly would enact a law enabling Nigerians abroad with valid passports to vote in all future elections through the country’s embassies.  For a start 30 percent of positions in all organs of political parties and all institutions of government would be set aside for men and women aged 40 years old and younger.

    Not all the denizens of the old order were “totally evil,” Obasanjo acknowledged graciously.  The new alliance that would take Nigeria to the Promised Land would have to seek out and work with the few good men and women among them that are willing to embrace a new order.

    But never again government by “The K34,” nor by “Ijaw Nation with Four Women,” nor yet by “Kith and Kin,” he said, waxing lyrical, almost. Never again government controlled by the denizens of the PDP and the APC who brought the Nigeria to its present parlous state.

    That, in essence, is the manifesto Obasanjo handed down in his latest epistle. Not the vaguest reference to re-structuring that the attentive audience has been demanding insistently, only tinkering at the edges with the Constitution, and more of the hyper-centralization that has vitiated Nigeria’s progress.

    If Buhari and his Administration would not embrace and implement these marching orders, they must be prepared to be swept off the political platform by the ADC in next year’s General Election.

    Obasanjo reiterated that he would not be a card-carrying member of the ADC, having retired from “partisan politics.”  With the ADC now a reality, his work was done.  But he would, apparently drawing on Plato, function as an influential player in the class of “guardians,” to keep the new order on course.

    There you have it.

    When Obasanjo first mooted the idea of a new political formation last January in an epistle eviscerating Buhari and his Administration, the PDP entered a response that reeked of barefaced opportunism.  True, the PDP had not in office delivered on good governance, and the APC had proved wholly incompetent; however, the answer did not lie in creating “another political quicksand,” but in grounding a rescue mission on “a repositioned PDP that Nigerians had already embraced.”

    The PDP, declared it a national publicity secretary, the hard-working and even harder-hitting Kola Ologbondiyan, “is now standing on a true democratic ground that perfectly represents and reflects the hopes and aspirations of all Nigerians irrespective of their class, creed, or tribe.”

    It is for that reason that the PDP has “become a centre of the new, patriotic and broad-based engagements by well-meaning Nigerians and coalitions across the board, including past leaders, in rekindling our democratic process that places priority on returning power to the people,” Ologbondiyan added.

    In short:  save your energies, Baba.  We already have on ground and as a going concern what you seek to establish.

    As the Buhari Administration stumbled from blunder to egregious blunder, and as the National Assembly it nominally controls plotted in plain view day after day to supplant the Presidency, the PDP that had suffered a humiliating rejection at the polls just three years earlier–the PDP that had threatened to govern for 60 unbroken years in the first instance–began to see itself and to be seen by its depleted  followership as a government-in-waiting.

    Those who had defected from its beleaguered ranks to join the hope-inspiring APC more from calculation than from conviction and had remained at heart true believers in the PDP, then felt sufficiently emboldened to demand a meeting “to prepare the party as a fighting force to deliver more pungently on its manifesto and face the 2019 General elections with even greater commitment.”

    Few will be taken in by this sudden outpouring of concern for the APC’s fortunes.

    The real reason, as documented in the widely-circulated petition, is to press for a greater share in of the spoils and to secure acceptance as bone fide members and candidates in impending party elections rather than risk being shunned as defectors waiting to take flight.

    To put it bluntly, the whole thing is designed to furnish a pretext for defecting.  It they don’t get their demands, they will claim that they were pushed out of the APC

    That was before the local government and ward congresses which it would be courteous to call shambolic, and before Obasanjo announced the ADC’s arrival on the scene.

    This latter development must have tempered the PDP’s exuberant dream of returning to power in 2019.  somewhat. Squaring up for a straight fight with the APC, it now finds the field complicated by the entry of a third contestant that may well turn out to be more spoiler than mere irritant.  Consequently, according to my sources, they are now hedging their bets in the ranks of would-be defectors.

    Meanwhile, I gather that the faithful have been piling pressure on the APC to demand that the waverers shape up or face expulsion for disloyalty and anti-party activities.  That would be a clarifying move indeed.  I understand that it is under active consideration.

    Whatever happens, don’t count the APC out yet.  The significant uptick in oil prices will swell the Federal Government’s coffers and enable it to devote more resources to projects and programmes that would touch the lives of the people in beneficent ways and thus cut down a major source of public dissatisfaction with the Administration.

    And if it the Administration were to show greater respect for Nigeria’s geo-political imperatives in filling the thousands of positions waiting to be filled, it would be seen to have moved, finally, to address boldly another source of great of public disaffection.

    To close with a riff on ace broadcaster Horatio Agedah’s famous sign-off on his election reports during the First Republic:  And so, the drama continues.

  • Letter to Ayo Opadokun

    My dear Ayo:

    When a gang of armed robbers staged a daring and spectacular raid on five banks and left more than 30 persons dead some two weeks in Offa, in Kwara State, I was more than a little jolted.   I know the town quite well.  In the late sixties, when I was teaching in a secondary school some 15 miles away, Offa was the nearest town served by a bank, and I was one of its hundreds of out-of-town patrons.

    Travelling up north by train, I had the choice of boarding in Ilorin on a direct route 30 miles away or in Offa,   en route which I would have to change transportation at Ajasse-Ipo, a mere six miles away from my base. But despite that inconvenience, I usually boarded at Offa.   The railway station was more passenger-friendly, boarding was less stressful, and you were almost sure to get a seat.

    Offa also served me as a second home for some four years during which my wife taught at local girl’s secondary school St Clare’s, and I commuted from Lagos as a visiting spouse.

    A good many of my classmates in secondary school and university hail from Offa, and some among them, like your good self, whom I am proud to number as cherished family. How could the desperate bandits have settled on a town that was rarely in the news except during feuds over succession to the Oloffa stool, or boundary disputes with its neighbours, chiefly Erin-Ile, for their murderous visitation?

    The last time I visited was in 1985 or so, for the burial of your mother.  Also in attendance, I recall, was the late Dr Olu Onagoruwa (SAN), and your fellow attorneys in his law practice in tow.  I will forever cherish having your principal, your good self, and four of your colleagues in my corner at the Lagos High Court during the hearings of my lawsuit against the Nigeria Television Authority.

    These were the sentiments that welled up in my mind as I learned of the raid, and the wanton spilling of so much innocent blood.

    When the police declared a young man with the surname Opadokun a suspect in the armed robbery, I became alarmed.  Something told me that the young man might turn out to be a relation of yours – a cousin or nephew – most likely someone belonging in the extended Opadokun family.  For, among our people, Opadokun is not a common name.  And I daresay everyone who encounters it thinks immediately of you who have by your noble and unstinting endeavours on the political, social and religious planes turned it into a household name in Nigeria.

    My alarm grew into panic when I learned that the young man in question had positively been identified as your 38-year-old son Kayode.  I was shattered. Nothing had prepared me for this piece of distressing news.

    We meet – mostly by chance these days; we meet, we reminisce, we rap, we compare notes, we promise         to stay in touch, and we move on. When we talk about children, it is usually in the most perfunctory terms. “The children are doing well, we thank God,” we say reflexively. I had no reason to suspect that your only son had, to your grief, and now to mine, chosen a different, self-destructive path.

    If there is anything I find even more distressing than the grief into which you have been plunged anew, it is the charge that has taken wings in the media that you had been so deeply engrossed in the political goal of building a new, more just, more caring and more equal society that you had neglected to attend to the immediate needs of your own family; that Kayode’s circumstances resulted from the failure of parenting.

    The charge has a familiar ring, but that does not make it a whit less unfeeling, less presumptuous and less gratuitous.  In fact, I am almost prepared to say that it is slanderous.

    Parenting is one of the most demanding and trickiest tasks a person can undertake.  And yet, paradoxically, it is never taught.  You learn on the job as it were, guided but not always to the most salubrious degree by the examples of your own parents, by your inner lights, by your observations of other families, and by a thousand other influences.

    No outcome is guaranteed.  Here, the common wisdom that the apple never falls far from the tree may well be false, at least in a literal sense.  A child reared in a home that sets the highest store by rectitude can grow into a wayward adult; vice versa, though this outcome is rarer, a child brought up in the most dissolute of homes can grow up into a fine, morally upright person, as shown by the example of Alyosha, the youngest of the Brothers Karamazov in Dostoyevsky’s great novel of the same name.

    Peer pressure and hundreds of other factors render a particular outcome more uncertain still.  So that, if a son or daughter shuns the usual vices, comes across as a person of good report and generally stays away from trouble, we should give thanks for our good fortune.  Rejoice.  But we must heap no blame on those parents whose children grew wayward.

    Pay no heed to such people, Ayo.  They are not worthy of your notice.  You have no reason to blame   yourself for doing things you should not have done, or for omitting to do things you should have done. Save your energies for the more urgent and much more difficult task of standing by Kayode, and standing  by him unconditionally, just as you must love him unconditionally.

    That is the task before you. That is what your Baptist faith and all scripture enjoin.   Allow nothing to divert you from that task.

    There are those who will say that, even if you are personally upstanding, there may be something in your wife’s family that contributed to Kayode’s waywardness.   That mind, well entrenched in our folkways, was captured well by the songster:  “If a child does well, they say he is the son of his father; if he misbehaves, they say the child takes after the mother.”

    You must banish them from your company, Ayo.  They do not mean well for your family, or for your peace   of mind at this difficult time.

    I know that despite your enormous sacrifices to make Nigeria the country of our dreams, you are a person of very modest means.  You often do the grunt work, but they hardly remember you when they are sharing out the spoils.

    But you must, Ayo, harness your resources to afford Kayode the best legal defence possible.  In juridical terms, that may not avail much.  But it will show Kayode that you care.  It will show him that you love him.

    It will show him that you are prepared to welcome him back into the family’s embrace; that you have forgiven his prodigality.

    Now is the time for your associates, your political family, to show their support and solidarity.

    At 38, Kayode is a young man, with many years ahead of him.  He needs to spend those years, wherever he finds himself, knowing that he is loved and cherished.  That knowledge, that realisation, may well make him turn away from his bad ways now and live a life worthy of you, his mother, his siblings, and the larger Opadokun family.

    Please know, my friend and brother, that my thoughts and prayers are with you and yours. May your faith sustain you at this difficult time.

    All the best in your present travail.

  • A milestone, and a transition

    Long before I met Chief Ayo Adebanjo whose 90th birthday celebration was a major event on the nation’s political and social calendar several weeks ago, I felt as if I had always known him.  Wherever you turned on the political landscape, wherever you found Chief Obafemi Awolowo, he was there, and not just as a fringe actor.

    He was there in the politics of the old Western Nigeria, in the region’s ruling party, the Action Group, at the Treason Trials, and in the Unity Party of Nigeria.

    He has been a constant presence in Afenifere, and he was there in NADECO, the coalition of opposition forces that fought military rule and Abacha’s terror machine to a standstill. He belongs in the leadership of politically engaged Nigerians demanding a comprehensive re-design of the national architecture.

    Built like a battle tank, Adebanjo is a formidable presence.  He never pulls his punches.  If he were a professional boxer, he would ever press forward, like Joe Frazier.  No shaking, no retreat, no surrender.

    My first direct encounter with him took place sometime in 1990, at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, on Victoria Island, Lagos.  The occasion was the launch of Ebenezer Babatope’s   book, Not His Will: The Awolowo Obasanjo Wager, before an array of Awo’s disciples.  The book was Babatope’s answer to Obasanjo’s Not My Will, in which Obasanjo declared, with not a little triumphalism, that the national leadership Awo sought in vain had come to him almost without a conscious struggle.

    Babatope charged in his book that as the military head of state who supervised the 1979 general election from which Shehu Shagari emerged president, Obasanjo had by acts and omissions stymied the quest of the UPN’s presidential candidate.

    Not proven, I said in the review I was invited to present.  Obasanjo was certainly not enamoured of Awo’s candidature, and had said that much in Not My Will. He had voted for Shagari, believing, that Shagari would make a better president than Awo.  But the evidence that Obasanjo had blocked Awo’s path to the presidency was inconclusive, I said.

    I had hardly come down from the platform when Adebanjo walked up to me.

    “Dare, you are wrong,” he said severely.  “You are very wrong. Obasanjo plotted against Awo’s election.  We know he did.”

    He must have come to the venue from the court, or from his law office at Western House, or was heading to some engagement, for he was wearing a suit. In subsequent encounters, I have never seen him thus attired, only traditional clothing, formal or casual, always matched by his emblematic AWO cap.

    Adebanjo never held it against me, and neither did Babatope, I must say to their credit, that I had not performed to the expectation of the assembled Awoists.

    Throughout the “June 12” struggle, he never fell for Babangida’s subversive generosity and was wholly undaunted by Sani Abacha’s terror machine.  Within hours of the state-sponsored murder of fellow NADECO chieftain and financier, Chief Alfred Rewane, in his Ikeja home, Adebanjo was on the scene, defiant as ever, calling things as he saw them, totally unmindful of consequences.

    If he should fall that very day, he said, it would not be said of him that he died prematurely.  But as               long as he lived, he would never flinch from championing justice, democracy, the rule of law, and a  more equitable federation, he declared.  As his life shows so eloquently, he was not grandstanding.

    Those who thronged the ceremonies marking his birthday anniversary were in a way affirming that he has stayed true to his vow, a profile in dedication and commitment.

     

    Adebayo Adedeji, scholar, author, administrator, diplomat, distinguished public and international civil servant, died last week, aged 87. He had been out of circulation on account of illness.

    The media took judicious notice of his accomplishments — professor of public administration, at the University of Ife; Federal Minister of Economic Development and Reconstruction in the aftermath of             the civil war; a major architect of the National Youth Service Corps; key negotiator of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Treaty, and executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), among other distinctions.

    At these and many other fora, Adedeji performed with his quiet distinction.  He was soft-spoken and would have been unobtrusive as well, but for the tobacco pipe that accompanied him everywhere he went.  It may well have been a prop as was rumoured, for few recall seeing him taking a puff.  It nevertheless accentuated his dignified, donnish look.

    Adedeji, it should be stated for the record, was the second African to serve as the ECA’s executive secretary, not the first, as some media outlets have reported.  The first was Robert K. Gardiner, the distinguished Ghanaian socio-economist, previously director of Extramural Studies at the University College, Ibadan, as it then was.  I should also add that Dr Gardiner was also the first African to present the BBC’s Reith Lecture.

    Though Adedeji operated for several decades at the highest level of policy-making and execution in Nigeria and on the international stage, with abundant opportunities for self-aggrandizement, he was untainted by the merest whiff of scandal.

    He insisted that policy should be informed by rigorous scholarship and the force of data.  This stance brought him into conflict with the administration of military president Ibrahim Babangida, which expected him to parrot, as if they were Holy Writ, the structural adjustment policies the IMF/World Bank had clamped on Nigeria.

    The scholar in Adedeji would not oblige.

    They said in Nigeria that there was no alternative to SAP, variations of which The South Commission, chaired by former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere said in retrospect were often founded on “unduly optimistic assumptions . . . a doctrinaire belief in the efficacy of market forces. . . excessive dogmatism and lack of commonsense. . .”

    Adedeji took a leading part in formulating and articulating a muscular and well-received African Alternative Framework to SAP.  In that task, he could not have settled on a more formidable collaborator and proselytizer than the brilliant Marxist economist, Professor Bade Onimode, of radiant memory.

    If Adedeji had been home-based and his office did not confer immunity on him, he would most certainly have been detained or jailed along with dozens of prominent Nigerians who wanted to organise debates on alternatives to SAP.

    Even so, he had a taste of their wrath.  They launched a media campaign to discredit him.  His term was up at ECA, and renewal should have been routine, more so since his performance had been outstanding, and he needed just one more year to qualify for a pension.  As punishment for his anti-SAP stance, the Babangida Administration refused to recommend renewal.  It took all the influence General Olusegun Obasanjo could muster as statesman-at-large to ensure that Adedeji stayed on to qualify for a pension.

    At the urging of some influential persons, who still believed against all the evidence that Babangida meant to hand over to an elected president he entered the presidential race. The foray never really            got off the ground.  He had no regrets that it was short-lived.   But he must have been grieved that the ambitious Africa Centre for Development and Strategic Studies into which he ploughed his resources  did not flourish.  The funding he was expecting did not materialise.

    Adedeji played his part and played it to high national and international acclaim.

     

  • IBB: No remorse, and no memoir

    Shortly after he emerged from the August 25, 1985, coup as leader of Nigeria’s new military regime,  General Ibrahim Babangida was asked why, departing from precedent going back to 1966, he chose the title of “President.”

    He had told his colleagues that he would like to go by that designation.   They thought the choice curious but had raised no objections, according to General Domkat Bali, then Chief of Defence Staff.

    Asked the same question on national television by news correspondent Inalegwu Odeh as Babangida was settling into his new role, Babangida said he would explain later.  With his accustomed doggedness, Odeh put the question again a day or two later, at a chance opportunity.

    This time, Babangida was ready.  He said he had chosen the title in keeping with the Constitution. The very Constitution that spelled out clearly the methods by which power could be obtained and exercised legitimately.  Those methods did not include a coup which is at bottom a crime against the Constitution.

    Going strictly by the Constitution, the official next in rank to Babangida should have answered to the title of vice president.  But Ebitu Ukiwe answered to the rather nebulous title of Chief of General Staff.

    Babangida was in effect invoking the Constitution to justify his subversion of the Constitution.

    His self-assigned title “President, Commander-in-Chief (no ‘and’ between; it denotes one and the same person) left the military in whose name he took power as well as the nation in no doubt that he had come to exercise supreme control over the Nigerian state and its armed forces.   And this, too, was presumably in keeping with the Constitution.

    The same kind of thinking runs through his recent interview with Channels Television.  He wondered why he had over the years been criticised, abused even, for annulling the presidential election of June 12, 1993, but had rarely been given the credit for organising and supervising the “freest and fairest” election ever held in Nigeria – the same June 12, 1993 election, aforementioned.

    Plus, did these critics realise; did they know that the winner of that election, Bashorun MKO Abiola, was his bosom friend?

    It is almost impossible to fathom the cast of mind of one who organised and supervised the ”freest and fairest” election ever held in Nigeria, mobilised the population against the outcome, drove the country to the edge of disintegration in the process, robbed his bosom-friend of the ultimate prize, then glory in the election, the friendship and the annulment without any mental discomfort.

    By and large, the public sees Babangida as the perpetrator of crimes against the Constitution, and against the sovereign will of the Nigerian electorate.  But he sees himself as a victim, the bugbear of an undiscerning and unappreciative people.  In his psyche, there is no room or capacity for remorse or contrition, only self-pity.

    If it ever got off his memo pad, if it ever made the transition from an idea in his head to an actual writing project, however tentative, the tell-all memoir Babangida promised Nigerians more than two decades ago and said was near completion much more recently will not now see the light of day.

    Why?  Because no one would read it, he said.  Once word gets out that Babangida is the author, the book is finished.

    I suspect that he has lived with that thought for long, and it may be the reason he abandoned plans to publish a daily newspaper in Abuja.  Before he was swept out of power, a casualty of his own overweening machinations, he had set up a state-of-the-art printing press in Abuja and reportedly             tapped Eddie Iroh, one of the best in the business, to run it.

    Contrary to the law, the plant took over from the Government Printer the printing of official government papers.  Babangida was the law, anyway.  It was there that all those crazy decrees were churned out in the dead of night, in the dizzying, closing phase of Babangida’s tenure.

    It is also probably the reason Babangida abandoned plans to build a university, for which he had acquired a vast tract of land in Kaduna State. What if parents refused to send their children there, on learning that Babangida was its proprietor?

    There is indeed an Ibrahim Babangida University, in Lapai, in Niger State.  But if those who have their children and wards studying there ever suffer from buyers’ remorse, they should remember that its proprietor is Niger State Government, not the resident of the Hilltop Mansion in Minna.

    It is sad that Babangida ended up in this manner.

    He had started out with great promise.  He enjoyed perhaps the longest honeymoon of all who have governed Nigeria.  He abolished the notorious Decree Four and pardoned two journalists, Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor, who had been jailed under it.

    He flung the prison doors open to release hundreds who had been detained arbitrarily under the previous regime, and to expose the squalid conditions in which they were held.  He unbanned the university students’ body NANS, the Nigerian Medical Association and the National Association of Resident Doctors and many other associations.

    He set up a judicial panel to review unconscionable prison sentences that had been handed down to Second Republic politicians convicted in trials that made a mockery of the rule of law. He discovered Nigeria’s neglected countryside and established, with substantial funding, various agencies (remember the Directorate of Food, Roads and Rural Infrastructures, the Directorate for Social Mobilisation, and the People’s Bank) to bring them into the mainstream of national life

    Freedom of the press and of speech and thought flourished.   Nigeria became a vast debating platform with the government itself an active participant.  It set up panels to review or propose one policy or another, to pronounce on the desirability, viability or affordability of one course of action or another.  The poet and columnist Odia Ofeimun called the practice “panelocracy.”

    One of my favourite cartoons from this era depicted a child with guilt written all over his face asking his mother to set up a panel to determine who had filched a chunk of beef from the family soup pot.

    By the time it came to light that Babangida has insinuated Nigeria into the Organisation of the Islamic Conference surreptitiously, the public had begun to view him warily.  The Administration’s intolerance of dissentient views over its controversial Structural Adjustment Programme, the parcel-bomb murder of Dele Giwa, in which the Administration remains a prime suspect to this day, quickened his rejection by the people. The duplicitous framing and the execution of the political transition programme, culminating in the election of the presidential election, virtually consigned him to infamy.

    It would be hard to find a more eloquent monument to the collapse of his tenure and ambition than the one captured for the ages in his ragged, lachrymose retreat from Abuja en route Minna and retirement.

    There will be no memoir, Babangida says; not even one that seeks to tell the story from his point of view, to explain the joys and pleasures of the office, the challenges and constraints of the office, and to hit back at his numerous detractors.   But few will be surprised if he comes out with such a memoir next month, caring nothing about whether it is read or not.

    Memoir or no memoir, there is abundant testimony by aides who chose to write the history of the period and stamp it indelibly with Babangida’s imprint rather than leave the matter to chance.  I am thinking of seminal volumes with such captivating titles as Portrait of a New Nigeria:  Selected Speeches of IBB, and Foundations of a New Nigeria:  The IBB Era.

  • The Senate and Ovie Omo-Agege

    The moment Senator Ovie Omo-Agege (APC Delta Central) allowed himself to be bullied or inveigled into apologizing on the floor of the Senate for his remark on the way a resolution changing the order of the general election scheduled for 2019 was confected, I knew that nothing less than his scalp would satisfy his colleagues in their feigned outrage.

    Better to start at the beginning.

    For reasons that have nothing to do with correcting a broken system and everything to do with the ambition of its scheming leadership, and the fecklessness of a fawning followership,  the National Assembly set out to reverse the order in which the general election had been conducted over the years by the Independent National Electoral Commission.

    The election for president, usually held in the first stage of a three-stage process, would be held in the last stage; that way, said the sponsors of the amendment to the law, a victory for the incumbent in the first phase would confer no advantage, no bandwagon effect, on the victorious party in the subsequent phases.

    The legislative effort was led by a faction of the APC beholden to Senate President Bukola Saraki, with significant support from the opposition PDP determined to crawl its way back to power by any means.

    Omo-Agege, one of 10 senators belonging in the Buhari Support Group, stated that only 36 of 360 members of the House of Representatives were present on the day the report on the amendment to the Electoral Act was adopted, and the Senate did not have a quorum on the day it passed the bill.

    As far as I know, he has not been challenged on the facts.

    At a press conference, Omo-Agege and his fellow dissident senators went on to call the proposed Amendment exactly what it was:  a plot against President Muhammadu Buhari, who had all but indicated that he would be seeking re-election.

    His Senate colleagues brought out the knives.  It was at this point that he allowed himself to be bullied or inveigled into apologizing for his stand.  Apparently realizing later that appeasement was not the path to follow on a matter so consequential, he rescinded his apology and sought a court injunction to block suspension.

    Following this, Omo-Agege was reported to the Senate Ethics and Privileges Committee, based on a motion by – yes, you guessed right — the ubiquitous Dino Melaiye (APC, Kogi West), who never saw an issue that couldn’t muddle.  Whereupon the committee recommended that Omo-Agege be suspended for 181 parliamentary days, allegedly for conduct unbecoming.

    Deputy Majority Leader, Senator Ibn N’Allah, pointed out that the change in election sequence did not emanate from the Senate but from the House of Representatives.  Then he unwittingly revealed the cause of the hysteria that had gripped the Senate over Omo-Agege’s criticism of the handling of the Amendment.

    It was all right for Omo -Agege to apologize, but the matter went far beyond that. “There are places  you dare not talk about the president,” he said.  Some senators come from such places.  By stating that the amendment to the electoral law was aimed at Buhari, Omo-Agege had put the lives of those senators at risk,” Na’Allah added.

    Whoever knew or even suspected that the stakes were so high?

    Senator Kabiru Marafa (Zamfara APC) entered this helpful contribution:  “Inasmuch as I am against the suspension of any senator, I am equally against the formation of any other group in this chamber. The formation of the parliamentary support group is evil and it should not stand, it is counter-productive and against the president himself,” he said.

    No tolerance for any dissident group within the Senate?   Is this official Senate policy?

    The path was now clear for the Senate President, who had  stayed out of view and hearing throughout a matter that could not have gone that far without his approval, if not his orchestration.  He stepped in daintily as his custom, innocent of all the hubbub.

    “Distinguished Colleagues, a number of points have been raised. One borders on the issue of preserving the integrity of this institution.”

    Integrity.  You hear that?

    “Second, is where we take actions that are not sincere. I think in this chamber if we want to talk about who has the right to say he is chairman of a Parliamentary Support Group for Mr. President both by action and by what we have done, I think that I have the right to lead that more than anyone else here.

    Sincerity, too.

    “Those of us that understand politics, understand that because of our own peculiar interest, sometimes some people decide to act like they are holier than thou or more committed – at the expense of others. This is not something that we should tolerate, and I believe that in an institution like this we must show discipline, but at the same time, we must also show compassion.”

    Not forgetting Discipline with Compassion

    “Distinguished Colleagues, there must be discipline. We must show that such groups must be suspended and the case in court must be withdrawn. I think by that we would have captured, no more of this kind of groups in the Senate.”

    Pardon this overly long quote from ThisDay, April 13, 2018.  A paraphrase would have done no justice to the distinguished Senate President.

    Tempering discipline with compassion, Saraki then recommended that Omo-Agege’s suspension be reduced from 181 to 90 legislative days, subject to Omo-Agege withdrawing the case in court, and without prejudice to the Senate revisiting the matter.

    From Saraki’s emphasis on discipline in this intervention, you would think that he was the most disciplined practitioner in the annals of politics.

    The kind of discipline that led him to cede, for his personal benefit, the position of Deputy Senate President to the opposition PDP, in defiance of his own party, the ruling APC.  The kind of discipline without which he could not have run Societe Generale Bank aground as its chief executive. The kind of discipline that assisted him greatly in retrieving the bank’s operating licence from the regulatory authorities and lending it to a financial institution to trade with for very valuable consideration.

    The kind of discipline that said it was perfectly all right for a former state governor to draw a pension or salary while serving as a senator receiving an obscene compensation passage.

    The kind of discipline that led him to organize, year after year, ceremonies at which  more than 20 impoverished residents of Ilorin were trampled to death in the stampede for the modest gifts he was handing out.

    To return to Omo-Agege:

    By allowing himself to be bullied or inveigled into apologizing to the Senate for an opinion on a public issue he was perfectly entitled to hold and express, Omo-Agege denied himself a chance to go down as  a profile in courage.  For the most part, appeasement emboldens and empowers the other side, laying the ground for new and greater demands.

    If the Senate can act with such clear disregard for the rights and privileges of one of its own, however disagreeable, those who look it to safeguard our liberties are deluded.  No assembly in a democracy should claim or exercise that kind of power.

  • Ike Ekweremadu’s troubled assets

    Poor Ike Ekweremadu!

    These are desperate times.  But the desperation with which his opponents have been pursuing him is excessive even by our own standards.

    He has been a marked man since he “emerged,” or since his “emergence,” as Deputy President of the Senate, just one breathless step behind Dr Bukola Saraki, who had with accustomed guile fashioned his own emergence as Senate President.

    As Saraki was being ferried to the courtroom day after day to answer charges of falsification of assets, Ike Ekweremadu was always in tow, a study in fraternal solidarity.   In their appearance before another court to answer charges of forgery in relation to the documents with which they had allegedly procured their emergence as the leaders of the Senate, each sought to come across as victim rather than perpetrator.

    Ekweremadu seemed to play the part with greater conviction.

    They say this latter charge has since been withdrawn, without the Attorney-General of the Federation formally entering a nolle prosequi.  The consideration seems to have been that if the charge stuck, if it was established that Saraki and Ekweremadu had obtained their positions in the Senate by deception, every act done or purported to have been done by the Senate under their watch would be a nullity, void and of no consequence whatsoever.

    The hope in the camp of Ekweremadu’s foes was that some development might move the Attorney-General to reinstate the charges and commence prosecution anew.  They had in fact been advised solemnly by a consortium of spiritual consultants in Abuja to expect such a development within weeks.

    As weeks passed by without any indication that the Attorney-General was set to re-open the case, Ekweremadu’s determined and envious adversaries could hardly contain their impatience.  As far as they were concerned, he was a poseur. He had to be unmasked by all means.  And if he was no poseur, make him out to be one.

    What, they wondered, was the secret of the glittering career that had seen him through a metamorphosis without parallel from Deputy President of a Senate controlled by his party, the PDP, to the same office in a Senate in which the PDP belongs in the minority Opposition?    How had he managed the transition with no apparent loss of credibility and authenticity?

    What had he been doing with the N31.5 million he had been taking home every month as “running expenses” since goodness-knows-when, plus other incomes not captured in the official revenue flow?

    They tried hacking into his computer to filch vital information with which they could shame him and end his career.  They came up short. The yahoo boys could not help them, nor could consultant hackers.  By one account, they could not get round the firewall Ekweremadu had built around his private information, digital man for a digital age.

    But that setback only re-energized his relentless pursuers.  For they saw it as proof positive that he was hiding something – something probably quite damning.  Hacking did not work and good old burglarizing was exceedingly fraught, given the battalion of security aides stationed at his office, homes and haunts, not forgetting the armed personnel that always accompany him.

    Time, then, to try something different.

    They decided to check out the Probate Registry in his home state of Enugu, knowing that he left little to chance and would have in all probability filed his Last Will and Testament. Now, that Registry is one of the most secure depositories in the entire bureaucracy, accessible only to a handful of trusted operatives sworn to the highest level of confidentiality.

    But with friends in high places, there are few barriers you cannot breach in Nigeria.

    So, without much fuss, they picked their way into the inner sanctum of the Probate Registry where, voila, an unhurried search turned up Ekweremadu’s Last Will and Testament.  But their joy was short-lived.

    The package was slender, not remotely as hefty as they had expected.  They ripped away the seal, only to find within the covers several pages detailing only a few solid assets in Enugu and Abuja and Lagos – nothing that a middling, God-fearing public servant living frugally and availing himself or herself of the usual opportunities could not have acquired in 20 years within the system.

    If that slim portfolio was all that Ekweremadu, one of the raiders said with cutting contempt, he must have spent all his time in Abuja and the world capitals he visited in the line of duty gawking at the superb infrastructure, the great monuments, the historic buildings when not shopping eating exquisite meals and drinking choice wines.

    “Yeye man,” the raider had said in exasperation, according to a report that cannot be corroborated at this time.

    But where one raider saw disappointment, another saw great opportunity.

    A week later, the raiders were back at the Probate Registry, carrying a package containing four hefty volumes of what they purported to be the original, authentic Last Will and Testament of  the afore-mentioned Ike Ekeweremadu, signed and sealed and delivered with the usual attestations and affirmations.

    In due time, the contents of the package were leaked.  Ekweremadu was as usual so engrossed in the affairs of state that he had no inkling of what was going on until an estranged relation, acting more out of schadenfreude than solidarity, called his attention to the reports.

    The disclosures were nothing if not explosive. Report after report credited Ekweremadu with luxury property on a scale beyond belief in virtually every city of consequence in the world, property of all shapes and descriptions: studios, condos, bungalows, duplexes, triplexes, office suites, apartment blocks, etc., all situated in the most desirable part of town, thus giving a whole new meaning to globalization.

    In their desperation to nail Ekweremadu, the raiders overreached.  It is simply inconceivable that an individual, even one as influential as the Deputy Senate President, acting from his base in Abuja, could have acquired such a property empire sprawled across the world.  To do so, the individual would have to own an exclusive and unregulated licence to print money, and to be driven by a galactic  propensity for that pastime.

    But as far as we know, Ekweremadu has no such licence.  He does not need it because of his modest and contented lifestyle  Even his one-time principal in the Senate, no stranger to lavish extravagance, was content to settle for just two golf courses in Europe, plus a mountain of cash and other assets detailed in the Panama Papers and documents of like nature. So why would Ekweremadu reach out for so much?

    The whole thing is simply not credible, and would have been so even if Ekweremadu had not disavowed it. He has named two well-placed individuals he believes are behind this gross invasion of his privacy that all patriotic and law-abiding Nigerians must condemn in the most vigorous terms and vowed to bring them to justice.

    That is the proper response for a lawmaker.

    But there is one option that the distinguished Senate President must not ignore, borrowed from a column Olusegun “The Verdict” Adeniyi wrote for ThisDay a while ago, about a young man who was putting up a building in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital. Each time he raised it several coats higher, he found the whole thing levelled the next day, apparently by some rival claimant to the site.

    So, he put up a sign proclaiming that the site belonged to Lamidi Adedibu, persuaded that nobody in the city would dare encroach on a property advertised as belonging to Himself the King of Molete.

    To the young man’s astonishment, construction resumed at the site almost immediately and advanced rapidly until the building was almost completed.

    The young man went to see Adedibu to explain why he had put the legendary man’s name on his building site. Adedibu expressed appreciation for the great compliment, completed the building, and handed it to the young man.

    And now, finally, the Distinguished Senate President’s option:  Establish a claim on all the property detailed in your purported Last Will and Testament, and seek a perpetual injunction restraining any individual or body corporate in any jurisdiction, domestic or foreign, from sequestering it or inquiring into how it was acquired.