The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • Annals of commencement speeches

    In a sojourn of more than five decades in the classroom and the newsroom and as a member of the audience for news and public affairs, I have had my full share of commencement addresses delivered by persons of great specific gravity to young men and women about to enter the world after a period of study in their cloistered environment.

    Like you, dear reader, few of their edifying messages cling in my memory.

    I have no doubt that at my graduation from the University of Lagos, what the chancellor and former president of Nigeria, and later the Owelle of Onitsha, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, and the vice chancellor, the distinguished historian Professor JF-Ade. Ajayi commended to the class and commended with stirring eloquence was nothing less than a distillation of the wisdom of the ages. Yet, weeks later, I would have  found it difficult to recall their exhortation with confidence.

    The commencement speaker at the School of Journalism the year I graduated from Columbia was Garry Wills, author (Nixon Agonistes) and Pulitzer prize-winning historian.  He must have spoken with great earnestness about the obligations of American journalists and the media in the post-Watergate era.   But I have no memory of his oration.

    I remember that the leader – and sole Member of Parliament for the anti-apartheid Liberal Party of South Africa, Helen Suzman, was among those honored at the larger University Commencement but I cannot now tell whether she gave a speech.  If she did, I have entirely forgotten whatever she said.

    All is not lost, however.  I do recall a few commencement speeches, but mostly for the wrong reason. I cite two memorable instances here.

    The first was at the 1991 post-graduate Convocation of the University of Lagos.  I was as attending as guest of my wife, who was due to receive the MSc(Ed), and of course as a newspaper reporter.  A one-time Naval chief was standing in for the Visitor, military president Ibrahim Babangida.  His speechwriters had apparently determined that this was a chance to show all those condescending lecturers and their misguided wards that the Ivory Tower has no monopoly on learning.

    In his solemn address before the assembled audience, the Guest Speaker recalled the “subventions, extra-budgetary grants and mass transit vehicles” the Federal Government had availed the university the previous year.

    These measures, he said, were “predicated on our belief that the ambience of our tertiary institutions  should be ameliorated, to facilitate the teaching and learning process.”

    Fund raising, he advised the university’s authorities, should not be undertaken only on formal occasions “but as on-going, well-articulated, perennial activity.”  They should keep it in mind that “the provision  per se of supplementary funds cannot obliterate the problems of our universities, because “deft          management is also a desideratum.”

    He went on to remark and deplore how students’ grievances reveal “a hiatus in the communication structure,” and how “distortive” processes cannot be a reflection of positive development.  He spoke of how, after the “ferments” on campus, “the prescribed quantum of knowledge become unimpartable and the degrees ultimately awarded stand a risk of being emasculated…”

    He closed by reminding teachers that since they stood “in loco parentis” to their students, they were “vantagely placed to show meritorious examples and moral rectitude to those who are in statu pupilari.”

    A guest in the row behind us said the whole thing reminded him of Bomber Billy in Ogali A. Ogali’s Veronica my Daughter, the flagship title in the Onitsha Market Literature Series.

    No prizes for figuring out that the guest speaker was Vice President Augustus Aikhomu, since deceased.

    Some two decades later and half-a-world away, I watched on live television a commencement address given by Noam Chomsky, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic and political activist, among other defining attributes.

    Wasting no time on preliminaries, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor launched into  an impassioned disquisition on the latest findings from research on the structure and functions of the brain, and on their implications for how we learn and think, and how we develop and use language.

    There was pin-drop silence.  No rustling or shuffling of papers.  The only sound was from Chomsky’s delivery.  It was unapologetic. It made not the slightest concession to the less intellectually endowed, nor to those who might have found some relief in eye contact.  “Total immersion” is what best describes the performance, for performance it was.

    After some 20 minutes, he finally looked up, gathered his notes, thanked the audience curtly, and retreated to his seat on the platform.  A huge sigh washed over the audience, followed by thunderous clapping.  Finally, it was over.  The school’s authorities, the students and the guests could finally face             the real business of the day.

    Until last week, there was one convocation address that I felt sure Nigerians of my generation would never forget, namely, Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s speech on the provisional results of the 1973 National Population Census, delivered at the University of Ife (as it then was), on July 6, 1974.

    Of that census, supervised by former chief justice Sir Adetokunbo Ademola, the Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon had stated, at once defensively and affirmatively: “The figures are very provisional but I can say that the 1973 count was probably the most thorough headcount in the history of the world.”

    Not so, Awolowo rejoined.

    “I have examined this result from several standpoints which time does not permit me to elaborate upon here, and as a result, I have been irresistibly impelled to the conclusion that the so-called provisional figures are absolutely unreliable and should be totally rejected by the Supreme Military Council,” he said.

    So absolutely unreliable, so incurably flawed, that no post-enumeration survey could save it.  With his trademark forensic brilliance and expository rigour, he showed that the 1973 Census reversed previous population growth rates in the 12 states of the Federation, crediting the Western State with an inter-censal growth rate of negative 0.62, and the North Eastern State with a growth rate of 7.04.

    “This just cannot be true,” the great man said.

    One of the first acts of the Murtala Muhammad regime on overthrowing Yakubu Gowon was to cancel that census.

    To this convocation address, this unforgettable instance of speaking truth to power, we must now add General TY Danjuma’s speech last week, at the Taraba State University, in Jalingo.

    During the past year, lethal clashes between nomadic cattle herders and farming communities have become the grisly subject of conversation where two or three Nigerians are gathered.  The orgy of bloodletting reached a high point of sorts when, over the New Year weekend, more than 70 helpless residents of Benue State were killed, reportedly by herdsman armed with sophisticated assault rifles, who also made it a point to leave entire communities pillaged.

    Similar killings have occurred repeatedly in Plateau, Nassarawa, Kaduna and Zamfara, Taraba, and Adamawa, among other states.

    How could this go on when Nigeria was not engulfed in a civil war? How could the perpetrators operate with such brazen contempt for the lives of Nigerians and the laws of the land? Why is it that none of them had been apprehended, much less prosecuted?

    With characteristic forthrightness, Danjuma, the nation’s former Chief of Army Staff and one-time Minister of Defence, furnished some answers to these questions in his convocation address at Taraba State University. His speech was unscripted, and the delivery had about it the subtlety of a whiplash.

    Excerpts, transcribed from the cable service provider TV Continental:

    ‘Taraba is a mini-state.  Taraba is a mini-Nigeria, composed of various ethnic groups living together reasonably peacefully.  But the peace of that state is under assault. There is an attempt at ethnic cleansing in the state, and of course in all the riverine states of Nigeria.

    “We must resist.

    “We must stop it.

    “Every one of us must rise up.

    “The armed forces are not neutral.  They collude.  They collude.  They collude with the armed bandits that kill people, kill Nigerians.  They have assisted their movements.  They cover them.

    “If you are depending on the armed forces to stop the killing, you will all die one by one.

    “The ethnic cleansing must stop in Taraba State, must stop in all the states of Nigeria.  Otherwise, Somalia will be a child’s play.

    “I ask every one of you to defend your country, your territory, your state.

    “You have nowhere else to go.  You have nowhere else to go.

    “God save our country.”

    A great many people have interpreted the address as a call to arms, a piece of incitement.  A great many also see it with greater truth as a call to self-defence in the face of the government’s inability to protect innocent, law-abiding citizens.

    Wherever one stands in this divide, there is no denying that General Danjuma has re-framed the national conversation.

  • Politics in the Age of the Internet

    The power of information technology was again splendidly displayed this past week as millions in some 800 locations across the world marched in solidarity with American students spearheading  protests against the gun violence that has turned their schools and streets and other social spaces into killing fields.

    “March for Our Lives” was a triumph of mobilisation and organisation.

    Not since worldwide protests in 2003 against the imminent invasion of Iraq by the United States and the United Kingdom based on transparent falsehoods has the world witnessed such a display of common purpose.  The rallies did not stop the invasion, perceived a “disaster” in its immediate aftermath, and now regarded as a crime, the horrid dimensions of which unfold with each passing day.

    Last weekend’s rallies may not in the short or even medium result in significant gun regulation in the United States where “the right of the people keep and bear arms” intended by the framers of the Constitution as legitimation for raising “a well-regulated Militia” essential to “the security of a free State,” has almost become an adjunct of “the right to the life liberty and the pursuit of happiness” clause of the Declaration of Independence.

    But it cannot be said, even now, that the rallies were unproductive.  They have served notice on lawmakers beholden to the National Rifle Association that the marchers and their supporters will henceforth employ the power of the ballot to challenge the power of the bullet that the NRA has relentlessly underwritten and sanctioned in the political and social life of the United States.

    That is no idle threat.  The NRA itself has in the wake of the protests lost much of its vast portfolio                      of its corporate endorsements and sponsorships.  It is not about to collapse – far from it.  But its stranglehold on gun legislation may slacken under sustained pressure from “March for Our Lives.”

    Steve Ballmer, co-founder with Bill Gates of Microsoft, said some ten years ago that the state of information technology then was no more advanced than that of the Model T Ford motorcar of the 1920s which, among other benefits, guaranteed its purchaser any colour so long as it was black.

    There was no Facebook then, no Twitter, no Snapchat, no Skype, no Instagram; none of the thousands of internet platforms and applications large and small that have become commonplace since then.  I say nothing about AI, or International Intelligence.

    With information technology, the possibilities are truly limitless, and so is the power.

    But it is a weapon that cuts both ways.  Its power can be harnessed to multiply human happiness or deployed to deepen human misery, to foster solidarity or to promote hatred and war, to cure and heal, or to kill on an industrial scale.

    When the fax machine came on stream in the mid-70s, it was hailed as the latest in a long line of “technologies of freedom” which, by making point-to-point and group-to-group communication through word and image feasible and affordable, has dealt the censor a severe blow on the way to ending his or her creepy occupation.

    They called its latest manifestation social media, as distinct from the older media that promoted a unidirectional flow of communication for the most part, with scant feedback opportunities.  Social media would democratise communication and move the world closer to what the Canadian media philosopher called a “global village.”

    Back in 1945, the British science writer Arthur C. Clarke had hinted at the feasibility of designing such a world. In a paper for the technical journal Wireless World, Clarke raised the possibility of placing “artificial satellite” at such a distance from the earth that the satellite would stay stationary relative to the same spot and lie within optical range of half the earth’s surface.  Three repeater stations set 120 degrees apart in the correct orbit, Clarke postulated, could give television and microwave coverage to the entire plant.

    As Clarke saw it, that was a project “for the more remote future – at least half a century ahead.”  Twelve years later, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite Sputnik.  Within four decades, fears were already being expressed that the geostationary orbit, the “parking space” for communication satellites 93 miles above the earth’s surface, would soon be crowded.

    How many people saw then that “technologies of freedom,” now symbolised most powerfully by the Internet, would within decades also come to be regarded as weapons of intrusion and invasion of privacy, for spawning and propagating conspiracies, conducting drug trafficking and human trafficking and child prostitution, spreading fear and hatred on a scale not previously known and threatening to strain even further the delicate consensus undergirding human society?

    Now, social media seems poised also to upend political community as we know it.

    Each passing day brings fresh indications that Russian security operatives acting on orders from President Vladimir Putin hacked into the computers of the Democrat National Council, vacuumed  material that would hurt Hillary Clinton’s chances and play to the advantage of her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, and planted on Facebook false and scurrilous information designed to serve the same ends in those states where tight presidential races are won or lost  based on the electoral college system rather than the actual vote.

    Donald Trump’s presidency, it is now being said, and not just in the ranks of his implacable foes, was founded more on Putin’s designs than on the sovereign will of the American people or Trump’s personal merits.

    The evidence is less substantial, but there are many on the other side of the North Atlantic who hold that the Russian authorities had employed similar aid the Brexiteers in the campaign on Britain’s future in the European Union.  They won, but rarely has victory tasted so unpleasant.  One more victory like that, and Britain would become a European backwater.  Not that Nick Farrage and his followers would mind that anyway.

    Last month’s general elections in Italy, a metaphor for political instability, furnish even more dramatic evidence that information technology can be employed to alter the political landscape almost beyond recognition.

    Italy’s trainload of traditional parties was almost swept off the political tracks, leaving in substantial reckoning only two: the Five Star Movement and the League.

    Five Star is a web-based party platform called Rousseau that promises to deliver “direct democracy,” a vehicle for articulating and ventilating resentments and fake news run by tech-savvy Italians. Like its 31-year-old leader, Luigi di Maio, who was elected through Rousseau, Five Star stands for little else. The party swept the impoverished south, eclipsing the Christian Democrats in their traditional redoubt

    In the north, it was the League that triumphed. Its leader, Matteo Salvini, is a fiercely anti-immigrant nativist who has called for cities to be “cleansed” by the police.

    The center-left Democratic Party took just 18.7 percent of the vote and its leader, former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, is set to quit.  In the age of television, the three-term former prime minister and one-time media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, who resembles Donald Trump in so many ways, was the politician to beat.  He still owns several influential television channels but with the Internet ascendant, his centre-right Forza Italia limped through the race with just 14 percent of the vote.

    The League and Five Star Movement have the numbers to govern, but they will not find it easy to put together a government.  Months of horse trading lie ahead.  Even for Italy the near future will be nothing familiar.

    Now shift gears and fast-forward to Nigeria’s general elections scheduled for April 2019.  The indications are that it will be most bitterly contested in memory.  Much of the contest is going to be waged on the Internet, to reach tens of millions of Nigerians connected to that global network with a steady drumbeat of lies half-truths and with hate-filled propaganda.

    Nigeria is, of course, not the United States, nor Italy.  Tribe and religion and careerism may fuel bubbling resentments, but they may also temper them.

    However, given today’s shifting alliances and the insurgent new formations, growing public disenchantment with the existing political order and the likely deployment of information technology on a wide scale but with scant inhibition in the forthcoming general elections, is it entirely inconceivable that the outcome may bear some resemblance to recent election outcomes in the United States and Italy?

  • Our much-maligned lawmakers

    It says a great deal about the extraordinary forbearance, the calm self-possession and the dignified restraint of members of the National Assembly that they have for so long put up with the most provocative falsehoods circulated and re-circulated about their compensation package and refused to be drawn into any discussion or debate on the issue.

    Their remit, remember, is to make good laws for the governance of Nigeria.  A discussion of their compensation package would therefore have been not merely a distraction; it would also have been subversive of that sacred mandate.

    A principal aide to one distinguished lawmaker told me that nothing would have been easier for the National Assembly to invoke its sweeping powers to teach these career calumniators a lesson they will never forget, and that the Assembly in fact came frequently under pressure to do just that.

    The aide was corroborated by one of the 25 personal assistants of another lawmaker whose ambition is to be elevated from the ranks of the merely honourable to the league of the actually distinguished. That aide was in turn corroborated by the deputy chief driver for another lawmaker’s fleet of exotic motorcars.

    But the collective wisdom of entire Assembly usually prevailed.

    Don’t dignify these frustrated malcontents whom we shall unfortunately always have among us:  don’t dignify them by answering or chastising them.

    Better to let them stew in their envy and drown in their cacophony, those so-called civil-society activists on the prowl for the next commissioned hit job, brown-envelope journalists sounding off as if they were crackerjack investigative reporters, frazzled charge-and-bail lawyers in their threadbare gowns and mouldy wigs, shoes misshapen from pounding court houses in search of clients, and self-styled anti-corruption crusaders so used to hearing their own jaded voices that they can no longer hear anything else.

    Day after day, in season and out of season, they carped endlessly about what they gave a gullible public to believe was the compensation package of our lawmakers – a package it would be courteous to call unconscionable and downright obscene even if was only 50 percent accurate.

    Each of these groups put out its own jaundiced and discrepant figures, but a public only too willing to believe the worst about persons of great consequence was not in the least troubled by the inconsistencies.

    In fact, the more improbable the figures, the more enthusiastically they were embraced by the public.

    Going by one of the more brazen publications, merely honourable lawmakers took home some N40 million every month.  Forty million Naira each month in the year, it is necessary to repeat, lest those of our countrymen whom time and tide and circumstance left behind think the figure represents the official compensation for an entire year.

    Distinguished members carted home some N2 million more each month, according to the publications under reference, satisfied that though insubstantial in monetary terms, it represented at least a tacit acknowledgement of the difference between being merely honourable and being truly distinguished.

    And these figures pertained only to above-the-table-payments, the traducers said, leaving it to the public to fill in, as its warped imagination dictated, what must have passed under the table.

    They had calculated that this strategy would goad the lawmakers out of their silence and engender a debate that was sure to trap them irretrievably in syndicated sleaze.  If they say their earnings are not a monumental scam and a shameless one at that, let them spell out their earnings clearly and unambiguously.

    Actuated as always by the finest traditions of noblesse oblige, the lawmakers refused.  Their slanderers who probably think that noblesse oblige is a delicacy specially confected to tickle the palates of the degenerate lawmakers argued that the lawmakers’ stony silence stemmed from nothing higher than the animal instinct for self-preservation.  They kept piling on, hoping that the wall of silence would develop a crack if the battering was kept going long enough.

    And so, the inventory of acts and non-acts for which they said the lawmakers were lavishly compensated just kept growing and growing.

    At one point, it included the following:  sitting, standing and maintaining every position in between; for meeting and not meeting; for clearing their throats to talk, talking, and not talking; for not clearing their throats; for belching and refraining from belching; for staying in one place and going everywhere; for picking their teeth; for the upkeep of their harems and their cars and their pets; for their clothing, right up to their intimate apparel, and generally keeping up with the latest fashion trends;  for hair care, manicure, pedicure, face and body massage; for sleeping on the job or staying awake.

    They even put it about that our lawmakers had parlayed what in their ignorance they called “the sedate and cushy job” of making laws into a punitive hardship that must be bounteously rewarded in cash.

    So unremitting was the malevolence of the calumniators that, instead of applauding our public-spirited lawmakers for submitting to debate a proposal to cut their allowances by a hefty 30 percent when they could have preempted discussion or raised their emoluments to keep pace with soaring inflation and the misfortunes of the Naira, they quipped: 30 percent of what?

    Now we know the truth.  And it has come, not from the jaundiced calumniators aforementioned, but from the least expected source–the Senate itself.

    According to Senator Sani (APC, Kaduna Central), the consolidated salary and allowances for each member of the Senate stands at only N700, 000 a month.

    In addition, each senator receives N13.5 million, being only unspecified “running costs” that must be accounted for nevertheless, and is thus strictly not a part of the so-called compensation package.

    To top it off, each senator is awarded a grant of N200 million a year as grant for projects to be sited in his or her constituency.  Contrary to what the calumniators have been claiming, the grant does not come as a cash handout.  The project is executed not by the lawmaker but through a private arrangement between him or her and a certified government agency.

    The arrangement leaves plenty of room for chiseling, Sani has acknowledged.  But it is nothing like the organised swindle the calumniators have been calling it.

    Prorated, the entire package may well gross out at some N42 million per month for each senator.  But that is emphatically not a monthly salary as the public had been led to believe.

    Even if you added the costs of all those luxury cars that the lawmakers are always acquiring with public funds and the unspent funds they share out at the end of each year as if they came out of a trading surplus, any objective commentator would give our lawmakers high praise for judicious fiscal husbandry.

    As I see it, they deserve an immediate and unconditional apology from their calumniators.

    But that is not the way the lawmakers see it.  Sani has said far too much for their comfort and pulled one stunt too many, they have been saying.  I hear they have ordered the senator representing Kogi West to bring out the knives – as if he needed any prompting.

  • As the APC faces 2019           

    As the APC faces 2019           

    The crown that had eluded President Muhammadu Buhari at three previous elections had hardly settled on his head when he was dealt a severe blow, not by the embittered stragglers of the beaten Opposition,  but by the combined forces of a stalwart of the ruling party he had worsted in the contest for the party’s presidential ticket, his acolytes, and the Opposition.

    The legislative majority Buhari was counting on to help translate his programmes and policies into law did not materialize.  The stalwart had other ideas.  In a cloak-and-dagger conspiracy, the machinery of which can be compared to a Shakespearean tragedy, he offered key legislative offices reserved for the APC as of right to the opposition in return for being elected Senate president, the third highest political office in the realm.

    That was how Dr Bukola Saraki, (APC, Kwara Central) supplanted  Senator Ahmed Lawan Ibrahim (APC, Yobe South) who had been chalked down for the post, in the process emasculating the Buhari Administration and the APC.   And that was how Ike Ekweremadu, of the PDP, who had served as deputy Senate president in the ousted Goodluck Jonathan administration, came to retain that position under the new APC Government.

    That was on June 9, 2015.

    Some members of the National Assembly, remember, were gathered in a meeting hall in Abuja, on the information that Buhari was to address them ahead of the Inauguration of the National Assembly later that day. They were still waiting there when a rump of APC senators led by Saraki, sneaked into the National Assembly, and with support from PDP senators, staged their power grab with forged  documents.  There, on national television, was a triumphal Saraki ensconced in the Speaker’s chair, gavel in hand.

    Why had Buhari not intervened to restore party discipline and due process? For an answer, the usurpers and their supporters fell back on a passage in Buhari’s Inaugural Address, wherein he had declared that, as president, he belonged “to no one and to everyone.”  By which he probably meant that, as president, he was enjoined be fair to everyone, supporter and adversary alike.

    The sentiment is unexceptionable, but the phrasing was disingenuous.  Buhari could not have meant that he was enjoined to be indifferent to the kind of scheme Saraki had hatched to become Senate president.   But that was how many inside and outside Saraki’s camp interpreted it and tried to use it    to hamstring the president.

    In truth, the president belongs in the APC, not in the PDP or any other political party.  It was through  the exertions of some key political actors that the APC was established and nurtured into a formidable political force.  The same key political actors had toiled to ensure that Buhari the party’s presidential ticket.  And it was through the exertions of party workers and across Nigeria sympathetic to his agenda that he was elected president.

    Now that he is president, he is free turn his back on them and accord their concerns no greater priority than the concerns of his sworn adversaries now in league with a faction of his party?

    In theory, perhaps, but not in the world of realpolitik.

    Buhari’s problematic phrase was even more widely interpreted as a signal that Buhari intended to cut APC national leader Asiwaju Bola Tinubu to size, now that his role as kingmaker was over.  He would be consigned to the margins.  He would play no part in the selection of key personnel and wield no influence in the day-to-day running of the administration.

    This resolve was perhaps best expressed in the aftermath of the gubernatorial election in Kogi State  won by the APC ticket of Abubakar Audu and Abiodun Faleke.  Audu died after the votes were in but before the result was officially announced. The best way of honouring the people’s choice was to proclaim Faleke governor-elect and employ the party machinery or some other transparent device to designate and finally consecrate a deputy governor.

    But the party chairman John Oyegun was inveigled into referring the matter to the Federal Attorney General who, given his reputation for obfuscation, would turn the whole thing inside out and upside down.  He lived up to that reputation; his advisory opinion, adopted wholly by a compromised court, handed the governorship to Yahaya Bello.

    Faleke was Tinubu’s candidate; if he was allowed to take power as governor, that would not only enhance Tinubu’s already huge profile, it would also extend his reach and influence to “the North.” Better to contain him; alienate him even, to the point that he felt much more comfortable and more appreciated outside Nigeria than within it.

    In today’s political climate, can Buhari still affirm that he belongs to no one and to everyone?  I cannot tell.  But I do know that his current difficulties resulted from his acting out that dictum.

    His agenda is stalled, and his reelection can no longer be taken for granted.  The legislative houses in which his party holds comfortable majorities have become an entrenched opposition, holding up his Budget proposals and confirmation of some of his nominees to key positions.

    In cahoots with a resurgent PDP, they moved to amend the Constitution to eliminate a provision of the electoral law they believe will play to Buhari’s advantage if he is a candidate, not minding that the amendment could work against whomever the party puts up as its candidate.

    Meanwhile, they are poised to dump the APC and embrace whichever party seems likely to advance their personal fortunes – and the public interest be damned.

    As things stand now, the APC as we know it may well enter the 2019 race fragmented and hobbled.  It will score high on effort and low on results.  In formal terms, the responsibility for its performance belongs to Buhari.  He is the president and answerable for his acts and for acts done in his name.

    In an informal but more damning sense, the responsibility also belongs to his handpicked officials and aides who have taken advantage of his laid-back approach and sought to run the government as a closed shop.

    It is to First lady Aisha Buhari’s credit that she saw through this cynical ploy and deplored it.

    Irony of ironies,  it is to Tinubu that the beleaguered President Buhari has now turned to help bring the feuding factions of the APC together so that the can face the 2019 general elections with confidence – the same Tinubu he and his cohorts have treated most shabbily, for no good reason.

    Concerned that he was about to be used again and dumped thereafter, many of Tinubu’s friends and associates urged him to decline the assignment.  But his commitment to the survival of the baby he helped bring forth and nurtured to winning form, plus his overarching sense of public service, seem to have supervened.

    If anyone can carry out the task Buhari has assigned, it has to be Tinubu.  It must be hoped that it is not too late.

  • Two embattled scholars

    Two embattled scholars

    The University of Ilorin stated a greater truth than it realized or intended when, in a report on its website detailing the staggering academic and professional accomplishments of the presenter of its 33rd Convocation Lecture, Professor Chris Imafidon, it described him as an “enigmatic personality.”

    More than four months after the event, the “intellectual colossus” and uber-achiever whose “rich and resounding voice tore neatly into the velvet air of the jam-packed” university of Auditorium, the “talented raconteur whose tub-thumping oratory wowed his audience for more than two hours and drove many among them to “tears of ecstasy” and who left no one in doubt about the true definition of genius,” Imafidon is in retrospect nothing if not an enigma.

    In the build-up to the Lecture, the University and other news sources had descried him as

    a multi-award winning researcher, and member of the Information Age Executive Round-table Forum – which is made up of the top 15 IT experts, decision-makers, CIOs, and executives in the UK, a consultant to governments and industry leaders, professor at Oxford University’s Keble College, and a visiting professor at leading American universities, among them including Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, Yale, and  Georgetown

    Imation’s other distinctions include serving as an internal and external post-graduate

    Examiner for Cambridge University, Imperial College, University College London, mentoring Ph.D. candidates at Queen Mary University of London, where he was Head of the Management Technology Unit.

    He raised a family of prodigies through a technique he perfected. That is no mean achievement.  He has also been listed as a leading ophthalmologist in the UK

    The foregoing should render Imafidon a polymath any times over.  But the University of Ilorin was right to call him an enigma, for an enigma he is

     

    At least one of his main bragging rights – an Oxford professorship has not checked out.  The authorities there say he does not figure in their records as student, staff, adjunct or faculty, merely that s young woman by that surname — one of Chris Imafidon’s daughters, it turned out — took a degree at their Kebel College many years ago.

    You would think that Imafidon would take high umbrage and paint the Internet and news outlets in Nigeria with pictures of himself ensconced in his book-lined, trophy-draped Oxford faculty office, or giving a tutorial, or participating at an important function of the university, all decked out in academic robes.

    Instead, he presents only his University Library Card as proof of the affiliation and challenges Oxford to demonstrate that his claim rests on shaky ground.

    Some of Imafidon’s other claims of affiliation with many other institutions, learned societies and professional bodies worldwide have turned out to be just as suspect.

    The whole thing calls to mind the case of another professor, Dr Gabriel Oyibo who burst sensationally on the intellectual scene in Nigeria some 12 years ago, when one of the more reputable Nigerian newspapers reported that he had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in physics three consecutive times.

    Albert Einstein had spent the last two decades of his life in a futile search for what has been called the “holy grail” of physics, a unified field theory that explains and the behavior of all matter, from sub-atomic particles to entire galaxies.

    In a message to a conference of the world’s leading astrophysicists in Beijing, China, in 2007, the Stephen Hawking announced that he and his colleagues were close to finding the elusive “holy grail.”

    Gabriel Oyibo was missing in Beijing.  He had no use for such gatherings. Way back in 1995, he said, he had found that “holy grail” and solved the problem Hawking and other cosmologists were still grappling with, long after Einstein.

    To this epochal breakthrough, Oyibo gave the curiously unscientific name of God Almighty’s Grand United Theorem, or GAGUT.

    GAGUT constitutes “the long awaited, the long sought, the holiest of holy grails of physics and mathematics,” he declared portentously on the website of his “research centre” OFFAPIT Institute of Technology (OITECH).

    The best evidence I could find for this rather exorbitant claim can be found a paper he presented in March 1995 at a symposium in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, a world-class university from which he earned his doctorate.  The paper was published in the proceedings of the symposium, with Oyibo himself as editor.

    Its title, “A General Mathematical Proof of Einstein’s Theory Using a New Group Theory,” does not immediately suggest a monumental breakthrough. But a professor familiar with the paper described it as “the first to complete the task that intrigued and challenged” Einstein.

    That feat, Edith Luchins said in a letter posted on the OITECH web site, placed Oyibo in the rank of world-class scientists, adding that “he is eminently qualified for the Nobel Prize in physics.”

    Luchins’s letter is undated, and is reproduced on the site only in part. Still, it is a ringing endorsement of Oyibo’s accomplishment, even if not exactly a nomination for a Nobel

    in physics.  Pushed relentlessly by Oyibo himself, it ignited reports in the news media in Nigeria that Oyibo had been nominated for the Nobel and catapulted him into the ranks of the immortals.

    Oyibo was flown to Nigeria, all expenses paid, by the National Universities Commission on a triumphal lecture tour. The Senate, parroting Oyibo’s claim that GAGUT could lead to a cure for HIV/AIDS and lift Africa out of its underdevelopment, passed a resolution designating him the first recipient of the African International Prize for Science and Technology.  His scraggy, contemplative visage now adorns the N50 postage stamp, which describes him as a “mathematical genius.”

    It was as if he had actually won the Nobel.

    Those versed in the scholarly scientific literature will have learned of Oyibo through

    his numerous publications in the leading journals of aeronautical engineering and mathematics, enough to earn him a professorship at one of the better universities.

    Indeed, an emeritus professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said

    Oyibo had published “some good, useful papers” in aero elasticity and composite material structures that should serve him well in consideration for a Presidential Medal in Science.

    The MIT professor, John Dugundji added in a letter dated June 28, 2000, that he was not competent to judge Oyibo’s more recent work in the fundamental problems of physics – the very work on which Oyibo’s claim to the stature of a Nobelist rests.

    This subtle disclaimer, I suspect, flows from the very nature of GAGUT itself. The  theory sounds suspiciously like the Biblical account of  creation dressed in scientific jargon.  Inserting God into what purports to be a scientific theory is a derogation of the canons of science.

    Nor did Oyibo help matters by the company he keeps.

    A posting on his OITECH site once featured a resolution by the New York Progressive Baptist State Convention endorsing him for a Nobel Prize and announcing the launch of a campaign to raise $2 million to call global attention to his achievements.

    The books he claims to have written on GAGUT are nowhere to be found. Most curiously for a world-class scientist and Nobel candidate, Oyibo is not affiliated with any top-notch research university.  In fact, he has no affiliation with any university at all.

    After basking in the limelight for one brief, shining moment, Oyibo seems to have sunk into oblivion with his GAGUT. Perhaps he is busy reworking it.  The “holy grail” of physics is yet to be apprehended.

    As for Professor Imafidon, it is unlikely that he will be getting any invitations soon from any Nigerian university to present a Convocation lecture or learned address.

    A motivational speech, perhaps.  That is where his genius lies.  The University of Ilorin got its money’s worth.

  • Matters miscellaneous

    Matters miscellaneous

    With so much happening so quickly, the usual recourse of this page is Matters Miscellaneous, in which I try to catch up on the glut of occurrenceswith broad strokes and in short takes.

    Today’s miscellany begins with a follow-up on last week’s column calling attention to some exceedingly attractive job openings for applicants from Nigeria, Ghana and Africa, at Michael MuchinyoIndustries Ltd, in Tokyo, Japan, manufacturers of the best car paint in the world

    The pay, only $7,000 a week as at December 2018, now stands at $10, 000 for a six-day week (Mon-Sat) and may well have risen since the column appeared.  About the only thing the successful applicant will be responsible for is income tax.  Everything else comes free. At the end of 15 years with the company, the employee stands to receive $500,000, a house,and a car by way of gratuity.

    So went the advert copy.  As a service to the public, I promised to send Muchinyo’s contact information, on request.

    Not exactly a deluge, but numerous indeed were the text and email messages that came by way of response.  A good many would-be candidates thanked me profusely for calling attention to the advert and asked if I would be so kind as to send  them Muchinyo’s contact information immediately.

    Their earnestness was touching indeed.

    I was deeply concerned, however, that their enthusiasm would be vitiated by the dire warnings of the killjoys whom we shall always have among us, unfortunately. They said the whole thing was a gigantic fraud, and that I stand to be charged with aiding and abetting.

    One of these days, I will publish a selection from the correspondence.

    Meanwhile, I am glad to relate that the killjoys, aforementioned, have it wrong on this one, and that the enthusiasts stand to have the last laugh.

    The assistant whom I had asked to call Muchinyo and apprise them of his interest in the advertised position received the email message infra from its Nigerian representative (mmuchichi@yahoo.com)  last Thursday, on the strength of his enquiry alone, without even filing an application:

    “GOOD MORNING . pls our confarmations have come from the company micheal muchinyo company now our visa ticket is aveilable in ghanaplsevery bodyhave to be in ghana by wed 21th febuary to summit the inter passport 22th thurs morning for visa. ticket collections and departure is sat  24th night by 8.45 through kotaka inter airport by hossana air to dubai and transit to cathay p air to japan tokyopls get ready and call me thanks.  Eazy.”

    It remains to wish all the successful applicants an uneventful passage to Tokyo and a fulfilling sojourn in thatgreat metropolis. Please go easy on the sushi and the sake (pronounced sakeh) they’ll be serving on Cathay Pacific.

    A Fight in the Executive Branch

    In Nigeria, nothing is impossible.  But pitched combat for power and control between a Cabinet Minister and the head of a sub-ministerial department is a rarity.  And when it does occur, it has the gripping quality of a telenovela.

    I have in mind the on-going, very public feud between the Minister of Health, Professor Isaac Adewole, and the Executive Secretary of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), Professor Yusuf Usman.  Investigations raised suspicions that Usman may have bilked the agencyof some N1 billion.  The Minister asked Usman to take a vacation so that a thorough investigation could be conducted.

    Usman refused and rented a crowd to stir things up instead.  The Ministry split into two factions, pro and contra, as if the staff were card-carrying stalwarts of the Road Transport Workers Union.  Further investigations have since confirmed allegations of serious fraud at the NHIS.

    Decisive intervention from on high was clearly indicated.  It came from President Muhammadu Buhari, urging the Minister and his recalcitrant subordinate to go find ways of working together harmoniously.  Meanwhile, the Ministry is wracked by turmoil.

    Usman has been so besmirched that he cannot continue to function with any credibility.Adewale seems unwilling not resign as a matter of honour, though it is now clear that he no longer enjoys the President’s confidence.  Nor can Usman and Adewole work harmoniously.

    Both of them should go.

    Fixing the 2019 General Elections

    Well before the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) put out its schedule for the 2019 General Elections,some desperate politicians had, in manoeuvers little noticed by a public that has far more important issues to contend with, determined that the extant arrangements would not serve their ambition and had, in their sneaky ways, moved the National Assembly to carry out what amounts to nothing less than a back-door amendment to the Constitution.

    Their reasoning, as I understand it, is that staging the President election in the first of a three-stage or two-stage poll will exert a “bandwagon effect” on the entire exercise, with the result of the presidential election determining the outcome of subsequent contests.

    There is scant empirical support for the kind ofeffect the lawmakers claim they are concerned to eliminate.  If one existed, the governing political party to which most them belongwould profit the most.  So, why would they consciously seek to disempower themselves?  Certainly not out of concern for equity and fair play. That is not their way of doing business.

    In whatever case, any bandwagon or primacy-recencyeffect will operate across the entire contest, no matter the order of the elections.

    So, why not hold all the elections on the same day?

    Cattle Colonyon the Runway

    Those ubiquitous cattle minders who have turned farmlands into killing fields and laid waste rural communities, colonized AkureAirport, in Ondo State, last Saturday, virtually blockading the runway as an Air Peace plane approached for landing.

    Ekiti State Governor Ayo Fayose and others waiting to board the plane watched in horror as the pilot was forced to execute all kinds of emergency manouevers to avert crash landing.

    Isn’t that carrying open grazing too far?

    This hair-raising incident will no doubt spur Fayose to complete the Ado-Ekiti International Airport that has been his administration’s prime project.  Those obdurate herders know that their prized wards caught grazing there will end up in soup pots across the state to bolster his stalled Stomach Infrastructure programme.

    With that facility in place, the world-acclaimed poet and native son Niyi Osundare, among other distinguished native sons, can fly into Ado-Ekiti direct from his base in New Orleans, conduct a seminar on Comparative African And Asian Poetry at the state university, dash home to Ikere-Ekiti for a piping-hot pounded yam dinner and jet back to New Orleans, arriving in time to give a keynote address at a colloquium on Post-Soviet Literature in Central Europe.

    Transparency demands that I disclose the collateral benefit that will redound to me from the completion of the Ado-Ekiti International Airport.  I would be able to fly direct from Chicago to Ado-Ekiti, cutting off that cratered, accident-prone stretch from Lagos and its infestation of armed robbers and kidnappers.  From there, I should be able to endure the 80 km stretch to Kabba.

    Hurry up, Governor.  Don’t leave office without completing and inaugurating the airport. It will stand an enduring monument to your tenure.

    Finally, finally

    I wish I could broach this matter with the utmost delicacy and avoid altogether the vulgarity in which it has been framed.

    It concerns the imposing statue of the recently ousted President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, emplaced scarcely five months ago in the Imo State capital, Owerri, by his admirer and fellow philanthropist, Owelle Governor Rochas Okorocha.

    Out of the coarsest of motives,the governor’s detractors called it “Okorocha’s erection.”  Behind his back, of course.

    Now that Zuma has become another instance of the instability of human greatness, those same detractors are wondering what will become of it.

    Keep them wondering, Your Excellency.

  • Tokyo calling

    Tokyo calling

    Half-way into the electronic edition of one of the more reputable national dailies, I found my eyes settling on an advertisement at the bottom of a right-hand page.  At first glance, there was nothing remarkable about it. Not even its cluttered appearance, for the papers carry at least a dozen adverts like that everyday, placed by marginal vendors concerned to obtain the biggest bang for their Naira.

    The typography was in like manner nondescript. The copy just lay flat on the page, without visual appeal or any kind of appeal for that matter.  That was probably not the intent, but the copy seems designed to make readers wish they were younger; that they had shunned all those campus cults and paid far greater attention to their studies.

    You know the kind of advertisements I am talking about – those inviting applications from university graduates who hold 2nd Class Upper (First Class preferred) degrees, possess four years of cognate experience, and will be 26 years old or younger at their next birthday, and please, you need not apply unless you meet these stipulations and others not spelled out in the copy.

    Such advertisements, I gather, are designed to fulfill all righteousness before officials of the Labour Department.  If the positions exist at all, if they were not placed to create the illusion that the firm was alive to its social responsibilities and solvent enough to hire the best and the brightest, the positions will have been filled long ago with far less qualified wards of influential insiders.

    Perhaps it was the tabloid headline VACANCY!  VACANCY!  VACANCY!!! that attracted my attention. Right beneath the headline, the copy announces:  22 More Men Wanted.

    Not just from anywhere, but from “Africa; Nigeria and Ghana”.

    Very precise:  22 men. So, you can weigh your chances of being hired and decide whether to apply or not.  I am myself not looking for a job, but I have a legion of relations, friends and acquaintances desperately looking for work. A good many of them have been on the job market for so long that they can no longer recall when they last held down a regular job, with salaries paid and benefits provided regularly.

    Some have never worked since graduating. If I called the advertisement to attention, perhaps one or two of them might secure a position. The odds are galactic, but one chance in a googol is still a chance.

    Also very transparent: No women. The usual people might find this particular stipulation sexist, but they will find little sympathy with those for who getting a job is serious, existential business.

    You knew right away that this was not one of those creepy agencies seeking to recruit our desperate women for the fleshpots of Rome, Milan, Naples and Turin. And there are plenty of indications to help you figure out whether the effort would be worth your while.

    The recruiter is none other than Michael Muchinyo Industry Limited of Tokyo, Japan – yes, Japan, not Tripoli or Benghazi or whatever remains of Libya. Muchinyo are, the advert copy states, “manufacturers of the best car paint in the world,” as well as “the best motor nylon tyre and rims 4x4x36.”

    Since no educational or technical qualifications or technical skills are required, it can safely be assumed that successful applicants will be trained on the job.

    From there, employees can expect to graduate to a life of abundance. In fact, it turns out that there has never been a better time than this to work with Muchinyo.  According to the advert copy, the company has just raised workers’ pay from $7,000 to $10,000 a week. This is not a misprint, please.  And the currency is the United States dollar, not the Japanese Yen.

    It gets better, dreamlike even, for employees who log 15 years of service. They will each receive a house in any city(sic) in Tokyo (sic), $500,000, and a brand new car as gratuity.

    All this, it is necessary to emphasise, comes without prejudice to many fringe benefits, including, but not limited to free medical check-ups, free ticket (further elaboration will probably be provided, but it is safe to assume that it is an airline ticket for the passage to Tokyo to resume duties), free visa, free work permit, free accommodation, and free city transportation.

    You will have to put up with those pesky taxes, unfortunately. But the work week is only six days, Monday through Saturday. You have the whole of Sunday entirely to yourself.

    To be considered for a position with Muchinyo, Nigerian applicants are required to furnish their current international passports, BTA or “Body Travelling Allowance” in the sum of $500 only.  I suspect they mean “Basic Travelling Allowance, or maybe that is what they call it in Japan.  They will also need to furnish a Doctor’s report, Police Clearance, and Drug Clearance.

    As any full-time job-seeker will tell you, these requirements are the least burdensome, slightly more than you can be expected to meet even for jobs that pay  starvation wages.  They are not asking for certificates of birth, educational attainments, prizes and distinctions, publications, performance evaluations, etc., etc., all of them originals; no certified copies, please.

    When you are done, Muchinyo helpfully counsels, send your CV and all your information to a designated yahoo email address, or call their agents (cell phone numbers supplied).  Worried that they will be besieged every working day by a surging army of applicants, they wisely omitted their office address from the advert copy.

    There you have Muchinyo’s advert copy in all its tantalising detail.

    It remains to confess that if I could pass myself off as a young man, I would suppress my instinctive aversion to great adventure and apply to be considered.  For that kind of compensation, who wouldn’t, except our National Assembly lawmakers?

    But since I cannot in good conscience apply, I have as a service to the devoted followers of this column asked my assistant to follow up on the advertisement.  Yesterday afternoon, he called one of the numbers supplied by Muchinyo.  Before the phone rang thrice , a cheery male voice asked him to call again in 30 minutes.

    Perhaps they were at that very moment taking calls from prospective applicants all over Nigeria, Ghana, and indeed Africa.

    My ever dutiful assistant called 30 minutes later.  This time, he was told to send all his application material to the email address supplied.  Do they have an office address?  To which the Muchinyo man responded with more than a hint of impatience:  What do you need an office address for?  Are we not talking to each other by phone right now?  And do you not have our email address?

    I would be impatient too, positively angry even, if I was offering such generous employment terms and a job seeker was asking for my office location, of all things.  Soon they would be asking for my name and information of the really personal kind.

    But this should not discourage those who wish to try their luck. It may well be that Muchinyo had an exceedingly busy time yesterday.

    One thing is for sure:  the phone numbers and the email that I will supply on request are genuine.  In this age of syndicated electronic crime, that is no small assurance.  To be doubly sure you may wish to check out their email address as well.

    Good luck.  In your prosperity, remember that it was this column that showed you the way.

  • What is IBB up to?

    What is IBB up to?

    President Muhammadu Buhari and his senior aides must have spent this past weekend trying to decipher the inner meaning and long-term implications of broadsides about his Administration released for public consumption last week  by two of his predecessors.

    The first, from former President Olusegun Obasanjo, was a no-hold-barred excoriation. There is no doubting its author, for it is composed in the blunt, sledge-hammer tradition of political pamphleteering that is his trademark.  He painted in broad strokes what he regarded as Buhari’s failures, urged him not          to seek a second term, and announced he was going to convene a Coalition for Nigeria to chart the way forward, unencumbered by the dysfunctions of the existing political parties and their superannuated leaders.

    To almost everyone’s surprise, the Coalition registered its arrival on the scene in Abeokuta less than 48 hours later, with Obasanjo himself, former Osun State Governor, Olagunsoye Oyinlola, and Donald Duke, former Cross River State governor and a presidential wannabe for 2019, among other veterans.

    Even Ahmadu Ali  — the same Ali of the 1977 campus upheavals, and more recently chairman of the inept PDP would not be left out.  It has also been reported that our good friend Professor Jerry Gana, former director-general of the defunct Directorate of Food, Roads and Rural Infrastructure (DFRRI), former director-general of the defunct Directorate for Social Mobilisation, former Minister of Agriculture etc, etc, is standing by to enlist

    Give it to Obasanjo:  No one ever accused him of dilatoriness.

    But it is the second broadside and its postscript that are of concern here.  The former came in the name of former military president Ibrahim Babangida, and was released to the media by his spokesperson of 14 years, Prince Kassim Afegbua.

    In vain does one comb it for the former military president’s deft footwork, his subtlety and his willful obfuscation, all designed to give him room for escape and leave him unscathed in any ensuing rage.

    He dismissed Buhari as an analog president in an era that calls for a digital leader and challenged him to produce evidence of the “change” he said had come to lead.

    He described the killings in Benue by Fulani cattle herdsmen as a “pogrom” and brought to public attention an incident in Dansauda, in Zamfara State, in which “over 200 souls were wasted for no justifiable reason.”

    “In the fullness of our present realities,” the statement said, “we need to cooperate with President Muhammadu Buhari to complete his term of office on May 29, 2019 and collectively prepare the way for a new generation of leaders to assume the mantle of leadership in Nigeria.”

    Babangida stated that he did not intend to deny Buhari his inalienable right to vote and be voted for.  “But there comes a time in the life of a nation,” he added poignantly, when personal ambition should not override national interest.”

    This does not sound like Babangida.  My textual analysis leads me to conclude that it is Afegbua’s composition all right. In tone and phrasing, not forgetting the barbs planted here and there, it bears a striking resemblance to many statements he had issued previously for his principal.

    I recall a particular one, responding to Obasanjo’s caustic attack on Babangida,   Afegbua seized on some unsavoury disclosures Obasanjo’s estranged son, Gbenga, to bludgeon Obasanjo literally and figuratively below the belt.

    Even if that was his remit, I warned on this page, he should have discharged it with greater circumspection.  Remember, I admonished him, that there was life after Babangida.

    Reading the broadside he issued recently in Babangida’s name, I thought, “Here we go again.”  This time I was sure Babangida would disavow the explosive statement credited to him and leave his spokesperson to rue the consequence.

    So, when another statement arrived in Babangida’s name, disavowing the one previously issued by Afegbua, I chuckled.  Vindication, at last.  Afegbua had finally overreached himself.

    And when police Inspector-General Ibrahim Idris reportedly ordered Afegbua arrested for making a “fake statement,” it looked as if Afegbua was doomed.

    On close examination, I can state with confidence that the statement in question could not have been written by Afegbua.  The grammatical flaws gave the game away.  “It has been drawn to my attention a press statement . . .” it began.  It spoke of how political events and civil unrest in many parts of the country “has raised many questions” on governance and unity.

    It characterized 2018 as being “inundated with seasons of literatures” on the corporate existence of Nigeria and how “many of such literatures have shown concerns of the corporate existence of Nigeria beyond the 2019 general elections.”

    Shortly thereafter, Afegbua appeared on television and gave interviews in which he said he stood by his earlier statement on behalf of Babangida, and that he had his principal’s authority to say that much.

    So, what went wrong?

    Afegbua’s explanation has a persuasive ring.

    When the first statement was issued and some of Babangida’s friends saw how it had been sensationalized in social media, they  were worried that it might put him on a collision course with  Buhari by the social media, and then took it upon themselves to issue the lexically-challenged rebuttal.

    Afegbua said Babangida had called him to say that the original statement stood, and that its “kernel” was designed to inform public discourse, not to be taken as an attack on Buhari’s person.

    And at this writing, Afegbua has not been arrested.

    So, there you have it.

    But there is this lingering question:  What is the calculating resident of the Minna Hilltop Mansion really up to?

    It is an outrageous thought, but is he testing the waters against 2019?  Is his aim to be counted with Obasanjo as a statesman who warned against the forces impeding good governance and undermining national cohesion, while leaving himself an escape hatch in case of reprisals?  Was he putting the final seal on his 1985 broadcast announcing and justifying Buhari’s ouster as military Head of State, followed by almost two years in detention? Is this a way of making up for the umpteenth time with Obasanjo?

    You never know with IBB.

  • OBJ don talk

    OBJ don talk

    The title of this piece was inspired by an incident on the Zaria-Kano local train in the late 1950s.

    Three rows across the aisle from me in the half-empty third-class coach sat a passenger, his head literally buried in the newspaper he seemed to be reading, a broadsheet.  From what I could make out, it was the West African Pilot.

    I paid no further notice until some10 minutes later when, to no apparent purpose and to no one in particular, he called out rather sententiously, “Zik don talk,” nodding vigorously, as if in concurrence with the aforementioned “Zik.”

    Everyone in the coach was startled.

    “Zik” was of course Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, scholar, legendary newspaperman, publisher of the West African Pilot and a string of regional titles, Leader of the NCNC, and premier of Eastern Nigeria.

    Some 10 minutes later, the passenger made the same declaration with the same gesture, eliciting the same response from his captive audience.

    I got up from my seat, walked past him as if I was headed to the next coach, and walked back some five minutes later just to look over his shoulder to get some idea of the material that had affected him so much.

    It was the West African Pilot all right. But he had been holding it upside down all along even as he riffed lustily on the Zik -don-talk declaration.  We never got to know what Zik actually said, nor the occasion.

    But that singular declaration has stuck with me all these years.

    I was reminded of it last week by former president Dr Olusegun Obasanjo’s special statement on the state of the nation. It was Obasanjo on the top of his ebullient form, blunt as a punch to the nose and twice as unsettling.

    Within hours of the release of the statement, “Obasanjo don talk” or variations thereof had become its summative frame. What Obasanjo said was splendidly displayed on the front pages and the headlines of Nigerian newspapers in all its prolixity, and reported concisely but with no loss of impact by the international news media.

    Abuja roadside entrepreneurs who know an opportunity when they see one, hurriedly packaged the special statement in compact, durable pamphlets and peddled them all over the city. Supplies ran out quickly, necessitating a second print run, and a third.

    The “special statement” contained nothing that you would not hear Nigerians discussing animatedly in homes, offices, bus stops, airports, beer parlours, and pepper-soup joints – indeed wherever two or three Nigerians are gathered:  the stagnant economy. the deepening frustrations of young men and women who cannot find work, the suffocating corruption, the epileptic power supply, the broken infrastructure, nepotism and lack of empathy at the highest level of government, the security vacuum that has emboldened cattle herders to turn farmlands into killing fields and entire communities into refugees, the pervasive lack of faith in public institutions, and the general loss of hope in a future that promises only more of the same.

    Given this litany of woes and Buhari’s recent medical history, Obasanjo said, Buhari would serve Nigeria best by foreswearing a second term, leaving the field to those better equipped to grapple with the country’s pressing problems.

    There is nothing new in the litany.  Pick up a newspaper or watch the news on any given day and you will find example upon example of these aberrations. What imparted a jarring salience to the message is the messenger, a personage who cannot be ignored.

    The Presidency was gracious in its response.  It pointed out areas where its policies and programmes have borne fruit – agriculture is a case in point, as are the counter-insurgency campaign against Boko  Haram and gains in the anti-corruption campaign – and admitted that much remained to be done.

    Not so Buhari’s well-placed supporters and their proxies in the traditional as well as in the misnamed  social media.

    They answered Obasanjo invective for invective.  They questioned his good faith and his qualifications for passing judgment on Buhari and offering him what they dismissed as gratuitous advice.  They reprised what was regarded at the time as a thinly-veiled attempt by Obasanjo to award himself a third term as president, contrary to the express stipulations of the Constitution. They reminded everyone that it was he who foisted on Nigeria the inept Shehu Shagari, the provincial Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, and the clueless Goodluck Jonathan.

    There was not a grain of altruism in is prescriptions, they said, only opportunism masquerading as statesmanship. His epistle, they said, was shot through and through with self-righteousness.  The Coalition for Nigeria he was proposing was nothing more than the vehicle he intended to ride back to power.

    Anyone examining Obasanjo’s record will find not a little to agree with in this excoriation.  But that is beside the point.  What matters is that millions of long-suffering Nigerians who believed that they were voting for change have seen little change and that a person of consequence like   Obasanjo spoke up for them, drawing on their lived experience.  Killing the messenger will not wipe out the message.

    True, the Administration has been in power for only two years, and has spent much of that time arresting the drift and decay of the Jonathan era.

    Still, in those two years, the public should have seen a radically different way of conducting government business and a tempo that matches the urgency of the situation.

    Obasanjo’s searing assessment need not pass as the definitive judgment on Buhari’s tenure, 2015-2019, however.

    This year will be consumed for the most part by preparations for next year’s general elections. The Administration may not be able to initiate many new programmes. But it can pursue with greater vigour and commitment those already approved. To enhance performance, it should press into service proven achievers.

    With oil now selling for N70 a barrel, the revenue profile should make more money available for projects that will advance its Change Agenda and help pare down the backlog of salaries and pensions owed public service employees and contractors. The spending will have a multiplier effect on the economy.

    Before Obasanjo released his “special statement,” the word in town was that Buhari would seek a second term. Even while he was in hospital, some influential members of his Cabinet and top officials of the APC were drumming up support for his re-election.

    Buhari himself had uncharacteristically let his guard down to confirm, more or less that he would be running.  But lately, he has been more tentative.  His close aides say he is still weighing his options.

    One thing is certain: Obasanjo’s “special statement” has shaken loose the entire field.  If Buhari decides to run, many aspirants to the Presidency who had been sitting on the fence will now see him as vulnerable, and challenge him for the APC ticket. If he decides against running, that would clear the path for Northern aspirants like the desperate Atiku Abubakar, the calculating Bukola Saraki, and the freewheeling Rabiu Kwankwaso to claim the second of the two terms they say belongs to the North by convention.

    The foregoing, I should state, is based on the assumption that APC, the PDP and the ANPP, the smallest of more than 50 fringe political parties, will not be swept away by the tide that Obasanjo’s Coalition for Nigeria is sure to unleash.

  • To the Newspapers Proprietors Association of Nigeria

    To the Newspapers Proprietors Association of Nigeria

    Belated but sincere congratulations on the winning for the second time in 43 years, the hosting rights to the World Congress of the International Press Institute (IPI), the global network of journalists, editors and media executives dedicated to media freedom, the free flow of news wherever they are threatened, and the improvement of journalism practices.

    I am sure you all recall that Nigeria first won the hosting rights to the Congress at a time now regarded with nostalgia as its Golden Age.  The end of the civil war and the pace of reconciliation that defied doomsday predictions of mass annihilation loosed on the land a heady optimism.  The oil boom was superheating the national economy.  A dynamic foreign policy gave Nigeria a new, assertive voice and a new standing in international affairs. Nigerians everywhere walked tall, believing that nothing was beyond their country’s attainment.

    This conflation, plus Nigeria’s reputation as home of the largest and freest press in Africa, played no little part in the assignment of the 1975 hosting rights to Nigeria.

    Ironically, it was also Nigeria’s new assertive voice and new standing in international affairs that, in a way, truncated what was supposed to be a World Congress.

    Nigeria refused to grant visas to apartheid South Africa’s delegation, despite strong pressure from the IPI and Western nations.  The Soviet Union and Third World countries backed Nigeria.  In yet another debacle with Cold War undertones, a divided IPI held two parallel meetings in lieu of an official Congress.  Western nations met in Vienna, Austria, and the rest of the world met in Lagos, with our own Lateef Jakande as one of the driving forces.

    More than four decades later, the entire IPI, with membership from more than 130 countries will meet in Abuja from June 21-23, for its 2018 World Congress, which has as its theme “Why Good Journalism Matters.”

    Congratulations, Kabiru Yusuf, chair of the Nigerian section of IPI and publisher of the TRUST newspaper group, and the team whose six-minute video helped clinch the hosting rights for Nigeria.

    It is a good sign that, unlike other bodies and institutions that rarely get to work on undertakings of this nature until the last minute, the Newspapers Proprietors Association of Nigeria (NPAN) is leaving nothing to chance. Its Local Organizing Committee, comprising leading publishers, proprietors and some of the best media professions, has been moving on a broad front and engaging with the usual stakeholders to ensure a successful outing.

    The World Congress is coming to Nigeria at a difficult time for the global media.  The capacity to absorb continuing losses is what now sustains the media for the most part.  Given is discontinuities of the national economy, this condition is probably truer of Nigeria than it is of most countries credited with a vibrant media system.

    Hosting the IPI World Congress not going to be cheap.  But the NPAN must stoutly resist every attempt to turn it into a government-sponsored event.

    Government has a role, especially in protocol, logistics, and in providing security for the visiting delegates and at all the conference venues.  Beyond that, its role should be limited and circumscribed. But the Nigerian Newspapers Proprietors Association (NPAN) should in no way encourage political officials to believe that the IPI s coming to “showcase” Nigeria to the world — i.e. dwell only on the most positive aspects of Nigerian life.

    Visiting will no doubt give ample coverage to realities of Nigerian life – the good, the not so good, and the positively ugly.   They will report on the glamour and glitz of Abuja, but they will also report on the broken infrastructure, the epileptic power supply, and the squalor of the surrounding squatter camps.

    If the reporting should dwell for the most part on the not so good and the positively ugly, public officials should not regard that outcome as a poor return on whatever they might have regarded as an investment.

    That, unfortunately, is just the way journalists in most parts of the world, including Nigeria, have been socialized into news work.

    In Nigeria, events of this nature tend to rest on “donations” from the government, which has its own agenda, and the so-called organized private sector, acting out of a sense of corporate social responsibility.  The latter is not always totally disinterested, but the NPAN can handle any fallout of donations from that province.

    But government donations to professional organizations are especially treacherous. They often end up destabilizing, if not compromising, the recipient body.  No one understood that better than – who else? – military president Ibrahim Babangida, who  took pride in conducting a “government by donation” as the noted poet and public intellectual, Odia Ofeimun, phrased it.

    If Bagangida wanted to sow the seeds of rancor, factionalization or disintegration in a professional  body, he seized upon any pretext to award it a large donation, especially if he could not take its goodwill for granted.  Almost immediately fights broke out over what the donation was meant for, the precise beneficiary, and sometimes the exact amount.  The in-fighting made it harder for the organization to speak with one coherent voice.

    The larger the donation, the greater the propensity for conflict within.  Rarely did the organization recover fully.

    Ask the Performing Musicians Association of Nigeria.  Ask the Nigerian Bar Association, which received a multi-million Naira grant to host a conference of the African Bar Association.  Ask the Nigerian Union of journalists which received, per its chairman Sani Zorro, a donation of N30 million toward instituting a welfare scheme for journalists.   In particular, ask what happened to the donation.

    The NPAN needs all the resources it can find.  But given this capsule history, and not forgetting the kerfuffle that broke over what it unwisely received from the National Security Adviser Sambo Dasuki as compensation for loss of business occasioned by government agents and Boko Haram insurgents, the NPAN will do well not to seek or accept any cash donation toward staging the 2018 IPI World Congress.

    Remember that in Nigeria, nothing divides like money, even among those we are used to regarding as prosperous.

    As much as possible, seek donations in kind.  If you must accept cash donations, make sure that they are properly accounted for.  It would be sad indeed if anything remotely indicative of a financial scandal should supplant news of a successful hosting or damage the NPAN’s reputation beyond repair.

    Good luck, and all the best.

     

                                            Ambassador Oladapo Fafowora

     

    There is little to add to the tribute my colleague Tunji “Cyclone”Adegboyega and deputy chair of the Editorial Board paid to Ambassador Dr Oladapo Fafowora in his January 21, 2018, column, on the occasion Dr Fafowora’s “retirement” from this newspaper’s Editorial Board.

    As one of several consultants, Dr  Fafowora, was a leading light on the Editorial Board on The Guardian  when I had the honour of being the editorial page editor and subsequently chair of the Editorial Board, from 1988 through 1994.

    He was, and has remained, everything you expect of a diplomat of the first rank:  exceedingly knowledgeable, impeccably mannered, uncommonly discreet.  Unless you researched his past, you would not know that, in a long and distinguished career, he had served as cabinet secretary in General  Obasanjo’s military government, deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador to Turkey, and director-general of the Nigerian Manufacturers’ Association.  Nor would you know that he earned his decorate from Oxford.

    Though he has some strong convictions, he is dispassionate for the most part, yet very engaging.  He had majored in History, but he wrote on economics with authority.  His weekly columns for this newspaper on a wide range of subjects shone through and through with insight, scholarship, and mastery of exposition.