The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • Those rampaging herders

    Those rampaging herders

    It must be hard to reconcile oneself to the thought that one will never see in the flesh again the mother, father, uncle, brother, sister, niece, grandfather, grandmother, grandson, granddaughter, friend, nephew, schoolmate, workplace colleague, friend, neighbour or casual acquaintance one had wished a Merry Christmas three weeks ago or a Happy New Year the following week and had fully expected to interact with again, perhaps the very next day or week or much later.

    But that is the grim reality with which thousands of our compatriots must now live, in addition to the pains and hardship and jarring discontinuities of life in Nigeria.

    Their loved ones were slaughtered by the hundreds, in the dead of night, by Fulani cattle herders asserting the preposterous right to graze their cattle anywhere they please, with no regard for the property rights and the lives of residents of the communities on which they set they their murderous sights.

    Everywhere they have operated in the Middle Belt and even farther south, they have left a tide of blood, tears, destruction, devastation and misery.  Plateau State was their preferred theater of carnage.  Hardly a week passed without their sacking one community or another and devastating their farmlands to make life more abundant for cattle.

    The marauders have since moved farther afield to turn farmlands in southern Kaduna State, Adamawa, Nassarawa, Taraba  and Benue into killing fields, and to give communities in Kogi, Anambra, Enugu, Cross River, Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Oyo, Ondo and Ogun more than a taste of their barbarous rage without any provocation, unless one regards lawful possession of farmlands going back several generations a provocation.

    By the admission of Alhaji Sule Yahari, identified as a member of its Board of Trustees, the organisation directly implicated in this wanton bloodletting, Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association, is active in 75 Local Government Areas across 21 states. That is a measure of its capacity, if not its will, to impose its genocidal will on vast stretches of Nigeria.

    Benue, more than any other state, seems to have borne the brunt of their murderous  visitations, the latest installment of which left 73 men, women and children dead, hundreds wounded and thousands displaced from their homes at the start of the new year

    To stem the bloodletting, the Benue State government enacted the misnamed “anti-grazing law” in May 2017, effective November 2017, mandating impoundment of cattle grazing without boundaries and confine them in designated ranches for seven days, after which they would be auctioned or the owner would be asked to pay a fine.

    The law does not ban grazing.  It regulates grazing.  Given the volatility of the issues at stake, a more sober phrasing of its title and purport was indicated.

    It seems a desperate response to the carnage that has been going on for years and had claimed thousands of innocent lives.  But all in all, the balance of sympathy here must lie with the Benue State Government, as it does with the authorities Ekiti State, regardless of Governor Ayo Fayose’s histrionics.  Distraught residents had to be assured that measures were being taken to stem the slaughter of innocents. But all in all the balance of sympathy must lie with the Benue State Government.

    If Miyetti Allah has any issues with a law duly enacted by the state legislature, it should challenge it in the courts.  But that is not Miyeti Allah’s way.

    For the more than five years that the local chieftain of Miyetti and his herd squatted on my uncle’s farm, they feasted on his crops, devoured his produce, destroyed his dam and other structures, and virtually plunged him into financial ruin.  When he sought redress in the courts, he was astonished at the quality of legal representation the squatter deployed, notwithstanding the team’s brazen inventiveness and dilatoriness.

    To this day, Miyetti has refused to pay the N2 million my uncle was awarded as damages.

    Sule Yahari, the Miyetti trustee, has said flatly that Myetti will never submit to any law that enjoins herders to ranch their livestock instead of marching them across farmlands as if the farmlands were so much free pasture.  Even if the fields are uncultivated, they are not terra nullius — no man’s land.  They belong to families, or are cardinal elements in the wealth of the surrounding communities.

    To exploit this precious resource without negotiation, without permission and without compensation, harks back to the feudal practices that these communities have long abandoned.  To levy war against them — for that is what the cattle herders of Myetti Allah and their confederates have been doing – is the height of depredation and outlawry.

    Declaring that the law would never work, Myetti Allah has warned darkly that Boko Haram’s depredations would be child’s play compared to what would follow if its grievances were not resolved – apparently to its satisfaction, if not exactly on its own terms.

    Miyetti Allah says it was not consulted before the Benue law was enacted.  Fair; but did Miyetti consult owners of the farmlands its cattle have ravaged with impunity for years?  It says its raids were reprisals for large-scale theft of its cows.  A life or several lives for a cow?  What system of jurisprudence allows this obscene equivalency?

    In the face of Miyetti Allah’s unambiguous and continuing threat to the lives and property of innocent Nigerians, the Federal Government’s response has been less than reassuring, sadly.

    According to one of his spokespersons, President Muhammadu Buhari is “conscious of his duty to Nigerians, not the least because he is accountable for everything that goes wrong.”  Plus, “He deeply sympathises with the families and all the other direct and indirect victims of this violence. He is determined to bring it to a permanent end.”

    To that end, said Garba Shehu, the government plans to stage a “stakeholders” conference on infrastructural and agricultural development that will take care of environment impact over 30 years – the usual holistic and longitudinal approach, you approach, you know.

    The Inspector-General of Police is asking for more time to arrange peace talks between the beleaguered communities and their tormentors.

    Agriculture and Rural Development Minister Audu Ogbe says the problem stems from the nation’s failure to provide cattle farmers the kind of subsidies European farmers enjoy under the EU’s crippling Common Agricultural Policy, even as it provides lavish support for yam and cassava and rice farmers. He must know, surely, that Myetti Allah is sabotaging the national food sufficiency drive by its indiscriminate grazing practice.

    After touting the Jos formula under which, in exchange for communal peace, citizens donate vast tracts of land to cattle farmers to ply their trade undisturbed as the magic solution to the problem and excoriating Benue Governor Samuel Ortom for choosing a different path. Plateau Governor Simon Lalong backtracked, claiming that he was misquoted.

    Information Minister Lai Mohammed warns the media against inflammatory and inciting statements, as if anything could be more inflammatory or more inciting than the slaughter of innocents.

    Many are in denial.  They say the killers are not Nigerians.

    Where is their evidence?  Has any official inspected their papers and verified their identities?  If they are foreigners, why has Nigeria not warned their home governments to cease and desist from exporting merchants of death to a sister African country?

    The ECOWAS protocol makes for free movement of persons, goods and services among member-nations.  Without documentation? Does it also permit a free flow of arms?  Do Nigeria’s laws permit the flow of unregistered weapons of war?  Do they permit their unregulated use?  Why is that, in the face of all the bloodletting, not one cattle herder has been charged, much less prosecuted?

    In the words of the great lyricist and Nobelist, Bob Dylan, we must now ask Miyetti Allah’s friends and partners in high places:  How many ears must they have before they can hear people cry? How many deaths will it take till they know that too many people have died?

    We ask, further:  How long will it take till they realise that far more people stand to be killed unless they act decisively to end the carnage and bring its perpetrators to justice?

    Finally, there is no better time than now to get serious about restructuring the country, which must have the establishment of state police as a key element.  That is the practice in every federation, except ours.

    It is time to end the pretence that an elected governor is the “chief security officer” of his state when he has no security outfit of his own worthy of that name and the police commissioner in that state reports directly to the Inspector-General in Abuja.

  • “Oluwole” revisited

    “Oluwole” revisited

    Not a few usually law-abiding persons, among whom I number myself, were saddened when the massed forces of law and order raided the enclave known as “Oluwole” in central Lagos, in March 2005 and reportedly put it out of business.

    Several weeks ago, there were widespread protests in Lagos against the slow rate at which the Passport Office processes applications for travel documents, despite inducements allegedly delivered directly to officials or through “consultants. ”There was anguished talk of interminable queues at passport offices, of applicants showing up at dawn day after day without getting any closer to obtaining their quests.

    Some of the distraught applicants were heard lamenting that “Oluwole” had been forced to close shop.

    “Oluwole,” I should explain, was a complex nuance phenomenon. It was an enclave somewhere inside Balogun Market in central Lagos, but few knew its exact boundary.

    Few of its teeming patrons actually went to its operating premises anyway.  Accredited and freelance agents stationed on the precincts of a popular hotel close by ran errands not too discreetly between patrons and service providers.

    In a clime where uncertainty ruled, “Oluwole” offered certainty. It was the one place where, for a negotiated fee, you were virtually guaranteed to get whatever you wanted and whenever you wanted it, no questions asked. At “Oluwole,” the perennial shortage of passport booklets that hobbled business at passport-issuing offices was inconceivable.

    To its operators, “Oluwole” was a way of life, of getting on in the world. But it was also a source of constant thrill, the thrill of reproducing any artifact or document so faithfully that it would be difficult to distinguish it from the original, and doing it without fuss and without the slightest regard for consequences.

    The police, not given to nuance, profiled “Oluwole” pithily as “a notorious area in Lagos Island noted for document forgery and counterfeiting.”

    During the 2005 raid on “Oluwole,” acting police Inspector General Sunday Ehindero, reported with breathless excitement how more than 40,000 Nigerian passports, ordinary and diplomatic.

    But that was just a fraction of the haul, which also included some 1,500 passports issued by Libya, Libra, Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau. Cameroun, Senegal, Gambia, Jamaica, Costa Rica and Ghana.  Before you dismiss this as no big deal, these being Third World countries, I should add that passports of the United States, Switzerland and South Africa were also in the mix.

    So also were 10,000 blank British Airways tickets, some 50,000 cheque leaves of foreign banks, about 10, 000 United States Postal Money Orders, blank certificates of occupancy, bills of lading, and printing plates from which documents of high commercial value could be pulled.

    How, then, can any law-abiding person be discomfited to see such an institution put out of business?

    Let me explain.

    As constituted under Sani Abacha, of loathsome memory, Nigeria was an exemplar of the state as criminal and government as criminal enterprise.

    Rapporteurs for the UN Human Rights Commission noted with diplomatic tact in 1996, that the rule of law in Nigeria “was on the verge of collapse, if it has not already collapsed.” More tellingly, they declared that “Whether there is a Constitution left is debatable.”

    Abacha’s whims and fantasies as he voiced them or as his marabouts divined them constituted the law of the land.  Those who questioned this state of affairs were marked for ruin, disappearance, or death.  Often, the only way to escape Abacha’s demonic dragnet was to leave the country on a one-way ticket.

    But even that option was fraught.

    Your name was most likely on one of the many watch lists that state officials  could download with the click of a mouse from computer terminals at every check point.  Presenting your papers at any port was like delivering yourself to a unit of Hamza el-Mustapha’s killing squad.

    Even if you could talk or bluff you way through the 17 check points between Mile Two in Lagos and the border town of Sémè, the so-called NADECO corridor, you would still have to present your travel papers to make the crossing.  The route through Idi-Iroko, the border crossing in Ogun State, was similarly booby-trapped.

    Going through the bush was even more fraught.  What if your escort was in reality an agent of the very forces you were fleeing from, and delivered you right into their crushing embrace?

    In whatever case, the first crucial step was to obtain travel papers that would facilitate your transit but conceal your true identity. And “Oluwole” was the best source.

    Off, then, to the popular hotel aforementioned in Balogun one Saturday afternoon, in 1996, clad in unaccustomed full native attire so you be would be almost unrecognizable. You were still staking out the place when a young man approached you and asked if he could help.

    You told him your mission almost in a conspiratorial whisper, looking furtively around you all the while. Sensing your unease, he said, “Sir, relax.  Big men like you come here all the time to do business. There is nothing to fear.”

    There were many possibilities, each with its own risks, he explained. Some examples:  A clean new passport with your picture and true identity; a new passport with your picture but another person’s identity; a well-worn passport bearing your name and identity, or an old passport with false particulars.

    You made your choice and paid the requisite fee. The following day, he handed you your travel papers at an agreed rendezvous and with a knowing wink, wished you luck.

    The facilitator had in fact understated the capacity of “Oluwole” when he said that it offered many possibilities. He should have said that nothing was impossible there.

    Mike Wallace, 71, veteran television journalist and correspondent for “60 Minutes,” the award-winning news programme on the American television network CBS, was visiting Nigeria in late 1996 to report on 4-1-9 crimes. Wallace, a white man since deceased, obtained a birth certificate representing him as a Nigerian farmer born some 40 years earlier, somewhere in Akwa Ibom.

    With that certificate and other documents procured in like manner, Wallace obtained a Nigerian passport.  Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Lagos, who should know, confirmed that the passport was as genuine as any they had ever seen.

    And all this was in a day’s work.

    It is the nature of institution like “Oluwole” that it is not easily put out business. It has countless patrons, acting from motives ranging from those that evoke empathy to those that can only draw the strongest disapprobation.

    You cannot dissolve it, as the police claimed to have done.  You can only disperse it.

    “Oluwole” has probably been recreated in several centres not too far removed from the geographic location for which it was named, or from the prying eyes of law and order. It is certainly flourishing in cyber-space.

    Weep not for Oluwole.

     

     

    Correction

    • In my December 19, 2017 column (“In this season of goodwill”), I referred to former Vice President Abubakar Atiku as Turakin Adamawa. A correspondent tells me that the former vice president has since been elevated to Wazirin Adamawa, while the former title has passed to the son.

    My apologies to all concerned.

  • The shame of a nation

    The shame of a nation

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

    Contemplating this conflation, a concerned citizen has suggested in earnest that we sus pendyuletide for a few years to begin with, and abolish it subsequently.  With Yuletide out of the way, there would be no need for marketers to “hoard” and “divert” fuel and thus create an artificial scarcity; no need for millions of Nigerians to embark on the obligatory migration to their homelands only to rush back to base scarcely a week later

    With Yuletide out of the way, he said, all those horrible road accidents that proliferate during the so-called ember months and reach their climax around Yuletide, earning another discomfiting entry for Nigeria in the international misery index, would be distributed equally throughout the year. Sectarian and ethnic champions would have one less turf to ply their victimhood.

    The wear and tear on the highways would be reduced drastically and the savings would be applied to other projects.

    This is the kind of desperate solution to which the perennial fuel crisis has driven even some usually serious people.  The redeeming grace is that it has also bred a great deal of creative entertainment.  I missed out on much of the latest installment of fuel crisis art, but among the few that were brought to my attention, there is one that is simply unforgettable.

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

    No fuel, No fuel

    No fuel, No fuel

    There is no fuel, Buhari.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Nor were the authorities done yet.

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

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

    Then they tried to sugar the pill.

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

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

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

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

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

    It must stop in this new year, this syndicated fraud that has covered the nation with shame and brought great pain and misery to the many while enriching the few.

    Your move, President Muhammadu Buhari.

     

  • In this season of goodwill

    In this season of goodwill

    Election politics is in the air.

    It has not quite reached fever pitch yet, but you can breathe it, feel it, and almost touch it.  Though the general elections are still some 16 months away, each passing day is guaranteed to raise the nation’s political temperature somewhat.

    Just consider this past fortnight.

    A rejuvenated President Muhammadu Buhari all but indicated during a visit to Kano that he will seek re-election, thus putting to rest speculations about whether his health can withstand the strains of what remains of his current term, let alone the burden of a second term beginning in 2019 when he will be seven months shy of 77.

    Recognising that his route to being elected Nigeria’s next president in 2019 is blockaded if he remains in the ruling APC, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar quit that party and returned to the PDP.  He not only defected, he urged colleagues who had migrated with him to the APC to return to the PDP fold.

    No surprise there; Atiku’s soul was never really there.  His critics might even say, with some justification, that his soul is everywhere and nowhere, considering his predilection for gravitating toward whichever political party can offer him its back to climb to the top job.  Besides, his often strident critiques of the President and the Administration while he was in the APC, always seemed calculating and self-serving.

    In an earlier column, I described Atiku as “a (presidential) candidate of habit.”   Based on his latest peregrination, I belong now among those see him, not without cause, as a candidate of desperation.  Only desperation can move even a politician to perform in full public view all the gyrations the Turakin Adamawa has been performing not just lately but in his political career.

    The gyrations include, most recently, a trip to Minna to solicit the support of the discredited former military president who apparently is still a king-maker in the PDP.  Atiku emerged from the encounter looking anything but upbeat.  At the PDP’s National Convention to elect party officials, he was received coolly at best.

    Atiku seems unlikely to clinch the PDP’s presidential ticket, and not just because of his image as a drifter. With Buhari in the running and most likely to win re-nomination, the PDP is unlikely to award its ticket to another candidate from the North.

    This should, however, not cause him great distress, nor signal the end a great public career.

    Through his business conglomerate, he can directly create more jobs than he will be able to do as president.  Through his acclaimed philanthropy, he can continue to bring aid and relief in a more personal way to far more people than he can do as president. He will be able to devote more time to nurturing the American University of Yola, of which he is the proprietor, from its already high standard to world class.

    In the end, these engagements may offer greater satisfaction and certainly far fewer frustrations than being President.

    But this being Nigeria, and given the mysterious ways politicians conduct their business, it is too early to count Atiku out of the race.

    Only in a land of “anything goes” can Chief Olabode George, and Gbenga Daniel  in all seriousness run for PDP National President.  Both are political lightweights.  Both will bring to the table more liabilities than assets

    As military governor, Bode George virtually ran Ondo State aground.  His more recent outing as Chair of the Ports Authority landed him in jail until the Court of Appeal quashed his conviction.

    Gbenga Daniel’s rap sheet with the EFCC on account of his stint as Governor of Ogun State stretches all the way from the Ijebu waterside to Abuja and back.

    It has to be said that the new PDP chairman, Uche Secondus, has also had his        day with the EFCC   As deputy national chair, he was accused in 2016 of corruptly receiving 23 luxury cars worth N310 million from Jide Omokore, a business associate of the former Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani  Alison-Madueke, and ordered to turn in the cars or pay the monetary worth.  The National Identity Management Commission, of which he was Board chair, was mired in inertia and dogged by allegations of serious fraud.

    But Secondus had in his corner his friend and fellow Rivers State indigene, Governor Nysom Wike, who reportedly bankrolled the election of all the candidates on the so-called Unity List the PDP Convention delegates were handsomely mobilised to approve.

    For once, Wike aimed before shooting, and was dead on target. He taught those who still think you can play party politics without money that the game is not       for paupers.  Instead of denouncing the influence of money in the race, General Babangida should have drawn on his fabled hoard to empower the aspirant of his choice.  But then, again he has been in the business long enough to know a forlorn cause when he sees one.

    As befits this Biblical season of goodwill to all men, this is also a season of political reconciliation.  Former Oyo State Governor Adebayo Alao-Akala is the most prominent of former PDP political heavyweights to be received into the APC fold, following his defection several months ago.

    And there he was in Ibadan being welcomed by Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and Governor Isiaka Ajimobi and other dignitaries, all enthusiastically holding high and literally brandishing the APC’s emblem, the broom.  Given Oyo’s recent political history, a colleague told me he did not believe he would ever witness a ceremony like that.

    Did he ever think he would live to see Governor Ayo Fayose of Ekiti State send birthday greetings to President Buhari whose imminent or actual death he has announced more times than anyone can recall? Prepare for stranger developments, young man.

    Talking of goodwill, powerful men on both sides of the North Atlantic – elected officials, entertainers, leading media figures, athletes, etc.,—can be forgiven for believing that if this season portends anything, it is goodwill toward women and the precise opposite toward men, especially with so much sex in the  air.

    I have in mind the way they have been tumbling from their high perches over their cumulative gratuitous and offensive conduct toward women, some of them even taking their own lives out of shame.  A good many of them now live in mortal dread of a phone call, fearing that it might be the signal that they have been outed by a woman or women they once preyed on.

    But, irony of ironies, the one man who was actually caught on tape reveling in his predatory behavior is ensconced in the White House composing his latest fulmination on Tweeter.

    It is also an irony that Christine Keeler, the call girl whose affair with John Profumo, Britain’s secretary of state for War, a defence attache at the Russian Embassy in London and an un-named “member of the Royal Family” culminated in the fall of Harold Macmillan’s Conservative Government, died last week as sex continued to dominate the news in the United States, and to a lesser extent, the UK.  She was 75.

     

    Correction

    Contrary to what I stated on this page last Tuesday (December 5, 2017), it is Crowther University’s Library that is the product of General TY week munificence.  Crowther University, Oyo, has no teaching hospital.

    I thank Professor Tunji Oloruntimehin for setting the record straight.

  • ‘The Brave One’ at 80

    ‘The Brave One’ at 80

    Two sterling attributes of the celebrator ran through the editorial advertisements placed in the media by friends and admirers of General Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma, the former Chief of Army Staff, later Minister of Defence and currently chair of PINE, the governmental organ charged with the reconstruction of the nation’s war-ravaged North-east, who turned 80 last Saturday: forthrightness and public spiritedness.

    Although I had heard much – who hasn’t?— about General Theophilus Yakubu (TY) Danjuma’s resolute manner, it was not until 1991 that I experienced it first-hand.

    Lagos State Military Governor Raji Rasaki had shut down Guardian Newspapers, following publication of a story that police had shot dead two students during a demonstration at Yaba College of Technology.

    Rasaki let it be known that if the paper disavowed the publication – which was accurate in every material particular —and apologised, he would allow it to resume business.

    As everyone knew, Rasaki was merely the cat’s paw, the local enforcer carrying out “orders from above,” i.e. military president Ibrahim Babangida’s diktat from  Abuja

    Publisher Alex Ibru had then called a meeting of senior editors to deliberate on Rasaki’s demand.  In attendance were two members of the Board of Directors, General Danjuma, and Chris Okolie, publisher of Newbreed magazine.

    The discussion had all but reached the point of finding the words to meet Rasaki’s terms when Danjuma, who had said nothing all along, intervened.

    “We will not apologise,” he said.  “We cannot apologise.”

    That resolute pronouncement, seconded by Chris Okolie, ended the discussion.  Rasaki did not get his apology.  A week later, The Guardian was back in business.

    If this incident is but a minor testament to Danjuma’s forthrightness, consider  his principled stand during the 1993 presidential election debacle. While his contemporaries in the military establishment embarked on appeasement and opportunist compromise, he visited Chief MKO Abiola at his Opebi home and  hailed him as “President-elect.”

    He went further to confirm what was an open secret:  that military president Babangida had always wanted to follow the example of Flight-Lt Jerry Rawlings who ran a provisional government for 11 years and then succeeded himself as civilian president, forgetting that he was no Rawlings.

    Consider, further, Danjuma’s address at the August 2013 ceremony in which he was conferred with the title of Jarmai Zazzau by the Emir of Zaria, Alhaji Shehu Idris.

    Translated from the Hausa, Jarmai means “The Brave One.” The title could not have framed the occasion better.

    Virtually every person of consequence in the North was in attendance. Danjuma seized the moment to deliver what is sure to go down as one of the most forthright speeches ever on the state of the nation.

    Nigerian society and economy were in tatters, due among other factors to leadership failure, he said. The mass of the people were “chained down in dehumanising and grinding poverty” while the nation continued to maintain           “a few islands of false prosperity in a turbulent ocean of penury and squalor.”

    Peace and harmony were unattainable in such a setting, he warned.

    He told his fellow Northern elders that they were talking too much and doing too little. They needed to think more, pray more, plan more, work harder, relate better, and talk less, because battles were better fought and won through wisdom and strategy than through “inflammable pronouncements and political tantrums.”

    More poignantly, he warned them that, by failing to adequately educate their young men and women, they were handicapping them in the competition for opportunities in a globalised world where knowledge itself had become the prime resource.

    General Danjuma told them they had failed to rise to that level of patriotic statesmanship where they could deploy their wisdom and experience to give     the country a clear sense of purpose and direction.

    “When elders become decadent, the youth are bound to become delinquent,” he said.

    I cannot recall an occasion during which such an assemblage of persons of great consequence were treated to such blunt, forthright talk.

    Yet, what ran through his address was not self-righteousness nor condemnation, nor yet resignation, but a challenge, a summons to collective action to help pull a failing nation back from the brink.

    “I still believe that Nigeria can be reawakened and rebuilt to achieve greatness,” he said. “If we renew our minds and reconcile with one another, if we coordinate our determined efforts, we can make northern Nigeria self-reliant and self-sufficient, while enhancing the unity and prosperity of all Nigeria, but first we must be at peace.”

    Those words, the stuff of statesmanship, are as poignant today as when they were spoken five years ago.

    But General Danjuma is not all exhortation and admonition.   He backs his talk with hard cash, drawing on his vast wealth from oil and shipping.

    Five  years ago, he donated N2 billion to the university’s Endowment Fund of Ahmadu Bello University, the successor institution to the Nigerian College of Arts, and Technology, Zaria, where he had studied for his ‘A’ Levels before opting out to join the army instead of taking a degree in history.  It is probably the largest single gift ever made by a Nigerian to an academic institution in Nigeria.

    Crowther University’s Teaching Hospital in Oyo is a product of his munificence. as are many significant facilities and structures all over Nigeria.  His NGO, the TY Danjuma Foundation, won an award from the World Bank for its exertions in curbing river blindness in Ghana.

    Hundreds of Nigerians have completed or are pursuing advanced study at home and abroad on outright scholarships or large grants from General Danjuma.

    And I know not a few persons who owe their lives or the lives of their loved ones to his decisive intervention during harrowing travails.

    But most of his philanthropy goes un-reported.  He has no “media adviser” or “spokesman,” the much-abused factotum that political officials hire at the public expense to put the best face on their often-indefensible utterances or transactions.

    Nor will you find a media department at his flagship company SAPETRO, or at his umbrella organisation TY Holdings.  That is the unobtrusive style that becomes Danjuma so well.  It is for that same reason that he has refused to            yield to pressures to write his memoirs or commission someone to document a  life so rich in interest and incident.

    He has been called a man with a heart of gold, a soldier’s soldier, “arguably the finest of his generation.”  The Royal Court in Benin City has called him “a worthy son-in-law of Edo State.

    It remains to add that General Danjuma is remarkably urbane, emblematic of “an  officer and a gentleman” in its pristine conception.  In my many interactions with him, I have found him unfailingly courteous and discreet.  He returns his calls at the earliest opportunity.

    He would rise from his chair in the small lounge that serves as his private reading room in his expansive and tastefully furnished living room to greet you, and walk you to the door to see you off.  For all his wealth and distinction, he is totally unpretentious.  He expresses deep appreciation for the smallest gestures.

    I should also add that he is also a bibliophile.  The reading room is chockful of volumes on history, biography, philosophy, business, diplomacy, politics, international relations, and military science.  And they are not just there as ornaments. You always found him perusing a recent New York Times bestseller or the latest issues of some of the better-known international newsmagazines.

    There is no television around, only a stereo from which classical music or jazz, jazz with a lot of swing, wafts across the expansive living room.  Danjuma belongs in the “It-Don’t-Mean-A-Thing-If-It-Ain’t-Got-That-Swing” school         of jazz connoisseurs.  I must not forget the bar stocked with choice wines.

    Danjuma has the good things of life, and knows how to enjoy them.  He is one wealthy Nigerian who knows how to relax.  In his person and home, wealth and sensibility dwell in harmony

    He deserves the outpouring of goodwill that marked his 80th birthday.  Many happy returns of December 9, Jarmai Zazzau.

     

  • The Osborne Towers Haul: Matters arising

    The Osborne Towers Haul: Matters arising

    By any reckoning, the Osborne Towers Haul has got to rank among the top 10 stories from Nigeria in 2017, given the way it broke and has continued to unfold, its many turns and twists.

    It remains, without question, the largest fortune any person or institution ever chanced upon in a single location since Shell Darcy struck oil in Nigeria in Oloibiri, in present-day Bayelsa State, 61 years ago.  And it transformed one of the most exclusive addresses in one of the most opulent neighbourhoods in Nigeria into a crime scene.

    Footage of the unearthing of the haul, some $43 million stacked in packs of mint-fresh $10, 000 bills, in a fire-proof steel cabinet in Flat 7B at the Towers, not forgetting small change in hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling, made the headlines and front pages of the news media across the world.

    Early reports claimed that the haul was part of the “security” money former President Goodluck Jonathan had squirreled away for fighting the 2015 presidential election that he should have known he could not win.  He had been so crushed by his defeat, they said, that he forgot the money.

    Even if Dr Jonathan remembered, how could he have come forward to claim the money, especially when his wife, the formerly excellent Dame Patience, was fighting desperately to re-possess some N54 million in bank deposits that the courts had ordered forfeited on the suspicion that it was the fruit of crime?

    Those who expected his consort, the formerly excellent lady aforementioned, to weigh in with an affidavit that the money at issue was her birthday gift to him when he turned 59 the previous November must have been disappointed.   Give it to The Dame:  she knows that there are only so many fronts on which even a person of her omnivorous appetite can fight.

    EFCC operatives who had swooped on Apartment 7B following a tip-off from a whistle-blower were still totting up the haul when Governor Nyesom Wike declared that it belonged unquestionably to the Rivers State Government, being proceeds of assets his predecessor and current Minister of Transport, Rotimi Amaechi had “fraudulently” sold

    “We will follow due process of the law to get back the money found at the Ikoyi residence, “he told Channels Television. “This money belongs to the Rivers State people. We have conducted our checks.

    “We will stun Nigeria with this matter. We will come out with our evidence at the appropriate time.”

    Wike’s plan was at full throttle when the Director-General of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), Ambassador Ayodele Oke, a spook whom few outside the community of spooks had ever heard of, stepped forward to claim that the money belonged to the NIA.

    The fund, he said, was duly appropriated by the Federal Government at the time of Dr Jonathan for projects that could not be named, that Oke had periodically reported on those projects to the complete satisfaction of the authorities, among them National Security Adviser Babagana Monguno, and by extension President Muhammadu Buhari.

    Premium Times (May 5, 2016) has confirmed that much in a painstakingly documented piece that has not been rebutted as far as I know.  The editors tell me they stand “perfectly” by their reporting.

    In 2013-2014, the paper reported, Ambassador Oke’s immediate predecessor, Olaniyi Oladeji, had proposed to the Jonathan Administration an upgrade to NIA’s intelligence gathering techniques. On taking over from Oladeji, Ambssador Oke had fleshed out the proposal in a memo he submitted to Dr Jonathan on Feb: 14, 2015.

    Goal: to “upgrade and professionalise agency operations” in order to “engender an effective clandestine communication systems central to the working of an intelligence service.”

    Project Schedule: 2015 – 2018.

    Price tag:  $89, 202, 282 to be expended on 12 high-level projects.

    According to the report, Dr Jonathan approved the request February 16, 2015 and directed the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Allison-Madueke, to release the funds.  Several weeks later, the NIA received the full amount in cash from the Central Bank.

    Eleven months later, in January 2016, the report continued, the NIA gave progress reports on the projects and a detailed breakdown of its expenses in a letter to NSA Monguno.

    Thereafter, Premium Times continued, a three-man panel from the National Security Adviser to inspect the projects.  In its February 29, 2016 report, the team expressed its satisfaction with the way the $289 million operation was being implemented.

    Some ten weeks later, on May 5, 2016: Mr. Monguno visited the NIA Headquarters for the first time since he assumed office in July 2015 and, according to Premium Times, wrote in the Visitors’ Book:

    “On the occasion of my maiden visit to the NIA since assumption of official duties as NSA, I am extremely delighted by the warm reception and hospitality shown to me by H.E. Ambassador Ayo Oke, DG, NIA, the quality of works in progress is notably breathtaking but very inspiring also.

    “All the facilities being constructed have demonstrated that the NIA is far ahead of its sister agencies in terms of foresight and dealing with 21st Century intelligence issues.

    “It is my fervent prayer that the NIA achieve all the goals it has set for itself so that all other institutions of government, particularly the intelligence community, will bring about the desired change for this great country,” Mr. Monguno wrote in the NIA visitors’ book on May 5, 2016.

    Two weeks later, on May 17, 2016, the NSA informed the NIA that President Buhari had been briefed about the ongoing projects and that the president expressed his gratitude to the NIA personnel, the paper reported.

    Roughly a year later, the EFCC recovered $43,449,947, £27,800 and N23,218,000 from Flat 7B at Osborne Towers.  Oke would be suspended from office, and dismissed subsequently by President Buhari, following the unpublished report of a panel headed by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, tasked with establishing the “circumstances in which the NIA came into possession of the funds, how and by whose or which authority the funds were made available to the NIA, and to establish whether or not there has been a breach of the law or security procedure in obtaining custody and use of the funds.”

    The Osborne Towers haul has since been forfeited to the Federal Government, on the orders of the Federal High Court, Lagos. But the ownership of Flat 7B remains disputed.

    The EFCC says it was purchased by Mrs Oke in the name of a company, Chobe Ventures  Ltd, of which she and her son, are the directors.  But Union Bank plc claims that it holds the mortgage to the property.

    Ambassador Oke is set to face trial, most likely in secret court, because of the sensitive nature of the office he once held.

    But how did matters come to this desultory pass?

    How come Oke’s request for the vast sum at issue was approved in just two days, and apparently without discussion or debate at the National Security Council?  How come the money was released to the NIA in one fell swoop, and in cash?   How did a project that had reportedly earned high praise from the National Security Adviser turn into a national scandal with no redeeming grace less than a year later?

    Was the NIA dissembling all along?  Was the Office of the National Security Adviser also dissembling? Was the National Security Adviser merely being collegial in its effusive report?  Or was his team caught up in the NIA’s web of deception by its own credulity or worse, gullibility?

    Is Oke being made a fall guy?

    Because the matter centres on national security, we may never know the answers.  Yet the questions are worth asking.

    Matters got even murkier regarding the identity of the whistleblower who stood to receive, by way of gratuity, one-tenth of the recovered haul, which would make the person an instant millionaire.

    At first, there was only one whistleblower.  The EFCC said the person had been identified and handed his reward.  Then they said the person would soon be paid.  Later reports said the person was undergoing psychiatric evaluation, for fear that the person might lose his or her mind on account of coming so suddenly into a vast fortune.

    They were still wrestling with these issues when a rival claimant to the title of whistleblower and the fortune that goes with it surfaced.

    This being Nigeria, a third is guaranteed to surface shortly.  And a fourth.  And a fifth.

     

  • Uncle Bob in retrospect

    Uncle Bob in retrospect

    What’s the news about Uncle Bob?”

    It is the kind of question a solicitous relation or friend of Uncle Bob’s would ask another friend or relation of the same Uncle Bob.

    But we were meeting for the first time, in a lounge at Amsterdam Schiphol International Airport for  connecting flights, he to Nairobi, Kenya, en route Juba, South Sudan, where he is serving on the UN Mission to that war-torn country, and I was bound for Chicago.

    “Uncle Bob” cued us on magically.  You would think we were friends of Uncle Bob, who had not seen each other in a long while.

    It so happened that at the time I started talking with my new acquaintance, he was at that precise moment surfing the Internet for the latest news on Uncle Bob

    “Uncle Bob” is of course Comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe, most recently , and for all of 47 years, First Secretary of the ruling ZANU-PF and President of Zimbabwe.

    That is the name by which he is known in Zimbabwe, from a curious blend of respect, fear, and loathing.  He commanded all three in roughly the same measure, the loathing manifested in the dancing in the streets, the wild rejoicing.

    The respect, if not the fear, was indicated in the courtesies the putschists accorded Mugabe right from their announcement that they were stepping in to clear the “criminal elements” that had surrounded him.  It was evident in his being given the usual escort, though watered down to preside over the Convocation at the Open University.  And it ran through the Inaugural Address of the new President, Emerson Mnagagwa, who described Mugabe as his leader and mentor.

    The whole thing was surreal. Zimbabwe’s armed forces showed before the whole world the class that Mugabe himself always displayed even at his most disagreeable.  You could never accuse him of coarseness.

    He had come on the scene with a sure-footedness that proved almost infectious.    He galvanised his compatriots.  You saw response in the quiet pride that radiated on the faces of officials high and low.

    I made the first of my five visits to Zimbabwe in 1985, five years after the country’s independence.  The new spirit, the confidence set off by the event, was almost palpable.  One incident from that visit clings in my memory.

    Rather than pay the custom duties on the goods he had brought in from an overseas trip, a military commander verbally abused and threatened the young customs officer.  The young woman stood her ground and refused to be overawed.

    When the papers reported the incident the next day, the public was outraged.  In the face of mounting censure, the commander apologised to the customs officer.

    How could this happen in an African, or Third World, nation

    The answer was to be found in the revolutionary Leadership Code adopted in 1984 by ZANU-PF.  Grounded on Socialist principles, the code imposed on leaders a strict regimen, a leader being person holding executive authority in any branch of government, local authority, armed services.

    Such persons, the Code maintains, must not deal arbitrarily or arrogantly with members of the public, or indulge in conduct that can bring ZANU-PF into disrepute or ridicule.

    They must not be found drunk in public place.  They must not commit acts of immorality or dress slovenly.  They must comply with orders from above but may decline if they consider the order improper, in which case they should immediately report, stating their reasons.

    Leaders must not own a business or share interests in a business organised for profit.  They cannot  accept inducement to carry  out or desist from carrying out an act.  They cannot use public funds to produce false reports.  They cannot collude with others to secretly obtain favours.  They cannot refuse to disclose personal interest in any project.  They cannot own real estate or other property from which they receive rent or royalties.  And so on and so forth.

    The Code was backed by an elaborate enforcement mechanism.

    The revolution seemed on course, despite the upheavals in Matabeleland Province, and Mugabe’s determination to emasculate the Opposition into a one-party state.  The shops were chockful of consumer goods, though only a small fraction of the population could afford them.  Grocery stores were well stocked.   The export market boomed with agricultural products, minerals and tourism driving commerce.  All the books you always wanted to read but could not find or afford were on tantalising display on four floors of a cavernous bookstore in downtown Harare.

    In the hotels, all-you-could-eat breakfast came with the room rate.   Buffet lunch and dinner were sumptuous and affordable.  Coffee houses and restaurants bustled.

    With each of my subsequent visits, signs of distress were palpable.  The US dollar, worth 4 Zim dollars  during my first visit in 1985, went up to seven and then 25 within two years.  The bookstore had shrunk to two floors, then occupied a corner of just one floor, the bewitching volumes replaced by shabby publications, some of them bordering on the pornographic.

    I watched Zimbabwe’s 10th independence anniversary celebrations at Harare’s Rufaro Stadium in 1990.  A fly past by combat jet planes and pinpoint landing by parachutists gave more than a hint of the country’s combat potential.

    Workers and students sang and praised and danced to ESAP and the wonders it would bring to the economy – the same scheme — SAP – that had virtually paralysed the Nigerian economy.

    Sanctions imposed by the West because Mugabe insisted on reversing a pernicious system whereby one percent of  white Zimbabweans owned 70 percent of the most fertile  land crippled agriculture.  Foreign exchange virtually dried up.  Hyperinflation set in, with one US dollar exchanging for one million Zim dollars at a point.

    At Mugabe’s ouster, Zimbabwe’s currency had collapsed. Trade by barter had replaced cash-backed transactions.

    By the time Mugabe was ousted, the commitment, conviction, honesty and dedication espoused in the Code had all but evaporated.

    The experiment that had begun in 1980 with such great promises ended in despair and misery on a scale almost beyond belief.  Perhaps if the Leadership Code had been implemented faithfully and the land repossession had been pursued more pragmatically, the course of Zimbabwe’s history under Mugabe might have been different.

     

  • ‘A coup in slow motion’

    ‘A coup in slow motion’

    This was a BBC correspondent’s prescient characterisation of President Robert Mugabe’s dilatory antics just two days after the March 29, 2008 general elections were concluded in Zimbabwe.

    Early returns suggested that Mugabe had been voted out (“massacred,” as a jubilant spokesperson for the opposition MDC said) after 28 years in office, and that his ruling ZANU-PF had lost its parliamentary majority for the time since Zimbabwe won independence in 1980.

    Zimbabweans and all those who had followed the country’s precipitous decline on virtually every front could smell change in the air. With the man who wrought this disastrous regression gone, there would be no swift return to the relative prosperity that Zimbabwe once enjoyed—the food self-sufficiency, a booming export market for tobacco, coffee, fruit, flowers, solid minerals, and the huge revenues from tourism.

    There would be no swift return to well-stocked grocery shelves, no immediate relief for millions ready and willing to work but unable to find any meaningful jobs.  The hundreds of thousands who had flocked into neighbouring South Africa through perilous routes might hurry back to friendlier climes, but to hardly any other relief.  With some luck, consumers will not have to trundle a truckload of Zim dollars to the shop to buy a family-size loaf of bread.

    Mugabe’s exit would however arrest the drift and decay, and create a climate in which the task of rebuilding could begin in earnest.

    But instead of departing, Mugabe launched a coup in slow motion.

    The electoral commission released the results of the parliamentary elections in tantalising driblets — calibrated to make the opposition feel that power was within its grasp and at the same time make the government feel that its viability was under no serious threat.  After several days, it seemed as if a stalemate was in the making, with neither the MDC and ZANU-PF coasting to victory.

    Relieved that the rout that had been widely forecast was unlikely to materialise, Mugabe unleashed the awesome powers of incumbency.  He warned darkly that proclamation of victory by the opposition would be regarded as an attempt to stage a coup and visited as such. As the stalemate dragged on, Mugabe let it be known that, contrary to public speculation, he was not averse to running against MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai if no clear winner emerged in the presidential election.

    By the time it was officially announced that the MDC had indeed wrested parliamentary majority from ZANU-PF, attention had shifted, not to the presidential election whose outcome was being awaited, but to a likely a run-off between Tsvangirai and Mugabe.

    At this writing, the results of the presidential election had not been formally announced.  The working assumption is that the MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai won a majority of the votes but did not score enough to avert a second ballot. Under Zimbabwe’s electoral law, a run-off should be held within three weeks.

    Given the strange trajectory of the general elections, the question must be asked:  Within three weeks of what?  If it is within three weeks of the first poll, then it is past due.  If it is within three weeks of declaring the official results, Mugabe can take his time and delay the results for as long as possible. Having recovered his balance, he can then deploy the powers of incumbency to ensure an emphatic victory in the run-off.

    Nor is it inconceivable that the results may never be proclaimed.  There is a precedent for it.

    I have in mind the June 12, 1993 presidential elections.  The military government of General Ibrahim Babangida launched against it a coup that dragged on in all its murder and melodrama and absurdity for two months until he was caught in his own snare and dragged off the scene in ignominy.

    It is now clear that Mugabe is not prepared to vacate office.  It is also clear that, having driven  Zimbabwe to the edge of ruin, he can offer only more of the same – blood, agony, despair and tears, in pursuit of no nobler goal or vision than self perpetuation.

    How can he as a Christian, a person of faith who almost became an ordained priest – how can he  reconcile himself to the depredations and privations that his own policies have brought upon the people?  Has he become so isolated that he cannot hear them cry?  Is he inured to their pain?

    Does it not bother him that his compatriots now feel obliged to wage a chimurenga (Shona for “struggle”) against the very man who had led their historic chimurenga against colonial and settler rule?  Does he not feel diminished that he is now more loathed and detested in the public consciousness than Ian Smith, the last white minority ruler of what was then Rhodesia?

    As the brazen assault on the popular will in Zimbabwe unfolds, African voices have been tepid  at best.  The Africa Union showed up briefly in Harare during a meeting with Mugabe, then went missing in action.  The African Peer Review Mechanism, the vehicle through which African leaders are supposed to b e able to tell each other unpleasant truths and demand redress went into abeyance.

    Africa’s pre-eminent diplomat and peacemaker, Kofi Annan, most recently secretary-general of the United Nations, was stuck in Kenya, trying to broker a solution to another election stalemate that had resulted in slaughter and displacement on a scale almost beyond belief.

    South African President Thabo Mbeki, speaking ahead of  last weekend’s summit of the Southern Africa Development Community member-states, said the debacle is the Zimbabwean way of  handling elections and that the authorities should be given time to announce the results.  Not much is to be expected, then from the summit.  Malam Musa Yar’Adua knows his own dubious path to power too well to speak out.

    Nelson Mandela is in the twilight of his remarkable life.  He may be working behind the scenes and the headlines.  Even so, he is known for his loyalty to his friends, among whom he counts Mugabe. Those expecting him to denounce Mugabe are likely to be disappointed. That is not the Madiba style.

    Twelve years ago, General Olusegun Obasanjo would have been the statesman for these times.

    He held no formal office; yet his voice was respected all over the world.  His counsel was sought far and wide.  He talked with a moral authority that commanded attention.  He spoke truth and wisdom to power.  His every utterance was backed by the force of personal example.

    Today, he is hobbled, his influence severely diminished at home and abroad on account of a record of performance that belied his vaunted commitment to democracy and the rule of law  during his eight years as president. Each passing day brings new startling allegations of sleaze against his administration and even members of his family.

    Nor has the so-called international community proved an honest broker. Zimbabwe’s former colonial suzerain, the United Kingdom, says it has set aside a billion pounds to kick start rebuilding once Mugabe vacates power.

    If  the UK and the United States had made that kind of money available to help Mugabe buy white-owned farms for redistribution to landless Zimbabweans in keeping with the Lancaster House protocols, Mugabe would not have embarked on the measures that have brought his country to grief.  Besides, the UK’s latest promise only strengthens Mugabe’s hands in portraying his opponents as agents of British imperialism.

    Nearly three weeks after the election, the coup continues apace in slow motion. In the latest installment, Mugabe is claiming that the parliamentary poll was rigged in favour of the MDC and is demanding a recount in some 23 districts. If and when the result of the presidential election is released, Mugabe will probably embark on a new stunt.

    In this unfolding tragedy, Archbishop Desmond Tutu stands out almost alone as an honest broker, committed not to expediency and opportunist compromise, but to justice and upholding the sovereign will of the people.  Those who truly wish Zimbabwe well and do not want it to  go the way of Kenya must heed his voice.

     

    • This piece was first published in this newspaper on April 15, 2008. It will be the point of departure for next week’s column
  • A university for David Mark

    A university for David Mark

    No initiative on Nigeria’s health care delivery system is judged worthwhile these days unless it is dedicated to curtailing medical tourism.

    There are no reliable figures on the volume and aggregate expenditure on the phenomenon, but the way some political officials and educational entrepreneurs talk, it is almost as if medical tourism is the bane of the nation’s health care delivery system, if not the entire economy.

    Just before he left office, former Governor Godswill “Uncommon Transformation” Akpabio commissioned a hospital declared to be among the very best on the planet, complete with modular surgical theatres and a helipad for air ambulances ferrying in patients requiring immediate attention.

    The complex would not only make it unnecessary for patients to go seek treatment in the      UK, France, Germany, Indiana or Brazil, at the risk of having their vital organs harvested surreptitiously;  it would also make the state capital, Uyo, a salubrious and more affordable destination for ECOWAS citizens, and people from all over the world seeking specialised medical treatment.

    When Akpabio sprained an ankle in a freak accident shortly after commissioning the hospital, he was ferried, not to the hospital he had built to curtail medical tourism, but to the UK. I gather that he headed to the UK not because he likes medical tourism, but because world-class specialists expected to run the hospital were not yet “on ground”, as we say here.  Apparently, it was taking forever to process their travel papers.

    The specialists are yet to hit the ground, I am told, and the complex has been boarded up. Akpabio’s successor Governor Udom Emmanuel, it would seem, is not averse to medical tourism  Or it may well be that he has been engrossed in transforming or re-transforming whatever Akpabio had left untransformed or only partially transformed.

    If Governor Emmanuel is not averse to medical tourism, he is in excellent company.  Those    who patronise the Aso Rock Medical Centre would rather promote medical tourism than put a brake on it. That explains why the Centre could not even boast a single capillary syringe–a device they had in abundance in village dispensary when I was growing up–to say nothing of a functioning x-ray machine the last time First Lady Aisha Buhari checked.

    Why equip the place when you can travel abroad every year, premier or business class, all expenses paid, plus generous spending money?

    Despite the bad examples around, the appetite for curtailing medical tourism remains robust. At the recent opening of the Teaching Hospital of the Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti, no less a personality than the Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, expressed great optimism that the facility would help reduce medical tourism.

    But nowhere has that appetite been more robust than the National Assembly, which last week passed a unanimous resolution urging the Federal Government to establish, as a matter of urgency and necessity, a comprehensive University of Health Sciences in Oturkpo, in Benue State, the hometown  of His Excellency the Distinguished Senator (Dr) David Bonaventure Aleichenu Mark.

    The resolution was the high point of discussion and debate on a motion proposed by .Senator Mark.  The discussion brought in the usual “stakeholders”:  officials of the Federal Ministry of Health as well as the Federal Ministry of Education, plus professionals in the medical sciences.  Lending intellectual muscle to the effort is the League of Idoma Professors, incorporating home and foreign-based scholars.

    David Mark’s proposal has had a chequered history.  As president of the Senate, Mark had  urged the establishment of a medical university on former President Dr Goodluck Jonathan.  Clutching at everything that might enhance his re-election chance, Jonathan had approved it.  The approval may have been in principle, but Mark considered it a fait accompli.

    The project, an example of the insidious patronage system that undergirded the Jonathan administration, never got off the ground.  A new sheriff had come to town.

    But give Mark high praise for following up and following through.

    He took up the matter with the APC -led 8th National Assembly in November 2016, steamrolled it through three readings, culminating in the enthusiastic endorsement of the Senate. All that is required now to make   it a law of the land is President Buhari’s assent.  Some influential senators are already saying that the whole thing is a done deal.

    If they had their way, the institution would be named David Mark University of Health Science and sited in his hometown, Oturkpo, in the Idoma heartland of Benue State.  Mark had failed to deliver on his promise of Apa State, but the medical university would be some redemption.

    Speaking to the bill, Mark said the university would be equipped to engage in specialized training of doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other medical health practitioners “to cushion the current admission deficit” underscored by the fact that the traditional institutions could only take 3, 000 out of nearly 160, 000 who apply every year.

    The need to curb medical tourism was, however, the theme that ran through the hearings on the proposal.

    Senator Jibrin Barau (APC, Kano North) noted that if the bill won presidential assent, it would surely reduce the rate of medical tourism among the country’s elite.

    “No one will have to fly to India or any country on medical ground if we have all the needed state-of-the-art facility on ground in our country,” he said.  “Once this university takes off, we could even export our medical practitioners, which would boost our economy. As we all know, health they say is wealth.”

    Senate President, Bukola Saraki, represented by Senator Olusola Adeyeye (APC, Osun Central) said the bill was timely, and that the establishment of the university would help mitigate the crisis in the health sector.

    When established, the university would address the issues of medical tourism and its associated capital flights amounting to some N3 billion expended by Nigerians seeking medical attention  abroad.

    Throughout the proceedings, nobody asked why setting up a new medical university, rather  than strengthening and equipping existing teaching hospitals and medical centres to world class, was the best answer to the nation’s health care crisis.

    Nobody asked how this particular institution would be the answer to medical tourism when, even if established and equipped today, it would produce no doctors for the next five years at least.  Just how many students can it accommodate anyway?

    This whole idea of curbing medical tourism through setting up a specialised medical university:  is this not a solution in search of a problem?  Just how pervasive is medical tourism?

    David Mark is to be commended on this initiative.

    Nigeria has given him a great deal – “abandoned property” czar, military governor, Minister of Communications over presiding and the nation’s octopus telecommunications network NITEL, senator of the Federal Republic since 1999 and president of that body for two consecutive four-year terms, etc, etc, and all the rights and privileges and compensation appertaining thereunto.

    In the process, he has acquired a huge portfolio of assets, reported to include two golf courses abroad, liquid wealth salted away in European and Caribbean tax shelters (remember the Panama Papers), and goodness knows what else in Nigeria.   By some accounts, he is an authentic billionaire.

    And yet, he and his cohorts want the Nigerian taxpayer to build, equip and run a medical university named for him and situated in his hometown.

    What does David Mark want to give back to a nation that has given him so much?  What material contribution does he intend to make to an institution, the establishment of which he has pursued with singular vigour?  What bequest does he want to make for having the proposed university named after him?

    Eleswhere, those seeking this kind of honour–for great honour it is, not a right -pay handsomely for it.

    Think on these things, Distinguished Senator.

  • Matters miscellaneous

    Matters miscellaneous

    For the benefit of those who need reminding, “Matters Miscellaneous” is the rubric under which, working from no particular design, I try to attend to the glut of occurrences with broad strokes and in short takes, lest some people and institutions feel neglected.

    Where to start?    Maina-gate has got to be the point of departure.

    Elements of Maina-gate

    It reads like a tale straight out of Kafka.

    A suspect in the investigation of the disappearance of some N100 billion in pension funds he was appointed to safeguard vanished from the public view for three years, during which he stayed in a safe house supposedly provided by an enforcement arm of the law he was running away from.  He was sighted living it up big-time in Dubai and other fun cities, and discovered functioning with perfect equanimity in the civil service in a higher capacity than the one from which he had been dismissed  three years earlier.   His reinstatement and rehabilitation resulted from a recommendation of the nation’s chief law officer that the head of the civil service had called flagrantly improper.

    That, in sum, is the story of Abdulrasheed Maina, one-time head of former president Goodluck Jonathan’s Task Force on Pension Reforms.

    Only in Nigeria could this have happened when a war on corruption is being waged.

    Grimly resolved not to go down alone, Maina has threatened to tell all.

    Bring it on, sir.

     

    Dino strikes gold

    Give it to Dino Melaye when it comes to full disclosure.  The APC Senator for Kogi West revealed recently that he has struck gold in a vast field with even vaster potential.

    Not through legislative work , the earnings from which he has acquired a fleet of the finest automobiles ever built, plus prime real estate in the most fetching neighboourhoods of Abuja.  Not through the video recording with which he bequeathed to the entertainment world the enchanting rhythms, the cadenced lyrics, and the captivating dance steps of Ajekun iya.

    To come right out with it, the source of the new wealth is his blockbuster book “Antidote for Corruption”.   At the last count, it had sold no fewer than 100, 000 copies, and doubtless tens of thousands more since then.

    On a recent trip to Germany, Melaye told Leke Baiyewu (Sunday Punch, November 5), he took 500 copies of the book along.  His agents have reported the stock “exhausted.”   A thousand copies sent to the United Kingdom were snatched up in double-quick time. He went to Russia with 100 copies; same story.   Ditto for the 2, 500 copies sent to five states in America.  They are demanding a new shipment.

    “I want to believe that it has been properly received,” Melaye said of the book, with the modesty that becomes him so well.

    How about the home front?

    “Within the country here, I have made huge sales,” he said. “I am laughing all the way to the bank.”

    Not bad for a compilation, the title of which was mocked as nonsensical, and the content of which was dismissed as a pastiche most likely to raise issues of copyright infringement.  Few books on The New York Times Bestseller List command this kind of international attention.

    And to think that the volume is just Melaye’s first literary outing!

    I hear that the authors of the anthologised entries are sharpening their knives and combing the text for anything on which they might be able to ground a copyright infringement law.

    When they strike, the good Senator cannot claim that the book was a commercial failure.  Commercial failures don’t send anyone laughing all the way to the bank, not when the top item on the person’s shopping list, according to inside sources, is a customised personal jet.

     

    Profiler, beware

    In these digital times, a library is just several clicks away on your computer screen.  Putting together a profile has never been easier.  Click your way into Wikipedia, and presto!

    But when several persons share the same name, it takes extra care to avoid a monumental mix-up, the kind that occurred last Sunday in one newspaper’s feature on what it called “Seven strong men around Buhari.”

    Among them, of course, is Abba Kyari, President Muhammadu Buhari’s Chief of Staff.  Only a few things the newspaper published about him were accurate:  his name, his picture, his education at Warwick and Cambridge, and his current designation. Almost everything else was wrong.

    Abba Kyari was not born in 1938; he did not attend Barewa College – I should know, because  he and I belong in the same alma mater, St Paul’s College, Wusasa, Zaria, since renamed Kufena College.  He did not enlist in the Nigerian Army in 1959 as an Officer Cadet.  He never served as artillery commander in the Kaduna-based 1 Brigade of the nor as Commanding Officer of the Kano-based 5th Battalion of the Nigerian Army

    Buhari’s Chief of Staff never served as military governor of North Central State during the Yakubu Gowon regime.  He never held any of the other positions he was reported to have held.  He never led the Northern delegation to the 1994 Constitutional Conference.

    That sweeping biography belongs to Abba Kyari’s older namesake but no relation, the late Major-General Abba Kyari.

     

    72 hours without phone service

    “Emergency calls only”

    For 72 hours last week, that was the message that bobbed up on the screen of my cell phone.  And I was experiencing the phenomenon for the second time in six weeks.  I could not reach the vast majority of my contacts who have no email.  They too could not reach me.  It was all so disorienting.

    Comparing notes with subscribers to the particular service provider, I was somewhat relieved that the fault was with the provider, not with my cell phone.  There had been no previous warning about service interruption, no indication of how long it would last, and no apologies when service was finally restored.

    Is this how brands lose their appeal?

    It is now perfectly notorious that all GSM service providers have sold and continued to sell far more lines than their carrying capacity; hence the disembodied and disingenuous rationalisations for those failed calls with which subscribers have become painfully familiar.

    “Your call did not go through.”  They never tell you why.

    “All lines to the country you are calling are busy.”  How so?

    “Your call is being forwarded.”  Even when no forwarding information or mechanism is indicated?

    “The subscriber you are calling cannot be reached?”  Really?

    And so on and so forth.  Now you know.

    Is there no national security implication to these discontinuities?

     

    Betweeen sleuthing and lawmaking

    In practice, there should be no sharp dividing line between the investigative function and the lawmaking function of the Senate. But lately, the one appears to have supplanted the other.

    At any given time, the Senate is inviting or threatening to invite one official or institution to appear before it, claiming to have uncovered massive fraud in one ministry, department or agency of government or another, and altogether positioning itself as a de facto EFCC, whose leadership it is    sworn to cripple, if not eviscerate altogether.

    The problem here is that the Senate suffers fatally from a credibility deficit.

    Here is an institution that has not audited its own financial transactions in six years, and concerning which it is only a slight exaggeration to say that it will have a hard time winning a transparency contest against a Black Hole, the hulk of a burned-out star with a density so high that not even light can escape from it.

    Whatever happened, by the way, to the challenge to the law “as revised” on which the ascendancy of the Senate president and his deputy was supposedly grounded – a document which the best authorities have put down as an inept forgery?

    They must be hoping to run down the clock on that one.

     

    Relief in Owerri

    I hear they are hugely relieved in the Imo State capital, Owerri, that the kerfuffle worked up by the life-size likeness of South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma that Governor Rochas Okorocha unveiled to mark his honored guest’s visit has subsided.

    Government House, Owerri, was flooded with messages from South Africa’s irreverent social media and its ungrateful patrons urging Okorocha to keep the original and send down the copy.

    All over Nigeria, and especially in Imo State, the attentive audience tittered endlessly about  what the media malignantly called “Okorocha’s erection.”

    Whatever happened to our value system?