The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • Roadblocks to restructuring

    Roadblocks to restructuring

    By whatever name the attentive public chooses to call it, restructuring is going to rank high on the national discourse until it is addressed forthrightly. But there is a formidable obstacle in the way: the National Assembly, which has never missed an opportunity to assert that the power to alter or revise the Constitution or write a new one rests with the legislature.

    The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, told State House  Correspondents in Abuja last week that, based on the Constitution, The National Assembly has the last say on the matter, no matter how loud or insistent the agitation and clamour for change.

    President Muhammadu Buhari has also said that constitutional review belongs in the province of the National Assembly, though not exclusively.  He has insinuated into the process the National Council of State, an advisory body that has no defined role under the Constitution and meets at the president’s pleasure.

    This is a misapprehension that can only compound matters.

    But both Dogara and Buhari have unwittingly identified a major roadblock to restructuring Nigeria.

    The letter of the Constitution, it is true, vests the National Assembly with the power of review and revision.  But we must never forget the Constitution’s origins.  Conceived in secrecy and fashioned in unseemly haste, it was foisted on the nation by an exhausted military regime whose legitimacy at its departure was at best dubious.

    The Constitution’s preface, “We, the people. . .” is a solemn lie, according to the best authorities.

    In its financial transactions, the National Assembly has been as transparent as a brick wall.  Nobody knows how much its members have elected to pay themselves.  But the indications are that their self-assigned compensation is obscene compared with what obtains in the world’s most prosperous nations. Placed in the national context, it is downright unconscionable.

    More often than not, the Assembly is on vacation.  Even when it is in session, the rate of absenteeism is high.  The financial cost to the nation is so huge that not a few thoughtful Nigerians have proposed replacing the present House with one whose members serve part-time, as in the First Republic, and abolishing the Senate outright, as the Republic of Guinea has done with great benefit to its exchequer but without loss in the quality of  law-making.

    This kind of arrangement may well be canvassed when the constitutional review gets underway.

    Is it conceivable that a self-dealing National Assembly that has “the last word,” according to Dogara, will approve a measure, that will effectively terminate the outrageous compensation its members enjoy – N29 million a month, according to  one account they have denied but not refuted with facts and figures?

    As my colleague Ropo Sekoni remarked in his September 15, 2017 column for this newspaper, “A legislature that is afraid to disclose to citizens what it pays itself does not have the credibility to write a new constitution.”

    When the National Assembly deliberated on a raft of proposals emanating from its own committees the other day, it rejected on the threshold a call for the devolution of powers, a measure designed to retrieve Nigeria from the centrally-administered state it had become and set it firmly on the federal path on which it was founded.

    If the National Assembly could be so hostile to devolution, a central issue in any serious effort to review the Constitution, there is no reason to expect it to do little more than tinker with a document demanding comprehensive revision, if not wholesale re-writing.

    On the other hand, in keeping with its propensity for self-dealing, the National Assembly approved proposals that would confer constitutional immunity on its principal officers and also bestow on them membership of the National Council of State.

    The All Cross River Nationals Front has furnished another reason why the National Assembly cannot be the proper forum for restructuring the country.  In a communiqué  issued on October 6, 2017 at the end of its meeting in the Cross River State capital, Calabar, the Front declared that it was time to have “precise and free discussions” on the articles of association among the different peoples of Nigeria, “with all options open for discussion.”

    More to the point, it stated that the machinery for negotiation cannot lie with the National Assembly “because of the imbalance in representation structured into the National Assembly by various military regimes.”

    This imbalance, it should be added, accounts for the fact that Kano State has  more than twice as many entrenched Local Government Areas (44) as Lagos State (20) which officially has roughly the same population as Kano State.

    The path to a new Constitution, then, is blockaded unless the constitutional clause vesting the National Assembly with the power to amend that foundational document is rendered inoperative.  The pre-eminent legal scholar, Professor Ben Nwabueze, has suggested suspending that clause to clear the way for a body with constituent powers to write a new constitution, while the National Assembly busies itself with making laws for the governance of Nigeria.

    But will a self-dealing National Assembly assent to such a proposition?

    Absent such an assent, however, efforts to give Nigeria a new constitution will grind on and on, through the state assemblies and back to the National Assembly.  The task cannot be completed in the life of the Eighth National Assembly, nor perhaps even in that of its successor.

    But unless the controversial clause is suspended, the task cannot begin in sound earnest, and the Nigerian state will stagger from political crisis to deeper political crisis.

     

    From Himself the Igodomigodo, Osahon (Patrick) Obahiagbon

     

    “My dear big brother:

    “Let me seek your imprimatur to asseverate ab ovo, how anatomically mollycoddled I always feel whenever you have found the time out of your perspicacious, percipient and intellectually hieratic ensconcement to find out what could be spinning in my encephalon, on our nation state, in your hebdomadal cerebral lucubrations.

    “Am in caboodle concordance with your very good self, Professor ltse Sagay and others who have didactically lampooned, serially lacerated and pooh-poohed the sodom and gomorrah that the National Assembly has become.

    “For me really, what is even more of the moment and deservable of mental pabulum more than the humongous lucre has to do with what I stigmatise as the picaninny legislative chicaneries, parliamentary makossa gymkhana and pachucoism preponderantly striding the National Assembly on matters pro bono publico that I find myself most times asking the question: cui bono the National Assembly?

    “I have always pertinaciously held the view that Nigeria’s democracy cannot be more elevated, dignified, ennobled and salubriously disposed more than its representatives and it’s up to the high priests, oligarchs and hierarchs of our respective political parties to put in place a party nomination configuration that will manacle all political gladiators, carpetbaggers, philistines and vacuous narcissistic epicureans who have no business in the sacred precincts of parliament either at the state or national level.

    “Unless and until a sifting process is put in place we will continue to be saddled with political jokers, opportunists ,and jobbers and little wonder also that a resort to muscles, brawn, hiceps and biceps rather than grey matter are frequently deployed in the various hallowed (now becoming hollowed) chambers across the country.”

    Even if I had not named my friend and aburo Patrick as the author of the foregoing correspondence, the attentive public would easily have divined his identity.

    Every sentence, if not every word, is a dead giveaway, stamped as it is with his trademark hyperpolysesquipedalianism.

    Nobody does it like His Magniloquence.

     

  • Attention: Patrick Obahiagbon

    Attention: Patrick Obahiagbon

    Three (four?) years have passed since we last exchanged correspondence, but it all seems like a galactic intermission. My grateful thanks to you for your flattering reference to me in an interview you granted one of our diurnal journals the other day.

    I have closely monitored developments in the sphere where, most recently, you brought your insights, perspicacity and savoir faire, to say nothing of your prodigious lexical endowment, to bear on matters of state, right beside the indefatigable Comrade Governor, helping chalk up for posterity imperishable accomplishments–a record that no doubt led to the visceral rejection of the group seeking to supplant yours by the discerning people of Edo State.

    You have thus far been reticent in commenting on developments in the aforementioned sphere in general, and resoundingly silent on the recent imbroglio in the once-hallowed forum where fists were freely employed and objects not nailed to the floor were converted to lethal missiles, leading the sedate and highly revered Monarch of the Kingdom to denounce the riotous members of the State Assembly.

    You will doubtless have noted that the National Day, our Independence anniversary, again occasioned an orgy of collective self-flagellation not untinged with self-pity, and that a milestone that should have been marked with rejoicing and rededication bred, instead, resentment and recrimination.

    Should we now christen it National Catharsis Day? Or National Lamentation Day?

    It is a development deeply to be deplored that, since your departure, not a whiff of your oratorical virtuosity and lexical wizardry has issued from the legislative house in which you held the members and indeed the entire nation spellbound for four years. For the most part, its proceedings are dilatory and desultory, and its transactions are about as transparent as a brick wall.

    When it comes to how much of the public purse they have chosen to award themselves, they  are as secretive as oysters.  At that point, even the few among them who condescend to discuss public issues become tongue-tied, incoherent.

    The other day when the much-learned senior attorney and chair of the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption, Professor Itse Sagay, whom no one has ever accused of frivolity or psittacism, disclosed that senators took home N29 million every month –yes, every month – as recompense for their exertions, they went nuclear.

    They disputed the amount, though some knowledgeable persons tell me it is grossly and egregiously understated.  They mocked the learned professor, disparaged him, berated him, taunted him – they did everything except disclose how much compensation they award themselves every month.

    It is a measure of how precipitously standards have plummeted since your time that the most talked- about lawmaker today happens to be a shameless exhibitionist, a person who would sooner punch you in the face or kick you in the groin than engage you in serious debate.

    I am talking, dear aburo, about a poor imitation of a street minstrel and dancer who stakes a larger claim on his sexual prowess than on his cerebration, and would rather flaunt his collection of exotic cars—acquired through legislative work, presumably — than state for the record what he has done for the people in whose name he sits in the legislature.

    But he is not alone.  The place has become a cushy asylum for former state governors, many of them fearful of their own shadows.  And yet, President Muhammadu Buhari says the power to review the incurably flawed 1999 Constitution foisted on the country by the departing military inheres in this self-dealing body and in the Council of State, an advisory body that meets only at the President’s pleasure.

    Mr President doth misapprehend the role of the Council of State in the constitutional order, it would seem.   His prescription in the face of the clamour for restructuring is not in the least reassuring.

    Being an indefatigable monitor of the lexical topography, you will have discerned that “restructuring” has suddenly become the most intractable term in contemporary political discourse.  Many mainstream political actors are claiming that they cannot fathom what it means.

    Apparently, unlike you, these people have not cultivated the habit of consulting the dictionary, let alone a predilection for burrowing into it and internalising it from cover to cover to disinter its hidden riches.  The online Cambridge English dictionary defines the term simply and authoritatively as “organising a company, business or system in a new way to make it operate more effectively.”  Nothing more.

    And yet, the very mention of “restructuring” drives even some usually sanguine people into           a condition bordering on catalepsy.  Can you extract from your lexical arsenal a term that will cure them of their heebie-jeebies?

    That would be all for now, dear aburo.  I look forward to the unalloyed delight of perusing your response.  Meanwhile, good luck on work in progress, and in your tireless and immensely rewarding engagement with your dictionaries.

    Fraternally

    OD

     Rewane:  A postscript

    Not a few readers have remarked that my October 10 column “Rewane: 22 years later” did not do justice to the statesman’s great personal kindness.

    Some spoke of how, without fuss and without ceremony, he assigned to needy persons, some           of them total strangers, rent-free accommodation in his vast property holdings in Lagos and Warri, funded scholarships in local and overseas institutions, picked up bills for overseas medical treatment, and handed out cash to persons who were down on their luck.

    “How could you have omitted his great legacy, the prestigious Hussey College, Warri, that he founded and endowed, together with his brother Chief O. N. Rewane and Chief Elliot Begho?”  a correspondent remonstrated.

    Emmanuel Olanrewaju Bandele, retired professor of medicine at the College of Medicine of  the University of Lagos, trustee and one-time president of the Nigerian Thoracic Association     and currently consultant chest physician at the Lagos State University College of Medicine,  has asked me to enter this testament to Rewane’s legendary munificence in the public record.

    “Around 1985, I was offered admission to the world-famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to undertake some research.  All the University of Lagos College of Medicine could offer me was a round-trip ticket.

    “In my desperation, I approached Dr Irene Rewane, since deceased, a niece of Chief Alfred Rewane.  She gave me a note to take to him.  He welcomed me with warm friendliness and immediately wrote me a cheque which helped substantially with my upkeep.

    “Thanks to his singular philanthropy, the research contributed largely to my becoming a professor of medicine, and the experience I gained helped in the management of Nigerian asthmatics.”

    End of Professor Bandele’s testament.

    It remains to close with a personal reminiscence.

    I met Chief Rewane only once, in 1984, and it was by chance.

    I had gone to keep an appointment with Chief Anthony Enahoro in his suite at The Sheraton Hotel in Ikeja.  He had left word with an aide that I should meet him in Chief Rewane’s residence at Oduduwa Crescent, in Ikeja, Lagos.

    On my being introduced to him in his expansive living room, Rewane drew a long breath, fixed me with his eyes and said in mild rebuke:  “So it is my aburo Tony that brought you here?   You would not have come here if he had not asked you to meet him here?”

    Pardon the digression, but I would gather that Rewane and Enahoro were always bantering        about who was older and therefore entitled to deference from the younger. Published records indicate that Rewane was older by seven years, but Enahoro was unyielding.

    To resume:  I apologised.  Chief Cornelius (C.O.) Adebayo, general secretary of the Enahoro-led Movement for National Reformation, joined in the apology, assuring our host that I meant no disrespect.  Our host seemed reassured.  A warm handshake followed, and he made me a cup of tea, a ritual emblematic of his hospitality.

    As I made to leave, Rewane said he hoped it would not take his aburo to bring me to the house again. “This is your home,” he added. “Feel free to visit or call me whenever you wish.”

    Much to my regret, I never availed myself of the offer.  Nor did I see him again.

     

  • Rewane: 22 years later

    Rewane: 22 years later

    Friday, October 6, marked the 22nd anniversary of one of the most dastardly political murders of recent memory.

    Chief Alfred Ogbeyiwa Rewane, elder statesman, industrialist, philanthropist, and a pillar of the progressive community, was shot dead in his home on Oduduwa Crescent, in the more tranquil section of Ikeja GRA, in Lagos.

    For the previous five years and indeed starting from Muhammadu Buhari’s military regime and through the depredations of the Babangida years to the loathsome Sani Abacha, Rewane had been an incisive and outspoken critic of government.

    Those uniformed potentates sought at every chance to stamp themselves on the public consciousness as patriotic redeemers who had come to free Nigeria from a shameful past and lead it to a glorious future.

    Drawing copiously on Nigeria’s history, Rewane showed with facts and figures in editorial advertisements that what the men of the moment were trumpeting as progress was nothing of the sort, and was in some instances actually a regression.  He supplied  that vital link with the past, without which a nation is condemned to grope and founder.

    That fateful Friday, October 6, 1995, he was getting ready to leave for his Western House office in Lagos when a pick-up van marked with the logo of one of his many companies pulled up at the gate. Accustomed to such visits, the gatekeepers dutifully admitted the van and its occupants into the premises.

    These were no visitors but intruders with murder on their minds. Drawing their guns, they overpowered the security guards, locked up all the residents and headed for Rewane’s bedroom.  There, they shot him in the chest.  They waited some five minutes to be sure he was dead; then they drove off.

    In Ibadan, Chief Bola Ige was about to set out for Lagos for a meeting with Rewane

    scheduled for the late afternoon when his phone rang.  The caller told Ige tersely and with more than a hint of triumph that the meeting would no longer hold because “we have taken care of Rewane.”  That call was placed within 15 minutes of the gruesome intrusion into Rewane’s home.  The caller did not identify himself.

    This was no random killing.

    The bullet that felled Rewane was not the type you could buy off the shelf at a gun shop or from a street vendor.  It was, according to insider accounts, specially designed to dissolve in body tissue, leaving no residue and hence no trace of its manufacture.  Only secret service operatives or persons engaged in syndicated crime pack that kind of ordnance.

    The killers had demanded nothing from Rewane.  Not cash, of which he kept a huge pile in mint-fresh banknotes handy.  Not gold jewellery, of which he was very fond, and of which his wife and members of his household could have supplied a truck-full.   Not the key to his safe, which doubtless held priceless documents.

    Rewane was not only a major financier of NADECO, the umbrella organisation at the

    spearhead of the struggle to terminate military rule, he used his enormous personal wealth to give aid and comfort and sustenance to political activists whom the authorities had marked for ruin.  He refused to succumb to the fear that Abacha’s terror machine had loosed on the land. The only question was when that machine would strike at Rewane.

    So, this could not have been an “armed robbery.”

    In the hours following Rewane’s murder, the police willfully ignored these important clues. They did not even make the pretence of searching for his killers. To create the illusion of momentum in the investigation, they seized several members of Rewane’s domestic staff – some of them had worked for him for so long that they were virtually members of the family – plus some vagrants in the Ikeja area, and charged them with armed robbery and murder.

    Five of the eight would die in prison custody, awaiting trial.

    Testimony before the Oputa Commission of inquiry into human rights violations as well as depositions at the murder trials of some of the principal actors of the Abacha regime would show what it required little imagination to figure out all along: Rewane had been killed by agents of the Nigerian state.

    For 14 years, six judges and at least as many prosecutors and defence attorneys would partake, wittingly or unwittingly, in an unconscionable mockery of the judicial system remarkable even by Nigeria’s standards.

    Finally, in January 2011, some 15 years after their arraignment, charges against two of the surviving suspects, Lucky Igbinovia and Effiong Elemi Edu, were dismissed by the Lagos High Court, Justice Olusola Williams presiding.

    “It appears to me that all the Police did was to visit the scene of the crime, arrest the workers there and obtain statements from them,” the judge said.  The “confessional statement” on which the prosecution had rested its case was inadmissible, Justice Williams said, because the court was convinced that it was coerced.

    No forensic or any evidence of probative value other than the alleged confession was tendered by the prosecution.

    The other survivor, Elvis Irenuma, had been discharged and acquitted several years because the prosecution had failed to establish a case against him.

    And so today, 22 years later, Rewane’s killers are yet to be brought to justice.

    One of several commemorative newspaper editorial advertisements (Punch, October 6) placed on the occasion by his family is in a way a comment on the state of the nation that could well have been written by Rewane himself, and a dire prediction.

    Emblematic of the forthrightness for which the late elder statesman was known, it reads:

    “After twenty-two years of your supreme sacrifice , nothing seems to have changed.

    “True democracy seems to be eluding Nigeria.

    “Autocracy by force and Democracy for cash are two sides of the same coin.

    “Some of the conspirators of your assassination are still in the closet while others are paying the price installmentally.

    “There is a moral decadence of values and culture, with the highest and revered now a subject of ridicule.

    “Our ancestors will reject the sale of our heritage to the unworthy.

    “Your message is as relevant today as it was back then.”

    The reference to those who “are paying the price” of their treachery is particularly striking.

    It says to the repellent thug, swindler, racketeer and embezzler widely believed to have led the operation to murder Rewane:  Humiliating imprisonment was only the first installment of the punishment awaiting you.

    May the next installment not be long in coming.  As for his confederates, may they be smoked out of their dank closets in due season.

  • Salami: An epic injustice revisited

    Salami: An epic injustice revisited

    When the National Judicial Council (NJC) recommended in May 2012 that the suspended president of the Court of Appeal, Justice Ayo Isa Salami, be reinstated, not a few of those who  had followed the matter closely felt that the Council was offering President Goodluck Jonathan            a decent way to end one of the ugliest episodes in Nigeria’s judicial history.

    That the recommendation bore the imprint of two of the nation’s most distinguished jurists  who stood at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum made the recommendation all the more resonant.

    If the liberal Justice Kayode Eso, judge of the Supreme Court, since deceased, and the conservative senior attorney and former Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of                              the Federation, Chief Richard Akinjide (SAN), could sign off on the document along with the majority, it would seem that the Council had decided to take politics out of the matter and had considered it purely on its legal merit.

    The NJC, I thought, had thereby placed in President Goodluck Jonathan’s hands a powerful weapon to rein in the hawks in the PDP who would settle for nothing less than Justice Salami’s scalp because his Court stripped them of their stolen gubernatorial trophies in Osun and Ondo and restored the people’s mandate to those who had earned it at the polls.

    I was hoping that Dr Jonathan would seize the opportunity to play statesman rather than party chieftain.  And when he was reported to be “studying” the recommendation, I thought he was trying to find a way of appeasing the hawks, aforementioned.

    Dr Jonathan had something else in mind.  He ran down the clock on Justice Salami, calculating that the books would be closed on the matter once the jurist reached the mandatory retirement age of 70 years.

    And so, two years after being consigned to judicial purgatory, Justice Salami served notice of retirement, effective October 15, 2013, victim  of an epic injustice that Dr Jonathan could and indeed should have ended.

    Justice Salami’s ordeal began, as I once recalled in this space, when he presided over the sitting  of the Court of Appeal that voided the purported election of the PDP candidate, Engineer Segun Oni, in the 2007 Ekiti gubernatorial election and declared Dr Kayode Fayemi of the ACN winner.

    The election was marred by fraud on a staggering scale.  In a court-ordered partial re-run  to ascertain the true voice of the people, the PDP, the election umpire INEC, Maurice Iwu presiding, and the police, executed a more brazen heist that a 3-2 majority of the Election Petitions Tribunal nevertheless consecrated with transparent sophistry.

    The Court of Appeal reversed, and Justice Salami became a marked man.

    Five weeks later, the Salami Court, Justice Clara Ogunbiyi presiding, vacated the stolen mandate under which yet another PDP candidate, Prince Olagunsoye Oyinlola, had governed Osun for three years and seven months–or seven years and seven months if one believes, as one now positively must — that Oyinlola and the PDP never won the 2003 election, on the basis of which    he had served a four-year term.

    As in Ekiti, the Osun poll was vitiated by massive rigging and violence.  The ACN candidate, Engineer Rauf Aregbesola, headed to the Elections Petition Tribunal for review and redress.  Obtaining neither, he took his case to a superior body, which held that the verdict of the court  below amounted to a miscarriage of justice and ordered that the petition be heard de novo.

    The new tribunal rejected Aregbesola’s petition in a “unanimous” judgment signed by four of  the five judges.  The text was festooned with alterations and interpolations that called the integrity of the process into question.

    In finding for Aregbesola, Justice Ogunbiyi wrote for a unanimous Court of Appeal that the Tribunal was “lackadaisical” in its handling of the case, that it dismissed vital evidence as “mere allegations”; that it set at nought compelling forensic evidence; that it wantonly misrepresented evidence of key witnesses; in sum, that the Tribunal’s conduct was “a travesty, and a mockery”   of the judicial process.

    That verdict sealed Justice Salami’s doom.  He would have to be taken out of the Court of Appeal, the terminus for all election petitions except those arising from the election of President.

    First they offered to promote him to justice of the Supreme Court.  He demurred.

    Several years earlier, when there was a vacancy on the Court, he had declined to apply for the position.

    Then, they accused him, first in whispers and subsequently in unsigned newspaper advertorials of all manner of misconduct, including consorting with attorneys of parties to the case he was handling.  Leading the charge was Senator (as he then was) Iyiola Omisore who, despite his apparent conversion to probity and propriety, nevertheless remained a principal suspect in the murder of the former Federal Minister of Justice and Attorney-General, Chief Bola Ige.

    Then there was talk of giving Justice Salami a “soft landing” if only he would just quit.

    Why would they contemplate, much less make such offers to a judge they claimed was tainted irredeemably?  Why would they reward him with a promotion to the Supreme Court?  Why would they offer him a “soft landing”?  Why not make a public example of him?

    If you had the facts on your side, if you were serious about cleansing the judiciary, if you were truly desirous of prosecuting a Transformation Agenda in which fighting corruption was a core element, why would you pass up such a great opportunity to nail the judge?

    But Justice Salami’s saga was never about law.  It was about politics through and through,  politics in its rawest form.

    A pending judgment in the disputed gubernatorial election result in Sokoto before the Salami Court would provide the final pretext for caging Justice Salami and ultimately terminating his career. The judgment could overturn many a political applecart, and the authorities were taking no chances.

    According to Justice Salami, the sitting Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Aloysius Katsina-Alu, requested that the judgment be withheld, for political reasons.  Justice Salami cited Justice Dahiru Musdapher, of the Supreme Court, as a witness to this encounter.

    Justice Katsina-Alu said he had merely informed Justice Salami that the judgment had been leaked, and that it might be wise to put off issuing it.  But at the material time, the judgment  had not been leaked.  It turned out that documents alleging a leakage did not surface for at least another week.

    Justice Musdapher whom Justice Salami had cited as witness would only say with diplomatic tact that he could not recall the occasion.  Not categorically that the encounter never happened; merely that he had no recollection of it.

    For all practical purposes, that was the end of Justice Salami’s career.  Those determined to teach him a lesson wove Justice Musdapher’s diplomatic answer into a charge of perjury, with Chief Justice Katsina-Alu as accuser and prosecutor and witness and judge while in office and even after he retired.

    Not even the NJC could save Justice Salami from their vengeful wrath those who had a vested interest in “arresting” the pending judgment of the Court of Appeal.

    Justice Salami left the scene bruised and battered, and not entirely on his own terms.   But his head was unbowed.  He refused to submit to blackmail and blandishment.  While they hurled every weapon in their arsenal of dirty tricks at him, he sought vindication through the law.

    A vindication of sorts came last week.   The NJC named Justice Salami to head the Crime Cases Trial Monitoring Committee, charged to fast-track corruption trials and free them from the delays and detours, the twists and turns contrived by lawyers and judges alike.

    Something tells me that posterity will remember Justice Salami more kindly than those who, when presented with a chance to end an epic injustice, chose to perpetuate it.

  • When names migrate

    When names migrate

    This piece is a foray into onomastics – the study of names.

    When I arrived in the United States in the mid-70s, I was excited to find that one of the more notable female performing artistes was called Lola Falana.  Though accented differently and pronounced differently, the name had the familiar ring of the home I had just left.  It could well have belonged to your old classmate, a colleague at work, or the young woman who lived down the street in your Surulere neighbourhood, in Lagos.

    That it was rendered as Lólá Fàlànà and not Lólá Fáláná mattered not in the least.  Americans are notorious for mangling foreign names anyway.   I have had a dickens of a job getting them to desist from pronouncing my last name as if it were and English word.  It is even worse when I use the initial of my first name, followed by a period, in front of my surname.

    Invariably, the period gets transformed into an apostrophe, and the whole arrangement comes across as O’Dare.

    “Do I look Irish?” I would quip.   That usually dissolves the testiness of such moments.

    To return to Falana:  However you rendered that name, the person answering to it had to be an expatriate Nigerian, or a descendant of a person of Nigerian extraction a generation or two removed, perhaps.

    To my disappointment, the well-known singer turned out to be nothing of the kind.  Lólá, it turned out was the shortened form of Lóletha, a variant of Lólita.  Remember Vladimir Nabokov’s classic novel of that title?  The surname is Spanish.  The compatriot I thought I had found was in fact Afro-Cuban.

    Or maybe she descended from Nigerian parentage after all, going back to the time of that pernicious traffick of Africans across the Atlantic into enslavement in the so-called New World, and over the centuries, the surname morphed into its contemporary Spanish pronunciation.

    One of these days, someone bearing that name will out of curiosity trace his or lineage by DNA and discover that he or she has Nigerian roots, and on further investigation learn that the lineage is alive and thriving.

    So, Femi Falana (SAN) don’t be surprised if you get a call from the United States or Cuba from someone announcing that he or she is your relation going back half a millennium.  Don’t reflexively dismiss it as a scam.

    My excitement on encountering George Pataki shortly thereafter was even more stirring.  Again, though pronounced differently (Pátákì), it resonated powerfully. Back home, pàtàkì means important, significant, consequential.  The fellow was nothing if not consequential: He was the Governor of the State of New York, no less.  Clearly, he was living up to the name.

    My excitement dipped sharply when I saw his picture.    He is as Caucasian as they come, and of Hellenic heritage.  It would be carrying speculation too far to even think that there lurked somewhere in his DNA some genes suggestive of Yoruba descent.

    But again, maybe not.  Is it not recorded that, on encountering Ori Olokun, that masterpiece of Ife bronze casting and other artifacts, the German ethnographer Leo Frobenius proclaimed to the world  in 1911 that he had found the lost ancient territory of Atlantis conjured up by Plato.  For only in that provenance and its famed civilisation could works of such exquisite beauty have been wrought, Frobenius declared.

    Is it beyond the realm of possibility, then, that our pàtàkì and their Pátákì were forged in the intermingling between ancient Ife and Atlantis?   Stranger things have happened.

    The case of the 32nd President of the United States is no less intriguing.  The D in his famous initials FDR stands for Delano.  They render it as Dèlánó, but whether you contemplate it forward or backward or sideways or up or down, it is our own Délánò, give or take one vowel inflection.

    Personally, I will not be surprised that a connection exists between Franklin D. Roosevelt or a forebear, and the famous Delano family of Abeokuta.  After all, in keeping with the evocative meaning of the name in these parts, FDR cleared the path that got the United States out of the Depression and set it on the course to great prosperity.  That was a family tradition, for his cousin Teddy Roosevelt who preceded him in that high office by 32 years, was also a trailblazer.

    Do not be blown off course by the fact that Delano is a middle name for the one and a surname for the other.  After all, the difference between a middle name and a surname is the placement.  Besides, middle names morph into surnames and surnames morph into middle names, so that one person’s middle name is another person’s surname.

    The only surprise here is that no attempt has been made to establish a connection beyond mere speculation   Over to the Delano family, and the Egba Descendants Union.

    Whenever the name of the multiple award-winning contemporary performing artiste Adele comes up, I think back to the Oba of Lagos, Adeniji Adele, who reigned from 1949 through 1964, and to the eminent political scientist, Professor Adele Jinadu.

    Isn’t there a connection here waiting to be unlocked? Is it not our Adélè that has in pronunciation been stripped of one precious syllable in its migration across the seas and thus rendered far less cadenced?

    A young man of vast scholarly promise called my attention the other day to Babington, the middle name of the famous historian and essayist Thomas Macaulay, not to be confused with the eponymous father of our own Herbert Heelas Macaulay, the Wizard of Kirsten Hall.

    His working hypothesis is that the name emerged from Bababimtan, which had migrated across the Atlantic to Britain.  The natives liked it, adopted it and domesticated it, in the process translating it to the more euphonic Babington.

    According to the best authorities, the young man is headed for a major breakthrough in the field of International Intercultural Studies.

    The first time I heard of the Mayo Brothers who established the world-famous Mayo Clinics, I shook my head in lament.  Going by their name, the brothers have got to be of Nigerian descent.  They may inflect their name to rhyme with Méyó, but that cannot conceal or erase their Nigerian origin, where the family name must have been Máyò.

    Can’t we latch on this strong connection to get them to establish a world-class medical facility in Nigeria in grateful acknowledgement of their roots?

    Over to the energetic and resourceful Lai Mohammed, Minister of Information and Culture.

  • The imperative of restructuring

    The imperative of restructuring

    In recent weeks, “restructuring” has dominated public discourse across Nigeria.  Interest groups that have not staged local or regional assemblies on the subject are preparing to do so, impelled by circumstances they can no longer ignore or control.

    If the declaration that “the unity of Nigeria is not negotiable” once passed  as measure of sincere commitment to the Nigerian project, today it must be seen as a most unhelpful response to the demand for a peaceful resolution of the National Question.

    At the heart of that declaration is the assumption that “the unity of Nigeria” already exists and that those seeking to discuss it are at bottom seeking to countermand, if not destroy it.  Yet, I do not recall a time since Independence when Nigeria was more divided than it is today, when the national consensus was more tenuous, when mutual loathing across the ethnic and religious divides was more pervasive.

    Reading comments on Nigerian news on the Internet sites frequented by Nigerians, you would think the constituent groups are engaged in a war of attrition.  Nothing is sacred anymore.  Vileness has become the standard of elocution.

    A great many of these comments issue from the products of so-called Unity Schools, established to promote a sense of oneness after the civil war, and from veterans of the National Youth Service Corps who were supposed to be transformed into catalysts for national unity by a year-long stint outside their states of origin.

    And yet, there is hardly any let-up in the chant from some quarters that “the unity of Nigeria is not negotiable.”

    In what respect, pray, is “the unity of Nigeria” not negotiable?  If the unity already exists, if it is an actuality, surely it can be still negotiated to reinforce it, to establish for her citizens “a more perfect union,” to borrow Abraham Lincoln’s phrasing at one of the darkest periods in American history?

    If “the unity of Nigeria” is an ideology, surely it can be refined by debate and discussion, in short, by negotiation?

    If it is an aspiration, that too can be negotiated?  Should debate be foreclosed on whether it is a worthy aspiration, or on its proper place in a hierarchy of national aspirations?

    In whatever case, “the unity of Nigeria” must mean much more than unity for the sake of unity.  So, what should be its purpose?  What should it consist in?  These, surely, are legitimate issues for discussion and debate, especially when the very concept of unity has for all practical purposes been turned into uniformity.

    Ours has been a federation in name only.  At Nigeria’s independence in 1960, Northern Nigeria was    twice as large as Eastern Nigeria and Western Nigeria combined.  It is not generally realised, for instance, that Mambila Plateau, in what was Northern Nigeria, lies on the same latitude as Abeokuta, in Western Nigeria.  The North was well placed to impose its policy preferences on Nigeria and dominate it in many other respects.

    This was a negation of one of the cardinal principles of federalism, that no unit should be so large as to dominate the rest.

    Even so, Nigeria at that time had more features in common with a federation than the present arrangement. Each region had its own constitution, approved by its own legislature.  And it was the operative law, so long as it did not conflict with the Constitution of Nigeria.  Each region determined its own local government structure and the number of such local authorities, fixed the minimum wage, as well as the remuneration of civil and political officials.

    Not anymore.  Almost everything begins and ends in Abuja.

    In the United States from which we borrowed our present Constitution, each state has its own constitution, which is the supreme law in designated areas of state authority.  The state constitution prescribes how the governor is elected, the number of terms he or she may serve, and the duration of each term.  It also specifies the locus of state power.

    In some states, the governor is elected for single four-year term, and can seek office again after only a new governor will have completed his or her own four-year term.  In Texas, power is concentrated in the legislature.  The governor is little more than a ceremonial figure.  In New Hampshire, a state senator gets $100 for each of a two-year term, and the figure has not changed for more than a century.  Also in New Hampshire, and Vermont, governors are elected for a two-year term, and for three years in Wyoming.

    A member of a local council in Alabama does as earn the same remuneration as a member of a local council in New York State, just not a local council member in Oneonta, in up-state New York does not earn the same pay as a council member in Manhattan

    Various territories in Nigeria parcelled into states from whim and caprice for the most part have not made for a more perfect union. Most of them are unviable anyway.   The creation of six so-called geo-political zones seeks to evade the problem by recreating it on a smaller scale.

    When you shunt Niger, Kogi, Kwara, Benue and Nassarawa and Plateau into a Northwest Zone, what you are most likely to get is a smaller version of Nigeria.  Each of the other zones will produce its own version of Nigeria.  How these can constitute the building blocks for a more perfect union beats the imagination.

    Whether expressed as a quest for” resource control” or “ true federalism” or  “fiscal federalism,” or a “sovereign national conference” or a “national conference,” the demand for restructuring has attained   a momentum that cannot be arrested and a salience that can no longer be ignored.  Those who claim that they do not understand what it is all about, or that it is a matter for the National Assembly to resolve, are being disingenuous.  And they risk consigning themselves to irrelevance in the task of re-shaping Nigeria, probably the most urgent task of our time.

    In an advertorial in Vanguard (May 25, 1995), Chief Anthony Enahoro of cherished memory,  one of the founders of modern Nigeria and leader of the Movement for National Reformation, reviewed the political situation and its implication for the country’s future.  The distinguished statesman and patriot concluded that Nigeria had only three options in the long run.

    One:  Continue headlong on its present course and pray that God would rescue it from the consequences of its folly.

    Two:  Take concrete steps to restructure the Federation, granting a substantial measure of internal self-government to the nationalities and groups of nationalities, and return to what he Enahoro called “collective self-government.”

    Three: The nationalities and groups of nationalities disband the Federation and go their separate ways.

    It seems unlikely that nationalities that can hardly agree on anything will agree to disband the Federation.

    What seems most likely is that, in the absence of substantive restructuring, as the Centre faces growing challenges from Boko Haram insurgents, Delta militants, Indigenous People of Biafra and incipient separatist groups, armed bands of lawless cattle herders, unpaid workers and pensioners, young men and women who see only a bleak future ahead–as these challenges mount, the authority and legitimacy of the Centre will weaken to the point that those nationalities strong enough or determined enough to break away will do so

    In short, in the absence of restructuring, Nigerian state will wither away, like the former Soviet Union and the territory formerly known as Yugoslavia.  That is the lesson of history.

  • Back on the beat

    Back on the beat

    A week, it has been said, is a long time in politics. Applied to Nigeria, that is an understatement. A week there is almost like an eternity. How then do you catch up even on a slice of the most noteworthy events that have occurred in the two weeks this column was on recess?. I have chosen to follow the path of extreme randomness, infact random musings.

    Returning from his long medical trip to the UK, all primed up to zip through the mountain of files requiring his attention, President Muhammadu Buhari found that he could not work from the Executive Office, because it had been trashed by a colony of desperate rodents that have no respect for constituted authority.

    Fortunately, they did not carry their brigandage near what President Buhari once called “the other room,” in a display of delicacy and circumspection that few credit him with.

    Those who are forever kvetching over funds in the Federal Budget earmarked for exterminating rodents in the palace owe the Presidency an unreserved apology.

    Now that the infestation seems to have developed resistance to whatever was being used to check it, no one should cavil at any request from the Executive Branch for emergency funds to fumigate the areas affected with the most potent rodenticide in the market.

    On a happier note, just as the president was settling down to work from his office at the residence, the recession ended or bottomed out or petered out — or whatever.  But why split hairs over the matter? The important thing is that the hard times that have been with us for some two years are about to make way for the return of the good times of the good old days.

    So, watch out for a huge increase in the volume and intensity of industrial disputes.  Now that the recession is ended, what excuse can any state government put up for not paying salaries for months on end, or for paying only a fraction thereof?  What excuse can Kogi State Governor Yahaya Bello in particular rake up for importuning doctors in the state’s medical service to settle for one half of their salaries?  Will he settle for their rendering only one-half of their services?

    Watch out for a huge increase in the volume of domestic disputes as well.  Heads of households who think they can unilaterally cut the housekeeping money by a third now that the recession has ended should be prepared to have only two-thirds of their recession-era meals to put up or go to the market to do all the cajoling and the haggling and the bluffing and absorb the vulgar abuse that often comes with buying stuff.

    The one group that is decidedly unhappy that the recession has ended, even if only in a technical sense, comprises the stragglers of the Jonathan Administration’s discredited PDP flailing and thrashing to find their feet in the political terrain they dominated for 16 years and drove to    the edge of ruin.

    All the indications of a recession were manifest at the time the Jonathan Administration was dismissed by the people.  I say nothing of the looting that was the fundamental objective and directive principle of its tenure. Yet, the PDP, per its national chairman Ahmed Makarfi, says it was under the Buhari Administration that the economy “nosedived” into recession.

    Haba, PDP!   Where are you, Olisa Metuh!

    Finally, a response from Yusuph Olaniyonu, Special Adviser on Media and Publicity to Senate president Dr Bukola Saraki, to my August 15 column, “A preface to the silly season.”

    Olaniyonu sent it as a “private letter.”  But since it raises issues that belong in the public sphere, I sought his kind permission to publish it herewith, slightly edited:

    “Dear Prof:

    “I have just read your article titled “A Preface to the Silly Season” and I find it very interesting and really surprising.

    “I have a lot of respect for you and I usually feel happy the way you treat everybody you come into contact with respect. My reverence for you was the reason why I refused to join issues with you publicly despite all the blackmail and intimidation I was subjected to in my last job with the Ogun State Government in Abeokuta when your article on Chief Olusegun Osoba and Governor Ibikunle Amosun was published.

    “This letter is to tell you privately that the column under reference was wrong and unjust in its reference to Saraki.

    ”I know you as a man with great conscience and who dwells on facts. However, I find it surprising that you were repeating the line of lies created and concocted by Sahara Reporters’ Omoyele Sowore in your article mentioned above.

    “Sir, where on earth did Dr. Abubakar Bukola Saraki ever refer to Prof. Yemi Osinbajo as “ordinary Commissioner”?

    “When Sowore created that lie as part of his wicked vow to single-handedly bring Saraki down as Senate President, I had not even joined the staff of the Senate President but I read the latter’s public denial of that claim.

    “Also, I have never seen anywhere where Sowore produced a tape recording of that statement attributed to Saraki and neither did anybody come out to claim he witnessed when the statement was made.

    “With due respect, sir, even though you are free to choose what to believe and which camp to propagate their view points, however, I am sure you have no evidence and nobody else in this life has an evidence of Saraki mouthing such nonsense as attributed to him by Sowore. I wonder why it was only Sowore who heard that, not even The Nation and Punch, despite their constant searchlight on Saraki and their unrepentant mischief against the man.

    “Back to another aspect of the article, how come, sir, that when you chose those who, in your own personal calculation would be interested in running for the Presidency in 2019 even when such persons have not openly and covertly indicated interest and you brilliantly tore them apart, you also carefully evaded writing about an aspirant who has categorically declared that he would join the race if Buhari does not contest?

    “That candidate whom you chose to protect is Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, owner of The NATION, in which your article is published.

    “This error of omission or deliberate decision not to mention Asiwaju Tinubu gave an unmistakable impression that the article in question is part of the ploy by the Bourdillon media/Intellectual Think Thank to which you are widely believed to belong, to quickly take  out the other potential rivals long before the race commences.

    “However, I believe The NATION and its columnists will not have the last say on who becomes the next President after Buhari, either in 2019 or 2023.

    “I want to assure you that, contrary to the propaganda by Sahara Reporters and its collaborators in The NATION, Dr. Saraki has a lot of respect for Acting President Osinbajo. I have seen the two men discuss face to face and on phone and I know Dr. Saraki relates to Prof. Osinbajo with all the respect due to the office and person of the Acting President, Vice President, a distinguished Professor of Law and older brother.  You may personally check this fact with the Acting President.

    “Well, I know that even those who want the Sahara Reporters lies to be entrenched in the psyche of Nigerians know the truth but they believe in Goebbel’s dictum that a lie often repeated assumes the status of the truth.

    “Sir, my respect for you and the good relationship we have cannot be affected by this article. I just feel I should let you know my opinion and give a different perspective on some of the statements contained in the article.

    “Prof, do have the assurances of my highest regards, sir.”

    Yusuph Olaniyonu, Abuja

  • Echoes from the ‘Third Term’ project

    Echoes from the ‘Third Term’ project

    Former President Olusegun Obasanjo seems fated to be dogged by the “Third Term” project he was widely reported to be hatching the way the former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida has been haunted by his annulment of the June 12, 1993, presidential election, however much Babangida may pretend to the contrary.

    No sooner was it bruited in 2006 that Obasanjo was scheming to change the rules to allow him remain in office beyond the two terms warranted by the Constitution than his one-time collaborators in the PDP worked themselves into a froth and warned of the direst consequences if he went ahead.

    The rumours were not unfounded.

    Obasanjo’s loyal followers had declared that he deserved a third term to continue the titanic job of rebuilding Nigeria after the depredations of military rule.  These were no fringe elements.   They came mostly from, and were backed enthusiastically by the organized private sector, which sponsored lavish wrap-around newspaper advertisements to press their case.

    A leading captain of industry said Obasanjo had been so good for business he could remain in office for another 35 years as far as operators of that sector were concerned.

    Obasanjo did not help matters by his mixed signals and studied evasions.  When he declared at a reception in Germany that “some well-meaning people” had been urging him to stay longer  in office to see his reform measures to a logical conclusion, alarm bells pealed back home.

    He calmed the waters somewhat when, when, asked by visiting but since defenestrated World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz whether he would leave office at the end of his term, he answered in the affirmative.

    Even after that affirmative statement, Obasanjo was not quite forthcoming. And so, every utterance or chance remark of his, every gesture, every action or failure to act, every clearing   of the presidential throat, his coming and his going, and every breath he drew, was deconstructed through the prism of the third-term bid.

    Those who claimed to know Obasanjo’s mind could not communicate his intentions clearly and coherently. They said he would surely leave, because he had assured them that he would  do nothing subversive of the Constitution. But that assurance left open the possibility that Constitution could be amended to accommodate Obasanjo’s rumoured ambition.

    Arguably the most definitive statement on the issue came from Ojo Madueke, Minister of Transport, who said that here was indeed a proposal for a constitutional amendment before the National Assembly, but that it was only one of more than 100 amendments under consideration.

    The strategy for the actualization of the Third Term rested on the calculation that at least 24 state governors  would be able to persuade, induce, bribe or corral their state assemblies into approving an enabling enactment, after which he National Assembly would be procured  by similar methods to approve it.

    Teams from the National Assembly fanned out to the so-called geo-political zones and staged “national consultations” to ascertain public opinion on the proposed amendments. In the Osogb centre, Ekiti Governor Ayo Fayose burst into dance, chanting “emi lowo si,” meaning that he fully endorsed the move.  After the consultations, the amendment was reported to have won popular endorsement.

    It all looked like a done deal.

    But when the question was put before the Senate for a voice vote, it elicited only a faint response from the Third Term lobby.  In stunned disbelief, the incumbent President of the Senate, Ken Nnamani put the question a second time.  Again, the response was barely audible.

    The protagonists of the Third Term had lost their voices and their nerves at the most crucial moment, after reportedly obtaining the N50 million and other inducements on offer for each vote.

    To this day, Obasanjo maintains that he never sought a third term.  He said God had given  him everything he ever asked for, and that God would have granted him a third term if he        had asked.

    There the matter rested until two weeks ago, when Ayo Fayose – who else –breathed new life into and perverted the narrative the way he has perverted everything he has ever touched.

    Hear him, as reported by the newsmagazine The Interview, in which he claimed  he personally witnessed  Obasanjo go down on his knee to beg the late Libyan president Moumar Ghaddafi to assist him realize his third-term quest.

    “It was such a pathetic scenario, so shameful. Obasanjo was speaking rapidly like a parrot. I was shocked beyond words. I never knew Obasanjo would be that humble.

    “He was on one knee till the end of the conversation. Ghaddafi kept quiet and was just watching Obasanjo. When Obasanjo stopped rambling, Ghaddafi said, ‘Have you finished? Just know that I will not attend that meeting. I have other engagements.”

    Obasanjo has his flaws, to be sure.  But the Obasanjo I know will never kowtow to any foreign leader.  When he was a statesman-at-large holding no substantive office, he carried himself with the dignity of a head of state, and was received as such everywhere he went.

    I accompanied him on trips to Benin Republic, Togo, Angola, Zambia, Namibia and to South Africa during and after apartheid.  These visits were like summits at which important bilateral issues and African issues were discussed.  He always informed military president Babangida before setting out, and always briefed him in writing on his return.    I contributed talking points and sat in at meetings, at once observer and participant.

    Obasanjo is too self-regarding, too proud of his being a Nigerian, too conscious of the responsibility that status confers on him as a citizen and statesman, and too steeped in the nuances of international diplomacy to kowtow to Ghaddafi or any foreign leader for that matter.    Remember his “Dear Margaret” letter joining issues with British Prime Minister Margret Thatcher over her no-sanctions policy on apartheid South Africa?

    I say nothing of his being a battle-tested general of the army, and an Owu chief to boot.

    Fayose’s claim that Obasanjo kowtowed to Ghaddafi is of a piece with earlier reports that Obasanjo had prostrated before his estranged vice president, Abubakar Atiku, and begged him not  to enter the race for the PDP’s  presidential ticket for the 2003 general election.  It speaks volumes about Atiku’s character that he has categorically disavowed that tale.

    In what way could Gaddhafi’s support have advanced  Obasanjo’s quest?  In what way could Ghaddafi’s demurral have hurt that quest?  Even if Libya belonged in ECOWAS, where Nigeria is  the dominant player, Ghaddafi’s support or demurral would not have mattered in the least.  Ghaddafi became chair of the African Union only in 2009, two years after Obasanjo had vacated power.  So, in what guise could he have helped or hindered Obasanjo’s bid?

    Besides, if Obasanjo was for any reason inclined to get down on his knees to beg for Ghaddafi’s support, I doubt whether he would have done so with the notoriously incontinent Fayose as witness.  Obasanjo would have asked his host for a private audience.

    The Obasanjo the world knows is in speech inclined to be slow, measured, and focused, very unlike the rambling parakeet Fayose made him out to be in the encounter with Ghaddafi.  This, surely, will not go down as the last installment in Fayose’s unspeakably tawdry career in public life.

  • A preface to the silly season

    A preface to the silly season

    Half-way into President Muhammadu Buhari’s term, the silly season has begun in earnest. The line-up for the succession may change, but it is already well-defined.   Some aspirants  have been more forthcoming than others, but none of them or their proxies can be accused  of coyness.

    Buhari has been hobbled for the past three months.  Present indications are that he is making a slow but steady recovery.  The prognosis is uncertain, however.  But that has not stopped the national chairman of the ruling APC Chief John Odigie-Oyegun and other stalwarts of the party from literally dragooning him into the race. The party’s ticket, they say, is his by right and performance, should he desire it.

    A great deal will depend on the state of his health in the coming months.

    Lately, former Vice President Abubakar Atiku has sought, through judicious lectures, signed newspaper articles and other interventions to come across as a progressive statesman who has thought deeply about the country’s problems and has the endowments to fix them.  The fact that he is more a candidate of habit than of conviction takes nothing away from his quest.

    Where else but up can Senate President Bukola Saraki go in the scheme of things?  Given the way he vaulted himself into his current position, and the Faustian bargain he made along the way, it was clear that he was out for the top job.  Meanwhile, he is doing everything to look   the part.

    He may not have suborned the fellow senator who moved a motion the other day calling for the Senate President to be declared Acting President in the absence of the Acting President and substantive Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, who was away in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on official duty.  But since Saraki knows what his colleagues will do un-suborned, why would he suborn them?

    Saraki has never concealed his disdain for Osinbajo anyway.  Told while he was perfecting his scheme to assume the Senate presidency through the backdoor that Vice President Osinbajo had summoned members of the APC Senate caucus to a meeting, he reportedly quipped: “Osinbajo?  Who does he think he is?  When I was Governor of Kwara State, he was an ordinary commissioner in Lagos State.”

    Apparently, Saraki was unaware or conveniently forgot that while he was yet an unremarkable Budget Adviser in President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration, Osinbajo was busy transforming the Lagos judiciary into the most enviable one in Nigeria and chalking up success after success in court battles to wrest back tangible assets and prerogatives that an overbearing Federal Government had usurped from Lagos State.

    It is entirely in character that Saraki recently sought to arrogate to the Senate over which he presides the power to amend the Constitution without the president’s assent.

    It will be interesting to see how he will fare when subjected to the kind of scrutiny he never had to endure in Kwara.  He has removed a potential source of embarrassment, assuming that anything can embarrass him, by returning to the Kwara Exchequer the payments he continued to receive long after he had left office, even while taking home a salary and hefty ancillary payments from the Senate.

    To nobody’s surprise, Governor Ayodele Fayose, the Conqueror of Ekiti and of all that is decent, honourable and of good report, is asking for a chance to replicate on the national level  all the wonders he has wrought in Ekiti, not the least of which is his universally acclaimed Stomach Infrastructure Programme.

    A source close to one of his principal strategists tells me that his first order of business on taking office as President will be to reprise the Ekiti Integrated Poultry Project in each state, so that by the end of his third month in office, every family will be guaranteed a turkey in its soup pot and a dozen eggs on its breakfast table.  Everyday, mind you; not just on festive occasions.

    Fresh from court coronation as national chair of the PDP, former Kaduna State Governor Ahmed Makarfi has also been mentioned as an aspirant,  But first, he will have to re-unite and resuscitate a party still reeling from its comprehensive sandbagging in the 2015 general election.  His quiet mien and general blandness may be just what the PDP needs, after all those riotous characters who brought the self-designated “largest political party in Africa” into disrepute.

    It is indeed a sign of the times that Dr Goodluck Jonathan, who led the PDP to its doom in the 2015 election, has found his voice and has come out to rally the stragglers.  He is threatening that the PDP will return to power to fulfill the yearnings of Nigerians – a mission it failed signally             to accomplish during 16 unbroken years in office and in power.

    Not even the comprehensive pillaging of one of his homes in Abuja has dampened Dr Jonathan’s enthusiasm for his new assignment.  The place was stripped bare by the policemen deployed to guard it. Fixtures, fittings, door frames, window frames, roofing sheets, plumbing, personal effects, furniture, appliances – everything that could be hacked was hacked, carted away and auctioned.

    Only the walls were left standing.

    Heartless people.  Was this their own way of acquiring the “dividends of democracy”?  Even if Dr Jonathan has many other homes, even if he had as many as his former Petroleum Minister Diezani Alison-Madueke, that would still not justify the pillage.

    Dr Jonathan’s sense of duty in the face of heavy loss is all the more commendable.

    Former Kano State governor, Senator Engineer Dr Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso , never one to conceal his hand, says he plans to run again in 2019, having lost the race for the APC ticket to Buhari in 2015.  Of all those who have declared or are expected to declare, he is the only one around whom a Movement has coalesced.

    Called Kwanwasiyya, it is rooted in the Talakawa ideology of the Northern Elements Progressive Union of the First Republic and its Second Republic offshoot, the Peoples Redemption Party, both founded by Malam Aminu Kano.

    Watch out in the coming months for the white garments and red caps, the dress code of the faithful.

    I gather that Himself the Ogidigboigbo, James Ibori, most recently a special guest of Her  Britannic Majesty, is consulting widely with his people who accorded him such a rapturous welcome back home the other day and weighing his options.  His friends and associates have meanwhile set up an Exploratory Committee to look into the prospects of an Ibori Presidency. It will no doubt be enriched by lessons from the UK.

    The foregoing is by no means an exhaustive list of those aspiring to be president.  By the time the game really gets going, we may have as many as 240, if not more.

    Those I have not featured here should not feel ignored.  As more aspirants declare, I will update the list, to create a level playing field.

    But this much is clear:  We are set to embark on almost two years of raw politicking during which, given the fears and the passions and the threats and the rage, the ethnic baiting and the hate-mongering convulsing the country, a great deal of ugliness is guaranteed.

    As the game gathers momentum, almost everything else will be suspended.  Everything else will be subordinated to winning.

  • Who is afraid of a new Constitution?

    Who is afraid of a new Constitution?

    Last week, the House of Representatives adopted 27 of 33 proposed amendments to the 1999 Constitution.  The Senate adopted 29 of the same number of proposed amendments.  The process was more than five years in the making.

    It reached a high point on December 10, 2012, when all 360 members of the House fanned out across the country to their constituencies to stage town hall meetings at which various “stakeholders” deliberated on 43 extant provisions of the Constitution they think should be reviewed.

    Discussions at the sessions were not merely free and robust, they were resoundingly “participatory,” Emeka Ihedioha, a stalwart of the ruling PDP, deputy speaker of the House of Representatives at that time and coordinator of the scheme, exulted.   “We have kept faith with Nigerians.”

    Votes were taken thereafter and recorded in full view of all the participants.  Each member of the House then presented a report, incorporating voting results from his or her constituency and backed by video evidence, to the secretariat of the ad hoc Committee on the Review of the Constitution.

    The reports were deposited with the secretariat of the Constitution Review Committee, which again invited representatives of “stakeholders” to join with its staffers to collate the findings.

    The outcome of this process, unveiled before the House of Representatives in April 2013, categorically represents “the voice” of the Nigerian people regarding what changes they would like to see an amended Constitution, Ihediora said.  The process might not be perfect but it marked, Ihediora claimed, “the first time in the history of this country that the people have been made part of the Constitution Review Process in a practical and transparent manner.”

    The process was nothing of the sort.  In conception and execution , it was just as flawed as the 1999 Constitution it was supposed to modify.

    For one thing, what the nation needs is not a trainload of amendments to a Constitution that  may not be a grand forgery as some leading authorities have called it, but is so shot through with errors and omissions, and so constricted in its underlying assumptions, that it cannot serve as a useful guide for resolving the conflicts convulsing the country.

    In undertaking to re-work that document, Ihedioha and his colleagues in the House were laboring under a misapprehension.

    For another, those whom House members railroaded from their constituencies into attending the town hall meetings were for the most part self-selected or induced by the prospect of free food and drinks and gifts from the abundant perks – the constituency and hardship allowances, among others — of the Honourable Visitor from Abuja.   In no sense can they be said to represent the political tendencies or shades of opinion in the constituency, much less in the country.

    For yet another, there was no independent verification of the “collation” that followed each town meeting.  The House member who staged the meeting and had a vested interest in showing that it was a “robust” grassroots deliberative forum, the kind of which Nigeria had never witnessed, was responsible for the “collation.”  Nor can “video evidence” presented with the report authenticate an exercise that was at bottom a mockery.

    Or “a sham and a monumental failure,” as High Chief  Rita Lori-Ogbebor, the influential minority rights activist called it, in a withering critique of the town hall meeting held in her Delta State constituency of Warri.

    It took place the day President Goodluck Jonathan was visiting to join in the birthday celebrations of the televangelist, Ayo Oristsejafor.   Scheduled to start at 9 o’clock in the morning, it did not begin until 4 p.m.  By then, many of those who had gathered for the   event had walked out.

    Only one minute was allowed for indicating “yes” or “no” to 43 questions on the template. That was the sum total of the “discussions.”

    “How on earth do you expect people of my calibre and age to just answer ‘Yes or No’ about a matter that was not previously discussed?” Lori-Ogbebor asked in indignation.

    Even if the House had a mandate to review the 1999 Constitution, the way it went about it belies Ihedioha’s claim that the outcome represents the “voice” of the people. For one thing,  the people had no hand in preparing the agenda.  They certainly took no part in designing the “43-item template” that constituted the substance of discourse – assuming it is not a case of unnecessary dignification to call what took place a “discourse.”

    Not all the public hearings across the country were as shambolic as the one in Warri. But even where they were better organised, one cannot in good faith call them  “consultations.”  Asking members of the audience to answer “yes” or “no” to the questions on the template cannot be called “consultations” without doing great violence to language.  Nor could it be honestly claimed that the outcome represented the “voice” of the people.

    What a good-faith exercise requires is a forum at which persons elected for the purpose of re-writing the Constitution meet over a period of time – certainly not one day – and deliberate, no options foreclosed, on a wide range of significant national issues in a spirit           of give-and take, and come up with a document that reflects a broad national consensus on which a healthier union can be founded.

    The town hall meetings provided no such forum.

    Yet they were the primary source of the documents that more or less constituted the substance of last week’s debate and discussion that led to the adoption of major amendments to the 1999 Constitution.

    Over the decades, Nigeria has steadily retreated from federalism – the bedrock principle on which the country was established — to the point that Nigeria today is more or less a centrally administered state.

    The so-called public hearings evaded that issue altogether, or sought to perpetuate it.  Five years later, and with the demand more clamorous, the House and the State were just as remiss, voting down a proposal for devolution of powers from an all-powerful Center to the constituent states.

    One of the items on the 2013 template required the audience to indicate by yes or no whether the electoral commissions in the states should be abolished, leaving it to the National Electoral Commission to conduct all polls.  The former would further erode the federal principle

    Five years later last week, the Senate voted to abolish state electoral commissions and to have the National Electoral Commission supplant them.

    Another item on the 2012 template called for a vote on whether the states should establish a police force, without laying out the arguments for and against, and without outlining how potential abuse of the scheme might be averted or curbed.

    Five years later, it is not clear whether the lawmakers seem to have sidestepped the issue of state police, a crucial element in a federation.

    All in all, the House of Representatives and the Senate have for the most part evaded some overarching issues in Nigeria’s existence while pretending to move it towards a harmonious existence.

    The basic architecture of the Nigerian Constitution is incurably defective. The way forward is a new constitution faithful to the federal principle and truly warranted by the preface “We, the People…”

    Who is afraid of a such a constitution?