The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • PMB: The scramble for visiting rights

    PMB: The scramble for visiting rights

    Policy-makers everywhere, and especially in Nigeria, must find it deeply frustrating that there is in the population a hard core of citizens that will keep on believing whatever it chooses to believe, despite indissoluble evidence to the contrary.

    How do you reach anything resembling a consensus in such a polity – the consensus without which it is impossible to build enduring common purpose?

    Back when there was media consonance, the task was challenging enough. In the age of media fragmentation, when anyone who has access to a computer and can work an electronic mouse can publish by word, sound or image his or her fancies and fantasies and prejudices and abiding hatreds to thousands of undiscriminating Internet users dispersed across the world, that task becomes well-nigh impossible.

    To this day, more than 30 percent of Americans still believe that the late dictator Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq.  No such weapons existed; none were ever found.  Yet the existence of such weapons was the advertised reason for an invasion in which hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed and the most advanced country in the Arab world destroyed.

    Going by the Internet traffic, you would think that President Muhammadu Buhari’s formal education ended in primary school.  The more generous commentators allow that he might have attended secondary school  but certainly did not qualify for the West African School Certificate.  To them, he remains the “Certificate-less  One.”  The West African School Certificate (Division II) that bears his name is to them a forgery protected by the Federal Might.

    And so, it is no surprise that all kinds of stories have been circulating about the state of his health.  The more benign has it that he can no longer talk or eat, and has to be fed intravenously.  The more sensational has it that he is in a vegetative state, tethered to a life-support machine.

    In mediaeval times, and even as recently as the time of Dr Kamuzu Banda in Malawi, it was a capital crime  to compass the death of the king or the chief of state.  But we live in a democracy, where some have argued that freedom of thought and speech, including the freedom to compass and canvass the death of chief of state, is constitutionally protected.

    To be sure, the moral law within us forbids such conduct, and so does the hallowed tradition of our people. To the hard men and women engrossed in this game, however, it is realpolitik pure and simple.

    And so, even after a delegation of the Federal Government and the ruling APC Governors visited the President where he is convalescing in the UK and returned with reports that he was hearty even if not hale, the dark rumours and dark wishes persisted.  The picture that came with the story of the visit did little to resolve the matter; it had been taken a while back, in Nigeria, at a different occasion, they said.

    Plus, why was there no video? And if there was nothing to hide, if the authorities were actuated by transparency, why were members of the political opposition not included in the delegation.

    And so, in the spirit of democratic transparency, a delegation of the political opposition went to the UK,   saw the president and on its return corroborated the report of the earlier delegation.

    But this recourse, I gather, has elicited only murmurs in local government circles, the third tier that caters to the grassroots.  The first delegation and the second were drawn from the first and second tiers.  It is emphatically the turn of the third tier, spokespersons for local government chairmen have been saying.

    Not so fast, says the Judicial Branch.  The delegations aforementioned were drawn from the Executive and Legislative branches.  What of the Judicial Branch, which is co-equal with the other branches, and has at least as much stake in the president’s health and well-being.

    Surely, the president would welcome a comprehensive brief on the state of the rule of law and the fight against corruption, both of which are very dear to his heart.  And which Branch is best placed to do the briefing?

    “First things first,” the police high command weighs in.  Law and order come before everything else, and those charged with maintaining law and order cannot be expected to defer to any other group when it comes to presenting a true and accurate picture of the state of the nation and the attendant challenges to the president.

    To which the Joint Chiefs of Staff, barely suppressing a snicker, rejoin:  “The police? This democracy thing has gone too far. Who do they think they are?”

    Were it left entirely to them, the Joint Chiefs would have gone to visit the President immediately on the return of the Vice President.  Esprit de corps demands it.  After all, he is their Commander-in-Chief.  He needs to know how the war against a resurgent Boko Haram is being waged, with what results and constraints. The military in turn will draw fresh inspiration from the meeting and profit from his personal experience in the area of strategy and tactics.

    The two delegations that had gone see the President had no strategic purpose, the Joint Chiefs maintain.  The jamboree has to end.  It is now their turn to meet their C-in-C, they insist.   The point is not negotiable.

    “Foul,” the Committee of Vice Chancellors of the 42 federal universities is crying out.  The President is their Visitor, and they need to bring him up to date on the state of the universities in particular and higher education in general. Discussions will explore but will not be confined to such perennial issues as funding, cultism, proliferation of first-class degrees especially in private universities, and implementation of protocols long agreed.

    Our monarchs, royal majesties in their own rights, have been told that it would strain the capacity of British diplomacy and Buckingham Palace to have so many of them descend all at once on those sceptred isles, and have graciously agreed to stay in their domains for the time being.

    But civil society groups, cultural associations, professional and occupational groups, and student bodies are pressing the authorities to arrange for them to meet with the president at the earliest opportunity.

    While the debate rages as to who has the most compelling case for visiting the president,  First Lady Aisha Buhari is reported to have expressed concern about the effect of further visits on his  health and prospects for full and complete recovery

    Personally, I understand her anxiety, since those “jackals and hyenas” still lurking in the corridors of power — operatives whose goodwill cannot always be taken for granted — play a large part in determining who gets to see President Buhari.

    Meanwhile, speaking on deep background, meaning that I can use the information only in outline but must under no circumstance attribute it to an identifiable source, well-placed insiders tell me that the most insistent and most demanding request for clearance to visit President Buhari has come jointly and severally from Ekiti Governor Ayo Fayose and Femi Fani-Kayode, most recently spokesperson for former President Goodluck Jonathan’s groundbreaking re-election campaign.

    They say they want to see Buhari with their own eyes, talk to him with their own mouths and touch him with their own fingers.

    They plan to take along at their own expense, a panel of experts from the World Health Organisation to establish with scientific finality what they have known and have been saying all along, namely, that the creature purporting to be President Muhammadu Buhari is a transparent clone.

    Given Fayose’s and Fani-Kayode’s iron-clad reputation for probity and veracity, to say nothing of rationality, who will be foolish enough to bet against them?

  • A doughty sentinel departs

    A doughty sentinel departs

    In 1986, I wrote an article for The Guardian criticising a Nigerian Television Authority series on the media in particular, and its programming in general. NTA struck back in a prime-time special that reeked with libel on a grand scale. Stamped all over it was what American case law calls “actual malice.”  Stunned speechless as I watched the broadcast at Rutam House, I knew I would have to file a defamation lawsuit.

    Halfway into the broadcast, I was summoned to Editor Lade “Ladbone” Bonuola’s office to take a phone call.  It was Dr Olu Onagoruwa on the line, saying that the content of the broadcast was defamatory through and through, and that if I was minded to pursue the matter at law, he would handle the case free, except for filing fees.

    The day the case opened, I had in my corner a team of six lawyers led by Onagoruwa.  When it became clear that the other side would be represented by relatively junior counsel, he handed the case to his nephew,Tokunbo Onagoruwa.

    I will never forget the consummate skill with which the younger Onagoruwa subdued a principal witness for the NTA and one of the tin gods there at the time.  In the face of withering cross-examination, the fellow cut a pathetic figure. Even I the plaintiff began to feel some pity for him

    As I narrated the proceedings to Onagoruwa later that day at his chambers, a broad smile spread across his face. That smile signified the joy a master gets from knowing that his pupil has mastered the trade.

    We won the case, and N30,000 in damages.  A few days after NTA paid up, I received a cheque  in that amount from Dr Onagoruwa’s chambers, together with a copy of the court’s judgment.

    I had no claim whatsoever on his generosity.  Before he represented me, I had met him only occasionally, in company of the late Kayode Awosanya, editor of Gbolabo Ogunsanwo’s news-magazine New Nation, of which I was a contributing editor.  Previously, Awosanya was Onagoruwa’s protégée at the Daily Times, where he was a senior reporter and Onagoruwa was Editorial Legal Adviser and a doughty sentinel-at-large of press freedom.

    But the Press and human rights were his twin constituencies.  Wherever freedom of the press was being derogated and human rights abused, there you found Onagoruwa always in the victim’s corner, always formidably prepared, a profile in forensic brilliance as he expounded recondite points of law.

    He seemed foreordained, therefore, to serve as lead counsel in the civil suit that the Nigeria Union of Journalists brought against a senior aide of Rivers State military governor Alfred Diete-Spiff (now His Royal Majesty King Alfred Diete-Spiff) who flogged Minere Amakiri, a reporter for the Benin City-based Observer almost insensate, allegedly on his principal’s orders, and for good measure shaved his head with broken glass.

    Amakiri’s crime?

    He had ruined the governor’s birthday, they said, by publishing a story that teachers in the Rivers State had given notice of a strike to back their demand for unpaid salaries.  The truthfulness of the publication was never disputed.

    The Amakiri case is the subject of a riveting book, in which Onagoruwa expounded the principles of press freedom with magisterial skill.

    It was notorious that, as editorial legal adviser to the government-controlled Daily Times,  Onagoruwa would be an early casualty of an NPN victory in the 1979 general elections.

    His sympathies for Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s UPN were well known. Later, his erudite commentary in signed newspaper articles and pronouncements on the lecture circuit marked  him out as an implacable adversary of military rule.

    I recall sharing a public platform with him during the Buhari-Idiagbon era, at which he declared, within earshot of Government House, Ilorin, and without the slightest tremor of voice or twitch of countenance that, by enacting the infamous Decree Four, the regime had declared war on the people of Nigeria.  It made no difference to Onagurowa that the occupant of Government House was Idiagbon’s local enforcer, Group Captain Salaudeen Latinwo.

    So unyielding was Onagoruwa’s opposition to the structural adjustment programme and other depredations of the Babangida era that the services were mandated to destroy him.

    They went from one media house to another peddling forged documents purporting that he had cheated at the Bar finals in the Nigerian Law School.  They found no takers. They prosecuted him for carrying and using an unlicensed weapon. The “weapon” at issue turned out to be an off-the-shelf spraying device to stun would-be assailants.

    They suborned a relation to file a criminal complaint against him, charging that he had failed to remit some money he had received on her behalf in a land transaction. It turned out that the complainant had sold the property to two different persons, and Onagoruwa was holding the money against the claims that were sure to follow.

    In the dark days after June 12, 1993, when the two official political parties engaged each other in a brutal fight to demonstrate which of them could better assist discredited military president Ibrahim Babangida throttle the popular will, the National Reformation Movement (NRM) led by Chief Anthony Enahoro came closer than any other single organisation to expressing that will with eloquence and commitment.

    Onagoruwa was its irrepressible general secretary.

    This glittering résumé would however be marred by a single misjudgment:  Onagoruwa’s decision to serve as Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice in the military regime of the debauched dictator, Sani Abacha.

    Onagoruwa often contested this view fiercely, insisting that President-elect Moshood Abiola had urged him to accept the appointment; that he had gone into cabinet to help realise the progressive agenda, including the actualisation of the June 12 mandate, and that his presence on the Abacha team had in the final analysis, been beneficent.

    I myself can bear witness that Abiola had indeed urged Onagoruwa to accept to serve in the Abacha cabinet.  I should add, in parentheses, that Abiola was also responsible for the inclusion of Chief Solomon Lar in the cabinet.  A Jos-based mining industrialist was originally penciled for the Plateau slot. But Abiola had demurred, on the ground that the man had a reputation for stinginess and could not therefore be counted upon to display the generosity of spirit the moment demanded.

    The plan, as another member of the cabinet Chief Silas Daniyan stated for the record, was that Abiola’s nominees would go into the Abacha cabinet for a stipulated period, first to help legitimise it in the public consciousness, and then to soften the ground for the validation of the June 12 mandate.  You could accuse them of credulity or perhaps even naiveté, but that was the agreement.

    But with each passing day, it became clearer that Abacha had seized power to entrench himself, not to help validate Abiola’s mandate.  Those who had thought they could do business with him finally saw their error, but not those they had pressed into Abacha’s service.  And so, when the latter were asked to pull out of an agreement that the other party had virtually abrogated, they sat tight, inventing one self-serving rationalisation after another.

    To his credit, Onagoruwa resigned, but long after he should have done so, and arguably not entirely on his own terms.  By then, the damage was already done.

    He had become alienated from the progressive community.  Abacha sent his goon squad to murder his son Toyin, a young attorney full of promise. The regime and its immediate successor used every means at their disposal to block his elevation to the rank of Senior Advocate – an elevation he had earned several times over. Then came the stroke that left him partially paralysed, but thankfully unimpaired mentally.

    It took the intervention of the Chief Justice of the Federation, Mariam Aloma Mukhtar, to break the choke-hold that a cabal in the Legal Privileges and Ethics Committee had kept on Onagoruwa’s translation to Senior Advocate.

    When it finally came, restitution was almost meaningless.  It came virtually as a mere adornment.  It came when Onagoruwa could not profit much from it.  This unconscionable delay was of a piece with the string of persecutions he suffered in a long career marked by great learning, courage, public service, and commitment to justice.

    Gabriel Olusoga Onagoruwa died last week, aged 80.

     

    This article draws on two previous columns written on Onagoruwa’s 70th birthday and on his taking silk.

  • Our game-changer in global trade

    Our game-changer in global trade

    Call me “commissariat-minded” if you like, but I have been thinking about the edible yam lately.

    Not merely on account of its central place in our dietary habits and the domestic economy, but in the larger culture of most Nigerian communities.  No betrothal, no wedding, no burial, no occasion that calls for celebration, is complete without yam or its derivative as the piéce de résistance. Withal, it is an object of veneration.

    It is a measure of its centrality in our culture that the yam harvest was the trigger for recent violent clashes between the Iloffa and Odo Owa communities in Kwara State.  At issue was which of them was vested with primacy to sell in the open market the crop harvested from the farms of their traditional rulers.

    By the time Governor Abdulfatah Ahmed declared a dusk-to-dawn curfew in the area, four residents lay dead, many homes had been razed, and dozens of families had been displaced.  The two communities must be wishing they had remained in their accustomed quiescence instead of being thrust into the news focus in that manner.

    This discontinuity is much to be lamented, for rarely has yam been an object of strife.  On the contrary, it has stood from time immemorial as an emblem of peace and rejoicing and solidarity on the cultural level, and a great culinary delight withal.

    But like many other items in our cultural apparatus, the yam is no longer what it used to be.  Its shelf life has always been relatively short – three months at best for the hardiest variety.  But if you sliced it or diced it within several weeks of harvesting, you had no reason to expect anything but a chunk of snow-white, cream or yellow consistency.  No black patches, no rotted section that has to be hived off to save what is left. You got a wholesome yam, worth every kobo you paid for it.

    And if you cooked only a portion of the yam, you could keep what was left, confident that it would stay wholesome until you returned to it.

    Not anymore.

    There was a time when families deliberately prepared far more pounded yam than they could consume         at dinner.  The next morning they would flatten and re-heat the left-over, topped with a judicious layer             of the house soup, in an earthenware pot or skillet and, bon appétit.  The crust formed in the process is especially prized, and has been known to be an object of serious contestation during family meals.

    That finger-licking delicacy too is gone.

    Keep a bowl of pounded yam overnight, and you will find it in the morning caked with black mould. You cannot salvage a morsel from it even with the supple fingers of a masseuse.

    They say that it is all the fault of the chemical fertilisers used today in growing yams.

    Happily, big-time relief is coming to the beleaguered yam, on the global stage no less.

    The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Mr Audu Ogbeh, a cultivator on an industrial scale, has found in one brilliant flash of insight that yam now holds the key to Nigeria’s crippling foreign-exchange crisis, and more importantly, to the much-postponed end of the recession.

    Forget all the crops that were at one time or another supposed to play that liberating role after the traditional cash crops of cocoa and groundnut and cotton and palm kernel and palm oil and rubber and cotton went bust.  Forget wheat, and cassava, their much-touted replacements   Forget even such old reliables like oil and gas. Move over, perennial prospects like steel and solid minerals and cashew.  Forget Nollywood.

    Make way for yams, set to become the hottest and most-prized commodity in international trade.

    The Minister, well known for his hands-on approach to project execution, personally flagged off the other  day the shipment of the first consignment of the commodity, a modest 72 metric tons, at Apapa Wharf in three containers, each with a holding capacity of 24 metric tons, one destined for the United Kingdom, and the other two headed for the United States.

    Nothing has been left to chance.  Some four months earlier, a high-powered Task Force had been set up to fast-track the acquisition of warehouses at the receiving destinations in Europe and North America. Yam farmers and exporters have been receiving tutorial in classroom settings and online on the best practices in the business, with special emphasis on production, storage, preservation and packaging, to meet the highest international standard.  And that is just for starters.

    That is how it should be, for the stakes are very high.  Whereas Nigeria accounts for 61 per cent of global yam output, according to the best authorities, it is Ghana and some Caribbean countries that have been dominating the market.  Nigerian yams are not to be found in the global market.

    Patriotic Nigerians must find this discomfiting.

    But the matter cuts deeper. Ghana’s dominance in the international yam market is only   the latest in a long line of challenges to our national sovereignty from that uppity country.  As if that is not provocation enough,           it is targeting $4 billion from yam exports over the next three or four years, in effect undermining, beg your pardon, sabotaging our international marketing potential and the benefits that should flow from it.

    Whatever happened to their bauxite and cocoa and gold?  Why are they muscling into our field of comparative advantage?  Is there no clause in the ECOWAS Treaty we can invoke to punish such rascality?

    In whatever case, Ghana is going to learn soon that it does not belong in our league.

    We have Audu Ogbe’s assurance that the ills that have been plaguing the Nigerian yam crop are close to being conquered, using the latest technology.  Solar coolers will be installed in markets and yam producing areas and export cargo vessels — already being built to order in European shipyards, according to an informed source – to keep yams at a constant temperature of 14 degrees Celsius.

    That way, the yams will stay fresh and crisp for two, maybe three years. So that anyone who buys Nigerian yams in Europe and North America will know that they are getting the real stuff, produced  under stringent supervision to meet the highest international standard and to tickle agreeably the  palate of the most discriminating consumers.

    Like this writer, who loves his yam steamed and served with a delicious eggplant sauce he developed and perfected over the years.  Upon request, he will be glad to mail the recipe to devoted followers of  this column.

    As was to be expected, the usual peddlers of negativity, whom we shall always have among us to our misfortune, went straight for Ogbeh’s scalp, saying, without research and without civility, that the whole scheme is misconceived and that the $10 billion projected to flow from it yearly when fully operational is a pipedream.

    Why such a hasty verdict when the scheme is only at the pilot stage?

    Others who cannot see beyond their stomachs are griping that the scheme will lead to scarcity, raise  prices, and keep yams out of the reach of the ordinary consumer.

    There is little to add to what the best authorities have said:  Yes, prices will go up, but only in the short term.  As production increases for the export market, prices will come down. So, there is no cause for worry.

    And as has been pointed out, when Nigeria attains self-sufficiency in rice production in December, a mere five months away, those who cannot afford yams can eat all the rice they want.

    To think that this game-changer in global trade has been hiding in plain sight for ages!  Thank you, Honourable  Minister, for unmasking it.  

  • The martyr they won’t honour

    The martyr they won’t honour

    Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, winner of Nigeria’s presidential election held on June 12, 1993, died 19 years ago last Friday, on the cusp of his widely anticipated release from the brutal detention into which he had been clamped in 1994 by the regime of the loathsome dictator Sani Abacha, for proclaiming himself President of Nigeria after the election was capriciously annulled.

    Abacha’s death some four weeks earlier, reportedly in an orgy of concupiscence, had given “June 12” a new life and a heightened salience.  It gave a new urgency to the status and the future of Abiola, and to the unresolved issue of “June 12.”  All of them had to be addressed immediately,

    The military authorities faced a daunting choice.  Remain in power, though  exhausted and hugely discredited, hoping to muddle through somehow, or release the President-elect from detention with the expectation that Abiola will have some role in negotiations to end the political debacle but unsure of how he would proceed.

    Suddenly, Abiola, who had for four years been denied access to his family, his attorneys, and only grudgingly allowed occasional visits by his personal physician, became the man of the moment, the political prisoner whom the leading Western nations and the international institutions wanted their representatives to meet.  Yet these were for the most part the very bodies that had been loath to  come down heavily on Nigeria for the election annulment and the gross human rights violations that had followed it.

    With the sudden departure from the scene of “a beacon of brutality” as The New York Times called Abacha in an editorial, they were more concerned to get Abiola to renounce his claim to being president-elect than to help secure his freedom and ensure at the very least that he would have a prominent seat at a table where Nigeria’s immediate future would be discussed.

    The UK Government dispatched Foreign Office Minister Tony Lloyd to Abuja, where he met with the Head of State who knew that he was at best a caretaker, but not with Abiola.  The Commonwealth followed with its Secretary-General, our own Chief Emeka Anyaoku.

    In notes of the meeting smuggled out of prison, and in which Abiola had named me among others as addressee, Abiola said Anyaoku told him that, counting from June 1993, the four-year term Abiola would have served  had expired and that, consequently, Abiola could no longer lay claim to any mandate.  Whitehall’s imprimatur was stamped all over Anyaoku’s visit.

    Abiola said he rejected the proposition on the threshold.

    United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan turned up in Abuja to meet with Abiola, with the same perverse end in mind as Anyaoku, if not the same argument.  It was not clear then, nor is it any clearer today, whose interest Annan was serving.

    Certainly not that of the United Nations in its fullest sense.  Nor could it have been at the behest of the UN Security Council, since the situation in Nigeria had not been declared to constitute a threat to global peace, in which case Chapter VII of the UN Charter would have been invoked.

    It is a measure of the cruel and inhuman conditions under which Abiola had been held that when Annan introduced himself as the UN Secretary-General, Abiola was puzzled and asked about “the Egyptian”, a reference to Dr Boutros Boutros Ghali, who had held that position until 1996.

    Such, indeed, were the pressures piled on Abiola by Abdulsalami Abubakar, and by the UK and the United States acting directly or through proxies that The Times (London), no admirer of the populist tendencies that were stamped all over Abiola’s political behavior, felt obliged to weigh in.

    Abiola, it said in its June 29, 1998, leading article, possessed a quality rare in Nigerian politics, “undoubted legitimacy,” derived from the 1993 election and from his conduct in captivity – specifically, refusing Abacha’s offer of freedom in return for retracting his claim to a mandate and retreating from politics “when all indications were that ill-health and further imprisonment would kill him.”

    “It would be shabby of the international community to press him to accept such an offer now,” The Times continued. “His stand for democracy has given him the aura of statesmanship, a quality not evident in 1993.  The form of administration he might head – transitional, national reconciliation, or conventional – is a matter for negotiation.  But he cannot negotiate as a prisoner. . . Only if he is released forthwith, and without conditions, should sanctions be lifted.”

    This flurry was the context in which members of Abiola’s immediate family who had been allowed to see him only fleetingly, at long intervals, and always in the presence of security minders, were cleared without fuss to visit him, on July 7, 1998.

    The party comprised two of his wives, Bisi and Doyinsola, and his eldest child Lola Edewor.  Abiola’s senior wife Kudirat, an unyielding protagonist of the June 12 mandate, had been murdered by Abacha’s goon squad three years earlier, in 1996.

    Four years in solitary confinement, they found, had taken a heavy toll on Abiola’s health.  But he was upbeat and looking forward to being reunited with them as a free man, confident that his release was imminent.

    As the party headed to Abuja airport to return to Lagos, Bisi and Doyinsola had just two things on their minds:  getting Abiola’s sprawling mansion in Opebi spruced up for his return, and catering to the multitudes that would throng the neighbourhood when Abiola returned.

    They were halfway to the airport when Doyinsola’s phone rang.  The caller asked them to head back to Abuja, to the Presidential Villa.

    Could it be that the authorities had decided to release Abiola so that he and his family could fly to Lagos together?   Having lived through so many disappointments and heartbreaks, they suppressed the thought.  But they saw the summons back to Abuja as a good sign.

    What confronted them when they were ushered into the Clinic at the Presidential Villa was Abiola’s lifeless body on a stretcher, nostrils stuffed with cotton balls.  Not four hours had passed since they saw him hearty, if not hale.

    Abiola had slumped and died, literally across the coffee table from a United States delegation comprising   Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice, special envoy Thomas Pickering, and United States Ambassador to Nigeria William Twaddell, in Abuja with the specific goal of persuading Abiola to renounce his claim to a presidential mandate, hard on the heels of Anyaoku and Annan.

    With a peremptoriness that would have been considered flagrantly indecent in the United States and indeed in any country claiming to subscribe to higher ideals, Twaddell declared literally on the spot that Abiola appeared to have died from “natural causes.”  That declaration seemed suspiciously tailored to foreclose questions about the tea Abiola had been served just before his sudden terminal collapse.

    An international autopsy failed to establish the cause of Abiola’s death definitively.  But suspicion lingers powerfully to this day it resulted from some substance with which they had laced the tea, a final solution of sorts, to “the problem of June 12.”

    To the end, Abiola resisted every pressure, discounted every threat and spurned every blandishment the military regime and its local and foreign proxies contrived.  His tenacity surprised the vast majority of Nigerians who did not know him well or knew him only in caricature.  They thought that, faced with the prospect  of being subjected to the slightest inconvenience, to say nothing of losing his freedom, his vast business empire and his life, he would cut a deal, put the best face on it, and move on.

    “June 12” and Abiola’s martyrdom made May 29 — the day officially celebrated in Nigeria as “Democracy Day” — inevitable.

    Perhaps one day, the feckless beneficiaries of the struggle that had cost Abiola his life will rouse themselves to accord him posthumous recognition as President-elect, with all the rights and privileges of that position going back to 1993.

    Therein lies the path of honour.

  • Let the recipient beware

    Let the recipient beware

    There was a time, not too long ago, when newspapering was a profitable business.  Not quite “a licence to print money” as the British newspaper baron Lord Thomson of Fleet once said of television, but a profitable business all the same – if run on sound principles and managed well.

    In the age of the Internet, newspapers all over the world, even those run on the soundest principles, have become an endangered species, what with spiralling production and distributing costs, plummeting advertisement revenues, and declining paid subscriptions and street sales. Increasingly, the survival of the newspaper now turns not on its ability to generate a surplus but on its capacity to absorb continual loss.

    Subsidies by proprietors known and hidden, bank overdrafts, and funds generated through ancillary ventures are what keep the average newspaper afloat, plus, more crucially, especially in Nigeria, leveraging the media’s singular power to confer status.  I will return to this latter point presently.

    Each of these survival strategies usually carries a price.

    To cite just one instance:  In the 1980s, one newspaper once published a scathing profile of a well-known Lagos socialite who was chair of a major commercial bank,  to which the newspaper was heavily indebted.  The bank immediately called up the loan, which had long matured.  As atonement, the newspaper published a much more approving profile several weeks later, by the writer of the earlier piece.

    The survival strategy of choice of the Nigerian media these days lies, as I was saying, in their unrivalled power to confer status on individuals, groups and institutions. In a society where status counts for a great deal, that is no trifling power.  Just consider how the media transformed Nnamdi Kanu from obscurity to celebrity almost overnight.

    That power may well be the traditional media’s greatest asset today.  It was always there, but the way they are exploiting it these days, one might be led to think that they have just discovered it.  Hardly a day passes without one media organisation or another conferring an award, prize or other recognition, at a widely publicised and lavishly staged ceremony, on prominent individuals, groups or institutions, for achievements ranging from the barely substantive to the frankly contrived.

    These awards rarely go to individuals, groups or institutions on the fringe of society, no matter how substantive their contribution to the national well-being, or to those who cannot be trusted to reciprocate the gesture with hard cash or bounteous patronage.

    Naturally, the recipients are for the most part state governors, officials of the federal and state legislatures, chairpersons of local government areas, well-heeled traditional rulers, banks, oil companies, high net-worth persons, the better corporate institutions, and their senior executives.

    The process begins with an announcement of a date for staging the year’s presentation of the highly competitive and much-coveted awards, or in the case of an organisation just getting into the lucrative act, a prefatory declaration of intent of the high-minded kind.

    From the media organisations that have built a reputation on this kind of thing, a declaration that the recipients will in the final analysis be selected by their highly revered “Board of Editors” and that the awards will be presented by international statesmen and women – former presidents and prime ministers and their spouses, and we are not talking of some Fourth World nations, please — is usually enough to dilute whatever misgivings the attentive audience may harbour about the whole thing.   Live performances by recording artistes and entertainers of global stature remove all doubt.

    Naturally, media organisations just getting into the act adopt a more cautious approach.  They lay out the award categories, and actually invite nominations from the attentive audience. After toting the returns, they travel round the country, camera crew in tow, to inform those who have been nominated of their good fortune.

    The lucky nominees in turn congratulate the media organisation and its readership on their sound judgment and patriotism and matchless contribution to the peace and unity and progress of the nation.

    Having come this far to getting their status proclaimed or affirmed, few persons, groups or institution due to receive awards will balk at purchasing a table or tables for ten guests and multiples thereof for  at a five or six-figure price tag.  After all, they must know, the ceremony may well be once-in-a-lifetime outing, for which no price can be too high.

    The awards gala finally takes place in all its tinselled glamour, with recipients getting awards matching their financial investment in the ceremony.  Cash prizes are announced, but redemption may not be guaranteed.  Baubles and other tokens of recognition are handed out.

    Everyone involved is a winner.

    The media organisation consolidates or establishes its power to confer status; the recipients go home  buoyed that their status has been affirmed or confirmed.  And in grateful appreciation, they buy acres of media space to congratulate the media organisation on its sense of duty and propriety; their friends, clients, partners and admirers buy even more media space to “felicitate” with them on the epochal achievement.

    The Daily Times, once a generic name for newspapers but now a faded and tarnished memory, sought early last month to stamp on the public consciousness an identity as the online offshoot of a “legacy newspaper” eminently qualified to honour those it deems worthy.

    Even in its present online form, a work in progress at best, it can hardly lay any claim to distinction.  Yet, it chose the 91st (ha!) anniversary of its forebear to confer all manner of awards on 91 Nigerians who, by its light, “have impacted society positively,” according to Fidelis Anosike, identified by the organisers as chairman of Folio Publications, publisher of the journal.

    The Times Heroes Awards, as the organisers portentously called them, spanned five categories: Leadership, Politician of the Decade, Woman of the Decade, Company of the Decade, Governance, Life Impact, and Public Service Impact.  Recipients include the quick and the dead.

    It is a mark of the thoroughness of the selection and the nice sense of discrimination of the Awards Committee that Yahaya Bello, the beleaguered governor of my home state, Kogi, who was thrust into that position by spite and sanctified by judicial legerdemain of the most transparent kind  and can hardly point to any substantive achievement, nevertheless took home a Times Heroes Award, ranked with Lagos State Governor Akinwunmi Ambode,  among others, as “one of the most performing governors in Nigeria.”

    Under the circumstances, it must be accounted a sad and grievous omission that they did not name his enabler-turned-nemesis, Senator Dino Melaye (APC Kogi West), “Lawmaker of the Century.”   Melaye,                I gather, is set to present a draft resolution before the Senate at its next plenary session urging it to void the Bello award, retroactive to the date of its purported conferment. My sources tell me that the Delinquent, beg your pardon, Distinguished Senator, will settle for nothing less than a unanimous vote.

    The Time Heroes Award gala held all right at the International Conference Centre Abuja,  but under  the ominous cloud of a page-long advertisement in several newspapers the preceding day declaring the event “illegal and criminal.”

    Issued under the hand of “The Board of Directors of the Daily Times of Nigeria plc,” the advertisement stated that the organisers of the award were not officers of the Daily Times in any guise or disguise, and had no authority from the company to transact any business on its behalf.

    Any person, group or organisation “participating in the ceremony in any manner whatsoever,” the advertisement warned darkly, “will be complicit in a criminal conspiracy.”

    So, one can be presumed complicit in a criminal conspiracy and visited with the appropriate penalties for merely receiving an award, even a fake one?

    Even in Nigeria, that is a new one.  Beware, recipient.

  • The enforcer and the receiver

    The enforcer and the receiver

    Two major figures in the tragic drama subsumed under the general label of “June 12” have been in the news lately, on the anniversary of that epochal date.

    One of them, an insider and participant has been recalling events surrounding the death of President-elect Moshood Abiola with his accustomed volubility and mendacity.

    The other, a sedate figure had operated in the margins power-play in the military until fortune positioned him in the right place at the right time to preside over the closing chapter of that tragic drama and to flourish as its eminent beneficiary.

    I am of course talking about Hamza al-Mustapha, the former army officer — by some accounts, he was substantively a lieutenant, and a major only in an acting capacity – the self-confessed torturer who served as chief enforcer for the loathsome General Sani Abacha.

    I am also talking about General Abdulsalam Abubakar who emerged from the intrigues  surrounding Abacha’s death as receiver and head of state, with the mission of organizing an orderly transfer of power from an exhausted and discredited army of which he was a denizen, to              a government based on the consent of the people.

    I will say more concerning Abubakar presently.

    al-Mustapha was in Ibadan last week, rehashing the tawdry tale he had told the Lagos High Court  during his trial in 2011 for the 1996 murder of Abiola’s wife, Kudirat, who was in the vanguard of the struggle to secure Abiola’s freedom and restore his mandate.  Resolute, outspoken and defiant, she was on her way to yet another strategy meeting when her car was ambushed and she was shot in broad daylight in the Oregun  section of Ikeja, Lagos.

    Investigations tied al-Mustapha and the goon squad he operated for Abacha directly to the murder.  But at his trial, and at every subsequent forum, he had sought to deflect the charge, and instead portray the major political figures from the Southwest who had led the campaign aimed at freeing Abiola from captivity and restoring his mandate under the aegis of NADECO as villains who colluded with Abiola’s “killers.”

    Those on whom he cast the vilest aspersions, Abraham Adesanya and Chief Bola Ige, were conveniently dead.  It is a mark of his perverted reasoning that he even cited Chief Bola Ige’s ministerial appointment in President Obasanjo’s cabinet as compensation for Ige’s “role” in Abiola’s murder.

    al-Mustapha read from a letter he claimed to have written through Clement Akpamgbo – the same card sharper who did most of the dirty legal work for military president Ibrahim Babangida and later for Sani Abacha — confronting Ige with evidence of Ige’s alleged complicity in Abiola’s death.

    Akpamgbo too was dead.  The prisoner submitted no proof of delivery, no evidence that the letter reached Ige, no indication of a response from Ige.

    He craved the court’s indulgence to play a videotape he claimed furnished conclusive evidence of NADECO stalwarts accepting hush-hush money from Abiola’s killers.  The videotape showed nothing of the sort, only the group emerging from a scheduled meeting in Aso Rock, apparently with General Abdulsalam.

    In the latest reiteration, in Ibadan, al Mustapha cited former NADECO secretary Ayo Opadokun as a participant-witness in the bribe-taking. The grandstander said was in possession of a videotape of Abiola’s final moments.  And as he does at every opportunity, the consummate poseur played victim, citing his detention in Ikoyi prison and other jails for ten years before his trial began.

    Now, ten years is an inordinately long period to hold a suspect in prison, even a suspect charged with the most abominable crime.  But it was al-Mustapha who engineered the delay.

    Shortly after his trial commenced, he accused the presiding judge in open court, without fear and without proof, of sending an unnamed  am emissary to him in prison to  solicit a bribe of N10 million as consideration for a favourable verdict.  He demanded that the judge recuse himself.  Thereafter, he filed motion after motion for interlocutory injunction, virtually tying up the case in knots that it would take a Houdini to untie.

    Al Mustapha would retract the evidence had given years earlier, claiming that it had been extracted through torture.  As for the gun from which the shots that killed Kudirat were fired, he had merely handed it for “cleaning” to a subaltern in the killing squad that called itself the Strike Force.

    The self-confessed torturer went on to claim in his rambling evidence that Abiola was his bosom friend, and that nothing had been dearer to him than Abiola’s comfort in captivity.  For that purpose, he said he made available some N800, 000 every three months for Abiola’s upkeep.  Back then, that was a small fortune.

    Were they feeding Abiola 48-karat diamond nuggets?

    In any case, that claim is undermined by the decrepitude that Abiola suffered in detention.  Until they seized him, Abiola ranked among the most dapper public figures anywhere.  The last time I saw him, in the Abuja High Court, sometime in 1995, he cut a pitiful figure.

    His tailoring was cheap, nondescript.  The sandals on his swollen feet were likewise cheap.  The right side of his face was swollen, as if a golf ball was lodged in that corner of his mouth.  Those who had seen him the previous week said he looked far worse then.

    If al-Mustapha, if this deranged megalomaniac, compulsive liar and self-confessed torturer truly  cared for Abiola to the point of regarding him as a close friend and yet allowed him to suffer so much physical deterioration in detention, Abiola needed no enemy.

    I return, finally, to General Abdulsalam Abubakar, who turned 75 last week and was profiled in many lavishly-produced, full-page newspaper advertorials by former military president Ibrahim Babangida, former Governor Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State and by Chief John Oyegun, national chairman of the ruling APC, among others, as the “Father” of the current political dispensation commonly referred to, in error I believe, as the Fourth Republic.

    It should be remembered that the Third Republic that was supposed to be the culmination of  Babangida’s duplicitous transition programmed was stillborn.

    Abubakar, took power after Abacha died, and presided over the end of military rule and the transfer of power.  But it was an untidy transfer, based on a Constitution that was drawn up in secret and never subjected to public discussion and debate.  Some persons learned in the law have even gone so far as to call the document a forgery.  In operation, it has turned out to be gravely flawed, with more than 70 amendments proposed as interim remedy.

    Still, few will grudge him the accolade of statesman in which he now basks.  In one of the most fraught periods in Nigeria’s history, his steadying hands and honesty of purpose made the difference between an orderly transfer and a chaotic national dissolution.

    There is less agreement, however, on his vaunted personal integrity. It was widely publicised that, on taking power, Abubakar withdrew huge deposits from the national exchequer for his private use and was forever talking about “welfare.”

    The newspaper, Abuja Today, published by Abidina Coomassie, detailed the alleged withdrawals as well as choice property Abubakar reportedly acquired in the most exclusive areas of London shortly after taking office.  Coomassie even dared Abubakar to challenge him in court if he felt he had been maligned. Abubakar declined.

    In his fact-free effusions in court, al-Mustapha had claimed that Coomassie, who died in 2001,   was “poisoned” because he was set to disclose the alleged transactions Coomassie had actually published some four years earlier.  That intervention is reason enough to doubt the entire story.

    But there is no denying that General Abubakar bears moral responsibility for Abiola’s death. He had a chance to free Abiola.  Instead, he kept bringing one representative of the “international community” after another to try to inveigle Abiola to renounce his claim to being President-elect.

    And when Abiola would not yield, they deployed their final solution.

    If Abubakar was not complicit in the plot, it was at any rate executed under his watch.

     

  • ‘June 12’: Between nightfall and mid-day

    ‘June 12’: Between nightfall and mid-day

    General Ibrahim Babangida’s transition programme may still end with a bang, but the build-up to the June 12, presidential election of June 12, 1993, that was supposed to be its high point  has been a desultory march of intrigue, disinformation, and all manner of skullduggery.

    As I write these lines at 7:30 pm on Thursday, June 10, 1993, just 48 hours to polling day, it is  by no means clear that the election will actually take place.  The High Court in Abuja is yet to determine whether the National Electoral Commission (NEC ), the Federal Attorney-General, Clement Akpamgbo, and military president Babangida have furnished compelling reasons why the election should not be stopped, as demanded by the Association for a Better Nigeria (ABN).

    The Association has followed up its petition with a huge demonstration in Kaduna urging Babangida to stay on for four more years.

    The self-styled Council of Elder Statesmen(spearheaded by S.G. Ikoku and persons of like mind) is still busy calling for what amounts to a scuttling of the transition.  Curiously, its advocacy, dripping with contempt for the two political parties (the SDP and the NRC), their presidential candidates and indeed for the entire political class, is described not as a proposal but a Report, and is received in Abuja with all the pomp, circumstance and solemnity befitting a commissioned job.

    The newspapers are awash with unsigned advertisements excoriating the SDP candidate Moshood Abiola and the NRC candidate Bashir Tofa for all manner of misconduct, ranging from alleged purloining of an opponent’s letter to religious fanaticism.  The entire country is awash in rumours of dark plots and dire warnings.

    From his base in London, Second Republic minister Umaru Dikko, no longer fearful of being shipped home in a crate, is reported to have written to the Kaduna Mafia, warning that under no circumstance should a Southerner be allowed to win power.

    As if to add poignancy to Dikko’s rumoured epistle, allegations surface that Abiola and a conclave of Yoruba elders had completed plans to transfer the federal capital back to Lagos if Abiola won the election.  And if he did not win, Igbo properties in Yorubaland were marked for destruction.

    Such were the doubts and distrust sewn he week before the election and watered assiduously every passing day.

    Long, disorderly queues formed by panic-stricken motorists in the wake of a strike by petroleum workers strengthened doubts about the election.  A breakdown in electricity and water supplies reinforced the doubts.

    NEC chairman Humphrey Nwosu comes on the television screen as I write these lines.  Ebullient as usual, and reeling out in a sing-song, combative voice a trainload of things that must not be done on Election Day and assuring a national audience that everything was set for the historic poll.

    But I am immediately reminded of what someone who should know told me long ago:  “Never mind all the histrionics.  Good old Humphrey is not actually in charge and often does not know what is really going on

    At any rate, 48 hours to the election, no polling booths have been erected and no voters list has been put on display in Lagos.  It requires a degree of credulity bordering on extreme naïveté to wager that the election will indeed hold on June 12.

    The network news broadcast on the Nigeria Television Authority has just ended.  There is no mention of any developments in the ABN’s legal battle to scuttle the election.  The doubts remain.

    The applicable election law states categorically that no court action can stand in the way of the poll.  If this means anything at all, it means that no court can entertain any petition that seeks to stop the election.  Yet, the Abuja court not only entertains the petition, it allows it to drag on for one full week, and to cast grave doubts on whether the election will hold.

    At this point, I break off and go to bed, hoping to complete this piece on Friday, June 11, to meet my deadline.

    At 11:05 pm, the doorbell rings.

    Who can it be at this time of day?  It is Femi Kusa, The Guardian’s director of publications and editor-in-chief.  He has a message, and it is for my ears only, the security guard tells me.  I go downstairs to meet Kusa in the courtyard.

    Without the slightest trace of agitation or surprise, he tells me, first, that the Abuja High Court, Justice Bassey Ikpeme presiding, has ruled, first, that  election planned for Saturday, June 12, must not hold as demanded by the ABN; second, that the court has reserved ruling for one month on NEC’s countermotion, and third, that the police had granted the ABN a permit to stage a Babangida-Must-Stay rally in Abuja.

    Kusa said he thought I should not have to read the papers the next day before learning of these stunning developments.

    Even those of our countrymen who have maintained all along that the transition programme bears the markings of a cruel hoax and of a prologue to tragedy could hardly have believed that matters would come to this dreary pass.  But such, alas, is the level of triviality to which the final phase of the transition programme has been reduced.

    No sooner were the presidential primaries concluded than rumours spread that the candidates of both parties stood to be disqualified.  Damning dossiers on the twain were said to have been compiled, with ample help from the intelligence services of some Western nations.

    Since then, it has been one dark hint or another of gloomy portents.  Was this the “hidden agenda” finally unraveling?

    A hidden agenda exists all right, weighs in Vice President Augustus Aikhomu.  But it belongs to the self-appointed messiahs and their confederates who held a widely publicised meeting  at General Olusegun Obasanjo’s Farm in Otta the other day, not to the Babangida Administration,

    As I conclude this piece at 1:05 am on Friday, June 11, NEC has not announced whether it will go ahead with the election as planned, the Abuja court’s injunction notwithstanding.  The authors and managers of the transition programme have made no statement.  Perhaps they are satisfied that the transition is still “on course” and that the “solid foundation” they have been laying for democracy these past seven years is, if anything, stronger than ever,

    Or it may well be that they regard the latest developments as just another phase of the “learning process” that is the transition.

    Others of a different cast of mind cannot be blamed if on waking up today and hearing the news from Abuja, they felt, like Jacob, that they had for seven years been sleeping with an illusion.

    The foregoing was published in The Guardian on June 15, 1993 and reproduced in my book, Diary of a Debacle:  Tracking Nigeria’s Failed Democratic Transition (1989-1994).

    It remains to add that it was well past midday on Friday, June 11, when NEC finally announced that the election would hold as scheduled.

    The Babangida Administration’s affirmation that the election would indeed hold came only indirectly, in response to a statement by the United States Embassy, per its Counselor on Public Affairs, Michael O’Brien, that any postponement would be “unacceptable” to the U.S. Government.

    Thus were Babangida and his co-conspirators forced into a frenzied reworking of the script.

    Go through the motion of holding the election but pour the nation’s resources into cajoling, coaxing, bullying, bribing, suborning., manipulating and otherwise inducing hegemonists, quislings, expired warlords, revanchists, traditional rulers, religious leaders, judges, shysters, professors for hire, media racketeers, student bodies, rented entertainers and all manner of careerists to discredit the poll, demonise its winner, Moshood Abiola, and annul the hope he kindled.

    Their Final Solution to “the problem of June 12” was only a matter of time.

    But “June 12” lives on in salience and spirit, unconquerable and indestructible.

  • From Saraki: Six Theses on corruption

    From Saraki: Six Theses on corruption

    It is most fitting that one of the best authorities on the subject took time off the other day to deliver a lecture on corruption, perhaps the most troubling issue of our time.

    I am of course talking about His Excellency the Irremovable President of the Senate of the  8th National Assembly of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Distinguished Senator Dr (with stethoscope) Abubakar Bukola Saraki.

    Who indeed is more qualified to expound and dissect that recondite subject with the clinical rigour it calls for than a personage with direct, first-hand experience of the subject as acclaimed suspect in one of the most sensational corruption trials ever staged in Nigeria, as architect of the most labyrinthine strategies ever devised to stall the court process, and as mastermind of the most audacious formula for staying in office and power in the face of corruption charges that would have driven a more squeamish person to permanent self-exile in a distant land?

    Only such a person is qualified to write a riveting foreword to a publication (“Antidote for Corruption:  The Nigerian Story”), its lexically-challenged author, sorry, compiler, titled it and then commend it excathedra to a select audience.  Admission to the event was by invitation only.  It was that kind of event.

    The publication at issue has been described by one professional critic who claims to have seen it as “desultory assemblage” of articles and materials from diverse sources on corruption in Nigeria. Its author, Senator Dino Melaye (APC Kogi West) is not bothered in the least, having been constantly at the receiving end of the darts and arrows and slings of the envious on account of his matchless legislative skills, to say nothing of his mastery of the martial arts and his self-advertised prowess in “the other room.”

    Members of his inner circle tell me that he regards all the calumny as the price of success and that he is only too glad to pay it.

    In this time of recession, the outing was worth envying.  A hard cover edition of the compilation  retailed for a princely N50,000 – less than Melaye’s monthly wardrobe allowance but more than three times the minimum monthly wage of N18 000 that many state governments say they cannot afford to pay.

    Saraki purchased a copy for each of the 109 members of the Senate for a total of N5.5 million, and House Speaker Yakubu Dogara  plonked down N18 million for 360 copies for members of the House of Representatives.  And that was just for starters.

    By the time the event was over, Melaye had grossed enough to pay Kogi State public service employees eight months arrears of salary the state government owes them,  and still have enough change to add a Maybach to his fleet of limousines.

    Not bad for a fellow who only several months ago was almost sunk by allegations that he had been earning a living under the false pretence of being a graduate of Ahmadu Bello University.

    By the way, I hope Melaye took care in the usual manner of the little matter of copyright the materials he re-published.  Otherwise, he should not be surprised to discover that not even Senators of the Federal Republic of Nigeria are at liberty to appropriate the literary and artistic works of other persons just like that.

    But enough about Dino the Compiler.

    Far more germane to the national policy dialogues is the seminal speech Saraki delivered on the occasion.  I have the highest confidence that it will go down as one of  the most important addresses of this age.

    What follows is my distillation from the speech, for the benefit of the reader in particular and posterity in general.  I call it “One Puzzle and Five Theses on Corruption.”  The puzzle and the theses are in italics, followed by my brief, interrogative commentary.

    The Puzzle:

    Do countries become more corrupt because the people are poor or are the people poor because the country is corrupt?

    That, Distinguished Senator, is the old chicken-and-egg puzzle.  And as you rightly noted, we may never be able to answer it to everyone’s satisfaction.

    But what is your learned view on the matter?  Your answer will contribute greatly to the anti- corruption war.

    First Thesis                                                                                                                          

    “If the purpose of government is to improve the quality of lives of its people, then any conversation about corruption must focus primarily on how it affects human development, whether it is health, wealth or education.”

    An insightful proposition, Distinguished Senator.  Again, what is your experience here?  Does corruption impede or advance public health, public education, and other aspects of human development?

    In what ways?

    Second Thesis:

    In the past two years, corruption has been forced to the top of our political agenda.  The people are demanding more openness, more accountability and more convictions.  Those of us in government are also responding, joining the conversation and accepting that the basis of our legitimacy as a government is our manifest accountability to the people.                                                                                                                                                   

    Not proven, Senator. The evidence of your acceptance of accountability to the people as the basis of your legitimacy is scant.  Impunity seems entrenched in the driver’s seat.

    Third Thesis

    If we want Nigerians to trust their government again, then government at all levels must demonstrate that we are not in office for the pursuit of private gains, but to make our people happier by helping them to meet their legitimate aspirations and achieve a higher quality of life…

    Capital, Senator.  Capital.

    It is going to be hard, Senator, but you really must demonstrate not just with one grand gesture but with all you do that you and your colleagues are not in office for private gain.  It would be more convincing still if you and your colleagues divested yourselves of the private gains you had made before your conversion to public service.

    Fourth Thesis

    In fighting corruption, we have favoured punishment over deterrence. That is why the fight has achieved only limited success.  We must build systems that make it much more difficult to carry out corrupt practices or to find a safe haven within our borders for the fruit of corruption.

    Would you also recommend that preventive approach for combating all other crimes, Senator? And how is it to be operationalised?  Former president Goodluck Jonathan said he fought corruption to a standstill by simply not making money available for stealing, and we all know the result.

    What is your own strategy, Senator?

    And if we ensure that there are no safe havens for corrupt practices at home, can we do the same on those foreign shores with which you are quite familiar?

    Fifth Thesis                                                                                                                   

    Corrupt officials profit from bureaucratic complexity and red tape.  Therefore we need to simplify administrative procedure.

    Right on the mark, Senator.  Unexceptionable.

    Sixth Thesis

    Low level corruption is largely powered more by need even than by greed.  Therefore, if we are able to build a quality public education system that is affordable, especially at the basic and secondary level, an efficient public health system that provides insurance cover to ordinary citizens and build a system that guarantees food and shelter to everyone, we would have gone a long way in removing much of the driving force for corruption at this level.”

    No Socialist Manifesto ever framed the issue more coherently, Distinguished Senator.  And your own example bears you out.  It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Kwara State, which you governed directly for eight years and which your proxy has been governing for the past six years has consistently been voted the least corrupt state in Nigeria.

    And it explains why your Administration in Kwara was voted as the least corrupt that has ever held office in Nigeria.

    Your prescription may not do much to help curb corruption at a higher level, the type driven by untrammelled greed rather than desperate need.

    But thank you, Your Excellency, for leading the anti-corruption war by personal example.

  • A fortune and its claimants

    A fortune and its claimants

    The $43 million in mint-fresh $100 bills the EFCC found warehoused in an unoccupied luxury apartment in the opulent Osborne Towers in Ikoyi, Lagos, is without question the greatest fortune any person or institution ever chanced upon since Shell Darcy struck oil in Nigeria in Oloibiri, in present-day Bayelsa State, in 1956.

    Shell Darcy at least set out deliberately to find the black gold. It carried out seismic explorations, invested heavily in men and machinery, and set up a technical and administrative bureaucracy to manage and market the oil.

    No such exertion was required to locate the Osborne Fortune.  It just sat there piled up layer upon layer in a fireproof steel cabinet, and would have stayed in that condition if an ungrateful guard had not ratted on the mysterious woman who showed up at regular intervals lugging a Ghana-Must-Go sack.

    Looking very much like the domestic help, the woman would ride the elevator to the 7th floor, step across the landing to Flat 7B, unlock the armoured door and go in.  Some two hours later, mysterious errand concluded, she would emerge from the apartment, ride the elevator to the ground floor and walk out of the premises in unhurried steps, only to repeat the visitation the following week.

    The guard, whom she often gave large tips, had learned that there was money in whistle-blowing.  So, he bought himself a state-of-the-art-whistle that can be heard all the way to Abuja, and took a crash course in blowing it.

    The EFCC swooped on Flat 7B at the Osborne Towers and the Nigerian public sphere has not been the same since then.

    Early reports claimed that the haul was part of the “security” money former President Goodluck Jonathan had squirrelled away for fighting the 2015 presidential election that he lost gallantly.   He had been so crushed by the loss, they said, that he forgot the money.

    Even if he remembered, how could he now 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?

    Plus, would it not have done grave and irreparable harm to Dr Jonathan’s goal of reclaiming the  Presidency in 2019 as the stragglers in what remains of the PDP have been urging him to do.

    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 last 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 appetite can fight.

    Not so the heedlessly combative Nyesom Wike, governor of Rivers State.

    Without a shadow of doubt, he asserted without fear and without research, the haul, which he had framed as loot pure and simple, belonged to the Rivers State Government, being proceeds of assets his predecessor and current Minister of Transport, Rotimi Amaechi, had “fraudulently” sold off.

    The logical thing, Wike said, was for the EFCC to arrange to transfer the money to his administration.  Pro-active as ever, he set up a high-powered committee comprising Leaders of Thought and Action from all the 23 local government areas of the state, with the state’s deputy governor as coordinator.

    Its mission: to take the delivery of the fortune at Port Harcourt Airport, where it would be ferried by a special cargo plane escorted by a squadron of the latest fighter jets from the Nigeria Air Force fleet.

    The team will then march in a carnival procession to Government House to present the precious  cargo to His Excellency the Governor who, on satisfying himself that it was delivered intact, will proceed, under armed escort, to deposit it in one of the more viable banks, after personally signing the relevant papers and negotiating the most favourable rate of interest.

    To confound the usual tale-bearers, the transactions would be videotaped in their entirety.

    Wike’s plan was already 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, claimed that the money belongs to the NIA.

    It has since come to light that the fund was duly appropriated by the Federal Government at the time of Dr Jonathan for projects that cannot 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.

    But why a luxury flat in Osborne Towers in Lagos, far removed from the NIA’s headquarters in Abuja? The NIA has no special vault or faux septic tank or overhead water tank or an even more imaginative receptacle where it can secret away ultra-sensitive material and monitor it  24/7 electronically?

    The NIA is so bereft of confidence in its own methods and personnel that it cannot find a safe place for its operating funds?

    On hearing the DIA’s claim, Wike, I gather, let loose a torrent of expletives that I cannot reproduce here, lest I offend the sensibilities of the discriminating readers of this newspaper.

    This past Saturday, he told Channels Television that a team of lawyers was already working to ensure the return of the loot to Rivers State.

    “We will follow due process of the law to get back Rivers Stationery found at the Ikoyi residence. 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.”

    Rivers would not fully reveal its strategy to recover the looted funds because of the games being played by the All Progressives Congress-led federal government, which had chosen to politicise the matter because it has a great deal to hide, Wike added.

    The audience gasped in disbelief.

    Wike who is famous for resorting to justice by self-help at the least provocation and sometimes without any provocation at all; the same Wike has decided to follow the due process of law?

    The old Wike would simply have led his armed stalwarts to the place where the money is being kept, forced his way inside, and carted it away

    The old Wike would have reasoned that the judiciary had not been cowed to the point that it would abjure the cardinal teaching of ancient and modern jurisprudence, namely, that possession is nine-tenths of the law.

    The new, improved Wike will be guided by the rule of law.

    His conversion must be counted, nay celebrated, as one of the more important gains of Nigeria’s ongoing experiment in democratic rule.

    Omissions, misstatements, and reiterations

    In the first part of “My Lagos story” (May 16, 2017), I omitted Ikorodu from the conurbations incorporated into Lagos State at its creation in 1967.  In the second part (May 23, 2017), I misstated the date of the 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts as 1978 – it was 1977.

    Nigeria defeated Guinea, not Ghana, to clinch the Soccer Gold at the 2nd All Africa Games.

    I reiterate, however, that the first goal on the pitch of the brand-new National Stadium was scored by Yakubu Mabo, a striker for Stationery Stores FC of Lagos, not Ismaila Mabo, the captain and doughty defender for the Mighty Jets FC of Jos, and one of the most durable    soccer figures of that era.

  • My Lagos story (2)

    My Lagos story (2)

    Returning to Lagos in 1971, I found the city vastly transformed.

    In the five years I was away, it had assumed an identity of its own as one of the 12 states created by General Yakubu Gowon’s military administration in 1967 to correct somewhat the pernicious federal structure Britain had  bequeathed to Nigeria.

    Before then Lagos was the federal capital, the stage on which federal might in its rawest form was displayed.  It was administered by various local councils and the Ministry of Lagos Affairs, but for all practical purposes, it was a political orphan.

    That changed in 1967 when Lagos became a state, incorporating Lagos metropolis, Epe, Badagry, and Ibeju-Lekki. This status gave indigenes of Lagos State an identity of their own, and a sense of ownership.  With the return to democratic rule in 1979, Lagos would acquire the full apparatus and powers of a state.

    Meanwhile Lagos metropolis had sprawled in every direction.  The population had exploded. Former residents who had fled on the eve of the civil war returned in large numbers, to a welcoming environment and to the property they had left behind.  In Lagos, there was no “abandoned property.”  There was no pogrom.

    Hundreds of Nigerians poured into the city from the hinterland and from neighbouring countries, Ghana in particular, to seek a piece of the thriving economy fuelled by the oil boom.

    The pathologies of runaway urbanisation soon set in. Old shanties expanded and new ones sprouted.  Armed robbery, now replaced by kidnapping for ransom, became an industry, crippling night life and the night economy.  Gridlock was choking the life out of the city.

    A four-fold increase in the price of crude oil, and a quantum leap in production following the end of the civil war poured so much petrodollars into the federal exchequer that General Yakubu Gowon was moved to declare that money was no longer Nigeria’s problem but how to spend it. The corruption we battle today is rooted in that era.

    But there was much to show for the sudden wealth. Enhanced pay benchmarks in the public sector were established, and hefty salary arrears backdated a year were paid out.  Today’s ageing infrastructure was built at that time, with new settlements like FESTAC Town, Navy Town, and Satellite Town.

    Lagos hosted the 2nd All-Africa Games in January 1973, in the glittering new National Stadium in Surulere.  I was in the main bowl of the stadium at the first event held there, an international soccer match between Nigeria and Mali, during which Yakubu Mabo scored the first goal ever on the pitch.

    I witnessed the opening and closing ceremonies and all the soccer events, thanks to free tickets you could obtain just presenting your student ID Card.

    It was such a joy to watch the national soccer squad the Green Eagles beat Ghana’s Black Stars to clinch the Soccer Gold.  With the victory came the re-naming of the team as the Golden Eagles. The bulk of the national team came from Stationery Stores FC, which enjoyed something close to a cult following in Lagos.

    It was on the pages of the Daily Times that I broke into column writing and flourished.  This development resulted from desperation. As junior faculty at the University of Lagos, I found myself blockaded on almost every front by my head of department

    One day, I asked myself:   Was there something I could do for credit and self-actualisation, without the HOD’s affirmation?

    Write, an inner voice told me.   Write for the media.

    That was my stepping stone to The Guardian, and to the most fulfilling 10 years of my professional life.  I actually looked forward to going to the office on Sundays. The lady of the house could not understand it. There had to be much more to the whole thing than editorial work, she often said, half in jest and half in earnest.

    I told her she was free to come check things out, and that she didn’t even have to give me a notice.  The day she showed up, she found me in the editorial suite with my colleagues who, unlike me, did not have to come to work.

    For one month from mid-January through mid-February 1978, Lagos hosted Black humanity and people of Black descent in a giddy celebration of their culture and civilisation. This was a time of heady optimism when Nigeria seemed set, finally, to claim the greatness for which everyone said it was destined.

    An activist, Afro-centric foreign policy broke with the cautious, conservative and conciliatory posture of the immediate post-colonial period.  Nigeria moved the Organisation of African Unity to recognise the Marxist MPLA over rival claimants as the legitimate government of Angola after Portugal’s colonial regime fled.

    At a time when most countries would have regarded it as an honour that U. S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s plane flew over their airspace, Nigeria turned down his request for a visit.

    Preparations for return to civil rule set off robust and ennobling debate. Nigeria’s military  leaders and a burgeoning intellectual and political class dreamed great dreams and planned on    a grand scale. That period, spanning the time the Murtala/Obasanjo administration assumed power and the time Shagari administration took office, is now nostalgically remembered as Nigeria’s Golden Age.

    I was in Lagos when a regression set in almost as soon as Shagari assumed office.

    But Lagos State was spared the contagion.   It had frontline newspaperman Lateef Jakande as its dynamic and progressive governor. Mushroom schools caring only for the money were running two, sometimes three shifts in a single day, as if they were factory assembly lines.  Within a year, his administration ended the racketeering.

    Few remember now that Lagos under Jakande was the first state to declare May Day work-free, and to proclaim it a public holiday subsequently.  The Federal Government felt compelled to follow several years later, as did other states.

    I was in Lagos when Chief Obafemi Awolowo died, and the city went into an orgy of mourning.  I was there when General Murtala Muhammed was assassinated and the city almost dissolved in tears,

    I was there when Wole Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Africa’s first.  I was there when Dele Giwa was blown up by a parcel bomb in his home.

    I was there in 1992 when a military transport plane plunged into the Ejigbo swamp, minutes after takeoff, killing a generation of officers on board.   For more than 18 hours, the authorities mounted no rescue effort.

    I was in Lagos when military president Ibrahim Babangida scurried out of town to safer harbour in Abuja, following the April 22, 1990 coup attempt that almost toppled his regime.  Lagos was the epicentre of the prolonged resistance to the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election won by Bashorun MKO Abiola.  It was the spine of the opposition to Sani Abacha’s barbarous rule.

    The former president, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, discovered to his eternal grief that Lagosians could not be purchased for any amount in any currency.

    During his time as governor, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu built on and expanded the progressive template of the Jakande years.  He discovered the vast, scarcely-tapped source of wealth that has made Lagos the most viable state in Nigeria today. As the PDP-led Federal Government set out to paralyse what it could not control, Tinubu was the last governor standing.  He defied a federal might and survived to tell the story.

    Babatunde Fashola carried on from there, and humanised the city.  Akinwunmi Ambode is carrying on in that tradition, executing urban renewal projects on a grand scale

    Together, they have given Lagosians splendid glimpses of the future of their city as a global megalopolis. They have done so with vision, imagination, creativity, and commitment.

    Since 1971, I have lived for the most part in Lagos, until 1997when I fled to the United States, following a tip-off from an insider in Sani Abacha’s terror machine.  Thereafter, I have visited regularly and followed its fortunes closely, for the city is nothing if not addictive.

    I should add that it was in Lagos that I got married, and that two of my four children were born there.

    Thank you, Lagos, and happy Golden Anniversary.