The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • Coming soon: A mega-circus, without the bread

    Coming soon: A mega-circus, without the bread

    This past fortnight, they have been planting broad hints at strategic moments and in strategic places about the coming of a mammoth political formation – a “mega-party,” its promoters, self-avowed and clandestine, have chosen to call it until it takes on a concrete existence that warrants a proper name

    You could almost hear me scream “Megawetin?” when the report first bobbed up on the computer monitor.

    Another political party, whether mega or mini or midi, perhaps to supplant, now that it is in terminal decline, the PDP which, without fear and without research, proclaimed itself Africa’s largest political party, destined to rule Nigeria for 60 unbroken years in the first instance?

    Or to shove aside the ruling APC, the bumbling amalgam of very strange bedfellows, concerned more to share the spoils of office than to wield its enormous mandate to make a dent on the privations in which the vast majority of Nigerians are mired now and for the immediate future?  The APC that was so stunningly successful in getting elected, but has been, alas, so  remiss in office?

    In whatever case, why is the political class so obsessed with the size of the parties that give expression to their policies and programmes?

    In a sense, that obsession, like a great many of Nigeria’s festering political ailments, goes back to the time of General Ibrahim Babangida and his duplicitous transition project, in which he  set the political formations seeking registration as political parties on an impossible obstacle course.

    He required them to supply, in the words of the late and much lamented political scientist Claude Ake, “a level of documentation that was absurd in meticulous detail, phenomenal in  bulk and prohibitive in cost…”

    Labouring under the misapprehension that size was everything, each of the associations accumulated as many as 13 truckloads of documentation.  In the end, none was deemed qualified.

    Babangida then ordered six of the associations that came closest to winning recognition to dissolve themselves into “two mass, grassroots democratic parties,” one a little to the left, to be known as the Social Democratic Party, and the other a little to the right, to be called the National Republican Convention.

    Neither the NRC nor the SDP could make a plausible claim to being grassroots political parties.  They were deeply rooted in the Babangida presidency, which funded them covertly, prescribed what they could and could not do (remember those “no-go areas”) and manipulated them in every conceivable manner, to the point that it would amount to a flagrant abuse of language to call them political parties.

    Nevertheless, Babangida advertised them as democratic fortresses capable of withstanding the fiercest assaults from anti-democratic forces and destined to lead Nigeria to a glorious rebirth.  They collapsed right under his nose, like the house of cards they were.

    Another factor in the obsession of the political class with size stems from the very definition of politics in these parts as “a game of numbers.”   Forget about programmes and policies rigorously thought through, about short-term objectives and long-term goals. Consider strategies and tactics only in so far as they relate to getting the numbers right.

    And remember, the whole thing is a game. “Get the numbers and everything else will be added thereunto” is the unwritten rule and the controlling ideology of Nigerian politics and governance; hence the padding of the voters’ register, ballot returns, budgets, payrolls, contracts, and indeed anything that can be padded.

    By one account, the so-called mega party was conceived in the first quarter of 2016, less than a year after the APC took office.  Back then, signs that the economy was headed southwards were already in the air.  Oil prices had crashed to their lowest in decades.  But the economy was not yet in recession – at least not officially.  The Naira had not been orphaned.  And there was little of the despondency and desperation one sees everywhere today.  Optimism, which many regard as the defining attribute of the Nigerian character, had not taken flight.

    And yet, the mega-party’s promoters, mainly careerists who lost out or had not secured as much booty as they had hoped in the patronage sweepstakes, were already scheming to bail out.  The problem, as they see it, is the vehicle in which they had been doing business, not the nature of the business, nor the way they have been conducting it.

    The vehicle is broken, they say; another craft must be fabricated, one that can take those on board safely to a more prosperous destination and deliver whatever they ask for.  But the passenger manifest will be more or less like that of the ship they are abandoning, and so will be the captain and crew.

    To swindle the credulous, they are spreading the word that the principal promoters include two titans of the APC, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, who has been alienated and marginalised by the APC he had laboured like no other person to create, and Abubakar Atiku who, in speech after speech, has voiced dissatisfaction with the way President Muhammadu Buhari and his team have been running the country.

    Tinubu and Atiku have separately issued forceful denials, but they continue to be linked with the scheme which apparently will involve, among other things, mass defection of governors and elected officials in various parts of the country to the mega-party.   They are planning to take a leaf from the playbook of the ACN/CPC/ANPP merger that produced the APC.

    Can’t they come up with something more innovative and more inspiring?

    In ancient Rome, the emperors distributed bread and staged circuses and gladiatorial shows to distract the public from the problems of the day.  Here, the promoters of the mega-party are scheming to divert and distract the public with circuses only.  Forget the bread.

    Buhari is not yet half-way into his term.  The country is beset by formidable problems.  It cannot pay its way without massive borrowing.  Unemployment among young persons willing and able to work stands at a scandalous high and is growing.  Inflation stands at an alarming 20 per cent. The infrastructure is so broken that it would not match 1990 conditions if 50 per cent of the budget were to be devoted to it for the next five years.

    Even in retreat, Boko Haram has continued to show a capacity for engaging the military in lethal firefights and for striking almost at will on soft targets.  There has been a lull in the murderous ravages of armed cattle herders devastating farms and communities.  But who can say that such brigandage is ended?

    If just a small fraction of the casualties of roads and domestic accidents reported daily had occurred in six months in a community, the elders would have set out to appease their gods.  Since we are such a prayerful country, it is a wonder that President Buhari has not declared  a National Day of mourning, prayer and atonement.

    In the midst of all this, the people that are lining up to join the mega -party are as self-absorbed as always. They are demanding that 20 per cent of the budget be handed to them for bogus “constituency projects,” in addition to the millions they appropriate unto themselves with scant regard for transparency and due process. They will not touch motorcars assembled in Nigeria.  Nothing less than exotic American-specification SUVs fit for their distinguished and honourable frames.

    This mega-party thing, it has to be said, is a flight from responsibility, and a distraction the country cannot afford.  Its promoters can best serve the country by carrying out to the best  of their abilities the tasks enjoined by their elective or appointive offices, and in keeping with their oaths of office.

    The vehicle is not the problem, gentlemen.  You are the problem, individually and collectively. If you empty it and fill it with passengers and crew cut from the same cloth as the former passengers and crew, you will get the same outcome.

     

    Correction

    I was in error when I stated in my December 12 column (“Sit-tightism:  A Primer”) that descendants of Sheikh Alimi have been sitting tight on the Ilorin royal throne for 120 years. Actually they have been at it for 192 years, no shaking.

  • Sit-tightism: A primer

    Sit-tightism: A primer

    Sit-tightism.

    An ugly word, I admit; ungainly in print and not easy on the tongue.  It may partake of the allure of “whirligig,” but it doesn’t have the enchanting cadence of that word.  It looks like a cheap intrusion upon the English language, the type that is all too common in messages posted on the Internet by malignant persons who have just learned the power and the magic of the computer keyboard.

    I was sure I had heard the word before and even seen it, probably back during military president Ibrahim Babangida’s misbegotten political transition, if not much earlier.    It may well have been coined by one of our compatriots, to whom such things come all too naturally.

    When in doubt, look it up.  I did and voilà, there it was, in all its ungainliness, in an online dictionary.  Whatever its provenance, and regardless of its inelegance, it has now been legitimised by usage.

    The earliest entry I found was in the May 12, 2003, editorial in the Kenya newspaper The Standard.  It didn’t expressly define the term, but the meaning is clear from the context.  “Anti-democratic arm-twisting, manipulation of the ballot and Constitution for the purpose of sit-tightism is totally anachronistic in the post –Cold War . . .” the editorial said, apropos of Zimbabwe’s President Robert “Uncle Bob” Mugabe.

    Some 13 years later, a blogger would decry the hardy phenomenon as a “virulent antithesis of constitutionalism” that is still “very much a significant part” of Africa’s political culture.”

    There you have it:  An ugly word, fittingly denoting and connoting an ugly phenomenon.

    No prizes for figuring out that “sit-tightism “comes from “sit tight,” which, despite its plainness, has the great merit of packing more vigour and of being more evocative, than its noun form.  It means simply to stay put, to remain in one’s place.

    What could be more harmless?

    But “sit-tight” can also stand as an adjective, and it was in that form, I now recall, that I had first encountered it, and in which it is most often employed to damaging effect.

    Think of the “sit-tight ministers” who first figured on the Nigerian political scene in the 1950s and have been with us ever since in one guise or another, mostly as public officials.  They refuse to resign when ordered to do so by the political parties whose platform they rode to the position, or by insistent public opinion when they have become wholly discredited.

    They just sit tight.  They remain in place, immovable.

    Dial back to 1952, to the crisis spawned by the major deficiencies the Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe’s NCNC and Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Action Group discovered in the 1951 Macpherson Constitution that was supposed to have conferred some measure of self-government on the regions when in practice it did nothing of the sort.

    Zik, in the East, and Awo in the West, were determined to bring down the Constitution. The AG Central Ministers resigned.  But a majority faction of the NCNC wanted to give it a fair trial. Buoyed by this development, the Central Ministers representing the NCNC at the Centre refused to vacate their portfolios.

    Even when the NCNC dismissed them from the party, they still sat tight, in Lagos.

    When Zik moved to reshuffle the Council of Ministers in the East, where a majority faction     of the governing NCNC was sympathetic to the Lagos “sit-tight” ministers, all nine regional ministers signed letters of resignation, to be submitted by the party’s hierarchy to the colonial governor the next day.

    Zik got there only to learn that, overnight, six of the nine, apparently on learning that they would not be reappointed, had written to the governor to withdraw their letters of resignation, claiming that the letters had been obtained by fraud or coercion.

    And they sat tight in their portfolios.  They even teamed up with the other sit-tight ministers from the Centre and legislators who had resigned from the Eastern House of Assembly to form a new political party.

    That, if you will, is an outline of how sit-tightism entered Nigerian politics.  And what fertile soil it found!

    The fastidious historian will dial back to the 1820s when Afonja, a general in the Oyo Empire, enlisted the Muslim cleric, Alimi, a leader of Fulani settlers in Ilorin, together with Nupe and Borno Muslim slaves and mercenaries in the town, to help sustain his rebellion against his principal, the Alaafin.

    Afonja’s would-be helpers, their eyes forever on the main chance, killed him, installed Alimi’s son, Abdulsalami, as emir and incorporated Ilorin as an emirate of the Sokoto Caliphate.   Since then, Alimi’s descendants have been sitting tight on the Ilorin throne, in what may well be the record in these parts for sit-tightism.  No power-sharing, no rotation, no shaking, 120 years on.

    Fast-forward to 1962, less than two years after independence.  The regional governor removed premier S. L. Akintola after a majority of the members of the Western Nigeria House of Assembly signified that he no longer enjoyed their confidence.

    Akintola sat tight.  AKINTOLA TAKU, the Daily Times proclaimed, in a headline for the ages.

    Nor is sit-tightism an affliction of only civilian politicians.

    Two years ahead of the date General Yakubu Gowon had set for handing back power to a democratically elected government, he declared the date no longer feasible.  He was all set to sit tight, but his colleagues ousted him.

    General Olusegun Obasanjo’s reputation rests in part on his voluntarily relinquishing power in 1979 to a democratically elected government, at the end of a carefully articulated and well executed transition programme.   Mohammed Haruna, until recently a columnist for this newspaper, has stated with accustomed iconoclasm that the reputation is bogus; that Obasanjo did crave continuation in power (i.e. sitting tight) but was dissuaded by General TY Danjuma and others who controlled the battalions.

    The jury is not yet out on that one.

    Fast-forward still to 1985, to the time of military president Ibrahim Babangida who took Nigeria through a transition programme that a noted scholar has called “one of the most sustained exercises in political chicanery ever visited upon a people.”   The whole thing was a preface to sit-tightism.  In the end, he was undone by one self-engineered ambuscade too many.

    The final phase of Babangida’s tenure was even more emblematic of sit-tightism.

    We have it on the authority of the peerless legal scholar Professor Ben Nwabueze, who was a member of Babangida’s misbegotten Transitional Council, that no more than two of 106 decrees the military president churned out between January and August 1993 were ever referred to the Council for discussion, comment, advice, or even for information.  The two did not include the decree that annulled the presidential election and the one that sought to eviscerate the news media.

    “Judged by its exclusion from law-making,” Nwabueze has written, the Council’s role in government was one of “almost total irrelevance and insignificance.”  And yet, not one of its members resigned; not its titular head, Ernest Shonekan, nor any of its 14 other members. They all sat tight.

    Indeed, through all the indignities Babangida heaped on his handpicked officials for eight years, not one among them resigned.  Political scientists will find that period a rewarding study in sit-tightism and its correlate, careerism.

    Before Sani Abacha, the mandatory retirement age in the public service was 55 years or 35 years on the job, whichever came first.  Raising the retirement age was Abacha’s first step in sitting tight.  He consolidated it by corralling the five political parties that existed at his pleasure into making him their presidential candidate.  If death had not supervened, he would today be one of the leading contenders for the African Medal in Sit-tightism.

    His ministers from the Southwest sat tight, even after their NADECO sponsors had urged them to resign.

    If Vincent Ogbulafor had his way, the PDP would have sat tight in power for 60 years to start with.  Not to worry; his one-time colleagues, Dr Bukola Saraki and Ike Ekweremadu, are carrying on that tradition in the Senate in their own way.

  • Matters miscellaneous

    Matters miscellaneous

    It is miscellany time again.  Time to catch up with broad strokes and short takes on recent occurrences, lest the personalities involved feel neglected.

    The Fixer departs

    Tony “The Fixer” Anenih has been marking his long-awaited retirement from party politics with a memoir, titled My Life and Nigerian Politics. A memoir being among other things an exercise in self-redemption and self justification, he sought to repudiate his renown for turning election winners into losers and losers into winners.

    It was on account of this propensity that I christened him “The Fixer,” back in 1993, at the height of the June 12 presidential election crisis when, as national chairman of SDP he led a team of likeminded chiselers to bargain away Chief Moshood Abiola’s victory and settled             instead for an Interim National Government as the vehicle to “move Nigeria forward.”

    That trade-off was a grand betrayal of millions of Nigerians yearning for a new order that held a vast promise not just for national growth and development, but more crucially for forging one nation out of the plethora of tribes inhabiting the space called Nigeria.

    Anenih has described the day the agreement setting up the ING was struck – a day of infamy, the jarring echoes of which can be heard even now – as “the happiest day” of his life.

    He must have been living a life of unspeakable misery up to that moment.

    Anenih says in the book that military president Ibrahim Babangida’s calculation was that the NRC candidate Bashir Tofa would win the election, thus empowering the authorities to pivot  on the many infractions of the electoral law Tofa had committed wittingly or unwittingly to justify annulling the election and hand Babangida the perfect excuse for clinging on to power.

    Against their uninformed calculations, Abiola won a sweeping victory, the type that no presidential candidate had ever won in Nigeria or is likely to repeat.  Babangida then had to manufacture all kinds of reasons for annulling the election, from the implausible to the infantile.

    To cite just one such reason:  The election had to be annulled because it failed the test of “absolute fidelity” to the rule of law, said the self-designated president who routinely enacted retroactive laws and just as routinely eviscerated the jurisdiction of the courts.

    The truth is that Babangida simply did not want to give up power, and would have found or confected any number of reasons for annulling the election, no matter who won.

    Anenih is quitting his tawdry trade when his reputation is in tatters.  He will never get another chance to mend it.  But he surely has earned his rest.

    Just how much is N2.1 billion?

    It is a vast sum of money that can buy almost everything one desires and still leave more than pocket change.  But it is hard to conceive its bulk, its physical dimension.

    It has been calculated that if you stack up one million US dollar bills, you will end up with a pile that is as high as the Empire State building in New York, including its antenna spire.  That translates into 1,454 feet, or 443 metres from the ground.

    If you stacked up one billion Naira in one Naira bills, your pile would reach at least twice the maximum altitude of 52,000 ft for commercial airliners – or six miles from the ground, assuming that the one Naira bill and the one US dollar bill have the same thickness.  And that is just one billion Naira.

    But we are talking two billion Naira and some, the amount of money reportedly ferried to Ayo Fayose and company, by agents of the Jonathan Administration, on the eve of the 2014 Ekiti gubernatorial election, Musiliu Obanikoro, Minister of State for Defence.

    If you prefer an avoirdupois perspective to a vertical one, here is how the thing shakes out:  The chopper they hired for the task had to make two trips.  It could not deliver in just one trip.  The bullion van that conveyed the money from Akure airport to Ado-Ekiti fared better.  It needed just one trip.  Though it is just a year old, it moaned and groaned and coughed and belched all the way to destination, I gather, never having ferried such freight before.

    Roughly one half of this sum –N1.1 billion- was reportedly handed over to Fayose’s agents at             his Spotless Hotel, in Ado-Ekiti, and the balance went into his Zenith Bank account .  The remittance was to ensure that the PDP and Fayose would prevail over incumbent Governor Kayode Fayemi and the APC.

    The bank’s staff took 10 full days to count the money.  The electronic counters deployed for the task just kept breaking down, unaccustomed to such heavy traffic.  Such was the strain on the  staffers doing the counting that they had to take a two-week paid vacation thereafter, according to knowledgeable sources.

    The luckless clerks at Spotless Hotel, which is far less endowed with banking hardware than  Zenith Bank, spent at least twice as many days to sort things out.  By one credible account, the hotel even had to shut down for the exercise, fobbing off its curious okada clientele with the bogus claim that stock-taking was in progress.

    Judges and Money

    It is not yet proven that the vast sums of money reportedly found warehoused in the official residence of some senior officers of the judiciary were proceeds of the corruption and perversion of justice, or the fruits of conduct inconsistent with their exalted positions.

    One judge said his son had given him the money for safekeeping.  Isn’t that refreshing, edifying even, in the days when children are so disobliging, that some children repose more faith in their parents than they do in the banks?

    Another judge said the money came from selling rice after hours.  As everyone knows, tedium is the hallmark of a judge’s life.  No fun, no variety; just one stultifying case after another.  If a judge decides to sell rice on the side to break the monotony, and to make a roaring financial success of it, personally, I would give him high praise for enterprise.  Seriously.

    Yet another judge says the money allegedly found in his house was his cumulative savings over the years from his unspent salary and allowances.  Now, if all our top officials were as frugal, as self-denying and as abstemious as the judge aforementioned, would the economy now be in recession?  Would our foreign reserve be so anaemic?  And would the rate of inflation have risen so dramatically?

    Prosecuting the judge in question is, in my view, tantamount to criminalising thrift.  Instead, I would recommend a Presidential Medal for Parsimony.

    One judge says he was groggy from anti-malaria medication when DSS operatives barged into his residence to conduct their unlawful search, only to emerge from one section of the house  bearing a vast sum of money in local and foreign currencies and order him, by force of arms, to acknowledge that the haul had been found on his property.

    It is deeply to be regretted that the judge was not accorded the humane and decent treatment enjoined by the Constitution.   What would the DSS have lost by suspending its operation and rushing him to hospital?

    Still another judge has been charged with receiving sums of money in local and foreign currencies running into billions of Naira from law litigants and law firms between 2013 and 2016, with his wife reportedly serving as liaison.

    That is ominous.  A woman can no longer collect on behalf of her husband?  And judges cannot warehouse their money, like the women traders at Oke-Arin Market, in Lagos?

    This war on corruption sef!

  • Fidel: Man, model, and legend

    Fidel: Man, model, and legend

    On October 25, 1983, President Ronald Reagan launched a U.S. military invasion of the small Caribbean island of Grenada, with token forces from some client states in the region.

    The immediate provocation, it seemed, was a military coup that installed a Marxist as prime minister.  There was also this lingering provocation:  the ongoing construction of a large airport on the island to boost tourism, the mainstay of the country’s economy.

    The Reagan administration claimed the airport was designed to serve as a Communist beachhead into the region and to the Americas. It did not matter that the airport was designed by Canadians, and funded in part by Libya, Algeria, and the UK.

    The presence of dozens of Cuban construction crews on the project site was conclusive evidence, Reagan said, of a Soviet- Cuban military build-up that the United States could not countenance.  The island’s Marxist government, Reagan further claimed, posed a threat to an estimated 1,ooo Americans on the island, most of them students at a medical school.

    It was of no consequences that no such threat was ever established.

    The invasion ran its desultory course within a week, leaving some 64 Cuban construction workers stranded. The Reagan administration dangled before them every blandishment if only they would denounce Cuban President Fidel Castro and defect to the United States.

    Their families and dependents would be spirited out of Cuba to join them in the United States in a life of comfort beyond their wildest imagining.  All they needed to do was to denounce Castro and defect.  Uncle Sam would take care of the rest.

    Not one among the 64 fell for the offer.

    This incident contrasted sharply with images of all sorts and conditions of men, women and children fleeing from the horrors of life in Cuba in dinghies and all manner of contraptions and risking everything in quest of freedom and a better life 93 treacherous miles across from the Florida Straits – images that had become a staple of television news.

    Hundreds, perhaps thousands, perished in the quest.  And yet the exodus continued.

    Back in Granada, the Cuban construction workers, all 64 of them, had spurned an offer that hundreds of thousands of their compatriots would have accepted on the threshold.  What  was going on?

    It may well be that accepting Reagan’s offer carried much greater risk than setting out from Cuba on the treacherous passage to Florida.  Still, I found it intriguing that not one among the Cuban workers stranded in Grenada accepted it.

    The occasion for these reminiscences is the death last Friday of Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, architect and leader of the Cuban revolution, From the moment he entered Havana in January 1959 at the head of a column of  his comrades-in-arms to finish off the corrupt dictator Fulgencio Battista and his regime, cheered on by thousands of admirers, until he transferred power to his brother Rául on account of his failing health in 2006, he dominated Cuba by the sheer force of his personality and by his symbolism.

    His enjoyed a global stature that seemed improbable for the leader of a Third World nation with a population of just 11 million

    That stature stemmed from many factors:  His personal charisma, emblematised by his military bearing, his regulation combat fatigues, and the lush beard and sideburns that framed his strong, masculine visage.

    Among my generation, Castro conferred revolutionary credentials of sorts on beards.  Full disclosure:  I myself kept one for more than a decade. I shaved it off on the eve of my nuptial in 1975.  Everyone said I looked much better without it, and I could not muster the confidence to re-grow it, except for the six months in 1996 that I was homeless.  But I digress.

    Castro’s global stature also stemmed from surviving not a few attempts by the CIA to assassinate him, from taking personal charge to rout, at the Bay of Pigs, an army of Cuban exiles and volunteers trained and equipped by the United States, to overrun Cuba and oust  him.

    It derived from his defying and outliving nine American presidents and weathering the blockade they instituted or tightened against Cuba, with the aim of grounding its economy           and thereby stirring up a mass revolt against the island’s communist government ,

    It has to be said that it also derived from his simple lifestyle, devoid of ostentation and vainglory. He was never tainted by allegations of corruption.

    In the face of the blockade and other hostile acts directed at Cuba chiefly by the United States, Cuba under Fidel Castro’s leadership, sought to build a new society to supplant the one that always had to reckon with the economic calculations of the United Fruit Company even as the country catered to the fancies and fantasies of American playboys.

    Within one generation, Cuba wiped out illiteracy.  Today, it has one of the highest literacy rates in the world.  It built a health care infrastructure that makes up in efficiency and effectiveness what it lacks in sophistication.   Education and health care, regarded as fundamental rights, are provided free.

    While many countries grapple with an acute shortage of doctors, Cuba produces far more doctors than it needs, and sends the rest to needy countries. It is instructive that throughout his long illness, Castro never sought medical treatment abroad.  Some doctors were brought   in from Spain to examine him, and that was that.

    He established a sports programme that produced and continues to produce world-class athletes.

    But for the decisive intervention of the Cuban military, in Cutie Cuanavale, and in Cunene Province to the south, apartheid South Africa’s forces would have overrun Angola.  Namibia’s march to independence would have been halted, and apartheid in all its debauchery would have lived on much longer.

    A large segment of the Cuban population took great pride in the gains of the revolution.  Was it these gains, then, and the pride that flowed from them that made the 64 Cuban military engineers trapped in Grenada spurn Reagan’s invitation to denounce Castro and defect to the United States, there to enjoy life on a scale Cuba could never provide?  Were they in effect saying that there is much more to life than material comforts?

    Let no one romanticise the Cuban revolution, however.  It led to crippling deprivations.  It upended, as all revolutions do, careers and projects and ambitions.  It led to an abridgement of fundamental rights.  It brought in its wake a massive flight of capital and talent.  It created a fundamental leveling, above which there is scant opportunity to rise.

    But it taught the world the meaning of self-reliance.  Even in the midst of deprivations, even after subsidies vanished with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no mass starvation in Cuba, no begging in the streets, no prostitution, no epidemics.

    Amidst the decrepit buildings and on the streets that make Havana look like a junkyard for American automobiles from the 1950s, life goes on at a rhythm that says to the over-curious visitor:  If you are looking for the unhappiest place on earth, go elsewhere.

    In death as in life, Castro remains a polarising figure.  Millions of Cubans and across the world venerated him almost to the point of deification.  Millions in Cuba and less so across the world loathed him to the point of execration.

    I am reminded of the latter phenomenon by this headline from the 1970s, spread across the front page of one of the Miami newspapers:

     

    Too, Too, Too, Too, Too, Too, Too Bad.

    Castro Narrowly Escapes Drowning.

    But there is no denying that Castro was a singular personage, and that history will count him among the greatest figures of the 20th century.

  • Donald Trump: The triumph and the angst

    Donald Trump: The triumph and the angst

    Benumbed.  Blitzed. Bewildered.  Confounded. Devastated.  Discomb-obulated.  Disconcerted.  Disconsolate.  Discomposed.  Dismayed.  Disoriented.  Distraught. Dumbfounded.  Outraged. Nonplussed. Poleaxed.  Shellacked. Shell-shocked.

    No, I have not been looking up the Thesaurus nor playing word games. I had asked some friends, expatriate Nigerians and Nigerians “on ground,” to indicate in just one word how they felt when it dawned on them that Donald Trump was about to be proclaimed president-elect of the United States.

    The foregoing is a selection from their responses.

    Full marks, again, to the percipient lady of the house.  She had seen it coming, right from the   debates that preceded the Iowa caucus.  As they unfolded, the primaries merely confirmed her premonition.  In vain did I point out that bluster and humbug and vulgar abuse might move a lot  of people to line up behind Trump, but would not be enough propel him to the nomination.

    By mid-May, Trump had won more than enough delegates to clinch the GOP ticket.

    Okay, winning the nomination is one thing.  Winning the presidential election is a different game altogether, whether Trump’s opponent was Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton.  Trump had come to the end of the road, I assured the lady of the house.

    But the surging crowds at Trump’s rallies, the enthusiasm with which they embraced even his most outlandish pronouncements  as if they flowed from Holy Writ, the way he worked them up to denounce with greater vehemence every person, idea, programme, policy or institution he denounced, convinced her that she had it right.

    Just wait until they have their first televised debate, I told the lady of the house.  Trump will be shown up as the empty suit he is, totally unfit to be president of the United States.  And that  was precisely what happened in their first one-on-one debate. In manner, speech, comportment and deportment, he looked anything but presidential.

    After that debate, Clinton overtook Trump for the first time in virtually every poll.

    “I told you so,” I teased the lady of the house, my mojo restored.   “In a one-on-one debate, Hillary Clinton will put Trump in his place any day.”

    Still, she was not impressed.  Her instincts told her Trump would prevail, even without those treacherous emails that dogged Hillary Clinton’s every step.  At that point, I thought I should invoke the authority of my professional calling to settle the matter.

    “Political journalism is my line of business,” I told the lady of the house portentously, as if she did not know it or had forgotten.  “If Trump wins, never trust me again.”

    It was when Trump won that I realized I had made an exorbitant wager, rendered all the more reckless by its open-endedness.    “Never trust me again,” period, I had said, instead of “Never trust my political judgment again.”

    I hope I can still walk it back.

    On the eve of the election, the most credible polls had Trump trailing by several percentage points. Nate Silver, the statistics wizard who had predicted with stunning precision Barack Obama’s victories in the 2008 and 2012 elections and the attendant distribution of seats in the United States Congress, scored the odds 76/33 Clinton. 

    The New York Times revised downwards its  forecast from 91/9 Clinton to 81/17 Clinton after FBI director James Comey mischievously reopened investigations into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as  U.S. Secretary of State.

    That was the point at which Hillary Clinton’s sizeable lead, which had spiked when tapes of Trump spouting demented “locker room” talk about women surfaced and one woman after another came out to report how he had groped, fondled and grabbed them by unmentionable parts of their anatomy — it was at this point that Hillary Clinton’s lead began to shrink.

    The race tightened, but not to the point that anyone could with confidence tip Trump to win.  Hillary Clinton still held a clear but not insurmountable lead.

    A few polls, it is true, had Trump winning.  But even the director of one such poll, a professor at Emory University, rejected his own findings as wildly implausible and scored the race for Hillary Clinton.  Other polls predicting a Trump win were dismissed as unreliable.

    In the event, Hillary Clinton won the popular ballot by some 250 000 votes.  But Trump prevailed  in the Electoral College, the platform that really counts in the election of president of the United States.

    The same Donald Trump whom Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee in the 2012 had described as a “a fraud” and “a phoney” who would drive the United States to the point of collapse, will soon have his finger on the nuclear trigger.

    “He’s playing the American public for suckers.”  Romney said of Trump.

    As Romney saw it, Trump had neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president. “Dishonesty,” he said, is Trump’s hallmark.

    The same Trump who elevated bigotry, xenophobia, demagoguery and misogyny to cardinal virtues.  The same Trump who had not paid federal income tax in 18 years, who ran a bogus university that issued worthless diplomas upon upfront payment of fees it would be courteous    to call unconscionable. The same Trump who waltzed unscratched through a trail of   bankruptcies even as his partners and shareholders faced certain ruin.  The same Trump who regularly stiffed his workers.

    The same Trump who built his gaudy hotel towers with cheap imports from China as the           domestic steel industry languished in terminal illness, and with even cheaper labour from         Mexico and Poland, the minimum wage be damned.  Even his signature “Make America Great Again” cap was made in China.

    The same Trump who . . .  But why belabor the point?

    The conventional wisdom was that a man with such a political baggage and a threadbare résumé of public service to boot had no business seeking the presidency of the United States and that a critical mass of Americans who believe that decency and integrity and trustworthiness and the values that undergird America’s claim to exceptionalism would see through the bluster and the bombast and mendacity and the megalomania and send him back to the world of Reality TV for which his talents are best suited.

    I allied myself with that wisdom, which must now go down as one of the most egregious political misjudgments of this or any era. That a great many among the best authorities made the same misjudgment is of course no exculpation.

    Even Trump’s camp was bracing itself for the worst. The mood there was gloomy, saturnine. The campaign was over.

     

    The frenzied crowds had returned to their domains, leaving Trump and his inner circle to contemplate not just the possibility but the imminent certainty of loss, of Trump figuring as just another loser in a long line of those he always took great delight in dismissing as losers.

    Trump will now have to do on the American landscape what he was never able to do to his rickety business empire:  Turn America from the doomed dystopia he painted in campaign stop after campaign stop and tweet after tweet into a glittering utopia.

    He is already learning that you don’t shoot first and aim later.  Having now found that the Affordable Health Care Act, the so-called Obamacare, is not the devil’s blueprint, he is saying he will retain two of its most revolutionary provisions:  the one that keeps children covered by their parent’s health insurance at no extra cost until they reach age 26, and the one prohibiting denial of coverage to persons with pre-existing conditions.

    However, expect no sobriety from the GOP.

    Basking in triumphalism, it is frantically looking for ways of eviscerating Obama’s legacy without troublesome recourse to established procedure.   It says it has found a way of getting rid of Obamacare through some chink in the Budget process

    Expect more shortcuts, and more in-your-face usurpations.

    The lady of the house had it right.  She had worked in some mean establishments and interacted with a great deal of mainstream Americans across the Midwest.  From those interactions she had gained the insights that helped her make the right call, unlike the man of the house who had been  cloistered in the Ivory Tower and had interacted for the most part with its denizens.

  • The day Zik didn’t die

    The day Zik didn’t die

    Zik-gate, as my inventive Rutam House colleague Emeka Izeze called the widely circulated but false reports of the death of the legendary Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe 27 years ago this week, has got to be the most scandalous episode in Nigerian journalism history.  It left mud on the faces of all of us journalists, those who proclaimed categorically that  he was dead, and those who merely hinted that he might have departed.

    At 85, Nigeria’s former president stood splendidly erect, and in full possession of his faculties. His voice had lost some of its resonance, but his speech was not slurred.  His hearing was acute, and he could see much more clearly with the unaided eye than some people half a century younger.  By some accounts, he was at the time engrossed in writing four books.

    This was the man whom not just one or two newspapers but the entire Nigerian news media proclaimed dead and awaiting burial.

    Rumours of Zik’s death started swirling on Wednesday, November 8, 1989, apparently triggered by enquiries from a BBC correspondent about his condition.  By Friday, the rumours had gained so much traction that two newspapers published speculations about his death.

    If any doubts lingered about Zik’s condition, they were dissolved by the newscast the NTA beamed to its fabled 30 million viewers the following night, almost one-half of it a moving depiction of Zik’s life and times.

    The newscast, a marvelous production featuring footage and archival material that captured Zik’s illustrious career, as well as moving tributes by those who knew him well, plunged the country into mourning.

    By Saturday, November 11, virtually every newspaper had the story of Zik’s reported death as front-page lead, in type size and headline vocabulary that sought to do justice to the great man’s memory.  Even those newspapers that left some room for doubt still felt obliged to refer to Zik in the past tense. The obituaries were adulatory, as indeed they should be.

    The Saturday papers that cared at all for sources searched no farther than Zik’s “associates,” many of whom had not seen him for several years. They cited no family sources, nor Zik’s personal physician, nor yet his protective private secretary of more than 40 years, the spectral and pleasantly disobliging figure everyone called “Mr Okolo”.

    In one of the Saturday papers, a letter purporting to be Zik’s “last correspondence” bobbed up.  In a fit of what can only be called misguided journalism, Sidi Ali Sirajo’s New Nigerian that was forever railing against “misguided heroism” cited not a single source for the reports that covered its entire front page.

    “Zik’s death,” it pronounced sententiously, had left Nigerians “benumbed,” but apparently not before they had reached a “spontaneous consensus” that he deserved            a full state funeral. The closest the paper came to naming a source for its sweeping assertions was a perfunctory reference to “political pundits.”

    The first editions of the Lagos- based Sunday newspapers printed Friday night and trucked to the more distant parts of the country the following morning, carried the same news about Zik, with updates and embellishments.  One enterprising Sunday newspaper even carried an editorial befitting the occasion.

    At the convocation of the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, in Kuru,     near Jos, the assembled dignitaries reportedly observed a moment of silence in honour of Zik’s memory.

    The whole thing had begun with a “letter of condolence” that Dr Kingsley Mbadiwe                     had sent with accustomed magniloquence to the Federal Government on the “passing”              of Zik.  For good measure, he also sent a copy to the NTA. That letter, plus a statement issued on behalf of the “National Committee for the Transition of Dr Azikiwe” by four prominent Nigerians, was all the NTA had relied on for its categorical pronouncement on so weighty a matter.

    Out-of-work politicians saw an opening and moved in swiftly.  A First Republic legislator and former stalwart of the Zikist Movement, Chief RBK Okafor, panting as if he had sprinted all the way from Nsukka to Rutam House in Lagos, narrated breathlessly how he had cradled his “beloved Zik” in his arms and how, even as his life ebbed, the great nationalist had said to him: “Chief RBK Okafor, my political son, remember that I am a Pan-Africanist and should be given a Pan-African burial,” or words to that effect.

    When the tale appeared in cold print, Okafor denied it vehemently.  He forgot that Ebube Wadibia, The Guardian’s resourceful and street-smart news editor, had caught him on audiotape word for word.  It turned out that Okafor had not seen Zik in several years.

    Nor were desperate politicos the only groups with eyes on the main chance.  At the airport lounge in Lagos, a person claiming to be a doctor told a Newswatch executive with critical solemnity that he had just come away from performing the autopsy on Zik and signing the death certificate.  That disclosure won him instant celebrity.

    By lunchtime on Saturday November 11, reports of Zik’s death had fallen apart.

    While television network news on Saturday showed Zik alive and well in his living  room talking with Colonel Robert Akonobi, the military governor of Anambra State and a team of journalists, in many parts of the country the Sunday newspapers were still proclaiming solemnly and unequivocally that Zik was no more.

    Zik, it turned out, had been watching the newscast at his home in Nsukka with his vivacious wife Uche, thinking that it was his birthday tribute until he heard “And may his great soul rest in peace.”  Not many octogenarians would have survived this excellent example of the actionable tort that Americans call “wanton and intentional infliction of mental and emotional distress.”

    What went wrong? 

    Dr Azikiwe was of course not the most accessible of eminent Nigerians.   Still, how was it that, for more than 36 hours, the entire news media and the government’s information machinery and the security apparatus could not establish his condition?

    Zik-gate showed how narrowly the news media cast their net and how vulnerable they were.  It was as if they had resolved not to let the facts get in the way of a “good” story.

    If they had checked and re-checked, they would have saved themselves a shameful  outing that they will never quite live down.

    And if a government obsessed with “national security” had swung into action with all the resources at its disposal as the rumours spread, a national embarrassment would  have been averted.

    Can Zik-gate happen today?

    I think not.  There are far more news sources, and the media have become more enterprising and sophisticated.

    Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe lived on for another seven years.  He said he was in no hurry to leave this beautiful planet.

    Those who had declared him dead and were organising his burial died well before him.

     

  • Curbing sexual exploitation on campus

    Curbing sexual exploitation on campus

    A few months back, this newspaper took editorial notice of sexual exploitation of female students   by teachers who should stand in the place of their parents, calling it “a disquieting but neglected phenomenon” warranting “forthright discussion and prompt action.”

    The tawdry phenomenon had gained national salience for a while in the late 1980s, largely through the attention it received from former first lady Maryam Babangida’s Better Life for Rural Women and allied women’s societies.

    Their intervention, seen largely by a skeptical attentive public as just another front on the Babangida regime’s unrelenting crackdown on the universities, the bastion of resistance to his dictatorial rule and his agenda of self-perpetuation, soon fizzled out.

    The message was unexceptionable, but the messengers had little credibility.

    Now, a more credible source with real authority has put the practitioners of sexual exploitation on our university campuses on notice that they will henceforth pay a stiff penalty for their concupiscence.

    Last week, the Senate unanimously passed the Sexual Harassment in Tertiary Education Institution Bill, 2016, which stipulates a jail term of five years or a fine of N5 million for any person on the faculty of a tertiary institution convicted of the offence.

    Senator Omo Ovie Agege (Labour, Delta Central), who sponsored the Bill, was right to exult at its passage.  “Sexual harassment has been there for so long unchecked.   Finally, we have a landmark for our wives, daughters, aunties and nieces,” he said.

    Campus sexploitation occurs in many guises and disguises,

    In perhaps the most brazen manifestation, lecturers blackmail female students into granting them sexual favours, on pain of failing a critical examination  Some lecturers even ask the unfortunate student to arrange, at her own cost, a rendezvous for her own violation.

    In another common practice, some lecturers invite female students to their offices under the pretext of academic consultation or advisement, only to grope and fondle them, without their consent and without the least regard for consequences.  They regard it as a “fringe benefit.”

    In a more subtle but no less deplorable manifestation, some lecturers lace their classroom presentation with gratuitous sexual allusions guaranteed to make female students uncomfortable.

    One line of argument in this prurient business has it that some female students dress “provocatively,” thereby inviting attention to themselves, wittingly or unwittingly.  Such reasoning is untenable.  Lecturers are supposed to be disciplined adults in full control of their emotions, not predators.

    For every case reported, there are probably dozens that never get reported, from fear of further victimisation and shame.  In a recent survey of tertiary institutions in Nigeria, the Dream Project for Africa found that three of every four students reported that sexual harassment was common on their campus, and roughly one of every three students said they knew someone who had been or was being sexually harassed, the same proportion that said they feared reporting the issue.  Only one of every 12 students believed that the authorities took the issue seriously.

    The case for a bill to curb campus sexploitation, then, is unanswerable.

    Some will no doubt compare the frenzied haste with which the National Assembly buried allegations of sexual misconduct by three of its members during an official visit to the United States and the tenacity with which it has pursued the Sexual Harassment Bill, and conclude that there is nothing high-minded about the Bill. High-minded or not, the Bill addresses an important social issue.

    In its present form, the Bill can be criticised on several grounds. First, it is predicated on the assumption that sexploitation occurs only on the campuses of tertiary institutions.  This is not the case.   It occurs in secondary schools and even in elementary schools. The law should, therefore, have a wider application.

    Second, sexual harassment also occurs in the work place, probably in the National Assembly itself, creating a hostile environment which makes it difficult for the person being harassed to function productively.  It occurs on passenger buses, and even on okada.The law ought to take into account this variety of sexploitation.

    Third, the law, being one of strict liability, criminalises sexual activity between adults even if it  is rooted in mutual consent.  This is an overreach. Sexual activity between consenting adults cannot pass the test of a good law. I know of many a campus romance between professor and student that blossomed into a happy marriage.

    Fourth, the law provides no protection for those reporting sexual harassment. A climate that offers such protection to those reporting sexual harassment will have to be created.    Without it, they will not feel confident to come forward.  And unless they come forward, the problem will not get the forthright attention it requires.

    The Senate should address these issues before transmitting the Bill to President Muhammadu Buhari for assent.  An identical Bill passed by the 7th National Assembly was sent to former President Goodluck Jonathan.   Perhaps mindful of the defects I raised above, Dr Jonathan refused assent.

    The 2016 Bill should not be allowed so suffer the same fate.  The Senate should send a revised Bill to which the President can assent with confidence.

    In whatever case, the bill should serve as a wake-up call to the university community. With the National Universities Commission providing the broad guidelines, university authorities should develop a code of conduct that defines sexual harassment in clear terms and specifies sanctions for conduct that violates it. The code will be binding on serving and new appointees, and must be rigorously enforced, without prejudice to the Sexual Harassment Bill.

     

    Guess Who is Reading

    In this space two weeks ago, I noted that the Stomach Infrastructure programme  of the Ekiti State Government had all but collapsed and suggested that one obvious way of reviving it that  had gone unnoticed was to round up those marauding cows and slaughter them for distribution to the faithful – the okada riders and motor park touts.

    A few days later, himself the Osoko, Governor Ayo Fayose, announced that any cows found out of bounds would end sizzling in cooking pots of families across Ekiti.  I can almost hear the salivation at Ado-Ekiti motor park.

    Another piece I wrote back in my days at Rutam House comes to mind. I lamented how much I missed Vice President Augustus Aikhomu’s Friday afternoon news conferences through which he put a personal stamp on developments that would dominate the headlines and front pages during the week end and beyond, there being few competing materials.

    Pronto, the very next Friday, the jolly mariner revived his press conferences.

    I cannot complain that the column does not get executive attention.

     

  • Dele Giwa: When one murder begat another

    Dele Giwa: When one murder begat another

    Around 10 o’clock in the morning of October 19, 1986, I sat down and wrote a letter to Dele Giwa, after completing my usual Sunday morning chores.  My younger brother who had spent Saturday night with us and was about to return to his lodgings in Ketu was to deliver the letter early Monday.

    “What if he is not around?” he asked in all innocence.

    “Give it to his secretary,” I said, attaching no significance to his question.

    About five hours later, his question would turn out to have been a stunning prophecy.  For, at the time I was composing that letter, Dele Giwa was being blasted out of this world by a parcel bomb whose origin is yet to be determined, two full years after the event.

    My undelivered letter, roughly two octavo pages long, lies before me as I write these lines.  The content, I am sorry to report, will not yield a scintilla of evidence, hard or soft, concerning the identity or motive of his murderers.

    I was only asking him to mollify a Newswatch staffer who was inconsolable after failing to secure a place in the mass communication programme at the University of Lagos.  The young man was persuaded that if I had pleaded his cause vigorously enough, he would have been accepted.  Nothing I said to the contrary moved him.

    So I thought I should ask Dele Giwa to help me make peace with him.   All along, he was aware of the young man’s quest but did not intercede for him.  As befitted the self-made man that he was, he felt his young staffer should earn a place in the university by his own effort.

    I suspect that if my letter had reached him, he would have called in the young man and told him baldly that he had flunked the entrance examination and should strive to do better the next time.

    Dissembling was not one of Dele Giwa’s vices.  He was blunt to a fault.  In his writings and in private conversation, he said exactly what he knew or believed about the events and the men and the women behind them, without fear of the consequences .

    That explains how he could state in cold print that if the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) failed, the people would rise up and stone its authors.  It is not disrespect to his memory to say that this was tactless in the extreme. Other commentators gave warnings that were just as dire, but in language not so direct and provocative.  But Giwa would not have been true to himself and to his conscience if he had framed the matter in any other way.

    I wonder what he would be saying today of SAP were he alive.  In the light of all the startling evidence around us, he would have cast grave doubts on the vaunted “gains” of the scheme. But I doubt whether he would have moved on to stir things up and lead the people to desiring a (socialist) revolution.

    He was no agitator.

    An unabashed admirer of capitalism, he was a good advertisement for that system.  His life story was proof that it worked.  And if that system was not working the way it was supposed to, adjust it incrementally, not wholesale; fine-tune it.  But, for goodness sake do not dismantle it. He would never have put himself to the mildest of exertions to institute a socialist order in Nigeria.

    Dele Giwa was an exemplar of the journalist as insider, if not participant.  He relished his closeness to power and influence, and was not above flaunting it.  He prized the access to news and information that it gave him.  Such closeness has its uses, to be sure.  Few public affairs commentators can perform effectively without it.

    But it also carries a price.

    For, as the great Walter Lippmann has warned, if the various guises and disguises that power assumes do not always corrupt, in the end they almost certainly co-opt or seduce the commentator, sometimes to the point of vitiating his critical faculties.  The reporter makes the agenda of his powerful sources his own.  Without his realising it, their fears and anxieties become his own, and he comes to regard his own survival as linked inextricably to theirs.

    I will not be surprised if, at the time of his death, Dele Giwa had begun to find the cost of access to power too high and to question whether it really made a great difference to his work. Journalists who pride themselves on that kind of access should once in a while stand back and  ask themselves whether the professional rewards justify the cost.

    One aspect of Dele Giwa’s life remains a puzzle.  If he had any admiration for Chief Obafemi Awolowo who, all things considered, should have been his role model if not his idol, he kept it splendidly to himself.

    Like Awo several decades before him, Giwa had raised himself by his bootstraps and by a determination that bordered on monomania.  Like Awo, he was driven by stupendous energy and possessed a prodigious capacity for work.  Again, like Awo, he believed very much in  himself and never doubted that he could attain any goal he set for himself.

    And yet, Dele Giwa almost could not bring himself to speak well of Awo, at least in public.  Even the probing, sceptical reporter in him could not see the so-called Maroko land deal as the hoax that it was.

    What forces were at work here?  Over to you, psycho-historians.

    It remains to add a grisly footnote to the foregoing  reminiscences, first published in The Guardian, in 1987, and later anthologised in my 1993 book, Matters Arising.

    My brother Herbert Tunde Dare, a deputy commissioner of police with the Special Branch, was  named a principal investigator  in the Giwa murder.  Shortly thereafter, he was  transferred to Kaduna but kept on the case.

    Concerning his work, he was as secretive as an oyster.  Taking advantage of the relaxed atmosphere of Yuletide, I asked him in late December 1987 how the investigation was shaping up.

    “Oba,” he replied, using the name we reserved for each other, “they are not serious.”  By “they,” he meant the authorities.  He went on to add that he was not even allowed to ask the basic questions on which a proper investigation must be grounded.  But he plugged on.  “Failure” was not in his dictionary.

    Some two months later, he was summoned to Lagos to file a preliminary report on his investigations.  He had planned to return to Kaduna the same way he had travelled to Lagos:   by air.  But at the last minute, the police authorities came up with an assignment that warranted his returning by road.

    Somewhere between Jebba, in Kwara State, and Mokwa, in Niger State, in the dead of night, he was killed in circumstances powerfully indicative of foul play.

    Announcing his death, the police said he had lost control of his car while trying to overtake another vehicle and had crashed it.  He had died instantly. The wreckage of the car he was allegedly driving was never produced. The police said a driver and an aide assigned to him, both unidentified, were injured in the accident but had been treated at an unidentified hospital and discharged.

    The announcement, my brother’s one-time boss in the Special Branch told me, could only have been designed to pre-empt an enquiry into his death.

    The death had resulted from his own careless driving. Case closed.

  • Whatever happened to…?

    Whatever happened to…?

    The Kogi Gubernatorial Election Petition

    In the books of the electoral umpire INEC, Abubakar Audu, candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and his running mate Abiodun Faleke, had to all intents and purposes won the election.  But before their victory was proclaimed officially, Audu slumped and died.

    The conventional wisdom, and more crucially the intendment of the law, according to many learned authorities, was that his running mate would inherit the mandate and name a deputy subsequently.

    Not so, said the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF), to whom the matter was referred for guidance, there being no precedent even by Nigeria’s chequered history.The election was declared inconclusive.

    Yahaya Bello, who had run a distant second to Audu at the primaries, was named the APC’s gubernatorial candidate for the purpose of completing the election and awarded the votes that had been cast for the Audu/Faleke ticket, plus the votes cast in those constituencies where no election had been held in the earlier poll.  Bello, not being registered to vote in Kogi, was not qualified to vote in that poll.

    Faleke’s appeal was dismissed by the election petition tribunal.  The dismissal was subsequently affirmed by the Court of Appeal and finally by the Supreme Court.

    The ratio decendi that ran through all three verdicts was strikingly similar to the AGF’s advisory opinion.

    All three judicial bodies held that votes cast at elections accrue to political parties, not to the candidates who represent them in the poll.   Therefore, the APC, or more accurately a faction of it, was at liberty to transfer the votes cast for the Audu/Faleke ticket to Bello.

    This reasoning is curious, if not spurious. A party member puts himself or herself forward as a candidate, mobilises resources, competes with other aspirants, and wins the nomination.  The candidate thereafter crisscrosses the constituency, sells himself or herself to the electorate, with the support of the party, and wins – or loses, as the case may be.

    If the votes cast in a poll belong to the party, why go through a tedious, costly and often rancorous nomination contest? Would it not be vastly simpler and more sensible for a political party to enter a race as a corporate body, and thereafter name a member to fill the post or occupy the seat it had won?

    At any rate, which is more ludicrous:  To allow Faleke inherit the votes the Audu/Faleke ticket had won, or to assign those votes to Bello who had not voted in that election, and was in fact not qualified to do so?

    The case was a difficult one, no doubt.   There were few, if any, sturdy guideposts.  It is the kind of case in which the Supreme Court elsewhere would have been split down the middle, with some judges concurring in part and dissenting in part, resulting in fractured verdict that would serve as a shaky precedent at best.

    Not here.  As my perceptive colleague Idowu Akinolatan has pointed out, not one of the justices of the Supreme Court could bestir himself or herself to enter a dissent.  Lost on them were the nuances and subtleties of the case.  The ruling now stands as the law, unless they vacate it in a subsequent case.

    Something tells me that it is going to haunt the courts and the polity.

    Dr Jonathan’s Favourite Loaf

    Just one presidential bite, and Dr Jonathan was hooked.  He would not touch any other kind of loaf.  In fact, no other kind of loaf was allowed near the presidential banqueting hall.

    It was a prized staple at breakfast, with fish pepper soup.  For lunch and dinner, it was optional.  They always kept an oven-fresh supply because the President could ask for a serving at anytime for himself or very special guests on whom he wanted to lavish Aso Rock hospitality.

    In case you haven’t guessed, it is cassava bread.

    According to a knowledgeable source who prefers not to be quoted because he was not authorised to make the disclosure, cassava bread became such a strategic item in the cuisine of Aso Rock that a Senior Special Assistant (SSA) was assigned to supervise its production, storage and preservation under the strictest rules of hygiene.

    Reporting to the SSA were two master- bakers trained and certified by the most famousboulangerie in France, a professor of food science, who would ensure that each loaf delivered the nutrients that would keep the President in good health, and a food inspector trained at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

    This team was supported by a carefully selected cast of artisans.

    The cassava came straight from a special farm in Abuja, supervised by an agronomist on loan from the International   Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Ibadan.They tell me that the best planes in the presidential fleet were retrofitted with ovens to produce piping-hot cassava bread on demand whenever the president was airborne.

    The cookware and kitchen wore out quickly from heavy use and had to be replaced every six months or so.  You can now understand why Aso Rock’s food bill stood at N1 billion a year,despite the President’s accustomed frugality.

    Arrangements to extend the benefit of this iconic gain of the Transformation – or was it Transformative? – Agenda had reached an advanced stage when the President and his team were distracted by the 2015 general election.  The rest is history.

    But it would be sad indeed if this culinary delight were to die literally in the mixing bowl, like an earlier version which, based on Brigadier (as he then was) Oladipo Diya’s expert testimony, was adopted as the official snack of military president Ibrahim Babangida’s Armed Forces Ruling Council, only to vanish thereafter from public consciousness thereafter.

    Will they ever cultivate the virtue of continuity?

    Stomach Infrastructure and all that

    Ekiti State Governor Ayodele Fayose has been celebrating two years in the office to which he was swept by a pledge to cater to the stomach infrastructure of the public, those who voted for him as well as those who did not.  He marked his first Christmas in power by distributing parcels of parboiled rice he personally milled and live chickens he personally bred, drawing on his experience from the failed Ekiti Integrated Poultry Project that guzzled mountain of cash without producing a single egg.

    That year, he got it right – the Christmas stomach infrastructure, that is.

    Lately, however, Fayose has shown scant regard for any group in the “Fountain of Knowledge”, certainly not for teachers and civil servants who have received no salaries for upwards of six  months.  To be fair to Fayose, he is not the only governor in this predicament.  But he is the only governor who made catering to stomach infrastructure the fundamental objective and directive principle of his administration’s policy.

    You know Fayose is dissembling when he says that the recent release of 21 of Chibok girls is a distraction,and that the more urgent task, which he has long stopped addressing anyway, is to put food on the table for the hungry masses.If it is indeed a distraction, I say long live the distraction

    If only the man would sit down and for once reflect, he would find a solution to his abandoned stomach infrastructure project staring him in the face.

    Don’t drag those marauding cattle herders to court. The case will drag on forever, and conviction is not guaranteed. They will not pay the fine the courts may impose.

    Better to seize the entire herd and press it immediately into the stomach infrastructure programme.  I hope the stray cow he personally arrested in Ado-Ekiti the other day landed in the cauldron of the caterer to the motor-park touts and Okada riders that are the backbone of his administration.

    Finally, the spectre haunting Europe, but not the one Karl Marx wrote about with brilliant andsearing prescience in 1848.

    Anxiety, primal anxiety, has gripped nations which have a female president or prime minister at the very thought of Donald Trump being elected president of the United States.

    Call it Trumpophobia.

    It runs deepest in the United Kingdom, which has a tradition of a “special relationship” with the United States.  Even the usually sedate Buckingham Palace is not resting easy, my sources tell me.

    What if – so the thinking goes – what if The Donald were to interpret that “special relationship” in his own Trumpian way, namely, as a licence to indulge his favourite pastime of groping and grabbing and fondling, even as he is being treated to a state banquet?

    Watch out, Your Majesty.  Watch out, Teresa May.  Be vigilant, William, Duke of Cambridge and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge.  The Donald’s tentacles reach far and wide and deep.

  • Curiouser and curiouser at the Justice Ministry

    Curiouser and curiouser at the Justice Ministry

    When ThisDay reported the other day that the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF) had declared inconclusive the police investigation on which a criminal indictment against the two principal officers of the Senate was grounded, you could almost hear a collective sigh of “Here we go again” from a weary attentive audience.

    The charges had been brought, according to the paper, following assurances from the AGF,  Abubakar Malami (SAN), that investigations into the forgery – or should we now call it alleged forgery? — had been concluded and that prosecution was fully warranted.

    Now, said the paper, the AGF was asking the police to commence further investigations that might furnish evidence to nail, and force out of office, Senate President Bukola Saraki and his deputy, Senator Ike Ekweremadu.

    The whole thing had seemed like an open-and shut-case.  The rules for electing principal officers of the Senate had been amended in two crucial respects between the time the 7th Senate was prorogued and the 8th inaugurated.

    The old rule stipulated that all members of the Senate shall participate in the election of its principal officers.  The amended rule says members would be encouraged to participate in the election.  Again, the old rule stipulated that voting should be by secret ballot.  The new rule dispensed with that provision.

    Saraki and Ekweremadu owe their present positions to this curious tampering with the rules, which was unearthed by some of their disaffected Senate colleagues.  If the twain did not instigate it, they certainly profited from it, and so did everyone else who connived in it.  And it is trite that the law will permit no one to profit from a crime.

    The matter was turned over to the police, who carried out an investigation and submitted their findings to the AGF, who then moved to indict, based on those findings. Some persons learned in the law who had seen the court papers said Saraki and Ekweremadu did not figure in the police report, and should not have been indicted.

    Had the AGF, then, engaged in an unseemly rush to prosecute? The AGF had no iron-clad case and yet went to court with an inconclusive police report, hoping that the court would convict?  Had he in the process perjured himself?

    These, at any rate, are some of the questions thrown up by ThisDay’s report.

    I was trying to make some sense of all this when, last Friday, the AGF filed to withdraw the charges against Saraki and Ekweremadu and two senior officials of the Senate, not on the premise that the report on which the indictment was grounded was inconclusive, but on the ground that the same case or one closely related to it was pending before a superior court.

    The court accordingly struck out the charges and discharged the men in the dock.   But was this an acquittal?

    It certainly was not a nolle prosequi, at least not explicitly.

    Whatever its purport, it was enough to set off jubilation in the camps of the beleaguered Senate leaders.

    When the matter comes up before the Abuja Federal Capital Territory High Court, Jabi, to which the AGF said he was deferring, will the AGF file to withdraw the charges again, thus leaving the court no choice but to discharge the persons indicted?

    That, I gather, would still not amount to an acquittal, unless the AGF enters a nolle. Will he?  Without entering a nolle, he could file the case anew even after withdrawing it a second time.  The jubilation in the Saraki/Ekweremadu camp may yet turn out to be premature.

    In whatever case, few could have foreseen that the case would take this curious turn.  Fewer still could have expected that as the case was unfolding, armed operatives of the Department of State Services (DSS) would launch a raid in the dead of night on the homes of six senior judges, apparently with the approval of the Ministry of Justice.

    By the time they were done, they had two justices of the Supreme Court, Sylvester Ngwuta and John Okoro, in custody, as well as Justice Adeniyi Ademola of the Federal High Court. They also raided the home of another judge of the Federal High Court, Nnamdi Dimgba, but did not arrest him.

    Also whisked into custody were Kabir Auta of the Kano High Court, Muazu Pindiga of the Gombe High Court, Mohammed Tsamiya of the Court of Appeal in Ilorin, and the Chief Judge of Enugu State, I. A. Umezulike.

    Efforts to search the home of a Federal High Court judge in the Rivers State capital, Port Harcourt, escalated into a tense stand-off between DSS operatives and the police, backed by stalwarts allegedly rushed to the scene by Governor Nyesom Wike.

    It almost turned bloody.

    The DSS said the raids followed close monitoring of the lifestyles of the judges and complaints as well as intelligence reports that they had received valuable consideration from some litigants in return for delivering verdicts favourable to those litigants, without regard to the merit of their case.

    Two other judges concerning whom evidence of graft had been uncovered were merely retired by the National Judicial Council when, according to the DSS, prosecution was indicated.

    Various sums of money in foreign currencies and the Naira recovered from the three judges, amounting to the equivalent of N93.5 million, were indicative, the DSS seemed to imply, of corrupt dealing.

    Whatever the yield, these raids fly in the face of President Muhammadu Buhari’s pledge in his National Day Broadcast that the war on corruption would be waged with due regard to the rule of law. The ink had not dried on this newspaper’s editorial endorsement of that pledge when they were carried out.

    The legal community, civil society and indeed the attentive audience are right to feel outraged by the DSS’s tactics. Yes, the raids were backed by search warrants.  There was reasonable fear that vital evidence might be destroyed if the DSS did not move quickly.  Still, there is something so creepy about it all, something so eerily reminiscent of a not-too-distant past, that it is insufficient consolation that it was done for a worthy cause.

    Even the worthiest of causes stands tainted if pursued by repugnant means.

    The authorities doubtless felt frustrated in their efforts to bring to justice high political and judicial officials against whom damning probative evidence of malfeasance might indeed have been compiled.

    Many in the attentive audience will say that the judges brought this calamity on themselves, and that it serves them right.

    It is the stuff of gossip that some judges would write two judgments, each plausible in the domain of law, but with the more favourable verdict going to the parties that bid the highest.

    It is also notorious that senior attorneys, officers of the court, serve as conduits for funnelling corrupt inducement to judges.

    No system of jurisprudence can account for a court ruling that restrains the police in perpetuity from investigating charges of misconduct against a political official or arresting him.  Yet, some court judges in Nigeria have issued such injunctions.

    The way things were going, the courts could one day issue an injunction restraining the National Assembly from passing a bill, or barring the President from signing a bill into law.

    A comprehensive purge of the judiciary was surely indicated.  But not with the tactics the DSS employed lately.  It may well be, as some have argued, that no other procedure could have guaranteed the desired result and that, given the goal, the government deserves sympathy, not condemnation.

    That is like walking a slippery slope, along which only a dangerous descent is guaranteed.  It must not become a habit.