The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • A milestone, and a transition

    A milestone, and a transition

    One of the blessings of my Rutam House years is that it brought me into close contact, on and off the editorial chair, with many exceptional men and women.

    I have written about Stanley Macebuh, the founding executive editor and later managing director, whose vision and leadership shaped what would be widely acclaimed as the best newspaper in Nigeria, and one of the best in Africa.  His dream was to make it one of the top 10 newspapers in the English-speaking world.

    I have also written about the late Alex Ibru, The Guardian publisher, who invested a fortune in the project but took a back seat for the most part and deferred to the expertise and judgment of seasoned professionals and academics from the universities, who ran the paper.

    Today,I write of two others, Sunmi(sola) Smart-Cole, who was my colleague, and Olorogun Michael Ibru, patriarch of the Ibru family and older brother of Alex, the Guardian publisher.

    Sunmi Smart-Cole, who turned 75 last week, comes closest in my book to the definition of a self-made man.  In an exact sense, there is no such person. He or she must have entered the world imprinted with genes from relations near and distant; along the way, the person must have been helped by other persons, or propelled by good fortune.

    Sunmi first came into my consciousness as a drummer for the Soul Assembly, one of the pop bands that rocked swinging Lagos of the 60s.  What I didn’t know then was that he had taught himself how to drum.

    Then he morphed into a barber, with a studio at McEwen Street, in what was then a tony part of Yaba, where Ogundero the Tailor, a wizard at his craft, had his well-patronised shop.  You can still see sunmi’s placebeneath the black paint over the façade of One McEwen.

    The going rate was a princely 10 shillings for a haircut, which I could not afford.  But there was no lack of well-heeled patrons, many of whom became Sunmi’s friends.  None of them, I suspect, know that Sunmi had taught himself the art of barbing.  He did it with such dexterity and precision, and with eye for visual effect. To him, barbing was an art form.

    Along the way Sunmi apprenticed as an architectural draughtsman, and has to his credit some remarkable buildings and structures in Sierra Leone and Lagos.

    But it was in the United States that he found his métier in photography, the art form for which he is justly celebrated.  On his return to Nigeria, he took up an appointment as the first photo editor of the newly established Guardian, turning what had been a ho-hum staple in newspapering into a creative and integral element of news and features.

    Given Sunmi’s unrivalled knowledge of the Lagos social scene and the close personal relationships he had cultivated with many of the influential persons in the city, he was a natural for the editorship of Lagos Life, a weekly journal of soft news and gossip that was the perfect complement to the sedate Guardian.  The centre-spread, featuring his photography, was one of the paper’s strongest selling points and a visual delight to boot.

    Even with this elevated status, Sunmi could not give up barbing.  He did it not for money, but for sheer love of craft, and as a way of signalling that he judged you worthy of his attention and friendship.  He carried his tool kit wherever he went, and could give you a fine haircut at short notice and just about anywhere, as long as there was electricity to power his tools.

    One day, as he gave me the first of many haircuts, we got talking.  My hairline was already in furious retreat, but I still had some hair worth grooming.  As his clippers slithered through my hair I asked whether he had considered parlaying his vast and distinctive output –black-and white only, like the Old Masters; no coloured prints, please —into academic credit that could lead without much fuss to a Master of Fine Arts degree of a university in the United States.

    The clippers went dead.  Sunmi stood still, motionless, wordless. Moments passed, and when I looked up, there he was, tears streaking down his face.  Composing himself several minutes later, Sunmi told me the story of his life, the story that has been captured faithfully in all major papers this past week to mark his 75th birthday.

    His formal education had ended at elementary school.  And so on and so forth.  Today, he stands as a peerless exemplar among photojournalists in Nigeria, and one of the best anywhere, emblematic of historian Edward Gibbon’s apothegm that the best and most important part of a person’s education is the part the person gives himself or herself.

    My interaction with Olorogun Michael Ibru, who died several weeks ago, aged 85, was limited.  I had admired him from the distance, having heard so much about his academic distinction at Igbobi College, where he was Head Boy, his sprawling business empire, his philanthropy and, above all, his humility, his capacity for relating to total strangers as though they were his buddies.

    That was until sometime in the late 80s, when the University of Lagos Alumni Association deputed me —as their “Rutam House man” — to ask if he would kindly chair their fund-raising dinner. When I called at his office to request an appointment, he checked his diary, and without asking what I wanted to see him about, granted my request.

    I met Chief Ibru several days later, in his well-appointed suite in an office block – which probably also doubled as some kind of residence or pad –overlooking Apapa Wharf, with a stunning view of the Atlantic Ocean. He asked solicitously about my work at The Guardian and said he hoped my experience there would be so pleasurable that I would want to stay back.

    He had returned from Europe just the previous week.

    There, he had watched a movie about World War II that centred on the nine-month siege to Stalingrad (now Volgograd) by the armies of Germany and its Axis Allies, and the grim Soviet counter offensive that destroyed Germany’s  6th Army, in what has gone down as the bloodiest battle in history.

    The Soviet Army had a grander design:  to pursue the stragglers of the invading army all the way to Germany and capture Berlin.  The trouble was that they had only eight landing craft. How they overcame this logistic nightmare and pressed on all the way to Berlin was what fascinated Ibru most.

    If only Nigeria could learn from that titanic feat, he said, with a sigh more than once.

    It remains to add that he accepted the invitation without hesitation. He was represented at the event by Sam Okudu, a senior executive at the Ibru Organisation, and a former registrar of the University of Ibadan, who gave a spirited speech and presented a handsome donation on the chief’s behalf.

    Although he had no formal links with The Guardian, he was a lightning rod for the newspaper.  Whenever the military authorities were angry about something the paper published and could not reach Alex Ibru or feared that they might not be able to bend him to their will, they took their case to the chief, persuaded that he would be more amenable.

    He was nothing of the sort.  He would listen patiently as always, and then fob them off with a promise to look into the matter.  Then he would call to tell you about the encounter, assure you he had taken care of the matter, and that you (my colleagues and I) had nothing to worry about so long as our motives were “as clean as a whistle”.

    This was priceless admonition, a distillation of his experience as business mogul, humanist, conciliator and statesman. At his death, the great business empire built by this foremost indigenous entrepreneur, spanning agriculture, fishing, manufacturing, banking, car dealership and aero services, to name just a few, had become a shadow of itself.

    But his personal life and public life were untainted by scandal.  In this clime, there is no greater tribute and no greater legacy.

  • In the throes of a recession

    In the throes of a recession

    Hard times are well and truly upon us.

    Gloom encircles the polity and despondency defines the national mood, all because the economy is in recession.  Everyone is feeling the pinch,  the privileged to a lesser extent than the average person, and the average person to a lesser degree than the underclass.

    A wave of panic is sweeping the country, at a time that calls for cool, focused deliberation and creative thinking.  A blame game is in full swing, with one segment of the population, comprising for the most part stragglers of the inept Jonathan administration under which official corruption and fiscal brigandage reached new heights, blaming the nation’s economic woes on President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration.  They promised us change, but plunged us into a regression, they have been saying of the APC-led government.

    Buhari and the APC answer back that what Dr Jonathan and his team bequeathed to them was a poisoned chalice, a system riddled through and through with dysfunction of the most intractable kind, and that the drift and decay of that era cannot be arrested overnight, to say nothing of getting the economy back to full throttle.

    To which the Jonathan people rejoin:  You were elected to fix the economy, based on your campaign promise, not to blame your predecessor nor dwell endlessly on the depredations of the recent past, brazen as they were. Get on with it, or make way for someone who can fix it.

    They have a point, but it is no more than a debating point.

    To fix the economy, it is necessary to understand how the nation came to this troubling pass.  Those who fail to examine the past, it has been said, are condemned to relive it. In their wisdom, our elders have it that if you do not know where you are going, you should at least know where you came from.

    Buhari can be criticised for his dilatoriness, for not hitting the ground running — pardon the cliché — for taking an inordinately long time to put together his cabinet, and most crucially, an economic team.   Timely action on his part might have helped slow the slide into recession, but he cannot be blamed for not fixing the economy in just one year.

    A recession does not happen overnight.  It develops through a slow accretion of adverse economic indicators.  The warning signs can be seen as the process unfolds, but that process usually cannot be arrested in the short term.  When all the elements coalesce into a full-blown recession, the task becomes even more difficult.

    There is no quick fix to a recession.  Japan was mired in a recession for almost a decade.  The effort to get the economy humming again resulted in stagflation – stagnant growth with inflation.  Europe — take out Germany — has been stuck in recession for some five years, and the United States has just begun to recover from a recession in which it had languished for more than five years.

    The Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun, may have been trying to calm the public when she said the recession would bottom out by the end of next year.  Central Bank Governor Godwin Emefiele probably had the same purpose when he said the worst was already behind us

    To which we must say, Amen.  But they and other political officials must not raise false hopes and expectations.  Failure of their projections can only deepen the frustration and discontent so palpable on the streets and in homes. Even if you come up with the most efficacious measures, they take time to turn the economy around.

    Unsettling as it is, a recession is not a strange phenomenon.  In fact, it is part and parcel of the capitalist economic system, characterised by cyclical booms and busts.

    As Dr Oladapo Fafowora has pointed out in a perceptive essay in this newspaper (September 22), only in two countries in the world is the economy not in recession:  China and India.  Even so, China’s superheated economy has cooled down considerably.

    Nobody, not even academic and professional economists, knows how the economy really works  If this seems like an indictment of the high priesthood of the dismal science, it is coming from one of their own, Paul Krugman, the youngest person to have been awarded the Nobel Medal in Economic Science and one of the most respected scholars in the business.

    Certain measures work under certain circumstance; some measures that work under one circumstance fail in other circumstances.   Plus, there is the human element.  Humans learn and grow and change and dissemble and behave in ways that defy prediction or even rationality.  That is why economists are forever hedging their bets with the caveat ceteris paribus.

    The problem is that, outside the laboratory where you can control one variable or another, ceteris is rarely paribus.

    As an example, consider the excitement in the community of financial and economic experts when the Central Bank did exactly what they had been urging:  deregulate and liberalise the foreign exchange market.  The underlying theory holds that the measure will result in a sharp narrowing, if not outright convergence, of the foreign exchange rate at the so-called parallel market and the official foreign exchange rate.

    Rather than shrink, the gap between the two exchange rates actually widened significantly.

    There you have it:  A beautiful theory murdered in Nigeria by a gang of brutal facts.

    In the long run, the economy always recovers.  Some measures may hasten recovery in certain places and under certain circumstances but prove ineffective elsewhere.  But the economy always recovers, steered by Adam Smith’s “invisible hands”.

    In the long run we all are dead, of course, as John Milton Keynes, whose middle name I erroneously rendered as “Maynard” several columns ago —thank you Eghosa Imade — has reminded us.  But recessions are not forever.Nor is a recession a meltdown, although it can culminate in a depression.  Going by present indications, we are far from that conjuncture.

    There is therefore no cause for panic, nor for a panicked response.

    Raising taxes in a recession is not good policy.  A better course is to widen the revenue net and cut existing taxes to put more money into the pockets of taxpayers.  Interest rates should be cut as well to encourage borrowing for businesses that will create jobs.

    Selling off national assets to generate revenue has been canvassed as a way of turning the economy around.  Every auction of public assets has been like a fire sale, with the items going to political officials or their cronies.

    Pouring billions into the economy to stimulate it is good.  But that should not translate into throwing money at the problem and in the hope that it will go away.  Spending should be targeted at productive growth, job creation and poverty reduction.

    How about cutting drastically the cost of running the government – the obscene compensation lawmakers appropriate unto themselves  from the public purse, not forgetting the equally obscene compensation local government political officials enjoy, and the fleets of armoured limousines political officials acquire for themselves as emblems of power, again, from the public purse?

    Rather than raise premature expectations of recovery, political officials should be counselling patience, and sacrifice.  Especially sacrifice. But they must be seen to be tackling the most pressing issues of the day with conviction and imagination.  It is not enough for them to say that they feel the pain of the public; they must be seen to be sharing in it.

    President Buhari should have prefaced his request for emergency powers to tackle the recession with a national broadcast calling attention to the state of the economy, outlining the measures the administration intends to take, warning that there is no quick fix, calling for patience and sacrifice and assuring the public that there is no cause for panic.

    He can still use that bully pulpit to great advantage even as the National Assembly deliberates on his request.

  • A leaf from Jonathan’s playbook?

    A leaf from Jonathan’s playbook?

    Did the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), fearing defeat in the Edo gubernatorial election scheduled for last Saturday, lean on the Federal Government to corral the Department of State Service and the Police High Command into demanding postponement of the poll for three weeks, citing security concerns?

    That, at any rate, is the case that has been made against the APC, Ekiti State Governor Ayodele Fayose leading the charge, as always.

    If true, it would mean that the APC took a leaf from the playbook the PDP and former president Dr Goodluck Jonathan employed in the run-up to the 2015 presidential election.  Then, virtually every indicator suggested powerfully that they would be routed at the polls.

    And so, in desperation they trotted out Sambo Dasuki, the former National Security Adviser now standing trial on multiple charges of corruption, to demand, on security grounds, that the election be postponed for several weeks.

    The real intention, of course, was to slow down the APC’s momentum, and to ensure that, having exhausted its war chest and other resources in the run-up to Election Day, it would be in no position to counter the ferocious Naira rain, beg your pardon, Dollar rain, that Jonathan loosed on the APC’s stronghold.

    It did not work.  Despite its overwhelming advantage in every department, except in the hearts and minds of the attentive electorate, the PDP sill went down to comprehensive defeat.

    So, if in today’s altered political environment the APC is predicating its electoral strategy in Edo State on Jonathan’s 2015 playbook, it must know that success is not guaranteed.

    Based on objective factors, especially on Comrade Governor Adams Oshiomhole’s sterling achievement in office, the APC should romp to an easy victory.  But there is nothing objective about politics, suffused as it often is, with factors that defy rationality.  For evidence, you do not have to look beyond Ekiti and Ayo Fayose, aforementioned.

    It may well be, on the other hand, that the Department of State Service and the Police High Command have in their possession credible and indissoluble evidence that some miscreants were set to launch a campaign of murder and mayhem across several states at the time scheduled for the election.

    They were in possession of this intelligence, and yet did not prevail on President Muhammadu Buhari to cancel a well publicised election-eve trip to Benin City to campaign for his party’s candidate?   That must be accounted a grave dereliction.

    Did they come by the intelligence between the President’s visit and the commencement of voting? That would have left them little time to analyse and verify it to the point of judging it credible enough to warrant arresting an election process already well under way.

    In the end, it may well have been a classic instance of “better late than never.”  Better to act precipitately on intelligence that may even be hazy, better to act from an abundance of caution than fail to act and thus yield the day to the merchants of murder and mayhem.

    One can concede all this and yet deplore the language the DSS and the Police High Command employed in conveying their reservations, namely that they could not guarantee the safety of anyone who went ahead to stage or participate in the election.

    The language is, of course, not new.  One recalls former Police Inspector-General Sunday Adewusi’s chilling warning to those who might be thinking of standing in President Shehu Shagari’s way:  The riot police, armed for battle, would descend upon them like mad dogs, and there would be no consequences.  They would kill, and they would go.

    One also recalls another police chief, Abubakar Tsav, head of the Lagos Command in the time of the brutal dictator Sani Abacha.  Whenever civil society organisations indicated that they were about to stage peaceful protests, he would urge parents and guardians to keep their children and wards indoors because the police could not guarantee their safety if they ventured outdoors.

    This is self-indictment of the highest order, disavowal even, of their constitutional responsibilities.

    If the Department of State Service and the Police High Command cannot guarantee the safety of citizens engaging peacefully in lawful activity, if they cannot contain and thwart those who would wantonly attack law-abiding citizens, of what practical use are they to society?

    Beyond this, the role of the DSS and the Police High Command in causing the Edo State gubernatorial poll to be postponed raises anew questions about Nigeria’s peculiar federalism.  It is offensive to the Federal Principle that the Centre should be vested with the power to determine when and how an election is to be held in a constituent State.

    Sooner or later, they will have to resolve this and other issues which lie at the heart of Nigeria’s malaise.

     

    Now this, From Himself the Igodomigodo:

    To those who cannot see beyond the estimable Patrick Obahiagbon’s magniloquence — and they abound plenteously — hereunder is a testimonial to his punctiliousness and to the celerity with which he conducts business, being his engaging and recondite response to the Open Letter I addressed to him in this space last week:

    My own Oga and Senior Brother:

    I must posthaste begin this piece by apologising that my response to the very weighty and crucial issues you have raised with the scintillating brilliance of a luminiferous mind is coming a clear 24 hours late.

    I was eager to respond with the agility of a monkey but for the whirligig of the governorship contestations in Edo State just now.  But permit of me the imprimatur to reassure you my brother of my supreme aplomb regarding the fact of the good people of Edo State returning APC to governance.

    They won’t be voting in APC because we have been Angels my senior brother but they will resoundingly do so because the Comrade Governor has been able to admiringly retrieve the paraplegic ship of state from the vice and pestilential grip of political pachucos and economic philistines and cornucopiously satiated the utilitarian question and performed multum in parvo.

    May I also thank you exceedingly and through you most Nigerians who do understand that my stoic equanimity and sangfroid predilection in the face of de die in diem socio-political putrescence and economic makosa dance, cascading from all facets of our institutional orifices, certainly does not stem from fecklessness or Olympian aloofness.

    You said it all, my brother, when you posited the fact of my being incommoded by my extant asphyxiating rules of engagement.  Let me, however, reassure you that this has been one immolation in my life reminiscent of the 12 labours of Hercules to the extent that I have had to “laugh without laughing and to laugh even when in serious pains”, if I may paraphrase one of our distinguished Nigerian writers.

    I pray that your latitudinarian spirit of Pantagruelian discernment never suffer atrophy as your aburo burst out from the trammelling jack of lantern of bureaucratic bubbles in futuro.

    My respect and admiration always SIR…

     

  • To my aburo Patrick, Himself the Igodomigodo

    To my aburo Patrick, Himself the Igodomigodo

    Pardon me for kick-starting this missive with this peculiarly Nigerian locution:  How far?

    The enquiry contains more than a hint of jocosity, to be sure, but there is nothing jocose about it insofar as it relates to the state of the nation, the Nigerian condition, of which you are a perceptive observer and incisive analyst.

    I say nothing of course of  your coruscating erudition and wit, in contradistinction to those hacks who, in desperate yearning for anything emblematic of distinction, however fleeting and fragmentary, however tenuous, are forever advertising themselves as “Abuja-based public affairs commentators.”

    The truth of the matter, the indissoluble actuality as you personally experienced it during your memorable and eventful sojourn in the House of the People in that city, with its asphyxiating sterility is that they are for the most part unemployed and unattached freeloaders, if not unreconstructed scroungers outright.  Even in your present disposition, you have encountered a surfeit of them, I am sure.

    It is deeply to be lamented that the aforementioned disposition has incommoded you in no small measure, rendering you not just invisible but also inaudible.  I still find it incomprehensible, inexplicable even, that a person of your vivaciousness, spontaneity and sensibilities can feel obliged to observe so much restraint in face of the daily occurrences that provoke nothing short of atrabilious rage even when each is considered as a singularity.

    Taken cumulatively, as a totality, the occurrences are nothing if not benumbing.  Your resolute and unflappable equanimity in the face of all this is eminently to be lauded.

    Unlike many of our compatriots of easy gullibility, I do not suppose for a nanosecond, however, that this apparent equanimity stems from fecklessness; I know you too much to entertain such a misimpression.  I know it has been forced upon you by the rules of engagement under which you currently operate.

    When you were not thus shackled, your voice resonated with unmatched clarity and eloquence rendered all the more arresting by your consummate mastery of cadenced, sesquipedalian oration delivered right off the cuff – unlike some of your colleagues who could not make the most prosaic statement off script and are consequently not remembered for anything except their propensity for self-aggrandisement of the most ravenous kind, by which I mean, gorging themselves remorselessly on the national patrimony.

    It cannot have been easy for a person of your public spiritedness and unswerving commitment to what is noble and just and of good report to live through an almost endless march of events of the most stultifying kind and yet refrain from giving utterance to disapproval and disapprobation even in the most subdued of tones, sotto voce, so to speak.

    And the events, in all their discombobulation, in all their furious gallop, are legion.  Where to start, then? Where to delineate as a point of departure in this excursus?

    Is it the Senate Rules of Order, as amended, which threw up a leadership that has been embroiled in a crisis of authority and legitimacy and credibility and integrity since that body launched its current session more than a year ago?  Or the perjury trial, the carnivalesque optics of which may appear to a first-time visitor to these parts as a coronation, replete with fawning adulation and saccharine glorification?

    Or Budget 2016 that has performed enough disappearing and re-appearing acts to turn the Cheshire cat into a rank amateur in the business, a mewling infant?  Or again Budget 2016 that was padded with layers upon layers of pork when a version which seemed closest to being authentic was eventually found?

    Or should I commence with the crash of the oil market and its deleterious consequences for everything: the Exchequer and the economy, not forgetting the Naira which has since become like an orphan abandoned, and the attendant disequilibrium and disarticulation in transactions of every kind and even social intercourse?

    I will enter no comment on the vexed and perennial subject of fuel subsidy, whether real or contrived.    I recall your spirited and illumining intervention the last time it was the focal point, the core issue of perfervid national discourse, and how it compelled abandonment of the perilous trajectory on which the authorities were determined to embark, and a near-complete reversion to the status quo ante, consonant with vociferous public demand.

    The price of that precious combustible has since escalated, with nary a public rally by the usual sworn opponents.  But where in the time of regulation there was a drought there is now in the time of de-regulation a cascading torrent, a glut.  Still, despite the superabundant revenue accruing to Abuja following deregulation, there have been dark intimations, registering just above whispering level, of some stubborn residual subsidy requiring radical excision.

    Save your heaviest ordnance for that conjuncture, Aburo.  It is not quite over yet.

    Something tells me, Aburo, you are fully primed for the looming battle for the succession on the home turf.  Having worked in close juxtaposition with the Comrade Governor – no, I under- state it horribly and crave your indulgence to take it back – having served him as trusted adviser, sounding board, confidant, having taken charge of organising his schedule and his work flow, you doubtless apprehend more than anyone else the factors that have conduced to his phenomenal success.

    Do you espy any of those traits or factors in any of the contenders?  It is again deeply to be regretted that even if you do, you cannot so proclaim under current rules of engagement.  Such, alas, is the perversity of bureaucracy.

    But you are nothing if not creative, my dear Aburo.  I am sure you will fabricate, with your accustomed ingenuousness a design that will help beam on the battle for the succession your unrivalled knowledge of the Comrade Governor, his vision, his work habits, his temperament, his proclivities and all those factors that shaped the great legacy he is bequeathing to the grateful people of Edo State and indeed to posterity.

    Someone who claims to be privy to recondite secrets tells me that reports to the effect that the Grand Fixer has been neutered, rendered hors de combat, are vastly exaggerated, and that he is lurking patiently in the shadows, waiting to charge into battle at the sound of the bell.

    Is there any veracity to the report, even a scintilla of verisimilitude?  I ask mostly of our curiosity, not from diffidence.  I know that with you and the other stalwarts in his corner, the Comrade Governor can contain a dozen grand fixers.

    That would be all for now, my dear Aburo.  Something tells me we will hear from or of you soon, over the chants of victory and the promise of continuity.

    Until then, I remain your Egbon and kindred soul.

  • Not yet executive desperation

    Not yet executive desperation

    Some people are saying that President Muhammadu Buhari’s request for emergency powers to fix the nation’s ailing economy smacks of executive desperation.

    What do they know about the subject?

    I should take them to Indonesia in the 1960s, at the time of its charismatic and fun-loving president, Dr Ahmed Sukarno.

    The economy lay prostrate.  Inflation ran into three digits.  Even if they had struck oil then, it would have made only a marginal difference to the 70 million inhabitants of the more than 1000 islands in the archipelago, for it had not become the black gold.  Nor had OPEC begun to exact a realistic price from the Western nations that had built an industrial civilisation on obscenely cheap oil.

    Sukarno tried all the prescriptions, the classic remedies in the pharmacopoeia of the economists, from Adam Smith to John Milton Keynes.  None worked.

    Then, he hit upon a bright idea.  He would offer a ministerial appointment to, and vest with sweeping powers, any Indonesian who thought he or she could fix the economy.  But there was a catch.  If the economy had not improved significantly at the end of one year, the minister would be executed by a firing squad.

    That was executive desperation at its starkest.

    There were no applications.

    Since then, I rarely stopped wondering what would have happened if that same offer were to be made by the federal authorities in Nigeria.  My relief came some three decades later, from a source I could never have conjured up, when the economist and one-time Vice Chancellor of the University of Benin, Professor Tijani M. Yesufu, volunteered a variation on Sukarno’s proposition that was even more stringent.

    That was the time of SAP, when the Nigerian economy was going through the same kind of discontinuities that had driven Sukarno to executive desperation. The black gold that had always seen the country through adversity had turned into black dust.   Approaches that had worked splendidly elsewhere seemed doomed to failure in Nigeria’s peculiar circumstances.

    The difference was that, unlike Sukarno, Babangida did not panic; he did not lose his equanimity.   On the contrary, he said he was astonished that the Nigerian economy had not collapsed, given all that it was going through.

    This was the context in which Professor Yesufu re-wrote Sukarno’s Proposition, offering to put the economy back on a solid path to recovery within one year if he was appointed Minister of Finance, failing which he would voluntarily submit to execution by a firing squad.

    The Babangida regime spurned the offer, just as it had spurned every offer to present an alternative to SAP.  The speculation then was that acceptance of Yesufu’s offer might create the pernicious impression that the economy was about to collapse when, in fact, the surprise in official circles was that it had refused to collapse.

    But there was a far more important reason for spurning Yesufu’s offer.  Given the regime’s oft-repeated declaration of commitment to upholding and respecting the fundamental rights of Nigerians, it could not in good conscience acknowledge, much less accept, Tijani’s offer.

    Back to my earlier question:  What would have happened if Sukarno’s proposition had been made to Nigerians on Nigerian soil?

    I believe that a good many of our compatriots would have jumped at it, and the authorities would have had a hard time winnowing their ranks and settling for the most plausible candidate.

    Some will accept the job and its terrible conditionality as a way of demonstrating that they are prepared to make any sacrifice for the nation.  Others will see it as an opportunity to obtain, at long last, their share of the national cake.  For such persons, the penalty for failure would be but a small price for a chance to telescope into one rollicking year all the fun they never had, and by  the same stroke, make up for all the material deprivations they had suffered.

    One thing is certain:  There will be no dearth of applicants.  It is just as certain that the successful applicant will contrive to escape execution even if the economy actually deteriorated during his tenure.  If he – pardon my sexism, but I doubt whether a woman would apply for the position – if he is truly a Nigerian, he will have taken fool-proof measures to guarantee safety for himself and his family.

    Half-way into his term, he will arrange an overseas trip for a loan or grant that only he can negotiate on behalf of the government. But as soon as he reaches destination, he will apply for political asylum.

    If the minister is barred from foreign travel during his tenure, he could sneak across the border in any number of guises or disguises.  He could use his new-found wealth to engineer a coup or an uprising –anything that can destabilise the government or keep the authorities so busy trying to maintain their hold on power, calculating that the ensuing turmoil will give him a chance to wriggle out of his Faustian bargain

    The more creative minister will resort to litigation as the surest way of staying alive.  In the tenth month of his tenure, he will seek a court order voiding, for any number of reasons, the agreement under which he was appointed minister.  If he fails at the court of first instance, he will appeal all the way to the Supreme Court, and thereafter to the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights.

    The process could drag on for several years, by which time the political and economic climate will have changed to the point of rendering the matter moot.

    Nor do these steps exhaust the possibilities.

    The minister will seek to employ what has become the most important weapon for evading restitution in Nigeria:   a perpetual injunction restraining the authorities from putting him on trial or executing him or inquiring in any manner whatsoever into any matter relating to his appointment to the cabinet.

    If that fails, he will file for a perpetual stay of execution (no pun intended).

    The whole thing will be messy and interminable, and a circus to boot, like the corruption trials now mired in contrived procedural issues.

    President Buhari knows this all too well and has wisely chosen, despite the great challenges of the times, not to riff on Sukarno’s Proposition.  The desperadoes out there expecting him to do so will be sorely disappointed.

    There is no sympathy for them in this corner.

    August 27, 1985: Why they struck

    After decades of studied silence, President Buhari recently spoke up about the motivations of his colleagues who toppled his military regime.

    One of them, General Aliyu Mohammed (Gusau), was to be cashiered for improperly obtaining an import licence and trading it for valuable consideration.  To save his friend, the aforementioned Aliyu, General Ibrahim Babangida led a group of officers to stage the August 27, 1985, coup, Buhari said.

    But that claim is incompatible with Babangida’s coup broadcast, which resonated as a study in high-mindedness, selflessness, and high patriotism.

    Was the coup just an elaborate pretext, then, and the coup broadcast a fudge?

    Babangida may well have struck to save a friend.  What is not generally known, according to an unassailable source, is that he struck to save himself as well.

  • Rio 2016: Musings on the XXXl Olympiad

    Rio 2016: Musings on the XXXl Olympiad

    However you judge it, Brazil and Rio de Janeiro will have to be accounted the biggest winners of the XXXl Olympiad just ended.

    Not in the quantum of medals and athletic accomplishment in which the United States, to no surprise, came out far ahead of every other national contingent, its traditional rival Russia having put up only a skeletal representation, its team decimated by a comprehensive ban on account of programmed doping on a scale almost behind belief.

    Brazil and Rio defied all the odds, real and contrived, to win big-time.

    The Western media said the host nation was not ready.  Construction lagged far behind schedule and was unlikely to be finished in time for the Games.  Brazil’s economy took a pounding from the crash of the international oil market and the income stream on which Brazil was relying to stage the extravaganza had almost dried up.

    The country was wracked by turmoil as the President, Dilma Rousseff, successor of Luiz Inació Lula da Silva, the former shoe shiner and trade unionist-turned politician and architect of Brazil’s economic revival and political rejuvenation, faced impeachment on corruption charges that seemed more apparent than real.  In the end she was suspended from office and had to watch Olympics from the sidelines as an unacknowledged observer when she should have by tradition declared the games open from a global spotlight.

    And then, there was zika, the mosquito-borne virus which spread fear and panic among pregnant  women or women who might become pregnant on a scale that has not been seen since the 1960s when the widespread use of the morning-sickness pill thalidomide resulted in the births of hideously deformed babies across Europe.

    Who would risk going to Brazil for the Games, when that risk involved the distinct possibility of having a baby with a small head and the pathologies associated with that condition:  very poor health, and early death?

    Television pictures of babies afflicted with that condition and their mothers struggling to cope with the trauma and stigma could not have done much to reassure those who thought the chance was worth taking.

    Rio, the host city, fared no better in the reporting. Its mean streets festered with crime and were dangerously unsafe, and you did not even have to venture near the favelas to get mugged.  Raw sewage emptied non-stop into the very waters in which some of the Olympic contests would be staged.

    When the water in the swimming pools turned green after a day of two of competition, the fear peddlers wasted no time in saying:  “We told you so.”  When the pools turned aquatic blue soon thereafter, they barely took notice.

    For the two weeks during which global attention was concentrated on Brazil as never before, no major crime was reported in the Games Village or its precincts.  The American gold medal-winning swimmer Ryan Lochte who confected a stick-up by gun-wielding police with two of his colleagues was unmasked and shamed, thanks to diligent sleuthing and closed-circuit television (CCTV).

    No major scandal was reported.  There was no outbreak of disease.  The lights never went out. The taps never ran dry. The public address system rarely faltered.  Political officials took the back seat and allowed the accredited organisers to run the show.

    In that vast assemblage of people of different races and tongues and creeds and faiths, nothing happened that could remotely be construed as a terrorist incident.  A single such incident would have played right into the hands of the demagogic and xenophobic Donald Trump, the Republican candidate in the U.S. presidential election.  He would have seized it to bolster his campaign theme that America succeeds best when it keeps out those who look or talk or worship differently.

    Maybe he was just being sarcastic.  You can never bet on The Donald.  As one American satirical writer remarked the other day, if Trump ever had his finger on the nuclear trigger, he could just squeeze it and explain later that he did so for sarcastic effect.

    Based on superb execution against all odds, I would still have adjudged Brazil the biggest winner of the XXXl Olympiad.  But then, the nation’s soccer squad, led by Neymar, he of the mesmerising nimbleness of foot and shots that call to mind the trajectory of a guided missile, won the only gold medal that matters to the host nation, the prize that it had never won in all its soccer glory.

    That feat was more than victory on the soccer pitch:  it was national redemption.

    In the World Cup semi-final two years ago, at the same fabled Maracanã Stadium, the German national team had done the unthinkable:  it had handed Brazil’s Selección a 7-1 shellacking.  That drubbing stuck in Brazil’s collective craw.  Rio 2016 offered a chance for a redemption of sorts.

    The final was not between the teams that had squared up in 2014.  The teams were not even drawn principally from the 2014 sets. It was a closely-fought duel, the outcome of which turned on penalty kicks and could have gone either way.

    Still, who is to begrudge Brazil its euphoric feeling of national redemption?

    I hope I will not be charged with harbouring low expectations when I say that, in this corner, the Nigerian soccer team was also in a significant sense a winner, even though it clinched only the bronze medal.

    The team was stranded in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States, and made it to Rio for its first match just seven hours before kick-off, with nary a chance to decompress.  Yet the players showed no hint of fatigue or despair when they took on Japan.  The fatigue did not show until well into the second half when Japan turned what seemed like an impending rout into a redeeming 4-5 loss.

    But take nothing away from our boys.

    Now, you would think that a team that had come this far would have all its anxieties assuaged.  But that is not the Nigerian way.  The boys had to threaten to boycott their quarter-final match, against Denmark, unless their earned bonuses were paid

    Commentator after commentator was smitten with awe by artistry and athleticism of the Nigerian players.  The team’s potential would be so much greater, almost limitless, they said, if it was backed by more purposeful organisation.

    That is the story of Nigeria in a nutshell.  So much potential; so little delivery.

    There was a time when, to our delight, the N in Nigeria used to be tagged on to the acronym BRIC, in which B stood for Brazil, R for Russia, I for India and C for China, emergent global actors.

    Not anymore.

    The challenge is to get it back in there in real terms, not with the jiggery-pokery of the Goodluck Jonathan and  Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala years.

  • They remember their Commandant

    They remember their Commandant

    Once in a while, you read an obituary that makes you wish you knew the subject and had interacted with him closely.

    That was how I felt on reading the obituary notices and the tributes that have been paid to the memory of General Timothy Babatunde Ogundeko, whose remains were buried this past weekend in his hometown Ijebu-Mushin, in Ogun State.

    The one thing that shines through them is that they stemmed more from conviction than from duty.  The picture that emerges is of an exceptional figure.

    President Muhammadu Buhari said Ogundeko ”will be long remembered for his towering role as an educationist and public administrator, who immensely contributed to the procedure and processes of training potential leaders in security and socio-political environment of Nigeria.”

    To General TY Danjuma, the former Chief of Army Staff whom no one has ever accused of being extravagant with praise, Ogundeko was “simply the best Direct Commissioned Officer that ever served in the Nigerian Army.”

    Danjuma, who should know, recalled that “all the professional soldiers who served with Timothy remember him as a mature and seasoned teacher who transformed the Nigerian Army Education Corps through his foresight, dedication, determination and diligence.”

    The former Chief of Army Staff also remarked how Ogundeko facilitated the establishment of the Command Secondary Schools to meet the needs of the children of Army personnel, a feat soon copied by other armed services.

    What is even more remarkable, Danjuma credits Ogundeko with changing the attitude of the officer corps toward continuous learning and the pursuit of knowledge.  In this respect, it can be said that Ogundeko was ahead of his time, persuaded that the army of the future had to be a knowledge-based institution.

    Previously (1962-1972) Ogundeko had served as Commandant of the Nigerian Military School, Zaria, where he also taught chemistry.

    Given his profile, and how heavily the ruling military regime was invested in the project, Ogundeko seemed an obvious choice to head the Nigerian Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, Kuru, Plateau State, at its founding in 1979.

    That was a time of heady optimism in Nigeria, where everything seemed no merely possible but splendidly attainable.  Money was no problem; the problem, as General Yakubu had formulated it, was how to spend it.

    Ogundeko retired from the position of Director-General and from the Army on health grounds – his eyesight was failing – in 1981.  He was aged only 49 years.  Though brief, his tenure can be regarded as a substantial part of the glory days of NIPPS.

    Nomination to its well regarded Senior Executive Course for ranking military and police officers,  civil servants and officials from the organised private sector was highly prized.  Certification from the Institute, which had some of the nation’s best academics on its faculty, was a mark of achievement.

    Over time, NIPPS became a haven for coup plotters and a half-way house to retirement for public servants who had minds of their own (Nuhu Ribadu, former chair of the EFCC, is one of the more  notorious recent examples). Funding shrank to the point that, like the universities, NIPSS is now a shadow of what it used to be.

    Command at the Nigerian Military School, Transformation of the Nigerian Army Education Corps, establishing the Command Secondary Schools and guiding NIPPS to a good start and nurturing it through its infancy:  These were achievements enough, but they were not what made Ogundeko exceptional.

    What made him truly exceptional is to be found in the full page obituary in this newspaper (August 10, p. 32) placed by students of the Nigeria Military School, Zaria, where he taught chemistry and served as Commandant before going to head the army’s Education Corps.

    Signed by “Senator (Dr) David A.B. Mark, GCON, President of the 6th and 7th Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria” for and on behalf of 50 living and 22 deceased “ex boys” of the NMS Class of 1966 – a troubling attrition rate, by the way — the tribute recalled how, even as a Major, well before he became the school’s Commandant, Ogundeko was a “father figure.”

    At the time of the January 1996 coup, Senator (Dr) Mark recalled on behalf of his contemporaries, there were “strong rumours” that the NMS was going to be attacked.  Here, in Mark’s own words, is his testimony of how Ogundeko reacted:

    “In his characteristic fatherly role, he gathered all of us in a classroom and said ‘anybody who wants to attack the School has to kill me first.’  He remained with us for two days.”

    Mark described Ogundeko as “a role model who led by example” and as a patriot whose patriotism was “beyond reproach.”  And Ogundeko’s wife was just as solicitous of the well-being of NMS students, laughing with them when they laughed and crying with them when they cried.

    Nor did Ogundeko’s fatherly disposition towards his students end when they were no longer under his charge.  Here again is David Mark:

    “(Ogundeko) followed our progress very closely, monitored and mentored us while we were in the Nigerian Defence Academy and as commissioned officers.  He continued his fatherly role long after we retired and until his last day. . . He was always willing and ready to listen to complaints and assist us as much as possible.”

    It was fitting indeed that at their 2009 reunion, the NMS Class of 1966 honoured him as a Patriot. I hope they did more than that.  I hope they asked on that occasion and thereafter what they could do for their esteemed teacher and father-confessor, not what he could do for them.  Ogundeko was unlikely to have made such a demand of them anyway, given that he lived, according to Mark, “a simple and contented life.”

    But come to think of it, why should a teacher not gently pull aside those former students who are forever seeking letters of reference or introduction or an endorsement or professional advice or assistance in finding a new job:  Why can’t one gently pull them aside and say to them slowly and deliberately, with due acknowledgement to President JF Kennedy’s gifted speechwriter, Ted Sorensen:   Ask not what your former teacher can do for you; ask what you can do for your former teacher?

    To my former students reading this piece:  Don’t say I didn’t give you fair warning.

    Back to Ogundeko:  For his labours, he was named an Officer of the Federal Republic (OFR), the nation’s fifth highest honour.  They did well to remember him but he deserved better in a country where higher national distinctions are routinely conferred on public officials, not for any great or even significant achievement, but for holding certain positions at the right time.

    There are probably hundreds, perhaps thousands of Ogundekos in Nigeria today.  It should not take an obituary by those who know them well to make us appreciate the exceptional service they rendered when they lived among us.

  • ‘June 12’: Dahiru Saleh’s self-immolation

    ‘June 12’: Dahiru Saleh’s self-immolation

    Apart from military president Ibrahim Babangida, those elements still with us who had connived in the annulment of the June 12, 1993, presidential election, have by and large lain quiet in their malignant dens, resigned to featuring at best as despicable adjuncts to history.

    Not Justice Muhammad Dahiru Saleh, formerly of the Federal Capital Territory who, in two rulings, provided the judicial cover for the annulment.

    In the first, which he gave when every indication was that the Social Democratic Party candidate Moshood Abiola was set for a decisive victory, was an injunction restraining the National Electoral Commission (NEC) from announcing further election returns.

    Separately, Akpamgbo ordered NEC to comply with Justice Dahiru’s ruling, and NEC’s chair Humphrey Nwosu to show cause why he should not be punished for discountenancing Justice Ikpeme’s convoluted ruling against staging the election.

    Justice Saleh’s injunction followed a petition filed by Arthur Nzeribe’s phantom Association for Better Nigeria (ABN), which was not a juristic person and therefore lacked locus standi to bring the petition or any petition for that matter before any court in Nigeria.

    On the eve of the election, and pursuant to a petition filed by the ABN, Justice Bassey Ikpeme, of the Abuja High Court, had in the dead of night set the stage for the bewildering events that turned what was supposed to be the high noon of Babangida’s transition programme into a nightmare.

    Pursuant to a petition filed by the misbegotten ABN seeking to pre-empt the poll, Justice Ikpeme  had acknowledged that the court’s jurisdiction had been ousted by a subsisting decree, but had granted the ABN’s request all the same, with reckless disregard for the consequences.

    The election must not be held, but the NEC was free to disregard the court’s order, since the court had no jurisdiction in the matter, she added.

    It was reportedly the very first case she was assigned, following her recruitment to the Bench from Akpamgbo’s law practice.  She never handled another case thereafter, and was never seen in public again.  She died in mysterious circumstances in a German hospital about seven years ago.

    To the chagrin of ABN and its sponsors in uniform, the election took place as scheduled.  And instead of the stalemate they had envisaged, a clear winner had emerged.  The game plan had  to be redrawn and the transition deck had to be shuffled; hence a fresh petition to the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory, Justice Dahiru Saleh again presiding.

    Ever so obliging, Justice Saleh declared the presidential election null and void and of no consequence.  It did not matter that NEC’s appeal against the Ikpeme ruling was pending before a superior court in Kaduna.

    Babangida quickly latched on to Justice Saleh’s ruling to void the presidential election, suspend NEC, and repeal the law governing the final stage of his transition programme.  By that singular move, he also terminated all court cases relating to the presidential election

    The foregoing developments occurred within 10 breathtaking days, and their consequences have continued to haunt Nigeria.

    Justice Saleh now wants Nigerians to believe that he acted out of fidelity to the rule of law and nothing else, and that if he was presented with another chance, he would void the election again without hesitation and without remorse.

    He went on to blame it all on the immediate victim, Moshood Abiola.  It was all Abiola’s fault because Abiola did not appeal the rulings, Justice Saleh said. But Abiola was not a party to any of the petitions. He never figured in any of them either as plaintiff or as respondent. So, on what would he have grounded an appeal? Besides, in the atmosphere I sketched above, to which court could he have appealed even if he was minded to do so?

    If Justice Saleh believes that he, acting alone and from the purest of motives annulled the 1993 presidential election, he is deluded beyond redemption.

    If he is the courageous, principled jurist he claims to be, if he was no actuated by a darker motive, he would have declined to entertain the ABN’s petition on at least two grounds.   Even if it was a corporeal entity — it wasn’t — the ABN was certainly not a juristic person.  Moreover, the Ikpeme ruling he purported to uphold had been given in contravention of a subsisting decree.

    So, far from upholding the rule of law, Saleh compounded its evisceration.  His claim that it was his principled ruling that annulled the election is hollow through and through.

    Babangida has a more plausible claim to that infamy.  In moments of contrived candor, he has  accepted responsibility for the annulment even as he claimed that the election was the freest and fairest in Nigeria’s history.  But he did not act alone.  The whole thing was from start to finish an orchestrated plot, the object of which was to perpetuate Babangida in office.

    Akpamgbo was one of Babangida’s principal strategists in the plot.  So was Arthur Nzeribe who, if you can believe this fellow who has never embraced any cause without bringing it into disrepute, claims that Babangida had promised to appoint him prime minister under a new Constitution to be modelled on that of France’s Fifth Republic if the plot succeeded..  By tacitly acquiescing in the annulment, the two official political parties – the SDP and the NRC – also aided and abetted it.

    Justice Saleh provided the legal cover for the annulment out of the subornation that was a fundamental objective and directive principle of Babangida’s presidency, not out of pure, disinterested legal reasoning or iron-clad fidelity to the rule of law. Babangida knew his man.

    The annulment shook Nigeria to its fragile roots.  Even today, it continues to animate public discussion and debate on the country’s future.  For Justice Saleh to claim, 23 years later, that it was his handiwork smacks of a perverse desire for immolation.  He needs help.

    Justice Saleh did not retire from the Bench honourably.  Rather, he was dismissed for conduct inconsistent with his status as a judicial officer.  Stripped of diplomatese, this means that he was dismissed for corrupt behaviour. His dismissal followed a recommendation by the Justice Kayode Eso panel set up to investigate widespread allegations of corruption in the judiciary. It was upheld by a review panel headed by retired Supreme Court Justice Bolarinwa Babalakin.

    So much, then, for Justice Saleh’s commitment to the rule of law and to propriety.

    As far as I know, the text of Justice Ikpeme’s ruling, if it exists, has never surfaced. I hope some enterprising reporter or researcher will invoke the Freedom of Information Law to ferret it out in the best tradition of public service.

  • The perils of plagiarism

    The perils of plagiarism

    Poor Melanie Trump!

    Her speech before the Republican National Convention, in Cleveland, Ohio, was the former  model’s opportunity to show the world that she was not just a trophy wife, all glamour and fashion, but an accomplished woman in her own right,  dutiful wife and caring mother, ready and waiting to be First Lady of the United States.

    It did just that, but only for the time her delivery and the applause in the hall lasted.  No sooner had she left the podium for the Trump family box than word went out that portions of the speech bore more than a striking similarity to Michelle Obama’s speech introducing her husband, the future president, at the Democratic National Convention eight years earlier.

    On the eve of her event, Mrs Trump had told an interviewer on national television that she wrote the speech herself, with minimal help from others.

    Wasn’t this, then, a case of plagiarism?

    It was, many said, on seeing the two texts displayed side by side. No, said the Trump people, doubling down as always.  The words at issue expressed Mrs Trump’s feelings, and it was of no consequence that Mrs Obama had earlier employed those very words in a similar setting.

    Those ever so ready to muddy the waters insisted that Mrs Obama herself had for her speech lifted lines from Elizabeth Dole’s introduction of Bob Dole on a similar occasion some two decades earlier.  So, why the fuss?

    In the end, when the matter refused to go away and was taking attention away from the GOP Convention, the Trump camp owned up, or more likely caused an aide to own up to the lifting.

    While the controversy raged, a Mrs Trump’s web site on which she qualified herself as holder of a degree in design and architecture from the University of Ljubljana, in her native Slovenia, suddenly vanished from the Internet.

    Her explanation?

    The web site was outdated and did not “accurately reflect” her “current business and professional interests.”

    The more plausible explanation is that she never earned the degree, having dropped out of the university in her first year.

    But I digress.

    Plagiarism is appropriating another person’s ideas, thoughts or words, or taking credit for another person’s literary or artistic work.  At bottom, it is an ethical issue.  But the courts litigate it as copyright infringement.  It occurs more frequently than is generally realised.

    I am told that there are persons who make a living scouring published material for plagiarism.  Whenever they find it, they alert the person whose work has been plagiarised, with the unspoken understanding that the sleuth will get a cut of any compensation awarded by the courts or through settlement.  Their task has been made easier by sophisticated computer software that can sniff intellectual theft wherever it occurs.

    Plagiarism is a serious matter and often has serious consequences.  Ask Senator (as he then was) Joe Biden, now Vice President of the United States.  Launching a bid for the presidential ticket of the Democratic Party in September 1987, he uttered these stirring words:

    “Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? Why is it that my wife… is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? …Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come after 12 hours and play football for four hours? It’s because they didn’t have a platform on which to stand.”

    Biden, it soon turned out, had appropriated the thoughts, ideas and words Neil Kinnock, leader of the British Labour Party, had employed several months earlier in a powerful speech at the Welsh Labour Party Conference.

    Here is what Kinnock said at the Conference:

    “Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn’t get what we had because they didn’t have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.”

    The difference is not clear.  And Biden’s presidential bid ended well before it got under way.  Too bad he – or his speechwriters – could not resist the seductive appeal of Kinnock’s rhetorical delivery.

    Plagiarism matters.

    Many a journalist here has been undone by plagiarism.  In 2010, a New York Times business reporter resigned after he was accused of plagiarising from the Wall Street Journal.  Also in 2010, a reporter for the online newspaper The Daily Beast resigned when he was found to have taken sentences from another newspaper, The Miami Herald, and to have used them in his reporting. In 2011, the Washington Post announced that one of its reporters had appropriated material from the Arizona Republic.

    I myself have seen chunks of unattributed material from The Economist, The Guardian (UK) and the BBC in by-lined articles in the Nigerian media, traditional and online.  I have also seen material from my own work and the work of leading columnists employed in the same manner, and have on at least one occasion brought the matter to the attention of the perpetrator and his editor.  As far as I know, no penalty followed.

    One of my most stultifying experiences as editorial page editor for The Guardian (Lagos) followed publication of an article that came in the mail, titled “This thing called luck.”  I had  my suspicions on reading it.  From start to finish, it was an elegant, seamless composition.  Every word was in place.

    It bristled with wit and wisdom and learning.  And it was not in the least laboured.  On the contrary, it seemed to have been put together with the minimum of effort.

    If the fellow submitting it was that good, where had he been all these years?  Why had we not heard from him or of him much earlier?  These were some of the questions on my mind as Iwondered whether I should publish it or not.  In the end, I decided to give the correspondent the benefit of my doubts.

    A week after the article appeared, I got a letter from another correspondent rebuking me for my credulity.  The article I had caused to appear on the highly regarded Op-Ed page of The Guardian, he remonstrated, was almost word for word a Lance Morrow essay that TIME magazine had published a decade earlier.  And by way of proof, he attached a photocopy of the Morrow essay. I apologised to our readers.

    Why do people plagiarise?

    To avoid the hard work of putting their own thoughts and ideas and words together in a coherent form, to appear more accomplished than they are, and to be admired.

    Whatever the reason, plagiarism is a risky venture.  Plagiarists will be found out sooner than later, and any work they produce subsequently will be suspect.

    There is no harm in borrowing phrases and sentences and even paragraphs from others. We all do.  The cardinal sin is taking credit for them.

  • The Donald and Dr Ben Carson

    The Donald and Dr Ben Carson

    There was always something unsettling, repellent even, about Donald “The Donald” Trump, who was officially crowned presidential candidate of the Republican Party (GOP) last week.

    The activist and film maker Michael Moore has called him a “wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath.”  I suspect that Moore used the term “wretched” not to denote Trump’s net worth – he advertises himself as a billionaire and lives like one – but as a more genteel synonym for “odious” or “despicable” or “loathsome.”

    Those attributes were so much on brutal parade at the GOP’s recent National Convention, that many media commentators, seeing how tangentially the GOP figured in the whole thing, have called it the Donald Trump National Convention.

    In an angry and embittered acceptance speech that galvanised the raucous crowd into a frenzy, Trump situated the United States in a frightful dystopia of strife and violence and decay and decline, with police officers being killed in the line of duty and illegal aliens and radical Islamists overrunning the country.

    “I alone can fix it,” he said of the dystopia he had conjured up.  That is a measure of his delusion, evocative of President Charles de Gaulle’s après moi, le deluge strategy that won him election after election until 1968 when progressive forces in France called his bluff.

    Trump said not a word, by the way, of the rampant killing of unarmed black citizens by police officers, some 320 so far this year, in situations that posed no threat whatsoever to the officers or public safety. He declared himself, shades of the odious Richard Nixon, the “law and order” candidate, on the way to becoming a “law and order” president.

    Nor did he utter a word about justice.  Justice has no place in Trump’s world, nor for that matter in the dark world of his adoring supporters.

    Of the figures who endorsed Trump at the Convention, none was perhaps more tragic than Dr Ben Carson, the globally acclaimed retired neurosurgeon, or brain surgeon as they call that arcane occupation here in the United States.

    Carson had entered the field as one of 18 candidates for the GOP ticket, and had, to his surprise and the surprise of those who all too easily get caught in the foam of events, quickly shot to the top of the pack, according to early polls taken ahead of the Iowa Caucus, the effective starting point of the race.

    I was not impressed.

    America, where large sections of the white population still cannot reconcile themselves to the reality of a black president, whom they perceive and depict cruelly as a usurper and a clueless one at that, is simply not ready for a black succession at the White House, whatever the polls may say. You have to be exceedingly obtuse to wager otherwise.

    But the polls went into Carson’s head, and so did adoring whites who followed him on the hustings and sought eagerly to shake those famous Healing Hands and have him autograph their copies of his latest book, a sophomoric commentary on the Constitution of the United States

    To them it was amazing to find an accomplished black member of the GOP confident enough to seek its presidential ticket. On television, the primary source of their information and images, they rarely see blacks as engineers and airline pilots and top-flight scientists and researchers, but mainly as athletes and entertainers and bad guys.

    And now a black brain surgeon?  This was an epiphany. They would not take the media’s word for it. They had to see him and touch him to believe that he was for real.

    Besides, they found Carson’s biography compelling.  Raised in poverty by a single parent who harboured no sense of entitlement and laid no claim on the munificence of the larger society, he had entered college without recourse to affirmative action. He went on to become a neurosurgeon of global renown, and at age 33 the youngest head of a major division at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University Hospital, in Baltimore, Maryland.

    There could be no better role model for black Americans

    Carson’s fellow black Americans perceived him differently. They admired his brilliance and his professional accomplishments but detested his politics and his penchant for blaming them and not the long legacy of slavery and structural as well as systemic disempowerment for their woes.

    They were aghast at his condescension, his utter lack of respect for President Barack Obama on Obama’s turf when Obama invited him to participate in a Prayer Breakfast at the White House. It was as if the opportunity he had been craving to openly identify with the lunatic fringe of the TEA Party had finally arrived.

    On live television seen around the world, and with Obama and his wife Michelle sitting to his right, he launched a savage attack on Obama’s signature achievement, the Affordable Health Care Act that has provided health insurance for some 30 million citizens not previously covered, comparing it  to “enslavement.”

    This vile comparison was a desecration of the memory of the millions of Africans who perished on the way to enslavement or were enslaved in America and a wanton insult to their descendants, among whom Carson is numbered.

    But it endeared Carson all the more to the Republicans and burnished his presidential prospects. He would go on to call Obama a “sociopath” at another forum.

    He entered the first debate leading the GOP pack. After Iowa Caucus, he had slipped several places.  He often came across as half awake and half asleep while talking, which led Donald Trump, he of the foul mouth, to characterise him as a person of “low energy.”  The label stuck.

    After Carson’s third outing, at the Nevada caucus, he was literally finished. True, Ted Cruise had inveigled Carson’s supporters into voting for Cruz or abstain, telling them that Carson had withdrawn from the contest. But even without that dirty trick, the game was over for Carson.

    They floated his name as Trump’s potential running mate, but I am sure even Carson knew he had not a ghost of a chance there.

    Perhaps as compensation, and to create the illusion of diversity in Trump’s camp, they invited Carson to speak on the Convention floor. He did not disappoint.

    He said voting for the Democratic Party’s nominee, Hilary Clinton, would be voting to surrender America to Lucifer.  Satan, no less.

    How so?

    Because, Carson said to tumultuous applause, Hillary Clinton is a great admirer of Saul Alinsky and had written her senior thesis on the author of Rules for Radicals, who in a preface to that book acknowledged Lucifer as the original radical who created his own kingdom.

    A nuanced reading would suggest that down the ages, new kingdoms, including America, had  indeed been founded by “original radicals.”

    But Carson, like Trump, doesn’t do nuance. In their world, brutalism reigns supreme.

    If Trump could get this far against all expectations, he can win the presidential election. The best forecasts I have seen give Clinton a 72 per cent chance of winning, as against Trump’s 28 per cent.  That is a huge margin, but a 28 per cent chance is still a chance.  Besides, the election is still some 12 weeks away, during which anything can happen.

    But something tells me Trump will get a thorough shellacking.

    Carson has his future well behind him.  His foray into politics shows that you can be a great brain surgeon and be obtuse at the same time.