The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • As the National Assembly celebrates

    As the National Assembly celebrates

    The 8th National Assembly recently celebrated the first anniversary of its inauguration.

    As was to be expected it scored itself high – very high – on performance and service delivery.  In separate reviews, Senate President Bukola Saraki and House of Representatives Speaker Yakubu Dogara submitted that the current Assembly has performed far better than previous assemblies in their first year, judging by the quantum of bills and resolutions passed.

    The quantity is impressive, it must be granted:  300 bills by the Senate alone, and 162 motions on such significant subjects as electronic transactions, debt recovery and insolvency, infrastructure fund, and national road fund.  It has also partnered with international agencies and the private sector to devise ways of improving the business environment and attracting investors.

    To this should be added its intervention in preventing the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission from gouging consumers, its interactions with the Central Bank to help shore      up the Naira, and its parley with indigenous manufacturers to help promote patronage of locally produced goods.

    Not bad, when you consider the distractions to which Saraki especially has been subjected, what  with his having to shuttle between the Assembly and the courts to answer charges of perjury and forgery. He did not sponsor any bill.  But only the greatest devotion to duty and patriotism of the highest order could have engendered such committed leadership.

    A total of 685 bills came before the Green Chamber in the period under review.  Some two-thirds –416 to be exact— cleared the first reading and are now awaiting the second.  Only ten  of them are from the Executive Branch, the rest being private members’ bills.

    Unlike Saraki who has not sponsored any bills –on account of the distractions aforementioned, Speaker Yakubu Dogara personally has nine bills to his name.  One of the pieces of legislation wending its way through the House is the Northeast Development Commission Bill, a spirited response to the devastation wrought by Boko Haram in that region of Nigeria.

    The ultimate test of course is not the volume of bills passed but how many have been signed into law and how well they serve the public interest.

    Here the record is less helpful.  I gather that no more than ten have crossed threshold. A great many of the bills are ego trips, proposed for the sake of having one’s name entered into record as a genuine lawmaker, or to create the illusion of active participation in lawmaking.

    The same goes for resolutions, usually knee-jerk reactions to some developing issues, or self-serving declarations on all kinds of subjects under the sky and beyond.  It does not matter that they are non-binding.

    The important thing is to have it on record that a certain distinguished senator — distinguished for being distinguished — or one honourable representative – honourable for being honourable — moved a motion, which drew the enthusiastic endorsement of another distinguished senator or honourable representative, and the concurrence of all the distinguished senators and representatives assembled.

    Still, with so many empty seats at any given moment, and with so many of its members trooping to the courts in a show of solidarity with the beleaguered Senate president, it is a wonder that any business gets done at all in the National Assembly.

    Overall, then, a great deal of motion, but not much movement.  A great deal of heat, but not much light.  Still, no amount of carping can dissolve the fact that the National Assembly is one of the few Nigerian institutions that actually work

    The other side of the ledger is less flattering,

    The configuration of the Assembly, and especially its leadership, was conceived in treachery, nurtured in intrigue and has been sustained by chicanery.  The circumstance of its birth has hobbled and will continue to hobble it until it summons the courage to return to the path of honour and the law of the constitution.

    It went into business vowing that it would never again be business as usual.   The first test of its resolve was the confirmation of the President Muhammadu Buhari’s cabinet nominees. Vetting was going to be thorough, tough and uncompromising, to ensure that only the most worthy candidates were left standing at the end.

    The exercise was for the most part perfunctory.  Many of the candidates were simply told to bow and go, as of old. One should not make too fine a point on this, however.  Buhari effectively blindsided the Senate by presenting only the names of his nominees, without indicating the portfolio he planned to assign them. The Senate went along and carried on business as usual.

    Scrutinising the Budget Estimates is probably one of the most important responsibilities of the National Assembly.  By the time the Presidency and the National Assembly were done, the whole thing had turned into a farce.  At home and abroad, the attentive audience tittered and sniggered about the budget that went missing.

    Another first from Nigeria.

    But nothing has exposed the national Assembly’s moral and ethical vacuity so much as the charges that its principal officers are facing before the courts.  Instead of prevailing on them to step aside for not having lived above suspicion, many of its members serenade them to court and in a vulgar display of solidarity occupy as a matter of entitlement seats meant for senior attorneys and others transacting legitimate business.

    They hunker down, claiming that the executive is muscling in on territory reserved for the legislative branch and presuming to set the rules under which it operates.  Those rules can be changed as the National Assembly rightly insists. But they can be changed only as provided by law.  As I understand it, that was not the case with the so-called Senate Orders.

    Under their definition of the separation of powers, the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches exist in separate, watertight compartments.  No branch is superior to another, and none can serve as a check on the other.

    This is a wilful misreading of the letter and the spirit of the constitution.

    When called upon to explain his part in an alleged forgery of official documents, the deputy Senate president who clinched that post through an unseemly pact takes it upon himself to tell the world that democracy in Nigeria is under assault by an overbearing executive.

    The Senate does not censure him for brining the body into disrepute.  It does remind him that the case at issue was initiated by some members of the same Senate.  Its idea of parliamentary independence is to corral the complainants into withdrawing the charge, failing which they stand to be suspended.

    A senator (ha!) threatens on the floor to rape a fellow senator, and the demented thug does not even get censured for un-parliamentary language and conduct.

    By now they must know that they overreached big-time when they summoned the Ambassador of the United States to come furnish further details of the sexcapades of their colleagues while on assignment in the United States.

    They did not know, and none on the trainload of legislative aides knew or apparently sought to enlighten the legislators that they could not do that kind of thing under the Geneva protocol governing diplomatic relations.  It’s like summoning the foreign head of state, of whom the envoy is personal representative.

  • Race, politics and economics in America

    Race, politics and economics in America

    Here, quoted at considerable length, is the lead story in The New York Times (Late Edition) for November 25, 2008, titled RACIAL BARRIER FALLS IN DECISIVE VICTORY.

    “Barrack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.

    “The election of Mr Obama amounted to a national catharsis – a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies, and an embrace of Mr Obama’s call for a change in the direction and tone of the country.

    “But it was just as much a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history that would have seemed unthinkable just two years ago.”

    In his victory speech the previous night, in Grant Park, Chicago, President-elect Obama was            no less expansive.

    “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy,’’ he said, “tonight is your answer.”

    “It has been a long time coming,” he added, “but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to America.”

    Three months later, on the night of Obama’s Inauguration, some 20 House Republicans gathered      at a steakhouse across from the US Capitol to lick their wounds – they had also lost control of the House and the Senate – and, more to the point, to plot how to ensure that the Obama presidency would fail.

    They came out of the working dinner vowing to fight Obama on every issue, to be united and unyielding in their opposition; in short, to “take back the country” – their country – at the earliest opportunity.

    Far from sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics” as The New York Times had declared, the election of Barak Obama entrenched it, consecrated it, and invested it with the kind respectability Jim Crow could not muster even at its most benign. Far from taking great pride in Obama’s oft-repeated assertion that only in America is his story possible, they are ruing how it  came about and saying, never again.

    The election upturned what white, middle-aged Americans without a college education had always regarded, and profited disproportionately from, as the natural order of things.  This is the group that globalisation and technological innovations left behind, the group that once thrived on high-paying jobs that have disappeared and will never return.

    Middle-aged white Americans without a college education live for the most part amidst sad reminders of halcyon days, in decaying towns piled with rutted heaps of abandoned mills and manufacturing plants.  The average family now has to work two jobs just to keep afloat. Access to credit, more than anything else, is what sustains the average American in the illusion of well-being

    Although the economy has made a significant recovery during Obama’s tenure – more than nine million jobs have been added since he took office — the really significant gains have gone to  speculators in the casino economy, many of whom go home with $10 million in bonuses alone at the end of each year.

    And now as reported recently by the Princeton economists Angus Deaton, recipient of the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, and Anne Case, “something startling” is happening to middle-aged white Americans, the foot soldiers of the Republican Party, the constituency of the TEA Party and Donald Trump.

    Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, and unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, driven by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse.

    In contrast, the death rate for middle-aged blacks and Hispanics continued to decline during the same period, as did death rates for younger and older people of all races and ethnic groups.

    Middle-aged blacks still have a higher mortality rate than whites — 581 per 100,000, compared with 415 for whites — but the gap is closing, and the rate for middle-aged Hispanics is far lower than for middle-aged whites at 262 per 100,000.

    The least educated also had the most financial distress.  In the period examined by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case, the inflation-adjusted income for households headed by a high school graduate fell by 19 per cent.

    In 2014, according to another analysis, among 25- to 54-year-olds without college degrees, blacks and Hispanics were much more positive than whites: 67 per cent of African-Americans and 68 per cent of Hispanics responded “much better” or “somewhat better,” compared with 47 per cent of whites.

    Those figures represent a reversal from 2000, when whites were more positive than blacks, 64 per cent to 60 per cent. (Hispanics were the most positive in nearly all years

    What used to be considered the peculiar pathology of black society in America has now caught up with the white underclass.  The resentment of that class is what Donald Trump has been exploiting.  It has served him well, at least to the extent that it has helped consolidate his base.

    Given the foregoing you can expect a hardening, not a softening of the racial rhetoric, especially on the right.  The world glimpsed something of this on live television and raw video last week showing the gruesome killings of two black men by police officers during more or less routine encounters — one in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the other in Falcon Heights, Minnesota.

    There was yet another in which a black man shot and killed five officers in an ambush and wounded nine more people at a peaceful demonstration by whites and blacks against the Lousiana and Minnesota killings.

    Hundreds of blacks have died at the hands of white police officers during routine traffic stops over the years, and in situations that posed no grave danger to the public or to the officers.  In almost every case, juries have absolved the police, saying they acted in reasonable fear for their lives, even when the police team had the lonely suspect on his back or belly, fully restrained.

    You do not have to act suspiciously or be in the “wrong” place to warrant the brutal attention of law and order.  The tennis star James Blake, a gentleman of the first class who would make an outstanding diplomat, was waiting in a hotel lounge in downtown Manhattan last year, for a cab to convey him to Flushing Meadows, venue of the U.S. Open Tennis Championships.

    Suddenly, two cops jumped him, guns drawn, pinned him down on his back and handcuffed him.  They said he matched the description of someone who had been reported snatching cell phones, or whatever.  The whole thing could have ended fatally.

    Couldn’t they have called him to a corner and interviewed him? He is, by the way, bi-racial, with a black father and a white mother, like Obama.

    The movement Black Lives Matter was launched to call attention to the casualness with which the police take black lives.  Its goal was to remind the police and a generally complaisant public that black lives need to be protected with no less vigour than white lives and Asian lives and Hispanic lives.

    Now, in a reversal not unusual here (remember, “Affirmative action” is “racist”), they are   calling the movement and its anthem racist.  Leading the pack is former New York Mayor Rudi Guiliani, he of the hyena snarl, who had condoned the racist excesses of New York Police officers in the bestial degradation of Abou Louima, a Haitian immigrant, and other serious misconduct.

    Of course, all lives matter.  That much is implied in the name and agenda of the movement.   But the police continually act as if they believe that some lives are more expendable than others.

    That is the issue. That is why it is necessary to remind them and those who think and act like them that Black Lives Matter.

  • To each system its dress code

    To each system its dress code

    There was a time in Nigeria, not very long ago, where one’s religion hardly mattered in the scheme of things.  It was neither a bar nor a boon to social, political or career advancement.  It was not the prism through which the content and intent of public policy was endlessly refracted and diffracted, nor was it the template for judging the motivations of policy-makers.

    During the First Republic, the Northern premier Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto, who traced his lineage directly from Umanu Dan Fodiyo, founder of the Sokoto Caliphate and in a way, the spearhead of an epic, sub-continental coup, the reverberations of which are still felt across the Sahel today, had around him Russell Dikko, Michael Audu Buba, Jolly Tanko Yusuf, Sunday Awoniyi, the Zakaris and the Donlis and many Christians who played key roles in his administration.

    Yakubu Gowon and Ishaya Audu and Yakubu Danjuma and the Miller brothers and sisters felt perfectly at home and in the walled city and in their places of worship.

    In the West, Chief Awolowo built a first-rate civil service in which neither religion, nor political affiliation for that matter, played any part.  Even if you did not belong to the ruling Action Group, As Sam, later Professor Aluko, did not, you got a scholarship if you qualified for one.  You were being educated to serve the Region and its people, not the ruling party.

    And although he was by faith a Christian, he established a (Muslim) Pilgrims Welfare Board,  the first of its kind in Nigeria, to cater to the interests of Muslims performing the hajj.  There were no complaints of “marginalization” from the Muslim community which made up roughly one-half the population.

    In the East, there were no contending faiths, only healthy competition among various Christian denominations to provide education through institutions subsidized by theRegional Government led by Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe.

    In theSecond Republic, Lagosians did not care that Governor Lateef Jakande and his deputy, the late Rafiu Jafojo, were Muslims.  The people were content to judge them by their performance, which was in many respects outstanding.

    In the President Shehu Shagari’s time, it was said that one of his close personal aides, Michael Prest, felt so alienated from the tight Muslim circle surrounding his principalthat he converted to Islam and changed his first name to Mikhail – or was it Mukaila?  But such instances were rare.

    At his first coming in 1984, no one cared that Muhammadu Buhari and his deputy, Tunde Idiagbon, belonged to the same Muslimfaith; their dourness – I named them the Dour Duo, and the label stuck — was what made them remarkable, not their faith.

    The Muslim-Muslim ticket of Bashorun Moshood Abiola and Babagana Kingibe, we now know indissolubly, won the 1993 presidential election. In the national convulsion that followed the annulment, the Christian community stood up much more robustly than the Muslim community for the validation of the poll.

    It was not until some five weeks into the debacle that the Sultan of Sokoto and titular head of      the he Muslim community in Nigeria finally roused himself to urge military president Ibrahim Babangida todo the right thing and uphold the election.

    Some two weeks later, Dasuki disavowed the statement, claiming that it had beenissued by his secretary without authorization, and further that Abiola had urged the international community to levy war on Nigeria, which no true Muslim would do.

    Abiola had done no such thing.

    Most recently in Lagos, who, in Lagos, who, apart from some desperate attention-seekers beholden to the hugely discredited Bode George, cared about what faith Governor Bola Tinubu and his successor, Babatunde Raji Fashola, practised?

    That was then.

    Today, religion has acquired higher salience in every aspect of national life  and I am not just talking about the industrial scale it has assumed, the vast stretches of highway that serve as camps of dedication and revival, the shop fronts that formerly catered to the fancies of well-heeled clients in tony neighbourhoods now converted to healing and miracle centres,  and once- bustling factories and warehouses that now serve as thriving mega-churches, or high clergy serving as bag men for corrupt public officials.

    Announce apublic appointment today, and the first thing some people will want to know is where the person comes from, followed closely whether he is a Christian or a Muslim, not how well qualified for the job he or she is. Announce the arrest of a perpetrator, and there is immediate speculation about his or her ethnicity or religious affiliation, as if they are correlated.

    I exaggerate here, but not by much.

    Wherever you turn, there is religion, or religiosity; you find itbeing manipulated to serve all kinds of ends, mostly ignoble and profane No wonder there is such great dysfunction in society,  and so little conformity with the value system as we knew it.

    So much religion, so little righteousness.

    And in the face of this crisis, what is the solution most frequently prescribed?

    More religion.  Intensify and widen religious instruction the schools.  Hand back to their rightful owners the schools that various governments seized from voluntary agencies and turned into the godless institutions that breed the anomie and chaos that are all around us.

    The foregoing, pardon its long-windedness, is my point of entry into the crisis roiling the State of Osun over the dress code in public schools —those schools established and funded by the state and administered by agents of the state, as distinct from parochial institutions established by religious bodies to advance their creed or to achieve a particular set of objectives recognized               by the state.

    The state is proprietorof the public school and at the same time stands in loco parentis to the students.  It is responsible for setting standards of conduct and behavior, and for maintaining discipline. The school uniform is a crucial instrument in attaining these goals.  It identifies the person wearing it as a bona fide member of that particular community, subject to its rules and regulations and fully deserving of is protection. Its ordinariness – no frills and no frippery – secures no personal advantage for anyone but guarantees broad equality of treatment for all.

    It is also an instrument of control.  The school is not obliged to admit into its premises anyone not wearing the prescribed uniform.  If it once had religious symbolism, the school uniform in public schools now has only a functional value.

    When students turn report to school in all manner of clothing like masquerades, contrary to what the authorities stipulate, they undermine discipline and control and create distraction that undermines teaching and learning.

    The school uniform serves basically the same purposes in parochial schools, though the religious symbolism is stronger.  It is a constant reminder of their faith, of their being set apart from adherents of other faiths; in short, of their specialness in the eyes of the deity they worship.

    That is their prerogative, and the modern state not only respects but guarantees it.  However, you cannot voluntarily enroll in such schools and then turn round to complain that the dress code violates your rights or offends your sensibilities.

    No legal issues arise here; so long as the dress code and other rules are not inconsistent with the fundamental human rights consecrated in the Constitution, and with what ordinary decency enjoins, they should not be open not to challenge.

    The same reasoning should apply, mutatis mutandis, to the dress code in public institutions. No one is compelled to attend a public school.  Those who choose to do so should wear the prescribed uniform or go seek an education elsewhere.

    To each system, then, its dress code.

    A final thought.

    Let all creeds and faiths and sects agree, in the spirit of ecumenism, to replace Islamic Religious Knowledge and Christian Religious Knowledge as currently taught in our schools with Comparative Religion.

  • Matters miscellaneous

    Matters miscellaneous

    Can you for a moment imagine what Nigeria would be going through now if Dr Goodluck Jonathan had not gone down to defeat in last year’s Presidential election – defeat so heavy that he could not refuse to concede?

    For one thing, the massive looting of public resources that we must now regard as a fundamental objective and directive principle of state policy in his time would never have come to light, or would have done so when it no longer mattered.  Or again, it would have been portrayed as the contrivance of the usual detractors too far gone in their malevolence or envy to perceive, much less appreciate, the great transformation occurring all round them.

    But even his most unyielding detractor will have to concede that Dr Jonathan, whom no one has  ever accused of possessing a fine sense of discrimination despite his advanced training in ichthyology, was right on this one. What took place was stealing pure and simple, unworthy of being dignified as corruption, even though in Dr Jonathan’s book, the latter was the greater crime, the former apparently rating no higher than third-degree malfeasance.

    Just when you think you have heard the ultimate revelation, the next day brings forth disclosures that make the totality of what had been reported stolen earlier seem benign, almost edifying even. By some conservative reckoning, as much as one half of the GDP may have been stolen during each year Dr Jonathan held office.

    But you cannot blame Dr Jonathan for that.

    “My approach to corruption,” (read “stealing”) “was don’t make any money available to anyone to touch,” he told Bloomberg TV New York, after a speech at Bloomberg Studios in London and reported in The Guardian (Lagos).

    There you have it.

    Jonathan fought corruption by simply refusing to make money “available to anyone to touch,” persuaded that if you can’t touch it, you can’t steal it.  In the digital age, it is indeed true that a great deal of stealing occurs in cyberspace, with the touch of a button on a computer keypad or the swiping of an electronic card.

    But much of the thieving that occurred under Jonathan’s administration was of the old-fashioned kind, like officials presenting handwritten notes at the Central Bank and driving off with billions of dollars stashed in cartons, or having one-half of the payroll for an entire agency delivered to their homes every month for several years, or burying millions of dollars in make-believe septic tanks in their homes.

    According to the best authorities, if Dr Jonathan had not pursued the tight-money policy that made money unavailable for touching, Nigeria’s entire GDP, plus some, will have been stolen each year he was in office.

    And there would have been nothing left to execute his Transformation Agenda, the fruits of which are all around us, not least the glut in food production and the millions of new farm jobs he talked about in the Bloomberg interview, thanks to the electronic wallet scheme that delivered fertilisers directly to farmers even in the most remote villages, cutting out the massive corruption that had paralysed the distribution chain.

    I am in a position to announce that, in the years ahead, Dr Jonathan will be giving the world the benefit of his unique approach to fighting corruption  — just don’t make money available for anyone to touch – by way of a Distinguished Lecture Series he has graciously agreed to teach online, under the auspices of The Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan School of Public Management and Finance at the Federal University of Otuoke, where he is set to be named the Dame Patience Faka Jonathan Distinguished Professor of Public Service.

    Be sure to tell prospective enrollees that you first learned about the programme from this column.

    Prime Minster David Cameron must be ruing the day he promised to organise a referendum to determine, once and for all, whether the UK should remain in the European Union or quit.  He didn’t do it on a whim; he calculated that a “yes” vote would silence all the sniping on the Tory back bench and unite the party behind him.

    In the event, the Brexiteers won a narrow victory – a plurality of less than 2 percent, with 30 million subjects or roughly 70 percent of the population voting.  But it is a victory with likely consequences so far-reaching that we can only glimpse their hazy out lines now.  It may well go down as the day when everything changed for the residents of those sceptred isles.

    A week later, the “United Kingdom” seems anything but united and not much of a kingdom. Those who “won” seem only slightly less confused than those who “lost.”  There is no great rejoicing in the streets.  It is almost as if the people had sleepwalked through the whole thing

    But trust the Brits.  They will muddle through this one, as they have always done.  It is not for nothing that they invented the science of muddling through.

    Every major development elsewhere has a way of turning Nigerians into more than detached observers and leading them to draw parallels with their homeland.  The Brexit referendum was   no exception.

    A Nigerian election or referendum in which winner and loser are separated by less than two percentage points would most certainly have been declared “inconclusive.”  Even a poll won by a far higher margin would still have been declared inconclusive if the authorities chose not to proclaim the results.  And there would have been no shortage of arguments to support the claim that it was incurably inconclusive.

    I am reminded again of the June 12, 1993 presidential election in which the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the National Republican Convention (NRC) were the contestants.  The winner of the poll, so said       a front-page editorial in the New Nigerian, the fully-funded official mouthpiece of the Northern Establishment and whichever among its factions was running the country, was Arthur Nzeribe’s misbegotten Association for a Better Nigeria (ABN), which was not even a party to the election.

    How so?

    Because, said the New Nigerian, ABN’s phantom registered membership of 25 million which had stayed home on Election Day as instructed by Nzeribe, outnumbered almost 2:1 those registered electors who had voted for the SDP and the NRC.

    And that was by no means the most trifling argument that led a large swathe of the public to accept that the election was indeed inconclusive.

    Finally, at the risk of sounding boorish, I have to ask again whether Senate President Bukola Saraki cares about anybody or anything other than Saraki, and whether he knows the difference between statesmanship and careerism.

    That he has been standing trial charged with perjury is scandal enough.  Now, based on a police report, he has been charged with complicity in the forgery of documents that created the path through which he and Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremadu carried out their hostile takeover of the institution.

    Saraki is praying the court to stand the letter proceedings down, on the ground that simultaneous prosecution will imperil his right to a fair trial and the performance of his constitutional duties.

    Our laws presume .an individual innocent until he or she is proven guilty.  But in other climes whose traditions and usages Saraki claims to embrace, that presumption always yields to the far higher principle of noblesse oblige.

    Saraki can still earn himself an honourable place in Nigeria’s history by bowing to this hallowed principle instead of clinging desperately to his career – such as it is – through employing the tawdriest contrivances e’er devised by the best lawyers that money can buy.

  • A nuclear scientist at the crossroads

    A nuclear scientist at the crossroads

    At the height of its power and fame and fortune, the PDP never let a bragging right pass it by.  So, it came as no surprise when, without fear, without research and without evidence of any kind, it proclaimed itself Africa’s biggest political party.

    I suspect that it arrived at that conclusion by a species of deductive reason that runs somewhat like this:  The PDP is the biggest political party in Nigeria.  Nigeria is the biggest country in Africa.  It must follow, that the PDP is the biggest party in Africa.

    So, when during one of its accustomed upheavals the PDP landed a nuclear scientist as its national secretary, one expected the appointment to be announced with, at the very least, the kind of publicity that would introduce to the world stage a new Secretary- General of the United Nations, more so since that organisation has never succeeded in attracting a nuclear scientist to that post.

    But the announcement was muted.  It merely named the new chap in Wadata Plaza as Professor Wale Oladipo.  It was totally silent on what he professes.  For all the reader knew, Oladipo could have been a professor of Chinese history or a professor of lunar exploration.  Nothing in it suggested, however remotely, that he is a nuclear scientist.

    Not your usual home-grown bruiser, veteran of dozens of wars of intrigue, with the scars and stripes to prove that he is more than equal to the task, but a fresh-faced scientist steeped in the mores and best practices of the academy, a professor of Nuclear Analytical Techniques, no less.

    If they thought he was going to be a pushover, they soon knew better.  He stood his ground against the previous holder of the office, Prince Olagunsoye Oyinlola, who by sundry tactics tried to prevent him from settling in at Wadata Plaza.   But he must have been hugely relieved when Oyinlola said good riddance to the folks over there, or was it the other way around?

    Thereafter, little was heard of, or from Oladipo, until he dismissed General Muhammadu Buhari, then presidential candidate of the APC as a “semi-literate jackboot.”  Not exactly the kind of language you would expect from a nuclear scientist, even one who has taken a break from analysing with clinical detachment and utmost precision the most elusive particles in the cosmos; you do not expect him to get down and dirty in the waters murky world of politics.

    Then, attention shifted to Oladipo.  Who is he, really, and where is he coming from?  What positions has he held in the nuclear science establishment?  What books or scientific papers has he published?  Does he by any chance hold a patent?  If so,   for what product or process?

    His formal designation is professor of Nuclear Analytical Techniques, and his last known workplace address is the Centre for Energy Research and Development (CERD), at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife. CERD would therefore seem to be the appropriate starting point for learning more about Professor Oladipo.

    At this writing, he does not figure on CERD’s web site.  I sent an email to CERD asking for information about him.  No luck.  I followed up with a phone call; no luck.  Perhaps it is CERD’s policy not to give out any information about their faculty and staff, for security reasons.  And CERD is nothing if not a national security facility.

    My Internet search turned out more information about Oladipo as PDP national secretary than about his scholarship in the arcane field of particle physics.  It also yielded more information about his time in prison custody with Iyiola Omisore in the investigation of the murder of the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Chief Bola Ige, than about his scientific work.

    Even his home page, such as it is, says nothing about his education and the universities he attended.  There is no picture showing him at a nuclear facility, or at his study surrounded by books and scientific papers; no picture showing him with colleagues at a conference; none showing him in any scientific context whatsoever.

    The only picture of Oladipo that keeps bobbing up shows him attired in a nondescript tunic made from fabric stamped with the PDP’s colours.

    But this conspicuous absence proves nothing.

    Perhaps Oladipo is not the type who blows his own trumpet.   If his bibliography is not out there, it may be because of the sensitive nature of his scholarship, not because there is no bibliography to publish. Some breakthroughs are so sensitive that they are placed under the national security classification system.  In addition, all those who came up with the breakthrough are enjoined to secrecy.

    I will not be surprised that Professor Oladipo’s work belongs in that category.

    At any rate, he did not appear to miss his nuclear research lab.  He seemed perfectly at home in Wadata Plaza even after the PDP’s disastrous loss in the last general election.  Having boasted that it would rule for 60 unbroken years in the first instance, it held power for only16 years, remembered now as an era of excess, drift, and corruption on a scale beyond belief.

    When the PDP fell on hard times, unable to pay headquarters staff and carry out other functions without the hefty government handouts that had sustained it, staffers who could bale out did so.  Not Oladipo.  He dutifully found a way out.  One-half the employees got dismissal notices. The other half would have to put up with a 50 percent pay cut.

    He had not weathered the resulting storm when the PDP went into disarray.  It broke up into  two factions, each claiming to be the authentic one, and each with its own “national chairman” and a retinue of national officers.

    Last week, a rented crowd of one of the factions invaded Wadata Plaza and flushed out its occupants.  Among those chased out, according to media reports, was Professor Oladipo.   He was reported to be “visibly shaken” as he pleaded with the mob to allow him go get his car he had parked a discreet distance away from his office.

    But he has dismissed the report as a fabrication.  And he insists that as far as he is concerned, he remains a loyal member and supporter of the PDP.  Brave, loyal soul.  In this age of turncoats, there is a great deal to be said for loyalty.

    But his friends must tell Professor Oladipo that, by fighting to keep an identity as national secretary of the PDP – even if it is still the largest political party in Africa  — when he may well belong up there with Ernest Rutherford and Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and Max Planck, he is carrying coyness too far.

    They should urge him to de-classify his bibliography, if only to awe the scoffers and turn them into admirers, to dust off his files and notebooks and start from where he took a break about a decade ago.  A great deal has happened in the field since then. They have nailed the Higgs boson, the holy grail of particle physics.  But there is still so much out there to discover and analyse in our expanding universe.

    The nuclear establishment, I gather, is eagerly awaiting the return to its fold of one of its crackerjack analysts.

  • These gods are man-made

    Think continuously of those who are truly great, men and women who by their deeds fight for fairness and the good of all; think of those who wear on their hearts’ sleeve and domicile in the inner recesses of their souls, irrepressible zeal to make our lives better and worthy of our dreams …there are no such men and women alive, are there? For if there are, Nigeria would be 21st   century version of Eden or Al Jannah; and men and women on whose watch our country so evolves and appreciate would be everything and even gods.

    Our people are quite inane, they wouldn’t know how to create a heaven or sustain the like of it but they create gods by the dozen. I do not speak of divinity that manifests only in far-fetched miracles and dreams; I speak of men and women, boys and girls that we quite desperately and misguidedly deify as our vanities dictate.

    Being rich is the closest you get to being god in Nigeria. Add an impressive root and very intimidating academic record to the mix and you have yourself a 21st century hero or god. Of what calibre are our idols? Who really is the Nigerian god? Who is an example of a quintessential idol? Allison-Maduekwe? Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu? President Muhammadu Buhari? Former President Goodluck Jonathan? Reuben Abati? Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala? Do their deeds make them worthy of hero-worship or blind deification?

    To what would these individuals owe our reverence of them? Some would say it is their brilliance and extraordinary achievements in their chosen callings. Anyone could be brilliant from time to time but intelligence is what we have to affect all of the time. How intelligent are our ruling class? How intelligent is President Goodluck Jonathan? How intelligent is Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala? How intelligent is Sanusi Lamido Sanusi? How intelligent are they and every other character we continue to endure in the Nigerian ruling class?

    The answer lies as much in their utterances as their deeds. Alas! Transcendent moments and heroic acts are rather deeds of an exalted intelligence, something which Nigeria’s incumbent ruling class pitifully lacks. But despite its protests and dissatisfaction with the status quo, the Nigerian citizenry equally lacks that towering immensity of intellect and strength of character that remains prime requirements in the constitution of a progressive race.

    Our lust for heroes and gods illustrates a fable; it is not of latent strength but disintegration rather it reveals the weakness and shallowness of the Nigerian adult’s awfully preadolescent mind. It reiterates a very shrill cry for help that’s at once selfish, infantile and retrogressive. Put precisely, we are incapable of creating such super humans or elements worthy of being called gods of unconditional love and compassion. All we are capable of are gods of impoverishment and gods of war.

    If we are to be judged by what Greek philosopher, Pythagoras, deems the human measure of all things, shall we fare excellently or not? Things have gone on decadently for too long; that is why idiots as fragile as clay toys have evolved into outsized heroes and gods, on our watch.

    The Nigerian hero is a human sound bite. He is essentially a half-formed mammal, animal to be precise. Take for instance gods and goddesses we have created as our ruling class; they are no longer exclusively Nigerian or humane. Rather they have been turned upside-down and inside-out; they have been scrambled, corrupted and fertilized by ghastly manifestations of self love, tribalism, wantonness, perverted education and sense of worth.

    This abnormality is accentuated by the citizenry’s lack of courage and inclination to dither when the situation calls for decisiveness and fearlessness in determining the course of our affairs. “All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours,” says Aldous Huxley, English writer.

    Truly; the manner in which the Nigerian electorate worships its ruling class and celebrates its mediocrity makes it impossible for the latter to affect the necessary humaneness, tact and humility that are prime requirements of occupants of exalted public offices. Having made super humans of them, they begin to delude that they are untouchable and unquestionable. They begin to parade themselves as gods and see the electorate on whose strength they ascended to their exalted positions as lesser creatures.

    They seek the exaggerated safety and coziness of fortresses they build around themselves to protect their ill-gotten wealth and ostentatious lifestyles. Suddenly it becomes taboo for them to hobnob with the working class. It becomes abominable for their wives, daughters and cooks to visit the same grocer or shop in the same market as the masses.

    Shamelessly, they clear our public coffers of our collective fund without any inhibition and in response; we celebrate them and grovel at their feet for crumbs of what is rightfully ours. Whenever they intrude our world, they leave behind pungent memories and pains. Whenever they come to town, we must be kept in traffic for them to move freely; whenever they are ‘guests of honour’ at our functions, we are treated with little or no honour. Apology to Kayode Oteniya.

    The chief quality of a true leader is the apparent sincerity in his manners. The speeches he makes are never mere platitudinous enterprise and his developmental programmes are never extraordinary elephant projects; his politics and humanity are not only heard but concretely seen and felt.

    Really there is prime merit in everything about him, and his life generally, radiates truth. His life is what we may call a great sober sincerity. A sort of temperate authenticity that is not only blunt but uncompromising. His fervor is undomesticated, bordering on the wild and forever wrestling naked with the elements that be for the love of the good and the truth of things. In that sense, there is something of the savage yet humane in him like all great men.

    He is one in whom one still finds human substance. He relishes no opportunity to tell any colourful story of himself anywhere; usually, he stands bare and grapples like a giant, face to face, heart to heart, with the naked truth of things.  ‘That, after all,” according to Thomas Carlyle “is the sort of man for one.”

    And such is the type of man we should value above all others. He is the man who as Norman Mailer, an American writer, puts it, would argue with gods and awaken devils to contest his vision. When he dies, his death would be felt nationwide as something more than a historic calamity; women would weep and men would fight back tears as if they had heard of the death of a very dear friend or Saint.

    The creation of such honorable man and god would be our noblest work. But we seem incapable yet of such honorable task. We could start by stripping ourselves of the greater vanities and portentous contradictions. Unhappy the land that has no heroes, says Andrea; No, unhappy the land that needs heroes, responds Galileo in Bertolt Brecht, late German playwright and poet’s “The Life of Galileo.” Regrettably, the meaning is lost on us all.

  • June 12: Babangida’s turn

    June 12: Babangida’s turn

    Why did military president Ibrahim Babangida annul the June12, 1993 Presidential election, the anniversary of which was marked over the weekend?

    Twenty-three years later, he has not been able to give a coherent answer.  Rather, he has been fudging and dissembling as is his wont.  He has said, among other things, that he annulled the  election as a favour to Abiola, because Abiola would have been overthrown and probably killed if Abiola was allowed to take office.

    Babangida laid out his reasons in his June 23, 1993 broadcast.  But as I will try to show presently, the case falls apart under close scrutiny.

    Those were desperate days in Abuja – days of wild improvisation and frenzied experimentation.  The scheduling of the broadcast shows that much.

    The broadcast would be made at mid-day, according to an official statement.  It did not take place.  It was rescheduled for an hour later.  Still, no broadcast.  The broadcast would now take place at 7 p.m, they said.  The hour came and passed without the broadcast.

    The broadcast took place, finally, two hours later, at 9 pm. It is a sprawling, laboured speech,       some 2,700 words long.

    The first part of the speech was an exercise in self-glorification.  Babangida said that the policies and programmes he had pursued –SAP, for example? — were sound “in understanding, conception, formulation and articulation,” and “comparatively unassailable,” and that history would certainly score the administration high in its governance of Nigeria.

    Twenty three years later, the most widely-held verdict is that Babangida is the prime architect of the nation’s current woes, and that his policies drove Nigeria to the end of ruin.

    So much for the testimonial he issued himself.   The concern here is with the rest of the speech, in which Babangida laid out his reason for annulling the election.

    In implementing its reform programmes, he said, the regime had to contend with social forces that had in the past impeded national growth and development, as well as new social forces that the programmes spawned. To resolve matters, he said, the regime was constrained to tamper with the rules governing the transition.

    Here, one must ask: What happened to the “in-built” corrective mechanism that the regime and its palace intellectuals had forever advertised as a unique feature of the transition design?

    To return to the speech:  Tampering with the rules out of sheer necessity unwittingly attracted “enormous public suspicions” of the regime’s intentions and policies.”  Translation:  The attentive public came to the conclusion that Babangida was nursing a secret agenda, the object being to perpetuate himself in office and in power.

    The transition programme, Babangida continued, was about building a lasting foundation for democracy.  But “lasting democracy,” hear all ye idle chatterers and self-styled human rights activists and your captive press, “lasting democracy is not a temporary show of excitement and manipulation by an over-articulate section of the elite of the whole nation and the political process; lasting democracy is a permanent diet to nurture the soul of the whole nation and the political process.”

    Democracy as “soul food?”   As “stomach infrastructure,” in other words?  Shades of Ayo Fayose.

    The June 12 election, like the presidential primaries that were cancelled the previous year, Babangida said, did not meet the basic requirements of democracy:  free and fair elections, un-coerced expression of voters’ preference, respect for the electorate as final arbiter in elections, decorum and fairness on the part of electoral umpires, and absolute respect for the rule of law.

    But because the administration was determined to keep faith with the deadline of 27th August, 1993 for the return to civil rule, it overlooked the reported breaches. The breaches continued into the June 12, 1993, on an even greater scale, but Humphrey Nwosu’s National Electoral Commission went ahead and cleared the candidates.

    There was also a conflict of interest between the government and both presidential candidates that would have compromised their positions and responsibilities were they to become president.

    The courts had been intimidated and subjected to “the manipulation of the political process by vested interests, to the point that the entire political system was endangered.  Under these circumstances, the National Defence and Security Council decided to annul the election “in the supreme interest of law and order, political stability and peace.”

    Do you hear, all ye skeptics: The election was annulled in the supreme interest of law and order, political stability and peace.

    Resting his case, Babangida declared: “To continue action on the basis of the June 12, 1993 election, and to proclaim and swear in a president who encouraged a campaign of divide and rule among our ethnic groups would have been detrimental to the survival of the Third Republic.”

    Thus spaketh Himself military president Ibrahim Babangida, on June 23, 1993.

    On the top of his form, Argentine soccer maestro Diego Maradona could not have done a better job of faking.

    Despite all the fudging, it is beyond dispute that the NDSC approved holding the election. Babangida admitted that much in the broadcast, perhaps unwittingly. Keep in mind that the NDSC in whose name he claimed to have acted was for all practical purposes a phantom of his own making.

    It was Babangida’s proxy, Arthur Nzeribe and his so-called Association for a Better Nigeria that, to use Babangida’s words, “intimidated and manipulated” the courts.  In that subversive undertaking, they were aided and sheltered by the regime’s Attorney-General and Minster of Justice, Clement Akpamgbo, and his retinue of shysters and cardsharpers.

    The breaches of the electoral laws that vitiated the election, as Babangida claims, furnished an opportunity to disqualify and prosecute the perpetrators and clean up the process.  Why did he put up with them for so long?

    The public was well primed to vote on June 12.  That date had been seared into its consciousness.  It was Babangida’s regime, not NEC, that created a climate of uncertainty around it.  Even so, 14 million Nigerians came out to vote.

    To invoke the “rule of law” to justify the annulment as Babangida did was to stand that concept on its head.  How can a regime that promulgated retroactive laws and routinely ousted the courts of jurisdiction honestly claim adherence to the rule of law?

    Which of the candidates, by the way, encouraged a campaign of divide-and-rule among Nigeria’s ethnic groups, as Babangida claimed?   A candidate for national office employing such tactics would have known that he was committing electoral suicide.  The public would have rejected him emphatically.

    Nothing emblematizes Babangida’s signature duplicity and chicanery better than the claim he now makes at every opportunity that he presided over the freest and fairest election ever held in Nigeria.  How can he reconcile this claim with his sweeping rejection of the June 12 election?

    The legal titan Professor Ben Nwabueze, who served as Secretary for Education in Babangida’s ineffectual Transitional Council and doubled as a strategist in the evisceration of the June 12 election, provides an important clue as to Babangida’s disposition at that critical time.

    “His behavior in the last days of his regime, “Nwabueze wrote in the rather inelegantly titled June 12, 1993 Election:  Problems and Solutions, “left a rather strong impression of a man forced to quit against his will, of one un-reconciled to quitting in the last days of his rule and in the face of defeat, he cut a figure of someone unwilling to reconcile himself with composure to the adverse torrent of events, of an angry and bitterly disappointed man.”

    More tellingly, Nwabueze wrote of Babangida, “His mind, his motions and his actions seemed to have become somewhat disoriented, and no longer governed by disinterested, patriotic considerations. In the event, he quit office in a rather undignified, unceremonious manner.”

    There is nothing more to add.

  • Muhammad Ali: Simply The Greatest

    Muhammad Ali: Simply The Greatest

    When Ebony magazine dropped Muhammad Ali from its canonical roster of the 100 most influential African Americans some thirty years ago – a roster on which he had figured prominently for 25 unbroken years, I was bewildered.

    The de-listing came nearly two decades after the Thriller in Manila, Ali’s third and final match-up with Joe Frazier, ranked by boxing experts as the greatest bout of all time.  Both fighters came out of the encounter significantly damaged.  Frazier could not get out of his corner for the final round, the 15th; Ali was too exhausted to celebrate.  He would say of the encounter that it was “the closest thing to death.”

    The thrilla itself, as Ali called the Manila clash with poetic lyricism, came a year after the Rumble in the Jungle – another Ali coinage –in which Ali taunted and battled the fearsome George Foreman to an 8th-round knockout in Kinshasa, in former Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo.

    That outcome does not tell the full story, however.

    For seven furious rounds, Foreman had thrown at Ali blows that would have felled an ox.  Ali had absorbed them on his arms and body.  The resulting internal injuries took months to heal, and it is a wonder that Ali returned to the ring the following year to face his old nemesis, Smokin’ Joe.

    The de-listing came some five years after Ali had cut a pitiful figure in an ill-advised challenge to his former sparring partner and reigning world champion, Larry Holmes, with Holmes literally pleading with the referee to stop the fight and save Ali from needless punishment.

    It came literally on the heels of Ali’s final ring appearance in 1981, in the Bahamas, against Trevor Berbick, a well-muscled, ponderous pugilist. Ali lost on all three score cards.  His courage showed through and through in that fight; he displayed flashes of brilliance and inspiration.

    But the razor-sharp reflexes were long gone.  Body and mind no longer syncopated.

    It was a poor imitation of the Mohammad Ali who had dominated my generation’s consciousness like no other person.  He had endeared himself to us with his exquisite physique, his matchless boxing skills, his lightning-quick hands, his supreme confidence, his courage, his defiance, his inventiveness, his pride in his black heritage, his eloquence and, yes, his brashness.

    So, his work was done and he now belonged in the past, this man with the most recognizable visage in the world, at once hero and legend? And this, according to Ebony, the quintessential journal of the Black Establishment, not some pesky publication with a reputation for putting back in his or her place any black person who stepped out of the line according to Jim Crow?

    And this was well before Ali’s speech was slurred almost to the point of being barely comprehensible, before his voice became a faint echo, before his body was palsied by the ravages of Parkinson’s disease and the countless hammer-blows to the head he had absorbed in 61 fights.

    The de-listing also came a decade or so before the toll of those fights was on global display at the opening ceremony of the 1996 Olympics, in Atlanta, Georgia.

    For about 30 seconds that seemed like an eternity, the world held its breath as mind and will seemed locked in elemental combat with the once-magnificent but now tremulous body of Ali, poised to ignite the flames of the Games of the XXVI Olympiad.

    It was not a pretty spectacle.

    But Ali’s indomitable mind and will prevailed, and the world breathed a collective sigh of relief.

    I cannot now recall the metrics Ebony employed to determine who was influential in the African American community, nor indeed what in its judgment constituted influence.

    Ali had long ceased to be in the limelight, but could he be written off as a marginal figure from the past, with little or no contemporary influence?

    The world did not think so.  TIME magazine named him Athlete of the (20th) Century.  The BBC voted him the greatest athlete of the century.  President George W. Bush conferred him the Medal of Freedom, America’s highest honour.

    He was a fixture and revered presence at Davos, the Swiss city where the most influential people in the world gather every winter to discuss important global issues.  He rarely spoke, but his presence somehow gave some authenticity to the proceedings; if Ali was there, the debates and discussions must be about real people.

    At the time of his first fight with Joe Frazier, Ali was one of the most polarising figures in America, venerated by African Americans and white liberals on the other hand and execrated by Establishment and conservative whites in equal measure.

    To the delight of the one, he had refused to be drafted to fight in Vietnam, saying he “ain’t got no quarrel with those Vietcongs,” and that no Vietnamese ever called him “nigger.”  To the implacable anger of the other, he was an unpatriotic draft dodger who had dared to embrace a faith they considered dangerous and threatening.

    This latter group was rooting for Frazier and looking to him to put Ali away once and for all.  Ali framed Frazier as an “Uncle Tom,” a symbol of black subservience to white authority, taunted Frazier as a gorilla, and made remarks about Frazier’s looks and skin colour that would have been judged offensively racist if made by a white person.

    If that was marketing hype, it was marketing hype taken too far.  It rankled till the end of Frazier’s life. He would say, apropos of Ali’s titanic struggle to ignite the flames at the Atlanta Olympics, that he wished Ali had fallen into the cauldron.

    Not a few consider rather overdone, mean-spirited even, Ali’s clinical demolition of former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson and the challenger Ernest Terrell, both of whom continued calling him Cassius Clay long after he had disavowed that name. For every punch Patterson threw, Ali countered with six crisp, lacerating blows. Patterson was carried out of the ring.  Terrell fared just    a little better.

    I have no quarrel with that.  It was payback.

    Ali’s last visit to Nigeria was a disaster, not on account of his waning stature but on account of the cause he had come to pursue.

    He had come as an envoy of the Carter Administration to lobby Nigeria to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics, following the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

    The mission was dead on arrival.

    Ali’s handlers should not have allowed him to undertake it.  It was incongruous that the country that had stripped him of his heavyweight title for political reasons and rendered him inactive for three years at his prime should be sending him abroad to campaign for a boycott of the Olympics for political reasons.

    It was unlike Ali not to have perceived the incongruity.  Still, you could never accuse him of selling out.

    It is his great legacy that he brought grace and glamour and elegance to the brutal sport of boxing.  He was a pillar of inspiration to young people all over the world striving to make a mark not just in boxing but in every sport and in public affairs.  He identified with the poor and downtrodden in society.  He was a goodwill ambassador-at-large for many worthy causes. He made boxing a money-spinning industry from which boxers could earn fortunes.

    In the closing years of his life, time and tide and personal circumstance conflated to transform Ali into a secular saint of sorts, revered and almost irreproachable.

    This generation will not see another like him.

  • Three anniversaries in review

    Three anniversaries in review

    This past weekend, three anniversaries conflated to accentuate the perennial debate on what I have often referred to in this space and elsewhere as the Nigerian Condition – Children’s Day, “Democracy Day,” and one year of the Buhari Administration.

    Children’s Day, an international event, is the oldest of the three.   It has been marked in Nigeria for several decades, even if not always in substantive terms.  It is also the least contentious.  No one disputes the place of children in the scheme of things.  Everyone is agreed that the future belongs to them, and that everything must be done to make that future secure and sustainable.

    Whether the foundation for such a future is being laid now is an entirely different issue, what with shabby state of the public educational infrastructure, the plummeting standard of education at virtually every level, the mistreatment of teachers that seems to have become a fundamental principle of state policy, and the bad examples children see wherever they turn.

    There was Senate president Dr Bukola Saraki on national television, regal as always and not           in the least diffident, reading to a group of children to mark the anniversary.  Lost on him was the incongruity of a senior political official, third in the formal national hierarchy, presuming  to serve as a role model for children while on break from criminal prosecution on perjury and relate charges.

    Next time he is shown in court on television, not a few of the children to whom he was reading will wonder why he is one day presuming to set them on the right path and the next day peering at them from the Code of Conduct Tribunal’s dock.

    Only in Nigeria.

    “Democracy Day” was controversial right from its proclamation by former President Olusegun Obasanjo to mark the day he took office, at the end of a rushed transition designed by those elements who survived the attrition and skullduggery of the Babangida/Abacha years to ease themselves into opulent retirement.

    None of those who succeeded them had seen the Constitution from which their power presumably derived, not even Obasanjo himself, who usually takes nothing for granted.  But the military were so desperate to vacate the scene, and the politicians so desperate to take over, that nobody asked any questions, let alone inconvenient ones.

    When the Constitution was finally released, Gani Fawehinmi, of fragrant memory, warned that it was so riddled with ambiguities that it could not be expected to guide Nigeria to a stable, democratic future.

    Gani, our Gani, was right on the mark.

    Sham elections, brazen manipulation of the judiciary, thieving by political officials in and out of uniform on a scale beyond belief, scant regard for basic decencies and for rules of civic engagement, came to define politics, with Abuja showing the way.

    It is a measure of the extent to which their “Democracy Day” has lived up to expectations that the PDP which foisted it on the nation and promised with Napoleonic conceit to hold power for 60 years in the first instance, is on this anniversary in disarray, hugely discredited and justly reviled for its overweening corruption and its staggering lack of vision. Under the PDP, Nigeria became a full-blown kleptocracy with hardly any redeeming grace.

    This, then, is their “Democracy Day,” a monument to pillage and squandered opportunity.

    It remains to add that their “Democracy Day” was erected on the epic struggle of Nigerians  and their sacrifice in toil and tears and blood to establish a government based on the pan-Nigerian mandate won in the June12, 1993 presidential election won by the Muslim-Muslim ticket of Bashorun Moshood Abiola and Babagana Kingibe, a sacrifice that the May Twenty Niners  have never summoned the honesty and the decency to acknowledge.

    In the hearts and minds of millions of Nigerians, June 12 has a much stronger claim to being Nigeria’ s Democracy Day, and will continue to be celebrated as such with greater eloquence and  conviction than May 29.

    May 29  also happens to mark President Muhammadu Buhari’s first year in office.  The appraisals have ranged from witheringly dismissive to mildly approving, with Ayo Fayose’s belonging in a special case of the congenitally lunatic.

    “What are the consequences of the French Revolution?” Henry Kissinger once asked the Chinese statesman Zhou Enlai?  “Too early to tell, Zhou told the former U.S. Secretary of State a distinguished historian.  And Zhou was not being facetious.

    In that context, one year is too short a period for any categorical assessment of Buhari’s tenure.   It provides an opportunity to review the choices he has made.  It furnishes some indication of the direction, the path the administration is likely to follow.  What seems the most informed appraisal of the moment may in the womb of time turn out to be dead wrong.

    Still, it has to be said that Buhari did not hit the ground running, pardon the cliché, as the APC had led the public to believe he would, and as the scale of the mess left behind by Jonathan and his team on every facet of national life demanded.

    He took an inordinately long time putting together his Cabinet.  When he finally did, the result felt far short of public expectations, given the challenges of the moment.

    He and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo set an inspiring example by making public their portfolio of assets; since taking office, they have together cut a profile that is a sharp departure from the   excess and the vulgarity of the Jonathan years.  But much more than that was required to assure the public that Change, a new way of conducting government business, was on the threshold.

    It would have struck a resounding blow for Change, as I had urged in this space, if the President were to declare that he would assume responsibility for domestic expenses for himself and his family and the cost of entertaining his personal guests, leaving the Nigerian taxpayer to pay only for official dinners and such outings hosted by the State House.

    Office cleaners take care of their families on the national minimum-wage salary of N18,000 they are paid several months late, if at all.  Why shouldn’t the President do the same?  What is the justification for this tradition whereby a president becomes for all practical purposes a ward of the state, with all his needs and fancies paid for from the public purse?

    Ending this pernicious state of affairs would signal Change that the public can embrace even when being asked to show understanding; it would have a ripple effect that will help cut the cost of governance and generate funds that can be invested more productively.

    Buhari should certainly be reminded of his campaign promises.  But how much can you do with an empty treasury and dwindling revenues in a global economy in recession?  Given some of the brutal realities the administration now has to contend with, the unpleasant truth is that a good many of those promises cannot be fulfilled in their original  form anytime soon.  But he must move quickly to implement faithfully those that are still feasible.

    In the end, however, even the most churlish critic will have to grant that Buhari has broken Boko Haram’s backbone; that he has put corruption on notice that it will no longer go unchallenged, despite the best efforts of pettifoggers shielding behind a strategic ritual they call the “rule of law,” and that he has arrested the drift, the serial impunity and the decadence of the Jonathan years.

    This last is almost achievement enough.

    Those who dispute it should contemplate where the nation would be today if Dr Jonathan and the Obtainers United had succeeded in suborning election officials to alter the returns of the 2015 poll so that they can remain in control, Potemkin “transformation” and all.

  • ‘How far, Chairman?’

    ‘How far, Chairman?’

    At the end of a visit some 15 years ago for a conference in Abuja that was going to stretch into a two-week stay in Nigeria, I learned from U.S. Embassy officials, horror of horrors, that under  the immigration laws, I would have to spend two years in Nigeria before I could obtain a Visa to return to my base.

    My appeal dragged on for some three months, until President Olusegun Obasanjo caused the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to issue, as demanded by the U.S. Embassy,  a Diplomatic Note stating that the Federal Government had no objection to my being granted a re-entry visa.

    While the impasse lasted, the question I dreaded most was:  “How far?”

    It always stumped me.  It made no difference whether the person asking the question knew my circumstance or not.  In fact, I suspected that the questioner did know my circumstance, and was being graciously solicitous; otherwise, he or she would simply have swept by with a perfunctory greeting.

    And so, I felt an obligation to answer courteously.  But how to answer?

    You could not answer yes, or no, or perhaps, or okay, or fine, or not bad. You could not give an answer that was as laconic as the question itself.   You could not always be sure that the inquiry related to your discomfited circumstance.  Yet, you could not permit yourself the pat retort:  “How far what?”

    That would be rude and ungracious to someone who probably meant well, though you could not tell.

    And so, I found myself having to explain to almost everyone who asked “How far?” the nuances of the Visa categories used by the US Immigration, especially the treacherous J-1 Visa; the usage of the Diplomatic Note or Note Verbale as they call it in diplolingo, slang for “diplomatic language,” and how an Embassy official who had demanded it thinking I could never secure it had become positively hostile after it had been couriered to his office, etc, etc.

    At every rendering, it was an exhausting narrative.  I was not always sure how it registered with the other party, or whether it even served any useful purpose.  But I could not come up with any short answer that could do justice to the question in its beguiling simplicity and apparent innocence.

    I tried “We are at it,” the time-tested response that farm and building-site laborers devised to fend off inquiries from dyspeptic employers or supervisors about the progress of work.  No luck. The other party simply repeated the question, as if he had not heard my answer.

    When asked “How far” on another occasion, I offered a variation on the labourers’ standard response aforementioned.  “It is coming up,” I said, with confidence.

    “So is Christmas,” my interlocutor shot back.

    Christmas was scarcely three weeks behind us, and its sounds and smells still perfused the air.  It was as if my interlocutor was determined to cure me of any illusion I might be harbouring that my ordeal would end soon.

    I began to contrive ways of evading anyone I suspected might put the question. But that only confirmed their suspicions that I was in a situation from which only a miracle could rescue me.

    What had seemed to me then an inquiry into my beleaguered circumstances, well-meaning or otherwise, has now turned into a salutation for all occasions, a substitute for “Hello” or “Hi there” or Bawo ni or yaya de or kedu.  You hear it all the time, from pals, from chance acquaintances, and from total strangers.

    A good many persons I have observed do not seem fazed in the least when asked “How far?”  Some see it as a jocular locution and respond just as jocularly:  Afa dey for mosque.   Others respond with the usual phrases of casual conversation.  It all ends there, in banter, and the parties move on.

    But surely, there must be those battling all kinds of anxieties who wonder whether the question, which could cover a whole range of issues from the deeply personal to the commonplace, and from the profound to the prosaic, is pure-minded; whether it is not at bottom intrusive, and  impertinent to boot?

    If you are preparing for the West African School Certificate examination and are perfecting plans to, shall we say, guarantee a relaxed supervisory environment, is  “How far?” not an insidious attempt to get you to implicate yourself?

    Perhaps you are seeking a place in the university and are entirely at the mercy of the JAMB.  Is the status of that quest what the “How far?” is about – whether you again failed to make the cut for the fifth year running, or whether they are dispatching you to the new Federal University of Bama which you did not know existed?  Is it about your secret plan to avoid being sent on National Service to Chibok country, on the edge of Sambisa Forest?

    It could be any or all or none of the above, which makes the inquiry all the more subversive.           For in all these instances, you could hardly answer the question without somehow compromising yourself.  Yet, ignoring the question might be seen as evasiveness stemming from a bad conscience.

    Another scenario:  You are about closing in on a contract to supply toothpicks to the National Assembly for the next ten years, or have concluded a deal with manufacturers for a shipment of run-of-the-mill motor vehicle spare parts from Taiwan or fake drugs from India, and some busybody in a chance encounter asks you “How far?”

    Can anyone blame you for construing the question as an invitation to divulge a trade secret – a ploy that any entrepreneur worthy of the title can sniff from ten miles?

    Okay, it is none of the above, only an affair of the heart.  You finally summoned the will to        tell the gorgeous girl next door or the sedate, winsome woman at your workplace or in the neighbourhood of your admiration and adoration and that the rest of your life would be meaningless without her.

    Just when things have entered a delicate phase, some bloke who may well have his own designs on the same gorgeous girl or winsome woman saunters up to you in the office canteen or at the pepper soup joint around the corner and asks, as if on cue: “Chairman, how far?”

    Even the usually imperturbable old-school type may at such a moment be driven to wonder aloud why some people just cannot mind their own business.