The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • That infernal ‘subsidy’, again

    That infernal ‘subsidy’, again

    For the past 28 years or so, virtually every measure trumpeted as a solution to the instability in the supply and pricing of gasoline has turned out to be a gigantic swindle.

    The long-running swindle began, like most swindles in Nigeria’s recent history, during the era of the self-designated military president, General Ibrahim Babangida.    The country was set to take a loan from the IMF, and as a sop to that latter-day Cerberus, the currency was to be devalued, import restrictions were to be lifted, and anything remotely suggestive of a subsidy was to be abolished immediately.

    Gasoline came to be identified as the soft underbelly of the Nigerian economy. It was grossly underpriced, they said, because it was heavily subsidised, with the pernicious result that a gallon of gasoline cost less than a bottle of soda or milk.  One image that clings to my memory of that time is of the engaging news correspondent Chris Anyanwu, now a Senator, peddling that line night after night on national television in her smooth, silky delivery.

    What subsidy?

    The difference between the price of a gallon of gasoline in Lagos and the same gallon of petrol in Fargo, North Dakota, they said.

    Wasn’t that what economists call an opportunity cost? If the cost of getting a gallon of gasoline to the pump exceeded the retail price, you could perhaps talk about a subsidy. What were these relative costs?  And whatever happened to comparative advantage and all that if Nigerians were to pay for gasoline produced on their soil the same thing as consumers half a world away were paying for it? Was the whole thing not at bottom a tax?

    They could provide no coherent answers

    Shifting gears, they said gasoline was so cheap that it was being mindlessly wasted.

    How?  Were Nigerians using it to wash their hands after a meal, or to prepare their vegetable stew in place of regular cooking oil, or as a beverage to entertain their guests, since it was so much cheaper than Coca Cola?

    Shifting gears still, they said because gasoline was so cheap in Nigeria, it was being smuggled to neighbouring countries to reap windfall profits.

    Now, you could not do that on any meaningful scale by lugging 50-litre petrol cans through bush paths.  Only motorised tankers driving on paved roads across international frontiers manned by immigration and customs and security officials had that capability.  Those vehicles had to be owned or controlled by political and military officials with guaranteed access to refined petroleum products.

    Why was it, then, that not one of those vehicles had been arrested and charged with this illegal traffick, only a few stragglers transporting smuggled gasoline cans in leaky dugout canoes or in rickety trucks across the border?

    And why make genuine, honest-to-goodness consumers pay for the sins of syndicated smugglers?

    Nor were they yet done.

    Gasoline was so cheap, they said, that it was being adulterated.  When substituted for kerosene in hurricane lamps and stoves, the adulterated mixture caused horrific explosions that maimed and sometimes killed entire families.

    Why not make kerosene cheaper than gasoline, then?  In any case, why would anyone adulterate a product that was already obscenely cheap?  Whoever heard of adulterated zinc?

    From the funds to be realised from a subsidy, the existence of which was never proven, new oil refineries would be built not merely to satisfy growing domestic consumption but also for export, to generate foreign exchange.  Those long, snaking lines at filling stations would be things of the past, they said.

    Whether framed as “correct pricing” or de-regulation or under any other label, this has been the standard litany, with a few variations here and there, whenever the government has needed to raise revenues during the last three decades.

    The more they cut the alleged subsidy, the more remains to be cut.  It reminded me of what they said of the whale found beached in Lagos in the early 6os that the more they hacked away at it, the more remained to be hacked.

    Gasoline pricing has been the first resort and quite often the only one. The “subsidy” has to be cut or abolished; if not the economy will collapse.  Humongous figures are conjured up as revenues that will accrue to the exchequer from cutting the subsidy.  Committees are set up to manage the cash inflow and to ensure it is put to the most judicious use, and palliatives to cushion the average person from comprehensive  price increases that will follow are announced.

    Those measures sprang more from panic than from sound reasoning.  Within a year, the “mass transit” buses running on subsidised fares vanish from the roads.  A striking project here, thriving scheme there, but much of the money goes the way of other state money — to satisfy the awoof proclivities of officials high and low and their confederates.

    The one thing that never gets built is a new refinery.

    Rather, the existing refineries are patched up to function fitfully at best, at costs that defy all reason.  Periodic Turn-Around Maintenance (TAM) gulps a huge fortune but the only thing that actually turns around is fortune of the contractors and the supervising officials.

    When the refineries produce at all, their output is shipped several hundred miles from the loading platform and returned as imported fuel to reap windfall profits in “subsidy” reimbursement for an untouchable criminal syndicate that is even now thriving fantastically.

    Organised labour and civil society rouse themselves, wowing that the cuts will not come to pass. The government says there is no going back.  The scene is set for a titanic encounter between an irresistible force and an immovable object.  Government yields a little ground, and so does organised labour and civil society. A prolonged crisis is averted, but the seed of future conflict continues to germinate, undisturbed, until the subsidy phantom stirs again.

    And it did just that last week, in an ambush that President Muhammadu Buhari sprang on the public.  Buhari had valiantly resisted all manner of pressures to devalue the Naira, saying it would inflict incalculable pain on the poor.  He had vowed to hold oil prices steady for the same reason, and had even cut prices in a surprising departure from the standard practice of his predecessors, and as a demonstration of his good faith.

    Then, without warning, without consultation, without provocation and apparently totally unmindful of the consequences, the government announced a more than 80 percent increase in the price of gasoline.

    Administration officials say the increase has nothing to do with cutting the alleged subsidy but is being undertaken only as an effort to align the offshore price of the petroleum products, still largely imported, with the official onshore price. Just another step in the “de-regulation” of the downstream sector, they say.

    At N145 per litre, the new price, though much higher than the old price of N86.50k per litre, is a bargain compared with the N200 –N300 per litre that desperate consumers were willing to shell out just several weeks ago to obtain gasoline.  But nothing had prepared them for the latest increase. Importers and retailers on the other hand have got so used to gouging the public that they are loath to accept the new price regime.

    In the end, the government seems to have managed to wrong all parties at once.  It will probably wriggle out of this one, but at a high cost in public goodwill.  The importers and retailers will regroup and look after themselves.

    But this ambuscade is bound, at least in the short term, to vitiate the attentive public’s waning faith in the administration’s credibility, its avowed intentions and its ability to translate them into the beneficent change on which its election campaign was predicated.

  • Matters Miscellaneous

    Matters Miscellaneous

    It is miscellany time again, Matters Miscellaneous being the rubric I patented more than three decades ago to take editorial notice, in broad strokes and short takes and in no particular order, of some events that might otherwise get lost in the glut of occurrences, and of some personages that might otherwise feel ignored.

    First, the Budget.

    To everyone’s relief, President Muhammadu Buhari drew the curtains on the 2016 Budget Drama last week as he signed the Appropriations into law.

    While it lasted, it was the most riveting drama in town, outpacing even the Bukola Saraki corruption trial in interest and incident.   Whereas the latter involves one individual seeking desperately but vainly to cast himself as an innocent person being persecuted vicariously for the Senate over which he presides, the other has as its subject nothing less than the long-awaited financial blueprint of the Change Agenda on which Buhari was elected, with expectations of deliverance from the ruinous era of Dr Goodluck Jonathan.

    If they take their self-assigned brief half as seriously as their audience takes them, the compilers will by now have entered Nigeria’s 2016 Federal Budget into the Guinness Book of Records.

    It may not count as the budget with the highest expenditure outlay, or the one with the biggest deficit, or even the one with the longest gestation period, though it scores high on all three. It will qualify as one of the most contentious – think, as an example, of whether or not it provided for the Lagos-Calabar rail line — and definitely as one of the least innovative, what with sections of it being no more than photocopies of budget items and expenditures from previous years, being themselves photocopies of items and expenditures from the years before.

    But it will be the first to go missing, and then to resurface, only for the best authorities to declare that it was never missing in the first instance.  It will also be the first to be disowned wholly or in part by ministers and department heads, on the grounds that what they had submitted had little in common with what the lawmakers were debating.

    They finally found a portion of the provision for the Lagos-Calabar project hidden between the lines, and recovered the remaining portion from appropriations the lawmakers had made for all manner of projects for their constituencies, among them town halls and public toilets.

    So, more than a century after the amalgamation – regarded as the Mistake of 1914 and not just by Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto and his adoring followers — the two most storied cities in colonial Nigeria are to be linked by rail.

    Expectations run high that the project will create thousands of primary and secondary jobs, boost inter-state commerce, ease travel and boost tourism. Its execution will bring change  the public can see.

    It must not be just another declaration of intent.

    Switching gears, it must not be like the electricity that Dr Goodluck Jonathan (remember him?) promised to make available yanfu yanfu well before he was due for re-election, to the point that generators would become sentimental archaisms, like oil-wick lamps.

    I took Dr Jonathan for his word and was looking forward to snagging for the house upcountry one of the better sets that Aso Rock would ferry to the dump site, only to come to grief like everyone else who took him seriously, except those political conjurers who could get him to sanction the withdrawal of hundreds of millions of Naira from the Central Bank by waving across his face any document purporting to contain the key to his re-election.

    Today, the power situation is as dire as it ever was, despite the increased tariffs.

    Dr Jonathan earnestly believed that he could engineer a technological and industrial revolution and transform Nigeria without a dependable electricity supply.

    Time is running out for the Buhari administration to convince Nigerians that it does not share that belief.  The official targets for power generation are ridiculously low.  Meeting them is not going to bridge the yawning gap between supply and demand.

    Better to think big, really big.

    It would be an unpardonable oversight if this miscellany did not include Ekiti Governor Ayodele Fayose, far and away Nigeria’s most frequently reported and most frequently cited public figure.

    There is nothing so bizarre, so sophomoric, so egregious, so indecent and so repellent that you will not find Fayose doing it.  There is no thought so coarse, so vulgar and so prurient that you will not find him giving it robust utterance.

    His strictures on President Buhari have been unceasing and unsparing, but not entirely unwarranted.  The trouble is that his everyday conduct manifests all too disgustingly what he so stridently condemns in Buhari in and out of season.

    Some commentators who would like to say the things Fayose says but cannot for all kinds of reasons bring themselves to say have conferred on him the status of “voice of democracy” and “conscience of the nation.”

    Fayose as “voice of democracy,” this man who is a living refutation of virtually everything that democracy connotes – this fellow who converted seven of the 27 members of the House of Assembly into a majority, who prevents the judiciary from sitting, leads his thugs to beat up court officials, supplants the Assembly to announce passage of budget proposals it never had a chance to discuss and runs Ekiti as if it were his private estate?

    Fayose as “conscience of the nation?”  Our modern-day Tai Solarin and Gani Fawehinmi?

    Is this what Nigeria has been reduced to?

    Phew.

    A country that has Fayose as its “conscience” and an exemplar of “democracy,” howsoever defined, is well and truly finished.

    You’ll never guess who turned 80 the other day.

    Chief Ernest (ha!) Shonekan, head of General Ibrahim Babangida’s so-called National Interim Government, the fìdìhè  contraption that was mercifully interim but was not a government and was not national.  He doddered on for 83 days before the loathsome dictator Sani Abacha put him out of his delusion and supplanted him.

    Probably more from duty than conviction, Ogun State Governor Ibikunle Amosun took a full page in this newspaper yesterday to mark the milestone and to praise Shonekan for heeding “the call to higher national service” at a critical moment in Nigeria’s history.

    What Shonekan heeded was a treacherous call to subvert the sovereign will of the Nigerian people as expressed clearly and eloquently in the June 12, 1993 presidential election which no sane person now disputes that it was won by Shonekan’s Egba kinsman, Bashorun Moshood Abiola.

    The advertorial goes on to hail Shonekan as a “national treasure.”

    Some treasure.

  • Kogi: These inconclusive times

    Kogi: These inconclusive times

    Several years ago, Boko Haram elements operated almost at will in parts of Kogi State, notably  in the Igala and Ebira country, terrorising communities, blowing up prisons and setting free the inmates, and manufacturing the infernal bombs with which they wrought their signature devastation and ruin.

    They were flushed out unceremoniously.

    The terrain was never hospitable anyway, and they were too thinly dispersed to duplicate their vicious grip on the Northeast.

    Recently, however, residents of the capital, Lokoja, caught more than a whiff of Boko Haram’s ideological soul mates, the Taliban and the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), propagated wittingly or unwittingly by the state’s pathetically insecure governor, Yahaya Bello, product of a process that made a mockery of law, logic, common sense, and elementary decency.

    Residents of the city woke up one morning several weeks ago to find that, in the dead of night, some unidentified persons had bulldozed and pulverised just about every roundabout that beautified the landscape and eased the flow of traffic. Where they once stood, dusty, unsightly gashes stared at passers-by like open wounds.

    At this writing, no one has been arrested and charged with willful and malicious destruction of public property.  There is therefore reason to believe that if the demolition was not ordered from above – decreed personally by the governor, that is — it was surely carried out with his blessing.

    This conclusion is strengthened by what is being said in official circles that the structures were defective not just structurally but also aesthetically, and that they had to be taken down.

    But where is it documented that they were accident-prone or constituted safety hazards?  And why was that determination not communicated officially to the residents.

    Why, for that matter, did the structures have to be taken down, in the night, all of them, and in one fell swoop?  Why were they not taken down one or two at a time, and a schedule for their reconstruction published?

    In any case, how can a demolition derby be the priority of a government that cannot pay its employees their wages or pensions, sustain existing services and maintain public facilities — how can this be the first order of business of any government, even a clueless government headed by a an inconclusive governor aided by a legislature that is more inconclusive still?

    Scarce funds that should have gone to serve more productive ends will now have to be appropriated to rebuild structures that should not have been demolished in the first instance.

    Nigerians are used to seeing wrecking crews tear down all manner of structures on the grounds that they were built without official permits, failed to comply with specifications, constituted a danger to public and environmental safety, or that the space was required for overriding public purpose. But a government demolishing with petulant disdain public structures erected with public funds duly appropriated — perfectly innocuous, functioning structures for that matter?

    This barbarous recourse takes political brutalism to a new low.   It calls to mind the depredations of the Taliban in Pakistan, and of ISIL in Iraq and Syria.  The one has been smashing up monuments erected unto Buddha, and the other has been smashing up ancient artefacts that have over millennia stood witness to the civilisation of the Arab world.

    To be sure, the parallel is inexact.  But the conclusion is not far-fetched that the Kogi demolition derby springs from the same mindset as the depredations of the Taliban and ISIL.  It will come as no surprise, therefore, if inconclusive Governor Bello in one of those muggy nights for which Lokoja is notorious, dispatched his wrecking crew to smash up priceless artifacts of Nigeria’s colonial history dotting that city, among them Lord Lugard’s residence and Bishop Samuel Ajayi’s vicarage.

    Before Bello does so, it is necesssary to remind him that he cannot remain an inconclusive governor forever.  He will conclude his tenure one day, probably sooner than later.  Then, he will lose the immunity that has shielded him from prosecution for a contemptible crime against public property.

    The claim that the Kogi structures were torn down because they were judged unsafe or inappropriate is puerile.  By whose lights, it is necessary to ask again, were they so judged? And by what metrics?

    The real reason must be sought in the insecurity of the governing class, and the fetishism in which they have consequently sought redemption.  Exercising power without anything that can be called a mandate, Bello has more reason than any of his predecessors to feel deeply insecure, and therefore to resort to voodoo.

    When I was visiting the other day, the word out there in the streets of Lokoja was that Bello’s strategists – an ecumenical team cutting across all creeds —  had divined that all the roundabouts in the town were infernal booby traps under which lay some of the most infernal objects conceivable, interred there with the dastardly objective of making Kogi ungovernable.

    Deep inside one of the more prominent structures bulldozed, I gather that they found two corpses placed back to back and facing opposite directions.  The horrible symbolism did not escape the crack diviners.  The Ebira, the ethnic group which Bello belongs, were to be locked into permanent  enmity with the Kogi Yoruba, the so-called Okun, who constitute the political base of the rival claimant to the governorship, Abiodun Faleke.

    And this was just one of the malevolent designs encoded in more than 20 roundabouts to which the Kogi authorities took the bulldozer and the wrecking ball that muggy night.

    I was told that a room in one government office had been out of bounds for as long as anyone could remember.  There was no formal decree to that effect; it was simply that everyone high and low had learned to avoid it from a healthy instinct for self-preservation.

    Not Bello.  Acting on orders, one of his aides shot a stream of bullets into the lock in a bid to force it open.  Whereupon, I was told, a viscous red gushed out of the bullet holes as if from a geyser. Forensic experts have been working since then to unravel the mystery of the viscous red fluid. Their findings will no doubt be of interest to students of the para-normal.

    The bodies found deep inside what used to be a roundabout before Bello came inconclusively on the scene is a different matter, however.

    That site is a crime scene.

    Bello should have had the crime properly investigated with a view to bringing the perpetrators to justice.  Who were the persons entombed in the scene?  How did they meet their gruesome fate? Who placed their bodies there?  Who supervised the project, with what kind of inducement, from whom?

    I don’t envy him.

    In the Muhammadu Buhari era, life even after the most conclusive governorship is uncertain enough. An inconclusive tenure that throws up the prospect of criminal prosecution for malicious damage to public property and destruction of evidence at a crime scene has got to be the ultimate nightmare.

  • Patricia Etteh: The fall and the triumph

    Patricia Etteh: The fall and the triumph

    Even by Nigerian standards, her rise was nothing short of dizzying.

    Literally out of nowhere – no I take that back; from the remote back bench of the House of Representatives, where she had sponsored no Bill, demonstrated nothing that could be called a grasp of parliamentary procedure nor made any memorable speech, Patricia Olubunmi Foluke  Etteh was catapulted to Speaker of House, in Nigeria’s pecking order the fourth most powerful person of the Realm, ranking behind the President, the Vice President and the Senate President.

    Elected from a federal constituency in Osun in 1999 on the platform of the opposition Alliance for Democracy, she had switched to the ruling PDP, “the biggest political party in Africa” as it called itself then without research, and held her seat in 2003. She won re-election four years later on its platform and succeeded Aminu Bello Masari in June 2007, when the PDP zoned the position to the so-called Southwest, thanks to her powerful sponsors.

    I recall the giddy excitement with which she travelled, entourage in tow, from one town to another, mainly in the Southwest, seeking royal blessings and, of course, basking in the accolade of Nigeria’s fourth most powerful person.  Among her devoted followers, that was not distinction enough; with the first three in the national pecking order being men, they had to present her as Nigeria’s most powerful woman.

    They had luck on their side.  The demure First Lady, Turai Yar’Adua, who knew how matters actually stood, allowed them to indulge their conceit.  Something tells me that if this had happened during her time in Aso Rock, Dame Patience Faka Jonathan would have summoned the Speaker and warned her solemnly to desist from pressing a claim that bordered on sedition and ordered her to rein in her misguided followers.

    The Dame might not even have needed to go that far.  A mere expression of disapproval would have done the job.  Fear of courting that famous disapproval was the beginning of political wisdom.   Ask those who had the temerity not merely to allege but to positively assert that the Chibok girls had indeed been abducted and spirited to places unknown.

    Etteh’s political opponents inside and outside the House did not take kindly to her preferment.  Aided by the envious, they mocked her modest educational attainments in and out of season.  The more polite among them dismissed her as a mere hairdresser; others given to slanderous talk portrayed her as little more than the indigent hair weaver who plied her trade by the roadside.

    In vain did she point out that she was a cosmetologist, qualified from one of the finest institutions in the business — in the UK for that matter, not in some Third World backwater, and certainly not from those fly-by-night Internet-based sites that offer training up to the doctoral level in everything from basket-weaving to brain surgery in 20 easy lessons.

    Her adversaries remained unmoved even after learning that she had earned a diploma in law from the University of Abuja, with a BSc in political science “in view.”  What this phrase meant in practical terms was unclear. It could mean that she intended to enter the programme one day. Or that she was enrolled in the programme and expected to graduate some years down the line.

    The sheer elasticity of that term played into her opponents’ hands; they berated and baited and taunted her endlessly.  For a while, she mustered enough support within the House and outside the House to maintain what was always a tenuous hold on the Speakership.

    In the end, Patricia Etteh’s fall, occasioned by allegations of sleaze, was almost as precipitous as her ascent had been steep.  The main charge was that she had unlawfully spent some N620 million – yes, 620 million Naira, not dollars, and not a misprint — in upgrading her official residence, and had awarded the contracts to her cronies.

    Today, that figure would have to be in the gazillions to cause a stir in the National Assembly, even if backed by indissoluble evidence of malfeasance pieced together by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the Code of Conduct Tribunal over the learned and not-so-learned objections of a trainload of attorneys manipulating every interstice of law and process to prevent the matter from coming to trial.

    What a difference two parliamentary sessions make!

    To continue:  Etteh’s response that the upgrade was not merely for her official residence but for a “cluster of houses” in which her residence and her deputy’s were the main structures did not move her vocal critics who, claiming to constitute the “Integrity Group” within the House of Representatives, demanded her resignation..  Another group, just as vocal in its support for Etteh, registered far less on the scale of probity and conviction.

    It all came to a showdown on the House floor, where one Dino Melaye, doubling as Etteh’s personal bodyguard and stalwart of the pro-Etteh group, displayed kick-boxing skills that   only the most accomplished mixed martial arts practitioner could have put together at short notice, nevertheless came out of the dust-up with his designer agbada shredded and his nose bloodied.

    But it was too little too late. Following several weeks of turmoil in the House, Etteh resigned as Speaker on October 30, 2007.  She had been just five months on the job. Having lost her exalted perch, she did not seek re-election and disappeared from the public view.

    Speculations were rife that she was away in London taking a refresher course, preparatory to setting up a world-class beauty parlour where she would employ her skills as a cosmetologist to groom  only the richest of the rich, with special rates for her former National Assembly colleagues and their spouses.

    Slanderers, all.

    Etteh was in fact immersed in legal and forensic studies at Buckingham University, in London, alma mater to an impressive list of public figures in Nigeria, among them the late Chris Okolie, Ebenezer “Ebino Topsy” Babatope and Prince Olagunsoye Oyinlola.

    With the LL.B. of that prestigious university under her belt, she now has the distinction of being the first trained Nigerian cosmetologist and lawyer of any gender.  If that title turns out to be disputed, this being Nigeria, she can withal lay unassailable claim to being the first and only female Speaker of the House of Representatives thus far.

    Welcome back, Madam Speaker, new and improved, a study in perseverance.  Long, long may you wear your hard-won wig and gown.

    You have returned to find Dino Melaye, allowing for the Lamborghini and prime real estate holdings in Abuja exactly where you had left him nine years— engaging in the verbal equivalent of mixed martial arts in defending another beleaguered principal, Senator Bukola Saraki, whom he has declared “un-removable”even as Saraki sinks deeper and deeper in the mire of disrepute with each passing day, taking the Senate along as his hostage.

    You will also have discovered that in Abuja, untrammelled racketeering is what now passes for law-making.

  • The Senate’s Order-gate: A reprise

    The Senate’s Order-gate: A reprise

    If it seems churlish to bring up yet another tawdry matter involving Dr Bukola Saraki at a time he is battling desperately to save his increasingly tenuous political future, the blame belongs squarely in his camp.

    The matter centres on the investigation, concerning which little has been heard lately, of the status of the instrument on which Saraki and his confederates relied to foist him on the Senate as its president and Ike Ekweremadu a stalwart of the minority PDP, as deputy president.

    I will return to that issue presently.

    After Saraki had forlornly employed every trick on and off the statute books — aided by a trainload of some of the most senior attorneys in the business — to block the Code of Conduct Tribunal from putting him in the dock on charges of perjury, he declared that he was glad he was finally getting a chance to prove his innocence in a court of law.

    It was as if the CCT and those he has accused of subjecting him to “political persecution” had prevented him from having his day in court.

    Testimony by the first prosecution witness has pointed at malfeasance on Saraki’s part on a scale almost beyond belief.   But one has learned not to jump to conclusions in these matters.  The hallowed principle of audi alteram partem – Hear the other side – must be our guide.  Besides, our laws presume an accused person innocent until he or she is proven guilty.

    Still, it does not help Saraki’s cause in the least that several days into his trial, he was named in leaked documents — the so-called Panama Papers – purportedly detailing all manner of shady transactions in shell companies based in offshore tax havens, along with some of the world’s most powerful and influential figures.

    His answer to the charge that he failed to declare assets belonging to his wife as required by law was that the assets at issue belonged to his wife’s well-heeled family.  Not so, says his wife’s attorney.  The assets belong to Mrs Toyin Saraki, not to her family, the attorney has asserted. If true, this disclosure can only complicate matters for Saraki

    In whatever case, it has strengthened calls for Saraki’s resignation from his Senate colleagues, civil society organisations and diverse groups.  They are saying that, given the charges arrayed against him, he has lost the legitimacy and moral authority to remain in office. And they have vowed to embark on demonstrations to press their case.

    All this, Saraki has said dismissively, is the work of his “political foes” out to turn his ongoing trial into a tool to damage his “political career.”

    Some career!

    Such people, he said through his ill-used chief spokesman, Yusuph Olaniyonu, had started distributing money and other materials to faceless civil society organisations, market men and women associations and other shadowy groups with a view to instigating demonstrations in Lagos, Abuja and Ilorin.

    Saraki should know, being a past master at such things.

    “They believe that the ongoing trial at the Code of Conduct Tribunal provides them the opportunity to stampede Dr. Saraki out of office so that their defeated objective of getting their lackey into the office of Senate President will be realised,” the statement continued.

    Blaming everyone except himself as is his trademark, Saraki added:  “This is another desperate move by these spineless (emphasis mine) politicians to achieve through the back door what they failed to realise on the floor of the Senate.”

    Here, Saraki, sly as ever, is resorting again to the threadbare claim that his “election” to the office of Senate president over the objections of his “political foes” — in actuality the hierarchy of the ruling APC and all but a handful of the APC majority in the Senate —was the root cause of his problems.  But the Code of Conduct Bureau’s investigations predated his so-called election and were grounded substantially on petitions filed by public interest groups in Kwara where he had reigned as governor for eight rapacious years.

    There was always something underhanded, insidious and smart-alecky about the process through which Saraki, in stark pursuit of his personal ambition, conspired with all 49 members from the Opposition PDP and nine renegades from the APC to wrest control of the Senate from the ruling APC.

    The extant rules stood impregnably in the way of this creepy project.  So, new rules had to be devised and pressed into immediate service.  To create the illusion that everything was being done by the book, make it clear from the outset that the exercise was undergirded by the Senate’s own rule-book, to wit:  Standing Orders 2015 “as amended.”

    That phrase, designed to assure the public that scrupulous adherence to law lay at the heart of the process that threw up Saraki and Ekweremadu as the Senate’s leaders, instead gave away the game in a manner the conspirators had not envisaged.

    It immediately begged several searching questions:  Amended by whom?  When? Where?  And how?

    When the 7th Senate was prorogued, the law in force was the Senate Standing Orders 2007 “as amended,” according to the best authorities.  And until the Senate convened to elect new officers, it transacted no official business whatsoever.

    So, how did Standing Orders 2007 (as amended), which required all members of the Senate to participate in the nominating and voting for the Senate president and deputy president morph into House Standing Orders 2015 (as amended), which states rather lamely that members of the Senate are entitled to participate in voting for Senate president and deputy president?

    The import of this disingenuous phrasing in the 2015 document is that any senator who did not participate in nominating and voting for the Senate leaders had done so by choice.  It was designed to put a seal on the legislative coup Saraki and his confederates were planning to stage with just one-half of the Senate membership present and voting.

    As far back as July 2015, the police had determined that the document at issue was a forgery.  The Director of Public Prosecutions of the Federation, Mohammed Diri, issued a legal opinion concurring in that finding and recommended that those behind it be identified and charged with criminal conspiracy, forgery, breach of official trust, and unlawful assembly.

    Toward that end, the legal opinion also set forth some questions the police should answer definitively, namely:  Who authorised promulgation of Senate Standing Order 2105? Who published it? Who approved it?  Who paid for its publication?  Who distributed it?

    The Ministry of Justice, then headed by immediate past Solicitor-General of the Federation and permanent secretary of the Ministry of Justice, Abubakar Yola, also concurred in the legal opinion and stated that the Senate leadership election, based as it was on forged documents, was null and void.

    But the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, AbubakarMalami (SAN), who took office four months after the legal opinion was issued has not formally entered nolle prosequi, but that is the practical effect of his being disinclined to commence prosecution.

    Cui bono?  Whose interest is he serving? Whom is he protecting?

    The police seem just as disinclined to pursue investigations to answer the questions formulated by the DPP. Again, cui bono?

    What more will it take to move the nation’s chief law officer and the nation’s law enforcement agency to discharge their duties as spelled out in the Constitution that those who confected House Order 15 and their proxies have so brazenly subverted?

    Despite all the buffeting, Saraki has served notice to the “spineless politicians” aforementioned and their misguided agents that he would not allow any distraction to take him away from his responsibility as President of the Senate and Chairman of the National Assembly.

    Some responsibility!

    It is almost as if the post is his birthright.

    He is either practically unconscious or he is too far gone in his hubris and his overweening sense of entitlement to see that the game is up.

  • Growing up amidst brands

    Growing up amidst brands

    To no particular purpose, I found myself thinking the other day of some of the brands I have known since childhood. To my surprise, a good many of them are still around, a tribute to their durability in an era in which many artifacts hardly live up to their vaunted billing and many more are as evanescent as rainbow gold.

    The house in Kabba was full of brands.

    Dad drove a Mercury V8 sedan, shaved with Gillette razor blades, wrote his journal entries in Lett’s Desk Diary with a Parker 51 fountain pen with a ceramic cobalt-blue barrel and a gold clip that used only Quink ink, squirted Peak milk into his occasional afternoon cup brewed from original Lipton tea leaves that came in a yellow can, sweetened it with Tate and Lyle sugar, did his official correspondence on a portable Remington typewriter, followed world and local news on a Bush radio powered first by Exide car battery and later by a bulky Berec battery pack, and litup the family lounge at night with a Tilley gas lamp.

    Fuel for the car and for Dad’s trucking business came, first, in 44-gallon steel drums, and later from the Mobil filling station, the only one in town.  Sunflower Kerosene came in squat tin receptacles holding four imperial gallons.

    Back then, the BSA motorcycle was a big status symbol, even if it came with a single ‘silencer’. The double-silencer model was capital. Even a Raleigh or Rudge bicycle got you some attention.

    I cannot recall when I last saw or used Tate and Lyle’s cubed sugar. It dissolved far too slowly, but that was no accident, I would gather some decades later.  The manufacturers had taken into account the tropical clime in which it was marketed.  If it did not stand up to the moist and damp air, it turned deliquescent and messy.  The British were ever so thoughtful.

    Not so the French.  They made their St Louis cubed sugar dissolve almost in an instant, and it soon supplanted the British brand.

    I used to gaze with envy at two older brothers holidaying from high school as they spread Blue Band margarine on boiled yam at breakfast or lunch.

    Star beer was the beverage of entertainment; in fact it was synonymous with beer, and its pitch man was the delightful cartoon character  Sammy Sparkle, who thought nothing of stopping cricket matches because it was time for Star.  They said the beer went well with Bicycle cigarette.

    Talking of beverages:  In the beginning there was Krola, which looked and tasted like what would later enter the market as Coca cola. From a distance, Guinness Stout, with its dark like Kola could well have been another name for that line of beverage was just another name and would taste just the same.

    One day I pilfered a half-pint bottle from a crate Dad kept in a store for his visitors from out of town. Unable to open it, I drove into the crown a sharp iron stake, the type the women of the house used for checking whether the yam in the huge cast-iron kettle that stood on three legs was ready for pounding.

    As its content burst forth in a foaming cascade, I seized the bottle with both hands and took a mouthful.  It tasted like cascara sagrada, a popular purgative in those days that was almost as repellent as liquid quinine. I spilled it out immediately.  Since then I have not touched Guinness Stout.

    Ovaltine was far and away the favourite family beverage, with or without milk and sugar.  Surreptitiously shoveling heaps of the brown powder into the mouth was always a delightful even if illicit and hence punishable pleasure.  Nescafe has been just as durable.

    Remember Trebor peppermints? Whether rectangular or round, it kept your throat agreeably tingled, and freshened your mouth and your breath. I haven’t checked them out lately but they were in the market up to several years ago, handed out to shoppers in place of small change the paper currency could not accommodate.

    Good old Vaseline must be one of the most durable ointments ever manufactured.  Usually standing on the shelf beside it was Mentholatum in the white and blue container that looked like a snuff box.  It was balm you used for almost every purpose.  Thermogene, in the white and red snuff box, was for external use only.

    If you bruised or sprained your knee or ankle, there was always Dr Sloan’s liniment, bearing Dr Sloan’s lean, mustachioed visage on the pack in which the bottle came and on the bottle itself. Are you by any chance reading this, Professor Remi Olatunbosun, alumnus of Igbobi, formerly of the University of Lagos, and most recently of the University of Birmingham?

    Talking of medications, there was the analgesic of first resort, APC, which the former first lady Patience Faka Jonathan, having regard to the contemporary political formation of the same name, dismissed as an expired drug?   In the event, what expired was the debauched kleptocracy over which her husband gleefully presided.

    For tough laundry jobs, there was Key soap, which came in long bars.  More delicate laundry called for Sunlight, which came in tablets as did the pinkish toilet soap Lifebuoy.  I haven’t seen Sunlight soap in a long time, but Lifebuoy is alive and well.  I recall buying a tablet from a supermarket in the United States last summer, more from nostalgia than from pressing need.

    If you wanted to add some sparkle to white fabrics, you soaked them in water containing a pinch of Robin Blue (aquamarine), rinsed gently, and put them out to dry. The stuff is still very much around.

    If you wanted your skin to be as lustrous as that of eight of every ten film stars who regularly used it, then Lux toilet soap was your brand, though I had no idea who a film star was.  Lux is still on the supermarket shelf.  Is Pepsodent still there?   It was the toothpaste you graduated to after dispensing with your chewing stick.  Yardley’s was the obligatory face powder for men.,

    The first men’s designer shirt I recall noting was Aristocrat.  Later came Rael Brook and Arrow and Double 2 and Van Heusen, made by the finest European clothiers.  Of these, only Arrow and Van Heusen are still highly visible in the stores, but they are more likely to have been made in the sweatshops of Thailand or Vietnam or Pakistan.

    Cecil Gee leather shoes with two-inch high crepe soles were à la mode.  Does anyone still wear them?  Then there was the quiet elegance of Clarks sandals, of which the quintessence was perhaps the Cross sandals.

    Even today, we still think of Afghanistan as a remote, inaccessible place that might as well be on the other side of the moon.  But it existed back then in our daily life through the indelible ink Kandahar, probably made in that city, now a metaphor for the mayhem that always places that country in the news focus for the wrong reasons.

    Asepso, the tablet soap containing mercury iodide, was a favourite among those bleaching the skin or those who wanted to make their faces picture-perfect.  Lather it on to the face, leave for several minutes, then wash it off, and you got the desired result.  If you let the lather stay on the fact for too long it could turn your face into a puffy mess.

    The Singer sewing machine has run the entire gamut from manual to electric and to electronic, apparently without compromising whatever it was that made the brand synonymous with sewing.

    Back then, Hoover used to be the first and last thing, indeed the only thing, in vacuum cleaning.  So much so that one of the officials of the Abacha regime grew up bearing that name, on account of his predilection for gobbling up every good thing in his sight.

    He was the original obtainer.

  • Our endangered value system

    Our endangered value system

    Wherever two or more Nigerians are gathered, you can be sure that they are talking about the Nigerian Condition – the crippling fuel crisis,the epileptic power supply, the Naira that fetches less and less even as it is harder and harderto come by, mass unemployment, delayed salaries and pensions, Boko Haram’s relentlessscorched-earth campaign,the murderous menace of ‘Fulani” herdsmen, syndicated kidnapping, shrinking opportunities everywhere, and, of course, Dasukigate, the political corruption scandal that has kept the country enthralled like a telenovela.

    It is a calendar of woes with few prospects of imminent reprieve, this dominant narrative of the Nigerian Condition

    The Change they were promised – the Change they chose when they voted Muhammadu Buhari into power, has not occurred, the narrative continues. He has been in the saddle for eight months, but isn’t that long enough to end the mess and turn the country around perceptibly?

    But there is another narrative that rarely enters into discussions of the Nigerian Condition, though it is at least as salient as the dominant one and its consequences probably more deleterious.

    That narrative centres on the collapse of the value system.

    Every society, community, group, or institution functions on a system of values. Sometimesthe values are explicit, as when they are spelled out in code, a declaration of fundamental principles. Sometimes they are implicit, when they flow from an ideology.

    But whether explicit or implicit, the value system defines broadly what is acceptable or unacceptableconduct, what is of good report and what is not, what is honourable and what is not. It is the compass by which a society navigates the challenges of the era

    When the value system is eroded or abandoned, the result is what the French sociologist Émile Durkheim called anomie, or normlessness. The standards of right and wrong become fluid. The restraints that govern social behavior as well as institutions lose their binding force.

    If Nigeria has not reached the point of anomie, it is dangerously close. The evidence is allaround us.

    Parents think nothing of procuring for their children the means to cheat in public examinations, and teachers are all too available to aid and abet the process. Persuaded that this way of doing business is not a sure-fire guarantee of success, two desperate parents, both university graduates, took turns last year to write the matriculation examination for their son who had not made the cut in previous attempts.

    In Bauchi State, a school principal was dismissed because he made it impossible for his studentsto cheat in the Senior School Certificate Examinations. By preventing his wards from cheatingwhen everyone else was doing so, his employers remonstrated, he had wantonly placed them at a competitive disadvantage.

    Educational standards have fallen precipitously because the system has been corrupted. Former Central Bank Governor Charles Soludo once complained that many of our university graduates are “unemployable.” One watches aghast as lawmakers introducing themselves on the floor of the National Assembly declare, without the slightest embarrassment:”My names are . . .”

    It is notorious that students in higher institutions are often compelled to offer gratification ofone kind or another to their lecturers to pass crucial exams or have their final projects approved. So ingrained is the practice that it even has a name:  “Sorting.”

    The judiciary is mired in sleaze and credible allegations of the same.  The news media are similarly circumstanced.  The country is awash in religion but starved of righteousness.

    Nothing is intrinsically right or wrong anymore. If you can get away with it, it must be right. If you criticize public officials, as I often do in my line of business, you are told that you wereactuated by envy or religious prejudice or ethnic bigotry, and that you would do no better and would probably do much worse if you were the one holding that office. So, shut up.

    I am told that when the distinguished historian Professor Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi returned from the UK after his doctorate, he was serenaded into his home-town Ikole -Ekiti by schoolchildren and members of the community. This was the kind of honour usually reserved for visiting ecclesiastics of the calibre of the Archbishop of the Anglican Province of West Africa, or the Anglican Bishop of the old Ondo-Benin Diocese.

    Today, society is more likely to honor wealth than academic or professional distinction, regardless of the source of that wealth.

    At least one generation of Nigerians is growing up believing that this is the way things havealways been done in Nigeria. Because History is no longer taught as a discipline, the onlyNigeria they know is the one they are living through. According to one report, high schoolstudents in Ogun State know more about Obafemi Martins the international soccer player thanabout Obafemi Awolowo, one of Nigeria’s pre-eminent political leaders and a foremost indigene of Ogun State.

    By one estimate, 70 percent of drugs in the Nigerian market are fake or adulterated. They maypromote fake recovery, but they are just as likely to lead to real deaths. The drug merchants and their vendors care only about their profit, not about the often lethal outcomes of their pernicious trade.

    The sense of sacrifice has been lost. What is in it for me? What can my country do for me? These are the questions most of our compatriots are asking, not what they can do for their country. Thus, only a handful of the nearly 500 delegates at the National Conference inaugurated in 2014 by former President Goodluck Jonathan declined the hefty stipend they were paid for what should havebeen seen as a call to serve one’s country at a critical moment in its history.

    The public at least has some idea of what the delegate were paid from the public purse for the four months the Conference lasted. Nobody knows just how much lawmakers in the National Assembly have elected to pay themselves. But the compensation package rumoured to border on the obsceneincludes a wardrobe allowance, as well as a “hardship allowance.”

    It is only in Nigeriathat being a member of the legislature is considered a hardship that requires special compensation.

    Even in these difficult times, the Senate is set, under the 2016 National Budget, to buy a luxury American-specification SUV for each of its 109 members to facilitate committee oversight, at a cost to the public of about N4.7 billion. The vehicles will be sold to each assignee as scrap after four years, and a newpurchasing spree will start again.

    Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the collapse of the value system is the scant regard for the sanctity of human life that now pervades the system, reaching even into our universities that were supposed to be governed by a higher culture.

    There is no more sickening example of the bestiality that has overtaken the Ivory Tower than the beheading at Abia State University, Uturu, of two students, and the use of those ghastly trophies as makeshift goal posts for soccer practice.

    This, in brief, is the dimension of the collapse of the value system, the other narrative thatrarely enters into discussions of the Nigerian Condition.It portends greater danger to society than the collapse of the economy.

    The economy can always be revived over time, drawing on the tested tools of research and on examples elsewhere. But it will take at least a generation to restore a collapsed value system.

    The journey is yet to start in earnest.

     

    *An earlier version of this essay appeared in the inaugural issue (February 14, 2016) of Kufena, the magazine of St Paul’s (Zaria) Old Boys Association.

  • Corruption: Their functional perspective

    Corruption: Their functional perspective

    Barely two years after the euphoric celebration of the independence that was supposed to usher in life abundant, life for the average Nigerian was anything but abundant.  Bowing to necessity, the Federal Government proclaimed an austerity programme that reflected the Nigerian condition, which Highlife maestro Victor Olaiya captured in song.

    In rough translation, the lyrics went like this:  Times are hard/There is no money out there/Men are yearning/Women are yearning/Everyone is yearning for money.

    From the hardest-hit in the population came this question poignantly and insistently:  “When will this independence end?”

    Some 50 years later, Nigeria is in the grip of an economic convulsion. There is no money in town is what one hears everywhere.  The little money in circulation has lost much of its purchasing power.  Try to shave a Naira or two off the price of a bunch of bananas or a pineapple or a piece of yam from the roadside vendor, and what you get is a polite rebuke.

    “Oga, you never hear say dollar don go up?  It is never “Oga, you never hear say Naira don fall?”  It is almost as if the dollar is the national currency, not the Naira.

    A government that came to power promising Change has made exposing corruption in public life its first order of business.  What has since come to light is that the word “corruption” is a wholly inadequate metaphor for the systematic and remorseless looting of public assets during the preceding administration of Dr Goodluck Jonathan even as it chanted ceaselessly that it was on a transformative mission.

    Jonathan and his team transformed Nigeria all right, but into the most debauched kleptocracy in recent memory.

    Just when you think that the most brazen instance of corruption has been uncovered, the next day’s bulletin reports another instance of corruption on a scale much larger, wrought by persons occupying positions of power, influence and public trust.  The following day brings fresh revelations of the same kind, only vaster in scope and more ingenuous in execution.  The day after that is guaranteed to bring more revelations that will stagger even persons gifted with the most larcenous imagination.

    It was heartening when it began.  The new sheriff is living up to his billing.  Finally, someone who has the will and the credibility has taken on the monster.  He may not slay it, but he will tame it over time and create an environment in which public funds will be spent for public projects, instead of ending up in the capacious maws of officials and their confederates.

    Lately, however, Nigerians are getting less and less impressed.   They have begun to question the methodology and even the motive of the anti-corruption drive.  Those who concede that the anti-corruption agenda signals a new direction nevertheless point out that it does not even begin to translate into the Change they expected the new administration to launch.  They say yester- year’s problems are still with them, intractable as ever.  Many are dispirited, and not a few are disillusioned.

    “Na anti-corruption we go chop?” they chorus.

    But that is the more constructive version of the anti-corruption critique, rooted in legitimate expectation of a coordinated and sustained assault on the problems that make life in Nigeria a daily grind.

    There is another critique that has to be judged frankly subversive.  It states unequivocally that Nigerians were far better off in the time of unbridled pillage.  Its blunt demand?  Bring Back Our Corruption. The battle cry even comes with a hashtag, this vulgar imitation, trivialisation even, of #Bring Back our Girls, the campaign to secure the release of the Chibokgirls still being held in parts unknown by Boko Haram.

    Theirs is a functional perspective on corruption, built on economic calculations of the rawest kind with stomach infrastructure at its core.  Here is their anthem:

    With Corruption a bag of pure water was N80

    Without Corruption a bag of pure water is N150

    With Corruption dollar was N180

    Without Corruption dollar is N400

    With Corruption I have 20hrs electricity at low tariff

    Without Corruption I have seven hrs electricity with 45 per cent increase in tariff

    With Corruption keke to my house takes N50

    Without Corruption keke to my house takes N100

    With Corruption smallest indomie was N40

    Without Corruption smallest indomie is N60

    # IStandWithCorruption

    #Bringbackourcorruption.

    The shrinking content of the Titus sardine brand seems to have hit the #BringBackOurCorruption Brigade particularly hard.  Originally there were four pieces of fish; then it was reduced to three, and now it is two.  “In years to come, you will open a can of sardine and see ‘Try Again.’”

    Their case, as I see it, is founded on the well-known fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc, Latin for”after this; therefore because of this.”Its classic formulation is:”Since event Y followed event X,  event Y must have been caused by event X.”

    Applied to the present case, the Bring Back Our Corruption campaigners are saying in effect that since the cost of everything skyrocketed after the anti-corruption drive went into full throttle, the escalation must have been caused by the drive to curb corruption.

    Nor does their misapprehension end there.

    During the period that serves as their reference point, the oil market, though less buoyant than before, had not collapsed.  Oil revenues provided the foreign exchange that catered to the huge national appetite for imports and kept the cost of consumer goods and services stable.  The sharp fall in receipts from oil heightened the demand for scarce dollars and exerted great pressure on the Naira, resulting in a fall in its value.

    The fall was exacerbated by desperate speculators hoping to force a devaluation of the Naira so they could make a fortune on its woes, but were checkmated by an adamant President Muhammadu Buhari.  Now some stability has returned to the Naira.

    The campaigners are willfully ignorant of this trajectory.  They are unlikely to be deterred by an appeal to facts or by serious argument.They are unlikely to be moved by a showing that if  Nigerians fared better – if they could feast on noodles and sardines — when the system was mired in corruption, they could have upgraded to caviar and Champagne if corruption had been less pervasive; that the answer to their privations is not more corruption but less.

    At this rate, it cannot be long before they demand that corruption be proclaimed a national ideology since, in their reckoning, it is sure to guarantee life more abundant for them and their children and their children’s children.

  • What if it had been Serena?

    What if it had been Serena?

    The tennis world is still reeling from Maria Sharapova’s disclosure last week that she had tested positive for a banned drug in an investigation conducted last January, just before the  Australia Open.

    So are the manufacturers of luxury goods, of which she is a richly-compensated brand ambassador.

    From the International Tennis Federation (ITF) the 7th ranked woman tennis player in the world faces the prospect of the standard four-year ban from competitive tennis that will almost effectively end her playing career.  From her sponsors, the glamorous Russian stands to forfeit the lucrative deals that have made her the highest paid and arguably the wealthiest female athlete in the world.

    Full marks to her publicity and public relations machine for swinging into pre-emptive damage control.

    Instead of waiting for the World Anti-Doping Agency to make the finding public, they orchestrated the televised appearance seen around the world that was at once a subdued display of betrayed innocence, an expression of remorse,   She said the whole thing was a huge mistake, that she accepted responsibility for it, and that she would like to be given another chance

    She admitted almost tearfully that she had been taking the drug Medlonium since 2006 for a variety of health issues and did not know that it had recently been added to the list of banned drugs. It was a “huge mistake,” she said,

    The anti-doping agency banned the drug because it helps athletes by delivering more oxygen to muscles, thus potentially enhancing performance, and although not a few athletes have been suspended this year for testing positive for it. Sharapova said she was not aware that it had been added to the banned list.

    The unfolding story suggests otherwise.

    The indications are that she had been warned by email up to five times about the drug. Perhaps the most pointed warning came in a December 22, 2015, email, with the subject line “Main Change to the Tennis Anti-Doping Programme, 2016.”

    Sharapova insists she had not opened that email.

    An earlier mail dated December 18 had conveyed a notice to the same effect, but Sharapova said the notice was buried deep in the copy and that she had not read it to the end.  Nor was it clear, from all the warnings, she said, that the drug she was taking, mildonate, was the same thing as the banned drug Medlonium.

    When it was pointed out that the manufacturers intended the drug to be used only two or three times a year over a six-week period, Sharapova said she had not been using it continuously for 10 years as her earlier statement might have suggested.

    The drug at issue is manufactured in Latvia and distributed only in the Balkan countries.  It is not approved for use in Europe and the United States.  This would seem to suggest that Sharapova had a special arrangement for her supply.  Her legal team insists that, whatever the case, the dosage she has been taking is too small to be effective.

    Given all the circumstances, the ITF is going to have a dickens to determine the appropriate sanctions.

    As I followed the drama, one question kept tugging at my mind:  What if it had been Serena Williams?  Serena who holds 21 grand slam titles under her belt – Sharapova has five;  Serena the best female tennis player in the world and one of the best players of any gender who ever wielded a racquet; Serena, probably the world’s most vilified athlete?

    No serious charge of doping has ever swirled around her, but if you attended only to the sensational press and social media, you would think she is just a dope sack on two legs.  With those sturdy calf muscles and the bulging biceps and the rippling abs, what further evidence does anyone need that she practically lives on steroids?

    That, they insist, is the secret of her phenomenal success, not her preternatural skills, her usually superb conditioning, and her fierce competitiveness, her mental toughness, and her dedication to her game – the factors that have placed her in a class by herself and on which she has drawn to beat all comers, including Sharapova in 18 of their last 19 matches.

    This is a manifestation of the racism that runs through sport.  In America, it has not got to the point where they throw bananas into the tennis court the way hoodlums throw bananas into the soccer pitch when the competing teams feature black players.  You don’t hear the racist catcalls directed at the black players.

    But Serena Williams rarely gets the kind of crowd support she gets on foreign soil.  Even when she is playing at home against a foreign player, you sense that the crowd is rooting for her opponent.  She is on record as saying that she feels more comfortable playing abroad than at home.  I have not inspected the record, but I suspect she has won more games abroad than at home

    So, what if it was Serena that was caught doping?

    The reporting would have used up all the synonyms in the Thesaurus for “cheat,” and would have made up new ones.   The sports media would have stated flatly that she had juiced up for every match she ever played, and that the only way to redeem the game was to strip her of every title she has ever won, and thereafter to ban her permanently from competitive tennis.

    There would have been no end to the name-calling.   Sharapova has already been neologised into Shara-Dopa.  Who knows what they would have made of Serena’s name?  It does not lend itself so easily to neologising as Sharapova does, but I am sure they would have come up with something cute and unforgettable.

    Serena’s parents would have been dragged into the matter.  I suspect the media would go so far as to assert, without fear and without research, that it was a family affair; that her controversial father had obtained the steroids and had been administering it personally

    Everyone of her sponsors would have terminated instead of merely suspending their relationship.  Not that she has many sponsors anyway.  It is one of the perversities of the system that sponsors would rather treat with a glamorous Number 7 or even No 10 on the circuit than with the very best.

    As a result, Serena makes the bulk of her earnings from winning competitions, whereas Sharapova makes hers from endorsements.  Her haul from that source alone dwarfs Serena’s total earnings.

    I am reminded of another glamorous Russian who came before Sharapova and showed great promise but soon fizzled.  Yet, Anna Kournikova made a huge fortune in endorsements, leading Sports Illustrated to quip:  “Of what use is a good backhand when you have a hot body?”

    Serena does not have the hot body that Sharapova has parlayed into a highly successful brand.  But she has something far more enduring – 21 Grand Slam titles, just one short Steffi Graf’s record 22 titles but more impressive in my view, considering that the field in which she won the titles is far deeper than in which Graf ever played, featuring some 20 players, anyone among whom could win a championship, whereas there were only about six such players in Graf’s time.

    It is a mark of her class that she has not been smitten with schadenfreude, unlike some of the other female players on the Tour, who would not be sad to see Sharapova sent into early retirement.

  • Dark days in America

    Dark days in America

    YOU know that adversity has well and truly come to the forest when the pawpaw fruit tree takes the floor at a gathering of the denizens and demands to be counted as one its stalwarts.

    You know that it is a dark era in American politics when the prohibitive front runner for the Presidential ticket of the Republican Party –hereafter the GOP, as in Grand Old Party – is the foul-mouthed Donald Trump, his immediate challenger is the venal Ted Cruz, and the other contestant whom it would be courteous to call a challenger is the robotic Marco Rubio.

    These three of the four candidates still standing are spawns of the extreme right wing that has seized the heart and soul of the GOP over the past three decades, ably supported by a string of ultra-conservative think-tanks, so-called evangelicals, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, a posse of millionaires determined to use money to bend the political   process to their will, and a Supreme Court that is for all practical purposes the high council of the GOP in judicial robes.  They are creatures of the people who produced Sarah Palin and similar aberrations.

    Now the very forces that created them are aghast and flailing desperately to block the frontrunner and promote one of the other two main contenders the least of three evils.

    Trump outscores Cruz and Rubio in notoriety and villainy, but both seem cut from the same cloth.

    Take Cruz first.

    In 1997, Michael Wayne Haley was prosecuted for stealing a calculator from a store. The crime carried a maximum two-year prison term. But prosecutors mistakenly treated Haley as a habitual offender. The judge did not detect the error, and sentenced Haley to a jail term of 16 years.

    The mistake was eventually discovered and Haley sought relief.  Ted Cruz, then solicitor-general of Texas, would have none of it and petitioned the Supreme Court to keep Haley in prison for the full 16 years.

    “Justice Anthony Kennedy’s interjection during oral arguments was telling.  “Is there some rule that you can’t confess error in your state?” he asked.  Haley was subsequently released. But by then, he had spent six years in jail.

    New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks cited this case in characterising Ted Cruz as “a stranger to most of what would generally be considered the Christian virtues: humility, mercy, compassion and grace.” Cruz’s behaviour in the Haley case, he wrote,”is almost the dictionary definition of pharisaism: an overzealous application of the letter of the law in a way that violates the spirit of the law, as well as fairness and mercy.”

    Until he was sandbagged in one debate by Chris Christie, the New Jersey Governor who has since dropped out of the race, Marco Rubio, the first –term U. S. Senator for Florida with the razor- thin résumé, carried on as if he was running against Obama, whom he addressed in the most disrespectful terms and accused of the heinous crime of trying to “change” America.

    The election, he said repeatedly, was about who was ready to serve as commander-in-chief from Day One, as if being the son of a bar tender and a hotel maid, a circumstance he always brought up, was the ultimate preparation for that supreme office.   That is how far gone he is in his delusion.  Though running a distant third, he has even urged Cruz to get out of the race and leave him to face Trump.  He says he is the only Republican candidate who can beat the likely Democratic candidate, Clinton, in a presidential election.

    It is to these two, Cruz and Rubio, that the GOP establishment has turned for salvation.

    They are pouring tens of millions of dollars into television advertising across key states, portraying Trump, for whom there is no sympathy in this corner, as a figure without any redeeming value.

    They had looked on with glee as Trump challenged President Barack Obama’s American citizenship, claiming that the people he had sent to Hawaii, Obama’s homestate, had come up with findings that would shock everyone.  He never released the alleged findings, and the news media did not challenge him to produce them or shut up.

    They had looked on approvingly as their ranks obstructed one Obama initiative after another, treated him with the utmost contempt, cast him as a Moslem terrorist-sympathiser, threatened to impeach him for “treason” and sought to de-legitimise him in every way inconceivable – all in an effort “to take the country back.”  They did not stir when First Lady Michelle Obama was portrayed in their media as first cousin of a chimpanzee that escaped from a zoo in Oklahoma.

    While all this was going on, Mitt Romney, President Obama’s opponent in the 2012 presidential election, would only say that he would not have used the language of Obama’s calumniators.  The calumny itself apparently sat well with him.

    In that election Romney actively sought and revelled in Trump’s endorsement, lauding the property developer as one of the most successful businessmen in America and as someone who has created thousands of jobs.

    Now, irony of ironies, it is the same Romney leading the Stop Trump brigade, denouncing Trump as a phony and a fraud, and as morally unfit to lead America.

    Romney apparently does not realise that he is one of the elite the movement conservatives have rejected to embrace the Trumps and Cruzes and Rubios – the voters whose minds they had poisoned with their racist rants, their homophobia, their rejection of science, their craven bid to disenfranchise African American and Hispanic voters, and their perversion of Holy Writ.

    Romney has little following and even less credibility. The health insurance scheme he instituted as governor of Massachusetts was so successful that it served as the template for what has come to be known as Obamacare.

    Yet, sensing the undercurrent of reflex opposition to Obamacare from the GOP camp, he vowed in 2012 that if elected president, he would repeal it in his first day in office.  Such is the cynicism, the utter lack of principle that drives those who created and now seek desperately to  ditch the monsters haunting and threatening to devour them.

    For all I care, they can stop Trump and foist either Cruz or Rubio or any other demagogue on the American electorate in November.  The centre has shifted from under their feet.  Long live their distemper.