The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • Annals of obtainment: A postscript

    Annals of obtainment: A postscript

    As the running scandal that is now sure to go down in the annals of sleaze as Dasukigate seeps drip by tawdry drip into the fount of public discourse, one cannot but marvel at the casualness, the utter disregard for consequences with which vast sums of money earmarked for national security were handed out even to persons who had not set out to obtain.

    One veteran says he has never met Dasuki and never obtained from him.  He was minding his  own business when they brought him $230,000, a far cry from the N100 million they claim to have given him.

    They didn’t tell him the source.  They didn’t tell him what it was for.  He apparently assumed that it was for old times’ sake, or for business as usual, not knowing that it was stolen money.

    Pardon the digression, but it brings to mind Dominique Strauss-Kahn , the randy billionaire former president of the IMF who would have been elected president of France in 2012 if he had not sexually assaulted a maid in a swanky New York hotel the previous year.  On trial for participating in  prostitution ring in France, he pleaded that since the women were naked, he had no way of knowing that they were prostitutes.

    Maybe the women should have put on identifying apparel, just as the package delivered to the veteran, aforementioned, should have been stamped “Stolen Money.”

    One free-floating, crackerjack social scientist was busy in his book-lined study putting the finishing touches to his magnum opus, “The Unified Theory of Society,” when National Security came calling for help. Dutiful patriot that he is, he shoved aside the papers on his desk and went to work.

    As if  partial recompense for the Nobel Prize they thought he should have been awarded long ago if those doddering old men in Oslo had not been intellectually fossilised, National Security handed him N450 million for his labours.

    One expired political godfather to whom they said they handed N100 million says it was actually N500 million and that he simply passed it on, N100 million apiece, to the lesser godfathers in the zone, taking nothing for himself.

    Those who claim to know him well say they believe him.  They say he would rather donate than obtain, and that it is not for nothing that he is called “Donatus” — behind his back.

    Amidst the back and forth, one strand of Dasukigate risks getting lost.  As the story goes, on hearing that huge sums of money were being handed out without appropriation, one influential lawmaker went to the main depository and threatened to bring the matter before the appropriate oversight body of one of the legislative houses unless he was, shall we say, accommodated.

    Knowing that this was no idle threat and that the fellow was firmly resolved to obtain from   the colossal slush fund they were dispensing, they quickly handed him N250 million in hush money.  So the story goes, at any rate.

    Are the authorities investigating it?

    Then there is the story set in Akwa Ibom that may or may not be related to Dasukigate.  In a controversial raid on a wing of Government House Complex in the state capital, Uyo, security operatives searching for illegal arms reported stumbling upon “a stockpile of dollars, “not the stockpile of illegal arms they expected to find.

    What became of the stockpile?  Has its owner –or custodian – been identified? Where did it come from, and what purpose or purposes was it meant to serve?

     

    Jankara journalism

     

    After Bode George conned him into doing a stultifying white-wash job on the contract-splitting scam at the Nigerian Ports Authority, you would think that the self-certified chief of Area Boys  and leading practitioner of Jankara journalism has learned some lessons in real journalism and  humility.

    Fat chance.

    There he was again the other day, this media wayfarer, pontificating that the Nigerian print media establishment is made up of “the Zombie Press” and others, with apparently nothing in between.

    Irrespective of the issue at hand,” he has written (Vanguard, October 11, 2015), “all the reader needs to know is where the interest of the owner lies and he can virtually write all the columns, editorials, comments, letters to the editor that would appear,”  pro and contra, in the “Zombie Press, “ of which he names this newspaper as an exemplar.

    He cites as one of his two test cases Saraki’s “emergence” as Senate president.  All the “journalists” (inverted commas in the original) writing for the Zombie Press, he found as he  had confidently expected, took the same position, despite the fact that “some of these writers are Professors (including Emeritus Professors), and holders of advanced degrees.”

    This Emeritus Professor of Journalism holds and has stated at every opportunity that Saraki’s path to the presidency of the Senate was base and ignoble. That view is shared by tens of thousands,  perhaps millions of Nigerians who are not in any way connected with this newspaper.

    Anyone who sincerely believes that Saraki’s conduct in the matter is the quintessence of propriety and nobility should come out forthrightly and say so, instead of sniping at those who hold a contrary view or ascribing improper motives to them.

    The second test case in the Jankara study – such as it was — centres on perceptions of President Muhammadu Buhari’s performance in office.

    Those “Zombies” who called Yar’Adua  “Baba Go Slow” in 2007 are now unanimous in  asking Nigerians to allow Buhari to operate at his own pace, whereas the other Zombies who had supported Yar’Adua back in 2007 have been carpeting Buhari for being too slow.  In each case, the editors operate as if the only view that counts is that of those who agree with their publisher, the study asserts.

    I don’t know what happens at the paper where the researcher moonlights, but that is not how The Nation is run.  You have to wonder whether he really reads the newspaper. The views expressed on its pages are far more nuanced than a casual researcher can fathom.

    Plus, they don’t do nuance at Jankara, I gather.

    Then, this :  Those ‘Zombie” newspapers “are so predictable that one must ask: whatever happened to self-respect? Is it possible that 20 educated and intelligent adults could agree on every important issue – unless “none thinks very much”?

    Do the columnists and editorial writers and editors he is excoriating in fact agree on every important issue?  What is the evidence for this sweeping assertion on the basis of which the author gratuitously questions the education, intelligence and self-respect or persons, many of whom are not one whit less educated, less intelligent and less self-respecting than he is?

    Pity they also don’t do civility at Jankara.

     

    Worse than Jankara journalism

     

    Late this past Sunday, a friend called my attention to a longish piece in Nigerian Tribune purporting to be an interview with the eminent legal scholar and Senior Advocate,            Professor Itse Sagay.

    Three or four paragraphs into it, I was already doubting its authenticity.  By the time I was done, my doubts were confirmed. The statements credited to Professor Sagay lacked the clarity of thought and the elegance of exposition that are his hallmark.  In part fact-free and in part driven by bilious rage, the piece seemed to have been put together by an Olisa Metuh clone.

    It has since been confirmed that the “interview” was a forgery through and through.

  • Obtainers Unlimited

    Obtainers Unlimited

    The word “obtain” has been on my mind lately.

    Somehow, I had assumed, and was going to assert, that you will not find the word “obtainer” in the dictionary. Out of a sound instinct for self-preservation, I decided to look it up online, and there it was, denoting a person who obtains.

    It reminds me, pardon the digression, of a story told me long ago by one of the most gifted Nigerians who ever wielded a scalpel.  He had independently developed and perfected a technique that greatly simplified a traditional surgical procedure that cut hospital stay as well as post-operation recovery period drastically.

    He shared with leading colleagues in the field the draft of a scientific paper he was going to submit to the leading journal of the trade and invited their comments and criticism.  All of them said the technique was a revolutionary breakthrough that would cement his place in the world of surgery,.

    Just as he was about to dispatch the paper to the editors of the journal, an inner voice told him to stretch his literature review back to the time of the ancients.  So he repaired to the Medical Library, in Yaba, for a final check.

    He found, much to his chagrin, that a Greek physician, a contemporary of Hippocrates, had described the very technique that he and well-regarded colleagues had regarded as a revolutionary breakthrough worthy of the Lister Medal of the Royal College of Surgeons, and perhaps a future Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine.

    It is amazing what one could find if one just searched diligently and long enough.

    To return to the matter at hand, I did not know that the word “obtainer” is in the dictionary. That finding gave me the confidence to use that word, pluralised, in the headline.  From “obtainer,” it is but a short step to “obtainment,” which can mean the act of obtaining, acquiring, or getting something.

    As words go, there is nothing special about the word “obtain.”   It is one of the most ordinary words in the English language, used routinely and indeed almost reflexively in all manner of contexts.  But it has never lain far from my political consciousness since the time when military president Ibrahim Babangida fooled the political class into embracing his duplicitous political programme, described by the noted political scientist, Richard Joseph, as “one of the most sustained exercises in political chicanery ever visited upon a people.”

    A fellow who went by the name of Professor “Eric Opia dropped on the scene from parts unknown and became, just like that, a major contender for governor in the newly-created Delta State.

    One of the primaries, later voided, was a contest not of ideas or programmes, but of which aspirant could dispense the most cash.  And how the residents of Warri and environs, the major theatre of the contest, delighted in their good fortune!  As reported by the perceptive Guardian political editor Akpo Esajere, the common salutation among the younger elements was no longer  “Ol’ boy how you dey?” but “Ol’ boy, you don obtain?”

    I was instantly fascinated with the locution.  “Obtain,” one had been taught back in high school, is a transitive verb.  It always goes with the object.   But in the Warri usage, there was no subject.  What they were obtaining — the object – was not stated.  Yet, it required no imagination to figure it out.

    Since then, the locution has been embedded in my political consciousness and journalistic bag of tools.  And it has framed my perception of the absorbing, even if maddening national drama that reached a high point of sorts with the arraignment in Abuja yesterday of one of the principal actors, Colonel (retired) Sambo Dasuki, most recently National Security Adviser, and three of his aides on money laundering charges.

    According to documents that trickled into the public domain day after passing day over the past three weeks, the security vote operated by the Office of the National Security Office (ONSA), Dasuki’s fancy title for his station, was reduced to a piggy bank from which the PDP and just about anyone who could peddle any ware or remedy, however dubious, could “obtain “on  President Goodluck Jonathan’s say-so.

    And many indeed are those who now occupy the gallery of obtainers.  A broadcast licensee who hadn’t paid his employees for some 20 months – and probably still hasn’t — shows the President  a proposal for publicising his achievements and boosting his re-election chances.  For his pains he is directed to go and obtain N2 billion and some pocket change.

    A high-living media mogul who runs his sprawling empire on the Mobutu Principle tells Jonathan that if his Administration had been alive to its responsibilities, Boko Haram would not have succeeded in bombing his printing plant.  And since the Administration was re-building the UN complex in Abuja that the same Boko Haram had bombed into ruins, it ought to compensate him for his losses.  Jonathan directs him to obtain a token contribution of more than N500 million from the piggy bank.

    Some newspapers – you know them — print several hundred copies a day, for local circulation, just to keep up the pretence of still being in the business.  Even if they were minded to, they were not in a position to suffer any losses when jittery security officials seized distribution.

    Yet they were not averse to obtaining N10 million each as compensation for the loss they allegedly suffered from the disruption of their business.

    One fellow who cannot be trusted to recite key passages in the most sacred texts without stumbling obtains more than N400 million from the piggy bank as “spiritual allowance.” Not to be outdone, a prayer warrior of indeterminate bona fides obtains the equivalent for intercession.

    Expired political godfathers with no constituencies whatsoever also obtain, though it is not clear that they filed demands.  The Arch Fixer who has been put out of the lucrative business that has sustained him for decades obtains, too, in the hundreds of millions.

    To augment the paltry official income that comes nowhere near what he used to make as a top professional in private practice, a very senior administration official develops the habit of  obtaining a princely N20 million a month from the inexhaustible piggy bank that Dasuki kept in the ONSA.

    Funds for mobilising voters in the Northwest for Jonathan’s re-election reportedly came out of the piggy bank, plus hundreds of millions for accredited delegates to the PDP Convention from which Dr Jonathan came out as the party’s sole presidential candidate.

    So did funds for members of the House of Representatives, for unspecified purposes.  In the bazaar that was the ONSA, it was not necessary to specify a purpose for obtaining.  It was okay  to obtain for the fun of it.

    I gather that the obtainers as well as the sub-obtainers are set to identify those who obtained from them in one guise or another.  Watch out, all those “Abuja-based public affairs analysts” who toiled ceaselessly to take down and take out anyone who would not place Dr Jonathan in  the same league as Nelson Mandela, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., Lee Kuan Yew and Barack Obama.

    It has to be said to the great credit of the former First Family that, although the First Husband has been mentioned as the issuing authority for permits to obtain, there has been no suggestion that he personally obtained.  He has had a piggy bank of his own anyway long before he took the top job. And the First Wife, a stickler for independence and propriety, kept a separate and amply provisioned piggy bank, I gather.

    Say what you will, the Office of the National Security Adviser also deserves great credit for its meticulous record-keeping.

    However the drama plays out, the Jonathan era may well come to be defined as the Era of Obtainment, when nothing succeeded like obtaining.

    Trust the column to provide periodic updates.

  • Kogi: From tragedy to farce

    Kogi: From tragedy to farce

    Kogi State residents were still struggling to come to terms with the sudden death of Abubakar Audu, their former governor who was on the cusp of returning to Lugard House for a record third stint, following his commanding showing in the November 21 election.

    Amidst the mourning and the wailing, tragedy quickly turned into farce.  And the whole thing has remained a perfect calendar of farce ever since.

    I am not referring to the jubilation that punctured the funereal ambience, following reports that Audu had resurrected, Lazarus-style, on account of a miracle worker’s intercession.  Elsewhere, that would be farcical indeed.  But in Nigeria, such claims, and even more brazen ones, are made routinely by syndicated charlatans with eyes on the main chance.

    This long-running farce began when, without research and without consultation, the returning officer, Professor Emmanuel Kucha, declared the election outcome inconclusive.  Audu and his running mate on the APC ticket had built a lead that their opponent, incumbent Governor Idris Wada, could not surmount even if he won every ballot in the constituencies where the voting had to be rescheduled because of logistic problems or election malpractices

    The APC, said INEC chair, would have to nominate a candidate to replace Audu.  That candidate would then pick a running mate, and together, they would face Wada in a supplementary poll.

    The Federal Attorney-General, who had not figured in the matter thus far, weighed in and endorsed INEC’s position.

    If INEC stuck to its decision, the bet was that Faleke would replace Audu at the head of a new ticket and then pick a running mate for the final stage of the election.  That seemed to be the position of the APC, a position dictated by common sense and backed by some of the nation’s leading attorneys.

    Nonsense, thundered Olisa Metuh, the last man standing in a long line of hacks who made the PDP the odious brand that it was and has remained.  With Audu’s death, he said, the APC had “crashed out” of the contest and the PDP’s candidate who had the second highest vote tally was the outright winner.  For stating otherwise, INEC’s chair and the Federal Attorney-General should resign immediately, he demanded.

    Resign, and then what comes next?

    But Metuh is not in the business of proposing solutions.  With him, nothing succeeds like bombast, and the more sophomoric the bombast, the more he celebrates it as a mark of achievement.

    Emboldened by Metuh, Wada who had won in only five of the 21 local government areas compared to the Audu ticket’s 16, found his voice.  He proclaimed himself winner of the election.

    Meanwhile, a solution that had seemed so commonsensical was vitiated by lawyers and non-lawyers canvassing a solution guaranteed to muddy the waters and generate maximum confusion. Faleke could not replace Audu, they said, because Audu had not been “duly elected”  governor at the time he died. Beside, Faleke had not participated in the primaries that threw up Audu.  It made no difference that he is joint legatee, with Audu, of the votes cast for the APC.

    Then, in a move that baffled and confounded its supporters, and the attentive public, the APC caved in to INEC and the Attorney General and agreed, per its National Chairman, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, to hold a primary to pick a replacement for Audu.   It was like snatching defeat from the jaws of unassailable victory and sowing the seeds of bitter conflict within the party.

    In its new wisdom, the APC settled for Yahaya Bello who had come a very distant second in the primaries that threw up Audu, and had contributed nothing to Audu’s campaign.  He was even reported to be preparing to defect to the PDP after his loss.  It is a measure of his political standing and influence that he lost his ward to the PDP in the November 21 election. In a curious reversal, Faleke was designated Bello’s running mate.

    Faleke, insisting that he was the rightful person to step into Audu’s shoes, had made it abundantly clear that he was not available to serve as Bello’s or anybody’s running mate.  But  the upshot was that Bello who had contributed nothing to the Audu/Faleke ticket stood to inherit the votes the twain had garnered, the very votes they said Faleke could not inherit.

    They went to the supplementary poll with that arrangement anyway, and Bello was proclaimed winner.  When added to the votes the Audu/Faleke ticket had won, the 6,885 cast for Bello’s dubious APC ticket last Saturday resulted in a plurality of more than 40, 000 votes.

    Bello has since been proclaimed governor-elect of Kogi State.  But no rejoicing, no dancing in the streets, no victory lap, has followed this strange victory.

    When reminded that Faleke had declined to serve as Bello’s mate, the returning officer had  replied curtly that Faleke could not do so since it was the APC that had designated him Bello’s running mate.  The APC is going to rue this one.

    Trust Olisa Metuh to stir things up.  Designating Bello governor-elect, he said, amounted to “a waste of time, a waste of scarce national resources and ridiculous shadow-chasing.”

    By the PDP’s reckoning, he said, Bello – “one Bello” he called him, with his trademark condescension — had scored only 6,885 votes in the supplementary election, as against Wada’s 204, 877 votes overall in the election.  The votes cast for the Audu/Faleke ticket in the earlier election had died with Audu. Wada was, therefore, the undisputed winner.

    In a rare moment of sobriety, he refrained from declaring that Wada had won  by a landslide. Perhaps the word had escaped him in the heat of composition. Something tells me he will deploy at his next press conference.

    So, there you have it.

    There are now three claimants to the gubernatorial perch at Lugard House in the Kogi capital, Lokoja: Wada, who lost at each stage of the election, Faleke, who was poised to win with Audu until Audu died at their moment of triumph, and Bello, who was substituted for Audu in a process that cannot pass the test of fairness and equity.

    There is even a fourth claimant:  None of the above.

    And each claimant has a formidable team of attorneys in its corner.

    I am here reminded of a quip about lawyers I first heard from the late Chief Bayo Kuku, a corporate lawyer of no mean repute.  A lawyer, he said self-deprecatingly, is the one who, when two parties are fighting over a cow, steps in between to milk the cow.  I am sure the lawyers will figure out how to proceed with the milking when there are three or more parties claiming ownership of the cow.

    The courts are going to have a hard time figuring out this one.

    It would be the height of judicial perversity if they found for Wada or Bello.  But anything can happen in a judicial system mired in perversity.

  • When two ministers went missing

    When two ministers went missing

    As former President Goodluck Jonathan’s tenure muddled toward its desultory end, two of his senior  ministers, with responsibility for some of the most critical issues of state, went missing from their strategic turfs.

    I called attention to one of them, the Foreign Minister, Ambassador Aminu Wali, in my September 23, 2014, column titled “Where is our Foreign Minister?”

    “Has anyone in the attentive audience ever seen, heard, sensed or otherwise encountered Ambassador Aminu Wali acting out his remit since he was appointed Foreign Minister in March 2014?’’ I asked.

    I had raised this question in the wake of the Chibok abductions, when the accident-prone Jonathan administration stumbled from miscue to egregious miscue in a perfect calendar of blunders. Day after day, Nigeria took a pummelling in the global news media.  And the foreign minister, who should have been the international face of Nigeria at such a time, was nowhere to be seen.

    Instead, he was trying desperately to sell Dr Jonathan to political kingmakers in the so-called Northwest geopolitical zone as the best thing to have happened to Nigeria since the  amalgamation, and an unquestionably worthy candidate for re-election.

    Hear him as he read the communiqué at the end of the meeting:  “Having carefully considered   the steady and stable progress of our nation under the able leadership of the President, the stakeholders of PDP in the Northwest, having in mind the monumental strides attained by this administration, have resolved to urge President Jonathan to declare for president in the forthcoming 2015 elections so as to continue the good works he started in nation building.”

    They say an ambassador is a person sent to lie for his country abroad.  Ambassador Wali was going round the country lying for the president and his administration.

    To be fair to Wali, he was not the only minister plying that trade. The Minister of Information, Labaran Maku, did exactly that each time he opened his mouth.  So did the Minister of Agriculture, Dr Akinwumi Adesina, but with emphasis on his personal achievement.

    It came as no surprise, then, that Wali’s expertise was not tapped during what must rank as one of Jonathan administration’s most humiliating foreign misadventures, namely, the dramatic seizure in hard currency of the equivalent of N9.3 million from a Nigerian-owned private jet that made a covert landing at a private airport near Johannesburg, in South Africa, with the Jonathan administration’s fingerprints all over it.

    The administration said the money was for the purchase of arms from private vendors for the security services and that the shipment was properly documented.  The South African authorities, on the other hand, were acting on the theory that this was a money-laundering caper gone awry and were not in the least impressed by the disingenuous fudging that marked Abuja’s attempt to explain the incident away.

    The last is yet to be heard of that incident

    The second cabinet official who went missing from his strategic turf at critical points in the last phase of Dr Jonathan’s presidency was Lt.-Gen. Aliyu Gusau, the Minister of Defence and, before that, National Security Adviser in the Obasanjo administration.

    Aliyu Gusau had been appointed to replace Dr Bello Haliru, to demonstrate the government’s resolve to regain vast swathes of territory Boko Haram had seized in the Northeast, and to crush the insurgency.

    Shortly after resuming office, he summoned the service chiefs to his office for a meeting, at which the war effort was likely to figure prominently.  The Chief of Defence Staff, Air Vice Marshal Alex Badeh, countermanded the summons, stating that the invitation had to be routed through his office.

    Whereupon, as was widely reported in the  media, Aliyu Gusau resigned.   Later reports said the minister had insisted on meeting with service chiefs alone, and had demanded an apology from Badeh, who was probably still in high school — or in the military  academy – when Aliyu Gusau was promoted to the rank of army general.

    Despite President Jonathan’s intervention, the twain stood their grounds, and Aliyu Gusau  made it known that, contrary to media reports, he had not resigned.

    For all practical purposes, however, he might as well have resigned.

    Boko Haram escalated its campaign of murder and mayhem and battled the ill-equipped and ill-used Nigerian military to a stalemate, often dictating the terms of engagement.  In one instance, an entire army battalion, faced with Boko Haram’s superior firepower and motivation, “tactically manoeuvred” its way to neighbouring Cameroun, where it was disarmed and escorted back to base.

    Through it all, the minister of Defence was missing.  He was not seen at the war front rallying the troops and boosting their morale.  Usually self-effacing, and  a man of few words as befits the super spook – beg your pardon – the consummate intelligence officer that he is, this time he stood aloof, distant, as if the war was none of his business.

    Nor did he join in the controversy surrounding the seizure by South Africa of a cash-laden private jet from Nigeria that had landed surreptitiously in a private airport near Johannesburg, allegedly on a mission to buy arms from private dealers for the Nigerian “security services.”

    Was Badeh’s refusal to submit to the authority of the minister of Defence the reason General Aliyu Gusau chose to keep his own counsel in matters relating to the military, including the Boko Haram insurgency that was steadily incorporating more and more Nigerian territory under its infernal control?

    Was that how it also came about that the National Security Adviser, Col. Sambo Dasuki (rtd), who, it has been said, was not a career intelligence officer but had on his own taken a crash course in military intelligence after his retirement — was that how he came to supplant the minister of Defence and to assume responsibility for procuring arms and ammunition and other materials for the military directly or through contractors?

    The figures cited in those transactions, in which Dasuki seems to be a central figure, boggle  the mind.  So do the puny returns resulting therefrom, according to officials looking into the matter.  President Jonathan, Dasuki has said, approved all the transactions at issue.

    Aliyu Gusau’s name has not figured thus far in the investigations.  He must be glad that he kept his distance from all the wheeling and dealing that the EFCC says it has uncovered in the office of the National Security Adviser.

    Should he merely have kept his distance under the circumstances?  Should he not have resigned to protect his honour?

    For the record will show that, under his watch as Defence minister, the armed forces could not tame Boko Haram, and allegations of shady transactions in military purchases surfaced.

  • Abubakar Audu: A Sophoclean tragedy

    Abubakar Audu: A Sophoclean tragedy

    Few subjects excite political journalists more than elections.

    To size up the major candidates – digging into their backgrounds and records, pointing up contradictions in their utterances and their biographies, weighing their grasp of issues domestic and foreign, evaluating their trustworthiness as well as their preparedness for the offices they are seeking, indicating who is up and who is down, and generally presenting pictures on which the attentive public can ground their choice:  this, in brief, is the responsibility of the political reporter.

    The job guarantees access to the candidates and their associates, often makes them privy to all kinds of secrets; it tests where the reporter’s allegiance lies – to the candidate, with whom he or she may have developed close ties, or to the public, of which he or she is a representative.   This vital distinction is often overlooked, but it remains a bedrock principle of political journalism.

    I have tried to follow most elections in Nigeria and indeed here in the United States, in that tradition of political journalism.

    Last week’s gubernatorial election in Kogi was different, however.  I had a vested interest in    the outcome. The race was between a divisive, incurably parochial, lethargic, do-nothing incumbent, and a challenger who had been there before and performed creditably but was heavily tainted, not without justification, by grave charges of corruption, and by delusions of grandeur.

    The intelligence from Kogi was that the challenger, Abubakar Audu, was not marketable and that if the APC fielded him against the incumbent Idris Wada, the APC would have in effect handed victory to Wada.

    I communicated this intelligence to the APC hierarchy and suggested that they talk Audu out of it and assure him he would be accorded the place of “Father of the APC in Kogi”, with all the attendant rights and privileges.  After all, he had served as elected governor of Kogi twice. No luck.

    In the primaries, Audu won more delegates than the rest of the field put together; none of  them could match his financial muscle.  He had the numbers, and since democracy as they say in Nigeria is a game of numbers, he was for all practical purposes the people’s choice.

    He had run a good race, and based on the plurality of his votes, the online newspapers Saharareporters projected him the winner.  Even if Wada won overwhelmingly in Abaji, he would at best come a close second.  In the event, Audu won in Abaji, and it was no longer whether the official election umpire would proclaim him winner, but when.

    The column you are reading now was going to be an open letter to Audu congratulating him on his epochal victory and entreating him to make his sojourn in Lugard House a mission of public service and personal redemption.  No personal aggrandisement; no imperial airs; no hubris; just devoted service to the public with humility, and in a spirit of reconciliation.

    I called the APC National Leader, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, to congratulate him.  His phone rang busy.  Perhaps he was taking calls from jubilant associates and supporters. Some thirty minutes later, my call went through.  I congratulated him on the hard-fought victory, saying that it presaged the prospect of change, real change, coming to Kogi.

    His voice was flat, bereft of its usual animation.  It did not sound like the voice of a person who had just wrought another political miracle.  He said he was attending to an emergency, and that I should call him later.

    What emergency? I wondered.  Surely, the usual suspects could not be trying to fix the results, certainly not with a new sheriff in town.  Besides, the Arch Fixer who always did their dirty work has been sent on permanent retirement, together with his infernal bag of tricks.  What emergency could Tinubu have been talking about?  What was going on?

    All this was before INEC declared the election inconclusive, because Audu’s plurality is smaller than the number of registered voters in precincts where the poll was cancelled for one reason or another and would have to be repeated.

    Still, it seemed to me that as morning shows the light of day, the figures now available indicated powerfully that Audu and the APC would win, no matter how they dressed it up.

    All this was academic, however. Audu had died even before they began collating the field reports.  But only those in his innermost circle were privy to the fact.  News of his death was first broken by Saharareporters in a terse bulletin.  If I did not know that online newspaper’s scrupulous commitment to getting the news fast and getting it right, I would have dismissed the bulletin as a sick joke.

    I called professional colleagues in Lagos for confirmation.  They said they had been working the phones but could still not confirm.  Next I called Kogi. Some of the political figures had not even heard and were asking me for details.  Several expatriate Nigerians here in the United States also called, believing that I would be in a position to confirm the news and provide details

    For me, confirmation came from Premium Times about an hour after Saharareporters broke the news.

    Pulling the strands together, I now realise that the “emergency” Tinubu said he was grappling with was Audu’s death.  In retrospect, it is a wonder that he could keep so calm under circumstances that would have rendered a person of lesser straw apoplectic.

    By some accounts, it was INEC’s declaring the election incomplete that induced the condition – was it a stroke, or a heart attack – from which Audu died.  That was not the case.  He had died, it is necessary to repeat, before INEC began collating the returns.

    The emerging truth is that he had been in poor health, and his condition was exacerbated by the rigours of the election campaign, to the point that it was with great discomfort that he turned up to cast his ballot on Election Day.

    His death has plunged Kogi and indeed Nigeria into murky constitutional waters, with some persons learned in the law asserting that Audu’s death had rendered the poll a nullity, and that a fresh gubernatorial election would have to be held.

    Others just as learned in the law insist that Audu and his running mate had won the election outright, because even if the votes cast in the supplementary election INEC says it is going to conduct in the 19 wards where no voting took place – if all the potential votes from those precincts went to Governor Wada, he would still have polled less than Audu overall.

    They might have added Audu that won in 16 of the 21 local government areas in Kogi, whereas Wada carried only five.

    Abubakar Audu lived a rich and textured life, the stuff of a Sophoclean tragedy.  His death is likely to generate more sympathy and admiration than he enjoyed while he was among us.

  • A new online media scourge

    A new online media scourge

    In the attentive media audience, passive readers and listeners abound.  But they are passive because they choose to be passive.  Those who are not so inclined can react to media fare almost instantly, react to other reactions, and generally keep going a public conversation the type that the German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas drew on to conceptualise what he called the public sphere.

    In the analogue era, one would have had to write a letter to the editor of a newspaper for that purpose.  And of the dozens, sometimes hundreds of letters that arrive in the editor’s mailbag, only a handful gets published.  Not infrequently, what gets published is not exactly what the writer had in mind.  The submission is vetted for grammar, factualness and good taste, then  cut to fit into the available space

    In the digital era, the era of interactive media, anyone who can work an electronic mouse can post a response to a news story, feature, editorial, photo or article.  Space is not a constraint. It helps, but there is no obligation to be factual or courteous or even decent.  Out there, it is an unregulated, anarchic world, in which the writer has almost full control of his or her material.

    Much of the feedback is valuable.  Factual errors are pointed out, as are faulty reasoning; counter-arguments are laid out, other perspectives are explored, gaps are filled and language use is questioned, for the most part in an ameliorative spirit.  There is even the occasional commendation for fine execution.

    But a good deal of the feedback is often perverse and petulant.  Columnists and other commentators are excoriated for not doing what they had not set out to do.  Their academic and professional qualifications are called into question. Their looks are derided.  Their antecedents up to three generations back are vilified.  Name-calling, coarse and vulgar abuse and ethnic baiting are standard fare.

    Some writers are urged earnestly to go do something violent to themselves, like hugging  an electric transformer, getting crushed by Goodluck Jonathan’s transformation trains, or something even more lethal, all for the heinous crime of saying something that someone disagrees with, or for criticising a public figure from the respondent’s ethnic group.

    You know when the mail is the product of an organizsed effort.  There is a dreary sameness about the language.  Change a singular noun to the plural, transpose a phrase here and there,  throw in an advert elsewhere, and despite the various points of origin, which are for all practical purposes contrived, it is clear that some rented individuals are doing the writing at someone’s behest.

    The package usually comes spiced with maledictions of the blood-curdling kind. You need a strong stomach and shock-resistant sensibilities to attend to that kind of stuff for long.   Little about it is social; yet, this is the kind of thing one encounters daily on “social media” sites frequented by Nigerians.

    Please add that term to your repertoire of oxymorons.

    For, instead of serving as the digital-era equivalent of Habermas’s public sphere, it is often a hate-filled platform for trading insult and abuse and perpetuating prejudice.

    In his time, Goodluck Jonathan kept a battalion of writers of that kind of stuff, pollutants of the fountains of public discourse who, for want of any other distinction, usually styled themselves “public affairs commentators” or “public affairs analysts.”  Invariably they were based in Abuja.  I hear they have since been disbanded and have found no new patrons yet.

    But I digress.

    Now, a new scourge has descended upon the feedback loop of our online newspapers.

    When I go to my column online and find that as many as 10 readers have bothered to respond (most of the responses come as sms text messages) I feel gratified that the effort that went into writing it has not been wasted.

    But to my dismay, not one of the reactions is actually about the column.  If the authors of the so-called reactions read it at all, it made no impression on them.  What they are doing is pivoting in the column to advertise all manner of merchandise for sale.

    Here, by way of “response” to my last column, is Udom Mike, offering Dangote Cement at a “promo price of N1,100 per bag, and N4,000 for a bag or rice, directly from the factory.  No middlemen or middlewomen.  Minimum purchase of 100 bags of each commodity, please. And to facilitate purchase and delivery, Mike supplies the name and phone number of the contact person.

    Chief Awosoga Awoniyi warns readers “not to die in silence” when all their problems can be solved by Ifa.  Then he lists every disease known and unknown to medical science and promises to cure them with “instant results.”  He also promises to ensure that your pocket never dries, that you never ask without receiving, and that you get quick promotion at work, on a job so secure that you can swear by it.

    Awoniyi is no itinerant herbalist.  He runs a Healing Home (telephone number supplied) that you can visit for consultation.  Better to do that than to “die in silence”, you hear?

    Adebowale (Big Boss) Adeyi is offering Dangote 3X cement for N1, 100 per bag, ex factory, minimum purchase of 200 bags.  Consignment will be delivered within one day of requisition. Name and address of contact person supplied.

    Precious Balogun is offering different brands of rice — Royal Stallion, Royal Umbrella, Mama Africa,  Mama Gold, Ade Brazil, Rising Sun, Super Eagle — at a cheap rate, to be delivered anywhere in Nigeria.  Hurry up; prices quoted are valid for three months only from date of post, because of price instability. Tomato puree of various brands also available.

    Ambruce Tamunosiki, for Nigerian Customs Service, announces that the auctioning of impounded cars has commenced at the Nigerian Customs Border Head Office Command Zone 2, Owode Ewekoro/Custom House Border (phone number supplied).  Come take your pick, at the quoted prices among Toyota and Peugeot brands.

    Abdullahi Momammed is also offering cars impounded by Customs for sale, together with laptops, at cheap and affordable prices.  Marketing Zonal Officer Abdullahi Mohammed (retired) is standing by to help.  Phone number supplied.

    Enyi Enyi says to call Mr Bello Adams, the officer in charge, if you would like to own a choice vehicle at minimal cost.  The Nigerian Government, no less, is using the medium to bring to it to your notice that Tokunbo vehicles in its custody are being sold off.

    Abdullahi Aisha, who says he is advertising manager with the Nigerian Customs Service, is also putting on the auction block a large inventory of Customs-impounded cars.  Interested buyers please consult a Mr Bankole Adeyemi (phone number supplied.

    Paul Okoro is offering Dangote Cement direct from Obajana and Ibese factories for the promo price of just N1,000 per bag for purchases of 100 bags or more to individuals and distributors alike.  Nationwide delivery available; names and phone numbers of contact persons supplied.

    These crude and possibly fraudulent sales pitches are a gross perversion of the loop that is designed to provide useful feedback on media content.  You encounter these irritants on the sites of most of the online Nigerian newspapers and journals. Even if they were advertisements duly paid for, they would be no less irritating.  But they are nothing of the sort, just tawdry,  opportunistic stunts.

    Is there no way of ending this scourge?

     

  • My own anniversary

    My own anniversary

    This column was five years old last week, but you could never have guessed it.

    Not the vaguest hint of the event was to be found anywhere.  There were no newspaper supplements, not advertised, or for that matter unadvertised – congratulatory messages by committees of friends and former schoolmates, no goodwill messages, no solidarity rallies, no special ecumenical service and no Merit Award.

    Even at Rutam House, it was business as usual.

    A friend to whom I complained was not in the least impressed.  “What makes you think that you are such a hot shot?” he queried.  “After all, as far as I know, you have never been arrested, given the Television Treatment (like Tai Solarin) or letter-bombed (like Dele Giwa).  And if you were to be dismissed, retired or disengaged today, I am sure that you will never (like Admiral Augustus Aikhomu) earn a promotion thereafter.”

    He is right, of course.  And he could have added that no policy or programme has been started, modified or terminated on account of anything that has appeared in this column since its debut on October 6. 1985.  Nor has any public officer been removed, rebuked or otherwise disciplined  for any act or utterance that has earned the censure of the column, however indecorous the act.

    Still, if my mail and my usually unreliable sources are any indication, the column is read and even preserved not only by those who treasure the newspaper as a marketplace of ideas and as a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism, but also by the agents of law and order and national security.

    My social interactions point in that direction, too.  From time to time, I meet people who tell me how much the column has meant to them.  At a reception outside Lagos the other day, a gentleman I was meeting for the first time seized my hand and said that I must meet his wife, an adoring fan.

    She was adoring indeed.  She fussed over me so much that if her husband had not been secure in his affection, he would have seized her by her necklace and dragged her out of the room under a torrent of foul abuse.

    I have no illusion that I will always be received in the manner the woman received me.  Thus whenever someone accosts me and says, “So you are the Olatunji Dare?” I measure the distance between us and watch his arms and his legs and quickly figure out how I would block, deflect or sidestep a punch to the nose or a kick to the groin.

    So far, no such attack has occurred.  I do not even think such a thing is warranted.  But you never can tell.

    Of course, in a situation of clear and present danger, I can always take a cue from Paul the Apostle and stoutly deny my identity.  That should be quite easy, since The Guardian does          not publish pictures of its contributors.  The African Guardian for which I do an occasional column does publish my picture, but it is a poor guide, having been taken well before large  grey patches appeared on my head and my hairline commenced a furious retreat

    I seize every opportunity to declare that I am only a commentator, not a critic.  Just being a journalist is dangerous enough.

    On the intellectual front, the column has, to my greatest astonishment, attracted some scholarly attention and even critical acclaim.  I do it primarily to earn a living, but some discerning minds have invested it with fine attributes that I never thought I possessed.

    A young woman at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, is completing a Master’s thesis on the column.  English majors at the University of Ilorin have written term papers on it for a class taught by Dr Olu Obafemi.  It was the subject of a learned essay by Dr Taiwo Oloruntoba-Oju of the same university for The Guardian Literary Series.

    At the University of Ibadan, I gather that the column has figured in a course on something called Stylistics.  A publisher has even urged me to put together some of the better installments  for a book.  I told him I was not sure of its success, but he said I should leave him to do he worrying.

    It is all very flattering, indeed.  I do the column, I insist, primarily to earn a living. Under my terms of employment.  I am required to produce 1,000 words every Tuesday, all things being equal, to fill a space reserved for that purpose on his page.  The whole thing is journalism pure and simple.  To regard it as art or literature is to engage in unnecessary dignification.

    Once in a while, however, the attention does get into one’s head.  But not for long.  Every other day or so, my SAP relief snack of epa and guguru or boli comes wrapped in a recent installment of the column.  I think of all the effort that went into composing it, shake my head and sigh.  Surely, this cannot be art or literature?

    And every other week or so, I am humbled when I find chunks of the column in Sunday Concord as excellent examples of errors in English usage, courtesy of the estimable Bayo Oguntuase.

    In the five years that it has been a staple of this page on Tuesdays, the column has been concerned with everything under the sun and even beyond,  Politics, economics, religion, education, sport, language, sex, justice the men and women and institutions in the news – the entire spectrum of human activity has been its purview.

    Its mood has swayed between the serious and the satirical, and its tone has ranged from the caustic to the compassionate, from the combative to the conciliatory, and from incandescent rage to clinical detachment.  Its judgments have sometimes proved hasty or even mistaken, and it has been known to contain an occasional error of fact.

    If it is one day counted among the many voices that helped shape the standards of sense and sensibility in a turbulent era, I would of course be flattered.  But I would contend that it achieved the distinction more by default than by design.

     

    • First published in “The Guardian” on August 13, 1992, and subsequently in 1993 collection, Matters Arising.

     

  • What happened to Dele Giwa?

    What happened to Dele Giwa?

    October 19 marked the 29th anniversary the assassination of Dele Giwa, crusading journalist and founding chief executive of the magazine Newswatch, in what remains one of the most horrific acts of preternatural malevolence ever carried out in Nigeria.

    Because of the passage of time and the twists and turns on the political landscape, the anniversary generated less attention and fewer reminiscences than in previous years.  But      three weeks later, the circumstances of Giwa’s death leapt onto the front pages and headlines, propelled by a crack-brained theory resurrected by Chris Omeben, the since-retired deputy inspector- general of police who had supervised the investigations.

    But first, some background.

    Just two days before that heinous murder, a senior official of the Directorate of Military Intelligence had accused Giwa of illegally importing and stockpiling arms and ammunition for the purpose of staging a socialist revolution in Nigeria.

    The charge was preposterous. Giwa had nothing but contempt for socialism.  He was a shinning advertisement for capitalism and the market economy.  But he had, in a widely discussed column, warned that if the structural adjustment programme on which the government was pinning all its hopes for economic recovery failed, the authorities would be stoned in the streets.

    Alarmed at the charge, Giwa quickly briefed his attorney, the late and much lamented Gani Fawehinmi, and asked him to pursue the matter at law.

    The following day, military intelligence chief, Colonel Halilu Akilu, called to reassure Giwa that the accusation had resulted from a misunderstanding; that the matter had been cleared, and that Giwa should think nothing to it.  He asked for directions to Giwa’s home so he could, as a demonstration of his good faith, stop by on his way to Ikeja airport to board a flight to Kano.

    Akilu then went on to intimate that a parcel from the commander-in-chief, most likely an invitation to some official event, was on its way to Giwa’s home.

    Several hours later, an emissary showed up.  Giwas’s son, Billy, collected the parcel and handed it to his father who was seated at the dining table, in company of Kayode Soyinka, the London correspondent of Newswatch visiting from the UK.  The envelope, which bore the seal of the Presidency, was marked “To be opened by addressee only.”

    “This must be from the Presidency,” Giwa said as he collected the package from his son.

    Those were the last words he would speak in calm repose.

    He placed it on his laps, and as he opened it, the package exploded, pulverizing his pelvis, setting a section of the house on fire and reducing the cars in the garage to smouldering heaps of mangled metal.

    Giwa died as he was being rushed to a nearby hospital.  Miraculously, Soyinka survived, and  so did Giwa’s wife and baby daughter, who were at the time in another section of the house.

    If they had all been killed, the investigating authorities would have passed off the blast as an accident waiting to happen.  After all, they had publicly accused Giwa of illegally importing and stockpiling arms and ammunition; the ordinance had exploded, killing its procurer, they would have said.  There would have been no witnesses to suggest anything to the contrary, and a perfect murder would have been committed.

    Soyinka, the visiting Newswatch correspondent who had witnessed the incident, came to be named the suspect.  If he was not complicit in the crime, senior state security officials and the police hierarchy said, how come he had survived it when his host seated across from him had perished?

    It was to this infantile theory, unworthy of a village talebearer, that Omeben had recourse recently, the same threadbare and wildly implausible theory that Col. Ajibola Togun and his military intelligence colleagues had been peddling about the murder.

    My brother Herbert Tunde Dare, a senior police officer with the Special Branch, had been assigned to the investigation. Soon after he began work with his accustomed energy and commitment – failure was not in his dictionary — he was transferred from Lagos to Kaduna, but kept on the case.

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

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

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

    Somewhere between Jebba, in Kwara State, and Mokwa, in Niger State, in the dead of night,  he was killed in a curious accident.

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

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

    In a panegyric marking military president Ibrahim Babangida’s 70th birthday, the columnist Mohammed Haruna cited Fawehinmi’s unsuccessful efforts to enter a private prosecution in the Giwa murder — unsuccessful because he was blockaded on every front – as proof that the fiery attorney was pursuing the wrong persons.

    Haruna went on to add that the murder might have resulted from marital conflict.  The guard at the Giwa residence, he claimed, had positively identified the driver of Giwas’s former wife,  Florence Ita, as the bearer of the parcel-bomb that killed Giwa.  And, by way of further insight, he added that a flour magnate whose shady business deals Newswatch had uncovered might also have had a hand in the murder.

    If these were viable or even plausible leads, why were they not pursued diligently?  Why were Omeben and Togun and company so fixated on Kayode Soyinka?

    Babangida for his part has consistently blamed everyone except his Administration for the failure to investigate Giwa’s murder forthrightly and bring the perpetrators to justice.

    Hear him in his own words, in this interview with Karl Maier, as reported by Maier in his book This House Has Fallen:  Midnight in Nigeria.

     “It was emotive.  There was a lot of passion.  I think one of the problems  was that the people, or more or less the media … up to now nobody seemed to say okay let’s look at these things   dispassionately.  But from the word go, the government did it.  That’s the first reaction. The media, his friends, and most important, the lawyers, the crusaders in this thing.  Then anybody who would want to say something different from the popularly held belief, you were seen as part of it.  So they succeeded in getting only one side of the story dished up.

    “But we carried out investigations,” Babangida continued.   “We had leads.  There were questions we asked but nobody went into this thing about the so-called questions that we asked. But the circumstantial aspect of it.  Akilu spoke to him twenty-four hours before.  But somebody had to talk to somebody.   That’s the harsh reality of life.  But unfortunately nobody wanted to listen. I suspect the media, whatever human rights groups, if they tried to look at this dispassionately, like normal intelligent people would, we may have gone (sic) somewhere.   But people have already made up their minds. That government is guilty, period.  The report, they are not interested.”

    This Joycean outpouring was Babangida’s answer to the question, “What happened to Dele Giwa?”

    These people who were so powerful that they could prevent a military government and the police from bringing to justice the perpetrators of one of the most dastardly murders of our time:   Who are they?  Why were they not prosecuted for interfering with the course of justice?

    And a final question:  Where is the “report” Babangida talked about?

    Portions of this article first appeared in the October 18, 2011, edition of The NATION.

     

     

     

  • On a personal note

    On a personal note

    All journalism is autobiography, at least to the extent that, consciously or unconsciously, the writer always reveals something of himself or herself.  Just how much to reveal, what to put out and what to omit, what to highlight and what to play down:  These considerations are never far from a columnist’s reckoning.

    Today, pardon my indulgence, reader; this column comes freighted with more autobiographical baggage than it usually carries. My intention is not so much to dwell on a singularity as it is to invoke personal circumstance as a point of entry in calling attention to a spiraling health issue that has far-reaching implications for public policy.

    *

    My son Gbolahan was diagnosed with autism in 1980, shortly after I commenced doctoral studies at Indiana University, on leave from the University of Lagos, where I was a journalism instructor. He was two years old at the time. One week of tests at the Children’s Hospital, Indianapolis, confirmed the diagnosis.

    He fretted and fidgeted; he was withdrawn and self absorbed; he shunned physical contact, engaged in repetitive behaviour, and could no longer communicate through speech.  He was not always like that.  Some malignant force seemed to have halted his mental development, and to have then sent it on the path of regression.

    What was the cause? The doctors said that, on account of some chemical imbalance, the signals reaching the brain from the central nervous system were too weak for the brain to interpret.

    Could the signals be amplified?

    Not in the present state of medical knowledge, they said.

    I was shattered.

    One day, I was terrified that I might do something terrible to myself if I did not seek counselling. Something — call it instinct or the spirit – directed me to my faculty adviser, a genial, courtly gentleman with whom I had struck a rapport at our very first conference.

    His door was shut, but I knocked all the same.  “Olatunji, you have something on your mind,” he said as he invited me to sit down.

    I told him about my son, adding that under the circumstances, I could not continue my doctoral studies and must return to Nigeria.

    “Do you believe in God?” he asked, after a long, reflective pause.

    “I can no longer say for sure,” I told him.  Why would God visit this affliction on my son?

    He was in deep meditation at the time I knocked on his office door. The Bible lay open on his table.  It was 10 years to the day his wife died after a long struggle with cancer, he told me. And like me , he had just enrolled for doctoral studies at American University, in Washington, DC, with two young children to look after, in addition to running the Washington Programme of the University of Missouri’s famous School of Journalism.

    “Ed,” his wife had told him moments before her eyes closed, “I know what this programme means much to you.  Please, do not use my death or the fact that you have to raise two children alone as an excuse for not pursuing or attaining the goals you have set for yourself.”

    Placing his hand over mine to comfort me, he said that was all he could tell me, for whatever it was worth. “Love your son.  Give him all the care he needs.  But do not use him as an excuse for not pursuing your goals.”

    It was a priceless counsel. It pulled me back from the brink. I forged ahead and with the support of a loving wife completed the doctorate in three years and returned to Nigeria. I have never looked back since then.

    *

    Eleven years later, on assignment for The Guardian to interview OAU Secretary-General Dr Salim Ahmed Salim and senior officials of Ethiopia’s ruling Dergue regime, Emeka Izeze and I  were treated to a sumptuous luncheon by senior Nigerian diplomat accredited to the OAU.

    Two other Nigerians, one a senior diplomat with the Nigerian mission in Addis Ababa and a distinguished international public servant visiting from Rome where he was Nigeria’s envoy at a global agency, made up our party of five.

    I cannot now recall what sequence of events steered the conversation to autism, of all things, certainly not the most glamorous subject in that atmosphere of haute cuisine washed down with the choicest wines.

    We discovered that four of us had autistic children.

    The odds against such an occurrence – of  four people under the same roof, all of them Nigerians, and three of them meeting each other for the first time – the odds of all four having autistic children are galactic.

    I realised then that autism was more widespread than was generally supposed. And since then, I have found cases upon cases of the condition, and bewildered parents unable to fathom the present and fearful of the future.

    *

    At a ceremony in July 2014 marking my 70th birthday, I pledged that after one more year on my faculty job at Bradley University, I would devote the rest of my days to raising awareness of autism and use the standing that I have earned through my professional work in classrooms and newsrooms at home and abroad to help raise funds to look after the needs of the autistic in Nigerian society.

    As if to confirm that autism is far more widespread in Nigeria than is generally supposed, four people walked up to me at the end of the ceremony that they had autistic children.  I have since learned of a young family that has two children, both autistic.

    *

    There are different, often overlapping forms of autism. The wide variation in symptoms among children with autism has led to the concept of autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. And the severity varies considerably.  At one end are those who cannot perform the most basic functions; at the other are those, the so-called idiot-savants who can perform the most astonishing feats of memory or execution but can do nothing else.

    Between these extremes lie gradations of autism in its many guises and disguises.

    At the time of my son’s diagnosis some 35 years ago, autism was a rare disorder, afflicting one male child out of 100,000.   For female children, the odds were even higher.

    Last year, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention reported that one in 68 U.S. children has an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a 30 per cent increase from one in 88 in just two years. Children with autism continue to be overwhelmingly male. According to the report, one in 42 boys has autism, 4.5 times as many as girls.

    Whether the huge increase resulted from genetic or environmental factors or from improved diagnostic techniques is unclear. What is clear, according to a statement issued this past August by the Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report, is that “there is a growing sense that something is going horribly wrong and no one knows why.”

    The situation in Nigeria may be just as dire.

    *

    The inventory I have been compiling shows no lack of awareness in Nigeria of autism and its depredations. Many agencies – banks, NGOs, schools, vocational training centres and medical institutions, have established intervention mechanisms of one kind or another. Their endeavour is to be commended, but it would be much more effective if coordinated and focused.

    My goal is to assist the organisations already on the ground to help raise the level of awareness of autism and situate it in the national policy dialogue, culminating in a National Summit on Autism in 2016;  in short, to help build a national constituency for the autistic in Nigeria.

    This column signals the start of that project.

    To that end, I would be grateful if organisations in the field or individuals interested in this project could send me at their earliest convenience a  conspectus of their work where applicable, as well as their contact information.

    My mailing address is c/o Vintage Press Ltd, 27B Fatai Atere Way, Matori, Lagos, PMB 1025,  Oshodi, Lagos.

    I can also be reached by email at this address:  <ohdee@fsmail.bradley.edu>

  • Immunity for all

    Immunity for all

    It is one of the most seminal ideas – no, I take that back:  It is far and away the most seminal idea ever proposed from the floor of the National Assembly since constitutional rule was restored in 1999.

    This time, I will not economise my material and keep readers in suspense as is my wont.  I will come right out with it and state without fear of contradiction that the proposal to confer immunity on the principal officers of the National Assembly, with collateral benefit for the Chief Justice of Nigeria, lest the judicial branch feels neglected, is the most thoughtful and sagacious matter that ever came out of its hallowed precincts.

    Its wisdom is self-evident.

    When the president of the Senate is hauled from one court to another to answer charges resulting from criminal investigations, he is bound to be distracted.  When he is distracted, the business of the Senate is bound to be disrupted.

    Only this past weekend, another official of the Senate was grilled for some nine hours by the  EFCC in the investigation of serious fraud.  And the indications are that, in the coming weeks, more lawmakers will be called in for questioning by one anti-corruption agency or another.

    This practice, if not checked, will cripple the National Assembly.  And the public the Assembly serves with such unstinting devotion and solicitude will be the loser.  It will undermine the autonomy of the legislative branch that Senate President Bukola Saraki has been guarding so jealously.

    The immunity being canvassed for principal officers of the legislature and the chief justice is therefore a step in the right direction, a major step to be sure, but only a step. And it is flawed, dangerous flawed, as I see it, in one important respect:  it is limited to only a few officials who constitute less than one per cent of the population.

    How can democracy thrive in such a setting?  Limited immunity is, like limited franchise, inegalitarian.  Being inegalitarian, it is incompatible with democracy.  If we are serious about enthroning democracy – and I am persuaded that we are, since all our policy makers never tire of so proclaiming – we should widen the immunity the National Assembly is mulling.

    Since all citizens are equal before the law and the Constitution, the immunity will have to be accorded all citizens without exception.  “Immunity for all,” not in 2020, but today, now, should be the new rallying cry.

    The President, Vice President, governors and their deputies enjoy constitutional immunity,  as they should.  But the immunity ends the moment they leave office.  Should they have to face any kind of harassment thereafter?  Conferring them with immunity that has no limit will insulate them from such indignity.

    Judges and officers of the law also enjoy the legal protection for what they say or do in the discharge of their official functions.  Again, why a limited immunity?  What would be lost by granting them full immunity in every context and contingency, so that they can live the rest of their days in peace and contentment?

    How about the police?  If they had to worry about the consequences of arresting, locking up or beating up the wrong suspect, would they ever move diligently against suspects or actual criminals?  And, mind you, many of those they go after are dangerous men and women packing superior firepower.  It is bad enough that the police are ill-clad,  ill-housed and ill-paid.  Must they also be denied total and unfettered immunity?

    Recently, some courts have been issuing orders restraining the police in perpetuity from arresting, detaining or prosecuting some suspects in the investigation of criminal activity.  That is a kind of immunity all right, but only for some favoured and well-heeled persons.  Why not democratise the whole thing and confer immunity on everyone in the community?

    Lawmakers already enjoy parliamentary immunity.  Whatever they say on the floor of the House properly convened about anybody in the course of a debate or discussion, however injurious it may be to an individual or institution, is absolutely privileged.  No successful defamation law suit can flow from it.

    But why limit the immunity to statements made during parliamentary debates?   Why not extend it to the statements they make outside the National Assembly, and to their conduct generally? If they had to worry about the intended or unintended consequences of their conduct, would they ever pursue their work diligently?

    And if the media had to worry about defamation lawsuits, can they really uphold the duty and accountability of the government to the public as enjoined by the Constitution?  To do that, they have to be accorded boundless immunity.

    Before American-style medical malpractice lawsuits cripple our healthcare delivery system, doctors and hospitals will have to be granted full immunity.  If they had to answer for everything that goes wrong under them, they will spend more time worrying about the vast sums they will have to shell out as damages than thinking of how to improve their skills.

    Through sheer terror, drivers of taxis, mini buses , trailers, tankers and articulated vehicles and their unions conferred immunity on themselves long ago.  They drive unmindful of other road users, they park anywhere and obstruct the flow of traffic, and are ever so ready to visit violent reprisal on anyone who questions their behaviour.

    Full and unfettered immunity might just be the elixir that will make them more amenable to civilised conduct.

    When I was growing up, parents and teachers operated on the principle that if you spared the rod, you spoiled the child.  These days, teachers are wielding the cane less frequently, for fear of what Ade’s parent might do if they gave him a real spanking.   So, even under the greatest provocation, they cannot touch Ade.   The result is that Ade grows more and more intractable.

    Granting teachers full and complete immunity is the surest path to restoring Nigeria’s lost educational glory.

    Several years ago, a principal who made it impossible for students to cheat in the West African School Certificate examination was punished, the authorities said, for putting the students at a competitive disadvantage.  That would not happen in a situation where teachers enjoy complete immunity.

    As for those who aid and abet examination malpractices by selling live questions to willing buyers, they already enjoy close to absolute immunity.  As far as I know, no one peddling live exam papers has been arrested, much less prosecuted.  All that remains is to formalise the immunity and extend it to their sundry patrons.  The immunity will also have to extend to parents who from sheer desperation take university matriculation exams as proxy for their children who cannot make the cut.

    Landlords who forcibly evict disobliging tenants should not have to answer at law.  Whose house is it anyway?  But in a society that guarantees equal protection under the law, the tenant who stands his ground should also enjoy the fullest immunity.

    Under this new doctrine, banks that advance dubious loans to even more dubious borrowers  should enjoy the fullest immunity from liability.  So should delinquent borrowers.

    I almost forgot the elections umpire INEC, which gets shafted with more law suits in a single year that all other public agencies combined.   Should it not be insulated from such rascality?  And should election candidates also not enjoy complete immunity from whatever INEC does or fails to do?

    As the late and much-lamented Dr K. O. Mbadiwe would have said, let immunity jam immunity.