The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • Saraki: The public’s turn

    Saraki: The public’s turn

    Not many of the columns posted in this space have drawn as many reactions as the most recent one (“Beyond the list,” October 6, 2015).

    The part that seems to have resonated the most was the concluding paragraph, here reproduced for ease of reference:

    “I am hoping that when the (confirmation) hearings get under way, at least one nominee will look Saraki in the face and say, ‘Senator, with all due respect to your office, you lack the moral integrity to sit in judgment as to whether I should serve on the President Buhari’s cabinet or not.  I cannot and will not submit to your authority in this matter.  I thank the President for the nomination, but must for the reason I have stated respectfully withdraw my name from consideration.’”

    The reactions speak for themselves.  I am reporting virtually all the salient ones, edited for space and coherence.  My aim is not to advance a cause, but to share with the attentive public some sense of the balance of opinion in this corner on an issue that is likely to define, for better or worse, the Buhari administration and its commitment to enthroning probity in public life.

     

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    Disciplined leadership is important to infuse and inculcate the right attitudes indispensable to meaningful progress.  Dr Bukola Saraki should learn what morality is all about by evaluating himself and taking a look at his conducts so far.  If a man goes into public office, he must be prepared for the consequences.  He must make himself proof against calumny.  In this, honesty is crucial. Adegoke O. O. Bako, Ibadan.

    Any nominee who acted the last paragraph will not only be stoned, but may fetch jungle justice from friends, family and even his wìfe or the husband as the case may be. –Anon.

    The case on Saraki is political and should be handled with care. Hence we may be sitting on a keg of a gun powder as a nation – Dr Albert Olajide Akinyemi, Ikole-Ekiti.

    Whether Saraki is corrupt or not is not the issue.  The fact remains that constitutionally, he will preside over the screening of ministerial nominees and he has the final say on who is cleared or not. – Anon.

    When will Nigerians develop mentally to the state referred to in the last paragraph of “Beyond the list”?  The Bukola Saraki I know could have stepped aside for moral reasons, pending the determination of the issue at stake – Joe Ehalaiye, Kogi State

    If any ministerial nominee thinks he is bold enough, let him confront the Senate president by telling him he doesn’t have the integrity to screen him and see if such a nominee will not be disqualified — Anon

    Your desire at your age to stand the truth on its head just to malign Saraki and satisfy your master is shameful.  For your information, Saraki and other dignitaries were assaulted by workers protesting non-payments.  It’s amazing how much space The Nation devotes to the Saraki bashing project.  We know it will soon be Buhari when he fails your master.  Anon

    Mr. Kabba (Okun) man. What actually is your problem with the Senate President, an Ilorin man? Old politics in the old Kwara State? Uhunn…time shall tell. I supposed by now, you ought to be an elder statesman. Anon.

    Leave Saraki alone. Where were you when Asiwaju went to CCT in 2011?  You were quiet. You are very partial. I will never read your comment again. Tokunbo.

    I’ve expected you to, at least investigate other political office holders, especially governors, past and present including your paymaster and tell the public your findings in respect of fraud or corrupt practices. If your sword of attack is directed at Bukola Saraki alone, any reasonable  reader will assess you as a mere archetype of personified journalist who lacks the ethics –Anon

    Re:  Beyond the list:  “. . .respectfully withdraw from consideration.” What a fantastic conclusion on your article.  I hope a nominee with a standing integrity could declare this. Alhaji (Dr) Senator Abubakar Olusola Saraki found himself entangled in a political cobweb and should only do the needful, to retain the little respect that he still has.   Biyi Adesanya, Ibadan.

    I’m still waiting for that day when The Nation will stop attacking Tinubu’s presumed enemies in politics. Well, he who pays the piper always dictates the tune. halabi42@yahoo.com

    I‘m not a politician, but an old Shell retiree, retired 23 years ago. Reading through your At  Home Abroad comments in today’s The Nation, I broadly salute you and say well done.  If Saraki is truly educated and honourable, he should at this point put in his resignation. Engr JK, Gasper.

    A very beautiful piece.  Let’s hope one of the nominees would be bold enough to speak up. Anon

    I cannot think of a more appropriate and damning response to your biased intervention on the Saraki matter than what Professor Ayo Olukotun aptly captures as “The Corruption of Anti-corruption”, on the back page of The Punch of September 25, 2015.  Kuteyi R.R, Ondo.

    Will it not be abnormal for an accused facing 13 charges with criminal undertone to screen ministerial nominees of the President of the biggest black nation in the world? Please let him know that he needs to be preparing for his defence on October 21, 22 and 23, 2015. ‘Wole Olatunbosun.

    You have passed this level you exhibited in your today’s article.  It’s very pedestrian and mediocre. We expect better intellectual inputs.  Anon

    Your article proves what a loyal employee you are. Imagine the way Saraki is searched and found is the same way the owner of The Nation is searched. By now, you would have been looking for another job.  Ogbadu

    Truth is bitter as always, but has to be told all the same. Well done sir for saying it the way it is. – Tony Iheanacho, Jos.

    Since Senate president Saraki has a case to answer over illegal assets declaration, he is not entitled to preside over the screening of ministerial nominees. —chika nnorom

    That was a masterpiece. The likes of Dino Melaye know that Senate confirmation in Nigeria is for sale.  This is the Senate’s harvest period; they waited long for it to come. Dino should not fool us. As for Saraki, red oil trying to wash the soap! What do you get?  Rubbish. Yes, let him forever get stuck “in the hole he dug himself into” Moses Imiegha

    “Beyond the list” was the tonic I need after much thought about the nation. The FG should not allow any political solution to any judicial matter in this country any more. Let the so-called Senate president continue his lying. The truth is that he was stoned in Ilorin.  Those senators supporting Saraki cannot go back to their constituencies and tell them. They are all liars. Your ink shall never dry. Abdulrahaman Yusuf.

    Re:.”Beyond the list” credited to Olatunji Dare in The Nation of October 6 is a piece that calls for sober reflection. Why is it that the Yoruba are always after themselves? I advise they should borrow a leaf from other tribes. Steve

    I always appreciate the flow in AT  HOME ABROAD. I will like to comment on “Beyond the list.”  The legislature can overturn the judgment of the court simply by enacting or amending a law. Please see S.E.C. v. Kasunmu  (2009) 10 NWLR (Pt. 1150) 509. Anon.

    The list of ministerial nominees unveiled turned out to be mixed bag of heavily corrupt, superbly corrupt and moderately corrupt Nigerians. Nothing to cheer. Rather than any of them looking Saraki in the face, they are most likely to lobby him not to expose them.  Whether charged to court or not, we know them. Anon

     

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    Nigerians voted decisively for change.  Following the election, heady intimations of a new dawn swept the landscape.  Many were cautious, skeptical even, because they have lived through too  many false dawns.

    This must not be another false dawn.

  • Beyond the list

    Beyond the list

    A head of its official release just as last week was ending, the most closely-guarded and most anticipated list in Nigeria’s political history sprang a huge leak.

    Senate President Bukola Saraki is keeping what has been released so far to his obdurate chest, bravely keeping up the pretence that he is a worthy occupant of that post and a worthy recipient of the document, even after being docked like a common miscreant.  I will return to this point shortly.

    Perhaps by the time you read this piece, Buhari will have released the complement.

    Never was a list so highly anticipated.  And it was not just by those jockeying for cabinet positions.  Having a close relation or friend or even the merest acquaintance in the cabinet is the closest thing to being a cabinet minister.  It could translate into easy money, financial help, juicy contracts, jobs for dependents who have been pounding the streets forlornly since graduating five years ago, and perhaps even into a huge leap from obscurity to celebrity.

    Interest and speculation were therefore very high among those with eyes trained on the main chance.  And in the ranks of such persons whose candidates found favour, there is already great rejoicing, as reflected in the upsurge in special thanksgiving sessions during Sunday worship.  The celebrations, aso ebi and all, will come later, with the scale varying directly as the perceived juiciness of the assigned ministry.

    There has also been a corresponding upsurge in supplication with regard to the content of the supplementary list.  Fervent prayers, with fasting and solemn pledges, are being said that those who did not figure in the first list will figure prominently in the coming one, and that    the outcome will confirm the wisdom of the ancients that those who laugh last laugh best.

    Some of those desperately hoping for cabinet positions fuelled interest and speculation in the process by insinuating themselves in the media as prospects receiving serious and active consideration, hoping thereby that if  Buhari does not know their merit, the media would tell  him just what he is missing.

    This tactic hasn’t always worked, but can you blame anyone for trying?

    Basking in Saraki’s faded glory instead of establishing his own bona fides, the mercurial Senator Dino Melaye has declared that the confirmation hearings will be thorough; that the era of “bow and go,” whereby a candidate for confirmation is asked to take a bow and move on, without any enquiry into his or her qualifications and fitness for the office, is over.

    It is to be hoped that this is not another example of the empty talk for which Melaye has become notorious. It would be nice if, for once, the Senate did its home work and put the candidates through the searching examination that will show how qualified they are to be ministers in these uncertain times that demand substantive mastery, and a huge capacity for learning, adaptation and innovation.

    President Buhari should help the Senate in his regard by attaching a portfolio to each nominee. The idea that any person adjudged fit for ministerial office can function as political head of any ministry, a carry-over from the Shagari era, is preposterous.  A person who can muddle through as Minister of Parks and Gardens is unlikely to do a credible job as Minister of Science and Technology or as Minister for the Navy.

    Vice versa, persons eminently suitable for those posts will most likely make a hash of the Parks and Gardens portfolio.

    In times past, some senators would now be preparing for a rich harvest.  Prospective cabinet members knew that it was one thing — the easy part, in fact— to be nominated, and quite another to be confirmed.   It was not unusual for hints to be planted by persons claiming to work within the system that the path might be lubricated with a substantial infusion of cash or goods routed through them, or for candidates to offer same upfront, without waiting to be asked.

    Either way, the “system” was the winner.

    Not this time; not under the new Sheriff.

    What role will Saraki play in all this?

    He is stuck in the hole he dug himself into, and continues to dig furiously.  Docked like a common criminal, he presumed to lecture the presiding judge on the law and the Constitution.  Instead of the triumphal homecoming that crowds had been rented to accord him in Ilorin, he was pelted with water sachets and stones and called the most repellent names at the praying grounds during Sallah and had to be spirited away for his own safety.

    The event was captured on video and splendidly reported by the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), the nation’s most professional and most reliable media source.  But Saraki’s spokespersons claim that it never took place.  So much for their credibility.

    To counter his Sallah misadventure and  create the illusion that he was in good standing,  Saraki suborned major traditional rulers in Kwara State, among them a retired judge of the Court of Appeal, who, as I was reminded by a younger friend the other day, might have become the nation’s chief justice, to pay him the courtesy visit that was usually accorded the serving governor, and to confer on him a vote of confidence even as he faced ongoing criminal investigations.

    When the Senate resumed after yet another well-compensated recess, he launched into a self-serving oration about how he had become Senate President in accordance with the constitutional provision that the Senate would elect one of its own to the post, and how he was being persecuted on account of that fact, and for his vow to safeguard the “independence” of the Legislative Branch.

    But not before stage-managing another vote of confidence.

    Why does a person who is completely innocent need so many votes of confidence?

    Yes, the Senate is enjoined to elect one of its own as president.  It also prescribes the manner in which the choice is to be made.  There is also the weighty matter of the spirit of the law.  Saraki subverted the spirit of the law to become president.  Withal, he is a defendant in a charge of forgery – forgery of the rules of procedure that governed his election.

    The “independence” of the legislature that Saraki says he is out to protect is a threadbare pretext. The legislature is just one of the three arms of government.  Its bills become law only when the President assents to them.  It can delay or revise, but only rarely can it countermand the President.  And whereas the courts can invalidate any act of the legislature incompatible with the Constitution, the legislature cannot overturn the verdict of the courts.

    So, where is the “independence” Saraki says he is out to protect?  “Independence” from whom, and for what?

    What will it take to make him realise that he cannot continue to preside over the Senate without  destroying that institution?  How many more of these sophomoric stunts can he stage in his desperation to hold on to office?

    I am hoping that when the hearings get under way, at least one nominee will look Saraki in the face and say, “Senator, with all due respect to your office, you lack the honour and the moral integrity to sit in judgment as to whether I should serve on the President Buhari’s cabinet or not.  I cannot in good conscience submit to your authority in this matter.  I thank the President for the nomination, but must for the reason I have stated respectfully withdraw from consideration.”

  • Ekiti: Your own airport, coming soon

    Ekiti: Your own airport, coming soon

    If there was a prize for the most robust, sustained and unsparing criticism of Ayo Fayose as governor of Ekiti, as aspirant to that office and as a castaway from it, this column would be the runaway winner.

    It has excoriated him again and again over his ill-conceived Integrated Poultry Project that gulped more than  a billion Naira – double that amount in today’s money – without delivering a single egg.  It has knocked him for his morbidity of thought and expression, for disrobing, in a manner of speaking, his own mother in the public square just to score a cheap political point, for his scattershot approach to governance, for his verbal incontinence, and for a general disposition that borders on megalomania.

    By my reckoning, only General Ibrahim Babangida, the former military president, has figured more often in this space than Fayose as an unedifying subject, if not as an outright villain.

    Seeing that this is yet another piece on Fayose, those who have found my strictures on him most agreeable would sit back, confident that this is going to be another sandbagging for the so and so.  Those who have always found the strictures tiresome and uncharitable, and have communicated their displeasure to me with the forthrightness that becomes Fayose so well,will most likely yawn, shake their heads and turn the page.

    Today, I am not going to follow that beaten path, and it is not just out of a desire to exercise a columnist’s sovereign right not to be too predictable.  I am going to disappoint Fayose’s implacable critics who count me as their patron, and I am going to surprise his teeming admirers who hold me in especial loathing.

    I do so not cavalierly but with great deliberation, on a matter that admits of no equivocation and no prevarication.  The merit of the matter at issue is so transparent that anyone who cannot fathom it and rejoice in it has got to be practically unconscious.

    To come right out it, I am thinking of the international airport that Fayose is set to build in the State capital, Ado-Ekiti.  Construction will start any moment from now, inside sources tell me.

    In their commentary, the usual naysayers —with whom I must today respectfully part company — have exhausted all the entries in the Thesaurus for “undesirable,” but they are not done yet.  These people, mind you, are the elite.  They did not vote for Fayose.  Instead, they slandered him relentlessly.

    Now, having catered adequately to the stomach infrastructure of the adoring masses, Fayose is against his better judgment giving the misguided elite an airport, and instead of praising him for being magnanimous when he could have been vindictive, they are denouncing him.

    Some of them are claiming that the project was in fact conceived by former Governor Segun Oni, and that Fayose merely appropriated it.  Such pettiness!  What really counts is the person giving life and form to what was no more than a dream in Oni’s head.  That person is Fayose.  And he is doing so against all odds – plummeting oil revenues, unpaid salaries and pensions, educational levies and mounting unrest.

    It is heartening that he is not in the least fazed by these pesky developments, nor by the base ingratitude of the elite, aforementioned.  If the elite are too blinded by spite to see that the project is being undertaken in their best interest and that they stand to profit the most from it, well might Fayose say in pained resignation:  So much for all their vaunted book learning.

    The project will go ahead whether they like it or not.

    I can now reveal that the facility will be officially known as Dr Goodluck Ebele Jonathan International Airport, Ado-Ekiti, with the telegraphic address GEJIA. This gesture is in grateful appreciation of the former president’s role in ensuring Fayose’s return to power eight years after an ignominious exit, and subsequently keeping Ekiti off-limits to other political parties.

    The airport is also being named in Dr Jonathan’s honour because he has promised to employ his new status as an acclaimed and much sought-after international statesman to help mobilise funds and resources that will make the airport second to none in the ECOWAS region if not in Africa.

    Those who think this is going to be another monument to folly are mistaken.  The potential is vast, and it is sure to translate into actuality once the project is completed.  In fact, I can reveal that the aviation community, led by the International Civil Aviation Organisation, has already asked to be identified with it at every stage.

    Consider just a few of the staggering gains that are guaranteed to flow from the project.

    Now, there is no academic specialism so abstruse or recondite that you will not find several scholars of Ekiti extraction at its cutting edge.   For lack of opportunities at home, these scholars are scattered all over the world.  A good many of them would like to give their homeland the benefit of their expertise through weekend seminars and boot camps.

    But they have been deterred by the prospect of being mugged at Lagos airport or along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway and at points in between, or being crushed by unlatched containers falling off rickety trucks.

    A direct flight to Ado-Ekiti  from London, Paris, Geneva, Frankfurt, Moscow, New York, Boston, Bologna, Berlin, Vienna, Washington DC, Los Angeles and other centres of advanced learning where they reside is exactly what these scholars need to help consolidate Ekiti’s place as the Fountain of Knowledge.

    With such a facility in place, the much-garlanded poet and Distinguished Professor of English, Dr Niyi Osundare, could take off from New Orleans in the morning, fly direct to Ado-Ekiti for an evening of poetry reading and return the very next day to his base in time to conduct a post-doctoral seminar on the Poetics and Aesthetics of Chaucer, Aeschylus, Okigbo and Walcott, with nary a hint of stress.

    For foreign-based Ekiti indigenes, a visit home would no longer be an endurance test, with long waits at connecting points.  You just fly direct into Ado-Ekiti, and within an hour, you’ll be home tucking into a hot meal of original pounded yam, not the insipid, synthetic stuff they sell in supermarkets.

    Intrigued by Governor Fayose’s ideology of stomach infrastructure, some of the world’s leading social scientists have been studying that phenomenon, as well as the role of okada riders as agents of political mobilisation and social enforcement, albeit from a distance.  With direct international flights to Ado- Ekiti, they can now converge on the entire state to conduct definitive fieldwork that will take these developments to the next level and place them in the proper epistemological context.

    These scholars can sniff a paradigm shift or a theoretical breakthrough from the end of the earth, and they believe Ekiti is where it is happening.  Hooray to the Fountain.

    Consider also the boom that tourism will experience.  I can already see jetliners from all over the world bringing tourists to the enchanting but under-patronised Ikogosi Springs and other wonders with which the Ekiti landscape is strewn, not forgetting the Idanre Hills close by in Ondo State.

    Europeans and Americans seeking escape from the harsh Northern Hemisphere summer will flock to Ekiti to savour the equable clime of Efon Alaye and Iyin-Ekiti, less than an hour’s ride from the international airport.

    The construction of JEGIA will create and sustain thousands of jobs, transform Ekiti’s economy from rural to global, boost trade and commerce and, in the process, generate so much revenue that the state will have to face the difficult task of figuring out what to do with such sudden affluence.

    The foregoing is only a conspectus of what Ekiti State stands to gain by Fayose’s visionary plan to build an international airport in Ado-Ekiti. It is nothing less than a stroke of genius.

    The usual critics can scoff to their hearts’ content.  On this one, I am solidly behind him.  Let the building commence.  I can hardly wait to fly into the airport direct from Peoria, Illinois, confident that I would be home in Kabba within an hour of clearing my luggage.

  • Saraki: Time to step down

    Saraki: Time to step down

    When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

    This is the time-tested piece of advice I would have passed on to the beleaguered Senate President Bukola Saraki if he was not too far gone in his self- absorption, his overweening sense of entitlement, his predilection for cutting corners, and his Raskolnikov Complex, the delusion named for the central character in Dostoyevsky great novel, Crime and Punishment, that the rules do not apply to him.

    Summoned to appear before the Code of Conduct Tribunal(CCT) in the investigation of some baffling inconsistencies in his declaration of assets, he spurns the order, dismisses the charges as false and frivolous, awards himself an acquittal, and seeks a court to block the Tribunal’sproceedings.

    In response to this contumacy, the CCT issued a Bench warrant for his arrest.  Saraki petitioned another court in a bid to void the warrant.  Based on that petition, he again failed to show up before the CCT.

    The CCT, Saraki charged, was being used to fight political opponents “to achieve through the back door what some people cannot get through democratic process.”

    It is almost as if it was through the front door, and in a process emblematic of the best democratic practice, that he had emerged Senate president.  I use the word “emerged” deliberately.  By his own account, he had been in hiding until it was safe to join his fellow plotters on the floor of the National Assembly where he was canonised in a proceeding that seemed like the parliamentary equivalent of a street mugging.

    His spokesperson warns that “we should not destroy our political institutions and heat up the polity for selfish reasons” in a desperate bid to settle political scores and nail imaginary enemies, adding gravely:  “Let us all learn from history.”

    Again, it is almost as if the process through which Saraki became Senate president was the quintessence of altruism and selflessness, and that it had, withal, brought down the nation’s political temperature from dangerously high to super normal.

    The Tribunal’s summons, his spokesperson further said, amounted to an abuse of the rule of law which portends danger to the judicial system.  Saraki affects the language of democracy but readily employs the tactics of a backroom fixer.  He is ever so ready to remind everyone that he ranks third in the nation’s constitutional order. Yet his conduct is sometimes almost indistinguishable from that of a political tout.

    Where is the noblesse oblige that should always inform the conduct of the holder of his exalted office?

    Within hours of the CCT’s order enjoining Saraki to appear before it, a shadowy organisation calling itself Nigerians of Conscience Against Impunity rushed a full-page advertisement to the major newspapers, demanding that officials of the Code of Conduct Bureau resign immediately and face prosecution for “gross violations” of their office.

    It was all so reminiscent of the shabby tactics Saraki’s surrogates in the Senate employed when his wife was invited for questioning by the EFCC in connection with some mysterious lodgments in her banking transactions.   In what was clearly an act of petulant vindictiveness, they announced that the National Assembly was set to launch an investigation into reports that EFCC officials had corruptly enriched themselves with funds recovered from fraudsters.

    In the wake of all this drama,  another –or perhaps the same set — set of Saraki’s surrogates recruited a huge delegation to travel from Ilorin to Abuja for the express purpose of conferring on him a traditional title of dubious worth.  The real purpose of the visitation, I suspect, was to create for the embattled Senate president the illusion of mass popularity and acceptability.

    One of his proxies even has it that Saraki is being pursued because of his zero tolerance for corruption, in keeping with the notorious fact that if you fight corruption, corruption will fight you back.

    No comment.

    Thus has Saraki continued to dig and dig with increasing fury since finding himself in a hole last June, in the hope that he can spend or bluff or bully or lawyer his way out of it.  He deepened that hole yesterday when he failed to appear before the CCT which had issued a Bench warrant for his arrest.

    One of his former comrades in the old PDP and one-time Minister of Works, Adeseye Ogunlewe, has warned that a situation in which the Senate president keeps making trips to             the courts would not only “put Nigeria in bad light” but slow down activities in the National Assembly, which would in turn affect the nation.

    Ogunlewe said if  Saraki appeared before the Tribunal and was found guilty, Saraki would appeal the verdict  to the High Court (sic).  If his guilt was affirmed there, Saraki would take his case to the Court of Appeal.  And if found guilty there, Saraki would head to the Supreme Court.

    Prosecuting Saraki was therefore not a good move, according to Ogunlewe.”Imagine the amount of time that would be wasted and the effect it will have on the legislative work within that period.

    If this intervention was designed to help Saraki keep the post of Senate president, it achieved the precise opposite.  It makes a powerful case for Saraki’s immediate and unconditional resignation, regardless of his guilt or innocence.

    A Senate president traipsing from one court to another would be a pathetic sight indeed, even if it is to answer traffic charges.  But we are dealing with investigations into allegations of serious fraud.  That the president of the Senate could figure in these allegations, however tangentially, should be cause for his resignation

    Noblesse oblige enjoins such an official to resign at the merest intimation of sleaze, real or merely perceived, in his conduct.

    In Saraki’s case, these intimations can no longer be ignored.  There is the matter of the forged House Rules with which he procured the post of Senate president.  There are the ongoing investigations into his wife’s finances.  There is the charge that he made false entries in declaring his assets.  And there is festering matter of how hundreds of depositors lost small fortunes in the family-owned bank that he ran aground, with nary a dent on his personal fortune.

    Each of these issues should move a public official in a country that sets a high store by probity to step down. Together, they make a compelling case for Saraki’s resignation.

    Saraki cannot be the public face of the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.  He does not have the gravitas to steer through the legislature the agenda on which President Muhammadu Buhari ran and won. He lacks the moral standing to preside over the hearings at which Buhari’s nominees for important positions are confirmed or rejected.

    Saraki, being Saraki, will most likely hang in there and hang tough.

    That might serve him well if he can pull it off.  But it cannot serve the larger national interest that he now claims to be espousing.  Everyday that Saraki continues to wield the gavel diminishes the office of the Senate president and the stature of the Senate.

    If he will not step down voluntarily, the Senate should, even if only from a sound instinct for self –preservation, ask him to go or face impeachment.

    This national nightmare cannot continue for much longer.

  • These disarticulated times

    These disarticulated times

    THese must be uneasy times for public officials.

    In Nigeria, nothing succeeds like public service.  It transforms those who were only yesterday struggling with the rent or mortgage into owners of choice property in some of the nation’s swankiest neighbouhoods and in the most sought-after sections of the business district.

    But now, they can no longer find refuge in the example of the one who “didn’t give a damn” about declaring his assets, acquired for the most part if not wholly through public service.

    The new man gives a damn, and has vowed to ensure that everyone on his team gives a damn.  If you are already inside and don’t give a damn, start packing up.  But remember that you may still be summoned to explain long after you are gone.

    If you are outside and looking to go in, you must belong unquestionably in the ranks of those who give a damn.  Otherwise, perish the thought.  You are much safer where you are, unless some past entanglements of the shady kind that you have long forgotten suddenly bobs up.

    In this season of startling disclosures stemming from principle or malevolence and everything in between, propelled by so-called social media that thrive on rumour and gossip and high scandal, who can vouch that such entanglements will not be exhumed and thrust into the public arena?

    Few developments are more indicative of these unsettling times than the recent raid on the hallowed premises of the Government House Complex in Uyo, Akwa Ibom, by operatives of the Department of State Security, following a tip-off by disaffected insiders.  There, the officials said, they found a quantity of arms and Improvised Explosive Devices — fancy name for dirty roadside bombs.

    Not quite a stockpile of munitions, to be sure.  But they found something much more tantalising – bundle upon bundle upon bundle of U. S. 100 dollar bills stacked up in one awe-inspiring heap.  So overawed were the DSS operatives that they could not immediately find a word for the spectacle.  So, they called it a stockpile

    Call it whatever you will:  the lesson is clear.  There is nowhere to hide again. There is no place to hide anymore.  No sanctuary even in the Presidential Lodge of a Government House Complex.  What is the country coming to?

    If you can’t put money away in the banks because of tighter regulations and can’t put stuff in the Governor’s Lodge because of all those aides who won’t mind their own business and you cannot store it in the Presidential Lodge without the intrusive DSS barging in just like that, and all this because you are a so-called public official, you have to ask, pardon the cliché, whether the game is worth the candle.

    All this drama was taking place as the former lord of the manor, who has not formally handed it over to his handpicked successor, was fighting for his life in a British hospital, following injuries he suffered when his car collided with a U.S. Embassy car as he was rushing to the airport to catch a flight to visit his family in America.

    Instead of wishing him a quick and complete recovery, many of those he served to the best of his ability for eight years – the same people who were forever trumpeting the “uncommon transformation”he wrought in Uyo – unlike his contemporary, former President Goodluck Jonathan, who could not effect transformation of the common kind – were taunting  him.  Unfeeling ingrates, all.

    Why, they are asking, why did he not check into the world-class hospital he said he had built in Uyo – a facility that is at par with, if not superior to, any other anywhere in the world, equipped to handle every ailment and every emergency, one designed to serve as the final destination for medical tourists in Africa and the wider world?

    A chopper could have ferried him right to the helipad atop the facility in a fraction of the time and the cost of flying him to the UK, and saved him all the pain and discomfort.

    They have been asking:  Has he no faith in the world-class hospital that is one of his signature achievements?

    Governor Godswill Akpabio deserves the benefit of the doubt on this one.  Surely, he must know what works best, unlike his misguided critics.

    But these are definitively times out of joint.

    So far, only President Muhammadu Buhari and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo have given the public a glimpse of their assets.  And if what I am hearing about the twain in this respect is anything to go by, public office just lost its allure.

    Why submit yourself to it when everyone knows your net worth, when you cannot create the illusion of affluence nor feign penury, and when importuning relatives and acquaintances  you’ve been fobbing off with disingenuous excuses now have proof you could be much more supportive if you were not such a  skinflint?

    I have with my own ears heard people ask: What is Buhari doing with 270 cows and four cars and several homes and a bank deposit close to N30 million, given his ascetic lifestyle? He doesn’t need all that stuff, especially now that he has become a ward of the Nigerian state.   Why doesn’t he give it all to his adoring talakawa?

    Would they have idolised him so much if they knew that, for all practical purposes, he was not one of them, merely one who empathises with them?  And now that they know his net worth, would they still hold him in high adoration?

    Henceforth, Buhari can expect to be bombarded with requests for financial and material assistance from his personal abundance by supplicants who now believe with growing confidence that he will have to find an excuse other than insolvency for not meeting their requests.

    If they cannot get to him directly, they will harass his relations in Daura, who will in turn harass him. If the Daura people cannot get to him directly, they will harass the First Lady, who will pass on the message and perhaps even do a little harassing of her own so as to get them off her back.

    I do not envy Osinbajo, in the least.  With almost a million dollars, plus close to N100 million in liquid cash, not counting homes in the UK and in the most opulent neighbourhoods in Lagos, his place is now assured, in the popular consciousness at least, in the ranks of persons of great wealth.

    Nobody will be fooled by those nondescript suits of which he is so fond, a carryover perhaps from his days as a law professor, nor by the modesty that becomes him so well.  He has money in the bank, and he will now be judged by how readily he is willing to share it with those who assert a claim to his estate, rightly or wrongly.

    If a relation wants him to help put a marbled roof on an uncompleted bungalow, and another wants him to assume responsibility for tuition and fees for a distant cousin who has just gained admission to the University of Saskatchewan for a Master’s degree in Advanced Eskimo Studies, and yet another relation wants him to foot the bill for hip replacement surgery in Brazil, he cannot now decline without being judged positively heartless, what with all those millions.

    You now know why everyone is rooting for public officials to declare their assets publicly – everyone, that is, except those who have something to declare.  Those who have nothing to declare are lying in wait with sharpened knives to carve out their own piece of the action.

    That is why the embattled Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike, has stated for the record that under no circumstance will he make a public declaration of his assets.

    Can you blame him?

  • One hundred days later

    One hundred days later

    One hundred days ago, heady optimism filled the air as President-elect Muhammadu Buhari took the oath of office.  The momentum had built up steadily through the campaign, and not even Dr Goodluck Jonathan’s panicked postponement of the presidential election could stop it.  Buhari’s emphatic victory consolidated the momentum, rendering the change that lay at the core of his agenda more insistent still.

    Not since 1975 when Murtala Muhammed and Olusegun Obasanjo shoved aside General Yakubu Gowon’s exhausted military regime has such optimism swept the country.

    The enthusiasm was understandable.  Jonathan had inflicted grave damage on virtually every aspect of Nigerian life in his six years of misrule, the culmination of which was a systems collapse.  There could not have been a more eloquent epitaph to his tenure.

    The change Buhari and the APC had promised was about to be launched and, finally, the translation of Nigeria’s vaunted potential into actuality was going to start in earnest.

    However, large swathes of the country refused, for all kinds of reasons, to be caught up in the wave, some from habit, some from genuine doubt, some from indifference and some from fear of retribution, especially those individuals and groups and blocs that had profited immensely from the systemic corruption and impunity that were the directive principles of the Jonathan administration.

    Iyiola Omisore, a stalwart of the PDP, spoke a greater than he intended or realised when he admonished the faithful on the eve of the last election that the PDP was “nothing without the Presidency.”  Message:  Win the presidential election at all cost, or face decline and oblivion.

    That prospect is real.  Desperately short on cash, the PDP secretariat recently served notice that it was going to cut its army of staffers and hangers-on by 50 per cent, and then cut by 50 per cent the pay of those who survive the attrition.

    Back when the PDP, the self-proclaimed biggest political party in Africa, was in power, that was unthinkable. The so-called Presidency, of which it was an arm — or was it the other way around? – would have stepped in with a train-load of cash to keep it going.

    But it is a tribute to the PDP’s tenacity that as it struggles for its life, it is showing the kind of innovativeness it could not muster in its glory days, even its life depended on it.   It has launched a hi-tech national campaign, biometrics and all, to recruit young persons into its thinning ranks – the same young people whose lives and prospects it blighted for 16 years.

    For six of those 16 years, the Jonathan-led PDP government saw the young people mainly as a reservoir from which to rent its crowds to create the illusion of popularity, only that the young men and women were sometimes not paid the promised rent at all, or were heavily short-changed.

    None in the PDP is trying more desperately than its pathetic National Publicity Secretary, Olisa Metuh, to shore up its sinking fortunes.  Day in day out he is grinding out hysterical screeds that say more about his detachment from reality than about Buhari’s failings, real or imagined.

    Does he seriously believe his own charge that Buhari has in just 100 days destroyed not only the robust economy he allegedly inherited from Jonathan, but indeed all the wonders allegedly wrought by Jonathan’s transformation agenda?

    The truth is that Jonathan inflicted grave damage on every aspect of Nigerian life, and the consequences will be with us for a long time.  What he handed to Buhari was a poisoned chalice.

    That is the background against which Buhari’s first 100 days in office must be judged.

    Those who saw him as the new messiah who would build all the road networks and hospitals and fast trains within that period and deliver to every home trays of fresh-baked potato bread that was reserved exclusively for Dr Jonathan’s breakfast table will doubtless be gravely disappointed.

    So also would those who expected Boko Haram to hand over the Chibok girls or morph into an international relief organiszation, or that Nigeria would overnight become a net exporter of electric power, or that importers would resume paying premium price for Nigeria’s crude oil, or that the Naira would attain parity with U.S. Dollar and greater purchasing power than the Euro.

    And so also would those who believed that Buhari would make life more abundant for all Nigerians within his first 100 days in office.

    They all are entitled to their disappointment, but they must blame it more on their delusions than on what the man said he was going to do or what he could reasonably be expected to do.

    If Buhari’s supporters and opponents can agree on one thing, it would have to be that he has not moved mountains.  He has not moved mountains.

    But he has arrested the drift of the Jonathan years and given purpose and direction to governance.  He has served notice that the depredations of the Jonathan years will no longer              be tolerated, and that the brazen impunity of that era will have no place under his watch.

    In the past, you could abuse the public trust with the utmost contempt, confident that you could use the elastic framework of the law not merely to escape but to prevent justice, and then live happily ever after with your loot.

    Henceforth, that will not be so easy. Buhari has set up a committee of eminent jurists and scholars to devise ways of removing, without doing violence to fundamental legal principles, those loopholes and technicalities that have stood as barriers to justice.

    To be effective, the war on corruption must be as comprehensive as possible.  But in practical terms, it must have a boundary.   However you draw it, the boundary will necessarily be arbitrary. The important thing is to start somewhere, and make sure that appropriate lessons are taught.

    Corruption has reached such an alarming degree in public life in Nigeria because no lessons were taught. And because no lessons were taught, no lessons were learned.

    Nigerians are used to judging government performance mainly on the basis of tangibles – roads and hospitals built or rehabilitated, electric power generated, jobs created, etc. On this score, Buhari has achieved next to nothing.  The period in review is too short even to process a contract for a major project.

    But governance is also about restoring faith and confidence in the system, creating a climate for recovery, in which people believe that government can be made to work for them rather than for a few — intangibles on which the attainment of other deliverables may well hinge.

    Buhari has instituted a dynamic of accountability.  By making public his material assets and those of Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, he has set an example that other public officials will find it hard to ignore.  He has begun the difficult task of re-building the value system that the political class in and out of uniform has destroyed.  He is establishing an environment in which mountains can be moved.

    I suspect that most Nigerians now feel more optimistic about the country’s prospects today than they did in the twilight of the Jonathan era, if not throughout its duration.

    That, as I see it, is a good start.

    But there is much more work to do.  Buhari should name a cabinet immediately, not only to give shape and direction to his administration, but also to stem growing criticism that he is running the country as if he was leader of a military regime rather than a democratically-elected president

    His cabinet should reflect the abundance of talent and expertise with which Nigeria is endowed,  as well as the country’s plural identities.

  • The power of definitions

    The power of definitions

    The international news network Al Jazeera sparked off a debate the other day about what to call the tens of thousands of persons from Africa, the Middle East and Asia flocking to Europe in a wave the continent has not seen since World War II, most of them enduring misery and suffering on a Biblical scale:  Are they primarily refugees, or just migrants?

    An opinion writer for the UK Guardian sought to widen the debate still:  Why not just call the multitudes what they are basically:  people?

    At first blush, this debate may seem academic, a semantic excursion at best, and unhelpfully diversionary to boot.  But it is nothing of the sort.  Definitions matter.  As the sociologist Ruth Benedict noted long ago, if we define a situation as real, it is real in its consequences.

    By whatever name you call them, those arriving in such large numbers in the European Union – some 100, 000 in July alone— constitute a daunting challenge to its member-nations grappling with serious social and economic problems of their own. But how you characterise them will influence, if not determine, how they are perceived or received.

    Call them refugees, and they could in good measure be received with empathy and fellow-feeling.  Call them migrants, and they could face the visceral hostility of those who regard the “other” as the source of all problems, as elements who must be kept away at all cost.

    Not surprisingly, Germany has been more welcoming to the beleaguered persons pouring into Europe, seeing them principally as refugees fleeing from war and persecution in their homelands. Forty percent of them are likely to find accommodation in Germany, as against eight per cent France and four per cent in the United Kingdom where they are viewed principally as migrants seeking better economic opportunities at the expense of the nationals.

    Poland and Slovakia will accept only Christians; no “Islamists” please, and no “jihadists.”  In Hungary, vigilantes actually took up arms to chase away asylum-seekers who manage to navigate the120 km-long barbed-wire fence it has erected to keep them away.

    The news media are the principal purveyors of the frames through which we select and interpret and organise what we see and experience, and by that fact the purveyors of our definitions of “reality”. Through the use of selection, emphasis, exclusion and elaboration, the media suggest, and large sections of the attentive audience come to accept, what the issue is.

    That is why countries pay particular attention to, and often seek to influence, the way they are profiled by the international news media.

    Defining the situation is a task not to be taken lightly, and Al Jazeera is right to examine its own role in performing that function. In this, it is following the BBC which long ago decided to drop the term “terrorist” from its news reporting on the Israeli -Palestinian conflict, if not from its entire reporting, and to employ less evocative terms, such as “militants” or “insurgents.”

    To the Israelis, the Palestinians are invariably “terrorists,” a definition echoed by the largely sympathetic Western news media.  There is no redeeming grace to that term, no patience with and no sympathy for any cause espoused by any person stamped with that label.

    Its effect is to strip individuals or groups identified as “terrorists”of their humanity and to render whatever is done them not merely acceptable but just.

    But framing is an indispensable element in the contest for influence and preferment in the policy debate. Sparing no effort, no expenditure, each side seeks to come up with a frame that will dominate the debate and ultimately shape its outcome.

    Take as an example the September 11, 2011, attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, masterminded by Osama bin Ladin and executed in the main by his fellow Saudi nationals.  Few disputed the attacks as acts of terror, and few questioned the American response – a war on terror.

    But that soon morphed into an invasion of Iraq, which had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, framed as an expedition to oust Saddam Hussein, rid Iraq of its frightful arsenal of “weapons  of mass destruction”and plant the seeds of American democracy – genetically engineered, to be sure —  in the barren sands of the Middle East.

    That frame, kept alive by relentless propaganda, dominated the debate and won enthusiastic support in America and even abroad, notably from former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, who would be undone by the misadventure.

    The term “weapons of mass destruction” was a key element in the framing.  It was designed to conjure up weapons so novel that the English language had not yet found names for them, or so frightfully destructive that their names were unmentionable.

    Iraq had no such weapons.  It had nothing resembling the nuclear, thermo-nuclear, chemical and biological weapons that those who invaded and occupied it have in super abundance. Today, Iraq lies in ruins.  Millions of Iraqis, combatants and non-combatants alike were killed, and much of the country’s population has forcibly dispersed.  Several thousand American and several hundred British soldiers in the occupation force lost their lives.

    Definitions matter. And as the case of Iraq shows powerfully, they can have tragic consequences.

    Back home, former President Goodluck Jonathan, remembered now more for the culture of grand larceny that thrived during his tenure than for the “transformation” he claimed to have wrought, even tried his hand at framing the debate on probity in public life.

    Chafing at those who were forever talking glibly about the lack of public accountability, he said the issue was not corruption but stealing and that the one must never be mistaken for the other.As usual, his point was not entirely clear.  Was he saying that stealing was a lesser, more acceptable, crime than corruption?

    There were those who thought he was only creating a distinction without a difference.  I thought he was advocating plain speaking; a thief is a thief in the exact sense that a spade is a spade and not a device for excavation.

    Too bad Dr Jonathan did not avail us of his seminal thoughts on the difference between mere stealing and outright looting, the term that has come to dominate the discourse on the conduct of a good many of the men and women who served with him.

    What cannot now be disputed is that a great deal of what Dr Jonathan preferred to call stealing went on unchecked during hiswatch.   Each passing day brings forth staggering new allegations of stealing that make the revelations of the previous day seem like amateur pilfering.

  • A top cop and tales of sleaze

    A top cop and tales of sleaze

    How I wish I were playing the proverbial fly-on-the-wall when President Muhammadu Buhari received a delegation from the Ministry of Police Affairs and the Police Service Commission  the other day in Abuja and warned his visitors that it was “totally unacceptable” for applicants to pay bribes, as was the case in the past, before being recruited.

    Media reports have it that the President told his visitors that the police board must be above board and eschew every form of extortion or underhand dealing in the coming recruitment of 10,000 officers.

    I would have scanned every muscle on the face of Mike Okiro, the chairman of the Police  Service Commission, as Buhari delivered that poignant charge.  For it was under Okiro’s watch as inspector-general of police that a recruitment scandal broke.

    Taking unconscionable advantage of desperate job-seekers, the police charged a fee of N2,000 per applicant, presumably for handling and processing.  To be fair to the police, it has to be stated that other government ministries, departments and agencies were also charging application fees.

    The practice was illegal through and through and the police, more than any other institution, should have known that.  But that was not the most troubling aspect of the matter.

    The police authorities said N1.6billion from the N2 billion realised from the application fee had gone into paying the consultancy fees to an IT company identified only as Bharmos Ventures Nigeria Limited, widely believed to be a front. The names and identities of its owners were never disclosed.

    Nor was this again the most troubling aspect of it all.

    The most troubling aspect, as I saw it, was that in this digital age, the Nigeria Police Force lacked the capacity or the will to develop a computer programme to handle a procedure as elementary as recruitment, and instead outsourced the task, at a price that should have gone into making life better for its ill-paid, ill-clad and ill-housed personnel.

    Nigerians have long been conditioned to expect nothing but the worst from their rulers and leaders. Hence, on any given day, damning allegations of sleaze proliferate about them even in the more responsible newspapers.  In the less discriminating newspapers and the misnamed social media, the public gets little more than a steady diet of actual sleaze and rumours of sleaze, at the centre of which are the men and the women we have been conditioned to regard as persons of great consequence.

    This may well be the case with Mike Okiro

    Still, few in the attentive audience can have failed to notice what appears to be an affinity between former police Inspector-General Mike Okiro and allegations of sleaze since his days as the top cop to the present, quite apart from his uncanny capacity for multi-tasking long before that term entered popular usage.

    Only such a facility could have explained how Okiro hounded former EFCC chair Nuhu Ribadu out of the anti-corruption agency so as to get him off the back of sleaze grandmaster James Ibori, now serving time in a British jail with his wife and his mistress and his lawyer; how he worked tirelessly to ensure a PDP victory under the most improbable circumstances; how he chased contracts for his pipe-laying company, raked up huge non-performing loans for his many businesses, and how he cranked  out a book on policing in a democratic Nigeria –  all this while holding down a full-time job as a senior police officer.

    For these and other services, Okiro was at his retirement rewarded with an appointment as chair of the Police Service Commission by former President Jonathan Goodluck, a position he holds to this day, and the capacity in which he was received by Buhari and handed a terse admonition.

    Just several days later, that curious affinity between Okiro and allegations of sleaze surfaced again, big-time, and in copious detail.

    Aaron Kaase, an official of Okiro’s Police Service Commission, had filed a petition with the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICRC) linking Okiro to acts most unbecoming, following which ICPC operatives had grilled him and several officials of the Commission in their Abuja offices and thereafter granted him “administrative bail”.

    In the complaint, Kaase asserted that Okiro had obtained N350 million, purportedly for the training of PSC staff due to be deployed to monitor the performance of the police in the 2015 general elections.  Of the prospective trainees, 500 were to be selected from PSC staff in Abuja, 200 from Kano PSC staff, another 200 from PSC Lagos staff, for a total 900.

    Based on Okiro’s projection, the Bureau for Public Procurement (BPE) had duly cleared the project and approved payments to designated contractors in the following amounts:  N95.3 million for training the 500 Abuja participants, N93.5 million for training  the 200 Kano participants and N85 million for training the 200 Lagos participants.

    I must digress again, for the last time.  Why is Lagos, our Lagos, always being short-changed at every point?

    To return to what is now likely to be a significant entry in the annals of official sleaze in Nigeria, actual or rumoured, Kaase stated that the entire staff of the PSC number no more than 400.  It is his contention that Okiro misled the BPE into approving a dodgy disbursement of N275 million out of the N350 million the Commission had obtained from the National Security Adviser.

    How Kaase arrived at his figure for the dodgy disbursement is not clear. But there is no imputation in his deposition, and none in this space, that Okiro personally profited from it.

    It is, however, instructive that, at the end of its investigations, the ICPC directed Okiro to remit the sum of N133 million to the Federal Government, being the difference between the N350 million the PSC obtained from the National Security for training 900 staffers nationwide, and the N217 million it actually expended in training 391 staffers in Abuja.

    The deposition goes personal when Kaase asserts that back in 2013, Okiro obtained N4.6 million for a first-class airline ticket for a trip to the United States that he never made, and that he routinely used fronts to collect allowances from the PSC at various times.

    In what seems to establish a pattern, Kaase charged in his deposition that Okiro collected travel grants for two conferences scheduled for the same time frame in Orlando, Florida, in the United States, and Dublin, in the Irish Republic, but attended only the latter meeting.

    The ICPC’s report does not dispute the fact.  But instead of taking a dim view of it, the Commission recommends that Okiro return the grant for the Florida conference only if the Federal Government rejects his offer to apply it to another conference coming up in October.

    Meanwhile, Kaase has been suspended from his duties in the press and public relations department of the ICPC , allegedly for leaking his deposition to the media.

    Compared with the trillions being casually tossed round in recent and ongoing allegations of Jonathan-era sleaze, the figures Kaase cited in his deposition amount to no more than a pickpocket’s haul on a good day.

    But what counts is the principle, not the sum.  And the principle here is that the chair of the Police Service Commission should live and be seen to live above the merest suspicion of impropriety, financial or otherwise.

    The cumulative evidence suggests powerfully that Okiro has not done so.  If he does not know it, his friends must tell him that his continuing tenure as chair of the Police Service Commission is incompatible with the temper and tenor of these times.

  • Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

    Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

    “Who will guard the guardians?”

    This question, perhaps as old as human community, has been looking for a definitive answer  since the ancient Greek philosopher Plato placed a master-class, the philosopher-kings, or guardians, at the head of his utopian polity.

    But even in this age of separation of powers, with an elaborate system of checks and balances entrenched in written constitutions, the question, if less insistent, still awaits a definitive answer.

    Who, indeed, will guard the guardians?

    The National Assembly sees itself once as a repository of the popular will and a custodian of the people’s interests, mandated to make laws for the advancement of both. This is no idle claim; it is backed by the Constitution

    To discharge these functions, the National Assembly debates the appropriations prepared by the Executive, modifies them based on the prevailing sentiment, and passes them into law.  In addition, it prepares its own budget, debates it (ha!), approves it and passes it into law, almost without any interference or modification from outside its ranks.

    It is all so incestuous, this process by which the National Assembly determines how much the Exchequer will expend on its operations for a given year, based almost exclusively on what its members decide they want to appropriate from the public purse.

    They see no conflict of interest in this arrangement.  After all, the Executive can countermand it if it so desires.  But when the Executive and the Legislative branches are controlled by the same political party as happened in Nigeria from 1999 until the APC came to power last May, and when impunity rather than probity was the directive principle if not the fundamental objective of state policy, there were no checks and no balances.

    Each branch extracted whatever it wanted from the public purse in a game of mutual aggrandisement.  There were signs all right that the purse was not inexhaustible, and that the practice was unsustainable.  But crunch time lay far ahead.  Why ruin the game by needless anticipation?

    But crunch time is finally upon us.  And to its great credit, the National Assembly says it is  prepared, in broad terms, to “make sacrifices.”  As proposed by a committee of the Senate, this will translate into a 30 percent cut in what has been the official operating budget of the Senate.

    I speak deliberately of the official operating budget, because nobody outside its ranks knows what the actual operating budget of the National Assembly is today or has been since 1999.

    In its finances, especially what accrues to members in one guise or disguise as compensation for one contrived activity after another, the National Assembly has been as secretive as an oyster, and just about as  transparent as a black hole, in astrophysics the hulk of a collapsed star so dense that not even light can escape from its bowels.

    Because of this secrecy, many a commentator has taken the liberty to portray the National Assembly as an institution concerned not with achieving sufficiency for the general public, but superfluity for its members.  Some have even gone so far in their contumacy as to cast the distinguished and honourable members collectively as predators in parliamentary garb.

    The commentators seem to think that this strategy would goad the lawmakers out of their silence and engender a healthy debate.  If they say their earnings are not an outrage on public sensibilities, let them spell out their earnings clearly and unambiguously.

    Out of a sound instinct for self-preservation, the lawmakers have refused to oblige.   And so, there has been no end to the dark insinuations masquerading as “common knowledge,” which has it that our lawmakers routinely pocket hefty compensations for activities including, but by no means limited to the following:

    Sitting, standing and maintaining every position in between; for meeting and not meeting; for clearing their throats to talk, talking, and not talking; for belching and refraining from belching; for staying in one place and going everywhere; for the upkeep of their harems and their cars and their pets; for their clothing, right up to their intimate apparel, and generally keeping up with the latest fashion trends;  for their grooming – hair care, manicure, pedicure, massage, face and body massage, etc, and for sleeping on the job or staying awake.

    It has even been claimed by their detractors, no doubt out of pure envy, that our lawmakers have parlayed the — to their critics – sedate and cushy job of making laws into the most hazardous enterprise in Nigeria, which should be bounteously rewarded in cash.

    Such indeed is the calumny of these detractors.  That, at any rate, is how we arrived at this pass where, instead of applauding the lawmakers for submitting to debate  a proposal to cut their allowances by 30 per cent when they could have preempted discussion or raised the emoluments to keep pace with soaring inflation and the misfortunes of the Naira, the detractors have been quipping:  30 per cent of what?

    An answer, by no means conclusive, has come from a report in one of the weekend newspapers,  with the salacious title “Naira rain at NASS as Senators collect N23.4 million each.”

    Over the same two months during which the Senate’s main achievement was the election of principal officers based on documents widely believed to be an inept forgery, members of the House of Representatives received N17 million each.

    Even taking into account fixed costs, this is a hefty charge on the treasury for an Assembly that has gone on recess three times since its inauguration last May and has not passed a single bill.

    In whatever case, it is now universally acknowledged that Nigerian lawmakers are far and away the highest-paid in the world, raking in by way of “wardrobe allowance” alone at least three times the national minimum monthly wage of N18,000 that many states cannot or will not pay.

    The payments made out to members of the National Assembly, it is necessary to state,               are not for actual reimbursable expenses  but outright grants. To cite just one example:  Each senator, it has been reported, stands to pocket or has already pocketed N3, 500,000 as local travel allowance and N2,500,000 for international travel.

    It is not clear whether this payment is for the month of July alone or for the first quarter of the current session, but that is beside the point.

    The point is that the whole thing is obscene, no matter how you dress it up.  It cannot be left to the National Assembly to perform “oversight functions” on its own finances when it has thus far proved unequal of carrying out that task on issues not shot through and through with conflict of interest.

    This ravenous guardian cannot be left unguarded.

  • Between ‘national icon’ and iconographer

    Between ‘national icon’ and iconographer

    A “national icon” turned 82 the other day.

    No, it wasn’t the literary titan and Nobelist, Wole Soyinka.  It wasn’t the great legal scholar and jurist, Professor Ben Nwabueze.  It wasn’t the statesman, First Republic Minister of Mines and Power and  Second Republic Ambassador to the United Nations, Yusuf Maitama Sule.  It wasn’t even Edwin Kiagbodo Clark, “Leader of the Ijaw Nation” and lately confidant, counsellor and father-confessor to yesterday’s man, former President Goodluck Jonathan.

    Unless you were like me a pertinacious consumer of the newspapers, including advertisements ranging from the self-indulgent to the flagrantly-seditious and everything in between, you would have missed the full-page announcement in one of the better national dailies of the grand arrival of this “national icon” at that epochal milestone.

    To persons of an even temperament, given neither to excess of praise nor censure, the accolade might seem over the top.  But considering the subject’s transcendent achievement as set out in the advertisement I cited earlier, qualifying him as a “national icon” might on deeper reflection seem a back-handed compliment.

    If I did not know the reputation, forthrightness and judgment of the iconographer, I would myself have accused him of engaging in denigration by faint praise.

    That would have been unduly hasty.  For, the advertisement goes on full throttle to elucidate, for contemporary society and posterity, just what the subject’s iconic status consists in.

    “A leader of uncommon achievement,” the iconographer declares languidly about his subject, preparatory to ramping up the adulation.  “Keeper of the peace of the nation, a political heavyweight and mentor to the upcoming generation, an elder statesman and a leader of indomitable mien.”

    Even so early in the game, I can almost see the reader scratching his or her head and wondering just who this “national icon,” this paragon of political virtue, is.

    Surely, our iconographer cannot be talking about Frederick Lugard or Herbert Macaulay or Nnamdi Azikiwe or Obafemi Awolowo or Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, or Abubakar Tafawa Balewa or Anthony Enahoro or Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu or their contemporaries who might still be among us?

    Who, then, is the “national icon” he is eulogising so rapturously?

    “No doubt, yours has been a life of consistent hard work, total commitment to higher principles and unalloyed loyalty to the national cause,” the iconographer continues, gathering pace.

    Total commitment to higher principles and unalloyed loyalty to the national cause in a land where the leadership has been defined by the absence of a commitment to higher principles and often to no principles at all, except for brief shining moments, a land that has espoused no national cause beyond preserving its so-called territorial integrity and is still seen by a large bloc of its inhabitants as a  “geographical expression” more than 50 years after independence?

    By now the reader is scratching his or head maddeningly. Who is this “national icon,” this paragon of civic virtue?  Where was he in all these years that Nigeria has been like a stalled caterpillar, its antennae probing forlornly in every direction, its body inert?

    Patience, reader.

    “The story of your achievements and the status you occupy, “ the iconographer continues his impassioned exordium, is (sic) an eloquent testimony to a life of discipline spent in sacrifice and sincere devotion to a nation that today expresses its gratitude…

    “Sincere devotion,” you hear.  No faking.

    That would be iconic indeed, if true; indeed, for a country mired in every pathology known to political science, nothing would be more iconic. But the reader cannot tell whether it is true until he or she knows the true name and identity of the subject of the exordium – the “national icon,” in other words.

    As for the nation “expressing its gratitude,” when did that happen?  By now, the reader who belongs in the attentive audience for public affairs is thoroughly frazzled.  He or she cannot recall a recent public event honouring the singular individual who has wrought such transcendent feats of public devotion and dedication and commitment and nation-building, but by design or default remains largely unknown and unsung.

    The reader cannot recall any national thanksgiving ceremony at which the “national icon” was presented on the national stage in appreciation of his iconic service, nor the proclamation of a federal holiday to mark the canonisation.

    Can it be that the iconographer was the only witness at the event who was not solemnly sworn to secrecy?

    Then this, up close and personal to the “national icon” from the iconographer: “Chief, there is nothing more for you to prove.”

    There you have it, a verdict for the ages is definitive and admits of no equivocation. Not even the most inventive revisionists can assail it.

    In their unwisdom, philosophers of antiquity warned that we should call no person good until he is dead.  But we have it on the authority of our latter-day iconographer that his subject is virtue personified.

    All that remains is a prayer, dutifully entered by the iconographer that as he”gracefully” adds to his years, the “national icon” may be granted longer life and good health “to continue with selfless service to the nation.”

    The mystery deepens, if not the awe. Where most people spend that time of life contemplating the hereafter, this “national icon” thinks of nothing but continuing his accustomed “selfless service” to the nation.

    Pray, who is this “national icon”?  And who is his gushing iconographer?

    It can now be revealed, as a reward to the reader who has stayed through this tortuous puzzle, that the “national icon” at issue is none other than Himself the Arch Fixer, Chief Tony Anenih, Iyase of Esanland, best known for his uncommon skills in turning election winners into losers and losers into winners.

    I can also now reveal that the gushing iconographer, joined by his wife Fati and their children, is General Abdulsalami Alhaji Abubakar, Grand Commander of the Federal Republic, former head of state, under whose custody President-elect Moshood Abiola was murdered for refusing to submit to the pernicious bargain that Anehih had made of his sweeping victory in the presidential election of June 12, 1993, and now a much sought-after international mediator:   in short, a “national icon” himself.

    It takes one “national icon” to identify another.

    Correction

    In this space last week, I blamed Kogi Governor Idris Wada for derailing a plan to site a federal university in Kabba.  It was his predecessor Ibrahim “Ibro” Idris who scuttled the plan. I regret the error.