The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • Bookending 2023

    Bookending 2023

    Do they know it’s Christmas in Gaza?

    Whoever thought that Hamas’s sneak attack on Israel and Israel’s response would develop into one of the bloodiest conflicts of the past 50 years?

    The attack, on unarmed civilians,  was brutal through and through. As missiles rained on the Israeli homeland from Gaza, Hamas militants struck, leaving a scene of devastation that Israel had not seen in its wars with its neighbours since its creation in 1948.   Casualties, numbering more than 200 dead, included youths in their innocence gamboling in an open-air concert, and residents of several settlements relaxing in their homes.  The infiltrators hustled more than 100 persons of various nationalities into captivity in Gaza.

    The attack shattered the myth of Israel’s unsurpassed mastery of intelligence and surveillance, a mastery it had parlayed into a diplomatic asset and a protection racket for jittery regimes in Africa and the Third World.   It shook the nation’s confidence in its armed forces as never before.  It rendered hollow Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s posturing as the leader who could best guarantee Israel’s security.

    Israel’s immediate response was swift, massive, and justified.   At the risk  of being stamped with the anti-Semite label, the deadliest political crime in America and most odious in Israel’s lexicon, I ally myself with those who have been saying that the response has since become vengeful, unrelenting and indiscriminate, as even Israel’s staunchest ally, the United States, has had to acknowledge. 

    For weeks on end, Israel carried out more than 200 bombing raids on the Palestinian homeland.  It has pulverized more than 60 percent of the homes and the infrastructure in Gaza and forced the civilian population to embark on march after perilous march from one devastated location to another, marches with few parallels in their depredation.

    The global sympathy, support and solidarity that Israel enjoyed several weeks into the attack has for the most part evaporated as the Palestinian dead are scooped up by excavators are shoved into mass graves day after day.

    Some 20,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s carpet bombing.  Hundreds, perhaps thousands, lie buried under the rubble.  Contrary to Israel’s claims that its lethal ordinance is dropped with surgical precision on carefully chosen targets, a detailed analysis has found that no more than 60 percent of them is released with anything resembling precision.  The rest are about as precise as a blunderbuss.

    The goal, Israel vowed from the outset, is to exterminate Hamas and render it forever incapable of launching another attack.  From seeking to exterminate Hamas, however, it is but a short step to exterminating the Palestinian people, especially when the one is conflated with the other.

    Calling it the Hamas-Israel War or Israel-Hamas War is duplicitous.  Rarely in the history of armed conflict has there been such inequality, such asymmetry of resources, between belligerents.  One enjoys almost  unchallenged use of the skies, a monopoly of heavy armaments and munitions, to say nothing about sheer numbers, in every department of warfare.

    As if these factors did not in themselves confer on Israel a prohibitive advantage, Israel has reportedly resorted to the use of white phosphorus in battle –  a substance that, according to the best authorities, causes severe burns upon contact with the skin or eyes. The smoke alone causes  gastro-intestinal irritation.  The evidence for this incendiary charge was strong enough to move U. S. President Joseph Biden, Israel’s chief enabler, to urge Israel publicly to cease and desist.

    It has to be said, again, that Hamas brought this unspeakable calamity upon itself and upon the Palestinians. But the world was slow to remark the disproportionate response and the scale of the human misery Israel unleashed.  It is as if conscience, or what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called “the moral law within us, went on vacation. 

    Read Also: The Israel-Hamas war: Conflict of the year

    It is as if those on whom this dreadful punishment was being visited day after day – women and children, the aged and the infirm, for the most part – are less than human.   Country after country trumpeted Israel’s right to defend itself and its population but was silent, funereally silent, about the means and the scale.

    A ceasefire, a pause in the bombing – euphemistically called “air strikes” – they said, parroting Israel, would only enable a crippled Hamas to regroup and attack Israel all over.  When the community of nations finally found its voice and called for a ceasefire, the United States vetoed their resolve, and the  UK abstained. 

    They opted to allow Israel to finish the job – to allow it to apply a Final Solution of sorts to the Palestinian problem.

    Medicines Sans Frontiers was right to call the veto “a vote against humanity.” When a world body founded with the aim of “saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war” is blocked from moderating a war that has subjected unarmed women and children to horrific reprisals, one must ask:  Whatever happened to our humanity?

    Well might today‘s Palestinians ask, as Shylock the Jew did in Shakespearian England:

    If you cut us, do we not bleed?                                                                                                                                                          If you slap us, do we not swell up?                                                                                                                                                     If you spit on us, do we not get wet?

    As I was composing this piece, I found myself wondering how Henry Alfred Kissinger who, as United States National Security Adviser and Secretary of State and mediator in the so-called Six-Day War between  Israel and Egypt, would have fared in that role in the present conflict.

    Kissinger died some three weeks ago, aged 100 years. He was a manipulative figure.   In death as in life, he was admired and reviled in equal measure.  There are those who regard it as a historic injustice that he was not put on trial and convicted for war crimes in Vietnam. Kampuchea (formerly Cambodia), Chile, and many other theatres of conflict.  And there are those who regard him as one of the greatest statesmen of his era or any era.

    You could not but acknowledge his brilliance, his grasp of strategy, the sweep of his scholarship rooted in German history, especially the career of the Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich, and the Concert of Europe  From these and other sources, he drew profound insights on the use and abuse of power, which he applied to his world.

    He was amoral through and through.  Power was the only thing that counted in international relations. Values have no place there.

    For all his brilliance and scheming, it was in Nigeria that Kissinger came a cropper.  He sought to foist a leader on Angola, which had just expelled the colonial overlord Portugal from its territory in a titanic liberation struggle that lasted more than two decades  Three main liberation armies were battling to fill the vacuum left by the fleeing colonialists:  Agostinho Neto’s Marxist-orientated MPLA, Holden Roberto’s FNLA, and Jonah Savimbi’s American-backed UNITA.  The MPLA had the strategic advantage of controlling the capital, Luanda, and the instrumentalities of state power.

    The country’s future hung on the outcome of a special summit of the OAU, convened to determine which of the warring factions would win the OAU’s recognition as the sole legitimate representative of the sovereign state of Angola.  The climate of opinion in Nigeria, driven by students and the labour unions, favoured the MPLA, and so did the government of Murtala Muhammed.  His foreign minister, the dynamic and articulate Joe Garba stood resolutely by Angola.

    Sensing a foreign policy defeat, the United States, which wanted to foist Savimbi, a former operative of the brutal Portugues secret service PIDE on Angola, put it about that an unnamed West African country had been given $100 million by the Soviet Union to champion the MPLA’s cause.

    Newsweek magazine upped the ante, asserting that the country the State Department had in mind was Nigeria.  Kissinger was setting out to cajole, bully, or blackmail it into toeing America’s line.

    At a time when most countries would have given just about anything to rate a visit by Kissinger, Nigeria told him angrily to stay at home. Murtala Muhammed went on to lead Nigeria’s delegation in place of his previously scheduled deputy, General Olusegun Obasanjo and delivered a fiery speech that mobilized African support for the MPLA.

    It has been said that Kissinger and the United States never forgave Murtala Muhammed, and that they engineered the coup attempt that claimed his life several months later.  The evidence I have seen is fragmentary.

  • Nwabueze: The legal Titan and his legacy

    Nwabueze: The legal Titan and his legacy

    Benjamin Obi Nwabueze, the great jurist and peerless legal scholar whom I once referred to on this page as “our own Lord Dicey” – after the celebrated English jurist and constitutional theorist who popularized the concept of “the rule of law…” died a fortnight ago, aged 94 years.

    He was greatly admired for his forensic brilliance, his forthrightness, his mastery of expository writing, his prodigious scholarly output – some 34 books, not counting journal articles, monographs, public lectures, reports, and pamphlets – stand in his name.  He could be dismissive and cutting, but urbaneness was his default setting.

    Nwabueze’s was a life of the mind and of engagement, whether he was domiciled in the academy as a professor, or outside it as a consultant on diverse subjects, and as a public intellectual.  He was a driving force in the national policy discourse.

    He once told me with a glint in his eye how practising lawyers throughout Anambra State and legal scholars from the universities in the neighbourhood had converged in Enugu to hear him address the High Court in an important case in which he was representing one of the parties, and how there was hardly any room for the throng in the hallowed chamber or in the precincts.  That was a measure of his stature at the Bar, and his influence on the practice of law. 

    His influence on lawyering and jurisprudence went far beyond these shores.  His treatises on constitutionalism, social justice, and the rule of law are cited with approval throughout the English-speaking world, particularly in the Commonwealth, a relic of British colonialism encompassing more than 50 nations.

    His legal scholarship earned him and our Taslim Olawale Elias the rare distinction of the LL.D the University of London’s highest accolade in the field, appropriately called a senior doctorate, to separate it from the Ph.D.

    Nwabueze went home knowing that generations of students across the globe nurtured and weaned on his erudition, his devotion to the cause of justice, and his professionalism, will keep alive the causes he championed with great eloquence and passion throughout his distinguished career,

    In those fields and more, he was a beacon.  He was more:  He was without question a monument.  But the politics of ethnicity often got in the way of his advocacy and scrupulous adherence to the highest principles he espoused whenever he tried to deploy his great learning to finding solutions to Nigeria’s problems. This failing reduced him to something less than a model.

    In no area of his public life was the gap between principle and practice more jarring than the positions he took during the annulment crisis that shook Nigeria right down to its fragile roots and ramifies with each passing day, and on issues relating to ethnicity. 

    The political programme that was supposed to culminate in the election of a president under a new Constitution had reached a dead end.  After eight years of tinkering, detours and revisions, it had lost its momentum. 

    The two official political parties had become so indistinguishable from each other that some media commentators called them “Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”  There was so little public input in their formation or nurturing that some opinion-makers called them “test-tube” parties.  The year 1993 offered Babangida the last chance to save the transition.

    Read Also: Ngige mourns Nwabueze, Uwechue

    A Transitional Council, comprising some technocrats and former political office holders, many of whom Babangida had spent much of his seven years in office banning, unbanning and re-banning from political office was the vehicle he confected to give the transition a new momentum.  Its charge:  to complete the transition agenda within nine months and clear the path for a democratically-elected government

    From a sense of duty, Nwabueze came out of semi-retirement to serve as Secretary for Education.  I wrote him on the occasion, stating that I was unsure whether to congratulate him or commiserate with him.  His reply was gracious.   I was not alone, he said.  He had already accepted the offer, and the challenge was to make the most of the opportunity.

    For more than four decades, I had admired Nwabueze from a distance, principally from his books and his public lectures.  So, when it fell to me as editorial page editor of The Guardian and chair of its Editorial Board to arrange the Guardian Lecture for 1989, the organizing committee and I settled on Nwabueze as the presenter, given the twists and turns of the transition.  He had left his last job as Secretary to the United Bank for Africa in controversial circumstances during the Shagari era, and had been out of public circulation.

    He received us warmly and accepted the invitation on the spot when Guardian editor Emeka Izeze and I delivered it to his home in the Lagos suburb of Isolo.  With Babangida as the chair of the occasion and designated keynote speaker, and Nwabueze as the anniversary lecturer, the occasion generated greater public interest than usual, and for weeks thereafter, the keynote address and the lecture remained the subject of animated public discourse.

    Babangida abused the occasion to chastise those he called “victims of dogma of varieties of Marxist/Socialist orientation alternating cyclically between half-truth and the sparing use truth about any government and its well-intentioned programme.”  Nwabueze vigorously rejected the notion of the military as custodians of the state and keepers of its conscience.  And he made a powerful case for constitutional government based on the rule of law.

    The occasion did much to revive Nwabueze’s career as a public intellectual on the lecture circuit and made me feel that I had an obligation to ensure that he suffered no loss of reputation from Babangida’s beguiling invitation, as many had before him. That was why I wrote him, convinced that Babangida’s invitation and indeed the entire Transitional Council scheme was yet another stunt in a catalogue of stunts.

    It was the same reason that impelled me to advise him to postpone the launch of two books to mark his 60th birthday at a time when virtually all the public universities – for which he held ministerial responsibility – were shut down because of a dispute over pay and conditions.  He reasoned with me that going ahead with the launch would be a public relations disaster.

    Citing no coherent reasons, Babangida annulled the presidential election that the Transitional Committee was supposed to guide to a smooth takeover of power.  Two weeks after the election, Babangida abolished all the instrumentalities of the transition programme that had been eight years and N400 million the making.

    Concerned that Nwabueze’s reputation and public standing might be damaged by what was going on in Abuja, I sent him a note expressing my fears about where it was leading and how it might end.

    Despite his busy schedule, he replied promptly, lamenting that events had taken a turn that nobody expected, and that the only thing left to us was to pray!

    I was expecting him to resign. Unbeknownst to me and doubtless to countless other Nigerians, he was busy helping Babangida draft and perfect the legal instruments consecrating the annulment. 

    He stayed in office apparently unperturbed that, of more than 106 decrees Babangida churned out between January and August 1993, not more than two were ever referred to the Council for discussion, comment, advice, or even for information.  Its members had learned of the annulment from the news media like other Nigerians

    He remained in the Transitional Council, not caring that his name and reputation were being taken in vain, without corresponding adherence to the values he had espoused in his long and distinguished career.

    Nor did Nwabueze stick with his “lawyer’s case” in support of the annulment.  He availed himself of the opportunity to settle ethnic scores.  Outside the Yoruba areas, he wrote, most people who voted for MKO Abiola in the South did so to end the North’s monopoly on power.  The annulment was therefore seen in the South, rightly or wrongly, as lending aid and comfort to the North’s monopoly on Presidential power

    The monopoly of the presidency by the Muslim ethnic group of the North has as its correlate, Nwabueze continues, “the ambition of the Yoruba to monopolize other positions in the federal establishment.” That ambition, he continues, poses a serious danger to the good government and unity of Nigeria.

    The Yoruba may seem nice and friendly, but “they have no sense of fraternity with other groups in Nigeria when it comes to federal appointments,” according to Nwabueze.   “They see nothing wrong in monopolizing all positions in federal establishments, from messenger to chief executive.  To them, that is as should be, the natural order of things.  Any other non-Yoruba in their midst in such an establishment is considered an intruder.  Yoruba becomes a medium of communication in which government business is conducted.”

    Continuing his ethnic baiting, Nwabueze said June 12 made Nigerians outside the Yoruba West fearful that after two terms – or eight years – of a Yoruba president, many federal establishments would have become thoroughly “Yorubanized.”

    “The Yoruba,” Nwabueze warned darkly, “must make up their minds whether they really want the various ethnic groups to continue to be together under a federal arrangement with its implication that federal appointments should be equitably distributed among the component groups as equal partners in the federal union.  They must give up their monopolizing ambition, for it is subversive of true federalism.”

    It is almost as if, in his mind, the Yoruba are the trouble with Nigeria.

    In contrast, Nwabueze says of his Igbo kinsfolk that they are “truly a democratic and fair-minded people, always prepared to concede to others the right to share equitably what belongs to all.  Their sense of fraternity and fairness always inclines them to consider others in the matter of federal appointments and the distribution of common benefits.”

    Even when articulated by the usual ethnic warriors, this kind of jingoism is reprehensible. 

    When espoused by the nation’s pre-eminent legal scholar, an intellectual of global stature, leader of a public-spirited and well-respected group that calls itself rather portentously “The Patriots,” withal a person who should rightly be regarded as an elder statesman, at a time the Yoruba were under siege and fighting for their place under the Nigerian sun and the country was teetering on the brink of violent dissolution, it would be courteous to call it perfidious.

    Finally, if it is true, as Nwabueze once said, that “the happiest day” of his life” was the day he met Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the Igbo separatist movement IPOB, Nnamdi Kanu, whom many even among the Ndigbo regard as a charlatan and a demagogue, we must be thankful that he channelled and sublimated his inner turmoil to bequeath to his compatriots and to the world at large a dazzling portfolio of intellectual and professional achievements.

    Hail and farewell.

  • Options before Atiku

    Options before Atiku

    Those who think that Waziri Atiku  Abubakar’s craven bid to wrest the Presidency from Asiwaju Bola Tinubu ended with last week’s dismissal of Atiku’s appeal from the PEPTC where it had fared no better  cannot have reckoned with  his personal history as a candidate of habit nor with the capacity of his attorneys for frightful inventiveness.

    As the Supreme Court was getting ready to deliver its verdict on Atiku’s appeal,  Atiku’s attorneys were urging a federal court in the United States to compel the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the FDA and other agencies to release information in their archives that would help the Nigerian court arrive at a definitive ruling on whether Tinubu  was a proper candidate for the presidential election  in the first instance , and if not, whether he could lawfully continue to exercise the powers of president.

    For weeks, trawlers of the vast sewer that occupies much of the so-called social media space had been abuzz with reports that the imminent release of archives, said  to run into more than 20, 000 pages, would finally spell the doom of the Tinubu presidency they  regard as misbegotten.

    Early reports said the damning documents would be released 50 pages per day, or per week, depending on whichever fake source you tumbled on.  Later accounts raised the projected output to 100 pages a day or a week.  Neither projection satisfied the trollers.

    Much more gladdening to their attentive audience was the reporting by sources citing unidentified but unfailingly dependable sources that the entire archives would be dumped online in one fell swoop.  Let the parties concerned worry about the consequences

    In Nigeria, the opposition parties and Tinubu’s implacable adversaries could hardly wait for the release of the trove.  Many in Team Tinubu on the other hand were fretting that some investigative and regulatory agencies, particularly the FBI and the CIA whom they vest with omnipotence and omnicompetence, might deliver the coup de grace to the Tinubu presidency that the Chicago State University and a federal court had declined to grant.

    Atiku’s move was a transparent stunt.  The court dismissed it as meritless.

    And it was, indeed. Even at its most availing, the U. S. Freedom of Information Act FOIA that Atiku and his cohorts were invoking is not, contrary to what is generally supposed, a talisman.  It operates under the penumbra of the Fourteenth Amendment, which recognizes, albeit, narrowly, privacy as a constitutional right affording individuals protection from unwarranted intrusions by the government or police agencies.

    Complementarily, the law of privacy as enunciated by judges and enacted by  legislatures, deals with invasions of personal privacy by individual and businesses.  Atiku and his team were in effect seeking the authority of the court to invade Tinubu’s privacy.

    The court could have denied the request under an array of general practices as well as  statutory exemptions to invoking the FOIA in that manner.  To start with, information that is not in the public domain cannot be obtained using the FOIA.  Such information would for all practical purposes  be held in any of the government’s classification systems  and therefore unavailable on demand. 

    The classification system is almost omnivorous in its inclusiveness.  Government can classify any piece of information it chooses to classify.  A newspaper in the UK once tested this propensity to classify  when it deliberately published the menu at an Officers Mess  catering to the British General Staff.  The menu was classified as an official secret, and its unauthorized disclosure carried a stiff fine or a year’s imprisonment.

    In the event that your quest succeeds, the document you end up with is more often a cause of disappointment than fulfillment.  It is  heavily redacted, line after line and page after page blacked out in such a way that no artificial intelligence expert can reconstruct.  Only two lines per page on a 10-page document may survive redaction, and the information therein could could be bland as white bread.

    Generally, information relating to national defence, foreign policy,  the CIA’s operational methods and  materials in relation to the National Security Agency,  trade secrets, investigations in progress, and  inter-agency or intra-agency communications, cannot be obtained by invoking the FOIA.

    In rejecting the plaintiff’s application, the court cited Exemptions 6 and 7 under which the FOIA cannot be invoked to obtain information not in the public domain.

    Read Also: If Atiku, Obi contest again in 2027, they will lose – Reno Omokri

    Exemption 6  protects personnel, medical and similar files . These could not be furnished without a “clearly unwarranted invasion,” of someone’s privacy.

    Exemption 7 has a broader sweep.  It relates to investigatory files compiled for law-enforcement purposes if the production of such records could interfere with law enforcement, deprive one a fair trial, constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy, disclose the identity of a confidential source, disclose investigative techniques, or endanger the life or safety of law enforcement personnel,

    It came as no surprise that Atiku’s request was denied.  It seems as if the plaintiff and his team were embarked on another fishing expedition.  Their trans-Atlantic endeavours having collapsed, it might seem that they have reached a dead end.   But they are nothing if not tenacious.  I will therefore not be surprised if  they henceforth  seek relief in jurisdictions nearer home.

    The forum that immediately  comes to mind comes to mind is the ECOWAS Court of Justice, by way of an application for relief for violation of  Atiku’s rights as enshrined in the African Charter of People’s and Human Rights, a right they claim was brusquely abridged by the Nigeria’s Independent  National Electoral Commission, the  Nigerian courts, and their American affiliates.

    They could relitigate before this supra-national court all the issues they had been litigating since to no avail since last February’s election and even make a persuasive case for stripping Tinubu of the post of President of the ECOWAS Commission, the body’s  Executive Authority.

    As readers will recall,  one of Tinubu’s first acts in the ECOWAS chair was to push through a resolution condemning the coup in Niger and ordering that country’s mutinous army to return to the barracks or  be dislodged by the ECOWAS  armies.  Four  members countries ruled by the military had made  it clear that they would not support such a move. 

    According to political observers, those countries and many more could be counted on to mobilize ECOWAS opinion against Tinubu’s tenure as president of its Executive Authority.

    Atiku’s case before the ECOWAS court might go thus: Tinubu was not  qualified to run for President of Nigeria.  He did  so in flagrant breach  of the Nigeria’s laws.  This being the case, he could not have won the presidential election, and should have no place in the Assembly of ECOWAS Heads of State.  All decisions taken by ECOWAS  since Tinubu became president of its Executive Council are therefore null and void and of no consequence whatsoever. 

    Failure to render that verdict and render it unambiguously,  it will be argued, would make the Ecowas Court of Justice an accessory in the betrayal of the fondest hopes and aspirations of peoples of African Descent worldwide who look to Nigeria for global leadership. Besides, it would call the continued existence of the Court and its parent body into question.

    If that fails, Atiku could to take his case all the way to the African Courts of Justice and Human Rights, the primary judicial agency of the African Union.

    If that fails, he could petition the United Nations to set up the civil equivalent of the International Criminal Court.  Nor does failure to realize that goal exhaust Atiku’s options.

    Just don’t count him out yet.

  • Tales of vanishing manhood, revisited

    Tales of vanishing manhood, revisited

    It came as a welcome relief to the tedium of test-tube politics, a system of politics without politicians, mainly parastatal types locked in desperate game to emerge as the group that best reflects the thinking of its progenitor, and therefore the group most likely to be anointed.

    It is a grim business indeed, this test-tube politics, and the alchemists who concocted it must be alarmed at some of the things that are going on.

    Imagine, for instance, the promise to turn Nigeria into a world power by 2000 A.D.  Would that not be a regression?  Those making that promise obviously have never heard of a place called Liberia, nor of something called ECOMOG.  The promise to abolish poverty at some unspecified future date is just as misguided.  How can anyone seek to fight all over again the battles that have been fought and won decisively by the Structural Adjustment Programme, the Better Life, Program, etc, etc?

    To rescue us from such drollery came tale upon tale of vanishing manhood in Lagos.  For upwards of one week, the city has been in the grip of a scare which, it would seem, surfaces every ten years.  It had been like that in 1980, except that adult males did not go about with their hands buried deep in their trouser pockets, clutching you-know-what, for fear that it might vanish on the slightest contact with some evil conjurer.

    I have been told of a young man who now encases his in a specially designed harness, with the strands terminating in a solid knot at the back of his neck. If there is any slackening of tension in the harness, he will know instantly that there has been some foul play and raise an alarm before the prized object in lands in one witchdoctor’s cauldron in Ondo or Ijebu.

    None of the accounts I have heard came from someone who personally witnessed, much less experienced, this troubling phenomenon.  Usually, it was a neighbour or friend or relation of impeccable integrity that had witnessed it.  And the victim, invariably, was a total stranger, never their father, husband, boyfriend, son, distant cousin, or even a neighbour.

    And as argument raged back and forth about whether the reported incidents signalled the advent of our much-postponed technological breakthrough or constituted a gigantic hoax on popular credulity, it struck me that, either way, something should be done, fast.

    The veteran educator and iconoclast, Dr Tai Solarin, has set an example in a different context.  When it was being claimed the other day that some people possessed the power to turn humans into goats, the founder of Mayflower School, Ikenne, had publicly challenged anyone who had such power to step forward and turn him into a goat. If the conjurer succeeded, the goat should be slaughtered on the spot.

    Dr Solarin, I presume, still stands by that audacious wager.  But no conjurer has surfaced so far.

    It seemed to me that somebody should post a similar challenge and thus silence those peddling tales of vanishing manhood.  I was even going to post the challenge myself, as a contribution to the advancement of science. But I have been warned by some people who have a vital stake in the matter not to do so.

    What it, in the end, it was not a hoax?

    And just in case I persisted, an attorney of the first rank has been retained to seek an injunction restraining me in perpetuity from pursuing the matter, and the learned fellow has given his clients a solemn assurance that no question of locus standi will arise,

    Being a firm believer in the rule of law and in due process, I have decided not to press the matter.  But the enterprise, I am happy to report, is far from doomed, thanks to a gentleman of my acquaintance. We first met some three years ago at business luncheon where, alone among more than 20 diners, he had ordered a lemon drink with his meal.

    “Haven’t you heard?” I teased him.

    “Heard what?”

    “That the drink you ordered is not good for your battery?”

    “Let it die,” he replied plaintively.  “It has been the source of all my problems.  Let it die.”

    Read Also: Tinubu appoints new boss for Energy Commission

    The fellow, just barely into his thirties, had four wives and 13 children at the time.  His youngest wife had just turned 16, and the folks back home were threatening to send him a pubescent maiden.

    If the source of all his problems were not merely to die but to vanish altogether, irretrievably, I reckon that he would be exceedingly glad.  When I made a proposal to him along that line, he accepted it enthusiastically, 

    Watch this column for further developments.

    Meanwhile, the insurance industry is reported to be cashing in on the scare.  They are offering special policy packages on demand, at special at special premiums that are unbelievable bargains if viewed in the proper context.  On the university campuses, women are reported to have found attractive possibilities in the phenomenon.

    Consider how much better campus life would be if just one or two of those professors of sexual harassment and sexploitation could by a mere wink be eviscerated of all offensive power.  If they think that everything has been forgotten or forgiven simply because the President, the National Council of Women’s Societies and the National Council on Education have not spoken about the vexed issue lately, our randy dons have it coming to them.

     The political possibilities are also receiving due attention.  If in the world of test-tube politics you cannot openly criticize, threaten or assault your opponent, you can at least strike decisively where it hurts most.

    All this will no doubt be grist to the mill of the junk magazines whose numbers seem to be growing exponentially.  I can imagine some of the titillating headlines already, as well as actual or contrived stories of would-be intimate encounters gone frightfully awry.

    First published in 1990, this piece is reproduced from Matters Arising, a selection from my collected  journalism for Guardian Newspapers  between 1985 and 1990.  Egret Books, Ibadan,1992.

  • Matters sartorialand culinary

    Matters sartorialand culinary

    A sartorial transformation, nay, revolution, is sweeping quietly through the palaces of the emirs and senior royals in northern Nigeria, leading them to dump the bulky, unadventurous outfits of their prime residents in the mouldy archives of the Caliphate and replacing them with smartly-tailored outfits carved from digital-age fabrics, the various pieces from the turban to the cape, rendered in sensuous hues.

    And their staff of authority is no longer a nondescript bauble.

    Call it the Sanusi Lamido Sanusi Effect, or the SLS Effect.

    For it was the former Emir of Kano who started it all.  Now, I must be careful here not to land in the lexical quandary that has ensnared everyone who has attempted to define the current status of the man who, before his royal ascension, used to be the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria and didn’t even make any fuss about his pedigree until the day he showed up at work decked out in the resplendent attire of a Crown Prince.

    It is not at first blush clear what his quarrel is with the term “former emir.”  The ordinary meaning is clear.  It designates a person who was an emir but is no longer one, and it makes no reference to the manner of the transition, unlike “deposed emir,” a term I gather he finds not just insulting but cruel.

    Nevertheless, Sanusi has with characteristic hauteur berated those who referred to him as a former emir of Kano, insisting that there is no such creature.  One top bureaucrat in Kaduna who introduced him at a public ceremony with that forbidden title found himself reduced to a former Secretary to the State Government by the time it was over, just as Sanusi had hinted.

    But he may well have a point.  How can you be “former” and “emir” in one and the same breath?  How can you be “deposed” and “emir” at once?  You are either an emir or you are not, and there is no station in between, according to a source said to be close to Sanusi.  He has made peace with that circumstance, the source said, but wonders why misguided sympathisers and ignorant detractors alike keep rubbing it in.

    After all, he is still very much a royal personage, only on a different, perhaps larger and richer canvas:  His Royal Highness Sanusi Lamido Sanusi – or is it Muhammad Sanusi II – is the Spiritual Leader or Khalifa of the Tijaniyya Movement, comprising more than 50 million adherents in Nigeria and the neighbouring countries.  Whatever he may have lost in temporal power he has more than recouped in spiritual power and influence.

    To return to the sartorial revolution that is the substance of this fragment, and of which SLS must be judged the architect and exemplar:  You will find intimations of his tasteful style stamped all over the royal attire of the northern royals, particularly the younger ones, and especially the emirs spawned by the balkanization of the old Kano Emirate in the wake of his defenestration.

    Even His Eminence Sa’ad Abubakar, the Sultan of Sokoto, has had to add a dash of colour to the all-white apparel he has donned for decades.   Expect more colour from there, and an infusion of the same in the former outposts of the Caliphate, not forgetting Borno-Kanem.   And expect the lesser royals across the Sahel to cotton on to SLS’s sartorial revolution.

    At this transitional stage, the tailoring isn’t quite as fastidious as that of SLS. A slap-dash approach rather than a well-calibrated colour scheme is what is out there right now.  But there is no mistaking its direction.  It is in the SLS Style.  Just give it time.

    Each time he steps out in his royal ensemble, Sanusi cuts a dashing, sprightly figure.  In a way, he has retained the soul, the essence of the traditional form even as he has taken the stuffiness out of it and made the person under its folds seem more approachable and accessible, less forbidding. You cannot accuse him of dandifying the court wardrobe.

    Plus, he cradles his staff of office not as a bauble but as part and parcel of his persona.  This adds glamour and mystique to his appearance.  It all seems like a performative act.

    In full flight, SLS comes across as a philosopher-king who can with the greatest confidence and elocution and the least preparation talk intelligibly on any subject, sacred or secular.

    Few can successfully replicate this aspect of his multi-faceted profile.  But a great many, I confidently predict, will adopt his sartorial assemblage enthusiastically and take it to that level where it will be granted a world-class designer label, to which SLS must be accorded the first propriety claim.

    Read Also: What’s wrong with Nigeria, by Wike

    Now to matters culinary.  The central character is so unlikely a personality that nothing less than that age-worn cliché will do as a preface:  Wonders will never cease.

    It is Nyesom Wike: the hard-charging, irascible, combustible, show-them-pepper Wike; showboat, Minister for Abuja Federal Capital Territory, and most recently executive governor of Rivers State; Wike figuring in none of the many guises and disguises we have encountered him.

    One hugely discredited former holder of that post, Jerry Useni, styled or allowed himself to be styled Abuja Czar or Emperor or whatever and used it to pursue an acquisition binge with few parallels even by our delusional standards.  When a public servant marks his 19th wedding anniversary or his wife’s 27th birthday with an Arabian Night-style celebration,  you are entitled to whatever conclusions you draw about the source of his wealth. 

    Wike is too self-regarding to indulge in that kind of thing. 

    At any rate, there he was the other day, Holy Molly, in the capacious and smartly equipped kitchen of his Abuja residence, taking personal charge in preparing some broth on the stove.  The way he held and wielded the mixing spoon, you could tell that this was no amateur or dilettante. 

    An audience of the day’s men and yesterday’s men watched in awe and cheered him on as he added ingredient after exotic ingredient, seasoned the broth, and stirred it at precise intervals to ensure that it came out in the right consistency.

    The mouth-watering aroma hit you as if propelled through ethereal space by some cosmic force.   The resident chef in a 5-Star Michelin-class restaurant could not have hoped for a greater effect.

    One of the guests was caught eyeing the slabs of cured beef – or was it bush meat – laid out in a tantalizing array on a tray and salivating uncontrollably.  Another was heard asking when the Wike Show would end and the real thing would start.  Unfortunately, the organizers did not allow viewers to witness that part of the telecast.

    Justice Eberechi Suzette Wike is lucky.  She can take all the time in the world to craft recondite judgments from the High Court of Justice, Port Harcourt, without having to worry about the culinary quality of her husband’s meals.  He can look after himself.  According to a source who should know, Justice Wike is the greatest admirer of his culinary prowess. 

    As Minister for Abuja FCT, Wike can be expected to carry over from his former domain his practice of non-stop launching and commissioning a blizzard of construction projects with song and music and dance and great merriment.

    But I will not be surprised if he invites the residents to Eagle Square one of these days to come savour his gourmet cooking.  It will not compensate for their loss of status as super-citizens vested with exclusive power to determine who becomes or can become President of Nigeria. 

    But it will be the next best thing to a restitution.

  • The verdict from Chicago

    The verdict from Chicago

    Calling Nigeria from the United States last Thursday was fraught.  Practically no one I was trying to reach was responding. 

    Some were surfing the Internet for the latest tidbit on how the Atiku Abubakar’s petition against President Bola Tinubu’s victory in the February 25 election was playing out in federal court in the Windy City more than 9, 600 miles away, and were determined to tune out any distraction.

    A good many were glued to foreign television news providers that have as their unique selling proposition the transmission of Breaking News, as opposed to news that is ferreted out.  That genre, I gather, belongs in the bad old pre-digital age.

    Those who could not afford that luxury stayed tuned to the local television stations that serve as  proxies for foreign outlets, complete with thumping, throbbing music and scary graphics suggestive of world-altering situations, marked by chaos, and violence. 

    Remember the “twilight of the gods”.  I will spare you the Germanic name for a medieval precursor of the genre, but if you are a glutton for punishment and insist on my invoking it, here goes:   gotterdammerung.   Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

    As I was saying, it was almost as if the future of Tinubu’s presidency, no less than the destiny of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and the world’s largest Black nation was hanging precariously on whatever ruling was handed down from that court house in Chicago.

    At issue was whether Tinubu had truly earned a degree in Accounting from Chicago State University, as he had indicated in election filings going back to 1999 when he first ran for Governor of Lagos State, or he had been using another person’s identity and credentials to advance his political fortunes, at the expense of candidates who had duly complied with all the rules and regulations.

    It is not a new issue. 

    The departed legal gadfly and  sworn enemy of humbug, Gani Fawehinmi, SAN,  had set out to have Tinubu’s victory in the 1999 election voided on the grounds that Tinubu did not have the qualifications detailed in his filing, nor did he attend the schools listed therein. 

    Tinubu’s response was that the application had been filed by his NADECO collaborator Tokunbo Afikuyomi without the benefit of the pertinent documents that Tinubu was not in a position to provide, being holed up in forced exile in the United States. 

    More concretely, Tinubu latched on to the constitutional clause that gave him legal immunity         as an elected state governor.

    But since then, the matter has followed his every political move like a shadow.  And there it was, more menacing than ever when he made his biggest political move career, declaring that it had been his ambition since childhood to serve as President, and that the time had come. 

    His “Emi lo kan,” or “It is my turn” declaration at a difficult time in his campaign for the APC ticket left no one in any doubt that his resolve was unshakeable, despite indications and dark whispers that he was in poor health.

    At first, what loomed as the most formidable obstacle in his path was settling for a fellow Muslim as his running mate. They said it was a plan to “islamize Nigeria, when the man couldn’t even “islamize” his own wife, a pastor in the Redeemed Church of God. 

    Read Also: Solid minerals will promote climate change, says Alake

    The run- up to the nomination was mired in the sterile debate over that binary issue until Professor Wale Adebanwi, dean of Africana at the Ivy-League University of Philadelphia entered what  will go down as the definitive essay on factors governing Tinubu’s motivations, the choices and the calculations that Tinubu must have made far removed from all the noise in the public sphere.

    The manufactured controversy fizzled. Had MKO Abiola not chosen Babagana Kingibe, a fellow Muslim as his running mate in the 1993 presidential election, and had the duo not an emphatic victory that was annulled by a military regime that wanted to stay put.  And had not Atiku Abubakar, a Muslim, reportedly sought to be on Abiola’s ticket in place of Kingibe?

    Tinubu’s opponents would reopen questions about Tinubu’s antecedents with ferocity when Atiku lost to Tinubu in the 2023 presidential election.

    Atiku was the architect of his own loss.  By the PDP’s rules, its national chair and its presidential candidate cannot belong in the same geopolitical zone.  But the national chair, Iyorchia Ayu, and Atiku, its presidential candidate. belonged in the same zone. 

    Atiku turned deaf ears to petitions to repair this breach.  As a result, five state governors elected on his party’s platform – the so-called Group of Five, or G5 – led by the combustible Nyesom Wike, broke ranks with Atiku, thus severely eroding Atiku’s support in their domains. 

    Without the split, Atiku could conceivably have won the presidential election,

    The defeat rankled.  Atiku blames it on Tinubu, whom he has accused of engineering the split, and pursuing it to the point of no return.  His petition before the Presidential Election Petitions Tribunal having been found lacking in merit, Atiku shifted gears. 

    He would frontload his appeal to the Supreme Court with what he had been assured would  constitute assailable evidence that the diploma Tinubu said he obtained from Chicago State University and the documents with which he had secured admission to that institution were blatant forgeries.

    In the run-up to the Supreme Court’s ruling on his appeal,  Atiku has pursued the quest for such materials with an intensity bordering on monomania.   It was in anticipation of  the release of the documents by Chicago State as ordered by  a federal court that the nation held its collective breath last Thursday.

    Schadenfreude wafted through the camps of the anti-Tinubu coalition. Their bogeyman was about to be brought down and taken out of contention, or so they hoped.  Team Tinubu was reckoning that, ultimately, what would really matter was what Nigerian courts have decided or will decide, based on their interpretation of Nigerian laws governing an issue that belongs indisputably in its jurisdiction.

    When it landed, the Chicago Verdict was neither the knockout punch, the evisceration  of Tinubu that the coalition of his adversaries confidently expected, nor the complete vindication that Team Tinubu would have welcomed.

    Chicago State released some dodgy application material from Tinubu’s file, to wit:  a transfer transcript from Richard Daley College, with a name and gender different from Tinubu’s, and an attestation  purportedly from Government College, Lagos, which had not been established at the time Tinubu sought admission.

    But it confirmed that the Bola Ahmed Tinubu, male, who sat the entrance examination to the institution, enrolled in the Accounting programme and was graduated with distinction, is one and the same person as the current President of Nigeria.

    Chicago State said the diploma filed with his election documents did not emanate from its provenance.  So that, even if it is a forgery, it does not materially detract from his status as a graduate in good standing.

    Read Also: Tinubu: Chicago State varsity has provided sufficient answers to all questions — Okeh

    The most judicious construction on the merit of Atiku’s case at this time has to be the Scotch Verdict:  Not proven.

    But proven or not proven, Atiku is not about to change course.  Rather, he seems set to change tactics.  He plans to turn a constitutional issue into a moral crusade against the Tinubu Presidency, which he hopes will resonate across the country. 

    Its effect will be to distract the Administration, to keep it so busy fending off attacks on its legitimacy that it would have  little time to pursue the policies, programmes and plans on which it was voted into power.

    -To be sure, Tinubu is no saint.  None among us is. Saints are anointed, not elected.  In whatever case, no election in Nigeria has ever produced a saint. And it is neither here nor there to insist that the Wazirin Adamawa is singularly unsuited to lead a moral crusade in Nigeria.

    The question is:  Where is all this leading, and how will it end?

    Nigerians must devoutly hope and pray that politics will yield to statesmanship before it is too late.  Atiku served Nigeria to the best of his ability as vice president, and may still, in the fullness of time, serve again in the higher office of President. 

  • Mangosuthu Buthelezi: A portrait

    Mangosuthu Buthelezi: A portrait

    Saturday, July 8, 1990. Forty minutes after take-off from Johannesburg’s Jan Smuts Airport -since renamed for a hero of the anti-Apartheid struggle, Oliver Reginald (OR) Tambo, – the Falcon 900 Executive jetliner clears the Mtonajeni Range, the low, grass-covered hills that ring the Ulundi plain, scene of the last great battle between the British invaders and the Zulu in 1879, and touches down at the airport.

    It is a small but well-maintained airfield.  On the tarmac is a small, twin-engined plane.  A 15-minute drive takes the visitors to the KwaZulu Administrative and Legislative Assembly, at the corner of King Dinuzule Highway and Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi Street.

    In the forecourt, a bronze statue of the great Zulu warrior Shaka, in full military regalia, stands atop a high reinforced concrete plinth, as if keeping a watch over the precincts.

    The visitors, General Olusegun Obasanjo, chairman of the Africa Leadership Forum and co-chair of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group which recommended the wide-ranging sanctions that quickened the collapse of white minority rule in South Africa, four aides and this reporter, were ushered into what looked like the Cabinet Room.

    There is no mistaking the seat reserved for our host, the Chief Minister of the KwaZulu Government, president of Inkatha Tenkululeko Wesizwe, and chairman of the Black Alliance,  Chief Dr Mangosuthu Buthelezi.  Behind him is a bust of the man himself, and other paraphernalia of state.

    Those who come into the room believing that Buthelezi is no more than a local potentate in rural KwaZulu are quickly struck by plenty of evidence to the contrary.  On the mantelpiece are framed pictures of Buthelezi with Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Margaret Thatcher, the Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, Senator Ted Kennedy, Julius Nyerere, Jesse Jackson, and many other persons of consequence.

    Being a prince himself – his mother was a princess – and he traces his bloodline to Shaka, it is only natural that royalty should be represented in this collection.  And it is indeed, in the form of a framed picture of the Prince of Wales and Diana, Princess of Wales, and their infant son.

     The writer is taking in all of this when our host walks into the room in brisk, confident steps, a picture of affability.  On this day, he is sporting a simple blue, long-sleeved French suit. Two articles of dress mark him out from his aides:  a green, yellow and black beaded necklace that terminates in a green triangular locket on his chest and from which a single bead string projects and two inches or so in his right hand is a carved, multi-coloured swagger stick, a symbol of his traditional office.

    At 62 years old, he can easily pass for a nab two decades younger.  Of average height, he is slim but not compact,  There is nary a streak of grey in his hair or his beard.  When he talks about Nelson Mandela, it is with unfeigned reverence.  In his autobiography, Buthelezi recalls his days as an activist in the Africa National Congress Youth League, and how Mandela had influenced him to head to Johannesburg after Law School.

    When Obasanjo visited Mandela in prison in 1988 as co-chairman of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group, Mandela had told him that he regarded Buthelezi as an authentic freedom fighter.  Obasanjo had conveyed the message to Buthelezi.  The compliment is like a tonic to Buthelezi, who never tires of citing it, just as he is ever so ready to share a letter Mandela had written to him from prison.

    “Dear Shenge,” the letter begins, using the clan name with which Buthelezi is hailed wherever he is stirring the Inkatha crowds.  Mandela expresses warm thanks to Buthelezi for the 70th Birthday greetings that Buthelezi had sent him in prison.  Stating that “few things in his political career had distressed him as seeing our people killing one another,” Mandela had urged that everything must be done to put an end to the slaughter of so many innocent lives.”

    Read Also: George Odiana bags Mandela Leadership Award, ECOWAS Ambassadorial appointment

    Mandela signs off this moving entreaty of peace and unity with his own clan name, Madiba.

    Buthelezi is clearly disappointed that several planned meetings between him and Mandela did not hold.  For this, he blames not Mandela but ranking officials of the ANC.  He does not sound embittered, but he is miffed at being treated like a pariah not only by the ANC but also by the leaders of the so-called independent homelands.

    The eight million Zulu, of whom he is the leader, deserve much better, he seems to be saying.  His aides stress that it just happens that Ihkatha was founded by Zulus and had a predominantly Zulu membership.

    The ANC, they remind you, was in fact founded by a Zulu but over the years, its leadership had been taken over almost entirely by the Xhosa of the Eastern Cape.

    Black-on-black violence, instigated at least in part by the white authorities, has been a sad fact of South Africa’s recent history.  But the violence had escalated as the prospect Mandela’s release from prison brightened, reaching a crescendo when the final obstacles to substantive negotiations between the apartheid authorities and the ANC were cleared. 

    Buthelezi, it seems to me, seeks to come across as a factional leader more sinned against than sinning. 

    I ask him about the land question that lies at the heart of the conflict in South Africa, with 13 percent of the population owning 87 percent of the productive land.  An 18-hour road trip from the Namibian capital Windhoek to Johannesburg earlier in 1990 that year gave me a glimpse of just how pernicious the system was, with individual whites or corporate entities holding titles to one million hectares of undeveloped farmland.

    How will this vexed issue be redressed in a post-Apartheid South Africa?

    We will appeal to those holding more land than they need to release some of it for redistribution to those who have none, Buthelezi said.

    If the foregoing is Buthelezi’s way of signalling to the ANC and its allies that they must reckon with him and his supporters, they should heed him, however much they detest his persona or deplore his tactics.  No settlement in South Africa will endure that does not accommodate them.

    • First published in The Guardian (Lagos), August 28, 1990.  Mangosuthu Buthelezi died on September 9, 2023, aged 95 years, and was accorded a state burial.
  • Countdown to October 1                        

    Countdown to October 1                        

    It is that time of year again when Nigerians, contemplating their country’s troubled past and uncertain future, engage in an orgy of collective self-flagellation tinged with self-pity, if not self-loathing; when an anniversary that should be an occasion for rejoicing and renewal breeds, instead, resentment and recrimination.

    It is the time we rue the road not taken as well as the road actually followed; an occasion that stirs up wrenching lamentations about what might have been if the right people had taken charge and pursued the right policies.

    For every ten persons who dismiss the occasion as unworthy of celebration, there is at least one person who regards it a great achievement worth remarking in and of itself that Nigeria has not gone the way of former Yugoslavia or the former Soviet Union.

    In whatever case, the verdict was clear: if Nigeria was not already a failed state or well

    on its way to becoming one, it had failed abysmally to live up to its vast promise. Its

    name had been taken in vain repeatedly by a long line of rulers to perpetuate misrule, justify plunder, reduce citizens to subjects, and sanction hegemonic rule on a scale that has given independence itself a bad name.

    And despite all the pomp and pageantry that was sometimes confected around the occasion, the attentive audience always seemed to be saying:   This unhappy state of affairs will continue unless . . .  And here, the apparent consensus breaks down. 

    From one year to the next, the narrative has rarely changed; if anything, it has grown darker and darker, with nary an uplift.   Many a political official has cited this state of affairs as their reason for entering party politics.  Instead of watching and wailing from the margins, they would enter the fray and strive to change the system from within.

     The system swallowed them.  It has never yielded the turf to those who are forever lamenting the nation’s woes.   Speeches from on high, written by committee to mark the occasion, are laden with statistics on virtually every aspect of national life, from the mundane to the seminal, detailing how many roads were built or rehabilitated and how many miles of railway tracks were laid or rehabilitated. 

    From the National Day Broadcast, you could expect to know the gross tonnage of shipment cleared at the ports; how much crude oil was extracted, refined, or exported, and the gross receipts from those transactions; how much was expended on oil subsidy, and how tantalizingly close the nation had come to attaining food self-sufficiency, thanks to the new expanded and accelerated agricultural production programme.

    Plus of course, the thousands of jobs that had been created or are in the pipeline, and the dozens of projects that are set to be commissioned or for which planning had reached an advanced stage, and much more.

    Read Also: Ex-Ogun council chair Adedayo arrested

    With rare exceptions, the National Day Broadcast has been a slap-dash affair, and the audience attends to it only perfunctorily, if at all.   Much of it reads like that of the previous year in tenor, if not in tedious detail.  It makes hardly any concession to nuance.

    The run-up to October 1, 2023 is shaping up to be even more dispiriting than the earlier editions.  The General Elections ended more than four months ago, but they are being litigated and relitigated in the courts and in the public sphere and on every street corner and in the marketplace and in the darkest recesses of social media with unrestrained passion.

    Increasingly, it has fallen to the courts to determine election outcomes employing parameters that the public does not fully understand or accept.  Why, they ask, is the evidence of their eyes and their ears accorded little or no probative value, whereas some obscure Latin phrase or clause fabricated by some long-dead white men may hold the key to what the courts regard as justice?

    The courts themselves sometimes move in mysterious ways that serve only to confuse the public and undermine whatever is left of the public’s faith in the judiciary.

    It seems wholly improbable that the framers of a Constitution anchored on the equality      of citizens could have consecrated residents of the Abuja Federal Capital Territory as

    super-citizens, whose votes alone could determine who becomes president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.  This crackbrained theory was canvassed as the election results unfolded, and cited in the petitions of the PDP candidate, Atiku Abubakar, and the Labour Party candidate, Peter Obi.

    The Presidential Election Tribunal saved some of its most trenchant censure for this proposal, which even students taking a first course in constitutional law would have rejected on the threshold.  But some of the nation’s most senior attorneys espouse it and are set to urge it on the Supreme Court, the tribunal of last resort for the presidential election.

    Many in the organized and unorganized Opposition are now looking to the Supreme Court to void the verdict of the PEPT, which unanimously affirmed the results announced by the Independent National Electoral Commission.  As I see it, and given the facts on the ground, the best that can be expected from the Supreme Court is a  split decision, with the majority  affirming PEPT’s verdict.

    But nothing short of voiding the entire poll and ordering a new one is likely to mollify the entrenched Opposition.  Doing so, however, could plunge the country into civil war, which not even the most reckless desire.

    Judges handling election petitions in Kano had to deliver their ruling via ZOOM because of a clear and present threat to their lives. Allegations are rife of judges being suborned to deliver prepared judgments on pain of being visited with some horrendous punishment.  The harassment has reached a point, it is claimed, where many judicial officers have contemplated suicide.

    Nor will the mysterious fire which engulfed the Supreme Court in Abuja yesterday dampen

    the threat to the machinery of justice in Nigeria.

    So, it is just as well that this year’s National Day will be marked on the usual low key.

    But the narrative of governance failure that has marked our post-colonial history would seem to have been punctuated by President Bola Tinubu’s much-acclaimed performance at the United Nations General Assembly.  Even some key elements of the Opposition have commended his demonstration of leadership on the world stage.

    It is a thin reed, to be sure.  But it could serve as a platform on which Nigeria can forge a new, inclusive, inspiring, leadership-driven, nation-affirming narrative.

    President Tinubu should launch that narrative in his National Day Broadcast with an invitation to elements of the Opposition to join him in a long-term search for common purpose at the table of brotherhood, around which all problems will be discussed honestly and solutions sought earnestly.

  • Niger, Gabon, and democracy in Africa

    Niger, Gabon, and democracy in Africa

    Just as the din of the sabre-rattling in the ECOWAS states over the military coup that toppled the civilian government of President Mohamed Bazoum of Niger Republic was subsiding, another din was loosed by the African Union, following the putsch that terminated the private arrangement under which Bongo family had ruled Gabon for six decades and counting.

    For an agonizing week, it seemed as if President Ahmed Tinubu, doubling as President the ECOWAS Commission, the regional body’s highest authority,  was set to marshal the combined armies of the ECOWAS states to march on Niamey to reinstate Bazoum and put the military throughout the region on notice that their incursions into politics would no longer be tolerated.  

    And it did not seem like empty posturing.   As the regime in Niger was handed an ultimatum to restore Bazoum and the disbanded governing apparatus, army chiefs of the member- states began consultations aimed at enforcing the orders of the ECOWAS Commission.   Military manoeuvres could commence anytime, it seemed, and we might just wake the next day to find that Operation Sahel Sweep was already in progress.

    While the sabre-rattling over Niger was going on, I found myself thinking about Muhammadu Buhari, who had honourably vacated the office of President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and Commander-in-Chief of the Forces scarcely three months earlier.  In a rare moment of levelling with the public, he had revealed that if at any time his kinsfolk in Daura and other interlopers would not let him enjoy his hard-earned retirement in peace and quiet, he would just  roll across the border and settle among the more agreeable branch of the clan there.

    The way events were shaping up, elements of the military forces he commanded for a decade might well combine with local rascals to push him across the border where he might get the opposite of the warm welcome he was counting on.

    Read Also: UNGA 2023: Kwara Gov shares experiences on solutions to learning crises in Africa

    What would happen if he was caught on the wrong side of the border?

    As far as I have been able to ascertain, not many Nigerians appear to have entertained any solicitude on this grim possibility, not even those who used to swear by his name. 

    Ingrates, all. 

    Darting south-east to Gabon, in Central Africa, a scene not unlike the one in Niger, was playing out.  Fourteen years into his own tenure as president, and 42 years after succeeding his father in the post, Ali Bongo was ousted by the military some three weeks ago within hours of his party proclaiming his re-election.  The coup-makers said the election was fraudulent through and through.

    Bongo suffered a serious stroke in October 2018, which left him physically impaired, with particular difficulty moving his right leg and arm.  Two years earlier, he had been returned in a hotly disputed poll.  Last month, he won one controversial poll too many for the family’s epochal hold on power to sustain.

    Not to be outdone by ECOWAS, the African Union said  it “strongly condemns” the military takeover of power in the Republic of Gabon” and has decided “to immediately suspend the participation of Gabon in all activities of the AU, its organs and institutions.”

    The conflict in Niger and Gabon, it should be remembered, stemmed from elections that were supposed to help resolve a lingering conflict that had originated in disputes over election outcomes.  And in all probability, the remedy the “international community” will urge upon the parties is yet another round of elections.

    This is a cycle of desperation.

    In Africa, Bongo père is remembered as a cartoon character who wept copiously at the funeral of the man he called his father, President Charles de Gaulle, and for handing out large parcels of Gabon’s gold and diamonds to leading French government officials and their wives.

    There is a tendency to judge and condemn Bongo fils just as perversely, mainly on account of his alleged human rights violations.  But he strikes me overall as a deliberative politician with an intuitive grasp of the dynamics of power, its limits and uses, even if not its abuses.

    I have before me, courtesy of Wale Adebanwi, most recently the Rhodes Professor of Race Relations and director of African Studies at the University of Oxford, and currently the Presidential Penn Compact Professor and director of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, a 2018 video featuring Ali Bongo fielding questions at an event Adebanwi moderated.

    “Term limits,” asked an African doctoral student in the Law program, student began, had come to be regarded as “core ingredients” of democracy.   Why then did the guest speaker remove term limits from Gabon’s Constitution, even as a he instituted some progressive reforms?

    It was as if Bongo had anticipated the question, prepared an elaborate response, and filed it away for instant recall as occasion might demand.

    Term limits sound nice, even sexy, Bongo began.  But they are not working, and that is not how politics works.  Gabonese law stipulated no term limits and he had removed no such protections.

    You get elected into office.  Your first two or three years of a five-year term are  bumpy,               he continued.  There are tough  measures to be taken, but you are already thinking of re-election. You then deploy your energies to winning re-election, but in the process, whatever remains of your tenure is lost in terms of serious governing.   Winning re-election does not help your agenda much, for the public knows that you are on your way  out of power, win or lose.   Your agenda thus becomes a hostage to whatever term-limits are in operation.

    In whatever case, Bongo went on, term-limits don’t work.  They don’t have them in Europe. In the United States, they are for presidents and governors only.  Lawmakers sometimes hold office for 40 or even 50 years and become institutions within institutions.  If term-limits were the “core ingredients” of democracy they have been made out to be, why not apply them to all elected officials?

    Yes, some African countries have written them into their laws, he conceded.  But not out of conviction.  They have them on their books to please the donors and, he might  have added, foreign academic citadels like Oxford.

    Long-winded, and more than a tad self-serving, to be sure.  But it raises some concerns about our unquestioning fidelity go the standard election and governance models that are routinely and reflexively pressed into service to resolve every political conflict, especially in developing countries.

  • A modest constitutional proposal       

    A modest constitutional proposal       

    I have been doing some hard thinking lately on the constitution, especially that aspect of it which, according to some of the most learned persons in the land and indeed the whole world on such matters, stipulates that no candidate can be duly elected President of this Federal Republic unless that candidate wins at least 25 percent, or one-fourth, of the total votes cast in Abuja Federal Capital Territory,  or Abuja FCT.

    No shaking.  No approximations.

    That provision, these authorities insist, is an iron law or, to employ a more fancied term, a categorical imperative.  You and your party may win the majority in each of the 36 states of this Federal Republic; you may harvest every vote in every precinct in each of the 774 Local Government Areas of the country, and you may even have won the overwhelming majority of the votes cast in the Federal Capital Territory that is the nation’s Magic Kingdom. 

    But unless you win at least one-quarter of those votes, you have laboured in vain. If you fall short by a single vote, you have laboured in vain.

    This, according to these learned authorities, is the sober, unambiguous position enjoined by an unsentimental construction of the matter by the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as Amended.   That has been the law of the land. Think realpolitik.

    Once upon an earlier silly season, the country was confronted with the calculus of what constituted in demographic and plebiscitary terms, two-thirds of the 19 states comprising     the Federation.  In the run-up to the 1979 General Election, the Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO) had held at every opportunity the answer was 13 states.

    Until Richard Akinjide the legal wunderkind, acting on intelligence indicating that the NPN’s Presidential candidate, Shehu Shagari would win 25 percent or more of the total votes cast in each of at least two two-thirds of the states in Nigeria States threw a deus ex machina into the works.  Two-thirds of 19 as every elementary school pupil can figure out, is 12 2/3, not 13,  Akinjide deposed in the manner of the precise school teacher he once was.

    There was just this little problem that the NPN candidate Shehu Shagari, polled a little under 20 percent, or one-fifth, in a 13th state, Kano just a little under 20 percent, or one-fifth of the total votes there.

    As they had been iterated and reiterated by FEDECO officials and understood by the general public, Shagari’s showing fell considerably short of the stipulation.

    Nothing to worry about, as Akinjide might have assured FEDECO chairman Michael Ani, not the most patient of bureaucrats, flummoxed that the wheels he had refined and perfected to meet any contingency in what was already being called over-engineered election machine  were in danger of coming off when with regard to a 13th state.

    The law meant simply that, in this particular instance, a candidate needed to win only one quarter of the votes cast in at least two-thirds of the states in Nigeria,  –i.e., 12 2/3 states, not 13.   That formulation tipped the scale in Shagari’s favour, and he was declared winner all the way to Supreme Court.

    Read Also: UPDATED: UAE lifts visa ban on Nigerians after Tinubu’s intervention

    The law cannot contemplate an absurdity, the jurists maintained portentously; then they went ahead to deliver an absurdity by reducing Kano, the state with the largest number of parliamentary constituencies, to a hypothetical 13th state.

    They laid it down, however, that this was not to be cited as a precedent -not out of timidity or diffidence, you understand, but because of the time-honoured practice that the highest court in the land cannot be bound by such means, but because doing so might insulate it from legal developments in juristic science or perpetuate error.

    Just to make sure that kind of thing never happened again, the departing military removed that lacuna from the draft of the constitution they signed into law.  And, for good measure, every revision of the Constitution has ensured that the number of states in the Federation was divisible four.

    How could they have known that additional engineering could only lead to the recognition of Abuja FCT as a super-state and its residents as super-citizens whose votes outweigh the voters of all other citizens put together in the constitutional order?

    But that is where we are today.  And because of this, as well as alleged sundry irregularities, many learned persons are demanding that the last General Election be annulled and a new one ordered.

    Easy gentlemen, easy.  Can’t you see – and seize – the opportunities created by the new jurisprudence to clear the mess, the jiggery-pokery in the electoral laws and sanitize for all the time the theory and practice of psephology in our clime?

    All the best authorities agree that even local government elections in Nigeria are over-regulated.  When it comes to national elections, to call them over-regulated is too courteous. They are prone to manipulation at every conceivable point.  Instead of pillorying election officials, we should be praising and rewarding them for doing the impossible time and again under the most arduous circumstances.  It is a wonder that they get any results at all.

    To start with, the sheer scale and complexity of the exercise almost defy human ingenuity. Local Council elections are daunting enough.  The cost, in these disarticulated times, is simply insane.  Then the time lost to productivity, the court hearings, the appeals and cross-appeals – the whole thing is simply unsustainable.  The logistics is maddening.

    To say nothing of the paperwork even in this digital age.  And the damage the whole thing does to the soul, to social relations, and to our common humanity.  Is this not too high a price to pay for representative government, even at its most productive and beneficial?  When it consists in layer upon layer of dysfunction, it is time to embrace any alternative that promises even a smidgen of redemption.

    Now that the entire electorate in all disparities has been distilled into one compact geographic space  – Abuja FCT – for the purpose of a presidential election, the whole thing can be completed in a few hours after a leisurely Sunday lunch. Residents only, please.  Identification cards not transferable.

    Registration of qualified residents – fewer than 75, 000 by one account – and a handful of officials selected from among residents should take no more than an hour.  For actual voting and toting things up, allow one additional hour each.  Proclamation of results, one hour.

    Set aside one full day following the post-election petitions, if only to indulge the most obstinate litigants. But no lawyers, please.   Absolutely no lawyers of any stripe.  No media advisers or strategists of any kind. The entire Abuja FCT electorate will sit as a jury and determine. the final outcome of the election.  

    No appeals will be countenanced.  No obfuscations No magomago.  No wuruwuru.

    To consecrate this reform into law should be the first of business of the Tenth National Assembly.