The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • Kogi: The unending mess

    Kogi: The unending mess

    “THE mess in Kogi” was the not-so-nuanced title of the article I posted in this space on February 2, 2012.

    How I wish time and tide and circumstance had softened that judgment. Rather, they have, if anything, reinforced it.

    Then Kogi State was, and is even more so now, a political unit administered by the Igala largely for the benefit of the Igala, with scant regard for the interests and well-being of the Yoruba – the so-called Okun people of the former Kabba Province, the Ebirra and the Nupe who were corralled in a state that treats them as colonial subjects.

    You see it at every stratum of the public service and in every aspect of the governance.  It is dominance most unsubtle.  When they bother at all to respond to the complaint of those whom they are lording it over with such in-your-face brazenness, they tell them it is all a game of numbers.

    They assert that the Igala people outnumber all the other ethnic groups combined and should by that fact exercise the dominance that comes with that endowment. Theirs is a game of brute numbers in which equity and fellow-feeling have no place.

    Those at the receiving end of this kind of treatment must therefore have felt sorely galled to hear Governor Idris Wada declaim the other day that he had brought equity and justice and fairplay to governance in Kogi.

    Hear him, in a wide-ranging interview with Thisday (July 23, 2015)

    “…We try to unify our people for a common purpose of development and transformation of Kogi State by being fair in the distribution of amenities and projects across the three senatorial zones of the state and we try to attend to the needs of our people in an equitable manner and this has helped to propel our agenda for unity and transformation …”

    This declamation can perhaps be understood in the context of the gubernatorial election in which Wada will be seeking a second term. Outside that context, it flies in the face of the facts.  It is even flatly contradicted by other claims Wada made in the wide-ranging interview.

    The claim that he is building a university teaching hospital and a vocational training centre and an “ultra-modern” parking garage and 500 houses and has “electrified” more than 400 villages and built 300 motorised boreholes and renovated “countless” number of schools even while building many more may be well-founded.

    The critical question is:  Where are these projects located?

    It is the contention of this column that the “equity” and “fairness” that Wada trumpeted in the interview under reference hardly informed the siting of the projects. The siting of the Federal University in the state and Wada’s role in it makes that point abundantly clear.

    Word had come, apparently from on high that, finally, a major federal project was likely to be sited in Kabba, in the much-neglected Yoruba area of Kogi State. The entire area was agog with excitement and great expectation. The town already boasted a thriving College of Agriculture, an affiliate of Ahmadu Bello University, set up during the First Republic when Kabba belonged in Northern Nigeria.

    With that solid infrastructure in place, and with plenty of room for expansion, the proposed university would be taking off on a sound footing, in an area where education is the major industry.  It would, withal, serve as a catalyst for economic development.

    The joy was short-lived. The university, Wada insisted, had to be sited in Lokoja, to make up for what he called a deficit of federal presence in the neighbourhood.

    If anything, Lokoja already enjoyed a surfeit of federal presence as befits a state capital. It is host to a Federal Medical Centre, a branch of the Central Bank of Nigeria, the Inland Waterways, a military garrison and a police area command, among other institutions.

    According to corroborated media reports, Wada led a visiting National Universities Commission delegation to the premises of a secondary school in serious disrepair and told its members that that would be the home of the new federal university. And at the end of its visit, NUC Chairman Professor Julius Okojie dutifully announced that it had indeed accomplished its mission of locating the best site for the new institution, namely the premises of the derelict school, aforementioned.

    To be fair to Wada, he is not solely or even principally responsible for the blazing inequity and the grasping propensity that have under the ruling ethnic group in Kogi become the defining characteristics, if not the fundamental objectives, of the governance of the state.

    The template was set by the imperious first elected governor, Abubakar Audu, who invested himself with royal airs and an ornate, outsized wardrobe to match. It was notorious that he conducted business from a throne-line chair while his fawning appointees had to stoop before him to take their orders.

    He reluctantly agreed to set up the state university in the nearest town, Ayingba, when it became clear that his village lacked the absorptive capacity for that kind of project.  Even so, he had it named for himself by subterfuge.

    A student delegation from the institution had gone to meet Audu in Lokoja to complain about a dearth of facilities at the institution.  The students, so the story goes, were dragooned into a room and asked to draft a petition urging the Kogi Assembly to name the university for Audu.  The petition was forwarded to the Assembly, which assented post haste.

    That was how it came to be called Prince Abubakar Audu University –not just any Abubakar Audu but the princeling – with the hilarious acronym PAAU.  The institution has since reverted to its original name.

    Audu’s successor Ibrahim Idris, the carpenter they called “Ibro”followed the same path, but without the flashes of urbaneness that Audu often radiated even at his most imperious.  Wada has been a good and faithful student of the duo.

    If Wada wins the PDP’s nomination, he will face re-election in November in a profoundly altered political environment. The superior numbers the PDP had relied upon over the years to win and retain power in Kogi without serious challenge is no longer assured.

    The PDP retained control of the State Assembly in the general election this past March, but the strong showing of the APC in that poll, not forgetting that it is now the ruling party at the centre and that it has thrown up candidates with far wider appeal do not bode well for Wada and the PDP.

    One more thing: The voting pattern in the general election suggests powerfully that, contrary to what has been the dominant assumption in Kogi all these years, the Igala do not constitute a bigger voting bloc than all the other ethnic groups combined.

    If they play smart, those groups can effect a power shift, especially if the PDP is seen to be offering nothing but continuity.

     

  • Musings on the Senate’s Order-gate

    Musings on the Senate’s Order-gate

    The jury is now more or less out on the validity of the legal instrument  on which Dr Bukola Saraki and his confederates relied to foist him on the Senate as its president and Ike Ekweremadu, a stalwart of the minority PDP, as deputy president.

    The most generous construction one can put on it is that it is a desperate interpolation.  The police who have scant regard for nuance have called it a forgery.  Others have gone farther and called it a brazen forgery, and a transparent one for that matter.

    Don’t take my word for it.  Read the report of the police, as summarised in the weekend papers.  Even more crucially, read attorney Jiti Ogunye’s brilliant and indissoluble forensic analysis for this newspaper and some online publications last week.

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

    In execution, the whole thing was shot through and through with indecent haste, in the absence for good reason of roughly one half of its 108 members, the goal being to create on the ground a set of accomplished facts. Too bad if the operation came across as the parliamentary equivalent of a street mugging, the usual apologists said.  Politics is a game of wits and one side simply outsmarted the other.  Get over it and play smarter next time.

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

    That phrase, designed to assure the public that scrupulous adherence to law and lay at the heart of the process that threw up Saraki and Ekweremadu as the Senate’s leaders, has instead given away the game in a way the conspirators could not have imagined. For it immediately begs several questions:  Amended by whom?  When? Where?  And how?

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

    So, how did Standing Orders 2007 as amended morph into House Standing Orders 2015 as amended?  Was this the handiwork of ghosts?  Almost everyday, we hear of ghost teachers, ghost public servants and ghost towns.  But ghost senators?

    The closest thing to an answer to this overarching question has come from an unidentified official of the Senate’s secretariat.  The 7th Senate had ended its run, but the 8th Senate was yet to be inaugurated.  So, there was a vacuum.  Nature abhors a vacuum.   So the vacuum had to be filled — if only to avert nature’s wrath, he might have added

    The extant rules had served the Senate well.  If they had not, they would have been thrown out long ago.  The problem was that, as they stood, they could not be employed to advance the agenda of usurpation that Saraki and his confederates had in mind.

    The dodgy 2015 enactment, it is now clear, was a disingenuous solution to a manufactured problem, the problem being to get Saraki ensconced in the Senate president’s chair at all cost and by whatever means, and Ekweremadu in the deputy president’s chair, as a reward to the PDP for giving aid and comfort to Saraki’s personal agenda.

    It was designed to establish facts on the ground that the polity would have to live with.  It did not matter that the process by which they arrived at it was in flagrant breach of the Senate’s standing rules, an impregnable barrier to the ignoble project they were about to launch.

    The 2007 Standing Orders (as amended) enjoin any member seeking any amendment to the rules to give a written notice to the Senate president, providing details of the proposed changes.  Within seven days of receiving the notice, the Senate president will send a circular detailing the amendments and have it printed in the Order paper.

    The member proposing the changes will get a chance to talk about them from the floor. Following that, the Senate will decide by a simple majority whether to consider or reject the proposed changes. If the Senate votes against the changes, the matter ends there.

    But if the Senate decides to take up the matter, two-third of the members must vote affirmatively before the proposals become a part of its rules.

    This foregoing is the process the Senate should have followed if it was minded to respect its own rules.  But why submit to a labyrinthine process with an uncertain outcome when you can “amend” the pesky law in question, an amendment in this case meaning, for all practical purposes, cooking the statute books?

    Even in Nigeria where “anything goes” and nothing is impossible, this is without precedent.  The Senate in whose name this tawdry transaction was consummated is going to come out of it hugely discredited.  So also will those members who orchestrated and have been celebrating it as an achievement that will guarantee the “independence” of the legislature.

    They have by their shabby tactics cast a penumbra of uncertainty over the prospects of the new administration’s agenda and the national yearning for change expressed so unambiguously in the recent general elections.

    The public they claim to serve is surely entitled to feel betrayed.

    The whole thing is being seen, rightly, as a test of President Muhammadu Buhari’s resolve to root out corruption in the body politic.

    Thus far, he has handled the challenge with credit.  If this had happened in the time of former President Goodluck Jonathan, it would have been smothered by all the obfuscation and the dilatoriness that rented crowds and hired publicists masquerading as “Abuja-based public affairs commentators” ever ginned up. The police leadership would never have risen to the professional challenge.

    The matter is now before the courts.  Given the issues at stake, the courts will have to accord it accelerated hearing. Until it is disposed of, the Senate cannot in good conscience transact any business, with Saraki and Ekweremadu officiating.  Any such business will come tainted with a  heavy presumption of illegality, given the overwhelming evidence that their ascendancy was founded on illegality.

    The Senate will therefore have to stand adjourned.

    Sure, the administration has already lost a great deal of momentum by its excessive caution and stands to lose more if the Senate goes into a long recess.  But it is better for the polity, for democracy, and for the rule of law, to ensure that when the Senate acts, it does so with unassailable integrity and authority.

    This is no time for shabby compromises dressed up as a “political solution.”  The ongoing criminal investigation must be allowed to work its way through our institutions.  For, in an exact sense, Senate Order-gate is also a test of the capacity of those institutions to guide and lead at a time of grave national crisis.

  • EFCC: So much bark, so little bite

    EFCC: So much bark, so little bite

    Two high-profile arrests by the EFCC in the past two weeks followed a script that has become wearisomely familiar.

    I have in mind the arrest, first, of former Jigawa State Governor Sule Lamido and two of his sons on money–laundering charges involving billions of Naira, and later of Stephen Oronsaye, former head of Service of the Federation in the investigation of fraud on an identical scale.

    First, the news media are briefed comprehensively by persons familiar with the case but who cannot be identified because they were not authorised to make the damning disclosures that go on to resonate on the front pages and in the headlines for subsequent weeks, while providing coarse entertainment in the so-called social media.

    Even in summary, the charge sheet is a litany of crimes and misdemeanours on a scale almost beyond belief – almost, because Nigerians have come to expect nothing less than the worst from their officials. In fact, if there is one thing that unites vast segments of the Nigerian public, it is the belief, indeed the expectation, that their officials will always gravitate toward all that is ignoble and not of good report.

    Then comes the arrest a few days later, staged with critical solemnity for the news media, especially television, which measures news salience by the extent to which an event translated into dramatic pictures for the television cameras. The suspects, looking grim and woebegone, usually are serenaded into the precincts of the EFCC by officials wearing vests marked with its logo.

    Another layer of officials, suitably armed, keeps the rear, apparently to deter those who might be thinking of sabotaging the proceedings. Yet more officials take positions to the left and the right of the suspects, boxing them in.

    The officials look sober for the most part. There is no swagger in them, no hint of the triumphalism you would expect to perfuse such a setting. It is almost as if they are labouring under a painful necessity.

    But make no mistake about it:  This is serious business. The EFCC officials are respectful. But you cannot overawe them with any claim to bigmanism. As if to make that point emphatically, they may often keep the suspects in custody, pending formal arraignment where an unabridged list of the crimes and misdemeanours is read.

    The charges go to confirm what many Nigerians have always believed of their officials, namely, that they are grasping, self-absorbed, larcenous to the point of obscenity and insanely acquisitive.  Even among those usually inclined to keep an open mind or show cool indifference, one could sense quiet outrage.

    “Have the suspects no shame?” you could almost hear them say with pained resignation.  “What ill they do with all that pillage?  Just how much do they need to feel contented?

    After the usual courtroom skirmishes, the trial finally starts.  Soon enough, it begins to appear that what had seemed an open-and-shut case is nothing of the sort. The suspect has in his corner some of the finest legal minds that money can buy, no pun intended.  The prosecution, on the other hand, is typically led by attorneys of lesser specific gravity.

    And in an encounter in which seniority counts for much and opposing junior counsel as well as the presiding judge often feel obliged to defer to senior counsel, the EFCC finds itself at disadvantage, and not just in psychological terms.

    As the trial gets underway, it is usually the prosecution that is seeking adjournment after adjournment, evidence that the case had been rushed to court, without the painstaking marshalling of probative evidence required for successful prosecution.

    More evidence of a rush to court surfaces when the prosecution requests leave of court to withdraw the charges so as to and amend them and re-file new material later. Such requests unduly prolong the court process, resulting in justice delayed.

    The case wends its way through the system, and judgment day finally arrives. But it is thrown out because it was filed in the wrong court – a court that has no business entertaining it.

    This verdict has been delivered so many times that it raises some troubling questions.  It may well be that the officials filing the cases could not figure out the right court the first time, and still cannot do so after losing their cases on the matter of jurisdiction, hardly one of the most recondite issues in legal practice.

    But that would raise the far more troubling issue of whether the cases were filed deliberately in courts with no jurisdiction, with officials subverting, for any number of reasons, the very cause they were employed to champion.

    When corruption cases are not dismissed for want of jurisdiction, they are often set aside because the prosecution failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, usually another indication of a rush to court, or of a deficit in prosecutorial skills.

    Halfway through the case, the prosecutor may settle for a bargain whereby the public official on trial pleads guilty to a lesser charge that may not involve jail term but allow him keep much of the ill-gotten wealth that lay at the heart of the prosecution.

    This is not the way to fight official corruption.

    Until the authorities can assemble, train and retain formidable prosecutors who can hold their own against the smartest defence attorneys, and until they can support them professionally equipped with the latest investigative tools in accounting, auditing and computing, the fight against official corruption will not be won.

    Assembling such a team cannot be done overnight, to be sure.  But the time to start is now, with our law schools as the recruiting ground.

    The finest products of these institutions – those graduating with First Class or Second Class Upper—will constitute the pioneer corps of some 200 federal prosecutors. After selection through a highly competitive process, they and the professionals who will work with them will be sent abroad for further training, including a year’s attachment to some of the finest prosecutors who have brought organised crime elements to heel in Italy, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Japan, India, Brazil Argentina, the United States, Mexico, Australia and South Africa.

    On their return they should be placed on special salaries that take into account the risks that flow from job, and insulated them from the political pressure of any kind.  They should enjoy security of tenure until age 70, subject only to good conduct and a record of successful prosecutions.

    Until prosecutors have at least the same skills and a scheme of compensation comparable to that of attorneys in private practice, until they are equipped with the resources for carrying out their work, the Nigerian state will never gain the upper hand in the waron official corruption.

  • As they emerge, dis-emerge and re-emerge

    As they emerge, dis-emerge and re-emerge

    Not many foreigners who read Nigerian newspapers regularly or visitors to these shores can have failed to conclude that the natives, especially those of them in the political class, must rank among the most self-disregarding persons on the planet.

    They do not get appointed or named or promoted or deployed to a position.  They simply “emerge” on the scene, literally from nowhere.  Some of them will dis-emerge only to re-emerge again.

    From “emerge,” it is but two keystrokes to “re-emerge, three keystrokes to “emergence,” and two more keystrokes to “re-emergence.”  Day after day, the front pages and the headlines dutifully report on the latest officials to have “emerged,” and what their “emergence” or “dis-emergence” portends for the polity.

    Samples:

    Saraki  and Ekweremadu emerge as Senate leaders.

    Maurice Iwu may re-emerge as INEC chair.

    NuhuRibadu may emerge PDP chair.

    Group hails emergence of Dogara as Speaker.

    Oliseh set to emerge as national football coach

    500 emerge with First Class at Roadside University

    It is almost as those who have emerged or are emerging or are set to emerge have been hiding, and not in a particularly congenial or healthy place, and certainly not out of modesty.

    I take that back insofar as it concerns Senate President Bukola Saraki.

    We now know that, just before his emergence, he was hiding in his car for four hours, following a tip-off that his adversaries had sent a gang of ruthless kidnappers to abduct him in a diabolical bid to sabotage his election bid.

    The strategy for his emergence, perfected at a meeting with a rump of his fellow APC rebels and PDP senators still reeling from the electoral sandbagging their party had suffered in the recent general election, was about to unravel.

    If he was not on the floor – like the 51 senators who were in another venue waiting for a meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari — he would not be nominated for the post.  And if he was not nominated, he stood little chance of being elected even in this land “anything goes” and nothing is impossible.

    I don’t know the kind of car Saraki rides, but it will have to be commodious enough to conceal his imposing frame and luxurious enough to provide the opulence to which he feels so entitled.  He could therefore not have been hiding in an unseemly place, unlike all many of the others  whose emergence dominates the front pages and the headlines.

    In whatever case, he emerged from his hideout with nary a tell-tale signs of his ordeal and moments later emerged Senate president with the minimum of fuss or ceremony, and with only one-half of the membership present and voting.

    Lesson:  To emerge, you have to prepare for your emergence and indeed for all emergencies.  Where there are no emergencies, contrive them.

    But I digress.

    As I was saying, the foreigner or visitor reading stories in the Nigerian news media about who has emerged or is emerging or is set to emerge must be wondering:  What are they hiding from, and why?  Where are they emerging from?  Why does it take apolitical appointment to make them “emerge,” to bring them out of hiding?

    I cannot state with confidence the point at which that term entered into the vocabulary of political discourse in Nigeria.  But my interest in its use, misuse and abuse dates back to the time of the loathsome dictator, Sani Abacha, and his desperation to bury the June 12, 1993 presidential election that his duplicitous military predecessor, General Ibrahim Babangida, had annulled.

    One of the schemes Abacha devised to that end was a Constitutional Conference packed with handpicked candidates, the usual retainers, and delegates chosen by less than 25 per cent of registered votes where the poll was not boycotted entirely.

    Concerned that the Confab – as it was called – was slow in starting, one newspaper beholden to the regime wondered why this should be the case, given that so many “credible delegates” had “emerged.”  Many of the “credible delegates” would later work assiduously to ensure Sani Abacha’s emergence as the presidential candidate of the five political parties he had licensed.

    That newspaper, to no one’s grief, has since gone into insolvency.  In a country where some sections of the news media are notorious for not meeting their payroll, it holds the dubious record   for indebtedness to staffers — 19 months in unpaid salaries.

    Another newspaper that basks in false affluence under a mountain of debt started paying salary arrears going back nine months only when industry unions shut it down.

    And a broadcast station that threw decency and professionalism and ethics overbroad to vilify opponents of the defenestrated and unlamented Goodluck Jonathan, it turns out, has not paid its staffers for 17 months.

    Where did all the billions it received for the odious assignment go?

    Though not wholly peculiar to Nigeria, this journalistic model seems to have come to stay here. You’ve been given a weekly column or some news hole or air time to fill as you please, no questions asked. What do you need a salary for?

    Call it the Mobutu Principle.

    In Zaire, as the Democratic Republic of Congo was then known, word reached President Mobutu Sese Seko that enlisted soldiers who could not recall when they last received their salaries had mutinied.

    He summoned the mutineers from one military to his palace.  “ I hear you are complaining that you have not been paid,” he said.

    The mutineers murmured in confirmation.

    Pointing at one of them, Mobutu asked,”What is that you are holding?

    “A rifle, Sir,” the subaltern replied.

    Mobutu pointed at another solider and put the same question to him.

    The same response:  A rifle.

    “I have given you each an assault rifle and you are complaining about unpaid salaries,” Mobutu intoned with stunned incredulity.  “What salary can be more assured than the rifle in your hand?

    The message was clear: Use what you have to get whatever you need.

    I will not be surprised if media people who have not been paid for months on end finally yielded to the temptation into which their employers had led them and used their columns and news holes and air time to fend for themselves, as indeed some of those selfsame employers had indeed urged them to do, I gather.

    Again, I digress, for the last time.

    If anything can be said with certainty about Nigerian politics, it is that the tide of emergence is not about to subside.

    It is now being bruited that, as an additional measure to guarantee the independence of the legislature, the Saraki group has embarked on strategy that will make Tony “The Fixer” Anenih emerge as vice chairman of the APC’s Board of Trustees, and the emergence of Ayo Fayose, the all-conquering governor of Ekiti, as associate chair of the APC Governors Forum.

  • Banking and Mrs Warren’s Principle

    Banking and Mrs Warren’s Principle

    “Looking for work,” I wrote on this page some six years ago, “has become one of the most dangerous occupations in Nigeria – a risky venture that is likely to cause harm or injury, even death.”

    In that piece (August 19, 2008), I had employed the term “occupation” not in a flippant or cynical sense, but to reflect what had become the painful reality for millions of our young men and women for whom looking for a job had become a full-time occupation in itself

    As they pounded the streets and scoured the corporate offices and factories and farms and construction sites in search of work, I remarked, they were more likely to be swindled, mugged, kidnapped, sexually assaulted or exploited and abused in every conceivable manner by persons masquerading as prospective employers.

    I was reacting to reports in the July 14, 2008, editions of the national newspapers that dozens had died the preceding weekend at various centres across Nigeria in recruitment exercises conducted by the Immigration Service and the Prisons Department.

    For 43 of the 195, 000 applicants jostling for 3,000 vacancies, the race proved a fatal regimen, a journey of no return.  A good many of them were trampled underfoot in the frenzied rush to gain a vantage position at the start; others died from sheer exhaustion.  Hundreds sought hospital treatment for the injuries they suffered from the race.

    This grisly scenario, slightly modified, was reenacted in March 2014 at various locations across where the same agency was scheduled to administer written tests to some 520, 000 applicants chasing  4, 556 openings…

    The 2008 fitness test of a 2.5 km run was replaced with an obstacle race requiring thousands of applicants who had converged on various locations several hours ahead of schedule to bulldoze, squeeze, elbow, claw, fight or otherwise find their way to the event through a single entrance.

    At least 19 persons, four of them pregnant women, were killed in the resulting stampedes.  Hundreds suffered injuries.

    In a sane society, the responsible political official would have handed in his resignation even if the fiasco had not been compounded by so wanton a grim harvest. Elementary decency demands nothing less.

    But Abba Moro, the Minister of the Interior, who supervised this carnage, kept his job right up to the end of the Jonathan Administration, and would doubtless have continued to serve in the cabinet if Dr Jonathan had not lost his re-election bid.  And Dr Jonathan roused himself to sympathise with the relations of the victims long after the carnage, handing them token compensation only as part of his cynical election strategy.

    The dangers to which job seekers are exposed are not always physical, however.  Women job seekers in particular, are constantly exposed to moral danger, and sexual abuse, particularly in the banking industry.  But that is nothing new.

    It goes back to the time of former military president Ibrahim Babangida, who was barely three years into his misbegotten rule when his palace intellectuals declared that Nigeria’s history would have to be divided into two neat periods: the era before Babangida (BB), when all was darkness, and the era that began with him (AB) when everything magically turned into sweetness and light.

    The more desperate revisionists among them even insisted that Nigeria’s history actually began with Babangida’s coming.   Before then, according to them, Nigeria had nothing worth calling a history.

    As evidence, they pointed to the wonders that structural adjustment had wrought all over the land –cocoa farmers fling to their plantations in their personal helicopters, entrepreneurs, freed from the shackles of de-regulation, establishing flourishing businesses that created more jobs than there were people to fill, and banking institutions sprouting up in every neighbourhood like mushrooms after the first rains, glittering symbols of the boom.

    It was an ensnaring boom. You made a substantial deposit for a fixed period and collected     your interest upfront, sometimes to the tune of 20 per cent.  But this conservative approach was employed only by banks that operated from known addresses.  The “wonder” banks that operated from one-room shacks, with bundles of bank notes piled from floor to ceiling  and where records, if any, were kept in notebooks or even loose sheets, offered much higher returns.

    Many indeed were the patrons who rushed in, usually with other people’s money to cash in on what looked like a sure path to wealth and the good life it can buy.  I recall a paymaster for the army who deposited the funds for the salary of soldiers in one of the wonder banks in the hope of turning it around within the month with a quick kill under his belt

    He never got his deposit back.  Neither did most of those who had rushed to cash in on the scheme.

    That was when the banks that operated from licensed premises and apparently in compliance with industry regulations hit upon the idea of hiring attractive young women for the most part. Entry salaries were so attractive that a job in the banks became the dream of most of our young school leavers.

    Their remit: to canvass for deposits.  It was not explicitly stated, but the underlying assumption,  to put the matter delicately, that the women among them will not hesitate to use what they have to get the deposits they need just to keep their jobs.   This is the ideology of Mrs Warren’s profession in George Bernard Shaw’s play of the same title writ small.

    The targets were impossibly high.  Just how high is indicted in a letter I have before me at this writing:

    “Dear Ms X:

    “You will recall that upon assumption of duty, your commitment to drive a liability target of N180,000,000 (not a misprint) and a risk asset target of N63,000,000 (again not a misprint) within a period of six months.”

    Even if she had a private mint, she would have found it hard to meet these targets, due to the scarcity of processing material, not forgetting the epileptic power supply  After six months, she had achieved only 2 per cent of her risk asset target of N63 million.

    “Management is extremely displeased with this abysmal level of performance and absolute destruction of value,” the letter under reference states in severe reproach.   “Please note that you have up to 31st January, 2015 to achieve significant improvement (60%) growth; otherwise your employment with the bank will be reviewed.”

    The new target is no more attainable than the earlier one, but there you have it.

    I have heard of canvassers offering would-be depositors a higher return than the going rate at the bank and making up the difference from their own earnings – in other words, subsidising their employers just so that they keep their jobs.

    There has always been a seamy side to banking. Putting young women in the way of moral harm and sexual exploitation, placing them in a position where they feel obliged to follow Mrs Warren’s footsteps to keep their jobs, makes it seamier still.

  • The tortuous road to public disclosure

    The tortuous road to public disclosure

    We have come a long way from that day in 1973, give or take a year, when Tai Solarin, the pre-eminent iconoclast and contrarian of his day, dialed up the Dodan Barracks switch board, introduced himself and asked a senior official how much the Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, was earning by way of salary.

    A full minute of silence that seemed more like an hour greeted the inquiry.

    That was not a good sign.

    Then, in a voice rendered all the more menacing because its owner was obviously straining to contain his rage, the fellow at the other end asked if Solarin could repeat the question.

    A person of lesser specific gravity would have taken fright and hung up.  If the caller was the  less tenacious type, he would have apologised profusely for calling the wrong number.  For it was clear  that the person making such an inquiry had come dangerously close to crossing the thin line that separated legitimate inquiry from seditious libel, and could therefore expect to be visited with the consequences that would naturally flow from such temerity.

    But Solarin, being Solarin, repeated the question.  From his home in Ikenne, Solarin told his interlocutor, he had been able to gather data on the salaries of various government leaders worldwide from their countries’ embassies in Lagos by telephone. The comparative study, he said, would be incomplete without the Nigerian data.  And so, could the official kindly tell him General Yakubu Gowon’s official salary?

    “You want to know the salary of the Head of State?” the official asked in stunned disbelief.

    Solarin confirmed that that was indeed his mission, making matters worse by repeating the offence when the official had clearly given him an opening to back off.

    “And how is that your business?” the official pursued, still reeling from the caller’s contumacy.

    “As a citizen, I have . . .”

    “Cit’zen my foot,” the official cut in.  “This is how you people get yourselves into trouble.  Just imagine, wanting to know the salary of the Head of State.  Tell me, has the Head of State ever asked to know your salary?”

    “No, but . . .

    “Why then do you want to know the Head of State’s salary?”

    Whereupon, before Solarin could answer the question, the official warned severely that Solarin would have only himself to blame if he persisted in that line of inquiry.

    If the official earnings of the principal officers of state were classified secrets, inquiries about  their private holdings belonged in the realm of the forbidden.  A full 35 years would pass between Solarin’s audacious quest and a public declaration by a Nigerian head of state not only of his financial worth, but of his wife’s, too.

    By openly declaring his assets and liabilities, Malam Umaru Yar’Adua struck a blow for probity in public life.  He made that move, we are told, against the strenuous objections of the Code of Conduct Bureau, and, one suspects, also against dire warnings of the party bigwigs and freeloaders and the denizens of officialdom who have turned public service into an oxymoron.

    It is not the case, of course, that all was quiet on the probity front between Solarin and Yar’Adua.

    On the contrary, as a repudiation of the excesses of 13 years of military rule, and an indication that Nigeria was headed for a new order, the Constitution that ushered in the Second Republic in 1979 established a Code of Conduct Bureau.

    The intent was that the Bureau would demand, receive, hold and make available for the inspection of bona fide inquirers documents detailing the assets of public officers, thus helping to close the gap between official earnings and private accumulation and keep public officers on the straight and narrow path.

    But the institution was soon perverted.  Not many officials cared to comply. Where submitted, assets declarations were shrouded in bureaucratic secrecy.  Instead of limiting the Bureau’s remit to elected officials as framers of the Constitution probably intended, it was stretched to include civil servants from GL 10 upwards.  Thus, the Bureau’s capacity to process and store data was overstretched, and its watchdog function vitiated.

    The whole exercise was turned into a joke.  Middling civil servants who had virtually no assets to declare but were compelled to do so on pain of facing some bureaucratic sanction declared their wives, parents, siblings, husbands, grandparents, cousins, nephews, nieces and even their household pets as assets.

    Meanwhile the elected officials and political appointees the scheme was designed to rein in gorged themselves on the very resources they were supposed to hold in trust for the public.

    Of the officials who cared to comment on this travesty, Commodore Ebitu Ukiwe, then Chief  of General Staff in the Babangida regime, came closest in my view to providing a plausible  explanation.  There would be no end to the importunities of friends and relations if they knew  how much a public officer was worth.   Some wicked supplicants might even send witches after public officers they deem tight-fisted

    He might have added that some desperate elements might even have been able to conjure a public officer’s life savings out of the bank vaults by mere incantation.

    Clearly, it was not just the skinflints that had to be troubled by the danger of making their assets public.  Every public officer had cause to worry about calculating friends and relations,  to say nothing of adversaries.

    But they had a choice.  They could decline to hold public office.  They could faithfully proclaim their assets and extend their munificence to their relations and friends and hope thereby to earn their goodwill and their blessings.   Or they could hog it all and risk an everlasting curse.

    Today, we have some idea of what elected officials are paid officially, right up to allowances  for their wardrobe, for clearing their throats before they talk, for belching.and even for farting, for sitting, for standing and for every posture in between, for dozing off and for staying awake during meetings, for doing their work and for not doing it.   We know the special compensation the “hardship allowance” they receive for the unspeakably hazardous job of law-making.

    That is no small improvement.  But we still do not know what they are worth, although service in the public realm constitutes the sum total of their careers for the most part.

    Musa Yar’Adua has broken the mould.  If we discount the cash and material donations to his  presidential race such as it was, he is even far less affluent than the assets declaration seems to suggest.  All the nitpicking that has trailed the declaration is unwarranted.  He deserves praise  for this act of transparency.

    But despite some gestures from Kogi and a belated one from Zamfara, his example is unlikely  to prove contagious.  In fact, I will not be surprised if the National Assembly were to commence  impeachment proceedings against him one of these days because he made a public declaration of his assets and his wife’s, despite strong advice to the contrary.  Abuja, as he knows and as we know, moves in mysterious ways.

    One particular item on Yar’Adua’s assets declaration points distressingly to the unconscionable appropriations that a good many Nigerians have carried out in the name of public service.  It is an undeveloped parcel of land in Abuja, worth N50 million.  It was in the same Abuja that  Mahmud Yayale Ahmed, most recently secretary to the Federal Government, was invited to buy his official residence for a cool N360 million.  Persuaded that the offer was a mere formality and that the house was not meant for people of his means, he turned it down.

    And yet, in the same Abuja, members of the National Assembly auctioned to themselves, at a reported N11 million apiece, magnificent mansions meant to serve as official quarters for legislators. And in the same Abuja, the Senate has as its presiding officer a fellow who acquired one of the auctioned mansions but now lives, without twinge of conscience, in a presidential suite at public expense in a five-star hotel because he has no “official accommodation.”

    Unless Yar’Adua moves quickly to void this odious auction and other acts of expropriation  carried out in the name of privatisation and monetisation, his assets declaration will amount to  little more than a hollow ritual.

     

    First published in this newspaper on July 10, 2007, under the title “The long road to probity,” this comment is being republished, slightly revised, because of its contemporary resonance.

  • June 12, 1993, and June 9, 2015

    June 12, 1993, and June 9, 2015

    The June 12, 1993 presidential election heralded a new dawn in Nigerian politics.

    Forsaking tribe and tongue and creed and station, a decisive majority of Nigerians voted to entrust their destinies to the Muslim-Muslim ticket of Bashorun MKO Abiola and Babagana Kingibe, of the Social Democratic Party (SDP).

    In eight years of virtually unchallenged rule, the duplicitous regime of military president  Ibrahim Babangida had led Nigeria to the edge of economic ruin and destroyed the value system. The election offered Nigeria a chance to chart a new course, founded on the principle that governance shall be based on the consent of the people freely given.

    Babangida annulled the election, with help from a suborned faction of the SDP, which was only too willing to bargain away its electoral victory and with it, the hopes and aspirations of millions of Nigerians who had given it their mandate.

    The rest is history.

    Of the many political figures complicit in the annulment, two have not only remained in circulation, their stock has risen.  I have in mind Brigadier General David Mark who, as a key player in the Babangida regime, is on record as having vowed to shoot Abiola to death if Abiola was allowed to take power

    David Mark has served as a member of the Senate for 16 years and as its president for the last eight, in which latter capacity he designated himself or was designated His Excellency the Right Honourable David Mark.

    I have also in mind Chief Tony Anenih, whose renown as a fixer had been established long before he took the leading part, as national chairman of the SDP, in bargaining away the party’s victory in the 1993 presidential election. He has since then made a lucrative career as a fixer for every season.

    Wherever a political job of the most unsavoury kind is to be done, like turning winners into losers and losers into winners, there you will find Anenih in his true element.

    In a way, June 8, 2015, some 22 years removed from the historic 1993 poll, also signalised a new dawn. The two houses of the legislature were to be inaugurated under new management as it were, the APC having wrested them decisively from the PDP.  These are the organs through which the APC was going to pursue the agenda of Change on which it had fought and won the election.

    To drive the agenda and pursue it faithfully, the APC had to have as the heads of these organs persons whose dedication, loyalty and commitment it can vouch for. In its judgment, Bukola Saraki did not pass that test. He had brought considerable assets to the APC through the ACN when he defected from the PDP, but he was for all kinds of reasons not his party’s candidate for Senate president.

    As if to prove prescient those elements in the APC who thought him unfit for that high office and to confirm what his fellow Ilorin kinsman Is’haq Moddibo Kawu has written about him, namely, that the only thing Saraki cares about is Saraki, the aspirant surreptitiously cut a deal with the PDP minority, which then voted en bloc with some renegades in the APC to steamroll him to the third rank in the national order of precedence.

    To get this dubious support, Saraki bargained away to the PDP the APC’s prerogative of selecting the deputy senate president from its own ranks. And in grateful appreciation of his role in facilitating this tawdry enterprise, the conclave elected David Mark “leader” of the   Senate, a position that does not exist. A little bankrolling also helped, I gathered.

    It took 57 of 108 senators, all the 49 from the PDP and eight from the APC, presumably including Saraki, to consummate this subversive deal. There was no dissenting vote. Before many in the attentive audience realised what was going on, Saraki was already ensconced in the Senate president’s chair and wielding the gavel.

    Such was the rush, the indecent haste with which an event that should have resonated with solemnity and symbolism came across instead as the parliamentary equivalent of a street mugging.

    The 51 APC senators who were not on the floor had not willfully absented themselves.  They were assembled at another venue, to which all APC senators had been summoned, for an appeal by President Muhammadu Buhari for party unity in the run-up to the election of leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives.

    Saraki may still have won if the election had been conducted with all APC members present and voting. But Saraki being Saraki, he left nothing to chance. Why wait for a vote of the full house and an uncertain outcome when you can achieve your goal through a Faustian bargain?

    As in the 1993 presidential election, David Mark, and according to media reports Tony Anenih, who was brought out of retirement to do what he does best, played pivotal roles in up-ending established process to achieve partisan, if not personal goals.

    It is in truth scandalous that David Mark who had served in the Senate since it was set up 16 years ago and presided over it for eight aided and abetted this flagrant abuse of process when he should have stood up robustly for propriety.  Where was the “elder statesman” in him?

    There was a time when the standard justification for a military coup was that politicians or the political class had learned no lessons. Were any lessons taught?

    The storied careers of David Mark and Tony Anenih, and indeed Bukola Saraki, whose rap sheet with the EFCC is about a mile long, show clearly that no lessons were taught. That is why Nigeria has been going round and round in an ever -shrinking circle.

    The usual pettifoggers have been justifying Saraki’s coup – for that is what it is at bottom —claiming that it accords with the rules and regulations in force. Even President Buhari has said that it was “somewhat constitutional.”

    Everything Saraki did may well have accorded with the letter of the law. But did it also accord with the spirit of the law?  And is fidelity to the spirit of the law not as important as, if not more important than, fidelity to the letter of the law? Fidelity to the letter of the law, like the sleep of reason, often brings forth monstrosities like the 12 and 2/3 formula that the Supreme Court relied upon to determine the winner of the 1979 presidential election.

    When the “anything goes” brigade claims that the coup is good for democracy because it will ensure the independence of the legislature, the retort must be: Independence from whom or from what? Independence for what?

    To return to the June 12, 1993 presidential election, the 22nd anniversary of which was marked last Friday largely in the Yoruba country:  President Buhari’s acknowledgement was a desultory tweet that had all the markings of an afterthought.

    We now know, thanks to Humphrey Nwosu who conducted the poll, that Abiola won it indissolubly. So, the claim that the election was “inconclusive” is no longer tenable.

    Nor can anyone in good faith now refer to Abiola as the “presumed winner” of that election. In the books of the National Electoral Commission, and in the records of accredited observers, domestic and foreign, Abiola was the actual, outright, undisputed winner, in truth a president-elect, a president–in-waiting.

    He died defending his mandate, after years of detention in solitary confinement, in the most barbarous of conditions. He rejected shabby and ignoble compromise, the kind that Saraki embraced to win election as Senate president.

    A long line of Nigerian rulers, from Babangida to Abdulsalami Abubakar, through Ernest Shonekan and Sani Abacha, suborned the institutions and instrumentalities of the state to persecute, and ultimately murder Abiola and his wife Kudirat, not sparing his global business empire, all because he won an election and would not surrender the people’s mandate.

    There is only one way to expiate this crime.

    It begins with Nigerian state marshalling all its institutions to acknowledge and honour that indissoluble fact.

    Thereafter, it should officially recognise Abiola as a president-elect who died before he could take office, and accord him all the rights and privileges of a president.

  • Ekiti: The conquistador at work

    Ekiti: The conquistador at work

    Governor Ayo Fayose sealed his conquest of Ekiti State with a victory parade through the streets of the capital, Ado Ekiti, last Friday, with a declaration and a warning.

    Declaration:  “I am a man destined for greatness and with the power of God, nobody can bring me down. I have defeated my enemies (emphasis added) during elections, and now I defeated impeachment.”

    Warning:   “Whoever thinks he could impeach his governor and the Deputy for him to become the Acting Governor always ends being destroyed. You have to learn from history. Those who impeached me the other time have died politically today.”

    Fayose’s election on the platform of the PDP in June 2014 was the first in a long line of the conquests that have now established him as a modern-day conquistador.  He conquered the incumbent governor, Dr  Kayode Fayemi, and the ruling ACN.

    But that stunning conquest was not enough.  At his inauguration, fresh from taking a solemn oath to serve all the people of Ekiti faithfully, to be governor for all and not just his supporters, he vowed to drive out the ACN out of the South West, its traditional stronghold in the short term, and thereafter out of Nigeria.

    As rule, conquerors don’t like sharing territory or power.   It is everything or nothing.  But here was Fayose, PDP governor, facing the daunting prospect of having to cohabit with a 27-member State Assembly, all of them elected on the platform of the ACN before it fused with other parties to morph into the APC.

    By sundry inducements, he won seven of the 26 to his side.  Bolstered by hired ruffians pretending to be members of the assembly and cheered on by a rented crowd, the seven promptly “impeached” the Speaker of the Assembly, Dr Adewale Omirin, elected one of their own to replace him, and proceeded to exercise the authority of the legislative branch.

    The police dutifully provided cover for the proceedings and, together with Fayose’s people – truck drivers, motor-cycle taxi operators, truck drivers, motor-park touts, artisans, petty traders, the usual crowd, you know – barricaded the precincts to keep away bona fide members of the Assembly.

    If you cannot persuade a person to be your friend, the Italian philosopher Niccolo Machievelli laid it down six centuries ago in his manual on how to win, exercise and retain power, make it impossible for that person to be your adversary.

    This piece of wisdom probably came naturally to Fayose, who has no patience with book learning, which he regards as the opium of the elite.  He made Ekiti unsafe for the 19 legislators who would not bend to his will.  They fled to the safer and more hospitable clime of Lagos, there to continue the struggle through the judicial process to regain their place in the Ekiti Assembly, and thereafter use that platform to impeach Fayose who had had treated that institution with such blazing contempt.

    They never returned.  He mobilized his supporters to blockade highways leading into Ado Edo Ekiti to ensure that they could not return to the city under any guise or disguise.  And in case they somehow slipped through the cordon, they would run smack into another band of Fayose’s enforcers from whom they could expect no mercy

    Score that not just as a coup but as another conquest for Fayose – conquest of the legislature.  But even that would be understating the matter:  It was a victory against the right of free movement of persons and lawful goods across the territory of Nigeria or any portion thereof

    There remained that other pesky third branch, the judiciary. Down the ages, no self-respecting conquistador has ever allowed it to function without interference, much less one marked for greatness by Providence, and against whom all weapons fashioned by the enemy will fail.  So, the judiciary had to be conquered, too.

    That turned out to be the easiest task on the conquistador’s agenda.

    Set your enforcers on the hallowed chambers of the court house in the state capital to harass, intimidate and bully, roughen up and physically assault its officers, rend their robes and tear up court documents.  Instill fear in them, those court officials in ermined raiments and black robes; primal fear, from which the police cannot deliver them.

    The heavens did not fall.  Rather it was the court officials that fell, and with them the machinery of justice in Ekiti State.  Score that as yet another one for the conquistador:  conquest of the judiciary.

    Nor were these Fayose’s only conquests.

    He conquered accountability.  He claimed to have sunk close to a billion Naira on, of all things, an “integrated poultry project.”  The scheme did not produce a single egg; yet, he could not be called to account, just as he has not had to account for operating the exchequer without lawful authority.

    He conquered truth, by knowingly deploying falsehood so readily and so often that can no longer distinguish between actuality and his own fabrications

    He conquered honour.  “Call me a bastard if Buhari ever becomes president of Nigeria,” he said during the election campaign.  Buhari took office nearly two weeks ago, but Fayose is yet to change his name.

    He conquered dissent.  By their support, he said during his latest victory lap, his enforcers had proved that “Ekiti will continue to speak with one voice.”  Fayose’s voice.

    He conquered and forced into a shameful silence or abject capitulation traditional rulers and elders, the custodians, if they are true to their station, of the mores, the value system of society.

    Every one of these conquests was undergirded by Fayose’s  earlier conquest of the rule of law and the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, with the active support of the Jonathan Administration and the PDP, the deluded holdovers of which have been threatening lately to resist any attempt to undermine “democracy” and the rule of law and all that in Ekiti.

    Fayose even conquered the most fundamental of decencies –the respect indeed reverence, that each person owes his or her mother’s privacy.  Just to score a political point, he told the whole  world that his mother suffered from an affliction of an intimate kind that is rarely mentioned in traditional society outside family circles and even there only in whispers.

    In sum, he has conquered all that is noble and decent and of good report.

    All that remains for Fayose the Conquistador is to conquer himself.  Unless and until he does that, all his vaunted conquests will vanish before his very eyes like rainbow gold.  The monsters he has spent his entire political life creating and nurturing may well devour him.

  • Matters miscellaneous

    Matters miscellaneous

    With yesterday’s men and women well and truly gone, and with today’s men and women not yet settled in, this seems to be an appropriate time to touch on some noteworthy events, recent and not-so-recent, in broad strokes and short takes, lest some people feel ignored.

    Time for “Matters miscellaneous,” the rubric I patented some three decades ago for dealing journalistically with the glut of occurrences in Nigeria, where there is never a dull moment.

    Each time the APC faithful came out in their tens of thousands during the presidential campaign brandishing their brooms, I was somewhat conflicted. On one hand, I was glad for those who made the brooms and those who traded in them.  The proceeds must have filled a gaping hole in their domestic budgets, assuming the brooms were not their sole source of income.

    On the other hand, my heart bled for the environment. It is going to take a long time for the palm tree population to recover, and for the environment to regain that portion of its equilibrium supplied by palm trees.

    I was also concerned about its potential impact on the supply of palm oil, palm kernels and, of course, palm wine.

    If there is ever an acute shortage of palm oil or the foaming-white beverage, you can be sure that the PDP, in keeping with its new role as vigilant opposition and defender of the public interest, will not hesitate to blame it on the APC.

    Lai Mohammed, don’t say you were not warned.

    In another picture that clings to my memory from the campaign, President (as he then was) Goodluck Jonathan is sitting, head bowed penitently in a high-backed chair, surrounded by wizened functionaries of the royal court – or maybe lesser royalty – pointing their symbols of authority at his head and chanting incantations in tongues he does not understand, the object being to bring him blessings from on high.

    Since, according to a reliable source, there were no translators on hand, how could Dr. Jonathan be sure that they were blessing him and not cursing him? You don’t ask that kind of question when you are desperate. Plus, you can never tell where salvation will come from.

    In whatever case, he seems to have got pretty little for all wads of dollars he dished out for that intercession. I hear there has been some murmuring in his camp about a “royal swindle.”

    It is probably just as well that the valedictory summit of the African First Ladies Peace Mission that Dr. (Mrs.) Patience Jonathan was planning to host in Abuja did not take place.

    It would no doubt have afforded the host a chance to show how much power and influence she wielded. If a summiteer was unable to fly in, Mrs. Jonathan would have dispatched a jetliner from the Presidential Fleet to ferry her here and back, as she did for the last summit. How she would have held court and reveled in all the attention and glory!

    But the long queues for fuel, the enveloping darkness and the pervading sense of despair would have shown how her husband, with not a little help from her, and had made a hash of things. The experience would certainly have eroded whatever regard they had for her.

    Of all the departing governors, none has had a more eventful exit than the Chief Servant of Niger State and Scholar of Minna, Dr. Babangida Aliyu.  Hs eight-year run was traumatic enough. On one occasion, some disgruntled elements rammed his boat as he was crossing the River Niger in an attempt to sink it and drown him. Mercifully, they failed. They had not reckoned that the Chief Servant is a crack swimmer.

    There they were again, the disgruntled elements aforementioned, at the venue where the Chief Servant was to formally transfer power to his successor. They serenaded him with taunts and jeers, and pelted him with “pure water” sachets and even stones! Not even his security staff could fend off the missiles.  In the end, Chief Servant had to be smuggled out of the stadium through a back door.

    What a way to reward a governor who chose to be called Chief Servant rather than “His Excellency the Executive Governor” and conducted himself as such?  Base ingratitude, that’s what it is.

    The massive flight from the PDP has continued, and so has the blame game for its disastrous showing in the recent general elections.  When the PDP brought in former Bauchi State Governor Adamu Mu’azu as national chairman, they advertised him as a game changer. Where former chairmen created the illusion of momentum, he was going to get the party moving.

    He got it moving all right, but not in the direction they expected.  They turned on him with such fury that he had to flee. The last we heard from him was that he was in Singapore for medical treatment. It was from there that he announced his resignation.

    Others have followed suit, perhaps the most notable being Himself the Arch Fixer, Tony Anenih.  When Anenih cannot even fix himself after being out-fixed by Professor Attahiru Jega and INEC, you know the game is well and truly up.

    The PDP may no longer be the largest political party in Africa, but it can still claim to be the only political party not just in Africa but probably the whole world, to have a nuclear physicist, and a professor of that arcane science to boot, as its national secretary.

    Physicists in that line of business deal with the smallest particles of matter. Now that the PDP has disintegrated, Professor Wale Olajide may just be the person to pick up the fragments and, in one huge leap for reverse engineering, put them together again into one formidable entity.

    Fortunately, he is staying put at Wadata Plaza, not heading to a centre for advanced nuclear research.

    Back in the time of military president Ibrahim Babangida when no pronouncement from on high was complete without ritual denunciation of “banned and discredited politicians,” I used  to look forward to the day when I would be able at the very least to qualify him and his confederates as “discredited.”

    I never had the pleasure of doing so. By the time the opportunity arrived, I had taken a break from active newspapering.

    This time, as the nation grapples with the detritus of the past 16 years in particular and the last eight years especially, I am not going to let pass a chance to acknowledge at least some of the persons and institutions that have merged from the period hugely and irredeemably discredited.

    Nominations, please.

     

  • From GEJ to GMB: A poisoned chalice

    From GEJ to GMB: A poisoned chalice

    Early in Dr Goodluck Jonathan’s presidency, I asked an eminent and influential public figure who was in a position to know — I asked him whether Dr Jonathan was up to the task.

    ‘Without hesitation, no,” he said, his voice tinged with pained disappointment.

    He went on to relate how Dr Jonathan would arrive at meetings not having studied his briefing papers, and how he would often doze off during meetings he himself had convened.

    Nor was the eminent person impressed by Dr Jonathan’s inner circle, men and women who had  no business being on such hallowed ground – “ ragamuffins,” — he called them.  They caroused far into the night, with their host holding court– as it were.

    I had no reason to doubt my source, a person of few but measured words. But I checked his assessment with two other public figures, persons of consequence in their own right, who were also in a position to know whether Dr Jonathan was up to the job.

    Each, separately, concurred in the assessment of my first source.

    That was early in the Jonathan presidency.  As the years passed by, he may have cut down on the night-time carousing and learned to stay attentive and engaged during meetings. But mastery of his brief, or of any public issue for that matter, eluded him throughout his presidency, now mercifully set to end next Friday.

    You could never accuse him of having a firm grasp on any issue, be it commonplace routine or recondite, despite his advertised doctorate in ichthyology.  You could never accuse him of profundity, of lofty thought, the type that springs from a lofty mind.  You could not even accuse him of honest-to-goodness blandness.

    Dr Jonathan was, well, Dr Jonathan.

    It has to be said, however, that he did not seek the office.  He did not envisage public office outside the bucolic enclave where he had spent his entire life until national service took him to Osun State. And as soon as he completed the one-year deployment, he returned to familiar surroundings. All his three degrees came from the University of Port Harcourt, which further locked him into the insularity that he was never able to shed.

    Catapulted from deputy governor in Bayelsa to state governor, to vice president, and then to president of the Republic in two dizzy years, from obscurity to celebrity and to the global stage as it were, Dr Jonathan was more than overwhelmed.

    Nothing had prepared him for such preferment. He never rose to its opportunities.

    Instead he took refuge in a Transformation Agenda that was more slogan than substance, so much motion but, alas, very little movement.   Meetings of the Federal Executive Council became contract bazaars, at the end of which contract awards were solemnly announced as if they were epochal achievements.  And for the most part, nothing was heard again about them.

    Dr Jonathan felt much more comfortable traipsing all over the country in gaudy apparel to attend to the affairs of the dysfunctional PDP than sitting down and contemplating how to make Nigeria work for the masses of the people.  Nigeria was working well for him and his cronies. The formerly shoeless boy had a fleet of 11 executive jets at his beck and call, a one billion naira budget for food and beverages.  What could be sworn with a system like that?

    Despite all the talk of transformation, Dr Jonathan could not build an independent power facility for the Presidential Villa and its complementary facilities.. Nor could he raise to world class the National Hospital that serves the Presidency to world class.  Why bother when he could always hop off in an executive jet for treatment in European hospitals?

    Being at the helm and reveling in the perks was what mattered the most to Dr Jonathan.  Performance was of no consequence, whether at the national level or in the states where the PDP held sway, more by crook than by hook.  Perversity and impunity thrived without even perfunctory remonstrance, especially in the PDP states or in the ministries, departments and agencies headed by its stalwarts.

    It is in fact the case that, the greater the perversity and the impunity perpetrated in those domains, the greater the tacit support of the Jonathan presidency.

    The PDP was never a political party, in any case.  It has always been a patronage organisation, held together by the power of federal patronage.  One of its chieftains, Iyiola Omisore, spoke a greater truth than he intended or realised when, in a plea for party unity, he urged squabbling camp followers to remember that the PDP was nothing without the presidency.

    Omisore was splendidly vindicated when, following the PDP’ rout two months ago in the general elections, its senior officials and card-carrying supporters started jumping ship by the thousands.  The cookie on which they had gorged themselves remorselessly for 16 unbroken years had crumbled.

    Jonathan presided over a comprehensive collapse of state institutions and the national value system.   In almost no area of national life can Nigerians say with confidence that they are better off today than they were four years ago when Jonathan was voted into office on his own.

    At its best, Nigeria generated in the Jonathan years only a small fraction of what a platinum mine in South Africa generates for its operations.  When they work at all, Nigeria’s four oil refineries produce less than one-half of the nation’s needs; the balance is imported through a system that is about as transparent as a steel door.

    Nigeria has been mired in corruption on a scale beyond belief.  But to Dr Jonathan, the problem is ordinary stealing, and we only compound matters when we call it corruption.

    Faced with the devastation over which he has presided, it might be thought that a contrite Jonathan would accept that he was not up to the task, thank Nigerians for the jolly good ride he has had, and humbly vacate the scene.

    Instead, he engineered a false consensus to clinch the PDP’s presidential ticket and sought desperately to buy or steal the presidential election, employing in the process some of the most despicable tactics ever seen in these parts.

    Instead of consolidating the ethnic solidarity that had triumphed over the machinations of a cabal  bent on preventing him from taking power following the death of his principal, and had thereafter given him a strong mandate for a substantive term of his own, he resorted to ethnic-baiting and incitement.

    In the twilight of his disastrous tenure, Dr Jonathan launched out on an activist streak, making major appointments, dismissing senior personnel, setting up new institutions,  threatening to link all 36 state capitals by rail, and even vowing to become a statesman, as if that is a position to which one can appoint oneself.

    He has even cast himself as a super patriot who has always been ready to lay down his life for Nigeria. Coming from a president and commander-in-chief of the armed forces who could not bring himself to go near Chibok where Boko Haram abducted 230 young women from their      school hostel and stole their future, this has got to be the height of delusion.

    The system collapse Nigeria is experiencing now is an eloquent epitaph to Dr Jonathan’s inept rule. The damage he has inflicted on every aspect of Nigerian life will be with us for a long time. What he is handing to President-elect Muhammadu Buhari is nothing less than a poisoned chalice.