The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • An unwelcome visitor

    An unwelcome visitor

    Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, also known as Phony Tony, and as Tony Bliar, came calling last week in Abuja, one of the few capitals where he can still count on a respectful welcome.  It was his third visit in just a little over four years.

    In February 2010, his hands still wet with the blood of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis liberated from this world and from their relations in a military invasion that he helped gin up  with a raft of lies, Blair was invited – along with fellow war criminals former U.S. president George W. Bush and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice – by one newspaper basking in false affluence to speak at a ceremony in Abuja honouring distinguished Nigerians past and present.

    Blair even got to meet acting President Goodluck Jonathan, as he then was, to discuss “matters  of mutual interest” between Nigeria and Britain, and how he would like that relationship to remain strong.

    He was back nine months later, declaiming with the unctuousness that becomes him so well that the “international community” was nursing a great deal of interest and excitement in Nigeria’s elections scheduled for 2011.

    More to the point of his new career as a money-grubbing influence peddler, he declared, with JP Morgan chief executiveofficer Jamie Damon beside him, that the global financial giant’s decision to upgrade its Nigerian office to a full branch was a demonstration of confidence in Nigeria and in President Jonathan’s effort to transform the economy.

    Shortly after that visit, JPMorgan bagged a huge chunk of Nigeria’s controversial Sovereign Wealth Fund, even as it recorded huge losses resulting from reckless transactions.

    His most recent visit to Abujawas no accident.  It was designed to secure future access in the Buhari dispensation for the major players in international high finance, for which he is a well paid lobbyist.

    It was entirely in character that Blair should have presumed at every stop to speak for the “international community,” though he holds no public office and is in fact a hugely discredited politician who, in a just world, should be in prison serving time for war crimes.

    So unpopular and discredited had he become at the end of his record tenure as prime minster that he could not embark on a farewell tour of Britain, where he was sure to be greeted with shouts of “Liar, Liar” and pelted with tomatoes and eggs. They even re-christened him Bliar. And so, he travelled instead to bid farewell to British troops in Basra, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan.

    Blair’s quest to become president of the European Council ended in humiliation. The British Government withdrew its backing when it became clear that member countries wanted nothing to do with him.  The Middle East for which Blair was designated international mediator has rarely witnessed greater turmoil.

    The last time Blair went to testify before a parliamentary committee looking into how the UK entered the unholy alliance that invaded, occupied and destroyed Iraq, he had to be smuggled into the committee room through a back door, to save him from the wrath of protesters.

    This was not the way the script was supposed to end for the youngest prime minister since 1812, the accomplished politician who rescued Britain from the exhausted Tories, redefined its place in world politics, and led his Labour Party to three successive election victories.  He seemed destined for greatness.

    But hubris and delusion soon set in, and glory turned to ashes.

    The September 11 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States presented him an opportunity to project himself as a statesman of global reckoning.  The United States would not fight alone, he assured Americans.  Britain would stand “shoulder to shoulder” with them as they confronted the terrorist threat.

    From then on Blair made it his business to confect a casus belli, just in case the United States could not come up with a compelling one.  First he published a dossier on what he said was Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-production programme.  It was a “dodgy” document, copied in part from a sophomoric doctoral dissertation that an American university had rejected.

    Next, he put it out that Iraq had sought to buy uranium cake from Niger Republic.  The document detailing the alleged transaction was a transparent forgery.  The minister who purportedly signed on behalf of the Niger Government had left office at least eight years earlier.   It is as if Federal Government documents dated May 2014 were to surface today bearing the signature of Sule Lamido as Nigeria’s foreign minister.

    He also claimed, falsely, that Iraq had developed nuclear weapons that it could assemble and deploy for combat within 45 minutes — the same Iraq that could not shoot down a single plane from the armada that had been patrolling its air space and since the end of the Gulf war and bombing military and non-military assets at will.

    The United States quickly latched on the document as proof that its homeland was imperilled, and that it could not afford to have its skies darkened by a mushroom cloud before striking.

    For his domestic audience, Blair declared that Iraq had developed missiles capable of hitting  British forces in Cyprus. Why Iraq would want to attack British troops in Cyprus he never explained.

    So determined was Blair to take Britain to war that even when Bush offered him a chance to change course, fearing that the British parliament might not share America’s enthusiasm for war, Blair deployed his forensic skills to stay the course, with no consideration for the massive anti-war demonstrations in London and around the world.

    Whenever he prefaces a statement with “to be perfectly honest” or “to be absolutely candid,” which he does very often, you could be sure that he was going to zap you with a falsehood, a barefaced lie.

    Contrived earnestness, evangelical fervor, and the ability to tell a blatant lie with a straight face: That is the quintessence of Tony Blair

    No weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq.  But by the time British forces pulled out, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi had been killed.  Hundreds of thousands more had been displaced, and Iraq lay in ruins.  Hundreds of British soldiers had also been killed – all for a lie.

    Blair says he is not sorry for that lie because others also believed it.  True, Britannia no longer rules the waves, but when did Britain become just another country?

    He compounds his war crimes each time he asserts that removing Saddam from power was the right thing to do.  But at what cost?

    The hundreds of thousands of Iraqis whom Blair’s warmongering removed from this world, and the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis it turned into refugees or otherwise brought to ruin have no place in Blair’s consciousness.

    He condoned or turned a blind eye to torture.  Four years ago, to head off trials that would have embarrassed the authorities, the British Government agreed to pay out millions of pounds to persons tortured by officials in parts of Iraq occupied by British forces.

    No wonder then, that when Blair offered to donate the earnings from his memoir to the families  of British troops killed or wounded in Iraq, they rejected it angrily, calling it “blood money”.

    In a just world Tony Blair would be serving a long jail term — my aversion to capital punishment is total and unconditional, unlike his — for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

    By receiving Blair in Abuja, President-elect Buhari has returned whatever favour he owes for  the photo opportunity Blair accorded him in London earlier this year. Henceforth, the Federal Government and other Nigerian institutions must stop inflicting him on the public

     

    Portions of this piece first appeared in this space on November 23, 2010.  The column was titled “Phony Tony:  The Liar’s progress.”

     

  • Osoba: The veteran politician at bay

    Osoba: The veteran politician at bay

    In my time, I have seen a great deal as observer and gone through a great deal as participant-observer.  But few things have unsettled me as seeing Chief Olusegun Osoba’s picture displayed prominently, following the general elections, in the gallery of “those who failed.”

    There was something so jarring, so incongruous about the characterisation

    Osoba, crackerjack reporter, astute manager of men and resources, media administrator who ran two regional newspapers with roaring success and steered the tottering Daily Times back to its glory days, pace-setting governor of Ogun State for one aborted term and a full term,  a pillar and symbol of the struggle against Sani Abacha’s brutish rule and the evisceration of the choice of the sovereign people of Nigeria, and one of the architects of the realignment that culminated in the formation of the APC, now a government-in-waiting:  How can such a person be characterised as a failure?

    It is true that Osoba served only one term as governor of Ogun State after the return to democratic rule in 1999, losing, in the official account, his re-election bid four years later to Gbenga Daniel.  They said he lost because he was remote, arrogant, and lacked the popular touch.

    I am in a position to say that this was not true, having witnessed him up close interacting with visitors who had gone to his office without an appointment but hoping to see him nevertheless.  It was around Christmas, in 2000, and President Olusegun Obasanjo was being expected on his sprawling farm in Otta for a short vacation.

    Visiting from the United States, I had gone to Otta in the hope of meeting the President and renewing ties.  Security and protocol were so suffocating that I could not even get past the farm gate. So, I headed to Abeokuta, hoping to meet Governor Osoba and pay him my compliments.

    After registering my presence at the reception, I was ushered into a waiting room.  Eighteen visitors had preceded me, all of them wanting to see the governor.  My heart sank.  This was going to be a very long day, surely.

    Some 30 minutes later, his voice wafted into the room, borne by the crisp harmattan wind.  I thought he was going to take the elevator to his executive suite.  Instead, the door handle turned, and into the room stepped the Governor Osoba himself.

    He surveyed the room for a minute or so, and began attending to the assembled visitors, starting with the person seated nearest to the door and proceeding counter-clockwise.

    There was the young man who said a federal agency in Ogun State was hiring and that the governor’s endorsement would enhance his chances.  Osoba endorsed his application on the spot.

    There was the elderly woman, a motor accident victim recently discharged from hospital. Apparently she had sought and received help from the governor, but needed more help still.  Osoba listened solicitously, and directed his personal assistant to attend to her needs.

    There was an official of the National Union of Teachers which was at that time locked in a trade dispute with the Ogun State Government.  From what I could make out, the official had conducted himself in a manner the governor considered contumacious of his office.  He told the official he would not treat with him until he apologised for his contumacy.

    In this manner did Osoba attend to all his visitors who, like me, had no previous appointment.  He invited the three of us he could not attend to on the spot to follow him to his office.

    Where in all this is the arrogance, the aloofness to which they ascribed his 2003 election loss?

    We now know that he did not lose the election; that official result was a cruel travesty, a product of ballot stuffing on a scale almost beyond belief.

    Hounded ceaselessly by Gbenga Daniel who never saw an opponent he did not want to destroy, Osoba went into political hibernation in Lagos, where he busied himself rebuilding the Ogun State ACN and positioning it to return to power in 2007 with Ibikunle Amosun, a former PDP Senator, as Governor.

    The day Osoba returned to Ogun State and his home in Abeokuta has got to be one of the most glorious in his eventful life.   He was met at the Lagos –Ogun boundary by a cavalcade of jubilant party men and women, admirers, and supporters, and escorted to the state capital and his home with song and dance.  Rarely had the ancient city witnessed such a carnival.

    Then, things began to go sour.  Osoba could not get his nominees appointed to the state’s cabinet or given senior positions in the Amosun Administration, I gather.  Though chair of the ACN in Ogun State, his influence was at best slight.  He found himself being pushed closer and closer to the margins.

    As rumours circulated that Osoba was set to dump the ACN because he felt he was not getting the respect he felt was his due, I talked with some friends about putting together a platform for reconciling him with Amosun.

    Before we could launch our effort, Osoba dumped the APC.

    But he did so with his accustomed refinement.  The PDP had been wooing him mainly out of spite for the ACN, and would gladly have paid any price to have him join its ranks.   Instead, Osoba pitched his camp with the little-known Social Democratic Party that had virtually no chance of supplanting the ACN and the PDP, the entrenched political parties in Ogun State.

    The outcome was all too predictable.  The SDP was clobbered in the general elections and now faces an uncertain future.  The ACN that Osoba played a significant role in setting up and nurturing is set to take office at the Centre in some three weeks – without Osoba.  I am sure he has no regrets but sees the outcome as the price of principles.

    In the winner-takes-all paradigm of Nigerian politics, the bell may well be tolling now for one of the most engaging and colourful careers in recent Nigerian politics.

    That would be a pity indeed.  Osoba’s superb managerial skills, his suavity, his excellent social and public relations skills, his perspicacity, his graciousness and his quiet competence, not forgetting his regal bearing, recommend him powerfully for a significant role in General Muhmammadu Buhari’s administration.

    He would make an excellent High Commissioner to the Court of St James’s.

     

    GEJ: Wrong on de Klerk

    Where on earth did Dr Goodluck Jonathan come by the information he dispensed with such solemn authority during worship at the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Abuja last Sunday, namely that the wife of FW de Klerk, South Africa’s last white president, left him because he ended apartheid and surrendered power to the African majority?

    Dr Jonathan intended the remark to make the self-serving point that doing the right thing as De Klerk did, and as he himself had done when he conceded defeat in the presidential election, often carries a heavy price.

    If it is any consolation to Dr Jonathan, Marike and her husband of 39 years separated in 1998 – four years after Nelson Mandela was sworn in as president – when she discovered that he was having an affair.

  • The return of the Imo Formula

    The return of the Imo Formula

    Before those who are too young or were too inattentive to remember rush to call it the “Kogi Formula,” I should warn that there is nothing original about it, being more or less a reprise of the “Imo Formula,” an economic stratagem developed on Nigerian soil, by a Nigerian, for Nigerians, unlike those World Bank/IMF remedies that often proved more harmful than the ailments they were supposed to cure.

    First, some background, going back to the period following the overthrow of the profligate, inept and corrupt administration of President Shehu Shagari which, in four years turned the heady promise of democratic rule and economic prosperity undergirded by a vast inflow of petrodollars into a nightmare, to the point that its sacking was greeted with dancing in the streets.

    The treasury was empty.  Foreign exchange was scarce. Consumer goods were in short supply. To discourage frivolous importation, a regime of import licence was imposed.  The currency was re-designed.  There was no relief in sight for public service employees, especially teachers, who had laboured unpaid for months under the previous dispensation.

    It was a dire situation requiring dire remedies.

    The breakthrough came from Imo – or to place the credit squarely where it belongs – from Dr Kalu Idika Kalu, the state’s cerebral commissioner for finance, and before then a World Bank economist credited with helping South Korea achieve the turnaround that catapulted it to the ranks of the G17 Nations.

    It is not entirely clear why they call it the Imo Formula rather than the Kalu Formula.  It may have something to do with Dr Kalu’s trademark self-effacement.  I recall that he was reportedly distressed when a well-known newspaper columnist, writing under the pseudonym Bamako Jaji, bestowed the term “Kalunomics” on the theoretical underpinnings of the loan agreement that Kalu would later negotiate with the IMF as Federal Minister of Finance.

    Keep his person out of it.  Let his prescriptions stand or fall by their merit. That, according those who know him well, is Dr Kalu’s philosophy of public service.  There is much to be said for that way of carrying on in a country where everyone who imagines himself or herself a person of consequence wants to hog the limelight.

    To return to the seminal breakthrough that was the Imo Formula:

    Freeze allowances and bonuses for public employees.  From the proceeds, pay teachers their basic salaries while the state looked for ways of widening its financial base.  In due course, all civil servants and teachers would have some money to take home at the end of the month.  Their morale would rise, as would their productivity.  These gains would trickle down and check the rising tide of poverty.

    In the popular rendering, however, this elegant, heuristic and parsimonious theory was twisted into something far more dreadful.  According to this popular version, fixed salaries had been abolished.  At the end of each month, the authorities in Imo would determine just how much was available for salaries.  The amount would then be paid out pro rata.

    It was not the salary you had grown used to, but it was far better than no salary.  That, at any rate, was the popular perception of the Imo Formula. They say it worked wonders.

    Perhaps that is why, facing the kind of difficulties Imo faced in 1984/85, Kogi State last week resurrected the Imo Formula, at least in substance, if not in form.

    At first blush, the Kogi version has something that the Imo original lacked:  Specificity. To put the mater positively, unlike other commentators who are forever dwelling on the negative, public service employees who have received no salaries for several months can now expect to smile home with 60 percent of their statutory pay.

    Yes, it is a 40 percent pay cut all right, but why dwell on the negative?  Why not emphasise the 60 percent of statutory pay that will now be available where previously nothing was guaranteed?

    Why can’t some people be positive for once?

    These same negative people have been asking whether the Kogi authorities will now urge suppliers of goods and services to cut prices by 40 percent, so that the new pay will fetch the same basket of goods and services that the old pay used to bring in.  Invoking the dubious proposition that “we all buy from the same market,” they say the arrangement is inequitable.

    Do we really buy from the same market?  What would they say if circumstances compelled the authorities to cut take-home pay to 50 or even 40 percent of statutory salary, as they well might?

    Equitable or not, this arrangement may well be the wave of the future as the newly-elected governments find on taking charge that they had been bequeathed empty treasuries that cannot be restored to solvency unless oil prices rebound dramatically or other resources that can yield quick cash on a sustainable basis are discovered.

    Unlike one departing governor, the new people will certainly not be able to hire by the dozen and for each ministry, department or agency, chief advisers, deputy chief advisers, principal advisers, deputy principal advisers, senior advisers, deputy senior advisers and assistant deputy senior advisers, not forgetting chief deputy assistant advisers, principal deputy assistant advisers, senior deputy assistant advisers, and so on and so forth.

    But governing in a time of economic adversity may well bring out the best in them. Has it not been said that it is far easier to manage scarcity than superfluity?  Up to a point, there is some truth to that.

    The good news is that, with oil prices on the uptick and President-elect Muhammadu Buhari set to check the obscene profligacy that has characterised government spending for nearly two decades and root out stealing in the public sector on a scale so vast that one must wonder why the economy has not collapsed completely, Nigeria is unlikely to have recourse to the Sukarno Formula.

    Dr Ahmed Sukarno was the swinging, charismatic president of Indonesia, and a founding father of the Non-Aligned Movement.  No one ever accused him of not dreaming great dreams or of lacking vision.  The trouble was that his country did not have the matching resources or the economic management skills that would have catapulted Indonesia to a major actor in world politics.

    His communist sympathies alienated him from the West.  The Soviet Union admired him but did not back its sympathies with hard cash or meaningful support.

    As Indonesia’s economy careened toward a terminal collapse, Sukarno tried every standard remedy in the pharmacopoeia of the economists, but nothing worked.

    Then he hit upon an ingenious solution.  He would appoint as a cabinet minister any Indonesian who truly believed that he could solve the country’s economic problems.  However, if the person did not deliver the expected results within a year, he or she would be executed by firing squad.

    There were no takers.

    I have often wondered how such a gambit would have played out in Nigeria.

    There would have been a surfeit of volunteers.  Within the first six months, the minister would  have evacuated his entire family from Nigeria.  In the ninth month, he would arrange a foreign trip ostensibly to seal a deal crucial to his mission’s success.

    It would be a one-way trip.

     

     

    Correction

    Dr Bojuwade is alive and well

    In last week’s column I referred to Dr Dokun Bojuwade, former Special Assistant to Uche Chukwumerije in the Ministry of Information, as “since deceased.”

    I regret this error and hereby offer again my remorseful apologies for the distress the publication must have caused Dr Bojuwade and his loved ones.

     

  • Remembering Uche Chukwumerije

    Remembering Uche Chukwumerije

    Back in 1986, I served with Uche Chukwumerije and about a dozen other senior media  figures on the Publicity Advisory Committee for the National Population Census, at the instance of Tola Adeniyi, the commissioner for public affairs and communications at the National Population Commission.

    After general introductions at the Committee’s inauguration, Chukwumerije had walked  up to me and told me how much he admired my weekly column for The Guardian, and how he looked forward to each installment. I told him how I had treasured his pan-African newsmagazine Afriscope, and how I had served as its University of Lagos stringer and had been generously compensated for my effort.

    That encounter was the beginning of what went beyond mere acquaintanceship, though it would be claiming too much to call it a friendship.

    Shortly after he was named Secretary for Information in the Transitional Council, he came to my office at Rutam House one late afternoon, unannounced.  Preliminaries over, he told me he had come to seek my help and that of “my boys” in carrying out his duties as Secretary for Information.

    “Not so fast, Uche,” I said.  “You didn’t consult me before taking the job, and now you are asking me to help you make a success of it.  Tell me: Why did you accept the job?”

    Chukwumerije said he had agonised over the offer and had consulted with his comrades in the progressive community – he named the activist Baba Omojola specifically – and they had all advised him to accept the offer because if he did not, it might go to someone who could not bring to the office the ideas and ideals for which Chukwumerije stood.   Besides, they had told him that the best way to change the system was from within.

    “What if, on taking office, you find that the government is pursuing an agenda different from the one you had been appointed to execute?” I asked.

    “No way,” Chukwumerije said.   He had raised that very question with Babangida, and had made it abundantly clear that he would resign if he found that the government was pursuing a hidden agenda, he said.   Babangida had in turn assured him that he harboured no hidden agenda, and was resolutely committed to handing over to a democratically elected government on August 27, 1993.

    As proof of his earnestness, Chukwumerije said, Babangida had pulled out a drawer from his desk and reached for a copy of the Quran to swear by, but could find none.

    “How very convenient,” I said.  “You believe him?”

    “C’mon, Tunji, you are too far gone in your cynicism.  If you don’t believe him, you should at least believe me.”

    He assured me, as he said he had assured Babangida, that he would resign if he found that he was being used to pursue a scheme he had not bargained for.

    “That’s good enough for me, Uche.  What do you want of me?”

    “Call me to order, rebuke me publicly whenever you feel that I am straying from the ideals we share,” he said.

    “I will do better than that,” I told him. “I will remonstrate with you privately.  I will not go public unless you make private discussion impossible.”

    We sealed the deal with a handshake.  We rarely met thereafter, but kept in touch through his special assistant, Dr Dokun Bojuwade, since deceased.

    The Transitional Council, comprising many eminent Nigerians from a class and an era that military president Ibrahim Babangida had spent the previous eight years excoriating, was charged with supervising the last nine months of his political transition programme that had lost momentum and credibility.  He had manipulated the programme so often and in so many ways that it seemed to have become an end in itself, a journey to nowhere.

    Even as the programme muddled its way towards the June 1993 presidential election that was billed as its culmination, proxy groups established and financed by the military regime were staging rallies and employing every platform to urge Babangida to continue in office.  And Babangida himself was lending them every encouragement.

    It was in the context of this pervasive uncertainty in the weeks leading to the presidential election that I asked Bojuwade to tell Chukwumerije that I needed to see him, persuaded that he would be in a position to help resolve my doubts.

    I met him at his official residence in Ikoyi, Lagos, in the afternoon of Friday, June 4, 1993, seven days to the presidential election.  Dispensing with the usual preliminaries, I asked Chukwumerije pointedly whether the election would hold.

    He said he could not answer categorically, but that the indications were that there would be no election.  He said he was flying to Abuja the next day, Saturday, to return to Lagos the following Tuesday.  If I looked him up the day after, he would be in a position to tell me categorically whether the election would hold or not.

    Chukwumerije did not return to Lagos that Tuesday, and I never saw him again. That very day, the Abuja High Court, Justice Bassey Ikpeme presiding, ordered NEC Chairman Humphrey Nwosu and the Federal Government to appear the following day, June 8, to show why the presidential election scheduled for June 12 should hold.

    Two days later, on June 10, in the dead of night, Justice Ikpeme issued an injunction blocking the election. But this was not a blanket ban, for she added that NEC was free to ignore her order since, as the law stood, the court lacked jurisdiction in the matter.

    Against all odds, the election took place.  When it seemed clear that Bashorun MKO Abiola of the Social Democratic Party was headed for a landslide victory, Babangida hid behind a battery of suborned judges and revanchist shysters to annul it.

    Chukwumerije was not a party to the annulment.  He first learned of it, I gather, from a reporter who sought his reaction to it.  He had dismissed the question as an unseemly joke, until the reporter assured that he was in earnest.

    But whether he was party to it or not, I had expected Chukwumerije to resign from the Transitional Council, based on the discussions we had held some six months earlier.

    Not only did he not resign, he championed the annulment with messianic zeal, the kind of   fervor with which he had promoted the Biafran cause to stunning success and acclaim.  With each passing day, he came across more and more like a Stalinist, bearing little resemblance to the engaging and amiable Marxist Comrade gifted with a rich, sometimes deprecating sense of humour, penetrating insights, a dialectical imagination, and a capacity for friendship across Nigeria’s treacherous cleavages.

    He dredged up footage on the civil disturbances of the First Republic and on the Nigerian civil war to inflict on the public a psychosis of fear.

    Listening to broadcasts on Radio Nigeria or watching news and current affairs programmes

    of the Nigeria Television Authority then, you thought you had been transported back in time  to Albania and Radio Tirana in the days of Enver Hoxa.

    Here, to cite just one example, is the doctrine Chukwumerije enunciated in a meeting with proprietors, no doubt as a warning to the so-called Lagos-Ibadan axis, the critical posture of which he resented passionately:  “Publication that subverts the national interest (as defined by the regime) “removes the publisher from the realm of proprietary rights and places him in the terrain of treason”.

    In another context, he charged that some sections of the press were being suborned “to incite communal mistrust” and hinted that tough new measures were afoot to replace the extant laws that did not provide “adequate regulatory safeguards.”  The measures would surface later as Decree 43, a throwback to Tudor’s England.

    But that dark era does not and cannot define Uche Chukwumerije, who died last week, aged 75.  Nor can it define his place in Nigeria’s history. It was but an episode in an otherwise productive and inspiring life of public service.   Babangida’s silence at his passing is telling indeed, but it reflects more on the self-styled “evil genius” than on his former cabinet minister who had served him so dutifully.

    Chukwumerije gave Nigeria its first intellectually oriented pan-African newsmagazine.  He was a committed socialist activist, eloquent advocate for the downtrodden, and as a member of the Senate and chair of its Education Committee, a first-rate legislator.

     

    Hail and farewell.

     

    I drew liberally on my book, Diary of a Debacle, for this column.

  • The perils of columnism

    The perils of columnism

    If you went strictly by what the late William Safire of The New York Times once said about writing a newspaper column, you might think that it is a perilous undertaking only in a physical sense.

    It is like standing under windmill with your head dangerously close to its rotating blades, he wrote.  Relieved that you had ducked a blade, you looked up only to find another one coming down.

    Safire exaggerates, of course, but the analogy is on target.  You bask in the excitement of seeing your journalistic labour in print one day and while you are still digesting the reactions pro and contra, another deadline looms large.  So it is from one column to the next, and the next.

    As Frank Rich, another master of the form has pointed out, the relentless production of a newspaper column can push you to express stronger opinions than you actually have, or contrived opinions you may not care deeply about, or run roughshod over nuance to reach an unambiguous conclusion.  And if you stay long enough, Rich adds, you run the risk of turning bland or shrill.

    And of course, there are in this age of the instant, unexamined response, those who are forever standing by not merely to tell you that you are wrong, but that what you had written could only had issued from a mind that is at once diseased, demented and disoriented.

    It has been said of President Goodluck Jonathan that he maintained at the public expense an army of such cavillers to harass and excoriate commentators who were not particularly enamoured of his so-called transformative agenda.

    This past weekend was the grim anniversary of one of the darkest chapters in Nigeria’s history: Boko Haram’s abduction of some 250 female students from their school hostel in Chibok, in Borno State, and their forcible march to the bowels of Sambisa Forest and thereafter to places unknown.

    Perhaps still chafing from his electoral loss, Dr Jonathan allowed the occasion to pass without comment.  Not so President-elect Muhammadu Buhari, and the community of the grieving.

    What would Dr Jonathan have said anyway, given that his dilatoriness and his wife’s witch hunt of innocent officials had pre-empted hot pursuit and rescue?

    Still, his rented army of cavillers would have savaged those who had the presence of mind and the humane concern to draw attention to this festering sore on the nation’s conscience.

    But I digress.

    When you deliver yourself obliquely as this columnist frequently does, there is, on the one hand, the danger that some will see through the subterfuge and desire to get even, and on the other hand, the twin danger that some will not get it and will wonder aloud why a person so lacking in knowledge and insight should have been allowed to inflict his imbecilities on the public.

    Of those two groups, the first is the one to be feared.  For there is no knowing how far they might go to settle scores.

    In my Rutam House years, whenever someone accosts me at a gathering and asks, “So you are the Olatunji Dare?” I mentally reconnoitre the setting for the nearest exit, measure the distance separating us and figure out in nanoseconds how I would block, sidestep, deflect or otherwise obstruct a punch to the nose or a kick to the groin.

    It never came to that.  But even today, I still wonder what some people might do if they felt sorely aggrieved over my writing.  Fortunately, for the time being at least, I am safely beyond their reach.

    Pardon the conceit, but journalists are also writers.  Wittingly or unwittingly, they teach; they teach ways of expressing self, of viewing and experiencing the world.  They teach attitudes and habits.

    What they write has consequences.

    This thought struck me with particular force the day I received a text message from a young man complimenting me on my column that he had just read, and informing me without fuss that he always took his opinions from the column.  I had always sensed that writing a column carries some responsibility, but not on that scale

    What if the columnist was wrong?

    A columnist can indeed be wrong for any number of reasons – prejudice, arrogance, ambition, insufficient knowledge, carelessness, disingenuousness, venality, muddy-mindedness, and sheer charlatanism.  If  I was wrong – and it is guaranteed that I will be wrong from time to time and from issue to issue —  I would have misled the young  man and doubtless others who looked up to me for leadership and guidance on public issues even if the error resulted from the purest of motives.

    That is no easy burden.

    These reflections flow from the media commentary on the recent general elections, in which the leading columnists lined up subtly or militantly in support of the status quo or change.  Here, as on the really important issues, there was no neutral ground.  To be “neutral” is to harbor no objection to the status quo, and hence to endorse it implicitly, if not explicitly.

    Of all the columns on the elections, easily the least nuanced was that of Dr Femi Aribisala, the Oxford-educated international affairs expert -turned pastor and public affairs commentator.

    From the one pulpit, he subjected the Bible to the kind of criticism that peer reviewers for the most selective journals reserve for sloppy submissions.  From the other, he belted out the most slanderous invective week after week on Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and General Muhammadu Buhari, while heaping the most exorbitant praise on Goodluck Jonathan —the best president Nigeria ever had, far and away the most accomplished, the most cerebral.

    The general election would witness Tinubu’s demystification in Lagos State, and would lead ultimately to his disgrace and political death.   By naming General Muhammadu Buhari its presidential candidate, the APC had already lost the election.  Buhari was not in the least qualified for the position, and would never be president.

    Aribisala’s strictures on Tinubu and Buhari and everything they stand for were so hate-filled that they raise serious questions about his urbane antecedents and his claims to being a priest.

    In this, he bears out George Orwell’s remark that the worst advertisement for Christianity is  to be found in some of its adherents

    All scriptures teach that hatred even of the objectively hateful is subversive of that charity on which the just society must ultimately be founded.  When the hatred is deep, ingrained, reflexive and unremitting, when it impairs reason and distorts judgment, you have to wonder what has happened to Aribisala, not too long ago a person of much charm and exceptional promise.

    The elections have come and gone. Virtually every prediction he made with the certainty of an oracle failed.  Tinubu has emerged as the most influential and most accomplished figure on the Nigerian political scene; General Buhari is set to take office as President of the Republic

    In Lagos, the APC won the gubernatorial election and an absolute majority in the State Assembly.  It won comfortable majorities in the two houses of the National Assembly, and no fewer than 19 state governors won election on its platform.

    But Aribisala has not summoned the courage or humility to fess up to his monumental errors and apologise to the reading public.

    It is not simply that he was wrong:  He was irresponsibly wrong.  He betrayed the thousands who looked up to him for guidance and orientation.

    For a columnist, there is no greater sin.

  • This defining moment

    This defining moment

    Far from confirming the claim of the incurably deluded spokesperson for Goodluck Jonathan’s doomed re-election campaign that his principal had conceded defeat out of patriotism rather than because he lost irredeemably, last weekend’s gubernatorial and state assembly elections show dramatically just how diminished, how washed-up the “biggest political party in Africa” has become.

    One of its chieftains, who would later stand trial for criminal embezzlement (he was cleared by the courts) had declared that the PDP would rule Nigeria for 60 years “in the first instance.”

    More recently, as she barged from one campaign stop to another, hurling coarse abuse at her husband’s opponents and inciting rented crowds to stone anyone demanding a change from   the status quo, Dr Jonathan’s wife had stamped her ample personal authority on continuity:  60  years of PDP power, nothing less.

    In the event, the PDP’s reign, which has drawn far more tears than cheers, is mercifully set to expire after just 16 years.

    An obituary notice to that effect, a spoof on the standard Nigerian fare, has been doing the rounds. With due acknowledgement to its anonymous author and high praise for his or her creativity, I quote the epitaph in part:

    “With gratitude to God and total submission to the will of the Nigerian Electorate,  we announce the death of our party, grand party and great-grand party, PDP, on March 30, 2015, after a prolonged illness from corruption, impunity, arrogance, bomb blasts, etc.

    “Funeral services will be held on May 29, 2015, at Eagle Square, Abuja, at 10 a.m”

    To be sure, the reports of the PDP’s death are somewhat exaggerated.   However, persuaded that it has served its time and now faces a bleak future, many of its hardiest denizens are bailing out as if it were a ship on which an outbreak of Ebola fever has just been confirmed.  The PDP, they have now realised, with their own Iyiola Omisore, is nothing without the Presidency.

    Sic transit gloria.

    As things stand now, the APC has, in addition to winning the Presidency, racked up comfortable majorities in both houses of the National Assembly, and all the principal officers of that body will come from its ranks.  It also has some 20 gubernatorial chairs and the same number of state assemblies under its control.

    Not bad for an opposition party that Dr Jonathan’s wife derided endlessly as an “expired drug”’ that has undergone so many name-changes that it might yet call itself “Ebola” — a party against which her husband who was only last week being hailed as a statesman for merely doing the decent thing, re-launched a vile, divisive, money-drenched campaign in a desperate but ultimately futile bid to supplant in Lagos, its stronghold.

    Oba Rilwan Akiolu’s bellicose warning to the Igbo to vote for the APC gubernatorial candidate Akinwunmi Ambode or face the consequences may well have been his answer to Dr Jonathan’s dishonourable campaign. But that is no justification. Whatever happened to noblesse oblige?

    Fears that Nigeria may become a one-party state, what with the rate at which members of the PDP are abandoning ship for the victorious APC bring to memory the aftermath of the 1983 general elections during which the NPN, inebriated with its stolen victories across Nigeria, declared that all other political parties had become “irrelevant.”   Three months later, it was swept into oblivion by the military.

    The APC must not for a moment indulge in such hubris.  Nothing stops the PDP from re-building itself into a strong and credible opposition party the way a decimated Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) under the dynamic and committed leadership of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu had done before the merger that produced the APC

    For one thing, even in those geopolitical zones where it is weakest, the PDP still has some diehard supporters, witness its entrenchment in the South East and South South where the plucky Rochas Okorocha and the much-persecuted but resolute Chibuike Amaechi are the last men standing, its tenacious grip in Ondo, its close run in Lagos, and its comprehensive sweep in all the elections held in Ekiti in the past two weeks.

    At his inauguration last July, Ekiti Governor Ayodele Fayose had in a speech that sounded as if it was an entry in the diary of a mad man, had vowed to drive the ACN not just out of Ekiti but out of Yoruba land and Nigeria.

    A delusion, to be sure; but he seems to have succeeded in driving it out of Ekiti.

    In the June 2014 election that returned Fayose to power after a previous outing remembered mainly for high scandal, arbitrariness, brazen corruption and sophomoric stunts, he won a majority in every local government to defeat the incumbent, Dr Kayode Fayemi.

    We now know, through damning documentary evidence produced by a competent witness, that the victory was procured, not by the so-called stomach infrastructure strategy, but by good old-fashioned skullduggery.

    But the formula Fayose employed to deliver Ekiti to Jonathan in the presidential race, secure the election of three senators, six members of the House of Representatives and 26 members of  the state assembly, all of whom he had personally handpicked, without challenge  – how Fayose constituted Ekiti into a one-party state remains one the best-kept secrets of Nigerian politics.

    Household per household, Ekiti is reputed to have the largest number of holders of advanced degrees not just in Nigeria but in all of Africa, and surely ranks high in the world league for that distinction, if it does not sit at the very top.

    That a delinquent who parades his mother’s infirmity of the most intimate kind in the market square to score a cheap political point can hold them in thrall, pervert all they hold dear and block every recourse to justice and redress, is an affront and a standing rebuke to the learned and highly accomplished people of Ekiti, and the elders who won’t call him to order.

    History will show that Fayose could not have done it without Dr Jonathan’s close collaboration or active connivance.  But how will the Ekiti people explain this tragic turn in their history to their progeny?

    To return to what lies ahead, at this defining moment:  The task before the APC now is to transform a loose coalition into a focused governing party and translate slogan into actuality.  It must deliver change – change that Nigerians can feel and see in their living conditions and in the lives of their children.

    Not change that will occur in a nebulous future, like regular power supply, but change with an immediate impact.

    It cannot be business as usual.  Governance cannot be a jobs-for-the boys scheme.  In this data-driven age, it cannot be an encounter of the unprepared with the unforeseen.

    Public expectations are high.  There is so much do, so much to fix.

    During World War II, one American military unit had this as its motto:  “The difficult task we do right away; the impossible takes a little longer.”

    That is the spirit that should animate the APC as it prepares to take power and guide it throughout its rule.

    This must not be another false dawn.

  • Verdict 2015: The week after

    Verdict 2015: The week after

    One of the most improbable transformations wrought by President Goodluck Jonathan’s Transformative Agenda centered on Dr Jonathan himself and occurred in the twilight of   his tenure.

    I have in mind Dr Jonathan’s brief telephone call to the APC candidate, General Muhammadu Buhari, at a tension-soaked moment in the final stages of the collation of the election returns to concede defeat and to invite him to a meeting to kick-start the transition.

    Nothing had prepared the public for it.

    A PDP stalwart, Jonathan confidant, proxy, and former cabinet minister, Godsday Orubebe,   had barely an hour earlier held up proceedings at the collation centre, in a show of petulant contumacy seen around the world,  just when all the indications were that Dr Jonathan was going down to certain defeat.

    Rather ominously, Orubebe was assisted in this desperate enterprise by retired Colonel Tunde Bello-Fadile, a director in the office of the National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki.  Whether Bello-Fadile was there representing national security interests or as an attorney for the PDP, his presence was dramatic illustration of how thin the line separating the security of the state from the electoral fortunes of the PDP had become under Dr Jonathan’s administration.

    Ebullient as ever, Femi Fani-Kayode, the Jonathan campaign’s publicity chief, was declaring boldly how his private set of facts indicated that his principal had won outright in 23 states and out-polled Buhari by no fewer than 3 million votes.

    Not in the least daunted by the disaster unfolding before them—or more likely alarmed by it– other      operatives of the Jonathan Campaign, citing unspecified violations, demanded not a review but outright cancellation of the poll’s results in seven states.

    Through all this, the word was that Dr Jonathan was confident he would win, if he had not already done so.  Among the PDP faithful, the belief that they had carried the day was bolstered by an announcement that Musiliu Obanikoro had congratulated Dr Jonathan on his emphatic election victory.

    Obanikoro, who had lost his bid for the PDP gubernatorial ticket in Lagos, had recently been named junior minister in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, by way of compensation.  His motive was dubious and self-serving.

    But if his example caught on and just a few dollarised traditional rulers were further dollarised to embark on a pilgrimage of solidarity to Aso Rock to pledge their unflinching loyalty to the Jonathan administration and its laudable, unprecedented, and far-sighted Transformative Agenda, the trickle might soon turn into a cascade, and it would be “June 12” all over again.

    A cascade was in fact rendered all the more probable by reports of raging discord in many a traditional ruler’s domain.  The paramount ruler, who had been given a sack stuffed with U.S. dollars in the presence of the royal court, carried on for days as if nothing had happened, until the lesser royals were constrained to ask ever so delicately:  Kábíyésì, tíbí nkó?

    Loose translation:  Your majesty, what became of that package?

    Whereupon Kábíyésì, feigning innocent forgetfulness, retreated into his boudoir and emerged some ten minutes later with seven bulging, sealed envelopes, one for each lesser royal.. The sheer heft of the envelopes sent not a few of them into rapturous reverie:  Just imagine how many young brides they could add to the royal harem, and how many new cars they could buy in the Naira economy.

    And they were about to render grateful obeisance to Kábíyésì when a yelp shattered the solemnity of the moment.  It had issued from one of the lesser royals as he crashed to the floor from his chair.  A heart attack, perhaps, occasioned by the sudden wealth he had just come into?

    He had opened the package and found that it was stuffed N200 bills.

    His experience could well set off a pilgrimage to Aso Rock by traditional rulers in search of dollar compensation.

    But I digress.

    Nothing, as I was saying, nothing had indicated that Dr Jonathan would concede.  Everything that had gone before suggested powerfully that he would hang in there and hang tough, doing or condoning anything that could secure political advantage.

    Had he not waged or condoned the vilest and most divisive electioneering campaign in Nigeria’s history, setting Christians against Muslims, soldiers and the police against civilians, and some nationalities against others?   Had his wife not supported him all the way, winning for him and his cause at every campaign stop a growing throng of implacable opponents by her habitual resort to coarse abuse, incitement and conduct most unbecoming?

    The record does not show that Dr Jonathan remonstrated with her or his aides to temper their incendiary language and provocative utterances.

    It was therefore most unlikely that he would concede under any circumstance.  Even if he was minded to, the cabal of which he was a prisoner would have none of it.  The PDP, as one of its leading lights Iyiola Omisore was reported to have said at one of the sessions where the strategy for rigging the last gubernatorial election in Ekiti was perfected, “The PDP is nothing without the Presidency.”

    But to everyone’s surprise, and to the discomfiture of the cabal aforementioned, he conceded.

    It has been said that the concession was literally wrung from him by retired General Abdulsalami Abubakar, acting at the behest of a consortium of African leaders and the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States.

    Whether Dr Jonathan made it voluntarily or it was wrung from him, history will record that the concession pulled Nigeria back from a looming abyss.  And in the popular consciousness, that singular act transformed him to a statesman of the first rank, nonpareil patriot, and one of the finest and noblest persons of this age.

    Considering the desperation, the divisiveness and the pusillanimity with which he conducted his campaign, and indeed how he has governed Nigeria in the past six years, the praise is in my opinion overwrought.  But it would be churlish to deny that, at the crucial moment, he bowed graciously to the popular will.

    He could have refused to concede, believing with his aides that a formula could still be found that would enable him hold on to power.  He could have decided that, if he must go down, he would   take with him the boat and the crew and the passengers. Between these two options he could have pursued any number of alternatives.

    But none of them would have given Nigeria the new sense of purpose, the return of optimism and the possibility of renewal that now perfuse the land. If he ends his tenure on this note, it will be said of him, paraphrasing the Bard, that nothing became him in office like the manner of his leaving it.

    Meanwhile, I gather that Omisore’s perceptive remark that the “the PDP is nothing without the Presidency” is set to become the ideology of its most desperate faction, with Omisore himself set to lead by personal example.

  • Waiting for Verdict 2015

    Waiting for Verdict 2015

    Unless you belong in the group of the expatriate Nigerian here who told me matter-of-factly the other day that Nigeria was “no longer relevant” to his life, monitoring the returns from last Saturday’s presidential and presidential and House of Representatives election was almost as anxiety-filled as the experience of any candidate engaging in the same activity.

    It was like waiting – more likely sitting on the edge of your chair in the family area of a hospital  or pacing up and down or feigning to be reading some recondite material — waiting for the doctor to emerge with news that the surgery or delivery was a complete success.

    To be sure, you had not sold off landed property nor borrowed money from the bank or from the neighbourhood loan shark  and invested it in a political race in the expectation that winning would enable you pay off your indebtedness in just your first year in office and then live happily ever after.  There was no fear that if the gamble failed, you might be ruined forever.

    Still, as you waited for the election returns to trickle in, you were almost as tense, as frazzled, and as restless as those who had staked their all in it, hoping for a particular outcome.

    Will it be a resounding vote for more of the same, for continuity?   That was essentially what the Jonathan camp was offering. But it never used that term, for obvious reasons.  If it did, well might the person being importuned ask:  Continuity of what?

    Even the most fork-tongued operative in its ranks will be flummoxed by the question.  Continuity of drift, dilatoriness, making peace with corruption, insecurity?  Continuity of delusion of grandeur and parade of false affluence, of vacuous claims of achievement, of tinkering around the edges of fundamental issues?

    Continuity of what?

    Far better to speak of transformation, or of a Transformative Agenda.  Even here, it is the lives of the agents and their cronies that have been transformed above all else.

    But you do not immediately run into a head wind when you wave the banner of Transformation.  You can at least point to the patched-up railways, as a result of which parents would no longer have to take their children all the way to England just to see what a rain looks like, as Herself the Dame of the Rock, Patience Faka Jonathan, was obliged to do several years ago.

    And very soon, when all state capitals will have been linked by rail, no child will have to do anything more stressful than just looking out of the window of his home or school room to see a sleek bullet train streaking past

    You can also point to the refurbished airports where the toilets actually flush, reel off figure after figure attesting to the superabundance in food production, the great culinary breakthrough in making bread from cassava flour, and the award of contracts for re-building the school from which the Chibok 219 were abducted and the privatised power plants what will in several years render generating sets as archaic as ceramic oil-and-wick lamp.

    You might create the illusion of transformation and even succeed in selling it as the real thing to some people, not all of them gullible.  So why talk about continuity and give the game away?

    In the epochal contest, would the loud, vibrant and insistent chorus of Change drown out the desperate and increasingly weary riff for transformation, which is nothing but more of the same by another name? A catchy term, Change; seductive even, but what does it really mean at bottom?  What will it consist in?

    Those who came up with the term have had a far easier job of explaining it than have those who have been hiding behind Transformation to peddle Continuity as Nigeria’s best hope.

    Arresting the drift, putting a dent on the pervasive corruption – beg your pardon, stealing; restoring faith in the institutions of governance, and hope in the present and in the future; putting an end to business as usual: these would be indications of the will to change, if not of actual change.

    So, would the day go to the usually recumbent incumbent who, following the postponement of Election Day by six weeks, finally roused himself to action when he saw defeat staring him in the face and launched a marathon sprint with the energy few knew he possessed, and a desperation that few thought he could muster?

    Or would it go to the lean, ascetic, angular challenger who, in a curious reversal of roles, stayed above the fray with dignified calm even as the other side suborned the instruments under and even outside its jurisdiction to assail his character and his integrity and his person and his principal associates in an orgy of demonisation that went well over the top, even by Nigeria’s exorbitant standards?

    I was mulling over these and other concerns when around midday here – early evening Nigerian time –I got a phone call, literally from the ringside.  Another debacle was in the making, the caller said.

    Stunned by the tide that seemed set to sweep them away, top officials of the governing party are frantically scrambling for a formula by which they can have the presidential election declared inconclusive, thus paving the way for their favourite deus ex machina, an Interim Government.They are pivoting, he added, on the problems that had come up with the use of Electronic Card Reader, and on new or old re-worked charges that INEC Chair Attahiru Jega was irredeemably compromised by his secret dealings with the Opposition.

    For clarity, I turned once again, as I usually do at moments like this, to one of the wisest and most knowledgeable persons in this clime.  His response was at once calming and alarming. GEJ is sinking.  The important thing is to make sure he doesn’t take the boat and the crew and the passengers with him.

    At this writing Monday evening Nigerian time, fears that the election results will be doctored have not subsided but have in fact moved the British and American authorities to issue strong warnings against recourse to such shabby tactics this time around.  The fears are grounded, at least in part, on Femi Fani-Kayode’s claim to possession of private data indicating that the PDP is well in the lead.

    From the official and unofficial but reliable figures I have seen, the indications are that General Muhammadu Buhari appears to be cruising unstoppably to a historic victory.

    But no matter how the election turns out eventually, it is already a new day in Nigerian politics.

    Foremost among the architects of this improbable conjuncture would have to be the tenacious Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, who took the leading part in forging the strategic political re-alignment that has created this new day and new era in Nigerian politics.

    He could not have wished for a greater present on his 63rd birthday.

    Since emerging APC candidate, General Buhari has at every point carried on like a president-in-waiting, a picture of regal imperturbability even when they painted him ceaselessly as the devil incarnate.  His running mate, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, evolved seamlessly from academic and technocrat to rousing and engaging political figure.

    Chief John Odigie-Oyegun’s steadying hands kept the APC in good temper, and as a party with a different way of doing business.  Not for him the bluster and the boisterousness of Tom Ikimi who fortunately left the party in a huff when he lost his chairmanship bid.

    Even under grave provocation, INEC chair Attahiru Jega displayed calm resolution, a picture of grace under extreme pressure.

    It was as if the more discriminating section of the attentive audience, for whom enough was already too much, took a collective resolve to transform itself into bus-conductors and to demand in one united voice:  Change.

    No matter the outcome of the election, its voice can never be ignored again.

  • The home stretch, finally?

    The home stretch, finally?

    By the time we meet again on this page next Tuesday, the presidential election – dare we hope?–would have been won or lost

    The thrill of victory will be ringing harmoniously in one camp and across its political base, and the agony of defeat will perfuse the other camp and its base. In one camp there will be rejoicing and in the other mourning; in the one, celebration and in the other, lamentation and recrimination.

    A great deal of re-positioning, to borrow the locution careerists so readily employ to justify their fecklessness – a scramble, the like of which Nigeria has never seen, will be well under way, with elements of the losing party denouncing it with the same or even greater fervor than that with which they had supported it and defecting en masse to the winning party, which they will hasten to canonize as the only one that can “move the country forward.”

    Contemplating this latter scenario, a leading expatriate Nigerian academic whose insights and judgment I respect tells me he is substantially sure that, if the APC wins, the foul-mouthed, equal-opportunity slanderer, Femi Fani-Kayode, will dump the PDP without hesitation and without regret, and begin singing the praises of the new people with even greater fervor than he had employed as media director of the Goodluck Jonathan campaign in skewering them.

    All this is of course assuming what cannot be assumed even at this point, namely, that the election will actually take place as scheduled.

    Leading personalities across the political divide are saying they cannot vouch that an election will actually take place on March 28.  The Jonathan administration, I gather, is still shopping around for a court judge who would consider a multi-billion Naira reward worth the risk of declaring General Muhammadu Buhari ineligible for the race.  It is also shopping around, by the way, for a judge who will, for very valuable consideration, prohibit the use of electronic card readers during the election.

    The national security apparatus, Dr Jonathan’s confederates in administering Nigeria as a police state, may yet come up with another excuse to warrant yet another postponement.  Don’t forget that they had requested that the poll be pushed forward by six weeks in the first instance to allow them crush Boko Haram.

    We are still in that first instance.  And with vast tracts of Nigerian territory yet to be recaptured from the marauding insurgents, who says that there cannot be a second instance, or a third?

    Nor can it be assumed, despite Dr Jonathan’s stout denial, that the “Interim Government” option is no longer under active consideration.  The former military president and self-proclaimed “evil genius,” General Ibrahim Babangida, who was reportedly awarded the contract for the scheme, may swear by anything he holds dear, but nobody will believe him.  He lacks a crucial attribute that his unexplained billions cannot buy:  credibility.

    He has been peddling the scheme and may yet find a buyer.

    I hope they are factoring Chief Ernest Shonekan into the scheme.  As the only Nigerian who has the experience of actually running an interim government, he is eminently qualified to head the scheme.   It lasted only 83 days, I grant.  But I am sure he learned all the appropriate lessons.  So that, if summoned to national service again, he may well be able this time around to transform the interim into the interminable.

    Nor should anyone be fooled by Dr Jonathan’s frenetic pace these days as he flies to far-flung places to buy support from traditional rulers and ethnic militias.  It is almost as if he has just discovered Nigeria.  His wife, Madame Patience Faka, is criss-crossing the country seeking – no,  I take that back – demanding support for Dr Jonathan, sowing coarse and vulgar abuse and the most delicious infelicities along her route.

    It is unsafe, I insist, to conclude from all this coming and going that the presidential election will actually take place. “Betwixt the cup and the lip,” says an English proverb, “there’s many a slip.”

    Whatever happens, the election campaign will go down as the dirtiest, ugliest, and the most indecent in Nigeria’s history.  It was not entirely devoid of ideas, but the ideas were crowded out by fear-mongering, character assassination, incitement, ethnic-baiting and hateful speech on a scale beyond belief.  As the perceptive Kayode Komolafe of ThisDay remarked, some combatants carried on as if the law of defamation was on vacation.

    I would add that it was almost as if the civil law relating to invasion of privacy and the criminal law relating to incitement were also on vacation.

    There is more than enough blame to go around, but it has to be said it was the PDP’s national secretary, Wale Oladipo, who cast the first stone when he dismissed General Muhammadu Buhari as a “semi-literate jackboot.”

    Though Oladipo has the formal designation of professor of Nuclear Analytical Techniques at the Centre for Energy Research and Development (CERD) at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, his antecedents at first blush seem as dodgy as Dr Jonathan’s doctoral dissertation.

    At this writing, he does not figure on CERD’s web site.  My Internet search turned out more information about him as PDP national secretary than about his scholarship in the arcane field              of particle physics.  Even his home page, such as it is, says nothing about his education and the universities he attended.

    Perhaps Oladipo is not the type who blows his own trumpet. But settling for such a desultory identity as secretary of the PDP – even if it is still the largest political party in Africa  — when  he may well belong up there with Ernest Rutherford and Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and Max Planck  is carrying coyness too far.

    As they say here, Man, if you’ve got a trumpet, blow it; blow it hard and blow it often.  Otherwise, it will get rusty.

    To return to the election:  Mrs  Jonathan has been ordering her fellow women to vote for her husband because more than one-third of the senior officials he has appointed are women, whereas Buhari did nothing for Nigerian womanhood when he held power for 2o months some 30 years ago.

    Stop throwing stones (no pun intended) when you live in a glass house.

    Was it not under her husband’s watch that about 230 girls were plucked from their hostel in Chibok and spirited to places unknown?  For ten precious days, her husband not only failed to rouse himself to launch a rescue effort, he was actually in denial, claiming that that the whole thing was another propaganda stunt by the Opposition to discredit his administration.

    And by way of support, Mrs Jonathan personally conducted on national television an inane inquisition seen and ridiculed around the world, blaming the school authorities for what was a failure of security, a failure of anticipation, and most crucially a failure of leadership – her husband’s leadership

    Two hundred and thirty young women unaccounted for under Dr Jonathan’s watch.  That is an entire generation.  Then, there are the tens of thousands of Nigerians lost to Boko Haram violence without serious challenge until lately, under a Commander-in-Chief whose primary duty is to protect the lives and property of citizens.  Then again, there are the millions of so-called internally displaced persons, refugees in their own country.

    Dr Jonathan has not indicated what he would do differently if elected.  In six years when money was not a serious problem, he succeeded only in patching the Lugard-era Lagos-Kano railway line.  Now that money is tight, he is promising to link all 36 state capitals by rail if re-elected.

    Desperation truly knows no bounds.

    A vote for Dr Jonathan is a vote for more of the same, for Continuity.

  • The Tinker as Transformer

    The Tinker as Transformer

    Going into the presidential election scheduled tentatively for March 28 – tentatively because  he and his proxies, sensing defeat, are doing everything conceivable and even inconceivable to scuttle or sabotage it — Dr Goodluck Jonathan has rested his case for a renewed mandate on the claim that he has transformed or is transforming Nigeria in spectacular ways.

    Public outrage and scorn have forced them to stop peddling the transparent falsehood that Jonathan has accomplished for Nigeria the wonders Lee Kuan Yew wrought in Singapore,  the miracle that Nelson Mandela worked in South Africa, the transcendental change that Dr Martin Luther King’s leadership of the civil rights movement effected in the United States, and the inspiration that has redounded to black humanity from Barak Obama’a ascendancy.

    Yet, Transformation continues to be the theme, the centrepiece of Dr Jonathan’s campaign–transformation of every aspect of the national experience.

    The opposition APC has continued to espouse “Change” as its campaign theme, despite Dr Jonathan’s wife’s incendiary appeal to the crowds at her campaign stops to stone anyone disrespectful enough to shout “change” to her hearing.

    With her habitual resort to coarse abuse, vulgar name-calling, ethnic baiting, and her crass insensitivity to the sociology and complexity of Nigeria, Patience Jonathan has taken first-ladyism to a level of degradation beyond belief.  Let that stand as her legacy, and her husband’s.

    Now, change is the opposite of continuity.  If Jonathan and his campaign are so sure that the  path he has pursued for the past six years is the right one, that Nigerians are better off today than they were six years ago and that staying the course will finally lead Nigeria to the greatness for which it is so richly endowed,  why don’t they pivot their case on Continuity?

    That term rarely figures in their propaganda of hate and incitement because they know that it will give the game away.

    Only a masochist will vote for continuity when the past six years have loosed little more than acute deprivation, popular misery and insecurity on the land; when another term of four years under the management that has wrought this devastation presages nothing but the same.

    So, pivot the campaign on Transformation.  Reel out an endless assemblage of “achievements”  as  proof, should the usual naysayers still require any, that the Jonathan Transformation is not an illusion conjured up by the “Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria.”

    But when you wade through the assemblage, what you see is tinkering – tinkering around the edges, patching, mending, refurbishing, and repairing.  There is no fundamental change  in the condition, the inner nature or the function of things and institutions, the essence of transformation.

    On this basis, Dr Jonathan would have to be regarded as a tinker rather than a transformative figure.  That, at any rate, is the contention of this column.

    The evidence is plain.

    Just the other day, I was going through the first installment of an editorial advertisement in which a grateful contractor or desperate supplicant or a high priest of the Transformation Brotherhood was threatening to inflict on the public a treatise detailing 500 reasons why Dr Jonathan should be re-elected.

    The full-page advertisement was a desultory litany of roads in conveniently far-flung regions of Nigeria that Dr Jonathan had allegedly rehabilitated, repaired, or reconstructed.  Even if it were possible to verify the claims and vouch for the quality of the work done, if work was indeed done, to call it transformation would still be an instance of unnecessary dignification.

    More substantively, one of the planks on which Dr Jonathan’s claim to being a transformer is an excellent example of patching and mending.  I have in mind the 1,200 km Lagos-Kano railway track that was supposed to be transformed into a standard-gauge structure for high-speed rail travel.

    It is nothing of the sort.  The trains run essentially on the tracks laid by Lord Lugard, with some patching here and there.  They take two full days to travel the distance.  The rolling stock goes back seven decades; passengers are for the most part herded into ill-ventilated coaches, without the slightest regard to hygiene. Neither Dr Jonathan nor any senior official has deigned to take a ride on these trains.

    To be fair, you cannot accuse Dr Jonathan of lack of ambition.  He has talked of building a West-East railway route, and even threatened to link all state capitals by rail.  But talk is not even tinkering, much less transformation.

    Lately, they have also been crediting him with the construction of the Abuja-Kaduna fast train, the contract for which was finalised in December 2010, barely seven months after Jonathan was conferred with the full powers of the Presidency following the death of the incumbent, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.  Jonathan had not quite found his feet then, and could not have been the originator of the project.  But he deserves praise for seeing it though to completion.

    Yet another plank on which Dr Jonathan’s alleged transformative genius has been erected is the Constitutional Conference that many are citing as reason for backing his re-election.  But it was at bottom another job of patching.  It was a disingenuous evasion of a Sovereign National Conference, the proper form for the restructuring, without which the Nigerian state will wither away eventually.

    The Conference could not have turned out differently, when the Conference was packed with people selected for the most part by the convening authority, operating under rules and conditions designed by the same authority, and beholden to yet again the same authority for its implementation.

    By now, the epileptic power supply should have become a distant memory, going by one of Dr Jonathan’s solemn promises. The supply would be so sure and steady, he said, that owners of power generating sets would literally be begging people on the streets to come cart them away for free.  But each year, the national output keeps shrinking.

    Lacking faith in his own prediction, Dr Jonathan runs his sprawling offices and living quarters  in Aso Rock on generators. He has not even thought of building an independent power supply for Aso Rock, let alone tapping into solar energy.

    He has built 12 new universities, some of them in areas that can hardly absorb them.  But he has made no investments in raising even one of more than 100 older universities to world class. Nor has he equipped a single medical facility in Nigeria to world class, not even the one that is meant to serve the Presidency.

    It is necessary to add that hopping from one traditional ruler’s domain to another and handing out bags stuffed with dollar bills in an effort to buy the election, now that Attahiru Jega has blocked the usual methods of stealing the people’s voices and votes, is no transformation.

    Rather, it harks back to the colonial-era policy of Indirect Rule.  Empower traditional rulers, and they will corral their subjects to do your bidding.

    Nor does awarding contracts for rebuilding the school from which the Chibok 219 were plucked by Boko Haram count as a transformative act, especially when as the girls remain unaccounted for more than a year later. Rather, the tawdry election-eve stunt calls to mind George Santayana’s quip about those who double the effort long after they have forgotten the aim.

    To say all this is not to say that Dr Jonathan has achieved nothing.   It is merely to make the case that his accomplishments belong in the realm of tinkering, not transformation.

    Oops:

    In “This thing called corruption,” (column, March 9), I erroneously credited Admiral Augustus Aikhomu, with drawing a seminal distinction between “misappropriation” and “misallocation” of public funds.  The distinction he drew was between misappropriation of public funds, of which he took a dim view, and mere “misapplication” of public funds, which he saw as unexceptionable.

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