The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • This thing called corruption

    This thing called corruption

    Each time President Goodluck Jonathan tries to educate the misguided Nigerian public about  what is often glibly called “corruption,” he reminds me of an earlier era, and of Vice Admiral Augustus Aikhomu.

    Remember him?

    Aikhomu was the gruff mariner who, as Chief of General Staff, ranked second in the regime of military president Ibrahim Babangida, appointed to replace the strong-willed Ebitu Ukiwe.

    Never so happy as when confounding opponents and confusing friends, Babangida woke up one day and announced that, in keeping with the Constitution of the Federal Republic, Aikhomu had become civilian vice president under the military regime.

    Apparently also in keeping with the Constitution that Babangida was operating a loose-leaf document, the pages of which he shuffled endlessly, he announced several months later that the former naval chief turned civilian, had been promoted to the rank of Admiral.

    Aikhomu had no patience with all the fancy footwork that was the preoccupation of his principal.  Irascible and, withal, blunt as a cudgel, he told it exactly as he saw it.  He was a reporter’s delight, always forthcoming with delicious quotes.

    One day, reporters assembled for his customary Friday afternoon news conference, asked for his reaction to yet another damning report on the Nigerian economy that the IMF/World Bank had just issued.

    “What report?” he snickered.  “Do you know that those so-called reports are written by small boys like yourselves?”

    Back then, the dominant issue in public discourse was “misappropriation” of public funds.  For the most part, when people talked at all about “corruption” in public office, they did so only in whispers, checkmated by Decree 2, under which the government vested itself with the power to detain anyone for as long as it pleased, without judicial review. And Aikhomu was the decree’s chief administering officer.

    But Aikhomu saw through the subterfuge.  From “misappropriation” of public funds, it was but a short step to “embezzlement” of the same.

    So, he re-framed the discourse, such as it was.  The problem, he said, was not so much misappropriation as misallocation of public funds.

    Unfortunately, weighed down by state duties and the twists and turns and the labyrinthine trajectory of his principal’s duplicitous political transition programme – in which he dutifully acquiesced, by the way —Aikhomu did not have the time to work out with lexical finality the difference between “misappropriation” and “misallocation” of public funds.

    But from what I could make of it, misappropriation, with its undertone of embezzlement or plain theft – “original stealing” as the immortal Afrobeat king Fela Anikulapo Kuti called it—was the cardinal sin.  Misallocation of public funds was not worth all the blather.

    In practical terms – and here I am second-guessing the mariner – if a public official used funds earmarked for a hospital to build himself a country home with a swimming pool and a helipad, he had merely misallocated the funds, and did not deserve the kind of condemnation to which an official who misappropriated such funds deserved to be subjected.

    It might even be argued that if the official moved such funds into his private bank account, it would still have been a mere mislocation  — putting the funds away in the in the wrong place — rather than a misappropriation.

    And here we are, more than two decades later and no wiser until the eminent scientist and respected taxonomist in him moved Dr Goodluck Jonathan to take time off his demanding re-election schedule to clear up the semantic mess and complete Aikhomu’s unfinished work.

    And he has gone about the difficult task with the fine sense of discrimination that only a world-class ichthyologist can call up at short notice and amidst the kind of distraction that only a few in his exalted league can even begin to imagine.

    In the popular understanding, and even in the minds of the lexicographers, corruption consists basically in dishonest acts. The Explanatory Memorandum to the Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Act 2000 says rather laconically that “corruption” includes bribery, fraud, and other related offences.

    But the body of that law goes on to define corruption to the point of saturation. Corruption is in play, it says, when a public official asks for, receives or obtains property or benefits of any kind for himself or others, agrees or attempts to receive such rewards for himself or others, for benefits or favours already granted or expected to be granted.  And so on and so forth.

    Conviction carries a seven-year jail term.

    That is the law of the land.  That is the law appointees of the Jonathan administration have been administering, with funds approved by the National Assembly. That is the law under which the Independent Corrupted Practices and other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) has prosecuted and sent to jail, by its own count, thousands of wayward public officials.

    But the ICPC and its agents, we now know, have been labouring not just under a misapprehension, but, under a delusion to boot.

    For, as Dr Jonathan has been saying, in statements heard around the world, the things people  call “corruption” in Nigeria fall far short of the threshold. Those who are forever beating the government on the head with allegations of overarching corruption would be closer to the mark if they talked instead about stealing.

    I hope they are listening, all those do-gooders who compile the International Corruption Index and the so-called foreign donors.

    In whatever case, the amounts usually cited as evidence of corrupt dealings are piddling.  One official creams off, say, N5 billion in pension funds and they rush to cite that it as evidence of corruption.

    Easy, gentlemen.  This is not Burkina Faso.  We are talking about the largest economy on the entire African continent, and the 16th largest and one of the fastest-growing in the whole wide world.

    From Dr Jonathan’s seminal submission, it would seem follow that the law under which ICPC has been prosecuting and jailing innocent persons is misconceived, at least insofar as it presumes to act on a matter in which its jurisdiction is dubious at best, and to the extent that it has been punishing acts it misconstrues as corrupt when it should have been punishing ordinary stealing.

    That kind of enactment has no place under Nigeria’s legal system – a system undergirded by the rule of law, of which Dr Jonathan himself is the foremost apostle. It has done too much harm already.

    Dr Jonathan should act with his accustomed dispatch and move the National Assembly to void the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Act of 2000 and its instrumentalities, going back to the day he took office.

    It is time to end the costly and damaging misperception that corruption rather than ordinary stealing is Nigeria’s problem.

  • Matters miscellaneous

    Matters miscellaneous

    In Nigeria where there is never a dull moment, where incident follows incident at a furious gallop, the glut of occurrences can overwhelm even the most pertinacious chronicler or analyst.

    As a way of coping with such moments, I patented back in my Rutam House years a rubric I named Matters Miscellaneous, under which I try to examine the day’s intelligence in short takes, working from no particular design.  It is also my way of attending to those who might otherwise feel neglected.

    So, here goes the miscellany, all protocols observed.

    Boko Haram on the Run

    Barely a week after he orchestrated the postponement of the presidential election and inveigled the electoral body INEC into accepting same, Dr Goodluck Jonathan finally gave a damn and went after Boko Haram (BH).

    Since then the marauding terrorist band has been in retreat and disarray.  Until the armed forces began regaling the public with their exploits and an inventory of just how many towns and villages and entire local government areas they had freed from the pernicious clutches of BH, few outside the Northeast had any inkling of the size of the territory over which it had proclaimed sovereignty.

    And in just one week, the outposts fell one after another, like ninepins.  It was hard to believe that this was the same BH that enlisted men were loath to engage, the same BH that had ravaged entire communities, sacked police formations, taken the fight to troops in their barracks, destroyed fighter aircraft on the tarmac, and roamed the entire region virtually unchallenged, its grisly business to conduct

    And Dr Jonathan, newly seized of his responsibility as commander-in-chief, has been touring the front, taking a victory lap as it were, decked out in combat gear as befits the office  and vowing that not one inch of Nigerian territory will remain under BH’s infernal thrall.

    You can’t begrudge him his new jauntiness.

    But the question remains:  What are the armed services doing now in the Northeast that they could not have done three years ago? Or two?  Or even a year ago?

    Dr Jonathan says he had underestimated B H’s menace.  He sure did, big-time, and despite warning from General TY Danjuma, chairman of the since-dissolved Presidential Adversary Council.

    How many other clear and present threats to vital national interests has he underestimated?

    If Jonathan had taken that advice and lived up to his oath of office instead of thrilling rented crowds with his azonto dance moves and carrying sacks of money around to bribe traditional rulers and all manner of opportunist groups to buy support for his re-election bid, the casualty list from BH’s depredations would have been much shorter, and so would the roll of internally displaced persons, now numbered in the millions.

    One cannot go as far as the commentator on one of the so-called social media sites who with Old Testament rage placed squarely on Dr Jonathan’s head the blood of the thousands killed  by BH and the pain and agony of the millions forced to flee their homes.

    But to the extent that Dr Jonathan could — and indeed should — have done what he is now doing at least three years ago but did not, it has to be said that, at the very least, he bears moral responsibility for the slaughter of innocents, and the benumbing misery and agony wrought by BH.

    One more thing we must not allow them to forget in all the chest-beating:  The Chibok 219.  The military high command has been saying that it knows where BH is holding the girls but would not close in on the camp for fear of putting them in harm’s way.

    With their new fire power and enhanced intelligence capability, this is the time go in for the rescue.  Forward, gentlemen, to the location you’ve had on your radar since the girls were abducted.

    Calling all Septuagenarians

    Like a dutiful helpmeet, The Iron Lady of Okrika, most recently Permanent Secretary Without  Schedule in the Bayela State Civil Service, and in the normal run of things Patience Faka Jonathan, First Lady of Nigeria and distinguished chair of the African First Ladies Peace Mission has been on the hustings, deploying her charm and well-honed communication skills to make a strong case for her husband’s reelection

    And what a wave she has been making!

    “A72-year-old man has nothing to offer Nigeria,” she declared the other day at one of her campaign stops.

    Do you hear that, Pastor Enoch Adeboye, whom her husband is forever importuning for divine blessings? Do you hear that, John Cardinal Onaiyekan?

    Do you hear that, General Danjuma, General Alani Akinrinade, Chief Segun Osoba, Dan Agbese, Brigadier-General Ike Nwachukwu, Senate President David Mark, Felix Adenaike, Onyema Ugochukwu, Chief Ajibola Ogunshola, Professor Ladipo Adamolekun,  Dr Dayo Shobowale, Dr Haroun Adamu, Professor Idowu Sobowale, Duro Onabule, Kole Omotosho, Ropo Sekoni, and other worthy compatriots in that age range?

    Do you hear that, members of the National Council of State, to whom her husband always        runs for the political equivalent of covering fire whenever he has another odious scheme to                 inflict on the public?

    I am not going to let my generation down.

    I have asked my attorneys to commence, for our group, a class-action lawsuit for gratuitous infliction of emotional distress and mental cruelty against the Iron Lady of Okrika in her official capacity as wife of the President, unless she issues within seven days an immediate and unconditional apology for the gross libel and promises never to go there again.

    Attahiru Jega:  The Arbiter as Villain

    Alas, poor Attahiru.  This genial, shy professor of political science and former president of the  university teachers union ASUU, must now be ruing the day he agreed to serve as chair of the Independent (ha) National Electoral Commission, the most treacherous job in the world.

    Those who appointed him expect him to do their bidding at every point.  If he does not, it must be that he has been bought by the Opposition.  And if he does not apply the rules the way the Opposition thinks they should be applied, he is carrying out the Government’s agenda.

    It is an ordeal, even in the best of times.

    When it is compounded by contrived distractions from the government and its surrogates – when they express confidence in him one day and none the next day; when one day they say that his time is up and hint darkly that it will not be renewed, and say the following day that  he will indeed preside over the forthcoming election;  when they suborn the media to publish scurrilous and fabricated charges of sleaze against him – how can he concentrate on the job at hand?

    How can he — or indeed the public – even tell that there is a job at hand?

    Why can’t Dr Jonathan just do whatever he wants to do, and as usual not give a damn?

    A Frustrating Countdown

    Ayo Fayose – he of the dubious mandate, on which he runs Ekiti when he runs it at all like a schoolyard bully gone berserk–has been at pains lately to assure the public that there is nothing personal to his ghoulish death-watch on General Muhammadu Buhari.

    “I have nothing against Buhari,” he declared the other day.

    Right, Governor.  You only want him to drop dead and are distressed that he has not obliged.

  • Annals of political debauchery

    Annals of political debauchery

    Ekiti’s stomach-infrastructure governor Ayo Fayose long ago joined the ranks of our compatriots in public life — you know them — who never touch anything without defiling it

    He has no shame. He is a compulsive liar.  He holds nothing sacred.

    Since General Muhammadu Buhari was voted presidential candidate of the APC, Fayose has mounted a ghoulish death-watch on him, pivoting on medical report purporting that the 72-year-old former head of state had been treated for prostate cancer, at the Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital, in Kaduna.

    Even if true, the report should have elicited empathy.  The report was fake through and through, however; an inept forgery. But it was more than enough for Fayose to embark on a countdown to Buhari’s demise with the kind of glee you would expect of a person about to come into a vast fortune.

    Don’t vote for Buhari in the presidential election, he urged his band of followers, for the most part those whose stomachs he has conscripted for the vilest ends; don’t vote for him because he is going to die in office, like four previous leaders from his corner of Nigeria .

    That, essentially, was the statement Fayose put out in a signed advertisement that several newspapers plastered on the entire front pages, as if it was editorial material of the highest importance. And to every newspaper that agreed to publish this obscenity, Fayose forked out the going price of N5 million.

    For a while, he was distracted from his macabre obsession with compassing Buhari’s death by the disclosures that have now enteredthe annals of electoral skullduggery as Ekiti-gate.

    On the eve of last June’s gubernatorial election in Ekiti, some leading PDP members and top officials of the Jonathan administration gathered at Fayose’s Spotless Hotel, in Ado-Ekiti, to put the finishing touches to their design for winning the poll.

    In attendance were Musiliu Obanikoro, Minister of State for Defence, Jelili Adesiyan, Minister of Police Affairs,  Brigadier-General A.A. Momah,  commanding officer of the 32 Artillery Brigade deployed to Ado Ekiti to supervise the poll.

    Also in attendance, probably for an on-the-spot assessment of the design that was to be pressed into service for him in the gubernatorial race in neighbouring Osun State several weeks later, was the PDP’s candidate, Iyiola Omisore.

    Unbeknownst to the schemers, the meeting was secretly recorded by Captain Sagir Koli, an aide to General Momah. The tape was posted online newspaper Saharareporters, after confirming that it was authentic.

    Fayose can be heard on the audiotape bullying and harrying Momah, charging that Momah had been taking a bribe from the APC to disarm the police and thus to clear the way for it to rig the poll.

    Obanikoro, who had all along denied being anywhere near Ado-Ekiti at the material time, can be heard declaring that he was on a mission from the President. He reminds Momah that his promotion lay more or less in his hands as Minister for the Army, and that he had better deliver.

    The tape contains just enough hints of the plot – how APC stalwarts were to be rounded up and detained and its field workers immobilised while only PDP operatives travelling in specially marked vehicles would have the field entirely to themselves.

    The plot is fleshed out in shocking detail in Koli’s deposition, including how one of the notorious Uba Brothers, rode into Ekiti at the head of a column of soldiers, with bus loads of cash taken out of the Central Bank in Umuahia, and how the military personnel in this special task force took their orders directly from Chris Uba, aforementioned.

    Only a person trained in reconnaissance could have reported in such precise and overwhelming detail how the gubernatorial election that brought Fayose to power for the second time was compromised, if not perverted. It makes frightening reading.

    When the audio surfaced on the web site of Saharareporters, Fayose stoutly denied its content, claiming that it was only the latest fabrication in a long line of fabrications by the APC, “the party of liars.”  He said no such meeting ever took place, and that his voice had been digitally manipulated to implicate him.

    “There are softwares (sic) that can re-create voices and even bring the voices of long-dead notable persons back to life,” Fayose reportedly said. “There are softwares (sic) that can turn printed text into synthesised speech, making it possible for anyone to use recordings of a person’s voice to utter new things that the person never said.  One of such softwares (sic) is called ‘Natural Voices.’”

    If this was Fayose speaking extempore rather than reading from a script that some bureaucratic hack prepared for him, the Higher National Diploma he parades from the Ibadan Polytechnic may well be authentic. Some might even be led to believe that he is actually a professor of cybernetics!

    It was only after several of the schemers named in the tape had fessed up to the fact of the meeting but not the purpose that Fayose admitted, without shame and without remorse, that he had indeed participated in it.

    To give Fayose his due, he did not threaten to go to court, as Obanikoro did. Even if the publication was false, Obanikoro’s recourse to the law courts would still be fruitless. Under American law, he would have to prove that the publication at issue was made with actual malice, .i.e. with knowing falsity, or with reckless disregard for its truth or falsity.

    That burden is almost insurmountable. And it explains why public figures rarely bring defamation lawsuits before American courts.

    If Fayose’s reaction to the Ekiti-gate was characteristically duplicitous, President Goodluck Jonathan’s was downright execrable. He would not waste his time investigating a fabrication, he told The Wall Street Journal long after some of the officials featured in the audiotape had admitted that they had met in Ado-Ekiti but for a different purpose, and long after Saharareporters had posted Koli’s damning account of rigging plan.

    How could Dr Jonathan, a scientist trained to be guided by empirical evidence, tell that the audio tape and the report were fabrications when he had not examined them?

    This is a repudiation of the scientific method.  No wonder Nigeria under Jonathan has been like a stalled caterpillar, its antennae probing in every direction, its body inert.

    Meanwhile, Fayose has resumed his ghoulish pastime – his Buhari death watch. No sooner was it announced that the APC presidential candidate would be going to the UK on a working visit than he released a bulletin on Buhari’s itinerary.

    Buhari, he said, had been ferried to a plane in the dead of night on a stretcher, and rushed to  London for urgent medical treatment. Buhari was not scheduled to speak at Chatham House, as his camp had claimed, was in the UK for one purpose only: to obtain  treatment.  Fayose even went on to name the hospital where Buhari was allegedly being treated.

    All this, Fayose exulted, was splendid vindication for the editorial advertisement he had placed in the papers several weeks ago warning that the APC had saddled Nigeria with a presidential candidate set to expire.

    Buhari has since been shown going about his business in the UK, including a photo-op with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. His Chatham House talk is scheduled for Thursday.

    Nothing in all this has moved Fayose to admit error. Rather, he has now conflated his ghoulish obsession with what he says is revelation from on high that Buhari will never be president.

    A debauched mind’s hallucination, Governor, is no revelation.

  • The selling of the front page

    Some 18 years ago, the Committee of Concerned Journalists, comprising 25 of America’s most influential journalists, media chiefs and journalism educators, produced a manifesto they called Elements of Journalism, to replace the Social Responsibility Theory that had served as the dominant ethos of American journalism for 50 years and influenced media practices worldwide.

    A distillation of the Committee’s research, surveys of readers, listeners, viewers, editors, and journalists, the manifesto contains 10 principles.

    In this examination of newspaper political advertisements in the on-going presidential election campaign, I will draw on five of those principles, viz:

    The primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing.

    Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.

    Journalism’s first loyalty is to the citizens.

    The essence of journalism is a discipline of verification.

    Journalists must serve as independent monitor of power and offer a voice to the voiceless.

    My concern is to examine how well newspapers are adhering to or departing from these principles in the placement of political advertisements on their front pages.

    The front page is a newspaper’s chiefest asset. There on display is, or should be, a report of the day’s events and intelligence, rooted in time-tested news values, carefully vetted, ordered, and rendered in a context that gives it meaning.

    Nigerian newspapers have parlayed the back page into a platform for their finest columnists and commentators, thus making it an important platform – for opinion and analysis. But the back page has also been turned into a platform for political advertisements.

    But the front page is the best advertisement for any newspaper that wants to be taken seriously. That is why, on most newspapers, the editor who signs off on the final product takes personal charge of what goes on to the front page, or delegates the task to a trusted senior aide.

    On some newspapers, a conference is held around mid-day, at which senior editors and staffers negotiate what stories will go on to the front page. They call it the Page One conference.

    The front page, then, is far too important to be left to mid-career journalists, much less interns. And it is emphatically too important to be bargained away to whoever is ready to pay hard cash for it, regardless of whatever content is plastered on it to masquerade as authentic editorial material.

    Even if such material carries a disclaimer, the trade-off is still a pernicious bargain.  If you cannot vouch for it, why publish it?

    When advertisement copy masquerading as editorial material carries no disclaimer, the newspaper is more or less ceding its prestige and authority to advertisers and announcing to its entire public that money is the measure of editorial propriety.

    I was driven to these reflections by the following material which occupied the entire front page of several newspapers last week.  Titled “Let’s talk about Change:  National Security (1), it is the first installment of a series of political advertisements placed by the Jonathan/Sambo Campaign.

    I could have picked on any among the dozens of sinister political advertisements doing the rounds in this election season, but this one ranks among the most repellent.

    Now, the text:

    “Thirty years ago – Under General Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria stopped equipping the Armed Forces in a major way to protect our military regimes from coups.

    “Once the Boko Haram insurgency took hold, our Armed Forces could not cope, mainly due to lack of equipment, lack of intelligence from local communities, and cross-border escape of insurgents.

    “Today, President Goodluck Jonathan has fully re-equipped that Armed forces, working with the international and local communities and has built an allied coalition of our neighbours and global partners —taking the war to Boko Haram, town after town.

    “As of today, Boko Haram is on the run and we are making steady progress to secure Nigeria

    “THAT IS CHANGING THE NATION FOR THE BETTER.”

    Since this claim, Boko Haram has staged deadly strikes in Gombe and Yobe.  But no matter.

    Those newspapers which plastered this advertisement on their front pages and made it look as if it is content generated by its staffers, content that has been vetted, did their proprietors, the sponsors of the message, and their principal, President Goodluck Jonathan,  a great disservice.

    The publication flagrantly violates the five journalistic principles I cited from the 10 enunciated by the Committee of Concerned Journalists.

    It is a transparent falsehood false, made with actual malice, with reckless disregard for the truth, and with knowing falsity.

    Buhari was in power for roughly two years.  Yet Jonathan’s proxies seek to hold Buhari responsible for the lack of equipment that made the armed forces wilt in the face of the Boko Haram insurgency that broke out some 25 years after Buhari left office.

    In those 25 years, Nigeria had four presidents who doubled as commanders-in chief of the armed forces, two of them serving generals and one of them a retired general, and two heads of state, one of them a doddering civilian and the other a general in active service.

    This listing does not include Dr Jonathan, who has served as president and commander-in-chief during the past six years.  The  syndicated columnist Sonala Olumhense reckoned that, in just the past 10 years, the Ministry of Defence spent well over N260 trillion.

    Where did all the money go?

    Jonathan has for several years declared on any number of platforms at home and abroad that Boko Haram’s days of murder and mayhem were numbered;  in one instance he went so far as to assure his audience that it would be “destroyed” within two months.

    When foreign military personnel and sophisticated equipment arrived to help search for the Chibok girls, Jonathan was all exultation. With that development, he said, Boko Haram was finished.

    That was almost a year ago. The Chibok girls have not been found, and Book Haram has waxed stronger and stronger. It even tied down the military high command in negotiations with fake agents while it seized more territory and consolidated its hold on the towns and villages it had overrun.

    And all this happened, Jonathan’s proxies tell us, because Buhari neglected to equip the armed forces in the two years he was in power three decades ago.

    Haba, Dr Jonathan and company!  This is Jonathanism taken too far.

    Newspapers all over the world are going through hard times.  Readership has declined, and so have advertisement and sales revenue even as production costs escalate.  Many titles are locked in a grim struggle for existence. The capacity to sustain loss repeatedly rather than the ability to turn a profit is now the measure of a newspaper’s standing.

    Still, that is no excuse for turning over their chiefest asset – the front page – to peddlers of transparent falsehoods or hate or religious bigotry to anyone who can pay for it.

    Newspapers that do this repudiate the primary purpose of providing citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing, they renounce their obligation to the truth and the loyalty they owe to citizens. They disavow the imperative of verifying information, and the duty to monitor power in its many guises and disguises.

  • Coup-makers at work

    Coup-makers at work

    Every outrage on the popular will in Nigeria has followed a familiar trajectory.

    There is, for a start, the stage of disbelief and anger and visceral rejection. “How could they do this to us?” the violated ask in indignation. “This must not pass,” others vow.

    At this stage, the perpetrators are somewhat tentative. Their exultation is restrained and private. Having no reliable measure of the balance of forces, they do not want to precipitate a showdown yet.

    In the second stage, those who belong in the substantial ranks of the “any government in power,” with support from the “anything goes” brigade, step gingerly out of the shadows to congratulate and embrace the beneficiaries of the outrage. Consummate players that they are, they say nothing about the process that wrought the controversial benefit, nor about how deserving the beneficiary is. The important thing is that the beneficiary is their man. Nothing else counts.

    Hard on the heels of these groups follow those who prize “stability” above all else, “national stability” especially. Outrage or no outrage, they counsel, the “nation” must not be allowed to drift into chaos. The outrage, they remind you, is only the latest in a very long line of outrages; so, why single it out? And, in whatever case, far greater outrages have occurred elsewhere. The really important thing is for everyone to come together “to move the nation forward.”

    Meanwhile, congratulatory messages for the beneficiary that had begun as a trickle turn into a cascade.   So do “solidarity” visits by an assortment of royal supplicants, influence peddlers, contractors and entrepreneurs with an eye to kick-starting their failed businesses, not forgetting other classes of political adventurers. These “solidarity visits” are dutifully captured live on national television. They are staged primarily for television anyway. It is the cameras that give them resonance.

    In the face of all this, the ranks of those who had vowed that the outrage would not pass begin to thin; their voices grow less insistent; the ranks and the voices of those urging acceptance of the outrage for the sake of stability and “moving the nation forward” appear stronger than they actually are.

    Soon, many of those who had vowed that the outrage would not stand begin to feel overwhelmed. They give up and move on, persuaded that resistance is futile.

    The foregoing first appeared in my column for May 1, 2007, written in the wake of the presidential election in which the Umaru Yar’Adua/Goodluck Jonathan ticket was declared winner over the Muhammadu Buhari/Chuba Okadigbo.  International and domestic observers said of the poll that it ranked among the most fraudulent they had   ever witnessed anywhere.

    Subsequent events followed the trajectory I sketched above.  Yar’Adua took the reins, dying two year later in office and was succeeded by Jonathan, who went on to win a disputed four-year term that has now run its desultory course.

    But Jonathan, his suborned Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Agency and their confederates in and out of uniform, have got to be practically unconscious if they expect that reactions to the coup they staged over the weekend will also follow that trajectory.

    The “any-government-in-power” marionettes, the “anything-goes” choir, the stability merchants and the fixers, we shall always have with us.  But they have had their day.

    A new consciousness is sweeping the land – a consciousness that rejects the manipulations, the subornation, and the corrupt blandishments that a long line of rulers had employed to get the people to connive in the subversion of their own will.

    Four weeks before they executed this coup, a source who is in a position to know had told me that Jonathan was going to do everything within his power to put off the general election for as long as possible, or to avoid it altogether, because he and his camp know that they are headed for a thumping.

    “Can he do that?” I asked the source, one of the most knowledgeable and reliable a reporter ca ever had in his corner.

    “It’s too late,” he said.

    In retrospect, he was wrong, as are all those who have in the face of compelling evidence, continued to underestimate Jonathan’s capacity for the perverse, the devious and the downright dishonourable.

    Calls for postponing the election, at first few and far between, grew louder and more insistent. Less than one-half of the electorate has received permanent voters cards stood to be disenfranchised if the election were held as scheduled, Jonathan’s proxies chimed.

    Suddenly the same Jonathan who for two weeks did not give a damn about more than 200 innocent girls kidnapped from their school hostels and has not given much of a damn subsequently was overflowing with solicitude for the voting rights of residents of the area – the same Jonathan who agreed to meet the distraught parents of the abducted students only at the urging of the Pakistani child activist, MalalaYousafzai

    The area in question, 14 local government areas spanning three states in a country comprising 774 local government areas spanning 36 states and Abuja Federal Capital Territory, is widely believed to be a stronghold of the opposition APC, the party stands to lose if voting there is spotty because of the insurgency.  Conversely, it is Jonathan’s PDP that stands to gain the most under the circumstances.

    So when the Jonathan and the PDP take on the role of advocate for those residents in the Boko Haram-infested areas, you know they are not motivated by altruism.  It is just another excuse for scrubbing the projected poll.

    Leaving nothing to chance, Jonathan tried to conscript the National Council of State to rubber-stamp his design.  The Council rebuffed him and his confederates.

    He then reached for his trump card to rein in the unyielding INEC chairman, Attahiru Jega and delay summary judgment on his failed presidency that  an electorate with which he has not kept faith was poised to deliver;  an electorate that he and his corrupt administration have more often betrayed than served.

    The commander-in-chief who had been missing in action, the one who visits the troops in the frontline decked out in the finest clothing, directed the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the state security apparatus to inform INEC in writing that it the armed forces were set, at long last, to launch a massive offensive against Boko Haram, beginning the very day the presidential election was to be held and lasting all of six weeks.

    During the period, the armed forces would tolerate no distraction.  Nor could it guarantee the safety of election officials or voters.

    In short:  You are on your own, Attahiru Jega.  Go ahead and stage your election, and may the blood of those who come to harm in the event be upon your head.

    Who can blame Jega for submitting to this tawdry blackmail?   But the self-indictment of the security chiefs is not lost on the public.

    If you are paid and provisioned handsomely to ensure the security of lives and property, and you declare that you cannot guarantee the discharge of that remit, you have no business remaining in office.   Do the honourable thing and resign.

    But honourable conduct is not something that Jonathan demands of himself or his officials.

    In any case, what makes them think they can crush the insurgency in six weeks when Boko Haram has been running rings around them in the past four years?  What would happen if six weeks passed and the insurgency continued to rage?

    When Jonathan asks Nigerians to accept his shabby conduct “in good faith,” he adds wanton insult to bitter injury.  What does he know about good faith?

    When he goes on to assure the public that May 29, the day the winner of the election will take office is sacrosanct, not March 28, the day of the re-scheduled poll, he raises new questions about his sincerity.

    Ironically, it is the sedate APC candidate, General Muhammadu Buhari who has increasingly been looking presidential, while Jonathan the incumbent has been running scared, a pathetic study in desperation and fecklessness.

    In six years on the job for which nothing had prepared him, not even a dodgy doctorate in ichthyology from the University of Port Harcourt, Jonathan had ample opportunities to equip himself to overcome his early stumbles and rise to its lofty demands.  Instead, he cut the office down to his own picayune stature.  Before a global audience, his inadequacies became more glaring and more embarrassing with each passing day.

    And now, he wants four more years?

    Nigeria deserves better.

  • Like June 12, 1993, like February 14, 2015

    Like June 12, 1993, like February 14, 2015

    Comparisons, it has been said, are odious.

    No two situations are ever exactly alike.  Even where that improbable symmetry obtains, symmetrical outcomes are far from guaranteed.

    Still, the parallels between the build-up to June 12, 1993 presidential election and the build-up to presidential election scheduled for February 14 are troubling.

    In the weeks leading up to June 12, 1993, orchestrated demands for the scrubbing of the projected poll filled the air, promoted for the most part by proxies of Military President Ibrahim Babangida.

    The country was not ready, they said; the political class had learned no lessons. Babangida was the only person who could keep the system going, and if he was allowed to vacate power, it would end in violent dissolution.   He must be persuaded to hold on to power.

    Days to the election, Arthur Nzeribe – he who has never embraced a cause without bringing it into disrepute – secured a court ruling in the dead of night restraining Humphrey Nwosu’s National Electoral Commission from conducting the poll.

    Demonstrations were staged in many cities to demand the continuation of military rule.  Nor was the military spared. Ballots were circulated in the barracks, urging enlisted men and women to demand that Babangida continue in office. Advertisements to the same effect, placed by unidentified sponsors, filled the newspapers.

    The culmination of the transition to democratic rule, eight years in the making, became in the hands of the regime and its propagandists, aided by the coercive power of the state, a subject of fear and loathing

    Now, fast forward to the presidential election scheduled for February 14, 2015.

    An aggrieved lawyer, doing a variation on the Nzeribe gambit, has gone to court to seek to disqualify the main challenger, General Muhammadu Buhari, on the grounds that he lacks the basic educational qualification specified in the Constitution.

    The challenger has since shown beyond all reasonable doubt that he meets and even exceeds the required West African School Certificate. Disdaining the rules of evidence and lacking the confidence to pivot on the incumbent’s vaunted record of “transformation,” his opponents have now framed that academic requirement as the central issue in the contest.

    Their chief spokesperson Femi Fani-Kayode, who is fast gaining Nzeribe’s reputation for bringing into disrepute every cause he has ever embraced, thinks he has found a chink in Buhari’s amour and he is tearing away furiously.

    A suborned national army now sits as the final authority on academic certification in general and the West African School Certificate in particular.

    Rented crowds are poised to stage protests all over the country calling for a postponement of the presidential election, or for the setting up of an “interim government, to be headed no doubt by the incumbent, because the Independent National Electoral Commission is not ready, or because it would be imprudent to deflect the country from its present glorious course of prosperity and transformation.

    The similarities between June 12, 1993 and February 13, 2015, it is necessary to insist, are sobering, troubling even.

    But there has also been some innovation.

    The leading opposition party says it will form a parallel government if it is persuaded that it was cheated out of victory. Armed militants beholden to the incumbent and warn darkly that it would be the end of Nigeria as we know it if their candidate is not re-elected.

    Unlike 1993, what is shaping up now as Election Day draws closer and closer is the prospect of a grand collision of an immovable object and an irresistible force.

     

    New girl on the block

    In the vast literature on “June 12”, the epic struggle of Nigerians to reclaim their sovereign right to determine who will govern them, it was perhaps inevitable that some individuals and groups who played pivotal roles have passed largely unacknowledged.

    Some of those key figures may well have chosen to remain unsung out of a sound instinct for self preservation.  Others may take the view that the chronicle is necessarily a work in progress, and that they will be accorded their proper due in the fullness of time. Yet others may have chosen out of modesty to keep in the background; they had done what duty and circumstance required, which was what really counted.

    To this latter group belongs Dr Hamidat Doyinsola Abiola, who turned 70 last Sunday.

    In the Abiola household, Kudirat, of revered memory, was the NADECO face of the struggle. Doyin Abiola, operating on a different but complementary plane, was the strategic thinker and discreet mobiliser.

    She saw beyond the crowds and the bombast of the earlier phase and realised, as few did, that the struggle was going to be long and bitter, and that it could not be won on the streets.

    Appeasement was of course out of the question, and surrender was unthinkable. A way had to be found to keep the struggle alive, not merely on the streets, but in the hearts and minds of influential actors spanning the political spectrum in Nigeria, well as in the international community. That was the task Doyin Abiola set herself.

    To its pursuit she deployed many formidable assets: a sharp, analytic mind emblematized by a doctorate in communication research – the first Nigerian woman to acquire that distinction; three decades in journalism from the rank of reporter to managing director, a voracious appetite for reading, versatility in using new communication technology, courage, tenacity, and a considerable portion of her endowment from her husband’s fortune.

    She also applied to it a quality so sadly lacking in public life in Nigeria: judgment, a capacity for comparing and deciding, which was enhanced by her instinctive sense of right and wrong, of what is possible, merely probable, or outright impossible.

    And so, while Kudirat kept alive the support and loyalty of the “June 12” faithful, on the home front, Doyin Abiola reached out discreetly to those who had abandoned the camp, those who were sitting on the fence, and those who were viscerally opposed to the project.  I can bear witness because I accompanied her on some of the missions.

    To reach the attentive and influential audience abroad, Doyin Abiola hit upon the idea  of a monthly newsletter that would provide analysis and perspective on the struggle for democracy in Nigeria, and a status report on the central figure in that struggle, her husband Bashorun Abiola.

    It had to be scrupulously factual, from cover to cover.  It had to reflect accurately and in proportion the acts and utterances of the major factions, their motivations as well as their fears. It must contain no hint of self-pity or bitterness. It must foist no judgments or conclusions on the recipients.

    I was privileged to assist her in preparing the newsletter until I left Nigeria late in 1996. Its recipients included key leaders of the Commonwealth, the Organisation of African Unity, the United Nations, the European Community, senior officials of the Clinton White House, and leaders of influential NGOs.

    If the effort did not produce dramatic results, the feedback indicated that it certainly provided a sober and credible counterpoint to Sani Abacha’s lying propaganda. And it helped generate empathy for the struggle, and for Bashorun Abiola.

    Nothing, not even serious illness, could move Doyin Abiola to seek rest and respite abroad. She learned to live with danger and continued quietly and tirelessly to mobilise support for “June 12”.

    In the fullness of time, Dr Hamidat Doyin Abiola will get her proper due as a pivotal figure in the struggle for democracy in Nigeria. For now, I am sure she will be content to be celebrated as the new girl on the block.

    Welcome to the Club, and to the neighbourhood, HDA.

  • GMB does a rope-a-dope

    GMB does a rope-a-dope

    Is General Muhammadu Buhari or any member of his presidential campaign team by any chance a devoted student of the sweet science in general, its greatest exponent Muhammad Ali in particular, and the stratagem he deployed in flattening his most fearsome opponent ever in the encounter he christened the Rumble in the Jungle?

    The opponent was of course George Foreman, who had yanked one-time Ali conqueror Joe Frazier off his feet with an uppercut and dumped him on the canvas with an uppercut, on the way to knocking him out in inside two rounds.

    Foreman had also administered the same brutal treatment to Ken Norton who had broken Ali’s jaw in one encounter, and whose unorthodox boxing style Ali barely managed to figure out in subsequent winning encounters.

    The stratagem, courtesy of Muhammad Ali, has entered sporting history as “rope-a-dope.”

    There are two strands to it.

    In one, you cover up and in the ring and often lean back against the ropes to allow your opponent punch away until he exhausts himself and can no longer defend himself effectively. Then he is ripe for the taking.

    In the other, you behave passively or with little aggression until the moment arises for decisive action.

    This latter is what the GMB Campaign seems to have employed in laying to rest the controversy that had raged for several weeks as to whether Buhari met the minimum academic qualifications for entering the presidential race – an issue that had never come up in his three previous runs for the post.

    At the time of filing his election papers, he had indicated that his certificates were in the possession of the military authorities and could be obtained from them. The military authorities had said at one point that they were indeed in possession of the certificates, only to recant later in a sensational press conference designed for prime-time television.

    In a disavowal heard around the world, military spokesman virtually put the contents of General Muhammadu Buhari’s personnel file on global display. It contained no evidence, Brig.-Gen. Oladele Laleye said that Buhari obtained the requisite West African School Certificate, merely a letter from his school principal recommending him for military commission and expressing confidence that he would pass the WASC examination.

    The way the military spokesman carried himself, you would think that he was the chief prosecutor at a court-martial.

    By then the Goodluck Jonathan Campaign had worked itself and the Jonathan crowd into a froth. They launched a made-for-the-Internet “Buhari, Show Your Certificate” Campaign, hashtag and all. General Buhari, the most desperate elements in this group said, had been smuggled into officers corps on quota, with total disregard to the rules. In the normal run of things, he would have rated no higher than a sergeant.

    All manner of experts on the Nigerian Constitution hopped from television station to television station, declaring that all the credentials Buhari had earned in prestigious foreign military academies could not make up for his not having the WASC. “You cannot build something on nothing,” one of them said sententiously, quoting that epigram in the original Latin for added effect.

    With breathless excitement, the same fellow went on to declare that, by laying claim to a qualification he did not possess, or by claiming that his credentials were in the possession of the military authorities, Buhari had committed perjury. The penalty for that crime, he hinted darkly, was 14 years imprisonment.

    The implication was clear: Buhari was more likely to end up in Kirikiri Prison than in the Presidential Villa.

    It was at this point that the GMB Campaign which had refused to be drawn into the contrived controversy — some were already calling it a scandal —and chosen instead to absorb the jeers and the taunts and the innuendos and the coarse abuse in the finest rope-a-dope tradition came out swinging.

    And what a devastating blow it landed!

    Buhari authorised Government College, Katsina, the successor of his alma mater, the Katsina Provincial Secondary School, to release authenticated statement of result in the WASC.  The transcript shows, as Buhari had earlier disclosed, that he had passed the examination in Division Two, a respectable achievement back when examination leakages were almost unheard of, and the syndicated cheating that today marks most public examinations was inconceivable.

    Buhari’s succinct statement refocused and reframed the presidential contest in a way the Jonathan camp loathes so much. It is not about the certificate Buhari earned 53 years ago, but about the Nigerian condition, defined by mass unemployment, especially among the younger population, corruption on a scale beyond anything the country experienced even in the Babangida and Abacha years, and pervasive insecurity.

    Not a few jaws in the Jonathan camp dropped as what its functionaries had been wielding as a trump card became a symbol of its desperation, its propensity for lying on an industrial scale.

    You would think that its functionaries would now cease and desist, if not admit error.

    No chance. They are calling the document furnished by Buhari’s school a fresh forgery.  They are claiming that Buhari could not have passed Hausa at the WASC exam in 1961 because that subject was not offered then. They even trotted out a “curriculum expert” from one of the universities, who declared without fear and without research that no indigenous-language examinations were conducted on that platform in Nigeria at that time.

    The libel is on them. Back then, Hausa was already being offered even at the Advanced Level, and one of the set books was Shaihu Umar, a well-regarded novel by Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, later Nigeria’s first prime minister. It is these slanderers, not Buhari, that should check in at the nearest police station, enter a full confession, get booked for criminal libel, submit to a swift trial, and proceed to jail thereafter.

    Why should anyone now believe anything they say?

    Now that Buhari has provided satisfactory answers to the questions that have been raised about his credentials, the Jonathan Campaign will have only itself to blame if attention now shifts, as indeed it should, to their principal’s credentials, particularly the University of Port Harcourt Ph.D. his acolytes are parading as his unique selling point.

    Former President Olusegun Obasanjo for one has been reported as saying that at the time Jonathan was being interviewed for vice president, he did not have a doctorate. It does not follow from this that Jonathan did not subsequently complete the requirements for the degree.

    Even his sternest critics concede that, when it comes multi-tasking, he belongs in a special class of his own. He could therefore have wrapped up the dissertation while holding the demanding job of vice president, or even president.

    But when did he actually obtain the degree?  When was it formally conferred?

    For another, the dissertation on which the doctorate rests, I gather, is not available in the University of Port Harcourt Library, as it should be by law. Again, it does not follow from this that the dissertation does not exist.

    But where is it? Why is the whole thing so dodgy?

    For yet another, in manner, thought and speech, Jonathan rarely comes across as someone who has been tempered, much less transformed, by the sustained rigour and comprehensive sweep of doctoral study. He is certainly not a shining advertisement for the doctoral programme of the University of Port Harcourt in ichthyology or in any academic specialism for that matter.

    He and those who conferred him with the distinction of Doctor of Philosophy of that fine institution surely have a lot to explain.

  • Desperate days in Abuja

    Desperate days in Abuja

    You know that Abuja has been seized big-time by panic and desperation when the Commander-in-Chief who had for all practical purposes been AWOL as rampaging insurgents slaughter and maim and render destitute innocent citizens he took an oath to protect and carve out a vast swathe of the homeland took an oath to defend – it is a sure sign of panic and desperation when a beleaguered President Goodluck Jonathan suddenly materialises in Maiduguri, in Borno State, with frazzled officials in tow.

    It is the closest he has gone to the frontline in the war against Boko Haram and the closest to Chibok since more than 250 girls were abducted from their school hostels in that town some 280 days ago and taken to locations unknown.

    If the visit was designed to boost the morale of the soldiers on deployment, it failed at the elementary level of symbolism.  The Commander-in-Chief was decked out elegantly in mufti, not in military fatigues.

    If it was meant to show empathy and solidarity with the parents and relations of the Chibok girls in particular and the area residents in general, there was little in President Jonathan’s largely perfunctory speech that could have served that purpose.

    It was at once a cynical and opportunistic visit, hastily cobbled to shore up Dr Jonathan’s re-election chances once thought to be assured but now sinking fast as the ship of the APC ticket of General Muhammadu Buhari and Professor Yemi Osinbajo sallies forth, buoyed by what the Americans call The Big Mo (“Mo” as in Momentum).

    Much to the discomfiture and frustration of the Jonathan camp, corruption has become a major issue in the election campaign.  Previously, corruption thrived only on the periphery of the power structure; now, says former President Olusegun Obasanjo, it is embedded in the very heart of the Presidential Villa.

    No less tellingly, former military president, General Ibrahim Ibrahim Babangida, whose tenure remains a byword for graft on a scale almost beyond belief, has said that if the reports reaching him about the goings-on in the Jonathan administration are true, he and his much-vilified regime would now have to be adjudged saints.

    Now, Dr Jonathan, who didn’t give a damn about making a public declaration of his immense on-shore and off-shore assets and doesn’t give a damn about so many things that lie at the heart of modern governance, is reeling under his administration’s well-earned reputation for syndicated corruption.

    In contrast, the appeal of Buhari’s candidature rests principally on public perception of his reputation for integrity, his Spartan lifestyle, and his having little or no tolerance for corruption in its many guises and disguises.

    In politics, perception is almost everything.

    No surprise, then, that Dr Jonathan’s publicists have been hacking away at the public perception of Buhari’s personal integrity with everything they can find or invent, determined not merely to neutralise it, but in the classic tradition of warfare, to turn it into a crippling liability.

    The thinking in their camp seems to be that if they can show that Buhari’s reputation for integrity is founded on shaky soil, they can cripple his candidature.They are pursing this strategy on two broad fronts.

    The first is not merely to cast grave doubts on Buhari’s academic qualifications for the post, but to assert categorically that he lacks those credentials.

    And so, all of a sudden, the paper qualifications of a person who has served as military head of state and run for president three times – albeit unsuccessfully – under a Constitution that has undergone no fundamental change, is whipped into an overarching issue, a test of his integrity.

    By the way, they should not make too much of the fact that Buhari is running for president the fourth time.  Abraham Lincoln was elected president at his fourth attempt, and went on to become one of the greatest U. S. presidents.

    Buhari is of course no Abraham Lincoln any more than Goodluck Jonathan is Nelson Mandela or Lee Kuan Yew or Martin Luther King, Jr., or Barack Obama, with whom Jonathan is being placed in one sacrilegious bracket by his acolytes.

    The second tack of the spirited campaign to render Buhari hors de combat is to cast grave doubt on his integrity as chair of the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF), a position to which he was appointed precisely because of his perceived integrity.

    A report on the intervention outcomes of the PTF recommended that some N25 billion be recovered from contractors and consultants who had been paid for work not done,  or had fleeced the Fund through heavy over-invoicing and supply of junk material and expired drugs, and officials who had spent public funds irresponsibly.

    Through dark innuendo, Dr Jonathan’s publicists seek to parlay this recommendation into iron-clad evidence that Buhari was somehow culpable and does not deserve the reputation he enjoys.

    It is nothing of the sort. The report indicts Buhari only to the extent that he was chair of the PTF.  He held that post in a non-executive capacity.  The executive secretary, and in effect the accounting officer, was Chief Tayo Akpata, who is unfortunately no longer with us.  Were he alive, he would have with his accustomed thoroughness answered point by point the charges the Jonathan camp has dredged up.

    They are even playing the ethnic card, portraying Buhari as a person who hates the Yoruba and Igbo because his regime detained a slew of their leaders for unconscionably long periods and because the courts handed many among them unusually long prison sentences.

    Many of the detentions and jail sentences cannot be justified. But there was no ethnic pattern to them. The target was a political class that had messed up the country.

    Former President Shehu Shagari was not held in prison, unlike former Vice President Alex Ekwueme; yet he almost lost his sight in the darkened rooms of the house where he was detained in Ikoyi. The late Solomon Lar almost lost his hearing as a result, he said, of drinking bad water in prison.

    Meanwhile, on a personal level, Dr Jonathan remains the gift that keeps giving to his opponents. In Lagos where he could have wowed the audience and even won it over with a scintillating demonstration of his mastery of the intricate dance steps of the dance craze azonto, he launched into a furious tirade against those parading themselves as international statesmen when they were no better than motor-park touts.

    I thought the person he had in mind was Chief Edwin Clark, until someone called my attention to the term “international,” which gave Dr Jonathan’s remark an entirely different construction. Only in Nigeria would a hard-boiled rabble-rouser like Clark be called a “statesman.”

    Again, there was Dr Jonathan elsewhere promising to fund at local, state and national level the hugely discredited “office” of First Lady even as he claimed that it did not operate on public funds.  On what funds do the women draw, then?

    In whatever case, is he not aware that his wife, Dame Patience Faka, has done more than all previous functionaries combined to bring the position into odium and disrepute?

    If in her own particular case she rendered the position so repugnant without access to public funds, she will make it positively execrable when guaranteed unlimited access to the public treasury.

    On yet another campaign stop Dr Jonathan, armed with figures conjured up by the Minister of Agriculture, Dr Akinwumi Adesina, went on and on about how, under his transformation agenda, Nigeria had achieved food sufficiency. He made this claim just several days after the Central Bank reported that the inflation rate had inched up, driven largely by rising food prices.

    Next month’s presidential election is not about Buhari’s past, though that past cannot be discountenanced entirely. It is primarily about the present, and what it holds for the future. Dr Jonathan bears the burden of presenting before a jaded national audience what he will do in the next four years that he could not do in the previous six, and what he will do differently if re-elected.

    This is the time when the superior learning they claim for him should translate splendidly into superior thinking, superior reasoning, superior understanding, superior articulation, and superior character.

  • Curiouser and curiouser in Ekiti

    Curiouser and curiouser in Ekiti

    Ekiti State has been going through a radical branding since the once and still hugely discredited Ayo Fayose returned to power as governor.

    It used to pride itself as a Fountain of  Knowledge on account of being reputed to have, household per household, the largest number of holders of earned doctoral degrees in Nigeria, and one of largest in the world. It had long been settled that there is no academic specialism so recondite or arcane that you will not find at least one person in a household in Ekiti holding a doctorate in it.

    Fayose seems to have made peace with that characterisation of Ekiti.

    What he apparently finds it hard to reconcile himself with is Ekiti’s other profile as a land of two of the most prized assets among the Yoruba – íyì and éeyè, which translate into honour and propriety.

    He served notice the other day that he would strip the Ekiti Coat of Arms of those enduring values, whether as aspiration or actuality. He may even have done so in the manner that becomes him so well.

    But that is not the subject of this piece.

    Nor is Fayose’s solicitous catering to the stomach structure of Ekiti State residents during the Yuletide the concern here, remarkable as it was, what with people from all over Nigeria and even from the ECOWAS region pouring into the state capital to obtain a portion of the Fayose Bonanza – rice, hens, cooking oil, salt, pepper and onions, together with pots and pans and other utensils guaranteed to do justice to such a special occasion.

    I gather that the next edition of the Stomach Infrastructure Initiative, or Fayose Special, is scheduled for Easter. Personally, however, I will not be surprised if Fayose were to decide to stage the event much earlier in deference to those complaining that Easter is too far, great democrat that he is. Plus, remember that the reason he connects so well is that he hears the people even before they begin to talk.

    Again, that is not the subject of this piece.

    Between his election and his inauguration, Fayose had gone from one bank to another warning of dire consequences if they granted his predecessor loans to service the administration’s financial  obligations.  And when that administration could not pay civil servants in its last month in office, Fayose had latched on to that as proof, were any still required, of the wickednessand callousness of Governor Kayode Fayemi and his team.

    Now finding himself similarly circumstanced, Fayose is appealing to civil servants to appreciate why their salaries had to be delayed.

    While campaigning for the governorship, Fayose had declared that President Goodluck Jonathan had promised to give him anything he wanted if he could capture Ekiti for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).  Why is Fayose not rushing to cash in on the promise to bring in huge federal assets to stave off the growing popular discontent?  The whole thing should take no more than a phone call to Aso Rock. So, what is Fayose waiting for?

    Again, that is not the subject of this column.

    By now, everyone knows how seven of the 26 members of the State Assembly, all elected on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC), defected to the PDP several hours after Fayose was declared winner of the gubernatorial election, and how the defectors, their ranks swollen by three infiltrators of identities unknown, purportedly convened a meeting of the Assembly during which they had claimed to have impeached the Assembly Speaker, Dr Ademola Omirin, and to have replaced him with one of their own.

    Everyone one knows how, drawing on a variation of the peculiar mathematics of the PDP and the Jonathan administration under which 14 is a larger number than 18, Fayose decreed that the seven defectors constitute a majority of the total membership of the House vested with law-making.

    The public knows how the seven defectors and their unidentified confederates had purported to carry out, in the appointed chambers, and under the full protection of the police,  the business of the Assembly, to wit, approving Fayose’s nominee for State Attorney-General (ha!) among other appointments, and passing into law the State’s 2015 Appropriations.

    Everyone also knows how the 19-member majority of the House was reduced to meeting at secret locations to countermand the legislative acts the defectors purported to have carried out. They had to meet in such circumstances because Fayose and the police could not or would not guarantee their safety.

    The public knows these developments all too well.  Those developments are consequently not the subject of this piece, merely a backdrop to it.

    To finally come right out with it, this column is about the recent transformation of the Police Command in Ekiti from a force accused of passively watching elements of the ruling PDP harass and intimidate and brutalise supporters of the opposition when it is not actually siding with and aiding and abetting the lawless rule of the PDP in Ekiti, to an institution dedicated to the peaceful resolution of disputes.

    To get to specifics, the police that had stood by as thugs invaded the Ekiti High Court, beat up judges, tore up lawyers’ robes and shredded court documents now want to reconcile the minority seeking to usurp the legislative functions of the Ekiti House of Assembly, and tne majority that have refused to submit to Fayose’s threats and blandishments and who knows what else from Abuja.

    How this improbable mission came about it remains for now a secret, but since it was announced by the Ekiti Commissioner of Police, Taiwo Lakanu, there can be no doubt that, at the very least, it has been approved from the very top. I doubt whether the police would have embarked on such a radical departure from its standard operational procedures without that kind of approval.

    If this is not another false dawn, the implications are far-reaching.

    Instead of dispersing protesters and demonstrators with main force, the police will henceforth function as honest brokers between them and the institutions they are protesting against  – between Labour and Capital, between students and the university administration, between perpetrator and victim.

    The more perceptive observers of the political scene would have sensed the coming of this new dispensation when, in the dispute over the competence of Aminu Tambuwal to continue to function as Speaker of the House of Representatives after defecting from the ruling PDP, Police Inspector-General Sulaiman Abba made it emphatically the province of the police to have the last word on the Constitution.

    From that singular act, it was but a short step to re-constituting the police into an institution for settling disputes and resolving conflict.

    Some may question whether the police are trained or otherwise equipped to perform such a function.  But they cannot question the function itself.  Somebody or some institution has to perform it.

    If, as in Ekiti and increasingly in other parts of Nigeria the courts and traditional rulers or so-called “royal fathers” cannot or will not perform that function, who can blame the police for stepping into the breach, even if that moves the country farther and farther along the road to a Police State?

  • GEJ and the ‘vision’ thing

    GEJ and the ‘vision’ thing

    I don’t envy Dr Goodluck Jonathan’s propaganda brigade

    This past week, its operatives have been striving to outdo each other in a frenzied race to demonise and pulverise General Muhammadu Buhari, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) who will be squaring off with their principal in the February 13 presidential election.

    In this season, that is probably the easiest of political assignments. Among politicians aspiring to higher office, Buhari is probably the softest of targets. And they are sparing no effort to paint him, with help from his record as military head of state nearly three decades back in the most repellent hues.

    The irony is that, while they are busy excoriating Buhari, their principal has been busy exhuming questions that had never lain far beneath the surface about his intellectual preparation and competence for the post he has held for six years

    Now, it is one thing to raise questions about the academic credentials of a career military officer-turned politician; it is quite another for the holder a doctorate and former academic to raise at every outing questions and doubts about his own intellectual competence.

    Yet, that is what Dr Jonathan does every time he speaks without a prepared text, even when his audience is a friendly church congregation. He delivers himself in a speech pattern of which non sequiturs, dubious analogies, mangled syntax, and thoughts arrested in mid-sentence are the distinguishing characteristics.

    “Jonathanism” is the provisional term that a researcher in linguistics in one of our universities has bestowed on that pattern of speech, in honour of our GEJ.   He tells me he is assembling an anthology of Jonathanisms, and would gratefully acknowledge examples of the phenomenon from readers.

    No fake entries, please. The entries must be based entirely on words that Dr Jonathan actually spoke, where and on what occasion he spoke them, and of course, the date.

    Entries should be sent to “Jonathanisms,” c/o P O Box 419, Abuja, or jonathanisms@yahoo.com

    Here is the latest example, of how Dr Jonathan has been undermining his own campaign in ways that his most outspoken critics will be hard put to match, in remarks made at the Dunamis International Church, in Abuja, on New Year Day, as reported in several national dailies:

    “President Goodluck Jonathan has identified lack of vision as one of the main reasons government policies have often failed and pledged a return to the good old days when things were done with clear-cut vision. . .”

    Nobody can blame you for holding it right there and slowly exclaiming:  Holy Molly!

    We cannot enter into Dr Jonathan’s mind to ascertain what he really meant.  Nor should we second-guess him. Going by his actual  words, an objective analyst would have to say that Dr Jonathan came across as yearning for a return of “the good old days” when planning was based on, as he phrased it, “clear-cut vision,”  unlike today, when government policies founder and fail for “lack of vision.”

    By way of clarification, Dr Jonathan added:

    “.. . If you look at what we have been doing as a nation, you really see that before this time when Nigeria used to have what we call 25-year rolling plan, we used to budget based on a 25-year clear plan for the country, so you know where you are going for 25 years then it was broken down to five years plan and now an annual budget.”

    “But after sometimes things collapsed and we run governments on emergency basis and you see government started wobbling and I can assure you that we are going back to those good old days when we had vision.”

    Nigeria never had a budget based on a 25-year plan, by the way. But there you have it.  In the good old days, there was vision. But now, in the Age of Transformation, there is no vision.

    This lack of vision explains so many things that define the Nigerian condition.

    It explains what happened to Vision 20/20, and what is likely to happen to Vision 2020/20,  despite the creative re-basing of the economy and all that.

    It explains why national budgets drawn up and presented with ritual fanfare every year fail miserably to achieve their targets. It explains why Benin Republic is cashing in big-time on duties on imports destined for Nigeria, at the expense of the Federal Government.  It explains why some inter-state highways look like tracks on the lunar surface.

    It explains why the power supply varies inversely as sum of the public funds pumped into power generation. It explains why eight months after some 250 school girls were spirited from their school hostels in Chibok into the infernal bowels of Sambisa forest, their traumatised parents and a jaded public are treated to nothing but threadbare assurances that the girls would soon be brought home.

    It explains why fuel has to be imported in a country that procures more than a million barrels of crude daily and has four oil refineries.  It explains the mess called SURE-P.  It explains why a president who grew up without shoes has made a fetish of acquiring executive jetliners.

    It explains why hundreds of millions of  Naira is allocated each year for procurement and maintenance of electric generator sets for the so-called Presidency and why, until there was a public outcry, that institution voted one billion Naira every year for food and refreshments.

    It explains why Nigeria abstained from delivering a crucial vote that would have aligned it with those countries seeking an end to Israeli annexation and occupation of Palestinian territories in defiance of United Nations resolutions going back to 1967, and other policies that have turned Gaza into what British Prime Minister David Cameron in one moment of lucidity called “the world’s largest open-air prison.”

    Lack of vision explains why Dr Jonathan – and his predecessors– would rather travel abroad for medical treatment than build and equip even one world-class medical facility in Nigeria.

    Given the lack of vision that has historically doomed Nigeria, what can be expected in the long run of Dr Olusegun Aganga’s Industrial Revolution that seeks in essence to re-invent the wheel, or Dr Akinwumi Adesina’s Agricultural Revolution founded on statistical flights of fancy?

    For that matter, what is the future Dr Jonathan’s Transformation Agenda that was conceived in this era of no vision? Given his new resolve to return to the good old days when there was vision, will he now jettison it?

    And here is a bit of presidential wisdom for all those institutions that provide training without giving any thought to creating jobs:

    “You are rather frustrating more people and increasing the number of criminals in the society,” Dr Jonathan admonished them. “I always say that if you train a young man as a fitter and he has no job to do, he will use that skill to break into banks, because you have trained him on how to handle iron and how to handle complicated locks.”

    There you have it again, a classic Jonathanism.

    Taking together, the lack of vision for which Dr Jonathan has entered a damning indictment on himself and his administration, the pattern of thought and speech that the researcher we encountered earlier has christened “Jonathanisms,” and his failure of leadership on some key issues of national existence, it is no injustice to say of Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan that he cannot lead Nigeria to the Promised Land.