The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • Fayose 2.0: A troubling start

    Fayose 2.0: A troubling start

    Ayo Fayose’s second coming as Governor of Ekiti State is the stuff of fairy tales.

    His first coming, marked by ceaseless tumult and high scandal, ended in impeachment and disgrace half-way into a four-year term. It seemed then, for all practical purposes, that he was finished politically, his future behind him.

    When he ran for Senate and was decisively rejected by the voters, nobody but Fayose himself could have wagered that, some three years down the line, he would secure the PDP’s ticket, despite an EFCC indictment for sleaze on a scale almost beyond belief, and two murder raps, on the way to a grand political resurrection that would take him back to the Governor’s Lodge in Ado-Ekiti.

    Such instances of redemption are rare in public life. A new, improved Fayose was widely expected to embrace it as an opportunity to chart a new trajectory, and to make up for the  huge deficits in character and achievement and elementary decency that had vitiated his first coming.

    But Fayose, being Fayose, is throwing the opportunity away with both hands.  Well before it was time for him to take charge, he had already started stirring things up. He sought at every opportunity to denigrate the person and office of the incumbent, Dr Kayode Fayemi, and his impressive portfolio of achievements with an incendiary brew of falsehoods, half-truths and innuendo.

    He countermanded Dr Fayemi, urging the public to disobey a curfew that had been imposed  in the interest of public safety. He led his band of supporters to abort hearings in a petition challenging his eligibility to run for governor. In the process, they beat up officers of the court and shredded a judge’s robes, as well as court documents.

    His inaugural address has, if anything, confirmed the worst fears of those who set a great store by due process and decorum in public life.

    The occasion called for reaching out to all the people of Ekiti, supporters and opponents —  especially opponents, assuring them that the race was over and that it was time to come together. It was certainly the moment to deploy language and ceremony and symbol to summon the polity to common purpose.

    Instead, Fayose launched into triumphalism of the coarsest kind, baiting and berating his political opponents and vowing to run them not just out of Ekiti but out of the entire Yoruba land. He reminded his audience that he was the first son of Ekiti to serve as state governor twice, and the first Nigerian to defeat two incumbents.

    Remarkable feats, to be sure.  But to what purpose?

    Instead of asking the public he had so grievously wronged during his first coming to forgive him his transgressions, he said he had “forgiven” the public for his impeachment and disgrace. But was it not his blazing lawless conduct and lack of probity that led to his downfall?

    Of what use, he said, were good roads to people who had no cars and no food? He was going to cater to the infrastructure of the stomach. To the vehement cheering of the crowd, he announced that he was already breeding their Christmas chicken, and that there would be plenty of rice to go with it.

    His predecessor and his team could take their urbaneness and all that came with it to “their master” in Lagos.  He would continue, as of old, to eat in the roadside and makeshift stalls that his favourite people patronise, and would continue to “put something down” at the end of his visits (translation: tips large enough to pay for the entire stuff on offer). And he would continue to partake of their medicinal concoctions.

    Fayose had conveniently forgotten that, in his first coming, he had shunned motor cars even where there were passable roads and had chosen instead to criss-cross Ekiti’s compact land mass in a helicopter. He had forgotten also the “integrated poultry project” on which he wasted a colossal amount of public money without producing a single egg.

    Why is he so obsessed with poultry anyway? Is that the limit of his imagination?

    In the manner of a conjurer or a Pentecostal preacher with an eye on the bottom line, he decreed prosperity and peace and happiness and jobs and every good thing imaginable unto the state, as if governance were a matter of just willing things into existence.

    The opposition APC, he said, bore full responsibility for the fracas in the precincts of the Ado-Ekiti High Court in the run-up to the inauguration. Desperate to block his taking office, it had bribed some judges to pervert the course of justice. The appropriate authorities were looking into the matter, and those judges who had compromised their oath of office  — one of them was appropriately on hand to swear him in — would face appropriate sanctions.

    In the meantime, he was going to build a judiciary in Ekiti that was second to none.

    And, yes, he was going to see to it that a “military formation” was set up in Ekiti. It was not clear whether he was going to pursue the project on his own, or invite the federal government, the agent of the ruling PDP, to establish a garrison in Ekiti.

    Not an industrial venture, not an undertaking that would pivot on the superior educational accomplishments of the residents, but a military formation.

    Like a person possessed, he has been issuing diktats abolishing, dissolving, rescinding, or suspending one thing or another, all in a bid to drive it home that a new sheriff was in town.

    As speeches go, in all my adult life, I have never heard anything more divisive even in Nigeria. About the only portion of Fayose’s peroration that almost sounded conciliatory and statesman-like was where he called for a moment of silence in remembrance of those killed in election violence.   But before you could accuse him of high-mindedness, he made it clear that the gesture extended only to his supporters.

    In practically every respect, he was serving notice that he had come, not to be governor for all of Ekiti but governor to his supporters and a scourge to his opponents, real or perceived. He seems not to realise that his opponents are also bona fide residents of Ekiti and citizens of Nigeria, and that the Constitution enjoins him to accord them equal treatment.

    Where Fayose’s inaugural address was not divisive, it read like a passage from the diary of a megalomaniac.

    All in all, it was a disastrous beginning. His first coming was decidedly a farce, riddled with sophomoric stunts, like renting hens to showcase an integrated poultry project that never got off the drawing board.

    His second coming has already taken on the contours of a tragedy.

  • When GEJ finally gave a damn

    When GEJ finally gave a damn

    The usually somnolent Presidential Villa in Abuja spurted into damage control last week when several Nigerian newspapers, quoting an online magazine RichestLifestyle.com, reported that Dr Goodluck Jonathan ranks sixth among the wealthiest African heads of state, with a personal net worth of U.S. $100 million.

    The report thus elicited from on high what a barbarous assault on the Judicial Branch that same week had failed to elicit. It also moved an apparently incensed Dr Jonathan to lapse       into an absurdity that was entirely lost on him.  If the publication was not retracted, he would file lawsuits against the first publisher of the alleged libel and all media organisations that republished it.

    Where?

    In the same courts, in the desecration of which he has connived, by act and omission?  The  very courts he has eviscerated out of raw partisanship?  It is preposterous that Dr Jonathan would effectively, even if temporarily, oust the jurisdiction of the courts out of self-interest,  and then threaten to use the authority of the same courts to affirm his self interest, namely,   the reputation he is asserting.

    The whole thing was clearly an over-reaction that proved nothing and settled nothing.  And it is emblematic of the utter humourlessness at the top, as I will demonstrate presently.

    To return to the publication that sent Aso Rock into a tizzy:  In absolute terms, the amount  reported as Dr Jonathan’s personal net worth might seem staggering, especially when most Nigerians live on no more than two dollars a day.  But when compared with the reported net worth of the Top Five in the League of Africa’s Wealthiest Rulers, it is piddling.

    President Eduardo dos Santos of Angola tops the League with a personal net worth, or “known wealth”, of $20 billion, according to NewsRescue.com, which seems to be domiciled in Nigeria. The Moroccan monarch, Mohammed V, comes a distant second, with a personal net worth of just $2.5 billion. Thereafter, the graph falls precipitously, with Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea at third place with a personal net worth of $600 million.

    This last has got to be a huge undercount.  Mbasogo’s playboy son, known simply as Teodorin, blows close to that amount every year in his escapades in the most notorious fleshpots of Europe and the United States.

    Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya, on the saddle for just one year, comes in fourth, worth some $500 million, followed by the wily and durable Paul Biya of Cameroun at fifth, reportedly worth $200 million.

    Only then does our JEG figure in the League, tied for sixth place with, of all people, the hugely concupiscent King Mswati of the landlocked, hardscrabble state of Swaziland, with Idris Deby of Chad ($50 million) and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe ($10 million), after nearly three decades in office and in power, bringing up the rear. Mugabe seems to have been tucked into the mix as an afterthought.  They never miss a chance to tweak what is left of Uncle Bob’s moustache.

    Personally, I am even more enraged than Dr Jonathan can possibly be, though for an entirely different reason.

    He is clearly not in the league of Aliko Dangote, Mike Adenuga, Folorunsho Alakija, or even  Femi Otedollar – beg your pardon again, Ote$, beg your pardon one more time, Otedola. Even after former police chief Tafa Balogun was dispossessed of sizable  chunk of his gazillions, he may still well be worth close to, if not more than the amount over which they are working themselves into a froth in the Villa.

    In Nigeria, it is no longer news that even middling “civil servants” and customs officers  now tote up their net worth in the hundreds of millions of naira. That kind of money is no more than pocket-change to the syndicate of wheelers and dealers and smugglers who control the petroleum industry.

    How then can it even be newsworthy that the man who sits atop Nigeria’s re-based economy, the largest in all of Africa and 16th largest in the entire world (take that, South Africa), with a run-away annual growth rate conservatively estimated at six per cent, to say nothing of a Transformational Achievement Index in the stratosphere:  how can it be newsworthy then, it  is necessary to ask, that the President of such a country has a personal net worth of just N100 million, unless the purpose is to canonise him for modesty and restraint and prudence, the rarest attributes in our clime?

    How can it be deemed equitable that Uhuru Kenyatta, who took charge in a Kenya with a struggling economy just a year ago, should have a personal net worth five times that of our own JEG who has been running Africa’s most prosperous economy for the better part of six years?

    Dr Jonathan’s inveterate critics will put down his puny personal net worth to lack of ambition or imagination or enterprise – or indeed, all three – on his part. And the gullible as well as the unpatriotic, whom we shall always have amongst us, just might believe them.

    It is at these – the inveterate critics and their gullible and unpatriotic followers, especially the  unpatriotic —that Aso Rock should have directed its indignation when it finally chose to give a damn, a mistake it must now be regretting.

    It should have stuck with its practice of not giving a damn in matters of this kind.  By breaking its own code, it has merely emboldened all kind of meddlers to wade into matter and stir things up.

    Instead of applauding Dr Jonathan’s forthrightness, some of these people are taunting him, saying that it is not enough to deny that he has personal assets worth $100 million. If Aso Rock disputes that figure, they say, why won’t it supply the correct one and lay the matter to rest?

    That was exactly what President Mobutu Sese Seko did in the 1980s at a point in his crisis-ridden reign in Zaire, now Congo DR, when the news media were saturated with reports that he had stashed away a personal fortune of $500 million in coded offshore bank accounts.

    Not so, he said at a news conference.

    How much was he worth, then?

    Only $25 million, he said, adding that, after 25 years of selfless service to the people – who, he once said in a moment of exasperation, had forfeited his confidence—he did not consider $25 million an unjust recompense.

    At a million dollars a year, that was a great bargain for the people of Zaire.  The matter never came up again.

    The challenge Mobutu faced is exceedingly courteous compared with the one that some of the unpatriotic elements, aforementioned, have launched. They say if Dr Jonathan still has enough faith in the courts he has locked up to repair there for redress, they will meet him there with iron-clad proof that he is worth a great deal more than the $100 million he is kvetching about and that the reputation he is claiming rests on shaky ground.

    Strong stuff, indeed.

    All because Dr Jonathan decided for once to give a damn.

    But all is not lost. There is an authentic Nigerian formula he can employ to get out of this unforced error.

    Accused in the 1960s of pocketing £3,000 — the equivalent of a cabinet minister’s salary for a year then –in what came to be known as the Ijora Land Deal, Dr Kingsley Mbadiwe responded with the bonhomie that became him so well.

    The money about which his detractors were working up so much fuss, he said, was “chicken feed in an elephantine mouth”.

    Loosen up, GEJ.  Take a vacation.

     

  • Silk, at last, for a doughty sentry

    Silk, at last, for a doughty sentry

    For Dr Gabriel Olusoga Onagoruwa, erudite legal scholar, brilliant advocate and a crusader  for human rights long before that subject acquired high salience in national and international politics, and Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation in the Sani Abacha junta, the road to silk has been long, thorny and tortuous. Every sitting Attorney-General of the Federation had by virtue of that office been elevated to the rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN). Onagoruwa was the sole exception.

    The forces ranged against him – the same forces that were ranged against Gani Fawehinmi in his quest for silk — were implacable and unyielding. It took the intervention of the Chief Justice of the Federation,  Mariam Aloma Mukhtar, to break the choke-hold that a cabal in the Legal Privileges and Ethics Committee had kept on Onagoruwa’s translation to SAN, just as it had required the intervention of another chief justice, Mohammed Uwais, to break the cabal’s veto on Fawehimi’s accession to SAN. When it ran out of excuses to deny Fawehimni the rank he had earned many times over in a career with few parallels, it conferred the distinction on him for his contributions to the legal literature, not for his brilliant advocacy and recondite forensic skills. When it finally came, restitution was almost meaningless. Fawehinmi‘s court appearances were few and far between; he was already battling the cancer that eventually claimed his life.

    Restitution has come to Onagoruwa at a time when he cannot profit much from it.  This unconscionable delay is of a piece with the string of persecutions he has suffered in a career marked by courage, outspokenness and commitment to justice. Onagoruwa’s erudite commentary in signed newspaper articles and pronouncements on the lecture circuit marked him out as an adversary of military rule. So unyielding was his opposition to the structural adjustment programme and so unsparing was he of the other depredations of the Babangida era, that the so-called security services were mandated to destroy him.

    They went from one media house to another, peddling forged documents purporting to show that Onagoruwa had cheated at the Bar finals in the Nigerian Law School. They found no takers. They prosecuted him for carrying and using an unlicensed weapon.

    The “weapon” at issue turned out to be some over-the-counter spraying device to stun would-be assailants.They suborned a relation to file a criminal complaint against him charging that he had failed to deliver some money he had received on her behalf in a land transaction. It turned out that the complainant had sold the property to two different persons, and Onagoruwa was holding the money against the claims that were sure to follow.

    They tried to gin up an appeal that would reverse the court’s verdict so that they could pivot on it to block Onagoruwa’s appointment as Federal Attorney-General as well as his taking silk, if not to bar him entirely from legal practice. His privations would be compounded by his ill-advised service as Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation in the junta of the loathsome Sani Abacha.

    Onagorowa will contest this judgment on his cabinet appointment fiercely, as he has on countless occasions. He will insist, as he has done again and again, that President-elect Moshood Abiola had urged him to accept the appointment; that he had gone into the cabinet to help realise the progressive agenda, including the actualisation of the June 12 mandate, and that his presence on the Abacha team had, in the final analysis, been beneficent.

    The plan, as another member of the cabinet, the late Chief Silas Daniyan, stated for the record, was that Abiola’s nominees would go into the Abacha cabinet for a stipulated period, first to help legitimise it in the public consciousness, and then to soften the ground for the validation of the June 12 mandate.

    You could accuse them of credulity or perhaps even naiveté, but that was the agreement. With each passing day, it became clearer that Abacha had come to entrench himself in power, not to validate Abiola’s mandate.

    Those who had thought they could do business with Abacha finally saw their error, but not those they had pressed into Abacha’s service. And so, when they were asked to pull out of an agreement that the other party had virtually abrogated, they sat tight, inventing one self-serving rationalisation after another. To his credit, Onagoruwa resigned after stating publicly that he knew nothing about the decrees the regime churned out daily, and that his name was being taken in vain.  By then, the damage was already done.

    He had become alienated from the progressive community. As punishment for Onagoruwa’s daring, Abacha sent his goon squad to murder his son Toyin, a young attorney full of promise.

    The regime used every means at its disposal to block Onagoruwa’s elevation to the rank of Senior Advocate – an elevation he had earned several times over. That is a fearsome price to pay for one single misjudgment.  It is a heavier burden still for a man who had already suffered so much and paid a high price for his principled commitment to the public good. Time has not fully restored him to the esteem he once enjoyed. When he turned 70 in 2006, they brought out the drums and the trumpets. Justice Kayode Eso, one of the most honourable jurists who ever served on the Bench in Nigeria, graced the occasion with his distinguished presence.

    The reclusive Guardian publisher and Onagoruwa’s former cabinet colleague, Alex Ibru, was in attendance with his wife, Maiden. Dozens of practising lawyers who had learned and honed their forensic skills in Onagoruwa’s law chambers turned up to pay homage-more.

    The drums rolled out all right and the trumpets wailed.  However, for a man once venerated as a doughty sentry of our liberties — I recall sharing a public platform with him during the Buhari-Idiagbon era at which he declared, within an earshot of the Government House, Ilorin, and without the slightest tremor of voice or twitch of countenance, that by enacting the infamous Decree Four, the regime had declared war on the people of Nigeria — the drums and the trumpets were muffled.

    Representatives of the worthy causes Onagoruwa had served to the best of his great ability earning in the process a solid reputation for courage and principle were for the most part missing.

    The news media, whose freedom he had championed and defended for decades, registered no presence.

    The human rights community sent no delegation. In the dark days after June 12, 1993, when the two official political parties engaged each other in a brutal fight to demonstrate which could better assist military president Ibrahim Babangida to throttle the popular will, the Movement of National Reformation (MNR), led by Chief Anthony Enahoro, came closer than any other single organisation to expressing that will with clarity and eloquence. Few remembered then or now that Onagoruwa was its general secretary. All because of one misjudgment.

    But few will contest Onagoruwa’s courage, his commitment to freedom and justice, and his essential decency. Fewer still will contest his great learningand his forensic skills, especially his devastating courtroom cross-examination. That it took the Legal Privileges and Ethics Committee so long to acknowledge Onagoruwa’s undeniable eminence in the legal profession speaks to the pusillanimity and manipulability that have often corroded its proceedings.

     

     

  • Serubawon in Ado-Ekiti

    Serubawon in Ado-Ekiti

    One of the more colourful politicians thrown up by military president Ibrahim Babangida’s duplicitous transition programme was a tall, solidly built young man who had about him an air of refinement that was accentuated by his exquisite tailoring. His trademark dog-eared cap,a sentimental archaism then but now a la mode, bespoke a cultured sensibility.

    But what he inspired most was fear – primal fear.

    I cannot vouch that he ever knocked one of his commissioners into unconscious during a cabinet meeting to consider the state’s appropriations,or that he ever lifted any of his permanent secretaries by the ears and slammed him onto the wall some 30 feet away.

    But tales of his predilection for that kind of behaviour was the stuff of political gossip, and had led to his being called – behind his back, of course, and clearly out of his hearing range – Serubawon, literally, the one who scares them witless.

    Even if the tales were apocryphal, they put associates and adversaries alike on notice that to trifle with His Excellency Serubawon was to court danger.

    But somehow, the governor’s reputation for getting things done without fuss and without challenge seemed not to have registered on the State Assembly, in which his party, the one that was a Little to the Left, held practically all the seats.

    Where he sought to move at a furious gallop, the legislators seemed to love nothing better than hearing their own voices proposing, amending and raising points of order.

    One cold, dusty morning in December, 1992, as the legislators were settling down for business in the State Assembly just across from the central market in Osogbo, they espied a motley crowd armed with shovels, pick-axes, machetes and all manner of cudgels. Before they could figure what it was all about, the Assembly was under siege.

    Shouting foul imprecations and bellowing blood-curdling threats, the invaders smashed their way into the chamber and set upon the legislators with maniacal fury.

    Casting off their ornately embroidered agbada with practised ease and displaying the comprehensive agility of the decathlete, many of them escaped through windows no wider than a computer monitor.

    Some hid for hours in stuffy broom cupboards and in the very toilets that had drawn their withering censure only the previous week during a debate on the physical plant.

    It was a focused, results-oriented Assembly that reconvened two weeks later, a real partner in progress with the state’s chief executive, Isiaka Adeleke.

    Fast forward to 1999, when Nigeria embarked on a fresh attempt at plebiscitary democracy. Almost from the moment he took office as governor, Abia State was in ferment. The air was saturated with talk of impeachment, with assassination plots, cabinet shuffles and threats of cabinet shuffles thrown in as comic relief.

    Matters took an alarmingly violent turn on June 26, 2,000, when hundreds of  youths reportedly incensed by rumours that the legislature was plotting to impeach Governor Orji Kalu, descended upon the State Assembly in busloads.  They smashed up the place, battered those legislators they regarded as Kalu’s opponents and helped themselves to whatever they could haul away.

    Mission accomplished, the mob headed to the Abia White House on a solidarity visit to Kalu, who, in keeping with his open-door policy, welcomed them. He listened attentively to their report on the sacking of the State Assembly and other measures they had taken to “sanitise” the undutiful legislative branch.

    Kalu rose magnificently to the occasion. Their intervention, he told his visitors, accorded perfectly with the finest traditions of democracy and freedom of expression.

    I was led to these reminiscences by recent developments in Ekiti, where Governor-elect Ayodele Fayose instigated or personally led a phalanx of okada operators and motor-park touts and thugs-for-hire to storm the courts hearing petitions against his election, beat up judges and other officers of the court, in one instance renting a judge’s garment and shredding court documents.

    Even in Nigeria, there is no precedent for such barbarous conduct.

    It is the contention of the petitioners that Fayose had perjured himself in the election papers he filed with INEC, and that his candidature was incurably flawed.  As if to confirm the charge, Fayose says the proceedings were designed to forestall his being sworn in on October 16 and that the judges had been compromised.

    The petition may lack merit, but why not allow the judicial process to run its course?

    Fayose’s tenure as governor ended in scandal on a scale almost beyond belief, impeachment and disgrace. He has been charged with serious fraud and accused of complicity in the murder of two political opponents.  His election last June to the same office remains one of the greatest comebacks in the annals of politics.

    It was widely expected that he would use this second chance to redeem himself; that he would eschew the sophomoric stunts and the predilection for violence that had marked his earlier tenure, and that he would conduct himself and the affairs of Ekiti State with the decorum that the high office of governor demands.

    But Fayose, being Fayose, loosed mayhem on the state capital even before taking office, leaving no doubt as to what he would do on taking charge.

    There was a time, not long ago, when I could have wagered that they will not find a judge in Ekiti to swear him in after his execrable conduct. Not anymore; some judges in the state’s judiciary may well be falling over themselves already  for the privilege of administering the oath of office on October 16.  Cry, oh cry, Land of Honour.

    No less execrable than Fayose’s conduct is the funereal silence in Abuja, a silence heard around the world. Not a word of admonition, much less condemnation, has come from President Goodluck Jonathan, who is in full reelection campaign mode, even serving notice in Benin City right before Governor Adams Oshiomhole that the PDP was set to “capture”  Edo  State and Rivers State where the APC currently holds power.

    Nothing, not even a brazen assault on the judiciary, can deflect him for a moment from his consuming quest for a second term, especially when the assault is perpetrated by his associates.

    What will it take to make Dr Jonathan learn that, over and above being leader of the PDP,  he is president of Nigeria, enjoined to faithfully uphold the Constitution and to serve the entire citizenry, not just supporters of his party?

    Nor has any word come from the nation’s chief law officer, the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Bello Adoke (SAN). Hallowed precincts of justice are desecrated and high officers of the judiciary violently assaulted in the course of duty, but it is of no concern to Adoke.  This is a shameful dereliction of duty.

    If Fayose gets away with this criminal assault, he will most likely take a chapter from Isiaka Adeleke’s  Osun and Orji Kalu’s Abia to pummel into acquiescence members of the Ekiti State Assembly, virtually all of whom belong in the APC.

    They face a clear and present danger, but cannot expect any protection from the Federal Government, nor from the police. The one is an agent of the PDP, and the other is an instrument of the Federal Government .

    I do not envy the lawmakers in the least.

     

  • Where is our Foreign Minister?

    Where is our Foreign Minister?

    HAS anyone seen or heard, sensed or otherwise encountered Nigeria’s Foreign Minister, Ambassador Aminu Wali, acting out his remit lately?

    This is the more nuanced version of the question that has been on my mind:  Has anyone in the attentive audience ever seen, heard, sensed or otherwise encountered Ambassador Aminu Wali acting out his remit since he was appointed Foreign Minister in March 2014?

    I first raised this question in the wake of the Chibok abductions, when the accident-prone Jonathan Administration stumbled from miscue to egregious miscue in a perfect calendar of blunders. Day after day, Nigeria took a pummeling in the global news media, and the foreign minister who should have been the international face of Nigeria at such a time was nowhere to be found.

    In his place, Dr Jonathan pressed into service political hacks innocent of the subtleties of international communication, rank amateurs who operate on the principle that the higher the decibel, the more persuasive the message.  They ended up confirming the worst fears of Nigerians and foreign audiences about the capacity or lack thereof at the top.

    Since then, Boko Haram has escalated its campaign of murder and mayhem and entered into the foreign policy calculations of the most prominent international actors. It has battled the ill-equipped and ill-used Nigerian military to a stalemate, often dictating the terms of engagement.  In one instance, an entire army battalion faced with Boko Haram’s superior firepower and motivation “tactically maneuvered” its way to neighbouring Cameroun, where it was disarmed and transported safely back to base.

    No matter how they spin it, this incident is a humiliation for the military, from which the Minister of Defence and, for that matter, the Commander-in-Chief, cannot wholly absolve themselves. The diplomatic ramifications are plain. Yet, they did not move the Minister of Foreign Affairs to issue a statement or call a news conference to address at least some of those issues.

    They say the nation is at war, and yet the Foreign Minister, the nation’s chief diplomat who should be explaining the situation to the outside and deflecting damaging charges of unlawful killings and gross human rights violations made against the military by the highly credible Amnesty International and other organisations is nowhere to be seen.

    No, I take that back.

    Ambassador Wali has actually been sighted lately, but not in a foreign policy context. He was desperately trying to sell Jonathan to political kingmakers in the so-called North West geopolitical zone as the best thing to have happened to Nigeria since the amalgamation, and an unquestionably worthy candidate for reelection.

    It fell on him to read the communiqué at the end of the September 1 meeting, from which I quote:   “Having carefully considered the steady and stable progress of our nation under the able leadership of the President, the stakeholders of PDP in the North West, having in mind the monumental strides attained by this administration, have resolved to urge President Jonathan to declare for president in the forthcoming 2015 elections so as to continue the good works he started in nation building.”

    Four days later, on September 4, Wali actually took a break from campaigning for Dr Jonathan’s re-election to do something that was perfectly within his remit:  He held talks in Abuja with the foreign ministers of Cameroun, Benin, and Chad to urge a joint approach to curbing arms trafficking and violence in the sub–region.

    By and large, however, an official who should be hopping from one foreign capital to another trying to repair Nigeria’s not-so-savoury image has been turned into a campaigner for a president who has not even declared that he will seek re-election, an operative of the ruling PDP for all practical purposes.

    In the United States from which Nigeria copied its much-abused Republican Constitution, Wali would have faced severe public censure.  Though he owes his tenure to the president, a cabinet official cannot turn himself or herself into a functionary of the ruling party, of any party for that matter.  A member of the cabinet who wants to campaign for the president will first have to resign, cease drawing an income from the public payroll and derive his sustenance from the party’s coffers.

    Ambassador Wali is of course not the only minister or senior official who has been dragooned into Dr Jonathan’ re-election campaign, or has insinuated himself or herself into it in the mistaken belief that the job demands it. There is Professor Rufai Alkali who answers the title of Senior Special Adviser on Political Affairs to the President. Paid from the public purse like Wali, he has been conscripted to coordinate the activities of some 80 mushroom organisations whose self-assigned mission is to ensure Dr Jonathan’s re-election.

    Wali stands out from the lot because of the stark incongruity between his cabinet portfolio and his campaign errands for Dr Jonathan.

    Given the abuse he has suffered from his principal and the self-abuse to which he has subjected himself, it is no wonder that his expertise has not been tapped even tangentially in the most recent foreign policy misadventure of the Jonathan Administration.

    I have in mind last week’s dramatic seizure of N9.3 million from a Nigerian-owned private jet that landed in a private airport near Johannesburg, South Africa. The Nigerian authorities say the money was for the purchase of arms from private vendors for the security services and that the shipment was properly documented.

    Now, if national sovereignty means anything, it means that Nigeria can legitimately purchase arms and ammunition to protect is territorial integrity. So, why the secrecy? Why go through third parties that are not even primarily arms dealers. Why were the South African authorities not properly briefed? Why was no Nigerian embassy official on hand to provide diplomatic and intelligence cover to forestall any embarrassment?

    The South African authorities seem to be acting on the theory that this was a money-laundering caper gone awry and are not in the least impressed by the disingenuous fudging that has marked the Nigerian government’s attempt to explain away the incident.

    I am not betting that, for once, they will trot out Ambassador Wali to try to finesse what is without question a diplomatic fiasco with criminal undertones.

    Or that he and indeed his principal are seized of the foreign policy implications of a pronouncement by a United States District Court last May that the status of a drug suspect and fugitive with the improbable name of Buruji Kashamu as “a political figure in Nigeria, and his relationship with President Goodluck Jonathan,” would render futile any attempt to extradite him to the United States to face criminal charges.

    *

    Benjamin Adekunle: A Postscript

    In the tributes that have been paid to the memory of Brigadier Benjamin “Black Scorpion” Adekunle who died last week, aged 78, much emphasis has been laid on his heroic even if controversial civil war exploits. His no less heroic exertions in decongesting Lagos Port, a task reminiscent of one of the more daunting labours of Hercules, was reduced to a footnote, if not forgotten altogether.

    It was a titanic undertaking.

    From the Marina, you could see ranged as far as the horizon ships laden with cement and consumer goods, the reckless importation of which a country awash in petrodollars had approved, money being the longer the problem but how to spend it.

    Some of the vessels had waited six months to berth, with no hope of doing so in another six months. Meanwhile more ships laden with more consumer goods convergedon the port from all over the world, paralyzing handling facilities.

    Demurrage billed to the Federal Government exceeded the annual budgets of the poorer West African countries put together.

    Adekunle cleared the mess with brutal efficiency.

    The task presented him with an opportunity, no questions asked, to acquire enough wealth to last his progeny till the end of time.   He spurned it, unlike many of his contemporaries.

    He lived the last two decades of his life in near destitution.

     

     

  • Jamborees without end

    Jamborees without end

    At any given time, one Nigerian official or delegation is to be found traipsing in a foreign country purporting to study how that country solved or is grappling with a particular issue, or its experience with a particular phenomenon.

    European countries used to be the destinations of choice, but any country will do these days, since the real purpose, usually, is to cash in on the obscenely generous terms of official travel.

    No coach please, and business class as a last resort.  Only the first class can begin to meet the                 discriminating taste of officials travelling at the public expense.  If a more opulent class were                   available –Super First Class say — I have no doubt that they would settle for nothing less.

    Then there is the travel allowance they call estacode, reputedly the most indulgent in the world.  It could be as high as $500 a night, depending on an official’s status.   So, the longer          the trip lasts, the more it profits the officials undertaking it.

    The package, I gather, usually includes an out-of-station allowance, to compensate for the hardship the trip is sure to inflict on the poor traveller, plus an extra baggage allowance to take care of all the stuff he or she is sure to bring back home

    These trips are not always to foreign climes, it is necessary to stress.  And there is never a shortage of pretexts.

    During the partial re-run of the gubernatorial election in Ekiti several years ago, a chieftain of the PDP and chair of the House Committee on Elections ensconced himself in the room where returns were being tallied, to advance the fortunes of sure his party’s candidate.  When challenged, he said he was there in his official capacity to perform “oversight” functions.

     I will not be surprised if, on being found fiddling with the locks on the vault of the Central Bank, the chairman of the House Committee on Banking said he was merely performing oversight functions as mandated by the Constitution.

    But I digress.

    As I am writing these lines, a source who is more often wrong than right, tells me that a Joint Committee of the Senate and the House on environment issues is preparing to travel to Inuit territory in the Canadian tundra to find out how the aboriginal people there are coping with their permafrost landscape.

    Why embark on a study conditions in arctic Canada when Nigeria lies in the tropics? I asked in stunned disbelief.

    “A stitch in time, you know,” he said. The Committee is moving proactively. Climate expert are predicting that weather patterns across with world will change so dramatically that Africa will be locked into the brutal cold of the Arctic winter, while the North America will be baked by the unforgiving tropical sun.

    And so, the Joint Committee, anticipating such a frigid future, will set out any moment from now for the arctic region to study conditions there and prepare Nigerians for their future environment.

    Mission accomplished, the Committee may well decide that a location half-way between the frigid Arctic and the torrid tropics is the ideal place for reflecting on their findings and writing its report.

    The report is likely to be forwarded to another committee which may or may not include any members of the House Committee aforementioned, for comment and criticism.  If the panel were to include one notoriously disputations fellow well-known in bureaucratic circles, the review will most likely eventuate in a fresh wave of trips to write the report, ending in the serene resort of Bellagio, in Italy, where there would be few distractions.

    Bellagio, you hear; not some hardscrabble town in Ghana where the House Committee on Health went to write its report so as to avert the disruptions caused by the epileptic power supply in Nigeria.  For, thanks to President Goodluck Jonathan’s Transformation Agenda,      the power supply is now no worse than that of Ghana.

    Even so, Abuja or the Mambila Plateau or Obudu Retreat is not Bellagio.   Jos is ruled out because of those grisly “Fulani herdsmen” visitations.  Lagos?  Too many distractions.

    In keeping with this jamboree tradition, a high-level Executive-Legislative team, led by no          less a person than the Minister of Finance and the Coordinating Minister for the Economy,           Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has just completed its mission in the UK and the United States  where it  held meetings with “Diaspora Nigerians” in London, Washington DC, New York, and Houston. The delegation includes, but is most likely not limited to the chairman, Senate Committee on Finance,  chairman, Senate Committee on Local and Foreign Debts, Chairman, Senate Committee on Rules and Business, chairman, House Committee on  Aid, Loans and Debt Management, member of the House Committee on Diaspora, member of the House Committee on Finance, and chairman, House Committee on Appropriation. Interactive sessions in the four cities, with invited professionals, were organized by the Debt Management Office, led by its Director-General.

    Purpose?

    To provide Diaspora Nigerians with opportunities for funding critical development projects back home. For good measure, the meetings provided the Coordinating Minister for the Economy and other members of the team an avenue to update Nigerians in the Diaspora on           the development of the economy, and the major achievements of the Transformation Agenda   of the Goodluck Administration.

    The meetings also reassured Diaspora Nigerians of developments in the country with respect to the Ebola Virus Disease and the government’s management of the situation.

    The context – or the pretext—for this trip would appear to be a World Bank report indicating that Nigerians abroad had remitted more than $10 billion home in the first half of this year, and that the second half could even witness a bigger volume of transfers.

    For the most part, these remittances were made to service obligations to relations and friends back home – pay school fees and delinquent rents, assist the living, bury the dead, and generally attend to the hard-luck stories that the next phone call from home is sure to relate in a way guaranteed to move you to head immediately to the nearest Western Union to wire money charged to your Credit Card.

    If there is anything left, the “Diaspora Nigerian” may trade in the stock market, build a house in the village over a ten-year period, or raise a mortgage to buy one in the city.

    This practice has been going on for decades and will continue as long as there are so-called Diaspora Nigerians with obligations to discharge back home.  No Executive-Legislative intervention was required to start it, and none is required to sustain it.

    The team that Dr Okonjo-Iweala led to London and Washington, DC and New York and Houston was preaching to the choir.  There is something to be said for that, to be sure. You court the choristers so that they do not migrate elsewhere.

    But this particular choir is not the type that migrates.  Though domiciled abroad, it is part and parcel of the Nigerian reality.   You do not need to make a round trip of 20,000 miles at a huge cost to an anaemic exchequer to preach to it.

     

     

     

  • Annals of careerism

    Annals of careerism

    In late July 2010, some three weeks before the launch of Diary of a Debacle, my chronicle on military president Ibrahim Babangida’s duplicitous transition programme, I called up one of the nation’s most accomplished technocrats to confirm whether he had received my invitation to the event, and whether he would be coming.

    I had not talked with him since the NADECO years, when he was forced to take refuge in the United Kingdom. He was one of the most valuable political and intellectual assets of the exiled opposition.  His broadcasts on Radio Kudirat, delivered with quiet authority –the type you could not dismiss as the fulminations of a fugitive wanted back home to answer for the most abhorrent crimes – rattled the regime of the loathsome Sani Abacha  even more than the street protests challenging his maniacal rule.

    He had received my invitation but could not say for sure that he would attend.

    I had thought that, as one of the stalwarts of NADECO and the struggle for the restoration of democratic rule, he would be enthusiastic in taking part in an event that was going to bring together the pillars of the movement and provide a forum for them to relive the experience, reminisce about what might have been, and contemplate what lies ahead.

    But he did not sound enthusiastic.  Rather, he sounded distant, remote.

    I was aware that he had shown little if any interest in sharing in the spoils, such as they were, which resulted directly from NADECO’s titanic struggle against the dictatorship, and had withdrawn altogether from the political process, unless it was a national assignment requiring his technocratic expertise.

    But why would he now shun the company he once kept and revelled in?

    “Look, Tunji,” he said, “Is it right that those who tormented us at home and hunted us all over the world should now occupy positions of influence and eminence in our ranks?”

    He said it with a sigh.  You could almost feel his pain.

    And the person he mentioned as an example of a one-time tormentor turned chieftain was none other than Tom Ikimi, the rambunctious foreign minister of the odious regime of Sani Abacha. He was the regime’s international face, and what an unflattering face it was. I will get to that presently.

    With the return to some semblance of democratic rule, Ikimi roamed the political landscape until he found his natural home in the PDP. There, he had a falling out with Tony “The Grand Fixer” Anenih, his one-time godfather in the PDP.

    And then, Ikimi the reactionary and the scourge of June Twelvers switched camp to the ACN, home to the rump of June Twelvers and began sounding off as Ikimi the beacon of progress, Saul the tormentor transmogrified into Paul the Apostle without a road-to-Damascus experience.

    This was what the technocrat I was talking about found so discomfiting in the emergent politics,  so discomfiting in fact that he decided to withdraw entirely from the political process. And that was even long before the ACN tapped Ikimi to head its negotiating team in the merger talks with the CPC and the ANPP.

    To Ikimi, the whole thing was a game, a way of getting on.

    To be fair, he is not the only figure enmeshed in this game of politics without principle.  One of his colleagues in the Abacha cabinet used to ask “June Twelvers” in genuine puzzlement why they were so worked up when all that was going on was just a game. He parlayed into a family  business the fortune he amassed running unconscionable errands for Abacha and prostituting his considerable learning, and has been living in quiet obscurity since then.

    Then, there is Sani Ahmed Yerima, the governor who set off a religious ferment, the like of which has not been seen in the Sahel since the jihad of Usmanu Dan Fodiyo by proclaiming sharia law in Zamfara.  The last time we heard from him, he was fervently defending his marriage to a child-bride. He did not only decamp to the ACN, he even threatened to seek its ticket for the presidential race.

    To these political acrobats and their kind – please add Dr Bukola Saraki – one political party is as good as another, provided it helps you realise your ambition or offers you the best chance to get on.

    In keeping with this orientation, Ikimi saw his assignment as chief ACN negotiator as an escalator to the national chairmanship of the APC. And when the position went instead to Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, you knew that it was only a matter of time before Ikimi would explode with his accustomed biliousness and denounce the organisation he had helped build and the officials he has accused of blocking his ascent.

    As I see it, those who blocked his ascent did the APC and the progressive cause a good turn.

    What message would they have been sending to the party faithful, to Nigerians still traumatised by the murderous rule of Sani Abacha and indeed the international community that suffered Ikimi’s tantrums – what message would these groups have taken away from the designation of Ikimi as national chairman of the APC, and its public face as such?

    As Sani Abacha’s foreign minister, Ikimi was also the nation’s chief diplomat. But nothing about  him was diplomatic. Not his tailoring, which was gaudy, nor his deportment, which was brash and overbearing, not yet his tone, which was stentorian.  He came across as someone who would sooner challenge you to single combat than engage you in civil discourse.

    Sonala Olumhense, my Rutam House contemporary and syndicated columnist, once reported how, in an encounter with the Editorial Board of The New York Times, the editors had asked Ikimi how he could in good conscience serve as the international spokesperson for a regime that had put a price on the head of the Nobelist, our own Wole Soyinka.

    To which Ikimi had replied, with characteristic hauteur, “What is so special about the Nobel Prize? Anyone can win it.”

    That fatuous remark ended the encounter.

    Ikimi’s tenure destabilised the usually sedate foreign ministry. He set aside established practice and ran the place on the principle that anyone answering a Yoruba name had got to be a June Twelver and hence an enemy who must be defenestrated.  And he went about the task with gusto, armed with Abacha’s carte blanche.

    It is not for nothing that, during a public lecture in Lagos, Professor Gabriel Olusanya, then Nigeria’s ambassador to France, described Ikimi as an exponent of “area-boy” diplomacy, an “area boy” in Lagos idiom being the neighbourhood thug or troublemaker. Olusanya was too circumspect. He should have called Ikimi’s conduct in those days of infamy by its proper name: gangsta diplomacy.

    But the blame is not entirely Ikimi’s.

    Ikimi was a competent architect in private practice when former military vice president and fellow Esan, Admiral Augustus Aikhomu, with Babangida’s connivance, planted him as the “newbreed” head of the National Republican Convention, one of the two political parties they had decreed into existence.

    When politics was politics and not a game Babangida devised to amuse himself and confound everyone else, Ikimi would have found it difficult to win election as deputy publicity secretary of a political party.  But there he was, starting his political career as the national chairman of the party that was “a little to the Right.”

    He made a hash of it. He could not give what he did not have then, and he cannot give it now.

    Oyegun, who was voted APC national chairman, is in every respect a more suitable person than Ikimi for that office.  He is brainy, suave, contemplative, sober, measured and well-respected. He is a consensus builder. He is not combative, but he is not afraid of a fight.

  • Enugu ‘Chicken Impeachment’: Matters arising

    Enugu ‘Chicken Impeachment’: Matters arising

    In countries with a tradition of adherence to the letter and spirit of the law, an impeachment is the ultimate political sanction, the punishment of last resort for high officers of state who betray the public trust or fail egregiously to live up to its stipulations.

    In Nigeria where politics is vengefulness and vendetta by another name, an impeachment is the weapon of first choice. Thus, on any given day, there is an actual impeachment, an attempted impeachment, or rumours of an impeachment already in the making or being contemplated, mostly for reasons that cannot stand legal scrutiny, or simply because the weapon is there and an ascendant group is all too willing to wield it just to show who is in charge.

    They have perverted impeachment and given it a bad name.

    Even so, the proceeding in the Enugu State House of Assembly last week that the online newspaper, Premium Times, referred to as the “Chicken Impeachment” must have stunned those who still cling to the belief that Nigeria is a land where certain things simply cannot happen.

    Before I am summoned to appear before the Enugu Assembly to show cause why I should not be punished for contumely, I should hasten to explain that it is emphatically not the case that the honourable members had become so idle or were so bereft of subjects worthy of  their notice  that they decided to impeach a chicken.

    Even at the local government level, our legislative houses have not sunk to that level yet.

    What happened was that the Enugu Assembly, after solemnly deliberating on the charges before  it, namely, that His Excellency the Deputy Governor, Sunday Onyebuchi, desecrated his high office by converting the hallowed grounds of his official residence into a sprawling chicken farm and, furthermore, that His Excellency the Deputy Governor, aforementioned, in a show of wanton disrespect, refused to dismantle the said chicken farm when ordered to do so by His Higher Excellency the Governor, Sullivan Chime.

    In vain did the Deputy Governor submit by way of extenuation documentary evidence that the impeaching authority, to wit, the Enugu Assembly, had dutifully approved, year after year, a budgetary provision for the upkeep of the chicken farm. In vain also did he depose that His Higher Excellency Governor Chime had for his part converted the pristine precincts of the Executive Mansion into a pig farm.

    The latter point was not at issue in the deposition, but I will not be surprised if the Enugu Assembly, in keeping with its remit for good governance and its reputation for equity, had also been providing annual budgetary support for His Higher Excellency Governor Chime’s hog farm.

    Persons learned in law tell me that the impeachment is likely to go down as an instance of legislative overreach and a flagrant breach of the Constitution to boot.  For nowhere in that much-abused document, they tell me, is it expressly stated that the deputy governor of a state cannot convert his official premises to a chicken farm.

    Nor, I should add in the interest of balance, that nowhere in the Constitution is it expressly stated that the governor of a state cannot turn the Executive Mansion into a hog farm.

    Why such projects should be supported by the Exchequer is a different matter.  Perhaps it is of a piece with the self-assigned allowances that have percolated from the federal legislature through the state assemblies down to the local councils – allowances for breathing, laughing, sleeping, staying awake, travel, sitting, standing, talking,  not talking, walking, driving, reading, writing, and for the incomparable hardship of doing the business of law-making.

    But this is mere speculation.

    If the Enugu Assembly was minded to abide by the law of the land and rather than embark on a witch-hunt, it could have found some clause in its remit to charge the beleaguered Deputy Governor with a misdemeanor that does not reach the threshold for impeachment, persons learned in the law insist.

    With a little creative thinking, they said, it could have come up with some shibboleth – doctrine of overriding necessity, for instance – to constitute itself into a special court and charged Onyebuchi, immunity or no immunity, with at least a dozen violations of the Enugu State Environment Law, found him guilty on all counts, ordered him to cease and desist, to relocate his chicken farm and clean up the place.

    And that strategy would have had the great merit of opening an exciting new chapter in Nigerian jurisprudence.

    But the usual people have been spinning all sorts of theories around the matter and imputing the basest of motives to the honourable members of the Enugu Assembly.

    Some of these slanderers, pivoting on the Stomach Infrastructure Theory, are saying that   some legislators had been heard complaining that, despite the budgetary appropriation for the defenestrated deputy governor Sunday Onyebuchi’s chicken farm, he had been “eating alone”.

    They say he never thought it necessary to send a tray – not even one single, solitary tray — of complimentary eggs to the breakfast table of His Excellency the Governor and the First Family, nor the state legislators’ homes. He did not consider the kitchen of the State Assembly worthy of a steady supply of assorted eggs for preparing meals and delicacies for the exclusive consumption of its honourable members and their special guests.

    At Easter and Christmas and New Year and the New Yam Festival and like occasions, it never crossed Onyebuchi’s mind to send even one ordinary dressed hen – to say nothing of a dressed turkey or ostrich – to the Executive Mansion or the homes of the legislators for their holiday enjoyment.

    If the formerly excellent Onyebuchi had catered more assiduously to the stomach infrastructure of his principal and members of the Enugu Assembly, his career would not have ended on such a sad note, the slanderers have been saying.

    From such reasoning, it is but a short step to the conclusion that the impeachment was the Enugu Assembly’s response to the Deputy Governor’s predilection for eating alone. The reasoning is tendentious, and the conclusion pernicious.

    The still excellent Governor Chime has not been supplying grilled pork and allied products or whole roast or barbecued pigs from his hog farm in the Executive Mansion to the homes of members of the state legislature on festive occasions. He has not been catering to the stomach infrastructure of the lawmakers. Yet he has not been impeached.

    Still, in a larger sense, Onyebuchi’s impeachment can be seen as a signal warning to those political officials who have been eating alone or may be tempted to eat alone, and a powerful reminder of the wisdom of our people that those who eat alone are doomed to fight alone.

    Since one impeachment has a way of begetting another, Governor Chime will have to take appropriate measures to avert the Pig Impeachment that could well follow the Chicken Impeachment of his former deputy.

    His first step would be to spread the pork from his Executive Mansion hog farm fast and far.

     

     

     

     

     

  • IBB @ 73: The dissembler at work

    IBB @ 73: The dissembler at work

    Former military president Ibrahim Babangida has been giving interviews to mark his 73rd birthday, which would otherwise have passed almost unremarked in the news media. Unlike the time when he subordinated the National Day, October 1, to his birthday, the news media were not crammed with congratulatory messages from hustlers of every hue.

    Back then, his birthday was the occasion for grand pronouncements and major policy initiatives or changes. The National Day featured for the most part desultory parades of school children and working people, and Babangida would send a message of goodwill to his compatriots, like a potentate in a distant capital out to assure the natives in a far-flung corner of his empire that he had not quite forgotten them.

    Ah, the instability of human greatness!

    Babangida said nothing new in the interviews and provided no insights. Where he was not obfuscating as is his wont, he was dissembling.

    Not a squawk of regret escaped from his lips on the chain of events that his brazen annulment  of the 1993 presidential election set off  – the killing of hundreds of Nigerians protesting the annulment, the flight into exile of hundreds of prominent Nigerians marked for elimination, the murder of prominent opposition figures, among them Alfred Rewane and Kudirat Abiola, the framing and jailing of General Olusegun Obasanjo and General  Shehu Yar’Adua  and some prominent media figures on bogus charges of plotting a coup, and the murder, in captivity, of President-elect Moshood Abiola.

    Instead, Babangida teased and taunted the entire Nigerian public and put the blame for all the mayhem on them. Ah, if only they had agreed to have another election within six months after the annulment. After all, an Interim National Government  (ING) had been set up to govern the country and a constitution had been fashioned specifically for the period that would lead to the election of a president and the restoration of democratic rule at the centre, to complement what was already in place in the states.

    But those hotheads, those extremists and spoilers in the so-called pro-democracy movement would have none of it. It was their way or no way at all, and now, see where it landed the country. If only they had listened to him, the course of Nigerian history would have been different; the country would have travelled far on the road to greatness.

    Anyway, all was not lost. Nigeria had finally embraced the two-party system he decreed into existence during his transition programme; the privatisation and commercialisation that were key elements of his much ballyhooed Structural Adjustment Programmed (SAP) had finally taken a hegemonic hold on the economy and on social policy.

    In retrospect, you would have to grant that he was far, far ahead of the time.

    Thus did Babangida tease and taunt his interviewers and through them the Nigerian public; thus did he berate his compatriots, this man who spent eight years and N40 billion building a house of cards, an exercise that the noted scholar, Richard Joseph, called “one of the most sustained exercises in political chicanery ever visited upon a people”.

    Babangida has never been able to give a reason for the annulment. At one time, he said he carried it out in “absolute fidelity”  with the rule of law. At another, he said if the winner of the election had been allowed to take office, the military would have toppled him in a matter of months. The way he framed it, it was as if he did President-elect Abiola a favour.

    At yet another moment, with the loathsome Sani Abacha conveniently dead, Babangida’s son said Abacha, who wanted very much to take power for himself, had literally held a gun to his  father’s head and threatened to blow it off if he allowed the election to stand.

    Some two decades later, Babangida, oblivious of the excuses he had confected in the past for annulling the election, claimed that the same election was the freest and fairest ever conducted on Nigerian soil, and that the credit belonged to him and his Administration.

    That is the mindset of the man who ruled Nigeria virtually unchallenged for eight years, wasted it and was scheming to return to finish the job until he was forced into a ragged retreat by the very forces he could not suppress nor bribe even at the height of his usurpation.

    It is of a piece with Babangida’s stock response to questions on the parcel-bomb murder of the journalist, Dele Giwa, in which he remains a prime unindicted suspect. The so-called human rights activists prevented the police and law-enforcement agencies from doing their work, and the media that should have led the search for the killer of one of their brightest stars went missing in action.

    The truth about the annulment is that Babangida did not want to quit. He did not want to give  up power, according to Professor Ben Nwabueze (SAN), who was in formal terms Secretary for Education in Babangida’s so-called Transitional Council, but morphed unaccountably into the regime’s legal strategist for eviscerating the sovereign will of the people.

    “His behavior in the last days of his regime left a rather strong impression of a man forced to quit against his will, of one un-reconciled to quitting in the last days of his rule and in the face of defeat, he cut the figure of someone unwilling to reconcile himself with composure to the adverse torrent of events, of an angry and bitterly disappointed man,” Nwabueze wrote of Babangida in his book, June 12, 1993 Election:  Problem and Solutions

    More tellingly, Nwabueze added: “His mind, his motions and his actions seemed to have become somewhat disoriented, and no longer governed by disinterested, patriotic considerations. In the event, he quit office in a rather undignified, unceremonious manner . . .”

    So, there you have it.

    The ING, the vehicle that was supposed to lead Nigeria to democratic bliss through an election, was a ramshackle contraption.  Babangida said not long ago that he knew little of the doddering ex-UAC chief executive, Ernest Shonekan, whom he named to head it. He had heard nice things about Shonekan, but the man had turned out to be a disappointment. Entrusting the destiny of a country to a man you hardly knew is nothing, if not indicative of Babangida’s contempt for the collective destiny of the people of Nigeria.

    In whatever case, it is illustrative of the conspiratorial and utterly opaque manner in which the Babangida regime governed the country. Hard copies of laws purported to be in operation were often not available to the Government Printer,  or were available only to commissioned government lawyers who employed them to ambush petitioners and the courts alike. The printing of decrees was often farmed out to Heritage Press, said to be owned by Babangida or his proxies.

    Thus, there were in circulation at least four versions of the decree setting up the ING, each claiming to be authentic. The one I saw contained a blank, to be filled by the military president, stipulating the name of the person to head the body. Babangida had declined to furnish the name of the appointee to those who drafted the law. He simply identified the office.

    It has been speculated that he was creating room for himself to hang on to power in another guise. When it became clear that his time was up, he named Shonekan to the post. For good measure, he inserted in the draft a clause mandating the most senior minister to assume the office of head of the ING if the substantive office became vacant

    Only one thing about the ING was true:  it was interim, lasting only 83 inglorious days. Everything else about it was false through and through: it was not national, and it was not a government.

    Yet, that was the body Babangida expected  to conduct  a presidential election just six months after the one he had annulled without fear and without probable cause, with more than 14 million Nigerians who had voted in the previous election trooping to the polls again, thankful for another chance to exercise their franchise.

    Anyone who believed this then or believes it now is either incurably naïve or practically unconscious.

  • Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi (1929-2014)

    Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi (1929-2014)

    Professor Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi, dean of Nigerian historians and a scholar of global stature died last week, some three months after his family, friends and associates staged two days of events in Ibadan to mark his 85thbirthday and celebrate his monumental accomplishments.

    I count it one of the greatest honours I have ever received to have been asked to deliver the Birthday Lecture on the second day of the festivities, May 26, which was Ade Ajayi’s birthday.  As it turned out, that was his last public outing.

    This is like a death in the family, and I thank all those who have sent me messages of condolence on the passing of the great man.

    Many have also asked me about his condition on that day.  He was frail, as was to be expected of any person well into the eighth decade of life.  But he was for the most part alert, animated even.  When he seemed disengaged, it was hard to tell whether it was because he was bored or simply bemused, this man of few words, and withal not given to ceremony.

    His autograph on my copy of the book presented on the occasion, “J.F. Ade Ajayi:  His Life and Career,” edited by Professor Michael Omolewa and our own Professor Akinjide Osuntokun, and with a Foreword by General Yakubu Gowon, reveals a man in full command of his mental and physical faculties.

    Rendered in his crisp handwriting, with all letters well formed and no tell-tale signs of a quaking hand, it is something I will treasure to the end of my days.

    It reads: “To Prof Olatunji Dare, with thanks for a well-delivered and thought-provoking lecture at the presentation of this book.”

    Today, I have chosen to pivot on a piece I wrote back when he delivered a Valedictory Address to mark his retirement from the University of Ibadan to pay my tribute to his memory. It was titled “A scholar at work” (The Guardian, December 12, 1989).

     

    *****

    Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi’s Valedictory Lecture at the University of Ibadan is sure to go down as one of the high points of Nigeria’s intellectual history.  It was a fitting climax to 31 years of teaching and research at his alma mater, 26 of them as a professor of History. The wide sweep of his scholarship was manifest in every paragraph; so was the depth, the profundity of his insights.

    No less evident were his intellectual humility, his modesty of exposition, his generosity of mind toward colleagues, students and even those who had sought to humiliate him, his concern for the nation and for the system he was leaving, as well as his devotion to his family.

    The preface to this remarkable lecture was itself another classic:  A perceptive essay on the man and his works by Obaro Ikime, one of six students to have earned national and international reputations of their own as professors out of the 24 Ade Ajayi taught in his first year at Ibadan. Few teachers could have asked for more. Something tells me that he will treasure this tribute almost as much he cherishes the National Merit Award.

    Ade Ajayi, like Kenneth Dike before him, gave legitimacy and direction to African historiography.  European scholars like Hegel, Arnold Toynbee and Hugh Trevor-Roper held that Africa had no history whatever.  Trevor-Roper for one insisted that history was about light and that since Africa was all darkness, it could not possibly have a history.

    Lost on him and his fellow intellectual chauvinists was the fact that a certain age of European existence characterised as the Dark Ages was nevertheless considered worthy of scholarly study.

    Ajayi is a leading light among those distinguished Nigerians, African and other Third World scholars  and some progressive Europeans (Basil Davison and Michael Crowder are worthy of special mention) who, through diligent research and scholarship, changed all that.  His scholarly output of more than 60 publications, with at least 11 more in the works on the eve of his retirement, is formidable by any standard; in a country where a scholar has to contend with bureaucratic distractions and material deprivations, it is truly awesome.

    And he is not even through yet.  For as Ikime made clear, Ajayi may retire from teaching but he cannot retire from History.

    In the tradition of Jakob Buckhardt, Ade Ajayi’s point of departure would seem to be that history is not just a narrow specialisation to be studied and written for its own sake.  It is not even merely a search for truth. The truths history reveals must be spoken to power, not in the spirit of confrontation, not to make the writer clever for a moment, but to make society wiser.

    It is in this spirit that Ade Ajayi has turned his prodigious scholarship on the processes and problems of national integration, education, public policy and administration, analysing, clarifying and illuminating issues and pointing the way forward

    But he is not like the direction post that is always pointing out the way but never going there.   The bureaucratic stability that the University of Lagos enjoys today is in large measure his handiwork. When he arrived on the scene in 1972, he found that the place had been carved up           into fiefdoms, to satisfy all kinds of interest.

    To cite just one example, there was an Institute of Computer Science which had no regular students but ran service courses from time to time. But it was a full-fledged faculty with a teaching staff of two, of whom one was the dean. The traditional Faculty of Science was split into a School of Biological Sciences and a School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, each with its own dean.

    In his first year, Ade Ajayi rationalised this profusion of faculties and deanships and created a leaner, more responsive, administrative structure.

    He also embarked on a vigorous staff development programme, under which graduates of the university were sent abroad to acquire advanced degrees and return to take up teaching positions.  Before Ade Ajayi, the university undertook to pay only one-half of the salary of members of staff training abroad, plus passage and tuition. Most of those who trained under that scheme did not return, and the programme was more or less a disinvestment.

    Ade Ajayi moved quickly to correct this half-hearted attempt at staff development. Under the new programme, staff members going on study leave abroad would receive their full salary, half of it in foreign exchange. The university would pay the full tuition as well as maintenance allowance for their families. And all this was without prejudice to any other financial support the staff member may get elsewhere.

    Virtually every beneficiary of the scheme returned.  Without it, the faculty strength of the University of Lagos would not have been what it was before SAP and other forms of attrition         led to a steady movement away from the system.

    Although Ade Ajayi’s second term as vice chancellor was brusquely and unfairly terminated, he did not touch on it his valedictory.  Instead he called attention to the humiliation of Professor Orishejolomi Thomas, former vice chancellor of the University of Ibadan.

    Thomas, distinguished surgeon, one of the first group of Africans to become Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, founding provost of the University of Lagos College of Medicine, had just finished presiding over the Convocation of the University of Ibadan when he learned on the evening news that he had been retired with immediate effect.

    Speculations were rife that his dismissal might have arisen from a court ruling in which he was purportedly rebuked for improper administration of an estate of which he was an executor. Those who knew him said such conduct would be totally out of character (Interpolation: Years later, he was vindicated on appeal).

    Shattered, Thomas retreated to his prosperous rubber estate in Warri. Years later, he took ill.  His family planned to fly him abroad for treatment.  He would hear none of it.  He said he should be taken to the University of Lagos Teaching Hospital that he had founded back in 1962.  If he could not be healed there, he would like to die there. And it was there he died. Such was his faith in that institution, in his colleagues, and in his country.

    It was ennobling in Ade Ajayi to do justice to the memory of this great Nigerian patriot.

    In today’s world so dependent on new ideas and creative thinking and on changing technology as a means of mastering nature, Ade Ajayi deposed in his valedictory, no society can continue to alienate, vilify and marginalise its intellectual community and hope to develop.

    This is the warning of a wise man, a distillation of the lessons of history.

    But were they listening?

     

    *****

    It remains to ask, today, 35 years later: Are they listening?