The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • The new Obasanjo (OBJ)

    The new Obasanjo (OBJ)

    There is a new Obasanjo (OBJ) in town.

    Don’t get me wrong. As far as I know, the former military Head of State and two-term elected President has not sired another offspring lately in or outside the curriculum. To be sure, his born-againism is not all encompassing, as he once, with a mirthful wink, cautioned a friend who expressed surprise that he had not reined in his roving eye. But, to be fair to OBJ, he has been minding his own business.

    If you can get close enough to ask how he is doing, he is unlikely to respond, “I dey like I no dey.” On a good day, he will rejoin rather expansively, “I dey kampe.” On a different kind of day, he will still give the same response, but perhaps with a hint of impatience. But all in all, what you will get is the unvarnished OBJ.

    Much to the relief of Aso Rock, he may not have fired off any missives lately. But that doesn’t mean that he has given up that line of penmanship entirely. Get him worked up, and you will get a dose of what he gave President Goodluck Jonathan the other day.

    Meanwhile, even as he rests that bracing pen, he has found other ways of registering his disdain. He never misses an opportunity to excoriate a certain person in high public office whose solemn word, given not once but twice, counts for nothing. The OBJ who is as blunt as a punch to the nose has not changed a whit.

    He rarely introduces himself these days in a self-deprecatory tone as a chicken farmer. Nor are you likely to find him holding court at his sprawling Ota Farm. But he still takes great pride in farming.

    True, he has stayed away from leadership selection and recruitment in the PDP. Having single-handedly made and un-made six party chairmen, he has earned his rest. Still whenever he sneezes, they catch cold at Wadata Plaza, all the way to Aso Rock. So, this is not about OBJ without clout.

    Nor has there been any indication of a change in his approach to conflict resolution. At one point, the chimurenga, or war of resistance, against the racist white minority regime, was not going well because of personality and ideological differences between the two protagonists, Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo. This conflict stood in the way of the support that Obasanjo was eager to provide, in keeping with Nigeria’s Afrocentric foreign policy.

    So, the story goes, Obasanjo invited them to Lagos, put them in a room, gave each of them a loaded pistol and said he would be back in 30 minutes to embrace whoever survives the shootout and mobilise Nigeria’s support behind him. Whereupon, he locked the door and departed.

    Thus was born the uneasy collaboration between Mugabe and Nkomo that led to the Lancaster House talks, and ultimately to Zimbabwe’s independence.

    Obasanjo has not changed to the point that you could count on him not to try that formula or a variation thereof between Salva Kiir Mayardit and his estranged vice president Riek Machar during his coming assignment as Africa Union Mediator in the South Sudan conflict.

    Nor is there any indication that the new OBJ will flinch from giving any person the Savimbi treatment if that is what the situation calls for. Savimbi, you will recall, was until his death in combat the leader of the South Africa-backed rebel UNITA army in Angola. I will never forget how, at a chance meeting over lunch with Togolese President Gnasssingbe Eyadema in Lomé, Obasanjo rounded on him.

    “Jonas,” Obasanjo said, calling the guerrilla chieftain by his first name, “I proceed from the principle that my enemy’s friend is my enemy. South Africa is Africa’s enemy. You are South Africa’s friend. Therefore, you are Africa’s enemy.”

    That Obasanjo is alive and well.

    What then does Obasanjo’s newness consist in?

    The newness is to be found in his wardrobe. To finally come right out with it, I am here calling attention to the new, sartorially improved Obasanjo.

    Time was when he went all over the place in nondescript clothes that seemed to have been made by a journeyman carpenter. Never crumpled, to be sure, but seldom remarkable. He would never have won a prize for excellent grooming even if he was the only candidate.

    That is no hyperbole, believe me. I was myself once sole candidate several decades ago for a technical position at a Lagos brewery, and had been assured that the job was mine for the taking. The interview was a formality, conducted to fulfill all righteousness. Yet I did not get the job.

    To return to Obasanjo: He cared passionately about policy and programmes and national unity and how to make Nigeria great, and still does. But about his tailoring, his personal grooming, he did not give a damn. Not even the stylish and delectable Stella Obasanjo, of fond memory, could move him to mend his unprepossessing tailoring.

    And he expected his children to be just as indifferent to matters sartorial. He was genuinely surprised that I was not scandalised when he told me of how one of his young sons had asked him in the time of structural adjustment for all of N25 to buy just a pair of underpants. “On what waist was he going to wear such finery?” he asked in astonishment.

    He was even more astonished when I told him that his son was probably settling for the cheapest stuff in the market and that the young man would be lucky it held together for three months.

    Today, going by his official age of 77years, Obasanjo has got rank among be the best-groomed men of his generation. If you add five years to that official age, as I have reason to do, you would have to bracket him with the venerable pioneer merchant banker Otunba Subomi Balogun and the senior attorney Lateef Olufemi Okunnu as leading exemplars of sartorial elegance in the ranks of the nation’s octogenarians.

    These days, you have to look very closely not to mistake Obasanjo for the younger, unfailingly dapper Aremo Olusegun Osoba. Gone from his wardrobe for the most part are the colourful adire ensembles with the perfunctory embroidery, the nondescript cap that sat jauntily on his head, and the reading glasses that seem to have been purchased from a street vendor at Anthony Bus Stop in Lagos.

    Now, you are more likely to see him decked out in fetching, made-to-measure, tastefully embroidered ensembles cut from the finest fabrics, matching caps that have character and designer eye-wear, all colour-coordinated to produce a visual delight. Everything about the new OBJ bespeaks superior grooming

    Look no farther than any of his recent pictures for the new, sartorially improved OBJ. See how he stands out resplendent in all his new elegance in the picture of former heads of state as they were being presented with the Nigeria Centenary Medal in Abuja the other day.

    The credit for this stunning turn-around belongs unquestionably to his consort Bola, herself a lady of great chic. How did she get Obasanjo who never gave a damn about such matters to submit to her Transformation Agenda?

     

  • Our much-abused jobseekers, again

    Our much-abused jobseekers, again

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

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

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

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

    Desperate applicants in various conditions of unfitness, many of whom probably had not eaten that day, were required to complete a 2.5 km race in 18 minutes (men) and 20 minutes (women). The recruiters had given no thought to setting up the emergency medical services that are routinely provided even in situations involving those whose physical fitness can be taken for granted.

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

    This grisly scenario, slightly modified, was reenacted last week, again by the Immigration Service, at various locations across the country where it was scheduled to administer written tests to some 520, 000 applicants chasing 4, 556 openings..

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

    They are still counting, but at least 19 persons, four of them pregnant women, were killed in the resulting stampedes. Hundreds suffered injuries. The luckier ones were horse-whipped (Calabar), tear-gassed (Port Harcourt), or sent into wild panic when Immigration officials and police shot into the air, they claimed, to control the surging crowds (Asaba and Abeokuta).

    In some of the centres where they managed to administer the written test, the whole thing was a sham. The main bowl of the National Stadium, Surulere, in Lagos, was reportedly crammed to the rafters, with hardly any elbow room; there were no desks, and many had to sit on the bare floor to take the test, though each candidate had paid a fee of N1, 000 for the privilege. So chaotic was the atmosphere that the outcome cannot pass for a true measure of any candidate’s ability.

    One has got to be practically unconscious not to have anticipated the bedlam that would claim so many innocent lives, or supinely indifferent to the pain and distress of others not to have thought of devising appropriate measures to avert it.

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

    But ours is a society in which nothing succeeds like impunity, Abba Moro, the Minister of the Interior, who has the Immigration Service under his portfolio, is an authentic product thereof. So, instead of taking responsibility, or even showing empathy, he blamed the victims.

    In one breath, he says this is not an occasion for apportioning blame. In the very next, he says the tragedy was all the fault of those who attempted to break into the stadium premises forcefully when they had not even applied for the advertised positions.

    “Several unauthorised persons came in here, especially pregnant women,” he said. Then, as if for emphasis, he added: “I am surprised that pregnant women would want to come and partake in this exercise that involves physical exercises.”

    It is almost as if a licence to talk without thought comes with being a political official in Nigeria. Still, Abba Moro’s statement has got to rank among the most unfeeling and indecent ever uttered by such a figure, on a par with Bauchi State Governor Isa Yuguda’s remark that the murder of 20 Youth Corpers doing election duties in state in 2011 was in keeping with their destiny.

    Compounding indecency with obtuseness, Moro presumes to set up a committee to investigate the tragedy and recommend to him measures that will help “ameliorate the situation.” It does not occur to him that he is not a fit and proper person to authorise that kind of investigation, and that he cannot even stay in his present office or any public office while an inquiry lasts.

    President Goodluck Jonathan must seize this moment to break the cycle of impunity that has been the hallmark of a good many of his Administration’s officials by dismissing Abba Moro and the head of the Immigration Service forthwith.

    Far too many Nigerians who have every right to the protection of the state have died needless deaths on account of the incompetence, negligence and fecklessness of officials who have learned no lessons because no lessons were taught.

    It is also time for the Administration to move beyond empty slogans to address unemployment forthrightly. It is nothing if not scandalous that an Administration which has made job creation a top priority for the past few years has not even made a dent on employment. Government officials don’t even have the true measure of the problem. Their estimates range between 35 and 50 percent of persons qualified, able and willing to work.

    Every so often, a cabinet minister or state governor calls a news conference to announce that thousands of job openings had been filled in some unspecified establishment, or that a policy that had just been approved would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the very near future, if not immediately.

    Some officials who have spent all their adult lives in cushy government jobs think nothing of admonishing the teeming armies of the unemployed not to look to the government for work but to seek their fortunes in the private sector or self- employment.

    Such stunts must stop, and so must the ritual sloganeering. It is a grand illusion to think that transformation of any kind can occur in a situation of mass unemployment.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Preface to the National Conference

    Preface to the National Conference

    Dr Goodluck Jonathan’s National Conference may yet re-shape Nigeria and define Nigerian-ness in ways that not even the most fervent protagonists of restructuring could have contemplated. But on the strength of how the conveners have gone about recruiting delegates, there is much cause to doubt whether it will change the existing order in any significant way.

    Advertised as a forum for addressing the National Question, the Conference was not going to be a desultory parody, the type staged by Sani Abacha, of frightful memory, to bury “June 12” and buy legitimacy for his murderous regime, and by former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who was widely believed to have confected it as a back-door route to a third term prohibited by the Constitution.

    Instead, the gathering was going to discuss, if not re-negotiate, the fundamental basis of Nigeria’s political existence, the sharing of power and management of national resources in terms of access, control, and distribution.

    Where the motley assemblies convened by Abacha and Obasanjo could only tiptoe around those issues on which discussion was not entirely foreclosed, representatives of Nigeria’s federating units, would at the Jonathan Conference engage in a wise, robust and uninhibited discussion to resolve, once and for all, the National Question.

    That, at any rate, was how Dr Jonathan sold the idea to the public.

    The pitch was a volte face for which nothing had prepared the public, and it was rendered all the more suspect by the timing. How do you convene a National Conference on the eve, literally, of a General Election, with the ruling party in disarray, in the face of an insurgency that has made a vast stretch of Northeastern Nigeria ungovernable, and an economy in which more growth has been translating into greater popular misery?

    Was the whole thing not a distraction? Could a new arrangement be designed in three months?

    Many thoughtful persons across the country who had for decades been demanding a National Conference embraced the proposal enthusiastically. To them, here was a chance, at last, to fix Nigeria and nudge it firmly and irreversibly into the place for which nature has so richly endowed it.

    There were also the usual careerists who saw the whole thing as an opportunity to bask in the glow of the Conference and more importantly pick up a good slice of the N7 billion voted for Helpful as always in such matters, the news media quickly figured it out that each delegate stood to take home some N4 million. That opened the floodgates for lobbying and influence-peddling.

    The list of delegates released last week represents both groups —those genuinely seeking significant if not radical change, and those with an eye on the main chance, plus more than a sprinkling of candidates handpicked by the Federal Government using a formula that is nothing less than a perversion of a “gathering of the tribes” demanded by protagonists of the National Conference and promised by Dr Jonathan.

    Learned societies like the Nigeria Academy of Science and professional bodies like the Nigeria Union of Journalists have suddenly been conferred with the status of “federating units.” Nor is it always clear how the delegates for many of the constituencies identified on the list were chosen.

    Take, an example, the two individuals who have been named to represent expatriate Nigerians in the United States, among whom I have counted myself for the past 16 years. I do not know them, and if any meeting was held at which they were voted to represent us, I was given no notification.

    I have inquired from fellow expatriate Nigerians living in the continental United States, from the Atlantic Northeast to the Pacific Northwest, and from the Florida panhandle to Sacramento, and their story is the same. They do not know the individuals, and had played no part in their selection.

    The very idea of designating some persons to represent expatriate Nigerians in America or Europe or Asia or Australia is grounded on the misapprehension that they are organised into a body that can speak and act for them. There are no such bodies. The authorities in Abuja know that but still went ahead with their accustomed fudging to pick “delegates” for them.

    The bodies that are best placed to address the National Question are the accredited delegates representing the 36 states and Abuja FCT, the so-called geopolitical zones, ethnic nationalities and socio cultural organisations, traditional institutions, and of various faiths.

    But in an effort to create the illusion of democratic participation, delegate selection has been fragmented in ways that have no bearing on the National Question, the main issue before the National Conference.

    As far as I know, the National Question has never been a central concern of the International Federation of Women Lawyers. Yet it has been assigned two delegates – the same number as the recognised political parties with millions of card-carrying members.

    Former legislators and governors and chairmen of local government councils could easily have been accommodated as delegates of zones, ethnic nationalities, geopolitical zones, or political parties. But they have been assigned separate quotas of delegates, as have retired senior military, police, and national security officials.

    The 17 “statesmen” handpicked by the Federal Government to serve as delegates could also have been selected by their ethnic nationalities, states, or zones. And you have to wonder how they arrived at a quota of six delegates to represent people living with disabilities, and how the six were selected, to say nothing about whether they have a position on the National Question.

    This fragmentation, plus the packing of the Conference with handpicked delegates supposedly representing interests that are hardly critical to fruitful discussion of the National Question, can only constrain the room for the consensus that should, according to the Conference’s rules of procedure, undergird decision-making.

    In the absence of consensus, the rules stipulate that decisions taken by the Conference must be backed by 75 percent of the 492 delegates. It so happens that there are more than enough handpicked delegates answering to the Presidency or to no coherent constituency who can be counted upon to supply the 25 percent of votes required to block resolutions.

    Is this the product of design or just pure coincidence?

    A good many of the handpicked delegates and those going in on quotas assigned to all kinds of fringe associations have been around for so long in public life and contributed in measures large and small to our present grief. To them, the system is not broken. It has served them well. So, why fix it?

    Given this arrangement, one can hardly blame those in the attentive audience – or stakeholders, to employ the stultifying Nigerian locution – who believe tenaciously that at the end of the National Conference, the National Question will remain largely unresolved.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • A Centennial and its discontents

    A Centennial and its discontents

    The Nigerian Centennial was always going to be a tough sell

    How do you celebrate and invite the world to celebrate with you an act that millions of those in whose name you are rolling out the drums regard as a monumental mistake? How do you bring on the trumpets to celebrate an entity regarded by millions of those inhabiting it as a mere geographical expression and a dysfunctional one at that, in need of radical re-composition, if not outright dissolution?

    Wasn’t the whole thing a misapprehension? After all, the cobbling of the autonomous territories and peoples inhabiting the area around lower Niger and Benue into one political unit by imperial fiat — “amalgamation” is the soulless term its progenitors called the process and by which the natives denote it — produced no amalgam.

    Something went horribly wrong in the foundry.

    One hundred years later, calls for reverse engineering of the process are growing louder and more insistent among the natives. But those determined to stage a huge fiesta would not let such considerations and even much more sobering thoughts get in the way.

    The run-up to one of the major events of the celebrations and the days following could not have been more sobering. Elements of the terrorist organisation Boko Haram broke into one of the symbols of “national unity”, the Federal Government College, Buni Yadi, in Yobe State, and killed at least 29 and perhaps as many as 40 students in yet another orgy of bestiality. Troops guarding the school had reportedly withdrawn some 12 hours before the attack.

    The day following this slaughter of innocents, two car bombs flattened a neighbourhood in Maiduguri, killing at least 51 persons, most of them young men and women attending a wedding or watching a soccer game at a television viewing centre.

    Emergency responders were removing the bodies when Boko Haram struck again in Manioc, near Maiduguri, and burned down the entire town. Some 39 residents were killed in the raid, bringing Boko Haram’s grisly harvest in the last two weeks to some 300 defenceless Nigerians.

    As they were clinking their wine glasses at the Centennial Dinner in Abuja, petrol stations across Nigeria were running out of supplies. Where supplies were available, prices rose sharply, more than two-fold in some cases. Long queues at filling stations backed into the highway, paralysing traffic. Long-scheduled travel plans and social engagements had to be abandoned.

    Motorists and travellers across Nigeria, this newspaper said in a round-up of the situation, “could not have had a worse weekend”.

    In Abuja, they went into a rhapsody on the Transformation Agenda and the great wonders it has wrought. As they must have known, the television stations covering the centennial feast were in all probability running on generators, and at least one-half of the national audience was viewing the show on generator-powered television sets. But all that is about to be fixed, permanently.

    How about one more toast then, Your Majesties, Your Excellencies, Lords Temporal and Spiritual, not forgetting the distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen here assembled: How about one more toast, to the coming Industrial Revolution.

    In what is billed as a year-long bash, there may yet be highlights to beat all highlights. But Centennial Medal awards will be talked about long after the celebrations have ended, for better and for worse.

    In a refreshing departure from entrenched practice, the nation honoured some of its best and brightest, persons who have held and can hold their own among the best and brightest anywhere, and who have made imperishable contributions to the political, social, material and cultural life of Nigeria. Of them, it can be said truly and finally that their labours were not in vain.

    No list can do justice to all the deserving, of course. Still, some of the omissions are puzzling. By any measure, Chief Simeon Adebo, who headed a regional civil service ranked among the best anywhere and went on to serve with distinction as Nigeria’s first Permanent Representative to the United Nations, should have been a recipient of the Centennial Medal.

    How could they have glossed over Colonel Adekunle Fajuyi, who told the mutineers that if they must kill his guest and commander-in-chief, Major-General JTU Aguiyi-Ironsi, they would have to kill him as well? Can it be that they are strangers to this kind of loyalty?

    Professor Ishaya Audu, the first indigenous vice chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University, the economist, Dr Pius Okigbo, first indigenous Federal Economic Adviser, former ambassador to the European Economic Community and public intellectual of the first rank, as well as the legal titan Professor Ben Nwabueze, qualified to be named recipients.

    The educator and social critic, Tai Solarin, widely regarded in his time as the conscience of the nation despite one or two memorable gaffes, surely belongs among those cited for courage and moral integrity.

    Emmanuel Ifeajuna’s gold medal in the 1954 British and Commonwealth Games in Vancouver, Australia, was a first for Nigeria. Should his part in the 1966 coup have effaced this epochal achievement and rendered him ineligible for centennial recognition?

    If these and several other omissions are curious, some of the entries on the list are scandalous almost to the point of vitiating the entire list. I will dwell on just four such entries.

    For eight years, General Ibrahim Babangida ruled Nigeria virtually unchallenged. Like no ruler before after him, he was handed a chance to propel the country to greatness. Instead, he drove it to the edge of ruin with one duplicitous, self-serving scheme after another until he was forced into a ragged retreat from Abuja. The nation is yet to recover from the depredations of his time.

    Ernest Shonekan, who was supposed to oversee the transition from military to democratic rule, connived in subverting the process, emerging as prime beneficiary of the subversion. Among his own people, he is justly reviled as a quisling. Yet Abuja conferred him with a Centennial Medal.

    The psychopathic Sani Abacha was far and away the most loathsome and the most debauched leader Nigeria has ever had. If he was not also the most corrupt, he cannot be far behind. He stole and plundered like a raven.

    The say they are honouring him for rescuing the Nigerian economy from the depredations of the Babangida era. But was Abacha not for eight years Babangida’s confederate? In any case, where were the manifestations of the miracle a year after he expired in an orgy of concupiscence?

    They should have used the good offices of the Minster of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, to beseech the IMF and the World Bank to endow a professorship in his honour at Stanford or the University of Chicago.

    Abdulsalam Abubakar bears moral responsibility for the death of President-elect Moshood Abiola. Rather than free him from the infernal detention into which he had languished for years for refusing to bargain away his election mandate, Abubakar stalled and schemed until Abiola was murdered in his custody.

    It was cynical in the extreme and downright indecent to accord victim and oppressor the same honour. Even where the oppressors have shown remorse and atoned, which is not the case here, honouring them and their victims in the same act would still be reprehensible.

    Our compatriots who feel insulted by this conflation and rejected the Centennial Award showed far greater moral integrity and judgment than the people who approved the final list of recipients.

     

     

     

  • Desperate president, haughty prince

    Desperate president, haughty prince

    He had it coming.” “It serves him right.” “About time.” “De man too do, sef”

    The subject of these sentiments and many more of like vintage, expressed again and again across media platforms, is of course Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, who was sent packing from the gubernatorial suite at the Central Bank of Nigeria last week by President Goodluck Jonathan.

    Sanusi had planned to leave that powerful office on his own terms. In the manner of royals used to determining when they come and when they go and how long they stay, he had served notice that he would not seek an extension of the statutory term of five years. He might well have thought that, by that singular stroke, he had at once positioned himself to assert the autonomy that goes with the position and insured himself against the abject groveling and the shabby compromises that public officials often have to make to hold on to their jobs.

    He did not grovel. But he carried on in the manner of someone who could not be touched, said his numerous critics. He was all too ready to express an opinion on every subject under the sun and even beyond. He talked far more than he listened. It was as if he was conducting a crusade against the Establishment of which he was a part.

    He turned a purely technocratic job into a political forum and invested it with power and authority that went far beyond what its creators envisaged. He reveled in controversy. He dispensed public funds as if he was stricken with the Mansa Musa syndrome. Sometimes, it was as if he saw the CBN and its sprawling bureaucracy as an extension of the Kano emirate court.

    All in all, his numerous admirers countered, he has been a breath of fresh air in the mouldy corridors of high finance. He called attention to issues the authorities would rather conceal, such as the extortionate salaries and allowances legislators appropriated unto themselves under the table, and the opacity of the reporting system on oil export earnings. He spent public money judiciously, for beneficent ends.

    Above all, his numerous admirers said, he had rescued the banking sector from the grip of a powerful mafia that had since the time of military president Ibrahim Babangida turned the industry into an organised racket.

    Sanusi had three months left on his term. To Abuja which had been chafing under his strictures, three months seemed like an eternity. If he could not be removed, surely he could be neutralised and kept so busy fighting for his name and honour that asking inconvenient questions would be the last thing of his mind?

    So, they got the Department of Dirty Tricks to work up to the most intrusive and titillating detail an alleged dalliance between Sanusi and a female executive at CBN they said he had employed without following the rules. From intercepted text messages the twain were alleged to have exchanged, you could almost hear the moan of ecstasy and the joy of conquest.

    The Department of Dirty Tricks blanketed the media with these salacious reports, hoping that the public would rise in indignation, declare any public official involved in such conduct guilty of “moral turpitude” and unfit to hold high public office.

    There were indeed those who reacted in exactly that manner. Some even went one better, demanding that Sanusi be hauled before the nearest Sharia court, tried summarily and sentenced to public flogging or lapidation.

    But by and large, the stories gained no traction in the media or in public discourse

    So, the authorities fell back on the bureaucratic expedients of audits and queries. That didn’t work either. With his accustomed hauteur, Sanusi disputed the competence and authority of the sources of the queries that did reach him and refused to respond. Nor would he resign as President Jonathan requested.

    He says he heard of but was never served with the documents released after his ouster charging him with reckless and incompetent management of public funds and hinting darkly at big-time sleaze.

    That is hardly surprising. Abuja had had more than enough. It was time to unsheathe the sword of presidential power; time for the formerly shoeless boy from the creeks to teach the haughty prince from Kano who has never lacked for anything a lesson in realpolitik he seems to have forgotten: Power will always find a way.

    Didn’t Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna Sokoto, and premier of Northern Nigeria depose and banish to Azare, in what was then Bauchi Province, the now former CBN governor’s iconoclastic uncle, Muhammadu Sanusi, who served as Emir of Kano between 1954 and 1963? Did the heavens fall?

    So who or what can stand in the way of a President vested with the powers of a leviathan in his resolve to dismiss an official he can no longer work with? The Constitution only says the official cannot be dismissed without the consent and approval of the Senate. It does not say that you require any such approval to suspend him.

    So, go at him, and do so with petulant vindictiveness. Humiliate him on the world stage; suspend him from office while he is conducting business in Niamey, in Niger Republic, on the nation’s behalf.

    Such shabbiness harks back to what military president Babangida did to Prince Tony Momoh.

    For weeks, rumours of a cabinet shuffle had been swirling, and Momoh, the regime’s Minister of Information, was one of those being mentioned as likely casualties. So, before setting out at the head of a delegation to represent Nigeria at ceremonies marking the end of slavery in the Caribbean nation of Guyana, Momoh had gone to Babangida to ask whether he should proceed, in view of rumours that he was going to be dropped in the impending cabinet shuffle.

    “You believe that?” Babangida remonstrated. “Common, Tony. How can we drop our resident philosopher from the Federal Executive Council?’’

    Whereupon he wished Momoh a pleasant trip.

    Momoh’s plane was streaking across the Atlantic when Dodan Barracks announced that he had been dropped from the Federal Executive Council. By the time the plane touched down, he had been stripped of all authority to transact any business on behalf of the Federal Government.

    Sanusi’s media acolytes and retainers unwittingly contributed to his present grief when they dared Dr Jonathan to dismiss him and face dire consequences. Their taunts did little to restrain Dr Jonathan and may well have emboldened him.

    For now, Sanusi is gone. But the issues he raised will not go away until they are addressed forthrightly. Of these, none is more urgent than an answer to the insistent question: What happened to $20 billion in oil receipts?

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Annals of awards and coronations

    Annals of awards and coronations

    In Nigeria, nothing succeeds like an award.

    It does not matter whether the award recognises recondite achievement or no achievement at all, for the award itself is often the achievement. And if it is of the latter kind, it has to be marked with lavish, multi-stage and multi-venue celebration, the type that only the most inventive local, state, national and Diaspora organising committees can arrange.

    Congratulatory advertisements fill the newspapers, crowding out the news entirely or reducing it to a mere adjunct. Not the staid, flat, monochromatic advertisements of a bygone era but visual delights laid out in living colour by some of the finest graphic designers in the business.

    Given the prominence of such features in our culture, is it not something of a scandal that no organisation, not even the Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria, has seen it fit to institute an award for The Congratulatory Advertisement of the Year Award? How can it be explained that there is no National Merit Award for the Designer/Producer of the Best Congratulatory Advertisement of the Year?

    But I digress.

    I was led to these ruminations by two congratulatory advertisements in this newspaper the other day, not for their visual quality, which is not particularly remarkable, but for the great achievement they celebrate.

    The first rejoices with Mrs Mercy Orji, first lady of Abia, God’s own State, on being crowned Most Valuable Governor’s Wife (MVGW for short), the lucky governor being His Excellency Theodore Orji. I am taking great liberties here, for this congratulatory advertisement does not actually mention her by name. Doing so, someone knowledgeable in such matters tells me, might be construed as carrying familiarity too far.

    Instead the advertisement, signed by Cosmos Nuke, Chief of Staff to the governor, refers to her as “Ochendo Global,” and as “Osinulomaranma,” the adoring titles the people of the state have conferred on her in grateful appreciation of her personal munificence.

    We learn from the copy that the award is a “fair and just authentication” of the “inspiring values” she exhibits. These values include compassion, magnanimity, a good heart and untainted love for the needy, not forgetting the raison d’être for the award — being a Most Valuable Wife to the Governor Orji, aforementioned.

    It is in the second congratulatory advertisement signed by Mrs Adanma Iheuwe who has the double-barrelled title of Permanent Secretary and Executive Secretary of the Abia State Planning Commission, that we actually learn the real name of Her Excellency the Most Valuable Governor’s Wife.

    We also learn that the distinction being celebrated was conferred on Her Excellency by the “independent” Organising Team for the Most Valuable Governor’s Wife, and that the crowning took place at the prestigious Abuja Sheraton and Towers.

    Why in Abuja where Her Excellency, despite her impressive credentials, is not a household name? Why not in the State capital Umuahia, where a mammoth crowd of her admirers could join in the celebrations, with a day designated a public holiday for that purpose?

    The choice of Abuja for the consecration was strategic, it can now be revealed. Going by the fine print in the congratulatory advertisement, Abia’s first lady was crowned the Most Valuable Governor’s Wife only for the South-east geo-political zone, a region of intense and pervasive rivalry.

    In Nigeria’s other five geo-political zones, you could almost hear a collective sigh of relief. There is no imputation whatsoever that the first ladies in those zones are anything less than Most Valuable. All is calm on those fronts, unless the organisers of the Most Valuable Governor’s Wife decide to nationalise the award.

    In that case I can see the police moving in swiftly to pre-empt the award ceremony in the interest of law and order and peace and stability, or a court of competent jurisdiction issuing a perpetual injunction prohibiting such an event.

    But imagine the turmoil that would have eventuated if the MVGW event had been staged in Umuahia. Stalwarts from the camps which lost out, sponsored or freelance, would have converged on the city to disrupt the ceremony and smash things up into the bargain from sheer envy.

    Do not for a moment mistake the apparent calm in the gubernatorial mansions in Awka, Abakaliki, Enugu and Owerri for resignation or acceptance, however. A great deal of seething is going on behind those high walls and the opulent splendour they protect. The first ladies, an unimpeachable source tells me, have jointly and severally declared that they regard the title in question as a gratuitous assault on their honour, and that it must be avenged immediately.

    Their discomfiture is understandable. In fact, it has to be said to their credit that they have displayed admirable restraint under grave provocation. The contest was not advertised. The criteria for winning were not spelled out, leaving the public to engage in idle and malicious speculation as to why the four first ladies were adjudged less than Most Valuable.

    I do not envy the first husbands. But what can they do?

    Organise their own version of the independent Abuja event and have their first ladies proclaimed Most Valuable Governor’s Wife? That would be four Most Valuable Governor’s Wives too many. Pretend that the award did not happen? But it did, and denying it explicitly or implicitly will only make the disaffected first ladies in the zone angrier.

    Declare the award bogus, the handiwork of a band of racketeers with an eye for the main chance? But that would smack of sour grapes.

    Create an award that covers a wider region? But even in an enlarged zone, there can be only one Most Valuable Governor’s Wife. What kind of enlargement anyway?

    You could not include the South-south without provoking the wrath of the state governors there. Nor could you reach deep across the Niger or the Benue Niger without courting a civil war by another name.

    Nor are the governors of Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo likely to be buoyed by reports now circulating that another independent organisation in Abuja has virtually completed arrangements for a ceremony at which the Most Valuable Governor’s Wife’s Husband in the Southeast will be crowned, to complement the Most Valuable Governor’s Wife award.

    You can expect the four first husbands who lose out in this race to be just as resentful and implacable as the first four ladies who lost out in the earlier race, with terrible consequences for good governance in the zone. And who knows what those merchants of awards will do next.

    Personally, I will not be surprised if planning for the Most Valuable African First Lady has already reached an advanced stage in Abuja, current headquarters of the African First Ladies Peace Mission, with the Organised Private Sector expected to foot the bill, and Herself Mama Peace the prohibitive favourite, unless the contest is fixed.

    In a city famous for gaudy celebration, the conferment will be the mother of all ceremonies, and a fitting climax to the Great Nigerian Centennial.

    Now this, just in:

    Sons and daughters of the historic town of Fugar, in the Etsako Central Local government Area of Edo State, at home and abroad, have unanimously resolved to send a message congratulating Dr Goodluck Jonathan on dismissing their disobliging and undutiful son, Mike Ogadiomhe, from the exalted post of the President’s Chief of Staff, and pledging their total, unconditional and unalloyed support, as they used to say back when politics was colourful and cool, for his laudable Transformation Agenda.

    Ogadiomhe’s sin? They said he ate alone, unlike their great son, the late and much-lamented Okhai Mike Akhigbe.

    Watch out for the congratulatory advertisements in the more influential newspapers.

     

  • Corruption: The EU to the rescue

    Corruption: The EU to the rescue

    The Jonathan Administration must feel sorely disappointed, if not mightily frustrated, that despite all its ringing declamations against corruption in public life and the valiant measures it has taken to curb it, the pestilence has shown no sign of abating

    Well might the situation remind Dr Jonathan himself, a keen student of international literature, according to unimpeachable sources, of the Red Queen’s race in Wonderland, in which a participant has to run twice as hard just to stay in the same place. What makes it particularly galling here is that the place in question is not the head of the pack but the bottom of the league.

    And every December, Transparency International (TI) drives home the point with pitiless monotony. In its survey for 2013, it ranked Nigeria 144th out of 177 nations under review, a slippage of two percentage points below the 2012 mark, when it was bracketed with Cameroun and Central African Republic. Earlier TI surveys going back to 2006 had placed Nigeria alarmingly close to the bottom of the world’s most corrupt nations.

    Now, reprieve and redemption have come from the least expected source — the European Union, no less.

    Corruption in the 28 countries of the EU is costing European taxpayers about €120bn (£100bn) a year, the equivalent of the Union’s annual budget, its Commissioner for Home Affairs, Cecilia Malmström, revealed in Brussels last week.

    “There are no corruption-free zones in Europe,” Ms Malmström said. “We are not doing enough. That’s true for all member states.”

    To phrase the matter in a lexical context that the attentive Nigerian audience will understand, corruption is a cankerworm that has eaten deep into the fabric of the European Community.

    And what does the EU plan to do about it?

    Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

    Malmström noted that declared intentions to combat corruption in EU countries had not produced concrete results, and that the political will to eradicate it was lacking,” but added: “We do not propose any sanctions at all. Or laws.”

    So, there you have it. The EU is teetering under the weight of corruption, to the value of its entire budget for one year. But it cannot bestir itself to come up with the appropriate sanctions.

    And yet, its representatives in Abuja are forever lecturing Nigeria on good governance and accountability and transparency and all that. At the slightest provocation and often with no provocation at all, they are asking awkward questions about what Nigeria has done with financial and other kinds of aid from the EU and about how business is done in Nigeria, the object being to uncover evidence of corruption.

    When next EU officials go sniffing around Abuja or asking awkward questions, the Presidency’s most combative spokesperson – Prince Dr Doyin Okupe, where have you been? – should say again of the EU what U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland said the other day while criticising the Union’s dilatoriness on the crisis in Ukraine.

    Ordinarily, this column would not counsel a resort to expletives, this being a newspaper for the entire family, enjoined to dwell only on whatsoever is of good report. But the EU has to be told clearly and unambiguously that Nigeria will no longer put up with its carping, especially in this year of our Glorious Centenary.

    Nobody denies that corruption is a problem in Nigeria. Yes, there are no reliable studies to go by. But not even the nation’s most unyielding critics have ever suggested, much less asserted as the official investigation into corruption in the EU has done, that the equivalent of the entire federal budget in Nigeria is lost to corruption. In fact, according to the best authorities, only a negligible slice of the federal budget is lost to corruption

    So, what can the EU teach Nigeria about transparency and accountability?

    Even in the much-maligned petroleum industry, the most jaundiced estimates put the volume of production lost to theft and other forms of corruption at no more than 40 percent of total output. That is a far cry from the equivalent of the EU’s budget for a whole year that is lost to sleaze.

    Consider, next, petroleum revenues, an issue that has been generating heated controversy lately. First, Central Bank governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, claimed that U.S. $49.8 billion in oil receipts was “missing,” presumably stolen. Through painstaking reconciliation by all parties concerned, that figure was whittled down to a mere U.S. $10.8 billion, roughly one-fourth of the original figure, nothing remotely close to the 100 percent of its annual budget that the EU loses to corruption.

    It turned out that even this smaller amount was never missing. It represents operational costs and is duly accounted for in records that anyone can inspect – anyone who can read a ledger, unlike Malam Sanusi and his fellow alarmists at the Central Bank.

    Even if the U.S. $49.8 billion he reported “missing” is actually missing, that would still not be justification for all the hectoring from the EU. For it amounts to only a piddling fraction of total revenue for the reporting period, not the totality of NNPC’s earnings, much less the entire federal budget for a year.

    And whereas the EU has decided to make peace with the corruption choking it, Nigeria has been tackling the problem frontally and with iron resolve. Wherever a hint of corruption has been uncovered, it has been thoroughly investigated; the findings have been subjected to further investigation, and the recommendations have been reviewed by panel after panel, to ensure the utmost transparency.

    If you do not follow the highest standards of transparency while investigating corruption, you merely perpetuate corruption. That is the error they fall into – those calling for the dismissal of the Minister of Aviation, Princess Stella Oduah, on no firmer ground than the alleged purchase of two armoured limousines for her personal use, allegedly with public funds.

    Left to such people, the Minister should have been dismissed the moment the allegations surfaced more than four months ago. But a government sworn to transparency cannot do that. It chose the infinitely more transparent course of entrusting the preliminary investigation to one panel, the substantive investigation to another panel, and the definitive investigation to yet another panel.

    Right now, unknown to all the agitators, a panel is collating the results of these investigations, the findings of the National Assembly investigating panel, and the report of the anti-corruption watchdog EFCC. Thereafter, another panel will review the collated report and forward it to the panel that will ultimately send it up to the Presidency.

    That is just one example of the determined manner in which Nigeria is tackling official graft. The EU could learn a thing or two here if it were not so closed-minded.

    The same procedure is being followed in the investigation of the accounts of the NNPC, and of what some unimaginative reporters have called subsidy-gate, through which some misguided individuals and corporate bodies – the kind of persons that abound even in the EU — reportedly collected billions of Naira as payment for imported gasoline that was allegedly not supplied.

    These things take time. The important thing is that, unlike the EU, Nigeria is not folding its hands in abject surrender to corruption.

  • Eusébio: The colonial conundrum

    Eusébio: The colonial conundrum

    Another poignant scene in the unending drama of empire took centre stage in Portugal with the death five weeks ago of the soccer legend Eusébio — Eusébio da Silva Ferreira, to identify him by his full name – three weeks short of his 71st birthday.

    A deep sense of bereavement swept the entire nation. The Portuguese government declared three days of national mourning. Grieving crowds thronged Lisbon’s Stadium of Light to view the flag-draped casket bearing his remains. Outside the stadium stands the imposing bronze statue of the maestro who scored a phenomenal 679 goals in 678 official appearances to lead Benfica FC to 11 league titles and five national championships. Thousands lined the route of the cortege to bid him farewell in a funeral fit for a king.

    But in Mozambique, where he was born to an indigenous African father and a Portuguese mother in 1942, his death hardly caused a stir. Many a soccer fan in Mozambique may have experienced a sense of loss, but it was probably no deeper than that felt by the attentive soccer audience in Nigeria. In Mozambique, it did not register on the national consciousness.

    For all practical purposes, Eusébio was Portuguese, and Mozambique was not going to contest the matter.

    It is not true, by the way, that he had been “abducted” from his native land at age 18 by colonial headhunters seized of his vast talent and promise, and thereafter pressed into service for Benfica, A proper contract had been executed, Eusebio insisted, and he was free to return to Mozambique if things did not work out.

    Whether true or not, the “kidnap” story accords perfectly with the rapacious nature of Portuguese colonialism: Cart away to the metropolis as much as possible, secure the rest for the minority settler population, and the natives be damned.

    In whatever case, Eusébio never went back to Mozambique. What followed was a dazzling career during which he was awarded the Ballon d’Or in 1965 as Europe’s player of the year. Subsequently, he won the Golden Boot in 1968 and 1973 for being the top scorer in Europe. In 1998, he was voted one of the ten greatest footballers ever by a FIFA panel comprising 100 international experts.

    But it was Eusébio’s magical exploits in the 1966 World Cup that stamped his name indelibly on the beautiful game.Portugal had knocked out perennial favorites Brazil but was three goals down in the quarter finals to surprise qualifier North Korea and seemed all but finished.

    Eusébio scored three goals to erase the deficit, and one of two more goals to seal Portugal’s victory and earn it a third-place finish in a competition it had failed to qualify for in six previous attempts.

    That feat made Eusébio a national hero and led Portugal’s dictator António de Salazar to declare him a “national treasure.” The designation meant that Eusébio could not explore more lucrative playing opportunities elsewhere in Europe or indeed anywhere.

    He did not need to. Nowhere else could he have experienced the adulation and idolisation, the canonical stature he enjoyed in Portugal. But the same Portugal that heaped honours on him was at the same time waging a brutal war of subjugation against the very people from whom Eusebio was descended, the land where his prodigious talent first found expression.

    This incongruity is best understood in the context of Portugal’s colonial policy of assimilation. If you had the talents or potential the metropolis valued, you were assimilated into Portuguese society and were for all practical purposes Portuguese, with all the rights and privileges appertaining to citizenship. Your skin colour was no longer a disabling factor. So, enjoy all the good things the metropolis has to offer; leave the unwashed masses in the jungles back home to fend for themselves as best they can.

    Given the fame and fortune Eusébio found in Portugal, he could hardly be expected to resist incorporation into that kind of society.

    French colonialism also had an assimilationist streak. Its colonies were extensions of the metro-polis, and generations of children were weaned on school books that spoke glowingly of “our ancestors the Gauls,” and those colonial subjects, the évolués who acquired the qualities the French prized, were guaranteed easy passage into French society.

    Thus it was that Félix Houphouët-Boigny who went on to lead Côte d’Ivoire to independence , once served as a deputy in the French National Assembly, and former President Léopold Senghor of Senegal went one better, serving as a cabinet minister and being inducted into the prestigious French Academy, the ultimate French distinction.

    Britain’s class society was less accommodating. If the colonial subject got carried away to the point of forgetting where he came from, the system reminded him at every opportunity of his origin and did not hesitate to send him back if he would not stay in line.

    Many accomplished colonial subjects in Mozambique, and in Portugal’s other territories of Angola and Guinea-Bissau could have made peace with assimilation and lived happily ever after. But they rejected the thought on the threshold and took up arms instead – men of an intellectual cast of mind who would have been catapulted by their accomplishments to the highest ranks of Portuguese society.

    I am thinking of Dr Eduardo Mondlane, the social anthropologist who founded the liberation movement FRELIMO in 1962 and led it until he was assassinated by agents of the Portuguese government in 1969. I am thinking of Dr Agostinho Neto, the talented poet and physician who helped found MPLA, the liberation movement that ended Portuguese colonial rule in Angola. He went on to become the country’s first president at Independence in 1975,

    I am also thinking of Dr Amilcar Cabral, the agronomist and cultural theorist, founder and leader of PAIGC, the armed liberation movement that ended Portuguese colonial rule in Guinea –Bissau and Cape Verde. Dr Cabral did not live to see the Promised Land, however. He was assassinated in 1973 by agents of Portugal’s fascist state outside his home in Conakry, in the Republic of Guinea, where he had his party headquarters. His brother Luiz took up the mantle and led the struggle unto victory,

    Eusébio was neither politician nor scholar. He was not as grounded in the brutal realities of Portuguese colonialism as were Mondlane, Neto and Cabral. All he had were his preternatural skills, and those skills took him to dizzying heights that he could not have reached in his native Mozambique. He made the most of the opportunity and endeared himself to all on and off the soccer arena by his exemplary graciousness. He had no cause to assert, much less seek to reclaim, his African heritage.

    To dwell on all this is to take nothing away from the great man. It is to try to explain why his death plunged Portugal into national mourning but hardly registered in Mozambique, the land of his birth, why he was a national hero in the one and in the other a native son that few remember.

    More crucially, it is to re-examine the political sociology of Portuguese colonialism, its contents and discontents.

  • Retirements of the lexical kind

    Retirements of the lexical kind

    A gale of retirements originating from –where else? – Abuja has been sweeping the nation this past week. No, I take back this bureaucratic rendering. To call it by its proper name, what has been sweeping the nation is a gale of dismissals.

    To show that he is still in control even as everything around him seems to be collapsing, President Goodluck Jonathan dismissed – beg your pardon, “approved” the dismissal- of the chiefs of the armed services. If he cannot dismiss the pesky Governor of the Central Bank, he can at least give the marching orders to the top brass who think they count for much more in the political scheme.

    And as if to serve further notice that he is in office and in power, he followed up by “approving” the dismissal of the beleaguered chairman of the fractious PDP who had been taunting those demanding his ouster and has seemed immovable.

    They said the most cutting things about Bamanga Tukur; they called him all manner of names, denounced his management style and generally disparaged him in a manner that would have discomfited a hippo. But he sat tight. When he was not warning of the dire consequences of his forced exit, among which could well be another civil war, he was running around making abject supplications to anyone he thought could help save his job.

    Okay, the PDP is the biggest political party in Africa, but why would anyone submit to so much abuse to retain the post of chairman? After all it is not the case that the chairmanship of Africa’s biggest political party translates into any position of consequence in the African context. In fact, outside these shores, the chairman of the PDP might just as well be the chairman of the TDT for all that anyone cares.

    But all politics is local. And on the local scene, the chairman of the ruling party is a major player by virtue of that office and of his person.

    He has only to let a state governor know that he needs some pocket change for the weekend, and it is delivered in crisp, mint-fresh bundles amounting to – well, let us just say several million Naira. No governor who values his perch would be temerarious enough to dispatch less than N5 million for the chairman’s weekend entertainment, or to ignore the birthday of the chairman’s wife, or the birth of her latest grandchild

    The chairman may not be able to award a major contract singlehandedly, but he can influence who gets it. He receives far more patronage than he dispenses.

    When it comes to selecting the party’s candidates for elected office, the party chairman is kingmaker of king makers. The aspirant who fails to reckon with him is courting humiliation at the party’s convention.

    To dislodge a chairman — any chairman – of the PDP is therefore no mean achievement. The fact that former president Olusegun Obasanjo performed that feat six times does not render it any easier. After all, no one has ever accused him of subtlety.

    But Dr Jonathan dislodged the well-connected and tenacious Bamanga Tukur without fuss and without thrusting himself into the vortex of the controversy that had dogged Tukur almost from the day he became party chair. That is class.

    Watch out, then, those who have been carrying on in the belief that Dr Jonathan is well and truly finished. He is in charge; he knows it, and if it ever doubted it, the world will know when he takes off in his latest executive jet to confer with other global leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with stopovers in Juba, in Sudan, and Bangui, in the Central African Republic. Canada can keep its dry martini.

    If there is any good thing about the gale of dismissals, it is that even in the jarring discontinuities of climate change, it is absolutely certain to be followed by a gale of appointments. Nature merely abhors a vacuum; politics forcefully repels it the way like poles of a magnet repel each other.

    This column cannot hire or fire; it cannot influence who comes and who goes; it cannot even “approve” an appointment or a dismissal. But in the gale of retirements that will soon be followed by a gale of appointments, I have been conducting a lexical excursus to identify those terms that need to be retired from the vocabulary of news reporting in Nigeria.

    After relating that Bamanga Tukur had finally handed in his resignation, the newspapers went on to add in the manner of someone imparting a profound secret that a new chairman would soon “emerge.” And the follow-up story is sure to declare that a new chairman has indeed “emerged”

    These people who are forever “emerging” on the pages of our newspapers: Where did they emerge from? It is almost as if they have been in hiding, or as if the mask has finally been yanked off their timorous faces. For all we know, they might even have been languishing in a place of involuntary confinement until they were sprung.

    It is time to retire that word, howsoever conjugated, from the vocabulary of political reporting. Don’t make the man or woman of the moment look like something that just crawled out from under a rock or from the swamps.

    Concerning the service chiefs, it was reported that President Jonathan had “approved” their “retirement,” making what is at bottom a dismissal look like an act of benevolence. Nor is that the only problem with that framing.

    By implying that the decision to defenestrate them was taken elsewhere by another person or authority, it reduces President Jonathan to a mere rubberstamp. As he was once moved to remind the public, the Constitution vests him with the powers of a leviathan, but he has chosen to act like a lamb. To cast him as a mere rubberstamp is therefore a calculated insult to his office and person.

    The insult is repeated, if not compounded, whenever it is reported that the President has “approved” an appointment to a high national office. Again the subversive implication is that the appointment was determined by another authority, and that the president merely played rubberstamp.

    As everyone knows, Dr Jonathan is an engaged, hand-on, resolute president who never shies away from taking the hard decisions called forth in the governance of a diverse, complex country , home to unquestionably the most querulous people on earth.

    The news media and his aides should accord him his due. He is no rubberstamp.

    Finally, in this centennial of the birth of Nigeria, the term “amalgamation” is in the air. They are planning a year-long bash that will be underwritten by the “private sector,” according to the coordinator of the jamboree, Chief Anyim Pius Anyim.

    I hope the “private sector” he has in mind does not include the NNPC and the Ports Authority and other parastatals that are ever so often corralled into underwriting dubious projects. Anyim should look to those business concerns that have historically made rich pickings from the colonisation of Nigeria – UAC, Lever Brothers, Cadbury, Union Bank, to name only a few among them. There are, in addition, latecomers like the enormously influential construction giant Julius Berger, and of course the oil companies forever playing by their own murky rules.

    I don’t know who first applied the term “amalgamation” to the merging of the northern and southern territories to produce Nigeria. If Anyim and company must have their bash, they should come up with another term for what they are celebrating.

    “Amalgamation” is an ugly word. It is a soulless term, evocative of the fusion of two objects. Frederick Lugard’s conjuration produced no amalgam. It was all about the resources that could be extracted from the territories. It was never about the peoples inhabiting them. This is the time to retire that term.

  • At a time like this

    At a time like this

    If any era in Nigeria’s history qualified as one of heady optimism, it was the time leading to the inauguration of the Second Republic.

    The wounds of the civil war had healed faster than most people expected. Petrodollars accrued to the national exchequer faster than the authorities could figure out what to do with the new wealth. Biafra had provided powerful intimations of what black humanity can achieve when pursuing common purpose; a re-united Nigeria, home of the largest aggregation of black humanity, was going to take its rightful place in the global community, propelled by the dynamic leadership of Murtala Muhammed and Olusegun Obasanjo.

    Nigerians everywhere walked tall. Those studying abroad, most of them on government scholarships, rushed back on completion of their programmes, believing not only that home was where they belonged but that it was where their future lay. The Naira was worth almost two U.S. dollars. The economy was expanding, and jobs were there for the taking.

    In short, a future that would be marked by prosperity at home and major influence abroad was splendidly visible and clearly attainable.

    The 1979 Constitution, the fundamental law of the Second Republic, reflected the big thinking of that era, the planning for and investing in future political greatness, what with the American-style presidency and other institutions of state, just as a sprawling bureaucracy had planned for and invested in the nation’s future economic greatness.

    Framed by a team boasting some of the nation’s best and brightest, the Constitution was as bold and innovative as the times demanded, and just as comprehensive. It left nothing to chance.

    One of its more notable innovations, which has been attributed in the main to the per-eminent legal scholar Ben Nwabueze, was encapsulated in a Council of State composed of the President and the Vice President, all former presidents or heads of state, all former federal chief justices, the president of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, all state governors, and the Federal Attorney-General.

    Its remit, re-stated in the 1999 Constitution, is to advise the President with respect to his duties on a wide range of subjects in general, and on issues relating to the maintenance of public order in particular “when asked to do so.”

    This latter qualification makes it clear that the Council is an advisory body, pure and simple, and that it meets at the pleasure or convenience of the nation’s President. But it does not render it otiose.

    The underlying assumption was that the ex-officio members of the Council would be men and women who, having given of their best to their country, would stay splendidly above the fray and would never again seek elective office nor descend into the pit of partisanship. Thus, their good faith would never be in doubt.

    In a proper setting, the Council would be the repository of the nation’s collective wisdom and experience, a fount of inspiration, a moral force. It would be the body to turn to when the country is buffeted by strife and uncertainty – the very kind of period Nigeria is going through now.

    The nation is paralysed on practically every front. The ruling PDP is in disarray and scheming desperately to hold on to power. The economy is reported to be growing by leaps and bounds, but the nation slips farther and farther down the international misery index. Power supply remains fitful, impervious to the magic wand of privatisation.

    Interstate highways remain dangerously cratered. Youth unemployment, already alarmingly high, is soaring. Fully one-fourth of the crude oil lifted from our shores is stolen, and record-keeping of what is not stolen is scandalously shoddy.

    The immediate future promises only more of the same.

    And at the top, diffidence reigns. Not even the most fervent chants of Transformation can drown out the din of the rank innocence, the utter bewilderment up there.

    It is precisely at a time like this that the Council of State should be deliberating and helping to chart a way forward. However, that very concept has turned out to be another instance in the nation’s life of how a beautiful theory was murdered by a gang of brutal facts.

    The higher echelon of the Council today is not composed of the kind of people the framers of the 1979 Constitution had in mind – elder statesmen whose moral force would flow from exemplary rectitude and distinguished service; persons who would stay splendidly above the fray and would never again seek elective office nor descend into the pit of partisanship.

    General Yakubu Gowon, forever radiating goodwill, would pray and pray but nothing would change. Former president Obasanjo could just take over the proceedings to deliver another blistring missive. Shehu Shagari would turn up more from habit than conviction. General Muhammadu Buhari, still chafing from the outcome of the last presidential election, will not attend a meeting called by a person he regards as a usurper.

    General Babangida says he has finally given up trying to return to power, but he is nothing if not calculating. What example or inspiration can anyone expect from Ernest Shonekan? General Abdulsalami Abubakar is preoccupied tending to the vast fortune he acquired in just one year in the saddle and shopping around for more.

    The state governors could turn the meeting into a forum for settling once and for all – by fisticuffs if necessary – the lingering puzzle of which number is bigger: 19 or 16?

    It is therefore understandable that President Goodluck Jonathan is in no hurry to convene a meeting of the Council, as some of its statutory members are urging him to do. He is not constitutionally obliged to do so. To convene the Council in the present charged atmosphere would be the closest thing to political suicide. I doubt whether a meeting would serve any useful purpose.

    But the drift cannot continue. Dr Jonathan must move quickly to arrest it by reaching out beyond his present inner circle to enlist help from disinterested men and women of undoubted goodwill and sound judgment, people who can tell him what he needs to know rather than what they think he would like to hear.

    Meanwhile, it would help enormously if he travelled less, listened more, and devoted more time to the serious reading that improves the mind and enlarges vision.