The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • Matters arising

    Matters arising

    Six hours before they rang in the new year, I was already responding to wishes of Happy New Year with great diffidence.

    I was hoping that, no later than June 2014, when the municipal power supply will be so abundant that private generators would become sentimental archaisms, I would be able to snag up one at a bargain price for the house up-country as an insurance against any relapse of the bad old days of darkness.

    Going by what President Goodluck Jonathan had given the public to understand some three years ago, generators would no longer be the prized assets that they were; they would be little more than junk and just a shade less than toxic machinery, and their owners would be locked in a fierce competition to determine who could give them away fastest – “dash” them out —as Dr Jonathan phrased it.

    My dream generator was a 25KVA affair that could light up the premises and power all the appliances in full throttle. I harboured no illusion that I would qualify for that kind of dash or any dash for that matter from Aso Rock. But I was hoping that if they decided to auction the gensets (shorthand for generating set) instead of dashing them out, I might with some luck post a successful bid for one on offer.

    Imagine my disappointment, then, when I read an advance copy of Dr Jonathan’s New Year message in this newspaper saying that despite the great progress that has been made in that sector, no more than 18 hours of electricity a day was guaranteed for 2014. For 18, read 12 hours of power supply on the average.

    No individuals and no organisations, it is now clear, are going to be auctioning their generators, much less dashing them out. In fact, Aso Rock, which had floated that beguiling idea, has wisely provided some N700 million in its budget for the fueling and maintenance of its gensets that are said to number close to a hundred. With that kind of hardware to manage and coordinate, it is a surprise that they do not have a cabinet-rank Senior Special Adviser on Generators in residence.

    As things stand now, it is unlikely that I will be able to acquire the genset of my dream this year, or even the next. Not a promising note to start a new year.

    A friend tells me that the uncle of his grand nephew also entered the 2014 on a note that is just as discomposing. On learning several months ago that the government was set to privatise Nigeria’s oil refineries that had been advertised for decades as irreparably broken, he had raided his investment portfolio to position himself to function as a major player whenever the plants come under new management, convinced that privatisation is just what is required to turn them into high-yield gold mines.

    The announcement had been made by the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Ms Diezani Alison-Madueke, no less, in London, before an audience of hard-headed businessmen and women who can sniff an investment opportunity from a thousand miles. That was good enough for the uncle of my friend’s grand nephew, who is as cagey as they come in this business.

    The well-known fact that the Minister has the President’s ear to at least the same extent as the Princess Stella Oduah, boss of the scandal-plagued Ministry of Aviation, virtually settled the matter. Even if Dr Jonathan had not confirmed from on high that that the refineries were indeed marked for privatisation, the uncle of my friend’s grand nephew would still have considered the whole thing a done deal.

    You cannot imagine how shattered he was when word came from Aso Rock the other day that the refineries were not slated for privatisation, that no decision had been taken to that effect, and that no Minister – not even one who has the President’s ear, they should have added – could take it upon herself to contemplate, much less actualise, such a proceeding.

    Those elusive foreign investors, disobliging even when there is policy consistency backed by attractive inducements, can hardly be blamed if they concluded that Nigeria is not yet safe for capital and that they are better off taking their funds to friendlier climes. I hope Dr Jonathan and his oil minister will offer them and the nation’s creditors, not forgetting the IMF, clear and convincing answers for this policy somersault.

    In this season of goodwill, it is meet and proper to dwell on one image of Dr Jonathan that brightened my holiday, in case you missed it. The picture shows him in a church or chapel, surrounded by the faithful, an acoustic guitar strapped across his shoulder. It was not clear whether he was preparing to strum or had just finished strumming the guitar.

    But it was clear that he is a practised performer on that instrument at praise worship, most likely of the traditional type rather than gospel pop. For, I cannot imagine him rocking and swaying and strumming lustily as the band belts out tunes evocative of rock ‘n’ roll or rhythm and blues.

    But who knows! It may well be that such a setting offers him a chance to shake off that starchy gait, to loosen up, to escape from the burdens of office and savour the kind of life he has not known since they railroaded him into this presidency thing.

    If that is the case, I say ride on. Mr President. That office needs to be humanised the way President Bill Clinton humanised his office when he donned sun glasses and played the sax in prime time on the Arsenio Hall Show.

    President Barack Obama humanises the office not just by the way he relates to his daughters in public, but by playing basketball with his friends on the White House grounds. Pardon me for inserting him into this matter, but your predecessor, our own Olusegun Obasanjo, did the same through his exertions playing squash. He still plays squash these days when not writing missives.

    Can The Presidency imagine how electrified the audience and indeed the nation would be if Dr Jonathan were to shed his habitual resource-control outfit or his federal-character ensembles for snazzy Giorgio Armani suit or designer casuals and take the stage at a cool nightclub in Abuja –no, Lagos – to accompany the resident band on his guitar and may be throw in a solo rendition as a bonus?

    It would be worth at least a million additional votes in 2015.

    And if Aso Rock were to take the road show nationwide, with Information Minister Labaran Maku in tow preaching the Gospel of Transformation and Agriculture Minister Akinwumi Adesina heralding the end of hunger as Dr Jonathan’s guitar belts out stirring tunes, this could turn around the PDP’s sinking fortunes, lock up the 2015 race, and shame all those noisy defectors.

  • December 2013: A month in missives

    December 2013: A month in missives

    When the history of these tempestuous times in Nigeria comes to be written, December 2013 will go down as The Month of Missives.

    The blizzard was set off by an 18-page missive from former President Olusegun Obasanjo to Dr Goodluck Jonathan, whose dizzy rise from the obscurity of deputy governor of Bayelsa State to vice president, en route to becoming president, Obasanjo had orchestrated. Obasanjo had in the same manouevre railroaded Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, governor of Katsina State, into the office of President

    Settling for these men when far more capable aspirants were available and willing will forever cast a pall on Obasanjo’s judgment.

    To return to the missive: It was vintage Obasanjo – blunt as a punch to the nose. I rather like the earthy Yoruba expression a correspondent employed to describe the matter, but I cannot reproduce it here even in loose translation, this being a newspaper for the entire family, enjoined to dwell only on whatsoever is of good report.

    Let us just say that my correspondent likened the missive in all its bluntness to a kick in the groin.

    Other than the charge that the Jonathan Administration was training a squadron of snipers at a secret location, there was nothing in Obasanjo’s missive that the attentive audience does not encounter daily in the newspapers, in the so-called social media, and in their workaday lives.

    Shortly after Dr Jonathan took office, I asked one of his top advisers whether he was up to the task. His reply: “Without hesitation, no.” And the adviser reeled out instance upon instance that led him to that judgment. Several senior officials close to Dr Jonathan also concurred in that evaluation when I put the same question to them.

    Given the special scrutiny my passport has received in the past three years upon my arrival at Murtala Muhammed Airport, I have good reason to believe, as Obasanjo has charged, that the Administration maintains a Watch List. Some prominent media figures of my acquaintance are also often subjected to the same wanton attention at Passport Control

    Many have argued that even if the missive was on target, as indeed it was, the author was not morally qualified to issue it; that many of the grave deficiencies he identified in the Jonathan record could be traced to his own tenure, and that he had not merely set a ghastly example for his estranged protégé, he had also guided him to follow it through. The pupil, they maintain, has learned only too well from his tutor.

    There is some merit to that reasoning.

    Still, doesn’t every parent expect his children to transcend his or her own inadequacies, to succeed where the parent failed, and altogether to chalk up a superior record of achievement? That, I suspect is the basis of Obasanjo’s disenchantment, that Dr Jonathan has not measured up to his expectations. It is now clear that he did not know his “son” well enough to nurse such expectations

    The sandbagging proved too much even for the usually meek pupil, and he has struck back using every available platform and occasion – in a BBC interview from Paris, in Nairobi, Kenya, and at church services, naming no names but leaving no doubt about whom he has in mind – those who regard not just the Presidency but the entire country as their personal bedroom.

    The centerpiece of his response was a blockbuster missive designed to counter almost point by point Obasanjo’s charges. It is competent in part but perfunctory overall. Polemically, there is little to recommend it. In substance, it was less than a robust rebuttal. I doubt whether it changed any minds.

    What must be seen as a far more damaging response to Obasanjo’s withering missive came in the form of another missive said to have been written by his daughter Iyabo, most recently a “distinguished senator,” to employ the inflated appellation members of Nigeria’s upper house of the National Assembly have bestowed on themselves to match their obscene, self- assigned material privileges.

    For sheer scurrility, it would be hard to match. In fact, I am almost prepared to state that, if it is confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt that she wrote the missive, it will go down as one of the most contumacious ever written by a child to a parent. It is perfused with contempt, ridicule, scorn, and loathing abhorrence of the most visceral kind.

    There are reasons aplenty for doubting that she wrote the missive published by Vanguard Newspapers. The missive was typewritten, not written in longhand, the intimate, personal format one would expect most children to employ in writing to their parents. The closing line lists her academic qualifications, as if it was a letter of reference or a job application. Surely, her father would know that she has doctorates in veterinary medicine and public health?

    Nor was the missive signed. This particular omission may have been designed to allow the writer to deny authorship. But does it not also suggest that Dr Obasanjo may not have written it?

    Much of what the missive contains about how Obasanjo relates to members of his family has long been in the public domain. Anyone who has read the memoirs of Iyabo Obasanjo’s mother or her numerous press interviews and has some familiarity with gossip about the family could have written that missive.

    So, judging strictly by the rules of documentary analysis, it is not proven that Dr Obasanjo wrote it. If she wrote it, did she intend it for publication? And if she did not write it, who did?

    To the extent that she has not disavowed the missive, reasonable people may reasonably conclude that she must have written it. But if she wrote it, why has she not come out to say so?

    If Dr Obasanjo confirmed that she wrote the missive, she would have assured for herself a lasting place in the annals of infamy. If she repudiated it, she would have spurred those who say they have proof that she wrote it to come out with it and destroy whatever ambition she might still be nursing.

    In the circumstance, she would seem to have calculated, or more likely been led to believe that keeping mum is the best strategy for damage control.

    That, at any rate, is the theory I have come to accept.

    As the nation reeled from its impact, the blizzard of missives was upgraded to a veritable maelstrom by yet another missive, this one from the plush and sedate executive suites of the Central Bank, courtesy of its governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi.

    Some U.S. $50 billion or N8 trillion in oil export earnings, the missive addressed directly to President Jonathan charged, had not been remitted to the federal exchequer by the notoriously opaque Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).

    Back when the trouble with Nigeria was not money but how to spend it, the charge would have been explosive indeed. Now that the government is reportedly broke and the air saturated with allegations of official thieving, the charge is nothing if not incendiary.

    The NNPC moved with uncharacteristic speed to explain that the gap identified by CBN represented remittances to other agencies of the Federal Government. Sanusi stuck to his missive and renewed the charge.

    In the end he conceded that just US$10 billion remains unaccounted for. That is still a great deal of money, but a far cry from the amount alleged to be missing, in the popular imagination diverted to private pockets.

    When principal officials of the treasurer to the Federal Government and the bank of bankers cannot count, when they are unfamiliar with the mechanism for reporting oil receipts, how much confidence can the public invest in all those figures they ritually churn out?

    Finally, I bring up another missive, a 12-page excoriation of Obasanjo that qualifies only as a minor footnote, and a contemptible one at that. Its author is Ameh Ebute, who played a part in bargaining away the victory of his party’s candidate, Chief MKO Abiola, in the 1993 presidential election.

    If Ebute and his gang had not betrayed the sovereign will of the people as expressed emphatically in that election, if they had stood firm, there would have been no Shonekan Interim, no Abacha, no Obasanjo redux and probably no Jonathan.

  • The Mandela files (3): Encounters

    The Mandela files (3): Encounters

    Of the four encounters I was privileged to have with Nelson Mandela, the second was the most revelatory.

    Many of his defining attributes that the entire world has been remarking and celebrating since his death three weeks shone through splendidly in that encounter – his graciousness, the deep emotional reserve he guarded tenaciously the way he must have guarded his face in the boxing ring, and his resoluteness..

    But first, some background.

    General Olusegun Obasanjo had served as co-chair of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group that had recommended economic sanctions and other measures that, together with the altered international environment – glasnost, perestroika, and all that – and the black insurrection in South Africa, moved the ruling regime to abandon petty apartheid and to begin seriously to contemplate a future without that pernicious doctrine.

    During the EPG mission, in 1986, he had struck a relationship with Nelson Mandela, then languishing in prison. He had strengthened the relationship when he hosted Mandela and his wife Winnie to a rousing reception at his farm in Otta when they visited Nigeria in May 1990. Some three months later, Obasanjo was headed for South Africa, on a mission “to listen, learn and encourage” the transition then slowly unfolding.

    I had asked to company him on the trip to get the kind of access that an earlier visit did not provide. Also on the trip were his friend and confidant, the engineer and industrialist Obafemi Olopade, Dr Yusuf Maiangwa, since deceased, director of the Africa Leadership Forum, and former Nigerian High Commissioner to Canada, on leave from Ahmadu Bello University, where he was a professor of French, and two security aides.

    The visit could not have started on a less promising note.

    Within an hour of our landing at Jan Smuts International Airport in Johannesburg, on July 25, 1990, well before General Obasanjo could brief Nelson Mandela and the ANC leadership of his mission, state radio had broadcast the news. Something told me that Mandela would at the very least regard this as a misstep, and would not take kindly to it.

    Early on July 26, 1990, the first full day of our visit, official state radio announced that a plot by the South African Communist Party and some elements of the African National Congress to overthrow the government by force had been uncovered. Specifically, it reported that Mac Maharaj, a member of the ANC National Executive, had been arrested in the investigation of the plot.

    To underscore the gravity of the situation, the government had detailed its intelligence chief, the intense and precise Dr Neil Barnard, to brief Obasanjo and his team on their arrival in Pretoria to meet with senior government officials.

    Barnard and other spokespersons were careful to point out that Mandela was not personally involved in the plot, which they characterised as a “betrayal of trust” that could undermine the peace process “before any significant milestone” was reached and, perhaps more ominously, “threaten the fragile peace in the sub-region.”

    As a condition for restoring trust, they demanded that Maharaj and Joe Slovo, leader of the SACP, be dropped from the ANC’s negotiating team.

    This was the unpromising backdrop to our meeting with Mandela at the ANC’s headquarters in downtown Johannesburg later that day – a day on which state radio announced repeatedly and to the ANC’s consternation, that Obasanjo had arrived to listen, learn and encourage.

    We were ushered into Mandela’s cluttered office as senior members of the ANC were dispersing after concluding a strategy meeting at which they issued a defiant rebuttal to the government ‘s claim that the SACP and ANC were plotting to overthrow it

    Preliminaries were less strained than I had expected. Half-way through, a young woman with a battery of cameras entered the room, and as she tip-toed round the conference table to go into an adjoining room, Mandela accosted her.

    “Mandissa, where have you been?” he said. “I haven’t seen you in quite a while.”

    The young woman, a photographer for the ANC, replied that she had been away on an official assignment.

    “I wanted to give you a copy of my new book,” he said. Grabbing a copy of No Easy Walk to Freedom from a desk, he autographed it and handed it to her.

    That was the essential Mandela, the person who always looked out for those who did the grunt work but on whom the klieg lights rarely shone and who never made the headlines and the front pages.

    Then, Mandela turned to Obasanjo and asked him to introduce his team. At the mention of Olopade’s first name, Obafemi, Mandela instantly made a connection with the more famous bearer of that name, Chief Awolowo, who had died some three years earlier. Twenty-seven years in prison, without access to the news media, had not dulled his memory.

    Mandela would debrief Obasanjo and his team several hours later in the house that Winnie built, in the West Orlando neighbourhood of Soweto, while he was in prison – an elegant affair but by no means the most elegant there, and far from opulent.

    “Whom have you been talking with?” he began, notepad before him and pen in hand.

    As Obasanjo told him about what had transpired in our earlier appointments, you saw Mandela the patient listener, the meticulous note-taker and the skilled interrogator all rolled into one.

    When we met him in the Cabinet Room in the Union Buildings in Pretoria — he had jokingly remarked that I was sitting in the chair usually occupied by the Defence Minister, General Magnus Malan — I had asked President Frederik de Klerk to sketch a time frame for the transition.

    Pulling out my notebook, I relayed his response to Mandela.

    “Difficult,” de Klerk had said. That year -1990 – and the next would be crucial and dynamic. “Certainly, no new election would be held under the present (apartheid) constitution. We are in a hurry. We are not playing games. We are not looking at ten or even five years from now . . .”

    “No new election will be held under the present constitution?” Mandela repeated slowly and deliberately.

    “Exactly what he said, sir,” I replied, looking toward Obasanjo for confirmation.

    Obasanjo confirmed that I had correctly reported de Klerk.

    All this was news to Mandela. He had never been told that much by de Klerk, who kept his cards fairly close to his chest, and may indeed have used our visit to telegraph to Mandela and the ANC that he was s person with whom they could do serious business.

    If Mandela was in the least excited by this development that had the markings of a game-changer in South Africa’s tortuous history, he did not show it. The deep, emotional reserve that had been his armour had supervened.

    But the fighter in Mandela broke through the emotional dam when Obasanjo informed him that, because South African Airways was grounded by a strike, he had offered the leader of the rival, hard-line Pan Africanist Congress, Zeph Mothopeng, a ride to Lagos the following day on the Falcon 600 executive jet that military president Ibrahim Babangida had provided for our trip.

    “Ólù,” he said, looking Obasanjo in the face and wagging the index finger of his right hand, “don’t have anything to do with that chap. If you do, you will lose all your friends here in South Africa.”

    He was firm, resolute. He expected no buts and no ifs, and he got none.

    General Obasanjo would call later to tell Mothopeng that his travel plans had changed, as indeed they had. He would not be flying to Lagos the next day after all. Instead, he would fly to Ulundi, in KwaZulu-Natal, for a meeting with the leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who was seething with resentment that he had been marginalised in the on-going negotiations.

    From there, he would proceed to the Zambian capital Lusaka to brief President Kenneth Kaunda, chair of the Frontline States, on his mission, and the team would spend the night there as Kaunda’s guests.

     

    *Third and final installment of a retrospective on Nelson Mandela. Some of the material here first appeared in my reporting for The Guardian Sunday Magazine (August 5, 1990), titled “Tracking Apartheid’s Changing Face”.

     

     

  • The Mandela files (2): Mandela in America

    The Mandela files (2): Mandela in America

    In the age of television and instant mass communication, we ought perhaps to revise Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quip and insist that every hero becomes a bore not merely at last but very soon, maybe after only two or three television interviews.

    To do so, however, would be to reckon without the phenomenon that is Nelson Mandela.

    If one week is a long time in politics as a British statesman once remarked, the six months that have passed since Mandela was released from prison and has been the focus of media attention constitute nothing less than an eternity in the murky world of international politics.

    And yet, his stature has continued to grow, and his admirers to multiply. Everywhere he speaks, his message gains in urgency. He has been winning friends for the African National Congress and the liberation struggle of which he is the foremost symbol.

    After scores of television appearances, innumerable newspaper interviews and speeches, he is still displaying an intriguing knack for saying the right thing in the right place at the right time in the right way.

    At 72, Mandela maintains a schedule that would have fazed many a man half his age. But rarely has he shown the irritability that usually flows from weariness that not even a person of his singular energies and willpower can conceal. To admirers and opponents alike, he has shown uncommon civility and a graciousness that is all the more remarkable for being so totally natural.

    In America, the land of the anti-hero, where the news interview is an inquisition by another name, it was widely expected that he would be cut down to human size at last. He had set out on a14-nation, six-week trip only four days after undergoing surgery. The calculation in some quarters was that by the time he reached the United States, signs of exhaustion would be so manifest in his conduct, his temperament would have become brittle, and he would not be able to stand up to the tough questioning for which the American news media are reputed.

    Mandela’s well-known favourable disposition towards some of the bêtes noires of the American Establishment – Cuba’s president Fidel Castro, Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and PLO leader Yasser Arafat – was sure to render him vulnerable to the sniping of the jingoistic right-wing press and the powerful Jewish interests, of which the United States policy-making is hostage.

    But in America, Mandela was at his brilliant and most engaging best. More than one million people in New York lined his route to honour him in a ticker-tape parade. The city’s first African American mayor, David Dinkins, gave him the keys of the Big Apple. At the United Nations, accredited representatives of all nations of the world rose in a prolonged ovation even before he began to speak.

    He told America that that its enemies were not necessarily the enemies of the ANC; he praised Castro and Gaddafi and Arafat for their contributions to the liberation struggle in South Africa. He spelled out without hatred or bitterness what apartheid means in human terms, insisted on the imperative of the armed struggle, and declared that nothing had happened in his country to warrant the lifting of sanctions.

    In Washington, DC, he drew rapturous applause at various points in his address before the United States Congress, the first by a black foreign leader who holds no executive authority.

    In television and newspaper interviews and speeches across the United States, he reiterated his position on various issues calmly and with the grave, measured dignity that is his hallmark.

    Predictably, a few rumbles were heard here and there. The Jewish lobby was aghast that Mandela did not denounce Yasser Arafat as a terrorist chieftain and the PLO as a terrorist organisation. Under pressure from the large Cuban exile community, Miami scaled down the reception that had been planned for Mandela.

    The New York Times in an editorial hailed him as an authentic hero, a manifestation of man’s unconquerable spirit, but remarked that if the United States were to employ Mandela’s standards and judge individuals and organisations by their attitudes toward it and not on the basis of other people’s prejudices, it would never have imposed economic sanctions against the South Africa.

    A.M. Rosenthal, the rabidly pro-Jewish columnist for the paper, wrote approvingly of Mandela but deplored as “amoral” his standards in choosing friends. So did other Times columnist Flora Lewis, whose liberal credentials are unimpeachable on all matters except those that have any bearing on Israel, however tangentially.

    All of them conveniently forget that the United States is only a recent convert to the view that economic sanctions can force Pretoria to reconsider its iniquitous policies’

    Was it not the U.S. that invented the opportunistic and amoral policy of “constructive engagement”? Was it not former Secretary of State, George Schultz, who declared that the U.S. could not impose economic sanctions against South Africa because American women would by that measure be deprived of a source of diamonds? Had the U.S. not always stood in the way of UN draft resolutions condemning the barbarities of apartheid?

    Mandela knows all this but is too gracious, too civil, to dwell on them. He had his own message to put across and was not going to be dragged into sterile controversy.

    *Second installment of a three-part retrospective on Mandela. The article was first published in The African Guardian (September 23, 1990).

    *

    Twenty-three years later, well before Mandela’s lifeless body had turned cold, the right-wing media in the United States resumed its campaign of framing Mandela according to its soulless measure of goodness and greatness.

    Yes, Mandela preached love and forgiveness and may even have practised same. But, you see, he was a Kha.mew.nist (read Communist). A Kha.mew.nist, you understand? He was the leader of a terrorist organisation that murdered thousands of innocent people in Africa and elsewhere, many of them women and children.

    You doubt it?

    Recently declassified material in the British archives, they said triumphantly, shows irrefutably that Mandela was not merely leader of an organisation of which the South African Communist Party was an ally, he was, horror of horrors, an actual, card-carrying, dues-paying member of that party.

    Such labelling is a familiar weapon of the American Right, reserved especially for outstanding black men whose complaisance could not be taken for granted – Paul Robeson, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, and Martin Luther King, Jr., to name just a few.

    Mandela had denied his alleged Communist affiliation again and again. But does it matter whether he was a Communist or not? If it is indeed proven that he was once an active, card-carrying, dues-paying member of the SACP, would that take anything away from his stature as one of the greatest men of our age and any age?

    Apartheid, the pernicious ideology that undergirded the machinery of government in South Africa, was justly condemned by the United Nations as a crime against humanity. To some of the loudest elements of the American Right, however, Communism is a far greater evil apartheid.

    Better a crime against humanity – especially black humanity — than a doctrine that challenges the foundations of market capitalism.

  • The Mandela files (1): The legend lives

    The Mandela files (1): The legend lives

    As rumours of the imminent release of Nelson Mandela gained ground, several nagging questions must have assailed even his most ardent admirers.

    What if the man turned out to be but a shadow of the legend? What if he emerged stooped and walked with tentative steps and a shuffling gait after 27 years in prison, most of them in the unspeakably inhospitable conditions on Robben Island? What if his shoulders drooped and his clothes hung on him as if on a peg?

    What if his speech was slurred and he could not give the rousing orations to the crowds that were sure to gather wherever he stopped? What if his memory no longer served him well? What if he was wizened and could not even withstand the strain of a brief address to the teeming crowd of chanting admirers? What if he had to be helped up and down the dais?

    His remarkable strength of character and indomitable will are of course well known. But what if prison had sapped his will, his vigour and his spirit, and there was no fight left in him? And surely, he is not superior to the laws of biology?

    Questions, questions, and more questions.

    True, the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group, of which our own General Olusegun Obasanjo was co-chairman, had reported some four years earlier that they found him in remarkably good physical shape, in full possession of his faculties and enormously well-informed. But anything could have happened since then to a person of Mandela’s age.

    Besides, sheer surprise at finding that the man was not so derelict as they had expected might have led them to exaggerate his condition. And, in any case, did they interact with him long enough to be able to make valid judgments about his physical and mental condition?

    Doubts, doubts, and more doubts.

    But the answers to the questions and the doubts came when he stepped out of the Victor Verster Prison, near Paarl, in the Western Cape, on February 11, 1990.

    Age and the prison regimen had taken their toll. The robust frame that once belonged to South Africa’s leading amateur middleweight boxer, the tireless people’s lawyer and guerrilla chieftain had yielded to a spare body. The cherubic face of the heydays of the resistance was now deeply lined. The hair was freckled with grey.

    But the gait was erect. His steps were measured, firm. His voice resonated with authority. He read from prepared texts with the unaided eye. The fighting spirit that had led his associates and admirers to call him the Black Pimpernel had not waned.

    Apartheid had got to go. The state of emergency must be lifted. The armed struggle would continue until conditions for meaningful negotiations were created. All political prisoners, including most of those whom the apartheid regime was holding on trumped-up charges, must be released. Sanctions must be sustained. Far too many people had died in communal violence. The killings must stop. Students should go back to their school; workers to their mines and factories

    White domination must end, but it would not be replaced by black domination. South Africa would be a home to all who want to live in a democratic, just, non-racial society.

    By one account, Mandela gave in a single day nine interviews to television crews from across the world. Nobody could have judged from his performance that he had never until a month or two before, seen a television camera. Without the slightest trace of unease, he responded calmly and confidently to questions that ranged from the personal to the public, and from the past to the future.

    Whether he was sitting in front of television cameras or addressing a huge crowd or receiving endless streams of visitors that poured into his Soweto home, he displaced, according to The New York Times, “the measured dignity” that the ancient Romans called “gravitas.” In a perceptive essay for The Observer, South Africa’s eminent journalist Allister Sparks described him as a “patriarch.”

    Even The Economist, that consummate master of the elegant putdown, especially of persons and institutions that do not regard capitalism in its rawest form as something divinely ordained, allowed that Mandela “turned out a finer man than South Africa” – by which it probably meant the racists “had a right to expect,”

    Mandela is an authentic martyr who chooses not to come across as one. He is the symbol of the struggle of justice and freedom in South Africa and without question its most authentic spokesman, but he insists that he is only a member of the African National Congress.

    Even when the rusty Iron Lady was again putting to ridicule whatever pretensions Britain still makes to greatness by calling for an end to sanctions, Mandela said he would have to clear with the ANC before answering her.

    Mandela’s travel plans also reflect a deliberate sunning of the limelight. His first port of call will be Liusaka, Zambia, to renew ties with ANC leadership and cadres. From there, he will proceed to Sweden to greet Oliver Tambo, his comrade-in-arms, who is recovering from stroke. While Mandela was in jail, it was Tambo who animated and kept the struggle alive from outside.

    Then, on to India and Canada, perhaps the two most unyielding protagonists of sanctions.

    A lesser man would have headed straight to Britain and the United States, for sumptuous banquets under glittering lights; he would have jumped at the opportunity to be photographed with those we have been conditioned to regard as the high and the mighty.

    Not Mandela.

    By now Mandela has shattered all the stereotypes, the fears, the greed, and all the ignorance that have sustained for almost half a century one of the most inhuman systems of government the world has ever known.

    I hope, for the sake of the apartheid regime that South African television has been presenting a faithful portrait of the man. The disciples of apartheid should study and understand and appreciate him. For, as matters now stand, he is probably the only person who can liberate them from the incomparable prison that is apartheid.

    First published in The Guardian (Lagos) on February 27, 1990, this is the first installment of a three-part retrospective on Nelson Mandela.

     

    Thumbs up for our GEJ

    Remembering especially his dismal performance in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and other unflattering outings, many Nigerians must have fretted when the BBC announced that President Goodluck Jonathan was going to favour its global audience with his reflections on Nelson Mandela’s legacy.

    They need not have worried.

    It was a lexical triumph for Dr Jonathan.  He delivered himself with semantic and syntactic aplomb, even taking a dig at those leaders who, instead of voluntarily relinquishing office like Mandela, sit tight and plunge their countries into chaos – no need for him to name them, said Dr Jonathan; you know them — and those leaders who leave office but continually lurk in the corridors of power.

    Is this perchance an indication that he intends to “play Mandela” by seeking neither a second term nor an elongation of his current term?

    In whatever case, I hope he is not scheduled to be in the same room anytime soon with Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe.  I can assure him that Mugabe, one of the most gifted polemicists in Africa and indeed anywhere, will respond in kind at the earliest opportunity,  and most likely with compound interest.

    When it came to naming an example of those who, according to Jonathan, vacated office but carry on as if they are still in power, I was stuck.  Can you help?

  • New turn in Nigerian politics

    New turn in Nigerian politics

    In the annals of political engagement, only in the rarest of circumstances does it happen that persons elected to high office on the platform of the ruling party and wielding the enormous powers of that office defect in large numbers to the Opposition.

    Nigeria may be the country of “anything goes.” But even there, that kind of migration was inconceivable — until last week, when five PDP governors defected to the APC.

    It is already one for the history books even if the PDP manages to stanch the widely anticipated migration in the weeks ahead of more governors, a raft of senators, and members of the House of Representatives, and of local government councils.

    No admirer of the self-styled largest political party in Africa, I confess to being smitten with schadenfreude. For, even at its least repellent, the PDP was more concerned with sharing the spoils of office than advancing the public welfare. Not even its most devoted followers have ever accused it of being imaginative. It has bred mass discontent and mass disillusionment

    It conducted itself as if it was an extension of the Presidency, wielding the wide powers of that institution without correlative restraint and responsibility. In relating to the rank and file, its senior officials behaved like schoolyard bullies. Having held power by hook or crook virtually unchallenged for 14 years, it had grown supinely complacent and developed an overweening sense of entitlement – the classic symptoms of regime fatigue.

    When key elected officials desert the protective ambience of The Umbrella and risk the petulant vindictiveness of the ruling party and its opulent agent, the Federal Government, for uncertain prospects in the Opposition, you know that a tectonic shift has occurred in the political landscape.

    Where it will lead is yet unclear. The new Opposition is an amalgam of political formations whose orientations span the entire ideological spectrum. Taking the situation in Kwara as an example, the amount of house-cleaning that it will first have to undertake will put it to the severest test.

    There, some two months ago, elements of the old PDP, with the active connivance of the state’s electoral commission, brazenly stole the re-rerun local government election in Offa, the state’s second-largest city and a stronghold of the APC. Several weeks later, it went on to stage state-wide local council elections, despite a subsisting court petition. The APC boycotted the poll, and the old PDP celebrated the outcome as yet another landslide victory.

    What is going to happen, now that those same elements of the old PDP have migrated en mass to the APC as decreed by the former governor and now Senator Bukola Saraki who, as chair of the Nigerian Governors Forum, had unsuccessfully sought the PDP’s presidential ticket?

    Before the grand defection, Dele Belgore, the senior attorney, was widely perceived as Kwara’s governor-in- waiting. As candidate of the now defunct Action Congress of Nigeria, he made a strong showing in the last gubernatorial election in Kwara. To this day, a substantial body of opinion in the state believes that he was robbed. If he secured the APC’s ticket for the next round, the election would be his to lose.

    Now, that calculus has become more complicated. With Bukola Saraki personally leading the mass migration of PDP members into the APC, and with his hand-picked successor Abdudlfatah Mohammed sure to seek a second term as governor, what awaits Belgore and his associates who had nurtured the ACN/APC and had been persecuted for their exertions?

    The situation in Kwara applies in other states, to a greater or lesser extent. Resolving it without rancour is not beyond the ingenuity of all those who fashioned the new coalition, but it is going to be a severe test.

    I was also concerned about how former Osun State governor Olagunsoye Oyinlola, the embattled secretary of the PDP and secretary, until its dissolution, of its breakaway faction, the new PDP, would fit into the latest arrangement.

    Apparently sensing the incongruity, he declared that he had not defected to the APC. With the merger, his post as national secretary of the new PDP no longer existed. But he remained national secretary of what is left of the PDP, he said. For his pains, the PDP, ramped up his suspension into expulsion.

    A war of words reminiscent of politics in the Second Republic – and indeed of the election at Eatanswill, recorded for the ages in all its hilarity by Charles Dickens in the Pickwick Papers –has since broken out between Oyinlola and his estranged protégé, Professor Wale Oladipo, who replaced him as PDP national secretary.

    I cannot repeat what Oladipo has said about Oyinlola’s mental state, or what Oyinlola said about Oladipo’s groveling ways without courting a writ of libel, especially from Oyinlola who is a qualified lawyer and has a partiality for litigation. If there are any adults still left in the room, would they kindly arrange an armistice? Where have you been, Tony “The Fixer” Anenih?

    Meanwhile, the grand coalition is gathering momentum. If this grand coalition coheres and endures, and if it is not just a vehicle for wresting power from the PDP and thereafter carrying on business as usual, it has the potential to set Nigeria on the path of real transformation. Even if it does not supplant what remains of the PDP as the ruling party, it will at least have positioned itself as a credible alternative. The enthusiasm with which it has been welcomed in many parts of Nigeria is a good augury.

    The chief architects of the grand coalition, Muhammadu Buhari and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, deserve high praise for their vision, leadership, commitment, and tenacity, not forgetting their associates who toiled and are toiling even now behind the cameras and the headlines to hammer out the details of the historic merger.

    It must be accounted a mark of Nigeria’s growing political maturity that the coalescence of the groups making up the Opposition has not been portrayed by the news media as a “gang –up” and that the seven state governors who pitched their tents in the breakaway faction of the PDP were called the G7—the Group of Seven – rather than the Gang of Seven.

    In the Shagari era, the national television and radio networks and the NPN’s client newspapers would have pilloried the defectors and called them the most censorious names. Only Chris Ngige is receiving that treatment at this time, for the atrocious crime of seeking on the platform of the APC to be governor of Anambra State – the state in which he was elected senator under the banner of the ACN, and of which he was once PDP governor.

    Now, in his latest foray, some ethnic warriors enjoying privileged media access are casting him as an “agent” of Fulani/Yoruba elements bent on invading Anambra and lording it over the Igbo in their own homestead, with yet another allusion to the “deportation” of their kinsmen from Lagos as proof, were any still required, of the perfidy of the new coalition.

    In the wake of the “deportation” saga, they berated Yoruba indigenes of Lagos, which they impudently called “no man’s land,” for sticking with their traditional “oro” rites against the demands of “modernity,” and to the great inconvenience of the diverse elements that make up the population.

    The two positions — APC gubernatorial candidate Chris Nigige, an authentic Igbo, as an “agent” of rank outsiders and hence unworthy of election, and the subsistence of “oro” rites in the “no man’s land” called Lagos as an inconvenience to the non-native residents that must be discontinued – are all too emblematic of a political mindset summed up by the phrase: “What is mine is mine but what is yours is ours.”

    They do not bode well for building bridges of understanding and mutual respect.

  • A new paradigm for these times

    A new paradigm for these times

    You know the situation is exceedingly dire when some usually sensible people start demanding that Professor Humphrey Nwosu who conducted the 1993 presidential election and could not even hint at the official result for 15 years be brought back to run future elections, following, the Independent National Electoral Commission’s disastrous outing in the recent gubernatorial poll in Anambra.

    Journalists should contemplate that prospect with the utmost wariness.

    To be sure, Nwosu was a journalist’s delight. He was very prolific in coining not just quotable quotes, but felicitous locutions for the ages as well. Remember how he brilliantly characterised the run-up to one of the elections of the era as being steeped in wuruwuru and magomago?

    He was, withal, hugely theatrical. The trouble was that the theatricality often got in the way of more serious business and created a clear and present danger to the physical well-being of persons within a close range.

    When he really got going, he would drive home his point with his arms and sometimes with legs. He would rock and sway back and forth and to the right and left in a manner that called to mind Ray Charles at the keyboard. He would spring to his feet on the least provocation or no provocation at all to enact those gestures even more emphatically.

    Reporters covering his news conferences had to worry at least as much about the possibility of getting an inadvertent head butt or a punch to the nose or a kick to the groin as they did about delivering on the assignment at hand. And so, as a means of self-preservation, they kept a safe distance.

    But I am sure it is not on account of Nwosu’s singular ways that some people are asking him to be brought back to run future elections.

    After Maurice Iwu who made a hash of the general elections in the preceding cycle and under whom the “Independent” in Independent National Electoral commission became a standing joke, Professor Attahiru Jega came as a breath of fresh air.

    He brought to the job a reputation for integrity, and a commitment to principle and fair dealing. Previous elections had for the most part been travesties of the plebiscitary principle. Millions could not vote at all, millions voted without choosing, while a handful of officials chose without voting. What these officials chose was then presented as the outcome of the election – and anyone who didn’t like it was free to go to court.

    Jega was going to be different.

    Unlike most of those who came before him, he was self-effacing to the point of reticence. He had a name and a reputation and a pedigree to protect –his father served as private secretary to the late Northern Premier and Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, and was a pioneer permanent secretary of the old Northwestern State. And his experience as vice chancellor of Bayero Universtity, one of the most fractious campuses in Nigeria, would undoubtedly stand him in good stead.

    If anyone could pull it off, it had to be Jega. That was the national consensus.

    Despite his best effort, he has not pulled it off. Under his watch, election after election has been vitiated by poor preparation, failure of logistics, voter disenfranchisement, syndicated rigging, and false returns. Not much seems to have changed, except that, unlike his predecessors, Jega has been quick to own up at every point to the manifest inadequacies of each poll.

    That is class. But it also makes all the more puzzling his insistence that the Anambra gubernatorial poll can be salvaged by staging “supplementary elections” in those constituencies where no voting took place. There is nothing to supplement.

    Even where voting took place the exercise was gravely flawed, going by media accounts and the reports of accredited monitors. A “supplementary” election cannot undo the flaws of the previous outing and may well end up perpetuating them. There is nothing to supplement.

    Despite all that Jega has going for him, the fact remains that he has not met the high expectations that greeted his appointment. Those expectations were grounded on a misapprehension, it is now clear. He is after all only an individual. Unless he can clone himself to take charge at hundreds of critical points during an election, he cannot ensure that the outcome will be a true reflection of his own high standards, much less of the popular will.

    Most of his predecessors may not have subscribed to his high standards, but they are entitled to the same extenuation. Even if they wanted the best, they had to rely on thousands of other people over whom they had no control to make it happen. We may have judged them too harshly, given the desperation of candidates and their sponsors to win at all cost, and the willingness of election officials to cash in on that desperation.

    Is Nigeria doomed, then, to live with “elections that are no elections,” to borrow the phrasing of a leading article in the University of Ibadan-based journal, Nigerian Opinion, back in the 1970s?

    Is there a way forward?

    There is indeed, according to one influential school of thought. Without our realising it, the school maintains, the way forward has been staring us in the face since the time of military president Ibrahim Babangida. And it is summed up in one word: Privatisation.

    Since that era when it was driven home relentlessly that government was wasteful and inefficient and could not be trusted to manage any enterprise or achieve any worthwhile goal, privatisation has been the standard recourse for solving the nation’s problems.

    They privatised the national airline. They privatised the steel plant that was to serve as the fulcrum of the nation’s industrialisation. They privatised the paper mills and the aluminium plant and the fertiliser plant and other state-run enterprises. They privatised the national telephony system. They even privatised the printing of official government documents.

    More recently they have privatised electricity. They have privatised the investment of the nation’s Sovereign Wealth Fund. Plans are afoot to privatise the oil refineries. Once they finish rehabilitating the railway tracks, the system is scheduled to be handed over to the private sector, the “real sector” as some of its worshippers now call it, in contradistinction to what they consider a phantom or virtual sector.

    In every instance, the gains have been astounding.

    Take the deadening hands of bureaucracy out of the things that really matter; hand those things over to the real sector and let market forces and Adam Smith’s invisible hands work their magic. That is the gospel according to the Privateers.

    Now, if Nigerians are agreed on one thing, they are agreed that elections matter. Is it not time, then, to take the deadening hands of bureaucracy out of elections and hand over the entire process to the private sector?

    It will be managed more efficiently and transparently, costs will be reduced drastically, huge savings will be made, and the nation will be spared the upheavals that usually trail each election.

    Thereafter, only one more step will be required to harness Nigeria’s vast potential and propel it finally and irreversibly toward its historic destiny: Privatisation of the entire machinery of government.

  • The road to a police state

    The road to a police state

    Just to be absolutely certain that I wasn’t missing something, I inspected President Goodluck Jonathan’s Transformation – or is it Transformative?—Agenda before writing this piece.

    The Agenda, I can report with the highest confidence, does not include turning Nigeria into a police state.

    Yet, that is what has been happening lately, sometimes brazenly and sometimes insidiously.

    With each passing day, Nigeria bears a closer resemblance to a state in which the activities of the people are strictly controlled with the help of a police force, in place of regular operation of administrative and judicial organs of government based on publicly known legal procedure.

    That is the definition of a police state.

    This ominous process probably has an earlier origin, but I would date it from the time relations between Dr Jonathan and Rivers State Governor Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi turned sour and Dr Jonathan sought to bring Amaechi to heel and to impose on the Nigeria Governors’ Forum a chairman who would be more complaisant than Amaechi and help clear the path to a second presidential term.

    To attain the first objective, he could not have found a better instrument than the Rivers State Commissioner of Police, Mbu Joseph Mbu, who owes his appointment to and takes his orders from Abuja. At every opportunity, Mbu countermanded the elected governor of the state, enforced Abuja’s will, and carried on as he was for all practical purposes the leader of the opposition.

    For the second objective, Dr Jonathan found a willing tool Akwa Ibom Governor Godswill Akpabio to engineer a split in the Governors’ Forum, in the hope that a majority fraction beholden to him would emerge. In the showdown election, Akpabio failed to deliver the majority he had promised. Undaunted, the minority crowned itself the new National Governors Forum, with the pathetic and utterly deluded Plateau State Governor Jonah Jang as chairman.

    Then came the rupture at the PDP mini convention. Seven governors elected on the party’s platform , as well as some senior party officials, broke ranks. A faction calling itself the New PDP, having no illusions about the petulance of its parent, had to confect a lie to secure a place to hold a meeting. It declared that the hall was to be used for a wedding reception. If the police had so much as suspected that the meeting was being held to elect officials of the breakaway faction of the PDP, the police would have moved swiftly to block it.

    That much was clear from the swiftness with which the police blockaded the headquarters building the new PDP rigged up. For good measure, the authorities of the Abuja Federal Capital Territory suddenly discovered that the house had been constructed in violation of the building code and would have to be pulled down. If and when the FCT gives the order, the police will be on hand to supervise the demolition.

    As for the seven dissident PDP governors – the so-called G7 — rarely have they been able to hold a meeting even in private premises without the rude intrusion of the police. The most recent of such intrusions, in Abuja, drew nation-wide condemnation. The Inspector-General of the Police, Mohammed Abubakar, told a committee of the House of Representatives that it had been carried out without his instructions.

    If this is true – and there is no reason to believe that he had perjured himself –it raises the alarming prospect that the Nigeria Police has indeed become the armed wing of the PDP, as the opposition APC has charged.

    Last Tuesday the police, kitted as for battle, sealed off the conference room of the Nicon Luxury Hotel in Abuja where the Socio-Economic Rights Accountability Project had planned to discuss Nigeria’s freedom of information law, with scheduled speakers from Europe, the United States and Nigeria.

    With Dino Melaye, a former federal legislator turned anti-corruption crusader among the organisers, there was no doubt that the participants would discuss the scandal that the Federal Government desperately wants suppressed: the illegal purchase of two armoured limousines worth $1.4 million by the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria for the use, and most likely at the behest of, Princess Oduah.

    As was the case with the intrusion on the G7 meeting, also in Abuja, senior spokespersons for the police have been quoted as saying that the authorities had “no knowledge” of the operation. This only goes to support the thesis that Nigeria is being transformed into a police state. In whatever case, the political calculations behind the intrusion point unmistakably to the self-styled “biggest party” in Africa.

    The PDP is even more deeply implicated in turning Nigeria into a police state than the foregoing suggests. Last week, the courts ordered the re-instatement of former Osun State Governor Olagunsoye Oyinlola as PDP national secretary, finding that his purported removal from that office was ultra vires.

    No sooner had Oyinlola served notice that he was set to resume work at the PDP’s Wadata Plaza national headquarters in Abuja than he was suspended afresh and the place was surrounded by battle tanks and police armed for combat. It was almost as if Boko Haram’s elusive high command had served notice that its forces had landed in the neightbourhood.

    There, you have fresh intimations of the making of a police state. I will not be surprised if the police authorities were to declare again that they had played no part in sealing off the PDP’s headquarters.

    To be sure, the court order was going to create all kinds of problems. Oyinlola was not merely one of the founders of the New PDP; he is its national secretary. To which faction would he answer if he resumed work at Wadata Plaza, which had vowed to treat him and other deserters as “criminals?”

    The brusqueness with which the PDP brushed aside the court order reinstating Oyinlola is of a piece with the impunity with which it suborns the police to do its dirty work. It is all the more disquieting that the PDP is the ruling party and its national leader is President Jonathan, who took an oath to uphold and defend the law and the Constitution.

    Only a few days ago, in the run-up to the incurably flawed gubernatorial election in Anambra, the police command in Imo State announced with breathless excitement the arrest of 180 “thugs” and “hoodlums” and “bandits” from Osun on their way to Anambra for the purpose — what else – of rigging the election.

    It claimed to have recovered from them voter ID cards and other election documents, not forgetting “other dangerous weapons”. A far more credible source insists that the 180 were accredited election monitors belonging to the Justice and Equity Organisation.

    If there was any merit at all to the arrest of the group from Osun, there was none whatsoever to the confinement of Nasir El-Rufai, to his hotel room in the Anambra State capital, Awka, by agents of the secret police. The APC chieftain was in town to monitor the poll. This shabby recourse to false imprisonment is yet another manifestation of the drift toward a police state.

    We can now understand why, against the express provisions of the Constitution, retired Inspector-General of Police and a failed senatorial candidate in the person of Mike Okiro was appointed chairman of the Police Service Commission. It was certainly not on account of his stellar performance. For, as IGP, he showed a brazen disregard for conflict of interest and, as we now know, connived in hounding Nuhu Ribadu out of the EFCC and the Police Force.

    By act or omission, Okiro contributed to the dysfunction in which the police force is mired today. They did not appoint him Police Service Commission chairman to lead a determined effort to chart a path out of that dysfunction. And he knows it.

  • Near-encounters with Mike Akhigbe

    Near-encounters with Mike Akhigbe

    Vice Admiral Okhai Mike Akhigbe, at various times military governor of the old Ondo State and of Lagos State, flag officer of the Eastern Naval Command, Chief of Naval Staff, Chief of General Staff in the military regime that handed back power to an elected government in 1999, and at his death last week in New York, a property mogul in Lagos and a significant player in the nation’s oil and gas industry.

    He was also a qualified lawyer, having obtained a law degree from the University of Lagos and completed the obligatory post-graduate diploma in the course of his multifaceted public career.

    I never met him. Yet, he occupies a unique place in my recollections of my years in Rutam House as an editorial writer and columnist for Guardian Newspapers.

    For it was on account of him that one of my columns was pulled from the final edition that served Lagos and the Southwest, which then accounted for some 60 percent of the circulation, after it had been published in the first edition that served the North and the East.

    An earlier column had rattled Akhigbe somewhat, according to some inside administration sources in Alausa. He had publicly questioned General Olusegun Obasanjo’s patriotism because of Obasanjo’s outspoken criticism of the Babangida regime’s benighted Structural Adjustment Programme.

    Now, Obasanjo was once Akhigbe’s commander-in-chief. He had seen battle long before Akhigbe took his first lessons in the art of war at the Defence Academy, Kaduna. Akhigbe’s conduct, I wrote in my column, was a breach of military etiquette with few parallels.

    He did not like it. To his credit, he had tried to explain away his outburst, only to repeat the offence more or less. I was of course not the only commentator who had rounded on him. Subsequent criticism by The Guardian of some projects he was planning to embark upon in Lagos seemed to have led him to develop a sense of siege, and to believe that the paper was out to get him.

    One of them was the establishment of a newspaper, Lagos Horizon, to serve as the state’s publicity organ. Lagos State, The Guardian argued, needed no such organ; it was home to the nation’s most vibrant newspapers, all of them giving it the comprehensive and sustained coverage that a state-owned newspaper could not.

    Akhigbe was also planning to build an ultra-modern official residence house in Ikeja, where visiting dignitaries would be lodged. Akhigbe had just returned from a visit to the United States, where he had been hosted by a governor of one of the states.

    His goal, he said, was to make sure that whenever the governor from America came calling on a return visit, he would be lodged in a befitting residence.

    A third project called for upgrading the old UAC Stadium across from the National Stadium in Surulere into a world-class facility. At that time, the National Stadium was a thriving concern. It made no sense, The Guardian said, to construct another stadium opposite it, in a residential area already groaning under the weight of vehicular traffic.

    The fourth project in the package was yet another stadium, to be built in Ikeja.

    Akhigbe had outlined the projects in a major policy statement, and The Guardian’s editorial, it is necessary to state, was a response to that statement, not a running critique of his administration.

    But it was too much for Akhigbe.

    So, off he went to Vice Admiral Augustus Aikhomu, Chief of General Staff who formally ranked second to the military president in political hierarchy, and to whom the military governors reported in the first instance, brandishing the ethnic card, in Nigerian politics the ultimate weapon of blackmail.

    Alex Ibru, an indigene of Bendel State as it then was, Akhigbe charged, had offered the Yoruba on his payroll a platform to run down the person and administration of a fellow Bendelite, his good self Mike Akhigbe, for no reason other than that Akhigbe was not Yoruba, unlike his predecessor, Air Commodore Gbolahan Mudashiru.

    Aikhomu, also a Bendelite, had summoned Chief Michael Ibru, the head of the Ibru dynasty, to demand an explanation. The senior Ibru had in turn passed on the message to his younger brother, the Guardian publisher, and negotiations aimed at reaching some understanding were underway.

    I would learn of these developments only much later when I wrote about a firefight that had almost broken out between Customs officials at Murtala Muhammed Airport and Akhigbe’s security aides, on hand to expedite clearance for his wife Josephine returning from an overseas trip

    At issue was a consignment of typewriters Mrs Akhigbe had brought with her. Customs officials had demanded payment of duty on the freight, but Mrs Akhigbe was apparently unwilling to pay, and had abused one of the officials. Her husband’s aides had weighed in, a noisy argument had followed, and guns had been drawn. Mercifully, a shoot-out was averted.

    The Guardian had reported the incident with the sobriety and the scrupulous attention to detail for which it was revered.

    Mrs Akhigbe would later explain that the shipment was not for the secretarial institute of which she was reportedly the proprietor, but a donation to some institution catering to the handicapped. In whatever case, I wrote in my column, her conduct was of a piece with the husband’s reputation for high-handedness.

    The column had appeared in the first edition which circulated in the North and in the East. Before the second – and final – edition was printed, a call came from Managing Director Stanley Macebuh asking me to see him.

    Dispensing with the usual preliminaries, he went straight to the point.

    “I would like to have your permission to clear your column from the second edition,” he said, just like that.

    “May I know why? I asked.

    “Akhigbe,” he said.

    He went on to explain how Akhigbe had complained to Aikhomu that Guardian publisher Alex Ibru, unmindful of the common heritage (Up Bedel!) all three of them share, had given free rein to Yoruba elements at the Guardian to run down the person and office of the military governor of Lagos State.

    The Guardian’s criticism of his plan to set up a newspaper was self-serving, Akhigbe had been saying. It was grounded on the fear that the paper would put the Guardian out of business. However, until that time came, he had instructed Lagos ministries, parastatals and agencies to cut their subscriptions to The Guardian and stop doing business with it altogether.

    Criticism of his plan to build a befitting lodge in Ikeja for official visitors was just as self serving, Akhigbe had also been saying; it stemmed from fear that the edifice might put Sheraton Hotel in which the Ibrus had a major interest out of business.

    If my column on the airport incident should appear at that time, Macebuh said, Akhigbe would regard it as a fresh provocation and as an act of bad faith to boot, given Chief Michael Ibru’s on-going mediation, at Aikhomu’s instance, between Rutam House and Akhigbe.

    My judgment and good faith were not in question, then?”

    “Not in the least,” Macebuh said.

    It remains to add that the stadium Akhigbe said he was going to build in Ikeja never got off the ground. The “befitting” lodge for special guests was never built. But construction started on the stadium in Surulere.

    Lagos Horizon hit the newsstands, but was received more as a curiosity than a serious journalistic proposition. It helped neither itself nor its proprietor when it declared in its debut edition that it had come to serve as “a melting pot of ideas.” It certainly never lived up to Akhigbe’s exorbitant billing.

    The foregoing, I should make clear, is only a slice of my reminiscences on my Rutam House years. I had set out with no larger purpose.

    As for Mike Akhigbe’s times and legacy, my Rutam House contemporary Sonala Olumhense has entered on several platforms, The Guardian and SaharaReporters among them, a summative piece stamped with his accustomed rigour and forthrightness.

    Titled “I knew NNS Fearless, Mike Akhigbe”, the piece instantly went viral.

  • Matters miscellaneous

    Matters miscellaneous

    It is miscellany time again, time to fall back on that old, reliable expedient to address with broad strokes and in short takes some issues in the glut of recent occurrences as well as non- occurrences, lest the usual people feel neglected.

    The point of departure has got to be Oduah-gate, the alleged scandal that has concentrated national attention like no other recent scandal real or merely alleged, to the point of almost reducing to a footnote President Goodluck Jonathan’ s epochal pilgrimage to the Holy Land to offer supplicationfor the redemption, peace, unity and prosperity of Nigeria with himself in the saddle for four more years after the expiration of the current term.

    It even took some attention away from the Burial of the Year in Okrika, in Rivers State, and from the stirring victories of the nation’s “Under -17” soccer team in their World Cup outings. That is no mean achievement for a mere allegation

    When the story broke three weeks ago on the online publication saharareporters, it all seemed straightforward. The report was backed by what appeared to be indissoluble evidence. It surfaced at a period when planes had been falling from the skies with frightful regularity and air travel to, from and within the country had never been more fraught.

    The official denials that followed were feeble and perfunctory at best. The question was not whether the Minister of Aviation. Princess Stella Oduah,would resign voluntarily or be dumped by President Jonathan, but when.

    That was then. Now nothing is certain anymore. The whole thing has been spun into an impenetrable web of allegations.

    If asked what the whole thing is about, I would have to say that it is about an alleged scandal set off by the alleged importation of two armoured BMW limousines, allegedly by the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority,for the alleged sum of N127.5 million each, with the alleged approval of the Minister of Aviation, Princess Stella Oduah, allegedly for her use, following all manner of alleged threats to her personal safety, allegedly by contractors and suppliers and supplicants whose allegedly corrupt overtures she had allegedly rebuffed.

    Neither the panel Dr Jonathan set up to investigate the matter nor the National Assembly nor the alleged supplier of the vehicles nor the Bank that allegedly financed the alleged purchase shown the will to rescue the facts from the treacherous web of confusion, to say nothing of the penumbra of ethnic jingoism in which they now lie buried.

    I will not be surprised if, in the end, they declare that no vehicles were purchased at all, whether for the reported price or a fraction thereof; that no import duty waiver was ever sought or granted, and that no official of any agency under the Ministry of Aviation or within the ambit of the Federal Government for that matter ever sought, received, or was a party to seeking or receiving, or knew anything whatsoever concerning any armoured or un-armoured vehicles of any description, contrary to all that has been reported in the media.

    Those conspiracy theorists whom we unfortunately still have among us are claiming that a real scandal is being shabbily covered up. If there was a real threat to Princess Oduah’s life, why did she not alert the police? Why did she seek refuge in armoured limousine when the police could have provided her with armoured personnel carriers protected from the air by helicopter gunships?

    Easy, gentlemen. Are you sure the good Princess, who is a stickler for doing all that is needful, did not alert the police, and the security services for that matter?

    In whatever case, the Princess knows, as her detractors seemed not to have noticed, that the police have in recent times been fully occupied preventing members of the political opposition from holding lawful meetings even in private premises. Under the circumstances, therefore, alerting the police would have served no useful purpose.

    Even this line of reasoning is resting on the increasingly brittle supposition that the limousines were requisitioned and supplied in the first place.

    But there is no denying that the story took attention away from some really important things that should lift the national spirit.

    Early in the year, the Weather Bureau warned the nation to prepare for unusually heavy rains that would make last year’s deluge look like a drizzle – the record rainfall that, as this column observed then, literally buried vast swathes of Nigeria from the parched Sahel to the mangrove swamps of the Atlantic coast under water, causing major rivers to swell and rage as never before, and swallowing up houses and washing away bridges and roads and farmlands and sparing nothing in their ravenous wake.

    If all this would be a mere drizzle compared with what was on the horizon, the augury was nothing it not apocalyptic.

    For four days in September/October, the column further noted, the national capital was cut off from traffic from much of the south, portions of the road linking Lokoja with Abuja having been washed away. Lokoja itself, like many other cities caught up in the floods, evoked scenes of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which our own Poet Laureate Niyi Osundare has memorialised for the ages in epic verse.

    Some 130 persons, most likely a gross undercount, were reported killed in the floods, with at least as many missing. The number of displaced persons had to be in the millions, and damage to private property must be reckoned in trillions of Naira. Tens of thousands of the victims are yet to recover. Tens of thousands among them will.

    And yet, the Weather Bureau warned, this perfect calendar of woe in the face of which the National Emergency Management Agency and the relief agencies proved utterly unprepared and inept, would be nothing compared with what the public should expect.

    The rainy season is almost over. Some flooding has occurred here and there, but not on the biblical scale forecast by the Weather Bureau. For a public starved of good tidings, this is cause for celebration. There should be dancing and rejoicing in the streets. But the unpatriotic elements who conjured up Oduah-gate have robbed the public even of that simple pleasure.

    Shame upon all of them.

    This tawdry Oduah-gate also swept off the front pages another development that should have been cause for national rejoicing. Finally, the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency can state with absolute confidence and to the nearest millilitre the amount of gasoline consumed daily in Nigeria and where it comes from.

    The figure stands at 38.298 million litres. The NNPC imports 33 percent of the quantum, and 30 oil marketers import the balance of 67 percent.

    The good news is that when the nation’s refineries are finally rehabilitated, they will be able to contribute significantly to the mix of products entering the market.

    Nor is this the only good news in the pipeline (pun intended). The Department of Petroleum Resources is tantalisingly close to figuring out just how much crude is lifted daily from the nation’s oil wells.