The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • A farewell to Baba and Omo

    A farewell to Baba and Omo

    Permit my literary licence.

    The one was not the father of the other anymore than the other was the son of the one as the juxtaposition of their names in the headline would appear to suggest.

    But Baba(rinde) Omojola and (David) Omo Omoruyi, were towering influences on Nigeria’s political life and development, and their deaths recently within a week of each other, both aged 75 years, have justly attracted national attention, despite the volatility that is the hallmark of public affairs in Nigeria.

    The circumstances of their passing could not have been more different.

    Baba Omojola died in harness. He had travelled from his Lagos base to the Ondo State capital, Akure, to make a presentation before the Okurounmu Committee charged with laying the groundwork for what its promoter President Goodluck Jonathan has at various times called a National Conference, a National Dialogue. and National Conversation, and may yet call by a different name altogether

    He had presented the Committee with the draft of a people’s Constitution that he had taken a leading part in fashioning, under the platform of PRONACO, of which one of principal conveners was the departed and much-lamented statesman, Chief Anthony Enahoro.

    That was Omojola’s last public act. On returning to his hotel room, he slumped. He was dead by the time they got him to the hospital. Something tells me that he departed the way he would have chosen – active, engaged in a cause dear to his heart, and in the service of the public.

    It was in Chief Enahoro’s company I first met Omojola, in 1993, in the aftermath of the annulment of the 1993 presidential election, though I had heard much about him, as must have any Nigerian who takes more than a passing interest in public affairs.

    Physically, he was rather smallish and slight, a far less imposing figure than I had imagined. He did not have the commanding presence of our host. But what he lacked in that department was more than compensated by his sparkling conversation, his lively and energetic spirit, his insights on a wide range of issues domestic and foreign, and a wry sense of humour.

    On many occasions, it was that small frame that saved him from the menacing forces of “national security.” Agents would barge into his home or his office, asking for Baba Omojola, hoping to find a figure so imposing that its owner deserved nothing less than the appellation “Baba.”

    He would reply calmly that he did not even know Omojola, let alone his father, and they would move on in search of Baba Omojola. After a while, the agents finally nailed their man. They hauled him to detention in Kuje Prison, in Abuja Federal Capital Territory, in the wake of massive protests against the continued tenure of military president Ibrahim Babangida, who had dribbled the nation into a standstill in a craven bid to perpetuate his rule

    As a student at the London School of Economics, Omojola had come under the spell of the legendary political theorist and socialist activist, Harold Laski. There he had honed his intellectual skills and left-wing activism. His brilliance marked him out for an academic career, but he chose o devote his great learning and his life to national development and the cause of the working people.

    Returning home after further studies in Eastern Europe, he served as a close aide and adviser to Michael Imoudu, and it is to him that we owe a biography of the man they called Labour Leader Number One. In his work as an independent economic consultant, the focus was on national development issues. Whenever matters touching on the welfare of the broad masses of the people were being discussed, there you found Omojola.

    It was therefore natural that he would be one of the leaders of the protests that rocked the Nigeria three years ago following the cutting of a phantom subsidy on petroleum products. By his reckoning, Nigerians were paying obscenely high prices for those products even before the government claimed that it had been providing hefty subsidies.

    The last time I saw Baba Omojola was at the Blue Roof Hall of Lagos Television Service, in Agidingbi, on June 12, 2012, at a ceremony to mark the 19th anniversary of the infamous annulment of the presidential election that heralded perhaps the most powerful intimations since the nationalist era the possibility of building a nation from the riot of nations inhabiting the geographic space called Nigeria.

    He was feisty as ever, even if less sprightly. Time and tireless engagement had taken their toll. But his intellectual acumen was not in doubt. As sole discussant, he did justice to a recondite paper on electoral reform presented by Professor Lanre Fagbohun, of the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, Lagos.

    Unlike Baba Omojola who died in harness, Professor Omo Omoruyi died long after he had done his work and that work had been undone by his estranged friend and patron, Ibrahim Babangida, the military president.

    Omoruyi belonged in a team of university professors, mainly political scientists, which Babangida recruited to serve as a kind of a Brains Trust for his office, which went by the grandiloquent name of “The Presidency.” When they were not turning Nigeria into a laboratory for crack-brained political experiments, they were fabricating elaborate rationalisations for the twists and turns of the programme that Babangida advertised as a transition to democratic rule.

    It was of course nothing of the sort, as the intellectuals-in-residence knew or ought to have known. Anyone who was not deluded or practically unconscious could see that the whole thing was an elaborate swindle.

    Omoruyi ‘s brief was to establish and run a Centre for Democratic Studies to prepare aspirants to political office as well as political parties for a future without military coups and without all the pathologies that brought previous attempts at civilised governance to grief.

    He plunged into the task with enthusiasm and energy, and became one of the more prominent and visible figures among the transition engineers. The programme survived one manufactured crisis after another until it reached its culmination, the June 12, 1993 presidential election.

    Despite all the obstacles that Babangida confected and threw in its path, the election took place. It was clean and peaceful. And it produced a clear winner. Omoruyi celebrated that outcome, proud that he had contributed significantly to securing it. Instead of celebrating the result, Babangida annulled the election, in the process driving Nigeria to the edge of ruin.

    From the upheavals that followed the annulment, Omoruyi realised that he was no longer safe in Abuja. He fled to Benin City, only to be shot months later and left for dead outside his home by gunmen who have not been identified to this day. With help from friends in the diplomatic community, he was flown to the United States for treatment. Thereafter he took up a one-year fellowship at Harvard, and later settled in Boston, Mass.

    I believe it was then he was diagnosed with cancer. With aggressive treatment, the disease went into remission. He returned to Nigeria, reconciled with Babangida, served briefly as a strategist for Vice President Abubakar Atiku, and subsequently as head of Edo State Governor Adams Oshiomhole’s re-ëlection campaign. By then, his cancer had returned, and he was in desperate need of funds to return to the United States for further treatment.

    His appeal to his one-time patron, former associates and friends fell on deaf ears for the most part. In pained frustration, he lamented publicly that he had been “used and dumped.” It was Oshiomhole who came to his rescue.

    It was hard not to be moved to pity for Omoruyi. As director-general of the CDS, he had at his disposal a huge budget into which he could have dipped to ensure his financial security. In that era, remember, the term “accountability” rarely figured in governance. The man at the top, it was said, expected those who served at the altar to eat to their fill, so long as they did not stain their uniform or clothing in the process.

    Omoruyi seemed to have risen above the rampant thieving of that era. If he had corruptly enriched himself, the officials whose duplicity he documented for posterity in his book, “The Tale of June 12: The Betrayal of the Democratic Rights of Nigerians (1993)” would have exposed him without hesitation.

    Baba Omojola, as I have noted, died in harness. Omo Omoruyi died in near destitution, long after his work had been done and undone, his body ravaged by cancer. The one, a pillar of the Nigerian Left, lived and thrived not merely outside government but in spite of it; the other functioned mainly within the power structure.

    But both, in their own ways, served the public to the best of their great abilities.

    Nigeria’s public sphere is the poorer for their passing

     

  • When philanthropy turns lethal

    When philanthropy turns lethal

    Philanthropy runs deep in the Saraki family.

    Its patriarch, himself the Oloye, Dr Abubakar Olusola Saraki, was a legendary giver. You always knew when he was in his country home in Ilorin GRA, to take a break from his endless trips abroad in search of new deals, to nourish and consolidate old business, or to undergo medical treatment.

    Large crowds would gather on the precincts of the expansive villa – old men, old women, young men, young women, pregnant women, women carrying their babies on their backs, children, people in all sorts and conditions of distress, some of them from the crack of dawn – waiting for the man they reverentially called Oloye to emerge from the innards, hold court, and hand out gifts with his accustomed generosity.

    They would go home with all manner of gifts – cash, food parcels, painkillers, and fabrics. Those familiar with this routine said no one ever left empty-handed or sorely disappointed.

    The next day the crowds would gather again, and the next, until Oloye left town to attend to his sprawling business interests across the globe.

    This philanthropy was the root of Saraki’s phenomenal success as vote harvester and political king-maker in Kwara State. If you agreed to his terms, he endorsed you for whatever office you were seeking, even if you did not belong in the same political party. And at election time, he delivered far more votes than you needed for victory.

    The formula failed him only once, when he tried to make his daughter Senator Gbemisola Saraki governor, just as his son Bukola was completing his second term on the job and had positioned himself to succeed the sister, aforementioned, in the Senate.

    To be fair to Bukola Saraki, he had stated for the record that it would be “immoral” for his sister to succeed him as governor. Still, it would be hard to praise him for high-mindedness. For, it was immoral for his sister to succeed him as state governor, what made it moral for him to succeed her as Senator representing Kwara Central?

    In the end, it was not morality that settled the matter. Oloye Saraki’s deeply conservative base, Ilorin Emirate, was simply not ready for a woman governor, even if that woman was his daughter. Her candidature never got off the ground. The philanthropy did not flag. But this time, the votes were just not there for the harvesting.

    His failing health deteriorated, and he died without enthroning another king, and without knowing for sure whether what happened to his daughter’s governorship bid was merely a setback or the end of his hegemonic hold on Ilorin politics.

    It may well be, as some detractors have been saying in light of the collapse of the family’s Société General Bank and with regard to some other financial transactions under investigation, that much of what was fuelling Oloye Saraki’s philanthropy was OPM – Other People’s Money.

    Even if this is indeed the case, we must still give him high praise. For, how many of the tens of thousands of Nigerians living the good life on OPM ever think of giving back anything, much less giving back on such a large and sustained scale as the Oloye?

    Senator Saraki has been carrying on in the tradition of his father, handing out gifts to the less privileged, especially during Muslim festivals. But in his hands, what used to be an orderly occasion, festive even, has turned not merely riotous but positively lethal. Not once, not twice, but three times now have such occasions degenerated into primal stampedes in which dozens were trampled to death or suffered grave injuries.

    Last week, 20 persons were reported to have died in the stampede for a piece of the Sallah gifts the Senator was handing out at his residence in Ilorin. At least as many persons were injured or fainted.

    This macabre spectacle was a reprise of a similar occurrence on May 27, 2011. By one estimate, no fewer than 10 persons died in Ilorin in the stampede for rice and other items Dr Saraki was distributing at Mandate House, his campaign headquarters.

    In November 2010, at least 11 persons had lost their lives in similar circumstances. The state government had swung quickly into a damage-control mode and put the number of fatalities at four. But that is still four persons too many, for an occasion designed to provide succour to those in distress.

    Senator Saraki has rightly suspended all such events and issued a message of condolence to the relations of the dead and the injured. But that is cold comfort. He should not embark on another philanthropic outing until he has devised fail-safe measures to ensure that those who gather to receive gifts do not end up trampled to death or maimed.

    There is no doubt that he means well and cares deeply. Despite his solicitude and that of others who are ever so willing to give out of their abundance, we shall always have the distressed with us. His challenge is to find a way of dispensing his philanthropy that is safe and respectful of the dignity of the people who flock to his home from necessity or desperation.

    Ours is not yet a litigious society, the type in which a man who crashed the car he had stolen from a parking lot sought damages from for his extensive injuries from the car’s owner on the ground that if the owner had kept his car in a good working condition, the accident would not have occurred and he, the petitioner – and car thief —would still have the use of his legs.

    Or the type in which the driver of a recreational vehicle that crashed while he was away from the steering wheel sought compensation from its manufacturers on the grounds that nowhere was a warning displayed that you could not leave the steering wheel while the vehicle was in motion to make coffee in the kitchenette at the rear.

    Both petitions failed, I should add. But they go to show what can happen in a litigious society. Nothing is too frivolous, too outlandish, to bring before the courts.

    In such a setting, Senator Saraki would now be drowning in an avalanche of wrongful-death lawsuits brought by relations of the casualties seeking hefty damages on the perfectly reasonable ground that he knew or should have known from experience that a stampede was likely to occur for the gifts he was dispensing, but had failed to take measures to forestall it; in short, that the deaths and injuries resulted from his negligence.

    But ours, fortunately for him, is not that kind of society – at least, not yet.

     

  • Re-positioning our universities: A modest proposal

    Re-positioning our universities: A modest proposal

    In the routine of daily life, nothing concentrates the mind like not knowing when the next paycheck is coming.

    That may well explain why the Federal Government has decided, after 100 days of fruitless negotiations, to stop the pay of striking university lecturers. Let them concentrate their minds on how they can transform the shabby system instead of carping about it in and out of season.

    If they needed any other inducement to focus their intellect on an agenda for transforming their campuses, I hope the spectacle of Her Excellency the First Lady of Nigeria (FLON), Dame Patience Fakabelemi Goodluck, decked out and looking stunningly resplendent in the doctoral regalia of South Korea’s Hansei University and soaking in all the high praise, supplied it.

    The Hansei citation described her generally as “the defender of the poor,” and more specifically as “a humanitarian who has dedicated her life to working for the less privileged in Nigeria, especially women and children.”

    It is a reflection on her modesty that she had journeyed to South Korea accompanied only by the wives of the governors of Benue and Ebonyi, the wives of the Chief of Army Staff and the Chief of Naval Staff, among some unnamed dignitaries. A person not given to her kind of modesty would have insisted of taking along the Minister of Education, the entire membership of the National Universities Commission, and the Committee of Vice Chancellors, as well as the Committee of University Registrars, plus the national executive of the National Association of Nigerian Students.

    With her accustomed humility and in the down-home style that becomes her so well, Mrs Jonathan told the convocation that she was “just doing her own thing,” not knowing that in faraway Asia, “everything was being noted.” And deeply appreciated, she should have added, unlike in her native country.

    Little wonder, then, that the doctorate encompassed the fields of Social Welfare as well as Administration – the one in recognition of her dedication to the cause of the poor and the underprivileged, and the other in acknowledgement of her expertise in matters bureaucratic, as evidenced by her appointment as a permanent secretary in the public service of Bayelsa State

    It was of course not the first time that Dame Patience would be honoured in that manner. Before the Hansei conferment, she already had three doctorates under her belt, according to the unofficial biographers; one from the alma mater that she and her husband Dr Goodluck Jonathan have in common, the University of Port Harcourt, and one from the Delta State University, Abraka.

    The third is from a university whose identity I could not establish with confidence at this writing.

    In their citations, the University of Port Harcourt and Delta State University also gave due recognition to Mrs Jonathan’s humanitarian and philanthropic exertions. But it all seemed so perfunctory. None of them was perceptive enough to describe her as “the defender of the poor.”

    Some people may see this approach as yet another instance of the prophetess being accorded less honour in her own domain than she deserves. I see it as emblematising the trouble with our universities and as reason for their stunted growth, their failure to register on the international index of great institutions of higher learning.

    That trouble can be summed up in one phrase: a failure of imagination.

    Is it not a crying shame, and a great scandal withal, that after more than three decades of First-ladyism in Nigeria and the vast opportunities it opened up for scholarly study and research, no Nigerian University has seen it fit to revise its curriculum to confer academic recognition on the phenomenon? And yet they complain that they are under-funded when, as I will demonstrate presently, they can with a little imagination fund themselves!

    It is not too late to repair this grievous omission, but the manner of redress must be bold and imaginative. There is no room for tokenism.

    The academic recognition I have in mind is not the kind that can be satisfied by offering one or two courses in firstladyism in a Philosophy Department or Sociology Department, or by staging an annual colloquium on the subject.

    It calls for nothing less than the establishment of an autonomous, self-accounting academic unit operating at the highest level of intellection. Call it the Higher Institute of Advanced Studies in Firstladyism, to distinguish it from those centres that may be offering only primary or secondary studies in that field.

    Initially, the curriculum will emphasise the study of the Nigerian variants of firstladyism, their origin, content, mutations, operational strategies and tactics, and their impact on society. No later than in its second year, the Institute will widen its curriculum to explore the subject in the wider African context, with special emphasis on the African First Ladies Peace Mission, of which Mrs Jonathan is the distinguished chairperson.

    In its third year, the Institute will go global and take on a new name, in recognition of the fact that the world is now truly a global village. It will be called the Higher Institute of Advanced Global Studies in Firstladyism.

    Just consider the resources that will flow to the institution from every direction.

    In keeping with her famed generosity and philanthropy, Mrs Jonathan can be expected to draw on her vast personal resources to ensure that it thrives. Something tells me that her devoted husband will not stand by and watch her bear the burden alone. He will, I am confident, incorporate the Institute as a core element of his iconic Transformative Agenda.

    Mrs Jonathan’s colleagues across the continent can be expected to support the Institute with generous endowments or dragoon their husbands into doing so. And when the Institute goes global it will be assured of the unstinting support of the international community.

    With this kind of support, it will attract the best and the brightest from all over the world, attain recognition as a global centre of excellence and place Nigeria, at long last, in the front ranks of the world’s greatest centres of learning.

    In many a setting, the designated “resource person” is usually an individual who has soaked up the theory and some aspects of the relevant literature. In the Institute, the resource persons will be actual or former first ladies, individuals who have lived the part and can humanise the subject. Aspiring first ladies need not apply. And no fakes, please; only true originals.

    In discussing such recondite subjects as Financing Firstladyism, or Power and Influence in First Ladyism: The Role of Pillow-Talk, or Diplomatic Firstladyism, who but practising or former first ladies can speak with insight, authority, and confidence?

    It goes without saying that the Institute will enjoy electricity and pipe-borne water 24/7. It will be equipped with latest Big Thing in information technology. Student will be housed in the hostels of the future, study in fully computerised libraries, attend lectures in well-appointed rooms, and work in laboratories where nothing is lacking. For faculty and staff, it will be nothing but bliss; life most abundant. Strikes and lockouts and cultism will be things of the past.

    I am the first to admit that not every public university can establish the kind of institution I have sketched here. But even if only one university can seize the concept and develop it, that university has assured its own fortune for all time.

    Besides, I have other ideas that are just as fecund. I have set them down in a special memo that I am sending to the National Universities Commission and the Committee of Vice Chancellors, not forgetting the usual stakeholders.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • An ‘October Surprise’

    An ‘October Surprise’

    In America’s presidential election cycle, no month is more dreaded than the October preceding the poll, which takes place on the first Tuesday of November.

    The candidates and their camps hold their collective breaths, fearing that the rival candidate or camp will unleash some dirty secret it had been hoarding – a secret that would throw the opponent off-balance or, with some luck, damage him irreparably.

    They call it the “October Surprise.”

    President Goodluck Jonathan did not exactly cripple his would-be opponents on the 2015 presidential race, but he came close to doing that when, in his broadcast marking the 53rd anniversary of Nigeria’s independence, he announced that the time had come for a “national dialogue” to address the unresolved issues of the Nigerian experience.

    The announcement took not only his political opponents but also his most ardent supporters completely by surprise. It came literally from nowhere.

    For years, he had batted away the demand for a national conference – sovereign or not – with strained civility. Though they differed on so many other issues, he and the National Assembly were united in their emphatic rejection of calls for a National Conference

    Whenever they prefaced their quest with the term “sovereign,” the protagonists unwittingly played right into the hands of the Executive and the Legislative branches, which wasted no time in asserting that there could not be two sovereigns in a given space at one time. Translation: The twain embodied the sovereignty of the Nigerian state, and any other claim to sovereignty was not merely fanciful but impermissible.

    When the demand was for an ordinary National Conference for the purpose of writing a constitution warranted by the preface “We, the People,” the response of the twain was just as pre-emptive: the power to change the Constitution was vested categorically and unalterably in the Constitution.

    Whatever its tenor or content, the demand for a conference to sort things out was dead on arrival.

    To leave the protagonists in no doubt that their quest was doomed, the twain set in motion the process for a major revision of the 1999 Constitution. A presidential panel dredged up some 54 provisions requiring amendments, and the National Assembly staged a one-day “consultative meeting” in federal constitutions at which self-selected attendees with their eyes on the refreshments and other inducements on offer were asked to vote yes or no on a raft of questionnaire items.

    The promoters were already jubilating that they were set to enter the history books as the first set of Nigerians to bequeath to their compatriots a home-grown, authentic, Constitution of the people, by the people, for the people.

    They had not taken into account Dr Jonathan’s predilection for setting up committees at the least provocation, and sometimes with no provocation.

    And so it came to pass that the day after he announced that a National Conference was now warranted, he set up a 13-member committee comprising some of its most formidable protagonists to work out the modalities for staging it and gave the committee one month to report.

    Where all this leaves Emeka Ihedioha, the driving force behind the National Assembly’s effort to foist on Nigeria what would for all practical purposes be a new constitution is now unclear. He and his collaborators must be chafing that their effort to write themselves indelibly into the history books had so suddenly come unstuck, and from a source they least expected.

    But Dr Jonathan has always moved in mysterious ways.

    Ihedioha and his colleagues will probably find some comfort in the knowledge that they are not the only persons flummoxed.

    In whatever case, it is far from clear that what Dr Jonathan is offering is what the protagonists have been demanding. Hedging his bets, he calls it a National Dialogue/Conference. The one envisages limited outcomes; the other suggests nothing less than a deliberative assembly whose decisions can be set aside only through a national referendum: take your pick.

    One faction of the protagonists, the Biafranist MASSOB has already taken its pick. It says it will settle nothing less than a conference that will allow for secession. Now, it has the government’s assurance that the agenda will be wide-open and unrestricted. But this will only deepen fears in the usual quarters that the Conference is a prelude to the dissolution of Nigeria.

    Meanwhile, among the nationalities expected to be seated at the conference table, there is already some disputation. The Northern Consultative Forum and Ohanaeze are locked in a debate over the size of the delegations, with the one claiming that, by virtue of the size and population of the North, it should have more delegates than the other.

    What would the Northerners do or say when the Ogoni, or the Ekoi, to pick just two examples, insist on the same level of representation on the perfectly sensible ground that one nationality is as important as another, regardless of size?

    But which “Northerners” anyway, when Jigawa State Governor Sule Lamido says the whole thing is superfluous and that Jigawa will have nothing to do with it? Several Northern governors will probably take the same stance in the days ahead.

    On the Southwestern front where the clamour for a National Conference has been loudest and clearest, and from which Dr Jonathan must have been expecting robust support that would undercut the mass appeal of the APC in the 2015 race, the reaction has been mixed at best. APC chieftain Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, for one, has shot the offer full of holes. Some have dismissed it as a Trojan horse, while some have welcomed it cautiously.

    Regardless of whatever name Dr Jonathan calls the proposed parley, why now, when his ruling party is in disarray, when all indications are that he will seek reelection in 2015, when the entire public university system has been shut down, and when large sections of the North are convulsed by a murderous insurrection the Administration seems unable to contain with the stick or the carrot?

    There are those who contend that such a time is precisely the best moment for staging a national conference, when the governing authorities have lost momentum and direction and their legitimacy is in contention. And they cite Benin Republic, the former Zaire (now DR Congo), and Mali, as examples of countries where national conferences were held at precisely such conjunctures.

    Nigeria has drifted dangerously close, but has not reached that point yet. But it may well be that Dr Jonathan has determined that a national conference can no longer wait. After all, despite all the official denials about the state of the treasury and other issues of a fiscal nature, he knows better than anyone else the real state of things.

    In all this, only one thing seems assured: The House of Representatives will now have to abjure the conceit that a mere review of the Constitution, however wide-ranging, is what Nigeria needs, and that the task belongs principally in its province.

    “Still writing – and pontificating — without facts”

    Rattled by the allusion in my last column to a newspaper that published “exit polls” for an election that was yet to be held and fixed dubious poll numbers to a pre-determined election outcome, Eni – B (as in Eniola Bello) has written:

    “How can President Jonathan’s impressive approval rating in the North Central be due to VP Sambo factor? Sambo is from Kaduna, a state in the North West. Has Dr. Dare stayed too long in the US that he has forgotten the geography of Nigeria? If not, can it be a case of a columnist with a “determined” view fixing his “findings to that result”? Or one still writing – and pontificating – without facts?”

    My error, and I acknowledge it with regret.

    I wish Eni-B could move the newspaper in question to acknowledge its errors in the same spirit – if indeed errors they were, and not something much darker.

     

  • Still planning–and polling-without facts

    Still planning–and polling-without facts

    Back in 1966, the American economist, Dr Wolgang Stolper, on secondment from USAID to help prepare Nigeria’s First Development Plan (1962-68) accented the difficulty of the task, with a book appropriately titled “Planning without Facts.”

    This past week, the World Bank Country Director for Nigeria, Marie-Françoise Marie-Nelly, warned during a workshop in Lagos for statisticians that there could be no meaningful development or evaluation of national strategies without quality statistics to identify socio-economic challenges.

    Little seems to have changed during the nearly five decades between.

    They have continued to draw up plans on practically every aspect of national life without facts. without even knowing how many people they are planning for, nor how they are constituted.

    The point of departure for serious national planning is the population census. It is the body of data – the sampling frame – from which field investigators draw up a representative sample for the kind of study and analysis that will make it possible for them to apply their findings to the general population with confidence.

    But nobody knows the population of Nigeria to the nearest 25 million. From the 1950s, the population census has been padded, for political reasons. Instead of rectifying the errors of the preceding census, every subsequent census has reinforced and even amplified them. Each exercise has been in effect an exercise in programmed inflation.

    So much for the population size.

    When it comes to the distribution of the population, especially the pattern of distribution, census after census has been marked by a sharp departure from the laws of demography. The Sahel, much of it semi-arid, is credited with a larger share of the population than the coastal, forest and savanna regions.

    It is true that the North occupies a much larger area than the South. But even this larger area does not satisfactorily explain the population distribution as manifested in the national census. Neither the ecology nor the economy can support the large populations with which vast stretches of the North are credited.

    Even where there is a large population as in metropolitan Kano, not to be confused with the rest of Kano State – it still defies reason that, after Jigawa was excised from it, Kano is still credited with a larger population than Lagos.

    Nobody, it is necessary to insist, knows the size of the national population to the nearest 25 million, or, to be quite generous, the nearest 15 percent. Now, if a study reports findings with a margin of error of plus or minus 15 percent, we would reject it on the ground that it is no better than guesswork. Even if the findings fall within the acceptable margin of error, they would still be questionable because it is impossible to use flawed data to arrive at valid findings.

    But we continue not only to plan with the census figures confected every ten years, but also to invest them with the sanctity of actuality. This is the aeronautical equivalent of flying blind.

    And it explains, in some measure, why nothing in Nigeria works the way it was designed to work. To be sure, corruption and incompetence play a large part in the national dysfunction, but the dearth of reliable facts and figures must also be accounted a major contributory factor.

    Take as an example the oil industry, the lifeblood of the economy. Nobody knows how much oil is extracted from our waters or shores. In 1980, Professor Ayodele Awojobi, the University of Lagos polymath, revealed that the barrel used for lifting oil in Nigeria was four gallons larger than the standard barrel. The situation may well have been rectified, but the fact remains that nobody knows how much oil is actually lifted.

    When they say that as much as one-fourth of Nigeria’s oil output is stolen, that is just guesswork based on guesswork.

    Just as nobody knows how much oil is extracted, nobody knows how much oil is consumed. During the last oil ‘subsidy” crisis, the NNPC and the Department of Petroleum Resources gave wildly different figures for national daily consumption. It follows that, if consumption of petroleum products was indeed being subsidised, it was impossible to calculate the amount of subsidy. Yet a trainload of projects was rolled out, to be funded with the money that would be realised from cutting the alleged subsidy.

    Hardly a day passes without one official declaring with certitude how many billions would accrue to the federal exchequer from ending rice or wheat-flour or cement or sugar or poultry imports, and how many billion tons of cassava would be harvested in the next season as a result of improved seedlings provided by the government.

    Whenever they put out the inflation rate, you have to ask: “In what country do these people live?” For the figure bears almost no correspondence to the experience of the people. And just the other day, two government agencies gave different figures for the rate of unemployment, each of them guesswork at best.

    Because there is no reliable census data, and thus no reliable sampling frame, it is impossible to draw a probabilistic sample – one in which every member of the population has an equal chance of being represented. In the absence of such a sample, it is impossible to conduct meaningful public opinion polls in Nigeria. Yet, results of opinion polls conducted by the media or third parties are routinely reported in the news, especially during elections.

    In one notorious instance, a newspaper lavishly published “exit polls” on an election that was yet to be held. In another instance, the forecast for the presidential election published by the same newspaper, in conjunction with a foreign polling agency that refused to submit its methodology to scrutiny, was matched in every particular by the outcome. Nate Silver, the statistician who predicted Barack Obama’s victory in the 2102 presidential election with near-perfect accuracy, could not have done better.

    But given the flawed sampling frame on which the Nigerian poll was based, it is perfectly permissible to infer, as many commentators did, that the election result had been determined, and the task before the pollsters and the newspaper was to fix their findings to that result.

    The entry on the Nigerian scene two years ago of NOIPolls, a partner with Gallup USA qualifying itself as “the No. 1 for country-specific polling services in the West African region,” promises to improve opinion polling in the country. NOIPolls says it enhances decision-making across all sectors of the Nigerian economy by delivering “forward-thinking research and relevant data,

    Dr Goodluck Jonathan will no doubt be heartened by the finding in its August 2013 poll that that six of every 10 Nigerians (the actual figure is 57 percent) approved his job performance, up four points from the previous month, and the highest since January 2013.

    Not bad for a month marked by tumult within the ruling PDP, nationwide strike by university teachers, and killings the Boko Haram on a blood-curdling scale.

    He will most certainly be surprised to find, however, that his approval is strongest not in his South-South redoubt (66 percent), but in the South East (76 percent), followed by the North- Central (70 percent).

    To borrow the language of election analysts in years past, could Dr Jonathan’s strong approval rating in the South East be due to the Anyim Pius Anyim Factor – Anyim being the dynamic and high-achieving Secretary to the Government of the Federation? By the same reasoning, Dr Jonathan’s impressive approval rating in North Central will have to be attributed to the Namadi (Vice President) Sambo Factor.

    General Muhammadu Buhari, where are you, sir?

    No prizes for making it out that Dr Jonathan’s less-than-robust rating in the South South has got to be a manifestation of the Amaechi Factor.

    Dr Jonathan has nothing to fear concerning the Southwest, where 33 percent of the residents were neutral about his job performance, unlike the Northwest where 36 percent disapprove his performance. Could that be the Babangida Aliyu factor?

    NOIPolls is a huge improvement on what previously passed for opinion polling in Nigeria. Its latest poll, conducted from August 12 through 15, was based on a random sample of 1009 phone-owning Nigerians aged 18 and above in the six geopolitical zones. The reported margin of error is a healthy plus or minus 3 percent.

    One question arises from the survey, however. Do the findings also reflect the views of the 30 percent of the population that, according to a previous NOIPolls investigation, does not own phones?

    By the way, is it true that the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, owns the outfit wholly or substantially?

  • Just following up

    Just following up

    We journalists are notoriously remiss in following up on the news that we usually report with such breathless excitement. All too often, we get caught up in the foam of events. Like bees in search of pollen, we hop from one event to another, oblivious of what had gone before. We rarely follow through.

    It is therefore by way of personal atonement that I return to three major issues that have all but vanished from the news horizon.

    Whatever happened to the government of Bayelsa State’s audacious programme to extirpate the epidemic of rumour-mongering that has been sweeping the riverine terrain and threatening to plunge all its glittering achievements right back into the swamps?

    The last we heard of the project, a high-powered committee comprising representatives of the secret service, the police, the Nigeria Union of Journalists (ha!), civil society and other relevant groups–I almost wrote “stakeholders” — was at work to produce a tough remedy that Governor Seriake Dickson would move the State Assembly to enact into law.

    The outlines are still hazy, but some hot lines and web sites would be dedicated to the project. Anyone who is not sure whether what he has heard is the gospel truth or just malicious gossip – which is often nothing but stark rumour – has only to call the hot line or consult the web sites to get the authentic facts from certified officials operating round the clock.

    Those who fail to avail themselves of this unique service and end up wittingly or unwittingly peddling rumours, however benign, will have only themselves to blame when the law comes into effect.

    Are the verification centres up and running?

    I ask because I would like to check out some rumour that has been gusting in Bayelsa lately.

    It concerns a mighty personage who wears, among other hats, that of permanent secretary-at-large in the state’s civil service. I hear that senior officials who have been murmuring that she is not qualified for the distinction and that her appointment was in every sense arbitrary have decided, under the aegis of Bayelsa Civil Servants for Due Process and Transparency, to take the matter to the next level.

    According to sources, who have asked me not to identify them lest they be persecuted, members of the organisation passed a unanimous resolution at a recent meeting declaring that the way the personage aforementioned has been carrying on is “incompatible with the ethos of the public service, and is capable of bringing the Bayelsa State civil service into disrepute if it has not already done so.”

    The resolution, they tell me, is only the first step to securing through the courts a cease and desist order that would, without prejudice to any other positions she may occupy or assign herself, have the effect of restraining the personage from parading herself as a permanent secretary in the Bayelsa State Civil Service in any guise or disguise, and from enjoying the benefits pertaining thereunto.

    Surely, you too must have heard the rumour, ladies and gentlemen of the Bayelsa Task Force on Rumour-mongering. For the benefit of the people of Bayelsa and indeed the teeming readers of this newspaper in Nigeria and abroad, I respectfully request that you confirm or dispel it at your earliest convenience.

    I have my own views on the matter, but they cannot be a substitute for the definitive verdict that only The Task Force can issue.

    Second, whatever happened to the National Good Governance Tour that Information Minister (and now acting Minister of Defence) Labaran Maku has been staging to showcase to all those who are too obtuse to notice and appreciate the great transformation the Goodluck Jonathan Administration has wrought across the land.

    The last time I wrote on the subject, Maku had just concluded a controversial tour of Edo State. I was definitely in error in stating that he was hopping from one site to another in an executive jet, and I hereby offer my remorseful apologies.

    I have since learned that he rides nothing more opulent than those passenger buses purchased for the public under the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P), and that the only reason he has not availed himself and his touring party of rail travel is that a good many of the sites are not accessible by train.

    When will he take his good governance gospel to Yobe, or Borno?

    Boko Haram or no Boko Haram, there are in those states shining examples of the irreversible Transformation the Jonathan Administration has wrought. Are they not worth showcasing, if only to give the lie to those who claim that underdevelopment is the cause of the insurgency roiling those cities, and to confound the insurgents themselves?

    The insurgents, knowing that he has the armed might of the Federal Government at his call as acting Minister of Defence, will be on their best behaviour while the tour lasts. The Honourable Minster may even succeed in charming them with his winning ways and his elegant tailoring into signing a permanent truce.

    Your move, then, Honourable Minister.

    In Bukola Saraki’s time as governor, wonderful things were said and written about how he had quietly transformed Kwara State into Nigeria’s breadbasket with his far-sighted agricultural policy and technocratic acumen.

    The vehicle for the revolution was the Shonga Farms, operated by 15 white farmers, who had lost out in the land redistribution programme through which President Robert Mugabe sought to empower his dispossessed people. With generous provisions of land and vital infrastructure and cash, the farmers were four years later producing lakes of milk, mountains of butter, and pyramids of rice and maize and sorghum and guinea corn, among other items.

    But there was one big problem. These products were available only in up-scale supermarkets in Abuja, so that, if Kwara was at al a breadbasket, it was a breadbasket only to the opulent denizens of the federal capital. Over time, the products vanished even from the shelves and cold stores of the up-scale supermarkets.

    What happened to Saraki’s revolution?

    It was over before it began. But the media took Saraki’s word for it that an agricultural revolution characterised by superabundance had indeed occurred in Kwara. Today, according to persons familiar with the place, Shonga Farm looks like an abandoned junkyard littered with the debris of broken machinery and structures, a monument to mass deception.

    Unlike the media, Saraki’s handpicked successor, Governor Abdulfatah Ahmed was not fooled. Months after taking office, he was already laying the groundwork for his own agricultural revolution, this time through a partnership with Cornell University in Ithaca, in the sub-arctic clime of up-state New York

    Surely, the attentive audience is entitled to ask: How many agricultural revolutions can you have within five years in the same location?

  • Here, there, and yonder

    Here, there, and yonder

    What a difference an umbrella makes – any umbrella, but the Umbrella of the PDP especially.

    If you are standing under it, you are protected against the law and the Constitution, to say nothing of the ordinary annoyances and vagaries of life in Nigeria. In fact, I m almost prepared to insist that you are the law and the Constitution.

    Step outside it voluntarily or involuntarily, and you instantly become a prime illustration of the instability of human greatness, bereft of any rights that the law and the Constitution are obliged to respect or protect.

    When he was comfortably ensconced under the protective canopy of the PDP Umbrella first as unelected governor of the State of Osun, retired Brigadier-General (Prince) Olagunsoye Oyinlola was for all practicaly purposes the law. His every utterance was an edict. He could make and unmake, without having to answer to anyone. He had his way on practically every issue.

    Continuing a practice he had inaugurated as military administrator of Lagos State, he turned Okuku Day into one of the most prominent signposts on the nation’s calendar. On that day, grateful contractors, desperate supplicants, plain hustlers, and all manner of influence-peddlers assembled in his place of birth and tried to outdo one another in contrived gestures of solidarity and philanthropy,

    Perhaps they still observe Okuku Day but, like Ibogun Day which brought national and international attention to former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s birthplace when he was in office, it is no longer what it used to be.

    All those ingrates! If invited, hardly any person who used to flock to Ibogun and Okuku will show up today, much less make pledges that they have no intention of redeeming. But while the applause lasted, those towns occupied the spotlight as never before – nor since.

    In his latter career as national secretary of the PDP, Oyinlola also wielded enormous powers that only the wishes and desires of those who belong in the upper echelons of the party could countermand. If you did not belong in that group, you learned not to mess with him.

    Then, Oyinlola found himself, along with other dissidents, outside the Umbrella, in circumstances not entirely of his own making, and a different reality set in.

    Men who once had the power to deploy the police to break up any assembly, however lawful, and did not hesitate to exercise it, found themselves obliged to tell a lie to keep the police from breaking up their perfectly lawful assembly.

    According to Oyinlola, the breakaway faction of the PDP, which calls itself the New PDP, could assemble at the Yar’Adua Centre in Abuja and elect its officers only because they had given the authorities to understand that the facility was going to be used for a wedding reception.

    They should not exult yet. For all I know, in the on-going war of attrition between those standing under the Umbrella and those operating outside it, Oyinlola and company may yet be charged with gaining entry into a restricted facility under false pretences.

    Next time they meet, they should announce to the world that the purpose is to generate ideas to help Her Excellency the Lady of the Rock realise her agenda of women empowerment and peace building. Heaven help the police officer or government official who would be temerarious enough to question the motives of those assembled for such a purpose.

    I was also going to suggest that if, for their next meeting, the New PDP could put it out that they were gathering to offer prayers for peace, stability and prosperity in Nigeria, with General Yakubu Gowon billed to deliver the invocation, the forces of law and order would keep a respectful distance from the event.

    But a certain diffidence supervened when I was reminded of what happened to a group in Swaziland which had fashioned such a pretext for staging a political meeting, something that the king of the Swazis categorically forbids. The purpose, they said, was to offer prayers for peace and prosperity in the land.

    The Swazi authorities were not fooled.

    The police swooped on the scene and disbanded the group on the perfectly sensible grounds that, first, there was no turmoil in the land, no conflict, no street protests to warrant such public supplication, and second, that offering payers for the nation’s prosperity carried the dark and impermissible imputation that the economy was not being run adroitly.

    Go back to your homes and say your prayers there as fervently and for as long as you wish, the police admonished them sternly.

    Since news travels so fast these days and bad practices travel even faster, the authorities in Abuja may well have heard of this incident and foreclosed a resort to such tactics by those who had taken themselves outside the protective canopy of the biggest Umbrella in Africa.

    Even if they should now say that their secretariat building the police prevented them from commissioning the other day is in fact designed to mobilise support for the PDP’s transformation agenda to ensure a landslide victory in the 2015 general elections, it is doubtful whether they will be allowed to proceed. The authorities are taking no chances.

    And after what happened to him last week, the beleaguered governor of Rivers State, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, must know that he has lost the protection of the big Umbrella irretrievably, and that nothing will avail him a place under it again.

    The police would not even let his convoy take the usual route to his official residence. A public relations officer for the Force, obviously seeking to distance the police from the act, ended up actually deepening the confusion. No blockade took place, she said. And no order for a blockade was given by the state commissioner of police, according to the officer, DSP Angela Agabe.

    Now, if the Commissioner, Mbu Joseph Mbu, Abuja’s point man in Rivers State and Governor Amaechi’s sworn adversary, did not order the blockade, who did? Who is in charge?

    Adding to the confusion, another account quoted the police on the scene as saying that Amaechi’s convoy would be allowed to move on only if Mbu gave an order to that effect. But it he had not ordered a blockade in the first place, why would they require his approval to lift it?

    The police order, it now seems in retrospect, was designed to block access to Amaechi’s former campaign headquarters, lately converted to the state secretariat of the New PDP. As the authorities might well argue, Amaechi suffered nothing worse than collateral damage, and was, in any case still able to get to his residence through another route; so, where was the so-called blockade?

    Collateral damage is also what some of the former ministers whom President Goodluck Jonathan dropped curtly from his Cabinet last week suffered, especially those of them who owed their positions to persons no longer entitled to the protection of the Big Umbrella. Some among them were no doubt casualties of the Administration’s preference for loyalty over competence.

    According to a leaked account, one of the ex-ministers badgered parastatals reporting to him or her into contributing N17 million to buy an SUV for his or her personal use.

    Don’t count on Dr Jonathan to refer the matter to the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission for further investigation and thus turn it into a teachable moment. He is busy transforming the PDP, with the consolation that if he cannot transform Nigeria, he can at least transform the political party in whose name he governs the country.

     

     

     

     

  • As the PDP implodes

    As the PDP implodes

    To anyone who has followed the unremarkable life of Nigeria’s ruling PDP, the only surprise must be that the implosion that has shaken it down to its shallow roots in recent weeks did not occur much earlier.

    With characteristic conceit, it branded itself the biggest political party in Africa – without having an audited record of its membership, let alone that of other political parties in Africa. It was this very conceit that led a former chairman of the party, Vincent Ogbulafor, to declare some five years ago that the PDP would rule Nigeria for 60 unbroken years.

    That is a frightful prospect indeed, mitigated only by the consideration that if Ogbulafor could not predict his own future, there is no reason to set much store by his prediction of the party’s future. For he was dismissed as party chairman within two years of making that prophecy and has since then been shuttling between his home and the high court to answer a charge of criminal embezzlement.

    Ogbulafor’s fate reminds me of what happened to the noted political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski who, on the way to becoming Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, had made a brilliant academic career at Columbia with his stirring anti-communism and combative Cold War rhetoric, all of which conduced to his reputation as the leading Sovietologist of the time.

    Then, the Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev, fell, just like that, in 1964, replaced by Aleksey Kosygin, in an internal purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

    The news media that had embraced as gospel truth almost everything Brzezinski wrote or said about the Soviet system were taken aback.

    “Professor Brzezinski, how come you had not predicted the fall of Khrushchev?” they taunted him.

    “If Khrushchev could not predict his own fall,” he replied with a smirk, “how can you fault me for not predicting it?”

    Before then, not even his doting admirers had credited the dour scholar with anything that could be mistaken for a sense of humour.

    But I digress.

    I was going to say that, despite the conceit and the bombast, the PDP is not even a political party in the strict sense of that term. Rather, it is a vote-harvesting machine that runs on patronage. And like all machines, it is soulless. See how many of its senior officials it has devoured.

    Ogbulafor, it has to be said to his credit, was just as taken in by the delusion of power as the party stalwarts who preceded him in that office. Those who came after him have operated with the same conceit, none more so than the current occupant of the post, the much re-cycled Bamanga Tukur, who runs the organisation like a camp master with help from Dr Goodluck Jonathan who, with disastrous consequences for all concerned, divides his time between serving as National Leader of the PDP and President of Nigeria.

    One day Tukur is suspending a state governor from the party because the governor did not take his phone call. The next day he is urging the National Assembly to pass a law mandating state governors or other political office holders to attend orientation courses, seminars or retreats before assuming office so that they would know how to address their superiors, like his good self.

    Lately, he has declared in the manner of the captain of the Titanic might have, that he was fully in charge, and that he would “crush” those who had broken away to form a new PDP faction, among them seven state governors and 57 members of the National Assembly.

    You know the PDP is in trouble when Olagunsoye Oyinlola, who governed Osun State under false pretences for three years – or seven – and had very little to show for it, clinches the post of National Secretary, edging out Ebenezer “Topsy” Babatope who had served with great merit as Director of Organisation of the defunct UPN in the Second Republic, and is far more articulate.

    Oyinlola had clinched the post by a process the courts considered flawed, like the process by which he had occupied the Executive Mansion in Osogbo, capital of the State of Osun for at least three and perhaps seven years. Now he is the National Secretary of the breakaway rump of the PDP. Its attempt to run a parallel operation has been crushed by the Nigeria Police Force, which has now dispensed with the pretence of being anything other than a wholly-owned subsidiary of Goodluck Jonathan’s and Bamanga Tukur’s PDP.

    This should come as no surprise to Oyinlola. For it was the same police force he had used to frame the man he had cheated out of power – Rauf Aregbesola – on a charge of forgery. What goes around comes around.

    It is in the wisdom of our forebears that when adversity comes, even the pawpaw will demand to be counted among the might trees of the forest. That is the context in which Bode George, the PDP’s one-time chieftain in the Southwest who compounded a criminal conviction with unspeakably shameless behaviour on his release from jail, has now embarked on a mission to rescue the PDP from its self-destructive path.

    But do not count the PDP out yet, weighed down by fatigue though it is.

    For, even as it was imploding, it still had the presence of mind to do what it does best: stealing an election in the most brazen manner conceivable, the type that Afrobeat king Fela Anikulapo-Kuti described as “ojukoroju stealing” and “original stealing.”

    In a reprise of its larcenous proceedings in Ekiti, it stole, for the second time, the council elections in Offa Municipal Local Government, in Offa, Kwara State. The court had voided an earlier election and ordered a re-run, satisfied that the PDP had not earned the victory it was claiming.

    Now, Offa has always been a bastion of progressive politics, a stronghold, first, of the Action Group, then the UPN, and lately of the ACN, which has since morphed into the All Peoples Congress, APC. With all their money and their bag of tricks, the Sarakis, father and son, could never secure a foothold in Offa for their self-aggrandizing brand of politics. And how it rankled!

    So, at every opportunity, they and their agents always seek to add Offa to their collection of purloined trophies. When they are not trying to foist a paramount ruler on the people, they are scheming to steal their votes. That they have never succeeded in the long run does not deter them.

    In their latest effort, they apparently had the chairman of the State Independent (ha!) Electoral Commission, Dr Uthman Ajidagba, in their corner. He did not announce the results in Offa as stipulated by law. Instead, he left it to the state-owned Radio Kwara to declare winners the day after, in a dawn broadcast. At this writing, the detailed results are yet to be announced. For good measure, the authorities have issued the usual refrain: Anyone who is not happy with the state of affairs should head to the courts.

    The brazen theft in Offa does not exhaust the parallel with the elections in Ekiti. There, Mrs the state chief electoral officer, Mrs Ayoka Adebayo, had announced defiantly that she could not on account of her Christian conscience announce the figures the election officials had cooked up, and was hailed as a heroine and a model of integrity.

    Several days later, she sent her Christian conscience on vacation and dutifully announced the cooked-up results.

    Now, in Offa, one of the councillors allegedly elected on the platform of the PDP has rejected the victory assigned to him and declared that the real winner was the APC candidate much to the discomfiture of the PDP which has been threshing about desperately and disingenuously to explain away how a candidate it claims not to have entered in the election was declared winner on its slate.

    Meanwhile, the candidate, Jimoh Olawale, is being hailed as a hero and a model of integrity. This time, meaning no disrespect to Mr Olawale, I am going to hold my applause for a few days, hoping he will, unlike Ayoka Adebayo in Ekiti, stand unshakably by his rejection of a phantom election victory.

     

     

  • Obama: Second-term blues for a President

    Obama: Second-term blues for a President

    In the folklore of American politics, the second term is when Presidents falter, when anything that can go wrong under their watch goes wrong.

    Nothing seems to work according to plan. At a time their eyes are fixed on their legacy and their minds concentrated on how they can can best shape and consolidate it, they find themselves buffeted by events over which they have little control — events and developments that may not only undermine how they would like to be remembered, but damage it fatally.

    Reckoning from the time of Richard Nixon, there is more than anecdotal support for this piece of native wisdom.

    In the 1968 Presidential election, Nixon defeated his Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey handily. His escalation of the Vietnam War and his domestic policies stirred much domestic unrest. But going to China, thus ending the American delusion that propped up Taiwan for decades in the UN Security Council as a state actor and the authentic representative of the Chinese people, he won respect across the world as an authentic statesman.

    He had in his corner, remember, the brilliant but frighteningly amoral Dr Henry “Super K” Kissinger, first as his National Security Adviser and later as his Secretary of State.

    Four years later, Nixon won reëlection even more handily. In the race, he urged voters to compare his “law and order” credentials to the appeal of his opponent George McGovern, to the dishevelled anti-war elements stirring up things on the campuses and in the streets. Driven more by cynicism and expediency than high-mindedness, he ended the Vietnam War, brought home the troops, and it seemed he was headed to be counted among America’s great presidents.

    By the half-way mark in his second term, he was hobbled by what was at first dismissed as a third-rate burglary carried out by some inept political operatives: a break- in at the offices of the opposition Democratic Party at the Watergate Hotel, in Washington, DC. Nixon’s fingerprints were all over the break-in, in the attempt to cover it up, and in so many other acts, summed up by the term Watergate” that brought his office into disrepute.

    He resigned in disgrace, to avert impeachment

    Ronald Reagan rode to the White House in 1980 on the back of conservative resurgence, the frustration and impotence that swept the country when 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days in Iran during the revolution that toppled the monarchy and brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power during President Jimmy Carter’s luckless term. An attempt to rescue the hostages failed even before it really got underway, deepening America’s sense of impotence.

    The conservative resurgence that had buoyed Reagan to The White House grew from strength and saw him to a second term, which he won by a landslide victory over Walter Mondale, his Democratic opponent, and promised to carry him through his second term.

    But the Iran-Contra scandal supervened and cast a pall over the second term and indeed his presidency. By the time Reagan left office, dementia had set in, reducing his presidency to a holding action

    Bill Clinton’s first term was successful by any measure; the economy that had contracted in the Reagan years expanded, and his leadership in the Balkan crisis resonated across the world.

    His second term was consumed by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. So toxic did the scandal render Clinton that, in his 2000 presidential campaign, his vice president and Democratic candidate, Al Gore, would not even stake a claim on a share of the glittering achievements of the Clinton Administration, especially on the economic front.

    George W. Bush owed his victory in the 2000 presidential election more to the Supreme Court of the United States than to the electorate. The 9/11 terrorist attack transformed his shaky and tentative start into an assertive control that propelled him to invade and devastate Iraq in a quest to rid the world of that nation’s arsenal of “weapons of mass destruction.”

    The weapons, it turned out, did not exist; they were a manufactured pretext for war. But victory in the war soon turned sour, and Bush’s dream of going down in history as an all-conquering war-time leader evaporated. Nor was that all; he squandered the hefty budget surplus of the Clinton years on tax cuts for the wealthy and plunged the economy into a recession from which it is yet to recover. The glory of the first term turned to ashes in the second.

    And now, Barack Obama.

    No sooner had he started his second term, after giving his Republican opponent Mitt Romney a severe thumping, than the term ran into contrary winds. The Republican faithful, sworn to ensure that Obama failed, thought they had found a promising opening when they put it out that the Internal Revenue Service had, for political reasons, scrutinised the tax returns of organisations with a conservative leaning more closely than those of organisations with a liberal leaning.

    So heavy was the drumbeat that the head of the IRS had to resign. That did not placate them. They branded the allegation a scandal of Watergate proportions that called for nothing less than the President’s impeachment.

    It would later turn out that the IRS had in this matter been an equal-opportunity inquisitor, scrutinising the tax returns of liberal-leaning organisations no less rigorously than the returns of conservative-leaning groups.

    The furore had not quite subsided when it came to light that the national Security Agency had been spying without warrant and without probable cause on millions of Americans and indeed foreigners, tapping into their e-mails and text messages and other electronic transactions, and invading their privacy in ways that George Orwell’s Big Brother could never have devised.

    And now, an off-the cuff remark that the use of chemical weapons in the festering civil war in Syria would “cross the line” and warrant an appropriate response is haunting Obama in ways he could never have imagined, this polished political actor who usually picks his words with the utmost deliberation.

    It appears that chemical weapons have indeed been used, but it is not clear beyond a reasonable doubt who used them, and on whose orders. Nevertheless, the powerful lobby for military intervention is holding Obama to his word. The coalition he was counting on to deliver an appropriate response has dissolved in the face of opposition from a war-weary public that remembers all too clearly the propaganda about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, the casus belli that turned out to be a phantom.

    When they hear British Prime Minister David Cameron declare that everything they know points to Bashar al-Assad as the perpetrator of the horrid attack that put hundreds of Syrians to agonising deaths, and that it was all a matter of “judgment,” a great many in the attentive audience rejoin: We’ve heard that before, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. And the case turned out to be bogus through and through.

    When U.S. Secretary of State asserts that the charges he had laid out against al-Assad were based on “facts” and were a matter of commonsense,” he reminds his audience of similar assertions before the United Nations Security Council by Colin Powell, his predecessor twice removed, in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq. And their response? “We heard that before. Tell us another.”

    Obama now finds himself obliged, in the face of public skepticism, if not outright opposition, to seek the approval of the U.S. Congress before launching the bombing raids on Syria he had vowed with such unaccustomed casuistry to execute, effectively shifting responsibility to that body.

    No outcome is guaranteed. Nor is it clear whether the approval he is seeking is definitive or merely advisory.

    What is clear is that the curse –more likely the fatigue — of the Second Term is now upon the Obama Administration. Barely one year into the term, Obama’s sure-footedness is no longer evident, his agenda seems to have come unstuck, his momentum is out of kilter, and the immediate future promises more of the same.

    But it is too early to count him out. He is a student of history. He knows the burden he carries as the first African American president. In spite of the disloyal opposition, he will find ways to regain his momentum.

     

     

     

     

  • Not a task for the self-serving

    Not a task for the self-serving

    The wholesale review of the 1999 Constitution that the National Assembly is currently undertaking, with not a little help from the Presidency, was from the outset a dubious venture.

    That document was drafted in haste and wreathed in secrecy so encompassing that not even President Olusegun Obasanjo who swore to protect and defend it and abide by it had seen it at the time he took office. After going through it, the late Gani Fawehinmi warned that it was strewn with booby traps, and that the framers did not take into account Nigeria’s altered political environment and the yearnings of the people.

    Its defects soon became clear even to those who stood to profit the most from them. Piecemeal amendment followed piecemeal amendment, but defects kept surfacing. Instead of abandoning that strategy and calling for a new Constitution, to be prepared by a Constituent Assembly and ratified by sovereign people of Nigeria in a referendum, President Jonathan Goodluck and the National Assembly settled for a trainload of amendments — as many as 75 at one point, 54 at the last count – in an exercise they now call a constitutional review.

    A Constitution that requires 54 amendments in one fell swoop is a constitution crying to be re-written altogether. But they will hear none of it. They are pressing ahead with this untidy strategy, armed with the self-serving and threadbare claim that the sovereignty of the Nigerian state inheres in them, and that since there cannot be two sovereigns in the same political space, a Sovereign National Conference or a Constituent Assembly has no place in the present scheme of things.

    They conveniently forget that they were elected to make laws for the governance of Nigeria, not to rewrite a new Constitution through the back door. Nor are they mindful that, even with all its imperfections, the 1999 Constitution declares unambiguously that sovereignty belongs to the people, and that the government derives its authority from the people.

    In any case, what kind of constitutional review is it in which the protagonists gather a more or less rented crowd in one city in each federal constituency for several hours in one day, presents them with a “template” of 54 proposed amendments, ask them to vote for or against each with nary a debate, and then celebrate the outcome as a triumph for popular consultation, the kind of which has never been witnessed in the history of constitution-making in Nigeria?

    The whole thing is a sham, and a prologue to future political grief.

    That much is clear from what happened the other day when the National Assembly set out to amend the law governing nationality. It botched the effort spectacularly and ended up, according to many persons learned in the law, actually endorsing child marriage.

    Senate President David Mark has said that the Senate was “tricked” into voting for a law upholding that atrocious practice. He deserves full mark for candour. But his candour raises many troubling questions. On how many other issues or occasions has the Senate or the House of Representatives been “tricked” into enacting one law or another? Where is the expertise, the mastery, in a legislative body that can be so easily swindled? Where is the judgment?

    Today, nobody can say with certitude where the law actually stands on child marriage. If the Senate vote is not revisited, it will probably take a ruling of the Supreme Court to clear the air, all because legislators arrogated to themselves the task of rewriting the Constitution through the backdoor – a task for which they are ill-equipped.

    The on-going constitutional review, as its protagonists have chosen disingenuously to call it, is misbegotten. It was conceived in bad faith. The way it is being carried out will not win plaudits for transparency, political sagacity, or competence.

    There is yet one more development that makes it clear that on-going review does not belong in the province of the National Assembly. That is the issue of local government “autonomy”.

    The House of Representatives voted for amendment that would make local councils autonomous, but the Senate voted against.

    “Autonomy,” whether in political science or praxis, or in the sociology of the professions, is a beguiling term. But what does it really mean? What does it mean in the context of the proposal before the National Assembly?

    The local government is probably the first layer of government citizens encounter, and the layer they encounter most frequently. When effective and efficient, it touches the lives of the residents in fundamental ways, improving their quality of life. Even in dysfunction, it still has consequences, deleterious ones to be sure, for the residents.

    How it is to be organised and structured, what powers it will exercise, and what status it will enjoy: these matters are far too important to leave to the determination of a legislature whose members always have their eyes on the main political chance.

    They belong, instead, to the people – the people who will be most affected by the policies and programmes of the local government, the people as sovereign exercising constituent powers. The people have neither surrendered nor delegated those powers to a body elected to make laws for the governance of Nigeria.

    What the National Assembly is doing in the name of a constitutional review is therefore a usurpation, and a self-serving one at that. Constitution-making is not a task for the self-serving.

    To return to the issue of “autonomy”: In a polity that is supposedly a federation but is in many significant respects centrally administered, what will this so-called autonomy consist in? How will local government councils enjoy autonomy when the states enjoy no such thing?

    Those advancing the case for local government autonomy probably have in mind a situation in which local government councils will receive their financial allocations directly from the Centre and disburse the funds as they like, without any interference from state governments. They reject the present practice, whereby state governors can dissolve elected councils at will, for political reasons.

    If this is what the “autonomy” they are canvassing consists in, there is much to be said for it. But why save it for local councils and deny it to state governments?

    What is the meaning of “autonomy’ in a setting in which a state governor is vested with responsibility as “chief security officer” of the state, but the police commissioner is appointed by, and takes his orders from, the Centre and actually operates at cross-purposes with the elected governor as in Rivers State, to cite the most recent example of this practice?

    Only a comprehensive overhauling of the Constitution – an overhauling that takes into full account present realities and the yearnings of the people – can make for a more harmonious union. The task of preparing such a Constitution, warranted by the preface “We, the people”, belongs to a Constituent Assembly or a Sovereign National Conference.

    The on-going constitution review, it is necessary to insist, is a costly sham. Its protagonists are sowing the seeds of future grief.