Category: Olatunji Dare

At the height of the carnage over which he was presiding without fear and without remorse, I wrote on this page that, whenever an account of the era was rendered, former Central Bank of Nigeria governor, Godwin “Mefi” Emefiele was sure to emerge as the most execrable figure.

How wrong I was! 

Now, the nation’s searing economic pains are being discussed as if Emefiele never happened:  Emefiele who confiscated the bank notes of millions living on the smallest of margins in aid of a crackbrained scheme of “re-designing” the currency when he only dabbed the template from which only a fraction of the old notes could be pulled – notes that bled on the fingers like a kindergartner’s crayon sketch, and at a cost rumoured to be close to the national budget.

Emefiele, who put the National Mint to work overtime printing as much paper money as former president Muhammadu Buhari might need to indulge his delusion of grandeur.  Emefiele, who crashed the Naira exchange, making it sub-par to what the Zim dollar fetched in Robert Mugabe’s final days.

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Emefiele, who could not hear the cries of the disconnected millions nor empathise with their grinding privations.  

His overarching concern was to prevent a particular presidential candidate from “buying” the election, having himself being stopped in his tracks from buying up the nomination without quitting his day job.  Subsequently, his goal was to line up a sweetheart “study leave” at a prestigious institution abroad to prepare himself for another cushy engagement.

Emefiele, the record of whose tenure as governor of the Central Bank reads like a calendar of Nigeria’s economic woes.  Emefiele, whose depredations go on and on and on . . .

And yet, it is as if he never happened. 

Something tells me that if Emefiele had appeared before the Senate in consideration of a new appointment, he would have been asked to “take a bow and go” in keeping with the ho-hum nature of the proceedings, or would have been asked some perfunctory questions and cleared.

It could be worse, to be sure.  He could have landed in a “gotcha” ambuscade like Dr Bosun Tijani, a ministerial nominee from Ogun State whom an excited senator sought to impale on the strength of a tweet he made during the #EndSARS crisis expressing disappointment with Nigeria’s lacklustre place among nations and lamenting the woes his Nigerian passport has brought him as an international innovations and applications expert.

Is it still your position, Senator Fatai Buhari (APC Oyo North) taunted him, “Is it still your position that Nigeria is a bloody expensive tag to have against your name?”

Our sunshine patriots had their day at centre stage.

I was at that stage reminded of United States Senator J.  William Fulbright’s intervention at a critical time in the debate on America’s war on Vietnam. Young men were denouncing the war and leaving the country in huge numbers to evade conscription. Supporters of the war, led by President LB Johnson, dismissed them at every opportunity unpatriotic elements.

Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas and cerebral chair of the powerful Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, dissented.    Criticism of one’s country, he declared, is “the higher patriotism.” It is a compliment rooted in belief that one’s country is capable of doing much better and should indeed strive to do better.

To return to Mefi:  There is something to be said for having a short national memory, if that is the phenomenon is at work here.  It is conducive to healing.  But it could also induce and even reward the supine recklessness with which Emefiele conducted the public trust he was handed.

They are saying in his defence that he never took a step that Buhari did not order or approve or approved it.  So much for his professionalism.

The confirmation hearings show no inclination of returning to their original purpose, which is to consider a nominee’s office fitness for a particular office, not just for any office.  They grind on in the belief that anyone adjudged fit for higher office based on the most perfunctory questioning can be assigned any office the President chooses. 

Under this theory, the person cleared can be appointed Minister of Parks and Gardens, or Minister for Nuclear Energy and Research. Is it any wonder, then, that apart from a few honourable exceptions, few appointees distinguish themselves in ministerial office?

The attentive public, and the progressives within it, have a right to feel disappointed that President Bola Tinubu did not break with this aberration that dates from the Shagari era.  It has served its time and should be discontinued

The “gotta ambuscade” was not the only moment of drama in last week’s Senate proceedings.

Dr Maryam Shetty, a nominee from Kano State, was standing by in the Senate’s precinct, rehearsing and perfecting her opening lines, when her nomination was pulled, in another move that shocked those who expected a sure-footed approach to these matters from Team Tinubu.  It was humiliating.  In fact, I am almost prepared to state that it was cruel, even though probably not calculated.

Did they not do their homework?  Did they have to sacrifice their credibility to satisfy some dyspeptic stakeholder?

Dr Shetty’s reaction is a study in graciousness.  Those who engineered the debacle will do well to learn from it.  As for Team Tinubu, it is too early in the game to allow itself to be labelled accident-prone.

Senate President Godswill Akpabio, the former Akwa Ibom governor who left the state so uncommonly transformed that there was nothing for his successor to transform, spoke movingly the other day about the death of a grandchild in circumstances all too indicative of the parlous state of the nation’s health care delivery system.  My condolences, Your Excellency.

In what facility did this tragic incident occur?  Why was the child not airfreighted to that uncommon hospital complex you built in Uyo and equipped and commissioned to end medical tourism bit just in the ECOWAS region but in the whole of Africa?

Finally, a word on the sartorial revolution quietly weeping the political landscape.  Since the First Republic, every change in government has been accompanied by some perceptible change in the wardrobe of the new people.

When Shagari came into office, his one-gallon cap sprouted on so many heads in the National Assembly, the Cabinet Office and the public service.  It sat rather uncomfortably on most of them and reportedly irritated Governor Olabisi Onabanjo of Ogun State to the point that he thought of banning its use by government officials.

Not so, Onabanjo said.  But have you seen any Fulani donning the gobi? He quipped

In the time of President Olusegun Obasanjo, the tilt of the cap was held to emblematize a Power Shift in the national political configuration.  Under Goodluck Jonathan, the wardrobe screamed Resource Control.  In Buhari’s time, it was nondescript.

Today Tinubu’s signature cap, with the iconic Infinity motif, is fast becoming the headgear of choice for politicos, except in the Obidient enclave.  They say it stands for awalalambe, or Na we dey there.

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He was barely out of his teens when he plunged into the struggle to free Nigeria from colonial rule, stirring huge crowds all over the country at public lectures and rallies.

He recalled one such engagement, a lecture in Ilesha (Osun State) during one of many discussions I was privileged to have with him, at his home in Benin City and in Lagos, between 1992 and 1996.

He and Ojeleye Fadahunsi, later ceremonial governor of Western Nigeria, and Adewale Fashanu, the firebrand Žikist, were the featured speakers. Ilesha was agog with expectation.

Two days before the lecture, the colonial police blockaded the town, searching every motor vehicle entering or leaving to make sure the speakers could not get to the venue of the lecture.

They got there all right but well past 10 o’clock p.m., some six hours behind schedule. Yet the room was packed full. Men and women old enough to be their parents and grandparents had waited all day to hear them preach the gospel of the nationalist awakening.

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More than five decades later, Anthony Eronsele Oseghale Enaharo still had a glow in his eyes as he told the story. He had never felt so humbled and so reassured, he said, that he had chosen the right path.

Public acclaim on a scale not witnessed since the death of Chief Awolowo would come later still to Enahoro, legendary newspaperman, platform orator, pamphleteer, raconteur, public servant, the ablest parliamentary debater and one of the most cerebral politicians Nigeria has ever known, when he returned home on April 10, 2000, after four years of penurious exile in the United States.

He was received at Lagos airport by the vanguard of NADECO, the democratic opposition that had rendered military rule unsustainable. A mammoth crowd cheered him as his motorcade drove through the streets. School children chanting kaabo, kaabo, kaabo, Baba kaabo (“Welcome, welcome, welcome Father welcome”) lined his route. And for several days, it was as if the entire metropolis was staging a carnival.

But more was to come. A powerful Lagos State delegation led by Governor Bola Tinubu escorted him to the border with Ogun State, where he was received with befitting ceremony by Governor Olusegun Osoba and members of the state’s Executive Council.

Ceremonies over, Osoba and his team escorted Enahoro to the Ondo border and de- livered him to Governor Adebayo Adefarati. More ceremonies, and it was then Adefarati’s turn to escort Enahoro to the border with Edo State.

Governor Lucky Igbinedion anchored the relay, ushering Enahoro, amidst chanting by jubilant crowds, to Enahoro’s home in the state capital. For the better part of the following weeks, all kinds of civic receptions were held in honour of the returning hero

There is some irony in all this.  Enahoro made his mark in the anti-colonial struggle. Until he died last week, aged 87, he was engrossed in the struggle to enthrone democracy and justice in self-governing Nigeria.

He paid a fearsome price. As a crusading newspaper editor and public orator, he was jailed three times for “sedition” by the colonial authorities. The third jail term resulted from his being drafted to chair, in the absence of the designated Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, a lecture titled “A call to revolution” at Tom Jones Hall, in central Lagos, delivered by Osita Agwuna.

The military regime of Ibrahim Babangida crippled his business interests. Sani Abacha, had billeted in his Uromi country home as commander of Nigerian troops bivouacked in the town. The civil war ended the week Abacha arrived but the house continued to serve him as residence and operational headquarters for another three years.

Landlord and tenant got on quite well, to the point that Abacha always referred to Enahoro as “uncle.”

In his craving for maximum power, Abacha forgot all this. He had Enahoro detained in squalid conditions without trial, and would have had him killed if Enahoro had not taken “evasive action,” as he called it, minutes ahead of Abacha’s goon squad.

Then followed forced exile in the United States, from where he served as the rallying point of the opposition to military rule. In their evocative power, Enahoro’s broadcasts to Nigerians at home and abroad on Radio Kudirat called to mind Charles de Gaulle’s broadcasts from England to his compatriots in Nazi-occupied France.

Temperamentally and socially, Enahoro would have felt more at home in the United Kingdom than in America.  But he must have remembered how, in 1963, the British Government had extradited him to Nigeria to face dubious charges of treasonable felony. 

A judge who should have recused himself on account of a notorious conflict of interest sentenced him to 15 years in prison, reduced to 10 years on appeal.

Sprung from jail three years later, he became, as Federal Minister of Information, the most eloquent spokesperson for the Yakubu Gowon regime and the Federal Cause which had to contend with a hostile foreign press that doted on the Biafran leader, Colonel Emeka Ojukwu, and was fixated on his Oxford education.

How, it has been asked, could Enahoro have pitched his political tent in the camp of the conservative and predatory NPN on the return to constitutional government in 1979? How could the high-achieving lieutenant to whom Awo would have handed the mantle of premier of Western Nigeria if he had not been countermanded by chauvinistic elements in the Action Group — how could such a person make peace with the mediocrity that the NPN emblematised?

The answer can be found in his memoir, Fugitive Offender: The Story of a Political Prisoner. .On reaching age 40 – the age at which a man should no longer take his own immortality for granted – Enahoro took stock of his circumstances. The few grey strands of hair on his head had multiplied. The anti-colonial struggle and the aftermath had left him bruised and battered. But he had little to show for it by way of material possessions.

And so, he vowed never again to be on the outside. Henceforth, he would be on the inside, with the majority, profiting from whatever came from the territory.

It is to his everlasting credit and to Nigeria’s greater fortune that Enahoro soon renounced the vow and entered into a Second Act. When the Buhari/Idiagbon regime embarked on draconian measures that most Nigerians thought could never be contemplated here, much less pursued, the fighter and mobiliser in Enahoro stirred again.

He decided to rouse survivors of the vanguard of the nationalist struggle to challenge military rule. Chief Awolowo, with whom he had reconciled, assured him of his support. So did Dr Azikiwe. And so did the vast majority of others Enahoro consulted throughout the country.

Enahoro then went to work, designing the form the challenge was going to take, and the occasion for its launch. And just to be sure that he had a solid platform, he set out on a final round of consultations.

The whole thing came unstuck in Enugu where, he told me, he spent three days in a hotel waiting for word that it was okay to head to Onuiyi Haven, Nsukka, to confer with Dr Azikiwe. The word never came. Dr Azikiwe, he was told, was under strict orders from his doctor not to receive – nor apparently talk – with any visitor.

Though Nigeria did not requite his labour, Enahoro never gave up on Nigeria. The principal mission of his Movement for National Reformation was to fashion a Nigeria that would be truly federal and would be governed by what he called “equitocracy,”  following a new coinage by a political scientist.

That dream lives on.

The best way his admirers and followers can honour him is to continue to pursue it, until it is realised.

If President Jonathan Goodluck had not recently named Liberty Stadium, Ibadan, for Chief Awolowo, it would have been fitting indeed to name it for Enahoro who had, as Western Nigeria’s Minister of Home Affairs and Information, supervised its construction, along with the establishment of Africa’s first television service.

Benin Airport would be a fitting memorial. But that would not be expiation enough. 

According Enahoro a full state burial would be a significant step toward paying the huge debt Nigeria owes his illustrious memory.

I have been doing some hard thinking lately on the constitution, especially that aspect of it which, according to some of the most learned persons in the land and indeed the whole world on such matters, stipulates that no candidate can be duly elected President of this Federal Republic unless that candidate wins at least 25 percent, or one-fourth, of the total votes cast in Abuja Federal Capital Territory,  or Abuja FCT.

No shaking.  No approximations.

That provision, these authorities insist, is an iron law or, to employ a more fancied term, a categorical imperative.  You and your party may win the majority in each of the 36 states of this Federal Republic; you may harvest every vote in every precinct in each of the 774 Local Government Areas of the country, and you may even have won the overwhelming majority of the votes cast in the Federal Capital Territory that is the nation’s Magic Kingdom. 

But unless you win at least one-quarter of those votes, you have laboured in vain. If you fall short by a single vote, you have laboured in vain.

This, according to these learned authorities, is the sober, unambiguous position enjoined by an unsentimental construction of the matter by the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as Amended.   That has been the law of the land. Think realpolitik.

Once upon an earlier silly season, the country was confronted with the calculus of what constituted in demographic and plebiscitary terms, two-thirds of the 19 states comprising     the Federation.  In the run-up to the 1979 General Election, the Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO) had held at every opportunity the answer was 13 states.

Until Richard Akinjide the legal wunderkind, acting on intelligence indicating that the NPN’s Presidential candidate, Shehu Shagari would win 25 percent or more of the total votes cast in each of at least two two-thirds of the states in Nigeria States threw a deus ex machina into the works.  Two-thirds of 19 as every elementary school pupil can figure out, is 12 2/3, not 13,  Akinjide deposed in the manner of the precise school teacher he once was.

There was just this little problem that the NPN candidate Shehu Shagari, polled a little under 20 percent, or one-fifth, in a 13th state, Kano just a little under 20 percent, or one-fifth of the total votes there.

As they had been iterated and reiterated by FEDECO officials and understood by the general public, Shagari’s showing fell considerably short of the stipulation.

Nothing to worry about, as Akinjide might have assured FEDECO chairman Michael Ani, not the most patient of bureaucrats, flummoxed that the wheels he had refined and perfected to meet any contingency in what was already being called over-engineered election machine  were in danger of coming off when with regard to a 13th state.

The law meant simply that, in this particular instance, a candidate needed to win only one quarter of the votes cast in at least two-thirds of the states in Nigeria,  –i.e., 12 2/3 states, not 13.   That formulation tipped the scale in Shagari’s favour, and he was declared winner all the way to Supreme Court.

The law cannot contemplate an absurdity, the jurists maintained portentously; then they went ahead to deliver an absurdity by reducing Kano, the state with the largest number of parliamentary constituencies, to a hypothetical 13th state.

They laid it down, however, that this was not to be cited as a precedent -not out of timidity or diffidence, you understand, but because of the time-honoured practice that the highest court in the land cannot be bound by such means, but because doing so might insulate it from legal developments in juristic science or perpetuate error.

Just to make sure that kind of thing never happened again, the departing military removed that lacuna from the draft of the constitution they signed into law.  And, for good measure, every revision of the Constitution has ensured that the number of states in the Federation was divisible four.

How could they have known that additional engineering could only lead to the recognition of Abuja FCT as a super-state and its residents as super-citizens whose votes outweigh the voters of all other citizens put together in the constitutional order?

But that is where we are today.  And because of this, as well as alleged sundry irregularities, many learned persons are demanding that the last General Election be annulled and a new one ordered.

Easy gentlemen, easy.  Can’t you see – and seize – the opportunities created by the new jurisprudence to clear the mess, the jiggery-pokery in the electoral laws and sanitize for all the time the theory and practice of psephology in our clime?

All the best authorities agree that even local government elections in Nigeria are over-regulated.  When it comes to national elections, to call them over-regulated is too courteous. They are prone to manipulation at every conceivable point.  Instead of pillorying election officials, we should be praising and rewarding them for doing the impossible time and again under the most arduous circumstances.  It is a wonder that they get any results at all.

To start with, the sheer scale and complexity of the exercise almost defy human ingenuity. Local Council elections are daunting enough.  The cost, in these disarticulated times, is simply insane.  Then the time lost to productivity, the court hearings, the appeals and cross-appeals – the whole thing is simply unsustainable.  The logistics is maddening.

To say nothing of the paperwork even in this digital age.  And the damage the whole thing does to the soul, to social relations, and to our common humanity.  Is this not too high a price to pay for representative government, even at its most productive and beneficial?  When it consists in layer upon layer of dysfunction, it is time to embrace any alternative that promises even a smidgen of redemption.

Now that the entire electorate in all disparities has been distilled into one compact geographic space  – Abuja FCT – for the purpose of a presidential election, the whole thing can be completed in a few hours after a leisurely Sunday lunch. Residents only, please.  Identification cards not transferable.

Registration of qualified residents – fewer than 75, 000 by one account – and a handful of officials selected from among residents should take no more than an hour.  For actual voting and toting things up, allow one additional hour each.  Proclamation of results, one hour.

Set aside one full day following the post-election petitions, if only to indulge the most obstinate litigants. But no lawyers, please.   Absolutely no lawyers of any stripe.  No media advisers or strategists of any kind. The entire Abuja FCT electorate will sit as a jury and determine. the final outcome of the election.  

No appeals will be countenanced.  No obfuscations No magomago.  No wuruwuru.

To consecrate this reform into law should be the first of business of the Tenth National Assembly.

Moshood Olawale Kashimawo, Abiola, winner of the 1993 presidential election who was prevented from taking office by a confederacy of military, civilian and foreign interests, and was done to death in captivity in 1998, would have been 86 years old on July 7.  Finally and fittingly, the nation has acknowledged and honoured Abiola’s sacrifice and example through his collaborator, President Bola Tinubu, as “a true hero of democracy.”

Moshood Abiola was an unlikely candidate for political martyrdom or indeed for martyrdom of any kind.

He had entered politics almost as a pariah who regarded money as the measure of all things.  He had everything that money could buy.  And he was not apologetic or coy about it. He flaunted his wealth even when putting some of it to serve beneficient ends.

But his compassion was genuine.  He held it as article of faith that anyone who was in a position to show compassion but failed to do so would never find favour with Allah.  He would recite in English, Arabic and Yoruba, passages from the Bible and the Quran to that effect.  And he lived every day by that creed.

Abiola’s compassion and public-spiritedness won him a great deal of public attention, even respect, but not much love nor significant following, as he discovered when he entered politics in 1978 as a card-carrying member of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) and entered his senior wife, Simbiat, as candidate for a Senate seat from Ogun on that party’s platform, in a state that was fanatically loyal to Obafemi Awolowo’s Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN). 

She lost by a huge margin.

Abiola’s position as chief executive of ITT in Nigeria did not help matters, given its notorious complicity in the overthrow of the democratically-elected Socialist government of President Salvadore Allende Gossens in Chile, and its notoriety for unsavoury business practices, which led the contrarian Afro-beat king, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, to mock the global brand as “International Thief-Thief,” or global robber.

ITT had won huge telephony contracts in Nigeria and its contractors had dug up all major streets in Lagos for telephone cables.  The work was moving at a very slow pace, putting residents, especially motorists, to great inconvenience.

Abiola himself seemed to have compounded matters by distributing to members of the Constituent Assembly debating the draft constitution for the Second Republic, a sophisticated, multi-function ITT  electronic calculator.  Not a few Nigerians interpreted it as an attempt to buy influence.

But what galled the teeming supporters of the  UPN, which governed the Yoruba states and             Bendel—what used to be Western Nigeria during the First Republic, but was in the opposition in the Second Republic—was the virulently anti-UPN stance of Abiola’s Concord newspaper group.

It was as if those newspapers had it as their goal to take Awolowo and the UPN out of political reckoning.  Even if they had been set up by the NPN and not by one of its well-heeled members, they could not have been more pro-NPN.  A large portrait of President Shehu Shagari graced the lobby, next to a portrait of Abiola’s, in the editorial offices of the Concord Press, in Ikeja.

In short order, they published a sensational story claiming that Awolowo had improperly acquired vast tracts of landed property in Maroko, Lagos, while falsely and hypocritically parading himself as a socialist devoted to the public welfare. 

They followed with another story, about another allegedly improper acquisition of landed property in Lagos, by Lateef Jakande, the UPN Governor of Lagos State, who enjoyed a reputation for probity and a Spartan lifestyle.  Then, they took on the UPN Governor of Ogun State, Chief Olabisi Onabanjo, claiming that he had improperly dipped into the public treasury for a lavish private vacation in the UK.

These stories delighted Awolowo’s political opponents in the NPN and other parties and infuriated the UPN’s teeming supporters.  In court hearings, the stories on Onabanjo and Jakande were held to be false and defamatory, and both plaintiffs were awarded substantial damages.  Awolowo’s lawsuit was still wending its way through the courts when Awolowo died in 1987.

Abiola’s romance with the NPN did not survive the 1983 presidential election.  In keeping with its claim to having a “national outlook,” the party had at its inception adopted a policy of “zoning” the presidency.  In practice, this meant that if a president from one zone had served his term, the party would give its ticket to a candidate from another zone.

Abiola had sought the NPN’s ticket for the 1983 presidential election.  A stalwart of the party from the North, Umaru Dikko, declared with petulant scorn that the presidency of Nigeria was not “for sale.”

So, the NPN could draw on Abiola’s wealth, but would not countenance his seeking its presidential ticket?

That was it.

Abiola stomped out of the NPN and never looked back.  He also tried to mend fences with individuals and groups from whom he had been estranged by his exertions in furthering the NPN’s cause.  Public appreciation for his philanthropy turned to respect for his person, and the respect turned into admiration.

But it was when Abiola declared for the Social Democratic Party (SDP) on the return to party politics in 1988 – when he finally got his politics right by embracing the progressive political tradition of the states carved out of former Western Nigeria – that he began to attract the devoted following that translated into the massive electoral support so crucial to his victory in the 1993 presidential election.

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It was this mass support that animated the struggle for the actualisation of Abiola’s electoral mandate and kept alive much of the passion surrounding the events subsumed under the evocative label of “June 12.”

If Abiola had not got his politics right, if he had, for example, cast his lot with the National Republican Convention (NRC) and run on that platform, it is doubtful whether he would have enjoyed that kind of electoral support.

This massive support, it is necessary to insist, has less to do with his being Yoruba than with his being the standard bearer of the party that was “a little to the left,’ one whose ideology accorded with that of the Yoruba.  After all, Ernest Shonekan, whom Babangida foisted on Nigeria as Head of his “Interim National Government” was Yoruba.  But the Yoruba rejected him roundly.  General Olusegun Obasanjo, who is also Yoruba, earned the fewest votes in Yorubaland when he ran for president in 1999 under the banner of the conservative PDP.  Running as an incumbent four years later, he hardly fared better.

We will never know whether Abiola would have made a good president.  After Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) decimated the middle class and pauperised the mass of the people, expectations ran high that an Abiola Presidency would improve the lot of the ordinary citizen in the short term, if not immediately.  Abiola had pivoted his campaign on Hope—hope for a better future, at a time when hope was in short supply.  He was going to tackle poverty frontally and help eradicate it.

In the popular consciousness, he seemed uniquely qualified for the task.  Born into and reared in dire poverty, he had become a multi–billionaire, with a business empire spread across the world.

By a curious coincidence, the price of imported milk, rice, and tomato puree had come down substantially in the weeks after the election. Around town, the word was that, as a gesture of goodwill to mark Abiola’s coming, importers had decided to reduce the prices of some commodities.  Whether this was true or not, the average consumer took the price reductions as a sign of the good times that would roll in when Abiola took charge.

The quest for the Presidency changed Abiola in significant ways, according to some members of his campaign team and senior aides. Gone was the brashness of those days when he regarded money as the measure of all things.  He learned to stoop to conquer.  He became a good listener and a patient conciliator.  He encouraged those around him to tell him what he needed to know rather than what they thought he would like to hear.  He became less impulsive and more deliberative. Worldly pleasures counted for less and less in his preoccupations.

Before he secured the SDP ticket, so un-organised was Abiola it was a surprise he ever got anything done. The campaign imposed some order and discipline on his proceedings, and he seemed to have embraced this new approach as a better way of carrying on in the public realm he was about to enter.

Before 1993 and subsequently, the legitimacy of persons elected to the political leadership of Nigeria was always disputed.  In the 1964 general election, the first after independence, the ceremonial president, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, was loath to invite the incumbent Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, to form a new government, persuaded that the outcome of a poll boycotted by the opposition for the most part could not be said to reflect the true wishes of the people.

In 1979, it was a mathematical sleight of hand that awarded the presidency to Shagari. Throughout his first term, his legitimacy was always in contention. The NPN went on to rig Shagari into office in 1983, in a manner so brazen that the military had to step in to stave off violent protests in many parts of Nigeria.

The 1999 general election that produced General Obasanjo was held under a constitution that had been kept a closely-guarded secret. The 2003 sequel was, according to local and international observers, the most fraudulent they had ever witnessed.  The 2007 contest was more of the same.

The 1993 election delivered a clean, pan-Nigeria mandate and conferred on Abiola a legitimacy that no Nigerian president before or since has been able to claim or enjoy. Abiola showed that, in Nigeria, elections can be won without the organised rigging that has been the bane of Nigerian politics.

To the very end, he resisted every pressure, discounted every threat, and spurned every blandishment the military regime and its foreign collaborators contrived.  His tenacity surprised the vast majority of Nigerians who did not know him well and those who knew him only in caricature.

They thought that, faced with the prospect of being put to the slightest inconvenience, to say nothing of being jailed, losing his vast financial empire and perhaps, his life, Abiola would cut a deal, put the best face on it, and move on.

Even some of those close to him thought him feckless, like the Concord editorial writer who told me on the eve of the 1993 election that, even at that stage, Abiola could still be bought or bribed off the race.  Abiola, he said, saw the election as nothing more than an opportunity to add one more feather to a cap that was already chockfull of feathers, and would gladly drop the idea if the price was right.

The fellow was wrong, as was everyone who thought likewise.

Abiola had entered Nigerian politics almost as a pariah.  He departed the political scene and the world almost sainted by his teeming supporters, with whom he refused to break faith. His influence lives on.

This profile of Abiola first appeared in my 2010 book, Diary of Debacle:  Tracking Nigeria’s Failed Democratic Transition (1989-1994).

No response short of the outpouring of grief and mourning across Nigerian universities, institutions, of further learning and media houses could have done justice to the memory of Dr Lai Oso, a professor of journalism at the Lagos State University and dean of its School of Communication from 2011-2015, since news broke of his death this past weekend.

Oso died in a motor accident between Abraka, in Delta State, and the Edo State capital, Benin City.  He died in harness, in the line of duty. He was returning from Abraka, where he had gone to serve as an external examiner in mass communication when the accident occurred.

Something tells me that if he could stand by unobtrusively and watch it all, Oso, professor of journalism, and most recently, dean of the School of Communication of Media Studies at the Lagos State University, Ojo, would have done so somewhat bemused.

Though he was a serious and industrious student, one of the best I have had the privilege and pleasure of teaching here and in the United States, he never took himself too seriously, no matter the occasion.

Oso was the one who always spoke out and asked questions in that rich baritone that filled the room. He was totally unpretentious and often came across to some as boisterous, but his boisterousness was not the flippant kind.  It was rooted in his self-confidence and in  his mastery of material and occasion.  He was never superficial.

Back then, a Second Upper represented superior academic achievement in the university.  It still does, but not to the same extent.  Today, the inordinately large number of students graduate with a Second Upper each year, but it is more a sign of grad inflation than of a quantum leap in scholarly achievement. Their skills set and the general bearing of their products often leave much to be desired.  

In Oso’s case, scholarly erudition, conviction, self-confidence, and, yes, a robust sense of humour enriched by a penchant for repartee, resided in the same person.

A perceptive student, he delineated his area of future scholarly inquiry early and made it the focus of his work.  Fascinated by Marxism, not as a political ideology, but as a framework for the study and analysis of social phenomena.

For his final-year project, Oso applied that framework to examine how industry and trade unions contend to shape the news of the day.  Although I took more than a passing interest in the project, I cannot now categorically assert that he executed it under my supervision.  But I remember it well and profited from its insights.

This perspective, called the political economy approach to the study of the media, informed his reporting for the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).  It was sharpened at the University of Leicester, the leading graduate communication programme in the UK, where he earned his doctorate in mass media research, and has perfused his numerous scholarly publications.

The political economy approach, also called the critical-intellectual approach, is what distinguishes European media scholarship from the American approach, which one of its pioneers described as “administrative.”

The administrative approach takes the media as given, and explores how to use them to certain ends, such as selling more goods, winning elections, or bringing about behavioural and attitude change.  It rarely questions, to cite a trite example, whether more soap should in fact be sold; instead, it seeks to determine how the media can be used to sell more soap.  It rarely questions the goals of national development; rather, it explores how the media can be used to promote them.  It is shot through and through with metrics that are at best indicative of a race in progress.

The critical intellectual approach, on the other hand, draws on insights from history, philosophy, literature and the social sciences in its analysis of media, which it regards as the province of cultural studies.  There is a prescriptive tenor to it, an iteration of what roles media should play in society, and an abiding concern with ethics.  It criticizes the existing order and seeks to replace it with something more humane.

The two cannot of course be placed in separate, water-right compartments. There is always a bit of the one in the other and, vice versa, a bit of the other in the one.  No body of work falls entirely in one tradition.  In the end, it is a matter of degree more than anything else.

It was in the critical-intellectual tradition that Oso situated his scholarship. By one account, he was one of the five most published mass communication and journalism educators in Africa.  He felt more at home in the classroom and at seminars and symposiums, where he could directly influence and inspire more minds than in the deanery.

I last saw Oso in 2016, at the Ade Ajayi Hall when mass communication alumni of the University of Lagos marked the 50th anniversary of the programme’s founding.  At the plenary, Debo Adesina, then head of Guardian newspapers, presented a recondite paper on the ferment in the media, given the exponential growth in the technologies of communication and information.

Without having read the paper previously, Oso gave an off-the-cuff review that left everyone in awe of his grasp of the issues.

When I was conferred with DAME’s Journalism Lifetime Achievement Award for 2016, it was Oso I asked to accept the trophy on my behalf.  Thereafter, our contacts stagnated. The trophy sits somewhere in his office as I write this piece an indication of when my direct contact with him ended.

Lai Muraina Oso was 67.  His death has robbed the community of media scholars and practitioners in Nigeria of one of its most influential voices.

The greatest tribute Oso’s colleagues and students can pay him is to advance his tradition of media scholarship, activism and advocacy, and to bring to bear on their work the courage and integrity that marked his career.

The case of the Osborne Towers Haul has got to be one of the most bizarre in Nigeria’s history.

At its heart was the largest fortune any person or institution ever chanced upon in a single location in Nigeria, and it transformed one of the most exclusive addresses in one of the nation’s most opulent neighbourhoods into a sensational crime scene brimming with money and mystery.

Footage of the unearthing of the haul, some $43.3 million stacked in packs of mint-fresh $10, 000 bills, in a fire-proof steel cabinet in Flat 7B at the Osborne Towers, in Lagos, not forgetting small change in hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling, made the headlines and front pages of the news media across the world.

Early reports claimed that the haul was part of the “security” money former President Goodluck Jonathan had squirreled away for fighting the 2015 presidential election that he should have known he could not win.  He had been so crushed by his defeat, they said, that he forgot the money.

Even if Dr Jonathan remembered, others said, how could he have come forward to claim the money, especially when his wife, the formerly excellent Dame Patience, was fighting desperately to re-possess some N54 million in bank deposits that the courts had ordered forfeited on the suspicion that it was the fruit of crime?

EFCC operatives who had swooped on Apartment 7B following, a tip-off from a whistle-blower were still toting up the haul when former Governor Nyesom Wike declared that it belonged unquestionably to the Rivers State Government, being proceeds of assets his predecessor and serving Minister of Transport, Rotimi Amaechi had “fraudulently” sold.

“We will follow due process of the law to get back the money found at the Ikoyi residence,” he told Channels Television. “This money belongs to the Rivers State people. We  have conducted our checks.

“We will stun Nigeria with this matter. We will come out with our evidence at the appropriate time.”

So much for Barrister Wike’s plan, which was at full throttle when the Director-General of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), Ambassador Ayodele Oke, a highly-regarded spook whom few outside the community of spooks had ever heard of, stepped forward to claim that the money belonged to the NIA.

The funds, he said, were duly appropriated by the Federal Government at the time of Dr Jonathan for projects that could not be named, and that Oke had periodically reported on those projects, to the complete satisfaction of the authorities, among them National Security Adviser Babagana Monguno, and by extension President Muhammadu Buhari.

Premium Times (May 5, 2016) confirmed that much in a painstakingly documented piece that has not been rebutted as far as I know.  The editors assured me on the record that they stood “perfectly” by their reporting.

In 2013-2014, the paper reported, Ambassador Oke’s immediate predecessor, Olaniyi Oladeji, had proposed to the Jonathan Administration an upgrade of NIA’s intelligence gathering facilities and techniques. On taking over from Oladeji, Ambassador Oke had fleshed out the proposal in a memo he submitted to Dr Jonathan on Feb: 14, 2015.

Premium Times quoted from Oke’s memo the following salient paragraphs regard the project:

Goal: to “upgrade and professionalise agency operations” in order to “engender an effective clandestine communication system central to the working of an intelligence service.”

Schedule: 2015 – 2018:

Price tag:  $289, 202, 282 to be expended on 12 high-level projects.

According to the report, Dr Jonathan approved the request on February 16, 2015 and directed the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Allison-Madueke, to release the funds.  Several weeks later, the NIA received the full amount in cash from the Central Bank.  The paper trail was minimal, given the nature of the project.

Eleven months later, in January 2016, the report continued, the NIA filed progress reports on the projects and a detailed breakdown of its expenses in a letter to NSA Monguno.

Thereafter, Premium Times continued, a three-man panel from the National Security Adviser went to inspect the projects.  In its February 29, 2016 report, the team expressed its satisfaction with the way the $289 million operation was being implemented.

Some ten weeks later, on May 5, 2016. Monguno visited NIA’s Headquarters for the first time since he assumed office in July 2015 and, according to Premium Times, wrote in the Visitors’ Book:

“On the occasion of my maiden visit to the NIA since assumption of official duties as NSA, I am extremely delighted by the warm reception and hospitality shown to me by H.E. Ambassador Ayo Oke, DG, NIA, the quality of works in progress is notably breathtaking but very inspiring also.

“All the facilities being constructed have demonstrated that the NIA is far ahead of its sister agencies in terms of foresight and dealing with 21st Century intelligence issues.

“It is my fervent prayer that the NIA achieve all the goals it has set for itself so that all other institutions of government, particularly the intelligence community, will bring about the desired change for this great country,” Mr. Monguno wrote in the NIA visitors’ book on May 5, 2016.

Two weeks later, on May 17, 2016, the NSA informed the NIA that President Buhari had been briefed about the ongoing projects and that the president had expressed his gratitude to the NIA personnel, the paper reported.

Roughly a year later, the EFCC in a sensational operation recovered $43,449,947, £27,800 and N23,218,000 from Flat 7B at Osborne Towers, the project’s “safe house.”  Oke was suspended from office and dismissed subsequently by President Buhari, following the unpublished report of a panel headed by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo (SAN) and comprising Monguno and the Federal Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar  Malami (SAN).

Its remit:  “To establish the circumstances in which the NIA came into possession of the funds, how and by whose or which authority the funds were made available to the NIA, and to establish whether or not there has been a breach of the law or security procedure in obtaining custody and use of the funds.

The Osborne Towers haul was forfeited to the Federal Government, on the orders of the Federal High Court, Lagos.

Based on the panel’s recommendation,  Ambassador Oke was in October 2017 dismissed from service and was scheduled to face criminal trial sometime in 2019, according to a statement from the Vice President, most likely in secret court, because of the sensitive nature of the matter.

In January 2019, however, Oke and his wife jetted out of Lagos to a European destination, in circumstances that carried not the slightest indication that they were fleeing from justice; to the contrary, more like senior officials in good standing embarking on a foreign trip and being accorded all the courtesies their exalted station warranted.

In his final days in power, Buhari commissioned the National Centre for Terrorism and Counter-terrorism, the nucleus of which Oke had built to high acclaim with the funds he obtained from the Central Bank.  Shortly after he took office, President Bola Tinubu also visited and commended the facility.

The matter rested there until last week when the Lagos High Court struck out, at the instance of the EFCC, the case the agency had filed against Oke.  The EFCC said the case could not be prosecuted for reasons of national security.

When did they come to that realization?

But how, at any rate, did matter cross over into the realm of criminal investigation and putative prosecution?  How did a project that had reportedly earned high praise from the National Security Adviser turn into a national security scandal with no redeeming grace less than a year later?

Was the NIA dissembling all along?  Was the Office of the National Security Adviser also dissembling? Was the National Security Adviser merely being collegial in its effusive report? 

Was Oke a victim of intra-agency rivalry?  Other agencies in the security establishment reportedly received funds for special projects to advance their missions as well, but could not  report the kind of progress Oke had made.

Was Oke a victim of inter-agency rivalry?  Was he being made a fall guy?

Was a crime even committed in the first place?

For now, the matter has been brought to a closure of sorts.  But the dark insinuations that have caused Ambassador Oke and his family such a huge loss of esteem among his peers and in the larger society have not been formally withdrawn.   Until that is done, last week’s official retreat is but cold comfort to him and his family.

For months, as the security situation worsened and hardships deepened across the country, the attentive audience in Nigeria urged President Muhammadu Buhari repeatedly to speak up, to engage, and to lead.

Amidst the turmoil, Buhari appeared unmoved.  The pleas turned into a clamour; still, he carried on as if he was reconciled to the situation as the new normal. Those who claim the ability to decode his “body language” said they saw resignation stamped all over his deportment and comportment.  They said he was so overwhelmed that he must be wishing he could speed up time and end his tenure well ahead of schedule.

The more firmly grounded in the attentive audience were diffident at best. What would he say then that he had not said at one forum or another, and what difference had it made?  How would another broadcast, the text of which was in all probability composed by bureaucrats and securocrats in the soulless language that is their trademark and likely to be rendered in like manner to a national audience alleviate their grinding misery?

In June 2021, as the nation celebrated Democracy Day, Buhari finally chose to engage.  He did so in a manner that confounded those who thought he had given up, and those who thought he had nothing new to say. They expected a talking head surrounded by the artefacts of office to read, perfunctorily, a text put together by persons who play a tangential role at best in the scheme of things.

He chose the more engaging format of not one, but two back-to-back interviews with media professionals from the Nigerian Television Authority and ARISE Television.

If his outing was not exactly a command performance, it was certainly not the foul-up many were expecting.  He held his own; he didn’t let his interlocutors back him into a corner; he was not in the least conciliatory.

He defended his most controversial public service appointments, saying they were based solely on merit and competence, with nary a taint of nepotism or parochialism.

Thousands of farmers may have been bankrupted by herders who have turned farmlands into killing and grazing fields; entire villages may have been sacked by marauding herders asserting a fundamental right to tend their herds anywhere they pleased.

Buhari’s answer to this mayhem is a law enacted by the Northern Nigeria Government in the 1960s establishing grazing routes for cattle herds.  The law applied only to that region, and expired with the Land Use Act, if not with that territory itself.  Was that law from that bygone era now to be nationalized?

The interviews presented Buhari with an opportunity to refine or modify his views on a wide range of important national issues.  Instead, he dug in, doubled down, without nuance and without any concession to those who hold different views, and even more crucially with no empathy for those who had been driven to the edge of ruin by the cattle herders who carried on as if they had a licence, his licence, to wage a campaign of terror and impunity against farming communities.

Buhari’s contempt for the national policy dialogue, especially as it concerns the National Question, would come to the fore a few days later, during the launch, in Zaria, of the Kudirat Abiola Sabon Gari Peace Foundation.

He declared, per Alhaji Mohammed Shehu, executive secretary of the Revenue Mobilization, Allocation and Fiscal Commission, that advocates of restructuring and secession were “naïve and mischievously dangerous.”  He told those calling for a national platform to discuss the crises roiling the country that he had no time for any “obscure conference.”

It was disingenuous indeed to conflate restructuring with secessionism.  It is worse.  The entire speech, it is necessary to state, was an abuse of forum, and a gratuitous insult to the memory of Kudirat Abiola, who was slain in broad daylight by agents of the Federal Government while she was running an errand for pro-democracy elements campaigning for the validation of the June 12, 1993, presidential election won by her husband, MKO Abiola.

To disparage the cause for which she gave her life, at a forum established in her honour, is worse than unconscionable.

In the face of withering criticism, some of it redolent of the contempt with which he had denounced those calling for national restructuring, Buhari backed off somewhat, saying he would sign into law any Bill duly passed by the National Assembly to that effect.

That was not a concession, but a dodge, and a transparent one at that.

When they insisted that only the National Assembly could change or amend the Constitution, Buhari and his cohorts unwittingly dropped all pretences.  The Constitution they are invoking is a disputed and contested document.  Its integrity is dubious at best.  It has not served Nigerians well.  It was designed by a small group that represented the military authorities of that era and the entrenched interests of the part of the country that is their power base, and then foisted on the nation with the fraudulent prefatory clause, “We the People.”

To make that document the basis of going forward or even remaining on the same spot is to put the entire nation and the political process in a straightjacket.  The amendments Buhari signed into law at the end of his tenure do not constitute a significant departure from the present arrangement.  They merely tinker around the edges

Building on the mistakes of the drafters of the 1979 Constitution who thought that what the Second Republic needed was a strong Centre, and on decades of the garrison rule of the military, the authors of the 1999 Constitution replaced the Federal Principle on which the country was founded with one grounded in uniformity, with every constituent unit marching at the same pace and to the same tune.

Under the 1963 Constitution, each of the three regions, later four, had its own constitution and institutions that reflected its needs, priorities and aspirations.  On issues delegated to the regions, the region’s constitution was the final authority unless and only to the extent that it was inconsistent with the Constitution of Nigeria.

A new constitution will have to return to that arrangement.

All through his political career, President Bola Tinubu has been an apostle of  a return to “true federalism.”  It was an article of faith in his campaign manifesto. Given the formidable challenges facing his administration, it might seem that restructuring can wait.  It is not something that can be accomplished overnight. 

But the atmosphere for serious reform has never been more propitious.  Tinubu and the Tenth National Assembly must exploit it to the fullest.

In a reconfigured Nigeria, each of the federating units will determine the balance of power between the Executive Branch and the Legislative Branch.  It may opt for a weak executive and a strong legislature or, vice versa, a strong executive and a weak legislature. 

Each state will determine how long governors can hold office, and whether legislators serve full-time or part-time.  It will fix their compensation, taking into account its financial resources.  Only those who are prepared to serve under the stipulated terms and conditions will offer themselves for public office.  Their goal must be to serve, not to get rich through public service. 

Each state will determine how many local governments it requires for effective delivery of services at that level, and the pay and conditions of service.

Each state will establish and equip its own police force.  Those who object to this arrangement on the ground that state police will be used to persecute political opponents have a point, but are federal police not being used to a considerable extent for that purpose?  What makes federal abuse more acceptable than state abuse?

It should be enough to enact and enforce laws against abuse of police powers at all levels.

Powers not expressly delegated to the Federal Government will be vested in the states.

Who needs a Senate that gulps scarce resources but adds little value to legislation and governance?  A Senate that serves as a cushy retirement home for careerists and grants them immunity from prosecution for well-documented misdeeds?

The choice before Nigeria is not whether Nigeria will restructure, but when.  Unless it restructures, it will go the way of former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union.  Each day that passes without an advance toward restructuring can only hasten that eventuality.