The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • Only in Nigeria

    Only in Nigeria

    It had been a long day.

    The Lady of the Rock had just emerged from the Situation Room where officials had been summoned to brief her on the latest intelligence from Rivers State and the struggle for survival of its beleaguered governor, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi.

    Earlier, senior representatives from the security and intelligence services had given her a detailed briefing, a battle plan actually, on her latest project: a national rally in Abuja to “sensitise” Nigerian women to the Federal Government’s epochal achievements in the areas of peace and women empowerment.

    She was about to settle down to a late afternoon snack of fresh-baked cassava bread and steaming fish pepper soup fortified with orisirisi when the AfDB’s searing report on the Nigerian economy bobbed up on the large television screen in the room that serves as her private study.

    “A-f-D-B.” She called out the letters slowly and deliberately, with more than a hint of disdain. “Wetin’ be dat one again?”

    “African Dèvèlopement Bank,” Your Excellency, one of six personal assistants waiting on her volunteered with a deep curtsey.

    “Dis world don spoil o, I swear. Yeye people. Wetin’ dem know about dèvèlopement?”

    Her Excellency had every right to be miffed. A month had scarcely passed since she was presented with the International Telecommunication Union’s Online Child Protection Award, in Geneva, Switzerland. Now, the ITU is one of world’s oldest international organisations, going back to 1869.

    That award recognising Nigeria’s leadership role in protecting children – the leaders of tomorrow — from the snares of cyberspace where anything goes was fundamentally an award honouring Nigeria’s commitment to development in the finest sense of the term.

    And yet, the so-called AfDB, an ordinary regional body funded in large part by Nigeria, has the temerity to issue an adverse report on the Nigerian economy and even contradict facts and figures that the responsible officials have painstakingly complied and dutifully checked?

    What, indeed, is the world coming to?

    Does the official who signed that contumacious report not know that Her Excellency could by a mere clearing of the throat get him deported, regardless of his diplomatic status? Or get the AfDB expelled from these shores? Or, for that matter, cause Nigeria to end its membership in the organisation and the financial support that constitutes such a large chunk of its operating funds?

    But on this day, she was exceedingly agreeable.

    The briefing on preparations for the National Rally for Peace and Women Empowerment, conducted by top officials from the National Security Agency and the armed services, had gone very well. The logistics had been worked out to the minutest detail. Nothing was being left to chance. All those who had been ranting that there were no clues at the top and no vision would be put to shame big-time.

    The rally, it has to be said at the outset, was a triumph of planning, organisation, and execution. Abuja is like a basket; it leaks at every point. Yet, the rally took even long-time residents of the town by surprise. They had no idea it was coming. Neither did Boko Haram.

    Withal, it must be accounted an astonishing feat that tens of thousands f women from all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory were outfitted, flown or bused to Abuja and housed in suitable lodgings without disruption to air travel and inter-state road transportation, without straining the city’s resources, and without attracting undue attention from the usual interlopers.

    And when it was staged last Thursday, the rally was quite a spectacle. Abuja had never seen anything like that. As a matter of fact, no city in Nigeria has ever seen anything like it. The recent week-long siege on Port Harcourt did not even come close. Someone who follows such matters closely tells me that we would have to go back to Romania, in the time of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, to find a modern precedent.

    Thisday’s terse, summative headline captured it best: “Residents Groan as First Lady’s Rally Shuts down Abuja.” The city finally got a taste of what the Lady of the Rock had worked up in Lagos, Makurdi, Lokoja and Port Harcourt, to name just some of the cities she has favoured with a visitation.

    All approaches to the venue, Eagle Square, were blocked to vehicular traffic. Hundreds of residents heading to the adjacent Federal Secretariat to resume work were reduced to sulking in impotent rage in their cars, immobilised, according to one account, by “stern-looking and gun-toting” men who had descended on the venue before dawn.

    Hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of empowered women clad in dresses bearing a portrait of President Goodluck Jonathan in black on a yellow background marched in close military formation to express gratitude to the man who had changed their fortunes, not forgetting the woman – I take that back: the Lady — behind him.

    Women in the armed services were not left out. Decked out in their official uniforms, women soldiers and police officers imparted to the march past the military precision their civilian sisters could not muster. You could see gratitude for their empowerment and a deep yearning for peace written not only on their faces but across their well-starched uniforms.

    So as not to be left out of the great occasion, women security operatives shed, at least in part, their accustomed anonymity. They wore tight black masks that covered just about the entire face except their eyes, nostrils, and mouths. In itself, that spectacle bespoke awesome power. It is frightening to think of what it would convey when the operatives are empowered all over again.

    Easily the most awesome demonstration of power on that day of power, however, was taking place in the skies above the parade ground, where a squadron of fighter jets streaked overhead, with orders to interdict, neutralise, or destroy any would-be saboteurs. Boko Haram finally got the message. It could pre-empt the National Day parade, but it cannot mess with the First Lady’s Rally for Peace and Empowerment.

    Meanwhile, on the ground, The First Lady looked on serenely from a covered stand and beamed with benevolent satisfaction as the empowered women in their tens of thousands marched past. First ladies from several African countries invited to the rally watched in awe and envy.

    I am told that a debate is now raging in the usual circles as to whether the terms “First Lady” and “Firstladyism” adequately depict the current Nigerian reality, and whether it would not be much more helpful to replace them, respectively, with “Maximum First Lady” and “Extreme Firstladyism.”

    The debate makes sense, especially after it was made clear the other day that the Office of the President is inseparable from the Office of the First Lady. Or do I have it backwards, with the Office of First Lady being inseparable from the Office of the President?

    In whatever case, the word from that corner is: You ain’t seen nothing yet.

     

  • Salami: An epic injustice

    Salami: An epic injustice

    When the National Judicial Council recommended in May 2012 after a detailed inquiry that the suspended president of the Court of Appeal, Justice Ayo Isa Salami, be reinstated, not a few of those who had followed the matter closely felt that the Council was offering President Goodluck Jonathan a decent way to end one of the ugliest episodes in Nigeria’s judicial history.

    That the recommendation bore the imprint of two of the nation’s most eminent jurists who stand at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum made it all the more resonant.

    If the liberal retired associate justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Kayode Eso, since deceased, and the conservative senior attorney and former Minister of Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation, Chief Richard Akinjide, could sign off on the document, along with the overwhelming majority, it would seem that the Council had decided to take politics out of the matter and had considered it purely on its legal merit.

    The Council, I thought, had thus placed in Dr Jonathan’s hands a powerful weapon to rein in the hawks in the PDP who will settle for nothing less than Justice Salami’s scalp because his Court stripped them of their stolen gubernatorial trophies in Osun and Ekiti and restored the people’s mandate to those who had earned it at the polls.

    I was hoping that Dr Jonathan would seize the opportunity to play statesman rather than party chieftain. And when he was reported to be “studying” the document, I thought he was trying to find a way of appeasing the hawks, aforementioned.

    Dr Jonathan had something else in mind. His strategy, it is now clear, was to run down the clock on Justice Salami, calculating that the books would be closed on the matter once the jurist reaches the mandatory retirement age of 70 years.

    And so, two years after being consigned to judicial purgatory, Justice Salami, according to competent sources, has served notice of retirement, effective October 15, victim of an epic injustice that Dr Jonathan could and indeed should have ended.

    Justice Salami’s ordeal began, as I once recalled in this space, when he presided over the sitting of the Court of Appeal that voided the purported election of the PDP candidate, Engineer Segun Oni in the 2007 Ekiti gubernatorial election and declared Dr Kayode Fayemi of the ACN winner.

    The election was marred by fraud on a staggering scale. In a court-ordered partial re-run to ascertain the true voice of the people, the PDP, the election umpire INEC, Maurice Iwu presiding, and the police executed a more brazen heist that a 3-2 majority of the Election Petitions Tribunal nevertheless consecrated with transparent sophistry.

    The Court of Appeal reversed, and Justice Salami became a marked man.

    Five weeks later, the Salami Court, Justice Clara Ogunbiyi presiding, vacated the stolen mandate under which yet another PDP candidate, Prince Olagunsoye Oyinlola, had governed Osun for three years and seven months — or seven years and seven months if one believes, as one now positively must — that Oyinlola and the PDP never won the 2003 election, on the basis of which he had served a four-year term.

    As in Ekiti, the Osun poll was vitiated by massive rigging and violence. The ACN candidate, Engineer Rauf Aregbesola, headed to the Elections Petition Tribunal for review and redress. Obtaining none, he took his case to a superior body, which held that the verdict of the court below amounted to a miscarriage of justice and ordered that the petition be heard de novo.

    The new tribunal rejected Aregbesola’s petition in a “unanimous” judgment signed by four of the five judges, and the text of which was festooned with alterations and interpolations that called the integrity of the process into question.

    In finding for Aregbesola, Justice Ogunbiyi wrote for a unanimous Appeal Court, that the Tribunal was “lackadaisical” in its handling of the case, that it dismissed vital evidence as “mere allegations”; that it set at nought compelling forensic evidence; that it wantonly misrepresented evidence of key witnesses; in sum, that the Tribunal’s conduct was “a travesty, and a mockery” of the judicial process.

    That verdict sealed Justice Salami’s doom. He would have to be taken out of the Court of Appeal, the terminus for all election petitions except those arising from the election of President.

    First they offered to promote him to associate justice of the Supreme Court. He demurred.

    Several years earlier, when there was a vacancy, he had declined to apply for such a position.

    Then, they accused him, first in whispers and subsequently in paid newspaper advertisements, of all manner of misconduct, including consorting with attorneys of parties to the case he was handling. Leading the charge was Senator (as he then was) Iyiola Omisore who, despite his apparent conversion to an apostle of probity and propriety, nevertheless remains a principal suspect in the murder of the former Federal Minister of Justice and Attorney-General, Chief Bola Ige, leading the charge.

    Then there was talk of giving him a “soft landing” if only he would just quit.

    Why would they contemplate, much less make such offers to a judge they claim has been tainted irredeemably? Why would they reward him with a promotion to the Supreme Court? Why offer him a “soft landing”? Why not make a public example of him?

    If you have the facts on your side, if you are serious about cleansing the judiciary, if you are truly desirous of prosecuting a Transformation Agenda in which fighting corruption is a core element, why would you pass up such a great opportunity to nail him?

    But Justice Salami’s saga was never about law. It was all along about politics, politics in its rawest form.

    A pending judgment in the disputed gubernatorial election result in Sokoto before the Salami Court would provide the final pretext for caging Justice Salami and ultimately terminating his career. The judgment could overturn many a political applecart, and the authorities were taking no chances.

    According to Justice Salami, the sitting chief justice of Nigeria, Justice Aloysius Katsina-Alu, requested that the judgment be withheld, for political reasons. He cited Justice Dahiru Musdapher, of the Supreme Court, as a witness to this encounter.

    Justice Katsina-Alu said he had merely informed Justice Salami that the judgment had been leaked, and that it might be wise to put off issuing it.

    If the judgment had indeed leaked, that was not unusual. Only last month, judgment in a major case before the Supreme Court leaked well ahead of delivery, and no member of the Court was blamed for it.

    Justice Musdapher whom Justice Salami had cited as witness would only say with consummate diplomatic tact that he could not recall the occasion. Not categorically that the encounter never happened; merely that he had no recollection of it.

    For all practical purposes, that was the end of Justice Salami’s career. Those determined to teach him a lesson wove Justice Musdapher’s diplomatic answer into a charge of perjury, with chief justice Katsina-Alu as accuser and prosecutor and witness and judge while in office and even after he retired.

    Not even the National Judicial Council could save Justice Salami from their vengeful wrath.

    He leaves the scene bruised and battered, and not entirely on his own terms. But his head is unbowed. He refused to submit to blackmail and blandishment. While they hurled every weapon in their arsenal of dirty tricks at him, he sought vindication through the law.

    Something tells me that history will remember him more kindly than those who, when presented with a chance to end an epic injustice, chose to perpetuate it.

     

    Re:  Allah-De

    A  retired career ambassador has commented as follows on my tribute in this space (July 31, 2013) (to Alade “Allah-De” Odunewu, the departed veteran newspaperman and revered columnist:

    “I could understand your good intention to “speak no ill of the dead.” But you should not mislead your readers by creating the impression that the veteran was utterly apolitical as a top Editor of the highly regarded Daily Times in the 60s. He certainly wasn’t!

    “The day after the Western Region election was massively rigged by Chief Akintola, & Co, the Daily Times under Allah De screamed with a headline in an unprecedented Yoruba language headline, “DEMO BORI!” — a clear exultant declaration by an ‘apolitical’ editor.

    “I hope you will be characteristically courageous to publish this contribution.”

     

     

     

     

  • ‘The spirit of Zaria’

    ‘The spirit of Zaria’

    General TY Danjuma, former Chief of Army Staff, former Minister of Defence, and most recently chair of Dr Goodluck Jonathan’s Presidential Advisory Council, lived up to his reputation for blunt talk this past June when he was turbaned Jarmai Zazzau, in Zaria.

    In Hausa, the title, conferred by the Emir, Alhaji Shehu Idris, translates into “The Brave One”.

    For Danjuma, it was a second homecoming.

    Several months earlier, he had his first homecoming when he was conferred with an honorary doctorate by Ahmadu Bello University, the successor institution to the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, Zaria, where he had studied for his ‘A’ levels before opting to join the army instead of pursuing a degree in history.

    On that occasion, he donated N2 billion to the university’s Endowment Fund, probably the largest single donation ever made by a Nigerian to an academic institution in Nigeria.

    Almost every person of consequence in the North was in attendance at the second homecoming, the installation, which was to have culminated in a durbar. But Danjuma had demurred, citing the prevailing security concerns and the misery he saw all around him.

    Instead, he parlayed the occasion into a platform for one of the most forthright speeches in recent times on the state of the nation. The bluntness was vintage Danjuma.

    Nigerian society and economy were in tatters, due among other factors to leadership failure, he said. The masses of the people, he went on, were “chained down in dehumanising and grinding poverty” while the nation continued to maintain “a few islands of false prosperity in a turbulent ocean of penury and squalor.”

    Peace and harmony were unattainable in such a setting, he warned.

    He told his fellow Northern elders that they were talking too much and doing too little. They needed to think more, pray more, plan more, work harder, relate better, and talk less, because battles were better fought and won through wisdom and strategy than through “inflammable pronouncements and political tantrums.”

    More poignantly, he warned that, by failing to adequately educate their young men and women, they were handicapping them in the competition for opportunities in a globalised world where knowledge itself had become the prime resource.

    General Danjuma told them they had failed to rise to that level of patriotic statesmanship where they could deploy their wisdom and experience to give the country a clear sense of purpose and direction. “When elders become decadent, the youth are bound to become delinquent.”

    I personally cannot recall an occasion during which such an assemblage of persons of great consequence were treated to such blunt, forthright talk.

    Yet, what ran through the speech was not self-righteousness nor condemnation, nor yet resignation, but a challenge, a summons to collective action to help pull a failing nation back from the brink.

    “I still believe that Nigeria can be reawakened and rebuilt to achieve greatness,” he said. “If we renew our minds and reconcile with one another, if we coordinate our determined efforts, we can make northern Nigeria self-reliant and self-sufficient, while enhancing the unity and prosperity of all Nigeria, but first we must be at peace.”

    The part that moved me most was where Danjuma called on his fellow Northerners and Nigerians in general to try to recapture “the spirit of Zaria.”

    I know something of that spirit.

    I had had my secondary school education in St Paul’s Secondary School (now Kufena College), in Wusasa, Zaria from 1958 through 1962. Some four decades before then, Wusasa had been the center of the Anglican Church’s missionary activity in the far North. It was home to St Bartholomew’s School, of which General Yakubu Gowon, the late Professor Ishaya Audu, Danjuma himself and a host of distinguished Northerners were products.

    St Bartholomew’s Church, where General Yakubu Gowon’s father, Pa Yohanna, served as a catechist, is reputed to be the oldest church in that part of Nigeria, dates back to 1929.The first ordained priest in Northern Nigeria, the Rev Henry Miller, father of the ace musician, Bala Miller, came from Zaria and lived in the walled city.

    By the way, it was from the younger Miller, lanky and lithe, visiting from swinging Lagos, that I first saw a demonstration of how to do the Twist, in Zaria, in 1962, in the home of Daniel Gowon, an official at St Luke’s Hospital, Wusasa, reputedly the first missionary hospital north of the Niger.

    St Paul’ s roll included students from all parts of Nigeria, with surnames like Abdulkadir, Abui, Adagba, Adebayo, Achimugu, Ahmed, Akaas, Akeju, Aken’Ova, Alausa, Alheri, Anyaegbu, Babatunde, Bature, Beckley, Carew, Coker, Dandaura, Dauji, Donli, Efobi, Egunyomi, Ekong, Fajana, Fakai, Gana, George, Gbadero, Gowon, Hassan, Halim, Ibitoye, Ibrahim, Ikwue, Igweonu, Jebak, Jiya, Kitchener, Kyari, Kogbe, Legbo, Mabadeje, Mbaeru, Mayuku, Mosugu, Nwakalo, Nnaji, Nunu, Odiwo, Okoye, Oloruntoba, Olusegun, Ohiomokhare, Obakponovwe, Olumodeji, Runsewe, Shiawoya, Soyebi, Spencer, Sule, Taidi, Uchegbu, Thomas, Udoh, Vincent, Wey, Yisa, Yusuf, and Zakari.

    Muslim students were excused from Christian worship.

    Some two miles or so away, between Wusasa and Tudun Wada, lay the famous Government (now Barewa) College. Right within the city walls lay the Provincial Secondary School. Zaria was also home to the Nigerian Military School.

    All four institutions competed in athletics, soccer, hockey and cricket with keen rivalry and good sportsmanship.

    Further down the road from Barewa was the School of Pharmacy. Farther still, in Kongo, across from Tudun Wada, was the Institute of Administration, where civil servants of all cadres were groomed.

    On the other side of St Paul’s, across from Kufena Rock, in Samaru, lay the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, later Ahmadu Bello University, that awarded University of London degrees in engineering and diplomas of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

    Also in Samaru was the School of Agriculture, with a pan-Nigerian student body, and St Peter’s College, for the training of primary school teachers, later relocated to Kaduna. St Enda’s College, a teacher-training school set up by the Catholic Church, Advanced Teachers College, and the Nigerian Civil Aviation Training Centre would come later.

    Tudun Wada was the home of the North Regional Literature Agency (NORLA), which promoted literacy in English and indigenous languages and nurtured it with supporting reading material. It was also home to Gaskiya Corporation, publishers of The Nigerian Citizen, now defunct, and Gaskiya Tafi Kwabo, probably the oldest indigenous-language in newspaper in Nigeria in continuous publication, and by far the most influential.

    Gakiya Corporation was in turn home to Abubakar Imam, the legendary editor and literary scholar, the subject of Haroun Adamu’s fascinating doctoral thesis for Ahmadu Bello University, and home also to the famous columnist and political journalist Bisi Onabanjo (Aiyekooto) during a stint as editor of The Citizen.

    Down south, in what used to be called southern Zaria, missionary activity was just as strong, and as unconstrained. The Sudan Interior Mission, the Sudan United Mission, the Catholic Church and Evangelical Church of West Africa (ECWA) ran schools that received grant-in-aid from the Regional Government in Kaduna for the education and training of young men and women.

    I must not forget the only manufacturing plant in town, the cigarettes factory of the Nigerian Tobacco Company which provided direct and indirect employment to a host of residents, and the bustling railway station, a staging post for passenger and freight transportation

    Expatriates in the educational and the commercial establishments commingled with residents from all over Nigeria – persons of many tongues and creeds — lived together in peace and harmony and mutual acceptance, dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and shared ideals.

    That conflation was what Danjuma, with a touch of poetry, called “the spirit of Zaria.”

    Most if not all of those institutions and establishments that made Zaria a beacon are still there in one form or another, but the spirit that once animated them is long gone.

    To recapture that spirit, as Danjuma enjoined his Northern brethren and Nigerians in general, is going to be a formidable task. But therein lies the path to true nationhood.

     

  • Allah-De: A model, and a monument

    Allah-De: A model, and a monument

    How time flies!

    It seems only a year or two ago – three at most — that a good many of Alade “Allah De” Odunewu’s contemporaries in his years at Kakawa and a host of his admirers gathered to honour him at ceremonies marking his 80th birthday.

    As befitted the occasion, reminiscences of the Man of the Day filled the air – his essential decency, his quiet dignity, his sardonic wit, his mastery of the art of satire, his unwavering professionalism, and the great mentoring skills he brought to bear on the grooming of a generation of Nigerian newspapermen and women.

    I found myself then thinking about Odunewu and two of his younger contemporaries at Kakawa — Peter Enahoro, who entered Nigerian journalism as “George Sharp” and is much better known as “Peter Pan,” and Sam Amuka who began his journalistic career as “Offbeat Sam,” and morphed later into “Sad Sam.” Though their Kakawa overlapped, each exercised editorial suzerainty at different times over the mighty journalism empire that the late Babatunde Jose built.

    Of the three, Odunewu was the most self-effacing.

    The boyishly handsome face of Enahoro, Odunewu’s star predecessor at the Daily Times adorned his column “Life with Peter Pan.” His bohemian lifestyle perfused it. Amuka signed his column with a sketch of his jaunty, hirsute self wearing a floppy hat and blowing a trumpet from the wrong end, and he lived up to that iconoclastic billing.

    Odunewu permitted only an outline sketch of his face to appear on the column, simply called Allah De. It showed him in a thoughtful, Byronic pose, wearing what looked like a French suit, and a skullcap.

    This depiction, it now seems in retrospect, was his way of signaling that though the “Allah De” column would inevitably be a projection of Alade Odunewu the columnist, it was not going to be extension of his person.

    That, after all, was the tradition at Fleet Street, then the mecca of journalism, a tradition in which he had been schooled at the Regent Street Polytechnic, in London, where he won the highest accolade bestowed on students from the Commonwealth.

    From the first column he wrote for the Daily Times after crossing over from the Allied Newspapers group where he had risen through the ranks to the position of editor-in-chief, you knew you were in the hands of a different person – different in temperament, in style, and in his concerns.

    One of the defining attributes of professionalism, sociologists tell us, is the capacity to separate fact from feeling. On this score, Odunewu must be rated the consummate professional.

    He dissected the issues of the day clinically, based on what he judged to be their merits. You suspected that he had to have some affiliations, if only by virtue of his being human. But you could never guess just what those affiliations consisted in. He kept them discreetly, and I should add, decently, to himself.

    The closest he came to volunteering something about himself was during one of the religious upheavals that have now become endemic in Nigeria, when he revealed that his wife was a Catholic. His Hadj title gave away his identity as a devout Muslim, but you could not guess it from his writing.

    It is not for nothing that Nnamdi Azikiwe, one of the finest newspapermen to emerge from these parts, canonised Odunewu as the dean of Nigerian satirical writing. Satire was the stuff of his work. Master of the well-placed innuendo, and of what the British call “damnation by feint praise,” Odunewu deftly laid bare the follies and foibles of his era without wounding the vanities of the men and women of the moment.

    Enahoro took great pride in being “controversial” and “hard-hitting.” Odunewu was self-effacing even when delivering those gentle jabs, those pin-pricks that in the end proved just as effective, even if not as dramatic, as a sensational knockout.

    Those were my reminiscences when Alade Odunewu turned 80, in 2007.

    He died six days ago, aged 85.

    Not much can be added to the tributes that poured forth on that epochal milestone and have been cascading since he drew his last breath.

    Odunewu knew no retirement or semi-retirement for that matter. Long after he quit active newspapering, he was an influential presence wherever journalism was being discussed, contributing insights and suggesting strategy and tactics, and generally helping to raise its professional and ethical tone.

    He steered the Nigerian Press Council for about a decade, monitoring performance, investigating and adjudicating complaints, and providing magisterial guidance for future conduct. The Council had won only grudging acceptance from the media at its inception and, with a person of lesser specific gravity than Odunewu as chair, it would have been marked for failure.

    For the better part a decade, he presided over the Nigeria Media Merit Awards recognising excellence in various aspects of print and broadcast journalism.

    It is a mark of his commitment to the pursuit of journalistic excellence that he personally endowed one of the most prestigious prizes in the business, the Alade Odunewu Prize for Informed Commentary, administered by the premier industry journal, Lanre Idowu’s Media Review.

    Now was it an accident that when new titles entering the Nigerian newspaper market used his name and prestige as strong selling points. Thus it was with The Guardian at its launch in 1984, and much later, in 1999, with The Comet, now defunct, where managing director Lade “Ladbone” Bonuola proudly introduced him as “our leader.”

    Without question, he will be remembered as one of the greatest pillars of Nigerian journalism — pillar by force of personal example, by tireless exertion. In that respect, he was a model.

    He was also a monument – monument to an enduring commitment to the best practices in journalism, to “All The News That’s Fit to Print,” as the evocative motto of The New York Times has it.

    His public service also bore the stamp of distinction. As the Commissioner for Information and Tourism in Lagos State from 1973 through 1975, he helped nurture and consolidate the state’s communications infrastructure. His even temperament and innate sense of fairness and justice suited him especially for the post of Lagos State Public Complaints Commissioner, a remit he discharged with his accustomed distinction.

    As a member of the Federal Electoral Commission that midwifed Nigeria’s transition from military rule to republican democracy in 1979, he was a front-row witness in the manipulations, the opportunistic revisions and the desperate fudging that handed Shehu Shagari and the NPN victory at the first ballot during the presidential race. But you could never get him to discuss them even off the record.

    A man of the utmost discretion, he seemed to have resolved to take those secrets with him to the grave. That may explain, at least in part, why he never wrote his memoirs when he was so abundantly endowed for the task.

    In more than four decades at the front ranks of journalism and public service in a country where the next major scandal is just one news bulletin away, Alade Odunewu served and thrived without being tainted even by a whiff of impropriety.

    There is no greater tribute.

     

    Portions of this article first appeared in my December 11, 2007, column for this newspaper, titled “The Kakawa Triumvirate”.

     

  • In America: The Trayvon Martin verdict

    In America: The Trayvon Martin verdict

    As I write these lines, protests are being staged in more than 100 cities against the discharge and acquittal by a Florida court of George Zimmerman, the neighbourhood vigilante who confronted an unarmed African American teenager, Trayvon Martin, against advice from the police, and then shot him dead in the fight that ensued.

    Martin was on a visit, with his father, to a gated community in Sanford, central Florida. He had gone to a store to buy some snacks, and was on his way back at dusk when Zimmerman, a mixed-race Hispanic, spotted him and immediately called the police to report that a suspicious person was in the neighbourhood.

    The police, it is necessary to re-state, had asked him not to go after the person. But Zimmerman did.

    A fight broke out. As Zimmerman’s bloodied head showed, he took a bad beating. According to his testimony, which Martin was not around to contest – nor any eyewitness for that matter — Martin had knocked him to the ground, banged his head on the concrete floor repeatedly, and was reaching for the gun Zimmerman was wearing in his holster with intent to kill him. Zimmerman reached the gun first, and shot Martin in self defence.

    It took 44 days and a national uproar for the police to arrest and question Zimmerman about the killing. The police chief said that, under the circumstances, Zimmerman had committed no crime. He had merely stood his ground.

    Bowing to pressure from a public that judged his remarks insensitive and casuistic, the police chief resigned. He now stands vindicated, Florida-style.

    A six-person jury, all women five of them white and the other ‘Hispanic,’ returned the verdict that, under Florida law, Zimmerman had reason to fear for his life and acted justifiably.

    The verdict has ignited a debate about an issue that the prosecution and the defence skirted throughout the trial – race, the “colour line” as W.E.B Du Bois, the pre-eminent African American scholar of the last century called it.

    Du Bois, who was no romantic, believed that the colour line would be the problem of his century. It is the problem of the 21st century as well, and not just in America. And it may well continue even into the next century. The noted socio-economist and Nobelist, Gunnar Myrdal in his classic study of race in the United States characterised being black in America as a caste condition – a condition from which it is impossible to escape.

    You can shed your class or your religion or your tastes or your habits or your accent or your diction, but you cannot shed your skin. Some persons of colour do crash the racial barrier —they call it “passing” — but they are the exceptions, and the consequences are not always pleasant.

    This race-based caste system is not as deeply ingrained, as rigidly ascriptive as in India, for example. But it operates all the time, in ways subtle and unsubtle. And race itself is a constant subtext.

    The Trayvon Martin verdict may not be about race principally. But race definitely played a part in the tragedy that claimed the young man’s life. If he had been a young white man, it is unlikely his presence in the community – not loitering, not wandering aimlessly but heading to the house of his father’s girlfriend – would have attracted Zimmerman’s attention to the point that he would call the police and go after him despite instructions to the contrary.

    There was a time when bells rang out loud in department stores to put security guards on notice at the approach of African-Americans who were generally regarded as potential shoplifters. Now the surveillance is more subtle, even if no less discomfiting. You are asked whether you need help, and given the kind of suffocating attention other patrons rarely get.

    The case of Dr Ruth Simmons illustrates just how far that practice continues. Dr Simmons, eminent literary scholar and the first black president of an Ivy League institution, Brown University, in Rhode Island — it was at her instance, by the way, that our late and much-lamented compatriot, the literary titan Chinua Achebe, relocated from Bard College, New York — one day went shopping, or just looking through stuff at one of New York ’s very famous department stores.

    As she headed toward the exit, a security guard stopped her and asked to inspect her purse. She obliged. She had bought nothing, and her purse contained nothing incriminating. But the guard was not satisfied.

    The guard took her to a private room, and there gave her a most intrusive and degrading frisking. Still he found nothing. For him, it was all in a day’s work, until the store learned the next day the identity of Dr Simmons from her attorney. She graciously accepted their apologies and made no issue of the matter. That was racial profiling at work.

    At American diners, you no longer find the kind of creeping discrimination on plaques in hotels in the former racist enclaves of Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola and South Africa that proclaim “Right of admission reserved.” But it is never far from the surface.

    Whenever I dine out, I survey the scene, looking out for the good tables where one can stretch one’s feet and generally compress, and watch where the waiter will seat me. If he or she seats me near the toilet or the radiator or facing a blank wall when better-appointed tables are available, I demand to be seated elsewhere and make mental a note of the encounter.

    Next, I pay close attention to how I am being waited on vis-à-vis other patrons. If they just slap the plate on the table and move on but fuss on diners of a different colour, it confirms my worst fears. When I finish eating, I clean my mouth with the napkin, take the check to the counter and pay the exact amount on it, leaving nothing for the waiter.

    The waiter in turn rejoices that he or she didn’t waste precious energy fussing on an African American who, true to type, does not reward hospitality. If the service is good and the waiter pleasant, I give the customary hospitality of between 15 and 20 percent. But I doubt whether that changes the perception of the African American as a tightwad. The waiter might just conclude that the individual is different. And the cycle perpetuates itself.

    Going about life in this manner can sometimes subvert the moral law that dwells in each of us. An expatriate Nigerian friend was walking from the parking lot to his office one wintry morning when the young white woman ahead of him, a secretary, lost her balance and fell.

    “I hope you are all right,” he said to her and walked on.

    “How very ungallant,” I remonstrated. “That’s un-African.”

    “Siddon there, Johnny-just-come,” he shot back. “If I had pulled her up and she later reported that I was fondling her under the pretext of helping her, nobody would give me the benefit of the doubt.”

    The fellow, I should add, always dresses formally no matter the time of day, in the belief that the police are less likely to mess with an African American attired like a professional.

    There you have it, the insidious and sometimes morally corrupting legacy of racism.

    No society is perfect, and America has come a long way indeed. Who among us ever believed that in his or her lifetime America would elect and re-elect a black man president? Those marching in “Justice for Trayvon” rallies across America belong in all colours and races. I have experienced great generosity and kindness and courtesy from most of those I have met here.

    But I also know many who have suffered racial indignities.

    It used to be said at least in recent times that sport and entertainment transcend race. But some of the most bigoted things I have ever read relate to two of the most outstanding African American athletes of this age – Tiger Woods and Venus Williams. And, oh, you should hear or read some of the things they say or write about Michelle Obama.

    Also, who can forget how European soccer fans throw bananas at players of African descent on the pitch as if they were starving monkeys and taunt them to distraction by recreating the noises of chimpanzees?

    The Trayvon Martin verdict may not principally centre on race. But you cannot isolate race from it any more than you can isolate it from the facts of contemporary life in America and Europe. The colour line, alas, is also the problem of the 21st century.

    You can believe that the law took its mysterious course in the Zimmerman trial, and yet show some empathy for two parents who lost their son. But it is hard to see Trayvon Martin as anything else but a victim.

     

  • IBB: A tormented mind at work

    IBB: A tormented mind at work

    Former military president General Ibrahim Babangida’s greatest fear, I gather from some persons who see him from time to time, is that despite his many accomplishments, he will be defined by a single event: the annulment of the June 12, 1993, presidential election.

    That fear would seem to explain why, over the past five years, he has been labouring desperately to re-write the very public record of the crucial events of the time, and to latch on to anything from that era that could soften what is sure to be history’s harsh judgment on him.

    Irony of ironies, he has seized the very election he annulled with such brazen casuistry as his path to redemption.

    He was back peddling that line the other day, in an interview with ThisDay, on the 20th anniversary of that election.

    “Well, it has come and gone,” he said of the poll. “Whatever I feel about it, at least, Nigerians agreed on one thing, that we, the administration, succeeded in holding one of the best and freest elections ever held in this country.”

    Then, this:

    “I can say I feel proud. We may not have achieved the objective but at least, we conducted an election that was not rigged, an election that was not marred by violence, an election that is still being referred to in the country.”

    In case he has forgotten, here, in his own words, is what he said in his June 24, 1993, national broadcast justifying the annulment:

    “ . . . Even before the presidential election, and indeed at the party conventions, we had full knowledge of the bad signals pertaining to the enormous breach of the rules and regulations of democratic elections.

    “But because we were determined to keep faith with the deadline of 27th August, 1993 for the return to civil rule, we overlooked the reported breaches. Unfortunately, these breaches continued into the presidential election of June 12, 1993, on an even greater proportion.

    “There were allegations of irregularities and other acts of bad conduct leveled against the presidential candidates but NEC went ahead and cleared them. There were proofs as well as documented evidence of widespread use of money during the party primaries as well as the presidential election. These were the same bad conduct for which the party presidential primaries of 1992 were cancelled.

    “Evidence available to government put the total amount of money spent by the presidential candidates at over two billion, one hundred million naira (N2.1 billion). The use of money was again the major source of undermining the electoral process.

    “Both these allegations and evidence were known to the National Defence and Security Council before the holding of the June 12, 1993 election. The National Defence and Security Council overlooked these areas of problems in its determination to fulfill the promise to hand over to an elected president on due date.

    “Apart from the tremendous negative use of money during the party primaries and presidential election, there were moral issues which were also overlooked by the Defence and National Security Council. There were cases of documented and confirmed conflict of interest between the government and both presidential candidates which would compromise their positions and responsibilities were they to become president.”

    Then, the coup de grace:

    “It is true that the presidential election was generally seen to be free, fair and peaceful. However, there was in fact a huge array of electoral malpractices virtually in all the states of the federation before the actual voting began. There were authenticated reports of the electoral malpractices against party agents, officials of the National Electoral Commission and also some members of the electorate.

    “If all of these were clear violations of the electoral law, there were proofs of manipulations through offer and acceptance of money and other forms of inducement against officials of the National Electoral Commission and members of the electorate.

    “There were also evidence of conflict in the process of authentication and clearance of credentials of the presidential candidates. Indeed, up to the last few hours of the election, we continued, in our earnest steadfastness with our transition deadline, to overlook vital facts.”

    But Babangida was not done yet.

    “For example, following the Council’s deliberation which followed the court injunction suspending the election, majority of members of the National Defence and Security Council supported postponement of the election by one week,” he continued. “This was to allow NEC enough time to reach all the voters, especially in the rural areas, about the postponement.

    “But persuaded by NEC that it was capable of relaying the information to the entire electorate within the few hours left before the election, the Council, unfortunately, dropped the idea of shifting the voting day. Now, we know better.

    “The conduct of the election, the behaviour of the candidates and post-election responses continued to elicit signals which the nation can only ignore at its peril. It is against the foregoing background that the administration became highly concerned when these political conflicts and breaches were carried to the court.

    “It must be acknowledged that the performance of the judiciary on this occasion was less than satisfactory. The judiciary has been the bastion of the hopes and liberties of our citizens.

    “Therefore, when it became clear that the courts had become intimidated and subjected to the manipulation of the political process, and vested interests, then the entire political system was in clear dangers. This administration could not continue to watch the various high courts carry on their long drawn out processes and contradictory decisions while the nation slides into chaos.

    “It was under this circumstance that the National Defence and Security Council decided that it is in the supreme interest of law and order, political stability and peace that the presidential election be annulled. As an administration, we have had special interest and concern not only for the immediate needs of our society, but also in laying the foundation for generations to come.

    “To continue action on the basis of the June 12, 1993 election, and to proclaim and swear in a president who encouraged a campaign of divide and rule among our ethnic groups would have been detrimental to the survival of the Third Republic.. . .”

    My apologies, reader, for drawing so copiously on Babangida’s broadcast formally announcing and justifying the election annulment. A paraphrase would not have done justice to it, I fear. Nor would it have shown so starkly the irreconcilable differences between Babangida’s 1993 evisceration of the poll in question and his desperate bid to canonize himself for conducting what he now advertises as a model and a signal achievement, if not his crowning glory.

    The ThisDay interview raises anew the question: When did Babangida know that the election he denounced so forcefully was indeed “one of the best and freest elections ever held in this country?”

    When did it occur to him that it was “an election that was not rigged, an election that was not marred by violence?”

    If he came to that judgment before his broadcast and yet annulled the election, history will charge him with perfidy and grand perjury. If he came to it after the broadcast but chose not to correct the record, history will hold him accountable for the tens of thousands who lost life, limb, livelihood and estate in the struggle for the validation of the election.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Again, capital punishment

    Again, capital punishment

    Encore un moment, monsieur le bourreau.

    Just a moment, executioner; just a small moment.

    Madame du Barry, at the guillotine, 1793

    Nigerians woke up two weeks ago to learn that four death-row prisoners in Benin City, who were convicted some 15 years ago but had not exhausted the appeal process, had been hanged

    The foursome had been convicted 15 years ago, and had not yet exhausted the appeal process

    The executions drew for the most part strong condemnation at home and abroad, and rekindled the on-again, off-again national debate on the propriety of capital punishment. They also raised searching questions about the ideological orientation of Edo State Governor, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole.

    It was troubling enough that this stalwart of the progressive community had signed off on the grisly proceedings in respect of two of the convicts ;it was unseemly, his colleagues-now-turned critics charged, that he defended his action so vigorously in the face of the outrage it generated.

    The condemned prisoners had committed crimes of the foulest kind; they had subjected their innocent victims to unspeakable brutality and then killed them in the most horrid manner conceivable. They had been tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death by courts of competent jurisdiction that afforded them at every stage the due process of law they had so wantonly and callously denied their victims.And what is more, the authorities said, the executions were carried out in accordance with the laws of Nigeria.

    In short, they fully deserved what they got.

    It would be unfeeling to dismiss this line of reasoning out of hand. Lives had been taken, careers and prospects and relationships had been savagely abridged. These heinous crimes, it would seem to follow, should be visited with appropriate retribution.

    But that is at bottom the Mosaic law of an eye for an eye. To achieve the grisly equivalence enjoined by that code, the state would have to do to torturers and murderers and rapists precisely what they did to their victims. In practice, no state does that. So, retributive justice cannot be a goal of the modern state, which is enjoined by municipal and international statutes to act humanely and eschew cruel laws.

    Nor does it help matters to insist that an act is justified or even proper just because it is sanctioned by law. That is the doctrine of rule by law, the doctrine the apartheid authorities in South Africa, and before them, Nazi Germany, invoked to justify their barbarous rule. It has little in common with the rule of law, which is premised on just laws justly administered.

    It is the contention of this column that capital punishment is inherently unjust; that it is inequitable, and that it serves no useful purpose

    Most homicides do not result from cold, brutal calculation. They result, criminologists say, from confusion, anger, stress and panic — in short, from a loss of capacity for rational judgment. The death penalty merely compounds the tragedy that flows from such lapses of judgment, to which even the most sober persons are susceptible.

    Even those murders planned to the most chilling detail and carried out with the utmost deliberation, psychiatrists maintain, result basically from an abnormal condition that may be biological or environmental or both.

    So that, when society executes a capital offender, it is at once condemning the offender for conduct that may have been biologically determined, and absolving itself of any responsibility in creating or sustaining the environmental forces that shaped the offender

    Capital punishment is not the blunt instrument of justice it is claimed to be. It is stacked against the poor and minorities and members of the underclass who, lacking the resources to hire competent attorneys and forensic experts, are more likely than better-endowed persons to be convicted. To the poor and disconnected, “equality before the law” is a myth.

    The support for capital punishment rests principally on the claim that it serves as a deterrent. Knowing that they stand to pay with their own lives if found guilty of murder, only those possessed by a death wish would kill. Without such a deterrent, it is claimed, the homicide rate would escalate.

    If this claim holds true, the homicide rates in the major industrial countries that have abolished capital punishment should have risen sharply. So should the volume of capital crimes in those states that do not practise capital punishment, or employ it sparingly. But this has not been the case.

    To take an American example, the homicide rate in Pennsylvania has remained roughly 6 in 100,000, despite the fact that Pennsylvania has carried out no execution since 1976. On the other hand, from 1977 to 1995, the homicide rate in Texas has stood at 13.3 per 100,000. Nor has the fervor with which Texas administered the death penalty under Gov. George W. Bush and his successor, Dick Perry, led to a significant decline in the homicide rate.

    The death penalty, then, is no deterrent. It deters only those who have been executed, for they will never kill again. But the same end can be secured with far less damage to the social psyche by keeping convicted killers in jail for life, without the possibility of parole.

    Perhaps the strongest argument against capital punishment is its finality. Once carried out, it cannot be reversed even if it turns out, as happens not infrequently, that the executed person was innocent, or that guilt was not established beyond a reasonable doubt.

    About a decade ago, it came to light that 13 of 18 persons on death row in Illinois had been convicted wrongly. This moved the state’s authorities to place a moratorium on executions. That moratorium remains in place to this day.

    No less instructive is the conclusion of a massive study of capital convictions and appeals in the United States between 1975 and 1995, conducted by James Liebman, of Columbia University Law School. The study covered 5,500 judicial decisions.

    In 68 percent of 4,576 cases they reviewed, the appellate courts found “serious, reversible error.” This means that roughly 7 of every 10 convictions did not pass close judicial scrutiny. “American capital sentences,” Liebman concluded, “are so persistently and systematically fraught with error that it seriously undermines their reliability.”

    Liebman’s study and the discoveries in Illinois that some innocent persons had been languishing on death row ought to move advocates of the death penalty to recognise, at the very least, that even the most scrupulous judicial proceeding may be tainted by errors resulting perhaps not so much from the perversity of officials as from human fallibility.

    The possibility that capital punishment may be administered in error — that possibility alone, however remote — ought to weigh decisively on the minds of supporters of capital punishment.

    Those who kill must be held to account. Life imprisonment, without the possibility of parole, sufficiently serves that purpose. When a society puts them to death by way of retribution, it sinks to their level of pathology instead of rising splendidly above it, as a growing number of countries have been doing.

    Of the 54 countries in Africa, 18 have abolished capital punishment, according to data supplied by the United Nations, among them South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, Gabon, and, in Nigeria’s neighbourhood, Togo, Senegal, Benin, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Côte d’Ivoire, and São Tomé and Principe.

    Among those countries that still have capital punishment on their statute books, none has carried out an execution for 10 years.

    It is a dent on Nigeria’s international image and its claim to continental leadership that it is not numbered among the countries that have abolished capital punishment outright or placed a moratorium on it.

    Capital punishment is inconsistent with the spirit of the Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of the Nigerian constitution, and with the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights, to which Nigeria is a signatory.

    It should have no place in the Constitution now under review.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • In America: A sad day for civil rights

    In America: A sad day for civil rights

    Last week, as the civil rights community and African Americans in particular awaited the ruling of the United States Supreme Court in Shelby County vHolder, the mind called up an incident that had occurred some 19 years earlier, in 1994.

    I was on assignment in Washington, D.C., and had gone to the sprawling Barnes & Noble Bookstore downtown during a break, more to feed my eyes than to purchase all those seminal books I wished I could add to my collection, based on their rave reviews and the reputation of their authors.

    As I was leafing through one volume, I noticed a middle-aged man stop as he approached me from the other end of the aisle, take a close look at me, and then move one. When he went through this procedure a second time, and then a third, I could hardly contain my discomfort.

    On his fourth round, he stopped just a few feet from me, and taking my full measure with his eyes, said, in a voice that was non-threatening but inquiring: “Sir, would you be Justice Clarence Thomas?”

    I still had a fairly decent head of hair and a moustache sprinkled with grey, was roughly of the same age, and might indeed be thought to bear some resemblance to the contemporary associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, the second black person to hold that distinction.

    My discomfort grew into panic.

    The last person you want to be mistaken for in progressive circles or in the African American community is Justice Clarence Thomas. In his three years on the Court, he had more than earned the denunciation that greeted his nomination and the vilification that dogged his confirmation hearings. He was the polar opposite of the great legal icon he was named to replace, Justice Thurgood Marshall, whom The New York Times described on his retirement as “a model and a monument.”

    If word went round that Thomas was in the neighbourhood, there was no knowing what might follow. Any trace of panic on my part could make matters worse.

    So, I summoned my voice at its most untroubled, looked my interlocutor in eye and said, “No, sir. I am not Justice Thomas. I do not know him. I have never met him. I have never . . .”

    Apparently sensing my deep unease, he cut in.

    “You are not Justice Thomas, I can tell,” he said. “You have an accent.”

    Was I mightily relieved!

    But the feeling was short-lived. As if determined to prolong my agony, he said, almost off-handedly, “But you sure look like him.”

    As soon as he turned the corner, I dropped the book, ran out of the store and jumped into the first available taxicab.

    To return to Shelby County v Holder, the case that called forth the foregoing recollections: the case originated in a petition by a county in Alabama, a state with an odious record of racial discrimination, urging the courts to strike down a law that bars nine states from changing their voting laws in ways that could disenfranchise residents without the approval of the United States Department of Justice.

    The law, revalidated by the Court’sunanimous decision in 2006, was enacted as part of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965, which made it possible for generations of African Americans to register to vote for the first time, without having to pass stultifying literacy tests and without having to show that they owned property.

    The tests were so brazenly manipulated that very few even among educated and propertied African Americans could pass them, leading a frustrated the Rev. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., to complain that, at the rate at which it was being carried out, voter registration of the black residents of the state of Alabama would take about 150 years.

    Some five decades later, the right to vote continues to be circumscribed, especially in states controlled by the Republicans, in ways that on their face seem to apply to the general population but are at bottom designed to suppress the votes of African Americans and Latinos who tend to support the Democrats.

    It is notorious, for example, that African Americans generally flock to voting centres to cast early ballots after Sunday worship. To prevent that, some states outlawed Sunday voting. In a variation of that theme, they also cut early voting so drastically that, as happened last November, voters in many cities had to wait in line eight hours to cast their ballots, a steep price for persons at the lower end of the economic scale.

    In yet another variation of that theme, the Republican majority in many states redrew electoral districts in such a way as to dilute the black vote and make the election of African Americans or a Democrat virtually impossible. So that, today, although Republican candidates polled at least a million votes fewer than Democratic candidates, they hold a commanding majority in the U. S. House of Representatives.

    It took spirited legal challenge mounted by disaffected citizens, with the backing of the Justice Department, to block the enforcement of the more brazen of these voter suppression laws during the 2012 U.S. General Elections.

    Scarcely five months later, a county in Alabama – a state in which an election was cancelled recently because an African American was favoured to win despite all the mago mago – was asking the Supreme Court to void the federal law mandating Department of Justice to vet changes of that kind to the state electoral laws.

    Last week, a month to the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington and its highpoint, Dr King’shistoric “I Have a Dream Speech,” the Court did just that, effectively cutting the heart out of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, in a 5-4 ruling that seems to have been scripted from the oral arguments it had heard in March 2013.

    Chief Justice John Roberts, for the Court, said as he had said during the oral arguments, that the United States had changed to the point that the law no longer reflected current racial realities in the United Sates.

    His four fellow conservatives on the Court, including Clarence Thomas, duly concurred.

    Separately, Thomas, who as is his habit had sat impressively through the 79 minutes the oral arguments lasted and had asked no question nor demanded any clarification from attorneys to the parties,entered it as his opinion that voiding Section 4 of the Act requiring the nine states to obtain federal clearance before changing their voting laws did not go far enough.

    He said he would also have struck down Section 5, which seeks to prevent the 9 states from circumventing the prohibitions of Section 4. He went on to note gleefully that, with Section 4 voided, Section 5 had become otiose.

    In a powerful dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reached back to a speech by – who else? – Dr King about how the “moral arc of justice,” though long, “always bends justice” to admonish the Court’s majority for the great harm it had just done to civil rights and justice. Its decision, she said, was an egregious error and a disservice to Dr King’s legacy and the nation’scommit-ment to justice.

    The Court’s ruling is only the latest in a long line of illiberal judicial opinions that have curtailed class actions, made it harder to sue manufacturers of dangerous drugs, employees accused or discrimination in the work place, and, in the words of the commentator Frank Rich, continued to do “everything to permit the abridgment of the rights of minorities even as it strengthens the rights of corporations.”

    This is the company Clarence Thomas keeps and revels in.

    Planting Clarence Thomas in the Court was a masterstroke by President George W. Bush and the Conservative Establishment to slow down, if not reverse, the march of civil rights and indeed the progressive agenda in America. And it has worked beyond their most optimistic calculations.

    The first President Bush probably spoke a greater truth than he realised or intended when he declared that Thomas, who had no judicial experience whatsoever, was “the best man for the job.” Their job.

    In the African American community, there were dozens far more qualified than Thomas on every score. But none could be counted upon like Thomas then – and even now — to be the scourge to his own people.

    The U.S. Supreme Court could not have gutted perhaps the single most important piece of legislation from the civil rights era without Clarence Thomas’s collaboration. His abstention would have saved it, at least for now.

    Next time anyone in the African American community tells me that I look like Clarence Thomas, Iwill call 9-1-1.

     

    •Portions of this comment first appeared in my March 5, 2013, column, titled “In the Shadow of Rosa Parks.”

     

  • Haba, Labaran!

    Haba, Labaran!

    Controversy has been its constant companion since the “National Good Governance Tour” was launched last September by the Minister of Information, Labaran Maku.

    “A lot of work has been done by this administration in the past two years which has not been adequately reported in the media. So, this tour will expose a lot of things for everyone to see,” Maku said.

    To correct this alleged failing of the media, Maku would lead a team to the states to explain what “the government” is doing or intends to do to better the lives of the people, and thus somehow “increase their participation in governance”

    Nigerians from all walks of life, using conventional and non-conventional media platforms, would have the opportunity of asking questions and expressing their views on the projects the team would be inspecting.

    By “the government,” Maku probably meant the Federal Government, since his ministerial brief does not include reviewing or passing judgment on projects undertaken by the states. It now seems in retrospect that he had used that term in a much broader context, and had thus unwittingly set the scene for the controversy that has been dogging the NGGT.

    I will dwell on that and other issues presently.

    The NGGT train – or more appropriately, the NGGT executive jet, since Maku has never deigned to travel by the trains, the rehabilitation of which he has been trumpeting as a transcendental feat – has since touched down in almost a dozen state capitals, with a retinue of political officials and news reporters and information officers, in what has increasingly seemed like a touring circus.

    The team “inspects” some on-going and completed projects in and near the state capital, Maku lustfully sings praises of Federal Government for real achievements and mere intentions, usually the latter. He goes into a rhapsody about contracts that have been awarded, giant rice mills that will be installed, tens of thousands of jobs that will be generated by the cassava plantations, based on feasibility studies the government has recently commissioned, and of course the breathtaking transformation the country has witnessed in just two years, with much more to come.

    He says some kind words for the state governor, especially if the governor belongs to the ruling PDP or is not perceived by Abuja as unsympathetic to Jonathan’s Project 2015, and takes off in the executive jet for his next stop.

    How this perfunctory visitation, conducted amidst a great deal of dining and wining, leads to or enhances “good governance” or “carries the people along” or makes them participants in governance as envisaged in the NGTT’s prospectus is rarely addressed.

    Maku claims that the Nigerian Governors Forum – presumably before Jonah Jang, with blessings from on high, reconstructed that body, superfluity and all, in his own image, endorsed the scheme.

    Yet, Edo State, perhaps not unmindful of the way Maku has been running his road show and suspicious of the entire scheme, declined to accord him a welcome. Governor Adams Oshiomhole probably had more important things on his plate anyway than giving aid and comfort to a jamboree.

    Maku soldiered on, undaunted. The outcome was a fiasco.

    Perhaps misled by federal officials and local PDP stalwarts, Maku appropriated to the Federal Government projects financed and executed by the state government, moving a spokesperson for the state government to charge him with “lying” and “advertising falsehood.”

    In this matter, I would rather cast my lot with a commentator who knows the area quite well, Usman Abudah, of The Guardian (June 20, 2013). He described Maku’s visit to Edo State as an “eye opener” to the Federal Government’s “periodic wasteful exercise through which it dazzles the citizenry,” adding that “its claims to performance usually reveal non-performance.”

    Abudah pooh-poohed Maku’s claim in Benin that the Federal Government had fixed the perennially dysfunctional Benin-Ore-Sagamu highway to the point that anyone so inclined can actually spread out a mat on it and enter into blissful sleep. It is almost as if what the people need is a veritable invitation to suicide rather than a first-class highway.

    The Okene-Lokoja-Abuja expressway Maku claimed the Federal Government had rehabilitated had witnessed only “skeletal works” along a small stretch, Abudah wrote.

    So, there you have it.

    Charging Maku with “lying” and “advertising falsehood” as the spokesperson for the Edo State Government did is un-parliamentary, to be sure. But Maku himself is an improbable candidate for a prize in civil discourse, despite his exquisite tailoring and fine grooming.

    That much was evident in comments credited to him that he has to the best of my knowledge not disavowed on the pace of developments in Lagos State under the administration of Governor Babatunde Fashola (SAN) who, like his Edo State counterpart, had refused to have anything to do with the NGGT, insisting that the visitation would serve no useful purpose.

    Fashola, so went the comment, had “something to hide.”

    Hide from whom?

    This is the language of the colonial inspector from the metropole, and it does not square with any of the advertised objectives of the NGGT. It is downright condescending.

    But Maku’s spokesperson was merely warming up.

    He went on to say that Fashola was an idle governor with nothing on his plate except traffic management and environmental sanitation; the Federal Government was taking care of everything else, in its great benevolence.

    Haba, Labaran!

    You have to be practically unconscious to believe such twaddle.

    Is the Lagos light rail a federal project? Or Eko Atlantic City? Or the scores of sparkling new model schools in Lagos? Or the network of roads and bridges that compare favourably with the best anywhere? Or a raft of housing schemes in various stages of completion? Or the ambulance units positioned in strategic sections of Lagos to respond swiftly to emergencies? Or dozens of other innovative projects that make Abuja look like an unimaginative plodder by comparison?

    The NGGT is only the latest derogation in a long line of derogations of the federal principle. It was conceived in double misapprehension, the first being that the PDP-controlled Federal Government, by virtue of that fact, has the power to supervise and second-guess and perhaps even discipline state governors, whether elected on its platform or other party platforms.

    That is a throwback to the dark days of military rule. Then, the military head of state related to military governors in the states like officers on military posting, which they indeed were. The practice must stop. To continue it is to subvert not just federalism, but democracy itself.

    The second misapprehension stems from the belief or assumption that inadequate reporting on what the government has been doing or intends to do for the people is the problem. That is the theory of national development by propaganda writ small for impact.

    If government programmes and projects have significant impact on the lives of the people, that impact will be their best advertisement. Propaganda, however skillful, cannot be a substitute for impact.

    But these are not the only things wrong with the NGGT. The Ministry of Information has at its behest one of the largest communication networks in the world. Its portfolio includes, to cite just a few of its organs, the Nigeria Television Authority, the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria and its external broadcasting arm Voice of Nigeria, and the News Agency of Nigeria.

    Maku therefore indicts himself and his office when he charges the media with failing to report adequately on what the government is doing for the people.

    Finally, the NGGT’s execution is flagrantly partisan – reeking of bad faith, I am almost prepared to assert, judging from its misadventures in Edo and Lagos.

    It is a costly distraction that raises more questions about the Minister of Information’s credibility the more he claims for Abuja landmark achievements that only he and his team can see, or appropriates unto it the solid achievements of state governors who decline to be co-opted into a circus.

     

  • Bashir Tofa: What manner of man?

    Bashir Tofa: What manner of man?

    In formal terms, Bashir Tofa was one of the principal figures in the June 12, 1993, presidential election debacle. As candidate and standard-bearer of the National Republican Convention (NRC), one of the two officially recognised official political parties, he shared the spotlight with the candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Bashorun MKO Abiola.

    Few outside Kano and the business community knew much about Tofa until he was catapulted to head the NRC ticket by the not-so-hidden hands of the grand manipulator in Aso Rock and his proxies, as an element in their secret agenda. The intelligence at the time was that military president Ibrahim Babangida would seize on some gaps in Tofa’s résumé to void the election if, as per his calculation, Tofa won. And Tofa would not be in a position to cause a stir.

    Secret agenda or no secret agenda, foil or no foil, Tofa grew quickly into the role of presidential candidate, criss-crossing the country in a spirited campaign. One element of that campaign clings in my memory. It was a television commercial in which a man wearing an upturned collar and black suit led an energetic crowd whose attires reflected the nation’s ethnic diversity to chant “Tofa is the answer.” Billboards dotting the landscape carried the same message.

    Even more memorable was the televised debate between Tofa and Abiola, staged by the NTA and moderated by its senior programme executive, Dr Biodun Sotumbi. Oil pricing came up, naturally, in the wake of yet another threat to cut a phantom gasoline subsidy. Tofa, it turned out, did not even know the pump price of a gallon of petrol.

    There was something of a cad about him. But his performance was on the whole passable. Among major commentators, only MCK Ajuluchukwu thought Tofa had “won” the debate.

    For Nigerians weary of the bitterness and the stubborn refusal to accept defeat that had been prominent features of Nigerian politics, I suspect that the high point of the debate came at the very end. Abiola and Tofa shook hands and pledged to abide by the result of the election, no matter how it turned.

    This, then, was going to be a different election. The political transition programme, despite its manifest flaws, might yet inaugurate a new political era.

    It was not to be.

    Abiola won outright in 18 states, including Tofa’s home state, Kano. He also won more than one-fourth of the votes cast in all but two or three of the remaining 14 states.

    This was the most decisive victory in Nigeria’s history, in what local and foreign observers ranked among the cleanest they had witnessed anywhere and also, I fear, the fairest and freest my generation will ever know.

    The National Electoral Commission had named a chief returning officer, signalling that it was set to declare a winner.

    In keeping with Tofa’s pledge, his camp has assembled to put the finishing touches to a statement conceding defeat when, according to Dr Doyin Okape, NRC’s national publicity secretary, Tofa’s cell phone rang. Tofa responded in Hausa to the call, which he said was from “the Villa,” and then retreated to a private room where he and the caller continued their conversation, in Hausa.

    Emerging some 30 minutes later, Tofa was a changed man. Gone from his countenance was any trace of a willingness to concede, or even compromise. In its place, defiance, and grim determination.

    The concession was never made. Instead, calls for voiding the poll, for reasons ranging from the infantile to the spurious, poured forth from the NRC camp.

    Babangida gladly obliged.

    Abiola’s camp, propelled by the umbrella organisation NADECO, mounted a campaign of protest and resistance that shook Nigeria to its fragile roots.

    Tofa slunk into the obscurity from which he had been plucked. Never has a principal actor in an epic drama faded so quickly from the scene, unremarked and unremembered.

    Sometime in 1997, Tofa’s handlers inveigled or bribed some rogue elements in the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations into inviting Tofa to address that prestigious bastion of America’s foreign policy establishment.

    Compounding his fecklessness with mendacity, Tofa declared with a straight face that he, not Abiola, had won the election – a claim he had never made at home — and that he had accepted the annulment in the national interest

    Year after year, as those who hold that governance should be based on the consent of the people rather than the caprice of a cabal celebrated the June 12 anniversary, Tofa kept denouncing the occasion.

    He was at  it again last week.

    The brutal and thieving dictator, Sani Abacha, of frightful memory, had called the election a “watershed.” In a shameless and self-serving retreat with few parallels here or anywhere, the annuller himself, General Babangida, had called the election the best in Nigeria’s history and claimed the credit for organising it.

    Fifteen years after the election, its chief umpire, Humphrey Nwosu, freed finally from the oath of silence the annullers had worn him to, published the official results. Abiola had won, in the manner that election returns awaiting official certification had indicated.

    As if to secure his place in the hall of infamy even as other authors and enablers of the annulment were seeking desperately to extricate themselves from that gallery, Tofa declared, on the 20th anniversary of the historic election, that “June 12” is dead, that its celebration is a “fiction.”

    “I am not one of those people that celebrate fiction that is the more reason why I don’t like to be talking again on June 12 presidential election,” he told journalists in Kano.

    “Only those who don’t have anything to offer to this country to move forward can still be talking about June 12 presidential elections.

    “If you have learnt any lesson out of it, well; if you have not, keep quiet, let this country make progress. But for one to still be talking about something that occurred 20 years ago, is colossal waste of time.”

    This is the quality of mind of a man whom the manipulators of the transition program judged fit to be president, the man who had a statistical chance of being elected to that office but chose to connive in the annulment of the election.

    I stated earlier that there was something of the cad in Tofa.

    On June 12, 1993, he traipsed from one voting booth to another in his Kano constituency in a vain hope of casting his ballot. His name was not on any of the books. Apparently, he had not even bothered to register to vote.

    Down the ages, history will remember him, but only as a contemptible footnote to “June 12.”