The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • June 12 annulment: A calendar of infamy

    June 12 annulment: A calendar of infamy

    By the time Justice Bassey Ikpeme delivered her first pronouncement on the petition of the Association for Better Nigeria (ABN) on June 7, 1993, it was clear that the presidential election scheduled for the following Saturday, June 12, was headed for a debacle

    ABN, the shadowy but well-funded and highly-connected organisation that has in recent times emerged as a major vehicle for consummating military president Ibrahim Babangida’s hidden agenda, had gone to court to seek an injunction restraining the National Electoral Commission (NEC) from conducting the presidential election.

    Why?

    Because, as claimed by the wily and mercurial Arthur Nzeribe who never championed a cause without bringing it into disrepute, 25 million Nigerians do not want the election to hold. They want General Babangida to continue as president for four more years. The petition, Nzeribe claims, is backed by the signatures of those 25 million Nigerians.

    Justice Ikpeme, about whom little was known until that day, was impressed enough to order NEC Chairman Professor Humphrey Nwosu, Federal Attorney-General Clement Akpamgbo and President Babangida to appear before her the following Wednesday to show cause “why the election should not be stopped.” She reserves ruling till Thursday, June 10.

    That ruling, delivered in the dead of night, follows closely her pronouncement at the first hearing, her language is just as exorbitant, and her conduct just as heedless. The election must not hold, she rules, but NEC is free to ignore her order.

    For the next 16 hours or so, there is no clear indication that the election will hold. It is well past lunchtime on Friday, June 11, when NEC finally announces that the election will go on as scheduled, Justice Ikpeme and the ABN notwithstanding.

    The Federal Government’s affirmation that the election will hold comes indirectly, in response to a statement by the United States Information Service, in Lagos, to the effect that any postponement of the election would be “unacceptable to the U. S. Government.’’

    The elections hold on Saturday, June 12, as scheduled. Minor hitches are reported here and there, the type that can be expected even in the best-ordered poll. For the most part, NEC and everyone connected with the election gets high praise for a job superbly executed.

    By late Sunday, intimations of a grand sweep by the Muslim-Muslim ticket of Chief MKO Abiola and Babagana Kingibe, of the Social Democratic Party, are all over the place. By lunchtime on Monday, June 14, victory songs are in the air in the SDP. The NEC has authenticated the returns from 14 states, and returns from the remaining 16 states are being “collated.” It names a chief electoral officer, an indication that it is set to declare a winner. The National Republican Party (NRC) is putting the finishing touches to a statement conceding defeat and pledging to work with the SDP in the country’s best interest.

    By the next day, Tuesday, the NRC is singing a different tune, following a telephone call to its candidate, Bashir Tofa, from Aso Rock. The NRC, per Nduka Obaigbena, publisher of the defunct newsmagazine ThisWeek, who had made an unsuccessful run for the Senate from Delta State, the NRC charges that SDP candidate Chief Abiola had gone to vote on election day attired in a dress on which was embroidered a stallion, the party’s symbol, in breach of the electoral rules,.

    The penalty for such a breach, they hint darkly, is a huge fine or a two-year jail term, or both fine and imprisonment. They assert that the breach raises questions of “morality;” that the entire poll stood fatally tainted, and should therefore be voided.

    Meanwhile, NEC has stopped announcing results, while apparently continuing the “collating.” But the results from all except two of the 30 states are everywhere at home and abroad. For just N200, you could at Oshodi Bus Stop, in Lagos, purchase a set of documents detailing how Nigerians had voted ward by ward and precinct by precinct. They show unequivocally that Abiola has won a decisive sweep.

    Unencumbered by NEC’s order forbidding publication of “raw scores,” foreign correspondents covering the election had filed the results with their media back home. Even the national press has all but called the election. So, why all the fuss, especially when the results that had been authenticated tallied in virtually in every aspect with the figures earlier circulated in Nigeria and abroad?

    A clearer but more troubling picture emerges as the day progresses. Another high court in Abuja Federal Capital Territory, Justice Dahiru Saleh presiding, grants a petition by the ABN to stop further announcement of election returns. Attorney-General Akpamgbo orders NEC, first, to comply with this order, and second, to show cause why it should not be punished for discountenancing the order of Justice Ikpeme, aforementioned.

    The following day, Wednesday, June 16, the New Nigerian, wholly owned by the Federal Government, and the Daily Times, in which it holds controlling interest, come out with editorials expressing diametrically opposed views. The Daily Times hails the election results a “people’s triumph.” The New Nigerian denounces the entire poll and calls for its cancellation, even while proclaiming that it had been won by a “third party,” presumably the ABN.

    How so?

    Because, says the New Nigerian, the 25 million ABN members who did not vote outnumbered 2:1 the 13 million Nigerians who had voted.

    That day, NEC chairman Nwosu fails to address a scheduled press conference. Also missing action is NEC’s director of publicity, the voluble Tonnie Iredia. An assistant director, about whom little has been heard previously reads out a convoluted statement saying NEC would seek legal clarification of Justice Saleh’s clarification. It is being bruited that Nwosu has offered his resignation, to no avail.

    It comes to light the following day that Yakubu Abdul-Azeez, editor of the New Nigerian, has resigned over the editorial attributed to the paper and by implication to him. He is quoted as saying that he is quitting because he cannot continue to affix his imprint on a newspaper being used to pursue policies that can “lead to Nigeria’s disintegration.”

    Throughout all this, there has been no word from the Presidency, save a statement by Chief Press Secretary Onabule, to the effect that the Federal Government had in no way interfered with the election and that NEC had not complained of any difficulties.

    Everything stands still until Monday, June 21, when NEC rises from the stupor into which it had been lulled by the events of the previous week and files a petition before the Kaduna High Court against the ruling of Justice Ikpeme, a certified copy of which it has not been provided, and against the ruling of Justice Saleh. None of NEC’s officials is in circulation. Professor Nwosu is reported to be ill, with an undisclosed ailment. The appeal is scheduled to be heard two days later, on Wednesday.

    Just as NEC is filing its appeal, Justice Saleh who had barred NEC from announcing further results, swings back into action in Abuja and declares the presidential election of June 12 null and void and of no effect whatsoever, on the ground that it had been conducted in violation of a restraining order.

    The order under reference is Justice Ikpeme’s. She had issued it fully acknowledging that NEC was not obliged to heed it, since the court had no jurisdiction in the matter. Justice Saleh now says that since NEC had disregarded that order, the election is null and void.

    Two days later, on June 23, the Federal Government strikes a blow that leaves everyone practically breathless. It cancels the presidential election, suspends NEC, and repeals the law governing the final phase of the political transition programme that had been eight years in the making. By that singular move, it also terminates all court cases relating to the presidential election.

    The statement announcing these measures is not signed and not dated. Typed on plain paper, it was issued on behalf of the government by Nduka Irabor, press secretary to the Vice President, Admiral Augustus Aikhomu. The statement says the government has taken these sweeping measures to ensure that a judiciary that has been built on a sound and solid foundation is not “tarnished by the insatiable political desire of a few persons.”

    This stunning announcement comes a few hours before the National Defence and Security Council is scheduled to meet and deliberate on the crisis. Can it be that the Council had met earlier than scheduled, or is the announcement designed to present the Council with a fait accompli?

    The Council disperses only after a brief meeting, ostensibly for what Information Secretary Uche Chukwumerije calls “wider consultations.” It is to convene the next day.

    When it finally convenes, it members are reported to have taken far-reaching decisions on a new agenda that could include the appointment of a prime minister to serve along an unelected military president, formation of more political parties, and the un-banning of all those who had been kept in political purgatory during the transition. Field commanders, principal staff officers in military formations, and the police hierarchy, are to be briefed the next day, Friday, followed by a national broadcast by Babangida.

    Friday ends without the promised broadcast, which is now rescheduled for Saturday, June 26. But it does not take place at mid-day as the public has been led to believe, nor an hour after mid-day as announced in a revised schedule. It does not take place at 7 p.m. as rescheduled again.

    It takes place, finally, two hours later, at 9 p.m. Even more than the benumbing events of the previous 12 days, the content is beyond belief. It provides proof, were any still required, that the “hidden agenda” was not the invention of cynical commentators.

    The broadcast, a tissue of self-serving lies and fabrications and evasions and rationalizations, eviscerates the promise emblematized by June 12, that one nation might emerge at long last, from the plethora of nations inhabiting the Nigerian space, and it locks the country even more securely into a debacle.

    Its place is assured in Nigeria’s calendar of infamy. So also is the political and judicial debauchery of which it was the culmination.

     

  • Their ‘Democracy Day’

    Their ‘Democracy Day’

    It was entirely in character that the ruling PDP and its cohorts celebrated their “Democracy Day” in the penumbra of a brazen evisceration of a fundamental tenet of democracy that calls to mind the annulment, with the active collaboration of some of the very elements that now constitute its hierarchy, of the June 12, 1993, presidential election.

    They rejected the clear outcome of that election, just as they have now rejected the unambiguous outcome of an election for the chair of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum. The quisling they trotted out in 1993 as head of an Interim National Government they confected to supplant the democratic choice of the Nigerian electorate was again trotted out as one of the stalwarts of their democracy.

    So was the civilian president who for just a little more than four years presided over a government so inept and corrupt that the military that had handed power to him after 13 years in the saddle felt obliged to topple him.

    Their “Democracy Day” has as its foundation May 29 1999, the day a military that had exhausted itself and driven Nigeria to the edge of ruin handed over the reins to Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, based on a Constitution he had not seen and the content of which he did not know.

    It was a false foundation, and since then, Nigeria has been struggling just to muddle through with rare instances of mastery, and a penchant for celebrating mere intentions as if they were actual accomplishments.

    For the most part, President Goodluck Jonathan tried to keep that penchant in abeyance when he presented his Administration’s report card on the first two years of his four-year term and challenged his compatriots to issue their own report cards if they disagreed with the official assessment.

    The verdict?

    A solid pass on a wide range of metrics. And they reeled out all kinds of figures to back it up.

    For the past two years, the economy has been nothing if not superheated, growing at an average. 7 percent yearly. The macro-economic and micro-economic policy environment has been stable, as has the exchange rate. Non-oil exports have almost displaced oil as Nigeria’s chief source of foreign exchange. Inflation has been kept on a tight leash.

    A Sovereign Wealth Fund has been created to guarantee Nigeria a stream of revenue from investments. The commercial banks that were teetering on the edge just three years ago have been rescued and are now doing roaring business.

    The trains that vanished more than a decade ago are back on the rehabilitated tracks, ferrying passengers and freight on the Lagos-Kano line, with shuttle services between major cities on the route. The re-furbished Kaduna-Port Harcourt line is expected to commence operation soon.

    Work is to commence, finally, on rebuilding what used to be the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway but is now so cratered that long stretches of it might be mistaken for a moonscape. The East-West highway now has a better chance of being completed than ever. The nation’s inland waterways have been primed for resumed navigation.

    Power supply regrettably still falls short of expectation, but that will soon be a thing of the past when the power stations being built are completed.

    During the period under review, some 15 new public universities were established, and a good many of them are up and running. The favourable environment created by the Administration has also spawned several private universities, with more projected.

    Agriculture is set for a major boost, what with new arrangements for supplying fertilisers directly to farmers rather than to rent-seeking middlemen, setting up industrial-scale rice mills all over the country to process the bounteous harvest expected from improved seedlings provided by the government.

    And, yes, the war on official corruption is being waged earnestly and vigorously

    And so on and so forth.

    It is in the nature of this kind of report to be self-aggrandizing. Much in it belongs in the realm of aspiration. Some of the assertions fly in the face of the facts. The controversial pardon the President granted former Bayelsa Governor Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, who was convicted in Nigeria of corruption and money laundering after fleeing from British justice does not square up with the claim that official corruption is being battled with vigour.

    There is no denying, however that much in the report card qualifies as substantive achievement, for which Dr Jonathan and his Administration can justly claim credit.

    At the same time, the matter has to be put in the proper perspective

    The economy has been growing at a fast, almost dizzying speed. But who has been reaping the benefits? Certainly not employees whose wages have remained stagnant, or workers who go unpaid for months on end, or pensioners pining away in the forlorn hope of receiving their stipends. And most definitely not hundreds of thousands of thousands of qualified young men and women able and willing to work but unable to find work several years after taking their degrees and diplomas.

    The trains may be back on the tracks, but they are shabby and ponderously slow, with the so-called Lagos-Kano Express taking two full days and sometimes longer to chug its way through the 1,020 km (700 miles) route. That train may be preferred to no train at all, but in the age of the bullet train, it is not the kind of transportation any government should be advertising as a great achievement.

    In the First Republic, Prime Minister Abubakar Tawafa Balewa used to ride the train all the way from Lagos to Bauchi whenever he was on vacation. None of the government officials touting the return of the trains as a major achievement has boarded the train even for the short trip from Abuja to Kaduna. Not even the Minister of Transport.

    Information Minister Labaran Maku has been going round the country on a “good governance” tour to showcase the achievements of the Federal Government. At every stop, he cites the return of the trains as one of its transcendent achievements. But he hops from one top to the next in an executive jet.

    In a world of brute empiricism and economism, it is easy to lose sight of the question that really matters when the performance of any government is being assessed. That question is this: To what extent has public policy improved the human condition?

    Growth is not enough. It is a measure of the perversity of economic science that the economy can show phenomenal growth even as popular misery deepens. Growth has to be matched by development.

    According to the late British economist Dudley Seers, the questions to be asked about a country’s development are these:

    What has been happening to poverty?

    What has been happening to unemployment?

    What has been happening to inequality?

    “If all three have declined from high levels,” Seers wrote, “then beyond doubt this has been a period of development for the country concerned.”

    Conversely, Seers continued, “If one or two of these central problems have been growing worse, especially if all three have, it would be strange to call the result ‘development’ even if per capita income doubled.” (emphasis added.)

    This is the line of thinking that should concentrate Dr Jonathan’s mind and indeed the minds of all officials vested with political authority.

    At the start of each day, they should ask themselves: What can I do today to improve the human condition in Nigeria? And at the end of each day, they should ask themselves: What have I done today to improve the human condition in Nigeria?

     

  • Doing what they know how to do best

    Doing what they know how to do best

    At the end of a visit the other day with former President Olusegun Obasanjo in Ota, Ogun State, in continuation of meetings with leaders of the party across Nigeria to resolve a raft of internal issues, the chairman of the PDP’s Board of Trustees, Chief Tony Anenih, debunked suggestions that the PDP could lose the next general elections.

    ‘When the time comes,” he declared, “I will assure you we will do what we know how to do best.”

    The elections are not due until 2015, but the biggest vote-harvesting machine in Africa showed this past week that, despite the conflicts rocking it, doing what it knows how to do best, namely, turning winners into losers and losers into winners, is still its standard operational procedure, its trademark.

    And the fingerprints of the Arch Fixer himself, Tony Anenih, are stamped all over the deed.

    I am referring to last week’s election for the chair of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF), an extra-constitutional body that has grown influential to the point of making President Goodluck Jonathan panicky and insecure, despite the awesome powers of his office. As a consequence, he has had to invest his prestige, as well as enormous public resources, to ensure that the incumbent chair, Rivers State Governor Chibuike Amaechi, would not win reelection.

    Since it was bruited several months ago that Amaechi would serve as running mate to Jigawa State Governor Sule Lamido in the 2015 presidential race, with Obasanjo’s blessing, it was clear that Amaechi’s days as chair of the NGF were numbered, and that his relationship with President Jonathan, who has given every indication of entering the race except formally declaring, as well as his political future, were in grave jeopardy.

    Amaechi has been a marked man since then.

    The NGF election planned for February was rescheduled for May, apparently in the hope that, by then, the assets needed to defenestrate Amaechi would have been fully deployed. The contrived kerfuffle over his official plane, operations permit and all that, was part of the grand strategy.

    Meanwhile, the alleged waywardness of the NGF under Amaechi’s leadership, it has been said, was more than sufficient to make Aso Rock engineer the creation of a complaisant faction, the PDP Governors Forum, with Godswill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom as chair.

    As if to put Amaechi on notice that his number was well and truly up, Anenih, reportedly echoing the “oga” at the very top, complained at a meeting of state governors, federal legislators and state chairpersons of the PDP in Asaba, Delta State, that the NGF had become “a formidable group of power wielders seeking to control governments at all levels.”

    Translation: The NGF had become a subversive organisation.

    The body, he said, had been “hijacked by “opposition” Governors and was no longer promoting the interests of the PDP.”

    Just why governors elected on five different party platforms expressly for “providing a common platform for synergy, collaboration among interests” and serving as a lobby group to foster, promote and sustain democratic ethos, good governance in Nigeria, Africa and beyond” should promote the interests of the PDP, Anenih did not deign to explain.

    But thus was the stage set for last week’s NGF showdown election to put Amaechi in his place.

    In that dubious quest, Dr Jonathan and Anenih seem to have been worsted.

    Of the 35 governors present and voting, Amaechi won the backing of 19, according to the returning officer for the election and director-general of the NGF, Ashishana Okauru, who described the poll as fair and transparent.

    Plateau State Governor Jonah Jang, who had been dragooned into the race at the last minute when neither Jonathan’s favoured candidate, Katsina Governor Ibrahim Shema nor Bauchi Governor Isa Yuguda who also had his eye on the job would step down for the other, garnered 16 votes.

    In the normal run of things, that should have settled it. But nobody has ever accused the PDP of subscribing to normality. And so, no sooner had Amaechi finished delivering his acceptance speech than the PDP launched its desperate bid to turn Amaechi’s victory into defeat and Jang’s defeat onto victory.

    The election, they claimed, was “rigged.” An election with just 35 candidates rigged? Consider what could happen in 2015, when the stakes would be much higher. Shifting gears, they claimed that the ballot papers had not been unnumbered serially. But why didn’t they point this out before voting began? Amaechi should have stepped down so that a neutral person could conduct the poll. Again. Why was no objection raised at the outset?

    Were they severally and jointly anaesthetised?

    Leaving nothing to chance, a conclave of 18 governors hastily organised another poll and proclaimed Jang the winner and new chair of the NGF. There is nothing curious here: this in-your-face brazenness is the modus operandi of Africa’s biggest vote-snatching machine. They don’t do subtlety at Wadata Plaza.

    Even by Nigeria’s standard in matters political, Jang’s speech at a special service ahead of “Democracy Day” at the Faith-way Chapel Church in Jos, the Plateau State capital, seems rather exorbitant.

    His “emergence” as chairman of the NGF, he asserted without fear and without irony, was “the will of God” because he had gone to Abuja merely an as an elector, only to be chosen by his colleagues to lead the organisation.

    As if anticipating those who might question why the divine should be insinuated into a project that bears all the marks of the profane, he declaimed: “God is a democrat, does not support rigging but if you rig and succeed, that means God approves of it.”

    So, there you have it.

    Even with his “suspension” from the PDP for allegedly defying the “directive” of the Rivers State Executive Council – of which he is chairman, by the way – to reinstate the executive council of a local government he had dissolved, and with his declaration of unswerving loyalty to President Jonathan and the party and all its grandees, Amaechi must entertain no illusions that his travails are ended.

    Soon, they will charge him with engaging in “anti-party activities” and expel him.

    But in whatever guise or disguise it functions henceforth, the NGF will be yet another symbol, and a constant reminder, of all that is wrong with the formation that calls itself the biggest political party in Africa.

    I verily believe with his spokespersons that President Jonathan had absolutely nothing to do with these developments.

    After all, he was away in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, availing a sub-Committee of the Africa Union of his globally recognised expertise on infrastructure, a subject so dear to his heart, and in the development of which he has achieved such transformative results at home, that he passed up his turn to address the full Summit.

     

     

     

     

     

  • Passages in the fraternity

    Passages in the fraternity

    In the past six months, the fraternity of Nigerian journalists has lost four of its ablest, all of them of my generation.

    Not to the lucrative field of Public Relations or corporate communications, or to the political bureaucracy, with its delusions of power and influence, but to the cold, undiscriminating handsof death.

    I knew Ayo (Arena) Ositelu, one of the four, only through his writings on sport. Now, sportswriting, like sports casting, is probably the most cliché-ridden journalistic form. String a few stock phrases together; garnish it with some atmospherics; deliver the product with breathless excitement, and you were well on the way to a career in sports journalism.

    The resulting narrative was predictable. But it was rarely remarkable or memorable.

    Ositelu was different.

    Tennis was his passion. And whenever he reported a tennis match, he made you see the flow and ebb, the crosscutting currents of play. He made you know not just the player but the person behind the racquet. He made you feel the atmosphere. He transported you to the scene of action.

    And he did so in graceful, riveting and uncluttered prose, and in a context that gave the event full meaning. You knew you were in the hands of an expert guide and a craftsman who cared deeply about words, chose them with precision, and deployed them with telling effect.

    Someone once rebuked Ositelu for “wasting “such elegant writing on tennis, of all things.

    The fellow must have been weaned on the tradition of sports writing that I described earlier – the one rooted in stringing a few stock phrases together, throwing in some atmospherics, and delivering the package with breathless excitement.

    But there is a richer and nobler tradition — one that elevates sports writing to the status of serious literature, even great literature. Here I am thinking of the writings of AJ Liebling and Grantland Rice in the first half of the last century, and their American compatriot Red Smith, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the third Mohammed Ali – Joe Frazier fight, “The Thrilla in Manilla”.

    I am thinking of Frank Deford, the contemporary National Public Radio personality who has parlayed sports writing into an art form. I am thinking especially of Ernest Hemingway’s gripping writings on bull fighting

    On the other side of the Atlantic, I am thinking of Peter Wilson of The Mirror, called by avid sports fans “the world’s greatest sports writer, on account of his great mastery of that form, and High McIlvanney, the Scotsman who has written for a string of British publications with enchanting facility on soccer, boxing, and horse racing.

    On our own shores, intimations of that tradition of sports writing as literature perfused the work of Bonar Ekanem and Peter “PECOS” Osugo, and is stamped on the commentary of the unfailingly delightful Bisi Lawrence.

    Ayo Ositelu kept that tradition alive until he breathed his last.

    I knew Victor Ogundipe the way I knew Ositelu: through his reporting of the economy, particularly banking and corporate finance. Ogundipe pioneered that genre in Nigeria, along with two or three others. Before him, that kind of reporting was perfunctory at best.

    He wrote about the subject incisively and engagingly and transformed it to the substance of headlines and the frontpages. With his boyish good looks and an elegant wardrobe, he brought glamour and not a little excitement to the trade, at a time the Nigerian economy was caught in the throes of a Structural Adjustment Programme.

    Ogundipe’s kind of expertise was just what the burgeoning banking industry needed, and for a time, he was its articulate and personable public face.

    But he was soon caught up in the intrigues that governed banking and left on terms not entirely his own. His plans to return to financial journalism did not materialise, and he left Nigeria for the United States, where he lived until he died late last year.

    Although he left active journalism more than two decades ago, he was at his death remembered as a pioneer and an innovator. There is no greater tribute.

    Ashikiwe Adione-Egom I knew quite well. I went to work for The Guardian, on leave from the University of Lagos, shortly after he burst on the scene with a 10-part serial for that publication that he signed with the self-deprecating byline, “The Motor-Park Economist“.

    I would learn later that he had had his secondary education at King’s College, Lagos, where he and Guardian managing director Stanley Macebuh were classmates,had entered Cambridge to study archaeology and branched into economics and social anthropology, and that had once served as a financial adviser to the Central Bank of Tanzania.

    He had joined The African Guardian at its inception and served as its editor for several months while maintaining a regular column on the economy for The Guardian.

    There was always something of the tramp about Peter Alexander Egom, as he later chose to be known. The settled life – home, wife, family, personal possessions — was not for him. He preferred to live in hotels or hostels, with as little freight as possible, and with the freedom to move on at short notice to wherever the spirit led him.

    On leaving The Guardian, he went to found and edit the weekly Financial Post. When the publication collapsed, he became resident preacher at a church in Surulere, Lagos, where congregants fondly called him Pastor Luke. Later still, he went to serve as scholar-in residence at the Ibru Ecumenical Centre in Agbarha-Otor, in Delta State.

    For years thereafter, he lived in Abuja in a Catholic facility, courtesy of Archbishop (as he then was) Dr John Onaiyekan. It was then that he wrote his 2002 book, “Globalisation at the Crossroads.”

    The last time I heard of him, he was reportedly affiliated with the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, in some unspecified capacity.

    He cared a great deal about ideas and expounded them with great versatility. But he was no intellectual snob. He was one of the least pretentious scholars I ever met. The Oxbridge thing never got into his head.

    Whatever his circumstances, Egom never lost his engaging, sometimes ribald, sense of humour, and his capacity for friendship.

    And then, Pini Jason, real name Jason Onyegbado. One day I was reading his measured remonstrance of an official of a public agency who claimed he had been victimised for publishing an article criticising its chief executive, Dr Ngozi Okonjo, the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy no less.

    It was vintage Jason. Measured. Combative, without being pugnacious.

    Disagreeing, without being disagreeable. Illuminating, without being pedantic.

    During his brief stint in Rutam House, we used to meet at the editorial conferences of The African Guardian of which he was a correspondent and I was contributing editor. I found him enormously well informed.

    His Op-Ed pieces for The Guardian, and his reports for the London-based New African, and for the short-lived ThisWeek magazine were models of clear thinking and lucid writing. The same quality perfused his writing for Vanguard Newspapers, his last stop.

    Jason was as much at home in Lagos and Ibadan as he was in the Igbo country. He wore his Igbo heritage on his lapel but did not make you feel that you should be apologetic that you belong to a different ethnicity. He campaigned for the validation of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, arguing that if the winner MKO Abiola could not take power, it would be hard for an Igbo to become president.

    Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Jason is that he was largely self-taught. If his formal education extended beyond CMS Grammar School, Lagos, he kept it a close secret.

    In life and in journalism, he exemplified the truth that the best part of a person’s education is that part the person gives himself or herself.

    Ayo Ositelu, Victor Ogundipe, Peter Alexander Egom, and Pini Jason: Nigerian journalism is the poorer for their passing.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Our unfortunate police officers

    Our unfortunate police officers

    This has got to be the worst time to be a police officer in Nigeria.

    Not that there was ever a best time or even a good time for that matter, for members of the force have always been poorly trained, ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-equipped, ill-used, and poorly paid into the bargain. Four months after television pictures of the hovels in which they are trained and housed were beamed to a horrified national audience, the conditions remain unchanged.

    In the field, they lack the communication gear and the mobility that may spell the difference not merely between operational success and failure, but even more crucially between life and death for the officers themselves and those they are trying to protect.

    It has long been a standard joke that when beleaguered citizens finally reach the nearest police station with frantic calls that their homes are under attack by armed robbers. the desk officer asks calmly whether the caller can send a vehicle down to convey police team to the scene.

    Sometimes, you even have to supply the stationery for filing a complaint at the police station.

    When it comes to firepower, the police are no match for the hoodlums they are supposed to rein in. I am told that there is a location near FESTAC Town where stolen luxury cars are parked until they can be ferried across the border to be sold off. Geo-positioning technology has traced many a stolen vehicle to that site. But it is so heavily protected by guards packing the most lethal munitions that it is for all practical purposes a no-go area, even for the fearsome mobile police.

    Colossal sums of money raised in the name of the police and purportedly for the well-being of its officers end up in private pockets, and the police cannot even vigorously prosecute the arch-swindler behind the scheme. Their pension funds are embezzled with impunity by the very people who are supposed to keep them in safe and profitable custody.

    As things stand, Nigeria must be the only country where you can swindle the police and suffer no consequences.

    But that is not the worst part. The worst part is that wearing the uniform of the Nigeria police gets more fraught with each passing day.

    In what seemed to signal a resumption of the insurgency in the oil-producing delta, the police have been prime targets and casualties. In one incident scarcely two months ago, 12 police officers on patrol – I used the term loosely, in the American sense, to get round the sexism inherent in “policemen” and “policewomen” – were ambushed, dispossessed of their weapons, killed, stripped of their uniforms, and buried in shallow graves.

    Exactly a week ago, Boko Haram militants attacked Bama, in Borno State, setting alight the police station and the prison. They also attacked the military barracks. By the time they had competed their grisly errand, 55 persons lay dead, among them 22 police officers and 14 prison officials.

    The next day, in Elakyo, near Lafia, the Nasarawa State capital, operatives of a little-known cult identified as Ombatse ambushed a contingent of security officials on a mission to arrest their leader. Early reports said as many as 90 members of the team had been killed. At this writing, some 30 police officers have been certified dead; their remains were mutilated in an orgy of bestiality, and then burned. The cultists are said to be holding roughly the same number of police officers hostage in a secret location.

    Every adult Nigerian probably has his or her own “police story”. More often than not, it is a story of shakedowns, extortion, arbitrariness, of grovelling ingratiation before those they perceive as persons of substance, and of more than occasional casual resort to deadly violence against unarmed civilians.

    But in an exact sense, our police officers are victims thrice over.

    They are victims of the successive governments since independence that have assigned them the task of maintaining law and order without providing the necessary tools to carry it out, without training them adequately, without providing decent housing, without paying them reasonable wages, and without guaranteeing that at the end of their service, they will be paid their entitlements without fuss.

    They are victims of the corruption that flows from the very top and permeates every layer of the police establishment.

    And yet, whenever there is talk of “reorganising” the police, the government falls back on a long line of police chiefs who contributed in no small way to its underdevelopment, the very people believed to have diverted official resources to serve private ends, or who conveniently looked elsewhere as the resources were being diverted.

    Tafa Balogun grew obscenely rich even as police officers had to pay bribes to get their official uniforms. Senior police chiefs were part and parcel of the so-called Police Equipment Fund that was a cover for pillage of public resources and private donations on a scale almost beyond belief. They were silent, funereally silent, while the Police Pension Fund was being systematically looted.

    While serving as full-time Inspector-General of Police, Mike Okiro reportedly ran on the side a construction company that routinely took loans from the banks and put in bids for government contracts. If he had invested more time and attention in projects designed to uplift the police force than he did in scheming with James Ibori, the career thief and former Delta State governor now serving time in a London prison, to hound Nuhu Ribadu out of the EFCC and the police and subsequently into exile, the establishment he once headed would probably not be in its present parlous state.

    And yet, Okiro is the person the Jonathan Administration has tapped to head the Police Service Commission, in the undistinguished company of persons re-appointed to the board despite their record of culpable negligence during their previous tour.

    These, surely, cannot be agents of the transformation Dr Jonathan claims to be promoting.

    The police are also victims, finally, of a society that cares little for law and even less for order; a society wedded to the belief that you can always bribe or buy your way out of every infraction of the law.

    Meanwhile, the Minister of Police Affairs, Caleb Olubolade, has not summoned the decency to hand in his resignation, nor President Jonathan the will to sack him.

    In the end, each society gets the kind of police force it deserves. We will never get the perfect society, and we will never get the perfect police force. But unless and until our police officers are substantially empowered to operate as citizens with a stake in the scheme of things rather than as alienated victims of a pernicious system, their woes will continue, and so will the nation’s.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • A morbid obsession

    A morbid obsession

    Why do they so desperately want Enugu State Governor Sullivan Chime dead?

    He defied their morbid expectations just three months ago, returning to Nigeria “hale and hearty” even if wordless, after spending three months of “accumulated vacation” in the UK undergoing treatment for what was described as “nose cancer”.

    While he was away, rumours of his death figured so frequently in the newspapers, on radio, and on the Internet that it required a huge leap of faith to believe that he was alive. His dramatic return dispelled rumours of his death, but his disdaining to address the throng that had converged on Enugu Airport to receive him only fueled speculations that he was gravely ill. No political leader would forego a chance like that unless he or she faced the direst odds.

    Scarcely three months later, the rumours have resurfaced with renewed virulence. Sullivan Chime, even the more respectable newspapers have been saying, had died again, this time in India, where he had gone surreptitiously to receive medical treatment

    These headlines, taken from various newspapers and Internet sites, tell the story in their own different ways:

     

    Gov. Sullivan Chime dead in India – Rumour?

    Enugu State Governor, Sullivan Chime, dies in India.

    Enugu State Governor, Sullivan Chime might be dead.

    Gov. Sullivan Chime dead?

    Chime feared dead

    Governor Sullivan Chime of Enugu allegedly dies in India

    Is Sullivan Chime dead?

     

    Practically all the platforms on which these headlines appeared attributed their stories to codewit.com, the web address for Codewit World News (CWN), which qualifies itself rather exorbitantly as “an outstanding, groundbreaking website that encourages citizen journalists to report ongoing corruption and government malfeasance in Africa.”

    The portal, its sponsors claim, “is among the world’s leaders in online news and information delivery. The project is engineered by the new sound (sic) of Nigerians, creatively declaring the uniqueness and greatness of the African People”

    As for its “vision,” it is nothing less than “to inspire the entire African people, starting with Nigerians, by employing credible media-driven platforms through which Nigerians can engage themselves, as well as the rest of the world.” The emphasis is mine.

    It purports to accept as a challenge the high-minded task of effectively debunking “the persistent effort of the western media to consistently and erroneously portray us as the Dark Continent, characterised by the 5D’s: Disease, Despair, Destruction, Disaster, Destitution and Deceit.”

    This project, the web site discloses, was conceived by Mr. Anthony Claret Onwutalobi, the founder of Codewit Global Network. Onwutalobi, the web site volunteers, is an author and educator who has developed a system of “philosophical thought” called “codewism,” in which he “clarified that the solutions to African problems lie in eight key principles.”

    Here is the codewit.com story on Chime in its essence:

    “A heavy cloak of mourning falls on the nation once more today as news of Governor Sullivan Chime’s death filters in.

    “A reliable source who confirmed his death to codewit.com said he gave up the ghost an hour ago in India (9 pm Nigerian Time).

    “His Excellency, the late Governor Sullivan Chime had battled an undisclosed illness for months. When citizens began questioning his prolonged absence from Enugu, the official story was that he was on a long vacation accrued over a period of 5 years. . .

    “Efforts to get across to some commissioners in the state were not successful as their phones were switched off.

    “May his soul rest in peace.

    “More details shortly.”

    The promised details never followed.

    Given Anthony Onwutalobi’s antecedents and the provenance of the story alleging that Chime had died in India, one would have thought that the news media, actual and virtual, would handle the matter with a nice sense of discrimination. For, as news stories go, his is threadbare.

    But it quickly went viral.

    Many media outlets simply reproduced the codewit.com story verbatim, though with proper attribution. Those that didn’t reproduce it verbatim entered perfunctory reservations that raised no questions about the substance of the story. Then, there were those who sought to pre-empt criticism or liability by qualifying the whole thing as rumour.

    But why give wings to rumour in the first place?

    “A reliable source,” combined with the precise time of death – not last night or yesterday, but an hour ago” – must have made some editors rest easy. Isn’t that what many of them have been taught or have come to regard as the stuff of good reporting?

    When codewit.com went on to explain that “an hour ago” in that context translated into 9 p.m. Nigerian time, and to add that “some commissioners” who could have confirmed or denied the report had switched off their phones, it was engaging in parody. But the parody seemed only to have conferred a patina of plausibility on the rogue story in some newsrooms.

    Spirited denials issued by the authorities in Enugu gained far less traction than the codewit.com report that had been republished in the newspapers and many other online outlets. Since news signalises a rupture or disjuncture, Chime dead has greater journalistic salience and resonance than Chime alive. That is the morbid calculus of tabloid journalism.

    Nor did it help matters when the officials said Chime was alive and well but could not say precisely where he was nor how he might be reached.

    Chime himself could have ended all the morbid speculation by showing up dramatically in his office or at some event in Enugu and confounding his tormentors once again.

    Perhaps he is taking consolation in the belief of our people that person falsely and maliciously reported dead is sure to live long. It must follow from this that the more frequently a person is falsely reported dead, the more assured that person is of longevity.

    Still, enough is already too much. This is “dem-say, dem say” journalism taken too far.

    It is more than enough to drive even the most accommodating official to elevate rumour-mongering to a penal crime and set up an entire bureaucracy, backed by a new law, to deal with this vexatious obsession.

    If Chime does not want to adopt Bayelsa Governor Seriake Dickson’s strategy for dealing with the issue, he can, crackerjack lawyer that he is, find a remedy in civil law. Falsely reporting a person’s death meets the legal definition of “wanton infliction of mental and emotional distress.” And it is actionable.

    If there is no Nigerian precedent, Chime could write himself into legal history by initiating a lawsuit to establish one.

     

     

     

     

     

  • Anarchy at the gate

    Anarchy at the gate

    Nineteen years ago, in February 1994, The Atlantic magazine published an article with the apocalyptic title “The coming anarchy,” in which its national correspondent, Robert Kaplan, advanced the thesis that poverty, overpopulation, disease and crime would conflate in urban areas of West Africa – and ultimately in other parts of the Third World — to set the stage for the meltdown of civil society.

    Nigeria, Guinea (Conakry) and Sierra Leone had furnished the raw material for Kaplan’s prognostication. Liberia was already being convulsed by a barbarous civil war.

    Fast forward to 2013; add to Kaplan’s toxic brew corruption on a scale almost beyond belief, massive and growing youth unemployment, free flow of firearms of every description, syndicated kidnapping, serial sectarian violence of which last week’s carnage in Baga, in Borno State, is only the latest installment, as well as degradation of the environment in oil-producing areas.

    Exacerbated and unaddressed, any of these factors could drive Nigeria to the edge. Together, they constitute a potent potion for disaster. Anarchy, it now seems clear, is not merely coming; it may well have arrived at the gate already.

    But the authorities seem all too distracted to notice it, or they notice it all right but do not give a damn, persuaded that they can ride the storm and live happily ever after Sometimes they even appear to be wringing their hands out of sheer helplessness, if not abject surrender.

    When they think at all about ameliorative measures, it is all in the future. By baking bread from cassava flour instead of wheat flour, the public was assured about a year ago that some three million jobs would be created. Some N4 billion that would have been spent importing wheat flour would be pressed into more productive use that would generate still more jobs.

    But well before a steady stream of the cassava crop has been assured, contracts had been awarded for purchasing and installing cassava-processing plants all over the country. The much-advertised bread has thus far been reserved for the breakfast table at Aso Rock. The jobs are yet to materialise.

    The same strategy has been applied to rice. Growing and processing the stuff locally will save billions of naira in foreign exchange and create thousands of jobs. Ahead of an assured and sustainable harvest stream, industrial-scale rice mills are being purchased to process rice for the local market and perhaps even for export, to earn foreign exchange. Meanwhile, the projected jobs remain just that.

    Every year, hundreds of thousands of young men and women armed with degrees and diplomas for the universities and other institutions of further learning are released to the job market to swell the ranks of those who had graduated three, perhaps or even five years earlier but are still pounding the streets looking for jobs that are just not there.

    Yet every year, the Federal Government and the states routinely establish more universities and institutions of further learning, most of them ill-provisioned, to produce yet more graduates destined to suffer the fate of those who had graduated much earlier.

    Not too long ago, a university degree was the passport to a career that was rewarding and full of promise. In Nigeria today, a strict cost-benefit analysis will lead the hard-headed to regard it as a disinvestment.

    The business mogul Aliko Dangote placed an advertisement to recruit university graduates as truck drivers the other day and could not cope with the deluge of responses, a good many of them from persons with higher degrees, including doctorates. Since I commented on the natter, hardly a week passes without my getting an inquiry from a graduate about the method of application, and whether I could provide a recommendation.

    Entertaining no illusions about what awaits them at the end of their service year, many youth corps members, now assure themselves a second term in the schemed and its anaemic pay by deliberately under-performing.

    The Minister of Finance and Co-ordinating Minister for the Economy, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, pivoted her ill-fated campaign for president of the World Bank on a promise to create jobs for the world’s youths. Why can’t she devote her abundant energies to doing just that on a national scale? Rarely does she mention the subject these days, though it once ranked high on the “Transformation” agenda of the Jonathan administration.

    Epileptic power supply has ruined small-scale businesses that served as a cushion against poverty for millions of Nigerians. Poverty is as visible as never before, just as hunger stalks the land as never before. Crime is just around the corner, and insecurity is a constant companion.

    This conjuncture ought to concentrate the minds of our policy-makers as never before and move them, if only out of a healthy instinct for self-preservation, to devise measures to stem what is clearly shaping up as a slide into ungovernability.

    Instead, they are focusing all their energies and resources on the general elections scheduled for 2015, frantically instituting measures to cripple potential or wholly imagined challengers, and scheming to impose a new Constitution on the country through the back door, in the process eviscerating yet another opportunity – some say it may well be the last one – to design a healthier union.

    The kidnapping saga of Kehinde Bamigbetan, the dutiful and unassuming chair of the Ejigbo Local Council Development Area, in Lagos, ought to serve as a wake-up call to all of them.

    The syndicate that abducted him was on routine reconnaissance, looking out to seize anyone for whose freedom they could obtain a hefty ransom. Bamigbetan seemed that kind of person. He was being chauffeured in an SUV, not in itself a sure sign of affluence in most Nigerian cities, but some indication that the fellow in the “owner’s corner” is not exactly a pauper.

    As the stalkers overtook his vehicle, a shot rang out from their Kalashnikov assault rifle. His driver jerked the SUV into reverse gear and tried to change course but hit an electric pole and stopped. More shots rang out from the AK-47, narrowly missing the driver who somehow opened the door and fled.

    Bamigbetan was now effectively in the hands of his abductors. They bundled him into their car, blindfolded him, and drove furiously toward Badagry. But not before they had kicked out of the car a captive who, they told Bamigbetan chillingly, had just been ransomed with hard cash.

    The kidnappers, numbering seven, split up into two groups. One group comprised “hardened” individuals, according to Bamgbetan. This was the group that administered the beatings and the blood-curdling threats. The other was more “humane.”

    It says something of the sophistication of the syndicate that they sent “spies” to mingle with the staff of Bamigbetan’s office and monitor what they were saying about their abducted boss. Their report apparently moved their principals to settle for a reduced ransom, and to release him after one traumatic week in their custody.

    Bamigbetan was lucky. Several weeks earlier, a former deputy governor of Anambra State, Dr Chudi Nwike and a chieftain of the opposition Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) was killed by his kidnappers after they had collected a negotiated ransom.

    Now, here is the point that should set our policy-makers thinking: The kidnappers, Bamgbetan said, “seemed to have been forced into criminality” by the prevailing circumstances. Many of them are graduates but had been unemployed for years. They could not understand “why we budget billions of Naira and graduates cannot get jobs.”

    So, they took to kidnapping as a way of registering their anger against “the system.”

    Continuing on the present trajectory and hoping to muddle through somehow is not a public policy option. If policy makers could summon just one tenth of the creativity they employ in enriching themselves and their cronies and apply it to devising sustainable employment schemes for the burgeoning army of restive young persons, they may yet stave off the looming prospects of anarchy in those parts of the country that have not been overrun by Boko Haram.

     

    For Funmilayo Olayinka:  A Postscript

    Funmilayo Olayinka, the deputy governor of Ekiti, whose remains were buried in the state capital last week, was an uncommon public figure. Abjuring the pomp and circumstance that went with the office, she was unpretentious through and through.

    Gracefulness – suavity, to employ a more evocative term — perfused every step she walked, every word she spoke, and every gesture she made. She battled the ravages of the cancer that ultimately claimed her life with great dignity and continued until the end to complement Governor Kayode Fayemi in devoted service to the people. She gave public service and politics a human and humane face.

    We are all the poorer for her passing. May her soul find peace. Her family will take pride and consolation in the outpouring of grief and affection that attended her passing. Her example inspires and ennobles us still.

     

     

  • A misbegotten constitution review

    A misbegotten constitution review

    The Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Emeka Ihedioha, has been all over the media this past week congratulating himself and his colleagues on executing what by his reckoning is one of the rarest political feats ever achieved in this clime.

    “We have kept faith with Nigerians,” he proclaimed, in an article detailing the exertions the House of Representatives put itself through in its self-serving and utterly misconceived task of fashioning a new Constitution for Nigeria (ThisDay, April 19, 2013).

    He recalled how, on December 10, 2012, all 360 members of the House fanned out across the country to their constituencies to stage town hall meetings at which various “stakeholders” deliberated on a 43-item template of issues they would like to see amended in the 1999 Constitution.

    Discussions at the sessions were not merely free and robust, Ihedioha wrote, they were resoundingly “participatory.” Thereafter, votes were taken and recorded in full view of all the participants. Each member of the House then presented a report, incorporating voting results from his or her constituency and backed by video evidence, to the secretariat of the ad hoc Committee on the Review of the Constitution.

    The reports were then deposited at the secretariat of the Constitution Review Committee, which again invited representatives of “stakeholders” to join with its staffers to collate the results.

    As Ihedioha sees it, the outcome of this process, presented to the House of Representatives last week, categorically represents “the voice” of the Nigerian people regarding what changes they would like to see an amended Constitution.

    He admitted that the process may not be perfect, but before you could give him high praise for candour, he declared without fear and without research that “it is the first time in the history of this country that Nigerians at the grassroots have been made part of the Constitution Review Process in a practical and transparent manner.”

    The process is nothing of the sort. In conception and execution, it is as incurably flawed as the 1999 Constitution it was supposed to modify. It is certainly not an improvement.

    To begin with, what the nation needs is not a trainload of amendments to a Constitution that may not be a grand forgery as some leading authorities have called it, but is so shot through with errors and omissions, and so constricted in its underlying assumptions, that it cannot serve as a useful guide for and resolving the conflicts convulsing the country.

    In undertaking to re-work that document, Ihedioha and his colleagues in the House of Representatives were laboring under a misapprehension

    Even if the House has a mandate to review the 1999 Constitution, the way it went about it belies Ihedioha’s claim that the outcome represents the “voice” of the people. For one thing, the people had no hand in preparing the agenda. They certainly took no part in designing the “43-item template” that constituted the substance of discourse – assuming it is not a case of unnecessary dignification to call what took place a “discourse”.

    For another, those whom House members railroaded from their constituencies into attending the town meetings were for the most part self-selected or induced by the prospect of free food and drinks and gifts from the abundant perks – the constituency and hardship allowances, among others — of the Honourable Visitor from Abuja. In no sense can they be said to represent the political tendencies or shades of opinion in the constituency, much less in the country.

    For yet another, there was no independent verification of the “collation” that followed each town meeting. The House member who staged the meeting and had a vested interest in showing that it was a “robust” grassroots deliberative forum, the kind of which Nigeria had never witnessed, was responsible for the “collation”. In this digital age, the “video evidence” presented with the report cannot authenticate an exercise that was at bottom a mockery.

    Or “a sham and a monumental failure,” as High Chief Rita Lori-Ogbebor, the influential minority-rights activist called it, in a withering critique (ThisDay, November 13, 2012) of the town meeting held in her Delta State constituency of Warri. The exercise, she said, was “nothing more than a ploy to rubber stamp the selfish agenda of those who organized it.”

    The Warri town hall meeting took place the day President Goodluck Jonathan was visiting to join in the birthday celebrations of the televangelist, Ayo Oristsejafor. Scheduled to start at 9 o’clock in the morning, it did not begin until 4 p.m. By then, many of those who had gathered for the event had left.

    Only one minute was allowed for indicating “yes” or “no” to 43 questions on the template. That was the sum total of the “discussions.”

    “How on earth do you expect people of my calibre and age to just answer ‘Yes or No’ about a matter that was not previously discussed?” Lori-Ogbebor asked in justified indignation.

    To be sure, not all the public hearings across the country were as shambolic as the one in Warri. But even where they were better organized, one cannot in good faith call them “consultations.” Asking members of the audience to answer “yes” or “no” to the questions on the template cannot be called “consultations” without doing great violence to language. Nor can it be honestly claimed that the outcome represents the “voice” of the people.

    What a good-faith exercise requires is a forum at which persons elected for the purpose of re-writing the Constitution meet over a period of time – certainly not one day – and deliberate, no options foreclosed, on a wide range of significant national issues in a spirit of give-and take, and come up with a document reflects a broad national consensus on which a healthier union can be founded.

    The town hall meetings provided no such forum.

    One of the issues that has been convulsing Nigeria is that federalism – the bedrock principle on which the nation was established — has over the years been honoured more in the breach than in the observance, to the point that Nigeria today is more or less a centrally administered state.

    The so-called public hearings evaded the problem altogether, or sought to perpetuate it. One of the items on its template required the audience to indicate by yes or no whether the electoral commissions in the states should be abolished, leaving it to the National Electoral Commission to conduct all polls.

    No one desirous of restoring true federalism would ask a question like that.

    Another item called for a vote on whether the states should establish a police force, without laying out the arguments for and against, and without outlining how potential abuse of the scheme might be averted or curbed.

    And in Lagos State of all places, a majority of attendees – the very people who stand to lose the most – reportedly voted to deny federal funds to local governments allegedly created outside the framework of the1999 Constitution.

    How plausible is this outcome? Did they really understand what they were voting on? Surely, the more fundamental question is whether Kano State, which allegedly has roughly the same population as Lagos State, should have three times as many local governments in Lagos State, and three times as many representatives in the lower house of the National Assembly.

    The foregoing, in sum, is the process Emeka Ihedioha and his colleagues in the House of Representatives are busy advertising as a great breakthrough. This is the product they want Nigerians to accept as an unprecedented act of keeping faith with the public.

    I see it as a grand evasion of the problems at hand, and a usurpation of the prerogative of the sovereign people of Nigeria to give themselves a new Constitution. Something tells me that it will go down as yet another exercise in futility.

    Meanwhile, the question needs to be asked again: Who is afraid of an authentic people’s Constitution, one truly warranted by the preface, “We the people . . .”?

     

     

  • Thatcher unreconstructed: A view from 1990

    Thatcher unreconstructed: A view from 1990

    What do you do with a lady who heads a cabinet supposedly run on the collegial principle, but who ain’t for stirring, much less for turning?

    Members of the ruling Conservative Party in the British House of Commons answered that question a fortnight ago.

    Their answer was: If the lady ain’t for turning, then she must be for dumping.

    And they dumped Dame Margaret Thatcher, the first woman to head the Conservative Party, the first to serve as prime minister, and in this century the person who has held that office longest.

    When she attained this last distinction, she seemed set to continue to rule, not merely to the end of the century but well into the next, if not forever. She had crushed the labour unions. She had won a resounding victory over Argentina in the Malvinas. She had cut Africans, Asians and Caribbean leaders of the Commonwealth to size and made it plain to them that they possessed no wealth in common with Britain. She had humiliated, and then dismissed from her cabinet, all those who helped plot her way to the leadership of the Conservative Party and sustained her during her first term.

    She had changed the face of Britain forever, and made socialism come across as something more frightful than bubonic plague – or so she claimed. Unemployment was up, but inflation was down, and so was productivity. Too bad for the millions thrown out of work; the important thing was that the economy was improving.

    Bereft of a sociological imagination, she brought to bear on the governance of the British Isles a book-keeper’s imagination and sought to reduce the human person to a slave of the market. The worth of everything was to be measured in terms of profit and loss. Forget about equity and justice. The only thing that counts is the bottom line – a phrase which, by the way, the British consider an unfortunate vulgarism.

    For her, greed was the motive force in human affairs, and to encourage it in every conceivable way was the highest principle of statecraft. Compassion was an unpardonable weakness. Where others had waged a war on poverty, Thatcher waged a war against the poor, ripping apart the social safety net that had insured the disadvantaged against the worst manifestations of poverty.

    She privatised everything in sight, and when she could not find anything else to put under the grinding wheels of market forces, she turned to water. Were it possible for her to privatise the air we breathe, she would have done so without a moment’s thought.

    Race relations in Britain steadily grew worse in the Thatcher years. She tightened the rules of eligibility for British passports in a bid to repudiate the obligation arising from centuries of British imperial conquest and pillage. Asian women seeking to join their husbands in Britain were subjected to degrading virginity tests.

    When Britons finally saw through the phantom prosperity that her policies had wrought, they blamed all their woes on the foreigners in their midst, especially those of Black descent. Race riots, unheard of in recent British history, erupted in several parts of the country on a scale and with a fury that was almost beyond belief.

    An Englishman’s word, it is said, is his bond – and an English woman’s too. With a few notorious exceptions in public life, this is still largely true. But one remembers how, at last year’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Thatcher put her signature on a communiqué advocating tougher sanctions against apartheid South Africa, only to renounce the agreement well before the ink had dried on it.

    It would be hard to improve on President Robert Mugabe’s comment on Thatcher’s conduct on that occasion: “Despicable.”

    In no sphere of Britain’s foreign relations were her chicanery and duplicity more evident than in the question of sanctions against South Africa. No, the sanctions she had supported so enthusiastically against Poland would never work in South Africa.

    Poland’s crime was that it had suppressed the trade union Solidarity. As far as Thatcher was concerned, that was a far greater crime than apartheid, which the United Nations had in resolution after resolution denounced as a crime against humanity. But then, the only humanity she recognises is white humanity.

    From claiming that sanctions would not work in South Africa, she went on to proclaim, without recognising her own absurd logic, that sanctions would hurt only the Black majority that needed protection most.

    Suddenly, this woman who as education minister had not scrupled to snatch milk away from British school children to save costs was brimming with the milk of human kindness for Black people in far-away South Africa.

    She even resorted to blaming the victim, employing the language of the oppressor. The ANC was a terroristic organisation. But for the dirty tricks of the non-white Commonwealth nations, South Africa would have remained within the family.

    When the pressure for sanctions reached a crescendo at the 1985 Commonwealth Summit in Nassau, Bahamas, and threatened to disrupt the organisation, she hit upon a ploy to sidestep the issue: the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group (EPG). Well before the EPG’s report was published, Thatcher launched a campaign of denigration against its members severally and collectively. She would allow no person and no principle to stand in the way of her giving aid and comfort to apartheid.

    That is now why she fell, of course. Her fall was rooted in her domestic and European policy. And she crashed with the same gracelessness that had animated her for 11 years, a stunning lesson in the instability of human greatness.

    Some self-hating Blacks may continue to adore her as the greatest person that ever drew breath. In this corner, the most charitable thing that can be said about the ghastly woman is: Good riddance.

    *This article, originally titled “And so, the lady was for dumping,” is republished from the December 10, 1990, issue of the newsweekly, The African Guardian, now defunct. The writer was a contributing editor for the magazine.

     

  • Bayelsa’s rumour epidemic: A propagandist at work

    Bayelsa’s rumour epidemic: A propagandist at work

    Following my column for this newspaper (“Beware, rumour monger,” March 26, 2013) on the firm resolve of the authorities to break the stranglehold of rumour on the governance of Bayelsa State once and for all, I expected a full-court rejoinder, couched in the reader-unfriendly lingo of bureaucracy and bearing the intimidating signature of a senior official of Governor Seriake Dickson’s administration, possibly the Secretary to the Government.

    It must be that I have been gone too long and have lost touch with the way such things used to be done, for I least expected that the rejoinder would issue from someone who identifies himself not merely as a journalist, but as chair of the Bayelsa State chapter of the Nigeria Union of Journalists.

    Even in this era of unsophisticated careerism, many Nigerians must still find it unsettling that a journalist – the chair of the Bayelsa State chapter of the NUJ, who could one day become its national president – would enter a robust defence for a law designed ostensibly to curb the transmission of rumour – or “dem say, dem say” communication in Dickson’s felicitous coinage, but is sure in operation to constrict freedom of speech and of the press.

    My analysis of the subject, says Torinyo Akono (“Understanding Bayelsa’s anti-rumor law,” The NATION, April 1, 2013) is “fundamentally misplaced in conception” and “an outright oversimplification.” Nor, he adds, is there any “draconian tendency” to the proposed law.

    “We disagree with his position,” Akono wrote with reference to my column.

    I have it on the authority of my editor, by the way, that despite the publication date of April 1, Akono’s piece was no April Fools caper.

    Notice the collective pronoun he employs, which can with justice be deconstructed as the royal pronoun as well, given the hauteur, the overweening presumption that perfuses his rejoinder. It is not clear whether he is employing that inflated mode of speech by virtue of his being NUJ chair in Bayelsa, or because he is a member of the state’s anti-rumour squad that bears the Orwellian title of “State Public Information Management Committee.”

    One thing is clear however: Akono is not an official of the Bayelsa State Government and has no mandate to speak for it.

    But hear him:

    “The intention of the state government is to have in place functional structures where information can be easily accessed by members of the public as well as quickly disseminating information on current issues of public concern to the people, detailing what is true or false, thereby nipping in the bud such dangerous information capable of causing disaffection and indeed reducing the incidence of blatant misinformation among the people.”

    This is the language of bureaucracy, not journalism. But Akono is not done yet.

    “The idea,” he submits in the same vein, “is to avoid the bureaucracy in the ministries but have many centres so localised that you can easily find out the truth about anything relating to the government and the public. Here, people can contact or meet officials for quick response to whatever may be their concern or interest on the flow of information, including any rumour that may also affect the interest of an individual or organisation in the state. This is important because of the pervasive nature of rumour-mongering among the people with inherent social crisis if not curtailed or addressed so frontally.”

    And then, with the smug condescension of the all-knowing insider, he adds:

    “What Dare failed to note is the peculiar nature of the society where such falsehood is politically motivated to create pure mischief and blackmail which could be dangerous to proper functioning of the government and socio-economic activities in the state.”

    In the face of such clear and imminent dangers, Akono declares, “Government must respond by spelling out what constitutes a decent citizenship and why it is not a right to engage in conscious actions to create social crisis and looking at the strategic position of Bayelsa State in the Niger Delta, then taking legal means to have stability is a legitimate action of any serious government.”

    That is precisely what the state government has done, Akono states. For the benefit of those who might think that the anti-rumour project is another ill-considered scheme that will soon run out of steam, he makes it clear that the state government “will continue to impress it on the people to be law-abiding and responsible stakeholders in the current mission of restoring Bayesla to its deserved glory in leadership and development.”

    When the law comes into force, he hints darkly, people will find it “unprofitable” to wake up one day and begin spreading the rumour that the state government had been sacked by a court in Port Harcourt, in the process causing panic and among the teeming population “lamenting the future” of the restoration of the programme of the Dickson administration.”

    This is boosterism of the most unsubtle kind

    And thus has Akono sought to imbue Bayelsa’s proposed anti-rumour law with the context and nuance he said my analysis lacked. Neither the chief press secretary to Governor Dickson, nor for that matter the secretary to the Bayelsa State Government, could have entered a more robust justification of the proposed law.

    No one should make light of the pervasiveness and perversity of the rumour industry in Bayelsa. It was something Dickson’s predecessor, the defenestrated Timipre Sylva, had to contend with all the time, to the point that he actually appointed to the senior ranks of his administration a Special Assistant or Senior Special Assistant on Rumour-mongering.

    It is not clear whether that official’s remit was to squelch the “rumours” the authorities did not like or to plant the government’s own “rumours” in the public sphere. In whatever case,the epidemic refused to lift

    That is why a high-powered committee comprising, according to Akono, “eminent journalists chosen for their integrity and credibility not only in their individual and professional lives but also to give credence to the good intentions of the state government” has now been set up to perform a task previously assigned to an aide of the former governor — a governor whose tenure he calls “the locust years, in contradistinction, it must be supposed, to the present era of super-abundance in Bayelsa.

    All this has been done, says Akono, in keeping with the time-tested wisdom that “peculiar circumstances in any political or social formation will invariably demand some clear-headed answers but to the extent that such ameliorating mechanisms conform to the basic ethics of leadership and constitutionalism.”

    There you have it.

    On one issue, namely, the content of the “rumours” that had driven Bayelsa to contemplate such drastic measures, Akono has been less forthcoming.

    “We can boldly say,” he asserts, “that not only are the contents of such rumours spurious and ill-informed, they constitute nuisance to the sanity of the society. They are inimical to peace and progress and must be checked forthwith.”

    Deconstruction: “Those rumours are too vile to be repeated. Take my word for it.”

    I am gratefully the wiser and more enlightened for Akono’s pellucid clarification of the real purpose of Bayelsa’s anti-rumour law in the making. I believe the public is, too.

    With a state chairman of the NUJ like Akono, the Bayelsa State Government needs no official propagandist.