The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

Obama 2.0: Retrospect and prospect

One of the high points of my two-week visit to Germany in 1993 as a guest of the German Foreign Office was an interview with the publisher of the influential weekly, Die Zeit, in the northern port city of Hamburg.

My interviewee was no ordinary publisher, and professional issues were the last thing on my mind as I was ushered that crisp September morning into his capacious office. Ringed by bookshelves reaching up to the high ceiling, it was like a busy but well-kept library.

Behind a cluttered desk commanding almost a full view of the room sat the man I had flown from Berlin the previous day to meet, one of the major world figures from the West who in the 1970s sought to inaugurate a new, more hopeful and more just international order even as the Cold War raged with deadly violence across the world.

There was Jimmy Carter in the United States, and next door, in Canada, Pierre Elliot Trudeau. Jim Callaghan held sway in Britain, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in France, and Guilio Andreotti in Italy. Down Under, in Australia, there was Malcolm Fraser.

In West Germany there was the longest serving and easily the most outspoken of them all, Helmut Schmidt, who served as chancellor from 1974 -1982, the man behind the desk in the capacious office at Die Zeit, the man they called “The Lip” because of his volubility and his habit of dispensing advice whether it was solicited or not.

He lived up to that reputation during our discussion that went on for more than an hour. Ask him a question and he would launch a tutorial worthy of the masters at Oxford and Cambridge.

He did not flaunt it, but he left you in no doubt about his great learning

The euphoria over the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the re-unification of Germany was still in the air, though much subdued, and I asked him whether he ever thought that Germany would be re-united.

He said he never doubted it, but he never believed it would happen in his lifetime.

It happened just eight years after he left office. And Helmut Schmidt is still very much alive.

I doubt whether any adult American alive today ever believed that a black man would be president of the United States in his life time. Dr Martin Luther King’s famous dream did not go that far. Nor can it plausibly be advanced that “the promised land” he said he had seen in the Memphis speech that prefigured his assassination the very next day was one in which a black man would be president and commander-in-chief.

The civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, it is true, did seek the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party in 1984 and 1988, as had Shirley Chisholm, the black Congresswoman, in 1972. Both knew that they did not have a ghost of a chance of securing the nomination, much less winning the presidential race.

They sought the nomination because they could; they sought it to make the point that, not merely in theory but also in practice, any qualified person can seek any elected office in the United States, regardless of skin colour.

But here we are today, in the lifetime of some of Dr King’s closest associates and disciples, celebrating the second inauguration of a black person as president of the United States and commander-in-chief. It is more than the stuff of dreams; it is the stuff of fantasy. What began as an unpromising journey— even Michelle Obama thought it was a quixotic quest – is now one of the most inspiring political stories of our time.

“RACIAL BARRIER FALLS IN DECISIVE VICTORY,” The New York Times proclaimed on the front page of its Late Edition for November 5, 2008. This was true in a narrow sense; in the larger sense what followed was the precise opposite.

In a tribute to what has been called “American exceptionalism,”Obama had proclaimed that only in America was his story possible But instead of embracing, even celebrating him as a glittering product of that uniqueness, those who felt that his ascendancy had upturned the natural order of things denounced him as a rootless impostor who had been insinuated into the system to destroy everything they hold dear.

They had to “take the government back,” their government, by all means.

Just three months ago, one of them, a political hack who bears the quintessential American surname Sununu, was publicly denouncing Obama for not having learned “how to be an American.”

Deconstruction: He is not one of us. He doesn’t belong.

Too bad we could not stop him first time. Take all means necessary – block every initiative he launches, suppress the vote, stir things up, focus anger and resentment against him, hint darkly at assassination – take all necessary measures to ensure that there will be no second time.

And, for a quite a while, it seemed Obama’s time was up. The TEA Party was set to run him out of town, and all those who could be identified with him or his policies, however remotely. A year before the election, pollsters were reporting that if the election were to be held then, a “generic Republican” would defeat him. With the economy in distress and the jobless rate north of 8 percent, all that a Republican – any Republican — needed to do to win was to show up.

The rest is history.

Obama can already point to some significant accomplishments. When it takes full effect, his Affordable Health Care Act will provide insurance cover for some 30 million Americans for the first time. He saved the auto industry. He curbed the predatory propensities of Wall Street and the banking industry and the securities market. He created a path to legal immigration status for millions of undocumented aliens. He arrested the economic decline.

That is achievement enough.

On the international scene, he ended the misbegotten invasion and occupation of Iraq. He reduced global tension and made the world safer by sublimating the American impulse to war

He enters his second term with his place in history already secure.

Now, he must have an eye on the legacy of his Presidency. Great challenges lie ahead, not the least of which is forging a partnership with a Congressional opposition that has turned calculated obstruction into an instrument of legislative policy.

He has to restore America to economic prosperity through investment in education and innovation. He has to see the unfinished work of comprehensive immigration reform through. He has to address climate change and its consequences forthrightly.

Gun violence in America has taken on frightful dimension that requires action. Obama will have to lead the effort to regulate access to guns and assault weapons and bullets designed for human slaughter, despite the militant opposition of the powerful National Rifle Association.

Because he has no illusions that he can forge a partnership with a Congressional opposition, he is turning over the awesome machine that helped put together the winning coalition in 2008 and 2012 to a movement that will be in permanent campaign mode during his second term, championing his agenda.

There is perhaps no greater symbolism than the fact that Obama took the oath of office yesterday with his hand on one Bible that belonged to Abraham Lincoln, the legendary 16th President who freed enslaved blacks, and another that belonged to Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, who led a titanic struggle to make that freedom real and meaningful, and on whose birthday, anniversary, an official American holiday, Obama’s second term was launched.

Hail to The Chief as he navigates the rough road ahead.

January 22, 2013
Unequal justice as state policy

As trials of drug offenders before his court drew to a close, the late Justice Muri Okunola usually prefaced the sentencing with a lament that the drug law enforcement authorities were always arraigning the minions, the cat’s paw as it were, never the cat not the kitten.

Even when splendidly visible, the baron or baroness was untouchable.

I was reminded of Justice Okunola’s pained lament the other day by a news story with the giddy headline “Oil Theft: Two Women Bag Three-year Jail Term” (Saharareporters, January 9, 2013) detailing the conviction of two women by the Federal High Court, Asaba, Delta State, on a two-count charge of illegal dealing in petroleum products and conspiracy. The sentence came with a N300,000-fine option.

Back in May 2009, the women were, according to the story, caught trucking 136 plastic drums of petroleum products somewhere in the Isoko country without a licence by operatives of the Delta State Command of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, who then handed them to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission for investigation and prosecution.

In a sense, justice was not only done; it was seen to be done. Prosecution was swift and diligent. No indulgent adjournments were sought or granted. The judge was punctilious, and the court process worked as it was designed to do.

The women broke the law, and fully deserved their punishment. Some might even say that they should consider themselves lucky that they got off so lightly. After all, in some parts of the country, people have been sent to jail for up to seven years for stealing a goat.

But if this is indeed justice, it is justice most unequal.

Although the capacity of the plastic drums was not specified, let us make the very generous allowance that each has a volume of 400 litres. That would make the volume of petroleum products they were trucking illegally 50, 400 litres. In absolute terms, that might seem substantial. It could fuel a small fleet of gas-guzzling SUVs for a year.

But in relative terms – relative, that is, to the thieving that goes on in the oil industry every day and even as you read this piece — it is less than piddling.

No fair comparison can be made even between the volume at issue and the volume of gasoline products ferried to neighbouring countries daily in tankers. These are registered vehicles that drive on paved highways and across checkpoints manned by officials of immigration, customs, and national security, as well as the police, and finally through international frontiers to their destinations.

A Nigerian international civil servant told me several years ago that he counted 18 such tankers in one day in the Burkina Faso capital, Ouagadougou, waiting to discharge, and that he had it on good authoritythat this was not a chance occurrence.

These tankers are never intercepted. Their cargo is never confiscated. The drivers and their mates are never arrested. If anything, they are guaranteed unimpeded passage.

Only those who can afford to own or hire the oil tankers, those who have access to oil, and those whom the law-enforcement authorities would be crazy to mess with—in short, only the well-connected – can play in this league.It is therefore no surprise that they are never brought to justice. Even their minions are untouchable.

I once told in this space the story of how a Nigerian diplomat in Latin America travelled to a city hundreds of miles from his base to check on the welfare of some Nigerian sailors who had been detained in the local jail for mutiny on the seas. The half-starved sailors, it turned out had committed no greater crime than demanding their wages for working the ships that ferried oil from Nigeria across the south Atlantic.

His investigations uncovered an elaborate smuggling operation. Refined diesel was loaded on to the ships, which were then escorted to safety by the Nigeria Navy vessels that were supposed to be protecting the nation’s territorial waters. It had been going on for years

The diplomat sent a detailed account of his findings to the Abuja and waited for instructions. None came. He forwarded a reminder. Weeks later, he was invited home, for what he thought would be a full debriefing. After waiting for weeks in Abuja without getting to see any person of consequence, he returned to base.

Waiting on his desk was a letter brimming with contrived indignation from the Latino boss of the syndicate smuggling refined diesel oil from Nigeria. Attached to the boss’s letter was a copy of the diplomat’s cable, courtesy of those he called “his friends” in Nigeria.

Thankful that neither the syndicate nor Abuja demanded his scalp, the diplomat learned to mind his own business. It is a fair guess that the smuggling continues. Didn’t a detained ship laden with smuggled oil vanish just like that from Nigeria’s waters the other day?

The still-unfolding “subsidy” racket shows just how mired in sleaze is Nigeria’s oil industry. Trillions of Naira has gone from the nation’s coffers to reimburse oil marketers for petroleum products that were never delivered.

The only qualifications a good many of the partakers in the feeding frenzy is closeness to power as exercised by the Federal Government and the ruling PDP. If the public had not risen in sustained indignation against the so-called subsidy the government said it was set to end, the freeloading would have continued.

Prosecution of the suspects in the racket has been perfunctory at best. The suspects continue to live like the potentates that easy money has transformed them into. They are free to travel, and to carry on as they please.

These are not the kinds of people that prosecutors strive with might and main to deny bail on the grounds that leaving them in circulation would fatally undermine investigations. That recourse applies only to ordinary suspects.

We should even be thankful that they have not procured the best attorneys and judges that money can buy to block the investigation that led to their arraignment, although that is no guarantee that they will face trial and be punished if found guilty.

The women convicted by the Federal High Court, Asaba, had neither the sophistication nor the resources to employ such tactics; hence the asymmetry between them and the subsidy freeloaders on the hallowed scale of justice.

He probably wanted it celebrated as another “breakthrough,” but it is nothing if not pathetic that the Minister of Trade and Investments, Olusegun Aganga, announced with breathless excitement only three weeks ago that. “for the first time,” the Federal Government had authorised measures to stem the leakages in the oil and gas industry arising from meters that are not working, or that were installed in the wrong places.

These measures are coming more than 30 years after it came to light that the bucket being used to lift crude from Nigeria’s oil fields was four gallons bigger than the standard international barrel. Taking the intent for the deed as is the habit of the Goodluck Jonathan Administration, Aganga said the measures would this year alone result in savings of $3 million and add N1.74 billion to the government’s receipts from oil and gas.

And yet, the public was bombarded incessantly with the infantile propaganda that government “subsidy” of gasoline was the problem with the Nigerian oil industry and that the industry would die if the subsidy was not terminated.

It is an index of the asymmetry of justice in Nigeria that, whereas two women were shafted with a three-year jail sentence for illegally trucking petroleum products, supervisors of an industry in which vital meters were not installed, were installed in the wrong places or not installed at all, have never been charged – not with dereliction nor even culpable negligence, much less criminal collusion.

January 15, 2013
A President’s endless distractions

There is no end to some people’s malevolence.

If they could not give Dr Goodluck Jonathan another jet plane to add to the burgeoning Presidential Fleet, or a cassava plantation to supply the raw material for his favourite breakfast loaf, or a pond for breeding fish for the gourmet pepper soup that is the best accompaniment for cassava bread, or a shipload of his accustomed beverage, couldn’t they at least have said a perfunctory “Happy New Year” to him and carried on with their lives of desperation?

Or, since he is scholar and an intellectual, they could have presented him with a basket of books carefully selected from the best-seller lists of the leading trade journals.

Instead, in the dead of night as 2012 faded into history and 2013 was emerging from the womb time, they slunk out of their malignant dens and painted the entire Abuja, government buildings not excepted, with election campaign posters warning those who might be thinking of challenging Dr Jonathan in the 2015 presidential race to perish the thought.

“2015: No vacancy in Aso Rock in 2015,” the posters, bearing a portrait of a half amazed and half bemused Dr Jonathan in his trademark fedora, proclaim sententiously.

Anticipating the querulous who might be led to ask why there would be no vacancy in Aso Rock, the poster declares: “One good term deserves another.”

A grand distraction – in fact, I am almost prepared to call it the Mother of all Distractions – this malevolent, cantankerous, and unpatriotic NewYear present to Dr Jonathan.

Dr Jonathan is of course no stranger to distraction. In fact, distraction has been his constant companion since he took office. Well before he could spell out the details of his much anticipated Transformation Agenda, Boko Haram launched a campaign of indiscriminate murder, its object being to destabilise the Administration as a first step to setting up an Islamic Republic in Nigeria.

When the Transformation Agenda finally got under way, it quickly fell victim to the mass protests that broke out across the nation, following termination of gasoline subsidies that had virtually paralysed the economy. The protesters and their manipulators could not see that only a few privileged persons were profiting from the pernicious subsidy, and that ending it was in the public’s best interest.

For the nine days the protests lasted, Dr Jonathan was so distracted that he lost track of the Transformation Agenda altogether.

Then followed yet another distraction, from Dr Jonathan’s village, of all places. The Italian contractor Gitto Construziani, I gather, had refurbished the old village church in Otuoke from its own abundance and in the finest tradition of social responsibility and corporate good citizenship.

But Dr Jonathan’s political adversaries claimed that he had knowingly solicited a gift from a contractor doing business with the Federal Government, and that at the very least, the whole thing was shot through and through with conflict of interest, if not actual sleaze. Some have even gone so far as to demand his impeachment or resignation, or both.

Even the elements conspired to add to the distraction. Raging floods swept away tracks laid for the nation’s first bullet train, paralysed newly commissioned power plants, washed away vast farmlands bursting with the first fruit of the agricultural revolution Dr Jonathan had initiated, and destroyed thousands of silos chockfull of grain and other produce

What Dr Jonathan has now been confronted with, however, has got to be, as I was saying, the Mother of all Distractions.

Instead of focusing with his accustomed laser intensity on the plans and programmes and projects he has drawn up to make 2013 our annus mirabilis, he has to waste precious time and resources disowning the election posters and dissociating himself from a project that is not even a part of his iconic Transformation Agenda.

The people behind the posters do not wish Dr Jonathan and Nigeria well. They fear that if he is allowed free rein to transform Nigeria, they will cease to have any political relevance. For they cannot say they are coming to transform what has already been transformed.

Hence their strategy: Keep him so busy denying that 2015 is on his mind that he will not be able to pursue the Transformation Agenda with vigour. Then seize on that failure to pre-empt his candidacy, and thus send him packing out of Aso Rock…

Some gullible people whom we shall always have among us seem to believe that Dr Jonathan had fore-knowledge of this diabolical scheme and might even have endorsed it.

If they need indissoluble proof that Dr Jonathan did not have and could not have had anything to do with it, however remotely, they need look no farther than the contemptuous manner in which some of the posters were displayed.

A good many of them were wrapped around refuse bins or posted on dumpsters. Are the malevolent elements behind the campaign not thereby saying that any ambition Dr Jonathan might be nursing for 2015 is destined to end up in dust bin?

Assuming – just for the sake of argument – that Dr Jonathan is interested in running for re-election in 2015, can it be supposed that he would denigrate his own aspiration in this manner? Not even his most implacable critics have ever accused him of masochism.

The Jonathan we know is a sportsman in the pristine sense of that term.He loves genuine competition, and he is so secure in his person that losing means nothing to him. When he plays squash, he tells his opponents at every opportunity: “Don’t be coy. Defeat me if you can.”

Contrast this, if you will, with your typical president whose unspoken message to the fellow across the net is: “You think you are smart? Defeat me if you dare.”

Is the Dr Jonathan we know the kind of leader, then, to resort to a tawdry poster campaign to pre-empt a challenge in a race that will not even come up until 2015?

Proxies of the agents of distraction have been going round asking why Dr Jonathan has not unleashed the forces of national security to smoke out those behind the poster campaign if it is true that he knows nothing about it and if he is genuinely distressed by it.

The more despicable among them are asking whether it is mere coincidence that Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State has been buying acres of space in the newspapers to proclaim, just when the “No Vacancy” posters surfaced in Abuja, that he does not intend to seek the office of President, has never harboured such an intention, and never will harbor it.

Persons of this diabolical cast of mind forger that Nigeria is now a constitutional democracy where freedom of speech and of press is guaranteed in equal measure to the ambitious and the unambitious, and even to agents of distraction. They forget that the days of authoritarian rule, of government by decree, are gone forever. They want to goad Dr Jonathan into playing Goliath.

They will do well to remember that he did not become President and has not remained in that exalted office by submitting to blackmail of any stripe.

The distraction must stop forthwith… Collectively, we must say to them, with the utmost indignation: Enough. Let President Jonathan be. Leave him alone so that he can devote all his energies to accomplishing the urgent task of National Transformation.

Correction

The historian Segun Osoba has written that he was not present at the 1989 Guardian Lecture I referred to in my December 18, 2012,column (“Omoruyi: A scholar’s lament”), and could not therefore have reacted in the manner I described.

I and a Guardian staffer monitoring the audience must have mistaken a look-alike for him.

My regrets.

January 8, 2013
The year that was 2012

n a two-part column for this newspaper (December 6 and December 13), the historian Jide Osuntokun called the year just ended our annus horribilis. I doubt whether, if they are true to themselves, other persons reviewing the major occurrences in Nigeria over that period will come to a different conclusion.

Right up to its closing hours, 2012 has been a year of horrors.

It began with a callous ambuscade. Nigerians woke up on January 1 to find, contrary to assurances from on high, that the price at the gasoline pump had gone up 120 percent, ending, it was claimed, a subsidy that had for decades subverted the nation’s quest for economic greatness.

Nine days of people’s power centered fittingly on the Gani Fawehihmi Freedom Square in Lagos forced the government to retreat somewhat. But the harm had been done. The uncertainty and confusion that heralded the New Year governed most of the year, putting investment decisions and the launch of new ventures in abeyance. A measure allegedly designed to perk up the economy ended up crippling it.

As part of its climbdown, a panicked government embarked on what it called palliatives, to cushion the impact of the hike in gasoline prices. Suddenly, some more than 1000 passenger buses bobbed up in Abuja, as if conjured out of President Goodluck Jonathan’s fedora, to serve with several hundred more expected shortly. The full assembly would work out 2.5 buses for each of the nation’s 774 local government areas.

Where are the buses today? What is the status today of another palliative, under which each state was going to get federal assistance to put 10, 000 young men and women to work? And just how much relief has the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P) delivered with savings from the abolished “subsidies”?

It would turn out, as was obvious to anyone paying even cursory attention to the matter, that subsidising was not petrol consumption but corruption of the most brazen kind, carried out on a scale almost beyond belief by government insiders, heir cronies and their proxies.The government has been going through the usual pretence of making them disgorge their loot and bringing them to justice.

The pains arising from cutting the phantom subsidy continue and have in some cases grown worse, but relief is in short supply. Meanwhile, “subsidy” payments continue, almost doubling projections.

Nigerians were still figuring out how to cope with this government-made disaster when they were zapped by a natural disaster of almost biblical proportions. From the parched Sahel to the mangrove swamps of Nigeria’s Atlantic coast, flood waters raged and swelled and swallowed everything in their path.

An equal opportunity visitation, the flood waters spared neither the tin shacks of the poor nor the marbled palaces of the wealthy. Even Dr Jonathan’s country home in Otuoke, Bayelsa State, went under water.

For the better part of a week, vehicular traffic from the south could not reach Abuja. And for the same period, millions of Nigerians displaced from their homes and farms were left to fend for themselves. When relief finally came, it was vitiated by poor distribution and corruption. Some families reported getting only a cup of noodles. For many of the displaced persons, life will never be the same again.

And then, there was Boko Haram, carrying its campaign of terror to the heart of the military establishment – the Command and Staff College at Jaji, near Kaduna, after more or less completing what General TY Danjuma called the ‘ Somalianisation” of Northeastern Nigeria.

Just this past week, some 40 gunmen believed to belong in its ranks attacked the Adamawa border town of Maiha, setting alight the police station, the court house, an official residence and freed prisoners in the jail house. It ended the year with a deadly note at the weekend, with the killing of 15 people in a Borno State village.

Kidnappers stepped up their game. Among their trophies: Delta State commissioner for Higher Education, Dr Hope Eghagha; the 82-year-old mother of Finance Minister Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and retired professor of sociology, and the wife of retired Brigadier –General Oluwole Rotimi, lately Nigeria’s ambassador to the United States.

All have returned to their families, but their experience just goes to illustrate how perilous life has become in Nigeria, even for people of privilege.

Amidst these travails, the nation was treated to a harvest of deaths of the prominent and not-so-prominent, and to reprise of the UmaruYar’Adua health saga that is playing even at this writing. Kaduna State Governor Patrick Yakowa and former National Security Adviser General Owoye Azazi were killed in a helicopter crash.

The President’s wife dropped out of sight, reportedly “resting” in Dubai, exhausted after hosting a summit of the African First Ladies Peace Initiative, only to be traced later to a German sanatorium where she was being treated for an undisclosed ailment.

Dame Patience’s prolonged stay led to rumours that she had died. Since her televised return some six weeks ago, she has stayed discreetly on the sideline. And the public is none the wiser about her condition.

Rumours of death have also been swirling around the heads of Enugu State Governor Sullivan Chime and Cross River State Governor Liyel Imoke. Chime left Nigeria last September for treatment of an undisclosed illness and was not heard of or from,until he reportedly issued two weeks ago a statement of condolence to the Yakowa and Azazi families.

Senate Leader, Victor Ndoma-Egba, who claims to have met with Imoke recently in the United States, says Imoke is not sick, much less dead. The governor, he said, was only enjoying a well-earned vacation

But, according to government sources, Imoke actually served notice that he was travelling to the United States to attend to a minor ailment and formally transferred power to the Deputy Governor as required by law.

Chime’s condition remains uncertain, and not even Imoke’s Facebook postings have settled the matter.

Taraba State Governor Danbaba Suntai, who suffered critical injuries when the plane he was piloting crashed near Yola, Adamawa State, last October, is in a bad shape, according to a prominent Nigerian who saw him several weeks ago on his hospital bed in Germany. It is doubtful whether he can return to duty.

A gruesome end-of-year crash near the state capital Lokoja almost claimed the life of Kogi State Governor Idris Wada.He is said to be responding to treatment in Abuja. His aide-de-camp Idris Mohammed was killed on the spot.

But it has not been all doom and gloom.

The government says it has finally taken measures that would help ascertain just how much crude is lifted from Nigeria’s oil fields, some 32 years after the University of Lagos polymath, Professor Ayodele Awojobi, established in testimony before the Irikefe Commission that the barrel being used in Nigerian oil fields was four gallons larger than the standard international barrel.

The economy grew by 5.8 percent, slower than in previous years but still one of the highest rates in the world.The rehabilitated railways, a key element in the Transformation Agenda,ferried 450 newly recruited soldiers from Zaria to Lagos, completing the 613-mile journey in just under 26 hours.

Above all, we have Dr Jonathan’s assurance that, while 2013 may not be annus mirabilis, it will be much better than 2012. Don’t mind those kvetching that he had said the same thing about 2102 at the end of 2011. And don’t mind those complaining that he is slow. He has himself admitted that much

They conveniently forget that our GEJ is also steady. They forget the old saying that “slow and steady wins the race.”

January 1, 2013
”Benito Aderemi, Benito Aderemi …”

It is that time of year again, of peace on earth – as an aspiration, that is – and goodwill toward men or to us men.

Apparently, the precise rendering of that phrase is one of the overarching issues in Christian theology.

About 20 harmattans ago, I worshipped at a Christian service at an Anglican church during which the vicar, probably the most learned venerable gentleman in these parts never to have been translated to the episcopacy, discoursed at great length on the matter.

He had studied and no doubt perfectly understoodthe original Greek text, and was thoroughly dissatisfied that the conflict had not been resolved definitively. The way he proceeded, one was almost led to believe that the laws of gravitation would suddenly cease to operate, and the earth would be plucked from its orbit, depending on whether the phrase in question was translated as goodwill toward men or to us men.

That was many years before Gloria Steinem and the women’s liberation army launched themselves on the popular consciousness in America. And if there was a woman in that Christmas Day congregation who felt that her gender could do with some goodwill as well, she did what was then the proper Nigerian thing: She kept her views severely to herself.

That we are once again in the season of aspirational goodwill was brought home to me the other day by the familiar strains of O Come, All Ye Faithful, wafted across by the harmattan wind from one of the schools that dot our neighbourhood.

The children sang it with the kind of innocence that only the pure at heart can muster. There was not the slightest trace of anxiety about thefuture in their voices, about an economy that seems determined not to recover, despite what anyone may prescribe.

Few of them, I am sure, are aware that this may be the last Christmas at which they can have wheat bread for breakfast. In such an eventuality, history is unlikely to repeat itself. There will be nobody who, on being told that the children are grumbling because they have no bread, will retort: “Let them eat cake.”

For there may be no cake to cut on birthdays or to eat just for the fun of it. And there may be no biscuits or cookies. Those items may vanish from the supermarket shelves at the end of the year when the ban on wheat imports goes into effect.

Wheat imports are being stopped to conserve foreign exchange, and to encourage all of us to structurally adjust our tastes in line with contemporary reality. Besides, there are adequate local substitutes that are just as good as, if not actually better than wheat for making all those foods that children love for their taste and adults cherish because such foods keep them away from the kitchen.

The ban will create an opportunity to present the Nigerian people and indeed the entire world the unique, all-Nigerian bread, made entirely by Nigerians, from Nigerian raw materials, with machines fabricated or adapted entirely by Nigerians.

In the end, instead ofwasting billions of Naira every year importing wheat, the nation stands to generate a great deal of foreign exchange from the export of the all-Nigerian bread for which the entire world has been waiting. If the protagonists of the wheat ban have not put forth its advantages in exactly those terms, it is because they are exceedingly modest people, seldom given to stating the obvious.

Yet, if the nation’s experience in banning undesirable or unaffordable items is any indication, the wheat ban, if not deferred or rescinded, will in operation be a farce. That, at any rate, is what I hope will happen, indeed, what I am substantially sure will happen.

About this time last year, a ban on rice imports was announced, to much editorial and popular acclaim, as part of yet another new beginning, a determined effort to”look inwards” and”to use what we have to get what we need.” Barely five months later, rice imports worth an estimated N40 million surfaced at Lagos port. Who placed the order for it, when, and how, remain mysteries to this day.

It was speculated, when no one could claim ownership, that the rice was part of relief materials being sent to Chad. If so, why was the shipment not identified as such? Why had Chad not stepped forward to claim it?

Part of the shipment later turned up in Benin Republic from where, according to newspaper accounts, it found its way back to Nigeria overland, and in much less contentious circumstances. And so, despite the official ban on rice importation, there has never been so much foreign rice in Nigeria since Shehu Shagari and Umaru Dikko launched their rice armada about six years ago.

Allthis should bring some cheer to wheat bread addicts. There will be bread and cake and biscuits and cookies, for there will be wheat flour somehow. And only an insignificant fraction of it will be produced locally.

As for the all-Nigerian bread that is supposed to replace wheat bread, I frankly cannot vouch for its future, if I were to judge only from personal experience. I recently had the displeasure of having a bite of the stuff made from corn or cassava or a blend of the two. It looked like caked, high-grade animal feed and tasted like sawdust.

It cannot have been the same stuff that was served as lunch to members of the Armed Forces Ruling Council the other day and praised by some of them as being as finger-lickin’ good as the Colonel’s chicken, and just a shade less delicious than caviar.

The pupils in the neighbourhood preparatory school are still where we left them, singing. Had the tune not been so familiar, I would have had to wonder what was going on in there as Benito Aderemi, Benito Aderemi drifted through the harmattan haze. They had completed adoring Him in English and had switched to the Latin. In their charmingly Nigerian minds and mouths, Venite adoremus had become Benito Aderemi.

I wonder whether there was a pupil called Benito Aderemi in that school and what he thought of it all. I wonder what those innocent children would think of the all-Nigerian “bread” if and when it materializes. Who knows but that they may actually come to prefer it to cake, being the “new Nigerians” that members of my generationare not?

They may even come to prefer oil-and-wick lamps to light bulbs, and the town-crier to John Momoh and Hauwa Baba Ahmed on television.

*

The foregoing, slightly abridged, was my column for The Guardian during the week leading to Christmas, 1986.

Today, 26 years later, they are raising tariffs on wheat flour to discourage its importation, and planning ultimately to replace bread as we know it with “cassava bread.” But only Aso Rock has made that culinary transition, and President Goodluck Jonathan seems in no hurry to share its vaunted delights with his compatriots.

They are talking of raising tariffs on rice imports, and are already furiously installing the mills that will process the local crop that is yet to be produced to meet surging demand. Only last week, they added raw sugar to the list of products marked for banning, and vegetable oil is sure to follow soon.

And they are already touting as money in the bank the billions of Naira in foreign exchange they claim will be saved from banning wheat and rice and raw sugar imports.

Meanwhile, nary a thought has been given to fixing the nation’s epileptic petroleum refineries so as to end gasoline imports and the attendant, ever-growing, “subsidies”.

“Transformation” never came more cynically packaged.

December 25, 2012
Omoruyi: A scholar’s lament

Every crusader, every committed protagonist, I suspect, is haunted at one time or another by this thought: When the battle is over, when the cause he served with great dedication and conviction has been won — or lost as the case may be— will his contributions be reciprocated when he falls on hard times, or will he be driven to lament, as Professor David Omo Omoruyi did the other day, that he had been “used and dumped”?

Omoruyi’s political roots go back to the Constituent Assembly that shaped Nigeria’s 1979 Constitution, where he took a leading part in moving the body to insert in the document a clause that would have, in effect, eliminated Chief Obafemi Awolowo from the presidential race.

There was great jubilation in the Constituent Assembly the day that amendment was passed, and Omoruyi was not in the least reticent in claiming a share of the credit. He later entered party politics, on the platform of the National People’s Party. His bid for elective office failed.

But he is probably best known as the director-general of the Centre for Democratic Studies, one of the many institutions the former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, set up to execute a transition programme that the political scientist Richard Joseph has called “one of the most sustained exercises in political chicanery ever visited upon a people.”

Omoruyi can justly claim to be the “father” – in an intellectual sense, that is— of the institution. He had outlined the mandate of such a body in a speech he wrote for Babangida’s delivery as Guest of Honour during the 1989 Guardian Lecture. He and Babangida had been contemporaries in the inaugural Senior Executive Course (1978/79) at the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, in Kuru, near Jos, Plateau State.

The two had forged a thriving friendship, and when Babangida seized power in 1985, he had drafted Omoruyi, then a professor at the University of Benin, into the conclave of political scientists that would wield such enormous influence during the transition and ultimately give political science a bad name.

Omoruyi, I recall, was a prominent presence at the Lecture, and could hardly conceal his delight at hearing his thoughts presented by the President, no less, before the Nigerian policy elite, at what was then perhaps the most significant event on Nigeria’s intellectual calendar.

It was a combative speech. Babangida used the forum to berate those he called “victims of the dogma of varieties of Marxist/Socialist orientation alternating cynically between half-truths and the sparing use of truth.” How many of them, he sniggered, could translate “ideology” into the indigenous languages? How many of these agitators operating from Lagos, Ibadan, Kaduna, Enugu and Benin – curiously, he omitted Ile Ife — know their communities?

As if to warn that such an option was not entirely foreclosed, he invoked a former colonial governor who once threatened to “deport” the “urban agitators” of that era to their villages so they could learn from their roots.

From my vantage position on the dais of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs – I was the master of ceremonies — I could see the radical Ife historian, Dr Segun Osoba, literally squirm in his seat as Babangida took his war against “extremists” to a new level.

So, it came as no surprise when, shortly after the Lecture, Babangida announced that the Federal Government was setting up a Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, with Omoruyi as its director-general. Somewhere along the line, it morphed into Centre for Democratic Studies (CDS).

It went to work in earnest, along the way making accommodation for the turns, the labyrinthine trajectory of the transition programme. Omoruyi doubled as a strategist, advising on policy and writing speeches. By his account, the CDS trained more than 400,000 members of Nigeria’s political class, through a “unique” political education programme it pioneered.

The capstone of the transition was of course the Presidential election of June 12, 1993 which, for reasons he still has not been able to explain 19 years later, Babangida decided to annul.

The CDS had invited and accredited international observers for the election. They had all certified it free and fair and credible. Based on their reports and the reports of the CDS’s field officers, Omoruyi stood resolutely by what was already widely known – that the candidate of the Social Democratic Party, Chief Moshood Abiola, had won decisively.

In vain, and with a growing sense of personal danger, did Omoruyi urge Babangida again and again to accept and abide by the election result. In the encircling gloom, he fled Abuja to his home in Benin City, where unidentified gunmen with murder on their minds attacked him.

He survived the attack, and was evacuated to the United States for treatment. On recovering, he took fellowships at Harvard and Lincoln, and wrote his revealing book, “The Tale of June 12:

The Betrayal of the Democratic Rights of Nigerians (1993).” It was during his sojourn that he was diagnosed with cancer.

The book is unsparing of those Omoruyi called “enemies” of June 12, but it is especially so of Babangida. The entire transition was a ruse. Everything Babangida said in his June 21 1993 broadcast justifying the annulment was false through and through, Babangida knew it.

Arthur Nzeribe and his Association for a Better Nigeria were Babangida’s proxies. The bizarre rulings of the Abuja courts on the election were given with the full knowledge and endorsement of the military president and the Federal Ministry of Justice.

As the scheme unraveled, Omoruyi wrote, Babangida was “more concerned with saving his life and the lives of his family members than with his office and, by extension, the country. There was absolutely no doubt that he was prepared to sacrifice anything, including the transition programme and the country, so long as he saved his life.”

Weighed down by the mental strain the crisis was taking on him, Babangida had said during one anguished moment: “I wish I can see a psychiatrist to examine me. I think something is wrong with me”

And so on and so forth.

After the book’s publication, Omoruyi seemed to have reconciled with Babangida. Omoruyi celebrated the rapprochement, which his son was instrumental in bringing about. If Babangida’s quixotic bid to return to power had not collapsed before it began, Omoruyi would most likely have been in his corner again.

All had been forgiven even if not forgotten, it seemed.

Then, Omoruyi’s cancer returned. Lacking the resources to travel abroad to seek the aggressive medical intervention it demanded, he turned to Babangida for help. Despite his famed large-heartedness, Babangida was not forthcoming. Neither were those friends on whose help Omoruyi thought he could stake a claim. In the end, it was Governor Adams Oshiomhole of his home state, Edo, who came to the rescue.

This sense of abandonment was what provoked Omoruyi’s pained lament that he had been “used and dumped.”

I think he did himself a great injustice by that statement.

They thought they were using him, as they had used and wasted so many of the intellectual courtiers of the era. They did not reckon that he has a mind of his own. Only those who have no minds of their own, those who cannot speak truth to power, get used and dumped.

The reader must judge for himself or herself whether Omoruyi should have returned to Babangida’s camp after what he went through, and after the excoriation of the former military president that perfuses “The Tale of June 12.” Whatever the judgment, we must in this season of goodwill wish him a speedy recovery.

It will certainly be said of David Omo Omoruyi that he served Nigeria devotedly with his learning and organisational ability at a crucial time in the nation’s history and, at great risk to his life, stood firm on principle when he found – rather late in the day, some might say – that those who recruited him into what he believed was a noble enterprise had all along been actuated by base motives.

December 18, 2012
The shame of our prisons

Just when you think you have crossed that threshold where nothing in the Nigerian public sphere can shock you, something jolts you out of your smugness.

No, I am not referring to the N2 billion that President Goodluck Jonathan has asked the National Assembly to appropriate for building a “befitting” banquet hall in Aso Rock, where he can treat his guests to the delights of gourmet cassava bread and fish peppersoup.

I do not see the delusion of grandeur that some mischievous people have insinuated into the project. On the contrary, I see great vision, and transformative genius. If previous residents of Aso Rock possessed these attributes, they would not only have dreamed up the project, they would have executed it at a fraction of what is now projected. Is it ever too late to do that which is befitting?

Nor am I referring to N9 billion being requested to complete the official residence of the Vice President, over and above the N7 billion it was projected to cost. Poor Architect Namadi Sambo! Since taking office, he has been squatting in a cramped guest house that is far less swanky than servants’ quarters tucked in a corner of his expansive compound in Zaria, to say nothing about his living quarters on the grounds.

Instead of praising him for his sacrifice, some so-called analysts have been carping about cost overruns and fiscal recklessness. I commend to them Dr Kingley Mbadiwe’s timeless dictum that those who want greatness must be prepared to finance greatness.

Nor yet do I have at the back of my mind the vast sums being requisitioned for building new residences for the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives. The proper authorities have certified that they cannot guarantee the safety of those principal officers of state, aforementioned, in their present quarters.

That consideration alone should have settled the matter. When they cannot even guarantee the safety of the President and Commander-in-Chief, when they put him in the humiliating position of having to take the salute at the National Day parade behind the fortified walls of Aso Rock, is it any wonder that they cannot guarantee the safety of these lesser officers unless they relocate to fortified quarters?

In any case, shouldn’t such protection come with the territory? Is it not a crucial aspect of national security?

It is, to be sure, galling that Mohammed Abacha, son of the repellent dictator Sani Abacha, is openly laying claim to a chunk of the proceeds from what is without question a colossal theft of the national patrimony, namely the Malabu Oil Field. Too much can never be enough for some people. But again, that is not what is on my mind.

To cut the crap as they say here and come right out with it, what moved me to write this piece is the living conditions of the inmates at the Kuje Medium Security Prisons, in the Abuja Federal Capital Territory reported in this as reported by this newspaper (December 4, 2012, at page 24).

Even without the picture accompanying it, the story is disquieting enough. Of 507 inmates there are at the time of the report, 424 were awaiting trial, a good many of them for 20 years or longer, without ever having their day in court. Many of them do not know whether they will ever be released. The facility was not designed to hold so many inmates

The picture could easily pass for a frame from Rwanda’s national archives of horrors. Absent the debris, it can pass for the mass of bodies washed ashore the tsunamis in South-east Asia and Japan. It evokes memories of the “Black Hole of Calcutta” ginned up by Tory historians to justify a further tightening the imperial chokehold. It conjures up haunting images of conditions on the ships that ferried millions of Africans into enslavement in the so-called New World.

My equanimity was restored somewhat by the finding that the picture was not taken at Kuje Prisons and cannot therefore be presumed to reflect prison conditions there. It is file photo illustrative of just how horrid prison conditions can get, not of conditions in any Nigerian prison.

Still, as the once merely notorious Lagos Boy and now totally infamous PDP chieftain, Chief (Dr) Olabode George will testify from personal experience, a prison is no holiday resort even if you are housed in its luxury wing.

Rare is the prisoner who gets that kind of treatment. Gani Fawehinmi, the departed crusading attorney, certainly never got it. So crowded was the prison cell in which he was once held that inmates had to sleep in a foetal position. If anyone was allowed the luxury of lying on his back, some other inmate would have had to stand throughout the night, assuming there was room even for that.

Wedged in such suffocating juxtaposition for years on end, with no regard for personal hygiene, the inmates are stripped of their humanity. The squalor and degradation breed further degradation and bring out the worst in the inmates.

For persons who have not been convicted of any offence, it is punishment most cruel and unusual. Even for those who might eventually be convicted, the punishment is already more severe than the law could have envisaged.

Even convicted persons have rights. There is thus no reason to abridge the rights of persons awaiting trial. The degradation and dehumanisation to which they are subjected has gone on for far too long.

It is time for the National Human Rights Commission, the National Assembly, religious bodies and civil society groups to take up the plight of our prison inmates with renewed and sustained vigour.

December 11, 2012
A farewell to two legends

What can anyone say now about Justice Kayode Eso and Dr Olusola Saraki, both recently deceased, that has not been said with greater eloquence and insight by persons who knew them closely?

I met Eso only once, at the Third Obafemi Awolowo Foundation Dialogue, in 1995. His paper for the colloquium, which had as its theme: “Nigeria: In Search of Leadership,” was the product of a supple mind versed in the liberal arts, and an erudite piece of expository composition withal.

Eso’s career on the Bench was marked by judicial activism. But it was activism informed by the noblest ideals – to humanise the Constitution, to enlarge rather than constrict human freedom, and to make the law an instrument of citizen empowerment, not subjugation. He never flinched from raising his learned and resonant voice against governmental acts that were inconsistent with the Constitution or were carried out in disregard of the extant law or the rule of law.

Two cases are usually cited in support of this summation.

The first centred on the one Justice Eso himself called “the mystery gun man” in his engaging memoir — the gunman who sneaked into the studios of Radio Nigeria, in Ibadan, and ordered the staffers to replace a taped recording by Premier Ladoke Akintola already on air with another one pouring abuse and scorn on Akintola and his lawless “Demo” Administration.

Wole Soyinka, a militant opponent of the regime, was arrested and arraigned before the Ibadan High Court, in Ibadan, Justice Eso presiding, for the armed intrusion. Prosecution witnesses contradicted themselves on key points. One said the gunman was bearded; another said he was clean-shaven.

Eso dismissed the prosecution’s case. Ordinarily, no judge should be praised for abiding by his oath of office. But Akintola’s Western Nigeria was no ordinary place. A regime that came to power by usurpation preserved itself by the most brazen subversion of law and process. Those who did not fall in line stood to be humiliated and hounded out of the system. And many were the judges who dutifully fell in line.

Not Eso.

For his fidelity to the law and to his judicial oath, Eso was transferred to Akure, then a provincial backwater. Today, we can only speculate how a finding of guilty would have changed the trajectory of the life of the no-longer-mysterious gunman and, for that matter, that of literary history.

The second case stemmed from the outcome of the 1979 Presidential election that was supposed to inaugurate a new democratic order in Nigeria after 13 years of unbroken military rule. To be declared winner, a candidate must secure a majority of the popular vote, plus a majority of the votes cast in at least 12 and two thirds of the nation’s 19 states.

The leading candidate, Shehu Shagari, won the majority of votes in only 12 states. Then, cardsharpers for the NPN, led by Richard Akinjide (SAN), inveigled the electoral umpires into declaring Shagari the victor on the ground that he had won the majority of the votes in 12 states, plus one quarter of the votes in two-thirds of a13th, thus satisfying a literal interpretation of the electoral law that had never been canvassed, namely, that two-thirds of 19 states translates into12 states plus two thirds of a 13th state.

Holding that the law could never contemplate an absurdity, that what the law states is exactly what it means, the Supreme Court nevertheless went on to consecrate a legal absurdity.

By what alchemy could a state with defined geographic borders and a juristic person to boot be transmuted into two-thirds of a state? When was the state divided into three equal parts for the purpose of ascertaining one quarter of the votes cast in two of its three constituent parts? Which law provided for this curious expedient?

These were the questions that rang through Justice Eso’s robust dissent which, Professor Ben Nwabueze said in his majestic 2005 Justice Kayode Eso Lecture at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife, should have been the court’s opinion. Nwabueze’s endorsement is all the more remarkable, considering that he was rooting for Shagari to become president

But Eso’s judicial activism extended beyond these cases.

There was his famous pronouncement that the Lagos State Government committed “executive lawlessness” when it evicted former Biafran leader Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu from his residence while determination of the ownership of the property was pending before the courts. There was the Adewumi case, in which he voided an edict of the military governor of Oyo State on the ground that only a decree of the Federal Military Government could override those portions of the Constitution that were operative.

Whether writing the lead judgment, concurring or dissenting, under military rule no less than under civilian rule, Eso insisted on maintaining a proper balance between the powers assigned to the Federal Government and those granted to the states by the Constitution. He sought to free the courts from technicalities that valued form over substance.

May his great example endure.

Olusola Saraki had already made his name and fortune in Lagos, where he ran a chain of clinics patronized largely by employees of government parastatals and private sector companies before he entered national politics to vie for the NPN presidential ticket in the First Republic. I saw him frequently at Lagos and Abuja airports, but never up close.

His preparation for the career move was vintage Saraki. He set up a state-of-the-art bakery in Ilorin, which flooded the city and environs with its delicious loaves and sold them below cost, undercutting Mafarosere bread, which had been a reliable staple in the community for decades, subsequently forcing it out of business.

The Saraki bakery would collapse not long thereafter, but its proprietor had endeared himself to the public. He dispensed favours small and large to just about anyone who could show up in the right place or at the right time.

He failed in his bid to clinch the NPN ticket for the presidency, but ended up as Senate Majority Leader.More importantly, he helped ensure victory in the Kwara gubernatorial election for his candidate.

Since then, nobody has become governor of Kwara or attained significant federal office on the Kwara quota without his imprimatur.. He would install you in the office, but if you failed to keep your end of the bargain, he took you out. Not for nothing did they call him “the strongman of Kwara politics.” He made and unmade.

Remember Adamu Attah, and Mohammed Alabi Lawal? Ask Shaba Lafiagi.

Only when Saraki sought to install his daughter as state governor, to succeed his son Bukola who had held the office for the two consecutive terms permitted by law did he run into a communal brick wall. Even he could not turn the conservative tide of Kwara politics.

The remarkable thing is that Saraki dominated Kwara politics so comprehensively and for so long without espousing any ideology or even what might be called a para-ideology; without any set of ideas that could be distilled into a framework for good governance and development.

He made no memorable speeches, wrote no books, set up no institutions. His Société Général Bank collapsed in insolvency.

Yet, when Saraki died, Kwara State went into deep mourning, and so did his political family and the countless beneficiaries of his munificence across the nation. The day he was buried, Ilorin and environs stood still. Persons of consequence and aspirants to that status gathered from all over Nigeria to pay their last respects, with the former military president General, Ibrahim Babangida, revealing that he had learned not a few political lessons from Himself the Oloye.

He had little in common with the grassroots; yet he was the quintessential grassroots politico.

Truly, this was a man of the people, and of his clime.

December 4, 2012
Putting those teeming graduates to work

To do a riff on the old mealtime prayer: Some Nigerians have money, but no style. Some of them have style, but no money. For those Nigerians that have both, like our own Aliko Dangote, we give thanks . . .

His wealth is legendary, and has been for the better part of two decades. According to Forbes Magazine, the authority on such matters, he is far and away the wealthiest man in Africa. And he didn’t just stumble into fortune; the money-making gene is locked into his DNA.

Dangote’s mother, so the story goes, was a granddaughter of the legendary Kano businessman, Alhassan Dantata, whose enormous wealth was talked about with awe throughout the length and breath of West Africa. His father was Dantata’s business associate. From that vantage position, Dangote’s father must have acquired an arsenal of money-making skills of his own by osmosis, assuming he did not have them in his DNA to start with.

But the older Dangote was not content to take a chance on osmosis. He married Dantata’s granddaughter, thus ensuring that the money-making gene that runs through that famous family was implanted in his son, Aliko.

The rest is history.

While in primary school in Kano, then home to the confectionery industry in Nigeria employing hundreds of workers, young Aliko would buy up cartons of candy at wholesale price for retail to customers. He had found his calling. At the earliest opportunity, he headed to Al Ahzar University, Cairo, in Egypt, to nurture his talent, majoring in business.

Dangote would transform a trading firm he started when just out of his teens with a business loan of N500, 000 in today’s money into the sprawling empire spanning four countries, and encompassing cement, sugar, and flour, among other products, with assets reckoned in the gazillions. He is set to enter the telecommunications market as a major player.

So, give it to Aliko Dangote: money is not his problem.

But until recently, not much was known about whether he also has what I here call style, for want of a better term. The verdict is now in.

Who but a person of great private wealth and style to match could stipulate a university degree or Higher National Diploma as the basic qualification for being considered for a truck driver in his business empire?

Give him none of your hell-raisers plucked from motor parks in the most notorious parts of town, cursing and swearing at the slightest provocation and oftentimes with no provocation at all, please.

Only those who have been tempered by university education and have attained the cultured sensibility that goes with it should aspire to drive a Dangote truck – but only after earning the coveted post-graduate diploma of the Nigerian Institute of Transport Technology.

If that is not style, I beg to be enlightened.

Nor is that all. Those who survive the winnowing will enjoy pay and conditions compatible with their qualifications, and could under a hire purchase scheme end up owning the very trucks they were hired to drive.

No wonder, then, that applications poured in — some 13,000 as the last count, a good many of them from candidates with master’s degrees and doctorates from reputable universities in fields ranging from archaeology to astrophysics.

So, full marks for style to Dangote. But only for style, not novelty. The prize for novelty in this area belongs to retired Vice Admiral Mike Akhigbe.

Back in the late 1980s, Navy Captain (as he then was) Akhigbe, military governor of Lagos State, had launched with great fanfare a Graduate Bus Drivers Scheme, the goal being to place the municipal transit service in a class of its own.

So, out with all those ‘Oluwole” drivers. Forward with newbreed graduate drivers who could in stalled traffic on the run from Oshodi to Obalende engage passengers in enlightened discourse on the Maastricht Treaty. During break, a dutiful bus driver with an honours degree in mathematics could give commuting students a tutorial on the binomial distribution, and the geometric properties of polyhedrons.

Another driver could during his run parlay the unfolding topography of Lagos into illustrations of the problems of ecological conservation and environmental planning for future students of urban geography on the bus.

It would be a win-win proposition for all concerned. The graduate driver would never get to own the bus, of course. But he would get a salaried job plus the usual benefits, and learn what they never teach in those stuffy universities, namely, that there is great and ennobling dignity in labour. Commuters would get free lectures and tutorials that will transform them into engaged citizens, the type that can move the nation forward.

The scheme took off all right, sputtered on for some six moths and collapsed within a year, remembered now if at all as a monument to misplaced priorities. Its putative gains never materialised. And Akhigbe lost nothing by it, since it was government business.

While the Graduate Bus Drivers Scheme lasted, there was no lack of imitators, potential and actual.

Brigadier-General David Mark, then Minister of Communications, was widely reported to be mulling the idea of a Graduate Telephone Operators Scheme. A panel of experts, it was said, had concluded that the woes of its Telecommunications Division NITEL stemmed primarily from the fact that only the most rudimentary qualifications were required for serving as telephone operators. In many cases, no qualifications were required.

If the telephone operator could engage a caller from Lahore in an informed discussion on the subtlety of Urdu poetry, or a caller from Outer Mongolia on how some edict from the Ying Dynasty sowed the seeds of its present subjugation — if an operator could do these things and much more while putting callers on hold, NITEL’s fortunes would grow dramatically, the experts said.

Unfortunately, the proposal never got off the ground. Contemplating NITEL’s fate today, the authorities must be regretting that they never saw it through.

About the same time, the Better Women were devising an innovative scheme of their own. Scandalised by the quality of service they were getting from their houseboys and housemaids, they were reported to have come up with the idea off setting up a Graduate Housemaids and Houseboys Scheme that would be entrenched in the Constitution. When not doing cleaning house, those recruited under the scheme could help the children with their homework.

Initially, entry would be restricted to holders of bachelor’s degrees with First Class Honours. If no appreciable quality in service resulted, the position would then be opened up to applicants with higher degrees.

The project went the way of the Better Life Programme. No novelty there, and the money wasn’t theirs. But who can deny that the Better Women had a style that was all theirs?

With Aliko Dangote’s Graduate Bus Drivers Scheme now up and running, interest in some variation thereof is surging. The Jonathan Administration, I gather, is already studying how such schemes can be incorporated into the Transformative Agenda to stem the country’s daunting employment crisis.

The possibilities are endless, Mr President.

November 27, 2012
Annals of concupiscence

This past fortnight, sex has been roiling the waters on both sides of the North Atlantic, or the pond, as that body of water is often called here, with a touch of lyricism.

That conflation was first accorded editorial notice in 1991, during this space’s incarnation in Rutam House

Back then, in Britain, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Alan Green, was caught, not for the first time, chatting up a woman of the night in a sleazy London neighhbourhood. Persuaded that he could not have been discussing the weather nor asking for directions to the nearest house of prayer, the police closed in and arrested him.

Suddenly, he had a great career behind him.

In the United States, it came to light that the swinging televangelist Jimmy Swaggert ritually prepared himself for the next rousing revival by procuring prostitutes to indulge his kinkiest adolescent fantasies. His congregation shrank dramatically, and the funds that had sustained his opulent lifestyle dried up.

The following year, in 1992, another conflation of that kind occurred on both sides of the pond, and was duly noted in the Rutam House space. The leader of the Liberal Party, Paddy Ashdown, outed himself when documents detailing his sexacapes with a young woman were stolen from his solicitor’s office. The woman, bless her discreet British heart, refused to sell her story to the tabloid press and promptly alerted Ashdown, who then came clean.

Other than seeing his surname recast as Pantsdown, Ashdown suffered no serious damage from the affair.

Meanwhile, in America, Bill Clinton, front-runner for the presidential ticket of the Democratic Party, saw his dream almost foundering in the wake of revelations by Gennifer Flowers that the twain had carried out a passionate love affair for a decade, no less.

Clinton – or “Slick Willie” as his detractors called him— survived Ms Flowers, clinched the race, and survived Monica Lewinsky on his way to becoming one of the most accomplished American presidents, and one of the most remarkable statesmen of our time.

Today, the names in the news are bigger than all the characters named above except Clinton, and the consequences more far-reaching.

Who would have thought that the world’s most reputable news organisation, the BBC (or the Beeb as they call it fondly in the UK), exemplar of all that is prim and proper and of good report, would be rocked to its foundations by sex, of all things.

Yet, that is what has happened.

Following whispers that its iconic entertainment producer Jimmy Savile who died last year had sexually exploited his ardent young fans and artistes, the BBC began an investigation, then inexplicably dropped it. Its rival, ITN took up the matter, and confirmed the whispers with a mountain of evidence.

Suddenly the BBC found itself mired in and desperately trying to fend off allegations of a cover-up. When it went on to identify a senior political figure, wrongly, with sexual abuse of minors, it found itself in tabloid territory not unlike that previously occupied by Rupert Murdoch’s scurrilous News of the World, now late and unlamented.

Its director-general of only 54 days, George Entwhistle, resigned in double quick time. His predecessor Mark Thompson, who was due to resume work in the United States as chief executive of The New York Times, found himself in an uncomfortable spotlight, as did his new employers. Was he the right person for the job?

Influential but not disinterested figures in rival networks called for the dissolution of the BBC Trust and breaking up of its news and current affairs operation.

“No sex, please. We are British.” So goes the saying. But this past fortnight, the Savile sex abuse scandal and its ever-widening ramifications have dominated the front pages and the headlines in the British press.

The treatment has been characteristically sedate, however; almost clinical. Those looking for titillation will be disappointed. The news is rooted in the sex scandal. But it also examines painfully the BBC’s departure from its own matchless professional standards in the handling of the investigations.

The abuses are tragic indeed. But it would be sad if they were to be compounded by measures that could further erode that mix of autonomy and integrity and professionalism that has made the BBC the global gold standard in broadcast news and programming.

On the other side of the pond, the sex scandal involving the retired four-star general and lately director of the CIA, David Petraeus, 54, and his winsome biographer who was literally as well figuratively embedded with him for the better part of a year in Iran and Afghanistan virtually chased the depredations of Hurricane Sandy and the fallout from the U.S. presidential election off the front pages and the headlines.

It was a scandal that almost didn’t break. If the biographer had just made the most of the dalliance, the affair might not have come to light. But Paula Broadwell, 40, an Army reservist and aspiring academic, grew territorial, to the point of sending threatening e-mails to another woman she thought was competing for the general’s attention. That woman, described as a “socialite”, referred the matter to the FBI. The FBI found a treasure trove of the compromising communication, turned over the stuff to the CIA, which confronted its boss with the material, whereupon he decided to resign.

In retrospect, it is something of a surprise that the scandal did not break much sooner. For their private communications, Petraeus and his biographer used nothing more discreet than open e-mail. It was almost as if they were daring the usual intruders to find them out.

This, at any rate, is the story in outline. But it is far more complicated. The “socialite” has turned out to be an influence peddler who is almost drowning in debt. The officer who discovered the compromising e-mails, it has since emerged, may not be disinterested investigator; he too has his eye on some collateral romance, if not career advancement.

Broadwell, wife of a psychiatrist and mother of two children, it has turned out, is no biographer. She had hired a ghost writer for the book, according to some reviewers a fawning hagiography, with the suggestive title “All In . . . The Education of General David Petraeus. Its subject, previously adored by the media as the quintessential soldier and scholar and statesman rolled into one is now being cast as a phony general who presided over phony ways in Iraq and Afghanistan. For now, his Princeton doctorate has been spared.

And GOP legislators, still reeling from the drubbing their feckless candidate Mitt Romney was handed in the recent presidential elections, quickly and predictably insinuated a political conspiracy into the whole thing

Petraeus, they are claiming, was pushed to resign by the White House, to avoid being subpoenaed by Congress to testify on the attack on the United States Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in which the American ambassador and three officials were killed – testimony the legislators said, would show conclusively that the White House had been less than forthright on the issue.

This being America, the most salient elements of news – sex, beauty, power, ambition, and a hint of conspiracy – will keep this scandal in the news for quite a while.

My American friends and colleagues have been asking me how the Petraeus story would have played in Nigeria.

I tell them that if it ever surfaced, it would have been the stuff of tawdry gossip and salacious speculation for no more than a week. As a general rule, we leave the business of throwing stones to those who are without sin.

November 20, 2012