Category: Olatunji Dare

Seventeen years and six days ago today, on August 19, 1993, as military president Ibrahim Babangida was flailing and threshing for a formula that would seal his annulment of the 1993 presidential election and keep him in office and in power, a frontline member of the Nigerian Senate made the following remarks in the course of a debate.

“I quote:

‘Distinguished Senators, we have a situation today that suggests that the abortion of June 12 election is another coup d’état.  My question is, when are we going to stop tolerating injustices, coups, and abuse by people on whom we have invested much resources – the public funds of this country? 

‘The highest portion of Nigeria’s budgets since independence is being invested on the military, from their barracks to the ammunition provided for them and up to their uniforms. The oath of office taken by the military is to protect the citizens and the sovereignty of this country. 

‘Should we therefore continue to tolerate the situation where the military turn that investment against us, to abuse and restrict and to prevent justice taking place? 

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‘Yes, it is true that we have a crisis but, to every action, there is a reaction.  This is a self-inflicted crisis because, without the abortion or annulment of the June 12 election, there would be no crisis like this. 

‘We have a government that made laws and abused its own laws.  Therefore, the present military administration by virtue of the abrogation and violation of its own decree has committed a crime . . .’

End of quote.

“The Senator who uttered these historic and courageous words, who insisted on justice and refused to take refuge in opportunist compromise, the Senator who defended the sovereign right of the Nigerian peoples to elect their own rulers, is  our Chief Presenter, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, Emeritus Governor of Lagos State, and a pillar of the coalition of democrats and progressives.

“The book is dedicated to the memory of Bashorun Moshood Abiola, winner of the historic June 12 1993 presidential election, who would have been 73 years old today, August 24, 2010, and to “The Spirit of June 12.”

“What do I mean by “the Spirit of June 12?”

“As I see it, the Spirit of June 12 is the spirit of service and sacrifice.  It exalts keeping faith with the sovereign electorate over and above considerations of personal gain and comfort, over self-preservation even. 

“That was the spirit that impelled Bashorun Abiola to hold fast to his historic mandate even when the cost of doing so was nothing less than his freedom and possibly his life, to reject compromises that would have made a mockery of the right of the people to elect their own rulers.

“It was the spirit that moved Kudirat Abiola to carry on the struggle long after Bashorun Abiola had been taken into captivity, and for which she paid the ultimate price.

“It is the spirit that has sustained the discreetly but deeply engaged members of the Abiola household – Dr Doyin Abiola and Hajiya Bisi Abiola.  That same spirit animates Hafsat Abiola, who lost her mother to Abacha’s assassins when she was still in her teens, and her father to the machinations of the “international community” and their local proxies well before she could settle into a life of her own.

“Dr Doyin Abiola is here, but Hafsat could not be with us today.  Please join me in saluting their inspiring example.

“The Spirit of June 12 is the spirit of firm resolve, of never counting the cost, of going the distance, the spirit of resistance to, and defiance of, arbitrary power. 

“It was the spirit that sustained many in our midst today and thousands across the country even as they were jailed, tortured, dispossessed, and subjected to all manner of privations, just because they stood up for justice, for democracy, and for the rule of law. 

“It was the spirit that impelled hundreds of our politically engaged compatriots to abandon kith and kin and home and hearth to move to distant, not always welcoming lands, there to continue the struggle for justice in their homeland.

“The June 12 Spirit reaches out and is not opposed to compromise.  But it insists that compromise for the sake of compromise is barren, and that fundamental principles must not be sacrificed at the altar of compromise.

“The June 12 Spirit holds that fundamental rights belong to all; that they cannot be saved for some and denied to others.  Thus, it defends those rights without equivocation wherever it finds them assaulted, even if, or rather, especially when the victims are sworn enemies of the June 12 Spirit.

“It is the Spirit of June 12 that has kept alive, against formidable odds, the long, dogged struggle to reclaim the stolen mandate of the people in Osun, and Ekiti; it contributed significantly to the restoration of the popular mandate in Edo and Ondo.

“The Spirit of June 12 is not merely about the struggle for democracy and justice, however.  In a practical sense, it is also about the delivery of goods and services to the public.  It is about improving the human condition.  In this practical dimension of the June 12 Spirit, our Chief Host, Governor Babatunde Fashola, SAN, stands out as an exemplar.

“The June 12 Spirit enjoins us to build bridges of understanding across Nigeria;         it transcends the divisions of tribe and tongue and creed and class; it enjoins us to forgive and summons us to find in ourselves that charity which is the surest foundation for a just society.

“But the Spirit of June 12 does not enjoin us to forget; indeed, it cannot enjoin us to forget.  Individuals and political communities and indeed nations put their very existence at risk when they forget. This fundamental truth is embedded in the names that many communities across Nigeria bestow on infants – names that translate into “forgetting is dangerous.”

“Bashorun Abiola breathed and lived the Spirit of June 12 in his private and public life. 

“Today, that Spirit finds probably its most robust expression in the tireless exertions, at home and abroad, of our Chief Presenter, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu.

“Finally, a few words about the book.  And here, I would like to return to the subject of forgetting, or rather, not forgetting.

“Every society cherishes its stories.  All of us – adults, no less than children, enjoy listening to those stories.  The story is our vehicle for conducting surveillance of the environment, transmitting the cultural heritage, and entertaining ourselves.

“It is the story that helps us locate where we came from when we have strayed.

Through the story, we draw inspiration from the past to prepare for the struggles ahead.  From it, we learn of the blunders of bygone years, even if we are sometimes  doomed to repeat them.

“That is the reason for this book – to awaken memory, to restore that which

has been forgotten, in the hope of perhaps helping to stave off a debacle even more tragic than the one I have tried to chronicle within its covers.”

The foregoing comprised my remarks at the public presentation of my book Diary of a Debacle: Tracking Nigeria’s Failed Democratic Transition (1989-1994), at the MUSON Centre, Lagos, on August 24, 2010.

What a delicious irony that Nigerians now celebrate June 12 as Democracy Day, some three decades after Clement Akpamgbo, the attorney-general and backroom legal fixer in Babangida’s lawless military regime, warned darkly that invoking it for any reason and in any context would be construed as a treasonable felony.

And how fitting that on the 30th anniversary of the capricious annulment of the 1993 presidential election, the person who most emblematizes the Spirit of June 12, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is the President of Nigeria and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.

For the first time in Nigeria’s history, an authentic progressive and a “June Twelver” is at the helm. May the Spirit of June 12, the Spirit that animated the formation of the ruling All Progressives Congress and pervaded Tinubu’s presidential campaign – may the Spirit of June 12 at its fullest be his guide and his anchor.

The day they said would never come has passed, and  the event they said would never take place was staged in a grand style.  On May 29, Bola  Ahmed Tinubu was inaugurated as Nigeria’s 16th president.

He was not, as the counter-social media and its denizens had predicted, seized as he arrived at the parade ground and whisked to prison to await the grim fate reserved for grand impostors, to be replaced at the seat of honor by Peter Obi, who had placed third in the presidential election, to the triumphal chants of the Obedient.

He did not collapse halfway through the ceremony, as had been bruited by those who wagered that no amount of steroids pumped into his bloodstream from vials sewn into the sleeve of his buba could keep him on his feet for more than one hour. 

Even at his best, you could never accuse him of crisp delivery.  But in the event, it was nothing near the mumbo jumbo they had primed their followers to expect.

But the Inauguration had been boobytrapped all the same by the collective vacillation, the irresolute posturing and, it has to be said, the complicity of the leaders who had ruled Nigeria for roughly four decades. 

I am of course talking about what has come to be known as the oil subsidy.

Failure to address it forthrightly over the years had driven the economy to the edge of collapse.  Papering it over or resorting to another cosmetic fix was no longer an option, Tinubu said in his Inaugural Address, adding tersely that the subsidy was ended.

Since then, his Administration has been grappling with the dislocations resulting directly from the announcement.  The weeks ahead will most likely witness more of the same.  There will be no honeymoon for the new government.

For the past 38 years or so, virtually every measure trumpeted as a solution to the instability in the supply and pricing of gasoline has turned out to be a gigantic swindle.

The epic swindle began, like most swindles in Nigeria’s recent history, during the era of the self-designated military president, General Ibrahim Babangida.    The country was set to take a loan from the IMF, and as a sop to that latter-day Cerberus, the currency was to be devalued, import restrictions were to be lifted, and anything remotely suggestive of a subsidy was to be abolished immediately.  “Market forces” had to govern every transaction.

Gasoline came to be identified as the soft underbelly of the Nigerian economy. It was grossly underpriced, they said, because it was heavily subsidized, with the pernicious result that a gallon of gasoline cost less than a bottle of soda or milk.  One image that clings in my memory of that time is of the engaging correspondent Chris Anyanwu, later a Senator, peddling that line night after night on national television in her smooth, silky delivery.

What subsidy?

The difference between the price of a gallon of gasoline in Lagos and the same gallon of petrol in Fargo, North Dakota, they said.

Wasn’t that what economists call an opportunity cost? If the cost of getting a gallon of gasoline to the pump exceeded the retail price, you could perhaps talk about a subsidy. What were the actual costs?  And whatever happened to comparative advantage and all that if Nigerians were to pay for gasoline produced on their soil the same thing as consumers half a world away were paying for it? 

Was the whole thing not at bottom a tax?

Shifting gears, they said gasoline was so cheap that it was being mindlessly wasted.

How?  Were Nigerians using it to wash their hands after a meal, or to prepare their vegetable stew in place of regular cooking oil, or as a beverage to entertain their guests, since it was so much cheaper than Coca-Cola?

Shifting gears still, they said because gasoline was so cheap in Nigeria, it was being smuggled to neighbouring countries to reap windfall profits.

Now, you could not do that on any meaningful scale by lugging 50-litre petrol cans through bush paths.  Only sea-worthy vessels or motorised tankers driving on paved roads across international frontiers manned by immigration and customs and security officials had that capability.  Those vehicles had to be owned or controlled by political and military officials with guaranteed access to refined petroleum products.

Why was it, then, that not one of those vehicles had been arrested and charged with this illegal traffick, only a few stragglers transporting smuggled gasoline cans in leaky dugout canoes or in rickety trucks across the border?

And why make genuine, honest-to-goodness consumers pay for the sins of syndicated smugglers?

Gasoline was so cheap, they piled on, that it was being adulterated.  When substituted for kerosene in hurricane lamps and stoves, the adulterated mixture caused horrific explosions that maimed and sometimes killed entire families.

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Why not make kerosene cheaper than gasoline, then?  In any case, why would anyone adulterate a product that was already obscenely cheap?  Whoever heard of adulterated zinc?

From the funds to be realised from ending a subsidy, the existence of which was never proven, new oil refineries would be built not merely to satisfy growing domestic consumption but also for export, to generate foreign exchange.  Those long, snaking lines at filling stations would be things of the past, they said.

Whether framed as “correct pricing” or “de-regulation” or under any other label, this has been the standard litany, with a few variations here and there, whenever the government has needed to raise revenues during the last three decades.

The more they cut the alleged subsidy, the more remained to be cut.  It reminded one of what they said of the whale that was beached in Lagos in the early 60s that the more they hacked away at the carcass, the more remained to be hacked.

At every hint of economic decline, gasoline pricing has been the first resort and quite often the  only one. The “subsidy” had to be cut or abolished; if not the economy would collapse.  Humongous figures are conjured up as revenues that will accrue to the exchequer from cutting the alleged     subsidies.

Committees are set up to manage the projected cash inflow and to ensure it is put to the most judicious use.  “Palliatives” to cushion the average person from comprehensive price increases that will follow are announced.

Those measures sprang more from panic than from sound reasoning.  Within a year, the “mass transit” buses running on subsidized fuel and charging subsidized  fares vanish from the roads.  A striking project here, a thriving scheme there, but much of the money went the way of other   state money — to satisfy the awoof proclivities of officials high and low and their confederates.

The one thing they never built was a new oil refinery.

Rather, they patched up the old refineries at costs that defy all reason.  They functioned fitfully at best.   Periodic Turn-Around Maintenance (TAM) gulped vast sums of money, but only the  fortunes of the contractors and the supervising officials actually got turned around

When the refineries produced at all, their output was shipped several miles from the loading platform and returned as imported fuel to reap windfall profits in subsidy reimbursements for an untouchable criminal syndicate.

Organised labour and civil society rouse themselves, vowing that the cuts will not  pass. The government says there is no going back.  The scene is set for a titanic struggle between an irresistible force and an immovable object. 

Government yields a little ground, and so does organised labour, as well as civil society. A prolonged crisis is averted, but the seed of future conflict continues to germinate, undisturbed, until the subsidy phantom stirs again.

That, in sum, is the sad history of attempts to end a subsidy that has been underwriting the theft of 40 percent of Nigeria’s oil production for decades.  The best time to end it, even some of the stoutest protagonists of a genuine subsidy are saying, is now, before the Administration gets bogged down by other issues.

Ending it is not going to be easy; certainly not for a government with the most progressive credentials in Nigeria’s history.  It cannot proceed on the facile calculation that only the elite who operate fleets of gas-guzzling vehicles have been profiting from the so-called subsidy.  They can absorb the steep price increases that will likely result from ending the subsidy.

Owners of capital, on the other hand, will pass the increase that will likely result from on to the general public, those eking out a marginal existence form one day to the next.  This public  must be  cushioned from the impact, which will cut across every aspect daily living – be it the education of their children, food, clothing, rent, cooking, transportation, lighting, health care even at its most rudimentary, and child care. 

The usual “palliatives” will not do.  The protections will have to be substantial, well-targeted, and delivered transparently.

But what is to be done about those who corruptly appropriated the national patrimony for decades and brought the economy to the edge of ruin through syndicated scams?  Should they not covenant to hand back quietly to the public treasury a negotiated but equitable fraction of their documented rip-off or face prosecution to the fullest extent of the law.

This teachable moment must not be wasted.

Like the proverbial bad coin, former British prime minister Tony Blair – Phony Tony and Tony,  to millions of his compatriots – surfaced in Abuja last week, in nearly the same circumstances as he had done exactly eight years earlier

Then, Blair was in a curious failure of judgment that almost ruined the epochal event, invited as keynote speaker at ceremonies to herald the inauguration of Muhammadu Buhari as Nigeria’s 15th president.

On the eve of his scheduled outing, he scurried out of Nigeria, and his one-time secretary of state and ideological soulmate, Peter Mandelson, was ferried in to take his place.         

Last week, he hustled his way into Abuja, wangled an audience and a photo opportunity with President-elect (as he then was) Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, and offered gratuitously to help the in-coming administration launch Nigeria on the path of democratic governance and development at home, and as a respectable international actor

Granting Blair an audience was a misstep in an otherwise finely calibrated countdown to the inauguration that culminated in yesterday’s inspiring rite of renewal.  He has no core convictions.  He has no political or moral capital that he can deploy for Nigeria’s benefit.  President Bola Tinubu and his administration must not allow him to indulge in that pretence again.

I was reminded the other day that it was my column for May 19, 2015, “An unwelcome visitor,” that scuttled Blair’s scheduled presentation before Buhari’s first inauguration.            I would like to take the liberty to draw substantially on it for this submission.

Abuja is one of the few capitals where Tony Blair can still count on a polite welcome.  His 2015 visit was the third in just a little over four years.

In February 2010, his hands still wet with the blood of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis liberated from this world and from their relations in a military invasion that he helped gin up with a raft of lies, he was invited – along with fellow war criminals former U.S. president George W. Bush and his former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice – by one newspaper proprietor basking in the illusion of influence and affluence to speak at a ceremony in Abuja purportedly honouring distinguished Nigerians past and present.

Blair even got to meet acting President Goodluck Jonathan, as he then was, to discuss “matters of mutual interest” between Nigeria and Britain, and his desire to keep that relationship strong.

He was back nine months later, declaiming with the unctuousness that becomes him so well that the “international community” was nursing a great deal of interest and excitement in Nigeria’s elections scheduled for 2011.

More to the point of his new career as a money-grubbing influence peddler, he declared, with JP Morgan chief executive officer Jamie Damon in tow, that the global financial giant’s decision to upgrade its Nigerian office to a full branch was a demonstration of confidence in Nigeria and in President Jonathan’s effort to transform the economy.

Shortly after that visit, JPMorgan bagged a huge chunk of Nigeria’s controversial Sovereign Wealth Fund, even as it recorded huge losses resulting from reckless transactions.

Blair’s 2015 visit was no accident.  It was designed to secure future access in the Buhari dispensation for the major players in international high finance, for which he is a well-paid lobbyist.

It was entirely in character that Blair should have presumed at every stop to speak for the “international community,” though he held no public office and was in fact a hugely discredited politician who, in a just world, should be in prison serving time for war crimes

So resented and discredited had he become at the end of his record tenure as prime minister that he could not embark on a farewell tour of Britain, where he was sure to be greeted with shouts of “Liar, Liar” and pelted with tomatoes and eggs. They even re-christened him BLIAR, And so, he went instead to bid farewell to British troops in Basra, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan.

Blair’s quest to become president of the European Council ended in humiliation. The British Government withdrew its backing when it became clear that member-states wanted nothing to do with him.  The Middle East for which Blair was designated international mediator has rarely witnessed greater turmoil.

When Blair went to testify before the Chilcot Inquiry into how the UK entered the unholy alliance that invaded, occupied, and destroyed Iraq, he had to be smuggled into the Committee Room through a back door, to save him from the wrath of protesters.

This was not the way the script was supposed to end for the youngest prime minister  of the UK since 1812, the skilled politician who rescued Britain from the exhausted Tories, redefined its place in world politics and led his Labour Party to three back-to-back election victories.  He seemed destined for greatness.

But hubris and delusion soon set in, and glory turned to ashes.

Blair seized the  September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States as lifetime opportunity to project himself as a statesman of global reckoning.  The United States would not fight alone, he assured Americans.  Britain would stand “shoulder to shoulder” with America as it confronted the terrorist threat.

From then on Blair made it his business to confect a casus belli, just in case the United States could not come up with a compelling one.  First, he published a dossier on what he said was Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-production programme.  It was a “dodgy” document, copied in part from a sophomoric doctoral dissertation that an American university had rejected.

Next, he put it out that Iraq had sought to buy uranium cake from Niger Republic.  The document detailing the alleged transaction was a transparent forgery.  The minister who purportedly signed on behalf of the Niger Government had left office at least eight years earlier.   It is as if Federal Government documents dated May 2014 were to surface today bearing the signature of Sule Lamido as Nigeria’s foreign minister.

Blair also claimed, again falsely, that Iraq had developed nuclear weapons that could be assembled and deployed for combat within 45 minutes — the same Iraq that could not shoot down a single plane from the armada that had been patrolling its air space and since the end of the Gulf war and bombing military and non-military assets at will.

The United States quickly latched on to the document as proof that its homeland was imperiled, and that it could not afford to have its skies darkened by a mushroom cloud before striking.

For his domestic audience, Blair declared that Iraq had developed missiles capable of hitting  British forces in Cyprus. Why Iraq would want to attack British troops that had been garrisoned in  Cyprus since the 1970s he never explained.

So determined was Blair to take Britain to war that even when Bush offered him a chance to change course, fearing that the British parliament might not share America’s enthusiasm for war, Blair deployed his forensic skills to stay the course, with no consideration for the massive anti-war demonstrations in London and around the world.

Whenever he prefaces a statement with “to be perfectly honest” or “to be absolutely candid,” which he does very often, you could be sure that he was going to zap you with a falsehood, a barefaced lie.  He did just that when he claimed in a debate in the           House of Commons that “weapons of mass destruction” would be found in Iraq within two weeks.

Contrived earnestness, evangelical fervor, and the ability to tell a blatant lie with a straight face: That is the quintessence of Tony Blair.

No weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq.  But by the time British forces pulled out, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had been killed.  Hundreds of thousands more had been displaced, and Iraq lay in ruins.  Hundreds of British soldiers had also been killed – all for a lie.

Blair says he is not sorry for that lie because other countries – Australia is the example he and George W Bush frequently cited – also believed it.  True, Britannia    no longer rules the waves.  But when did Britain become just another country?

Germany did not believe it.  France did not believe it  China did not believe it.  Russia did not believe it.

Blair compounds his war crimes each time he asserts that removing Saddam from power was “the right thing to do.”  But at what cost?

The hundreds of thousands of Iraqis whom Blair’s warmongering removed from this world, and the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis it turned into refugees or otherwise brought to ruin have no place in Blair’s consciousness.

He condoned or turned a blind eye to torture.  To head off trials that would have embarrassed the authorities, the British Government in 2011 paid out millions of pounds to persons tortured by officials in parts of Iraq occupied by British forces.

No wonder, then, that when Blair offered to donate the earnings from his memoir to the families of British troops killed or wounded in Iraq, they rejected it angrily, calling it “blood money.”

In a just world, Tony Blair would be serving a long jail term – my aversion to capital punishment is total and unconditional, unlike his – for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In the meantime, the Federal Government and other institutions must stop inflicting him on the Nigerian public.

I have come by several jibes on idealism but the most provocative to date was Mecken’s slur that an idealist is one who concludes that a rose makes a better soup than a cabbage simply because it smells better.

In essence, fragrant idealism thrives as Utopia. It wholly diminishes if unaccompanied by the preconditions essential to its actualisation.

Without grit, the most radiant ideal dims to smut; flaming and curling, it sears with promise until it scalds the heart of the idealist, leaving him with a charred psyche.

The best idealism is mined inside out, deep down in the trenches. It surpasses the splendour of pontification or a snobbish purge of the mind. Thus to attain actual relevance under the incoming dispensation, the Nigerian idealist must descend from his arrogant perch and hop into primaeval mud.

Torrid idealism, alone, could never demolish the castle gates of malfeasance ingrained in the Nigerian psyche. Our multiplex of corruption is celebrated and worshipped by several raptorial divides.

The Nigerian public office is not for the faint-hearted; treasury looters, paedophiles, rapists, advance-fee fraudsters, ex-convicts, and thugs vie for public office – often against the patriot.

All is fair in pursuit of power thus politicians sponsor carnage and hate speech in pursuit of public office. At their victory or defeat, they recruit all shades of characters – intellectuals inclusive – to condemn their defeat or celebrate their victory.

To such end, a few privileged idealists assume the role of courtiers; to validate power in unworthy hands, they create a pseudo-reality plausible enough to redefine truth and distort facts. It is instructive, for instance, that a good many of them are still egging on Labour Party’s ‘obidients’ that Peter Obi is set to grab power through the trapdoor of the electoral court, even though he came a distant third to the winner of the February 25 election, President-elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

Outside the corridors of power, they plot pseudo-events and pretend to speak for the people. They claim to work for the country’s good but they are performers whose chief intent is to make money. Conflict is their treasure trove. Call them political profiteers or merchants of misery.

In the corridors of power, they shamelessly parrot official propaganda, polluting public discourse with sycophancy, and doublespeak, among other behavioural toxins. 

Government and corporations allow courtiers into their inner circles imbuing them with instant celebrity but as Saul points out, no class of courtiers, from the eunuchs behind Manchus in the 19th century to the Baghdad caliphs of the Abbasid caliphate, has ever transformed into a responsible and socially productive class.

Courtiers are, ultimately, political degenerates. They are intellectual hooligans committing the violence of pretence against Nigeria and her people. When they claim to be pro-citizenry, they carry on like “political hobbyists,” often lending their ‘voices’ to front-burner issues, and sponsoring hashtags to attain clout.

There is little difference between them and the proverbial fawning page, who plays smooth flatterer and thug to both the government and citizenry-herd, twisting and turning with changing circumstances.

They are deucedly reactive, a spectacle of submission and ideological sodomy, their words and deeds boom as a cloying mime of irate mobs, corrupt politicians, and corporations’ reprobate wiles.

Eitan Hersh, Associate professor of political science at Tufts University identifies courtiers as “political hobbyists,” and highlights their perfect contrast in the person and politics of Querys Martias. The Dominican immigrant, resident in Haverhill, United States, presents a rare exemplar to supposedly educated eggheads.

For Matias, politics isn’t just a hobby. In her day job, she is a bus monitor for a special-needs school. In her evenings, she amasses power. By leading a group called the Latino Coalition (LC) in Haverhill, she unites the Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and Central Americans who together make up about 20 per cent of Haverhill. The coalition gets out the vote during elections, but it does much more than that, notes Hersh.

The coalition once met with the Haverhill representative in Congress and asked for regular, Spanish-speaking office hours for its community. It advocates for immigration reform and federal assistance in affordable housing. The coalition has also met with the mayor, the school superintendent, and the police department requesting more Latinos in city jobs and on city boards.

Matias’ political participation is strategic; the 65-year-old influences governance to the benefit of her community. Under her leadership, the coalition operates with discipline, combining electoral strategies with policy advocacy under her leadership.

Unlike Matias, Nigeria’s college-educated intellectuals personify Hersh’s political hobbyist stereotype. They are disproportionately educated, flaunting several awards, titles, and postgraduate degrees.

They espouse politics of the soapbox; a wanton game in which they debate Nigeria’s big issues on abstract merits – often mouthing off their “superior” logic or sounding off for clout in social space, at events sponsored by meddlesome foreign consulates or on government-sponsored think tanks.

Their assemblage thrives on pseudo-realism, their ability to propound and market spurious experience. In reality, they are toxic to politics and harmful to the country. 

Nigeria would do better if her eggheads redirected political energy to serve the people. For instance, they could start at the grassroots, where government presence is non-existent. 

To re-establish relevance and repair integrity, Nigeria’s idealists, revolutionary heroes, youth leaders, or whatever other labels they answer to, must detach from ideological voyeurism and fault-finding – a tactic of assault and defence that eventually becomes their nemesis and tomb.

They must seek to empower people. For so long, they have united to market cunning and rhetoric, for and against selfish segments of the political class; it’s about time they united in the interest of the electorate.

Grassroots politics thrives on empowerment; helping imperilled peasant farming communities defeat desert encroachment, insecurity, and flooding; improving fringe communities’ access to health care, electricity, and good roads, and provision of soft loans to unemployed youths, SMEs, and agricultural start-ups – all these can be championed and facilitated by the social critic and idealist. The latter would foster societal progress in no small measure by championing such initiatives and drawing attention to the plight of society’s underprivileged.

These could be achieved by influencing real political power. Nigeria’s eggheads could seek collaboration in modest and large organisations to meet the immediate and long-term needs of the people. Then, when an election dawns, the community would show up. Call it dividends of their investment in the people’s emotional bank account.

Some would call it strategic citizenship. It’s pragmatic, humane, and real politics. It’s the kind of engagement that public intellectuals must perform to give substance to their professed clout.

And it’s precisely the kind of politicking that helps the electorate shun the tokens and humiliating food packs, often handed out by the political class in exchange for their votes, at election time.

If we humanely engage with the people, we might attain noble repute with the grassroots and the grudging respect of the political class. We might assume a prideful place in the pantheon of Nigeria’s finest patriots and statesmen.

True, fancy repute and ghostly online clout may earn us money in the short run but we shall lose it all in the long run to the same system that taught us to be soulless hobbyists.

We have used fiery intellect and the soapbox as mirrors to reflect society’s hypocrisy, moral corruption, and injustice.

It’s about time we walked our talk in the interest of Nigeria and the populace

High-profile arrests by the EFCC in the investigation of official corruption in Nigeria have followed a script that has become wearisomely familiar.  I need cite no specific instances.  The attentive reader can doubtless come up with several that make the point unambiguously.

First, the news media are briefed comprehensively by officials familiar with the case but who cannot be identified because they were not authorized to make the damning disclosures that then go on to resonate on the front pages and in the headlines for subsequent weeks, while providing coarse entertainment in the feral media.

Even in summary, the charge sheet is a litany of crimes and misdemeanours on a scale almost beyond belief – almost, because Nigerians have come to expect nothing less than the worst of their officials. In fact, if there is one thing that unites vast segments of the Nigerian public, it is the belief, indeed the expectation, that their officials will always gravitate toward all that is ignoble and not of good report.

Then comes the arrest a few days later, staged with critical solemnity for the news media, especially television, which measures news salience by the extent to which an event translates into dramatic pictures.   Looking grim and woebegone, the suspects usually are serenaded into the precincts of the EFCC by its uniformed officials.

Another layer of officials, suitably armed, keeps the rear, apparently to deter those who might be thinking of sabotaging the proceedings. Yet more officials take positions to the left and the right of the suspects, boxing them in.

The officials look sober for the most part. There is no swagger in them, no hint of the triumphalism you would expect to perfuse such a setting. It is almost as if they are labouring under a painful necessity.

But make no mistake about it:  This is serious business. The EFCC officials are respectful. But you cannot overawe them with any claim to bigmanism. As if to make that point emphatically, they may often keep the suspects in custody, pending formal arraignment where an unabridged list of the crimes and misdemeanours is read out.

The charges go to confirm what many Nigerians have always believed of their officials, namely, that they are grasping, self-absorbed, larcenous to the point of obscenity, and insanely acquisitive.  Even among those usually inclined to keep an open mind or show  cool indifference, one could sense quiet outrage.

“Have the suspects no shame?” you could almost hear them say in pained resignation.  “What will they do with all that pillage?  Just how much do they need to feel contented?”

After the usual courtroom skirmishes, the trial finally starts.  Soon enough, it begins to appear that what had seemed an open-and-shut case is nothing of the sort. The suspect has in his corner some of the finest legal minds that money can buy, no pun intended.  The prosecution, on the other hand, is typically led by attorneys of lesser specific gravity.

And in an encounter in which seniority counts for much and opposing junior counsel as well as the presiding judge often feel obliged to defer to senior counsel, the EFCC finds itself at a disadvantage, and not just in psychological terms.  Its attorneys were probably still in diapers when many of the counsel on the other side entered law practice.

As the trial gets underway, it is usually the prosecution that is seeking adjournment after adjournment, evidence that the case had been rushed to court, without the painstaking marshalling of probative evidence required for successful prosecution.

More evidence of a rush to court surfaces when the prosecution requests leave of court to withdraw the charges so as to amend them and re-file new material later. Such requests unduly prolong the court process, resulting in justice delayed.

The case wends its way through the system, and judgment day finally arrives.  But it is thrown out because it was filed in the wrong court – a court that had no business entertaining it.

This verdict has been delivered so many times that it raises some troubling questions.  It may well be that the officials filing the cases could not figure out the right court the first time, and still cannot do so after losing their cases on the matter of jurisdiction, hardly one of the most recondite issues in legal practice.

But that would raise the far more troubling issue of whether the cases were filed deliberately in courts with no jurisdiction, with officials subverting, for any number of reasons, the very cause they were employed to pursue.  What does this say about the supervisors at the EFCC?

When corruption cases are not dismissed for want of jurisdiction, they are often set aside because the prosecution failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, usually another indication of a rush to court, or of a deficit in prosecutorial skills.

Halfway through the case, the prosecutor may settle for a bargain whereby the public official on trial pleads guilty to a lesser charge that may not involve jail term but allows him to keep much of the ill-gotten wealth that lay at the heart of the prosecution.

In the end, amidst its loud barking, the EFCC does very little biting.

This is not the way to fight official corruption.

Until the authorities can assemble, train and retain formidable prosecutors who can hold their own against the smartest defence attorneys, and until they can equipped them with the latest investigative tools in accounting, auditing and computing, the fight against official corruption will not be won.

Assembling such a team cannot be done overnight, to be sure.  But the time to start is now, with our universities as the recruiting ground.

The finest products of these institutions – those graduating with First Class or Second Class Upper – in law, accounting, computer science, and foreign languages, will constitute the pioneer corps of some 1000 federal prosecution units. 

After selection through a highly competitive process, they will be sent abroad for further training, including a year’s attachment to some of the finest prosecutors who have brought organised crime elements to heel in Italy, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Japan, India, Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Mexico, Australia, and South Africa.

On their return, they will be deployed across the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory.  They should be placed on special salaries that take into account their prized skills as well as the risks that flow from the job, and insulated from the political pressure of any kind.  They should enjoy security of tenure until age 70, subject only to good conduct and a record of successful prosecutions.

Until prosecutors have at least the same skills and a scheme of compensation comparable with or superior to that of attorneys in private practice, until they are equipped with the most advanced tools for carrying out their work, the Nigerian state, even under a new administration with the best intention will never gain the upper hand in the war on official corruption.

The parties that lost in the recent General Election and their proxies have been cooking  up yet another “June 12” subterfuge with their call for an “Interim National Government,” a term they alternate with “Government of National Consensus.

They are pursuing the quest unmindful of the circumstances that led to the setting up of the body that operated under the first title 30 years ago.

It was set up, remember, after military president Ibrahim Babangida, aided principally by the infernal Arthur Nzeribe of ghastly memory, suborned a coterie of state actors led by the Federal Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice, Clement Akpamgbo (SAN), to confect a raft of threadbare falsehoods and spin an elaborate web of intrigue to serve as  a pretext for annulling the June 12, 1993, presidential election.

The SDP presidential candidate, Moshood Abiola, was set to win a landslide. The annulment torpedoed the process.  But the annuller lost the plot.  In the event, he was forced to beat a ragged, tearful retreat from Abuja to his hometown Minna, and to infamy.

Then, unlike now, a president-elect was never proclaimed.  So, technically, there was going to be a vacuum, albeit contrived, in the governance of Nigeria.  The ING was rigged up to fill that vacuum.

With the successful completion of the 2023 poll and the proclamation of a president-elect, no such vacuum now exists.  To create one, the ING protagonists will have to engineer and successfully execute a coup d’état.  They must know that they face overwhelming odds, the seething discontent with the election outcome in some quarters notwithstanding.

As was said of the ING, it was not national, and it was not a government.  Its only redeeming grace was that it was interim through and through, doddering on for just 83 days.

It was conceived in treachery, delivered in infamy, and died in ignominy.

At the time of its inauguration, I set out to examine the law undergirding it, portentously called the Interim National Government (Basic Constitution Provisions) of 1993  All I had to go by was a photocopy that had been pulled from a photocopy.

No one among my contacts had seen a hard copy, or had been able to obtain one from the Government Printer.  For one thing, Government Printer could no longer cope with the rate at which decrees were being churned out in the twilight of Babangida’s presidency.  For another, it could not be trusted to circumvent the stringent procedure for vetting them.

Consequently, the presidency had farmed out to the printing of government documents          to Babangida’s private commercial outfit in Abuja, Heritage Press, against the law.  Pardon the digression, The Mint had likewise found itself unable to keep up with Babangida’s demand for new banknotes to buy support for the regime.

Nobody knew what version of the Interim Constitution was being followed in Abuja, assuming that they were following anything other than the divisive, dilatory and duplicitous instruments that had served the preceeding regime so well,

Senate President (as he then was) Iyorchia Ayu, not to be confused with the retread, had said that the document being touted as the Interim Constitution differed significantly from the one he was shown on the eve of Babangida’s exit. By one account, as many as four different versions of the document were in circulation.

The distinguished jurist, Dr Akinola Aguda, since departed, said that the document was signed by Babangida after he had been forced out of power, and then backdated to make it look like his final act.

Aguda, a former chief justice of Botswana and pioneer director-general of the Nigeria Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, was no flippant commentator.  His charge called  into question the honour of the Attorney-General in particular and the government as a whole, and their claim to being worthy custodians of the public trust.  But they were too busy procuring any gesture that could be construed as support for their lawless rule to worry about such trivial matters.

To return to the version of what purported to be the Interim National Constitution that I examined:  From the Preamble, we learned that the Federal Military Government decided to annul the June 12 1993 election and processes leading to it out of its abiding concern for “national security, law and order, enduring democracy and for the provision of effective economic direction for the nation,” and “because the processes had been marred by “grave electoral malpractices.”

So deep was this concern that no court of law in Nigeria was allowed to inquire into the validity of the decree, and no part of it could be varied, altered, modified by any other decree, law, or enactment.

Section 42 of the Interim Constitution was remarkable for what it concealed.  It says:  “The Chairman and Head of the Interim National Government shall be . . .”

Section 47, which provided for a vice chairman was just as dodgy.  It stated:  “The Vice Chairman of the Interim National Government shall be . . .”  The intention was to fill in the names later. 

Babangida the military president was keeping his options open, leaving himself ample room to morph into Chairman of the ING and for another dupe to bask in the delusion of being second-in-command.

The so-called Interim Constitution was drafted by a  coterie headed by Professor Ben Nwabueze (SAN), fresh from serving as Secretary for Education in the Transition Council that was supposed to lead the nation to democratic rule but ended up being another complaisant tool in Babangida’s arsenal of duplicity. 

The team also compromised the Attorney-General of the Federation, Clement Akpamgbo, aforementioned; PK Nwokedi, chair of the Law Review Commission, and two scholars from that body, Professor Egerton Uvieghara, and Dr Epiphany Azinge.

In Nwabueze’s telling, they all waited and waited for Babangida to supply the missing names. At their deadline, the names had not been furnished.  So, they turned in their draft, lacunae and all.

The Constitution, was silent as to who would appoint the ING chairman and vice chairman.  But it provided for the appointment of ministers, to be named by the ING chairman.  In the event, Ernest Shonekan, who became chairman of the ING, functioned with “Secretaries” foisted on him by Babangida.

Section 5(c) spelled out the powers of the chair of the ING.  Part of his remit was “to  oversee the election to the Local Government due in December 1993 (emphasis added).  Now, since the Constitution could not be altered or amended or modified in any way, this meant that the council elections could not be held before or after December 1993.

The calculation was that, by lumping the local council and presidential election together, the National Electoral Commission and the ING would be able to induce an electorate still chafing from the annulment of the June 12 poll to come out again and vote.  Instead, they found themselves confronted by an impregnable obstacle where  they least expected it.

The constraint on the staging of local council elections was more than compensated, however, by the fact that the ING Constitution set no limit on the Interim period.

Shonekan gave the public to believe that his interim team would complete its work and quit on March 31, 1994,  But the version of the ING Constitution that I saw, said nothing of the sort. 

Hardly had the ING embarked on its doomed tenure on July 26, 1993, than resonant calls for an extension of its mandate were being issued by the usual people.  Just 93 days into their tenure, Shonekan and the ING were put out of their misery by Sani Abacha, acting on a clause Babangida has surreptitiously inserted in its Constitution mandating “the most senior military officer” in the outfit to take over power in the event of the resignation or incapacitation of its chairman.”

That clause was not included in the draft that Professor Nwabueze and his team had produced on demand.  And for four years thereafter, Abacha presided over one of the darkest chapters in Nigeria’s history.

The ING Constitution, then, was shot through and through with bad faith.  Lateef Jakande’s Lagos Daily News  rightly dismissed the entire scheme in a withering editorial as “interim nonsense.”

Those calling for a reiteration of an ING can be forgiven for not knowing the treacherous history of its first coming and the sad end to which it led the country. Still, they must be careful what they wish for.

When justices of the Supreme Court  unanimously served notice the other day in the manner of shop-floor artisans that they would have no alternative than to embark on an industrial action unless their grievances centering on pay and conditions were addressed to their satisfaction, even those who thought that nothing new could happen in Nigeria’s political firmament had to concede that this was altogether a singular development

Even to those who allowed that “anything can happen” in Nigeria’s public sphere: this, surely was not the kind of thing they had in mind.  They would have dismissed the mere thought of it as a joke taken too far.

The only thing the justices left out was the date the action would commence.  Its duration would depend on the response of the authorities.  The public imagination was already astir with images on the one hand, of their bewigged lordships in their ermined raiments, driven by desperation to behave like actual trade unionists, and on the other, of the police in riot gear,  ready to discharge their duties in the cause of law and order.

And, of course, television cameras positioned to capture the spectacle, live.

The case has great merit.

In this electronic age, they still have to take down depositions in the longhand.  Their access to the internet, so vital for instant research and for acquiring facts and data at the touch of a button or a screen, is not guaranteed beyond office hours.  Electricity is not fully guaranteed even during office hours. 

The justices live in accommodation that does not reflect their status and dignity.  They go about their official duties in vehicles that often break down and expose them to ridicule and danger.  Funds earmarked for hiring bright minds from universities to do legal research and draft opinions have been swallowed up in the maws of the bureaucracy. or are disbursed improperly.

And so on and so forth.

Their petition has great merit, even without relating it to what obtains in other institutions of public service.  If you compare it to what obtains, say, in the National Assembly, you have to commend their lordships for their restraint.

Officially, it is the Revenue Mobilization and Fiscal Allocation Committee that determines the compensation of public officers.  But, following the lead of the National Assembly,  every ministry, department, or agency, tweaks the scheme, often in ways that distort it beyond recognition.

The National Assembly has turned this practice into an art.  It is the only institution of its kind in the world that regards lawmaking as a hardship that must be handsomely rewarded.  Its compensation scheme is so padded with “allowances” that you wonder what they need salaries for.  In the absence of verifiable audits, conservative guesstimates of what a lawmaker takes home range between N30 million and N50 million every month.

So steeped in this practice is the National Assembly that it is often seen more in caricature than in perspective.  According to the caricature, it even gives its members allowances for sleeping, for staying awake, and for everything in between; for doing what they are elected to do; for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and newspapers.   One account has it that they are even remunerated for farting and for belching, which a member reportedly characterized on the floor as “evidence of good living.”

It can be said without exaggeration and without doing violence to facts that, in Nigeria, no business succeeds like lawmaking.  The rewards are instant and guaranteed by the Exchequer.

You need only look at a video of the portfolio of the choicest luxury goods and automobiles that former senator Dino Melaye periodically posts on the so-called social media to tease and taunt the public with a glimpse of the rewards that can accrue even to mediocre and insufferable lawmakers.

Melaye has been accused of so many things – bombast, showboating, crassness, exhibitionism, and so  onand so forth.  But, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever accused him of playing any part, however tangential, in promoting, shaping, or securing the passage of a significant law for the good governance of Nigeria.

But everyone in the attentive audience can tell you the special features of his Lamborghini, Alfa-Martin, Bugatti, Rolls Royce, Mercedes  Benz, and Jaguar, to mention only a selection from his fleet. 

Everyone knows Melaye has enough high-end wristwatches, and shoes to stock an exclusive shop.  If you were to add his luxury travel goods and the usual knickknacks, you would need a store on three levels.

A person briefed on Melaye’s current concerns tells me that the fleet will soon boast a vertical-takeoff helicopter and a long-haul executive jet, in time for his Kogi gubernatorial election campaign on the PDP’s platform. 

All this just from lawmaking.

 No wonder they are fuming in the Judicial Branch.

In the Supreme, beg your pardon, Apex Court, they cannot get even the basic essentials, while officials in other arms of the public service are basking in superfluity.

Amici curiae who are concerned that it will be infra dignitatem for their lordships to resort to the tactics of shop-floor trade unionists to press their case for better pay and conditions are hoping that it will not come to that.

But one of them is taking no chance.

He has petitioned the courts, locus standi be damned, to raise the salary of justices of the Supreme Court from a measly N3 million a month to N7 million, and to raise that of the chief justice to N10 million a month.

And in double quick time, the court obliged.  Petition upheld.

But those who want to keep their lordships in acute deprivation are saying that the judges have made a mockery of the doctrine of nemo judex in causa sua be damned;  that the ruling is at bottom an exercise in self-dealing, in which judges stand to profit from their own rulings.

They say it is a hallowed canon of jurisprudence. 

“Hallowed canon” my foot. I call it soulless.  If judges cannot advance their own standing, who is to do so for them?  The Melayes, who are so busy grabbing and acquiring stuff that they have no time for any other pursuit?

Those given to aridly legalistic disputations will debate and discuss the court’s ruling till the end of time.   What really matters is that the court has introduced a dynamic new element into our system of jurisprudence in general, and our system of conflict resolution in particular.

Shop around for a court or judge whose sympathy you can count on, press your claim, and       have it translated into a perpetual injunctive relief that cannot be won through negotiation or arbitration The process is quick and affordable.

Under that system, university lecturers who teach and conduct research under the harshest conditions would not have to go on strike for six months just to get the attention of the authorities.

Just imagine:  The textbook that a professor of law is teaching from is into its fourth edition, but the instructor has only the second, which he guards jealously and treats like Holy Writ. At the end of one class meeting, a student walks up to the instructor and tells him respectfully that he is teaching from a dated text.

“How do you know?” the professor asked non-threateningly.

“Because I have the latest edition, sir.” Whereupon she brought it out of her bag.  Her father had bought it for her for £180 during her last vacation in the UK.

To state that the instructor, a person of great sensibility, felt thoroughly chastened by this change in the power calculus, is to understate the matter.   When the student added good-naturedly that the professor could borrow the book anytime he desired, it could only have sealed his discomfiture.

And when she was done with the course, she donated the book to the professor. 

Without question, it is the ghastly system of remuneration in the universities that is responsible for this scandalous reversal.

But that could be a thing  of the past if university professors adopted the formula that the petitioner mentioned earlier used to secure appropriate pay for court judges.

Get a person who cannot easily be dismissed as a busybody to file an amicus curia brief with a court noted for progressive disposition of the resident judges – get a person in good standing to file a brief demanding that university teachers be compensated on a scale ranging from N10 million to N40 a million a month for five years in the first instance.  The pay scale can be adjusted as time goes on, but only northwards, never southwards. 

That would be an enduring solution to the pesky ASUU problem, and it would carry with it the imprimatur of a court of competent jurisdiction.

Other fractious groups such as the National Association of  Resident Doctors (NARD), the petroleum and gas workers union, and indeed other occupational groups, can be pacified in like manner. 

That is the path to social justice and industrial peace.

It was my friend calling from Lagos.

In the twenty years that I have known him, he had never sounded so animated.  I sensed immediately that he had something on his mind, something he thought I must know right away, at that unholy hour.

Perhaps the diehard revanchists and their confederates had obtained a midnight court injunction voiding the entire General Election, thus clearing the path to the setting up of an Interim Government?

“What’s up?” I asked him.

“Abuja,” he replied.  In his excitement, he could only articulate one word in one breath.

“What is it about Abuja?”

“So, you haven’t heard?”

My mind raced through all the bad news, bad news and more bad news that came out of Abuja the previous week, and set me wondering which particular piece of bad news I could have missed.

“Heard what?” I asked.

“You haven’t heard that residents of Abuja Federal Capital Territory (FCT) have all along been super citizens without even knowing it?”

There goes another conspiracy theory, perhaps the latest in a very long line of conspiracy theories that have flooded the news media and the pseudo-social media outlets and polluted social discourse, especially in this silly season, I said to myself.

“I must confess i have not kept pace with the deluge of news out of Nigeria.  Please tell me the latest about Abuja.”

“It is right there in the Constitution,” he said breathlessly.

That foundational document stipulates, he went on, that no candidate can become president of Nigeria unless he wins 25 percent of the votes cast in Abuja FCT in a national election.   “It is there in black and white,” he said.

“Not even if the candidate fulfills every other requirement, such as winning an overall majority of votes cast, and meeting the two-thirds rule.”

“Not even then, sir.  Regardless of every other stipulation, he or she has to win 25 percent of the FCT votes to be deemed elected.  That is the learned consensus of the best legal minds.  Call it the Iron Law of the Constitution.

“So, what is in it for you?”

“A  great deal, sir.  A great deal.  Can’t you see the implications, sir?  They are profound.  To start with, it confers special status on the residents of the FCT, rich and poor, lawmaker and lawbreaker, homeowner and home watcher alike, over and above the status of ordinary Nigerians – like your good self, sir, assuming that after all these years in America, you still consider yourself a Nigerian. With this special status comes many special rights and privileges, at least by implication.

“Such as?”

“The right to special treatment for Abuja FCT residents in the scheme of things.  For example, it would follow that, in federal recruitment, appointments, contracts, and admission to federal institutions, FCT residents would be served first.”

Would that not collide with the equal-protection clause of the Constitution, which requires broad equality of treatment for all citizens?

“Not in the least, sir, since FCT residents are not ordinary citizens.  They are super citizens.  The Constitution itself says so.”

It would follow, then, by the same reasoning, that representatives of the FCT in the National Assembly and the FCT Administration can jointly and/or severally veto federal legislation on any whatsoever?

“Absolutely, sir.  Absolutely.  You are beginning to see things as they really are.”

“Why are they conferred with this special status, if I may ask? Is it simply by virtue of their residing in the FCT, or is there something transcendent about living in that space?”

 “Good question sir.  The framers of the Constitution did not explain how they came about the FCT’s special status.  But they must have had it at the back of their minds that they were dealing with something new, perhaps unique even, and that the document should reflect that point splendidly and unambiguously.   It had to   espouse and honour the soul of Abuja.”

I did not tell him that, regardless of what the Constitution says, I have always had some doubts about Abuja. Maybe it is a different place now, but back in the 90s, I always felt that it was just a collection of masonry, bereft of “town-ness.”  Whenever I visited, I always came away asking:  “Where is the town?”

 But if there is a soul to Abuja, it is only fair and proper that the Constitution should articulate it.  What does that soul consist in?

“Like Nigeria itself, it is a work in progress.  It speaks to the nation’s vast potential, about which there is no disagreement.  We can also speak of its can-do, never-die optimistic spirit.”

“It seems like you are set to relocate.”

“You took the words right out of my mouth, sir.  I am actually calling to tell you that, given recent revelations about the extra-constitutional status of its residents, I have decided to relocate to the FCT before a new Administration is sworn in on May 29, and to ask for your blessings.

It has been my experience that whenever younger folk seek your blessings, they are thinking of hard cash to help them in a new venture, not pious, incantatory chants.  He is not that kind of chap.  He is not asking too much of a retired professor living on a modest pension.  My prayers will go with him.

His plans seem hazy for now.  He has some money in the bank, and no constricting family obligations.  Fortunately for him, he is no stranger to the place.  He lived and worked there several years back, and knows his way around.

With Abuja’s new status, he can now see new opportunities he did not see even when they were staring him in the face, opportunities for self-actualization on a scale he and doubtless others never could have imagined

Is Abuja ready for the thousands of who will flock there to seek fame and fortune following the constitutional epiphany, and the brickbats that earlier residents who missed the tide will hurl at them?

Obidient Mess

All kinds of memes have sprung from the Obidient Movement and its insurgent sweep, most of them deprecatory.  I will not repeat them here.

How I wish I could come up with a more polite term than Obidient Mess to characterize the drama surrounding Labour Party presidential candidate Peter Obi’s clandestine visit to the UK to celebrate Easter, his detention for questioning by the immigration authorities at Heathrow, his alleged deportation, the UK Government’s apologies for the inconvenience he suffered and his sepulchral silence since returning to base.