Category: Tuesday

It was as unusual for that time of year as it was ominous, the December 31, 2018, warning, from the Nigeria Army high command, that it would begin “to monitor and take actions against masterminds of subversive propagandists for their false publications designed to dampen the morale of troops on the war fronts.”

Issued by the Army’s Director of Public Relations, Brig.-Gen Sani Usman, the statement spoke of “attempts to politicise and derail the ongoing fight against terrorism and insurgency” by “disgruntled elements” recycling video clips and old interviews of “disgruntled soldiers,” as well as inaccurate reports on the ongoing operations “to create sense of insecurity in the country.”

The statement evoked the dark days of the loathsome goggled dictator, General Sani Abacha, or from the more distant but no less frightful era of Decree Four of the Dour Duo of General Muhammadu Buhari and Brigadier Tunde Idiagbon, with the difference that the military were a law unto themselves back then. Now, in a democratic dispensation under which power is vested in elected officials, the military take their instructions from the civil authority.

The line is somewhat blurred when the civil authority has as its head a retired army general, or where the Minister of Defence is also a retired general. But the principle is well established:  Under our Constitution, the military has no independent power. Even when performing its assigned duties, it is subject to legislative oversight.

It was somewhat reassuring then, that later in the statement under reference, Usman retreated from this disquieting proposition and warned that the law would take its course against those behind “concerted efforts to ridicule the efforts of the military in ensuring peace and security of the country.”

The law is the final arbiter. Let every aggrieved party submit to its jurisdiction and its reasoned pronouncements.

But any hope that the Army would follow the path of law rather than resort to self-help to settle its claim against unnamed “detractors” has proved illusory.

Barely a week after Usman’s warning, armed soldiers raided the offices of Daily Trust newspaper in Abuja and Maiduguri, Borno State. According to the online newspaper Premium Times, the soldiers, backed by operatives of the Department of State  Services (DSS) and the Civil Defence Corps, sealed off the Daily Trust’s regional office in Maiduguri and arrested its regional editor, Uthman Abubakar, and one of the paper’s reporters, Ibrahim Sawab.

In Abuja, more than two dozen armed soldiers in five pick-up trucks sealed off the main office of the paper in the Utako District and seized computers and other items, said Premium Times, citing eyewitness accounts. The military authorities then followed up with yet another raid, on the newspaper’s Lagos offices.

The Maiduguri, Abuja and Lagos raids were carried out hours after Daily Trust published a news story detailing the military’s preparations for a massive operation to retake Baga and the neighbouring towns of Doron-Baga, Kross Kawwa, Bunduran, Kekeno and Kukawa in Borno State that a faction of Boko Haram affiliated to the Islamic State in West Africa Province had overrun some two weeks earlier, according to Daily Trust.

These raids call to mind the time when military president Ibrahim Babangida closed down some of the nation’s leading newspapers for asking hard questions and reporting the inconvenient truths about his duplicitous transition programme.

Unlike the publications that had moved Babangida to shut down major media houses, the Daily Trust’s story violates a cardinal principle of journalism and news reporting.

In times of war –and the nation is at war, according to the best authorities – you cannot publish information on the location or movement of troops of the national army. Doing so can put their lives at risk and their mission in danger.  Loose lips, it has been said, sink ships.  Even if the national audience has a right to know, the enemy certainly has no such right.

The Trust’s publication, it is necessary to insist, was unprofessional through and through.

But the military’s brusque show of force against an unarmed quarry was unnecessary. A police search with a warrant, followed by prosecution by the appropriate authorities for any established breach of the law, would have served the purpose the Army said it set out to achieve just as effectively, and much more reassuringly.

Here, it is instructive to recall an incident from the Gulf War.

While reporting for the Fox News Channel from Iraq in 2003, the excitable Geraldo Rivera, who was a fine reporter before he morphed into a showboat and a tabloid character, broadcast a report that virtually gave away the position and movement of the invading U. S. troops he was embedded with.

The publication consisted of nothing more elaborate than a map Rivera drew in the desert sand indicating, on camera, the location of the troops, and the likely route of their advance.

The American military authorities lifted his accreditation immediately, abridging his bragging rights to the status of a war correspondent. In another clime, Rivera probably would been charged with lending aid and comfort to the enemy, and prosecuted. Any other recourse would have been lawless.

The Nigerian military are waging a war of resistance against fanatical, well-equipped forces arrayed in the country’s northern fringes and along its open international borders stretching across three countries – barbarous forces that have no respect whatsoever for human life. It is not surprising that they would bristle at criticism, whether it is coming from Nigeria or outside, and that they would consider it unhelpful.

Sadly, the fight against the Boko Haram and its confederates has tended to be perceived hitherto as a matter between the armed forces and Boko Haram. It is a national assignment. Nothing less than the future of Nigeria is at stake in the war.  Yet, no sacrifice has been demanded of the national population. Maybe that is why the public hardly feels involved, except those who have experienced first-hand the war’s depredations.

This failure of mobilisation must not endure.

Publication of classified material can undermine the morale of troops just as military raids on media houses can undermine support for the war effort from critical sections of the populace. Everything must be done to avert both.

The media will have to engage in self-censorship in matters relating to the war.  Journalists do this on a far wider scale than is generally realised. From an abundance of caution, they publish only a fraction of the material they gather or stumble upon.  That is what the present situation calls for.

Senior editors will have to bring their experience and expertise to bear on the processing of material that touches on national security.

The military authorities should be more engaging. They should cultivate editors and the leading commentators, give them background briefings, and seek their cooperation in the management of sensitive information. I am thinking of the ‘D-Notice’ system in the UK, under which the authorities voluntarily supply classified information to the media, with the caveat that it is for their information only, not for publication.

That system is of course open to abuse. It can be used to block publication of material obtained from independent sources.  But it is rarely used in such a manner. It helps build trust.

Also as a way of building trust, the military should conduct at least a weekly press briefing on the war effort, with ample opportunities for reporters to ask questions. Weekly bulletins on the war effort will also help. Meanwhile, the military should vacate Daily Trust’s premises and return all the equipment it carted away during the raids.

The war against Boko Haram is among other things a contest for the heart and minds of the Nigerian public. The military authorities must wage this aspect of the war with professionalism.

Leave of Absence

This column is taking a long leave of absence, starting next week.

I thank its teeming followers who have kept faith with it over the decades, and I look forward to resuming our communing in due course.

“If you choose to head an article ‘An Inquiry into the Conditions of Mycenaean Civilization in the Heroic Epoch with Special Reference to the Economic and Domestic Functions of Women Before and After the Conjectural Date of the Argive Expedition against Troy,’” the British critic and philosopher GK Chesterton once wrote, “you have no right to complain if a newspaper alters it to ‘How Helen did the Housekeeping.’”

The Helen here, in case you are wondering, is Helen of Troy.

Former President Shehu Shagari must be wishing that he had come across this piece of advice before he wrote his paper for the Abuja conference on Federalism and Nation-Building in Nigeria, in late January, 1993.   The title of the paper is nothing nearly as abstruse as and pedantic as the one manufactured by Chesterton.  Indeed, it is a model of clarity.

“The Power and Limitation of the Executive and the Legislature in the Presidential System of Government: A Personal Experience” is surely an unexceptionable title for a conference paper.  But by the time the headline writers were finished with it, Shagari must have felt an even greater sense of betrayal than he did when the soldiers picked him up ten years earlier, on the night of December 31, 1983, at Abuja, and told him the game was up.

“Why I failed, by Shagari,” was the banner headline in virtually all the newspapers the day after his speech.  From that headline, nobody could have known that the address had been greeted with a prolonged standing ovation.

The best way of coping with an after-dinner speech, it has been said, is to give the speech yourself.  That way, you are guaranteed not to fall asleep even if everyone else does, as is most likely to be the case.  But there was not the slightest indication of somnolence among the more than 200 people who listened to the speech at the Banquet Hall of the Abuja Sheraton and Towers.

Shagari was wearing a white embroidered baban riga with his trademark one-gallon cap tilted backwards from the skull at an obtuse angle.  He is perhaps the only major figure who still wears a cap of such dimensions.  Former Plateau State Governor Solomon Lar used to sport a two-gallon variety of the cap, but he has now replaced it with a much more modest purple fez, and you might mistake him for former Imo State Governor Sam Mbakwe without the rambunctiousness unless you looked very carefully,

On this night, Shagari was sprightly as usual.  His voice was a little strained from a harmattan-induced cold, but it was resonant and penetrating.  The forum presented him with the first opportunity since his ouster to explain the constraints under which his Administration had labored, and to put his leadership  in the proper perspective.  He clearly relished the chance and was determined to make the most of it.

The charge of “ineptitude” has followed him everywhere like a shadow. Even ten years after he was ousted, no reference in the media to him or his Administration is complete unless it is prefaced with the term “inept.”  Right from the opening paragraph of the 14-page speech, Shagari sought to contest that evaluation.

The checks and balances in the 1979 Constitution, he began, rendered the president helpless in many circumstances.  But no such checks and balances were prescribed for the legislature which, enjoying enormous powers but lacking any executive responsibility, became some kind of Frankenstein (sic) “which tended to destroy what it could not create.”

His problems, Shagari continued, had begun even before the National Assembly had commenced sitting.  Word had reached him that “the so-called Progressive Alliance” was planning to take over “absolute control” of the legislature where the NPN was the single largest party.  By postponing the Inauguration of the Assembly and entering into a pact with the NPP, he frustrated the designs of the plotters.

Even so, Shagari said, legislators engaged in all kinds of blackmail to win favours for themselves.  They even went as far as to purchase an airplane for the Senate President without the consent of the Executive Branch.  The so-called Progressives, aforementioned, thwarted government plans and programmes at every opportunity.  In fact, but for the Presidential system which made that kind of thing impossible, the combined Opposition would have voted the President out of office.  Resolutions emerging from the legislature were either frivolous or totally divorced from reality.

But the National Assembly had its own problems, too, Shagari said.   Most of its members were inexperienced.  There were too many political parties.  The presidential system itself was a novelty that posed many problems.  It provided no room for interaction between the Executive Branch and the legislature , and when such interaction did occur, the legislature seized upon it as a chance to show a cabinet minister just who was in charge.  Nor were matters helped, he said, by a vociferous press that claimed to be the voice of the people, even though it had not been elected by anyone.

But as the Administration neared the end of it first term, Shagari went on, things were beginning to improve; rapport and accommodation were beginning to replace rancour and recrimination, and this would no doubt have continued into his second term if the military had not struck again.

African countries, Shagari warned, would never be able to develop along democratic lines until the shadow of “military paternalism” disappeared.  Elected officials and accredited servants of the people must be allowed unfettered freedom to continue where they left off in 1983.  Nigerian rulers must be allowed to correct their own mistakes themselves.

Then, reaching his peroration, he declared, “The tools of nation-building must not be associated with lethal weapons but in future, we should use pen and paper and the art of reason as opposed to that of treason.”

It was this last sentence that brought the audience to its feet and to rapturous applause.  And Shagari savored every moment of it.

Senate President (in military president Ibrahim Babangida’s misbegotten transition) Iyorchia Ayu would remark in a vote of thanks that Shagari’s speech was rather “strident” and totally out of character for the speaker whom everyone, friend and foe alike, held up as a first-class gentleman.  Another Babangida-era senator, David Iornem, would dismiss the speech as sanctimonious mush.

Mush or no mush, Shagari had a lot to be strident about.

When you are accused in and out of season of presiding over an inept and corrupt Administration and of superintending a period of drift and decay, and when a decade later those who supplanted you have not posted any superior performance, a little stridency might not be a bad thing.

The foregoing was my February 2, 1993, column for The Guardian.

Shehu Aliyu Usman Shagari, Nigeria’s first elected president, died on December 28, 2018, aged 93, at the National Hospital, in Abuja.  He died as he had lived.  Not for him the crass ostentation, the delusion of grandeur, the overweening sense of entitlement, and the rapacious self-dealing that are the defining characteristics of today’s lesser officials, especially those populating the National Assembly.

It remains to thank those who visit this column week after week, be they admirers or provocateurs, and to wish them a fulfilling and abundant New Year, the unsettling auguries of the General Election and its aftermath notwithstanding.

It is that time of year again, of peace on earth – as an aspiration, that is – as 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 – make it 52 – I worshipped at a Christmas 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 on the matter at great length.

He had studied and no doubt perfectly understood the original Greek text and was thoroughly dissatisfied  that the conflict had not been resolved definitively.  The way he proceeded, one was almost led to think that the law of gravitation would suddenly cease to operate and the earth would be plucked from its orbit, depending on whether that phrase 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 the United States.  And if there was any woman in that Christmas Congregation who felt that her gender could do with some goodwill as well, she did 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 rousing strains of O Come, All Ye Faithful, wafted across by the harmattan wind from one of the kindergartens 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 the future in their voices about an economy that seems determined not to recover, whatever anyone may prescribe.

Few of them, I am sure, are aware that this may be the last Christmas at which they can have bread from wheat flour for breakfast.  In such an eventuality, history is unlikely to repeat itself.  There will be nobody who, on being told that 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 will be no  cookies.  These items may vanish from grocery shelves at the end of the year when the ban on wheat   imports comes into effect.

Wheat imports are being stopped to conserve foreign exchange and to encourage us all 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 flour for making all those foods that children love for their taste and adults cherish because it keeps them out of the kitchen.  The ban will create an opportunity to present the Nigerian people and indeed the entire world a unique, all-Nigerian bread made entirely by Nigerians, from Nigerian raw materials, with machines fabricated or adapted entirely by Nigerians.

In the end, instead of wasting 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 which the entire world has been waiting for.  If the protagonists of the wheat ban have not put forth its advantages actually in these terms, it is because they are exceedingly modest people, seldom given to stating the obvious.

Yet, if the nation’s experience in banning the undesirable or unaffordable is any indication, the wheat ban, if not deferred or rescinded, will in operation be a farce.

About this time last year, a ban on rice imports was announced, to much popular and editorial 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 shipments worth an estimated N40 million surfaced at Lagos port.  Who placed the order, when, and how, remain mysteries to this day.

It was speculated, when nobody would openly claim ownership, that the rice was part of international relief material being sent to Chad.  If so, why was the shipment not marked 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 later found its way back to Nigeria overland, and in much less contentious circumstances.  And so, despite the official ban on its importation, there has never been so much rice in the country since Shehu Shagari and Umaru Dikko launched their rice armada six years ago.

All this should bring some cheer to bread addicts.  There will be bread and cake and and cookies, for there will be wheat flour, somehow.  And only an insignificant part of it will be produced locally.  I doubt whether it will ever come to a stage where those who cannot live without bread – the real stuff, that is, not the Akinloye speciality — will ask friends and relations travelling abroad to be sure to bring back or send some bread, as villagers used to demand of their kin visiting from the cities.

As for the all-Nigerian bread that is supposed to replace wheat flour 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 tasked like sawdust.

It could not have been the same stuff that was served as lunch to members of the Armed Forces Ruling Council (AFRC) the other day and praised by some of them as being just as finger-lickin’ good as the Colonel’s chicken.  Perhaps after the Federal Institute for Industrial Research, Oshodi, will have reaped a fortune from imparting to bakers the secret formula for this most wondrous loaf, lesser Nigerians will be allowed  to partake of it, if only as a matter of human rights.

The pupils in the neighbourhood preparatory school are still where we left them, singing.  Had the song   not been familiar, I would have wondered what was going in that schoolroom as Benito Aderemi, Benito Aderemi drifted through the harmattan wind.  They had completing adoring Him in English and had switched to the Latin.  In their charmingly Nigerian minds, Venite adoremus had become Benito Aderemi.

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

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

Stripped of its many connotations and significations, “democracy,” so goes its Nigerian working definition “is a game of numbers.”

Stated differently, democracy is a matter of counting. The party with the most seats in the legislature controls the legislative process. Just count the numbers.

The political party, contestant, or proposition that can muster the most votes carries the day. Just count the votes, pro and contra.

Can anything be more straightforward, more empirical and more democratic, assuming there is a will to determine what the numbers are and to determine them accurately, to take guesswork out of the whole thing and ensure, among other outcomes, an equitable sharing of national assets?

Where that will is lacking, or where working with the actual numbers may be politically inconvenient, there is always an aversion to counting. Here, I am

thinking of Lebanon, where no population census has been conducted since the 1930s and the proportion of Muslims to Christians is fixed by national policy for all time at 54: 40.5 percent, in the interest of national stability.

But in a polity that defines democracy as a game of numbers, you would expect that everything that can be counted will indeed be counted, and the numbers publicised and stored for easy retrieval. Even if the national population cannot be ascertained to the nearest 25 million, you would expect that six months after a realignment of forces that made the political landscape almost unrecognisable even to the most practised eye, the makeup of the legislature would not be a matter of guesswork.

Not in Nigeria.

In the Senate, where sheer numbers may determine whether a Bill passes or fails, they do not know which of the two dominant political parties, the APC and the PDP, is in control. The National Assembly, remember, was shut down to pre-empt a showdown that would result in such a determination.

Months after the Senate returned to business, they have still not bothered to find out the balance of forces in that chamber, and most likely in the House of Representatives as well. The issue seems to have become irrelevant, and would have remained so if a spat had not arisen last week between Senate Majority Leader, Ahmed Lawan (APC-Yobe), and the Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu (PDP-Enugu) on a newspaper report on the Senate’s proceedings.

The newspaper, according to Lawan, had stated that the APC senators numbered 56 as against PDP’s 57. The truth of the matter, Lawan said “for the record,” was that the APC had 54 senators, as against 46 for the PDP.

But Ekweremadu (PDP-Enugu) countered that there were no particular figures in respect of the number of APC or PDP members in the Senate.

The Senate does not know its own composition, the balance of forces on which its deliberations often turn. Its majority leader cites figures that its deputy president disputes, without citing any figures of his own, and is apparently content with the situation.

There you have it.

“As regards the party configuration, I want to say there is no particular statistics for now,” Ekweremadu said, to remove all doubts on the matter. “We cannot talk about the figures that each political party has because there is no such statistics. So, let it be on record that we have no such record now.”

He made this declaration without embarrassment, without feeling in the least scandalised. And his colleagues in the Senate received the intelligence in the same manner, and have continued business as usual.

Why count when you can get by with a voice vote that means wherever the presiding officer says it means – the presiding officer who controls the allocation of juicy positions in the Assembly?

I suspect that, just as no record exists of the balance of forces in the Senate, no record also exists of how many persons are on the National Assembly’s payroll as aides and other support staff, the group now threatening to shut down the Assembly over unpaid salaries and other benefits stretching back six months or longer.

Without records, no meaningful audit can be conducted

But who needs an audit?

Why count when you can fudge and muddle through?

‘Buhari’s Double’: A reprise

I had intended the postscript I did for this newspaper two weeks ago (“Buhari’s Double: A postscript,” December 5, 2019) to be my last word on the kerfuffle arising from one David Oyedepo’s egregious misreading of an entry on the same subject in my November 27, 2018, miscellany.

But I must now reprise the matter, following the intervention (TheNEWS, December 5, 2018) of Professor Sheriff Folarin, chairman, Media and Editorial Board, Living Faith Church Worldwide, in defence of his principal, the aforementioned David Oyedepo.

Here, in summary, is Folarin’s submission:

Oyedepo is the wronged one, the misunderstood party. He knew all along that the material at issue was a satire, and had even privately expressed surprise at its “weakness.”

Oyedepo felt that President Muhammadu Buhari should have laid the matter to rest long before it became “cancerous and embarrassing.” At no point, however, did Oyedepo “admit belief” in the story; rather, he made “measured submissions,” chose his words “intelligibly and without ambiguity to be misunderstood (sic.)”

Oyedepo, being an “elder statesman” and a stakeholder in the Nigerian project, could not afford to keep quiet in the face of the “odious turn of tide” for the country. He and other well-meaning Nigerians “could not be working so hard to build a great image for the country and others, including the government, are destroying what such people labour hard to build.”

Therefore, unlike others, Oyedepo chose not to fold his arms, mindful of Professor Wole Soyinka’s warning that “the man dies in him who keeps silent in the face of tyranny,” tyranny being, among other things, “insensitivity to issues of national concern.”

“Dare’s “satire” failed if it could not achieve its purpose and could be understood so literally,” Folarin concludes. “If the likes of Animal Farm’s George Orwell and Voltaire had written such flat satires and had later done postscripts explaining their works were satires, the way Dare has done, how could the satirical genre of writing have been popular?”

Well, well, well!

Folarin’s submission is a classic instance of repeating the offence instead of refuting the charge. Invoking Soyinka’s authority to justify his principal’s egregious misconstruction of my article is the height of cynicism. The entire response is emblematic of the profound lack of humility in an establishment where the leadership never admits error and is above criticism.

If Folarin’s principal knew that my piece was a satire, albeit a “weak one”, but still went on to expound it in a solemn homily before his worldwide congregation, not as an example of a poorly-executed satire but as an authoritative revelation of unrighteousness and conspiracy of the foulest kind at the highest levels of government, he cannot blame those who have charged that he acted from impure motives, and with un-statesmanlike disregard for consequences.