The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Back to compassion and empathy

    You would have to be stone-hearted not to be deeply moved by the following story that appeared as the tailpiece to deputy editor Lawal Ogienagbon’s column for this newspaper on July 26, 2018.

    Titled “Agony of a dad,” it captures the lack of compassion, the cold application of rules that admits no exceptions even in the most compelling of circumstances, with which the bureaucracy in Nigeria is shot through and through.

    At the center of this tale is a distraught man whose wife and only daughter suffered hideous burns in the Otedola Bridge tanker explosion of June 28.  He had spent N4 million on fees in a private hospital in Lagos where they were receiving treatment before he transferred them to the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH) in Ikeja, Lagos.

    Persuaded that they could receive yet better treatment abroad, he sought to fly them out.  Money was apparently no problem.  The problem was that his daughter’s passport had expired.   To get it renewed, officials said, he would have to take his daughter, third-degree burns and all, to the Passport Office for electronic capture of her biometric data.

    That was the law, they told him. There was no alternative.

    That was the story the distraught man took to an assembly of transport operators convened by the Lagos State Ministry of Transportation at the Bagauda Kaltho Press Centre at the State Secretariat at Alausa, Ikeja, to figure out the actuarial implications of the disaster and their responsibility to the victims.

    The crowd listened in hushed silence, the tension heightened, I gather, by the distraught man’s refusal to disclose his identity or to have his photograph taken.

    He was not asking for financial help, the distraught man.  He was there to solicit Governor Akinwunmi Ambode’s help to move the Passport Office to take their equipment to LASUTH for the biometrics, since it was not possible to transport his daughter there in her condition.

    The Commissioner for Transportation, who stood in for Ambode at the session, asked the distraught man to see him privately after the meeting.

    I do not know how the meeting ended.  I hope the Governor acceded to the distraught man’s request, and that his wife and daughter are now abroad receiving the kind of treatment they could not get in Nigeria.

    Ordinarily, the distraught man should not have found it necessary to seek Governor Ambode’s intervention.  The supervising officer of the Passport Office should have been vested with discretionary powers to waive, in exceptional circumstances, the law mandating a passport applicant’s physical presence for biometrics.  Plus, the equipment is portable and can function just about anywhere there is an electrical outlet.

    But in Nigeria, nothing is ever ordinary.

    The system operates on the assumption that exceptions will be abused.  Therefore, it admits none, not even on the most compelling of reasons. To render the system impermeable to corrupting influences, they enact rules that drive frustrated patrons to the criminal embrace of syndicated hustlers operating a parallel system that delivers quickly, and with the minimum of fuss.  You pay the fee, and you get the document – almost any document — and it is just as good as the one issued by the bureaucracy.

    But because the system admits of no exceptions, patrons are forced to devise all manner of schemes for obtaining whatever services they require.  And the more unlawful, the more assured.

    Apparently the distraught man, bless his innocence, had never heard of “Oluwole.”

    The whole thing is self-defeating.  Government loses vital revenue and erodes citizens’ faith, shaky at the best of times, in the system.  Nigeria is one of the few countries in the world to require a passport applicant’s physical presence for biometrics, an anomaly in this age of information technology.  But the requirement has done little to curb the fraffick in Nigerian passports

    The United States Passport is probably the most valued in the world.  To obtain it, you have to sign the application form in the presence of an official; yet, it remains the world’s most trafficked travel document.

    The point is that the kind of stringent controls I have been describing rarely work.

    Yet, illustrations of their application abound in Nigeria.

    Issuance and renewal of drivers’ and vehicle licences should be routine.  But the officials vested with the authority have insinuated so many obstacles into the process that motorists and vehicle owners are often forced, after an interminable wait, to seek these documents from touts who care nothing about driver competence or the condition of the vehicles plying city roads and inter-state highways.

    The high volume of road accidents and the mounting death toll are attributable, at least in part, to the ceding of this vital function to touts, by the very officials entrusted to safeguard it.

    To ensure that nobody can vote at multiple centres, restrict movement on Election Day from home to voting booth and back, shut down the airports and seaports, lock down the country, and virtually place the population under house arrest.

    Otherwise, some people can vote in Lagos in the early morning, drive to Abeokuta to vote two hours later, fly to Kano to vote around lunchtime, hop to Makurdi to cast yet another vote, and land in Port Harcourt just before the polls close.  And they can do so in numbers large enough to subvert the popular will.

    The loss to the economy from this misapprehension is incalculable.   I say nothing of course about the disruption to arrangements long made, contracts long sealed, and to the rhythm of life.

    To take an example from the banking sector:  Because of the high level of money laundering and other syndicated crimes in the system, depositors are required to obtain a Bank Verification Number (BVN) that will help officials keep track of customer transactions.  To obtain the BVN, depositors have to report in person at banks or designated centres to register, within a specified period.

    Patrons who fail to furnish the BVN before the deadline have been warned that they stand to forfeit their deposits, on the presumption that they are money launderers.   No account is taken of the inconveniences, the costs, and the risks to which depositors residing in far-flung places have to subject themselves to register for the BVN.

    And yet, all manner of technological tools are available for verifying the identity of depositors in the comfort of their homes, or without requiring them to travel far from wherever they live. When banks and other institutions fail to avail themselves of these technologies, they unwittingly retard Nigeria’s digital advance.

    Consider, finally, the matter of policing the country.  It is feared that if each state is allowed to run its own police force, as is the case in every federation, the force will be used to persecute the political opposition.  That has happened before in Nigeria, and could well happen again.

    But instead of making laws to curb and punish such abuse, constitutional provision is made only for federal only.   Now, is the unified police command not often used today to persecute political opponents?  Or is it the case that persecution by the federal police is to be preferred to persecution by state police?

    Even in the best-ordered societies, laws, rules and regulations will be abused.  That is a fact of human society.  But since they are made for people and not the other way round, they must admit of exceptions, and must be executed with compassion and empathy.

    It used to be said that Compassion and Empathy are Africans.  It is time to reclaim them in the making of public policy.

     

    Correction

    In my column for August 14, I mischaracterised the PDP as the majority party in both Houses of the National Assembly of the Second Republic.

    That status belonged to the NPN.  The PDP did not exist then.

    I regret the error.

     

  • Appian way

    Making the yearly Ilese Day, the Ilese-Ijebu, Ogun State, community-mobilization-for-development show-piece, has for three years now, become a duty.

    That is thanks to the loving prompting of Otunba Kunle Kalejaiye — KK to about everyone — a distinguished native, and golden cousin.

    But surprise, surprise!  The town’s major road, for eons narrow and snaky, had morphed into a wide four-lane way,  though still under construction.

    Taiwo Adeoluwa, Secretary to the Ogun government who represented Governor Ibikunle Amosun, at August 11 final carnival and rally, called it “Ijebu Ode-Ilese road, which indeed, it is.

    But the historic-minded could well dub it “Appian Way”, after the famous 62-km freeway in antiquity, from Rome to Brindisi, built by the Roman, Appius Claudius Caecus (340-273 BC).

    Quite a fitting prize  — for a community that, every year, rallies its natives and residents; and therefore, nudges the government to its developmental needs!

    Still, making this year’s Ilese Day, through the crippling traffic on the Ibafo-Mowe section of the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, that Friday August 10 night, was almost mission impossible.

    Yeah, the Redeemed folks, that swelled the traffic, were the fall guys for that glitch — and, was it bad!  From the Kara Bridge at the Berger end of the Lagos border, to communities spanning Ibafo to Mowe, it was bumper-to-bumper traffic!

    The Redeemed folks were holding the grand finale of their yearly convention.  But the real culprit was reconstruction works going on, at that corridor.  That forced a traffic squeeze from eight lanes to four.

    But even as the bad traffic sparked foul temper, the Redeemed zealots, in various buses, en route to their camp, were in good cheer: sprightly, merry and boisterous in praise and worship; spiced with free-style prayers, and thunderous halleluyah!

    You never saw a more beatified band, bristling with bliss, when about everyone else was in pains — excruciating pains!   Why were they so blest!

    But as the Redeemers had their fun, the two-man traveling party cowed under own cross.

    At the wheel was Foluso Adelaja, another Ilese son and publisher of SOS (State of Ogun State), an Ogun-wide community newspaper. He had both communal and commercial interest in the spectacle.

    Ripples, on the other hand, was a study in stormy calm.  With this pace, when a snail’s speed is a like sprint, when the hell are we getting to Ilese?

    Then, as the crawl snailed near a fuel station near Ibafo, the worst dawned.  The sputtered to a stop.  It was around 9pm, four hours after leaving Lagos.

    The mechanic, hired on the spot, diagnosed an ignition complication.  He suggested a manual kick-start, which, after a few false starts, set the engine roaring again.

    Still, we couldn’t possibly trust this machine, on a late night trip, all on our own, without additional expert hands?

    A brief but intense negotiation saw, for a fee, emergency mechanic morph into emergency driver.

    Due diligence (driver’s licence and discreet inquiry about his person) followed; and we were back, after an agonizing hour, waltzing again in the traffic.

    To cut short a long story: we didn’t hit Ijebu Ode until 11.56 pm — almost 12 midnight.  A one-and-a-half-hour trip, at the most, had lasted almost seven hours!  We checked into a hotel in Ijebu Ode, too tired to make Ilese that night.

    Yet, that was a major loss.  Even at that late hour, Ilese was all-bubble, with the festival’s gala nite, which main attraction is the Miss Ilese Beauty Pageant, with the Queen driving away with her win — a car.

    That alone is a massive youth-pull, from all of Ijebuland and even beyond.  But even more iconic, with the winner also announced during the gala nite, is the Ikokore cooking contest — Ikokore, the Ijebu foremost national delicacy.

    It is the making of perhaps the greatest concentration of youth anywhere in Ijebuland, for a particular event.

    Yes, Ijebu Ode boasts its yearly Ojude Oba festival, tied to the Muslim feast of Eid-el-Kabir, which the Yoruba call Odun Ileya.  Compared to Ilese Day, however, its crowd would is more evened out, since it pulls all age grades, young or old.

    It’s that specific youth pull that makes the Ilese Day Gala Nite a vibrant market for products and services — fashion lines, cosmetics, food seasoning, beer and general beverages, and even telecoms.

    For the discerning manufacturer, service provider and smart marketer, that gala nite is a captive market.  With a heavy flow of undergraduates and other tertiary students to the show, it could well prove a profitable tryst between today’s market and the future decision maker.

    But having missed out on the gala nite, the final carnival and rally proved no less exciting — both from fun fair and commerce.

    As the five carnival troupes, exquisitely costumed, dazzled the audience with their dance steps and sundry displays, the commercial side of this fun fair peeped at you.

    Otunba Kalejaiye, sponsor of the triumphant Purple House, told the gathering it cost as much as N2.5 million to costume each group.

    The Purple group dethroned the Yellow House, 2017 winners, sponsored by Otunba Sola Mogaji, the chairman, the Ilese Day Organizing Committee.

    But if it costs N2.5 million to costume each group, discounting training and drilling costs, the commerce of it all also sounds good.

    To hire any of the groups costs no less than N500, 000 each.  The Orange House, hired by a neighbouring Ijebu community to perform two shows, reportedly grossed N1 million.

    But that deal would later burn their hands.   As they savoured the after-show fawning of the excited hosts, some crooks carted away their costumes!

    That explained their abject display at this year’s rally.  With most of their costumes gone, and their major sponsor also dead, they cut the picture of pitiable orphans!  Still, next year is another date!

    But the Sappers Barracks ensemble, from the Nigerian Army cantonment in Ilese, continue to earn plaudits.  They retained the third position they achieved last year, but their especial strength, is the pan-Nigeria mix they give the pageant.

    Ilese Day, according to Otunba Kalejaiye, invited and honoured Gen. Azubike  Ihejirika, then chief of Army staff (COAS), with an award.  But seeing the catchy carnival display, he queried the local army commander why the barracks community were not part of the show.

    Enter, the Sappers Barracks’ carnival ensemble, the Pink House, with their distinct military camouflage, a proud part and parcel of the Ilese community!  See how communities, without much ado, can creatively weave own pan-Nigeria clans?

    Ilese Day continues to show how to deepen community bond, build economic assets and showcase developmental potentials.

    It’s an Appian way other communities need to follow.  Unlike the biblical wide and merry way, this isn’t likely to lead to perdition.

     

  • CANned

    CAN — the Christian Association of Nigeria — appears a perfect fit for this pun.  But it is only symptomatic of a general malaise.

    At a crucial juncture, when everyone ought to face down the demons rendering the republic prostrate, critical segments not only snooze but proudly so.

    In the classical making of self-canning, CAN has taken an unfazed lead.  Among others, a distracted section of the media ripples over inanities; but stays placid on vital issues.

    Ethnic lobbies too, a key collage of the Nigerian fabric — and problem — are too busy — and petty — nursing ancestral hurts, from ancestral feuds, to seize the moment, and face down the demon plaguing all.

    In Vice President Yemi Osinbajo-speak, it’s as rare a time as ever, when Nigerians are faced with a sharp good-vs-evil divide.  But hey, where are the onward Christian soldiers, going onto war, rippling for the kill?  Not CAN!

    Sure, it would be grossly unfair to claim every Christian, or even every church leader, is onto this dole of Christian reproach.  That would be criminal over-generalization.

    Still, even the most doting lover of CAN would admit since Ayo Ortisejafor played unfazed Grigori Rasputin in the court of Goodluck Jonathan, that association has all but projected the mammon, symptomatic of the wide-and-merry; than the holy, epitomizing the straight-and-narrow.

    Like a horror movie, the hypocrisy and sanctimony of 15th century Catholic England, as captured by Geoffrey Chaucer’s Prelude to Canterbury Tales, come reeling in the CAN of 21st century Nigeria.

    In that classic tale, a poem written in old English, about only the lowly Parson, a humble, rustic parish priest, cut the muster of his faith.

    The others, higher up in the Catholic hierarchy — the Summoner, bully papal police; the Pardoner, corrupt hawker of indulgences, “hot, fresh and smoking from Rome”; and the Miller, gold-fingered from massive heist of clients’ grains — were hustlers per excellent, spiritual and temporal!

    Compare and contrast those Brit old rogues, with the free-wheeling prosperity preachers, merry doomsday prophets and political pundits in priestly garb of today’s Nigeria, and the difference might not be so clear.

    Take the prayer sortie to Ike Ekweremadu, deputy senate president (DSP), under scrutiny for alleged sleaze.

    Now, the issue is not to demonize praying.  Even the Christ Jesus himself quipped the healthy had no need of physicians.  So, from Christian tenets, every sinner — and that means everyone — needs prayers, every time.

    What rather rankles is the ugly symbolism of it all, in all its combative and un-Christian filth, of a slew of clerics rushing — to the prayerful defence? — of a DSP accused of questionable assets, in a polity laid prostrate by sleaze.

    The Ekweremadu case is a fundamental moral stinker, which crippling stench ought to warn any self-respecting priest, Christian, Muslim or traditional worship, off that persona.

    Ekweremadu, as DSP, was a product of soulless perfidy and unfazed opportunism.  Under the PDP ancien regime, Ekweremadu was DSP.  That was legitimate, for his party commanded the majority in the Senate.  So, he emerged DSP as of right.

    Now, under APC rule, he emerged DSP by sleight, powered by the most condemnable strain of blind opportunism.

    And his accuser, trier and gaoler is no more than the immaculate logic of his first coming under PDP, now rendered moral and logical gargoyle, under APC.

    In legal metaphor, if Bukola Saraki stole APC’s DSP “pearl”, Ekweremadu was its unflinching receiver and adorner.  That act is an abomination, under logic; and a rebuke, under morality.

    Yet, Ekweremadu has pranced, swaggered and capered with that sickly pearl, bolstered by the nauseating humbug that rules the political roost; which, however, every true Christian, as society’s moral conscience, ought to scorn.

    Again, for clarity: this column has no problem with Citizen Ekweremadu, as a person.  But the rotten stench, from the Ekweremadu DSP persona, is a terrible assault on the nose.

    Now, pile this same moral aberration with allegations of suspect assets, and the best the leading lights of Nigerian Christendom could do was rush in with combative prayers?

    “If gold rusts,” the immaculate Parson’s voice drifts in from 15th century England, in all its gentle but chilling rebuke; as censorious as it was, uttered against the Catholic England of his day, “what would iron do?”

    In holy empathy, these same leading lights bawl and thunder over the hunger ravaging the land.

    But if corruption unfairly skews the bulk of the common patrimony, leaving the majority beggared, and priests rush to offer solidarity with those accused of sleaze, are their holinesses too not complicit in the hunger tearing apart the land, despite their holy cant?  And isn’t that the very acme of hypocrisy?

    CAN is mealy-mouthed at best, starkly indifferent at worst, on the corruption question.

    Fiery Catholic Bishop Matthew Kukah, at the very genesis of it all, sensationally declared the country should forget the nation-burying corruption of the Jonathan era, simply because the former president did fantastic by losing an election and quitting.

    That, more or less, has been the attitude of CAN, and its leading lights.  Yet, by the tenets of their faith, they ought to be among the most radical, to stamp out the menace.

    But again, CAN stands in good company, in a raped country, at its most trying hour, sapped by condemnable indifference, by its critical pillars.

    Since Lord Frederick Lugard forged, in the imperial furnace, the colonial territory he christened Nigeria, the media, marshalled by the newspaper press, had always been on the right side of history.

    Name it — the colonial times, the turbulent immediate independence era and the dark epoch of military rule — the media had always championed the best for the polity.  Not any more?

    In any case, on corruption — sleaze and political humbug — the media is in a raucous free fall, like the collapsing Tower of Babel.  It’s a moral equivalent of a swagger on Mount Olympus, down to a whimper deep inside the Hades.

    The ethnic champions?  Corruption, no matter its clear danger, is nothing but welcome tool to point finger, whip up rogue tongue solidarity and wield, as umpteenth rod, of clan and ethnic victimization.

    It never occurs to these folks that sleaze has no ethnic coloration, in its total and complete destruction.

    Still, decay in other critical pillars, no matter how grand, can’t compare to decay in the church, with its deep link to the spiritual and the celestial.

    Yet, that’s the terrible image CAN and leading lights lug; running dubious campaigns, championing suspect causes, at variance with own tenets.

    It’s time CAN and allies did away with such canned thinking.

  • The danger ahead

    Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action”. To anyone familiar with the above lines from Ian Fleming’s gripping detective novel Goldfinger – the seventh in the popular James Bond series, the events of the past week must have rekindled distant chords. For while the main elements of the thriller Bond story, particularly the plots and counterplots may have possibly been lost in distant memory, not unlikely are those immortal words which, long after it leapt out of the pages of the 1959 novel, has, like an imperishable commodity, remained in the public square to be routinely drawn upon to describe aspects of the human, nay Nigerian experience.

    True, the polity that has not been in short supply of excitable moments since a group of 15 senators and 36 members of the House of Representatives defected from the ruling party on July 24. But then, the raft of countermeasures witnessed in the past that have not only left the citizens bewildered but have thrown up questions about the character of the actors and their understanding of the niceties of process and constitutionalism.

    It is a silly season, no doubt. From the train of defection which kicked off in Abuja July 24, it has since berthed in Benue where the embattled governor, Samuel Ortom alongside members of the state parliament dismounted the APC coach to join old comrades in the PDP. Days after, the spectacle would shift to Sokoto where the governor, Aminu Tambuwal also alongside some lawmakers moved from the APC to the PDP. And then the mother of all defections in Akwa Ibom State, where Godswill Akpabio, erstwhile minority leader in the upper legislative house junked the PDP on whose ticket he not only rode to parliament but served in the exalted office as governor for eight years.

    Nothing outside the Nigerian pathology of opportunism – if you ask me.

    And to imagine that these merely preface the real battles –the control of the National Assembly and the ultimate prize in 2019. This is where the weeks and the coming months promise to be exciting. Suffice to say that  we are at the point where it is safe to say that things would never remain the same for the Bukola Saraki-led senate. In the unlikelihood of Saraki yielding the exalted office of Senate President which he apparently coverts more than life; and in the equal unlikelihood of the majority APC willing to let go of what they consider as theirs by right, a do-or-die battle appears joined. And so between a senate carved in Saraki’s image – a body that has done little else than shop for ignoble technicalities to retain the ‘stolen’ trophy – and a determined and equally inventive ruling party, one that claims the moral high but would nonetheless betray a willingness to sacrifice due process for expediency even if it tends to a repudiation of everything it claims to stand for, the rest of us, can only watch– in slow motion – as the fight crawls to a photo finish.

    Call it a state of neither war nor peace; that is precisely where we are at the moment. However, never mind the sabre-rattling and threats of Armageddon; or even the few egos that would be bruised and the momentary discomfort that would come by a few of the current actors as a result of shifting loyalties, nothing of the long predicted tectonic shift would happen.

    In the end, it would still be they, versus the rest of us!

    Only if they had spared us the terrible migraine from their unfathomable mind games; then we would have been content with a ring-side seat to watch as events unfold. Unfortunately, the insidious, grotesque institutional atmosphere they also seek to nurture as they cruise dangerously along, has become too unsettling to ignore. It is increasingly, proving to be toxic to our constitutional health.

    I cite three examples – all of them fresh. On July 30, eight lawmakers from Benue State House of Assembly reportedly served an impeachment notice on the state governor, Samuel Ortom. Their leader, Terkimbi Ikyange, who coincidentally had in the preceding week been removed as Speaker it was who gave the governor a seven-day ultimatum to respond to alleged misconduct and corruption charges. In all, a tidy N54 billion broken into N22 billion (security vote) and N32 billion (local government funds) was cited.

    As in a movie, the gang of eight lawmakers actually moved to impeach the governor – never mind that this was a 30-member parliament!

    The mother of it all was that the police actually provided the renegade lawmakers security while shutting out the majority 22 members!

    The story unfortunately, didn’t end there. Last week, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) reportedly swopped on the account of the state government, thus effectively crippling the activities of the government for days. And all of this happening few weeks after the governor’s defection from the ruling party at the centre!

    Happenstance?

    How about the more recent – perhaps the more dramatic one which happened in Akwa Ibom – also last week. The story, according to the Sunday edition of this newspaper is that a tidy N1.4 billion belonging to the Akwa Ibom government was traced to 11 slush accounts. Already, the finance commissioners and three others were said to have summoned by the anti-graft body. Again, this happening few days after the former governor, Godswill Akpabio, defected from the ruling party in the state.

    Mere coincidence?

    Now the third – and perhaps the biggest one, a class act is the invasion of the National Assembly by hooded men of the Department of State Security on Tuesday last week. While we worry about the motives or even the characters behind the violation of the hallowed precincts of the National Assembly, there is – good enough –a near unanimous acceptance that the Lawal Daura-led Department of State Security had finally crossed the red line. That is certainly important just as the swift measures taken by the acting President Yemi Osinbajo is also critical to restoring credibility to the body. So much for our collective outrage; the pretence about the pattern as somewhat strange to the polity seems to me an extension of the culture of denial. Closer to the reality is the implicit admission by the highest authorities in the land that our nation’s secret service is not only fickle but so patently amenable to seductions by opportunistic actors in the political system.

    That danger, which we daily live with, is something to chew upon.

    Let me end this piece this way: politics and the work of EFCC or DSS do not mix. Let politicians indulge in their fancies; let those running the federal government allow the EFCC and the DSS to work for us – without political interference. By the way, given the critical roles of the two institutions to the nation’s democratic project, it seems to me that a crash course in optics wouldn’t entirely be a bad idea for their leadership.

  • These disarticulated times

    Beleaguered Senate President Bukola Saraki surpassed his own notoriety for inventiveness and grand-standing last week in various statements explaining and justifying his recent defection from the ruling APC to the PDP, from which he and his supporters had bailed out in 2015 when it        was clear that the biggest party in Africa was doomed to go down to historic defeat.

    There was nothing high-minded about it.  It was a career move pure and simple.

    It did not follow from ideology, much less conviction.  To leader and follower alike, one political party is as good as another as long as it delivers the juice.  Once its ability to deliver the juice in the usual quantities seems threatened, or it is time seek another party that can gratify their overweening sense of entitlement.

    This scenario is all the more likely to occur when the party of their current sojourn develops vulnerabilities that might imperil its chances of re-election, as the APC is now circumstanced.

    Four issues have above all made the Buhari administration especially vulnerable.

    The first is the narrow base from which President Muhammadu Buhari makes some of the most important federal appointments.

    The second is the murderous reign of cattle herders from the Sahel to the Atlantic coast.  Each day brings with it blood-curdling tales of murder, arson, devastation, rapine, and displacement. For the most part, the government wrings its hands in abject befuddlement and promises to bring the marauders to justice.  The very next day, the marauders strike on a more brutal scale.

    The third is the dilatoriness with which urgent national issues are being handled, at a time that demands decisiveness.

    The fourth is the gloomy atmosphere across the country, the pervasive feeling that things aren’t improving or improving fast enough, despite the Buhari Administration’s best effort.

    The PDP, which took Nigeria to the edge of economic ruin and set the value system at nought has skillfully exploited these vulnerabilities to cast itself as the deliverer Nigeria is waiting for.   Last week’s defections from the APC into the welcoming embrace of the PDP was supposed to signalise its resurgence and its unstoppable march back to power.

    Regardless of the balance of forces in the Senate, it now has in its collection Saraki, who has always had one foot in the PDP where his soul belongs, and the other in the APC. For deputy Senate president, thanks to the self-same Saraki, it has an entrenched PDP stalwart, Ike Ekweremadu.

    These are no minor trophies.

    The Senate president used to be little more than a ceremonial office, but Saraki has parlayed it into an independent centre of power to delay, disrupt and obstruct Buhari’s agenda.  No other Senate president in the world exercises the kind of power Saraki has arrogated to himself; none draws nearly as much on the public purse.

    Saraki has vowed to remain president, a position he had usurped by fraud and kept by dispensing patronage, thanks to Buhari’s vacillation in enforcing party discipline – a vacillation that doubtless haunts him today.

    Meanwhile, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, another PDP crossover who was also set to defect, has been hedging his bets – in case he finds his position unviable – further evidence, were any needed, that the defections were never rooted in conviction.

    Saraki’s proxies are claiming that, even in Nigeria, there is precedent for members of the Opposition holding key positions in the legislature.  As examples, they cite Ume Ezeoke of the NPP who served as Speaker in the NPN-dominated House of Representatives, and John Washpam, also of the NPP, who functioned as deputy president in the NPN-controlled Senate.

    This brazen revisionism should not pass unchallenged.

    The arrangement was a product of negotiations between the two parties.  It also included allocation of cabinet positions to the NPP.  Though the largest single party in the National Assembly, the NPN lacked an overall majority that would have enabled it to govern effectively, what with the strong UPN presence in the legislature.

    When the marriage of convenience collapsed, each party went its separate way. It cannot therefore be cited as a precedent for Saraki’s tenacity of office.

    Last week’s armed siege on the National Assembly was barbarous through and through.  It is indefensible. Those who planned and staged it must be identified and brought to justice, and there should be no prevarication in the matter.

    But that intrusion hardly justifies Saraki’s heated rhetoric and his grandstanding.

    Hear him, at his chaotic “world press conference”:

    “. . .The legislature, more than any other institution in this country, more than any other arm of government, represents the will of the people. We are elected by the people, and an assault on the legislature is an assault on the people of Nigeria. The forcible shutdown of the legislature was an unconscionable assault on a national institution, and thanks to all your efforts, the aggressors have been put to shame. . .”

    In what ways, it is necessary to ask, has the legislature over which Saraki has presided in the past three years and run as a fief represented the will of Nigerians?  And isn’t it rich that a person impervious to shame and noblesse oblige should talk of putting others to shame?

    And this from the same press conference, about the siege and its masterminds:

    “. . .They attempted to execute an illegal impeachment of the leadership of the Senate without the backing of the law, but they faltered. We are confident that, together, we shall always defeat acts of unconstitutionality. The rule of law shall always prevail. . .”

    Saraki’s new-found belief in the rule of law – if belief it is indeed and just another instance of his accustomed posturing – is hollow through and through.  Whether in his political career or in his business operations, he has always lived under the penumbra of the law.  Ilorin and Kwara State,  not forgetting Lagos and Abuja, are littered with the evidence.  I say nothing of the Cayman Islands and other foreign shelters for wealth of dubious provenance.

    In case Saraki has conveniently forgotten the underhanded, insidious and smart-alecky path he trod to “emerge” Senate president, how he conspired with all 49 members of the PDP and nine renegade members of the APC to wrest the position for himself and assign that of deputy president to the minority PDP, the APC be damned, here is a reminder.

    When the 7th Senate was prorogued, the law in force was the Senate Standing Orders 2007 “as amended,” according to the best authorities.  And until the Senate convened to elect new officers for the 8th Senate, it transacted no official business whatsoever.

    So, how did Standing Orders 2007 (as amended), which required all members of the Senate to participate in the nominating and voting for the Senate president and deputy president morph into House Standing Orders 2015 “as amended” which states rather limply that members of the Senate are entitled to participate in voting for Senate president and deputy president?

    Back in July 2015, the police had determined that the document at issue was a forgery.  The Director of Public Prosecutions of the Federation, Mohammed Diri, issued a legal opinion concurring in that finding and recommended that those behind it be identified and charged with criminal conspiracy, forgery, breach of official trust, and unlawful assembly.

    Toward that end, the legal opinion also set forth some questions the police should answer definitively, namely:  Who authorised promulgation of Senate Standing Order 2105? Who published it? Who approved it?  Who paid for its publication?  Who distributed it?

    The Ministry of Justice, then headed by immediate past Solicitor-General of the Federation and permanent secretary of the Ministry of Justice, Abubakar Yola also concurred in the legal opinion and stated that the Senate leadership election, based as it was on forged documents, was null and void.

    But the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami (SAN) who took office four months after the legal opinion was issued has, without formally issuing a nolle prosequi, discontinued the case.  Nor has he deigned to explain why.

    The police seem just as disinclined to pursue investigations to answer the questions formulated by the DPP.

    That is the background to the making of Senate President Saraki.  Those who are now lionising him as a champion of democracy and the rule of law care little about his personal history.

    They care even less about democracy and the rule of law, and about integrity in public life.

  • Osun: Looking back, looking forward

    Guess how the Osun governorship electioneering would go?

    Davido belts out sexy and seductive music.  Uncle, and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, Ademola Nurudeen Adeleke aka Jackson (though, no Michael) turns instant amoeba, with neither shape nor form, in a fit of free-wheeling caper.

    The dancing senator, in his true elements, earns boisterous and thunderous roar, as the merry campaign partisans catch the fire!

    Reminds you — doesn’t it? — of the Biblical King David, doing his vigorous twist-and-turn, before the Ark of Covenant; a wild gyration that drew an instant rebuke from Queen Michal, Saul’s daughter, who felt it was scandalously un-kingly?

    But that itself drew David’s counter-rebuke: Michal’s womb would never bulge with babies; or her legs ever leap with joy, while cuddling infants — a dire decree with Jehovah’s final seal!

    Still, this Jackson caper can’t be to high Jehovah?  No.  But to the low voter, baited to use his heart, not his head.

    From the Iyiola Omisore end, if the impasse over the Social Democratic Party (SDP) ticket gets resolved in his favour?  Perhaps bewitching claims bordering on flagrant untruths; and threats, rude and crude, bordering on the sinister.

    And from the Osun traditional politicians, progressive, conservative or reactionary?  Hot bile over “Tekobo” (returned Lagos emigre) versus the home-bred — sterile controversies that add nothing to wise voting.

    Then, blatant lies; vicious and virulent personality attacks, laced with wicked rumours, that turn the voter into an unthinking, self-destruct mob.

    It’s the old Osun bile-driven electioneering, to whip up base instincts.

    But it has always proved the Biblical wide and merry way, that leads nowhere but perdition and eventual gnashing of teeth, by that same mob, when the emotions ebb.

    Flashback 2003.  Governor Bisi Akande — not the best of glib politicians, being blunt to a fault — was heckled out of office.

    Baba Akande got pummelled, as the hated apostle of enduring present pains for future comfort.  It was a classic mob verdict, all passion, no reason.

    But his replacement?  Almost eight years of near-total paralysis, under Governor Olagunsoye Oyinlola.  Of course, you can’t claim Oyinlola did “nothing”, as excitable partisans are wont to argue and ripple.

    But whatever he did, almost everything about Osun headed south, until the Rauf Aregbesola restoration years, starting 2010, after a three-year judicial battle to reclaim the stolen mandate of 2007.

    Even then, the Osun Government Secretariat at Abere, complete with the Bola Ige House, the Governor’s Office Complex, was the grand vision Akande left behind to mock the Oyinlola-era ruins — and the voters’ grand folly.

    So, what should the Osun voter do, in the midst of the unimaginable din of electioneering?  Look back, before looking forward.

    That way, (s)he can make an informed decision on the ballot.  How was Osun seven years ago?  How would (s)he want it to be four years from now?

    Security?  Kwara was created, first as West-Central State; shortly later, Kwara State, in 1967.  It was one of the original 12 states, created from the four 1st Republic regions, of North, East, West and Midwest, by Gen. Yakubu Gowon.  Osun was created in 1991.

    Yet, the Offa robbery of 2018, probably the worst in that state’s history, caught Kwara napping.  For Osun, however, it was a glorious “so near, yet so far away”, for Offa is virtually Osun’s next door.

    Crime could happen anywhere.  But it was no accident such a hideous robbery didn’t take place in neighbouring Okuku (in Osun) or even relatively far-away Lagos.

    The difference is clearly the rigour Osun put into its security architecture, these past eight years, contrasted to the relatively sloppy thinking across the border.  Yet, Osun is 26; Kwara, 50.

    Yeah, at a time, such robberies were common place in Lagos, Kwara’s 1967 contemporary.  But again, by sheer superior thinking, such became history in Lagos.

    Education.  Eight years ago, how many of those futuristic schools dotted the Osun skyline?  How many kids were being daily fed, at the lowest rung of the Osun school system?  Indeed, how many of these kids, from the poorest of the poor, were even in school?

    Yet, barely two years into the period of reference, the Nigerian economy collapsed, no thanks to the cumulative rot in the Goodluck Jonathan presidency, precipitating the nationwide salary crisis.

    But pray, how many states lugged that burden, yet didn’t allow its education and youth empowerment vision to be impaired?  Again, ode to superior, if punishing, thinking!

    Infrastructure.  For eons, the Gbongon junction, on the Ibadan-Ife Expressway, like the Mobalufon junction, Ijebu Ode, on the Sagamu-Benin Expressway, was the grave of many travellers, victims of avoidable road crashes.

    Now, that junction boasts the Bisi Akande trumpet bridge.  Sure, many may crow about its beauty, as a novel landscape.  But its most vital intervention, again thanks to smart thinking, is saving life.  Travellers, that Gbongan grave is sealed, forever!

    Still, that trumpet blares Osun’s great infrastructural strides, these past eight years.  Yet, it was a period of high adversity!  With high prosperity, what might it have been?

    The Oba Adesoji Aderemi ring road, Osogbo, serves as the bewitching beauty of that new thinking, which manifests, like dazzling pearls, in the Osogbo city centre!

    Yet, there is nothing like infrastructure for infrastructure’s sake.  Though still work-in-progress, history would laud these efforts as critical drivers to prise Osun off its economic puddle, as “civil service state”.

    A civil service state is a euphemism for economic stagnancy.  That had been the fate of Osun, since creation in 1991, till these past eight years.

    Despite this delicate upswing, if you peruse the Osun Media & Allies Forum, a WhatsApp Osun community news forum, you could sense some renaissance flaring, on the Osun plain of sports.

    Sundry posts, on that forum, include a community cricket test at Ilesa, the Ogunjobi Gold Cup, a yearly youth football championship for U-20 and below, some Osun youths winning continental titles in weightlifting and canoeing, and some inter-collegiate basketball championships, using as hubs, the courts in the new government high schools.

    Again, these are just no accidents.  They are natural responses to certain policy stimuli, which is the way to go — just as the raft of hotels and event centres, that now dot the Osogbo city centre and other Osun major towns, are the logic of business following better infrastructure.

    As electioneering hots up, a lot of passion would burn around “afsa” (the Osun cynical street lingo for “half salary”).

    The “debt burden” would be amplified and especially vilified, with sloppy thinkers and blabby talkers waxing poetic but empty.

    Opposing partisans would howl, scream and bawl about scandals, real or imagined, in a sweeping condemnation of the present order — hardly undemocratic!

    Still, all things considered, even after addressing the valid queries, is Osun better now than it was eight years ago?

    Osun’s future is best secured by a higher notch of the current policies.  Anything less, the state risks a tragic drop into Oyinlola-era ruins.

  • Dino: A lawmaker’s travails

    Poor Dino Melaye.

    Given the unremitting bad press he gets each passing day, you would think that “Delinquent Senator” better describes the Senator for Kogi West than “Distinguished Senator.”

    It is almost as if he cannot do anything that is not delinquent, no matter how hard he tries.

    They said he did not earn the degree he claims from Ahmadu Bello University.  He proves the contrary.  To leave no one in doubt, he decks himself in doctoral regalia to attend a session of the National Assembly, only to be denounced afresh as an impersonator on the insidious ground that he holds only a bachelor’s degree of the third rank.

    When did a degree cease to be a degree, pray?

    He writes a best-selling tome on the nation’s most pressing problem “Anti-corruption,” and instead of applauding his scholarship, some career calumnists dismiss it as a desultory pastiche riddled with grammatical errors, starting from the title page.  It matters not in the least to them that the entire membership of the National Assembly individually and collectively witnessed the historic launch of the volume and supported it with googols of Naira.

    I wonder what the calumnists aforementioned will do when the senator emerges (I use that word advisedly) as a frontline member of the Association of Nigerian Authors or as an Honorary Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, if not the short list for a Grammy – remember he is also a best-selling recording artist – or the National Order of Merit.

    Rest easy, contenders for the prizes endowed by the oil companies and the finance houses for fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama.  The Senate’s literary crackerjack is not coming after you.  He doesn’t need the piddling cash prize, which amounts to a little more than a month’s takings from his day job of making laws for the good governance of Nigeria.

    Still on the book: They say they can’t find it in any reputable bookstore.  Why don’t they check out the disreputable bookstores, then?

    Dino invokes the Senate’s oversights power to compel an obdurate chief of Customs to appear in uniform to testify on some important national security issues, and they say he over-reached.  If he, a distinguished senator – let them lump that if they don’t like it — if he can voluntarily appear before the most distinguished Upper Chamber in his academic robes, why should an ordinary chief of Customs countermand orders to wear his official uniform on a summons from the Senate, not once but three times?

    Where, pray, is the over-reaching?

    Through frugal spending and judicious husbandry of his emoluments from the legislature, he acquires a fleet of some of the finest automobiles ever built.  The collection includes a Lamborghini, Alfa Romeo and a Bentley for sure, and may also boast a Rolls Royce, a Maybach, and some motorcars said to have been specially manufactured to meet his exacting standards.

    Elsewhere, they would be celebrating his nice sense of discrimination.  Here they dismiss him as a playboy and a showboat inebriated with hot new money and all the crassness and vulgarity associated with it.

    A senator can’t spend his own money as he pleases?  What is the country coming to?

    Unarmed, the senator single-handedly faced down in his hometown a squad of assassins that couldn’t even shoot straight. That, I would argue, is the stuff of heroism.  In a land so bereft of heroes, the event should have been memorialised with a public holiday.

    Not in a land smothered by Dinophobia.

    At his first coming as a member of the House of Representatives, the future senator displayed such versatility and prowess in the martial arts on the floor that it was widely believed that if he was minded to set up a Kick-boxing Academy in Abuja for the benefit of his fellow lawmakers and others who may need such skills, it would be a roaring success. He was the complete package.

    When his constituency would not return him to the House and he was literally down and out, he carried out feasibility studies on the project.  He concluded that a Senate seat would serve him much better.

    The rest is history.

    Now his prowess is reserved exclusively for the protection of his patron the irremovable president of the Senate, in the capacity of personal bodyguard.

    Nobody is applauding his loyalty and sense of sacrifice.  Undiscerning as always, the usual detractors see in the Kogi Senator’s relationship to his principal only grovelling subservience.  Some of them, I bet, can’t recognise nobility of character even if it were to kick them in groin.

    It was prowess in the martial arts that the Senator deployed in executing a Houdini-style escape from the police when they were taking him in an armoured vehicle to Kogi to face spurious criminal charges. To cover their embarrassment, the police charged him with “attempted suicide.”

    First of all, whose body is it?  Second, why would he attempt to kill himself when he has so much to live for – those mansions in Abuja and elsewhere, those luxury cars, money in the better banks and in the hardest currencies, with much more to come?

    Dinophobia is a terrible affliction, believe me.  As if that is not bad enough, recent events have, if anything, further compounded and raised it to a national malady.

    The other day, as the good senator was heading to Kogi to commission blocks of classrooms, the latest addition to his impressive portfolio of constituency projects, some hoodlums with murder on their minds emerged from the bush somewhere on the Abuja-Lokoja stretch, intercepted his car, and immobilised it.

    They struck it viciously and relentlessly with their cudgels but could not make a dent on its armoured frame.  Nor could they shatter the glass windows.  They tried to flip the vehicle on its side.  No luck.  They tried to flip it on its back; same result.   The senator just looked on, bemused.

    The hoodlums then scampered away in search of disused tyres or some highly combustible material  with which to set the senator’s car on fire. The senator knows their type all too well; no need to take further chances.

    So he bolted out of the car into the bush and ran as fast and as far as his sturdy legs could carry him, his assailants in hot pursuit.  By then, it was dusk, and visibility was diminishing.  In the distance, he could just make out the hazy outlines of a huge, solitary tree. He raced to it, wrapped his arms and feet around its trunk and with practised movements lifted himself three feet at a time until he reached safety some 120 feet above ground.

    With danger lurking everywhere – from his nonplussed assailants, hunters who might mistake the bulky object high up the tree for some exotic game and shoot at it, denizens of the bush bristling at the invasion of their habitat, and from cattle herders who might perceive whatever was up there as a threat to their priceless herd, he decided that the tree was the safest refuge.

    And there he stayed until daybreak, fighting off insects and sleep and hunger and thirst and creatures of his own imagining.

    By any standard, this was a feat of extraordinary daring, valour, and resourcefulness.  But they are not cheering.  Instead they are calling it a stunt, a tawdry tale designed to shore up the image of a senator who has become a byword for delinquency.

    In his ordeal, they won’t even accord him the empathy we owe one another.

    Dinophobia, I tell you one more time, is a terrible affliction.

  • Between Saraki and Coriolanus

    When political actors roar and thunder; and everyone cowers and blunders, recourse to literature — the wisdom down the ages — is rare asset.

    Somewhat, that puts some calm on the bedlam.

    That about captures the great hoopla of July 24: the hyper-excitement before; the chest-thumping after; and the dejection, laced with bluff and bluster (ironically, in both giving and receiving camps), as the whole thing morphs into a flux — and a farce — with no predictable end.

    It was the high-octane drama of APC-to-PDP defection, with Senate President Bukola Saraki, as consummate strummer-in-chief.

    Even as the press hailed or wailed, Saraki and perfidy remained yoked.

    Perfidy heralded Saraki’s emergence as Senate president.  For personal gain, he sold off his ruling party to the opposition PDP.

    On July 24, with even more solemn perfidy, Saraki reeled out defections in plenary, which he probably hoped would smash his party’s ruling Senate majority, after which, his traducers allege, he planned to jump.

    But as the republic, with bated breath, awaits the virtuoso stunts of the latest Prince of political “jump-ology”, it’s back to literature as teacher, in times of great upheaval.

    The bedlam of July 24 should stir, in poetic minds, the storm-in-paradise by Lucifer and his imperious angels, as poetically reported by John Milton, in his epic, Paradise Lost.

    “Better reign in hell than serve in heaven,” was the whoop, as Lucifer and rebellious hosts flapped their wings in fury; bristled, hovered and zoomed with rage.

    But when the hysteria cleared, Lucifer, the incandescent beautiful son of the morning, had sunk to Satan, the eternal Prince of darkness!

    It’s morning yet on the road to political paradise or hell.  But in due course, even that would be manifest, with the result and aftermath of Election 2019.

    “E don beg me,” was a cheeky quip from Himself the Abami Eda, Fela.  He claimed Justice Okoro Idogu, who gaoled Fela for questionable currency offences, had apologized, in the course of the embattled jurist’s hospital round, where Prisoner Fela was admitted.

    The media, always baying for the underdogs, went ballistic!

    Not a few also went rabidly excitable, when news came that President Muhammadu Buhari, and the hard-punching, tough-talking Adams Oshiomhole, new APC party boss, were “begging” Saraki to stay.

    But that alleged begging only echoed William Shakespeare’s tragedy of Coriolanus.  Panicky Rome begged estranged Corionalus, leading foreign enemies, not to sack his city.

    Either way though, Coriolanus was doomed.  He rippled with power, leading the invading Volscians.  Nevertheless, the plea met him at his weakest point.

    Now, the Coriolanus tragedy is vintage linkage, both to Saraki and the Nigerian media, in this unfolding and ever-gripping drama.

    Caius Marcius Coriolanus was a brave general of old Rome.  For his valour, he earned intense patrician love.  But for his alleged vanity and pride, from the plebs came no less passionate loathing.

    Much of the plebeian hate came from deliberate mind-poisoning from the Tribunes — state-installed ombudsmen, to gauge the masses’ grievances, soon after the overthrow of the harsh Tarquin kings.

    By private bile, however, the Tribunes profaned a sacred public duty; and pumped the excitable plebs full of anti-Coriolanus hate.

    Pray, how are these Tribunes of old Rome different from a section of Nigeria’s current media, unleashing visceral hate and base emotions, along faith and ethnic lines, by manipulating the people’s angst, in a most difficult period of Nigerian history?

    But back to Rome.  Coriolanus, pushed by doting mom, Volumnia, declared for Consul.  During electioneering, the Tribunes poisoned the plebs to reject him.  A short-fused Coriolanus blew his tops; and earned banishment from Rome.

    Rome’s loss was the Volscians’ gain — and the Volscians, Rome’s nemesis, put at bay only by the war volcano named Coriolanus, promptly pressed their new advantage.

    But then, vanished were the toxic Tribunes, that baited the catastrophe.  Vamoosed too, were the excitable plebs, in mortal fear of slaughter, capture and conquest!

    Rome was only ransomed by the plaintive plea of Coriolanus’s mother, using as bait his infant son and distraught wife.  But saving Rome equated Coriolanus’s doom in the Volscians’ camp!

    Again, might the current media-goading and hate-gaming be inviting an inevitable crunch, where the media gamers would bale, leaving in the lurch these neo-plebs, now baying and all excitable?

    Still on begging, trust and allied matters, you can’t but tap into another tragic play, Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta.

    Barabas the Jew, its tragic hero, was a zestful and unconscionable serial betrayer, driven by nothing but endless chicanery, just to preserve his hoarded trove.

    Eventually, Barabas would burn, cursing and bitter, in a secret cauldron he had fashioned for his enemies, even as his would-be victims jeered at his painful end.

    Might the Barabas tale weigh on Saraki’s mind, as he floats mid-air, torn between the taunt of his former(?) APC colleagues and the hail from his new(?) PDP landing pad?

    Despite deafening, if contrasting partisan bellows, it is not the best of times for Omo Baba Oloye.  He seems to have burnt his candle of trust from both ends!

    Pray, how do you build an enduring political career, on eternal intrigue and everlasting distrust, from both friend and foe? Talk of chilling lonesomeness in pulsating company!

    But beyond the giddy theatrics of defection and counter-defection, something good may well be happening, both to the ruling party and to Nigeria’s troubled politics.

    A quarter to the election high hour, a rather perplexing realignment is playing out. The ruling party’s most virulent and most lethal moles are exiting. nPDP, now renamed rAPC, heads back home to PDP.

    You can’t but pity President Muhammadu Buhari for the havoc this vicious band had unleashed on his development agenda, under the parliamentary prefects of Saraki and Yakubu Dogara.

    It’s a dire lesson the ruling party has learned the hard way.  It rode to power in a mishmash alliance.  But in power, it found itself stuck by that same mishmash.  If it regains power in 2019, it must burn off this treacherous flab.

    Still, might some spiritual dynamics be draining off its life-threatening fat, to where they came from?  Even then, it must rigorously screen National Assembly candidates jostling for its ticket.

    Also, by some strange chemistry, most of Nigeria’s troublers of Israel appear herding selves into a neat pen.  Even former President Olusegun Obasanjo, still mouthing holy but empty platitudes, drifts towards his not-so-immaculate habitat.

    If things peak along these lines, then the choice between Nigeria’s good and evil couldn’t have been starker.

    Noxious forces, ever plaguing this country, could be clinically guillotined.  All it takes is wise voter choice — and Nigeria could then have its life back.

  • Echoes of Decree 43 of 1993

    Nigeria’s recent history is rich in paradox.

    Nowhere is the paradox richer than in legislation on the media, especially since 1984.

    A regime that had on seizing power won wide popular support by abolishing the execrable Decree 4 of 1983 and asked to be judged by its respect for fundamental human rights ended its tenure with Decree 43 of 1993, an enactment so thoroughly subversive of freedom of expression that one would have to go back to Tudor England to find a parallel.

    Designed purportedly to protect public officials against false accusations, Decree 4 made publication of the embarrassing truth a crime and demanded of journalists a greater level of exactness scarcely attainable even in the physical sciences.

    Its protagonist, the dour General Muhammadu Buhari, who suffered no delusions of grandeur and no obsessive concern about his place in history, had said at his very first press interview on taking power that he would “tamper” with press freedom.  And he kept his promise, with the making of Decree 4 and the prosecution and jailing of two Guardian journalists.

    Fast forward to Decree 43 of 1993, eight years into the tenure of General Ibrahim Babangida, who had abolished Decree 4 peremptorily and asked to be judged by his regime’s human rights record.

    Despite the draconian provisions of Buhari’s Decree 4, that enactment is almost benign compared with Babangida’s Decree 43, which sought to return Nigeria to the era of newspaper licensing that even the colonial authority had terminated some 70 years earlier.

    A Newspaper Registration Board, to be established by the Federal Government and having as its members some superannuated, out-of-work individuals who had at various times been engaged in  some form of journalism, was the vehicle with which this sordid task was to be accomplished.

    Every newspaper title was to be registered anew with the posting of bonds and fees as huge as king’s ransom. The Board could grant or deny registration without having to state any reason.  Its decision could not be challenged in any court.  Registration was to be carried out every year.  Publication without prior registration could result in a fine of N200, 000 in the currency of that era, or imprisonment for seven years, or both fine and imprisonment.

    However, successful registration did not guarantee uninterrupted operation.  The Board could void registration at any time, without having to state any reason, and its decision could not be challenged at law.

    The entire premises of any newspaper which continued business after being denied registration would be shut down, together with other businesses operating there.  Collateral damage, you know.

    For publication of any material the authorities deemed disagreeable, the proprietors and directors and every employee right down to the janitor would be held to be just as culpable as if they had personally published the material at issue.  The penalties included a 10-year jail term for publication of “false news.

    To quality for registration as a business or to have one’s name inscribed in the official register of journalists, applicants must be persons of “good character.”  What constituted “good character” was left entirely to the discretion of the Board freighted with government appointees.

    Perhaps the only aspect of the Decree that did not smack of malign intent was the designation of the Council as an accreditation body with powers to ensure that journalism training institutions in Nigeria   conformed to the highest standards.

    It is a measure of the collapse of values Nigeria suffered in the Babangida era that finding some ex-journalists who were only too ready to carry out what was at bottom an undertaker’s job was no difficult task.  To cite an example, Clarkson de Majomi, the fawning publisher of one fringe newspaper was named to represent “the public interest” on the Board.

    That alone was a telling indication of the chicanery of the authors of Decree 43.and of the character of some of the members of the Board and withal a measure of the extent to which institutions and individuals were suborned or cowed during that era that very few voices were raised against Decree 43, even within the press.

    It was understandable that newspapers owned and controlled by the government could not bring themselves to say anything critical of Decree 43.  But even some supposedly independent newspapers could not acknowledge, much less denounce, the danger the enactment posed to Nigeria’s long tradition of press freedom.

    And so, not only was criticism of Decree 43 muted at best, even most of the publications that stood to be wiped out if the decree was rigorously enforced refused to be drawn into an action to challenge it at law. Invited to join in such an action, one newspaper’s chief executive replied curtly that he was for “dialogue,” not “confrontation.”  The way he said it, you would think that Decree was a product of the  most elaborate dialogue ever staged.

    In the end, it was The Guardian which took on the fight.  On November 18, 1993, the day after General Sani Abacha ended Ernest Shonekan’s interim delusion, the Ikeja High Court, Mr Justice S. O. Ilori presiding, declared Decree 43 null and void and of no consequence whatsoever, holding that Babangida had by an earlier decree divested himself of any law-making power.

    Maradona had dribbled the ball irretrievably into his own goal.

    For good measure, the Ilori Court discharged The Guardian and by extension other newspapers form any obligation to comply with it.

    Who would have thought, then, that Babangida’s long, malignant shadow would pursue the news media into the chambers of the National Assembly and even find comfort there some 16 years after he was forced to beat a ragged retreat from Abuja, and then again some nine years thereafter?

    But that is precisely what has happened.

    The Press Council Bill now under discussion in a democratically elected Senate determined so see it through is a rehash of Decree 43 in one guise or another.

    Its intendment is clear.  But who are its sponsors?  Is this the Assembly’s idea of “making laws for the good governance” of Nigeria?

    Cui bono?  For whose benefit is the law being enacted?

    The Ikeja High Court that voided Decree 43 twenty-five years ago did so on narrow, technical grounds.  It did not pronounce on its content, nor its spirit, nor yet its constitutionality.

    It now belongs to another court to perform that urgent task on that enactment’s transparent reincarnation.

    Well before Decree 43 was voided by the Ikeja High Court, the Nigerian Press Organization (NPO) had rendered it inoperable by the simple expedient of refusing to nominate representatives to the Press Council.  It would have to invoke that strategy again if the Assembly endorsed the bill now before it.

    The NPO and the liberal community cannot stop the National Assembly from following the treacherous path the Assembly has chosen. But it can head to the courts if the National Assembly pressed ahead to clear the bill, despite its flagrant breach international norms and usages, and its evisceration of Nigeria’s much-admired tradition of press freedom.

    For President Muhammadu Buhari, the wheel has turned full circle. Paradox of paradoxes, the author of the infamous Decree 4 now has an opportunity as an elected chief of state to save the polity from the even more toxic Babangida-era bill being debated in the National Assembly.

    He should make it clear, even now, that he will veto it if it ever reached his desk.

    It is time to exorcise Babangida’s malignant spirit from our laws and institutions.

  • Problem Has Changed Name, again?

    Until very recently, few Nigerians could claim to know the body that goes by the name ANED let alone what it represents. Not anymore. Today, the body struts the space leaving the electricity little doubt about the ascent of new powerful cartel, which although cannot get their members to deliver on their mandate, insists on operating in lieu of rules. For Nigerians who had thought that they were done with the public utility monopoly that morphed from ECN to NEPA and to PCHN, they are finally, finding out that the problem has changed name literally and figuratively!

    Welcome to the world of Association of Nigerian Electricity Distributors (ANED) – the new cartel presumably so powerful that, after wrestling the electricity consumer to the ground and sending the electricity sector regulator on a Rip Van Winkle sleep now thinks it’s time to mount the lecture circuit to teach the minister in charge of power – Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN one or two things about power – minus the art of delivery!

    Ours truly is an interesting country.

    Twelve years into the coming of the Power Sector Reform Act and another five years after the takeover of the unbundled entities of the defunct PCHN, we pretend to be making progress even when it is so obvious that movement is in reverse gear.  Never mind the old assumptions about private capital providing catalyst for national development; the promises of new ways of getting things done, the elementary principle of value delivery that is at the heart of modern capitalism or if you like – businesses; all of these are being torn into shreds – right under our very eyes – by a body that perennially goes in search of a problem to a solution!

    Not too long ago, yours truly recalls accusing the minister of being soft on his “Abiku” Discos – a charge the minister would vehemently disagree with.

    Not to worry; he insisted then that the job of policing – if you like regulating – the industry, lay elsewhere. The minister was of course right – at least legally; my view then and which has since been borne out, was that the position, considering our peculiar circumstances, amounted to mere sophistry.

    Not that I do not understand the dilemma of the minister. It is the dilemma of the mother of an Abiku child. With the child is said to be sworn to die, the mother nonetheless insists on splashing all the due care hoping sometimes against hope that the child might somehow find the will to live. Never mind the claim about mother’s milk of mercy being inexhaustible, there comes a time when in a fit of desperation, the supremely troubled mother tells the child to choose to either go or stay!

    With the Abiku neither ready to let us alone nor allow us the peace of mind, a push-back would seem at some point inevitable. We are apparently at that moment now.

    That perhaps is the sense in which yours truly understands the minister’s briefing of Monday, July 9 aptly titled “Power Sector State of Play, Next Steps and Policy Directives”. In a tone that could be considered most unusual in the circumstance, the minister, in bare knuckle manner left no one in doubt that the season of indulgence was over.

    First, the minister thinks NERC, is not doing enough given the extensive regulatory powers conferred by the law “including the power in Sections 73 and 74, to amend or cancel a license if the licensee is unable to discharge the duties and obligations imposed by the license.”  That reminder is, quite frankly, long overdue.

    More tellingly, he thinks NERC should proceed to enforce the contract of DisCos to supply meters and act to ensure the urgent speedy supply and installation of meters with a view to eliminating estimated billing and promote efficient industry and market structures. On this, I have nothing to add.

    To the Discos, he says it is time to either shape up or ship out. Again, few would contest this.  The sins of the Discos are not only many, that Nigerians have been forced to endure their crippling debility from their inability to deliver service says more about our legendary resilience than anything else.

    They include failure to provide prepaid meters; failure to ramp up capacity to enable them take up the available 2,000MW difference between the generated power and their distribution capacity; their penchant to play dog in the manager –threatening private entrepreneurs from entering the market to supply consumers whom they are unable to supply and their overall antagonism to other initiatives – private and public – to bridge the electricity supply gap.

    For these failures, particularly the failure to match the distribution infrastructures with the pace of power generated, the generating companies (GenCos) are not only left to choke, the banking sector, the enabling arm currently asphyxiates for the same reason of the failure of the Discos to discharge their due obligations to the other players in the electricity value chain.

    Yet, in the midst of these, the Discos would dare to press for territorial exclusivity or even monopoly. Never mind Section 71(6) of the Electric Power Sector Reform Act (EPSRA) dealing with Terms and Conditions of licenses. Now, the minister reminds that nothing in the law provided for the so-called “exclusivity” nor could “monopoly” for any class of players have been envisaged. That looks like telling it as it is!

    “If we take into consideration that, after five years of privatisation, there are still people and businesses who do not have power or enough power, common sense and public interest demands that we must not resist ordinary people, small businesses like shops and markets from seeking alternative sources of energy.”

    “The truth is that they already have these sources of alternative energy, in small petrol and diesel generators that cost them about N100 per kilowatt hour. If the DISCOs are not resisting the generator sellers who are contributing to pollution, what is the logic of resisting small entrepreneurs bringing mini gas plants to supply a market need?”.

    “Government” he said with some tone of finality, “must act, and will do so. The DisCos bought these assets with their eyes opened, and they must compete to deliver or exit”. These no doubt, are tough words.

    Which of course takes us to the final question – what does ANED want? Although the minister calls the body “interloper”, I believe ANED deserves a hearing. Yes, the body has spoken – mainly about technical issues hampering service delivery, the challenges that they daily face – the same standard rote routinely dished out as rationalisation. For a body that wants to be taken seriously, there is as yet, no serious signs of concrete investment in structures and processes on the basis on which the future of their sector could be anchored.

    Want to know what ANED truly wants? You guessed right; they want money – loads of it from the piggy bank.  How can anyone forget the N213 billion bailout packaged by the apex bank for the sector in 2014?  Or the N39 billion said to be in support of their metering plan only last year? They want more. Period.

    Sure, the Problem Has (merely) Changed Hands!