The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Black Thursday on my mind

    NSR 888 YC. Does it mean anything? Guess, it doesn’t. I believe it should. Indeed, Nigerians ought to by now, be familiar not just with the registration number but the actual owners of the killer truck that has thrown scores of families, if not the entire nation, into mourning since Thursday last week. While the media may have, overall, done fairly well in their reportage of the tragedy, in vain did yours truly find any reference to the registration mark let alone the question of the ownership of the truck said to have despatched some nine citizens to their early graves in addition to the scores wounded  – until Sunday evening.

    To Ladi Lawanson, the Lagos commissioner and his colleagues at the transportation ministry must go the credit for lifting the lid on the identity of the killer truck – that is permitting some measure of uneasiness that the vital information was tucked somewhere obscure among the other updates supplied by the ministry – and this after 72 hours.

    That of course is big deal to the extent that the media didn’t consider that “small matter” important until that formal disclosure on Sunday night. Is it a case of being overwhelmed by the scale of human tragedy, or one of media’s typical obsessions with morbid statistics? Whatever may be the reason, that lacuna, in my view, underlies another chapter of the same malady: the tragedy of a nation that has neither the discipline nor the stomach for important details when they matter most; a window into understanding how and why we have become what we are today.

    Needless to state that little piece of information is actually everything – from whether the hapless, innocent victims of the man-made disaster will ever get justice; whether the citizens as a whole will ever be able to wrest themselves free from the stranglehold of the licensed mass murderers prowling the highways, to whether operatives in the economic realm could be compelled to adorn a human face.

    Back to NSR 888 YC.  For now, the much we know is that – “It (the tanker) was manufactured in 1999 by Mack Trucks Inc at its assembly plant in Winnsboro, United States”. Secondly, it was “designed as a 14,959kg (approximately 15 ton) drilling rig with low bed, but it was converted in Nigeria from a drilling rig to fuel tank carrier to carry 30 tonnes…” And that “the truck should not have been loaded to the weight of 30 tonnes, which is twice its pulling capacity.”

    Although the identity of the owner(s) would have to wait a bit longer since, according to the state government, the vehicle has changed 13 times since the original purchase, Lagos of course deserves every support and encouragement in its bid to unravel the mystery of ownership of the man-made disaster unleashed on the highways by the uncaring system.

    There are a number of reasons why this is this important. For far too long, we have indulged in the crazy, noxious fatalism of leaving matters, even when they are man-induced, to God. As a result, individuals, corporate bodies as indeed all manners of for-profit entities have been known to perpetrate murder and mayhem often with innocent citizens as victim, and perhaps in the understanding that they will never be called to account.

    Picture a 15-ton low bed truck originally configured as a drilling rig being converted by some unscrupulous local fabricators into a 30-ton fuel tanker. Never mind the age of the vehicle – something that hardly matters in these shores – imagine some officials passing off the “disaster” for use in the highly combustible business of fuel haulage? Again, imagine that some Vehicle Inspection Officers actually caused a roadworthiness certificate to be issued to the operator of the contraption ostensibly to fulfil all righteousness!

    Still believe that NSR 888 YC was anything but an accident waiting?

    Already, I see in my mind’s eye many layers of actionable torts that public defenders and other public-spirited lawyers could pursue in defence of public interest! Unfortunately, can we truly say we are anywhere near that level, yet?

    I think Lagos State government is uniquely positioned to take the nation there. It is no accident that Lagos is described as the Centre of Excellence. Here is one instance when that burden imposes the duty to act not just in the interest of the victims but also to set an unmistakeable governance template for corporate responsibility while ensuring that operators within its jurisdiction live by them.

    This is not about reinventing the wheel; that template, to be sure, already exists. What is perhaps missing is the political will, the firm resolve and the due diligence to avail countless hapless victims of criminal behaviours the necessary protections within the ambits of existing laws. Here again, the point bears restating that Lagos, with its culture of excellence, with its world-class forensic infrastructure, proven leadership in governance and an unequalled justice delivery system in the Nigerian federation, can make all the difference.

    What do we expect? A two-layered class action on behalf of the victims of that Black Thursday, against the owners of the truck and against the federal government. First, without prejudice to criminal charges that might be deemed necessary, the state government, through the Office of the Public Offender (OPD) with active collaboration of public-spirited lawyers, should sue the hell out of the owner(s) of the truck. The hefty monetary compensation – to be demanded, should not preclude the winding up of the business of the owner(s) of NSR 888 YC.

    Will that bring back the dead? Certainly not. But most assuredly, it will set a new bar for public conduct by corporates. Secondly, the point would have been unambiguously made that human life – as against profits – not only matter but should actually come first. Thirdly, in a clime where impunity rules, it would send the signal that actions can be made to carry consequences.

    As for the federal government, whose culpable negligence contributed to the disaster, the claim should be exemplary damages/compensation. Much as I understand how politically sensitive such action might be at this time, it seems the only necessary step to be taken against that tier of administration which although invested with awesome powers, continues to visit the ordinary citizen with the fruits of its derelictions.

    May God almighty console the grieving families.

  • A legal Titan, June 12, and other matters

    One of the more puzzling aspects of the debacle the annulment precipitated is how Professor Ben Nwabuewe,  Secretary for Education – yes, Education – in the Transitional Council mandated to oversee the successful completion of the final phase of the transition programme, morphed into a legal strategist for shaping the instruments by which military president Ibrahim Babangida eviscerated it.

    That mandate was just one of the many fictions that undergirded Babangida’s hidden agenda.  As Nwabueze himself has noted, no more than two of the 106 decrees churned out between January and August 23, 1993 were ever referred to the Council for discussion, comment, advice, or even for its information.

    The two, we learn from Nwabueze, did not include the decree that annulled the June 12 1993 presidential election and the one that sought to emasculate the news media. Council members had learned of them from the news media and other sources, just like the rest of the public.

    “Judged by its exclusion from law-making,” Nwabueze has written, the Council’s role in government was one of “almost total irrelevance and insignificance.”

    My own reporting at the time, and the reporting of The Guardian’s correspondents in Abuja, had led me to the same conclusion. Concerned as a long-standing admirer that Nwabueze’s reputation as a legal scholar of global stature and distinguished public servant might be damaged by his involvement in the juristic and political travesty unfolding in Abuja, I sent him a note expressing my fears about where it was all leading and how it might end.

    Despite his busy schedule, he replied promptly, saying that events had indeed taken a turn that the nation did not expect, and that the only thing left for us was to pray.

    I was expecting him to resign.

    I did not know that he was busy preparing, with help from the Federal Attorney-General Clement Akpamgbo, chairman of the Law Reform Commission Justice P. K Nwokedi, and two members of the Commission, Dr Epiphany Azinge and Professor Egerton Uvieghara, the instruments for consecrating the annulment.

    Even so, it is to Nwabueze’s penetrating insights that we owe what we know of the military president’s   state of mind and behavior as the house of cards he had spent eight years constructing and promoting as a fortress was collapsing all around him.

    Babangida, he wrote, “left a rather strong impression of a man forced to quit against his will, of one un-reconciled to quitting in the last days of his rule and in the face of defeat, he cut the figure  of someone unwilling to reconcile himself with composure to the adverse torrents of events, of an angry and bitterly disappointed man.”

    More tellingly, Nwabueze wrote of Babangida:   “His mind, his motions, and his actions seem to have become somewhat disoriented, and no longer governed by disinterested patriotic considerations.  In      the event, he quit in a rather undignified and unceremonious manner. . .”

    Paradoxically, it is also to Nwabueze that we owe “June 12, 1993 Election:  Problems and Solutions,” probably the most sustained, even if tortuous and aridly legalistic defence of the annulment. Because that book furnishes the context for deconstructing his recent stricture on the Federal Government’s recognition of Moshood Abiola as winner of the 1993 presidential election and proclamation of June 12 as “Democracy Day” in place of May 29 that had been conscripted for that purpose, I will deal with it at some length here.

    Nwabueze’s point of departure is the strange proposition that justification or condemnation of the annulment must be based on the “officially announced reasons” for the annulment and nothing else.  The great English jurist JL Austin who defined law tersely as the command of the sovereign could not as subscribed to this instance of forensic brutalism.

    At any rate, here, as I understand it, is what Nwabueze calls a formal or “lawyer’s case” for the annulment.

    The election was annulled because it was held in violation of a subsisting restraining order. “A pronouncement of the courts, no matter how perverse, or blatantly wrong,” he states grandly, “establishes the law unless it is and until it is reversed on appeal.”

    “The rule of law required,” Nwabuze continues his lawyer’s case, “that the Federal Government obey the order of June 10 stopping the election, and of June 15 suspending announcement of results, and June 21 declaring the election illegal.”

    The decision of the Ikpeme court was clearly wrong, he grants, its jurisdiction having been ousted in unequivocal terms by decree.  The affidavit deposed by Abimbola Davis for Arthur Nzeribe’s Association for a Better Nigeria contained no substance that warranted such an order, most of the averments being “sheer irrelevances and frivolities.”

    Still, Ikpeme’s injunction was the order of a superior court of record while it subsisted, and neither the National Security and Defence Council nor the National Electoral Commission had a right to disobey it. The proper thing was to comply while taking steps to have it vacated on appeal.

    Two principles, Nwabueze said, were in conflict in the election debacle:  the rule of law, and the right of the electorate to choose those who would govern the polity, and the Federal Military Government was “justified in observing the former to ensure the full realisation of the latter.”

    He joins issues with the High Court of Lagos State, Justice Dolapo Akinsanya presiding, which voided the Decree 61 setting up the so-called Interim National Government, on the ground that at the time he signed it into law, Babangida had by the earlier Decree 59 divested himself of the power to make laws.

    Then, a Decree 62 suddenly emerged, purporting to have restored Babangida’s law-making power of which he had divested himself through Decree 59.  The courts held that the decree was a forgery.  Not so, argues Nwabueze; the decrees were intended to come into effect at the same time, and their numbering was “wholly immaterial.”

    He concedes that the “lawyer’s case” is not one the ordinary man can accept.  He acknowledges the need to go behind the formal reason to seek other factors that might have led to the annulment, whether they were corruptly or perversely contrived, and if so, by whom.  And he accepts the burden of doing so.

    But he does not deliver.

    He merely distributes blame, asserting that the crisis was caused by the political class jointly with Babangida, the judiciary and some members of the legal profession, and that its prolongation had resulted from “sheer blind intransigence on the part of the “political class,” especially Abiola, and his supporters in NADECO, the labour movement, and other civil society organisations.

    Nwabuze’s “lawyer’s case” case rests on the assumption that there were no reasons for the annulment other than those dredged up by Babangida.  However, given the foul distemper in which Babangida retreated from Abuja, “the impression of a man forced to quit against his will, of someone unwilling to reconcile himself with composure to the adverse torrents of events,” to quote Nwabueze himself,” it is plain that Babangida annulled the election because he did not want to quit, and that all the rhapsodising to the rule of law was just a fudge.

    If fidelity to the rule of law was what concerned the authorities above all else, why were the decrees annulling the election and voiding the final phase of the transition not open to legal challenge?  How did observing the rule of law by voiding the election help ensure “full realisation” of the right of the people to choose those who would govern them, as Nwabueze has asserted?

    Nwabueze claims that Babangida had left it to Nwosu to decide whether to proceed with the election or not.  He goes on to echo insinuations that Nwosu had a vested interest in the election because he and the National Electoral Commission had been compromised, adding that if the allegation was true, “the desire for self-enrichment led to a string of measures that plunged the nation into chaos.”

    But was it true?

    Here, Nwabueze’s characteristic grace, generosity and even-handedness are conspicuously missing.  He drops grave allegations deftly, recycles gossip and moves on quickly, without asking the hard questions  that should be asked under the circumstances.

    Here is one such question that was screaming to be asked:  If indeed, as Babangida claimed, he had “proofs” and documented evidence” of offer and acceptance of bribes that compromised the election, surely that would have constituted iron-clad evidence for moving the courts to void the election and punish those involved in its execution. And that recourse would have accorded eminently with the  regime’s avowed commitment to the rule of law.

    Why was that path not followed?

    “Justice” hardly figures in Nwabueze’s “lawyer’s case,” which is pivoted entirely on the rule of law, as if that is an end in itself.  He dismisses the annulment as just one instance in a long line of injustices that would have to be addressed together, which is at bottom a recipe for doing nothing.

    Like that personage of whom it has been said that he loved humanity but could not stand humans, it is almost as if Nwabueze loves the rule of law so much that he will not allow its march to be interrupted by justice.

    Nor does Nwabueze even stick with his lawyer’s case in support of the annulment.  He availed himself of the opportunity to settle ethnic score.  Outside the Yoruba areas, he writes, most people who voted for Abiola in the South did so to end the North’s monopoly on power.  The annulment was therefore seen in the South, rightly or wrongly, as lending aid and comfort to the North’s monopoly on presidential power.

    The monopoly of presidency by the Muslim ethnic group of the North has as its correlate, Nwabueze continues, “the ambition of the Yoruba to monopolise other positions in the federal establishment.” That ambition, he continues, poses a serious danger to the good government and unity of Nigeria.

    The Yoruba man may seem nice and friendly, but “they have no sense of fraternity with other groups in Nigeria when it comes to federal appointments,” according to Nwabueze. “They see nothing wrong in monopolising all positions in federal establishments, from messenger to chief executive.  To them, that is as should be, the natural order of things.  Any other non-Yoruba in their midst in such an establishment is considered an intruder. Yoruba becomes a medium of communication in which government business is conducted.

    Continuing his race-baiting, Nwabueze said June 12 made Nigerians outside the Yoruba West fearful that after two terms – or eight years – of a Yoruba president, many federal establishments would have become thoroughly “Yorubanised.”

    “The Yoruba,” Nwabueze warns darkly, “must make up their minds whether they really want the various ethnic groups to continue to be (sic) together under a federal arrangement with its implication that federal appointments should be equitably distributed among the component groups as equal partners in the federal union.  They must give up their monopolising ambition, for it is subversive of true federalism.

    It is almost as if, in his mind, the Yoruba are the trouble with Nigeria.

    In contrast, Nwabueze says of his Igbo kinsfolk that they are “truly a democratic and fair-minded people, always prepared to concede to others the right to share equitable what belongs to all.  Their sense of fraternity and fairness always inclines them to consider others in the matter of federal appointments and the distribution of common benefits

    Even when articulated by the usual ethnic warriors, this kind of jingoism is reprehensible.

    When espoused by the nation’s pre-eminent legal scholar, an intellectual of global stature, leader of a public-spirited and well-respected group that calls itself rather portentously “The Patriots,” withal a personage a person who should rightly be regarded as an elder statesman, at a time the Yoruba were under siege and the country was teetering on the brink of violent dissolution, it would be courteous to    call it odious.

  • Before we hang the National Assembly

    Although the cat and mouse game has endured for months, last week would provide the moment for President Muhammadu Buhari to let out his irritation with the National Assembly. If the president was any dismayed that it took the august body seven long months to pass the budget instrument, more intriguing perhaps was the outcome of the exercise. With nearly 5000 new projects inserted into the original proposal by the National Assembly while at the same time cutting almost equal number of the administration’s own proposals, the president pointedly accused the lawmakers of not only distorting his projections but also of mutilating the document on which his administration’s plans and programmes for the fiscal year are anchored.

    Never mind the charge about the president scoring an own goal when he opted to put his hand on a supposedly flawed document; guess the president might be forgiven for placing the interest of the economy over and above what would ordinarily pass for an unproductive turf war, even if, his artful play on victimhood would seem by far, less forgivable.

    So what did the lawmakers do wrong?

    I can hear a horde of angry Nigerians chorus – everything. To be sure, not a few times have I heard a horde of angry citizens’ call for the storming of the so-called Nigerian Bastille for their uncountable transgressions of which its latest handling of the 2018 budget may actually be the least treasonable. That, although bizarre, is perhaps understandable. In these terribly lean times, if you pay, for instance, a senator N750,000 monthly in consolidated salary and allowances, an unearned running cost of N13.5 million every month, and an additional N200 million per quarter pork described as constituency fund, the least the citizen would expect is that the ‘greedy fellows’ to leave whatever is left in the treasury for the hoi polloi! Clearly, the suggestion that they would rather not, can be quite frankly, difficult to bear. So much for their love for us; imagine them jacking up the budget from N8.6 trillion to N9.1 trillion, only to cut off N347 billion from the votes considered strategic by the executive. That was not before raising their own votes from N125 billion to N139 billion.

    Ours is an interesting country no doubt; a country where citizens bandy the law when it suits them. I have read many of the so-called defence put up to justify the blatant heist. In all, at the heart of the defence is the claim that constitution recognizes the parliament as the ultimate custodian of the purse. I don’t think there’s any question as to whether or not the nation’s organic law grants the lawmakers the power to determine what gets spent or even how. Nor does anyone suggest that an institution that has the power to authorize the use of funds cannot move some or parts thereof around. It is therefore not about law – but morality and public policy.

    Fortunately, we do also know that the obverse side of the same law charges the executive branch – exclusively – with the implementation of the budget. This of course depends on the quantum of funds available within the given year, the capacity of the implementing agencies and the will (by the executive) to get things done. Guess this is where the law clashes with reality – call it practicability!

    Never mind the posturing legislature; it seems clear which of the branches that holds – ultimately – the joker! Where the executive chooses to play ball, there is at least a faint hope that something would be done – which in any case hardly guarantees that values will be delivered in the end as the funds are either stolen or where attempts are made to implement something in the name of projects, they are at best done, haphazardly, which of course explains the hordes of white elephant projects spread across the length and breadth of the country today.

    And where it chooses not to play ball? They can always dangle the sword of impeachment and so risk the Bastille treatment!

    Does the above serve as endorsement for the blustering and oftentimes sanctimonious executive branch? For an arm of governments whose own sins are legion, it seems about time the nation also paid equal attention to its own transgressions. A few sure stands out. One that Nigerians are most familiar is the humongous figures annually rolled out but which never gets to mean anything to the ordinary man in the end. To that we can add the tardiness and incompetence that have become the hallmarks of the budget process. Those are what have made our budgets the farce that they have become.

    Having said all, it is not hard to imagine what is essentially at the heart of the turf war. It’s all about procurement and the power of patronage! The chief executive in charge of a parastatal knows what it means in real terms. The lawmakers surely do hence their endless, almost insatiable craving for a piece of the pie! The bureaucrats understand the power only too well. So do the contract-spinning weekly Federal Executive Council meetings where the subject is guaranteed to sit atop the weekly Order Paper! The absence, I am told, makes governance something of a grinding, monotonous labour!

    Welcome to our self-help republic! As they say, like it was in the beginning…

    Let no one therefore suck us into a meaningless war. If you ask me, I will simply say there’s nothing in this war – not for us. It is an elite game; either way, we are guaranteed to lose. What is currently playing out between the two arms of government comes to a failure of elite politics.

    So, you don’t want the National Assembly to pad the budget? Fine. How about getting FEC to leave those routine businesses of contract awards to the professionals in the bureaucracy while political appointees get their hands dirty with policy? Shouldn’t the sauce for the goose be good for the gander? Or put another way, why should one be made to feel that it has a right to eat to its satisfaction while the other feels left out?

  • Anti-people parliament

    Neither Senate President Bukola Saraki nor House of Representatives Speaker Yakubu Dogara was at Basorun MKO Abiola’s Grand Commander of the Federal Republic (GCFR) investiture. Strange, wasn’t that?

    Yes, June 12 was canonization for MKO, Nigeria’s democracy martyr. He lost his life, lost his wife, lost his means of livelihood, huge and sprawling, for winning a democratic election.

    No people do such a crime, sans penance, and live happily ever after.

    But June 12 was also the beatification of the very basics of democracy: the sanctity of the people’s will. Every vote must count, despite the grand delusion of Gen. Ibrahim Babaginda and his tragic military clique.

    That the two heads of Nigeria’s central legislature appeared unimpressed by the severe beauty of this golden symbolism — hence their absence — beggars belief. Yet, their forte, the celebrated custodian of the people’s weal, ought to be more excited by it all than most.

    But with June 12 still “trending” (as they say on social media), came another blast of rot from the past.

    In 2009, Speaker Dimeji Bankole’s House of Representatives tried to bully Lagos lawyer, Festus Keyamo, now SAN, for demanding answers to a 2008 Newswatch story, alleging a scam in bulk car purchase for House members.

    The House goaded the Inspector General of Police (IGP) to criminalize Keyamo’s legitimate inquiry, prompting the lawyer to launch a legal challenge.

    Ten years after, the courts just found for the lawyer, voiding the House’s impunity at investigating criminal allegations, setting free its own; indicting others.

    That verdict proves the National Assembly’s (NASS) penchant for rank impunity and bully tactics isn’t new.

    Even then, this 8th NASS, under Saraki and Dogara, has raised these ugly traits to some sickly fundament of parliamentary policy, most times over-reaching itself; and thus echoing the Achebe brat that challenged his “chi” to a wrestling bout.

    That appears the tale, of a butchered budget as always, from the presidential camp, after the June 20 signing of the 2018 Budget.

    But that would appear only the climax. The preliminary malady started much earlier, when the 8th Senate reached for the hubris of bullying critical organs under the Presidency, just as the Bankole House tried to bully Keyamo, to cover up alleged infractions of the law by some of its members.

    Saraki was in the vortex of an alleged car-import scandal, blown open by the Nigerian Customs Service (NCS). That triggered a Senate imperious summons, “in uniform”, of Col. Hammeed Ali (rtd), who promptly called its bluff on the uniform question.

    That birthed a sterile controversy, that arrayed partisans in two opposing camps, not fired by common sense, but uncommon inanity.

    Then, the Dino Melaye show of shame, of alleged escape from police custody. Again, the Saraki Senate thought the best way to deal with it was to summon the IGP to come explain why the Police nabbed a senator, who enjoyed no immunity, for alleged crime.

    When it found out its bully tactics was a tad too specific, it re-tuned its pitch: “invitation to security agencies”. The IGP responded by sending a representative, which he argued was allowed by law.

    What followed was another chain of inanities. Avoiding to be bullied, a reckless Senate growled, equalled subverting democracy! Pronto, Senate the Formidable decreed the IGP “enemy of democracy”, unfit to occupy public office. Senatorial bluff never got so reckless, so cheap, so empty!

    But at the end of this baiting and counter-baiting, Dr. Saraki found himself linked to alleged Ilorin cult killings and the hideous Offa robbery — the alleged perpetrators of both claiming to be Saraki’s “boys”, as well as the Kwara government’s election enforcers, with sweetheart relationship with the Kwara State House!

    And all these in a futile bid to bully IGP over Melaye?

    But the climax of the NASS malady would dawn, with President Muhammadu Buhari’s new charges, that NASS brutally marked down key infrastructures in the budget but willy-nilly marked up its own estimates: from N125 billion to N139.5 billion.

    The president’s charge was clear: counterpart funding for Lagos-Ibadan expressway, 2nd Niger Bridge, Mambilla Power Plant, East-West road, Boni-Bodo road and Itakpe-Ajaokuta rail project, chopped by an “aggregate of N11.5 billion”.

    In the face of Boko Haram, vote to secure unity schools nationwide was slashed by N3 billion; Enugu Airport terminal building project scythed from N2 billion to N500 million and take-off grant for Maritime University, Delta State, cut from N5 billion to N3.4 billion, the president further alleged.

    By its knife-crazy budget activism, the people’s parliament would appear at war with every segment of the people, East, West, North or South!

    Might NASS be embarking on a deliberate sabotage of its electors, including Labour and retired workers, whose estimates also went under the knife?

    Talk of the Achebe brat wrestling his “chi”!

    But Abdulrazak Namdas, the House Committee on Media and Publicity chair, entered a six-paragraph defence for his chamber, ranging from “late” submission of the proposals to meet the January-December budget cycle, late defence of estimates, and presidential bad faith.

    But the most revealing is Paragragh 4 of his statement, here quoted in full: “Before 2015, the budget of the National Assembly was N150 billion for several years. It was cut down to N120bn in 2015 and further down to N115bn in 2016. In 2017, the budget was N125bn and N139.5bn in 2018. This means that the budget of the National Assembly is still far below the N150bn in the years before 2015.”

    The big question: what was a barrel of crude selling for pre-2015; and what is it selling for now?

    A Freudian slip was never so revealing; never so damning, in its crooked honesty! Nothing, not even a crippling recession, would vitiate this NASS’s greed!

    And from the Senate? An “Awada Kerikeri” — Yoruba for the stupendously comical —analogy from Shehu Sani.

    Holy Shehu’s conscience once beat him up over a N13.5 million monthly allowance. But now, over an unconscionable budget mutilation — the people be damned! — all it could spew is some comical tale, of a tailor that sewed kaftan instead of agbada for his client! Very funny!

    You can’t, in all good conscience, claim everyone in this 8th NASS is bad. But you can legitimately say most in there yielded space, to the vocal moral cretins, to brand the collective in own rotten image.

    Still, NASS has made its bed. En route to the next election, it must lie on it. But the electorate be damned, if they should ever allow such a wayward, reckless, selfish and venal brood, to ever again profane their legislative chambers.

    In any case, Nigerians must realize how little even the best of presidents can do, when swarmed by a reactionary and retrogressive legislature. That’s the nightmare playing out in this 8th NASS.

    That is why the people must pay as much attention to NASS representation as they do the presidency. Which is why most of those in this 8th NASS must be booted out.

    Nigeria needs a citizen-parliament, not a band of anti-people elements, bivouacked in the people’s legislative chambers, fomenting endless mischief.

  • How much is a tooth worth?

    How much is a human tooth worth?

    Call it a trick question. It has no obvious answer, for there are teeth and there are teeth, and at least in material terms, a gold or platinum implant, digital or analog, is probably worth much than an enamel tooth.

    Any answer will also depend on what functions a given tooth performs. Can we objectively rank an incisor, a canine, a pre-molar or a molar in terms of utility?

    Plus:  are we talking about a solitary, stand-alone tooth, or a tooth securely embedded in the mouth?  If it is the former, was it dislodged by surgical extraction, by violent assault, or by natural attrition?

    At the time it was plucked from its natural habitat, what was the condition of the tooth?

    Without knowing the person behind that solitary tooth – lifestyle, eating habits, attitude to oral hygiene, age, gender, etc– we cannot even begin to assess the worth of human teeth.

    So, we are dealing with a trick question all right.

    If put to the test, I cannot answer the question with respect to my own teeth.  Rather, I will refer you  to my dentist. He never fails to send me a birthday card every year, with a subtle reminder that it was about time I made an appointment for a comprehensive check-up.  I take it that he is saying, in effect,   my teeth are worth much more than I realise.

    By definition, a trick question has no answer, as I stated out the outset.  Yet the trick question I posed above was what a judge of the Lagos High Court had to wrestle with, not as an abstract problem but, in real human terms.  Even when due allowance has been made for the usual delays arising from power outages as well as real and contrived objections,  I am not surprised that it took the court all of six years to tackle the matter with some confidence.   Indeed, the surprise is that the court did not take at least seven years longer.

    Here is how the matter arose.

    Word went forth from the well-appointed offices of an evangelist revered by his teeming followers as an authentic Man of God, inviting the general public to what could well turn out to be the mother of all harvests of miracles.

    Billboards providing details of the event were erected at strategic points.  Attendance was of course voluntary, as should be in such matters.  If you don’t attend, you cannot receive the miracle designed especially for you.  And to make sure that everybody had an equal opportunity to receive his or her special miracle, admission was free.

    You could not ask for a more level playing field, pardon the cliché.

    Venue was the National Stadium, in Surulere, Lagos, not some hideous structure that had been erected in violation of the building code and environmental law. To be sure, the place had seen far better days, but it is centrally located, and the rent is affordable.

    Now, nothing concentrates the mind of the average Nigerian like the prospect of experiencing a miracle: miracle deliverance, miracle cures, miracles in their finances, examinations, jobs, business, well-being, marriage, miracles in the lives of their children and friends and relations and indeed in every department of life.

    You may be a person of no fixed address but if you can show up at a bus-stop or road-side market and merely hint that you are a miracle worker, you are guaranteed a sizeable crowd wherever and whenever  you choose to perform.

    But the man in this tale was not an itinerant evangelist and faith healer.   Back in 2010 at the time the events here narrated took place, he served as the Presiding Pastor, Registered Trustee of Manna Miracle Mountain Ministry, and publisher/writer for the highly-regarded devotional guide, “Our Daily Manna.”

    It was therefore no surprise that thousands of miracle-seekers flocked that day, January 10, 2010, to  the stadium where the Man of God was scheduled to stage “the mother of all miracle harvests.”  What New Year present could be more precious than a miracle designed especially for the worshipper?

    Among the faithful worshippers nursing great expectation that day was Tamara Egbedi, a lawyer.

    As the congregants positioned themselves to receive their miracles, or as the miracles rained down on them from on high, the kind of pushing and shoving and jostling that was to be expected in such a setting ensued.

    In the process, court filings show, the winsome Ms Egbedi fell into an uncovered concrete gutter running between the seats, lost seven teeth from her comely dentition and suffered other injuries that left her severely traumatised.

    But that is only a partial picture.  Consider also the loss of business she must have suffered to boot:  No court appearances until surgical reconstruction has been carried out; no speaking engagements from her huge clientele of reputable organisations and institutions.  To this, add involuntary withdrawal from the social circuit.  And a sharp diminution in romantic attention from men on the prowl.  The cumulative is incalculable loss.

    Fortunately, Ms Egbedi knew her rights at law.  She demanded compensation from Manna Miracle Mountain Ministry, the organisers of the event that had brought her so much grief.

    The organisers responded with bracing petulance.

    Neither the Ministry nor its Presiding Pastor, The Rev Dr Chris E. Kwapovwe, they said, bore any responsibility for what happened to Ms Egbedi; they had merely rented the venue.  However, actuated by Christian charity, the Ministry had offered her the princely sum of N100, 000 to take care of her injuries, persuaded that any reasonable person would have accepted it with gratitude.

    But Ms Egbedi, the Manna Ministry said, had turned out to be no such person.  As they saw it, she came across more as gold digger than as a person seeking legitimate compensation for injury.

    Satisfied that they had done more than duty required, they had accordingly terminated negotiations and dared Ms Egbedi to seek legal redress.

    In a judgement laced with stern rebuke, the court held that the Manna Ministry and its Presiding Pastor had the duty and obligation to ensure the safety of those they had invited to their crusade, and that  failure to do so amounted to culpable negligence.  Consequently, the court awarded Ms Egbedi the sum of N9, 454, 000 as compensation.

    This outcome does not answer the trick question we posed at the start.  Since the compensation is for a raft of injuries, we still do not know exactly how much a tooth is worth.  But it seems clear that when teeth are dislodged from their natural habitat in circumstances not entirely of the owner’s volition, damages could start from N1 million apiece if you are a person of consequence. For average persons, court-ordered compensation could start at N500, 000.

    So beware, organisers of owambe parties, religious revivals, weddings, and all manner of ceremonies and festivities.  Providing food and drinks and entertainment is not enough.  You have also to ensure that your guests come to no harm through your acts and omissions.

    Which brings me to the 40 persons who were trampled to death or seriously injured at three separate events during which a prominent public figure indulged his fabled philanthropy by handing out bolts of ankara, food parcels, cooking oil and sundry gifts of middling value to surging crowds that had gathered at the venues well before dawn.

    If the first lethal stampede was an accident, the second and the third were foreseeable and preventable. All it required was a change in logistics.

    Yet the philanthropist was never charged with any offence. Not even negligence.  No lawsuits for compensation were filed by the aggrieved or their relations.  The philanthropist, who has mercifully stopped this annual cull, offered the victims of his lethal practice only messages of condolence and sympathy.

    But something tells me that many other victims or their proxies, not forgetting enterprising lawyers, are studying the case of Ms Egbedi versus the Manna Ministry with a view to discovering how it might      apply to instances in which philanthropy went horribly lethal.

  • Law, justice and the June 12 question

    Nigerians wouldn’t have been the most excitable people they are globally acclaimed to be had the familiar legal hair-splitting not attended the national awards conferred on Chief Moshood Kashimawo Abiola, the acclaimed winner of the June 12, 1993 elections and the foremost human rights lawyer, Chief Gani Fawehinmi by President Muhammadu Buhari penultimate week. Clearly, Nigeria may have been described as a country never in short supply of excitable moments, some of the reactions that have trailed it has merely reinforced this national character.

    In an environment permanently locked in the partisan mode, dissensions would not only seem the natural order but something to be expected. Dissension, by the way – if I may borrow the Biblical cliché –is the way we live and have our being. For daring to reach out for the trophy of righting the historic wrong, the administration has been variously accused of cynically manipulating the historic event for political advantage. Others, perhaps more charitable, have insisted that what the president did was doing the right act done in a wrong way. Considering – some say – the mass alienation of the southwest in particular –the motive(s), they charged could not be altruistic!

    And now – the ruse – as against the ballyhooed – rule of law has since come handy for those interested in obfuscating issues than see justice done. For something that every fair-minded citizens has long deemed cut and dried, the revelation of how deep the resentment still runs in some people’s veins –the usual familiar quarters –which sees any attempt – even merely symbolic – to revisit the historic wrong as something of an equivalent of their own Golgotha moment – must be something to chew upon.

    Pity that a quarter of a century gone by has quite clearly failed to wash off those terrible blinkers hence the specious patriotism couched in legalism.

    Thanks to President Muhammadu Buhari, the nation would appear to have turned a new chapter – even as it turned that not a few remain unimpressed – and that is to put things mildly. On Tuesday, June 12, he dared to do what others before him couldn’t find the courage to do, or as in an earlier attempt made, half-heartedly.

    As they say in these parts – the president literally killed two birds with one stone. In what appears a move designed to stoke a fierce fire of legalism, the president did not stop at announcing a posthumous honour of Grand Commander of the Federal Republic on Bashorun Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, and Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger on the irrepressible lawyer – Gani Fawehinmi, he went as far as putting June 12 on the nation’s foremost calendar as Democracy Day.

    Not so fast – said former Chief Justice of the Federation, Alfa Belgore – and with it an instinctive disclaimer:  “It is not done…”

    The national honours committee – which he chaired in 2016(?) – he said, was not consulted prior to the decision. He claimed, citing Section 3 (1) and (2) of the National Honours Act,  that the particular awards could not be done posthumously: “Subject to the next following paragraph of this article, a person shall be appointed to a particular rank of an Order when he receives from the President in person, at an investiture held for the purpose”.

    Did the revered jurist bother read the next subsection? That seems doubtful. That subsection, clearly unambiguous, gave the president the latitude to do what he did. It reads: – If in the case of any person it appears to the President expedient to dispense with the requirements of paragraph (2) of this article, he may direct that that person shall be appointed to the rank in question in such a manner as may be specified in the direction!

    Case closed? You bet not. Foremost constitution lawyer, Prof Ben Nwabueze (SAN) has  since opened another flank – at best a variant of the same specious legalism. Last week, he fired a statement to The Guardian titled “President Buhari’s 6th June, 2018 Declaration of a New Democracy Day and the Rule of Law”.

    And what did legal luminary say?

    First, he questioned the motive behind the declaration – “whether it is motivated by the public interest or by a political desire to secure the votes of Nigerians in the 2019 election, especially the votes of people of the South-West or to sow the seed of division among the members of the National Assembly in order to scuttle the threat to impeach him or to throw the country into turmoil or to smear the polity with the taint of illegality”.

    He then concluded: “A motive of mischief seems evident on the face of the declaration. It is indeed a masterstroke of mischief and insincerity, a deceitful contrivance, suddenly and mischievously trumped up to rescue his dying image three years after his installation as president”.

    I will concede that the eminent lawyer is entitled to his opinion. In fact, he is entitled to conjure as many doomsday scenarios that suit his moods or fancies even when these fly in the face of reality. My question: if the specific acts resultant from the declaration is deemed as positive and desirable as it appears that our legal luminary somehow believe they do, do we then treat them as wrong only because of some perceived benefits accruable to the initiator?

    Second, he delved into what he called the legal aspects of the President’s Declaration, and pronounced, rather gracelessly, that the president misfired! Let’s look closely at his grouses? To him, the Federal Military Government (FMG) Decree No. 61 of 1993, which annulled the June 12, 1993 election, would seem cast in steel and so would remain inviolable perhaps for all ages!

    In the opinion of the learned Silk, President Buhari had no right to treat the decree, which he calls “as a matter both of fact and law” as if it does not exist! Here at once is the supreme irony of it all: a foremost constitutional scholar treating the corrective, albeit largely inchoate acts of an elected sovereign as inferior if not subordinate to a military decree procured under the cover of darkness to subvert the will of the Nigerian people!

    I need not to into the other leg of his argument about the Rule of Law being more fundamental and overriding than any consideration of justice! His exact words: Respect for the rule of law must not therefore be sacrificed to the need for justice.

    Thankfully, not everyone subscribes to this specious but tragically mechanistic view of the relationship between law in process and justice as an end. Not least is the revered Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka whose famous dictum –Justice is the first condition of humanity – has long provided humanity a worthy template for resolving the thorny question in the face of the endless clashes between the forces of regression known to trade the ruse for the rule.

    By the way – I almost forgot to add that Nwabueze not only served in that infamous contraption called the Interim National Government – put in place to bury the June 12 struggle, he was the drum major in the orchestra to confer legitimacy to that interim nonsense.

    Glad to be back!

  • June 12 like no other

    Twenty-five years after Nigeria’s ultimate electoral crime, today is June 12 like no other.

    In 1993, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, with his deluded junta, cancelled the presidential mandate Basorun MKO won on June 12, 1993; thus inflicting on Nigeria the political equivalent of a spiritual curse.

    Today, June 12, 2018, exactly 25 years after that epochal poll, President Muhammadu Buhari is lifting that curse.

    He is correcting the grave injustice of 23 June 1993, when the IBB junta, in a fit of swashbuckling impunity, pushed out an unsigned document to purportedly annul the MKO mandate, freely given by 14 million Nigerians, for or against.

    Today, MKO gets honoured with the Grand Commander of the Federal Republic (GCFR), reserved only for Nigeria’s past Presidents or military heads of state.  His running mate, Ambassador Baba Gana Kingibe, also gets invested with the Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger (GCON), reserved for Nigeria’s Vice Presidents.  That is a tacit acknowledgement of a presidential term crookedly denied.

    From 2019, June 12 becomes Nigeria’s Democracy Day, burying May 29, the civil take-over date in 1999, former President Olusegun Obasanjo had hoisted, to bury June 12, with its troubling MKO ghost.  Talk of the reverse burial of the spiteful undertaker!

    But even more pungent symbolism: the late Chief Gani Fawehinmi, SAM, SAN, iconic arrowhead of the June 12 resistance army, also gets a posthumous GCON.

    That is for the hundreds of Campaign for Democracy (CD) protesters, mown down on Lagos streets, by a rogue military under Sani Abacha as Defence Minister, for mounting civil protests against the brazen annulment.

    Also, for the brave Chima Ubani, grand Marshall of those Lagos June 12 protests, who would die much later in an auto crash in the North.  He must be smiling from his grave.

    June 12, 2018 thus marks the beginning of concrete and laudable steps to bring a final closure to the ultimate crime by IBB, his reckless junta and their no less criminal civilian collaborators.

    Even then, are these steps perfect?  Definitely not.  For one, the president’s proclamation, which he personally signed, still referred to MKO as “presumed winner”.  That, with all due respect to the president, appears a historical fraud.

    Yes, “presumed” could be technically correct, because the final results of the elections were never formally declared.  But that proved nothing for, thanks to the Modified Open Ballot System (MOBS) adopted, the final results were an open secret, given certified collations from election zones nationwide.

    Then, the Kingibe question.  Should he have shared from the current gains, because he virtually threw off his mandate, by joining the Abacha government as Foreign minister?

    Legitimate query.  Still, it’s better to do right in an imperfect situation, than stall because you await the perfect moment that never comes.  So, let Kingibe be.

    Besides, despite the MKO rehabilitation — which cannot be under-stressed in any way: you don’t kill both a man and his wife for winning a free election and hope to live happily ever after? — the philosophy behind rehabilitating June 12 is even more electorally immaculate:  the people’s choice is inviolate; and you cannot wipe it away without dreadful consequences.

    That is the eternal disgrace IBB and his deluded junta, with their civilian collaborators, must grapple with till they enter their graves — and God, in His infinite mercies, has preserved most of MKO’s principal June 12 traducers to taste this disgrace.

    IBB: Each time MKO “resurrects” on June 12, IBB gets buried, for being the arrowhead of an evil junta, that played God with their compatriots’ electoral will and goaded their country to needless catastrophe.

    History would even be harsher to him, for his epigram may well read: Here lies a wayward general, who nearly baited his country with ruin, by organizing its sanest election, yet cancelled the results!

    Obasanjo: A master-writer of self-fawning history, this June 12 bubble has exposed him in his full nakedness — and the sight is not pretty!

    The author and finisher of a presidential library, of vacuous philosophical and moral value, you could feel his full emptiness, as he falls flat in basic human virtues: charity, gratitude, fairness, justice and conscience.

    Sani Abacha: Manifestation of the quintessential Yoruba proverb, of the opportunist that would rather perish, than let go of his freebie.

    He expired still clutching his toy.  But he lost his honour.  Still, Abacha’s faith would appear far better than those now consigned to the living dead.

    The living dead aside, it is even more alarming the decay, sustaining the June 12 injustice, has inflicted on Nigeria’s moral infrastructure.

    In 1993, the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) was most vociferous on condemning the annulment crime, while its Moslem counterpart, the Nigerian Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs (NSCIA) hee-hawed, save the public bucking of that cant by its late secretary-general, Dr. Lateef Adegbite.

    Twenty-five years later, at the correction of that epochal injustice, CAN’s loud silence is well and truly stunning.  Even if you dismiss the Pentecostals as mainly lost in their holy mammon, what of the Catholics — no Father Mathew Kukah, to cook fresh polemics that leaves you winded and lost?  No people’s priest, from the Lagos front, to rally the troops in a whoop of moral victory?  Indeed, no thundering release from the CAN Secretariat? And the Anglicans and the Baptists?

    Might less than six years of a “Christian” president, in Goodluck Jonathan (2010-2015), have gifted Nigerian Christendom the moral pathology NSCIA manifested when the June 12 crisis broke out in 1993?

    And Afenifere!  The restoration of June 12 ought to be its sweetest victory, for it waged the battle when the war was bitterest.  But no thanks to its self-imposed dissonance, it is acting as if its own very victory is mere ash in its mouth!

    The reason is its latter-day ultra-nationalism, and the anti-Hausa-Fulani ethnic baiting by many of its guiding lights.  Why, an Afenifere elder last year granted The Punch an interview, claiming the so-called Hausa-Fulani were “Yoruba enemies”!  Well, it so happens the so-called “enemy” has granted MKO the honour a prodigal Yoruba son could not, even in 10 lifetimes!

    Many have pilloried Vanguard’s Ocherome Nnanna for his anti-Yoruba bigotry — and frankly, the man deserves all the flak that has hurtled his way.

    But the true Yoruba must be seriously perturbed at, from their own ranks, the flare of ultra-nationalist venom, anti-Fulani poison and a heady roar of irredentism and ethnic smugness, mostly from these old folks, simply because a Fulani president, not of their preference, holds the reins.

    If the Yoruba command respect in Nigerian political discourse, it is not because they are the brightest or the most talented or even the most articulate.

    It is rather because of their penchant to stick to justice and fairness, even if many of theirs end up holding the short end of the stick.  It is that spirit that landed this great June 12 victory, 25 years after, when all seemed totally lost.

    So, let every Nigerian clamber back on the spirit of June 12.  It is the Justice-to-all credo Nigeria sorely needs to navigate the present bend — one of the most challenging in its chequered history.

  • Honour, at last, for a hero of our time

    “Perhaps one day,” I signed off on my column “Abiola, the martyr they would not honour” published in this space on July 11, 2017, “the feckless beneficiaries of the struggle that had cost Abiola his life will rouse themselves to accord him posthumous recognition as President-elect, with all the rights and privileges of that position going back to 1993.

    “Therein lies the path of honour.”

    President Muhammadu Buhari did not go that far.

    But he moved decisively in that direction when he surprised tenacious “June Twelvers” and confounded its entrenched opponents by proclaiming June 12 the new Democracy Day, and by announcing that he would be conferring the nation’s highest award, the GCFR, on Abiola and honouring his family and some of those whose pivotal contributions had, against formidable odds, memorialised that historic day.

    I have no quarrel with President Buhari’s motives or motivations.  Whatever they might be, he did the right thing, with uncommon courage.

    To be sure, the honor roll cannot be all-encompassing.  But some omissions are more significant than others.  I am thinking in particular of Rear Admiral Ndubuisi Kanu, General Alani Akinrinade, Colonel Abubakar Umar, Chief Cornelius Adebayo, Dr Arthur Nwankwo, Chief Ralph Obioha, Omo Omoruyi, Ayo Opadokun, Dapo Olorunyomi, Maj.-Gen Ishola Williams, Madam Rita Lori-Ogbebor, Sully Abu, Babafemi Ojudu and Odia Ofeimun.

    It remains for the Administration to complete Abiola’s restitution and honour other valiant contributors to the historic struggle. It remains also for Buhari to govern Nigeria henceforth in the June 12 spirit.

    For perspective, what follows is a profile of Abiola.  It is the concluding chapter of “Diary of a Debacle”, my 2010 book on the June 12 crisis.

    MKO Abiola, man and martyr

    Moshood Abiola was an unlikely candidate for political martyrdom or indeed for martyrdom of any kind.

    He had entered politics almost as a pariah who regarded money as the measure of all things.  He had everything that money could buy.  And he was not apologetic or coy about it. He flaunted his wealth even when putting some of it to serve beneficent ends.

    But his compassion was genuine.  He held it as article of faith that anyone who was in a position to show compassion but failed to do so would never find favour with Allah.  He would recite in English, Arabic and Yoruba, passages from the Bible and the Quran to that effect.  And he lived every day by that creed.

    Abiola’s compassion and public-spiritedness won him a great deal of public attention, even respect, but not much love nor significant following, as he discovered when he entered politics in 1978 as a card-carrying member of the National party of Nigeria (NPN) and entered his senior wife Simbiat as   candidate for a Senate seat from Ogun on that party’s platform, in a state that was fanatically loyal to Obafemi Awolowo’s Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN).  She lost by a huge margin.

    Abiola’s position as chief executive of ITT in Nigeria did not help matters, given its notorious complicity in the overthrow of the democratically-elected Socialist government  of President Salvadore Allende Gossens in Chile, and its notoriety for unsavoury business practices, which led the contrarian Afro-beat king Fela Anikulapo-Kuti to mock the global brand as “International Thief-Thief,” or global robber..

    ITT had won huge telephony contracts in Nigeria and its contractors had dug up all major streets in Lagos for telephone cables.  The work was moving at a very slow pace, putting residents, especially motorists, to great inconvenience.

    Abiola himself seemed to have compounded matters by distributing to members of the Constituent Assembly debating the draft Constitution for the Second Republic a sophisticated, multi-function ITT  electronic calculator.  Not a few Nigerians interpreted it as an attempt to buy influence.

    But what galled teeming supporters of the  UPN, which governed the Yoruba States and Bendel—what used to be the Western Nigeria during the First Republic but was in the Opposition in the Second Republic—was the virulently anti-UPN stance of Abiola’s Concord newspaper group.

    It was as if those newspapers had it as their goal to take Awolowo and the UPN out of political reckoning.  Even if they had been set up by the NPN and not by one of its well-heeled members, they could not have been more pro-NPN.  A large portrait of President Shehu Shagari graced the lobby, next to a portrait of Abiola’s, in the editorial offices of the Concord Press, in Ikeja.

    In short order, they published a sensational story claiming that Awolowo had improperly acquired vast landed property in Maroko, Lagos, while falsely and hypocritical parading himself as a Socialist devoted  to the public welfare.  They followed with another story, about another allegedly improper acquisition of landed property in Lagos, by Lateef Jakande, the UPN Governor of Lagos State, who enjoyed a reputation for probity and an a Spartan lifestyle.  Then they took on the UPN Governor of Ogun State, Chief Olabisi Onabanjo, claiming that he had improperly dipped into the public treasury for a lavish private vacation in the UK.

    These stories delighted Awolowo’s political opponents in the NPN and other parties and infuriated the UPN’s teeming supporters.  In court hearings, the stories on Onabanjo and Jakande were held to be false and defamatory, and both plaintiffs were awarded substantial damages.  Awolowo’s lawsuit was still wending its way through the courts when Awolowo died in 1987.

    Abiola’s romance with the NPN did not survive the 1983 presidential election.  In keeping with its claim  to having a “national outlook,” the party had at its inception adopted a policy of “zoning” the presidency.  In practice, this meant that if a president from one zone had served his term, the party would give its ticket to a candidate from another zone.

    Abiola had sought the NPN’s ticket for the 1983 presidential election.  A stalwart of the party from the North, Umaru Dikko, declared with petulant scorn that the presidency of Nigeria was not “for sale.”

    The NPN could draw on Abiola’s wealth, but would not countenance his seeking its presidential ticket?

    That was it.

    Abiola stomped out of the NPN and never looked back.  He also tried to mend fences with individuals and groups from whom he had been estranged by his exertions in furthering the NPN’s cause. Public  appreciation for his philanthropy turned to respect for his person, and the respect turned into admiration.

    But it was when Abiola declared for the Social Democratic Party (SDP) on the return to party politics in 1987 – when he finally got his politics right by embracing the progressive political tradition of the states carved out of the former Western Nigeria – that he began to attract the devoted following that translated into the massive electoral support so crucial to his victory in the 1993 presidential election.

    It was this mass support that animated the struggle for the actualisation of Abiola’s electoral mandate  and kept alive much of the passion surrounding the events subsumed under the evocative label of “June 12.”

    If Abiola had not got his politics right, if he had for example cast his lot with the National Republican Convention (NRC) and run on that platform, it is doubtful whether he would have enjoyed that kind of electoral support.

    This massive support, it is necessary to insist, has less to do with his being Yoruba than with his being the standard bearer of the party that was “a little to the left,’ one whose ideology accorded with that of the Yoruba.  After all, Ernest Shonekan, whom Babangida foisted on Nigeria as Head of his “Interim National Government” is Yoruba.  But the Yoruba rejected him roundly.  General Olusegun Obasanjo, who is also Yoruba, earned the fewest votes in Yorubaland when he ran for president in 1999 under             the banner of the conservative PDP.  Running as an incumbent four years later, he hardly fared better.

    We will never know whether Abiola would have made a good president.  After Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) that decimated the middle class and pauperised the mass of the people, expectations ran high that an Abiola Presidency would improve the lot of the ordinary citizen in the short term, if not immediately.  Abiola had pivoted his campaign on Hope—hope for a better future, at a time when hope was in short supply.  He was going to tackle poverty frontally and help eradicate it.

    In the popular consciousness, he seemed uniquely qualified for the task.  Born into and reared in dire poverty, he had become a multi –billionaire, with business empire spread across the world.

    By a curious coincidence, the price of imported milk and rice and tomato puree had come down substantially in the weeks after the election. Around town, the word was that, as a gesture of goodwill to mark Abiola’s coming, importers had decided to reduce the prices of some commodities.  Whether      this was true or not, the average consumer took the price reductions as a sign of the good times that would roll in when Abiola took charge.

    The quest for the Presidency changed Abiola in significant ways, according to some members of his campaign team and senior aides. Gone was the brashness of those days when he regarded money as              the measure of all things.  He learned to stoop to conquer.  He became a good listener, and a patient conciliator.  He encouraged those around him to tell him what he needed to know rather than what they thought he would like to hear.  He became less impulsive and more deliberative. Worldly pleasures counted for less and less in his preoccupations.

    Before he secured the SDP ticket, so un-organised was Abiola it was a surprise he ever got anything done. The campaign imposed some order and discipline on his proceedings, and he seemed to have embraced this new approach as a better way of carrying on in the public realm he was about to enter.

    Before 1993 and subsequently, the legitimacy of persons elected to the political leadership of Nigeria was always disputed.  In the 1964 General Elections, the first after independence, the ceremonial president, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe was loath to invite the incumbent Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, to form a new government, persuaded that the outcome of a poll boycotted by the Opposition for the most part could not be said to reflect the true wishes of the people.

    In 1979, it was a mathematical sleight of hand that awarded the presidency to Shagari.  Throughout his first term, his legitimacy was always in contention. The NPN went on to rig Shagari into office in 1983, in a manner so brazen that the military had to step in to stave off violent protests in many parts of Nigeria.

    The 1999 General Elections that produced General Obasanjo was held under a Constitution that had been kept a closely-guarded secret. The 2003 sequel was, according to local and international observers, the most fraudulent they had ever witnessed. The 2007 contest was more of the same.

    The 1993 election delivered a clean, pan-Nigeria mandate and conferred on Abiola a legitimacy that no Nigerian president before or since has been able to claim or enjoy.  Abiola showed that, in Nigeria, elections can be won without the organised rigging that has been the bane of Nigerian politics.

    To the very end he resisted every pressure, discounted every threat, and spurned every blandishment  the military regime and its foreign collaborators contrived.  His tenacity surprised the vast majority of Nigerians who did not know him well and those who knew him only in caricature.

    They thought that, faced with the prospect of being put to the slightest inconvenience, to say nothing of being jailed, losing his vast financial empire and perhaps his life, Abiola would cut a deal, put the best face on it and move on.

    Even some of those close to him thought him feckless, like the Concord editorial writer who told me on the eve of the 1993 election that, even at that stage, Abiola could still be bought or bribed off the race.  Abiola, he said, saw the election as nothing more than an opportunity to add one more feather to a cap that was already chockfull of feathers, and would gladly drop the idea if the price was right.

    The fellow was wrong, as was everyone who thought likewise.

    Abiola had entered Nigerian politics almost as a pariah.  He departed the political scene and the world almost sainted by his teeming supporters, with whom he refused to break faith.

  • A scholar and a gentleman departs

    Two weeks ago, they buried the remains of the University of Ibadan historian, Dr Gabriel Akindele Akinola, in Ugbole, in the Ekiti country, the hometown of the legendary Daniel Ojo, who through sheer mental prowess and uncommon doggedness, rose through the grinding poverty in which he was reared, made his way to Cambridge, earned a doctorate in physics, and became, reputedly, the first African professor of geophysics.

    Akinola would have been embarrassed, scandalised even, to be mentioned in the same breath as Ojo Ugbole, for he was the quintessence of modesty and self-effacement.  But he was a first rate scholar in his own right, and a gentleman to boot.

    It is necessary to dwell on those twin attributes, because there are scholars, even great scholars, who cannot be called gentlemen.  There are also gentlemen who labour in the academy and other knowledge-production centres who cannot be called scholars.  Akinola belonged in the select breed of outstanding scholars who are also fine gentlemen.

    It was my good fortune to encounter him in 1971, in a section of the General African Studies course he was teaching at the University of Lagos.  The class met in a large, windowless room, at the basement of the Main Library.  It usually overflowed with students, scores of whom would have arrived some two hours earlier to start class at 8 o’clock in the morning.

    The entire setting was a fire marshal’s nightmare.  The hall had only one exit.  Once in a while, I would entertain the scary thought:  What if a fire broke out?  The University did not even have a fire service back then.

    Akinola stepped into the lecture room that morning, a box containing pieces of chalk and a duster in one hand  (ah, those analog days!), a sheaf of papers in the other, walked with quiet dignity to the front of the room and took his position at the lectern, and introduced himself.

    There were no airs about him.  On the contrary, it was as if he had set out deliberately to carry no airs about him.  He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt tucked into a pair of knee-length khaki shorts, and could easily have been mistaken for an older student.

    His crisp, precise and cultivated elocution immediately endeared him to me. His mastery of the material and the verve with which he imparted it showed that the man at the lectern was no accidental teacher but a scholar.  When the lecture was over, I could hardly wait for the next one.  And so it was for the six weeks or so that he taught the African History section of General African Studies.

    He transferred to the University of Ibadan shortly thereafter. I never forgot the man, and I never forgot the material that transported us the class to exotic places like Kush and Nubia and Meroe and Axum.  These places would come vividly to mind some two decades later when I was on assignment in Ethiopia.

    Sometime during the mid-80’s a submission signed “G. A. Akinola” arrived at my desk at The Guardian, where I was Editorial Page Editor.   I recognised the name instantly, and literally devoured the piece.  The elegant phrasing, the scholarly exposition that had endeared its author to me back at the University of Lagos perfused the article.  It was impeccable through and through, an editor’s delight.  I scheduled it for immediate publication.

    Then I followed up with a letter to Akinola introducing myself as his grateful admirer and former student at Akoka, and asked if he would be kind enough to favour The Guardian with his occasional interventions in the national policy dialogue.

    That was when I discovered the Gentleman in the Scholar.

    His response overwhelmed me.  You would think I was the former teacher, and he the grateful student             and admirer.  Such humility; such solicitude for my progress and well-being, and so many words of encouragement and support at every turn, laced with wisdom and uttered with deep feeling.

    Every so often, he would send me articles for publication.  The last one I recall receiving from him at The Guardian before I left Rutam House, following the paper’s banning by the Abacha regime, was in 1994, and it was titled “Lest we regret.”  Full of historical insight, it was a brilliantly prophetic piece about Nigeria’s future under Abacha.

    Subsequently, he forwarded his contributions to me for publication in The NATION.  Over the years, his submissions never lost his graceful exposition and compelling logic.  Every word was in place.  You could not take out a phrase or paragraph without ruining the architecture.

    Not once did Akinola ask for the modest honorarium we pay for each article.  The desire to share his knowledge and advance the public good was what animated him.  These are the marks of a true public intellectual.

    When Akinola discovered that his friend and confidant, the celebrated poet Niyi Osundare, is also a close friend of mine, his solicitude turned into doting affection.  Whenever I was visiting from the United States, he kept track of my movements.  In this age of kidnappers, please do not take your personal safety for granted, he would counsel, especially whenever I was going to my hometown Kabba, in Kogi State.

    He made contact invariably by telephone.  He never cottoned on to the Internet and all that.

    In a moving tribute, the historian, Emeritus Professor Akinjide Osuntokun remarked that if Akinola’s published scholarship was not voluminous, it was largely because Akinola did not subscribe to the “publish or perish” code of the university system, which often privileges sheer plenitude over quality.  Akinola set          his own targets and strived to attain them to the best of his great ability.

    Dr Akinola paid me what I regard as the ultimate compliment when, in 2014, he journeyed from Ibadan             with Professor Osundare to Lagos to attend events marking my 70th birthday.  He looked rather frail.  I would gather later that he had been ill, but had insisted on making the trip.

    He died three weeks ago, aged 82.

    Farewell, sir, and thank you, sir, for your great personal example and your public spirit. You have left us, but that example endures, and guides us still.

     

     

    The State and Dr Saraki

    Senate President Bukola Saraki has no sterner critic than this column, right from when he was Governor of Kwara State.

    It has remarked his overweening sense of entitlement, his predilection for cutting corners, his disdain for rules and process, and his serial disregard of the precept of noblesse oblige.

    Saraki’s proxies have in return threatened the column with defamation lawsuits and dismissed it as a front for the APC leader Asiwaju Bola Tinubu.

    I thought I should state all this upfront.

    As I was finishing this column on Sunday night – six hours behind Lagos time — to meet a Monday morning deadline, the usually sedate online newspaper Premium Times flashed this headline:  “IGP Idris gets Buhari’s nod to arrest Saraki over murders.”

    This has got to be one of the most dramatic newspaper headlines in recent memory.  And it raises a troubling:  question:  With whom does the power to authorise prosecutions lie, based on the evidence available:  The President, or the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice?

    At this writing, the details are sketchy.  The whole thing centres on the recent robberies in Offa, in Kwara State, during which nine policemen and 26 other persons were killed.  Some of the suspects reportedly claimed in confessional statements that the arms found on them were handed to them by, or purchased with help from, Saraki.

    Saraki seems to have anticipated this development when he announced sensationally two weeks ago on the Senate floor that IGP Idris was set to frame him on a murder charge, mobilised the Senate to denounce the alleged scheme, led a Senate team to brief President Buhari and urge him to step in.

    Recall that the Senate had engaged in a running battle to get IGP Idris to come testify on issues related to law enforcement, notably the recent arrest and detention of the dissolute Senator Dino Melaye (nPDP/APC Kogi West).

    Recall also, that following the IGP’s refusal to honour the invitation, the Saraki-led Senate declared him “an enemy of democracy” and a person “unfit to hold any public office within Nigeria and outside.”

    Saraki’s followers must have been stunned by the latest development, especially coming when elements of the nPDP, of which he is the arrowhead, are set to defect to the rump of the PDP ahead of the 2019 General Elections so as to wrest power from the APC and stop Buhari from clinging to power.

    Saraki’s sworn opponents, on the other hand, as well as those envious of his political profile, may well be gloating, saying that he had it coming and that it serves him right.

    That would be wrong, and egregiously prejudicial.

    Only the courts can pronounce one way or the other on the issue, and they must be allowed to do their work without any interference.  Any prosecution arising from this matter must be transparent and expeditious.  And the end must be what all judicial processes worthy of that designation seek in the final analysis:  Justice.

  • Ekiti on the move again

    It’s rather exciting that the authors of the Ekiti debacle are regrouping to fix their mess.  Is July 14 then redemption day — or yet another hope deferred?

    At the very Genesis in 2007, Dayo Adeyeye stormed out of the old Action Congress (AC), the vibrant part of the comatose Alliance for Democracy (AD), and forebear of the legacy Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), that fused with other legacy parties to form APC.

    Prince Adeyeye’s protest was on Ekiti gubernatorial nomination matters.  His exact ire was this same Kayode Fayemi, who he alleged the AC top hierarchs had given undue edge.

    Though Adeyeye was a dashing progressive and, as the nimble national publicity secretary of the then formidable Afenifere, a veteran of the NADECO-era anti-Abacha war of attrition, he felt piqued enough to jump in with the relatively conservative PDP.

    Besides, at Ayo Fayose’s second coming in 2014, while others were still disputing his nomination, Adeyeye was the first to strike a deal with him.  That took the wind out of that protest, and sort of cemented the Fayose encore.  But it’s good Adeyeye is back, and is part of the salvage mission.

    The same, with former Governor, Segun Oni.  Chief Oni, a quintessential gentleman if ever there was one, was another former progressive that found warmth in Ekiti conservative duvet.

    Oni was part of the Ekiti elite that fought Fayose to a standstill, at those ultra-dangerous times, of free-wheeling killing and maiming, of Fayose’s first coming.  But somewhat, Fayose had fled town, on account of a controversial impeachment, so rife during President Olusegun Obasanjo’s second term, of organized anomie.

    Somewhat still, Oni popped up, as gubernatorial candidate for the same party, on whose behalf Fayose had run down Ekiti.  Like Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, who claimed he didn’t hate Julius but loved Rome for partaking in Caesar’s murder, some folks claimed Oni didn’t hate Fayemi but just loved himself more!

    So, he rode to office with a huge dose of perceived opportunism.  Not only that, his “progressive” whiff watered down the AC Ekiti progressive franchise.  So, when that election was comprehensively stolen, no thanks to the 2007 Obasanjo do-or-die electoral salvo, the Ekiti progressives were bitterly divided.

    Well, after more than three years, the court ruled Oni’s win was a heist; and restored Fayemi’s mandate.  One thing led to the other, including PDP’s self-destruction and Oni’s defection.  Now, Oni is back “home”, among the Ekiti salvagers.

    Now MOB — Michael Opeyemi Bamidele — who almost became victim of a policeman with a mob mentality, at Fayemi’s campaign launch on June 1, no thanks to a reported accidental discharge that hit him and others.  May the Almighty grant them all complete healing.

    Were it not so tragic, MOB’s shooting could pass as a heroic spilling of blood, for a very grim rescue mission, which success or failure could make or mar Ekiti.

    Yet, both MOB and Dr. Fayemi must take the full blame (aside from the Goodluck Jonathan Presidency that cashed in, with rogue “federal might”), for Fayose’s second coming.

    MOB insisted on challenging Fayemi for governor, despite a sitting governor’s right to second term.

    His grouse?  Fayemi allegedly failed to consummate agreed political trade-offs, which led to MOB giving up his Senate aspiration (which Femi Ojudu eventually got, incidentally defeating Fayose in that election), and Jimoh Ibrahim, an Ado-Ekiti politician, who ran a joint campaign with MOB — MOB for Senate, Jimmy for Reps — to give up his Federal House ticket (which MOB got) for promised party patronage, that allegedly never came.

    Aside, asked why he couldn’t just wait till 2018, MOB claimed he had cause to believe Fayemi had zoned him out; and parcelled the governorship to another.  So, he exited to Labour Party (LP) to stake his claim.  Needless to say, the ACN in-fighting back then gave Fayose the edge, aside from Jonathan’s “federal might”.

    Well, again MOB is back in the house, to join in the Ekiti rescue — and again, may God grant him fast and full healing from his gunshot wounds.

    Fayemi’s contribution to the Ekiti debacle was his rather perplexing gubernatorial medley of brilliant policies and toxic politics.

    Dr. Fayemi achieved unprecedented developmental strides in Ekiti.  His urban upgrade lifted Ado from at best a big rural town, at worst a sprawling big village, to a modern metropolis.  His street-lighting gave security a healthy jab in the arm, aside from boosting night city beauty.

    His education policy would mature and yield wonderful fruits, ironically during Fayose’s second coming, thus acting as an oasis of Renaissance in a desert of unbridled barbarism.  His N5, 000 payout to the poorest and most vulnerable Ekiti elders was the most ambitious in Ekiti’s history, despite the state’s humble purse.

    His tourism policy, trying to transform the Ikogosi Warm Springs into a hub of nature leisure all-year and a summer scholarship retreat, to rebrand Ekiti, was a serious study in structured development.

    But not all these would appear to matter, as his perceived toxic politics turned almost every developmental asset into an electoral albatross.  Though Fayemi always insists he didn’t really fairly lose the 2014 polls, a good segment of Ekiti, with zest, embraced Fayose’s manic gallop into the past, than Fayemi’s carefully calibrated path into the future.

    Even if Fayemi wins on July 14, he must fundamentally revamp his politics to earn the plaudits his policies deserve.  Otherwise, his political future could be bleak.  But again, it is good too that he heads the salvage mission, for a debacle he helped to create.

    Before you charge Ripples with stark Manichaean presumption — Fayemi is good, Fayose is evil; progressives are good, conservatives are bad, etc — let it be known this column is driven by the ideology of development.

    And if you want to know how bad Ekiti is faltering on that scale, just contrast how Ekiti has regressed under Fayose with the advancement the neighbouring Osun has chalked under Rauf Aregbesola.  Yet Ekiti, under Fayemi, had a few months head start, retrieving its stolen mandate than Osun, in 2014.

    In eight short years, six of which were economically lean, if not outright perilous, Aregbesola has primed Osun with the critical infrastructure — physical and social — needed to modernize its economy, propel productivity and earn genuine prosperity: futuristic schools, critical and ultra-modern road networks Osun had never witnessed, and the signal schools feeding programme, so beneficial the Federal Government has copied and implemented it in 24 of Nigeria’s 36 states.

    Ekiti?  It’s the direct opposite.  Fayemi’s four development-savvy years have been blown away by Fayose’s four of the barbarians — barbarians of cascading backwardness, in almost every sphere of life — with the empty whoop of “stomach infrastructure”

    Imagine what Ekiti would have been today, if Fayemi, warts and all, had secured a second term, based on his developmental agenda?

    That is the race against time Ekiti faces on July 14.  But it’s good the authors of the debacle are back, in a tough battle, to make good.

    It’s all left to Ekiti to, four years after Fayose, yet again choose salvation or perdition.