The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Democracy Day: A balance sheet

    They are celebrating their Democracy Day in the face of a huge democracy deficit.  It may even be said, without doing great violence to the facts, that what they are celebrating in Nigeria today is a regression of democracy.

    The evidence is all around us.

    The trappings of democracy are there all right.  A written Constitution stands as the supreme law of the land, pillar of the rule of law and a bulwark against arbitrariness.  General elections are held every four years into national, state and local assemblies which meet regularly, their broad mandate being to make laws for the good governance of Nigeria.  Each of them has a Mace, the symbol of its authority. The  judiciary, independent of the Executive and Legislative arms, mediates disputes among the state, institutions, groups, and individuals.

    We have all these institutions and observe these rituals in common with other democracies.  But that is where the similarities end.

    A Constitution drafted in secret and sprung on the people has in operation turned out to be more a source of frustration than fulfillment.  Its provisions are often flouted, and its spirit is seldom honoured.

    Voting is rarely an exercise in choosing.  Each election, be it local, statewide or national, is like a civil war.  Fighting breaks out, shots are fired, and people get killed.

    It is not about winning a contest to serve the public.  It is about joining the ranks of the thousands who have acquired great wealth simply on the strength of being declared winners in a plebiscite.  That declaration is a ticket to gratuitous wealth and life most abundant.  Winning by any means is the only thing.

    Even on the most important issues, deliberations in the legislative assemblies rarely rise above the jejune and the perfunctory.  The Mace doubles as a handy cudgel or missile when what passes for debate gets heated.  Withal, the Senate has been turned into a platform for bullying, humiliating and reigning in officials performing their lawful duties whenever such duties collide with the lawless conduct of its manipulative, self-entitled and scandal-plagued leadership and its enablers.

    The Senate routinely violates even its own laws with impunity, invoking powers it does not possess, to “suspend” dissident members for as long as six months instead of the maximum of 14 days stipulated by its own rules.

    At its most basic, democracy has been defined as “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” The first two clauses of this tripartite definition find some expression in the representative institutions of government.  But democracy as government for the people?  In Nigeria?

    That is a stretch.

    This past weekend, the news media published Finance Minister Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s revelations from her time as Finance Minister under President Olusegun Obasanjo and President Goodluck Jonathan, in the life of the 7th Senate.

    According to her, the operational budget of the National Assembly rose steadily over the years to the point where, in 2015, it stood at N150 billion — 16 percent or just a little under one -seventh of the  Appropriations, and more than three times  the entire budget for 2006.  Former Central Bank Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, as he then was, had it right.

    Oil prices had crashed from more than $100 per barrel to $58.  Yet the National Assembly not only refused to accept any cuts in its own “standard” (read “sacrosanct”) budget; it actually piled another N20 billion on the appropriations, agreeing only after a great deal of haggling with the Executive Branch to slice just N3 billion off the spending bill.

    There is no saint in this matter. The Executive goes to the legislature with a bloated spending bill, in which durable goods – computers, kitchen ware, etc. — purchased the previous year and the year before are set to be purchased all over again, in greater quantities and at far higher prices.

    This self-aggrandising permeates the entire machinery of government at all levels, with not more than five percent of the population gulping the about 90 percent of the operational budget.  A sprawling  presidential system of government that its beneficiaries are loath to modify or replace, keeps this pernicious arrangement in place.

    There was a time when various governments presented various schemes as “dividends” of democracy. Lawmakers who present articles purchased from their trainload of allowances to their constituencies no longer dress them up as dividends of democracy.  Rather, they call them “donations,” handouts from their abundance of kindness to the less privileged in their community.

    The judiciary is a kept institution where timidity, perjury and susceptibility to unwholesome influences come panoplied in ermined robes.  The evidence on which a court discharged and acquitted a political baron in Nigeria was used to convict the baron in a foreign court.  Only in a setting such as ours can a court issue an injunction restraining the police in perpetuity from investigating allegations of serious fraud against a political official.

    It will come as no surprise if, one of these days, a court restrains the National Assembly from passing a bill, and the president from signing it into law.

    As the General Elections loom larger, Nigeria stands at a crossroads.  In a formal sense, the APC is in government, but whether it is also in power is debatable. Its legislative prerogative in the National Assembly has been usurped by rogue elements whose defection from the Opposition PDP helped the APC defeat the PDP which had held power for 16 years.  Now set to return to their natural habitat, these elements calling themselves nPDP, have meanwhile joined forces with the stragglers in the defeated Opposition to seize that initiative.

    The Change that the core APC promised has been rather slow in coming, in a polity that has seen its patience betrayed so often by the ruling class that it now demands rapid results as the price for its support and loyalty.

    Sensing an opening, the PDP has been pillorying the APC for failing to achieve what the PDP could not deliver in the 16 years it held power.  To keep up the presence of still belonging in the APC, the nPDP  has  presented the APC core leadership a portfolio of grievances they want redressed, failing which they will formally return to their natural habitat.

    That portfolio reeks of the fixation on self, the utter self-absorption that has been the standard conduct of the lawmakers.

    Three years during which it was an integral part of the Establishment, they claimed, falsely, that their bloc in the APC had been sidelined, accorded no ministerial slots, denied patronage as well and executive positions on boards of government institutions and parastatals.

    They said their members were subjected to “vicious and relentless” political attacks when they “showed interest” in running for Senate President and House Speaker. They did not mention, however, that they  had settled the matter by self-help, using methods that the best authorities have characterized as a criminal breach of the law.

    They regard investigation of their members by the anti-corruption agencies as official harassment.  They have since added to their portfolio of grievances the staging of parallel state congresses in which their faction lost out big-time.

    These grievances, if addressed, the faction said, “will lead to a harmonious APC where justice, equity, fairness and peace will reign and enable APC avoid rancor, reinvigorate the pace of national development and face the 2019 General Elections as one united party.”

    When the splinter group meets sub rosa with the leadership of the APC, it will probably demand that on-going corruption investigations and prosecutions of its members be discontinued to keep them in the fold.

    Even if the APC now develops the spine to call the nPDP’s bluff — realpolitik suggests the contrary — the balance sheet on this Democracy Day, judging from the promise and spirit of 1999, will remain in deficit.

  • Lagos, refuse and legacy

    Just as well, Visionscape Sanitation Solutions (VSS) and Waste Collection Operators (WCOs), the old PSP operators, have reached some detente on the refuse war.

    The Lagos prisoners of war (POWs), victims of the resultant environmental blight, can  now heave a sigh of relief, hoping the refuse siege would lift soon.

    Yet, after all said and done, Lagos is clearly dirtier than three years ago exactly today, when otherwise high-flying Governor Akinwunmi Ambode took over.

    Indeed, many a harsh critic would gloat — and not without basis — that Lagos is dirtier today, than during Governor Bola Tinubu’s second term (2003-2007); and the eight-year stretch of Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola (2007-2015).

    That is, on the refuse cum environmental wellness front, hopping back 12 clear years!

    Quite a looming legacy — and it’s not pretty!

    Yet, it is a rather stiff blight, for the governor has performed superlatively on other fronts.

    But no matter how derisive or biting the refuse criticism becomes, it wouldn’t matter if it is fixed.  That is what the governor should focus on.  That is what would determine his legacy.

    On the surface — and this resonates in the street — Ambode met a working system, and for whatever reasons, crippled it.  Proof: refuse heaps, the ugly signposts of old Lagos, circa 2001, are back with a vengeance!

    But looked at more closely, that conclusion doesn’t tell the complete story.

    Yes, the PSP system had a good hang on refuse collection.  But how sustainable was that system for a mega-city state, with fresh garbage from a thumping population, swollen daily by economic migrants nationwide?

    That made imperative the Cleaner Lagos Initiative (CLI) — in any case, in the opinion of the Ambode government.

    The CLI high point was the prospect of fresh capitalization, in waste clearing hardware: 600 brand new compactors and 900, 000 electronically tracked refuse bins, secure in the streets, being less prone to theft.

    The advent of the enabling law, the Environmental Management and Protection law (now being reworked by the Lagos House of Assembly, because of the fierce opposition to CLI), was to signal a new dawn.

    But it all ended a still-birth — or nearly so.  The old PSP veterans, now dubbed WCOs, resisted their perceived elbow, by VSS, with alleged conspiracy by the Ambode government, out of the household waste segment.

    VSS itself, overwhelmed as much by the fierce resistance as by the late delivery of its hardware — mainly the 600 brand new compactors — which were to be the market game-changers, looked far less nimble under pressure.

    Then, uproar from shocked citizens.  Suspected sabotage, as refuse piled up — in Malthus-speak — in geometrical proportions, while the refuse breakdown was still elementary in scope. Of course, the PSP also launched a legal challenge to VSS market entry.

    The Lagos garbage war had broken out, with rare savagery — and Akinwunmi Ambode was the villain-in-chief!

    The refuse-assaulted citizens — sight, smell, hearing and touch — were captured POWs, even as car tyres squelched heaps of spilled garbage from road medians; and stretched out skeins of sickening and smelly mats, on the road!

    But even as affronted Lagos groaned under refuse, some new order was taking shape, though with barely anyone in the mood to notice.

    From its mandate, VSS is charged with infrastructure upgrade, even as it competes with the WCOs on the refuse clearance front.

    These core refuse chores include constructing more transfer loading stations, recycling facilities, biomass plants, leachate and waste treatment schemes, waste to energy plants, dumpsites and land-filled remediation.

    That innovation points to the future of waste management in Lagos — an integrative process, which goal is to turn Lagos waste into wealth, doing that by best global practices.

    With the present confusion and resentment, that might sound as arcane as they come.  But it is the future of any modern city-state, intent on turning wastes into recycled  assets, creating jobs along the way, in the best tradition of government-private sector partnership.

    Still, between that future waste management utopia and the present grim challenges, there appears a gulf.

    So, what should the Lagos government do, now that the rains are coming, to avert city-wide piles of uncleared refuse, becoming some push for water-borne epidemics?

    Simple: accelerated clearance of refuse and faster turn-around of compactors, doing the rounds — some sort of refuse clearance emergency.

    While city-wide feedbacks tend to suggest reduced piles, the situation is still far from what it was before the system broke down.

    But that is little surprise.  For starters, the WCOs are not as near-equipped, in sound compactors, as they should have been, which in the first instance, necessitated the CLI reforms.

    Then, VSS’ anticipated new compactors are arriving in bits.  Worse for capitalist morale: WCOs are infringing on VSS’ former household waste monopoly, in the spirit of the new waste entente.

    Still, it is a thing to cheer that the government would appear getting a hang, once again, on the refuse situation.  What to do now is fasten, by whatever means necessary, the turn-around time.

    But something must be done — and done urgently: get rid of illegal dumpsites, particularly on medians, roundabouts and road junctions.  These sites flared during  the VSS-WCO turf war.

    Now that there have been some operational agreements, the government should ensure they vanish, even if it means drafting security agencies, on a 24-hour surveillance, to arrest those responsible for these dumps.

    Still, a lasting lesson from the refuse crisis: never take anything for granted; for the best systems often collapse with the least but routine neglects.

    The strength of Lagos State, since 1999, has been its continuity — laudable and effective continuity, of winning policies, of which waste management was only a part.  But see what havoc CLI’s sudden shock has caused!

    Henceforth, Governor Ambode would do well to secure stakeholders’ consensus — or near so — before moving in to implement any policy, no matter how good on paper.  This refuse fiasco teaches that stiff lesson.

    As for political adversaries, hoping to cash in on Ambode’s refuse slip for negative electioneering pitch, all is fair in war!

    Still, the governor, like 2nd Republic Alhaji Lateef Jakande, and immediate predecessor, Babatunde Fashola, SAN, before him, would appear to have done enough to earn re-election.

    Even, after the first two years, Governor Bola Tinubu, who like the Biblical King David fought all the battles to establish the Lagos “kingdom”, was already showing enough fox-trot, to secure a second term. The refuse reforms, aside from massive infrastructure upgrade, topped in his golden score card.

    For Ambode, therefore, failure on the refuse front is a dire legacy stain.  It is absolutely no option!

  • Gowon, ouster and corruption

    Open confession: I doubt if I can ever be critical of Gen. Yakubu Gowon, former military Head of State (1966-1975).

    As a pupil of St. David’s Anglican School, a public primary school in Okesuna-Lafiaji, on  Lagos Island, Gen. Gowon, with his Lagos Governor, then Lt. Col. Mobolaji Johnson, did what Osun Governor, Rauf Aregbesola, now does for Osun’s most vulnerable families — school feeding.

    True, the Gowon-Johnson mid-day meal programme, for Lagos public schools, was not entirely free.

    But for a termly token, the government blessed the pupils with delicious and nutritious food, some of which — like Semo: vita and lina, barley cooked like jollof rice, stuffed with corned beef, spice and dried fish, and other staples, superbly cooked — most of us first sampled, and thoroughly enjoyed, in school.   Why, generous fruits and chilled fan milk came with the treat!

    That proved superb bonding, with impressionable minds, by a caring state!

    So, when by October 1974, the inimitable Dr. Tai Solarin started writing his “Beginning of the end” letter (because Gen. Gowon reneged on a 1976 promised return to civil rule); and other heavyweight moulders of opinion then were calling Gowon the worst to have happened to the Nigerian humanity, a bit of my child’s mind balked — what the hell are these adults talking about?

    Though almost a secondary school graduate at Gowon’s 1975 overthrow, and replacement by Brig. Murtala Muhammed, my teenage mind felt something close to personal grief.

    Fond recall of the Gowon regime, seeping with child-like innocence and naivety!  Even then, Gen. Gowon’s May 15 Abuja recollection of that ouster evoked that same deep pathos, echoing a long lost age, of child-like military innocence!

    At his ouster in 1975, he told the 8th AGM and Conference for Heads of Anti-Corruption Agencies in Commonwealth Africa in Abuja, that he had no dime, save his salary savings.

    It was a Monday morning, away at Kampala, Uganda, heading the Nigerian delegation to the summit of the Organization of African Unity (OAU, now rechristened African Union, AU).

    Even worse: his tearful delegates had to contribute part of their estacodes to fly him to London, UK, his new home in exile.  Otherwise, he would have been stranded in Uganda.  Yet, he had been military Head of State for nine years, superintending Nigeria’s first Oil Boom!

    Gen. Gowon’s conclusion?  That big-scale corruption came after his regime, since his military successors were scared stiff of ending up kobo-less like him.

    With all due respect to Gen. Gowon, that conclusion cannot be right.

    For starters poverty, real or feared, cannot be basis for stealing.  If stats shows Nigeria’s rich elite are more vicious thieves than the vulnerable poor, it logically follows that those who steal are driven by base instincts, just as those who don’t are driven by high principles.

    Besides, there was that “You-Tarka-me-I-Daboh-you” scandal, broken by the old Daily Times.  Godwin Daboh (now dead) accused the late Joseph Tarka (Benue co-native and Federal commissioner — minister — under Gowon) of corruption.  The crusading media back then accused Gen. Gowon of alleged cover-up.

    And, after Gowon’s overthrow, the Murtala regime indicted 10 of Gowon’s 12 state governors for corruption (Lagos’ Mobolaji Johnson and Western State’s Oluwole Rotimi were the two exceptions); and ordered seizure of their assets.

    So, for Gen. Gowon to claim corruption came after him would sound rather rich.  Yet, there is a sense that hyperbole could make some sense, when you compare the modest Gowon-era military office holders, with the Murtala-Olusegun Obasanjo set of successors.

    The mercurial Murtala boomed and roared and kicked against “indiscipline and corruption”.  In fairness to his memory, he walked his talk for the six months he ruled (29 July 1975-13 February 1976).

    But that cannot be said of his successors, despite projecting empty exceptionalism.   The ex-general as a super-rich citizen, bristling with an offensive sense of entitlement, dawned after the Obasanjo handover to civil rule in 1979.

    Gowon’s “corrupt” governors included names like Bendel’s iconic Sam Ogbemudia (God bless his soul!), Kano’s Audu Bako, Rivers’ Alfred Diette-Spiff (now a king) and even Kwara’s David Bamigboye.

    Though tarred by Gowon ouster probes, their achievements and regime conduct still loom large in their respective states, so much so that the late Ogbemudia, aside from rallying back as elected Bendel (now Edo and Delta states) governor (1 October-31 December 1983), died a hero among his people.

    In contrast: former army generals, morphing into emergency, much sought-after boardroom czars, just to pimp illicit influence to corner public sector contracts, was basically a post-Obasanjo affair.

    While Gowon, as ex-Head of State, exited as a golden pauper, Obasanjo exited the same position, even after a shorter duration, as a big-time farmer.

    Obasanjo’s deputy, the late Maj-Gen. Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, that regime’s Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters, exited as big-time investor with niche interests in banking, shipping, publishing — the so-called commanding heights of the economy.

    Contrast that to Gowon’s No. 2, Vice Admiral Joseph Edet Akinwale Wey (1918-1991), and you’d probably figure out Gowon’s claim that corruption came after him.

    Besides, though not many noticed it back then, a more noxious strain of systemic corruption, tailoring public policy to private ends, if not entirely novel, would appear to have luxuriated.

    Take Obasanjo’s laudable Operation Feed the Nation (OFN) campaign, of household food gardening and mass farming.  That birthed the Land Use Decree (now Land Use Act).  But that access to land on the cheap — courtesy that law — created many ex-army general farmers, including Obasanjo himself.

    This clever ploy of self-settlement, hiding behind the veneer of productivity, would decay into the subversive generosity, aka ”settlement” and sweeping sleaze of the Babangida regime; and hit the nadir of brazen heist, of the Sani Abacha era.

    Why, even Obsasanjo’s second coming, as elected president (1999-2007), boasts its own holy acquisition: when a “blind trust” saw clearly enough to suborn the flower of Economic Nigeria, to “donate” to a sitting president’s exit library!  The result today is the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL), first in Africa!

    Not even the vilest of the Gowon era boasts such audacity!  Yet these military regimes, starting with the Muhammadu Buhari junta (January 1984-August 1985), were proud “off-shoots” of the Murtala-Obasanjo regime!

    But the spartan Buhari, now sitting president, would appear the only refreshing difference, from that post-Gowon era of holy venality.   That clearly explains his missionary zeal to risk all to kill corruption.

    But Prof. Wole Soyinka, our own WS, has nailed the anti-corruption argument: until EFCC brings thieving past leaders to justice, there would be little dent on that nation-slaying monster.

  • As OBJ’s Third Force enters the fray

    The last thing you could ever charge former President Olusegun Obasanjo with is languor.

    Walk some distance with him, and he leaves you panting even if you are much younger, unless you are exceedingly fit.  Do not enter into project with him unless you are prepared to go to work immediately and to deliver your own end of the bargain at the appointed time, if not earlier.

    It is therefore no surprise that barely four months after he issued a bristling criticism of the Buhari Administration and announced that he was starting nation-wide consultations to establish a broad coalition to rescue Nigeria from the dysfunctions into which it had been driven by the governments that followed his tenure, the initiative has gone from proposal to actuality.

    Conceived as a popular grassroots movement to stimulate the interest and participation of youth and women in the political process and thus force “power addicts” to make way for new entrants in Nigeria’s power structure to sanitize the system, the Coalition for Nigeria Movement (CNM) has found a new home in, and reinvigorated, the previously moribund African Democratic Congress (ADC), Obasanjo announced last week at a news conference

    Nigerians in their millions, comprising individuals, groups, social, cultural and political formations, had registered in the CNM, desirous of fostering a “new dawn,” a real one, unlike the type Nigerians had been promised with every change of the baton since 1960, he could have emphasized.  And with the transition from the CNM to ADC, the first phase of the initiative to set up new platform,  turn a new page and inaugurate a “paradigm shift” in the country’s political history had been completed.

    The second phase, Obasanjo said, would involve “the galvanization” of all like-minded forces to work together to enthrone a new order.

    Key elements of that order would include curbing elitism, promoting inclusiveness, reforming the electoral system to lower the cost of entry, with one national agency supervising all elections; setting  new rules for funding of political parties and meaningful participation; empowering 25 million Nigerians living with disabilities to contribute to social discourse and development; fostering internal democracy, and curbing corruption drastically.

    Under the new order, the National Assembly would enact a law enabling Nigerians abroad with valid passports to vote in all future elections through the country’s embassies.  For a start 30 percent of positions in all organs of political parties and all institutions of government would be set aside for men and women aged 40 years old and younger.

    Not all the denizens of the old order were “totally evil,” Obasanjo acknowledged graciously.  The new alliance that would take Nigeria to the Promised Land would have to seek out and work with the few good men and women among them that are willing to embrace a new order.

    But never again government by “The K34,” nor by “Ijaw Nation with Four Women,” nor yet by “Kith and Kin,” he said, waxing lyrical, almost. Never again government controlled by the denizens of the PDP and the APC who brought the Nigeria to its present parlous state.

    That, in essence, is the manifesto Obasanjo handed down in his latest epistle. Not the vaguest reference to re-structuring that the attentive audience has been demanding insistently, only tinkering at the edges with the Constitution, and more of the hyper-centralization that has vitiated Nigeria’s progress.

    If Buhari and his Administration would not embrace and implement these marching orders, they must be prepared to be swept off the political platform by the ADC in next year’s General Election.

    Obasanjo reiterated that he would not be a card-carrying member of the ADC, having retired from “partisan politics.”  With the ADC now a reality, his work was done.  But he would, apparently drawing on Plato, function as an influential player in the class of “guardians,” to keep the new order on course.

    There you have it.

    When Obasanjo first mooted the idea of a new political formation last January in an epistle eviscerating Buhari and his Administration, the PDP entered a response that reeked of barefaced opportunism.  True, the PDP had not in office delivered on good governance, and the APC had proved wholly incompetent; however, the answer did not lie in creating “another political quicksand,” but in grounding a rescue mission on “a repositioned PDP that Nigerians had already embraced.”

    The PDP, declared it a national publicity secretary, the hard-working and even harder-hitting Kola Ologbondiyan, “is now standing on a true democratic ground that perfectly represents and reflects the hopes and aspirations of all Nigerians irrespective of their class, creed, or tribe.”

    It is for that reason that the PDP has “become a centre of the new, patriotic and broad-based engagements by well-meaning Nigerians and coalitions across the board, including past leaders, in rekindling our democratic process that places priority on returning power to the people,” Ologbondiyan added.

    In short:  save your energies, Baba.  We already have on ground and as a going concern what you seek to establish.

    As the Buhari Administration stumbled from blunder to egregious blunder, and as the National Assembly it nominally controls plotted in plain view day after day to supplant the Presidency, the PDP that had suffered a humiliating rejection at the polls just three years earlier–the PDP that had threatened to govern for 60 unbroken years in the first instance–began to see itself and to be seen by its depleted  followership as a government-in-waiting.

    Those who had defected from its beleaguered ranks to join the hope-inspiring APC more from calculation than from conviction and had remained at heart true believers in the PDP, then felt sufficiently emboldened to demand a meeting “to prepare the party as a fighting force to deliver more pungently on its manifesto and face the 2019 General elections with even greater commitment.”

    Few will be taken in by this sudden outpouring of concern for the APC’s fortunes.

    The real reason, as documented in the widely-circulated petition, is to press for a greater share in of the spoils and to secure acceptance as bone fide members and candidates in impending party elections rather than risk being shunned as defectors waiting to take flight.

    To put it bluntly, the whole thing is designed to furnish a pretext for defecting.  It they don’t get their demands, they will claim that they were pushed out of the APC

    That was before the local government and ward congresses which it would be courteous to call shambolic, and before Obasanjo announced the ADC’s arrival on the scene.

    This latter development must have tempered the PDP’s exuberant dream of returning to power in 2019.  somewhat. Squaring up for a straight fight with the APC, it now finds the field complicated by the entry of a third contestant that may well turn out to be more spoiler than mere irritant.  Consequently, according to my sources, they are now hedging their bets in the ranks of would-be defectors.

    Meanwhile, I gather that the faithful have been piling pressure on the APC to demand that the waverers shape up or face expulsion for disloyalty and anti-party activities.  That would be a clarifying move indeed.  I understand that it is under active consideration.

    Whatever happens, don’t count the APC out yet.  The significant uptick in oil prices will swell the Federal Government’s coffers and enable it to devote more resources to projects and programmes that would touch the lives of the people in beneficent ways and thus cut down a major source of public dissatisfaction with the Administration.

    And if it the Administration were to show greater respect for Nigeria’s geo-political imperatives in filling the thousands of positions waiting to be filled, it would be seen to have moved, finally, to address boldly another source of great of public disaffection.

    To close with a riff on ace broadcaster Horatio Agedah’s famous sign-off on his election reports during the First Republic:  And so, the drama continues.

  • Revisiting: AAA, 10 years after

    How might the late Senator Abraham Aderibigbe Adesanya (AAA) have assessed the May 2 Lagos gathering in his honour?

    Beam with his familiar smile of utmost satisfaction?

    Or throw in a wry smile, mocking the Nigerian penchant for willy-nilly consensus — even on a regnant buzz like “restructuring”?

    A nation does not yoke together and develop on the easy diet of self-serving consensus — just a heartbeat from cant.

    It rather achieves both on rigorous ethos, tough principles and lasting values, universal, shared and beneficial, to every age.

    That would appear absent from that Lagos pot-pouri; and that would jar on AAA’s fealty to principle.

    Which was why a mocking irony, like an apparition, hung over the gathering, but was hardly noticed: MKO.

    MKO Abiola was the martyr of the June 12, 1993 presidential election.  The MKO/NADECO resistance to that annulment re-calibrated the ethnic given in the Nigerian political power calculus; and roused others’ dream to the Nigerian presidency.

    It also vaulted AAA to the summit of influence, in Yoruba progressive politics; and drove the supremacy of Afenifere, at the turn of 1999.

    So, without MKO, not a few would have legitimately argued, AAA wouldn’t have unfurled, in his purest and most glorious form, in principled and trusted leadership.

    Yet, all through the ceremony, no one seemed to remember MKO — not even his widow Dr. Doyinsola Abiola, one of the symposium speakers, who nevertheless made a passing reference to her husband’s attempt at the presidency — enough to warrant a minute’s silence in his memory!

    Still, that gathering teemed with those that sustained the June 12 annulment crime, which led to the death, after four years of detention, of a man whose “crime” was winning a free election.

    On MKO, even while celebrating AAA, Nigeria had moved on!

    Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar was chairman of the occasion.  After MKO’s sudden death, he worked closely with AAA to midwife the return of civil rule in 1999.

    But Gen. Abubakar has an epochal query to answer: how did MKO suddenly expire  under his care?  For all of Sani Abacha’s villainy, that never happened under his charge.

    But you can’t really strafe Gen. Abubakar, for he carries himself with exceedingly good grace; flaunting neither virtue nor villainy.

    That cannot be said of Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, who was also there; as boss of AAA’s only daughter, Dupe Adelaja, one of his first-term ministers.

    So far, there is no proof Obasanjo was part of the Babangida annulment.  But he would appear part of its criminal sustenance, from the Interim National Government (ING) early days.

    Obasanjo’s prime contribution was eternal intrigue, if not outright perfidy.  He never, even for a second, acknowledged MKO — not before, not after his presidency.  Yet, he was chief beneficiary of MKO’s martyrdom.

    Even appointing Mrs Adelaja, as minister, was to undermine her father, who saw the treachery and instantly balked.  That would signal the opening salvo, aside from the Bola Ige entrapment, to subvert the AD.  It climaxed with the 2003 vile double-cross of the party’s South West governors, despite AAA’s strident warning.

    When the smoke cleared, Ige had lost his life; AD had become comatose; and Obasanjo’s Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), by stealth, had taken over the South West, with disastrous consequences.

    Why PDP, Obasanjo’s former battering ram, the old fox is now busy buffeting, in favour of new toy, African Democratic Congress (ADC), in his latest racket!  Whoever haggles with the Ebora Owu and heads home with a bargain?

    Also at the AAA symposium was John Nwodo, president of Ohanaeze Ndigbo, who launched a rather wild attack on Chief Bisi Akande, for “not telling President Buhari the truth”!

    Suffice to say: that attack was completely indecorous.  You don’t attack a man who couldn’t — or wouldn’t, because of his breeding — respond in kind, more so when that person is a respected elder.  Besides, what is Nwodo’s definition of “truth”; and what is his proof of Akande’s “guilt”?

    Yet, Chief Nwodo made a forceful pitch, as a passionate “restructuring” neophyte.  Even then, his regale, as a youth national executive of the Second Republic National Party of Nigeria (NPN), teemed with self-indictment.  If the bid for Nigeria’s re-federalization is not new, what was the young Nwodo’s take, as an NPN rising star, back then?

    Perhaps his Saul, over the years, turned Paul?  That’s not to be decried.  A fairer federal Nigeria is, after all, a win-win for all.

    Still, by Nwodo’s rather impassioned take on the security appointment imbalance and the IPOB “terrorist” status question, you could tell he was pushing a specific agenda — no crime, though — from the prism of newfound “restructuring”.

    Security appointments, with no Igbo input, may well be skewed.  But whoever heard Nwodo’s voice when, under President Goodluck Jonathan, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, made the Federal Ministry of Finance and its parastatals an impregnable Igbo fort, and when confronted, declared the Igbo could “rather compete”?

    Perhaps, Nwodo wasn’t Ohanaeze leader then.  But he was all through the Nnamdi Kanu IPOB lunacy; and no one heard him raise his voice until Kanu’s madness attracted counter-madness from ”Northern youths”: their ultimatum for the Igbo to leave the North.

    Even, back to the MKO annulment saga.  Wasn’t it Nwodo’s brother, Okwesilieze, as then sitting Enugu governor, who swore to sentence himself to self-exile, should MKO’s mandate be revalidated?

    The moral from all these?  Simple.  Genuine fighters for justice don’t make it just about themselves.  They rally for everyone, every time.  So long for Nwodo’s “restructuring” high horse!

    Surprisingly, even Prof. Banji Akintoye, famed historian of the best cut, made an uncharacteristically rash attack on those who claimed “Allah” had given them divine rule over Nigeria.  Seated in that hall were invited friends that could rile to no end.

    Besides, who doesn’t know such claims belong to the lunatic fringe — and which ethnic group lacks its own lunatic fringe?  So, how fair is using the fringe to tar the whole?

    Though Afenifere lugs little record of selective crusade for justice, that such incongruous voices resonated at an AAA show, appear proof of Afenifere’s plummet from its pristine high ideals, to base irredentism, while hectoring “restructuring”.

    True, restructuring is a win-win for all, but not as an all-comers’ cant that means different things to different people.  Besides, pushing it without fixing the current oozing national moral rot could be counter-productive.

    What does it benefit restructuring, and its resultant re-regionalization, if the central parasites of today become the regional parasites of the future?

    That is the danger of willy-nilly consensus on “restructuring”.  Nigeria’s future must be anchored on a more rigorous base.

  • Benue: ‘Fulani herdsmen’ come of age

    An April 24, the ubiquitous, all-slaughtering, “Fulani killer herdsmen”, the sweet headline invention of Nigeria’s southern media, struck again in Benue.

    In Ayer-Mbalom community, in Benue’s Gwer East local government, the “killer herdsmen” attacked St. Ignatius’ Catholic Church, killing two Catholic priests: Joseph Gor and Felix Tyolaha, among the 17 that lay dead.

    But when on April 27 preliminary arrests were made, the attack’s alleged mastermind, Aminu Yaminu aka Tashaku, was neither Fulani nor herdsman.

    Neither was he even Muslim at birth.  Security sources say he is a Tiv Muslim convert, with core Boko Haram records.

    Tashaku was among those original disciples, detained with Mohammed Yusuf, pristine Boko Haram leader, that survived Yusuf’s murder in police cell; and most probably a hardened veteran of the first wave of Boko Haram terror, in a blitz to avenge the killing of their master.

    Tashaku’s probable conspiracy dawned, even more, with the profile of his arrested “army”, armed to the teeth: again neither Fulani nor Muslim; nor even farmers or herders.

    The bulk were Benue youths, somewhat linked to the Benue government’s anti-open grazing enforcement militia.  Tashaku, said to be close to Benue Governor, Samuel Ortom, is a big player in that “people’s militia”.

    Said Olabisi Ayeni, an assistant  director, Army Public Relations, 707 Special Forces Brigade, on the Tashaku arrest: “Following an intelligence report, it was gathered that Aminu [aka Tashaku] had concluded plans with his cohorts in Bauchi, Borno, Yobe and Nasarawa states to lunch a major attack on innocent citizens in Benue State.”

    What was April 24 then?  A Muslim-Christian slaughter, as now being falsely trumpeted by many “men of God”, who should know better?

    Or a Christian-on-Christian, Benue-on-Benue massacre, coldly planned to further hang the omnipresent “Fulani killer herdsmen”, in the great southern media gallows?

    Besides, did anyone notice how fast the media drumming for another round of “public burials” quietened, the moment the Benue government realized this latest violence might just be home-brewed?

    Benue’s necromancy, for whatever end, appears unravelling!  But after how many wasted lives?

    So long for a media, led more by emotive, explosive clichés, than by even-handed treatment of news!

    But if you think Tashaku’s was a one-off or novel allegation, just consider this 24 July 2017 petition to the security agencies, by the Shitile community, in Katsina Ala local government of Benue State.

    According to Premium Times that reported the story, complete with a full copy of the petition, that community accused the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF), allegedly sponsored by the Benue government, of ethnic cleansing and sundry human rights abuse.  CJTF is allegedly headed by one Aondona Ishenge aka Tor-Abaji.

    But guess who is also named as a local CJTF enforcer in Shitile?   See an extract from the petition, which alleges the CJTF: “is supervised and armed with sophisticated automatic firearms through the office of the Security Adviser, Edwin Jando (rtd) and commanded by one Aliyu Tashaku, who enjoys the ignoble fame of having been an operative of the Boko Haram terrorist group.”

    By the Shitile petition, the terror in that community started in November 2016, with the alleged murder, by CJTF, of two lads, Wangyo Mbatsav and Orkar Galgbom, in Utyondu village of the Mbayondo district.

    Again, a rather extensive quote from the petition, on how the Shitile terror flared and spread; citing dates, casualties and modalities:

    “In January 2017, there were many killed at Tse-Igbe, while on the 18th, 25th and 26th days of June, 2017, Tor-Abaji, dressed in military uniforms and armed with sophisticated automatic rifles, together with his horde of heavily armed gang, moved through Abaji settlement on a spree of destruction, burning down houses and brutalising women and children, after which he arrested some targeted persons whom he took away to an undisclosed location and subjected them to severe torture, resulting in scores of deaths.”

    Do a little content analysis of newspaper reports of these killings.  You bet they would all be belching: “Fulani herdsmen”!

    Aside from the recurring Tashaku, you probably have noted the eerie similarity between the Shitile attacks and the recurring Benue attacks, by their media reportage.

    That’s just a snippet of how the preening fourth estate has let down the realm in a period of dire need!

    Yet, these vile, one-track reports are not limited to Benue alone.  It’s the same in the extensive killing fields, spanning most of the Middle Belt and North East.

    July 2017, for instance, witnessed the great Taraba massacre, allegedly by a local “Christian” militia, with alleged Taraba government sympathies.

    The Nation, back then, reported the visit of Major-Gen. Ben Ahanotu, GOC 3 Division, Nigerian  Army, Jos, which security jurisdiction covers the Mambilla Plateau area, with its gory and heart-rending massacre: mangled were over 600 helpless Fulani villagers, including pregnant women, whose unborn babies were hacked off their womb.  Later Emir Muhammadu Sanusi would put the gory tally as no less than 800 slaughtered.

    Yet, this crime never grabbed screaming headlines.  The great southern media, that always bristles, over alleged Fulani “Christian massacres”, suddenly went blind, deaf and dumb.  Blessed are those whose sins are covered — by the media?

    This clear media conspiracy notwithstanding, one Kefas Dauda, a Junkun from Taraba, did an open letter to Governor Jonathan Ishaku, that alleged the Taraba government’s complicity in killings in the state.

    Part of that letter reads: “It is now indisputable that the youths allegedly armed by you are emboldened by General Danjuma’s persuasion of self-defence to commit more heinous crimes against our innocent people,” it charged, “by killings, maiming and destructions, which is erroneously but deliberately attributed to Fulani herdsmen.”

    Like Benue, like Taraba, then?

    But absolutely nothing in this piece has exonerated the criminal elements among the Fulani herdsmen.

    Or even the stark, daft and garrulous, among the Fulani, vomiting rubbish about some delusional divine right to subjugate others, fired by a so-called right of conquest.

    These are the stark lunatic fringe that give their kind a bad name.

    Still over all, the southern media has proved a millennial disgrace, sexing up doomsday news along North-South, Christian-Muslim divides; and furiously spurring this country, towards the ruinous cliff of Mogadishu and Kigali combined, by its criminal one-sided reportage.

    But since Rwanda had its consequences, these media and their editors had better brace themselves.

    Those Rwanda editors that drove their country to the abyss, later faced their own abyss in International Criminal Court (ICC) gaol houses.  The Nigerian editors, whose media daily belch emotive mischief, should be prepared for no less.

    Perhaps Nigeria would never hit such a tragic nadir?  Still, it’s good to appreciate how close our media are goading it towards that pit.

    Maybe that realization would force a change for the better before it’s too late.

  • Letter to Ayo Opadokun

    My dear Ayo:

    When a gang of armed robbers staged a daring and spectacular raid on five banks and left more than 30 persons dead some two weeks in Offa, in Kwara State, I was more than a little jolted.   I know the town quite well.  In the late sixties, when I was teaching in a secondary school some 15 miles away, Offa was the nearest town served by a bank, and I was one of its hundreds of out-of-town patrons.

    Travelling up north by train, I had the choice of boarding in Ilorin on a direct route 30 miles away or in Offa,   en route which I would have to change transportation at Ajasse-Ipo, a mere six miles away from my base. But despite that inconvenience, I usually boarded at Offa.   The railway station was more passenger-friendly, boarding was less stressful, and you were almost sure to get a seat.

    Offa also served me as a second home for some four years during which my wife taught at local girl’s secondary school St Clare’s, and I commuted from Lagos as a visiting spouse.

    A good many of my classmates in secondary school and university hail from Offa, and some among them, like your good self, whom I am proud to number as cherished family. How could the desperate bandits have settled on a town that was rarely in the news except during feuds over succession to the Oloffa stool, or boundary disputes with its neighbours, chiefly Erin-Ile, for their murderous visitation?

    The last time I visited was in 1985 or so, for the burial of your mother.  Also in attendance, I recall, was the late Dr Olu Onagoruwa (SAN), and your fellow attorneys in his law practice in tow.  I will forever cherish having your principal, your good self, and four of your colleagues in my corner at the Lagos High Court during the hearings of my lawsuit against the Nigeria Television Authority.

    These were the sentiments that welled up in my mind as I learned of the raid, and the wanton spilling of so much innocent blood.

    When the police declared a young man with the surname Opadokun a suspect in the armed robbery, I became alarmed.  Something told me that the young man might turn out to be a relation of yours – a cousin or nephew – most likely someone belonging in the extended Opadokun family.  For, among our people, Opadokun is not a common name.  And I daresay everyone who encounters it thinks immediately of you who have by your noble and unstinting endeavours on the political, social and religious planes turned it into a household name in Nigeria.

    My alarm grew into panic when I learned that the young man in question had positively been identified as your 38-year-old son Kayode.  I was shattered. Nothing had prepared me for this piece of distressing news.

    We meet – mostly by chance these days; we meet, we reminisce, we rap, we compare notes, we promise         to stay in touch, and we move on. When we talk about children, it is usually in the most perfunctory terms. “The children are doing well, we thank God,” we say reflexively. I had no reason to suspect that your only son had, to your grief, and now to mine, chosen a different, self-destructive path.

    If there is anything I find even more distressing than the grief into which you have been plunged anew, it is the charge that has taken wings in the media that you had been so deeply engrossed in the political goal of building a new, more just, more caring and more equal society that you had neglected to attend to the immediate needs of your own family; that Kayode’s circumstances resulted from the failure of parenting.

    The charge has a familiar ring, but that does not make it a whit less unfeeling, less presumptuous and less gratuitous.  In fact, I am almost prepared to say that it is slanderous.

    Parenting is one of the most demanding and trickiest tasks a person can undertake.  And yet, paradoxically, it is never taught.  You learn on the job as it were, guided but not always to the most salubrious degree by the examples of your own parents, by your inner lights, by your observations of other families, and by a thousand other influences.

    No outcome is guaranteed.  Here, the common wisdom that the apple never falls far from the tree may well be false, at least in a literal sense.  A child reared in a home that sets the highest store by rectitude can grow into a wayward adult; vice versa, though this outcome is rarer, a child brought up in the most dissolute of homes can grow up into a fine, morally upright person, as shown by the example of Alyosha, the youngest of the Brothers Karamazov in Dostoyevsky’s great novel of the same name.

    Peer pressure and hundreds of other factors render a particular outcome more uncertain still.  So that, if a son or daughter shuns the usual vices, comes across as a person of good report and generally stays away from trouble, we should give thanks for our good fortune.  Rejoice.  But we must heap no blame on those parents whose children grew wayward.

    Pay no heed to such people, Ayo.  They are not worthy of your notice.  You have no reason to blame   yourself for doing things you should not have done, or for omitting to do things you should have done. Save your energies for the more urgent and much more difficult task of standing by Kayode, and standing  by him unconditionally, just as you must love him unconditionally.

    That is the task before you. That is what your Baptist faith and all scripture enjoin.   Allow nothing to divert you from that task.

    There are those who will say that, even if you are personally upstanding, there may be something in your wife’s family that contributed to Kayode’s waywardness.   That mind, well entrenched in our folkways, was captured well by the songster:  “If a child does well, they say he is the son of his father; if he misbehaves, they say the child takes after the mother.”

    You must banish them from your company, Ayo.  They do not mean well for your family, or for your peace   of mind at this difficult time.

    I know that despite your enormous sacrifices to make Nigeria the country of our dreams, you are a person of very modest means.  You often do the grunt work, but they hardly remember you when they are sharing out the spoils.

    But you must, Ayo, harness your resources to afford Kayode the best legal defence possible.  In juridical terms, that may not avail much.  But it will show Kayode that you care.  It will show him that you love him.

    It will show him that you are prepared to welcome him back into the family’s embrace; that you have forgiven his prodigality.

    Now is the time for your associates, your political family, to show their support and solidarity.

    At 38, Kayode is a young man, with many years ahead of him.  He needs to spend those years, wherever he finds himself, knowing that he is loved and cherished.  That knowledge, that realisation, may well make him turn away from his bad ways now and live a life worthy of you, his mother, his siblings, and the larger Opadokun family.

    Please know, my friend and brother, that my thoughts and prayers are with you and yours. May your faith sustain you at this difficult time.

    All the best in your present travail.

  • Stamp duty: NIBSS as Nigeria’s supra-state?

    Until my colleague Segun Ayobolu’s April 21 piece appropriately titled Stamp duty impunity, I could have sworn that the managers of the national economy have  finally rid the system of the more manifest oddities in our public finance system.  What with the operations of the Treasury Single Account and its clean sweep of every kobo of public revenue from the filchy hands of officials into the national coffers.  Yours truly was one of those who celebrated the measure designed to snuff the life out of the islands of mini-governments operating as parastatals; entities whose expenditure outlays, sometimes exceeded those of states, and yet couldn’t be bothered by the niceties of parliamentary appropriation not to talk of remitting their operating surpluses to the national coffers.

    You know the familiar culprits – the mini-federations within the Nigerian state. For obvious reasons, I will leave out the apex bank – which insists on conflating autonomy with independence and so believes erroneously that it could dispense as much as it pleases from the piggy bank.

    That cannot be said of the national oil corporation – the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation – that one that routinely sends the crumbs to the national exchequer only after it has had its fill. Or the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), a behemoth which although spins billions if not trillions but ensures that nothing ever gets pass the gatekeepers – until perhaps when our lawmakers on self-help sorties, come calling for them to open the tap. Then is the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), which until recently ran errands for a certain Tompolo and other big boys from the Niger Delta rather than attend to its primary business of tending the country’s blue economy.

    TSA which ensures that every kobo of public fund is captured and pooled into the piggy bank is supposed to have changed all of that. Unfortunately, we may have failed to reckon with the cowboys in the financial services sector – smart Alecs trained in the art of subversion, of whom no rules are held as sacrosanct and niceties of transparency and fair-play are luxuries to be cynically dispensed with.

    Thanks to Ayobolu’s illuminating piece, we ought to by now, know better than to ignore the cabal of ruthless operatives. Let me refresh if only in the interest of those who did not read the piece and the report he alluded to. To paraphrase Ayobolu, the story in two parts started when a certain Nigerian, Tola Adekoya, saw an opportunity in the then moribund Stamp Duties Act, 2004. His outfit, the School of Banking Honours (SBH), SBH then approached the Nigerian Postal Services (NIPOST) on April 20, 2012, to see how it could partner with it to boost its internally generated revenue by affixing adhesive stamp on banking receipts as provided for in the law. Armed with a Masters Services Agreement with NIPOST on September 14, 2012, SBH then approached the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) for authorization to engage Deposit Money Banks (DMBs) and other qualified institutions as collecting agents. The apex bank, convinced of the immense possibilities in the partnership, gave the nod On December 3, 2012. Then, on October 15, 2015, the Nigerian Copyright Commission (NCC) issued the SBH a Copyright Certificate (No. LW1023) affirming its copyright ownership of the initiative on stamp duty collection.

    As Ayobolu would further have us know, the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) collected the stamp duty on all cheques with a value above N500,000 something it had done since 1993, although there was no evidence it remitted same into the federation account as required by law. With SBH came the expansion of the scope of the Stamp Duty to encompass all gamut of banking transaction ranging from manual to e-transfers.

    Today, SBH reckons that the unremitted revenue to the Federation Account is in the region of N20 trillion – monies which ought to have been remitted into the distributable pool to be shared between the federal, states and the local governments. Call it double jeopardy if you may –not only is the federation account denied access to the huge fund probably lying idle somewhere, the agents – SBH is equally denied fruits of its toil. And to imagine what difference the huge funds could make at a time of unprecedented infrastructure deficit.

    The good news: the president has since directed the monetary authorities to collect every kobo and remit same into the federation account. The directive is said to cover – SBH, the labourers for their toil. The bad news is that the president’s express directive, which traverses the whole gamut of constitutionalism, sanctity of contracts and proprietary interests, has not been carried out.

    That was the summary of the story as told by my colleague.

    So where is the money? Could the money be with the individual banks – the collecting agencies or their alter ego, NIBSS through which all transactions must necessarily pass through? Does that in any way confer the custodial role on a private company? And under what authority? Would that not strike a dart at the heart of the TSA?

    To be sure, we know what NIBSS does – it holds the franchise for inter-bank payments in order to remove potential bottlenecks associated with inter-bank funds transfer and settlement. That is what their website says. A limited liability company owned by all licensed banks including the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), it operates the Nigeria Automated Clearing System (NACS) which facilitates the electronic clearing of cheques and other paper based instruments, electronic funds transfer, Automated Direct Credits and Automated Direct Debits.  None of the roles as far as one can see, makes the company a revenue collecting agency of the federal government. Even if was so appointed – which seems extremely doubtful  at least from a constitutional point of view– it still has to explain why the funds, which belong exclusively to the distributable pool is floating around at a time most of its beneficiaries are struggling to pay salaries and pensions. Or are we dealing with a supra-agency – an institution above the strictures of state control?

    Could the money be with the apex bank? That again seems doubtful. For much as it can claim to sits atop the financial system, it remains at best an agent to multiple principals – the federal, states and the local councils – the beneficial owners of whatever accrues to the distributable account and all in accordance with guidelines established by the constitution.

    Which again takes us to the earlier question – where is the money?  If only to affirm the sanctity of the saying that the labourer deserves his wages, Nigerians must help Adekoya and his SBH find the money. How much does the Nigerian Governors Forum know? And what have they done about it?

    While we dwell on what that quantum of fund can achieve in a clime like ours, we must also think of the alternative to which the funds could be put –when left in the hand of rogue operatives.  It is the latter prospects that must be seen as truly frightening.

     

    • The column proceeds on vacation.

  • A milestone, and a transition

    Long before I met Chief Ayo Adebanjo whose 90th birthday celebration was a major event on the nation’s political and social calendar several weeks ago, I felt as if I had always known him.  Wherever you turned on the political landscape, wherever you found Chief Obafemi Awolowo, he was there, and not just as a fringe actor.

    He was there in the politics of the old Western Nigeria, in the region’s ruling party, the Action Group, at the Treason Trials, and in the Unity Party of Nigeria.

    He has been a constant presence in Afenifere, and he was there in NADECO, the coalition of opposition forces that fought military rule and Abacha’s terror machine to a standstill. He belongs in the leadership of politically engaged Nigerians demanding a comprehensive re-design of the national architecture.

    Built like a battle tank, Adebanjo is a formidable presence.  He never pulls his punches.  If he were a professional boxer, he would ever press forward, like Joe Frazier.  No shaking, no retreat, no surrender.

    My first direct encounter with him took place sometime in 1990, at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, on Victoria Island, Lagos.  The occasion was the launch of Ebenezer Babatope’s   book, Not His Will: The Awolowo Obasanjo Wager, before an array of Awo’s disciples.  The book was Babatope’s answer to Obasanjo’s Not My Will, in which Obasanjo declared, with not a little triumphalism, that the national leadership Awo sought in vain had come to him almost without a conscious struggle.

    Babatope charged in his book that as the military head of state who supervised the 1979 general election from which Shehu Shagari emerged president, Obasanjo had by acts and omissions stymied the quest of the UPN’s presidential candidate.

    Not proven, I said in the review I was invited to present.  Obasanjo was certainly not enamoured of Awo’s candidature, and had said that much in Not My Will. He had voted for Shagari, believing, that Shagari would make a better president than Awo.  But the evidence that Obasanjo had blocked Awo’s path to the presidency was inconclusive, I said.

    I had hardly come down from the platform when Adebanjo walked up to me.

    “Dare, you are wrong,” he said severely.  “You are very wrong. Obasanjo plotted against Awo’s election.  We know he did.”

    He must have come to the venue from the court, or from his law office at Western House, or was heading to some engagement, for he was wearing a suit. In subsequent encounters, I have never seen him thus attired, only traditional clothing, formal or casual, always matched by his emblematic AWO cap.

    Adebanjo never held it against me, and neither did Babatope, I must say to their credit, that I had not performed to the expectation of the assembled Awoists.

    Throughout the “June 12” struggle, he never fell for Babangida’s subversive generosity and was wholly undaunted by Sani Abacha’s terror machine.  Within hours of the state-sponsored murder of fellow NADECO chieftain and financier, Chief Alfred Rewane, in his Ikeja home, Adebanjo was on the scene, defiant as ever, calling things as he saw them, totally unmindful of consequences.

    If he should fall that very day, he said, it would not be said of him that he died prematurely.  But as               long as he lived, he would never flinch from championing justice, democracy, the rule of law, and a  more equitable federation, he declared.  As his life shows so eloquently, he was not grandstanding.

    Those who thronged the ceremonies marking his birthday anniversary were in a way affirming that he has stayed true to his vow, a profile in dedication and commitment.

     

    Adebayo Adedeji, scholar, author, administrator, diplomat, distinguished public and international civil servant, died last week, aged 87. He had been out of circulation on account of illness.

    The media took judicious notice of his accomplishments — professor of public administration, at the University of Ife; Federal Minister of Economic Development and Reconstruction in the aftermath of             the civil war; a major architect of the National Youth Service Corps; key negotiator of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Treaty, and executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), among other distinctions.

    At these and many other fora, Adedeji performed with his quiet distinction.  He was soft-spoken and would have been unobtrusive as well, but for the tobacco pipe that accompanied him everywhere he went.  It may well have been a prop as was rumoured, for few recall seeing him taking a puff.  It nevertheless accentuated his dignified, donnish look.

    Adedeji, it should be stated for the record, was the second African to serve as the ECA’s executive secretary, not the first, as some media outlets have reported.  The first was Robert K. Gardiner, the distinguished Ghanaian socio-economist, previously director of Extramural Studies at the University College, Ibadan, as it then was.  I should also add that Dr Gardiner was also the first African to present the BBC’s Reith Lecture.

    Though Adedeji operated for several decades at the highest level of policy-making and execution in Nigeria and on the international stage, with abundant opportunities for self-aggrandizement, he was untainted by the merest whiff of scandal.

    He insisted that policy should be informed by rigorous scholarship and the force of data.  This stance brought him into conflict with the administration of military president Ibrahim Babangida, which expected him to parrot, as if they were Holy Writ, the structural adjustment policies the IMF/World Bank had clamped on Nigeria.

    The scholar in Adedeji would not oblige.

    They said in Nigeria that there was no alternative to SAP, variations of which The South Commission, chaired by former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere said in retrospect were often founded on “unduly optimistic assumptions . . . a doctrinaire belief in the efficacy of market forces. . . excessive dogmatism and lack of commonsense. . .”

    Adedeji took a leading part in formulating and articulating a muscular and well-received African Alternative Framework to SAP.  In that task, he could not have settled on a more formidable collaborator and proselytizer than the brilliant Marxist economist, Professor Bade Onimode, of radiant memory.

    If Adedeji had been home-based and his office did not confer immunity on him, he would most certainly have been detained or jailed along with dozens of prominent Nigerians who wanted to organise debates on alternatives to SAP.

    Even so, he had a taste of their wrath.  They launched a media campaign to discredit him.  His term was up at ECA, and renewal should have been routine, more so since his performance had been outstanding, and he needed just one more year to qualify for a pension.  As punishment for his anti-SAP stance, the Babangida Administration refused to recommend renewal.  It took all the influence General Olusegun Obasanjo could muster as statesman-at-large to ensure that Adedeji stayed on to qualify for a pension.

    At the urging of some influential persons, who still believed against all the evidence that Babangida meant to hand over to an elected president he entered the presidential race. The foray never really            got off the ground.  He had no regrets that it was short-lived.   But he must have been grieved that the ambitious Africa Centre for Development and Strategic Studies into which he ploughed his resources  did not flourish.  The funding he was expecting did not materialise.

    Adedeji played his part and played it to high national and international acclaim.

     

  • AAA: ten years after

    Politically, AAA — Abraham Aderibigbe Adesanya (1922-2008) — was “born” a progressive. He died a progressive.

    He stepped into the Western Parliament in late 1959, a progressive. He died in 2008, as Yoruba and Afenifere Leader, a progressive.

    Not everyone, among the progressive clan, bore that gold standard. Examples, of fallen angels, abound down the line.

    Baba Adesanya fully understood the Yoruba political fiat: who is not for us is against us — “us”, meaning Obafemi Awolowo’s brood of progressive disciples.

    The Yoruba might have fought the Kiriji War (1877-1893), a civil war that brought down Ibadan hegemony, and sprung their various ethnic groups from internal imperialism.

    But Awo’s ideological hegemony, with its alluring mass development and rapid social-economic advancement, proved a hit with the Yoruba majority.

    So, as the Yoruba fawn over their political princes — beatified by the glow of Awo’s progressive ideology — they are especially severe with progressive-turncoats.

    Down the ages, Chief Adesanya, contrasted with other “fallen angels”, provide excellent examples.

    From the 1st Republic: Dr. (later Prof.) Sanya Onabamiro (1912-1985), famed scientist, brilliant academic and high flying politician, native of Ago-Iwoye, Ogun State, just across the road from Adesanya’s native Ijebu Igbo.

    During the Action Group (AG) schism, Onabamiro joined the Samuel Ladoke Akintola (SLA) bloc.  Akintola was sitting premier of the Western Region.

    Not only that: Onabamiro was a star prosecution witness, at the Treasonable Felony trials, which not a few believed was factory-forged to kill Awo as a political force.

    In contrast, even as a young and fledgling parliamentarian, Adesanya stuck to the Awolowo bloc and AG mainstream.

    Meanwhile, the irate electorate, in Adesanya’s Ijebu North and Onabamiro’s Ijebu West constituencies, were taking dire notices. They would later vent their spleen, in the 1965 West regional elections.

    While Adesanya romped home, in a landslide of 16, 307 to 3, 091 votes, polled by  Demo’s (Nigerian National Democratic Party) Akinola Adaramaja, Onabamiro, regional minister under SLA, got hammered with 2, 149 votes to AG’s Esther Sosanwo’s 18, 222.

    The minister not only lost his deposit, it was his baleful constituents’ ultimate pleasure that he lost to a “mere woman”! So implacable is the Yoruba electorate on the ideological turncoat!

    In the Second Republic, Chief Adesanya (Ijebu East and North senatorial district) was among the Western parliamentary 1st Eleven that made the Senate, all under Awolowo’s Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), led by Senate Minority Leader, Senator Jonathan Odebiyi (of blessed memory), Adesanya’s co-Ogun senator.

    Others in that galaxy included Prof. Banji Akintoye (old Ondo), Senator Lere Adesina (old Oyo) and Senator Sikiru Shitta-Bey (Lagos), just to mention a few.

    But as it was with AG, UPN suffered its own crisis, in the spoil for 1983 governorship slots.  Like the SLA bloc before, Shitta-Bey, and other notable Awoists like Akin Omoboriowo, Olaiya Fagbamigbe (both from old Ondo) and Sunday Afolabi (from old Oyo), among others, fell by the way side.

    These fallen Awoists got herded into the hellish ideological pen, in the iron-clad Yoruba cosmos of political saints and sinners. But Adesanya emerged from it all, a more toughened Awoist progressive.

    Then came the June 12, 1993 presidential annulment crisis and the resultant National Democratic Coalition (NADECO)-Committee of Afenifere-Campaign for Democracy (CD) challenge, which raged from 1993 till the restoration of democracy in 1999.

    Indeed, that challenge not only humbled Gen. Ibrahim Babangida’s wayward military “presidency”, it also fought, to a standstill, Gen. Sani Abacha’s iron dictatorship; and eventually forced the return to civil rule.

    Now, Awo was long dead, but Titans of his era, like Chief Michael Adekunle Ajasin, were still alive.  He promptly took his place as Afenifere Leader and local NADECO chairman, after Abacha’s goons had forced NADECO chair, Chief Anthony Enahoro, abroad, with the likes of Prof. Wole Soyinka.

    Even at that latter stage, many an Awoist would still fall by the way side, Chief Ebenezar Babatope, the famous Ebino Topsy, Nigerian Tribune columnist and former UPN director of Organization, for example.

    Ebino had parted ways with his progressives family, over the NADECO diktat that all progressives quit the Abacha formative cabinet; the moment it was clear the goggled one wasn’t about revalidating MKO Abiola’s June 12 presidential mandate.

    Yet, a pang of conscience later made him renounce his Abacha-era United Nigeria Congress Party (UNCP) senatorial “win”, during that “democratic” transition from military rule to military rule.  Still, he ended up with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

    The great Ebino still thunders as he is wont.  But unappreciated by his new conservative company and excommunicated from his natural progressive habitat, he is a lone but ringing voice in double wilderness!

    Yet, another celebrated progressive plumbing the Yoruba political Hades.

    Not so, Chief Adesanya!  The ultra-dangerous IBB-Abacha period was no more than a fiercer crucible to re-forge his progressive essence.

    When therefore in 1998 — 10 years before he eventually died — Abacha goons made to snuff out his life, the Apamaku (Yoruba for Invincible) that survived, unscathed, had passed the ultimate Awoist test, with added garlands and charisma.

    Staying on the right side of history, despite the tempest of the times, would earn him coronation as Yoruba Leader in 1998, after the Abacha dark years.

    But that itself was a glorious historical parallel to the coronation of Chief Awolowo, as Yoruba Leader in 1966, after his triumphant march through the eclipse of prison. Both coronations held in Ibadan, the Yoruba political capital.

    Still, the Yoruba progressive-glory-to-ash cycle would seize his tenure. The Alliance for Democracy (AD) shadow election, that picked Chief Olu Falae over Chief Bola Ige, as AD presidential candidate in the 1999 polls, would for Afenifere mark the beginning of the end, as a political force.

    After Adesanya’s death, Afenifere would fissure into Afenifere (Classic), led by the old Awoists; and Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG), peopled by the younger Turks.

    The Afenifere old guard have continued to push the Awo franchise, to the point of Yoruba irredentism.

    ARG, no less proud of their Yoruba legacy, have gifted the former Western Region the Yoruba Academy, which conceived the Development Agenda for Western Nigeria (DAWN) policy document, which has birthed the DAWN Commission, headquartered at the iconic Cocoa House, Ibadan.

    That integrated policy clearing house, for an integrated Western Nigeria, has been a net gain, despite the fierce intra-Afenifere struggle for political relevance.  But it is to Baba Adesanya’s sweet memory that Afenifere never split under him, even if the tell-tale tension was already there.

    Tomorrow, May 2, in Lagos, the cream of Nigeria would gather for a symposium, titled “Leadership and the future of Nigeria”, in honour of AAA, 10 years after his passage.

    It’s a fitting tribute to a great progressive, who despite the twists-and-turns of his lifetime, lived and died on the right side of history.