The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Between Sani and Omo-Agege

    Consider the differing fates of Shehu Sani (Kaduna Central) and Ovie Omo-Agege (Delta Central); and you’d probably put your finger on the moral sewers in which this eighth Senate proudly wallows.

    Sani ratted on his colleagues — a very good ratting, if you ask — of a N13.5 million monthly “running costs”, in a season of economic angst and pan-Nigeria hunger.

    That alone symbolizes unconscionable greed; and perhaps the greatest concentration of senatorial parasites, on a vanishing national purse.

    Indeed more ruinous, for the reckless assembly’s health: it is suicidal hubris for the parasite to care less about its host.  If its host drops dead, is it not kaput too?

    The great Awo resonates, from the world beyond, on his iron clad classification of the politicians of his day: the “Oselu” (Yoruba for politician) versus the “Ojelu” (Yoruba for parasite).  No prize for guessing where the Senate, under Bukola Saraki, falls!

    In spite of his ratting however, Shehu Sani sits pretty and dainty.  No one could touch him.  The assembly just licks its wound in seething but impotent rage.

    Not so, with Ovie Omo-Agege.

    Omo-Agege never ratted on anyone.  And even if he did, it was never on nation-threatening greed, on which this Senate and the House of Representatives stand fairly accused.

    He only blew the whistle on what everyone already knew: that this Senate had developed a sickening pleasure, of turning public estate, into private treasure.

    The exact “satanic verse” that sent the senatorial cabal hopping mad?

    “The President has not done anything to warrant the deliberate provocations being directed at him by this Senate.  It is callous and unacceptable to me,” he told the media, of the Senate attempts to reorder the sequence of elections. “We cannot make a law just to fight one man. I will not be part of it, 59 Senators have said that we won’t be part of that act of vindictiveness, put it into vote, we will defeat it…”

    Indeed, illicit advantage never had higher parliamentary representation in Nigerian history!  A Senate never looked more like a coven of powers and principalities!

    But after all that, the dam broke!  The guilty may well be afraid.  But when, in Chinua Achebe-speak, a coward sights a person he can maul, he becomes hungry for a fight.

    A Senate that cowered before Shehu the Impregnable — his hard moral punch so stunning and so devastating — rashly rushed for the scalp of Ovie the Vulnerable, alleging an abuse of parliamentary privilege.

    Dino Melaye put Omo-Agege in the dock.  Bukola Saraki handed down the final judgment, albeit with perverse mercy — the “convict” would endure 90 days suspension, half of the original “ sentence” of 180 days!

    In-between, members of a tiny clique testified why open truth and notorious facts are dire threats to them on their senatorial street!  It’s the making of a Senate as a democratic farce!

    When the dust cleared, even a greater farce had seized the horizon.  Some alleged louts stole into the Senate-at-plenary, grabbed the mace and vanished — rippling security be damned!  Whodunnit?

    “You, Omo-Agege!” a furious Senate barked.

    “Not me!” Omo-Agege counter-hissed.

    As patriotism is often the last bastion of the scoundrel, the Senate dived into its umpteenth frenzy of empty cant — Saraki in America and Ike Ekweremadu in Abuja — mouthing beatification everyone knows is the exact opposite of what this Senate is.  Reminds you — doesn’t it — of Wole Soyinka’s Beatification of the Area Boy?

    Still, even as the farcical drama plays out and the polity vibrates with excitement, it is clear to everyone, not the least the hypocritical Senate, that its crude impunity is the architect of its crude invasion of April 18.

    Its self-imposed nemesis is its so-called “suspensions”, which vault group rights over and above the constitution-enshrined right to constituency representation.  As The Nation argued in its editorial of Sunday April 22, how can the 1999 Constitution say yes, but its mere creations say no?

    In this eighth Senate, it would even appear worse: that “group right” would appear no more than the oppressive whims and caprices of a clique, carving the assembly out in its reactionary image.

    Of course, a telling riposte to this impunity was the Omo-Agege stunt — no, not the criminality of alleged louts making away with the mace — but of defying the so-called suspension and attending plenary, Senate integrity be damned!

    A case of jungle resolutions earning civil defiance, all in the hallowed chambers of the Senate, now turned completely hollow?  It never gets more bathetic — and pathetic.

    Still, this fumbling Senate ought to have armed itself with little history, of how parliamentary rascality had, in the past, earned Nigeria sundry grief.

    On 25 May 1962 — 56 years ago by May — some rascals in the Western Region House of Assembly orchestrated the chaos that led to the declaration of emergency in the Western Region.  That would push Nigeria to destructive military rule.

    But that was the age of naivety when, for the reckless rascality of a few lawmakers, conceited soldiers presumed they could sack the republic.

    As E.M. Forster quipped in A Passage to India — and Nigeria has been eminent proof — soldiers could indeed put one thing straight.  But they’ll set tens of others awry.

    Luckily, that age of innocence is gone.  Now, come Election Day, every senator must pay for his own insouciance — or be rewarded for his own diligence.  It’s all about the grim majesty of democracy.

    For the decent souls in the Senate, this isn’t the best of seasons.  Aren’t they even stunned at the gargoyle their chamber has turned?

    The Senate president, for personal hustle, sold his party cheap.  The deputy, happy, merry and cheerful, received the “stolen good” — for where else, in a sane democracy, does a man, for personal gain, pawn his party’s birthright to the opposition?

    It’s epochal perfidy — the making of the eighth Senate as a moral howler.

    With such a dangling moral albatross, it is doomed with fatal distractions.  That is why it would tarry to pass the budget — and it’s near-end April — but hurry to impose farcical suspensions.

    That is why it would cannibalize the 2017 budget, and cream off crucial votes for the Lagos-Ibadan expressway — among other key arteries nationwide — for useless porks that pass for boreholes, Marwa tricycles and allied nonsense, as “constituency projects”.  Yet, that was an economy wrestling with recession!

    In ancient Athens, the Areopagus — supreme legislative and judicial council — teemed with seasoned minds.

    In its Sparta equivalent, the famed elders of the state that existed for Spartans passed laws that ensured the coming generations also lived — and died — for Sparta.

    In ancient Rome, the Senate was the bastion of critical thinking and provocative debates.  So, is it in present day United States.

    Why does this eighth Senate glory in nothing but frivolities, sundry humbug and illicit self-help?

    Nigeria needs servant-senators that would serve the people, not errant hustlers that spur them like a mule.  It’s time for a complete clear-out in 2019.

  • IBB: No remorse, and no memoir

    Shortly after he emerged from the August 25, 1985, coup as leader of Nigeria’s new military regime,  General Ibrahim Babangida was asked why, departing from precedent going back to 1966, he chose the title of “President.”

    He had told his colleagues that he would like to go by that designation.   They thought the choice curious but had raised no objections, according to General Domkat Bali, then Chief of Defence Staff.

    Asked the same question on national television by news correspondent Inalegwu Odeh as Babangida was settling into his new role, Babangida said he would explain later.  With his accustomed doggedness, Odeh put the question again a day or two later, at a chance opportunity.

    This time, Babangida was ready.  He said he had chosen the title in keeping with the Constitution. The very Constitution that spelled out clearly the methods by which power could be obtained and exercised legitimately.  Those methods did not include a coup which is at bottom a crime against the Constitution.

    Going strictly by the Constitution, the official next in rank to Babangida should have answered to the title of vice president.  But Ebitu Ukiwe answered to the rather nebulous title of Chief of General Staff.

    Babangida was in effect invoking the Constitution to justify his subversion of the Constitution.

    His self-assigned title “President, Commander-in-Chief (no ‘and’ between; it denotes one and the same person) left the military in whose name he took power as well as the nation in no doubt that he had come to exercise supreme control over the Nigerian state and its armed forces.   And this, too, was presumably in keeping with the Constitution.

    The same kind of thinking runs through his recent interview with Channels Television.  He wondered why he had over the years been criticised, abused even, for annulling the presidential election of June 12, 1993, but had rarely been given the credit for organising and supervising the “freest and fairest” election ever held in Nigeria – the same June 12, 1993 election, aforementioned.

    Plus, did these critics realise; did they know that the winner of that election, Bashorun MKO Abiola, was his bosom friend?

    It is almost impossible to fathom the cast of mind of one who organised and supervised the ”freest and fairest” election ever held in Nigeria, mobilised the population against the outcome, drove the country to the edge of disintegration in the process, robbed his bosom-friend of the ultimate prize, then glory in the election, the friendship and the annulment without any mental discomfort.

    By and large, the public sees Babangida as the perpetrator of crimes against the Constitution, and against the sovereign will of the Nigerian electorate.  But he sees himself as a victim, the bugbear of an undiscerning and unappreciative people.  In his psyche, there is no room or capacity for remorse or contrition, only self-pity.

    If it ever got off his memo pad, if it ever made the transition from an idea in his head to an actual writing project, however tentative, the tell-all memoir Babangida promised Nigerians more than two decades ago and said was near completion much more recently will not now see the light of day.

    Why?  Because no one would read it, he said.  Once word gets out that Babangida is the author, the book is finished.

    I suspect that he has lived with that thought for long, and it may be the reason he abandoned plans to publish a daily newspaper in Abuja.  Before he was swept out of power, a casualty of his own overweening machinations, he had set up a state-of-the-art printing press in Abuja and reportedly             tapped Eddie Iroh, one of the best in the business, to run it.

    Contrary to the law, the plant took over from the Government Printer the printing of official government papers.  Babangida was the law, anyway.  It was there that all those crazy decrees were churned out in the dead of night, in the dizzying, closing phase of Babangida’s tenure.

    It is also probably the reason Babangida abandoned plans to build a university, for which he had acquired a vast tract of land in Kaduna State. What if parents refused to send their children there, on learning that Babangida was its proprietor?

    There is indeed an Ibrahim Babangida University, in Lapai, in Niger State.  But if those who have their children and wards studying there ever suffer from buyers’ remorse, they should remember that its proprietor is Niger State Government, not the resident of the Hilltop Mansion in Minna.

    It is sad that Babangida ended up in this manner.

    He had started out with great promise.  He enjoyed perhaps the longest honeymoon of all who have governed Nigeria.  He abolished the notorious Decree Four and pardoned two journalists, Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor, who had been jailed under it.

    He flung the prison doors open to release hundreds who had been detained arbitrarily under the previous regime, and to expose the squalid conditions in which they were held.  He unbanned the university students’ body NANS, the Nigerian Medical Association and the National Association of Resident Doctors and many other associations.

    He set up a judicial panel to review unconscionable prison sentences that had been handed down to Second Republic politicians convicted in trials that made a mockery of the rule of law. He discovered Nigeria’s neglected countryside and established, with substantial funding, various agencies (remember the Directorate of Food, Roads and Rural Infrastructures, the Directorate for Social Mobilisation, and the People’s Bank) to bring them into the mainstream of national life

    Freedom of the press and of speech and thought flourished.   Nigeria became a vast debating platform with the government itself an active participant.  It set up panels to review or propose one policy or another, to pronounce on the desirability, viability or affordability of one course of action or another.  The poet and columnist Odia Ofeimun called the practice “panelocracy.”

    One of my favourite cartoons from this era depicted a child with guilt written all over his face asking his mother to set up a panel to determine who had filched a chunk of beef from the family soup pot.

    By the time it came to light that Babangida has insinuated Nigeria into the Organisation of the Islamic Conference surreptitiously, the public had begun to view him warily.  The Administration’s intolerance of dissentient views over its controversial Structural Adjustment Programme, the parcel-bomb murder of Dele Giwa, in which the Administration remains a prime suspect to this day, quickened his rejection by the people. The duplicitous framing and the execution of the political transition programme, culminating in the election of the presidential election, virtually consigned him to infamy.

    It would be hard to find a more eloquent monument to the collapse of his tenure and ambition than the one captured for the ages in his ragged, lachrymose retreat from Abuja en route Minna and retirement.

    There will be no memoir, Babangida says; not even one that seeks to tell the story from his point of view, to explain the joys and pleasures of the office, the challenges and constraints of the office, and to hit back at his numerous detractors.   But few will be surprised if he comes out with such a memoir next month, caring nothing about whether it is read or not.

    Memoir or no memoir, there is abundant testimony by aides who chose to write the history of the period and stamp it indelibly with Babangida’s imprint rather than leave the matter to chance.  I am thinking of seminal volumes with such captivating titles as Portrait of a New Nigeria:  Selected Speeches of IBB, and Foundations of a New Nigeria:  The IBB Era.

  • Omo-Agege: Death of outrage

    A week after the invasion of the hallowed chambers of the upper legislative house, it is not exactly surprising that a good number of supposedly outraged Nigerians have, in the fouled-up atmosphere of partisan bickering, done little else than fish for the moral equivalence to justify the odious act.

    To be sure, many have condemned the invasion in one breath. Overall however, there is a sense in which in the eyes of many, the brazen outlawry could be tolerated, if not entirely vitiated by the so-called weak moral or ethical foundations of the current Senate leadership, its supposedly tyrannical hold on the institution and alleged unwillingness to tolerate dissent. And so they argue that the suspension of Senator Ovie Omo-Agege was merely the tipping point!

    It is a measure of how far things have sunk that the citizens cannot find a common voice to condemn the brazen despoliation of the sacred institution of parliament only because the current temporary occupants of its precincts belong to the club we love to hate. It has been a tragic week – if you ask me.

    Away from the tepid rationalisations – the pertinent question and which the entire country must find urgent answer remains – Is the Senate right to have suspended the lawmaker from Delta Central? To the extent that the brouhaha was kindled by the spark of the suspension of the senator, that would appear as the heart of the matter hence the need for a dispassionate consideration of the issues.

    I certainly do not agree that the issue is as cut and dried as often presented. Clearly, just as it is inconceivable to have a complex organisation without a body of rules and conventions guiding its day to day activities, I do not think there can be questions as to whether or not the parliament as an institution can set out the rules to guide its members. It would seem given that such rules would include sanctions for infractions to parliamentary conduct. While arguments about what could be deemed as misconduct by the institution itself and the general public would be understandable, the rules are not only fundamental but inviolate.

    Now to the arguments. The first– an emotive one, insists that the senate lacks the power to deny the constituents of representation in parliament.  The other– an interesting one – which has since become something of an orthodoxy particularly in the aftermath of  last Monday’s event insists that the parliament lacks the power to suspend any of its members. Those of this persuasion cite the November 2017 ruling of Federal High Court in Abuja which nullified the 90 days suspension handed to Senator Mohammed Ali Ndume by the Senate. In a judgment delivered by Justice Babatunde Quadri, the Senate and its President, Bukola Saraki, were ordered to pay the embattled lawmaker representing Borno South Senatorial District, all his outstanding salaries and allowances.

    The matter, if I may recall, has since gone on appeal – which means that it is far from closed. For now, the best we can do is to await the decision of the appellate court if not the apex court for final resolution.

    However, for a guide – I find the example of the United States, a country with older tradition and practice and where our presidential constitution was borrowed helpful if to illuminate the debate and hopefully strip arguments of their pretensions to sanctimoniousness.

    Specifically, Article I, Section 5, of the United States Constitution provides that “Each House [of Congress] may determine the Rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behaviour, and, with the concurrence of two-thirds, expel a member.”

    We know what that means. It means stripping the electors of their representation in parliament – an extreme measure – by means of mere internal parliamentary rules!

    For milder forms of punishment, censures and reprimands are imposed by a simple majority of the full House.

    Permit me to quote rather extensively from the website – History, Arts and Archives of the United States House of Representatives http://history.house.gov/Institution/Origins-development/Discipline/:  “In devising this framework, the Constitutional Convention drew upon British legislative tradition as well as nearly 175 years of precedent in the colonial assemblies in North America. Other than the two-thirds requirement, however, the framers left it up to the House and Senate to determine their own rules and the type of behaviour that might warrant expulsion from their respective chambers.

    It further states: “Despite this broad grant of authority, the framers set the two-thirds threshold because such an action would necessarily remove someone who had been elected by the popular vote of his or her constituents. And though the House has wide discretion to act in such cases, it has demonstrated keen deference to the peoples’ choice of their Representatives. One measure of that restraint is that the House has never expelled any Member for conduct that took place before his or her House service. Nor has the House removed Members for action in a prior Congress when the electorate insisted on re-electing them to the House despite a record of improper conduct”.

    The debate is no doubt, legitimate; not so however is the pretensions of those – like Ovie Omo-Agege, who think little of the rules of proper parliamentary behaviour. It therefore follows that those who go into parliament must accept that rules exist to guide their conduct –that certain behaviours are no no!

    My final point. It’s certainly not time yet to judge the Eighth Senate under Bukola Saraki. Not by the events of the suspension of Omo-Agege and its aftermath or by the manoeuvres that swept it into the office. Surely, there will be ample time to evaluate the performance of arguably the most expensive parliament in the universe. The same goes for the APC government that swept into office wielding their brooms of change. For now, it suffices to say that what is bad is bad. And if I may borrow the words of the most Distinguished Senator Shehu Sani, no amount of deodorizing of last Monday’s outlawry would make it smell like rose.

  • Looters’ list and other matters

    Talk of the most effective way to advertise the impotence of our institutions. Imagine the frenzy over the so-called looters list released few days back. That’s supposed to be the federal government’s response to the challenge thrown to it by the opposition PDP.

    So what’s new, if I might ask, aside that routine advertisement of institutional impotence, the open confession of utter helplessness by an administration that rode into office on the chariot of anti-corruption, or citizen’s indifference if not plain cynicism as a result of which most citizens could not be seen to interrogate the list for all it’s worth?

    After three years of combing the books for corrupt elements, it must be discomfiting that we can’t seem to get pass the roadblock of securing simple evidence to get things moving. Clearly, if Looters 1.0 was a joke; the 2.0 was a farce. And we are supposed to be expecting Looters 3.0. The circus goes on and on; I mean the national orchestra of shame and the unending of finger-pointing.

    Can’t we get serious, for once? Surely, the APC federal government can, and must do better. For while I would agree that it has done fairly well to bring the issue of corruption on the front burner, the result, unfortunately does not seem to have matched the efforts.

    The PDP’s right to cry foul. The looters list is a disappointment. It goes against the grain of process. The accused is after all presumed innocent until the courts say so. For no matter our feigned outrage at what the ravaging gang of yesterday has done, the law demands that facts are properly assembled for lawyers on both sides to sift through. Part of the beauty of process is that weights are attached to evidence so gathered after which they are placed on the scale of law to enable our judges come to a verdict. That is what justice is all about – a task that continues to prove impossible here.

    But then, that position is only a refuge for the legalistic. Indeed, while it seems understandable that PDP’s sensory organs would be deadened to the engulfing putrefaction after 16 years of mindless looting of our patrimony; no so the latest cry of innocence in its ranks particularly in the situation that many of its members accused of filching the cookie jar have done little else than mount drama at trial venues which in the end, not only delays the process but end up frustrating same.

    So, do we pretend that Dasuki-gate never happened? Or that billions recovered from the thieving Generals are pure fiction? Or that the Goodluck Jonathan administration did not turn over the treasury to party hacks only because the judiciary has not so pronounced?  Of course, there is a world of difference between permissiveness and folly; Nigerians may tend to the former; certainly not the latter!

    No doubt, we have a problem. The executive branch is ineffectual. Terrible. The legislature is hopelessly indifferent. Tragedy. The judiciary has become a hollow shell of its once vibrant self. Disaster. Between them, a nation’s destiny is being tossed around like a piece of leather ball on a sprawling beach front.

    So, what is the place of name and shame? Shame – where? It has long taken flight from our shores. Does it work? Extremely doubtful. Let’s draw example from those who stole our banks dry. Today, they are walking free; never mind that a badly haemorrhaged nation had to cough out some six trillion naira to clear the mess they left behind. The same with the PDP folks; they may deem themselves innocent before the law; the nation is yet to fully repay the cost of their profligacy, and so the cloud will remain permanently hanging until they sought things out – one way or the other.

    To that extent, the looters’ list is not entirely useless. At least, it reminds us of who did what and when. While it may not equal the wage of conviction, it helps that things are kept in focus.

    Back to the judiciary. Today, the simple truth is that the nation wobbles because there is no consequence for impunity and crime. To the extent that no other institution is charged with pronouncing on crime, the judiciary must be seen as carrying the greater burden of institutional dereliction. Caught between a judiciary that is frustratingly irresponsive to the point of being outright irresponsible and a shameless cohort that insists on wearing criminality like a badge of honour, isn’t it a shame that the rest of the civil society is caught in the crosscurrent of smouldering emotions?  Never mind that lawyers in other climes see themselves as ministers in the temple of justice; it is often the case that our so-called learned fellows would rather to play the obstructionist game to defeat the course of justice. Instead of being seen to preserve the sanctity of the judicial institution, many have been known to defecate – figuratively speaking – in the communal pond for the filthy lucre, taking their institution, in the process, to the abyss.

    The result:  a castrated and impotent judiciary.

    It’s alright to blame the politicians for sundry crimes; for sure, they are the devils we love to hate.  As for the enablers who make criminal enterprise appear like a noble preoccupation, isn’t it about time we begin the process of stripping them of their pretensions to royalty?

  • The Senate and Ovie Omo-Agege

    The moment Senator Ovie Omo-Agege (APC Delta Central) allowed himself to be bullied or inveigled into apologizing on the floor of the Senate for his remark on the way a resolution changing the order of the general election scheduled for 2019 was confected, I knew that nothing less than his scalp would satisfy his colleagues in their feigned outrage.

    Better to start at the beginning.

    For reasons that have nothing to do with correcting a broken system and everything to do with the ambition of its scheming leadership, and the fecklessness of a fawning followership,  the National Assembly set out to reverse the order in which the general election had been conducted over the years by the Independent National Electoral Commission.

    The election for president, usually held in the first stage of a three-stage process, would be held in the last stage; that way, said the sponsors of the amendment to the law, a victory for the incumbent in the first phase would confer no advantage, no bandwagon effect, on the victorious party in the subsequent phases.

    The legislative effort was led by a faction of the APC beholden to Senate President Bukola Saraki, with significant support from the opposition PDP determined to crawl its way back to power by any means.

    Omo-Agege, one of 10 senators belonging in the Buhari Support Group, stated that only 36 of 360 members of the House of Representatives were present on the day the report on the amendment to the Electoral Act was adopted, and the Senate did not have a quorum on the day it passed the bill.

    As far as I know, he has not been challenged on the facts.

    At a press conference, Omo-Agege and his fellow dissident senators went on to call the proposed Amendment exactly what it was:  a plot against President Muhammadu Buhari, who had all but indicated that he would be seeking re-election.

    His Senate colleagues brought out the knives.  It was at this point that he allowed himself to be bullied or inveigled into apologizing for his stand.  Apparently realizing later that appeasement was not the path to follow on a matter so consequential, he rescinded his apology and sought a court injunction to block suspension.

    Following this, Omo-Agege was reported to the Senate Ethics and Privileges Committee, based on a motion by – yes, you guessed right — the ubiquitous Dino Melaiye (APC, Kogi West), who never saw an issue that couldn’t muddle.  Whereupon the committee recommended that Omo-Agege be suspended for 181 parliamentary days, allegedly for conduct unbecoming.

    Deputy Majority Leader, Senator Ibn N’Allah, pointed out that the change in election sequence did not emanate from the Senate but from the House of Representatives.  Then he unwittingly revealed the cause of the hysteria that had gripped the Senate over Omo-Agege’s criticism of the handling of the Amendment.

    It was all right for Omo -Agege to apologize, but the matter went far beyond that. “There are places  you dare not talk about the president,” he said.  Some senators come from such places.  By stating that the amendment to the electoral law was aimed at Buhari, Omo-Agege had put the lives of those senators at risk,” Na’Allah added.

    Whoever knew or even suspected that the stakes were so high?

    Senator Kabiru Marafa (Zamfara APC) entered this helpful contribution:  “Inasmuch as I am against the suspension of any senator, I am equally against the formation of any other group in this chamber. The formation of the parliamentary support group is evil and it should not stand, it is counter-productive and against the president himself,” he said.

    No tolerance for any dissident group within the Senate?   Is this official Senate policy?

    The path was now clear for the Senate President, who had  stayed out of view and hearing throughout a matter that could not have gone that far without his approval, if not his orchestration.  He stepped in daintily as his custom, innocent of all the hubbub.

    “Distinguished Colleagues, a number of points have been raised. One borders on the issue of preserving the integrity of this institution.”

    Integrity.  You hear that?

    “Second, is where we take actions that are not sincere. I think in this chamber if we want to talk about who has the right to say he is chairman of a Parliamentary Support Group for Mr. President both by action and by what we have done, I think that I have the right to lead that more than anyone else here.

    Sincerity, too.

    “Those of us that understand politics, understand that because of our own peculiar interest, sometimes some people decide to act like they are holier than thou or more committed – at the expense of others. This is not something that we should tolerate, and I believe that in an institution like this we must show discipline, but at the same time, we must also show compassion.”

    Not forgetting Discipline with Compassion

    “Distinguished Colleagues, there must be discipline. We must show that such groups must be suspended and the case in court must be withdrawn. I think by that we would have captured, no more of this kind of groups in the Senate.”

    Pardon this overly long quote from ThisDay, April 13, 2018.  A paraphrase would have done no justice to the distinguished Senate President.

    Tempering discipline with compassion, Saraki then recommended that Omo-Agege’s suspension be reduced from 181 to 90 legislative days, subject to Omo-Agege withdrawing the case in court, and without prejudice to the Senate revisiting the matter.

    From Saraki’s emphasis on discipline in this intervention, you would think that he was the most disciplined practitioner in the annals of politics.

    The kind of discipline that led him to cede, for his personal benefit, the position of Deputy Senate President to the opposition PDP, in defiance of his own party, the ruling APC.  The kind of discipline without which he could not have run Societe Generale Bank aground as its chief executive. The kind of discipline that assisted him greatly in retrieving the bank’s operating licence from the regulatory authorities and lending it to a financial institution to trade with for very valuable consideration.

    The kind of discipline that said it was perfectly all right for a former state governor to draw a pension or salary while serving as a senator receiving an obscene compensation passage.

    The kind of discipline that led him to organize, year after year, ceremonies at which  more than 20 impoverished residents of Ilorin were trampled to death in the stampede for the modest gifts he was handing out.

    To return to Omo-Agege:

    By allowing himself to be bullied or inveigled into apologizing to the Senate for an opinion on a public issue he was perfectly entitled to hold and express, Omo-Agege denied himself a chance to go down as  a profile in courage.  For the most part, appeasement emboldens and empowers the other side, laying the ground for new and greater demands.

    If the Senate can act with such clear disregard for the rights and privileges of one of its own, however disagreeable, those who look it to safeguard our liberties are deluded.  No assembly in a democracy should claim or exercise that kind of power.

  • Value-laden

    Saul has slain his thousands and David his tens of thousands –  1 Samuel  8: 7

    This biblical quote (above) epitomizes the subversive praise of Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, as he acted for ill President Muhammadu Buhari, in those testy times of the administration.

    Tiny David had just slain Giant Goliath, the Philistinian.  Sensation-craving Israelites, like present-day Nigerians, just went berserk!

    But that was subversive in King Saul’s troubled ears, and the resultant David-induced paranoia would prove fatal for the eventually ousted king; and near-fatal for the young man, David, himself.

    Like the Jews of old, many aNigerian just yakked, with impressive innocence, at the great vice-presidential strides — no crime.

    But with some spiteful lobbies, that praise was a deliberate ploy, to goad Prof. Osinbajo into new vanity, and put a wedge between him and the president.

    That would have re-played the ugly Obasanjo-Atiku presidential feud, that all but crippled their second term (2003-2007).

    Was Osinbajo taken in by all the razzmatazz, friendly or fiendish?  If he was, he didn’t show it.

    Besides, watching President Buhari and Vice President Osinbajo at the 10th Bola Tinubu colloquium in Lagos on March 29, the body language was clear: neither Saul nor David; absolutely no vanity or paranoia — just one seamless, self-reinforcing “kingdom”, primed for, in Jeremy Bentham-speak, the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

    Indeed, the duo would appear the political equivalent of another famous scriptural quip: Paul planting, Apollo watering, grace sprouting!

    At that colloquium, Osinbajo-in-Buhari established a clear nexus between fighting corruption and freeing hitherto stolen resources for human development — and gave logical reasons why folks must continue to talk about it.

    Geez, could leadership be so simple and unobtrusive, when not poisoned by empty conceit and tragic ego; and when the thrust is the people’s welfare, not the crust of personal glory and solo riches?

    Perhaps if President Olusegun Obasanjo and Vice President Atiku Abubakar had struck such a working ethos and work chemistry; and if both were perceived non-venal and as clean as the whistle, the decayed polity wouldn’t have logically metastasized under President Goodluck Jonathan, which made the Buhari Presidency such an imperative.

    That returns the subject to the nexus between corruption and crippling under-development, with its attendant mass poverty.

    Prof. Osinbajo made a graphic and telling point, citing the Jonathan-era  ”strategic alliance” heist at the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), from which Nigeria allegedly lost US $3 billion (about one trillion Naira).

    From the equivalent of that trove, allegedly pocketed by the thieving lobbies that cut the deal, the Buhari presidency is now proposing to fix the following ongoing crucial roads nationwide: Abuja-Kaduna-Kano road, 2nd Niger Bridge (which a NAN source says is now over 40 per cent completed), Enugu-Port Harcourt road, East-West road, Sagamu-Ore-Benin road (though in all fairness the Jonathan government fixed a stretch of that road), Kano-Maiduguri road, Abuja-Lafia-Akwanga-Keffi road, and the old Lagos-Abeokuta expressway, passing through Ota-Ifo-Wasimi, all in Ogun State.

    But the occasion was not really for physical infrastructure, which stats nevertheless the vee-pee’s speech ran through.  It was rather to showcase the Buhari government’s comprehensive investment in social infrastructure, despite depleting resources.  That policy is driven by the Vice President.

    The theme, “Investing in the people”,  was therefore a vivid feedback on the state of the Buhari social safety net programmes, to a select gathering, with the president himself in-situ.

    Personal testimonies, which often pushed the house into a frenzy, underscored how those social infrastructural stats had positively impacted on citizens — the lowly, the vulnerable, the disinherited and the abandoned, for whom “government” had for too long been nothing but a loud abstraction.

    The social investments are captured under a quad of programmes, being implemented concurrently: Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT), Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP) with the street lingo of “market moni”, the N-Power Programme, split between graduate volunteers and trainees, all aimed at stemming high unemployment and the National Home Grown School Feeding Programme (NHGSFP), which beneficiary testimonies sent the hall thundering with cheers.

    CCT — of N5,000 monthly — is for the society’s poorest and most vulnerable.  It is a classic welfare state’s direct intervention in cash; and it is on in 21 states so far (with the remaining 16 waiting to follow, if you add the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja).

    Thus far, 297, 973 households, harbouring 1, 033, 294 Nigerians are current beneficiaries, according to Dr. Temitope Sinkaye, the national coordinator of the programme.

    GEEP is in the realm of entrepreneurship, driven by a hub of trade cooperatives.

    Of GEEP, Mrs Toyin Adeniji, its coordinator quipped: “GEEP is the largest and most ambitious microcredit scheme in the history of Nigeria, providing interest-free loans of N50, 000 to N250, 000 to over 300, 000 Nigerian micro-enterprises (market women, traders, artisans, youths and farmers).  It is a direct effort of the Federal Government to break the multi-decade jinx of economic growth without shared prosperity at the base of the pyramid.”

    A couple of “market moni” beneficiaries were also there to testify to its impact on their business bottom line.

    The most graphic testimonial of the day came from the NHGSFP, the school feeding programme, with one of the beneficiary pupils, a girl from Akwa Ibom, cooing “O, my God! O, my God!”, to show her relish for the daily menu, again sending the house into a rapture.

    As at February 2018, 7, 487, 441 pupils in 22 states have been beneficiaries, 75, 333 cooks have reportedly been empowered and 26 states “have completed food safety and hygiene training, as well as medical screening for cooks.”

    But the most telling, in terms of tactics and strategy against joblessness, would appear the N-Power Programmes.  N-Power volunteers, with a stipend of N30, 000 a month, are an immediate counter to graduate unemployment.  N-Power volunteers are integrated, as quality manpower, into CCT, GEEP and NHGSFP.

    N-Power training, code-named “N-Power Build”, is a strategic programme to train top-notch artisans, in seven key areas: automobile, carpentry and joinery, welding and fabrication, electrical installation, masonry, plumbing and pipe-fitting, and painting and decoration, vital areas where current skills levels are at best sloppy.

    A corollary, N-Power Junior, is being grafted into the regular school system to target young Nigerians from ages 6 to 18 in skills like coding and computer programming, computer hardware repairs; and 2D and 3D animations, including scriptwriting for films.

    As the Vice President proudly rendered his account, in front of his beaming and cheering principal, something was crystal clear.

    If the Nigerian top two had always reinforced themselves, in integrity and brilliance, our country would never have been in this hole.

    It’s all about value-laden leadership.  That is the sane path to tread.

  • Neo-new breed from IBB

    There is strutting deja vu, in Gen. Ibrahim Babangida’s call for power gerontocrats to quit.

    That one-black-brush-tars-all is aimed at President Muhammadu Buhari — hardly a democratic crime, even if its ultra-base motive is glaring.

    It is IBB’s latest, to shoo President Buhari from a legitimate second term; even as the old soldier from Minna hides behind a finger, of newfound love for the “youth”.

    Yet, that deja vu would appear completely lost, on the opportunistic brood that clambered to his Minna hill top mansion, like vultures swooping on a thick ooze of carrion — political carrion of lazy and illicit advantage.

    If these youngsters were not residents of Mars all this while, they ought to have asked themselves what became of IBB’s first push at “new breed”.

    It was during IBB’s halcyon years, of military power without responsibility; and endless wayward experimentation, that his junta dubbed political transition.

    Still new breed, old or neo, the IBB principle is constant: eternally butting citizens off their legitimate rights.

    The old experiment was, for personal glory, to elbow off the 1st and 2nd Republic political Titans; and make way for IBB as transmuted president.  That failed, following the fiasco that forced, then issued from, the annulled June 12, 1993 presidential election.

    This new gambit is, for class envy, to gyp an old man of his constitutional right to second term.

    Then, IBB was young.  Now, he is old.  But again, the motive remains constant, which again underscores the fallacy of young-old dichotomy in politics.

    It was Karl Marx who quipped: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.”

    In his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (published 1852), he was contrasting the farce of Louis Napoleon’s French dictatorship (as Napoleon III, 1851) to Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s real power and glory (as Napoleon I, 1799); after the tragic mimicry of Napoleon Francois Charles Joseph Bonaparte, as Napoleon II, Emperor-without-Empire of France, after his father, Bonaparte’s abdication in 1814; and from birth, titular Prince Imperial and King of Rome).

    Did the great Marx ever put any thought to farce repeating itself?  He probably never envisaged the Nigerian situation.  Yet, that is what is opening before our very eyes.

    IBB, seized by the hubris of his military power and glory in 1989, decreed the old “new breed”.  That ultimately turned a farce.

    Now in 2018, even as his old power is gone, and his influence appears waning, he pushes another farce in “neo-new breed”!

    Talk of farce — not history — repeating itself!  What a polity!

    But history or farce, there are always consequences — and dire ones for a country that rushes into fresh blunders, because it proudly lacks institutional memory.

    The collapse of the political party system is one of those telling consequences, for a fledgling democracy.

    There is this penchant to rhapsodize the 1st Republic, as some lost utopia, compared to today’s ruin.

    That is not totally incorrect, so long that romanticization is limited to the operating regional structure.  Truly, that spurred the federal system into high inter-regional competition, dizzying productivity and promising development, all-round.

    Even then, arbitrary power, and its reactionary use, came with that pristine territory.  That was why, as early as November 1960 — one month after independence — North and East lobbies, in the federal Parliament in Lagos, were already dizzy with reckless talks about “abolishing” the West, because they hated Obafemi Awolowo’s politics.

    That of course sent that republic to early grave, and heralded military rule with its best-forgotten abuses.

    Still, something survived the military hurricane, that would rage for the next 29 years (1966-1999) — with a civilian interregnum of four years under 2nd Republic President Shehu Shagari (1979-1983) — getting most destructive under Gen. Babangida, and his Khalifa, Gen. Sani Abacha.

    That was the party system.  Between the 1st Republic (1960-1966) and the 2nd Republic (1979-1983), the party system somewhat held.

    Conservatives banded together from the old Northern People’s Congress (NPC), to new National Party of Nigeria (NPN).

    So largely did the progressives: from the old Action Group (AG) to the new Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), under Chief Awolowo, though some of his key 1st Republic allies, like Anthony Enahoro and Joseph Tarka, crossed over to the NPN.

    The other three parties, registered for the 1979 elections, were variants of these two major planks: the Nigerian People’s Party (NPP), under Zik; its offshoot, Great Nigeria People’s Party (GNPP), under Waziri Ibrahim, and the People’s Redemption Party (PRP), under Mallam Aminu Kano, still bore ideological fealty to tendencies in the 1st Republic.

    Indeed, so strong was the party system that President Shagari, though an executive president, attended party caucuses under party chairman, Adisa Akinloye; and was bound by party decisions.

    So did the UPN maintain a stranglehold on its governments, made easier by its rule that its governors, or governorship candidates, were state chairmen of the party, while Awo, as presidential candidate, was national president.

    But in 1989, IBB’s “new breed” truncated all that — and the disaster today is the collapse of the party system, the recession of the party as an ensemble of shared values and the rise of the one-man financier, instead of the collective levy of old.

    That was also why, within two years of his presidency, Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo would pounce on the PDP that propelled him to power; and with apostolic frenzy,  got rid of its more decent minds: like Sunday Awoniyi, Solomon Lar and Audu Ogbeh.

    By the time he settled for Ahmadu Alli, as his “garrison commander” into the 2007 “do-or-die” election, the PDP goose was cooked, though its members were too full of the delicious gravy of power to notice a thing.

    Enter then, the era of the president as “party leader”, which instals the president as some emperor over the party that fired him into power.

    That absurdity is replicated in states too, where the governors also fancy themselves as strongmen, before whom other party hoi polloi, including even elected collectives as the House of Assembly, must bow and worship!

    Apologists of this humbug quip that is how America does it — America, whose presidential system we copy.

    Ay!  But does Nigeria boast the robust conventions, of party checks and balances, spanning over 200 years, that make the American system work?

    Even the ruling APC is hit by this plague, of president as party emperor.  PMB might be a decent fellow, who commands moral authority.  But how would APC cope, with its rainbow coalition yet to fully gel, when hit by its own “Obasanjo”?   Can the party stand the storm?

    That is the systemic ruin, all for selfish ends, IBB’s old “new breed”, has wrought on the political party system.

    Pray, what more future ruin, does IBB’s new farce, the neo-new breed, hold for the polity?

    Of course, that is totally lost on the history-vacuumed youth, dancing around his subversive flame, like doomed moths.  Pity!

  • Ike Ekweremadu’s troubled assets

    Poor Ike Ekweremadu!

    These are desperate times.  But the desperation with which his opponents have been pursuing him is excessive even by our own standards.

    He has been a marked man since he “emerged,” or since his “emergence,” as Deputy President of the Senate, just one breathless step behind Dr Bukola Saraki, who had with accustomed guile fashioned his own emergence as Senate President.

    As Saraki was being ferried to the courtroom day after day to answer charges of falsification of assets, Ike Ekweremadu was always in tow, a study in fraternal solidarity.   In their appearance before another court to answer charges of forgery in relation to the documents with which they had allegedly procured their emergence as the leaders of the Senate, each sought to come across as victim rather than perpetrator.

    Ekweremadu seemed to play the part with greater conviction.

    They say this latter charge has since been withdrawn, without the Attorney-General of the Federation formally entering a nolle prosequi.  The consideration seems to have been that if the charge stuck, if it was established that Saraki and Ekweremadu had obtained their positions in the Senate by deception, every act done or purported to have been done by the Senate under their watch would be a nullity, void and of no consequence whatsoever.

    The hope in the camp of Ekweremadu’s foes was that some development might move the Attorney-General to reinstate the charges and commence prosecution anew.  They had in fact been advised solemnly by a consortium of spiritual consultants in Abuja to expect such a development within weeks.

    As weeks passed by without any indication that the Attorney-General was set to re-open the case, Ekweremadu’s determined and envious adversaries could hardly contain their impatience.  As far as they were concerned, he was a poseur. He had to be unmasked by all means.  And if he was no poseur, make him out to be one.

    What, they wondered, was the secret of the glittering career that had seen him through a metamorphosis without parallel from Deputy President of a Senate controlled by his party, the PDP, to the same office in a Senate in which the PDP belongs in the minority Opposition?    How had he managed the transition with no apparent loss of credibility and authenticity?

    What had he been doing with the N31.5 million he had been taking home every month as “running expenses” since goodness-knows-when, plus other incomes not captured in the official revenue flow?

    They tried hacking into his computer to filch vital information with which they could shame him and end his career.  They came up short. The yahoo boys could not help them, nor could consultant hackers.  By one account, they could not get round the firewall Ekweremadu had built around his private information, digital man for a digital age.

    But that setback only re-energized his relentless pursuers.  For they saw it as proof positive that he was hiding something – something probably quite damning.  Hacking did not work and good old burglarizing was exceedingly fraught, given the battalion of security aides stationed at his office, homes and haunts, not forgetting the armed personnel that always accompany him.

    Time, then, to try something different.

    They decided to check out the Probate Registry in his home state of Enugu, knowing that he left little to chance and would have in all probability filed his Last Will and Testament. Now, that Registry is one of the most secure depositories in the entire bureaucracy, accessible only to a handful of trusted operatives sworn to the highest level of confidentiality.

    But with friends in high places, there are few barriers you cannot breach in Nigeria.

    So, without much fuss, they picked their way into the inner sanctum of the Probate Registry where, voila, an unhurried search turned up Ekweremadu’s Last Will and Testament.  But their joy was short-lived.

    The package was slender, not remotely as hefty as they had expected.  They ripped away the seal, only to find within the covers several pages detailing only a few solid assets in Enugu and Abuja and Lagos – nothing that a middling, God-fearing public servant living frugally and availing himself or herself of the usual opportunities could not have acquired in 20 years within the system.

    If that slim portfolio was all that Ekweremadu, one of the raiders said with cutting contempt, he must have spent all his time in Abuja and the world capitals he visited in the line of duty gawking at the superb infrastructure, the great monuments, the historic buildings when not shopping eating exquisite meals and drinking choice wines.

    “Yeye man,” the raider had said in exasperation, according to a report that cannot be corroborated at this time.

    But where one raider saw disappointment, another saw great opportunity.

    A week later, the raiders were back at the Probate Registry, carrying a package containing four hefty volumes of what they purported to be the original, authentic Last Will and Testament of  the afore-mentioned Ike Ekeweremadu, signed and sealed and delivered with the usual attestations and affirmations.

    In due time, the contents of the package were leaked.  Ekweremadu was as usual so engrossed in the affairs of state that he had no inkling of what was going on until an estranged relation, acting more out of schadenfreude than solidarity, called his attention to the reports.

    The disclosures were nothing if not explosive. Report after report credited Ekweremadu with luxury property on a scale beyond belief in virtually every city of consequence in the world, property of all shapes and descriptions: studios, condos, bungalows, duplexes, triplexes, office suites, apartment blocks, etc., all situated in the most desirable part of town, thus giving a whole new meaning to globalization.

    In their desperation to nail Ekweremadu, the raiders overreached.  It is simply inconceivable that an individual, even one as influential as the Deputy Senate President, acting from his base in Abuja, could have acquired such a property empire sprawled across the world.  To do so, the individual would have to own an exclusive and unregulated licence to print money, and to be driven by a galactic  propensity for that pastime.

    But as far as we know, Ekweremadu has no such licence.  He does not need it because of his modest and contented lifestyle  Even his one-time principal in the Senate, no stranger to lavish extravagance, was content to settle for just two golf courses in Europe, plus a mountain of cash and other assets detailed in the Panama Papers and documents of like nature. So why would Ekweremadu reach out for so much?

    The whole thing is simply not credible, and would have been so even if Ekweremadu had not disavowed it. He has named two well-placed individuals he believes are behind this gross invasion of his privacy that all patriotic and law-abiding Nigerians must condemn in the most vigorous terms and vowed to bring them to justice.

    That is the proper response for a lawmaker.

    But there is one option that the distinguished Senate President must not ignore, borrowed from a column Olusegun “The Verdict” Adeniyi wrote for ThisDay a while ago, about a young man who was putting up a building in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital. Each time he raised it several coats higher, he found the whole thing levelled the next day, apparently by some rival claimant to the site.

    So, he put up a sign proclaiming that the site belonged to Lamidi Adedibu, persuaded that nobody in the city would dare encroach on a property advertised as belonging to Himself the King of Molete.

    To the young man’s astonishment, construction resumed at the site almost immediately and advanced rapidly until the building was almost completed.

    The young man went to see Adedibu to explain why he had put the legendary man’s name on his building site. Adedibu expressed appreciation for the great compliment, completed the building, and handed it to the young man.

    And now, finally, the Distinguished Senate President’s option:  Establish a claim on all the property detailed in your purported Last Will and Testament, and seek a perpetual injunction restraining any individual or body corporate in any jurisdiction, domestic or foreign, from sequestering it or inquiring into how it was acquired.

  • Nigeria first!

    Not a few a Nigerians, as it appears, are still ruing President Muhammadu Buhari’s refusal to serve the country the sweet poison described as the African Free Trade agreement. To Olusegun Obasanjo for whom the aspiration to continental statesmanship borders on obsession, the refusal comes to an unforgivable sin: “That President Buhari didn’t sign the free trade agreement in Kigali is disappointing. I hope he signs it before it is too late. Egypt started the discussion on the formation of Organisation of African Unity but didn’t conclude it and Nigeria took over. Nigeria was also central to the discussion of the free trade agreement, but I am surprised that the country withdrew from signing”, he said.

    For now, President Buhari thinks the issue is not open for discussion – at least not yet hence his famous tweet –”Our continental aspirations must complement our national interests”.

    To go back in time, the idea of African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) dates back to 2012 when African Heads of State and Governments resolved to have a single continental market for goods and services, free movement of business persons and investments, and ultimately, a single currency. Consultations and negotiations commenced in June 2015 during the 26th Ordinary Session of the AU Assembly Heads of State and Government in Johannesburg, South Africa. The March 21, agreement during which 44 African governments finally put pen to paper – never mind the refusal of the two economic powerhouses of South Africa and Nigeria to follow suit – can truly muster as the turning point.

    The quest is not entirely without justification. Last year for instance, trade within the continent came to barely $170bn – some 15 percent of the continent’s trade as against 67 percent with the European Union and 58 percent with the Asians. If that is any revealing, worse is the lack of reciprocity in the form of which 60 per cent of African exports to the EU are primary products compared to the continent’s 70 per cent imports chiefly manufactured goods.

    In the opinion of free trade advocates, removal of trade barriers will make it easier for the countries to develop regional supply chains and export more finished goods as against present preoccupation with raw materials exports. London’s Financial Times in fact quotes UN’s economic commission on Africa as forecasting a boost of some 50 per cent in trade volume in the following five years.

    Not everyone appears enamoured of the idea or the rosy projection. From the umbrella body of manufacturers – the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria, MAN, the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, to the Nigerian Employers Consultative Association, NECA, theirs have been unequivocal urge for caution; they cite the relatively poor state of the manufacturing sector, and the absence of such guarantees about the elements of such trade being truly African among the reasons for which care is indicated.

    Frank Jacob, president of MAN, puts it rather succinctly: “We are afraid that the rules of origin cannot be adequately enforced because goods from the EU can find their way into one of the African countries that have bilateral agreement with the EU… When the goods get into the African country, they can repackage them, change the label from made in Europe to that of the African country”. He thinks the goods will surely find its way to Nigeria – “the main target market for the EU’’.

    Yours truly could not agree more. To the extent that a good number of African countries are a little more than satellites of the erstwhile colonial masters, it seems inevitable that the question would usher a new wave of deindustrialization.

    Picture a country like Nigeria that manufactures next to nothing seeking to be enlisted among the club of value-creating nations in the name of free trade; a country that is at best an exporter of primary products with nary a value addition; a country whose neighbours offer ready sanctuaries for smuggling and other forms of illicit trade. Just imagine the country pushing for open borders at a time of unprecedented youth unemployment and in the age of terrorism. Only in the context can one begin to grapple with the danger that the so-called free trade portends.

    No one denies that trade is good; the issue is reciprocity. We are certainly not there yet. For a country that has made a business of denominating its external reserves in terms of many months of import cover it can fetch, it seems to me that the starting point ought to be elementary lessons in value addition and the imperative to ensure that its so-called infant industries do not go into total oblivion. That is common sense. And that is my understanding of President Buhari’s position which I consider not only informed but nationalistic given our current realities. Those urging us to be holier than the Pope only need to cast their glances at what leading globalists of Western Europe and Americans have done with their duplicitous clampdown on immigration while encouraging unfettered influx of their goods?

    Sometime ago on this page, I had written about the anachronism of the 43-year old sub regional body called ECOWAS in the age of Brexit, Donald Trump and the resurgence of economic nationalism. My position is simple: globalisation – or globalism – or the idea that goods and persons can move freely may have worked for some, the benefits are far from equitably shared. Those who think it can work for us only need to imagine the mindless destruction being wreaked on Nigeria’s economy under the so-called ECOWAS treaty.

    Two examples would suffice. December 2016, some 500,000 metric tons of rice were reportedly blocked from coming into the country. Again, in November last year, Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo would alert Nigerians about three ship loads of 120,000 metric tons of Thailand rice headed for a neighbouring country but which in fact has Nigeria as the ultimate destination. His words: “It is very clear that the rice is meant for Nigeria because they don’t consume parboiled rice in that country; they consume the white broken rice…Our neighbours do excellent business with allowing rice to come into Nigeria.” Never mind that they collect the customs duties and other port charges, leaving the Nigerian rice producer ruing his loss. The same is true of smuggled chicken, turkey and assorted domestic products.

    A reader of this page once urged Nigeria to demonstrate the true stuff of leadership by closing its borders on recalcitrant neighbours. Much as that might seem drastic, there can be no question about whether or not the situation demands drastic actions. As for the quest for free trade, that should be out for now.

  • Annals of commencement speeches

    In a sojourn of more than five decades in the classroom and the newsroom and as a member of the audience for news and public affairs, I have had my full share of commencement addresses delivered by persons of great specific gravity to young men and women about to enter the world after a period of study in their cloistered environment.

    Like you, dear reader, few of their edifying messages cling in my memory.

    I have no doubt that at my graduation from the University of Lagos, what the chancellor and former president of Nigeria, and later the Owelle of Onitsha, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, and the vice chancellor, the distinguished historian Professor JF-Ade. Ajayi commended to the class and commended with stirring eloquence was nothing less than a distillation of the wisdom of the ages. Yet, weeks later, I would have  found it difficult to recall their exhortation with confidence.

    The commencement speaker at the School of Journalism the year I graduated from Columbia was Garry Wills, author (Nixon Agonistes) and Pulitzer prize-winning historian.  He must have spoken with great earnestness about the obligations of American journalists and the media in the post-Watergate era.   But I have no memory of his oration.

    I remember that the leader – and sole Member of Parliament for the anti-apartheid Liberal Party of South Africa, Helen Suzman, was among those honored at the larger University Commencement but I cannot now tell whether she gave a speech.  If she did, I have entirely forgotten whatever she said.

    All is not lost, however.  I do recall a few commencement speeches, but mostly for the wrong reason. I cite two memorable instances here.

    The first was at the 1991 post-graduate Convocation of the University of Lagos.  I was as attending as guest of my wife, who was due to receive the MSc(Ed), and of course as a newspaper reporter.  A one-time Naval chief was standing in for the Visitor, military president Ibrahim Babangida.  His speechwriters had apparently determined that this was a chance to show all those condescending lecturers and their misguided wards that the Ivory Tower has no monopoly on learning.

    In his solemn address before the assembled audience, the Guest Speaker recalled the “subventions, extra-budgetary grants and mass transit vehicles” the Federal Government had availed the university the previous year.

    These measures, he said, were “predicated on our belief that the ambience of our tertiary institutions  should be ameliorated, to facilitate the teaching and learning process.”

    Fund raising, he advised the university’s authorities, should not be undertaken only on formal occasions “but as on-going, well-articulated, perennial activity.”  They should keep it in mind that “the provision  per se of supplementary funds cannot obliterate the problems of our universities, because “deft          management is also a desideratum.”

    He went on to remark and deplore how students’ grievances reveal “a hiatus in the communication structure,” and how “distortive” processes cannot be a reflection of positive development.  He spoke of how, after the “ferments” on campus, “the prescribed quantum of knowledge become unimpartable and the degrees ultimately awarded stand a risk of being emasculated…”

    He closed by reminding teachers that since they stood “in loco parentis” to their students, they were “vantagely placed to show meritorious examples and moral rectitude to those who are in statu pupilari.”

    A guest in the row behind us said the whole thing reminded him of Bomber Billy in Ogali A. Ogali’s Veronica my Daughter, the flagship title in the Onitsha Market Literature Series.

    No prizes for figuring out that the guest speaker was Vice President Augustus Aikhomu, since deceased.

    Some two decades later and half-a-world away, I watched on live television a commencement address given by Noam Chomsky, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic and political activist, among other defining attributes.

    Wasting no time on preliminaries, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor launched into  an impassioned disquisition on the latest findings from research on the structure and functions of the brain, and on their implications for how we learn and think, and how we develop and use language.

    There was pin-drop silence.  No rustling or shuffling of papers.  The only sound was from Chomsky’s delivery.  It was unapologetic. It made not the slightest concession to the less intellectually endowed, nor to those who might have found some relief in eye contact.  “Total immersion” is what best describes the performance, for performance it was.

    After some 20 minutes, he finally looked up, gathered his notes, thanked the audience curtly, and retreated to his seat on the platform.  A huge sigh washed over the audience, followed by thunderous clapping.  Finally, it was over.  The school’s authorities, the students and the guests could finally face             the real business of the day.

    Until last week, there was one convocation address that I felt sure Nigerians of my generation would never forget, namely, Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s speech on the provisional results of the 1973 National Population Census, delivered at the University of Ife (as it then was), on July 6, 1974.

    Of that census, supervised by former chief justice Sir Adetokunbo Ademola, the Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon had stated, at once defensively and affirmatively: “The figures are very provisional but I can say that the 1973 count was probably the most thorough headcount in the history of the world.”

    Not so, Awolowo rejoined.

    “I have examined this result from several standpoints which time does not permit me to elaborate upon here, and as a result, I have been irresistibly impelled to the conclusion that the so-called provisional figures are absolutely unreliable and should be totally rejected by the Supreme Military Council,” he said.

    So absolutely unreliable, so incurably flawed, that no post-enumeration survey could save it.  With his trademark forensic brilliance and expository rigour, he showed that the 1973 Census reversed previous population growth rates in the 12 states of the Federation, crediting the Western State with an inter-censal growth rate of negative 0.62, and the North Eastern State with a growth rate of 7.04.

    “This just cannot be true,” the great man said.

    One of the first acts of the Murtala Muhammad regime on overthrowing Yakubu Gowon was to cancel that census.

    To this convocation address, this unforgettable instance of speaking truth to power, we must now add General TY Danjuma’s speech last week, at the Taraba State University, in Jalingo.

    During the past year, lethal clashes between nomadic cattle herders and farming communities have become the grisly subject of conversation where two or three Nigerians are gathered.  The orgy of bloodletting reached a high point of sorts when, over the New Year weekend, more than 70 helpless residents of Benue State were killed, reportedly by herdsman armed with sophisticated assault rifles, who also made it a point to leave entire communities pillaged.

    Similar killings have occurred repeatedly in Plateau, Nassarawa, Kaduna and Zamfara, Taraba, and Adamawa, among other states.

    How could this go on when Nigeria was not engulfed in a civil war? How could the perpetrators operate with such brazen contempt for the lives of Nigerians and the laws of the land? Why is it that none of them had been apprehended, much less prosecuted?

    With characteristic forthrightness, Danjuma, the nation’s former Chief of Army Staff and one-time Minister of Defence, furnished some answers to these questions in his convocation address at Taraba State University. His speech was unscripted, and the delivery had about it the subtlety of a whiplash.

    Excerpts, transcribed from the cable service provider TV Continental:

    ‘Taraba is a mini-state.  Taraba is a mini-Nigeria, composed of various ethnic groups living together reasonably peacefully.  But the peace of that state is under assault. There is an attempt at ethnic cleansing in the state, and of course in all the riverine states of Nigeria.

    “We must resist.

    “We must stop it.

    “Every one of us must rise up.

    “The armed forces are not neutral.  They collude.  They collude.  They collude with the armed bandits that kill people, kill Nigerians.  They have assisted their movements.  They cover them.

    “If you are depending on the armed forces to stop the killing, you will all die one by one.

    “The ethnic cleansing must stop in Taraba State, must stop in all the states of Nigeria.  Otherwise, Somalia will be a child’s play.

    “I ask every one of you to defend your country, your territory, your state.

    “You have nowhere else to go.  You have nowhere else to go.

    “God save our country.”

    A great many people have interpreted the address as a call to arms, a piece of incitement.  A great many also see it with greater truth as a call to self-defence in the face of the government’s inability to protect innocent, law-abiding citizens.

    Wherever one stands in this divide, there is no denying that General Danjuma has re-framed the national conversation.