The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • To the Newspapers Proprietors Association of Nigeria

    To the Newspapers Proprietors Association of Nigeria

    Belated but sincere congratulations on the winning for the second time in 43 years, the hosting rights to the World Congress of the International Press Institute (IPI), the global network of journalists, editors and media executives dedicated to media freedom, the free flow of news wherever they are threatened, and the improvement of journalism practices.

    I am sure you all recall that Nigeria first won the hosting rights to the Congress at a time now regarded with nostalgia as its Golden Age.  The end of the civil war and the pace of reconciliation that defied doomsday predictions of mass annihilation loosed on the land a heady optimism.  The oil boom was superheating the national economy.  A dynamic foreign policy gave Nigeria a new, assertive voice and a new standing in international affairs. Nigerians everywhere walked tall, believing that nothing was beyond their country’s attainment.

    This conflation, plus Nigeria’s reputation as home of the largest and freest press in Africa, played no little part in the assignment of the 1975 hosting rights to Nigeria.

    Ironically, it was also Nigeria’s new assertive voice and new standing in international affairs that, in a way, truncated what was supposed to be a World Congress.

    Nigeria refused to grant visas to apartheid South Africa’s delegation, despite strong pressure from the IPI and Western nations.  The Soviet Union and Third World countries backed Nigeria.  In yet another debacle with Cold War undertones, a divided IPI held two parallel meetings in lieu of an official Congress.  Western nations met in Vienna, Austria, and the rest of the world met in Lagos, with our own Lateef Jakande as one of the driving forces.

    More than four decades later, the entire IPI, with membership from more than 130 countries will meet in Abuja from June 21-23, for its 2018 World Congress, which has as its theme “Why Good Journalism Matters.”

    Congratulations, Kabiru Yusuf, chair of the Nigerian section of IPI and publisher of the TRUST newspaper group, and the team whose six-minute video helped clinch the hosting rights for Nigeria.

    It is a good sign that, unlike other bodies and institutions that rarely get to work on undertakings of this nature until the last minute, the Newspapers Proprietors Association of Nigeria (NPAN) is leaving nothing to chance. Its Local Organizing Committee, comprising leading publishers, proprietors and some of the best media professions, has been moving on a broad front and engaging with the usual stakeholders to ensure a successful outing.

    The World Congress is coming to Nigeria at a difficult time for the global media.  The capacity to absorb continuing losses is what now sustains the media for the most part.  Given is discontinuities of the national economy, this condition is probably truer of Nigeria than it is of most countries credited with a vibrant media system.

    Hosting the IPI World Congress not going to be cheap.  But the NPAN must stoutly resist every attempt to turn it into a government-sponsored event.

    Government has a role, especially in protocol, logistics, and in providing security for the visiting delegates and at all the conference venues.  Beyond that, its role should be limited and circumscribed. But the Nigerian Newspapers Proprietors Association (NPAN) should in no way encourage political officials to believe that the IPI s coming to “showcase” Nigeria to the world — i.e. dwell only on the most positive aspects of Nigerian life.

    Visiting will no doubt give ample coverage to realities of Nigerian life – the good, the not so good, and the positively ugly.   They will report on the glamour and glitz of Abuja, but they will also report on the broken infrastructure, the epileptic power supply, and the squalor of the surrounding squatter camps.

    If the reporting should dwell for the most part on the not so good and the positively ugly, public officials should not regard that outcome as a poor return on whatever they might have regarded as an investment.

    That, unfortunately, is just the way journalists in most parts of the world, including Nigeria, have been socialized into news work.

    In Nigeria, events of this nature tend to rest on “donations” from the government, which has its own agenda, and the so-called organized private sector, acting out of a sense of corporate social responsibility.  The latter is not always totally disinterested, but the NPAN can handle any fallout of donations from that province.

    But government donations to professional organizations are especially treacherous. They often end up destabilizing, if not compromising, the recipient body.  No one understood that better than – who else? – military president Ibrahim Babangida, who  took pride in conducting a “government by donation” as the noted poet and public intellectual, Odia Ofeimun, phrased it.

    If Bagangida wanted to sow the seeds of rancor, factionalization or disintegration in a professional  body, he seized upon any pretext to award it a large donation, especially if he could not take its goodwill for granted.  Almost immediately fights broke out over what the donation was meant for, the precise beneficiary, and sometimes the exact amount.  The in-fighting made it harder for the organization to speak with one coherent voice.

    The larger the donation, the greater the propensity for conflict within.  Rarely did the organization recover fully.

    Ask the Performing Musicians Association of Nigeria.  Ask the Nigerian Bar Association, which received a multi-million Naira grant to host a conference of the African Bar Association.  Ask the Nigerian Union of journalists which received, per its chairman Sani Zorro, a donation of N30 million toward instituting a welfare scheme for journalists.   In particular, ask what happened to the donation.

    The NPAN needs all the resources it can find.  But given this capsule history, and not forgetting the kerfuffle that broke over what it unwisely received from the National Security Adviser Sambo Dasuki as compensation for loss of business occasioned by government agents and Boko Haram insurgents, the NPAN will do well not to seek or accept any cash donation toward staging the 2018 IPI World Congress.

    Remember that in Nigeria, nothing divides like money, even among those we are used to regarding as prosperous.

    As much as possible, seek donations in kind.  If you must accept cash donations, make sure that they are properly accounted for.  It would be sad indeed if anything remotely indicative of a financial scandal should supplant news of a successful hosting or damage the NPAN’s reputation beyond repair.

    Good luck, and all the best.

     

                                            Ambassador Oladapo Fafowora

     

    There is little to add to the tribute my colleague Tunji “Cyclone”Adegboyega and deputy chair of the Editorial Board paid to Ambassador Dr Oladapo Fafowora in his January 21, 2018, column, on the occasion Dr Fafowora’s “retirement” from this newspaper’s Editorial Board.

    As one of several consultants, Dr  Fafowora, was a leading light on the Editorial Board on The Guardian  when I had the honour of being the editorial page editor and subsequently chair of the Editorial Board, from 1988 through 1994.

    He was, and has remained, everything you expect of a diplomat of the first rank:  exceedingly knowledgeable, impeccably mannered, uncommonly discreet.  Unless you researched his past, you would not know that, in a long and distinguished career, he had served as cabinet secretary in General  Obasanjo’s military government, deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador to Turkey, and director-general of the Nigerian Manufacturers’ Association.  Nor would you know that he earned his decorate from Oxford.

    Though he has some strong convictions, he is dispassionate for the most part, yet very engaging.  He had majored in History, but he wrote on economics with authority.  His weekly columns for this newspaper on a wide range of subjects shone through and through with insight, scholarship, and mastery of exposition.

     

     

  • Those rampaging herders

    Those rampaging herders

    It must be hard to reconcile oneself to the thought that one will never see in the flesh again the mother, father, uncle, brother, sister, niece, grandfather, grandmother, grandson, granddaughter, friend, nephew, schoolmate, workplace colleague, friend, neighbour or casual acquaintance one had wished a Merry Christmas three weeks ago or a Happy New Year the following week and had fully expected to interact with again, perhaps the very next day or week or much later.

    But that is the grim reality with which thousands of our compatriots must now live, in addition to the pains and hardship and jarring discontinuities of life in Nigeria.

    Their loved ones were slaughtered by the hundreds, in the dead of night, by Fulani cattle herders asserting the preposterous right to graze their cattle anywhere they please, with no regard for the property rights and the lives of residents of the communities on which they set they their murderous sights.

    Everywhere they have operated in the Middle Belt and even farther south, they have left a tide of blood, tears, destruction, devastation and misery.  Plateau State was their preferred theater of carnage.  Hardly a week passed without their sacking one community or another and devastating their farmlands to make life more abundant for cattle.

    The marauders have since moved farther afield to turn farmlands in southern Kaduna State, Adamawa, Nassarawa, Taraba  and Benue into killing fields, and to give communities in Kogi, Anambra, Enugu, Cross River, Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Oyo, Ondo and Ogun more than a taste of their barbarous rage without any provocation, unless one regards lawful possession of farmlands going back several generations a provocation.

    By the admission of Alhaji Sule Yahari, identified as a member of its Board of Trustees, the organisation directly implicated in this wanton bloodletting, Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association, is active in 75 Local Government Areas across 21 states. That is a measure of its capacity, if not its will, to impose its genocidal will on vast stretches of Nigeria.

    Benue, more than any other state, seems to have borne the brunt of their murderous  visitations, the latest installment of which left 73 men, women and children dead, hundreds wounded and thousands displaced from their homes at the start of the new year

    To stem the bloodletting, the Benue State government enacted the misnamed “anti-grazing law” in May 2017, effective November 2017, mandating impoundment of cattle grazing without boundaries and confine them in designated ranches for seven days, after which they would be auctioned or the owner would be asked to pay a fine.

    The law does not ban grazing.  It regulates grazing.  Given the volatility of the issues at stake, a more sober phrasing of its title and purport was indicated.

    It seems a desperate response to the carnage that has been going on for years and had claimed thousands of innocent lives.  But all in all, the balance of sympathy here must lie with the Benue State Government, as it does with the authorities Ekiti State, regardless of Governor Ayo Fayose’s histrionics.  Distraught residents had to be assured that measures were being taken to stem the slaughter of innocents. But all in all the balance of sympathy must lie with the Benue State Government.

    If Miyetti Allah has any issues with a law duly enacted by the state legislature, it should challenge it in the courts.  But that is not Miyeti Allah’s way.

    For the more than five years that the local chieftain of Miyetti and his herd squatted on my uncle’s farm, they feasted on his crops, devoured his produce, destroyed his dam and other structures, and virtually plunged him into financial ruin.  When he sought redress in the courts, he was astonished at the quality of legal representation the squatter deployed, notwithstanding the team’s brazen inventiveness and dilatoriness.

    To this day, Miyetti has refused to pay the N2 million my uncle was awarded as damages.

    Sule Yahari, the Miyetti trustee, has said flatly that Myetti will never submit to any law that enjoins herders to ranch their livestock instead of marching them across farmlands as if the farmlands were so much free pasture.  Even if the fields are uncultivated, they are not terra nullius — no man’s land.  They belong to families, or are cardinal elements in the wealth of the surrounding communities.

    To exploit this precious resource without negotiation, without permission and without compensation, harks back to the feudal practices that these communities have long abandoned.  To levy war against them — for that is what the cattle herders of Myetti Allah and their confederates have been doing – is the height of depredation and outlawry.

    Declaring that the law would never work, Myetti Allah has warned darkly that Boko Haram’s depredations would be child’s play compared to what would follow if its grievances were not resolved – apparently to its satisfaction, if not exactly on its own terms.

    Miyetti Allah says it was not consulted before the Benue law was enacted.  Fair; but did Miyetti consult owners of the farmlands its cattle have ravaged with impunity for years?  It says its raids were reprisals for large-scale theft of its cows.  A life or several lives for a cow?  What system of jurisprudence allows this obscene equivalency?

    In the face of Miyetti Allah’s unambiguous and continuing threat to the lives and property of innocent Nigerians, the Federal Government’s response has been less than reassuring, sadly.

    According to one of his spokespersons, President Muhammadu Buhari is “conscious of his duty to Nigerians, not the least because he is accountable for everything that goes wrong.”  Plus, “He deeply sympathises with the families and all the other direct and indirect victims of this violence. He is determined to bring it to a permanent end.”

    To that end, said Garba Shehu, the government plans to stage a “stakeholders” conference on infrastructural and agricultural development that will take care of environment impact over 30 years – the usual holistic and longitudinal approach, you approach, you know.

    The Inspector-General of Police is asking for more time to arrange peace talks between the beleaguered communities and their tormentors.

    Agriculture and Rural Development Minister Audu Ogbe says the problem stems from the nation’s failure to provide cattle farmers the kind of subsidies European farmers enjoy under the EU’s crippling Common Agricultural Policy, even as it provides lavish support for yam and cassava and rice farmers. He must know, surely, that Myetti Allah is sabotaging the national food sufficiency drive by its indiscriminate grazing practice.

    After touting the Jos formula under which, in exchange for communal peace, citizens donate vast tracts of land to cattle farmers to ply their trade undisturbed as the magic solution to the problem and excoriating Benue Governor Samuel Ortom for choosing a different path. Plateau Governor Simon Lalong backtracked, claiming that he was misquoted.

    Information Minister Lai Mohammed warns the media against inflammatory and inciting statements, as if anything could be more inflammatory or more inciting than the slaughter of innocents.

    Many are in denial.  They say the killers are not Nigerians.

    Where is their evidence?  Has any official inspected their papers and verified their identities?  If they are foreigners, why has Nigeria not warned their home governments to cease and desist from exporting merchants of death to a sister African country?

    The ECOWAS protocol makes for free movement of persons, goods and services among member-nations.  Without documentation? Does it also permit a free flow of arms?  Do Nigeria’s laws permit the flow of unregistered weapons of war?  Do they permit their unregulated use?  Why is that, in the face of all the bloodletting, not one cattle herder has been charged, much less prosecuted?

    In the words of the great lyricist and Nobelist, Bob Dylan, we must now ask Miyetti Allah’s friends and partners in high places:  How many ears must they have before they can hear people cry? How many deaths will it take till they know that too many people have died?

    We ask, further:  How long will it take till they realise that far more people stand to be killed unless they act decisively to end the carnage and bring its perpetrators to justice?

    Finally, there is no better time than now to get serious about restructuring the country, which must have the establishment of state police as a key element.  That is the practice in every federation, except ours.

    It is time to end the pretence that an elected governor is the “chief security officer” of his state when he has no security outfit of his own worthy of that name and the police commissioner in that state reports directly to the Inspector-General in Abuja.

  • Beyond outrage

    Beyond outrage

    Good old outrage is alive — and the nationwide uproar, over the Fulani herdsmen Benue killing, is proof.

    What routinized sleaze had numbed, shocking gore just woke — and just as well!

    A nation, in search of the right soul, must develop a Mannichaean ethos — that stark awareness of good and evil: the one to fulsomely praise; the other to utterly raze.

    It is the narrow and winding way to equity and justice for all.

    Still, outrage must be well calibrated, so that it doesn’t become a regular catharsis for avoidable tragedy.

    No sympathy for the killer herdsmen; and their alleged sponsors.   The Nigerian state must ensure the Benue 73 get justice.

    Still, that should not equate a blanket condemnation of the entire Fulani, just because a segment of their stock is criminal and murderous.

    Nor should the present wailing lay the foundation for future tragedies — just as past wailings appeared to have laid the foundation for this one — by adopting the sweet tragedy of wailing without thinking.

    Unfortunately, that ruinous pattern is emerging yet again.   It’s time to break that tragic cycle.

    For starters, avoid over-simplifying the problem, just because such inanities thrive in the heat of the moment.

    Take the Fayose Ekiti elixir.  With anti-Fulani hysteria flaring, Ayo Fayose, the majestic master of vacuity and merry poster-boy of gubernatorial vacuum, has come up with a winner!

    He just drafted a colony of Ekiti hunters, with their Dane guns and assorted charms and amulets, to the defence of Ekiti farmers.  The same media that thrust his tragi-comic derring-do upon their readers, report that the “Fulani killer herdsmen” prowl with AK-47 and other sophisticated arms and ammo.

    “Shakabula” (Yoruba pejorative term for crude arms) versus AK-47?  If that’s not another avoidable tragedy loading, kindly point to a worse threat!

    Then, the law as swashbuckler!  Again, Ekiti is prime example.

    Ekiti’s anti-open grazing law, against rampaging herdsmen, was a great hit, with many an editorial comment recommending it to others.  But no thanks to simplistic thinking, what has worked for Ekiti has proved sheer catastrophe for Benue.

    Simon Lalung, Plateau governor, claimed he warned Samuel Ortom, the Benue governor, about the dangers of an anti-open grazing law.  Ortom has countermanded this claim.

    What is important, however, is not the controversy, or even the justness or otherwise of that law.  It is rather how the local dynamics fated it to catastrophe.

    Still, the point here is not to romanticize outlawry or rationalize brazen slaughter.  It is rather to ask: could that law have better served everyone, if it had been more sensitive to every stakeholder’s perceived rights — native or settler, farmer or herdsman — than in its present form of perceived championing of the right of farmers against pastoralists?

    Ay, every farmer needs protection against the plague of rampaging herdsmen.  But the problem is not even this basic fact, which is commonsense enough.

    It is rather the combined pathology of ethnicity and politicking, in a vast territory of native communities, which federal system is not robust enough to come to terms with the dynamics of its rippling settler communities, driven by sheer economic push.

    So, the Benue crises — and those of the contiguous Plateau, southern Kaduna, Taraba and even Adamawa — are, at the roots, neither communal nor ethnic.  They are economic.  Therefore, it all boils down to perceived threat to livelihoods — and its fatal consequences.

    That must underscore the Lalung claim that he “warned” Ortom against the dangers of the Benue anti-open grazing law.  Both states face similar dynamics in itinerant livestock farming, itinerant crop farming (rotational farming in basic economics), as well as native-settler landholding tension  — a dangerous cocktail that is always political volcano waiting to explode.

    But the same dynamics that make the Benue anti-open grazing law so dangerous also doom the so-called “grazing colonies”, which the Federal Government is currently floating.

    So, averting these tragedies demands you plot the economic rights of farmers against the economic rights of herdsmen; and work out a mutually beneficial compromise.

    That could result in a much more equitable law,  even if less popular with both economic partisans.  But it guarantees the livelihood of all.  It is a simple solution from complex thinking.

    Such, more than ever now, is needed to stop these periodic orgies of gore, of which the Benue massacre is the latest, but not necessarily the last.

    Talking about pastoral rights: has anyone deeply interrogated the morphing of the stick-carrying Fulani cattle boy of yore to the AK-47 dreaded killer of today?

    Here is a quotation straight from the Christmas 2017 double issue of The Economist: “When you have cows, the first thing you must do is get a gun.  If you don’t have a gun, people will take your cow.”

    Straight out of the Benue, Plateau, southern Kaduna and Taraba axis, the vortex of herdsmen’s killing in Nigeria?  No.  That was from a herder from Wau, a city in South Sudan.

    In Wau, just as these blighted areas of Nigeria, cattle rustling is a big rural crime.  So, the state must find an antidote.

    But as the herder has resorted to self-help, to secure self and asset, the criminal-minded among the lot have left heinous killings in their trail.  Sad!

    To be sure, that criminality must be condemned and stiffly punished — which is the angst not a few have against the Buhari Presidency.

    But the  solution is simple(?): the state must secure the herdsmen’s cattle asset; as well as his personal safety to tend his cows — a standard demand by other citizens, in other far-flung sectors as banking, manufacturing, IT, transport, trade and commerce, and even crop farming.

    It is under the rubrics of this trade security that modernization of the process, via ranching, must be comprehensively discussed; and fashioned out over a target period of time.

    That way, itinerant cattle herding can be gradually phased out.  But in the interim, the available land can be carefully tracked, thus limiting farmers-pastoralists clashes, and the attendant blood-spilling crises. Any other way is baiting needless tragedy.

    But even as this process evolves, the Federal Government must not fail in its duty of law and order.  Criminal elements among the cattle-herding community must be caught and swiftly brought to justice.

    So should rogue elements of the state, that for ethnic and religious reasons, aid and abet the criminal segment of the cattle lobby. Such intra-government criminals would appear to fire the rising notoriety of a faction of the Miyetti Allah cattle lobby.

    To solve this problem, the state must think clearly, while the media must be less hysterical, even when expressing understandable outrage.

     

    Happy new year! 

    It’s nice to be back after a period of rest, even if that, with the present tension in the land, near-equates breezing into Dante’s inferno. But the media must be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

  • And now our Shitholia republic

    And now our Shitholia republic

    I confess upfront that the word Shitholia is not original to yours truly. Guess you know who coined the original word to describe the world’s so-called basket cases whose citizens must be kept far from Uncle Sam’s country. Used in this specific context of this piece, the credit deservedly goes to my prodigiously bright and talented young friend and blogger – Tade Oshaloto, who in his ceaseless blogs about the Nigerian condition first used it – at least to my knowledge – in describing the cesspit that our country has fallen.

    Never mind the rambunctious Donald Trump and his infantile rants, Nigerians were never in doubt that things were bad – really bad. The debate has always been – just how bad particularly with each new day revealing new depths to which our humanity has sunk. In a nation where fixing basic infrastructure that defines modernity has remained a tall order and where routine matters of governance has turned a joke, that human life ordinarily thought of as sacred is now worth far less than the value of a cow can only be explained in the context of a society’s free fall on the human evolutionary ladder!

    Nearly a week after the horrific killings of 73 villagers and farmers at Guma and Logo Local Government Area of Benue State, perhaps the only thing that is not in contention is that Homo sapiens as opposed to Bos Taurus it was that were gruesomely butchered. In a nation that has never been able to properly count itself – that the figure of 73 was returned as body count would pass for no mean achievement except that countless others are still missing and may never be accounted for anytime now or in the future.

    Trust Nigerians for their love for finger-pointing – there have just been as many angles to the dissection of the problems all depending on who is doing so. The same with determining the aggressors as against the victims in the terribly vacuous and morally challenged ethical and legal space; there has equally not been a shortage of contributors. Again, just like everything Nigeriana, much has been the smoke and heat without any sign of the much needed flicker of light at the end of the long dark tunnel.

    Let’s start with the mourner-in-chief, Governor Samuel Ortom who blames everyone but himself. First, he blames, not entirely without basis, the leadership of the Fulani herdsmen – the Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore for constituting itself into an alternative government and for openly threatening to make the state ungovernable should his administration proceed with the implementation of a law duly passed by the state legislature. He blames President Muhammadu Buhari and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo for failing to respond to his distress letter on getting the intelligence on the imminent attack of the Fulani herdsmen.

    For a man who only few weeks before had rolled out the controversial anti-open grazing law said to threaten the livelihood of a significant section of the people living in the state, what did he do to assuage the concerns of the herdsmen other than talk tough that the law had come to stay? His sin: unlike the Fulani, the governor obviously lacks native intelligence! Could he not have used the judicial system to bind the Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore leadership to good conduct?

    To be sure, VP Osinbajo has denied receiving any communication about “specific budding attacks” but rather on complaints about public utterances of some herdsmen. His spokesman Laolu Akande only yesterday put the statement out that the Vice President actually met with the governor to discuss the matter and the security situation in the state and then ordered law enforcement agencies to be on the alert to prevent any attacks or violence. This was in June 2017!”

    Does that entirely exculpate the presidency considering that the attacks came barely seven months after? What did the police and the intelligence community in particular do with the information sent to the presidency and the subsequent directive considering that the state has, as at that point in time, recorded no less than 46 deadly clashes since 2013?

    Now, to Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore – a body that oftentimes carries on as if it is above the law of the land, utterly impervious to the cries and anguished suffered by Nigerians – West, East, North and South – to the murderous activities of the Fulani herdsmen.  On Sunday, this newspaper reported a member of the Board of Trustees (BoT) of Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association, Sale Bayari – yes, the same Bayari who in 2016 actually rationalised the gory massacres in Agatu Benue State); this newspaper reported him as not only rejecting the accusation that the Fulani engineered the mayhem but also the law against open grazing.

    Says he: “It is just a misconception that there should be no open grazing in Nigeria. In the entirety of Africa, there is nowhere open grazing is banned…There is no country where there are lots of cows including South Africa, Rwanda, Kenya, Burundi, Tanzania, there is nowhere you can tell me that there is a  total ban on open grazing.

    “What is normally available is that there should be open grazing for those people who think it is traditional and cultural to do it because that is their only form of exercise, leisure and pleasure because that is their culture; we also have grazing reserves for those who would want to start learning how to settle and then the ranches for those who are wealthy and into livestock only for commercial purposes.”

    The problem here is that he cites no single instance of the herdsmen’s love for open-ended pastoralism being allowed to either extirpate the traditional land tenure system or property rights of the farming population in those countries he mentioned.

    Even more serious is the indication that the massacre may have been fuelled by revenge. Hear Emir of Kano, Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II on the matter: “Some months ago in Mambilla, in one weekend, over 800 Fulani were murdered by Mambilla militias. The papers did not even go there to cover the story. Most of those wiped out were women, infants and the elderly.

    “In one case, a pregnant woman was killed, her stomach was ripped open and the baby was brought out and slaughtered. I personally handed over to the federal government a dossier with the names and pictures of the 800 or so people slaughtered as well as the names and addresses of persons known to have participated in these acts of ethnic cleansing.

    “Nothing has happened. I also ensured that authorities received video and audio evidence of senior politicians in Taraba State, who were involved in this act of genocide. No one has been arrested. Fulanis were also murdered in Kajuru and Numan.

    Does the statement echo similar rationalisation by Bayari in 2016 in the aftermath of the Agatu killings? And to think that we have a government in place? Where does all of these that lead? What happens should every aggrieved community embark on reprisals over every perceived injury?

    In the end, Benue tragedy – as indeed other tragedies that daily rain upon us – would not be so much about the number of lives lost but the fact that every single incident of such nature was preventable and their masterminds not unknown.  It happens because the leadership at every level, have not only abdicated their responsibility to lead, but have long surrendered to society’s basest instincts.

    The bigger tragedy is that it will happen – again.

  • Fuel: It’s market forces, stupid

    Fuel: It’s market forces, stupid

    It must have been exasperating to watch officials of the Nigerian national Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, Department of Petroleum resources, DPR and the petroleum resources ministry all speak, as it were, in tongues in the wake of the embarrassing fuel shortage that gripped the nation few days to Christmas. Seems one moment when lies would trump truth-telling; obfuscation, clarity. After a month-long circus in which corporate dereliction accounts for no mean part, we are, as always, pretending to getting around to the bolts and nuts of the vexing issue even if, as in times past, the solutions proposed not only amounts to merely kicking the problem down the road but are merely attempts to recycle worn solutions as new.

    And so we are back to the pre-May 2016. Back to the same wearisome arguments about the co-efficient of fuel-price determination; the import price parity and the troubling mathematics of fuel cost recovery; of subsidies and opportunity costs; of phantom and cooked up figures. And finally, to the ugly, though hard, truth about the economics of a product around which other elements in the polity spins.

    Never mind the posturing by Maikanti Baru, Nigerians know who it was that finally won the day. Never mind the docking of the usual big boys of the fuel import trade – Depot and Petroleum Products Marketers Association (DAPMAN) and their perennial sparring partner, the Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (IPMAN), the latter of which complains to no end about getting fuel to dispense even when the hordes of shadowy players had enough to flood the streets with; in the end, the cold arithmetic of the business or what some choose to call the fundamentalism of the market seems to have finally prevailed. Something, it has finally dawned, must have to give about the current price of the ‘essenco’ called petrol. It is either a review of the current price of N145 per litre for petrol to something around the N180 per litre band, or a return to the full-blown Nigerian nightmare called subsidy!

    Either way can only be bad, terrible news. Whereas a review of the current price would seem beyond contemplation at a time real incomes have witnessed an unprecedented decline under the Buhari administration, a return to the era of subsidy on fuel would be just as toxic for an economy said to be hungry for development funds. However, like every single public policy issue in this clime, it is not that the problems suddenly chanced upon us, or would require some complex algebraic formula to decipher; the problem stems from the game of denial by the NNPC and its principal the federal government. Rather than level with the citizens on the dilemma posed by the rising oil prices and unstable exchange rates considering not just our dependence on fuel imports but the fact that we have absolute no control over the global price of crude, they resort to drawing a veil of secrecy on what is ordinarily a straightforward economic issue.

    The truth is that some newspapers had as far back as October 2017 more than speculated on the return of the subsidy regime. Vanguard actually reported a figure of N586 million daily as fuel subsidy following the rise in crude oil price from $49 to $58 per barrel then. Today, with oil prices closing menacingly on $70 a barrel mark, we should be looking at a much higher figure of the subsidy than the N586 million daily reported for October 2017. And so, the question naturally bears asking – what happens should oil price hit, say $100– a price not exactly inconceivable given the volatility in commodity prices?

    Which is why Nigerians should take the theatrics by Maikanti Baru and company with a pinch of salt. Nor should anyone for that matter be deceived by the effort to conceal the corporate incompetence of the minders of the oil industry.

    By the way, does it strike anyone that the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency, PPPRA, the agency charged with the determination of the fuel-price template thinks it is better to play the ostrich – pull down the template element from their website as if by so doing,  the price movements would be guaranteed frozen!

    What to do? Get the figures out. As far as I can see, only the National Assembly stands in good stead to help lay all the cards on the table. Certainly not the subsidy-denying PPPRA. Much as we are a long way from the era of denying the arithmetic of the differential between the cost of import and price at the pump, the fact remains that the subsidy debate remains largely emotive. Yet, to the extent that there is no other name given under the heaven to describe the under-recovery of costs save subsidy, establishing the quantum of the differential will surely be a good step not just towards stripping the fuel trade of its needless mystique, but removing the veil behind which officials hide to prey on the system! Can anybody think of a better way to psychologically prepare the citizens for the imminent liberalisation say, when Dangote refinery and others, finally come on stream?

     

    Change and its many semantics

    “I have kept a close watch on the on-going debate about “Restructuring”. No human law or edifice is perfect. Whatever structure we develop must periodically be perfected according to changing circumstances and the country’s socio-economic developments. We Nigerians can be very impatient and want to improve our conditions faster than may be possible considering our resources and capabilities. When all the aggregates of nationwide opinions are considered, my firm view is that our problems are more to do with process than structure.

    We tried the Parliamentary system: we jettisoned it. Now there are shrill cries for a return to the Parliamentary structure. In older democracies these systems took centuries to evolve so we cannot expect a copied system to fit neatly our purposes. We must give a long period of trial and improvement before the system we have adopted is anywhere near fit for purpose”.

    That was President Buhari in his New Year broadcast. For those clamouring for ‘restructuring”, it must have been disappointing that the president thinks that the current structure can be salvaged by some process of re-engineering.

    Rather than engage in the endless but increasingly unfruitful debate on the path that the Buhari administration would rather not tread, why don’t we, for a change, focus on interrogating the so-called re-engineering which the president seems enamoured?

    It seems that only then can the citizens begin to meaningfully account for the administration’s scandalous squandering of a national goodwill!

    I rise!

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • “Oluwole” revisited

    “Oluwole” revisited

    Not a few usually law-abiding persons, among whom I number myself, were saddened when the massed forces of law and order raided the enclave known as “Oluwole” in central Lagos, in March 2005 and reportedly put it out of business.

    Several weeks ago, there were widespread protests in Lagos against the slow rate at which the Passport Office processes applications for travel documents, despite inducements allegedly delivered directly to officials or through “consultants. ”There was anguished talk of interminable queues at passport offices, of applicants showing up at dawn day after day without getting any closer to obtaining their quests.

    Some of the distraught applicants were heard lamenting that “Oluwole” had been forced to close shop.

    “Oluwole,” I should explain, was a complex nuance phenomenon. It was an enclave somewhere inside Balogun Market in central Lagos, but few knew its exact boundary.

    Few of its teeming patrons actually went to its operating premises anyway.  Accredited and freelance agents stationed on the precincts of a popular hotel close by ran errands not too discreetly between patrons and service providers.

    In a clime where uncertainty ruled, “Oluwole” offered certainty. It was the one place where, for a negotiated fee, you were virtually guaranteed to get whatever you wanted and whenever you wanted it, no questions asked. At “Oluwole,” the perennial shortage of passport booklets that hobbled business at passport-issuing offices was inconceivable.

    To its operators, “Oluwole” was a way of life, of getting on in the world. But it was also a source of constant thrill, the thrill of reproducing any artifact or document so faithfully that it would be difficult to distinguish it from the original, and doing it without fuss and without the slightest regard for consequences.

    The police, not given to nuance, profiled “Oluwole” pithily as “a notorious area in Lagos Island noted for document forgery and counterfeiting.”

    During the 2005 raid on “Oluwole,” acting police Inspector General Sunday Ehindero, reported with breathless excitement how more than 40,000 Nigerian passports, ordinary and diplomatic.

    But that was just a fraction of the haul, which also included some 1,500 passports issued by Libya, Libra, Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau. Cameroun, Senegal, Gambia, Jamaica, Costa Rica and Ghana.  Before you dismiss this as no big deal, these being Third World countries, I should add that passports of the United States, Switzerland and South Africa were also in the mix.

    So also were 10,000 blank British Airways tickets, some 50,000 cheque leaves of foreign banks, about 10, 000 United States Postal Money Orders, blank certificates of occupancy, bills of lading, and printing plates from which documents of high commercial value could be pulled.

    How, then, can any law-abiding person be discomfited to see such an institution put out of business?

    Let me explain.

    As constituted under Sani Abacha, of loathsome memory, Nigeria was an exemplar of the state as criminal and government as criminal enterprise.

    Rapporteurs for the UN Human Rights Commission noted with diplomatic tact in 1996, that the rule of law in Nigeria “was on the verge of collapse, if it has not already collapsed.” More tellingly, they declared that “Whether there is a Constitution left is debatable.”

    Abacha’s whims and fantasies as he voiced them or as his marabouts divined them constituted the law of the land.  Those who questioned this state of affairs were marked for ruin, disappearance, or death.  Often, the only way to escape Abacha’s demonic dragnet was to leave the country on a one-way ticket.

    But even that option was fraught.

    Your name was most likely on one of the many watch lists that state officials  could download with the click of a mouse from computer terminals at every check point.  Presenting your papers at any port was like delivering yourself to a unit of Hamza el-Mustapha’s killing squad.

    Even if you could talk or bluff you way through the 17 check points between Mile Two in Lagos and the border town of Sémè, the so-called NADECO corridor, you would still have to present your travel papers to make the crossing.  The route through Idi-Iroko, the border crossing in Ogun State, was similarly booby-trapped.

    Going through the bush was even more fraught.  What if your escort was in reality an agent of the very forces you were fleeing from, and delivered you right into their crushing embrace?

    In whatever case, the first crucial step was to obtain travel papers that would facilitate your transit but conceal your true identity. And “Oluwole” was the best source.

    Off, then, to the popular hotel aforementioned in Balogun one Saturday afternoon, in 1996, clad in unaccustomed full native attire so you be would be almost unrecognizable. You were still staking out the place when a young man approached you and asked if he could help.

    You told him your mission almost in a conspiratorial whisper, looking furtively around you all the while. Sensing your unease, he said, “Sir, relax.  Big men like you come here all the time to do business. There is nothing to fear.”

    There were many possibilities, each with its own risks, he explained. Some examples:  A clean new passport with your picture and true identity; a new passport with your picture but another person’s identity; a well-worn passport bearing your name and identity, or an old passport with false particulars.

    You made your choice and paid the requisite fee. The following day, he handed you your travel papers at an agreed rendezvous and with a knowing wink, wished you luck.

    The facilitator had in fact understated the capacity of “Oluwole” when he said that it offered many possibilities. He should have said that nothing was impossible there.

    Mike Wallace, 71, veteran television journalist and correspondent for “60 Minutes,” the award-winning news programme on the American television network CBS, was visiting Nigeria in late 1996 to report on 4-1-9 crimes. Wallace, a white man since deceased, obtained a birth certificate representing him as a Nigerian farmer born some 40 years earlier, somewhere in Akwa Ibom.

    With that certificate and other documents procured in like manner, Wallace obtained a Nigerian passport.  Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Lagos, who should know, confirmed that the passport was as genuine as any they had ever seen.

    And all this was in a day’s work.

    It is the nature of institution like “Oluwole” that it is not easily put out business. It has countless patrons, acting from motives ranging from those that evoke empathy to those that can only draw the strongest disapprobation.

    You cannot dissolve it, as the police claimed to have done.  You can only disperse it.

    “Oluwole” has probably been recreated in several centres not too far removed from the geographic location for which it was named, or from the prying eyes of law and order. It is certainly flourishing in cyber-space.

    Weep not for Oluwole.

     

     

    Correction

    • In my December 19, 2017 column (“In this season of goodwill”), I referred to former Vice President Abubakar Atiku as Turakin Adamawa. A correspondent tells me that the former vice president has since been elevated to Wazirin Adamawa, while the former title has passed to the son.

    My apologies to all concerned.

  • This time, last year

    This time, last year

    What a way to end the year! I mean a year which started on a cautious note, then slowly waltzed up in a surprising momentum only to end up in a terrible anti-climax. Having been spared of the experience about this time last year, if we thought that the era of crippling fuel shortages was finally gone with the supposed mother-of-all reviews of the fuel-price template of May 2016, the grand return of that Nigerian nightmare on Christmas has shown how far the handlers of the sector have yet to master the intriguing dynamics of the sector under their watch.

    As it appears, nothing truly has changed: not the pathetic blame game under which the culprit in chief would accuse others of precipitating the crisis when its own dereliction is so obvious to see; the perennial sideshow which comes by way of the routine hounding Depot and Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (DAPMAN), the Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (IPMAN) and the legion of ubiquitous hoarders into Hades; and now top cap it all is the return of that toxic word – subsidy – into the nation’s fuel price template – yes, the old script – which underlies the federal government’s pathetic lack of will to address the economics of fuel importation under which the world’s leading oil producer are routinely subjected to the vagaries of crude oil price movements and foreign exchange fluctuations.

    Forget the NNPC’s needless showmanship; neither the crippling scarcity nor the return of the subsidy is entirely surprising. Nigerians would readily recall that the best argument put forward when the current petrol price template was set was not so much about deregulation but cost recovery. Whereas the regime of cost recovery was understandably designed to foster competition, true deregulation would involve a constant review of the parameters on the fuel price template which in effect means that prices would also change as the dynamics change. That is the dilemma that the current administration has found itself – and which has now cast a dark shadow on its modest achievements.

    It is a cross that the change administration must carry so long as oil prices continues to increase.

    By and large, year 2017 seems to have surpassed expectations. Against all expectations, it exited the recession in the second quarter with a modest GDP growth of 0.55 percent. Inflation is down from 18 percent in 2016 to around 15 percent. The naira has of course gained strength; from N490 to the USD a year ago, it currently trades at N360.  The same with the foreign reserves, it has improved dramatically from $23 billion in October 2016 to $38.2 billion a record 38-month. On the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Report for 2018, Nigeria ranks 145th position – 24 positions up from the 169th position in the 2017 report. There is also a fresh commitment to improve on revenue collection going by the unprecedented haul by the Nigerian Customs Service.

    So what do we expect this year?

    Whereas I wrote of a future hung on faith about this time last year, I must say that year 2018 is pregnant with possibilities. A lot depends on the fiscal discipline across the board.  At a time of unprecedented infrastructure gaps, it seems inexplicable that the federal government will for whatever reasons, fail to implement its own budget.

    Secondly, a lot would also depend on the extent on the abilities of revenue collecting agencies like the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) and the customs to sustain the current momentum. Thirdly, a lot will also depend on the extent to which the federal government is able to reduce or narrow the crippling infrastructure challenge. It is unfortunate that the Buhari administration appears to have done far less than would ordinarily been expected in the dire situation in which the economy has found itself. A sure proof of that is the perennial failure to implement the capital elements in the budget.

    But even more important is the extent to which the federal government is able to enlist the support of the private sector in getting things done. How to reduce the near total dependence of our manufacturing companies on forex market almost without exception and the associated capital flows which goes on under various guises – all of which flow directly from the failure backward integration remains  a big challenge. Just like the in the outgone year, the situation is expected to continue in 2018 and beyond.

    Finally, I want to talk about two factors that continue to undermine the economy. The first is fuel import said to account for 40 percent of our forex earnings; and the second, the scandalous situation of youth unemployment. On the first, there is at least hope that the country will somehow exit the import cycle when hopefully Dangote refineries comes on stream.

    But then, how do we begin to address the challenge of putting the nearly 50 percent of our idle youths to work? Only recently, the National Bureau of Statistics projected that “the unemployment rate, induced by a recession, typically peaks about 15-18 months after the beginning of a recession or 4-8 months after the end of a recession before it returns to its pre- recession trend”. That the unemployment situation will return to that terrible normal in 2018 can only be bad news for an economy with such a huge idle population. Has anyone thought of something of a Marshall plan to get our youths off the streets even for public works?

    Or do we need a new economics to address this? Happy New Year to you, dear readers.

  • The shame of a nation

    The shame of a nation

    If there is anything one can predict unerringly in Nigeria, it is that Yuletide will bring with it crippling fuel shortages and disruption in the movement of persons, goods and services and in social intercourse on a  scale that only a civil war or major natural disaster can fully explain or justify.

    Contemplating this conflation, a concerned citizen has suggested in earnest that we sus pendyuletide for a few years to begin with, and abolish it subsequently.  With Yuletide out of the way, there would be no need for marketers to “hoard” and “divert” fuel and thus create an artificial scarcity; no need for millions of Nigerians to embark on the obligatory migration to their homelands only to rush back to base scarcely a week later

    With Yuletide out of the way, he said, all those horrible road accidents that proliferate during the so-called ember months and reach their climax around Yuletide, earning another discomfiting entry for Nigeria in the international misery index, would be distributed equally throughout the year. Sectarian and ethnic champions would have one less turf to ply their victimhood.

    The wear and tear on the highways would be reduced drastically and the savings would be applied to other projects.

    This is the kind of desperate solution to which the perennial fuel crisis has driven even some usually serious people.  The redeeming grace is that it has also bred a great deal of creative entertainment.  I missed out on much of the latest installment of fuel crisis art, but among the few that were brought to my attention, there is one that is simply unforgettable.

    A riff on the closing lines of “The First Noel,” one of the best-known Christmas carols, it goes thus:

    No fuel, No fuel

    No fuel, No fuel

    There is no fuel, Buhari.

    There you have it – a hilarious instance of the capacity of Nigerians to defy adversity, and of Nigeria’s fabled resilience.

    In the more than 30 years that Nigerians have lived with crippling fuel shortages, the authorities have never being short on excuses.  At first, it was turn-around maintenance (TAM) of the local refineries.  While the exercise lasted, petrol had to be imported to bridge the gap.  But by coincidence or design, TAM was for the most part carried out at the end of the year, the peak travel season.

    Despite its huge cost, TAM maintained nothing and turned nothing around, except the fortunes of complicit contractors and their local supervisors. The refineries were producing at far less than full capacity if they produced at all, the gap between supply and demand widened and more and more fuel had to be imported to fill the gap. Oil supplies grew more and more unstable, and so did pricing.

    Since then, virtually every measure trumpeted as a solution to the problem has been a swindle.  Like most swindles in Nigeria’s recent history, it began during the era of military president, General Ibrahim Babangida.    The country was set to take a loan from the IMF, and as a sop to that latter-day Cerberus, the currency was to be devalued, import restrictions were to be lifted, and anything remotely suggestive of a subsidy was to be abolished immediately.

    Gasoline came to be identified as the scapegoat for Nigeria’s under-performing economy. It was grossly underpriced, they said, because it was heavily subsidised, with the pernicious result that a gallon of gasoline cost less than a bottle of soda or milk.  One image that clings in my memory of that time is of the engaging news correspondent Chris Anyanwu, now a Senator, peddling that false equivalency night after night on national television in her smooth, silky delivery.

    The subsidy was the difference between the price of a gallon of gasoline in Lagos and the same gallon of petrol in Fargo, North Dakota, they said.

    Wasn’t that what economists call an opportunity cost? If the cost of getting a gallon of gasoline to the pump exceeded the retail price, you could perhaps talk about a subsidy. What were these relative costs?  And whatever happened to comparative advantage and all that if Nigerians were to pay for gasoline produced on their soil the same price as consumers half a world away were paying for it? Was the whole thing not at bottom a tax?

    Shifting gears, they said gasoline was so cheap that it was being mindlessly wasted.

    How?  Were Nigerians using it to wash their hands after a meal, or to prepare their vegetable stew in place of regular cooking oil, or as a beverage to entertain their guests, since it was so much cheaper than Coca Cola?

    Shifting gears still, they said because gasoline was so cheap in Nigeria, it was being smuggled to neighbouring countries to reap windfall profits.

    Now, you could not do that on any meaningful scale by lugging 50-litre petrol cans through bush paths.  Only motorized tankers driving on paved roads across international frontiers manned by immigration and customs and security officials had that capability.  Those vehicles had to be owned or controlled by political and military officials with guaranteed access to refined petroleum products.

    Why was it, then, that not one of those vehicles had been arrested and charged with this illegal traffick, only a few stragglers transporting smuggled gasoline cans in leaky dugout canoes or in rickety trucks across the border?

    Nor were the authorities done yet.

    Gasoline was so cheap, they said, that it was being adulterated.  When substituted for kerosene in hurricane lamps and stoves, the adulterated mixture caused horrific explosions that maimed and sometimes killed entire families.

    Why not make kerosene cheaper than gasoline, then?  In any case, why would anyone adulterate a product that was already obscenely cheap?  Whoever heard of adulterated zinc?

    Then they tried to sugar the pill.

    From the funds to be realised by abolishing the subsidy, the existence of which was never proven, new oil refineries would be built not merely to satisfy growing domestic consumption but also for export, to generate foreign exchange.  Those long, snaking lines at filling stations would be things of the past.

    They conjured up in galactic figures the revenues that would accrue to the exchequer from abolishing    the subsidy.  They set up committees to manage the expected cash inflow and to ensure it was put to the most judicious use.  They came up with palliatives to cushion the average person from comprehensive      price increases that would follow.

    In less than two years, the “mass transit” buses charging subsidised fares vanished from the roads.  A striking project here, a thriving scheme there, but much of the money went the way of other state satisfy the awoof proclivities political officials high and low, and their confederates.

    The one thing that never got built is a new refinery.

    When the refineries produce at all, their output is shipped several hundred miles from the loading platform and returned as imported fuel to reap windfall profits in “subsidy” reimbursement for an untouchable criminal syndicate.

    It must stop in this new year, this syndicated fraud that has covered the nation with shame and brought great pain and misery to the many while enriching the few.

    Your move, President Muhammadu Buhari.

     

  • In this season of goodwill

    In this season of goodwill

    Election politics is in the air.

    It has not quite reached fever pitch yet, but you can breathe it, feel it, and almost touch it.  Though the general elections are still some 16 months away, each passing day is guaranteed to raise the nation’s political temperature somewhat.

    Just consider this past fortnight.

    A rejuvenated President Muhammadu Buhari all but indicated during a visit to Kano that he will seek re-election, thus putting to rest speculations about whether his health can withstand the strains of what remains of his current term, let alone the burden of a second term beginning in 2019 when he will be seven months shy of 77.

    Recognising that his route to being elected Nigeria’s next president in 2019 is blockaded if he remains in the ruling APC, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar quit that party and returned to the PDP.  He not only defected, he urged colleagues who had migrated with him to the APC to return to the PDP fold.

    No surprise there; Atiku’s soul was never really there.  His critics might even say, with some justification, that his soul is everywhere and nowhere, considering his predilection for gravitating toward whichever political party can offer him its back to climb to the top job.  Besides, his often strident critiques of the President and the Administration while he was in the APC, always seemed calculating and self-serving.

    In an earlier column, I described Atiku as “a (presidential) candidate of habit.”   Based on his latest peregrination, I belong now among those see him, not without cause, as a candidate of desperation.  Only desperation can move even a politician to perform in full public view all the gyrations the Turakin Adamawa has been performing not just lately but in his political career.

    The gyrations include, most recently, a trip to Minna to solicit the support of the discredited former military president who apparently is still a king-maker in the PDP.  Atiku emerged from the encounter looking anything but upbeat.  At the PDP’s National Convention to elect party officials, he was received coolly at best.

    Atiku seems unlikely to clinch the PDP’s presidential ticket, and not just because of his image as a drifter. With Buhari in the running and most likely to win re-nomination, the PDP is unlikely to award its ticket to another candidate from the North.

    This should, however, not cause him great distress, nor signal the end a great public career.

    Through his business conglomerate, he can directly create more jobs than he will be able to do as president.  Through his acclaimed philanthropy, he can continue to bring aid and relief in a more personal way to far more people than he can do as president. He will be able to devote more time to nurturing the American University of Yola, of which he is the proprietor, from its already high standard to world class.

    In the end, these engagements may offer greater satisfaction and certainly far fewer frustrations than being President.

    But this being Nigeria, and given the mysterious ways politicians conduct their business, it is too early to count Atiku out of the race.

    Only in a land of “anything goes” can Chief Olabode George, and Gbenga Daniel  in all seriousness run for PDP National President.  Both are political lightweights.  Both will bring to the table more liabilities than assets

    As military governor, Bode George virtually ran Ondo State aground.  His more recent outing as Chair of the Ports Authority landed him in jail until the Court of Appeal quashed his conviction.

    Gbenga Daniel’s rap sheet with the EFCC on account of his stint as Governor of Ogun State stretches all the way from the Ijebu waterside to Abuja and back.

    It has to be said that the new PDP chairman, Uche Secondus, has also had his        day with the EFCC   As deputy national chair, he was accused in 2016 of corruptly receiving 23 luxury cars worth N310 million from Jide Omokore, a business associate of the former Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani  Alison-Madueke, and ordered to turn in the cars or pay the monetary worth.  The National Identity Management Commission, of which he was Board chair, was mired in inertia and dogged by allegations of serious fraud.

    But Secondus had in his corner his friend and fellow Rivers State indigene, Governor Nysom Wike, who reportedly bankrolled the election of all the candidates on the so-called Unity List the PDP Convention delegates were handsomely mobilised to approve.

    For once, Wike aimed before shooting, and was dead on target. He taught those who still think you can play party politics without money that the game is not       for paupers.  Instead of denouncing the influence of money in the race, General Babangida should have drawn on his fabled hoard to empower the aspirant of his choice.  But then, again he has been in the business long enough to know a forlorn cause when he sees one.

    As befits this Biblical season of goodwill to all men, this is also a season of political reconciliation.  Former Oyo State Governor Adebayo Alao-Akala is the most prominent of former PDP political heavyweights to be received into the APC fold, following his defection several months ago.

    And there he was in Ibadan being welcomed by Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and Governor Isiaka Ajimobi and other dignitaries, all enthusiastically holding high and literally brandishing the APC’s emblem, the broom.  Given Oyo’s recent political history, a colleague told me he did not believe he would ever witness a ceremony like that.

    Did he ever think he would live to see Governor Ayo Fayose of Ekiti State send birthday greetings to President Buhari whose imminent or actual death he has announced more times than anyone can recall? Prepare for stranger developments, young man.

    Talking of goodwill, powerful men on both sides of the North Atlantic – elected officials, entertainers, leading media figures, athletes, etc.,—can be forgiven for believing that if this season portends anything, it is goodwill toward women and the precise opposite toward men, especially with so much sex in the  air.

    I have in mind the way they have been tumbling from their high perches over their cumulative gratuitous and offensive conduct toward women, some of them even taking their own lives out of shame.  A good many of them now live in mortal dread of a phone call, fearing that it might be the signal that they have been outed by a woman or women they once preyed on.

    But, irony of ironies, the one man who was actually caught on tape reveling in his predatory behavior is ensconced in the White House composing his latest fulmination on Tweeter.

    It is also an irony that Christine Keeler, the call girl whose affair with John Profumo, Britain’s secretary of state for War, a defence attache at the Russian Embassy in London and an un-named “member of the Royal Family” culminated in the fall of Harold Macmillan’s Conservative Government, died last week as sex continued to dominate the news in the United States, and to a lesser extent, the UK.  She was 75.

     

    Correction

    Contrary to what I stated on this page last Tuesday (December 5, 2017), it is Crowther University’s Library that is the product of General TY week munificence.  Crowther University, Oyo, has no teaching hospital.

    I thank Professor Tunji Oloruntimehin for setting the record straight.

  • ‘The Brave One’ at 80

    ‘The Brave One’ at 80

    Two sterling attributes of the celebrator ran through the editorial advertisements placed in the media by friends and admirers of General Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma, the former Chief of Army Staff, later Minister of Defence and currently chair of PINE, the governmental organ charged with the reconstruction of the nation’s war-ravaged North-east, who turned 80 last Saturday: forthrightness and public spiritedness.

    Although I had heard much – who hasn’t?— about General Theophilus Yakubu (TY) Danjuma’s resolute manner, it was not until 1991 that I experienced it first-hand.

    Lagos State Military Governor Raji Rasaki had shut down Guardian Newspapers, following publication of a story that police had shot dead two students during a demonstration at Yaba College of Technology.

    Rasaki let it be known that if the paper disavowed the publication – which was accurate in every material particular —and apologised, he would allow it to resume business.

    As everyone knew, Rasaki was merely the cat’s paw, the local enforcer carrying out “orders from above,” i.e. military president Ibrahim Babangida’s diktat from  Abuja

    Publisher Alex Ibru had then called a meeting of senior editors to deliberate on Rasaki’s demand.  In attendance were two members of the Board of Directors, General Danjuma, and Chris Okolie, publisher of Newbreed magazine.

    The discussion had all but reached the point of finding the words to meet Rasaki’s terms when Danjuma, who had said nothing all along, intervened.

    “We will not apologise,” he said.  “We cannot apologise.”

    That resolute pronouncement, seconded by Chris Okolie, ended the discussion.  Rasaki did not get his apology.  A week later, The Guardian was back in business.

    If this incident is but a minor testament to Danjuma’s forthrightness, consider  his principled stand during the 1993 presidential election debacle. While his contemporaries in the military establishment embarked on appeasement and opportunist compromise, he visited Chief MKO Abiola at his Opebi home and  hailed him as “President-elect.”

    He went further to confirm what was an open secret:  that military president Babangida had always wanted to follow the example of Flight-Lt Jerry Rawlings who ran a provisional government for 11 years and then succeeded himself as civilian president, forgetting that he was no Rawlings.

    Consider, further, Danjuma’s address at the August 2013 ceremony in which he was conferred with the title of Jarmai Zazzau by the Emir of Zaria, Alhaji Shehu Idris.

    Translated from the Hausa, Jarmai means “The Brave One.” The title could not have framed the occasion better.

    Virtually every person of consequence in the North was in attendance. Danjuma seized the moment to deliver what is sure to go down as one of the most forthright speeches ever on the state of the nation.

    Nigerian society and economy were in tatters, due among other factors to leadership failure, he said. The mass of the people were “chained down in dehumanising and grinding poverty” while the nation continued to maintain           “a few islands of false prosperity in a turbulent ocean of penury and squalor.”

    Peace and harmony were unattainable in such a setting, he warned.

    He told his fellow Northern elders that they were talking too much and doing too little. They needed to think more, pray more, plan more, work harder, relate better, and talk less, because battles were better fought and won through wisdom and strategy than through “inflammable pronouncements and political tantrums.”

    More poignantly, he warned them that, by failing to adequately educate their young men and women, they were handicapping them in the competition for opportunities in a globalised world where knowledge itself had become the prime resource.

    General Danjuma told them they had failed to rise to that level of patriotic statesmanship where they could deploy their wisdom and experience to give     the country a clear sense of purpose and direction.

    “When elders become decadent, the youth are bound to become delinquent,” he said.

    I cannot recall an occasion during which such an assemblage of persons of great consequence were treated to such blunt, forthright talk.

    Yet, what ran through his address was not self-righteousness nor condemnation, nor yet resignation, but a challenge, a summons to collective action to help pull a failing nation back from the brink.

    “I still believe that Nigeria can be reawakened and rebuilt to achieve greatness,” he said. “If we renew our minds and reconcile with one another, if we coordinate our determined efforts, we can make northern Nigeria self-reliant and self-sufficient, while enhancing the unity and prosperity of all Nigeria, but first we must be at peace.”

    Those words, the stuff of statesmanship, are as poignant today as when they were spoken five years ago.

    But General Danjuma is not all exhortation and admonition.   He backs his talk with hard cash, drawing on his vast wealth from oil and shipping.

    Five  years ago, he donated N2 billion to the university’s Endowment Fund of Ahmadu Bello University, the successor institution to the Nigerian College of Arts, and Technology, Zaria, where he had studied for his ‘A’ Levels before opting out to join the army instead of taking a degree in history.  It is probably the largest single gift ever made by a Nigerian to an academic institution in Nigeria.

    Crowther University’s Teaching Hospital in Oyo is a product of his munificence. as are many significant facilities and structures all over Nigeria.  His NGO, the TY Danjuma Foundation, won an award from the World Bank for its exertions in curbing river blindness in Ghana.

    Hundreds of Nigerians have completed or are pursuing advanced study at home and abroad on outright scholarships or large grants from General Danjuma.

    And I know not a few persons who owe their lives or the lives of their loved ones to his decisive intervention during harrowing travails.

    But most of his philanthropy goes un-reported.  He has no “media adviser” or “spokesman,” the much-abused factotum that political officials hire at the public expense to put the best face on their often-indefensible utterances or transactions.

    Nor will you find a media department at his flagship company SAPETRO, or at his umbrella organisation TY Holdings.  That is the unobtrusive style that becomes Danjuma so well.  It is for that same reason that he has refused to            yield to pressures to write his memoirs or commission someone to document a  life so rich in interest and incident.

    He has been called a man with a heart of gold, a soldier’s soldier, “arguably the finest of his generation.”  The Royal Court in Benin City has called him “a worthy son-in-law of Edo State.

    It remains to add that General Danjuma is remarkably urbane, emblematic of “an  officer and a gentleman” in its pristine conception.  In my many interactions with him, I have found him unfailingly courteous and discreet.  He returns his calls at the earliest opportunity.

    He would rise from his chair in the small lounge that serves as his private reading room in his expansive and tastefully furnished living room to greet you, and walk you to the door to see you off.  For all his wealth and distinction, he is totally unpretentious.  He expresses deep appreciation for the smallest gestures.

    I should also add that he is also a bibliophile.  The reading room is chockful of volumes on history, biography, philosophy, business, diplomacy, politics, international relations, and military science.  And they are not just there as ornaments. You always found him perusing a recent New York Times bestseller or the latest issues of some of the better-known international newsmagazines.

    There is no television around, only a stereo from which classical music or jazz, jazz with a lot of swing, wafts across the expansive living room.  Danjuma belongs in the “It-Don’t-Mean-A-Thing-If-It-Ain’t-Got-That-Swing” school         of jazz connoisseurs.  I must not forget the bar stocked with choice wines.

    Danjuma has the good things of life, and knows how to enjoy them.  He is one wealthy Nigerian who knows how to relax.  In his person and home, wealth and sensibility dwell in harmony

    He deserves the outpouring of goodwill that marked his 80th birthday.  Many happy returns of December 9, Jarmai Zazzau.