The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Attention: Patrick Obahiagbon

    Attention: Patrick Obahiagbon

    Three (four?) years have passed since we last exchanged correspondence, but it all seems like a galactic intermission. My grateful thanks to you for your flattering reference to me in an interview you granted one of our diurnal journals the other day.

    I have closely monitored developments in the sphere where, most recently, you brought your insights, perspicacity and savoir faire, to say nothing of your prodigious lexical endowment, to bear on matters of state, right beside the indefatigable Comrade Governor, helping chalk up for posterity imperishable accomplishments–a record that no doubt led to the visceral rejection of the group seeking to supplant yours by the discerning people of Edo State.

    You have thus far been reticent in commenting on developments in the aforementioned sphere in general, and resoundingly silent on the recent imbroglio in the once-hallowed forum where fists were freely employed and objects not nailed to the floor were converted to lethal missiles, leading the sedate and highly revered Monarch of the Kingdom to denounce the riotous members of the State Assembly.

    You will doubtless have noted that the National Day, our Independence anniversary, again occasioned an orgy of collective self-flagellation not untinged with self-pity, and that a milestone that should have been marked with rejoicing and rededication bred, instead, resentment and recrimination.

    Should we now christen it National Catharsis Day? Or National Lamentation Day?

    It is a development deeply to be deplored that, since your departure, not a whiff of your oratorical virtuosity and lexical wizardry has issued from the legislative house in which you held the members and indeed the entire nation spellbound for four years. For the most part, its proceedings are dilatory and desultory, and its transactions are about as transparent as a brick wall.

    When it comes to how much of the public purse they have chosen to award themselves, they  are as secretive as oysters.  At that point, even the few among them who condescend to discuss public issues become tongue-tied, incoherent.

    The other day when the much-learned senior attorney and chair of the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption, Professor Itse Sagay, whom no one has ever accused of frivolity or psittacism, disclosed that senators took home N29 million every month –yes, every month – as recompense for their exertions, they went nuclear.

    They disputed the amount, though some knowledgeable persons tell me it is grossly and egregiously understated.  They mocked the learned professor, disparaged him, berated him, taunted him – they did everything except disclose how much compensation they award themselves every month.

    It is a measure of how precipitously standards have plummeted since your time that the most talked- about lawmaker today happens to be a shameless exhibitionist, a person who would sooner punch you in the face or kick you in the groin than engage you in serious debate.

    I am talking, dear aburo, about a poor imitation of a street minstrel and dancer who stakes a larger claim on his sexual prowess than on his cerebration, and would rather flaunt his collection of exotic cars—acquired through legislative work, presumably — than state for the record what he has done for the people in whose name he sits in the legislature.

    But he is not alone.  The place has become a cushy asylum for former state governors, many of them fearful of their own shadows.  And yet, President Muhammadu Buhari says the power to review the incurably flawed 1999 Constitution foisted on the country by the departing military inheres in this self-dealing body and in the Council of State, an advisory body that meets only at the President’s pleasure.

    Mr President doth misapprehend the role of the Council of State in the constitutional order, it would seem.   His prescription in the face of the clamour for restructuring is not in the least reassuring.

    Being an indefatigable monitor of the lexical topography, you will have discerned that “restructuring” has suddenly become the most intractable term in contemporary political discourse.  Many mainstream political actors are claiming that they cannot fathom what it means.

    Apparently, unlike you, these people have not cultivated the habit of consulting the dictionary, let alone a predilection for burrowing into it and internalising it from cover to cover to disinter its hidden riches.  The online Cambridge English dictionary defines the term simply and authoritatively as “organising a company, business or system in a new way to make it operate more effectively.”  Nothing more.

    And yet, the very mention of “restructuring” drives even some usually sanguine people into           a condition bordering on catalepsy.  Can you extract from your lexical arsenal a term that will cure them of their heebie-jeebies?

    That would be all for now, dear aburo.  I look forward to the unalloyed delight of perusing your response.  Meanwhile, good luck on work in progress, and in your tireless and immensely rewarding engagement with your dictionaries.

    Fraternally

    OD

     Rewane:  A postscript

    Not a few readers have remarked that my October 10 column “Rewane: 22 years later” did not do justice to the statesman’s great personal kindness.

    Some spoke of how, without fuss and without ceremony, he assigned to needy persons, some           of them total strangers, rent-free accommodation in his vast property holdings in Lagos and Warri, funded scholarships in local and overseas institutions, picked up bills for overseas medical treatment, and handed out cash to persons who were down on their luck.

    “How could you have omitted his great legacy, the prestigious Hussey College, Warri, that he founded and endowed, together with his brother Chief O. N. Rewane and Chief Elliot Begho?”  a correspondent remonstrated.

    Emmanuel Olanrewaju Bandele, retired professor of medicine at the College of Medicine of  the University of Lagos, trustee and one-time president of the Nigerian Thoracic Association     and currently consultant chest physician at the Lagos State University College of Medicine,  has asked me to enter this testament to Rewane’s legendary munificence in the public record.

    “Around 1985, I was offered admission to the world-famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to undertake some research.  All the University of Lagos College of Medicine could offer me was a round-trip ticket.

    “In my desperation, I approached Dr Irene Rewane, since deceased, a niece of Chief Alfred Rewane.  She gave me a note to take to him.  He welcomed me with warm friendliness and immediately wrote me a cheque which helped substantially with my upkeep.

    “Thanks to his singular philanthropy, the research contributed largely to my becoming a professor of medicine, and the experience I gained helped in the management of Nigerian asthmatics.”

    End of Professor Bandele’s testament.

    It remains to close with a personal reminiscence.

    I met Chief Rewane only once, in 1984, and it was by chance.

    I had gone to keep an appointment with Chief Anthony Enahoro in his suite at The Sheraton Hotel in Ikeja.  He had left word with an aide that I should meet him in Chief Rewane’s residence at Oduduwa Crescent, in Ikeja, Lagos.

    On my being introduced to him in his expansive living room, Rewane drew a long breath, fixed me with his eyes and said in mild rebuke:  “So it is my aburo Tony that brought you here?   You would not have come here if he had not asked you to meet him here?”

    Pardon the digression, but I would gather that Rewane and Enahoro were always bantering        about who was older and therefore entitled to deference from the younger. Published records indicate that Rewane was older by seven years, but Enahoro was unyielding.

    To resume:  I apologised.  Chief Cornelius (C.O.) Adebayo, general secretary of the Enahoro-led Movement for National Reformation, joined in the apology, assuring our host that I meant no disrespect.  Our host seemed reassured.  A warm handshake followed, and he made me a cup of tea, a ritual emblematic of his hospitality.

    As I made to leave, Rewane said he hoped it would not take his aburo to bring me to the house again. “This is your home,” he added. “Feel free to visit or call me whenever you wish.”

    Much to my regret, I never availed myself of the offer.  Nor did I see him again.

     

  • CAN of cant

    CAN of cant

    CAN, the Christian Association of Nigeria, could easily have played Immanuel Kant, pushing the tenets of the faith as Cthe categorical imperative for salvation.

    But instead, CAN has embraced cant.  By that, it shuns the severe majesty of its faith; and waddles and waffles in empty controversy.

    Kant (1724-1804) was the German philosopher, whose famous “categorical imperative” was about the most sweeping, the most vigorous and the most robust in moral philosophy.

    To Kant, there is absolutely no cant; absolutely no waffling.  Man has no choice but to follow, as duty, the severe code to do good and shun evil.

    That moral duty is imperative.  It is the strict dictate of reason.

    Imagine CAN following this Kantian philosophy? It would push, as own initiative, the war against corruption with Christ-like zeal.  Instead, CAN is neither-nor, to the gravest moral crisis of this generation!

    Like Christ Himself, it would epitomize the straight-and-narrow.  But it pushes its democratic right to the wide-and-merry.

    The result? CAN hustles and bustles in the sewers, just to be seen to fight “Islamization”, real or phantom!

    The latest, in that quixotic quest, is the CAN fiery campaign against Sukkuk, the Islamic development bond; and its ferocious war against Islamic banking.

    How did CAN come to this sorry pass?  It is dross of carnal preferment, dating back to the Goodluck Jonathan years, when CAN President, Ayo Oritsejafor — somebody shout hallelluyah! — appeared not unlike that regime’s Rasputin.

    Remember Grogori Yefimovich Rasputin (1869-1916)?  He was the Russian self-proclaimed mystic, who had more than decent spiritual influence on the doomed family of Czar Nicholas II of imperial Russia, on account of his grip on Czarina Alexandra.  Rasputin was assassinated in 1916, aged 47.

    Save the Olusegun Obasanjo years, the Muslims had been in charge so long that the Christians, in any case under CAN President Oritsejafor grabbed, with two hands, the rare chance to corral high state influence.

    The politics of South-South solidarity, under a minority southern president, all put it together for Pastor Oritsejafor.  Before long, CAN’s influence was vice-like in the Jonathan court.

    But what CAN forgot was that the organized Muslim Umma themselves, under the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA), had also run themselves into a ditch, on the annulled 12 June 1993 presidential election.

    Again, the NSCIA tormentor-in-chief, at that great fall, was politics-induced cant.  This was spectacular because the chief dramatis personae, in that gripping, dirty drama, were fellow Muslims.

    MKO Abiola, a Muslim from Western Nigeria, was the victim-in-chief.  So was Baba Gana Kingibe, MKO’s running mate, another Muslim from the North East.

    Ibrahim Babangida, self-named “military president”, another Muslim, from North Central, was the “annuller-in-chief”.  Yet another Muslim, from the North West, the late Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, former No. 2 to Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, when he was military head of state (1976-1979), headed the rally to sustain the annulment.

    Yar’Adua caused his faction of the victorious Social Democratic Party (SDP), led by Tony Anenih, SDP national chairman, to conjure up the so-called Interim National Government (ING), pending the re-run of an election pundits back then declared was the fairest and freest ever in Nigerian history.

    The NSCIA President, Ibrahim Dasuki, then Sultan of Sokoto, also hee-hawed, instead of arming himself with the moral courage — Kant-speak, the categorical imperative of Islam — to proclaim good and condemn evil.

    Base ethnic solidarity, therefore, trumped the high ideals of Islam.  Muslim-on-Muslim injustice triumphed; ethnic fealty was supreme lord and master over fidelity to faith.

    Well, God would not be mocked — and most of those involved in that manoeuvre ended in grief.  What is more?  The illusion that the North had a near-spiritual hold on national power and leadership vanished — like a mirage in the desert.

    That is a warning of history to CAN, for in the name of Christianity, it treads a path to perdition, fanning inter-faith hatred along the way.

    That brings the matter back to the Sukkuk question, Islamic banking and allied matters.

    CAN’s constant ”Islamization” screech, under current president, the Baptist Supo Ayokunle, is another Islam-Christianity ding-dong to shape Nigeria in own images.  It has nothing spiritual to it.  It’s just holy cant to corner carnal influence.

    Even on that score, Christianity holds the edge.  Thanks to the colonizing British, governmental business, the schools system and uniform, the working week, routine rest days, and court procedures are clearly Judeo-Christian.

    Indeed, such is the total British (read Christian) stamp on the courts, with its wig-and-gown, that the Alkali, Sharia and other courts are portrayed by a section of the media as a near-savage bastion.

    On their own part, the Muslims (thanks to northern domination of the federal executive since independence) have somewhat projected Islam as the ruling faith.  A few scribbles of Arabic on the currency has underscored that.  Also, some Arabic scrawls, on some military insignia, also register early Muslim influence.  But that would appear because northern elements were the first the British drafted into the Nigerian Army.

    Still, to drag this influence ding-dong into the Sukkuk debate, as CAN is hysterically doing, is rather rich.

    When Rauf Aregbesola, the Osun governor, pioneered Sukkuk, as cheap instrument of developmental funding, a lobby went berserk with ludicrous allegations.  Yet, that was a classic example of thinking outside the box, for a resource-challenged state, to build infrastructure, grow its wealth and enhance its internally generated revenue (IGR).

    Now, the Federal Government has adopted such smart thinking, and the best CAN can offer is infantile whining over “Islamization”!

    Of course, there is always a trade-off — are we not all supposed to be wary of the Greek and his gifts?

    Even Christianity was validly charged, as the deceitful vehicle of European colonization!  Yet, warts and all, pristine Christianity made its social marks, in education and health, to retain its pull and lustre.

    Sure, the Sukkuk would win Islam a few souls, just because of its social capital.  So would Islamic banking, which shuns the usury in conventional banking — which by the way is heavily Westernized (read Christianized — if not by tenet, then by culture).

    Therefore, except CAN can prove Sukkuk-funded roads are Muslim–exclusive — and they are not, as the Osun case has shown — then its case is pathetic.

    But CAN can counter this “onslaught” by championing corresponding “Christian” developmental finances, and usury-free “Christian” banking.  That way, it would have matched the Muslims in social capital, and returned Christendom Nigeria to its pristine straight-and-narrow way.

    In Kant-speak, that is the categorical imperative of the Sukkuk challenge.

  • Rewane: 22 years later

    Rewane: 22 years later

    Friday, October 6, marked the 22nd anniversary of one of the most dastardly political murders of recent memory.

    Chief Alfred Ogbeyiwa Rewane, elder statesman, industrialist, philanthropist, and a pillar of the progressive community, was shot dead in his home on Oduduwa Crescent, in the more tranquil section of Ikeja GRA, in Lagos.

    For the previous five years and indeed starting from Muhammadu Buhari’s military regime and through the depredations of the Babangida years to the loathsome Sani Abacha, Rewane had been an incisive and outspoken critic of government.

    Those uniformed potentates sought at every chance to stamp themselves on the public consciousness as patriotic redeemers who had come to free Nigeria from a shameful past and lead it to a glorious future.

    Drawing copiously on Nigeria’s history, Rewane showed with facts and figures in editorial advertisements that what the men of the moment were trumpeting as progress was nothing of the sort, and was in some instances actually a regression.  He supplied  that vital link with the past, without which a nation is condemned to grope and founder.

    That fateful Friday, October 6, 1995, he was getting ready to leave for his Western House office in Lagos when a pick-up van marked with the logo of one of his many companies pulled up at the gate. Accustomed to such visits, the gatekeepers dutifully admitted the van and its occupants into the premises.

    These were no visitors but intruders with murder on their minds. Drawing their guns, they overpowered the security guards, locked up all the residents and headed for Rewane’s bedroom.  There, they shot him in the chest.  They waited some five minutes to be sure he was dead; then they drove off.

    In Ibadan, Chief Bola Ige was about to set out for Lagos for a meeting with Rewane

    scheduled for the late afternoon when his phone rang.  The caller told Ige tersely and with more than a hint of triumph that the meeting would no longer hold because “we have taken care of Rewane.”  That call was placed within 15 minutes of the gruesome intrusion into Rewane’s home.  The caller did not identify himself.

    This was no random killing.

    The bullet that felled Rewane was not the type you could buy off the shelf at a gun shop or from a street vendor.  It was, according to insider accounts, specially designed to dissolve in body tissue, leaving no residue and hence no trace of its manufacture.  Only secret service operatives or persons engaged in syndicated crime pack that kind of ordnance.

    The killers had demanded nothing from Rewane.  Not cash, of which he kept a huge pile in mint-fresh banknotes handy.  Not gold jewellery, of which he was very fond, and of which his wife and members of his household could have supplied a truck-full.   Not the key to his safe, which doubtless held priceless documents.

    Rewane was not only a major financier of NADECO, the umbrella organisation at the

    spearhead of the struggle to terminate military rule, he used his enormous personal wealth to give aid and comfort and sustenance to political activists whom the authorities had marked for ruin.  He refused to succumb to the fear that Abacha’s terror machine had loosed on the land. The only question was when that machine would strike at Rewane.

    So, this could not have been an “armed robbery.”

    In the hours following Rewane’s murder, the police willfully ignored these important clues. They did not even make the pretence of searching for his killers. To create the illusion of momentum in the investigation, they seized several members of Rewane’s domestic staff – some of them had worked for him for so long that they were virtually members of the family – plus some vagrants in the Ikeja area, and charged them with armed robbery and murder.

    Five of the eight would die in prison custody, awaiting trial.

    Testimony before the Oputa Commission of inquiry into human rights violations as well as depositions at the murder trials of some of the principal actors of the Abacha regime would show what it required little imagination to figure out all along: Rewane had been killed by agents of the Nigerian state.

    For 14 years, six judges and at least as many prosecutors and defence attorneys would partake, wittingly or unwittingly, in an unconscionable mockery of the judicial system remarkable even by Nigeria’s standards.

    Finally, in January 2011, some 15 years after their arraignment, charges against two of the surviving suspects, Lucky Igbinovia and Effiong Elemi Edu, were dismissed by the Lagos High Court, Justice Olusola Williams presiding.

    “It appears to me that all the Police did was to visit the scene of the crime, arrest the workers there and obtain statements from them,” the judge said.  The “confessional statement” on which the prosecution had rested its case was inadmissible, Justice Williams said, because the court was convinced that it was coerced.

    No forensic or any evidence of probative value other than the alleged confession was tendered by the prosecution.

    The other survivor, Elvis Irenuma, had been discharged and acquitted several years because the prosecution had failed to establish a case against him.

    And so today, 22 years later, Rewane’s killers are yet to be brought to justice.

    One of several commemorative newspaper editorial advertisements (Punch, October 6) placed on the occasion by his family is in a way a comment on the state of the nation that could well have been written by Rewane himself, and a dire prediction.

    Emblematic of the forthrightness for which the late elder statesman was known, it reads:

    “After twenty-two years of your supreme sacrifice , nothing seems to have changed.

    “True democracy seems to be eluding Nigeria.

    “Autocracy by force and Democracy for cash are two sides of the same coin.

    “Some of the conspirators of your assassination are still in the closet while others are paying the price installmentally.

    “There is a moral decadence of values and culture, with the highest and revered now a subject of ridicule.

    “Our ancestors will reject the sale of our heritage to the unworthy.

    “Your message is as relevant today as it was back then.”

    The reference to those who “are paying the price” of their treachery is particularly striking.

    It says to the repellent thug, swindler, racketeer and embezzler widely believed to have led the operation to murder Rewane:  Humiliating imprisonment was only the first installment of the punishment awaiting you.

    May the next installment not be long in coming.  As for his confederates, may they be smoked out of their dank closets in due season.

  • Kachikwu – Baru saga

    Kachikwu – Baru saga

    Days after, Nigerians are left to hazard wild guesses as to what transpired at the meeting between President Muhammadu Buhari and his Minister of State for Petroleum Resources Ibe Kachikwu last Friday over the latter’s letter in which he levelled allegations of grave misconduct against the Group Managing Director of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (GMD-NNPC), Maikanti Baru. We must admit to the strange ways of this presidency that a letter written by the minister since August did not get the President’s attention – not until it was leaked to the media last week. We surely have the President to thank for considering the contents at least weighty or sufficiently embarrassing to generate some action.  Never mind that the issues provoked are themselves a measure of how detached the chief steward is from his team and the government that he leads; or that it strikes at the heart of the charge that a cabal actually holds his government by the jugular – a charge that has unfortunately stuck; Nigerians should by now have a better appreciation of the character of the administration which, aside tardiness has since elevated intrigue to a directing principle of state policy.

    As for the issues raised by Kachikwu in his letter to the president, they are grave as they are disturbing. The minister complains of gross insubordination, subversion of rules, contempt for the rule of process and other sundry malfeasances against the GMD. He mentioned the $24 billion worth contracts said to have been made without the minister’s input or review by the NNPC board. No doubt, the coming days will be interesting as facts and ‘alternative facts’ are bandied around.

    For now, even if we grant that two big, somewhat irreconcilable egos are at play in the unfolding development, no less revealing is the high wire intrigues, the bad faith and the subterfuge also at play – something that has become the administration’s defining character. Whether it is Department of State Service (DSS) making the appointment of Ibrahim Magu difficult if not nigh impossible, or the justice ministry engaging the EFCC in needless turf wars, or even the executive secretary of the National Health Insurance Scheme openly challenging the authority of his supervising minister for daring to ask him to proceed on leave while being investigated for sundry financial infractions, what we see are daily manifestation of the degenerative disease of institutional  disorder being systematically nurtured by the so-called reformist administration of President Muhammadu Buhari. Agreed, our politicians may have proven to be an inventive lot; however, if Nigerians had expected an administration headed by a former army General to have a handle on something as simple as running a tidy administration, what we see are daily manifestations of crass indiscipline, opportunism, and cronyism that the politicians are often deemed to be guilty of.

    We must of course insist that the issues do not appear quite complicated despite the attempts by spin doctors to obfuscate them. Understandably, a lot of heads are already swooning over the funds said to be involved which of course informs some of the most unhelpful interpolations being made. In a sector where some smart alecs have been known to walk away with billions of dollars merely by conjuring sweetheart deals, Nigerians’ concerns would seem understandable considering that we are dealing with amounts far in excess of the 2017 budget and even more so at a time billions of dollars are being borrowed in their name supposedly to finance critical projects.

    For sure, no one is yet talking about missing funds; we are instead dealing with what is potentially a return to the ancien regime under which our institutions are suborned to private interests. Coming from an administration which promises to deploy a new broom to clean things up, Nigerians obviously have reasons to be worried.

    This newspaper has helped in no small measure to lay out the issues. As against the strict administrative cum bureaucratic legalese which the NNPC has deemed fit to put out, there are obviously serious questions requiring clarification by both the Presidency and the corporation.

    Let me start with the obvious – which is the status of the minister of state. One part of the narrative being put out is that the NNPC Act did not recognize the office of the minister of state. And so the theory goes that “the NNPC Act is explicit that the petroleum minister is the chairman of the NNPC board.” Of course, no one argues about who the petroleum minister is. The real issue is whether the actors can by some administrative subterfuge, declare the position of Kachikwu as minister of state and chairman of the NNPC board, redundant without keeping the appointing authority in the know. This is where the bits of the puzzle begin to fall into place.

    See the picture? The President is the de facto petroleum minister. To help him effectively run the sector, he appoints Kachikwu as minister of state and chairman of the NNPC board. The President also names other members, one of which notably, is the President’s Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari and then the GMD-NNPC, Maikanti Baru. The duo of Messrs Baru and Kyari are said to enjoy the confidence of the de facto petroleum minister. One works directly with the President; the other is said to nurse a grudge with Kachikwu for pushing him, earlier on, upstairs, if you like, into redundancy. Between the duo, Kachikwu’s fate would seem to be all but sealed. Could the duo have procured a parallel reporting line to the President while keeping Kachikwu in the dark?

    To imagine the joker:! ‘The Act establishing the NNPC stipulates that the chairman of the corporation’s board is the Minister of Petroleum Resources and NOT the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources’! The hierarchs of the NNPC also make the beautiful point that “the board of NNPC cannot approve contracts but they can review and give advice”.

    Really? The same statute says that makes clear that “Any contracts for a value beyond the financial limits of the NNPC Tenders Board will go via the Board to the Federal Executive Council (FEC) for approval”?

    By the way, it is worth remembering that Kachikwu, the man originally head-hunted by President Buhari to help clean the NNPC’s augean stables is from South-south; Baru, the man who succeeded him as GMD is from the North-east and Kyari –the President’s major domo is also from the North-east!  For a presidency already carrying a terrible baggage of ethnicity, the perception of unfair treatment seems to have stoked fresh round of debates about equity and equal treatment for our federation’s  constituent parts!

    Although, the minister did not give anything away as to what options he might consider in the circumstance, it seems unlikely that the management of the petroleum sector will remain the same.

    The big issue of course is the management of the industry. As chairman of the NNPC board, Kachikwu has deftly outlined the issues begging for answers. As far as he is concerned, none of the contracts in question came either before the board or the Federal Executive Council for consideration – as required by the NNPC statutes. The NNPC on its part argues that due process was duly complied with.

    Suffice to say that in one of the contentious contracts – the Crude Oil Term Contract (COTC)- valued at over $10bn – the NNPC admitted that it ‘was presented to the approving authority (Mr. President) for consideration and approval’. Which of course raises the begging question: Does the presidential approval vitiate the requirement for the consideration and approval of the Federal Executive Council as spelt out in the NNPC handbook?  

  • Ajasin legend

    Ajasin legend

    Twenty years ago, Michael Adekunle Ajasin (1908-1997) died.

    Twenty years later, a yearly conference, in his name, has debuted; to be alternated between the University of Ibadan (UI) and Adekunle Ajasin Univeristy, Akungba-Akoko (AAU).  The first, of this conference, just held at UI, from October 3 to 4.

    Chief Ajasin was, pre-1st Republic, the primal brain behind Western Region’s epochal free primary education policy; 2nd Republic governor of old Ondo State (now Ondo and Ekiti states); and local chair of the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), to revalidate MKO Abiola’s annulled presidential mandate.

    Thus, across three epochs — pre-independence/1st Republic (1955-1966), the 2nd Republic civilian interregnum (1979-1983), and virulent military rule, under the duo of Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha (1985-1999, though Ajasin died in 1997), he stood by his sterling beliefs.

    These are developmental politics via free education; sane governance, birthing total service, unstinted sacrifice, and unimpeachable integrity; and the sanctity of the vote.

    He fought — and won — the Akin Omoboriowo Ondo gubernatorial heist of 1983.  He died fighting the Abiola presidential robbery of 1993.

    Indeed, in everything good, principled and noble, Chief Ajasin was a man of all seasons.

    But there is another man of all seasons, in Nigeria’s wide and merry way: two-time elected president and former military ruler, Olusegun Obasanjo.

    In the 20 years after Ajasin, Chief Obasanjo has done two presidential terms (1999-2007), emerged the first to rule Nigeria as a junta head and elected president, and erected the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL), of suspect moral progeny.

    On the literary plane, Ajasin was far less fecund, having to his quiet name, the rather deep Ajasin Memoirs and Memories, an autobiography, first published after his death in 2003.

    Compare that with Obasanjo’s slew of “My-s”: My Command, Not My Will, My Watch, et al, not to talk of This Animal Called Man, you could easily figure out who is the more fecund.

    Still, while Ajasin, in his quiet, candid way, espoused his life philosophy and how it fired his rich public service ethos, Obasanjo pushed his myriad of “My-s” to excoriate real or imagined foes, daft enough to want to share the spotlight.  Baba Iyabo shares his glory with nobody!

    Between Ajasin and Obasanjo, there are more parallels yet.

    Ajasin was primal brain behind the Obafemi Awolowo Western Region free primary education policy, that thrust the West ahead of other parts of Federal Nigeria.

    Obasanjo, on the other hand, as military head of state, introduced nationwide, the Universal Primary Education (UPE) policy; and, as elected president, the Universal Basic Education (UBE), covering the first nine years of formal education.

    On character building, vis-a-viz responsible citizenship, Ajasin and Obasanjo approached this task in their different ways.

    Ajasin as Awo, his friend and ideological soul mate in unrepentant social democracy (progressive politics, in Nigerian lingo), believed in man as the centre of development.  Pre-politics, Ajasin, as a teacher, used the classroom to unleash, in the lucky tender minds under his charge, his solid personal examples of honesty, integrity, discipline, sacrifice, service, community value and hard work.

    Obasanjo,  perhaps because of his military training, and conservative temper, adopted a more mechanistic approach.  As military head of state, he changed the National Anthem and introduced a National Pledge to boot.  He also brought back the comatose Nigerian National Honours, just to reward responsible citizenship.

    Yet, for all Obasanjo’s striving, the best he could bequeath Nigeria, after his first coming, was a corrupt civilian order, that buckled in just four years and three months, in the sorry 2nd Republic (1979-1983).

    Muhammadu Buhari was the cleansing rod, back then.  But his regime hall-marked the dawn of the grimmest era of Nigeria’s military rule, which Babangida and Abacha drove to the very sewers.

    In his second coming?  His best legacy, after two presidential terms and two successors, in who he had a rather heavy hand, is another cesspool of sleaze, though he insists on his personal probity.  Again, Muhammadu Buhari, now as elected president, is the fall guy to clean up the Obasanjo era dirt!

    But on Obasanjo’s personal probity, no one can say no: the man is no convict of sleaze.  Yet, no one can say yes either, for it is his golden word against others’ wooden — these others, to be sure, no best friends of his.

    Still, Obasanjo sounds too eerily like the Soyinka tiger (with all due respect to our own WS), that proclaims his own tigeritude!  And from his ready torrents, the former president appears self-condemned to shrieking for attention, as long as he lives; and after that, maybe his OOPL would mouth his mechanical legacies.

    Contrast this to Ajasin, absolutely under no such pressure.  In life, he was taciturn as Obasanjo is boisterous.  In death, even quieter.  Nevertheless, he earned his legend in spectacular fashion.

    Proof?  The Ajasin Conference, organized by the Ajasin Foundation, in conjunction with UI’s Department of Arts and Social Science Education and the Adekunle Ajasin University (AAU), Akungba-Akoko’s Department of Arts Education.

    The chairman of the first day, Prof. Eyitope Ogunbodede, vice chancellor of the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, was Ajasin’s student at Owo High School, a 1975 product who, in his words, “retired with Papa” that year, from the school in which Ajasin was proprietor-principal.

    Ajasin didn’t name AAU after himself.  It was a grateful people who did — and that, after his death.

    UI’s Prof. Clement Kolawole, one of the brains behind the conference, was Ajasin’s chief typist when he was chairman of Owo Local Government till 1978.  By 1988, he with his AAU counterpart, Prof (Mrs) Nireti Duyilemi, Dean, Faculty of Education, AAU, Akungba, were course mates at AAU.  Both are personal testimonies and proud products of the Ajasin government’s free education policy.

    The old Yoruba intelligentsia rose to honour one of their own: Prof. Banji Akintoye, ace historian, with his brilliant lecture in Ajasin’s memory; Prof. Emanuel Babajide Lucas, retired UI professor of Mechanical Engineering,  Davidson A. Adeniyi, first chartered accountant in Imeri, Ondo State, even Afenifere chieftain, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, who — Yoruba political pathosis! — even dismissed a contributor, at one of the close sessions, as a member of the “Afenifere Rebel Group” (read Afenifere Renewal Group, ARG)!

    Also, there were Honourable Wale Oshun, ARG chairman, as reticent, soft-spoken but granite-principled as Papa Ajasin himself, Chief Ayo Afolabi and Prof. Adebayo Williams, prodigious academic-in-exile and heavyweight columnist of The Nation.

    Spice these personages with the young Turks — undergraduates, fresh graduates and post-graduate students that graced the occasion, and you’d understand true legacy.  Yet, Ajasin needed no bully commentaries or a gubernatorial shrine to push his case!

    That, is the making of true legacy.  And Nigeria, under Muhammadu Buhari, plodding the bog back to the straight-and-narrow, from the ruinous wide-and-merry, would do well to study the Ajasin essence — conquering self, mastering the non-material and dissolving the ‘I’ in the collective.

    That earned Ajasin his legend.  It may yet bale Nigeria out of its current moral woods!

  • Salami: An epic injustice revisited

    Salami: An epic injustice revisited

    When the National Judicial Council (NJC) recommended in May 2012 that the suspended president of the Court of Appeal, Justice Ayo Isa Salami, be reinstated, not a few of those who  had followed the matter closely felt that the Council was offering President Goodluck Jonathan            a decent way to end one of the ugliest episodes in Nigeria’s judicial history.

    That the recommendation bore the imprint of two of the nation’s most distinguished jurists  who stood at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum made the recommendation all the more resonant.

    If the liberal Justice Kayode Eso, judge of the Supreme Court, since deceased, and the conservative senior attorney and former Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of                              the Federation, Chief Richard Akinjide (SAN), could sign off on the document along with the majority, it would seem that the Council had decided to take politics out of the matter and had considered it purely on its legal merit.

    The NJC, I thought, had thereby placed in President Goodluck Jonathan’s hands a powerful weapon to rein in the hawks in the PDP who would settle for nothing less than Justice Salami’s scalp because his Court stripped them of their stolen gubernatorial trophies in Osun and Ondo and restored the people’s mandate to those who had earned it at the polls.

    I was hoping that Dr Jonathan would seize the opportunity to play statesman rather than party chieftain.  And when he was reported to be “studying” the recommendation, I thought he was trying to find a way of appeasing the hawks, aforementioned.

    Dr Jonathan had something else in mind.  He ran down the clock on Justice Salami, calculating that the books would be closed on the matter once the jurist reached the mandatory retirement age of 70 years.

    And so, two years after being consigned to judicial purgatory, Justice Salami served notice of retirement, effective October 15, 2013, victim  of an epic injustice that Dr Jonathan could and indeed should have ended.

    Justice Salami’s ordeal began, as I once recalled in this space, when he presided over the sitting  of the Court of Appeal that voided the purported election of the PDP candidate, Engineer Segun Oni, in the 2007 Ekiti gubernatorial election and declared Dr Kayode Fayemi of the ACN winner.

    The election was marred by fraud on a staggering scale.  In a court-ordered partial re-run  to ascertain the true voice of the people, the PDP, the election umpire INEC, Maurice Iwu presiding, and the police, executed a more brazen heist that a 3-2 majority of the Election Petitions Tribunal nevertheless consecrated with transparent sophistry.

    The Court of Appeal reversed, and Justice Salami became a marked man.

    Five weeks later, the Salami Court, Justice Clara Ogunbiyi presiding, vacated the stolen mandate under which yet another PDP candidate, Prince Olagunsoye Oyinlola, had governed Osun for three years and seven months–or seven years and seven months if one believes, as one now positively must — that Oyinlola and the PDP never won the 2003 election, on the basis of which    he had served a four-year term.

    As in Ekiti, the Osun poll was vitiated by massive rigging and violence.  The ACN candidate, Engineer Rauf Aregbesola, headed to the Elections Petition Tribunal for review and redress.  Obtaining neither, he took his case to a superior body, which held that the verdict of the court  below amounted to a miscarriage of justice and ordered that the petition be heard de novo.

    The new tribunal rejected Aregbesola’s petition in a “unanimous” judgment signed by four of  the five judges.  The text was festooned with alterations and interpolations that called the integrity of the process into question.

    In finding for Aregbesola, Justice Ogunbiyi wrote for a unanimous Court of Appeal that the Tribunal was “lackadaisical” in its handling of the case, that it dismissed vital evidence as “mere allegations”; that it set at nought compelling forensic evidence; that it wantonly misrepresented evidence of key witnesses; in sum, that the Tribunal’s conduct was “a travesty, and a mockery”   of the judicial process.

    That verdict sealed Justice Salami’s doom.  He would have to be taken out of the Court of Appeal, the terminus for all election petitions except those arising from the election of President.

    First they offered to promote him to justice of the Supreme Court.  He demurred.

    Several years earlier, when there was a vacancy on the Court, he had declined to apply for the position.

    Then, they accused him, first in whispers and subsequently in unsigned newspaper advertorials of all manner of misconduct, including consorting with attorneys of parties to the case he was handling.  Leading the charge was Senator (as he then was) Iyiola Omisore who, despite his apparent conversion to probity and propriety, nevertheless remained a principal suspect in the murder of the former Federal Minister of Justice and Attorney-General, Chief Bola Ige.

    Then there was talk of giving Justice Salami a “soft landing” if only he would just quit.

    Why would they contemplate, much less make such offers to a judge they claimed was tainted irredeemably?  Why would they reward him with a promotion to the Supreme Court?  Why would they offer him a “soft landing”?  Why not make a public example of him?

    If you had the facts on your side, if you were serious about cleansing the judiciary, if you were truly desirous of prosecuting a Transformation Agenda in which fighting corruption was a core element, why would you pass up such a great opportunity to nail the judge?

    But Justice Salami’s saga was never about law.  It was about politics through and through,  politics in its rawest form.

    A pending judgment in the disputed gubernatorial election result in Sokoto before the Salami Court would provide the final pretext for caging Justice Salami and ultimately terminating his career. The judgment could overturn many a political applecart, and the authorities were taking no chances.

    According to Justice Salami, the sitting Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Aloysius Katsina-Alu, requested that the judgment be withheld, for political reasons.  Justice Salami cited Justice Dahiru Musdapher, of the Supreme Court, as a witness to this encounter.

    Justice Katsina-Alu said he had merely informed Justice Salami that the judgment had been leaked, and that it might be wise to put off issuing it.  But at the material time, the judgment  had not been leaked.  It turned out that documents alleging a leakage did not surface for at least another week.

    Justice Musdapher whom Justice Salami had cited as witness would only say with diplomatic tact that he could not recall the occasion.  Not categorically that the encounter never happened; merely that he had no recollection of it.

    For all practical purposes, that was the end of Justice Salami’s career.  Those determined to teach him a lesson wove Justice Musdapher’s diplomatic answer into a charge of perjury, with Chief Justice Katsina-Alu as accuser and prosecutor and witness and judge while in office and even after he retired.

    Not even the NJC could save Justice Salami from their vengeful wrath those who had a vested interest in “arresting” the pending judgment of the Court of Appeal.

    Justice Salami left the scene bruised and battered, and not entirely on his own terms.   But his head was unbowed.  He refused to submit to blackmail and blandishment.  While they hurled every weapon in their arsenal of dirty tricks at him, he sought vindication through the law.

    A vindication of sorts came last week.   The NJC named Justice Salami to head the Crime Cases Trial Monitoring Committee, charged to fast-track corruption trials and free them from the delays and detours, the twists and turns contrived by lawyers and judges alike.

    Something tells me that posterity will remember Justice Salami more kindly than those who, when presented with a chance to end an epic injustice, chose to perpetuate it.

  • Restructuring and states’ fiscal crisis

    To the club of governors currently chaffing under the burden of their workers’ wages and salaries, the modest resurgence of crude prices should offer cold comfort of some sorts. That the Brent – finally hit $58.38 a barrel last week should be good music to the ears of the club of insolvent governors; not least the managers of the piggy bank called Excess Crude Account: a furlough from the troubling wintry season which would have been inconceivable only a few months back has suddenly become a distinct possibility.

    It’s still a long way out of the winter though. Two bailouts and two tranches of Paris Club largess to boot, there are, as yet no signs, that the interventions by the federal government have made appreciable dent on the precarious financial situation in the states. Only two weeks back, NLC President Ayuba Wabba threatened to name and shame governors, who, he accused of refusing to pay complete salaries to workers, in spite of the bailout funds. Never mind, he listed 10 states as being particularly guilty, and then went on to name the six states of Imo, Bayelsa, Ondo, Ekiti, Benue and Kogi as the most terrible of the lot. Kogi, with 40 per cent of workers paid up to date and 25 per cent not paid for between eight and 21 months takes the cake as the worst among the worst.

    To the extent that none of the affected states has put any sustainable structure in place to guarantee their exit from the crisis which attenuated the oil price slump, it seems reasonable to expect the situation to endure a while longer – in which case, another cycle of bailout would appear as not entirely, foreclosed. In other words, I see the worst affected states, pushed to the wall, seeking another tranche of Paris Club loan refunds in no distant time – until things, hopefully, normalise!

    Let’s be clear about the nature of the current problem. The states have, rightly in my view, been accused of not doing enough to rebalance their finances in the wake of the crisis. Much has been said on the need for them to drain their swamps – to borrow the cliché from Donald Trump – given the level of profligacy at that level of government. We do know about the bloated payrolls and the subterfuge going on in many states of the federation in the guise of staff verification – exercises more often than not designed by their Excellencies to buy time as against the stated objective of payroll clean up.

    Could the states have fared better in the circumstance? That seems debatable. Earlier on, I wrote about the governors as being endangered. Now let me stretch the argument a bit further:  while the attempts by the governors to draw attention to the cold realism of financial arithmetic underlying their predicament may have failed to impress many; yet, it seems to me that the arithmetic must be located at the very heart of the current fiscal crisis threatening to overwhelm them. Again, I am reminded that while all eyes are on the governors to explain how their state’s shares of the bailout and Paris Club refund were spent, with many of the governors’ critics having long concluded that the one-off intervention fund should actually offer a permanent elixir to the fiscal crisis facing their states, not very many Nigerians are minded to ask where the funds that the federal government has found necessary to disburse are coming from. Most certainly, it cannot be from the whopping 52 percent it takes from the distributable pool, which are expectedly, captured in the annual budgets. Hard to imagine a piggy bank somewhere from where the federal government which insists on playing the baseless donor role, can draw the kind of funds being deployed to bail out the states!

    Now, the suggestion that Nigerians are before now, oblivious of the fiscal waywardness of the federal government is certainly not true. The difference is the government currently striving to put things on the table which of course is the esence of the current debate. Thanks to the operations of the Treasury Single Account (TSA), and the streamlining of the budgetary process by the Buhari administration, we are suddenly finding out about agencies of the federal government running budgets outside of the contemplation of the law. There were before now, agencies whose annual budgets, although exceeded three or four states combined – were never brought under the normal appropriation process. And now that some agencies federal government are suddenly remitting their operating surpluses into the federation account, we are supposed to be in glee over the dawn of a new era.

    And so I look at the texture of the current debates on restructuring and observe a lot of exertions on geography and ethnography of the concept as against what should ordinarily be a simple and deliberate move to evolve a federation that is functional and truly productive. Yes, we know that the federal government is inept, wasteful and dysfunctional; that Abuja needs to be drained of the swamp (that expression again!). For a bureaucracy so evidently removed from the grind of our day to day experiences of citizens, and where the kind of stealing that are daily reported goes on, I would argue that it not only needs a fraction of what it current gets to get its jobs done, some of its organs truly needs to be taken out. The problem is that some actually imagine that we require a high-octane constitutional affair and all the works to effect changes that are so easily achievable even under the current constitutional strictures.

    As my colleague Segun Ayobolu brilliantly argued in his column on Saturday, we do not require a new conference to effect changes to the lopsided fiscal architecture that puts the states in such terrible disadvantage. And so he puts it aptly: “The 1999 constitution makes provision for a continuous revision of the revenue allocation mechanism every five years obviously to take account of changing dynamics and circumstances. If the political actors refuse to continuously adjust the revenue allocation formula  as constitutionally stipulated and the electorate is impotent to elect into office those who will do so, is the constitution to blame?”

    Let me close by saying that more funds in the states isn’t just good politics but sound economics. The question is – how do you get the funds through when the federal government while keeping a disproportionate share of the common pool also insists on putting shackles on the feet of states? Over to you – our Abuja exports!

  • October 1 

    At 57, this year’s October 1,  National Day 2017, was fated to enter and exit with minimum fuss.

    Nigeria’s Golden Jubilee (though without much gold to show) was seven years past. The Diamond Jubilee (with a promise of true diamond to come?) is still three years away.

    Yet, some maladies came to blow away that anonymity, replacing it with raw fear — a deja vu of horrors once endured?

    It all started with the Nnamdi Kanu Biafra advocacy, which not only set the whole of the South East on virtual fire, but also sentenced other areas to an emotive tinder.

    Then came the baleful riposte, from some Arewa “youths”; who growled that should the Indigenous People Of Biafra (IPOB) be serious with its secessionist threat, then the Igbo, living and earning their living in the North, must quit that region by October 1 — or else!

    That raised the bogey, of a possible 50-yearly bloodbath — 1967, 2017, 2067? — while Nigerians grapple with Nigeria’s unending crisis of nationhood.

    Well, October 1 has come and gone; and the ballyhooed thunder of slaughter has all but stilled!  But could it be another Ides of March and the Julius Caesar tragedy?

    The Ides of March is come, the intrepid Caesar faced down his prophet of doom.  Ay, countered the other, but it’s not gone.  In truth, before the Ides of March eclipsed, Caesar himself was history!

    For starters, Nnamdi Kanu’s IPOB has, in Achebe-speak, run itself lame before the real dance began.  Kanu himself has vanished, a cheap fugitive from the law, though there is some infantile propaganda, as to his living — or dying.

    Still, given that the IPOB campaign was driven by the impassioned orchestration of Igbo “marginalization”, it is interesting that the Anglophone Cameroon issue is flaring at about the same time.

    Remember the 1961 plebiscite, in which the Anglophone south-western flank of Cameroon voted to join the Francophone majority to the east and north, while the northern tract of the same English-administered territory opted to stay, as Nigeria’s Sardauna Province?

    Why these southern Cameroonians decided for a new country was partly the ominous political crisis, in the new Nigeria, less than one year after independence.  But the local and more pressing decider was the charge of “domination” by the then Eastern Region majority — the Igbo.

    Chinua Achebe it was who, among the many Igbo aphorisms in his works, said a man that, for donkey years, ran away from a certain ailment, yet ended up dying the same death, had simply lost his care.  Anglophone Cameroon fled from feared Igbo domination in Nigeria.  Now, it is crying blue murder, under alleged domination by Francophone Cameroon!

    Ironically, the same Igbo would-be dominators of yore are themselves howling “marginalization” in a Nigeria that just turned 57, even after a futile violent attempt at secession (1967-1970).

    Now, what is happening?  Some political karma at play?  Or just the spectre of unrelieved domination, that turns everything a fevered nightmare of exclusive “Igbo marginalization”?  Mere analytic projections, crying for more definitive researches!

    Still, President Muhammadu Buhari’s Independence Day speech sharp rebuke of Igbo elders, who should have cautioned Kanu, was spot on.  If angry youths can work themselves into a lather that knows no history, elders cannot permit themselves that ruinous luxury.

    Well, with the callow Kanu running himself out of town, the Nigerian national question is resolved?  Hell, no!

    Indeed, the South East excitement, making October 1 loom as some sure Armageddon to come, exposed the stark fault lines — at least among the pigeon-holing elite, jousting for political gravy, but never shy of using their fellow ethnics as tragically disposable battering rams.

    Take the North.  Faced with the rather irascible IPOB taunts, the Arewa political elite played the Nigerian-unity-isn’t-negotiable card.  Yet, that’s another illusion, if not outright delusion.

    Nigerian unity — or otherwise — would have to come from the people themselves, not from some self-appointed champions, living up to the old cynical quip: patriotism is the last bastion of the scoundrel.

    Still, you could hardly fault President Buhari’s hardline stance.  He wasn’t elected to dismember Nigeria.  He was elected to improve it as an entity.

    Having admitted that, however, there often is a gulf between frozen law and living reality.  De jure, Nigeria is one and ought to be united and strong.  But de facto, it is hardly so.

    The National Day anniversary thus offers another window for serious thinking to turn Nigeria, warts and all, into that dream country it is capable of being, if only everyone would work hard at it.

    That is why the North must drop its instinctive opposition to re-working the federation to a more workable, productive and prosperous one, away from the present centralist desert that delivers stupendous poverty from stupendous wealth.

    In return, proponents of “restructuring”, must cease serving it as some anti-North comeuppance; for that region’s past excesses.  If the country is successfully reworked, it would be win-win for all — and the long-suffering northern masses would perhaps be the greatest beneficiaries.

    That brings the matter to the grand “restructuring” and “true federalism” barons of the South West.  Since 1949 when, with Path to Nigerian Freedom, the immortal Obafemi Awolowo started his federalism push, Nigeria’s West had always been champions of re-federalization for development.

    Yet, when the opportunities at a rare consensus came calling, what some Yoruba elders, former young Turks under Awo, offered was mere dross.

    While some were busy pointing at real or imagined “Yoruba enemies”, others were goading IPOB on, promising a Yoruba support they lacked the capacity to deliver.  Yet others, poor young romantics, spurred by these elders’ open show of ethnic supremacy, foamed in the mouth, proclaiming the Paradise Republic of Oduduwa.  What hubris!

    The main dampener, to the near-consensus over restructuring, is the eminent bad faith, on which horse it galloped into town.  It all started with the fad to hate and demonize the “Hausa-Fulani”, just because a certain Muhammadu Buhari was president.

    Then, to the South West progressive grandees, flashing their Awo franchise as Geoffery Chaucer’s Pardoner would, in Canterbury Tales, flash his papal pardon, hot, fresh and smoking from Rome, it was additional gall, that a certain Bola Ahmed Tinubu, midwifed the Buhari coalition!

    Still despite this human dross, the Nigerian government should seriously address re-federalizing towards a productive Nigeria.  That should be the principal message from National Day 2017, after the aborted thunder and fury.

  • IPOB and South-east governors

    Earlier in the week, a friend had posted on his Facebook page his reading of the no contest between the bunch of stick-wielding IPOB militia and the Nigerian Army. In the decidedly a one-sided narrative of what he would acknowledge as a David versus Goliath mismatch, the army was cast as the lone aggressor, the clash between the modestly armed youth and a well kitted army is presented as a heroic new normal in the quest for self determination.

    The daily spectacle of quasi military parades by IPOB and its leadership meant nothing, the buildup and priming of the obviously misguided youths for an inevitable showdown was supposed to be fair agitation as in war. The images of the Biafra Secret Service, the Lion Brigade and other paramilitary assemblages counted for nothing. Add those to the threats to burn down the zoo; the order by Nnamdi Kanu to his equally unhinged supporters to kill anyone who dared to come near to take him in.

    Juxtapose these with the venomous frothing which has gone on the for years on Radio Biafra against the inhabitants of his Nigerian zoo, the ethnic and religious baiting, the delusions which bordered on the schizophrenia the climax of which was the threat and overt mobilization to stop the election in Anambra; all of these were deemed to be cowboy affairs – and, ostensibly for some – supposedly more tolerable of the countless moral equivalences symptomatic of the many dysfunctions of our diseased polity!

    I beg to differ. Understandably, a lot has been made of the unbridled militarization of the civil space as evidenced by Operation Python Dance and its many hybrids across the Nigerian federation. I would of course agree that the situation is deplorable as it is. It does not matter whether it is Operation Crocodile Smile in the South-south and parts of South-west, Operation Harbin Kunama II in the North-west and parts of the North-Central, aberration is the word. I will argue that the developments are merely a window into the grave distortions that have made our federation experience such a nightmare – a topic for another day.

    The psych-op deployed against the IPOB leader is however a different kettle of fish. The one, although by far inexcusable, is tolerated because the Nigerian state failed in the duty to equip the Nigeria Police; the other, a necessary measure in the face of direct and sustained affront to the territorial integrity of the Nigerian state by a group whose declared mission is to break up the country.

    Conflating the military show of force against bandits, kidnappers and murderous Fulani herdsmen with the psychological operation against the secessionist band in the circumstance would seem plain cheap and opportunistic!  Those who see the army’s so-called ‘provocation’ in Kanu’s neighbourhood as anything more than a signal warning to a putative foe and so indulge in the fancy semantics and dubious legalese about IPOB being ‘non-violent’ only because it has not opened up its armoury for review or formally commissioned its fighting brigades are entitled to their delusions. As the Yoruba is wont to say – you do not wait for the stubborn gouge your eye; you take steps to remove it from a safe distance!

    One does not have to be an authority on military psychology to understand why the army would not take kindly to the threat that Kanu and his IPOB have come to represent; perhaps only in the Kanu’s vacuous universe of thoughtless followers could that kind of scenario be contemplated.  This is perhaps what the army set out to prove. It certainly “helped” that Nnamdi Kanu and his IPOB, jointly and severely, crossed innumerable treasonable red lines. Even at that, the timing of the ‘confrontation’ would seem a matter of operational convenience – coming few days before the September 15 kick-off of Operation Python Dance.

    Where do we go from here? At this stage, the answer is hard to hazard. One thing seems clear though:  things will never remain the same for IPOB and its leader Nnamdi Kanu. In the first place, the operational symbolism of the psych-op apart, the action by the military has somewhat demystified the IPOB leader; for now, it appears to have created a dramatic effect of enabling the constitutional authorities regain the initiative –assisting the South-east governors to pull the chestnut out of their fire. With IPOB proscribed by the South-east governors and the federal government going as far as declaring IPOB a terrorist organisation, there is perhaps now a remote possibility of a more productive discourse if not engagement – among and between different regions – on the contending issues at the heart of the crisis of our nationhood. By hurling all manners of invectives against other ethnic groups, Kanu and his co-travellers would appear to have foreclosed that prospect or possibility in his pet Biafra project.  Apart being tragic in the circumstance in which the nation currently finds itself, it is, as current developments seems to dictate, proving to be fatal to his Biafra quest.

    Now, I do not by any means underrate the capacity of the group for mischief; a lot would of course depend on well the Buhari administration is able to respond appropriately in the coming months. However, it does seem highly likely that the world will, going forward, insist on measuring the atavism of the group against its latter-day pretensions of being non violent. For the South-east leadership many of whom had been thoroughly embarrassed by the antics of the group, including those browbeaten into silence, (I am not talking about closet IPOB diehards who obviously see the appeasement of Kanu as the only way out), it seems about the best of times to step out to offer contributions.

    At the moment, the buzz word is restructuring. Like I observed sometime ago on this page: “while most of us – in some form or the other – somewhat agree that Nigeria, in its present form, is not only a political, but also an administrative, nightmare. That whereas Frederick Lugard and company may have designed it to secure maximum benefits for the colonial authorities, the structure has neither served to integrate the people nor fostered development; and that while the in-built dissonance is itself potentially fraught with challenges, our situation has been exacerbated by the crisis of governance that has dogged her since independence…”

    My warning then bears relevance even today: we must be wary of the current champions of unbridled ethnic nationalism. Yes, a new architecture of governance is desirable; in fact, it has become imperative in the circumstance to remove the suffocating hands of the centre from the states to allow them to be more productive. Nothing is to be gained by the secessionist cry as championed by IPOB.

  • When names migrate

    When names migrate

    This piece is a foray into onomastics – the study of names.

    When I arrived in the United States in the mid-70s, I was excited to find that one of the more notable female performing artistes was called Lola Falana.  Though accented differently and pronounced differently, the name had the familiar ring of the home I had just left.  It could well have belonged to your old classmate, a colleague at work, or the young woman who lived down the street in your Surulere neighbourhood, in Lagos.

    That it was rendered as Lólá Fàlànà and not Lólá Fáláná mattered not in the least.  Americans are notorious for mangling foreign names anyway.   I have had a dickens of a job getting them to desist from pronouncing my last name as if it were and English word.  It is even worse when I use the initial of my first name, followed by a period, in front of my surname.

    Invariably, the period gets transformed into an apostrophe, and the whole arrangement comes across as O’Dare.

    “Do I look Irish?” I would quip.   That usually dissolves the testiness of such moments.

    To return to Falana:  However you rendered that name, the person answering to it had to be an expatriate Nigerian, or a descendant of a person of Nigerian extraction a generation or two removed, perhaps.

    To my disappointment, the well-known singer turned out to be nothing of the kind.  Lólá, it turned out was the shortened form of Lóletha, a variant of Lólita.  Remember Vladimir Nabokov’s classic novel of that title?  The surname is Spanish.  The compatriot I thought I had found was in fact Afro-Cuban.

    Or maybe she descended from Nigerian parentage after all, going back to the time of that pernicious traffick of Africans across the Atlantic into enslavement in the so-called New World, and over the centuries, the surname morphed into its contemporary Spanish pronunciation.

    One of these days, someone bearing that name will out of curiosity trace his or lineage by DNA and discover that he or she has Nigerian roots, and on further investigation learn that the lineage is alive and thriving.

    So, Femi Falana (SAN) don’t be surprised if you get a call from the United States or Cuba from someone announcing that he or she is your relation going back half a millennium.  Don’t reflexively dismiss it as a scam.

    My excitement on encountering George Pataki shortly thereafter was even more stirring.  Again, though pronounced differently (Pátákì), it resonated powerfully. Back home, pàtàkì means important, significant, consequential.  The fellow was nothing if not consequential: He was the Governor of the State of New York, no less.  Clearly, he was living up to the name.

    My excitement dipped sharply when I saw his picture.    He is as Caucasian as they come, and of Hellenic heritage.  It would be carrying speculation too far to even think that there lurked somewhere in his DNA some genes suggestive of Yoruba descent.

    But again, maybe not.  Is it not recorded that, on encountering Ori Olokun, that masterpiece of Ife bronze casting and other artifacts, the German ethnographer Leo Frobenius proclaimed to the world  in 1911 that he had found the lost ancient territory of Atlantis conjured up by Plato.  For only in that provenance and its famed civilisation could works of such exquisite beauty have been wrought, Frobenius declared.

    Is it beyond the realm of possibility, then, that our pàtàkì and their Pátákì were forged in the intermingling between ancient Ife and Atlantis?   Stranger things have happened.

    The case of the 32nd President of the United States is no less intriguing.  The D in his famous initials FDR stands for Delano.  They render it as Dèlánó, but whether you contemplate it forward or backward or sideways or up or down, it is our own Délánò, give or take one vowel inflection.

    Personally, I will not be surprised that a connection exists between Franklin D. Roosevelt or a forebear, and the famous Delano family of Abeokuta.  After all, in keeping with the evocative meaning of the name in these parts, FDR cleared the path that got the United States out of the Depression and set it on the course to great prosperity.  That was a family tradition, for his cousin Teddy Roosevelt who preceded him in that high office by 32 years, was also a trailblazer.

    Do not be blown off course by the fact that Delano is a middle name for the one and a surname for the other.  After all, the difference between a middle name and a surname is the placement.  Besides, middle names morph into surnames and surnames morph into middle names, so that one person’s middle name is another person’s surname.

    The only surprise here is that no attempt has been made to establish a connection beyond mere speculation   Over to the Delano family, and the Egba Descendants Union.

    Whenever the name of the multiple award-winning contemporary performing artiste Adele comes up, I think back to the Oba of Lagos, Adeniji Adele, who reigned from 1949 through 1964, and to the eminent political scientist, Professor Adele Jinadu.

    Isn’t there a connection here waiting to be unlocked? Is it not our Adélè that has in pronunciation been stripped of one precious syllable in its migration across the seas and thus rendered far less cadenced?

    A young man of vast scholarly promise called my attention the other day to Babington, the middle name of the famous historian and essayist Thomas Macaulay, not to be confused with the eponymous father of our own Herbert Heelas Macaulay, the Wizard of Kirsten Hall.

    His working hypothesis is that the name emerged from Bababimtan, which had migrated across the Atlantic to Britain.  The natives liked it, adopted it and domesticated it, in the process translating it to the more euphonic Babington.

    According to the best authorities, the young man is headed for a major breakthrough in the field of International Intercultural Studies.

    The first time I heard of the Mayo Brothers who established the world-famous Mayo Clinics, I shook my head in lament.  Going by their name, the brothers have got to be of Nigerian descent.  They may inflect their name to rhyme with Méyó, but that cannot conceal or erase their Nigerian origin, where the family name must have been Máyò.

    Can’t we latch on this strong connection to get them to establish a world-class medical facility in Nigeria in grateful acknowledgement of their roots?

    Over to the energetic and resourceful Lai Mohammed, Minister of Information and Culture.