The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Osun: threat to a new order

    Osun: threat to a new order

    An Osun, it is a birth pang of sorts.  An old order is dying — and frankly, no sane mind would mourn its passage.

    But a new order is struggling to be born.  Again, until it is delivered, safe, healthy and strong, no sane mind can afford to be sanguine.

    It’s a dramatic juncture of two extreme possibilities: either to consolidate the emerging era of conscious safety nets, by a compassionate state, to shield the most vulnerable; or take a tragic roll-back into the prebendal past, where state resources were captive to the few fat cats in government — and their cronies.

    All that is playing out in the make-good senatorial election, billed for July 8.  It is to replace the late Senator Isiaka Adeleke, aka Serubawon, the first elected governor of Osun and two-time senator of the Federal Republic.

    Interestingly, in the rumpus to fill that void — and elections here are always a rumpus, simply because barren folks often hide behind empty bluff and bluster — is an Adeleke brood, Ademola Adeleke, literarily sworn to, willy-nilly, succeeding his elder brother.

    To face him is Mudashir Hussain, a Tekobo (Lagos arriviste) by defensive but bitter local political gossip, but a legislative veteran in his own right.

    Hussain represented Oshodi-Isolo, Lagos, as Alliance for Democracy (AD) member in the House of Representatives (1999-2007), before he joined the Aregbesola-led long trek to salvage Osun, back in 2007.

    After losing to the elder Adeleke in the controversial election of 2007  —  an election not a few insist could be the worst in Nigerian history, in which Rauf Aregbesola himself got his governorship mandate stolen —he defeated the same Adeleke, as sitting senator, to became an All Progressives Congress (APC) Osun West senator in 2011.

    But Senator Hussain would yield his place to the same Serubawon, an election-eve trade-off to the defector from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), after Serubawon’s sinister confrontation with the Omisore group.

    By Serubawon’s own words, the Omisore group threatened to kill him, with Jelili Adesiyan, then President Goodluck Jonathan’s minister of Police Affairs, allegedly raining stiff blows on Adeleke, at the PDP state secretariat at Osogbo, to underscore that threat.  That sent hurtling the mighty Serubawon.  For once, the fearsome one that sent folks scuttling, himself dived for cover!

    It’s an irony of the no-holds-barred clawing for power, in these climes, that the younger Adeleke is back in bed with the same noxious forces that nearly politically gassed his brother.

    In “The politics of death and the triumph of truth”, Niyi Akinnoso, The Punch columnist, did full justice to the soulless manoeuvres  of the younger Adeleke: the dirty politics of poison over a sudden family tragedy, the media amplification of that theory, the attempt to sully the waters over the coroner’s probe, the politics of intra-APC disqualification and re-qualification, and the eventual Ademola Adeleke scurry to the Osun PDP, the same party and people his late brother fled from for dear life.

    In that piece, Prof. Akinnaso did a clinical, if furious, putdown of Otunba Adeleke, for his desperate tactics.  To be sure, that was well earned, with all facts available.

    But lo!  Politics is often a utility business, with morality as the least consideration. Remember the Machiavellian quip about the end justifying the means?  The only catch though, is that a politician would forever live with how he defines himself.

    Take Iyiola Omisore, furiously remaking his image and rebranding his political essence on Facebook, and other social media channels.  Not bad — after all, Saul, the ultimate anti-Christ turned Paul, the Christian neophyte-without-equal!

    But would that, open sesame, wipe off Omisore’s past, any more than all the waters of the Atlantic would blot out the blood in the hands of the evil Lady Macbeth, in Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth?

    With his first steps in politics, the younger Adeleke has defined himself.  It is a democratic right he would float or sink with.

    That, however, is not the problem.  The problem is what Adeleke and his new company epitomize: the right to pushing emptiness, as a democratic alternative to substance.

    That is almost beyond pardon, especially in a state experiencing seven straight years of developmental governance, after nearly eight years of ruin and stagnation.

    But because an old order is dying and a new one is not fully born, these poster boys of democratic barrenness jerk awake at each electoral cycle, to rattle-dazzle the gullible, with a rich lather of empty emotions.

    In the past seven years, despite a deliberate orchestration of the contrary by the Osun opposition and their media confederates, the news coming from Osun has been decidedly developmental.

    Only from June 15 to 17, UNICEF midwifed a study tour by 16 states, to understudy Osun’s social safety nets, for possible implementation in these other states.  The states: Sokoto, Kebbi, Zamfara, Benue, Katsina, Delta, Lagos, Ondo, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Enugu, Adamawa, Kano, Bauchi and Rivers.

    Lagos is to Nigeria what California, the “Golden State”, is to the United States — the biggest economy around.  Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Delta, Rivers and Ondo are oil royals, far more endowed than Osun.  Kano is the northern commercial nerve.

    Yet, all these states went, under UNICEF’s proud banners, to take a tutorial on what mighty developmental strides puny Osun had attained, with its meager resources, to protect its most vulnerable!

    Apart from safety net programmes like OMEAL (the school feeding programme, which the Federal Government is adopting), OYES (youth volunteer and retraining programme, to tackle unemployment) and O-REHAB (focused on care for the destitute and the mental health-challenged), the whole state is a huge work-in-progress, in solid roads and futuristic schools, on a scale never witnessed before.

    That is the new Osun, struggling to consolidate.

    The old Osun?  A daily plague of ruin: run-down schools; cratered roads; dysfunctional polity, where thugs were lords of the manor;  a relay of contrived crimes to trap political opponents; and, of course, unfazed haven of institutionalized ignorance, and cavalier global capital of destructive rumours!

    Indeed, the grim modern equivalent of Hobbes’s state of nature: an Osun where life was nasty, brutish and short.

    So, the July 8 election is between Hussain and Adeleke, for the Osun West senatorial seat?  Only on the surface.

    The real battle is progressive and reactionary forces gunning for the soul of Osun, as prelude to the 2018 gubernatorial elections: either to further deepen the developmental strides of the past seven years (which would be wise); or slip back into the ruin of the past (which would be tragic).

    Talk of the delicate tendrils of a new order, of hope and promise; tangling with the dry stubs of a dying order, of ruin and stagnation.

    That, then, is the stark choice before Osun West voters — and one false step, it just might be back to the past of ruin, from the emerging future of hope.

  • What they won’t tell you

    What they won’t tell you

    The current ruckus between the executive and the National Assembly over Budget 2017 reminds me of a Yoruba allegory of a spat between husband and wife. While each would swear that the other is the more sinning than sinned against, expecting one side to spill the bean is akin to asking (s)he to reveal what went wrong in between the sheets! That is why – safe for the costly distraction and the potential stasis that it forebodes for an economy already down and under – we might just as well enjoy the luxury of a ring-side seat while the drama lasts.

    I am here referring to the increasingly rancorous debate in the aftermath of the signing of the budget into law. If we had expected the so-called truce said to have been brokered to resolve the grey areas between the executive and the National Assembly on the budget to hold, it has since turned out as misplaced. In fact, the bubble actually burst days after with acting President not only shredding its elements but openly thumbing down the National Assembly in the process.

    Here’s what Osinbajo said days after appending his signature to the budget:  “Now, there are these two broad issues about who can do what. The first report is about who can do what. When you present a budget to the National Assembly, it is presented as a bill, an appropriation bill… do not introduce entirely new projects and all of that or modify projects. This is something that we experienced last year and this year again. It now leaves the question about who is supposed to do what?”

    As if that didn’t sufficiently capture the mood of the presidency, Power, Works and Housing Minister, Babatunde Fashola would lend his telling opinion – “It is unfair to Nigerians after public hearings were conducted with taxpayers’ money and consultations with the lawmakers only for the budget to be altered, cut or padded”. He would equally note that apart from the 200 uncompleted roads he inherited from the previous administration, the lawmakers added100 new roads: “These roads are not federal roads and some of them do not have designs, how do we award roads that were not designed irrespective of the power you have?

    “It is unconstitutional for the National Assembly to legislate on state roads”, he had declared.

    Trust the National Assembly to rejoin in kind. First, from Senate President Bukola Saraki we heard: “I want to say that there are times we have a number of consultations and I want to make it clear that these consultations we do with the executive will not at any time mean that we will give up the powers we have in line with the constitution… As we bend backwards, I don’t think that should be misrepresented that powers given to us in the constitution do not exist”.

    By this of course he means the power to alter, reshape or if you like, tinker with the budget.

    The senator from Kebbi State, Bala Ibn Na’Allah would be far less restrained in his reaction: “I know that the Acting President who is a Professor of Law is sufficiently trained in law to know that the National Assembly has powers to tinker with the budget. I am not making a case for him and I do not want to believe that he said what has been alleged that he said”.

    To House of Representatives Speaker Yakubu Dogara, “it was erroneous for any individual to think that the legislature could not add, remove or reduce items in budget estimates”. As to the interpretation of the provisions of the 1999 Constitution, which vests the powers of appropriation on the legislature, he says that “a declaration as to which of the arms has the power and rights, in as much as it is related to the interpretation of the law, is the function of the judiciary and not of the executive.”

    And finally, weekend’s riposte from Abdulrazak Namdas, chairman, House of Representatives Committee on Media and Public Affairs to Fashola. Quoting Justice G. O. Kolawole in FEMI FALANA V the President FRN & 3 Others, Suit No: FHC/ABJ/CS/259/2014 delivered on March 9, 2016 he says “the Constitution did not design the National Assembly as a “rubber stamp”.

    It is, quite frankly, an old tiff. While I understand that the annual bickering has become an inextricable element in our fiscal processes, what this latest one has done is rekindle fires that will be hard to put out anytime soon given the on-going joust for vantage position as 2019 nears.  What is great interest to yours truly however is the claim by each party to have the law on its side. As far as the presidency is concerned, the process brooks no insertion of strange elements beyond the authorization or withholding of proposals made by the executive. The lawmakers on their part claim the absolute power to refashion the budget in their very own image and likeness!

    Is the issue strictly of law? I do not think so. The position of the law is certainly clear enough – the power of appropriation resides – unquestionably – with the legislature. The power as far as I know, is however not in contention. What I understand to be in contention is whether the National Assembly can cause to be laid before itself, a spending bill, outside the one contemplated by the constitution! I say this because the whole gamut of process – of formulation, design and costing and all of that, of the budget – is supposed to have originated at the level of the executive and the bureaucracy.  The problem comes when the National Assembly insists on short-circuiting the phase on the erroneous grounds of having the power to alter the votes! Would that not be tantamount to promoting the notion of power without responsibility – an abuse that the constitution could not have envisaged?  And to imagine that the executive branch – so deliberately blindsided, being called to implement the strange insertions at the pain of sanctions! It’s akin to forcing a specialist in anesthesia to do tooth extraction! Surely, that would be absurd.

    Except we want to pretend, we know that the brouhaha is essentially about pork –artfully packaged as constituency projects; the line element in the book designed to assuage the greed of a few; an extension of the elite squabble to secure privileges and earmarks. By the way, have not our 109-odd senators and 307 Representatives made clear that the elements are their way to spread the gravy round? Of course, while I will not agree that it is an entirely bad thing, their attempt to conflate the power of appropriation with hare-brained subversion of process as in the current case when what should ordinarily be a passable quest is being pushed through the back door is not only cynical but utterly self-serving.

    Nigerians sure know what these projects are about. Conceived in the cynical imagination of our lawmakers with nary a utilitarian value beyond lining the pockets of their promoters, we have seen their results in the swathe of ‘stranded’ projects without provision for maintenance; projects that could only have been hastily conceived with anyone but the supposed beneficiaries in mind, and which no sooner than their commissioning end up as white elephants.

    How about that as the reason for the ego trip?

  • The enforcer and the receiver

    The enforcer and the receiver

    Two major figures in the tragic drama subsumed under the general label of “June 12” have been in the news lately, on the anniversary of that epochal date.

    One of them, an insider and participant has been recalling events surrounding the death of President-elect Moshood Abiola with his accustomed volubility and mendacity.

    The other, a sedate figure had operated in the margins power-play in the military until fortune positioned him in the right place at the right time to preside over the closing chapter of that tragic drama and to flourish as its eminent beneficiary.

    I am of course talking about Hamza al-Mustapha, the former army officer — by some accounts, he was substantively a lieutenant, and a major only in an acting capacity – the self-confessed torturer who served as chief enforcer for the loathsome General Sani Abacha.

    I am also talking about General Abdulsalam Abubakar who emerged from the intrigues  surrounding Abacha’s death as receiver and head of state, with the mission of organizing an orderly transfer of power from an exhausted and discredited army of which he was a denizen, to              a government based on the consent of the people.

    I will say more concerning Abubakar presently.

    al-Mustapha was in Ibadan last week, rehashing the tawdry tale he had told the Lagos High Court  during his trial in 2011 for the 1996 murder of Abiola’s wife, Kudirat, who was in the vanguard of the struggle to secure Abiola’s freedom and restore his mandate.  Resolute, outspoken and defiant, she was on her way to yet another strategy meeting when her car was ambushed and she was shot in broad daylight in the Oregun  section of Ikeja, Lagos.

    Investigations tied al-Mustapha and the goon squad he operated for Abacha directly to the murder.  But at his trial, and at every subsequent forum, he had sought to deflect the charge, and instead portray the major political figures from the Southwest who had led the campaign aimed at freeing Abiola from captivity and restoring his mandate under the aegis of NADECO as villains who colluded with Abiola’s “killers.”

    Those on whom he cast the vilest aspersions, Abraham Adesanya and Chief Bola Ige, were conveniently dead.  It is a mark of his perverted reasoning that he even cited Chief Bola Ige’s ministerial appointment in President Obasanjo’s cabinet as compensation for Ige’s “role” in Abiola’s murder.

    al-Mustapha read from a letter he claimed to have written through Clement Akpamgbo – the same card sharper who did most of the dirty legal work for military president Ibrahim Babangida and later for Sani Abacha — confronting Ige with evidence of Ige’s alleged complicity in Abiola’s death.

    Akpamgbo too was dead.  The prisoner submitted no proof of delivery, no evidence that the letter reached Ige, no indication of a response from Ige.

    He craved the court’s indulgence to play a videotape he claimed furnished conclusive evidence of NADECO stalwarts accepting hush-hush money from Abiola’s killers.  The videotape showed nothing of the sort, only the group emerging from a scheduled meeting in Aso Rock, apparently with General Abdulsalam.

    In the latest reiteration, in Ibadan, al Mustapha cited former NADECO secretary Ayo Opadokun as a participant-witness in the bribe-taking. The grandstander said was in possession of a videotape of Abiola’s final moments.  And as he does at every opportunity, the consummate poseur played victim, citing his detention in Ikoyi prison and other jails for ten years before his trial began.

    Now, ten years is an inordinately long period to hold a suspect in prison, even a suspect charged with the most abominable crime.  But it was al-Mustapha who engineered the delay.

    Shortly after his trial commenced, he accused the presiding judge in open court, without fear and without proof, of sending an unnamed  am emissary to him in prison to  solicit a bribe of N10 million as consideration for a favourable verdict.  He demanded that the judge recuse himself.  Thereafter, he filed motion after motion for interlocutory injunction, virtually tying up the case in knots that it would take a Houdini to untie.

    Al Mustapha would retract the evidence had given years earlier, claiming that it had been extracted through torture.  As for the gun from which the shots that killed Kudirat were fired, he had merely handed it for “cleaning” to a subaltern in the killing squad that called itself the Strike Force.

    The self-confessed torturer went on to claim in his rambling evidence that Abiola was his bosom friend, and that nothing had been dearer to him than Abiola’s comfort in captivity.  For that purpose, he said he made available some N800, 000 every three months for Abiola’s upkeep.  Back then, that was a small fortune.

    Were they feeding Abiola 48-karat diamond nuggets?

    In any case, that claim is undermined by the decrepitude that Abiola suffered in detention.  Until they seized him, Abiola ranked among the most dapper public figures anywhere.  The last time I saw him, in the Abuja High Court, sometime in 1995, he cut a pitiful figure.

    His tailoring was cheap, nondescript.  The sandals on his swollen feet were likewise cheap.  The right side of his face was swollen, as if a golf ball was lodged in that corner of his mouth.  Those who had seen him the previous week said he looked far worse then.

    If al-Mustapha, if this deranged megalomaniac, compulsive liar and self-confessed torturer truly  cared for Abiola to the point of regarding him as a close friend and yet allowed him to suffer so much physical deterioration in detention, Abiola needed no enemy.

    I return, finally, to General Abdulsalam Abubakar, who turned 75 last week and was profiled in many lavishly-produced, full-page newspaper advertorials by former military president Ibrahim Babangida, former Governor Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State and by Chief John Oyegun, national chairman of the ruling APC, among others, as the “Father” of the current political dispensation commonly referred to, in error I believe, as the Fourth Republic.

    It should be remembered that the Third Republic that was supposed to be the culmination of  Babangida’s duplicitous transition programmed was stillborn.

    Abubakar, took power after Abacha died, and presided over the end of military rule and the transfer of power.  But it was an untidy transfer, based on a Constitution that was drawn up in secret and never subjected to public discussion and debate.  Some persons learned in the law have even gone so far as to call the document a forgery.  In operation, it has turned out to be gravely flawed, with more than 70 amendments proposed as interim remedy.

    Still, few will grudge him the accolade of statesman in which he now basks.  In one of the most fraught periods in Nigeria’s history, his steadying hands and honesty of purpose made the difference between an orderly transfer and a chaotic national dissolution.

    There is less agreement, however, on his vaunted personal integrity. It was widely publicised that, on taking power, Abubakar withdrew huge deposits from the national exchequer for his private use and was forever talking about “welfare.”

    The newspaper, Abuja Today, published by Abidina Coomassie, detailed the alleged withdrawals as well as choice property Abubakar reportedly acquired in the most exclusive areas of London shortly after taking office.  Coomassie even dared Abubakar to challenge him in court if he felt he had been maligned. Abubakar declined.

    In his fact-free effusions in court, al-Mustapha had claimed that Coomassie, who died in 2001,   was “poisoned” because he was set to disclose the alleged transactions Coomassie had actually published some four years earlier.  That intervention is reason enough to doubt the entire story.

    But there is no denying that General Abubakar bears moral responsibility for Abiola’s death. He had a chance to free Abiola.  Instead, he kept bringing one representative of the “international community” after another to try to inveigle Abiola to renounce his claim to being President-elect.

    And when Abiola would not yield, they deployed their final solution.

    If Abubakar was not complicit in the plot, it was at any rate executed under his watch.

     

  • Wanted: a Third Force

    “The civil war was a disaster, the failure of reason and the triumph of egoism and narrow-mindedness” — Sam Amadi, in a 4 September 2002 piece published in This Day, headlined “Nigeria: enter the Third Force”

     

    The first casualty of the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) was reason.  But mutual hurt sharpened the knife for that grand slaughter.

    The Igbo pogroms all over the North followed the 15 January 1966 coup.  That coup overthrew the North-led civil order. But it enthroned Major-Gen. Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi, after the so-called “Igbo coup”.  The pogroms badly hurt the Igbo — as it would any other people.

    But the pogroms too were a result of reported taunting, by some Igbo in the North, of the northern locals.  The taunts were over the northern leaders, felled during the first coup.  That hurt the North — as it would any other people.

    The counter-coup of 29 July 1966 gorily settled scores — a Northern coup cancelled out an Eastern one, with all the grisly killings.  But it only roasted the collective Nigerian psyche.

    No surprise, the counter-coup only signalled the final descent into political Hades — the Civil War, which followed Eastern Region Governor, Lt-Col. Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu’s 30 May 1967 declaration of the ill-fated Republic of Biafra.

    Before that tragic denouement, however, the drums of war beat with deafening intensity. Ojukwu was canonizing his Biafra Army as so formidable “no force in Africa” could vanquish it — a tragic bluff.

    Yakubu Gowon, also then a lieutenant-colonel though also head of state and supreme commander of the Nigerian Armed Forces (before the Aburi Accords in Ghana pared that title down to commander-in-chief), was also positioning the coming slaughter as a “police action”, to rein in the break-away rebels of the East — a sinister threat.

    Less than three years later, tragic bluff had sized up sinister threat — and no less than two million, victims on both sides, lay dead!

    Even as that tragedy was brewing, only Wole Soyinka, then 33, of all the intelligentsia then, was unimpressed by the war-mongering.  He would try to prevent war at all cost.  Hence, he called for a Third Force, neither for Nigeria nor Biafra but against avoidable carnage.

    His reward?  Detention without trial, almost all through the war, by the Gowon Federal Military Government.

    But his contemporary writers?  Ken Saro-Wiwa, of the Ogoni South-South minority, opted for Nigeria.  Indeed, after the liberation of Port Harcourt from the Biafra forces, he was administrator of that city.  But the country he opted for later consumed him under Sani Abacha, a young military commander when Saro-Wiwa was PH administrator.

    Chris Okigbo sided with his Igbo folks, though using his poetry to lament the blood and gore.  He was consumed by the war.

    Chinua Achebe, Soyinka’s most famous contemporary, also sided with his Igbo folks; and was soon drafted as Biafra’s war-time envoy.  He survived the war and even joined Aminu Kano’s People’s Redemption Party (PRP), during the 2nd Republic (1979-1983).

    But his unrelieved Civil War bitterness would come in There Was A Country, his 2012 “Personal History of Biafra,” a classic example of the swan song as ogre.  That book is believed, by not a few, to power the philosophical push for the present neo-Biafra campaign.

    That ogre may yet consume the naive.  But the old man is safe in his grave.

    The Achebe angle neatly ties the present to the past, with its avoidable tragedies. History is threatening to repeat itself.  But it may well be a costly farce.

    Already, there are eerie parallels: check out Ojukwu of 1967 with Nnamdi Kanu of 2015.  The one bluffed and blustered out of plain hurt.  The other does, out of free-wheeling bigotry and hatred — as the  callow youth, in that Yoruba proverb, that mistakes potent herbs for a delicious vegetable soup.   But both are  hardly the epitome of sober introspection.

    Check out too the Igbo-Hausa/Fulani ethnic baiting and counter-baiting, culminating in the sensational diktat, by the so-called “Northern youths”, for the Igbo to quit the North before October 1 — or else!  That, in response to IPOB’s gospel of hate and threat — lunacy and counter-lunacy!

    As in a theory in basic creative prose, you know the true character of a person when under crisis.  In the crisis of the moment, about every ethnic group is betraying its own maladies.

    Some elements in the Niger Delta have given their own counter-order: not only should northerners quit their enclave, those that have oil well interests should also scram.

    Even in Yorubaland, some atavistic elements are celebrating the sweet prospects of their great utopia: the immaculate Oodua Republic where, open sesame, Ibadan domination would vanish in Oyo State; the Ijebu-Remo rivalry, in Ogun, would disappear; and the “Lagos-for-Lagosians” lobby in Lagos would, Saul to Paul-like, morph into happy-go-merry pan-Yoruba nationalists, with zero condescension towards the ”ara-oke”, the Yoruba upcountry denizens!

    It’s an emotive season of anomie, which shows how little the Nigerian mule, warts and all, is appreciated by these ultra-nationalists!  Indeed, as crooned Don Williams, the American country music ace, some folks don’t know what they’ve got until it’s gone!

    Kudos to Acting President Yemi Osinbajo for his systematic way of diffusing the tension by his ongoing meeting with leaders of the different ethnic groups.

    But one point must be made, if you must come to equity with clean hands: you can’t blame the northern reaction to torrential threats and insults without first condemning, in the most vigorous of terms, the South East source of that torrential hate.

    Still, to forestall tragic history from repeating itself, a third force against reckless ethnic ultra-nationalism is imperative.

    Despite all the ethnic bellowing and muscle-flexing, it is reassuring that a parallel counter-voice, from all ethnic divides, is challenging this emotional foray into Golgotha.  Those voices — Igbo, Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba, Ijaw, Idoma, Tiv, Kanuri, et al — should coalesce and face down these divisive voices.  More of such sane voices should speak up.

    In 1967,  Wole Soyinka went solo, when the rest of Nigerians were going mad on ethnic hate.  Their eyes did not clear until two million people lay dead.

    In 2017 — 50 years later — surely we have learnt enough from our tragic past to avert yet another?

    That is why the Soyinka spirit of 1967 must inspire a determined pan-Nigeria Third Force to defeat this ethnic madness.

    If Nigeria is sick – and indeed, it is — fix it!  Restructure, if you must.  Ensure justice, equity and fair play reign.

    But sure, balkanization cannot be the solution?  That would create new problems for the illusory el-dorados to follow.

     

    Poetic Extra

    June 12

    June 12!

    And a culprit is long dead.
    But his memory 
    is a septic tank of sleaze,
    memory worse than no memory!

    Another lives,
    perfumed by the high
    and the mighty.
    But what oozes from his chamber
    is the rot
    of the living dead!

    But MKO, their victim
    lives, though long dead!
    Each year, this day,
    he comes alive:
    pleasure to the righteous,
    pain to the hideous,
    but a deep gash,
    on the soul 
    of a nation
    that kills its best!

    June 12!

    Lagos, 13 June 2017

     

  • Of baby and bathwater

    Sensing the mood of the citizens, the Senate on Thursday June 8, stepped down the proposal on the National Roads Funds Bill 2017 – in its words “to enable other relevant committees to go through its content”. Senator Kabiru Gaya and his co-promoters of the “Act to Establish the National Roads Fund for the purpose of financing the Maintenance and Rehabilitation of National Roads and for other Matters connected therewith, 2017(S.B 218)”, from the look of things, will have to wait for another day to push their initiative through. However, if the outrage which greeted what is supposed to be a vital legislation designed to take the funding of the critical infrastructure out of the strictures of the paralysing bureaucracy and to secure more sustainable framework for road development finance is anything to go by, the entire idea does seem at the moment – dead on arrival.

    To be sure, it was expected that opposition to the proposed road fund would be swift and unequivocal. Apart from being the nature of taxes anywhere, that this tax is linked to the highly combustible product –physically and metaphorically – makes it worse. For while furtive glances in the direction of oil prices each time each time the government needs to grow its revenue is nothing new; coming from an administration that got away almost unchallenged when it hiked petrol price moments after coming into office, the proposal would seem like stretching things to its limits. However, while it comes as no surprise that the traditional bastions of opposition have been up in arms, of greater interest are the same wearisome arguments being canvased on both sides – arguments which in the final count generates more heat than light.

    Of course, we need roads; good roads. And good roads cost quite a lot. At the same time, it is fairly common knowledge that the entire 2017 Budget comes to mere spittle when put side by side with what is required to change the face of that important enabler. So, we need funds; plenty – public and private. How to ensure that funds continue to flow to match the pace of needs. You can bet; someone’s got to pay!

    I need to be clear though; any talk of additional fuel price hike would be intolerable at this time. At a time of recession, it would amount to plain bad economics to push such measures that would inevitably translate to further shrinking citizens’ disposable incomes. Moreover, in a country where elected officials not only vote humongous amounts for their wardrobes but also have their fleet of official vehicles fuelled at taxpayers’ expense, any talk of additional punishing tax would be satanic.

    My understanding however is that the situation, as dire as it is, should not foreclose the debate on the way forward, not just because of the unprecedented infrastructure gaps but also in the face of increasingly limited revenues available to deliver on the infrastructure imperative. For much as Nigerians are wont to live in denial of its gravity, it seems to me that one burden that the current leadership must carry is charting the way out of the infrastructure crisis. I would in the circumstance argue that Nigerians should not be in a hurry to throw away the road fund baby with the bathwater!

    Now let look at the general outlines of the proposed bill. It seeks a fund with high levels of independence under the jurisdiction of the Federal Ministry of Finance ring-fenced– for the purposes of routine and periodic maintenance works on roads and the administration of the road network, including research and development. A major plank of the proposal is that “Roads agencies that will receive disbursement from the National Roads Fund must be established by law as independent agencies with dedicated accounts to receive disbursements from the National Roads Fund. “The National Roads Funds should be excluded from the Consolidated Revenue Fund and Treasury Single Account relying on Section 80 (1) of the 1999 constitution (as amended)”. And as if an answer to worries about the envisaged road bureaucracy dog wagging the operational tail, the bill offered a ready answer when it specifies “an amount not exceeding three per cent of the total monies accruing to it in the preceding year as administrative fund”.

    It is doubtful that anyone would still argue for the retention of current practices under which routine road maintenance would wait endlessly for the tardy process called appropriation. But even worse is the assumption that the country’s 193,200 kilometres crater-infested roads will somehow receive the kiss of life without a completely new framework for their funding, maintenance and administration. This, we know will not happen.

    This is where the road fund idea comes in. Will it solve the problem? Maybe; maybe not. However, while it may well be one long shot in the dark, one thing that is sure is that it would be a major step towards addressing the funding challenges.

    Will it come without some sacrifices? Most certainly not. Even at that, we have a fair idea of what is coming: axle load charges, toll fees, international vehicle transit charges, road funds surcharge of 0.5 percent taxed on the assessed value of any vehicle imported into the country; inter-state mass transit charge of 0.5 percent deductible from the fare paid by passengers to commercial mass transit operators on inter-state roads, etc. All of these would of course be borne by Nigerians most likely without a whimper. Only it doesn’t seem that Nigerians would agree that it should apply to the N5 levy on (or out?) of the existing template of N145 per litre of fuel.

    As for the idea that the levy will automatically translate to higher fuel price, this sounds somewhat like jumping the gun. For a proposal that is at best a work-in-progress, methinks it is still early in the day to talk of hike in fuel price. Far from taking the words of the leadership of the Senate Committee that there would be no resultant fuel price as gospel, the real problem, as it appears, is the continuing failure by the stakeholders to interrogate the disparate elements in the current template foisted by the Petroleum Products Prices Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) with a view to eliminating those elements that have become, quite frankly, anachronistic. That however can only happen whenever Nigerians decide to have an open mind.

    So much for our collective outrage on behalf of the owners of the 11,387,185-odd vehicles on our roads; isn’t it about time we looked at the angle of equity in the situation that this class only gets to enjoy the so-called bounties of nature? And, if we agree that the wasting product belongs to us as indeed the coming generations, what could be wrong with exploring the option of consumption tax on the wasting asset? Wouldn’t that be a sure way to cure our collective fixations on a product that, on the whole, has been more of a curse than blessing?

  • ‘June 12’: Between nightfall and mid-day

    ‘June 12’: Between nightfall and mid-day

    General Ibrahim Babangida’s transition programme may still end with a bang, but the build-up to the June 12, presidential election of June 12, 1993, that was supposed to be its high point  has been a desultory march of intrigue, disinformation, and all manner of skullduggery.

    As I write these lines at 7:30 pm on Thursday, June 10, 1993, just 48 hours to polling day, it is  by no means clear that the election will actually take place.  The High Court in Abuja is yet to determine whether the National Electoral Commission (NEC ), the Federal Attorney-General, Clement Akpamgbo, and military president Babangida have furnished compelling reasons why the election should not be stopped, as demanded by the Association for a Better Nigeria (ABN).

    The Association has followed up its petition with a huge demonstration in Kaduna urging Babangida to stay on for four more years.

    The self-styled Council of Elder Statesmen(spearheaded by S.G. Ikoku and persons of like mind) is still busy calling for what amounts to a scuttling of the transition.  Curiously, its advocacy, dripping with contempt for the two political parties (the SDP and the NRC), their presidential candidates and indeed for the entire political class, is described not as a proposal but a Report, and is received in Abuja with all the pomp, circumstance and solemnity befitting a commissioned job.

    The newspapers are awash with unsigned advertisements excoriating the SDP candidate Moshood Abiola and the NRC candidate Bashir Tofa for all manner of misconduct, ranging from alleged purloining of an opponent’s letter to religious fanaticism.  The entire country is awash in rumours of dark plots and dire warnings.

    From his base in London, Second Republic minister Umaru Dikko, no longer fearful of being shipped home in a crate, is reported to have written to the Kaduna Mafia, warning that under no circumstance should a Southerner be allowed to win power.

    As if to add poignancy to Dikko’s rumoured epistle, allegations surface that Abiola and a conclave of Yoruba elders had completed plans to transfer the federal capital back to Lagos if Abiola won the election.  And if he did not win, Igbo properties in Yorubaland were marked for destruction.

    Such were the doubts and distrust sewn he week before the election and watered assiduously every passing day.

    Long, disorderly queues formed by panic-stricken motorists in the wake of a strike by petroleum workers strengthened doubts about the election.  A breakdown in electricity and water supplies reinforced the doubts.

    NEC chairman Humphrey Nwosu comes on the television screen as I write these lines.  Ebullient as usual, and reeling out in a sing-song, combative voice a trainload of things that must not be done on Election Day and assuring a national audience that everything was set for the historic poll.

    But I am immediately reminded of what someone who should know told me long ago:  “Never mind all the histrionics.  Good old Humphrey is not actually in charge and often does not know what is really going on

    At any rate, 48 hours to the election, no polling booths have been erected and no voters list has been put on display in Lagos.  It requires a degree of credulity bordering on extreme naïveté to wager that the election will indeed hold on June 12.

    The network news broadcast on the Nigeria Television Authority has just ended.  There is no mention of any developments in the ABN’s legal battle to scuttle the election.  The doubts remain.

    The applicable election law states categorically that no court action can stand in the way of the poll.  If this means anything at all, it means that no court can entertain any petition that seeks to stop the election.  Yet, the Abuja court not only entertains the petition, it allows it to drag on for one full week, and to cast grave doubts on whether the election will hold.

    At this point, I break off and go to bed, hoping to complete this piece on Friday, June 11, to meet my deadline.

    At 11:05 pm, the doorbell rings.

    Who can it be at this time of day?  It is Femi Kusa, The Guardian’s director of publications and editor-in-chief.  He has a message, and it is for my ears only, the security guard tells me.  I go downstairs to meet Kusa in the courtyard.

    Without the slightest trace of agitation or surprise, he tells me, first, that the Abuja High Court, Justice Bassey Ikpeme presiding, has ruled, first, that  election planned for Saturday, June 12, must not hold as demanded by the ABN; second, that the court has reserved ruling for one month on NEC’s countermotion, and third, that the police had granted the ABN a permit to stage a Babangida-Must-Stay rally in Abuja.

    Kusa said he thought I should not have to read the papers the next day before learning of these stunning developments.

    Even those of our countrymen who have maintained all along that the transition programme bears the markings of a cruel hoax and of a prologue to tragedy could hardly have believed that matters would come to this dreary pass.  But such, alas, is the level of triviality to which the final phase of the transition programme has been reduced.

    No sooner were the presidential primaries concluded than rumours spread that the candidates of both parties stood to be disqualified.  Damning dossiers on the twain were said to have been compiled, with ample help from the intelligence services of some Western nations.

    Since then, it has been one dark hint or another of gloomy portents.  Was this the “hidden agenda” finally unraveling?

    A hidden agenda exists all right, weighs in Vice President Augustus Aikhomu.  But it belongs to the self-appointed messiahs and their confederates who held a widely publicised meeting  at General Olusegun Obasanjo’s Farm in Otta the other day, not to the Babangida Administration,

    As I conclude this piece at 1:05 am on Friday, June 11, NEC has not announced whether it will go ahead with the election as planned, the Abuja court’s injunction notwithstanding.  The authors and managers of the transition programme have made no statement.  Perhaps they are satisfied that the transition is still “on course” and that the “solid foundation” they have been laying for democracy these past seven years is, if anything, stronger than ever,

    Or it may well be that they regard the latest developments as just another phase of the “learning process” that is the transition.

    Others of a different cast of mind cannot be blamed if on waking up today and hearing the news from Abuja, they felt, like Jacob, that they had for seven years been sleeping with an illusion.

    The foregoing was published in The Guardian on June 15, 1993 and reproduced in my book, Diary of a Debacle:  Tracking Nigeria’s Failed Democratic Transition (1989-1994).

    It remains to add that it was well past midday on Friday, June 11, when NEC finally announced that the election would hold as scheduled.

    The Babangida Administration’s affirmation that the election would indeed hold came only indirectly, in response to a statement by the United States Embassy, per its Counselor on Public Affairs, Michael O’Brien, that any postponement would be “unacceptable” to the U.S. Government.

    Thus were Babangida and his co-conspirators forced into a frenzied reworking of the script.

    Go through the motion of holding the election but pour the nation’s resources into cajoling, coaxing, bullying, bribing, suborning., manipulating and otherwise inducing hegemonists, quislings, expired warlords, revanchists, traditional rulers, religious leaders, judges, shysters, professors for hire, media racketeers, student bodies, rented entertainers and all manner of careerists to discredit the poll, demonise its winner, Moshood Abiola, and annul the hope he kindled.

    Their Final Solution to “the problem of June 12” was only a matter of time.

    But “June 12” lives on in salience and spirit, unconquerable and indestructible.

  • Vandals at the court gate

    Stained judges, preening from the Bench, are akin to barbarians sacking the Rome of Justice.

    Yet, that’s the path of self-ruin the National Judicial Council (NJC) is treading.

    Vandals at the gate of Rome — that echoes the Goth siege to Rome, preceding the 410 AD sacking of the city.

    By 476 AD came final eclipse: the Barbarian Flavius Odovacer, of Germanic descent, sacked Romanus Augustulus, the last emperor of Western Roman Empire; and named himself king of Italy.

    Why did the Rome, of Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony and Augustus Caesar, it of the famously proud citizen-army, wilt so badly?

    Once lean and vigorous, Rome became soft and soggy.  Its citizens, pumped full of empire gravy, became too soft to fight.

    So Barbarians (non-citizens), soon peopled its army, as fighting serfs.  In due course, the conqueror became the conquered — thus ended classical Rome, after 500 years; though its Middle Ages variant would not expire until 1453, when the Ottomans killed Constantine XI Palaiologo in battle.

    The Judiciary, under the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Walter Onnoghen, appears merrily baiting a Rome-like ruin.

    Like Ancient Rome, the Nigerian judiciary of Taslim Elias, Chukwudifu Oputa, Kayode Esho and other greats, hitherto a glittering star among peers, is getting so flabby it doesn’t even recognize its core of straight-and-narrow.

    In a throwback to the classical tragedy, severe gift from Greece and Rome, the judiciary, suffused with sleaze and rumours of sleaze, is about committing institutional suicide. For that, however, polite society would pay a hefty price.

    Proof?  Look no farther than the June 1 National Judicial Commission (NJC) order, that indicted judges return to their courts.

    Emerging from its 82nd meeting, the NJC, with CJN Onnoghen presiding, had ordered heads of courts to recall judges, indicted for alleged sleaze but yet to be formally charged, six months after the media brouhaha over a “sting” operation by DSS.

    That looks more like a grudge call against DSS and the judges’ pre-trial media-roasting; than a wise decision to preserve the sanctity and integrity of the judiciary.

    The beneficiary judges: Justice John Inyang Okoro (Supreme Court), Justice Uwani Abba Aji (Court of Appeal), Justice Hydiazira A. Nganjiwa and Justice Adeniyi Ademola (Federal High Court) and Justice Agbadu James Fishim (National Industrial Court).  The high court has discharged and acquitted Justice Ademola, though the prosecution has signified it would appeal the verdict.

    With no prejudice to the innocence or guilt of the affected judges, that they sit in almost every cadre of courts is a piquant symbol of how much the judiciary has fallen in public perception, as some rarefied house of graft.

    Which makes it all the more surprising — NJC pushing all that aside, and assuming an arch-legalistic view, on a matter that has scaled the narrow precincts of the courts into a burning moral matter, in the public space.

    All the judges may well be innocent.  Indeed, the Nigerian court system presumes they are, until duly convicted by a competent court.

    But the courts themselves are no fiat from space.  They are a creation of society: a set of legal Leviathans created by law, to adjudicate disputes and punish crime. Remove that societal moral cover, and all the courts, with their arcane procedures and scholarship, become hollow jokes.

    If that would affect judges and lawyers alone, it would be fair comeuppance for NJC’s rashness.  As the Yoruba would say, you don’t counsel a wilful child against growing crooked fore-teeth.  The paralyzingly ugliness would impress him soon enough!

    Rather, it is the sad case of a wayward child, whose rascality soon entraps his community in avoidable ruin.

    The moment the docked — many of them hardened criminals — start a tragic huff, taking His Lordship on a biting tutorial in moral rectitude and integrity, polite society would have lost it!  Sad!

    Still, it is amazing how NJC actions, since the era of CJN Alloysius Katsina-Alu, continue to reinforce the good old aphorism that a fish rots right from the head.

    Under CJN Katsina-Alu, NJC was the illicit special duty vehicle (SPV), used to hound a straight-and-narrow jurist, Justice Ayo Salami, from his Court of Appeal presidency.

    His crime?  His court’s audacity to return stolen governorships from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) vote-heisting machine, to which the normally feckless Goodluck Jonathan presidency took terrible exception, and for which an innocent and dutiful man must pay with his career.

    Under CJN Onnoghen, the NJC appears being forged into another SPV to give judges, facing allegations of graft, some judicial bolster, under crass legalism.

    It’s way down the nadir, from those lofty heights of 2007, when former CJN, Muhammadu Lawal Uwais, beatified the NJC with that singular honour of recommending the electoral chief, a power his Electoral Review Panel wanted taken from the president.  What forlorn hope, given NJC’s later actions!

    Their Lordships, with the equally misguided Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), which pushed, and has been trumpeting support for this outrage, probably fancy themselves hoisting their own brand of judicial dictatorship, over long-suffering and long-abused Nigerians.  What hubris!

    The Buhari presidency do should everything lawful to redress this outrage.  Neither should the rest of society rest, until these judges are kept from court, pending the time they are cleared by the judicial system.

    That is the due process they swore to.  That is the due process they must abide by.  Any other way is not only unwise, it is a fast track to anarchy.

     

    Biafra, Oodua and allied acolytes (6 June 2017)

    Reader: Good morning.  I’ve been reading your pieces in The Nation for long; and in fact came to the conclusion that you’re the only one of its columnists, who is not a hatchet writer.  But today’s piece shattered that assumption.  You also crossed the line by simply being disrespectful of Okurounmu’s age, even if he was a demagogue.  It’s obvious you took sides with Tinubu in this issue of 2014 national conference.  This is sad and not to your credit. You could still canvass your opinion on the old man’s interview without insulting him.  Cheers — Olakunle Tajudeen

    Ripples: Thank you for your remarks.  But you know, the issue is in the public space.  Elders should be wise and not say stuff that would endanger their people, even when they themselves feel they are secure.  Yoruba youths live everywhere, not the least in the North.  When an elder dubs a whole people “Yoruba enemy”, then some counter voice of reason should prevail.  I didn’t insult the old man.  I only faithfully described what he did.  If he was innocent, that shouldn’t rankle anyone.  As for supporting or opposing Tinubu, that’s no crime the last time I checked.  But if you have been reading my pieces as you said, you should have known I’m a person of conviction, and names, to me, don’t really matter.  Only logic does.  Still, thanks for your comment.

  • Hate and Biafra’s utopia

    Hate and Biafra’s utopia

    If you haven’t watched the latest Nnamdi Kanu video trending in the social media, you must be one of the lucky few whose firewalls have held firmly against hate-filled garbage daily spewed out of the social media. Even then, for the hordes of Nigerian netizens familiar with his video-casts particularly his unflattering characterization of the country as a zoo and fellow citizens as baboons, it must come as a new one that the infantile, hate-filled rant of the individual who was at best an unknown quantity, or, if you like, a gadfly – until the Buhari administration unintentionally thrust him into the centre of the firestorm of nationalist agitations –recognise no boundaries between the sacred and the profane. Clearly, if the video is any window into the mind of the individual who obviously thinks the best way to the heart of his people is to denigrate every other group in the Nigerian federation, the greater tragedy must be the delusion it feeds his hordes of followers on his Biafra project.

    The undated video is classic IPOB leader –unhinged. It proclaims: “…If you are attending a Yoruba Church, you should be ashamed of yourself, anybody attending a Pentecostal Church with a Yoruba Pastor is an idiot, a complete fool, a slowpoke…They are worse than BOKO HARAM, they are very very FOOLISH, if your Pastor is Yoruba, you are NOT FIT to be a human being…”

    In a country where ethnocentrism is the way we live and have our being, the putative leader of the secessionist agitation would ordinarily seem to have said nothing new that has not been said by different groups making up the federation. Let no one remind yours truly about the infamous allegory about the ‘dogs and baboons’ being soaked in blood’ credited to then then General Muhammadu Buhari, the presidential candidate of the Congress for Progressive Change, CPC, in the aftermath of the massively rigged 2011 elections; or even the royal threat to herd the Igbos into the Lagoon in the heat of electioneering – both of which I insist are as dissimilar as far as context would go – there is something particularly noxious about this supremacist mind-set of the emergency rabbi that demands close scrutiny.

    Fine, it is just as well that the IPOB Supremo is riding the crest of popularity at the moment. After all, he literally shut down the economy of the South-east on May 30. If there is any doubt about his extensive his hold on his followers, just imagine how his little-known Isiama Afara community in Umuahia, Abia State has transformed to a Mecca of sorts since he was admitted to bail. Add to that the fawning adulation by his hordes of courtiers, the high profile visitations and the orchestrated photo-ops with the high and the mighty in the South-east, the man is unmistakably having ball.  Earlier on, I have talked about his empty bombast; the treasonable activities and not least, his ethnic baiting. Welcome to the new Igbo exceptionalism – all of these thanks to the budding Eze Gburugburu!

    Beyond the raw anger, in vain have yours truly sought for any coherence in thought about his idea or his vision for his dream republic. So badly does he want his Biafra Republic that dissent or civility is deemed treasonable. It is either his Biafra or death (?).

    The other day, I watched one of his celebrated videos on You Tube. A group of Igbos in United States had gathered to interrogate him on the feasibility of his pet project amidst his grandiose claims about his stock of weaponry and other logistics only to be subjected to a brutal putdown all because they dared to ask hard, probing questions on a project which requires all to come on board! If I came away with the impression that the man either suffers from what psychologists call delusion of grandeur or is an outright fraud, his worst form of uncivility would be reserved for groups outside his Igbo kith and kin – groups that his Biafra had built strong relationships many of which predated the colonial contact, right up to the contraption now deemed loathsome. As far as Kanu and company were concerned, they were at best expendables or worse, mere fodders in his dream project of Biafra.  Ever heard of exceptionable xenophobia? It’s a brand new world of delinquency!

    Where do we go from here? If I may again borrow the Biblical expression – our fathers may have eaten the sour grapes; it is we, the children’s teeth that are set on the edge. Today, the wages of poor leadership are in full bloom, the country seems set to reap the wages of abdication in full. From the Biafrexit sing-song of the South-easterners, a new chant from the North proclaiming Biafra-must-go has since taken over. Not to be outdone in the secessionist quest, a brand new group in the South-west has since proclaimed its own Oduduwa Republic. Next is perhaps the Niger Delta republic. There is no telling where the next secessionist group will come from.  From resource control, to restructuring and now to free-for-all secession; the Nigerian disease would appear to have fully metastasised. Where will the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) quest end?

    I ask: how will the labelling of groups advance the Biafra quest?

    The scripture is no doubt right: Woe to you, O land, when your king is a child, and your princes feast in the morning? It is sadly the case that our elders are left to mumble in their bedchambers while infants – proclaiming themselves as leaders – strut the land. Why should a Nnamdi Kanu not take the centre-stage in the absence of the restraining voices of the elders of the region? I am not talking of elders like Ango Abdullahi, who would instinctively jump behind some misguided northern youths seeking to expel other Nigerians from their abodes; or others like Ben Nwabueze who would struggle, valiantly, to find accommodation for the objectionable methods of Kanu and co.

    I have nothing against the Biafran agitation. Like I said last week, I am all for it provided it is about redressing all the imbalances and the in-built injustices that have hobbled all attempts to create a just and equitable federation. Call it restructuring or fiscal federalism or whatever; so long as it is about good governance, optimal delivery of services and more transparent utilisation of national resources, the nomenclature would matter only a little. What I find detestable is the clanging babel of secessionist voices claiming to speak for the rest of us; their crude and opportunistic appropriation of the peoples’ desire for justice and equity for narcissistic ends.

     

  • From Saraki: Six Theses on corruption

    From Saraki: Six Theses on corruption

    It is most fitting that one of the best authorities on the subject took time off the other day to deliver a lecture on corruption, perhaps the most troubling issue of our time.

    I am of course talking about His Excellency the Irremovable President of the Senate of the  8th National Assembly of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Distinguished Senator Dr (with stethoscope) Abubakar Bukola Saraki.

    Who indeed is more qualified to expound and dissect that recondite subject with the clinical rigour it calls for than a personage with direct, first-hand experience of the subject as acclaimed suspect in one of the most sensational corruption trials ever staged in Nigeria, as architect of the most labyrinthine strategies ever devised to stall the court process, and as mastermind of the most audacious formula for staying in office and power in the face of corruption charges that would have driven a more squeamish person to permanent self-exile in a distant land?

    Only such a person is qualified to write a riveting foreword to a publication (“Antidote for Corruption:  The Nigerian Story”), its lexically-challenged author, sorry, compiler, titled it and then commend it excathedra to a select audience.  Admission to the event was by invitation only.  It was that kind of event.

    The publication at issue has been described by one professional critic who claims to have seen it as “desultory assemblage” of articles and materials from diverse sources on corruption in Nigeria. Its author, Senator Dino Melaye (APC Kogi West) is not bothered in the least, having been constantly at the receiving end of the darts and arrows and slings of the envious on account of his matchless legislative skills, to say nothing of his mastery of the martial arts and his self-advertised prowess in “the other room.”

    Members of his inner circle tell me that he regards all the calumny as the price of success and that he is only too glad to pay it.

    In this time of recession, the outing was worth envying.  A hard cover edition of the compilation  retailed for a princely N50,000 – less than Melaye’s monthly wardrobe allowance but more than three times the minimum monthly wage of N18 000 that many state governments say they cannot afford to pay.

    Saraki purchased a copy for each of the 109 members of the Senate for a total of N5.5 million, and House Speaker Yakubu Dogara  plonked down N18 million for 360 copies for members of the House of Representatives.  And that was just for starters.

    By the time the event was over, Melaye had grossed enough to pay Kogi State public service employees eight months arrears of salary the state government owes them,  and still have enough change to add a Maybach to his fleet of limousines.

    Not bad for a fellow who only several months ago was almost sunk by allegations that he had been earning a living under the false pretence of being a graduate of Ahmadu Bello University.

    By the way, I hope Melaye took care in the usual manner of the little matter of copyright the materials he re-published.  Otherwise, he should not be surprised to discover that not even Senators of the Federal Republic of Nigeria are at liberty to appropriate the literary and artistic works of other persons just like that.

    But enough about Dino the Compiler.

    Far more germane to the national policy dialogues is the seminal speech Saraki delivered on the occasion.  I have the highest confidence that it will go down as one of  the most important addresses of this age.

    What follows is my distillation from the speech, for the benefit of the reader in particular and posterity in general.  I call it “One Puzzle and Five Theses on Corruption.”  The puzzle and the theses are in italics, followed by my brief, interrogative commentary.

    The Puzzle:

    Do countries become more corrupt because the people are poor or are the people poor because the country is corrupt?

    That, Distinguished Senator, is the old chicken-and-egg puzzle.  And as you rightly noted, we may never be able to answer it to everyone’s satisfaction.

    But what is your learned view on the matter?  Your answer will contribute greatly to the anti- corruption war.

    First Thesis                                                                                                                          

    “If the purpose of government is to improve the quality of lives of its people, then any conversation about corruption must focus primarily on how it affects human development, whether it is health, wealth or education.”

    An insightful proposition, Distinguished Senator.  Again, what is your experience here?  Does corruption impede or advance public health, public education, and other aspects of human development?

    In what ways?

    Second Thesis:

    In the past two years, corruption has been forced to the top of our political agenda.  The people are demanding more openness, more accountability and more convictions.  Those of us in government are also responding, joining the conversation and accepting that the basis of our legitimacy as a government is our manifest accountability to the people.                                                                                                                                                   

    Not proven, Senator. The evidence of your acceptance of accountability to the people as the basis of your legitimacy is scant.  Impunity seems entrenched in the driver’s seat.

    Third Thesis

    If we want Nigerians to trust their government again, then government at all levels must demonstrate that we are not in office for the pursuit of private gains, but to make our people happier by helping them to meet their legitimate aspirations and achieve a higher quality of life…

    Capital, Senator.  Capital.

    It is going to be hard, Senator, but you really must demonstrate not just with one grand gesture but with all you do that you and your colleagues are not in office for private gain.  It would be more convincing still if you and your colleagues divested yourselves of the private gains you had made before your conversion to public service.

    Fourth Thesis

    In fighting corruption, we have favoured punishment over deterrence. That is why the fight has achieved only limited success.  We must build systems that make it much more difficult to carry out corrupt practices or to find a safe haven within our borders for the fruit of corruption.

    Would you also recommend that preventive approach for combating all other crimes, Senator? And how is it to be operationalised?  Former president Goodluck Jonathan said he fought corruption to a standstill by simply not making money available for stealing, and we all know the result.

    What is your own strategy, Senator?

    And if we ensure that there are no safe havens for corrupt practices at home, can we do the same on those foreign shores with which you are quite familiar?

    Fifth Thesis                                                                                                                   

    Corrupt officials profit from bureaucratic complexity and red tape.  Therefore we need to simplify administrative procedure.

    Right on the mark, Senator.  Unexceptionable.

    Sixth Thesis

    Low level corruption is largely powered more by need even than by greed.  Therefore, if we are able to build a quality public education system that is affordable, especially at the basic and secondary level, an efficient public health system that provides insurance cover to ordinary citizens and build a system that guarantees food and shelter to everyone, we would have gone a long way in removing much of the driving force for corruption at this level.”

    No Socialist Manifesto ever framed the issue more coherently, Distinguished Senator.  And your own example bears you out.  It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Kwara State, which you governed directly for eight years and which your proxy has been governing for the past six years has consistently been voted the least corrupt state in Nigeria.

    And it explains why your Administration in Kwara was voted as the least corrupt that has ever held office in Nigeria.

    Your prescription may not do much to help curb corruption at a higher level, the type driven by untrammelled greed rather than desperate need.

    But thank you, Your Excellency, for leading the anti-corruption war by personal example.

  • Biafra, Oodua and allied acolytes

    It’s a season of supremacists; and Biafra, Oodua and allied acolytes preen, strut, caper and crow!

    It is not unlike that Yoruba proverb: at the fall of Ajanaku, the mighty elephant, knives and daggers of different hues go ga-ga!

    Is the Nigerian Ajanaku, sired since 1914 by Lord Frederick Lugard, about to buckle — and all the buzz, dire signs of the free-wheeling knives to come?  Maybe.  Maybe not.

    One thing is clear, though: in the excitement of the moment, the mirage of instant desire swallows cold reality.  It is excellent wine for the trending feast of wild passion.  But the sure hangover would be no less telling — and galling!

    Which brings the matter to  e-maps, springing up on the social media, pronouncing emotive, post-Nigeria republics.

    The problem, however, is less the emotion.  It is more the crass presumption.

    Neo-Biafra, despite the fiasco of 1967-1970, the pre-defeat rollback at the Midwest and the post-defeat Igbo “abandoned property” of Rivers, is still mapped as the Igbo homeland; plus all of the Niger Delta, east and south; and, to the west, the eastern fringe of the present Delta State.

    Why, the most virulent of that delusion even annexed part of Idoma country, in the North’s Middle Belt, as part of neo-Biafra!

    As for “Oodua Republic”, it is the Yoruba homeland of the political South West; plus Edo,  Ishan and Auchi lands (the present Edo State), the Itsekiri country of the present Delta, and, of course, the Yoruba “diaspora” in the political “North” of Kwara and Kogi, up to Lokoja and Idah!

    At the height of this fantasy, romantics, Biafra and Oodua, were already swooning about some “South” — after IPOB’s Nnamdi Kanu’s reported threat of no election in the South East, until IPOB secured its Biafra secession referendum; and former Senator Femi Okurounmu’s call for a united southern phalanx against the “Hausa-Fulani” he seems to viscerally hate.

    How these romantics secured the consent of the non-Igbo and the non-Yoruba, mapped into “Biafra” and “Oodua Republic”, is not clear.  But pray, how is that different from the Lugard cobbling of Nigeria?

    In fairness to Senator Okurounmu he, with his Afenifere, are not new converts to restructuring.  Neither is Ripples.

    As he correctly noted in his two interviews with The Punch and Nigerian Tribune, restructuring has been the war cry of the South West, since Ibrahim Babangida’s rash annulment of the 12 June 1993 presidential election, which the late MKO Abiola won.  That argument holds today as it held then — restructuring could well be the elixir to save Nigeria.

    Still, pushing for restructuring is one.  Launching into hate, by passionately dubbing a whole people the “Yoruba enemy”, as Dr. Okurounmu did in his interview, is another.  That crosses the line from a civil campaign to crass demagoguery.  That was unfortunate, with all due respect to the Yoruba elder.

    Of course, the former senator got mixed up with pushing the legitimacy of his cause and marketing the Goodluck Jonathan National Conference, with its sop of pre-poll bribery and sundry baggage, that went awfully wrong for Jonathan’s re-election.

    That was fatal to his message.  To the acute, the medium simply slaughtered the message.  He clearly appeared to speak from the bitterness of backing a wrong horse in 2015, and, for political redemption, desperately clinging to the “restructuring” buzz.

    As it is true of Senator Okurounmu and his group, so it is of the avid new converts, of the South East/South-South, to “restructuring”.   Their campaign would appear fired more by an election loss than any intrinsic belief in their new crusade.

    Why?  Well, President Jonathan, with his vociferous South East backers, had ample time to “restructure”.  But why didn’t he do it, until his election-eve poisoned chalice, which lured the likes of Afenifere which, with the balance of political forces, had little or no electoral value, anyway.

    But you must congratulate Nnamdi Kanu for his newly demonstrated street value, among the Eastern rabble.

    Still, the “Biafra” sit-at-home order is nothing new.  After June 12, it became a yearly ritual in the South West, to force back the unjust annulment, while the rest of the country, particularly much of the South East, didn’t see what  the fuss was all about.  What goes around, as they say, comes around!

    Just imagine if everyone had squared against that heinous crime back then?  Perhaps the search for justice would have been swifter and easier; and the national question, maybe resolved by productive federalism, wrought from hard compromise.  But alas!

    How far can IPOB stay the course of yearly sit-at-home strikes?  Despite all the emotional huff over Biafra, it is a grand design to scuttle the Buhari mandate, lost and won.  June 12 was to revalidate the MKO mandate, fairly won.  Yet, it petered out as the years went by.

    Still, for this latest rash of southern supremacists, arrogantly crooning their own homelands would thrive should Nigeria buckle, the political North has itself to blame.

    The story of Nigeria is a torrent of injustices, arising from a skewed political geography that created a Northern sheriff, over and above the original two Southern regions of East and West.

    By playing the end against the middle, pre- and post-Civil War, the North headed a concert of powers, with the South East/South South in tow, against Western Nigeria, in perpetual opposition.

    But no thanks to Babangida’s recklessness, the North crossed the fatal line over the June 12 annulment.

    No evidence, perhaps, that Babangida acted on behalf of anyone to annul a pan-Nigeria mandate, freely given. From his self-perpetuation scheming, he seemed to have more than enough self-motivation.

    But there is more than enough evidence that the North’s power elite aided and abetted that crime, with the fond wish that the North’s political supremacy would stem the tide.

    Well, it didn’t.  And from that spot, the North lost its power invincibility; and started a sure and steady decline in power and influence.

    Still, if supremacy is bad for the North, it can’t be good for the South — and that is the point the Biafra and Oodua supremacists miss, busy flexing muscles about making it alone; while betting the North would be left in the lurch.

    If Nigeria must be saved — and it is imperative it is, for a united but workable Nigeria is far better than its balkanized parts — everyone must eschew hatred and bigotry.

    Rather, we should embrace good, old justice, which need we re-stress, by quoting Prof. Woke Soyinka’s eternal words, is the first condition of human dignity, nay existence.

    Besides, if Nigeria were to be restructured and saved, partisans across the divide must start talking with themselves.  But with all these ethnic cacophony, they only talk at themselves.

    That is a great pity, for Nigeria is at a crucial pass, which could make or mar it.