The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Serubawon : The principle and the legacy

    Serubawon : The principle and the legacy

    One of the more colourful politicians thrown up by military president Ibrahim Babangida’s duplicitous transition programme was a tall, solidly built young man who had about him an air of refinement that was accentuated by his exquisite tailoring.  His trademark dog-eared cap, a sartorial archaism that he parlayed into a fashion statement, bespoke a cultured sensibility.

    But what he inspired most was fear – primal fear.

    I cannot personally vouch that he knocked a state commissioner unconscious with a single punch during a cabinet meeting to consider the state’s appropriations, or that he once lifted an uppity permanent secretary by his ears and slammed the poor fellow on to the wall some 30 feet away.

    But tales of his predilection for that kind of behaviour were the stuff of political gossip, and had led to his being called Serubawon, literally, the one who scares them witless.  By some accounts, he had not merely bestowed that name on himself.  He actually gloried in it.

    The tales were probably apocryphal, yet they put associates and adversaries alike on notice that to trifle with His Excellency Serubawon was to court danger.

    But somehow, the governor’s reputation for getting things done without fuss and without challenge seemed not to have registered on the State Assembly, in which his party, the one that was a Little to the Left, held practically all the seats.

    Where he sought to move at a furious gallop, the legislators seemed to love nothing better than hearing their own voices proposing, amending, and raising points of order.  They were even plotting to impeach him

    One cold, dusty morning in December 1992, as the legislators were settling down for business in the State Assembly just across from the central market, in Osogbo, they espied a motley crowd armed with shovels, pick-axes, machetes and all manner of cudgels.  Before they could figure what it was all about, the assembly was under siege.

    Shouting foul imprecations and bellowing blood-curdling threats, the invaders smashed their way into the chamber and set upon the lawmakers with maniacal fury.

    Casting off their ornately embroidered agbada reflexively and displaying the comprehensive agility of the decathlete, many of them escaped through the most improbable exits. Those who could not escape or hide got a good dose of the serubawon treatment.

    It was a focused, results-oriented assembly that reconvened two weeks later, a real partner in progress with the state’s chief executive, Isiaka Adeleke.

    Elected Senator in 2007 on the platform of the ruling PDP, some 14 years after he had pummeled the Osun Assembly into unconditional surrender, and again in 2015 on the platform of the APC, he was priming himself for the 2018 gubernatorial election in Osun when he died suddenly.

    In the outpouring of grief that marked his redemptive return to politics, the Serubawon element of the prior phase seems to have been forgiven and largely forgotten.  But it was not lost on the future generation of politicians.  It seemed to have registered powerfully on the mind of a young Ekiti man then eking out an existence in Ibadan, in the rough-and-tumble world of municipal transportation.

    But first things first.

    Shortly after Orji Uzor Kalu took office as governor in 1999, Abia State was in ferment.  The air was saturated with talk of impeachment, with assassination plots, cabinet changes and rumours of major changes in the top ranks of the bureaucracy.

    Matters took a frighteningly violent turn on June 26, 2000, when hundreds of youths, reportedly incensed by rumours that the legislature was plotting to impeach Kalu, descended upon the State Assembly in busloads.  They smashed up the place, battered those legislators they regarded as Kalu’s opponents, and helped themselves to whatever they could haul away.

    Mission accomplished, the mob headed to Abia White House on a solidarity visit with Kalu who, in keeping with his administration’s open-door policy, welcomed them.  He listened attentively to their report on the sacking of the State Assembly and other measures they had taken to “sanitise” the undutiful legislative branch.

    Their intervention, he told his visitors, accorded perfectly with the finest traditions of democracy and freedom of expression. Thereafter, nary a murmur of dissent was ever heard again from the state legislature.

    Next stop:  Ekiti, and back o the young man who was eking out an existence as a transporter in Ibadan at the time of the serubawon episode.

    Ayodele Fayose’s first tenure as governor had ended in scandal on a scale almost beyond belief, impeachment, and disgrace.  He had been charged with serious fraud, and with complicity in the murder of two political opponents.  Some 11 years earlier, in 2014, he was running for the same office, against an incumbent widely perceived to be a better candidate on almost every metric.

    How it happened is still not clear, but Fayose won by a landslide, in what remains one of the greatest political comebacks in Nigerian politics. It was widely expected that he would embrace that second chance as an opportunity for self-redemption.

    Instead, Fayose loosed mayhem on the state capital even before taking office, leaving no doubt as to what he would do on taking charge. He personally led a phalanx of okada operators and motor-park touts and thugs-for-hire to the courthouse where a petition against his election was about to be heard, where they beat up judges and other officers of the court, in one instance renting a judge’s gown and shredding court papers.

    From that triumphal outing, it was but a short step for Fayose to present the State’s Budget to the State Assembly, adopt it on its behalf without debate, and sign it into law in just one day.

    The Serubawon Principle was also operative in Anambra, at the time of Governor Chris Ngige. His predecessor, who served two terms, owed his election to the spectral Chris Uba, the so-called godfather of Anambra politics.

    If you wanted to be governor, you sought his help.  It did not come cheap.  On winning, you  had to indenture the state’s treasury to him.  After he had helped himself to whatever he thought was his due, there was little left for anything else.  But that was the governor’s business. And that was the condition under which Ngige’s predecessor had governed.

    In Ngige’s case, the condition was that he had to step down after taking office, so that Uba could install another governor, probably on terms more favourable than Ngige was  willing to entertain.

    The pact was undergirded by an infernal oath taken stark naked, in the dead of night, before the dreaded Ogwugwu Shrine, in Okija, in Ihiala Local Government Area of Anambra State.

    When Ngige tried to repudiate this pact, Uba’s forces invaded the Government House,            seized Ngige, and held the state capital, Awka, under siege for several days until residents of the city rallied to rescue him.  While the mob operated, the forces of law and order were nowhere to be found.

    Finally, Lagos, the stronghold of the opposition APC that seemed set to dislodge the hugely discredited Goodluck Jonathan administration in the general elections scheduled for May 2015. Jonathan postponed the poll by one month, hoping the interval would help him turn the tide. It did not work.

    He hopped from one city to another, handing out sacks stuffed with the most sought-after foreign currencies to just about anyone he thought could advance his election fortunes.  No luck

    Then he hit upon the Serubawon Principle.  He recruited Gani Adams and the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) and assorted motor-park touts to put up a show of force and terror, the kind of which the city had never witnessed. They immobilised the metropolis for an entire day.

    The United States, the UK, and France ganged up to ensure that it didn’t work.

    But the Serubawon Principle lives on.  I suspect that somewhere, one desperate politician or another is waiting for the slightest opportunity to operationalise it.

  • Death of empathy

    The president is sick, with not a few fixated with morbid tales and ghoulish fancies.

    But what is clear here, even in every mortal’s helpless surrender to the uncertain certainty of death, is the death and burial of empathy.  That is a roaring shame.

    In formal creative prose, you were taught — at least Mr. Pius Omole taught his University of Ibadan students, among whom was Ripples — that you knew the true character of a man, when the man was in crisis.

    Nigerians — the entire Nigerians or just the over-exposed ultra-minority that ride the media crest? — are in a crisis of empathy.  The picture is a flint-hearted, contemptible, and graceless rabble, with nary an iota of human compassion.  Sad.

    Now, rigorous presidential health comes with the presidential territory.  That is why a section of the 1999 Constitution talks of the possible incapacitation of the president; and how such emergencies could be resolved.

    And yes: the ghost of the Umaru Musa Yar’Adua presidential debacle (God rest and bless his gentle soul!) still hovers over the polity, where some players, back then, tried to hide the state of health of the president, for their own selfish ends.

    Many say that experience has made not a few hyperactive in their quest for the latest news on President Muhammadu Buhari’s state of health.  Once bitten, after all, twice shy!

    But like anything Nigerian, where even routine things pass through grotesque ethnic lens, a quest for accurate information about presidential health soon peters down into savage nastiness, with even the cream of the media swooning in its orgy!

    Yet, things need not be that way.

    In neighbouring Ghana, President John Evans Atta Mills died in office, just as Yar’Adua died here.  Before then, he was ill, though the illness was so well managed that the president never faced any harangue as Buhari faces now.  Yet, the Ghana opposition could be as cantankerous as any, particularly during its early evening radio talk show belts.

    What then was so insensate?

    When the president passed away, the whole nation collapsed in genuine grief — and not just the cant and hypocrisy of the politically correct.  Had the president survived, he would have been nursed back to full wellness by the enduring love of his people.

    The enduring picture of Ghanaians, during this trying period?  A noble, caring and compassionate people, soaring high even in their low grief, on their common humanity.  Just wished someone could say that of Nigerians, with the present hysteria over Buhari’s health!

    Still, those who insist President Buhari and his handlers should come clean with his health status have a point.  If anything, that would follow the constitutional dictates over possible incapacitation.

    But a demand to conform with the constitution is one thing.  Crass insensitivity by mocking, heckling and gloating, en route to that demand, is another.

    Besides, there is a crucial sociological angle, which many appear to happily ignore.

    The law is clear on full disclosure of presidential (and gubernatorial) health.  Yet, the sociology of the polity jumps at secrecy, in such delicate matters.  Even standard medical convention preaches tact and caution, when it comes to the individual’s health.  Hence, the confidentiality dictate.

    So, even in the case of the president as complete public property, where does the law end and where does sociology begin?  Even with that, does the medical code of strict confidentiality have any role to play, in going public with the president’s health?

    In the hullabaloo that accompanied President Buhari’s medical tourism to Britain, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo made a point: Buhari himself would tell Nigerians about his health.

    The president did when he came back: how he had never been that sick all his life; and counselling Nigerians to shun self-medication.  No previous Nigerian president ever went that public with his health.

    So, those who claim to be unaware of the president’s health only speak the half-truth.  What is not public knowledge is exactly what is wrong with him.  The onus is on his medical team to divulge, with requisite tact and decency, according to the laws of the land, and the dictates of their profession.

    But public office and public property aside, President Buhari is only human like the rest of us.  He cannot give life. Neither can he take life.  At this juncture, only common humanity rules — not the pauper, not the rich, just the human.

    So, to those who play God pontificating over another person’s health, with such brutal zeal, just remember: Buhari is your president.  But he is also another person’s husband, father, uncle, cousin and even neighbour, all bound by intense family ties.

    Pray how do you sound to these fellow humans — some brute?

    Just think about that!

     

    Gory harvest

    First, the comet of DAWN.

    The Omoluabi, of iconic portraits,

    even mien and temperate heart;

    Cohabiting a furious temper

    To develop his native West.

     

    Did he figure death would dawn so fast,

    Conflicting another’s birthday:

    Birthday bliss, death-day blues,

    Leaving the celebrator winded —

    to laugh or to cry?

     

    Then, an Iroko of the native theatre,

    Hardly de-leafed, yet reaped,

    Neither the ripest fruit condemned to saddest,

    as our bard WS decreed;

    Nor the hard and sour, turned happiest.

    Just brazen victims,

    of the Reaper’s grim illogic.

     

    Then, outrage of outrage,

    On the Sabbath:

    Serubawon, serubawoned!•

    Now, all life at Iwo, a sparkling, gurgling eternal spring;

    Then, dead as mutton, in his native Ede!

    Death finally clamps the heart of one,

    who put others’ hearts quaking with fear!

     

    Death, be not proud,

    Once cautioned John Donne,

    He, of metaphysical poesy.

    But today, death is done with  Donne,

    metaphysics and all!

     

    Death rips, reaps, barges, smacks and roars!

    He, who would dare him, is not born.

     

    Yet, sweet memories, are death to death!

    As calm water, in easy quiet, swallows a roaring fire,

    So do sweet memories, with abiding pleasure,

    kill the pangs of death!

     

    To you fallen trio, be consoled.

    Death brags, with nothing, but your empty scalp.

    Rest well.

    Always, in our hearts, you live!

     

    • Serubawon, Adeleke’s political street moniker (Literally, Yoruba for “freeze them with fear”).

     

    Olakunle Abimbola,

    For Dipo Famakinwa (50), Olumide Bakare (64) and Senator Isiaka Adeleke (62), eminent Yoruba sons, who died within a three-day interval.

     

  • Lawmakers or undertakers?

    Lawmakers or undertakers?

    Just as many had predicted, Friday May 5, passed without the National Assembly transmitting a final copy of the 2017 Appropriation Bill to the executive for assent into law. For a budget whose parameters both parties had assured Nigerians were far less contentious, or if you like, disagreeable than the one preceding it, it has certainly been a hell of a waiting since the formal laying of the budget document before the two chambers of the National Assembly on December 14, 2016.

    So much for the feet-shuffling of the past few days, the best we had was the listing of the “presentation of the report” as the first item on the Senate’s Order Paper last Thursday. Even at that, like school children faced with the prospects of writing an examination for which they were totally unprepared, Senate Leader, Ahmed Lawan, merely caused to be announced that it be stepped down and taken “by the Grace of God” today (Tuesday) since the Danjuma Goje-led appropriation committee were “currently” meeting with their counterparts in the House of Representatives on the last-minute harmonisation of the budget proposal.

    Imagine that happening barely 24 hours to the expiration of the 2016 Appropriation Act. This is a budget that Senate President and chairman of the National Assembly, Bukola Saraki had promised way back in February would be returned to the President for his assent by the end of March.

    To our ‘distinguished’ parliamentarians, there was – as far as they could see – no cause for alarm.

    No risk of an embarrassing shutdown of government of the kind that would spark outrage on the streets – thanks to Section 82 of the constitution which allows the president to authorise withdrawal from the Consolidated Revenue Fund for the purpose of meeting expenditure necessary to carry on services of the government until the coming into operation of the new budget.

    No sense of urgency or emergency for an economy which shrunk by 1.5 percent in 2016, the first full-year drop in 25 years according to International Monetary Fund; a country whose infrastructure situation would best pass as antediluvian, whose real sector chokes from the unprecedented infrastructure deficit; an economy that has only lately begun to show modest signs of crawling out of the recession.

    And to further imagine that this is only the second money bill in the series of which the minders of the economy had sought to spend it out of recession! A budget said to be based on the Buhari administration’s Economic Recovery and Growth Strategy; a plan said to provide “a clear road map of policy actions and steps designed to bring the economy out of recession and to a path of steady growth and prosperity”; held hostage by the institution decidedly holding both the yam and the knife!

    But then, it is not as if the current holdout has not been long in coming. It started with the bickering over the administration’s 2016-19 external borrowing plan of $29.960 billion; it extended to the 2017-2019 Medium Term Expenditure Framework and Fiscal Strategy Paper which the National Assembly found incomprehensible; followed by the Hammed Ali – the Customs Comptroller-General and the uniform sideshow; and then of course the Ibrahim Magu confirmation affair –all  climaxing in the April 20 raid on the residence of the chair of the Senate Committee on Appropriation, Danjuma Goje by the police during which some laptops and 18 documents said to contain the work of the committee on the 2017 budget were said to have been removed.

    We know what happened after: the august body reportedly threatened to dump the process in its entirety – until the police returned all documents carted away in the raid!

    Talk of a parliament that would rather major in minors at a time of dire emergencies!

    By the way, here is what yours truly wrote on November 8, last year at the onset of the crisis:

    “If we had thought the nation was done with the nightmare of budget documents missing in transit, the topsy-turvy of an exercise whose final product was mangled to the point of rendering it of dubious provenance, we are again learning that nothing has changed in any shape or form about the annual ritual called budgeting. Even at that, there must be something spectacularly enervating in the antics of an administration that prefers drama over substance; an administration that has now made a habit of draping signature incompetence in the colours of patriotism. This is where the latest fire-fights and turf wars in the count-down to Budget 2017 is not only wearisome, it is one distraction Nigerians would gladly do without”.

    The wheels – as they say – have now turned full cycle.

    Add to the confused and utterly bungling executive branch, the insufferable arrogance of a body which would not baulk at deploying crude blackmail to achieve its base objectives, and at a time APC, the party in government is practically missing in action, the result is the creeping disaster currently set to overwhelm us.

    As for the six-point something trillion on which the nation pins its hope for survival, expect no miracle – or rather, no shortage of excuses for non-delivery on the budget objectives whenever it is finally passed into law.

    So much for the perennial circus.

    At a time the world is moving at the jet speed, it is alright for our lawmakers to live in pretence that all is well. And for the executive to imagine that it has all the time in the world to fix the problems. Together, they can choose to kick down the road – the burden of Nigeria’s 30-year roadmap infrastructure development plan – the National Integrated Infrastructure Master Plan (NIIMP), projected to cost a record $2 trillion (N398.1 trillion) over the next three decades. Isn’t it precisely what their predecessors did that landed us in the current hole?

    And now with oil price showing steady recovery, why bother again with the old symptoms of the Dutch curse that has held the economy down? Why expend valuable rigour on fixing things when you can enjoy the current bazar? Never mind the talk about mid-term being barely three weeks hence; why bother when you still have the whole of two years to get things moving?

    Who is talking about change?

     

  • Will Paradise be postponed, again?

    Will Paradise be postponed, again?

    I have been thinking of the year 2020.

    This must seem capricious, given the exigencies and the sheer volatility of the moment.   Need I recite the litany that everyone knows so well?

    Twenty-wetin’?  I can almost hear the reader gasp in disbelief.  Twenty-wetin’?

    But those who are not too far gone in their cynicism, especially those among them who have also been paying close attention to what some of the best authorities have been saying, will have no difficulty apprehending  that the year 2020 must now be the focus of the national policy dialogue.

    To cite just two of the best authorities aforementioned:  The World Bank Group said six weeks ago that the recession had bottomed out and would end soon.  And only last week, the Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, drawing on a report from the Central Bank of Nigeria, said the recession was fast tapering off and would end by June.

    Let nobody call this optimism unfounded.  At the height of the recession, the government’s main problem was how to find the money to pay all the bills.  Now the money has been pouring in from sources expected and unexpected in such abundance that the problem now is how to spend it.  The wheel has turned full circle, from the oil-boom days of General Yakubu Gowon’s regime.  The good old days are about to return, even if only slowly

    Then, an acute shortage of foreign exchange, the U.S. dollar especially, virtually grounded manufacturing. Now, there is so much foreign exchange in supply that the banks which used to hoard them and sell to buyers at rates that it would be polite to call usurious, are literally begging customers to come buy.  But takers are few and far between.  They are stuck with a glut.

    Only three years now stand between our exit from the one and our entry into the other; between a desultory 2017 and a 2020 full of the great expectations encapsulated in Vision 20:2020

    Here is the first of several Vision Statements, formulated in 1999:

    By 2020, Nigeria will have a large, strong diversified, sustainable and competitive economy that effectively harnesses the talents and energies of its people and responsibly exploits its natural endowments to guarantee a high standard of living and quality of life to its citizens, The Statement continued.

    The whole thing had begun life as Vision 2010, in the time of the debauched dictator Sani Abacha. He inaugurated the Vision 2010 Committee in September 1996 and charged it to produce a report no later than September 1997. The Committee was chaired by Ernest Shonekan, whose tragi-comic pretence of being head of state Abacha had tolerated for 83 days before summarily kicking him out back in 1993.

    Its remit was, first, to determine why, some 36 years after independence, national development lagged         far behind Nigeria’s vast potential and, second, to envision where Nigeria should be in 2010, five decades  after attaining sovereign rule.

    In reality, the whole thing was to provide a setting for Abacha to transform himself into a civilian president, under a new Constitution that would grant him two six-year terms.   He did not live to pursue his scheme

    On taking office in 1999, President Olusegun Obasanjo exhumed the Vision 2010 document, dusted it up, breathed new life into it and projected it as the blueprint for catapulting Nigeria to the league of the 20 biggest economies in the world by the year 2020.  His bid to amend the constitution to allow him a third term —to implement Vision 2020, among other projects — crashed on a procedural vote on the floor of the Senate.

    On succeeding Obasanjo, President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua  more or less embraced Vision 2020, renamed Vision 20: 2020, but his mantra was The Seven-Point Agenda.  Until he died two years after taking office,  it was hard to tell which was goal and which was mechanism: The Vision, or The Agenda

    Among its specific targets:  By 2020, a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of not less than $900 billion and national per capita income of not less than $4,000 per year, and generation of 60,000megawatts (mw) of electricity by 2020.  These targets, Vice President (as he then was) Goodluck Jonathan said while launching the Vision Document, might even be achieved earlier.

    In fact, Jonathan could hardly wait until 2020 for Nigeria to be counted in the league of world’s 20 largest economies.  His administration re-calibrated the economic data and came up with the finding that Nigeria, not South Africa as was generally supposed, had far and away the largest economy in Africa, and the 16th largest in the world.  And as if the Vision was not sufficiently freighted already, he grafted an Industrial Revolution on it.

    Given present realities, it seems clear that the targets set out so clearly and eloquently in all the Vision documents are unlikely to be achieved.  When 2020 comes three years hence, will Paradise be postponed again?

    That won’t be the first time.

    Most of the good things in Vision 20:2020 and its antecedents were supposed to bring should have become commonplace some 17 years ago, in 2000, the magical year that marked all at once the end and the beginning of a decade, a century and a millennium, a conflation that occurs only once in a thousand years.

    That was the year Paradise was going to be regained.

    There would be education for all, health for all, shelter for all, water for all, transportation for all, food for all, clothing for all, shelter for all,  and money for all. There would be absolutely no need to worry about admissions into schools and universities, for there would be enough places for everyone.  Hunger would vanish from the land, and so would homelessness and disease.

    When they were peddling these nostrums in the 1980s, the target year of 2000 seemed quite safe.  Almost like a thief in the night, it came and went.  But the Paradise it promised never came.  In Nigeria, it was postponed, until 2020.  And now that 2020 is nigh upon, and with everything indicating that the targets are unlikely to be achieved, will Paradise have to be postponed again, perhaps to 2030, 2040, even 2050?

    President Muhammadu Buhari’s Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (2017-2020)  two years late in the making, treads basically the same paths and promises the same outcomes as the Vision Documents I have here examined, though couched in far less portentous tones.  One can only hope that it will fare better than what came before.

    A much earlier Paradise envisioned in the Second National Development Plan (1970-74) launched shortly after the end of the civil war, a time of giddy optimism when Nigerians thought all things possible and petrodollars poured at a rate that overwhelmed the national exchequer, should not pass unremarked.

    The goals of the Plan were to establish Nigeria firmly as

    • a strong, self-reliant nation;
    • a great and dynamic economy;
    • a just and egalitarian society;
    • a land of bright and full opportunities for all citizens, and
    • a free and democratic society.

     

    It hardly got off the drawing board.  Less than a decade later, President Shehu Shagari was setting up a Presidential Task Force, supervised by one of the most influential members of his cabinet, to import rice.

    Some five decades and several Vision Documents later, how to produce enough rice for Nigeria’s teeming population lies at the heart of the national policy dialogue, and the prospect of generating enough electricity recedes with each passing day.  Toothpicks remain high on the import list.

  • Between Fayose and Kanu

    Between Fayose and Kanu

    Ekiti maverick, Ayodele Fayose and IPOB’s Nnamdi Kanu, are a peculiar pair.
    The one is twice a blight on his Ekiti generation.  The other, a heady presage to avoidable catastrophe: again, for the second time, in a generation.
    They made quite a sensational pair at an Abuja court on April 25 with Fayose, all infantile jabber, declaring himself and his Ekiti Kete, self-annexed Biafrans.
    But beyond the drama of optics, they made a more telling metaphor — sweet disasters baiting their people.  Nevertheless, the people appear too roused to resist their own doom.
    In Fayose’s first coming (2003-2006) — Fayose o, Yes oooooooooooooooo! — he exited in a blaze of odium.
    But that wasn’t his ultimate humiliation.  At his fall, he was accused of all sort of heinous crimes — poultry racketeering, a killer squad to bump off political enemies, real or phantom, and gubernatorial fascism Ekiti never knew; and again unlikely to know.
    This second coming (2014 till date), he is a worrying study in noisy emptiness — yakking before thinking, and sundry empty street drama, to press his democratic folksiness.
    Vintage Fayose street shows?  The governor as executive fire-fighter; as merry glutton, wolfing at the buka next door; as ladder-clambering member of a work gang, monitoring work on a bridge — in fact, as unabashed hustler for attention, with a spider’s web line between the sane and the insane!
    So, when Fayose happened on his Biafra jabber, he provoked additional comedy to Ola Rotimi’s comic play, Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again.  Tweak that a bit, with Fayose’s melodrama? Maybe, Their Osoko Has Gone Mad Again!
    So long for Fayose’s unending ribaldry! Nnamdi Kanu’s is made of a more tragic hue.
    Now, wherever the Igbo want to be, in or outside Nigeria, is entirely their business.  But if they go about that with hateful demagoguery, then it becomes everybody’s business. That is Ripples’ only problem with Kanu and his Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).
    Besides, there is something eerie about Biafra’s one-sided narrative, powered by a saint-versus-sinner passion.
    It was, in the build-up to the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970).  It was in its post-mortem, by Prof. Chinua Achebe, in his swan song, There Was A Country.  It is in Kanu’s current turbo-charged IPOB gambit.
    That appears the most sensational attempt at rigging history, even when some of the participant-observers still live, if aging.
    Since Nnamdi Azikiwe’s West African Pilot started amplifying Igbo achievements and toning down others’, hype appears to come with the Eastern territory.
    To be sure, hype is no crime.  Every people always project something to burnish collective pride.  But it becomes dysfunctional, when instinctive and compulsive.
    Take the land hunger that has sent many Igbo scuttling outside homeland for economic nourishment; and see how it fits into the Biafra agenda.
    Land hunger is nothing new — or bad.  In antiquity, fierce land hunger in Crete and surrounding islands, triggered the founding of Greek colonies, a cluster of voluntary diasporas, angling for economic survival.
    These settlements would mature into city states, which not only birthed pristine democracy, but also gifted the West its grand thinking — art and literature, philosophy, science, technology and IT.
    Just imagine the evolution of Greece — and Western critical thinking — without these pristine settlements!
    But tweak that a bit: can you imagine Igbo evolution in Nigeria, without these far-flung internal economic diasporas?  Yet, not a few, even among the most asset-vulnerable, would recklessly endanger all of that, in a moment of unthinking hype!
    The Biafra gambit — now, more than then — appears to fit pat into that explosive mindset, without much thought about the Igbo land hunger question.
    If the Biafra fiasco (1967-1970) didn’t curb land hunger, by making the East retain its best within its homeland, what guarantees a future Biafra gambit — success or failure — would?
    Despite the sharp contrast between Emeka Ojukwu’s Oxford elitism and Nnamdi Kanu’s explosive street populism, Biafra now, like Biafra then, runs on breathless emotions. In such campaigns, sobering facts are killed and buried.
    There is a sweet claim — that the Civil War was a northern ploy to subjugate the East; and that the West, under Chief Obafemi Awolowo, merrily played Judas.
    But Nigeria, at independence, opened with a North-East conspiracy to subjugate the West (see Hansard of the parliamentary debate of 29 November 1960, as quoted in Awolowo’s book, The Travail of Democracy and the rule of Law).
    At that session, Northern People’s Congress (NPC), with National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroon (NCNC) partisans pushed for a federal take-over of the West, under the ruling Action Group (AG). That would crystallize in the 1962 emergency.
    Besides, how do you justify the 1963 creation of Midwestern Region from the West, without a corresponding carving, for minority elements, in the North and the East?  Because the two formed a coalition federal government?
    So, when did two ganging up against one become a crime — since the East became a victim?
    In recounting the horrors of old Biafra, perhaps to justify a new one, emotive words like massacre, genocide, et al are freely deployed.  But seriously, can there be “genocide” in a shooting war, where you either kill or be killed?
    And guess the pre-war sabre-rattlers? Ojukwu accused Awolowo of “platitudes” in a May 1967 Enugu rally to avert war.  He further bragged: “I am no longer speaking as an underdog, I am speaking from the position of power.”. It turned out a costly bluff that consumed thousands of lives.
    Compare Ojukwu’s sabre-rattling back in 1967 with Kanu’s impassioned hate today, against the non-Igbo in what he dubbed the “Nigerian zoo”, and you would perhaps realize how little a once-bitten people have changed over a 50 year-period!
    But why go into these notorious though harsh historical facts?  Simple: the demagoguery of Fayose and Kanu creates catastrophes from small problems. Yet, it claims to gun for a solution!
    Ekiti would feel Fayose’s rascality, maybe in another 25 years, when his blind flight to Stone Age would have matured.
    Kanu’s sweet demagoguery may well inspire a future fresh and sweet South East mono-tales. But then, it’s a democracy, and choice is free!
    Still, between Fayose and Kanu is an emotional plane. It leads nowhere but avoidable perdition.

  • Soludo: Wiser after the fact?

    Soludo: Wiser after the fact?

    The current situation of more than 10 percent premium in the parallel market rates compared to the official rates is simply unacceptable. While we hope that some of the structural constraints (especially relating to the trade policy and practices) will be eliminated over time, the CBN has resolved to take some concrete steps to further liberalize the market to ensure greater efficiency of the market and drastic reduction in the premium between the official/interbank rates under WDAS, and the Bureau de change/parallel market rates. Our strategy is to ensure increased supply of Forex to all markets and also reduce the demand pressure in the parallel market by reviewing or eliminating many of the restrictions imposed on users of the official market. This will make many of the hitherto ineligible transactions in the official market eligible, thereby reducing the pressure on the parallel market” Chukwuma Charles Soludo, March 27, 2006.

    “Nigeria must get out of multiple exchange rates and we must eliminate the premium, get it back on track at a competitive exchange rate regime. The uncertainty that is created by that is so enormous; and with the oil price rising and with the increase in oil earnings, this is the time to take bold steps and do the needful…We have done it before and it is just going back to it. If it (the template) is not broken, why mend it? Get back and eliminate the multiple exchange rate regime, eliminate the premium, or at least significantly reduce it to not more than between three to maximum of five per cent premium between the parallel and official exchange rates”.

    That was Chukwuma Charles Soludo speaking in Lagos the other day as chairman of the Economic Discourse organised by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN).

    Now, if we excuse his trademark conceitedness as indeed his dig at Godwin Emefiele’s CBN, not so his pretence at being oblivious to the completely altered canvas in which he expects his worthy successor to hatch his lifelong fixation.

    From being a leader who pushed admirably to get a rather difficult job done, to one apparently bitten by the Nigerian bug to the extent that he now sounds more like an emergency crusader with an undisclosed agenda, (just imagine the hubris regarding the claim about so-called magical template or the veiled attempt to rewrite a most recent history!), the wheel has turned full cycle for our man. How about an individual that has left the stage but would not stop at writing own report card but would rather cart away the trophy before the game is called?
    Talk about our elite’s dalliance with hubris!

    Those are not the only things wrong with the Soludo message.

    As far as I can see – everything – is wrong!

    It starts with the disingenuous attempt to frame the issue (about multiple forex rates – that is) as something that either started yesterday or a relapse of a disease long cured when in fact it is the same stubborn disease that has not only defied cure, but continues to present in different forms depending on the vitality of the economy-host! Was that not why the ex-CBN governor could frame it as a problem in 2006?

    How about the so-called Soludo magic template – which if it existed at all, it was at best an accidental or chance occurrence? One only needs to recall that oil was price doing reasonably well (I think around $90 per barrel) in the Soludo years. Also, production held fairly steady at some two million barrels per day then – the reason we could build an impressive war-chest of $60 billion and with it a guarantee of 30-odd months of import cover.

    Remember, there was just about enough forex to import anything from carpets to tooth-picks with our hordes of parallel market operators left to scramble for pickings in what was at best a marginal market. Yes, the Soludo magic worked at some point; the rates appeared to have converged at one point (I can’t exactly recall when now).

    Today, we can look back in time to ask – why was it not sustained; or better still – sustainable?

    The answer has now emerged: like now, the apex bank as the main forex supplier could not satisfy the demand. The chief factor, as it now appears, is the degree to which the rulers made fetish of forex. Then, the dollar was important – but only to a point. Today, it is everything. With the economy virtually dollarised and with billions of hoarded naira – mostly stolen – chasing fewer and fewer international currencies no thanks to the slump in oil prices, a thousand and one CBNs could never have met the local demand. This – coupled with the criminal complicity of the banks – is what gives the black market the wing to fly. It explains why the naira continues to respond in fits and starts despite the apex bank’s activism; it explains the current scepticism about its sustainability. This is what – amazingly – Soludo pretend not to see!

    The truth of course is that the Soludo message represents a barely disguised attempt at reinforcing the age-long fetish about forex and the phantom ‘allocative’ efficiency of the so-called market (packaged as liberalisation) even when supply is finite and demand indeterminable. This is where the pretence that the malaise could be cured, not by taking on the abusers of the forex trade, but by abandoning the very institutional controls designed to bring some order, comes across as curious.

    When are we going to stop making the business of forex an end itself as against being a means to an end? Shouldn’t we be talking more now about putting in place enduring policies to get our factories revving full throttle as against the current focus on forex management?

    Does the present course not obfuscate the real debate about what ails the Nigerian economy? Isn’t the old but familiar course responsible for the current situation in which the economy lack the vital appendages on which to stand, one so utterly dependent and hopelessly vegetative that it currently survives on life support offered by petro-dollars?

    Imagine that we are already beginning to act like the drunk that has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. Thanks to the steady improvement in oil prices and hence the reserves, there are already pressures on the prodigal country to go back to the old paths –again. Yes, the chants are becoming louder as to why we must go back to the ruinous path of conspicuous consumption; to bring back the 41-odd banned items, to remove the very buffers that served us well in the difficult days; the humongous subsidies on those expensive vacations on the Riviera!
    As it was in the beginning, so shall it be….

  • Perilous times for the PEP

    Perilous times for the PEP

    These recessionary times are fraught with anxiety.

    Endlessly, you worry about money, family, work, health, career, relationships, and just about everything under the sun and even beyond it.

    That anxiety is compounded if you are a politically exposed person (PEP), the type who may for any reason whatever register on the radar of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) or the Department of State Services (DSS)

    What kinds of cues, verbal and non-verbal, are likely to raise the PEP’s hackles, disrupt his exterior calm or otherwise put him out of sorts?

    In the normal run of things, these cues often come from persons who usually defer to them – persons from whom the PEP has a right to expect a great deal of deference – personal assistants, stewards, drivers, gardeners, guards, and the whole lot.  They have been with him for so long that they are virtually family.

    As has been said, no man is a hero to valet, and no lady a heroine to her maid.  Vulnerabilities open up here and there, but the relationship has endured. Over the years, no signals from this extended family have disrupted the relationship in any fundamental way.

    But lately, the steward has been reporting only spottily and going about his chores indifferently. The driver keeps talking back or mutters under his breath instead of following instructions.  The gardener, inscrutable even in the best of times, has become positively taciturn.

    When he deigns to mow the lawn or trim the hedges, he goes about it as if he is doing you a favour. The guard takes his time opening the gate when you get home after hours.  He is in no hurry to switch the generator on or off as determined by the municipal power supplier.

    Collectively, they adopt a sneering tone toward the lady of the house.  They no longer make the children feel welcome in their company.

    They have not asked for pay increases.  They have not complained about conditions. They seem to have discovered the power in silence, and to have chosen to exercise that power.

    But to what purpose? What does it all mean? What could account for this collective sullenness in what has been a cheerful household?

    If you are a PEP, these are ominous signals.

    Should you call them together or separately, tell them what you have noticed, and demand an explanation?  Or perhaps maintain your equanimity in the hope that the situation will work itself out? Could it even be that you were only imagining things and tormenting yourself needlessly?

    If the PEP overhears his aides chatting animatedly about the EFCC and the DSS without a care as to whether he or anyone was listening, that is not a good sign.  But there may be nothing to it, since those agencies dominate the headlines and the front pages these days, conducting raids that uncover mountains of cash in the most sought-after currencies.

    Money owned by nobody in particular, or abandoned because it has become an encumbrance, like the “stockpile of dollars” found on the grounds of the Executive Mansion in Akwa Ibom following the change in government, or because there is just no way to spend it even in several lifetimes.

    Nor should he be alarmed if they went on to talk about fortunes stashed in faux septic tanks, abandoned at airports, buried  in farms, piled up in steel vaults tucked away in rat-infested rooms in derelict houses in the most distressed parts of town, lodged in bank accounts in the names of a battery of untraceable proxies, or warehoused in ultra-luxury flats inhabited only by persons of galactic net worth.

    If they should add amidst knowing glances that EFCC and DSS operatives would shortly be turning their attention to flower beds and cemeteries in the neighbourhood and ruins of ancient dwellings back in the villages and palaces and places of worship, not sparing their sanctums,     there might be something to that.

    The PEP may well recall how, in Babangida’s time, Colonel Yahaya “Jungle Expert” Madaki had disclosed at the end of his tenure as military governor of Katsina State, that he always took the most sensitive official materials to the palace of the monarch of his ancestral village for safe-keeping.   The colonel did not trust the bureaucracy one bit.

    The suspicion is widespread now that some of the people running the country today may be doing the same thing, only that what they are shipping out is public money, heaps and heaps of it.

    At this point, the PEP should begin to worry about how much his aides really know? Were they taunting him, or just bluffing?

    The driver knows his going out and his coming in and is not totally innocent of the transactions thereof.   The gardener knows where stuff could have been buried.  The steward knows the kinds of things stewards usually know and has supporting documents. The gateman knows what those heavy sacks they are continually lugging in and out contain.

    “How times have changed?” I can almost hear the PEP reminisce.

    In the good old days, empty overhead water reservoirs used to be the preferred storage for the kind of money that has been a staple of the news. So were chest freezers, until one-time U.S. Congressman William J. Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana, gave the game away.

    The FBI found interred in his freezer bundle after bundle of shrink-wrapped dollar bills amounting to the tens of thousands, believed to have been corruptly obtained from a prominent Nigerian politician.

    Don’t count on them to acknowledge it, but they must have learned a thing or two from Nigeria’s armed robbers. Years before FBI agents zeroed in on the Congressman’s freezer, Nigeria’s armed robbers had made full access to that receptacle a prime objective of their operations.

    On breaking into a home, they would head straight for the freezer and methodically empty it in search of cash or other valuables.  They would then move to the kitchen and rummage through sacks of gari or rice or beans or yam flour, in case other valuables were concealed therein.  That was back when you could purchase these commodities by the bagful.

    For good measure, they would upend shelves piled high with books, rip apart slim volumes, shake the stouter ones off their spines, and generally leave behind a huge mess.  All this was before syndicated kidnapping supplanted armed robbery as the surest and least risky path to money.

    Back then, politically exposed persons had little to fear even from armed robbers and even less to fear from law-enforcement officials.

    Still, there are politically exposed persons and politically exposed persons.  It is some consolation if, compared with others in that league, you are a minor player. Nothing may yet come of your gnawing fears.

    The day that should worry you is the day you overhear your steward ask the steward next door across the fence, “Old boy, dem whistleblower sef, how dem dey operate?  Especially if, after that encounter, your steward’s face turned aglow and his eyes danced in ways you had not seen them do since you hired him seven years ago.

    Then you know that the game is up.

  • Xenophobia at our door

    Xenophobia at our door

    If the Nigerian federal government ever harboured the thought about being “on top’ of the mindless rage against their citizens in the former apartheid enclave, the brutal slaughter of a Nigerian auto mechanic, Rasak Ajao, by some South Africans in Polokwane, Limpopo Province on April 6, ought to have removed that illusion. For while the inept ANC government of Jacob Zuma continues to deny that xenophobia constitute one of its directing principles, and the Nigerian government joins in mouthing the nonsense about engagement, the picture that comes out is as grotesque as it is unmistakeable: Xenophobia is actually the way ordinary South Africans and their hypocritical elites live and have their being. Less familiar of course is the benign form of the virus daily served on Nigerians right on their soil – by the country’s ill-tutored consular officials.
    Truly, I had heard different versions of the same story of ill-treatment of Nigerians by South African officials at their embassy in Lagos. A fellow Nigerian who was billed to attend a Motor Show sponsored by a South African company had the trip aborted as the embassy only released her passport days after the event was concluded. A cousin who had journeyed from Benin to Lagos for visa was told to wait until after the conclusion of the training programme – never mind that it was the very reason for the trip and for which he had already spent a fortune – to obtain the visa! A company executive had to storm the embassy to demand for his passports after the latter withheld same for weeks. His ‘crime’ was that he visited a third country – I believe Swaziland – in the course of an earlier visit. The dumb officials couldn’t understand why another sovereign country would oblige him their visa from their country!
    I would get my bitter serving of their pill in March. Late February, yours truly embarked on a six-week vacation that was to include a two-week visit to the former apartheid enclave. For a 40-day holiday, I thought I had just about enough time to apply for a visa. After all, their website said something about six days minimum to process the visa. In all, I assumed that the maximum would be no more than 10 working days or at worst 15, just as any thoughts of denial of visa were far from my mind. My mistake.
    Confident of my bona fide, I sent in my completed application at the VFS office in Lagos February 13. And then the waiting game began. One week stretched to two and then three; yet no word. The agents – VFS – said they had no control. The embassy, I was told, was a no-go as they don’t deal with individual applicants. By the fourth week, I could no longer accept that the situation.
    By the fifth week, I had clearly had enough. I called the agents – VFS – which advised I call the embassy directly. A day, two days, the embassy wouldn’t pick my call. Frustrated, I called VFS people who insisted I keep trying. Finally, on March 16, a lady picked the phone. After collecting my details, she assured me I would hear from them. True to her word, I did – barely two hours later: a text message requesting me to proceed to the VFS for my passport. With 10 days left of the six-week vacation, I settled on making the best of what had turned to a bad situation. What I got instead was a shocker: application refused! Reason? Some silly incomprehensible nonsense about some transactions in my bank statement not being credible!
    Let me be clear. I perfectly understood the bit about issuance of visa being a privilege. In the age of terrorism and social cataclysm, I do understand why embassies would go the extra mile to keep undesirable visitors at bay. However, I also do understand that the visa hurdle is not meant to be an iron curtain to deny legitimate visitors entry otherwise the whole point about opening consular offices would be pointless.
    Thanks to South Africa’s affirmative action, I have heard that a good number of the consular staff are barely of high school grade and so could barely read local newspapers; even at that, one considers it utterly disgraceful that consular officials could not make the distinction between a journalist/ columnist with a national newspaper and the hordes of potential economic migrants said to daily besiege their embassy.
    So much for my conceit. I had visited the country before together with my wife and three children. Moreover; I had a letter of invitation from my younger brother – a specialist family physician, including a letter of introduction from my employer – this newspaper – confirming my employment status. Besides, I had I had multiple visas on my passport – including United States and Canada –which the South Africans were apparently fastidious about and which they insisted on my showing proof with photocopies in the application. Now, at age 50+, I would consider myself effectively out of that broad category that has become the South African nightmare: the class of Nigerian professional supposedly predisposed to stealing their women; not excluding his compatriot street-hustler who do drugs in the country’s poverty and crime infested suburbs.
    Anyway, the accompanying note said I could re-apply within 10 working days if I was not satisfied with their decision! So much for consolation after waiting for 31-days!
    Ask anyone who has dared to apply for their visa, they would tell you that my story is typical. I must admit though that things are shades better than they were some 10 years ago when officials behaved like emperors and treated people like they have no use for their time. I recall an instance when I had to wait at the embassy till 10 pm for a 2 pm appointment!
    Never mind the so-called principle of reciprocity, (forget the lie about African brotherhood), South Africans do not think much of us or our government. Told that some 20 Nigerians had been killed in the renewed wave of xenophobia, South Africa Home Affairs Minister, Malusi Gigaba reportedly asked Nigerians to stop “complaining too much about the renewed attack on Nigerian nationals in the country”. Daring Big Brother to do its worst he warned: “This is the discussion South Africa would not want to get into as it would turn ugly…I am not privy to the figures from the Nigerian government and how they collected them…I do not think it is the discussion we want to get into. It will turn out very bad. Countries should desist from pointing fingers at each other”!
    Still think xenophobia is not official? How about the City of Johannesburg mayor, Herman Mashaba’s December call on illegal immigrants to leave his city? “You see, for me, when I call these criminals, criminals, I want them to understand that they are criminals,” Mashaba was quoted to have said, adding, “They are holding our country to ransom and I am going to be the last South African to allow it.”
    Or the Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini’s devastating riposte to Big Brother: “The fact that there were countries that played a role in the country’s struggle for liberation should not be used as an excuse to create a situation where foreigners are allowed to inconvenience locals”.
    The South Africans are right. The cups of our brother migrants are full and brimming over – their sins being no more than choosing to live in the unwelcoming country. And truly, many of them are known to do stuff from the petty to the heinous. But then, are they more sinning than local South African companies who rape and pillage our economy under the guise of foreign investment?
    It is alright for politicians and the elite to look away as hoodlums chase the kwerekwere (foreigner) with arrows and machetes in the inner cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria. With their corporate interests doing murder and mayhem in the Nigerians economy, I hope someone, somewhere would remember the rule of unanticipated consequences.
    And sure it would happen, sooner than later!

  • Elite children of perdition

    Nigeria’s elite children of perdition easily forget:  Goodluck Jonathan’s electoral rout of 2015 was a rejection of a feckless fellow, as it was an elite gambit at class preservation.
    Yeah, a bumbling Jonathan had to go; for his scandalous humbug was fast demystifying the elite, and the hoi polloi were rumbling — just as a reckless military provoked the Fela famous quip: uniform na khaki, na tailor dey sew am!
    So, that defeat was nothing but a fiery pyre, with crackling dry wood of elite panic: they must bury Jonathan first, before he buried them with him.
    But why did Jonathan unravel so fast, despite so much initial goodwill?  Free-wheeling sleaze.
    Yes, that probably had been the norm.  But its brazen projection under Jonathan earned a furious, mass censure, akin to the Achebe quip, in A Man of the People:  folks just stole too much for the owner not to notice!
    Candidate Muhammadu Buhari, hardly a revolutionary in spite of his ascetic contempt for graft, struck the right message; the people keyed into it; and Jonathan, with his hubris-stricken Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), became shameful history!
    Back then, no elite symbol, of the old venal class, could save their beleaguered class.  Everyone, lovers and haters, just scrambled onto the coat tail of the severe General from Daura!
    Which is what now makes that picture — of the trio of IBB, Bukola Saraki and Dino Melaye — which went viral, all the more amusing.  The picture was taken after Saraki’s and Melaye’s visit to IBB’s Minna hilltop mansion.
    Now, to their doting families, charmed friends and acquaintances, these three are excellent private citizens.  But public perception — right or wrong – may well differ.
    IBB, General Ibrahim Babangida, Nigeria’s first (and last) military president, is fairly adjudged the very quintessence of military rot.
    True, the late Sani Abacha was unfazed champion of military venality; and, from the exciting tales from Vindication of a General, Ishaya Bamaiyi’s new memoirs, as Abacha’s chief of army staff, the military plutocrats back then just might have buried Abacha, before Abacha would bury them, with him.
    Still, the IBB regime clearly owned that devil-may-care rapacious temper, that drove Abacha to new greed. IBB not only crowned corruption as the cornerstone of state policy, he annulled the sanest election in Nigerian history.
    Saraki,  as Senate president, projects himself as a doughty cohabitant of state power.  But while President Buhari tries to clear Nigeria’s towering mountain of sleaze, Saraki pushes his democratic right, with the Senate he heads in tow, as the very antithesis, of this noble historic duty.
    That much was clear from the Senate’s carping, climaxing in Ibrahim Magu’s non-confirmation as EFCC chair.
    But that has provoked a counter executive sleight of hand — even if very noble in the circumstance — that purports the Constitution does not require Magu’s confirmation, even if the EFCC Act says so.  Is it not trite, argues the Presidency, that any law inconsistent with the Constitution is void, to the extent of that inconsistency?
    Talk of a de-jure key democratic institution, tragically pushing itself into de-facto irrelevance, because of the hubris of a few of its members!
    As for Dino Melaye, Saraki’s unfazed sidekick, in Magu and allied senatorial wars, the beam on his university degrees, real or phantom, clearly shows he is no more, as his adopted name suggests, than grating din.  It’s tough luck that the highest legislature in the land is his echoing chamber!
    Still, IBB and friends have a democratic right to free association; and to pictorially toast themselves, schmoozing in great camaraderie, as long-lost lovers.
    But should acute Nigerians interpret that, given IBB’s past record and Saraki/Melaye’s current labours, as worrying symbol of the ethically challenged ancien regime, rousing itself, after two years of searing heat, to gamely confront its nemesis?  Only the good Lord knows!
    Still, the problem is less with individuals, no matter how powerful they fancy themselves; but more with the broad spectrum of the Nigerian elite.  They, like Emperor Nero of old Rome, fiddle over puffery, while their kingdom is on fire.
    Take the Judiciary.  First, the new Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Walter Onnoghen, plays the Pontius Pilate, washing his charges clean, of any perceived glitch, in the anti-corruption war.
    But did that performance, by the original Pilate, erase the grave piracy of justice, of nailing the Christ, on trumped up charges, even if, by the Christian doctrine, that was spiritually pre-ordained?
    Can the CJN, in all good conscience, say the Judiciary under his watch is less corrupt, than under his predecessors?  O, the judicial throne is safe but the estate is sinking!
    And the lawyers!  In truth, many senior lawyers have bought into the anti-sleaze war.  A good many others too decry the alleged technical shallowness of those charged with prosecuting high profile graft cases, and call for drastic changes.
    But it is also true that many a silk picks no bones about defending the decadent order that had pumped them, to near-bursting point, with sweet rot.
    Many hitherto too busy eating to talk, from the rot of yore, now lash out as fiery, crusading angels of corruption, though they hide behind legal cant.
    Well, here is great news, for this judicial Sodom and Gomorrah!  The awe of the courts is less in the impressive gown and foreboding wig, which nevertheless contribute to their grim dignity.  It is more with the societal acquiescence to polite adjudication.
    The moment irate citizens go the Fela way: court na house, nay mason dey build am, the game might just be up!
    And that’s not as difficult as it seems, does it?  Even as Ekiti governor-elect, Ayo Fayose tried it, and the response was the easy bedlam of fleeing gowns and tumbling wigs!
    Just imagine the society butting into that outlawry, just because the courts are perceived the biblical house of worship turned a den of thieves?
    If polite society collapses, the judiciary gets buried without trace.  So, its flowers had better quit posturing, and roast the few corrupt elements, before these corrupt few roast, with themselves, the upright majority.
    Still, you could excuse judicial nervousness at any change.  Not so the media, perhaps the most vibrant trigger of change, in all human history.
    The grandmasters of the early Nigerian press, John Payne Jackson and son, Horatio (Lagos Weekly Record), George Alfred Williams (Lagos Standard) and John Bright Davies (Times of Nigeria), among others, set the tone, of doughty social activism, that served the newspaper press so well, in its titanic clash against military despots.
    Herbert Macaulay (Lagos Daily News), Ernest Ikoli (later of Daily Service) and Nnamdi Azikiwe (West African Pilot), among others, built on the robust legacy of the early colonial era, in their own independence struggle age.
    Though critics accuse many of these greats of striking a happy marriage between public good and private bliss, history is clearly kind to them, by the way they have shaped the temper of the Nigerian newspaper press.
    But pray, what would history say of the Nigerian press today?  Strangers from Mars playing the ostrich, in culpable finger-pointing, while the soul of their country blaze in filth?   Analysts-turned-pundits, obliged to live or die by rogue punditry, when naked facts point to a more redemptive lane?
    Purveyors of pure fiction, faith and tribal champions, driven by explosive bigotry, when the times call for for the exact opposite — universal ethos that lifts all?
    At a critical pass, when corruption either kills Nigeria or Nigeria kills it, vital segments of the media, the judiciary and an errant parliament are marooned in Distraction-land.
    Nigerian elite children of perdition play Emperor Nero while their estate goes up in moral smoke!

  • An assassination plot that failed

    An assassination plot that failed

    If there is anything more deplorable than the dastardly bombardment this past weekend of the country home of Senator Daniel Jonah (Dino) Melaye in Aiyetoro-Gbedde, in Ijumu LGA of Kogi State, with the object of assassinating its distinguished resident, it is the failure of the National Assembly to end its recess and rush back to Abuja to deal with what must be judged a clear and present threat to the Nigerian nation and everything it stands for.

    What is the Nigerian nation without its premier legislative body, constitutionally mandated to act as a check on the Executive and curb its tendency wherever it is implanted to overreach?  For all practical purposes, an attempt on the life of a Distinguished Senator is ipso facto also an attempt to dismember and dismantle the Nigerian nation as we know it.

    Given the amount of speaking time he gets on the floor of the Senate, to say nothing of the wide latitude he is permitted, it must be that in its reckoning, Melaye emblematises the best values of that assembly.

    The fiery passion he brings to bear on issues recondite and prosaic sometimes gets in the way of the brilliant delivery for which he was well known in debating circles in his high school days.  Even so, few will dissent from the proposition that on a good day, his firm grasp of the issues, the incisiveness with which he expounds them, his mastery  of legislative strategy and tactics, plus his comportment and deportment, unfailingly ennoble that institution and lend not a little credence to its claim to pre-eminence.

    And yet, at this writing three days after the armed attack on his residence by people with murder on their minds, Melaye’s colleagues have not bestirred themselves to cut short their recess and return to Abuja to hold an extraordinary session devoted exclusively to this extraordinary development, the despicable intent of which, it is necessary to insist, was to deprive the Nigerian nation of Melaye’s sage counsel and sane guidance on the pressing issues of the day.

    Can’t they see that a threat to any Senator is a threat to all Senators, and that an armed attack on a Senator is an armed attack not merely on all Senators, serving, emeriti and deceased, but also on the Senate as an institution and everything it represents?

    But all is not lost.

    It is not too late for the Senate to rise in solidarity with its beleaguered member for Kogi West and apprise friend and foe alike that its distinguished members will never submit to intimidation from any quarters, least of all from a desultory assemblage of gun-toting village touts who, fortunately, can’t even shoot straight.

    It is not too late to put them and their ilk on notice that they are labouring under a delusion if they think they can continually assail the Senate with impunity

    Before examining the Senate’s options, it is necessary to isolate some elements of the armed attack.

    Like the security raids that have been yielding vast, orphaned fortunes in the best currencies in the unlikeliest places, the attack was not a fishing expedition.  The perpetrators knew the house; they also knew that Melaye was in residence at that particular time.

    They must have known, too, that he was not accompanied by his security detail.  Only two vehicles were parked in the compound.  Melaye had chosen to travel light, in keeping with the modesty for which he is well known.

    The rampaging touts, cowards all, took advantage of the security vacuum to launch their satanic attack.

    Now, why was the distinguished Senator, enemy of cant and humbug, and tenacious anti-corruption crusader to boot, left so dangerously exposed?  This question will have to be the starting point in a comprehensive Senate investigation into the failed assassination attempt.

    Why was he not accompanied on the trip by a full security complement? Why were the best officers not deputed to watch over him from the moment he set out on the trip?

    Why did it take the local police chief who lives down the road more than two hours to respond to the Senator’s distress call?  And why did the police area commander based in Kabba, 13 miles away, fail to rush his men to Aiyetoro-Gbedde to lift the armed siege to the residence?

    Why have no suspects been arrested or arraigned?

    The Senate will have to summon the Inspector-General of Police, the head of the Department of State Services, the director-general of the National Assembly Secretariat and the staffers responsible for scheduling constituency visits and arranging advance payment of allowances pertaining to same – all of them will have to be summoned to explain on oath how and why these gross derelictions occurred.

    They will of course have to appear before the Senate in their official uniforms and accoutrements. For good measure, since the matter relates to competence and preparedness for the job, they should be required to bring along the originals of all their academic credentials, from primary to finishing school, not forgetting a detailed breakdown of their incomes and expenditures for the past five budget-years.

    What of the local people, whose interests Melaye has championed at every opportunity with the utmost punctiliousness, and for whom he has made incalculable sacrifices?  Ingrates, all.  They did not raise the perfunctory alarm to signal that bad people were operating in the neighbourhood, nor did they fire shots to warn the marauders that they did not have the field entirely to themselves.

    What of the monarch of Aiyetoro-Gbedde kingdom, where Melaye belongs in the titled nobility? If he is worth his crown, if he is a true heir to his illustrious forebears, the monarch should have divined the attack to the minutest detail months before it occurred.  So, why did he not warn the Senator, a member of the royal court, to stay away from danger?

    More crucially, why did the monarch not perform the traditional oblations to ward off danger and save his domain the bad publicity the armed attack on Melaye’s residence was sure to set off?

    The monarch and the entire royal court should be summoned to explain to the Senate how they could have allowed all this to happen.  They will of course have to appear in their full traditional regalia, and with the originals of the instruments appointing them to their offices.  They will also have to justify the hefty grants they receive from the Federation Account through the Local Government Council.

    This list comprises only the first wave of officials who may have by acts and omissions contributed to the treasonous assault on a distinguished member of the Senate as well as the integrity of the Republic.

    At some point, the distinguished Senator Melaye himself will have to explain under oath how he came to attract so much obloquy from his constituency and to be held in such loathing abhorrence by a vocal section thereof.

    Before the Senate went into recess, Melaye had appeared in one of its business sessions decked out in the doctoral robes of Ahmadu Bello University as further evidence that he is an alumnus in good standing. The university’s vice chancellor was wearing his workaday clothes during his Senate testimony in support of Melaye’s claim.

    For the special inquiry I am proposing, Melaye should be required to wear the academic robes commensurate with his degree.  The vice chancellor will be required to back Melaye’s claim afresh, this time with the chairman of the University’s Governing Council, the registrar, the bursar, the librarian, and the director of works and services in tow.

    All of them will have to submit their certificates, transcripts and letters of appointment (originals only, please) to forensic scrutiny.

    The Senate must get to the root of this matter, even if that means suspending every other business indefinitely.