The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Donald Trump: The triumph and the angst

    Donald Trump: The triumph and the angst

    Benumbed.  Blitzed. Bewildered.  Confounded. Devastated.  Discomb-obulated.  Disconcerted.  Disconsolate.  Discomposed.  Dismayed.  Disoriented.  Distraught. Dumbfounded.  Outraged. Nonplussed. Poleaxed.  Shellacked. Shell-shocked.

    No, I have not been looking up the Thesaurus nor playing word games. I had asked some friends, expatriate Nigerians and Nigerians “on ground,” to indicate in just one word how they felt when it dawned on them that Donald Trump was about to be proclaimed president-elect of the United States.

    The foregoing is a selection from their responses.

    Full marks, again, to the percipient lady of the house.  She had seen it coming, right from the   debates that preceded the Iowa caucus.  As they unfolded, the primaries merely confirmed her premonition.  In vain did I point out that bluster and humbug and vulgar abuse might move a lot  of people to line up behind Trump, but would not be enough propel him to the nomination.

    By mid-May, Trump had won more than enough delegates to clinch the GOP ticket.

    Okay, winning the nomination is one thing.  Winning the presidential election is a different game altogether, whether Trump’s opponent was Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton.  Trump had come to the end of the road, I assured the lady of the house.

    But the surging crowds at Trump’s rallies, the enthusiasm with which they embraced even his most outlandish pronouncements  as if they flowed from Holy Writ, the way he worked them up to denounce with greater vehemence every person, idea, programme, policy or institution he denounced, convinced her that she had it right.

    Just wait until they have their first televised debate, I told the lady of the house.  Trump will be shown up as the empty suit he is, totally unfit to be president of the United States.  And that  was precisely what happened in their first one-on-one debate. In manner, speech, comportment and deportment, he looked anything but presidential.

    After that debate, Clinton overtook Trump for the first time in virtually every poll.

    “I told you so,” I teased the lady of the house, my mojo restored.   “In a one-on-one debate, Hillary Clinton will put Trump in his place any day.”

    Still, she was not impressed.  Her instincts told her Trump would prevail, even without those treacherous emails that dogged Hillary Clinton’s every step.  At that point, I thought I should invoke the authority of my professional calling to settle the matter.

    “Political journalism is my line of business,” I told the lady of the house portentously, as if she did not know it or had forgotten.  “If Trump wins, never trust me again.”

    It was when Trump won that I realized I had made an exorbitant wager, rendered all the more reckless by its open-endedness.    “Never trust me again,” period, I had said, instead of “Never trust my political judgment again.”

    I hope I can still walk it back.

    On the eve of the election, the most credible polls had Trump trailing by several percentage points. Nate Silver, the statistics wizard who had predicted with stunning precision Barack Obama’s victories in the 2008 and 2012 elections and the attendant distribution of seats in the United States Congress, scored the odds 76/33 Clinton. 

    The New York Times revised downwards its  forecast from 91/9 Clinton to 81/17 Clinton after FBI director James Comey mischievously reopened investigations into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as  U.S. Secretary of State.

    That was the point at which Hillary Clinton’s sizeable lead, which had spiked when tapes of Trump spouting demented “locker room” talk about women surfaced and one woman after another came out to report how he had groped, fondled and grabbed them by unmentionable parts of their anatomy — it was at this point that Hillary Clinton’s lead began to shrink.

    The race tightened, but not to the point that anyone could with confidence tip Trump to win.  Hillary Clinton still held a clear but not insurmountable lead.

    A few polls, it is true, had Trump winning.  But even the director of one such poll, a professor at Emory University, rejected his own findings as wildly implausible and scored the race for Hillary Clinton.  Other polls predicting a Trump win were dismissed as unreliable.

    In the event, Hillary Clinton won the popular ballot by some 250 000 votes.  But Trump prevailed  in the Electoral College, the platform that really counts in the election of president of the United States.

    The same Donald Trump whom Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee in the 2012 had described as a “a fraud” and “a phoney” who would drive the United States to the point of collapse, will soon have his finger on the nuclear trigger.

    “He’s playing the American public for suckers.”  Romney said of Trump.

    As Romney saw it, Trump had neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president. “Dishonesty,” he said, is Trump’s hallmark.

    The same Trump who elevated bigotry, xenophobia, demagoguery and misogyny to cardinal virtues.  The same Trump who had not paid federal income tax in 18 years, who ran a bogus university that issued worthless diplomas upon upfront payment of fees it would be courteous    to call unconscionable. The same Trump who waltzed unscratched through a trail of   bankruptcies even as his partners and shareholders faced certain ruin.  The same Trump who regularly stiffed his workers.

    The same Trump who built his gaudy hotel towers with cheap imports from China as the           domestic steel industry languished in terminal illness, and with even cheaper labour from         Mexico and Poland, the minimum wage be damned.  Even his signature “Make America Great Again” cap was made in China.

    The same Trump who . . .  But why belabor the point?

    The conventional wisdom was that a man with such a political baggage and a threadbare résumé of public service to boot had no business seeking the presidency of the United States and that a critical mass of Americans who believe that decency and integrity and trustworthiness and the values that undergird America’s claim to exceptionalism would see through the bluster and the bombast and mendacity and the megalomania and send him back to the world of Reality TV for which his talents are best suited.

    I allied myself with that wisdom, which must now go down as one of the most egregious political misjudgments of this or any era. That a great many among the best authorities made the same misjudgment is of course no exculpation.

    Even Trump’s camp was bracing itself for the worst. The mood there was gloomy, saturnine. The campaign was over.

     

    The frenzied crowds had returned to their domains, leaving Trump and his inner circle to contemplate not just the possibility but the imminent certainty of loss, of Trump figuring as just another loser in a long line of those he always took great delight in dismissing as losers.

    Trump will now have to do on the American landscape what he was never able to do to his rickety business empire:  Turn America from the doomed dystopia he painted in campaign stop after campaign stop and tweet after tweet into a glittering utopia.

    He is already learning that you don’t shoot first and aim later.  Having now found that the Affordable Health Care Act, the so-called Obamacare, is not the devil’s blueprint, he is saying he will retain two of its most revolutionary provisions:  the one that keeps children covered by their parent’s health insurance at no extra cost until they reach age 26, and the one prohibiting denial of coverage to persons with pre-existing conditions.

    However, expect no sobriety from the GOP.

    Basking in triumphalism, it is frantically looking for ways of eviscerating Obama’s legacy without troublesome recourse to established procedure.   It says it has found a way of getting rid of Obamacare through some chink in the Budget process

    Expect more shortcuts, and more in-your-face usurpations.

    The lady of the house had it right.  She had worked in some mean establishments and interacted with a great deal of mainstream Americans across the Midwest.  From those interactions she had gained the insights that helped her make the right call, unlike the man of the house who had been  cloistered in the Ivory Tower and had interacted for the most part with its denizens.

  • Trump: Globalization gobbles self

    Trump: Globalization gobbles self

    Just as well Himself the Osoko, Ayodele Fayose, has mouthed his usual “plebeian-nity” on the Donald Trump upset in the American presidential election of November 8.

    “It is … a turning point for Nigeria and Nigerians, particularly those controlling the federal government that must change their ways as their allies who imposed them on us just lost out,” he gloated.  “Most importantly, President Barrack Obama got what he did to Dr. Goodluck Jonathan.”

    As apt as a butcher jiving on the latest high-tech surgery, isn’t it?

    And pray, what did Obama do to Jonathan?  Voted with Nigerians to throw out that un-presidential disaster?   Or conspired to “rig the polls” against Jonathan,  as Trump, Third World gift to America, would have mouthed?

    Only in Fayoseland of vile demagoguery and mischief, powered by sweet ignorance!

    Besides, the Fayose triumphalism — over nothing, really — is not unexpected.  What did Awo say?  Only the deep can call to the deep!  But flip that:  only the shallow can call to the shallow!

    So, if the  Ekiti governor foams in the mouth, in his infantile triumph, it is because in President-elect Donald Trump, he has found a kindred spirit, across the Atlantic, in uppity America, in political buffoonery!

    Eight years after Bush the Son, and his presidential contagion on the globe over eight calamitous years, if the global bastion of presidential democracy still elects a Donald Trump, it just shows the direction they want to take their country.  That is perfectly legitimate and democratic.

    Still, Trump’s election is perhaps the first in American modern history to face angry protests, ala the Third World, with many, in rage, reportedly calling him “not my president”.  But again, Americans’ funeral!

    At the end of the day, whoever the Americans elect is their business — to enjoy or to endure.

    Ripples’ business — and that ought to be every thinking Nigerian’s — is what lessons Nigeria can learn from the American choice.

    Over the ages, there has been a roaring debate over the core of man: good or evil.

    The Scot, T. M. Ballantyne, in The Coral Island (1858), voted for the innate goodness of man, with the excellent and civilizing conduct of three British school boys, survivors marooned, after a ship-wreck, on a coral island, off the Pacific Ocean.

    But two World Wars later, Englishman and Nobel Prize for Literature winner, William Golding, pushed a counter and darker narrative, in Lord of the Flies (1954): that the core of man was evil, given the way some British school boys, despite their elite education, descended into savages.  They too were trapped on another island, following a crash-landing.

    This ultra-dark side of the American psyche, it would appear, the Trump phenomenon has tapped and awakened: racism, bigotry, dictatorship, xenophobia, misogyny and nativism — all Trumpian monsters that threaten to turn America’s vaunted utopia into a stark dystopia.

    From the noise and fury in American streets, spanning 25 cities as at the last count, is it then morning yet on the Trump debacle day?

    Still, something dire always awakens the human monster, so conventionally hidden.

    In the fictive Lord of the Flies, a grim locale shred the conventional veneer of civility, to expose a rotten core of sheer savagery.

    But in real-life Trump’s America, it is globalization (euphemism for investor greed), savagely gobbling its own.

    Down the ages, Western thinkers always came up with a deodorizing philosophy, to veil the extant evil playing out.

    During colonization, it was Christianization, and its sacred imperative for missionary trips.  But that only hid Europe’s criminal greed; and its abhorrent culturicide against non-European peoples.

    Perhaps it was sweet coincidence that slave trade, in the British Empire, exited in 1846, after the Industrial Revolution’s triumphal entry, between 1760 and 1840.

    But it should take no especial acuity to figure that slave trade only exited because labour’s primacy in the production chain was dwindling.  Yet, some smart Western minds insisted its abolition was due to their high minds, and not the low profit — if any at all — trading in slaves was posting.

    “Globalization” is the latest of those buzzwords, intended to hide the cruel greed of “capital” (euphemism for ultra-greedy investors).  However, this time round, this was a  Western coup against the West; a coup by an infinitesimal few, against the bulk of their people.

    It is this elite greed that would make America toss its factories to Mexico and China, and assume it is chic; and crow its people are cool about a so-called post-industrial age.   Trump clearly shows they are not.

    With that new dogma, America must “import” what it could produce, simply because its capitalists are scouring the globe for “cheap” labour, and less exacting environmental laws, to maximize profit!

    That irrational philosophy birthed the irrational rage that birthed Donald Trump and consumed Hillary Clinton, and her otherwise golden history as Uncle Sam’s first female president, after Barrack Obama, its first Black president.

    But the real tragedy here is not America settling for chaff instead of solid gold: for Mrs Clinton would appear the most prepared, if not the most qualified for that job, in American contemporary history.

    It is rather the Nigerian elite that parrot, without thinking, the so-called “globalization”, as some canticle of merry self-destruction, by pathetic house negroes, desperate to be counted in metropolitan economic orthodoxy!

    You could see it in an Okonjo-Iweala counting the beans and cooking the books, while the real economy went comatose.  You could see it in a Soludo theorizing and be damned on NEEDS and SEEDS. You could see it in the glum orthodoxy of the Olusegun Obasanjo years.  Merry destination?  This present reality of economic death!

    Their victorious, if tragic, whoop?  Firm out this, out-source that!  Even despite producing crude oil, you must shun refining but import processed fuel.  With massive land, you must also import your food since you have cash to sell yourself short.

    Your universities?  They are infra-dig for your scions.  Send them to American universities.  Send your wives — and girlfriends — to deliver in American maternities, and come back with Baby American Citizen to crow, in high but empty conceit, about how you — and your baby — are American!

    Well, it’s Trump country now and the game is up!  America may well decline by voting Caveman Trump.

    But maybe that shock therapy would force the Nigerian elite to know you don’t solve your problems by fleeing from them.

    If only that singular lesson is learnt, maybe the Clinton loss and whatever it forebodes for America may well be good for Nigeria.

    Perhaps after all, there is something good in globalization trumping its own; and Trump’s America receding into its nativist, racist (and maybe fascist), misogynist and xenophobic mode!

  • Lessons of Trump whitelash

    Lessons of Trump whitelash

    Days after the phenomenal whitelash of November 8, I came across an article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian of London. It was something of a prognosis of Trump presidency. Titled “Be Calm: trump is not the worst and won’t go unchallenged”, he had written: ‘This is not about sanitising the unthinkable. It is about adjusting to a new reality. Trump is not the worst candidate to become president. He has to beat Andrew Jackson, Warren Harding and Richard Nixon for that title. He is unknown and unqualified rather than proven to be incompetent’.

    By no means a consolation to the throng out there who, unable to find any redeeming grace in the prospect of a Trump presidency have come to see it as the modern equivalent of Armageddon, rather, it sought to draw attention to the infinite power of the country’s institutions to rein in a wayward president.  I guess the throng would include the allies of the world’s sole superpower, whose leaderships, assailed by his nativist instinct and jarring demagoguery, are forced to recalibrate their position in the wake of the emphatic victory of the individual who not only swore to make America great again but has promised “to bring our country back”.   The exceptions of course would be the Nigel Farages and Marine Le Pens of this world whose far right positions are fast changing the face of European politics.

    Howbeit, the reality is that the world is today stuck with a man who not only defied the books but broke every known rule in his journey to the White House. A man who proposed to ban Muslims – albeit temporarily – from entering the United States; an individual who derided Latinos, Africans and who promised to deport some 11 million illegal immigrants; who not only promised to scrap the Trans-Pacific Trade pact but to build a wall along the Mexican border – is now president-elect.

    Need we say more? A man which Washington Post’s celebrated right-leaning columnist Charles Krauthammer once described as “authentic” but “unelectable”; of whom he had painted an unflattering character sketch days after he attacked the Gold Star family: “I used to think Trump was an 11-year-old, an undeveloped schoolyard bully. I was off by about 10 years. His needs are more primitive, an infantile hunger for approval and praise, a craving that can never be satisfied. He lives in a cocoon of solipsism where the world outside himself has value — indeed exists — only insofar as it sustains and inflates him…Most politicians seek approval. But Trump lives for the adoration. He doesn’t even try to hide it, boasting incessantly about his crowds, his standing ovations, his TV ratings, his poll numbers, his primary victories. The latter are most prized because they offer empirical evidence of how loved and admired he is…”

    That is the newly elected leader of the so-called free world.

    I have read Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter, his 100-day anchor designed to restore prosperity to America’s economy, security to communities, and honesty to government. Undoubtedly, the document which purports to speak to the primacy of America’s interest merely taps into the anger and deep frustrations of a class of Americans left behind by the forces of globalization. In the context of the anti-immigration sentiment sweeping through Europe and America, it seems the perfect setting for the toxic brew of isolationism championed by Brexiters and now Trump.

    I don’t think it’s time for the world to mourn. There would be enough time in the coming months to bewail what happened to America. What the world should brace for at this time is a presidency that would be defined more by symbols than any real substance in the long run. For a good number of the voters who jumped on the Trump train which promise of the good life, it seems only a matter of time before they discover that the smooth-talking billionaire, who obviously thought it was chic to exude raw power, and who believed that it was a smart thing not to pay federal taxes, actually conned them.

    There are however positive lessons to take from the Trump challenge. Topmost is his idea of putting his country America first. Never mind America’s claims about being the global policeman, Trump obviously understood that his charity should begin right from his front door. Obviously, if the president-elect thought little of the trade deals which, in his view, disadvantaged his country, he has practically no patience for the open trade promoted in the guise of globalization which has turned swathes of manufacturing complexes into abandoned warehouses while the country turns to China and Mexico for imports. A country like Nigeria whose leaders, apart from pretending to be more catholic than the Pope, are known to perennially whine over issues of trade to the extent that landscape which once boasted of vibrant manufacturing concerns have now become empty storehouses, it seems there is some lesson they can take here. I think one of the greatest tragedies of leadership on the continent is the penchant to pander to interests other than those of the electors. Again, our leaders could do with some basic lessons on how to connect with the people from the American president-elect.

    Like in trade so it is with security. Trump for instance, would have NATO understand that the burden of security would henceforth be a shared one. To the Russians, he would rather find common cause rather than embark on adversarial moves that have proven to be quite often, needless and unhelpful. Thanks to Trump, it seems obvious now that the NATO security framework would have to be overhauled at some point. In a country where money and materials come before strategic thinking, our leaders could do with a page in the Trump manual to understand how to put the nation’s strategic interests first. It seems about time our leaders begin to properly articulate the nation’s interest in the sometimes complex matrix of global politics.

    There is no better time than this, in my view, for the Nigerian government to reclaim our country back – for us.

  • The day Zik didn’t die

    The day Zik didn’t die

    Zik-gate, as my inventive Rutam House colleague Emeka Izeze called the widely circulated but false reports of the death of the legendary Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe 27 years ago this week, has got to be the most scandalous episode in Nigerian journalism history.  It left mud on the faces of all of us journalists, those who proclaimed categorically that  he was dead, and those who merely hinted that he might have departed.

    At 85, Nigeria’s former president stood splendidly erect, and in full possession of his faculties. His voice had lost some of its resonance, but his speech was not slurred.  His hearing was acute, and he could see much more clearly with the unaided eye than some people half a century younger.  By some accounts, he was at the time engrossed in writing four books.

    This was the man whom not just one or two newspapers but the entire Nigerian news media proclaimed dead and awaiting burial.

    Rumours of Zik’s death started swirling on Wednesday, November 8, 1989, apparently triggered by enquiries from a BBC correspondent about his condition.  By Friday, the rumours had gained so much traction that two newspapers published speculations about his death.

    If any doubts lingered about Zik’s condition, they were dissolved by the newscast the NTA beamed to its fabled 30 million viewers the following night, almost one-half of it a moving depiction of Zik’s life and times.

    The newscast, a marvelous production featuring footage and archival material that captured Zik’s illustrious career, as well as moving tributes by those who knew him well, plunged the country into mourning.

    By Saturday, November 11, virtually every newspaper had the story of Zik’s reported death as front-page lead, in type size and headline vocabulary that sought to do justice to the great man’s memory.  Even those newspapers that left some room for doubt still felt obliged to refer to Zik in the past tense. The obituaries were adulatory, as indeed they should be.

    The Saturday papers that cared at all for sources searched no farther than Zik’s “associates,” many of whom had not seen him for several years. They cited no family sources, nor Zik’s personal physician, nor yet his protective private secretary of more than 40 years, the spectral and pleasantly disobliging figure everyone called “Mr Okolo”.

    In one of the Saturday papers, a letter purporting to be Zik’s “last correspondence” bobbed up.  In a fit of what can only be called misguided journalism, Sidi Ali Sirajo’s New Nigerian that was forever railing against “misguided heroism” cited not a single source for the reports that covered its entire front page.

    “Zik’s death,” it pronounced sententiously, had left Nigerians “benumbed,” but apparently not before they had reached a “spontaneous consensus” that he deserved            a full state funeral. The closest the paper came to naming a source for its sweeping assertions was a perfunctory reference to “political pundits.”

    The first editions of the Lagos- based Sunday newspapers printed Friday night and trucked to the more distant parts of the country the following morning, carried the same news about Zik, with updates and embellishments.  One enterprising Sunday newspaper even carried an editorial befitting the occasion.

    At the convocation of the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, in Kuru,     near Jos, the assembled dignitaries reportedly observed a moment of silence in honour of Zik’s memory.

    The whole thing had begun with a “letter of condolence” that Dr Kingsley Mbadiwe                     had sent with accustomed magniloquence to the Federal Government on the “passing”              of Zik.  For good measure, he also sent a copy to the NTA. That letter, plus a statement issued on behalf of the “National Committee for the Transition of Dr Azikiwe” by four prominent Nigerians, was all the NTA had relied on for its categorical pronouncement on so weighty a matter.

    Out-of-work politicians saw an opening and moved in swiftly.  A First Republic legislator and former stalwart of the Zikist Movement, Chief RBK Okafor, panting as if he had sprinted all the way from Nsukka to Rutam House in Lagos, narrated breathlessly how he had cradled his “beloved Zik” in his arms and how, even as his life ebbed, the great nationalist had said to him: “Chief RBK Okafor, my political son, remember that I am a Pan-Africanist and should be given a Pan-African burial,” or words to that effect.

    When the tale appeared in cold print, Okafor denied it vehemently.  He forgot that Ebube Wadibia, The Guardian’s resourceful and street-smart news editor, had caught him on audiotape word for word.  It turned out that Okafor had not seen Zik in several years.

    Nor were desperate politicos the only groups with eyes on the main chance.  At the airport lounge in Lagos, a person claiming to be a doctor told a Newswatch executive with critical solemnity that he had just come away from performing the autopsy on Zik and signing the death certificate.  That disclosure won him instant celebrity.

    By lunchtime on Saturday November 11, reports of Zik’s death had fallen apart.

    While television network news on Saturday showed Zik alive and well in his living  room talking with Colonel Robert Akonobi, the military governor of Anambra State and a team of journalists, in many parts of the country the Sunday newspapers were still proclaiming solemnly and unequivocally that Zik was no more.

    Zik, it turned out, had been watching the newscast at his home in Nsukka with his vivacious wife Uche, thinking that it was his birthday tribute until he heard “And may his great soul rest in peace.”  Not many octogenarians would have survived this excellent example of the actionable tort that Americans call “wanton and intentional infliction of mental and emotional distress.”

    What went wrong? 

    Dr Azikiwe was of course not the most accessible of eminent Nigerians.   Still, how was it that, for more than 36 hours, the entire news media and the government’s information machinery and the security apparatus could not establish his condition?

    Zik-gate showed how narrowly the news media cast their net and how vulnerable they were.  It was as if they had resolved not to let the facts get in the way of a “good” story.

    If they had checked and re-checked, they would have saved themselves a shameful  outing that they will never quite live down.

    And if a government obsessed with “national security” had swung into action with all the resources at its disposal as the rumours spread, a national embarrassment would  have been averted.

    Can Zik-gate happen today?

    I think not.  There are far more news sources, and the media have become more enterprising and sophisticated.

    Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe lived on for another seven years.  He said he was in no hurry to leave this beautiful planet.

    Those who had declared him dead and were organising his burial died well before him.

     

  • The circus, all over again

    Had the economy not shrunk to the lowest levels in the nation’s chequered history, Nigerians would, most probably have been entertained by the circus currently playing out between the Muhammadu Buhari-led federal executive and the National Assembly. For while Nigerians may be a boisterous, mirthful lot, there ought to be a limit to citizens’ forbearance in the context of the kindergarten governance that has become their lot.

    Today makes it exactly two weeks since President Muhammadu Buhari forwarded a request to the National Assembly seeking its approval for his administration’s 2016-19 external borrowing plan of $29.960 billion to execute key infrastructural projects across the country. That by the way, is supposed is to represent the most spectacular shove by the administration to jump-start the economy said to be so ill-served by infrastructure that the limited economic activities still taking place qualify to be described as a miracle.

    The funds, we were told, will fund targeted projects cutting across all sectors with special emphasis on infrastructure, agriculture, health, education, water supply, growth and employment generation. And then of course the administration’s flag-ship programmes in the area of poverty reduction, governance and financial management reforms.

    You know the rest of the story.

    Against all expectations, the Senate threw out the request last week – without debate. It turned out that the presidency – as usual – didn’t do its homework. The letter from the chief steward is said to have contained no detailed information about the loan. Moreover, a certain reference to an “attached” breakdown in “the first paragraph” of the letter would raise a red flag: Convinced that the reference could well have been a dummy since there was no attachment, the senators resolved to give the president a thumb down.

    As if the omens are not bad enough, a similar storm would converge around the 2017 appropriation bill. A month ago, the President had forwarded the 2017-2019 Medium Term Expenditure Framework and Fiscal Strategy Paper to the National Assembly. With the National Assembly not forthcoming, the Minister of Budget and National Planning, Senator Udo Udoma, was quoted as blaming the lawmakers’ failure to attend to the documents as causing the delay in the laying of the Appropriation Bill before it.

    Trust the exasperated Senate to immediately draw the sword.

    Said the Senate leader, Ali Ndume at plenary last Thursday:  “We received the MTEF on 30th of September instead of submitting it according to the law not later than the 1st of September. That is not even the problem. I have a copy (of the MTEF and FSP), I went through (it) and the copies have been circulated. I talked to some experts. Even in this chamber, we have people we can call experts…If you look at this document that they call the MTEF, it is empty; it is empty and it doesn’t contain anything. If you have nothing, how do you consider nothing?

    “Going through (it) and knowing that it is empty, on October 19, I wrote to the Minister of Budget and National Planning…I stated, ‘To enable the Senate objectively to review the MTEF from a holistic fiscal perspective, we deem it necessary to invite you to a meeting to brief the leadership of the Senate on Tuesday, November 1.’ But the minister failed to turn up.

    “Before then, I said, ‘You are requested to please send the following documents ahead of the meeting’, because that is what will make us to have something to consider. I said, ‘(a) the Medium-Term Development Plan (even a draft copy) upon which the 2017-2019 MTEF is founded;’ you know that is important.

    “Secondly, I requested for a comprehensive report on the implementation of the 2016 budget (as of the third quarter, that is, September 30); that is also an important ingredient.”

    Ndume would observe: “Up until now, there is no communication as to that (the requests).”

    And so, miffed by the failure of the Budget and National Planning Minister to honour its invitation to explain the short comings of the MTEF and FSP documents, the Senate again resolved not consider the two documents because it was empty and lacked all the materials required of it by law to qualify it as MTEF and FSP.

    If we worried before now about the antics of a hubristic legislature – one whose directing principles is self-help, it couldn’t be worse that the country is currently stuck with bumbling executive branch, a team clearly out of depth with the requirements of how modern governments run, sadly at a time the economy is faced with daunting challenges.  If it seems any measure the depth of disaster on our hands, clearly inexplicable is the arrogant posturing of an arm of government, which lacking rigour and any sense of responsibility, has now elevated finger-pointing to an art.

    Describing the situations as tragedy would pass for an understatement.

    The truth however is that the drama has only just begun. 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.

    By the way, it is nearly three months since the administration gave hint of a need for emergency powers to stabilize the economy. That was to be the harbinger of the so-called “Emergency Economic Stabilisation Bill 2016”. While the text of the bill supposedly to be presented to the National Assembly on resumption from vacation September 12 would later be denied, hard to deny are the grim realities what gave it justification. In any case, that hierarchs of the administration chose fly the kite at the time would itself be indicative of how much it appreciates how extraordinary the times are. Nearly three months on, no prize for guessing what has happened: it’s all part of the drama.

    With less than two months left of Fiscal 2016 to run its course, it is probably too much now to expect that the administration would get the papers right for Budget 2017. That is if anyone is still talking about the ‘impact’ of the 2016 ‘reflationary’ budget said to have been targeted at infrastructure renewal and boosting consumer spending. With every citizen currently engrossed in the corruption dog-fight, such concerns are now academic. As for the tribe of Nigerians still whining over matters of coherence in the administration’s economic policy or general thrust, isn’t it said that the end justifies the means?

    And by the way, when did the ‘end’ cease to be what they say it is?

     

  • Ondo and the tinder that wasn’t

    Ondo and the tinder that wasn’t

    The November 26 poll in Ondo State is just another ritual, in the cycle of gubernatorial elections.

    But its build-up is cresting in some high-octane action cinema sans the celluloid, with no less than three riveting plots rolled into one.

    Part of the sub-plots is history repeating itself without exploding in a farce.  But already, one historical parallel has popped up in smoke.

    The fate of the other is left in the womb of time.  Delivery date?  Latest November 26.

    Governor Segun Mimiko, undisputed master of political gaming for ultra-selfish ends, was the first to tempt fate.  He wanted history to repeat itself, in a classical study of the gambit as political grandstanding.

    No sooner had the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) replaced Eyitayo Jegede, SAN, with Jimoh Ibrahim, as the Ondo Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governorship candidate, than, open sesame, Ondo “burnt”!   At least, that was the media cliché, reporting the Akure dawn excitement of burnt tyres and ruptured transit.

    That was enough motivation for Mimiko, doting and patriotic governor, to scurry off on a presidential mission to save Ondo State: Muhammadu Buhari, the commander-in-chief, must ensure Ondo didn’t burn.

    Mimiko’s sinister reference was the 1983 gubernatorial-robbery-gone-awry gambit of the late Akin Omoboriowo and his National Party of Nigeria (NPN) doomed apostles of federal might. That set the old Ondo State (now Ondo and Ekiti states) ablaze, and eventually torched the 2nd Republic (1979-1983) to hell.

    Perhaps the dramatic gamer in Mimiko was even posturing with the classics of Nigerian electoral mayhem, the 1964/1965 “Operation Wetie”, in the “wild, wild West”.   That checkmated the Demo (Nigerian National Democratic Party) electoral robbers. But it also took down the 1st Republic (1960-1966) with it.

    But alas!  It all ended a damp squib — tinder that never was.  Somewhat, the intelligence agencies busted the blaze; and claimed it was allegedly contrived, by the same patriots frantically calling the fire service!

    History just repeated itself as farce!

    Incidentally, Mimiko is also embedded in the second essay at history repeat, this time by Olusola Oke, ex-PDP, ex-APC but now proud Alliance for Democracy (AD) candidate.

    When in 2007, the 2003 Mimiko-Agagu sweet song of political treachery turned hideous proverbs, Mimiko annexed the Labour Party (LP) as electoral platform.

    With that, he sacked the late Segun Agagu from the Alagbaka State House, despite a hideous rigging, even if that victory came only after months of fierce legal battles.

    Now, with Oke dumping the All Progressives Congress (APC) and birthing in AD — no thanks to a disputed primary where Oke came third behind winner, Rotimi Akeredolu, SAN, and runner-up, Segun Abraham — Oke is somewhat hopeful of replicating the Mimiko 2007 formula, of mounting a Lilliputian platform, to trounce mighty Gullivers, just to make the point treachery-induced doom is no respecter of party might.

    You could even add: AD, Oke’s pick, is at best a sleeping volcano, much potentially stronger, in the Yoruba South West, than an LP would ever be.  Everything: Action Congress, Action Congress of Nigeria and APC, started here from AD.

    So, might Oke be playing the AD card, as alpha-and-omega, to thrash Jegede, Mimiko’s protégée and Akeredolu, the scion of the federal ruling APC?

    An Oke triumph comes with rich symbolism.  For starters, an AD victory would eternally mock Mimiko’s perfidy against the late Adebayo Adefarati, the Ondo AD governor (1999-2003), who had Mimiko in his cabinet as Health commissioner.

    Mimiko broke ranks to cut a better deal for self, by defecting to Agagu’s PDP, to become Agagu’s secretary to Ondo State Government.  But by 2007, that sweetheart deal had turned ashen, replicating Mimiko’s umpteenth betrayal of former collaborators for personal gains.

    Again, an Oke triumph would push the narrative that even Abuja bows, when there is a South West resolve.  The AD symbolism, in it, would be especially sweet for South West ultra-nationalists.

    They would crow that the tactical AD routing of 2003 (no thanks to Olusegun Obasanjo’s well reported electoral double-cross of the then AD South West governors) is, in 2016, resulting in a strategic triumph, with the Ondo AD vanquishing both APC and PDP — one, the current federal ruling party, the other, the former one.

    In Oke, is Mimiko’s history about to repeat itself against Mimiko?  Wait until November 26 to be sure it’s no farce!

    That brings the discourse to the last of the triple plots in this engaging gubernatorial drama: Akeredolu, the APC candidate.  Even in this third leg of the plot, the Iroko is rooted!

    The last time round, Akeredolu aka Aketi, was the chief beneficiary of a process at which he now rails and howls — that little matter of intra-party candidate imposition, by which he clinched the  2012 Ondo ACN ticket.

    Back then, this same Mimiko proved his nemesis by playing the primordial card, of some fictive foreign marauders coming to corner the Ondo treasury, should Akeredolu win.  But with the Iroko’s terrible devaluation in street value four years later, what happened?  Did Ondo native marauders clean out the Ondo exchequer?

    The Ondo APC crisis, you must recall, started with Bola Tinubu’s reported “endorsement” of Segun Abraham (hardly a crime, but clearly impolitic).

    Aketi screamed “imposition”, which it was not, though the Abraham campaign received a clear boost, and the Akeredolu camp felt disadvantaged.  Then came insane threats and juvenile boasts, from the Aketi camp, that would almost always win the war but never secure the peace.

    Then the Aketi primary election triumph, which soon turned ashen, no thanks to allegations of delegate fiddling — allegations strong enough to warrant a reported 3-2 split decision, by the APC appeal body, to order a fresh re-run, which the APC National Working Committee (NWC) vetoed.

    That made Oke to scurry to AD.  Although Robert Borrofice, another top primary contender has reconciled with Aketi, Abraham maintains a no-retreat-no-surrender posture.  That can hurt no one but his APC.

    And horror of horrors!  The Ondo imbroglio triggered the Tinubu riot act — sack John Odigie-Oyegun, APC national chairman, or else!  But that threat Abuja seems to have rebuffed, leaving the ruling APC in a present limbo of what it was against what it would be.

    Meanwhile, Akeredolu has an election to win.  And he would appear well and truly fortified by his coalition.

    Snag is, with the Jimoh Ibrahim aka Atiba threat to the Jegede PDP candidacy, a desperate Iroko is back to his default setting of cutting a deal with just anyone, including Lucifer!

    Meanwhile, the ideological-neuter Oke goes on a grand blitz of milking AD’s primordial “progressive” value, in concert with his own reportedly rather high street presence.

    So, to win, can the Aketi coalition hold — or will they melt, when the chips are down, not unlike the three witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, whose solid-seeming assurances went up in pure smoke, as Birnam Wood “moved” to Dunsinane; and Macduff, not “born of woman”, eventually emerged to slay Macbeth?

    Ripples is back at the observatory, watching this gripping movie.  Game on, folks!  Absolute silence and no disturbance, please!

  • Curbing sexual exploitation on campus

    Curbing sexual exploitation on campus

    A few months back, this newspaper took editorial notice of sexual exploitation of female students   by teachers who should stand in the place of their parents, calling it “a disquieting but neglected phenomenon” warranting “forthright discussion and prompt action.”

    The tawdry phenomenon had gained national salience for a while in the late 1980s, largely through the attention it received from former first lady Maryam Babangida’s Better Life for Rural Women and allied women’s societies.

    Their intervention, seen largely by a skeptical attentive public as just another front on the Babangida regime’s unrelenting crackdown on the universities, the bastion of resistance to his dictatorial rule and his agenda of self-perpetuation, soon fizzled out.

    The message was unexceptionable, but the messengers had little credibility.

    Now, a more credible source with real authority has put the practitioners of sexual exploitation on our university campuses on notice that they will henceforth pay a stiff penalty for their concupiscence.

    Last week, the Senate unanimously passed the Sexual Harassment in Tertiary Education Institution Bill, 2016, which stipulates a jail term of five years or a fine of N5 million for any person on the faculty of a tertiary institution convicted of the offence.

    Senator Omo Ovie Agege (Labour, Delta Central), who sponsored the Bill, was right to exult at its passage.  “Sexual harassment has been there for so long unchecked.   Finally, we have a landmark for our wives, daughters, aunties and nieces,” he said.

    Campus sexploitation occurs in many guises and disguises,

    In perhaps the most brazen manifestation, lecturers blackmail female students into granting them sexual favours, on pain of failing a critical examination  Some lecturers even ask the unfortunate student to arrange, at her own cost, a rendezvous for her own violation.

    In another common practice, some lecturers invite female students to their offices under the pretext of academic consultation or advisement, only to grope and fondle them, without their consent and without the least regard for consequences.  They regard it as a “fringe benefit.”

    In a more subtle but no less deplorable manifestation, some lecturers lace their classroom presentation with gratuitous sexual allusions guaranteed to make female students uncomfortable.

    One line of argument in this prurient business has it that some female students dress “provocatively,” thereby inviting attention to themselves, wittingly or unwittingly.  Such reasoning is untenable.  Lecturers are supposed to be disciplined adults in full control of their emotions, not predators.

    For every case reported, there are probably dozens that never get reported, from fear of further victimisation and shame.  In a recent survey of tertiary institutions in Nigeria, the Dream Project for Africa found that three of every four students reported that sexual harassment was common on their campus, and roughly one of every three students said they knew someone who had been or was being sexually harassed, the same proportion that said they feared reporting the issue.  Only one of every 12 students believed that the authorities took the issue seriously.

    The case for a bill to curb campus sexploitation, then, is unanswerable.

    Some will no doubt compare the frenzied haste with which the National Assembly buried allegations of sexual misconduct by three of its members during an official visit to the United States and the tenacity with which it has pursued the Sexual Harassment Bill, and conclude that there is nothing high-minded about the Bill. High-minded or not, the Bill addresses an important social issue.

    In its present form, the Bill can be criticised on several grounds. First, it is predicated on the assumption that sexploitation occurs only on the campuses of tertiary institutions.  This is not the case.   It occurs in secondary schools and even in elementary schools. The law should, therefore, have a wider application.

    Second, sexual harassment also occurs in the work place, probably in the National Assembly itself, creating a hostile environment which makes it difficult for the person being harassed to function productively.  It occurs on passenger buses, and even on okada.The law ought to take into account this variety of sexploitation.

    Third, the law, being one of strict liability, criminalises sexual activity between adults even if it  is rooted in mutual consent.  This is an overreach. Sexual activity between consenting adults cannot pass the test of a good law. I know of many a campus romance between professor and student that blossomed into a happy marriage.

    Fourth, the law provides no protection for those reporting sexual harassment. A climate that offers such protection to those reporting sexual harassment will have to be created.    Without it, they will not feel confident to come forward.  And unless they come forward, the problem will not get the forthright attention it requires.

    The Senate should address these issues before transmitting the Bill to President Muhammadu Buhari for assent.  An identical Bill passed by the 7th National Assembly was sent to former President Goodluck Jonathan.   Perhaps mindful of the defects I raised above, Dr Jonathan refused assent.

    The 2016 Bill should not be allowed so suffer the same fate.  The Senate should send a revised Bill to which the President can assent with confidence.

    In whatever case, the bill should serve as a wake-up call to the university community. With the National Universities Commission providing the broad guidelines, university authorities should develop a code of conduct that defines sexual harassment in clear terms and specifies sanctions for conduct that violates it. The code will be binding on serving and new appointees, and must be rigorously enforced, without prejudice to the Sexual Harassment Bill.

     

    Guess Who is Reading

    In this space two weeks ago, I noted that the Stomach Infrastructure programme  of the Ekiti State Government had all but collapsed and suggested that one obvious way of reviving it that  had gone unnoticed was to round up those marauding cows and slaughter them for distribution to the faithful – the okada riders and motor park touts.

    A few days later, himself the Osoko, Governor Ayo Fayose, announced that any cows found out of bounds would end sizzling in cooking pots of families across Ekiti.  I can almost hear the salivation at Ado-Ekiti motor park.

    Another piece I wrote back in my days at Rutam House comes to mind. I lamented how much I missed Vice President Augustus Aikhomu’s Friday afternoon news conferences through which he put a personal stamp on developments that would dominate the headlines and front pages during the week end and beyond, there being few competing materials.

    Pronto, the very next Friday, the jolly mariner revived his press conferences.

    I cannot complain that the column does not get executive attention.

     

  • From Awo to Tinubu

    From Awo to Tinubu

    It has been unceasing bedlam from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) — unceasing bedlam that suggests unceasing dissonance.

    A grave dissonance that paints two armies, locked under the same command, but sworn to a fight-to-finish, from which no soul might survive.

    But that ode to unbridled anger automatically shutters the grand significance of the electoral breakthrough of 28 March 2015, starting from the North Vs West no-retreat-no-surrender temper of the Obafemi Awolowo era; to the hideous stalemate of the June 12, 1993 presidential election annulment.

    That annulment consumed both MKO Abiola (the winner) and Sani Abacha (the usurper); but relegated Ibrahim Babangida (the “annular”) into something of the living dead, in Nigeria’s hurly-burly politics of endless conspiracies.

    Such muddying up of waters is fine by the heinous characters, plotting and scheming to ship-wreck the state for personal fortune.

    But it would be plain catastrophe for those in the opposite camp, clearing the perpetual mess, a camp which incidentally both President Muhammadu Buhari and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu belong.

    So, if the APC work themselves into an explosive emotional lather, that suggests intra-party reasoning has imploded.  That is bad news; which sketches a party on a merry voyage to self-ruin.

    But make no mistake.  Were Ripples to weigh in, on any side of the reported principal disputants of Buhari and Tinubu, his sympathies would be with Tinubu.

    The reason is simple.  Given the stupendous powers of the Nigerian presidency, Tinubu is the clear underdog.  Besides, a detached interpretation of the emerging facts, about the dispute, shows Tinubu as the wronged party.

    Worse: most of the wrongs would appear to stem from the sheer ingratitude to deny and undermine Tinubu his true place in the APC triumph, and the subsequent sharing of political spoils.

    Yet, Ripples’ thinking would be much more strategic than raw anger, to willy-nilly tear down the 2015 alliance. Neither Buhari nor Tinubu would benefit from that.

    Of course, when unflagging emotion rules, mischief and sheer folly leap in.  That perhaps explains why a Bukola Saraki lobby would, in a piece written by Abdulwahab Oba, chief press secretary to Kwara Governor, Abdulfattah Ahmed (‘Many troubles of the ruling party’,  The Nation,  October 27), would equate Saraki’s perfidy against his party for personal gain, with Tinubu’s intra-APC odyssey.

    An enemy of my enemy is my friend may well be an unfazed Machiavellian quip.  But the Oba piece was amity-in-grudges pushed too far.

    While the Saraki misadventure draws odium to itself by its sheer perfidy, the Tinubu challenge draws sympathy by the essential fairness of its claim.  Let no one mix up the two.

    The emotive opportunism from the Saraki camp also draws attention to the rather revealing profile of Tinubu’s latter-day supporters in this new campaign: the Afenifere old guard, the Femi twain of Fani-Kayode and Aribisala, a pair that guns for raw emotions, doubly sure their victims are unthinking robots, if not outright zombies; and of course, the unfazed champion of gubernatorial push-and-shove, Ekiti’s Ayodele Fayose, who with every second, continues to blight the high office of governor.

    Of these latter-day Tinubu friends, perhaps only the Afenifere old guard could claim something of a Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, who committed himself to slaying Caesar not because he hated his bosom friend, but because he loved Rome!

    Even then, Afenifere would appear driven by the same philosophy as the so-called Buhari cabal: primordial distrust, ogling ethnic nationalism, bordering on ethnic irredentism. That is bad for all.

    The others in the assemblage?  Equal-opportunity mischief merchants, that thrive only in confusion.  Throw in the vitriol the Fani-Kayodes, the Aribisalas and the Fayoses hauled at the enterprise of 28 March 2015, and you probably would figure out their base motives, by this new-found solidarity.

    Which is why the Buhari and Tinubu camps must pause, eschew whatever bitterness plaguing their hearts and constructively engage each other.  This battle is theirs to lose — and lose they will, if they don’t immediately wear their cap of vigorous thinking.

    That brings the subject back to the Awo and Tinubu era in Nigerian politics, using June 12 as mid-point.

    To start with, June 12 demonstrated — and conclusively too — the utter futility of any segment of Nigeria essaying a domination agenda. Yes, Babangida pulled off his annulment crime. MKO — and wife, Kudi — died without consummating his presidency.  And Abacha perished in sleaze.

    But what did that yield those rascals that hid behind the ‘North’ to perpetuate that evil?  A capitulation six years after in 1999, that returned Olusegun Obasanjo, defeating another Yoruba son, Olu Falae, just to appease the MKO injustice.

    That should be serious food-for-thought for the so-called cabal allegedly hiding behind Buhari to clip Tinubu’s wings; and erecting malicious blocks between the two, for personal and ethnic gains.

    By the way, that experiment from 1999, no matter how imperfect, has not only birthed Nigeria’s first minority President, Goodluck Jonathan, whose presidential ruin is best forgotten; it has also delivered the defeat of a federal ruling party, in the landmark election of 2015, despite the unconscionable dollar-rain and sundry subterfuge, by the then extant powers.

    However, the alliance lined up behind Tinubu, eager to smash the progress he and Buhari have chalked, also needs some historical checks.

    Sir Ahmadu Bello, the late Sardauna of Sokoto and premier of the 1st Republic Northern Region, was quoted to have sworn to dip the Koran into the Nigerian southern sea.  Even if that quote was apocryphal, conquest was perhaps the only world the Sardauna knew, being the scion of the Usman Dan Fodio Islamic conquest of the much of Nigeria’s North.

    But he was historically matched by Chief Obafemi Awolowo, whose counter-world was freedom, since bar slave trade and British colonization, his  Ijebu people were never captives to any other peoples.

    That shaped the Awo no-retreat-no-surrender temper of the 1st Republic.  The tragic push to alter that balance, by a parliamentary forgery that created a phoney Western emergency, led to the crash of the 1st Republic.

    Now, that collapse offers two valid lessons.  First, the Tinubu protégées in Abuja, and top APC hierarchs, friends turned alleged foes, would do well to remember the tragic fate of Chief SLA Akintola.

    The Yoruba world may have changed drastically between 1962 and 2016. But little has changed in the Yoruba psyche’s zero tolerance for perfidy, particularly when the victim is perceived right and just.

    That canonized Awo.  It may yet canonize Tinubu.  But the Yoruba can do without new age SLAs, for aside from his rankling political memory, SLA was among the brightest and best of his era.

    Then, the Afenifere foes-turned-friends.  They were so bitter about Tinubu’s bold entente that made APC a reality, and landed Buhari the presidency.  However, they now are near-rabid in their Tinubu support.

    Still, they must admit some fixation with the past, which Tinubu broke to achieve the 2015 breakthrough — an entente that, other things being equal, promised some pan-Nigeria rapprochement.

    Buhari and Tinubu must lock themselves up somewhere and talk.

    Lest the ongoing conspiracies, of subversive love and base motives across the aisle, smash what they have worked extra-hard to build.

  • Anaemic Discos, helpless citizenry

    Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote no doubt touched on the heart of our national embarrassment when as a guest lecturer at the Senior Executive course 38 at the National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), Kuru, Plateau State last week, he not only came down hard on the privatisation of the electricity sector but called for the reversal of the entire exercise.

    According to the business mogul, “People who wanted to buy all these plants, both the generating and distribution companies, thought that this was another opportunity like mobile phones, where we have moved from 500,000 lines in 2000 and in 10 years we now have 120 million lines…These are guys, with respect to them, when I say guys I don’t mean 100% of them but the majority of them went in without even understanding what they are doing and the worst thing for any entrepreneur is to go into a business without understanding it.”

    And so his submission: “We should be as open as we can. If government doesn’t intervene by taking back these assets and giving them to people who really have money that they can really inject, we will not be able to deliver on power.

    “We should ask, how many people, who and who are these guys that have actually gone into the power sector then you will know when you see the quality of people, are they really serious, because they went in to just make money, power business is not just about money, it is a huge business when you invest heavily you will reap at the end of the day…”

    “My own advice is that government should sit down with them and negotiate the best way out because we need power, we are desperate for power and if there is no power no growth because if you look at the medium and small industries, most of their income goes into buying diesel or petrol to generate power and that shouldn’t be the case…”

    Coming from a man whose Bluestar Consortium’s acquisition of Port Harcourt and Kaduna refineries by the departing administration of Olusegun Obasanjo would be overturned under the presidency of Umaru Yar’Adua few months after, the call would seem a drastic solution considering the circumstances in which the nation currently finds itself.

    To start with, nothing that Dangote said can be said to be out of sync with what is loudly whispered in street corners in the face of the pathetic performances of the disparate actors in the electricity value chain. Across the board, the verdict is virtually the same: some 11 years after the coming into being of the Electric Power Sector Reform Act, and exactly three years since the federal government parcelled out five generation companies (Gencos) and 11 Distribution companies (Discos) to the disparate club of private investors; the exercise has been an unmitigated disaster. Whereas the absence of matching ancillary infrastructure both in the areas of gas and transmission infrastructure continues to leave the sector enfeebled on one hand, the expected injection of new money and technologies on which the exercise is said to have found justification is not only proving a mirage, but seems to have floundered. Nothing however demonstrates the miasma to which the sector has sunk than the anguish daily experienced by Nigerians in the hands of the distribution companies – the so-called Discos – entities that have proven that they have neither the technical capacity in any particular sense nor the financial muscle to take the industry out of the woods yet insists on milking the Nigerian cow. And now for want of better description, we refer to the anaemic chain as a sector!

    Three years on, the Discos appears to have done better in procuring alibis to explain away their incompetence than they have done at implementing the Service Level Agreements (SLA) made with the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE). Under the agreement, they were to guarantee the metering of electricity consumers as well as significantly reducing the collection and technical losses in the sector within five years.

    Today, Nigerians are the best judge of the extent to which the agreement has been observed.

    More seriously however is that no one appears to know where the sector is headed. First, the investments envisaged are nowhere forthcoming. The result is that the system is not only stuck on the obsolete equipment and business methods, there are yet no signs that the operators know what to do to get the sector moving. As if jinxed, all we hear daily are figures of power generation which have come to mean nothing to Nigerians other than for their amusement and entertainment.

    Today, we know for a fact that the operators are worse than clueless. Rather than articulate or present a strategic pathway for a sector in dire need of critical rescue, they have done little else than whine about old problems as if these problems were not the reasons they were invited to party.

    As for whether or not the situation calls for drastic action, I do not think there should be any further debate. To the extent that the situation indicates a dire emergency, the challenge for the Buhari administration is to find a way to wrest the citizens from the clutches of the clueless operators in a fair, transparent manner, shorn of abuse and arbitrariness. The situation, as it is, akin to one of a terminally sick patient; while a surgical intervention may not necessarily guarantee that the patient would live, it does offer a shot at life; the same way that the option of doing nothing would most certainly hasten the demise.

    So what to do? The choice in the circumstance seems simple and straightforward. It is time to reverse the sale of the entities. To the extent that the Discos have made a terrible job of the entities evidenced in the unimaginable levels of technical and commercial loses, coupled with their inability to provide basic meters to the consumers three years on, there must be enough clauses in the sale agreement to bring them to their heels. Time, in my view, to look for world class players who will not only deliver first-rate services to Nigerians, but would ensure that the needed modernisation and expansion do take place.

    The process should not be as complicated as one would imagine. At the moment, the federal government retains 40 percent equity in each of the entities.  Moreover, it is known to have pumped billions of naira as stabilisation funds to the sector in the event of the failures of the owners to come up with requisite capital. While those should ordinarily come handy in the negotiation process, the push should be for an outright buyout! As far as I can see, the consequences of failing to act now would not only prove costly, it would most certainly outweigh whatever assumed benefits that could be delivered by a club of anaemic operators.

  • Dele Giwa: When one murder begat another

    Dele Giwa: When one murder begat another

    Around 10 o’clock in the morning of October 19, 1986, I sat down and wrote a letter to Dele Giwa, after completing my usual Sunday morning chores.  My younger brother who had spent Saturday night with us and was about to return to his lodgings in Ketu was to deliver the letter early Monday.

    “What if he is not around?” he asked in all innocence.

    “Give it to his secretary,” I said, attaching no significance to his question.

    About five hours later, his question would turn out to have been a stunning prophecy.  For, at the time I was composing that letter, Dele Giwa was being blasted out of this world by a parcel bomb whose origin is yet to be determined, two full years after the event.

    My undelivered letter, roughly two octavo pages long, lies before me as I write these lines.  The content, I am sorry to report, will not yield a scintilla of evidence, hard or soft, concerning the identity or motive of his murderers.

    I was only asking him to mollify a Newswatch staffer who was inconsolable after failing to secure a place in the mass communication programme at the University of Lagos.  The young man was persuaded that if I had pleaded his cause vigorously enough, he would have been accepted.  Nothing I said to the contrary moved him.

    So I thought I should ask Dele Giwa to help me make peace with him.   All along, he was aware of the young man’s quest but did not intercede for him.  As befitted the self-made man that he was, he felt his young staffer should earn a place in the university by his own effort.

    I suspect that if my letter had reached him, he would have called in the young man and told him baldly that he had flunked the entrance examination and should strive to do better the next time.

    Dissembling was not one of Dele Giwa’s vices.  He was blunt to a fault.  In his writings and in private conversation, he said exactly what he knew or believed about the events and the men and the women behind them, without fear of the consequences .

    That explains how he could state in cold print that if the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) failed, the people would rise up and stone its authors.  It is not disrespect to his memory to say that this was tactless in the extreme. Other commentators gave warnings that were just as dire, but in language not so direct and provocative.  But Giwa would not have been true to himself and to his conscience if he had framed the matter in any other way.

    I wonder what he would be saying today of SAP were he alive.  In the light of all the startling evidence around us, he would have cast grave doubts on the vaunted “gains” of the scheme. But I doubt whether he would have moved on to stir things up and lead the people to desiring a (socialist) revolution.

    He was no agitator.

    An unabashed admirer of capitalism, he was a good advertisement for that system.  His life story was proof that it worked.  And if that system was not working the way it was supposed to, adjust it incrementally, not wholesale; fine-tune it.  But, for goodness sake do not dismantle it. He would never have put himself to the mildest of exertions to institute a socialist order in Nigeria.

    Dele Giwa was an exemplar of the journalist as insider, if not participant.  He relished his closeness to power and influence, and was not above flaunting it.  He prized the access to news and information that it gave him.  Such closeness has its uses, to be sure.  Few public affairs commentators can perform effectively without it.

    But it also carries a price.

    For, as the great Walter Lippmann has warned, if the various guises and disguises that power assumes do not always corrupt, in the end they almost certainly co-opt or seduce the commentator, sometimes to the point of vitiating his critical faculties.  The reporter makes the agenda of his powerful sources his own.  Without his realising it, their fears and anxieties become his own, and he comes to regard his own survival as linked inextricably to theirs.

    I will not be surprised if, at the time of his death, Dele Giwa had begun to find the cost of access to power too high and to question whether it really made a great difference to his work. Journalists who pride themselves on that kind of access should once in a while stand back and  ask themselves whether the professional rewards justify the cost.

    One aspect of Dele Giwa’s life remains a puzzle.  If he had any admiration for Chief Obafemi Awolowo who, all things considered, should have been his role model if not his idol, he kept it splendidly to himself.

    Like Awo several decades before him, Giwa had raised himself by his bootstraps and by a determination that bordered on monomania.  Like Awo, he was driven by stupendous energy and possessed a prodigious capacity for work.  Again, like Awo, he believed very much in  himself and never doubted that he could attain any goal he set for himself.

    And yet, Dele Giwa almost could not bring himself to speak well of Awo, at least in public.  Even the probing, sceptical reporter in him could not see the so-called Maroko land deal as the hoax that it was.

    What forces were at work here?  Over to you, psycho-historians.

    It remains to add a grisly footnote to the foregoing  reminiscences, first published in The Guardian, in 1987, and later anthologised in my 1993 book, Matters Arising.

    My brother Herbert Tunde Dare, a deputy commissioner of police with the Special Branch, was  named a principal investigator  in the Giwa murder.  Shortly thereafter, he was  transferred to Kaduna but kept on the case.

    Concerning his work, he was as secretive as an oyster.  Taking advantage of the relaxed atmosphere of Yuletide, I asked him in late December 1987 how the investigation was shaping up.

    “Oba,” he replied, using the name we reserved for each other, “they are not serious.”  By “they,” he meant the authorities.  He went on to add that he was not even allowed to ask the basic questions on which a proper investigation must be grounded.  But he plugged on.  “Failure” was not in his dictionary.

    Some two months later, he was summoned to Lagos to file a preliminary report on his investigations.  He had planned to return to Kaduna the same way he had travelled to Lagos:   by air.  But at the last minute, the police authorities came up with an assignment that warranted his returning by road.

    Somewhere between Jebba, in Kwara State, and Mokwa, in Niger State, in the dead of night, he was killed in circumstances powerfully indicative of foul play.

    Announcing his death, the police said he had lost control of his car while trying to overtake another vehicle and had crashed it.  He had died instantly. The wreckage of the car he was allegedly driving was never produced. The police said a driver and an aide assigned to him, both unidentified, were injured in the accident but had been treated at an unidentified hospital and discharged.

    The announcement, my brother’s one-time boss in the Special Branch told me, could only have been designed to pre-empt an enquiry into his death.

    The death had resulted from his own careless driving. Case closed.