The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • NBA, NJC and the burden of history

    NBA, NJC and the burden of history

    From an initial thunder of “judicial emergency”, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) is softening its war cry.  It now wants judges, accused of corrupt practices, to recuse themselves, until they clear their names.

    That is tribute to common sense.

    But not so from the National Judicial Council (NJC) war room.  That body seems fated, with all due respect, to that cynical old quip: those the gods would destroy, they first confound!

    In that rarefied NJC chamber, scoffing down from the clouds at the unlearned hoi polloi on the dusty streets, stubborn procedure must trump common sense.

    That fixation with technicality is clear hubris, which may yet prove fatal for the  NJC brand integrity.

    That was clear from its stonewalling — not entirely unreasonable — of the Department of State Services, DSS’s rather cheeky call on NJC to “suspend” judges it is accusing of sleaze.

    NJC was right to bristle: if DSS could go solo, and with satanic gusto, jettisoning constitutionally stipulated procedures on disciplining errant judges, why doesn’t it complete its solo demolition run?

    The DSS Leviathan doesn’t need NJC’s puny powers to suspend anyone, does it?  Perfect sarcasm!

    Still, it would be extremely reckless, with all due respect, for NJC to spurn the NBA-offered soft-landing.

    For one, the NBA suggestion gives the judiciary the opportunity to regain a moral high ground.  What is more?  NJC would suspend nobody; and would continue to hold DSS in high judicial contempt its hurt soul now needs for mental balance.

    Yet, the accused judges would graciously stay off, pending their days in court, as they would in any civil community.  The onus would now be on DSS to prove its allegations, thus defanging the so-called trial by the media.

    For another, the initiative would have been the judiciary’s.  That would send the message that though it would resist — to the death, if necessary — the DSS’s alleged jungle methods, it would not condone any judicial corruption.

    But by its response to the NBA pitch, it would appear clear the NJC would rather, parodying English Poet, John Milton in Paradise Lost, rule by its stubborn procedure in hell, rather serve with it in heaven!

    If you think the heaven-hell comparison is extreme, just take a glimpse at the judicial netherworld NJC, by its stubborn insistence on procedure, is pushing.

    It would not suspend judges, because DSS usurped procedure by its sensational arrests.  Neither would it hearken NBA’s plea that the accused judges recuse themselves.

    So, blimey!  His Lordship, accused of graft, arrogantly sits in judgment over others, in a sensational case of an alleged felon trying another alleged felon!

    If that is not the eminent judicial disgrace — and ruin — NJC is fleeing from, it is hard to contemplate a worse equivalent!

    Adegoke Adelabu, had he lived in these troubling times, would simply have snorted:  a judicial peculiar mess! To which his doting Ibadan country yokels would have roared, “judisia pen-kele-meeesssssiiiiiiiiii!”, with a few even attempting a yodel, in the hilarious hubbub of the moment!

    It is that peculiar mess of history that the contemporary judiciary (perhaps without fully realizing it) is grappling with.

    If the NJC must be fair to themselves, they must ask when the Nigerian Judiciary cascaded from the Mount Olympus of honour, to the Hades of disgrace, to borrow an illustration from Greek mythology.

    A proud national institution that earned near-universal acclaim with the likes of Taslim Elias, Chukwudifu Oputa, aka Socrates, Kayode Esho, Daddy Onyeama, Udo Udoma and Akinola Aguda (all of blessed memories) now diminuted to the grim conclave of what Justice Esho called “billionaire judges”, allegedly trading Justice — or more correctly, injustice — to the highest bidder!

    Remember that biblical racket, that riled the meek Christ Jesus to ire?  My father’s house of worship has become a den of thieves!

    Just replace, with the NJC, Pharisees and Sadducees and the colluding high priests feeding fat from that holy racket, and contemporary Nigerian judiciary may well find itself in that holy company of the Jews of yore!

    Yet, let no one, in romanticizing the past, be deceived that the judiciary had always been perceived spotless — at least by those in the unlearned streets, that neither knew law nor procedure.

    CJN Adetokunbo Ademola virtually made the law an ass for the ruling establishment to spur as they wished.   So,  when in 1967, he championed a National Conciliation Committee to fend off war — a noble enterprise — voices across the Nigeria-Biafra divide rejected him as a credible voice for mediation.

    Forty-nine years later, his grandson is one of the judges in the eye of the DSS storm.  If the allegations are proved, would it be from alleged personal failings? Or the case of the Biblical fathers eating sour grapes but setting their children’s teeth on edge?

    Justice Elias was razor-sharp, both as lawyer and CJN.  But as Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa’s attorney-general and Justice minister, he midwifed, on 29 November 1960 in the House of Representatives,  the parliamentary canonization of the legal voodoo that in 1962 supplanted the West, under the guise of a dubious emergency.  That proved the beginning of the end for the 1st Republic.

    Ironically, the “Elias solution” — searching for CJN, outside the Supreme Court’s present hierarchy, hangs like a sword of Damocles.

    The “weight of evidence” himself, the irreplaceable FRA Williams, SAN, would at dawn take a brief from Satan but balance it out at dusk with a brief from Christ and claim, in all honesty and integrity, he was bound by the lawyer’s creed!

    His opponents, particularly the equally irrepressible Gani Fawehinmi, SAN, SAM, did not like it.  But almost everyone agreed his motives were anything but robust fidelity to the law, even it became a bully crushing morality.

    That was the law yesterday, warts and all.  Still, the public perception of it was a great national enterprise which though imperfect, held humanly promises — profound promises founded on robust erudition and near-celestial integrity.

    The law today would appear the diametrical opposite.  Despite stellar though quiet work by probably a majority of Nigerian justices and lawyers, the overwhelming public perception is the Bench is yet another conclave of hustlers.  And that the Bar is not exactly aghast at that unholy racket.

    Help, the ghosts of Esho’s “billionaire judges” are haunting the hallowed chamber, and are fast turning it a hollow shell!

    That is the heavy burden of history the present generation NJC and NBA carry.  You don’t discharge that by instinctively raising a flag of solidarity, and stonewalling grave allegations with “defending the judiciary”.

    Corrupt judges are a scourge to justice, much more than any arbitrary DSS action, no matter how brazen.  And if justice departs from the judiciary, what is left?

    If that thinking necessitated NBA’s softening rhetoric, it is hugely welcome — but much more to the judiciary themselves.

    But when would the NJC wake up and, as the Americans would say, smell the coffee?

    Maybe when, to parody Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the hurly-burly is done, when the battle is lost and won!

  • When judges sing

    When judges sing

    It couldn’t get more bizarre – and interesting – that two of the apex court justices currently in the eye of the corruption storm have literally been singing as if determined to bring the roof down on selves and just about everyone. First it was Justice John Okoro, who on Tuesday last week fired a letter to the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) Mahmud Mohammed. The letter dated October 17, leaked to the media moments after, accused Rotimi Amaechi, former Rivers Governor and current minister of transportation of being behind his travails. His problems, he claimed in the letter, stemmed from his refusal to help the Amaechi fix the apex court judgment in the Rivers, Akwa Ibom and Abia states’ election cases.

    Rather than being exculpatory as one might expect in the circumstance, the letter  would seem perfect, tailored to draw blood: “I strongly believe that my travail is not unconnected with the verbal report I made to you on February 1, 2016, about the visit to my official residence by H/E Rotimi Amaechi, former Governor of Rivers State, and now Minister of Transportation…In that report, I told you my Lord that Mr. Amaechi said the President of Nigeria and the All Progressives Congress mandated him to inform me that they must win their election appeals in Rivers State, Akwa Ibom and Abia states at all costs.”

    The judge would also finger Umana Okon Umana, the APC gubernatorial candidate for Akwa Ibom in another nocturnal visit, again, for the same mission of judicial subversion.

    Next to break the dam was his ‘co-accused’ on the apex bench, Sylvester Ngwuta. Forty-eight hours after his brother justice released his ‘satanic verses’, he fired his own well-timed canon: Amaechi, he wrote, also sought his help to make the Supreme Court to set aside the election of Ayodele Fayose, to pave the way for another election to enable his friend, Kayode Fayemi (Minister of Solid Mineral and Steel Development), contest the poll again.  Again, he added that Amaechi claimed he was acting at the behest of his boss, President Muhammadu Buhari. The judge also accused Ogbonnaya Onu, minister of Science and Technology of seeking his help to sway the Court of Appeal’s decision on Ebonyi State governorship election matter.

    Whoever said that the nation’s judicial establishment would remain the same after the on-going saga must be kidding. For while the thrills, the intrigues and the suspense would make for an interesting thriller, we must see the latest development as marking the final rite of despoliation by those sworn to the duty of maintaining the ethical and spiritual balance of the nation’s judicial establishment.

    Let me clear, much as the revelations about judges’ residences being turned to Bureau de Change are ordinarily troubling, no one has dared to suggest that the accused justices are guilty at this point.

    So it goes also to the point that their quarries, the politicians whom we so much love to hate, have also not been found complicit in the crime of subversion. However, while those are for the investigating agencies and ultimately the courts to decide, if they ever will, it would seem that the justices, in electing to cast away restraint in their indignation, may have thrown a dart more lethal into the heart of the justice system than the agencies being accused of hounding their esteemed institution could have done; and so have unwittingly raised questions about the quality of the individuals invested with the judicial aura and authority.

    Of course, Nigeria has never been anything other than a strange country. A country where a citizen defence when caught for a crime is that others who did the same in the past are walking free; where an accused will rather spend a fortune not to clear his name but to frustrate trial!

    Before now, we thought that such routes were the exclusive preserve of our politicians; we are however finally finding out that our esteemed justices have not been inoculated against the lethal virus! Aside every other thing, it is certainly a new thing that judges ordinarily trained to be taciturn would elect to sing like a canary.

    Short of offering what could plausibly be described as defence, what the justices did vide their averments that the CJN was privy to the alleged attempt to bribe them to subvert the cause of justice, was to literally throw their principal under a moving trailer!

    How?

    Here is what the law – the ICPC Act 2000, says in section 23: sub sections (1), (2), (3).

    23(1) Any public officer to whom any gratification is given, promised, or offered, in contravention of any provision of this Act, shall report such gift, promise or offer together with the name, if known, of the person who gave, promised or offered such gratification to him to the nearest officer of the commission or police officer.

    (2) Any person  from gratification has been solicited or obtained, or from whom an attempt has been made to obtain such gratification, in contravention of any provision of this Act, shall at the earliest opportunity thereafter, report such soliciting or obtaining, or attempt to obtain the gratification together with the name, if known, or a true and full description of the said person who solicited, or obtained, or attempted to obtain the gratification from him, to the nearest officer of the commission or police officer.

    (3) Any person who fails, without reasonable excuse, to  comply with subsections (1) and (2) shall be guilty of an offense and shall on conviction be liable to a fine not exceeding one hundred thousand Naira or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years or both fine and imprisonment.

    By the account of the judges, the CJN was duly informed of the alleged bribe as well as the nocturnal visitation by the parties. Nothing in the letter however suggested that the justices reported the inducements to the security agencies as the law required. The best we could glean from the letters is the statement that his lordship – their principal – was not only informed, but that he also admitted that similar pressures were being brought to bear on other justices sitting over electoral cases!

    While it remains their words as against those being accused of inducing them to break their judicial oath, the statement is hardly ennobling, coming several months after, and only after the DSS went after them. Not only does it render their account less than credible, it makes the CJN an accessory to the crime. That is how messy things can get.

    Don’t ask me where all of these will end? Truth is, I don’t know. What I do know is that things will never be the same – ever.

     

  • Whatever happened to…?

    Whatever happened to…?

    The Kogi Gubernatorial Election Petition

    In the books of the electoral umpire INEC, Abubakar Audu, candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and his running mate Abiodun Faleke, had to all intents and purposes won the election.  But before their victory was proclaimed officially, Audu slumped and died.

    The conventional wisdom, and more crucially the intendment of the law, according to many learned authorities, was that his running mate would inherit the mandate and name a deputy subsequently.

    Not so, said the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF), to whom the matter was referred for guidance, there being no precedent even by Nigeria’s chequered history.The election was declared inconclusive.

    Yahaya Bello, who had run a distant second to Audu at the primaries, was named the APC’s gubernatorial candidate for the purpose of completing the election and awarded the votes that had been cast for the Audu/Faleke ticket, plus the votes cast in those constituencies where no election had been held in the earlier poll.  Bello, not being registered to vote in Kogi, was not qualified to vote in that poll.

    Faleke’s appeal was dismissed by the election petition tribunal.  The dismissal was subsequently affirmed by the Court of Appeal and finally by the Supreme Court.

    The ratio decendi that ran through all three verdicts was strikingly similar to the AGF’s advisory opinion.

    All three judicial bodies held that votes cast at elections accrue to political parties, not to the candidates who represent them in the poll.   Therefore, the APC, or more accurately a faction of it, was at liberty to transfer the votes cast for the Audu/Faleke ticket to Bello.

    This reasoning is curious, if not spurious. A party member puts himself or herself forward as a candidate, mobilises resources, competes with other aspirants, and wins the nomination.  The candidate thereafter crisscrosses the constituency, sells himself or herself to the electorate, with the support of the party, and wins – or loses, as the case may be.

    If the votes cast in a poll belong to the party, why go through a tedious, costly and often rancorous nomination contest? Would it not be vastly simpler and more sensible for a political party to enter a race as a corporate body, and thereafter name a member to fill the post or occupy the seat it had won?

    At any rate, which is more ludicrous:  To allow Faleke inherit the votes the Audu/Faleke ticket had won, or to assign those votes to Bello who had not voted in that election, and was in fact not qualified to do so?

    The case was a difficult one, no doubt.   There were few, if any, sturdy guideposts.  It is the kind of case in which the Supreme Court elsewhere would have been split down the middle, with some judges concurring in part and dissenting in part, resulting in fractured verdict that would serve as a shaky precedent at best.

    Not here.  As my perceptive colleague Idowu Akinolatan has pointed out, not one of the justices of the Supreme Court could bestir himself or herself to enter a dissent.  Lost on them were the nuances and subtleties of the case.  The ruling now stands as the law, unless they vacate it in a subsequent case.

    Something tells me that it is going to haunt the courts and the polity.

    Dr Jonathan’s Favourite Loaf

    Just one presidential bite, and Dr Jonathan was hooked.  He would not touch any other kind of loaf.  In fact, no other kind of loaf was allowed near the presidential banqueting hall.

    It was a prized staple at breakfast, with fish pepper soup.  For lunch and dinner, it was optional.  They always kept an oven-fresh supply because the President could ask for a serving at anytime for himself or very special guests on whom he wanted to lavish Aso Rock hospitality.

    In case you haven’t guessed, it is cassava bread.

    According to a knowledgeable source who prefers not to be quoted because he was not authorised to make the disclosure, cassava bread became such a strategic item in the cuisine of Aso Rock that a Senior Special Assistant (SSA) was assigned to supervise its production, storage and preservation under the strictest rules of hygiene.

    Reporting to the SSA were two master- bakers trained and certified by the most famousboulangerie in France, a professor of food science, who would ensure that each loaf delivered the nutrients that would keep the President in good health, and a food inspector trained at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

    This team was supported by a carefully selected cast of artisans.

    The cassava came straight from a special farm in Abuja, supervised by an agronomist on loan from the International   Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Ibadan.They tell me that the best planes in the presidential fleet were retrofitted with ovens to produce piping-hot cassava bread on demand whenever the president was airborne.

    The cookware and kitchen wore out quickly from heavy use and had to be replaced every six months or so.  You can now understand why Aso Rock’s food bill stood at N1 billion a year,despite the President’s accustomed frugality.

    Arrangements to extend the benefit of this iconic gain of the Transformation – or was it Transformative? – Agenda had reached an advanced stage when the President and his team were distracted by the 2015 general election.  The rest is history.

    But it would be sad indeed if this culinary delight were to die literally in the mixing bowl, like an earlier version which, based on Brigadier (as he then was) Oladipo Diya’s expert testimony, was adopted as the official snack of military president Ibrahim Babangida’s Armed Forces Ruling Council, only to vanish thereafter from public consciousness thereafter.

    Will they ever cultivate the virtue of continuity?

    Stomach Infrastructure and all that

    Ekiti State Governor Ayodele Fayose has been celebrating two years in the office to which he was swept by a pledge to cater to the stomach infrastructure of the public, those who voted for him as well as those who did not.  He marked his first Christmas in power by distributing parcels of parboiled rice he personally milled and live chickens he personally bred, drawing on his experience from the failed Ekiti Integrated Poultry Project that guzzled mountain of cash without producing a single egg.

    That year, he got it right – the Christmas stomach infrastructure, that is.

    Lately, however, Fayose has shown scant regard for any group in the “Fountain of Knowledge”, certainly not for teachers and civil servants who have received no salaries for upwards of six  months.  To be fair to Fayose, he is not the only governor in this predicament.  But he is the only governor who made catering to stomach infrastructure the fundamental objective and directive principle of his administration’s policy.

    You know Fayose is dissembling when he says that the recent release of 21 of Chibok girls is a distraction,and that the more urgent task, which he has long stopped addressing anyway, is to put food on the table for the hungry masses.If it is indeed a distraction, I say long live the distraction

    If only the man would sit down and for once reflect, he would find a solution to his abandoned stomach infrastructure project staring him in the face.

    Don’t drag those marauding cattle herders to court. The case will drag on forever, and conviction is not guaranteed. They will not pay the fine the courts may impose.

    Better to seize the entire herd and press it immediately into the stomach infrastructure programme.  I hope the stray cow he personally arrested in Ado-Ekiti the other day landed in the cauldron of the caterer to the motor-park touts and Okada riders that are the backbone of his administration.

    Finally, the spectre haunting Europe, but not the one Karl Marx wrote about with brilliant andsearing prescience in 1848.

    Anxiety, primal anxiety, has gripped nations which have a female president or prime minister at the very thought of Donald Trump being elected president of the United States.

    Call it Trumpophobia.

    It runs deepest in the United Kingdom, which has a tradition of a “special relationship” with the United States.  Even the usually sedate Buckingham Palace is not resting easy, my sources tell me.

    What if – so the thinking goes – what if The Donald were to interpret that “special relationship” in his own Trumpian way, namely, as a licence to indulge his favourite pastime of groping and grabbing and fondling, even as he is being treated to a state banquet?

    Watch out, Your Majesty.  Watch out, Teresa May.  Be vigilant, William, Duke of Cambridge and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge.  The Donald’s tentacles reach far and wide and deep.

  • My bank and I

    My bank and I

    If anyone still needed evidence on how still deeply troubled the financial services sector is, one only needs to grab a copy of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)’s June 2016 edition  Financial Systems Report for a first hand report on the status of a sector that continues to play the laggard. Of interest aren’t just the similarities between it and the findings of the United Arab Emirates-based investment bank, Arqaam Capital suggesting a sector very much in trouble – something the apex bank stridently denies – the revelation that very little has changed after two major restructurings in just a little more than a decade ought to be seen as troubling.

    According to Arqaam Capital, seven Nigerian banks are undercapitalised to the tune of N1tn ($3.2bn). It identified the banks as First Bank of Nigeria, Unity Bank Plc, Diamond Bank Plc, Skye Bank Plc, FCMB Group Plc, Sterling Bank Plc and Fidelity Bank Plc. Two others, Unity and Skye banks, it further claims, is close to being insolvent. In all, it averred that Nigeria’s banking industry “is experiencing a full-blown financial crisis” as failed fiscal and monetary policies had led to a credit crunch.

    Let’s look at what the CBN’s own authoritative report – the Financial Systems Report says.  Under the section Key Risks to the Financial System, the report cites non-performing loans as growing by 158 per cent from N649.63 billion at end December 2015, to N1,678.59 billion at end June 2016 – taking the industry wide NPL ratio from 5.3 per cent to 11.7 per cent thus exceeding the prudential limit of 5.0 per cent. Familiar?

    Oil and gas, of course remains the leader accounting for 28.77 per cent of the gross loan portfolio, growing from N3, 307.87 billion at end December   2015 to N4, 511.34 billion. By contrast, manufacturing sector accounted for 12.95 per cent of the total credit, compared with 13.91 per cent in the second half of 2015. Agriculture, forestry and fishery accounted for a measly 3.08 per cent of the total, indicating a 0.69 percentage point decline compared with 3.77 per cent in the preceding half year.

    State governments, faced by the biting realities  declining  revenues, have also had their share of credit rise to N1,386.61  billion  by June end from N1,053.97  billion  at  end December  2015. This is despite CBN’s N338   billion special scheme designed to  refinance their debts,  and  a  debt  restructuring programme introduced by  the  Debt  Management  Office  (DMO),  which  enabled them restructure  their  commercial  loans.  This is also aside afresh  facility  of N90  billion  with  a  nine  per  cent  interest  made available to the states.

    Nothing however compares with the revelation that top 50 obligors took between them a whopping N5.23 trillion (33.4%) of total industry credit exposure of N15.68 trillion. Needless to state that a huge chunk of this belong in the troubled category. For a country in the throes of an unprecedented meltdown and which currently have its hands full managing its fallouts, the thought of using public funds to bail out a club of unprofessional lenders and their delinquent friends would certainly pass for a troubling proposition. Unfortunately, that is what the signs of the moment suggest.

    Just as the denial of the problem would seem out of the question at this time, the questions we must be asking at this time are why our banks, despite claims to have arrived at the big league, remains essentially fragile entities tied to the apron strings of a cartel; institutions that would rather play in the comfort zone of easy money than oil the wheel of national development; a club that would rather scorn the small creditor, an industry which hat has for all practical purposes has not grown beyond our traditional esusu collectors.

    Yours truly has a personal testimony in this regard. Few months back, I received an unsolicited offer of a loan from a bank where my salary is domiciled. The conditions for the personal loan, never mind the fine print, were ordinarily fair enough until I started going through the motion of filling the forms which I found quite burdensome. This, I was assured, came with the territory. At some point, I was told that I needed authorisation for the bank to obtain a credit report from a credit bureau – which again, seemed just fine – hence my doing the needful. Some three weeks later, I got a call that one out of the three credit bureaux contacted by the bank found that I had an outstanding balance of N9,999 on a domestic loan I took from another bank nearly eight years before!

    How can? I wondered? A loan charged to an account whose operations have remained unbroken all these years? And now one out of three different credit bureaux arriving at different opinions on the same set of bank data? Ever seen a loan applicant suddenly turn bad debtor within hours? That, I though could only be the stuff of the Nigerian wonder.

    More than mere multiple ironies; first, the account in question, far from being a dormant one was not only ‘live’ as it were but had as balance an amount far exceeding the amount said to be standing to my name at the point of enquiry; second, the bank had at no point in time informed me of the existence of any debt not to talk of classifying the debt! To be fair to  the creditor bank, they assured me that the credit report could have come from Mars as nothing in their books showed that I owed a dime! And to imagine that I had to go through all of this just to be able to access a credit facility equal to one half of my monthly salary! And third, I, not my accusers, had to part with my hard earned money to prove my innocence!

    And to imagine that as being my testimonial for a “relationship banking” that has spanned the whole of nine unbroken years?

    My story, hardly unique, is probably one out of the many frustrations daily experienced by the bank customer in our typically antediluvian banking environment. It is partly the reason why more money is outside the banking system than in it; it is the reason the market woman in Oke-Arin, Lagos or the transporter upland has more faith in the age-long guild contributors than they have in the banks. It  explains one peculiar characteristic of the sector: the prevalence of short-term funds and with it the humongous cost of funds.

    For now, we continue to indulge the big boys who do not consider themselves bounds by the strictures of obligor limits or the rules of process; the so-called top 50 who, with the regulators looking askance, would not baulk at bringing down the industry with their odious debts while the rest of us are forced to pick up the bills. That is how it has been and will remain in the foreseeable future. It is after all, their world.

     

  • Between Edo and Ekiti

    Just as well Edo has spurned a return to Eygpt, typified by the Lucky Igbinedion rot years (1999-2007); for a promise of Jerusalem, founded on the Adam Oshimhole years (2008-2016).

    That is what it ought to be — for the electorate, if they were not to embrace self-ruin, must exercise the vote with reason.

    The Edo electorate, by voting Godwin Obaseki, the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, over Osagie Ize-Iyamu, of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), seemed to have done just that.

    But that is not always given, with the Ekiti experience.

    Ekiti purportedly — purportedly because, latter information suggests that  poll was manipulated by the then extant powers — jettisoned the noble exertion of the Kayode Fayemi years, for a journey to nowhere, which Ayodele Fayose’s present government-by-impulse suggests.

    Indeed, between Adams Oshimhole and Kayode Fayemi, there are many parallels — beyond the fact that the one was pushing a protégée to succeed him after his constitutional limit of eight years; the other was seeking reelection after a first four-year term of hard and noble work.

    Like Fayemi, Oshiomhole was adjudged, at least going by disinterested verdicts, to have done stellar work, after previous years of uninterrupted ruin — good work that presaged exciting new promises.

    But like Fayemi too, Oshiomhole had an Achilles’ heel.

    In Fayemi, it was a distant, elitist persona that, though taciturn, hardly suffered fools gladly.  With razor-sharp intellect, he was Plato’s philosophical king looming over his commune of bemused country yokels.

    On the eve of a crucial election, therefore, he got a millstone of “arrogance” hung on his neck.  He was fated to sink in the electoral stream — and he did.

    In Oshiomhole, it was a razor-sharp tongue and devastating wit that took no prisoners.  Though puny of frame, not a few perceive him as the human equivalent of the belching battle tank, firing from all cylinders; and mowing down whoever is on its way.

    And you can’t even bet which is more lethal: his prowess-at-war; or the ultra-painful sting of his post-war whoops!

    To the Tony Anenihs and Igbinedions — father and son — of this world, the post-victory whoop was ringing and clear: we have tamed, slain and buried the godfathers!

    To Osagie Ize-Iyamu, a former protégée turned opponent, a most provocative challenge: hurry to court so I can prove your purported vote tally is a grand farce.  You’re just incapable of harvesting such number of votes!

    The outgoing Comrade-Governor is a great talker, to whom piercing wit and searing gloating are game. But while people in his camp lustfully roar as he lands his verbal bazookas, those at the receiving end resent him to the death; and are sworn to unhorsing him as spectacularly as he had verbally bombarded them.

    That was the grim danger in the Edo election.  At a point, like Fayemi in Ekiti, Oshiomhole’s great strides (in stark contrast to the near-paralysis of the Igbinedion years) was counting for near-nothing on the explosively emotive street.

    That suited the Edo PDP fine — anything that would divert attention from their own ruinous rule, when state resources were the exclusive pleasure of godfathers and their cronies.

    Like Ekiti too, Edo was almost condemned to a wilful embrace of its political nemesis, so much so that, at a point, Lucky Igbinedion, convicted for sleaze, was even bragging the next governor (read Mr.Ize-Iyamu) would emerge from his political family!

    If that had happened, that would have replicated Ekiti, where the people, at least by the result of that controversial election, merrily re-embraced Ayodele Fayose, a past ruin come to plague the present, and poison the future.

    You doubt that claim?  Just review Fayose’s infantile stunts since his second coming, the latest of which is his no-brainer that the 21 Chibok girls, just released from Boko Haram captivity, werePresident Buhari’s perfect ploy to deflect attention from the pains in the land!

    But Edo didn’t choose the Ekiti option.  By voting Godwin Obaseki, they chose the Lagos option of sustained development, that could only lead to prosperity.

    The Lagos experience started in 1999, under Governor Bola Tinubu. Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, built on that foundation.  Now, Akinwunmi Ambode is doing so.

    So, 17 years down the line — and still counting — the Lagos experience has become a national showcase.

    That could be the fate of Edo, but only if Mr. Obaseki stays focused on a strict and rigorous developmental agenda.

    For the first time in Edo history, a “progressive” agenda would power the state for at least 12 years, and if Mr. Obaseki wins reelection, 16 years.  That has never happened.

    In 1963, when the then Midwestern Region (now Edo and Delta states) was carved from the old West, the progressive Action Group gave way to the centrist National Convention of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC).  That was a development stall, for the new NCNC government could not match the old AGgovernment’s huge investment on social and physical infrastructure.

    In 1983, the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) electorally torpedoed the Ambrose Alli Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) governorship (1979-1983).

    And in the aborted 3rd Republic, Social Democratic Party (SDP) Governor John Odigie-Oyegun (now APC national chairman) left office in November 1993, after the Babangida transition programme collapsed, under the weight the June 12, 1993 presidential annulment crisis.  That was just 22 months, out of a 48-month tenure, barring reelection.

    Indeed, before the Oshiomhole years, conservative or centrist-leaning parties (witness NCNC, NPN, National Republican Convention and PDP) had cumulatively exercised power longer than progressive-leaning parties (AG, UPN, SDP, Action Congress of Nigeria and APC), with PDP’s Igbinedion enjoying the longest stretch of eight straight years; plus 17 months of illicit rule before the election tribunals voided Prof. Oserheimen Osunbor’s election in November 2008, to make way for Governor Oshiomhole.

    Contrast that to Lagos’ near-uninterrupted progressive rule: AG, UPN, SDP, Alliance for Democracy, Action Congress, ACN and APC and it could be validly argued that Lagos has gained far more from its progressive-leaning parties than Edo, with its centrist-conservative-progressive mishmash.

    Indeed, Asiwaju Tinubu’s reengineering of the Lagos government, with all its proven developmental wonder, was built on the earlier foundation of the Lateef Jakande years, and the AG thinking that weaned Lagos from NCNC dominance, in the Lagos Town (later City) Council politics.

    It could be validly argued that Nigeria is evolving into an ideological-neuter zone, with little definitive difference between political parties.

    That might well be. But that is strictly from an ideologue’s point of view. From a pragmatist’s perspective, progressive-leaning parties (cant and all) would appear more development-savvy than their conservative and centrist-leaning cousins.

    That is the legacy Mr. Obaseki is buying into.  That is why he must, in policy, be even morerigorous and focused than Mr. Oshiomhole; but in politics, much less controversial.

    Lest again, in the next season of elections, his opponents try to beam more on his perceived personal failings, in the cynical hope that would eclipse his stellar work as governor.

    He owes Edo that much, if he performs well in his gubernatorial tour of duty.

  • Curiouser and curiouser at the Justice Ministry

    Curiouser and curiouser at the Justice Ministry

    When ThisDay reported the other day that the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF) had declared inconclusive the police investigation on which a criminal indictment against the two principal officers of the Senate was grounded, you could almost hear a collective sigh of “Here we go again” from a weary attentive audience.

    The charges had been brought, according to the paper, following assurances from the AGF,  Abubakar Malami (SAN), that investigations into the forgery – or should we now call it alleged forgery? — had been concluded and that prosecution was fully warranted.

    Now, said the paper, the AGF was asking the police to commence further investigations that might furnish evidence to nail, and force out of office, Senate President Bukola Saraki and his deputy, Senator Ike Ekweremadu.

    The whole thing had seemed like an open-and shut-case.  The rules for electing principal officers of the Senate had been amended in two crucial respects between the time the 7th Senate was prorogued and the 8th inaugurated.

    The old rule stipulated that all members of the Senate shall participate in the election of its principal officers.  The amended rule says members would be encouraged to participate in the election.  Again, the old rule stipulated that voting should be by secret ballot.  The new rule dispensed with that provision.

    Saraki and Ekweremadu owe their present positions to this curious tampering with the rules, which was unearthed by some of their disaffected Senate colleagues.  If the twain did not instigate it, they certainly profited from it, and so did everyone else who connived in it.  And it is trite that the law will permit no one to profit from a crime.

    The matter was turned over to the police, who carried out an investigation and submitted their findings to the AGF, who then moved to indict, based on those findings. Some persons learned in the law who had seen the court papers said Saraki and Ekweremadu did not figure in the police report, and should not have been indicted.

    Had the AGF, then, engaged in an unseemly rush to prosecute? The AGF had no iron-clad case and yet went to court with an inconclusive police report, hoping that the court would convict?  Had he in the process perjured himself?

    These, at any rate, are some of the questions thrown up by ThisDay’s report.

    I was trying to make some sense of all this when, last Friday, the AGF filed to withdraw the charges against Saraki and Ekweremadu and two senior officials of the Senate, not on the premise that the report on which the indictment was grounded was inconclusive, but on the ground that the same case or one closely related to it was pending before a superior court.

    The court accordingly struck out the charges and discharged the men in the dock.   But was this an acquittal?

    It certainly was not a nolle prosequi, at least not explicitly.

    Whatever its purport, it was enough to set off jubilation in the camps of the beleaguered Senate leaders.

    When the matter comes up before the Abuja Federal Capital Territory High Court, Jabi, to which the AGF said he was deferring, will the AGF file to withdraw the charges again, thus leaving the court no choice but to discharge the persons indicted?

    That, I gather, would still not amount to an acquittal, unless the AGF enters a nolle. Will he?  Without entering a nolle, he could file the case anew even after withdrawing it a second time.  The jubilation in the Saraki/Ekweremadu camp may yet turn out to be premature.

    In whatever case, few could have foreseen that the case would take this curious turn.  Fewer still could have expected that as the case was unfolding, armed operatives of the Department of State Services (DSS) would launch a raid in the dead of night on the homes of six senior judges, apparently with the approval of the Ministry of Justice.

    By the time they were done, they had two justices of the Supreme Court, Sylvester Ngwuta and John Okoro, in custody, as well as Justice Adeniyi Ademola of the Federal High Court. They also raided the home of another judge of the Federal High Court, Nnamdi Dimgba, but did not arrest him.

    Also whisked into custody were Kabir Auta of the Kano High Court, Muazu Pindiga of the Gombe High Court, Mohammed Tsamiya of the Court of Appeal in Ilorin, and the Chief Judge of Enugu State, I. A. Umezulike.

    Efforts to search the home of a Federal High Court judge in the Rivers State capital, Port Harcourt, escalated into a tense stand-off between DSS operatives and the police, backed by stalwarts allegedly rushed to the scene by Governor Nyesom Wike.

    It almost turned bloody.

    The DSS said the raids followed close monitoring of the lifestyles of the judges and complaints as well as intelligence reports that they had received valuable consideration from some litigants in return for delivering verdicts favourable to those litigants, without regard to the merit of their case.

    Two other judges concerning whom evidence of graft had been uncovered were merely retired by the National Judicial Council when, according to the DSS, prosecution was indicated.

    Various sums of money in foreign currencies and the Naira recovered from the three judges, amounting to the equivalent of N93.5 million, were indicative, the DSS seemed to imply, of corrupt dealing.

    Whatever the yield, these raids fly in the face of President Muhammadu Buhari’s pledge in his National Day Broadcast that the war on corruption would be waged with due regard to the rule of law. The ink had not dried on this newspaper’s editorial endorsement of that pledge when they were carried out.

    The legal community, civil society and indeed the attentive audience are right to feel outraged by the DSS’s tactics. Yes, the raids were backed by search warrants.  There was reasonable fear that vital evidence might be destroyed if the DSS did not move quickly.  Still, there is something so creepy about it all, something so eerily reminiscent of a not-too-distant past, that it is insufficient consolation that it was done for a worthy cause.

    Even the worthiest of causes stands tainted if pursued by repugnant means.

    The authorities doubtless felt frustrated in their efforts to bring to justice high political and judicial officials against whom damning probative evidence of malfeasance might indeed have been compiled.

    Many in the attentive audience will say that the judges brought this calamity on themselves, and that it serves them right.

    It is the stuff of gossip that some judges would write two judgments, each plausible in the domain of law, but with the more favourable verdict going to the parties that bid the highest.

    It is also notorious that senior attorneys, officers of the court, serve as conduits for funnelling corrupt inducement to judges.

    No system of jurisprudence can account for a court ruling that restrains the police in perpetuity from investigating charges of misconduct against a political official or arresting him.  Yet, some court judges in Nigeria have issued such injunctions.

    The way things were going, the courts could one day issue an injunction restraining the National Assembly from passing a bill, or barring the President from signing a bill into law.

    A comprehensive purge of the judiciary was surely indicated.  But not with the tactics the DSS employed lately.  It may well be, as some have argued, that no other procedure could have guaranteed the desired result and that, given the goal, the government deserves sympathy, not condemnation.

    That is like walking a slippery slope, along which only a dangerous descent is guaranteed.  It must not become a habit.

  • Before darkness falls

    Before darkness falls

    Whatever anyone may say of the events of the past 96 hours as touching the “invasion” or if as some say, midnight “abduction” of judges from their abodes by functionaries of the Department of State Security (DSS), it is apparent that a new but fearsome vista has been opened in Buhari administration’s war on corruption. For while it is not necessarily the case that judges are immune from prosecution any more than their abodes are deemed inviolate by any written code, it was at least given that nothing be done to remove from the aura and prestige that their office confers. Until last Saturday.

    With Saturday’s development, and going by threats by the DSS to bring in more judges for questioning for allegedly violating their judicial oaths in the coming days, that last bastion of orderly society seems not only set to be stripped of its remaining aura and prestige for good, the notion of its famed independence under the rule of law would appear set for a complete redefinition.

    That seven justices – two of who sit on the apex court – were hauled before the DSS on suspicion of corruption with many more said to be on the watch list must represent the lowest point ever for the nation’s judiciary. As if the reports of learned justices stashing troves of cash in multiple currencies in their bedrooms which have inundated the cyberspace days after raid are sufficient proof of guilt, expect no ending to the savaging of the bench as the changers renew the offensive in PMB’s lone war! Where all of these would lead for a nation described as fantastically corrupt is anyone’s guess.

    To be sure, this would not the first time judges would be accused of corruption. The charge of corruption has been in the air as long as anyone would care to remember.  The late Justice of the Supreme Court, Kayode Eso, it was who gave us the phrase “billionaire judges” to describe the cult of perverts in the temple of justice in the aftermath of the 2007 elections. Itse Sagay, law professor and Senior Advocate of Nigeria, would rue several years on that “The number of rogue judges who have completely gone out of line with the rules and ethics of the profession has increased tremendously.” As if today’s soulless, contradictory and oftentimes perverse judgements are not enough proof of the general decadence in the judicial institution, we now have daily occurrences of judges openly hawking ‘justice’ as market women would their wares on the busy highways!  

    However, what happened to the judges went a tad beyond what is conceivable in constitutional environment. It is, as my colleague Kunle Abimbola with whom I share this page is wont to describe, as the Buhari administration’s serial unforced errors –something that can only be explained by the antics of an administration consumed by messianic complex. The problem, it has been said, is the administration’s dangerous assumption that its indignation over perceived infractions should not only override the provisions of our laws and statutes but the very niceties of process that makes the law a beauty to behold.  This is where the ardent supporters of the administration particularly of its anti-corruption war must find it frustrating to see the administration descend from arbitrariness to crude self-help even when the law so clearly set out the rules.

    Understandably, not everyone agrees that the methods are reprehensible. Trust our ever vibrant brigade of netizens to be hyperactive at a time like this. Our neighbor next door, Ghana, we are told, rounded up a group of 34 judges out of which 20 were axed barely a year ago. Again, we are told of the celebrated case in Philadelphia, United States in January 2013 during which nine traffic court judges were arrested in one fell swoop to face charges for crimes bordering on conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, perjury, making false statements to the FBI etc.

    While I do not disagree that the methods were drastic in the two circumstances, the problem as we see all too often is the penchant by our investigating agencies to undermine supposedly good causes with methods that are as sloppy as they are aberrant. Today, if Nigerians appear to be less bothered about the discovery of US$319,475 in the wardrobe of a serving judge than they are of the act of bringing in a judge suspected of breaking the law for questioning, part of the explanation must be found in the security agencies’ tradition of pronouncing conviction before the rigours of a trial!

    To the extent that judges neither enjoy immunity from arrest nor from prosecution, nothing that the DSS did could, strictly speaking, be said to be out of order. As for the other details surrounding the events – such as whether the DSS has a good case to invite the judges for questioning or the question of whether the agency possessed a valid search warrant for the ‘invasion’, or whether it could not have gone ahead in a more civil, less obtrusive manner – those are matters of opinions and conjectures. The point being made here is that process has become everything in a world where transparency rules. It is the reason Nigerians openly voice out their concerns about the methods being adopted in the prosecution of the anti-corruption war particularly the growing disdain for the rules. I guess part of the aversion for the rules would explain why DSS as against the EFCC is leading the onslaught.

    Having said that, we must of course come to the fundamental point of admitting that we have a terrible malignancy in our hands. It is as simple as saying that the Nigerian bench and the bar are both diseased. Between a bar whose leading lights in trading technicalities would rather upend justice for the lucre and a bench where mammon rules, it’s hard to imagine anything more toxic to the society. The tragedy is that the legal practitioners’ body – the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) not only prefers to live in denial, it pretends that things can continue like this.

    “We condemn the raids in the strongest possible terms,” said its President, Abubakar Mahmoud in his reaction to the judges’ arrest.  “We are in a democratic society and we cannot accept a situation where armed, masked SSS operatives invade homes of the justices of the Supreme Court and judges of our high courts… This is a ploy by the executive to intimidate the judiciary and we will not accept it. The NBA will not accept it. I want to emphasise again that we’re not under military rule and we cannot accept this Gestapo style of operations.”

    Well said –I guess.

    If we disregard the fatuous nonsense which deigns to suggest we chase the fox before returning to give the errant chicks a good hiding, the indignation from an NBA that has become, quite frankly an enabler of judicial perversion can only be described as hollow – pure hot gas.

    Let the heavens fall – if it must. But then, let the dwellers of the cathedral know that there can be no such thing as a hiding place for anyone.

  • His Lordship, the rogue?

    His Lordship, the rogue?

    It doesn’t get more chastening — does it? — the portrait of a justice of the law as an alleged rogue!

    That jars on the very fundament of cultured society.

    And it doesn’t get more damning for civil society architecture — herding justices of the courts (including the Supreme Court) into detention, with alleged smoking guns, after a sting operation, by the secret police.

    Neither does it get more troubling: a governor — and a lawyer to boot! — dramatically speaking, hopping off the bed to block the arrest of a judge, alleged to have soiled his hands; and judge and governor allegedly conspiring to trot away vital evidence!

    His Excellency and His Lordship at a conspiracy?

    Besides, what is the nexus between the two — the one, enjoying legal immunity because his high office is supposed to be above board; the other, enjoying other constitutional privileges, because he is deemed an immaculate priest in the temple of justice?

    Did one illicitly aid the other, the past favour the beneficiary now returns, in his benefactor’s day of woe?

    So, if both shirk their responsibilities, can they, in all good conscience, hold on to the privileges, despite extant laws?

    The extant laws!  Yes, for that is where a party, in the emerging macabre drama, could be accused of resorting to self-help.  In arresting the judges,  DSS has been accused of “Gestapo tactics”.

    On this score, the gubernatorial case is clear-cut.  So long as he is in office, a governor enjoys immunity against criminal prosecution.  But does that allow him the laxity to indulge in alleged criminal behaviour?

    The judge’s?  Less so.  True, there are stated procedures to discipline an erring judge; and in fairness, the National Judicial Council (NJC) has latterly gone on the offensive to discipline some of such judges.

    Still, is there anything in the law that expressly forbids arresting and docking a judge, beyond the constitutional refinements of channelling grievances through the NJC, the Areopagus of judicial cleansing?

    Experts must provide specific answers to these questions to guide the polity, in these very unusual times!

    Jesus, the Christ, famously rued: my father’s house of worship has become a den of thieves!

    With this alleged governor-judge conspiracy, therefore, has Nigeria’s shrine of government become captive to a concert of executive and judicial rogues?

    And why a sting operation?  Is the Nigerian judiciary so much beyond redemption, in its alleged gobbling of sleaze, that even constitutional provisions to punish judges are so effete and ineffectual, hence this shock therapy?

    Shock therapy!  Will it achieve the desired purpose, teach the right lessons and send errant rats scampering into the hole?

    Or will it develop a life of its own, like some earthquake that could swallow the society, as we know it today?

    Questions, questions, questions!

    But instead of clear and dispassionate answers, it is the tragedy of contemporary Nigeria that everyone is diving into this troubling pool of high scandal; and pressing their constitutional right to an emotional splash.

    For starters, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) is flexing what its president calls a “judicial emergency”.

    There are also threats.  Thundered Abubakar Mahmud, SAN, NBA president, backed by a “war council” of four former NBA presidents, Wole Olanipekun, SAN, Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, J.B. Daudu, SAN and Augustine Alegeh, SAN: “I’ll be meeting with the CJN later tonight or tomorrow. There will be consequences,” he warned, “if these demands are not met.”

    The NBA stance is understandable, given the Bar-Bench esprit de corps.  However, whether it should be less combative and more calculative boils down to tactics and strategies it has decided to apply.

    Since it has first-hand information about the matter, at least much more than the general public whose sympathy it is trying to rally, it is only reasonable to respect its stance.

    Still, that bit on later meeting with the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), and threatening “consequences”, should the government not accede to its demands, border on the reckless, with all due respect.

    For starters, that puts the CJN on the spot.  However the NBA wants to engage the CJN, it should have kept to its chest; and not blabbed to the public.

    The NBA is, of course, entitled to its formalistic and legalistic view, which from its tone, presumes the arrests were to “intimidate the judiciary”.  But shouldn’t it have been a bit more nuanced about it all?

    What if DSS’s claims are proven, that the arrested judges were caught with some humongous cash in varied currencies, after a sting operation possibly after a tip-off, would the NBA not draw the CJN into unfair controversy, about using his office to shield corrupt elements in the judiciary?

    Would that not eventually weaken the CJN’s position, in the delicate balance of state power?

    The late Sabo Bakin Zuwo was a 2nd Republic Kano governor, accused of criminally warehousing public funds.  The press, ever so mischievous, dubbed him “Banking Zuwo”, after a devastating pun of his name.

    So, with alleged “Banking Zuwo” judges, can the NBA, or the CJN for that matter, beyond obdurate legalism, defend the conduct of judges allegedly warehousing huge cash at home, when they are not some illiterate Idumota traders mortally scared of the banking system?  What, by the way, might their motive be?

    Bakin Zuwo, of course, echoes a parallel in 1984, after the Buhari military regime had overthrown the Shehu Shagari 2nd Republic presidency (1979-1983).  It clamped most of the politicians in detention, and set up special tribunals to try the “corrupt” politicians.

    Just like now back then, NBA kicked — and to be fair, there were genuine fears those tribunals would not dispense justice.  Even then, the late Gani Fawehinmi broke ranks.

    Now, Femi Falana, SAN, is breaking ranks (claiming NBA, by its stand, risks protecting “corrupt judges”) — and, truth be told, the NBA would appear on more slippery grounds than it was in 1984.

    With all of these, can the NBA really afford to go toe-to-toe with the state, without risking its own integrity?  That is why NBA should show more wisdom than bellicosity.

    Of course, the human rights army has also weighed in with the ogre of looming dictatorship, claiming humiliating judges was tantamount to endangering democracy.

    That might well be.  But what if the judges first humiliated the law, by betraying their sacred oath?  Besides, “humiliating the judiciary”, on account of a few indicted judges, is hot but empty  gas.

    A few illicit judges cannot seek licit cover under the decent majority.  Indeed, keeping those bad judges humiliates the good ones.

    However, even the  Buhari Presidency must admit the sting operation, against the  judges, was nothing short of revolutionary.  So, DSS had better possess the evidences it claims it possesses.  Otherwise, it just might be the government’s last-ever romance with civil society.

    However the case pans out, the roiling notion of his Lordship, the Judge, as a thief should churn the tummy of everyone.

    So, whatever the posturing and counter-posturing, as both sides bluff and bluster, such a decadent judiciary should worry everyone.

    This is why Nigerians should navigate this sorry pass with more sobriety, and less grandstanding.

  • A milestone, and a transition

    A milestone, and a transition

    One of the blessings of my Rutam House years is that it brought me into close contact, on and off the editorial chair, with many exceptional men and women.

    I have written about Stanley Macebuh, the founding executive editor and later managing director, whose vision and leadership shaped what would be widely acclaimed as the best newspaper in Nigeria, and one of the best in Africa.  His dream was to make it one of the top 10 newspapers in the English-speaking world.

    I have also written about the late Alex Ibru, The Guardian publisher, who invested a fortune in the project but took a back seat for the most part and deferred to the expertise and judgment of seasoned professionals and academics from the universities, who ran the paper.

    Today,I write of two others, Sunmi(sola) Smart-Cole, who was my colleague, and Olorogun Michael Ibru, patriarch of the Ibru family and older brother of Alex, the Guardian publisher.

    Sunmi Smart-Cole, who turned 75 last week, comes closest in my book to the definition of a self-made man.  In an exact sense, there is no such person. He or she must have entered the world imprinted with genes from relations near and distant; along the way, the person must have been helped by other persons, or propelled by good fortune.

    Sunmi first came into my consciousness as a drummer for the Soul Assembly, one of the pop bands that rocked swinging Lagos of the 60s.  What I didn’t know then was that he had taught himself how to drum.

    Then he morphed into a barber, with a studio at McEwen Street, in what was then a tony part of Yaba, where Ogundero the Tailor, a wizard at his craft, had his well-patronised shop.  You can still see sunmi’s placebeneath the black paint over the façade of One McEwen.

    The going rate was a princely 10 shillings for a haircut, which I could not afford.  But there was no lack of well-heeled patrons, many of whom became Sunmi’s friends.  None of them, I suspect, know that Sunmi had taught himself the art of barbing.  He did it with such dexterity and precision, and with eye for visual effect. To him, barbing was an art form.

    Along the way Sunmi apprenticed as an architectural draughtsman, and has to his credit some remarkable buildings and structures in Sierra Leone and Lagos.

    But it was in the United States that he found his métier in photography, the art form for which he is justly celebrated.  On his return to Nigeria, he took up an appointment as the first photo editor of the newly established Guardian, turning what had been a ho-hum staple in newspapering into a creative and integral element of news and features.

    Given Sunmi’s unrivalled knowledge of the Lagos social scene and the close personal relationships he had cultivated with many of the influential persons in the city, he was a natural for the editorship of Lagos Life, a weekly journal of soft news and gossip that was the perfect complement to the sedate Guardian.  The centre-spread, featuring his photography, was one of the paper’s strongest selling points and a visual delight to boot.

    Even with this elevated status, Sunmi could not give up barbing.  He did it not for money, but for sheer love of craft, and as a way of signalling that he judged you worthy of his attention and friendship.  He carried his tool kit wherever he went, and could give you a fine haircut at short notice and just about anywhere, as long as there was electricity to power his tools.

    One day, as he gave me the first of many haircuts, we got talking.  My hairline was already in furious retreat, but I still had some hair worth grooming.  As his clippers slithered through my hair I asked whether he had considered parlaying his vast and distinctive output –black-and white only, like the Old Masters; no coloured prints, please —into academic credit that could lead without much fuss to a Master of Fine Arts degree of a university in the United States.

    The clippers went dead.  Sunmi stood still, motionless, wordless. Moments passed, and when I looked up, there he was, tears streaking down his face.  Composing himself several minutes later, Sunmi told me the story of his life, the story that has been captured faithfully in all major papers this past week to mark his 75th birthday.

    His formal education had ended at elementary school.  And so on and so forth.  Today, he stands as a peerless exemplar among photojournalists in Nigeria, and one of the best anywhere, emblematic of historian Edward Gibbon’s apothegm that the best and most important part of a person’s education is the part the person gives himself or herself.

    My interaction with Olorogun Michael Ibru, who died several weeks ago, aged 85, was limited.  I had admired him from the distance, having heard so much about his academic distinction at Igbobi College, where he was Head Boy, his sprawling business empire, his philanthropy and, above all, his humility, his capacity for relating to total strangers as though they were his buddies.

    That was until sometime in the late 80s, when the University of Lagos Alumni Association deputed me —as their “Rutam House man” — to ask if he would kindly chair their fund-raising dinner. When I called at his office to request an appointment, he checked his diary, and without asking what I wanted to see him about, granted my request.

    I met Chief Ibru several days later, in his well-appointed suite in an office block – which probably also doubled as some kind of residence or pad –overlooking Apapa Wharf, with a stunning view of the Atlantic Ocean. He asked solicitously about my work at The Guardian and said he hoped my experience there would be so pleasurable that I would want to stay back.

    He had returned from Europe just the previous week.

    There, he had watched a movie about World War II that centred on the nine-month siege to Stalingrad (now Volgograd) by the armies of Germany and its Axis Allies, and the grim Soviet counter offensive that destroyed Germany’s  6th Army, in what has gone down as the bloodiest battle in history.

    The Soviet Army had a grander design:  to pursue the stragglers of the invading army all the way to Germany and capture Berlin.  The trouble was that they had only eight landing craft. How they overcame this logistic nightmare and pressed on all the way to Berlin was what fascinated Ibru most.

    If only Nigeria could learn from that titanic feat, he said, with a sigh more than once.

    It remains to add that he accepted the invitation without hesitation. He was represented at the event by Sam Okudu, a senior executive at the Ibru Organisation, and a former registrar of the University of Ibadan, who gave a spirited speech and presented a handsome donation on the chief’s behalf.

    Although he had no formal links with The Guardian, he was a lightning rod for the newspaper.  Whenever the military authorities were angry about something the paper published and could not reach Alex Ibru or feared that they might not be able to bend him to their will, they took their case to the chief, persuaded that he would be more amenable.

    He was nothing of the sort.  He would listen patiently as always, and then fob them off with a promise to look into the matter.  Then he would call to tell you about the encounter, assure you he had taken care of the matter, and that you (my colleagues and I) had nothing to worry about so long as our motives were “as clean as a whistle”.

    This was priceless admonition, a distillation of his experience as business mogul, humanist, conciliator and statesman. At his death, the great business empire built by this foremost indigenous entrepreneur, spanning agriculture, fishing, manufacturing, banking, car dealership and aero services, to name just a few, had become a shadow of itself.

    But his personal life and public life were untainted by scandal.  In this clime, there is no greater tribute and no greater legacy.

  • Notes on Nigeria @ 56

    Notes on Nigeria @ 56

    Thanks to YouTube, I had a good time on Sunday evening watching the presentation by former Anambra State governor, Peter Obi at this year’s edition of The Platform, powered by the Covenant Christian Centre. If you subtract the hubris, the vainglory which shone through and through, the presentation comes to a fair testimonial of the sojourn of the man his admirers prefer to call Okwute in the Anambra Government House. In this, yours truly bears testimony to the former governor’s frugality when, on invitation to Awka, the Anambra State capital, I had to pay for a bottle of Fanta ordered in the hotel to down my meal because, the governor, I was told, had decreed that drinks – alcoholic or none – save water, was off limits!

    His Platform outing is however not entirely a Peter Obi story. A window into all that is wrong with our polity, a stinging rebuke of the culture of waste and profligacy in our government houses and the cluelessness of their occupants in the face of shrunk national gravy; his tale essentially captures the recurring tragedy of a prodigal nation banking on bountiful harvest after eating a huge chunk of its productive seeds.

    Hereunder are two takeaways from the outing that I find to be at the heart of the mess that governance has become today.

    The first of course is that governance has long ceased to be a serious business in these shores. Witness the whining and moaning going across the state capitals only because oil, a sector that contributes 8.26 percent to the real GDP has gone bust under just two years. After two lifelines from the federal government, many of the states have remained practically insolvent. Not even the endless staff audit and verifications appears to have done the magic of pruning state expenditures into manageable levels. Most states, it would appear, have long given up on the possibility of raising their Internally Generated Revenue hence their unending supplication for either a rebound in oil prices or a change of heart by the Niger Delta militants. Meanwhile, in the event of inability of to think through a way out, most have elected to either kick the problem down the road or take solace in harebrained solutions that are at best placebos!

    In this, the federal government does not appear to fare any better. With the economy officially in recession, the nation is at crossroads over what to do to get thing moving again. If one expected clarity of purpose and strategy at a time like this, the signals have been at best mixed. Yes, we have heard the familiar catchphrases about spending our ways out of recession; but then, it is increasingly clear that the federal government does not have the foggiest idea of how to proceed let alone where the funds will come from!

    Borrowing? Yes, but from where and at what terms? Assets sale. Is it not amazing that administration could not lay out a good case for its proposal to sell national assets to raise cash? Agriculture? Whence? Industry? Where are the infrastructure and the policy support? Solid minerals? Really? Which ones?

    The railways? On the pages of newspapers?

    When will the federal government quit talking to start getting the job done? Again and again, we are told that the PDP brought the nation into this mess.  Wasn’t that the reason Nigerians sacked the inept PDP federal government?  When are we going to see signs that the federal government truly knows what it is doing?

    Let’s turn to the second takeaway – the pervasive wastefulness – a vice that is unfortunately aided and abetted by the very institutions charged with the delivery of the public good.

    Nigerians have spoken, and continue to speak of the dysfunctions of our institutions and how these inhibit the delivery of the so-called public good. Today, we know that our budgetary process is worse than a mess. Like we have seen of Budget 2016, the executive may have its wishes, the bureaucrats and the legislature will nonetheless have their way. It is a messy affair all the way.

    Today, few speak of the kalokalo –that our bureaucracies have become, particularly their infinitely creative ability to spin dizzying zillions into private coffers of public actors. We would rather talk about the politicians – the tribe we love to hate only for their love of ostentation and good life. Hardly do we talk about the brood of vipers in the bureaucracy that daily suck our blood.  Yet, between our politicians who are given to boisterous living and our bureaucrats who prefer to operate by stealth, the battle for the control of the national gravy, akin to the battle of two strong men are such that both are guaranteed to win while the rest of society remain anaemic!

    Still wondering where the zillions earmarked for roads and other infrastructures disappeared to? Check out the sprawling real estates with the tag Anonymous – dotting Abuja and the 36 state capitals; look out for those gleaming armoured plated SUVs – the terror on Nigeria’s pot-hole infested highways that routinely announces the arrival of the man of power to town; funny how Nigerians continue to fail to make the critical connection between their poverty and these elite indulgencies!

    At 56, the Nigerian story remains one of missed opportunities. It is lamentation galore. Fifty years after the country found oil in commercial quantities, our capacity to undertake meaningful activities in the upstream has remained extremely limited; as for our involvement in downstream operations – whether in refining or petrochemicals, it has been an unmitigated disaster. The story is no less true in the power sector that has been in perpetual regression, or of the antediluvian railway contraption bequeathed to us by Lord Lugard that has been object of endless modernization programmes. All have been utter disappointments all the way. In the absence of the critical enablers of infrastructure, describing the Nigerian economy as pre-industrial can hardly be an overstatement although a more fitting description will be an acquisitive-consumptive society!

    At 56, the great tragedy is that leadership hasn’t even begun to figure out the place of the African giant in the sun. It is the reason why the nation is not working – or not at work. A Nigeria where wealth comes before work. Our case is worse than tragedy.