The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • A birthday, an anniversary and the crunch

    A birthday, an anniversary and the crunch

    Birthday boy”, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, was right, at the 8th Bola Tinubu Colloquium in Abuja: the stunning All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential win of 2015 was a fitting birthday gift.

    But that connect, between personal bliss and group glory, underscores the thin divide between triumph and failure in politics.

    One year ago, the land was upbeat with renewed optimism.  Right now, it is downcast with yet unrealised hope.

    It’s the ancient children of Israel out there again in the jungle, out of Egypt but yet to reach the Promised Land; bawling, yelling and screaming at Jehovah to clear off his celestial high horse and return them to Egypt fast, since his Canaan promise was nothing but holy smoke!

    The triumph of March 2015 has turned the crunch of March 2016!

    To be sure, most of the shrieking and screeching and squealing has come from the defeated class, praying and fasting that the Buhari administration fails.

    Even then, Nigeria has more than its fair share of the fickle, the simplistic, the gullible, and the outright vacuous, ready victims of the nay orchestra.  Besides, when the pocket hurts, cold reason melts in hot passion.

    Still, Tinubu’s personal triumph, in the context of the opposition’s victory, is a salute to an individual’s total devotion to a cause, no matter how lonely or chilly.

    Indeed, were history to record Nigerian political evolution from 1993 till now, it could well tag this epoch Tinubu Era (TE); the era before, Before Tinubu (BT) and the epoch after, After Tinubu (AT).  Such has been his grand impact on Nigerian politics (and governance) between the still-birth Third Republic (1992-1993) and now.

    Here is why.

    1993: After joining the conservative progressives in Shehu Musa Yar’Adua’s People’s Front (PF) faction of the victorious Social Democratic Party (SDP) to sack the classical Awoists of the Lateef Jakande school in Lagos, Tinubu balked at PF trading off Moshood Abiola’s June 12 presidential mandate, after Gen. Ibrahim Babangida had annulled that election.  Dapo Sarumi, the Lagos PF leader then, kept faith with PF.

    Between Tinubu and Sarumi, that made the difference between political life and death.  Though Sarumi would briefly buoy up as one of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s first set of ministers, his political career would fizzle out.

    But Tinubu’s would bloom — thanks to standing on the sanctity of the vote, with NADECO fighting the annulment, and helping to birth the current democratic order; rather than pally with intra-party reactionaries for short term selfish pleasure.

    2003: After Obasanjo’s grand electoral invasion of the South West, following the controversial 2003 general elections, Tinubu’s Lagos remained the sole state to escape the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) capture.  Talks then were rife: the then Lagos governor should dump the progressive shipwreck and join federal power.

    Not Tinubu.  He instead rallied the dejected progressive troops, even with savage plots and hideous intrigues from the Obasanjo presidency; and its crass executive bullying.

    Two election seasons after in 2011, most of the South West was back under the progressive fold, if not as one party then as ideological soul mates, notwithstanding the Olusegun Mimiko political prostitution and ideological subversion that careened him from Alliance for Democracy (AD, 1999), to PDP (2003), Labour Party (2007) and back to PDP (2015).

    Again like Sarumi, comparing Mimiko to Tinubu is a harsh study in unprincipled wheeling-and-dealing, which leads to eventual ruin (Mimiko); and staying steady on a tough and difficult turf, which leads to ultimate triumph (Tinubu).

    2015: That was the blessed year the Afenifere grandees finally got their deserved comeuppance; but again, Tinubu was their battling ram.

    Even when clear Goodluck Jonathan was running everyone into a ditch, the Afenifere divine, Kabiyesi (the Unquestionable) of the Awo progressive franchise, that reserve the right to bestow or withdraw it from mere mortals, located their own good fortune in Goodluck.

    Since their personal good equalled the Yoruba comfort (so went their tragic conceit which really was hubris), they all zoomed off to their personal ruins, expecting the fond Yoruba collective to follow.

    But again, as in 2003 when the five other AD governors fell for the Obasanjo deceit, backed by this same Afenifere grandees, apart from the late Chief Abraham Adesanya, Tinubu charted a radically different path.

    For one, the opposition alliance APC was gathering traction.  For another, the PDP was unravelling fast, with a president doing all the wrong things in electoral desperation; and Patience, his spouse, mouthing all the wrong things on the stumps, to further bury hubby without trace.

    But to the Afenifere, old or young, nothing drove them but concentrated Tinubu spite.  To this well-funded conspiracy of demonization and blackmail, the Odua People’s Congress (OPC) duo of Fredrick Fasehun and Gani Adams — one, an old man bordering on political senility; the other, a callow youth punching above his weight — were merry recruits.

    Add the AIT hate documentary, and feel anew the full venom of Operation Total Demonization!  Still, AIT has since gobbled its vomit; and some news media, merry echoes of those hate messages, now fall upon themselves to make Tinubu their man of that same year!

    At the end, the impossible, on which the spiteful Afenifere and confederates hedged their bet, despite the clear balance of demography and political power, happened.  For the first time in Nigerian history, a federal ruling party got electorally toppled and cobbled by the opposition!

    Again, Tinubu is flush with victory; and his traducers are whining in defeat!  For the Afenifere, the age of innocence, the halcyon paradise of integrity, is over.  They not only lost an election, they lost their brand integrity.

    Chief Olu Falae, who spearheaded the anti-Tinubu army, spurring the Trojan horse called SDP, is now freely cited for alleged obtainment with established political crooks in the land!  How many of the other grandees savoured Jonathan’s sweet electoral dollars, now turned poison to all?

    It doesn’t get more tragic!

    But as it often happens in politics, tragedy and victory comingle, with a rapidity faster than even the flux of Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher that posits change is the sole permanent thing in life.

    So, for Tinubu himself, this is as much victory time as it is crunch time.  The victory whoops of 2015 only echo at a distance, with its hangover.  One year later, it is crunch time; and the groans, the pains and the angst in the land aren’t pretty.

    From that terrible din, come taunts of the electorally vanquished; the shriek of the fickle; and the occasional jeer of the alienated, even from the victorious camp.

    From the media come the obtuse, the acute, the reasonable, the outright malevolent and hostile and the grand conceit of the brilliant but unwise, all staking their republican claim to tutor their government the ABC of winning policy.

    But the Buhari administration need not be frazzled.  It is only a grand reminder its work is well cut out; and that failure is no option.  So, it must work its butts out.

    Indeed, if Tinubu’s personal triumph is to last, and not buried in the present crunch, APC must fulfil its historic mission of changing Nigeria for good.

  • Our endangered value system

    Our endangered value system

    Wherever two or more Nigerians are gathered, you can be sure that they are talking about the Nigerian Condition – the crippling fuel crisis,the epileptic power supply, the Naira that fetches less and less even as it is harder and harderto come by, mass unemployment, delayed salaries and pensions, Boko Haram’s relentlessscorched-earth campaign,the murderous menace of ‘Fulani” herdsmen, syndicated kidnapping, shrinking opportunities everywhere, and, of course, Dasukigate, the political corruption scandal that has kept the country enthralled like a telenovela.

    It is a calendar of woes with few prospects of imminent reprieve, this dominant narrative of the Nigerian Condition

    The Change they were promised – the Change they chose when they voted Muhammadu Buhari into power, has not occurred, the narrative continues. He has been in the saddle for eight months, but isn’t that long enough to end the mess and turn the country around perceptibly?

    But there is another narrative that rarely enters into discussions of the Nigerian Condition, though it is at least as salient as the dominant one and its consequences probably more deleterious.

    That narrative centres on the collapse of the value system.

    Every society, community, group, or institution functions on a system of values. Sometimesthe values are explicit, as when they are spelled out in code, a declaration of fundamental principles. Sometimes they are implicit, when they flow from an ideology.

    But whether explicit or implicit, the value system defines broadly what is acceptable or unacceptableconduct, what is of good report and what is not, what is honourable and what is not. It is the compass by which a society navigates the challenges of the era

    When the value system is eroded or abandoned, the result is what the French sociologist Émile Durkheim called anomie, or normlessness. The standards of right and wrong become fluid. The restraints that govern social behavior as well as institutions lose their binding force.

    If Nigeria has not reached the point of anomie, it is dangerously close. The evidence is allaround us.

    Parents think nothing of procuring for their children the means to cheat in public examinations, and teachers are all too available to aid and abet the process. Persuaded that this way of doing business is not a sure-fire guarantee of success, two desperate parents, both university graduates, took turns last year to write the matriculation examination for their son who had not made the cut in previous attempts.

    In Bauchi State, a school principal was dismissed because he made it impossible for his studentsto cheat in the Senior School Certificate Examinations. By preventing his wards from cheatingwhen everyone else was doing so, his employers remonstrated, he had wantonly placed them at a competitive disadvantage.

    Educational standards have fallen precipitously because the system has been corrupted. Former Central Bank Governor Charles Soludo once complained that many of our university graduates are “unemployable.” One watches aghast as lawmakers introducing themselves on the floor of the National Assembly declare, without the slightest embarrassment:”My names are . . .”

    It is notorious that students in higher institutions are often compelled to offer gratification ofone kind or another to their lecturers to pass crucial exams or have their final projects approved. So ingrained is the practice that it even has a name:  “Sorting.”

    The judiciary is mired in sleaze and credible allegations of the same.  The news media are similarly circumstanced.  The country is awash in religion but starved of righteousness.

    Nothing is intrinsically right or wrong anymore. If you can get away with it, it must be right. If you criticize public officials, as I often do in my line of business, you are told that you wereactuated by envy or religious prejudice or ethnic bigotry, and that you would do no better and would probably do much worse if you were the one holding that office. So, shut up.

    I am told that when the distinguished historian Professor Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi returned from the UK after his doctorate, he was serenaded into his home-town Ikole -Ekiti by schoolchildren and members of the community. This was the kind of honour usually reserved for visiting ecclesiastics of the calibre of the Archbishop of the Anglican Province of West Africa, or the Anglican Bishop of the old Ondo-Benin Diocese.

    Today, society is more likely to honor wealth than academic or professional distinction, regardless of the source of that wealth.

    At least one generation of Nigerians is growing up believing that this is the way things havealways been done in Nigeria. Because History is no longer taught as a discipline, the onlyNigeria they know is the one they are living through. According to one report, high schoolstudents in Ogun State know more about Obafemi Martins the international soccer player thanabout Obafemi Awolowo, one of Nigeria’s pre-eminent political leaders and a foremost indigene of Ogun State.

    By one estimate, 70 percent of drugs in the Nigerian market are fake or adulterated. They maypromote fake recovery, but they are just as likely to lead to real deaths. The drug merchants and their vendors care only about their profit, not about the often lethal outcomes of their pernicious trade.

    The sense of sacrifice has been lost. What is in it for me? What can my country do for me? These are the questions most of our compatriots are asking, not what they can do for their country. Thus, only a handful of the nearly 500 delegates at the National Conference inaugurated in 2014 by former President Goodluck Jonathan declined the hefty stipend they were paid for what should havebeen seen as a call to serve one’s country at a critical moment in its history.

    The public at least has some idea of what the delegate were paid from the public purse for the four months the Conference lasted. Nobody knows just how much lawmakers in the National Assembly have elected to pay themselves. But the compensation package rumoured to border on the obsceneincludes a wardrobe allowance, as well as a “hardship allowance.”

    It is only in Nigeriathat being a member of the legislature is considered a hardship that requires special compensation.

    Even in these difficult times, the Senate is set, under the 2016 National Budget, to buy a luxury American-specification SUV for each of its 109 members to facilitate committee oversight, at a cost to the public of about N4.7 billion. The vehicles will be sold to each assignee as scrap after four years, and a newpurchasing spree will start again.

    Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the collapse of the value system is the scant regard for the sanctity of human life that now pervades the system, reaching even into our universities that were supposed to be governed by a higher culture.

    There is no more sickening example of the bestiality that has overtaken the Ivory Tower than the beheading at Abia State University, Uturu, of two students, and the use of those ghastly trophies as makeshift goal posts for soccer practice.

    This, in brief, is the dimension of the collapse of the value system, the other narrative thatrarely enters into discussions of the Nigerian Condition.It portends greater danger to society than the collapse of the economy.

    The economy can always be revived over time, drawing on the tested tools of research and on examples elsewhere. But it will take at least a generation to restore a collapsed value system.

    The journey is yet to start in earnest.

     

    *An earlier version of this essay appeared in the inaugural issue (February 14, 2016) of Kufena, the magazine of St Paul’s (Zaria) Old Boys Association.

  • El-Rufai and Kaduna’s antichrists

    El-Rufai and Kaduna’s antichrists

    For daring a bill to regulate religious practice in Kaduna State, Governor Nasir el-Rufai’s explosively intolerant opponents, reading religious chauvinism into it all, have tagged him “antichrist”.

    But from their hysteria, not the governor, but they, sound every decibel the antichrist.  By their deeds, declares the Bible, the divine Christian constitution, we shall know them!

    For starters, an Auchi, Edo-based Pentecostal pastor, Apostle Johnson Suleiman, let fly his own version of Christian fatwa: the governor must withdraw the bill or he dies!

    Is that the good pastor’s interpretation of Christ’s turn-the-other-cheek doctrine, in this blessed season of Easter — Christ, that was divine, yet meekly submitted to be mauled and crucified, just to cleanse humanity of sin?

    Or, given the Islamic ring to the pastor’s surname, is it a neophyte getting too excitable for his own good, preaching hate instead of love, just to score one for Christianity against its great “enemy”, Islam?

    But even if Islam is Christianity’s enemy (which it is not, though their doctrines differ), didn’t Christ insist you must pray for your enemies?

    Besides, the irate apostle (didn’t the Bible say be angry, but don’t sin?) must be told that theocratic arrogance — which is what his show of ire amounts to — doesn’t excuse the breach of the law in a secular republic.

    Threatening a sitting governor with death, for whatever excuse, could well amount to treason, if the affected high official of state decides to press charges.

    Another piqued Christian brother, on his facebook wall, gleefully posted an el-Rufai picture defaced with a giant X, in red.  His furious and sweeping verdict: “This Uncircumcised Philistine!  Cannot stop the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ in Kaduna State!!!”

    But pray, is the proposed  “Bill for a Law to substitute the Kaduna State Regulation of Religious Preaching Edict No. 7 of 1984” targeted solely against Christians?  Hardly, though this emotive reaction would suggest otherwise.

    Just as well it is nothing but hot fallacy.  Calling a fellow citizen “uncircumcised Philistine” could satisfy religious bile.  But if you distil history from theology, that phrase clearly belonged to the pre-Christian era, the Judaist era, when the ancient Israelites fought turf wars against virulent opposition in the Promised Land which, by the way, belonged to some people before they got there.

    Judaists, if they wish, could luxuriate in such cavalier bigotry.  Not Christians.  Though Christ talked of Jews and Gentiles, there was nothing chauvinistic about it: just a realistic aggregation of humanity, beyond just Jews, since all, according to the Christian creed, are entitled to Christ’s redemption.

    Anyway, applying psychoanalysis to Nigerian users of facebook would appear a disturbing but penetrating beam into the innermost crevices of their soul: the ultra-dirty id, without the restraining strictures of the ego and super-ego.

    It is the classical Freudian slip, a raw exposé into the thick jungle of the soul, where unfettered savagery reigns.

    Still, nothing from this discourse presumes el-Rufai a saint; and his opponents, irredeemable devils.

    Indeed, from his tenure as Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) director-general to Abuja minister, both stewardship he proudly rendered in Accidental Public Servant, his Obasanjo-era public service memoirs, the not-so-accidental elected governor of Kaduna assaults you with his in-your-face manifest goodness of his intentions, no matter how controversial.

    That enlists him needless enemies, especially among those who feel he is too proud, too huffy and absolutely insufferable.  An acute mind that does not suffer fools gladly, and who gets irritated and shows it when folks are not making sense, not a few dismiss him as “arrogant”.

    He may well need to seriously work on his emotional intelligence.  But his mark on the public space, both at BPE and as Abuja minister, would appear indelible.

    But if the new law is targeted at both Christians and Muslims, why is it that, apart from a few Muslim lobbies, only Christians foam in the mouth, rave and mouth threats?

    Well, maybe for too long, religion has had too unfettered a rein in a secular republican state. In Kaduna, the dominantly Christian southern Kaduna vs the Kaduna establishment, which leaning is clearly Muslim, appears a crusade of all seasons.

    Generally in the North, Islam appears the faith of power, which has the effect of radicalising the Christian swathe of the populace, with their penchant for ultra-sensitivity in faith matters.  But then whoever is not feeling their pinch can’t teach them how, or how not, to yelp.

    Even at the federal level, with the northern domination of power for a long time, Islam has had its fair share in Nigerian power metaphysics and imaging.

    But that has been a rogue balance of a sort, since the departing British colonising powers had already codified the Christianisation of government business.  That is why Sunday (when Christians go to church), not Friday (when Muslims observe their Jumat), was the original civil service rest day.

    Which is why Governor el-Rufai and the Kaduna legislature must ensure the proposed legislation goes through the grill of public hearings and other legislative in-built devices to ensure the law, when passed, is fair, just and equitable to all.

    But one thing the state must not do: surrender its constitutionally given powers to legislate for the good of its people, just because of some religious hysteria.

    That would be succumbing to theocratic outlawry — which really is a contradiction in terms because both Christianity and Islam clearly define their relationship with secular powers: and every true Christian and Muslim must be bound by that.

    Besides, the 1999 Constitution, as amended, fully empowers the state to regulate religious practice.  While section 38(1) guarantees religious freedom, section 45(1) mandates the government to make “reasonable justifiable” regulatory laws “in the interest of public safety, public order, public morality or public health or for the purpose of protecting the rights and freedoms of other persons.”

    People easily forget that Kaduna used to be a cauldron of faith riots and killing; until Governor Ahmed Makarfi (1999-2007) somewhat found an antidote.  Even then, that did not avert the Shiite crisis, which recent tragic escalation a judicial commission of inquiry is still trying to sort out.

    So, if el-Rufai decides to be pro-active, so long as he is fair and equitable to all, what’s wrong with that?

    Apostle Suleiman’s boast that he needs no licence to preach anywhere is not only hot gas to his revved up congregation, it is also akin to theocratic outlawry.  If the Kaduna law is passed and he breaches it, he risks a gaol term, pure and simple.

    It is the same outlawry that, with due respect to genuine Shiite grievances, would make that commune pledge allegiance to Iran, while the Nigerian state secures and guarantees its members; with the practice of their faith.

    Now, see what tragedy that privilege without responsibility has caused everybody?  Don’t such misguided notions negate the Social Contract?

    Let lawful and responsible religious communes, Christian and Muslim, rally to ensure the proposed Kaduna law is fair and equitable to all.  Religious hysteria can’t strip the government powers the constitution has granted it.

  • Kachikwu lays an egg!

    Kachikwu lays an egg!

    Reading the flurry of responses to the statement credited to the Minister of State Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, on the lingering fuel crisis last week, I must confess to struggling to understand what it is really that irked Nigerians the more: an alleged inscrutable arrogance in the face of damning failure; or the momentary candour of admitting that the extravagant placebo, or if you like, the outsized artifice which the Buhari administration had sought to count upon to deliver on the promise of stabilizing the fuel supply situation, is as unworkable as it is patently dated!

    Confronted by a battalion of reporters to tell them when he hopes the nation would get out of the latest cycle of fuel crisis, the minister, who doubles as the helmsman of the national oil corporation reportedly blurted out: “One of the training I did not receive is that of a magician, but I am working very hard to ensure some of these issues go away”.

    How, he didn’t say.

    The minister would nonetheless go on to remind the newshounds that: “… for the five or six months we have been here, NNPC has moved from a 50 per cent importer of products to basically a 100 per cent importer and the 445,000 barrels per day that were allocated were to cover between 50 and 55 per cent importation…So it is quite frankly by sheer magic that we even have the amount of products at the stations. We are looking to see how to get foreign exchange input; the President and I discussed extensively on how to get more crude directed at importation”.

    So much for the exaggerated self-score by the minister; the fact is that we are here: citizens of OPEC’s six largest exporter of crude can’t get fuel to buy at the pumps. From North to East, West to East, the story is the same – petrol has become the latest essential commodity to be procured at great pains. Officially, it is supposed to be selling at N86.50 a litre; now you’d be lucky to buy at N150. A friend in Lokoja, the Kogi State capital told me he bought at N200 a litre. That is the way it is. And to imagine that this is happening under an administration that promised change.

    By the way, it is no small matter that a minister of the republic, a supposedly first rate one, would dare to link the current situation with the calling of the practitioners of the high art of magic – going as far as to suggest that it is “sheer magic that we even have the amount of products at the stations”! Or his self-serving statement about two months waiting period for which Nigerians must necesarily endure after which fuel will thereafter flow ceaselessly! Can we ever get serious?

    There is certainly a sense in which the minister’s momentary candour – minus the hubris – could in fact be far more ‘beneficial’ than Nigerians could have imagined. I mean the carefully constructed edifice of make-believe, the castle of denials and the blame-game that have sustained the industry in the past months right up to the point of spawning a culture of abdication; all of these unravelling to the embarrasment of all and right before our very eyes. The development, if anything, comes to one basic but uncomfortable truth: the new NNPC team –headed by Kachikwu, has done practically nothing different on the basis of which it expected things to have changed! And this is despite being in office for more than six long months!

    This is why his resort to blaming the fuel crisis to dollar shortages, moribund refineries, and alleged misallocation of fuel imports by the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA), at best efforts at rationalization, is unlikely to impress Nigerians. While it is a long way from when we were required to throw up our arms in mock surrender to the the usual culprits: the ubiquitous pipeline vandals said to have practically brought the downstream sector to its knees; the club of marketers said to have made a habit of feeding feed fat on Nigerians’ misery, the latest development challenge us to focus on the lingering inertia as well as the criminal lack of responsibility by the NNPC and its principal, the Federal Government, which have fostered the current climate of despondency.

    Clearly, Nigerians didn’t expect the administration to work magic – and certainly not in six months. That is if magic means overhauling the extensive pipeline network, the disused depots and their ancillary infrastructure, the re-streaming of the moribund refineries – all of these within six months to even a year. Even at the best of times – and most Nigerians would readily agree that these are not the best of times – it would ordinarily be a tall order – to get these done. Of course, given the years of neglect, Nigerians certainly understand that it would take some time for changes to become apparent at least in these areas.

    Point is – Nigerians have learnt to see beyond appearances, the self-glorification of officials particularly when they mount the high roads to hold imaginary saboteurs responsible for what is essentially structural problem of inadequate supply; they are able to appreciate genuine efforts when they see one. At the moment, what they are being served daily is a menu of placebos that falls short of what is needed. The earnest expectation of Nigerians is that they will be served the real stuff soon.

    Are the latest supply hiccups inevitable? Only if the NNPC can convince that there are elements in the supply chain that are either unknown or unknowable or that Nigerians have suddenly found new uses for the liquid gold. Dollar shortages? Haba – NNPC! Moribund refineries? Since when did we begin to rely on the refineries for local supply? And now this new one – an alleged misallocation of fuel imports by PPPRA!  Would there ever be an end to the tale? Is Kachikwu no longer the supervisory minister for the PPPRA? The truth is, none of the activities as far as we can see, are unknown or incapable of being anticipated. We have a fair idea of our daily requirement of fuel; the same with the import cycle. To the extent that the situation didn’t happen overnight, there is sufficient lead time for the federal government to have taken action.

    This is where an apology instead of self-justification would have done the magic. But then, our minister, not being a magician, is unlikely to offer Nigerians the benefit of that simple but efficacious therapy.

  • Corruption: Their functional perspective

    Corruption: Their functional perspective

    Barely two years after the euphoric celebration of the independence that was supposed to usher in life abundant, life for the average Nigerian was anything but abundant.  Bowing to necessity, the Federal Government proclaimed an austerity programme that reflected the Nigerian condition, which Highlife maestro Victor Olaiya captured in song.

    In rough translation, the lyrics went like this:  Times are hard/There is no money out there/Men are yearning/Women are yearning/Everyone is yearning for money.

    From the hardest-hit in the population came this question poignantly and insistently:  “When will this independence end?”

    Some 50 years later, Nigeria is in the grip of an economic convulsion. There is no money in town is what one hears everywhere.  The little money in circulation has lost much of its purchasing power.  Try to shave a Naira or two off the price of a bunch of bananas or a pineapple or a piece of yam from the roadside vendor, and what you get is a polite rebuke.

    “Oga, you never hear say dollar don go up?  It is never “Oga, you never hear say Naira don fall?”  It is almost as if the dollar is the national currency, not the Naira.

    A government that came to power promising Change has made exposing corruption in public life its first order of business.  What has since come to light is that the word “corruption” is a wholly inadequate metaphor for the systematic and remorseless looting of public assets during the preceding administration of Dr Goodluck Jonathan even as it chanted ceaselessly that it was on a transformative mission.

    Jonathan and his team transformed Nigeria all right, but into the most debauched kleptocracy in recent memory.

    Just when you think that the most brazen instance of corruption has been uncovered, the next day’s bulletin reports another instance of corruption on a scale much larger, wrought by persons occupying positions of power, influence and public trust.  The following day brings fresh revelations of the same kind, only vaster in scope and more ingenuous in execution.  The day after that is guaranteed to bring more revelations that will stagger even persons gifted with the most larcenous imagination.

    It was heartening when it began.  The new sheriff is living up to his billing.  Finally, someone who has the will and the credibility has taken on the monster.  He may not slay it, but he will tame it over time and create an environment in which public funds will be spent for public projects, instead of ending up in the capacious maws of officials and their confederates.

    Lately, however, Nigerians are getting less and less impressed.   They have begun to question the methodology and even the motive of the anti-corruption drive.  Those who concede that the anti-corruption agenda signals a new direction nevertheless point out that it does not even begin to translate into the Change they expected the new administration to launch.  They say yester- year’s problems are still with them, intractable as ever.  Many are dispirited, and not a few are disillusioned.

    “Na anti-corruption we go chop?” they chorus.

    But that is the more constructive version of the anti-corruption critique, rooted in legitimate expectation of a coordinated and sustained assault on the problems that make life in Nigeria a daily grind.

    There is another critique that has to be judged frankly subversive.  It states unequivocally that Nigerians were far better off in the time of unbridled pillage.  Its blunt demand?  Bring Back Our Corruption. The battle cry even comes with a hashtag, this vulgar imitation, trivialisation even, of #Bring Back our Girls, the campaign to secure the release of the Chibokgirls still being held in parts unknown by Boko Haram.

    Theirs is a functional perspective on corruption, built on economic calculations of the rawest kind with stomach infrastructure at its core.  Here is their anthem:

    With Corruption a bag of pure water was N80

    Without Corruption a bag of pure water is N150

    With Corruption dollar was N180

    Without Corruption dollar is N400

    With Corruption I have 20hrs electricity at low tariff

    Without Corruption I have seven hrs electricity with 45 per cent increase in tariff

    With Corruption keke to my house takes N50

    Without Corruption keke to my house takes N100

    With Corruption smallest indomie was N40

    Without Corruption smallest indomie is N60

    # IStandWithCorruption

    #Bringbackourcorruption.

    The shrinking content of the Titus sardine brand seems to have hit the #BringBackOurCorruption Brigade particularly hard.  Originally there were four pieces of fish; then it was reduced to three, and now it is two.  “In years to come, you will open a can of sardine and see ‘Try Again.’”

    Their case, as I see it, is founded on the well-known fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc, Latin for”after this; therefore because of this.”Its classic formulation is:”Since event Y followed event X,  event Y must have been caused by event X.”

    Applied to the present case, the Bring Back Our Corruption campaigners are saying in effect that since the cost of everything skyrocketed after the anti-corruption drive went into full throttle, the escalation must have been caused by the drive to curb corruption.

    Nor does their misapprehension end there.

    During the period that serves as their reference point, the oil market, though less buoyant than before, had not collapsed.  Oil revenues provided the foreign exchange that catered to the huge national appetite for imports and kept the cost of consumer goods and services stable.  The sharp fall in receipts from oil heightened the demand for scarce dollars and exerted great pressure on the Naira, resulting in a fall in its value.

    The fall was exacerbated by desperate speculators hoping to force a devaluation of the Naira so they could make a fortune on its woes, but were checkmated by an adamant President Muhammadu Buhari.  Now some stability has returned to the Naira.

    The campaigners are willfully ignorant of this trajectory.  They are unlikely to be deterred by an appeal to facts or by serious argument.They are unlikely to be moved by a showing that if  Nigerians fared better – if they could feast on noodles and sardines — when the system was mired in corruption, they could have upgraded to caviar and Champagne if corruption had been less pervasive; that the answer to their privations is not more corruption but less.

    At this rate, it cannot be long before they demand that corruption be proclaimed a national ideology since, in their reckoning, it is sure to guarantee life more abundant for them and their children and their children’s children.

  • Agatu: Our march to self-help republic!

    Agatu: Our march to self-help republic!

    We must thank the online medium, Premium Times, for the other narrative of the events leading to the killing of some 300 villagers in Agatu, Benue State and sacking of their communities. The medium’s interview with the Interim National Secretary of Gan Allah Fulani Association – the umbrella body of Fulani associations in Nigeria – on the events leading to the tragedy now variously described on the nation’s calendar of blood-letting as “genocide”, “pogrom” or such stuff and which left the nation gawking in horror, does more than provide insight into why the problem has remained intractable; it certainly throws up issues which the nation can ignore to its eternal regret.

    By the accounts of the scribe of the Fulani body, the story actually began sometime in 2013 when a group he described as Agatu and Tiv militia, numbering 20, killed one Shehu Abdullahi, a prominent Fulani man inside his compound and carted away over 200 cows. In its aftermath, the police were said to have made some arrests among whom were four said to be carrying some of the meat on their motorcycle who were then taken to the police station. Assuring the Fulani leaders that they knew where 150 of the cows were kept, the Divisional Police Officer, according to him: “promised to recover and return the cows, but up till today, nothing has happened”. As if that was not tragic enough, three days after the murder of the said Abdullahi, another prominent Fulani leader, Ardo Madaki, said to have been invited to the palace of the district head of the area on the grounds that a solution was being sought to the problem was reportedly beheaded right in front of the district head.

    “This action” said Abdullahi “reverberated across all Fulani people in the whole of West Africa and the clamour for revenge began to grow strong. He comes from a very well respected clan and the Agatu sent the Fulani a chilling message with his murder…”

    Although he didn’t say when, he would further allege that the Agatu also killed over 300 of their people: “but because we don’t have people in government or the media, no one said anything when genocide was being carried out against our people”.

    The incident above happened in 2013 – some three years before the Agatu reprisals. You ask – where was the Nigerian state when all of these were happened? You want to know the answer? Missing in Action! The result is that criminals on both sides are living large – content to know that the long arms of the law will never reach them.

    For sure, we’ll hear the refrain again in the coming years when the Agatu refugees, currently scattered across some half-dozen make-shift camps return to their homestead to seek their own pound of flesh! Welcome to Nigeria’s self-help enclave.

    Question is – where does such developments lead in a nation where grudges are as diverse as they are complex; a nation where the nerves of the various components are literally on the edge 24/7? Where else but Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)?

    Now, the point really is that the crisis didn’t start in 2013 any more than the attempt to rationalise the heinous crimes that have thrown a huge security blanket over the entire country can be explained by one single incident of a reprisal attack in 2016. To accept that is to reduce the skirmishes between the Fulani herdsmen and farmers whether it is in Kogi, Enugu, and Anambra or wherever to incidences of reprisal actions – and thereby ignore the complex dimensions to the budding crisis.

    Is the issue really one of access to grazing lands or are there other things to it? Frictions between Fulani herdsmen and farmers are certainly not new; indeed, they predate the Nigerian state. As for the challenge of cattle rustlers threatening to reduce the Fulani herdsmen to an endangered specie, that is certainly grim enough. But then, that is the same challenge everyone else faces – poor, rich alike – hardly a justification for the ubiquitous AK-47 that has become the Fulani herdsman’s principal tool of trade. As for the invasion by AK-47-bearing marauders who neither recognise nor defer to the authority of the Nigerian state let alone the principle of peaceful cohabitation in their business of animal husbandry, would that also form part of the inevitable transition that Nigeria must go through?

    Really, can somebody explain what is going on?

  • Falae: from muck to muck?

    Falae: from muck to muck?

    This renewed charge of alleged obtainment by Chief Olu Falae, the Afenifere chieftain — is it that same Falae we all knew and revered?

    And that same Afenifere that, for so long, with devastating bragging right, preened and savaged everyone with their squeaky clean essence?

    There is something brutally rigorous about the ethos of the Roman masters, in the classics.

    That clearly explains why Julius Caesar could proclaim Caesar’s wife — note, the wife, not Caesar himself — must not only be above reproach, but should, indeed must, be seen to be so!

    Now, if Caesar’s spouse was expected to scale such great heights, in private and public rectitude, what height was Caesar himself expected to vault?  It would appear the political equivalent of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative.

    That also, it would appear, explained the Roman strict military code.  A misfiring general would much rather end his own life, than suffer the supreme indignity of being paraded, in chains, in the streets of Rome.

    Nor, nearer home, is such ethos exactly novel.  When the traducers of the late MKO Abiola taunted him with sickening bail conditions, after annulling the free mandate he won in the June 12, 1993 presidential election, he reportedly scoffed: Iku ya j’esin (better to die than be mocked)!

    And thanks to Wole Soyinka’s gripping play, Death and the King’s Horseman, it was only such a rigorous code that would compel Olunde, the Elesin’s medical doctor son — with his western education to boot! — to challenge his father to be man enough to do dire duty, following the death of his king, after fattening, for years, on the sweet lollies of office!

    But back to politics from fiction.  Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the Afenifere doctrinal avatar, was never far from political sainthood.  His piqued rivals often growled and, mala fide, dismissed him as “holier than thou”.

    Back in 1978 when presidential candidates were thrusting their papers upon the then Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO, now INEC), with Chief Michael Ani (now dead) as chair, Awo wasted no time declaring his tax returns, which then had hit the million naira mark.

    Tax was what you did in private; and it is an open secret that the world over, citizens would rather not pay tax, if they could get away with it.  His presidential rivals back then, including the Great Zik of Africa, manifested such a syndrome, leading to a lot of media hoopla.  Not Awo!

    But such saintly attitude drove the story by the defunct National Concord, about the Awo Maroko land deal.  In lieu of cash, Awo’s law firm had negotiated payment in land with the client it represented in the land dispute.  That party won and duly consummated the agreement.

    Still, Awo in his autobiography, Awo, had explained his grand strategy: law was his profession.  Politics was his vocation.  He needed a viable profession, he reasoned, to fund his rather demanding vocation.

    That was why he proudly referred to himself and his disciples as oselu (politicians), in contrast to his venal and corrupt rivals, who he contemptuously dismissed as ojelu (parasites)!

    That such a straight land transaction could elicit such media uproar, therefore, was tribute to Awo’s rather “holy” public persona.  The Nigerian polity back then, seemed to share the sentiments of Geoffrey Chaucer, the old English poet: If gold rusts, what would iron do?

    Awo did nothing wrong in earning fair wages — even if in kind — for his hard forensic labour.  Still friends, defensive, felt queasy; and fiends, malicious, ecstatic; triumphantly gushing: holier-than-thou had been unhorsed!  Yet, Awo did no wrong!  Remember the Caesar quip about his wife?

    But why this long tie-back to the Awo essence, as man and politician?  It is because, with the advent of another obtainment allegation against Pa Falae, one of his supporters, some top hierarch at the Ondo State Social Democratic Party (SDP), is already manifesting an empty sophistry, in defence of a suspect, if not entirely, lost cause.

    It is a neither-nor rationalisation a contemptuous Afenifere, at their full glory, would have mocked with clinical derision.

    Falae obtained money from nobody, he seemed to reason.  His evidence?  First, he submitted, the initial claim was Papa obtained from Sambo Dasuki, the Jonathan era National Security Adviser (NSA)-turned spigot for slush electoral funds.  That “lie” had now changed colour, he triumphantly enthused,  with Papa allegedly obtaining from a special coded account from the Central Bank of Nigeria!

    Case dismissed and Papa’s image restored?  Not quite.

    For starters, it isn’t clear if the first alleged obtainment is the same as the second.  The only similarity is the alleged sum: N100 million.  Besides, if Papa earlier admitted he indeed collected N100 million for SDP to mobilise for Goodluck Jonathan’s doomed presidential encore and drum up support for PDP, where was the lie in all of this?

    And more worrisome: what if the CBN obtainment was indeed a second in the series?  Do we then brace ourselves for yet more muck, if the Papa obtainment were indeed a series?  Holy Moses!

    Just imagine: with Awo alive, and his most trusted lieutenants, say a Michael Adekunle Ajasin or an Abraham Aderibigbe Adesanya, listed with the Demo duo of Remi Fani-Kayode (aka Fani-Power) and Adisa Meredith Akinloye, Yoruba conservative rivals Awo loved to slam as ojelu, as having obtained, from the government of their day?  That is the Awo-era impossibility post-Awo Falae has found himself, even though an avowed Awoist!

    Incidentally, Pa Falae, horror of horrors, is listed with a Fani-Kayode!  That, of course, is no conclusion of guilt.  But in the severe beauty of Awoism’s puritanical politics, such mere listing is damaging enough, if not outright fatal!

    Classical Awoists don’t do grey — just black or white; not unlike a severe Nigerian political interpretation of Kant’s categorical imperative!  And Falae, with his Afenifere commune, crested the public wave as fiery Awoists, clutching the political, nay spiritual, franchise of Awoism, and would brook no defilement of their holy grail.

    For Pa Olu Falae, these are not the best of times: evening years savaged by extreme chill, after the merry sunshine of youth, built firmly on integrity and unassailable character.

    But these are logical results from options he deliberately made, even with ample warning, from the generality of the Yoruba, majority of who are Awoists at heart.  Ripples just hopes and prays he rides the storm and clears his name.

    Still, his odyssey should be a fitting lesson to others, especially younger and aspiring politicians —and that quip comes from a rather common saying: as you lay your bed, you lie on it!

    History may well remember Pa Falae more by his grand mistakes of old age, than the fine strivings of youth, on which he built a solid reputation.  Sad!

    • Correction: Christopher, not John, was the patriarch of the ill-fated Adubes: John, Joy and Lucky, all four, massacred in Rivers, in the build-up to the 2015 general election, as mentioned in this column last week.

     

  • Runsewe: Economy beyond oil

    Runsewe: Economy beyond oil

    At a time of massive shift in focus to non-oil sources to boost the nation’s revenue, it comes as refreshing that one of the foremost practitioners in the tourism sector, Otunba Olusegun Runsewe has offered the nation the benefit of his thoughts on a sector that holds so much promises for the nation’s economic revival.

    I refer to his presentation at The Telegraph Economic Summit with theme “Nigeria: Beyond Oil Economy” held at the Lagos Sheraton Hotel And Towers Thursday, March 17. Until like the now-familiar cant about the need to diversify the nation’s economy, Runsewe’s 3,649 words paper, titled Our Heritage, Our Destination in A new Economy  offers a fresh vista on the subject, locating what I consider the missing link in the search for the nation’s place as tourism destination.

    His resounding thesis is that our heritage – which embraces our landmass, ecosystem, culture and all those tangible and intangible attributes that define us as a people – when carefully harnessed and packaged, has the potential capacity to support a robust tourism industry that could serve as a major pillar and key player in a new economy.

    He argues, quite forcefully, that “our landmass of over 923, 000 sq kilometers stretching from the Atlantic Coast and the Rain Forest in the South through the Savannah to the semi-arid region in the North… a fascinating topography magnificently blessed by nature”…the diverse ecosystems manifesting in varying climatic zones, network of rivers, lakes, beautiful beaches, awesome caves, warm and cold springs and waterfalls all add to the beauty, glamour and vagrancy of Nigeria’s natural environment” – eminently predisposes us to a share of the big tourism pie which is reckoned to hit USD 2.0 trillion by 2020.

    His words:  “With over 350 ethnic groups, Nigeria is the most plural and most culturally diverse nation in black Africa. The richness of her natural environment and her culture and the diversity of her people readily make Nigeria a potential tourist destination of choice in Africa”.

    Like the veteran practitioner that he is – (he was former DG of Nigerian Tourist Corporation) – he saw the nation’s ecotourism resources as having the potentials to draw tourists from all corners across the globe; the various festivals such as the Argungu International Fishing and Cultural Festival  in Kebbi State, Nwonyo Fishing Festival in Taraba State and Osun-Osogbo Cultural Festivals in Osun State, the Religious Tourism all of which provide a rich diversity from which the world could pick from.

    If there is any single take-away for me; it would be the lesson he sought to draw from Dubai, the once remote, obscure desert that has today transformed to one of the foremost global tourist destinations. If I may paraphrase the singular lesson, it is that – tourism does not just happen; it has to be made to happen. Here is hoping that those in charge of the sector will care to listen to the admonitions of Chief Runsewe now that the nation needs all the help it can get!

  • What if it had been Serena?

    What if it had been Serena?

    The tennis world is still reeling from Maria Sharapova’s disclosure last week that she had tested positive for a banned drug in an investigation conducted last January, just before the  Australia Open.

    So are the manufacturers of luxury goods, of which she is a richly-compensated brand ambassador.

    From the International Tennis Federation (ITF) the 7th ranked woman tennis player in the world faces the prospect of the standard four-year ban from competitive tennis that will almost effectively end her playing career.  From her sponsors, the glamorous Russian stands to forfeit the lucrative deals that have made her the highest paid and arguably the wealthiest female athlete in the world.

    Full marks to her publicity and public relations machine for swinging into pre-emptive damage control.

    Instead of waiting for the World Anti-Doping Agency to make the finding public, they orchestrated the televised appearance seen around the world that was at once a subdued display of betrayed innocence, an expression of remorse,   She said the whole thing was a huge mistake, that she accepted responsibility for it, and that she would like to be given another chance

    She admitted almost tearfully that she had been taking the drug Medlonium since 2006 for a variety of health issues and did not know that it had recently been added to the list of banned drugs. It was a “huge mistake,” she said,

    The anti-doping agency banned the drug because it helps athletes by delivering more oxygen to muscles, thus potentially enhancing performance, and although not a few athletes have been suspended this year for testing positive for it. Sharapova said she was not aware that it had been added to the banned list.

    The unfolding story suggests otherwise.

    The indications are that she had been warned by email up to five times about the drug. Perhaps the most pointed warning came in a December 22, 2015, email, with the subject line “Main Change to the Tennis Anti-Doping Programme, 2016.”

    Sharapova insists she had not opened that email.

    An earlier mail dated December 18 had conveyed a notice to the same effect, but Sharapova said the notice was buried deep in the copy and that she had not read it to the end.  Nor was it clear, from all the warnings, she said, that the drug she was taking, mildonate, was the same thing as the banned drug Medlonium.

    When it was pointed out that the manufacturers intended the drug to be used only two or three times a year over a six-week period, Sharapova said she had not been using it continuously for 10 years as her earlier statement might have suggested.

    The drug at issue is manufactured in Latvia and distributed only in the Balkan countries.  It is not approved for use in Europe and the United States.  This would seem to suggest that Sharapova had a special arrangement for her supply.  Her legal team insists that, whatever the case, the dosage she has been taking is too small to be effective.

    Given all the circumstances, the ITF is going to have a dickens to determine the appropriate sanctions.

    As I followed the drama, one question kept tugging at my mind:  What if it had been Serena Williams?  Serena who holds 21 grand slam titles under her belt – Sharapova has five;  Serena the best female tennis player in the world and one of the best players of any gender who ever wielded a racquet; Serena, probably the world’s most vilified athlete?

    No serious charge of doping has ever swirled around her, but if you attended only to the sensational press and social media, you would think she is just a dope sack on two legs.  With those sturdy calf muscles and the bulging biceps and the rippling abs, what further evidence does anyone need that she practically lives on steroids?

    That, they insist, is the secret of her phenomenal success, not her preternatural skills, her usually superb conditioning, and her fierce competitiveness, her mental toughness, and her dedication to her game – the factors that have placed her in a class by herself and on which she has drawn to beat all comers, including Sharapova in 18 of their last 19 matches.

    This is a manifestation of the racism that runs through sport.  In America, it has not got to the point where they throw bananas into the tennis court the way hoodlums throw bananas into the soccer pitch when the competing teams feature black players.  You don’t hear the racist catcalls directed at the black players.

    But Serena Williams rarely gets the kind of crowd support she gets on foreign soil.  Even when she is playing at home against a foreign player, you sense that the crowd is rooting for her opponent.  She is on record as saying that she feels more comfortable playing abroad than at home.  I have not inspected the record, but I suspect she has won more games abroad than at home

    So, what if it was Serena that was caught doping?

    The reporting would have used up all the synonyms in the Thesaurus for “cheat,” and would have made up new ones.   The sports media would have stated flatly that she had juiced up for every match she ever played, and that the only way to redeem the game was to strip her of every title she has ever won, and thereafter to ban her permanently from competitive tennis.

    There would have been no end to the name-calling.   Sharapova has already been neologised into Shara-Dopa.  Who knows what they would have made of Serena’s name?  It does not lend itself so easily to neologising as Sharapova does, but I am sure they would have come up with something cute and unforgettable.

    Serena’s parents would have been dragged into the matter.  I suspect the media would go so far as to assert, without fear and without research, that it was a family affair; that her controversial father had obtained the steroids and had been administering it personally

    Everyone of her sponsors would have terminated instead of merely suspending their relationship.  Not that she has many sponsors anyway.  It is one of the perversities of the system that sponsors would rather treat with a glamorous Number 7 or even No 10 on the circuit than with the very best.

    As a result, Serena makes the bulk of her earnings from winning competitions, whereas Sharapova makes hers from endorsements.  Her haul from that source alone dwarfs Serena’s total earnings.

    I am reminded of another glamorous Russian who came before Sharapova and showed great promise but soon fizzled.  Yet, Anna Kournikova made a huge fortune in endorsements, leading Sports Illustrated to quip:  “Of what use is a good backhand when you have a hot body?”

    Serena does not have the hot body that Sharapova has parlayed into a highly successful brand.  But she has something far more enduring – 21 Grand Slam titles, just one short Steffi Graf’s record 22 titles but more impressive in my view, considering that the field in which she won the titles is far deeper than in which Graf ever played, featuring some 20 players, anyone among whom could win a championship, whereas there were only about six such players in Graf’s time.

    It is a mark of her class that she has not been smitten with schadenfreude, unlike some of the other female players on the Tour, who would not be sad to see Sharapova sent into early retirement.

  • Wike’s Rivers of blood

    Wike’s Rivers of blood

    There is a tragic déjà vu playing out in Rivers.  So please, compare and contrast.

    Pre-2015 general election, and the Civil Society Network Against Corruption (CSNAC), in a petition to Madam Amie Bensouda, the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor, put that pre-election butchery in grim perspective.

    In a petition it dated February 22, and which Olanrewaju Suraju, the CSNAC chairman signed, it listed the following, among the no less than 100 killed, maimed or displaced in the build-up to the 2015 elections in Rivers, alleging high powered conspiracy from the then Presidency, high ranking members of the Police and other security agencies, including the Army and the DSS.

    The alleged victims: Kingsley Emenike, Police Corporal Ifeanyi Okorie, Charles Eruku, Mebaka Opuogoliya, John Adube, Joy Adube, Lucky Adube, Ebuka Mbamalu, Ikechukwu Ogarebe, one Ezekiel, Sampson Chinnah, Kerian Wobodo and Charles Wobodo, among others.

    It is not clear if Kerian and Charles Wobodo were relations; but the gory tale of the Adubes, John, Joy and Lucky, captured the insane slaughter back then: a whole family, starting with their patriarch, John, was nearly wiped out, because of their partisan affiliations.

    The petition did not also state if Corporal Okorie was among those felled, when partisan thugs rained bullets at the Okrika All Progressives Congress (APC) campaign rally, killing a few, including some Police personnel; and maiming many more.

    The allegations back then was that partisan opponents should not campaign in Okrika, the home town of the then First Lady, Patience Jonathan.

    And now, pre-2016 National Assembly and Rivers State of Assembly legislative re-runs, the similarity, in casualty count, is simply eerie.

    The election tribunals and Court of Appeal ordered the re-runs, after voiding the returns for most of the Rivers legislative seats, federal and state; before the Supreme Court, in a bizarre verdict, endorsed the governorship poll, held the same day, and under the same bloody conditions, as the state legislative elections.  The re-runs are fixed for March 19.

    On March 5, in a chilling replay of the Adubes’ massacre, gunmen invaded the Rutachi Street, Omoku, home of Franklin Obi, at around 9 pm, and killed Obi, his pregnant wife, Iheoma and 18-year old son, Bestman.  The late Obi was Rivers APC Ward 4 chairman; and the murderers severed and took away his head.  Also slain was Chukwuladi Adiela, an APC stalwart in the same Ward.

    This is the reportage of that nerve-jangling murder, by the Punch of March 7, quoting Victory, Obi’s daughter, 16: “Last night, I was inside when I heard my mum crying.  We heard the sound of a gunshot and hid somewhere in the room.  I opened the curtain of my room and I saw the men cutting off my father’s head.  They (gunmen) then came to our room,” she added, “and ordered me and my brother to  come out; and as we were coming, my brother was moving slowly and they shot him.  Then they left with my father’s head.”

    And what was Governor Nyesom Wike’s response to that gruesome murder, involving a political opponent?  The beheading was a cult affair, the perpetrators had been arrested and why was APC making so much fuss, claiming cultists as its own!

    That from a supposed chief security officer, sworn by law to protect every citizen, as governor to all?  But even assuming cultists were indeed victims, so cultists are not entitled to state protection, in a polity founded on the rule of law?  Might Wike’s Rivers then have made its grim peace with outlawry, and the resultant anarchy?

    On March 7, in Buguma, Asari-Toru Local Government of Rivers State, Ofinijite Amachree, aka Kpom Kpom, another APC chieftain, was killed and burnt, after clashes between APC and PDP supporters.

    Another five, according to a report by The Nation on the Rivers pre-re-run fracas, were clubbed to death: an unnamed four in Obibi, Etche Local Government and one Gabriel Cookey, in Opobo, the headquarters of Opobo/Nkoro Local Government.

    Another AP report quoted Rivers APC chieftains as alleging that 32 of their members had so far been shot, clubbed or beheaded in the run-up to the March 19 re-runs.  Compare to the 100 slain before the 2005 general election, and you perhaps would appreciate the Rivers of blood flowing under Governor Wike!

    It is only fair though, to enter the defence of the Rivers PDP, which claims it had no hand in the murders; but instead blames “satanic cult clashes”.  But again, which lawful government sits back and lets “satanic cults” slaughter its citizens, no matter their partisan hue?

    Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, after the 2015 presidential election, declared no electoral crime would go unpunished.  But he didn’t reckon with a judicial lobby unfazed at putting the law at the service of electoral violence, thereby reinforcing murderous electoral conduct.

    Now, the Supreme Court, finding for political violence, has worsened the security situation in that troubled state.  Indeed, if Wike got his governorship, splashing in  a guggling pool of blood, why shouldn’t the lawmakers?  Had they the luxury of pressing their cases at the apex court, perhaps they would have been certified okay to swim into power in the blood of others, just as their governor!

    But that supreme folly would appear to have put the Buhari Presidency on the spot.  Before the 2015 election Rivers killings had come the grand subversion of legal authority by the Jonathan Presidency.

    Indeed, the Wike penchant for impunity, and trash power talking, started back then.  Wike was Education minister of state, but Jonathan’s not-so-hidden viceroy in Rivers.  Mbu Joseph Mbu, then Rivers commissioner of Police, was busy subverting Rotimi Amaechi’s gubernatorial authority.  Of course, Dame Jonathan’s crass vituperations inspired that grand subversion.

    Now, Rivers APC partisans would wish they had their own Mbu Mbu to wring Wike’s gubernatorial neck.  They would wish a grand abuse of federal power, with the same Police, DSS and Army, that aided the PDP Rivers impunity back then, at their own beck and call too — and certainly, they would be thrilled to see Wike shrill and complain as Amaechi did, under the ancien regime.

    That is the un-coded message in their the-Federal-Government-has-abandoned-us mass complaint.

    But abusing federal might is absolutely unacceptable, not the least for a government that rode to power on the mantra of change.  President Buhari should not fall into that temptation.

    But the president should put everything in place to nab the Rivers killers — not only the crazed cultists, but their big political sponsors.  Slaughtering fellow citizens should never be accepted as normal electoral behaviour.

    It is not only vile and barbaric, it is extremely savage — and it doesn’t matter if the victims are PDP, APC or even the so-called “cultists”.

    On the March 19 re-runs, the Federal Government should put in place formidable security to enforce peace and order, even if, as the mass violence is sure to scare away not a few, it may appear too late to achieve a free and fair process.  Still, on the day, the free killing and ballot snatching of 2015 must never be tolerated.

    As for the Supreme Court, Their Lordships should savour, in unanimous horror, the Frankenstein monster their Rivers verdict has created.