The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Fayose’s devil on the cross

    To Ayo Fayose, Adamu Mu’azu, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) national chairman, is a devil that must be nailed on the cross — and nailed hard.

    And trust the Ekiti abrasive one (not famed for any deep thinking, lay or intellectual, but only a relay of reflex thought bounces), to make a facile comparison between election fortunes and misfortunes in Nigeria and the United Kingdom.

    “Haven’t we now seen what operates in saner climes, with the resignation of the British Labour Party and Liberal Democratic leaders?” he roared, referring to the duo’s crushing election losses to the ruling Conservatives in the May 7 general elections.  “Shouldn’t our party national chairman also take a cue from this and allow for fresh minds to steer the ship of the party at this difficult time?”

    Of course, Burlesque Fayose would be incomplete without Trademark Fayose: graceless gloating.  “I am … not operating here on empty boast because Ekiti State was delivered to the PDP 100 per cent. …” he further growled.  “Imagine the PDP not getting up to five per cent … in Bauchi State, the national chairman’s home state, and someone is still not being honourable enough to resign”.

    Honourable enough!  Saner climes!  The grave irony of this twain clearly is lost on Triumphalist Fayose!

    Saner climes!  Did Ed Miliband, the British Labour Party leader, have in his camp a Mr. No Apology, with a penchant for insane adverts, that coarsely projected a principal opponent’s sure death, and harvested for his party mass hatred, among those who had the putative electoral numbers?

    And honour!  What has been honourable in Mr. Fayose’s conduct since his unfortunate second coming in Ekiti?  Besides, is it not tragic narcissism, powered by unconscionable villainy, to work on over-drive to lose northern votes, yet crow over delivering Ekiti votes 100 per cent — Ekiti votes, the minority of minorities of electoral numbers in the South West?

    Ripples would not be bothered by whatever pains bickering Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) hierarchs inflict upon themselves, in their post-defeat feuding.  For all the havoc they socked on the country, they sure had it coming.

    Besides, the recrimination is almost spiritual.  You don’t mess up millions of longsuffering Nigerians and exactly expect to live blissfully ever after!

    But it is a conceptual matter.  PDP may well have been a useless ruling party, that has led Nigeria to nowhere but perdition.  By the way its partisans fall upon themselves, it could even be a far more useless opposition prospect, since its only glue is power without responsibility; its only life, humongous greed for the common wealth.

    That seems to explain the mutual allegation of soulless money sharing, between party and presidency, with each combatant in each camp grossing no less than N30 million each. And the more that illicit pork appears slipping away, the more hysterical and distracted PDP is likely to become.

    Still, we have a democracy to run.  On May 29, roles would change, with the All Progressives’ Congress (APC) becoming the new federal ruling party.  But the PDP meltdown is self-evidence that a multi-party democracy, without vigorous opposition, is nothing but an endangered species.  So, for the polity to develop, and democracy to deepen, there must be a strong and vibrant alternative.

    PDP appears best suited, if not most suitable, to play that role.  But with its emotive in-fighting, it is fated to lose focus even more.  So, it is in the polity’s enlightened self-interest to try to refocus this stranded, bad-tempered giant, lest it becomes the polity’s collective burden.

    Chairman Mu’azu may have led his party to electoral slaughter.

    And the quad of First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan, Governor Fayose, Femi Fani-Kayode, and Doyin Okupe may well be the real devils to be nailed hard on the cross, for strafing and bombing their party with reckless electioneering.

    But they all were a symptom of President Jonathan’s sickening craving for power — power to which he had proved most inept and sorry; but to which he must, do-or-die, reclaim for four more years.

    Never, in the history of Nigeria, even with its serial disappointment in leadership, has any leader manifested such crassly inordinate hunger for power .  Not Ibrahim Babangida, not Sani Abacha, and certainly, not Olusegun Obasanjo, even with his doomed attempt at third term.

    The trio of Babangida, Abacha and Obasanjo were certainly no saints where Jonathan was the very devil.  But under none of them did the Nigeria virtually collapse as a state, with Boko Haram bombing at will, capturing territories and kidnapping citizens, and Jonathan having absolutely no solution.  Yet, the president, and his deluders, were adamant he had earned a second term!

    This single-minded hunger for power, if not for service, was what induced old man Bamanga Tukur to risk a PDP collapse on his head, rather than confront Jonathan’s power demands.  Alhaji Bamanga ended up the fall guy, but not before the Governors-7 had rebelled, and the Governors-5 defected, thus sending a collapsing PDP on a journey of no return.

    This tragedy also hall-marked the emergence of Adamu Mu’azu, hailed then as “game-changer”, for somewhat helping to stanch the bleeding.  It is ironic now that he is being nailed over an electoral game-change, that nailed the PDP coffin and snapped it out of its grave hubris.  He likely would get the sack as Alhaji Bamanga before him.  But that would just be chasing shadows.

    In all of these though, Goodluck Jonathan is the mathematical constant.  Fortunately, Nigerian voters have given him the tortoise treatment — wasn’t it the tortoise, in Yoruba folklore, that swore not to return from his trip until he was disgraced?

    Still ironically, Jonathan was only the victim of past excesses of the Obasanjo era.  His chief offence is nothing but rank opportunism.  To cast PDP in his own image, Obasanjo created the rather fraudulent title of party “national leader” — a euphemism for being over and above the party that nominated him for presidency.

    Jonathan inherited this fraud and decided to milk it to the hilt.  On that, he spurred old man Bamanga like a wild horse; and savaged Chairman Mu’azu with the embarrassment of making his gutless National Working Committee (NWC) claim the party only printed one presidential nomination form, and the sole form had been annexed by the national leader — so paranoid was Jonathan to coral the PDP presidential ticket!

    Jonathan, the party leader, badly wanted that form — and before that request, every party knee must bow!

    Unfortunately, Jonathan lacked neither the brutal savvy nor the native intelligence — or even the routine policy bragging rights! — to impose his will.  The result was the crashed PDP humpty-dumpty; and the evaporation of its dream of ruling in perpetuity — 60 years to start with!

    So, the Fayoses of this world, who bay for Mu’azu’s blood, only savage the puppet.  But the puppeteer is their real quarry.

    The Jonathan debacle must teach the Nigerian party system a stiff lesson.  Never again must a president be so powerful to subvert collective party interest.

    APC must put a president on its platform under some form of party leash, if it must escape the PDP fate.

    ‘The Fayoses of this world, who bay for Mu’azu’s blood, only savage the puppet.  But the puppeteer is their real quarry’

  • A government on AWOL

    Considering that it took its well articulated terms of reference to awaken the somnolent Presidency to the reality that it still ran the show, there might yet be something that the incoming All Progressives Congress administration can still do to help halt the pervasive meltdown under which vital institutions of state have gone prostrate.

    As it is, the story is virtually the same of governance in full flight – if you like, retreat. Not the lame duck stuff as one might expect of a government winding down. Indeed, for a country ordinarily under-governed, what is increasingly palpable is a Jonathan administration practically missing on all fronts – what the military call AWOL; the only exception being the rash of opportunistic appointments designed to rile the incoming government.

    In the electricity sector, the story is all too familiar of alibis manufactured, traded and recycled the same way financial sector smart alecs continue hawk their sweet poison of derivatives to the hapless public in Jonathan-nurtured laissez-faire environment. Once upon a time, the sector was comatose; today, it is as good as dead. The minister in charge, a world-class scientific mind now adorns the garb of prayer warrior in chase of industry demons. The electricity sector regulator – the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission – has since relapsed into the ‘sleep’ mode in the absence of an industry to regulate; meanwhile, the club of disparate players inelegantly called DISCOs or distribution companies –more aptly rent collectors- are apparently lost in the park after discovering something bigger than the magical pot of fortune promised them post-privatisation – they just couldn’t figure out what to do! Between them, the nation is presently locked in a bind.

    Isn’t it said that what you see is what you get? Should anyone still be in wonder as to why the nation is in darkness?

    As it is in the power sector, so it is in the petroleum sector. Here the administration’s benumbing incompetence, long laid bare before the world, ordinarily ought not to deserve any attempt at exhumation. Clearly, if the current paralysis of the nation’s socio-economic life occasioned by the dry pumps across the land is any living proof of the astounding lack of imagination of those running the downstream sector, that is only when one fails to reckon with the state-abetted criminality in the upstream sector – the industrial scale theft under which 20 percent of the nation’s crude is said to disappear to some invisible Mafiosi, daily. And this is aside the invisible operations of the prospecting arm of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation – the Nigerian Petroleum Development Corporation – known of course only to the shadowy players and their patron saints in the oily business – thanks to the PWC fellows!

    How about that for a legacy?

    You ask: what happened to the Jonathan magic that was celebrated ‘live’ and in ‘colour’ by the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) in the heady days of electioneering? I mean the outlandish claims of achievement in power stabilisation, railway modernisation and road building – that left one wondering if they were talking about another country but Nigeria?

    With recriminations going back and forth between the Finance Ministry and the cartel of fuel importers over the bureaucracy-induced crisis, it seems now so easy to imagine that the so-called called ‘Jona’ magic was nothing more than the relentless inflow into the piggy bank. With oil price in the dive and with it the sluggish demand for Nigeria’s sweet crude, the nation would appear wiser to the administration’s claims to superlative performance.

    It is however the security sector that stands the administration apart in corporate dereliction.  This is a sector in which the concept of the state as holding the monopoly in the use of force has undergone the most comprehensive redefinition by the outgoing presidency. Today, under Jonathan’s new-fangled paradigm, sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest navy now finds itself playing second fiddle to yesterday’s pirates on the nation’s exclusive economic zone. In the same vein, nearly a quarter of the nation’s security work is outsourced to a rag-tag army of ill-clad, ill-equipped and certainly ill-trained volunteers called Civilian Joint Task Force in the North-east. Again, under that strange blend of Public-Private-Partnership security model, another quarter has also been outsourced to yesterday’s brigands in the free-for-all bazaar of pipelines protection – and this in a nation with a long heritage of disciplined, cohesive and well-structured military.

    Do I exaggerate? Please recall the various accounts of the death of Oluwadimilola Adebimpe Fajana – the 26-year-old lady caught up in the cross-fire between the vandals and the OPC hired by the administration to do the job of policing the pipelines. Today, the much that is known is that she was felled by the guns of operatives of Jona-licensed militia at Arepo– one of the many popular theatres of pipeline vandalism along the Ogun State corridor.

    Pity the grieving father, Ojo Babafemi Andrews; he could only moan helplessly to wit that “by the reason of his patronage of people who have no basic training in arms and weaponry in the business of pipeline protection, which is a very dangerous security enterprise which is supposed to fall under the purview of the trained Nigerian security agencies… President Goodluck Jonathan is culpable in the death of Damilola Fajana and that of others by the virtue of his morbid desperation for political power which led him to awarding such senseless contract to OPC in return for political support in Lagos State”.

    Case closed.

    Now, I have actually heard one or two people wonder whether the current potion of affliction being administered by President Jonathan isn’t proving too much of a price to pay for the slaying of the PDP bear on March 28. To them I can only offer a word of consolation: forbear. Having long given up on my search for the distinction between a lame duck administration and a vengeful, mischief-driven one, I have since accepted the Yoruba philosophical expression – Suru lojo – which roughly means, patience has an end point.

    Finally: what’s the idea behind the ostentatious pity-party staged by the President at the weekend? I refer to his Thanksgiving homily where he stated that he, his ministers, advisers and other appointees will be persecuted when they leave office and that they should be ready for that? The problem, I guess, isn’t so much the President’s artful play on the word ‘persecution’ in place of prosecution to describe the fate awaiting his men – which is nonetheless opportunistic, if you ask me; it is his less-than elegant attempt to launder an ignoble legacy. The question is – could anything be wrong with being called to account for one’s stewardship? Why should anyone be afraid?

    ‘I have actually heard one or two people wonder whether the current potion of affliction being administered by President Jonathan isn’t proving too much of a price to pay for the slaying of the PDP bear on March 28. To them I can only offer a word of consolation: forbear’

  • The return of the Imo Formula

    The return of the Imo Formula

    Before those who are too young or were too inattentive to remember rush to call it the “Kogi Formula,” I should warn that there is nothing original about it, being more or less a reprise of the “Imo Formula,” an economic stratagem developed on Nigerian soil, by a Nigerian, for Nigerians, unlike those World Bank/IMF remedies that often proved more harmful than the ailments they were supposed to cure.

    First, some background, going back to the period following the overthrow of the profligate, inept and corrupt administration of President Shehu Shagari which, in four years turned the heady promise of democratic rule and economic prosperity undergirded by a vast inflow of petrodollars into a nightmare, to the point that its sacking was greeted with dancing in the streets.

    The treasury was empty.  Foreign exchange was scarce. Consumer goods were in short supply. To discourage frivolous importation, a regime of import licence was imposed.  The currency was re-designed.  There was no relief in sight for public service employees, especially teachers, who had laboured unpaid for months under the previous dispensation.

    It was a dire situation requiring dire remedies.

    The breakthrough came from Imo – or to place the credit squarely where it belongs – from Dr Kalu Idika Kalu, the state’s cerebral commissioner for finance, and before then a World Bank economist credited with helping South Korea achieve the turnaround that catapulted it to the ranks of the G17 Nations.

    It is not entirely clear why they call it the Imo Formula rather than the Kalu Formula.  It may have something to do with Dr Kalu’s trademark self-effacement.  I recall that he was reportedly distressed when a well-known newspaper columnist, writing under the pseudonym Bamako Jaji, bestowed the term “Kalunomics” on the theoretical underpinnings of the loan agreement that Kalu would later negotiate with the IMF as Federal Minister of Finance.

    Keep his person out of it.  Let his prescriptions stand or fall by their merit. That, according those who know him well, is Dr Kalu’s philosophy of public service.  There is much to be said for that way of carrying on in a country where everyone who imagines himself or herself a person of consequence wants to hog the limelight.

    To return to the seminal breakthrough that was the Imo Formula:

    Freeze allowances and bonuses for public employees.  From the proceeds, pay teachers their basic salaries while the state looked for ways of widening its financial base.  In due course, all civil servants and teachers would have some money to take home at the end of the month.  Their morale would rise, as would their productivity.  These gains would trickle down and check the rising tide of poverty.

    In the popular rendering, however, this elegant, heuristic and parsimonious theory was twisted into something far more dreadful.  According to this popular version, fixed salaries had been abolished.  At the end of each month, the authorities in Imo would determine just how much was available for salaries.  The amount would then be paid out pro rata.

    It was not the salary you had grown used to, but it was far better than no salary.  That, at any rate, was the popular perception of the Imo Formula. They say it worked wonders.

    Perhaps that is why, facing the kind of difficulties Imo faced in 1984/85, Kogi State last week resurrected the Imo Formula, at least in substance, if not in form.

    At first blush, the Kogi version has something that the Imo original lacked:  Specificity. To put the mater positively, unlike other commentators who are forever dwelling on the negative, public service employees who have received no salaries for several months can now expect to smile home with 60 percent of their statutory pay.

    Yes, it is a 40 percent pay cut all right, but why dwell on the negative?  Why not emphasise the 60 percent of statutory pay that will now be available where previously nothing was guaranteed?

    Why can’t some people be positive for once?

    These same negative people have been asking whether the Kogi authorities will now urge suppliers of goods and services to cut prices by 40 percent, so that the new pay will fetch the same basket of goods and services that the old pay used to bring in.  Invoking the dubious proposition that “we all buy from the same market,” they say the arrangement is inequitable.

    Do we really buy from the same market?  What would they say if circumstances compelled the authorities to cut take-home pay to 50 or even 40 percent of statutory salary, as they well might?

    Equitable or not, this arrangement may well be the wave of the future as the newly-elected governments find on taking charge that they had been bequeathed empty treasuries that cannot be restored to solvency unless oil prices rebound dramatically or other resources that can yield quick cash on a sustainable basis are discovered.

    Unlike one departing governor, the new people will certainly not be able to hire by the dozen and for each ministry, department or agency, chief advisers, deputy chief advisers, principal advisers, deputy principal advisers, senior advisers, deputy senior advisers and assistant deputy senior advisers, not forgetting chief deputy assistant advisers, principal deputy assistant advisers, senior deputy assistant advisers, and so on and so forth.

    But governing in a time of economic adversity may well bring out the best in them. Has it not been said that it is far easier to manage scarcity than superfluity?  Up to a point, there is some truth to that.

    The good news is that, with oil prices on the uptick and President-elect Muhammadu Buhari set to check the obscene profligacy that has characterised government spending for nearly two decades and root out stealing in the public sector on a scale so vast that one must wonder why the economy has not collapsed completely, Nigeria is unlikely to have recourse to the Sukarno Formula.

    Dr Ahmed Sukarno was the swinging, charismatic president of Indonesia, and a founding father of the Non-Aligned Movement.  No one ever accused him of not dreaming great dreams or of lacking vision.  The trouble was that his country did not have the matching resources or the economic management skills that would have catapulted Indonesia to a major actor in world politics.

    His communist sympathies alienated him from the West.  The Soviet Union admired him but did not back its sympathies with hard cash or meaningful support.

    As Indonesia’s economy careened toward a terminal collapse, Sukarno tried every standard remedy in the pharmacopoeia of the economists, but nothing worked.

    Then he hit upon an ingenious solution.  He would appoint as a cabinet minister any Indonesian who truly believed that he could solve the country’s economic problems.  However, if the person did not deliver the expected results within a year, he or she would be executed by firing squad.

    There were no takers.

    I have often wondered how such a gambit would have played out in Nigeria.

    There would have been a surfeit of volunteers.  Within the first six months, the minister would  have evacuated his entire family from Nigeria.  In the ninth month, he would arrange a foreign trip ostensibly to seal a deal crucial to his mission’s success.

    It would be a one-way trip.

     

     

    Correction

    Dr Bojuwade is alive and well

    In last week’s column I referred to Dr Dokun Bojuwade, former Special Assistant to Uche Chukwumerije in the Ministry of Information, as “since deceased.”

    I regret this error and hereby offer again my remorseful apologies for the distress the publication must have caused Dr Bojuwade and his loved ones.

     

  • Haba; Madam honorary adviser!

    Haba; Madam honorary adviser!

    Yours sincerely was on vacation when Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, President Jonathan’s minister of finance and Coordinator of the Economy took on the self-assigned role of honourary, albeit unofficial adviser to the incoming APC-administration of General Muhammadu Buhari (rtd). I refer to the widely reported media event tagged “A conversation with Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala” staged by the second deity in the presidential godhead (apologies to Azu) in faraway Washington. The outing was as one might expect: magisterial, unabashedly prescriptive –with just enough tips for the incoming Buhari administration to either follow or risk a flounder! Stripped of self-promotion and plain hubris, I actually wondered what purpose of the media event sought to achieve coming so soon after the Nigerian electorate had decided that ‘change’ was it.

    At first reading, my instinctive reaction was to observe that the reality of that electoral loss may have taken far too long to wear off for the hierarchs of the expiring administration to appreciate that power has indeed changed hands. Or was I expecting too much to imagine that her ilk would fade like a thief into the night as part of the necessary rites to bring our 16-year nightmare under their watch to a closure? After a deeper reflection, it became clear to me the extent to which many, yours truly inclusive, has underestimated the resistance to the promise of change!

    Of course, the problems wasn’t just that the same cocktail of measures which, though neither original nor particularly new, but which successive PDP administrations including two of which she was a frontline actor either lacked the nerves or the discipline to push through were being recycled as something novel. Or even the attempt to present the current crisis which took the whole of a decade and half to berth, as one that chanced upon us, as if we didn’t have the crisis of the 80s to instruct us.

    Rather, it was her disingenuous way of papering over, if not entirely deflect, Pontius Pilate-like, her direct culpability in the making of the crisis via emergency management fantasies – something that have since become her stock in trade. At once, she would have us pretend that we didn’t know where the rains started to beat us; more than that, she would wish that the contributions of her cast and crew of undertakers particularly their free-wheeling policies simply recede from memory!

    Of course, I daresay that only in that foreground could Madam Okonjo-Iweala’s gratuitous offer of advice to the incoming government after nearly 10 years of sojourn in the corridors of power, as honourary adviser, finance minister, foreign minister and finally as finance minister and coordinator of the economy could pass for barely ‘credible’!

    Guess most Nigerians – outside of the innermost circle of its unrepentant courtiers, that is – know more than the hierarchs of the departing administration would care to admit about its legacy of broken public finance and unparalleled corruption and profligacy than to take any of their prescriptions seriously. Today, Nigerians must marvel at how our globally acclaimed technocrat, an individual headhunted from the Breton Woods institution to clean up our public finance has only one software of a payroll system to show as evidence of how much work has gone into the clean up, 10 years after! Suddenly, in the twilight of the administration, we are hearing about the hire of a foreign tax consultant said to have delivered additional $500million into the national kitty; now she gleefully recommends this to the in-coming government with a fatuous claim that they could to fetch $3billion over the medium-term!

    And now, for crying out loud, our reform-minded minister cannot even pay creditors – you guessed right, fuel importers – without taking to the airwaves to lecture those owed about the virtue of patriotism! Truly, our redeemer liveth! Will somebody get serious?

    Talking about the finger-pointing game, isn’t it amazing that our lady is ever too eager to cast the proverbial first stone? For the ‘crime’ of insisting on the sharing the proceeds of the piggy bank – the so-called Excess Crude Account – which the law deems ‘extra-legal’, the governors are adjudged guilty of squandermania before the court of that lone functionary with the double-barrelled office of minister of finance and coordinator of the economy!

    Now the question: Which official went on a borrowing spree at a time of unprecedented oil earnings and at such costs that defy logic? Which official insisted that an infrastructure-challenged economy maintain an off-shore savings at a measly two percent while hankering after foreign funds at between 5-10 percent interest?

    Should I go on?

    What of the free-for-all bonanza of fuel import subsidies under which payments quadrupled in a space of one year? Have we forgotten so soon how the N240 billion budgeted for fuel subsidy under the 2011 Appropriation Act ballooned to N1.2 trillion under the watch of the same pretentious patriot-minders of the treasury?

    I haven’t yet settled on the other ‘stain’ that comes close to undoing everything – the unresolved riddle of import duty waivers that top officials of the finance ministry would prefer buried. It started with the claim by Minister Okonjo-Iweala that her ministry approved only N170.73 billion worth of duty waivers and exemptions in three years.  The Customs as the implementing agency would later show that value of waivers processed for the same period was N1.4 trillion!

    As against the minister’s claim of N55.96 billion for 2011, N55.34 billion for 2012 and N59.42 billion for 2013, the Customs posted N480 billion for 2011, N480 billion for 2012 and N603 billion for 2013! Imagine, we are talking of a figure that is more than a third of one year’s federal budget lost to the fancies of some top bureaucrats! Years on, while Nigerians waiting for the outcome of the reconciliation and, possibly the justification for the inclusion of such items as aircraft, helicopter, “motor spare parts” furniture, “building materials and cabinet parts for kitchen door drawers”- and wait for it – kolanut in a country battling with high unemployment – our pious minister has long front-loaded a ready defence: ‘Yes, in the past, it wasn’t good but now we have been running a different system for two years.’ Case closed!

    It is possible that Madam Okonjo-Iweala served her principals well. However, for change to have its true meaning, it must go beyond the seductions to more-of-the-same preachments of a discredited member of an ancien regime. Nigerians didn’t vote for change for some pretenders to serve them old wines in some refurbished skins.  Good grief if they cannot read the signs that the market is over. It’s the broom revolution, and as they say – of what use is the broom if it cannot sweep clean?

    The days ahead promises to be interesting.

    Glad to be back!

  • Restructuring or sour grape?

    Restructuring or sour grape?

    Two different but related events prompted this piece.

    One was Willie Obiano, the Anambra governor’s widely reported visit to President-elect, Muhammadu Buhari.

    Forget voting, forget parties, forget everything, the governor pleaded, but don’t forget to gift Ndigbo appointments!

    Is it then what it is all about — after voting, parties, vile electioneering, hate messages, even killings and maiming on e-day — just appointments, whoever wins?  Geez!

    The other was the April 20 call for Nigeria’s restructuring, by a body that calls itself the Lower Niger Congress (LNC).

    Declared LNC: South East and South-South want Nigeria restructured, pronto; and its 75 million denizens would soon declare, by democratic referendum, whether they still want to be part of Nigeria, and under what terms!

    It isn’t clear if LNG wants restructuring for real; or was just moaning attention-grabbing moans, driven by bitter election loss!

    Still, it’s a worrying déjà vu. Pre-Abacha times, both South East and South-South were the 1st Republic Eastern Region — and post-1st Republic (1960-1966), the old East Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu and his secessionist braves re-christened Republic of Biafra, sparking the tragic Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970).

    Might the Civil War still be raging in another guise?

    To be sure, LNC spokesperson, Tony Nnadi, at the body’s press briefing in Lagos, rippled with sour grape and bad faith.  He claimed Gen. Buhari’s victory was a “conspiracy” between the North and the South West, against the old East.

    Even if that were true — and it certainly is not — he conveniently forgot that everyone, including the South East and South-South, had a chance to be part of that “conspiracy”, but decided to spurn it.  So, it is voodoo logic: to exercise your constitutional right to differ, lose out in the electoral sweepstakes but turn round to wail about “conspiracy”!

    Both South East and South-South backed the wrong horse, no democratic crime!  But they must live with their choice, sans any dishonourable bleating.

    Besides, how is the 2015 “conspiracy” different from its 2011 cousin, when Southern Nigeria, with the Middle Belt, ganged up against the core North?

    Ironically back then, this same Buhari was the “victim”, this same Goodluck Jonathan was the “victor” and this same Attahiru Jega was the electoral chief!  If roles are now reversed, is it not legit democratic change?

    LNC Chairman, Fred Agbeyegbe’s contribution, adds more interesting perspectives to the debate.

    For one, Elder Agbeyegbe has earned his stripes, over the years, as a champion of minority rights and unfazed advocate of a politically restructured Nigeria; from its present central parasite to a federal productive hub, fired by ethnic nationalities creating — and spending — own wealth.

    For another, despite the whoop of victory and moan of defeat, nothing has negated Mr. Agbeyegbe’s stand.

    Still, Mr. Agbeyegbe’s rhetoric is all too familiar.    Hear him: “…We, the ethnic nationalities, minorities, owners of the resources, victims [italics mine] of and for whose sake the Nigerian brand of democracy was wrought, are aware that their [foreign powers’] commercial interests in a peaceful Nigeria, overrides any pretended interest in democracy.”

    That was Fred Agbeyegbe, reacting to Goodluck Jonathan’s loss in 2015.

    But flip back to 2012, when Annkio Briggs, Niger Delta environmental campaigner, had this take, during the Occupy Nigeria national strike and protests against a hike in fuel pump prices. “If Jonathan, a Niger Delta son is not good enough to govern Nigeria, the oil in his Niger Delta is not good enough for Nigeria,” she said in a communiqué she signed on 15 January 2012 [exactly  42 years  to the day the Civil War officially ended!], on behalf of a body she called Niger Delta Occupy Niger Delta Resources, (NDONDR).

    But she still wasn’t done: “We call on Niger Delta peoples, for the sake of our future, to look to our nearest neighbours, the Igbo, for immediate and strong alliance to enable the Niger Delta nations and the Igbo nation to face the obvious change that will come to Nigeria, in strength, justice, brotherhood and truth.”

    Now what is this — a call for “democratic” secession?  That would go a tad too far.  But certainly, some democratic gang-up — which played out in the 2015 elections, as the old East made its emphatic choice.  Does its loss then cancel out the majority’s win — and the “majority gang-up” morally inferior to the “minority gang-up”, thus earning the losers the moral right to threaten the winners?

    And don’t forget: the original Annkio Briggs’s threat came because the rest of Nigeria had the temerity to tell a Niger Delta president, now backed by his newfound majestic minority, to up his act!

    Indeed, link up the LNC sour-grape and Madam Briggs’s bile, with the Niger Delta former militants’ virtual oath to war, should Jonathan lose, and you see a familiar, if contemptible, pattern of emotive threats.

    Some comfort, though: before the polls, it was a threat to war-war.  Now, after, it is a threat to jaw-jaw.  We thank God for small mercies!

    Still, if LNC and allied lobby were to be less emotive and more clinical, the disastrous Jonathan tenure was the umpteenth proof that Nigeria would unravel, without restructuring into a productive federation.

    Jonathan, as president, came from a minority bloc.  Yet, in his near-six years in office, he didn’t radically restructure to underscore economic equity, and structurally cement minority rights.  All he did was play age-old majority game of president as patronage King-Kong!

    Then LNC was blissfully quiet — vicarious power must have been sweet!  Old man Edwin Clark even played, to the annoying hilt, the power godfather!  Now, Jonathan is out in the cold and these folk suddenly re-found their federating voices!  Seriously?

    But just as Jonathan has delivered under-development to his region as lollies for vicarious power, Olusegun Obasanjo too delivered under-development to his native South West, in his eight-year presidency.

    The North?  It is the very epitome of political power as potent tool for arrested development!  If you doubt, just check the havoc Boko Haram has caused the region.  Could that devilish group have recruited and brainwashed northern youth, if past dispensations headed by northerners had given the mass northern poor some hope to live for?

    Gen. Buhari, no doubt, towers with moral integrity.  That, with his sound mandate, will combine to forge a formidable tool for the arduous tasks ahead, in post-Jonathan Nigeria.  But even this is no magic wand, as he, with his winning coalition, must know!

    Restructuring is imperative — to both unleash regional talent and genius; and eliminate wanton waste at the irresponsible and unresponsive centre.  Yeah, Buhari’s vaunted integrity would help clean up the system.  But even that prospect is still not good enough.  This deep rot calls for a fresh and radical paradigm — restructuring!

    That is why the likes of LNC, that continue to munch sour grapes over elections won and lost, should further push their advocacy to fix the fundamental problem of Nigeria’s federal power — but not as infantile threats.

    That fixed, Governor Obiano and his people can vote whoever they want in their enclave, without giving a damn (apologies to Jonathan) about whoever gets what at Abuja!

  • Remembering Uche Chukwumerije

    Remembering Uche Chukwumerije

    Back in 1986, I served with Uche Chukwumerije and about a dozen other senior media  figures on the Publicity Advisory Committee for the National Population Census, at the instance of Tola Adeniyi, the commissioner for public affairs and communications at the National Population Commission.

    After general introductions at the Committee’s inauguration, Chukwumerije had walked  up to me and told me how much he admired my weekly column for The Guardian, and how he looked forward to each installment. I told him how I had treasured his pan-African newsmagazine Afriscope, and how I had served as its University of Lagos stringer and had been generously compensated for my effort.

    That encounter was the beginning of what went beyond mere acquaintanceship, though it would be claiming too much to call it a friendship.

    Shortly after he was named Secretary for Information in the Transitional Council, he came to my office at Rutam House one late afternoon, unannounced.  Preliminaries over, he told me he had come to seek my help and that of “my boys” in carrying out his duties as Secretary for Information.

    “Not so fast, Uche,” I said.  “You didn’t consult me before taking the job, and now you are asking me to help you make a success of it.  Tell me: Why did you accept the job?”

    Chukwumerije said he had agonised over the offer and had consulted with his comrades in the progressive community – he named the activist Baba Omojola specifically – and they had all advised him to accept the offer because if he did not, it might go to someone who could not bring to the office the ideas and ideals for which Chukwumerije stood.   Besides, they had told him that the best way to change the system was from within.

    “What if, on taking office, you find that the government is pursuing an agenda different from the one you had been appointed to execute?” I asked.

    “No way,” Chukwumerije said.   He had raised that very question with Babangida, and had made it abundantly clear that he would resign if he found that the government was pursuing a hidden agenda, he said.   Babangida had in turn assured him that he harboured no hidden agenda, and was resolutely committed to handing over to a democratically elected government on August 27, 1993.

    As proof of his earnestness, Chukwumerije said, Babangida had pulled out a drawer from his desk and reached for a copy of the Quran to swear by, but could find none.

    “How very convenient,” I said.  “You believe him?”

    “C’mon, Tunji, you are too far gone in your cynicism.  If you don’t believe him, you should at least believe me.”

    He assured me, as he said he had assured Babangida, that he would resign if he found that he was being used to pursue a scheme he had not bargained for.

    “That’s good enough for me, Uche.  What do you want of me?”

    “Call me to order, rebuke me publicly whenever you feel that I am straying from the ideals we share,” he said.

    “I will do better than that,” I told him. “I will remonstrate with you privately.  I will not go public unless you make private discussion impossible.”

    We sealed the deal with a handshake.  We rarely met thereafter, but kept in touch through his special assistant, Dr Dokun Bojuwade, since deceased.

    The Transitional Council, comprising many eminent Nigerians from a class and an era that military president Ibrahim Babangida had spent the previous eight years excoriating, was charged with supervising the last nine months of his political transition programme that had lost momentum and credibility.  He had manipulated the programme so often and in so many ways that it seemed to have become an end in itself, a journey to nowhere.

    Even as the programme muddled its way towards the June 1993 presidential election that was billed as its culmination, proxy groups established and financed by the military regime were staging rallies and employing every platform to urge Babangida to continue in office.  And Babangida himself was lending them every encouragement.

    It was in the context of this pervasive uncertainty in the weeks leading to the presidential election that I asked Bojuwade to tell Chukwumerije that I needed to see him, persuaded that he would be in a position to help resolve my doubts.

    I met him at his official residence in Ikoyi, Lagos, in the afternoon of Friday, June 4, 1993, seven days to the presidential election.  Dispensing with the usual preliminaries, I asked Chukwumerije pointedly whether the election would hold.

    He said he could not answer categorically, but that the indications were that there would be no election.  He said he was flying to Abuja the next day, Saturday, to return to Lagos the following Tuesday.  If I looked him up the day after, he would be in a position to tell me categorically whether the election would hold or not.

    Chukwumerije did not return to Lagos that Tuesday, and I never saw him again. That very day, the Abuja High Court, Justice Bassey Ikpeme presiding, ordered NEC Chairman Humphrey Nwosu and the Federal Government to appear the following day, June 8, to show why the presidential election scheduled for June 12 should hold.

    Two days later, on June 10, in the dead of night, Justice Ikpeme issued an injunction blocking the election. But this was not a blanket ban, for she added that NEC was free to ignore her order since, as the law stood, the court lacked jurisdiction in the matter.

    Against all odds, the election took place.  When it seemed clear that Bashorun MKO Abiola of the Social Democratic Party was headed for a landslide victory, Babangida hid behind a battery of suborned judges and revanchist shysters to annul it.

    Chukwumerije was not a party to the annulment.  He first learned of it, I gather, from a reporter who sought his reaction to it.  He had dismissed the question as an unseemly joke, until the reporter assured that he was in earnest.

    But whether he was party to it or not, I had expected Chukwumerije to resign from the Transitional Council, based on the discussions we had held some six months earlier.

    Not only did he not resign, he championed the annulment with messianic zeal, the kind of   fervor with which he had promoted the Biafran cause to stunning success and acclaim.  With each passing day, he came across more and more like a Stalinist, bearing little resemblance to the engaging and amiable Marxist Comrade gifted with a rich, sometimes deprecating sense of humour, penetrating insights, a dialectical imagination, and a capacity for friendship across Nigeria’s treacherous cleavages.

    He dredged up footage on the civil disturbances of the First Republic and on the Nigerian civil war to inflict on the public a psychosis of fear.

    Listening to broadcasts on Radio Nigeria or watching news and current affairs programmes

    of the Nigeria Television Authority then, you thought you had been transported back in time  to Albania and Radio Tirana in the days of Enver Hoxa.

    Here, to cite just one example, is the doctrine Chukwumerije enunciated in a meeting with proprietors, no doubt as a warning to the so-called Lagos-Ibadan axis, the critical posture of which he resented passionately:  “Publication that subverts the national interest (as defined by the regime) “removes the publisher from the realm of proprietary rights and places him in the terrain of treason”.

    In another context, he charged that some sections of the press were being suborned “to incite communal mistrust” and hinted that tough new measures were afoot to replace the extant laws that did not provide “adequate regulatory safeguards.”  The measures would surface later as Decree 43, a throwback to Tudor’s England.

    But that dark era does not and cannot define Uche Chukwumerije, who died last week, aged 75.  Nor can it define his place in Nigeria’s history. It was but an episode in an otherwise productive and inspiring life of public service.   Babangida’s silence at his passing is telling indeed, but it reflects more on the self-styled “evil genius” than on his former cabinet minister who had served him so dutifully.

    Chukwumerije gave Nigeria its first intellectually oriented pan-African newsmagazine.  He was a committed socialist activist, eloquent advocate for the downtrodden, and as a member of the Senate and chair of its Education Committee, a first-rate legislator.

     

    Hail and farewell.

     

    I drew liberally on my book, Diary of a Debacle, for this column.

  • So long, Abba

    “Ema ba won wi o, funra won no ma funra won loogun je! [Never mind them, they are fated to self-destroy] — Yoruba cynical saying

    Impunity makes, impunity takes, chikena!

    That appears a fair epigram on the eight-month tenure of Suleiman Abba, the briefest-serving Inspector-General of Police (IGP) in Nigerian history.

    But mocking Mr. Abba’s fall, as sweet, tempting or even well deserved as it is, completely misses the point.

    Well deserved?  Yeah.  More than any other, IGP Abba epitomised the visage of the security forces as shameless conspirators in looming fascism, with his invasion of the House of Representatives for crass partisan causes.  But he, as a responsible Police officer, ought to have been sworn to neutrality and strict legality.

    He not only abysmally failed on that score, with hubris, he armed himself with power he never had by law.

    One, he summarily stripped Speaker Aminu Tambuwal of his security details.  Two, he bragged  before the very committee of the House of Representatives — incense upon incense! — that he (and who the hell was he — the  courts?) did not recognise the Speaker because Mr. Tambuwal had defected from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the All Progressives’ Congress (APC).

    That was not only a rude affront to the House, by the Constitution an independent branch of government.  It was also a violent rape of the doctrine of separation of powers, on which presidentialism is anchored.

    That, of course, was profitable careerism gone sour.  That bravado, after all, seemed to have earned the ousted IGP, then acting, a confirmation.

    Nevertheless, Mr. Abba soon ended with pelted eggs on his face.  The rotten morality of the National Assembly, shortly after, resolved itself against PDP, its chief promoter.  A gale of house defections — which PDP had soullessly pushed all its power years to subvert the opposition and the Constitution — made Alhaji Tambuwal Speaker, de facto and de jure, when his APC gained the majority.  Mr. Abba therefore ate bitter crow, and restored the Speaker’s full security.

    But make no mistake.  Mr. Abba was no devil any more than any of his predecessors was — or indeed, any of his successors would be — a saint.

    His action — silly then, silly now and silly if repeated in future — was only driven by the bad power socialisation of Nigeria’s extant orders, to make an ass of the same law that temporarily propelled over and above fellow citizens.

    Not for them that flat dismissal by Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (God bless his rebellious soul!), which reeks of the lean-and-mean wit of John Donne, the English metaphysical poet: Uniform na khaki, na tailor dey sew am!

    Which brings the discourse to the fable that Nigeria’s president is the most powerful in all of the universe.  That could be true by the way of hyperbole, to capture the sheer depth and breadth of the Nigerian president’s powers under the Constitution.

    But to every power, there is a limitation — except you want to breach the law.  The Constitution says so.  The presidential system, on which the Constitution is built, with its rigorous checks and balances, also says so.

    But all too often, most of Nigeria’s extant orders believe that costly power illusion, and expect their poor appointees, especially top dogs in the security agencies, to read their body language and merrily conspire to subvert the law.

    That was the Genesis to Revelation of Mr. Abba’s loud thud of a fall, in the presidential court of Goodluck Jonathan.  Abba’s tragic grandstanding to please raised him.  But it also smashed him.

    Now, to the main point that must not be missed.

    The cruel joke may be on IGP Abba for earning a sack from vile careerism.  But the overall shame is on a manipulative President Jonathan, who shopped around for a pliant hand to skew an election he knew full well, from his rotten performance record, he deserved to lose — and with ignominy.

    While Jonathan eyed four more years of undeserved presidential power, Abba eyed no less than four years as IGP.  If  that meant helping Jonathan to achieve his goal, it was only a blissful marriage of two sweet dreams.   Even if Mr. Abba’s police would lose respect as a vicious PDP rod, the end would justify the meanness (apologies to Prof. Wole Soyinka) in career sweetness!

    The gamey IGP proved his commitment to this dubious cause, when he half-appealed, half-threatened voters to depart the voting zone immediately after voting, despite INEC’s countermand that such a directive was alien to the Electoral Law.

    But as Jonathan lost, the tactics exploded in Abba’s face — and strategies must logically change.    But too bad, Abba trundled on a presidential snake that though scorched, was neither dead nor defanged.  Hence, the fatal final bite!

    But in this brutal swish of instant punishment for perceived treachery, Fate played a terrible double.

    President Jonathan, still savouring his newfound toga of “global statesman” for conceding an election he soundly lost, by firing Abba, relegated himself to yet another grumpy, vindictive African Big Man, unwilling to expire without the last ugly roar.

    But the more profound anti-Abba comeuppance was the emergence of Solomon Arase as acting IGP.  Reportedly Mr. Abba’s senior, by year of entry (Arase’s 1981 to Abba’s 1984), Mr. Arase’s putative reluctance to be engaged for dubious causes reportedly led to his sidelining when Mr.  Abba got the job. Now, see who is going home earlier!

    Yet, it is unclear if Mr. Arase should laugh or cry over his temporary triumph.  By virtue of his late emergence in an outgoing administration, his career too could have been adversely affected.

    What if the new government decides to sweep away all the service chiefs, and start on a clean slate?  Perhaps the reported lobby in his favour, by past IGPs, could somewhat come to his aid?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  He is due to retire in 2016, anyway.

    But the moral here is less for President Jonathan and more for President-elect Mohammadu Buhari.  Impunity almost always comes back to haunt its perpetrator.  Jonathan, for all his advertised meekness, was not shy of playing God.  Yet, his own hand-picked IGP ditched him the moment he became lame-duck!

    Therefore, Gen. Buhari cannot, like most of his predecessors, afford to play the misguided but tragic Leviathan that, at whims, twists and turns the Constitution to partisan and self-serving ends.

    Let security chiefs be appointed solely on merit; not on their perceived duplicity to subvert the law against the political opposition.  Jonathan and Abba fell flat on their faces — good!   But they were not the first to attempt such.  Neither will they be the last.

    But Gen. Buhari must strive for a radical and positive change in attitude.  That is the surest way to deepen our democratic institutions.

    “Let security chiefs be appointed solely on merit; not on their perceived duplicity to subvert the law against the political opposition”

     

     

  • That pipeline protection contract

    After six years of lack-lustre performance, President Goodluck Jonathan is expected to relinquish Nigeria’s presidency on My 29, 2015. But like the proverbial Whiteman that defecates on the chair before vacating his seat, Jonathan is bent on leaving behind some mess for the incoming administration.

    The All Progressives Congress (APC) has raised concern over what it called last minute looting of the nation’s resources, secret sales of government property and massive recruitment into the public service by the departing Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) led Federal Government. While these might not be entirely true, it behoves the Jonathan administration to tread with caution, its last days in office, in order not to create problems for the incoming administration.

    And one of such likely problems is the planned handover of the job of protecting the nation’s oil/gas pipelines and waterways to former militants and self determination groups by President Jonathan. Barring any last minute change, former Niger Delta militants/warlords, Government Ekpemupolo (aka Tompolo), Mujaheedin Asari-Dokubo and Chief Bipobiri Ajube (aka Gen. Shoot-At-Sight) together with Dr Frederick Faseun and Ganiyu Adams of Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC), should be in charge of protecting these vital economic facilities. They were billed to take over from the various security agencies yesterday.

    Looking at the implications of contracting out such important duty of government to private individuals/companies, to the security of state, one would have expected President Jonathan to leave the decision on the outsourcing of such assignment to the incoming administration. The pipelines and waterways are treasured national assets that should not be placed in the hands of anybody or group of people other than agents of the state.

    Considering the cry over poor funding of our armed forces and other security agencies, the N9.3 billion to be expended on the pipeline protection contract for the former militants could go a long way in adequately arming the Nigerian Navy and the Nigeria Police to provide the needed security for these pipelines and our waterways. These are bodies/organizations statutorily empowered to carry out the job of protecting these facilities, and if for whatever reason they have been unable to do so effectively, the solution is not to outsource their duties, but to ensure they carry out such duties.

    Moreover it is doubtful if any of these contractors have any requisite knowledge or training on how to carry out the assignment. Giving them the contract amounts to merely giving ‘job to the boys’ to keep them quiet or away from crime. While it is good and even necessary for government to either provide gainful employment for all or create a conducive environment for everybody so willing to be gainfully employed, this kind of job being given to Tompolo and others is beyond their level of competence and should be stopped immediately.

    If Jonathan insists on going ahead with the contract, the incoming administration on taking over power should halt the implementation as soon as possible. If the government feels there is a need for a special force to be in charge of protecting these facilities, it should create such and put under its control, just like it created the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) and the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) to take care of road safety matters and drug law enforcement in the country.

    I had complained about this contract in the past when it was first mooted. I have nothing personal against the people involved, but I believe that the security of state, including that of the citizens and vital state facilities/resources should not be put in the hands of private individuals. And considering the past activities of some of those benefiting from the contract, I believe it amounts to rewarding criminality if those who had at one time or another taken up arms against the government in the past, should be so rewarded, if at all they should be rewarded, the Niger Delta  amnesty programme notwithstanding.

    While the incoming General Muhammadu Buhari’s administration has promised not to probe Jonathan or any of his predecessors, this type of pipeline protection contract could leave the new government with no choice than to look into the books of the outgoing government. And Nigerians would definitely understand if the new government came to this.

    There are some actions of the Jonathan government that would and should definitely be looked into. No responsible government would want to close its eyes to the disappearance of 20 billion USD oil earning not remitted into the federation account by the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) as alleged by the former governor of Central Bank of Nigeria, Alhaji Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the Emir of Kano.

    Sanusi, as CBN government made the allegation and instead of Jonathan looking into it fired the apex bank boss. It is believed that Sanusi’s appointment as Emir of Kano probably prevented Jonathan from further persecuting for making the revelation.

    President-elect, Buhari is right in saying he would look into the books on this matter once he assumes office on May 29, 2015. Nigerians would understand why. We need to know who was saying the truth; Sanusi or Jonathan’s government that says no $20billion was missing. Corruption is at the root of our problems in this country and until issues like the alleged missing oil money is satisfactorily dealt with and the truth uncovered, and punishment meted out if necessary; corruption will continue to thrive in Nigeria. $20billion is big money and no effort must be spared by Buhari to uncover the truth and no sacred cow must be left untouched if at all somebody or some people tampered with that money.

    The president-elect should also look into the bogus oil subsidy being paid by the federal government to importers of petrol. This is another platform where Nigeria is being defrauded of huge sums of money.

    The fraudulent practices are not of monetary nature alone. There is so much fraud in our electoral system which if not stopped could derail this democracy. The last general elections and the sham that took place in Rivers and Akwa Ibom States just to mention a few, in the name of election was enough to show that all is not well with our democracy in spite of the worldwide kudos given to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and its chairman, Attahiru Jega for a job well done.

    It was glaring that no election took place in these two states and yet results, votes, running into millions were declared. Who did the voting? While the judiciary should be left alone to determine whether it was right for INEC to declare result in the face of so many irregularities in these states, conscious efforts should be made by the Buhari administration to reform our electoral system such that votes would count. It would be wise for the incoming administration to look into the Justice Uwais Commission report in this regard.

    As Jonathan prepares his hand over notes, it is hoped that the president would make himself available to the new government for clarification on some of his actions if need be. Let us thank the president once again for that concession speech. For once in six years, he did something good.

  • The perils of columnism

    The perils of columnism

    If you went strictly by what the late William Safire of The New York Times once said about writing a newspaper column, you might think that it is a perilous undertaking only in a physical sense.

    It is like standing under windmill with your head dangerously close to its rotating blades, he wrote.  Relieved that you had ducked a blade, you looked up only to find another one coming down.

    Safire exaggerates, of course, but the analogy is on target.  You bask in the excitement of seeing your journalistic labour in print one day and while you are still digesting the reactions pro and contra, another deadline looms large.  So it is from one column to the next, and the next.

    As Frank Rich, another master of the form has pointed out, the relentless production of a newspaper column can push you to express stronger opinions than you actually have, or contrived opinions you may not care deeply about, or run roughshod over nuance to reach an unambiguous conclusion.  And if you stay long enough, Rich adds, you run the risk of turning bland or shrill.

    And of course, there are in this age of the instant, unexamined response, those who are forever standing by not merely to tell you that you are wrong, but that what you had written could only had issued from a mind that is at once diseased, demented and disoriented.

    It has been said of President Goodluck Jonathan that he maintained at the public expense an army of such cavillers to harass and excoriate commentators who were not particularly enamoured of his so-called transformative agenda.

    This past weekend was the grim anniversary of one of the darkest chapters in Nigeria’s history: Boko Haram’s abduction of some 250 female students from their school hostel in Chibok, in Borno State, and their forcible march to the bowels of Sambisa Forest and thereafter to places unknown.

    Perhaps still chafing from his electoral loss, Dr Jonathan allowed the occasion to pass without comment.  Not so President-elect Muhammadu Buhari, and the community of the grieving.

    What would Dr Jonathan have said anyway, given that his dilatoriness and his wife’s witch hunt of innocent officials had pre-empted hot pursuit and rescue?

    Still, his rented army of cavillers would have savaged those who had the presence of mind and the humane concern to draw attention to this festering sore on the nation’s conscience.

    But I digress.

    When you deliver yourself obliquely as this columnist frequently does, there is, on the one hand, the danger that some will see through the subterfuge and desire to get even, and on the other hand, the twin danger that some will not get it and will wonder aloud why a person so lacking in knowledge and insight should have been allowed to inflict his imbecilities on the public.

    Of those two groups, the first is the one to be feared.  For there is no knowing how far they might go to settle scores.

    In my Rutam House years, whenever someone accosts me at a gathering and asks, “So you are the Olatunji Dare?” I mentally reconnoitre the setting for the nearest exit, measure the distance separating us and figure out in nanoseconds how I would block, sidestep, deflect or otherwise obstruct a punch to the nose or a kick to the groin.

    It never came to that.  But even today, I still wonder what some people might do if they felt sorely aggrieved over my writing.  Fortunately, for the time being at least, I am safely beyond their reach.

    Pardon the conceit, but journalists are also writers.  Wittingly or unwittingly, they teach; they teach ways of expressing self, of viewing and experiencing the world.  They teach attitudes and habits.

    What they write has consequences.

    This thought struck me with particular force the day I received a text message from a young man complimenting me on my column that he had just read, and informing me without fuss that he always took his opinions from the column.  I had always sensed that writing a column carries some responsibility, but not on that scale

    What if the columnist was wrong?

    A columnist can indeed be wrong for any number of reasons – prejudice, arrogance, ambition, insufficient knowledge, carelessness, disingenuousness, venality, muddy-mindedness, and sheer charlatanism.  If  I was wrong – and it is guaranteed that I will be wrong from time to time and from issue to issue —  I would have misled the young  man and doubtless others who looked up to me for leadership and guidance on public issues even if the error resulted from the purest of motives.

    That is no easy burden.

    These reflections flow from the media commentary on the recent general elections, in which the leading columnists lined up subtly or militantly in support of the status quo or change.  Here, as on the really important issues, there was no neutral ground.  To be “neutral” is to harbor no objection to the status quo, and hence to endorse it implicitly, if not explicitly.

    Of all the columns on the elections, easily the least nuanced was that of Dr Femi Aribisala, the Oxford-educated international affairs expert -turned pastor and public affairs commentator.

    From the one pulpit, he subjected the Bible to the kind of criticism that peer reviewers for the most selective journals reserve for sloppy submissions.  From the other, he belted out the most slanderous invective week after week on Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and General Muhammadu Buhari, while heaping the most exorbitant praise on Goodluck Jonathan —the best president Nigeria ever had, far and away the most accomplished, the most cerebral.

    The general election would witness Tinubu’s demystification in Lagos State, and would lead ultimately to his disgrace and political death.   By naming General Muhammadu Buhari its presidential candidate, the APC had already lost the election.  Buhari was not in the least qualified for the position, and would never be president.

    Aribisala’s strictures on Tinubu and Buhari and everything they stand for were so hate-filled that they raise serious questions about his urbane antecedents and his claims to being a priest.

    In this, he bears out George Orwell’s remark that the worst advertisement for Christianity is  to be found in some of its adherents

    All scriptures teach that hatred even of the objectively hateful is subversive of that charity on which the just society must ultimately be founded.  When the hatred is deep, ingrained, reflexive and unremitting, when it impairs reason and distorts judgment, you have to wonder what has happened to Aribisala, not too long ago a person of much charm and exceptional promise.

    The elections have come and gone. Virtually every prediction he made with the certainty of an oracle failed.  Tinubu has emerged as the most influential and most accomplished figure on the Nigerian political scene; General Buhari is set to take office as President of the Republic

    In Lagos, the APC won the gubernatorial election and an absolute majority in the State Assembly.  It won comfortable majorities in the two houses of the National Assembly, and no fewer than 19 state governors won election on its platform.

    But Aribisala has not summoned the courage or humility to fess up to his monumental errors and apologise to the reading public.

    It is not simply that he was wrong:  He was irresponsibly wrong.  He betrayed the thousands who looked up to him for guidance and orientation.

    For a columnist, there is no greater sin.

  • Ekiti, sick boy of Yorubaland?

    As long as the Constitution lives, Ayo Fayose is doomed.  But Ekiti must make up its mind, if it wants to sink with him.

    Which makes it very infantile, the Ekiti opposition’s hope that somewhat, the Supreme Court would help do the job on April 14, driving up media adrenalin to that end.

    And no less childish, the Fayose post-verdict Ado-Ekiti road show, that suggested a Supreme Court okay of his election had saved his doomed governorship.

    Or even more childishly asinine, the Fayose electoral stacking of cards, which suggested that since the enfant terrible had “swept” the Ekiti legislative polls of April 11, making it 3-0 against his alleged traducers, his constitutional crimes had automatically vanished!  Fond hope!

    All three were just perception games that changed nothing.  Fayose, as a constitutional bandit, leper in decent society and gubernatorial scum, has damned himself — almost  beyond redemption.  But again, it is left to Ekiti to play the stubborn fly that will, against all common sense, follow the corpse to the grave — or steer a wiser direction.

    Many a Fayose sympathiser, or even the unwary public, could whimper and wail, claiming calling a governor constitutional bandit, social leper and scum is vulgar abuse.  It is not.  It is rather truth brutally told!  And Fayose and his deeds are living and damning evidence.

    Fayose, as constitutional bandit: It is only a bandit that would forge a quorum of seven rogue legislators — with two ghosts to boot! — to sack a legislative majority of 19.  It is only a bandit that would claim the Rogue 7 had sacked the legitimate Speaker; and proceeded to instal one of them, a perverse caricature, whose starkness violently negates Ekiti’s Fountain of Knowledge moniker!

    And it is certainly a constitutional bandit, of no mean notoriety, that would present his budget to a phantom house; and claimed authority to spend the people’s money, knowing full well what the Constitution says about the Appropriation Bill.  Still, this bandit does have a perverse sense of humour: presenting and having this illusory house approve his “Attorney-General”, who at least ought to know the fine points of law!

    Fayose, as gubernatorial scum: If the office of governor is created by law, it is a gubernatorial scum that would wilfully overthrow the legislature, a constitutional check in the presidential system of robust checks-and-balances, and presume to rule happily ever after!  Need anyone say the Fayose travesty is only a relic of the executive outlawry of the extant Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) order soon to go extinct?

    Fayose as social leper: For starters, only a social leper would run puerile adverts, suggesting that since some previous heads of government from the North had died in office, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari would meet with that fate.  And certainly, only a person of suspect progeny would mock his own mother’s health at old age, just to score vulgar political points — and lest we all forget: he is Mr. No Apology!

    But while the Fayose decadence is beyond pardon, it issued from the notorious penchant of the so-called Ekiti progressives to mismanage success.

    Fayose’s first coming, with the war cry of “Fayose ooo!”, and the plebeian counter-whoop of “Yes oooooooooooooo!” issued from the crisis of expectation that near-wholesale, with Lagos Governor Bola Tinubu’s exception, swept out the South West Alliance for Democracy (AD) gubernatorial class of 1999-2003.  That bid ended in controversial disgrace.

    His second coming issued from Governor Kayode Fayemi’s alleged failure to share legitimate pork among his own party members, despite his government’s massive developmental strides.  The face of that internal convulsion, emanating either from the governor’s own party members growling over pork or bristling against alleged suppression of legitimate political ambitions, was the Fayemi vs Opeyemi Bamidele tango.  As the progressives fought to the death, Fayose stole in and grabbed the prize!

    Indeed, when the history of Fayose’s political savagery is written, Fayemi’s name would merit a special mention.  For starters, his mass demonization, much of it coming from disgruntlement inside his own camp, coupled with his politically fatal war with Bamidele, would directly trigger Fayose’s second coming.  How could Fayemi’s stellar developmental achievements wear such a hateful face of gargoyle?

    Then much earlier, disputes over his 2007 Action Congress (AC) gubernatorial nomination drove the likes of Ayo Arise, Dayo Adeyeye, Caleb Olubolade, Dare Babarinsa and others to PDP.  Though Mr. Adeyeye now strikes the John Milton Paradise Lost pose of rabid zest to rule in hell than serve in heaven, the Ekiti unfolding tragedy, without that dispute, would perhaps have taken a different trajectory.

    Then, there is the question of self-destruct politics of party machine.  A case in point is Ayodele Adu, a chartered accountant and Lagos-based Omuo native, who tangled with sitting Senator Anthony Adeniyi, an Ikere native, for the APC senatorial ticket for Ekiti South.  The party machine claimed Senator Adeniyi won. Mr. Adu alleged brazen manipulation, even with the open secret that Mr. Adeniyi was allegedly unpopular in the senatorial district.  Result: another wilful loss of political territory.

    From Fayose’s power savagery to Ekiti progressives’ power blunders, a historical retrogression, of monumental proportions, looms over Ekiti.

    In one generation, Obafemi Awolowo, with his free primary education policy and creative secondary and tertiary scholarships, vaulted Ekiti as the Yoruba future; as Ekiti Kete, with acute thirst for knowledge, catapulted themselves into the very front of Nigerian scholarship.  That would earn the Fountain of Knowledge pet name.  That was the 1950s, in the 20th century.

    But another generation in 2015, second decade of the 21st century, a regression is afoot.  Fayose and his barbarians are in town, and Ekiti is about cementing its pact with the past, as socio-democratic laggard; and sick boy of Yorubaland.

    So, what Awo made, Fayose wilfully destroys; and the Ekiti elite, traditional and modern, many of them busy rationalising Fayose’s executive outlawry, appear comfy with this historical reversal!

    That is why Ekiti must be wary of the Adagun Odo (stagnant water) complex, the same syndrome that spectacularly undid Somalia.  Ethnic homogeneity is as much a strength as it could be a weakness.

    Like Ekiti, Somalia is ethnically homogeneous.  As Ekiti indulges Fayose, Somalia’s elite looked askance while the likes of Siad Barre started bombing their people with brazen injustices.  That was the wide and merry way to Africa’s first failed state!  Ekiti appears following this self-destructive path, even as its elite play the ostrich in homo-ethnic cocoon.

    In Achebe-speak in A Man of the People, Fayose has stolen too much for the Constitution not to notice.  So, let the law come heavily down on him.

    Fayose is dead meat, whether or not the APC Legislative 19 succeed in impeaching him.  Even if he survives the present gale, it is clear that by May 29, the rogue federal security cover, under which Fayose perpetuates his outlawry, would have vanished, leaving him stark naked.

    But again, it is Ekiti’s choice — to sink with this prodigal or throw him to the sharks.