The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • This defining moment

    This defining moment

    Far from confirming the claim of the incurably deluded spokesperson for Goodluck Jonathan’s doomed re-election campaign that his principal had conceded defeat out of patriotism rather than because he lost irredeemably, last weekend’s gubernatorial and state assembly elections show dramatically just how diminished, how washed-up the “biggest political party in Africa” has become.

    One of its chieftains, who would later stand trial for criminal embezzlement (he was cleared by the courts) had declared that the PDP would rule Nigeria for 60 years “in the first instance.”

    More recently, as she barged from one campaign stop to another, hurling coarse abuse at her husband’s opponents and inciting rented crowds to stone anyone demanding a change from   the status quo, Dr Jonathan’s wife had stamped her ample personal authority on continuity:  60  years of PDP power, nothing less.

    In the event, the PDP’s reign, which has drawn far more tears than cheers, is mercifully set to expire after just 16 years.

    An obituary notice to that effect, a spoof on the standard Nigerian fare, has been doing the rounds. With due acknowledgement to its anonymous author and high praise for his or her creativity, I quote the epitaph in part:

    “With gratitude to God and total submission to the will of the Nigerian Electorate,  we announce the death of our party, grand party and great-grand party, PDP, on March 30, 2015, after a prolonged illness from corruption, impunity, arrogance, bomb blasts, etc.

    “Funeral services will be held on May 29, 2015, at Eagle Square, Abuja, at 10 a.m”

    To be sure, the reports of the PDP’s death are somewhat exaggerated.   However, persuaded that it has served its time and now faces a bleak future, many of its hardiest denizens are bailing out as if it were a ship on which an outbreak of Ebola fever has just been confirmed.  The PDP, they have now realised, with their own Iyiola Omisore, is nothing without the Presidency.

    Sic transit gloria.

    As things stand now, the APC has, in addition to winning the Presidency, racked up comfortable majorities in both houses of the National Assembly, and all the principal officers of that body will come from its ranks.  It also has some 20 gubernatorial chairs and the same number of state assemblies under its control.

    Not bad for an opposition party that Dr Jonathan’s wife derided endlessly as an “expired drug”’ that has undergone so many name-changes that it might yet call itself “Ebola” — a party against which her husband who was only last week being hailed as a statesman for merely doing the decent thing, re-launched a vile, divisive, money-drenched campaign in a desperate but ultimately futile bid to supplant in Lagos, its stronghold.

    Oba Rilwan Akiolu’s bellicose warning to the Igbo to vote for the APC gubernatorial candidate Akinwunmi Ambode or face the consequences may well have been his answer to Dr Jonathan’s dishonourable campaign. But that is no justification. Whatever happened to noblesse oblige?

    Fears that Nigeria may become a one-party state, what with the rate at which members of the PDP are abandoning ship for the victorious APC bring to memory the aftermath of the 1983 general elections during which the NPN, inebriated with its stolen victories across Nigeria, declared that all other political parties had become “irrelevant.”   Three months later, it was swept into oblivion by the military.

    The APC must not for a moment indulge in such hubris.  Nothing stops the PDP from re-building itself into a strong and credible opposition party the way a decimated Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) under the dynamic and committed leadership of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu had done before the merger that produced the APC

    For one thing, even in those geopolitical zones where it is weakest, the PDP still has some diehard supporters, witness its entrenchment in the South East and South South where the plucky Rochas Okorocha and the much-persecuted but resolute Chibuike Amaechi are the last men standing, its tenacious grip in Ondo, its close run in Lagos, and its comprehensive sweep in all the elections held in Ekiti in the past two weeks.

    At his inauguration last July, Ekiti Governor Ayodele Fayose had in a speech that sounded as if it was an entry in the diary of a mad man, had vowed to drive the ACN not just out of Ekiti but out of Yoruba land and Nigeria.

    A delusion, to be sure; but he seems to have succeeded in driving it out of Ekiti.

    In the June 2014 election that returned Fayose to power after a previous outing remembered mainly for high scandal, arbitrariness, brazen corruption and sophomoric stunts, he won a majority in every local government to defeat the incumbent, Dr Kayode Fayemi.

    We now know, through damning documentary evidence produced by a competent witness, that the victory was procured, not by the so-called stomach infrastructure strategy, but by good old-fashioned skullduggery.

    But the formula Fayose employed to deliver Ekiti to Jonathan in the presidential race, secure the election of three senators, six members of the House of Representatives and 26 members of  the state assembly, all of whom he had personally handpicked, without challenge  – how Fayose constituted Ekiti into a one-party state remains one the best-kept secrets of Nigerian politics.

    Household per household, Ekiti is reputed to have the largest number of holders of advanced degrees not just in Nigeria but in all of Africa, and surely ranks high in the world league for that distinction, if it does not sit at the very top.

    That a delinquent who parades his mother’s infirmity of the most intimate kind in the market square to score a cheap political point can hold them in thrall, pervert all they hold dear and block every recourse to justice and redress, is an affront and a standing rebuke to the learned and highly accomplished people of Ekiti, and the elders who won’t call him to order.

    History will show that Fayose could not have done it without Dr Jonathan’s close collaboration or active connivance.  But how will the Ekiti people explain this tragic turn in their history to their progeny?

    To return to what lies ahead, at this defining moment:  The task before the APC now is to transform a loose coalition into a focused governing party and translate slogan into actuality.  It must deliver change – change that Nigerians can feel and see in their living conditions and in the lives of their children.

    Not change that will occur in a nebulous future, like regular power supply, but change with an immediate impact.

    It cannot be business as usual.  Governance cannot be a jobs-for-the boys scheme.  In this data-driven age, it cannot be an encounter of the unprepared with the unforeseen.

    Public expectations are high.  There is so much do, so much to fix.

    During World War II, one American military unit had this as its motto:  “The difficult task we do right away; the impossible takes a little longer.”

    That is the spirit that should animate the APC as it prepares to take power and guide it throughout its rule.

    This must not be another false dawn.

  • Okonkwo in Lagos

    Okonkwo in Lagos

    Just as antiquity was enthralled by the real-life glorious tragedy of the Spartan King Leonidas and his 300 in 480 BC, the modern literary world has been gripped by the wilful tragedy of Okonkwo, Chinua Achebe’s fictional creation in Things Fall Apart, his 1958 classic.

    As Leonidas and his men fought to the last man at the pass of Thermopylae, in a Greco-Persian War, the fictional Okonkwo sacrificed self to resist creeping Christian (read European) incursion into his pristine Igbo world.

    Many say Okonkwo was rash and brash.  Others say he, as a rule, acted first, thought later.  Still, others insist his tragedy was avoidable, had he been less impulsive.

    But after all said, Okonkwo hanged, so his Igbo essence could live.  Indeed, the Okonkwo mystique was chaffing at the living dead, making shameful peace with the new “abomination” — for what is a people’s life sans their culture?

    Given how some Igbo leaders in Lagos played their numbers game in the March 28 presidential/National Assembly and April 11 gubernatorial/state legislature elections, it was as if Okonkwo leapt from his pristine Umuofia, landed pat in the Igbo dominant areas of 21st century Lagos, and hollered: “meeennn, a new sheriff is in town”!

    The only difference though, was that while the original committed self-martyrdom over a just cause, this grotesque, Lagos Okonkwo manically launched into a dubious one; suggestive of rank covetousness of Lagos, that instantly brought out the virtual beast in their Yoruba hosts.

    Brash, rash and impulsive, the war-cry of this herd was spewing fictional history, bawling dubious statistics plus insensate boasts, and threatening, in concert with a pressured Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), orchestrating a hateful campaign of opponents’ demonization and ethnic baiting as own survival strategy, to take over Lagos!  One, Tony Nwulu, now an Oshodi-Isolo House of Representatives-elect was even quoted in the media as threatening that, should he lose, he and his group would make Lagos ungovernable!

    Yet, at the end of it all, it turned a damp squib.  When the dust cleared, both at the presidential and gubernatorial elections, all the bragging about making up 30% of Lagos could only notch a win in five out of 20 constitutionally recognised local governments!

    Though this “win” fetched the Igbo in Lagos a couple of seats in both the House of Representatives and the Lagos House of Assembly, that such was attained by perceived ethnic gang-up makes such gains pyrrhic, given the rupture of an age-old Yoruba-Ndigbo amity, despite that ethnic tensions were never too far from the placid surface.

    Besides, it takes no especial acuity: an Igbo representative in Lagos, propelled almost solely by the votes of fellow ethnic Igbo, to the chagrin of their ethnic Yoruba hosts, is a journey to nowhere.

    The reason is simple, even if unpalatable to dreamy-eyed democrats, or even worse: the so-called “de-tribalised” (whatever that means!) Nigerians.  Unlike the United States, which is a settler community, Nigeria is a country of indigenous peoples, with each passionate about its own space.  Besides, before democracy, there was sociology; and before sociology, there was anthropology.

    So, it is patently shallow to claim playing democracy, without grasping social formations and showing acute sensitivity to the indigenous people’s aspirations, mores and values, especially in  indigenous communities like Nigeria’s, no matter how big or cosmopolitan, as is the case with Lagos.

    In the Lagos case, it was especially politically costly.  Aligning with PDP which had ruined the central government, against APC, which had built Lagos was, to many Lagosians, brazen betrayal.

    Which brings the matter to the Oba of Lagos, Riliwan Akiolu’s alleged Lagoon fatwa — alleged because the Eko Palace had tried to tone down its menacing import — which generated quite a huff.

    On the political/democratic plane, the threat was awful — and you could tell by the way it immediately put the Lagos All Progressive Congress (APC) establishment on the back foot, disowning the royal and placating the hurting Igbo; and the way the Lagos PDP latched onto it, like some Deus-ex-machina making a divine appearance, to breathe fresh life to a doomed project.

    But not so, on the sociological/anthropological plane.  When Jimi Agbaje, the Lagos PDP gubernatorial candidate told cheering Igbo traders at the Lagos Trade Fair complex to, with their votes, drive the rival APC into the Atlantic Ocean, it was a devastating and recklessly irreverent pun, telling his own Kabiyesi to himself go jump into the lagoon!

    That moment, his bid probably received a fatal kiss.  For one, the Oba in Yoruba culture is Kabiyesi — he who cannot be questioned.  For another, Nigeria is a democracy that cohabits with feudalism, in delicate dialectics.  After all the excitement on the campaign stumps, and all mythical claim to free speech, you would still go prostrate to your monarch in private — so decrees culture!

    But the most lethal of the Agbaje gaffe was setting himself up as putative Afonja of Lagos — a toxic tag.  Afonja was the personage in Yoruba history, whose treachery helped the Fulani to put Ilorin, hitherto a Yoruba town in the Oyo Empire, under Fulani suzerainty.

    The Trade Fair charge bolstered the cheering but obviously distraught Igbo, despite their overt braggadocio.  But it also galvanised a piqued Yoruba population, furious at “Jimi’s [alleged] conspiracy to gift Lagos to the Igbo”.  So, while comparatively the Yoruba appeared to have come out in their numbers, the Igbo rather seemed to recede.

    In three short months of electioneering — or even less — Mr. Agbaje had, therefore, morphed from the decent and avuncular neighbour next door, to a putative betrayer of his own people!  But that cannot be true!  Mr. Agbaje needs urgent help to throw off this unflattering, if not fatal, tag.

    The fact, however, is that, for the umpteenth time, the swashbuckling Ndigbo in Lagos blundered into the maelstrom of a brutal power play, both nationally and in Lagos.  But they ended up as merry fall guys.

    President Goodluck Jonathan started the noxious campaign, way back in 2011, when he suggested in Lagos that if Lagos non-indigenes banded together, they could politically usurp the native Yoruba.  Pre-2015 election,  he followed that up with campaign stops to churches, posturing as an endangered Christian president, waiting to be undone by vicious Muslims.  That was the long and short of Lagos PDP’s electoral strategy: ethnic baiting and religious divisiveness.

    On the Lagos front, not a few business gentries and free-wheeling political aristocrats, progressive, conservative and reactionary, who hate the guts of Bola Tinubu, the APC national leader, cooked their own plot.

    Mr. Agbaje, always hinting at “vested interests”, was the smiling, brilliant and decent face of that ugly plot.  A more discerning Okonkwo in Lagos should have seen through the booby trap, and not recklessly blundered into it, as if it were its own.  But alas!

    This is no triumphalism — no!  It is rather truth, frankly and painfully told.  The Ndigbo, for too long have been mixed up in needless crises.  The Lagos debacle is the latest.

    It is high time their leaders had some introspection, if they must attain their ultimate in the context of a just, fair and equitable Federal Nigeria.

     

  • What to do with Rivers and Akwa Ibom

    What to do with Rivers and Akwa Ibom

    The 2015 general elections, to the surprise of many, were largely free, fair and to some extent peaceful. If one could ignore what happened in Rivers and Akwa Ibom States in the name of election, it could be safely said or assumed that Nigeria’s democracy has finally come of age. But it would be foolhardy and even dangerous to brush aside what took place in these states on March 28 and April 11 and conclude that Nigeria has finally joined the global enviable league of established democracies.

    Located in Nigeria’s south/south region, Rivers and Akwa Ibom State are two of the three states, the other being Delta, heavily relied upon by Dr Goodluck Jonathan and his ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)to deliver votes in their millions to the president to aid his re-election bid.

    Jonathan’s expectation of a heavy voters’ support for him in this region was based mainly on the fact of his being from the south/south and not on account of any outstanding performance. But the people of this region, especially residents of these two states were not given to this sentiment.

    In the run up to the elections it was glaring that they were not ready to reward incompetence as exemplified by the Jonathan administration and instead were ready to team up with the rest of Nigeria rooting for change. They were leaning towards the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC). In fact, Rivers States has an APC government already in place and the expectation was that the state would go the way of the party in the general election, the fact of Jonathan coming from that region notwithstanding.

    The financial recklessness of the Godswill Akpabio administration in Akwa Ibom state with nothing tangible to show for the huge state resources available to him also commended the APC to the people of the state as the party of change that they yearn for. So, like Rivers, the expectation here also was that the wind of change would blow the PDP away on elections day. But that was not to be or rather, not allowed to be by the powers that be.

    Faced with an imminent defeat at the polls, the Jonathan federal government deployed all State’s and non-state’s resources at its disposal to rig the election in its favour with the hope of making it back for a second term. In the March 28 presidential election, Jonathan recorded near overwhelming support in these two states, with over 95 per cent of the votes, but it wasn’t enough to win him the presidency again.

    The way this ‘victory’ was achieved cast doubt on the legitimacy of the result. In Rivers State, apart from the pre-election violence that led to the killing of many people, mainly from the APC, no election in the real sense of the word took place anywhere on that day, a fact acknowledged by both foreign and domestic observers, yet the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) said it was satisfied with the exercise and declared Jonathan the winner in the state.  While no voting took place, results were allocated to parties by INEC officials in a predetermined way to give victory to PDP with a landslide.

    In Akwa Ibom State, the way ‘victory’ was achieved was disingenuous. While voters were given the impression that they could vote and their votes would count, (at least in places where INEC was allowed to show up), government/PDP agents/thugs were deployed to polling units to obtain the number of accredited voters and forward same to a situation room in the Government House where the votes were allocated to parties based on the number of accredited voters, with the PDP getting the lion share. The figures recorded on the result sheet at the Government House were then forwarded to INEC which in turn released same as the outcome of the election.

    With the outcome of the presidential election in these two states not enough to tilt the scale of victory in Jonathan’s favour nationwide, the PDP went back to the drawing board for the governorship and state assembly elections on April 11, to ensure that its rigging plan not only produces a winner but retains/returns the control of the two states to the party. The outcome was a sham election that even PDP sympathizers in some so called opposition parties could not stomach.

    The Labour party governorship candidate in Rivers State, Prince Tonye Princewill, a known supporter of President Jonathan was so disappointed in the conduct and outcome of the election that he described the exercise as neither free nor fair. He expressed his frustration in the following words: “Without the presence of INEC officials or material in some areas, results were declared in the very same areas as if elections actually did hold. What kind of message are we sending? Can the people who experienced this ever have faith in politics or the electoral process again? This process was neither free nor fair and it certainly was not credible. But in the end INEC felt otherwise.”

    Observers from the African Centre for Leadership Strategies and Development described the elections in Rivers State as not only bloody but also fraudulent, urging INEC to cancel the polls. International election observers also spoke in the same vein, yet INEC went ahead to declare the result giving victory to PDP. The same things happened in Akwa Ibom. The APC, the party at the receiving end of this electoral fraud is crying foul but INEC does not seem to be listening.

    The implication of INEC accepting the result of these sham elections is that the electorate in these areas would never have faith in politics and the political process, especially the principle of one man one vote. And as long as the result stays good people will continue to stay out of politics in these areas and we will continue to have thugs as leaders coming from there; and when they come to the national stage you can imagine the pollution they would bring to national politics.

    I don’t want to dwell on the violence that attended the so called elections in these states, it is sickening. People being beheaded, whole family being wiped out, political thugs, at times in military/police uniform going from house-to-house, clubbing or shooting opponents to death, most of these in the presence of and even with active connivance of security agents. What kind of democracy is that? And on elections day, ballot boxes/papers being snatched and yet INEC accepted the results from such polling units?

    For the sake of the democracy we are trying to build and also the credibility of Professor Attahiru Jega’s INEC, the result in Rivers and Akwa Ibom States should not stand. Let there be fresh elections in these states with enough security personnel on ground to prevent the killings and the fraud that attended the March 28 and April 11 elections.  This is how to build a good democratic culture. Let the winner win clean and clear and the loser lose clean and clear as well.

  • GEJ’s phone call to GMB: the dangers of hyperbole

    GEJ’s phone call to GMB: the dangers of hyperbole

    Whatever criticisms anyone may make of President Goodluck Jonathan’s six-year presidency which will end on May 29 – and God knows there’s a hell lot – he cannot be denied credit for his statesman-like March 31 phone call to his rival, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, in which he accepted defeat ahead of the formal declaration of the opposition All Progressive Congress’s (APC) presidential candidate as victor, the following day.

    That simple call was possibly, even probably, the most difficult decision of the president’s political life, considering the unprecedented bitterness that had characterised this year’s general elections, thanks mostly to the hawks the man surrounded himself with, several of whom had sworn, presumably with a wink from him, that Buhari will never be elected president of this country.

    However, while the president deserves the praise singing that has been heaped on him for that simple but, at the same time, difficult, phone call, it must be said that the country stands in the grave danger of over-exaggerating its significant, in the sense that it is being made to look as if it is enough to atone for the enormous sins the man, his lieutenants and his Peoples Democratic Party have committed against Nigeria and Nigerians the past 16 years.

    No doubt the phone call averted the descent into chaos which many a doomsday prophet – not least semi-official American institutions that had predicted Nigeria’s implosion this year – had prophesied for the country. Even then anyone who thinks that that phone call alone has completely dispersed the storm that had gathered over the nation before and during this year’s general election may be in for a great shocker.

    There are critics of the president who say his concession was forced. Perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn’t. However, a two-page statement issued on Monday by the Chairman of PDP’s Board of Trustee, Chief Tony Anenih, titled “Marching on with Hope” suggests that the phone call wasn’t so voluntary.

    “President Jonathan,” Anenih said in the statement, “has worked, selflessly, to deepen democracy in Nigeria. His consistent advocacy of the rights of the people to freely choose their leaders had earlier yielded free, fair and credible elections in some States of the Federation. Now, a peaceful transition is expected to follow after the general elections.” (Note his phrase, “in some states”, presumably PDP).

    Coming from a man who originated and popularised the notorious phrase, “No vacancy in Aso Villa,” the man must think Nigerians are idiots to believe his claim that anybody in PDP can deepen, or has indeed deepened, democracy in Nigeria; after all, advocacy is not practice, and no one resident in Nigeria the last 16 years will agree with “Mr Fix-it” that PDP chieftains ever practiced the principles of anything they preached.  In any case by apparently tagging the election as half-free, it is obvious that his party, and certainly the man himself as its presumed conscience, did not accept Buhari won it fair and square.

    Yet, in spite of Anenih’s dubious caveat about the credibility of the election, President Jonathan’s phone call may have been sincere. However, there are at least two tests by which the president can prove his sincerity beyond any reasonable doubt, one immediate, and the other during and after the transition.

    The immediate test is his willingness to call to order the governors of PDP states and Abuja-backed PDP elements in opposition states who made it almost impossible for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to use card readers in their states and generally made their states hell on earth for the opposition in the March 28 elections through the use of thugs, army and the police, notably Akwa-Ibom and Rivers, the First Lady’s home but opposition state. The president should charge these governors and PDP Abuja politicians to allow for free, fair and credible governorship and Houses of Assembly elections in their states this weekend.

    In addition, he should prevail on the PDP governors who lost their senatorial bids on March 28 – notably those of Niger and Benue states – not to resort to the Samson’s Option of bringing down the roof on everybody’s head they seem hell-bent upon adopting in the same election as punishment against voters in their states for their rejection.

    The second, and bigger, test is how willingly the president cooperates with the in-coming administration in personally accounting for his six-year rule and how far he succeeds in persuading all his lieutenants to do the same.

    General Buhari has assured that his administration will not “witch-hunt” anyone. This is as it should be. However, this cannot mean letting all bygones be bygones. To do so would be to teach the wrong lesson that all it takes for politicians and their sidekicks to get away with the kind of corruption and impunity we witnessed in this country in the past 16 years, the last six in particular, is simply for an incumbent to anticipate the formal announcement of his defeat.

    Re: “Buhari- Fourth time lucky”

    Sir,

    Let us join hands and thank God for Saturday March 28, 2015. We asked for it, and He graciously gave it to us.

    Chief Tony Chigbo,

    +23450494477.

    Sir,

    APC has won the elections. Let sleeping dogs lie.

    +2348057366302.

    Sir,

    Your piece today (April 1) is as usual solid but for the constant recourse to religion and ethnicity. It’ll be good if you could stop looking at the Nigerian crises from the prism of ethnicity and religion.

    Chijioke Uwasomba,

    OAU, Ife,

    +2348037058775.

    Sir,

    I don’t know the inner workings of our darling APC, but to ascribe the ‘poor outing’ in the South-South to Gov. Amaechi’s failings is disingenuous and cruel. Please we need to close our flanks.

    Mikefe Tanno

    +2348062322295.

    Sir,

    I hardly reply to articles but in your case of Wednesday April 1, I couldn’t hold myself. Please don’t set a dangerous agenda with your attack on Gov. Amaechi. The fact that GMB won is a testament to the good job he did as DG. You must appreciate the high risk he took in his fight with the presidency on behalf of GMB. Even some of us who were unknown supporters were nearly mobbed in several quarters.

    The point I am making is that it was not easy being a Buhari supporter down south. Therefore, your early attack on Amaechi’s style is unwarranted and uncalled for.

     +2348030784586.

    Sir,

    Your article, “Buhari: Fourth Time Lucky”, was another insightful piece.  However, permit me to strongly disagree that Governor Rotimi Amaechi, the Director-General of the Buhari campaign team, “came highly recommended”.  If truth is not to be turned on its head, Amaechi came to the position with more brawn than brain.  That was why he found it almost impossible to run a cohesive campaign where all the various tendencies could have been carried along.

    Yes, Amaechi may have been right in trying to check the over-bearing excesses of some leaders, but the limited presence of the other serving Governors and party leaders in the campaign, would have brought Buhari’s electoral bid to grief, but for God’s grace.  This is why, without doubt, many discerning minds rightly say the triumph of GMB was hardly due to the efforts of his party.

    Segun Adewale

    Sir,

    There you go again trying to cause schism among APC leaders and followers. Amaechi never alienated Tinubu and others. They worked together as a team. APC lost the S/E and S/S to money politics, the army and corrupt INEC officials.

    +2348075476140.

    Sir,

    Thanks for your usual great attempts at an equilibrated presentation. A word, however, on the perennial suspicion of GMB for Islamic fundamentalism.

    He is said to have made the application for the thorny membership of Nigeria with the OIC, which IBB later ratified. On the other hand, I read from factchecking.ng in GMB’s defence,  that the OIC Conference of Minister, the OIC organ responsible for treating application did not discuss Nigeria during GMB’s military rule, and therefore it was not he who applied for it; in fact, that he refused to sign to full membership of Nigeria because Nigeria was a secular state. In any case, since secrecy has surrounded the ratification of full membership, some of us are still unaware of the details.

    Be that as it may, could GMB add to his top restoration agenda the restoration of that secular status please?

    I believe this message can reach the president-elect through you.

    Sincerely,

    JOSEPH AKAA

    joeakaa@yahoo.com

     

    Sir,

    I have watched good writers of our time like you doing good job. But personally, I would like you people, using your influence and contact, to ensure that that patriotic and uncompromising army captain who leaked the rigging of Ekiti governorship election is reinstated in the army.

    This captain must not lose his job. He is the unsung hero of our time.

    Alhaji Abiodun Hussain,

    +2348023311676.

    Sir,

    FFK (Femi Fani-Kayode) is Publicity Director, not Director General of PGEJ’s (President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan) campaign organisation. The DG is (Col) Ahmadu Ali.

    +2348073647104.

     

    I stand corrected. The error was inadvertent. Another error was my reference to Buhari’s running mate as Professor Femi Osinbajo, instead of Yomi. Both errors are regretted.

  • Next stop, Lagos

    Next stop, Lagos

    After the stunning triumph for Abuja on March 28, the next stop is Lagos — Lagos, the South West super-mart and the crown jewel of the Nigerian economy.

    And all the arguments that compelled the federal ruling party’s debacle of March 28, also compel the Lagos ruling party’s triumph on April 11.

    But first, some dues.  In “So long, Goodluck” (March 24), this column hinted at President Goodluck Jonathan’s impending defeat and, likening him to the departing expatriate that spitefully defecated on his seat, feared the president would exit in a huff.

    Regular readers also bear witness that Ripples had always opposed President Jonathan, with the sole exception of his aborted attempt to rename the University of Lagos (UNILAG), Moshood Abiola University, Lagos (MAUL).

    Given the cavalier conceit that suggested Unilag was too “tush” for  MKO’s “bush” name, even if the university gladly enjoyed his charity in the past, and the democratic republic owing its essence to MKO’s martyrdom, Ripples insisted President Jonathan, as visitor to the university, reserved the right to rename Nigeria’s first federal-owned university, subject to amending extant laws, of course.

    It is from this point of eternal critiquing that Ripples happily eats crow on how President Jonathan gracefully conceded defeat.  His defeat acceptance speech, both in rendition and sentiments, would appear his best ever.  The great irony: Jonathan sounded more presidential in defeat than he ever sounded throughout his troubled tenure!

    This beatification does not, of course, wipe clean the president’s dangerous pre-election manoeuvres: on the explosive fronts of combustible religion, divisive regions and ultra-dangerous ethnic antipathies.  But that Jonathan knew when he was licked, and pulled off a dignified bow-out was, indeed, a thing of cheer.

    On that score, he towers above former President Olusegun Obasanjo, his estranged godfather turned bitter enemy, who executed a most frenetic dance after Jonathan’s unhorsing.

    But it is to Nigeria’s hefty luck that Jonathan abandoned Obasanjo’s do-or-die ethos just at the nick of time!  That, of course, was because Attahiru Jega was no Maurice Iwu (President Obasanjo’s remorseless election fixer); and, for that matter, when the chips were down, Jonathan was no Obasanjo!

    By conceding defeat in an election he could not have won, President Jonathan hall-marked the long-awaited transition from civil rule to democracy in Nigeria’s 4th Republic.  By the defeat of Nigeria’s ruling party — arrogance, warts, hubris and all — the Nigerian voter would never again crouch before an extant order!  Welcome, sweet democracy!

    It is in this new democratic spirit that Ripples navigates the April 11 gubernatorial and state legislature elections in Lagos — and other South West states of Ogun and Oyo, though no thanks to past electoral heists and judicially reclaimed mandates, only legislative elections would hold in Osun, Ondo and Ekiti states.

    Ripples’ grouse with Jonathan and his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was simple: Nigeria needed the very best; and service delivery at the centre, despite all the din and threat, was far from the best.

    In 1999, we knew what Nigeria was.  In 1999 too, we knew what Lagos was.

    Between 1999 and now, Abuja had embroiled itself in so much chaos that all it can show is net-retardation, taking down so many states with it.  No thanks to shambolic management of the Federation Account, most states, not excepting the Federal Government itself, cannot pay monthly salaries.

    Even humble but rapid infrastructure-developing states, like the State of Osun, have taken a terrible hit, from the Jonathan Presidency’s terrible mismanagement.  Osun today, therefore, stands a mere shadow of itself; with the freezing of many futuristic roads, a gargoyle of what might have been, had the state received its due from the federal purse!

    Lagos, on the other hand, despite being in political opposition, had not languished in its 1999 mountain of refuse, arrested growth and generally bad infrastructure.

    Instead, thanks to the Bola Tinubu-led order from Alliance for Democracy (AD), to Action Congress (AC), to Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and to All Progressives’ Congress (APC), a renascent Lagos has come into its own; developing decent infrastructure within its comparatively puny resources — in comparison to the humongous but largely wasted resources at the centre — secured for itself financial independence and, in 16 short years, rose from being among the dirtiest cities on the globe to one of the cleanest in the West African sub-region.

    What is more?  The gospel according to rapid infrastructure development, driven by focused governance, spread to Ekiti (under Kayode Fayemi, which, unfortunately Ayo Fayose is busy undoing now), Ogun (under Ibikunle Amosun), Oyo (under Abiola Ajimobi), Osun (under Rauf Aregbesola) and even Edo in the South-South (under Adams Oshiomhole).

    Indeed, the stark difference, in infrastructure development, between Fayemi’s Ekiti (one of the poorest Nigerian states) and Mimiko’s oil-bearing Ondo (the richest in the South West, outside Lagos), shows the difference in contrasting vision.

    Besides, the South West-North West political entente that drove the APC historic presidential win of March 28 issued largely from the same Lagos thinking.

    That is why it is preposterous, nay fraudulent, to suggest that because there has been Change at the centre, Change must be in Lagos — or, for that matter, in Oyo or Ogun State.

    If Lagos, even under the most inclement of political weathers, had got it relatively right; and its success has influenced the change at the centre, why would Lagosians want to vote the dying federal (dis)order?

    Akinwunmi Ambode comes from the Lagos camp, whose idea has made the difference.  Jimi Agbaje comes from a discredited federal order, that not only ruined itself, but nearly ruined Nigeria. Can anyone truly imagine four more years of a PDP federal government?

    Let Lagos, and the rest of the South West in Oyo, Ogun, Ekiti, Osun and Ondo vote a new federal order they have helped to midwife.  That is the most logical way to work the work, before savouring the sure prosperity, to follow from sure hard work.

     

    Adieu, Pa Paul Oni Meduna

    The Oni siblings, on April 2 and 3, at Iyamerin-Okeri in Kogi State, treated friends, well wishers and guests to a most befitting funeral rites for their patriarch, Pa Paul Oni Meduna.  And boy, was it a funeral to remember!

    Pa Meduna must be smiling in his grave.  Reason?  Given pre-election tension, it was a journey to dread, into the bowels of Kogi, the southern swathe of the North. What if the election had gone nasty?

    But it became a celebration of newfound democracy — with the officiating priest, at the funeral service, saying the locals voted with anger borne out of hunger!  Sweet indeed, is the memory of the just!  Rest in peace Pa Meduna, and congratulations, the Oni siblings: Sanya, Tope, Toso and Comfort.

  • Let the healing begin

    Let the healing begin

    March 28, 2015 like June 12, 1993 will go down in history as the day Nigerians decided to take their destiny in their hands. As it was about 22 years ago, Nigerians turned out in their millions to cast their votes for a president of their choice to lead the nation, but unlike the 1993 experience, their votes did count this time around.

    After a 72-hour wait, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) announced to an expectant nation the result of the election and General Muhammadu Buhari (rtd) of the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) was declared winner.

    But before the final votes were counted and with one state yet to be  declared, President Goodluck Jonathan, the candidate of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) did the unexpected by calling his main opponent, Buhari, on phone, to not only concede defeat, but also congratulate him on his well deserved victory. And with just that one phone call, President Jonathan saved Nigeria from an imminent catastrophe and thus elevated himself to the status of a statesman.

    Prior to the election, the handwriting was clearly visible on the wall that Jonathan and his PDP were heading towards a crushing defeat, but not a few Nigerians were afraid that the president and his supporters might not accept the result and could resort to strong arm tactics to remain in power.

    The fear of a major crisis erupting after the election had been heightened by provocative comments being made by Jonathan core loyalists, particularly by his Ijaw kinsmen and two renegade governors from the south west in the run up to the election to the effect that it was either victory for Jonathan or war. The conduct of Jonathan’s agent at the counting centre in Abuja, Elder Orubebe did nothing to calm the fear. But the president rose to the occasion to allay the fear with that phone call and the concession speech that later followed. As a colleague rightly put it, that was the only good thing that Jonathan has done since he became president and it will surely define his six-year presidency. I agree and also join millions of Nigerians to thank him for that. But whether that would be enough to wipe out his sins to Nigerians is left for history to decide.

    Part of those sins was the way he divided Nigerians along ethnic and religious lines just for him to secure enough votes to retain the presidency. It is on record that the 2015 presidential campaign was the most divisive in the history of electioneering in Nigeria and Dr Goodluck Jonathan, his wife Patience and the PDP were largely responsible for this.

    To get the Igbos votes in Lagos and the rest of the south west, Jonathan pitched the Igbos against their host community, the Yoruba, urging them to come together and vote for him and the PDP which they did. The president actively promoted his candidature as that representing the Christians just to get their votes and he did, in large numbers especially in the south east and some states in the north with large Christian majority. No politician has ever done this in the past and if truth must be told, Nigeria is now sharply divided along these lines no thanks to Jonathan’s ambition.

    Now the Igbos living in Yoruba land are being regarded as traitors in the house by their host just because they ignored glaring cases of incompetence on the part of Jonathan and voted for him on account of him being a Christian and from the old eastern region. Nobody here (Yoruba land) would have bothered if they voted the way they did had the president not prompted them. Yoruba pride themselves as being liberal and expect their guests to behave the same way. When they voted for Jonathan in 2011 and fought for him to become acting president two years earlier when then President Yar’Adua was indisposed, they did so based on conviction and not merely because he is a Christian or a fellow southerner. This sharp division if not quickly corrected could lead to a larger problem politically between Igbos and Yoruba in future. This is why leaders from the two prominent ethnic groups must come together quickly to address the ugly development. Igbos and Yoruba have been living peacefully together in Yoruba land for centuries and on no account should the Jonathan issue be allowed to divide them or cause trouble between them. President Jonathan who caused it must play a prominent role in healing the wounds, just as the incoming President Mohammadu Buhari must initiate programmes and policies that would integrate all Nigerians wherever they reside irrespective of their religion, ethnicity or gender. Buhari has a big role to play here especially in the north, where in most parts the Christians were seen as supporters of Jonathan. Most importantly, religious leaders must also preach peace, oneness and integration to their followers. I don’t know whether some Islamic leaders did preach against a Christian president to their congregation, but there were instances of some Christian clerics preaching and vowing that Nigeria would never be ruled by a Muslim and urging their congregation to pray against terrorism, both indirectly ordering a no vote for Buhari, a Muslim and suggesting he was a supporter of terror/Boko Haram. Utterances like this have far reaching consequences, even beyond the elections. Now that Buhari has been elected, what would these clerics tell heir congregation and how do they expect them to relate with the new administration.

    Even after the election of Buhari, some politicians on the other side in spite of President Jonathan’s appeal, are still holding on to the pre-election propaganda that the President-elect plan to Islamise Nigeria. I was shocked to read in the newspapers the day after Buhari’s victory a statement by former Anambra State governor Chief Ezeife beating his chest that Igbos voted overwhelmingly for Jonathan because they believe he is one of them (meaning a Christian) and to forestall planned Islamization of the country. When people like him say things like this it is irritating and annoying. These are people who should know and indeed knows but have instead chosen to mislead their people. People like him are not needed in the present dispensation and I am sure the Igbos would note that. We don’t need leaders that would keep promoting the divisions amongst us; we need leaders who can unite us, leaders who would think Nigeria first and rally us all behind project Nigeria. Buhari has that opportunity with his election and he cannot afford to fail. We are in a last chance bus and everybody must be on board to ensure a safe journey.

    Why did we elect Buhari and not Jonathan? Nigerians, tired of widespread corruption that typified Jonathan’s presidency believe that Buhari, with a track record of incorruptibility would clean the system of corruption and end the corrupt tendencies inherent in our officials/leaders. As a former military man, Nigerians expect him to restore discipline into our nation as well as restore our pride as the leader of Africa and the champion of the Blackman. Nigerians expect him to make our country work again, reinvigorate our economy, give us electricity, repair and improve on our decaying infrastructure, return quality to our education, make our military the best in Africa again, and restore our lost glory. But these cannot be achieved in an atmosphere of division that currently pervades the polity hence the urgent need to heal all the wounds created by the acrimonious campaigns that preceded that historic presidential election.

  • Verdict 2015: The week after

    Verdict 2015: The week after

    One of the most improbable transformations wrought by President Goodluck Jonathan’s Transformative Agenda centered on Dr Jonathan himself and occurred in the twilight of   his tenure.

    I have in mind Dr Jonathan’s brief telephone call to the APC candidate, General Muhammadu Buhari, at a tension-soaked moment in the final stages of the collation of the election returns to concede defeat and to invite him to a meeting to kick-start the transition.

    Nothing had prepared the public for it.

    A PDP stalwart, Jonathan confidant, proxy, and former cabinet minister, Godsday Orubebe,   had barely an hour earlier held up proceedings at the collation centre, in a show of petulant contumacy seen around the world,  just when all the indications were that Dr Jonathan was going down to certain defeat.

    Rather ominously, Orubebe was assisted in this desperate enterprise by retired Colonel Tunde Bello-Fadile, a director in the office of the National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki.  Whether Bello-Fadile was there representing national security interests or as an attorney for the PDP, his presence was dramatic illustration of how thin the line separating the security of the state from the electoral fortunes of the PDP had become under Dr Jonathan’s administration.

    Ebullient as ever, Femi Fani-Kayode, the Jonathan campaign’s publicity chief, was declaring boldly how his private set of facts indicated that his principal had won outright in 23 states and out-polled Buhari by no fewer than 3 million votes.

    Not in the least daunted by the disaster unfolding before them—or more likely alarmed by it– other      operatives of the Jonathan Campaign, citing unspecified violations, demanded not a review but outright cancellation of the poll’s results in seven states.

    Through all this, the word was that Dr Jonathan was confident he would win, if he had not already done so.  Among the PDP faithful, the belief that they had carried the day was bolstered by an announcement that Musiliu Obanikoro had congratulated Dr Jonathan on his emphatic election victory.

    Obanikoro, who had lost his bid for the PDP gubernatorial ticket in Lagos, had recently been named junior minister in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, by way of compensation.  His motive was dubious and self-serving.

    But if his example caught on and just a few dollarised traditional rulers were further dollarised to embark on a pilgrimage of solidarity to Aso Rock to pledge their unflinching loyalty to the Jonathan administration and its laudable, unprecedented, and far-sighted Transformative Agenda, the trickle might soon turn into a cascade, and it would be “June 12” all over again.

    A cascade was in fact rendered all the more probable by reports of raging discord in many a traditional ruler’s domain.  The paramount ruler, who had been given a sack stuffed with U.S. dollars in the presence of the royal court, carried on for days as if nothing had happened, until the lesser royals were constrained to ask ever so delicately:  Kábíyésì, tíbí nkó?

    Loose translation:  Your majesty, what became of that package?

    Whereupon Kábíyésì, feigning innocent forgetfulness, retreated into his boudoir and emerged some ten minutes later with seven bulging, sealed envelopes, one for each lesser royal.. The sheer heft of the envelopes sent not a few of them into rapturous reverie:  Just imagine how many young brides they could add to the royal harem, and how many new cars they could buy in the Naira economy.

    And they were about to render grateful obeisance to Kábíyésì when a yelp shattered the solemnity of the moment.  It had issued from one of the lesser royals as he crashed to the floor from his chair.  A heart attack, perhaps, occasioned by the sudden wealth he had just come into?

    He had opened the package and found that it was stuffed N200 bills.

    His experience could well set off a pilgrimage to Aso Rock by traditional rulers in search of dollar compensation.

    But I digress.

    Nothing, as I was saying, nothing had indicated that Dr Jonathan would concede.  Everything that had gone before suggested powerfully that he would hang in there and hang tough, doing or condoning anything that could secure political advantage.

    Had he not waged or condoned the vilest and most divisive electioneering campaign in Nigeria’s history, setting Christians against Muslims, soldiers and the police against civilians, and some nationalities against others?   Had his wife not supported him all the way, winning for him and his cause at every campaign stop a growing throng of implacable opponents by her habitual resort to coarse abuse, incitement and conduct most unbecoming?

    The record does not show that Dr Jonathan remonstrated with her or his aides to temper their incendiary language and provocative utterances.

    It was therefore most unlikely that he would concede under any circumstance.  Even if he was minded to, the cabal of which he was a prisoner would have none of it.  The PDP, as one of its leading lights Iyiola Omisore was reported to have said at one of the sessions where the strategy for rigging the last gubernatorial election in Ekiti was perfected, “The PDP is nothing without the Presidency.”

    But to everyone’s surprise, and to the discomfiture of the cabal aforementioned, he conceded.

    It has been said that the concession was literally wrung from him by retired General Abdulsalami Abubakar, acting at the behest of a consortium of African leaders and the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States.

    Whether Dr Jonathan made it voluntarily or it was wrung from him, history will record that the concession pulled Nigeria back from a looming abyss.  And in the popular consciousness, that singular act transformed him to a statesman of the first rank, nonpareil patriot, and one of the finest and noblest persons of this age.

    Considering the desperation, the divisiveness and the pusillanimity with which he conducted his campaign, and indeed how he has governed Nigeria in the past six years, the praise is in my opinion overwrought.  But it would be churlish to deny that, at the crucial moment, he bowed graciously to the popular will.

    He could have refused to concede, believing with his aides that a formula could still be found that would enable him hold on to power.  He could have decided that, if he must go down, he would   take with him the boat and the crew and the passengers. Between these two options he could have pursued any number of alternatives.

    But none of them would have given Nigeria the new sense of purpose, the return of optimism and the possibility of renewal that now perfuse the land. If he ends his tenure on this note, it will be said of him, paraphrasing the Bard, that nothing became him in office like the manner of his leaving it.

    Meanwhile, I gather that Omisore’s perceptive remark that the “the PDP is nothing without the Presidency” is set to become the ideology of its most desperate faction, with Omisore himself set to lead by personal example.

  • Waiting for Verdict 2015

    Waiting for Verdict 2015

    Unless you belong in the group of the expatriate Nigerian here who told me matter-of-factly the other day that Nigeria was “no longer relevant” to his life, monitoring the returns from last Saturday’s presidential and presidential and House of Representatives election was almost as anxiety-filled as the experience of any candidate engaging in the same activity.

    It was like waiting – more likely sitting on the edge of your chair in the family area of a hospital  or pacing up and down or feigning to be reading some recondite material — waiting for the doctor to emerge with news that the surgery or delivery was a complete success.

    To be sure, you had not sold off landed property nor borrowed money from the bank or from the neighbourhood loan shark  and invested it in a political race in the expectation that winning would enable you pay off your indebtedness in just your first year in office and then live happily ever after.  There was no fear that if the gamble failed, you might be ruined forever.

    Still, as you waited for the election returns to trickle in, you were almost as tense, as frazzled, and as restless as those who had staked their all in it, hoping for a particular outcome.

    Will it be a resounding vote for more of the same, for continuity?   That was essentially what the Jonathan camp was offering. But it never used that term, for obvious reasons.  If it did, well might the person being importuned ask:  Continuity of what?

    Even the most fork-tongued operative in its ranks will be flummoxed by the question.  Continuity of drift, dilatoriness, making peace with corruption, insecurity?  Continuity of delusion of grandeur and parade of false affluence, of vacuous claims of achievement, of tinkering around the edges of fundamental issues?

    Continuity of what?

    Far better to speak of transformation, or of a Transformative Agenda.  Even here, it is the lives of the agents and their cronies that have been transformed above all else.

    But you do not immediately run into a head wind when you wave the banner of Transformation.  You can at least point to the patched-up railways, as a result of which parents would no longer have to take their children all the way to England just to see what a rain looks like, as Herself the Dame of the Rock, Patience Faka Jonathan, was obliged to do several years ago.

    And very soon, when all state capitals will have been linked by rail, no child will have to do anything more stressful than just looking out of the window of his home or school room to see a sleek bullet train streaking past

    You can also point to the refurbished airports where the toilets actually flush, reel off figure after figure attesting to the superabundance in food production, the great culinary breakthrough in making bread from cassava flour, and the award of contracts for re-building the school from which the Chibok 219 were abducted and the privatised power plants what will in several years render generating sets as archaic as ceramic oil-and-wick lamp.

    You might create the illusion of transformation and even succeed in selling it as the real thing to some people, not all of them gullible.  So why talk about continuity and give the game away?

    In the epochal contest, would the loud, vibrant and insistent chorus of Change drown out the desperate and increasingly weary riff for transformation, which is nothing but more of the same by another name? A catchy term, Change; seductive even, but what does it really mean at bottom?  What will it consist in?

    Those who came up with the term have had a far easier job of explaining it than have those who have been hiding behind Transformation to peddle Continuity as Nigeria’s best hope.

    Arresting the drift, putting a dent on the pervasive corruption – beg your pardon, stealing; restoring faith in the institutions of governance, and hope in the present and in the future; putting an end to business as usual: these would be indications of the will to change, if not of actual change.

    So, would the day go to the usually recumbent incumbent who, following the postponement of Election Day by six weeks, finally roused himself to action when he saw defeat staring him in the face and launched a marathon sprint with the energy few knew he possessed, and a desperation that few thought he could muster?

    Or would it go to the lean, ascetic, angular challenger who, in a curious reversal of roles, stayed above the fray with dignified calm even as the other side suborned the instruments under and even outside its jurisdiction to assail his character and his integrity and his person and his principal associates in an orgy of demonisation that went well over the top, even by Nigeria’s exorbitant standards?

    I was mulling over these and other concerns when around midday here – early evening Nigerian time –I got a phone call, literally from the ringside.  Another debacle was in the making, the caller said.

    Stunned by the tide that seemed set to sweep them away, top officials of the governing party are frantically scrambling for a formula by which they can have the presidential election declared inconclusive, thus paving the way for their favourite deus ex machina, an Interim Government.They are pivoting, he added, on the problems that had come up with the use of Electronic Card Reader, and on new or old re-worked charges that INEC Chair Attahiru Jega was irredeemably compromised by his secret dealings with the Opposition.

    For clarity, I turned once again, as I usually do at moments like this, to one of the wisest and most knowledgeable persons in this clime.  His response was at once calming and alarming. GEJ is sinking.  The important thing is to make sure he doesn’t take the boat and the crew and the passengers with him.

    At this writing Monday evening Nigerian time, fears that the election results will be doctored have not subsided but have in fact moved the British and American authorities to issue strong warnings against recourse to such shabby tactics this time around.  The fears are grounded, at least in part, on Femi Fani-Kayode’s claim to possession of private data indicating that the PDP is well in the lead.

    From the official and unofficial but reliable figures I have seen, the indications are that General Muhammadu Buhari appears to be cruising unstoppably to a historic victory.

    But no matter how the election turns out eventually, it is already a new day in Nigerian politics.

    Foremost among the architects of this improbable conjuncture would have to be the tenacious Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, who took the leading part in forging the strategic political re-alignment that has created this new day and new era in Nigerian politics.

    He could not have wished for a greater present on his 63rd birthday.

    Since emerging APC candidate, General Buhari has at every point carried on like a president-in-waiting, a picture of regal imperturbability even when they painted him ceaselessly as the devil incarnate.  His running mate, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, evolved seamlessly from academic and technocrat to rousing and engaging political figure.

    Chief John Odigie-Oyegun’s steadying hands kept the APC in good temper, and as a party with a different way of doing business.  Not for him the bluster and the boisterousness of Tom Ikimi who fortunately left the party in a huff when he lost his chairmanship bid.

    Even under grave provocation, INEC chair Attahiru Jega displayed calm resolution, a picture of grace under extreme pressure.

    It was as if the more discriminating section of the attentive audience, for whom enough was already too much, took a collective resolve to transform itself into bus-conductors and to demand in one united voice:  Change.

    No matter the outcome of the election, its voice can never be ignored again.

  • On the verge of history

    On the verge of history

    After all said and done, Nigerians went to the polls on March 28, to elect their next President and Commander –In-Chief, as well as members of the National Assembly. And the election went smoothly in most parts of the country save in Rivers State where violence took centre stage.

    Apart from the violence that characterized the exercise in Rivers State, there were doubts as to whether voting actually took place as the two major parties have different positions on the issue. While the ruling party at the centre, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) wants the world to believe that elections took place in Rivers State on March 28, the All Progressives Congress, the party in power in the state insists that no voting took place.

    The election umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has however gone ahead to declare the PDP winner amidst the dispute, suggesting that the body was satisfied that voting actually took place. But time will tell whether this INEC decision will stand. Apart from Rivers State, the election was also disputed in Akwa Ibom State where the APC is also crying foul.

    Not a few Nigerians are worried as to the credibility of the March 28 election considering the calls for cancellation of the exercise in these two states. Rivers and Akwa Ibom states are traditionally the stronghold of the PDP in the south/south region where the party usually gets millions of votes, always large enough to tilt the balance of victory in its favour. But with the caliber of people leading the opposition APC in the two states, the PDP is not expected to have a clean sweep as usual. So, if the PDP is claiming near 99 per cent victory in these two states, then something must be wrong somewhere, especially against the backdrop of the opposition’s insistence that there were massive irregularities in the course of the exercise.

    I don’t intend to dwell much on the Rivers and Akwa Ibom issues for now as I don’t want what happened or did not happen there to remove from the fact that Nigerians last Saturday proved the doubters wrong about our ability to conduct ourselves in an orderly and peaceful manner when it comes to general elections.

    In a replay of what happened across the country during the June 12, 1993 presidential election, Nigerians, last Saturday trooped out in their millions to the various polling units to cast their votes for the candidate of their choice. In most places, there were no police men or any other security personnel around and yet the crowd of electorate comported themselves very well.

    Where I voted, it was a friendly atmosphere throughout as voters supporting different parties/candidates mixed freely and discussed as friends, even sharing drinks while awaiting the exercise to commence.  This was a far cry from what was expected judging by what was in the media and what the politicians were saying during their campaigns in the run up to the elections. The hate campaigns being churned out by politicians before the election were enough to cause concern and fuel the fear of violence on elections day.

    But Nigerians put the politicians to shame by their largely peaceful conduct at the polls and this calls for commendation. By their conduct last Saturday Nigerians have proven to the world, especially our politicians that left alone, we can organize ourselves without their meddlesomeness. I’ve often said it that too much government interference in our lives is the cause of most of the problems plaguing us as a nation. Without government interference or instigation by politicians, Nigerians generally relate well with each other, but when these people come between them and then the issue of ethnicity and religion come to the fore.

    In the run up to these elections, President Goodluck Jonathan will go down on record as one leader who used religion and ethnicity to divide Nigerians just to gain advantage over his opponent. In the South west, especially in Lagos, he used ethnicity to rally the non-indigenes, especially the Igbos to his side. This no doubt has sown mistrust in the minds of the indigenes against the non-indigenes, and the only harvest that could come out of this is further polarization, which will not augur well for peaceful co-existence between these two great ethnic groups.

    During his campaigns, Jonathan presented himself as a candidate of the Christians almost to the total exclusion of the Muslims among his supporters. He also promoted himself as a candidate of the south fighting against the north. These are dangerous paths to tread and I wonder how he intends to rectify the damage his campaigns have caused to our fragile unity if he scales the hurdle and returns as president and commander in chief. Did I hear you say Amen or God forbid?

    If Jonathan returns, it would be a herculean task for him to repair this damage. It would be better for him and the country not to return so that we can start on a very clean slate. The economy is in bad shape; our unity is shaking, and confidence in government badly eroded. We need another leader to restore these things. These are just my thoughts and things could end up that way or the status quo remains and Jonathan returns. This presidential election is so dicey that the result could go either way, but whichever way it goes, kudos must go to the Nigerian electorate who defied all the odds to cast their votes last Saturday. We are gradually coming of age. How great it would be if we can chase a sitting government out of power through our votes; that would be history in this country and a right signal to the rest of Africa that power resides with the people. But will the power that be allow that to happen here? I doubt. But can it be done? Yes.

    Regardless of who comes out top in this presidential contest, the next president of Nigeria come May 29 has his work already cut out. How he goes about it would be a function of his understanding of the situation. If he comes in as an ethnic champion, then we are doomed. What is required of our next president is to think as a Nigeria and do everything in the best interest of Nigeria and Nigerians. And his choice of men and women to join his cabinet will tell us a lot about the direction he intends to take us. The way the Senate handles the screening of his ministerial nominees would also tell us the kind of National Assembly to expect in the next four years, post May 29, 2015.

    However, to set the next administration on a sound footing, INEC must deal with the issues concerning the conduct of the elections in Rivers and Akwa Ibom States with clear head and in the best interest of our democracy.

  • Abobaku!

    The Yoruba concept of the Abobaku (literally, “fated to die with the king”) came into full dramatic flourish with Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman.

    The play is the tragic tale of the Elesin, the pampered king’s horseman who savoured, to the full, the lollies of his calling; but balked at his grim duty — dying with the king!

    Though the Elesin sought comfort in the British colonialist, Simon Pilkings’s decision that ritual suicide to “follow the king” was “barbaric”, the Elesin eventually killed himself after his son, riled by his father’s “cowardice”, committed suicide to save the “family honour”.

    Elesin’s son was a medical doctor trained in the West — and the big irony was that though he had acquired western exposure, the African ethos in him would appear to run deeper than his father’s.  That was double tragedy for one — just because someone tried to evade grim responsibility.

    The concept of the Abobaku has come in handy with the behaviour of some top political elite in the South West, in the build up to the March 28 presidential election.

    Of the lot, the grim fate of Segun Mimiko, the Ondo governor, is the most dramatic; for despite his huffing-and-puffing, in support of President Goodluck Jonathan’s second term bid, the president lost in Ondo State.

    Dr. Mimiko’s war haemorrhaging include, apart from the presidential tally, two senatorial seats (out of three) to the All Progressives Congress (APC) and five House of Representatives seats (out of nine).

    For the South West coordinator of the Jonathan presidential campaign, that was quite some bleeding.  Even more: for an ambitious political personage who even postures at some political force in Yorubaland, if not some alternative Yoruba leadership on the political front, it would appear morning yet on political decline day.

    In the words of Thomas Malthus, the Mimiko defeat, given its narrow margin (299, 889 to 251, 368) may well be “arithmetical”.  But whether it would signify a geometrical decline in Mimiko’s political fortune is buried in the womb of time.  For now, however, the Mimiko magic and cunning appear waning.

    Still, Governor Mimiko is a politician.  If he “dies” with his principal, he knows, unlike Soyinka’s Elesin, that he rightfully commits “ritual suicide”, in exchange for the rare political lollies he had savoured.  Satanically noble!

    Junking his Labour Party (LP) — to be sure, an act of political treachery — for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), after all came with great benefits.  For one, the Jonathan presidency gifted him the Ondo PDP structure, pitting him against the PDP old guard.  As it would later turn out, that would work against his success.

    For another, he landed the billion naira South West presidential campaign coordination job — surely another poisoned chalice.  Again, between him and the PDP old guard — the very same that stole his LP gubernatorial vote, under the ancien regime of the late Olusegun Agagu — opened another battle front.  The old guard feel they more eminently deserve the coordination job.  Mimiko himself has a swagger and gubernatorial chip on the shoulder.  Result: working at cross purposes, which leads to brilliant failure.

    Besides, Mimiko as political schizophrenic is quite an exciting sight!  By wholesale taking LP to PDP, he became the proverbial bat — neither bird nor mammal.  His old LP comrade regard him with contempt.  The PDP he wants to take over regard him with resent.  Something, of course, would have to give.  That would seem to explain why the all-mighty South West coordinator failed to win his own polling unit for his principal!

    Still, Mimiko is only a politician who, win or lose, is working hard for the money!  Pray, what can otherwise respectable Yoruba, particularly the Afenifere elders, say on their Goodluck Jonathan campaign, curling up snugly in Mimiko’s pseudo-paradise?

    Would Jonathan pass as the most brilliant and incisive president Nigeria has ever had?  Would he pass as the president who has done the most for the Yoruba nationality, in the context of a federal Nigeria?  Would he pass as a moral Palladium, of which Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the avatar of these elderly Awoists, would eternally be proud of?

    If the answers to these questions are negative, why would the likes of Pa Ayo Adebanjo, Chief Olu Falae (though a latter-day Awoist), Dr. Femi Okunrounmu and Pa Reuben Fasonranti, the factional Afenifere leader, clamber on the Mimiko gravy train, with hardly any regard for their hard earned reputations?

    Why would they, by sheer guilt by association, be mixed up in the atavistic display of Gani Adams’s Odua People’s Congress (OPC), in its shameful invasion of Lagos streets, on behalf of President Jonathan?  If Adams, with his rather limited exposure and exaggerated self-importance, does not understand the full implication of his actions, particularly the oil-pipeline-in-exchange-for-muscled-protest, should we say the elders too do not?

    Of course, their reason is the Jonathan pledge to, should he win, “implement” the recommendations of the National Conference that he staged, but which recommendations had been gathering dust in his office, until the season of the elections.

    But how primed is Jonathan to do that?  The implementation requires constitutional amendments; and such amendments require both inputs from the National Assembly and also no less than two-thirds of the legislatures of the 36 states?

    No prize for guessing right: the real reason is these gladiators, young and old, callow or wizened, are united in hate and spite against Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the APC national leader.  Not only that: so searing is the spite that they appear to have assumed Tinubu’s progress in politics automatically translates into their own retrogress.

    Well, they are entitled to their choices.  But there is something patently unwise in cutting your nose to spite your face.  You still get to bear the brunt of the ensuing ugliness!

    For starters, the Afenifere grandees, particularly those the late Chief Bola Ige used to call the  Ijebu Mafia among them, already bear vicarious, if not real responsibility, for electing into the Senate the controversial Buruji Kashamu, an alleged fugitive from US law.

    Now, politics is not about electing popes or saints.  But it was exactly because Awo insisted on such rigorous standards, of looking out for saints in the public space, that Awoists developed their swagger in Yoruba politics!  So, what would Awo say from his grave by his living apostles’ crass lowering of their own rigorous ethos — and for political convenience as cheap as hating the guts of another?

    But back to Mimiko, the chief Abobaku!  If after all these his political fortunes head south, it would only teach the lesson that there is a limit to spite, particularly in politics.  Since his split with Tinubu, his chief strategy has been intrigue, cunning and spite, to corral primordial advantage.  But alas!  How long can that last in the politics, which is a marathon?

    The eventual victim though, is the Yoruba motherland.  A land once known for quality representation in parliament is now open to some riff-raff, simply because some leaders go on ego-tripping.

    If the Yoruba must maintain their famed sophistication, though their political parties may differ, there must be a consensus on quality.