The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • So long, Goodluck

    So long, Goodluck

    “B’Oyinbo nlo nlu, a su s’aga” [A fleeing expatriate defecates on his seat] — Yoruba saying

    Almost like yesterday, the 16 April 2011 presidential election.  “It takes patience to get Goodluck,” punned a voter in the scorching sun, in a Lagos voting precinct.

    Neither Patience nor Goodluck now appears worth all that trouble!

    Not long after the deed, Goodluck Jonathan having romped to victory, it was standard fare to crow, not without a mighty sense of pride and fulfilment: “We voted Jonathan, not PDP”.

    Again, neither Jonathan nor PDP has proved a good deal!

    Why, not a few back then christened their new-borns Goodluck!  It was the sunny and halcyon days of Goodluck Jonathan, the adored president of the Federal Republic.

    Not anymore!

    Ripples wished he could swagger and say, “I told you so!”

    But that would be insensitive — not after Chibok and the missing 219; and Buni-Yadi and the doomed 29: school girls and boys consumed by terror, while the commander-in-chief practically dosed; the ill-fated Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) 16, youths that perished in legitimate search of jobs, because the sitting government could not curtail soulless racketeering; and civil servants nationwide, federal and state, now tasting the bitter novelty of salary yo-yo, because the Jonathan Presidency could not account for Nigeria’s oil receipts.  That has led to astronomical slashes in states’ monthly Federation Account takings, without any cogent reason.

    Still, yours truly saw through President Jonathan, even when he was Prince Charming — and raised alarm.

    Late 2010 in New York, the new President Jonathan was asked: will you contest in 2011 [given the circumstances of President Umaru Yar’Adua’s exit and the North’s bitterness about its loss of power]?

    Simple question.  But Jonathan launched into a rigmarole: well, I might still contest as vice-president; I might contest as president; I might just conclude Yar’Adua’s tenure and quit; in fact, I’ve not really thought about it — I’m still busy with my current assignment!

    Ripples saw through the sophistry; spotted a devious power schemer and raised an alarm.  Even when people were celebrating Jonathan’s “pan-Nigeria mandate”, Ripples declared it was no more than a regional gang-up, which conspiracy produced a “pan-Nigeria mandate of Southern Nigeria and the Middle Belt.”

    Indeed, Lagosians and other southerners now howling about a disastrous Jonathan should own up to their own share of the mass conspiracy that created him.  By, for southern solidarity,  acquiescing to the expedient scrapping of electoral zoning, they joyfully created the monster that would later gobble them.

    Glorious irony: former President Olusegun Obasanjo, chief and happy cheer-leader of that expediency, despite himself being a zoning beneficiary, has become the bitter jeer-leader of Jonathan!

    But just as Gen. Obasanjo, in 1979, handed Second Republic President, Alhaji Shehu Shagari, a legitimacy grave in the twelve-two-thirds controversy, which Chief Richard Akinjide, SAN, baked, Chief Obasanjo handed Jonathan a serious legitimacy crisis in the zoning controversy, with a cheated core North screaming blue murder.

    Still, the Jonathan debacle was at best a blissful marriage between the duplicity of the power elite and Jonathan’s own crass opportunism.

    Because he had a legitimacy baggage — the guilty are afraid, after all! — Jonathan fretted and lingered, while Boko Haram made hay, thinking he was appeasing the North.  That way, he thoroughly demystified the once and supremely proud Nigerian military.  A commander-in-chief never ended a more tragic fall guy!

    In terms of concrete-and-mortar, Jonathan never achieved much, never mind all the crowing about antiquated coaches and pre-historic rail tracks, that his lobby credits him with.

    But it is in the area of intangibles, democratic, normative and lawful, that Jonathan has proved an unmitigated disaster, almost without any redemptive value.

    Indeed, in both governance and politics, Jonathan brought the Presidency to nadirs unimagined; and manically worked — and is still working — a divided Nigeria; and wilfully creating mutually loathing Nigerians, along explosive religious and ethnic lines; more than any other government in Nigeria’s painful history.

    Besides, though he boasts a PhD, his grasp of issues is pitiably childish and pedestrian.  The president parrots, in 2015, his e-payment anti-corruption “achievement”.  But e-payment, for the Lagos State government, has been standard fare since 2002!

    The less said about Dame Patience Faka, the presidential spouse, the better.  Suffice it to say she has brought that usually classy office to great disrepute by her gross insensitivity, galloping lexical challenge and unapologetic vulgarity.  All these will return, with a vengeance, to wreck her husband on March 28.

    In presidential imaging, Jonathan also plumbed new lows.  Proof? Just listen to his reckless presidential canvassers, sounding off like all-muscle-no-brain bouncers: Edwin Clark, Ayodele Fayose, Doyin Okupe, Femi Fani-Kayode, Olisa Metuh, Fredrick Fasehun, Gani Adams and Dame the Game, herself!  Now, garnish all that with Jonathan’s atavistic crusaders: MASSOB, OPC and Niger Delta militants.  Pray, how can a president sworn to law and order, court so much anarchy, for wishful electoral gains?

    Mention institutional wrecks, and Hurricane Jona has been hyper-active, starting with his ruling Peoples Democratic Party.  Despite the bluff and bluster, a hugely divided PDP goes into the polls — and even that is a rump, following the split and exit of the Governors-5.  Even then, a paranoid Jonathan still subverted his party’s nomination process:  PDP claimed, even after aspirants had paid the due fees, that it only printed one presidential nomination form — and the president had got it!

    What other areas has Jonathan’s locusts not eaten: respect for electoral laws — which Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) brazenly breached, organising pro-Jonathan rallies, thus undermining INEC?

    Or, the PDP shameful campaign to prematurely sack Prof. Attahiru Jega, the INEC chair, for having the temerity to insist on innovations like permanent voter cards (PVC) and smart card readers, to authenticate genuine voters?

    Or, Jonathan as author and finisher of hate campaigns, in lieu of hardly any concrete achievements, erected on brutal demonization of political opponents, and explosive Christian-Muslim, North-South and petty ethnic divides, all served in the most incendiary, hateful and vulgar of languages — not to mention the cavalier ploy to politicise the security and armed forces!

    Lest we forget: the unprecedented Police invasion of the House of Representatives, all in a bid to forcefully change the Speaker, after Aminu Tambuwal’s defection to the opposition APC!  It is tribute to the triumph of reason over brute force that both the Police and DSS have eaten crow and restored the Speaker’s full security, after an initial shameful romance with state outlawry.

    Jonathan’s supporters, just like his opposers, have their democratic right.  But four days to the presidential election, it is clear which of the two are upbeat, and which are downcast.

    Take the media.  The pro-Jonathan This Day deviated from its tradition of electoral mapping to predict putative winners and losers.  Could it be that This Day editors have seen the handwriting on the wall; and instead, settled for an advert form of a Richard Grenell Armageddon scarecrow, written for Washington Times, suggesting should Buhari win, Nigeria risks Islamization?  But why is no one surprised at the green Mr. Grenell?  Didn’t Islamization scare run through the Jonathan campaign?

    O, Sunday Vanguard too, on March 22, ran a front-page advert predicting Jonathan’s “victory”.  But even a casual look at it shows the parameters are highly suspect.  But maybe they tell Jonathan what he wants to hear!

    In contrast, The Nation (pro-Buhari) and Sunday Punch (neither friend nor foe) ran a electoral map that tilted towards Buhari, with accompanying detailed analyses.  Well, it is all in voters’ hands now!

    In Ripples’ view however, it would take a most egregious rigging for Jonathan to prevail in this election.  That is clear from the geopolitical balance of numbers and spread.

    That is why INEC must stand firm and do its duty to motherland: credible, free, fair and transparent election.  The security forces too must resisit any partisan temptations, that runs contrary to their oaths of service.

    So long, Mr. President.  One just wished your outgoing activities would not earn the portraiture of the exiting white man that soils his high seat, just because he is skipping town!

  • The home stretch, finally?

    The home stretch, finally?

    By the time we meet again on this page next Tuesday, the presidential election – dare we hope?–would have been won or lost

    The thrill of victory will be ringing harmoniously in one camp and across its political base, and the agony of defeat will perfuse the other camp and its base. In one camp there will be rejoicing and in the other mourning; in the one, celebration and in the other, lamentation and recrimination.

    A great deal of re-positioning, to borrow the locution careerists so readily employ to justify their fecklessness – a scramble, the like of which Nigeria has never seen, will be well under way, with elements of the losing party denouncing it with the same or even greater fervor than that with which they had supported it and defecting en masse to the winning party, which they will hasten to canonize as the only one that can “move the country forward.”

    Contemplating this latter scenario, a leading expatriate Nigerian academic whose insights and judgment I respect tells me he is substantially sure that, if the APC wins, the foul-mouthed, equal-opportunity slanderer, Femi Fani-Kayode, will dump the PDP without hesitation and without regret, and begin singing the praises of the new people with even greater fervor than he had employed as media director of the Goodluck Jonathan campaign in skewering them.

    All this is of course assuming what cannot be assumed even at this point, namely, that the election will actually take place as scheduled.

    Leading personalities across the political divide are saying they cannot vouch that an election will actually take place on March 28.  The Jonathan administration, I gather, is still shopping around for a court judge who would consider a multi-billion Naira reward worth the risk of declaring General Muhammadu Buhari ineligible for the race.  It is also shopping around, by the way, for a judge who will, for very valuable consideration, prohibit the use of electronic card readers during the election.

    The national security apparatus, Dr Jonathan’s confederates in administering Nigeria as a police state, may yet come up with another excuse to warrant yet another postponement.  Don’t forget that they had requested that the poll be pushed forward by six weeks in the first instance to allow them crush Boko Haram.

    We are still in that first instance.  And with vast tracts of Nigerian territory yet to be recaptured from the marauding insurgents, who says that there cannot be a second instance, or a third?

    Nor can it be assumed, despite Dr Jonathan’s stout denial, that the “Interim Government” option is no longer under active consideration.  The former military president and self-proclaimed “evil genius,” General Ibrahim Babangida, who was reportedly awarded the contract for the scheme, may swear by anything he holds dear, but nobody will believe him.  He lacks a crucial attribute that his unexplained billions cannot buy:  credibility.

    He has been peddling the scheme and may yet find a buyer.

    I hope they are factoring Chief Ernest Shonekan into the scheme.  As the only Nigerian who has the experience of actually running an interim government, he is eminently qualified to head the scheme.   It lasted only 83 days, I grant.  But I am sure he learned all the appropriate lessons.  So that, if summoned to national service again, he may well be able this time around to transform the interim into the interminable.

    Nor should anyone be fooled by Dr Jonathan’s frenetic pace these days as he flies to far-flung places to buy support from traditional rulers and ethnic militias.  It is almost as if he has just discovered Nigeria.  His wife, Madame Patience Faka, is criss-crossing the country seeking – no,  I take that back – demanding support for Dr Jonathan, sowing coarse and vulgar abuse and the most delicious infelicities along her route.

    It is unsafe, I insist, to conclude from all this coming and going that the presidential election will actually take place. “Betwixt the cup and the lip,” says an English proverb, “there’s many a slip.”

    Whatever happens, the election campaign will go down as the dirtiest, ugliest, and the most indecent in Nigeria’s history.  It was not entirely devoid of ideas, but the ideas were crowded out by fear-mongering, character assassination, incitement, ethnic-baiting and hateful speech on a scale beyond belief.  As the perceptive Kayode Komolafe of ThisDay remarked, some combatants carried on as if the law of defamation was on vacation.

    I would add that it was almost as if the civil law relating to invasion of privacy and the criminal law relating to incitement were also on vacation.

    There is more than enough blame to go around, but it has to be said it was the PDP’s national secretary, Wale Oladipo, who cast the first stone when he dismissed General Muhammadu Buhari as a “semi-literate jackboot.”

    Though Oladipo has the formal designation of professor of Nuclear Analytical Techniques at the Centre for Energy Research and Development (CERD) at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, his antecedents at first blush seem as dodgy as Dr Jonathan’s doctoral dissertation.

    At this writing, he does not figure on CERD’s web site.  My Internet search turned out more information about him as PDP national secretary than about his scholarship in the arcane field              of particle physics.  Even his home page, such as it is, says nothing about his education and the universities he attended.

    Perhaps Oladipo is not the type who blows his own trumpet. But settling for such a desultory identity as secretary of the PDP – even if it is still the largest political party in Africa  — when  he may well belong up there with Ernest Rutherford and Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and Max Planck  is carrying coyness too far.

    As they say here, Man, if you’ve got a trumpet, blow it; blow it hard and blow it often.  Otherwise, it will get rusty.

    To return to the election:  Mrs  Jonathan has been ordering her fellow women to vote for her husband because more than one-third of the senior officials he has appointed are women, whereas Buhari did nothing for Nigerian womanhood when he held power for 2o months some 30 years ago.

    Stop throwing stones (no pun intended) when you live in a glass house.

    Was it not under her husband’s watch that about 230 girls were plucked from their hostel in Chibok and spirited to places unknown?  For ten precious days, her husband not only failed to rouse himself to launch a rescue effort, he was actually in denial, claiming that that the whole thing was another propaganda stunt by the Opposition to discredit his administration.

    And by way of support, Mrs Jonathan personally conducted on national television an inane inquisition seen and ridiculed around the world, blaming the school authorities for what was a failure of security, a failure of anticipation, and most crucially a failure of leadership – her husband’s leadership

    Two hundred and thirty young women unaccounted for under Dr Jonathan’s watch.  That is an entire generation.  Then, there are the tens of thousands of Nigerians lost to Boko Haram violence without serious challenge until lately, under a Commander-in-Chief whose primary duty is to protect the lives and property of citizens.  Then again, there are the millions of so-called internally displaced persons, refugees in their own country.

    Dr Jonathan has not indicated what he would do differently if elected.  In six years when money was not a serious problem, he succeeded only in patching the Lugard-era Lagos-Kano railway line.  Now that money is tight, he is promising to link all 36 state capitals by rail if re-elected.

    Desperation truly knows no bounds.

    A vote for Dr Jonathan is a vote for more of the same, for Continuity.

  • The Tinker as Transformer

    The Tinker as Transformer

    Going into the presidential election scheduled tentatively for March 28 – tentatively because  he and his proxies, sensing defeat, are doing everything conceivable and even inconceivable to scuttle or sabotage it — Dr Goodluck Jonathan has rested his case for a renewed mandate on the claim that he has transformed or is transforming Nigeria in spectacular ways.

    Public outrage and scorn have forced them to stop peddling the transparent falsehood that Jonathan has accomplished for Nigeria the wonders Lee Kuan Yew wrought in Singapore,  the miracle that Nelson Mandela worked in South Africa, the transcendental change that Dr Martin Luther King’s leadership of the civil rights movement effected in the United States, and the inspiration that has redounded to black humanity from Barak Obama’a ascendancy.

    Yet, Transformation continues to be the theme, the centrepiece of Dr Jonathan’s campaign–transformation of every aspect of the national experience.

    The opposition APC has continued to espouse “Change” as its campaign theme, despite Dr Jonathan’s wife’s incendiary appeal to the crowds at her campaign stops to stone anyone disrespectful enough to shout “change” to her hearing.

    With her habitual resort to coarse abuse, vulgar name-calling, ethnic baiting, and her crass insensitivity to the sociology and complexity of Nigeria, Patience Jonathan has taken first-ladyism to a level of degradation beyond belief.  Let that stand as her legacy, and her husband’s.

    Now, change is the opposite of continuity.  If Jonathan and his campaign are so sure that the  path he has pursued for the past six years is the right one, that Nigerians are better off today than they were six years ago and that staying the course will finally lead Nigeria to the greatness for which it is so richly endowed,  why don’t they pivot their case on Continuity?

    That term rarely figures in their propaganda of hate and incitement because they know that it will give the game away.

    Only a masochist will vote for continuity when the past six years have loosed little more than acute deprivation, popular misery and insecurity on the land; when another term of four years under the management that has wrought this devastation presages nothing but the same.

    So, pivot the campaign on Transformation.  Reel out an endless assemblage of “achievements”  as  proof, should the usual naysayers still require any, that the Jonathan Transformation is not an illusion conjured up by the “Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria.”

    But when you wade through the assemblage, what you see is tinkering – tinkering around the edges, patching, mending, refurbishing, and repairing.  There is no fundamental change  in the condition, the inner nature or the function of things and institutions, the essence of transformation.

    On this basis, Dr Jonathan would have to be regarded as a tinker rather than a transformative figure.  That, at any rate, is the contention of this column.

    The evidence is plain.

    Just the other day, I was going through the first installment of an editorial advertisement in which a grateful contractor or desperate supplicant or a high priest of the Transformation Brotherhood was threatening to inflict on the public a treatise detailing 500 reasons why Dr Jonathan should be re-elected.

    The full-page advertisement was a desultory litany of roads in conveniently far-flung regions of Nigeria that Dr Jonathan had allegedly rehabilitated, repaired, or reconstructed.  Even if it were possible to verify the claims and vouch for the quality of the work done, if work was indeed done, to call it transformation would still be an instance of unnecessary dignification.

    More substantively, one of the planks on which Dr Jonathan’s claim to being a transformer is an excellent example of patching and mending.  I have in mind the 1,200 km Lagos-Kano railway track that was supposed to be transformed into a standard-gauge structure for high-speed rail travel.

    It is nothing of the sort.  The trains run essentially on the tracks laid by Lord Lugard, with some patching here and there.  They take two full days to travel the distance.  The rolling stock goes back seven decades; passengers are for the most part herded into ill-ventilated coaches, without the slightest regard to hygiene. Neither Dr Jonathan nor any senior official has deigned to take a ride on these trains.

    To be fair, you cannot accuse Dr Jonathan of lack of ambition.  He has talked of building a West-East railway route, and even threatened to link all state capitals by rail.  But talk is not even tinkering, much less transformation.

    Lately, they have also been crediting him with the construction of the Abuja-Kaduna fast train, the contract for which was finalised in December 2010, barely seven months after Jonathan was conferred with the full powers of the Presidency following the death of the incumbent, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.  Jonathan had not quite found his feet then, and could not have been the originator of the project.  But he deserves praise for seeing it though to completion.

    Yet another plank on which Dr Jonathan’s alleged transformative genius has been erected is the Constitutional Conference that many are citing as reason for backing his re-election.  But it was at bottom another job of patching.  It was a disingenuous evasion of a Sovereign National Conference, the proper form for the restructuring, without which the Nigerian state will wither away eventually.

    The Conference could not have turned out differently, when the Conference was packed with people selected for the most part by the convening authority, operating under rules and conditions designed by the same authority, and beholden to yet again the same authority for its implementation.

    By now, the epileptic power supply should have become a distant memory, going by one of Dr Jonathan’s solemn promises. The supply would be so sure and steady, he said, that owners of power generating sets would literally be begging people on the streets to come cart them away for free.  But each year, the national output keeps shrinking.

    Lacking faith in his own prediction, Dr Jonathan runs his sprawling offices and living quarters  in Aso Rock on generators. He has not even thought of building an independent power supply for Aso Rock, let alone tapping into solar energy.

    He has built 12 new universities, some of them in areas that can hardly absorb them.  But he has made no investments in raising even one of more than 100 older universities to world class. Nor has he equipped a single medical facility in Nigeria to world class, not even the one that is meant to serve the Presidency.

    It is necessary to add that hopping from one traditional ruler’s domain to another and handing out bags stuffed with dollar bills in an effort to buy the election, now that Attahiru Jega has blocked the usual methods of stealing the people’s voices and votes, is no transformation.

    Rather, it harks back to the colonial-era policy of Indirect Rule.  Empower traditional rulers, and they will corral their subjects to do your bidding.

    Nor does awarding contracts for rebuilding the school from which the Chibok 219 were plucked by Boko Haram count as a transformative act, especially when as the girls remain unaccounted for more than a year later. Rather, the tawdry election-eve stunt calls to mind George Santayana’s quip about those who double the effort long after they have forgotten the aim.

    To say all this is not to say that Dr Jonathan has achieved nothing.   It is merely to make the case that his accomplishments belong in the realm of tinkering, not transformation.

    Oops:

    In “This thing called corruption,” (column, March 9), I erroneously credited Admiral Augustus Aikhomu, with drawing a seminal distinction between “misappropriation” and “misallocation” of public funds.  The distinction he drew was between misappropriation of public funds, of which he took a dim view, and mere “misapplication” of public funds, which he saw as unexceptionable.

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  • Jega: making of a new demon

    Jega: making of a new demon

    Attahiru Jega, Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) chairman, and Nigeria’s 11th chief electoral umpire, is the latest demon on the political horizon.

    But he is a demon with a difference — at least from the colourful prism of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

    Not long ago, he was Goodluck Jonathan’s proud mascot of clean elections.  Under Jega’s watch, PDP had lost elections: in Edo, Ondo, Anambra and Osun.  Only in Ekiti did it “win” — and Nigeria’s ruling party loves to flaunt that “democratic” record!

    So, what has changed — with Prof. Jega porting from the mascot of electoral rectitude to the demon of electoral turpitude?

    Not much. But again, a lot.

    Not much, because the chief electoral job, right from the pioneering headache of the late Eyo Esua (who chaired the first Electoral Commission, 1960-1966), always came with demonising.  Since the electoral chief was always perceived to lean toward the ruling party, he was fated to being savaged by the opposition.

    But not without cause.  Everybody knew — the ruling party, by its body language; the opposition, by its iron conviction; and even the people, by their fatalistic acquiescence — that the chief electoral referee is the sitting government’s 12th player: if you would permit a football metaphor.

    Any electoral chief too thick-skulled to get that ended with unimaginable ignominy.  Witness: Humphrey Nwosu.  He gamely delivered June 12, the cleanest election in Nigerian history.  But on his way to declaring the wrong winner in MKO Abiola (God bless his kind soul!), the Ibrahim Babangida junta socked Prof. Nwosu so hard!

    For starters, they annulled Nwosu’s rude call.  Then, there were reports of alleged slaps, fearsome threats and allied personal humiliation.

    Is Jega treading Nwosu’s dreaded path?  It would seem so!

    If indeed that were so, then it would appear a lot has changed.  Still, Jega’s demonization is strange, coming from the sitting government.  It used to be the exclusive preserve of the howling opposition!

    But even that is very nuanced — for the opposition itself had damned Jega to the lowest pit of hell, when it had cause to.

    Good old Comrade-Governor, Adams Oshiomhole, then the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) candidate, berated  INEC, after noticing some early polling zone shambolic display, early on re-election day, in 2012.   But as the Edo governor later coasted to victory, the morning jeers segued into evening cheers.  The fulfilled Edo electorate exploded in sheer ecstasy!

    In the mouth of Chris Ngige, candidate of the defunct ACN, the 2013 Anambra gubernatorial election should still leave a bitter taste.  The senator had genuine cause that a good number of his supporters were disenfranchised.

    But All Progressives Grand Alliance’s Willie Obiano, the winner, got away with it; since the courts had since okayed Mr. Obiano’s election.  But INEC got the full lash of Senator Ngige’s tongue.

    Yet, even with opposition scalding, Prof. Jega had managed, somewhat, to keep his personal integrity — which makes very surprising, all the muck and darts and poisonous arrows that the PDP now throws his way.

    From his premium throne as presidential godfather, Pa Edwin Clark has roared: sack Jega!  In his auspicious company, of base but baseless partisan manoeuvring, are a medley of otherwise respected elder citizens, turned unfazed fronts for a suspect campaign: Senator Femi Okunrounmu and Dr. Chukwuemeka Ezeife, aborted 3rd Republic Anambra governor; and seasoned rabble rousers like Gani Adams (who weighed in with some bit of carpentry logic: Jonathan must sack Jega, if he wants to win!) and Ralph Uwazurike, leader of the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), whose cadres even staged anti-Jega road shows on South East streets, just as OPC did its equivalent violent orgies on Lagos streets!

    This strange ensemble threatened that should Jega not be sacked, they would mobilise Southern Nigeria to boycott the election.  Some bluff!

    But from fronts, the PDP itself, given the combined gratings from Femi Fani-Kayode, Ayodele Fayose and Oliver Metuh, has tarred Jega and his electoral household, with everything in its partisan sinews: Jega is a fraud; PVC is a racket; smart card reader (for pre-vote accreditation and authentication) is a crime!

    What has Jega done to earn all these?  Simple: he has been too thick-skulled to read the body language of the president, zestfully backed by his power party — any result, that doesn’t return Goodluck Jonathan as re-elected president, cannot be free and fair!

    That might sound asinine to those who indulge in reason.  But for those locked in the language of power?  It is de-rigueur of thinking!

    Indeed, in Jega, Jonathan would appear the grand victim of his own cunning.  In 2011, he showed off the INEC chair as the epitome of electoral fairness.  After all,  Jega’s much vaunted credibility, in lieu of the Lawal Uwais’s Electoral Reforms Panel’s recommended rigorous strictures to make INEC truly independent, delivered Jonathan the presidency in a “free and fair election”.

    In the intervening years, the same “credibility” ensured PDP lost every election (in Edo, Ondo, Anambra and Osun) but one (in Ekiti) — never mind the Ekiti rigging tapes, which the president has dismissed as a “fabrication”, though he didn’t listen to it; and the fingered dramatis personae have owned up, even if they plead a different motive.

    Still, the PDP election losses would appear a devious scam: Edo, to set the template of Jonathan’s dummy.

    Anambra (won by APGA) and Ondo (won by Labour): a cynical president sacrificing mere pawns for the big one.  Proof?  Both winners,  Mr. Obi, ex-APGA and Dr. Mimiko, ex-Labour, are now ecstatic PDP barons — in grateful quid-pro-quo to the president for “allowing” them to win, back then?

    Ekiti: in retrospect with the rigging tape, a brazen test-running of scientific rigging (though aided and abetted by former Governor Kayode Fayemi’s spectacular blunders, epitomised by his “civil war” with Opeyemi Bamidele), to be fully unleashed on Osun three months later — which, however, got aborted.

    So, the Jega “credibility” that, “free and fair”, made Jonathan president in 2011 is about to, “free and fair”, make Jonathan ex-president in 2015!  That prospect is scary — and you could tell by a panic-gripped president running from pillar to post; and a ruling party, bitterly orchestrating hate campaigns, all over the place!

    But that is even on the surface.  Viewed deeper, in the context of Jonathan Vs Muhammadu Buhari, Jega is trapped in the tempest of the Nigerian ruling class, at a terrible crossroads.  To these wayward children of Lord Lugard, with their cherished ethos of power without responsibility, these are indeed trying times!

    Jonathan epitomises a decayed agency, at its most vulnerable.  Still, Jonathan pitches his class to, through him, at least for four more years, play in the wide and merry way, the big bazaars from the wild festivals of rent, which however might end in sure perdition and class death.

    In Buhari, however, the choice is no less stark: take some galling home cure.  Though that cure could gore a few, it might just save the whole clan!

    Either way, Jega is fated to midwife!

    That seems to explain all the Interim National Government conspiracy theories, and alleged  cloak-and-dagger manoeuvres allegedly involving Jonathan and some former military rulers, with the fond hope of shutting out Buhari.  Well, their problems, not the people’s!

    Let the people look out for themselves in this election.

    Let Jega too, do his duty as a patriot; no matter the high-octane distractions.

    If the people vote right and Jega holds true, Jonathan will be put out of his misery — and Nigeria, with Nigerians, handed a new lease of life.

  • Wise words from the palace

    Wise words from the palace

    As part of his whistle stop campaign visits to Yoruba monarchs to drum up support for his second (third?) term ambition, President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan has been to many palaces across Yoruba land than ordinarily he would have loved to, no thanks to the massive shift of Yoruba support in favour of his main challenger in the March 28, presidential election, General Muhammadu Buhari (retd) of the All Progressives Congress.

    Jonathan has been sweating for quite some time now over how to retain the votes from the south west that ensured he secured the presidency in 2011. Four years ago, Yoruba in a near overwhelming support, gave their votes to Jonathan to consign Buhari, then of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), now merged with other opposition parties to from APC, to yet another defeat in his quest to rule Nigeria again,  as a democratically elected president.

    Four year on, the Yoruba have changed their minds preferring instead to pitch their tent with Buhari, a decision, if fully implemented on March 28, that will most certainly end Jonathan’s tenancy in the presidential villa in Abuja.

    Expectedly, the president is worried and has been running from pillar to post to convince the people of the south west not to abandon him. Various hate programmes have been aired on Jonathan/PDP friendly radio and television stations to demonise Buhari before Yoruba, while some publishers have equally lent their pages to publishing smear advert campaigns to bring down the former Head of State and APC presidential flag bearer  before the right thinking people of Yoruba land.

    To achieve his aim, the president has enlisted the support of some renegade Yoruba sons and daughters to paint Buhari black and deceive their people to vote him for a second term. Since out of every 12 there must be a Judas as the saying goes, Yoruba are not worried about such renegades as they will get their punishment at the appropriate time. In Yoruba land, if all sins can and are indeed forgivable, nobody forgives treachery. Traitors are traitors, and are punished even down to their 4th generation. Let us leave that for now.

    If the Yoruba are not worried about these ‘ordinary’ sons and daughters now attempting to sell their people to Jonathan, they are certainly worried that some of their traditional rulers, their revered Obas (Kabiyesi, Alase, ekeji Orisa) are being enlisted into this Jonathan for second term campaign. Obas are not ordinary mortals in Yoruba land. They are treated as next to the gods who must be obeyed. As fathers to all their subjects, most of whom hold diverse religious and political views, they are not supposed to be partisan or biased against any religious or political interest. But when Obas now begin to dabble into the political arena, their actions and utterances will definitely divide their people and that is dangerous for that society.

    Those who advised President Jonathan to be jumping from one Yoruba palace to another are trying to cause trouble in Yoruba land. Just as the president’s numerous visits to different churches in recent times to promote himself as a candidate of the Christians is divisive and could further strain the delicate Christians/Muslims relationship in certain parts of the country, so also is his provocative visits to Yoruba Obas to seek their support for his re-election bid.

    One or two of these Kabiyesis have taken positions against the interest of the Yoruba people in the past which led to serious crisis in the land. Inducing them with money and using state resources to force them into joining the Jonathan for second term bandwagon is pushing them into a loggerhead with their people, and this could have serious repercussion.  Yoruba support for their Obas and leaders is total, but provided the Oba/leader does not go against their interest. It is total but reciprocal.

    I don’t have anything against the president selling himself to the people and canvassing for their support for another term. That is the way it is done in a democracy. But going to the symbol of the people, like the traditional rulers to seek their partisan support is dangerous and divisive. It could lead to a serious crisis and erode people’s confidence in the traditional institution.

    This was aptly stated at the palace of the paramount ruler of the Ijebu, the Awujale of Ijebu land, Oba Sikiru Kayode Adetona, Ogbagba II, last week in Ijebu Ode when Jonathan visited. The highly revered Yoruba monarch told the president not to expect any Oba in Ijebu or any part of Yoruba land to campaign for him. Any monarch that does that in Yoruba land, Oba Adetona told him is looking for trouble. And that is the truth.

    If any of the Obas had promised Jonathan the votes of his people, he is just deceiving the president. As the situation stands in Yoruba land today regarding the March 28, 2015 presidential election, the Yoruba have made up their mind on the person they are supporting and one thousand and one Kabiyesis cannot change that.

    It would be better for the president to heed the advice of the Awujale of Ijebu land to take his campaign to the people and not the palace of their traditional rulers. Obas don’t vote and their views/directives would only be followed by their people provided they tally with the interest of their people. Whether the Yoruba are sufficiently satisfied with Jonathan’s performance as to give him another term on March 28, is not for their Obas to decide or direct.

    As I’ve stated repeatedly on this page, Jonathan cannot claim to have done anything exclusively for the Yoruba to warrant their queuing behind on March 28. When the people did four years ago, he didn’t go to their Oba, and their monarch did not force or direct them to do so. He made some promises which have not been fulfilled.  Going to the palace to beg is not just a waste of time but a demeaning of the presidency.

    The British would be having their election this year and I am sure none of the party leaders would go to the Queen to seek her support. If we say we are practicing democracy, let us do it the way it is done in enlightened societies.  If it were to be in the good old days of absolute monarchy in Yoruba land, the Kabiyesis would have dismissed Jonathan’s government for incompetence instead him seeking their support. This is what I expect those Obas to have told the president and we must salute the Awujale for being bold and courageous to tell Jonathan the truth. KAAAABIYESI O.

     

  • This thing called corruption

    This thing called corruption

    Each time President Goodluck Jonathan tries to educate the misguided Nigerian public about  what is often glibly called “corruption,” he reminds me of an earlier era, and of Vice Admiral Augustus Aikhomu.

    Remember him?

    Aikhomu was the gruff mariner who, as Chief of General Staff, ranked second in the regime of military president Ibrahim Babangida, appointed to replace the strong-willed Ebitu Ukiwe.

    Never so happy as when confounding opponents and confusing friends, Babangida woke up one day and announced that, in keeping with the Constitution of the Federal Republic, Aikhomu had become civilian vice president under the military regime.

    Apparently also in keeping with the Constitution that Babangida was operating a loose-leaf document, the pages of which he shuffled endlessly, he announced several months later that the former naval chief turned civilian, had been promoted to the rank of Admiral.

    Aikhomu had no patience with all the fancy footwork that was the preoccupation of his principal.  Irascible and, withal, blunt as a cudgel, he told it exactly as he saw it.  He was a reporter’s delight, always forthcoming with delicious quotes.

    One day, reporters assembled for his customary Friday afternoon news conference, asked for his reaction to yet another damning report on the Nigerian economy that the IMF/World Bank had just issued.

    “What report?” he snickered.  “Do you know that those so-called reports are written by small boys like yourselves?”

    Back then, the dominant issue in public discourse was “misappropriation” of public funds.  For the most part, when people talked at all about “corruption” in public office, they did so only in whispers, checkmated by Decree 2, under which the government vested itself with the power to detain anyone for as long as it pleased, without judicial review. And Aikhomu was the decree’s chief administering officer.

    But Aikhomu saw through the subterfuge.  From “misappropriation” of public funds, it was but a short step to “embezzlement” of the same.

    So, he re-framed the discourse, such as it was.  The problem, he said, was not so much misappropriation as misallocation of public funds.

    Unfortunately, weighed down by state duties and the twists and turns and the labyrinthine trajectory of his principal’s duplicitous political transition programme – in which he dutifully acquiesced, by the way —Aikhomu did not have the time to work out with lexical finality the difference between “misappropriation” and “misallocation” of public funds.

    But from what I could make of it, misappropriation, with its undertone of embezzlement or plain theft – “original stealing” as the immortal Afrobeat king Fela Anikulapo Kuti called it—was the cardinal sin.  Misallocation of public funds was not worth all the blather.

    In practical terms – and here I am second-guessing the mariner – if a public official used funds earmarked for a hospital to build himself a country home with a swimming pool and a helipad, he had merely misallocated the funds, and did not deserve the kind of condemnation to which an official who misappropriated such funds deserved to be subjected.

    It might even be argued that if the official moved such funds into his private bank account, it would still have been a mere mislocation  — putting the funds away in the in the wrong place — rather than a misappropriation.

    And here we are, more than two decades later and no wiser until the eminent scientist and respected taxonomist in him moved Dr Goodluck Jonathan to take time off his demanding re-election schedule to clear up the semantic mess and complete Aikhomu’s unfinished work.

    And he has gone about the difficult task with the fine sense of discrimination that only a world-class ichthyologist can call up at short notice and amidst the kind of distraction that only a few in his exalted league can even begin to imagine.

    In the popular understanding, and even in the minds of the lexicographers, corruption consists basically in dishonest acts. The Explanatory Memorandum to the Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Act 2000 says rather laconically that “corruption” includes bribery, fraud, and other related offences.

    But the body of that law goes on to define corruption to the point of saturation. Corruption is in play, it says, when a public official asks for, receives or obtains property or benefits of any kind for himself or others, agrees or attempts to receive such rewards for himself or others, for benefits or favours already granted or expected to be granted.  And so on and so forth.

    Conviction carries a seven-year jail term.

    That is the law of the land.  That is the law appointees of the Jonathan administration have been administering, with funds approved by the National Assembly. That is the law under which the Independent Corrupted Practices and other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) has prosecuted and sent to jail, by its own count, thousands of wayward public officials.

    But the ICPC and its agents, we now know, have been labouring not just under a misapprehension, but, under a delusion to boot.

    For, as Dr Jonathan has been saying, in statements heard around the world, the things people  call “corruption” in Nigeria fall far short of the threshold. Those who are forever beating the government on the head with allegations of overarching corruption would be closer to the mark if they talked instead about stealing.

    I hope they are listening, all those do-gooders who compile the International Corruption Index and the so-called foreign donors.

    In whatever case, the amounts usually cited as evidence of corrupt dealings are piddling.  One official creams off, say, N5 billion in pension funds and they rush to cite that it as evidence of corruption.

    Easy, gentlemen.  This is not Burkina Faso.  We are talking about the largest economy on the entire African continent, and the 16th largest and one of the fastest-growing in the whole wide world.

    From Dr Jonathan’s seminal submission, it would seem follow that the law under which ICPC has been prosecuting and jailing innocent persons is misconceived, at least insofar as it presumes to act on a matter in which its jurisdiction is dubious at best, and to the extent that it has been punishing acts it misconstrues as corrupt when it should have been punishing ordinary stealing.

    That kind of enactment has no place under Nigeria’s legal system – a system undergirded by the rule of law, of which Dr Jonathan himself is the foremost apostle. It has done too much harm already.

    Dr Jonathan should act with his accustomed dispatch and move the National Assembly to void the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Act of 2000 and its instrumentalities, going back to the day he took office.

    It is time to end the costly and damaging misperception that corruption rather than ordinary stealing is Nigeria’s problem.

  • Hand of Esau…

    Hand of Esau…

    Two famous lines immediately came to mind on hearing ruling of the Federal High Court Abuja ordering the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to register Young Democratic Party (YDP). The first is that of George Santayana that – ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. The other well known verse is attributed to the American statesman Henry Kissinger: “It is not often that nations learn from the past, even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.

    Shortly after the ruling filtered in, most Nigerians, like yours truly, would imagine the YDP to be a reincarnation of the Association for Better Nigeria (ABN) – the genie sprung on the political space by the maverick Arthur Nzeribe in 1993 to ambush the nation’s democracy. Though hardly an improved version of the old as one might expect after more than two decades of mutation, YDP seems the perfect PDP Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) with all the essential features of the old complete with subterfuge and political toxicity.

    It was perhaps just as it was designed to be: on the one hand, the ruling by Justice Ahmed Mohammed has sent the nation’s adrenalin soaring; on the other, such has been the jubilation in the camps of the YDP and the PDP that one imagined that they already have a big trophy in their hands. I have struggled to make sense of what is supposed to be its substance over which political vagrants have been dancing naked. My puzzle, to be sure, is one of understanding the basis of their morbid dance. Is it a case of the upstarts seeing what the rest of us cannot see? Or simply one of those situations in which media reportage, aside muddling up issues, may have done grave injury to the renditions of the learned judge?

    Either way, it must be troubling enough that some political delinquents would seek to abort what seems to be a well laid out democratic pathway.

    What do we know of the YDP? I watched their officials – five or six of them – on TV during their press conference the other day. They seemed youthful alright (which by the way is sheer tragedy given what they represent); with the exception of the chairman who looked a bit serious, their media outing in all conveyed a picture of school children coerced to make an appearance!

    As to their middle appellation – Democratic – I confess to having a bit of difficulty reconciling what is supposed to be a legitimate quest to get a party formally registered with the stated resolve to achieve same through the back door and at the pain of bringing the roof of the house down on everyone!

    On their claim to be a party – I leave the judgement of whether or not the motley assembly of the odd fellows qualify to be labelled a “party” to Nigerians given the infinitely elastic interpretation of their rights to form just about any association. After all, I have countless times wondered about the farce under which some deluded fellows would hold the system down only because they have just enough money to rent shops in 36 state capitals all in the name of party formation.

    But I digress. I do not pretend that I have read the judgment of the Federal High Court Abuja. It seems doubtful that anyone has come across let alone read the full text. Like many Nigerians, I am limited to the snippets as reported in the media which unfortunately comes to pretty little. Which is of course unfortunate given what is supposed to be its import on the orderly process of the 2015 election. Merely by what the inferences and interpretations suggest, a judicial mine is supposed to have been laid in the way of the process.

    Nothing of course can be fundamentally wrong with the specific order on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to immediately register YDP as a political party. The judge’s finding that the party is deemed to have been registered when INEC failed to inform it of its decision not to register it as a political party within 30 days of receiving its application, is said to find strength in Section 78 (4) of the Electoral Act, 2010ý. On that, I have no quarrel.

    The part I consider troubling is the varied interpretations of the ruling particularly as touching on the elections barely three weeks away. Here, the issue is whether the court actually ordered INEC to put the name of the YDP candidates on the ballot for the March 28 and April 11 elections? Did it? Could it – or should it have – given the implications?

    And which candidates are we talking about here – those that emerged with or without INEC-supervised primaries? Could the litigants have been automatically availed of that right without inviting grievous assault to public policy? Assuming one concedes that the party is truly deemed to have been registered by May according to the law, where should the pendulum of public policy ordinarily tilt given that the printing and logistics for the elections ought to have been concluded before now?  Still wondering why Nigerians are apprehensive of the imminence of a judelex coup? Judelex  – yes – judiciary-electoral-executive coup!  Look at it this way: The ruling PDP has by words and deeds, shown that it would rather not have the elections. The dithering PDP administration not only gifted itself six weeks to sort out a security mess that it had nearly the whole of eternity to clean up but chose not to, it has in the last three weeks found a ready song in the deployment in card readers which it claimed would disenfranchise voters. It is hard to imagine a worse case of electoral avoidance –I once described it as electoral allergy – by a party in government in a democratic setting!

    Now, YDP, its minion wants the names of its so-called candidates on the ballot; knowing how impractical the demand is. It offers INEC a gratuitous option of postponing the elections which it knows is unlikely to happen! In the meantime, it purports to procure a judgment, which for all practical purposes, makes it a supremo with the power of discretion over electoral validity? Yes, that is where some have taken us!

    So, where is the difference between the party with acute electoral allergy and another which insists on not caring a hoot if the entire structure is brought down so it can have its way? Aren’t we again at a point where a band of certified delinquents, aided by the piper, would brazenly suborn the judiciary to their devious schemes? How short some people’s memory can be! See you after the polls.

     

    • This column goes on a five-week vacation. God willing, we meet again at the other side of the polls.
  • This way for presidential sewers

    This way for presidential sewers

    That the Jonathan presidential court is deep in the sewers, when it should epitomise rarefied refinement, is underscored by the crude electioneering outbursts by First Lady, Patience Jonathan.

    It is damning symbolism, showing how low the high office of the Nigerian president has sunk under President Goodluck Jonathan.

    In a clearly unprecedented fashion, Mrs. Jonathan claimed Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential standard bearer and her husband’s top challenger in the March 28 presidential election, was “brain-dead”.

    True, the context of the statement, the giddiness of the campaign stump, was not quite as clinical and as foreboding as it appears in cold print.  Besides, the First Lady is notorious for her lexical challenges.

    So, beyond demonstrable bad grace and undisguised spite, she might not have fully understood the full impact of her blurting.

    Still, what offence, beyond legitimately running for president, has Gen. Buhari committed to earn personal insults from Mrs Jonathan?  Or is the Nigerian presidency the exclusive preserve of the Jonathan clan?

    Thank God she didn’t — and, from her conduct and comportment thus far, she could not have.  But what if Mrs Aishat Buhari, the General’s wife, had responded, tit-for-tat?  So, Nigerians would have witnessed the unflattering sight of, if Gen. Buhari wins, an in-coming First Lady trading insults with the outgoing one?  What lessons would that have taught the Nigerian youth?

    Aside, Mrs Jonathan was also quoted to have told Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) supporters to “stone” whoever shouted, to their hearing, Change, the APC electoral slogan; apart from thoroughly insulting the North, saying some families over there produce more children than they could ever care for.

    So, would the insulted trot to the polls on March 28 and happily gift her husband the vote, for which she was campaigning?

    When a First Lady, who ought to be the quintessence of poise, dignity and grace, perennially embodies unrepentant coarseness, to the captive cheer of her unfortunate aides, then something fundamental is wrong!

    Meanwhile, mum is the word, from her husband, for whose cause she unleashed such unmitigated crudeness.  The president, the quintessential gentleman, sees no evil, hears no evil!

    Still, if Nigeria is organised on the basis of families — as indeed, it is — there is something notoriously amiss with a man who seems unwilling or unable — or both! — to control his family, on which his spouse is perched, asking to lead 160 million Nigerians made up of composite families.

    Still, if Mrs Jonathan could plead campaign giddiness, what might Femi Fani-Kayode, the president’s chief campaign spokesperson plead, by insisting that, indeed, Buhari was “brain-dead”?  It was additional evidence, if any were required, to confirm that President Jonathan’s campaign messages came brewed in the gutter!

    Mr. Fani-Kayode, is well and truly quixotic, in his bid to sell a winning campaign with a tongue that sears, a voice that barks and a mouth that mocks and lies — all on overdrive from a mind that merrily libels.  But he is only the most grotesque face of a hugely cynical, devil-may-care, campaign din: Doyin Okupe, Olisa Metuh, Asari Dokubo and Ayo Fayose — he, the perfect living example of how not to be a governor.

    Add Pa Edwin Kiagbodo Clark to this list, and you won’t be wrong.  Even an otherwise classy Reuben Abati appears thoroughly enjoying his first sweet lessons in vulgar abuse — judging from the memorable echoes of his latest letter, challenging the APC candidate to a presidential debate.

    After lustily orchestrating a certificate non-issue, proudly announcing political opponents with bad breath and bawling about another allegedly wearing pampers, Mr. Fani-Kayode, the Don Quixote of the Jonathan presidential campaign, is now pushing, full gallop, for war reparations against Candidate Buhari, for his anti-Biafra exploits in the Nigerian Civil War!  It is his latest elixir to further warehouse Igbo votes!

    The others in the din ensemble have not be idle, either.  Dr. Okupe, ever charging, ever growling, ever battering, has barked at anyone who cares to listen: mark my words, he growled, Muhammadu Buhari is not electable!

    Mr. Metuh, fresh from the crushing success of christening the APC opposition an “Islamic party”, has rushed post-haste to declare the INEC card reader (no friend of his party, for no mysterious reason) an irredeemable failure, even if concrete evidence suggests otherwise

    Asari has been a bit quiet, since declaring war against the rest of Nigeria, should they make the fatal mistake of not re-electing his Ijaw kinsman.

    Elder Clark is still quite sprightly.  Still at the ferocious war front, of the sack Jega campaign, this respected Nigerian patriot and alter ego of the commander-in-chief, is already belting out a diktat: no matter what the law says, soldiers would be used for election duties, to the raucous applause of trillions of PDP members nationwide!

    Ayodele Fayose?  That one does nothing at half-measures!  With the prodigious gift of treading where angels dread, he has hollered, what the hell: sack Jega, and heavens won’t fall!  It is the final declaration of the self-named Irunmale (spirit) that snacks on jollof rice!  Fayose has spoken!  Which unfortunate law of the land dares demur?

    Still, the in-the-sewers-we-trust orchestra is not limited to middle-level officers alone, in the Jonathan presidential army.  Vice President Namadi Sambo too would trade his proud place for no one!

    After rejecting Olisa Metuh’s branding, and repositioning PDP as “Islamic party” in the North (because Alhaji Namadi is Muslim and is a northerner) but “Christian party” in the South (because President Jonathan is Christian and a southerner), he now flails and wails against the odious idea of a 72-year old becoming president.  That is the latest sagacity from the ultra-loyal deputy, even if it is un-African to mock old age.

    President Jonathan?  He is the proverbial grand masquerade that claims the final flourish!

    After, for Christian votes, posing in churches nationwide (most latterly in the South) as perhaps more Christian than any other; swaggering out, as all-conquering commander-in-chief in the victorious Baga road show (to convince the troops he is more general than General Buhari that quit the army some 28 years ago, and perhaps make a sweepstakes of barrack votes nationwide), the president, at the weekend, scaled new heights: the sporty president is sportier than any other — so, the Nigerian sporting universe must reward him with their grateful votes!

    If the blessed president made a good campaign surge of politicising churches (never mind that religion is dangerous tinder), shows off the army as one in which he is especially well pleased (even if it is a collective bastion that must never suffer politicisation), why should he not claim sports at his exclusive, partisan ally (even if sports is Nigeria’s most unifier, defying any partisan affiliation)?

    Well, for holier-than-thou Christians who have developed dissonance at the president’s latest harvest of traditional blessing from a section of Yoruba Obas from Nigeria’s South West, it is the realpolitik of hardball electioneering: the end justifies the meanness, apologies to Prof. Wole Soyinka!

  • Matters miscellaneous

    Matters miscellaneous

    In Nigeria where there is never a dull moment, where incident follows incident at a furious gallop, the glut of occurrences can overwhelm even the most pertinacious chronicler or analyst.

    As a way of coping with such moments, I patented back in my Rutam House years a rubric I named Matters Miscellaneous, under which I try to examine the day’s intelligence in short takes, working from no particular design.  It is also my way of attending to those who might otherwise feel neglected.

    So, here goes the miscellany, all protocols observed.

    Boko Haram on the Run

    Barely a week after he orchestrated the postponement of the presidential election and inveigled the electoral body INEC into accepting same, Dr Goodluck Jonathan finally gave a damn and went after Boko Haram (BH).

    Since then the marauding terrorist band has been in retreat and disarray.  Until the armed forces began regaling the public with their exploits and an inventory of just how many towns and villages and entire local government areas they had freed from the pernicious clutches of BH, few outside the Northeast had any inkling of the size of the territory over which it had proclaimed sovereignty.

    And in just one week, the outposts fell one after another, like ninepins.  It was hard to believe that this was the same BH that enlisted men were loath to engage, the same BH that had ravaged entire communities, sacked police formations, taken the fight to troops in their barracks, destroyed fighter aircraft on the tarmac, and roamed the entire region virtually unchallenged, its grisly business to conduct

    And Dr Jonathan, newly seized of his responsibility as commander-in-chief, has been touring the front, taking a victory lap as it were, decked out in combat gear as befits the office  and vowing that not one inch of Nigerian territory will remain under BH’s infernal thrall.

    You can’t begrudge him his new jauntiness.

    But the question remains:  What are the armed services doing now in the Northeast that they could not have done three years ago? Or two?  Or even a year ago?

    Dr Jonathan says he had underestimated B H’s menace.  He sure did, big-time, and despite warning from General TY Danjuma, chairman of the since-dissolved Presidential Adversary Council.

    How many other clear and present threats to vital national interests has he underestimated?

    If Jonathan had taken that advice and lived up to his oath of office instead of thrilling rented crowds with his azonto dance moves and carrying sacks of money around to bribe traditional rulers and all manner of opportunist groups to buy support for his re-election bid, the casualty list from BH’s depredations would have been much shorter, and so would the roll of internally displaced persons, now numbered in the millions.

    One cannot go as far as the commentator on one of the so-called social media sites who with Old Testament rage placed squarely on Dr Jonathan’s head the blood of the thousands killed  by BH and the pain and agony of the millions forced to flee their homes.

    But to the extent that Dr Jonathan could — and indeed should — have done what he is now doing at least three years ago but did not, it has to be said that, at the very least, he bears moral responsibility for the slaughter of innocents, and the benumbing misery and agony wrought by BH.

    One more thing we must not allow them to forget in all the chest-beating:  The Chibok 219.  The military high command has been saying that it knows where BH is holding the girls but would not close in on the camp for fear of putting them in harm’s way.

    With their new fire power and enhanced intelligence capability, this is the time go in for the rescue.  Forward, gentlemen, to the location you’ve had on your radar since the girls were abducted.

    Calling all Septuagenarians

    Like a dutiful helpmeet, The Iron Lady of Okrika, most recently Permanent Secretary Without  Schedule in the Bayela State Civil Service, and in the normal run of things Patience Faka Jonathan, First Lady of Nigeria and distinguished chair of the African First Ladies Peace Mission has been on the hustings, deploying her charm and well-honed communication skills to make a strong case for her husband’s reelection

    And what a wave she has been making!

    “A72-year-old man has nothing to offer Nigeria,” she declared the other day at one of her campaign stops.

    Do you hear that, Pastor Enoch Adeboye, whom her husband is forever importuning for divine blessings? Do you hear that, John Cardinal Onaiyekan?

    Do you hear that, General Danjuma, General Alani Akinrinade, Chief Segun Osoba, Dan Agbese, Brigadier-General Ike Nwachukwu, Senate President David Mark, Felix Adenaike, Onyema Ugochukwu, Chief Ajibola Ogunshola, Professor Ladipo Adamolekun,  Dr Dayo Shobowale, Dr Haroun Adamu, Professor Idowu Sobowale, Duro Onabule, Kole Omotosho, Ropo Sekoni, and other worthy compatriots in that age range?

    Do you hear that, members of the National Council of State, to whom her husband always        runs for the political equivalent of covering fire whenever he has another odious scheme to                 inflict on the public?

    I am not going to let my generation down.

    I have asked my attorneys to commence, for our group, a class-action lawsuit for gratuitous infliction of emotional distress and mental cruelty against the Iron Lady of Okrika in her official capacity as wife of the President, unless she issues within seven days an immediate and unconditional apology for the gross libel and promises never to go there again.

    Attahiru Jega:  The Arbiter as Villain

    Alas, poor Attahiru.  This genial, shy professor of political science and former president of the  university teachers union ASUU, must now be ruing the day he agreed to serve as chair of the Independent (ha) National Electoral Commission, the most treacherous job in the world.

    Those who appointed him expect him to do their bidding at every point.  If he does not, it must be that he has been bought by the Opposition.  And if he does not apply the rules the way the Opposition thinks they should be applied, he is carrying out the Government’s agenda.

    It is an ordeal, even in the best of times.

    When it is compounded by contrived distractions from the government and its surrogates – when they express confidence in him one day and none the next day; when one day they say that his time is up and hint darkly that it will not be renewed, and say the following day that  he will indeed preside over the forthcoming election;  when they suborn the media to publish scurrilous and fabricated charges of sleaze against him – how can he concentrate on the job at hand?

    How can he — or indeed the public – even tell that there is a job at hand?

    Why can’t Dr Jonathan just do whatever he wants to do, and as usual not give a damn?

    A Frustrating Countdown

    Ayo Fayose – he of the dubious mandate, on which he runs Ekiti when he runs it at all like a schoolyard bully gone berserk–has been at pains lately to assure the public that there is nothing personal to his ghoulish death-watch on General Muhammadu Buhari.

    “I have nothing against Buhari,” he declared the other day.

    Right, Governor.  You only want him to drop dead and are distressed that he has not obliged.

  • Jonathan’s new found love for Yoruba

    Jonathan’s new found love for Yoruba

    July 5, 2013 was a busy day on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, particularly at the Sagamu interchange. President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan was in town and as is customary with presidential movements in Nigeria, every other motorist had to wait for the president to conclude his business on the road.

    And what did he come to do? To flag off the reconstruction and expansion of the 120-kilometre Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, a project that had been on the drawing board for too long that people were beginning to think it would never take off.

    Not a few who ply that road almost on a daily basis were critical of the federal government for neglecting the only major road that links Lagos to the rest of the country and arguably the most important road in the south west region. The neglect did not start with Jonathan; even former President Olusegun Obasanjo, the ‘son of the soil’ didn’t touch the road during his eight years in power and so were his predecessors. So, nobody is blaming Jonathan solely for the sorry state of that road.

    But when the president suddenly decided about 20 months ago that the Lagos –Ibadan Expressway was to be given a facelift, not a few applauded his government for this gesture heaving a sigh of relief that their sufferings on that road were about to end.

    But in the euphoria of the flag off, some discerning members of the public, particularly in the south west cautioned the people not to be unduly carried away by the president’s promise of a brand new Lagos-Ibadan Expressway as he might just be playing politics with the project with his eyes set on the 2015 presidential election and the millions of votes available for grab in the region.

    Twenty months on and they have been proved right. That road is not anywhere near completion even within the time frame given by the government for its completion, though work is going on albeit at snail’s speed. And given the present state of that road, the people in the region are surprised that Jonathan could even have the guts to come to them and ask for their votes for another term in office.

    In the south west, people are very sentimental about that road and they have their reasons. Lagos is the commercial backbone of the region and every family in Yoruba land has one form of connection or another with the megacity. So, if the road connecting the hinterland to Lagos is ok, whoever was responsible would be ok with the people. And if it was in bad shape whoever was responsible would be punished for it at the right time. May be that time has come now and the people are ready to take their pound of flesh.

    Apart from the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, there are other federal roads in the south west, as there are elsewhere in the country begging for Jonathan’s attention. My focus on Yoruba land is because the president has made more visits to the region in the last few weeks meeting with interests groups making promises and campaigning for re-election than probably all his entire visits since his presidency began. This is not saying the region is more important than the other regions, no, but Jonathan has been paying too many visits to Yoruba land pretending to be a friend of the region that many are beginning to wonder why. Is it because of our votes? If yes, then he has failed as he has done nothing here to deserve even one Yoruba vote.

    He has met with the Alaafin of Oyo many times in the recent past and even visited the monarch in his palace at Oyo, where as usual his convoy/entourage disrupted the socio economic life of the people while his visit lasted. What is he looking for? Has he just now realized that there is an Alaafin in Oyo? Is he not aware that the Ibadan-Oyo-Ilorin Expressway, a federal government project has been abandoned for decades, especially the portion between Oyo and Ogbomoso which has remained a death trap? Does he seriously think the people in that area would be foolish to give him their votes after doing nothing for them?

    Politics or public service to an average Yoruba person is not about what he can benefit from the office holder personally, although a few hungry people from this region surrounding Jonathan have resorted to doing that, but what that office holder can do for the larger society. When Yoruba voted overwhelmingly for Jonathan in 2011, it was with the expectation that he would do something meaningful with that office to benefit the people. But what has he done for them? Nothing!

    Having squandered the little goodwill he got in the north four years ago, he cannot go back to that region now expecting their votes. The East-West road, the only road that traversed the entire south-south region where he comes from has remained uncompleted even after six years in office. And as he recently admitted at his campaign rally in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, he has done nothing for his people back home and yet he wants their votes.

    The people of the south east that are ready to die for and with him politically, I do not know what Jonathan has done for the region that the people are ready to commit political suicide on his behalf. The roads in the south east are not better than the death traps called federal roads elsewhere in Nigeria.

    I am using roads to illustrate Jonathan’s failure as a president because they are about the only public infrastructure that is shared by everybody, rich and poor, old and young. While the rich can provide houses for themselves, provide the light, water, education, health and even security, they cannot build the roads on which their expensive and exotic cars will travel; they still have to use public roads. So, with these roads in terrible shape, it means Jonathan has failed both the rich and the poor across the country, if only in that aspect.

    So, where does the president expects to get the votes from on March 28 for a second term in office? This is the million-naira question. In addition to the decay in infrastructure in the north, there is insecurity there, so not much to expect from that region in terms of votes. If he managed to get the south east and south –south votes in the bag (which is doubtful), he would need the votes from the south west for the sums to add up. And as the second highest voting bloc in the country, Jonathan needs the Yoruba to back him if he is to return to the presidency on May 29, 2015. But will he get their votes? I don’t think so.

    He has offended the people in so many ways apart from the infrastructure question mentioned above. The characters he has chosen to be his friends in Yoruba land are not the kind of people we consider as leaders here and as such they cannot influence votes for him here. I won’t mention their names, but you know them; the failed politicians who are only interested in their pockets. I pity Jonathan. It is too late in the day now to pretend to be a friend of the Yoruba, the people have seen through his deceit. Enough is enough.