The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • So frank a letter

    So frank a letter

    Your Excellency, Mr. President,

    I respect your high office.  But I insist on my republican right to engage you and ask questions, no matter how unpalatable.

    Nigeria is no monarchy: some form of cultural impunity, where some nobles seize power and lord it over the rest.  Neither is it a theocracy: some ecclesiastical impunity, where some religious order seizes power and claim they rule on behalf of God.

    It is rather a republican democracy, in which everyone is equal before the law.  It goes from there to codify that the majority of votes, of these equal citizens, determines whoever would be president, the chief servant of state.  To be sure, I didn’t vote for you, back then.  But my “no” vote, only validated the “yes” of the majority.  That is the majesty of democracy!  Besides here, law rules; not arbitrary power or impunity.

    So, Mr. President, you are there today.  I could be there tomorrow.  Another citizen, the day after.  So, republican democracy is nothing but citizen mutual respect, under the operative laws of the land.

    You may wonder why the title of this letter, “So frank a letter” echoes so much So Long a Letter, a fictional work by Mariama Ba, that dead Senegalese brave.

    Don’t wonder far, Your Excellency.  Madame Ba’s “letter”, with pathos, reflected the throes of the educated, modern African woman, operating under the strictures of ancient African matrimony!

    My own letter also bears the throes of modern Nigerian voters.   We voted you in as democratic president.  But we are pained at your ardour for an ancient African potentate — no disrespect intended.  This is no citizen “abusing the president”!  More worrying, you seem to be flirting with shredding our law-bound covenant of periodic elections.

    Would you, by any means, Your Excellency, be dodging elections, for fear of defeat, as former President Olusegun Obasanjo has alleged?  He claimed you were trying out the Gbagbo formula.  Laurent Gbagbo, former president of Cote d’Ivoire, postponed elections many times for fear of defeat.

    Eventually, he met his nemesis — no dishonour.  But the villainy was that he stonewalled after the people had withdrawn their mandate.  He had no right to do that.  He was no monarch.  He was an elected president — who voted in, could be voted out.

    So, please, please, don’t go the Gbagbo way!  There is no dishonour in losing elections.  If you in 2011 enjoyed the joy of victory, you can in 2015 endure the gall of defeat.  In any case, that is the lawful thing to do — and Your Excellency, law rules in a democracy.

    But many of your opponents have alleged you were planning to go a wee smarter than Gbagbo; that your camp was perfecting its rigging plot.  Indeed, they swear the last-minute postponement of the February 14 election; the initial whoops of hysteria, at that coup, by your campaign platform; your hyper-activity at the Boko Haram front thereafter, where you were busy playing the all-conquering commander-in-chief, complete with military camo and chutzpah; your camp’s scaled-up demonization of Attahiru Jega, the chief electoral umpire, for no noble cause; your camp’s campaign for the junking of permanent voter cards (PVCs) for temporary voter cards (TVCs), your campaign’s seeming fixation with using the military for electoral duties, when the courts have demurred; and your alleged dollar-blitz visit to Lagos, are all tell-tales of softening the grounds for a most horrendous rigging your camp is allegedly planning.

    I hope, Your Excellency, these are just mere speculations.  If they were not, you would have set in motion a chain of reactions you yourself cannot comprehend.  If in doubt, Your Excellency, read Nigeria’s contemporary history books.

    Since I’m hoping for the best, while I prepare for the worst, I wish to discuss your electioneering.  Even before formal electioneering, Mr. President, you were in churches, from which pulpit you launched subtle political bazookas.  Since formal electioneering, you have visited about every church worth its name.  Mr. President, what’s the idea — that you are a Christian president about to be unhorsed by ravaging Nigerian Muslims?

    Even at that, you were on the stumps when Namadi Sambo, your running mate and sitting vice-president, said in Dutse, Jigawa and Minna, Niger, that yours was the “Muslim” party, while the opposition was the “Christian” party.  So, in the South, your party is “Christian”, but in the North, “Muslim”?

    Sambo’s proof?  Yemi Osinbajo, the All Progressives Congress (APC) vice-presidential candidate was a pastor, who boasted 5,000 churches!  Sure, he reportedly spoke in Hausa, which you probably don’t speak.  But I have not read anywhere, Mr. President, that you rebuked your deputy against such rabid and vile campaign lines.

    There are also these allegations that the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) had received, from your campaign, between N6 billion and N7 billion to help purchase Christian votes.  Governor Rotimi Ameachi (no friend of yours) claimed it was N6 billion.  But Maiduguri-based Pastor Kallamu Musa-Dikwa (no foe of yours) also alleges it is N7 billion!  Any truth to these allegations, Mr. President?

    Whatever the truth, two things should worry you.  That a sitting president is alleged to spray about money-for-vote gives your image, and your government’s, no spruce; particularly with the not unfair allegation that yours is about the most corrupt government Nigeria has ever had.

    Then the Christian-Muslim divide, which no government before has ever inspired, or even wilfully promoted, more than you. Even if you win, you want to rule over a bitter, religiously divided country?  And if you lost, and your creek militants walked their talk on their threatened war, and an ethnic quarrel degenerated into a religious inferno, can you honestly live with your conscience as the man under whose presidency Nigeria finally unravelled?  Think of it, Mr. President!

    And while at it Mr. President, I must say your desperate ethnic divisive strategy is working wonders in Lagos!  No one is discussing your glaring deficiencies as president again.  Everybody is rather receding to their tribal laager, either for or against you.  But as you know, Your Excellency, there is life after election.  O, lest I forget: those South West hustlers who are promising you Yoruba votes.  They love you not, they only hate another!

    By the way sir, congratulations on your successes against Boko Haram.  That is good news! I wish though you could follow that up with the rescue of the Chibok girls.  Their parents, and we, traumatised co-citizens, would be very pleased.  Success is sweet, Your Excellency, so I won’t begrudge you your new-found derring-do, as all-conquering commander-in-chief.  But take it easy on the drama.  It is our military, and you are just the extant commander-in-chief.  Don’t act as though it was an Ebele Army, which some of us are against, simply because we have principled disagreement with you.

    Until we meet at the polling zone on March 28, please stay well.  I won’t vote for you.  But others will.  All I want from you, as a civic and law-abiding citizen, is to make every vote count — and let the lawful majority win.

    Yours patriotically,

    Lawful Citizen.

  • Taming the behemoth

    We must thank the House Public Accounts Committee for finally waking up to the duty of reminding us of one terrible absurdity that is less talked about – and yet inextricably linked to the nation’s crisis of public finance and by extension, governance.  I refer here to its latest finding that the combined financial expenditures of some powerful “statutory and extra-ministerial departments” actually outstrip the federal budget by a ratio of one to four.

    Much as I would love that the issue be elevated, being an inescapable aspect of the discourse of the nation’s future, I suspect that the issues may have come too late in the day. For not only does the charged atmosphere of electioneering makes it an unlikely subject of interest at this point in time, (which is tragic really considering the mess that the current administration has made of the finances), it seems even more unlikely that our politicians would have the stomach for serious debate when the atmosphere is suffused with issues of stomach infrastructure.

    To say that the federal behemoth is awash with cash is hardly saying anything new. We have heard it over and over again from its hierarchs that the federal government is not broke. We know what they mean – the huge pool available to service all manners of purposes under the sun – excepting everything that matters to the ordinary Nigerian. The good thing is that we are finally getting around to determining the size of the fiscal operation of that parallel arm of the federal government not known to be subject to the strictures of parliamentary budgetary process.

    Having said that, I must confess that I have quite a bit of a problem in the attempt by the committee– after nearly 15 successive cycles of budget – to present it as serendipity finding. To the extent that this is the way the business of government has been run over the years, someone surely must be kidding to imagine that the subject will suddenly excite Nigerians only because the federal purse is shrinking!

    Does that take anything from its legitimacy as a subject of interest? Hardly. Look at it this way: this year – no thanks to the slump in oil prices – the entire federal budget is projected at N4.3 trillion. Even with two months of its 12-month cycle already gone, that budget is still at the mill – undergoing processing at the two chambers of the National Assembly – a picture of what the process entails. Merely from what is indicated in the dry figures, the signs are that 2015 will be a very difficult year for everyone. For instance, we know for a fact that there will be little left for you and me for capital projects after removing the wages and salaries of bureaucrats and political actors – including the vote for their choice toys. If I may decompose the figures for the 2015 budget for better comprehension: Imagine that for every N91 the federal government earmarks for its operations, it plans to leave a left-over of nine naira to deliver on projects for the rest of us – themselves inclusive! Picture the same federal behemoth, now with a vastly shrunk budget –having a parallel one – four times as big, superintended by select appointees or nominees of the federal executive. Could there be a better infrastructure for the silent killer of corruption? Does anyone still wonder where all the cash moving around for all manners of purposes under the sun – including the slush for political activities are coming from?

    Perhaps the House PAC has been deaf and mute to the cries by stakeholders about the sheer outlawry of agencies such as the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) which prefers operate in defiance of the laws of the republic in the last 16 years. Had the House done its duty in those years, that monstrosity would have been long curbed. This is where, if you ask me, the committee’s finding – if it is any finding at all, is a decade and half late.

    I say this because, Section 162 (1) of the Constitution is explicit: “The Federation shall maintain a special account to be called “the federation account” into which shall be paid all revenues collected by the government of the federation, except the proceeds from the personal income tax of the personnel of the armed forces of the federation, the Nigeria Police Force, the ministry or department of government charged with the responsibility for foreign affairs and the residents of the Federal capital territory, Abuja”. Section 162 (3) also makes clear that; “Any amount standing to the credit of the Federation account shall be distributed among the federal and state governments and the local government councils in each state on such terms and in such manner as may be prescribed by the National Assembly”.

    Of particular interest here is Section 162 (10). It says “For the purposes of subsection (1) of this section, “revenue” means any income or return accruing to or derived by the government of the federation from any source and includes–

    (a)        Any receipt, however described, arising from the operation of any law;

    (b)        Any return, however described, arising from or in respect of any property held by the government of the federation;

    (c)        Any return by way of interest on loans and dividends in respect of shares or interest held by the government of the federation in any company or statutory body.”

    Let me be clear at this point: as it is in the federal behemoth, so it is in the 36 states of the federation. Across the board, the tradition is to treat the operating surpluses of revenue-earning agencies as piggy-banks – exclusive fiefdoms of the executive arm!

    Do I hear that somebody is still thinking of where to find the money to fund the 2015 budget? A good way is to bring the operating surpluses of Nigerian Ports Authority, the Nigerian Maritime and Safety Administration and those of the scores of agencies into the pool to start with. It seems to me a surer, more productive way to fund the budget than the endless chase for loans that ends up shackling future generations. As important as that is however, it comes nowhere the business of taming the monster known to bleed the treasury of billions annually.

  • Annals of political debauchery

    Annals of political debauchery

    Ekiti’s stomach-infrastructure governor Ayo Fayose long ago joined the ranks of our compatriots in public life — you know them — who never touch anything without defiling it

    He has no shame. He is a compulsive liar.  He holds nothing sacred.

    Since General Muhammadu Buhari was voted presidential candidate of the APC, Fayose has mounted a ghoulish death-watch on him, pivoting on medical report purporting that the 72-year-old former head of state had been treated for prostate cancer, at the Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital, in Kaduna.

    Even if true, the report should have elicited empathy.  The report was fake through and through, however; an inept forgery. But it was more than enough for Fayose to embark on a countdown to Buhari’s demise with the kind of glee you would expect of a person about to come into a vast fortune.

    Don’t vote for Buhari in the presidential election, he urged his band of followers, for the most part those whose stomachs he has conscripted for the vilest ends; don’t vote for him because he is going to die in office, like four previous leaders from his corner of Nigeria .

    That, essentially, was the statement Fayose put out in a signed advertisement that several newspapers plastered on the entire front pages, as if it was editorial material of the highest importance. And to every newspaper that agreed to publish this obscenity, Fayose forked out the going price of N5 million.

    For a while, he was distracted from his macabre obsession with compassing Buhari’s death by the disclosures that have now enteredthe annals of electoral skullduggery as Ekiti-gate.

    On the eve of last June’s gubernatorial election in Ekiti, some leading PDP members and top officials of the Jonathan administration gathered at Fayose’s Spotless Hotel, in Ado-Ekiti, to put the finishing touches to their design for winning the poll.

    In attendance were Musiliu Obanikoro, Minister of State for Defence, Jelili Adesiyan, Minister of Police Affairs,  Brigadier-General A.A. Momah,  commanding officer of the 32 Artillery Brigade deployed to Ado Ekiti to supervise the poll.

    Also in attendance, probably for an on-the-spot assessment of the design that was to be pressed into service for him in the gubernatorial race in neighbouring Osun State several weeks later, was the PDP’s candidate, Iyiola Omisore.

    Unbeknownst to the schemers, the meeting was secretly recorded by Captain Sagir Koli, an aide to General Momah. The tape was posted online newspaper Saharareporters, after confirming that it was authentic.

    Fayose can be heard on the audiotape bullying and harrying Momah, charging that Momah had been taking a bribe from the APC to disarm the police and thus to clear the way for it to rig the poll.

    Obanikoro, who had all along denied being anywhere near Ado-Ekiti at the material time, can be heard declaring that he was on a mission from the President. He reminds Momah that his promotion lay more or less in his hands as Minister for the Army, and that he had better deliver.

    The tape contains just enough hints of the plot – how APC stalwarts were to be rounded up and detained and its field workers immobilised while only PDP operatives travelling in specially marked vehicles would have the field entirely to themselves.

    The plot is fleshed out in shocking detail in Koli’s deposition, including how one of the notorious Uba Brothers, rode into Ekiti at the head of a column of soldiers, with bus loads of cash taken out of the Central Bank in Umuahia, and how the military personnel in this special task force took their orders directly from Chris Uba, aforementioned.

    Only a person trained in reconnaissance could have reported in such precise and overwhelming detail how the gubernatorial election that brought Fayose to power for the second time was compromised, if not perverted. It makes frightening reading.

    When the audio surfaced on the web site of Saharareporters, Fayose stoutly denied its content, claiming that it was only the latest fabrication in a long line of fabrications by the APC, “the party of liars.”  He said no such meeting ever took place, and that his voice had been digitally manipulated to implicate him.

    “There are softwares (sic) that can re-create voices and even bring the voices of long-dead notable persons back to life,” Fayose reportedly said. “There are softwares (sic) that can turn printed text into synthesised speech, making it possible for anyone to use recordings of a person’s voice to utter new things that the person never said.  One of such softwares (sic) is called ‘Natural Voices.’”

    If this was Fayose speaking extempore rather than reading from a script that some bureaucratic hack prepared for him, the Higher National Diploma he parades from the Ibadan Polytechnic may well be authentic. Some might even be led to believe that he is actually a professor of cybernetics!

    It was only after several of the schemers named in the tape had fessed up to the fact of the meeting but not the purpose that Fayose admitted, without shame and without remorse, that he had indeed participated in it.

    To give Fayose his due, he did not threaten to go to court, as Obanikoro did. Even if the publication was false, Obanikoro’s recourse to the law courts would still be fruitless. Under American law, he would have to prove that the publication at issue was made with actual malice, .i.e. with knowing falsity, or with reckless disregard for its truth or falsity.

    That burden is almost insurmountable. And it explains why public figures rarely bring defamation lawsuits before American courts.

    If Fayose’s reaction to the Ekiti-gate was characteristically duplicitous, President Goodluck Jonathan’s was downright execrable. He would not waste his time investigating a fabrication, he told The Wall Street Journal long after some of the officials featured in the audiotape had admitted that they had met in Ado-Ekiti but for a different purpose, and long after Saharareporters had posted Koli’s damning account of rigging plan.

    How could Dr Jonathan, a scientist trained to be guided by empirical evidence, tell that the audio tape and the report were fabrications when he had not examined them?

    This is a repudiation of the scientific method.  No wonder Nigeria under Jonathan has been like a stalled caterpillar, its antennae probing in every direction, its body inert.

    Meanwhile, Fayose has resumed his ghoulish pastime – his Buhari death watch. No sooner was it announced that the APC presidential candidate would be going to the UK on a working visit than he released a bulletin on Buhari’s itinerary.

    Buhari, he said, had been ferried to a plane in the dead of night on a stretcher, and rushed to  London for urgent medical treatment. Buhari was not scheduled to speak at Chatham House, as his camp had claimed, was in the UK for one purpose only: to obtain  treatment.  Fayose even went on to name the hospital where Buhari was allegedly being treated.

    All this, Fayose exulted, was splendid vindication for the editorial advertisement he had placed in the papers several weeks ago warning that the APC had saddled Nigeria with a presidential candidate set to expire.

    Buhari has since been shown going about his business in the UK, including a photo-op with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. His Chatham House talk is scheduled for Thursday.

    Nothing in all this has moved Fayose to admit error. Rather, he has now conflated his ghoulish obsession with what he says is revelation from on high that Buhari will never be president.

    A debauched mind’s hallucination, Governor, is no revelation.

  • Pee-dee-pee … shred your card!

    Pee-dee-pee … shred your card!

    This is no jeer at an unravelled behemoth, scythed by own sheer hubris: fixation with power and nothing else.

    It is rather the lamentation for a tragi-comic Nigerian polity: a party democracy sans organic political parties.

    But it is also a penetrating x-ray into the personal odyssey of Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo — a truly iconic citizen, at least by the Lugardian ethos that threw him up; but which spectacularly let Nigeria down. Hence, the many fits and starts; and near-eternal instability.

    No news: Obasanjo is in a titanic face-off with President Goodluck Jonathan; and therefore, with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).  By Obasanjo’s own presidential power code, Jonathan is PDP’s sitting emperor — long reign the king!  You brawl with the emperor — what effrontery! — and remain in one piece?

    But what is news, at least to the not-so-discerning, is that the current war’s many battles are strictly according to Obasanjo’s own “war” manual: his PDP sack and counter-sacking; and the Defence Headquarters’ rather reckless disavowal.  Both leap off the Obasanjo personal manual — as would be presently demonstrated.

    Confounding?  Maybe.  But first, the latest from the Obasanjo-Jonathan “war front”.

    Paparazzi clicked as cameras buzzed and whirred, and flashlights exploded; and Obasanjo’s PDP Ward 11, Abeokuta, co-members whooped in victory: Baba just shred his membership card!  It was the hilltop drama of February 17.

    Adabayo Dayo, Ogun PDP chairman would, two hours later, announce Obasanjo’s expulsion; the brash Ayo Fayose would prompt South West PDP to make some hostile noise; but PDP National would eat crow, with Sule Lamido, Jigawa governor, hinting at begging the old man.  Too late: the old fox had outsmarted his estranged presidential godson and allied traducers!

    But beyond the high drama: the card Obasanjo tore — did it symbolise the original PDP?  Hardly!   Rather, it was the PDP Obasanjo moulded in his own image.  But how could somebody’s own image disgust him so much — the severe wages of playing god?

    Make no mistake: the Alex Ekwueme-led G-34, with the likes of Solomon Lar and Sunday Awoniyi (both late), who confronted Sani Abacha, were no especial revolutionaries.  G-34 later formed PDP.

    Indeed, while the NADECO home pair of Adekunle Ajasin and Abraham Adesanya intensified their anti-Abacha war of attrition, Dr. Ekwueme and company were, at best, moderates; at worst, putative co-habitants, that nevertheless grimly told Abacha his transmutation would be morally wrong.

    Still, there was some democratic temper, some etiquette, some decorum.  But all that vanished when President Obasanjo gruffly proclaimed himself the PDP national leader — sure a US convention, but with thick and heavy bad faith — that vaulted the president over and above the party that presented him for election.

    With a new party Leviathan, the purge list was instructive: Chief Lar, first PDP national chairman, forced to abdicate because the “national leader” declared he could not work with him; and Chief Awoniyi, who accused Obasanjo of “spiritual corruption”.  “When a man is afflicted with spiritual corruption,” he warned, “he corrupts everything around him”.  Still, no stopping the new PDP king-kong!  Lar and Awoniyi were in the original G-34.

    The last PDP chairman with a mind of his own was arguably Audu Ogbeh, now an All Progressives’ Congress (APC) chieftain.  But Obasanjo crushed him over the Chris Ngige Anambra governorship kidnap, pulled off by Chris Uba and gang.  Ogbeh, the national chairman, shrieked his outrage.  Obasanjo, the national leader, bawled what the heck!

    Years later, Uba is fingered in the Ekiti rigging scandal.  From kidnapping a governor without sanction, he has graduated, given allegations from the Ekiti rigging audiotape, to crossing the Niger into Yorubaland, with soldiers under his command, to rig another governor into office.  Pee-dee-pee … pawa!

    Even Ahmadu Ali, Obasanjo’s garrison commander, he of 101% zombie-like loyalty as national chairman, has switched camp as Jonathan campaign director-general.  The hirelings of yesteryear have come of age — and are feigning the Pharaoh who knew not Joseph!

    That was the PDP which card Obasanjo tore!  Will the pristine PDP, warts and all, ever reincarnate?

    Then, the excitement from Defence Headquarters.  Declaring as an “embarrassment”, Gen. Obasanjo — four-star general, three-time commander-in-chief and Civil War hero, who received the Biafra instrument of surrender — makes the Army velvet ranks themselves an embarrassment to that once great national institution that brought the old soldier to national fame, honour and even wealth!

    Even the gibberish about the present-day military besting the Obasanjo-era one is pure gas!  Obasanjo-era military went to Congo and everywhere and excelled.  Buhari-era military chased intruding Chadian rascals almost all the way to Ndjamena.  Now, present-day Nigerian military gasp for breath facing a hitherto ragtag Boko Haram — until, irony of ironies, the same Chad came to the rescue — or the latest push, which the ever fond Jonathan somewhat hopes will save his doomed re-election chances!  Nice dreams!

    Some spiritual-inclined could even wager the authors of that brutal putdown have earned themselves a Karma-like professional curse, which dooms them to similar treatment from future juniors.

    The saving grace though, is that there is no evidence that release came from DHQ, since no one from  there signed it, even if it appeared on their website.  Just like the unsigned document that started the disastrous annulment of the 12 June 1993 presidential election result, this is another bastard document by cowards not man enough to append their signatures.

    But the Karma bit is no comfort, for again it emanated from the Obasanjo war of attrition manual.

    Just as the present military commanders now mock their old commander-in-chief, Gen. Obasanjo once mocked his.

    In his Not My Will, with supreme rudeness and intolerable petulance, Obasanjo growled at Gen. Yakubu Gowon.  He accused “Mr. Gowon” of duplicity and complicity; and merrily trumpeted his dismissal from the Nigerian Army.  Whenever Gowon set foot on Nigerian soil, he thundered, he would answer for his crime!  Gowon’s “crime”?  Unproven allegations about involvement in the Bukar Dimka failed coup, that took the life of Gen. Murtala Muhammed.

    As it happens, Gen. Gowon, 80, honour fully restored, remains the quintessential elder citizen, officer and gentleman.  In contrast, Gen. Obasanjo faces a tempest in his winter years.  Is the supernatural whispering something to the old general?

    Ironically, his latest anti-Jonathan campaign seems for public good, though yoked with private ire.  Yet, he looks more and more like Barnabas, the tragic hero in Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta.  Barnabas loved only himself.  But the first time he committed to others, he was double-crossed!  Obasanjo always pushes a private agenda.  But now that he seems to push a public one, not a few remain sceptical!

    Obasanjo, in the context of a collapsing PDP, should be a lesson to APC.  No political party should allow its own nominee, though he be president, so much power as to turn the party into his own fiefdom.

    History may doom Jonathan for destroying PDP — and possibly Nigeria, as Obasanjo fears.  But it would also, while recording his present heroics, blame Obasanjo for creating the Jonathan destructive genius.

  • Now, it’s GEJ versus Soludo!

    Now, it’s GEJ versus Soludo!

    Just as I predicted, the dust raised by former Central Bank of Nigeria Governor, Chukwuma Soludo on Nigeria’s missing trillions, seems unlikely to settle anytime soon. Once I had thought the matter settled – disappointingly – after Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala contemptuously dismissed the weighty issues raised by Soludo as “outright nonsense and self-seeking aggrandizement that need not be dignified with a response”. With last week’s response by President Goodluck Jonathan as reported by Premium Times (the latter quoting Thisday), the season of indifference is not only over; the matter – mercifully – has become live again!

    Permit yours truly, dear reader to bring you up to date on a controversy that the administration would rather sweep under the carpet. In January, Soludo had observed in a letter to the Finance Minister and Coordinator of the economy, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala that “the basket of our national treasury is leaking profusely from all sides”. He cited examples. First is the issue of oil theft which he noted averaged 400,000 per day which came to about $60bn ‘stolen’ in just four years. He put the cost in naira to about N12.6tn.

    The second was the issue of foreign reserves. Soludo had claimed that minimum forex reserves should have been at least $90bn instead of the current level of $30bn. To him, the gross mismanagement of the reserves has denied the country some $60bn or another N12.6tn.

    Expectedly, he brought up the issue of ‘missing’ $20bn from the NNPC (N4tn); the fuel subsidy racket and the import duty waivers bazaar. He asked: “How many trillions of naira were paid for oil subsidy (unappropriated?)? How many trillions (in actual fact) have been ‘lost’ through customs duty waivers over the last four years? How many trillions of naira self- financing government agencies earn and spend?”

    His conclusion was that “probably more than N30tn has either been stolen, or lost, or unaccounted for, or simply mismanaged under your watchful eyes in the past four years. Since you claimed to be in charge, Nigerians are right to ask you to account. Think about what this amount could mean for the 112 million poor Nigerians, or for our schools, hospitals, roads, etc.”

    And what did the super-minister, the lone official in the eye of the storm have to say to the matters that are not only legitimate but of immense public interest? A rude and haughty riposte delivered through an aide, Paul C Nwabuikwu. Dismissing Soludo’s charges off-hand as “littered with abusive and unbecoming language” she stated that the comments “shows how an embittered loser in the Nigerian political space can get so derailed that they commit intellectual harakiri by deliberately misquoting economic facts and maliciously turning statistics on their head to justify a hatchet job…We hope all the intellectuals in the international circles in which Professor Soludo has told us he flies around in will read what a Professor of Economics has chosen to do with his intellect”!

    Mercifully, yours truly is not alone in finding the language offensive; I recall that the descent to vulgar abuse actually prompted Obiageli Ezekwesili to write on her Twitter handle shortly after – the “nation and people seem to be on an accelerated race to the bottom. So sad! Why would a statement from (the) government read like that? Gosh!”

    Did the President finally clear the fog? Let’s hear the President speak through Thisday as reportedby Premium Times:  “Not too long ago I read in one of the papers, I think Vanguard, that former chief economic adviser to President Obasanjo who also went to become a CBN governor… Soludo is a professor and first class material. Yes, making a first class in economics, he is a brilliant person. His secondary school records are fantastic. So by all standards he is a brilliant person… he accused Ngozi; that N30 trillion was stolen under the watch of Ngozi in four years.”

    He went on: “Ngozi became a finance minister, let’s say from 2011 till date. From that time till now, our annual budget is between N4.3 trillion and N4.9 trillion. So even if you put all together, it is about 18 plus trillion naira, and not 30 trillion. The budget for these four years is less than N20 trillion, but Soludo said that under Ngozi’s watch they stole N30 trillion. This is in the papers, social media, stored in the clouds and will continue to be there. And when you type it in it will come out that during President Jonathan’s time they stole N30 trillion.”

    You think the President deliberately muddled up the issues? Then wait for this assault on the professional integrity of Soludo:  “We asked Ngozi how her colleagues in the World Bank saw the accusation and she said they were laughing and couldn’t believe it. There are certain things that you just cannot believe and if that is coming from somebody considered to be cerebral like Professor Soludo, then of course you know what the ordinary person would say. It is all political.”

    Interesting isn’t it? Soludo ignorant, doing mischief – or simply playing politics? Ignorant? That seems extremely doubtful. Mischief? Even more unlikely. Playing politics? The President should know – after all, he’s been doing a lot of shuttles of late, doing rounds to revamp his beleaguered presidency. So what’s wrong with Soludo taking a sip from the giddy brew?

    Expect Soludo to thunder again – if only to defend his honour being rubbished by the President and his appointees. It would be most tragic should Soludo be forced into an arrangee silence so as not to further ruffle feathers.

    Now to the substance. I am alarmed that a matter as serious as those raised by Soludo – on which several other Nigerians have also voiced alarm – would be reduced to a trivia by a President obviously in awe of his appointee! If you ask me, I’ll say that the President needed not have reminded us that his super-appointee to whom he outsourced his economic management has his roots in the World Bank – where all knees must bow when it comes to economic wisdom! As if we didn’t know that already. After all, where else, except in Jonathan’s Nigeria would an appointee secure appointment on such terms as to negate the federalist principles, and in such undisguised affront to the constitution of the republic? Or is the president saying that a sojourn at the World Bank automatically translates to immunity from questions over an individual’s stewardship?

    By the way – I am unaware of the resolution of the import duty waiver bazaar – in which our untouchable minister would swear that her ministry granted waivers and exemptions worth N55.96 billion in 2011, N55.34 billion in 2012 and N59.42 billion in 2013 – totalling N171 billion while the implementing agency, the Nigeria Customs Service, would show that a whopping N1.4 trillion waivers were granted during the same period.

    So much for the Jonathanians and their white-washed sepulchres.

  • Sad tales from Okrika

    Last Tuesday was a particularly bad day for the Rivers State governorship candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the now rescheduled April 11 gubernatorial election Dr. Dakuku Adol Peterside.  As you all know, he almost lost his life while campaigning in Okrika, the home town of our First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan.

    Those who watched the event live on Channels Television were shocked as unknown gunmen rained bullets on Peterside and his team as he mounted the podium to address thousands of Mrs. Jonathan’s kinsmen/women who had gathered enthusiastically to listen to the man who could be the next governor of their state.

    As the reign of terror continued, there was pandemonium everywhere. Those who could ran as far as their legs could take them while many more took cover to avoid being hit. By the time the gunmen were done, a police corporal, Ifeanyi Okorie, 33, was killed while no fewer than 50 others, including the Channels television reporter Charles Eruka were injured.

    The Okrika mayhem was the height of the series of violence that had characterized electioneering campaigns in Rivers State since the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) signaled the beginning of this general elections cycle. The violence had been targeted at the APC campaigns and fingers, rightly or wrongly, are being pointed at the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

    To be sincere, the violence was not unexpected judging by the intense rivalry between the ruling APC in the State and the opposition PDP. But the scale was unexpected. No one would have thought that guns and other firearms would be used to disrupt campaign rallies, to the extent of even threatening the life of the governorship candidate of a major party.

    Whoever was behind the attack did mean well for Rivers State. If any harm had been done to Peterside that day, where would Rivers State and indeed Nigeria be today? What would have become of our democracy?

    In the run up to that disrupted APC campaign, explosions had gone off earlier in the day near the campaign ground, destroying public properties. Even before last Tuesday, APC offices had been similarly bombed in different parts of the state by unknown people. Nobody has yet been brought to book for these.

    Peterside taking his campaign to Okrika was an act of bravery as Mrs. Jonathan and her supporters including former warlord Ateke Toms had reportedly vowed never to allow him campaign in their backyard. But for a man who intends to govern the whole of Rivers State, no part of the state is or should be a no go area.

    The Okrika attack should be a source of concern to President Goodluck Jonathan not just because a repeat of such could derail this democracy, but most importantly, the attack took place in his wife’s community. Mrs. Jonathan is noted for picking quarrel with anybody who dared to stand in her way. And her husband has never for once called her to order.

    At the height of the criminality unleashed on the Niger Delta by a section of the then Niger Delta militants, Okrika waterfront served as the hideout for the criminals terrorizing Port Harcourt and environs,  and when Rivers State governor Rotimi Amaechi attempted to clean up the area, Mrs. Jonathan resisted claiming to be fighting her peoples cause. Hmmmm.

    And now to allow APC campaign in her backyard, we are told is something she doesn’t want to hear. Well, Madam must hear this. The people of Okrika, just like every other community in Rivers State deserve to see and hear from all the candidates jostling to become the next governor of the state. It doesn’t matter which party; it is their right. They should have enough information to assess all the candidates before making their choice on the day of election.

    This kind of attack doesn’t present the president, his wife and the PDP well before the public. If such was going to happen anywhere at all it should not be in Okrika because nobody would believe it if they deny knowledge of it. But should such even happen anywhere at all?

    We have been told several times that the president is a good person but surrounded by bad people. But I ask, why must a good person surround himself with bad people? It is either of two things; the person is bad but pretending to be good, or is incapable of identifying and picking good people as aides. And if you find yourself surrounded by bad people accidentally, why is it difficult to dispense with their services?

    How the president deals with the Okrika attack would go a long way to show whether he truly believes in giving Nigeria a free, fair and credible elections. You might want to ask what has Jonathan got to do with it after all it is the business of the security agencies .  A lot. If the president is determined to provide a level playing field for everybody, then he should go ahead today and give a firm instruction to the Inspector General of Police to fish out those behind the Okrika attack and their sponsors and punish them accordingly. That is what a commander -in -chief should do.

    The danger here if the perpetrators were not fished out and punished is that others might be encouraged to try out a similar thing as we move towards the general election. And if such became the order of the day then this democracy would be in serious trouble.

     

    Fayose’s death wish for Buhari

    Part of the problem with President Jonathan is his penchant for surrounding himself with bad people (as stated above) like Governor Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti State. Repeatedly the governor has been speaking on the health of the All Progressives Congress Presidential candidate General Muhammadu Buhari , saying the former Head of State is not healthy enough to assume Nigeria’s presidency and would probably die in office if elected.

    Jonathan has not distanced himself from Fayose over this nor has he called him to order, suggesting that he tacitly support the erratic governor. When key supporters of Jonathan talks like this and the president keeps quiet, it says a lot about him and this is disturbing even to some of his genuine supporters. Comments like this from people like Fayose would further alienate Jonathan from right thinking Nigerians. If the president had called the governor to order even in private, he would not go about repeating this death wish for Buhari.

    Death is a necessary end for everybody and it will come when it will. But to wish Buhari to die now as Fayose is doing is to wish Nigeria bad. God forbid, if anything happens to the APC candidate now, Nigeria could be plunged into a crisis the outcome of which nobody can predict.

  • The selling of the front page

    Some 18 years ago, the Committee of Concerned Journalists, comprising 25 of America’s most influential journalists, media chiefs and journalism educators, produced a manifesto they called Elements of Journalism, to replace the Social Responsibility Theory that had served as the dominant ethos of American journalism for 50 years and influenced media practices worldwide.

    A distillation of the Committee’s research, surveys of readers, listeners, viewers, editors, and journalists, the manifesto contains 10 principles.

    In this examination of newspaper political advertisements in the on-going presidential election campaign, I will draw on five of those principles, viz:

    The primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing.

    Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.

    Journalism’s first loyalty is to the citizens.

    The essence of journalism is a discipline of verification.

    Journalists must serve as independent monitor of power and offer a voice to the voiceless.

    My concern is to examine how well newspapers are adhering to or departing from these principles in the placement of political advertisements on their front pages.

    The front page is a newspaper’s chiefest asset. There on display is, or should be, a report of the day’s events and intelligence, rooted in time-tested news values, carefully vetted, ordered, and rendered in a context that gives it meaning.

    Nigerian newspapers have parlayed the back page into a platform for their finest columnists and commentators, thus making it an important platform – for opinion and analysis. But the back page has also been turned into a platform for political advertisements.

    But the front page is the best advertisement for any newspaper that wants to be taken seriously. That is why, on most newspapers, the editor who signs off on the final product takes personal charge of what goes on to the front page, or delegates the task to a trusted senior aide.

    On some newspapers, a conference is held around mid-day, at which senior editors and staffers negotiate what stories will go on to the front page. They call it the Page One conference.

    The front page, then, is far too important to be left to mid-career journalists, much less interns. And it is emphatically too important to be bargained away to whoever is ready to pay hard cash for it, regardless of whatever content is plastered on it to masquerade as authentic editorial material.

    Even if such material carries a disclaimer, the trade-off is still a pernicious bargain.  If you cannot vouch for it, why publish it?

    When advertisement copy masquerading as editorial material carries no disclaimer, the newspaper is more or less ceding its prestige and authority to advertisers and announcing to its entire public that money is the measure of editorial propriety.

    I was driven to these reflections by the following material which occupied the entire front page of several newspapers last week.  Titled “Let’s talk about Change:  National Security (1), it is the first installment of a series of political advertisements placed by the Jonathan/Sambo Campaign.

    I could have picked on any among the dozens of sinister political advertisements doing the rounds in this election season, but this one ranks among the most repellent.

    Now, the text:

    “Thirty years ago – Under General Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria stopped equipping the Armed Forces in a major way to protect our military regimes from coups.

    “Once the Boko Haram insurgency took hold, our Armed Forces could not cope, mainly due to lack of equipment, lack of intelligence from local communities, and cross-border escape of insurgents.

    “Today, President Goodluck Jonathan has fully re-equipped that Armed forces, working with the international and local communities and has built an allied coalition of our neighbours and global partners —taking the war to Boko Haram, town after town.

    “As of today, Boko Haram is on the run and we are making steady progress to secure Nigeria

    “THAT IS CHANGING THE NATION FOR THE BETTER.”

    Since this claim, Boko Haram has staged deadly strikes in Gombe and Yobe.  But no matter.

    Those newspapers which plastered this advertisement on their front pages and made it look as if it is content generated by its staffers, content that has been vetted, did their proprietors, the sponsors of the message, and their principal, President Goodluck Jonathan,  a great disservice.

    The publication flagrantly violates the five journalistic principles I cited from the 10 enunciated by the Committee of Concerned Journalists.

    It is a transparent falsehood false, made with actual malice, with reckless disregard for the truth, and with knowing falsity.

    Buhari was in power for roughly two years.  Yet Jonathan’s proxies seek to hold Buhari responsible for the lack of equipment that made the armed forces wilt in the face of the Boko Haram insurgency that broke out some 25 years after Buhari left office.

    In those 25 years, Nigeria had four presidents who doubled as commanders-in chief of the armed forces, two of them serving generals and one of them a retired general, and two heads of state, one of them a doddering civilian and the other a general in active service.

    This listing does not include Dr Jonathan, who has served as president and commander-in-chief during the past six years.  The  syndicated columnist Sonala Olumhense reckoned that, in just the past 10 years, the Ministry of Defence spent well over N260 trillion.

    Where did all the money go?

    Jonathan has for several years declared on any number of platforms at home and abroad that Boko Haram’s days of murder and mayhem were numbered;  in one instance he went so far as to assure his audience that it would be “destroyed” within two months.

    When foreign military personnel and sophisticated equipment arrived to help search for the Chibok girls, Jonathan was all exultation. With that development, he said, Boko Haram was finished.

    That was almost a year ago. The Chibok girls have not been found, and Book Haram has waxed stronger and stronger. It even tied down the military high command in negotiations with fake agents while it seized more territory and consolidated its hold on the towns and villages it had overrun.

    And all this happened, Jonathan’s proxies tell us, because Buhari neglected to equip the armed forces in the two years he was in power three decades ago.

    Haba, Dr Jonathan and company!  This is Jonathanism taken too far.

    Newspapers all over the world are going through hard times.  Readership has declined, and so have advertisement and sales revenue even as production costs escalate.  Many titles are locked in a grim struggle for existence. The capacity to sustain loss repeatedly rather than the ability to turn a profit is now the measure of a newspaper’s standing.

    Still, that is no excuse for turning over their chiefest asset – the front page – to peddlers of transparent falsehoods or hate or religious bigotry to anyone who can pay for it.

    Newspapers that do this repudiate the primary purpose of providing citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing, they renounce their obligation to the truth and the loyalty they owe to citizens. They disavow the imperative of verifying information, and the duty to monitor power in its many guises and disguises.

  • June 12 to February 14

    From 12 June 1993 to 14 February 2015 may have taken 21, going to 22, long years.  But the reactionary forces billeted in Nigeria’s power chambers have changed little.

    That is the long and short of the aborted February 14 presidential poll, now moved to March 28 — and democratic forces had better take notice.

    While June 12 aborted the result of Nigeria’s cleanest election ever, February 14 postponed — but hopes it has aborted — the looming electoral demise of a failed presidency; proven by an increasing momentum, pointing at a probable Valentine Day’s electoral guillotine of President Goodluck Jonathan and his ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

    Even after the perils of June 12, February 14 was power magicians at work.  Nigeria, we hail thee!

    But more electorally significant: February 14 was to mark a novel IT offensive on polls rigging — use of card readers to biometrically authenticate the voter.

    That has led to another furious round of debates — temporary voter cards (TVCs) versus permanent voter cards (PVC).  If PDP is bearish, and All Progressives Congress (APC) is bullish, on PVC use, as Attahiru Jega’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) insists, you can guess which of the two has the electoral bounce.

    You could also guess which side is hollering, bawling and cursing, just to fiddle the vote.  PVC has a chip to thwart voter impersonation.  TVC has no such in-built check.  So, if one side now pushes for TVC, on some subversive love for the voter, you could guess where it figures its electoral salvation is — soulless rigging!

    The gripping fear of crushing defeat would, therefore, appear, for the ruling party, the beginning of wisdom — which might soon turn grave folly, for wilful stalling of due elections, in a supposed democracy, is grim business, bordering on treason.

    That is why you must really pity Ijaw elder Pa Edwin Clark and his Southern Nigeria confederates, even if you first feel, towards their  latest  cant, only justifiable anger.

    Clark is unfazed symptom of a collapsed community.  He has been since when, from Ken Saro-Wiwa’s lofty heights (which the Nigerian state unfortunately visited with a hideous hanging), militants, many of them no more than miscreants and equal-opportunity criminals, hijacked the Niger Delta cause.

    In the Goodluck Jonathan presidential cause, Clark and his Ijaw lobby have continued to betray their collapsed community.  Elder, Clark would libel the non-Ijaw for even daring to think not voting Jonathan.  Youngster, the brash Asari Dokubo, would threaten to levy war.  From Jonathan, the supposed commander-in-chief, mum is the word.

    Even the sedate and gifted Atedo Peterside would author an analytical fraud, presuming whoever read his piece, on the supposed bad sides of the two major presidential candidates, would be too dumb to see through the charade.  An ultra-mischievous political analyst never chanced on the polity!

    Clark got his wish to postpone February 14.  And with crushing defeat postponed, Atahiru Jega, the INEC chair, is his next quarry — to avert looming electoral disaster.  How fond!

    Clark, with his so-called Southern Nigeria People’s Assembly (SNPA), have called for Prof. Jega’s sack and arrest; for alleged offences only their jumbled minds can understand! Like June 12 which demonised, abused and sacked Humphrey Nwosu for delivering the cleanest election in Nigerian history, Clark’s SNPA pushes for Jega’s sack — and INEC’s dissolution — because it dreads his election would, for the first time, visit a Nigerian ruling party with free and fair defeat.

    The SNPA push is so comical, were it not so tragic.  It goads a contesting president to sack the electoral umpire.  But isn’t that like a football player sacking the referee mid-game, just because his side is facing a wallop?  Only Nigeria could tolerate such buffoonery!

    Worse: that President Jonathan could delude himself he has such powers — though in his latest presidential chat he mercifully claimed he never thought of wielding such — is satanic tribute to gunboat thinking!

    Clark’s SNPA confederates, Alex Ekwueme, Walter Ofonagoro, Chukwuemeka Ezeife, Femi Okunrounmu, with others, are a perplexing mix: unfazed reactionaries with life-long devotion to dubious causes; otherwise decent citizens who just don’t appreciate their due place in the Nigerian epoch; and reactionary neophytes, newly recruited to the Nigerian wide and merry way, that leads nowhere but perdition.

    More: all are pledged to a near-fatally damaged presidential product in Jonathan.  And worse: all labour in vain over a fictive political Southern Nigeria.  Geographically, there is indeed a Nigerian South.  But, as in a political North?  That is plain fiction!  Still, even with all their heroics, colluding to stall legitimate elections, they are only marionettes.

    The real power puppeteers are bivouacked behind the scene — and democratic forces owe Femi Falana, SAN, a debt of gratitude for his rare insight in this matter.  He insisted that the noxious, anti-June 12 forces are at work again, in the election postponement gambit.

    Take Sambo Dasuki, President Jonathan’s national security adviser (NSA).  He first flew the postpone-the-election kite in London.  Then, even after Jega had won the election debate before the National Council of State, he was part of the coup de grace — with the service chiefs in tow — that claimed the military could not guarantee security for the election, thus forcing Jega to postpone.

    So, for the first time in Nigerian history, not the military-in-power, not an errant elected commander-in-chief but security chiefs, sworn to oath under civil authority, gave the diktat — and the feckless commander-in-chief, rippling with crass power opportunism, could only gawk and gloriously concur!

    Still on Dasuki, but some blast from the past: he was part of the IBB palace coup that toppled Gen. Buhari; and was probably part of the IBB ensemble that pulled off June 12.

    Of course, Col. Dasuki (rtd) is no devil any more than co-power players of his generation are angels.  But he appears a grim metaphor for intense private fears that force intense public anguish — like the annulment of June 12 and postponement of February 14.

    Even the Afenifere grandees that pressed into Jonathan’s service, the blanket Yoruba support they don’t have, appear to suffer from such irrational fears.

    But, at the end of the day, the tragic, cruel joke is on the Commander-in-Chief.  The man who hates to be a General, appears being merrily snared in the generals’ plot.  The man who balks at being Nebuchadnezzar appears set to be consumed by Nebuchadnezzar’s tragic conceit.  And the man who is riled at being Pharaoh, appears leading his deaf, dumb and blind forces to sink, without trace, in the Red Sea!  May the good Lord save Jonathan from Jonathan!

    Still, Nigeria’s democracy would remain hugely suspect until felons behind clear treasonable manoeuvres are direly punished.  If that had been done on June 12, there would not have been February 14.

    As for Pa Clark and his misguided Ijaw irredentists, pushing a vacuous cause, a friendly reminder: the last time such a rascality got out of control, a brainless Nigerian state wiped out innocent Odi villagers, for the sins of a criminal few.

    What fresh perils bring these present manoeuvres on the polity?  Only the good Lord can tell!

  • Who cares?

    While the military-induced shift in the elections by six weeks is increasingly looking like a minor part of a long but complex play, one aspect that seems to have escaped attention is the economic, human and institutional dimensions of the unfolding plot. Six weeks, ordinarily is supposed to be nothing in the life of a nation. Indeed, merely by the assurances of the military’s top brass to whom the nation’s chief steward has outsourced his primary function as commander-in-chief, the nation is being offered a dubious respite from the insurgency in the North-east.

    Win or lose the war in the North-east, the truth is that the end to our nightmares is nowhere yet in sight. Once the country was described as under-governed, what we have in place at the moment is total abdication. I once described the Jonathan presidency as outsourced only because I was short of words to describe the flight by the Team Leader; today, we neither have a team nor anyone in charge. However, while it seems convenient for our steward of state to abandon state duties to the exigency of tenure renewal, the systematic co-optation of state institutions into the electoral project under his direct supervision would come to the greatest irony of all time. I will return to this issue shortly.

    Talking about the poll shift, I guess it is no accident that the support for the measure has been loudest among the beleaguered parasitic throng infesting the presidency. The motivations of the legion that have long mastered the art of making wealth without breaking a sweat should not be hard to understand; the perfidious club would rather keep the flush funds flowing under the regime of unearned wealth, till kingdom come.

    Of course, you can hardly say the same of, for instance, a Dangote, whose wealth under the floundering administration continues to dissipate. Only recently, Forbes reported Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, as losing more than $7.8 billion of his fortune in the wake of the latest plunge in the nation’s capital market. His net worth as at November 7, 2014 was put at $21.6 billion. His entire fortune is currently said to be around $17.2 billion! Whereas Forbes puts the negative trend to: “a general uncertainty regarding the 2015 general elections, Central Bank regulatory headwinds, and weak earnings from large cap companies”, I put it to state-induced uncertainty designed to generate a mad scramble for Abuja’s crumbs!

    And that is supposed to be one individual’s loss. Can one possibly compute the cost of the postponement to millions of families across the federation? I write here of programmes forced to be put off; meetings that have to rescheduled and the countless other opportunities scuttled – all because Jonathan and his PDP are suddenly allergic to elections?  Does anyone care? What about President Jonathan; does he care – at least not when, in his own words, all his campaign expenses are underwritten by the nation’s treasury?

    In spite of the dark ominous clouds, I see Divine hands at work. How? I will explain.

    Doubtless, the nation is already as fractured as can be along the traditional fault-lines of religion and ethnicity. All across the land – no thanks to the PDP’s mantra of the-end-justify-the-meanness – so palpable has been the curtain of mutual distrust across religious and ethnic lines that everyone now seems to appreciate that it would require an ultra-nationalist to heal the deep wounds inflicted by Jonathan and his men.

    You ask me of the good in this? I say it is in the recognition that the nation currently has a big task of retrieving its destiny from the band of opportunistic wayfarers! I consider that as a significant step forward. On those issues, it seems inevitable that the party would burn itself out sooner than later. Having succeeded up to a point in their play of the opportunistic card of religion and ethnicity, the signs from the wearied citizens would seem to suggest that their days of reckoning is here at last!

    This is even more so in the economic sphere. Today, the dip in oil prices has since become an alibi for the incompetent administration to explain its glaring failures across the board. Never mind that the plunge in oil prices is barely two months old; how does one explain an economy once deemed as resilient and impregnable like the Titanic succumbing only few weeks after the oil price plunge?

    Presently, virtually all the indices on which the administration has hinged its claims to superlative performance have continued to unravel right before our very eyes: not only is the naira doing yoyo, down the road, the industrial and manufacturing sectors are already under intense strains – not from the traditional sources of inclement operating environment, but from the ill-effects of unmanaged or unmanageable exchange rate fluctuations. And just as one would expect that that high exchange rate would drive up costs; the threat of possible cut-back in industrial/manufacturing capacity has since become one that we must worry even in the near term. That threat has become so real and with it the grim likelihood of factory closures and massive lay-offs that the nation can ignore it at great costs.

    Trust the administration to choose the difficult time to go AWOL – thereby giving the band of speculators full reign! Guess it’s time to ask – who are those forces fuelling foreign exchange demand? In other words, who are the demanders of forex and to what purpose? A clear answer to the above would obviously reveal a lot that the administration would rather not let Nigerians into. However, it suffices to say that the answer would, at least in part, explain the laissez-faire activities that has left the economy floundering. It is just as well that the administration has suddenly become subdued or less exuberant in its claims of achievement. Guess it’s a measure of the extent to which its inelegantly constructed castle has gone up like the smoke!

    Back to the issue of the President’s cooptation of state institutions to his electoral project. By now, Nigerians must be sufficiently embarrassed by the revelations emerging from the farce that the Ekiti gubernatorial election has turned out to be. Of course, we have since heard that the Ekiti template was also deployed in Osun – although with limited success. Today, an Assistant General of Police, Joseph Mbu has been telling all who cared to listen that he is neither answerable to the constitution nor the laws of the country but his taskmasters in Abuja. That for me is the limit of state regression – an supossedly organised society in free fall.

  • Bull in a china shop

    Tortoise: I’m going on a journey. Audience: When will you come back? Tortoise: When I’m disgraced. —Yoruba saying.
    Those the gods will destroy, they first make mad. — An African saying.
    Fools tread where angels dread. — An English saying

    No, it is no festival of aphorisms.  But ongoing political rascality in the land, that if not checked could plunge Nigeria in fresh but needless crisis, requires some straight talk.

    First, it is surprising that the symbolism of the election-must-hold-from-February 14 ensemble, at the February 5 Council of State meeting, must have been totally lost on President Goodluck Jonathan and his party.

    According to a front page report in The Nation of February 6, former presidents/heads of state that opposed shifting the elections were Gen. Yakubu Gowon, Alhaji Shehu Shagari, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar and Chief Ernest Shonekan.

    Of the pack, Gen. Babangida and Chief Shonekan are especially significant.  Both were star actors in the catastrophic 12 June 1993 presidential election annulment crisis, which satanic script the current power rascals appear to be acting out, despite being blessed with the hindsight of how June 12 nearly finished Nigeria.  But more on that presently!

    Nevertheless, in the overall context of Nigeria’s grand political mess, the trio of Gen. Gowon, President Shagari and Gen. Abubakar are no less important.

    Though the quintessential officer and gentleman, Gen. Gowon’s prevarication over a pledged 1976 return to civil rule date drained his military government of all legitimacy, leading to his eventual overthrow in 1975.

    President Shagari fell because, after a failed presidency like the current Jonathan’s, his National Party of Nigeria (NPN) — again as notorious as the current Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) — savagely rigged the polls, which led to the collapse of the 2nd Republic  — and the president’s ouster — in 1983.

    Gen. Abubakar was the fall guy who was constrained, between 1998 and 1999, to lead a disgraced military back to the barracks, after dissipating its essence in toxic political power.

    Gowon was benign.  Murtala Mohammad/Olusegun Obasanjo, on impulse, tried to fix the polity, but destroyed the civil service.  Muhammadu Buhari/Tunde Idiagbon were draconian, riled by the decadence of the 2nd Republic.  Babangida was devious and noxious; and feverishly laid the foundations of the rot that lasts till today.  Sani Abacha was well and truly savage, materially and spiritually, and was the very epitome of military rule as Stone Age tyranny and debauchery.

    Well, Gen. Abubakar led the Army, tail between hind legs, back to the barracks; and birthed the current 4th Republic, though the sudden death of Chief Moshood Abiola, who won the 12 June 1993 presidential election, is an eternal blight on his tenure.

    June 12, of course, brings back the pair of Babangida and Shonekan.

    “A bull in a china shop” (incidentally the title of this piece) was the Obasanjo vicious putdown, when Gen. Babangida was trying every trick under the sun — not unlike President Jonathan and his crowd are doing now — to stay in power, though he pretended to organise an elaborate and circumlocutory transition programme.

    Babangida knew he had to leave at the end of his transition programme — but he didn’t want to.  Jonathan knows he is a sorry failure as president and, from feelers, will lose the election — whether on February 14 or later.

    As Babangida stonewalled then, blundering into the tragic annulment of June 12, Jonathan is stonewalling now, pushing for election postponement.  But by that gambit, what crisis will he plunge Nigeria into?

    Still, the Shonekan leg of the narrative.  Chief Shonekan, an otherwise respected business voice, stumbled into the power maelstrom as head of IBB’s contrived Interim National Government (ING), after even the annulment could not guarantee IBB’s stay; thus playing out the tortoise who would not return from a trip until it was thoroughly disgraced.

    Yet, Shonekan was doomed to similar fate.  For starters, he became a pariah in Nigeria’s South West — for playing Judas to a cheated fellow Egba man; but more importantly, to the Yoruba cherished culture of standing firm, no matter what, on fairness and justice.

    Then, a Lagos High Court declared his ING illegal.  Finally, his judicial ouster rocketed the terrible Abacha into power.  By the courts, Shonekan ought not to be on the National Council of State; but an Abacha regime decree som ewhat revalidated his tenure.

    So, if IBB and Shonekan were trenchant elections must hold as scheduled, it is because they had passed through the perilous path Jonathan and his gang are leading themselves.  It brings nothing but perdition and disaster.

    “With report from NSA,” The Nation of February 6, quoted IBB as reportedly quipping to Col. Sambo Dasuki (rtd), President Jonathan’s National Security Adviser’s jeremiad, on parlous security in Adamawa, Yobe, Borno and Gombe states, “it is clear that only 14 out of the 774 local governments in the country (less than 5%) are under security threats.  You cannot,” he reportedly insisted, “stop  elections because of these areas.”

    Yet, the NSA angle is another face of the postpone-the-election grand burlesque.  In London, the NSA’s dissonance was the slow distribution of permanent voter cards (PVCs), an Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) headache.  Less than two weeks later, the NSA has developed new worries — his own core area of security.  Six weeks hence, what would the excuse be?

    It takes no especial acuity to see that someone, somewhere is trying to dodge elections — and that person might just be the president of the Federal Republic!  That is a new low in Nigeria’s chequered but troubled political history!

    Doyin Okupe, a presidential spokesperson, was later to spill the beans — his principal could not guarantee security during elections, if they start on February 14!  If a president cannot guarantee security, what the hell is he still doing on his seat — just to grow gross on the people’s fat?

    The Okupe angle also introduces another rich parallel to this running power show, vis-a-vis June 12.  Back in 1993, Okupe was part of the National Republican Convention (NRC) negative campaign to hurl down MKO Abiola, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) candidate; since they lacked the panache to vault Alhaji Bashir Tofa, NRC candidate, to MKO’s dizzying heights.

    The Jonathan campaign, with their puerile scandals where there are none; and petty blackmail and threats, and ridiculous scaremongering, are adopting the same dumb tactics to shoot down Gen. Buhari.  But if that tactic electorally buried  Tofa in 1993, it is not about to lift Jonathan in 2015.

    But political rascality aside, a democratic president that dodges an election, because of mortal fear of a crushing loss; and security agents of state, that stack their cards to achieve scare-mongering to subvert elections, play an ultra-dangerous game that borders on treason.

    Goodluck Jonathan is a co-citizen.  Only the law, with the instrumentality of democratic elections, thrust him above the rest of us, as president of the Federal Republic.

    Now, if for any reason he subverts that law, he only knocks the ground from under his own feet — and risks a fatal crash.

    It is playing the proverbial fool, treading where angels dread.