The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Inching to the abyss?

    It did not come as a surprise that the late Saturday night announcement by INEC chairman, Prof Attahiru Jega of the shift in the polls from the initial February 14 date to March 28 has again torn Nigeria and Nigerians right through the middle. It was, as one might expect of a well-crafted assault designed to confuse, confound and ultimately provoke different sets of actors in an already polarised polity. Unfortunately, it would appear one instance in which the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan would overplay the opportunistic card while pretending to be above the fray.

    Today, Nigerians know the story – either in part or in whole – of a plot that has gone through long incubation. Saturday announcement was merely the maturation of a plot which actually preceded the Chatham House kite flown by Jonathan’s National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki on January 22. Of course, it was convinient as it was well-timed: barely 50 percent of the permanent voters cards had been distributed; in the increasing unlikelihhood that that the balance would be able to collect their PVCs at the end of the initial target date, the NSA had argued that a shift in the elections by three months – within the limits allowed by the Electoral Act – would be a good idea.

    Apparently, INEC’s assurances that the distribution would be completed in time for the polls made no sense to him; he would still insist on allowing more time for a successful election. “It costs you nothing, it’s still within the law”, he had stated at the Chatham House parley.

    Of course, Nigerians knew that he merely spoke the mind of his principal, President Goodluck Jonathan. What was not known at the time was that the whole business of PVCs was merely a decoy, a ploy sort of, to halt the momentum of the President’s main rival, General Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress. Indeed, as the following days would reveal, INEC was merely being suborned to play the unwilling fall-guy in the dangerous scheming by an administration desperate to keep its hold in power.

    As Nigerians would later witness, what followed was a game of wits: a stubborn INEC would refuse to play the game strictly their way leaving the out-of-depth administration to shop for plausible alibis to convince Nigerians on the inevitability of the shift. To make good, the office of the NSA would write to INEC highlighting the issues of security in the North-east. If the letter, a sort of insurance, was meant to secure the co-operation of INEC, it apparently failed; which was why the federal government turned to the National Council State where the NSA’s letter would again come up for discussion. Of course, the body saw through the charade and threw the matter back to INEC, the body charged with organising the elections to conclude upon. Indeed, most members, according to reports, saw no sense in halting the elections – insurgency or not – given that their activities was limited to 14 local governments out of the 774 in the country.

    This was perhaps the point that things got desperate. With limited options left for manouvre, the federal government again turned the pressure on INEC. This time, it found a willing ally in the brass-hats in the military to whom it appeared to have outsourced the dirty job. Trust the no-nonsense fellows, they dared INEC to proceed with the elections and risk the dire consequences! With the nation’s dog at this point wagging the military’s tail, and given the unfathomable situation in which the office of the commander-in-chief, the bastion of state authority, had been  cynically surrendered to a group of functionaries within the military establishment, the capitulation of INEC was more than assured!

    That obviously sets new limits for the outsourced presidency of Dr Jonathan.

    And who won?

    Merely by the gloating in the camps of the federal government and the ruling PDP, the instance of capitulation by INEC is supposed to be a strategic victory of sorts. Without any doubt, it guarantees the party just enough time to revamp its flailing campaigns, and perhaps just enough time to unleash more sinister plots from its inexhaustible bag of tricks. Whether or not the development would confer the much sought-after electoral advantage for the president and his party is of course a different matter.

    Now, let’s look at who lost. The most promiment victims are the key institution of the Nigerian state daily undermined by the PDP-led federal government. Top on the list is the military whose institutional integrity is being violated on a daily basis; no doubt, the development has since brought back its characterisation by one of its leading lights as an institution of anything-goes.

    I must confess that I found a contribution by Karen Attiah in the  Washington Post on the issue irresistible:  “… after years of Boko Haram’s carnage, what will the army do in six weeks that they couldn’t do in five years and with a $5 billion security budget? Where was this urgency hiding for the past six years? And why escalate tensions and anger Nigerians who have been eagerly waiting to cast ballots by making this announcement with only a week to go before the polls?” Like a hunter’s dog sworn to be lost in the woods, it seems unliekly that anyone is listening.

    The next victim is INEC. Expecting INEC to proceed with the elections in those impossible circumstances would obviously amount to stretching legalism to surrealism. It would amount to inviting chaos. In the circumstance, that postponement would seem pragmatic. But then, the real danger will come six weeks down the line; in other words, what happens should service exigencies, as defined by the military high command, compel further extension? What would INEC do? Defy the brass-hats, or what? Would it be time again to invoke the overused doctrine of necessity? And what happens to the constitutional order?

    That is the bind that the nation has found itself. Clearly, the prognosis are anything but good. In all of these, what must pass as lamentable is that an administration that came into office via the ballot box has become so terribly allergic of the democratic process as to now seek to undermine it. How the current development plays out is anyone’s guess. I would however wager that neither the PDP or the federal government would have the last laugh – except they do what is right by the law and the constitution. In this case, it seems the only thing to do is to ensure that nothing – no matter how remote – is allowed to abort the May 29, handover date.

  • Coup-makers at work

    Coup-makers at work

    Every outrage on the popular will in Nigeria has followed a familiar trajectory.

    There is, for a start, the stage of disbelief and anger and visceral rejection. “How could they do this to us?” the violated ask in indignation. “This must not pass,” others vow.

    At this stage, the perpetrators are somewhat tentative. Their exultation is restrained and private. Having no reliable measure of the balance of forces, they do not want to precipitate a showdown yet.

    In the second stage, those who belong in the substantial ranks of the “any government in power,” with support from the “anything goes” brigade, step gingerly out of the shadows to congratulate and embrace the beneficiaries of the outrage. Consummate players that they are, they say nothing about the process that wrought the controversial benefit, nor about how deserving the beneficiary is. The important thing is that the beneficiary is their man. Nothing else counts.

    Hard on the heels of these groups follow those who prize “stability” above all else, “national stability” especially. Outrage or no outrage, they counsel, the “nation” must not be allowed to drift into chaos. The outrage, they remind you, is only the latest in a very long line of outrages; so, why single it out? And, in whatever case, far greater outrages have occurred elsewhere. The really important thing is for everyone to come together “to move the nation forward.”

    Meanwhile, congratulatory messages for the beneficiary that had begun as a trickle turn into a cascade.   So do “solidarity” visits by an assortment of royal supplicants, influence peddlers, contractors and entrepreneurs with an eye to kick-starting their failed businesses, not forgetting other classes of political adventurers. These “solidarity visits” are dutifully captured live on national television. They are staged primarily for television anyway. It is the cameras that give them resonance.

    In the face of all this, the ranks of those who had vowed that the outrage would not pass begin to thin; their voices grow less insistent; the ranks and the voices of those urging acceptance of the outrage for the sake of stability and “moving the nation forward” appear stronger than they actually are.

    Soon, many of those who had vowed that the outrage would not stand begin to feel overwhelmed. They give up and move on, persuaded that resistance is futile.

    The foregoing first appeared in my column for May 1, 2007, written in the wake of the presidential election in which the Umaru Yar’Adua/Goodluck Jonathan ticket was declared winner over the Muhammadu Buhari/Chuba Okadigbo.  International and domestic observers said of the poll that it ranked among the most fraudulent they had   ever witnessed anywhere.

    Subsequent events followed the trajectory I sketched above.  Yar’Adua took the reins, dying two year later in office and was succeeded by Jonathan, who went on to win a disputed four-year term that has now run its desultory course.

    But Jonathan, his suborned Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Agency and their confederates in and out of uniform, have got to be practically unconscious if they expect that reactions to the coup they staged over the weekend will also follow that trajectory.

    The “any-government-in-power” marionettes, the “anything-goes” choir, the stability merchants and the fixers, we shall always have with us.  But they have had their day.

    A new consciousness is sweeping the land – a consciousness that rejects the manipulations, the subornation, and the corrupt blandishments that a long line of rulers had employed to get the people to connive in the subversion of their own will.

    Four weeks before they executed this coup, a source who is in a position to know had told me that Jonathan was going to do everything within his power to put off the general election for as long as possible, or to avoid it altogether, because he and his camp know that they are headed for a thumping.

    “Can he do that?” I asked the source, one of the most knowledgeable and reliable a reporter ca ever had in his corner.

    “It’s too late,” he said.

    In retrospect, he was wrong, as are all those who have in the face of compelling evidence, continued to underestimate Jonathan’s capacity for the perverse, the devious and the downright dishonourable.

    Calls for postponing the election, at first few and far between, grew louder and more insistent. Less than one-half of the electorate has received permanent voters cards stood to be disenfranchised if the election were held as scheduled, Jonathan’s proxies chimed.

    Suddenly the same Jonathan who for two weeks did not give a damn about more than 200 innocent girls kidnapped from their school hostels and has not given much of a damn subsequently was overflowing with solicitude for the voting rights of residents of the area – the same Jonathan who agreed to meet the distraught parents of the abducted students only at the urging of the Pakistani child activist, MalalaYousafzai

    The area in question, 14 local government areas spanning three states in a country comprising 774 local government areas spanning 36 states and Abuja Federal Capital Territory, is widely believed to be a stronghold of the opposition APC, the party stands to lose if voting there is spotty because of the insurgency.  Conversely, it is Jonathan’s PDP that stands to gain the most under the circumstances.

    So when the Jonathan and the PDP take on the role of advocate for those residents in the Boko Haram-infested areas, you know they are not motivated by altruism.  It is just another excuse for scrubbing the projected poll.

    Leaving nothing to chance, Jonathan tried to conscript the National Council of State to rubber-stamp his design.  The Council rebuffed him and his confederates.

    He then reached for his trump card to rein in the unyielding INEC chairman, Attahiru Jega and delay summary judgment on his failed presidency that  an electorate with which he has not kept faith was poised to deliver;  an electorate that he and his corrupt administration have more often betrayed than served.

    The commander-in-chief who had been missing in action, the one who visits the troops in the frontline decked out in the finest clothing, directed the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the state security apparatus to inform INEC in writing that it the armed forces were set, at long last, to launch a massive offensive against Boko Haram, beginning the very day the presidential election was to be held and lasting all of six weeks.

    During the period, the armed forces would tolerate no distraction.  Nor could it guarantee the safety of election officials or voters.

    In short:  You are on your own, Attahiru Jega.  Go ahead and stage your election, and may the blood of those who come to harm in the event be upon your head.

    Who can blame Jega for submitting to this tawdry blackmail?   But the self-indictment of the security chiefs is not lost on the public.

    If you are paid and provisioned handsomely to ensure the security of lives and property, and you declare that you cannot guarantee the discharge of that remit, you have no business remaining in office.   Do the honourable thing and resign.

    But honourable conduct is not something that Jonathan demands of himself or his officials.

    In any case, what makes them think they can crush the insurgency in six weeks when Boko Haram has been running rings around them in the past four years?  What would happen if six weeks passed and the insurgency continued to rage?

    When Jonathan asks Nigerians to accept his shabby conduct “in good faith,” he adds wanton insult to bitter injury.  What does he know about good faith?

    When he goes on to assure the public that May 29, the day the winner of the election will take office is sacrosanct, not March 28, the day of the re-scheduled poll, he raises new questions about his sincerity.

    Ironically, it is the sedate APC candidate, General Muhammadu Buhari who has increasingly been looking presidential, while Jonathan the incumbent has been running scared, a pathetic study in desperation and fecklessness.

    In six years on the job for which nothing had prepared him, not even a dodgy doctorate in ichthyology from the University of Port Harcourt, Jonathan had ample opportunities to equip himself to overcome his early stumbles and rise to its lofty demands.  Instead, he cut the office down to his own picayune stature.  Before a global audience, his inadequacies became more glaring and more embarrassing with each passing day.

    And now, he wants four more years?

    Nigeria deserves better.

  • Like June 12, 1993, like February 14, 2015

    Like June 12, 1993, like February 14, 2015

    Comparisons, it has been said, are odious.

    No two situations are ever exactly alike.  Even where that improbable symmetry obtains, symmetrical outcomes are far from guaranteed.

    Still, the parallels between the build-up to June 12, 1993 presidential election and the build-up to presidential election scheduled for February 14 are troubling.

    In the weeks leading up to June 12, 1993, orchestrated demands for the scrubbing of the projected poll filled the air, promoted for the most part by proxies of Military President Ibrahim Babangida.

    The country was not ready, they said; the political class had learned no lessons. Babangida was the only person who could keep the system going, and if he was allowed to vacate power, it would end in violent dissolution.   He must be persuaded to hold on to power.

    Days to the election, Arthur Nzeribe – he who has never embraced a cause without bringing it into disrepute – secured a court ruling in the dead of night restraining Humphrey Nwosu’s National Electoral Commission from conducting the poll.

    Demonstrations were staged in many cities to demand the continuation of military rule.  Nor was the military spared. Ballots were circulated in the barracks, urging enlisted men and women to demand that Babangida continue in office. Advertisements to the same effect, placed by unidentified sponsors, filled the newspapers.

    The culmination of the transition to democratic rule, eight years in the making, became in the hands of the regime and its propagandists, aided by the coercive power of the state, a subject of fear and loathing

    Now, fast forward to the presidential election scheduled for February 14, 2015.

    An aggrieved lawyer, doing a variation on the Nzeribe gambit, has gone to court to seek to disqualify the main challenger, General Muhammadu Buhari, on the grounds that he lacks the basic educational qualification specified in the Constitution.

    The challenger has since shown beyond all reasonable doubt that he meets and even exceeds the required West African School Certificate. Disdaining the rules of evidence and lacking the confidence to pivot on the incumbent’s vaunted record of “transformation,” his opponents have now framed that academic requirement as the central issue in the contest.

    Their chief spokesperson Femi Fani-Kayode, who is fast gaining Nzeribe’s reputation for bringing into disrepute every cause he has ever embraced, thinks he has found a chink in Buhari’s amour and he is tearing away furiously.

    A suborned national army now sits as the final authority on academic certification in general and the West African School Certificate in particular.

    Rented crowds are poised to stage protests all over the country calling for a postponement of the presidential election, or for the setting up of an “interim government, to be headed no doubt by the incumbent, because the Independent National Electoral Commission is not ready, or because it would be imprudent to deflect the country from its present glorious course of prosperity and transformation.

    The similarities between June 12, 1993 and February 13, 2015, it is necessary to insist, are sobering, troubling even.

    But there has also been some innovation.

    The leading opposition party says it will form a parallel government if it is persuaded that it was cheated out of victory. Armed militants beholden to the incumbent and warn darkly that it would be the end of Nigeria as we know it if their candidate is not re-elected.

    Unlike 1993, what is shaping up now as Election Day draws closer and closer is the prospect of a grand collision of an immovable object and an irresistible force.

     

    New girl on the block

    In the vast literature on “June 12”, the epic struggle of Nigerians to reclaim their sovereign right to determine who will govern them, it was perhaps inevitable that some individuals and groups who played pivotal roles have passed largely unacknowledged.

    Some of those key figures may well have chosen to remain unsung out of a sound instinct for self preservation.  Others may take the view that the chronicle is necessarily a work in progress, and that they will be accorded their proper due in the fullness of time. Yet others may have chosen out of modesty to keep in the background; they had done what duty and circumstance required, which was what really counted.

    To this latter group belongs Dr Hamidat Doyinsola Abiola, who turned 70 last Sunday.

    In the Abiola household, Kudirat, of revered memory, was the NADECO face of the struggle. Doyin Abiola, operating on a different but complementary plane, was the strategic thinker and discreet mobiliser.

    She saw beyond the crowds and the bombast of the earlier phase and realised, as few did, that the struggle was going to be long and bitter, and that it could not be won on the streets.

    Appeasement was of course out of the question, and surrender was unthinkable. A way had to be found to keep the struggle alive, not merely on the streets, but in the hearts and minds of influential actors spanning the political spectrum in Nigeria, well as in the international community. That was the task Doyin Abiola set herself.

    To its pursuit she deployed many formidable assets: a sharp, analytic mind emblematized by a doctorate in communication research – the first Nigerian woman to acquire that distinction; three decades in journalism from the rank of reporter to managing director, a voracious appetite for reading, versatility in using new communication technology, courage, tenacity, and a considerable portion of her endowment from her husband’s fortune.

    She also applied to it a quality so sadly lacking in public life in Nigeria: judgment, a capacity for comparing and deciding, which was enhanced by her instinctive sense of right and wrong, of what is possible, merely probable, or outright impossible.

    And so, while Kudirat kept alive the support and loyalty of the “June 12” faithful, on the home front, Doyin Abiola reached out discreetly to those who had abandoned the camp, those who were sitting on the fence, and those who were viscerally opposed to the project.  I can bear witness because I accompanied her on some of the missions.

    To reach the attentive and influential audience abroad, Doyin Abiola hit upon the idea  of a monthly newsletter that would provide analysis and perspective on the struggle for democracy in Nigeria, and a status report on the central figure in that struggle, her husband Bashorun Abiola.

    It had to be scrupulously factual, from cover to cover.  It had to reflect accurately and in proportion the acts and utterances of the major factions, their motivations as well as their fears. It must contain no hint of self-pity or bitterness. It must foist no judgments or conclusions on the recipients.

    I was privileged to assist her in preparing the newsletter until I left Nigeria late in 1996. Its recipients included key leaders of the Commonwealth, the Organisation of African Unity, the United Nations, the European Community, senior officials of the Clinton White House, and leaders of influential NGOs.

    If the effort did not produce dramatic results, the feedback indicated that it certainly provided a sober and credible counterpoint to Sani Abacha’s lying propaganda. And it helped generate empathy for the struggle, and for Bashorun Abiola.

    Nothing, not even serious illness, could move Doyin Abiola to seek rest and respite abroad. She learned to live with danger and continued quietly and tirelessly to mobilise support for “June 12”.

    In the fullness of time, Dr Hamidat Doyin Abiola will get her proper due as a pivotal figure in the struggle for democracy in Nigeria. For now, I am sure she will be content to be celebrated as the new girl on the block.

    Welcome to the Club, and to the neighbourhood, HDA.

  • LASAA/FG tango: When might is right

    With the hustings at the feverish pitch, it is expected that politicians would exploit all the tricks in the book to tilt everything to their advantage. Perhaps, nowhere is the battle so fierce as the contest over our minds and souls. To describe the media space in the last few months as oversaturated would therefore be an understatement. Whether it is in the traditional media of print and broadcast or the virtual jungle of the World Wide Web (www) where rules are not known let alone respected, it is the season for Nigerians to say something about just anything under the sun. Boom time no doubt for those in advertising business.

    But then, so also is creeping anomie into what is ordinarily a regulated and highly creative sector. Although, the symptoms have been with us for a long time, we have ignored the tell-tale signs of the budding malaise to the extent that the metastasis now threatens collective health. Whereas in the PDP’s war manual, the end is supposed to justify the meanness, the free-for-environment of public communication would seem one of the more stark derivatives of the current anomie.  For while it would seem ordinarily troubling enough that an Ayo Fayose, a certified political delinquent who currently runs the administration in the enlightened state of Ekiti, would dare to put out an advertisement wishing the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress party, General Muhammadu Buhari dead, it would have been utterly unimaginable that the mediums would have carried an advertisement that is not only insensitive but clearly affront public morality as the piece in question in years past.

    Talk of the signs of the troubling times.

    As if also in the same spirit, there is currently an on-going tango in the outdoor advertising sector between the Lagos State government and the PDP-federal government, described as “poster wars”.

    The particulars are as one might expect in a politically-charged season. Lagos PDP had accused the Lagos State Signage & Advertisement Agency (LASAA) of orchestrating the removal of its campaign posters from public places. Ever so assured of the federal might behind it, the party would dare to issue a dire warning: “Henceforth, anywhere our posters and outdoor campaign materials are removed by LASAA, we will do the same to materials belonging to the ruling APC government in Lagos State in a bigger magnitude. We will no longer condone this reckless abuse of public institutions for the selfish interests of those who want to perpetuate themselves in power at all costs.”

    Days after, Kayode Aderanti, the Lagos State top cop would threaten a clampdown on officials of LASAA. His office, he told Lagosians, was inundated with series of complaints from candidates of other political parties alleging mass pulling down of their posters and billboards by officials of LASAA. Taking cover under Section 100(2) of the 2010 Electoral Act as amended which states that “State apparatus including the media shall not be employed to the advantage or disadvantage of any political party or candidates at any election”, he threatened to arrest anybody or group – excluding staff of the regulatory agency, LASAA – caught in the act!

    With the battle so joined, last week, the Federal Government went for broke; the Federal Ministry of Works wrote to the President of the Outdoor Advertising Association of Nigeria (OAAN) terminating the existing approvals for outdoor sites previously given to members of the body in Lagos State specifically for locations on federal government roads/setbacks. Earlier, the PDP had reportedly mounted its adverts on street poles in violation of existing contracts with Globacom and Huawei leading to an alleged loss of  N350 million.

    It seems aeons ago that outdoor advertising in Greater Lagos city space was defined by the rule of disorder – with every manner of advertisers with just about anything to sell –contesting for space to grab the attention of their patrons. Today, were Lagosians to be asked about one area where their city has truly lived to its billings as centre of excellence, it must be in the area of sanitising the outdoor advertising arena through effective regulation. Gone – and it seems forever already – are the days when public buildings were defaced with all manners of materials purporting to sell their messages. The same goes for the ubiquitous billboards once indiscriminately mounted in the city landscape; a new discernable order is in place as one would expect in a modern, 21st Century city –a tribute to the efforts of LASAA.

    The problem isn’t just that the structure carefully put in place is being threatened by the noxious politics being promoted by the state PDP, if we expected that the law – and not the police – would be the arbiter in cases where such disputes arise, the reality on ground must be deeply troubling indeed.

    To begin with, yours truly is of the view that CP Aderanti’s statement threatening to clamp down on LASAA officials though unfortunate underlies a more sinister script. Shouldn’t the police commissioner have known that the agency is creation of statute, hence its operations are governed by strict provisions of its statute?

    How about simply directing the aggrieved Lagos PDP members to seek redress in court rather their naked resort to issuing threats? That apparently would not have played to the script – the same way that his invocation of the provisions of the Electoral Act 2010 (as amended) to justify his threat to clamp down on an agency created by law while feigning ignorance about the provisions of the fourth schedule of the Constitution of the Federal Republic Of Nigeria 1999 (as amended) which vests the authority over outdoor advertsing in local governments!

    Still wondering where the narow alley that the PDP recourse to self-help leads? Let’s go back little. Sometime in July last year, the federal government reportedly granted approval to the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P) and Federal Road Maintenance Agency (FERMA) to set up a task force ostensibly to maintain traffic on the federal roads in Lagos State. National Coordinator of the agency, Alhaji Abdulrazak Rafiu Otto would later warn that “any attempt by the Lagos State government or its officials to interfere in the management of traffic on the federal roads would be resisted” as according to him, “the Act setting up SURE-P/FERMA empowers it to carry out such civic responsibility on federal roads”.

    See the catch: the SURE-P Task Force schedule of duties as outlined on their billboard on the old toll-gate along the Lagos-Ibadan expressway says something about the management of traffic on federal highways, control of set-backs and other nonsense stuff that a gung-ho federal behemoth would dare to dream! And that regulation is supposed to override the one validly made by the Lagos House of Assembly!

    Still wondering about the confidence of Lagos PDP? With a  trained SURE-P militia already trained to administer their jungle municipal services in Lagos State, the lawless Jonathan administration would seem one step away from capturing their dream prize – Lagos.

    LASAA and the Lagos State government should sue the hell out of them.

  • Macbeth Jonathan

    Like Shakespeare’s King Macbeth, charmed and ruined by the three witches, three apparitions continue to haunt Goodluck Jonathan, president of the Federal Republic.

    But these apparitions belong to three different categories: tragic, comic and tragi-comic.

    Tragic: the Chibok girls, whose capture, some nine months ago, continues to define the Jonathan Presidency: its incompetence in citizens’ basic security and safety — the most fundamental duty of any state.

    Comic: the Transmogrification — sorry Transformation — Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) that, like Macbeth’s subversive witches, make of Jonathan inordinate and bizarre likenesses — the outrageous comparisons to Barrack Obama, Nelson Mandela, Lee Kuan Yew and Martin Luther King, trusting Nigerians were dimwits to swallow the nonsense.

    Tragi-comic: the pair of Pa Edwin Clark and Asari Dokubo — the one old and wise, yet makes statements that continue to distance angry voters from the president; the other young and brash, that continues to yak and yak — nonsensical threats that impress no one but his deluded self.

    This duo, that ironically hurt the Jonathan cause more than any other, epitomise the quality of presidential counselling, on the virtual eve of a crucial election.

    Apparitions, therefore, virtually threw up President Jonathan — and apparitions appear set to consume him.  It would appear the rise and fall of a voodoo presidency!

    The tragic Macbeth, hardy soldier flush with yet another victory, appeared quite content with his raise from Thane of Glamis to Thane of Cawdor; and quite appreciative of his ill-fated King, Duncan — until the three witches put, in his head, regicide, en route to himself becoming illicit king.

    Jonathan too was quite content — and overly appreciative, it would appear — playing second fiddle to Dieprieye Alamieseigha, the then wave-cresting, self-named Governor-General of the Ijaw nation, though only officially Bayelsa governor — until President Olusegun Obasanjo entered the fray.

    Jonathan committed no regicide.  Indeed, it was Alamieseigha, no thanks to stupendous sleaze, that committed power suicide.  Though Jonathan was, even at the nadir of the crisis, still loyal to his boss, Obasanjo would not rest until he planted, in Jonathan’s mind, the idea of higher responsibilities — governor, vice-president and eventually, president.

    That, to be sure, was no crime.  But as the witches goaded Macbeth to usurp his king and later unravel, Obasanjo — for no altruistic reasons, by the way — goaded Jonathan to higher state responsibilities, that would later prove beyond his ken; and from which he would eventually unravel.

    What is more?  The Obasanjo power game and Jonathan’s receptive opportunism, came with a cruel repudiation of the zoning agreement that vaulted Obasanjo himself to power.

    That created a poisoned chalice.   A baleful North felt cheated and openly grumbled.  The result was mutual distrust and blame-trading that allowed Boko Haram, the crazed killers in the name of pseudo-Islam, to fester.  That thoroughly demystified the president as effete; his presidency as prostrate and the Nigerian state as simply pathetic.

    But even as the North chaffed, President Jonathan, virtually first thing in 2012, launched the start of a series of campaigns that would eventually wipe out his goodwill — the January 2012 hike in the pump price of petroleum products, sparking the Occupy Nigeria citizen protests in Lagos, Abuja and other major cities nationwide.

    Now, was this some spiritual comeuppance, or the accidental starting of a journey with the ominous left foot, that would snowball into never-ending bad luck?

    This is because the Occupy Nigeria protests, and its handling, set the tone for the Jonathan Presidency — unsavoury tones on most counts.

    For starters, impunity.  That President Jonathan literarily smashed the Lagos protests with military tanks established, early enough, the administration’s penchant for the military fist of mail, when it could not reason its way out of trouble.  It won the protest war, all right.  But it tragically lost the peace.

    Then, the profile of the president as simplistic.  In rather childish reaction to the Occupy Nigeria protests in Lagos, the president thoroughly insulted Lagos and its denizens, claiming that the so-called subsidy only favoured Lagos fat cats and their rotten offspring, and never, for instance, the hardy souls of this own Otuoke village.

    And when, somewhat it came out that the so-called subsidy removal could well be taking back, from the majority, what a few hustlers — voodoo fuel independent marketers had stolen from the state, possibly to help fund the president’s election — the administration donned its most toxic toga so far: the president as perceived but unfazed champion of corruption and allied sleaze.

    When the president made that ill-fated comment about “ordinary” stealing not being anything near corruption, the notorious canonisation stuck — this government does not give a damn about probity and accountability!

    Meanwhile, a meltdown was on.  Boko Haram was killing and bombing at will; and demystifying the Nigerian military.  The president’s Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) seethed with rebellion, culminating in a split.  In blind panic, the Jonathan Presidency was also turning key security agencies of state into partisan political tools — perhaps more than any other government in this country’s history.

    But even with all of these, TAN — that stole illicit campaign time ahead of others, because the sitting government thinks nothing of bending the law to its own brazen advantage — came out with its infamous comparison that Jonathan was the best thing that ever happened to Nigeria!  That was well and truly comic!

    And with more than ample evidence of acute presidential failure, the president on the stumps making ridiculous promises it clearly cannot keep, given its parlous performance record; and the grand collapse of a campaign structured on religious and ethnic divisiveness, Pa Clark and ex-militants still delude themselves with levying war, should their “son” lose?  That is well and truly tragi-comic!

    But the real tragedy is the fate of the Chibok 276.  How can a government that could not protect these innocent school girls from Boko Haram, yet dilly-dallied until their rescue became almost a mission-impossible, in all good conscience, seek re-election?

    Chibok is the painful metaphor of a state, under the agency of President Jonathan, that has failed in its basic and most important duty.  Pray, where has it found the guts to pitch the same people for re-election?

    But even if the rest of Nigeria decides to “move on” as the president and his party clearly hope they would, the ghost of the kidnapped girls, the deep hurt of their parents and even the self-rebuke of the president’s own prickling conscience, continue to haunt — and will eventually smash — this re-election gambit.

    It is well and truly tragic!

    From an irate and insulted electorate, to the president and his party: from February 14 looms a crushing and comprehensive defeat, other things being equal!

    Well, no tear for Goodluck Jonathan on his well earned fate.  But let those who will take over from him beware.  After the Jonathan meltdown, it is unlikely the Nigerian electorate would tolerate, from anybody, the pre- and Jonathan era humbug.

  • GMB does a rope-a-dope

    GMB does a rope-a-dope

    Is General Muhammadu Buhari or any member of his presidential campaign team by any chance a devoted student of the sweet science in general, its greatest exponent Muhammad Ali in particular, and the stratagem he deployed in flattening his most fearsome opponent ever in the encounter he christened the Rumble in the Jungle?

    The opponent was of course George Foreman, who had yanked one-time Ali conqueror Joe Frazier off his feet with an uppercut and dumped him on the canvas with an uppercut, on the way to knocking him out in inside two rounds.

    Foreman had also administered the same brutal treatment to Ken Norton who had broken Ali’s jaw in one encounter, and whose unorthodox boxing style Ali barely managed to figure out in subsequent winning encounters.

    The stratagem, courtesy of Muhammad Ali, has entered sporting history as “rope-a-dope.”

    There are two strands to it.

    In one, you cover up and in the ring and often lean back against the ropes to allow your opponent punch away until he exhausts himself and can no longer defend himself effectively. Then he is ripe for the taking.

    In the other, you behave passively or with little aggression until the moment arises for decisive action.

    This latter is what the GMB Campaign seems to have employed in laying to rest the controversy that had raged for several weeks as to whether Buhari met the minimum academic qualifications for entering the presidential race – an issue that had never come up in his three previous runs for the post.

    At the time of filing his election papers, he had indicated that his certificates were in the possession of the military authorities and could be obtained from them. The military authorities had said at one point that they were indeed in possession of the certificates, only to recant later in a sensational press conference designed for prime-time television.

    In a disavowal heard around the world, military spokesman virtually put the contents of General Muhammadu Buhari’s personnel file on global display. It contained no evidence, Brig.-Gen. Oladele Laleye said that Buhari obtained the requisite West African School Certificate, merely a letter from his school principal recommending him for military commission and expressing confidence that he would pass the WASC examination.

    The way the military spokesman carried himself, you would think that he was the chief prosecutor at a court-martial.

    By then the Goodluck Jonathan Campaign had worked itself and the Jonathan crowd into a froth. They launched a made-for-the-Internet “Buhari, Show Your Certificate” Campaign, hashtag and all. General Buhari, the most desperate elements in this group said, had been smuggled into officers corps on quota, with total disregard to the rules. In the normal run of things, he would have rated no higher than a sergeant.

    All manner of experts on the Nigerian Constitution hopped from television station to television station, declaring that all the credentials Buhari had earned in prestigious foreign military academies could not make up for his not having the WASC. “You cannot build something on nothing,” one of them said sententiously, quoting that epigram in the original Latin for added effect.

    With breathless excitement, the same fellow went on to declare that, by laying claim to a qualification he did not possess, or by claiming that his credentials were in the possession of the military authorities, Buhari had committed perjury. The penalty for that crime, he hinted darkly, was 14 years imprisonment.

    The implication was clear: Buhari was more likely to end up in Kirikiri Prison than in the Presidential Villa.

    It was at this point that the GMB Campaign which had refused to be drawn into the contrived controversy — some were already calling it a scandal —and chosen instead to absorb the jeers and the taunts and the innuendos and the coarse abuse in the finest rope-a-dope tradition came out swinging.

    And what a devastating blow it landed!

    Buhari authorised Government College, Katsina, the successor of his alma mater, the Katsina Provincial Secondary School, to release authenticated statement of result in the WASC.  The transcript shows, as Buhari had earlier disclosed, that he had passed the examination in Division Two, a respectable achievement back when examination leakages were almost unheard of, and the syndicated cheating that today marks most public examinations was inconceivable.

    Buhari’s succinct statement refocused and reframed the presidential contest in a way the Jonathan camp loathes so much. It is not about the certificate Buhari earned 53 years ago, but about the Nigerian condition, defined by mass unemployment, especially among the younger population, corruption on a scale beyond anything the country experienced even in the Babangida and Abacha years, and pervasive insecurity.

    Not a few jaws in the Jonathan camp dropped as what its functionaries had been wielding as a trump card became a symbol of its desperation, its propensity for lying on an industrial scale.

    You would think that its functionaries would now cease and desist, if not admit error.

    No chance. They are calling the document furnished by Buhari’s school a fresh forgery.  They are claiming that Buhari could not have passed Hausa at the WASC exam in 1961 because that subject was not offered then. They even trotted out a “curriculum expert” from one of the universities, who declared without fear and without research that no indigenous-language examinations were conducted on that platform in Nigeria at that time.

    The libel is on them. Back then, Hausa was already being offered even at the Advanced Level, and one of the set books was Shaihu Umar, a well-regarded novel by Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, later Nigeria’s first prime minister. It is these slanderers, not Buhari, that should check in at the nearest police station, enter a full confession, get booked for criminal libel, submit to a swift trial, and proceed to jail thereafter.

    Why should anyone now believe anything they say?

    Now that Buhari has provided satisfactory answers to the questions that have been raised about his credentials, the Jonathan Campaign will have only itself to blame if attention now shifts, as indeed it should, to their principal’s credentials, particularly the University of Port Harcourt Ph.D. his acolytes are parading as his unique selling point.

    Former President Olusegun Obasanjo for one has been reported as saying that at the time Jonathan was being interviewed for vice president, he did not have a doctorate. It does not follow from this that Jonathan did not subsequently complete the requirements for the degree.

    Even his sternest critics concede that, when it comes multi-tasking, he belongs in a special class of his own. He could therefore have wrapped up the dissertation while holding the demanding job of vice president, or even president.

    But when did he actually obtain the degree?  When was it formally conferred?

    For another, the dissertation on which the doctorate rests, I gather, is not available in the University of Port Harcourt Library, as it should be by law. Again, it does not follow from this that the dissertation does not exist.

    But where is it? Why is the whole thing so dodgy?

    For yet another, in manner, thought and speech, Jonathan rarely comes across as someone who has been tempered, much less transformed, by the sustained rigour and comprehensive sweep of doctoral study. He is certainly not a shining advertisement for the doctoral programme of the University of Port Harcourt in ichthyology or in any academic specialism for that matter.

    He and those who conferred him with the distinction of Doctor of Philosophy of that fine institution surely have a lot to explain.

  • Buhari agonistes

    From the present agonies of Citizen Muhammadu Buhari, issuing from a sham certificate controversy, it is a far cry from the halcyon days of 1984!

    The then Brigadier Buhari was a dashing though taciturn military officer, who just took over as head of state, after the collapse of the 2nd Republic (1979-1983).

    “I will gag the press,” he roared to National Concord (now defunct) in January 1984, in perhaps his first major interview with a newspaper.

    The grouse of the new Nigerian helmsman were media reports, traced to a Vera Ifudu scoop during the Second Republic — Ms Ifudu was an NTA reporter — that alleged US$2.8 billion NNPC money vanished when Buhari was federal commissioner (now minister) for Petroleum, under Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo.

    Buhari defended his integrity, claiming the report was phantom.  The media, never one to give government and its officials the benefit of the doubt when the subject is sleaze, insisted on its scepticism, bordering on summary media conviction.  It was therefore perhaps a truly innocent but thoroughly bitter man that issued that threat.

    In any event, Gen. Buhari soon enough walked his talk, with the promulgation of Decree 4 of 1984, which soon claimed the scalp of The Guardian duo of Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor, for publishing a report that was essentially factual.

    A callow Buhari did what he had to do.  He is living with the consequences of his actions.

    But how is an older and wiser Buhari reacting to the present storm, which appears even more blatantly unfair, given the vacuity of the certificate allegations?

    Indeed, there is an eerie parallel between 1984 and now.

    Back then, Buhari was accused of sleaze, which would appear fantastic indeed, given his acclaimed probity.

    Shortly after he gained power, he took it out on the press; and today, it hangs as albatross on his neck.  However,  Tunde Thompson, one of the victims of Decree 4, has decried the use of his odyssey as partisan blackmail against the Buhari presidential candidacy — a candidacy that Mr. Thompson himself has practically endorsed.

    Now, the same media, in the course of its routine reportage, and under the rubrics of the people’s constitutional right to know, is busy amplifying a certificate non-issue, on the cusp of Gen. Buhari becoming Nigeria’s next president, should he win the February 14 presidential election.

    If indeed he wins — as about every indication points he would — he cannot possibly, Decree 4-wise, hit at his traducers on the certificate controversy, which the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) cynically exploited to con the voting public.  Constitutional rule is a far-cry from military impunity!

    Besides, it is season of electioneering; and about any sense or nonsense is allowed in the passion of the campaign stump!

    Twenty years ago, therefore, Citizen Buhari was a military officer who, on assuming martial powers, could practically do anything.

    But now, if Gen. Buhari assumes constitutional powers, he cannot touch anyone, except the law says so — even in the face of the most blatant of provocations.

    Therefore, Buhari’s present agonies — as cynical as they appear — are no more than constitutional strictures to purge him — as indeed every candidate — of any dross of misconception, over civil power.

    Aberrant soldiers could shoot their way into power.  Since they hold nobody’s mandate, they could indulge in crass recklessness.  But attaining democratic power is much more sobering — except, of course, you are an Ayo Fayose!

    This stark difference must, more than anyone, impress Gen. Buhari, given his 1984 derring-do  and his current electioneering experience.  But that kiln should forge him into a more tempered wielder of power.  Nigerian democracy — and governance — should be the better for it.

    Still, the general would appear to have got off comparably lightly.  Gen. Ibrahim Babangida’s presidential bid never got beyond testing the waters.  A wild roar of public hostility shot it down — and just as well, for the IBB regime was notorious on most fronts.

    Goodluck Jonathan, that got his presidency on a virtual platter of gold, despite his ultra-minority status, must really think Nigerians stupid to have voted him.  That is why he had not offered leadership yet got his propagandists to proclaim him Nigeria’s best president ever!  His comeuppance appears nigh, as the election looms.

    What has stood Gen. Buhari in good stead, despite his terrible decisions as military head of state, is his integrity, which has remained steady over the years, courtesy of the Buhari records, just released by the Nigerian Army.

    1961: Buhari’s principal, Provincial Secondary School, Katsina, in the letter recommending him for the Army commission: “ … A fine boy of honest disposition … “

    1973: His instructors at the Defence Services Staff College, Wellington, USA: “Buhari is a quiet, unassuming and honest individual …”

    Both sources describe him as intellectually “average”.  While Wellington wrote Buhari was “of average intelligence”, his secondary school principal, an expatriate, wrote: “Took WASC in 1961; predict [and that prediction came to pass] a Grade 2 certificate for him.  This is a reasonable hope.”

    So, while not being a dullard — he was Head Boy in his secondary school — his forte was character, not necessarily brilliance.  Yet, it is on the character plank that his partisan opponents try to rubbish him!

    Many, for instance, make a sickly meat of the difference between “Mohammed” on his released WASC statement of result and “Muhammadu” his official first name, perhaps making the ever-glib  Femi Fani-Kayode, the Jonathan presidential campaign chief spokesperson, reach his rather infantile conclusion that the statement was “Oluwole” (alleged forgery) — Oluwole, being a notorious neighbourhood, off Tinubu Square in Lagos, where documented forgeries were big business.

    Yet, in his own handwriting, in his application to the then Royal Nigerian Army (RNA) for military commission in 1961, the boy Buhari wrote his name as Muhammadu.  But his expatriate principal changed it to Mohammed, apparently seeing no fundamental difference between the two variants!

    To play that up is, of course, the cynical clutching at straws that has typified the Jonathan camp’s demonise-Buhari-at-all-cost costly strategy, which has however badly backfired.

    But this negative electioneering strategy echoes another eerie parallel: between Gaius Marcus Coriolanus, boy soldier in old Rome; and Muhammadu Buhari, old soldier in contemporary Nigeria.

    Coriolanus wanted to be Consul, after vanquishing his city’s enemies at the battle field.  But the vengeful tribunes (constitutional defenders of the Roman rabble) would have none of it.  So, they launched a campaign of calumny that goaded Coriolanus to his doom, knowing full well Coriolanus was young, rash and short-fused.

    The Jonathan campaign, on the Buhari certificate saga, are essaying similar tactics.  But unlike the Roman tribunes that unhorsed Coriolanus, Femi Fani-Kayode and co have only succeeded in burying their own principal!  How sweet!

    Buhari agonistes may be well and truly galling, to the general that has built life-time integrity.  Still, it is not so bad for the polity.

    For one, the certificate storm has restored Gen. Buhari’s honour and further consolidated his electoral bounce, barely two weeks to the election.  For another, when he becomes president, a tempered Gen. Buhari would realise 2015 is not 1984, just as constitutional rule is no errant military usurpation!

    That cannot be bad for the polity!

  • Soludo and the Jonathan scorecard

    Expect a fatwa from the intellectual goons of the Jonathan administration on former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor Chukwuma Soludo for his blistering critique of the policies of their principal as published by this newspaper yesterday. A refreshing detour from the tonnes of staid and sterile stuff spewed by the henchmen of a rattled regime, it does more than a needle-prick on the exaggerated self-score by the regime hacks.

    Exactly three weeks ago on this page, yours truly had predicted that the administration’s claims of achievement would, sooner than later, be tested literally and figuratively with fire. That prediction appears to have come to pass at the weekend. The only thing I could not have foreseen was that the roasting would come from a man who would ordinarily qualify as an insider, who only a while ago served as the number one banker to the same PDP federal government.

    I have read the 6,232 word critique by Soludo with the rather suggestive headline Federal Government’s economic team weak, selfish. Irrespective of what anyone may say about its timingor the motives behind it, particularly his unflattering characterisation of the administration as ineffectual and self-centred, Soludo is hardly a man you can put away as a nincompoop as far as issue of the nation’s economic management is concerned. His words, conveyed with the profound insight of an insider are not just weighty but authoritative. While I do not here pretend that his views represent any final judgement any more than his critics are also entitled to their own verdicts on the performance of the Jonathan administration, the views, set in the context of the administration’s outlandish claims of achievement, is helpful and illuminating.

    To be sure, it isn’t exactly that Soludo has presented any new facts or stumbled on a serendipity over which Nigerians should be excitable. Yes, he has helped articulate in his own way, some of the economic issues that many Nigerians have at one point or the other expressed their views about. Like a disciplined academic that he is, what he has done is to distil the issues to help in the understanding of the subject which the administration insists on muddling up for reasons that are self-serving.

    The point is that other actors in the preceding PDP administrations have done no less. Nigerians would remember Oby Ezekwesili, who, about this time last year similarly accused the administrations of late President Umaru Yar’Adua and the incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan of squandering’ $67 billion (about N11 trillion) oil money left in two separate accounts by Obasanjo. The same charge would be repeated early in the year by the former President much to the discomfiture of the Jonathan administration. As it appears, the issues would simply not go away.

    I consider the Soludo interjection important for a variety of reasons. That the nation’s one-time banker would re-echo the same charges earlier made operatives of the former administration would seem a measure of their dissatisfaction with the explanations rendered by the hierarchs of the administration. More embarrassing is that Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, minister of finance actually served in that administration whose top actors are the ones accusing the current one of squander-mania!  It couldn’t get any messier that the lone functionary to whom the management of economy was outsourced to could not even persuade his erstwhile colleagues that nothing is amiss!

    Now, for an administration that has done nothing else than serve Nigerians its endless cocktails of distractions in the last few weeks, it must be said that Soludo has helped in no small measure to change the course of the debate from the banality of muck-raking and character assassination to one driven by issues. Having helped to frame the issues, it is left for the rest of the civil society to pick up the gauntlet.

    Having said that, I must say that the coming days would seem easy enough to predict. With the regime hounds already off the leash, those expecting a healthy contest of ideas on the issues raised by Soludo had better prepared for disappointment! Knowing how the mind of this administration is programmed, I know it won’t happen; rather expect a choreographed demolition job on the messenger. Trust me; if the administration’s legion of netizen warriors have not already set out on the demolition job, it’s probably because they are still reeling in the after-shock of the Soludo put down. For sure, every activity of the CBN under Soludo would come under intense scrutiny. If you ever served in government, you know what I mean: every book under the sun will be opened in the bid to roast their latest enemy in the sun. Contracts signed and sealed several years ago will suddenly become matters of interest. Nigerians should expect some revealing files to suddenly pop up somewhere showing how people who claim to be “Mr Clean” are actually white-washed sepulchres! Remember the unfinished business of Securency International Pty Ltd – the polymer currency people?  Expect findings of ‘great interest’. That is the way of the desperate administration, an administration for whom no boundaries are inviolate.

    Continuity or change? That is the million dollar choice Nigerians are being called to make at this time. A government fittingly described by Soludo as “dominated by self-interested and self-conflicted group of traders and businessmen, and so-called economic team meetings have been nothing but showbiz time”. A government in which “the very people government exists to regulate have seized the levers of government as policymakers and most government institutions have largely been “privatised” to them”? An economy “on auto pilot, with confusion as to who is in charge and government largely as a constraint…where “there are no big ideas, and it is difficult to see where economic policy is headed to”? That is the terrible choice foisted on the nation by the PDP. And now some have told us that the devil you know is better than the saints you don’t know!

    After nearly 16 years of motion without locomotion, if you ask me, I would take a gamble on a different course.

  • Desperate days in Abuja

    Desperate days in Abuja

    You know that Abuja has been seized big-time by panic and desperation when the Commander-in-Chief who had for all practical purposes been AWOL as rampaging insurgents slaughter and maim and render destitute innocent citizens he took an oath to protect and carve out a vast swathe of the homeland took an oath to defend – it is a sure sign of panic and desperation when a beleaguered President Goodluck Jonathan suddenly materialises in Maiduguri, in Borno State, with frazzled officials in tow.

    It is the closest he has gone to the frontline in the war against Boko Haram and the closest to Chibok since more than 250 girls were abducted from their school hostels in that town some 280 days ago and taken to locations unknown.

    If the visit was designed to boost the morale of the soldiers on deployment, it failed at the elementary level of symbolism.  The Commander-in-Chief was decked out elegantly in mufti, not in military fatigues.

    If it was meant to show empathy and solidarity with the parents and relations of the Chibok girls in particular and the area residents in general, there was little in President Jonathan’s largely perfunctory speech that could have served that purpose.

    It was at once a cynical and opportunistic visit, hastily cobbled to shore up Dr Jonathan’s re-election chances once thought to be assured but now sinking fast as the ship of the APC ticket of General Muhammadu Buhari and Professor Yemi Osinbajo sallies forth, buoyed by what the Americans call The Big Mo (“Mo” as in Momentum).

    Much to the discomfiture and frustration of the Jonathan camp, corruption has become a major issue in the election campaign.  Previously, corruption thrived only on the periphery of the power structure; now, says former President Olusegun Obasanjo, it is embedded in the very heart of the Presidential Villa.

    No less tellingly, former military president, General Ibrahim Ibrahim Babangida, whose tenure remains a byword for graft on a scale almost beyond belief, has said that if the reports reaching him about the goings-on in the Jonathan administration are true, he and his much-vilified regime would now have to be adjudged saints.

    Now, Dr Jonathan, who didn’t give a damn about making a public declaration of his immense on-shore and off-shore assets and doesn’t give a damn about so many things that lie at the heart of modern governance, is reeling under his administration’s well-earned reputation for syndicated corruption.

    In contrast, the appeal of Buhari’s candidature rests principally on public perception of his reputation for integrity, his Spartan lifestyle, and his having little or no tolerance for corruption in its many guises and disguises.

    In politics, perception is almost everything.

    No surprise, then, that Dr Jonathan’s publicists have been hacking away at the public perception of Buhari’s personal integrity with everything they can find or invent, determined not merely to neutralise it, but in the classic tradition of warfare, to turn it into a crippling liability.

    The thinking in their camp seems to be that if they can show that Buhari’s reputation for integrity is founded on shaky soil, they can cripple his candidature.They are pursing this strategy on two broad fronts.

    The first is not merely to cast grave doubts on Buhari’s academic qualifications for the post, but to assert categorically that he lacks those credentials.

    And so, all of a sudden, the paper qualifications of a person who has served as military head of state and run for president three times – albeit unsuccessfully – under a Constitution that has undergone no fundamental change, is whipped into an overarching issue, a test of his integrity.

    By the way, they should not make too much of the fact that Buhari is running for president the fourth time.  Abraham Lincoln was elected president at his fourth attempt, and went on to become one of the greatest U. S. presidents.

    Buhari is of course no Abraham Lincoln any more than Goodluck Jonathan is Nelson Mandela or Lee Kuan Yew or Martin Luther King, Jr., or Barack Obama, with whom Jonathan is being placed in one sacrilegious bracket by his acolytes.

    The second tack of the spirited campaign to render Buhari hors de combat is to cast grave doubt on his integrity as chair of the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF), a position to which he was appointed precisely because of his perceived integrity.

    A report on the intervention outcomes of the PTF recommended that some N25 billion be recovered from contractors and consultants who had been paid for work not done,  or had fleeced the Fund through heavy over-invoicing and supply of junk material and expired drugs, and officials who had spent public funds irresponsibly.

    Through dark innuendo, Dr Jonathan’s publicists seek to parlay this recommendation into iron-clad evidence that Buhari was somehow culpable and does not deserve the reputation he enjoys.

    It is nothing of the sort. The report indicts Buhari only to the extent that he was chair of the PTF.  He held that post in a non-executive capacity.  The executive secretary, and in effect the accounting officer, was Chief Tayo Akpata, who is unfortunately no longer with us.  Were he alive, he would have with his accustomed thoroughness answered point by point the charges the Jonathan camp has dredged up.

    They are even playing the ethnic card, portraying Buhari as a person who hates the Yoruba and Igbo because his regime detained a slew of their leaders for unconscionably long periods and because the courts handed many among them unusually long prison sentences.

    Many of the detentions and jail sentences cannot be justified. But there was no ethnic pattern to them. The target was a political class that had messed up the country.

    Former President Shehu Shagari was not held in prison, unlike former Vice President Alex Ekwueme; yet he almost lost his sight in the darkened rooms of the house where he was detained in Ikoyi. The late Solomon Lar almost lost his hearing as a result, he said, of drinking bad water in prison.

    Meanwhile, on a personal level, Dr Jonathan remains the gift that keeps giving to his opponents. In Lagos where he could have wowed the audience and even won it over with a scintillating demonstration of his mastery of the intricate dance steps of the dance craze azonto, he launched into a furious tirade against those parading themselves as international statesmen when they were no better than motor-park touts.

    I thought the person he had in mind was Chief Edwin Clark, until someone called my attention to the term “international,” which gave Dr Jonathan’s remark an entirely different construction. Only in Nigeria would a hard-boiled rabble-rouser like Clark be called a “statesman.”

    Again, there was Dr Jonathan elsewhere promising to fund at local, state and national level the hugely discredited “office” of First Lady even as he claimed that it did not operate on public funds.  On what funds do the women draw, then?

    In whatever case, is he not aware that his wife, Dame Patience Faka, has done more than all previous functionaries combined to bring the position into odium and disrepute?

    If in her own particular case she rendered the position so repugnant without access to public funds, she will make it positively execrable when guaranteed unlimited access to the public treasury.

    On yet another campaign stop Dr Jonathan, armed with figures conjured up by the Minister of Agriculture, Dr Akinwumi Adesina, went on and on about how, under his transformation agenda, Nigeria had achieved food sufficiency. He made this claim just several days after the Central Bank reported that the inflation rate had inched up, driven largely by rising food prices.

    Next month’s presidential election is not about Buhari’s past, though that past cannot be discountenanced entirely. It is primarily about the present, and what it holds for the future. Dr Jonathan bears the burden of presenting before a jaded national audience what he will do in the next four years that he could not do in the previous six, and what he will do differently if re-elected.

    This is the time when the superior learning they claim for him should translate splendidly into superior thinking, superior reasoning, superior understanding, superior articulation, and superior character.

  • Non-violence and allied pacts

    “You dare God but scamper before men”— Yoruba saying     

    What globally renowned Africans, Kofi Annan (Ghana), former United Nations secretary-general; and Emeka Anyaoku (Nigeria), former Commonwealth secretary-general, were involved in the non-violent pact of January 14, would underscore the African anxiety over Nigeria’s 2015 general election.

    That bodies like the European Union, UKaid, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the US International Republican Institute (IRI) and the Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada, backed the pact-signing, shows the touching affection the rest of the world harbour toward Nigeria and its wellbeing.

    Still, even with all the international do-gooding, it is amazing how the global order is rigged against justice and fair play; but is nevertheless primed to rally against violence, the sure and logical result of injustice.

    It is the Yoruba equivalent of daring God but scampering before men!

    The involvement in the pact-signing, of Mr. Annan and Chief Anyaoku, global patriots of the first rank, introduces an ironic déjà vu, particularly if the mind flips back to the 12 June 1993 presidential election result annulment debacle.

    June 12?  O, yes!   June 12 is the fundament of the current mess.

    If Gen. Ibrahim Babangida had not annulled Nigeria’s cleanest election ever, there would  have been no Gen. Sani Abacha, whose iron despotism totally defrocked the military, before he  expired via “divine intervention”; no NADECO war of attrition; no Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar and his hurried handover; no concessionary zoning that made Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo president to placate the Yoruba, but whose presidency gave the 4th Republic its worst possible start; no President Umaru Yar’Adua dying in office, prompting an opportunistic junking of zoning that vaulted Dr. Goodluck Jonathan to power; and no President Jonathan, thoroughly and hopelessly overwhelmed, so much so that he is not only the undertaker of his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) federal ruling party but may well be, from threats of his own camp fearing a crushing election defeat, the undertaker of the country.

    But back to June 12, vis-a-vis the intervening pair of Mr. Annan and Chief Anyaoku.  IBB had annulled the election and Abacha had gaoled Chief MKO Abiola for four years, roughly equalling his annulled presidential term.

    But to break the deadlock, before MKO’s own alleged elimination by not-so-divine-intervention, what brief did the two renowned global diplomats have?  To persuade MKO to surrender his freely given mandate — not to compel the erring Nigerian order to right the grave wrong, even with Abacha’s death!

    This however, had nothing to do with the personal ethics of these two gentlemen; but rather the cast-in-iron ethos of the hypocritical establishment that sent them.

    It didn’t matter: that MKO committed no crime, aside from winning a credible election; that while in gaol, the state also eliminated his wife Kudirat, for crusading to actualise the mandate of her locked-up husband;  that a vicious state also ruined his multi-billion naira business empire!

    Twenty-one years after June 12, during which period Nigeria and its institutions badly atrophied, and in the run-up to another vital poll, this soulless pro-power, anti-justice mindset has changed little.

    In the non-violence pact of January 14, equal access, the most fundamental guarantor of electoral justice — and peace — was the last of the five protocols: “All the institutions of government, including INEC and security agencies, must act and be seen to act with impartiality.”

    The first four protocols were sentimental platitudes, on which hardly anyone can be held to account: issue-based campaigns, no inciting statements, zero-tolerance for provocative campaigns and a national peace committee to commit all parties to the accord!

    Now, what was that: a honest oversight or a lexical Freudian slip showing that even in the search for “peace”, the core fundament of justice matters less than sentimental pufferies?

    Why, the president even blighted the ceremony with his near-patent illogical assertions, this one a fantastic claim that rigging does not necessarily cause violence.  It was a light jibe at Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, his main presidential rival, whose “inciting” statement was blamed for the post-2011 electoral violence in the North.

    President Jonathan reasoned — rather speciously — that in Kano and Bauchi he got barely 16 per cent of the vote.  Yet, violence still broke out.  But what if even that number was stolen?

    Nasir El-Rufai, on page 466 of his book, The Accidental Public Servant, claimed a fleeing Kaduna PDP hierarch, on board the same aircraft with him, confessed that to make the 25 per cent mark in the state, Jonathan’s vote was inflated by 800, 000!  On account of this heist, he alleged, Vice President Namadi Sambo and his close confidants, complete with scions and prized autos, skipped town!

    Mallam El-Rufai argued that such explosive vote-pilferage, which allegedly leaked to irate youths, accounted for the  post-vote rage in many northern cities.  If that were true, would the Jonathan pact-signing theory of rigging-does-not-cause-violence still hold?

    That patent illogicality of some-people-are-willy-nilly-violent seemed to have driven the certitude in Prof. Bolaji Akinyemi’s thinking that whichever side won the presidential election, violence would break out.

    With all due respect to the erudite and rigorous professor, that theory cannot be supported by logic — or even common sense.  If violence breaks out, it is because there is demonstrable violence to the voting right of the people.

    That was the trigger in the Wild, Wild West of the 1st Republic, when Demo politicians, with a certain Remi Fani-Kayode leading the pack, boasting on the hustings that if the people did not vote for them, others would.  Certainly, the others did; and the people reacted.  The rest, as they say, is history!

    Ironically, some 50 years later, a certain Femi Fani-Kayode, the proud scion of the original, is in the Jonathan camp, leading the charge with his own harvest of pre-vote illogicality!

    That was the trigger in the 2nd Republic, in the tragic Akin Omoboriowo brazen gubernatorial steal in old Ondo State (now Ondo and Ekiti states), via the notorious federal might.  That inferno consumed the otherwise fine mind, Olaiya Fagbamigbe, among others.

    That probably would have been the trigger, had federal might attempted to skew the Osun gubernatorial election of 2014, against the people’s clear and unmistakable will.  And whoever still believe both the Ekiti and Osun gubernatorial elections of 2014 were “free and fair”, despite delivering contradictory results, are entitled to their costly delusion.

    Trust no politician — progressive, conservative or reactionary — if they can rig, they will.  Still, from its certified record of deviant abuse of state coercion for partisan gain, and the near-complete collapse of elite consensus on, and mass revulsion at, the Jonathan Presidency, it appears to have higher motive, than anyone else, to rig the election.

    In fairness to the Jonathan government, such brazen electoral abuse is the usual trend.  But by its spectacular bungling, Jonathan appears stripped of any elite conspiracy that could, like in the past, cover up such a heist.

    So, let the noble, anti-violence ensemble pressure the government to deliver a demonstrably fair poll.

    Prevention-is-better-than-cure wise, that would be better antidote to violence than a thousand pacts, even if a non-violence pact isn’t a bad idea.