The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Jona’s Greek Gift

    Expect the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) to take to the airways to celebrate the benevolence of the Jonathan administration in bringing down the price of petrol from N97 per litre to N87. Greek gift or not, it seems doubtful that transformers actually appreciate the import of what their principal has done to the spending power of the fuel consumer by that N10 slice off the price of petrol. For if we adopt the lower mark in an economy which consumes anything between 33-40 litres of petrol daily, we are talking of a princely N330 million daily addition to the consumers’ spending power. Multiply that by the average of 30 days in a month; or if you like, 365 days a year and the scale of “achievement”, like their rebasing magic, comes stark clear!

    I leave our economists to find the multiplier and the countless other derivatives for the Nigerian economy; and this from a simple gesture of hiving N10 off petrol price courtesy of our loving President. Our legion of transformers ought to see themselves in my debt for helping them to figure out one of the less obvious achievements of their principal!

    It is of course an issue of what to make of the gesture. What is undeniable is that the price of oil has tumbled by more than 50 percent over the last six months. From a little over $100 a barrel in June last year, Nigeria’s Brent crude currently struggles to hit the $50 a barrel mark.  Of course, the argument goes that if it petrol sold for N97 when oil sold for $100, Nigerians should consider themselves entitled to a generous discount.

    Sunday night’s announcement by the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke was therefore supposed to be the answer to Nigerians’ quest for some equity at least in product pricing. It is doubtful that Nigerians bargained for the tokenism of N10 as announced by the minister. Now, the question is being raised whether the N10 cut –a discount of approximately 10 percent on petrol only – is the best the administration can do. There is also the issue of whether the administration is not being clever by half in creating the impression that the oil price slump only affects premium motor spirit.

    Let’s look at the issue a bit more closely. We know for a fact that the price of diesel has long been deregulated. In other words, we are supposed to see the efficacy of the market forces at work. But what do we have? A depot price of N97, excluding trucking expenses and the marketers’ margin hence the pump price between N140 to N150 a litre. If we expected the retail price of the product to reflect the dynamics of the movement in oil prices given the dive of more than 50 percent on the price, what we have seen is more of the same old story of distortion in which prices, once they go up never truly go down. Of course, that in itself would be understandable enough in an economy where every operation is powered by diesel; and where in the absence of reliable power, makes the perfect price inelasticity of diesel more than guaranteed.

    As for kerosene which is said to be under a regulated regime of N50 per litre, the reality is that the household product has never been sold for anything less than N120 per litre at the retail end. Again, the reason is not difficult to understand: the so-called poor, for whom the product is said to be meant, have long given up in the quest to make the product either accessible or affordable. Rather, they have simply yielded the space to marketers’ forces – perhaps waiting for Jonathan’s wonder cooking stoves to bail them out!

    By way of contrast, only the buyer of premium motor spirit, with an ‘artificial’ cap in price, pretends that product prices are set by anything but the rule of the thumb. Even at that, it depends on where the buyer is doing so from!

    That is the state of the nation’s downstream sector today. It is a big jungle where marketers rule – a market of unequal actors – disparate fuel consumers versus unscrupulous marketers, the latter aided by the government through the regulator – the Petroleum Products Prices Regulatory Agency (PPPRA). By the way, I invite you, my dear reader to check out the website of the PPPRA, which until Sunday’s announcement was alive and well. All through yesterday, my efforts to find at least some basis for the Greek gift on their website yielded nothing: that website is for now temporarily out of service – perhaps until the agency’s mathematicians fine-tune their magical template!

    Still want to know what the ‘gesture’ is meant to achieve? With general elections barely six weeks away, it is in the character of the Jonathan administration to cynically exploit just about any issue for political advantage – which of course is not a crime. What is unacceptable in this instance is that the course neither offers the nation a pathway out of the mess nor the long-sought opportunity to overhaul its energy policy.

    And you know where this leads? Sure enough, we’ll be back to debate the “subsidy” or lack thereof; the fuel price template and the mechanisms of determining appropriate marketers margins –  all the jargons and everything except the future of our endangered downstream sector. And while the motion goes on, the administration can claim a potent alibi in the inchoate Petroleum Industry Bill! Such has been the legacy of the transformers!

     

    …And now Ayodele Fayose

    Until yesterday, I honestly considered some boundaries inviolate even to our band of delinquent political actors. After seeing the front page advertisements in The Punch and Daily Sun signed by Ekiti State Governor Ayodele Fayose, my simple conclusion was that some of our elected officials should be herded to the shrink. The advert was not just downright offensive, it was in bad taste. Mercifully, I am not alone in feeling this way. All of those I have spoken to on the advert agree that Fayose went beyond the boundaries of decency.

    Here is what a reader C. Olumide, from Ajah Lekki sent to me on the issue. I take my reader’s liberty for granted in publishing the short piece:

    “Governor Ayo Fayose’s advert for Jonathan on the Friont Page of today’s The Punch is sickening and in very bad taste. Haba! It should be condemned by all right-thinking Nigerians. Is that PDP’s issue-based campaign? For a sitting governor of a PDP state to descend to that level is the height of depravity and impunity – a deadly combination that exist only in Nigeria. (or can you cite a similar example anywhere else in the world?)

    We should therefore let the whole world know through our writings and radio and TV discussions that majority of Nigerians condemn this crude, meaningless, repulsive and indecent advert which mocks the memory of our heroes and can trigger North-South violence and thereby negate the undertaking signed by both Jonathan and Buhari. The newspaper should have exercised better judgement by rejecting such stupid but volatile advert in the first place”.

    What more can I add? These are interesting times no doubt.

  • Curiouser and curiouser in Ekiti

    Curiouser and curiouser in Ekiti

    Ekiti State has been going through a radical branding since the once and still hugely discredited Ayo Fayose returned to power as governor.

    It used to pride itself as a Fountain of  Knowledge on account of being reputed to have, household per household, the largest number of holders of earned doctoral degrees in Nigeria, and one of largest in the world. It had long been settled that there is no academic specialism so recondite or arcane that you will not find at least one person in a household in Ekiti holding a doctorate in it.

    Fayose seems to have made peace with that characterisation of Ekiti.

    What he apparently finds it hard to reconcile himself with is Ekiti’s other profile as a land of two of the most prized assets among the Yoruba – íyì and éeyè, which translate into honour and propriety.

    He served notice the other day that he would strip the Ekiti Coat of Arms of those enduring values, whether as aspiration or actuality. He may even have done so in the manner that becomes him so well.

    But that is not the subject of this piece.

    Nor is Fayose’s solicitous catering to the stomach structure of Ekiti State residents during the Yuletide the concern here, remarkable as it was, what with people from all over Nigeria and even from the ECOWAS region pouring into the state capital to obtain a portion of the Fayose Bonanza – rice, hens, cooking oil, salt, pepper and onions, together with pots and pans and other utensils guaranteed to do justice to such a special occasion.

    I gather that the next edition of the Stomach Infrastructure Initiative, or Fayose Special, is scheduled for Easter. Personally, however, I will not be surprised if Fayose were to decide to stage the event much earlier in deference to those complaining that Easter is too far, great democrat that he is. Plus, remember that the reason he connects so well is that he hears the people even before they begin to talk.

    Again, that is not the subject of this piece.

    Between his election and his inauguration, Fayose had gone from one bank to another warning of dire consequences if they granted his predecessor loans to service the administration’s financial  obligations.  And when that administration could not pay civil servants in its last month in office, Fayose had latched on to that as proof, were any still required, of the wickednessand callousness of Governor Kayode Fayemi and his team.

    Now finding himself similarly circumstanced, Fayose is appealing to civil servants to appreciate why their salaries had to be delayed.

    While campaigning for the governorship, Fayose had declared that President Goodluck Jonathan had promised to give him anything he wanted if he could capture Ekiti for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).  Why is Fayose not rushing to cash in on the promise to bring in huge federal assets to stave off the growing popular discontent?  The whole thing should take no more than a phone call to Aso Rock. So, what is Fayose waiting for?

    Again, that is not the subject of this column.

    By now, everyone knows how seven of the 26 members of the State Assembly, all elected on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC), defected to the PDP several hours after Fayose was declared winner of the gubernatorial election, and how the defectors, their ranks swollen by three infiltrators of identities unknown, purportedly convened a meeting of the Assembly during which they had claimed to have impeached the Assembly Speaker, Dr Ademola Omirin, and to have replaced him with one of their own.

    Everyone one knows how, drawing on a variation of the peculiar mathematics of the PDP and the Jonathan administration under which 14 is a larger number than 18, Fayose decreed that the seven defectors constitute a majority of the total membership of the House vested with law-making.

    The public knows how the seven defectors and their unidentified confederates had purported to carry out, in the appointed chambers, and under the full protection of the police,  the business of the Assembly, to wit, approving Fayose’s nominee for State Attorney-General (ha!) among other appointments, and passing into law the State’s 2015 Appropriations.

    Everyone also knows how the 19-member majority of the House was reduced to meeting at secret locations to countermand the legislative acts the defectors purported to have carried out. They had to meet in such circumstances because Fayose and the police could not or would not guarantee their safety.

    The public knows these developments all too well.  Those developments are consequently not the subject of this piece, merely a backdrop to it.

    To finally come right out with it, this column is about the recent transformation of the Police Command in Ekiti from a force accused of passively watching elements of the ruling PDP harass and intimidate and brutalise supporters of the opposition when it is not actually siding with and aiding and abetting the lawless rule of the PDP in Ekiti, to an institution dedicated to the peaceful resolution of disputes.

    To get to specifics, the police that had stood by as thugs invaded the Ekiti High Court, beat up judges, tore up lawyers’ robes and shredded court documents now want to reconcile the minority seeking to usurp the legislative functions of the Ekiti House of Assembly, and tne majority that have refused to submit to Fayose’s threats and blandishments and who knows what else from Abuja.

    How this improbable mission came about it remains for now a secret, but since it was announced by the Ekiti Commissioner of Police, Taiwo Lakanu, there can be no doubt that, at the very least, it has been approved from the very top. I doubt whether the police would have embarked on such a radical departure from its standard operational procedures without that kind of approval.

    If this is not another false dawn, the implications are far-reaching.

    Instead of dispersing protesters and demonstrators with main force, the police will henceforth function as honest brokers between them and the institutions they are protesting against  – between Labour and Capital, between students and the university administration, between perpetrator and victim.

    The more perceptive observers of the political scene would have sensed the coming of this new dispensation when, in the dispute over the competence of Aminu Tambuwal to continue to function as Speaker of the House of Representatives after defecting from the ruling PDP, Police Inspector-General Sulaiman Abba made it emphatically the province of the police to have the last word on the Constitution.

    From that singular act, it was but a short step to re-constituting the police into an institution for settling disputes and resolving conflict.

    Some may question whether the police are trained or otherwise equipped to perform such a function.  But they cannot question the function itself.  Somebody or some institution has to perform it.

    If, as in Ekiti and increasingly in other parts of Nigeria the courts and traditional rulers or so-called “royal fathers” cannot or will not perform that function, who can blame the police for stepping into the breach, even if that moves the country farther and farther along the road to a Police State?

  • Yet again, Sege talks the talk

    President Goodluck Jonathan and his alienated godfather, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, have been heating up the polity, with their less-than-presidential bile.

    In fairness though, the former president is the guiltier party, for the president’s you-are-no- statesman-but-motor-park-tout retort would appear from a person pushed to the wall by a ferocious, relentless and  unsparing foe.

    Still, no tears for President Jonathan.  He emerged by conspiracy — a pan-Nigeria gang-up that delivered a pan-Nigeria mandate of Southern Nigeria and the Middle Belt, fired by mass hysteria against the North, and its legitimate — and illegitimate — expectations, following the death, in office, of President Umaru Yar’Adua.

    Ironically, Obasanjo was proudly part of that thumping anti-zoning, false testimony-bearing orchestra; swearing on their (dis)honour that there was nothing like zoning, just to pave the way for Jonathan, who Obasanjo verily believed would be a puppet, he could manipulate anyhow.

    Now, if Jonathan emerged by pan-Nigeria conspiracy and anti-North hysteria, why shouldn’t he vanish by another pan-Nigeria mandate of Northern Nigeria and the South West, fired by mass pro-Muhammadu Buhari hysteria, itself powered by pan-Nigeria outrage against crass incompetence and rank insensitivity?

    Still, Obasanjo’s latest bombing, which elicited Jonathan’s rather inelegant riposte, was rather predictable.

    “When we left in May 2007,” Obasanjo thundered with patriotic rage, “the reserve was said to have been raised to US $35 million.  But today, that reserve has been depleted.  Our reserves,” he added, after exiting the debt overhang in 2005/2006, “was US $45 billion … I heard that the reserve increased to almost US $67 billion.  [But] our reserves now …” he rued, “is left with around only US $30 billion.”

    Long and short?  Jonathan is an irredeemable spendthrift, unworthy of public trust.  That could well be, though his economic czarina, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has written a long letter to rebut that claim.

    But the irony of ironies!  Mrs Okonjo-Iweala was in charge, when President Obasanjo was amassing the huge reserves.  Now, this same Okonjo-Iweala is in charge, as President Jonathan is busy depleting them!

    So, is Dr. Okonjo-Iweala’s equivalent of the late Senegalese Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter, aside from trenchant self-defence, proof that Breton-Woods’ local under-development agency is alive and well?

    Still, even if Jonathan is guilty as charged, he is only the latest fall guy of Obasanjo’s age-old wilful infliction of suspect successors on the polity, yet growl most at their clear non-performance, in contrast to his own “golden years” in office.

    In 1979 Gen. Obasanjo, as exiting military head of state, was so eager to deliver Alhaji Shehu Shagari as president, that his military junta even conspired to scuttle a looming electoral college face-off between National Party of Nigeria, NPN’s Shagari and Unity Party of Nigeria, UPN’s Chief Obafemi Awolowo.

    The trigger was NPN National Legal Adviser, Chief Richard Akinjide’s controversial  twelve-two-third legalistic joker.  It claimed Shagari needed to win, not by a spread of 25 per cent in 13 states (mathematically, the twelve-two-third of the then 19 states, earlier affirmed by Michael Ani’s Federal Electoral Commission, FEDECO), but by 25 per cent in 12 states, and a fraction of the 13th!

    The Supreme Court upheld this contentious argument but hurried to add the judgment would not be cited as precedence in future cases!

    Now, why did Obasanjo do this?  Some said he wanted to impress the North at Awo’s expense.  Maybe.

    But others insisted Obasanjo did it because he sensed if Awo became president, he would lose his anticipated bragging right that things were far better under him, than under his successors.

    So, when the 2nd Republic collapsed after four years, Obasanjo was quite happy to wear a chip on his shoulders: that the succeeding Buhari-Idiagbon regime claimed the Murtala-Obasanjo regime was its nativity.  The biting irony that Obasanjo himself de-legitimised Shagari, on account of the twelve-two-thirds controversy, never troubled his patriotic soul!  What is more?  When he came back in 1999, Baba lamented that all he left in 1979 had vanished!

    That same crass illogic drives Obasanjo’s present gloating.

    After inflicting a fatally ill Umaru Yar’Adua on the country, via his infamous do-or-die (s)election of 2007 — the most horrible in Nigeria’s history — Obasanjo disowned poor Umoru, on his death bed: resign with honour, he thundered, if you are given a job and you can’t do it!

    It was another especially callous call from the Olusegun Obasanjo brutal stable!  Even if his formerly beloved Umoru was far too gone to feel anything, what about the hurting folks he left behind?

    The same Obasanjo would carpet Yar’Adua, in his new book, My Watch, as an ingrate — a dead man that cannot defend himself?

    Goodluck Jonathan’s presidential incompetence is clear, without Obasanjo’s huffing-and-puffing.  But can Obasanjo wash himself clean of it?

    Obasanjo puritanically bombs Jonathan he is hopeless spendthrift — which probably he is — judging from the Jonathan Presidency’s record.  But what of Obasanjo’s own fatally flawed strategy of hoarding money as “reserves”, when local decayed infrastructure needed urgent fixing?

    Obasanjo’s all-wise, economic holy writ: reserves is it, do-or-die!

    Still, juxtapose Gen. Ibrahim Babangida’s simple and profane theory, on his own Gulf War oil windfall: “Our argument then was if you have the money, why keep it and be looking at it, when you have a lot that will benefit the ordinary man.  So, that money was not stolen.

    See the fatal danger of showing off grand ideas, when you don’t even understand simple ones?

    The notorious fact: with all Obasanjo’s grating noise, he has not, all his public life, nurtured any worthwhile successor to edify his legacy.  Yet, he has been military head of state and two-term elected president!

    Contrast his tale with common Bola Tinubu, a comparable toddler in power and politics, being only two-term governor of Lagos.  Asiwaju Tinubu raised Babatunde Fashola, SAN, to build on his legacy in Lagos; and also inspired post-Tinubu tenure development governance in Nigeria’s South West.

    Now, perhaps you realise how hollow Obasanjo’s eternal jeremiad, over his useless successors, really sounds!

    Even, Obasanjo’s ad nauseam love for Nigeria is, at best, a happy marriage of showy public love and intense private gain.

    What, for instance, does OFN mean?  Operation Feed the Nation — an Obasanjo military rule agricultural policy?  Obasanjo Farms Nigeria — an Obasanjo post-head of state private enterprise?  Or Operation Fool the Nation — a  not-so-illegitimate interpretation, given how the Land Use Decree powered the first two OFNs!

    Pray, where was Obasanjo waxing lyrical about his love for Nigeria, while meeting the Yoruba market women leaders?  The Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library of profoundly suspect moral provenance!  So long for hot love for Nigeria and cold love for own pocket!

    President Jonathan should, other things  being equal, meet his electoral waterloo on February 14.  But let Obasanjo not delude himself he wasn’t the mastermind of Jonathan, whose meltdown must be removed, if the country were not to melt down with it!

    Obasanjo made many bad calls, as Nigeria’s wannabe messiah.  Jonathan is only the latest of those mistakes.

    Therefore, let him quietly deal with those costly errors, without insulting the polity with his eternal posturing of peculiar patriotism.

  • The President is angry!

    Nigerians describing the President’s outbursts at the PDP presidential rally at the Tafawa Balewa Square in Lagos last week as a moment of revelation are only partially right. As far as revelations go, that outing neither added anything new nor did it reveal any new trait in a president ever too eager to fly off the handle at the slightest irritation. Aside the familiar effusions of a public figure pretending to be inured to criticism, what emerged was the ultra-defensiveness of a cornered man; a statement made out of a keen sense awareness of the dire implications of performing an elementary public duty.

    Just when one would imagine that the President would take on an issue that many of his “enemies” would rather have him hung on the guillotine in broad daylight, what we saw was a President, who in a fit of indignation, opted to trivialise a malaise that has grown to cancerous proportions. To him, corruption was not just an overblown non-issue; it required no extra-ordinary measures to tame.

    Here is how he puts it:  “If somebody tells you that the best way to fight corruption is to come and arrest your mother and father and show them on television, will that stop corruption? In fact, it will even encourage corruption. We are shooting armed robbers but is that stopping them? So, arresting people and showing them on television sets will do nothing. We must set up institutions and strengthen them in order to prevent people from stealing public money. That is what we are working on and we are succeeding.”

    Seems perfectly in the character of a President, who once, in a fit of indignation over demands that he publicly declare his assets would retort: “The issue of public asset declaration is a matter of personal principle. That is the way I see it, and I don’t give a damn about it, even if you criticise me from heaven. When I was the Vice President, that matter came up, and I told the former President (late Umaru Yar’Adua) let’s not start something that would make us play into the hands of people and create an anomalous situation in the country”.

    That statement, unknown to most Nigerians at the time, would later set not just the moral tone, but the directing principle of the laissez-faire administration.

    The charge of course was that the President was not just soft on corruption, but that the administration which he heads is more than any before it, corruption-compliant. In what appeared as a well-timed testimonial, the President’s “adopted father”, Ibrahim Babangida had, only days before, declared his administration’s no less sordid record as child play compared to brazen looting going on under his godson. Here is how he compared the two eras: “Maybe I have to accept that but anybody with a sense of fairness has no option but to call us saints. I give you an example, in a year; I was making less than $7 billion in oil revenue but in the same period there were governments that were making between $200 billion and $300 billion…With $7 billion, I did the best I could but with $200 billion there is still a lot to be achieved. I don’t have all the facts but if what I read in the papers is what is currently happening, then I think we were saints.”

    Remember that his arch-nemesis, Olusegun Obasanjo had earlier on written off the administration as spendthrift citing what he called the administration’s gross mismanagement of both the excess crude account and the foreign reserve.

    If we expected the president to mount a robust defence of his “record”, it was his moment to sift, select and serve Nigerians a brew of convenient “facts”, a veritable platform to rationalise the all-round paralysis that dogged his so-called fight against corruption. His administration, he would insist, had curbed corruption in the civil service and the agricultural sector. The former via the adoption of IPIS, a payroll system designed to eliminate theft; the other through the Electronic Wallet designed by local IT gurus!

    No pronouncment on the riddle of the “missing” $20 billion and on the inquiry ordered by the President himself. Not even a passing acknowledgement of the pension scam under which some select few, made away with hundreds of billions of naira belonging to Nigeria’s senior citizens. Today, one of the chief culprits, Abdul Rasheed Maina, is reported to be living large somewhere in the Middle East, with free passage generously supplied by the administration under Jonathan’s due process waiver!

    What of the subsidygate under which a supposedly democratic administration would ratchet a bill of $17 billion (approximately N2.7 trillion) on fuel subsidies as against the $8bn (N1.2 trillion) appropriated? Or the quantum jump in the number of fuel importers from six in 2006 to a record 140 in 2011? Now we know why those fictional ships, which reportedly fleeced the nation to the tune of N422, 542,937,668.59 would never be brought to book. In Jonathan’s book, due process trumps all!

    What do we know about the waiver-gate supervised by Jonathan’s finance minister and coordinator of the economy Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala?  It couldn’t get worse that a self-acclaimed business-friendly administration would be seen as encouraging indiscriminate issuance of waivers. But then, it emerged that the administration could not resist helping its partners with the lucrative waivers. Today, we now know, and it is public record, that the administration actually gave out waivers to the tune of N1.4 trillion in the three years between January 2011 and September 2013, as against Minister Okonjo-Iweala’s claim of N171 billion. If we insist on not flogging an already dead issue – the matter of Stella Oduah’s purchase of two bullet-proof vehicles for the princely sum of N225 million, what about the extortion by Abba Moro of N1,000 from applicants seeking the Nigeria Immigration Service job at the end which 19 of them lost their lives? Isn’t minister still sitting pretty as minister in Jonathan’s morally-challenged cabinet?

    The President no doubt has a right to be angry. His anger is understandable. This is an election season. He probably assumed that a day like this would never come. As things are fast turning out, he couldn’t be more wrong. The issue however is that his anger is misdirected. I believe that the target of the President’s anger ought to be the laissez-faire type of leadership which he provided and which his uninspiring team exploited to the hilt. As things stand, he would do a better job of directing his ministers and legion of courtiers to get down to the business of rendering the accounts. Should that be too much to ask after six years of stewardship?

  • Between Agbaje and Ambode

    In Jimi Agbaje, suave gentleman and pharmacist, as Lagos candidate, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has altered its preference for roughnecks as South West gubernatorial hopefuls.

    Witness: Ekiti’s Ayo Fayose, demagogue of the first rank; and, from his gubernatorial deeds so far, constitutional outlaw, if he can get away with it — for which gubernatorial kind would get his budget “passed” by a rogue parliament of seven ultra-minority members (less than a quorum of nine in a legislature of 26); and claim to be in constitutional governance?

    And Osun’s Iyiola Omisore: a truly controversial figure, with suspect community value, that ran a truly menacing gubernatorial campaign, complete with hooded gunmen, even if that campaign eventually failed.

    In Mr. Agbaje, however, it is something refreshingly different.  Obviously, Eko o ni gba-gba ku gba (Lagos won’t take any nonsense)!

    Akinwunmi Ambode, Mr. Agbaje’s All Progressives Congress (APC) equivalent, is made of no less stellar stuff.

    A famed civil service technocrat and professional accountant, the former Lagos Accountant-General and permanent secretary, Lagos State Ministry of Finance, was reportedly the silent wheel behind the financial re-engineering that kept Lagos afloat, when President Olusegun Obasanjo bared the fangs of his imperial presidency, over the creation of additional local governments in Lagos, under the Bola Tinubu administration.

    Still, whatever Mr. Agbaje did as a private investor; and Mr. Ambode, as a public sector technocrat, are all in the realm of supposition, since neither had taken direct charge as the Lagos chief executive.

    Therefore, their first point of contact, with the electorate, at least, would have to be their proxies — mentors, if you like: show-me-your-friends, fashion.

    For Mr. Agbaje is the triumvirate of Olabode George, Adeseye Ogunlewe and Musiliu Obanikoro.

    In a spade of a few weeks however, Mr. Obanikoro has turned Mr. Agbaje’s co-contestant for the Lagos governorship ticket; sworn virtual enemy, on the allegation that the primary was rigged in Mr. Agbaje’s favour; and now a supporter of a sort, on account of some post-primary intra-PDP entente.

    For Mr. Ambode would appear former Governor Bola Tinubu and current incumbent, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN.

    Though Asiwaju Tinubu said before the Lagos APC gubernatorial primaries that he backed no candidate, whispering campaigns persisted Mr. Ambode was his man.  Since the candidate emerged, Governor Fashola, from his public comments and actions, appears backing Mr. Ambode to the hilt.

    So, where stand the two, proxy-wise?

    That Chief George and former Senator Ogunlewe broke into an involuntary embrace, after Mr. Agbaje’s win over Mr. Obanikoro, spoke volumes.  Why?

    No prize for guessing right — for it needs no especial perspicacity: some merry real-politik trade-off was afoot.

    Both George and Ogunlewe need Mr. Agbaje’s good name.  Mr. Agbaje, on the other hand, needs the twain’s political structure, on which to erect his own gubernatorial run.  Quid-pro-quo: a sweetheart deal was born!

    Yet, from that initial merriness, Mr. Agbaje’s brand appears heading for collateral gloom, considering the duo’s rather unflattering public perception, when the issue is Lagos.

    Mr. Ogunlewe, as a senator of the Federal Republic, was one of the first sets of renegade Alliance for Democracy (AD) Lagos senators, that gifted PDP their AD mandate, resulting from former President Obasanjo’s AD destabilisation plot.  The senator had the temerity to come back, in 2003, to re-contest the Lagos East senatorial seat on the PDP platform.

    He was electorally guillotined — his seat given to Senator Nimbe Mamora, who after two distinguished terms, rose to become widely acknowledged as one of the finest senators of his age.

    That 2002 sweet poison of soulless defection would come back to purge the federal ruling party, with the APC defection of Speaker Aminu Tambuwal, prompting the rash police invasion of the National Assembly.  Talk of parents eating  sour grapes and children’s teeth being set on edge!

    Still, Mr. Ogunlewe was not done with Lagos.  As President Obasanjo’s Works minister, he levied virtual war on Lagos, with his Federal Roads Maintenance Authority (FERMA) corps, that tried to elbow the Lagos State Traffic Management Authority (LASTMA) corps from Lagos roads, claiming they had suzerainty over federal roads in Lagos.

    In one of the senseless skirmishes, Mrs. Derin Disu, then chairman of Lagos Island Local Government, was thoroughly assaulted and harassed.  Her “crime”?  Having the temerity to confront Mr. Ogunlewe’s FERMA corps!

    Mr. Ogunlewe’s partner in the Jimi Agbaje project, Chief George, has contributed little to the public space, except military conceit and insufferable arrogance.  He invented the word “capture” for winning elections, so many times thundering the PDP would “capture Lagos”, a diction that has a ring of do-or-die, foul-or-fair menace.  Even as military governor of old Ondo State (now Ondo and Ekiti states), George’s record was nothing to crow about.

    Mr. Obanikoro too would follow Mr. Ogunlewe’s template of defecting to PDP with his Action Congress (AC) senatorial ticket, after ironically replacing the late Wahab Dosunmu, who committed a similar electoral perfidy by taking his AD ticket to PDP.  Like Mr. Ogunlewe too, Mr. Obanikoro sought election (though as Lagos governor), but was defeated by Mr. Fashola.

    Ironically too, both George and Obanikoro appear doomed to the Ogunlewe script.  While Ogunlewe used FERMA to traumatise Lagos, Obanikoro has accused George of using the SURE-P cadre, a bric-a-brac federal corps noticeable on Lagos roads, as alleged armed bouncers to fix elections.

    Obanikoro himself, as short-lived Defence minister of state (Army), wasn’t shy of despatching his soldiers to disrupt work at the Ilubinrin, Lagos Island housing project of the state government, aside from trotting them to try and fix elections at Ekiti and Osun gubernatorial elections in 2014.

    This would appear Mr. Agbaje’s exalted company in his gubernatorial quest!

    Mr. Ambode’s company?  Former Governor Tinubu and the incumbent, Governor Fashola.

    Now, in the eyes of the other camp, Tinubu is the worst that could ever afflict any polity.  And Fashola is nothing but his eternal stooge!  That might well be.  Besides, one man’s meat is another man’s poison; and, in war, all would appear fair!

    Still, on a less emotive plane, the Tinubu-Fashola lineage has brought a 1999 Lagos from its abyss of infrastructural decay, environmental paralysis and sheer anomie, depressing results of years of hopeless military rule; to a 2015 near-financially independent Lagos, renascent and vibrant, confident of facing its future, even if it is always work-in-progress.

    Inversely, the PDP at the federal level, has brought a 1999 Nigeria, flush with cash but nevertheless inefficient and wasteful, to a 2015 Nigeria, broke and beggarly, set to enter again the debt trap, it only exited in 2005/2006.  That is Mr. Agbaje’s preferred space shuttle into governance.  Wish him the best of luck!

    There is partisan muck, of course; of which both camps are not necessarily guiltless.  Still, Mr. Ambode would appear rooted in an already established tradition of developmental Lagos, tested and proved, with verifiable results.  That, with all due respect to his good name, cannot be said of Mr. Agbaje.

    Ambode’s reported rich contribution to Lagos’ financial re-engineering is reassuring, giving the impression that with him, Lagos would remain in safe and tested hands, and not just passing to partisan rivals, bustling with a me-too syndrome, but hardly exhibiting any cogent reason it could raise Lagos higher.

    That is the clear choice Lagos must make, between Mr. Agbaje and Mr. Ambode.

  • Between Agbaje and Ambode

    In Jimi Agbaje, suave gentleman and pharmacist, as Lagos candidate, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has altered its preference for roughnecks as South West gubernatorial hopefuls.

    Witness: Ekiti’s Ayo Fayose, demagogue of the first rank; and, from his gubernatorial deeds so far, constitutional outlaw, if he can get away with it — for which gubernatorial kind would get his budget “passed” by a rogue parliament of seven ultra-minority members (less than a quorum of nine in a legislature of 26); and claim to be in constitutional governance?

    And Osun’s Iyiola Omisore: a truly controversial figure, with suspect community value, that ran a truly menacing gubernatorial campaign, complete with hooded gunmen, even if that campaign eventually failed.

    In Mr. Agbaje, however, it is something refreshingly different.  Obviously, Eko o ni gba-gba ku gba (Lagos won’t take any nonsense)!

    Akinwunmi Ambode, Mr. Agbaje’s All Progressives Congress (APC) equivalent, is made of no less stellar stuff.

    A famed civil service technocrat and professional accountant, the former Lagos Accountant-General and permanent secretary, Lagos State Ministry of Finance, was reportedly the silent wheel behind the financial re-engineering that kept Lagos afloat, when President Olusegun Obasanjo bared the fangs of his imperial presidency, over the creation of additional local governments in Lagos, under the Bola Tinubu administration.

    Still, whatever Mr. Agbaje did as a private investor; and Mr. Ambode, as a public sector technocrat, are all in the realm of supposition, since neither had taken direct charge as the Lagos chief executive.

    Therefore, their first point of contact, with the electorate, at least, would have to be their proxies — mentors, if you like: show-me-your-friends, fashion.

    For Mr. Agbaje is the triumvirate of Olabode George, Adeseye Ogunlewe and Musiliu Obanikoro.

    In a spade of a few weeks however, Mr. Obanikoro has turned Mr. Agbaje’s co-contestant for the Lagos governorship ticket; sworn virtual enemy, on the allegation that the primary was rigged in Mr. Agbaje’s favour; and now a supporter of a sort, on account of some post-primary intra-PDP entente.

    For Mr. Ambode would appear former Governor Bola Tinubu and current incumbent, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN.

    Though Asiwaju Tinubu said before the Lagos APC gubernatorial primaries that he backed no candidate, whispering campaigns persisted Mr. Ambode was his man.  Since the candidate emerged, Governor Fashola, from his public comments and actions, appears backing Mr. Ambode to the hilt.

    So, where stand the two, proxy-wise?

    That Chief George and former Senator Ogunlewe broke into an involuntary embrace, after Mr. Agbaje’s win over Mr. Obanikoro, spoke volumes.  Why?

    No prize for guessing right — for it needs no especial perspicacity: some merry real-politik trade-off was afoot.

    Both George and Ogunlewe need Mr. Agbaje’s good name.  Mr. Agbaje, on the other hand, needs the twain’s political structure, on which to erect his own gubernatorial run.  Quid-pro-quo: a sweetheart deal was born!

    Yet, from that initial merriness, Mr. Agbaje’s brand appears heading for collateral gloom, considering the duo’s rather unflattering public perception, when the issue is Lagos.

    Mr. Ogunlewe, as a senator of the Federal Republic, was one of the first sets of renegade Alliance for Democracy (AD) Lagos senators, that gifted PDP their AD mandate, resulting from former President Obasanjo’s AD destabilisation plot.  The senator had the temerity to come back, in 2003, to re-contest the Lagos East senatorial seat on the PDP platform.

    He was electorally guillotined — his seat given to Senator Nimbe Mamora, who after two distinguished terms, rose to become widely acknowledged as one of the finest senators of his age.

    That 2002 sweet poison of soulless defection would come back to purge the federal ruling party, with the APC defection of Speaker Aminu Tambuwal, prompting the rash police invasion of the National Assembly.  Talk of parents eating  sour grapes and children’s teeth being set on edge!

    Still, Mr. Ogunlewe was not done with Lagos.  As President Obasanjo’s Works minister, he levied virtual war on Lagos, with his Federal Roads Maintenance Authority (FERMA) corps, that tried to elbow the Lagos State Traffic Management Authority (LASTMA) corps from Lagos roads, claiming they had suzerainty over federal roads in Lagos.

    In one of the senseless skirmishes, Mrs. Derin Disu, then chairman of Lagos Island Local Government, was thoroughly assaulted and harassed.  Her “crime”?  Having the temerity to confront Mr. Ogunlewe’s FERMA corps!

    Mr. Ogunlewe’s partner in the Jimi Agbaje project, Chief George, has contributed little to the public space, except military conceit and insufferable arrogance.  He invented the word “capture” for winning elections, so many times thundering the PDP would “capture Lagos”, a diction that has a ring of do-or-die, foul-or-fair menace.  Even as military governor of old Ondo State (now Ondo and Ekiti states), George’s record was nothing to crow about.

    Mr. Obanikoro too would follow Mr. Ogunlewe’s template of defecting to PDP with his Action Congress (AC) senatorial ticket, after ironically replacing the late Wahab Dosunmu, who committed a similar electoral perfidy by taking his AD ticket to PDP.  Like Mr. Ogunlewe too, Mr. Obanikoro sought election (though as Lagos governor), but was defeated by Mr. Fashola.

    Ironically too, both George and Obanikoro appear doomed to the Ogunlewe script.  While Ogunlewe used FERMA to traumatise Lagos, Obanikoro has accused George of using the SURE-P cadre, a bric-a-brac federal corps noticeable on Lagos roads, as alleged armed bouncers to fix elections.

    Obanikoro himself, as short-lived Defence minister of state (Army), wasn’t shy of despatching his soldiers to disrupt work at the Ilubinrin, Lagos Island housing project of the state government, aside from trotting them to try and fix elections at Ekiti and Osun gubernatorial elections in 2014.

    This would appear Mr. Agbaje’s exalted company in his gubernatorial quest!

    Mr. Ambode’s company?  Former Governor Tinubu and the incumbent, Governor Fashola.

    Now, in the eyes of the other camp, Tinubu is the worst that could ever afflict any polity.  And Fashola is nothing but his eternal stooge!  That might well be.  Besides, one man’s meat is another man’s poison; and, in war, all would appear fair!

    Still, on a less emotive plane, the Tinubu-Fashola lineage has brought a 1999 Lagos from its abyss of infrastructural decay, environmental paralysis and sheer anomie, depressing results of years of hopeless military rule; to a 2015 near-financially independent Lagos, renascent and vibrant, confident of facing its future, even if it is always work-in-progress.

    Inversely, the PDP at the federal level, has brought a 1999 Nigeria, flush with cash but nevertheless inefficient and wasteful, to a 2015 Nigeria, broke and beggarly, set to enter again the debt trap, it only exited in 2005/2006.  That is Mr. Agbaje’s preferred space shuttle into governance.  Wish him the best of luck!

    There is partisan muck, of course; of which both camps are not necessarily guiltless.  Still, Mr. Ambode would appear rooted in an already established tradition of developmental Lagos, tested and proved, with verifiable results.  That, with all due respect to his good name, cannot be said of Mr. Agbaje.

    Ambode’s reported rich contribution to Lagos’ financial re-engineering is reassuring, giving the impression that with him, Lagos would remain in safe and tested hands, and not just passing to partisan rivals, bustling with a me-too syndrome, but hardly exhibiting any cogent reason it could raise Lagos higher.

    That is the clear choice Lagos must make, between Mr. Agbaje and Mr. Ambode.

  • GEJ and the ‘vision’ thing

    GEJ and the ‘vision’ thing

    I don’t envy Dr Goodluck Jonathan’s propaganda brigade

    This past week, its operatives have been striving to outdo each other in a frenzied race to demonise and pulverise General Muhammadu Buhari, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) who will be squaring off with their principal in the February 13 presidential election.

    In this season, that is probably the easiest of political assignments. Among politicians aspiring to higher office, Buhari is probably the softest of targets. And they are sparing no effort to paint him, with help from his record as military head of state nearly three decades back in the most repellent hues.

    The irony is that, while they are busy excoriating Buhari, their principal has been busy exhuming questions that had never lain far beneath the surface about his intellectual preparation and competence for the post he has held for six years

    Now, it is one thing to raise questions about the academic credentials of a career military officer-turned politician; it is quite another for the holder a doctorate and former academic to raise at every outing questions and doubts about his own intellectual competence.

    Yet, that is what Dr Jonathan does every time he speaks without a prepared text, even when his audience is a friendly church congregation. He delivers himself in a speech pattern of which non sequiturs, dubious analogies, mangled syntax, and thoughts arrested in mid-sentence are the distinguishing characteristics.

    “Jonathanism” is the provisional term that a researcher in linguistics in one of our universities has bestowed on that pattern of speech, in honour of our GEJ.   He tells me he is assembling an anthology of Jonathanisms, and would gratefully acknowledge examples of the phenomenon from readers.

    No fake entries, please. The entries must be based entirely on words that Dr Jonathan actually spoke, where and on what occasion he spoke them, and of course, the date.

    Entries should be sent to “Jonathanisms,” c/o P O Box 419, Abuja, or jonathanisms@yahoo.com

    Here is the latest example, of how Dr Jonathan has been undermining his own campaign in ways that his most outspoken critics will be hard put to match, in remarks made at the Dunamis International Church, in Abuja, on New Year Day, as reported in several national dailies:

    “President Goodluck Jonathan has identified lack of vision as one of the main reasons government policies have often failed and pledged a return to the good old days when things were done with clear-cut vision. . .”

    Nobody can blame you for holding it right there and slowly exclaiming:  Holy Molly!

    We cannot enter into Dr Jonathan’s mind to ascertain what he really meant.  Nor should we second-guess him. Going by his actual  words, an objective analyst would have to say that Dr Jonathan came across as yearning for a return of “the good old days” when planning was based on, as he phrased it, “clear-cut vision,”  unlike today, when government policies founder and fail for “lack of vision.”

    By way of clarification, Dr Jonathan added:

    “.. . If you look at what we have been doing as a nation, you really see that before this time when Nigeria used to have what we call 25-year rolling plan, we used to budget based on a 25-year clear plan for the country, so you know where you are going for 25 years then it was broken down to five years plan and now an annual budget.”

    “But after sometimes things collapsed and we run governments on emergency basis and you see government started wobbling and I can assure you that we are going back to those good old days when we had vision.”

    Nigeria never had a budget based on a 25-year plan, by the way. But there you have it.  In the good old days, there was vision. But now, in the Age of Transformation, there is no vision.

    This lack of vision explains so many things that define the Nigerian condition.

    It explains what happened to Vision 20/20, and what is likely to happen to Vision 2020/20,  despite the creative re-basing of the economy and all that.

    It explains why national budgets drawn up and presented with ritual fanfare every year fail miserably to achieve their targets. It explains why Benin Republic is cashing in big-time on duties on imports destined for Nigeria, at the expense of the Federal Government.  It explains why some inter-state highways look like tracks on the lunar surface.

    It explains why the power supply varies inversely as sum of the public funds pumped into power generation. It explains why eight months after some 250 school girls were spirited from their school hostels in Chibok into the infernal bowels of Sambisa forest, their traumatised parents and a jaded public are treated to nothing but threadbare assurances that the girls would soon be brought home.

    It explains why fuel has to be imported in a country that procures more than a million barrels of crude daily and has four oil refineries.  It explains the mess called SURE-P.  It explains why a president who grew up without shoes has made a fetish of acquiring executive jetliners.

    It explains why hundreds of millions of  Naira is allocated each year for procurement and maintenance of electric generator sets for the so-called Presidency and why, until there was a public outcry, that institution voted one billion Naira every year for food and refreshments.

    It explains why Nigeria abstained from delivering a crucial vote that would have aligned it with those countries seeking an end to Israeli annexation and occupation of Palestinian territories in defiance of United Nations resolutions going back to 1967, and other policies that have turned Gaza into what British Prime Minister David Cameron in one moment of lucidity called “the world’s largest open-air prison.”

    Lack of vision explains why Dr Jonathan – and his predecessors– would rather travel abroad for medical treatment than build and equip even one world-class medical facility in Nigeria.

    Given the lack of vision that has historically doomed Nigeria, what can be expected in the long run of Dr Olusegun Aganga’s Industrial Revolution that seeks in essence to re-invent the wheel, or Dr Akinwumi Adesina’s Agricultural Revolution founded on statistical flights of fancy?

    For that matter, what is the future Dr Jonathan’s Transformation Agenda that was conceived in this era of no vision? Given his new resolve to return to the good old days when there was vision, will he now jettison it?

    And here is a bit of presidential wisdom for all those institutions that provide training without giving any thought to creating jobs:

    “You are rather frustrating more people and increasing the number of criminals in the society,” Dr Jonathan admonished them. “I always say that if you train a young man as a fitter and he has no job to do, he will use that skill to break into banks, because you have trained him on how to handle iron and how to handle complicated locks.”

    There you have it again, a classic Jonathanism.

    Taking together, the lack of vision for which Dr Jonathan has entered a damning indictment on himself and his administration, the pattern of thought and speech that the researcher we encountered earlier has christened “Jonathanisms,” and his failure of leadership on some key issues of national existence, it is no injustice to say of Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan that he cannot lead Nigeria to the Promised Land.

  • Are you better than you were four years ago?

    In the intervening days before Christmas and the New Year, a friend posted on his Facebook page what he called the wonder of the Jonathan revolution for which he believes the rest of us should consider ourselves in debt.  His abode, somewhere in Otta, Ogun State had until that morning, according to him, not experienced outage in electricity supply for eight days running. Like most Jonathan die-hards, he saw this as a signal not just to a new dawn in the power sector but of the infinite possibilities in the coming years should Nigerians be persuaded to gift their lucky President with another term!

    My friend is lucky; he has a job. Asides, he got his December check early enough to make his preparations for the yuletide unlike most Nigerians who had to endure dry fast!

    Days after, I would be a guest on a breakfast television programme in which two other invited guests would sing the praise of the Jonathan administration to high heavens for what they considered as the laudable foundations being laid across all facets of the nation’s life. They spoke about the administration’s efforts to get the economy moving on an even keel. One even talked about our new found freedom under the man with the Goodluck charm. Copious references were made to the ‘revolution’ in the agricultural sector that has seen Thai rice exit family menus – replaced by Abakaliki Rice. Petrol, once elusive, they reminded, is now available. Gone are the days when spent days on queues in search of the essential commodity, they chorused. The refurbished Lugardian contraption –the Jona’ wonders on the rail are not only back, so also is an ambitious 25-year programme to transform them to world class railways. This is aside the massive road rehabilitation programme that has transformed the highways to a beautiful driving experience. And for those who cared to know, they were also too eager to point at the administration’s record in Foreign Direction Investment!

    Ever heard of Transformers’ Nigeria?

    For once, I thought we are finally getting around the main issues around which the February elections ought to be woven. This is obviously a far cry from the exertions of the legion of cyber rodents – if you like cyber assassins – on the payroll of the administration who have done pretty little else than put down anyone who dared to hold up the administration’s record for public scrutiny. To the extent that the issues are finally emerging on the front burner, and given that we have barely six weeks from the Presidential elections, we can at least claim to be making progress just as we do well to remind ourselves of the promises given against what the administration claims to have delivered.

    To be sure, this administration can hardly be accused of rigour of policy let alone of execution. In essence, it is not about holding it to any lofty standards in global best practices but simply to invoke its avowed standards as benchmark for measuring how well it has done in a little more than four years of being in charge.  For this, yours truly’s gratitude – as indeed that of every Nigerian –go to Premium Times for reminding us of the “Goodluck Transform Nigeria” document. As it appears, a good number of Jonathan supporters may not have had the benefit of sighting let alone reading the 28-page document prepared by the transformers.

    Today, I serve some samplers from the document. Prominent on the bill, as one would expect, is the electricity generation target of 16,000 MW to be achieved by 2013. Well, this is 2015! Has the President achieved? You be the judge!

    Next is the promise to rehabilitate all existing power generation, distribution and transmission assets to give a minimum of 6,000 MW of electricity. In this, the National Integrated Power Projects, (NIPP), were to be completed to inject another 4,000 MW to the grid by 2012.  Twenty-four months after, it is still a case of transformation-in-the-works! So also are the promises to harness alternative sources of energy such as coal, wind and solar with another 13, 000 MW target. Gone with the wind. Lest I forget, once upon a time, the administration celebrated the achievement of its attainment of peak generation of 4, 322 MW, which it claimed was “the highest ever attained.” That was in December 2011. By September 2014, it was again time to celebrate a two-year high of 4,044 megawatts (MW) in what was supposed to be progress!

    In the President’s transformation booklet, he had assured among other things to achieve balanced national economic development, with specific focus on increasing oil production and refining capacity. According to the document, the President’s goal was to “stimulate local value-addition and strategically position the nation to meet the domestic demand for the refined products and take advantage of a new market niche-export of refined products”.

    So what happened three years on? The answer is – aplenty. Instead of a boost in oil production, what we have is massive plunder of the oil resources, an industrial scale theft under which the nation is bled to the tune of billions of dollars annually. Don’t ask me what the administration has done to stamp out the menace. The last thing we heard was that the government had farmed out the pipeline-protection contracts to former militants – a case of using the thief to catch another!   As for the prospects of enhanced local refining, the only visible ‘transformation’ is perhaps the spectacular Turn Around of the fortunes of the regime contractors – minus the real TAM – Turn Around Maintenance – of the refineries.

    And what about the gas sector which the President promised would be “developed with special focus on meeting the domestic and individual demands of gas within the country, especially with the anticipated increased demand due to the Visions 20:2020 intent of rejuvenating the manufacturing sector”? If what the administration has been saying is to be taken with a pinch of salt, the nation is still running deficit in gas supply to power plants ordered by former President Olusegun Obasanjo as far back as 2006/7!  What about the world-scale petrochemical and fertilizer companies which the administration promised? Isn’t it the same old story of apathy, neglect and indifference?  I can go on and on! Today, instead of creating a durable framework for road construction, maintenance and rehabilitation, the administration celebrates as achievement, the award of contracts for building and rehabilitation of roads!

    It seems about time the administration’s record is tested with fire. Time to confront the singular question: are you better off today than you were four years ago?

    I invite you, dear reader, to join the debate.

  • Too many people have died

    Too many people have died

    In the week leading to Christmas, dozens of gunmen stormed Gumsuri, some 70 kilometres south of Maiduguri, killed more than 30 young men and abducted more than 100 women and children. Boko Haram has not claimed responsibility, but the operation, carried out along the road that leads to Chibok, bears its grisly signature.

    Chibok, as the world knows, was where Boko Haram abducted more than 200 girls from their school hostel last April. Their whereabouts and their condition remain unknown.

    Details of the deadly raid on Gumsuri did not emerge for four days. Boko Haram had sabotaged the mobile phone network in the area, and many of the roads are impassable.

    For Boko Haram, this was all in a day’s work.

    During the past six months, Boko Haram has killed at least 2,053 civilians, according to Human Rights Watch. From the data supplied by the African Studies Programme at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, in Baltimore, Maryland (no official Nigerian figures are available), no fewer than 29, 600 civilians have been killed in Boko Haram’s campaign of murder and mayhem since 1998.  More than one million have been forced to relocate.

    These figures are most likely undercounts.  But even at that, for a country that is not caught in the paroxysm of a civil war or ravaged by an epidemic or natural disaster on a Biblical scale, that is a lot of deaths and a lot of displacement.

    And the prospects are for more of the same, given Boko Haram’s fiendish zealotry and the token resistance that Nigeria’s armed forces have thus far mustered in their engagements with the insurgents.

    The military high command has taken a great deal of criticism for what many see as its desultory response to the Boko Haram challenge. As if in refutation, the military has been prosecuting its own rank and file on a charge of mutiny, the ultimate crime in its code.

    Fifty-four enlisted men were recently sentenced to death, having been found guilty of mutiny by a court martial. Some three hundred others are awaiting trial on the same charge, and the indications are that a good number of them will be found guilty and condemned to death.

    All this is coming at a time when too many people have died at the barbarous hands of Boko Haram that the armed forces were supposed to hold in check, if not vanquish altogether. To add to this the grisly toll by executing those solders found guilty of mutiny can only exacerbate the bloodletting without serving any useful purpose.

    This column has always stood resolutely and implacably opposed to capital punishment even as a sanction for the most heinous crimes.

    The support for capital punishment rests principally on the claim that it serves as a deterrent. Knowing that they stand to pay with their own if found guilty of a capital crime, only those possessed by a death wish would commit such a crime. Without such a deterrent, it is claimed, capital crimes would escalate.

    If this claim holds true, the homicide rates in the major industrial countries that have abolished capital punishment should have risen sharply. So should the volume of capital crimes in those states that do not practise capital punishment, or employ it only sparingly. But again, this has not been the case.

    Capital punishment, then, is no deterrent. It deters only those who have been executed: they will never commit another capital crime. But the same end can be secured with far less damage to the social fabric by keeping those convicted of capital crimes in jail for life, without the possibility of parole.

    The strongest argument against capital punishment is its finality. Once carried out, it cannot be reversed even if it turns out, as happens not infrequently, that the executed person was innocent, or that guilt was not established beyond a reasonable doubt.

    It will be objected that the military is a special case governed by military law, and that the foregoing arguments do not and should not apply.  I will argue that the military are part and parcel of the larger society and are, in democratic settings, subordinated to the civilian authority, which can properly set aside death penalties decreed by martial law.

    There are many reasons why the civilian authorities should vacate the capital punishment that 54 condemned soldiers now face for mutiny.

    The men had entered the military, prepared to die for their country in the expectation that their country would do its duty by them – house them properly, train them adequately, give them the tools of their trade, pay their salaries and allowances at the appropriate time, and care for them when they come to harm in the line of duty, generally look after their welfare.

    What do we find in practice?

    The barracks in which many military personnel live are just a shade less decrepit than those housing the police. Payment of salaries and allowances is often delayed, sometimes for several months

    It came to light at the hearings of the Oputa Panel that, more than 15 years after the Ejigbo plane disaster in which a generation of army officers perished, their families had not received their entitlements.  It may well be that, today, 10 years later, they are still waiting for their due.

    Several years ago, soldiers who served with ECOMOG in Liberia had to stage a sustained demonstration to get their entitlements released by their commanding officer. Those who returned from Sierra Leone and Liberia with serious injuries were abandoned to their own devices in squalid hospital wards.

    Former U. S. President Jimmy Carter was so moved by their plight that he brought in a planeload of medicines and supplies for their relief. The luckier war casualties shipped to Egypt for treatment had to stage strikes and demonstrations to get their remittances.

    The obsolescent weapons issued to our military personnel are no match for the munitions of those they are supposed to engage in battle. The Federal Government confirmed that much when it set out to raise a loan of one billion dollars to equip the armed forces to fight Boko Haram.

    Training and re-training have been put in abeyance. Professionalism has been compromised by those who should serve as shining examples. The corruption choking the larger society has corroded the esprit de corps of the armed forces. Budgets are drawn up, funds are released, but there is little to show for all that expenditure.

    The result has been widespread demoralisation. The refusal of a large number of soldiers to proceed on combat duty is a manifestation of that demoralisation. Under the military code, the refusal was an act of insubordination. They were certainly remiss in their obligations.

    But so are the military establishment and the Nigerian state, which failed to hold up their end of the bargain. To make the condemned men pay for their dereliction with their lives will amount to a travesty of justice and morality.

    Demobilising them – with dishonourable discharge in the most egregious cases — would be punishment enough. Too many people have died.

  • Baba, the Bard and barbs

    Baba, the Bard and barbs

    Still on his Watch, Baba and the Bard (BAB) just tangled. Is it any wonder barbs are flying from the Bard, that takes no lexical prisoners?

    Baba, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, has committed the literary equivalent of the proverbial Islamic zealot that carries his saara (votive offering) beyond the mosque.  The last time the Ebora Owu committed such literary harakiri, he was still the all-mighty president.

    But not even that illusion could save Baba from the Kongi tempest, sending Baba hurtling down the literary plane, as a vicious hurricane would uproot a big tree and send it zipping on the horizon, like some tiny pin!

    Phew!  Had Baba compared notes with those who inherited his court, they would not have committed similar suicide.  Not so long ago, a certain presidential spouse tried her lexical kindergarten on this same bard — and open sesame, a new lexicon birthed on Nigeria’s literary space: sheppopotamus!  This bard sure takes no prisoners.  Lexical mis-adventurers, beware!

    But like a doomed dog deaf to the hunter’s whistle, Baba would go court avoidable trouble. In his latest book, My Watch, Baba ran his mouth on the Nobel laureate’s alleged shakabula (crude, inaccurate) reputation as a political pundit.

    Hear Baba Iyabo declare with flourish: He is a “misfit as a political analyst, commentator or critic … For Wole, no one can be good, nor can anything be spot-on politically except that which emanates from him or is ordained by him … I take him seriously on almost all issues except on the political, particularly Nigerian politics.”

    Since Baba chose literature, a field in which the Nobel laureate is well grounded to dismiss him as a “bloody amateur”, the same way the general would, in military conceit, dismiss non-soldiers as “bloody civilians”, Kongi chose D.O. Fagunwa’s Yoruba classic, Igbo Olodumare, to paint an unflattering portraiture of Obasanjo’s public persona. That persona belonged, according to the book, to the worst set of humans who, when they die, in Fagunwa’s fictive cosmogony, don’t go to heaven or hell direct, but are garrisoned somewhere, for extreme wickedness, while on earth.

    The Bard declared that the alleged persona of his amateur literary traducer, from Fagunwa’s classification, belongs to the seventh and worst of this class of people.

    More details on that persona, according to WS, quoting Fagunwa: “With his mouth, he ruined the work of others, while he used a big potsherd to cover the good works of some, that others might not see their attainments. He nosed around for secrets that would entrap his companions, and blew them up into monumental crimes in the eyes of the world. He who turns the world upside down, places the deceitful on the throne, casts the truthful down — because such is a being of base earth, he will never stand as equal among the uplifted …”

    Does that really add up Baba’s public image, though the Bard insists the man is an unfazed master of mendacity? The jury is out!

    But before you could call WS, our Bard rounded off with sarcastic flourish: “So, let our Great Immortal, the Unparalleled Achiever, Divinely appointed Watchman … remember Fagunwa’s Iku, the ultimate predator whose visitation comes to us all, sooner or later.  Chei! There is Death o!”

    Did a certain presidential spouse feel some collateral heat?