The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Yoked to the past

    Yoked to the past

    Two weeks after the announcement by Petroleum Minister, Diezani Alison-Madueke of the plan by government to sell the nation’s four refineries by the first quarter of 2014, there are enough signs already to suggest that the process is not guaranteed a smooth sail. As it appears, not even the horror of the reversal of an earlier sale of two refineries to Bluestar Consortium by the late President Umaru Yar’Adua, or the self-evident folly that flowed from that botched exercise would suffice to persuade those whose understanding of the times seems at best antediluvian to have a change of heart.

    I refer of course to the latest round of opposition mounted to the planned privatisation of the refineries by the Trade Union Congress (TUC) and the newly created multi-purpose vehicle– NUPENGASSAN – an amalgam of the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers, NUPENG, and the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria PENGASSAN.

    The indications are that a titanic battle lies ahead.

    Not surprisingly, it would be another instance in which emotions rather than reasons would rule the roost; the same old stuff about a patrimony that needs to be preserved for some future generation. And so the argument goes that simply because those refineries were built with millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money, everything must be done to preserve them as public entities even when it amounts to pouring scarce funds into bottomless hole.

    Here is how the TUC chieftain put it: “Other countries are building and maintaining refineries, what are you selling them to achieve? Is it to privatise them? What becomes of the workers and the assets? What becomes of the people whose land produces the oil? Are you going to sell to them as if Nigeria is not producing oil? Which of the OPEC countries will sell their refineries now? It is a development that workers will not accept just like that”.

    NUPENGASSAN on its part could not make its point without the usual threat to shut down the economy: “This planned outright sale is uncalled for; inimical to the economy and Nigeria as a nation…If government refuses to listen to the voice of reason, we will have no option than to do the needful – shut down the sector to protect these asets for generations unborn”.

    The problem with NUPENGASSAN and their likes is that they have simply refused to change. If their penchant to revert to their traditional default setting of antagonism is partly understandable given the history of their tortuous relationship with the government, their insistence on yoking the nation to the past, far from accceptable, is certainly not tenable in 2013. The point is, if only they would just take a step out of their comfort zones, they would find that the idea of elevating proprietorial issues over and above service delivery is long dated. Imagine defending such patently obsolete paradigm which puts everything other thing over above service?

    So, what’s their understanding of privatisation– stripping those aged complexes – bolts and nuts – and transferring them from their present locations to some fantasyland? Isn’t it about transferring them to better, more capable hands to enable their deliver on their rationale? What could be wrong with that? Isn’t somebody getting things muddled up here? Again, so much for the paranoia, what makes privatisation of the power sector desirable and the refinery not? And where is the evidence that some future administration would do better with the management of the refineries even when the facts of government’s legendary incompetence sticks out? And why should the interest of the unions override the collective interest of Nigerians?

    Imagine the costs being borne by the nation since TUC and their NUPENGASSAN fellow-travellers in the oppose-the-sale-train forced the hand of the federal government to abort what was possibly the best deal in the circumstance. It started with the $700 cheque returned to the Bluestar Consortium – a decision which although was quite popular then, was probably the dumbest, stupidest thing to do by a supposedly rational administration. Since then, the opportunity costs have grown to humonguos proportions. How many millions of dollars have been poured into the endless Turn Around Maintenance ever since? I wager that it would have exceeded that $700 million paid for the two refineries.

    Six years on, can anyone guarantee that the so-called prized assets would be worth anything near that $700 million?

    And now, courtesy of the presidential audit team on the refineries, we are even now learning that their performances are “sub optimal”, fit for the auction market! Yes, we have managed to poured billions of naira into the refineries for far less value all for the love of Grandpa’s piece of Oldsmobile! How about that as a fitting wage for prodigality?

    Now, if you ask me, it would hardly matter if the refineries are off-loaded into the market today. And I wouldn’t even bat an eyelid if the refineries are sold for a nominal price of one naira! Why should it matter that one money-bag with more cash than business buys up the carcass so long as he/she able to put it work? Who cares whether the fuel dispensed at the pump comes from Wazobia refinery so long as quality is guaranteed? Or would rather TUC and company prefer that the country continue to throw money into the hopeless entities? Is that what they want?

    Don’t ask me whether anything could be wrong with government establishing new refineries. First, it is late in the day. Secondly, its no use attempting to force an unwilling horse to drink. Moreover, the prospects of another refinery owned by the government must be seen as frightening indeed at this time. Apart from the fact that value for money at any point along the procurement chain would be a distant dream, it would most certainly end up as a museum piece – like the infamous four now locked in the battle to find willing suitors.

    We can only plead that TUC and NUPENGASAN take heart. One of the great lessons of the wave of globalisation is the futility of fighting it. As the far as the issue of the refineries’ privatisation goes, it’s as good as saying that the battle is lost; time to concentrate on the minor battle of process.

  • Good luck for him, bad luck for PDP

    Good luck for him, bad luck for PDP

    Scratch Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, the embattled national chairman of the crumbling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and you probably would find, in his DNA, traces of a political undertaker.

    Back in the Second Republic, Alhaji Bamanga, fresh from a high-flying stint as top dog at Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), Nigeria’s national ruling parties’ cash cow, recorded a landslide to sweep into the Government House of the defunct Gongola State (now Adamawa and Taraba states), as National Party of Nigeria (NPN) gubernatorial candidate.

    Alhaji Bamanga’s landslide was part of the general electoral typhoon that shellacked the opposition; and which Alhaji Umaru Dikko, then President Shehu Shagari’s Transport minister and awesome man Friday, in roguish humour, christened a “moon slide”.

    That “moon slide”, by another election in 1987 the wise Dikko proclaimed, would explode into a “space slide”, by which time Dikko’s beloved NPN would have gobbled up the whole country (opposition be damned!), even if its incompetence was as clear as the moon at night.

    Compare NPN then to PDP now, and it is clear the PDP journey to perdition, under President Goodluck Jonathan, is not novel.

    Incidentally, there was no “1987”. The violently raped 1983 election rigged out the Second Republic. Three-month Governor, Tukur’s landslide mandate vanished under that republic’s rubble.

    Incidentally too, Alhaji Umaru is now chairman of PDP’s disciplinary committee, under the troubled national chairmanship of Alhaji Bamanga. Might the duo be comparing notes, with shared hindsight from the Second Republic crash, that might yet save their crumbling PDP?

    They had better! Otherwise, Alhaji Bamanga would yet earn another stripe as party undertaker – but this time, an hyperactive one. PDP’s crumbling fate is as much a result of past unconscionable impunities as it is Alhaji Bamanga’s reckless power grab, even with his suspect “election” (read presidential imposition) as PDP national chairman, after losing among delegates in his Adamawa base.

    Ironically, Chief Ebenezer Babatope, the much beloved Ebino Topsy of Awoist fame, is busy roaring like a lion in a new jungle, among PDP disciplinarians under Dikko – to underscore the neophyte progressive is in town to fix the conservative (if not reactionary) camp?

    Is he then fulfilling the post-1983 election Awo prophesy that after a political thesis and antithesis, a synthesis would align Nigeria’s political forces, such that those with Awo’s progressive inclination would ascend? Is Ebino then the Khalifa the PDP needs to set things right and yet triumph? Perhaps!

    Still, the Tukur mess is only a culmination of far too many bad calls. To start with, Tukur is only the party face of a dissembling president and a desperate Presidency, whose and which attitude to 2015, like that of former President Olusegun Obasanjo in 2007, is do-or-die.

    So, Tukur was supposed to do the dirty job and take the flak; while the real McCoy, the president breezes in, as prim and proper electoral statesman, to take the glory. It is the classical cant of Goodluck!

    Or why else would Chairman Tukur remain in charge, even if his party must become history? Unfortunately for Tukur and his principal, the “presidential chairman”, like the Achebe thief in A Man of the People, grabbed too much power for the owner not to notice – hence the PDP schism.

    Before the Jonathan-Tukur power show was the Obasanjo pious profanity of repudiating the PDP zoning arrangement – the same principle that propelled him to power – all in the bid to make Jonathan president, so he could be Baba’s poodle (Baba, that craved relevance at all cost), which Jonathan has not exactly been.

    Even before that was Obasanjo’s blatant subversion of party democratic principles, curling PDP round his fingers as first president of the Fourth Republic, ruthlessly purging those who might challenge him; and imposing on the party an unconscionable ethos of dog merrily eating dog; carefully veiled by a gruff military temper.

    And before all that was the grand subversive genesis: the Army Arrangement, (AA, apologies to Fela) that, in illicit concert with the North’s top political elite, imposed Obasanjo as Hobson’s choice, if only to impress upon starry-eyed democracy agitators the reality of Greek philosopher, Parmenides: nothing ever changes – departure from military rule must be a return to military rule, even if the starched khaki gave way to flowing agbada or babariga!

    Of course, there was Election ’99, but only to ratify Selection ’99 of AA and allied power plotters!

    Well, everything worked perfectly, except that Obasanjo proved no poodle of the North, any more than Jonathan has proved his own poodle! Indeed, things have turned full circle: the “North” finds itself at the receiving end of its own plot, and Obasanjo is threatened by the putative irrelevance he so mortally feared!

    This play of power giants has landed the country with an umpteenth mess: a clumsy Jonathan, a clumsier Jonathan Presidency and the meltdown of the federal ruling party in the clumsiest of ways!

    But having served as undertaker to his PDP, no thanks to unbridled desperation to remain president, Jonathan may yet serve as undertaker to his country. If the Anambra poll is anything to go by – and if that was aimed at securing an ally for 2015 – Jonathan may well press to that extent to make something give.

    Now, flash your mind back to 1983 and Umaru Dikko’s “moon slide”. Back then, the Shagari Presidency was the most incompetent in the country’s history. Now, the Jonathan Presidency would appear to have beaten that record. Yet, Jonathan, at all cost, wants an encore!

    So, if Umaru Dikko’s “moon slide” rigged the country out of democracy, a “space slide” by 2015 might just slide Nigeria into worse. For a country touted to kaput by 2015, these are indeed perilous times!

    The All Progressives Congress (APC) will therefore do well to learn from the PDP pitfall. PDP, ab initio, prided itself an all-comers’ affair. So, it can contemptuously thrust its jaw at any charge of harbouring strange bed fellows.

    APC has no such luxury. It has committed itself to a “progressive” ideology. Yet, not every strand in its rainbow coalition is “progressive”. But it can overcome these teething problems by federalising and being task-driven.

    It can do this by submitting itself to local tendencies, while committing to some pan-Nigeria goals. Then, it must rein in party barons, beyond offering leadership to rally members to the party’s cause, and educating fellow Nigerians on the difference the party can make.

    It should also sort out the very peculiar problem of internal democracy, the main driver of the PDP split, from which none of the APC legacy parties was immune.

    But most importantly, it must work out a restructuring agenda for the country. Without proper federalism, the collapse of Nigeria is only a matter of time.

     

  • A new paradigm for these times

    A new paradigm for these times

    You know the situation is exceedingly dire when some usually sensible people start demanding that Professor Humphrey Nwosu who conducted the 1993 presidential election and could not even hint at the official result for 15 years be brought back to run future elections, following, the Independent National Electoral Commission’s disastrous outing in the recent gubernatorial poll in Anambra.

    Journalists should contemplate that prospect with the utmost wariness.

    To be sure, Nwosu was a journalist’s delight. He was very prolific in coining not just quotable quotes, but felicitous locutions for the ages as well. Remember how he brilliantly characterised the run-up to one of the elections of the era as being steeped in wuruwuru and magomago?

    He was, withal, hugely theatrical. The trouble was that the theatricality often got in the way of more serious business and created a clear and present danger to the physical well-being of persons within a close range.

    When he really got going, he would drive home his point with his arms and sometimes with legs. He would rock and sway back and forth and to the right and left in a manner that called to mind Ray Charles at the keyboard. He would spring to his feet on the least provocation or no provocation at all to enact those gestures even more emphatically.

    Reporters covering his news conferences had to worry at least as much about the possibility of getting an inadvertent head butt or a punch to the nose or a kick to the groin as they did about delivering on the assignment at hand. And so, as a means of self-preservation, they kept a safe distance.

    But I am sure it is not on account of Nwosu’s singular ways that some people are asking him to be brought back to run future elections.

    After Maurice Iwu who made a hash of the general elections in the preceding cycle and under whom the “Independent” in Independent National Electoral commission became a standing joke, Professor Attahiru Jega came as a breath of fresh air.

    He brought to the job a reputation for integrity, and a commitment to principle and fair dealing. Previous elections had for the most part been travesties of the plebiscitary principle. Millions could not vote at all, millions voted without choosing, while a handful of officials chose without voting. What these officials chose was then presented as the outcome of the election – and anyone who didn’t like it was free to go to court.

    Jega was going to be different.

    Unlike most of those who came before him, he was self-effacing to the point of reticence. He had a name and a reputation and a pedigree to protect –his father served as private secretary to the late Northern Premier and Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, and was a pioneer permanent secretary of the old Northwestern State. And his experience as vice chancellor of Bayero Universtity, one of the most fractious campuses in Nigeria, would undoubtedly stand him in good stead.

    If anyone could pull it off, it had to be Jega. That was the national consensus.

    Despite his best effort, he has not pulled it off. Under his watch, election after election has been vitiated by poor preparation, failure of logistics, voter disenfranchisement, syndicated rigging, and false returns. Not much seems to have changed, except that, unlike his predecessors, Jega has been quick to own up at every point to the manifest inadequacies of each poll.

    That is class. But it also makes all the more puzzling his insistence that the Anambra gubernatorial poll can be salvaged by staging “supplementary elections” in those constituencies where no voting took place. There is nothing to supplement.

    Even where voting took place the exercise was gravely flawed, going by media accounts and the reports of accredited monitors. A “supplementary” election cannot undo the flaws of the previous outing and may well end up perpetuating them. There is nothing to supplement.

    Despite all that Jega has going for him, the fact remains that he has not met the high expectations that greeted his appointment. Those expectations were grounded on a misapprehension, it is now clear. He is after all only an individual. Unless he can clone himself to take charge at hundreds of critical points during an election, he cannot ensure that the outcome will be a true reflection of his own high standards, much less of the popular will.

    Most of his predecessors may not have subscribed to his high standards, but they are entitled to the same extenuation. Even if they wanted the best, they had to rely on thousands of other people over whom they had no control to make it happen. We may have judged them too harshly, given the desperation of candidates and their sponsors to win at all cost, and the willingness of election officials to cash in on that desperation.

    Is Nigeria doomed, then, to live with “elections that are no elections,” to borrow the phrasing of a leading article in the University of Ibadan-based journal, Nigerian Opinion, back in the 1970s?

    Is there a way forward?

    There is indeed, according to one influential school of thought. Without our realising it, the school maintains, the way forward has been staring us in the face since the time of military president Ibrahim Babangida. And it is summed up in one word: Privatisation.

    Since that era when it was driven home relentlessly that government was wasteful and inefficient and could not be trusted to manage any enterprise or achieve any worthwhile goal, privatisation has been the standard recourse for solving the nation’s problems.

    They privatised the national airline. They privatised the steel plant that was to serve as the fulcrum of the nation’s industrialisation. They privatised the paper mills and the aluminium plant and the fertiliser plant and other state-run enterprises. They privatised the national telephony system. They even privatised the printing of official government documents.

    More recently they have privatised electricity. They have privatised the investment of the nation’s Sovereign Wealth Fund. Plans are afoot to privatise the oil refineries. Once they finish rehabilitating the railway tracks, the system is scheduled to be handed over to the private sector, the “real sector” as some of its worshippers now call it, in contradistinction to what they consider a phantom or virtual sector.

    In every instance, the gains have been astounding.

    Take the deadening hands of bureaucracy out of the things that really matter; hand those things over to the real sector and let market forces and Adam Smith’s invisible hands work their magic. That is the gospel according to the Privateers.

    Now, if Nigerians are agreed on one thing, they are agreed that elections matter. Is it not time, then, to take the deadening hands of bureaucracy out of elections and hand over the entire process to the private sector?

    It will be managed more efficiently and transparently, costs will be reduced drastically, huge savings will be made, and the nation will be spared the upheavals that usually trail each election.

    Thereafter, only one more step will be required to harness Nigeria’s vast potential and propel it finally and irreversibly toward its historic destiny: Privatisation of the entire machinery of government.

  • Osun: three years after

    The November 16 Anambra election echoes the Uba brothers’ Anambra selection of 2003.

    That itself echoes the Ekiti Ido-Osi electoral rerun travesty of 2010, which ties back to the “original sin” of 2007: the most audacious electoral heist in Nigerian history, in which Osun, with other states, fell to brazen electoral robbers.

    On Anambra, a later revisit; since the children of electoral perdition are still at their game. Emotions run sky high; and the jury is still out on how the self-destruct game would end.

    But a grand irony seems to have escaped the dramatis personae: the champions of impunity in 2007, now scamper to the courts as victims of impunity in 2013!

    But thanks to the Court of Appeal, under Justice Isa Ayo Salami. From the ashes of that electoral nadir of Osun 2007, with all its self-assured paralysis, sprung new hope three years later in 2010, boasting legitimacy-fired vitality.

    Another grim irony: Justice Salami, for the temerity to save, from themselves, non-democrats in Nigeria’s troubled democracy, was conked with heinous conspiracy that challenged his honour and integrity. But he triumphs today by the notorious fact that yesteryear emperors of impunity now cower before the courts – Justice Salami’s sacrosanct instrumentality to bring felons of all hues to book – for protection!

    The Rauf Aregbesola government in Osun, child of judicial integrity, birthed on 27 November 2010. That government would be three years tomorrow.

    Like the famous 7up radio commercial, the difference would appear clear: paralysis from electoral robbery versus release from sound electoral mandate. Again, that difference appears lost in the present Anambra imbroglio!

    On the Osun story, two personal reminiscences. In 2008, Sola Fasure, then The Nation Editorial Page editor, lost his dad. At the funeral reception at Ilesa, it was a tug of war between beggars, hungry, aggressive and cheeky, and guests; with the beggars at the ready to sweep the remnants off the guests’ table! That was paralysis ala the ancien regime!

    This year, 2013, Bolade Omonijo, a member of The Nation Editorial Board, also lost his mum. Destination: the same Ilesa. Sure, there were still beggars. But that desperation to snatch the guest’s plate at the burial reception was gone. Between the ancien regime and the present order, the difference is clear!

    That, of course, should be the trite: a government with legitimate mandate, after a free and fair poll, knows it floats or sinks on the strength of its service to the people. That would appear the hallmark of the Aregbesola government, as it goes on an overdrive to make up for the paralysis of the Olagunsoye Oyinlola era.

    Yet, the governor has not been without controversy, most of it tantamount to what is called “unforced error” in tennis; or “own goal” in football, despite his wide canvass of near-excellent service delivery.

    The governor’s “principal sin” is zest for his Islamic faith, hardly a crime! Many growl his beard is shaggy and rather un-gubernatorial. Others in pious rage point at his going for sukuk, the Islamic loan, as evidence that Mullah Rauf wouldn’t rest until he had Islamised Osun. Others foam in the mouth at his penchant for donning the Islamic skull cap, even at official functions.

    Indeed, a particular commentator, playing the prescriptive emperor, virtually ordered the Ogbeni (a moniker which, by the way, many deem too plebeian for high gubernatorial office!) to go shave his beard since, according to him, it robs negatively on people; and also told him to junk his school reclassification policy and go hand over schools back to their missionary “owners”, in proud and combative ignorance of extant situation in Osun.

    Another bellyached over the metaphysics and alchemy of governance and concluded, rather sadly and gravely, that though no Islamisation “smoking gun” existed, the governor remained legitimately charged, by his body language!

    Of course, all these are happy ammo for the governor’s opponents who, mercilessly routed at the realm of ideas, have happily embraced the high passion of lies and blackmail as their last stand.

    But the governor need not bother about columnists as Rip Van Winkles. The original Rip snored for 20 twenty years only to jerk awake, and find things irreversibly changed! Merchants of lies and blackmail too are fated to irrelevance.

    The inevitable is that many years hence the Aregbesola government would be remembered by generations, many of them not even born now, for its ambitious infrastructure programmes and projects, aimed at vaulting Osun from the socio-economic backwaters it had sunk into, after years of neglect, from the pristine hub of commerce in the Yoruba heartland.

    The tell tale of such stunning modernisation is already on and will, as day follows night, signal the political death and un-rued burial of many.

    But what would really stand Aregbesola out in Osun, as did the legendary Chief Obafemi Awolowo in the old Western Region, is his audacious bid to fix the Osun infrastructure of the mind.

    In a state hitherto regarded, by many, as the rumour capital of the globe (a euphemism for mass ignorance and susceptibility to mindless elite manipulation), an “Islamist-governor” has given everyone, Christian, Muslim and African traditional adherent, a sense of religious projection, in the best tradition of religious equity.

    Not only that: he has attacked educational reforms in Osun with a revolutionary zeal, second only to Awo’s much-abused free primary education policy turned much-revered development elixir, that earned the modern Yoruba paterfamilias the moniker of Ebudola (Yoruba, for scorn-turned-praise).

    Now, if Mullah Rauf wanted to Islamise his state, why would he give Osun children and youth the key to unlocking their minds with sound education, and making their own informed choices, like the odyssey of the cave man in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave? A mind hitherto chained to darkness in a cave, got exposed to lamp light, then to electricity and finally to the full grandeur of the sun! What release!

    So long for the manifest idiocy of emotional Islamisation!

    The glaring fact: Aregbesola has the courage to take risks on the strength of his conviction. The sukuk as developmental loan is a good case. The emotional army was priming their big guns until Westminster that brought Christianity to Nigeria, as part of its own cultural imperialism en route to colonisation, announced with glee that London was ready to be sukuk’s global leading mart!

    Sukuk would not turn Canterbury into Mecca any more than it would Islamise Osun roads, bridges, power plants, hospitals and other developmental projects it is put to. It is only an investment window!

    So far, so good – and the Osun renaissance could not have come at a better time, after nearly eight years of paralysis. But it is time the governor also tampered risk-taking with tact, by shunning needless controversies.

    The last three years have been nothing short of phenomenal. But Osun needs no less than eight years – and more of progressive tinkering – in its developmental race against time

    Ogbeni Aregbesola can achieve this by staying focused and shunning needless controversies.

  • The road to a police state

    The road to a police state

    Just to be absolutely certain that I wasn’t missing something, I inspected President Goodluck Jonathan’s Transformation – or is it Transformative?—Agenda before writing this piece.

    The Agenda, I can report with the highest confidence, does not include turning Nigeria into a police state.

    Yet, that is what has been happening lately, sometimes brazenly and sometimes insidiously.

    With each passing day, Nigeria bears a closer resemblance to a state in which the activities of the people are strictly controlled with the help of a police force, in place of regular operation of administrative and judicial organs of government based on publicly known legal procedure.

    That is the definition of a police state.

    This ominous process probably has an earlier origin, but I would date it from the time relations between Dr Jonathan and Rivers State Governor Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi turned sour and Dr Jonathan sought to bring Amaechi to heel and to impose on the Nigeria Governors’ Forum a chairman who would be more complaisant than Amaechi and help clear the path to a second presidential term.

    To attain the first objective, he could not have found a better instrument than the Rivers State Commissioner of Police, Mbu Joseph Mbu, who owes his appointment to and takes his orders from Abuja. At every opportunity, Mbu countermanded the elected governor of the state, enforced Abuja’s will, and carried on as he was for all practical purposes the leader of the opposition.

    For the second objective, Dr Jonathan found a willing tool Akwa Ibom Governor Godswill Akpabio to engineer a split in the Governors’ Forum, in the hope that a majority fraction beholden to him would emerge. In the showdown election, Akpabio failed to deliver the majority he had promised. Undaunted, the minority crowned itself the new National Governors Forum, with the pathetic and utterly deluded Plateau State Governor Jonah Jang as chairman.

    Then came the rupture at the PDP mini convention. Seven governors elected on the party’s platform , as well as some senior party officials, broke ranks. A faction calling itself the New PDP, having no illusions about the petulance of its parent, had to confect a lie to secure a place to hold a meeting. It declared that the hall was to be used for a wedding reception. If the police had so much as suspected that the meeting was being held to elect officials of the breakaway faction of the PDP, the police would have moved swiftly to block it.

    That much was clear from the swiftness with which the police blockaded the headquarters building the new PDP rigged up. For good measure, the authorities of the Abuja Federal Capital Territory suddenly discovered that the house had been constructed in violation of the building code and would have to be pulled down. If and when the FCT gives the order, the police will be on hand to supervise the demolition.

    As for the seven dissident PDP governors – the so-called G7 — rarely have they been able to hold a meeting even in private premises without the rude intrusion of the police. The most recent of such intrusions, in Abuja, drew nation-wide condemnation. The Inspector-General of the Police, Mohammed Abubakar, told a committee of the House of Representatives that it had been carried out without his instructions.

    If this is true – and there is no reason to believe that he had perjured himself –it raises the alarming prospect that the Nigeria Police has indeed become the armed wing of the PDP, as the opposition APC has charged.

    Last Tuesday the police, kitted as for battle, sealed off the conference room of the Nicon Luxury Hotel in Abuja where the Socio-Economic Rights Accountability Project had planned to discuss Nigeria’s freedom of information law, with scheduled speakers from Europe, the United States and Nigeria.

    With Dino Melaye, a former federal legislator turned anti-corruption crusader among the organisers, there was no doubt that the participants would discuss the scandal that the Federal Government desperately wants suppressed: the illegal purchase of two armoured limousines worth $1.4 million by the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria for the use, and most likely at the behest of, Princess Oduah.

    As was the case with the intrusion on the G7 meeting, also in Abuja, senior spokespersons for the police have been quoted as saying that the authorities had “no knowledge” of the operation. This only goes to support the thesis that Nigeria is being transformed into a police state. In whatever case, the political calculations behind the intrusion point unmistakably to the self-styled “biggest party” in Africa.

    The PDP is even more deeply implicated in turning Nigeria into a police state than the foregoing suggests. Last week, the courts ordered the re-instatement of former Osun State Governor Olagunsoye Oyinlola as PDP national secretary, finding that his purported removal from that office was ultra vires.

    No sooner had Oyinlola served notice that he was set to resume work at the PDP’s Wadata Plaza national headquarters in Abuja than he was suspended afresh and the place was surrounded by battle tanks and police armed for combat. It was almost as if Boko Haram’s elusive high command had served notice that its forces had landed in the neightbourhood.

    There, you have fresh intimations of the making of a police state. I will not be surprised if the police authorities were to declare again that they had played no part in sealing off the PDP’s headquarters.

    To be sure, the court order was going to create all kinds of problems. Oyinlola was not merely one of the founders of the New PDP; he is its national secretary. To which faction would he answer if he resumed work at Wadata Plaza, which had vowed to treat him and other deserters as “criminals?”

    The brusqueness with which the PDP brushed aside the court order reinstating Oyinlola is of a piece with the impunity with which it suborns the police to do its dirty work. It is all the more disquieting that the PDP is the ruling party and its national leader is President Jonathan, who took an oath to uphold and defend the law and the Constitution.

    Only a few days ago, in the run-up to the incurably flawed gubernatorial election in Anambra, the police command in Imo State announced with breathless excitement the arrest of 180 “thugs” and “hoodlums” and “bandits” from Osun on their way to Anambra for the purpose — what else – of rigging the election.

    It claimed to have recovered from them voter ID cards and other election documents, not forgetting “other dangerous weapons”. A far more credible source insists that the 180 were accredited election monitors belonging to the Justice and Equity Organisation.

    If there was any merit at all to the arrest of the group from Osun, there was none whatsoever to the confinement of Nasir El-Rufai, to his hotel room in the Anambra State capital, Awka, by agents of the secret police. The APC chieftain was in town to monitor the poll. This shabby recourse to false imprisonment is yet another manifestation of the drift toward a police state.

    We can now understand why, against the express provisions of the Constitution, retired Inspector-General of Police and a failed senatorial candidate in the person of Mike Okiro was appointed chairman of the Police Service Commission. It was certainly not on account of his stellar performance. For, as IGP, he showed a brazen disregard for conflict of interest and, as we now know, connived in hounding Nuhu Ribadu out of the EFCC and the Police Force.

    By act or omission, Okiro contributed to the dysfunction in which the police force is mired today. They did not appoint him Police Service Commission chairman to lead a determined effort to chart a path out of that dysfunction. And he knows it.

  • This way to Nigeria’s rebirth

    It is the season of football glory, with the November 8 Golden Eaglets’ fourth triumph at the FIFA U-17 World Cup at UAE 2013; and Super Eagles’ fifth qualification, beating Ethiopia, to the FIFA World Cup in Brazil 2014.

    So, a bit of football imagery is apposite.

    Right now, there is a hat trick of coincidences: a weakened presidency, a ruling party in disarray and a “North” in political retreat, despite all grandstanding to the contrary.

    These coincidences look like setbacks – great setbacks, almost tragedies – for critical segments of the Nigerian state. Yet these setbacks, if well handled, could well earn Nigeria a rebirth from its unending season of anomie; and halt its perennial crisis of nationhood.

    Never in history, perhaps, has the Nigerian Presidency been so weakened; and the Nigerian president so vulnerable to political pressure.

    In 2011, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, Nigeria’s first president from a minority bloc, rode to stunning pan-Nigeria presidency. But two years down the line, due to presidential commission or omission, grafted with stark contradictions in the polity, the presidency is looking increasingly frail.

    Presidential royalists continue to kid themselves the president is all-powerful. But it is clear that office is, right now, far from the constitutional Leviathan power romantics claim it is.

    Linked to that presidential meltdown is the meltdown of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the federal ruling party.

    In Jonathan’s emergence, and by violently abrogating its own zoning principle, PDP overreached itself, even by its own accustomed impunity. The ensuing bitterness, from a “North” that felt cheated, is the basis of cascading bricks in the PDP house.

    Of course, the “North”! It is central to the present distemper. As that Yoruba saying goes, the consummate executioner finds no mirth in someone fumbling with a sword near his neck!

    A region versed in power dominance, if not outright domination, certainly finds it extremely reprehensible to feel dominated! So, it screams, it yells, it bawls; warning at the apocalypse to come, should such a situation continue.

    That would appear the chief driver of the North’s bid for power in 2015, aside from its not illegitimate growl of being cheated of its due in 2011, with the abandonment of PDP’s zoning formula, simply because President Umaru Yar’ Adua died in office.

    As it happens, therefore, there is a hat trick of angst, sweeping through the ruling office, the ruling party and, if not chastened by current developments, a region by its power log in Nigeria, that could easily have regarded itself as the ruling region!

    That is just as well!

    A hitherto Leviathan presidency is feeling the blues of impotence, particularly when the subject is influence (aka ‘soft power’), to change things; and not the near-brutal presidency that Olusegun Obasanjo bequeathed. Those who misinterpret Jonathan’s fascist bent for power are grandly mistaken: a dog barks out of fright, not out of power.

    A hitherto impregnable PDP is feeling real threats of collapse, simply because having rigged things against others for too long, it is now rigging things against itself and, by so doing, rigging itself out of cohesion. The ensuing schism is well and truly earned!

    And a hitherto all-conquering “North” – in any case, the tiny cabal that commits political murder in its name now endures the bitterness of feeling dominated!

    Not unlike the Achebe tortoise in Things Fall Apart, that renamed itself “All of you” to corner everything, leaving its shocked benefactors in the lurch, this power cabal raised political domination to a sickly art, while leaving their impoverished people with an empty illusion of might. Now that the chips are down, this same cabal is screaming “northern domination”!

    So now, what? A bitter fight to the end, even if Nigeria goes kaput? Or a reasonable retreat to reason, to rework Frederick Lugard’s unworkable contraption, even in the run-up to the final month of its centenary?

    There lies the way from the hat trick of present chaos to the hat trick of future opportunities.

    Indeed, in a troubled federation battered by decades of military rule, and labouring under an emerging democracy, the presidency as unquestioned and unquestionable Leviathan is as much a danger to itself as it is to the democratic republic.

    The highest office in the land, therefore, needs a tactical pare-down to ensure its strategic relevance. For Nigeria to survive despite its present challenges, a key demand is a federalism-compliant presidency. A polity reconfigured on strict federal principles holds the ace to future development and prosperity from the present retardation and chaos. A sovereign national conference could fix this nicely, if only Nigeria’s power blocs would stop playing games!

    The PDP meltdown is a metaphor for the rotten party system. That is a clear and present danger to Nigerian democracy. Parties are key drivers of democracy. So, a democracy with sick parties is itself sick, by simple logical extension.

    The hubris now consuming PDP must impress it on its members the limits of a ruling party, no matter how powerful or invincible it once felt it was. But that message is as valid for the PDP as it is for new parties hoping to kick it out of power. It would be a tragedy, indeed, to kick out the PDP and replace it with PDP with another name.

    The message for the North’s political elite, so gung-ho about 2015, is clear. The North once dominated. Now, it is being dominated, at least going by its shrill complaints. So, domination is bad for everyone. Every country should be erected on an equal-opportunity ethos, fired by equity, fair play and justice.

    So, while it is legitimate for northern lobbies to fancy their chances by 2015, it is imperative to drum it loud that the pre-12 June 1993 Nigeria, in which some miscreants, acting in the name of the “North” to cancel a valid presidential election, and sustain that high treason, is gone and gone forever. Any attempt to dream such subversive encore could well sound the death knell for the country.

    So, as political alignments are afoot, two crucial messages must be clear. One, the North, if it is really interested in Nigeria’s survival, must shun any penchant to dominate. It has enjoyed and endured domination; and can tell the honey and gall of both!

    And two, whoever are negotiating with the northern lobby must never surrender the long-term chore of building a just, fair and equitable Nigeria to the immediate gravy of winning federal power. The North must not dominate. But it must not be dominated either.

    That template should apply to every part of the country. Indeed, after walking in the wilderness for nearly 100 years (53 years of this under flag independence), with the Lugard contraption always threatening to abort, that should be the template on which sustainable Nigeria must be erected.

    Any other way would be tempting fate. If the regnant power folly continues, the tip-over point cannot be far away!

  • Reality or perception?

    That was our President Goodluck Jonathan speaking at the fifth edition of the Presidential media chat late September. As if you didn’t know already, the kernel of his submission was that corruption, among the many ills afflicting the Nigerian polity, is simply exaggerated. For proof, he referred Nigerians to the operative word “perception” in the annual rating exercise by Transparency International of which Nigeria ranks pretty among the top rung of the most corrupt nations on earth.

    Far from accepting that the unrestrained self-help that goes on in Abuja and the 36 state capitals in the name of governance is a major problem, the President chose to locate our problems in the hype that normally attends every reported incident of heist by highly placed officials!

    Just when the deliberate misdiagnosis of the problem expectedly rankled to no end, the President would, days later, further expound his treatise by insisting that Nigerians – not his administration that has made an open show of harbouring tainted officials in its ranks – were the main culprits in fostering the environment of corruption.

    I don’t think anyone should lose sleep over the specious dissection of the national pathology by a leader under whose watch the industry of graft has grown to monstrous proportions. Situated in the context of its appalling helplessness in combating the monster, the statement provides a window into why the fight against graft under the Jonathan presidency not only went tepid but ineffectual.

    Of course, a lot has happened since those statements were uttered. We have had Stellagate – a scam which not only threatened to rip the innards of the Jonathan presidency open, but has since unleashed a burst of adrenalin across the land the result of which the administration is presently utterly breathless. And now, with a related event in Ghana in which a cabinet minister got the boot from her plum cabinet position merely for dreaming about cornering some future gravy, the welter of media commentaries and the not-so-subtle prodding that the President off-load his own “damaged good” has simply reached the heavens.

    As it is, the surest evidence of how far apart the President and Nigerians are on the subject would be the deliberate stone-walling over the Stellagate affair. This is even when the evidence in the public domain has exposed several layers of graft for serious administration to act upon. Is it a case of someone being convinced that the dust would blow away sooner than later? For this, we must grant that this President should know a thing or two things about perception as a subject and its links with the messy business of corruption that the whole world is yet to know.

    To be sure, we must be clear about the President’s diagnosis of the problem particularly his rather effusive distinction between the popular perception about the cancer and the reality he sought to paint, I guess, almost entirely in his own colours. Just as the president believes that the two are miles apart, the question must arise as to whether those accusing his administration of either fuelling the cancer or is at least indifferent to it are not entirely uncharitable. Conversely too, for a menace that has not only persisted, but has earned the nation notoriety as the global capital of graft, Nigerians would also be right to wonder about the President’s line of thought which appears to suggest that negative perceptions are at least tolerable in so far as the facts are beyond establishing! The truth of course is that perceptions, no matter how exaggerated or distorted they may seem, oftentimes have more than a whiff of reality. We must also acknowledge that the business of separating facts from fantasies in a clime riddled with corrupt practices is certainly not helped by the sheer scale of impunity that borders on schizophrenia. Whether it is the latest issue infamously described as Stellagate, in which a serving minister reportedly directed a parastatal head “to do the needful” as in the purchase of two fancy cars for a whopping N255 million; or the well-reported extravaganza of another cabinet member said to have ratcheted a bill of nearly N2billion to hire private jets, the point is that the scale of impunity in these parts simply beggars belief! And the President, as the leader of the team has done pretty little to dispel the image of his administration as one that condones impunity.

    Again, it goes to the fundamental point about what facts say. Beyond deniability, I think the issue is well established that corruption is not just real but has under this presidency become the driver of governance processes. Didn’t subsidy payments balloon from N300 billion under the Umaru Yar’Adua presidency to an unprecedented N2.5 trillion under this presidency? Yes, we are talking of one product line, petrol – jumping in multiples of eight under 18 months – the sheer stuff of fairy tales happening right under our very eyes!

    How about that for perception? Today, the subsidy figure is in the neighbourhood of N1.2 trillion. Has anyone been called to account for the deviation? Now, thanks to the Swiss non-governmental advocacy group, the Berne Declaration, the nation has just begun to find confirmation of how the triumvirate of NNPC, Vitol and Trafigura –two Switzerland-based oil traders, and their local minions numbering seven, used their offshore ‘letterbox companies’ to defraud the country of over $6.8bn in subsidy payments between 2009 and 2011.

    Are the documented findings of the Swiss body also in the realm of perception? What about the jumbo loans at a time of record oil earnings? At least, to its credit, the administration of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, converted the benefits of the bumper oil earning to exit from the creditor-cartels of London and Paris Clubs. Today, not only is the nation back on the ruinous path of debt peonage even when the promise of infrastructural renewal remains undelivered.

    Former United States Ambassador Walter Carrington recently framed the issue rather succinctly when he quipped: “The question must now be asked, why is Africa’s most endowed country which earn $57billion a year in oil revenue not yet able to solve its persistent problems of electric power and infrastructure?”

    Well, the President has supplied the 10-letter answer: Perception.

    Surely, there must be something in the Villa that inures its occupants to the putrefaction.

     

  • Near-encounters with Mike Akhigbe

    Near-encounters with Mike Akhigbe

    Vice Admiral Okhai Mike Akhigbe, at various times military governor of the old Ondo State and of Lagos State, flag officer of the Eastern Naval Command, Chief of Naval Staff, Chief of General Staff in the military regime that handed back power to an elected government in 1999, and at his death last week in New York, a property mogul in Lagos and a significant player in the nation’s oil and gas industry.

    He was also a qualified lawyer, having obtained a law degree from the University of Lagos and completed the obligatory post-graduate diploma in the course of his multifaceted public career.

    I never met him. Yet, he occupies a unique place in my recollections of my years in Rutam House as an editorial writer and columnist for Guardian Newspapers.

    For it was on account of him that one of my columns was pulled from the final edition that served Lagos and the Southwest, which then accounted for some 60 percent of the circulation, after it had been published in the first edition that served the North and the East.

    An earlier column had rattled Akhigbe somewhat, according to some inside administration sources in Alausa. He had publicly questioned General Olusegun Obasanjo’s patriotism because of Obasanjo’s outspoken criticism of the Babangida regime’s benighted Structural Adjustment Programme.

    Now, Obasanjo was once Akhigbe’s commander-in-chief. He had seen battle long before Akhigbe took his first lessons in the art of war at the Defence Academy, Kaduna. Akhigbe’s conduct, I wrote in my column, was a breach of military etiquette with few parallels.

    He did not like it. To his credit, he had tried to explain away his outburst, only to repeat the offence more or less. I was of course not the only commentator who had rounded on him. Subsequent criticism by The Guardian of some projects he was planning to embark upon in Lagos seemed to have led him to develop a sense of siege, and to believe that the paper was out to get him.

    One of them was the establishment of a newspaper, Lagos Horizon, to serve as the state’s publicity organ. Lagos State, The Guardian argued, needed no such organ; it was home to the nation’s most vibrant newspapers, all of them giving it the comprehensive and sustained coverage that a state-owned newspaper could not.

    Akhigbe was also planning to build an ultra-modern official residence house in Ikeja, where visiting dignitaries would be lodged. Akhigbe had just returned from a visit to the United States, where he had been hosted by a governor of one of the states.

    His goal, he said, was to make sure that whenever the governor from America came calling on a return visit, he would be lodged in a befitting residence.

    A third project called for upgrading the old UAC Stadium across from the National Stadium in Surulere into a world-class facility. At that time, the National Stadium was a thriving concern. It made no sense, The Guardian said, to construct another stadium opposite it, in a residential area already groaning under the weight of vehicular traffic.

    The fourth project in the package was yet another stadium, to be built in Ikeja.

    Akhigbe had outlined the projects in a major policy statement, and The Guardian’s editorial, it is necessary to state, was a response to that statement, not a running critique of his administration.

    But it was too much for Akhigbe.

    So, off he went to Vice Admiral Augustus Aikhomu, Chief of General Staff who formally ranked second to the military president in political hierarchy, and to whom the military governors reported in the first instance, brandishing the ethnic card, in Nigerian politics the ultimate weapon of blackmail.

    Alex Ibru, an indigene of Bendel State as it then was, Akhigbe charged, had offered the Yoruba on his payroll a platform to run down the person and administration of a fellow Bendelite, his good self Mike Akhigbe, for no reason other than that Akhigbe was not Yoruba, unlike his predecessor, Air Commodore Gbolahan Mudashiru.

    Aikhomu, also a Bendelite, had summoned Chief Michael Ibru, the head of the Ibru dynasty, to demand an explanation. The senior Ibru had in turn passed on the message to his younger brother, the Guardian publisher, and negotiations aimed at reaching some understanding were underway.

    I would learn of these developments only much later when I wrote about a firefight that had almost broken out between Customs officials at Murtala Muhammed Airport and Akhigbe’s security aides, on hand to expedite clearance for his wife Josephine returning from an overseas trip

    At issue was a consignment of typewriters Mrs Akhigbe had brought with her. Customs officials had demanded payment of duty on the freight, but Mrs Akhigbe was apparently unwilling to pay, and had abused one of the officials. Her husband’s aides had weighed in, a noisy argument had followed, and guns had been drawn. Mercifully, a shoot-out was averted.

    The Guardian had reported the incident with the sobriety and the scrupulous attention to detail for which it was revered.

    Mrs Akhigbe would later explain that the shipment was not for the secretarial institute of which she was reportedly the proprietor, but a donation to some institution catering to the handicapped. In whatever case, I wrote in my column, her conduct was of a piece with the husband’s reputation for high-handedness.

    The column had appeared in the first edition which circulated in the North and in the East. Before the second – and final – edition was printed, a call came from Managing Director Stanley Macebuh asking me to see him.

    Dispensing with the usual preliminaries, he went straight to the point.

    “I would like to have your permission to clear your column from the second edition,” he said, just like that.

    “May I know why? I asked.

    “Akhigbe,” he said.

    He went on to explain how Akhigbe had complained to Aikhomu that Guardian publisher Alex Ibru, unmindful of the common heritage (Up Bedel!) all three of them share, had given free rein to Yoruba elements at the Guardian to run down the person and office of the military governor of Lagos State.

    The Guardian’s criticism of his plan to set up a newspaper was self-serving, Akhigbe had been saying. It was grounded on the fear that the paper would put the Guardian out of business. However, until that time came, he had instructed Lagos ministries, parastatals and agencies to cut their subscriptions to The Guardian and stop doing business with it altogether.

    Criticism of his plan to build a befitting lodge in Ikeja for official visitors was just as self serving, Akhigbe had also been saying; it stemmed from fear that the edifice might put Sheraton Hotel in which the Ibrus had a major interest out of business.

    If my column on the airport incident should appear at that time, Macebuh said, Akhigbe would regard it as a fresh provocation and as an act of bad faith to boot, given Chief Michael Ibru’s on-going mediation, at Aikhomu’s instance, between Rutam House and Akhigbe.

    My judgment and good faith were not in question, then?”

    “Not in the least,” Macebuh said.

    It remains to add that the stadium Akhigbe said he was going to build in Ikeja never got off the ground. The “befitting” lodge for special guests was never built. But construction started on the stadium in Surulere.

    Lagos Horizon hit the newsstands, but was received more as a curiosity than a serious journalistic proposition. It helped neither itself nor its proprietor when it declared in its debut edition that it had come to serve as “a melting pot of ideas.” It certainly never lived up to Akhigbe’s exorbitant billing.

    The foregoing, I should make clear, is only a slice of my reminiscences on my Rutam House years. I had set out with no larger purpose.

    As for Mike Akhigbe’s times and legacy, my Rutam House contemporary Sonala Olumhense has entered on several platforms, The Guardian and SaharaReporters among them, a summative piece stamped with his accustomed rigour and forthrightness.

    Titled “I knew NNS Fearless, Mike Akhigbe”, the piece instantly went viral.

  • Fascism ala Jonathan?

    There is a myth that the Nigerian president is the most powerful of his kind in the world. That could be true. But only if the president wilfully breaks the law, and hopes he can get away with it.

    That is because for every power the president has, there is a check: in the best tradition of the doctrine of separation of power, on which the presidential system of government is built.

    What has been happening, since the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency (1999-2007), is that the president would essay a constitutional infraction, but flex his presidential muscles to dare anyone to challenge him, since democratic institutions are still rather weak.

    That worked ruinously during Obasanjo’s presidential monarchy, so much so that it gave birth to that myth: the Nigerian president is all-conquering and all-powerful; that it could even challenge the law that gave it life to a wrestling bout – and prevail!

    But isn’t that constitutional harakiri tantamount to the folly of the Achebe wrestler, quoting Igbo folklore, who figured he was so powerful he could challenge his chi (personal god)?

    Indeed, presidential conceit Nigerian style, and its concomitant reckless power play, contrasts the poetic conceit of John Donne (1572-1631), the English metaphysical poet in “The Sun Rising”, one of his famous sonnets, a fragment of which is quoted, prelude to this piece.

    In “The Sun Rising”, the protagonist, one of two lovers, lampooned the early morning sun for its intrusiveness, on the lovers’ nest. The “Busy old fool, unruly sun,” the angry lover fumed, could well make the difference between night and day; between sleeping and waking hours.

    But with a mere wink, he insisted, a man could shut it and its all-mighty rays from sight!

    From the rarefied world of poetry to the brick-and-mortar plain of politics, this translates to the fact that a citizen, relying on the law, could easily damn the most menacing of governments. So long for the myth of the all-mighty powers of the Nigerian Presidency!

    That leads to the delicate mix of power, authority, legitimacy and influence. Power is the most visible but the least potent. Influence is the least visible but the most potent. Authority, in a democracy, is delegated electors’ power to the elected. Legitimacy is the electors’ retentive power to periodically choose, thus guaranteeing regular elections.

    Trouble starts in a democracy when the elected project power as if it were absolute. But every student of Politics 101 knows that once power is challenged, even by the weakest and most abject in the polity, it is defeated. That is why smart governments never rely on brute force, but on legitimacy and influence.

    That is the tragic undoing of the Goodluck Jonathan Presidency and its creeping fascism. It must be checked right now; or the democratic republic will live to rue such tardiness.

    President Jonathan put the wrong foot forward when he assumed the conceit that he, because he was president, could dictate who would or who would not become the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) chair.

    Rivers Governor, Chibuike Amaechi, defied the president as meddlesome interloper in NGF matters. He needed no especial courage to do so. All he needed was to insist on his right under the law, like the lover in Donne’s poem, winking to shut out the sun.

    A similar piece of power illogic caused the split in the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Instead of sensitivity to democratic dissent in the federal ruling party, the president and his advisers reached for a fist of mail.

    Again, all the dissenting lobby, led by the G-7 Governors, needed was to stand their grounds, and take their chances against the all-mighty presidential machine. Again, that machine unravelled. But even if it had crushed the “rebels”, that they had defied the president and his awesome powers would have been enough victory – for the myth would have vanished.

    Still, instead of the Jonathan presidency taking the cue and beating a tactical retreat, it has embarked on an ill-advised, if not outright unthinking attack, which has further compromised the authority of the president and the dignity of the presidency.

    Indeed, it is from this attack that putative fascism would appear to be creeping in. An irate president appears on the offensive to politicise, if not personalise, crucial state agencies and apparatuses.

    The sheer misuse of the Police in Rivers, under the command of CP Mbu Joseph Mbu, is well and truly reprehensible. It is the unflattering paradox of an outlaw police! First, Mr. Mbu fancies himself some Abuja-anointed viceroy, contending every inch of space with Governor Amaechi. This is a constitutional infraction deserving of the harshest censure.

    Then, the police under Mbu’s command are so partisan, a bloc of governors has dubbed them the PDP armed wing – and they sound very credible! Indeed, the police ought to be so embarrassed at their own gross misconduct. They would manufacture the most absurd of reasons to push back the governor’s supporters. They would manufacture even more absurd reasons to aid presidential sympathisers, in their war against political enemies.

    Do these corps of misguided officers realise their sympathy is to the Constitution and not to any individual no matter how powerful they feel he is? But the futility of such impunity was borne out of the Amaechi march with his supporters to welcome his All Progressives Congress (APC) guests.

    The sheer dignity of the gubernatorial office reduced Mbu’s men to a contemptible rabble, lobbing tear gas canisters at a trek they could not abort! So, so disgraceful!

    But the most alarming sign of putative fascism is the crude attempt to stop the G-7 governors at all costs: now threatening to demolish buildings associated with them, then violently abridging their constitutional rights as citizens and as governors. Imagine a lowly divisional police officer (DPO) arresting governors, constitutionally immune from arrests!

    Obasanjo, during his imperial presidency, viciously manipulated state legislatures to criminalise their governors, on the suspect motive of fighting corruption, and sending the EFCC after them.

    But never in his imperial conceit did he dare to threaten governors with summary arrest – no matter how rabidly convicted they were in the media!

    But the Jonathan Presidency – or whatever “powers from above” gave that DPO of Asokoro the instruction to bound into the meeting of governors in the Kano State Governor’s Lodge and threaten them with arrest – is already crossing that Rubicon.

    All that remains, it appears, is for the threatened arrest to be effected. Fancy an almighty DPO, lobbing tear gas canisters, and sitting governors running helter-skelter to avoid arrest? It just might not be too far off!

    But then, it would be welcome, fascism!

    This polity would not triumph over vicious military rule, only to succumb to civilian fascism. But what audacity, for a common columnist to warn the almighty powers-that-be!

    Again, like Donne and his intrusive sun: it does not take any especial courage – just an insistence on the law. The rule of law is the straight and narrow path to nurture our democracy.

  • Confab excitements

    No doubt about it: Col. Tony Nyiam (rtd), member of the Presidential Advisory Committee on National Dialogue/Conference, which former senator, Dr. Femi Okurounmu chairs, ought to fall on his sword, for his October 29 spat with Edo Governor, Adams Oshiomhole.

    This is, of course, without prejudice to the rightness or wrongness of his motive; or the nobility or otherwise of his action.

    By that public spat, Col. Nyiam badly compromised the position of his committee. His passion – unfortunately – got the better of him, thereby reinforcing cynicism in some quarters (not by any means received wisdom, but widespread enough) that the Okurounmu committee could be a Jonathan presidential dummy, working towards a preconceived answer. This is despite its official mandate of no “no go” area.

    The colonel’s outburst gifted the committee the intolerant toga – intolerant to any view outside the approved official lines. The potent blackmail that Nyiam tried to shut up a sitting governor in public, aside from the legalistic fuel that he tried to abrogate an elected governor’s democratic right to contribute to national discourse, paints him as an anti-democracy demon of sorts, to be shunned, lampooned and excoriated by all!

    Nothing he will say, it appears, would ever mitigate that dire sentence.

    That is why the colonel should step down: to save the honour of the committee, recharge its credibility that it is no Jonathan’s poodle and perhaps take the wind off the sail of the confab’s opponents.

    Still, the colonel’s sacrifice, because of the political incorrectness of his action, does not necessarily equate public good, in the all-important issue of a national conference.

    Sovereign or no, the conference is to restructure Nigeria, from its present destination of self-destruction, to a country that gives its longsuffering citizens development and prosperity, en route to morphing into a nation, from a mere geographical expression of mutually antagonistic nationalities.

    On the Nigerian crisis, Col. Nyiam is no neophyte. In the grand anarchy of the military era when the most audacious brute was king, he was linked to the Gideon Orkar coup. The putschists not only claimed they had overthrown the extant power bully, they also claimed to have excised some northern parts of the country from the Federal Republic!

    What provocation could have driven that lunatic attempt? Those caught paid with their lives. But the survivors would appear to have continued living with the bile of the dead.

    Besides, the tragic annulment of the 12 June 1993 presidential election and the even more tragic death, in detention, of MKO Abiola, winner of that election, further fuelled the open secret that Nigeria was indeed in the vice-grip of hegemonists.

    That, with post-1999 Obasanjo era power rascality, including the Jonathan Presidency’s craving for a lawless presidency (witness events in Rivers State), which borders on creeping fascism, has snowballed into the clear lack of unanimity on retaining Nigeria as presently structured.

    The result is a pre-anarchy season of anomie that now beclouds the country. That urgently suggests some national dialogue to fix things.

    The big question: can you trust President Goodluck Jonathan on this one? Ripples would not wager for Jonathan. He may well be playing games. But others have put their faith in him, claiming he means well. Yet, others are ambivalent, deciding to play along, thinking the perilous objective situations on ground would force his hands, whatever his original motives, to do good by the republic.

    Ironically, that would appear where the likes of Nyiam come in. From the ill-fated passion of the military era, Col. Nyiam has articulated his thoughts, on the Nigerian question, in his book: True Federal Democracy or Awaiting Implosion? An Aide-Memoire for Makers of the Nigerian Constitution.

    A citizen that has gone through the rigour of putting pen to paper on the Nigerian question, after the miscarriage of the Orkar coup and its tragedies, would appear ardently committed to the restructuring school, against the establishment school that baits open catastrophe, by hoping to take their chances on Nigeria’s extant structure.

    Indeed, apart from Senator Okurounmu (at least going by his pre-2003 stance as an SNC purist) and Prof. Ben Nwabueze (who excused himself from the committee on health grounds), Col. Nyiam would appear the only other known member that clearly belongs to the pro-change lobby.

    That would appear the full tragedy of the colonel’s emotional blunder. In his spat with Governor Oshiomhole, and his looming sacrifice (self or forced), the sovereign national conference movement would appear fated to lose a key ally. That might prove even more devastating for the country, for Nigeria as presently constituted would appear a journey to nowhere.

    That brings into the fray the Oshiomhole intervention. Did the governor have a right to air his views? No doubt. Did Nyiam have a right to obstruct him in any way, even if the governor, in his view, was playing to the gallery? Definitely not.

    Does the governor have a right to overplay his own opinion, even after the visiting committee had listened to him, for 40 minutes, as Nyiam claimed, in his office? No law says he shouldn’t, though decorum demands the governor also cedes space for other opinions.

    But one thing is sure: if there was a time limit for contributions, then the governor ought to have stuck to that time limit. If he did not, then the governor erred. In a republic, every citizen should subject themselves to rules: and a governor or president is first a citizen, before his catapult to high office. But all that is in the realm of controversy!

    What is well and truly amazing is the manifest illogicality of the argument of Organised Labour (first put across by Isa Aremu, NLC vice president and also amplified by Oshiomhole at the confab Edo town hall meeting) that the Nigerian question is settled. It is not.

    Comrade Oshiomhole feels “Nigerian” because he was “Kaduna boy”, who made good over there, even if he was from Edo. His view should be applauded and respected. But to dub as “tribalists”, other citizens with diametrically opposed experiences, is plain conceit with nary any logical merit.

    Bola Ige (of blessed memory) was another Kaduna Boy (his childhood biography), his Esa-Oke folks teased as “Gambari”, because he could not even at first, speak his native Yoruba tongue. Yet, he scurried down South because he found he couldn’t enjoy educational privileges other “Kaduna boys” were enjoying!

    In any case, if “Kaduna boys” had all morphed into “Kaduna men” and lived happily ever after, why didn’t the comrade governor consider running as Kaduna governor? So long for the annoying sweeping finality of Organised Labour’s argument!

    Nigeria needs restructuring to earn a rebirth. Jonathan may or may not be sincere. But that does not eliminate that notorious fact; or that the Nigerian state is at its weakest in history for change. This is the time to remould – or die.

    It is imperative this toxic structure be done away with, whoever takes over by 2015.