The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Still on the deportation saga

    I have read with some concern comments from certain sections of Ndigbo on the controversial deportation of some destitute to Anambra State by the Lagos State government. I have read the reaction of Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, and a more detailed reaction from his Special Adviser on Youths and Social Development, Dolapo Enitan Badru, and I am yet to see any such detailed response from the Anambra State Government. What it did was to send a “strongly-worded” protest letter to President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan. The president is yet to respond to the letter. According to Governor Fashola, who spoke to the media on the issue, “it is unfortunate that my colleague governor has made this a media issue. As I speak to you, I haven’t received any telephone call or letter from him, complaining over the issue and I don’t think that is the way government works. The relationship between Lagos and Anambra has always remained cordial. I remember that on less important matters, he had called me before and we discussed at length.

    I know that this is a political season and Anambra will be up for contest. In a political season, unusual things happen and perhaps, we are living in an interesting time”. Speaking on the matter, Badru said: “We (Lagos State Government) wrote letters to Anambra State Government through its Lagos Liaison Office. It is not just Anambra we wrote a letter to. We wrote to Kano State. We wrote to Ondo State. We wrote to Jigawa State. We wrote to Katsina State. Every state has its own file. In the same way, we wrote to Anambra that we got some destitute on the streets that claimed to be indigenes of your state.

    “We asked the Anambra State Government to send people from their Liaison Office to come and interview the destitute to ascertain if they are actually from Anambra so that we know who is lying and who is not. Some will come. Some will ignore us. If you go to our rehabilitation facility in Majidun, we have more than 1,500 destitute there. The number keeps going up. We keep and feed (them) three times daily. In a place designed for 1,200 people, there are about 2,000 there. That is a recipe for chaos. When we treat them, we try to teach them a trade before we relocate them to their states. But they prefer to go back to the street and beg.

    “Anambra State Government wrote us back. The state government asked us to detail the status of those under our care and protection local government by local government. We did it as directed and then wrote the state government back, indicating the status of destitute who claimed to be from Anambra. Since April we have done that, there is no response from the state. We also put through series of phone calls to them, there was no response. We then decided we could not continue to keep these people under our care and protection. We thus took them to their place so that their state government can find a way to re-unite them with their parents.

    “We did not forcefully relocate any person to Onitsha; neither did we deport. We are not immigration; neither are we a country that we should deport. What happened is that we actually traced their families one after the other. We went through the Department of Social Welfare of Anambra State.

    May I then ask, is it true that Lagos State Government wrote to some states government asking them to come forward and take those identified as their people away from the streets of Lagos? Is it true that that these states came and carried away their own “destitute”? Did Anambra State Government get such a request? Did they make any effort to ascertain if these “destitute” were their people, were truly destitute? Did anybody make any effort to talk to the Governor of Lagos over the issue before the deportation was carried out? Is it true that there was an arrangement between Lagos and Anambra states to meet at Onitsha Head Bridge for the purposes of taking over and taking care of these “destitute” and that when they got to the place there was nobody from the state to meet them?

    I ask these questions because they have been thrown up by the so-called wide-spread anger over the deportation. I have seen the letter from Lagos State Government, the acknowledgement from the Anambra State Liaison officer in Lagos, who went further to request a list of the destitute involved. If the arrangement to transfer them to the state was bungled from that end, do we now blame Lagos for our own inefficiency?

    To worsen the matter, Governor Peter Obi of Anambra State, rather than call his Lagos counterpart to discuss the matter, chose to write a protest letter to President Jonathan, threatening in the process to retaliate. And I ask, retaliate against whom? How many destitute of Yoruba ethnic group do you have in the whole of Igbo land? By writing Jonathan was Governor Obi expecting the President to call Fashola and flog him? Or order him to take back the destitute?

    My point is: we ought to be realistic and weigh our actions before we take them. The way some of us have reacted to the development leaves much to be desired.

    A lot of folks are being emotional about the issue and are hence guilty of poor judgment. Yet others see it from political angle and hope to score some cheap political point from the unfortunate development. My advice to all Ndigbo, who feel hurt by the development, is to ask questions and get answers before jumping to conclusions.

    I am neither saying what Lagos did is correct nor am I saying it was right to deny any Nigerian the right to freely live, move in any part of the federation. But we must also admit that Lagos has the right to clear its streets of any form of social menace. I also look forward to the day they would stop area boys from harassing and extorting money from people, who buy machines and other private stuffs, and rein in on them to save people like us from constant harassment. My only worry, though, is that these area boys include Igbos too. So, what am I saying? Let us not rush to judgments. Of the 36 states of the federation, Lagos still remains the most Igbo-friendly. And I mean every word of it. It is the only state where an Igbo man is a commissioner; and it is not because his kind is in short supply in the state. Rather they are in abundance not just in the state but all through the South-west geo-political zone. Does this count? Yes. It does.

    It’s better to deport me to my state than to continue to murder me and burn, loot my property at the slightest provocation. This has been going on in some parts of the country for years, but definitely not Lagos.

    Most importantly, it is not only Igbo destitute that have been removed from the streets of Lagos; only recently destitute from Ondo State were equally moved to their state of origin. These are Yoruba people. So why are Ndigbo reacting as if we are being systematically targeted? Why are we making it look as if everybody is against us?

    Having said that, let our government go and interview those “deported”, sieve innocent ones among them and return them to Lagos where they have every right to live according to the laws of the federation and that of the state. Then let them rehabilitate the destitute among them in Anambra. Anything short of this would amount to naked politicking and shadow chasing in the face of bare facts.

    • Chukwuelobe wrote from Lagos

     

  • Orji’s harvest of laurels

    One of the supreme ironies of freedom and comfort is the tendency to quickly forget the unbearable conditions and the ugly past that hitherto pervaded the socio-political landscape; which necessitated and triggered emancipation struggles. At the time Governor T.A. Orji took over the reins of governance, Abia was on the bottom rung of the ladder of nation’s politics. The run-of-the-mill performance of his predecessor equally complicated matters.

    A major challenge that faced his administration was the issue of insecurity. Abia’s ugly experience and the fine sense of operational strategies adopted to stem the tide became a cloud with a silver lining. At the peak of the first tenure of Governor T.A. Orji, kidnappings and other violent crimes shook the state to its foundation. Abia hit the headlines as hotbed of heinous crimes.  In fact, well-to-do individuals and top government officials became ready targets for kidnappings. Banks were shut down during the peak of business hours especially in Aba, the commercial nerve-centre. Ostentatious living became a liability. Those who had the means relocated from Aba and Ukwa-Ngwa axis, where the hydra-headed monster loomed large and appeared intractable. Security agencies lost some of their field men who were confronted with assorted and sophisticated weapons of the bandits.

    But the nasty scenario reached a climax when a group of school children were kidnapped on their way to the school in a school bus. As would be expected, the already battered image of the state got messier nationally and internationally. The water-boarding of Abia security apparatus by the bare-faced test of government might occasioned by the abduction of innocent school children prompted a re-jig of security measures.

    Governor Orji acquired over 100 patrol vehicles with modern security and information gadgets, and distributed them to all security formations in the state. In an unprecedented manner, security officials were provided with logistics and mouth-watering motivational packages that boosted their morale in tackling the menace of kidnapping.

    The healthy working relationship between Abia State government and the Federal Government played a key role in restoring normalcy in the troubled zone. The military was drafted to clean up the Augean stables. The barracks long abandoned in Ohafia, a sub-urban area of the state, was renovated by the state government and this brought about a restoration of the military base with a full complement of artillery brigade. The Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen. Azubuike Onyeabor Ihejirika, who is a son of the soil, collaborated finely with Governor Orji in mobilizing the military to flush out the kidnapping gangsters.

    The flashpoints were cordoned off while the thick forests that served as temporary abode for the kidnappers were ransacked by the courageous men of Nigerian Army. Peace automatically returned to the besieged area as the perpetrators took to their heels. Not leaving anything to chances, strategic points in the state have since been manned with Armoured Personnel Carriers (APCs) and combat-ready soldiers and policemen, to contain any threat of resurgence of the violent crimes. Abia has since acquired the status of investors’ haven as its security architecture in now a model.

    The main lesson from Abia State security experience is that with right leadership, agility, rationality, political will and striking of healthy alliances with appropriate institutions, no socio-economic nay political challenge can remain insurmountable. Abia is today showered with encomiums on account of her feat in security tending. It was therefore not surprising that the Security Watch Africa in Ghana festooned Governor Orji with the award of the Best Governor on Security Matters in Nigeria in 2012.

    Interestingly enough, the management of two reputable national media houses, Daily Champion and Daily Independent Newspapers considered and festooned Governor Orji with the awards of Icon of Democracy in 2012 and Man of the Year Award in 2013 respectively.

    The state government runs a tuition-free primary and secondary schools to enable the poor and the vulnerable groups to have access to formal education. The moribund State Scholarship Scheme was also reactivated by Governor Orji to assist brilliant but indigent students in the tertiary institutions at home and abroad. Through the State Youth Empowerment Scheme, Ochendo has equally provided job opportunities for hundreds of idle youths in the transport sector. Hundreds of vehicles (buses and cars) and tricycles are periodically given to the youths across the LGAs without any strings attached. This is besides the monthly payment of N15,000 stipends to about 4500 youths  in the state to cushion the harsh economic challenges of apprenticeship and studentship. In workers friendliness, it is needless to belabour the fact that Governor Orji, at the inception of his government promoted all cadres of workers to the next salary Grade Level and it is on record that Abia State pays the highest minimum wage in the country. But the greatest of these accomplishments is Governor Orji’s rare courage in yanking off the affairs of the state from a tiny cabal that held her by the jugular. Top government officials and political appointees are no longer emasculated with demonic oath-taking to extract subservience needed to service the over-bloated ego of a pocket tyrant with vaulting ambitions.

    Good governance indeed has no borders. Of course, with the sophistication of modern telecommunications that has shrunk our world to a global village, peoples across nations can access information from far places on a shoestring with just a click. Even the Ndigbo in Diaspora (USA) is not left in appreciating the giant strides of the present administration in the State. They gave Governor Orji an Excellence Award in Governance as a result of his pacesetting efforts at rebuilding Abia from the scratch and the preponderance of legacy projects. Abia is today a huge construction site: new office complexes, new government house, gigantic international conference centre, new court halls, e-library complex, new classroom blocks, network of roads, new modern markets and industrial clusters for SMEs and a robust policy of tackling youth unemployment.

    In appraising the modest efforts of the administration in building solid road infrastructure, the Chairman of House of Representatives Committee on Works, Hon. Ogbuefi Ozomgbachi and his team declared during their oversight visit to Abia that the only standard federal roads in Abia are the ones rehabilitated by Governor Orji. Both the President of the Senate, Senator David Mark and the Speaker of House of Representatives, Rt. Hon. Aminu Tambuwal had equally commended Ochendo’s visionary leadership when they commissioned the new Amokwe Housing Estate and new office complex for the State Environmental Protection Agency respectively.

    Recently, the National Association of Optometrists gave Governor Orji the award of the Prime Ambassador of Health Care. His policies on health matters attracted the newest honour which include but not limited to the building of 250 primary health centres across the State, the building of Abia State Specialist and Diagnostic Centre with seven dialysis machines in Umuahia and Aba, renovation and upgrading of Amachara Specialist Hospital with new structures and doctors quarters; and the erection of nine 100-bed capacity hospitals at strategic locations in the three senatorial zones of the state. The Honourable Minister of Health, Professor Onyebuchi Chukwu capped these endeavours by commissioning the new dialysis centre on July 22. The dialysis centre will drastically reduce the huge amount of money spent by Nigerians on medical tourism to India.

    It is indeed the wish of Abians that this momentum of good governance would be sustained to leapfrog the state from the pangs of underdevelopment.

    • Uche, a public affairs analyst wrote in from Isuochi, Abia State.

  • Osun: Erecting a mansion from bubbles

    There is an atmosphere of dreams hanging over the city of Osogbo, the capital of the State of Osun. They are good dreams, romantic dreams perhaps-some sort of high-wattage excitement with that too-good-to-be-true feel. Osun environment is the type that has all excuses for failure but one which has stubbornly refused to be ruled by its natural limitations under Ogbeni Aregbesola.

    If you had visited a couple of years back when experts in excuses held sway there, limitations were held high by the rulers of the time and the eloquent parroting of them was the distinguished insignia of statecraft. The state and the citizens were offered no option than to “understand”.

    Well the government at the time rose up and did something, and it was something that shook up the place, at least. They went to a bank nearby and got themselves a loan of N18 billion naira; only. The usury was around N600 million every month – never mind – but the actors in this state with a paltry Internally Generated Revenue of N250 – N300 million assumed they could cope. In any case, with the loan they intended to build, of all things, six stadia spread across the state. After they had conducted six sod turning rituals, several of the indicators turned south. Works halted on the six sites and the builders went home.

    After this loan, the state under PDP administration went into margin loan to play stock market. One wonders how a sleepy state with decrepitated hospitals abandoned its social service for commercial selfish individual interests. The Central Bank decided that Osun State has had it. They placed the state under AMCON, the nation’s official undertaker for banks and individuals in financial ruins, and in this case, since a state cannot be put on receivership in the real sense, AMCON became its Intensive Care Unit.

    And out there, since the drains were mostly blocked, floods came in and washed away people, depositing their corpses far downstream as it flattened homes and severed roads and swept businesses away along with rubbish. The local economy naturally folded and new investments were rare. Even the blind could see that the end was near: the very air pulsated with the feel.

    On November 27, 2010, the end came, and thankfully, it was a saving end. The government was sacked by a brave court of law and Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola was installed governor of the state. It has been some 30 months since that day and it makes sense to stand at a vantage position and compare the ‘then’ and ‘now’ pictures.

    The Punch of July 25, bore the headline: Osun Tops Primary School Enrolment. When I saw that header, my first thought was the strategic move of the governor to institute a free lunch programme for the elementary school children pupils. He also established a clothing factory floated in partnership with a private concern to make uniforms for free distribution to the 750,000 students in the state of about 3.8million citizens. That factory is the nation’s largest of its type today, employing reasonable labour and paying off dividends in the jump in school attendance.

    The government of Aregbesola somewhere along the line announced the commencement of rehabilitation of 10 roads per each of the 30 local government areas in the state. The job specification called for strictly the use of reinforced concrete in construction of drainages – and that gives an idea of what will go into the road proper. Many of those roads have been completed and commissioned while the rest are all in various advanced stages of completion.

    The chapter on road construction in the Aregbesola administration is a long one and the scope has no precedent in the history of the state or in fact, the history of the South-west region since the time of Obafemi Awolowo. Ongoing is the Osogbo East Bypass road, an 18-kilometre axial system that loops traffic round the outer half of the invigorated city. Then there is this ambitious motorway in the works too that links the city with Ikirun and then proceed 45 miles northwards to the gates of Kwara State. The next major roads effort is the dualisation of the all-important link road between the state capital and Lagos-Abuja expressway with the interception at Gbongan. The 30 kilometre road is under construction and will latch onto the aforementioned expressway with a clean, trumpet exchange flyover opening an ultra-wide gateway into the state capital. All over the state, in cities great or small, construction firms are busy digging, grading, levelling and laying asphalt, either cutting out new roads or fixing existing ones. The Rural Access Mobility Programme, RAMP is belching smoke in the countryside too, paving roads, building small bridges and culverts to open up rural communities to rapid development and provide a conduit for agricultural products to get into markets in the cities.

    Osun Youth Empowerment Scheme was started early by the administration to fire hope and provide some part time employment for young people. Beneficiaries sign on for two years for a stipend and offer services to their communities in form of landscape beautification, traffic control or provision of paramedic services and environment sanitation. The first tranche of 20,000 youths taken on the programme have exited and the current batch of the same number are still in service. In view of the series of the achievement recorded through the programme, the World Bank has recommended it to the federal government to emulate, that is, by putting its money where its mouth is by supporting its nationwide implementation with a 400-million dollars grant.

    In health the landscape is changing the chill of the winter of dilapidation and decay being gradually replaced by the bloom of the renewal of spring. The state government in renovating all the nine state hospitals in one fell swoop in a N1.7 billion naira effort. Take the one at Ila for example. It was built in 1972 and was only renovated once until now. All the 15 buildings in the hospital have been re-roofed and being fitted with new windows. The transformation there is second only to what is going on at the State Hospital, Ikirun where the repairs had to start a hundred yards away, the very road leading to the hospital having been severed when flood washed away the culvert. An entire block of about 20 wards is almost being rebuilt. The roof, doors, windows and floor are being replaced. The kitchen and the laundry are being revamped all the buildings in the big health complex is being worked on, the first time since the hospital was built in 1982.

    Farmers in the state of Osun are getting much more than new rural roads. Up to N2 billion has been spent on different farming support initiatives in the production of rice, chicken, catfish, cocoyam and to boost efforts in cocoa farming. Over a thousand hectares of land was cleared for farmers free of charges, saving them cumulatively nothing less than 100 million naira.  A robust response is underway in cassava production in view of its newfound relevance as composite baking flour in the country. Such is the upbeat in agriculture that the state is gradually becoming a centre of hope for agricultural revolution for the country. If you want to see the rare sight of banks of greenhouses turning out tomatoes in Nigeria, go to Ilesa in the state of Osun.

    We return to matters of education, where the government has enshrined as the engine room of its long haul development strategy. The conditions in many of those schools were deemed to have gone too far down the bend that things just had to be remade, not renovated. This called for brushing off the existing buildings before the come crashing down and killing children. Some of the newly completed modern school buildings are standing out there this moment, tall palaces of learning; eloquent testimony of renewal, rejuvenation and hope for a better tomorrow in the state. School enrolment and raw academic performance has picked up with the state jumping in WAEC results from 34th to the 8th position within the first 18 months of the administration. But the big masquerade that wraps up the festival is the Opon Imo, the one-per-student free tablet computer programme for all senior level public schools in the state. The tablets come pre-loaded with 56 textbooks and a total of 20 years of past question papers from JAMB and WAEC complete with   solutions helps. It has hours of video lessons and audio classes. The Opon Imo idea is first of its kind not only in Nigeria or Africa, but anywhere in the world and will probably go down as the Opus Magnum of educational initiative of the Nigerian Fourth Republic. The enthusiasm alone that this has generated among students is electric. Parents are plucking their wards from private schools to install them in public schools, a very unusual trend in Nigeria since the 1980s.

    • Bolorunduro, PhD is Honourable Commissioner for Finance Economic Planning and Budget, State of Osun

     

  • ‘The spirit of Zaria’

    ‘The spirit of Zaria’

    General TY Danjuma, former Chief of Army Staff, former Minister of Defence, and most recently chair of Dr Goodluck Jonathan’s Presidential Advisory Council, lived up to his reputation for blunt talk this past June when he was turbaned Jarmai Zazzau, in Zaria.

    In Hausa, the title, conferred by the Emir, Alhaji Shehu Idris, translates into “The Brave One”.

    For Danjuma, it was a second homecoming.

    Several months earlier, he had his first homecoming when he was conferred with an honorary doctorate by Ahmadu Bello University, the successor institution to the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, Zaria, where he had studied for his ‘A’ levels before opting to join the army instead of pursuing a degree in history.

    On that occasion, he donated N2 billion to the university’s Endowment Fund, probably the largest single donation ever made by a Nigerian to an academic institution in Nigeria.

    Almost every person of consequence in the North was in attendance at the second homecoming, the installation, which was to have culminated in a durbar. But Danjuma had demurred, citing the prevailing security concerns and the misery he saw all around him.

    Instead, he parlayed the occasion into a platform for one of the most forthright speeches in recent times on the state of the nation. The bluntness was vintage Danjuma.

    Nigerian society and economy were in tatters, due among other factors to leadership failure, he said. The masses of the people, he went on, were “chained down in dehumanising and grinding poverty” while the nation continued to maintain “a few islands of false prosperity in a turbulent ocean of penury and squalor.”

    Peace and harmony were unattainable in such a setting, he warned.

    He told his fellow Northern elders that they were talking too much and doing too little. They needed to think more, pray more, plan more, work harder, relate better, and talk less, because battles were better fought and won through wisdom and strategy than through “inflammable pronouncements and political tantrums.”

    More poignantly, he warned that, by failing to adequately educate their young men and women, they were handicapping them in the competition for opportunities in a globalised world where knowledge itself had become the prime resource.

    General Danjuma told them they had failed to rise to that level of patriotic statesmanship where they could deploy their wisdom and experience to give the country a clear sense of purpose and direction. “When elders become decadent, the youth are bound to become delinquent.”

    I personally cannot recall an occasion during which such an assemblage of persons of great consequence were treated to such blunt, forthright talk.

    Yet, what ran through the speech was not self-righteousness nor condemnation, nor yet resignation, but a challenge, a summons to collective action to help pull a failing nation back from the brink.

    “I still believe that Nigeria can be reawakened and rebuilt to achieve greatness,” he said. “If we renew our minds and reconcile with one another, if we coordinate our determined efforts, we can make northern Nigeria self-reliant and self-sufficient, while enhancing the unity and prosperity of all Nigeria, but first we must be at peace.”

    The part that moved me most was where Danjuma called on his fellow Northerners and Nigerians in general to try to recapture “the spirit of Zaria.”

    I know something of that spirit.

    I had had my secondary school education in St Paul’s Secondary School (now Kufena College), in Wusasa, Zaria from 1958 through 1962. Some four decades before then, Wusasa had been the center of the Anglican Church’s missionary activity in the far North. It was home to St Bartholomew’s School, of which General Yakubu Gowon, the late Professor Ishaya Audu, Danjuma himself and a host of distinguished Northerners were products.

    St Bartholomew’s Church, where General Yakubu Gowon’s father, Pa Yohanna, served as a catechist, is reputed to be the oldest church in that part of Nigeria, dates back to 1929.The first ordained priest in Northern Nigeria, the Rev Henry Miller, father of the ace musician, Bala Miller, came from Zaria and lived in the walled city.

    By the way, it was from the younger Miller, lanky and lithe, visiting from swinging Lagos, that I first saw a demonstration of how to do the Twist, in Zaria, in 1962, in the home of Daniel Gowon, an official at St Luke’s Hospital, Wusasa, reputedly the first missionary hospital north of the Niger.

    St Paul’ s roll included students from all parts of Nigeria, with surnames like Abdulkadir, Abui, Adagba, Adebayo, Achimugu, Ahmed, Akaas, Akeju, Aken’Ova, Alausa, Alheri, Anyaegbu, Babatunde, Bature, Beckley, Carew, Coker, Dandaura, Dauji, Donli, Efobi, Egunyomi, Ekong, Fajana, Fakai, Gana, George, Gbadero, Gowon, Hassan, Halim, Ibitoye, Ibrahim, Ikwue, Igweonu, Jebak, Jiya, Kitchener, Kyari, Kogbe, Legbo, Mabadeje, Mbaeru, Mayuku, Mosugu, Nwakalo, Nnaji, Nunu, Odiwo, Okoye, Oloruntoba, Olusegun, Ohiomokhare, Obakponovwe, Olumodeji, Runsewe, Shiawoya, Soyebi, Spencer, Sule, Taidi, Uchegbu, Thomas, Udoh, Vincent, Wey, Yisa, Yusuf, and Zakari.

    Muslim students were excused from Christian worship.

    Some two miles or so away, between Wusasa and Tudun Wada, lay the famous Government (now Barewa) College. Right within the city walls lay the Provincial Secondary School. Zaria was also home to the Nigerian Military School.

    All four institutions competed in athletics, soccer, hockey and cricket with keen rivalry and good sportsmanship.

    Further down the road from Barewa was the School of Pharmacy. Farther still, in Kongo, across from Tudun Wada, was the Institute of Administration, where civil servants of all cadres were groomed.

    On the other side of St Paul’s, across from Kufena Rock, in Samaru, lay the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, later Ahmadu Bello University, that awarded University of London degrees in engineering and diplomas of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

    Also in Samaru was the School of Agriculture, with a pan-Nigerian student body, and St Peter’s College, for the training of primary school teachers, later relocated to Kaduna. St Enda’s College, a teacher-training school set up by the Catholic Church, Advanced Teachers College, and the Nigerian Civil Aviation Training Centre would come later.

    Tudun Wada was the home of the North Regional Literature Agency (NORLA), which promoted literacy in English and indigenous languages and nurtured it with supporting reading material. It was also home to Gaskiya Corporation, publishers of The Nigerian Citizen, now defunct, and Gaskiya Tafi Kwabo, probably the oldest indigenous-language in newspaper in Nigeria in continuous publication, and by far the most influential.

    Gakiya Corporation was in turn home to Abubakar Imam, the legendary editor and literary scholar, the subject of Haroun Adamu’s fascinating doctoral thesis for Ahmadu Bello University, and home also to the famous columnist and political journalist Bisi Onabanjo (Aiyekooto) during a stint as editor of The Citizen.

    Down south, in what used to be called southern Zaria, missionary activity was just as strong, and as unconstrained. The Sudan Interior Mission, the Sudan United Mission, the Catholic Church and Evangelical Church of West Africa (ECWA) ran schools that received grant-in-aid from the Regional Government in Kaduna for the education and training of young men and women.

    I must not forget the only manufacturing plant in town, the cigarettes factory of the Nigerian Tobacco Company which provided direct and indirect employment to a host of residents, and the bustling railway station, a staging post for passenger and freight transportation

    Expatriates in the educational and the commercial establishments commingled with residents from all over Nigeria – persons of many tongues and creeds — lived together in peace and harmony and mutual acceptance, dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and shared ideals.

    That conflation was what Danjuma, with a touch of poetry, called “the spirit of Zaria.”

    Most if not all of those institutions and establishments that made Zaria a beacon are still there in one form or another, but the spirit that once animated them is long gone.

    To recapture that spirit, as Danjuma enjoined his Northern brethren and Nigerians in general, is going to be a formidable task. But therein lies the path to true nationhood.

     

  • Allah-De: A model, and a monument

    Allah-De: A model, and a monument

    How time flies!

    It seems only a year or two ago – three at most — that a good many of Alade “Allah De” Odunewu’s contemporaries in his years at Kakawa and a host of his admirers gathered to honour him at ceremonies marking his 80th birthday.

    As befitted the occasion, reminiscences of the Man of the Day filled the air – his essential decency, his quiet dignity, his sardonic wit, his mastery of the art of satire, his unwavering professionalism, and the great mentoring skills he brought to bear on the grooming of a generation of Nigerian newspapermen and women.

    I found myself then thinking about Odunewu and two of his younger contemporaries at Kakawa — Peter Enahoro, who entered Nigerian journalism as “George Sharp” and is much better known as “Peter Pan,” and Sam Amuka who began his journalistic career as “Offbeat Sam,” and morphed later into “Sad Sam.” Though their Kakawa overlapped, each exercised editorial suzerainty at different times over the mighty journalism empire that the late Babatunde Jose built.

    Of the three, Odunewu was the most self-effacing.

    The boyishly handsome face of Enahoro, Odunewu’s star predecessor at the Daily Times adorned his column “Life with Peter Pan.” His bohemian lifestyle perfused it. Amuka signed his column with a sketch of his jaunty, hirsute self wearing a floppy hat and blowing a trumpet from the wrong end, and he lived up to that iconoclastic billing.

    Odunewu permitted only an outline sketch of his face to appear on the column, simply called Allah De. It showed him in a thoughtful, Byronic pose, wearing what looked like a French suit, and a skullcap.

    This depiction, it now seems in retrospect, was his way of signaling that though the “Allah De” column would inevitably be a projection of Alade Odunewu the columnist, it was not going to be extension of his person.

    That, after all, was the tradition at Fleet Street, then the mecca of journalism, a tradition in which he had been schooled at the Regent Street Polytechnic, in London, where he won the highest accolade bestowed on students from the Commonwealth.

    From the first column he wrote for the Daily Times after crossing over from the Allied Newspapers group where he had risen through the ranks to the position of editor-in-chief, you knew you were in the hands of a different person – different in temperament, in style, and in his concerns.

    One of the defining attributes of professionalism, sociologists tell us, is the capacity to separate fact from feeling. On this score, Odunewu must be rated the consummate professional.

    He dissected the issues of the day clinically, based on what he judged to be their merits. You suspected that he had to have some affiliations, if only by virtue of his being human. But you could never guess just what those affiliations consisted in. He kept them discreetly, and I should add, decently, to himself.

    The closest he came to volunteering something about himself was during one of the religious upheavals that have now become endemic in Nigeria, when he revealed that his wife was a Catholic. His Hadj title gave away his identity as a devout Muslim, but you could not guess it from his writing.

    It is not for nothing that Nnamdi Azikiwe, one of the finest newspapermen to emerge from these parts, canonised Odunewu as the dean of Nigerian satirical writing. Satire was the stuff of his work. Master of the well-placed innuendo, and of what the British call “damnation by feint praise,” Odunewu deftly laid bare the follies and foibles of his era without wounding the vanities of the men and women of the moment.

    Enahoro took great pride in being “controversial” and “hard-hitting.” Odunewu was self-effacing even when delivering those gentle jabs, those pin-pricks that in the end proved just as effective, even if not as dramatic, as a sensational knockout.

    Those were my reminiscences when Alade Odunewu turned 80, in 2007.

    He died six days ago, aged 85.

    Not much can be added to the tributes that poured forth on that epochal milestone and have been cascading since he drew his last breath.

    Odunewu knew no retirement or semi-retirement for that matter. Long after he quit active newspapering, he was an influential presence wherever journalism was being discussed, contributing insights and suggesting strategy and tactics, and generally helping to raise its professional and ethical tone.

    He steered the Nigerian Press Council for about a decade, monitoring performance, investigating and adjudicating complaints, and providing magisterial guidance for future conduct. The Council had won only grudging acceptance from the media at its inception and, with a person of lesser specific gravity than Odunewu as chair, it would have been marked for failure.

    For the better part a decade, he presided over the Nigeria Media Merit Awards recognising excellence in various aspects of print and broadcast journalism.

    It is a mark of his commitment to the pursuit of journalistic excellence that he personally endowed one of the most prestigious prizes in the business, the Alade Odunewu Prize for Informed Commentary, administered by the premier industry journal, Lanre Idowu’s Media Review.

    Now was it an accident that when new titles entering the Nigerian newspaper market used his name and prestige as strong selling points. Thus it was with The Guardian at its launch in 1984, and much later, in 1999, with The Comet, now defunct, where managing director Lade “Ladbone” Bonuola proudly introduced him as “our leader.”

    Without question, he will be remembered as one of the greatest pillars of Nigerian journalism — pillar by force of personal example, by tireless exertion. In that respect, he was a model.

    He was also a monument – monument to an enduring commitment to the best practices in journalism, to “All The News That’s Fit to Print,” as the evocative motto of The New York Times has it.

    His public service also bore the stamp of distinction. As the Commissioner for Information and Tourism in Lagos State from 1973 through 1975, he helped nurture and consolidate the state’s communications infrastructure. His even temperament and innate sense of fairness and justice suited him especially for the post of Lagos State Public Complaints Commissioner, a remit he discharged with his accustomed distinction.

    As a member of the Federal Electoral Commission that midwifed Nigeria’s transition from military rule to republican democracy in 1979, he was a front-row witness in the manipulations, the opportunistic revisions and the desperate fudging that handed Shehu Shagari and the NPN victory at the first ballot during the presidential race. But you could never get him to discuss them even off the record.

    A man of the utmost discretion, he seemed to have resolved to take those secrets with him to the grave. That may explain, at least in part, why he never wrote his memoirs when he was so abundantly endowed for the task.

    In more than four decades at the front ranks of journalism and public service in a country where the next major scandal is just one news bulletin away, Alade Odunewu served and thrived without being tainted even by a whiff of impropriety.

    There is no greater tribute.

     

    Portions of this article first appeared in my December 11, 2007, column for this newspaper, titled “The Kakawa Triumvirate”.

     

  • The metaphor of Abia Tower

    Two coloured birds sat complacently atop the Abia Tower this cloudy Sunday evening. They were chatting away happily, oblivious of the chaos of motorists below the height of about 100 meters. The gigantic concrete tower stands at the middle of the Port-Harcourt/Enugu Expressway at the interjection into Umuahia metropolis. Beyond its towering height and aesthetic grandeur, there is a quite significant meaning and message in the edifice. The imposing tower, built in Gothic cathedral designs with a concave metallic arch, is the first structure that welcomes one into the Abia State capital. With a certain reassuring air, it announces this hospitality with a bold inscription: Welcome to Abia ; God’s Own State. There are four of this inscription facing the four directions of the road, all written in bold white letters on a background of black metallic plates. The walls are painted in pink and light yellow colours which glow with the translucent lights overlooking the ground from the height. I see the tower as the first brand ambassador of Abia State and it has consistently lived up to this billing with the warmth and friendliness conjured into its magical designs – a quality it transmits to visitors and residents alike as they behold its majestic heights. It embraces everyone and quickly introduces the people and the style of the incumbent leadership. Since 1991 when the tower was built, it has remained a landmark structure with some architectural elegance around it. There is an effort, perhaps unconscious, to re-enact the surreal Gothic designs with its galloping pillars and the hollowness of its interior. A ring of iron bars encircles and secures it and there is a staircase that leads to the first elevation where a greenery of flowers has been laid out like a farm around it. There is a clear effort to create an enduring and beautiful statute. But, there is obviously no intension to have the tower speak in political tunes or stand as a fore-runner to the style of a current political leadership. All former leaders before Governor Theodore Orji saw it as only what it is – a statute, a tower. They could not see the potential in the concrete object as a great image-maker for the state and for the manner of leadership. Indeed, the Abia tower is an embodiment of the Abia story – a journey through stagnation and then revival. It is an epical monument capturing a dispensation in the people’s movement. Though a mere object of cement and gravel, it projects the message that is Governor Orji’s travails and triumph in the corridors of power. It celebrates the revival and the rebirth that are the governor’s stewardship. Before 2007 when Governor Orji came on board, the tower was a statement of stagnation. In very unmistakable terms, it told the story of the style and manner of leadership of Governor Orji’s predecessor. The tower was weather-beaten, dirty, dilapidated and literally abandoned. Happy and well-fed spiders built a mast of cobwebs around its concave parapets. The paintings wore out and the smooth surfaces peeled. The surroundings remained unkempt and overgrown with the inner pavement transforming into a defecation point for hoodlums and motor parks boys around the place. Some letters of the bold inscription cleaned off and the walls cracked with neglect. It was a shoddy sight which provided a parallax view of the eight-years of Abia’s stagnation. In year 2000, when I accompanied some tourists, journalists and movie-makers to attend the eight-day UgwuAbia cultural festival, the Abia tower was an eyesore. It was a demeaning testimony of neglect and stagnation and it spoke volumes about the style of the government of the day. Thank God! Today, there is a new Abia tower. Quite cleverly, Governor Orji saw an opportunity in the tower to tell the message of his vision and the giant political strides. Upon ascension to power in 2007, he quickly renovated the tower and has consistently maintained it as a treasure for the state. Since then, the towering structure has continued to wear a new and sparkling look. It has recovered its charm and mystique. With the new paintings, the bold inscription has come alive. On the ground and around the surroundings, there is a beautiful greenery dotted with flowers. And in place of the old garbage is a beautiful arcade which has added to the beauty of the landscape of this inroad into Umuahia. Indeed, the Abia tower of today speaks eloquently of the new Abia. The new, beautiful outlook, in abstract forms, represent the rebirth and the attendant changes that have come with the liberation. It is a testimony of Governor Orji’s transformation efforts transmuted in a concrete structure. This transformation has seen to the laying of a fresh foundation for Abia, an enterprise under which he converted Abia into a huge construction site. There are many sides to the message of the new tower. The first is the testimony of the two coloured birds. The sense of order and tranquility conjured by the uniformity of the design and the paintings represent the new society of law and order which is the current status of Abia. This air of peace evokes the memory of the governor’s pragmatic struggle to create a society of law and order out of the chaos of the past. There was a time when Abia was almost like a pariah state due to the challenges posed by kidnappers. Today, Abia is an oasis of sanity in the federation. There is security in Aba, Umuahia and other parts of Abia State, a situation that has transformed Abia to a destination of choice for major national events. The JAMB, NUJ, CBN, Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria (CBCN) and other national organizations have all come to Abia to hold their conferences and retreats. This is a testimony to the success of Orji’s commitment and policy in the area of security. From being a pariah state, Abia is now a destination of choice. The second message is coming from the renovated walls of the tower. It speaks of the governor’s large-scale programme of infrastructural renewal. Under this programme, Orji started by laying a totally fresh foundation for the state. With a paltry federal allocation, he has been able to build legacy projects, like the world-class Conference Centre in Umuahia, the new four-storey Secretariat Complex, the new Government House, the Abia Diagnostic Centre in Umahia and Aba, the new High Court building, new modern offices for the Broadcasting Corporation of Abia and a host of other monumental projects. The roads in Aba and Umuahia have been transformed. The third message lay buried in the beautiful grounds and greenery of flowers around the tower. I see it this the governor’s agricultural revolution and his efforts to revive the time-honoured Abia agro-economy. Under this effort, he revived the cashew and palm tree plantations of old. He disbursed N1 billion micro-credit to farmers and established the liberation farms in the 17 local councils of the state. Already, 50 Abians are working at the Okeikpe farms, the pilot project of the liberation farms where plantain is being bred Truly, the Abia tower is a lucid narrative about Abia’s transformation. • Adindu is the President-general of the Abia Renaissance Movement (ARM)

  • As al-Mustapha prepares to join PDP…

    As al-Mustapha prepares to join PDP…

    When Major Hamza al-Mustapha, former Chief Security Officer to late Head of State, General Sani Abacha was recently discharged and acquitted of change of murder of Alhaja Kudirat Abiola, wife of presumed winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, Bashorun M.K.O Abiola, by an Appeal Court in Lagos, it felt like somebody messing in ones mouth and putting salt as well, as the Yoruba would say.

    The mess, one can’t swallow, the salt one cannot spit out, if you understand what that means. It was a sweet/bitter verdict that could be described as both victory and defeat for justice at the same time. To al-Mustapha and family, it was victory for justice while the Abiola family naturally felt otherwise. I guess most Nigerians felt the same way as the Abiolas but because the appellate court had spoken, are resigned to leaving everything in the hands of God, the ultimate judge.

    But the Lagos state government (the prosecutor in this case) I guess, might not be inclined to handing over to God yet, as there is still one window of appeal to the Supreme Court left and might be willing to explore that, if only to be seen to have tried everything legally possible to get what the majority (at least in the South west) believes to be justice in this celebrated murder case.

    I deliberately refused to join the bandwagon in condemning or praising al-Mustapha’s acquittal for obvious reasons even though I smelt rat in the whole thing. I could see politics at play here even though one could not point at any particular politician as being behind it. But with speculations in the air that al-Mustapha is about to pitch his tent with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), coupled with the reception he got when he visited the Government House in Kano shortly after his release, one needs no soothsayer to conclude that the former CSO had the support of the ruling party while his trial lasted.

    It might not be out of place to also conclude that the powers that be in the north were sympathetic towards al-Mustapha’s cause as could be seen not only in the enthusiastic welcome he had received so far from his home region, but also in the shocking silence of that class on how to get justice for the Abiolas, after all somebody shot and killed Kudirat and the person was acting under somebody’s order. So, who did it and who gave the order? Until that person or those people are found and punished, al-Mustapha remains guilty in the minds of the people here, the show of shame by Dr Fredrick Faseun of the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) hailing his acquittal notwithstanding.

    In spite of the court’s verdict, if al-Mustapha and his co-accused as they were then, had a hand in Kudirat’s murder or any of the numerous unresolved murders of the Abacha era, definitely they will not go unpunished, both here and in the hereafter.

    My concern here is not even about their punishment if they were indeed involved in the murder, but the red carpet being given to al-Mustapha in particular as if (the murder case apart) he was a honourable, just and competent officer while he held court as the unseen number two in the administration of the late maximum ruler. Don’t forget that al-Mustapha, a mere Major in the Nigerian Army was more powerful than most of his seniors, Major Generals et al including the official second in command in that regime, a three-star General, Lt. General Oladipo Diya. After Abacha, no other person was most feared than al-Mustapha.

    Have we suddenly forgotten all those revelations made at the Oputa panel about the activities of the death squad of that regime that were answerable only to al-Mustapha? Has anybody been punished? If al-Mustapha had no hand in the killing of Kudirat what of the other crimes committed under his watch as CSO? Are we sweeping such under the carpet or has he been cleared? Until we are told that the man is free of all the baggage attached to him as Abacha’s CSO, it would be wrong to parade him as a kind of a hero or victim of vendetta as he wants us to believe. It would even be worse if any political party should roll out the red carpet for him and admit him into its fold.

    It is unfortunate that the PDP already smells opportunities for electoral gains in the release of al-Mustapha, and the young man himself seems to wants to make political capital of it. Apart from visiting the Government House, Kano, controlled by the PDP, shortly after his release, he had been making some political comments and visitations as well.

    He was at the Abuja home of the leader of the Niger Delta Peoples Volunteer Force (NDPVF), Alhaji Mujahideen Asari-Dokubo at the weekend where he was beating his chest as being the one whose actions shortly after Abacha’s death gave birth to this democracy. Can you imagine that, coming from an al-Mustapha? He wants us to praise him for not taking over power then, which he could have easily done according to him if he wanted to. What an insult? I think the young man is better advised to take it easy and lie low for some time and not reopen healing wounds. His choice of words and association tend to portray a man with an exaggerated view of his value. The Asari-Dokubo that he visited would either be in detention or a dead man under the Abacha administration that he served. We have not forgotten who killed Ken Saro Wiwa.

    In any case politics they say is all about interest. So, an Asari-Dokubo can hobnob with an al-Mustapha? Wonders shall never cease. All for a Jonathan presidency again in 2015? So all those derogatory things Asari-Dokubo has been saying about the north, what E. K Clark, the Ijaw leader has been saying against the Hausa/Fulani no longer hold water as long as al-Mustapha can help win the northern votes for President Goodluck Jonathan in 2015? Nigeria we hail thee.

    Since al-Mustapha’s release, different Ijaw groups and leaders have been failing over each other to outdo one another in hailing his acquittal, nothing wrong in that if only they are genuine and sincere, but we all know why; 2015. But al-Mustapha should remember the party story of the Biafran leader late Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegu Ojukwu, who because he was granted pardon by the NPN government of President Shehu Shagari in the second republic, quickly joined the on his return from exile and took Ndigbo to NPN, thinking that the interest of his people, who had followed Dr Nnamdi Azikwe to NPP that time would be better protected in the ruling party, he was wrong. The rest is history.

    Nothing personal against al-Mustapha, but he should tread softly and realise that the murder of Alhaja Kudirat Abiola is still fresh and hurting in our memory, beating his chest all over the place or jumping into the political arena would do nothing to heal the wounds, he needs to show remorse and seek ALLAH’s forgiveness for the pains he inflicted on so many Nigerians as Abacha’s CSO. This is more honourable than joining the political fray. A word for President Jonathan and his group as well, Nigerians are no fools again; our mumu don do.

     

  • Oil theft and a minister’s lament

    Oil theft and a minister’s lament

    Did anyone watch the Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala bemoan, on TV, the nation’s daily loss of 400,000 barrels of crude before the House of Representatives Joint Committee on Appropriation/Finance two weeks ago?

    It is not impossible that many Nigerians passed off that latest signature cluelessness of the Jonathan administration to the festering menace as one of one of those things – another instance of the systemic meltdown under the current managers – more out of indifference to its trademark incompetence than anything else.

    Unfortunately, we are talking of a development that is at the heart of the survival of the Nigerian nation, a malaise that the nation can pass off only at its peril.

    Picture a minister in charge of the exchequer passing off a loss nearly equal to 20 percent of its projected revenue for a given year? And this presented merely as footnote in the context of turf war between the executive and the legislature over the shape and size of budget – as against what should have been a red flag to summon citizens to war?

    Don’t ask me how bad things can further get. I doubt if it could be worse.

    Those who say Nigeria is a country of infinite possibilities are damn right. What are we talking about here? At a conservative estimate of $100 a barrel, we are talking of a daily loss of $40 million; that is a princely loss of N2.184tn per annum – a figure nearly 50 percent of the entire federal government budget for 2013 – and this lost to shadowy operators!

    The obverse side of the tragedy is that the Jonathan administration does not even know the fraction of the 400,000 barrels stolen!

    Ten percent, 20, or more? Even President Jonathan’s acclaimed coordinator of the economy wouldn’t attempt a guesstimate beyond that “it is not as if the entire 400,000 barrels is stolen, no”.

    Really? What more does she know? “That whenever the pipelines are attacked and oil is taken, there is a total shut down. All the quantity of oil produced for that day will be lost because it means government cannot sell it and it means a drop in revenue.” Good heavens! How about offering Nigerians that for consolation and that coming from our Ivy League minister!

    Let’s attempt a simple arithmetic, taking a conservative figure of 10 percent of the amount as representing the stolen crude. That is some $4 million dollars daily –lost to the illicit trade and in the Gulf of Guinea region that already enjoys the dubious reputation of being one of the most under-policed regions of the world?

    Well, I’m told that the sum is enough to finance Gulf War 11!

    Is anyone still in doubt that the nation is sitting on gunpowder?

    And what did our distinguished lawmakers do? Nothing. No summons to the Petroleum Minister. None to the Navy authorities or even the entire defence establishment. Does anyone see how easy it is for the abnormal to become norm in these parts? No wonder our bored but sometimes hyperactive lawmakers have since moved on to attend to other matters!

    In this however, the lawmakers would seem by far less culpable than the ‘dovish’ Commander-in-Chief under whose watch the nation is being violated and bled.

    In the first place, given what we know of the illicit trade, it is hardly done under the cover of darkness. It cannot be. Hard to imagine is how those super-tankers mooring to the shore to steal Nigeria’s crude escape being caught under the radar of the Amphibious Brigade of the Nigerian Army or the continent’s second largest Navy? And we are told that the business is a daily occurrence? Who’s kidding?

    Let me put things in proper perspective. Oil theft is certainly nothing new – at least not in these parts. At Obasanjo coming in 1999, the daily loss to the activities of criminals stood at some point at 100,000 barrels per day. To its credit, the administration, rather than whine about the menace, actually brought the illegal trade down to 30,000 barrels per day or even less by 2003. The reversal of the achievement, which began under the Yar’Adua administration, is what has now hit the record levels of 400,000 barrels per day under President Goodluck Jonathan.

    To have a clearer sense of the disaster that is daily visited on the nation is to imagine a corporation losing nearly 20 percent of its revenue, not to acts of nature but to activities that are within the purview of those charged with running it. Surely, that would be a good ground for an extraordinary meeting by shareholders to sack both the board and executive management; that is if they are lucky to get out apiece as against seeking a renewal of woeful tenure!

    The greater tragedy is that all this is happening at a time of great dynamism in the oil industry globally. One of the major developments is the revolution in shale oil sub sector primed to ensure that oil imports by leading consumers like the US is drastically curtailed. From barely 111,000 barrels per day production in 2004, the United States ramped up its shale oil output to 553,000 barrels per day in 2011 – an annualised growth rate of 26 percent during the period. As if the trend is not ominous enough for the oil-producer OPEC cartel, the country’s oil imports is said to be down to its lowest levels in two decades with shale oil projected to displace hydrocarbon imports by 35-40 percent in the long term.

    If you thought that an OPEC member country like Nigeria ought to have gone to the drawing board to assess the likely impacts of the shale oil revolution on its revenues, budgets and the economy as a whole, you are tragically mistaken. Indeed, OPEC’s sixth largest producer hasn’t even shown signs of joining the debate anytime soon, not to talk of seeking to evolve a strategy to mitigate the potential long term effects of the revolution on its revenues. Instead, what we have is a nation hung on the menace of oil theft, a legislature on spendthrift mode, and a President on global shuttle looking for foreign help to protect its exclusive economic zone when he should be at his War Room issuing orders to his men to end the menace!

    Let me reiterate what I said at the beginning; it couldn’t get worse. I mean it.

  • Of leaders and dealers: Soyinka Vs Clark

    Of leaders and dealers: Soyinka Vs Clark

    A community with worthy elders never comes to ruin – Yoruba proverb 

    When do elders morph from leaders to dealers?

    The latest foxtrot on the Rivers crisis, by the South-South Elders and Stakeholders, a group led by Pa Edwin Clark, Ijaw leader and presidential godfather, might just offer a clue.

    The Clark-led elders, on July 24, told Governor Chibuike Amaechi to stop blaming President Goodluck Jonathan and Patience, his ever-meddling wife, for the contrived Rivers crisis; told the governor to shape in or shape out; told the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to kick out the governor to serve as warning to other power renegades; pooh-poohed the four northern governors that went on a solidarity visit to Amaechi as cynical meddlers; and branded Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, as an arch-hypocrite who wept more than the bereaved at the legislative banditry of the Rivers G-5, while he kept mute in earlier legislative outlawry in Oyo (where Governor Rashidi Ladoja was illegally impeached) and Soyinka’s native Ogun State (when Governor Gbenga Daniel inspired legislative lawlessness in his gubernatorial dying days).

    Indeed, they practically did a pun on the famous author of The Man Died and his work: that the man died in the Nobel Laureate for his alleged quiet at constitutional outrages in Oyo and Ogun states; while jerking awake at the repeat of the same crime in their Rivers!

    But, of course, Clark and his “elders”, in their release, never bothered with the rigour of reason. All they barked, conceited folks, was the language of power, boasting neither wisdom nor reason.

    The whole thing was some dumb smartie’s response to the five northern governors’ “Save Democracy tour” to former President Olusegun Obasanjo (Jonathan’s estranged godfather), Gen. Ibrahim Babangida and Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, three former soldiers ironically pitched to help save democracy under Jonathan’s reckless assault!

    But again, the Clark gambit was a classic from the brilliant dullness of the Jonathan court: no tactics, no strategy, just stark power blundering and bumbling!

    Even then, if the so-called elders wilfully lost a bit of their wisdom in anticipation of some power gravy, can’t their young Turks at least work hard to safeguard the integrity of their claims?

    The Clark group made the fantastic claim that Soyinka kept mute during the legislative anomie in Oyo and Ogun states. But this claim is either criminal forgetfulness or plain mischief.

    On the Ladoja illegal impeachment, Soyinka called for Obasanjo’s impeachment, linking the Oyo legislative crisis to his complicity – just as Jonathan’s link to the present Rivers affront is crystal clear.

    “Obasanjo has acted sufficiently against the constitution to warrant his impeachment,” Soyinka declared on 20 January 2006. “There is more than enough evidence to warrant his impeachment”.

    That was even a case of 18 (a simple majority) removing the governor in a 32-member legislature, which nevertheless fell short of the constitutionally required two-thirds majority: not a case of Rivers’ “simple minority” of five versus 27! AFP, with Nigerian newspapers, reported the Soyinka stand.

    On the Gbenga Daniel legislative shenanigans in Ogun, where the minority G-9 overthrew the majority G-15, Soyinka was no less hard-hitting. “I wish to state, categorically, this cannot and must not be allowed to stand. I call on the citizens of the state to ensure democracy is restored. A minority” he insisted, “cannot sack a majority”.

    Indeed, since Soyinka’s famous “Daani Elebo” laconic putdown, he had visited every OGD misdeed with ringing condemnation, including dismissing OGD’s as “government by billboard”.

    But where was Clark’s beloved presidential godson in all of these? Feigned culpable disinterest enough to name and retain Daniel as his South West presidential campaign coordinator! For Jonathan, it was, it is and ever shall be: to win and keep power, every constitutional breach is tolerable!

    All these were in the public space. They are eminently verifiable with a push of the computer keyboard. Yet, Clark and his elders made such an outlandish claim! Might these elders suffer criminal senility, just to patch up the ultra-bad case of their beloved godson?

    Even if Soyinka had kept mum: does that justify the criminality in the Rivers Assembly of five (with a fake mace to boot!) trying to overthrow the will of 27, simply because of collusion from Jonathan’s Nigeria Police? That is the futility and hollow arrogance of power, while these so-called South-South elders ought to have built their case on rigour and reason. It falls flat – even in the ears of the dumb!

    But Soyinka was right: if Obasanjo had been impeached for the Ladoja outrage or Jonathan seriously reprimanded for playing dumb, for electoral gain, on the OGD-inspired Ogun legislative crime, this nonsense would not have repeated itself; and the Clark “elders” would not ridicule themselves with woolly thinking to back constitutional evil.

    But maybe it is good Jonathan is pushing his good luck. And maybe, if he pushes it enough, he just might be impeached to avert any future presidential rascality! Did these elders ever think of this dire possibility?

    Really, it is amusing Clark of all people would doubt Soyinka’s total commitment to a Nigeria driven by equity, justice and fair play, and not arbitrary power. Indeed, when Soyinka landed in Ibadan in 1969, after his Civil War Kaduna incarceration, his first response to the war-time jingle, “To keep Nigeria One …” was a snappy riposte: “Justice must be done!”

    A younger Clark was busy collaborating with the same northern forces he now wants to demonise, to willy-nilly protect his godson – a power he doesn’t even have. But that is the way of Nigeria’s power men and women of all seasons!

    Soyinka comes from a diametrically opposed culture: justice men and women of all seasons. And names like Obafemi Awolowo, Tai Solarin, Ayodele Awojobi, Gani Fawehinmi, Femi Falana – do they ring a bell? They stand for justice and fair play and would battle anyone, no matter where he comes from, even within their own Yoruba stock, that essays impunity.

    So those orchestrated merchants of vulgar abuse, who claim the Yoruba are their problems because Soyinka told Jonathan to rein in his henchmen and women in Port Harcourt, miss the point.

    The Nigerian Presidency is not South-South property. Whoever occupies that post must play by the rules or face the flak of right-thinking citizens – Nigeria is a republic, after all! So it is with President Jonathan.

    As for Clark’s grouse with the visiting northern governors, the late Chuba Okadigbo called it “political arithmetic”. If Jonathan, with his power delusion and certified incompetence, alienates a wide swath of the North and a good chunk of the South West, how does he hope to win a second term? Indeed, if his party is in disarray and he is, for ego, planting further insurrection in his back yard, how does his centre hold?

    Elders are supposed to be wise. Clark and co must do some hard thinking, save Jonathan from self-inflicted ruin and stop playing to juvenile gallery.

     

  • In America: The Trayvon Martin verdict

    In America: The Trayvon Martin verdict

    As I write these lines, protests are being staged in more than 100 cities against the discharge and acquittal by a Florida court of George Zimmerman, the neighbourhood vigilante who confronted an unarmed African American teenager, Trayvon Martin, against advice from the police, and then shot him dead in the fight that ensued.

    Martin was on a visit, with his father, to a gated community in Sanford, central Florida. He had gone to a store to buy some snacks, and was on his way back at dusk when Zimmerman, a mixed-race Hispanic, spotted him and immediately called the police to report that a suspicious person was in the neighbourhood.

    The police, it is necessary to re-state, had asked him not to go after the person. But Zimmerman did.

    A fight broke out. As Zimmerman’s bloodied head showed, he took a bad beating. According to his testimony, which Martin was not around to contest – nor any eyewitness for that matter — Martin had knocked him to the ground, banged his head on the concrete floor repeatedly, and was reaching for the gun Zimmerman was wearing in his holster with intent to kill him. Zimmerman reached the gun first, and shot Martin in self defence.

    It took 44 days and a national uproar for the police to arrest and question Zimmerman about the killing. The police chief said that, under the circumstances, Zimmerman had committed no crime. He had merely stood his ground.

    Bowing to pressure from a public that judged his remarks insensitive and casuistic, the police chief resigned. He now stands vindicated, Florida-style.

    A six-person jury, all women five of them white and the other ‘Hispanic,’ returned the verdict that, under Florida law, Zimmerman had reason to fear for his life and acted justifiably.

    The verdict has ignited a debate about an issue that the prosecution and the defence skirted throughout the trial – race, the “colour line” as W.E.B Du Bois, the pre-eminent African American scholar of the last century called it.

    Du Bois, who was no romantic, believed that the colour line would be the problem of his century. It is the problem of the 21st century as well, and not just in America. And it may well continue even into the next century. The noted socio-economist and Nobelist, Gunnar Myrdal in his classic study of race in the United States characterised being black in America as a caste condition – a condition from which it is impossible to escape.

    You can shed your class or your religion or your tastes or your habits or your accent or your diction, but you cannot shed your skin. Some persons of colour do crash the racial barrier —they call it “passing” — but they are the exceptions, and the consequences are not always pleasant.

    This race-based caste system is not as deeply ingrained, as rigidly ascriptive as in India, for example. But it operates all the time, in ways subtle and unsubtle. And race itself is a constant subtext.

    The Trayvon Martin verdict may not be about race principally. But race definitely played a part in the tragedy that claimed the young man’s life. If he had been a young white man, it is unlikely his presence in the community – not loitering, not wandering aimlessly but heading to the house of his father’s girlfriend – would have attracted Zimmerman’s attention to the point that he would call the police and go after him despite instructions to the contrary.

    There was a time when bells rang out loud in department stores to put security guards on notice at the approach of African-Americans who were generally regarded as potential shoplifters. Now the surveillance is more subtle, even if no less discomfiting. You are asked whether you need help, and given the kind of suffocating attention other patrons rarely get.

    The case of Dr Ruth Simmons illustrates just how far that practice continues. Dr Simmons, eminent literary scholar and the first black president of an Ivy League institution, Brown University, in Rhode Island — it was at her instance, by the way, that our late and much-lamented compatriot, the literary titan Chinua Achebe, relocated from Bard College, New York — one day went shopping, or just looking through stuff at one of New York ’s very famous department stores.

    As she headed toward the exit, a security guard stopped her and asked to inspect her purse. She obliged. She had bought nothing, and her purse contained nothing incriminating. But the guard was not satisfied.

    The guard took her to a private room, and there gave her a most intrusive and degrading frisking. Still he found nothing. For him, it was all in a day’s work, until the store learned the next day the identity of Dr Simmons from her attorney. She graciously accepted their apologies and made no issue of the matter. That was racial profiling at work.

    At American diners, you no longer find the kind of creeping discrimination on plaques in hotels in the former racist enclaves of Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola and South Africa that proclaim “Right of admission reserved.” But it is never far from the surface.

    Whenever I dine out, I survey the scene, looking out for the good tables where one can stretch one’s feet and generally compress, and watch where the waiter will seat me. If he or she seats me near the toilet or the radiator or facing a blank wall when better-appointed tables are available, I demand to be seated elsewhere and make mental a note of the encounter.

    Next, I pay close attention to how I am being waited on vis-à-vis other patrons. If they just slap the plate on the table and move on but fuss on diners of a different colour, it confirms my worst fears. When I finish eating, I clean my mouth with the napkin, take the check to the counter and pay the exact amount on it, leaving nothing for the waiter.

    The waiter in turn rejoices that he or she didn’t waste precious energy fussing on an African American who, true to type, does not reward hospitality. If the service is good and the waiter pleasant, I give the customary hospitality of between 15 and 20 percent. But I doubt whether that changes the perception of the African American as a tightwad. The waiter might just conclude that the individual is different. And the cycle perpetuates itself.

    Going about life in this manner can sometimes subvert the moral law that dwells in each of us. An expatriate Nigerian friend was walking from the parking lot to his office one wintry morning when the young white woman ahead of him, a secretary, lost her balance and fell.

    “I hope you are all right,” he said to her and walked on.

    “How very ungallant,” I remonstrated. “That’s un-African.”

    “Siddon there, Johnny-just-come,” he shot back. “If I had pulled her up and she later reported that I was fondling her under the pretext of helping her, nobody would give me the benefit of the doubt.”

    The fellow, I should add, always dresses formally no matter the time of day, in the belief that the police are less likely to mess with an African American attired like a professional.

    There you have it, the insidious and sometimes morally corrupting legacy of racism.

    No society is perfect, and America has come a long way indeed. Who among us ever believed that in his or her lifetime America would elect and re-elect a black man president? Those marching in “Justice for Trayvon” rallies across America belong in all colours and races. I have experienced great generosity and kindness and courtesy from most of those I have met here.

    But I also know many who have suffered racial indignities.

    It used to be said at least in recent times that sport and entertainment transcend race. But some of the most bigoted things I have ever read relate to two of the most outstanding African American athletes of this age – Tiger Woods and Venus Williams. And, oh, you should hear or read some of the things they say or write about Michelle Obama.

    Also, who can forget how European soccer fans throw bananas at players of African descent on the pitch as if they were starving monkeys and taunt them to distraction by recreating the noises of chimpanzees?

    The Trayvon Martin verdict may not principally centre on race. But you cannot isolate race from it any more than you can isolate it from the facts of contemporary life in America and Europe. The colour line, alas, is also the problem of the 21st century.

    You can believe that the law took its mysterious course in the Zimmerman trial, and yet show some empathy for two parents who lost their son. But it is hard to see Trayvon Martin as anything else but a victim.