Category: Tuesday

I have been doing some hard thinking lately on the constitution, especially that aspect of it which, according to some of the most learned persons in the land and indeed the whole world on such matters, stipulates that no candidate can be duly elected President of this Federal Republic unless that candidate wins at least 25 percent, or one-fourth, of the total votes cast in Abuja Federal Capital Territory,  or Abuja FCT.

No shaking.  No approximations.

That provision, these authorities insist, is an iron law or, to employ a more fancied term, a categorical imperative.  You and your party may win the majority in each of the 36 states of this Federal Republic; you may harvest every vote in every precinct in each of the 774 Local Government Areas of the country, and you may even have won the overwhelming majority of the votes cast in the Federal Capital Territory that is the nation’s Magic Kingdom. 

But unless you win at least one-quarter of those votes, you have laboured in vain. If you fall short by a single vote, you have laboured in vain.

This, according to these learned authorities, is the sober, unambiguous position enjoined by an unsentimental construction of the matter by the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as Amended.   That has been the law of the land. Think realpolitik.

Once upon an earlier silly season, the country was confronted with the calculus of what constituted in demographic and plebiscitary terms, two-thirds of the 19 states comprising     the Federation.  In the run-up to the 1979 General Election, the Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO) had held at every opportunity the answer was 13 states.

Until Richard Akinjide the legal wunderkind, acting on intelligence indicating that the NPN’s Presidential candidate, Shehu Shagari would win 25 percent or more of the total votes cast in each of at least two two-thirds of the states in Nigeria States threw a deus ex machina into the works.  Two-thirds of 19 as every elementary school pupil can figure out, is 12 2/3, not 13,  Akinjide deposed in the manner of the precise school teacher he once was.

There was just this little problem that the NPN candidate Shehu Shagari, polled a little under 20 percent, or one-fifth, in a 13th state, Kano just a little under 20 percent, or one-fifth of the total votes there.

As they had been iterated and reiterated by FEDECO officials and understood by the general public, Shagari’s showing fell considerably short of the stipulation.

Nothing to worry about, as Akinjide might have assured FEDECO chairman Michael Ani, not the most patient of bureaucrats, flummoxed that the wheels he had refined and perfected to meet any contingency in what was already being called over-engineered election machine  were in danger of coming off when with regard to a 13th state.

The law meant simply that, in this particular instance, a candidate needed to win only one quarter of the votes cast in at least two-thirds of the states in Nigeria,  –i.e., 12 2/3 states, not 13.   That formulation tipped the scale in Shagari’s favour, and he was declared winner all the way to Supreme Court.

The law cannot contemplate an absurdity, the jurists maintained portentously; then they went ahead to deliver an absurdity by reducing Kano, the state with the largest number of parliamentary constituencies, to a hypothetical 13th state.

They laid it down, however, that this was not to be cited as a precedent -not out of timidity or diffidence, you understand, but because of the time-honoured practice that the highest court in the land cannot be bound by such means, but because doing so might insulate it from legal developments in juristic science or perpetuate error.

Just to make sure that kind of thing never happened again, the departing military removed that lacuna from the draft of the constitution they signed into law.  And, for good measure, every revision of the Constitution has ensured that the number of states in the Federation was divisible four.

How could they have known that additional engineering could only lead to the recognition of Abuja FCT as a super-state and its residents as super-citizens whose votes outweigh the voters of all other citizens put together in the constitutional order?

But that is where we are today.  And because of this, as well as alleged sundry irregularities, many learned persons are demanding that the last General Election be annulled and a new one ordered.

Easy gentlemen, easy.  Can’t you see – and seize – the opportunities created by the new jurisprudence to clear the mess, the jiggery-pokery in the electoral laws and sanitize for all the time the theory and practice of psephology in our clime?

All the best authorities agree that even local government elections in Nigeria are over-regulated.  When it comes to national elections, to call them over-regulated is too courteous. They are prone to manipulation at every conceivable point.  Instead of pillorying election officials, we should be praising and rewarding them for doing the impossible time and again under the most arduous circumstances.  It is a wonder that they get any results at all.

To start with, the sheer scale and complexity of the exercise almost defy human ingenuity. Local Council elections are daunting enough.  The cost, in these disarticulated times, is simply insane.  Then the time lost to productivity, the court hearings, the appeals and cross-appeals – the whole thing is simply unsustainable.  The logistics is maddening.

To say nothing of the paperwork even in this digital age.  And the damage the whole thing does to the soul, to social relations, and to our common humanity.  Is this not too high a price to pay for representative government, even at its most productive and beneficial?  When it consists in layer upon layer of dysfunction, it is time to embrace any alternative that promises even a smidgen of redemption.

Now that the entire electorate in all disparities has been distilled into one compact geographic space  – Abuja FCT – for the purpose of a presidential election, the whole thing can be completed in a few hours after a leisurely Sunday lunch. Residents only, please.  Identification cards not transferable.

Registration of qualified residents – fewer than 75, 000 by one account – and a handful of officials selected from among residents should take no more than an hour.  For actual voting and toting things up, allow one additional hour each.  Proclamation of results, one hour.

Set aside one full day following the post-election petitions, if only to indulge the most obstinate litigants. But no lawyers, please.   Absolutely no lawyers of any stripe.  No media advisers or strategists of any kind. The entire Abuja FCT electorate will sit as a jury and determine. the final outcome of the election.  

No appeals will be countenanced.  No obfuscations No magomago.  No wuruwuru.

To consecrate this reform into law should be the first of business of the Tenth National Assembly.

Moshood Olawale Kashimawo, Abiola, winner of the 1993 presidential election who was prevented from taking office by a confederacy of military, civilian and foreign interests, and was done to death in captivity in 1998, would have been 86 years old on July 7.  Finally and fittingly, the nation has acknowledged and honoured Abiola’s sacrifice and example through his collaborator, President Bola Tinubu, as “a true hero of democracy.”

Moshood Abiola was an unlikely candidate for political martyrdom or indeed for martyrdom of any kind.

He had entered politics almost as a pariah who regarded money as the measure of all things.  He had everything that money could buy.  And he was not apologetic or coy about it. He flaunted his wealth even when putting some of it to serve beneficient ends.

But his compassion was genuine.  He held it as article of faith that anyone who was in a position to show compassion but failed to do so would never find favour with Allah.  He would recite in English, Arabic and Yoruba, passages from the Bible and the Quran to that effect.  And he lived every day by that creed.

Abiola’s compassion and public-spiritedness won him a great deal of public attention, even respect, but not much love nor significant following, as he discovered when he entered politics in 1978 as a card-carrying member of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) and entered his senior wife, Simbiat, as candidate for a Senate seat from Ogun on that party’s platform, in a state that was fanatically loyal to Obafemi Awolowo’s Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN). 

She lost by a huge margin.

Abiola’s position as chief executive of ITT in Nigeria did not help matters, given its notorious complicity in the overthrow of the democratically-elected Socialist government of President Salvadore Allende Gossens in Chile, and its notoriety for unsavoury business practices, which led the contrarian Afro-beat king, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, to mock the global brand as “International Thief-Thief,” or global robber.

ITT had won huge telephony contracts in Nigeria and its contractors had dug up all major streets in Lagos for telephone cables.  The work was moving at a very slow pace, putting residents, especially motorists, to great inconvenience.

Abiola himself seemed to have compounded matters by distributing to members of the Constituent Assembly debating the draft constitution for the Second Republic, a sophisticated, multi-function ITT  electronic calculator.  Not a few Nigerians interpreted it as an attempt to buy influence.

But what galled the teeming supporters of the  UPN, which governed the Yoruba states and             Bendel—what used to be Western Nigeria during the First Republic, but was in the opposition in the Second Republic—was the virulently anti-UPN stance of Abiola’s Concord newspaper group.

It was as if those newspapers had it as their goal to take Awolowo and the UPN out of political reckoning.  Even if they had been set up by the NPN and not by one of its well-heeled members, they could not have been more pro-NPN.  A large portrait of President Shehu Shagari graced the lobby, next to a portrait of Abiola’s, in the editorial offices of the Concord Press, in Ikeja.

In short order, they published a sensational story claiming that Awolowo had improperly acquired vast tracts of landed property in Maroko, Lagos, while falsely and hypocritically parading himself as a socialist devoted to the public welfare. 

They followed with another story, about another allegedly improper acquisition of landed property in Lagos, by Lateef Jakande, the UPN Governor of Lagos State, who enjoyed a reputation for probity and a Spartan lifestyle.  Then, they took on the UPN Governor of Ogun State, Chief Olabisi Onabanjo, claiming that he had improperly dipped into the public treasury for a lavish private vacation in the UK.

These stories delighted Awolowo’s political opponents in the NPN and other parties and infuriated the UPN’s teeming supporters.  In court hearings, the stories on Onabanjo and Jakande were held to be false and defamatory, and both plaintiffs were awarded substantial damages.  Awolowo’s lawsuit was still wending its way through the courts when Awolowo died in 1987.

Abiola’s romance with the NPN did not survive the 1983 presidential election.  In keeping with its claim to having a “national outlook,” the party had at its inception adopted a policy of “zoning” the presidency.  In practice, this meant that if a president from one zone had served his term, the party would give its ticket to a candidate from another zone.

Abiola had sought the NPN’s ticket for the 1983 presidential election.  A stalwart of the party from the North, Umaru Dikko, declared with petulant scorn that the presidency of Nigeria was not “for sale.”

So, the NPN could draw on Abiola’s wealth, but would not countenance his seeking its presidential ticket?

That was it.

Abiola stomped out of the NPN and never looked back.  He also tried to mend fences with individuals and groups from whom he had been estranged by his exertions in furthering the NPN’s cause.  Public appreciation for his philanthropy turned to respect for his person, and the respect turned into admiration.

But it was when Abiola declared for the Social Democratic Party (SDP) on the return to party politics in 1988 – when he finally got his politics right by embracing the progressive political tradition of the states carved out of former Western Nigeria – that he began to attract the devoted following that translated into the massive electoral support so crucial to his victory in the 1993 presidential election.

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It was this mass support that animated the struggle for the actualisation of Abiola’s electoral mandate and kept alive much of the passion surrounding the events subsumed under the evocative label of “June 12.”

If Abiola had not got his politics right, if he had, for example, cast his lot with the National Republican Convention (NRC) and run on that platform, it is doubtful whether he would have enjoyed that kind of electoral support.

This massive support, it is necessary to insist, has less to do with his being Yoruba than with his being the standard bearer of the party that was “a little to the left,’ one whose ideology accorded with that of the Yoruba.  After all, Ernest Shonekan, whom Babangida foisted on Nigeria as Head of his “Interim National Government” was Yoruba.  But the Yoruba rejected him roundly.  General Olusegun Obasanjo, who is also Yoruba, earned the fewest votes in Yorubaland when he ran for president in 1999 under the banner of the conservative PDP.  Running as an incumbent four years later, he hardly fared better.

We will never know whether Abiola would have made a good president.  After Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) decimated the middle class and pauperised the mass of the people, expectations ran high that an Abiola Presidency would improve the lot of the ordinary citizen in the short term, if not immediately.  Abiola had pivoted his campaign on Hope—hope for a better future, at a time when hope was in short supply.  He was going to tackle poverty frontally and help eradicate it.

In the popular consciousness, he seemed uniquely qualified for the task.  Born into and reared in dire poverty, he had become a multi–billionaire, with a business empire spread across the world.

By a curious coincidence, the price of imported milk, rice, and tomato puree had come down substantially in the weeks after the election. Around town, the word was that, as a gesture of goodwill to mark Abiola’s coming, importers had decided to reduce the prices of some commodities.  Whether this was true or not, the average consumer took the price reductions as a sign of the good times that would roll in when Abiola took charge.

The quest for the Presidency changed Abiola in significant ways, according to some members of his campaign team and senior aides. Gone was the brashness of those days when he regarded money as the measure of all things.  He learned to stoop to conquer.  He became a good listener and a patient conciliator.  He encouraged those around him to tell him what he needed to know rather than what they thought he would like to hear.  He became less impulsive and more deliberative. Worldly pleasures counted for less and less in his preoccupations.

Before he secured the SDP ticket, so un-organised was Abiola it was a surprise he ever got anything done. The campaign imposed some order and discipline on his proceedings, and he seemed to have embraced this new approach as a better way of carrying on in the public realm he was about to enter.

Before 1993 and subsequently, the legitimacy of persons elected to the political leadership of Nigeria was always disputed.  In the 1964 general election, the first after independence, the ceremonial president, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, was loath to invite the incumbent Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, to form a new government, persuaded that the outcome of a poll boycotted by the opposition for the most part could not be said to reflect the true wishes of the people.

In 1979, it was a mathematical sleight of hand that awarded the presidency to Shagari. Throughout his first term, his legitimacy was always in contention. The NPN went on to rig Shagari into office in 1983, in a manner so brazen that the military had to step in to stave off violent protests in many parts of Nigeria.

The 1999 general election that produced General Obasanjo was held under a constitution that had been kept a closely-guarded secret. The 2003 sequel was, according to local and international observers, the most fraudulent they had ever witnessed.  The 2007 contest was more of the same.

The 1993 election delivered a clean, pan-Nigeria mandate and conferred on Abiola a legitimacy that no Nigerian president before or since has been able to claim or enjoy. Abiola showed that, in Nigeria, elections can be won without the organised rigging that has been the bane of Nigerian politics.

To the very end, he resisted every pressure, discounted every threat, and spurned every blandishment the military regime and its foreign collaborators contrived.  His tenacity surprised the vast majority of Nigerians who did not know him well and those who knew him only in caricature.

They thought that, faced with the prospect of being put to the slightest inconvenience, to say nothing of being jailed, losing his vast financial empire and perhaps, his life, Abiola would cut a deal, put the best face on it, and move on.

Even some of those close to him thought him feckless, like the Concord editorial writer who told me on the eve of the 1993 election that, even at that stage, Abiola could still be bought or bribed off the race.  Abiola, he said, saw the election as nothing more than an opportunity to add one more feather to a cap that was already chockfull of feathers, and would gladly drop the idea if the price was right.

The fellow was wrong, as was everyone who thought likewise.

Abiola had entered Nigerian politics almost as a pariah.  He departed the political scene and the world almost sainted by his teeming supporters, with whom he refused to break faith. His influence lives on.

This profile of Abiola first appeared in my 2010 book, Diary of Debacle:  Tracking Nigeria’s Failed Democratic Transition (1989-1994).

No response short of the outpouring of grief and mourning across Nigerian universities, institutions, of further learning and media houses could have done justice to the memory of Dr Lai Oso, a professor of journalism at the Lagos State University and dean of its School of Communication from 2011-2015, since news broke of his death this past weekend.

Oso died in a motor accident between Abraka, in Delta State, and the Edo State capital, Benin City.  He died in harness, in the line of duty. He was returning from Abraka, where he had gone to serve as an external examiner in mass communication when the accident occurred.

Something tells me that if he could stand by unobtrusively and watch it all, Oso, professor of journalism, and most recently, dean of the School of Communication of Media Studies at the Lagos State University, Ojo, would have done so somewhat bemused.

Though he was a serious and industrious student, one of the best I have had the privilege and pleasure of teaching here and in the United States, he never took himself too seriously, no matter the occasion.

Oso was the one who always spoke out and asked questions in that rich baritone that filled the room. He was totally unpretentious and often came across to some as boisterous, but his boisterousness was not the flippant kind.  It was rooted in his self-confidence and in  his mastery of material and occasion.  He was never superficial.

Back then, a Second Upper represented superior academic achievement in the university.  It still does, but not to the same extent.  Today, the inordinately large number of students graduate with a Second Upper each year, but it is more a sign of grad inflation than of a quantum leap in scholarly achievement. Their skills set and the general bearing of their products often leave much to be desired.  

In Oso’s case, scholarly erudition, conviction, self-confidence, and, yes, a robust sense of humour enriched by a penchant for repartee, resided in the same person.

A perceptive student, he delineated his area of future scholarly inquiry early and made it the focus of his work.  Fascinated by Marxism, not as a political ideology, but as a framework for the study and analysis of social phenomena.

For his final-year project, Oso applied that framework to examine how industry and trade unions contend to shape the news of the day.  Although I took more than a passing interest in the project, I cannot now categorically assert that he executed it under my supervision.  But I remember it well and profited from its insights.

This perspective, called the political economy approach to the study of the media, informed his reporting for the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).  It was sharpened at the University of Leicester, the leading graduate communication programme in the UK, where he earned his doctorate in mass media research, and has perfused his numerous scholarly publications.

The political economy approach, also called the critical-intellectual approach, is what distinguishes European media scholarship from the American approach, which one of its pioneers described as “administrative.”

The administrative approach takes the media as given, and explores how to use them to certain ends, such as selling more goods, winning elections, or bringing about behavioural and attitude change.  It rarely questions, to cite a trite example, whether more soap should in fact be sold; instead, it seeks to determine how the media can be used to sell more soap.  It rarely questions the goals of national development; rather, it explores how the media can be used to promote them.  It is shot through and through with metrics that are at best indicative of a race in progress.

The critical intellectual approach, on the other hand, draws on insights from history, philosophy, literature and the social sciences in its analysis of media, which it regards as the province of cultural studies.  There is a prescriptive tenor to it, an iteration of what roles media should play in society, and an abiding concern with ethics.  It criticizes the existing order and seeks to replace it with something more humane.

The two cannot of course be placed in separate, water-right compartments. There is always a bit of the one in the other and, vice versa, a bit of the other in the one.  No body of work falls entirely in one tradition.  In the end, it is a matter of degree more than anything else.

It was in the critical-intellectual tradition that Oso situated his scholarship. By one account, he was one of the five most published mass communication and journalism educators in Africa.  He felt more at home in the classroom and at seminars and symposiums, where he could directly influence and inspire more minds than in the deanery.

I last saw Oso in 2016, at the Ade Ajayi Hall when mass communication alumni of the University of Lagos marked the 50th anniversary of the programme’s founding.  At the plenary, Debo Adesina, then head of Guardian newspapers, presented a recondite paper on the ferment in the media, given the exponential growth in the technologies of communication and information.

Without having read the paper previously, Oso gave an off-the-cuff review that left everyone in awe of his grasp of the issues.

When I was conferred with DAME’s Journalism Lifetime Achievement Award for 2016, it was Oso I asked to accept the trophy on my behalf.  Thereafter, our contacts stagnated. The trophy sits somewhere in his office as I write this piece an indication of when my direct contact with him ended.

Lai Muraina Oso was 67.  His death has robbed the community of media scholars and practitioners in Nigeria of one of its most influential voices.

The greatest tribute Oso’s colleagues and students can pay him is to advance his tradition of media scholarship, activism and advocacy, and to bring to bear on their work the courage and integrity that marked his career.