The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • As they muddle through

    As they muddle through

    The left them last week where they were “unveiling” those personages who had slogged it through the primeval forest of Nigerian politics and “emerged” into broad daylight in fairly good shape, needing only to have the detritus of that environment scrubbed off them. Others in the attentive audience were making the direst predictions about the 2023 General Election and the future of Nigeria.

    They are still where we left them.

    The unveiling has continued apace.

    This week, Governor Ahmadu Fintiri of Adamawa State and PDP gubernatorial candidate, is scheduled to unveil Professor Kaletapwa Farauta, vice chancellor of Adamawa University, Mubi, as his running mate.  About time they unveiled a woman, for a change.

    First-time visitors to these parts who are hoping that the unveiling will satisfy their kinkiest fancies will be disappointed.  There is nothing in it for voyeurs of any stripe.  The good lady, a professor of agriculture technology education, is only being formally presented to the Adamawa electorate, sir.

    She will be lucky to be spared the sniggering to which academics in the bureaucracy are usually subjected.

    I am thinking of Professor Essien Essien-Udom, the noted University of Ibadan political scientist and pioneer vice chancellor of the University of Maiduguri, who went on to serve as secretary to the old South Eastern State Government and Head of Service under the military administration of Jacob Esuene, from 1973-75.

    On his last day on the job, they rounded up the staff for a farewell party, an afterthought, at which they gave him high praise for bringing an academic mindset to practical problems of administration. As he made to speak, thinking that they would accord him the privilege of making brief remarks as is the custom on such occasions, the police band cued in the National Anthem, and the event was over.  So was Essien-Udom’s unhappy stint in the bureaucracy.

    I have it on good authority that Vice President Yemi Osinbajo is endlessly derided in Aso Rock as VP (Academic), riffing on a familiar designation in the university system from whence he came.  They snigger and titter about his predilection for whipping out his iPad to take notes or trotting to the overhead projector at the slightest provocation or no provocation at all to make a PowerPoint presentation.

    The sniggering can only have grown more corrosive, I suspect, following the unceremonious collapse of Osinbajo’s quixotic quest.

    Add to this the sexism that also pervades the political and cultural landscape, not forgetting the patriarchy, and you have some idea of what awaits Professor Farauta if she becomes Deputy Governor of Adamawa.  Don’t put her down as DG (Academic), please.

    It is a measure of the frenetic pace of the political process in Nigeria that many can be forgiven if they no longer remember a good many of the persons involved, nor the particulars thereof.

    I was particularly bemused by the case of the quester for a Senate seat from Ondo who took things into his own hands concerning the rank inconstancy, nay the brazen duplicity, that has been ingrained in the body politic.

    This is the way it operates:  A quester approaches a person whose vote at some crucial stage in the political sweepstakes could make or mar the quester’s fortune: give him one huge leap closer to the Senate and great expectations, sentence him to a despondent return to the Ekiti interior.

    The quester knows this, and so does the person with the vote. They strike a bargain.

    For casting the vote for him, the quester covenants to give the owner of the ballot a house, an undeveloped parcel of land, a sports utility vehicle in good working order, or some other valuable item, depending on how desperate the parties are, or how much “juice” the position being sought can reasonably be expected to yield.

    Read Also: Yoruba elders to Tinubu: your victory in 2023 certain

    Quester and voter shake hands and part, quester looking forward to E-Day with great expectations, and voter buoyed by his good fortune.  But there is more for the voter where that came from; much more.

    Soon enough, others come calling and the voter pledges his ballot to another quester, for a richer harvest.

    The man with the vote pledges it to five different questers and “obtains” appropriately from each There is more than a hint of skullduggery here, but not to worry.  At least one, perhaps several of the obtainers will deliver for the quester, and he will never know who among them has flagrantly breached the protocol.

    In the Senate primaries from Ondo State, it turned out that an aspirant who had given out a car in exchange for a vote got no vote at all.  Nought.  Zilch.  Nada.   Meaning that not even the obtainer cruising around town in his car had bothered to vote for him.

    As soon as the results were announced, quester rented a team of policemen and headed for the home of the voter who had obtained a car from him grimly resolved to take the car back, since the fellow had failed to keep their bargain.

    This was not a singular case. I should report. Questers who have been swindled are moving to recover.  It has been a time of reckoning for disobliging obtainers and great is the fear that is sweeping their ranks.

    All this has raised an intriguing question.  Now, according to the best authorities, vote-selling and vote-buying are illegal and punishable.   When a disobliging voter refuses to hand back items obtained in consideration of voting for a quester, what is the quester to do?

    Is the deal legally enforceable?

    Watch out for the case of Quester v Obtainer coming soon to a court near you.

    The race is not for the swiftest, it has been said.  Nor is it for the first to plunge into it.  Otherwise,  Kogi Governor Yahaya Bello (GYB) would as of now be the prohibitive favourite to win the presidency.

    He was the first to make an earnest bid for the crown.  He turned the most routine event on his schedule into a presidential campaign event.  A GYB presidency, he proclaimed on billboards, was “God’s plan for Nigeria.”  He brandished his age as his principal qualification for the post.  He proclaimed at every chance that it was the turn of youths, with himself as their symbol and avatar, to rule Nigeria.

    He would guarantee safety and security and vanquish banditry in any guise.  Hadn’t he single-handedly barred the intractable Covid-19 from his domain even as it ravaged the nation-space and the world?

    Streams of “Youths for GYB” flocked week after week from the creeks of Bayelsa to the Kogi capital, Lokoja, to express solidarity with their hero and champion.  They returned to base heavily laden with cash and went back again and again for more.  Women, teachers who cannot remember when they last received their salaries in full;  even journalists, rallied for GYB and drew copiously on his war chest, said to be almost inexhaustible.

    Kogi bubbled with political activity while GYB was pursuing his flight of fancy.  By comparison, Lagos was sedate.  And Lokoja became the mecca of obtainers. But in the presidential primaries.  GYB barely registered.

    Today, Kogi has become a theatre of the banditry, the kidnappings and the killings he said could never occur in Kogi because of his expertise in national security issues.  GYB continues to tout that alleged expertise.

    Meanwhile, skepticism about 2023 continues to grow.  The misbegotten Constitutional Review embarked upon by the National Assembly is grounded.  Only eight of 36 states had voted on the more than 40 proposed amendments.  The chairman of the National Assembly’s Constitution Review Committee, Senator Ovie Omo-Age, says nevertheless that the review is still on course.

    A constitution that requires 40 amendments is not worthy of that name.  It is a document calling for comprehensive re-writing.  That task belongs to the people as constituent public, and must be done before everything else.

    For how much longer can they dodge it?

  • Tired president and angry legislators

    Tired president and angry legislators

    The ship of the Nigerian nation is at the mercy of a tired captain and distraught sailors and will require the grace of God to weather the turbulence of the 2023 channel. While President Muhammadu Buhari has openly expressed his desire to throw in the towel, he has by his action also shown lack of concentration or disinterest in the affairs of the Nigerian state. Perhaps, he is distraught that some of his closest aides have betrayed him, and despite his best efforts, the nation under his care is in peril.

    Those who have counselled that the president should be aided so he doesn’t drop the clay pot on a rocky terrain surely know what they are saying. Indeed, for some, it seems that the president might even be preparing for a life in neighbouring Niger Republic should the worst happen. With fire raging in his ancient Katsina, and even the northern elite redoubt, Kaduna, the president might be planning a retirement home amongst his famed cousins across the Nigerian border, damn the torrents of abuses.

    And how better to become the darling of the Nigeriens than to use what Nigerians don’t have, to make them happy. At least if Nigerians are ungrateful for all the tiring efforts of the president to get things going, perhaps his efforts would be appreciated by Nigeriens. So, in addition to the disgraceful effort of former Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, to build a railway into Niger Republic, while his oil producing state, Rivers, where the money comes from has none, the president has approved funds for fleet of vehicles for Niger Republic.

    So, while the main media is writing tepidly about the efforts of the president to show Nigeria’s large heartedness to their northern neighbour, which the president’s men are explaining as an act of diplomacy, the social media is feeding the appetite of Nigerians with fake videos of several hundreds of luxury cars on a low bed train purportedly going to Niger. Of course, those whose anger is being stoked would not bother to ask, where the train is coming from, since the Kastina-Niger train tracks have not started working.

    As the angry populace further abuse the president for his missteps, the president gets even more disconsolate at the people, and the mass discontentment that the unhappy relationship is breeding is a tinder box that could turn into a volcano. That is why those who are in a position to help the president to retrace his steps should step in, since some people are by nature fatalistic and may stand on the track starring at an approaching speed train.

    To make matters worse, the majority of the legislators are even angrier than the people, even though the cause of their anger is unrelated. On the part of legislators, most of them are angry that their tired captain has conscripted them to early retirement with the ship they have by mutual incompetence nearly wrecked. Despite their gross incompetence, they had hoped that the captain would, regardless of their performance, give them a return ticket to the gravy train. Unfortunately it didn’t happen, and they are now threatening fire and brimstone against their captain.

    In their angry state, they have completely abandoned the affairs of the Nigerian state. As one writer wrote, they have even abandoned their juicy oversight functions in the city of Abuja out of fear of the rodents feasting on the mess they helped the captain create. But that was after a feeble threat to impeach their captain should their redoubt remain threatened. Of course, the presidency has dismissed their threat as barking of toothless dogs. Even this column confirms that the legislators at the National Assembly are too stepped in comfort to engage in any wrestling bout.

    But what worries this column most, is that the attempt to further amend the 1999 constitution may be consumed by the imbroglio of the rudderless ship that our nation is turning into. As even the core beneficiaries of the defective constitution we operate have come to realise, there is the ever urgent need to add any incremental amendment to the dysfunctional 1999 constitution, as every National Assembly has the courage to make. Whether it is disentangling the national economy or tinkering with the impracticable security architecture, those kneeling on the neck of Nigeria needs to give her a break.

    And the only way to systematically untie the Gordon knot that the 1999 constitution has been is to incrementally amend the constitution. While the previous national assemblies have made some spirited efforts, not much has been achieved. And the present National Assembly led by Senate President Ahmed Lawan, and House of Representative Speaker, Femi Gbajabiamilla in their separate legislative agendas promised far-reaching amendments. Towards fulfilling that promise, the two chambers passed a total of 44 Constitution Review Bills, which were transmitted to the states for their legislative input.

    According to a recent report by this paper, only nine states have worked on the bills and submitted their decision to the review committee for further action. The process of amending the constitution is provided by section 9 of the 1999 constitution. Section 9(2) provides: “An Act of the National Assembly for the alteration of this constitution, not being an Act to which section 8 of this constitution applies, shall not be passed in either House of the National Assembly unless the proposal is supported by the votes of not less than two-thirds majority of all members of that House and approved by resolution of the Houses of Assembly of not less than two-thirds of all the states.”

    Section 9(3) further tightens the grip should the National Assembly wish to amend section 8 which provides on creating new states, new local governments and boundary adjustment; and Chapter IV and section 9 itself. With legislators at the state level tied to the apron strings of the state governors, who themselves are enmeshed in politics of 2023, there is worry that the proposed amendment may be jeopardised. To avoid a debacle, the leadership of the ruling All Progressive Congress should strike a bipartisan deal with the Peoples Democratic Party, to get two-third of states pass the bills.

    As those who thought that a defective federal constitution would favour them may have realised, the deformity is turning the nation into a worthless imbecile. For instance, the large swathes of the northern part of the country, warehousing minerals which have been abandoned in pursuit of the oil wealth of the Niger Delta, have turned to ungovernable spaces, where bandits help themselves with the abandoned minerals. Of note, our tired president and angry legislators should better be wary of a disenchanted mob at their gates.

     

  • Three tickets, three spins

    Three tickets, three spins

    Three tickets, three different spins.  Which of the spins would the voter buy?

    That’s the big question at this pre-electioneering spot, as all the parties eyeing presidential power 2023 keep their gun powder dry, for the looming vote banger.

    Primed, with their loud silence, are the two major parties: the ruling APC and lead opposition party, PDP.  Both seem to plot their next moves in relative quiet.

    Not so the Labour Party (LP), its spin-loving candidate, its thunderous partisans, playing the loud wannabe: blistering noise, showy acts and infantile stunts to grab attention; with fond hope that this hyper-activity would fill up LP’s yawning structural gaps.

    LP’s Peter Obi and his raucous crowd know their weaknesses perhaps more than they know their strengths.

    Forget the spin of Obi as champion of “youth” dreams: there is little or no difference between Obi as Igbo identity candidate for the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) in Anambra 2003, and Obi as LP’s emergency candidate for presidency 2023.

    It might have been 20 years between 2003 and 2023.  Obi might have traversed APGA and PDP, before berthing in LP as spruced-up candidate: a product of mutual hustling between desperate candidate and whoring platform.  Yet, Obi’s stark appeal hasn’t changed: the dream Igbo candidate.

    That, to be sure, is no crime, in a Nigeria still trying to evolve a national identity, from the present ethnic and — even worse — clannish outlook.  Still, that is the debilitating weakness of Obi, which his supporters, clever by half, try to spin as weaponized noise.

    Adams Oshiomhole, a tested veteran of Labour and mainstream political mobilization, saw through this vacuous strategy of social media noise, when he told his Arise TV panel of interviewers: “Time will tell.”

    All the noise from the Obi camp, he declared rather solemnly, could well be from the same set of computer whizzes dishing out Hail Mary propaganda from a couple of workstations!  Again, never mind the one-billion-man marches in cities!

    But even now, that noise is throwing up its inherent follies: Igbo youths, as rowdy as they come, and coastal activists, masquerading as pan-Nigeria “youths” in Obi’s social media megaphone; an Igbo youth brandishing a gun in a viral video, threatening to kill whoever did not vote Obi; gruff distemper and wild threats against partisan foes; and some rogue INEC staff planting a voter registration machine in the compound of a Catholic church in Lagos!

    No doubt.  Some Igbo interests are delirious about Obi’s presidential chances.  Again, that’s no crime; and they need not be defensive over their choice.  But beyond media noise, the challenge will be to win friends across ethnic and regional lines.  That could prove a bridge too far, though nothing is impossible.

    Besides, an Igbo quip, courtesy Chinua Achebe’s rich repertoire, hovers above Obi’s boisterous campaign: might their antelope be dancing itself lame before the real dance begins?  Time will tell!

    From that noisy zone, to some quieter quarters, starting with former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and his PDP.

    Atiku is bland though he postures to be something more, grandstanding to be some economic wit; and crowing to be some statesman.  On both ends, however, he is Teflon Abubakar.

    He appears everywhere but he’s so sparse, in actual conviction, to be nowhere, though he has a decent national reach.

    That would appear why he entered his PDP presidential nomination run on a simple, if tribal, thesis: in 2023, only a northerner could win PDP the presidency.  By winning the nomination ahead of an ever-bragging Nyesom Wike, his party appears to have sided with him, despite having Iyorchia Ayu, a northerner too, as national chairman.

    So, Atiku logically followed that initial thesis, with another simplistic move to pick his running mate: Ifeanyi Okowa, a southern Christian and ethnic western Igbo, even if some of his eastern Igbo kith-and-kin couldn’t resist the temptation that he might not be Igbo enough!

    By this fulfilment of “every righteousness”, to borrow that Biblical quip, Teflon candidate segues into a platform of convenience.  Besides, a Muslim northern candidate couples a Christian southern one — and open sesame, all the pressing problems in the land would vanish!

    Even then, PDP is facing early headwinds of a northern kraal: northerner presidential candidate, northerner national chairman, northerner Board of Trustees (BOT) chairman, which the Wike camp ruthlessly exposes for own intra-party gaming; but which the party hopes against hope would be buried by APC’s “Muslim-Muslim” ticket.

    The most fanatical of PDP supporters know the party is driven by nothing but raw power.  Grab power first and everything is added!  That was PDP yesterday.  That is PDP today.  That would be PDP tomorrow, world without end! — to luxuriate in another Biblical phrase.

    Even at this very challenging juncture, the PDP would play the vulture hovering over carrion: point cynical fingers, ruthlessly milk negative passion and hope to power home by default, not because it has credible answers to any issue; or because it posted better results during its 16-year rule, which served as grand nursery for today’s critical problems.

    So, grand cynicism to PDP is grand strategy.  In that, the party has a willing alliance in the media’s general penchant to howl over challenges, be coy over credible gains and hysterically flash a skewed mirror, which distorts and leads the voter to perdition.

    That is why, at every election year, the media plays the happy illusion of stagnation — which is nevertheless false, no matter the extant crushing challenges.

    That transits into the third ticket: APC’s Asiwaju Bola Tinubu/Alhaji Kashim Shettima, the so-called “Muslim-Muslim ticket”, over which many partisans can’t stop drooling.

    But Senator Shettima put the right spin on it when he told the press to stop chasing inanities and interrogate issues, fair and square: his gubernatorial record in war-torn Borno; Tinubu’s yeoman rescue of a sinking Lagos into the dynamo of an economy: now 4th biggest economy in all of Africa by gross domestic product (GDP).

    Though promising and ultra-rich in combined track records, it could be a difficult ticket to spin, now that President Muhammadu Buhari has become free football that every malevolent partisan kicks with gusto — too much emotions to think straight!

    But APC’s best way is to stick to real issues: interrogate PMB’s records in agriculture and infrastructure (even in the worst of times); and his scorecard of sane elections — and you’ll see he has out-performed his predecessors, who had a relative best of times; and put inflation, insecurity and continuous power challenges in proper perspectives.

    Three parties, three spins: LP’s be-Labour-ed bedlam; PDP’s vulture-like hovering over carrion; or APC’s tough chores to explain that Buhari-era pains are not certain death pangs, as boomed by the gloom-and doom orchestra, but really grim gains from a life-saving surgery, for a country that, for too long, has lived on borrowed air!

    Voters, beware! Don’t be scammed by false rallies, or by empty posturing!

  • Back on the beat

    Back on the beat

    Laid low since last February by major spinal surgery, the second in four years, I had all the time to attend closely to Nigeria’s unfolding political drama.  From the moment it was unveiled, or rather, from the moment it unveiled itself, since it is hard to say exactly when the veil was lifted, it bore the markings of a silly season to beat all silly seasons.

    More about the veil, shortly.

    From a cornucopia of media outlets, Nigerian and foreign, I was guaranteed the kind of access that only a few of those “on ground” could claim: a ring-side seat as it were, day after day.

    The news from home was almost always disconcerting, but I did not have the energy to be angry or mad.  Nor did I have the stamina to keep track of the shifting political alliances and the dizzying personnel changes. Yet, indifference was out of the question.

    It seemed best, under the circumstances, to while away the time taking note of some of its more diverting aspects, lexical and dramaturgical.

    Where to start?

    The point of departure has to be the opening act itself, the unveiling.  On any given day, a proposal, programme, project, or institution, is being unveiled in Nigeria.  It helps if the matter under reference is new, but a tweak here and a transposition there is all that an unveiling requires, plus all the pomp and circumstance that attended the original unveiling.

    The practice has now been extended to actual persons, especially persons of consequence. The APC presidential candidate, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, is set to inaugurate a 40-member Think Tank to, well, unveil his Election Manifesto.  He had spent much of the preceding weeks unveiling his running mate Kashim Shettima before the APC National Executive and a conclave of priests, now alleged to have been rented for the purpose.

    Is it so hard these days, pardon the digression, to find the genuine article that fake priests decked out in the most ludicrous costumes have to be pressed into ecclesiastic duty?

    Something tells me the PDP presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar will jet in from Dubai any moment from now to the Osun State capital, Osogbo, to unveil Ademola Adeleke, following his recent “emergence” as the state’s governor-elect. The unveiling should be quite a spectacle, especially if Adeleke gets a chance to show off his nerve-wracking choreographic prowess.  Just watching him do an impromptu jig from his vast repertoire is sure to drive many in the audience to the edge of exhaustion.

    Meanwhile, Adeleke is set to unveil this week his Transition Team headed by Professor Meyiwa Oladejo, a Doctor of Nuclear Medicine and a Fellow of the Euro(pean) Institute of Reticulo-endothelial Biology and Medicine, no less.

    The professor will need some unveiling of his own.  But the joke is on you, those who continually regard Adeleke as if there is nothing to him but those dancing feet.

    “Consensus” has made a spirited return to the grammar of politics, I can report.  Not since the manufactured debacle around “June 12” 1993 has that term resonated powerfully in political discourse.  Back then, Champion newspaper and its constituency never tired of calling for a “consensus candidate,” to supplant President-elect Moshood Abiola who won 19 states out of 30, as well as the Federal Capital Territory.

    This translates to 58 percent of the ballot and remains the clearest, cleanest and widest mandate that Nigerian electors have ever conferred on a presidential candidate.

    Still, they clamored for a “consensus candidate.”

    In the run-up to the recent party primaries, the call for a consensus presidential candidate issued loudest from some fringe aspirants who knew they had no chance of clinching the prize.  l am thinking of former Kwara Governor and more recently Senate president Bukola Saraki, now looking like a hustler on the sideline rather than a powerbroker, and Aminu Tambuyal of Sokoto State, his eyes forever trained on the main chance.

    None of the apostles of consensus was prepared to yield.  Each saw himself as the Consensus Candidate.  Meanwhile, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, up and running comme d”habitude, locked up the nomination, despite his former principal’s excoriation heard around the world.

    One of the most treacherous locutions in Nigeria’s political sociology bobbed up early in the silly season.  No prizes for figuring it out.  It is “third term,” whether actually proposed, casually insinuated, or merely whispered.  It is the political equivalent of a torpedo.  Ask former President Obasanjo.  Ask former President Goodluck Jonathan.

    Even President Buhari, usually so slow in reacting to political developments as to be practically lethargic, sensed the dark portent of that term when they said his “body language” suggested not merely that he might not be averse to a third term but that he was positioning himself for one.

    Buhari forcefully denied nurturing any third-term ambitions, and the matter ended there.

    But Jonathan, having learned nothing and forgotten nothing, allowed himself to be insinuated, in the eleventh hour as it were, into the process of crowning the presidential candidate of the major political parties.  He kept everyone guessing as to his political affiliation.  Apparently, they had led him to believe that Nigerians were yearning for him to return to power under any flag.

    Like Barkis, Jonathan was willing.  Sources close to the family said Herself the former First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan was more than enthusiastic to return to the chair of the African First Ladies Peace Mission that ended when her husband lost his re-election bid.

    The parties have since chosen their presidential candidates, But so what?

    Nigeria being Nigeria, anything can happen during the inordinately long pause between the party primaries and the elections. So don’t be surprised if the ever-obliging Dr Jonathan is trotted to the national political stage again, this time with Dame Patience up close.

    If Jonathan’s entry into the presidential race was puzzling, that of Central Bank governor Godwin Emefiele’s was mystifying.  Jonathan was at least a politician, though a largely ineffectual one.

    Emefiele had served as CBN Governor for some ten years and had seemed totally, if unsuccessfully, immersed in the task of general overseeing the economy

    If he had any political inclinations, he had kept them severely to himself.  Suddenly, his name found its way into the register of presidential aspirants.  And he was so coy about it.  No one knew for sure under which political platform he was making his quest.  He did not resign his position as required by law but sought to continue being the principal regulator of the economy, while at the same time being a major player in the overarching political game as a presidential aspirant.

    When challenged, Emefiele headed to the courts for injunctive relief.

    He has not been heard of in political circles since the primaries. The word out there among the conspiracy theorists is that he is being held in strategic reserve (no pun intended), to be sprung on the public when, not if, the 2023 blueprint will have collapsed.

    They also said the urbane and high-achieving former Lagos State governor and Minister for Housing, Babatunde Fashola, SAN, was especially favored to emerge as consensus president-in-waiting.  He would draw on the mass support the APC enjoys in the South-west while attracting little of the antagonism that trails it elsewhere.

    At some point, it almost seemed as if we were back in 1993, in military president Ibrahim Babangida’s transition programme, according to a noted analyst, “one of the most sustained exercises in political chicanery ever visited upon a people.”  They said the APC frontrunner Tinubu was going nowhere.  He would be disqualified on any number of vulnerabilities and technicalities.

    In whatever case, the elections would never hold, they said.  If they ever held, they would end in confusion.  No clear winner would emerge, and the result, in a clime perfused by malignant anti-social media platforms, would be sheer anarchy.

    And so on and so forth, only they didn’t say what would fill the void.

    Borrowing from the PDP’s playbook, a faction of the APC, with Buhari’s implicit support, launched a secret search for a consensus presidential candidate under a suffocating deadline.  And, presto, the party’s national chairman, Senator Ahmed Lawan, “emerged” as that candidate, just like that.

    You could almost hear the air being sucked out of Tinubu’s buoyant campaign for the APC ticket.  The rumor mill buzzed with reports that Tinubu was set to walk away from the party that he took a part that was second-to-none in forming and nurturing into the dominant force in Nigerian politics.

    At that point, moment executed a strategic counter-move that stunned everyone.  Going off-script        at a rally in the Ogun State capital, Abeokuta, and rebuking the state governor for inconstancy, he  recounted his labours for the party and asserted a claim to its presidential ticket.

    That performance breathed new life into Tinubu’s campaign.   He would go on to win the ticket by a landslide.

    But as his campaign gained new life, Atiku’s chugged on and an improbable wave of support for latecomer Peter Obi swept the social media, the violence that has been convulsing the country — the murderous zealotry of Boko Haram, the banditry, the savage killings, the kidnappings and general outlawry that had been convulsing the country went several frightful notches higher.

    The state has lost its primacy in the control and use of lawful force.   President Buhari seems listless, disconnected.  So self-assured and contumacious are the purveyors of terror that they openly taunted him and served notice the other day that they were coming to get him.

    Nigeria is not working.  This soulless federation is not working.

    A wave of pessimism is washing over the country demanding urgent, sincere and sustained efforts            to grapple with the crippling discontinuities of daily life in Nigeria.

    The country is awash in illicit arms. The enthusiasm that should undergird the General Election is eroding, to the point that many are questioning whether it is the answer to our woes.

  • Terror and banditry: the way forward

    Terror and banditry: the way forward

    As at 2014, Boko Haram’s “Islamic State” Caliphate controlled an area about the size of the five South East states, with all the administrative and operational structures, foreign recognition and partnership with other such fundamentalist terror groups across the world.

    Today, the caliphate has long ceased to exist, despite strong support from global networks to revive it as a success story of fundamentalist insurgency. The war is not yet over, but the insurgents have been knocked out of control, degraded and caged within some fringe areas of the North East. That is a remarkable success story by any standard, even though it has been slow and steady over seven years.

    South Africa’s corporate mercinary group (private army), in partnership with Nigerian military, first proved what is doable by knocking out the insurgents’ key operational and administrative structures in less than three months of relentless attacks in the early months of 2015. Many Boko Haram fighting units were either decimated or withdrew intact to remote forest areas to escape being hit.

    When the new Federal  Government came to power in 2015, it disengaged the mercenary group on the ground of national pride that Nigerian troops could do it alone. Boko Haram immediately launched desperate bids to retake their lost grounds, just as Nigerian troops consolidated on the success achieved by the mercenaries. Slowly but steadily, they pushed the insurgents out of their key areas. Thus, Boko Haram never recovered enough to re-establish its caliphate till date.

    Meanwhile, the insurgents were dissipating some of their fighters from the North East and relocating them to other places, particularly the big forests in North West and North Central, to team up and partner with pre-existing bandit groups in these areas to launch raids and attacks, abduct victims, and march them to the insurgents’ forest dens to negotiate for ransom.

    The security forces have not been able to offer effective response to this pattern. There have been a few success stories against the terrorist bandits.  But for the most part, the criminals are in control and making huge money from ransom payment,  becoming stronger, better armed and launching more audacious attacks, while the security forces look virtually helpless.

    Abuja, the nation’s capital, and its environs, have come under successful audacious attacks by the terrorist bandits.

    The Service chiefs and heads of other security agencies have gotten accustomed to the old ways. They are not innovative enough to land appreciable breakthroughs.

     

    Case study

    In the 1990s, a Russian passenger train was hijacked on its way from Kazakhstan, and was diverted towards Chechnya.  The hijackers threatened to blow up the train if there was any interference. But Russian troops launched an operation.

    A couple of crop-dusting planes (the type used to spray insecticide on large wheat farms) were sent with heavy loads of choking tear-gas to smoke the train along its rail route.  A couple of fighter jets hovered at higher altitude to engage any opportunity target. Mobile troops were also placed in strategic locations along the train route.

    That destabilized both the hijackers and the passengers; and the train could not be processed as planned before the troops swooped on them. Some hijackers were killed. Some managed to escape but were later caught. A few passengers died or were wounded in the melee.

    The Kaduna-Abuja train attack and kidnapping of 24 March 2022

    Within 24 hours, there were clues as to the location of the terrorist bandits and their kidnap victims. Imagine if the security troops had attacked the location(s) within one or two days, first bombarding the area with choking tear-gas, or fire from artillery guns or by advancing ground troops in armoured fighting vehicles, with a couple of helicopter gunships hovering overhead to engage opportunity targets!

    If it is night operation, appropriate illumination bombs (which are like pyrotechnics) would be used to light up the target area(s). Both the terrorists and their captives would be destabilised as the troops with protective gear swoop on them. The troops would have a medical team prepared to resuscitate kidnap victims with respiratory problem arising from tear-gas effect.

    Such operation could not be completely free of collateral damage, but the idea is to keep it to the barest minimum. The bigger picture is to hit hard at the terrorist bandits and severely degrade their capacity to mount such a large-scale operation, if not wipe out that particular group.

    As far back as the early 1970s, American troops in Vietnam had used air-sprayed Agent Orange, a gaseous spay, to defoliate thick jungles and make it possible to see hidden structures and human habitation from air surveillance. The leafs will drop off the trees in two to three days. In present day, better versions of the gas, with less effect on the environment, are available in the international market, and can be produced by any big pharmaceutical company.

     

    Kuje, Abuja, Prison Attack of July 2022

    About 200 well-armed terrorist bandits marched to the place at night and successfully attacked the prison, freed over 500 inmates, including more than 60 of their colleagues being detained there.

    Consider that within 10 minutes of the incident, all the people that matter in Abuja security circle must have heard about it through phone calls or signal message.  But they had no immediate response. Neither was there a viable contingency plan.

    It took over two hours to send reinforcement troops when the terrorists had finished and gone. This is unbelievable, happening in Abuja, the seat of power. The Service chiefs and their subordinate commanders, particularly those entrusted with the security of Abuja, should hide their faces in shame.

     

     Way forward

    In governance, there are some areas that may require the government to partner with the private sector to achieve the desired goal. That is called public-private-partnership (PPP).

    PPP is sometimes applicable to security operations, particularly in developing nations that don’t have top-notch technological wherewithal. There are foreign technical teams that have the expertise, the right connection and the tools to do the job.

    They could use their links to guide an orbiting spy satellite to zoom in on an area of interest and transmit actionable real-time intelligence through some short-cut or back-door channel or by poaching; and such information would be passed to security forces on the ground.

    There are certain classified details and special tools usually difficult for the government to acquire through the normal bureaucratic processes, even with strict conditions for usage. But like internet hackers, specialist private operatives, who had worked in the system and understood it, and know how to breach it, can.

    The government should not continue to stick to some primitive pride and arrogance against seeking outside help, when the situation keeps deteriorating rapidly.

     

    • Azubike Nass, a retired colonel from the Nigerian Army, writes from Enugu. In 1994, Col. Nass established the Nigerian Army Counter-Terrorist Training Wing in Jaji, Kaduna State.
  • Fire on the mountain

    Fire on the mountain

    Fortuitously, the organisers of the unveiling of the new Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) in Abuja the penultimate Tuesday, invited the multiple award-winning singer, guitarist, and international music star Bukola Elemide popularly known as Asa, to entertain guests at the event graced by President Muhammadu Buhari, who doubles as the Minister for Petroleum Resources. Perhaps to the chagrin of those who invited her, she choose to perform her prophetic classic, Fire on the mountain, before a traumatised president and his audience.

    It is possible that as Asa sang the song, the president and other distinguished guests were furtively looking over their shoulders to see whether the emboldened miscreants who has threatened to kidnap the president and Governor El Rufai would burst into the arena to carry out their threat. To make Asa even more prophetic in this scary times, terrorists a few days after her performance rained fire from Zuma rock against a military checkpoint. But unlike in Asa’s lyrics, there is fire on the mountain and everyone is on the run.

    Same last week, members of the National Assembly hurriedly adjourned plenary until September. In their muted contributions before the adjournment, most of them showed they were scared to their bones that the terrorists they thought had been restrained to the countryside may have infiltrated their Abuja hideout. In panic members of the opposition in the senate railed at President Buhari for the state of insecurity and threatened to impeach him, if by the time they return from their six weeks recess, the insecurity persists.

    Their colleagues in the House of Representatives also quickly held a press conference to show solidarity with the threat by the senators, before hurriedly adjourning. The minority leader, Ndudi Elumelu gushed out that his colleagues should leave Abuja as quickly as possible. In his support of the motion to adjourn, he said: “However, I want to beg members, Abuja is no longer safe, please, if possible, go back to your constituency. The place is so insecure.”

    Despite the lame attempts of the Deputy Speaker Ahmed Wase to dismiss the observation as a joke, the challenges of the capital city in the past few weeks, show that there is serious fire on the mountain in the federal capital territory. Few days ago, three soldiers from the elite Brigade of Guards were killed in an ambush by terrorists. Some claimed the terrorists were aiming at the Nigerian Law School, Bwari, and out of fear, the Federal Government College, Kwali, was hurriedly closed down.

    Meanwhile conspiracy theorists who had predicted that there is a grand plan to hand Nigeria over to extremist Islamists, are honking their megaphones that the government of President Buhari is moving according to that plan. Even scarier is that while those kidnapped by Boko Haram are still held under their suzerainty, with huge ransoms demanded, Boko Haram captives jailed in various correctional centres have been forcefully released through jail breaks. The latest of such breaks happened in Kuje, Abuja, with relevant authorities telling tales by the moonlight.

    To make matters bizarre, a presidential spokesman was reported to have asked the media to take over the battle against the terrorists, since the president is doing his best. Unfortunately his best has not resulted in the release or rescue of the kidnapped victims of the Abuja-Kaduna train, neither has it resulted in the re-arrest of the Boko Haram terrorists that escaped from the Kuje prison. It has not also led to the rescue of the numerous school girls kidnapped and married or sold off as the terrorists have boasted.

    As if to give credence to the conspiracy theories, the alarm raised severally by the governor of Niger State, Abubakar Sanni Bello in the past one year that Boko Haram and their affiliates have taken over several forests in his state and could attack Abuja from there were ignored. There are also stories in the media that there were several intelligence reports that the Kuje correctional facility would be attacked, which were ignored. And despite these breaches, nobody has been punished or even indicted for this national embarrassment.

    Emboldened by the increasing disability of the state to get its acts together, the terrorists have now threatened to kidnap the president and governor of Kaduna State, Mallam Nasir El Rufai. In a flurry of activities since that threat, the president and members of House of Representatives have held consultations with security chiefs, and there have been redeployments of GOCs and Brigade Commanders amongst others. Whether those redeployments would make any difference is in the womb of time.

    On his part, the governor of Kaduna State has reiterated his call for carpet bombing of the forests to eliminate the terrorists. He is of the view that the federal government is not doing enough to deal with the challenges from the terrorists. And despite El Rufai’s touted closeness to the Buhari presidency, his advice is ignored or perhaps it is militarily unreasonable. Again, the governor with his colleagues in the northwest have tried different kinds of the carrot and stick approach with little success.

    As things stand, most of the vast forests stretching from the north-central states to the northwest states have been taken over by the bandits with our security forces appearing helpless in the circumstance. But for the introduction of Amotekun security corps by the states in the southwest, similar fate would have befallen the forests stretching from Oyo to Ondo and Ekiti State. And despite the best efforts of the regional outfit, there are still breaches as we witnessed in Ondo State recently.

    The southeast would also have been completely taken over, if not the self-help efforts of the people of the region. But for the efforts of the state governments and self-determination groups, the criminals would have taken over the region; even though there are still breaches occasionally. Unfortunately indigenous renegade groups in the region have allegedly taken advantage of the crisis to kidnap for ransom, are there is a blur between external and local organised criminality in the region.

    The south-south is not exempted from the terrorist activities of the insurgents. There are fears that the insurgents are entrenched in the Edo and Delta forests, and even in Cross River and Akwa Ibom states. Of course, the entire northeast has remained a hotbed of Boko Haram criminality since President Goodluck Jonathan’s era. So, when conspiracy theorists project that there are plans to forcefully take over Nigeria, many believe them.

    With President Buhari announcing to the nation that he is exhausted and is in a haste to leave office, one wonders who would douse the raging fire on the mountain. If President Buhari is tired of fighting the fire, he should honourably resign.

     

  • Sour grapes of CAN

    Sour grapes of CAN

    The Kashim Shettima unveiling, on July 20, threw out of joint the nose of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN); and that of other ethnic bigots.

    Both went berserk over a bomb from Shettima — devastating to them, pleasant to non-bigots: that Paul Ojukwu, an Igbo Christian from Southern Nigeria, is Shettima’s adopted son!

    Paul is proud beneficiary of rare “Muslim” charity done in utmost privacy 15-years ago, by the part-holder of CAN’s “hated” Muslim-Muslim ticket!  Abomination!

    Though from Shettima the Muslim, isn’t that akin to Christ-like charity: that bit about not letting your left hand know what your right hand is giving?  But for the holy hate of CAN and co, would Shettima ever have gone public on this 15-year-old benevolence — and still counting?

    Besides, CAN wilted at the sight of Christian clerics at the Shettima presentation, despite its theocratic decree!  But it turned its deep angst into cheap bluff and bluster.

    So panic-stricken, and in concert with its hysterical social media confederates, CAN crunched its many sour grapes, which further set its teeth on edge!  With that it growled and screeched, hoping its row would drown the reality it hates to see!

    So long for CAN that rolled out a “fatwa” it couldn’t enforce!    As all the waters of the Atlantic could not wash the blood off the regicidal hands of Shakespeare’s evil Lady Macbeth, all the cacophony of lies on social media won’t block out CAN’s well-earned shame.

    It’s a fair price to pay for the so-called men of God, preening as imperious gods of men, decreeing political choices for co-citizens, in a 21st century democracy!

    This naked dance of CAN is somewhat reminiscent of Geoffrey Chaucer’s work, Prologue to Canterbury Tales, a biting satire on Catholic England in Medieval times.  Christendom sure has a chequered history of its most rotten preening as its finest!

    In Canterbury Tales, the most discounted was the Parson, tenderer of a humble, near-unknown, rural parish.  Yet, only him, followed the biblical straight and narrow path.

    Among the most celebrated, among the Papal establishment on the pilgrimage, were the Pardoner and the Summoner.  The Pardoner boasted his bag choked with papal pardons, “hot, fresh and smoking from Rome.”  For a hefty fee, you could obtain those holy pardons!

    For the Summoner, of the papal Police, just imagine the “wetin you carry” policemen of today, degraded a thousand times!  That was the Summoner’s level of illicit hustle, while dragooning poor locals to the holy court!

    Faced with all of the celebrated abuse in the holy court, the meek Parson gifted the most immortal quote from the entire work: “If gold rusts, what will iron do?”

    That is a fair poser today to CAN — and, of course, to the Nigerian media: for its lowest-common-denominator thinking, at a very delicate juncture where it ought to put its supposed acute mind and critical thinking on high alert but is failing on every front.

    If you think that’s harsh, just contrast how BBC Hausa Service treated the row over the “unknown bishops” with how the Nigerian media treated the same subject.

    With BBC’s permission, juxtapose the answers to questions, to a “real” and “fake” bishop, by the BBC Hausa service:

    Reverend John Joseph Hayab, Kaduna CAN chairman and acting chairman of CAN in the 19 northern states: “They are not bishops. We don’t know them. They are charlatans hired to show that they have support. If you are a Christian, you know how Christian clergy wear their garb. Some of them are Christians.  Some are not even Christians.”  In other words, the gown makes the monk!

    Pastor Edward Williams, one of the so-called “fake” bishops: “We are real pastors. If they say we are fake pastors, that’s their opinion. Pastorship is God’s calling, not Man’s calling. When God called us, they were not there. Only God can say who’s a real pastor.”

    Still on fakery: BBC to Hayab: “Are you saying all of them are fake?”

    Hayab: “If they are not fake, let them tell us their churches.”

    Williams’ riposte on how Christian clergy wear their garb: “That’s nonsense — just media hype.”

    These are instructive sound bytes from two supposed men of God: the one celebrated, the other scorned; the one brash and loud, the other gentle and reasonable.

    Track back to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: you could see that the spirit of the Pardoner/Summoner — brash, unconscionable and pompous as they come, still lives in CAN, just as that of the humble and meek Parson lives in the so-called “fake bishops”!

    It took CAN’s reckless dance, in the market of high-wire politics and politicking, to once again expose this dirty underbelly.

    Still, Ripples is not necessarily perturbed by CAN.  It’s a hubris-stricken collective, which seems unable to learn from history and is therefore fated to be consumed by it.

    Four years ago, the trio of Catholic Bishop Matthew Kukah, Winners’ Bishop David Oyedepo (both among Christendom Nigeria’s twinkling stars) and Islamic cleric, Sheikh Abubakar Gumi, went to Abeokuta to plead Atiku Abubakar’s case, not with voters but with arch-narcissist, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, and his eternal, elephantine grudge against Atiku.  Eventually, the voters ignored them and their comedy.

    Months after, Kukah would rave and Oyedepo would bawl, under the guise of public-spirited citizen commentary from their elevated pulpits.  But the election was lost and won!

    Since President Goodluck Jonathan thrust CAN into his failed re-election run of 2015, CAN has catapulted itself on the political road to perdition.  It may yet meet another crunchy comeuppance in 2023.

    Without prejudice to Christian’s legitimate interest and worry over a presidential ticket that excludes one of their own, Nigeria’s challenges are beyond the colour of a ticket.  It’s the substance that should interest — and worry — voters.

    This is where the Nigerian media, always following the herd it should shepherd, constitutes a greater menace.

    The following quote from Sadeeq Shehu’s Facebook post, on the Nigerian media’s poor interrogation of the “fake bishops” row, contrasted to BBC Hausa’s, just underscores the contempt many readers, listeners and viewers hold their home media:

    “Hear question from one of Nigerian journalists from The Whistler as he pursued one of the ‘unknown bishops’: What can you tell Nigerians as a Christian that you’re attending this event? You don’t want to talk to Nigerians? Are you supporting Muslim- Muslim ticket? Shameless and unprofessional!”  Flat and pedestrian too!

    Yet, it’s such a delicate juncture which compels the media to ask the right questions and report in the right contexts.  Otherwise, they would lead voters to perdition and start all over again their trademark listless wailing they self-servingly dub “criticism”.

    Meanwhile, enough of the row over “Muslim-Muslim” ticket.  Time to focus on real issues.

  • Has this house finally fallen?

    Has this house finally fallen?

    Exactly three weeks after, the country continues to grope in search of explanations for the stupefying breach of that supposedly impregnable custodial centre within an earshot to the Nigeria’s seat of power. Built in 1989, the Kuje Custodial Centre came under the fire of terrorists at the end of which over 800 prisoners, notable among of which were 60 Boko Haram terrorists, simply took a walk. Before the Kuje incident, there had been similar attacks on correctional facilities in Owerri, Bauchi, Ubiaja in Edo State, Kurmawa in Kano, Jos, Kabba in Kogi, and Abolongo in Oyo State.

    Never mind the serial humiliation of the country and the astounding rationalisation of incompetence that followed, Nigerians, if not the world, has since been gifted with copious literature on how not to handle a sensitive national security institution like a correctional centre. Now, the joke in town is that no institution is inviolable; not even the supposedly sacred precincts of Abuja’s Three Arm Zone – no thanks to the bungling by officials who, were things to be normal, should have no business in the sensitive security sector.

    So much for the running national security tragedy thought to have climaxed in the March 28 blow-up of the Abuja – Kaduna rail and the consequent killing of eight people and abduction of 63 others. Clearly, if that terrible incident was meant to present a teachable moment for the nation and its security apparatus, other serial humiliations that have followed, topmost of which is the horrendous killing of at least 43 people including 30 soldiers and seven mobile police personnel in an attack on a mining site in Shiroro Local Government Area of Niger State, have since presented in stark colours, the difference between a de facto government and a de jure one.  For without as much as the hoisting of the terrorists’ flag on the soil of the Nigerlites, the good people of Shiroro, like their kin in Zamfara and Katsina, surely know the difference between the formal authority flowing from Minna and the raw power oozing from the redoubt of the terrorists not to appreciate the essence of true allegiance!

    Of course, if anyone ever imagined those serial killings would somehow mark the moment to draw the line to what seems to be a determined humbling of the African Giant by the rabid band of terrorists; two recent but related events – the turbaning of the bandit leader – Adamu Aliero – as Serkin Fulani (leader of Fulani) by the now suspended Emir of Yandoto, Aliyu Garba Marafa, and the trending video of the victims of the railways abductions being flogged by the terrorists, would appear the final rite of humiliation for a country whose armed forces were once rated among the best, not just in the continent but in the global south. Just imagine – the loonies, now emboldened, are no longer content with hunting for high net worth victims, they now want the heads of President Muhammadu Buhari and Governor Nasir El- Rufai served on a platter!

    Talk of a country that has gone full cycle. A little while back, Governor Aminu Masari of Katsina not only embraced the bandits, he actually negotiated and granted them amnesty. His words: “Because they (terrorists) said they are Muslims, we went as far as asking them to swear to the Holy Qur’an that they will never participate in banditry again”.

    Well, they did – only to return to the lucrative business of banditry a little while after.  He would later tell a visiting United Nations Development Programme delegation that he had negotiated with “thieves”.

    “Anybody who says he is going to engage them on anything is free. I will pray for him but I will not do it again,” he was quoted to have said, saying that after failing him twice, he would be a fool “to go the same way”.

    That was then. The bandits have not only become implacable, they have since transformed into full-time terrorists, setting up camps and military bases with highly sophisticated network of informants complete with communications systems. With Rocket Propelled Guns, they even dared to take down an aircraft at some point! Just as they have camps that can house hundreds of their kidnapped victims, in all likelihood, they have hundreds of fighting men primed to engage at any given point. And then the matching logistics to guarantee not just that the basic living standards are met but such other equipment considered necessary for their deadly operations.

    Their modus operandi as has become evident is to deploy the instrument of fear to enforce their will. Now, the government, initially reluctant to declare the terrorists as such, have since done so.

    Sadly, whereas the scale appears to have fallen from the eyes of the Nigerian leadership, nothing in their new awareness of the character of the enemy appears to have led to any change of strategy or tactics. If anything, it has been more of the same. From imponderable dilatoriness to sometimes empty posturing, government’s responses to the terror challenge has been most pathetic.

    When they talk about engagement, negotiation or whatever, it is oftentimes more out of weakness than strength; from dictating the terms and conditions for releasing their luckless victims to such profile escapades and show of force, such has been the daring attempt by the terrorits to present the government as weak and ineffectual and the military as lacking the fighting spirit.

    Say what you may of the poor Zamfara emir; he probably had enough good sense to know what it means to hearken to the daily yearnings of his people to be left to enjoy their lives in peace than what the government in Gusau or even the Federal Government cares to understand. For while his understanding might have been that a title on the bandit leader would be worth more than its value in gold should peace finally to return to the beleaguered emirate, the chap in Gusau, Bello Matawalle, who wears the title of the Chief Security Officer, and President Muhammadu Buhari, the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces would in the same vein seem to him as far too distant, and certainly too remote to be able to address his immediate existential challenges hence his resort to self-help! Talk of an unenviable position to be in! His banishment to Siberia should afford him enough time to rue the lessons.

    Finally, on the trending video on the flogging of the kidnap victims. Truly, it is gut-wrenching – so much so that some have described it is the final (?) crossing of the proverbial red line. Agreed. But then, how many of such red lines have those savages crossed in the last seven years with the government betraying utter helplessness? And why should anyone expect this latest provocation to be different?

  • God save Imo State

    God save Imo State

    With the federal and Imo State governments showing lack of capacity to protect lives and properties of the residents of Imo State, perhaps it is time for the people to turn to God for divine intervention. Otherwise, what can the people of the state do when those that hold the levers of power have become clueless in the midst of mass murder of unarmed citizens by bandits and so-called agents of the state?

    The most recent of such gruesome mass murders took place in Awomama, Orlu Imo State. Indeed, according to a human rights organisation, International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety), between 800 to 900 citizens of Imo State have been killed under the watch of the government of Hope Uzodimma. While it may be preposterous to blame the governor exclusively for the killings, considering the constitutional challenges faced by governors on security, that report should alarm the governor.

    According to Intersociety, those killed in Awomama were wedding guests returning from a weeding. In their report, they named the wedded couple, the place of the wedding, their family and villages, the persons killed, those fatally wounded, those missing and those arrested. Yet, in the account of the governor, those killed were dreaded terrorists killing and maiming residents of the state. While the governor claims it was the DSS on security mission that killed the criminals, the people claimed Ebubeagu security men killed guests returning from a wedding.

    Such a controversy under the nose of the state governor is outrageous and disheartening. As far as the people of Awomama are concerned, the governor is lying and is propagating a false claim by the DSS that those killed were criminals. This column supports the call for an independent inquiry to unearth what happened in Awomama, Imo State. The state government should be interested in such public inquiry, unless it has something to hide. If it doesn’t, the governor should immediately convene a judicial panel of clearly independent persons to find out what happened.

    The governor has nothing to lose if the information given to him by the security agencies turns out to be false but he has everything to lose if he allows the controversy to linger for the rest of his tenure. He should know by now that the controversy will not go away; rather it will mutate into all manner of conspiracy theories most of which would revolve around his person. The leadership of DSS must also set up an administrative inquiry to determine whether her officials in the state are telling the truth, or involved in the alleged cover-up.

    If the leadership of the DSS is unwilling to take such steps, the president must show interest and invite the Attorney General of the Federation to institute an inquiry into the activities of the state DSS and the findings sent to the president and subsequently made public. Under the watch of President Muhammadu Buhari, there have been too many killings by armed terrorists and bandits, and a state institution like the DSS should not be associated with such mass murders, or cover-up as claimed by the people.

    It should also worry the state government that the people of the state are pointing accusing fingers against Ebubeagu, set-up to deal with security challenges occasioned by armed insurgency by foreign elements that attack people in the region. If the allegations are true, then it means that a security outfit set up to protect the people from external aggressors has become the problem of the people. If the allegations are true, then the fish is rotten from the head.

    It is such belief that the state is unwilling to save the people that made them to go into the streets to demonstrate. If those gruesome killings were truly carried out by Ebubeagu security men, then Imo State has given a bad publicity to the call for state police. As part of the answer to the insecurity that has befallen our dear country, there are stringent calls for state police, and the security outfits operating in the regions are supposed to be a model of what the state police would look like.

    Perhaps, the controversy surrounding the emergence of Governor Uzodimma, may be part of his challenges in governance. For many in the state, the governor remains a usurper despite the judgment of the Supreme Court, upon which he became the governor, instead of Emeka Ihedioha, sworn in as the winner of the state governorship election in 2019. So, could the deteriorating security situation in the state be caused by those opposed to his government, as he has claimed?

    Even if that claim is true, it is expected that after being in charge of the state for about two years and six months, the governor should have found a way to deal with the fall-out of his controversial emergence as state governor. To keep blaming political opponents while the state he governs is deteriorating into a state of anarchy is unacceptable. Indeed, despite the usual promises to expose those behind the perennial killings in the state, nothing of such has happened. And naming political opponents is not enough; the governor should ensure that any person involved in the prevalent mayhem faces the law.

    To do otherwise is to court the acronym of cluelessness. This column also urges Igbo leaders to examine the possibility of mediating the crisis between state actors and non-state actors in the state. Without prejudice to the right of the security agencies to deal with any acts of outright criminality in the state, there is no doubt that the emergence of Uzodimma generated a lot of political tension that have affected social stability in the state. Such social tension can be doused by such intervention, while dealing with criminality is left in the hands of security agencies.

    The incremental descent into anarchy in Imo State, also calls for prayers. For while the Book of James 2:26 says: “For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead”, the Psalmist on its part in Chapter 127:2 notes: “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain; if the Lord does not guard the city, the watchman watches in vain.” For this column, whatever can be legitimately done to bring peace to Imo State should be done.

    Those in government have the responsibility to protect lives and property and they should brace up to their responsibility. In case they have forgotten, section 14(2)(b) of the 1999 constitution provides that: “the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government.” Governor Hope Uzodimma, and President Muhammadu Buhari owe the people of Imo that even as they seek God’s intervention.

     

  • So, what happened at Osun?

    So, what happened at Osun?

    Against all predictions, the Peoples Democratic Party governorship candidate in the Osun gubernatorial election, Senator Ademola Adeleke, won the election. It was as decisive as could be: he polled 403,371 votes to beat the incumbent, Governor Adegboyega Oyetola of the All Progressives Congress party who polled 375,927 votes. Whereas the PDP candidate won in 17 of the 30 local government areas, Oyetola came top in 13 local government areas. The electoral umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission, (INEC) not only proved that its investment in technology was not a waste, it came off in the end as a body ready to do credible electoral business.

    The winners of course have since been savouring their sweet victory.  Adeleke’s PDP has, as one would expect, been gloating, convinced as it were that the win, beyond mere symbolism, would amount to something in the assumed electoral calculus that is still some eight months away.  And then our ubiquitous but partisanly charged netizens; they have said just enough to leave the unwary public the impression of an electorate reduced mere tools in the electoral sweepstakes as against their being the principal driver of the process. To this trenchant army, the weekend gubernatorial election was a proxy war of sorts; something of a referendum on the APC and its flag bearer, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the outcome of which was supposed to be a pointer to the shape of things to come.

    Particularly interesting is how some newspapers actually gave the fantasy a wing, a trend that has become an inescapable part of the orchestrated onslaught against the APC presidential runner in the current hyper-charged political season.

    I guess the APC leaders in Osun would have, in the coming days, enough time to reflect not just on the election and its outcome but also on the many other developments tangential to it. In the meantime, the rest of us are left to speculate on why a governor who was obviously cut of a different cloth from his controversial and sometimes divisive predecessor, and who did well to tinker with some of the more outlandish policies that pitted the preceding administration against the people, couldn’t in the end, count on the same people to deliver him when it mattered most.

    Talk of fate playing its hand; few today remember that the man who later became famous as a dancing senator would perhaps have not smelt politics let alone being elected as a senator, had his more illustrious elder brother, Isiaka Adeleke not died in April 2017 while serving as APC senator. In the same vein, had the party, then under the leadership of Rauf Aregbesola as governor, yielded the seat to the younger Adeleke in deference to the mourning family and in recognition of the powerful interest the family represented and continues to represent in the state’s political matrix, the individual, who has now become his party’s nemesis, would in fact have contested and mostly likely would have won as an APC candidate with things possibly taking a different trajectory.

    Unfortunately, Aregbesola, the leader would have none of it – and the rest as they say, is history.

    A lot of water has of course passed under the bridge. Unquestionably, the 2018 election was a referendum on the departing administration of Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola. A bruising contest in which the eventual winner only managed to scrape a victory by the proverbial skin of his teeth, then, the issues were not so much about what the then candidate, Gboyega Oyetola, was bringing to the table but the burden that the departing administration had become to the people and with it the many controversies that it had courted many of them needlessly. Clearly, if many of the policies such as the controversial re-classification of the schools and with it the introduction of single uniforms across the entire schools system left the citizens breathless, some others, like the equally controversial the restructuring the local government system were such that left many in wonder as to the extent that the administration would go to elevate forms over substance. With the administration almost in all cases preferring to listen to itself as against the voices of the people on whose behalf it claimed to govern, the hapless citizen could only seize on the 2018 ballot to express their displeasure. And yes it did at great cost to the party and the candidate.

    The 2022 election obviously presented a different scenario. As the incumbent, Oyetola’s record in nearly the whole of four years would of course come to play. Although lacking in the activist temper of his predecessor, here, even his most ardent critics would readily concede to his superior performance both in the management of the people and the resources of the state – the very department in which the preceding administration was rated low both by the bureaucrats and by the ordinary folk. So, as against being a referendum on performance, the contest would come down to basically a grudge rematch in which countless but disparate players – without and within – were involved, one in which victory was not so much about records but the extent to which the ruling party was able to tame the insidious forces of division and cleavages promoted by those who felt excluded from the gravy.

    In all, the difference between those rejoicing and those gloating over an assumed electoral rout would seem as clear as the line between those savouring the sweetness of victory and those relishing the shellacking of their erstwhile comrades. The former of course wanted the top job for their man; the latter – enemies within – were more about ensuring that the governor and by extension, their party paid a huge price for leaving them in the lurch.

    This is where those talking glibly of referendum miss the point.  As for those who suffer the delusion that the gubernatorial contest was anything more than a local affair, they are of course entitled to their dream world where anything is possible.

    Could Governor Oyetola have done better? Of course, those who say that the state’s helmsman, being the number one political leader, could have done things differently have a point. He could have played better politics. Some say he could have been less obsessed with his predecessor to the point of being paranoid. And that he could have been more trusting of his aides as a leader.

    On the other hand, some have also pointed out that the predecessor, under whom he had served as chief of staff for eight years, not only demanded being consulted on everything from party affairs to governance, but also insisted on being the last word on every matter. That a former boss would routinely mouth continuity as some cast-iron article of faith to which his successor is inextricably bound, would sound not only galling to a self-respecting leader but roundly offensive to an elected one.

    That, in a nutshell is at the root of the problem. Now the famed state of the Living Spring has found itself in a sorry pass in which a barely literate governor would have to be in the saddle for four dreary years.

    The situation is a huge lesson in the mismanagement of power and its correlates.