Category: Tuesday

Instead of bemoaning how singularly horrible the past year was, or engaging in the dismal task of delineating a hierarchy of horribleness in the events thereof, would it not be healthier, certainly more respectful of the reader’s equanimity in particular and the temper of these times in general to dwell on matters more diverting and perhaps in some respects even more illuminating?

Such as, well, Matters Miscellaneous?  Why not?

That, any rate, is the mission of the column today, the first in 2022.

Who has not by now had a surfeit of the litany of bad news, more bad news and very bad news that has suffused the airwaves, the headlines and the front pages of the news media.  You cannot get away from them.  They pursue you insidiously and relentlessly.  Who would not welcome a respite, however brief, from such suffocating attention?

You don’t have to look hard to find them. To even mention them, however obliquely, is to ruin the spirit of the occasion; hence, this miscellany, starting with a lexical concern.

To preserve the purity of the language, the lexicographers at the English Oxford Dictionary (OED) periodically cast shadows on the legitimacy of some words in current usage.  Bless their fairmindedness, they scour the lexicon for some terms that are widely employed in current usage but had not been accorded formal entry into the language.

It was in one such review in early 2020 that many terms that were formerly dismissed as “Nigerianisms” were formally incorporated into proper lexicon – terms such as barbing, bukateria, ember month, flag-off, non-indigene, next tomorrow, gist, guber, rub minds, sef, and K-leg.

Whatever the rank OED now accords them, I would hesitate to use them when writing for foreign audiences   or the newly literate in English.

To update its review, OED should next look at terms that are not widely used and in fact may not be a candidate on any protagonist’s list for promotion but nevertheless have such a powerful ring on the ear that you have to wonder what they are doing outside the league.

I am thinking of the term “byforce,” verb.

It won me over the very first time I heard it used in the pidgin, as in Dem byforce you? And since then, I have never missed a chance to use it myself.

It is felicitous, it is direct, it is vigorous, and it admits of no ambiguity, it is as sharp as a command.

Rendered in Standard English, it would come out in the interrogative as:  Were you forced? Did anyone force you?  Or as “Did they force you?

That sentence has nothing of the vibrancy, the vigour, the directness, and the immediacy of “Dem byforce you?”

So that if and when you finally accord the term its proper place or set out to translate into Standard English, take special care, ladies and gentlemen, to preserve those elements that make it so finely wrought.

Who would have thought that, even in Nigeria, being referred to as a former holder of an office you have  long ceased to hold can cost a third party more than a little inconvenience?  That was what happened at the Kaduna Investment Summit last September, when the master of ceremonies introduced the Man of the Moment, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, as the “former Emir of Kano.”

The former emir’s countenance changed as he rose to speak. “Next time don’t call me a former Emir of Kano,’’ he said gravely. “There is nothing like that.”

If anyone in that august assembly was steeped in protocol, it would have to be the master of ceremonies, Muhammad Sani Abdullahi, chief of staff to Kaduna State Governor Nasr el Rufai.  So, what went wrong?

Would Sanusi have preferred to be called a former governor of the Central Bank, at the end of which controversial tenure he was named emir of Kano in contentious circumstances?

For good measure, Sanusi hinted before resuming his seat that that he too might soon have to call Abdullahi a former Chief of Staff. Three weeks later, the former emir’s prophecy came true.  Abdullahi had indeed become former chief of staff.  Substantively, he had been reduced to an ordinary permanent secretary, following a cabinet shuffle.

Observers are still puzzled as to the cause of the former emir’s umbrage.  Was it because the title was not prefaced with “His Royal Highness”?  Would he have preferred to be called “the deposed former emir of Kano, or even more truthfully “the deposed emir of Kano”?

Since the former emir whose attendance is so much in demand at home and abroad, and since he still dresses the part, san the staff of office he used to cradle so fondly, he should clarify matters to save his hosts future embarrassment.

The Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, had cause to rebuke the media lately for, among other crimes, holding the government hostage.   I am surprised that he has not urged the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice to comb the statute books for laws prohibiting and punishing that kind of rascality.

The charge seems to me to be based on a misreading of the evidence. If anything, it is the media that are forever investing President Muhammadu Buhari with powers he does not possess, thus seeking to hold him hostage to their fancies.

Thus, hardly a week passes without encountering newspapers headline such as the following:

Buhari orders power agencies to double output by March.

Buhari orders NUC to produce Nigeria’s Nobel Prize winner in Physics.

Buhari orders NNPC to double oil exports to meet demand.

Buhari to Army Defence Chiefs:  Crush Boko Haram and ISIS Now.

It is also only in Nigeria that you have the media reporting all kinds of persons, most of them insignificant, “dragging” the eminent persons of the realm to court, among them, the President, the Senate President, state governors cabinet ministers, and just about anyone who wields a rubberstamp.

One crucial issue at the recent Glasgow Conference on Climate, COP 26:  What to do with coal, a leading source environmental pollution, beg your pardon of greenhouse gas emissions. Phase it out, some countries submitted.  Phase it down, others said.

Those in favour of phasing down said it was the first crucial step toward phasing out; that you cannot phase out without first phasing down.  Those for phasing out could not but agree that phasing down was a good start toward that goal.  They debated targets for phasing out or phasing down.

Each side went home with sense of accomplishment.

A nice dodge, until they meet again.

To the National Assembly: 

Before you engage in another public spat with the executive branch again over legislative jurisdiction, make sure you do your homework.  You cannot afford anytime soon the kind of dusting you suffered last week.  It wasn’t pretty.

In the aftermath of the Presidential election crisis of 1993, discussions between me and Dr Doyinsola Abiola, wife of president-elect Moshood Abiola, publisher of the opposition Concord Newspapers, strategic thinker and discreet mobiliser for “June 12,” invariably devolved into a comparison of our notes on the unfolding situation in South Africa and its implications for Nigeria.

Each of us had made three separate but overlapping visits to South Africa during which we met and held discussions with many of the leading political officials and non-state actors.

At our meetings back home in Nigeria, we would in the light of what we had read about them and our interactions with them, weigh the personalities we had met, dissect them, and delineate their dominant characteristics so as to gain their support and understanding on the “June 12” debacle.

At such sessions, it was Dr Abiola who provided the sharpest insights and the summative judgements.

When you met Nelson Mandela, she would say, you knew that you were in the presence of greatness.  It flowed from every pore of his skin, from the simplest gesture, or act, to pronouncements requiring the most profound deliberation.  It seemed so effortless.

With Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Dr Abiola would say, you knew you were in the presence of goodness.  You almost couldn’t imagine him committing any wrongdoing.

Desmond Mpilo Tutu, Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town,  recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, leader of the anti-apartheid struggle, moral voice for global civil and human rights and one of the most influential theologians of our time, died on December 26, 2021, at the Oasis Care Centre, in Cape Town, aged 90.

Tutu rose from humble beginning and the fraught circumstances that the racist White minority apartheid rule reserved for the Black majority to become, by sheer force of will, determination and steadfastness to principle to become one of the most influential voices of this century.

For his generation, the clergy was one of the few routes out of the daily grind of apartheid.  Law and teaching were open, but only up to a point.  The system was designed to make it well-nigh impossible for Blacks to reach their potential.  As Hendrik Verwoerd, Minister of Bantu Education and later prime minister articulated it, the goal was to equip the natives to function at a level no higher than that of domestic servant.

There clings in my memory a 1961 TIME magazine story in which a white policer espied a black man sprawled across the floor in a Whites-only church.

“What are you doing there?” demanded the scandalised police officer.

“Cleaning the floor, bass,” came the tremulous reply.

“Good that you are only cleaning the floor,” the officer said, as he caressed his sjambok. If you had been praying, you would have needed help from above.”

Even if the story is apocryphal, it captures eloquently the essence of the apartheid spirit:  Blacks may worship or claim to worship the same God as their superiors, but they must do so in separate, water-tight compartments.

Oliver Reginald (OR) Tambo, a founder and later president of the ANC, grew up dreaming of becoming a medical doctor.  He had the best result in the qualifying examination held throughout the country.  But under apartheid rules, that was forbidden territory. Faithful to Tambo’s unfulfilled dream, the South African government named the country’s largest hospital complex after him. It also renamed Johannesburg’s international airport in his memory.

So, like millions of Blacks before him, Tutu had to settle for a future not of his own choosing but one charted by others.

That future, the priesthood, was one for which Providence seemed to have prepared him in diverse ways.  He was enormously gifted in empathy and sympathy.  He could feel the pain of others.  He could identify with other people and insert himself in their circumstances. He could communicate eloquently and relate to audiences large and small in ways that made them feel that their privations were also his own.   And, oh, he could sing, and he could dance!

He had the gift of spontaneity.  Words, gestures and symbolic action came naturally to him.  He was a true believer. With him, there was no playacting, no faking.  His strictures on the bestialities of apartheid were heartfelt; his moral revulsion, eloquent.

Yet, even in that miasma, he often found cause for joy and laughter in little things.  That laughter was infectious, and so was his effervescence. It dispelled the gloom of the moment and the awkwardness of the occasion. He led by example, not precept. He was an apostle of nonviolence, but acknowledged the limit of that doctrine when he declared that he was not a pacifist.

At the height of the carnage in South Africa’s townships and in the 1980s, he was moved to declare that if he belonged in the generation of the young men and women stirring the urban revolt, he would have rejected the leadership of Tutu’s generation because it was producing no meaningful change, only ever more brutal reprisals.

Still he never lost faith that the struggle could be won.

And when it was won, there was no happier person in the world than Desmond Tutu. I can still see him on the long, snaking queue as he waited to cast his ballot in South Africa’s general elections for the first time in his life. Even now, I can still see him holding up his ballot in triumph at the point of casting it and having done so, burst into his trademark dance, chirpy and engaging as ever.

When apartheid fell and the new Black majority government that took over from Mandela departed from the core principles that had animated[OD1]  the anti-apartheid struggle and undergirded the new dispensation, Tutu was unsparing.  He rebuked them just as fiercely as he had disavowed the apartheid regime.

He reminded the new people at every opportunity that the basic task of government was to serve the people and improve their living standards.  Catering principally to the privileges of the elite, he stated, again and again, was a betrayal of the struggle.

Tutu’s outspokenness irritated the governing elite and their allies in the new oligarchy.  They called him all manner of names and sought to discredit him.  But because he was anchored in what he believed to be the word of God and the purpose for which he was called to the Ministry, he never wavered.

His close friendship with Nelson Mandela never had him flinch from disagreeing with him on matters of strategy while holding fast to fundamental principles.  He was a democrat’s democrat.  The protests he led were lessons in civic engagement and participation.

No greater testament to Tutu’s greatness can be found anywhere other than in his lived example and in comments that have poured forth from across the world since his passing.  They bespeak genuine affection and appreciation from across the world for his life of service, truth and honesty.

He held no elected office and wielded no political power.  Yet he parlayed the role that his calling imposed on him into statesmanship of the rarest kind.  It should indeed be said of Desmond Mpilo Tutu that he gave statesmanship itself a whole new meaning.  His life was untainted by scandal.

May his vision of justice based on restitution rather than retribution grow and thrive, and may his idea of South Africa as a Rainbow Nation count for more than a slogan.

By any reckoning, the Osborne Towers Haul has got to rank among the top 10 stories from Nigeria in 2017, given the way it broke and has continued to unfold, its many turns and twists.

It remains, without question, the largest fortune any person or institution ever chanced upon in a single location since Shell Darcy struck oil in Nigeria in Oloibiri, in present-day Bayelsa State, 61 years ago.  And it transformed one of the most exclusive addresses in one of the most opulent neighbourhoods in Nigeria into a crime scene.

Footage of the unearthing of the haul, some $43 million stacked in packs of mint-fresh $10, 000 bills, in a fire-proof steel cabinet in Flat 7B at the Towers, not forgetting small change in hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling, made the headlines and front pages of the news media across the world.

Early reports claimed that the haul was part of the “security” money former President Goodluck Jonathan had squirreled away for fighting the 2015 presidential election that he should have known he could not win.  He had been so crushed by his defeat, they said, that he forgot the money.

Even if Dr Jonathan remembered, how could he have come forward to claim the money, especially when his wife, the formerly excellent Dame Patience, was fighting desperately to re-possess some N54 million in bank deposits that the courts had ordered forfeited on the suspicion that it was the fruit of crime?

Those who expected his consort, the formerly excellent lady aforementioned, to weigh in with an affidavit that the money at issue was her birthday gift to him when he turned 59 the previous  November must have been disappointed.   Give it to The Dame:  she knows that there are only so many fronts on which even a person of her omnivorous appetite can fight.

EFCC operatives who had swooped on Apartment 7B following a tip-off from a whistle-blower were still totting up the haul when Governor Nyesom Wike declared that it belonged without question to the Rivers State Government, being proceeds of assets his predecessor and current Minister of Transport, Rotimi Amaechi had “fraudulently” auctioned.

“We will follow due process of the law to get back the money found at the Ikoyi residence, he told Channels Television. “This money belongs to the Rivers State people. We have conducted our checks.’’

“We will stun Nigeria with this matter. We will come out with our evidence at the appropriate time.”

Wike’s plan was at full throttle when the Director-General of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), Ambassador Ayodele Oke, a spook whom few outside the community of spooks had ever heard of, stepped forward to claim that the money belonged to the NIA.

The fund, he said, was duly appropriated by the Federal Government at the time of Dr Jonathan for projects that could not be named, that Oke had periodically reported on those projects to the complete satisfaction of the authorities, among them National Security Adviser Babagana Monguno, and by extension President Muhammadu Buhari.

Premium Times (May 5, 2016) confirmed that much in a painstakingly documented piece that has not been rebutted as far as I know.  The editors tell me they stand “perfectly” by their reporting.

In 2013-2014, the paper reported that Ambassador Oke’s immediate predecessor, Olaniyi Oladeji, had proposed to the Jonathan Administration an upgrade to NIA’s intelligence-gathering capability. On taking over from Oladeji, Ambssador Oke had fleshed out the proposal in a memo he submitted to Dr Jonathan on Feb: 14, 2015.

Goal: to “upgrade and professionalize agency operations” in order to “engender an effective clandestine communication systems central to the working of an intelligence service.”

Project Schedule: 2015 – 2018.

Price tag:  $89, 202, 282, to be expended on 12 high-level projects.

According to the report, Dr Jonathan approved the request February 16, 2015 and directed the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Allison-Madueke to release the funds.  Several weeks later, the NIA received the full amount in cash from the Central Bank.

Eleven months later, in January 2016, the report continued, the NIA submitted progress reports on the projects and a detailed breakdown of expenditures in a letter to NSA Monguno.

Thereafter, Premium Times continued, a three-man panel from the National Security Adviser           went to inspect the projects.  In its February 29, 2016 report, the team expressed satisfaction with the way the $289-million operation was being implemented.

Some ten weeks later, on May 5, 2016, Mr. Monguno visited the NIA Headquarters for the  first time since he assumed office in July 2015 and, according to Premium Times, wrote in the Visitors’ Book:

“On the occasion of my maiden visit to the NIA since assumption of official duties as NSA, I am extremely delighted by the warm reception and hospitality shown to me by H.E. Ambassador Ayo Oke, DG, NIA, the quality of works in progress is notably breathtaking but very inspiring also.

“All the facilities being constructed have demonstrated that the NIA is far ahead of its sister agencies in terms of foresight and dealing with 21st Century intelligence issues.

“It is my fervent prayer that the NIA achieve all the goals it has set for itself so that all other institutions of government, particularly the intelligence community, will bring about the desired change for this great country.”

Two weeks later, on May 17, 2016, the NSA informed the NIA that President Buhari had been briefed about the ongoing projects and that the president expressed his gratitude to the NIA personnel, the paper reported.

Roughly a year later, the EFCC recovered $43,449,947, £27,800 and N23,218,000 from Flat 7B at Osborne Towers.  Oke would be suspended from office, and dismissed subsequently by President Buhari, following the unpublished report of a panel headed by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, tasked with establishing the “circumstances in which the NIA came into possession of the funds, how and by whose or which authority the funds were made available to the NIA, and to establish whether or not there has been a breach of the law or security procedure in obtaining custody and use of the funds.”

The Osborne Towers haul has since been forfeited to the Federal Government, on the orders of the Federal High Court, Lagos. But the ownership of Flat 7B remains disputed.

The EFCC says is it was purchased by Mrs Oke in the name of a company, Chobe Ventures  Ltd, of which she and her son, are the directors.  But Union Bank plc claims that it holds the mortgage to the property.

In a bizarre turn, Ambassador Oke was set to face trial, most likely in secret court, because of the sensitive nature of the office he once held.

But how did matters come to this tawdry pass?

How did it come to pass that Oke’s request for the vast sum at issue was approved in just two days, and apparently without discussion or debate at the National Security Council?  How come the money was released to the NIA in one fell swoop, and in cash?   How did a project that had reportedly earned high praise from the National Security Adviser turn into a national scandal with hardly any redeeming grace less than a year later?

Was the NIA dissembling all along?  Was the Office of the National Security Adviser also dissembling? Was the National Security Adviser merely being collegial in its effusive report?  Or was his team caught up the NIA’s web of deception by its own credulity or worse, gullibility?

Was Oke being made a fall guy?

Because the matter centres on national security, we may never know the answers.  Yet the questions are worth asking.

Matters got even murkier regarding the identity of the whistleblower who stood to receive,  by way of gratuity, one-tenth of the recovered haul, which would make the person an instant millionaire.

At first, there was only one whistleblower.  The EFCC said the person had been identified and handed his reward.  Then they said the person would soon be paid.  Later reports said the person was undergoing psychiatric evaluation, for fear that the person might lose his or her mind on account of coming so suddenly into a vast fortune.

They were still wrestling with these issues when a rival claimant to the title of whistleblower and the fortune that goes with it surfaced.

This being Nigeria, a third is guaranteed to surface shortly.  And a fourth.  And a fifth. . .

But the whistleblower’s identity almost pales into nothingness (no pun intended) compared to the mystery that has since enveloped Ambassador Oke and his wife, Folashade.  Weeks after they were arraigned, the twain, almost in the manner of lovers embarking on a honeymoon, boarded an international flight to parts unknown.

Since then, nothing seems to have been heard from or about them.  No requests seem to have been made for their extradition to answer the crime they were alleged to have committed, which is one for the annals.  Recovering the Osborne Fortune seems to have been considered  a satisfactory end, with Ambassador Oke’s honour as collateral damage if he is not guilty as charged?

Where are Ambassador Oke and his wife now?

 

Republished with minor revisions, this piece first appeared in this space on December 5, 2017

Correction

On December 14, this column misstated total Covid deaths in the United States as approaching 800.  The actual figure should have been 800, 000, which translates into one of every 100 stricken  persons dead.

A merry and safe Christmas to all.