Category: Tuesday

My dear Aburo:

It seems only several weeks ago that what our inventive compatriots inscribed into the English Language as the Ember Months crept in upon us.  And lo, they have almost run their course, bar the dark portents.

I thought I should touch base with you before they pass ineluctably into history.

I am sure you will have discerned that the scarcest resource these days is not food or money or clean water or clean air or shelter, hard as they are to come by.  Even good old-fashioned equanimity is in retreat.  But the scarcest commodity of all is Optimism.

As I write these lines on Monday, December 13, this is the headline that greets me from my favourite newspaper: “U.S. Nears 800,000 Virus Deaths, 1 of every 100 Older Americans Has Perished.”

It adds, in a kicker: “People 65 and older are still falling seriously ill in great numbers, particularly if they are unvaccinated, and U. S. hospitals have been strained his month.”

“Particularly if they are unvaccinated,” the report points out carefully with regard to those 65 and over.  But not exclusively, it is necessary to add.  Hundreds of deaths have also been recorded among the vaccinated.

Across the Atlantic, the figures only a shade less grim and the prospects just somewhat less dire.  In the UK, the frolicsome prime minister, Boris Johnson, has warned the public to be prepared for a “tidal wave” of new coronavirus infections of the hardy strain the world has been battling for some two years, the new Omicron virus, and the variants it is spawning even as scientists worldwide struggle to understand its insidious and ravenous ways and contain it.

As the director-general of the World Health Organisation, Dr Tedros Adhanon Gebreyesus has warned, Covid-19 is “not yet done with us.”

I do not mean in the least to alarm you, my dear aburo.

But tell me:  Have you and your household been vaccinated?  Or you an anti-vaxxer, or someone who does not believe at all in viruses, or believed that if they exist at all, they are not beyond the powers of our forebears to subdue and banish to the infernal world they came from, without recourse to needles and the mysterious potions they deliver into the bloodstream?

In your communion with them on this subject, what insights and revelations have the ancients vouchsafed   you?

Regardless of where you stand, Osahon, it must be jarring, scandalous beyond belief even, to learn from the very officials charged with protecting public health that one million doses of Covid-19 vaccines expired in storage in Nigeria, before they could be administered – vaccines in all likelihood provided by foreign donors and philanthropists.

And yet, there have been no resignations, voluntary or forced.  They are instead saying that such things are not uncommon.  It is almost as if they expected to be congratulated on keeping the loss to only a million doses.

This loss could have resulted from many factors, among them limited capacity for proper storage, tardiness in rolling them out, poor logistics and insufficient personnel.  But none of them, nor even all        of them together, can explain, much less excuse how one million doses of vaccines that could have made the difference between life and death for perhaps even thousands, of our compatriots.

The thing was compounded by Covid denial.  In many states and within communities, political officials who should lead the campaign against the disease actively denied its existence and suppressed efforts to tackle it.  It was in this context that health facilities that should protect were not built and those that exist by default are rendered inoperative.

According to federal health officials, Covid situation reports were coming in only from only 10 percent  of field offices nationwide.  There was little testing, and hence no detection.  From there, it was but a short step to conclude that there was no Covid manifestation whatsoever.  Better to face malaria fever.  But if and when the malaria vaccine comes on stream would they behave any different?

It is a matter of attitude as it is of impunity.  There are grave consequences for the collectivity but none for the official.

Time to turn away from this funereal subject of pathogens and talk instead of the imminent return of politics in its more exciting manifestation.  Recall, aburo, that we were treated to a titillating foretaste of this during the PDP’s National Convention in Abuja the other day.

The public must be growing impatient with the APC in this regard.  Rumours mount on rumours that the APC is about to stage its own show in a manner that will be membered long in the annals of political choreography in Nigeria.  But it just rumour after rumour.  Nothing happens.

What is going on, Osahon?  Why is the APC finding it so hard to hold its national convention?

Technically, the General Elections are just some 15 months away.  But once we emerge from the Ember Months into the New Year, politics will be the only game in town, and the issues now being addressed only cursorily will take an insistent turn.

In the broadest sense, will the president come from the North or the South?  Will he be a Christian, or a Muslim?  Where will the running mate come from?  Will that person be male or female?  Are we on the cusp of the Igbo Presidency?  Or the Edo Presidency?  Or the Tiv Presidency?  Or the Idoma Presidency  for that matter?

How will the principal offices of the state be distributed across zones and states and local government areas?  Will the rail link from Katsina to Maradi, in Niger Republic, be fast-tracked?

These are nuts and bolts to which the political class has reduced issues of governance in Nigeria.  Rarely are the overarching issues, the fundamentals, being addressed.  They talk endlessly about Nigerian unity and how it is non-negotiable.  They talk about it as if it already exists.  They rarely talk about what it should consist in, and how best to cultivate it.

Should Nigeria continue to exist in its present form?  If so, with what adjustments?  What should be  the agreed mechanism for making such adjustments?

Who needs a sybaritic National Assembly?  How will the country fulfill its obligations to its citizen instead of expending three-fourths of its resources on what is at bottom the administration of administration?  How can Nigeria find, claim and uphold is so-called “rightful place in the global community?

You have to be skeptical about whether they really mean what they say – that the future belongs to the youth.  Current policy does not accord with that pietism. What is to be dome about the millions of well-educated young men and women pounding the streets year after without finding work or any prospect thereof – where all they can expect are palliatives in the form of very temporary jobs in the performance of which they are cruelly exploited?

It especially is among that latter that Optimism is the scarcest resource.  The most urgent task for now is to give them reasons for Optimism.  The task will not be easy, I fear.

I have no doubt that your response will be as thoughtful and constructive as always.

All the best, Osahon, for you and yours at Chrismas and throughout the coming year.

Judging by the shellacking that the ebullient Chief Joseph Wayas received from sections of the news media when he was Senate president, the press obviously did not regard him as a friend.  To be sure, some of his friends in the good old days when he was Nigeria’s Number Three citizen were journalists, on whom he reportedly lavished precious gifts and favours, not for services rendered or expected to be rendered but as a matter of disinterested habit.

But he was also a friend of the press as an institution.  During the debate on the 1979 draft constitution at  the Constituent Assembly, he spoke eloquently, even forcefully, for a clause that would formally guarantee the freedom of the press, even as former journalists such as Adamu Ciroma, Turi Muhammadu and Olabisi (Aiyekooto) Onabanjo, among others, opposed such a measure.

Wayas, together with the protagonists of a constitutional guarantee of press freedom, lost the battle.  But what had he to show for his exertions in that epic struggle, and what was his reward for his great personal kindness to many a journalist?

Calumny and coarse abuse about his deportment, his comportment, his taste, his women, his wines, his education, and even his munificence.

On learning that Wayas regarded it as the ultimate humiliation to be called Mr Wayas and not Dr Wayas, one journalist actually resolved never to prefix that distinction to his name again.

His reason?

The doctorate was honorary, not earned and was, the journalist claimed, conferred by a little-known college in the United States in recognition of something the recipient had practised more abroad than at home:  public philanthropy.

Yet the journalist did not apply the same rule to dozens of other Nigerians of lesser specific gravity who, on the strength of doctorates awarded by obscure foreign universities for even more obscure attainments, demand to be held in awe.

Not even Wayas’s authorship of a thoughtful book, Nigeria’s Leadership Role in Africa, despite his crippling Senate schedule, to say nothing of his endless social engagements, could move the press to recognize his stature as a person of intellect.

It was bruited that his Higher National Diploma in Business Administration could not have equipped him for such an undertaking.  Some self-styled insiders even claimed that the book was written for valuable consideration by a professor in one of the first-generation universities, a compulsive gambler who had fallen on hard times.

The Senate over which Wayas presided was likewise and object of derision.  No sooner had it commenced business than the leading national newspaper alleged that, rather than face the serious business of law-making, senators busied themselves chasing contracts.

The Senate was scandalised.

Wayas needed no tutoring on his duty to protect the dignity and integrity of the institution. He promptly dispatched the sergeant-at-arms to fetch the newspaper’s editor to come reveal his sources.

Compounding calumny with contumacy, the editor spurned the summons.  Then, he dragged the Senate to court and sought an injunction restraining it from demanding his sources.

Wayas could have regarded this developments an affront and cited the editor for contempt.  He did not, thanks to his overarching commitment to upholding the rule of law.  Still, the press was not impressed.  It continued to berate him, thus undermining the authority of the Senate.

Wayas would have been more than human if his patience and his well-known commitment to due process had not snapped.   They did.  He came to favour former Rivers State military governor, now King Alfred Diete-Spiff’s, principle:  “Spare the rod and breed ill-tempered and disrespectful journalists.”

To take a journalist to court, he came to believe, was to confer unmerited dignity on the fellow.  Flog the daylight out of him, and he will shape up.  To his credit, Wayas never personally flogged any journalist.  Nor did he even go so far as to wrest the microphone from a reporter in earnest or in jest as a former Head of State once did.

The military coup of December 1983 terminated Wayas’s colourful career at the summit of power, which he had attained at age 38.  You hear that, Governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi State. Only 38.  He was only 43 when the colonels came calling.

Wayas returned to Nigeria in mid-1987, ending some 42 months of penurious exile in foreign lands. But his diminished circumstances did nothing to mollify the press.  They said he had been eking out a meagre existence as a house salesman in the United States, and had even been seen at a party dangling from the arms of two women.

They made snide remarks about the time when he strolled majestically through the precincts of the National Assembly, fawning aides tow, to approving chants of “Black Velvet,” his favourite beverage, an exotic brew of black beer and Champagne for which they said he was about to seek a patent when the colonels struck.

Wayas tried to re-enter the political waters during military president Ibrahim Babangida’s fake transition programme.  But with all the banning, unbanning and re-banning of aspirants, he made little headway.  In the end, he settled for being a political consultant where his immense mobilising skills and grassroots touch were said to have spelled the difference between the success and failure of an aspirant or a cause.

Contrary to what the foregoing might suggest in parts, Wayas was no cartoon character.  He was much beloved and commanded a mass following in his Cross River State redoubt.  Whenever and wherever a political fix was needed, he was the one to whom everyone turned.

A grateful political class kept faith with him, showering him with high praise at his death last week, aged 80.

Even President Muhammadu Buhari who had as a major-general led the coup that toppled the Second Republic, a byword for excess, praised him for his leadership of the Senate, his grasp of parliamentary procedure, and for nurturing a younger generation after he retired from party politics.

Obasanjo went one better, declaring Wayas a great patriot who “lived for the welfare and security of the common man.”

Professor Ben Ayade, Governor of Wayas’ home state, Cross River, said Wayas “left indelible footprints on the sands of time” and brought “robust and vibrant leadership” to bear on Nigeria’s quest for democracy.

Few will dispute that overall, Wayas was a jolly good fellow.  Among political figures of this generation and the previous one, he ranked with the most clubbable.

 

The #EndSARS Report

I am a third of the way through a close reading of the 309-page submission of the Lagos State Judicial Commission of Inquiry on the Lagos State.  The Commission is to be commended on executing a tough assignment under the gun, literally.  Final judgement will have to await a full reading, but even at this stage, it seems to me that it deserves much of the criticism that has greeted it.

It appears to me to have generated more heat than light.  Its characterization of the unfortunate deaths as a “massacre,” howsoever qualified, was insensitive and incendiary.  Where are the bodies? Instead of the sobriety that should perfuse the document, the reader is here and there treated instead to hyperbole, to proof by assertion.  Some vocal elements on the panel seem to have been seized more by a theatrical impulse than by a duty to ascertain facts and establish truth.

“Muscle velocity” appears repeatedly as “muscle velocity.”  One hopes that this solecism and others will not find their way into the permanent record.

Prefacing the report is this unattributed declaration:

“Between the agitation and the state’s political-cum-belligerent reaction to lawful dissent, there is a space, and in that space is our power to choose to engage responsibly in the spirit of unity, equity, and fairness toward winning the peace.”

If “the state’s political-cum-belligerent reaction to lawful dissent” is not the Commission’s phrasing, it ought to be properly attributed.  If the phrasing is the panel’s, it will be seen as prejudicial to its remit.

It was in Windhoek, Namibia, on March 31, 1990, that I first shared the same space with Frederick Willem (FW) de Klerk, at ceremonies marking Namibia’s independence from South Africa which had ruled it as a mandated territory of the United Nations since the end of World War II when Germany forfeited it.

“Misruled” is a better term here, for the change brought no relief to the territory, formerly formerly known as South West Africa. South Africa simply incorporated the territory into its apartheid system, which was just as brutal and degrading as German rule. Some five decades later, the territory’s last colonial authority was departing and handing over power to the new nation.

It was a triumphal lap for de Klerk. Two years earlier, despite rumours and murmurs of change, in South Africa, the visit would have been fraught, if not inconceivable.  But on February 2, 1990, at the opening of Parliament, he had stunned the world with a speech that had a tectonic reverberation not just in South Africa but across the world.

The African National Congress and other anti-apartheid political organizations were going to be unbanned.  After 27 years in prison, Nelson Mandela was going to be freed.  The state  of emergency that had given cover to the most horrid human-rights abuses in recent memory was going to be ended.  And the death penalty, which the apartheid regime had employed with cold-blooded casualness to stifle Black resistance, was going to be ended.

In the wider world, de Klerk was hailed as the Gorbachev of Africa.  The accolade was apt, but only that time. Mikhail Gorbachev, remember, was the leader who, to the drumbeat of glasnost and perestroika, restructured and reformed and restructured the Soviet Union unto death and was reduced in the end to a pitchman for Pizza Hut and luxury travel baggage.

Fate has been kinder to De Klerk. The reviews since his passing two weeks ago have been mixed but positive overall. The reforms he instituted reforms laid the foundation for transition from apartheid to a democratic society, which has perhaps the world’s most liberal constitution.

At his press conference before departing the Namibian capital Windhoek for the last time as suzerain, he stuck a friendly note, promised cooperation on a wide range of issues and pledged that South Africa would be a good neighbor.  He responded to barbed questions with a deftness and forthrightness that impressed the assembled international press.  A statesmanlike outing, overall.

Some three months later, I would have a close encounter with de De Klerk.

First, the back story.

General Olusegun Obasanjo, then a statesman-at-large, had served as co-chair of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group that had recommended economic sanctions and other measures that, together with the altered international environment and black insurrection in South Africa, moved the ruling regime to abandon petty apartheid and to begin seriously to contemplate a future without that pernicious doctrine.

During the EPG mission, in 1986, he had struck a relationship with Nelson Mandela, then languishing in prison.  He had strengthened the relationship when he hosted Mandela and his wife Winnie to a rousing reception at his farm in Otta when they visited Nigeria in May 1990.  Some two months later, Obasanjo was headed for South Africa, on a mission “to listen, learn and encourage” the transition then slowly unfolding.

I had asked to accompany him on the trip to get the kind of access that an earlier visit did not provide

Within an hour of our landing at Jan Smuts International Airport, in Johannesburg, on July 25, 1990, well before General Obasanjo could brief Nelson Mandela and the ANC leadership of his mission, state radio had broadcast the news

Then, early on July 26, 1990, the first full day of our visit, official state radio announced that a plot by the South African Communist Party and some elements of the African National Congress to overthrow the government by force had been uncovered.  Specifically, it reported that Mac Maharaj, a member of the ANC National Executive, had been arrested in the investigation of  the alleged plot.

To underscore the gravity of the situation, the government had detailed its intelligence chief, the intense and precise Dr Neil Barnard, to brief Obasanjo and his team on their arrival in Pretoria to  meet with senior government officials.

Barnard and other spokespersons were careful to point out that Mandela was not personally involved in the plot, which they characterized as a “betrayal of trust” that could undermine the peace process “before any significant milestone” was reached and, perhaps more ominously, “threaten the fragile peace in the sub-region.”

As a condition for restoring trust, they demanded that Mac Maharaj, Mandela’s fellow prisoner on Robben Island and Joe Slovo, leader of the SACP, be dropped from the ANC’s negotiating team.

This was the unpromising backdrop to our meeting with Mandela at the ANC’s headquarters in downtown Johannesburg later that day – a day on which state radio announced repeatedly and  to the ANC’s consternation, that Obasanjo had arrived to listen, learn and encourage.

We were ushered into Mandela’s cluttered office as senior members of the ANC were dispersing after concluding a strategy meeting at which they issued a defiant rebuttal to the government ‘s claim that the SACP and ANC were plotting for overthrow it

Mandela would debrief Obasanjo and his team several hours later in the house that Winnie built, in the West Orlando neighbourhood of Soweto, while her husband was in prison – an elegant affair but by no means the most elegant in the vicinity, and far from opulent.

“Whom have you been talking with?” Mandela began, notepad before him and pen in hand, like   a lawyer deposing a witness or client.

As Obasanjo told him about what had transpired in our earlier appointments, you saw Mandela the patient listener, the meticulous note-taker and the skilled interrogator all rolled into one.

Earlier, we had met de Klerk in the Cabinet Room in the Union Buildings in Pretoria.  He sat in his accustomed place at the head of a long of rectangular table, with Obasanjo to his immediate left and me to his immediate right.  He had remarked jokingly that I was sitting in the chair usually occupied the Defence Minister, General Magnus Malan.

I had asked De Klerk to sketch a time frame for the transition democratic rule.  Flipping the pages of              my notebook, I relayed his response to Mandela.

“Difficult,” de Klerk had said.  That year -1990 – and the next would be crucial and dynamic.  “Certainly, no new election would be held under the present (apartheid) constitution.  We are in a hurry.  We are not playing games.  We are not looking at ten or even five years from now . . .”

“No new election will be held under the present constitution?” Mandela repeated slowly and deliberately.

“Exactly what he said, sir,” I replied, looking toward Obasanjo for confirmation.

Obasanjo confirmed that I had correctly reported De Klerk.

All this was news to Mandela.  He had never been told that much by De Klerk, who kept his cards fairly close to his chest, and may indeed have used our visit to telegraph to Mandela and the ANC that he was a person with whom they could do serious business.

Four years and thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands of lives lost in so-called Black-on-Black violence instigated by elements of the security services, Black majority rule finally supplanted white minority rule following elections held under a new constitution.

FW de Klerk stayed on for some two uneasy years as one of two vice presidents — the other was Thabo Mbeki –in an arrangement designed to dampen white fears of revenge and dispossession,   faded away.

His videotaped apology released shortly after his death apologized for the hurt and pain and indignity caused by apartheid sounded sincere and contrite.  But can any apology ever assuage  the sustained barbarous cruelty that apartheid engendered, the ghastly consequences of which South Africans live with to this day?

An apology might perhaps have mitigated the horrors of apartheid if De Klerk had delivered it shortly after taking the reins as president of the apartheid state and signaled an intention to change course.

Still, there is no denying his essential courage and his place in history.