The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

Happier days are beckoning

Now that the patronage organisation that used to call itself the largest political party in Africa has successfully conducted its national convention, its members must be resting and breathing easier, if not rejoicing and dancing in the privacy of their homes or at ceremonies bankrolled by the power-brokers in and outside the fold.

And to think that it almost never happened, this harbinger of a return to happier days of dining and wining and wenching that were supposed to go on for 60 unbroken years until it was rudely terminated, beg your pardon, interrupted, some six years ago!

Yes, it almost didn’t happen.

Former national chairman Uche Secondus, leader of a faction of the party, had petitioned the courts to block the convention, on the ground that the party was under his control and that there was no vacancy for another leader. Only when the courts denied his petition some 24 hours to the scheduled beginning of the convention, was it certain that it would indeed hold.

There they were at any rate, counting the days to the 2023 General Election when they will wrest power from the governing APC. Many of the hardy perennials were either missing outright from the Southwest contingent or deliberately stayed in the shadows.

I am thinking in particular of Ebenezer “Ebino” Babatope and his Mainstreamers Group.

Ebino was the much-admired, sure-footed director of Organisation of Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Unity Party of Nigeria and a close aide of the Sage himself. You could say that he stood higher than most Nigerians than in terms of name recognition. At that time Olagunsoye Oyinlola was probably a cadet in the Military Academy. Outside that institution, nobody knew him. And yet decades later, Olagunsoye worsted Ebino in the race for PDP National Secretary.

Something told me then that Ebino was politically finished. Washed up. Some would date his fall to the time he nominated the brutal dictator Sani Abacha to run as the sole presidential candidate of five political vehicles fabricated for that purpose, a contraption that Chief Bola Ige put down for the ages as “five leprous fingers of the same hand.”

Oyinlola, aforementioned, was of course at Eagle Square, brooding and raring to duel it out with Taofeek Arapaja, an alumnus of Lamidi Adedibu’s school of garrison politics, for the post of Deputy Chairman (South) of the PDP.

The post was to be filled by consensus, like all other posts. The cards were stacked against Oyinlola, but he refused to yield and carried the contest right down to the wire. He lost. But he took it in his stride as befits a gallant soldier and graciously congratulated Arapaja. “Politics without bitterness” is not quite dead yet in Nigeria, contrary to the lament that has been in the air for decades.

In my book, Oyinlola’s encounter with Arapaja has got to be the high point of the convention. Each went to the Eagle Square with a retinue of minstrels and drummers and praise singers belting out songs and chants and slogans laced with snide remarks, salacious abuse, delicious gossip and biting sarcasm reminiscent of the good old days in Western Nigeria when politics was also a spectacle.

At Eagle Square, it is necessary to repeat, candidates had to emerge through consensus. Why engage in a brutal, no-holds-barred contest to pick a candidate when you could with some negotiation, the path of which may lie through a network of shrines, some blackmail, and a promise of patronage to sugar the pill, get everyone else to stand down for a preferred candidate. That is the game they call Consensus.

Since politics is among other things the art of building consensus to achieve a common purpose, there can be no politics without consensus. But that is not the sense of consensus that has come to dominate Nigerian politics since the June 12 1993 presidential election.

Bashorun MKO Abiola had run through dozens of contests to clinch the Social Democratic Party (SDP) ticket. In the substantive election, he garnered more than one-third of the votes cast, and more than one-fourth of the votes where he fell short of the one-third benchmark. He had won the race decisively.

Consensus never came in finer robes. Nigerian politics had never witnessed this margin of victory and probably will never see it again. Yet, they wanted the contrived annulment of the election resolved by Consensus – in the form of a contraption that claimed to be a government when it wasn’t, and national when it was anything but.

The only truth in its advertised label was that it was interim; mercifully so, too, lasting all of 93 inglorious days, most of it wobbling, with no sense of direction.

Since then, at every stage of the political process, be it local, state, or national, one is assailed by loud and insistent calls for “consensus” candidates.

Consensus seems to have served the PDP very well, at any rate. It knocked out former Senate President David Mark, who was angling to be national chair; it eliminated Oyinlola even before the race had begun, and catapulted Arapaja over him in the race for deputy national chair Consensus produced 17 of the 21 offices filled in at the convention just ended.

We will see more applications of this winning formula.

If many of the hardy perennials were missing in Eagle Square, it was not all gloom. There was a judicious sprinkling of relatively new faces, many of them relatively unknown. They will come of age literally on television.

Atiku Abubakar, more a candidate of habit than conviction, was on hand. They thought they had neutered him when they employed consensus to zone the Presidency to the North the calculation being the national chair and the presidential candidate cannot emerge from the same zone.

Nonsense, says Atiku. Only party offices were zoned, not elective offices. To zone the latter would be unconstitutional, he maintains. As I see it, Atiku is going nowhere, consensus or no consensus. They are going to have to reckon to wish him until the very last act.

Bukola Saraki, candidate of opportunity and entitlement was there, carrying himself like a king in exile poised to make a glorious return to his domain to claim his throne, and o to gee be damned. His gleaming luxury Sarakiya buses were not just for conveying his supporters to the convention grounds. I suspect they are designed to awe the o to gee group and lead them to believe that there is more, much more still in the till that financed the munificence of the era before o to gee and that a return to that era is imminent.

Following a gale of high-value defections from the PDP to the APC, with more expected in the aftermath of the convention, Saraki, who knows a thing or two about such matters, has warned the APC that it is deluded if it believed even for a moment that it could retain power by inducing opposition elements to break ranks.

I see a roaring defection market opening up shortly. I see disaffected members in one camp threatening to defect to the other camp. If the members are considered valuable assets, the party asks them to name their price for staying. The disaffected members will ask the other camp to match the offer or top it. And since politicking is not a game of charity, the camp that offers the best inducement wins.

Even former Senate President and more recently secretary to the Government of the Federation, Anyim, Pius, Anyim, is threatening to run for president, and to dragoon Oyinlola along as his running mate. Poor Oyinlola. Maybe it will never come to that, but if it does, many are going to be asking: How did Oyinlola’s political fortunes fall so precipitously?

But whether it comes to that or not, Anyim, who has no known political constituency has said that even with the presidency zoned to the North, nothing precludes an aspirant from the Southeast from running. The political convention signalled the start of political activity. He had received the calling back in 2020 when his supporters flooded the nation with his banners and posters but had decided that the time was not ripe. Now is the time to go and the EFCC be damned with its nebulous and unfounded charges of graft.

The silly season is now well and truly upon us. Let us savour it unencumbered by Boko Haram and ISIS and bandits and cattle herders and marauders of whatever stripe, not forgetting Covid-19, the epileptic power and water supply, the slaughter slabs that pass for highways and inflation and climate change and all such irritants.

We have learned to live with them anyway.

November 2, 2021
Governors’ lawlessness

The jejune determination of some state governors to frustrate the financial autonomy of the judiciary and the legislature in their states in flagrant disobedience of the 1999 constitution (as amended), amounts to executive lawlessness, and should be decried by every well-meaning Nigeria.

Without equivocation, by the fourth alteration act, section 121(3) of the constitution provides: “Any amount standing to the credit of the House of Assembly, and Judiciary in the Consolidated Revenue Fund of the state shall be paid directly to the said bodies respectively; in the case of judiciary, such amount shall be paid directly to the heads of the courts concerned.”

Despite this clear provision, as at the end of September, only 12 states have enacted the necessary legislation to give effect to the above provision of the constitution. The states are: Plateau, Sokoto, Bauchi, Bayelsa, Enugu, Lagos, Imo, Jigawa, Kwara, Taraba, Nassarawa, and Kaduna. Perhaps, it will be fair to conclude that the rest of the 24 states are governed by outlaws? And that the state legislators are too timid to exercise their lawmaking powers, to provide a guide for the implementation of the autonomy granted them and the judiciary by the said alteration act.

Since the governors want to be reminded; the fundamental principle of the presidential system of government is the doctrine of separation of powers, succinctly elucidated by Baron de Montesquieu, a French philosopher. He postulated: “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.”

He pontificated further: “Again, there is no liberty, if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive. Were it joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control; for the judge would be then the legislator. Were it joined to the executive power, the judge might behave with violence and oppression.”

He concluded: “There would be an end of everything, were the same man or the same body, whether of the nobles or of the people, to exercise those three powers, that of enacting laws, that of executing the public resolutions, and of trying the causes of individuals.” The state governors must bear in mind that the independence of the legislature and the judiciary will remain lame provisions, if the executive controls their funding. After all, he who pays the piper dictates the tune.

So, except the governors are lawless, there can be no other driving force for the refusal of the remaining 24 state governors to ask their state attorneys-generals to initiate executive bills to guide the implement of the clear provision of the constitution. More so, since the governors agreed to do so, in a memorandum of action to end the recent strike action by the Parliamentary Staff Association of Nigeria (PASSAN) and the Judiciary Staff Union of Nigeria (JUSUN) that crippled the state Houses of Assembly and the judiciary.

Read Also: Governors can’t control PDP, says Chidoka

Or are the state governors waiting for another round of strike by the unions before they will do the needful? Or is that they don’t give a damn about industrial peace in the state they govern by virtue of the powers granted them by the grundnorm they treat with cynical levity? As it is, they enjoy the executive powers granted them by the constitution, but wear the garb of lawlessness when the occasion suits them.

It is important to remind the lawless governors that the 1999 Constitution (as amended) is supreme and must be obeyed by all and sundry. Section 1(1) of the 1999 constitution (as amended) provides so. And in Ahmed vs RTAKRCC, (2019) All FWLR, pt. 1014, Bage, JSC, thundered: “The Constitution is the Supreme Law of the Land. The constitution confers jurisdiction on the court.” And in a number of cases the courts have confirmed the financial autonomy of the federal and state judiciaries.

That position of the law was confirmed in the following cases: Judiciary Staff Union of Nigeria & National Judiciary Council vs Governors of the 36 States in suit no: FHC/ABJ/CS/667/13; and Olisa Agbakoba vs FG, NJC & National Assembly, Suit No. FHC/ABJ/CS/63/2013. To guide the governors on the path of rule of law, I will quote extensively the excoriation of the Justices of the Supreme Court, in the case of Military Governor of Lagos state vs Ojukwu (2001) F.W.L.R 1639-1848, pt. 50.

As held by Obaseki JSC, “In the area where rule of law operates, the rule of self-help by force is abandoned. Nigeria, being one of the countries in the world, even in the third world which profess loudly to follow the rule of law, gives no room for the rule of self-help by force to operate.” The learned Justice elucidated: “The rule of law presupposes that:- the state is subject to law; the judiciary is a necessary agency of the rule of law; government should respect the rights of individual citizens under the rule of law.”

On his part, Oputa, JSC, succinctly posited: “I can safely say that here in Nigeria, even under a military government the law is no respecter of persons, principalities, governments or powers and government, alert to see that the state or government is bound by the law and respects the law.” On his part, Uwais, JSC, admonished: “If governments treat court orders with levity and contempt, the confidence of the citizen in the courts will be seriously eroded and the effect of that will be the beginning of anarchy in replacement of the rule of law.”

This column believes that the confidence of the citizens may have been eroded by the actions of the 24 state governors who have continued to treat the constitution with levity and contempt. The citizens may begin to see the entire democratic process as a sham, and may resort to self-help whenever they are challenged. This writer urges the governors who have been entrusted to govern by the constitution to operate under the rubric of the law. To seek to do otherwise is to let anarchy loose upon our country.

As we say in law, no one can approbate and reprobate at the same time. If the governors are unwilling to obey the constitution, the president is under oath to enforce the provisions of the constitution. Thankfully, the president has already issued Executive Order 10, in furtherance of his executive powers to enforce obedience to the constitution. Instead of waiting for another round of industrial strike by the judicial and state legislative staff, this column urges the immediate implementation of the Executive Order 10, in states where the governors are lawless.

November 2, 2021
E-Naira and other matters

Although it’s still some six weeks to Christmas, a lot of excitement is already in the air. For this, all thanks must go to Godwin Emefiele and crew for giving Nigerians something to chew upon. Never mind the initial false start, the long-awaited digital currency finally arrived Monday 25 – although not without a bout of glitches here and there and – wait for it – a most unwarranted disclaimer by the issuer!

Talk of excitement; yours truly has yet to figure out what the excitement is all about. I watched President Muhammadu Buhari speak at the launch. He spoke of Nigeria being ‘the first country in Africa, and one of the first in the world to introduce a digital currency to her citizens’.

What I didn’t hear was that the naira – let alone the eNaira on which it is inextricably indexed – has suddenly become the currency of choice in the sub region not to talk of the continent. Trust a leadership that has long perfected the art of counting the chicks before they are hatched, we are told to gobble the flat, home-made fiction that ‘the adoption of CBDC and its underlying technology, called blockchain, can increase Nigeria’s GDP by US$29 billion over the next 10 years’!

Unfortunately, if the eNaira launch had sought to presage an era in which central banks seek to go global – via the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) – the apex bank seems to have done a lot of muddling up to leave Nigerians more bewildered than informed.

Indeed, merely by the way the eNaira has been hyped and sold, you’d be right to put the eNaira on the pedestal of those tradeable instruments that those bright chaps on the stock exchange floor would not be found without. I mean the kind of instrument that shrewd investors would rather have for keeps.

Interestingly, I have heard not one or two people refer to it as Emefiele’s cryptocurrency – which although amusing, is not necessarily off the mark.

Of course, they are partly wrong and, right!

Right – because cryptocurrencies actually foreshadowed the eNaira as a digital financial instrument.

Few months ago, a good number of Nigerians could have sworn that cryptocurrencies came closest to the idea of ‘digital currency’. Not only were they freely traded at the crypto exchanges, they were actually transactional instruments of choice among the class of the so-called big boys who preferred to operate in the shadows. That was the case until February, when Emefiele decided that the cups of the operators were full. He did not only shut them out of the financial system, he went as far as ordering the closure of their accounts.

Read Also: BREAKING: Why e-Naira went missing on Google playstore, by CBN

They are also wrong to have described it as such because, while the coming of the eNaira could be linked to that development, it is simply not a case of one replacing the other! Although Emefiele had then made clear that the sins of the crypto exchanges – which included their lack of regulation, being a playground of sorts to shadowy investors and speculators and so open to all manners of illicit financial transactions, which meant that it was only a matter of time before bad money flooded and ultimately destroy the financial system under his watch – the best he could do was what he’s already done – which is to keep them at bay!

In other words, the eNaira didn’t come to replace them. The eNaira for all the noise and excitement was not even designed to be an antidote to the cryptocurrency challenge! Although deriving from the same blockchain technology, the objectives are clearly different. As for the eNaira, not in anyone’s wild imagination could it be described as a game-changer in any shape or form more so in a country with countless other platforms for digital transactions.

Which is why many still wonder – what difference would the eNaira make, when, with the touch of a few buttons on my smartphone, I could send tens of thousands of naira to my mum in the village all within seconds?

Let me attempt an answer this way – it is like asking why anyone would bother with say Telegram in a world where the WhatsApp and other messaging applications already rule?

To the extent that today’s world is driven by innovation, such derivatives are only to be expected.

I do understand that the CBN e-wallet comes with a number of attractions. Said to be fast and safe – offering simple trading and transactional opportunities to customers and end-users, it comes as the apex bank’s introduction to the game! While it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than being an additional channel to those already in the business, it does offers multiple values which those countless other platforms could only but dream. In other words, the CBDC idea, of which the eNaira is an early comer, it is one whose time has come, although not in any sense revolutionary as one might imagine it to be!

For our banks that have long mastered the art of making fortunes from doing little, with their multiple charges on transactions, the eNaira platforms means real competition hence tough times ahead. In perhaps a year or two, Nigerians should be able to measure its impacts on their bottom-line. So much for their penchant for unearned wealth.

This takes me to the final point – which is the tragedy of a country which continues to soar on the financial technology (fin-tech) plane, but which for whatever reasons has not been able to get the basic things right. No doubt, innovation is good. It is the way of the world. As it is, if progress were to be measured by mere offerings on the fin-tech arena, Nigeria would certainly be a clear leader on the global front. In the same way, if there are any lessons to draw from the surfeit of the countless innovations which offer no more than platforms to shuffle currencies – whether virtual or physical – around and among the citizens of different cadres in the society, it is their limitation in engendering real wealth.

November 2, 2021
Sir ‘Eyo! When comes another?

In 2018 when he turned 70, we all gushed at how age had stolen on the “young” Dr. Adewale Adesoji Adeeyo — Sir ‘Eyo, to many of his doting contemporaries; Uncle Wale, to the hundreds of other younger folks, to whom he was an immaculate role model.

At one of those memorable Sallah soirées at his Ikeja GRA, Lagos, home, he had casually told his gathered friends he would be 70 in a few days — a Monday — and would by honoured by their presence, at that epoch’s Islamic morning prayers.

Now, three short years after, we howl: death has, even more surreptitiously, snatched him from us! He was just three fleeting years, among young elders, of 70 and above!

But alive or dead, Adeeyo retained a cosmopolitan streak. He was born in Accra, Ghana, on 27 August 1948. His early and teenage education, mainly in Ibadan, is well documented. His avid love for his Ede nativity was without a doubt.

Yet, at his passage on 14 October 2021, Dr. Adeeyo chose to spend his post-life bliss, not in his native Ede but in Ibadan — Ibadan, the Yoruba political capital, where Adeeyo enjoyed his earliest education as a child. He rests in that same city, at Eternal Home Cemetery, Km 25, Ibadan/Oyo road.

Watching the funeral rites up close on ZOOM, it was as if Adeeyo himself was there, superintending: clean-cut grave, neat pillars, solemn hearse, immaculate procession — the quintessential neat-and-tidy stuff that defined the suave and genteel Adeeyo.

But not many people knew the story behind the giant flex portrait, that literarily stood by the grave to welcome mourners; as Adeeyo himself in life, ushered in guests to his famed, choice garden soirées.

That flex was tribute to how Adeeyo honoured — and was honoured by — those who loved him.

Muyiwa Hassan, ace photojournalist, now with The Nation, was one of the Adeeyo many protégées, spread across life’s many stations: rich or poor; young or old; patrician or pleb.

Hassan developed a sudden whim: to honour Adeeyo, his publisher at The Anchor newspaper, with a huge, befitting portrait. So, he splashed own money on one befitting his taste, as professional photographer and crack photojournalist.

An immensely grateful Adeeyo was nevertheless stunned: he didn’t like planting “garish” (his very word) giant portraits in his living quarters. Yet, he wouldn’t turn down such a kind gesture. So, a compromise: that huge portrait nestled in his serene bedroom.

From that ultra-private spot, however, its replica leapt to be “sentry” — and the cynosure of all mourning eyes — at the Adeeyo graveside!

Hassan, ever-faithful and ever-loyal, was there: at the graveside in Ibadan; at the third-day Islamic prayers at Harbour Point, Victoria Island, Lagos. From both spots and via his lens, he fed the public with the funeral rites, from The Nation pages.

Yet, not many could feel Hassan’s tinge of quiet excitement. He set out, in private, to honour the living Adeeyo. Yet, here was Adeeyo, in death, somewhat honouring him back, in full public glare: Hassan’s photography has become a treasured heirloom in the Adewale Adeeyo family history!

Dr. Adeeyo always honoured those who honoured him. As he was in life, so he turned out in death! But here is another personal example.

I had written a tribute to the late Kofi Annan, then UN secretary-general, when in 2000 he, with the United Nations, jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize. It was routine stuff — The Anchor back-page portraiture of the befitting, mainly by Ikechukwu Ameachi, that paper’s prolific and hardworking deputy editor back then, and I.

Somehow, Dr. Adeeyo drew the attention of Prof. Ibrahim Gambari, now presidential chief of staff but then a top shot in the UN system. It was an excited publisher of The Anchor that then approached me: “Prof,” he beamed — not the real one, to be sure, but a honorific moniker among work colleagues — “everyone is reading you at the UN!”, flashing the culled copy of the Annan tribute, in the UN house magazine!

Dr. Adeeyo — God bless his soul! — sure knew how to honour you; and make you walk tall! That rare generosity of spirit is common testimony from his former employees at The Anchor, who later became his life-long younger friends: Ikechukwu Amaechi, Kunle Fagbemi (now Adekunle Ade-Adeleye), Tunji Adegboyega aka Cyclone, Ngozi Asoya, and many others.

But that was second only to his relentless intellectual pursuit. In Make or Break: A Handbook for the April 2011 Elections in Nigeria, Dr. Adeeyo left posterity with his favoured company. It was a special publication by The Anchor newspaper, though then long defunct. But the contributors were brilliant minds Adeeyo would rather roll with.

Adewale Maja-Pearce edited the collection. Prof. Adebayo Williams wrote the preface. The contributors, aside from Adeeyo himself, included Prof. Adigun Agbaje, Adekunle Ade-Adeleye, Reuben Abati, Ikechukwu Ameachi and Kanmi Ademiluyi, who now runs Osun Defender, a newspaper based in Osogbo, among others. That was quintessential Adeeyo, always in tune with acute minds!

In post-Anchor private exchanges, he often dreamed of a “post-retirement project” — a brain trust to be located in serene Ibadan (Ibadan again!), to intellectually engage the society in seminars, workshops and special publications. The Adeeyo family, estate and friends may want to actualize that dream, as fitting tribute, to his stellar memory!

Meanwhile to widow, Hauwa, and sons, Aminu and Bashir; not discounting their elder sisters, adorable products of Adeeyo’s first marriage, Farida and Olamide: your patriarch lived an impactful life that left nothing but sweet memories.

Though he is gone, you will never walk alone!

Still, echoes from Biafra 1 …

By Pet Mmonu

Just finished reading and re-reading your guest columnist (“Echoes from Biafra 1” by Azubike Nass, October 26). It made my Tuesday more memorable as always. Today’s column touched base. This is because the writer seemed to be writing about me too.

I was in the primary three at the time. It was at same Nsukka. My father was the principal of St Teresa’s College. I was not so young. I remembered clearly how my father came for me that Sunday morning, completely subdued and terrified. I was in a primary boarding school, run by Irish nuns; and my father used his influence to take me out of the school quietly, so as not to scare other kids.

We drove back to our house. Before then, my father had taken my pregnqnt mum and other siblings to our village. He reached out to get the keys to the house and behold: he had, in his fear, put on the pair of trousers with a deep hole in the pocket! The key fell off somewhere!

He got into the car and we left with only the clothes we had on. I remember, as a 7-year old, seeing the Biafra army guys as we got to the strategic Opi junction. They stopped us and threatened to commandeer my father’s Peugeot 403 car.

My father’s car was eventually commandeered, as was then the case in Biafra. He was driving to an engagement with Caritas. The army guys stopped him, ordered him out and drove away. That was the last time we saw the car.

To cut a long story short, it was the most horrible experience for our family. It is an experience best forgotten. This is what irks when some thugs who were not there when the corpse was buried start digging from the legs — God forbid!

I was horrified and in pains last night watching Ezeife talking Goebellian trash. I was engulfed in bitterness. You can then imagine the relief I felt, reading your guest columnist today — always a Tuesday, the best part of waking up!

Mrs Mnonu writes from Port Harcourt, Rivers State.

November 2, 2021
Colin Powell: The glitter and the tarnish

On May 10, 2001, TIME magazine carried a cover story titled “Where have you gone, Colin Powell?” Powell, the Secretary of State in the George W. Bush Administration had gone nowhere, but he was conspicuously missing where his critics thought his presence would have counted most.

The first was in the decision-making on America’s likely response to a terrorist attack on the U. S. homeland, still six months away but already an element in the inchoate electronic chatter that American intelligence was grappling with.

The second followed from the first: How America would respond to those September 11 attacks with Iraq at the receiving end – Iraq, still reeling from its expulsion from Kuwait by American and allied forces in Operation Desert Shield. That looming invasion, Operation Desert Storm, was still some 18 months away. But the impulse to war in the Bush White House was strong and insistent, and the drumbeat was being pounded relentlessly by a largely jingoistic press.

Minutes after the second plane struck the second tower of the World Trade Centre on 9/11, Peter Jennings, the anchor for the ABC News cut in live to declare, without fear and without attribution that Iraq (read Saddam Hussein) was behind the attacks. His fellow anchor Dan Rather, of CBS, was only slightly more guarded. He noted dutifully that Iraq’s Saddam had denied ordering the attacks but had provided no proof to that effect.

Jennings and Rather were two of the most revered figures in American television news. One said flatly that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks; the other said Saddam Hussein had denied any part in the attacks but had provided no proof that he had nothing do with them.

Between them, and before the attentive global television audience, they had within two minutes of each other shredded the most basic rules that had undergirded news reporting for decades and had set the agenda that would dominate American and to a large extent global perceptions on the war on terror for decades to come.

Even at full throttle, the American effort in Afghanistan had the makings of a debacle.

It was to end the barbarous reign of the Taliban in Afghanistan and in that region, they said. Afghanistan would no longer function as a training ground and a haven for terrorists. From its ashes would rise a modern state founded on democracy and the rule of law.

The invasion plan for Afghanistan had little in common with key elements of the so- called Powell Doctrine, the strategy that Powell had enunciated as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the run-up to the 1990-91 Gulf War to defeat Iraq in five short weeks and terminate Saddam Hussein’s brutal reign.

Among other discontinuities from the Powell Doctrine: it set no clear and attainable goals, identified no risks and costs that had been fully analysed, and it lacked an exit strategy that would help avert endless entanglements.

Like all previous imperialist undertakings, the invasion which was launched in 2001 soon got bogged down in mission creep and was mired until the US negotiated its way out in a chaotic retreat some two months ago. It has gone down as America’s longest war.

But even as the invasion of Afghanistan dragged on with no end visible, only escalation and mounting military casualties on both sides and on the civilian population, the White House turned its sights on Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

The case against Iraq rested on the claim that it already possessed a huge stockpile of weapons so fearsome that they were unmentionable. Only by designating them “weapons of mass destruction” (or WMD) could anyone even begin to fathom their infernal capacity for damage and destruction.

The invasion was conceived in imperial hubris laced with oedipal undertones. Bush the elder had declared “mission accomplished” after the liberation of Kuwait and left Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq. Bush the son saw the imminent invasion as a chance to prove that he was a man of finer straw than his father, whom he had always thought weak and irresolute.

Bush the elder had marched from victory in Kuwait and stratospheric approval ratings to a crushing defeat in the presidential election just one year later. Bush the son would take no chance with so fickle an electorate. So, in the name of the war on terror, make fear, primal fear a constant companion: fear of the state, fear of the other, fear of those who look different or talk, think, dress and worship differently.

At every opportunity, demonize those counselling against a rush to war as latter-day Neville Chamberlains; cast compatriots who had won battlefield laurels for heroism in another war but were opposed to the looming one as traitors. Brush aside age-long canons of municipal and international law. Presume all suspects guilty until they prove their innocence before secret military tribunals that are not obliged to tell them the charges on which their indictment is grounded.

Prescribe, approve or condone “coercive interrogation” techniques that would elsewhere be called by their proper name: Torture.

Though a loyal Republican, the new president’s first cabinet pick who had a matchless record of public service, a reputation for integrity and a renown as a problem-solver, felt uncomfortable with what was going on, voiced disapproval quietly as was his wont and often in private.

In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the White House had kept him on the margins. Vice President Dick Cheney to whom the president related as a father-figure, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice ran rings around him, and he was often reduced to second-guessing the administration’s next move.

Until they had to justify the planned invasion of Iraq to a skeptical international community.

They scratched and fudged and fumbled. It was in this context that TIME magazine came up with its now famous May 10, 2001 cover, “Where have you gone, Colin Powell” – a nostalgic riff probably on “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio,” the title of the great 1973 movie on the life and times and exploits of the baseball legend.

Iraq was to be made to pay fearsome consequences of 9/11, in which it had played no part whatsoever, as inquiry after inquiry had shown. As to whether Iraq had developed and was set to lose weapons of mass destruction on the world, Condoleezza Rice declared that the world could not afford to delay action until mushroom clouds darkened the skies.

For 12 years during which American and British and French war planes flew over and routinely rained bombs on its territory, Iraq could not shoot down a single one. International sanctions had crippled Iraq to the point that the most basic goods had to be imported with the strict approval of supervising United Nations officials, and then rationed.

Yet, the same Iraq had in the same period developed unmanned planes that could spray deadly poison germs across the United States, as well as long-range missiles strike British forces in Cyprus, it was claimed.

Why Iraq would want to launch a suicidal bacteriological attack on the United States, or attack British forces that had been garrisoned in Cyprus since the 1970s was never explained, but no matter.

A global organization that was set up “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” was now to be used to launch an unjustified war.

None among the officials calling for the invasion of Iraq could make a persuasive case. In the entire administration, only Colin Powell had the credibility. He was polished, suave, and so non-threatening that both the Democrats and Republicans cottoned on to him as a worthy presidential candidate.

On a visit to the Reagan White House where Powell was serving as National Security Adviser, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, no admirer of Blacks, was reportedly so taken in by Powell’s bearing and grasp of issues that she urged Reagan to dismiss his replace his garrulous and bombastic Secretary of State, Alexander Hague and replace him with Powell.

And so, as the U. S Government sought justification for waging war on Iraq, they trotted out Powell, who had been kept on the fringes, to the United Nations to warn the international community that unless Iraq was invaded and disarmed immediately, the evidence the appeasers were clamouring for would come in the shape of mushroom clouds from Sadaam’s arsenal of WMDs.

The evidence that Iraq had stockpiled and was set to unleash such weapons on the world was never more than threadbare. Powell’s testimony before the United Nations did nothing to improve its quality. What he presented on the world’s stage as iron-clad evidence of Iraq’s alleged nuclear perfidy was so fragmentary and so speculative that the attentive global audience came away wondering whether his towering reputation for integrity and forthrightness had not been oversold.

Their harsh judgement reverberated across the world this past week, following Colin Powell’s death on October 18, 2021. He was aged 84.

October 28, 2021
Colin Powell: The glitter and the tarnish

On May 10, 2011, TIME magazine carried a cover story titled “Where have you gone, Colin Powell?” Powell, the Secretary of State in the George W. Bush Administration had gone nowhere, but he was conspicuously missing where his critics thought his presence would have counted most.

The first was in the decision-making on America’s likely response to a terrorist attack on the U. S. homeland, still six months away but already an element in the inchoate electronic chatter that American intelligence was grappling with.

The second followed from the first: How America would respond to those September 11 attacks with Iraq at the receiving end – Iraq, still reeling from its expulsion from Kuwait by America and the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm. That invasion was still some 18 months away. But the impulse to war in the Bush White House was strong and insistent, and the drumbeat was being pounded relentlessly by a largely jingoistic press.

Minutes after the second plane struck the second tower of the World Trade Centre on 9/11, Peter Jennings, the anchor for the ABC News cut in live to declare, without fear and without attribution, Iraq (read Saddam Hussein) was behind the attacks. His fellow anchor Dan Rather, of CBS, was only slightly more guarded. He noted dutifully that Iraq’s Saddam had denied ordering the attacks but had provided no proof to that effect.

Jennings and Rather were two of the most revered figures in American television news. One said flatly that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks; the other said Saddam Hussein had denied any part in the attacks but had provided no proof that he had nothing do with them,

Between them, and before the most attentive television audience, they had within two minutes of each shredded the most basic rules that had undergirded news reporting for decades, they had set the agenda that would dominate American and to a large extent global perceptions on the war on terror for decades to come.

At full throttle, the American effort in Afghanistan already had the makings of a debacle.

It was to end the barbarous reign of the Taliban in Afghanistan and in that region, they said. Afghanistan would no longer function as a training ground and a haven for terrorists. From its ashes would rise a modern state founded on democracy and the rule of law.

The invasion plan had little in common with key elements of the so- called Powell Doctrine, the strategy that Powell had enunciated as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the run-up to the 1990-91 Gulf War to defeat Iraq in five short weeks to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait and other territories it had forcibly occupied.

Among other discontinuities from the Powell Doctrine: it set no clear and attainable goals, identified no risks and costs that had been fully analyzed, and it lacked an exit strategy that would help avert endless entanglements

Like all previous imperialist undertakings, the invasion which was launched in 2001 soon got bogged down in mission creep and was mired until the US negotiated its way out in chaotic retreat some two months ago. It has gone down as America’s longest war.

But even as the invasion of Afghanistan dragged on with no end visible, only escalation and mounting military casualties on both sides and on the civilian population, the White House turned its sights on Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

The case against Iraq rested on the claim that it already possessed a huge stockpile of weapons so fearsome that they were unmentionable. Only by designating them “weapons of mass destruction” (or WMD) could anyone even begin to fathom their infernal capacity for damage and destruction.

The invasion was conceived in imperial hubris laced with Oedipal undertones. Bush the elder had declared “mission accomplished” after the liberation of Kuwait and left Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq. Bush the son saw the imminent invasion as a chance to prove that he was a stronger man than his father, whom he had always thought weak and irresolute.

Bush the elder had marched from victory and stratospheric approval ratings to a crushing defeat in the Presidential election just one year later. Bush the son would take no chance with so fickle an electorate. So, in the name of the war on terror, make fear, primal fear a constant companion: fear of the state fear of the other, fear of those who look different or talk, think, dress and worship differently.

At every opportunity, demonize those counseling against a rush to war as latter-day Neville Chamberlains; cast compatriots who had won battlefield laurels for heroism in another war but were opposed to the looming one as traitors. Brush aside age-long canons of municipal and international law. Presume all suspects guilty until they prove their innocence before secret military tribunals that are not obliged to tell them the charges on which their indictment is grounded.

Prescribe, approve or condone “coercive interrogation” techniques that would elsewhere be called by their proper name: Torture

Though a loyal Republican, the new president’s first cabinet and who had a matchless record of public service, a reputation for integrity and a renown as a problem-solver felt uncomfortable with what was going on, voiced disapproval quietly as was his wont and often in private.

In the run-up to the war, The White House kept him on the margins. Vice President Dick Cheney to whom the president related as a father-figure, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice ran rings around him, and he was often reduced to second-guessing the Administration’s next move.

Until they had to justify the planned invasion of Iraq to a skeptical international community. They scratched and fudged and fumbled. It was in this context that TIME magazine came up with its now famous May 10, 2011 cover, “Where have you gone, Colin Powell” a nostalgic riff probably on “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio,” the title of the great 1973 movie on the life and times and exploits of the baseball legend.

Iraq was to be made to pay fearsome consequences of 9/11, in which it had played no part whatsoever, as after inquiry had shown. As to whether Iraq had developed and was set to lose weapons of mass destruction on the world, Condoleezza Rice declared that the world could not afford to delay action until mushroom clouds darkened the skies.

For 12 years during which American and British and French war planes flew over and routinely rained bombs on its territory, Iraq could not shoot down a single one. International sanctions had crippled Iraq to the point that the most basic goods had to be imported with the strict approved of supervising United Nations authorities, and then rationed by the government.

Yet, the same Iraq had in the same period developed unmanned planes that could spray deadly poison germs across the United States, as well as long-range missiles strike British forces in Cyprus, it was claimed.

Why Iraq would want to launch a suicidal bacteriological attack on the United States, or attack British forces that had been garrisoned in Cyprus since the 1970s was never explained, but no matter.

A global organization that was set up had been set up “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” was now to be used to launch an unjustified war.

None among the officials calling for the invasion of Iraq could make a persuasive case. In the entire Administration, only Colin Powell had the credibility. He was polished, suave, and so non-threatening that both the Democrats and Republicans cottoned on to him as a worthy Presidential candidate. On a visit to the Reagan White House where Powell was serving as National Security Adviser, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, no admirer of Blacks, was reportedly so taken in by Powell’s bearing and grasp of issues that she urged Reagan to replace his garrulous and bombastic Secretary of State, Alexander Hague, with Powell.

And so, as they desperately sought justification for waging war on Iraq, they trotted out Powell, who had been kept on the fringes to the United Nations to warn the international community that unless Iraq was invaded and disarmed immediately, the evidence the appeasers were clamoring for would come in the shape of mushroom clouds from Sadaam’s arsenal of WMDs.

The evidence that Iraq had stockpiled and was set to unleash such weapons on the world was never more than threadbare. Powell’s testimony before the United Nations did nothing to improve its quality. What he presented on the world’s stage as iron-clad evidence of Iraq’s alleged nuclear perfidy was so fragmentary and so speculative that the attentive global audience came away wondering whether his towering reputation for integrity and forthrightness had not been oversold.

Their harsh judgement reverberated across the world this past week, following Colin Powell’s death on October 18, 2021. He was aged 84.

October 26, 2021
Echoes from Biafra 1
First, I want to identify myself, to give an indication of where my position is coming from. I am of Igbo ethnic group. I experienced the Civil War first-hand.

The first shot of the war in present-day South East was fired in Alo-Uno, a border village in Nsukka; part of present-day Enugu State. I was there at the time. Some hours before that, the first batch of Federal troops had entered the then Eastern Region in Gakem, a border village in present-day Cross River State.

I was a senior primary school pupil of Alo-Uno Primary School, when the war started. I remember what the experience was like, including our evacuation to Enugu town; and further, to my village in Anambra State.

From then, till the end of the war, in my post-war secondary-school years and after, I had developed a keen interest in the study of wars, starting from the Civil War. I later joined the Nigerian Army as an officer-cadet.

During my service years, I retained a consummate interest in military history and conflict studies across the world, with closer interest in African conflict spots: Morroccan war with Western Sahara; Arab-Israeli wars; Algerian years of fundamentalist bloodbath; the Tanzanian-supported guarrilla war that chased away President Idi Amin of Uganda; Ethiopian-Eritrean conflict; Somalia; the long Congo war (s); Liberian and Sierra Leone civil wars; Angolan war with Jonas Savimbi’s rebel army; the anti-Apartheid long war, with its extended dimensions to the wars in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Namibia.

Many years ago, I had argued that there was a major difference between the South West (Yoruba) and the South East (Igbo), when it comes to thinking about going to war. In about the past three centuries, before the 20th Century, the Yoruba ethnic group, which cuts across about four countries of present-day West Africa (majority of them in Nigeria), had fought several serious wars, some of which were very devastating and protracted on-and-off conflicts.

They ran a vast empire that cut across about three nations of the present-day West Africa, with headquarters in present-day South West Nigeria. Their racial memory has a better understanding of what war is. Dissent and dissidents abound, but they remain an ineffective minority, with loud voices that can dish out insults and abuses.

On the other hand, the Igbo had hardly had any experience of serious war, other than inter-village communual conflicts. They are traditionally of republican administrative structure, and personal enterprises in trade and commerce. I first made this argument in a discussion with fellow Igbos as to whether Awolowo betrayed the Igbos by not declaring secession of Western Region from Nigeria, after Ojukwu did so for Eastern Region in 1967.

In Igbo land in the late 1960s, it was relatively easier to mobilise public support for the secession war by playing up victimhood emotions and coordinated propaganda narratives that presented half-facts as the whole truth. The secession war lasted just 30 months (two and a half years), and Biafra was roundly defeated in battle.

It was a progressive combat defeat from beginning to the end. It was not any peace talk that ended the war; nor was it any international intervention. It was a clear defeat — one of the shortest full-scale wars in contemporary African conflict studies.

By its second year, many top Biafran leaders had moved their families out of the land. In the last weeks of the war, many other top leaders, including Ojukwu, fled to other countries; and the remaining frontline commanders, particularly Brigadier Achuzia who refused to flee (he was promoted to the rank of Brigadier by Ojukwu, as he, Ojukwu, was set to flee the land), reached out to surrounding Federal troops to surrender.

It was a completely hopeless situation: no logistics, no food, no ammunition, demoralized and confused troops, at a time when even the shrinked Biafraland had been dissected into three parts (Biafra 1, Biafra 2 and Biafra 3), with virtual no-man’s-land in-between; and surrounded by Federal troops!

Read Also: Family: Akunyili lived with civil war bullet in his skull till he was killed

The present drumbeat of war in the South East is driven by dirty politics carried too far. Feeding the flame of passion with provocative rascality, insults and abuses, ethnic hate propaganda and coordinated lies, in which there is even no attempt to present a verifiable evidence: statistical facts, to prove the battle cry of marginalisation.

All that is required is the “Big-Lie” strategy as propounded by Joseph Goebbel, the Nazi propaganda minister of the Second World War: “Tell the lie boldly and repeatedly, and the masses will take it as the truth.”

But that strategy didn’t save Hitler’s Germany, despite that it had a very formidable military force. Germany was roundly defeated and its capital city, Berlin, reduced to rubbles by massive ground and aerial bombings.

Back to Nigeria, those who make stupid gambles of war today in the South East, trusting in their version of the”Big-Lie” strategy, may sooner than later face a catastrophic and even more humiliating and confusing collapse of their dream and ego.

I rest my case.
- Col. Nass (rtd), my guess columnist today, writes from Enugu, Enugu State.
#EndSARS: of memorials and amnesia

After #EndSARS (8-20 October 2020) tragically aborted, too many souls perished that should not have.

Yet, one year after, it’s fashionable memorials for a set of the dead; and even more fanatical amnesia to blot out the other set — especially by “do-gooder” international media and rights agencies.

In 2020, CNN’s Nima Elbagir reported a fictive “Lekki massacre”. In 2021, Stephanie Busari, also from CNN, renewed that one-track tale, even canonizing DJ Switch and her “massacre” lies — in one-sided “news” CNN would rather push; and have the globe believe. Call it news terrorism, if you will!

Amnesty International (AI) thunders, with admirable anger, over the doomed Nigerian 16, killed by the security forces — bad and condemnable, to be sure — during the #EndSARS commotion.

But what of the soldiers (six) and policemen (37) killed by the #EndSARS mob? The other 196 policemen injured? 164 police vehicles burnt? 134 police stations razed?

The “useless” government side deserved no instant AI empathy or sympathy, because they had no rights? Or any institutional memory from the AI crusading angel, as it pushes its skewed international amnesty against fair and balanced empathy?

What of the many caught in the crossfire, in the course of doing legitimate work? The Nation Lagos head office which vandals visited and torched? Or TVC’s state-of-the-art studios, now a charred carcass, one year after?

It gets even grimmer, with the latest Federal Government’s allegation that Nnamdi Kanu instigated his IPOB mob to torch and destroy target facilities!

What say CNN and AI on that allegation? Holler from the roof top if it’s false? Or trigger their funereal mode, of culpable amnesia, if proved true?

Rights campaign is noble and laudable. But it becomes a charade when it’s fashionably — and arrogantly — skewed.

That’s the grotesque “rights” tale oozing from #EndSARS memorials and amnesia.
October 26, 2021
Is anyone still in charge?

I watched Malam Jafaar Jafaar, publisher of Nigerian Daily provide some interesting context moments after his medium broke the news of the blast on the Kaduna bound rail by some bands of terrorists on Arise Television mid- last week. That was even at a time when the debate still raged as to whether there was any blasts at all, let alone on the Kaduna-Abuja rail network. As I would learn later, the former senator representing the Kaduna Central district, Shehu Sani, had actually reported this on his Facebook page. He said the bandits planted an explosive that damaged the rail track and shattered the windshield of the train’s engine on Wednesday evening.

The Nigerian Railway Corporation had, as if to compound the confusion, initially denied only to concede later that an incident did in fact, take place. A terse statement from Fidet Okhiria, said that the explosives damaged the rail track at a spot between Dutse and Rijana, and that the corporation was making efforts to restore train services on the route.

“Efforts are currently ongoing to ensure that the train services along the Kaduna-Abuja route are fully restored,” he said.

The meat of Jafaar’s intervention was that the Nigerian security agencies actually received some intel alerting them to the imminence of the blast. He alluded to some specific targets mentioned in the report which he claimed the agencies had; efforts to reach the police and perhaps other agencies – all to no avail. In the end, the Nigerian Daily publisher gave valuable clues as to why some officials should be called in for questioning for what amounts to acts of gross dereliction of their duties, while also calling for serious interrogation and possible overhaul of the extant reporting structure under which egregious failures bordering on breaches of national security could take place!

Talk of the tragedy merely echoing the typical Nigerian tragedy: one bored official on getting the intel quips – what of it – convinced that the big man on the reporting line probably has better things to do with his time. That one passes on to the next in line, who although convinced of its actionable contents, does not care a hoot. Indeed, he merely assumes it’s a trophy of sorts for a day’s exertion, as against setting the trigger to scupper a looming conflagration. And when it then happens…trust the grandmasters of the lecture circuit holding a world press conference to rationalise/deny/vilify and, ultimately to exculpate themselves!

Talk of the Nigerian version of intelligence utilisation!

Well, it’s been more than 144 hours since. No one has yet to be called in for questioning. Indeed, mum has remained the word between then and now from the police, the Department of State Security and other agencies.

Is it a case of being too embarrassed to admit the obvious? Or perhaps that they do not think Nigerians deserve explanations on why the blast could not have been aborted despite the prior intel received?

Guess matters of security are for the closet even if citizens are daily reminded that security is everyone’s business. In the meantime, the locomotives have since Saturday returned to active duty belching their smoke through the thick Abuja-Kaduna forests – never mind that the distraught passengers are still in states of shock or suspended animation!

Left to Rotimi Amaechi, our minister of railways (or is it transportation?) the incident, if it happened at all, is probably just one of those countless but minor footnotes in the nation’s calendars of catastrophe. The minister is since back on his desk with a new energy and resolution: to talk some sense into those fellows in the Federal Executive Council who before now could not be convinced that the railway corridors needed to be protected!

To yours truly, that itself is some revelation! I mean the minister’s implicit admission that the Federal Executive Council, right up till now, could not have envisaged the possibility of the rail tracks constituting soft targets to local vandals and their unscrupulous foreign cohorts?

Read Also: Lagos-Ibadan: Discovering the expediency of rail transport

Not after the stories daily told of some unscrupulous Nigerians and their Chinese counterparts making brisk business from harvesting rail tracks and sleepers only now being fairly common! One such haul, apparently headed for a steel factory somewhere in Ogun State was intercepted by the Anti-Kidnapping Unit of the Nasarawa State Police Command. That was in May – some four months ago. Among those reportedly taken in was a Chinese national, Marra Thai and an aide of Nasarawa’s Governor Abdullahi Sule and 13 others. Also in the same month, this time in the coal city of Enugu, the police and the local vigilante, apparently acting on intelligence, swooped on a gang of outlaws attempting to vandalise railway tracks at Nkwubor rail-line.

Of course, if one had imagined that the vandals would restrict their heists to the sprawling network of disused tracks littering every corner of the country, Nigerians would, in the same month of May have a taste of the new broth being prepared; the brigands extended their reign of outlawry to the newly delivered Itakpe – Aladja – Warri line. This time, the vandals cut several sections of the track around Kilometre 30, Adogo, in Kogi State. All of these – we told were going on – while Minister Amaechi was making frantic efforts to persuade his colleagues in the Federal Executive Council to buy into his digital security template!

Last week the ‘vandals’ would remind us that the country is still at war; more than that, they also served notice that nothing is off-limits; that all is fair in war!

Those who still doubt the progression of the so-called roving band of outlaws to their the mutation into bandits and to what is finally their unrestrained embrace of raw terror, and so believe that the rest of us should join in their wild semantic sophistry apparently know a thing or two that the rest of us do not yet know. However, while our common rationality still subsists, it’s probably not too much to ask them to consider the programmed mass murder that would have eventuated had the vandals had their way – from the coaches careening off the track at those ungodly hours of the night, with the scores of the bandits lurking nearby moving in to finish what they had planned all along! By then, there would just be enough passengers alive to hive off a hefty ransom from Nigeria’s subdued mass!

Talk of the terrorists that they have misnamed bandits being on the march; from missions to down fighter jets, they have their sights now set on the railway’s terra firma!

We must of course thank God for the tragedy that was averted. Also, we must hold Minister Amaechi to his promise to fish out the terrorists who planted the explosives on the rail track.

Even at that, the job would not be considered as nearly half done. Nigerians deserve to know whether some officials had actionable intel and neglected to take action or pass on to the appropriate organs of government. They need to know why basic things were not in place before the commencement of the rail services. For while Nigerians might have been in the race to join the rest of the civilised world in rail transportation, it stands also to reason that such small but basic things as comfort and security are actually what signals our arrival into modernity!

October 26, 2021
Rapprochement versus repression

This column believes that President Muhammadu Buhari is in a dilemma over how to deal with the spate of dissents, underpinning the security crisis facing the country as he winds down his eight years’ reign. As a leader, what is likely to be uppermost in his mind now is how history will remember him few years from now, when he will no longer be in power and all the sycophants and the aides desperate to keep their jobs have disappeared from the national radar.

That feeling was reinforced after listening to the president addressing the Ogoni traditional leaders who paid him a visit last week. In his address, the president said that the federal government would consider a pardon for Ken Saro-Wiwa and the other eight Ogoni activists who were extra-judicially killed by the government of Sani Abacha. We recall that in the 1990s, Ogoniland became the hot-bed of activism against the environmental degradation of the Niger Delta with Ken Saro-Wiwa leading the charge, under the rubric of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP).

While the people of the region laid a charge of environmental degradation and criminal appropriation of the resources of the Niger Delta against the Nigerian state and the International Oil Companies led by Shell Petroleum Development Company, the government of Nigeria accused the activists of undermining the economic well-being of the nation by threatening her national economic assets. Of course, for the Ogoni people, the so-called national economic assets were sign-posts of repression and subjugation by a behemoth structured to supress their rights.

Feeling alienated and primed for annihilation, the crisis within Ogoni turned an internal struggle between the moderates who preferred rapprochement with the federal government and the activists who pushed that the Ogoni should take their destiny into their own hands and fight their cause. In the ensuing melee, four prominent Ogoni leaders who were considered as saboteurs of the Ogoni struggle, where murdered by suspected activists of the struggle.

With the Ogoni Bill of Rights (1990) in place, under the guidance of the intellectually savvy Ken Saro-Wiwa and his compatriots, and with the possibility that other parts of Niger-Delta may follow suit and potentially demand for their independence from the oppressive federal-unitary system of government in Nigeria, the government of Sani Abacha decided to peremptorily end the struggle by snuffing life out of the leaders, relying on a bizarre criminal jurisprudence. With Saro-Wiwa and company hanged on November 10, 1995, and internal schism implanted amongst the Ogonis, the struggle petered out.

Expectedly, the peace of the graveyard returned to the Niger Delta, but resurrected ferociously during the regime of President Umaru Yar’Adua. Perhaps with the hindsight of history, President Yar’Adua choose rapprochement with the Niger Delta militants, who have acquired some level of deterrent against the federal government, by acquiring lethal weapons able to threaten the much beloved critical national oil assets. Again, with the benefits of democracy at play, it would have been extremely difficult for Yar’Adua to apply similar strong-arm tactics like Abacha, without the international human rights community screaming.

So, even though the Yar’Adua regime did not tinker with the repressive federal-unitary system of government he inherited, he somehow ended up a hero for some Niger Delta people for instituting the Presidential Amnesty Programme. And with the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) also in place, the two programmes provided some opportunities for the jobless militant youths of the region and created a pool of resources to develop the much neglected region, and bribe their troublesome elites, when necessary.

Read Also: 2023: Our politics rowdy but steer clear, Buhari tells envoys

But now with few days to the 26th anniversary of the hanging of Saro-Wiwa and his compatriots at the Port-Harcourt prison, the Ogoni traditional rulers have returned to the oppressive federal government, whose actions and inactions prompted the crisis to ask for clemency for their sons.

For the Ijaw National Congress (INC), the request for clemency is unnecessary, instead the federal government should apologise to the Ogonis for killing their sons “as a result of their peaceful campaigns against economic exploration, environmental despoliation and gross abuse of the people’s fundamental human and resource rights.” Prof Benjamin Okaba, the INC president argued further: “we wonder what crime Ken Saro-Wiwa and others committed that warrants state pardon. Secondly, even if he was allowed the defence, was he given the right of appeal?”

Of note, the killing of Saro-Wiwa elicited sanctions against Nigeria by the United Nations and leading democracies.

This writer agrees that since the federal government did not allow the Saro-Wiwa and company their right of appeal, after their conviction by the special military tribunal created by Abacha, their killing was unlawful in the eyes of the law. In Bello & Ors vs Attorney-General of Oyo State (1986) 5 NWLR (Pt. 45) 828, the Supreme Court found in favour of the appellants and awarded damages against the government of Oyo State for executing a convict, while his appeal was pending.

In that case, Aniagolu JSC held: “I… hold, that the most reasonable construction that can possibly be placed on those section (section 220(1), section 213(1) of the 1979 constitution must be that it must be implied, and that implication read into the constitution, that an appellant who has validly appealed against a death sentence imposed on him, must have the sentence stayed while he is proceeding with the appeal. The substance of a valid appeal in such a case is, by itself, a stay of execution.”

No doubt, before the execution of a judgment, the period provided by law for a right of appeal is allowed to extinguish, so to do otherwise amounts to executive lawlessness as held in the case of Bello & Ors vs Attorney-General of Oyo State supra. But also very importantly, President Muhammadu Buhari, if he is interested in securing enduring peace in Ogoni land, must ask himself if the Nigerian state has been fair to the people of the Ogoni and indeed the Niger Delta in the appropriation of their resources and the environmental despoliation of their land.

Of course, the resounding answer is a capital NO. For this column, at the root of the many agitations that has continued to beset the nation is the lack of will to deal fairly with most parts of the country, especially the oil bearing sections of the country. In the determination to fasten its grip on the oil resources, the Nigerian state has tendentiously abandoned the federal system of government which our forbearers negotiated for, at independence.

If President Buhari has the political will, this column recommends a return to a federal system of government, against the present suffocating federal-unitary practice, as the best rapprochement to birth a peaceful Nigeria.

October 26, 2021
Soro-soke vandals

Those who blunder but would rather be blameless — read Soro-Soke vandals — are keen on another round of protests to memorialize #EndSARS (8-20 October 2020).

But which part of it all are they memorializing?

The admirable protests that challenged police brutality, which the defunct Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad (FSARS) epitomized, that started on 8 October 2020?

Or its tragic miscarriage (no thanks to protesters’ own fatal lies), which from 20 October 2020, sank into avoidable catastrophe?

To refresh: the protests raged from October 8. But by October 20, they were getting out of hand. The so-called “youth” lay siege to major highways, feasted on slaughtered cows, molested all-comers, torched police stations, and hunted down security agents — and that was nation-wide.

To arrest the drift, the Lagos State government, on October 20, imposed a curfew from 8pm. Protesters’ attempt to bust the curfew at the Lekki toll gates; and the resultant military shootout, birthed the fictive “Lekki massacre”.

So again, which are they remembering: the original protests, popular enough? Its endgame “massacre” of lies on the Lekki front?

Or the real massacre of Lagos and its trove — in irreplaceable lives and mindless arson — arising from those fatal and brazen lies?

The Soro-Soke generation, by their social media manoeuvres, have shown their preference: flare the popular push against Police violence. But play dumb on the reprehensible violence they themselves heaped on the public.

That indeed would be a historical farce — and the Lagos government would be damned to let it happen all over again!

Besides, such wilful self-deceit, and lack of sober self-analysis, show the so-called “youths” have learned nothing from the debacle they made of #EndSARS.

An encore of #EndSARS, on the first anniversary of the last, therefore, is a clear mirage — no matter what data heroism suggests — and the organizers have nobody to blame but themselves.

But that is not to say Police brutality and extortion, especially of the youth, have vanished, despite the exit of FSARS. That is a ringing scandal, calling for sweeping police reforms. A year after #EndSARS, it is rather depressing that a video could still make the rounds, showing an armed policeman slapping a young man on an inter-city shuttle and menacingly cocking his rifle; while a voice in the video alleged the police, at that checkpoint somewhere in Kogi State, were driving a harassed passenger to a POS to forcefully withdraw money!

The government, as a matter of urgency, must probe this video and punish all those involved.

Much more: it must — even more urgently — birth a friendly, decent and self-respecting Police, in whom the people, young or old, are well pleased. That must be a new Social Contract, to which the Nigerian government must commit itself.

But it’s clear the route to that is not some mass rally admirably organized, but lacking any clear leadership: to monitor its crowd even if it morphs into a mob; luxuriate in its glory but also take the fall for its flaws.

That was the path not taken last time. It led nowhere but perdition, even with its good start. That is not something to repeat.

Rapper Folarin Falana, aka Falz, is in full threnody, claiming the Lagos government was organizing concerts, to distract “youths” from marking the first anniversary of #End SARS.

Read Also: #ENDSARS memorial: No protest in Lagos, CP insists

“They killed innocent souls that were simply asking not to be killed or brutalized,” he claimed. ”A year later, no one has been punished yet for those heinous crimes.”

Indeed! But does Falz realize the blood of many of those killed are on the hands of his lying colleagues, who conjured a Lekki massacre that was not, which forced mindless arson and killings from 21 October 2020?

Take DJ (S)witch, for one. In her tweety witchery, she cooked up the so-called “Lekki massacre”, before she flitted to Canada on broomstick, in search of asylum! But hey! Who needs asylum more than she, whose fatal fibs fired insane anger, which triggered wanton waste of other innocent lives?

Aside from DJ (S)witch, many of Falz’s colleagues falsely tweeted many celebrities just perished at Lekki, allegedly massacred by soldiers. Those tweets too turned data fibs, as one celebrity after another announced (s)he was alive and well! Actor Eniola Badmus was among those return-to-life celebrities — and merrily so!

In one-track data activism, Falz and co are not blaming their own kind for any of those killings, particularly those ill-fated policemen and a handful of soldiers, slaughtered by a mob, let loose by “massacre” lies!

And the mindless arson! The sad sight of new, glittering public buses up in a blaze at Oyingbo and Berger bus termini? Or the most iconic of Lagos, belching smokes, to a shocked Lagos skyline: the High Court? City Hall? Nigeria Ports Authority on the Inner Marina?

Who takes the blame for all these? The nameless ‘hoodlums’ that ‘hijacked’ the protests, as the ready apologia goes? Or the not-so-nameless #EndSARS organizers, whose lack of exit strategy gloriously fired the mayhem?

So, if the Lagos government throws music acts some carrots at the anniversary of #EndSARS, it’s because it has serious business to do, after the free-wheeling sack of Lagos one year ago. It should earn Falz’s melody, not threnody, for its creativity.

But the Lagos government must not hesitate to wield the big stick, against any trouble makers. Indeed, it’s ode to the pseudo-memory that Soro-Soke vandals would roll out drums to mark the first anniversary of their epochal destruction of Lagos. The government must root out all such delusions.

‘Soro-Soke!’, by the way, is Yoruba urban slang that could mean “bleat it loud and clear!”, in all its gangling, sweeping irreverence.

“Soro-Soke weere! (Speak louder, you lunatic!)” one of the irate youths had yelled at Governor Jide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos, who was placating the crowd, soon to degenerate into a mob, to keep the protest peaceful.

Soro-Soke! — at least in Lagos — became #EndSARS’ rallying cry! That was #EndSARS at its high noon; when the government quivered and acquiesced to its demands. But it badly unravelled — and a year later, Lagos still lay buried, in its destructive ashes!

Jim Reeves, that great American country artiste with immortal lines, once crooned: “great memories are made of these!”

But that can’t be of wanton torching of glittering public assets and gutting of iconic monuments, talk less of wasting precious lives.

Enough of romance with freedom without responsibility! That’s the abiding memory of #EndSARS, with all its anguish.

October 19, 2021