The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • From the woodwork, IBB

    From the woodwork, IBB

    Waywardness and flippancy, twin traits that plagued the self-named military president as a young man, would appear still very much with him at 80.

    That much was clear from Gen. Ibrahim Babangida’s interview with Arise TV.

    It was waywardness that would make a man annul a universally acclaimed election, and hope to live happily ever after.

    But that folly alone harboured a twin-injury: first, IBB’s deep insult of those that voted on 12 June 1993; claiming they didn’t vote when they did, using military fiat.

    Then, even more grievous self-injury: IBB denied himself due plaudits, for organizing Nigeria’s best election, despite his earlier yo-yo, with military hand-over date.

    Indeed, as you lay your bed, you lie on it!

    Then, it is in-your-face flippancy, craving to be Maradona, despite the huge baggage of the original, whose in-your-face cheating denied the Argentine true greatness, despite his audacious skills.

    And it is irredeemable moral debauchery, for a man that wreaked so much havoc, ruining generations unborn, to crawl out of the woodwork and prattle over his past evil, as if that merited some Nobel Prize!

    Why IBB, in that Arise interview, even struts a rogue lecture on the next president, chalking up near-final criteria, in the guise of old IBB playing God — remember his power-day bragging crow, of though not knowing who would succeed him, he certainly knew who would not?

    But in that again, IBB played Rip Van Winkle — that fictional Dutch-American villager, in Washington Irving’s 1819 short story, who snoozed for 20 years, only to jerk awake to see colonial America completely transformed!

    Lo, 28 years after June 12, our own Rip, though wide awake, hasn’t figured out the sweeping changes around him — eight long years more than the original!  The sweet urge but bitter futility of playing God!

    It’s certainly not the best of times, for the so-called owners of Nigeria, furious and trapped, in their lairs!

    Still, IBB’s gratuitous presidential lecture appears a bolt from John Milton’s Paradise Lost: a conclave, of Satan and fallen angels, that would reign in hell than serve in heaven, yet wax poetic over sure things to happen in paradise!

    Now, let’s put all of these in grim context.  MKO Abiola lost his life, his wife and his livelihood, for winning a free election; and resisting the Babangida-era military’s efforts to bully him from his mandate.

    Does IBB even imagine the impact, on the MKO family, of his umpteenth tale from Kandahar — the fib that he did their patriarch rogue mercy, by cancelling his mandate, because some goons, in his deranged junta, had bragged to kill the president-elect?

    In Babangida’s grim political euthanasia, MKO lost everything, except his honour.  But in contrast IBB, the kind political doctor, gained everything, except his honour.

    Pray, what does it profit a man, to gain everything but lose his honour?

    The country that gave IBB everything, rare privileges the deluded strongman and the Army of his era took for granted, convulsed so badly, and nearly lost its soul!

    Besides, the severe beauty of IBB and co, hubris-stricken soldiers all, would birth the stark Sani Abacha, the Khalifa whose in-your-face graft drove IBB-era venality into insane heights, in the most arbitrary form of primitive grabbing Nigeria ever knew!

    Read Also: IBB: Prince of Niger at 80

     

    Gen. Abacha, greedy, grim and stark, may have written himself into history’s dustbin as Nigeria’s most ruthless brigand-in-chief.  Twenty-three years after his death, the trails to Abacha loot, in foreign vaults, are hot and smoking as ever!

    But the overarching philosophy, of that blind and soulless steal, was birthed during IBB’s roller coaster power years, when strutting venality, mouthed as “settlement”, of self and cronies, became the fundamental pillar of state policy!

    Yet, the guardian angel of systemic sleaze in Nigeria just bragged, to Arise, that he fought corruption better than anyone!  What blasphemy!

    Still, make no mistake: that economic slaughter of the majority, to gift a few cronies obscene wealth without sweat, had deep roots much earlier than June 12.

    Indeed, June 12 was political slaughter come to meet economic plunder, of the long-suffering majority!

    It all started with the August 1986 launch of the structural adjustment programme (SAP), which gifted the Naira its kiss of death!

    Back then, came the IBB cant: for their future, we give our today — arrant nonsense!  For their today, he and his clique merrily gobbled up the future of the rest!

    And for free-wheeling racketeering, by economic bandits, SAP provided the perfect elixir — witness the many rogue bankers and allied pimps that turned emergency millionaires!  But what was elixir to that rogue class, was abject ruin for the majority.

    The abiding tragedy, from IBB to Abacha, to Abdulsalami Abubakar, to Olusegun Obasanjo, to Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, to Goodluck Jonathan and now, Muhammadu Buhari, is not throwing off SAP as economic philosophy, even if the policy’s supposed expiry was September 1993.

    It’s abiding IBB-era poison that would kill Nigeria, if Nigeria doesn’t kill it first.

    Just to put that ruinous philosophy in the context of rail, from IBB to elected Obasanjo and Buhari, through two oil booms and a sustained bust.

    Under IBB, the rail joker was converting 16-seater vans into rail buses, rhapsodized as “Spirit of IBB”!  Rail, a proven mass transporter turned a romantic but grotesque micro-shuttle!  It was IBB’s boom time gift to his long-suffering compatriots!

    On rail, President Obasanjo huffed and puffed; but his own policy, over eight years, never went beyond project designs and award of contracts — and the Ebora Owu enjoyed his own oil boom!

    Under Muhammadu Buhari, it is lean times and bust all through.  Yet, rail has received no better renaissance, in all of Nigerian history!

    No thanks, however, to hate merchants passing as ethnic champions, the corrupt conspiratorial elite craving post-Buhari IBB-era illicit bazaar, misguided youths, and disoriented masses, Buhari is the devil that must be nailed on the cross!

    IBB would need periodic media bob-ups to pinch himself he is yet not totally irrelevant.

    Obasanjo would need a presidential library — first in Africa! — as personal shrine, to ingrain, in the public mind, self-gains from his messianic and imperial presidency.

    But Buhari would need neither, after his presidential term.  His public works, even in the leanest of times, will speak for him, in the public mind.

    Why is why it is tragic, that many Nigerians are too mixed-up to see this clear difference.  But then, aren’t they always, at critical junctures of Nigerian history?

    Still, make no mistake: the IBB lecture may be no happenstance — it may be the old coven: the ruinous old military class and civilian parasites, the so-called owners of Nigeria, giving very early notice, of their post-Buhari manoeuvres.

    The long-suffering majority would be damned if, this time, they are caught napping —again!

     

     

  • Doctors as politicians

    Doctors as politicians

    The Latin maxim Nemo debet esse judex in propria causa (No one should be judge in his own cause) is a principle of natural justice that no one should be a judge in a matter he/she has an interest. It resonates with the rule against bias, and as posited by Lord Hewart in R vs Sussex Justice, Ex parte McCarthy: “Justice should not only be done but should be manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.”

    In the dispute between the National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD) and the federal government, many thought that the Minister of Health Dr Osagie Ehinare and that of Labour Dr Chris Ngige, being medical doctors, would be biased in favour of their junior colleagues, who are on strike for the failure of the federal government to implement the agreement reached with the association.

    But instead, as far as NARD is concerned, the two ministers are biased in favour of the federal government. They have joined the government to deal ruthlessly with their junior colleagues, as they propose no work, no pay policy. With that threat appearing not to move the doctors, the minister of labour has decided to approach the National Industrial Court (NIC) for adjudication on the propriety of the strike.

    Perhaps, the two older medical doctors turned politicians, have a higher interest in self-preservation, as sympathy with doctors may cause them their prime positions in government. For Ngige, the doctors are playing god, and he warns that from his vantage position, he can confirm that medical practice is in danger. He also argued that it appears that doctors go on strike more often when their colleagues are in office.

    While no doubt medical practice is in danger in Nigeria, this column posits that the strike by NARD, is merely a manifestation of the malignancy in the industry. Not long ago, Dr Ngige reportedly contended that the high migration of doctors to other countries is of no consequence. This column disagrees as the increased migration is another demonstration of the malignancy.

    And evidently, doctors who migrate abroad are better remunerated financially, professionally and psychologically. Again, statistics show that the ratio of doctors to patients in Nigeria is abysmally low. Even more worrying is the double jeopardy for Nigerians, whose resources were used to subsidize the training of students in public universities, which doctors benefit more from, because they spend longer years in training.

    So, even if the National Industrial Court rules in favour of the federal government, the fundamental challenges facing the industry would still not be addressed. Except the labour minister is manifestly biased in favour of his employers, he should admit that the condition of service for the doctors in Nigeria is not favourable, compared to their training and the work they do.

    As expected, the court would rule on the fidelity of the procedure followed by NARD before going on strike, but even the federal government will not allow it to adjudicate on the substantive issue of whether the federal government has breached the agreement it reached with NARD. So, it is the two ministers who should persuade the federal government to implement the agreements reached with NARD.

    Read Also: Strike continues as court adjourns case against doctors till September 15

    But of course, the federal government is in serial breach of other agreements with other labour unions under the principle of collective bargaining. Whether it is the Academic Staff Union of Nigeria (ASUU), the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU), and unions in the oil industry, it is the same tale of reneging on agreements.

    Clearly, the problem facing the labour industry in our country is fundamental, and not just about doctors who have been accused of playing politics with the lives of Nigerians. So, without a fundamental restructuring of our public sector, with regards to work and wages, the Buhari administration, like its predecessors, will just manage the crisis until they finish their term in 2023.

    When Dr Ngige lamented that doctors appear to go on strike more often when their colleagues are in power, he missed the point. He failed or choose not to connect the work they do, to the depreciation in their earnings. As the value of the wages continue to depreciate, those who have collective bargaining power would demand better wages and when they don’t get it, they will go on strike to press their demand.

    So, the real threat to the medical industry and every other sectors of the national economy, is actually poor governance and corruption, which continues to depreciate the actual earning by workers, even when the minimum wage has been increased marginally. After all, the essence of a wage is to give the earner purchasing power, and if that power is completely eroded by runaway inflation, insecurity and corrupt practices, then the wage earner would continue to make increased demands for a better wage.

    But of course, as I have argued earlier, the ministers of health and labour are too biased to see clearly. As adjudicators in the dispute between the federal government and NARD they are tainted by bias. As Niki Tobi JCA, as he then was, posited in Eriobuna vs Obiorah (1999) 8 NWLR pt. 616, p.622: “In a charge of bias… the judge is said to have a particular interest, a propriety interest which cannot be justified on the scale of justice, as he parades that interest recklessly and parochially in the adjudication process to the detriment of the party he hates and to obvious advantage of the party he likes.”

    Instead of raising the cudgels against their junior colleagues in NARD, Drs Ehinare and Ngige should approach the problem scientifically, after all, they are scientists. They need to ask: why is it that doctors are so overwhelmingly better remunerated abroad than in Nigeria? To make matters worse, because of poor governance, the nation’s economy continues to plummet, which in turn further pauperises everyone, including the doctors. Agreeably, the challenges are beyond the control of both ministers, who are mere agents of the federal government.

    Of note, while corruption is the biggest threat to the nation’s economic wellbeing, the reliance on oil resources as the determinant of the nation’s economic wellness, leaves Nigerians is such a precarious situation, as the value of our currency is always on a topsy-turvy. So, if a young doctor goes abroad and earns a thousand British pounds, she/he has earned more than half a million naira, which perhaps equates to the salary of a top consultant in a Nigerian public hospital.

    To compound the crisis, the distorted remuneration in favour of political office holders plus corrupt enrichment in public service, makes doctors who are in politics more prosperous than their colleagues, who spend quality man-hours developing core competence in medical practice.

  • The ‘saviour’ on the Minna Hilltop

    The ‘saviour’ on the Minna Hilltop

    By Olatunji Dare

    These days, the former self-anointed president, General Ibrahim Babangida, makes news by default, usually when he is rumoured dead again.  Perhaps to break this macabre cycle, he took matters into his own hands the other day, in an interview on Arise Television, during which he went again into a labored justification for the annulment of the 1993 election, of which Bashorun MKO Abiola has since been declared the unequivocal winner.

    Since 1993, Babangida has been deploying a raft of pathetic lies to explain away the annulment, scrambling, shuffling, re-working and re-issuing them in a futile bid to make peace with his tortured conscience.  Not for him even the pretence of remorse for plunging Nigeria into a crisis that claimed thousands of lives and drove the polity to the edge of collapse.  More than three decades on, the polity is still tottering, its survival far from assured.  But Babangida soldiers on, duplicitous as ever.

    There he was again, peddling the preposterous fib that he saved Abiola’s life by annulling Abiola’s election victory.

    How so?

    Because, said Babangida, Abiola would have been killed if the election was allowed to stand.

    By whom?

    By the monsters Babangida had created and nurtured in the military and security services to perpetuate himself in office and in power.  One of them, Colonel (as he then was) David B. Mark, later president of the Senate (ha!), publicly threatened to shoot Abiola to *death if Abiola was allowed to take office.

    Read Also: IBB under fire for saying June 12 was annulled to save Abiola

    “If it materialized,” Babangida said with reference to Abiola taking office, “there would have been a coup d’état, which would have been violent.  That is all I can confirm.”  The violent uprising, he added for effect, could have been staged by the military, because they had the weapons, or by disaffected groups in civil society.

    It is all of a piece with a version of the same tale that Babangida’s son Mohammed – the annulment morphed into a family affair of sorts -used to peddle.  In it, Sani Abacha, the debauched chief of Army Staff, virtually held a gun to Babangida’s head and threatened to blow it off if he allowed Abiola to take office.  By then, Abacha was conveniently dead,

    A military regime was in power, of which, ever so calculating, Babangida designated himself “president, commander in chief.”  This was no twin designation you could bifurcate but one solid, indivisible and irreducible title. At the slightest provocation, and oftentimes with none, he reminded his hapless compatriots – nay, subjects – that he was not merely in office but also in power, and that he was in full control of an institution trained to deploy power according to its own fashion to secure its own ends.

    Babangida’s military government and a posse of political scientists had micromanaged the transition that culminated in the election and signaled the end of eight years of military rule and the inauguration of democratic rule under a president elected with the kind of plurality Nigeria had never seen and probably will never again witness.  Accredited international are local observers certified the election as free and fair and fully reflective of the choice of the people.

    A band of insurrectionists nevertheless vowed to kill the person who emerged victorious from the process if he was allowed to take office.  The “president, commander-in-chief,” obsessed as he was by what he and his palace intellectuals called “his place in history,” could not rally the troops to crush the mutineers and set a new standard for the conduct of political business in Nigeria.

    Instead, he cowered abjectly, scuttled a transition that had been eight years in the making, turned soldier against soldier, soldier against civilian and civilian against civilian, and kinsman against kinswoman, all in a desperate bid to hang on to power.

    Since then, he has been executing one somersault after another to explain away or justify the annulment.

    His 1993 speech defending the annulment two weeks after decreeing it could have been titled “With malice toward all.”  The election, he said, was neither free nor fair; that it had been corrupted by “tremendous negative use of money” and by subversive inducements, and that the outcome did not represent the “uncoerced expression” of voters’ preferences.

    The outcome, Babangida continued, was not informed by respect for the electorate as the final arbiter in elections, nor by “decorum and farness” on the part of electoral umpires.  On the contrary, the entire nation and the political process were manipulated by an “over-articulate section” of the elite; the election was vitiated by “conflict of interest” between the candidates of the two political parties and the government, by the intimidation of the judiciary, and by other deficiencies Babangida dredged up in his desperation to cling to office – deficiencies that only he and his confederates could see.

    It is almost as if Babangida was a helpless spectator throughout, with no power and no responsibility.

    Easily the most bizarre of Babangida’s post-election stunts is the claim that he organised and supervised the freest and fairest election in Nigeria’s history and that he deserved to be honoured for that feat.

    No, he is not talking about another election.  He is talking about the June 12 1993 presidential election that he had claimed was so shot through and through with irregularities, corruption, and fraud that annulling it came as the logical response, and election he had declared illegal. Yet he seems to experience no mental discomfort in harbouring and publicly canvassing these irreconcilable positions.

    This phenomenon belongs in the realm of absurd psychology.

    No amount of fudging and fabrication will erase the fundamental truth that Babangida annulled the election for one reason and one reason only:  to hold on to power indefinitely.

    In the Arise interview, he reveled as usual in inconstancy and invested slipperiness with political virtue and wisdom, hence his childlike delight in being called Maradona, after the late Argentine soccer maestro, he of the preternatural dribbling skills. He conveniently forgot that he had in a moment of supreme hubris crowned himself an “evil genius” and now attributes the dubious title to his detractors.

    In whatever case, Babangida’s claim that he supervised the freest and fairest election in Nigeria’s history does not square with his sweeping rejection, nay demonization, of the June 12 1993 in his post-election broadcast.

    The legal titan Professor Ben Nwabueze, who doubled as a strategist in the evisceration of the June 12 1993  election even while serving as Secretary for Education in Babangida’s Transitional Council that was charged with successful completion of the transition programme, provides an important clue to Babangida’s disposition at that critical time.

    “His behavior in the last days of his regime, “Nwabueze wrote of Babangida in June 12, 1993 Election:  Problems and Solutions, “left a rather strong impression of a man forced to quit against his will, of one un-reconciled to quitting in the last days of his rule and in the face of defeat, he cut a figure of someone unwilling to reconcile himself with composure to the adverse torrent of events, of an angry and bitterly disappointed man.”

    More tellingly, Nwabueze said of Babangida in the volume, an aridly legalistic apologia for the annulment, “His mind, his motions and his actions seemed to have become somewhat disoriented, and no longer governed by disinterested, patriotic considerations. In the event, he quit office in a rather undignified, unceremonious manner.”

    Now holed up in the opulent sterility of his Minna Hilltop Mansion, grateful for the occasional visitor, Babangida probably never imagined that he would see the day he had sought with manic desperation to eviscerate consecrated as a national holiday, a point of reference and a goal of our collective aspiration.

    He could never have imagined that he would be reduced to an object lesson in the delusion of power.

    When Babangida says he saved Abiola’s life by voiding his election, I can almost hear Abiola quip: “With a saviour like Babangida, who needs a tormentor unto death?”

     

  • Hunting Police

    Hunting Police

    By Gabriel Amalu

     

    The past few weeks have provided an excruciating paradox to the policing challenge facing the country, and I hope the nation’s leaders caught the bug. Just as the tragic denouement of the widely celebrated deputy commissioner of police, Abba Kyari, was spreading like wild fire, the indomitable governor of Borno State, Professor Babagana Zulum, was showcasing his Borno hunters, as the new police in charge of protecting farmers in the state, who the presidential spokesman had warned not to go to the farm without security clearance.

    Obviously, in the face of the failure of the Nigerian security forces to provide security for the Borno farmers, the desperate Borno State chief security officer, has decided to cut his coat according to his cloth. Poor Borno State farmers, and even poorer hunters recruited as police; their faiths are now intertwined in the deadly hunting grounds of the murderous Boko Haram insurgents. They have my sympathy.

    As this paper’s front page last week showcased the hunters decked in bright attires, carrying hunting sticks with which they will defend their brethren against the bandits who recently shot down a military fighter jet, I could only feel pity for Nigerians at the mercy of a failed federal authority. With the modern instruments of the state failing miserably to protect the citizens, the leaders in desperation are regressing to our anachronistic past.

    In an era of drones, artificial intelligence and robotics as military soft and hard wares, Nigeria is sending her young men to the war front with sticks, and perhaps Dane guns. Interestingly, the same last week, the Minister for Defence, Maj. Gen Bashir Magaji (retd), was blaming the traditional rulers and clerics, for the failure of the security agencies to deal with the banditry and insurgency that have overwhelmed large swaths of the rural parts of our country.

    Yet, the government officials only visit the rural communities with battalions of soldiers, even as they pontificate that the traditional rulers should stay in those unsafe communities, and act as intelligence officers, for the nation’s security agencies. Now, the joke has been taken to another level, with the resort to hunters as the frontier men in the nation’s security architecture. That in 21st century, Borno State has such number of young men relying on hunting wild life as occupation is worrisome.

    Even in hunting the wild, the hunters have to employ guile and intelligent decoy in the practice of their trade, as some wild animals can be dangerous to confront. Now, in their latest employment as an arm of Borno State police, they will have to stand guard to ward off the Boko Haram and their affiliate groups that no doubt are more dangerous than the most dangerous of the wild animals.

    This column sympathizes with the people of Borno State, over the failure of the nation’s security and policing architecture to protect them, necessitating the resort to confront the tiger wit bare hands. It prays that the way they have chosen to deal with their problem will not bring them greater pain and agony. Of course, the military would heave a sigh of relief, as their will be someone to blame, if farmers are attacked.

    Read Also: US, Mo Abudu set to produce movie on Hushpuppi’s lifestyle

     

    On their part, the hunters recruited into the Borno State policing architecture will be basking in the glory of gaining a government appointment, despite their humble skills. Going forward, they will see themselves as government officials, and when they see the perks of office other government employees get, they will expect to gain more as their responsibility increases. From basic allowances, they would begin to ask for salaries and enhanced emoluments.

    Should any of them make the supreme sacrifice in the line of duty, would their families be adequately compensated just like the other arms of the security organs of the state? If the threat to their lives gets more dangerous, would they expect the state to insure their lives? On its part, the state may have to provide them with uniforms and other forms of identity, so that they can be distinguished from the other hunters who are not policing the farms.

    If the hunters ever feel that they are not getting what should be their due, considering the level of responsibility they bear, will they be tempted to engage in self-help in the line of their duty? Perhaps, the temptation to help himself, is what befell the suspended DCP Abba Kyari, of the Inspector General of Police Intelligence Response Team. While he was being celebrated by the legislators for his “distinguished performance” in the line of duty, there is the likelihood that his salary was not up to the wardrobe allowance of a neophyte member of the House of Representatives celebrating him.

    So, in reality, while he was putting his life in danger, by confronting the high-tech fraudsters, like Hushpuppi, who hunt in the gardens of the wealthy, like the honourable members, he was poorer than them, even when he may see them as idlers draining the system they both work for. Again, as he solved one crime after another, and the authorities yielded to him powers beyond the contemplation of the constitution and the Police Act, conceit and greed would have crept in.

    Sooner than later, the Hushpuppis of the underworld must have begun to tantalize him with the possibilities of enjoying wealth, even while retaining the enormous powers the state has unwittingly donated to him. And at least, as confirmed by the suspended DCP, the intelligence arm of the underworld began to send him to small errands like buying clothes for them, and finding a good tailor to sew the cloths, in exchange for income that are higher than his meagre salary.

    Also, with high net worth politicians, like a former vice president, and a former senate president, dinning and winning at the table of an underworld king like Hushpuppi, even a clear headed senior police officer would be tempted to join the gravy train.  As one advertisement says, power without control is dangerous. So, sooner than later, haven been sunk into the underworld conundrum, the police officer, instead of protecting lives and property, begins to hunt for lives and property.

    As DCP Abba Kyari battles the demons that elevated him beyond his contemporaries, because of his limited achievements amidst a failed policing structure, the Borno hunters are getting their chance to become adjunct police men in dangerous clime. This column hopes that they would not fall to the temptation of running errands for those they have been recruited to contend with, like the fallen DCP Abba Kyari did. How to ensure that they don’t become double agents, also hunting for the Boko Haram, will be the challenge of Borno State.

     

  • Abba Kyari: Do Miranda rights matter?

    Abba Kyari: Do Miranda rights matter?

    By Sanya Oni

     

    Let me confess that I barely paid attention to the controversial postings of the embattled super cop, Deputy Commissioner of Police Abba Kyari on the Facebook, until a friend a friend drew my attention to what he described as the cop’s tepid denial moments after his indictment by the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI). And that was even before the FBI released the ‘killer’ transcripts of the exchanges between Hushpuppi and the now out-of-favour cop. From then on, not only did the matter take on a life of its own, the man at the centre of it all, chose the incredible route of singing like a canary, as if completely oblivious of his Miranda Rights – yes, the right to be silent!

    Little wonder that ‘little matter’ – of how a Deputy Commissioner of Police, couldn’t have seen the grave folly of waiving his Miranda Rights so cynically when it actually mattered has since become a subject of animated discussion in beer parlors!

    So much for the so-called presumption of innocence; now you do not even need a polygraph test to know the version of the unfolding story – between that of Hushpuppy and the FBI on the one hand, and the Kyari version on the other – will stand on scrutiny. After all, the FBI indictment, based largely on the transcripts of the telephone conversations between the duo of Kyari and Ramon Abbas (including text messages and audio) left little to imagination particularly with the copious references to payments, to trips and to activities that had the tinge of criminal conspiracy, with one Kelly Chibuzor Vincent, an individual of whom Hushpuppi was said to have been locked in dispute over a criminal enterprise completing the triumvirate. And the matter: how to share the $1.1 million scammed from a Qatari businessperson.

    If, in the end, you are left to marvel at the painstaking rigour of attention to every detail brought to bear on the investigation, or the sheer professionalism that is hard to find in these parts, and, the specific the finding on the criminal racket between the supposedly elite team of crime-bursters and certified international fraudsters. Amazingly, the weighty findings were passed off as sheer bunkum on some nondescript Facebook walls!

    Not to the embattled super cop, that old-time police standard operating procedure meant to guard against self-incrimination; if he sensed disaster looming on the horizon, the resort to that all-familiar showmanship was simply irresistible. Not the calm, measured rebuttal as one might expect given the weight of evidence – that is if there was any; but by some thoughtless, ill-advised bravado in a situation where the right to be silent would have been more appropriate if not entirely golden. Our super cop apparently forgot that the internet never forgets. The super cop, who hitherto took delight in regaling his admirers with regular updates of his exploits on his Facebook wall, obviously mistook the saga as one of those fairy tales that his name has been associated. Talk of the matter becoming one of one mis-step after another until the entire castle of inelegantly woven network came crashing down in the world-wide-web!

    Poor Abba Kyari; guess he never imagined that a day like this would ever come. Just imagine the stories: the bit about a certified fraudster needing an introduction from a crack detective to his tailor! And then, the other equally implausible account about a man with such a globally acclaimed sordid reputation needing his help to investigate an alleged threat by on his family without as much as basic background checks! And now with the full details of his dalliance now out in the cybersphere, with the weighty allegations sticking out like a sore thumb, our elite cop suddenly realizes that he needs the whole of 12 edits over a 24-hour period to undo the mumbo-jumbo earlier posted as defence before finally taking it down on Wednesday morning.

    Read Also: Hushpuppi Saga and Kyari’s seven fatal errors

     

    A case of self-incrimination or one of public relations disaster? The days ahead certainly promises to be interesting as more facts and defence are unleashed on the public space!

    Meanwhile, the joke out there is our super cop is actually all brawn – and no brains. By this, they mean that the head of the elite Inspector-General of Police Intelligence Response Squad (IRT) ought to have shown more intelligence and better discretion in the situation that Abba Kyari found himself. The joke of course extends to the Nigerian Police. As it is, the familiar stereotypes about the institution as one where just about anything goes has not only been reinforced, it has been presented as one available for hire by anyone with the means to pay!

    In all however, the greatest joke is on the Nigerian society currently riven by primordial sentiments. In the first place, I can understand the attraction to the James Bond-like tactics of Abba Kyari, and even more the exploits attached to the individual in a country where heroes/heroines are perennially in short supply. The latter obviously explains why the nearly one-dozen allegations of impunity levelled against the IRT have either gone un-investigated or simply overlooked. Had Nigerians not given to promoting form over substance, they ought to have seen through the hollowness in the methods routinely deployed in the name of crime-fighting as indeed the in-built impunity not to pay attention to what is going on; and by extension, to anticipate the embarrassment that the country now has to deal with.

    But then, the real problem, seems to me, the ever-growing chasm between Nigerians, on what should be an acceptable behaviour by functionaries in public office.

    As it is, not a few Nigerians believe that the man’s misdeeds are no more than misdemeanors, which, given his ‘exploits’ should be overlooked! In other words, the clear breach of trust by a functionary, not least, from an individual charged with law enforcement, could be overlooked under some extenuating circumstances!  In the case of Abba Kyari, it would seem to the likes of Arewa Youth Consultative Forum (AYCF), being an effective crime fighter should avail Abba Kyari something of a waiver from “castigation”; hence the threat to bring the roof down, should the federal government yield to “the attempted intimidation of a police officer right inside his independent fatherland”!

    Hopefully, we still have enough time for their Oodua and Ndi-Igbo counterparts to hand in their submission on the rule and applicable threats to apply in the cases of Ramon Abbas and Kelly Chibuzor Vincent, the other two-some in the WAZOBIA triumvirate!

    Reminds me of that old anthem – though tribe and tongues may differ, in brotherhood they stand! Talk of a brotherhood!  Yes, Nigeria – we hail thee!

  • Between Jega and Solomon

    Between Jega and Solomon

    By Olakunle Abimbola

     

    Why would Prof. Attahiru Jega, former INEC chair, latch onto the APC-PDP-are-same-and-useless rhetoric, as entry strategy for his new-found partisan politicking?

    How King Solomon wisely cracked the riddle of the two harlots, and averted the premature killing of a sinless infant, might just offer a pointer.

    The evil harlot, who had carelessly crushed her own child, wanted both babies slashed.  The good harlot, who had hers intact, wanted the living baby spared.  Who knows?  It might yet gravitate toward its mother, later in life.

    King Solomon, rippling with wisdom and intellect, pronto figured out the motive of each woman.  He ruled the living baby be given, not to the woman that voted senseless butchery, but to the one that voted life.

    Case closed.  Verdict was pinnacle of wisdom.  All hail Solomon the Wise!

    But what has this brief Biblical allusion got to do with the Jega declaration?  Just that whoever tries to muddy waters — and Jega did, in his sweeping denunciation  — probably hopes to scam the naive or the unthinking or the shallow-minded.

    That was the hurdle Solomon brilliantly scaled. But those tricks didn’t die with Solomon.  So, here we are!

    Still, to be fair, that claim wasn’t Jega’s original.

    It accrued over time — defensive PDP buffs under public odium for how their party ran the polity aground under President Goodluck Jonathan; the piqued public, riled that the APC Egypt-to-Cannan trip was dragging too long in the wilderness between; and the millions of plebs, who just echo anything — sense or nonsense — like the good old plebeians, in the streets of Rome!

    So, when Jega filched and pitched it for own partisan spin, it had assumed the gabble of some truth — as good, old propaganda.

    Yet, it is not.  Before King Solomon, even the two prostitutes were never the same.  But again, that’s left to the discerning to figure out — as Solomon did.

    Still, such sleight of hand was never Prof. Attahiru Jega’s way, going by his earnest public persona, since he broke into public consciousness.

    He was Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) president (1990-1994); Bayero University, Kano (BUK) vice chancellor (2005-2010) and the most definitive INEC chair (2010-2015), rising on the solid wave of public trust, from a member of the Yar’Adua-era Muhammadu Uwais Panel on rotten elections, to be appointed INEC chief, under President Jonathan.

    Indeed, Jega’s track was most uncommon.  As a leftist-leaning scholar, he fought the IBB military regime to a standstill.  That made him a non-conformist, which would later gross him the ASUU presidency, among his Aluta scholar-comrades.

    That alone should have tagged him “Danger — keep off”, to the conservative order, an establishment often too scared of own shadows.  Yet, the ASUU presidency never stopped him from nicking the BUK vice-chancellorship.

    Nor, for that matter, a membership of the Uwais Panel, after Olusegun Obasanjo’s “do-or-die” 2007 elections had set new lows in election butchery, to shame the winner, the decent but ill-fated Umaru Musa Yar’Adua enough, into some urgent electoral reforms that solidly resonated with the polity.

    Indeed, at that critical juncture, the Jega establishment/iconoclastic cross-appeal peaked, to eventually fetch him the INEC chair, after the much compromised and fairly vilified Maurice Iwu, who delivered that 2007 electoral outrage.

    It was not only tribute to his personal reputation as a scholar of deep conscience and rigorous ethics, it was also the triumph of his winning leftist rhetoric, without betraying any Samson complex that sought to bring down the roof on all in patriotic ire, at the height of impassioned theorizing — or is it grandstanding?

    Read Also: Jega to voters: reject PDP, APC in 2023

     

    With that mild and trusty temper, Jega pulled off Nigeria’s two most definitive elections to date: the triumph of Goodluck Jonathan, scion of the tiniest minority of his own Ijaw minority, as Nigeria’s first president from a minority ethnic stock; and the electoral burial of the PDP dream of 60 long power years, at a first instance.

    Jega’s zenith, of personal glory, may have come with the immaculate delivery of those historic mandates.

    But INEC Chair Jega, as a moral Leviathan of a sort, came with his calm but vicious strafing of the pathetic Elder Godsday Orubebe, and his tragic stunts, as the presidency was slipping through the fingers of Goodluck Jonathan!

    Still, do all of these clothe Jega, as some moral Daniel come to judgment, dismissing both APC and PDP in frothing moral rage, just to make a case for his own PRP?

    That was hubris taken too far!  Such “we-are-good-they-are-bad” emotive lather is just too rich and too mushy, for even saintly Jega to pull off, without doing tremendous damage to own reputation — if not among the neo-plebs, then among the discerning.

    That has been clear from the swift partisan flak, from the two dominant parties — and just as well, for both exchanges fall within legitimate partisan thrust and riposte.

    Still, in 2023, every party would fly or sink, carrying its own cross.  But that might not be such a drag for both APC and PDP; as it would be a lift for PRP, as Jega tried to spin.

    For good or for ill, APC and PDP have records by which voters can judge them.  Both have formed the federal government: PDP for 16 years; APC, for six, though that would climb to eight, when voter revalidation or rejection knocks in 2023.

    PRP can’t boast such records, though it’s a far older entity, dating back to the 2nd Republic (1979-1983), when it was formed by the late Mallam Aminu Kano, the great champion of the northern Talakawa.

    But even at his heyday, Aminu Kano’s PRP was a fringe party.  True, it won two governorships back then in 1979: Kano, under young, charismatic and radical scholar, Abubakar Rimi; and Kaduna, under that great socialist ideologue, Balarabe Musa, both now dead.

    But Malam Balarabe would lose his Kaduna governorship after 21 months (1 October 1979 – 23 June 1981), for refusing hardball cohabitation with the corrupt National Party of Nigeria (NPN)-dominated Kaduna legislature.

    Rimi, on the other hand, would fall out with Mallam Aminu, leading to the birthing of the bathetic Sabo Bakin Zuwo, aka ”Banking Zuwo”, PRP three-month governor of Kano, of the government-money-in-government-house fame, at the collapse of that republic, in 1984.

    APC would run on its great infrastructural and agricultural strides, and hope voters would remember only that good, sans its serious security challenges.

    PDP would run on its normal bluff and bluster, and hope voters would have forgotten its smelly and wayward power years, including own insecurity woes.

    Pray, what would PRP run on?  Jega’s saintliness and PRP’s exceptionalism?  Jega had better get real, if his PRP won’t remain the fringe player it has been since birth in 1979!

  • Dangerous gambits

    Dangerous gambits

    By Olakunle Abimbola

     

    Cunning politicians, and technical-minded courts that hear their cases, think very little of the electorate.

    That appears crystal clear from the 4-3 Supreme Court verdict, on the Rotimi Akeredolu vs Eyitayo Jegede Ondo gubernatorial case.

    Yet, how do you run a democracy, without due regard for the electorate, and respect for their sacred choices at the polls?

    That’s the monster evolving, after 22 straight years of democracy, in this present 4th Republic.  The earlier that trend is halted, the better for everyone.

    That strain of judicial activism leads nowhere but perdition, after the cases of Bayelsa, Zamfara; to some extent, Rivers — and, if you love some mechanical balancing, painting a picture of cross-party rogue gains to spite the electorate, then add Imo.

    But before going into these fore-mentioned states, this poser: had the July 28 4-3 Supreme Court decision for APC, ended 3-4 for PDP, how would things be now?

    Jegede, smashed at the polls, would have taken office.  Winner Akeredolu, with his landslide, would have been shooed out.

    Worse: the Ondo electorate would have been told — not by cast votes, but by Their Lordships — their choice stank.  Live with it, or go crack your skulls against the Idanre rocks!

    And over what?  Judicial activism that fled the substance but flaunted the shadow, as the real deal?  A wide and merry gallop into judicial autarchy?  Come on!

    In Bayelsa, David Lyon Perewonrimi, 2019 governorship election winner, on the eve of taking office, on 13 February 2020, was rehearsing his swearing-in, when Their Leviathan, Supreme Court Justices, turned his win into a loss, in what Fela Anikulapo-Kuti would have dubbed government — sorry, court — magic!

    Though Lyon committed no infraction, Degi Eremienyo Wangagha, a sitting senator of the Federal Republic but his running mate, was alleged to have submitted, to INEC, “fake” certificates — a “forgery” a lower court later found only just his many different names!  But poof! went Lyon’s mandate.  Even after proving no forgery, no remedy!

    Now, Duoye Diri, loser at the Bayelsa polls, now sits pretty as governor — a triumph of legal cunning by clever politicians; and brilliance, without wisdom, by the apex court!

    Again, the Bayelsa electorate hold the short end of the stick, aside from the courts gifting PDP an APC victory.  It was the first in Nigerian history.  But it won’t be the last.

    Now, Zamfara.  If Bayelsa was single miscarriage of votes — and therefore electoral injustice — Zamfara was sweeping and wholesale; though no tears for APC for tragically setting itself up, by wilfully shunning own internal laws and processes, in election primaries.

    At Zamfara’s 9 March 2019 governorship polls, the result wasn’t even close — APC’s Muktar Idris: 534, 541, to PDP’s Bello Matawale: 179, 452 votes.  That sweep was reflected, across board, in all of the elections: presidential, National Assembly, gubernatorial and state House of Assembly.

    But again, Suicidal APC shot itself in the foot.  Abdulaziz Yari, outgoing governor, had allegedly replaced the party’s nomination processes with own personal whim. Both the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court won’t have such nonsense, and the penalty was dire: all votes, cast for APC, declared wasted!

    Overnight, PDP turned sensational winners — across all spectra of Zamfara polls, sans the presidential one, which primary wasn’t faulted, in a tragic case of APC-on-APC massacre!  That catapulted Matawale to the governorship.

    But then, came the thunder of June 29 — two years later: Mutawale, all three Zamfara senators, six of seven Zamfara House of Representatives members and all 23 House of Assembly members, swore fealty to APC!

    There were only two exceptions: Deputy Governor Mahdi Aliyu Gusau and Anka/Mafara member of the House of Representatives, Kabiru Gaya, who chose to remain in PDP.

    In all of these macabre drama, you don’t even know which is worse: judicial vote awards that turn winners into losers — in Fela-speak, turn white into blue?  Or cross-partisan whoredom that thrusts Party A’s vote to Party B, with absolutely no remorse!

    In this grotesque case of Zamfara, however, the winning votes never belonged to PDP, even if that party boasted a judicial charter to haul its electoral loot and crow over it!

    As folks croon in Yoruba streets, “ole gbe, ole gba” — grabbed by a band, snatched by another, case closed!

    But the snag is the Nigerian vote, in such a delicate democracy, should be no kith-and-kin to such banditry — not even one with a judicial halo!  Yet, that is the case of Bayelsa and Zamfara.

    Still, PDP could validly say what it gained in Bayelsa and Zamfara, it also lost in Imo, via same judicial awards, by Nigeria’s apex court.

    That is not untrue, particularly that bit about the fourth-placed APC’s Hope Uzodimma (96, 458 votes) upstaging the first three: PDP’s Emeka Ihedioha (273, 404) judicially ousted governor; Action Alliance’s Uche Nwosu (190, 364) and All Progressives Grand Alliance’s Ifeanyi Ararume (114, 676).

    But the Supreme Court’s explanation was that Uzodimma’s least votes were nevertheless the majority of lawful votes.

    In the concrete jungle of APC Rivers politics, Rotimi Chibuike Amaechi and Magnus Abe fought themselves to a terrible pass.  When the dust cleared, the federal ruling party had zero candidates, so INEC declared, in Rivers for the general elections!

    It was another strain of APC high fever of self-slaughter, which always redounded to the advantage of PDP, its greatest rival and former federal ruling party.

    Might that then be the stunt Eyitayo Jegede, SAN, the PDP Ondo governorship candidate, was pulling, by leaving his clear loss at the polls, to lurch at APC’s internal politics, somehow hoping to pull another Bayelsa or Zamfara?

    Just to be clear: this query is without prejudice to the eminent silk’s right to explore any legal and legitimate means to argue his case; and push his gain by the judicial process.  All, after all, is fair in war!

    If he had won 4:3 as he had lost 3:4, his win wouldn’t have been less legitimate in the eye of the law, even if that eye had been blinded, by legal technicalities, from finding for substantial justice.

    Still, ala Bayelsa and Zamfara, the law would have, yet again, throttled the vote; and an election loser would have gained office, in another fit of “court-ocracy” trumping democracy!

    That’s the dire danger of this judicial activism, gaining traction.  That’s why the courts, particularly the Supreme Court, must be wary of partisan cunning, ghosting as judicial briefs, before them.

    By all means, punish the rascality of political parties raping own internal processes — but not at the expense of cast votes!  That’s the alarm the near-debacle of Ondo must blare.

  • Extraordinary times

    Extraordinary times

    By Sanya Oni

     

    Just as well that the nation is currently fixated with the spate of events happening in two theatres – Abuja and Cotonou – to bother about the event in Taraba and its aftermath. That is understandable. If the two events are any revelation of the desperate gung-oho tactics by a government that has run out of patience with contrarians, Nigerians might sooner have to come to terms with extraordinary measures that might prove a mere forestate of a new dawn of intolerance and with it, the emerging descent into dictatorship.

    It is after all, no mean thing that a government that professes the rule of law would comb the books to arrive at the choice of the strategy of “extra-ordinary rendition” which by any account, is itself extraordinary even under international law, to get the gadfly by the name – Nnamdi Kanu under the hammer. But then, didn’t they say – stuff happens – particularly when you are dealing with an administration that has long confused self-righteousness with due dictates of the law!

    If one adds the midnight siege in the Ibadan home of the Yoruba agitator, Sunday Adeyemo aka Sunday Igboho as another instance in which the niceties of the law and process are put in abeyance in the administration’s mistaken confusion of vengefulness for the fine tenets of justice, you can then put it to the re-born (or it de-born) moment for our erstwhile born-again democrat!

    But then, these are extraordinary times. The administration is supposed to be doing well in the extraordinary circumstances in which it has found itself – even if the view out there is that the administration has, in reality, fared much worse than its predecessor on virtually all known indices of governance!

    Facts, of course are stubborn things. The Jonathan tag-team may have been the grandmasters in profligacy; from the administration’s undelivered mega-projects to dubious ‘strategic alliance’ projects designed to fleece the public till, not forgetting the low-grade governance; yes, the unparalleled incompetence it brought into public finance and administration. That was an administration that came into office at a time the country’s accounting balances were pretty healthy. Oil prices were doing good even if production sometimes came in fits and starts. Over all, the sky could be said to be blue.

    Of course, there was a war to be fought. In the Northeast, the Boko Haram raged. But then, that merely presented opportunity for the administration to yield the treasury to private ends in what would later be touted as the scam of the century. As if designed to open the floodgate for the bazaar that followed, all the elements would appear to have conspired to ensure that debts piled upon debts even when the country was supposed to be earning more – in perhaps one of the most bizarre moments of fiscal brigandage ever to be unleashed on the nation’s treasury. If the Boko Haram – with nearly two score local governments lost to the new caliphate country – was pain in the administration’s neck, the Chibok Girls saga would be its Achilles heel

    Yet, half a decade on, the fact is that more and more Nigerians have had to wonder if indeed they had not judged the Otuoke man either too soon or rather too harshly considering the mess our latter-day conquistadors have made of their lives!

    Yes, facts are stubborn things. That is why Nigerians all must answer to President Buhari’s call to evaluate and judge his administration not only fairly but on the promises it made, first in 2015 and later affirmed in 2019 – and then of course on the Human Development Indices. For only in that context would its quest for ‘fairness’ truly make sense – in other words, it should not be on the standards of its low-grade predecessor as it is wont to do!

    Now, the Buhari die-hards continue to remind us that their era is one of great accomplishments. If you – like yours truly, complain of being wearied by the so-called achievement merely on account of the number of roads still largely under construction, you are told it’s simply because you haven’t taken a ride in those Chinese contraptions already touted as the ninth wonder in modern transportation!

    Not on the power sector that remains a no-no; a sector where very little has changed in the last six years and one in which Nigerians are told at every turn that the grid has collapsed. Nigerians, in the meantime, are supposed to be on the waiting mode – until such a time that our new German friends deliver on the rocket science that electricity generation and distribution have become.

    Today, the economy is in tatters. For all the regional showmanship, the country is probably poorer and certainly far less economically self-reliant than it was when it drew shutters on its ECOWAS borders. If we warned that the border closure could only be a means to an end, the administration apparently saw things differently; if there were any meaningful evaluation or practical, clear-headed measures to address the identified problems, these remain to be seen. Which of course makes many to wonder what the fuss was all about in the first place!

    Don’t get me wrong. The roads and the railways and other infrastructures are important. But so should the promises made by a leader generously described by his cult of followers as Mai Gaskia be held as sacred! Today, an administration which supposedly came into government with a blueprint on state and community policing, with a resolve to ban on all government officials from seeking medical care abroad, and a promise to deliver three million jobs per year has generated far more alibis than the hard ideas and practical actions needed to drive them – which makes one wonder if these weren’t the problems the administration pledged to Nigerians to solve!

    And that is putting things mildly considering the wild and negative dispositions on those same issues. Of course, we can write a book on the economy, and how the continues to plunge on the HDI ladder.

    Beyond the promises however, is whether the Buhari administration actually appreciates the imperative of the moment. For, if the administration could be described as rather tame and tardy on the issues of terrorism, banditry and other variants of criminality currently tearing the country apart, even more atrocious is its mismanagement of the country’s diversity. Which explains why the country is being torn on all sides by the atavistic forces unleashed by herdsmen and the separationists – and then the notable charge against the Buhari administration of using differential measures – or standards – for basically the same crimes – all depending on the factor of ethnicity.

    Nothing of course better illustrates these tendencies than the Sallah day ultimatum by the Emir of Muri, Alhaji Abbas Njidaa Tafida, calling on Fulani herdsmen in the forests to vacate the place. To the revered monarch – himself of the Fulani stock, the cups of his kinsmen, as far as the sheer terror associated with them is concerned, is not only full, but running over.

    Remember, this was basically the same call by an elected governor, for which the chief law officer of the federal government stopped short of tagging as treasonable. While mum has been the word from Abubakar Malami, the nation’s chief law officer since the emir handed the ultimatum, a certain Abdullahi Bello Bodejo, said to be president of Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore barely stopped short of pronouncing a fatwa on the monarch. To him, the emir should be taken to the shrink, since, according to him, no right-thinking Fulani can issue such a threat to his people!

    As it is, so ingrained in the administration’s DNA is the virus of unequal justice that it would require more than the ancient magical art of exorcism to root out.

  • Desperate for bread

    Desperate for bread

    By Gabriel Amalu

     

    Could it be that the desperation for bread has blinded the APC’s leadership from the warning signal from the judgment of the Supreme Court, in the election petition between Eyitayo Jegede vs Rotimi Akeredolu? But first, let me note that the inspiration for this title came from Rev. Fr. Melvis Mayaki, a Catholic priest. In his Sunday homily, he had referenced Jesus’s teaching that he is the bread of life, in comparison to the regular bread which the world is desperate for, to satisfy hunger.

    Of note, the priest reminded his congregation that from time immemorial the desperation for bread or food has been the casus belli or cause of wahala for man. He reminded his listeners of the biblical Garden of Eden, where despite the warning from her Maker, Eve, fell to the temptation of Satan, because of the desperation to eat an apple. He also talked about how Esau sold his birth-right because of bread and stew.

    Furthermore, he told the story of the Israelites, who rebelled against God in the wilderness when they were desperate for bread. And also, how the Israelites where determined to make Jesus their King, after he miraculously fed five thousands with mere five loaves and two fishes. While the priest drew his examples from Bible contexts, as I sat to write this column, my mind remonstrated on the hunger ravaging Nigerians, with the prices of staple food literally hitting the roof.

    I wondered whether the leaders of the All Progressive Congress (APC), who like their predecessors, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), are already boasting about coasting to victory in 2023, and even beyond, are conscious of the spate of hunger in the land, and how desperate for food, the people have become. I wondered whether those who are merely desperate for power, are not worried that out of the desperation for food, Nigerians may rebel against the party at the next elections.

    As the Bible told us, while Moses was away on the mountain engaged with God for what he considered of greater importance, the 12 commandments, the people who were desperate for food, made a deal to quench their hunger. For the people, the higher things of the spirit can wait, as they demonstrated willingness to worship a foreign god, as long as such endeavour could quell their hunger. So, could the inflationary pressure on food items become the waterloo for APC in 2023?

    On another level, I also linked the desperation for bread to the desperation of Governor Mai Mala Buni to hold onto two very divergent positions simultaneously, even when the Supreme Court has interpreted that under section 183 of the constitution and Article 17(4) of the APC Constitution, he cannot. With other band of desperate APC leaders in tow, Buni and his team seems to care less if they actions eventually plunge the country into avoidable crisis.

    As the deputy senate president, Omo-Agege, has postulated, the courts would not dare to bar the APC from the presidential election. His desperation for bread, emanating from the plum position he occupies, may have blinded him to the clear provision of section 183 that: “the governor shall not during the period when he holds office hold any other executive office or paid employment in any capacity whatsoever.” What he thinks the courts should do, if asked to interpret that provision with respect to their acting chairman who is the governor of Yobe, can only be imagined.

    Perhaps, like his other colleagues desperate for bread, he believes the courts would fear that the consequences could be worse that what is happening in South Africa where the former President Jacob Zuma, a quintessential ‘African big man’, was imprisoned for contempt of court. What is likely playing in the deputy senate president’s mind is that since his party is in power, any such decision could herald the end of democracy, and for all he cares, if his party cannot retain power, then no other party should.

    Otherwise, why would the APC having the fortune of a pre-taste of the sour grape the courts would serve them, for their ill-informed decision to handpick a serving governor constitutionally barred from heading the party, waste the enormous resources expended last Saturday, for a ward congress across the country that is likely to be declared null and void by the courts? Like the deputy senate president, there are other bands of desperate APC leaders, who are willing to sacrifice the party for the bread they seek to eat.

    Poor President Muhammadu Buhari leading a band of hungry desperadoes who will lie through their teeth just because they are desperate for bread. Those who argue that a minority judgment of the Supreme Court is of no consequence, should also inform the president that the majority judgment in favour of Rotimi Akeredolu, avoided making a pronouncement on that issue, because according to the learned justices, a relevant party, was not added to the suit.

    So, while the minority judgment cannot remove the governor from office, it showed the mind of the apex court on the vexed issue of allowing a governor to hold another executive position or a paid employment, which the constitution clearly forbade. Without gainsaying, the position of the chairman of the party is both an executive position and a paid employment, by any stretch of imagination; and if the party is lucky to get away on a technical ground in the Ondo petition, it may have no chance, should the legitimacy of the congress, be properly challenged before the court.

    With the way things stand, the people of Anambra State may have no APC candidate in the next gubernatorial election, as the very litigious politicians of the state, will milk the chance to disqualify the party’s candidate in the polls, for being tainted by the Governor Bunu’s stigma. With the hunger ravaging the land, there are many, particularly members of the opposition, who would joyously celebrate the disqualification of APC, at the centre in the 2023 election.

    The way out for the APC, is to cure both the hunger for bread in the land, and the desperation of their hungry party members, if they want to save their party and the country from avoidable crisis. Since it was in deference to President Buhari that the elected executive led by Adams Oshiomhole, was sacked, and an illegal executive led by Governor Bunu appointed; the president owes every member of his party, whatever legitimate steps that needs to be taken, to ensure the APC’s boat do not capsize.

    If the APC ignores the warning signal, and continues to hope on manna from the courts, they may wake up late, when there will be no freebie.

     

  • Buhari’s Legacy

    Buhari’s Legacy

    By Gabriel Amalu

    As the final term of President Muhammadu Buhari’s presidency reeves to breast the tape, it is right to begin to access his legacy. One of the benefit of such endeavour is to remind the president that willy-nilly his tenure will soon come to an end. Another is to give the president an opportunity to cement his positive endeavours; and the chance to amend the negatives where the opportunity still exists.

    Of course, this piece will not be able to list all the achievements of the president, neither would it be able to itemize all the failings of the regime. So, it will take a bite of both, and hope the message is passed that very soon, the alarm bell will start ringing time-up.

    On the positive side, history would be kind to the president for his work to revive the railway, which was abandoned in the days of the military buccaneers that took over power in 1985. As I write this piece, the Lagos-Ibadan rail-line is ready, and there are plans to continue the project going up to the northern part of the country.

    There is also a quantum leap in road infrastructure, and that includes a 10 lane Lagos- Ibadan expressway; as well as the 2nd Niger Bridge, which has been in the works, without much action, since the return of civilian rule in 1999. Similar important roads arteries are being developed in other parts of the country.

    The Buhari presidency is also doing well in the aviation sector. The runways in Abuja, Lagos, and Enugu have been rebuilt, while some airports have new terminals. Also the temporary closure of the Abuja airport some time ago, offered an opportunity to upgrade the Kaduna International airport. In the agricultural sector, both the Central Bank and the ministry of agriculture are pumping resources into the sector.

    Where the tenure of President Buhari to be about such positive efforts to revive various sectors of the economy, his legacy would be secured. But alas, one factor seems to have almost torpedoed all the great achievements. And that is the tragic promotion of the president’s filial relationship over and above the oath of office to which the president swore at his inauguration.

    And that is why, despite all these achievements, the president is derided as a tribal and nepotistic leader, whose principal interest is to protect persons of his ethnic nationality, persons who worship God in the same way he does, and those who come from a certain geographical region. Of course, those who surround him, lie to him that exuding those preferences does not infringe the constitution of the country.

    The most perverse of those negatives is his bias for his ethnic Fulani. While it will be unfair to expect the president to deny his Fulani nationality, and cultural idiosyncrasies, it is absurd, unlawful, unconstitutional and reprehensible that the president would promote the interests of his ethnic nationality, even when such action is derailing the corporate existence of country, he swore to protect and defend.

    At the risk of repeating myself, it is that outward manifestation of bias that is undermining the achievements of his presidency. Except one lives in self-denial, the nation is torn apart today, because people of other ethnic nationalities, including the Hausas, are in various degrees of protest against the state, because they believe the president exudes ethnic characteristics.

    Unfortunately, the resultant inter-ethnic tension and crisis have bread mini-insurgency in some parts of the country, and other forms of open confrontation against the state in other parts. As a sign of loss of faith, people of other ethnic nationalities openly call for the dismemberment of the country, and mentioning the president’s actions as the reason for their demands.

    Emboldened by the disposition of the president, armed herdsmen, who are of Fulani ethnic origin, have become a menace in many parts of the country, as they kill indigenous people, destroy their property and appropriate their lands, as legitimate aspiration. Tragically, while the state characteristically hunts down other trouble makers, the armed herders who are the root cause of the crisis are treated with kid gloves.

    Another negative impact of the menace of the armed herdsmen is that the agricultural programme of the president to ensure food security for the country is in jeopardy. Recently, the president lamented that only about 2.5% of the arable land in the country is being cultivated. Of course, a major reason why Nigerians have abandoned their farms is the fear of the armed herdsmen who have made going to farm dangerous.

    All across the country, there are incidences of rape, murder, wilful destruction of farms, and banditry by armed herdsmen without any repercussions. To compound the crisis those whose farmers have been eaten up by herds have resorted to kidnapping and armed banditry as an industry. In turn the herders whose cattle have been rustled have turned to banditry and kidnapping as a better business.

    There is also political tension across the country, because of the one-sided appointments the president promotes. While the president has obeyed the constitution in ministerial appointments, he has disobeyed the constitution in appointing heads of parastatals and agencies of government. Such one-sided appointment ignore the provision of section 14(3) of the 199 constitution which the president swore to “preserve” by his oath of office.

    More importantly, when the president ignores such fundamental provision of social justice, fairness and equitable disposition to governance, the people withdraw their allegiance to the state, and in some extreme case, take up arms to confront the state, as we see in some parts of the country. And as the people who feel oppressed voice out their frustrations and anger, the president is tempted to clamp down on their freedom of expression.

    So, one bad policy encourages another bad policy and the cycle goes on. As John Locke (1632-1704) wrote centuries ago: “Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to everyone of that society and made by the legislative power created in it, and not to be subject to the inconstant, unknown arbitrary will of another man.”

    To forestall the inevitable criticism over the self-inflicted shortcomings of the administration, the Buhari regime is now looking for ways to clamp free speech and press freedom. Unfortunately that battle is one the president will never win. As the US Supreme Court held in Olmstead v USA, “If the government becomes a law breaker; it breeds contempt for the law; it invites everyone to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”

    For this column, all the avoidable distractions and detractions of the regime, arise from the president’s ill-advised disposition to ethnic and nepotistic tendencies.