The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • The president has spoken!

    The president has spoken!

    By Sanya Oni

    There you have it! Two television interviews in quick succession followed by a broadcast all in a space of 72 hours, supporters of our media-averse president can now sit back and relax in confidence that the First Citizen not only ‘killed it” but has finally put paid to the wild speculations about whether or not their principal was in firm grasp of his environment and matters of governance!

    With no prior announcement of the Arise TV interview, it certainly came off as a ‘coup’ of sorts – timely and artfully packaged! The interview was vintage Buhari: languid for the most part in style, and convoluted in delivery; he neither dispelled any ‘myths’ or about his government nor offered any clarity on policy. In street lingo, it would be described as nothing spoil!

    Over all, you get the impression that the man spoke from the heart – simplistic, disagreeable but at least honest! A case of – since you want it; here it is! I am here referring to the Arise TV interview! As for the other one on the NTA, it was simply drab – what you see is what you get!

    I know many out there who are disappointed that the president did not utilize the opportunity to engage or if you like, to re-connect with the people after his rather long absence and his discomfiting silence in the last few months. But then, I also know no less out there who aver that the citizens ought to be grateful that the president has at least responded to our quest to talk to us – something that his aides have been doing all of these while on his behalf! Now, we must thank God for little mercies.

    Let me add to the two, a third group – many in this category wonder, whether silence, wouldn’t have been more ‘golden’ in the light of those antediluvian views canvassed by the president during those interviews. I dare say that yours truly belong in this latter category.

    Let’s take some of the issues the president spoke about. Starting with perhaps the most contentious one – open grazing. Amazingly, the president somehow still believes that the Fulani pastoralist nomadic culture could still be preserved!  Indeed, he verily believes that the solution resides – not in the coming to terms with current realities of population explosion with its correlates of pressures on land use and criminality – but in a romanticized past of freewheeling pastoralism!

    More than that, our president, sworn to the 1999 Constitution (as amended), thinks pretty little of exhuming a carryover colonial law – the Grazing Reserves Act 1964 – apparently without the encumbrances of the Land Use Act and other ancillary legislations that have long rendered that archaic law not only inoperable but a nullity – to push that through!

    I quote here, verbatim, what the president said of his directive to the attorney-general of the federation.

    “What I did was ask him to go and dig the gazette of the First Republic when people were obeying laws. There were cattle routes and grazing areas. Cattle routes were for when they (herdsmen) are moving up country, north to south or east to west, they had to go through there.

    “If you allow your cattle to stray into any farm, you are arrested. The farmer is invited to submit his claims. The Khadi or the judge will say pay this amount and if you can’t the cattle is sold. And if there is any benefit, you are given and people were behaving themselves and in the grazing areas, they built dams, put windmills in some places there were even veterinary departments so that the herders are limited. Their route is known, their grazing area is known. So, I asked for the gazette to make sure that those who encroached on these cattle routes and grazing areas will be dispossessed in law and try to bring some order back into the cattle grazing.”

    Talk of presidency caught in time warp; the whole thing reminds me of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle classic– a book of wonder in which a farmer wanders into a certain mountain, comes upon a group of dwarfs playing games, accepts their offer of a drink of liquor and promptly falls asleep only to wake up 20 years later, an old man with a long white beard!

    Here by the way is a presidency that has spoken variously of RUGA, National Livestock Transformation Plan and other shades of pastoral modernisation. Now, the revelation is that the chief marketer of those programmes is himself, yet to be cured of his preference for those ancient practices that has arguably no redeeming features. Call it dissonance at its best; here at once is a perceptible clash between the personal preferences of the leader and the posturing of the government that he leads; a classic instance of the unending muddle of inchoate ideas packaged as policy by officials at the highest levels of government.

    We wait for AGF Abubakar Malami. Trust me, he knows the law – in and out; or better still, he tghinks he – not the courts – can make pronouncement on what the law is! Don’t be surprised therefore should the gazette and the accompanying executive order acquire the force of law or if it comes to that, made to be superior to the Land Use Act!

    While the administration is at it, permit me to state upfront that the job will not be nearly half done with the retrieval of those grazing routes/reserves; there’s also a bounden duty on the government to retrieve those high calibre weapons from the nomads – a sine qua non – at least for equity. That way, the farmers could reasonably be assured of living for another day even as  our revered Khadis and judges would have something to adjudicate upon!

    Of course, the president addressed other issues. Like his threat to IPOB and other unruly youths on the Southeast. To those who expected the president to walk back on that threat – ‘to speak to those people in the language they understand’, what he did was to double down. Now, he says, it is fire for fire! The terrorists, kidnappers and bandits troubling the country from the Northeast, to Northwest and north-central, he said, can expect the same treatment under his equal opportunity onslaught!

    Don’t ask me why the fire couldn’t have been put out before things got out hand. Like the imagery of the soldier in Samuel Finer’s Man on the Horseback, our dear president, long thought to be on AWOL, wants to convince that he’s back and smoking!

    Finally, the president touched on Lagos, the EndSARS and all that. Nothing of word of comfort for the people on the carnage and destruction wrought by rioters; deemed guilty for not preventing the arson on those high capacity buses, the president would have the good people of Lagos condemned to walk.

  • Death, TB Joshua and peer envy

    Death, TB Joshua and peer envy

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    Chris Okotie, head Pastor at the Household of God Church, in classy Oregun, Ikeja, was tackling TB Joshua, of the Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN), in seedy Ikotun, Lagos.

    Trapped, in the crossfire, was the other Chris, and neighbour of Chris: Pastor Chris Oyakhilome — classy peers both, at their classy Oregun base.

    Poor Oyakhilome had dared to join Joshua — Joshua, the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN) pariah! — to pray for a man in a wheelchair.  What heresy!

    Ripples’ interest, back then, wasn’t really the holy men of God, their holy beefs, their holy spite.  It was rather own peers’ uncritical attitude to a potential story, being explored and discussed, at The Anchor on Sunday editorial suite.

    The modal view, in that chirpy, frenzied ensemble, was clear: PFN had decreed Joshua a pariah.  A pariah he must be.  Let the story validate that sacred creed!

    But Ripples cautioned: shouldn’t we first sound out both sides, and let the readers decide?  We will, came the riposte!  But we all know where all this would lead!

    The story did lead to the answer — and no prize for guessing right: TB Joshua got thoroughly roasted!  But Ripples wrote a “rebel” piece: an analytical side bar, insisting on fairness to both parties.  The editor graciously published it, with the story.

    A grateful Joshua would, the following Monday, seek out Ripples, at The Anchor: his followers bearing tonnes of ”Synagogue” literature, evangelizing video cassettes and allied souvenirs.  Still, the newsroom buzzed: beware of Joshua and his hypnotism!

    For a barely educated prophet — he had only one year of formal secondary education — TB Joshua boasted rare organizational savvy!

    So, if the dandy, the trendy, the lyrical, the musical, the handsome, the winsome, and above all, the lexically flamboyant Chris Okotie crowed at Joshua’s death, you know that beef didn’t come overnight.

    “The wizard at Endor who assumed the title Emmanuel,” Okotie gushed, in his now (in?)famous joy at Joshua’s death, “has been consumed by divine indignation. And now his disciples bewail his ignominious exit.”

    To boot, the lexical juggernaut signed off with trademark heavy artillery diction: “Operation Hupopodion (footstool) has commenced. The day of the vengeance of our God has fully come to Nigeria. And they shall not escape.”!

    To the excitable — and converted — that was classic Prophet Elijah, thundering down the miserable prophet of Baal and Ashera, at the biblical crunch!  But really, it was the classic dross of man, seeping through the man of God, playing the god of man!

    Joshua is dead.  Okotie still kicks.  But God, who they both claim to serve, knows who is who.

    Much earlier, Ripples — indirectly — had crossed TB Joshua’s path.  It was 1993, around the June 12 annulment crisis.  Mother-in-law, Madam Felicia Omosipe (beautiful and gentle, God bless her soul!), was down with terminal illness.

    Her distraught daughter, after fruitless hospital rounds, heard of “TB Joshua”, the new seer in town, about whom everyone crowed.  She met him at his Agodo sanctum, then a pond-side, under the Egbe-Ikotun bridge.  The place streamed with scores, craving healing, craving miracles.

    Joshua couldn’t do much for her mom — beyond a blessed bottle of stream water, which worked no miracle on her dying mom.  But she came back awed by “a young, powerful, yet humble prophet.”  Joshua must have been around 30 then.  He started his church in 1987, at 24.

    Ten shy years later, less than 10km away from that Egbe under-bridge, Joshua had built his Ikotun SCOAN global sanctuary.  But beyond the faithful among the Ikotun folks — Ikotun itself streaming with the hoi polloi of all races — he was the biblical prophet, not without honour, except in his own country, among his own people.

    As Joshua’s SCOAN globally bloomed — not as some American Evangelical mimic: an image much of Pentecostal Nigeria crave and court — Joshua’s peers put him down: if not as the supreme antichrist of the age, then certainly the ultimate fakery of the era.

    Ayo Oritsejafor’s Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) — Daddy Oritsejafor, later the Rasputin of Goodluck Jonathan’s presidential court — buffeted him from one side.  Joshua’s immediate PFN rivals lanced the prophet from another.

    It was almost Christian Nigeria’s version of the biblical Stephen stoning: except that this neo-Stephen wasn’t martyred — unless, of course, you buy Okotie’s merry dirge!

    But the Joshua prophetic image — less plastic than local American-wannabes, but more in tune with the first wave of pioneering Nigerian Pentecostals of the late 19th century — grabbed global attention.  The unorthodox Joshua thrived.  So did spiritual tourism, traced to his seedy Ikotun doors!

    Joshua’s healing and miracle bent was a clear throwback to that first age of Nigerian local Pentecostals, who battled the cultural hegemony of white missionaries, at the close of the 19th century.

    Mojola Agbebi (1860-1917) battled American white missionaries to, with others, found the Ebenezer Baptist Church, from the First (then Native) Baptist Church, Lagos.

    Joshua’s immediate models, in healing and miracles, however, would appear the duo of Moses Orimolade Tunolase (patron saint of the Aladura movement: the first breed of local Pentecostals, registered as the Eternal Sacred Order of Cherubim & Seraphim, formalized 1930, though the church started in 1924) and Joseph Ayo Babalola (whose Christ Apostolic Church, in 1941, emerged from the schism in The Apostolic Church).

    Now the eerie parallels, between Joshua and his “models”:  Orimolade Tunolase (1879-1933) died at 54.  Ayo Babalola (1904-1959) died at 55.  Joshua himself (1963-2021) died at 58.  Relatively short life of founders didn’t stop either the Aladura or CAC  from thriving after.  Will that be the story of Joshua’s SCOAN too?

    Still, more parallels, if the Okotie school won’t fall into a swoon: Joshua minded his flock for 33 years (1987-2021) — more than Tunolase (nine years, from 1924, as formal head of his church); and Babalola (18 years, after the founding of CAC in 1941).

    But 33 years — depending on the month in 1987 the church opened — could have equalled the Christ’s total earthly existence!

    Temitope Balogun Joshua (12 June 1963-5 June 2021) had his fair share of controversies.  Not a few claim his “so-called” miracles were either fake or staged — or both.  Others claim the bevy of beautiful ladies, in his commune, were all but priestly sexual fringe benefits.  And the ultimate blot: the crashed hostel that consumed no less than 145 lives, most of them South Africans.

    Still, in simplicity, humility, compassion and philanthropy — all Christ-like traits — TB Joshua trumped most of his noise-some peers in the PFN market.  His scorn for materialism also jarred against the screaming, sacred mammon of many of his peers.

    Whether his powers were of God or of Satan is for his maker — who just called him —to decide.  Which is why Okotie should not have mocked, in Joshua, a debt everyone owes.

  • Double standard

    Double standard

    By Gabriel Amalu

    The disagreement between Twitter and President Muhammadu Buhari has surprisingly been elevated to a dispute between the company and the Federal Republic of Nigeria. And with the federal government adamant, despite the misgivings of majority of G7 members to the banning of Twitter in Nigeria, the nation may unnecessary be exposed to avoidable international economic backlash. This column therefore urges for a quick détente, before a private dispute degenerates into an international dog-fight.

    Obviously, Nigeria is dealing with enough catastrophe, and should not add an a new international economic war-front to the multifarious crisis that made the United States Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) label Nigeria a failing state. What Twitter did to President Buhari, it also did to President Donald Trump, while he was the President of USA, and the dispute was never elevated as an affront to the country.

    To tag what Twitter did to President Buhari as a destabilisation plot against Nigeria is to mix-up issues; for while the president is a symbol of our nation, he is not the nation. To think otherwise is to elevate him to an absolute monarch in the nature of the failed Louis XIV who at the height of his reign, had quipped: ‘L’etat c’est moi’ (I am the state). In fairness to President Buhari, he has never equated himself to the state, and at the twilight of his regime, those surrounding him should not misguide him.

    Before the federal government’s hammer fell of Twitter, the Honourable Minister for Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, accused Twitter of engaging in double standard. He observed that Twitter did not delete posts by Nnamdi Kanu, of the banned Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), who had posted incendiary posts worse than what President Muhammadu Buhari did. To affirm merit to the accusation, Twitter struck down the offensive posts by Nnamdi Kanu.

    While some are concerned that the minister has unintentionally elevated Nnamdi Kanu, by comparing him to President Buhari, this column is more concerned about the issue of double standards, which the minster rightfully denounced. So, in condemning the double standards by Twitter, it also argues that double standard should be unacceptable and resisted in any decent relationship, by all and sundry.

    Talking about double standard, it urges the minister to introspect over allegations of double standard by President Buhari’s government, which many believe is the root cause of the crisis afflicting the social cohesion of our country. If the complaints are genuine, it will be fair and equitable that the government should make amends. It is also important to note that some of the major complaints against the government also touch on the provisions of the constitution, upon which the democratic enterprise hangs.

    Section 14(3) of the 1999 constitution (as amended) provides without equivocation that: “The composition of the government of the federation or any of its agencies and the conduct of its affairs shall be carried out in such a manner as to reflect the federal character of Nigeria and the need to promote national unity, and also to command national loyalty, thereby ensuring that there shall be no predominance of persons from a few state or from a few ethnic or other sectional groups in that government or in any of its agencies.”

    Will the minister say that the present government has obeyed this kernel provision of the 1999 constitution, as to reap the benefits envisaged by its obedience? With complaints against the lopsided appointments by the federal government, does it not follow that the federal government is engaged in double standards? Again, section 16(2)(a) of the constitution provides: “The state shall direct its policy towards ensuring: the promotion of a planned and balanced economic development.”

    One example. Considering the decision of the president to approve the establishment of a standard gauge railway line, an important factor of economic development, from his home state to a neighbouring country, while his minister for transportation is offering about one-half of the country the archaic and out-dated single gauge; would it not be appropriate to levy accusation of double standards against the government? Of course, such double standards will not enhance “federal character, promote national unity and also command national loyalty.”

    The greatest challenge faced by our dear country is that, a large chunk of her citizens have withdrawn their loyalty to the country, substantially because they perceive the country as being run on double standards. Of course, some of the challenges predate the government of President Buhari, but it appears to have been aggravated under his watch. For one, in a recent interview, the president vehemently denied the allegation of lopsided appointments, even as his opponents reel out statistics to counteract his assertion.

    More importantly, since there are those who disagree with the perception of Mr President, the ideal reaction should be to engage the claimants in debates in sundry manners. If the president is convinced that his appointments are not lopsided, and that his military chiefs are appointed because of their proven field experiences, his men should present facts to counter those claiming otherwise. As the saying goes, facts are sacred.

    Regardless of how angry the president has become, this column strongly advises him to change his strong-arm tactics in dealing with those who hold a different view as to how to resolve the lingering national questions. Of course, this column decries and condemns the orchestrated violence by non-state actors to pursue their misgivings against the government. But the president must realise that his dithering in correcting the anomaly, rather escalates the crisis.

    With less than two years in power, substantial part of which he will be a lame-duck president, President Buhari must avoid being remembered as a dictatorial civilian president. If he does not rein in the war-mongers around him, the country may degenerate into chaos by the time the regime winds down. The international community may also make him and our country a pariah, for the excessive force currently on display, especially in the southeast, which amounts to abuse of the fundamental rights of Nigerian citizens.

    The perception out there is that while the president is soft both in words and actions against the armed herdsmen that have been wreaking havoc in several rural communities across the country, he has been vehement and trident in condemning separatist groups, like IPOB. While the president is entitled to his private idiosyncrasies, he must exercise due diligence in matters of national importance and public perception.

    As we have stated here severally, comparatively, the president has not done badly in terms of performance in infrastructural development. He must therefore not allow his mismanagement of the national fault lines, and his foreign relations tactics, to mare every achievement.

  • ‘June 12’: An infamy reprised

    ‘June 12’: An infamy reprised

    By Olatunji Dare

    I am writing these lines at 7:30 in the evening of Thursday, June 10, 1993, just 48 hours to the presidential election.  But it is by no means clear that the election will actually take place.

    The High Court in Abuja is yet to determine whether the National Electoral Commission (NEC), Federal Attorney-General (Clement Akpamgbo) and military president Ibrahim Babangida have furnished compelling reasons as to why the election should not be stopped, as demanded by Arthur Nzeribe’s Association for a Better Nigeria (ABN).  The Association has followed up its petition with a huge demonstration in Kaduna, urging Babangida to stay on for four more years.

    S. G. Ikoku’s self-styled Council of Elder Statesmen is still busy calling for what amounts to a scuttling of the transition process, Curiously, its advocacy, dripping with contempt for the two official political parties and their presidential candidates and indeed for the entire political class, is described not as a proposal but a “Report.” The “Report” is received in Abuja with all the pomp and circumstance of a commissioned job.

    Newspapers are awash with unsigned advertisements excoriating the SDP candidate, Moshood Abiola, and the NRC candidate, Bashir Tofa, for all manner of misconduct, ranging from alleged purloining of an opponent’s letter to religious fanaticism.  The country is awash with rumours of dark plots and dire warnings.

    From his base in London, fugitive Second Republic minister Umaru Dikkko, no longer fearful of being shipped home in a crate, is reported to have written to the Kaduna Mafia warning that under no circumstance should a Southerner be allowed to win power.

    As if to add poignancy to the rumoured Dikko epistle, allegations surface that Abiola and a conclave of Yoruba elders have completed plans to transfer the federal capital back to Lagos if Abiola won the election.  And if he did not, Igbo property in Yorubaland was marked for destruction.

    Such were the doubts and distrust sowed in the week before the election and watered assiduously every passing day.  Long and disorderly queues formed by panic-stricken motorists in the wake of a strike by petroleum workers strengthen doubts about the election.  A breakdown in electricity and water supplies further reinforces the doubts.

    NEC chairman Humphrey Nwosu comes on the television screen as I write these lines, ebullient as ever, and reeling out in a sing-song, combative voice, a trainload of things that must not be done on election day and assuring a national audience that all was set for the historic poll.

    I am immediately reminded of what someone who should know told me long ago:  Never mind the histrionics.  Good old Humphrey is not actually in charge, and does not know what is really going on.

    At any rate, no polling booths have been erected, and no voters’ list has been put on display in Lagos 48 hours to the poll.  It requires a degree of credulity bordering on naiveté to wager that the poll will indeed hold on June 12.

    NTA’s network news has just ended.  There is no indication at all of developments in the ABN’s legal battle to scuttle the election.  The doubts remain.  The electoral laws state categorically that no court action can stand in the way of the election.  If this means anything at all, it means that no court can entertain any petition that seeks to stop he election.  The Abuja High Court has not only entertained the petition, it allows it to drag on for one full week, and to cast grave doubts on whether the election will be held.

    At this point, I break off and go to bed, hoping to complete this piece the next day, Friday,   June 11, to meet my copy deadline.

    At 11:05 p.m., the doorbell rings.

    Who can it be at this late hour?

    It is Femi Kusa, The Guardian’s director of publications and editor-in-chief.  He has a message, and it is for my ears only, the night guard tells me.  I go downstairs to meet Kusa.

    Without the slightest trace of agitation or surprise, Kusa tells me, first, that the Abuja High Court has ruled that election scheduled for Saturday, June 12, must not hold as demanded by the ABN; second, that the court has reserved ruling for one month on NEC’s counter-motion, and third, that the police had granted the ABN a permit to stage a Babangida-Must-Stay rally in Abuja.  He says he thought I should not have to read the newspapers the next day before learning of these developments.

    Even those of our countrymen (and women) who have maintained all along that the transition programme bears the markings of a cruel hoax and of a prologue to tragedy could hardly have believed that matters would come to such a desultory pass. But such, alas, is the level of triviality to which the final phase of the transition programme has been reduced.

    No sooner were the presidential primaries concluded than rumours spread that the candidates of both parties would be disqualified.  Damning dossiers on both candidates were said to have been compiled, with generous help from the intelligence services of Western nations. Since then, it has been one dark hint of gloomy portents after another.

    Was this the ”hidden agenda” finally unravelling?

    A hidden agenda exists all right, weighs in Vice President Augustus Aikhomu.  But it belongs to the self-appointed messiahs and their confederates who held a widely publicized meeting at General Olusegun Obasanjo’s farm the other day, not to the Babangida Administration.

    As I conclude this piece at 1:05 a.m. on Friday, June 11, 1993, NEC has not indicated whether it will go ahead with the election as planned, the Abuja injunction notwithstanding.  The authors and managers of the transition programme have made no statement.

    Perhaps they are satisfied that the transition is still ”on course,” and that the ”solid foundation” they have been laying for democracy these past seven years is, if anything, stronger than ever. Or it may well be that they regard the latest developments as just another phase of the “learning process” that is the transition.

    Others of a different cast of mind cannot be blamed if, on waking up today and hearing the news, they felt, like Jacob in the Old Testament, that they had for seven years been sleeping with an illusion.

    For the next 16 hours or so after Justice Bassey  Ikpeme’s ruling, there is no clear indication that the election will hold.  It is well past lunchtime on Friday, June 11, when NEC finally announces that the election will go on as scheduled, Justice Ikpeme and the ABN notwithstanding.

    The Federal Government’s affirmation that the election will hold comes only indirectly, in response to a statement issued by the United States Government through the United States Information Service in Lagos to the effect that any postponement of the election would be “unacceptable” to Washington.

    The election holds as scheduled.  Minor hitches are reported here and there, the type that can be expected even in the best-ordered poll.  For the most part, NEC and everyone connected with the election gets high praise for a job superbly executed.

    Nine days later, when results already proclaimed or authenticated and only awaiting official release, indicated that the SDP ticket of Moshoold Abiola and Babagana Kingibe had swept the poll, the regime of military president Ibrahim Babangida which had been thrown into panic by the returns, finally drops all subterfuge to announce through an unsigned and undated memo issued on plain paper by Nduka Irabor, chief press secretary to Vice President Augustus Aikhomu, that it had annulled the election.

    Why?

    “To rescue the judiciary from inter-wrangling . . . to protect our legal system and the judiciary from being ridiculed and politicized both nationally and internationally,” according to the memo, and to ensure that a judiciary built on sound and solid foundation was not “tarnished by the insatiable political desire of a few persons.”

    By that instrument, the Babangida regime summarily terminates all court proceedings on any matter touching on the June 12 1993 presidential election, and for good measure repeals all laws relating to a political transition programme that had been eight years and some N40 billion in the making.

    The consequences of this brazen evisceration of the sovereign will of the Nigerian people, executed with the active connivance of the political class, sections of the judiciary and the news media, political merchants, revanchists, and quislings, live with and haunt us still.

    • Adapted from my book Diary of a Debacle: Tracking Nigeria’s failed Democratic Transition (1989-1994),this piece was first published on June 11, 2012. It appears today with minor revisions.

     

  • Twitter tango and other matters

    Twitter tango and other matters

    By Sanya Oni

    While Nigerians struggle to make up their minds on what to make of the ‘clampdown’ on twitter – whether it is a suspension or outright ban – one of its many correlates is what to also make of the Abubakar Malami’s fiat which deigns to create a felony where none hitherto existed merely per force of his proclamation, and of course the growing rage that currently threatens to constitute the directing principles of state policy under the Buhari administration.

    Although the conveying instrument read – ‘indefinite suspension’, it would really not matter either way at this point. Why because the Nigerian twitterdom has since moved on apparently convinced that the measure came to nothing really. For while many are left wondering whether the government actually appreciates how limited matters of territoriality have come to be in the intricate, virtual world of netizens; for others, the past few days – at least for the likes of yours truly and indeed those willing to explore – have been teachable moments in terms of the vast possibilities that makes state control of that world largely ineffectual.

    So, what to make of the directive by Attorney-General of the Federation and Justice Minister Abubakar Malami, on “immediate prosecution of offenders of the federal government ban on Twitter operations in Nigeria” and calling on the public prosecutor to “swing into action”?

    To start with, the learned Silk did not as much as tell Nigerians which law(s) that covered the ban and by extension its prohibition. Could it be in one of the numerous bureaus of the justice ministry – unknown to Nigerians? Or are we expecting some new multi-purpose but loosely-worded executive orders to take care of the exigency?

    Quite typically; the minister also gave no hints on how the law would be enforced; will Nigerians be subjected to routine searches on their phones, tablets or other devices for the purposes of ensuring compliance? And by the same Nigerian Police serially accused of unfairly targeting innocent youths in the guise of chasing yahoo-boys?  And all of these from the head of the justice ministry that can’t seem to draw the fine line between animal and citizen rights?

    Again, these are interesting times. Talk of killing a fly with the sledge-hammer. So, for the offence of taking out what it considers an offensive phrase, the country – not the president and his 4.1 million followers on twitter that could have campaigned for a boycott – will have to endure the pain of enforced prohibition? And at what costs to the economy, particular the army of youths for whom the outlet constitutes a business companion of sorts?

    Now, don’t get me wrong. Twitter may well be guilty as charged; I read somewhere where a colleague – to quote him – referred to “the tyranny of the Big-Techs and the emergence of an unprecedented, unconventional superpower”. However, while the debate on the subject of power without control as touching that unconventional media is both salutary and legitimate, it is however something else to argue that an administration can so whimsically shut out an entire platform on those grounds that the administration set out.

    Of course, the debate continues. Suffice to say that the issue, in this particular instance, goes beyond the attempt at self-justification. No doubt, the charge sheet prepared by Lai Mohammed against Twitter – “the persistent use of the platform for activities that are capable of undermining Nigeria’s corporate existence” – would, in the eyes of some, seem somewhat treasonable. Fact also is that a growing tribe of Nigerians would, while scoffing at the administration’s oftentimes specious definitions of crime and criminality, have just enough to point to in its unconscionable if not entirely bizarre interventions – yes, double standards – that assails our very essence as citizens equal before the law – actions which are routinely served live via the same social media!

    That the administration, whose language is itself emblematic of the same problems of divisions and insensitivity to be found not just pointing accusing fingers but also going as far as charging others of the same crime is probably one of the grotesque demonstration of powers in recent time.

    Yes, the Buhari administration is probably right to be angry with Nnamdi Kanu’s IPOB and its pet-creation ESN. What is doubtful is the right to deploy such a language that in broad stroke, tars innocent youths of the southeast with terrorism brush, while in the same breadth, reminding the people of a past whose wounds are still fresh and so sore. Here, the president does not even need Twitter to let him know that his tone on that occasion is not helpful.

    As for Kanu, only a weak-kneed administration can afford to ignore the anarchy being unleashed by his IPOB group in the Southeast. The issue is that the southeast is no more equal to IPOB than the rampaging bands of outlaw herders is equal to the president’s beloved Fulani! While both deserve the same treatment under the law, only a country of unequal justice would permit one and ignore the other; or as it suits the likes of Miyetti Allah Kaore and their ilk, to issue brazen threats to the extent of literally getting away with murder whereas other less favoured agitators can only do so at the risk of massive clampdown.

    Finally, Tompolo versus FG

    I don’t know if many Nigerians paid attention to the bizarre drama that just played out in the South-south. Earlier in the month, we heard Government Ekpemupolo alias Tompolo, serve the Buhari administration a seven-day ultimatum to either get the substantive board of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) inaugurated or be prepared for a showdown. Call it the mother of all ironies – a lone non-state actor seeking to force the hands of the federal government to do what is right by the law – something that the parliament could not get the president to do!

    Remember, President Muhammadu Buhari had in October 2019 forwarded the names of the 16-member board of the commission to the senate for confirmation. A month later, all but one of the 16 nominees were confirmed by the senate, until the minister in charge of NDDC, Godswill Akapbio decided that the process could not go on until the audit of the place was concluded – something that is at variance with the commission’s enabling law!

    Well, a year and half on – and two major crises in between both of which the minister was a star actor – the audit has become interminable just as the minister and his ‘people’ have continued to dig in as against their original pledge to clear the mess in the place in record time.

    That was until penultimate week, when Ekpemupolo and company served notice that the region had had enough of the nonsense by the Uncommon Minister Akpabio! Ever since, the minister has been running from pillar to post to get the process back on track! Truly, in the Niger Delta, the fear of Tompolo is the beginning of wisdom!

    Now, the same minister who once swore that the board cannot be inaugurated until the audit is completed has promised the month’s end to get the board in place – a case of bare threat achieving what the relevant statute and constitutionalism could not achieve!

    See who’s talking ‘change’ in Buhari’s Nigeria?

  • June 12 and elite manoeuvres

    June 12 and elite manoeuvres

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    June 12 — the brazen cancellation of the 12 June 1993 presidential election — was simple, if serious, electoral crime, which craved a simple, if hefty, resolution.

    MKO Abiola won the election.  Ibrahim Babangida cancelled the result.  The crime was simple.  The time ought to be ample.

    But then came elite manoeuvres, playing dangerous regional and ethnic cards.  The result was avoidable crisis that shook Nigeria to its roots.

    From that simple crime, the elite, all round, fed fat.

    Somehow, IBB broadened self and cronies’ waywardness into a “northern” plot. Still, no one could finger any northern plebiscite, mandating that costly act.

    Among the Yoruba, Olusegun Obasanjo’s cunning first drove him to the nadir of Abacha’s gulag.  Then, to the zenith of the Nigerian state, as elected president — both from elite manipulations of that same June 12.

    Egba Chief, Ernest Shonekan, was quite earnest, glorying as Interim President, while MKO, his Egba kinsman and rightful claimant to that tenured office, would die in limbo.

    Poor Shonekan!  Once the toast of military-era policies, became the scorn of annulment-era politics — at least in his outraged, native South West!

    In the South East, Dim Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, at the onset of the Sani Abacha madness, prattled his Abacha Constitutional Conference “mandate” trumped MKO’s.

    Okwesilieze Nwodo, then Enugu governor, swore he would hit voluntary exile, should MKO’s mandate be restored — aside from pushing the bogey of another civil war!

    Indeed, an age of elite brutal opportunism, if ever there was one!  Yet, all issued from a clear crime, which a right-thinking elite should have promptly — and justly — resolved!

    That’s the Nigerian elite.   On that, no part of Nigeria can claim sainthood!

    Still, remember the “All of You” stunt the selfish tortoise pulled in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart?  Tortoise’s neighbours had kitted him with wings to fly to his in-laws’ bash, in the skies.

    But on getting there, tortoise declared he was “All of You”: meaning he cornered all of the lollies!  Needless to say: his piqued benefactors stripped him of borrowed wings, and sent him scuttling down the skies and crashing down to earth!

    In four days, the June 12 watershed would clock 28 years.  But the “All of You”, in the Nigerian elite, appears much worsened, particularly in this high winter of dissent.

    So, the starry-eyed, beware!  You might just end up cannon fodders, in others’ selfish battles!  Even the most sincere-sounding of minds is not beyond cant!

    Our own WS, in his latest work, Chronicles of the Happiest People on Earth, calls it the “professionals of emotive trafficking”!

    Take the latest Twitter uproar.  The media, in uncritical ideological crow, decree it “assault on free speech!” So, does the political opposition, to gain sensational mileage.  So does too, the embattled Twitter itself, posturing as battered but unbowed global champion of free speech.

    But really?  If Twitter was so enamoured of “free speech”, why did it clang off Donald Trump — who ironically, till tomorrow is still shrieking “free speech!” — after the US Capitol invasion of January 6?  Perhaps free speech, that threatened to burn America’s democracy, is handshake that shoots beyond the elbow?

    So, if the same “free speech”, via Twitter, wilfully pours fire on Nigeria, and fuels the slaughter of innocent souls in the South East, and threatens Nigeria’s democracy with anarchy, how’s the situation different from America’s January 6 experience?

    Yes: Twitter shut down Donald Trump but an irate Nigerian government shut down Twitter — true.

    But isn’t the core motive the same: preventing lunatics from razing their respective homesteads?  Twitter, its American business bastion, from where it creams off billions of dollars, globally? And Nigeria, which government has a legal and sacred duty to its populace, despite reckless and subversive tweets from Twitter?

    The sententious Seyi Makinde, governor of Oyo State, has declared moving against Twitter is moving against the livelihood of the Nigerian “youth” — not untrue.  But would the wise governor rather have both his beloved youth and Twitter businesses perish, in the very blaze Twitter itself lit?

    Talk of “professionals of emotive trafficking” and their one-sided posturing!

    Those who canonize Twitter the fiery arch-angel of global free speech are entitled to their fancy.  But that gadget is more interested in gobbling up billions of dollars, from its global captive market, bewitched into an eternal buzz of sense and nonsense!

    That was why, even in America, the high shrine of free speech and global cathedral of democracy, Twitter conked Trump before Trump conked its business — free speech be damned!

    Which is why, in Nigeria — or any sane country — Twitter can’t be the Almighty Lord of the Flies (apologies to Nobellist William Golding), which must be appeased with citizens’ blood, on the reckless altar of free speech!

    Think the likes of Libya and Syria, caught in the cross-current of the so-called Arab Spring, lit by these same foreign gadgetry!  The doom after, Libya and Syria are in ashes.  But the archangels of “free speech” have moved on!

    Between Nigeria and Twitter, therefore, it’s a clash of interests.  Beyond the seductive humbug of “free speech”, Twitter has a right to drive its business.  But that right can’t ride roughshod over the Nigerian government’s right, within the laws of the land, to govern in peace and protect its people.

    That willy-nilly arrogance was what Twitter courted, by failing to moderate the anarchic tweets, from its end.  No responsible government would tolerate that.

    But the suspension (and hopefully its early resolution) calls for a new beginning, in which both sides realize — and respect — their limits, in a symbiotic relationship that could be win-win.  It’s not who wins or who loses.  It’s rather a call to common sense.

    The same Nigerian elite that feasted on June 12 and baited catastrophe, now abuse the use of Twitter, putting their compatriots in harm’s way, because of current challenges.

    The pitch, pathos and bathos of English Romantic poetry issued from laments: the Industrial Revolution laying Nature bare!  Yet, demonized Nurture back then, has greatly enhanced human living now.

    Nigeria today goes through current throes because some “All of You” gluttons had gobbled up the people’s future. Efforts to block these parasites have earned the Buhari government a fearsome elite tar, which the naive masses — poor, manipulable souls!  — only amplify.

    Twitter — and allied social media tools — are in the thick of that dark campaign.

    Twitter has its normative good.  But its misuse is outright evil.  Mouthing “free speech” can’t fob off that danger.

  • Kidnapping not yet ‘digital’

    Kidnapping not yet ‘digital’

    By Sanya Oni

     

    It’s hard to know how much the live drama that played out last weekend in Kaduna will affect the tempo of deliberations on the so-called Terrorism Prevention (Amendment) Bill 2021 currently in the works in Nigeria’s upper legislative house.

    By the way, that ‘live drama’ is the release of the 14 remaining abducted students of the Greenfield University, Kaduna after 40 days in captivity. Call the altercation a sight to behold: a group of exasperated parents/relatives of the abductees telling the security agencies and government officials to back off as they scampered to take the rescued team for medicals! The same officials that were nowhere in sight while their 40-day ordeal lasted? Absurd!

    To those who do not yet know, that Bill on terrorism prevention also under reference, sponsored by Francis Onyewuchi, the distinguished senator from Imo, and which has since scaled through second reading, seeks to make ransom payment a felony punishable by no less than 15 years in jail! Interestingly, while as it seems unlikely that the bitter-sweet aftermath of the release of the Greenfield 14 will faze the bill’s sponsors one way or the other, we might as well take that development as one among the many absurdities of our time – part of the tragedy of living in the Shitholia republic.  And while the Bill or thoughts of any such thing would be the last thing on the mind of the distraught parents/relatives in those 40 agonizing days and nights; think of a government that practically abandoned those young Nigerians when it mattered most coming to mouth some meaningless mumbo jumbos to convince that we still have a functional government in place!

    Home at last! We must of course thank God for granting the prayers of countless Nigerians for the safe return of those hapless young Nigerians. And then of course the parents and relatives for being resolute even when the odds were stacked against them, and, for standing up to the distraction of a do-nothing government. How can one forget the five that were butchered by those savages even when frantic efforts were being made to engage the outlaws? Or even the male warden whose life was also brutally terminated in the course of the abduction?

    How much was paid as ransom? It really would not matter whether it is N150 million or N180 million. What matters is that these young Nigerians are now reunited with their families. I watched some of the parents tell the story of how they sold valuable property to meet the kidnappers’ demands; how they had to put up with the absence of soothing words from the leaders in those dark, terrible days including the insensitive taunts by officials who sought relevance by talking.

    Now that their ordeal is somewhat over, the rest of us can look back in time to look at the issues more closely. Rather than wallow in pitiable disbelieve in the face of outlandish manoeuvres by a band of relatively unsophisticated loonies, we can now take on the task of asking the difficult question of how the intelligence/security services of the supposed African giant has been reduced to a little more than company of the local Boys Scouts movement.

    Like in every successive cycle of abductions, the impression had all along been conveyed that the nation was actually dealing with an extra-terrestrial enterprise and so requires a little more than science and technology as we know it to root out. And then the other notion of the existence of a vast ungoverned space in the Nigerian territory, not only removed from the orbit of governance but far beyond the reaches of the security forces! Until Sheik Abubakar Gumi went into the deep forests (?) to draw out the outlaws, some Nigerians could have sworn such reality actually exists; that the country was dealing with some extra-terrestrial beings with UFOs providing both logistic and reconnaissance support. And that they reside in some imaginary bunkers borrowed into the earth far below the prying eyes of modern satellites and with parallel communications network to boot!

    Thanks to the cleric, we now know that such notions are patently exaggerated. The first revelation is that these individuals are really not extraordinary.  Although consigned to the fringes of society and so have grouse with the rest of the orderly society, they are, more than anything driven by the filthy lucre – or more appropriately greed.

    Of course, they have the technology – crude at very best, to carry on their heinous business. Sure, they are fairly well armed with AK-47, RPG and the likes; beyond that, they have just the barest of tools to ensure their human cargoes, sometimes numbering hundreds are effectively and efficiently evacuated as against a modern, supposedly mobile and sophisticated army that once boasted of being among the best on the continent. And then of course, their ultimate weapon – they stoke fear!

    So where did the Nigerian Army, the Nigerian Police Force, the Department of State Security, and the motley of other agencies get it so wrong that the army of the so-called African giant cannot move massively and decisively against the rag tag army? That is where the puzzle lies! And that is where the revelations from the Greenfield abduction rankle.

    Let’s assume for the purpose of argument that the parents actually pandered to the entreaties of the abductors not to cooperate with the security agencies; would this have also stripped them of the basic but statutory duty of mapping out the territories for eventual onslaught once the abductees were out of harm’s way? Are we to believe that none of the agencies have been able to evolve a credible insight into the operations of the kidnappers? Again, where is the place of intelligence in all of these?

    It seems one great irony that distraught victims would appear more trustful of their tormentors than both their government and the security agencies – one instance of shredding of the social contract! Although unfortunate, that appears to be one lesson that has emerged from the Greenfield University tragedy!

    Moving on, the other fact that we know about the ordeal of the parents/relatives was that talks were going on forth and back during this period; even more is that various sums – in cash – were delivered at various times – until what became the final haul of N50 million was delivered. Of course, the currency of exchange was the naira – our beloved but now abused naira. Is it really true that the security agencies could not have found a way, no matter how clandestine, to follow the hefty sums after delivery?

    Back to the Terrorism Prevention (Amendment) Bill 2021. Rather than seek to punish the victim – which the Act– is all about, why not better put the burden of cracking the Gordian knot of kidnapping on those charged with the business of securing our collective peace? Truly, kidnapping may have gone industrial; it has not gone digital – yet. Which means that a lot can still be done to curb it using the tools of science.

  • Avoidable fire

    Avoidable fire

    By Olakunle Abimbola

     

     

    Avoidable fire — that’s what some South West hot heads court. Which is why the May 23 anti-secession caution, by the South West political order, was reassuring, even if belated.

    That order should now follow its caution with full blast counter-mobilization, against lobbies sworn to torching the region’s dry thatch, in the harmattan of high discontent.

    Dangerous developments, in the South East, make that even more imperative.

    On May 30, Ahmed Gulak, ex-aide to ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, was killed, in cold blood, in Imo State; en route to the Sam Mbakwe International Cargo Airport.

    A report by The Punch claimed the Police had killed the Gulak-killing gang; at a spot in Aboh-Mbaise local government area, where they were allegedly playing Robin Hood, gifting locals free onions, from a seized truck, from the North.

    Killing the alleged assassins would make investigations into their motives a tad problematic. Still, everyone looks up to the Police for answers, after a thorough investigation. Until then, no one should jump into any hasty conclusions. But the Police have earned rare praise, for apprehending the felons on the double.

    Still, as historical trends go, it appears deja vu: 1966 all over again!  A January 1966 coup, dubbed “Ibo” coup, cleared top political and military officers from the North and the West.

    That provoked a fearsome pogrom, of “Easterners”: majority Igbo, but not excluding other Eastern and Midwestern minorities — or even Yoruba look-alikes, in the North.

    But those massacres were a precursor, to the “revenge” coup of July 1966 — with hundreds more of “Eastern” officers (including Mid-West Ibos, in the present Delta State) killed, displaced and sent scuttling to their Eastern homeland.

    Welcome, Biafra!  But that secessionist nightmare would well-nigh wipe out the Igbo starting gains in independent Nigeria (thanks to the North/East elite power coalition from 1960, with its winner-takes-all bragging culture), which continues to fuel Igbo victimhood till today.

    Still, compare and contrast the 1966 trend with now, using Imo as grim metaphor. First, the murder of nameless northern “suya” sellers, during a community brawl.  Now, the killing of a northerner with a name.

    To boot: the economic sabotage of rogue Robin Hoods, playing charity with a truckload of others’ onion-sweat!  But that cargo could well be an Igbo merchants’!  Double jeopardy?

    Now add the dark spice of Nnamdi Kanu and his IPOB, baying for blood, en route to own peculiar Biafra, without caring a hoot about millions of Igbo ordinary folks, who would be poor cannon fodder; or even millions of peaceful Igbo doing honest and legitimate business, all over Nigeria.

    So, what if some northern “youths” — the favourite Nigerian romantic coinage for tolerable mischief — decide on their own counter-killings?  1966-1970 all over again?

    Those who refuse to learn from history risk being consumed by history!

    You think this is ethnic finger-pointing across the Niger?  Welcome to the macabre parallels, of today’s South West, to the unfortunate events of 1966!  Yet, the region that Awo built prides itself the palladium of reason in Nigeria!

    Chief Obafemi Awolowo left gaol to be crowned the Asiwaju Yoruba, even as the old power partners, North and East, that plotted Awo’s persecution and gaol — or prosecution and gaol, if you’re legalistic-minded — fell upon themselves.

    Today’s South West, successor to the old West, has another Asiwaju Yoruba, in the illustrious, celebrated and respected historian, Prof. Banji Akintoye.  That sparks the Karl Marx quip of history repeating itself — whether as tragedy or farce, time will tell!

    Suffice it to say: while the original Asiwaju Yoruba steered the Yoruba from the perils of secession, the current Asiwaju Yoruba goads them right into Oodua Republic, though the celebrated author, of the latest authoritative account of Yoruba history, swears it would be “peaceful”, waxing poetic on the doctrine of self-determination.

    But the secessionist foot soldiers?  Now, that’s quite a Babel, between Oodua Republic and re-federalized Nigeria.  But the base motive is clear: scalding Fulani hate faking hot Yoruba love.

    The stark Sunday Igboho bravely grapples with what he little understands. “Field Marshal” and celebrated hero of the Igangan Fulani campaign appears the Yoruba equivalent of Nnamdi Kanu, with his happy-go-merry anarchy!

    Gani Adams, who crows over his Aare Oona Kakanfo title, even with its bag of  chequered tragedies, merrily conflates “restructuring” with some romantic “Yoruba nation”, in which he and his atavistic crowd would have some say — and sway.

    Why, good old Afenifere is also there, standing “gidigba”, as old fox, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, would crow.  On restructuring it stands.  But it won’t mind playing the bogey of “Yoruba nation” as bargaining chip — a glorious double-speak, that sits pat with both agenda.  Talk of having your cake and eating it!

    What a Babel, in the Yoruba country!

    Hardly a surprise then: that May 23 caution, by the South West APC governors, elders and leaders of thought in the formal polity, came under a bombast of vulgar abuse and base name-calling, by a little-known group called Apapo Oodua Koya (AOKOYA), in a statement by one Col. Abimbola Sowumi (rtd).  Contrast with Agbekoya of the 1970s!

    AOKOYA might be a beautiful Yoruba pun, which could mean “We’ll prevail”.  But while the Col. Sowumi screeched insults for barely any attention, Gen. Alani Akinrinade, in the cautioning camp, didn’t have to say a word to grab attention.

    The General had fought a war.  Even from the winning side, he knows the horrors of war to openly glory in, and thirst for it — unlike some of these Yoruba data-tigers, belching hate in the social media!

    This cacophony, driven by hate fuelled by ethnic hubris, echoes W. B. Yeats’s poetic quip: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity”!

    That is why the South West political order must boldly counter these reckless voices — who screech shrillest, about a grim business, they least comprehend.

    But they are only excitable puppets dancing to the hidden juggling of puppeteers — cold elite faking personal grudges as ethnic slurs.  This band too must be checked.

    As a boy growing up in Lagos, it was often perplexing to see and hear adults brand anything and everything bad as “Ijebu” — particularly fake money: “owo Ijebu”.

    Then, the jarring saying: “Ijebu o da; Ijesa o sunwon; iyen wa l’oun Ijebu-Ijesa!” [The Ijebu are no good; the Ijesa equally worthless.  Yet the daft calls himself Ijebu-Ijesa!].

    As at that time, the venom had left those intra-Yoruba bigotry, leaving behind a playful tease.  But later reading up history, it was clear these were explosive intra-Yoruba biases, cresting in the Kiriji War (1877-1893), well ahead of the Awolowo make-over.

    A nation, founded on hatred of others, will consume its own, when there are no more “aliens” to hate.  That might just be the fate of “Oodua Republic,” if this hate-filled secession-by-emotion continues unchecked.

  • Constitution Amendment Caution

    Constitution Amendment Caution

    By Gabriel Amalu

     

    The 9th senate has suddenly burst into life, and is undertaking a ‘holistic alteration’ of the 1999 constitution (as amended). Up till now, no far-reaching amendment of the constitution has been successful, because the political class usually disagree over drastic alterations, which is the minimum requirement to get Nigeria on the path of sustainable growth.

    The four alterations made so far, while significant in some respects, have avoided the big issues, and without a resolution of the big issues, the clamour for restructuring, or even balkanisation of the country will not go away. Under President Goodluck Jonathan, the first to third alterations were made; while under President Muhammadu Buhari, the fourth alteration was made.

    The first alteration was geared principally to grant financial autonomy to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the National Assembly and judiciary; and to secure the transmission of power should the president or governor refuse or is unable to handover to the deputy during a temporary absence from office. The second alteration was geared to ensure the timely dispensation of election petitions, and the procedure and makeup of various election petitions.

    Like the first two alterations, the third alteration was also not contentious. The amendment was to create the National Industrial Court, as a superior court of record. The fourth alteration under President Muhammadu Buhari, came in five parts, and the first of the five parts dealt with the time-line for the determination of pre-election matters. The second dealt with the reduction of the age for electability to the various political offices.

    The third of the fourth alteration granted financial autonomy to the House of Assembly of the state and the judiciary and but for the initial cowardly disposition of the members of state houses of assembly is non contentious. The fourth of the fourth alteration act, dealt with granting INEC sufficient time to conduct bye-elections, and provided ground for de-registration of political parties. Just as well, the fifth of the fourth amendment dealt with issue of the disqualification of a person who completed a vacated term of governor or president, being eligible for only one more term.

    What is abundantly clear from the above-mentioned alterations is that none of them dealt with the contentious issues that have made our federation a quasi-unitary system of government. The alterations gingerly avoided the devolution of economic power, like whitling down the items in the exclusive legislative list. It also avoided the contentious issue of creating sub-national police, at the state and other levels. The amendments stayed clear of the issue of resource control, and the status of local governments amongst other issues.

    Tragically, after what was thought to be a holistic effort by the 7th National Assembly, President Goodluck Jonathan, shot it down, contending that some of the provisions are offensive to the amendment procedure and the powers conferred on the executive. Under President Muhammadu Buhari as shown above, only piecemeal amendments have been made, but it appears the senate and the House of Representatives are geared to test the waters.

    The senate in a jiffy have concluded the town-hall meetings across the six-geopolitical zones, and it is hoped the House of Representatives will embark on its own consultations shortly. The promise from the leaders of the National Assembly is that the amendments would be ready for presidential assent before they proceed on their summer break. Considering many unkempt promises, on the electoral reform bill, and the Petroleum Industry Bill, Nigerians are sceptical about the genuineness of the promise.

    Again, considering that President Buhari is an ultra-centralist, and for some a sectional leader in favour of the status quo, many Nigerians are doubtful whether any fundamental alteration would receive his presidential assent. Furthermore, considering the make-up of the National Assembly which favours the northwest and northeast in numbers, especially in the House of Representatives, and the procedural requirement for any amendment, any proposed amendment that they don’t support will fail woefully.

    Perhaps these obstacles are why the Afenifere, the pan-Yoruba socio-political organisation decided not to participate in the exercise. Of course, the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) which despite their proscription, commands significant followership in the southeast and south-south, and the Sunday Ighoho-led Yoruba separatist groups, which is growing in sympathisers, consider the National Assembly a contraption of a failed state, and as such lacks the legitimacy to meet the minimum demands of a restructured Nigeria.

    So, could it be that that like their predecessors, in the 7th National Assembly, the 9th National Assembly members are merely on a jamboree, to deflate the agitation for restructuring? This column is worried that those elected or selected to govern our country are too far engrossed in their eating (apologies to late Sunday Afolabi) that they do not understand the urgency of the situation and the need to engineer necessary constitutional amendments to restore peace and progress in our country.

    As the Ooni of Ife, asked recently, how many of our political office holders, including the president of the senate, and the speaker of the House of Representatives can go home to their constituencies and stay for a week, without overburdening the security men? The same situation, I might add, is applicable to the commander-in-chief and his top commanders. None of them can freely go home, and like Chinua Achebe said, gather with their kinsmen in the village square, to enjoy fairy tales and the succulent incandescence of the moonlight.

    None of them will dare travel home by road, even with the protection of the national army, not to talk of stopping by the road-side to enjoy the decor of the undulating hills and the stimulating savannah of the country-side. Yet, most of our leaders are incapable of rising above their ethnic sentiments, religious bigotry and private interests masquerading as national interests, to become statesmen and history makers, and gift our country a life-line.

    In case the members of the National Assembly cares, they have the opportunity to take the sail off the separatists, by making far-reaching constitutional amendments that can give our country an opportunity for a new beginning. Such amendments must touch on the fundamental underpinnings which hoist a unitary state on a multi-ethnic and substantially disparate nationalities. To think and act as if all s well, is playing the ostrich.

    To believe that by force of arms, the present unitary structure foisted on the nation by the military can be rammed down the throats of every part of the country, is to live in a fools’ paradise. President Buhari who is playing the statesman, to save the unravelling democracies across the West Africa, must realise that he is being mocked for playing the fire-fighter for other countries, while his backyard is smouldering.

     

  • Malami’s bad verse

    Malami’s bad verse

    By Sanya Oni

    Exceptionalism. That unsettling word – again! Like yours truly is wont to say, these are strange times indeed. If we started off on the note of that galling concept which insists on exclusive privileges for migrant herders, and the fulsome attempts to rationalise the correlates, warts and all, we have finally arrived at a junction where no less than the nation’s number one law officer has, after combing for the specious legalism to oxygenate it, has finally delivered that official imprimatur!

    The setting of course is what is now described as the Asaba Declaration. Fifteen southern governors had, after a four-hour meeting in the Delta State capital rolled out a 12-point communiqué on those issues currently tearing the country apart: open grazing, devolution of powers, state police etc. – broad, if you like, general governance issues that have in recent time, tended to drive the nation apart.

    As it turned out, the most contentious of the lot is the ban on open grazing, the source of most of the conflicts between host communities and migrant herders.

    “It is about constitutionality within the context of the freedoms expressed in our constitution. Can you deny the rights of a Nigerian?

    “For example: it is as good as saying, perhaps, maybe, the northern governors coming together to say they prohibit spare parts trading in the north.

    “Does it hold water? Does it hold water for a northern governor to come and state expressly that he now prohibits spare parts trading in the north?”

    That was Abubakar Malami, the federal government’s attorney-general and minister of justice. As it appears, that doctrine – that the Fulani herders deserves especial consideration in all matters pertaining to governance, and public policy – is now official.

    From Bauchi’s Bala Mohammed and his odious exceptionalism to Zamfara’s Bello Muhammad Matawalle’s opportunistic posturing, the nation seems to have turned full circle.

    If you think that those views could as well have come from the lawyers to the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN); consider the fact that such views, no matter how distasteful, are increasingly being mainstreamed. I recall Prof. Usman Yusuf, former Executive Secretary of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), once described what he mischievously labelled as “blanket ban” on open grazing by 15 elected governors as “irresponsible.” His grouse: the southern governors did not consult Fulani leaders before making their regulation! The National Secretary of Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore, Alhassan Saleh, simply described the ban as “empty policy:

    “The governors are confused and mischievous; are herders the problem of this country? Are they IPOB killing people up and down, burning police stations?”, he was quoted to have said in his reaction to the communique of the southern governors.

    So also is the National President of Kulen Allah Cattle Rearers Association of Nigeria (KACRAN), Khalil Mohammed Bello, who said the ban negates the 1999 constitution. According to him, the constitution allows every citizen to freely move peacefully.

    What is ‘new’ is that the number one federal government lawyer would not only lend his voice to the perverse logic behind these effusions, but would, in framing the issue, call to question, both his understanding of the law and his duty and oath of office. If you add to these his equally intriguing equivalence of comparing the settled spare parts sellers in the north with the itinerant pastoralists with their wanton destruction of lives and farmlands (note the barely concealed ethnic baiting), ethnocentrism – that terrible predilection of evaluating other cultures by the standards and customs of one’s own culture –couldn’t have come across in a more brazen variant!

    Talk of more appropriate comparison: why not bring up those countless cases of licenced liquor dealers whose cargoes sometimes valued in hundreds of millions are routinely destroyed by the Hisbah, the religious police under the untested doctrine of prohibition even when those cargoes are merely transported through territories considered ‘off-limits’? Are those supposedly, exceptions to Malami’s roll of freedoms?

    Now, if it seems utterly disingenuous that a senior lawyer couldn’t make the distinction between a ban on transhumance – which the entire body of governors had earlier recommended and which the southern governors only affirmed, and an outright ban on cattle rearing/business – which was never on the cards – but which the likes of Malami maintain that it is; Nigerians could then begin to appreciate not just the depth of the crisis, but the clever manoeuvres of those whose agenda could best be described as opportunistic and devious.

    For even if we concede to the rights of the nomads to freely move and settle in any part of the Nigerian federation, certainly not the most expansive interpretation of the ‘freedom’ could conceivably be extended to their cattle save under Malami’s warped notion of constitutionalism. Surely, the learned Silk couldn’t be referring to the Nigerian constitution, which by the way, leaves little ambiguities about those entitled to the ‘freedom’ of movement as indeed the curbs designed to delimit them.

    And while it suits the so-called chief law officer of the federal government to talk glibly of ‘freedoms’ while pretending to be oblivious of the rights of other Nigerians in the event of wilful trespass on their property or even injury to their lives, does that also abrogate the powers of the sub-national entities to make such laws as to engender communal peace in the face of the massive destructions being wreaked by the lawless herders?

    In all of this, the tragedy really is that many actually believe and actually subscribe to such jaded notions of the law as espoused by Malami. Too bad that southern governors are not exactly models where matters of good governance are on the table; but then, the truth is that the Northern governors with their 10 million-odd out-of-school kids should ordinarily have more to worry about in a ‘freedom’ that seeks to consign a generation to the forests as either bandits and terrorists – some 15,000 years after mankind domesticated the first set of animals – and in an age where other 10-year-olds are already solving complex tasks on their computer tablets!

    Talk of a country where meanings attached to everyday symbols are as diverse as those making them, part of our tragedy is our inability to agree on the definition of the problem on the basis on which we might begin to proceed on an enduring solution. Whether the talk is federalism, devolution of powers, state police, name it; everything has been reduced to “we” versus “them” – or more appropriately, north versus south, even as the country, our so-called beloved federation, continues in the slow descent into anarchy and chaos. Who says our country is not jinxed?