By Olatunji Dare

The last time they talked him into bidding for the PDP ticket in Anambra State’s gubernatorial race, the quest almost ended before it got under way.

The “him” in this case, was Charles Chukwuma Soludo, decompressing in London, still not fully recovered from being edged out of his perch as Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria.

The “they” comprised an amorphous group, but the principal figure was President Umaru Yar’Adua, who had signed off on Soludo’s defenestration from the CBN, with other persons of consequence in the PDP who were forever scheming to “capture” those states not governed by the biggest party in Africa.

In his revealing January 21, 2013, Op-Ed piece for THISDAY (“What Obasanjo and Yar’Adua told me”) Soludo recalled how, on inquiring about him, Yar’Adua had been told that he was holidaying abroad and how he had been told that Yar’Adua would like to meet with him on his return.

Their goal, Yar’Adua told Soludo when they finally met on July 26, 2009, was to get him elected governor of Anambra State in the election scheduled for February 2010 so as to finally endow the state with the leadership it had never had the good fortune to enjoy – the kind of leadership encapsulated in the technocratic skills Soludo had applied to nation’s economy and financial system, as well as his accomplishments in those fields.

Why then was he denied a second term at the CBN?

But I digress.

If Soludo thought this was a fanciful goal, considering the power of incumbency in Nigerian politics and the rugged tenacity that the incumbent, Peter Obi, of the APGA, had displayed over the years, not forgetting the malignant influence of the Ubah clan on the political life of the state, his diffidence must have dissolved there and then.

Himself The Fixer, Tony Anenih, he was told, had been mobilised for the project and could hardly wait to go into action, if only to demonstrate that, recent setbacks notwithstanding, he was still a past master at turning losers into winners and winners into losers.

Soludo did not have to make any commitment then.   He should go discuss the matter with his family and associates.  But if he decided to run, he would enter the race knowing that Yar’Adua would “come out fully” to ensure that he won the prize.

His wife stood resolutely against the idea, but Soludo felt sufficiently buoyed by his consultations with friends and associates to tell Yar’Adua one month later that he would enter the race, but with preconditions.

The Federal Government would have to build an airport and dredge the River Niger to enable medium-sized ships sail all the way to Onitsha, where an international seaport would have to be constructed.  The Anambra-Kogi road would have to be upgraded to a dual-carriage highway. Because one-third of its land mass was threatened by soil erosion, Anambra would have to be given special drawing rights from the Ecological Fund.

Nor was that all.

The Federal Government would also have to complete the Greater Onitsha water scheme, designate Anambra an oil-producing  state, and as a “pilot state” for large-scale commercial agriculture.   Finally, it would have to speed up construction of the second Niger Bridge.

With these things in place, Soludo said, he was confident that, after two terms of working 24 hours a day, he would have transformed Anambra to the point that Federal allocations would be devoted wholly to capital projects.  Re-current expenditure would be wholly internally generated.

But with all these things in place, who needs Soludo’s intimidating antecedents and credentials to transform Anambra into “an international city”?  And why would the Federal Government do those things for Anambra and not for other states?

But I digress again.

The important thing is that Yar’Adua agreed to all these demands, according to Soludo, who then asked for four more weeks for wider consultations.  The deal was sealed.

Thereafter, the waters got muddied.

Yar’Adua fell ill, went to seek treatment in Saudi Arabia, and was never in control again. Soludo’s 78-year-old father was kidnapped. His captors demanded a ransom of N500 million, but later reduced it to N300 million, warning darkly that “the worst” would happen if the  demand was not met promptly. They freed him unharmed after six weeks, under terms that were never disclosed.

Soludo’s opponents sought to envelop him in scandal, charging that he had profited from improprieties in the printing of small denomination polymer banknotes handled by an Australian company when he was CBN governor.  More than 1,300 petitions were filed, their major contention being that “outsiders,” were trying to impose Soludo on the Anambra State branch of the PDP. The petitions moved the PDP to suspend the party primaries indefinitely.

When the process finally got under way, party officials had to be imported from Benue State to conduct the election of delegates.   Following a shuffling and reshuffling of the delegates, the PDP and the Independent National Electoral Commission declared Soludo winner of the ticket.

The high court voided the outcome.  That verdict was affirmed on appeal, but reversed by the Supreme Court, just in time for the election proper.

In the event, Peter Obi was reelected governor.  Soludo placed third, with just under 20 per cent of the vote, behind second-place winner Chris Ngige.  The Fixer apparently went missing in action, or was thoroughly out-fixed.

Given the circumstances, running for governor of Anambra again after this ordeal should have been the last thing on the mind of the average political aspirant.  No outcome was guaranteed, what with the predatory Ubah clan lurking in the shadows.

But Soludo is not your average aspirant.

With one deft stroke, he served notice of his intent to re-enter the fray. “The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs,” he wrote, echoing Plato, “is to be ruled by evil men.

He was as good as his word.

When Anambra’s gubernatorial space opened up in 2013 as Obi was completing his second term, Soludo entered the race, this time on the platform of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), having fulfilled all requirements

They were waiting for him in a well-planned ambuscade.  Citing all kinds of rules and regulations   and applying them in the most tendentious manner conceivable, they eliminated him on the threshold. The party’s grandees and fixers simply declared him unqualified for the race.   And that was that.

Undaunted, and politically much wiser after a cooling-off period of eight years, Soludo has recently renewed his gubernatorial quest, still on APGA’s platform, to replace William Obiano who is not eligible for re-election.

Again, they were waiting for him, this time with deadly force.

Soludo was returning from a parley with youths in Isuofia, in Aguata Local Government Area on April 2, when unidentified gunmen attacked his entourage, killing three police and abducting the state’s Commissioner for Public Utilities.  He was released several days later, on terms that were not disclosed.

For a while, the whereabouts of Soludo, the gunmen’s principal quarry, were unknown. Then, he surfaced in Lagos, to much public relief.

His fighting spirit, I wager, is urging him not to submit to such tawdry tactics, and so are his teeming supporters.  His sworn adversaries, on the other hand, are probably daring him to return to the turf and suffer even grimmer consequences.

What to do?

Not being a grass-roots politician, Soludo cannot campaign effectively for the November 6 poll from exile.  I doubt whether any authority, local, regional (think Ebube agu) or federal, can guarantee his safety on the stump.   If they can, will they be available to protect him and his administration in the event of his winning the election?  Will they let him govern?

Contemplating the Soludo saga, even the most seasoned professional students of Nigerian politics who think they have seen it all must be scratching their heads in puzzlement.

In this corner, the question of the moment is:  Who is afraid of Dr Soludo?

 

By Olatunji Dare

As I watched the lead attorney Eric J. Nelson grind out before a Minnesota court his case for exculpating  his client police officer Derek Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd two weeks ago, my mind flashed back and forth to a passage in Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s classic memoir AW0, published some six  decades ago.

Awolowo, who had given up legal practice for a political career that culminated in his premiership of Western Nigeria and Leader of the Opposition in Nigeria’s first post-colonial government, was reflecting rather nostalgically, on the joys of lawyering.

Here is the passage:

“To engage , without bitterness or animosity, in the fiercest contention; to cultivate the habit of always examining  both sides of a problem, and to present the side you espouse with forensic forcefulness and assuredness; to identify yourself with your client and to enter into his feelings as if you were the plaintiff or the defendant or the prisoner at the Bar; to propound and urge points of law which are sometimes difficult, sometimes not all too tenable, or sometimes so fine and abstruse that it is not at all easy to distinguish one point from another; to be utterly fearless and unsparing in combat; to acquire an independence of outlook in all things and to enjoy immunity in all you say and do as long as it is legitimate and within the bounds of professional etiquette; to take part in fostering the cause of justice  and equity in their total impartiality before the very bulwark of the citizens’ liberty and individual freedom – all these and more are the inherent and distinctive attributes of a noble profession  which I love and will forever cherish.”

That is a whale of a sentence, but also a beauty.  Only a gifted writer could have pulled it off.

In writing classes, student are admonished not to write sentences that contain more than 25 words, or more than 40 if the teacher is the indulgent type.  It is a useful rule, but it is not iron-clad.  The best test in these matters is clarity, and one cannot err by following Anatole France who, when asked to state the three most important characteristics of French prose, replied:  First, and above all, clarity.  Second, clarity.  And finally, clarity.

On that score, the passage from Awo is a model of clarity.

But I digress.

As he laid out his case for his client, Nelson was a picture of imperturbability, even as witness after witness presented in chilling detail, evidence that pointed unwaveringly to his client’s culpability.  But Nelson would not to allow the facts get in the way of the most far-fetched improbabilities.

Forget the knee that Chauvin pressed and pressed on Floyd’s neck as Floyd lay prone on the tarmac handcuffed,  with one officer sitting on his back and another holding his feet together.  Forget his heart-rending cries that he could not breathe.  Forget his writhing, his pathetic plea for his mother who had been dead for four years to come deliver him.  Forget those bulging eyes that seemed in imminent danger of popping out of their sockets.

Forget the tongue hanging out like that of a parched animal.  Forget the anguished entreaties of passers-by watching in horror what seemed like an execution in progress. Forget that Floyd’s neck remained jackknifed by Chauvin knee even after his accomplices reported that Floyd’s pulse had stopped.  Forget that Chauvin, striking a pose not unlike that of a game hunter in a safari posing triumphantly with the prostrate body of his trophy, kept his neck grinding into Floyd’s neck for nearly five minutes after Floyd had stopped showing any signs of life.

Forget that, in their official account, Chauvin and company had reported tersely that Floyd had died from a “medical incident,” following his arrest for purchasing cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill.  Forget that there was not the slightest indication in that account of any physical encounter with Floyd. Forget police testimony that Chauvin’s conduct violated the official rules through and through.

Forget a young Black woman’s plea to Chauvin to “get off of” Floyd’s neck, a woman who realised that the Black man pleading for his life to the extent that he could still draw some air into his lungs, could have been her father or uncle or brother or neighbor.  Ignoring that plea would seal Chauvin’s doom.

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That young woman Darnella Frazier, 17, who was going to a candy store with a younger relation, had  the presence of mind to set her camera rolling to record live in chilling detail, all nine minutes and more of it, what is likely to go down as one of the most gruesome pictures of our time.   The video constituted perhaps the decisive piece of evidence in the trial.

But Chauvin’s counsel urged the court to discount it.  Chauvin’s knee lay on Floyd’s collar bone, not on his neck as the video would seem to suggest, he contended; plus, Chauvin’s foot was resting on the tarmac, so that his body weight was not actually impressed on Floyd’s.  Again, Chauvin weighed a mere 144 pounds.  So, how much damage could that weight have done to the neck of a giant possessed of super-human strength?

Forget appearances; forget even commonsense, Nelson urged the court.   The knee locked on Floyd’s neck for almost ten minutes had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with Floyd’s death.  Floyd was a notorious drug user.  Even at the time of his arrest, illegal drugs had been found on his body.  His dissolute lifestyle also contributed mightily to his fate.

He was overweight and diabetic; he smoked, and he was not in the habit of exercising regularly. Because of these and other pathologies, he had an enlarged heart that made him a candidate for premature death, regardless of what Chauvin and company did or failed to do.

There was also the carbon monoxide factor, remember?  Floyd was held down on the tarmac close to the exhaust of a motor vehicle that was belching out a mixture of toxic effluents.  It was this mixture  that poisoned the very air Floyd was breathing.  Throttling him with a knee to his neck for almost 10 minutes had nothing to do with the difficulty of breathing, the asphyxia that was alleged to have resulted in Floyd’s death.

Nor should the jury set any store by the so-called video evidence, which can be manipulated and was in all likelihood heavily doctored.  When the prosecution urges you to believe only your eyes, they are asking you in effect to believe in doctored evidence.  Remember: not everything that happened that day could be seen or heard or even remembered.

Thus did Nelson the lead defense counsel grind on poker-faced, and relentlessly and unflappably.  The way he carried on, a person unfamiliar with the actual circumstances might have been led to conclude that Floyd had somehow connived in his own death and that Chauvin was the wronged party, to whom society owed an apology.

It required just one person among the 12-member jury to embrace Nelson’s theory, and his client would have been pronounced not guilty.  All the posturing, all the appeal to racial tropes and caricatures, was designed to appeal to the one juror who might be of a prejudicial cast of mind.  Chauvin was only doing his job, as the law  prescribed.

It did not work.  The jurors chose to believe what they had seen in vivid, excruciating detail.

I doubt whether Nelson ever came across the passage I quoted from Awolowo, on the joys of lawyering.  He was hewing to the tested courtroom strategy spelled out by Awolowo: “to present the side you espouse with forensic forcefulness and assuredness; to identify yourself with your client and to enter into his feelings as if you were the plaintiff or the defendant or the prisoner at the Bar; to propound and urge points of law which are sometimes difficult, sometimes not all too tenable. . .”

Chief Richard Akinjide (SAN) employed it successfully in the 1979 presidential election case.  Johnnie Cochran relied on it in part in the OJ Simpson’s case until the glove that didn’t fit cast a grave and indissoluble doubt on the prosecution’s case.

Nelson failed in his attempt to press it into Chauvin’s service.  But as they say here, you can’t blame a guy for trying.

By Olatunji Dare

 

Kogi, the Confluence State, is beckoning earnestly, and not just to those seeking to breathe its invigorating Covid-free air, or would-be tourists who have fallen on hard times and cannot afford to vacation in Europe.

It is today’s mecca for obtainers.  Sambo Dasuki’s Office of the National Security Adviser is dead; long live the Office of the Executive Governor of Kogi State, perceived as the Interim National Office of Obtainment.

Those well-versed in the practice have been all over the place doing what they do best, that is, obtaining.  Lately, they have stepped up the tempo, following broad hints from local and foreign intelligence sources of a severe slump in the official resource allocation.

It is not that they fear a run on the system, much less expect the bottom to fall off anytime soon. The system is nothing if not resilient, as those who have been predicting its collapse must have learned to their chagrin.  Those who have moved to ramp up the tempo, I am told, are simply being proactive.  They have learned to strike before anxiety turns to panic.

Still, I will not be surprised if they – the accomplished obtainers, that is — ratcheted up the tempo still in the coming weeks and months.  Time, it is hardly necessary to stress, is of the  essence.

So, let me stop dancing around the issue and come right out with it.  But before then a preface to the column, in which I will try to define the operative term and furnish the context in which it arose and is now being employed, assuming the allusion to Dasuki’s ONSA has not done that.

The term, if not the practice, goes back, to military president Ibrahim Babangida’s political transition programme, for which he conjured up two “mass, grassroots” political parties, one  a little to the Left and the other a little to the Right, and in which money would play no part whatsoever.

With politics de-monetised, every participant will have the same weight in the political calculus, and each will have an equal chance of attaining whatever office he or she chooses to vie for, from President of the Federal Republic, to local councilor.

That, at any rate, was the theory.

In practice, the whole thing turned out to be an excellent example of how a beautiful theory  was murdered by a gang of brutal facts.  Never had money – or “tremendous negative use of money” played such a central role in a political campaign, as a distraught Babangida would lament when the experiment blew up in his face.

In Warri, Delta State, the so-called primary contest between the two leading contestants for the gubernatorial candidate of the party that was a little to the Right was essentially a matter of cash and the contest was reduced to a bazaar.

Per Akpo Esajere, political editor for The Guardian, electors laden with cash they had obtained from one camp sashayed to the other camp to obtain even more cash, solemnly and solicitously  accosting everyone they encountered en route: “Ol’ boy, you never obtain?”

To return to Kogi:  Yahaya Bello, Kogi’s accidental governor, set the wheels of obtainment spinning from the moment he divined that his next career destination would be Aso Rock, as president, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.

Nigeria’s next president, he had intuited, would have to emerge as they say, from the ranks of state governors.  He is far and away the youngest of them all.  Not the wisest, he would be the  first to admit.  Not the most accomplished.  Nor yet the most brilliant.

But whatever he may lack in those departments is more than made up by Bello’s youthfulness and the daring and the sense of adventure that come with it.  Besides, although he has not projected himself as such, he is seen as President Muhammadu Buhari’s favourite governor and governor of governors.  By one account I have not verified, he has been received in audience at Rock more frequently than any other state governor, if not more often than all the other 35 combined.

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For obvious reasons. Buhari cannot be indifferent as to who will succeed him. That being the  case, who fits the bill better than Bello?  Moreover, come 2023, the presidency has been assigned to the North Central zone.  Seriously:  Which of the six states in the zone is best     suited to host the post -Buhari presidency?

If Bello had been too modest to parlay these in-built advantages into a winning formula for the 2023 presidential race, the new crop of obtainers have been far less restrained.   They have been trooping to Lokoja, the Kogi capital, to assure Bello that he is not merely the favoured candidate, he is the anointed one, to whom every other aspirant must yield or be swept away.

This is the only conclusion to which an objective, unsentimental and dispassionate examination of the matter leads, they have assured him.  It is not conjecture; it is backed by hard data, having been confirmed in a string of computer simulations.  It is the verdict of realpolitik.

What is even more remarkable, they have fanned all over the country sensitising the public to Bello’s epochal achievements — the modern highways and waterways and transportation network and latest-generation computer network and round-the-clock security that have been – magnet for foreign investors, and the technologies of the future.

I understand that they have even set up bureaus of the Nigerian Youths United for a Yahaya Bello Presidency in key Western and Commonwealth  capitals, and of course in Addis Abba, the headquarters of the African Union.

From the creeks of the Atlantic coast to the forests of Zamfara and Jigawa and Sambisa and the desiccated Sahel, Nigerians on waking up each day find themselves literally swamped by Yahaya Bello’s campaign posters.  His protagonists are leaving nothing to chance.

Have you wondered why Yahaya Bello has made a habit of decking himself out every passing day in the wardrobe of each of Nigeria’s ethnic groups for media advertorials?  I can now reveal that it is to drive home his acceptability nationwide, as counselled by the Youths United for Bello, aforementioned.

Probably the latest and most consequential addition to the group is Olujonwo Obasanjo, who assured Bello in Lokoja the other day that he would mobilise 30 million Nigerians across the country to deliver the Presidency to him in 2023.  He not only has a name behind the claim, he has the experience, too.

When the Youths United point out that Yahaya Bello single-handedly conquered the dreaded corona virus disease and rendered Kogi a no-go- area for the plague; when they add that he also in like manner pulled the country back from the brink of civil war by ending the food blockade of the Southwest by some northern merchants, they will have established his credentials and his qualifications even beyond the most unreasonable doubt.

Youths United activists who have made the pilgrimage to Lokoja returned to base amply reimbursed for the costs they have incurred. They have demanded nothing over and above that. That is not obtainment.  They are in it not for what they can get, but because they believe in Yahaya Bello and are persuaded, based on his unparalleled achievements and promise, that he is the man for 2033.

It is of course possible, likely even, that in the fullness of time, and after he would have clinched the Presidency, Yahaya Bello would compensate them with lucrative oil and gas and construction deals, not forgetting juicy appointments.

Even if he doesn’t, the stalwart assured me, Youths United will take it in its patriotic stride.  For their only concern is that Nigeria should finally get it right.

Those planning to head to Kogi on a mission of obtainment are courting disappointment.