The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Lateef Jakande writes back

    Lateef Jakande writes back

    By Olatunji Dare

     

     

    The following piece from Lateef Jakande, the first civilian governor of Lagos State who died last week, aged 91, was published in The Comet (since defunct) on November 30, 1999.  It was his rejoinder to my November 16, 1999, column for the paper, titled “Yesterday’s Men.”

    I am offering it unedited, as a tribute to the great man’s memory and accomplishments, and as a model of his clarity of exposition and civil discourse. 

    His legend truly lives on.  

    ***

    I have always had high regards for the writings of Dr Olatunji Dare on any subject, but what he wrote about me in his column on Tuesday, November 16, 1999, in The Comet shocked me into unspeakable disappointment.

    Not only were many of his facts wrong, his conclusions were patently absurd and sounded very much like political propaganda.

    This is what he wrote:

    “Finally, I am thinking of Lateef Jakande, Abacha’s minister of ministers, a towering figure in Nigerian journalism and one of the original leading light of NADECO.  If Jakande agreed to serve under Abacha, it could only be because he was convinced of Abacha’s honesty of purpose.  And if Abacha could appoint the high-achieving, serious-minded Jakande his senior minister, it must be because Abacha intended to move Nigeria forward.

    “All who harboured such thoughts were cruelly deluded, including Jakande himself.  He soon abandoned June 12 and made common cause with the very forces he had fought courageously in a distinguished public career spanning three decades.  In his days as governor of Lagos State, his residence was as accessible as a schoolyard.  As Abacha’s minister, he was forced to turn it into a fortress.

    “The press that had been his passport to fame was being systematically emasculated, but he uttered not a word in its defence.  He became the butt of taunts and jeers of the very people who once swore by his name.  His influence dimmed, then vanished altogether.  To borrow a phrase employed by the late Remi Fani-Kayode in another context, Jakande came across as a man ‘compelled to witness the funeral of his own reputation.’

    “Ordinarily such a funeral might even contain some redeeming grace.  As regards Jakande’s reputation, however, the pallbearers acknowledged no redeeming value.

    “Babagana Kingibe, Walter Ofonagoro and Lateef Jakande are by no means the only well-known Nigerians who enthusiastically pressed their talents and skills and reputations into a scheme that brutalized and stultified their compatriots and drove their country to the edge of ruin.  What is it that impels otherwise decent and sensible men – and women — to such self-destructive conduct?”

    First, let me state very clearly that I have never been a member of NADECO.  From its very inception, I had questioned its raison d’être and disagreed with its methods of approach.

    Second, Dr Dare said that I “abandoned June 12.”  This is a blatant falsehood.  I never at any time, in private or in public, in writing or in speech, abandoned June 12.

    I presume that that by June 12, Dr Dare meant the Presidential Election of June 12, 1993, which WE won decisively and convincingly.  It was the first time in the annals of this country that the progressives won a Presidential Election, and this was done by coming together in one political party instead of splitting votes        as we had done in past elections.  No one worked harder for that victory than I did.  And I am very proud of that victory and my humble contribution to it.

    Third, Dr Dare said I “made common cause with the very forces I had fought courageously.” This is not true.  I made no common cause with any such forces anywhere at anytime.

    Fourth, Dr Dare said that “as Abacha’s minister, I was forced to turn my residence into a fortress.  Where did Dr Dare get that story from?  There was no time when I turned my Ilupeju residence into a fortress.  In the 14 months I served in the Federal Government, my residence was “as accessible as a schoolyard,” as it had always been and as it still is today.

    Fifth, Mr Dare said I “uttered not a word when the press was being systematically emasculated.”  The truth, of course, is that the press was not emasculated during the 14 months I served in the Federal Government.  I regard conflict between Government and the Press as perfectly normal and, indeed, very necessary for the health of the nation.  I would not bother over such conflicts.  But if there was any emasculation of the press, it did not occur when I was in government.

    Sixth, Dr Dare said I became the “butt of taunts and jeers of the very people who once swore by my name.”  This too is an exaggeration.  I was never jeered at any time or in any place during my 14 months service.          But I did lose some friends and supporters because I rejected the call of a group of people who held a conference in Ibadan in August 1994 and resolved that all Yoruba Ministers, Constitutional Conference delegates and holders of other public offices should resign and “come home.”

    No reason was given for this demand.  It was a totally reckless, unwarranted and thoughtless call.  I am quite happy that nobody heeded it – not even one councilor or one Conference delegate.

    Can anyone imagine what could have happened to this country if we had allowed ourselves to be frightened into resigning our offices?  It would have been seen as a declaration of war by the Yoruba against the Federal Government in particular and other Nigerians in general.  The consequences could not have been palatable to anyone.

    If I lost my popularity because of this principled and courageous stand, I regard it as part of the price a good leader must be prepared to pay for his deep-seated conviction and for public good.  In this respect, I am in good and honourable company.  World History is replete with several inspiring and noble precedents of this experience in the footsteps of the Great Masters. And their reputations have survived their experiences.

    Dr Dare said that my “influence dimmed, and then vanished altogether.”  That is his own personal assessment to which he is fully entitled.  But he went too far when he announced “the funeral of my reputation.”

    Mr Dare was carried away by the flowery language of my late friend, Babs Remi Fani-Kayode.  But his quotation of Fani-Kayode is not apt in the present case.  In all humility, my reputation is not dead at all.               It can never die.

    My reputation is built on the solid rock of imperishable landmarks which were achieved during my tenure of office as Governor of Lagos State and as a Federal Minister of Works and Housing, and also my contributions to the development of Nigerian journalism and the World Press Institute. These landmarks are still there and will, by the grace of God, continue to be there forever.

    I am eternally grateful to my Creator that He used me in these periods to bring joy, relief, even prosperity, to millions of my fellow men through the abolition of the shift system in education, the provision of free education at all levels with free books, the creation of Lagos State University, the establishment of 13 low-cost housing estates, the construction of Lekki Express Road, Osborne Road Estate, the free supply of drugs and medical treatment, the establishment of the Nigerian Institute of Journalism, the Nigerian Guild of Editors, the Nigerian Press Organization, the organization of a World Press Freedom Committee, being the first and only African President of the International Press Institute, the presidency of the Newspapers Proprietors Association of Nigeria,, the establishment of Lagos Television, the launching of an unprecedented Housing Programme with 38, 000 houses under construction in 14 months, the Lagos metroline project, the discovery of Banana Island, the building of the NIgerian Tribune, plus efficient, selfless and uncorrupted administration in each sphere of activity, to mention only  few.

    All these in a lifetime.

    To Almighty Allah belongs all the Glory.

     

  • Baba Kekere! When comes another?

    Baba Kekere! When comes another?

    By Olakunle Abimbola

     

     

    Except you grew up on Lagos Island, you probably would not know Iga Jakande, en route to Okepopo, in Epetedo.

    But anywhere you are in sprawling Lagos today, Jakande is ubiquitous — in Ojokoro, Oke Afa-Isolo, Lawanson, Iponri, Mile 2, Adenji Adele (a shouting distance from the original Iga), Ikorodu, Epe, Ilasan (Lekki) — not the palace of some potentate, not ultra-luxurious splashes of a former governor, but the bastion of Lagos denizens’ housing needs!

    That is the Lateef Kayode Jakande (LJK) essence.  A common name, popularly bestowed upon these estates, was a glorious citizen exchange, not initiated by LKJ but by the people themselves: you serve us, we honour you!

    It’s a grateful people’s making of a living legend.  That legend passed into higher glory, at 91, on February 11.  Adieu, Baba Kekere!  But when comes another?

    In the annals of social democracy, locally dubbed progressive politics in Nigeria, LKJ’s feat in Lagos, between 1 October 1979 and 31 December 1983, was in sheer comprehensiveness, second only to Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s sweeping social revolution, in pre-Independence Western Region from 1952.

    From education to sanitation, housing to transportation, rural development to urban renewal, LKJ was a replica of Awo’s acute vision, and the very epitome of the low-cost Citizen Governor.

    As governor, he lived in Bishop Street, Ilupeju, his own home.  He drove his own Toyota Crown, which soon became iconic, in its gubernatorial simplicity.

    His dressing was spartan too: Yoruba male buba and sokoto, the LKJ variant of the Awo fez, and the irukere, which spoke of a beloved, benign democratic royal next door, sans any feudalist conceit.  He was the classic man of the people, minus the cynical hue, of Chinua Achebe’s fictive creation.

    As the 2nd Republic Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) was generational successor to the 1st Republic Action Group (AG), LKJ was only one of the progressive Titans, charged with implementing the UPN four cardinal programmes, in the then LOOBO states: Lagos (LKJ), Ogun (Olabisi Onabanjo), Oyo (Bola Ige), Bendel (Ambrose Alli) and  Ondo (Michael Adekunle Ajasin).

    Still among these Titans, who implemented these programmes to the best of their abilities, it was LKJ that best replicated the wondrous Awo pre-1st Republic developmental magic.  Hence the moniker, Baba Kekere (practically, Junior Awo) — the famed Action Governor of Lagos.

    Though the political street would sizzle with the Baba Kekere moniker, avidly proclaiming LKJ was an Awo replica, it drove serious peer envy in the progressive camp, in the fierce positioning, for post-Awo leadership.

    But peer politics and envy aside, the LKJ developmental worth, in a rising conurbation as Lagos, with its vanishing land resource, was well and truly awesome.

    In a virtual twinkle of an eye, he collapsed the two-, in some cases, three-shift Lagos schools system, for his new free education policy.  As a child in primary school on Lagos Island in the late 60’s, it was no fun at all, going to afternoon school, in the draining heat!

    But LKJ’s ultimate master stroke was, as trusted governor, persuading communities to cede yet unused communal lands, to build new schools.  Enter, the different schools villages, at different locations, in a sprawling, rapidly growing Lagos.

    It was an Awo-like vision, that trouble-shot a sure future education crisis, and tackled it head on.  Can you imagine Lagos today, without those public school complexes?

    Yet, at the start of it all, the elite, quick to condemn, slow to suggest, dismissed the earliest functional classrooms as “poultry sheds”.  To be sure, those “poultry sheds” were stark and unpretentious.  But today, they have all given way to more befitting structures, extending educational opportunities to the poor and vulnerable.

    Sanitation was another under-reported achievement of the LKJ era.  Much of Lagos had bucket latrines, with night-soil men nightly servicing each household, in a blanket of stench.

    But in a race against time, LKJ mounted an upgrade to healthier flush toilet systems, in four short years.  Now Sura, hitherto Lagos Island’s high shrine of filth and stench, where the Council stationed its night soil sanitary tank, now boasts a modern shopping complex.

    Still, the area where LKJ most replicated the brilliant Awo vision was the Metroline light rail, which the military, in command arrogance, killed.  It was an intra-city rail that foresaw the booming Lagos population today, and figured how to power their daily shuttle, without a fuss.

    But alas!  In 1984, a new military order dawned.  In its wholesale demonization of the fallen civil ancien regime, it cancelled the Metroline, with messianic hubris.

    A grand irony, though: Major-Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, that undid the Lagos Metroline, has morphed into President Muhammadu Buhari, impatient champion of the sweeping modernization of Nigerian rail!

    Even the Sani Abacha post-June 12 stumble — the only chink in LKJ’s formidable progressive armour — was driven by Baba Kekere’s rigorous personal code of unstinted service.

    Abacha was an eel to string along the progressive forces, with a dummy to honour MKO Abiola’s June 12 mandate.  But the public servant in Jakande, having felt the pull to serve, couldn’t turn back.  He threw himself at legitimate grind, for an illegitimate regime.  His progressive comrades frowned.  But ordinary Nigerians were net-gainers.

    To these comrades and the thundering, rabid popular press, LKJ’s was a capital crime, to be slammed with political death!  In the ruthless, dog-eat-dog gallows of the Yoruba progressives, whispering campaigns flared: that LKJ’s Abacha stumble was indeed an alleged Awo “curse”, for some alleged 2nd Republic trade-off, that allegedly imperiled Awo’s presidency!

    Pure fantasy?  Gospel truth?  Peer envy gone ga-ga? Who knows!  But something is clear.  With his 2nd Republic feat, LKJ had secured his place in history, as second only to the Great Awo himself, in implementing progressive ideas in government.

    Even the way LKJ yielded space to younger progressive elements, in his native Lagos, was a study in grace, reminiscent of the Titan-Olympian change of guards in Greek mythology.

    Not for him the grating hauteur of some of his Awoist contemporaries, heating up the polity.  LKJ was the Awoist tiger, that need not proclaim its tigeritude (to borrow that timeless quip, of our own WS).  His works spoke for him.

    Farewell, Baba Kekere, foremost exponent of the Jeremy Bentham greatest happiness of the greatest number!  When comes another?

  • Un-leaders all!

    Un-leaders all!

    By Sanya Oni

     

    I have in the past couple of days been struggling to recall where I first came across the word – un-leader. Be that as it may, I understood it then, as I do now, that it typifies the exact opposite of what leadership is all about. In other words, leadership in reverse!

    Now, of all the things that could be said of the anger and simmering animosities currently ravaging the Nigerian federation, a major one that stands out is the absence of leadership. So much for the babel of voices on the current situation in the country; if these were all that was required to banish the Nigerian nightmare, the nation ought, to, to, by now, be on a steady cruise to Blissland as against Destination Kigali that it seems currently headed.

    Within the past fortnight, much has certainly happened none of which bodes well for the future of our republic. In Uromi, headquarters of Esan North-East Local Government Area of Edo State, scores of women trooped to the streets in protest against the activities of criminal herdsmen which they said have brought hardship to their communities. At the palace of their monarch, Onojie Anselm Edenojie, they demanded the immediate removal of herdsmen from their lands.

    Premium Times quoted one of the leaders, Angela Esangbedo, as saying that they could no longer access their farmlands for fear of being raped.

    “We are demanding that Fulani herdsmen must leave our communities because we can no longer go to our farms for fear of being kidnapped or raped by the herdsmen. They have taken over our farmlands and have destroyed our farm produce”.

    The story from Yewa North Local Government Area of Ogun State is no different. Here, a group of youths is said to have served a seven-day quit notice on cattle herders following the storming of the Igbooro, Oja-Odan communities during which three people were killed with two others sustaining gun injuries.

    And now, Ibadan, the famed city of the warriors. Incidentally, yours truly, on a short visit to the ancient city, was actually caught up in the mayhem that could only have leapt out of a scene in Dante’s Hell. What began – as I was told – as a group of hoodlums said to be on a mission to avenge the death of a young man following a minor dispute became an occasion for free-for- all fight between two major ethnic groups. And now with the death now being counted in nearly a score, no one as it appears can tell where the next anarchy is coming from.

    Unfortunately, if the current descent into chaos was foreseeable, some members of the political class have either chosen to play the McCoy or simply have no clues as to what the current season demands. To some unfortunately, it’s probably just another phase of the darned game that politics have become.

    That to me is where the difference between Governor Abdullahi Ganduje of Kano State and his Bauchi State counterpart, Bala Mohammed comes out stark clear: one a leader; the other, you can guess!

    To the likes of Ganduje, the incessant farmers-herders clashes are not hard to solve: all that is required is for federal government to come up with a law stopping the movement of cattle from the North to the South and the rest could follow. His solution: “My advocacy is that we should abolish the transportation or trekking of herdsmen from the Northern part of Nigeria to the Middle Belt and to the Southern part of Nigeria.

    “There should be a law that will ban this, otherwise we cannot control the conflicts between herdsmen and farmers and cannot control cattle rustling which is affecting us greatly.”

    Talk of a governor’s good thinking;  today, he has the $95 million Kano State Agro-Pastoral Development project, KSADP, a flagship project of his administration as proof that things can actually take a better, less morbi, turn. Which explains why his colleagues in the Nigerian Governors Forum have since embraced the idea!

    Not so however, the Bauchi governor. Not only does he see things entirely differently, he has probably little bother about the constitution which is supposed to guide his action as a public official much less the oath to which he swore on taking office. No thanks to his notion of Fulani exceptionalism, to him, nothing should stop his beloved Fulani from their age-long practice of transhumance. Declaring his support for the carrying AK-47 rifles, he says this has become necessary to enable them to defend themselves against bandits, kidnappers and assassins since security agencies cannot protect them. He didn’t stop there: the woodlands in the south, he claims, should be fair game to which everyone – including I suppose – foreign pastoralists are entitled; the rampaging herders, he contended, should be at liberty to freely help themselves without risking charges of land grab!

    Lest I forget, he also let it be known that the Fulanis, being stateless should be accorded the right to free movement – without any inhibitions – across the sub region.

    I ask – as I also did last week: what happens then to those on the receiving end of his prescription of entitlement? To turn the other cheek? And what happens should they choose to resists as it is increasingly becoming the case daily?

    We must thank God for small mercies. The governor has not only recanted, he has literally gorged on his own vomit. Like Saul after the botched trip to Damascus, he now claims to have finally ‘seen’ the light; that there’s no such nonsense as extra-territoriality to which anyone could claim; and that local laws (land tenures) exist to define access to lands across the federation of which no tribe can claim exclusion. And moreover, that his prescription on the bearing of arms is not only unlawful, but is actually a recipe for national destabilization!

    Don’t forget that we are talking about leaders at such a time like this!

    I have said it before and I will say it again, none can compare with our absentee presidency when it comes to abdication and irrelevance.  Unfortunately, if the events of the past few days are any pointers of what lies ahead, which is that the country no longer has the luxury of time let alone the option of inaction or indifference, the administration would seem to have long convinced itself on the wisdom of either doing nothing or yielding the space to non-state actors!

    Sunday Igboho. Sheik Gumi. I see both as two obverse sides of the same coin. They are as much the symptoms of state impotence as they are of leadership failure. Only a few weeks back, a friend, who once regarded himself as Buharist unable to hide his frustration any further had blurted out: the country has entered “one chance”. Now, I verily believe that he understated the looming tragedy.

     

  • Buhari’s faulty passes

    Buhari’s faulty passes

    By Gabriel Amalu

    The Buhari presidency may not receive the accolades it deserves for its performances in infrastructure development, because of the faulty passes, which casts his team in negative light. For reasons, which historians may eventually unravel, his presidency sometimes behaves as if it doesn’t give a hoot about its place in history. The latest of such own goal, is the retention of a statutorily retired police officer as the Inspector General of Police (IGP), when he has no need to disobey the law.

    Of course, some of his predecessors behaved dictatorially, but at least the reasons for their actions can be dressed in expediency. Take the gale of unlawful impeachments under President Olusegun Obasanjo. In trying to unravel Obasanjo’s motive, there are many who will argue that he was fighting corruption, even when the impeachment could be a weapon to fight political battles. The same split decision may apply to Obasanjo’s military invasion of Odi, after some security men were allegedly killed.

    In the matter of extorting corporate Nigeria to build his presidential library, his supporters would defend his action, for the uniqueness and worthiness of the project. During the Umaru Yar’Adua’s presidency, he did not engage in much braggadocio, as the president was hobbled by ailment. President Jonathan who took over from him was calmer, except when he bullied Governor Murtala Nyako for calling out his failure in the war against Boko Haram. Also, when he ambushed the former Central Bank Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi following his false accusation in that particular instance about some debilitating corrupt practices.

    But the significant thing about the examples of constitutional infractions by the predecessors of President Buhari is that the consequences of their action are somewhat localised and not far reaching. So while their actions are condemnable, the consequences are limited. But under Buhari’s presidency which has carried out some far reaching infrastructure development, for which it ought to be celebrated, some of his actions have significantly alienated many citizens of the country.

    Take the decision to retain the service chiefs well past their usefulness. While by convention and tradition, military postings to the theatre of war do not last for more than two years to eschew fatigue and loss of concentration, yet for no just cause, indeed regardless of glaring diminishing performance, the Buhari presidency stubbornly kept the service chiefs well beyond their prime. Even when the people of the northeast who bear the brunt of the war and are his ardent supporters asked for change, the president ignored them.

    So, when the history of the war is written, historians may ignore his achievements in the war front, and focus on his poor decision to retain the service chiefs as the reason for the failures of his effort. Yet, perhaps a fairer analysis may show that the war efforts of his regime is not as useless as many now believe, principally because of his stubborn refusal to change the service chiefs. No doubt, that avoidable debacle over the service chiefs did a lot of damage to the integrity of the war effort.

    But the most far reaching act that has marred the reputation of his regime is the seeming condoning of the criminal activities of the armed herdsmen. It is difficult to understand the perverse indifference of the Buhari’s presidency to the cries of nearly all parts of Nigeria, over the atrocities being perpetrated by the armed Fulani herdsmen. From the north-west to the north-central to the southeast to the south-south and the southwest, the nation has been tottering on the edge of civil disobedience because of the criminal activities of the armed herdsmen.

    Yet in the face of these grave attacks on the security and welfare of the citizens the president swore to protect, the impression created is that because President Buhari is of the Fulani stock, his body language depicts an ‘I don’t care attitude’. Well, while clearly the president feels more comfortable having those who speak the same language with him and who practice the same religion with him as the members of the inner circle of his government, I do not believe that he doesn’t care, when people are killed by herdsmen.

    What is strange is why he has failed to publicly and stringently condemn the atrocious activities of these criminals who masquerade as herdsmen, and give the Fulani a bad name. Because of his so called body language, the security agencies treat the criminals as untouchables. Recently, it was reported that those who chased the herdsmen away from their community in Ogun State were flogged by the army, perhaps to please the body language of the president.

    The tragedy is that while this lethargy festers, the fabrics that hold our nation together is turning to tatters. Indeed, many Nigerians who started off as die-hard supporters of the president have now openly accused him of being a sectional leader. Some have even gone ahead to rue their initial support, as if the entire presidency has not brought any value to the country. Yet as some have correctly argued, it is not only Fulani herdsmen that are engaged in kidnapping for ransom.

    But the problem is that unlike how other groups troubling the peace of the nation are treated, the long arm of the law have treated the armed Fulani herdsmen with kid gloves. Even when the president has confirmed that armed criminal marauders from the Maghreb area are troubling our country, he is hesitant to declare itinerant foreign Fulani herdsmen, enemy of our country. A pragmatic president would have declared their specie a terrorist organisation, and banned them from crisscrossing our nation and causing harm and destruction on their trail.

    So when in the face of these faulty passes, the president against the express provision of a law he signed into existence, chooses to once more act in flagrant disobedience of the constitution, one wonders his motive.  The Nigerian Police Act 2020 unequivocally and mandatorily states in section 18(8) that a policeman shall retire after 35 years in service or on the attainment of 65 years. Since IGP Mohammed Adamu has served for 35 years, it is preposterous for the president to be asking for three months to organise a handover.

    If truly the Minister of Police Affairs, Muhammadu Dingayi, stood idly by, while the tenure of the IGP expired without alerting the president and helping him to plan a handover, it is enough reason to sack him. After all, he is supposed to be the eye and ear of the president in that department. Again, if the president is not his own problem, he must begin to hold his appointees who cause him the numerous embarrassments befuddling his presidency accountable.

  • Pathway to Somalia

    Pathway to Somalia

    Olakunle Abimbola

     

     

    It’s testy time in the Yoruba country.  Dire insecurity plagues the people. No less dire reactions, to that threat, hurl them towards a sorry pass.

    Would they, from there, power into the Oodua utopia of their agitated dreams? Or hurtle right back, into the sorry dog-eat-dog, of their pre-colonial past?

    The magic capsule, for good or for ill, could well be Sunday Igboho, who the media, ever ready to crunch the latest cliche in town, now flaunt as “Yoruba rights activist”.

    Yet, the focus here is not Sunday Adeyemo aka Igboho, as a person, but on the you-push-me-I-shove-you tendencies he epitomizes; and the danger the Yoruba elite are letting themselves — and their civilization — ceding space to such seedy tendencies.

    Forward, on the double, into the immediate pre-Kiriji War (1877-1893) past!  Long before Somalia unravelled in clan heads mortally preying on own stock as mighty warlords, Yorubaland had once descended into such Oodua-on-Oodua chaos.

    Yet, it must be said: Igboho’s dawn follows the collapse of Nigeria’s centre-powered security; and the tragic tardiness of the Federal Government to re-jig it, to effectively face current harsh realities.

    For that, the Muhammadu Buhari Presidency bears a harsh censure, for sticking with a collapsing infrastructure, when it ought to have made timely adjustments, to tackle the dynamics of the moment.

    Yet, that censure is less a monopoly of any regime since 1999, but more of an Aso Rock constant.  As it was with Obasanjo, so was it with Yar’Adua and Jonathan.  And now, it is with Buhari: sticking, blindly, with a decayed central policing system.

    So, if you dwell less on Fulani-baiting, on dangerous profiling of every herder as a violent criminal, and on draping an entire ethnic group in the grim colours of its criminal elements, the structural security collapse would be clear: the Nigeria Police, and its civil security sister agencies, are overwhelmed by the criminality of the day.

    What to do, therefore, is to infuse complementary constabularies, at state levels.  To dig deep, you could even sanction sub-state community police, if necessary, to fend off creeping grassroots criminality.

    But while tweaking the law en route these new security imperatives, the central police must rally to enforce the law, and rout criminal elements, in every part of the country.  Had that happened, Igboho, as charming gargoyle, wouldn’t have appealed to long-suffering natives, in Ibarapa (Oyo), the Ketu areas of Ogun; and much of forested Yorubaland, chaffing under the assault of violent and criminal herder elements, and sparking the present justifiable uproar.

    But let it be clear: even a recharged federal police, rooting out criminals nationwide, would still not be enough right now.  Too much confidence is down the drain.  Too much mutual distrust is in the air.  Besides, the police is too spread thin to sustain such a blitz.

    So, let the need meet the time.  Let the federal authorities work with state governments to fast-track the South West Amotekun, and equivalents in other geo-political zones, into formal state police.

    If tasks are shared; and stringent operative protocols are drawn, and each arm is funded and fully equipped for its tasks, this spiralling danger may yet be curtailed.  It may well be the last opportunity for the civil order to put out this roaring blaze.

    That re-birth will save everyone from the do-me-I-do-you (to borrow that colourful pidgin) credo, central to the Igboho essence.

    True, harried local folks may balk at all this: folks that these criminals, moonlighting as herders, routinely slaughter; farmers these violent elements banish from their livelihoods; and husbands whose wives these hardy felons consistently rape.  Still, canonized disorder, which an Igboho intervention entails, should be a no-no.

    Besides, the elite, whose bounden duty is to be strategic, no matter the acute immediate provocation, should be more receptive to civil processes.

    The dangerous overthrow of norms, in the heated convenience of the moment, is the beginning of strategic tragedy.

    All that was clear from military rule.  When Murtala Muhammed roared into town “with immediate effect”, the polity hooted and cheered!  But it killed job security in the civil service, turning not a few into soulless hustlers.

    This has fuelled the gargantuan corruption plaguing the bureaucracy today. Yet, the Murtala patriotic temper was to root out corrupt civil servants “with immediate effect”.

    Norms!  The dangerous overthrow of norms is the beginning of strategic tragedy!

    But back to Igboho and the herders crisis.  If you norm-alize torching Fulani folks’ assets, simply because some of their kins are accused of violent crimes, how do you prevent such fate befalling the Yoruba in other parts of Nigeria, even if they too are only guilty by association?

    Even if you have credible evidence that the victim is a kidnapping racketeer, as Igboho claimed of the Igangan Seriki Fulani, when did being an accuser and judge and dispenser of penalty, cease to be jungle justice?

    Even if canonized disorder helps to expel hated aliens, is it not only a matter of time the strong, among the now cheering natives, use it to pounce on the weak?  Norms!

    But perhaps to the basest and most virulent campaigners for Oodua Republic, this is pure gas, since that tantalizing, post-Nigeria utopia, is already winking in the dark?

    The grim fact is pre-Nigeria Yorubaland offered pretty little reassurances, if historical accounts from Samuel Johnson’s The History of the Yorubas, are anything to go by.

    The Oyo Empire, of murder and plunder, was bad enough.  The dominant victims, of  that Yoruba-on-Yoruba orgy, were the Yoruba themselves.

    But as civil order collapsed, with Oyo unravelling in the awesome contradiction of own imperial violence, Yorubaland became a marauder’s haven.

    In that canonized disorder, every neighbourhood tough headed to Ibadan, the new imperial power of renewed plunder, which claimed fealty to a highly weakened and much diminished Alaafin.

    Things got to a head in September 1877, when Oyepetun, Ibadan’s local ruler in Okemesi, raped Fabunmi’s wife.  A provoked Fabunmi hewed off his oppressor’s head.  Enter, the Kiriji War!

    The Latoosa-led, all-conquering Ibadan army, which pronto launched a punitive expedition, didn’t care about Fabunmi’s ravaged manly pride.  They were only incensed at a dire imperial crime.  Norms!

    It was this self-loathing patch-patch that the British colonialists stemmed, and Awo moulded into the Yoruba nation of today.

    Mainstreaming Igboho’s push-and-shove would be a dive, right back, into that dark past.  That would be the death of the Yoruba civil elite — and civilization — within or without Nigeria.

    That is the pathway to Yoruba Somalia.

  • Finally, we are getting there!

    Finally, we are getting there!

    Sanya Oni

     

    Thanks to a section of the Nigerian elite for yet another chapter from their book of mischief and bad faith: it’s like the cries of our nomads, particularly those of their armed variant – not those of the victims of their scorched earth activities across the length and breadth of the federation – have finally reached their heavenly abodes. Words like “mass eviction”, “massacre”, “genocide” and “ethnic profiling” have suddenly become the buzz words in a clime where notions of standards of right and wrong, not least, that of human dignity have come to mean next to nothing. Finally, the hurt is being felt in the part least expected!

    Welcome to Nigeria, a country of innumerable paradoxes and puzzles!

    Seems like yesterday when scores of Agatu communities in Benue State were razed and hundreds, including women, children and the elderly, massacred by suspected herdsmen of the Fulani stock. That was in February 2016. And just when the country was still in wonder as to those behind the heinous crime, a certain Saleh Bayeri, then Interim National Secretary of Gan Allah Fulani Association, had not only stepped forward on behalf of “his” people to own the crime, but claimed that it was merely a reprisal attack for an earlier injury inflicted on his people.

    According to him, some 20 Agatu and Tiv militias had on April 20, 2013, invaded the compound of one Shehu Abdullahi, killing him and carting away over 200 cows. He claimed that the police confirmed to Fulani leaders that they knew where 150 of the cows were kept and the Divisional Police Officer promised to recover and return the cows. As it turned out, nothing of the sort happened.

    End of story? Not quite!

    He claimed that three days after the murder of Abdullahi and the stealing of his cows, a prominent Fulani leader, Ardo Madaki, invited to the palace of the district head of the area to help resolve the crisis, was beheaded Ardo right in front of the district head.

    “This action”, he had claimed at the time, “reverberated across all Fulani people in the whole of West Africa and the clamour for revenge began to grow strong…” We know the rest of the story.

    Five years on, there are enough of the harvests of impunity and self-help for a country said to be a constitutional republic to choke on. Such has been the horrific twists in the tales to the age-long farmers-herders clashes, the metastasization of the festering sore to such an extent that an old problem is not only now barely recognizable but has since become so complex as to become intractable.

    One recalls a notable example in 2018, when some communities in Guma and Logo local governments of Benue State again came under the fire of the pastoralists’ militia in an attack that left 73 dead. That time, the Minister of Defence, Mansur Dan-Ali, it was, that supplied the rationalization. The herders, he surmised, had little choice; it was a last-ditch challenge to an existential threat in the event that their grazing routes had since been taken over by the agrarian farming communities of Benue. As if it was not bad enough that the state government enacted the anti-open grazing law, he says, it went on to set up and arm forest guards to enforce the legislation.

    Again, we know the rest of the story

    Today, the theatre has since shifted to the Southwest. And so has the nature and texture of the crisis. Talk of the push coming to the shove – just very much like the Tivs and the Agatus of the Benue Valley, the increasingly restive Yorubas appear neither willing to turn the other cheek while a band of rampaging herders turn their homesteads to a wasteland, nor persuaded of the admonition of President Muhammadu Buhari for tolerance in an atmosphere where the government, expected to be the guarantor of the public peace has chosen to be either AWOL or seen to betray a certain degree of complicity in the tragedy!

    Yes, everyone is talking of a certain Sunday Igboho and his forces of atavism, his outlawry and mission in self-help.  Those who love him of course see him as their man of the moment, just as few are prepared to appreciate how much awareness he has brought to the layers of the problem that is not only threatening to tear the country apart but also fast redefining our humanity.

    To some, it suffices that he’s broken the law and so the law should be set upon him! Did I hear someone say – wishful?

    It is perfectly understandable, that some, while of enamoured of the specious legalism of invoking the constitution for a lost cause would at the same time gloss over other issues that would truly give context and meaning to the whole. A good example is the claim currently bandied about the rights of Nigerians to live anywhere of their choosing as if this vitiates the rights to own and keep property or that a land tenure system is actually in place!

    Call him a hero or villain, Sunday Igboho’s coming, like I pointed out on this page two weeks back, seems to me the perfect foil needed to force a rethink on the multifarious issues around herdsmen’s menace at these dangerous times.

    So much for the denials at the highest levels of government; few Nigerians could claim to be unaware of the destructive activities of the migrant herders. To them, it is like the laws, simply do not exist, or it does at all, it does not affect them. It explains why many of them carry sophisticated arms that they are only too willing to display and use at the slighted provocation. Unfortunately, while it doesn’t help matters that the business of pastoralism has come to be associated with the Fulani, or that their modus operandi have tended to convey an impression of untouchables which often times takes the form of invasion of ancestral lands without care to the concerns or the feelings of the owners; the rape, kidnapping and the mayhem that is increasingly associated with the occupational group has become something difficult to ignore. And so, the governors, increasing helpless and lacking the formal means to enforce their will in their domains, have had to increasingly improvise while the people themselves, left at the mercy of the outlaws, have since resorted to helping themselves.

    Reminds me of Newton’s third law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

  • Tony Momoh: a media titan departs

    Tony Momoh: a media titan departs

    By Olatunji Dare

     

    With the death last week of Anthony McNonoh Momoh (simply Tony Momoh), the community of Nigerian journalists and the national policy dialogue audience were plunged into mourning again barely a month after the death of the celebrated columnist, Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, which occurred some six weeks after the passing of Bisi Lawrence, one of the most accomplished Nigerian journalists of all time.  In the first week of the new year, another journalist of note, Eddie Aderinokun, died.

    The generation of journalists we fondly call “veterans” is slowly withering away.

    Momoh would have been 82 on April 27.

    Trained originally as an elementary school teacher, he left his native Auchi for Lagos and entered journalism as a sub-editor at the Daily Times.  That humble beginning led to one of the most eventful careers in Nigerian journalism and public life.  His was a household name,

    That career culminated in his appointment, based on a competitive interview, as editor of the paper, the crown jewel of the Times Group, and the most influential newspaper in Nigeria.

    No surprise there.  Over the years, he had served in one capacity or another in virtually every department of the organization. On the way up, he completed at the University of Lagos the journalism degree programme he had begun at the University of Nigeria Nsukka, but which the civil war had interrupted.  He went on to take a law degree, also from the University of Lagos, and qualified as a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court.

    Momoh was a scion of the Auchi Royal Court, but he never flaunted that distinction.  He affected no royal airs. He was not the type to flaunt anything – be it his enviable job, his prodigious learning, or his connections.  He comported himself with quiet dignity, which only served to enhance his dignity and presence.

    Momoh’s editorship coincided with a turning point in Nigerian politics – the preparation for the                 return to party politics and constitutional government after 13 unbroken years of military rule.  It was an exciting time to be the editor of Nigeria’s most influential newspaper, and as he soon found out, a treacherous time as well.  On that, more, shortly.

    At Kakawa Street, the storied home of the Daily Times in its glory days before it relocated uptown to a more commodious setting, Momoh earned a reputation for fairness, probity and forthrightness, and for leading by example.  He applied himself to the task at hand with intensity. You rarely found him on the owambe circuit.  Not for him the flash and the dash that went with being editor of the nation’s most prestigious newspaper.

    He was a much sought-after presenter or symposiast wherever issues relating to journalism were being discussed in Nigeria or abroad. His written presentations, based on a firm grasp of theory and practice, were lucid and incisive; his oral delivery was forceful, and he sometimes came across as combative.  It was nothing personal; it was all about journalism, which he cared for passionately.

    And it is in journalism rather than law that Momoh’s fame, his legacy, will endure.  He would           have made a theatrical but formidable figure in the courts, delivering his submissions with verve and vigour. But he never went into full legal practice. He operated from his chambers as a legal consultant.

    He earned fame through the many books, pamphlets and papers on journalism ethics, media law, media history, press freedom, media-government relations, media’s role in national development, and many other related subjects.

    In his “Point of Order” column for the Vanguard Newspapers collected in three volumes, he bore faithful witness to the major events of the era and, through incisive analysis, guided the reader in interpreting, and situating them.

    It was also as a journalist that he made legal history in the celebrated case of Momoh v The Senate of the National Assembly.

    “Grapevine,” a gossip column in the Daily Times, reported that members of the National Assembly, senators in particular, were parlaying their exalted office into business solicitations, whereupon the Senate summoned the paper’s editor, to appear before it to disclose the source of the information contained in the publication.

    Momoh declined, claiming a constitutional right to protect his sources, especially given the fact that the Constitution vests the news media with the duty of upholding the responsibility and accountability of the government to the public.

    The Lagos High Court found for him, holding that reporters enjoyed a qualified privilege to protest their sources.

    There was jubilation in the media. The courts, per Tony Momoh, had struck a significant blow for press freedom in general, and for investigative reporting in particular.  The victory was short-lived, however. The Court of Appeal reversed, drawing on American jurisprudence on the subject, but without underscoring the heavily circumscribed conditions under which the court can ask reporters to disclose their sources.

    Momoh had written himself into legal literature. That was not all.  Before the Court of Appeal, he had deployed his legal training to make a robust case as plaintiff.  It was a fine outing for the lawyer/journalist.

    Several years later, as the Brits would say, they kicked Momoh upstairs to serve as General Manager for the Group’s titles.

    It was from that station that military president Ibrahim Babagida appointed him Minister of Information and Culture, at a time the government was threshing to find a formula to revive the economy.  The vaunted Structural Adjustment Programme generated only a great deal of heat, and hardly any light.

    It was Momoh’s remit not only to explain government policy, but to sell it to the public.  It was a tough sell.   The writer and pamphleteer in Momoh went about the task writing epistles to his compatriots on one aspect of public policy after another.  The novelty soon wore thin, without winning the government more friends or sympathisers.

    Much more significant was his convening, early in his tenure, a conference at the Administrative College of Nigeria in Topo, Badagry, to fashion a National Communication Policy for Nigeria. No conference of that compass had been convened before, and none has been held since.  It remains an abandoned project. The published proceedings and recommendations will doubtless constitute the point of departure for revisiting the subject.

    Two incidents in Momoh’s life provide a window into his character and worldview.

    In the first, he was confronted at Ishaga, in Surulere, Lagos, by a carjacker training a sub-machine machine gun at his head and barking at him to get out of his official car.  He would have lost nothing by surrendering the vehicle.  But instead of doing that, Momoh lunged at the gunman.  They mixed it. Momoh gained the upper hand and dispossessed the hoodlum of the weapon.  The hoodlum fled as an irate crowd closed in on the scene.

    In the second, armed robbers broke into his book-strewn residence in the dead of night and demanded money in foreign currencies. They threatened his wife and even roughed up his son.  They got into a fight, during which they found that Momoh was no softie.  In the end, they fled without getting the foreign currency they were demanding, and without taking anything from the house.

    “I am not an inordinate man of valour, but I will not stand oppression, he wrote of both incidents decades later.  “You cannot hold a gun to my head and force me to do what my spirit frowns at.”

    The key phrase here is “what my spirit frowns at.”  Momoh was a person of deep spirituality.   He was guided by the Spirit, and lived his life according to the teachings of the Grail Message.

    In the five decades he spent in active journalism as trainer, editor and administrator, and in public life as a Minister of the Federal Republic and statesman mediating the political tensions roiling Nigeria,  not a whiff of scandal swirled around him.

    That is achievement enough.

    And in this clime, there is no greater legacy.

     

     

  • Dogara: beyond the theatrics

    Dogara: beyond the theatrics

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    Behind the ongoing Bauchi theatrics, judicial and political, is the sanctity of the political party system, an umpteenth casualty, even as Nigeria shambles in its willy-nilly advance in democracy.

    But the drama ripples with varied ironies, that lead the trail right back to where and when the rain started pelting.

    The first irony is Yakubu Dogara, former Speaker of the House of Representatives.  The disputed seat, Bogoro/Dass/Tafawa Balewa federal constituency of Bauchi State, the embattled Dogara has held since 2007 — the zenith of PDP rule.

    From those halcyon days of PDP federal power (when Dogara was faithful MP), to APC’s first taste of federal power (when Dogara was controversial House Speaker), to the present stormy days of alleged change of political gear, Dogara has been a constant: the proud poster-boy of a dominant Christian constituency, eager to enthrone its own.

    Alleged change of political gear?  Yes, because the matter is before a court of competent jurisdiction.  Until the court rules on the matter, either way, media commentaries are not allowed.  But not so, on the political aspect of the combat.

    That leads to the second irony: both Dogara and Bauchi Governor, Bala Mohammed, the two prime dramatis personae in the Bauchi theatre, have been involved in cross-party manoeuvres.

    Mohammed, Bauchi PDP governor (since 2019), is ex-ANPP-turned PDP veteran, in prosperity and adversity, since 2010.

    He was ANPP senator (2007-2010) but became minister of Federal Capital Territory, FCT (2010-2015), even while still ANPP elected senator — the last FCT minister, under PDP rule — for supporting the “Doctrine of Necessity” that made Goodluck Jonathan acting President, in the last days of mortally ill President, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.

    Mohammed may have joined PDP after Dogara, a veteran from 1999.  But since joining up in 2010, Mohammed never left — even when the PDP power dam broke; and new PDP (nPDP) elements, like Dogara and Bukola Saraki, teamed up with the then mega opposition party, APC, to sack PDP from federal power.

    That leads to the third irony: the PDP itself, on whose behalf the Bauchi battle rages.  It’s the utmost irony, indeed, that PDP which during its power years made killing opposition parties and poaching their members to grow — or more accurately, bloat — now growls against injury from that very same practice.

    Talk about gulping own bitter herbs!

    Indeed, in the routinized subvert-to-collapse PDP policy against the luckless opposition, it became a badge of honour, in PDP-controlled parliaments, for MPs to sack parties on whose platforms they got elected, and swagger into the ruling parliamentary sanctum, cock-sure of illicit cover by the notorious “federal might”.

    If you still doubt, ask former members of the defunct Alliance for Democracy (AD), for their bitter experience in the South West, and elsewhere, between 1999 and 2003.

    Yes, it could be argued — and validly so — that such lack of fealty to parties was a general product of an era just emerging from long-term military rule.

    Still, there was no question: the PDP amoral politics, and its power-first-and-last credo, helped in no small measure to subvert the political party system.  Pray, how can democracy endure and thrive, without a robust and vibrant party system, culture and tradition?

    But back to the Bauchi drama.  Dogara, more than anyone from the nPDP misadventure into APC, enjoyed the best of two worlds.  Is he then fated for some bitter pills, after the hurly burly is done, and the Bauchi battle is lost and won?

    Unlike ex-Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki, who got his Kwara political thraldom smashed, becoming a virtual POW fleeing from own metropole, jeered by former subjects to boot, Dogara somewhat clobbered back in triumph.

    Unlike Saraki who lost everything — his Kwara central senate seat; and putative second term as Senate President the least of his worries — Dogara rumbled back to reckoning.

    He not only dusted Dalhatu Kantana, the APC challenger for his parliamentary seat (by 73, 609 to 50, 078 votes), he also helped to oust then APC Governor and arch-rival in local Bauchi power play, Mohammed Abdullahi Abubakar, whose second term dreams turned ashes, with the triumph of PDP’s Bala Mohammed.

    Ay, former Speaker Dogara returned as ordinary House member and opposition legislator.  But he wore, on his high shoulders, the proud chips of new Bauchi kingmaker, that delivered when it was toughest.  But he forgot, apparently, Machiavelli’s chilly whoop: the sacred, bounden duty of the new king, with eye on the long haul, is the swift despatch the king maker!

    So, it would appear to be, between the embattled Dogara, and Governor Mohammed baying for his blood, for clutching tight to the PDP mandate, after allegedly crossing the partisan aisle to APC.

    To be sure, however, Dogara fired the first salvo.  In a resignation letter from the PDP, on 24 July 2020, to his Bogoro Ward C chairman, Dogara rued the “breakdown of governance in Bauchi”, by Mohammed, the governor he “helped instal” only the previous year.

    The governor and his allies riposted.  ”As a party,” Hamza Kashe Akuyam, the Bauchi PDP chairman swore, “we will do everything possible to get back our seat from him through legal means.”  The voice of Jacob but the hands of Esau, since the governor had dead-panned he had no problems with Dogara?

    But why did the governor and allies pick the gauntlet, rather than let the alleged defection slide, as many before had done, even when it was illicit advantage PDP, the all-mighty federal ruling party, destined to rule for 60 years, at the first instance?

    To push for the sanctity of the party and its sacred electoral rights?  Hardly!  To push Dogara’s nose out of joint, to prove who rules the roost in Bauchi politics?  More likely!

    Besides, when is defection a defection?  Immediately you dump your party for a new one?  Or after your new party enlists you in its rolls?  Within that grey zone, however, what happens to the mandate you lug?

    A contraband to be wrenched off you, with all the contempt your former party can muster?  Or some holy grail to forbear, until the defecting process is complete?  The courts have their jobs well cut out!

    Still, challenging illicit defections is the way to go, if the party system must bloom with Nigeria’s growing democracy.  Strong institutions are, after all, the sine qua non of vibrant democracies.

    So, let the Bauchi PDP press its rights.  Also, let Dogara defend his honour.  But had PDP, in its power years been less wayward in bucking sacred democratic norms, it wouldn’t have been caught in this warp.

    That ought to be a telling lesson to the ruling APC.

  • Like winning the lottery

    Like winning the lottery

    Olatunji Dare

     

    Whoever said that old age sucks was expressing a truism that every person who has grossed the proverbial three score and ten years not only knows but feels.

    But the coronavirus pandemic has upended even this truism, turning an actuarial handicap into a blessing of sorts, by propelled persons who belong in that demographic right next to the ranks of those on the priority list for what may well be the most precious gift in these dark and darkening days: the scarce anti-Covid vaccine.

    The rollout of the vaccine has been as desultory as its formulation and manufacture were hope-inducing. The quantity reaching the public fell far short of what had been advertised, trust Donald Trump.

    From early morning till late at night in mid-winter, long lines of frazzled citizens spilled from the streets and snaked round the passages and corridors on to the halls of designated vaccine centres.

    Most went home disappointed and returned the next day; same outcome. There simply wasn’t enough vaccine to go round.

    And not just in the United States, where Covid-19 deaths had averaged more than 1000 a day for weeks on end. In post-Brexit UK, and in Europe, the rollout has been just a problematic, sparking rows among governments and manufacturers and among the manufacturers themselves, and fueling what has been called vaccine nationalism.

    The dangerously vacuous but highly conceited governor of Kogi State, Yahaya Bello, will dismiss this narrative as “political Covid.”

    The late Western Nigeria premier, Chief SL Akintola, had an answer for people of Bello’s ilk.

    “When adversity comes to the forest,” that unrivalled master of Yoruba, would say in that evocative language, “even the pawpaw plant will demand to be counted as a stalwart.”

    This is the context in which Yahaya Bello, an accidental governor and Covid denialist with scarcely an exceptional entry in his résumé, not only seeks to become Nigeria’s next president but actually sets in motion the machinery for pursuing that quest with public funds.

    It is also, sadly, the context in which major political actors are importuning former president Goodluck Jonathan, a byword for cluelessness, to come claim the second term he was denied six years ago when the APC machine and its presidential candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, sandbagged him at the polls.

    That is a measure of the depth to which Nigeria has sunk. Under military president Ibrahim Babangida, we had a national Army of “anything goes.” Now, some 25 year later, ours seems to have become a country of “anything goes.”

    But I digress.

    Amidst all the snafus that have marked vaccine production, distribution and administration, the infernal virus has been spawning ever more durable variants that surface in the farthest corners of the world almost as soon as they are identified in one location, rendering the global war against Covid more and more fraught.

    You have been accorded a privileged place in the ranks of million yearning for the vaccine all right. But given all the attendant discontinuities, would your turn ever come? How would you know anyway, since those seeking answers to those questions have gotten nowhere?

    Meanwhile, new cases are surging everywhere.

    Then the phone rings. It is the family doctor’s nurse, asking whether you would like to take the vaccine. It was like being told that you had won the lottery.

    Of course, I replied eagerly.

    “When?”

    “How about yesterday?” I asked jocosely.

    “No, but we can do tomorrow, 3 pm at the Methodist Hospital Atrium,” she said. I reckoned that, with some luck, I would be back home by 10 pm.

    The parking lot was fuller than usual, but there was no other sign a mass vaccination event was in progress. No overflow crowd; no crowded passages or hallways. You were shepherded, masked like everyone else, along a marked, socially distanced path, to four stations.

    At the first, they took your body temperature. At the second, you were registered for the vaccine on showing a government-issued identification card. At the third, they explained the name and nature of the vaccine you were about to receive, gave you the shot, told you the second instalment was due in 28 days, and presented you with a certificate documenting the transaction.

    At the fourth and final stop, you rested in a well-padded chair for some 20 minutes so that nurses could monitor you and report any behavior that may warrant medical intervention. If there was none, they wished you a good day. From start to finish, the whole thing lasted no longer than 30 minutes. It was a seamless operation.

    None of the five vaccines now in the market confers immunity, but regardless of the mutations, they have eliminated Covid deaths and reduced hospitalizations drastically, according to the best authorities. That is perhaps the best news to have come out of this dark encounter with the virus.

    The bad news is that the virus is going to be around for quite a while.

    The lesson from the United States and every country that has confronted the Covid menace robustly is that it is one thing to produce or procure the vaccines and quite another to distribute or administer them.

    Donald Trump (remember him?) made false claims about the quantity that would be supplied, and naively assumed that the vaccine would flow through the system like commercial goods, not taking into account special properties of the vaccines and the conditions in which they must be administered.

    The Nigerian effort has been marked by the usual false starts. Officials were discussing how to share the vaccines – federal character, equality of states, populations (inflated for the most part) absorptive capacity, etc, etc. – before perfecting a strategy for acquiring them. It has even been suggested that the vaccines be produced locally, to conserve foreign exchange.

    When they finally decided to place orders, they could not furnish the Budget Office with the data that would enable it figure out just how much was required, and at what cost. They say the figures are being crunched now. And from there, the proposal will go before the National Assembly, where enlightened debate and a swift resolution are not guaranteed.

    There is no danger, happily, that the effort will be hijacked by an ambitious First Lady with an eye on the main chance, as happened with the Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) at the time of the loathsome General Sani Abacha. The amount budgeted for the programme ran into billions of Naira, and his wife Mariam, being “Mother of the Nation,” took it upon herself to ensure that it was faithfully executed.

    She hijacked it, thinking perhaps that it was just another item in the self-aggrandizing portfolio of the Better Life Programme initiated by Maryam Babangida, the wife of her husband’s predecessor, or even better, an opportunity for presiding over the award of lucrative contracts for vaccines.

    But it was no such thing. A national immunization drive, Dr Nataila Kanem, an epidemiologist with Ford Foundation in Lagos and now executive director of the UN’s Fund for Population Activities, told me at the time, is like a military mission. The design must be precise and comprehensive; the schedule must be exact, supply lines must be foolproof, the outcomes must be clearly articulated. Failure was not an option.

    In Mariam Abacha’s less than amateurish hands, the EPI collapsed, with disastrous consequences for Nigeria’s children.

    There is little chance of that happening now. But we shall always have among us those determined to profit and profit hugely from the misery around them. Everything must be done to frustrate their designs.

    More importantly, by the time the vaccines arrive, the logistics, the strategy and tactics for distribution and administration, should have been perfected to the highest degree possible.

     

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  • Emerging civilian police

    Emerging civilian police

    By Gabriel Amalu

     

    When the Nigerian military failed abysmally to protect the people of the northeast from the rampaging Boko Haram murderers, there arose an aberration called the Civilian JTF. By that adulteration of the military JTF, civilians untrained in weaponry acquired arms to defend themselves. Soon enough, the bumbling military accommodated it and the federal government acquiesced. Many have gone ahead to call for their integration into the national army.

    So, while in the beginning, the Civilian JTF was a rebellion by the people and their state government over the failure of the federal government and its military to protect them, it has morphed into a recognised arm of the national security architecture against the insurgents. I guess it was a classical instance of a fait accompli.  A government which has failed in its primary duty to protect lives and property will be talking balderdash, if it engages in the polemics of the legality of civilians bearing arms.

    A people left at the mercy of marauders, who have shown themselves superior to the national security agencies, cannot be expected to fold their arms and be slaughtered like chicken for a bohemian festival. A similar scenario as in the northeast with regards to the emergence of the Civilian JTF is unfolding in the southwest and eventually will spread to other parts of the country unless the federal government rises up to its primary responsibility of protecting lives and property.

    To avoid that, the federal and state governments must wake up to the clarion call of section 14(2)(b) of the 1999 constitution (as amended), which provides: “the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government.” Where and when the government fails in that primary assignment, it is an invitation to the people to take up the cause of protecting themselves and their property. For reasons not far-fetched, the federal government has treated the scourge of armed herdsmen with levity, and predictably the crisis is coming to a head.

    In Ondo State, Governor Rotimi Akeredolu, SAN, who may be considered as sympathetic to President Muhammadu Buhari’s faction of the APC, had no alternative than to seek alternative police in the face of the failure of the Nigerian Police and allied security agencies to protect the people of the state. Of course, he saw that if he continues to wring his hands in frustration and explain away the murderous acts of the armed herdsmen, the people by themselves will raise their own police.

    To the consternation of the presidency, Akeredolu started his intransigence over the failure of the Nigeria Police with championing the establishment of Western Nigeria Security Network, otherwise called Amotekun. He has raised the ante by outlawing herding in the reserved forests of the state and asking herders to register with the state among other measures. How far these measures can go to ensure the security of lives and property in the state remains to be seen; but at least his people will not accuse him of doing nothing in the face of the kidnappings and killings.

    A similar void in effective policing in Oyo State has resulted in the emergence of one Sunday        Igboho, as a hero of the Ibarapa people of the state. While many have painted Igboho’s past in sundry infamy, he has risen to fill the gap, as the state authorities are bumbling in the face grave insecurity. An order by the Inspector General of Police to arrest the people’s hero has been treated with scorn by the people. The police on their part are afraid of further raising the tension by arresting Igboho.

    The Oyo State governor, Seyi Makinde, who has been talking tough over the activities of the killer herdsmen in his state, has mellowed down, and is doing everything possible to distance himself from the activities of Igboho. Perhaps because he belongs to a minority party (PDP) in the region, and an opposition party at the centre, he is afraid that he could become a victim of politics, if Sunday Igboho is cast in the shadow of his apparel.

    So, Governor Makinde who was a strong champion of Amotekun is playing soft, when the main reason for the outfit knocks on the door. But while Governor Makinde can save his political skin by playing coy with the clamour by the people for an alternative to the bumbling Nigeria Police, he should realise that if the authorities fail, the people will create an alternative for themselves. Those who think that there will be peace if they take out Sunday Igboho, may find many more discontented persons ready to dare a moving train, regardless of the ominous consequences.

    With the Ondo forest becoming too hot for the herdsmen, it was reported that they are massively moving into the Ogun State forest. While the state government is denying the development and the police authorities in the state are down playing the import of such migration, the Ogun State House of Assembly wants a speedy passage of the state law banning open grazing. Of course, the thousands of herdsmen in Ondo, as confirmed by the presidential spokesman, Garba Shehu, would not just disappear.

    If the southwest forests become unbearable for the practice of their trade, the herdsmen would migrate towards the south-south and southeast, as long as the archaic practice of open grazing is allowed to fester in our country. Those who hold the view that the Fulani has an agenda to create new fiefdoms across the country, would continue to propound that theory as long as the federal government allows the abuse of animals and Fulani herders by their wealthy compatriots and their associates.

    Of course, the argument against open grazing will never cut ice with the real owners of the herds, most of whom are the movers and shakers of the society and government, because it is very economical to rear animals with free pasture and cheap labour. Imagine the gains accruable, where the owner of 100 herds gives even as much as 10% of the cows to herdsmen, to take care of them until there are sold. By that arrangement, the cost of feeding, caring, transporting and marketing are all absorbed by the herders, who bears the inevitable losses associated with that dangerous practice.

    Compare that obnoxious business practice, with the apprenticeship model of the Igbos, where the trainee after a number of years, is given the seed money and helped to become a trainer. Those in government who are Fulani should stop telling lies that the Bororo Fulani prefers to live in the bush, and cannot be transformed. The truth is that they use them as cheap labour to fester their economic interest.