The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Recession 2.0

    Recession 2.0

    For those who do not already know, the Nigerian economy, as long predicted, slipped into the recession during the three-month quarter ended in September. Never mind that the ordinary Nigerian has known nothing but systemic regression in his lot in the last decade and more, it is – coming after the 2016 from which the country has barely recovered – a sobering reminder of extremely modest progress and the frightening vulnerabilities of which the nation’s economic management team are yet to find the answer.

    Let’s begin by thanking God for little mercies though. The starting point of course is the figures which show that the economy actually shrank by 3.6 per cent in that third quarter and this against an earlier forecast by the International Monetary Fund of 4.3 percent; compared with the 6.1 per cent contraction recorded in the second quarter, that would pass for a significant improvement. And then, the other notable bright spot: the non-oil sector, which makes up some 90 percent of the economy, actually declined by a comparatively modest margin of 2.5 percent during the period.

    As we are wont to say in these parts– things could have been much worse. Remember, Mallam Mele Kyari, the Group Managing Director of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, was recently quoted as saying that things were so bad in April that the corporation had to beg buyers of crude to take a barrel of our sweet crude for $9! And this at a time we could barely push our crude output of 1.8 million barrels which in fact came down to 1.67 million barrels in the third quarter, according to the Financial Times. We are talking here of crude oil, the main driver of the economy, a commodity which provides nearly 90 per cent of our foreign exchange and some half of government revenues.

    And all of these due chiefly to Covid-19. The National Bureau for Statistics puts the situation succinctly: “The performance of the economy in Q3 2020 reflected residual effects of the restrictions to movement and economic activity implemented across the country in early Q2 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic”.

    It went on to note that: “As these restrictions were lifted, businesses reopened and international travel and trading activities resumed, some economic activities have returned to positive growth”. In other words, things can only get better – at least to the extent allowed by the gradual return of economic activities and the limits imposed by the unfriendly operating environment.

    Most certainly, there can be no wishing away of the devastating impact of Covid-19, any more than the attempt to paper over the economy’s inherent vulnerabilities would amount to living in fools’ paradise. These vulnerabilities, which are now legendary, will unfortunately remain long after Covid-19 pandemic has exited.  Even at that, these are merely long shadows of our consumptively skewed economy – under which genuine creators of wealth are meant to sweat while speculators and flight-by-night businesses rake fortunes in unearned wealth!

    Let’s take a few samples to illustrate the depth of the crisis – starting with our forex management – an area pretty much stiff – no thanks to the low price of oil and the associated poor demand – and which we are certainly not doing badly given the current circumstances. Never mind that the rate of forex accretion has been rather sluggish, we certainly can still boast of an impressive $35.7 billion in foreign reserves as at the end of October – a figure Godwin Emefiele, the CBN governor, reckons will suffice to finance eight months of imports. That unfortunately is where the rosy part ends. Indeed, if one had imagined that the Covid-19 lockdown would have imposed some curbs on demands for forex, not only has it turned out the exact opposite, Emefiele and company now carries the additional burden of separating those who genuinely need forex to get their businesses up and running and those in the business of illicit forex transfers!

    It’s certainly not hard to figure out the forces behind the rush. Call it what you may, it is certainly not the ordinary forces of demand and supply as would play in the normal market setting but forces unleashed by parasitic actors to stoke panic and ultimately to kill the local economy. With the naira officially trading at N390 to the United States dollar, the same naira, in the hands of the merchant speculators and their portfolio-investor allies, aided and abetted by their friends in high places, trades at nearly N500 to the United States dollar. Imagine a well-connected player with access to a million dollars at the official rate. He could, without lifting a finger, return over a hundred-naira profit in a single cycle of transaction! If he is one of those flight-by-night investors, he could afford to offer just about any amount for the dollar to cart his Nigerian trophy home! Either way, the economy, through the mindless bet in the national currency, bleeds. Those are the kind of forces that Emefiele’s CBN have to contend with.

    Can anyone see why our dear naira would not heal anytime soon?

    Let’s talk about the other matter killing the economy albeit slowly: the billions of man-hours lost on daily basis due to either the criminal negligence on the part of officials expected to get things done or the indifference of our regulatory institutions. Let’s mention briefly the story of the ports, where years after the so-called reforms, the story remains one of disappointing outcome with the systems remaining nightmarish for operators. This newspaper recently published on its front-page the photograph of a multi-million-naira scanner purchased to aid operations at the ports but which officials, for whatever reasons, have refused to put to use. Taken together with the virtual absence of ancillary infrastructures as befitting a modern ports complex – all of which renders productivity nigh impossible and needlessly increases turnaround time for the most basic of port operations, the best the country can hope for is a fringe player in the global maritime trade.

    But then, as it is in the maritime sector, so it is in the road sector, where, no thanks to the programmed nightmares under the guise of road reconstruction/rehabilitation, billions of otherwise productive man-hours are not only wasted but also vital assets reckoned in billion routinely destroyed. Today, if it is hard to imagine a trip from Lagos to Ibadan, a journey of less than 150 kilometres taking less than six energy-sapping hours, picture a truck, carrying tomatoes from say Oturkpo, Benue, bound for Lagos, a journey that would ordinarily take 10-12 hours now taking days to arrive the Lagos market with the perishable still in fit-for-consumption state! And now as if the story of the billions of naira post-harvest losses to the farmers are not daunting enough, or that of endless clashes between itinerant herders and farmers, we are finally at a point, where farmers, in their scores, are summarily executed by terrorists for no other crime than the search for the daily bread.

    Recession, as against regression, would seem a more tolerable path in the circumstance.

  • Fast-forward to 2023

    Fast-forward to 2023

    By Gabriel Amalu

    The Nigerian elected political officials are a special breed of optimists. Their spirit of ‘never say die’, even when others are seeing political graveyards, can only be matched by the stubbornness of the defeated Donald Trump of United States of America.  Except for platitudes, most of them have no fidelity to the provision of section 14(1) (b) of the 1999 constitution (as amended), which provides that: “the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government.”

    One wonders if they are concerned about the state of insecurity in the country, which has worsened since the Nigerian Police was sacked by vandals and criminals last month. Even the fact that Nigeria has become the country with the greatest concentration of the poor is not enough warning to thread with caution. To further aggravate the desperate situation, the country according to the World Bank, is facing the worst economic recession in many decades.

    Yet, the only matter of concern from the presidency to the least official is strategizing for 2023 presidential election.  Take the tango between David Umahi, the erstwhile Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governor of Ebonyi State, who has ported to the All Progressive Congress (APC), and Nyesom Wike, of the PDP. While the president and APC governors are celebrating as if they have discovered a cure for Corona virus, Governor Wike, the self-appointed general overseer of PDP, has said the real reason Umahi defected is to position himself for the presidency in 2023.

    Of course, Governor Wike on his part has not denied his plan to draft Governor Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto State, as a candidate in the PDP presidential primaries in 2023, as he did in the 2019 primaries. And with his second term ending, Wike, obviously hopes to run as his deputy, if not in the reverse order. Elsewhere, the APC governors have visited former President Goodluck Jonathan, celebrating him as the best thing to happen to democracy. Yet, their party dismissed the same Jonathan as clueless in 2015.

    So, fast-forward to 2023, and damn the political and economic challenges that nearly torpedoed our democracy few weeks ago. In their usual reckless manner, our elected political office holders are not concentrating energy to interrogate the groundswell of massive discontentment that saw the underclass of our country try to burn down the country in orgy of violence. In their bravado, they hope that haven regained the initiative after the mayhem of last month; the dissatisfaction in our country can be treated as a matter of law and order.

    The ruling APC which has been hijacked by the governors forum, are behaving like their contemporaries in the opposition party did, when PDP held sway. As long as they are in the driver’s seat, it is fair to overwhelm the environment with the political machinations for 2023. Few weeks after the house they occupy was almost burnt down, they have not pursed to ask themselves what they have been doing wrong, to generate such malcontent, beyond blaming the promoters of #EndSARS protest.

    Instead of calling a bipartisan governors meeting to discuss the state of the sick union, they are gallivanting all over the place, pretending that all is well. Their counterpart in the PDP, instead of offering clear alternatives to the beleaguered citizens, are rather busy plotting for supremacy over 2023. None of the governors, who are desperately plotting to gain positional advantage in 2023, has offered an intellectual pathway for the recovery of Nigeria. As far as they are concerned, what matters most is scheming to control the party, not to offer any worthy alternative.

    With the times so uncertain, a more responsible influential stakeholder like the governor’s forum should have concentrated energy offering solutions to the security challenges made bare by the inefficiency in the police force, which predates the present crisis. Rather, the governors pretend they can’t see a manifestly disenchanted police force, when it is an open secret that most policemen have abandoned their duty posts, or have sent in their resignation letters out of frustration.

    In Lagos, last week, the okada riders who have become a menace to residents and other road users in the metropolis, refused the entreaties to remain law-abiding. In some cases, they mobilized and confronted the beleaguered police and state task force officials, who had to flee from the horde of motorcyclists in hot pursuit. Obviously, the message is lost on the governments at the federal and state levels, who may think it is just a Lagos problem.

    This column warns that the open confrontation that took place last week between okada riders, and the Lagos State Environmental Task Force officials, which include security officers, provides a bird’s eye view of what awaits our dear country, as the state security agencies try to regain exclusive control of the coercive powers of the state. Instead of expending energy politicking for 2023, the governors should deeply worry about the very survival of the democratic endeavour, because without the basic provision of security and welfare for the citizens, the entire thing may collapse on all of us.

    If the democratic project is allowed to derail, all the scheming and plotting would come to naught, as there would be no existing platform for the intrigues. So, any government official at any level who thinks that all is well with the democratic project is perhaps dim-sighted, and needs help to see well. Since governors now exert so much influence in the operational control of the two major parties, it is fair for them to be more concerned than any other political office holder.

    While the APC is entitled to celebrate the porting of the governor of Ebonyi State to the party, they should worry about what history will say about the time in power of their party. Regardless of whether the PDP could have done better, considering the extraneous challenges of the year 2020, the APC must worry to what extent they have delivered on their election promises. While the corona virus pandemic is easily blameable for the worsened economic crisis, it is not an excuse for failing on the political reform promises.

    If for any reason the APC is not returned to power in 2023, they would rue the lost opportunities they had, to help Nigeria become a sustainable federation. Many of the governors, especially from the northwest part of the country, who are excited about the power they are wielding during the presidency of the President Muhammadu Buhari, needs the structural reforms, more than the rest of the country. Yet, like Niger Delta political office holders under President Jonathan, they are ignoring the opportunity they have to engineer the necessary fundamental changes.

  • Roiling(?) Rawlings

    Roiling(?) Rawlings

    Olakunle Abimbola

     

     

    During his epochal deeds, gushing admirers crowed he was “JJ” — Junior Jesus.  But unfazed haters also growled he was SS — senior Satan: if not in those exact words, but in scalding and scornful, if not outright hateful, sentiments.

    During his older days, not a few, friend or foe, called him Pappy Jay.

    But roiled or pleased, riled or bliss, friend or foe, no one could ignore Jeremiah John (JJ) Rawlings aka Jerry Rawlings, the “Scot” that took over Ghana (a condescending Western media headline framing of his power capture); and gifted it back its soul!

    JJ, 73, died on November 12.  He ruled Ghana as military strongman (1981-1992); and then, as two-term elected president (1993-2001), as candidate of his National Democratic Congress (NDC).

    But that twin military/democratic tour was his second coming.  His first, a short, sharp but intense 112-day roller-coaster (4 June – 24 September 1979), cemented Rawlings’s place in history — a mark neither friend nor foe would forget.

    Yes — and regretfully — it was a testy period of bloodletting.  For that, not a few dismiss JJ as “murderer” and “blood-spiller”, his act beyond pardon, and Rawlings himself, unmitigated villain of history.

    But it was bloodletting as shock therapy, for a post-Nkrumah Ghana that had totally lost its soul; and the cream of its intellect, the flower of its knowledge class, self-reduced to hewers of wood, cobblers of shoes and lowly teachers with tick-tok minds, in neighbouring Lagos, Nigeria, in a furious gallop from the nightmare at home.

    But even that hit a trough: in the Shagari Presidency Ghana deportations of 1983 (a reverse of the 1969 Kofi Busia mass expulsion of Nigerians from Ghana), which the rather picturesque Nigeria-speak dramatically captured: Ghana Must Go (GMG)!

    Even, if you didn’t witness that Ghana odyssey in Lagos and all-over Nigeria, just pick up and read Ayi kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are not Yet Born (published 1968): to see, and hear, and smell the depth of the tragic dialectics, that triggered the Rawlings-era bloody purges.

    Eight Ghana senior army officers were executed for official graft: Major-Gen. Robert Kotei, Cmdr. Joy Amedume, Col. Roger Felli, Air Vice Marshal George Boakye and Major-Gen. Edward Kwaku Utuka.

    But three generals, among the doomed eight, caught global attention, all ex-heads of state: Akwasi Amankwaa Afrifa, Ignatius Kutu Acheampong and Fred Akuffo.

    Akuffo had earlier overthrown Acheampong, in a corrupt junta palace coup.  But the sight of two immediate past Ghana heads of state, facing the firing squad, was roiling and shocking!  It sent a chill through the emergent but corrupt Ghana elite!

    But deep global sympathy welled up for Afrifa.  Afrifa, a retired lieutenant-general, had overthrown Kwame Nkrumah in 1966; and become head of state.  Later, he was first chair of the three-member, collegiate presidential commission that “reigned” with elected Prime Minister, Kofi Abrefa Busia (1969 to 1972), in a diarchy.  Besides, Afrifa had just won a seat in the soon-to-be-inaugurated Ghana 3rd Republic Parliament, and pop! — his execution, at 43, on 26 June 1979!

    There, Ghana regained its soul the hard way!

    But all happened in 112 days, after which the Rawlings Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) handed over to elected President Hilla Liman, on 24 September 1979.  But two years later, Rawlings would overthrow Liman, on 31 December 1981, for his second coming, stretching 20 long years.

    Between Nkrumah and Rawlings, therefore, lay Ghana’s paradise lost and paradise regained (to borrow John Milton’s glorious literary coinages), in a rich belt of — even if  — bloody 20th century history!

    Both have earned Ghana’s eternal gratitude, for their mutual salvation of motherland.  But beyond that common glory, they were radically different ideological birds.

    Nkrumah was a radical intellectual ideologue and pan-Africanist, fired by dreams of Ghana’s greatness; and its leadership of an Africa — indeed, a Black universe — totally free of any foreign domination, political or cultural.

    His classic, Neo-colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (published 1965), which saw — and punched — through Africa’s post-flag independence western domination, sent sheer panic through western metropolitan capitals.  Indeed, the US State Department sent the author-president a growling note of protest; and promptly cancelled a US$ 25 million “aid” to Ghana!

    That appeared the beginning of the end.  Next was his 1966 overthrow, by international capital and renegade local soldiers.

    Rawlings, on the other hand, was the impassioned, development-minded pragmatist, propelled by a strong sense of right and wrong; and the urgent push to force the ruinous Ghana elite through the straight and narrow path.  But he never claimed any ideological kin with Nkrumah, though Rawlings harboured own pan-Africanist streak.

    Still, that strong “right and wrong” cast palls on his interventions.  In his second coming, three Ghana Supreme Court (GSC) justices: Cecilia Koranteng-Addow, Frederick Sarkodie and Kwadjo Agyei Agyepong; and two military officers, Majors Sam Acquah and Danasa Nantogmah, were all abducted and later found killed.

    It’s true: Joachim Amartey Quaye, a top civilian hierarch of the Rawlings second intervention, and four others: Lance Corporal Amedeka, Michael Senyah, Tekpor Hekli and Jonny Dzandu, were tried, convicted and executed for killing the GSC jurists.

    Yet, it all happened under Rawlings, with even some tongues wagging over his alleged involvement.  Others also pointed fingers at Kojo Tsikata, retired Captain in the Ghana Army and head of National Security and Foreign Affairs in the Rawlings Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC), the ruling council of his second military regime.  But these accusations were not proved.

    Still, whatever his drawbacks, Rawlings was never about Rawlings.  Rawlings was all about Ghana.

    In 1967, Gnassingbe Eyadema took power in Togo.  Now, 53 years later, Togo is near-Eyadema fiefdom, with “Baby Doc”, Faure Gnassingbe, presiding over “family fortunes”!  Why, siblings Faure and Kpatcha, one the president, the other Defence minister, once even brawled, in the Eyadema “royal” rumble!

    In Liberia, the pathetic Master-Sergeant Samuel Doe made a bathetic push at power; and copped a civil war that consumed him at 39.

    Even in Nigeria, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida essayed a failed Peronist transition, from self to self.  But all he achieved was a Khalifa, Sani Abacha, who left sleaze as stinking memory!

    But Rawlings entered Ghana’s Osu Castle as Flight-Lieutenant.  Twenty-two years later, even with the Liman “interregnum”, he left that castle as Flight-Lieutenant.

    More importantly, he left Ghana far saner than he met it.  That can’t be said of most African rulers of his generation.

    Rawlings was all about Ghana — and history would never forget!

     

     

  • Remembering Leke Salaudeen

    Remembering Leke Salaudeen

    Olatunji Dare

     

    LATE in the evening of October 5, 2020, well past my usual bedtime, I received a text message from Barakat Salaudeen, informing me that her father Leke had been taken to Gbagada General Hospital, in Lagos.  Her tone was subdued. It betrayed not the slightest indication of panic.  But there was no mistaking the urgency of the situation.

    I wrote back immediately to ask for details.

    Apparently he had been ill for some time and had been receiving medical treatment for a heart condition until he was diagnosed with kidney disease and rushed to Gbagada General Hospital.  She promised to keep in touch.

    When her text message bobbed up early the following day, I sensed that the worst had happened.  It had, indeed.  Leke had died less than 24 hours after his admission to Gbagada General Hospital, reputed to have one of the best dialysis facilities in Nigeria.

    I knew in my heart that I would have to enter a tribute to his memory.  But I was conflicted.  It is  not the custom of our people for a much older person (I am 76) to join in the public mourning of a much younger person (Leke was 62).  If the younger person was your student as undergraduate and graduate, he looked up to you as confidant and counselor, the challenge becomes all the more formidable.

    But Leke was more; he was a friend; he was a professional colleague, and he was family more or less.

    He entered the BSc programme in mass communication in the late 70s, then and even now among the most competitive in the University of Lagos.  In the year-long Advanced Reporting class I taught, Leke’s diligence and painstaking attention to detail stood him out.  Not for him the shortcuts, the expedients many a student contrive to dodge the hard work of ferreting out the facts and presenting them in a context that gives them meaning – the qualities that separate the perfunctory                  or merely competent from the truly remarkable.

    I recall taking the class on a field trip to the old Parliament Buildings in Lagos where the Constituent Assembly was debating the draft of the Constitution for the Second Republic that was to come into force in 1979. Each student was required to interview at least one member of the Assembly for a profile, an update on its deliberations, especially the constraints; prospects for the Second Republic, and matters relating to the on-going debates and discussions on Nigeria’s future.

    Leke’s doggedness landed him a great catch:  Shehu Shagari, who went on to become Nigeria’s first elected president the following year.  His submission was one of the most illuminating.

    During his National Service year with the New Nigerian in Kaduna and later employment with the Triumph Newspapers, in Kano, and this newspaper, his last stop, where he served as an Assistant Editor on the National Desk, he scored exclusive interviews with many of the leading personalities of the time, among them Lagos State Governor Lateef Jakande, in whose home he was always welcome.

    His final year project was a magazine-length feature on traditional healers in Lagos, and how leading medical scientists have sought to incorporate them and their work in mainstream medical practice.  A great deal of legwork went into the project, one of the best-executed by the graduating class.

    In this age of cut-and-paste journalism, Leke remained wedded to shoe-leather reporting.  He used online resources and worked the phones.  But he remained at heart a shoe-leather journalist, doing the rounds, tending old sources and cultivating new ones

    Leke was unobtrusive, unpretentious, and unthreatening.  You felt as ease with him.  I suspect that these characteristics contributed significantly to his success as a journalist.  Gaining access to news sources came easy to him, and so did gaining their confidence. You had no reason to suspect, much less fear, that he would give you away. And so, he filed story after exclusive story with all the newspapers he worked for.

    One particular story that landed him in trouble and in detention during the time of General (as he then was) Muhammadu Buhari bears out his faithfulness.  It centred on the crash of a training flight of a sophisticated jet in the fleet of the Nigeria Air Force.  Leke had reported it exclusively, much to the embarrassment of the authorities who wanted to keep it a secret.

    They demanded that he disclose his sources.  He refused and was clamped into jail under Decree Four.

    Seeing him pecking his laptop keyboard in his marked-off space in the newsroom at The NATION or in a setting where colleagues talked about their journalistic escapades, you would never suspect that “he has been there, seen this, or done that,” pardon the cliché.  He was self-contained, introspective, almost inscrutable.

    Leke was an embodiment of decency and decorum.  Even when he had ample cause to feel aggrieved or resentful, he just shrugged his shoulders and moved on.  Yu could not engage him in gossip or unseemly talk.  His life was anchored securely on his Muslim faith, which he practiced with his accustomed obtrusiveness.  Until I asked him several years ago, I did not even know that    he had performed the holy pilgrimage.

    Not many can recall him raising his voice, or putting down another person.

    Whenever he called, he never failed to ask after my younger brother Kolade, who was his colleague at the New Nigerian.  When Kolade died last May, I was sure Leke would call to offer condolences.  When a decent interval had passed and I had still not heard from him, I called him.

    “How is Kola?” he asked, prelimaries over.

    Kola, as Leke called him, died about a month ago, I told him.

    The cell phone he was clutching fell on his table.  For one full minute he said nothing.   Then, he said, ever so plaintively, that he was only just learning of Kolade’s death.  I told him it was reported in The NATION and other media outlets, print and electronic.  He said he had not been attending to the media.  He apologized profusely and said the usual prayers.

    I believe him. His illness was probably well advanced at that time.  He offered an explanation.  He did not seek to parlay in into an excuse.

    Leke left one unfished business that was dear to his heart.  His youngest daughter who holds a degree in the biological sciences, desires to pursue a doctorate in molecular biology, preferably in the United States.  Could I help find a good school and explore scholarship opportunities?

    That was his dream for Barakat.  I hope it will not die with him.

    May Leke’s gentle soul rest in peace.  And may Allah abide with his widow, Barakat, and her siblings.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • EndSARS: A post-mortem

    EndSARS: A post-mortem

    Sanya Oni

     

    THESE are interesting times, no doubt. Talk of the serial events in the past week looking more like a chapter in the Jefferey Archer’s thriller – Twist in the Tale, the clampdown on the EndSARS activists by a federal government that has apparently learnt nothing nor forgotten anything, has since inserted a comical dimension into the tale!

    Not that anyone – at least not yours truly – ever doubted the capacity of the federal government to make what tennis buffs call unforced errors. This is probably one of those seasons when the government can afford to pretend to be acting in good faith while embarking on a course whose optics suggest a different thing entirely. In any case, the signals in the past week could not be clearer or unmistakable: the EndSARS protesters may have latched on popular anger to put the government on the spot locally and internationally, there can be no denying where the raw power lies! And now, like the army on rampage, the government seems finally set to exact its pound of flesh from the leaders of the EndSARS protesters, using such state institutions as the Nigerian Immigration Service, the Corporate Affairs Commission and the Central Bank of Nigeria! Again, talk of the twist in the tale – a case of yesterday’s hunter being the hunted!

    Of course, the story may have only just begun. When the news first broke that the federal government may have put masterminds of the #EndSARS protests on its no-fly list, my gut reaction was certainly not one of a surprise. Although, the matter started as a wild rumour, the sort of fire routinely lit by our hyperactive social media, it was, for me, one moment in which the still silence voice whispered its plausibility – borne out of the knowledge of the strange ways of the government. And that was even moments before the confirmation that Modupe Odele, one of the key actors in the EndSARS drama, had been prevented by the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) from making a trip to the Maldives where she had been billed to celebrate her birthday!

    Nor was I particularly shocked when the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC), the institution responsible for the incorporation of organisations and businesses in Nigeria, suddenly deemed a certain company – Enough is Enough (EiE), as no longer worthy of registration – more than eight years after the entity was registered! Clearly, if the charge, which was that the entity registered to engage in General Contracts, Sales of Sport Equipment/Promotion category, “deviated from its main objectives over the course of time” was ludicrous, just as strange was the novelty of communicating the sentencing via a tweet!

    But then, Nigeria is a country where strange things happen.

    Here is how the tweet from CAC read: “Based on the provisions of Section 579 (2) of the Companies and Allied Matters Act, (CAMA), the Corporate Affairs Commission has cancelled the registration of the Business name “Enough is Enough BN 2210728” with immediate effect”. Just like that! No room for defence or justification. End of story!

    We are talking here of a business that provides bread and butter for its promoters – entities that no one has linked at any specific acts of infractions bordering on financial crime; more like saying that an entity registered to sell garri taking to selling Dangote Cement instead should be denied a lifeline!

    But that was not even the strangest of them all. Now, we have the apex monetary authority in the land not only going after the accounts of 20 individuals and organisations said to be linked to the #EndSARS campaign but alleging high crimes committed by them against the Nigerian state. We are not talking here of billions in illicit financial flows being undertaken by unscrupulous lenders  under the apex bank’s remit or the activities of the smart alecs whose activities continue to do harm to the naira; but the activities of some fringe actors which even at the best of times are matters for either the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission or the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU)!

    In the eyes of Emefiele, a man whose house was on fire would do far better to chase those slimy rats than seek to put out the fire! Talk of some cooked-up infractions to keep those boys busy if only to buy the nation some quiet!

    I know a tribe out there who would argue that the government did no wrong; and that these institutions broke no law. They are probably right. The law after all is supposed to be an ass – or worse; moreover, Nigeria is no stranger to the specious type of legalism under which notions of justice and fair-play are turned upside down. In this particular case, neither the CBN nor the CAC actually pretends that the play is anything but to teach the activists a lesson of their lifetime. All would seem fair game in the service of their principal, an insular federal government which not only views legitimate agitations from the narrow prism of survival and regime legitimacy but would deploy vital institutions of state for narrow regime ends. And then of course the judiciary not only acquiescing but choosing to tag along in the travesty!  Which is a shame really considering the great opportunities which the EndSARS protests ought to have afforded the administration to reconnect with its so-called “wayward children” as indeed the rest of the society.

    For sure, the EndSARS affair is certainly not a contest between saints and sinners. If the youths have not by now, learnt the lesson on the yawning chasm between boundless idealism and the requirement for deft organisation and the huge cost of failure on the latter, they would most likely never learn! And then of course the ease with which an otherwise good cause can be lost. Pitifully, we saw facts loosely traded for seductive propaganda in what is now a world of alternative facts. We saw strain of intolerance, an aversion for alternative viewpoints, an unbending obduracy in which those with differing opinions are targeted for vilification. And finally, the fatal flaw in their inability to know when to call it a day. If I may borrow from Achebe’s famous work to address our youths: it’s yet morning on creation day!

  • Liberal dictatorship

    Liberal dictatorship

    Olakunle Abimbola

     

    LIBERAL dictatorship — a violent contradiction in terms, right?

    Yet, that appears what some lobbies are trying to impose, post-#EndSARS protests that tragically miscarried, kissing bare anarchy.

    Dateline October 12, and The Nation outed with this headline: “Banire, Utomi, Falana, others slam Fed Govt for ‘dictatorship’”.  That news report captured the take of Concerned Professionals (CP) on the #EndSARS aftermaths.

    To be sure, different lobbies in a democracy, can push their legal and legitimate rights to dub the sitting order whatever they like.  It’s all about participatory democracy; the right to free speech and the clash between citizen and state rights.

    Do citizens have rights?  Absolutely, though no right is absolute.  Still, let’s be clear: these rights subsist from the harshest of dictatorships to the freest of democracies.  Citizen right is simply the spice of the modern state; and the vanguard for those rights are critical to any democracy.

    But do states too have rights?  Definitely.  Indeed, a 1949 UN document, named Draft Declaration on Rights and Duties of States, which the International Law Commission adopted and submitted to the General Assembly, itemized the rights and duties of states.

    Article 2 of that document spoke of the basic right to govern: “Every state has the right to exercise jurisdiction over its territory and over all persons and things therein, subject to the immunities recognized by international law”.

    That right is rooted in the pristine social contract: by which the people conceptually agreed to forego part of their rights, in exchange for common security and safety, guaranteed by the state and its ruling agency, the government.

    But Article 6 also insisted the state must, as duty, respect and uphold its citizens’ rights: “Every state has the duty to treat all persons under its jurisdiction with respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion”.

    So, every polity (indeed, every democracy), boasts that taut and delicate tension, which balance must not snap: between the right of the state to exercise its legal powers; and the right of the citizens to uphold their legitimate freedoms.

    It’s dictatorship, if it snaps to the government’s side.  It’s anarchy, if it snaps the people’s way.  Neither is desirable — and #EndSARS was living proof!

    To be fair, you must credit the liberal movement — lawyers, jurists, the progressive media, rights advocacy groups and even international rights organizations — as the historic vanguard for the survival of democracy.  They are the palladium that holds these rights as the democratic holy grail; and would go to any length to defend it — admirable!

    Which shows why this movement would ideologically, even if near-uncritically, gravitate towards protests like #EndSARS.  Indeed, Police brutality is such a brazen and unapologetic assault on citizen rights that it must be condemned.

    But support for the right cause is one thing.  Using that agenda to block putative wrongs, even from good intentions, is another.

    Therein then lies Ripples’ departure from CP, in its bid to stonewall legitimate probes into the dirty underbelly of the #EndSARS protests.  By that it, rather arrogantly, beatifies crass sentiments as the manifest good.  It is nothing but holy fraud.

    But don’t get it twisted: the liberal phalanx is right to insist on transparency and openness of whatever probe the government is launching.  They are right to disagree with — and even challenge, at superior courts — the legal propriety of a court handing the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) the power to freeze citizens’ accounts, pending investigations.

    They are also within their constitutional rights to raise hell over passport seizures, of citizens that contributed to the success of free, legal and legitimate protests.  Again, aside from raising hell in the press, they can approach the courts to challenge — and overturn — those actions.

    However, they can’t — and mustn’t — wholesale canonize their own preferences as rights groups, but demonize, wholesale, the other side; not on the basis of facts and rigour but on frothing and fraudulent sentiments.  The government also has rights!

    That, however, appears the rally of CP and media allies, carefully passed as progressive thinking.  It is not.

    On the contrary, it’s a looming liberal dictatorship, as bad as government dictatorship.  Both are undemocratic tendencies that must be decried, despite the liberal lobby’s puritanical play to the gallery.

    For starters, if lobbies and individuals earn due praise for driving free, legal and legitimate protests, what stops them from earning due blame, for that critical juncture, where it all went awry?  Didn’t the good saying say the road to hell was paved with good intentions?

    That is the long-and-short of the present CP rally, cloaked as manifest public good, sure to snare the unwary.  First, is the ubiquitous apologia, that #EndSARS’ end- criminality was the work of so-called hoodlums.  That could well be true.

    But if there were no #EndSARS protests, would there have been any follow-up criminality?  If the protesters had not balked at the curfew, at the Lekki toll gate, would there have been the military shootings, and the so-called “massacre”, real or phoney, for which there are desperate, but fruitless, efforts to gather non-existent body bags?

    Indeed, if the protesters had called off their action in sensible time, would latter-day anarchists have forced the curfew in the first instance?  Why this dishonourable efforts to de-link #EndSARS from its chaotic aftermath?

    Why, the CP even used DJ Switch to illustrate its gaseous grandstand, claiming her reported case of Canada “asylum” was forcing “youths” to flee their country — rich!

    To be sure DJ (S)witch is the guilty soul that bales when no one pursues her — no one, except the witchery of her wild social media posts, that later fuelled tens of real deaths!  She can scam external lobbies, ever ready to believe the worst about her country.  But can she scam her troubled conscience?

    It’s even getting more interesting that a Twitter user, Bayo Adedosu, has reportedly offered our puritanical and revolutionary “youth” N1 million to provide evidence of a “Lekki massacre”!  Over to DJ Switch in her Canada “asylum”!

    It’s an abject failure of character that fiery youths, who would drag their country to the straight-and-narrow, pathetically buckled with brazen lies, on a massacre that was not. It speaks to the deep darkness of their soul that every celebrity they pronounced killed, at that e-massacre, has resurrected!

    Let all involved in the #EndSARS debacle be fairly probed.  Let the innocent walk free.  Let the guilty carry the can.  By that, justice is served. Fending off fair probes does no one any good.

    Older CP members should counsel their younger charges to walk their talk.  That would be better than erecting yet other barriers of lies, simply because you could manipulate the media.  It’s the tragic making of liberal dictatorship, which ruins all!

  • Malami’s half measure

    Malami’s half measure

    Gabriel Amalu

     

    RECENTLY, at a national summit on the reform of Nigerian Correctional Centres in Abuja, the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) Abubakar Malami, SAN, proposed the decentralisation of the management of the Nigerian Correctional Centres. According to Malami, the proposal “will allow states to effectively participate through the setting up of their own correctional centres to manage offenders who commit state offences while the federal government will continue to manage offenders who commit federal offences.”

    Coming from the attorney general of what appears an ultra-conservative presidency with respect to restructuring, could the proposal be a shift in strategy in the management of our criminal justice system? Or is it merely a knee-jerk reaction to the burgeoning burden of managing the dilapidating correctional centres, overpopulated largely by those charged and awaiting trial for offending state laws? No doubt, the future is bleak for the federal government-owned overpopulated correctional centres, considering the increasing pressure to accept even more inmates.

    Of note, President Muhammadu Buhari last year signed into law, The Nigerian Correctional Services Act, 2019, which many hailed as innovative compared to the repealed Nigerian Prisons Act, which was considered as dilapidated as many of the prisons, now called correctional centres. The organisational structure under the new law, provides for a controller-general who is responsible to the president, through the Minister of Interior and the Civil Defence, Fire, Immigration and Correctional Board which the minister heads. If I may ask, under the AGF’s proposed reform, how will the governor and the state authority fit into the organisational structure?

    Interestingly, it was reported that some correctional centres refused to accept the huge number of detainees arrested and charged with sundry offences, after the tragic fall-out of the #EndSARS protests, because the centres were already overpopulated. Coupled with the breach of the correctional centres in Edo and few other states, during the #EndSARS riot, the federal authorities perhaps are waking up to the foolhardiness of running a jaundiced over-centralized criminal justice system, and is starting with tinkering the correctional centres’ management.

    While the management of the correctional centres is one of the challenges of the criminal justice system that we operate, it is the end result of a bad beginning. To start the change from the correctional centre is like digging the yam, from the bottom. The chances are that you may just break the yam. But even with respect to the correctional centres, if the AGF believes that state intervention is needed to solve the problem of overpopulation, he should propose the amendment of the 1999 constitution and other extant laws to enable state authorities lawfully establish state correctional centres and employ their own warders to man same.

    Of note, the AGF thinks his intervention would save the situation, for he said: “These are all measures expected to address the problem of congestion in the correctional centres as witnessed presently.” But this column thinks it is unfair to ask the state governments to manage a federal owned correctional centre, whose employees are not answerable to the state authorities. That would involve using state resources to develop the physical infrastructure of the federal owned correction centres, since prisons is listed as item number 48, in the exclusive legislative list, in the 1999 constitution (as amended).

    The states may also need to pay allowances and provide other incentives to motivate the work force, as well as provide vehicles, stationaries, amongst other necessary infrastructure at the federal-owned correctional centres. So, the states would be expected to provide the facilities, but will not be able to audit its efficiency. For instance, if the state authority provides vehicles to aid the efficient movement of detainees, and it is deployed elsewhere, the state would merely wring its hand in frustration and do nothing.

    Again, without effective control of the other factors that contribute to the overpopulation of the correctional centres, the impact of merely giving states the authority to manage federal-owned correction centres, as proposed by the AGF, would be minimal. This column considers that at the head of the criminal justice system is of course the police, charged with the responsibility of maintaining and enforcing law and order, investigating crimes and providing evidence in court.

    Just like the prisons, the police is listed as item number 45 on the exclusive legislative list, in the 1999 constitution (as amended), and as such is placed exclusively under the federal government control. Now, unless the state has control of the police to ensure efficiency in investigation and prosecution, the prevailing inefficiencies that has contributed so much to the state of overpopulated correctional centres, would continue even if the state is given the opportunity to manage some correction centres.

    So, if the AGF sincerely has interest to effect a change in our criminal justice system, he must come to terms that he has to advise the president to start with granting the state governments control over their police. A lot has been written about the challenge faced by our country because of the inefficiency of the police. But the recent helplessness of the federal police as rioters and hoodlums ran riot across the states shows the urgency for state policy. It is that police that will complement state owned correctional centre, to gift Nigeria the efficiency the AGF talked about.

    For this column that is the place to start, and as such do not agree with the averment made by the AGF, when he said to state heads of government and heads of court that: “in order to put in place enduring measures for effective management of correctional centres for the reformation, rehabilitation and reintegration of offenders back to the society, the decentralisation of correctional service in the country has been proposed.”

    Clearly, I do not think that much can be achieved if the state government would still rely on the challenged federal police to investigate its matters, prosecute same or timeously give evidence to ensure efficiency. The same challenge will be faced by the state in managing the federal staff of the Nigerian Correctional Centres, whose command and control is beyond the ken of the state chief executives. As we have seen with regards to the police, all the support state governments extend to the police, has never amounted to any form of control.

    But it is clear that the burden of managing Nigerian Correctional Centres overpopulated by inmates charged with sundry state crimes has started biting hard on the federal government, with leaner resources. But the solution does not lie in knee-jerk approach, but in a holistic overhauling of the entire criminal justice system. Again, to attract the needed private capital to upgrade our correctional centres, the federal government must genuinely reform and apply best international practices.

  • Beyond Donald Trump

    Beyond Donald Trump

    Olatunji Dare

     

    DURING the Trump Presidency, on which the sun thankfully set last week, the news often got so depressing that I wished I could escape from it.

    That wish was almost overpowering during the week of September 3, 2018, barely two years into what will surely go down as the most tumultuous presidency in American history in recent memory.

    Prominent in the news cycle that week were excerpts from Bob Woodward’s book – he, with Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame – chronicling the chaos and dysfunction in the White House, the erratic and often alarming behavior of its occupant, and the abysmal disesteem in which he is held by key aides and senior staffers.

    The attentive public was still digesting the snippets from Woodward’s book and the shady manner  in which Republican majority in the Senate was conducting the confirmation hearings for the dissembling Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh when The New York Times, which no one has ever accused of recklessness, came out with an unsigned Op-Ed piece that raised anew, and with insider knowledge, grave and disturbing doubts about Trump’s mental, moral and intellectual fitness for his high office.

    The writer, identified simply as a “senior official” of the Trump Administration, qualified himself or herself as part of a “resistance” within the White House laboring behind the scenes to save America from Trump and thwarting Trump’s “more misguided impulses” until he is out of office.

    “The root of the problem,” the writer declared, “is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision-making.”

    He described Trump’s style as “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.”  He spoke of Trump’s “preferences” for autocrats and dictators, and of his “anti-democratic impulses.”

    He spoke of how senior officials, from the White House to Executive branch departments and agencies, ”would privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander-in -chief’s comments and actions,” and how “most (of them) are working to insulate their operations from his whims.”

    Meetings with Trump “veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back,” the writer added.

    Given this instability, the writer said, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment that spells out how to remove a president from office.  But rather than precipitate what was sure to be a long-drawn constitutional crisis, he and the resisters within would do everything to steer the Administration in the right direction “until – one way or another – it’s over.”

    He indicted American society of complicity in Trump’s desecration of the nation’s values.  “The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility,” he wrote.

    That publication in what Trump reflexively calls “the failing New York Times”, the article became   the talk of the political class.

    Trump almost blew his top.  He said the whole thing amounted to treason pure and simple, and demanded that the author be turned in immediately for prosecution under the espionage laws.  His volcanic rage confirmed virtually everything the writer and many others had said about him.

    Mary L. Trump, a niece of Donald Trump and a noted clinical psychologist has since confirmed and amplified the submissions of the anonymous New York Times correspondent, in a book titled “Too Much and Never Enough:  How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” The slim volume bristles with penetrating professional insight and the informed judgment of an insider, even if a disaffected one.

    In recent memory, The New York Times has been known to grant anonymity to Op-Ed contributors in only two instances.  In both instance, publication of their identities would have gravely imperiled the contributors.

    In the latest instance, the paper explained, anonymity was granted because the writer would face certain dismissal and other reprisals if identified.  The writer had approached the paper through a person known to the house, and the paper had satisfied itself and the intermediary and the writer’s good faith.  Besides, the article contained important insider knowledge that might not otherwise reach a public that had the right to know – the public Trump took an oath to serve diligently, honestly and faithfully.

    What good faith, some have sniggered.  If the writer was not a showboat and a coward to boot, what was he still doing in the Trump White House?  If he had the courage of his conviction, why did he not resign, and then publish the piece under his name?  How senior was the “senior official” anyway?

    The New York Times would not tell, saying merely that the writer’s identify was known only to the Editor of the Editorial Page and a few staffers of the Op-Ed section.

    The paper has this bifurcated existence whereby the Editorial Page is separate from the newsroom and The Editorial Board represents the opinions of its members, its editor and the publisher.

    So, even the executive editor of the larger paper does not know the identity of the writer.  But the larger paper, not being privy to the confidentiality agreement between the Op-Ed section and the writer of the explosive article, is not obliged to respect it.  Nothing in the set-up of the paper precludes it from seeking and revealing the identity of the writer.

    I will not be surprised therefore, if it is The New York Times that finally reveals in its news section   the identity that its Editorial Page has vowed to keep secret — until it is released from that pledge.

    As the attentive audience worldwide breathed easier this past weekend, relieved that it is not doomed to put up with Donald Trump’s grating voice and nonstop plying for, I went back to read the piece from the anonymous Times correspondent that I had quoted more liberally than some might judge proper.

    I found buried there this indictment pf American society’s complicity in Trump’s desecration of the nation’s values. ”The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.”

    Whether celebrating their deliverance from Donald Trump or bemoaning his defeat and imminent departure from the White House they should pause and reflect on that assessment.

    The election was framed as a referendum on Donald Trump and Trumpism.  The outcome was not entirely approving, to be sure.  But not even the most unyielding detractors can celebrate it as a repudiation of Trump and Trumpism.

    He garnered some 70 million votes to President-elect Joe Biden’s 74 million.  However you construe it, that is a great deal of following. Trump is venal through and through, but as this election has shown, he is no aberration.

    On the contrary, he is almost mainstream, this demagogue who waged a relentless assault on decency and decorum, turned The White House into a crime scene, played the basest human emotions, set the rule of law at nought, goaded tens of thousands to ghastly and untimely deaths by repeated assurances that Covid-19 is a hoax, an irritant not more bothersome than the common ‘flu; a leader to whom empathy, justice and honour are alien concepts.

    These characteristics have been on stunning display every day since he took office in some four years ago.  Yet, at least two of every five Americans cheered him on as the embodiment of their hopes and aspirations and their values,  Even today, as he flails in every direction, pouting petulantly and claiming without a scintilla of evidence that he was robbed of victory, the 40 per cent are standing resolutely with him.

    You have to ask: What did they vote for last week, the 70 million Americans who cast their ballots for Donald Trump?

  • Trump taku

    Trump taku

    Olakunle Abimbola

     

    AKINTOLA taku — remember that infamous phrase?

    Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola’s decision to buck a sacred democratic norm (of a prime minister quitting the moment he loses parliamentary support), captured as iconic Daily Times headline, forced a chain of events that crashed Nigeria’s 1st Republic (1960-1966).

    US President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede, days after his Democratic Party rival, Joe Biden, had been projected winner, is unlikely to collapse America’s democracy, more than two centuries strong, from its 1788 debut.

    But by it, Trump risks the garbage of American history.  He has bucked America’s most cherished political ethos: a graceful concession; threatened the peaceful and orderly transfer of power; and profaned American democracy, by a comic plea of “stolen votes”.

    Even now, like the Biblical King Saul, power is leaving Trump.  But Donald Trump kids self he is not leaving power.

    Still, his crashed presidency has always been powered by blatant unreason: whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad!

    Sophocles’s Greek tragedy, Antigone, first sounded that warning.  But then, its African — nay universal — truism came oozing from Ola Rotimi’s The Gods are Not to Blame, an adaptation of another Sophocles classic, perhaps the most famous of his plays, Oedipus Rex.

    In that Trumpian universe of passionate and grand delusion, the embattled president is neo-Samson; and his Delilah is a terrible combo: big ego, badly bruised; and delusion, as deep as the Atlantic, goading him to his doom.

    The Samson, in Trump, would crash America’s entire system on own head!  He would bury the world to save his presidential candy!  Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad!

    That tragic refrain, indeed, aptly captures the relay of unforced errors, that has left the Trump presidency reeling; and Trump the fair object of global derision, if not outright contempt.

    His reckless COVID-19 behaviour makes him the king of unreason in a foxtrot: a failed president in the pan-American anti-COVID-19 charge; an embattled candidate, with COVID-19 as the ultimate referendum.  Not even sympathy, from copping the virus, offers Trump any redemption.

    He dismissed as “idiots”, his COVID-19 task force experts, that acidic tongue-lash tanning the iconic Dr. Anthony Fauci, famed physician and immunologist; and revered boss, since 1984, at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, with excellent track records in epidemiology.

    Fauci might boast global reverence.  But all he earns from Trump is scorn.  This is because Fauci is the Biblical Elijah, that wouldn’t tell King Ahab the sweet stuff he wanted to hear, like Ahab’s posse of false prophets.  Little wonder: Trump threatens Fauci with a post-poll sack!

    “Perfect human specimen” Trump (as he dubbed himself, after his COVID scare, at one of his boisterous mega-rallies) won’t wear a face mask, and would be damned if he told his doting supporters to wear one — nor would he tell them to social-distance!

    If he did, his rallies would not happen.  If they didn’t, poof! — would go — Trump’s perfect platform: to abuse, to traduce and to trash-talk, the Trumpian vile trinity, and searing verbal weapon of mass destruction!

    But while Trump accessed quality care at his COVID-19 crossroads, his expendable republican rabble have none.  That portrays Trump as passionate, if unconscionable, narcissist; and enchanting demagogue, steeped in the most ruthless streak of Machiavelli.  But his doting crowds grumbled not!

    The ever-paranoid Trump, believing America’s critical segments, including the liberal media were gunning for him, dismissed overworked medics as COVID-19 profiteers, claiming they blew up COVID-19 death numbers to boost their earnings — a frothy lie that galled and incensed the medical community.

    In a taped audio interview with Bob Woodward, ace American investigative journalist while working on his book, Rage, Trump mocked American service (wo)men that fell, or got maimed for motherland, as “suckers” and “losers”, though Trump himself dodged the draft.

    Now, Woodward is troubling blast from the past.  With Carl Bernstein, he saw to the drowning of Richard Nixon, another disgraced Republican president, on account of the Watergate scandal.  Rage, a damning work on the Trump presidency, vis-a-vis COVID-19 mishandling, could well be nemesis against Trump, as Woodward was nemesis against Nixon.

    The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement epitomizes Trump’s serious race challenges.  Little wonder, the BLM Washington DC Plaza provided the hub for anti-Trump victory rallies, at the precinct of the White House.  Meanwhile, in Wilmington, Delaware, a victorious Biden singled out Black American voters for special praise.

    So, with alienation from the critical mass of America’s polite society, where did Trump get his 71 million votes from, the second highest in American presidential election history? The answer would appear in America’s fast changing demographics.

    The frontiers men, WASP — White Anglo-Saxon Protestant — from Europe homed in on America and chiselled it in own, and to be sure, glorious and winning image.  En route, they all but wiped out the American aborigines: native red Indians and allied Latinos; and brought in tethered Africans, as plantation slaves.

    But 200 years down the line, its rapid demographic  changes — enough to alarm the core white American base.

    That base and Trump enjoy fierce, symbiotic passion; and even fiercer mutual fears: rural seniors, suburban men and non-college educated Whites who couldn’t see, for the life of them, why “aliens” (read immigrants) could come take away their opportunities, in their own native land.

    Hence the war cry: Make America Great Again (MAGA)!  It is hooked to the past and driven by raw fear.

    But the Biden coalition is much more hopeful and futuristic: college educated and global-minded Whites, Blacks, Latinos, suburban women alarmed by Trump’s divisive rhetoric — and even elders, male and female, endangered species, by Trump’s bad management of COVID-19.

    The first alarm, of this looming coalition, of irreversible demographics, was Barack Obama, America’s first Black president.  Though Trump was the nativists’ electoral response, now Kamala Harris, America’s first female Vice President — horror of horrors! — of African and Indian heritage too, raps loudly on the door!

    Donald Trump might feature among the most flawed of personalities in history.  But it is vital to understand the raw dynamics that drive him to further, if avoidable, disgrace.

    Trump is the strong breed of nativist white America, not in a hurry to face its racist past but nevertheless fated to do so.

  • A tale of two elections

    A tale of two elections

     Olatunji Dare

     

    See who has been denouncing the conduct and outcome of Tanzania’s recent elections, citing “credible allegations” of fraud and intimidation?

    Guess who has been chafing at “the systematic interference” of Tanzania’s authorities in the “democratic process, “or has warned severely that the United States would “hold accountable those responsible for any use of force against unarmed civilians” protesting the elections, in which the incumbent President John “The Bulldozer” Magufuli, of the ruling party Chama Cha Mapunduzi, blitzed his opponents by winning 12.5 million (or 89.2 per cent) of a total 14 million valid votes?

    The one is a U.S. assistant secretary of State in its Bureau of African Affairs, and the other is a State Department spokeswoman – a distinction without a difference.

    There was indeed a time when such warning, even without the threat of sanctions, would have sent the authorities at the receiving end scrambling desperately to assure Washington, through their paid lobbyists and consultants, of their unshakeable and ineffable commitment to free and fair elections, rule of law, inclusive government, transparency and accountability – the usual catchphrases to which democracy has been reduced  by the calculations of its merchants, foreign and domestic.

    Not anymore.

    But the State Department seems wholly innocent of the disesteem into which the United States has fallen under the Trump Presidency, an Orwellian world in which up is down one day, and down the next; up again as that day wears on, down the next day, and sideways later that day.  And throughout the whirligig, the very concept of up and down is perpetually shifting, as is the concept of virtually everything else under the sun and even beyond.

    Even those who are prepared to allow that a penumbra of uncertainty of what Humphrey Nwosu, the vanishing chief empire in the 1993 presidential election called wuruwuru and magomago with unassailable authority will always surround elections in Africa will be troubled by this one.  Landslide victories of such magnitude invariably evoke suspicions of ballot stuffing and other irregularities.

    Nor did the East African Community 59-member Observer Team’s preliminary report calm such doubts.  The team, led by Sylvester Ntibantunganya, former President of Burundi, arrived on October 21, and set up shop on October 26 to observe the final stages of the elections scheduled for October 28.

    That period was far short for investigating whether everything was in place to ensure a free and fair place, to ascertain that all the rules and regulations have been complied with, and to meet with all the political parties and address their concerns

    No wonder its interim report is strewn with the usual platitudes:  The election was conducted in a peaceful environment; political parties and their candidates were able to conduct their campaigns across the country in accordance with the existing laws; voting proceeded smoothly in the voting stations; officials demonstrated competence and compliance; the proceedings were professional.

    In sum, said the Observer Mission, the election was “credible.”

    Not so, reported the Tanzania Election Watch Group, a consortium of unattached observers from the region and South Africa.  In language reflecting the Opposition’s complaints, it submitted that the poll was conducted “in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation” and media restrictions.

    The ringing endorsement of the poll by the Community Observers practically ends the matter.  Even without it, the Electoral Commission has the last word. Its verdict cannot be challenged in any court of law.

    To return to America:  The plebiscitary stage of the U. S. General Elections ended yesterday – dare we hope? The Presidential Election that lies at its core has been one long, tortuous, nasty, and formidable obstacle course.  Given the Administration’s endless tinkering with the electoral process with the aim of gaining advantage or stripping it of any claim to legitimacy unless he wins, one might reasonably assume that Trump and his enablers would show some humility in discussing election arrangements elsewhere

    But that is not the style of the house.  America’s Strong Man does not do humility; neither do those who work for him.

    Tens of thousands of Americans were killed, maimed, beaten and jailed in the epic struggle to secure the right to vote, once regarded as the most fundamental of all rights.  Clause by clause, laws in which that right is consecrated has been whittled down by elected legislatures and with the imprimatur of a partisan U.S. Supreme Court which increasingly regards the constriction of fundamental human rights as its remit.

    The right to vote has been eviscerated by act after insidious act at practically every stage, among them proof of eligibility that places costly or inconvenient burdens on the citizen; reduced in-person voting hours resulting in long, winding queues; discouraging voting by mail even in the face of a raging pandemic; crippling the postal system so as to undermine its capacity to process election mail quickly, and as just reward for those stubborn elements who insist on voting by mail despite all the discouragement, sharply reduced collection centres for drop-in mail.

    The Houston metro, in Atlanta, Georgia, is probably the most notorious example of the probably the most notorious example of latter. After completing your ballot you have to circumnavigate the county of some 4.7 million residents to find the one box where you can drop it, or travel long distances in search of other centres.

    Nor do these exhaust the egregious by which the will of the people is being subverted by a desperate White House.

    Trump’s acolytes have filed thousands of lawsuits to challenge outcomes that do not favour them. The larger purpose is to tie up the entire process and render it inconclusive.  Their plans for voter suppression – in this case, vote erasure — include suborning the state delegates who actually elect the president in the Electoral College system to cast their ballots not for the candidate who won the state but for Trump.

    He has vowed to insinuate supporters carrying unconcealed weapons into voting centres to look out for persons with fraud on their minds.  Knowing how easily the most innocuous act or statement serves as a pretext for shooting to kill, many a potential voter may choose to stay home rather than risk their lives.

    To Trump’s most ardent supporters, Voting While Black is provocation enough.

    The threat of violence is palpable.  Lethal ordinance has been flying off the shelves, with a record sale of 17 million guns in 2020, 1.2 million in September alone. Trump has warned that he cannot guarantee what his supporters will do if he loses.  The stark message out there is:  Be afraid; Be very afraid especially it Trump loses.  Be very, very afraid.

    The State Department’s warning that it would hold “accountable” those responsible for the use of force against unarmed protesters in Tanzania is admirable.  But what has it done to help hold accountable law-enforcement responsible for the barbarous murders of unarmed and innocent American Blacks, a good many of them mere children.  Here I have in mind the bestialities that spawned Black Lives Matter.

    Has it pointed out to the White House their foreign policy implications?

    The foregoing is the context in which the State Department is presuming to lecture Tanzania and will doubtless presume to lecture other countries on how to conduct their elections.   Tanzania at least had the humility to invite foreign observers to monitor and report on its General Elections.  Will the United States ever cultivate that kind of humility?

    Every country, to riff on Leo Tolstoy’s immortal opening and over-invoked opening lines in Anna Karenina, is exceptional in its own way.  American Exceptionalism derives its appeal from the force of America’s ideas, ideals and institutions.

    Trump has done incalculable damage to those ideas, ideals and institutions.  Time to return to basics, to the things that made America truly great.