The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Eyo Charles: A reporter’s unholy baptism

    Eyo Charles: A reporter’s unholy baptism

    Olatunji Dare

     

    I MEAN no disrespect, but just one week ago, the name Eyo Charles would have been a head scratcher to all but the most avid consumer of the news.

    “Who is Eyo Charles?” I can almost hear a good many of them murmur, deterred from flipping the page only by the titillating prospect of being regaled with details of the unholy baptism.

    Journalists often talk of the hazards of the profession – even those of them who have no stripes to show for their sojourn in it, only  a fleet of late-model cars, elegant homes in the best part of town, thriving businesses on the side, and robust bank accounts, domestic and foreign.  Could this perhaps be a real, contemporaneous enactment or variation of the kind of baptism visited on Minere Amakiri in 1973?

    Amakiri was the Port Harcourt-based reporter for The Nigerian Observer. It all began with a news story with his byline, factually and accurately reporting a threat, made at a press conference by state-employed teachers, to embark on a strike over their unpaid salaries going back several months.

    Even by the standards of those days, this was a ho-hum story.  But it was published on the most hallowed day in the Rivers State calendar, the birthday of His Excellency Alfred Diete-Spiff, the state’s military governor, with the sole purpose of subjecting him and the government and the good people of the state to scorn, odium, ridicule, and contempt.

    Whereupon they seized Amakiri, shaved his head with the jagged, razor-sharp edge of a piece       of glass from a broken beer bottle and flogged him almost insensate, Diete-Spiff’s chief security officer presiding.

    Perhaps because it occurred at the hands of an ordained priest, Eyo Charles’s advertised “unholy baptism” did not even come close to what they did to Amakiri.  Yet, today, you have to be practically unconscious not to have heard of Eyo Charles.

    Eyo Charles is a reporter who covers for the Abuja-based Daily Trust, the so-called South-south States.  And he would have remained just that if he had assigned to a junior reporter the coverage of a press conference by a notoriously foul-mouthed political brawler and opportunist craving the bright lights and the fawning adulation he once enjoyed as a minister of aviation, and later as head of Goodluck Jonathan’s publicity campaign team in his doomed re-election bid.

    There was nothing significant or challenging about the news conference.  The scheduled newsmaker, it is true, was one of yesterday’s men seeking to insinuate himself into the moment.

    It had been called to provide Femi Fani-Kayode a platform to brief the public through the media about the wonders he had seen in a guided tour of Cross River State and to issue a report card on the government projects, as he had done at the end of an earlier excursion in beleaguered Zamfara State, where Muslim insurgents control a swathe of the territory.

    At the end of the dining and wining and – I can’t vouch for this one – the wenching, that is the standard agenda for such visits, he was conferred with a prestigious title dating from the time Usmanu dan Fodiyo established his Caliphate in Sokoto.  He even got to parley with His Eminence the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar, on matters of mutual interest.  Throughout, he carried himself like visiting potentate from distant lands.

    After that heady triumphal tour, Cross River State was his next port of call.  The stage was set   for a reprise of the Zamfara report – the wonders the state government has wrought across every aspect of human existence and experience, despite lean and declining resources, the stratospheric level to which the people’s government in the state had raised its Human Development Index in just a year or two in office, etc., etc.

    The news-starved area press corps had gathered in eager expectation.   For security, Fani-Kayode had a man standing behind him in military camouflage keeping an eye on the proceedings, and two other men in rear, probably officials from the Governor’s Office.

    In Zamfara, they had asked Fani-Kayode who was funding his trip.  He had batted the question away, without profoundly alienating his audience.  Apparently he had not anticipated such a basic question.  Or perhaps he had reasoned that no reporter would be temerarious enough to ask him a former minister, a lawyer, a fourth-generation alumnus of the University of Cambridge, such a question.

    But that was precisely the question Charles put to Fani-Kayode shortly after he began his news conference: Who is bankrolling the junket?

    Whereupon Fani-Kayode blew his top.  There is no point recalling here the torrent of insults, the inelegant putdowns, the coarse and vulgar abuse that he rained on Charles.  Among his sundry talents that we have since come to know, he can divine a person’s intelligence even before setting his eyes on that person.  Let us just say that Charles did not rank high on his divination board.  So he had known what kind of interviewer Charles would be.

    And yet, when Charles asked his question, Fani-Kayode was caught utterly unprepared, flummoxed. He replied with a tirade, and served notice that he was going to report Charles to his publisher, who happens to be his good friend.  If Charles did not get the message, most of his colleagues in an endangered industry did.  One of them was heard rebuking him:  “See what you have brought upon yourself?”

    After an explosion of rage that would have left a person of lesser stamina breathless, it would have been  a wonder if Fani-Kayode had continued his press conference.  He gathered his papers and walked out.

    At the prompting of his advisers, he has since apologised, saying he failed himself, his family, his friends, his political associates, and his mentors, among whom he named former President Olusegun Obasanjo, of whom he used to say the most spiteful things until he gave him a cabinet post.

    It cannot have been easy for a person of Fani-Kayode’s leviathan ego to make a public apology in such stark terms.   His friends must hope that it was born of contrition.

    If his conduct was scandalous, that of the press corps at the event was shameful. Instead of walking out on Fani-Kayode while his tirade was in progress, they tried by sundry gestures to placate and mollify him, and even rounded on their colleague Charles for bringing a promising outing to an unrewarding ending.  Instead of applauding his professionalism, they rebuked him.

    This was a great chance to take a collective stand and tell the attentive audience they would no longer submit to being ill-used and insulted. They blew it.

    Charles’s professionalism is indeed to be commended, but I do not absolve him from blame for participating in what amounted to a reflex submission to wanton ridicule and disrespect.  He was probably too star-struck, like his colleagues.

    Nigerian journalists are disrespected largely because they do not respect themselves by and large.  They pander to crassness and are all too willing to bat on any winning side.   Instead of holding officials to account, they confer all manner of dubious honours on them and importune them for favours.

    The media have been infiltrated by persons who have never taken a course on Media Ethics nor imbibed the letter and the spirit of the Nigerian Press Organisation’s Code of Ethics.  Even on issues over which they should assert autonomy, they defer all too willingly to the authorities.

    Publishers and proprietors who do not pay their staffers regularly and expect them to fend for themselves as they see fit invariably set them forth on the path of journalistic perdition.

    Until the media critically review their own internal operations and professional standards to make them safe and healthy for the practice of good journalism, they will never command the respect the media are accorded in other climes.

    Meanwhile, the question lingers:  Who, just who, has been bankrolling Fani-Kayode’s travels?

     

     

     

  • Absentee landlord

    Absentee landlord

    Gabriel Amalu

     

    The photograph of President Muhammadu Buhari, in the newspapers, last week, admiring samples of gold bars and other precious minerals, brought to him by the Zamfara State governor, Bello Matawalle, at the Presidential villa, Abuja, caught the image of an absentee landlord, admiring the precious metals brought by the overseer of one of his far flung estates. Governor Matawalle visited the president, to show him the wasting assets, and notify him that ‘foreign gold poachers’ have taken over the mines and are trading the precious metals for firearms.

    As relayed by Governor Matawalle, the ‘foreign gold poachers’ have entered the state: “to buy gold and sometimes, instead of paying people (with money), they pay back with arms.” He confirmed that his finding is a product of an investigation. Zamfara and other parts of the northwest have become a hotbed for banditry and sundry criminality, and very regularly the governors of the states run to Abuja, to seek presidential help to curb the insecurity.

    Of course, the federal power cannot do much, with revenue from oil resources in doldrums, partly because of the economic crisis arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, and decreasing dependency on hydro-carbons by world economic behemoths. But more importantly, the oil revenue, is becoming insufficient, to fight the wars in the northeast and northwest, the armed herdsmen’s insurgency in the middle belt, the kidnapping and banditry in the southern part of the country, and feeding the ballooning population, without commensurate economic activities.

    Like a tenant who relies on his absentee landlord for survival, Governor Matawalle, is banking on the recently launched Presidential Artisanal Gold Mining Development Initiative, to curb the illegal gold mining that is fuelling insecurity in his state. Of course, he cannot legitimately touch the gold and other precious metals, without the approval of the federal government. To compound his dependency syndrome, he cannot also set up a police to curb the security menace from the illegal mining, because that will be illegal under the law.

    So, the governor as state chief security officer is prohibited from providing any security, just as he cannot harness the mineral resources nature endowed his state with. Except to share the resources sent down from Abuja, the governor is a caricature of a chief executive. He survives at the mercy of an absentee landlord. According to Law.com, an online dictionary, an absentee landlord is “an owner of a real estate who leaves the premises vacant. While there may be no tenant and the property is empty, they have not abandoned the property.”

    Like his brother governors, Governor Matawalle is trapped in a bizarre constitutional web, which makes him a chief executive, without the legal instrument to fully act as one. While section 2(2) of the 1999 constitution (as amended) proclaims that: “Nigeria shall be a federation consisting of states and a federal capital territory” section 214, says: “There shall be a Police Force for Nigeria, which shall be known as the Nigeria Police Force, and subject to the provisions of this section no other police force shall be established for the federation or any part thereof.”

    So Governor Matawalle is what is called in local religious parlance, ‘a powerless power.’ His legal encampment by the absentee landlord with regards to the challenge his state faces is total. By the provision of section 1 of the Nigerian Minerals and Mining Act 2007: “The entire property and control of all minerals resources in, under or upon any land in Nigeria, … shall be vested in the Government of the Federation and on behalf of the people of Nigeria.”

    To securely lock that door against the state chief executive and the peoples of the state, Section 2, reiterates: “All land in which minerals have been found in commercial quantity shall from the commencement of this Act be acquired by the government of the federation, in accordance with the provisions of the Land Use Act.” On its part the Land Use Act which vests all land in the state on the governor, makes an exception with respect to land with precious minerals like gold.

    So, a combined reading of the Land Use Act with the Nigerian Minerals and Mining Act vest all land on which minerals have been discovered or on which mining is taking place assuredly on the federal government. That is why the governor like a forlorn tenant scurried to Abuja to seek the favour of the president to mind his resources, and secure the state. If the president dislikes the governor, he can ignore his pleas and allow the minerals in Zamfara State to remain a curse of monumental consequences, instead of a blessing.

    While speaking to the press, Governor Matawalle recognised the abundant mineral resources in Zamfara, as the root cause of the insecurity in the state. The tragedy is that he can do little to save the state, because the laws of the land hamstring him. That is the conundrum, in Zamfara and across Nigeria. As I have argued on this page severally, the tragedy of the failing Nigerian state is substantially the result of our greedy appetite, for the oil resources of the Niger Delta.

    The incongruity of languishing in abject poverty and insecurity, by Zamfara State and many of its ilk, in the midst of its gold and other solid mineral resources, is because the Nigerian state cannot sever the ownership of oil minerals from solid minerals. So, if the federal government must keep control of the oil resources of the Niger Delta, then it must also keep the solid minerals and thereby render the entire nation’s landscape a poor and dejected abandoned estate.

    While the ordinary people have been suffering the consequences of this bizarre federal system of government, because they lack the capacity to join in the looting of the oil wealth, the chicken has come home to roost, for even the rich, with the insecurity that is trying to submerge the entire landscape, into a feisty conundrum of fire and brimstone. To make matters worse, the corona virus pandemic has shown that it is possible to lock everyone inside the cage, while the boiling runs its course.

    Going forward, instead of the federal capture of the mineral resources across the country remaining an issue of ‘might is right’, it has mutated into a ‘poisoned chalice’. No doubt, the gods of the Niger Delta, must be laughing at the gods of the other parts of the country, and mocking their subjects, whose gluttony for oil wealth, is about to upend their existence. Restructuring the security and economic architecture of our country, is a matter of survival. Those running the Nigerian bazaar, must realise that awuf dey run belle.

  • Before MAN takes Emefiele to Golgotha

    Before MAN takes Emefiele to Golgotha

    Sanya Oni

     

    Two new measures – rolled out in quick succession by Godwin Emefiele’s apex bank last week – to quell the forex storm have shown how desperate things have become. The measures, coming after two earlier bouts of devaluation, although predictable, can best been seen in the context of the fierce urgency of the moment.

    The first was the directive to banks stopping authorized dealers to stop opening Form M for payments routed through a buying company or other third parties, followed by the riot act, 24 hours after, to exporters that failed to repatriate their export proceeds. The banks were told to submit their names, addresses and Bank Verification Numbers (BVN) for possible sanctions.

    The latter, an exemplification of the Foreign Exchange Manual which provided that exporters repatriate export proceeds back to the country to support the local currency and boost the economy, while the former seems to suggest that the apex bank had had enough of the activities of the middlemen in the volatile forex market.

    The memo under the hand of O.S. Nnaji, the apex bank’s director of trade and exchange read: “As part of continued efforts by the Central Bank of Nigeria to ensure prudent use of foreign exchange resources and eliminate incidences of over-invoicing, transfer pricing, double handling charges, and avoidable costs that are ultimately passed to the average Nigerian consumers, authorized dealers are hereby directed to desist from opening of Forms M whose payment are routed through a buying company/agent or any other third-parties”, the memo read.

    It then added: “Additionally, in line with best practices around the world, the CBN will be immediately introducing a Product Price Verification Mechanism to forestall over-pricing and/or mispricing of goods and services imported into country”.

    If one had thought that the measures were somewhat expected given the harsh reality of negative forex accretion, the response by the manufacturers’ body – the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) – was just as predictable and flat.

    Says MAN, the measure is “inimical to the survival of many manufacturing concerns that are not involved in any unethical practices, especially at a time when the nation is implementing gradual ease of the lockdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic”.

    Warning that the nation had better brace up for the worst as “most manufacturers, especially SMEs, deal with accredited agents for their supplies, as many Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) abroad do not sell directly to individual buyers”, MAN would further sound the alarm that “many companies had gone into contractual agreements via the procurement agencies for the 2020 financial year and, in some cases, beyond, hence, a default on the contractual obligations may result in expensive lawsuits across jurisdictions, bring disruptions to the production process and further undermine the resilience of the sector”.

    According to MAN President, Mansur Ahmed, “a phased approach should be adopted to enable companies to have sufficient time to re-organize and build the required relationships with original suppliers, which they do not currently have”.

    From being a measure of the Nigerian dilemma, it is also a reflection of how MAN typically behaves to type. The point here is that even the most elegantly worded contract has built-in clauses that recognise such unforeseen acts of nature such as Covid-19 –reason businesses put in the force majeure in contracts when things go awry. Why should Nigeria’s case be different? Secondly, in choosing to gloss over the apex bank’s current predicament occasioned by Covid-19 and the ensuing collapse of oil prices, MAN, in bandying the threat of “expensive lawsuits across jurisdictions”, merely plays up the issue of where its interests lie hence affirming the very underlying fears that led to the apex bank memo!

    By the way, one struggles to find anything in the CBN memo that could be deemed as spectacularly punitive save for the insistence that the Nigerian consumer, on whose behalf the policy is hatched, as opposed to the rentier class of middlemen, gets the best of value for his kobo’s worth!

    I do not blame MAN as indeed other members of the Organised Private Sector (OPS). Although the paradox is oftentimes lost, it is the way it’s always been. Their members buy forex from the weekly auction for sundry items ranging from raw materials to spares; in the end, the final goods produced are sold in naira in time for members of the body to embark on the next cycle of forex bidding to complete a recurring forex dependency cycle! And when things go wrong like it’s happening at the moment, they not only crow about not being carried along, attempts to ameliorate the situation becomes an occasion for dissension!

    By the way, don’t ask me if the CBN is only just coming to terms with the practices being targeted with the latest measures. It is an open secret that the bankers and their collaborators know only too well; it matters only now that things are no longer as they used to be!

    We certainly know the story of why, despite its proven availability, the Nigerian pharmaceutical industry cannot produce industrial grade corn-starch from the local corn. It is the same old paradox of an oil-producing country would rather import than refine enough crude for its domestic needs.

    Way back in 2017, the Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria (PSN) not only drew attention to this the anomaly, it warned that “unavailability of medicines and vaccines is a huge security risk to the Nigerian populace” even as it called on government and all relevant stakeholders to prioritize local production of drugs to ensure availability of medicines at all times. Of course, as it is in the pharmaceutical industry, so it is in the agro-allied sector.  I recall a visit, years back to the multinational Wilmer-PZ palm oil plantation in Cross Rivers and could not but wonder why the country would still spend a dime of its scarce forex on oil palm imports! It is the same way that a trip to the Machine Tool Industry in Osogbo, the Osun State capital cannot but leave one in wonder about how a multi-billion-dollar project that could have permanently changed the face of the nation’s industrial landscape is left to rot!

    So much for the fixation with forex, Covid-19 has not only brought home more forcefully, the extent to which things have gone wrong, it has dictated the need to see and act differently. Unfortunately, it would appear that the lessons are a long way from being imbibed. Which explains why bodies like MAN still prefer to see Godwin Emefiele as our own Jesus, who with a reserve of $32 billion of some five months of import cover, must feed the multitude of 200-odd million people. While they deny that backward integration is the way to go, like the Covid-19 pandemic that has caught the entire humanity unprepared, their nightmare may have only just begun.

  • Amotekun, community police and all that

    Amotekun, community police and all that

    Olakunle Abimbola

     

     

    Amotekun and community police, twin-drivers of the latest security controversy, must be placed in requisite conceptual blocs: the clash between federalist and centralist pulls, in a country craving a workable balance.

    Still, an early caveat: Amotekun wouldn’t have had any appeal, nor community police any need, had the central police and allied security system not faltered; so much so that many citizens now begin to question the very basis of the Nigerian state.

    But today’s reaction to community policing (latest tool of the centralist forces) and Amotekun (latest counter-tool of the South West federalist wing — and the most vibrant arm of the nationwide federalist army), appears rooted in the utterances of Nigeria’s tripod of founding fathers, with their accompanying conspiracy theories.

    You must, however, note: these utterances were driven more by the mutual fear of the unknown in emergent Nigeria.  So were the distemper that came with these fears, and have plagued the polity till this day.

    Sir Ahmadu Bello, the famed Sar’dauna of Sokoto and first northern premier, spoke of dipping the Koran in the sea; and carving out all of southern Nigeria among his political lieutenants, while he bossed affairs from Kaduna.  That hegemonic boast naturally provoked a fierce southern anti-Islamization whiplash.

    Still, the Sar’dauna bluster would appear driven more by the North’s impotence at feared southern domination (in a Nigeria to be driven by products of Western education, where the North could barely compete), than any cocksure hegemonic reality, even if the North indeed harboured such a dominant power dream.

    Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the great Zik of Africa in 1949, told the Ibo Federal Union gathered in Aba, that the “God of Africa … created the [martial] Ibo nation to lead the children of Africa from the bondage of the ages …”

    Ironically, Zik’s hint at eventual Igbo domination, even if benign, was rooted in Igbo fears and complaints, in 1949 colonial Nigeria: “Since suffering is the label of our tribe,” he rued, “we can afford to be sacrificed for the ultimate redemption of the children of Africa.”

    Chief Obafemi Awolowo, clearly the sharpest developmental mind of his era, seemed to have taken the Sar’dauna hegemonic threat most frontally, leading the Yoruba and their culturally liberal worldview, which bristled at any domination, benign or malign.

    Better to die and perish, he was quoted to have sworn, than be subjugated by anyone!  But the same Awo, more than anyone of his era, articulated a federalist principle (to fend off any ethnic domination in emergent Nigeria) and mass education (to make his people better compete, in the polity to come).

    This brief trip into Nigerian contemporary history demonstrates that in this conceptual push-and-pull, each side generates emotive distempers, which portray the polity as an irredeemable dystopia — which it is not.

    But these distempers are so fearsome, they become symptoms that loom larger, and seem far more virulent, than the actual disease.  They also make complex otherwise simple issues.

    Welcome, yet again, to another distracting bedlam, where folks yell at each other, after which no one is none the wiser!

    Yet, for a fruitful discourse, folks should reason with one another.  That compels a clinical analysis, in which venom and emotions have little place.

    Now, back to the core issue: on central policing, the Nigerian centrist pull has failed — and there is no other way to put it.

    Despite Nigerian regions’ abuse of local police, pre-1st Republic and during that short-lived era, unitary Police, in a federal Nigeria, is catastrophe waiting to happen.  The current security meltdowns are ample proof of that epochal miscalculation.

    The Federal Government’s latest “community police” is, frankly, an attempt to dig deeper to the hole, when there ought to be a quick, smart strategy to bale out of that security ditch.

    Indeed, “community police”, unleashed from Abuja, is a violent contradiction in terms.  Perhaps it could offer some comfort, if it were conceived to link the central Police command with the outlying communities, the savage butt of the serious insecurity crisis.

    That way, there would be some built-in flexibility, in the operational command structure, featuring Abuja and local players.

    But the Garba Shehu community police portraiture, in which the IGP is summary czar, is much of the present same, which has not worked.  It risks being another bureaucratic layer, which further pushes urgent solution away from a crying crisis.

    Still, the Amotekun lobby themselves appear more primed to gripe and growl (perhaps for good reasons), at the crafty central subversion of the Amotekun agenda.

    Indeed, the South West compromise to re-make Amotekun a state-by-state affair, from the unified regional outfit it was originally conceived, fuels the promoters’ anger.

    Still, this cold point must be made, which again reinforces the supremacy of clinical thinking over base anger: Amotekun is not especially useful to the South West because it is harmful to others.

    On the contrary, Amotekun is useful, nay critical, to all — East, West, North and South. Indeed with a North West Amotekun variant, Aminu Bello Masari, Katsina governor, won’t complain his outlying areas are sitting ducks for bandits, because they are thinly policed.

    With the failure of the central security apparatus, therefore, the Amotekun concept, of decentralized policing, spiced with a vibrant local content, to aid intelligence-gathering and forestall crime, is the sane way to go.

    So, different shades of Amotekun, all over the geo-political zones, should earn a joyful — and grateful — federal nod.  It should help the Federal Government regain the security mojo. It’s a win-win for everybody, that could presage a new security dawn.

    In the toxic centralist-federalist exchange, many have claimed a central police is a hegemonic agenda.  But what is hegemony worth, if you can’t secure the space, which you dream to dominate?  If this central system is failing, how can that hegemony survive?

    Decentralizing security, with requisite local input, is the way to go.  That is how the locals can take ownership of own security, by not taking laws into their hands.

    Still, Nigerians must learn to discuss this crucial issue without throwing tantrums and belching fire.

    A suitable security architecture should not continue to plague Nigeria, as race relations is plaguing Donald Trump’s America, 244 years afters it’s 1776 Declaration of Independence.

    But only a frank exchange of ideas anchored on logic and common sense, not a thunderous trading of insults driven by base fears, can avert that plague.

  • Save Kaduna

    Save Kaduna

    By Gabriel Amalu

    The petit governor of Kaduna state, with a big ego, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, has shown himself incapable of saving Kaduna State from self-destruct. El-Rufai, who thrust into national limelight while serving assiduously as the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, obviously lacks the dexterity to govern a multi-ethnic and multi-religious state, like Kaduna. An otherwise intelligent man, especially with mapping infrastructural development, he has proved himself bereft of the emotional intelligence necessary for managing a fractious state with ethnic fault lines.

    While the inter-ethnic crisis in Southern Kaduna predates El-Rufai, he has worsened the situation with his petulant arrogance and debilitating idiosyncrasies. Unfortunately, he has an ally in President Muhammadu Buhari, who is slow to react to matters of urgent national importance. With pressure from the international community, perhaps those kneeling on the necks of the indigenes of Southern Kaduna can be forced up and brought to account at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at Hague.

    El-Rufai’s latest gaffe that leaders of Southern Kaduna are asking for money to stop the violence is absurd, and deserves an investigation by the excitable Department of State Security (DSS). If non-state actors like Obadiah Mailafiya and former Speaker House of Representatives Ghali Umar Na’Abba, can be questioned for making statement on national security issues, the allegation by El-Rufai deserves similar investigation unless he names those asking for money and provide proof.

    Earlier on, the governor had asked any traditional ruler in Southern Kaduna who claims that the armed herdsmen were appropriating their lands after sacking their communities to come forward with proof. Such demand begs the question, because appropriation of land can’t be the only reason for the mindless killings that is taking place in the region.  Otherwise what is the motive for the mass killings, insane destruction of properties and dislocations that is the hallmark of the attacks?

    With the Nigerian state incapable or unwilling to bring the perpetrators to account, there is justification to warrant the intervention of the ICC prosecutors. The ICC is an international court with “jurisdiction to prosecute individual for international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crimes of aggression.” According to Wikipedia “It is intended to complement existing national judicial systems and it may therefore exercise its jurisdiction only when national courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute criminals.”

    Earlier in his administration, El-Rufai had admitted the helplessness of the Nigerian state in bringing the perpetrators to account, which necessitated his sending emissaries to the bandits and inducing them with financial rewards to stop the attacks. In an interview in 2016, the governor claimed most of the attackers where from outside Nigeria, and there were aggrieved for losses incurred while passing through Southern Kaduna, after the General Elections in 2015. He said that he had traced those concerned and begged them to forgive, while those that demanded compensation were paid.

    In his words: “A lot of what was happening in Southern Kaduna was actually from outside Nigeria.” He went on: “we got a group of people that were going round trying to trace some of these people in Cameroon, Niger Republic and so on to tell them that there is a new governor who is Fulani like them and has no problem paying compensations for lives lost and he is begging them to stop killing.”

    He assured the general public that “in most of the communities, once that appeal was made to them, they said they have forgiven. There are one or two that asked for monetary compensation. They said they have forgiven the death of human beings, but want compensation for cattle. We said no problem and we paid some.” So by the governor’s account, while he was begging non-nationals to accept compensation to stop killing Nigerians, he is now accusing indigenes of his state of demanding money to stop foreigners from killing them.

    The incongruity and illogic of the governor’s claims shows that as the state chief security officer, the Nigerian state has either lost the capacity to bring the perpetrators to account or are unwilling to take steps accordingly. So, perhaps the ICC should be in the best position to come to the aid of the indigenes who are at the mercy of the criminals that have turned Southern Kaduna to a killing field.

    The Office of the Prosecutor (OTP), under the ICC, is an independent organ of the court, which can initiate investigation, if appropriately triggered as provided by the Rome statute. Of course, it recognises that: “National authorities bear the primary responsibility, in the first instance, to investigate and prosecute those most responsible for the commission of mass crimes. The court will initiate investigations, in accordance with the legal criteria set by the Rome statute, only when the national authorities have failed to uphold this primary responsibility and in the absence of genuine national proceedings.”

    The question Governor El-Rufai and the federal government should answer is why the state authority has failed to uphold its primary responsibility of providing security for the indigenes of Southern Kaduna? Perhaps, Ghali Na’Abba provided a general answer about the status of our country, as a failing state. To make the matter worse, many argue that the Kaduna State government is partial. So, it is time to resort to the international community to save the people of Southern Kaduna.

    Nigeria as a state party to the Rome Convention, having signed since September 27, 2001, is bound by the provisions of the convention. So, if the appropriate petition is made to ICC, the prosecuting authority can initiate investigating that could trigger the prosecution of those responsible for the mayhem in Southern Kaduna.

    Of note, at the 18th session of the Assembly of State Parties to the Rome Statute, at the International Criminal Court, at Hague, in 2019, the Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, SAN, pledged the federal government’s commitment to end various acts of impunity in the country. The daily carnage in Southern Kaduna is a sad reminder that Nigeria lacks the capacity to keep its pledge and commitment.

    Last Thursday, this paper provided in grim figures a glimpse of the daily atrocities in Southern Kaduna: “On 16th August, 2020 in Bugai village in Kachia LGA was attacked by armed militia. The village head, Dan’azumi Musa (67), was killed. His siblings, Aniya Musa (60), his very aged mother, Kande Musa (97) and sister Angelina Irmiya (45) were killed.” It went further: “On the 17th of August, Bulus Joseph (48) a father of nine was murdered gruesomely.” Interestingly, the ambivalence of Governor El-Rufai has been appropriately noticed by the Nigerian Bar Association, and this column urges him to make a turn around.  

  • CAMA: Of a city set on the hill

    CAMA: Of a city set on the hill

    By Sanya Oni

    In a clime where conspiracy theories have since become staple, the Buhari administration has certainly added some fuel to the fire with the newly signed amendment to the Company and Allied Matters Act (CAMA 2020). Like most things Nigerian, it would not be entirely surprising to find that a good number of those that have gone to town in strident opposition have not seen a copy of the new law beyond the snippets served in the news let alone perusing it. Because ours is a country where reason immediately takes flight where matters of faith is concerned, there are understandably, a large army out there, not just unwilling to give the government the benefit of the doubt as to its motives, but would in the same vein ascribe some fangled infallibility to mere mortals only because they adorn the clerical garb.

    And so, here we are AD 2020 still trying to figure out whether the religious establishment – the supposed moral exemplars – should provide the living the example in transparency and accountability both in words and deeds in their ordinary day-to-day business – which is really what the CAMA brouhaha is all about!

    If my memory serves me right, the last time the nation was dragged to this level was in 2016 when the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria sought to extend its code of corporate governance to religious entities.  Just like it’s happening now, a segment of the church – notably the Pentecostal wing of CAN – would have none of– something –and this is interesting – that most of the older, so-called orthodox churches are already doing! And then as if to appease the angry gods of that wing then baying for blood, the then FRCN helmsman, Jim Obazee – himself a pastor – had to be shoved under the bus!

    Four years after, we are back full circle. With FRCN rendered prostrate by the same religious establishment, the Corporate Affairs Commission has since taken up the gauntlet to ensure that NGOs are not only held to account on how they administer the trust but to mete appropriate sanctions where applicable laws are broken.

    I understand that the legalistic minded amongst us have drawn attention to aspects of CAMA 2020 they consider unacceptable. And this is not so much because they consider the essence as superfluous but for some perceived inadequacies in legal phraseology, (which is perhaps to be expected given that no law can be deemed as perfect). For an area that would pass as relatively as uncharted, there is, understandably, a sense in which aspects of the new law, which seeks to inject some transparency into the operations of NGOs under which the church is classed, would be deemed as somewhat intrusive.  Which is why it is not entirely surprising that one particular NGO – the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), has dared to question what it sees as the “overly broad and discretionary powers to arbitrarily withdraw, cancel or revoke the certificate of any association, suspend and remove trustees, take control of finances of any association…” fearing that such the powers “would be used by the authorities to exert extensive scrutiny over the internal affairs of associations, as a way of intimidation and harassment, which would eventually unduly obstruct the legitimate work carried out by associations.”

    Yet, salient as those observations appear to be, the truth that the provision is neither novel nor strange; in fact, they are mere elements of the best practices in the global corporate governance rule-book; in any event,  few Nigerians would have bothered to pay attention to such objections had the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) not enlisted in the fray in what is now its not-too-infrequent descent into the arena of opposition politics. In any case, whereas objections to any law might be deemed legitimate, not so, unfortunately, when such have a tinge blackmail which, if you ask me, would seem a measure of the waning influence of the once powerful bloc; a worrisome revelation of a moral authority in mortal decline.

    The point of course needs to be made:  CAMA is not so much about NGOs or even the church as it is about easing the process of doing business in the country. Section 839 –which now constitutes the casus belli, though important, merely seeks to instil some order and discipline into how the NGOs conduct their businesses. More than that, it simply demands that those charged with the public trust, whether in the secular or religious sphere exercise the duty of care on the assets which they hold in sacred trust on behalf of the others.

    To these, CAN leadership says: “How can the government sack the trustee of a church which it contributed no dime to establish? How can a secular and political minister be the final authority on the affairs and management of another institution which is not political? How can a non-Christian head of government ministry be the one to determine the running of the church? It is an invitation to trouble that the government does not have power to manage”.

    Really?

    So much for CAN’s pretensions to be the mouthpiece of the Christendom in Nigeria, the truth of course is that opinions on the matter would vary depending on which denomination that one is dealing with. For instance, I am aware that a number of churches have nothing against the law – in fact, they see it as the minima – below which the Body of Christ – so properly called should not dare to fall below! Chairman of Nigerian Christian Pilgrims Commission (NCPC), Reverend Yomi Kasali provides the perfect example when he says: “The law is not only for the church, it also applies to mosques and NGOs, so I think we should look at it from different perspectives before we start throwing tantrums and jumping up and down. They are not even deregistering churches; they are only saying they will remove the trustees…If for instance they find out that I, as a trustee of that church, have committed gross misconduct, financially; they find some terrorists’ money in my account or discover that I am laundering drug money, they have the right to remove me. Then, I would now go to court to challenge the government. But to say the government does not have the right does not make sense; that’s why they are government”.

    The truth of the matter is that CAMA is not a Nigerian invention. If in doubt, ask one or two of Nigerians churches that have run afoul of UK’s Charity Commission, the non-ministerial government department that regulates registered charities in the country. To be sure, in none of the cases did the presumed infallibility of the entities availed those found to have transgressed the law. Rather, Her Majesty’s Government sacked the board of trustees of the churches and appointed auditors to run the show while they mind the altar. Today, the Christendom remembers how in 2014, a certain David Yonggi Cho, the acclaimed leader of the world’s largest megachurch was convicted of embezzling $12 million of the church that he founded.

    Still in doubt as to the issues at stake? How about the American classic as captured by the Charles E. Blair in his book – The man who could do no wrong published in 1981? By the way, these were no mean men but giants in our shared faith – unfortunately consumed by hubris. In all of the cases, there was no debate about whether the government had the right to look into their books. It was sufficient, just like the story of the Biblical David as told in 1 Samuel 21:6, that they helped themselves to the consecrated bread – which the law strictly forbade!

  • Between CAMA and hate speech

    Between CAMA and hate speech

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    Just as well the holy fathers, pleading sacred exception, from holy arrogance, are blazing at the new CAMA, with holy ire — and fire!

    The “new CAMA” is the Companies and Allied Matters Act 2020 (which replaces CAMA 1990), signed into law on August 7 by President Muhammadu Buhari.

    Section 839 (1) and (2) of CAMA 2020 may well signal true karma for churches, mosques and allied holy racketeers, though the target is general thieving charities.  Any charity whose accounting is found wanting, risks a replacement of its trustees, under the new law.

    But that piece of generic legislation has sent the holy fathers threatening, growling and roaring!

    Indeed, why should sacred enterprises bow to profane laws, by a rude and irreverent secular republic?

    But before you roast the seething spiritual fathers, peep at their secular cousins, and their sizzle over “hate speech”, in the Obadiah Mailafia-induced N5 million radio fine question.

    Media Titans, high secular priests of speech and allied rights, clearly sympathetic to the smitten radio — a peer in distress — bristle over what constitutes “hate speech”, even if its basic meaning appears simple and clear enough.

    Now, what’s this?  Spiritual and secular tag-bullies, ranged against a weak, prostrate and lowly state?  You’d be damned if the state stomached their pillorying!

    Still, hollow exceptionalism, driven by empty opportunism, is one reason contemporary Nigeria stagnates.  It’s high time the authorities, therefore, faced down that crappy mindset.

    Winners Chapel Bishop David Oyedepo’s whine-and-damn style wasn’t really unexpected.  You know the bishop would rail, any time public policy clashed with his investments, spiritual or temporal.

    So, it was all a tale of the expected: when he launched a tirade against the new CAMA,  a deep rumbling-in-the-cathedral in tow.  His doting congregants, in captive roar, cheered at his holy bragging against the secular order.  The priest himself, flush with combat, awaited that day, when profane orders would appoint trustees over his sacred church!

    But any attempt at thinking the holy bishop represented only the fringe of Nigerian Christendom quickly vanished, with the official response of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN).

    CAN thundered at CAMA 2020: “The satanic section of the controversial and ungodly law is section 839 (1) and (2), which empowers the commission to suspend trustees of an association for some given reasons” — a veritable appeal to pity, which has no place in rational discourse.

    Then, the flexing of supreme spiritual powers, over a prostrate secular order: “The church cannot be controlled by the government because of its spiritual responsibilities and obligations.  That is why we are calling on the Federal Government to stop the implementation of the obnoxious and ungodly law until the religious institutions are exempted from it.”  Again, nothing but cheap holy bluster.

    Still, there you go!  After a racket of adjectives and frenzied name-calling, all powered by holy gas, the best CAN can plead is exemption!  In other words, while other charities, registered under the same set of laws, can be regulated, churches cannot — and should not?

    On what pillar would such exemption stand, in the eye of the law — on the diktat of holy exceptionalism, solely and arrogantly defined, prescribed and imposed by CAN? How even fair, legitimate or logical is that?

    Besides, what happens to the Christ Jesus’ sacred concept of being under authority?  Yes, churches are under the authority of their sponsoring missions.  But if those missions are not under the authority of the state (without invading their constitution-secured right to faith and spiritual freedom), why does a church have to register as a charity under the law, in this case, CAMA?

    Didn’t Jesus, the Christ Himself, say give to God what is God’s; and to Caesar what is Caesar’s?  But then, that is taking up CAN on the logical front.  That is one area it isn’t willing to play, because it can’t win.

    That explains its un-Christ-like arrogance and emotive blather; and its crafty, holy filibustering, instead of a logical marshal of its case — if any — in utter disregard, if not outright contempt, for others with which it shares the Nigerian space.

    Still, CAN is right on one score: CAMA 2020 is “satanic” — but not in the self-serving way it wanted its message understood.  It would bring out the Satan in smart Alecs that convert God’s trove into personal and family treasures.  Those would be named and shamed!

    Now, how can that be bad for any polity, spiritual or temporal?

    But CAN and other religious lobbies are not the sole hustlers, shopping for exceptions to dodge responsibility.  Other secular bodies do — including the media, that push ideological fixation to fend off reasoned discourse.

    A favourite rhetorical question, in Nigeria’s newsrooms and Editorial Board suites, is: “who determines hate speech?” — asked with a triumphant and deadpan finality, that signals “end of discussion”, to parody that popular street lingo.

    The Mailafia affair, and the offending radio’s N5 million fine, by National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), has brought media folks posing that query with renewed vigour.

    Twenty-six years after, people still flinch at the Rwanda genocide of 1994.  Yet, only a few, if any at all, seem to remember the “media slaughter” that powered it all: a Rwanda radio charging inflamed killers to “cut down the tall trees!”, a barely veiled code, for the tall and endangered Tutsis!

    Incidentally, the Arusha, Tanzania-based International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, gaoled for life, Father Athanase Seromba, a Hutu Catholic priest, for his role in the brutal slaughter of some 2, 000 ethnic Tutsis, in the infamous Nyarubuye massacre.  That tribunal also convicted the killer radio’s sponsors, including presenters.

    In the beginning (according to the Bible), there was the Word.  That word was God.  He created all.  In Rwanda, there was also the word.  But that word was hate.  It destroyed all!

    Fierce Ideologues of free speech, who poker-face wait to define “hate speech”, miss the point.  Everyone should take responsibility for whatever they say or write.

    After that, we are all better primed, to push against government abuse of citizens’ rights, in the liberty-control continuum.

    Anything short of that is pursuing, on the secular plain, the holy gas CAN pushes on the spiritual sphere.  Dodging responsibility is an expressway that leads to perdition.

  • The ECOWAS’s failed mission to Mali

    The ECOWAS’s failed mission to Mali

    By Olatunji Dare

    The Africa Leadership Forum (ALF), one of the continent’s best known and most influential non-governmental organizations, stood on the brink of dissolution. Though not formally banned, it was finding it well-nigh impossible to operate at its base, the Obasanjo Farm Complex, in Otta, Ogun State.

    Security officials had brusquely terminated its most recent outing at the Gateway Hotel, Otta, an international conference on accountability in governance in Africa. It was only a matter of time before         it would be slapped with a banning order and crippled.

    Its founder and chairman, General Olusegun Obasanjo, the former head of state and statesman-at-large,    was languishing in prison, jailed by the brutal dictator Sani Abacha on false charges of plotting to overthrow his benighted regime.

    The ALF outsmarted Abacha and relocated, overnight as it were, to Accra, Ghana, before Abacha’s agents could move to seal up and occupy its premises.

    It was from there that it organised an international conference titled Africa on the Eve of the 21st Century, in Maputo, Mozambique.  From September 9-11, 1997, policy-makers, scholars, and political figures from Africa and the wider world reflected on the African Condition in the millennium that was about to end, and its prospects in the one about to commence.

    One of the more engaging discussions at the conference centred on a paper on Integration in Africa.  More than three decades after the inauguration of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the evidence of continental unity was sparse and the evidence for integration was even sparser, its presenter contended.  Although cross-border trading counted for much more, official trade among African countries accounted for less than 5 per cent of the total transactions for the continent.

    In education, development planning, transportation, manufacturing, and in virtually all fields, every country carried on almost as if it were an island unto itself, with scant regard for the choices their neighbours were pursuing and the advantages that might be gained by an integrated approach.

    “African leaders are well integrated, but African peoples are not,” the presenter said to general applause. The OAU, he reminded the assembly, was for African peoples, not just their leaders, and it was time to make it work for the people and not just their leaders.

    It came to light at the conference that only Senegal had a designated Department for cooperation and  regional integration, headed by an official without cabinet rank. So, when Obasanjo went from prison to power scarcely two years later, I drew on the communiqué for a memo urging him to appoint a minister of cabinet rank to take charge of those twin subjects.

    “An appointment at that level would be a strong indication of your Administration’s commitment to advancing the cause of cooperation and integration of the continent,” the memo said.

    I cannot claim that it played any part in his naming Dr Abimbola Ogunkelu Minister for Cooperation and Integration in Africa.  Obasanjo has always regarded the pursuit of these goals as an imperative, and the memo may well have seemed to him like an epistle to the choir.

    I was led to these reminiscences by the Economic Community West African States (ECOWAS) recent “peace mission” to Mali. Its doom was foreseeable. The peacemakers, led by our own Dr Goodluck Jonathan, were acting more like shareholders concerned to preserve their stock in a tottering holding company at all cost rather than return to basics, question fundamental assumptions, and set the organisation on a new path.

    They seemed more concerned to preserve the rule of President (as he then was) Boubacar Keita than to aassuage and reassure Malians who had been saying in one strong, united voice, that they had had more than enough of him. Citing rigged elections, official corruption, deepening deprivations and general insecurity, the Opposition demanded that Keita step down.

    But the mediators would countenance no outcome that did not leave Keita in power. Little surprise there; most of them have dubious legitimacy at best, and a tenuous hold on power.  Each of the countries most of them preside over is a Mali waiting to happen.  They were not going to commit class suicide by abandoning one of their own who had been rejected by the people.

    Even after the military moved in and ousted Keita, and Dr Jonathan and his team, parroting France and its allies whose overbearing presence in Mali’s affair has been cited as one of the reasons for the seething popular discontent on the streets of Bamako, urged them to go back to their barracks.  Keita has since bowed to necessity and accepted his fate.

    The mediators too seem to have recognised the facts on the ground and are now urging a speedy return to constitutional rule, as if it was not the brazen manipulation of that hallowed principle that has lain at the bottom of virtually every political crisis in Africa.

    In its formative years and indeed well into its second decade, the OAU would have been loath to intervene in the crisis, even for the sake of mediating.  “Non-interference” in the affairs of other member-states was one of the bedrock principles of its Charter, and African leaders interpreted that term liberally to cover their sins and to preserve themselves in power.

    It was indeed a sign of progress when the OAU, bowing to the growing salience of human rights in the conduct of national and international affairs, tacitly abandoned that standard in the 1990s.  Its successor,            the African Union, went one significant step better to set up a novel institution, the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) to enable member-states carry out self-monitoring and self-assessment on all aspects of governance, the type that would have anticipated, and perhaps even forestalled, the convulsions that rock African countries all too often.

    But the ARPM is grossly under-funded, and stands today as aspiration rather than actuality.  If the African Union is to attain the goals for which it was founded, it must as a priority, empower the ARPM to function smoothly and continuously.  The political fortunes of the African peoples and solidarity with them must be grounded on institutions, not on personalities whose own fortunes are as evanescent as rainbow gold.

    So also must the pursuit of cooperation and integration in Africa.

    Back in the 1960s, President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana was calling insistently for a continental government.  Deeply suspicious of his alleged ambition to dominate the continent, and despairing of discounting or trading in their newly won sovereignty, showed not the least enthusiasm for it.

    Even today, Nkrumah’s proposal seems starry-eyed.  The idea of European Union must have seemed just as fanciful when it was first mooted in a continent laid prostrate by Word War II when it was first mooted.  But behold the transformation, the idea and its faithful pursuit, have wrought on the European landscape and indeed on global geopolitics today.

    It came to life as a small-bore operation, based on common trade in coal among three relatively small countries – Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg, the so-called BeNeLux nations.  It expanded to six members and acquired a new momentum when France, Germany and Italy entered.  The rest is history.

    History suggests powerfully that African cooperation and integration can only spring from such small beginnings.

    I am thinking of a proposal made by the Beninoise intellectual and statesman Professor Albert Tévoédjrè more than two decades ago.  He called it un jour sans frontiers – a day without boundaries, allowing for free movement of goods and persons across West Africa to begin with, not just cattle and their murderous minders.

    Drawing on the lessons learned, the period of free movement can be raised to two days a week, a full week, a month, and so on, until the borders literally collapse under their own contradictions.

    This is the kind of arrangement ECOWAS leaders should be thinking about, not propping up yet another member of their discredited club.

  • NBC as judge

    NBC as judge

    Gabriel Amalu

     

    The Nigeria Broadcasting Commission (NBC) has drawn an angry mob for slamming a five million naira fine on a Lagos based radio station, Nigeria Info 99.3Fm, for alleged professional misconduct. A disconsolate public accuses the NBC of acting as the accuser, the prosecutor and a judge in the matter. They argue that the 1999 constitution (as amended) is unequivocal as to the institution vested with judicial powers. Agreeably, section 6(1) of the constitution provides: “The judicial powers of the federation shall be vested in the courts to which this section relates, being courts established for the federation.”

    For our purpose, what constitute judicial powers was adumbrated in Section 6(6)(b) of the constitution. It provides: “The judicial powers vested in accordance with the foregoing provisions of this section – shall extend to all matters between persons, or between government or authority and to any person in Nigeria, and to all actions and proceedings relating thereto, for the determination of any question as to civil rights and obligations of that person.” Of course, the Black’s Law Dictionary defines a person to include: “An entity (such as a corporation) that is recognised by law as having the rights and duties of a human being.”

    The NBC is the federal government agency imbued with the powers to regulate the broadcast industry, as a medium for expression. Interestingly, the right of freedom of expression and the press is a fundamental right, enshrined in section 39 of the constitution. Section 39(2) provides: “Without prejudice to the generality of subsection (1) of this section, every person shall be entitled to own, establish and operate any medium for the dissemination of information, ideas and opinions.”

    Of significance is the regulatory powers, in the proviso, to section 39 (2), to wit: “Provided that no person, other than the government of the federation or a state or other person or body authorised by the president on the fulfilment of conditions laid down by an act of the National Assembly, shall own, establish or operate a television or wireless broadcasting station for any purpose or whatsoever.” From the foregoing, the regulatory power of the NBC can only be derived from an Act made by the National Assembly.

    So, can and did the National Assembly’s powers to make regulatory laws under section 39(2) of the constitution, extend to imbuing the NBC with powers to regulate the fines, determine the guilt and impose such fines on those licenced by it, to operate a broadcasting corporation, for alleged infractions of the controversial broadcasting code? First, is whether the National Assembly has the power to grant to a body created by it, what amounts to administrative, sub-legislative and quasi-judicial powers? Yes.

    The powers of the National Assembly is succinctly provided for, in the 1999 constitution. With regards to the issue at hand, section 4(8) provides: “Save as otherwise provided by this constitution, the exercise of legislative powers by the National Assembly or by a House of Assembly shall be subject to the jurisdiction of courts of law and of judicial tribunals established by law, and accordingly, the National Assembly or a House of Assembly shall not enact any law, that ousts or purports to oust the jurisdiction of a court of law or of a judicial tribunal established by law.” So, if any person is aggrieved about the extent of power granted by the National Assembly, the recourse is the courts.

    But can the National Assembly delegate the power to make a subsidiary legislation on broadcasting rights to the NBC? Yes, it can. In his book on Administrative Law, Ese Malami, quoted the finding of the British Committee on Ministers Powers, on the need for such delegation thus: “The truth is that if parliament were not willing to delegate law making power, parliament would be unable to pass the kind and quality of legislation which modern public opinion requires.”

    The power of the NBC, is provided by Act No. 38 of 1992, as amended by Act No. 55 of 1999. The Act gives the NBC expansive powers, which include: “Regulating and controlling the broadcast industry; determining and applying sanctions, including revocation of licenses of defaulting station which do not operate in accordance with the broadcast code and in the public interest; and intervening and arbitrating in conflicts in the broadcast industry.”

    Clearly from the foregoing, the NBC, through its organs has powers to regulate the broadcast industry. The two main organs of the NBC, are the Board of the Commission and the Board of the Management. While the Board of the Commission is vested with the authority to make policies, the Board of Management has the power to implement such polices and run the commission. Could the management determine a new broadcast code, without the approval by the board, as claimed by the board? I doubt.

    Significantly, the chairman of the NBC Board, Ikra Bilbis, has vehemently disagreed with the Acting Director General, Armstrong Aduku Idachaba, on the propriety of the new broadcast code, and the heavy sanction imposed on Nigeria Info 99.3Fm. The chairman said that due process was not followed, and warned against making the broadcast code a disincentive to private investment in the broadcast industry.  He also claimed that the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, is obtrusively intervening in the running of NBC. Of note, the role of the minister, in the law establishing the commission is very minimal, and he cannot lawfully take over the functions of the board, as alleged.

    The critics of the fine imposed on Nigeria Info 99.3 consider the fine as draconic, and this column agrees with that. But also important, is whether the statement by Obadiah Mailafa amounts to a criminal defamation, and whether the channel can be punished without the author being convicted by a court of competent jurisdiction? Further challenge is to determine what constitutes a hate speech. For instance, can a factual statement be a hate speech? No doubt, the fine imposed by the NBC would be subjected to judicial review, to determine whether NBC’s administrative adjudication followed due process.

    In summary, the Nigerian court will be expected to observe the dictum of Lord Greene, in the English case of Caltona Ltd vs Commissioner of Works & ors, (1943) 2 All ER 560 at p.564, to wit: “All the courts do is to see that the power which is claimed to be exercised is one which falls within the four corners of the powers given by the legislature and to see that those powers are exercised in good faith. Apart from that, the courts have no power at all to inquire into the reasonableness, policy, the sense or any other aspect of the transaction.”

  • The envoy Abacha couldn’t settle or scare

    The envoy Abacha couldn’t settle or scare

    Olatunji Dare

     

    FOLLOWING the official acknowledgment of Chief MKO Abiola as winner of the 1993 Presidential election and the proclamation of June 12 as “Democracy Day,” former United States Ambassador to Nigeria Walter Carrington figured prominently practically on every roster of persons deemed worthy of being officially honoured for their momentous contribution to the struggle to re-establish legitimate rule in Nigeria.

    Carrington’s tour of duty coincided with a period when all the things Nigerians said could never happen in their country happened time and again, routinely. There was, first, the contrived confusion in the run-up to the presidential election, the capstone of a transition that had been eight years in the making.  Then the annulment; then Ernest Shonekan’s Interim farce, and then the infernal Sani Abacha.

    In that time of tyranny, Carrington never flinched from speaking truth to power; he never shied away from identifying with the democratic yearnings of the Nigerians. Until his death last week at age 90, he stood as a pillar of inspiration as Nigeria faltered and stumbled on its journey to democracy and development.

    It says a great deal about his faith that we would get it right that he spent much of his final years in Nigeria.  He had come to Nigeria as the representative of a foreign power that recognised and admired Nigeria’s great potential but also felt curiously ill at ease with prospect of that potential translating into actuality.  He never shared his country’s ambivalence, however.

    Carrington pined for a Nigeria that would take its place as one of the world’s leading nations, a spiritual home to Black humankind. The tributes and the outpouring of grief that followed his passing bear powerful testimony to the respect and affection he commanded among the attentive audience.

    Among my many interactions with him, one in particular clings in my memory.  It was the Fourth of July reception in 1997, marking the 221st independence anniversary of the United States, an account of which had appeared in this space.

    Even for a time of year when the skies parted without ceremony and seemed in no hurry to close, the rain that fell that Friday morning was unusually heavy.  And it threatened to wash out the most eagerly awaited event on the diplomatic calendar.

    Then, it lifted just as suddenly as it had begun.  The clouds dispersed, and bright sunshine suffused the landscape.  A cool, crisp wind wafting across from the sea that provides a stunning backdrop to the official residence of the Ambassador of the United States dissolved the muggy heat of the preceding days.  Nature in its mysterious ways had turned a looming washout to a soothing prelude.

    By 4:30 p.m., the grounds thronged with guests.  Virtually everyone who was somebody, thought he was somebody or aspired to be somebody was there.  Stewards in their starched, snow-white uniforms drifted with clockwork precision from one cluster of guests to another, offering trays of tantalizing snacks. Other stewards followed with cocktails.

    In groups small and large, long-lost friends and comrades and colleagues carried on animated chatter about – what else – the latest barbarities that Sani Abacha and his confederates had visited on the people, the general hopelessness to which they had sentenced their compatriots, and the indifference of an international community held hostage by Foreign Minister Tom Ikimi’s gangsta diplomacy.

    Free at least for the moment from fear of being abducted, kidnapped, disappeared, mugged, or killed in a drive-by shooting, they compared notes, reviewed strategy and tactics, and contemplated the way forward.

    Not a few secret and not-so-secret agents of the Abacha regime had infiltrated the reception in one guise or disguise, but it was easy to keep them at bay or avoid them altogether.

    All too soon, it was time for the main event.

    Carrington took his place at the podium.  One step behind him stood his elegant Nigeria-born wife, Arese.  To his right, a United States marine stood at ramrod attention, cradling the Stars and Stripes.

    On the occasion of his country’s independence anniversary, Carrington began, nothing would be more fitting than revisiting  the circumstances that had led  British colonies in the New World to renounce foreign rule way back in 1776, and the very words that had inspired and sustained the struggle unto victory.

    Whereupon he began to read in that resonant and sometimes haunting baritone, the storied text of the (American) Declaration of Independence.

    “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with rights that, among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among them, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter it, and to institute a new government.”

    The authors of the Declaration never held these propositions to be truths, of course, much less self-event truths. Theirs was a slave society.  Even today, America has to be reminded that Black Lives Matter.

    But in that place and at that time, the lofty ideals of the Declaration counted for much more than its contradictions.

    A hush fell upon the assembly.

    “All experience has shown,” Carrington continued, his voice precisely modulated, “that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while the evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.  But when a long line of abuses and usurpations evince a desire to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such a government, and to provide new grounds for their future security.”

    It was as if time itself and indeed all the elements stood still,  The only thing astir was that haunting, almost taunting, baritone, projected far and wide by the public address system and the wind.

    But Carrington was only warming up.

    “The history of the present king is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States. . .

    “A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. . .”

    The hush had deepened with Carrington’s rendering of each line of the litany of woes residents of the American colonies suffered during British rule. But virtually every line reflected the barbarities the loathsome General Sani Abacha and his regime were visiting upon the Nigerian public.

    By the time Carrington was done, the atmosphere had taken on an unsettling resemblance to the proverbial calm before the raging storm. The assembled guests looked nervously at one another, shook their heads in sorrow and sighed deeply in despair and unspoken rage.

    If Carrington had ended this command performance by saying nothing more electrifying than “Eminent sons and daughters of Nigeria, the future of your country lies in hour hands,” I suspect that most of the guests would have yanked off their ornately embroidered apparel and fancy suits and stormed Bonny Camp and Kam Selem House.  And the revolution would have begun in earnest.

    Abacha never forgave Carrington.

    His propagandists put it out that Carrington was embittered because the regime had refused to grant him a lucrative oil concession.  If he had ever made such a request, they would have used it to destroy him.

    Abacha sent his goons to invade a private residence where a reception was being held for Carrington on the eve of his departure from Nigeria, claiming “intelligence reports” that an armed robbery was in progress in the neighbourhood. When the guests relocated to another venue, the regime’s goons followed them there and dispersed them.

    The regime celebrated Carrington’s departure at the end of his tour as signal achievement of Tom Ikimi’s gangsta diplomacy.

    Today, Abacha and his enablers are justly held in loathing abhorrence.  But Walter Carrington stands splendidly venerated.

     

    •For comments, send SMS to 08111813080