The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Prickly governor, haughty emir

    Prickly governor, haughty emir

    Olatunji Dare

     

    “He had it coming.”

    “It serves him right.”

    “About time”

    “De man too do, sef”

     

     

     

    The subject of these sentiments and many more of like vintage, expressed again and again across media platforms, is of course Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, who was sent packing from the gubernatorial suite at the Central Bank of Nigeria last week by President Goodluck Jonathan.

    Sanusi had planned to leave that powerful office on his own terms.   In the manner of royals used to determining when they come and when they go and how long they stay, he had served notice that he would not seek an extension of the statutory term of five years.

    He might well have thought that, by that single stroke, he had at once positioned himself  to assert the autonomy that goes with the position and insured himself against the abject groveling and the shabby compromises that public officials often have to make to hold on to their jobs.

    He did not grovel.  But he carried on in the manner of someone who could not be touched, said his numerous critics.  He was all too ready to express an opinion on every subject under the sun and even beyond.  He talked far more than he listened.  It was as if he was conducting a crusade against the Establishment of which he was a part.

    He turned a purely technocratic job into a political forum and invested it with power and authority that went far beyond what its creators envisaged.  He reveled in controversy.  He dispensed public funds as if he was stricken with the Mansa Musa syndrome.   Sometimes, it was as if he saw the CBN and its sprawling bureaucracy as an extension of the Kano Emirate Council.

    All in all, his numerous admirers countered, he has been a breath of fresh air in the mouldy corridors of high finance.  He called attention to issues the authorities would rather conceal, such as the extortionate salaries and allowances legislators appropriated unto themselves under the table, and the opacity of the reporting system on oil export earnings.  He spent public money judiciously, for beneficent ends.

    Above all, his numerous admirers said, he had rescued the banking from the grip of a powerful mafia that had since the time of military president Ibrahim Babangida turned the industry into an organised racket.

    Sanusi had three months left on his term. To Abuja which had been chafing under his searing strictures, three months seemed like an eternity.  If he could not be removed, surely he could  be neutralized and kept so busy fighting for his name and honour that asking inconvenient questions would be the last thing on his mind?

    So, they got the Department of Dirty Tricks to work up to the most intrusive and titillating detail an alleged dalliance between Sanusi and a female executive at CBN they said he had employed without following the rules.

    From published text messages the twain were alleged   to have exchanged after a tryst at a five-star hotel in Lagos you could literally hear the moan of ecstasy and the joy of conquest.

    The Department of Dirty Tricks blanketed the media with these salacious reports, hoping that the public would rise in indignation, declare any public official involved in such conduct guilty of “moral turpitude” and unfit to hold high public office.

    There were indeed those who reacted in exactly that manner.  Some even went one better, demanding that Sanusi be hauled before the nearest Sharia court, tried summarily and sentenced to public flogging on his concupiscent butt.

    But by and large, the stories gained no traction in the media or in public discourse.

    So, the authorities fell back on the bureaucratic expedients of audits and queries. Those didn’t work either.  With his accustomed hauteur, Sanusi disputed the competence and authority of the sources of the queries and refused to respond to them. Nor would he resign, as President Jonathan requested.

    But Abuja had had more than enough.  It was time to unsheathe the sword of presidential power; time for the formerly shoeless boy from the creeks to teach the haughty prince from Kano who has never lacked for anything a lesson in realpolitik he seems to have forgotten: Power will always find a way.

    Didn’t Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna Sokoto and premier of Northern Nigeria depose and banish to Azare, in what was then Bauchi Province, the now former CBN governor’s iconoclastic grandfather, Muhammadu Sanusi, who served as Emir of Kano between 1954 and 1963?  Did the heavens fall?

    So who or what can stand in the way of a President vested with the powers of a leviathan in his resolve to dismiss an official he can no longer work with?  The Constitution only says the official cannot be dismissed without the consent and approval of the Senate.  It does not say that you require any such approval to suspend him.

    So, go at him, and do so with petulant vindictiveness. Humiliate him on the world stage; suspend him from office while he is conducting business in Niamey, in Niger Republic, on the nation’s behalf.

    In the foregoing narrative first published in column (“Desperate president, haughty prince” February 25, 2014), substitute President Goodluck Jonathan with the prickly Kano State Governor, Dr Abdullahi Dangoje and replace Sanusi, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria with an unreconstructed Sanusi as emir of Kano, self-absorbed and indelicate as ever, and you have the setting for a perfect storm.

    That storm rocked Kano last week and by the time it was over, Sanusi had become a forme emir, banished for the rest of his life, said the State government, to a rustic community in Nassarawa State, as far away a place as conceivable for re-creating the splendor and opulence  to which Sanusi had felt so entitled.

    Within 24 hours, Sanusi’s powerful friends, aided by a restraining order against the banishment, plucked from that desolate setting and whisked him to the more familiar ambience of Lagos.

    Whatever may have been Sanusi’s acts and omissions, the banishment must be seen in today’s circumstances as a cruel and unusual – nay, impermissible — punishment, and the Abuja High Court was right to grant him an injunctive relief.  That anachronism must be expunged from our body of laws.

     

     

     

    Odia Ofeimun @70

     

    For a year before joining the Editorial Board of The Guardian in 1985, I had read with profit and pleasure Odia Ofeimun’s weekly Op-Ed pieces for the paper as well as his frequent contributions to its Literary Supplement, then premier platforms for informed discussion and debate on ideas, public affairs, literature, and the arts.

    Odia OfeimuN @70
    Odia-Ofeimun

    I would get to know him much better in the five years we served together on the Editorial Board and subsequently. I found him enormously well informed on an astonishingly wide range of issues.  He was no showboat.  He was not in the least pretentious.

    But when the occasion called for it, you saw him at his most erudite, ranging seamlessly from one issue to another, domestic and foreign, from broad policy to the minutiae of governance, from personalities to the programmes they pursued and what became of those exertions.  He recalled facts and figures with stounding facility.  His grasp of philosophy, history, literature and the arts was immense.

    There are scholars who are everywhere and nowhere. Odia is everywhere all at once in the world of scholarship.  Sometimes, you wondered whether there was a book he had not read, or a subject he was totally unfamiliar with.

    Meetings of the Editorial Board sometimes took on the tone of a post-doctoral seminar, but Odia, who held only a first degrees from the University of Ibadan, more than held his own.

    Few encounters at the meetings were more enthralling than watching Stanley Macebuh, the urbane scholar and chair of the proceedings, and Odia debating some arcane point of literature, poetics or aesthetics. The point counterpoint, the cut and thrust of argumentation was truly edifying.

    Moved by his great learning on the one hand and the sparseness of his formal academic qualifications on the other, I said to him what an admirer once said to the novelist and social philosopher Arthur Koestler, a person of catholic intellectual pursuits like Odia:  “If you don’t take your degree, they’ll always find out the tramp in you wherever you go.”

    His peripatetic engagements contain a hint of the tramp, but Odia is no tramp. More than 40 books on various themes, four poetry collections, two anthologies and dance-drama bear testimony to his prodigious scholarship

    His natural home, it seemed to me, was a great university or institute of higher learning.

    But he has shunned all such affiliations, preferring to eke out a precarious existence as an independent scholar in the Max Weber mould. That is the true measure of his commitment to scholarship and ideas.

    Finally, in this short tribute, a word about character.

    One of the most searing events in Odia’s life was his dismissal from his highly influential post as private secretary to Chief Obafemi Awolowo, on account of someone else’s betrayal of trust.

    A highly confidential letter from Awo to his great contemporary, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, in the manoueverings that followed the controversial 1979 presidential election was leaked to the  media even before it had reached Azikiwe.

    Suspicion fell on Odia as private secretary, and soon hardened into certainty.  It did not matter that Odia had not for a moment set his eyes upon the letter in question.  He was sent packing.

    To this day, Odia would only say that he had nothing to do with it.

    It can now be revealed that the correspondence was leaked by, or with the connivance of MCK Ajuluchukwu, the director of research and publicity at the national headquarters of Awolowo’s Unity Party of Nigeria, who was privy to it.

    Aiming to cash in on the rupture, Chief MKO Abiola, Awolowo’s implacable adversary, sought out Odia and offered him a job at his Concord Newspapers on terms that it would be an understatement to call generous.

    Odia thanked him politely and declined, though he didn’t know where his next paycheck would come from, or when.

    Such nobility is rare in these parts.

    Happy Birthday, Odia, and welcome to the Club.  Get Femi Osofisan to impart to you our secret handshake, if he has not done so already.

     

     

  • Nigeria in a web

    Nigeria in a web

    By Gabriel Amalu

     

    The agreement by the police and the department of state security (DSS), to enforce the administrative banishment of the deposed Emir of Kano, Mohammed Sanusi, to Awe, in Nassarawa state, exposed our country as a feudal democracy.

    According to the midwives of this strange doctrine, it is in accordance with tradition that a deposed Emir, should be forced to go on exile. And pronto, security agencies created under the 1999 constitution (as amended), obeyed a command not within the contemplation of the constitution that created them. What a travesty of constitutionalism.

    So, if we may ask, which law is supreme in Nigeria? The 1999 constitution of the federal republic of Nigeria, or the customs and mores of the constituent parts of the country? If it is the constitution, under what part of the constitution or laws derived therefrom, was the former Emir banished from Kano, and other parts of Nigeria to Awe?

    But if such an archaic custom is supreme, one can then ask, can a talakawa, depose and exile the supreme leader of the Kano Emirate?

    Perhaps our nation is trapped in the web of a feudal democracy? While the power elites answer modern titles like governors and presidents, and exercise powers donated as such by the constitution, they are at hearts, feudalists, and so acts as feudal lords when dealing with the electorates, who they treat as subjects.

    Could this conflicting mind-set be the reason why our nation is trapped in a web of underdevelopment? Could it be why, corruption is so endemic, as public officials see public funds as belonging to the chief executive, because he has custody of the funds in trust?

    While it is heartening that a federal High Court has granted an interim relief to the Emir, based on which the Governor of Kaduna State, Mallam El Rufai, sprang the Emir out from the illegal detention, if truly we are a democratic nation, those who gave the unlawful order, and those who obeyed it, should be sanctioned under the law.

    It should not be glossed over that despite the clear provisions of our constitution on the liberty of citizens, a so called Attorney-General, whether of state or federal, or even the president of the country or the governor of a state can unilaterally without a court order, order the banishment and detention of a citizen, without consequences.

    The provision of sections 35 and 41 are clear, and if an eminent citizen like Sanusi, can be treated with such indignity, it is better imagined how the rich and mighty treat the poor and lowly in our society, without consequences.

    Section 35(1) of the 1999 constitution says clearly: “Every person shall be entitled to his personal liberty and no person shall be deprived of such liberty save in the following cases and in accordance with a procedure permitted by law.”

    The circumstance upon which a person can be deprived of his liberty were listed in paragraphs a-f. Paragraphs (a) provide: “in execution of the sentence or order of a court in respect of a criminal offence of which he has been found guilty”, (b) “by reason of his failure to comply with the order of a court or in order to secure the fulfilment of any obligation imposed upon him by law”, and (c) “for the purpose of bringing him before a court in execution of the order of a court or upon reasonable suspicion of his having committed a criminal offence, or to such extent as may be reasonably necessary to prevent his committing a criminal offence”

    The other three paragraphs deals with a minor who is apprehended for the purpose of his education or welfare; a person suffering from infectious disease, persons of unsound mind, drug addicts, or vagrants for the purpose of their care or treatment, and lastly, for the purpose of preventing unlawful entry into Nigeria.

    But for any of the aforementioned paragraphs, no person can lawfully be deprived of his personal liberty, as the Kano state government and her accomplices did to the former Emir, before the court intervened.

    Section 41(1) provides that: “Every citizen of Nigeria is entitled to move freely throughout Nigeria to reside in any part thereof, and no citizen of Nigeria shall be expelled from Nigeria or refused entry thereto or exit therefrom.”

    Subsection (2) make a number of exception which in no way can be alluded to the former Emir, to warrant the archaic, obnoxious and repugnant tradition of restricting the movement of a citizen, without a court order, as the government did.

    Read Also: Sanusi’s deposition and martyrdom

     

    If not the state government, who gave the administrative order that citizen Sanusi should be restricted to Awe, in Nassarawa state?

    Are the culprits ignorant of section 1(1) of the constitution, which provides that: “This constitution is supreme and its provisions shall have binding force on all authorities and persons throughout the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

    ”? In sub-section (2) it further provides: “The federal Republic of Nigeria shall not be governed, nor shall any person or group of persons take control of the government of Nigeria or any part thereof, except in accordance with the provision of this constitution.”

    Indeed, as far back as the 19th century, Chief Justice John Marshall of the United States of America, in Marbury vs Madison (1803) 5 US 137, adumbrated on the supremacy of a written constitution, when he said: “Certainly, all those who have framed written constitutions contemplate them as forming the fundamental and paramount law of the nation….” Nigeria no doubt, falls within the contemplation of the dictum by his Lordship, the Chief Justice of a country from which we borrowed our presidential system of government.

    Here in Nigeria, Justice Nnaemeka-Agu, of the Supreme Court, in Imonikhe vs A. G. Bendel State, held: “A constitution is the organic law, a system or body of fundamental principles according to which a state, or body or organisations is constituted.” Confirming the constitution as the summon jus,

    Justice Kayode Eso in Kalu vs Odili, also held: “It is both a fundamental and elementary principle of our laws that the constitution is the basic law of the land. It is the supreme law and its provisions have binding force on all authorities, institutions and persons throughout the country. All other laws derive their force and authority from the constitution.”

    For this column, while the circumstance of the deposition of Emir Sanusi, deserves our sympathy, what is most scary is the capacity of a democratically elected government, to exercise the power of a despotic government, by banishing a citizen, without any court order. Unless we wean our country from such flagrant abuse of the summon jus, we will never become an egalitarian society.

     

    Muhammadu Sanusi versus the North — who finally blinks?  That nestles in the womb of time!

     

  • Touching base with Patrick Obahiagbon

    Touching base with Patrick Obahiagbon

    By Olatunji Dare

     

    MY esteemed Aburo:

    It has been quite an intermission.

    Where to start, having regard to all that has transpired since our last correspondence, a determination rendered  especially fraught by the paucity on the one hand of the ennobling and uplifting, and on the other by the surfeit, the superabundance, of the stultifying and the soul-destroying?

    Best, perhaps, to dwell on what I perceive as some of the most consequential developments of the period under review, but in no particular order.  No hierarchy of significance, consequence or impact is here implied.

    Before we get into all that, let me say that I was profoundly discombobulated on learning that a good many of those you had counted as progressive elements and whom you had courted assiduously turned out to be political laggards, the type we shall always have among us, unfortunately.

    With consummate self-abnegation, you offered to place at their service as a Distinguished Senator, your great learning, your vast experience in the legislative and executive branches at the national and sub-national levels, your immense knowledge of human affairs and statecraft, your firm grasp of the history, culture and diplomatic sophistication that have sustained the Benin Kingdom for millennia

    You offered to deploy these sterling attributes to serve them, plus the attendant exertions and a judicious infusion of the usual resources, to say nothing of your legendary lexical dexterity.  But the resonance was lost on them.

    Were the whole thing not so lamentable, one might give in to not a little schadenfreude.  In place of the learned discourse, the incisive analysis and the stirring perorations that would have flowed seamlessly from you, we have elected officials advertising their sexual prowess on the floor of the House.  And Dino Melaye is even no longer in that conclave, being content these days to peddle his tinseled acquisitions on social media.

    Instead of coming up with proposals that will enhance the quality of life of the average Nigerian, their preoccupation is life more abundant for themselves.  And so, like underprivileged children loosed on an unprotected toy shop, their first order of business is to acquire new motor cars for each member, as they had done four years earlier, and four years before then.

    It serves your constituents right.  Next time, it must be hoped, they will make a wiser use of their opportunities.

    Of the many troubling political developments in Nigeria, I make bold to asseverate that none is more confounding than the bitter falling out between your former principal the former governor of Edo State, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, and the incumbent, Godwin Obaseki.

    It now seems almost beyond belief now that Obaseki had served loyally and dutifully in the Comrade’s second and final term as his hand-picked deputy, and had as a consequence been anointed by his erstwhile principal as his successor.

    The bequest contained more assets than abilities.

    Consider for a start the Comrade’s credentials as an authentic progressive, a results-oriented negotiator who knows when to float and when to sting and when to mix things.  Add to these a predilection for cutting through contention and concatenation to get things done.  And should his protégé ever be buffeted by the treacherous winds of Edo politics, the watchful Comrade stood ready to ride to the rescue.

    Few, then, could have imagined that one day, the tempestuous Comrade who had almost single-handedly forced a fearsome political fixer and his band of freeloaders into retirement, would himself         be declared a prohibited person in the domain of which he was lord and master scarcely two years ago by his former associates, a good many of whom he had lifted from obscurity to prominence and renown.

    Greater indignities followed.

    The Etsako branch of the ruling All Progressives Conference, of which Comrade is national chairman, stripped him of party membership, effectively rendering his position at the national level untenable.   His implacable adversaries – yesterday’s collaborators – pressed ahead and secured a court injunction barring him from representing the APC in any capacity whatever.

    Within minutes, Oshiomhole found himself locked out of the APC Secretariat, his redoubt.

    Who would have thought that many in the Governors Forum, of which he was once the livewire, would turn willing participants in what is looking increasingly like a political lynching?

    Another court has found for the Comrade.  I suspect the matter will now go all the way to the Supreme Court, as if that body were not sufficiently beleaguered already and in urgent need of rescue.

    As jurist and legal scholar, you will have taken more than a cursory interest in in the issues surrounding  the last gubernatorial elections in Imo and Bayelsa.  In the latter, based on authenticated results, INEC declared Emeka Ihedioha, of the PDP, winner.  Ihedioha had settled nicely into the gubernatorial perch when his opponent Hope Uzodinma, who had placed a distant fourth in the race, was proclaimed winner.

    Uzodinma had produced from literally nowhere some hitherto uncounted votes from some 380 polling units which, if added to his goal, would erase Ihedioha’s margin of victory and vault him to the winner’s pedestal.  The tribunal of first instance rejected this deus ex machina.  But the Supreme Court fell for it peremptorily, in what seemed like an instance of judicial magical realism.

    Then, on a mere showing of inconsistencies in the certificates submitted to INEC by Biobarakumo Degi-Eremienyo to back his candidacy for deputy governor under the aegis of the APC, the Supreme Court voided the entire poll literally hours away from the inauguration.

    Encouraged by these developments, some litigants have even sought to move the Supreme Court to reverse itself not only on these but on previous adjudications as well.  I have heard it said that the Supreme Court brought this upon itself by its timidity, its prevarication, and by the high susceptibility of some of the justices to unwholesome influences. Perhaps so.

    What is your learned and informed juristic opinion on these matters, Aburo?

    How has your thinking evolved on restructuring, which recently won a prized convert in former President Olusegun Obasanjo, zoning, and related matters? What have you made, if anything, of the Southwest’s security network AMOTEKUN and Abuja’, effort to smother it?   The sustainability of sealing Nigeria’s land borders to curb smuggling and promote agricultural self-sufficiency?  The insolent audacity of Boko Haram and its confederates?

    The nation is still grappling with the detritus of the apparently unfinished 2019, but they are already talking excitedly about 2013. But they are for the most part not talking about the policies that can sustain Nigeria as a going concern until then and well beyond.

    They take it for granted that the policies will shape, and then sell themselves to the people, and Nigeria will live happily ever after. Such optimism runs deep among the political class, in contra-distinction to the pervasive pessimism of our quotidian experience.

    Again, I would be highly gratified if you could favor me with your thoughts on these issues.

    Finally, and on a brighter note, l must enter an adumbration with regard to so a subject dear to your heart and mine.  You must have paid more than cursory attention to a recent bulletin of the Oxford English Dictionary (your inseparable companion) admitting into hallowed company, finally, some locutions previously abjured by the most fastidious users of the English language, domestic and foreign.

    Some people are celebrating “mama put” and “majorly” as an advance.  But some are denouncing them as ungainly intrusions.  What do you think, counsellor?  How far is the progressive in you willing to travel to accommodate new usages that gnaw at the stability of the lexical order?

    That would be all for now, my esteemed Aburo.   Eagerly anticipating the recondite response that is your trademark.

     

  • Ekweremadu on state police

    Ekweremadu on state police

    By Gabriel Amalu

    The flurry of meetings by governors of the southeast, south-south and northeast zones, to establish regional security outfits, akin to the south-west experiment, was predicted by this column. Last week, as the legislative assemblies in southwest states were simultaneously passing the security network bills, otherwise known as Amotekun, the governors of south-south met in Asaba, to plan a regional security initiative. Of note, the media projected the Amotekun laws as not authorising the bearing of arms by the security outfit.

    Each state will subsequently apply to the Inspector General of Police (IGP) to authorise its outfit to bear arms. Of course, by the provision of the Firearms Act, Cap F28, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria, 2004, the IGP has powers to authorise the bearing of certain categories of arms, while the authority to bear more sophisticated firearms can only be granted by the president. So, the arms with which the various mutating security outfits will use to defend their states will depend on the discretionary powers of federal office holders, not law.

    Well, Amotekun, according to knowledgeable insiders may also rely on traditional methods, like charms and magic, to defend and ward off armed bandits, and kidnappers. I look forward to when eminent office holders, visiting the states in the region, would ask the regular police to hand over their protection to these security outfits relying on charms and amulets. Well, in fairness to the promoters of the zonal security network, the outfit will also gather intelligence for the police and other security agencies.

    But will the proposed state security outfits and the touted collaboration deal the needed heavy blow to the high level of insecurity across the states in the country? I doubt. While this column is not an authority in African mysticism, to gauge the efficiency of charms, amulets and magic; my father who worked with the correctional services, before fakes took over our everyday lives, (may God rest his beautiful soul) told me that such things were ineffective when government wants to enforce law and order.

    Going forward, a more plausible answer to the grave challenges of insecurity trying to torpedo our dear country, should be a further amendment of the 1999 constitution, the Police Act, and the Firearms Act, to allow a shared policing power between the federating units and the central authority. Why state governors are excitedly working hard to convince the people they govern that oranges and apples are one and the same, instead of demanding for powers to buy apples, which they know is what is needed by their people, beguiles this column.

    Perhaps, the art of governance includes playing the ostrich? Interestingly, the former deputy senate president, and the senator representing Enugu West, Senator Ike Ekweremadu, has presented a bill seeking relevant amendments to enable the federating units – the states, share policing responsibility with the federal government. Except the governors are merely grandstanding about confronting the crisis facing them as chief security officers of their states, they should all latch on the Ekweremadu bill, to deal the challenge a heavy blow.

    Of note, sections 214, 215 and 216, of the 1999 constitution (as mended), which provides on the Nigeria Police Force, is very jealous of the creation of another police force. Section 214, magisterially provides: “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 other part thereof.”

    To completely emasculate and embarrass the federating units, section 215(4) first provides: “subject to the provisions of this section, the governor of a state or such commissioner of the government of the state as he may authorise in that behalf, may give to the commissioner of police of that state such lawful directions with respect to the maintenance and securing of public safety and public within the state as he may consider necessary, and the commissioner of police shall comply with these directions or cause them to be complied with.”

    But in a proviso, the power seemingly donated by the constitution was desecrated. It says: “Provided that before carrying out any such direction under the foregoing provisions of this subsection the Commissioner of Police may request that the matter be referred to the President or such Minister of the Government of the federation as may be authorised in that behalf by the President for his directions.” Such a nebulous provision, can be relied upon by the commissioner of police, for instance, when a state government wakes him up, that a village is under attack by herdsmen.

    To make this anomalous proviso secure and inviolable, subsection (5) provides: “The question whether any, and if so what, directions have been given under this section shall not be inquired into in any court.” So, while the establishment of an alternative police is unlawful, if the president and his IGP decides to make the governor of the state miserable with respect to use of the federal police in the state to maintain security of lives and property, the constitution provides them opportunity to lawfully do so.

    To put concrete on the emasculation of the federating units to provide reasonable security by themselves, the Firearms Act seals their fate. Of the three categories of firearms, referred to in sections 3, 4, and 5 of the Act, the governor cannot authorise the licencing of any. Section 3, which deals with category of firearms in the schedule part l, authorises the president to issue licence at his discretion, while section 4 which deals with personal arms, listed in Part ll of the schedule.

    It is with respect to the firearms listed in the Part lll of the schedule referred as muzzle loading guns, that the Commissioner of Police is expected to consult with the governor to issue licences. How the regional security outfits will use the muzzle loading guns to confront the bearers of AK-47, not to talk of the self-loading RPGs which has flooded our country is anybody’s guess. To compound the dire security situation, the ineffective security networks and absence of federal police in the remote villages across the country, makes the villages sitting ducks for the dare-devil criminals working to upend our country.

    Mallam Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State acknowledged his helplessness some days ago, when 51 indigenes of his state where mercilessly massacred by bandits. While his apology is appreciated, uncharacteristically, he didn’t offer a solution to the menace. Perhaps, apologies will now replace the condolences we have been used to getting from ineffective state authorities. To change the paradigm, the bill sponsored by Senator Ekweremadu, makes a lot of sense.

  • Supreme Court: between restraint and rashness

    Supreme Court: between restraint and rashness

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    In 1979, the Supreme Court cropped a blizzard, over the twelve-two-thirds crisis.

    The Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO), ancestors of present-day Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), had consistently used 13 states, as the twelve-two-thirds of the then 19 states, in every pre-election decision: registration of parties, certifying parties’ compliance with nationwide constitutional spread, and the like.

    But then came a looming electoral college run-off between the two leading candidates, as Section 7 of the Electoral (Amendment) Decree, 1978 stipulated, after the first round of the 1979 presidential election: National Party of Nigeria’s Alhaji Shehu Shagari and Unity Party of Nigeria’s Chief Obafemi Awolowo.

    NPN’s Shagari was nearest to breasting the tape.  Aside from having the highest vote count, he had one-quarter of the vote in 12 states. UPN’s Awolowo had the next highest in popular vote, but with one-quarter spread in six states.

    The Electoral (Amendment) Decree 1978 was clear: an electoral college showdown, between Shagari and Awolowo.  That college would be peopled by National Assembly members, elected from the same 1979 general elections.

    That was taken as given, and media pundits were already painting a scenario of possibilities, probabilities and re-design of partisan alliances, when Chief Richard Akinjide, SAN, NPN’s national legal adviser, outed with his joker: twelve-two-thirds of 19 states was not 13, but 12 states and a fraction of the 13th!

    The polity was up in a tail spin!  When the Michael Ani-chaired FEDECO bought Akinjide’s joker and declared Shagari duly elected;  and the body language of the Olusegun Obasanjo outgoing military order suggested the junta was tilting towards that decision, the tail spin exploded in sheer Armageddon, blazing with molten conspiracy theories!

    Enter the Supreme Court, the supreme battle ground that would cure that supreme headache — or compound it to supreme migraine!

    The apex court eventually went with the Justice Boonyamin Kazeem-chaired Presidential Election Tribunal, with a 5-1-1 split decision: five for, one neither-nor, one against.  Shagari was president!

    Whether that supreme judicial intervention was supreme cure or supreme bust was a function of partisan parallel lines that would never meet.

    Even then, not a few thought that decision gifted the 2nd Republic (1979-1983) a legitimacy kiss of death — from which it never really recovered, until its overthrow on 31 December 1983, after another round of rotten and fiercely disputed elections!

    In 1979 then, the Supreme Court was a solid pillar of conservatism, extremely wary of rocking the boat, even if the polity could have been better off, if it did.

    But in 2020, it appears the violent opposite: a ripple of activism, which exuberance borders on judicial recklessness — perceived recklessness that could well retard polite society; and tear off the mystique holding the civil polity.

    Worse: in the explosive electoral cases, the legal justice the apex court handed down appears to violently jar with social justice, as perceived by the teeming masses on the street, free or cajoled.

    Free or cajoled?  Yes, because much of the protests were organized reactions to express partisan angst.  But the real danger: those protests may have resonated with, using that legal-speak, “right-thinking” members of society.

    That sparked a lot of wild claims, of an apex court allegedly available for the apex bidder!  Again, much of that could be pure trash from sore losers.  But that they were mooted at all brought the Supreme Court no sheen.

    Besides, such wild talks risk gravely de-marketing the democratic order.  Indeed, had the political soldiers, opportunistic pseudo-saviours of yore, not rightly self-destroyed, those decisions could have jolted the civil order, with devastating consequences.

    That perhaps explained the supreme judicial-political hotchpotch of 1979, which though kept the martial power hustlers at bay, only postponed the evil day by just four years.

    But that was a best-forgotten era of heady military hegemony and cowering civilian interregnums — and just as well!  Still, this new-found Supreme Court activism appears insensitive to those dark and turbulent pasts.

    The Imo decision, which stripped Emeka Ihedioha of his eight-month governorship, was nothing short of revolutionary.  That set the Imo — and national — PDP wailing and screeching without end!  Indeed, ex-Governor Ihedioha still impresses everyone he’s yet in cursing mode!

    The thing though was that the PDP was always crying wolf, with no discernible moral compass beyond crowing after winning, and whimpering after losing: no matter how foul the winning was procured; or how fair the loss was earned.

    Nevertheless, might Imo be one of such rare cases when a band of wolves really came prowling? Ihedioha, struck by judicial Amadioha, really thought — and still thinks — so!  But his party is a victim of its own waywardness — crying wolf!

    In Bayelsa, APC’s David Lyon appears to have borne his own supreme judicial thunder with stoic grace, even if he was struck on swearing-in eve, rehearsing his inauguration; and did no wrong beyond his joint ticket being fatally infected by a name-crazy running mate, who popped five different names, on five different certificates!

    Some howl forgery, and insist the defaulting candidate be hauled in for a criminal charge.  But if the certificates were fake, countered others, where are the duly proven originals?

    With no proven fakery, therefore, not a few have declared the Supreme Court decision rather harsh — both on the running mate in the eye of the storm; and on his ill-fated principal, who had to surrender his thumping mandate, for the sin of another.

    The court appeared to have brutally exercised its discretion against both, in a case that could have gone either way.

    More than the tragic gubernatorial duo, however, the Bayelsa electorate were the grand victims: they said an emphatic yes; yet the court said an emphatic no!  By apex judicial diktat, minority vote trumped the majority — not unlike the biblical wonder, where seven lean cows swallowed seven hefty ones!

    That is no way of democracy, with its hegemony of the many.

    Still, on Imo and Bayelsa, the Supreme Court has bared its fangs on its supreme finality — even if it does so, not with supreme reason, but with well, supreme illogic, canonized as supreme legalese: we are supreme and final and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it! (appeal to force and threat); never thought this day would come — tears! tears! — when our decisions would be challenged! (appeal to pity).

    Why, might it be in this same spirit of supreme — ad baculum, ad misericordiam — fallacy, that the apex court harshly fined the party that took its controversial verdict with better grace, but gave the one with unfazed ill grace a slap on the wrist?

    Might the judiciary then be taking its own pound from an administration that has challenged it to square up to its sacred judicial duty, in its cardinal fight against corruption? Conspiracy theories!

    After the present debacle, the Nigerian Supreme Court should live its essence: a palladium of wisdom, restraint and utmost sensitivity; not a conclave of callow activism. Enough of this new-found exuberance, which threatens civil society balance.

  • Armageddon here?

    Armageddon here?

    By Sanya Oni

    Guess some Nigerians probably saw the appointment of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala into South Africa’s Economic Advisory Council more newsworthy than the looming fire threatening to consume their homesteads.  Who cares that South Africa, the country of Cyril Ramaphosa has again slipped into recession – the second in two years? What mattered, as far as many Nigerians were concerned, was that our Okonjo-Iweala (which some say has been denied recognition by her home government) has been drafted by the South Africans to help the country pull its chestnut out of the raging fire!

    But then, it would not be entirely in our character if we are not to be found chasing rodents when our house is literally on fire. Only a few weeks back, our ever boisterous tribe of “hailers’ actually gloated at the prospects of an economy on firm rebound; as against the International Monetary Fund had projection of 2.1% in 2019, the gross domestic product actually grew by 2.27% in 2019 – according to the National Bureau of Statistics. In that, the NBS would note that: “The strong fourth quarter 2019 growth rate also represented the highest quarterly growth performance since the 2016 recession.”

    All of that now belongs in the past. That the same economy is headed for trouble today is an understatement. As if we do not already have enough trouble mapping the potential impact of the Corona Virus on the economy, OPEC, the oil producing cartel was confronted with a stunning discount by the Saudis of between $6 to $8 on every barrel of their crude headed for Asia, the United States and Europe – the consequence of which the Benchmark Brent crude oil futures has tumbled by 30 per cent to below $34 per barrel – the steepest drop since the Gulf War in 1991. And this is nowhere the trouble still looming with OPEC’s leading oil producer, Saudi Arabia locked in oil-price war with the non-OPEC Russia over production cuts with the latter scoffing at the calls.

    We do have a fair idea of what the immediate future bodes. Never mind the rather optimistic picture painted by the finance, budget and national planning minister, Zainab Ahmed, about oil production mitigating the adverse developments; the single issue now is how much of the items contained in the N10.59 trillion naira ($35bn) budget instrument could still be salvaged in the face of the massive cutback in revenue.  And we are not even talking of such parameters such as the lavish assumption of $57 per barrel of our crude, or even the N2.18 trillion ($7.2bn) deficit hole – which the government hopes would be financed through foreign and domestic borrowing – all of which has, quite frankly, rendered the 2020 budget unrealistic.

    Soon enough, Nigerians would be required to prepare for another round of structural reforms a la belt-tightening. Trust our officials, critical projects would be gutted; for sure, nothing will happen to the massive gravy embedded in the service wide votes for which the bureaucracy is renown; or their legislative equivalence put out as running costs. Trust the executive branch to somehow take care of its own in the elegantly woven scam that our public finance has since become; the poor hapless workers in the bureaucracy are welcomed to another season of the gnashing of teeth!

    That was how it was in the past – and will – most unfortunately – remain in the foreseeable future!

    Nigeria is, after all, a place where strange things happen. For instance, only in Nigeria can a whopping $253 million (N91 billion) disappear from the excess crude account in a space of one month without the parliament or the states raising hell!

    Remember the alarm raised in February at the Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) that the strategic reserve account – the Excess Crude Account – went down from $324.968 million recorded on January 15 to $71.814 million by February! And the so-called rainy days have not yet set upon us! Has anyone yet raised question about the authorisation let alone the question of whether or not the amount in question was duly appropriated?

    So what have we learnt since 2016 – the year the economy hit the bottom? Never mind that claims of achievement are oftentimes outlandish; that the administration scored some hits is agriculture is merely stating the obvious. Sure, the country has done well in the area of boosting agricultural output; however that it has done pretty little to optimise the nation’s food processing potentials renders the claims of sufficiency exaggerated. We may have shut our borders to give junks and other unwanted stuff from coming in; only that we have done pretty little to address the roots of the problem: the poor operating environment which renders our manufacturing companies non-starters in competitiveness.

    So much for our claims of resilience, our economy continues to bleed from massive imports. From fuel to consumables. As a consequence, our currency – the naira has remained fragile – so fragile that Godwin Emefiele’s Central Bank has had to pump billions of dollars to keep it from hitting the bottom. With oil price now sub $40 a barrel, he will certainly need to do more and so Nigerians had better mount a vigil so Emefiele can find magic of keeping their beloved currency from a free fall!

    One good thing – we wouldn’t have to worry about fuel subsidy while the current cycle lasts! The government should be making profit instead.

    Think Armageddon is far-fetched? Think about it this way: picture what it costs to keep the war in the Northeast going – an expensive business; what the country requires to contain the banditry, kidnapping and other variants of anarchy across the entire federation.

    Add to it what it would cost the nation to put the 13 million out of school kids back into the school system; put the economy that is barely growing at 2.2 per cent side by side with population growing annually at rate of 2.5 per cent. Only then can one begin to picture the bleak future which lies ahead. And we have not gotten around to talking about what it would cost to modernise our infrastructure – a critical pillar in our quest to create a sustainable future.

    Still in doubt as to where the latest cycle of plunge in oil prices will take us?

  • Two defining speeches

    Two defining speeches

    Olatunji Dare

     

    WHEN the history of these troubling times in Nigeria is written, two speeches are guaranteed to be counted among the most consequential of the era.

    The first is the oration of the Most Rev Matthew Hassan Kukah, Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Sokoto, delivered some two weeks ago in Sokoto, at the funeral mass for the  18-year-old novitiate Michael Nandi, who was plucked from the Good Shepherd Seminary in Kaduna last January 9 by gunmen dressed in military uniforms and killed in cold blood.

    The second is former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s address at a ceremony last week inLgos to mark the first anniversary of the passing of the founder of the Oodua People’s Congress and medical philanthropist, Dr Frederick Fasehun.

    Dr Kukah’s presentation is the stuff of Vital Speeches. Comprehensive in its sweep, magisterial in its scope, arresting in its delivery, it was delicately balanced between hard thinking and strong feeling, and withal between despair and hope on the national scale. The expository quality accords with what the attentive audience has come to expect from the learned theologian.

    If the governing authorities heed his admonition and embrace his message of love and human solidarity, they may yet be able to steer the country away from the path of perdition.

    Obasanjo’s address is a product of nothing less than an epiphany.  Over the years, whether he  was in office or a statesman-at-large, few would have counted him even as a sympathiser of the movement to restructure Nigeria.  He held so tenaciously to a view of the inviolability of Nigeria as concept and practice long after his peers and cohorts and many in his inner circle had virtually given up that they called him “the last Nigerian” behind his back.  It was not an approving label.

    He had pitched his tent in the camp of those who believed that there was nothing wrong with Nigeria that a little patching of the framework here and a little tweaking there will not fix.

    Five years ago I doubt whether Obasanjo would have attended a ceremony with which the irredentist OPC is remotely associated, concerned that it would have sullied his credentials as an authentic Nigerian and apostle of the country’s indissolubility.  I doubt whether he would have fraternised with its founder

    But there was Obasanjo the other day finally acknowledging at a ceremony honouring Fasehun’s memory that the 1999 Constitution on which he was sworn into office at his Inauguration that year and at the start of his second term four years later is not working and will not work, and that nothing less than a “new order” based on a restructured polity can take Nigeria out of its present predicament.

    One must be careful not to make too much of Obasanjo’s apparent conversion to the cause of restructuring and all that it implies.  He may yet tamp down expectations flowing from what the public is entitled to interpret as his new stance.  But there is no reason to doubt that it is borne of experience and conviction, not convenience.  Not opportunism.

    And those who have been preaching the gospel of restructuring must embrace him, cultivate him and draw on his knowledge and wisdom.

    This page for its part welcomes the former president on board.  Better late than never.  By his belated awakening, he has redefined and clarified the debate on Nigeria’s future.  Henceforth, no one calling for bureaucratic amendments or revisions to the Constitution can expect to be taken seriously.

    The debate must encompass a restructuring of Nigeria to address the National Question forthrightly in the broadest sense, with justice for all as the primary goal of society and “national unity” as a means, not as an end in itself.

    Like Bishop Kukah’s, Obasanjo’s address is a timely summons to the governing authorities to think new thoughts, dream new dreams  and contemplate new directions that can lead Nigeria to security and prosperity.  There is where their real self-interest and the future of their progeny lie.  The safety of the present course is at once illusory and unsustainable.

    Together, Obasanjo and Kukah have defined anew and clarified the Nigeria Condition and its challenges.

    The 1999 Constitution was conceived in secrecy and written in unseemly haste by the rearguard of the Abacha regime following the dictator’s sudden death.  It was never vetted.  At the time it came into force, many of the political officials and bureaucrats who were supposed to operate it had not set their eyes on it.  Its preambular claim that it derived from “the people” was a brazen lie.  Some commentators have even gone so far as to call it a forgery.

    Forgery or not, a cursory review led the legal titan Gani Fawehinmi  to conclude that it would not work, riddled as it was by studied evasions, contrived ambiguities, and by all manner of obfuscation resulting from less than competent drafting. The only remedy was to write it anew, Fawehinmi insisted.

    It was not from collective resignation, however, that the 1999 Constitution has endured so long, despite its manifold flaws.  Citizen-led efforts were either criminalized, suppressed, or fatally undermined.

    Every effort by the governing authorities to tinker with, modify, alter or otherwise review the document that stands as the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria  has been misconceived from the outset, and then mired in false starts.  Thereafter, it has ended in futility.

    The misconception begins with the assumption that it is somehow the province of the National Assembly to review or revise the Constitution.  That is not the case.  The National Assembly’s remit is to amend the Constitution. This latter involves making piecemeal, incremental changes, in keeping with new realities, not a wholesale break with the founding document.

    It is a slow, evolutionary process.

    That is why in its 229 year history, the Constitution of the United States has undergone only 27 Amendments — or 17 if we discount the first ten Amendments that were grafted on to the original document at its ratification as the Bill of Rights.

    Revising or reviewing the Constitution is a different matter.  That is not what you do when you identify 43 matters warranting consideration in a review as the Emeka Ihedioha’s House of Representatives Committee did in its failed 2012/2013 effort.  Nor is it what you do when you have identified 50 elements that needed to be “reconsidered” in a new constitution, among them creation of states, devolution of powers, revenue allocation, and state police, as the Jonathan Presidency did.

    To do so is to seek to write a new constitution through the back door.

    The National Assembly has no mandate to write a new constitution.  That task belongs to a Constituent Assembly convened expressly for that purpose; one truly warranted by the preface, “We, the People . . .

    From this fundamental misconception, it has been but a short step to the false starts, the jiggery-pokery and the bad faith that have doomed previous efforts to give Nigeria a viable Constitution.

    If the latest initiative is not to suffer the same fate, Buhari must abandon the view that the task at hand is one of the reviewing or revising the existing constitution, and that the task belongs in the National Assembly.

    There may not be another chance.

  • Season of atonement

    Season of atonement

    Gabriel Amalu

     

    Last week, the Supreme Court excoriated two amongst the foremost living Senior Advocates of Nigeria, Afe Babalola and Wole Olanipekun, for asking the apex court to review its earlier final judgment in the Bayelsa gubernatorial case.

    In the judgment, the court held that the All Progressive Congress (APC) resounding victory in the Bayelsa gubernatorial election that saw the emergence of Chief David Lyon and Biobarakuma Degi-Eremienyo, as governor and deputy governor, were inconsequential because the deputy governor presented certificates with different names to INEC, and did not take appropriate steps to answer the discrepancies. Mr Degi-Eremienyo has however denied forging the certificates.

    As atonement for their jurisprudential sin, perhaps in the spirit of Lent (a period for fasting and almsgiving for Christians), the two learned silks were asked to personally pay N10 million each, to the three respondents sued in the matter. Of course, for the two legal giants, the penance is within their means to observe.

    Considering their status, what they may be regretting is allowing the politicians to lead them to sin. Like in the Bible, it was Satan that beguiled Eve, who in turn made her husband, Adam, to sin.

    Justice Amina Augie, who read the unanimous judgment of the full panel of the Supreme Court, was unsparing in denouncing the application made by the learned silks.

    She held: “I feel like shedding tears that senior counsel in this case would ever bring this kind of frivolous application during my lifetime.

    This court is not authorised and indeed lacked jurisdiction to review any judgment delivered on merit, more so when the applicants have not pointed out any accidental error or slip in the judgment.”

    She went on: “There must be an end to every litigation. It is settled that the decision of this court is final. This is final court and its decision is final for all ages.

    To do otherwise is to open a floodgate of litigation on appeals already settled by this court. There is even no guarantee that if these applications are granted, the other side will not come up with fresh applications for further review of the court’s decision.

    As I said, there must be an end to litigation to ensure certainty in the law.”

    Like Adam and Eve, who became afraid, after eating the forbidden fruit, when “they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the Garden in the cool of the day”, the two learned silks must have been squirming in the air conditioned court, as Justice Augie took her pound of flesh.

    But while the two counsels may have suffered embarrassment for accepting the brief, there are some key issues that should worry all Nigerians, including the learned justices who were dispensing justice according to our law.

    First is, will a reasonable man say that substantial justice was done in the matter? In R vs. Camplin AC. 705 (1978), a reasonable man “means an ordinary person of either sex, not exceptionally excitable or pugnacious, but possessed of such powers of self-control as everyone is entitled to except that his fellow citizens will exercise in society as it is today.” I strongly doubt if the hypothetical reasonable man would accept the Bayelsa judgment as serving the ends of justice.

    But if I may mimic Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar – ‘the fault dear Nigerians is not with our learned Justices, but in our laws, that our judgements sometimes do not do substantial justice.’

    Read Also: Supreme Court gets kudos for case review

     

    As I have argued strenuously on this page previously, the adversarial legal system we practice, do not allow the judges to go beyond the applications made by parties, and the argument proffered by their skilful lawyers, vis-à-vis the provisions of law (including what is commonly referred to as technicalities) to reach their judgments.

    For the Judge to go beyond the depositions and arguments in support will amount to a jurisprudential sin on the part of the learned Justice, and the atonement for such sin could include accusation of bias, descending into the arena, or outright accusation of incompetence.

    Of course, the atonement for sinning by a judge is more grievous than what the distinguished silks Afe Babalola and Wole Olanipekun are made to pay. For them, the baying public would readily ask for an orderly room trial by the National Judicial Commission, and then dismissal.

    As a lawyer and a trained mediator, but more as a mediator, let me hazard what the reasonable man would ordinarily look out for, in the Bayelsa case to achieve substantial justice. Did Degi-Eremienyo forge the certificates he presented to INEC?

    If he did, the judgment of the Supreme Court is satisfactory without much ado. If he didn’t and he was merely playing with several aliases in the certificates he presented, will the nullification of his candidature be a fair punishment for swearing a general affidavit, instead of petitioning the relevant institutions and taking steps as they demand, to authentic the results as belonging to one and the same person. Of course, the answer is NO.

    Another issue will be whether the ‘sin of the deputy’ should be visited on Chief Lyon, and the majority of electorate who voted for him to be governor? The reasonable man would ask whether Lyon was aware of the ‘infraction’ and sought to gain an advantage by it, to justify the faith that jointly befell the two candidates.

    With respect to the majority electorate, the reasonable man would insist they be given another chance to vote in their preferred candidate, as to do otherwise will foist the minority preference, over the majority.

    This writer has called for a review of our inherited adversarial legal system, in comparison to the inquisitorial legal system.

    Many of those who expected the judges to raise the questions I have identified as a reasonable man’s expectation for a fair outcome, in the courts’ judgement with respect to the Bayelsa State case may be rooting for the Inquisitorial legal system.

    According to Wikipedia, it is “a legal system where the court or a part of the court is actively involved in investigating the facts of the case.”

    For many, similar sentiments would play out in the Imo State gubernatorial dispute where the Supreme Court allegedly did not bother about the mathematical incongruity of their judgement, since they relied more on what the parties presented, or inadvertently failed to object to, at the material time.

    This column will continue to canvass a more indigenous legal system, which will try to offer what the ordinary man in the street who is reasonable, will adjudge as substantial justice. In this season of atonement, is there a way the courts can atone for the disappointments of the ordinary man?

     

  • Oyetola: Taking government to the people

    Oyetola: Taking government to the people

    Sanya Oni

     

    Most newspapers somewhat reported casually on the maiden Civic Engagement Programme of the Adegboyega Oyetola administration tagged “Apero” held in Ikirun, Ifelodun Local Government Area of the state on Tuesday last week.

    For yours truly however, the development would bring back memories of a similar initiative Labe odan initiated by the Bisi Akande administration during which state’s helmsman engaged with the ordinary folks.

    My initial excitement came from the realisation that successive administrations (even of different parties) in the state have since gone beyond merely embracing the concept to treating it as an important element of governance!

    In this, the State of the Living Spring may have scored a first among its peers in the federation!

    How could I forget Gbagede-oro through which Governor Olagunsoye Oyinlola engaged with the common folk? Or the sometimes supercharged Gbangbadekun – the no holds- barred citizen-engagement programme of the activist Rauf Aregbesola years? And now, Apero, from a supposedly taciturn governor who, some say, appears to be more interested in being judged more by solid achievement than forms?

    Of course, if I understood the common thread to be the need to inform the people on the priorities of government and to receive vital inputs into the formulation of policy, that thread certainly speaks more to the profound acceptance of the primacy of citizen-engagement in the development process by successive Osun leaders.

    ‘Apero’ – which in Yoruba means engagement, would seems not just a perfect fit for the season but a tradition worth showcasing!

    How many town hall meetings has Governor Oyetola hosted since coming on board? Most likely, several. I refer here to the countless thank-you visits to the people in the aftermath of electoral victory and an opportunity to re-affirm promises made.

    Apero is of course different: it is the entire government being taken to the people; an occasion for those entrusted with the public trust to be taken to task on their stewardship; an avenue for the people to make demands on their government.

    This point was succinctly made by the Commissioner for Information and Civic Orientation, Olufunke Egbemode in her welcome address.

    While congratulating the people of Ifelodun, Boripe and Odò-Ìtín federal constituency for the opportunity to interact directly with the governor and tell him their needs, she re-affirmed the determination of the governor to improve the living standards of the people.

    Let’s take some highlights from the governor’s engagement.

    Expectedly, one burning issue is salary payment – an area which the state has received bad press in the last few years – no thanks to the economic downturn. When asked, the governor simply stated: “I will continue to pay the full salary of workers and God will continue to help us”.

    How does he plan to do this – considering the state’s paltry allocation in the face of declining oil prices? To this, he says, “We manage what comes in by not engaging in wasteful spending.”

    The governor would also be taken to task on the planned review of the educational system flowing, as it were, from the recommendations of Education Panel Review Committee set up by the Oyetola administration.

    Read Also: Osun Obas back Oyetola’s policies on education

     

    The committee, at the conclusion of its work had recommended that the state revert to 6-3-3-4, as against 4-5-3-4 system currently in place – a development that has generated some buzz not only in the media but in the political circles.

    His short and simple answer was: the state Executive Council would look at the recommendations with a view to making a decision on it.

    The same with Opon Imo – an initiative of his predecessor, when asked on whether the state government will supply new ones, he stated, matter-of-factly that the one in circulation is still good to use!

    The governor also spoke on his government’s intervention in agriculture – specifically of the state government had been assisting farmers with fertilisers, seedlings as well as the grading of farm roads for easy accessibility through the Rural Access Mobility Programme (RAMP).

    Of course, his commissioners were not left out. Education commissioner, Folorunsho Bamisayemi, informed the gathering that the governor had approved the recruitment of 2,500 teachers to boost teaching and learning.

    He also disclosed that the governor had approved the payment of examination fees for those students qualified to write external exams.

    Old students association of various schools, he disclosed, were being brought on board to join hands with government to the standard of education in the state.

    Next to take turn was Rafiu Isamotu, the health commissioner. He told the gathering that the governor had approved the renovation of the state hospital at Asubiaro as indeed all General Hospitals, adding that the governor has taken steps to start cancer screening so as to detect early cases of cancer.

    He spoke of the governor’s approval for the purchase of drugs for all the 332 primary health care centres in the state.

    Special Adviser on Health, Siji Olamiju would also inform the gathering of the governor’s approval of renovation of all comprehensive health centres in the state.

    Not left out was Commissioner for Works, Engr. Remi Omowaye who, through a video documentary displayed to the gathering the intervention of the Oyetola administration in various sectors of the state.

    At the end of his presentation, he disclosed that the state government had earmarked N5.2 billion for the reconstruction of 54.3 km roads in the three senatorial districts in the state.

    For a maiden outing, it is certainly an impressive start. That is however not to suggest that the answers provided by the governor and his appointees would satisfy everyone.

    In any case, that was not the idea. The whole idea is to use the forum to reach the people; for the government to explain what it was doing on their behalf, and to help the people to appreciate the practical constraints facing their government and for the government to receive critical feedback on its programmes and policies.

    In short, to foster inclusive governance.

    The Ikirun outing would appear to have achieved these – and perhaps much more. As it is, the rest of the nine federal constituencies in the state can look forward to when next the Apero train will berth in their neighbourhood as the Oyetola administration has promised it will surely do. For yours truly, that’s true democracy as work!

  • Opposition by rascality

    Opposition by rascality

    Olakunle Abimbola

    His kith-and-kin kid selves it’s only a mild ailment. But those who know him not swear he is raven mad — Yoruba saying

     

    There is something, about a fallen big man, that chips away at common humanity.

    If Shakespeare’s and Greek classical tragedies are drenched in pathos, it’s simply because they touch the chord of common humanity, across races, across ages, across sages.

    You could feel the pathos in Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra; in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, and even in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, even if Barabas, the tragic hero here, was a cur, with no redeeming trait.

    Man, over the ages, always over-reaches himself.  Then after toppling and crashing, he consigns fellow humans to avoidable anguish.

    That is true of the February 25 36-year jailing for money laundering, of Olisa Metuh, the last national publicity secretary of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), during its boisterous power days.

    Frankly, unbearable Metuh, with his pre-trial hauteur, irritable stunts during trial to stonewall justice, and generally unrepentant audacity, is closer to Marlowe’s Barabas, than to either Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony, or Sophocles’s Oedipus.

    As the party he served, he oozes the public image of repugnance, devil-may-care imperiousness and in-your-face arrogance.  Could he be different in private?

    Pre-trial for money laundering, EFCC accused Metuh of shredding evidence and attempting to chew it all up — a charge Justice Okon Abang re-echoed with a bang, on judgment day.

    On the personal lane, a brazen Metuh traumatized the vice-principal of his child’s Abuja school, for the school’s temerity to seize his son’s phone, as routine discipline.

    Metuh, the unfazed African Big Man (apologies to The Economist of London), hit the school with security details in tow, and bawled at the poor man to identify himself.  In front of staff and pupils, he bundled him into his car boot, thundering: no IGP or SSS can save you!  At the high moon of PDP impunity, never mess with mighty Metuh!

    Even after the sun had set on the PDP power years, bristling Metuh in 2015 patented “the international community must see this, international community must hear that” — the grand credo that now powers PDP’s bathetic squeal: “democracy in danger!”, each time they lose out in the political sweepstakes!

    Thus, Metuh the neo-Don Quixote tilting at political windmills, bequeaths to his beloved party an eternal chase of shadows.  If you doubt, check out the PDP leaders’ comic tours, of foreign embassies and United Nations facilities, to report their country to metropolitan overlords and demand prompt sanctions!

    Yet, when Justice Abang banged down the first guilty-as-charged sentence, all that braggadocio vanished;  and the craven human in Metuh craved to obey nature’s call!

    Pray, was that, to parody our own WS in The Man Died — a mere titration, or the full sit-down strike?  Either way, he had only three minutes, under the watch of three court guards!

    Metuh’s all-too-human reaction re-echoes Barabas’s anguish in The Jew of Malta.

    True, Barabas lacked any redeeming trait.  Yet, when to ransom Malta, the Malta aristocracy annexed the entire Barabas trove, claiming the poor Jew should feel honoured, because another Jew — Christ Jesus — had earlier given his life to ransom humanity, you feel the unbridled heresy, cynicism and humbug of the Malta stance!

    At that moment Barabas tapped into the common human pathos.  So did Metuh in his tragic hour of truth.

    But Metuh’s pathos plumbs to clear bathos, in PDP and its regnant rascality: trivializing all, mouthing wild allegations, and vaulting official waywardness as its cornerstone of partisan policy.

    Over the Supreme Court verdicts on Imo and Bayelsa, PDP swings between two extremes, like a tantrum-throwing brat.

    Hear it serenade the apex court, the very same it had shellacked and reported to Metuh’s beloved ‘international community’, over Imo:

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    “Nigerians know that the APC has been going through a hemorrhage since the Supreme Court delivered valid judgments on Bayelsa and Zamfara, and as a result, they are no longer interested in the logic of these judgments.”

    In Bayelsa and Zamfara, PDP became judicial winners, after a fearsome drubbing at the polls.  So, “valid logic”, in PDP-speak, is clear, framed in the cynical finality, of that street lingo: either we win or they lose!

    Partisan cant was never more piously crunched!

    But should APC challenge its fate in Zamfara and Bayelsa, as PDP challenged its on Imo, the former ruling party let out a cascade of infantile threats: to seek a review of the Supreme Court verdict on the 2019 presidential elections, aside from decided governorship cases in Katsina, Kaduna, Osun and Kano states!

    Partisan cards are never more flippantly stacked!

    Even after APC got itself badly scalded, over its ill-fated attempt to get a Supreme Court reprieve over its Bayelsa debacle, the best PDP could blab were wild conspiracy theories, ahead of its own Supreme Court Imo review.

    From Solomon Lar to Uche Secondus, how did PDP arrive this bind?

    From the flamboyant Emancipator from the Plateau, to the Total Chairman of rut and unthinking from Rivers, how did the former ruling party hit this cul-de-sac?

    From cradle, Ripples never really thought much of PDP.  For one, its nativity of Army Arrangement (AA), apologies to Fela.  For another, ideological dissonance: the one, a social democrat; the other, a proud conservative.

    Still, PDP had own share of noble conservatives: the late Sunday Awoniyi of Kogi; Kaduna’s Ahmed Makarfi (Governor from 1999-2007) who ended Kaduna’s native-settlers’ perennial bloodshed. Even, the Donald Duke-Liyel Imoke-Ben Ayade continuum in Cross Rivers, the closest conservative answer to social democratic Bola Tinubu-Babatunde Fashola-Akinwunmi Ambode-Jide Sanwoolu continuum in Lagos.

    But much of the wheat got purged for mere chaff, when former President Olusegun Obasanjo started his brutal chiselling, to remake the then ruling party in his own grim image.  Enter the dragon, of soulless power hustlers that crashed under Goodluck Jonathan!

    Despite its past havoc as ruling party, and present endless bungling as flippant opposition, PDP is absolutely unrepentant.

    PDP is a classic case of that unfortunate Yoruba being that glumly self-serenades, while provoking a torrent of tears in others.  That dovetails rather neatly, if sadly, into the Yoruba saying that opened this piece: His kith-and-kin kid selves it’s only a mild ailment. But those who know him not swear he is raven mad!

    For dragging the country into mass penury in the years of plenty — and Metuh’s jailing is ample proof of that era’s free-wheeling sleaze — PDP takes absolutely no liability.

    Instead, it indulges in mealy-mouthed cant, infantile finger-pointing and crass hell-raising, to goad the simplistic against those trying to clear the gargantuan mess it left behind.

    It’s a classic opposition by rascality.

    The ruling APC had better learn hard lessons from the pitiful PDP.  To waste your essence in power, and gamble away your future in opposition, pays no one — not individual politicians, not the polity as a collective.