Category: Tuesday

Olatunji Dare

IF Dr Jerry Gana or his friends are reading this piece, they should rest easy.  It is not about him.

Since his most recent presidential bid failed, the genial former academic who has logged probably a great deal more mileage across political territory and political appointments than most Nigerians living or dead has barely registered in the news.

He always kept a low profile anyway in his many manifestations as a professor of geography, senator, director of the agency for food and rural development DFRRI, chief of the agency for social mobilization MAMSER, minister of agriculture and national resources, minister of information and culture, minister of information and national orientation, minister for cooperation and integration in Africa, and in his several runs for president.

These appointments encompassed the era of military president Ibrahim Babangida, the interim administration of the deluded Ernest Shonekan, the brutal regime of Sani Abacha and Olusegun Obasanjo’s two terms.  But Gana never lost his equanimity, his even temperament.  More importantly, he was never tainted by scandal.

This piece is about Jeremiah Useni, or Jerry as he likes to be called, another perennial presence in the political firmament who has been around for so long and held so many political appointments on so many fronts that even members of the attentive audience might be forgiven if they have forgotten that he was a military officer for practically all those years, more so, since along the way, he took the evocative title of Sardauna of Langtang and became chair of the National Council of Traditional Rulers.

Few Nigerians have been given as many opportunities as Useni to serve the public and make a difference in the lives of his compatriots and the fortunes of his country – minister of transport and aviation, military governor of the old Bendel State, minister for Abuja Federal Capital Territory, and member of the Senate, the only position he won through an election rather than preferment.

Somebody once said that they just kept moving him from one gold mine to another

When Useni was appointed Minister of Transport Aviation, he was assigned the house formerly occupied by Umaru Dikko, who was well know known for his aristocratic taste.  A former student of mine, a senior official in that ministry, was assigned to get the house ready for the incoming occupant.

Virtually everything had to be upgraded.  Appliances had to be the latest.  Furnishings, crockery, flatware and stemware had to be the finest.   Taking a cue from mai gida, the mai guard said the black-and-white television in his post was outmoded.  Pronto, the mai gida ordered that it be replaced with the latest, in living colour.  And so on and so forth.

One day the supervising official, my former student, came to my office at the University of Lagos, utterly dejected.  He said he was scandalised by the cost of getting the house ready for Useni and was going to ask to be transferred to another department or ministry.  He said he feared that if it became public, the whole thing was going to stir up public outrage and that there         was no way he could defend or explain it away.

Today’s civil service, it is necessary to interject, is governed by a different ethos.

From Useni’s profligacy regarding the furnishing of his official residence, it was but a natural progression to the acquisition spree he embarked upon when he was named minister for the Abuja Federal Capital Territory.

That portfolio made him sole administrator and dispenser of prime real estate worth at least as much as Nigeria’s oil fields.  And you needed no oil rigs, no pipelines, foreign technical partners, no syndicated loans, and no long wait to cash in.  All you needed was access to Useni, and you emerged clutching a piece of paper allocating a piece of the choice land to you.

It was a fail-safe transaction, translating into instant wealth, in cash.

Useni cornered a vast swath of the estate for himself, not forgetting his friends and cronies.  With funds of dubious provenance, he acquired and acquired more, on a scale beyond belief:  shopping malls, warehouses, residential homes, office blocs, undeveloped parcels of land all over the country.  When a man celebrates his 17th wedding anniversary on a lavish scale as Useni did, you know that money is no longer his problem but how to spend it.

To be specific, his acquisitions confiscated by the Federal Government, apart from the N4 billion reportedly recovered from one of his homes, N2 billion of it in foreign currency, included a terminal in Jos, from where he operated a transport service with a fleet of 20 buses;  controlling shares in a bank, two shopping malls in Abuja, 40 lock-up stalls in Garki and Wuse districts of Abuja, more than 70 undeveloped plots in Abuja, more than 30 houses in Langtang and Abuja, and 43 personal cars.

Not even the “special oil allocations” he said he had enjoyed “along with others” for three years as a member of the Armed Forces Ruling Council can begin to account for his sprawling portfolio, of which the foregoing is but an abbreviation.

It is as if Useni had, well before his first public appointment, taken a vow to compensate himself over and over again for, and insulate himself from, the material deprivations of his childhood years in his native Langtang.

Before then, he had been unmasked as the official who procured the women and manned the gates while his friend and principal Sani Abacha indulged himself in orgies of debauchery that eventually claimed his life.

For a time, Useni vanished from headlines and the footnotes.  Not even his comprehensive notoriety, it seemed, was enough to earn him the attention of the junk press.  So they left him severely alone, thinking that he was finished.

But Useni is nothing if not durable.

He would bob up among the unrepentant enablers of Sani Abacha’s brutal dictatorship parading themselves as apostles of democracy, and even emerge as a chieftain of the ANPP, and later chair of its breakaway faction, the Democratic Party.

Losing his bid for election to the Senate on the platform of that party in 2011, Useni defected to the PDP and was four years later elected to the Senate on that platform.  Not one to settle for mere “distinguished senator” when he can return to being “His Excellency,” and “Executive Governor” as a civilian, he entered the race for Plateau State governor, against Simon Lalong, the incumbent and his daughter’s former classmate.

On every lip, the question was:  What does Jerry still want? He lost.

Useni’s latest quest ended last week when the Supreme Court affirmed the verdicts of the lower tribunals and held that his appeal lacked merit.  And now, Useni finds himself in the unusual position of wielding no authority from an appointive office and no influence from a political perch.

In the decades of his immersion in Nigeria’s public life, it is doubtful whether he has ever had a chance or an inclination to reflect seriously on his career and what it all means.

This is perhaps Useni’s best chance to do so, forthrightly.

What are his signal achievements in the ministries and agencies over which he presided? Where are the monuments he built? What marks did he make on public policy, and on the lives of his compatriots?  How is he going to be remembered?  In short, what is his legacy?

He should not leave the answers entirely to history.

Olatunji Dare

FINALLY, finally, the best authorities on the English language have decided to enrich it by yielding to some of the more creative and distinctive locutions that have emerged from Nigeria over the decades and will no doubt continue to emerge.

In its latest update, the Oxford English Dictionary catalogues a number of Nigerian English words make it into the dictionary for the first time, most of them borrowings from Nigerian languages, or unique Nigerian coinages that entered English in the 1970s and 1980s.

This development is liberating.  One can now use terms such as buka, or its more gentrified form bukateria without having to explain their meaning to the uninitiated, or even mama put, which at first blush seems incomplete, an expression arrested mid-way. Mama put what? But its apparent incompleteness, I suspect, is what really distinguishes it.

I suspect that it originated from the average Nigerian’s disdain for standard measures. The food vendor (mama) dishes out food worth in her judgment the exact amount the buyer has indicated, but the buyer will have none of it.  So, the buyer implores the vendor, mama to put more, (shades of Oliver Twist) for the same price.  From this, it was but a short step to mama put as entreaty and  destination.

Danfo makes the cut as a no-frills form of urban transportation; mass transit without the mass.  Perhaps much more than the defunct Okada Airline whose rutted remains now lie on the fringes of many airports in Nigeria, much more than its proprietor Gabriel Exemption Igbinedion and probably at least as much the university the named for himself, okada will now resonate across the English-speaking world as a motorbike taxi.

Let us face it:  gubernatorial, of or pertaining to governors, is an ugly word. It is also not a word for headlines, where short but bracing terms count for the most. So Nigerians clipped it to guber.  Now everyone understands what it means.

Agric has been with us for a long term as an abbreviation for agriculture, hence School of Agric, or BSc (Agric).  As in agric chicken, however, it is now used pejoratively to denote the brittle, commercially reared chicken, in contrast to the much tastier and probably more nutritious ‘native’       or traditionally reared) chicken.

I used to think that K-leg, was a wholly Nigerian locution for a condition in which    a person’s knees turn inward, resembling the letter K.  Its history, I gather, goes back to 1842.  But its usage to denote a problem, setback, obstacle, or impediment, has been overwhelmingly Nigerian.

I searched in vain for bow-leg, a condition in which the legs bend outwards, like a bow.  When I was growing up, the thinking was that you had to have bow legs to become a fine footballer, like the great Stanley Matthews and many of our contemporaries who excelled in the beautiful game.  And so, we walked on the edges of our feet, hoping to induce our legs to bend outwards.

It never worked.

Purists often frowned upon the use of next tomorrow to designate the day after tomorrow as an especially coarse indication of a poor education, if not outright illiteracy.  Now it is legit.  Eat your heart out, all ye stuffy purists.

I was pleased to see Kannywood there, depicting the Hausa-language film industry based in Kano.                I hope Nollywood, the much larger English-language move industry, has won recognition, too.  No surprises at the legitimation sef for self nor with chop, which has long stood for food or eating,

A young man who thought I should know much better once queried my using the terms “barbing” and “put to bed” on this page.  They had sneaked in at time of diminishing returns.  I admitted my error, and he and I became good friends.  Now the venerable Oxford English Dictionary says the usage is permissible.

When a Nigerian speaks of qualitative education, he or she will be understood to be speaking of education of very high quality, rather than about the quantitative variety.  And when he or she has a gist for you, or has been gisting with another person, it means he or she has some rumor, gossip, or intelligence for you, or has been sharing same with another

I must say I was disappointed not to find the popular uniquely Nigerian locutions on ground and not on ground in the OED update.  To say the former of a candidate for political office is to say that he or she has good prospects.  To say the latter is to pronounce the candidate politically dead.

Maybe these terms will appear in the next update, as well as “majorly,” meaning “for the most part,” and others the attentive audience are sure to bring up.

Of chutzpah and irony

You will have heard the perhaps apocryphal story of young man who killed his parents and at his trial asked the judge to show mercy because he was an orphan.

That trope is the classic example of what is called chutzpah (hootspah) in the Yiddish.  It means overweening impudence, unexampled temerity, in-your-face brazenness, outrageous effrontery, presumption of the most brazen kind, and like conduct.

I was reminded of that term and conduct bordering on it the other By Orji Uzor Kalu, who used to be the executive governor of Abia State and until recently the Majority Whip in the Senate as well as the Senator representing Abia Central in that body.

In the former office, he was presumed Excellent; in the latter, he was deemed Distinguished.  The titles came with the territory. He was nothing of the sort, of course, but he was never in the least embarrassed by the titles. Instead of striving to earn them, he disgraced and betrayed them through and through.

For each of the eight years he spent in the Executive Mansion, he virtually carted home Abia State’s statutory appropriation from the Federal Exchequer and turned it into his personal portfolio of assets without the least regard for the consequences.

Drawing on his mastery of stunt and subterfuge, he evaded justice for almost a decade.  But the law finally caught up with him, and he was sentenced to 12-year term in jail — beg your pardon, in a correctional facility.

It was from there that he filed for release the other day, on the ground that, for every day he was kept there, the good and deserving people of Abia would be denied effective representation in the Senate and a voice in the governance of Nigeria, contrary to the Constitution’s express stipulation that all States shall be treated equally.

The same Abia State he had sucked dry year after year without remorse or twinge of conscience.  The same Abia he had pillaged to build a personal business empire.

And now, irony in the United States, where race colours everything and reflected daily in the lived experience of black people, making their very existence fraught.  This condition is amply reflected in their language.

Driving while black.  Shopping while black.  Dining out while black.  Teaching while black.  Walking the streets while black.  Being ambitious while black.  Stepping out of line while being black, and so on and so forth.    Sometimes, just being black can create difficulties.

Banking while black is one of the oldest constraints that black people live with the States, was shown dramatically on the floor of a bank the other day.

A black had gone went to his bank to deposit a substantial sum of money won in a wrongful-dismissal lawsuit against his employers, whom he had accused of racial bias and do some transactions based on the cheques.

A bank official took a look at the cheques and immediately radioed the police, who stormed the banking hall in a patrol vehicle, with another as back-up.  They were heavily armed.

The bank’s officials said they suspected forgery and fraudulent intent.  It is doubtful whether they would have harboured such suspicions if the client was white.

And now, irony of ironies, the black man who was trying to deposit the money he won for termination of appointment on racial grounds has served notice that he is going to file a lawsuit against the bank that worked an embarrassing racial fuss over his own money.

Olatunji Dare

IT is perhaps just as well that the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Malam Abubakar Malami (SAN), peremptorily declared dead on arrival the security network, codenamed Amotekun, or Leopard, that state governments in the Southwest recently inaugurated to complement the federal law enforcement agencies that have proved supinely remiss in containing the menacing bands of marauders and their cattle herds that have virtually upended the way of life in their jurisdictions.

The project is unconstitutional through and through, Malami declared ex cathedra, literally moments after the scheme was unveiled in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital, by governors or their representatives from the six states, with leading traditional rulers and prominent indigenes of the Southwest in attendance.

No state government, whether acting singly or in a group, Malami went on, has the legal right or competence to establish any form or organisation or agency for the defence of Nigeria or any of its constituent parts.

“Security,” he declared with no sense of irony, “is the exclusive preserve” of the Federal Government.

He seems totally innocent of the fact that it was precisely the Federal Government’s inability to discharge that fundamental responsibility that led to the setting up of Amotekun in the first instance. But he was not yet done.

To leave its sponsors and supporters in no doubt about what they were bringing on themselves, Malami warned gravely, in the manner of a colonial officer reading the riot act to natives who have stepped out of line, that “the law will take its natural course in relation to the excesses associated with the organization, administration and participation associated (sic) with it as an association.”

For some five years, the Southwest has been under the siege of shadowy elements who carry out their grisly business in different guises and disguises.  They and their cattle herd devastate farmlands. They have been known to expel entire communities from their farmsteads, and to put to gruesome deaths those who dared to resist.  They have ambushed unwary travelers on the highway, kidnapped them for ransom, and subjected to horrible ordeals those they do not kill.

This campaign of murder and mayhem and arson and rapine, which cannot be attributed to the Boko Haram insurgency in the Northeast, has a longer, and some would even say, more barbarous history in parts of the North, notably Plateau, Kaduna, Adamawa and Taraba.   The Federal Government condemns each gruesome episode, rigs up some desultory resettlement centres for the displaced, and vows that the perpetrators would be brought to justice.

But few of the perpetrators are ever arrested; fewer still are ever charged or prosecuted, and the number of convictions must be one of the best-kept secrets in the country.

If the victims of the marauders can look forward to occasional material succour from the federal authorities, they cannot depend on Abuja for their safety and security even in the short or medium term.

That is the grim reality that led the Southwest state governments to organise Amotekun.

And yet, the nation’s chief law officer, at who bears no small responsibility for the pervading failure of law enforcement warns petulantly that they cannot do that, and reads them the riot act.  Haba!

The marauders, many of them their national origin unknown, enter and reenter Nigeria at will. But there is no record and thus no monitoring of their movements.  They roam the countryside dealing death and destruction with Kalashnikov assault rifles and other lethal ordinance that should be registered by law.  No record exists of their compliance.  Precious little has been done to dispel the widespread impression that they have powerful friends in high places.

If the Attorney-General and the establishment over which he presides had spent much more time enforcing the law than in spelling out its letter, perhaps the nation would not have descended into the lawlessness that now threatens the safety of citizens and the nation’s corporate existence

It is not even clear that Malami has the law entirely right.  For the law that makes security and safety the “exclusive preserve” of the Federal Government also confers on the people the right to organise to pursue and protect common interests and common purpose, of which safety and security are the most important.

In whatever case, to vest the overarching issues of safety and security exclusively in the Centre in a country that purports to be a federation is an aberration with few parallels.

But as I was saying, it is probably just as well that, at least in the matter of Amotekun, Malami is relating officially to the Southwest as if it is Abuja’s internal colony.  From reactions across Nigeria to his provocative utterance, he will have realized that those Nigerians who have experienced the mindset he represents feel deeply insulted, as indeed they should.

It is more; it is a calculated slap in the face of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, to whose political wizardry the APC owes in no small way its existence and ascendancy.

And it brings to the fore with greater urgency the demand for restructuring, or call it whatever you will: an arrangement that will honour Nigeria’s essential diversity even while striving to promote its unity, not one that seeks unity for its own sake, nor unity that brings grief of the constituent parts.

The stiffest opposition to restructuring has always come from those Malami represents and speaks for, and for whom the present arrangement is but a cloak for preserving their hegemony. They automatically conflate any talk of restructuring with secessionism.  They do not see it as springing from a yearning for justice and equity.  To them, unity is everything.

The ruling APC promised change to the constitutional order.  That was the platform on which it was elected in 2015 and reelected in 2019. But since then, it has carried on business as usual.  You cannot even accuse it of pursuing constitutional change at a glacial pace.

Raise constitutional issues requiring urgent attention, and Abuja says it is a matter for the National Assembly, which is only too glad to arrogate that overarching task unto its dilatory self. It is charged  with making laws for the good governance of Nigeria, but the vast majority of the laws that emerge   from that institution, even house-keeping rules, are initiated by the Executive Branch.

Any meaningful move to review the Constitution must therefore begin at and be driven by the Presidency.  There is no shortage of ideas on the issues that must be addressed to make for a more equitable and more workable design – the size and structure of the federating units, the relationship between them and the Centre, devolution of powers, and so on and so forth.

A first step would be to synthesize the ideas and solutions that have been proposed over the decades to address some of the most glaring deficiencies of the constitution.   The emerging document will then be discussed and debated in an assembly comprising no more than 10 representatives from the states, duly  approved by the state legislature.

This assembly will have three months to come up with recommendations, including whether a referendum shall be held to give effect to a reworked constitution.  It will then be the President’s duty to parlay the recommendations into a Bill for the National Assembly to enact.

By his ill-tempered intervention in the Amotekun issue, the Federal Attorney-General has given a fillip  to a cardinal issue in restructuring: the desire of a good many the federating units to set up their own police establishments. Opponents say the arrangement will be used to persecute political opponents.  But is the present arraignment not also abused?  And is federal abuse more acceptable than abuse at a lower level?

The remedy is to make and enforce laws that will keep abuse to a minimum and punish it wherever it occurs.

Whether Amotekun has come to stay and growl and rumble as its protagonists across the country maintain and as the marauders fear, or is dead on arrival as Malami has declared, one thing is clear: the clamour for Nigeria’s federating units to set up their own police force can only grow louder and more insistent.