Category: Niyi Akinnaso

The crises engulfing the appointments of Vice Chancellors in Nigerian public universities (federal and state) reached fever pitch in the last two years. Even premier Federal universities are affected, including the University of Ibadan; the University of Lagos; and Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife as well as recently established universities, notably, Federal University at Oye-Ekiti. Similarly, notable state universities have experienced similar crises. They include Lagos State University; Rivers State University of Science and Technology; and Enugu State University of Science and Technology.

The immediate causes of the crises are threefold. First and foremost is the overbearing influence of either the Chairman of the Governing Council or the Vice Chancellor or both. In most cases, these leaders throw ethics to the wind and insert themselves in the process in order to ensure the selection and subsequent appointment of their so-called “anointed” candidate. The suspicion is often rife that these leaders want a compliant candidate, who would do their bidding—the Chairman probably to have his way with funds and the Vice Chancellor to protect his inadequacies after leaving office and to keep drawing funds from the university, which only his anointed candidate could facilitate.

Whether this is their true intention or not is immaterial. It is the appearance of guilt that matters. Even more importantly, interference with the process often spurs the University Senate and unions to cry foul, leading to internal crisis in which these bodies are thrown into conflict with the university Vice Chancellor on the one hand and the Council Chairman on the other. The result often is a stalemate as happened at UI and LASU, leading to repetitions of the process.

The second issue, often in service of the one identified above, is the deliberate flouting of the University Act as well as the rules, regulations, and conventions governing the appointment of a Vice Chancellor. Again, in most cases, the advertisement often deviates from established rules, while the procedures, clearly set out in the regulations, are often flouted.

The procedures are clearcut: The Registrar submits the advertisement to Council for vetting, following which it is published in at least two national newspapers. Manipulation often begins with the qualifications set out for prospective applicants and who receives the applications. Council thereafter sets up a Search Committee, comprised of members of Council and Senate. Its function is to monitor the inflow of applications and also reach out to exceptional candidates, who may not have applied.

Once the application deadline is reached, the Registrar submits all received applications to the Search Committee, which passes them on to yet another Committee of Council, namely, the Joint Committee of Senate and Council. The Search and Joint Committees are chaired by members of Council. The two committees should not have overlapping membership. It is the duty of the Joint Committee to screen the applications in accordance with the application guidelines and make a shortlist for Council’s consideration. The Council, as a body, creates the scoring matrix, the criteria for ranking the candidates, and then ranks them according to their scores.

Ideally, Vice Chancellors have no role whatsoever in the appointment of a successor. It is not their duty to groom a successor, as some erroneously suggest. Rather, they should mentor the academic community and, indeed, the entire university community, by displaying ethical, academic, and administrative leadership. To be sure, there are VCs who live by these standards. Unfortunately, however, a number of them flout necessary procedures, by using their office as a clearing house for applications, a role normally assigned to the Registrar, in his or her capacity as the Secretary to Council. Some overbearing Council Chairmen also often insert themselves into the process, some for the reasons stated above and others out of sheer ignorance.

A third issue is the injection of primordial considerations—ethnicity and religion as well geopolitics, particularly, the demand for appointing a “son of the soil”, that is, someone from the locality in which the university is situated. This unfortunate requirement applies to both Federal and State universities and involves both the elite and ordinary folks, including thugs and other riffraffs. This problem recently underlined the protests against the choice of Vice Chancellors at the University of Ibadan, where the elite demanded a son of the soil, and Obafemi Awolowo University, where riffraffs, apparently without elite input, made a similar demand.

Yet, from all indications, the process at Ife was rule-governed and rancour free. That’s why, as a first generation student on the Ile-Ife campus of OAU and a lecturer there for over a decade, I was so disturbed by the recent senseless protests, more so when they involved the barbaric display of charms and amulets, that I called on the Ooni of Ife, Oba Eniitan Ogunwusi, Ojaja II, twice to implore him to intervene, which he did but not as successfully as he had hoped. Negotiations are usually difficult with leaderless protesters, leading the Vice Chancellor, Professor Eyitope Ogunbodede, to request police reinforcement on campus.

The implications of these issues for the place and functions of the university in society are far-reaching. In advanced democracies the university is where political leaders are trained in addition to its basic mission of teaching, research, and service to the community at large. Ideally, the university is a microcosm of the larger society. It is the bastion of liberal democracy, fairness, and justice. Unfortunately, however, the issues reviewed above indicate the poverty of leadership and democratic values in our universities, not to speak of the abandonment of meritocracy.

Equally disturbing is the rate at which universities erode their own autonomy by inviting external arbiters. As if the interventions of JAMB and the NUC are not enough, university leaders invite external intervention, by throwing their institutions into needless crises. Thus, the Federal Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, had to intervene through the NUC, in the UI case, while Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu intervened twice in the LASU case. Perhaps in apprehension of possible crisis, the Ife Governing Council sold out their powers by needlessly inviting a representative of the Federal Character Commission to the interview process.

What is even more disturbing is the extent to which the behaviours of many a university leader simulate or replicate the behaviours of political leaders. Thus, the difference between the recent crises of leadership in our universities and the chaos within the political parties in preparation for the forthcoming presidential election is a matter of detail. They both demonstrate the poverty of leadership and the disrespect for established rules, regulations, and conventions.

As I was closing out on this column, it was announced that the coronavirus, code-named COVID-19, had hit the grim milestone of 6 million deaths worldwide. So far, however, against all predictions and expectations, the toll of the coronavirus pandemic on Africa has remained very low, compared to other regions of the world. This is especially true of Nigeria, which houses one in every five Africans.

After two full years of the pandemic, here’s how Africa stacks against other major continents (in parenthesis, infections and deaths, respectively): Europe (160m, 1.7m); Asia (121m, 1.3m); North America (95m, 1.4m); South America (54m, 1.2m), Africa (11m, 250,118; that is, just over a quarter million deaths). With a population of over 200 million, Nigeria has only recorded 254,657 infections and 3,142 deaths, whereas Brazil, with comparable population and climate, has recorded over 29 million infections and 652,207 deaths!

However, much less is known about the factors behind the relatively low infection and death rates in Africa than about the predictions of possible devastation of the continent by the virus. Those predictions were based on four key factors, namely, weak health infrastructure; lack of social safety nets; crowded spaces, especially in the urban centres and local markets; poor leadership, leading to weak or weakened institutions and governance failure.

Aware of these weaknesses, African leaders quickly took measures to address them, while politicians in Europe and the Americas were busy politicizing the pandemic or developing uneven measures based on contrived severity matrices for a virus that defies boundaries. Accordingly, as early as February 4, 2020, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention quickly established the Africa Task Force to combat the novel coronavirus. That was 10 days before the first case of the virus was detected in Egypt.

Within a week of the detection, health experts from the African Union’s 55 member states convened at the AU’s headquarters in Addis Ababa to jointly develop a plan, based on the recommendations of the World Health Organisation. The plan included several mitigation measures—wearing face masks; keeping at least 2-meter distance; avoiding crowds and indoor gatherings; and washing or sanitizing hands regularly.

In addition, African leaders quickly established molecular testing labs, adopted early lockdowns, and provided economic palliatives to the poor and the elderly in partnership with private donors. In Nigeria, for example, isolation wards were rapidly established across the country and the list of molecular testing labs increased exponentially from just a few at the outbreak of the pandemic to well over seventy within six months.

Although these mitigation measures assisted in curbing the spread of the pandemic in its early days, they could not explain the failure of the negative predictions, especially as the measures were relaxed, due partly to the governments’ inability to sustain them and partly to noncompliance as the economic effects of the pandemic began to take its toll on the restive populations.

Besides, Northern countries with much better health facilities and stronger institutions succumbed to the pandemic at a much higher rate than African countries, despite the adoption of the same mitigation measures. Even after vaccinating well over half of their populations against the virus, infections and deaths still soared among Northern populations in response to the Omicron variant, which incidentally originated on the African continent, specifically in South Africa.

These variable statistics have rekindled the search for explanations for the relatively low COVID-19 infection and death rates in Africa. Two major factors were quickly identified, namely, (a) Africa’s demography, typified by a very large young population, and (b) cross-protective immunity.

Put simply, it is argued that Africa has demographic protection against COVID-19 due to its young population: Youths (35 years old and below), constitute over 60 percent of the population. Indeed, the average age in Africa is 20, compared to 39 in the United States and 43 in Europe. The age logic is based on the low infection and death rates among youths across the globe. The youth-led #EndSARS protests in the midst of the pandemic in October 2020 attests to this logic.

A second explanatory factor, cross-protective immunity, is based on the assumption that Africans have developed strong immunity as a result of repeated exposures to various kinds of pathogens. Compared to Northern populations, it is true that Africans in general have been exposed to more parasitic diseases—from measles and smallpox to malaria, polio, and Ebola, not to speak of the endemic common cold caused by human coronaviruses. Nevertheless, as I pointed out earlier on this column, the explanatory power of this factor awaited scientific proof.

It would now appear that evidence is emerging that past infections with parasitic diseases might provide some level of immunity against COVID-19. Late last year, researchers in Uganda found that COVID-19 patients highly exposed to malaria were less likely to suffer severe disease or death than people with little or no exposure to the parasite.

Similarly, several studies have shown that preexisting immune responses against endemic human coronaviruses that cause the seasonal common cold can mitigate the manifestation of disease from exposure to COVID-19.  Along this line, a recent study, carried out by scientists at Imperial College London, found that high levels of pre-existing T cells (a type of cell in the immune system), created by the body as a result of infection with other human coronaviruses, such as the common cold, are effective in preventing infection from COVID-19. The study, therefore, suggests that there are so-called “never Covid” people, that is, those who never become sick of COVID-19, even after exposure to the virus. This study is the more significant, given the high levels of exposure to parasitic diseases in Africa.

There is yet another research indicating that, when compared to COVID-19 patients of European heritage, a whopping 80 percent of COVID-19 patients of African ancestry had the protective gene variant (rs10774671-G) that is effective in breaking down the virus that causes COVID-19. This is not surprising since the most primitive (that is basic, original, or oldest) genes are to be found on the African continent. This means that there is no gene variant found elsewhere on the globe that could not be traced to Africa.

Yes, there would be unreported cases of COVID-19 infections and deaths, but that is not peculiar to Africa. All considered, Africa has held its own against COVID-19. It is not yet time, however, to let down the guard.

Historical, anthropological, and folkloric data are replete with accounts of various rituals in every human society as far back as records existed. Such rituals were performed for various reasons, notably, the regeneration of societies, institutions, associations, and individuals. While some rituals were used to reproduce societies and memories of the past, others often involved sacrifice in order to avert evil or to attract blessings or success in an endeavour. Vestiges of these rituals exist today but with the stamp of modern societies and their vagaries.

Today’s money rituals have antecedents in pre-existing rituals of supplication. Such rituals often involved one form of sacrifice or the other. What is unusual in modern Nigeria is not the use of human sacrifice for such rituals. Humans were sacrificed in ancient societies, including precolonial African societies. What is alarming today is the scale and the involvement of youths in the belief that human sacrifice is a pathway to quick wealth. Whether it works or not is a totally different question. Some commentators have conflated the two issues and concluded on the basis of the latter that money ritual does not exist. I will separate both issues and address them in turn.

As indicated above, human sacrifice is not new. It was practiced widely in human societies until modern religions, notably Religions of the Book (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) began to condemn the practice and modern societies came to treat it as murder. However, ritual killing involving nonhumans continues, as witnessed for example in the killing of rams during the Muslim festival of ramadan.

In ancient societies, human sacrifice was offered for various reasons—to pacify the gods or a human ruler; to ward off evil, such as enemy attack; to bring good fortune, and so on. Headhunting in some societies was a type of human sacrifice that involved taking the head, for ceremonial or magical purposes, of a killed adversary.

Most examples of human sacrifice in ancient societies were carried out for the public good, rather than for personal reward as such. Accordingly, money ritual  involving human sacrifice in order to get rich was unknown.

In the absence of thorough ethnographic or investigative data, most accounts of money rituals in Nigeria today are based on purported confessions of those involved, who were caught afterwards; social media reports; and commentaries by armchair columnists. One can extrapolate from these accounts that the practice is becoming prevalent and getting scarier and scarier: Youths are killing their parents, siblings, friends, and others to use their body parts in money rituals. Some of these accounts indicate that youths, especially fraudsters known as Yahoo Boys, are not the only ones involved in money rituals. Politicians, businessmen, market women, contractors, artistes, professionals, and those seeking elevation at work are also allegedly involved.

Not all seekers of these rituals want to get stupendously rich. Some are just looking for whatever amount they could get from participation. In one instance, a teenage boy, who participated in a killing, recounted that he was promised N50,000 if he could bring a specific human part to the occult practitioner. Apparently, the practitioner too wants to use the human part in money ritual for others for which he would be paid.

Whether money rituals work or not is immaterial to both sides. It is all about making money one way or the other. As in ancient societies, those who engage in such rituals believe that they work. This belief is reinforced today by their colleagues, who suddenly became rich, building houses and riding expensive cars.

What is surprising about these believers is why they don’t stop to ask why the practitioners themselves are not stupendously rich. Why can’t they use their ritual powers to create wealth for themselves or for their relatives or friends? If specific human parts are needed for the ritual, why must they be taken from their parents, siblings, or friends, rather than from just anyone? Perhaps the answer lies in making the ritual so esoteric and outlandish to be believed.

The point about belief, though, is the willing suspension of rationality and logic. Even some parents, who should know better, are caught up in this web of belief, leading them to be willing accomplices. It takes a flight away from rationality to see a connection between human sacrifice and wealth creation.

Who exactly are the occult practitioners, who order human sacrifice as passport to wealth creation? They are said to include not just some jungle priests but also alfas and pastors. Do these occult practitioners believe that human sacrifice can really create wealth? It is doubtful. Many of them are in the business of raking as much money as they can from believers.

The question now is how might this practice be stamped out? A four-prong approach is needed. First, while belief in human sacrifice as passport to wealth cannot be simply legislated out of existence, specific laws are in order that specify stiff penalties for anyone involved in human sacrifice.

Second, a select group of investigators, drawn from the intelligence, police, and local vigilante outfits, should be empowered to secretly fish out all those involved, or are planning to be involved, in human sacrifice for whatever reason and bring them to book. There are those who would argue that such a group of investigators may not be effective or may be comprised. This is Nigeria, they might say. We are doomed if every issue is approached with this mindset.

Third, all investigated cases of human sacrifice should be widely publicized to show that you will be caught if you get involved in this ignoble crime. The publicity should involve advertorials in which the pictures and names of past convicts appear in major newspapers.

Fourth, there should be massive reorientation of society, focusing on the youths, who appear to be in the forefront of the objectionable practice of human sacrifice. The reorientation could take various forms. One, parents need proper education about effective parenting during this challenging period, typified by banditry, kidnapping, cyber fraud, human sacrifice, and relentless social media indoctrination.

Two, federal, state, and local governments should set aside funds for various programmes that would engage the youths at all levels. A key event at such programmes should be values education and the need to avoid criminal activities, including human sacrifice. The point here is to condemn the practice as much and as frequently as possible.

Human sacrifice is murder. We cannot just talk glibly about it, without coordinated action.

My Participations: Bisi Akande on governance and financial management.

“It is a bonus to be cherished that this life narrative of a frontline politician has emerged from the hands of a man whose moral integrity in governance, as in all spheres of responsibility, has remained undented”.

-Professor Wole Soyinka, in his Forward to My Participations: An Autobiography, by Chief Bisi Akande, page xx.

In this continuation of my serial review of Chief Bisi Akande’s book, I focus on two inter-related aspects of his political participations, namely, governance and financial management as revealed in the book. Akande devoted Chapters 9-13 to his service in Chief Bola Ige’s government (1979-1983), first as the Secretary to the State Government and later as the Deputy Governor. He would later devote ten chapters (18-27) to his experiences as the Governor of Osun State (1999-2003).

It is clear from the accounts in the book that Akande sees effective financial management as key to good governance, especially in Nigeria’s cash-strapped subnational governments. In the case of Osun state, often regarded as a Civil Service state, the wage bill has always been too large for the state’s federal allocation. Yet, the state’s Internally Generated Revenue often did not cover the shortfall. The result is often little or nothing left for capital development. Here’s how Akande painted the situation: “I inherited a staff of 23,077 workers, who were mostly inefficient and badly coordinated, yet insisted on being appropriated with N260 million per month out of a total monthly revenue of N150 million”. This contrasts sharply with “an average of 14,500 workers” with which Chief Obafemi Awolowo serviced the entire Western Region, now made up of the six States of the South-West plus Edo and Delta States in the South-South (page 293).

This finding informed Akande’s focus on personnel management, vetting of contractors’ charges, and cutting down on the excesses of civil servants. Fortunately, he learned the ropes very early as workers staged a violent protest within one week of his assumption of office as State Governor. Their goal was to cow him into submission to their demands, including bribes. Indeed, four labour union leaders showed him proof of bribes paid by previous governments (pages 292-293). Akande responded with characteristic bluntness by refusing to cooperate.

He thereafter developed a scheme of 10% senior policy-making management; 15% middle management staff; 20% supervisory executive staff; and 55% working staff. He thereafter briefed the House of Assembly about the precarious financial situation of the state and got it to pass a resolution for him not to spend beyond 70% of average state monthly income on salaries and wages (pages 296-297).

In order to implement this policy, Akande initiated an establishment audit, which revealed a top-heavy civil service in which there were more supervisors than the supervised! Similarly, there were well over 2,000 teachers in excess of the number needed. Yet, some key subjects, such as English Language and Mathematics, were inadequately staffed, while some schools had teachers without pupils! To complicate matters, the Federal Government increased the minimum wage, which put additional burden on the states.

Worse still, there was no State Secretariat as civil servants were distributed across local government offices and rented apartments. The Governor’s office was a building donated by the Federal Government, while the Government House was “an old wood-decked house with leaking roofs built for the Divisional Engineer by Awolowo’s administration in 1955” (pages 294-295).

Against the above backgrounds, Akande engaged in fund saving measures. He started by cutting down on political appointees, limiting the number of Commissioners to only eleven.  This was followed by pruning the civil service, including (a) retrenchment of workers with negative records of service and those who had attained retirement age or served for the maximum 35 years and (b) merging and reducing government agencies from 43 to 34. This, of course, intensified strikes by the Labour Unions, to which some reviewers of the book attributed his re-election loss, rather than to the massive rigging carried out by the Obasanjo-led People’s Democratic Party in 2003.

Akande also prevented contractors from milking on the state, by slashing proposed contract sums and subsequent variations. In one instance, he bluntly told a contractor, who had submitted a variation of N377 million: “You are the one who incurred this debt on our behalf. It is either you take my terms or you go to court. I can only pay you N140 million … After four days, he came back and accepted my terms” (page 398).

From his previous experience as SSG and Deputy Governor, Akande had seen through civil servants. He knew about budget padding and inflated purchases: “In one instance, they wanted to buy four tyres for an SUV … for N40,000 each”. On further enquiry, Akande discovered that the market price for the tyres varied from N9,000 to N11,000 (page 396). At the end of the day, the tyres were purchased for N10,000 each!

He resisted several attempts to offer bribe, even to prevent his own impeachment. He also resisted attempts by the late Ooni of Ife, Oba Okunade Sijuwade, to trap him into borrowing the sum of $300 million to repair the Ede-Osogbo Waterworks. Akande went behind the Ooni to get the same Waterworks completed with only half a million dollars, instead $300 million (page 336)!

As a further step to save funds, Akande also exposed the financial shenanigans of his Deputy, Iyiola Omisore, which led to the latter’s impeachment.

It was this prudent management of personnel and financial resources that allowed Akande, without borrowing a penny, to build the new sprawling Secretariat, including the iconic Bola Ige House, which the Osun State Government uses till today: “It is on record that the entire Secretariat and the Bola Ige House were built from savings I made from yearly recurrent expenditure” (page 395). He also embarked on road construction and rehabilitation, including the mapping out of the road network in and around Osogbo, which subsequent administrations embarked upon.

Anyone familiar with Akande’s biography would not be surprised by his prudence and no-nonsense governance style. Here is a man, who started building his own house in Ila with his first salary arrears at about age 20 (page 65); shunned a funeral party for his mother in order to save money for his brother’s education (page 69); became an Accountant at age 23; joined British Petroleum, where he worked in the Accounts Department and role to top executive level; and already knew the inner workings of government before he became Governor.

As I was growing up, what baffled me was the apparent, debilitating and abject poverty of my parents … throughout his working life, my father climbed an average of seventy to eighty palm trees twice daily. My mother hawked and sold the wine my father could procure daily … But despite their hard work and diligence, they never had any respite from poverty. They endured this poverty till death.”

-Bisi Akande on his parental background in My Participations, An Autobiography, page 37.

The above quote from Chief Bisi Akande’s book is one of several statements others might have chosen to omit in their own autobiography. Similarly, Akande narrated how he was upbraided for a bureaucratic error by the State Executive Council, when he was the Secretary to the State Government, for initiating a memo that should have originated from the Ministry of Education (page 147). On yet another occasion, he told us, “I incurred a shortage of £1:5/- … by some duplicated entries under pressure from customers”, while acting for the cashier, who was on leave, while he was the Divisional Accountant (page 85). These are just a few of many examples of self-reporting in the book.

These examples demonstrate Akande’s truthfulness even to the point of self deprecation, while offering a taste of what he revealed about himself – his hometown of Ila-Orangun, his upbringing and education, his professional career, and his excursion into politics. If he revealed this much about himself, one can understand why he held nothing back about others. Reviewers who ignored these essential biographical details missed the insights into the making of the man that Akande eventually became.

Akande grew up in Ila-Orangun, a town deeply rooted in Yoruba history, which suffered greatly from the Fulani-led coup that toppled Afonja in Ilorin and the upheavals that attended the subsequent collapse of the Oyo Empire in the 19th century. Today’s Ila-Orangun was resettled by returning refugees from the Yoruba wars, after losing much of Igbominaland to the Ilorin Emirate, now in Kwara State. This displacement and resettlement explain why many Ila-Orangun residents today have one ancestor or the other from other parts of Yorubaland. It was against this background that Akande charted the development of Ila-Orangun, his own ancestry, and his own growth as a youth, pupil, teacher, accountant, Councillor, Constituent Assembly member, and politician-SSG, Deputy Governor, Governor, and Chairman of 4 progressive political parties.

Akande’s ancestors “were parts of these general displacements and movements occasioned by the years of wars in the Yoruba country” (page 39). Indeed, Akande’s great grandfather was an Ila military commander during the Yoruba wars (page 50). Akande’s encounter with the warrior’s military outfit and fighting arsenal in his grandfather’s house made a lasting impression on him. When he was told that the relics were being kept there as his inheritance, the impression was created that “that I was likely going to end up as a warrior. All this had effect on me. As a young boy, I was foolhardily bold”.

Anyone who has read through My Participations would know that the boldness has persisted. He never shied away from trouble in his youth and confronted elders as appropriate: In 1978, when the trio of older politicians – Chiefs Akinfosile, Onitiri, and Coker – tried to woo him away from Chief Awolowo, Akande retorted: “What did Awolowo do wrong in politics that any of you had not done worse (page 6)?” Furthermore, when he was caught sleeping at work while still learning the ropes as a worker for British Petroleum, he boldly asserted that he slept, arguing that the job of sitting down to understudy someone else in a comfortable corporate environment was vastly different from the setting of his previous standing job as a school teacher. The management must keep him busy, if they did not want him to sleep off! (page 83). Moreover, when Chief Olusegun Obasanjo sought to shift the blame for Bola Ige’s murder, Akande boldly told the sitting President: “You must be out of your mind” (page 350).

Akande’s parents were offsprings of returning refugees of the wars. Although both parents were born into wealth by local standards, Akande’s father chose two different paths of his own: First, he took to palm wine tapping, instead of farming like his own father (that is, Akande’s grandfather). Second, Akande’s father chose to forsake his own father’s traditional religion by adopting Islam.

Thus, young Akande grew up fully exposed to traditional religion, embraced by his paternal and maternal grandparents with whom he lived, and to Islam, which his parents had adopted. The encounter with Christianity would compound the situation when he eventually enrolled in colonial and missionary schools and became a teacher in the latter. As a youth, he freely was going in and out of mosques and churches. This experience sowed the seed of Akande’s religious tolerance.

Young Akande could have become a farmer or a palm wine tapper but for the intervention of a Railway Station Master whom his father respected. Later, when he went to Idanre to complete his primary education, he was lured into being a Mechanic, but he was redirected to school by concerned relatives, who conspired with the Master Mechanic to ask the new apprentice to produce a primary school leaving certificate.

After a short stint as a pupil teacher in Idanre, he went to a Teacher Training College to become a certified teacher. He enrolled in a correspondence college, while still in training and eventually became an accountant. He rose through the ranks to become an executive in British Petroleum. How he joined BP and his experiences with the company are a lesson for today’s job-seeking youths.

It was in the Teacher Training College that Akande’s leadership training actually took off as the school’s Health Prefect, whose duty it was to determine the suitability of the kitchen’s food for consumption. While working for BP, he joined the Ila Student Union in Lagos in his effort to contribute to the development of his hometown. He subsequently became a Councillor, where he distinguished himself, and other political appointments would follow.

What is rather distinctive about Akande’s political participations is the recognition accorded him by his people and other politicians beyond his state. Rather than go all the way out to seek office, he was always selected for office or invited to run for one. His role in the offices he occupied and the lessons to learn from his experiences will be the subject of the next contribution.

“Despite my involvements in politics, I was still a novice of the peculiar ways of politicians – their love of intrigues and conspiracies, and their capacity for blackmail”.

-Chief Bisi Akande, in his book, My Participations, An Autobiography, page 141.

If politics are the strategies, intrigues, and maneuvers employed in obtaining a position of power or control, then perhaps no better political theatre is provided than Nigeria. In Nigeria, it is politics to leave one party on the eve of an election, hoping to maximize political gains in another. It is politics to deceive other politicians in order to get them out of office so you can consolidate your own power. It is politics to snatch ballot boxes or otherwise destroy votes or relevant records of an election, if it is not going your way. It is politics to get an Attorney General of the Federation killed in cold blood, without ever finding the killers, let alone bringing them to book. Yes, it is also politics to sidetrack the constitution of your party and the rule of law.

True, these intrigues are not peculiar to Nigeria. What is peculiar is the conjunctive employment of the various intrigues during every election cycle. Equally peculiar is the crudity of the forms they take, including conspiracies; blackmail; deception; falsehoods; cheating; thuggery; and all kinds of malpractices, even including assassinations.

No book since the advent of the present democratic dispensation since 1999 provides an inside look into these intrigues as much as Akande’s My Participations. In the present contribution, I focus on major political intrigues Akande experienced in his political participations.

The Constituent Assembly on which Akande served in 1977 provided the first major insight into political intrigues as various groups and coalitions began to form in preparation for the 1979 general elections (Chapter 8). From then on, intrigues and maneuvers came to overshadow desirable political processes. Akande had a firsthand taste of such intrigues in his hometown after his appointment as the Secretary to the State Government in 1979, following Chief Bola Ige’s victory as Governor of old Oyo State.

Chief J K Fadeyi had led a petition to the Governor against Akande over the location of the College of Education, without letting him (Akande) know about it (Chapter 10), accusing Akande of subversive activities. Since it was the same Fadeyi who had suggested to Akande to stay away after the election, an advice the latter took in good faith (page 129), it is unclear whether the advice was motivated by Fadeyi’s plan to nominate another candidate for the position of SSG (page 133), which the Governor offered to Akande without seeking it.

After responding to the Governor’s query on the petition, Akande quickly tendered his resignation and left. But the governor sent his Deputy after him. He stood his ground that he did not want to meet with “that Fadeyi crowd” (page 141). At the end of the day, Governor Ige cajoled Akande back to office and referred the petition to a larger group of Ila stakeholders, which finally affirmed the original decision.

Such intrigues blossomed, leading to the rigging of the Ige administration out of office in 1983. Before the election, some members of Ige’s cabinet had conspired against him in pursuit of their own political ambition, with many of them eventually defecting to the opposition party. Akande named the leading characters in this intrigue and described their activities in captivating detail (Chapters 11-13).

The military took over again in December 1983 with their own intrigues. A kangaroo Tribunal was set up, which accused the Alliance for Democracy Governors and their Deputies of corruption. Their specific charge was that they enriched their political party. They were imprisoned for 21 years, only to be released by General Ibrahim Babangida after yet another military coup in 1985.

It was painfully surprising to read some reviewers of the book accusing Akande of corruption simply because he was so accused by the military government, without reading the details of the story and without acknowledging that top politicians of the period were detained or imprisoned, all on trumped up charges of corruption, a tactic employed by the military at the time to justify their intervention and perpetuate themselves in power. Also overlooked was Akande’s refusal, despite combined police and military threats, to sign a paper implicating his Governor so he could be set free (Chapters 14-16).

Akande was unhappy with the intrigues following the death of Chief Obafemi Awolowo in 1987 by the sage’s close associates as they jostled for power and leadership (Chapter 17). Those intrigues would later affect the running of Afenifere, the Yoruba sociocultural group, and the Alliance for Democracy, the political party it birthed. The intrigues would lead to the rejection of Chief Lateef Jakande and Chief Bola Ige in favour of Chief Olu Falae as the presidential candidate of the AD for the 1999 presidential election, which was lost to Chief Olusegun Obasanjo.

However, the mother of all intrigues in the book was perpetuated by former President Obasanjo as part of his scheme for reelection in 2003. Working through the leadership of Afenifere, with the connivance of some of the leaders, Obasanjo successfully derailed Southwest Governors from their planned local government elections for fear that they could erode local support for him. Once the governors agreed, Obasanjo put up PDP candidates against them and rigged them out of office, except Governor Bola Tinubu of Lagos State. Obasanjo’s maneuvres were supplemented with huge sums of money, at least N1.4 billion for the Southwest contests alone (Chapters 26 and 27).

These manouvres should be distinguished from the coalitions of whole political parties and factions, which gave rise to the formation of the All Progressives Congress in 2013. However, even as the mega party was being formed, intrigues took over as different interests began to manifest, some along the lines of the legacy parties and others along ethnic and religious lines. Nevertheless, superior planning and strategies led to the registration of the party in 2013 and  its success in the next two presidential elections (Chapters 32-33).

What is significant about Akande is the way he carried himself with integrity through these intrigues as the Chairman of four different progressive political parties, namely, AD, AC, ACN, and APC, without any complaint or bid to remove him. How he did it and the lessons to be learned from his experiences are the subject of another contribution.

No book launched in Nigeria in 2021 excited the public and the media as much as My Participations: An Autobiography (xxviii + 557 pages), authored by Chief Bisi Akande and published by Gaskia Media Limited, Lagos, in November 2020, with a Forward by Professor Wole Soyinka.

It takes a thorough and complete reading of the book (not the market noise generated by armchair reviews) to realize that only a bold, honest, and forthright participant in high stakes politics would say or do certain things recorded in the book, such as telling a sitting President, “You must be out of his mind”; resigning as Secretary to a State Government on principle, only to be cajoled back into the job by a surprised Governor; or refusing to bribe councillors for their vote or legislators not to impeach him. He declared and demonstrated several times in the book that he neither offered nor received a bribe. Nobody or group has come out with credible evidence to the contrary.

Moreover, no one has controverted the evidence in the book that the author was favourably courted by many outstanding national and local political leaders, from Chief Obafemi Awolowo to Chief Bola Ige. Besides, he was and remains a beloved citizen of his native Ila Orangun, where he is the Asiwaju (frontline leader) and his home state of Osun, where he is revered as Baba Akande. All these attributes attracted the attention of four different political parties, which made him Chairman, namely, Alliance for Democracy; Action Congress; Action Congress of Nigeria; and All Progressives Congress. A common thread across these parties is the welfarist ideology of progressivism from which, till today, Akande never winked.

It is not surprising, therefore, that book attracted praise in some quarters, while generating controversy in others, controversies which gave us insights into certain events, while seeing their participants in a new light. The author is praised for giving pulsating accounts of his own participations in Nigeria’s political development, partisan politics, and governance, by providing eyewitness accounts of certain defining moments in Nigerian political history, especially since 1977. In the process, he unveiled the intrigues that shaped key events from the work of the Constituent Assembly in 1977/78 to the formation of the All Progressives Congress in 2014 and the ousting of the Peoples Democratic Party from power in 2015.

He is also praised for the thoroughness of his accounts in citing the locations and dates of certain key events, while also naming key participants, quoting conversations and quoting figures, where necessary. He never shied away from expressing his opinion on key events and the actors behind them. One such event is the assassination of Chief Bola Ige, then Attorney General and Minister of Justice. The author left no one in doubt about the possible culpability of former President Olusegun Obasanjo and his government as well as the alleged involvement of Iyiola Omisore.

Similarly, Obasanjo’s trickery of the Afenifere leaders and AD governors in 2003 in service of his reelection led the author to describe the trickster as “wily”, “cunning”, and “ruthless”, leading to the verdict on the trickster’s “relentless dalliance” as that of “a faithless suitor and an unblinking philanderer on the political field”.

At the same time, however, the book provides interesting historical details about Ila Oragun, the author’s birthplace and hometown, its place in Yoruba history, and its political development about which most reviewers appear uninterested. Yet, the author’s own growth and development as a person, professional, and politician parallel the growth and development of his home town, one shaping, as much as being shaped by, the other.

Besides, the author delved deep into his own family history. Few would narrate in detail the abject poverty of his parents as the author did, portraying his father as a palmwine tapper whose income could not sustain basic necessities, let alone afford the children’s school fees. He had no qualms in letting us know that his father died a pauper, because that is the truth.

Yet, Akande struggled through school, once trying to become a Mechanic, until he completed the Teachers Grade III certificate. He later veered into accounting, learning via correspondence colleges,  while remaining a classroom teacher. Only those who took correspondence courses in those days would appreciate the discipline required to complete them successfully while working full time. Yet, Akande did and became a qualified Accountant at the age of 22.

Faced with choice between a funeral party for his mother and paying his brother’s school fees, he chose the latter and left town peremptorily to avoid the family’s prescribed traditional rituals for his mother’s funeral as involvement would deplete his resources.

Unfortunately however, the press has been busy orchestrating the views of those exposed in the book, who began to spit fire as as soon as snippets appeared in the press. And the press blew up their condemnation of the book. Even those who cared to read the book were lured into finding faults, by overlooking the book’s merit and that of its author. This is not surprising, because, as Professor Soyinka foretold in his Forward, “This is one historic reckoning that will make many uncomfortable”.

No one seemed to care to even investigate some of the allegations, if they are to be so characterized, that the author levied against some of the participants in the events he described. Take, for example, Chief Ayo Adebanjo’s response to the allegations against him. He focused on the Lekki house, alleged to have been built for him by Bola Tinubu. That was just one of several allegations against him in the book, to which he had no answer. What is more, soon after Chief Adebanjo released his rebuttal on the Lekki house, an interview granted by Chief Segun Osoba surfaced in which Chief Adebanjo’s recalcitrance and duplicitous role was also revealed.

Other detractors of the book focused on what they alleged as a plan to promote Bola Tinubu’s presidential ambition. But I know that the book would have been launched years ago but for delay in publication. A further delay was caused by the second wave of COVID-19 when the book was finally published in November, 2020.

The book should be read from cover to cover in order to appreciate its value and the import of Professor Soyinka’s forward. A serialised review of the book is forthcoming. In the meantime, I have no hesitation in promoting it as my Book of the Year here in Nigeria, and its author as Man of the Year for his courage, resilience, forthrightness, and faithfulness to courses, principles, and ethical standards.

We tend to associate brutality with physical violence. This has been demonstrated time and again in the various encounters between Nigerians and the Nigeria Police. They are known to torture, maim, and even kill some of the citizens they are hired to protect. No wonder then that various Civil Society Organizations, notably, Human Rights Watch, have repeatedly accused the Nigeria Police of extrajudicial killings, often without repercussion.

It was the series of notorious brutal encounters between Nigerian youths and a special squad of the police, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, that led to the #ENDSARS protests in October 2020. During the squad’s reign of terror, any young man or lady, who drove a car or held a phone, tablet, or laptop easily fell prey to the squad. Sometimes, you only needed to be within their dragnet to be arrested for no reason. True, that squad has been disbanded, or so we are told, the physical assault of the police on Nigerians continues under various guises. If they don’t claim to be going after armed robbers, kidnappers or bandits, then they tell us they are going after cultists or Yahoo Boys, often with guns drawn.

However, not all police brutality involves physical violence. There is also symbolic brutality, which involves symbolic, rather than physical, violence. Symbolic brutality causes unnecessary delay, tortures the mind, and inflicts emotional or psychological pain. When inflicted by the Nigeria Police, extortion is often the ultimate goal. Nigerians encounter this kind of violence on a daily basis, especially on roadways.

Even when it is not their statutory duty to do so, the Nigeria Police would ask for your drivers license and your vehicle’s “particulars”. You can be sure they will find some fault, either with your papers or the vehicle. If everything is OK, then they turn to the driver: “How now?” All the delay and psychological torture is a way of asking for a bribe.

Perhaps the most ubiquitous victims of symbolic brutality in the hands of the Nigeria Police are commercial drivers and Okada operators (that is, commercial motorcyclists). In what follows, I use Okada operators as a reference point for all drivers. In recent years, Okada has become a critical mode of transport, especially for the working class, for at least two major reasons. One, municipal transportation is inadequate. Second, riders find them useful in beating traffic congestion in the cities.

Okada operators, however, operate under severe pressure from four major sources. First, most of them purchase their motorcycles on credit or are sponsored by some Big Man. They must make monthly, sometimes weekly, returns to the seller or sponsor of the motorcycle and still make some profit. That’s why they are always in a hurry to move from one spot to another, meandering among moving vehicles and sometimes making illegal turns or jumping traffic lights.

The second source of pressure on them is the state. In order to monitor their activities, many states require Okada operators to obtain a “permit” from the state, in addition to registering their motorcycle. The fee for the permit varies from state to state. In many cases, the operators are also given a numbered uniform for which they also pay. The state permit became necessary because of the use of motorcycles to commit various crimes. It was noted, for example, that they were used extensively during the looting that followed the #ENDSARS protests last year.

The third source of pressure on Okada operators is the local branch of the Articulate Motorcycle Owners and Riders Association of Nigeria. Local branches of the Association often insert themselves as intermediaries between the Okada operators and the state, by putting their own commission on top of the official permit fee charged by the state.  Local branches also collect daily “ticket” fees from the operators. The ticket fees are often arbitrarily hiked, sometimes leading to a fight between the operators and the Association’s officials or representatives. Such was the case in Magboro, Ogun state, last September, when the operators demanded the removal of the local chairperson.

It is against the above backgrounds that Okada operators often react negatively to a fourth pressure, this time, from the Nigeria Police. They know that the main purpose of police intervention in their business is extortion. In two different communities where I interviewed various Okada operators recently, I was told that the fee charged varies from N50 to N5,000 or higher, depending on police charges against the operator. To be sure, some of the operators fail to register their motorcycle or obtain the state’s operator permit. These illegal operators are the ones who offer the highest bribe, whereas legitimate operators normally pay a lower bribe just to operate freely on the road.

It is within this context that the recent plight of the Okada operators in a Lagos suburb should be understood: “Commercial motorcycle operators … in Ejigbo, a Lagos suburb, have protested alleged extortion and harassment of their members by members of the Nigeria Police in the area … the commercial cyclists are angry with officers of the division for allegedly turning them to their Automated Teller Machine (ATM) and raiding them on the roads”. In the ensuing crisis, some police vehicles were vandalized, while some Okada operators were arrested (Okada riders protest alleged police extortion, harassment in Ejigbo, Lagos, The Guardian, December 20, 2021).

What happened in Ejigbo is commonplace across the nation and it has been going on for a long time. Several years ago, I saw a dead young man on the roadside, still lying in a pool of his own blood. Onlookers alleged that he was shot by a policeman for refusing to have his motorcycle seized after declining to pay a N50 bribe. Brandishing his gun to escape mob attack, the same policeman allegedly commandeered another Okada operator and forced the operator to take him to the station, the same station to which the case was reported. Your guess is as good as mine as to the outcome.

In this particular case, symbolic brutality was elevated to physical violence, with deadly consequences. Such cases are not uncommon across the country. Yet, there is neither a clear policy on the regulation of police behaviour toward Okada operators or to drivers in general. When some states, such as Lagos, do intervene, the goal often is to restrict the operators in certain areas. It is high time something was done to prevent another nationwide stop-police-brutality protest.