The Nation Newspaper

Category: Wednesday

  • Why does Jonathan want four more years?

    Why does Jonathan want four more years?

    Like many others who looked forward to hearing why Jonathan wants four more years in office, I was surprised he blithely threw away the opportunity to make his case when the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) kicked off its presidential campaign in Lagos on Thursday.

    Much has already been said about his lack of composure and how agitated he looked. He had barely got going when he inserted his foot in his mouth by declaring that he and his generation were old, expired failures – effectively ruling himself out as an option.

    Rather than explain to the watching world what he would do with another term that he could not accomplish in the almost six years he’s been in office, he spent the bulk of his time trying to demonise Buhari. Anyone watching would have thought the former head of state was the incumbent and the president the challenger.

    At his next campaign stop in Enugu, he reached into the archives for the speech made by General Ibrahim Babangida to justify the overthrow of Buhari. He proceeded to read through the list of the ex-military ruler’s cabinet pointing out that it had no woman. He then asked rhetorically whether this was the sort of person Nigerians wanted to hand the country to.

    I agree that if we are to put the president’s performance under scrutiny, Buhari’s record in office must also come under the spotlight. But such an examination is only relevant to the extent that it tells us something about the man’s character and his ability to do the job he seeks. It would have been especially relevant if Jonathan was not running and the two contenders were outsiders without any incumbency burden or record to defend.

    However, this election is about much more than that. Though some would love to see it cast in those terms, it is NOT about Buhari’s past. It is a referendum on what Jonathan has done with power in his initial term. What candidates have done is usually the platform for seeking another term. That is why people should be asking themselves: Is my life better than it was four years ago? Given what I have seen can I endure another four years with this man in charge?

    Those questions are not going to be answered by merely demonizing Buhari. The president and his team should ask themselves why in spite of their best efforts to cast the former head of state as a devil with two horns, his popularity isn’t waning.

    Many frustrated Nigerians have reached the point where they are saying ‘Anyone but Jonathan.’ They are not hearing anything new from the man who wants four more years.

    Four days before Jonathan came to Lagos, Boko Haram stormed the Nigerian town of Baga and razed it. Several other towns and villages suffered a similar fate. It is projected that as many as 2,000 people may have been killed in what Amnesty International is calling Nigeria’s worst massacre.

    Many are still waiting to hear the president say what he would do differently to end the insurgency. They are waiting to hear when the Chibok girls would return. They want to hear about job creation initiatives; they are anxious to know what the plan is to cushion impending shocks arising from crashing crude oil price. And they are hearing nothing! Instead we are being assaulted with one long whine about how his predecessors did nothing.

    The president spent his time playing the victim and being angry that the only one who can see the ‘great’ work he has done is himself. And there’s the rub! A while back, disturbed at unrelenting criticism of his administration, he once declared that his team would no longer depend on the media to rate it. They would henceforth assess themselves internally.

    The trouble with that is we all look handsome when we peer in the mirror. The next person’s assessment of our looks might be radically different. Jonathan fails to realize that it is the job of ordinary citizens, the electorate, to assess him. It is not in his place to do so. We do the rating and decide whether he deserves another four years. Until he realizes that he would be giving himself serious heartburn.

    But if he cannot make a compelling case for his second term, there are more than a few loyal party men eagerly waiting to do so. Take the unlikely example of the PDP gubernatorial candidate in Lagos State, Jimi Agbaje. A report in The Punch quoted him as warning that the South-South zone would shut down the economy if Jonathan wasn’t reelected. The PDP governorship candidate reportedly said this at meeting in London organised by his supporters and the UK chapter of the PDP.

    That Agbaje hasn’t refuted the assertion is shocking. How can any democrat attempt to push a candidate on the basis of blackmail and threats? Democracy is about the freedom of a people to choose their leaders in an atmosphere devoid of intimidation. We can’t be browbeaten into voting for someone just because gunmen are going to attack the nation’s economic interests. That would no longer be a democracy but a thug-o-cracy.

    Lest we forget, the Nigerian constitution only makes provision for individuals to run for two terms of four years each in the executive branch – and not an eight year stretch. The allocation is to persons and not their zones or regions. Political parties in their internal arrangements may opt to keep positions in certain areas but whoever they choose still has to make a case for us to reject or endorse. Make your case Mr. President.

  • Making a MEND

    Hitherto comatose, the shadowy Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) has resurrected and landed feet first in the 2015 campaigns. In Lagos, Jonathan disclosed that the militant group twice tried to assassinate him.

    The group’s notoriety scaled new heights October 1, 2010 when its agents were implicated in bomb blasts that rocked Abuja. MEND took responsibility for the incident which claimed 16 lives. But surprisingly a day after President Jonathan said the government knew the persons who masterminded the bomb blasts, and that they were terrorists and NOT (MEND) as was widely speculated.

    Speaking at a colloquim organised by the ECOWAS Parliament he said: “We know the persons behind the terrorist attacks on the nation. We know they used an organisation that operates in the Niger Delta called MEND as a front, but we are aware that MEND is not a terrorist organisation.”

    Fast forward four years and the same MEND that is ‘not a terrorist organisation’ endorses Buhari for president and all hell breaks loose. Whatever happened to the clean bill of health given to the organization in 2010? Or is this another case of selective amnesia?

  • Statesmen, motorpark touts and pickpockets

    Statesmen, motorpark touts and pickpockets

    If we categorise them by advanced age and exalted positions in which they served their country, Nigeria’s elderstatesmen are a very small tribe. Those who make the sort of statements that have provoked President Goodluck Jonathan to make his now famous jibe belong to an even smaller tribe of one: Olusegun Obasanjo.

    Just as the president was warming up to kick off his election campaign, the pesky old man summoned a conclave at his Abeokuta hill top redoubt with leaders of market women from across the land. You didn’t need to be a seer to know that he wasn’t about to lecture the women on Keynesian economics.

    It turns out that those who feared the worst had reason to do so. Obasanjo didn’t disappoint in his latest bid to torpedo MV GEJ 2015. He accused the incumbent of squandering billions of dollars painstakingly built up in the Excess Crude Account (ECA) by his predecessors. The summary of the day out with the traders was that squandermania mixed with managerial incompetence had brought Nigeria to her current sorry economic pass.

    It was hardly the sort of testimonial with which PDP wanted to go into battle. Aso Villa went into firefighting mode. First, Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, offered a restrained rebuttal – leaving the brutal bit to the president himself.

    In a moment of uncommon transformation, mild and meek old Jonathan was changed into a fire-eating combatant who declared: “Some people call themselves statesmen but they are not statesmen; they are just ordinary politicians. For you to be a statesman is not because you have occupied a big office before but the question is what are you bringing to bear? Are you building this country? Or are you a part of people who tell lies to destroy this country?”

     “Making provocative statements in this country, statements that will set this country ablaze and you tell me you are a senior citizen. You are not a senior citizen you can never be; you are ordinary motorpark tout.”

    Although Jonathan didn’t mention names, the media decided there were  enough hints in the soundbite to conclude the salvo was aimed at Obasanjo’s doorstep. There’s also the Yoruba proverb that says “an owl (witch) cries in the night and a child dies in the morning: who doesn’t know that it is the witch that killed the child.”

    The problem with the president’s angry swipe at his elderly critics is that his failure to name names left the statement broad enough for anyone who sees himself as falling into that category to be offended. Not only that, hurling insults at others leaves you open to a sucker punch from those with the capacity to improve on whatever you have dished out.

    So, quick as a flash the Alhaji Maitama Sule-led Northern Elders’ Forum (NEF) hit back with choice commentary of its own. Group spokesman, Prof. Ango Abdullahi, called out Jonathan for being abusive towards elders who fought for the unity of Nigeria.

    He said: “President Jonathan should know that in a motorpark, there are touts and there are pick-pockets, so if some past leaders are touts, some sitting leaders are pick-pockets and thieves. So, you have to make your pick from that.” Ouch!

    I agree that being at the receiving end of an unending stream of flak cannot be fun. Still, describing prominent but voluble old men as ‘motor park touts’ just because they gave a less-than-flattering assessment of your performance is a disaster on any given day.

    If the barb was aimed at Obasanjo then it missed him and landed in the ‘overreaction hall of fame.’ For one thing the former head of state in his meeting with the market leaders didn’t use foul language. His critique was cutting but he went out of his way to be civil – even saying that he didn’t have anything personal against Jonathan.

    In our environment, and I dare say in many African societies, scolding elders in such coarse manner is unacceptable – and that is putting it mildly. Jonathan might be the occupant of the most exalted office in the land but it isn’t licence to speak that way to people who may be nearly 20 years older than him, and who were even once his benefactors.

    Indeed, the high office he holds demands a certain kind of behavior. A president is expected to project dignity, poise and calm in his public interactions. He is the captain of the ship and in the midst of a storm when all around him are flustered and losing their cool, no one should know he’s sweating.

    Jonathan lowered the dignity of the office of president with his crude insults. By so doing he invited the offended to dish out even more gross invectives in reply. He is entitled to be angry but presidents don’t get their hands dirty saying such things. That is why they have attack dogs. For him to have to have done the dirty job himself is further evidence that Jonathan is beginning to show the strain.

    Embarrassingly, the ‘motor park touts’ episode came shortly after the same president asked his campaign team not to insult his opponents. But I guess it is tough practicing what you preach when there’s fire raging on all sides of the mountain.

    All the same I ask myself when hurling abuse became electoral strategy. The president and his supporters seem content with just insulting their interlocutors. At this point in the game voting intentions are already set for the vast majority. Between 10 and 20 percent of the electorate might still be undecided. How does a volley of silly little insults convince them to vote for you? Insults are not going to win you friends; conviction would do it. I suspect, however, that those who have chosen to go negative don’t really ‘give a damn anymore.’

  • Our Girls, Gumsuri; GE Marinho;  29% WAEC pass, 71% Nigerian education failure; MEXAHNYIA

    Our Girls missing since April 15 joined by Gumsuri Dec 12 victims kidnapped by Boko Haram who murdered 33. Christmas Day will be empty for many. Let us all buy a present and a meal for an Internally Displaced Person, IDP and send them through your pastor or imam.

    Nigeria survives because of the sacrifice of millions. Permit me to pay tribute to Mrs Grace Ebun Marinho who joined the saints triumphant at 78 years. She had six children: Bisi, Nike and Tunji Osuntokun whose father Major Osuntokun, senior brother of late distinguished Professor BO Osuntokun, died when they were infants and Yinka, Funmilayo and Laolu Marinho with my father Dr Abayomi Marinho whom she married and supported through the rest of his life. She had a successful nursing career with Lagos State. I was sort of number one childas I was 17 or so years old when we met and all the children still have nightmares about me making them finish their food ‘because many children have no food to eat’. Sorry O, aburos! Now they have children they are singing the same song. I wonder why? I also used to take them to the cinema as compensation.

    Aunty Ebun was a uniquely warm hearted person, welcoming, smiling and offering all a meal and an invitation to stay, sometimes for years. She ran one of the last truly open houses in Nigeria. She had memory for family history and an excellence in the kitchen. Her Saturday moin moin was original ‘leaf wrapped and ready by 9am’ to be dispatched from her home where she presided as Mama Gbagada especially at Christmas, New Year and Easter-. My visits from Ibadan were completed by at least two moin moin, gariice block water and no sugar pls. Any moin moin affectionado knows that good moin moin always leaves the best tasting morsels hidden between the leaves. Her moin moin melted in the mouth. The lessons from Aunty’s life include patience, perseverance in the face of death and adversity and peaceful coexistence. Another lesson is that people, especially elderly relations, must be taken for regular completemedical check-ups. She will be missed particularly tomorrow, the first Christmas without her in Gbagada. May her gentle soul RIPP- Rest In Perfect Peace. Amen.

    We have cause to worry and not only about the absence of electric power growth since 1999 when it was 3000Mw and still is 3,000Mw 15+years and $?billions later. And the worry is not even at Fulani and Boko Haram Wars or the coming election violence war. We must worry that even in non-war torn parts there is routine disgraceful mass exam failure. The pass rate at the recent WAEC examination in key subjects is 29% pass or 71% failure.  The failures will enter the ‘market’ as cannon fodder for politicians who ‘mistakenly sent their own children abroad to study’ and some will join Boko Haram as examples that western education fails.

    The mass failure for young citizens is horrendous. It is a disgrace to government institutions where the vast majority of these failures occur in spite of N100 billion+ in the accounts of oversight bodies. Most schools lack basic education facilities, like good books and good teachers. The good student will study in a pigsty and still succeed. However, the majority of students worldwide are plodders needing prodding by good books and good teachers. American books tend to simplify complex problems better than traditional British books. The art and science of mental arithmetic has been lost to the calculator leaving the brain unchallenged, feeble and unable to add, let alone remember a telephone number. When I did the school run with eight or nine children we did mental arithmetic while I drove. Mental arithmetic is not WAEC mathematics but it helps.  As soon as you want to add 1+1 those around you immediately produce some IT device like an I-Pad. We require ‘Annual LGA, State and National Mental Arithmetic Prizes’ to revitalise our youth brains. Even our health officials were mathematically challenged as to whether there were 10 or 11 Ebola Victims.

    Note that 29% of anything is failure and each government level has responsibility. Education is a conveyor belt, so far with poor products. This failure requires a strategic  ‘Education War’ to counter Boko Haram. Our abysmal education fuels their propaganda. Government should learn from and not destroy private education. We should embrace and visit what is good. Visit Afe Babalola University AdoEkiti, ABUAD to get an honest education yardstick and work backwards to primary school. Every town has good private primary and secondary schools to measure against. God bless these great Nigerians proprietors, organisations and religious bodies which provide alternatives to failure, at a cost, yes. Government must provide better fast, for the current students on the education conveyor belt. Cutting class sizes, increased quality and dedication of teachers, more and better books and facilities are not nuclear physics, but the essential ingredients of education success and rights of the youths.

    Remember that in 2015 politicians will spend billions on millions of posters towards ‘election success’ but will never approve 10million educational posters for one million empty bare-walled classrooms in Nigeria for ‘exam success. Shame. A picture is worth 1000 words except in Nigeria.

    Ps: It is not too late to buy a present and a meal for an Internally Displaced Person and send them through pastors or imams. MEXAHNYIA.

  • A powerful minister and his enforcers

    A powerful minister and his enforcers

    Minister of Police Affairs, Jelili Adesiyan, is a very powerful man. He has at his beck and call hundreds of thousands of men enlisted in the Nigeria Police. An indeterminate number of officers belonging to the shadowy Department of State Security (DSS) are equally available to do his bidding at the snap of a finger.

    In a country where the authorities over the years have not been squeamish about deploying armed agents of state to disconcert the opposition and claim ‘victory’ at the polls, the concentration of such power in the hands a brazen partisan is potentially disastrous for our young democracy.

    When he proudly announced at a book launch last week that he had given orders to the Inspector-General of Police, Suleiman Abba and the DSS to arrest anyone who makes ‘inflammatory statements’ ahead of the 2015 elections, the gravity and implications of his utterances were clearly lost on him.

    At the same event he made the incendiary claim that All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate, Muhammadu Buhari and former President Olusegun Obasanjo were working to foist an interim government on Nigeria.

    Explaining his order for a crackdown, Adesiyan said: “Many of those in the APC are disgruntled PDP members who are no longer relevant and because they could not have their way, they have started to heat up the polity. They have said they will form a parallel government if they lose.”

    This same statement had riled President Goodluck Jonathan who at one of his campaign stops at an Abuja church wondered how a politician, and a Christian to boot, would dare utter such a statement.

    Everyone knows that the ‘Christian’ politician being referred to by Jonathan is his bête noire and Rivers State Governor, Rotimi Amaechi. I have no doubt that but for his constitutional restraint of immunity, the Aso Villa would have moved against the outspoken governor.

    Amaechi, never one to sidestep a controversy, infuriated his foes afresh with his remarks insisting that soldiers recently court-martialed and convicted for mutiny had the right to protest being asked to fight Boko Haram insurgents without being adequately armed. Since those comments were made all heel has broken loose with the army and DSS piling in the governor for saying things they consider an invitation for soldiers to be mutinous.

    It might help to remind readers here that the same comments the governor made have been repeated by the likes of Major General Ishola Williams (retd) who went on to state that soldiers protesting suicidal orders was not unheard off. The remarks of the former Chief of Defence Operations, Planning and Training, at Defence Headquarters have been largely ignored, but Ameachi’s have triggered near ballistic reactions given his political profile.

    In the light of what Adesiyan has revealed the response of the DSS is a follow-up to instructions from above. But beyond that it is especially sinister.

    The organisations’s Deputy Director of Public Relations, Marilyn Ogar, warned political office holders not to ‘hide under the privileges of their offices to perpetrate and encourage the commission of acts inimical to the general interest of this nation.” This, she said pregnantly, was the “final warning.”

    I am struck by the finality of Ogar’s threat. Assuming Amaechi or some other public officer protected by law from prosecution were to say something which the agencies consider inciting, would they violate that individual’s constitutional immunity?

    In today’s Nigeria nothing is impossible. If a squadron of policemen could seal off the National Assembly and humiliate its members by teargassing their chambers without consequences, then there is no low our security forces will not plumb in their desire to please whoever holds power at a given time.

    I am all for peace and security. But democracy is also about free speech and freedom to choose who will lead a country or community. It is about exercising such freedoms without some non-judicial arbiter standing as a middle man to determine what constitutes appropriate or inflammatory comment, or determining what is constitutional or not.

    It was that sort of effrontery that prompted the Inspector-General of Police to declare that Aminu Tambuwal was no longer Speaker of the House of Representatives because he decamped from APC to PDP. In an outrageous power grab that remains as yet unpunished, he assumed the role of the courts to add to his powers as an enforcer.

    Since that event, legislators have been crossing the carpet at the National and state assembly levels at a dizzying rate. Embarrassingly, the great enforcer of the Nigerian constitution has suddenly gone absent without leave.

    Whatever section of Nigeria’s statutes the security services are depending on to clamp down on people for their comments, they would find that such provisions  don’t define what constitutes ‘inflammatory comment.’

    When does a comment become inciting? What is the empirical gauge for judging its flammability other than the jaundiced assessment of the likes of Adesiyan and Abba?

    With barely six weeks to go before the general elections, I dare say any strong criticism of the incumbent and his embattled administration would rank as ‘inflammatory comment’ in the books of the Police Minister and his enforcers.

    On the day Adesiyan was making his arrest order public, he was also accusing two former Nigerian Heads of State of planning treasonable acts without providing any shred of evidence. In my book that ranks as a grade one ‘inflammatory comment.’ But who’s going arrest the arresters?

    Is all this anxiety over “inflammatory comments” not an indication how fragile the Nigerian federation has become? Instead of looking for vulnerable scapegoats should we not be pointing the finger at failed leadership that has brought us to this pass?

    If there’s a grave danger facing our democracy today, it isn’t from the occasionally heated statements made by excitable politicians. It is emanating more from the pedestrian interpretation of what constitutes threat to national interest by Nigeria’s security agencies.

    Politics is activity that excites passions and roils emotions. It involves contest: we should expect the temperature to rise during any election cycle. All the lazy and clichéd talk about ‘heating up the polity’ arise from ignorantly trying to turn politics into Sunday Mass: it is not! It is passionate business that generates heat, insults and sometimes, unfortunately, violence. Live with it.

    This is the understanding that seems to elude our all-powerful minister and the enforcers that are ever so gung-ho about arresting people for speaking their minds. The police, DSS and others should stop inserting themselves in the middle of the political mudfight. By presenting themselves as interested partisans they erode the integrity of their institutions and lose respect in the eyes of the people.

    That is why aside the economy and insurgency, one of the most pressing challenges confronting the national leadership that will emerge this February is reforming our security services to make them relevant to the needs of an emerging democracy in the 21st century. What we have now are services whose mindset is stuck in the military era of the 70s and 80s.

    That reform must, however, be National Assembly-led because the abuse of the security agencies has always been a crime perpetrated by the executive branch. If APC wins the Presidency don’t be surprised if next day security agencies start threatening PDP members who make critical comments about the new powers-that-be. The system is that backward and servile.

    We need a police and DSS that are truly engaged with protecting the people from violent criminals and insurgents. We don’t need a bunch of armed men and women who are confused about what their roles are and have lapsed into some sort of ‘thought people’ dragooned to screen what we say in the heat of the moment. Don’t turn Nigeria into North Korea please!

    But more importantly we need a decentralised police and intelligence agencies structure that does not leave such powerful institutions in the hands of small-minded individuals with anything but a democratic temper and mindset.

  • The PhD and the ‘illiterate’

    The PhD and the ‘illiterate’

    PDP National Secretary, Professor Wale Oladipo, says this February Nigerians will have to choose between Goodluck Jonathan the PhD holder and Muhammadu Buhari, the ‘semi-illiterate’ jackboot.

    Oladipo isn’t saying Buhari cannot read and write in English, Hausa or Arabic. He isn’t accusing him of not passing through the precincts of some primary, secondary or military school. The former head of state has been forcibly demoted to the ranks of the illiterate because he didn’t attend a university.

    Thankfully for the APC candidate that is no hindrance to his aspirations as the constitution only requires him to have secondary school education – a conditions he more than meets.

    Given that Oladipo is some sort of professor it is amazing he does not understand that mighty accomplishments are not a function of your string of degrees. Some of the greatest business leaders the world has ever known are either university dropouts or never even had the tertiary education experience.

    Names like Microsoft founder and one of the world’s richest men, Bill Gates; Oracle founder, Larry Ellison, worth $28 billion who dropped out of University of Chicago; Chelsea Football Club owner, Roman Abramovich, worth $11.2 billion – a college dropout who once sold plastic toys out of his small apartment in Russia.

    But the most interesting example is Britain’s war time Prime Minister Winston Churchill who had a very poor academic record in school. He struggled through three independent schools before ending up at the famous Harrow School.

    After leaving Harrow he applied to attend the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He would make three attempts before passing the entrance examination. Although he never went to university, Churchill is today regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the 20th century. He is the only British Prime Minister to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature since its inception in 1901, and has been voted the greatest Briton ever.

    Strong leadership comes from your innate character traits, not the number of paper qualifications on your wall. Enough said.

  • Between GEJ’s today and GMB’s yesterday

    Between GEJ’s today and GMB’s yesterday

    In an interview with Channels TV three Mondays ago, Dr. Doyin Okupe, a senior spokesman for President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ), said the All Progressives Congress (APC), the country’s leading opposition party, made “a fatal error” by electing General Muhammadu Buhari (GMB), a former military head of state and serial loser in the country’s presidential elections since 2003, as its candidate for the February 14, 2015 presidential election.

    General Buhari won his party’s presidential primaries, held on December 10 in Lagos, by a landslide, much to the surprise of most pundits who had forecast a tight race between him and former Vice-President, Atiku Abubakar. Indeed, so confident was the Atiku camp of his victory that his able spokesman, Garba Shehu, boasted on the eve of the primary that his principal’s acceptance speech had already been written. Shehu, you may recall, had conducted the vice-president’s highly successful media war in 2007 against his estranged boss, former President Olusegun Obasanjo,

    “For you to know how confident we are,” Shehu said, “Oga’s acceptance speech has already been written. So we are winning.”

    In the event, Shehu and his oga couldn’t have been more disappointed; not only did he lose to Buhari, he also lost to a much less fancied Dr. Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, the Governor of Kano State, who came a very distant second. The scores were 3,430 for the winner, 974 for the governor, 954 for the former VP, 624 for Rochas Okorocha, the Governor of Imo State, and 10 for Sam Nda-Isaiah, the publisher of Leadership.

    The contrast between Buhari’s win and the coronation ceremony of President Jonathan as PDP’s candidate in Abuja on the same day couldn’t have been starker as a comparative study of the internal democracy of the two parties; the ruling party simply made it absolutely impossible for anyone to contest for its presidential ticket against the incumbent, inadvertently betraying a lack of confidence that the man can retain his ticket even in a rigged primary.

    When Okupe said he knew Buhari’s election was “a fatal error” he of course meant it for APC. Buhari, like Generals Ibrahim Babangida, Abdulsalami Abubakar and Obasanjo (whose spokesman he once was), he said, only reminded Nigerians of a past that was best forgotten. Well, contrary to Okupe’s wish, APC’s “error” may well turn out to be fatal, not for itself, but for PDP, which has ruled (misrule is more like it) this country since the start of the Fourth Republic in 1999 – and has threatened to rule us much longer for at least the next half century.

    Okupe’s remarks in the Channels interview merely echoed his master’s acceptance speech on his coronation as PDP’s candidate. “The choice before Nigerians in the coming election,” he said in the speech, “is simple: A choice between going forward or (sic) going backwards; between the new ways and the old ways; between freedom and repression; between a record of visible achievements and beneficial reforms and desperate power-seekers with empty promises.”

    I do not have any opinion poll to back my belief, but I have no doubt that if Nigerians were free today to choose between the immediate and distant past Okupe has denigrated, on the one hand, and his principal’s present, on the other, the vast majority of them will prefer the past. Whatever those like Okupe who prefer the status quo may choose to believe, the fact is that Nigerians have never had it as bad as it has been in the last five years under President Jonathan, the good people of the oil producing Niger Delta region he comes from not exempted.

    As Eric Teniola, a veteran reporter and now a frequent commentator, pointed out in a well researched piece, “Changing tide for the Niger Delta” in The Guardian (December 24), with the region blessed with a development commission (NDDC), a ministry and the Presidential Amnesty Programme, all being allocated princely sums that are the envy of most states in the country – not, above all, to mention a president who is a son of the soil – money has since ceased being an object for the region.

    Yet, today the ordinary people of the region have not in any way been better off than they were in the past. On the contrary, they are probably worse off today, as they wallow in abject poverty in sharp contrast to the mindless opulence of a few of them who the president seems ever so proud to say, as he repeated during his fundraiser two Saturdays ago, he has made millionaires and billionaires and, who knows, even trillionaires.

    Speaking on December 23 at the inauguration of the Enugu-Port Harcourt train service, the president repeated the statistical self-delusion, following the so-called rebasing of our Gross Domestic Product this year, that his administration has grown Nigeria’s economy into the biggest in Africa and one of the biggest in the world. “We have,” he said, “managed the economy such that it has risen to be the greatest economy in Africa and one of the biggest in the world.”

    Obviously the president, in repeating this mantra about Nigeria’s new economic status, chose to ignore a report, issued by the UK-based Legatum Institute, a research organisation that documents annual prosperity indicators around the world, which listed Nigeria as 125th in poverty out of 142 countries the institute surveyed.

    The report, issued on December 19, said: “Despite its latest status as Africa’s biggest economy, and its government’s claim of improved standard of living, Nigeria was not only one of the world’s least prosperous countries in 2014, but also one of Africa’s poorest, beaten by smaller nations like Niger, Benin, Mali and Cameroun… Remarkably, Nigeria failed to make the list of Africa’s top 10 most prosperous countries, a league dominated by Botswana and South Africa.”

    Obviously this is not a record any leader who cares for the welfare and the happiness of his people would be proud of. As The Punch said in the conclusion of its strongly worded front page comment, “Jonathan’s N21 bn donation: Impunity taken too far,” (December 23), “It is all evident that Jonathan has failed badly to build a credible, honest and minimally effective government for almost half a decade that he has been president. This is regrettable indeed.”

    Yet we are told that we should reject change and vote for the status quo next year when our yesterday seems all so much better than our today.

    Of all the things the president said in his acceptance speech as PDP’s candidate, the most profound for me was one of the shorted paragraphs in the speech. “Our mission,” he said, “is to secure Nigeria’s future.”

    On his current record of his abysmal failure to even secure our present, it seems highly doubtful that he can secure the country’s future – certainly not with the level of threat we have repeatedly been subjected to by several of his henchmen like Asari Dokubo, who have said his loss next year will mean the end of Nigeria. Given the widespread public concern about recent massive and illegal importation of arms as articulated only the other day by former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, in a letter to the President and to Buhari as the two leading presidential contenders, pleading with them to sign a memorandum of understanding that they will get their respective followers to eschew violence especially after the election, Dokubo’s threats cannot be dismissed as empty or idle.

    Predictably, threats from the likes of Dokubo have provoked counter-threats from Buhari’s camp, the most controversial of which has been the threat by Rivers State Governor and now the Director-General of the Buhari Campaign Organisation, Rotimi Amaechi, that the opposition will form a parallel government if PDP wins, his assumption being, of course, that PDP cannot win next year’s election if it is free and fair.

    Amaechi’s threat is to be condemned as much as Dokubo’s. However, whereas government officials have condemned Amaechi over his threat, they have maintained a deathly silence over those from the president’s men.

    Not only have government officials condemned threats of violence from opposition elements, they have now gone further to threaten them with arrest and imprisonment. Only two Mondays ago, the combative Minister of Police Affairs, Chief Jelili Adesiyan, said he has ordered the Inspector- General of Police and the Directorate of State Security to arrest anyone “making mutinous and inflammatory statements.”

    He named no names but it was obvious he was referring mostly to Amaechi, especially over another statement the governor made, condemning the death sentence passed recently on 54 soldiers for alleged mutiny in the war on Boko Haram terror in Borno State. “The soldiers,” the governor had reportedly said, “have a right to protest for the Federal Government’s failure to fully equip them.”

    If the rather liberal interpretation of Amaechi’s words by PDP and government officials is accurate, he was hardly alone in speaking them. In this he was clearly in the company of such human rights lawyers like Femi Falana, SAN, and the Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole  Soyinka, who have said the inability of government to arm and motivate the soldiers adequately are mitigating circumstances for their misconduct.

    More importantly Amaechi is in the good company of one of the most respected retired generals of the Nigerian military, Major-General Alabi Williams.

    “Those playing politics with the lives of these soldiers who were being sent to commit suicide in the name of fatherland and they refused, have to be ashamed,” the general, who retired as an officer and gentleman of the highest integrity and as the Chief of Defence Operations, Planning and Training in 1993, said recently. “The army’s top hierarchy is covering up its weaknesses by court-martialling these soldiers. Period.”

    As the February presidential election approaches, the question then is not whether our present is worth preserving, because obviously it is not. The question is, can the opposition deliver on its promise to bring an end to our nasty and brutish present? My answer will form the subject of this column next week, God willing.

     

    Happy New Year

    With every difficulty, says a dictum, there’s ease. As we enter the year 2015 tomorrow, may the Good Lord bring an end to our sufferings of recent years. Happy New Year.

  • HARDBALL

    HARDBALL

    May God hear Pope’s prayer on Nigeria

    Pope Francis’ Christmas Day informal intervention in strife in Nigeria, specifically the apparently religious war by Islamic fundamentalists under the banner of Boko Haram, should be cause for deep reflection by the presidency, which does not seem to be winning.  It is noteworthy that the Goodluck Jonathan administration extended emergency rule in the troubled Northeastern states of Adamawa, Borno and Yobe by another six months with no end to the destructive conflict in sight. There are indications that the insurgents have reviewed their strategy in a counter move to the government’s approach, and their recent devastating penetration of military facilities demonstrated that they were not about to surrender or concede defeat.

    So, when the new Vicar of Christ, elected on March 13, in his first “Urbi et Orbi”  (to the city and world) message on the theme of peace,  called for a dialogue to resolve the violence, he was understandably speaking as a priest and perhaps without a clear understanding of the basic issues. It is certainly difficult to imagine a compromise on the part of the rebels, who have escalated hostilities since 2009 and callously terrorised the people with a view to imposing an Islamic theocracy, which amounts to an unacceptable contradiction of the secularity emphasised by the country’s constitution. How do you talk with closed-minded desperadoes who refuse to co-exist with others outside their own faith?

    Ironically, the Roman Catholic leader, who preached a homily of harmony to tens of thousands of the faithful from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, represented a symbol of the very religion that Boko Haram considers anathema and deserving of destruction, to go by its consistent attacks on churches.  It is interesting that with particular reference to the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, and the crisis in Nigeria, Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Iraq, the chief of the 1.2 billion-member church said: “God is peace; let us ask him to help us to be peacemakers each day, in our life, in our families, in our cities and nations, in the whole world.”

    Of course, the Pope’s recommendation of dialogue in connection with the Nigerian conflict is not novel; various other voices from different quarters have before now suggested that the government should pursue the path of negotiation and lay down arms. However, there is no doubt that, on account of his immense stature and moral influence,  the Pope’s verbal mediation has not only further publicised the clash internationally, it has also reinforced the need for government  to critically re-evaluate its road map to peace. It is a development that demands a high degree of strategic creativity, especially in the light of the fact that the prolonged fighting continues to arrest progress in the affected areas.

    It is intriguing that the government has been unable to crush the rebellion through the force of weapons, which makes the Pope’s wisdom attractive.  However, apart from the rigid resistance of the militants to dialogue, there is the inevitable possibility that such accommodation may set a counter-productive precedence, which could be exploited by others. The situation places the administration in a tight spot, but it will need to do something anyway and expeditiously too.

    It is clear that the world is watching and waiting to see how answers will be provided to the problem, and what answers.  The Pope’s supplication for peace brings to mind the poetic construction of Alfred Lord Tennyson, who wrote: “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.”  In this context, it is optimistic to dream of a New Year that will bring an end to terror in the land. May God hear the Pope’s prayer!

  • Our Girls; Gumsuri victims;   Disgrace on Ibadan Lagos ‘Expressway’; B vs J on Fulani Farmer war

    Our Girls; Gumsuri victims;   Disgrace on Ibadan Lagos ‘Expressway’; B vs J on Fulani Farmer war

    For Our Girls –a short poem – Christmas came and now New Year/ For Chibok girls and Gumsuri victims Chibok girls we shed a tear/

    Too many ‘Fellow Nigerians’ live in fear/ Even questioning if God is near. And so, too many families will enter 2015 without word of their loved ones and will little hope of ever hearing from them again. The report that Boko Haram has a large contingent of neighbouring country foreigners should raise the stakes to a war situation, an invasion situation, even if the murder of an unknown number of Nigerian security officials is taken as an ‘insurgency’.

    As we pray for the return of all victims of the Boko Haram and the Fulani Wars, what do the two major political candidates offer beyond saying ‘peace’? Being a Fulani himself and a general, Buhari must have strong views on the lethal ‘Fulani matter’. What are his views on his strategy to end the ‘Fulani Herdsmen–Nigerian Farmers’ violence? He and we will bear in mind that the ‘Railway Transport of Cows‘ option has been suggested, as has the ‘Trailer Transport of Cows’. Indeed with railways, this problem would quickly become of historical importance –though the dead will remain dead, the crops will remain destroyed, the orphans will remain orphans, the widows and widowers will remain without a kobo in compensation.

    Unfortunately, Buhari has never proved himself a lover of modern transport or the modernisation of Nigeria, as he with or without Babangida, cancelled Lagos State’s Jakande Rail in 1983, hailed as solution to Lagos gridlock, at a suggested compensation cost of $184million penalty. Even when he was chairman at PTF, a lot of the resources ‘appeared’ diverted to the North but the railways unfortunately stagnated further. So it will be a miracle if Buhari builds an inch of railways or roads during his era should he become President. Of course we know what Jonathan is doing in this area but we must question its slowness and the cost. There are such huge outsized contracts that make nonsense of any purported anti-corruption drive. The result is an overpricing and obvious reduction in value of the end product – a proposed multi-state modern rail link nationwide.

    We spent five and a half hours getting from Ibadan to Lagos, just 110km, last Sunday December 20, another four hours Lagos-Ibadan on Sunday December 27,  18 kilometres an hour –on an expressway. Has government no shame even if it has no road management skills? Zero movement or massed vehicles are a danger. This regular crisis is a catastrophe waiting to become a mass carnage. The difficulties at the time I travelled had nothing to do with the Berger repairs as there are no repairs going on there and no church services at Redeemed or the Mountain of Fire. It is about bad roads and poor planning for the Ember months increase in traffic, in spite of noisy FRSC readiness claims and the noisy FERMA doing nothing to ’make smooth our paths’ just before and immediately before and after Redeemed, at Ibafo, Mowe, Berger, the bus stops in Ibafo, Mowe and at Berger in Lagos. Government should have sent its engineering staff to identify the top 10 or 30 or 100 worst bottleneck bad portions; secondly it would have immediately filled them; thirdly it would have widened the road at those turning points to accommodate turning traffic and also bus stops. Government should have led these same engineers and road maintenance departments to liaise with an increasingly questionable   FRSC, to stop stopping innocent passing vehicles at Ogere, but rather to ensure safe and unhindered travel at difficult spots. Unfortunately too many Nigerian ministry and organisational officials actually plan evil, not good, for the traveling public who are mere victims to be preyed upon by the use and abuse of the power of the uniform.

    Redeemed, Ibafo and Mowe are ‘towns with no overhead bridges and yet dual carriageways run through them. It is similar in many towns in Nigeria. What type of Nigerian human beings, engineers, have not built the 100 overhead bridges and 100 more turning points needed to reduce strain of jaywalking and turning.

    Government must solve this problem. Nigerians cannot wait four years for road completion, fall in oil prices and oil sales or not. Government should negotiate with construction giant Julius Berger to open all available road surface and start fixing the top 100 trouble spots first and start major construction from the Lagos end of the Ibadan Lagos side. By starting at the Sagamu junction, the contractors are delivering more vehicles quicker to the bottlenecks at Redeemed, Mowe and Ibafo and Berger. Fixing Mountain of Fire, Mowe and Ibafo now will allow quick exit of vehicles from these bottlenecks.

    Another key problem is the abuse of the road shoulder for driving. Those in the correct lanes look like idiots as all those who overtake on the shoulder will get in front sometimes 100 to 200 vehicles and six lanes are formed. This is so easily solved by a more efficient FRSC which should allow shoulder driving only in specific circumstances of accidents and lane obstruction. Government can also insert plastic barriers every 50 metres on all shoulders to discourage the practice. May your roads be rough, the Chinese quote proclaims as a prayer. The road of most Nigerians is rough enough from road management incompetence. HNYIA.

  • 2015 and the violence card

    2015 and the violence card

    Just like religion, the specter of violence hangs ominously over the 2015 general elections. That should surprise no one because virtually all our electoral exercises – with the possible exception of 1993 – have been trailed by tears and blood.

    If the recent intra-party primaries were as chaotic as they were, we should look with trepidation towards next year when the contest would be across party lines. Up North the Boko Haram insurgents would do their level best to disrupt the process. Add to that irresponsible politicians trying to manipulate religious sentiments for electoral advantage and you have the makings of a real tinderbox.

    The stakes are incredibly high. For the first time in 16 years a very strong possibility exists that the opposition could seize power from the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) which has dominated the landscape for so long.

    The game-changer is the emergence of the All Progressives Congress (APC) which provides a credible platform for the contestation of power with the PDP. The opposition can sense that their moment is at hand: the incumbent is horrified by the prospect of power slipping from its grasp. In these parts being in opposition is worse than winding up in hell: there’s no greater incentive to hang on using all possible means.

    This has set the stage for the some of the most incendiary pre-election rhetoric to assault our ears. A few days ago President Goodluck Jonathan was in church moaning about the volatile comments being made by politicians. Typically, he focused on the threat of the opposition to form a parallel government if the polls were rigged. What he didn’t say was that all sides are just as guilty of firing things up.

    One of his ardent supporters and one-time leader of a militant Niger Delta group, Asari Dokubo, has threatened that there would be bloodshed if the president loses the next election. Some other retired militants have equally threatened to come out of cushy retirement if their kinsman and benefactor were toppled through the ballot box. Another way of putting it is that a band of gunmen are putting a pistol to the head of the rest of Nigeria saying – ‘Vote Jonathan or else…’

    What makes this threat interesting is that in 2011 one Northern PDP leader angry that the party would not allow the region field someone to serve another four years of what would have been the late Yar’Adua’s second term, vowed that they would make the zone ungovernable.

    There are those who still argue that the upsurge in activities of the Boko Haram sect is a fall-out of that threat. If we were to take that conspiracy theory seriously then we should be prepared for a fresh red tide of blood in the creeks next year.

    Up North, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi stirred controversy when he called on Jonathan not to contest the 2015 election. Perhaps to balance things up, a few days after he also advised General Muhammadu Buhari to forget about his fourth bid for power.

    Last week, he cried out that supporters of the APC presidential candidate had been sending threatening text messages to his phone over his stance. Some other leaders in the region have also claimed that an unspoken threat hangs in the air over anyone who would dare oppose the Buhari’s aspiration.

    Given what happened in 2011 when supporters of the general embarked on an orgy of violence through the North because they believed he had been rigged out of certain victory, it is not out of the realm of possibility that there could be a repeat if the results turn out to be controversial.

    Given this backdrop should we been running for the hills because of the prospect of violence marring the polls? Former Minister of External Affairs, Prof. Bolaji Akinyemi, thinks we have real reasons to worry about looming “horrendous violence.”

    In an open letter to President Jonathan and General Buhari last Monday, he proposed that both candidates sign an undertaking to rein in their supporters after the election.

    He wrote: “The certainty of violence is higher than it was in 2011. If President Jonathan wins, the North will erupt into violence as it did in 2011. If Gen. Buhari wins, the Niger Delta will erupt into violence.” I don’t believe that we need rocket science to make this prediction.”

    Adducing other reasons to support his fears about impending violence he said “illegal massive importation of weapons into the country, which has reached such alarming proportions that I really wonder which is better armed, the militia on one hand or the official armed forces on the other hand”.

    To prevent disaster, Akinyemi suggested that frontline traditional rulers – the Sultan of Sokoto, the Emir of Kano, the Lamido of Adamawa from the North, the Ooni of Ife and the Oba of Benin from the South; elder statesman Chief Emeka Anyaoku; religious leaders Pastor Enoch Adeboye and Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor and ex-Heads of State Gen. Yakubu Gowon and Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar -facilitate a pre-election meeting between the candidates, the preparation of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and act as a Council of Wisemen to assist in managing the post-election conflicts.

    The recommended MoU would commit the candidates to “a civil and peaceful campaign, devoid of threats; a commitment to control their supporters after the elections; and that supporters of whoever loses should be entitled to peaceful protests but not to violent protests.”

    We’ve already had a quick dismissal of the proposals from the Presidency after its spokesperson said there was no need for Jonathan to sign any agreement since he had always been committed to peaceful, free and fair polls. This is another of saying ‘don’t worry about us you talk to the bad guys on the other side.’

    This is where the problem begins – when we chose to see the speck in the opponent’s eyes without first plucking out the beam in ours. No side has been guiltless over the use of violent rhetoric. If we’re to make progress towards peaceful polls, a starting point would be for all sides to admit their sins. It is unhelpful when the government and the ruling party posture as the patriots while the opposition are painted as rebellious rabble.

    Akinyemi’s suggestions are some of the most useful I have come across in what currently passes for debate about the coming elections. They deserve to be treated with more respect and given a second look.

    I believe that given the level of maturity displayed by politicians in most Third World environments violent transitions are things we must learn to live with. Whether in India or Pakistan, Egypt or Zimbabwe elections are often contested against a canvas of booming guns and bombs. As a supporting cast you have the police and other security agencies who think their role is to align with whoever is in power.

    While it is difficult to hold leaders responsible for the sometimes spontaneous actions of supporters, there can be no denying that their firm utterances can have a calming influence on them. Imagine if the late Nelson Mandela had not spoken strongly against blacks taking vengeance against their erstwhile white Apartheid oppressors?

    All Nigerians who are truly committed to peaceful polls next year should now insist that Jonathan and Buhari should sign on to the sort of MoU Akinyemi has proposed as a first step. This might not be a magic wand but it would certainly help.

    The only problem I see is that our leaders have shown that they don’t respect agreements or signed documents. People who can baldly disavow commitments they made publicly cannot be expected to respect any deal on peaceful elections – especially when there are no credible means of enforcement beyond moral persuasion.

    It might also be helpful to remind gung-ho supporters that while their threats of conflict might seem romantic now, the consequences are often bitter. Those who promise violence and act on it invariably turn their home turf into the theatres of war. The wars will not be fought on European soil.

    Whether it has political undertone or not we have seen how the Boko Haram insurgency has devastated the North East. The economy is shattered and families broken in pieces. Thousands have become internally displaced persons in the own homeland. Even with billions of naira thrown in it would take at least a decade to restore this region to where it was in 2009.

    The rotund ex-Niger Delta militants who are threatening mayhem if their benefactor losses the polls should remember what happened to poor local people in the days leading to the ceasefire that birthed the amnesty programme of the Umaru Yar’Adua administration.

    Fed up with the unrelenting attacks by militants on oil installations and security agents, the government unleashed military action to root out the rebels. In a matter of days the lightening fast offensive unmasked a string of militant camps. Unfortunately, the fighting also devastated hapless communities which had been under the thumb of the gunmen.

    Thousands of women and children were put to flight – an indeterminate number killed. The palace of the paramount ruler of the Ijaw Gbaramatu Kingdom was razed by federal troops. As the one-sided fight unfolded Ijaw leaders like Chief Edwin Clark were forced to cry out that their people were being slaughtered and called for a truce.

    This bit of history might be helpful in jogging the memories of billionaire ex-militants dreaming of returning to the creeks. What counts is not starting a conflict but understanding where it takes you and whether you can finish what you’ve started.

    I suspect that whoever governs Nigeria after now will not treat any insurgency in the Niger Delta that threatens the country’s economic jugular vein with the same cavalier attitude the Boko Haram war has been handled.

    In any event much of these threats might just be empty bluster. Even if Jonathan loses I don’t expect millions in the Niger Delta whose lives have not been bettered in the last four years to start rushing into the creeks to fight. Most are just ordinary people who will just want to carry on with their lives.

    The Asari Dokubos, Ateke Toms and Boyloaf we can understand: they would have millions of reasons to be disgruntled.