The Nation Newspaper

Category: Wednesday

The coming North/ South ‘brawl’

After several months of suspense and drama, President Goodluck Jonathan has finally declared his intention to seek re-election next year. And last week Thursday, he made a triumphant-esque appearance at Wadata Plaza, the national headquarters of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, PDP, in Abuja, to pick his party’s nomination and intention forms. A day before that, the arch-rival opposition party, the All Progressive Congress, APC, held an Extra-Ordinary National Convention at the Old Parade Ground, also in Abuja. There, the party welcomed into its fold, Aminu Waziri Tambuwal, Speaker of the House of Representatives, who had just dumped the PDP to pitch his tent with the APC. With these two events, the campaign trails towards the 2015 general elections seem fully laid out.

However, Jonathan’s formal entry into the race for a second term as President of Nigeria did not come as a surprise. It is coming more than a year since several groups that were daily mushrooming over the country’s political landscape, had been holding rallies complete with all forms of acrobatic display and break dancing, to highlight what they consider to be Jonathan’s unique selling points. But getting the President to pick up his party’s nomination for the Presidential ticket did not come without intrigues. First was a break-away faction of the PDP which initially featured seven sitting PDP governors and some other top officials of the party. Eventually, five of the aggrieved governors defected to the rival APC. On the heels of this, Bamanga Tukur, the then chairman of the party, was unceremoniously eased out of office and compensated with the post of chairman of the Nigerian Railway Corporation after he refused an offer to be sent to ‘Siberia’ as Nigeria’s Ambassador to China.

Next, the President’s minders turned their attention to Sule Lamido, the Jigawa State governor who, for several months, had put up an uncompromising stance over his 2015 ambition to become President on the platform of the PDP. He was made to recoil into his shell. Of course, we are all aware of the gargantuan harassment that was unleashed on Rotimi Amaechi, the governor of Rivers State, who was initially rumoured to be gunning for the post of Vice-President to Lamido. It was the same tug of war that led to the bastardization and eventual balkanization of the Governor’s Forum into two factions.

The scramble for and partition of the once-stable Governor’s Forum was preceded by the formation of a hitherto non-existent PDP Governor’s Forum headed by the loquacious Godswill Akpabio, governor of Akwa Ibom State and an unapologetic presidential megaphone. Several other acts of cajoling and alliances followed in the bid to clear the way for Jonathan, culminating in the multiple PDP stakeholders’ endorsement of the President as the party’s sole candidate for the election. While all this was going on, the President kept mum on his actual intention even though his body language made it clear that he had made up his mind to run. His strategy to seek re-election was all-too-clear to see with his foot soldiers orchestrating various forms of it at every forum.

Now, with Jonathan in the fray, the roller coaster for next year’s election is in full swing. That this coincided with the defection of Tambuwal to the APC shows that the two dominant parties, PDP and APC, have unwittingly transformed the country into a two-party state, as they are set to lock horns in the 2015 elections particularly the presidential election. With the array of political juggernauts in the APC, mostly those who once wined and dined with the PDP and have, therefore, mastered the election ‘winning’ tricks of the PDP, the coming election bears the imprimatur of a keener contest than most previous ones. This will be a sharp departure from the elections of previous years, 1999, 2003, 2007 and 2011, in which the PDP as the outright dominant party, dictated the tune all over. For the first time in the history of elections in this country, the conservative octopus seems vulnerable to defeat at the hands of a seemingly formidable progressive opposition.

However, like most elections, many factors will influence the outcome of next year’s polls. For the presidential election, which will come first and which is the Holy Grail the two mega parties have trained their sights on, Jonathan obviously has an advantage as a sitting President. His party has been in power since the country’s return to democratic governance in 1999, almost 16 years ago. During this period, the party has monopolised power at the centre as well as being in dominant control of nearly two-thirds of the 36 states of the federation. Therefore, the party can boast of significant presence all over the country and this will come in handy during election because democracy is a game of numbers. Also, the party has stupendous financial muscle which gives it a huge war chest for the elections. Besides, the party has unfettered access to the machinery of government including propaganda machinery and all coercive apparatuses in the security and non-security services.

On the other hand, though the APC parades hordes of tested and influential politicians with huge followership at national, regional, state and local government levels, the party is yet to make up its mind on who to field as its presidential torch-bearer. Right now, those jostling for the party’s ticket are from the npart of the country. In actual fact, whoever finally emerges as APC’s presidential candidate, will determine how far the party can go in its quest to wrest power from the hands of the monopolistic PDP. And except the party has some fast cards in its kitty to play in this high stakes game, the PDP may have built an unassailable head start in the campaigns using its well-oiled propaganda machinery. In this case, the APC must work assiduously to get its message of redemption and national re-birth down to the electorate all over the country with lightning speed.

At no other time since the end of the country’s civil war – 1966 to 1970 – has the country become so much divided, so much polarized, along tribal and religious lines than now. This is because politicians continue to whip up primordial sentiments all over the place in order to woo supporters for their narrow, selfish interests of winning election at all costs. For Jonathan and his Ijaw ethnic group in the South-south geopolitical zone of the country, winning the forthcoming election is like protecting a finally-discovered treasure having searched to the end of the world to find it. Much of the oil that is the mainstay of the nation’s economy flows from the creeks of the South-south. As a result, the people of the region sees the retention of the Presidency by a son of the region, for another four years, as a legitimate claim having been zoned out of the power equilibrium of the country since independence in 1960.

For the northern part of the country, the region is still brooding from the political ‘calamity’ of losing the presidency in 2010 owing to the untimely demise of President Umaru Yar’Adua, a development that paved way for Jonathan, who was Yar’Adua’s deputy, to assume power. This, perhaps, was one of the remote causes of the widespread violence, arson and brigandage that greeted the presidential election in some parts of the north in 2011. Since the APC is bent on featuring a northerner as its presidential candidate, there is a very good chance that the coming presidential contest will be a North/South and Christian/Muslim affair. In that case, whichever way the pendulum swings, it could trigger some catastrophic consequences for the country. If this happens, it will be the proverbial fight between two elephants in which the ordinary man on the street bears the brunt as the metaphorical grass. The only antidote to this is to ensure free and fair elections next year. But with the type of desperation being exhibited by our politicians, this may appear to be a mere wishful thinking or a tall order. May God help us!

November 5, 2014
‘Our Girls’; Mubi; EU ‘Goes Sahara solar’, AU:‘ Take Africa Solar’; ‘Part Time Politics’

Our Girls’ are missing since April 15. They are the main symbol, no longer of themselves alone, but of the wider murderous Boko Haram terrorist tragedy with its thousands of executed victims and millions of refugees. Last week’s daylight sack of 700,000 population Mubi with huge casualties and the expulsion of the Armed Forces and the bomb in Gombe State motor park killing and injuring long-suffering Fellow Nigerians exemplify the will and power of Boko Haram. Where next? Abuja? The Armed Forces needs new strategic victories, intelligence and defence strategies.

Nigeria is groping with a pitiful 3-5,000Mw in spite of uninterrupted government boastful continuous political or military power since independence confirming a mass failure of understanding of the value of electric power. It is repugnant that a civilian government is only planning 10,000Mw by 2015 and 20,000Mw by 2020 of power when our population would have grown by 18 percent. Do you understand the ridiculousness of explaining to a Nigerian child that Nigeria after 50 years of lucrative oil trade still shamelessly has ONE TENTH OF THE ELECTRIC POWER of the evil anti-Black Apartheid South Africa which has 45,000Mw, WITH A QUARTER OF OUR POPULATION? Apartheid ‘kindly’ provided uninterrupted power supply. Why do Nigerians hate each other so much- ‘Nigerian Electricity Apartheid’?

Incomprehensibly, corrupt and incompetent Nigeria exports crude oil abroad only to re-import refined products due to ‘Serial Killers Of Nigeria’s Refineries’. Do not expect an electric power miracle to silence the deafening cacophony of Nigeria’s new ‘Talking Drum’ the generator. No other African country is as poor power-wise as Nigeria. Nigerians require 150,000Mw recommended by the World Bank and the United Nations as our right.

Indeed if all the money that the political and military class stole and steal were used for annual incremental electricity capacity building, we would not have ‘No Electric Power Always’ today and even Boko Haram may have never taken such hold. Instead of power plants which the Minister of Power happily boasts will take three years to plan, fabricate and build, why does Nigeria not provide ‘Emergency Power’ or do what it did with the cellphone – jump landline wahala and go into the future by making everywhere ‘power’-ful by going solar everywhere at once with a $5 billion Solar CBN Fund with low interest loans? Use what God has given us- the sun. There are solar efforts, recently a planned 3,000Mw plant in the South-east and solar-lit major roads. But we need a quantum leap in solar strategies.

If you do not believe that God has given us enough power from the sun and if you do not believe the power of Nigeria’s politicians to willingly and wickedly deprive you even of God’s gift, solar power, then please read these internet quotes found by ‘yahoooing’ or Google-ing ‘France solar power Sahara farms. ‘Instead of looking at the Sahara desert as unusable wasteland, look at it as good as gold! Think… If 0.3% of this desert were covered in solar panels, African solar farms will power all of Europe by 2050.’ ‘One percent of the Sahara Desert covered in solar panels would power the entire world . . . The EU seeks to take 20% of their energy from renewable resources by 2020. The EU will lay cables across the Mediterranean, build solar power plants in the Sahara, and import energy from across the sea – financed by European companies…supported by the EU. The plan is to cover 6,500 square miles of the desert in photovoltaic systems and wind parks’.

And what will be the benefit to Africa of this EU ‘Sun for Europe’ initiative? Beyond the politics of Burkina Faso and the overdue exit of Blaise Campaore who killed Thomas Sankara 27 years ago, what strategies do the AU’s Energy Commission and the African Development Bank have to solarise Africa for Africans? Are they discussing with billionaires like Gates, Mo Ibrahim, Tata and Dangote? Are 100 African universities and businesses being funded for ‘Africa Goes Solar’ mega projects? Let it not be that ‘EU goes solar, Africa remains mumu inside darkness, O!’ Africa was never the Dark Continent. Africa always had the sun. All we need is a sun-someone with a ‘Presidential Solar Vision’ to light up the day and night with that sun.

Nigeria must go solar in all homes and businesses. The federal government is training 700 solar engineers. Unhappily the training of 400 engineers under FERMA had little effect on potholes, so do not expect much solar power.

Nigeria expects a spiralling fall in naira value and an economic disaster unless we cut the excessive self-allocated political Salaries and Perks and salaries for life for National Assembly (NASS) officials which are a manifestation of a cross-party political greed. For example, consumptive Constitutional Projects are kicking off. Do not be deceived. Every kobo of the ridiculously high political party nomination form fees was got or will be recovered by stealing from the budget. Nigeria must cut these political budgetary items. And implement strategies to keep political parties away from the LGA, state and national budgets. For self-preservation, Nigeria must urgently cut the number of Special Advisers and their salaries. Make them and NASS and all state and LGA legislatures, all politics, part time. Nigeria cannot bear the financial assault of political Salaries and Perks and corruption–SAPing our budgets nationwide. Politics must go PART TIME.

November 5, 2014
Tambuwal’s defection

His handlers have tried to cast him in the image of a meek lamb with little, if any, discouragement from the man himself. But, as many of those who have crossed his path would testify, he is as tough as nails. Ask former President Olusegun Obasanjo, his estranged godfather, who brought him to political limelight to begin with. Ask former Central Bank of Nigeria Governor and now Emir of Kano Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi. Ask the Rivers State Governor, Rotimi Amaechi.

These three must have since come to feature prominently in what, metaphorically speaking at least, must be President Goodluck Jonathan’s Black Book, tucked away somewhere in the inner recesses of the Presidential Villa. The first for openly writing a letter to his erstwhile godson, which dripped with so much vitriol; the second for accusing the untouchable Minister of Petroleum and, by extension, the man himself, of incredible venality in the management of the country’s oil wealth; and the third for cultivating the cheeky habit of tweaking the president’s nose every now and then.

All three – and more – must have rued the day they may have thought the man would, meek as a lamb, simply roll over and absorb their punches, or even turn the other cheek. Instead, he has responded each time with as much vicious counter upper-cut as the heavy weight champion, Mike Tyson, could land on an opponent.

And now, to this list of those who have been at the receiving end of the president’s unsparing anger, must be added the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Waziri Tambuwal. His own offence? On October 28, the man finally confirmed speculations that he had for long harboured the treasonable intention of defecting from the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) when he announced his defection on the floor of the House and then adjourned its sitting to December 3 – long enough to escape immediate impeachment.

The presidency’s response was swift even if predictable; the speaker’s security details were withdrawn by the Inspector General of Police two days after, apparently on orders from “oga at the top”. Not only that, it seemed the leadership of the PDP in the House got their marching orders to defy the House rules and reconvene immediately in order to remove the speaker, come hell, come high water. The party had, of course, asked him to step aside but he had dutifully declined.

Both moves have now become bones of contention, with both the Speaker and his new party heading for the courts to plead that PDP be stopped from reconvening the House before December 3. On Monday, Justice Ahmed Ramat Mohammed, sitting in a Federal High Court in Abuja, granted them temporary respite when he ruled for the status quo to remain until the substantive hearing of the case on November 7.

The swift withdrawal of Tambuwal’s security details and the moves by the authorities to remove him would not be the first time the speaker would be the object of presidential ire. On June 22, he suffered an even more personal humiliation at the hands of soldiers when they insisted on searching his vehicle before he would be allowed into the venue of an international conference on the security and challenges of pastoralism held in Kaduna and organised by the Office of the National Security Adviser.

Tambuwal was a special guest and speaker at the conference. Other VIPs arriving for the conference, governors especially, had been allowed into the venue without search. The insistent soldiers said they were acting on “orders from above”. In anger the Speaker disembarked from his vehicle and walked into the venue. His apparent offence at the time was that he had already been seen to be hobnobbing with key figures in the opposition party, not least of who was the governor of his state, Alhaji Aliyu Magatakarda Wamakko.

The Speaker’s defection raises both moral and legal questions about his holding on to his position as the country’s No. 4 Citizen. Only the courts can decide on the legal question. However, on this count, in withdrawing his security details so fast and moving just as fast to try and remove him as Speaker, the presidency and the PDP have, once again, demonstrated their impatience with, and total disregard for, the law as long as it does not accord with their whims and caprices.

On the moral question, it is pretty obvious that the positions of both sides rest on very shaky grounds, to put it mildly. Defections have been a two-way affair in this country, going all the way back to even before the Bauchi State Governor, Alhaji Isa Yuguda, defected from the opposition All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), on whose platform he had won the election for his first term in 2007, to the ruling PDP in 2009. In all cases, whereas the authorities sought to punish defectors to the opposition party, they have amply rewarded those who defected to it. This is clearly a classic case of double standards.

In more civilised climes politicians accept the fact that defections, like all decisions, have personal consequences, and therefore think twice before they defect. Take for example, the case of one, Douglas Carswell, a Conservative member of the British Parliament. Dissatisfied with the politics of his party he first resigned his seat in August which he had won in 2010 by a handy 53 per cent and then joined the new United Kingdom Independent Party (UKIP) which, right now, is looking like the nemesis of the Conservative Party and, to a lesser extent, the Labour Party.

His resignation triggered a by-election, which was held on October 1. He then contested the election as UKIP’s candidate. This time, he won even more handily than in 2010 by almost 60 per cent of the votes, beating the Conservative candidate to a distant second place with 24.6 per cent and Labour to third place, with an even more miserable 11 per cent. Carswell has now made history as the first UKIP member of Parliament.

In Nigeria, it’s almost impossible to contemplate a Carswell’s honourable conduct, whatever party he would have belonged to. Sadly, Tambuwal himself, with all the public sympathy he is likely to get because of PDP’s blatant inconsistency, is no exemplar. A 1991 law graduate of the University of Sokoto, his home state, his first taste of national politics was in 1999 when he worked as a legislative aide of Senator Abdullahi Wali from Sokoto, then Senate leader.

In 2003 he contested and won the House seat for Kebbe/Tambuwal on the ticket of the ANPP, one of APC’s three major legacy parties. He then defected to the DPP, founded by the state governor, Attahiru Bafarawa, ahead of the 2007 elections when the governor left ANPP due to disagreements within the party’s leadership. However, when DPP denied ANPP defectors automatic tickets, he returned to his old party. He then moved once again to PDP when the ANPP governorship candidate, Aliyu Magatakarda Wamakko, who had been Bafarawa’s deputy on the ANPP ticket, was persuaded by the PDP through some intricate manoeuvres to defect to it, ahead of the 2007 elections. The future speaker won again on PDP ticket in the last elections in 2011.

His defection to the APC last month would not be the first time he would poke his finger in PDP’s eyes; he became speaker in June, 2011, by defying the party’s zoning arrangement in the House when he contested and walloped the party’s candidate for the job, Mulikat Adeola-Akande, by 252 votes to 90 of the 350 members that voted. Ten abstained from voting and another 10 were absent.

Used to double standards, the same party, which actively supported President Goodluck Jonathan to make nonsense of its zoning formula in the year’s presidential elections, never forgave the speaker for defying its zoning arrangement. On one or two occasions, it even tried to impeach him but failed because of his firm grip of the House.

His October 28 defection to the enemy camp must be the last straw for the PDP. It would be surprising if the presidency and the party do not pull every string possible to remove him as speaker ahead of next year’s general elections.

The APC House Leader, Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila, has been boasting that no one, except the speaker, can reconvene the House, presumably as the prelude to removing him. “The President,” he is quoted as saying, “cannot do it, the deputy speaker lacks the powers and indeed it is beyond the signatures of 120, 150, 250 or 350 members. That power resides solely and exclusively with Mr. Speaker. We had hoped that the PDP and the Executive would at least this one time be decorous in their conduct and respect the rule of law and the legislature but we were wrong.”

On the other hand the Deputy Majority Leader, Hon. Leo Ogor, apparently speaking for the PDP, has, in effect, been threatening to bring down the whole House on everybody’s head if that is what it would take to remove Tambuwal.

“I expect Gbajabiamila,” Ogor said, “to learn to use his head, else if heavens fall, all of us will bear the consequences.”

The consequences of removing the speaker because of his defection could indeed be dire for Nigeria. But then, unfortunately for Nigerians, dire consequences have never been known to stop your typical Nigerian politician from using all means, fair and foul, to grab power and hang on to it for as long as he is alive.

November 5, 2014
Tambuwal and the integrity question

Ripples’ candid view: Aminu Tambuwal, Speaker of the House of Representatives, should have resigned his speakership.

From the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) camp, now busy shopping for sympathy, and howling “betrayal”, that view would be “balanced and objective”; or even “patriotic”.

From the All Progressives Congress (APC), celebrating a big political catch, Ripples would be guilty of “empty idealism” and perhaps culpable ignorance of the realpolitik.

But both views would amount to cant. Principles are constant. But cant is the chameleon that changes with the season, even if it has to risk high unreason, bordering on patent absurdity.

By convention, the party with the majority provides the Speaker — democracy is, after all, majority rule. So, Alhaji Tambuwal ought to have stepped down because it is decent, because it is honourable, because it is fair.

But which of the opposing sides plays by decency, plays by honour, plays by fairness? And if overwhelming bad faith is the grundnorm, why would a partisan play by good faith — to commit partisan suicide?

To the emotive and non-introspective, therefore, the Tambuwal affair is a PDP vs. APC tango. In a way, it is — to the extent that the one got a net-loss and the other, a net-gain. But dig deeper, and what you see is the unconscionable face of Nigerian politics, and its rotten, smelly core! That ought to impress the perceptive, much more than partisan gains or losses.

Take the PDP that now screams blue murder. What moral right has it to do so: because it boasts better morality when similar situations are to its own rogue advantage?

Mulikat Adeolu-Akande, the House Leader, was quoted as saying that the with Ondo Governor, Olusegun Mimiko’s defection to PDP, all eight Labour Party (LP) members of the House of Representatives “automatically” (and Ripples adds, seamlessly) become PDP members — just like that? And there was even no split in LP!

Now, if the House Leader is so sloppy in her sense of proprietary, why should others be more scrupulous — because the majority is now the victim? Or because PDP can ripple its majority muscles to threaten others, or corral illicit orders from the Police high command to impose its will?

That, of course, brings the debate to the purported withdrawal of security from the office of Speaker — not because he has been deposed as Speaker, but because he has defected from the majority party.

To start with, there is an eerie similarity between Sulaiman Abba, acting Inspector-General of Police (IGP) and his commander-in-chief, President Goodluck Jonathan, in the so-called withdrawal of the Speaker’s security details.

The one wants to be confirmed IGP at all cost; the other wants to win in 2015 at all cost. So, it is meet that the subversive order — subversive of the law — emanated from the Concert of the Desperate, into which the duo fits pat! Whenever desperation is sighted, bad judgement is never far away.

Besides, it is tribute to Jonathan’s presidential focus that even as Boko Haram swooped over Mubi in Adamawa, the commander-in-chief was swooping over a presidential nomination form for a job he has clearly proved his inability; and was also gracelessly settling partisan scores with the Speaker.

On what basis was the IGP giving that illegal order? That Alhaji Tambuwal is no longer Speaker? That definitely is not true, for no parliamentary session has deposed him. And if he is still Speaker, does the IGP, even if the president gives him an illegal order, have the right to summarily strip the No. 4 citizen of his security, his right by law?

If that were so, then it would be dangerous indeed: for maybe some day, someone, somewhere could “order” the IGP to summarily withdraw the president’s security details too! And by pure logic, why not? If a mere policeman can deny the No. 4 citizen his legally guaranteed security, on some phantom law he lacks the capacity to correctly interpret, he could also as well deny the No. 1, citizen, the president, of his too!

Outrageous? That is the risk you take when, by reflex but unreflective actions, you try to undermine the institutions of state.

But back to the basic argument: ought Speaker Tambuwal have remained Speaker, after defecting from his majority party? On moral grounds, Ripples thinks not. But the legality or otherwise of it is much more complex, all the more complicated by the mala fide all round.

To start with, by Section 50(1)(b) of the 1999 Constitution, the Speaker is the exclusive business of the House. So, is the IGP (or even the president) a member of the House? So, how come both have convinced (more of colluded with) themselves the Speaker has been removed, and so should forfeit his right to official security by law, if both don’t suffer from grand executive delusion?

Then even the law the IGP glibly quoted: Section 68(1)(g), which says a House member loses his seat if he left his party for another, provided there was no division in the party or merger with another party.

Now, where was our IGP when Labour Party MPs defected to PDP, even with no division in their party? The same law he brandished with a flourish at the Speaker died then, just because the president was pleased with the defection to his own party? So, it is some Animal Farm, where some animals are more equal than others?

Of course, partisan opinion is divided on whether a division exists in the PDP. The ruling party hierarchs love to flaunt a court verdict that there was nothing like “New PDP”. They follow that up to kid themselves there was no division in the party. But if there was no division, how come five governors (Sokoto, Rivers, Kano, Kwara and Adamawa — now reclaimed by gunboat impeachment) left the party for APC?

The opposition APC has even upped the ante, pushing forth two Federal High Court judgments: Justice Faji, in Ilorin, that held there were indeed factions in the PDP; and Justice Aikawa, in Sokoto, which not only affirmed that there was a division but also held that the resulting faction merged with APC.

So, if these judgments are real, where stands the PDP position that factions never existed simply because of the legal sophistry that no “New PDP existed”? And where stands the IGP precipitate order to strip the Speaker of his security, simply because Mr. President is boiling?

Let President Jonathan and fellow PDP hierarchs boil all they want. They are only a victim of their own impunity. The rich also cry!

But let them be wary of, as Jonathan always does when he appears trapped, rushing to wield power, without recourse to the law that created that power. That would reinforce the ultimate futility of impunity and doom them to crises like the Tambuwal affair, if not the eventual collapse of the democratic project.

As for APC, let them too be wary of playing the politics of cant, and play more of the politics of principle. It is such penchant to play in the PDP sewers that fuels the rising opinion that APC differs from PDP as six differs from half-a-dozen.

APC, if it really wants to deliver change, cannot afford such conceptual putdown.

November 4, 2014
Uduaghan’s United Nations example
Growing up in in the 1980s in Warri, Delta State (Bendel State as it was called then) was fun. The indices of a good life; shelter, healthcare, and food were present. Life then was beautiful in the ancient town that is home to the Itsekiris, Urhobos, and Ijaws. However, following the military incursion in governance, many infrastructures deteriorated and began to run at an epileptic style – that is where they were not completely absent. By the time I would leave Delta State in the mid-nineties, many semblances of development had spiralled to a terrible low.

For instance, as a child, I knew that the Eku Baptist Hospital was an epitome of healthcare in that part of the world. Established by the American Baptist missionaries in 1945, in the following decades, it was the shining star of that region. It was an institution well-revered for its ability to heal. And heal it did for many years. But this institution also began to suffer as governance suffered. And gradually, the standard of this hospital nose-dived with each passing military administration that by the time democracy returned to the country, the hospital was in a pitiable state. It became more of a place to die and people shied away from it. On a visit during that era, I saw a compound overgrown with weeds, wards empty and looking dirty, roofs that leaked and the whole hospital was populated by unenthused and unsmiling staff. Put simply, it was not a place that anyone willing to live would want to linger.

However, on a present visit to the Eku hospital, it was a different experience I had. I learnt the Delta State government under the present administration had taken the hospital under its wings and its new name is Eku Baptist Government Hospital. Greeting my arrival was a freshly renovated fence but that was not all. The wards wore cheery colours of paint, had modern hospital beds and it was full of activities – patients coming and going, doctors and other medical staff going about their duties and other bustles. At the Dental Clinic, I saw gleaning modern equipment and there was a brand new Accident and Emergency ward. The whole atmosphere seemed just how a modern hospital should be. I also got to know that healthcare is free for children under the age of five and also for people older than 65 years old.

No doubt, the fact that the governor, Dr Emmanuel Uduaghan, is a trained medical doctor has impacted on the state’s health sector. However, the state’s exploits transcends into other sectors.

In the transportation sector, his administration has ensured that intra-city movement have been with ease by providing shuttle buses to connect virtually the whole state. And the buses of the state’s bus transport service, Delta State Mass Transit, are commonly known as ‘Uduaghan Bus’. In the area of roads, the government is also on course to bring the much-needed development to the state. That is the situation in other spheres of governance too such as agriculture.

This exemplary model recently attracted global recognition. In September, Uduaghan who was at the United Nations General Assembly in New York was commended by the UN. Prior to that event, UN officials had visited the state. And for over a year, a UN delegation assessed the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the state.

To those who have been following the governor’s conduct, it would hardly come as a surprise that he was commended. It is the trademark of a great leader to ensure that he leaves his position with the knowledge that his or her people are better than when he assumed the leadership position. And deploying limited resources for unlimited wants usually takes a master-stroke, but with love for the people, vision of a better scenario, and diligence to work towards it, the tough work can be made easy. Such is the going-on in the leadership of Delta State at the moment.

According to the UN, the state has met international standards in the areas of education, health, agriculture, provision of potable water and sanitation through the micro-credit scheme. And expectedly, the Delta State Commissioner for information, Chike Ogeah, felt fulfilled reeling out a press statement on how the UN highlighted the free medical care for children under five years and seniors over 65 and free maternal care up to the point of delivery for pregnant women as crucial to Delta’s reduced infant mortality rate.

Concerning education, while the government ensured students did not lack for classrooms and teachers and also scholarship opportunities, it also positioned itself to directly monitor secondary school students. One aspect of this project was the introduction of Edu-Marshals; these are officials deployed to all towns in the state to ensure that children of school-age actually take advantage of the free and compulsory education being provided by the state. And the UN report specifically recommended the adoption of such monitoring projects to other Nigerian states ensure the country as a whole meets the goals of universal education.

Though, the concept of the MDGs could be said to be ‘foreign’ but to the needy, it hardly matters who formulates or execute the policies. As a Delta citizen, I demand that the government do more, but I can relate to the government’s success so far.

The report also stated that implementing the MDGs is a continuous exercise, and it recognised that attaining its present status of development would have its challenges. And while to other state governors, allowing external assessors to scrutinise its works is like opening one’s flanks, Governor Uduaghan has shown that he is ready to take correction. To him, it is neither about passing or failing, but having an unbiased body point out what the government is doing well, what it needs to do more of or change, and what strategies it needs to adopt to realise the MDGs.

Already, the governor has promised to institutionalise the report by taking a Bill to the House of Assembly to ensure the findings become a working document for succeeding administrations. The example of Delta State government on working assiduously for the people and being open to assessment by unbiased assessors is key to institutionalising development throughout the country. This is much needed at this juncture of our lives as Nigerians it would do well for other states to come and learn from Delta, ‘the Big Heart State’.
- Chukwuma writes in from Lagos.
October 29, 2014
The enemy next door

It appears there is no truce in place between the federal government and Boko Haram terrorists who have been waging a fierce war against the state especially in the north-east part of the country. Now it is increasingly getting clear that what we have been treated to in the last couple of weeks are half-truths, denials (that are not even subtle) and mere propaganda – all designed to achieve pre-conceived political agenda. At any rate, the release of the abducted Chibok girls from the hands of Boko Haram has since assumed some level of desperation in the form of a hurriedly-concocted ceasefire agreement. The agreement, if there was ever anything like that, collapsed even before the ink had dried on the paper on which it was signed.

The concern of this column is not whether there was actually a truce or if the truce ever worked. It is about the characters that engineered the truce. The public is not availed the opportunity to identify those involved in the negotiations. Therefore, it is difficult to decipher the real intention and motive behind the (supposed) ceasefire. Nobody knows whether it is for the sake of the country, for political aggrandizement or any other reason in the interest of certain groups or individuals for that matter.

However, we are aware of the involvement of neighbouring Chad and its President, Idriss Deby, a former military leader and now a politician, who has been presiding over the affairs of his country since he seized power in a military coup in 1990. He has been actively involved in the ceasefire talks. Deby was born into a family of the Zaghawa ethnic group in the Ennedi region of northeastern Chad, one of the many ethnic groups holding on to power in that country. He joined the army in the early 1970s and went to France in 1976 to train as a pilot at a time the country was in the grip of a long-running civil war.

He returned to Chad in 1978, in the heat of the conflict and threw his support behind Hissène Habré, leader of one of the rebel groups, who was then serving as prime minister. He rose rapidly in the army. He later emerged as a leader of Habré’s forces and helped Habré to seize power and become President in 1982. Habre made Deby, who had then become widely recognised as a brilliant military strategist, Commander-in-Chief of the Chadian Armed Forces. Deby moved against Habre, his Principal, in 1990 and became President.

From his background, Deby is a veteran of several conflicts between the various rebel groups vying for control of power in Chad. His long years of experience in the intrigues and internecine conflicts that have plagued his country in the past, must have come in handy for him in trying to resolve the conflict between Boko Haram and the Nigerian state. But the peace talk between the Nigerian government and the terrorists, which is being mediated by the Chadian government, has been called into question since it was announced by the military following the refusal of both parties to respect the ceasefire deal. Though, Boko Haram is yet to make an official comment on the ceasefire, its fighters have continued to attack villages in the North-east prompting many people to wonder whether, indeed, a peace talk had taken place at all.

The terrorist group has been responsible for the killings, abductions and the displacement of many Nigerians in the North-east. In spite of these horrors, the Chadian government maintained that Nigeria’s deal with the terrorists to free the Chibok schoolgirls would still go ahead. The emergence of Chad as a peace negotiator between Boko Haram and Nigeria did not come as a surprise. As far back as the late 1960s and the early 80s, alien bandits suspected to have their base in neighbouring Chad, Niger and Cameroun, had been pillaging the North-east part of the country where Boko Haram now holds sway. Thousands of villagers in Nigeria’s North-east zone had been sent packing by these criminals mostly populated by itinerant rebels seeking for means of livelihood after being displaced from their own countries especially Chad.

Banditry by Chadian hoodlums along Nigeria’s North-east region is an age-long problem. If it is not harassment of Nigerians, or forceful occupation of Nigerian territory, it is armed carnage in which innocent Nigerians are maimed, killed or their properties seized. The irony is that most of the time, the Nigerian government seems helpless over the situation because the government regards Nigeria as a ‘big brother’ to other African nations. But all along, the fear of those living in Nigeria’s northeast had always been that the rebels may one day declare that Nigeria’s north-east belongs to them. A number of people had expressed dismay over the nonchalant attitude of the federal government over the Chadian miscreants’ atrocities which continued to grow beyond control in many cases. The activities of the miscreants had resulted in a lot of victims being scattered across different parts of such towns as Baga and other neighbouring towns in Borno while others were forced to migrate outside Borno State.

In spite of this, the government had consistently treated with levity, information given to it by the people directly affected by the banditry of Chadian criminals, putting faith, instead, on wrong data that do not paint the true picture of the situation on ground. This body language from the Nigerian government obviously encouraged the Chadian charlatans who had ceaselessly, continued to unleash terror on Nigerians. The Chadians’ atrocities could be traced as far back as the 1960s. But with the outbreak of the Nigerian civil war in 1967, either owing to fear or other considerations, coupled with the tension within the country then, the Chadian atrocities reduced with many Chadians vacating the shores of Lake Chad.

The end of the Nigerian Civil War in 1970 coincided with the outbreak of hostilities in Chad which resulted in the bloody coup that terminated the life of President François N’Garta Tombalbaye. As a result, many of them fled into neighbouring border towns and islands within the north-east region of the present-day Borno State and environs. Since then, they have not looked back. At a point, their atrocities became so worrisome that series of reports were forwarded to the Shehu Shagari civilian government between 1979 and 1983. Consequently, in 1982, General Muhammadu Buhari, who was then the General Officer Commanding, GOC, 3 Armoured Division, Nigerian Army with headquarters in Jos, stormed the affected zones and chased the miscreants out.

But if Nigerians thought that was the end of the matter, they were dead wrong. No sooner had Buhari withdrawn his troops from the area, than the rebels started to make a comeback, this time, in full force. Today, many of the villages have fallen under the control of the Boko Haram terrorists who are mere offshoots of the Chadian rebels. Due to the incessant violent eruption in Chad, most Chadian nationals, including their displaced troops; have found Nigeria a haven where everything is available, including uninterrupted harassment of the citizenry. While their women take to prostitution in several parts of Borno State, a greater number of their men find in banditry, a lucrative business which has now become properly structured and entrenched by Boko Haram .

Successive governors of Borno State including the late Mala Kachalla, who was governor of the state from May 29, 1999 to May 29, 2003, raised sufficient alarm through several security reports warning that unless concerted efforts were made, several towns and villages along Nigeria’s border with Chad may be occupied by Chadians. One of the reports advised that in tackling the Chadian-Nigerian situation, “dialogue through diplomacy would be the best option but without prejudice to our ability to resort to military action to flush them out”. Since then, nothing has changed. The situation has only gone from bad to worse, resulting in the current situation where Chad, a country that appears to have inadvertently let loose bandits to prey on Nigerians, is now trying to rescue Nigeria from the holocaust. What an irony! What a pity!!

October 29, 2014
‘Our Girls’, The 2014 Ebola Media Campaign; ASUU etc Education Summit

Our Girls’ are sadly still missing since April in spite of the enthusiastic hype around the announced ceasefire and the subsequent capture of over 60 women and murder of over 30 Fellow Nigerians. There is rumour of factions, positions, moles and interest groups on both sides – Boko Haram and Nigeria. Not all ceasefires work completely first or even tenth time. Read about FARC, IRA, Red Brigade and ETA to learn more about the violence of international terrorist groups and failed ceasefires.

We congratulate our Super Falcons as true champions. Nigeria football is like Nigeria’s Ebola victory. We get results often for little input -the wrong reasons. While we welcome the accolades heaped on Nigeria by the international community over the ‘containment’ of The Ebola Epidemic, a thorough Coroner’s Board of Enquiry should be instituted to identify where we went wrong and what needs to be done. We in medicine know that it was not as big a success as the world thinks. For years medicine has been in need of the mechanisms to fight such epidemics but any attempt to train anybody was pushed aside as wild dreaming and the ranting of an ant. The result was a massive level of unpreparedness with lack of all the needed protective gear. Nigeria lacked even one practice isolation facility with trained and retrained professionals. The abysmal state of the first isolation facility to be used as attested to by survivors and staff adequately demonstrated the ‘we who about to, or are left to die salute you’ mentality. There is nothing spectacular in barrier nursing, the key to safe care of such patients. Protective equipment, hosing down and adequate disposal of all contact material are the key and training is compulsory to prevent spread of infection to staff and others in the contact chain including home, transport, arrival, stay and at disposal sites for contaminated products and, in some cases, bodies. The lone intuition, initiative and incisive decision making by Dr Ameyo Adadevoh and Dr Benjamin Ohiaeri and the team at First Consultants indeed reduced a possible long string of contacts to one stream and suffered and some paid with their irreplaceable lives for their heroism. This cost is also paid by thousands of victims of Boko Haram and Fulani Wars. We must thank God that the index case did fall ill when he did and not a few hours later.

The 2014 Nigerian Anti-Ebola Media Campaign was a credit to the media and the country. It totally eliminated the disease called ‘Ignorance of anti-Ebola Strategies’. The methodology should be taught in media schools and university faculties of Communication and Language Arts across the country. The media is too powerful an influence to neglect its duty in an ignorant country to ‘sell’ all its airtime in favour of the highest bidder! When giant corporate bodies come to the media, the media should have its own agenda to integrate with adverts and reality programmes and incorporate some other messages. The media also has the right and responsibility to have daily life skill messaging targets to educate on every aspect from hygiene to health to road use to non-partisan voter education. One death from ignorance is a mark against all of us. The war on ignorance is squarely in the media’s court but the media in an effort to put everything under Internally Generated Revenue (IGR), sees almost everything from the selfish money-making aspect. It would rather remain silent unless paid to speak. It therefore fills gaps with music and often charges for everything including social life-skill messages on HIVAIDS, reading culture, breast examinations, the man being responsible for the sex of the baby, wearing a seat-belt and crash helmet, avoiding bullying, sex and drugs etc.

Ebola has taught us what a 21st Century Social Message Advertising Revolution entails. It requires a truly massive educational and strategic reorganisation of all media and public service organisational communication templates. The first class lesson of the Nigerian Ebola Media Campaign must be learnt and it should start here to spread around the world for the successful combat of the top 100 conditions that the UN and WHO identify as needing an ‘Ignorance Elimination’ media strategy.

Nigeria builds Malls not Museums and Event Centres not Exhibition Centres. Our best buildings were banks for lending money when we need book buildings –libraries for lending books.

The ongoing ASUU/NAAT/NASU/SSANU Education Summit 27-31st October with the theme: Towards a System Of Education For The Liberation In Nigeria’ is the best thing that has come out of tertiary education unionism in years. Hopefully it will address the liberation of the over N102billion trapped in UBEC, TET Fund etcetera. For a long time I have suggested that ASUU needs a strong ‘Academic Division’ for the future guidance of education in Nigeria. It is here at last and we are hopeful of a successful, non-political, outcome led by a full scale war on our disgraceful 31% pass at WAEC, a systemic, not a student failure. With tumbling oil prices decimating education budgets nationwide, it is essential to strategise on how ‘Bring Back Our Student Refugees’ forced by crumbling standards, insecurity and lack of space to flee to pay billions annually in private educational facilities in Ghana, South Africa and the UK for a better education in a normal calendar timeframe. There is a lot to include in an ‘Education Action Plan’ including financing.

October 29, 2014
Crony capitalism at work?

A little over a year ago this month, President Goodluck Jonathan made History when he presented 14 new private investors in the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN), the country’s electricity company, with their share certificates and licences. This was at a ceremony in the Presidential Villa on September 30, 2013.

This was the culmination of the power reform started by President Olusegun Obasanjo when, in 2015, he split the PHCN into 18 companies, six for electricity generation (GENCOs), one for transmission (TCN) and 11 for distribution (DISCOs). This disaggregation of PHCN was itself part of a promise he had made to provide, at least, 4,000 Megawatts of electricity in the country by 2003. In addition to the disaggregation, the law backing the decision provided for independent power generation. About 29 of the many independent companies that applied were licensed to do so.

At the time Obasanjo made his promise, the supply was less than 2,000 MW out of the country’s demand of 5,000. By 2003 he was able to deliver 3,760, a huge improvement over the past but still a little short of his promise.

Actually the demand of 5,000 MW which fell short of our installed capacity of 5,600, was itself light years short of the global standard of 1MW supply per 1,000 people, meaning we should’ve been producing well over 150,000 more than a decade ago if all Nigerians were to have had access to electricity. As it is, less than half do so even today.

To put all this in global perspective, more than 1.3 billion people around the world, or around 20 per cent of its population, lack access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the Paris based club of 29 or so rich-country members, including the U.S., UK, Japan, South Korea and Turkey. More than 95 per cent of these people with no electricity, says IEA, are in sub-Saharan Africa and developing Asia. Nigeria, as the most populous country in Africa, clearly shares in this predicament of severe shortage of electricity as a vital source of energy for growth and development.

The long running failure of government owned electricity company to meet the demand for the commodity led to the conclusion that privatisation was the solution. Hence, government’s decision to privatise the PHCN as it did telecommunication with relative success.

Four years after President Obasanjo created the 18 companies out of PHCN and provided for independent power generation, hardly any investor, foreign or local, indicated any interest in them. Similarly none of the licensed independent electricity generating companies generated even one watt of the commodity. The general excuse was that the tariff was too low to make any profit. To date this has remained the excuse for the relative lack of enthusiasm by investors in investing in the sector more than a year after the GENCOs and DISCOs have more or less taken off.

Four years ago this month, I said on these pages that our thinking that privatisation was the solution to our electricity problem was a bit of a delusion. Public ownership, I said, may have failed to deliver satisfactory service but neither would private ownership. This was as long as we pursued privatisation in the opaque and self-serving manner that has characterised the decisions of our policy makers since the first indigenisation of the commanding sectors of our economy in the 1970s. Time and again, I said, public assets have all too often been undervalued and sold, not necessarily to the highest and the most competent bidder, but to the most well-connected.

“Consequently,” I said on these pages, “we have, time and again, experienced how promises of more efficient and cheaper goods and services from privatised companies have been broken.” (November 17, 2010).

The September 30, 2013, ceremony, during which President Jonathan launched the privatised electricity companies was itself the culmination of his own version of Obasanjo’s earlier power reform. The president unfolded his own road map in 2011 when he set himself a target of 14,000 MW by 2013 to be increased to 40,000 by 2020.

A little over a year since then it seems we face the grave danger that I may be proved right, at least in one case. On October 8, Daily Trust led the day’s edition with the story that the Kano Electricity Distribution Company (KEDC) made an “illegal” payment of N670 million to a sister company, Northwest Power, that was the preferred bidder of the Kaduna Disco. One of the KDEC shareholders, INCAR Power Ltd, owned by the former banking magnate, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, then filed a complaint to the National Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), to say that the transaction was never authorised by the consortium’s board.

A NERC audit had found that this payment and others totalling over N1.3 billion in six months up to April this year were dubious and were mostly on the creature comfort of some of its directors and senior managers. These payments were made from revenues collected from consumers. Meantime the delivery of the commodity to them has been dismal, to put it mildly.

This apparently prompted a group calling itself “Concerned Consumers of Electricity in Kano”, to publish a full page advert in Trust (September 23) appealing to the president to “intervene in the mismanagement of Kano Disco by Sahelian Energy.” Sahelian is the leading company in the consortium that owns KEDC. The advert was signed by Garba Muhammed as “Coordinator” and four others, Yusuff Bala, Benjamin Agu, Mukthar Kankarofi and Boniface Ononiwu.

The following day Sahelian Energy replied in the same newspaper with a full page advert signed by Mukhtar Baffa Usman as its head of corporate affairs. The company dismissed all the allegations in the earlier advert as baseless.

Two days later the Kano consumers’ group rejoined Sahelian’s rejoinder with another full page advert. The well-informed adverts of the group suggested they were possibly fronting for the reserved bidder of the Kaduna Disco, LEDA Consortium Ltd, which has petitioned the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) over what it says is preferential treatment being accorded Northwest, the preferred bidder, in failing to meet the deadlines and extensions for payment for the Kaduna Disco, a failure which should have opened the way for LEDA to take over. The insinuation is that Sahelian has strong connections in the presidency and has so far been allowed to get away with blue murder, in a manner of speaking.

Whether the Kano consumer group is fronting for LEDA or not, the fact is that KEDC has not been providing satisfactory service to consumers in Kano, Katsina and Jigawa, their area of operation. One probable explanation is greed, that is, if you subscribe to the suspicion, as I do, that the money Sahelian paid to Northwest with which it shares directors was to enable it buy the Kaduna Disco.

The Kano Disco is not the only one under suspicions of diverting revenues from providing services paid for. However, it is the only one that has been queried so far by NERC. And as usual, an ethnic and sectional dimension is being introduced into the matter to confuse and bury the issues; partisans of Sahelian are said to be making allegations that its crime is where its main shareholders come from.

Obviously this is nonsense. It would be wrong if Sahelian is the only Disco singled out for a query for diverting its revenues from providing satisfactory services. But then the scale of its “malfeasance”, as INCAR called it in its petition to NECR, is all in a class of its own.

It is acts like this which give privatisation a very bad name. Elsewhere they call it crony capitalism. And as with all counterfeits it is very unlikely to deliver satisfactory goods and services.

The BPE and the NERC have a duty to protect consumers from the greed of a few. They should do so without fear or favour.

October 29, 2014
‘Our Girls’; General Gowon @80; Lagos Ibadan; BBOG; Trust Boko Haram? End Fulani War

Our Girls’ kidnapped from Chibok at night during exams and missing since April 15, six-plus months, are on the brink of or may even have mostly been released today.

We celebrate humane longevity with General Yakubu Gowon @ 80, the Officer and Gentleman leader of Nigeria. His was not that of his successors like Buhari or Abacha brutality or Babangida ‘Missing oil wind fall money’ settlement corruption. His administration, unfortunately, accommodated the first generation of get-rich-quick militarism which got worse dragging Nigeria into the quagmire of corruption and 4,000Mw instead of 170,000Mw it faces now.

The Lagos-Ibadan Expressway is still rubbishing our lives. Why so much pain for us to gain a smooth road – a human right even during reconstruction?

This article was submitted on Monday, after the Boko Haram ceasefire but before any release. Sadly, there are new Boko Haram attacks. The release, if it comes, is, thanks to the combined worldwide pressure on both government and the Boko Haram. A major pressure came from a tenacious red ‘Bring Back Our Girls’ campaign. This was mismanaged by a government myopic policy which alienated the citizenry by demonising the BBOG as ‘opposition politics’.

In addition, there was at last military pressure on Boko Haram from a re-equipped, motivated armed forces restricting the Boko Haram. Boko Haram was supposedly in a militarily weakened position and forced to the negotiation table by countries surrounding Boko Haram hideouts. With no trans-border retreat options and an aggressive Cameroonian campaign preventing reinforcements, negotiations were inevitable as even Boko Haram people no wan die! But feel sympathy for the honest Nigerians negotiating with such blood-thirsty cruel people. Under that same negotiating table, there is the smell of death and an ocean of blood and misery from 10,000 murdered Nigerians and millions of displaced refugees. That is 10,000 people with five litres each or 50,000 litres of blood shed for nothing- just a negotiation?

Since the capture of ‘Our Girls’, this column began every article with ‘Our Girls’ which was the first item. Though many of ‘Out Girls’ may come home, some will not, due to death, brainwashing, stigmatisation or becoming untraceable, sold into marriage and slavery. If the girls were Israeli or American, there would be dedicated security groups authorised, trained and funded to punish anyone who stole or enslaved even one of ‘Our Girls’ without being brought to justice. If any of ‘Our Girls’ is pregnant and claiming to be ‘happily married’, that girl would be brought home to declare freely her desire to go back if she is old enough.

Both parents and ‘Our Girls’ will need intensive one-on-one psychological support requiring the recruitment of an army of mainly female psychologists and psychiatrists some requiring to give or take crash courses in clinical psychology and ‘Post Traumatic Stress’, PTS. Each girl should have a strategy worked out for her to enable her catch up the six months lost or do WAEC delayed exams and get results.

Nigeria must not forget that refugees and the military also require PTS care. Since ‘Our Girls’ were taken, Boko Haram has killed between 3-5,000 citizens. The veteran soldier and politician David Mark and his fellow ‘leaders of the National Assembly (NASS) have maliciously manoeuvred to damage the economy further by approving a law allowing them to claim their NASS salaries for life, so ‘There is money, O!’ also for ‘Our Girls’ from Chibok to be rehabilitated. We know that this is just a pretext for all NASS members ‘living and dead’ to also claim ‘Permanent Pensions’. Will their grandchildren get something or at least ‘automatic ticket’? Why not? Power don drunk! God go vex for dis one, 0!

This is such an idiot country where soldiers are not paid pensions in the middle of a war, no two wars – the Boko Haram War and the Fulani War and we all saw on TV serving solders asked to confront the demonstrating pensioners. The same serving soldiers face being sent to battle even as their compatriots return in back dead and 98+12 are being court martialled for matters surrounding equipment and welfare institutional failures. Will Boko Haram reveal who is funding it? Can it be trusted to stop the violence?

Last week, the Fulani War was discussed in this column. Surely now that even the Boko Haram is on the negotiation table, it is time for a total ceasefire for the Fulani War, which is a local war with no international funding or fighters. We must not trivialise this Fulani War claiming 20-50 citizens a day or weekly for years. What is good for Boko Haram War is good for the Fulani War. Where is the negotiating team? It is one failure of the 2014 Non-Sovereign National Conference that it neither addressed nor offered any commission to stop the Fulani War.

Arthur Wharton is ‘Lesson for Today’. He was an athlete, footballer, first African professional footballer in England and is being celebrated this week. Did he run 100 yards in 10 seconds? When? Which clubs did he play for? What position did he play? Where was he from, Nigeria or Ghana? Which school? Did he die poor? Google him for your children. Do not go too far to find role models and heroes. Your heroes are with you. Have you heard of Olaudah Equiano, Nigeria’s best known slave and first best-selling author? And when did he live? Google please!

October 22, 2014
Yakubu Gowon at 80

Among his many virtues, perhaps the most endearing is his compassion. This could be attributed to his strict Christian upbringing in Wusasa where he was born 80 years ago, this month, to the highly respected Christian couple of Yohanna and Sanaya. The father was originally from Pankshin in Plateau State but settled in Wusasa, a sleepy suburb Northwest of Zaria and the evangelical headquarters of northern Christianity. Soon enough the suburb became the first home of the Gowons, as we shall soon see.

The most obvious manifestation of the man’s compassion was the way he executed the country’s civil war between 1967 and 1970 as the officer and gentleman who came to power accidentally in July 1966. The war itself was triggered by the country’s first military coup in January, a coup in which virtually the entire northern political and military leadership was wiped out by a group of officers that was almost entirely Igbo. The young Colonel Yakubu Gowon, then Adjutant-General of the army, was lucky to escape the massacre.

Widespread resentment at the one-sidedness of the coup soon led to a revenge coup in which the Military Head of State, Major-General JTU Aguiyi-Ironsi, was killed along with many Igbo officers. The young northern officers who carried out the coup drafted Gowon, as the most senior officer left standing from the region, to replace Aguiyi-Ironsi.

A more senior Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, then military governor of Eastern Region, thought this breached military protocol and showed his reluctance to take orders from his junior. Ojukwu’s hands were soon strengthened by the mass killings of Igbos which followed the July counter-coup killings, which, in turn, led to the mass migration of Igbos and other eastern minorities to the East for safety.

Following the breakdown of a series of attempts at home and abroad to end the instability, insecurity and division that had resulted from the military’s incursion into politics, Ojukwu declared a rebellion. Gowon countered by ordering what he called police action. Invariably this turned into a full scale war which lasted three years.

Gowon executed it with as much compassion as was possible in a war. True, millions of Nigerians, mostly Igbos, lost their lives in the war zone. However, the unprecedented speed with which the warring sides reconciled with each other after the war was only possible because Gowon did not behave like a general whotook prisoners.

One glaring manifestation of his compassionate frame of mind revealed itself 12 years after the war in a lengthy interview I had with him as a New Nigerian reporter. This was at his London home where he lived in exile following his overthrow in 1975. “I thought honestly,” he said in an answer to criticisms that he’d allowed the war to drag on for too long, “it is bad to say you do not want somebody in your home and then he moves to his own home and you follow him there in order to hurt him again, et cetera. I think it is immoral.” (Sunday New Nigerian, May 9, 1982).

For someone who was an accidental military head of state, nine years in office seemed to have made him reluctant to leave; in an Independence Day broadcast on October 1, 1974, he told a stunned nation that 1976, as the year he had promised to return power to civilians, was no longer realistic. He needed, he said, first to put the economy on a sound footing and second, it seemed the politicians had learnt no lesson from their ouster from power in 1966.

His reasoning did not, apparently, wash even with the top military brass, much less with the public and from then on it looked like his overthrow was only a question of time. When it came he was away in Kampala, Uganda, attending the year’s annual Organisation of African Unity conference.

He accepted the coup with equanimity but decided to stay away until things settled down. They never did; six month after he was overthrown, some disaffected officers struck. Their coup failed but they succeeded in assassinating the head of state, General Murtala Mohammed.

The coup makers’ ring leader, Colonel Bukar Suka Dimka, implicated Gowon in their attempt. Overnight the man became the nation’s chief villain regardless of his protestations of his innocence and his well-deserved image of someone who could not hurt a fly. His protestations were hardly helped by a statement the Federal Government issued on February 18, 1976, five days after General Mohammed was killed, that it had “ample evidence” that he “knew and by implication approved the coup plot”.

If he was innocent as he claimed, he should, the government said, return home to answer his charges. It assured him that his trial would be fair. Wisely, he declined the invitation. Wisely, because it turned out that his younger brother, Moses, had remained in detention for three months after assurances from the government that he had been cleared of suspicions that he was part of the coup, and freed.

Time, they say, heals. It may not have been a hero’s welcome but on December 6, 1983, the former head of state returned to Nigeria no longer a villain. This was two years after he had been cleared of having a hand in the February 13, 1976 coup attempt. His clearance came in a speech by President Shehu Shagari on October 1, 1981, in which he announced the declaration that Gowon was wanted for General Mohammed assassination had been “rescinded forthwith” and the general was “free to visit or return to Nigeria should he so wish”.

Shagari had come to this conclusion, presidential sources said, after he studied reports of the 1976 coup attempt and found no evidence that Gowon knew, much less approved, the coup attempt. The president was also said to have sounded out the military top brass and found no objection to granting Gowon a reprieve.

In his first press interview upon his return, he said he was through with politics. Nearly 10 years later he seemed to have changed his mind. In December 1992, he announced his intention to join General Ibrahim Babangida’s long transition programme as a presidential candidate, much to the surprise of many Nigerians, including some members of his family. Indeed, one of them, the younger and late Daniel, who was Sarkin Wusasa, told the rested Citizen magazine that he was unequivocally against it. “They think Nigeria is at another cross-road,” he said, “and only the general with his patience and accommodation, can guide it aright. But I say it is all rubbish. Yaya mutum zaiyi amai ya dawo ya lashe?”, the Hausa for how can someone swallow his vomit? (Citizen, April 6, 1992)

Probably the most celebrated criticism of Gowon’s bid to return to power was General Olusegun Obasanjo’s. Many a reader will, I am sure, recall how he had asked his former commander-in-chief what he had forgotten in the presidential villa that he wanted to return to pick. Such is the allure of power that the man apparently forgot his advice to his former boss when he returned in 1999 and even wanted to stay put.

Gowon’s return bid eventually turned into a misadventure. He lost the primaries conducted under the controversial Option A4, where delegates physically lined up behind the ballot box of their preferred candidate, to a far less well known Dr Sarki Tafida, one time personal physician of President Shehu Shagari who went on to become a senator and is Nigeria’s current High Commissioner in the UK.

Many attributed his loss partly to his choice of Wusasa as his constituency, instead of his native Pankshin. As a small part of Zaria which was overwhelmingly Muslim, he was naive, the critics said, to think he could prevail over a Muslim candidate, no matter how little known. It was a measure of the man’s outward looking nature that he never thought of Wusasa as a second home after Pankshin.

Others said he was equally naive to think that his reputation as an honest man and former head of state was enough to give him victory.

In spite of this misadventure and in spite of his going back on his promise shortly after the war to hand over power to civilians in 1974 , the general is today arguably the most respected former head of state in the country. This is mainly due to his compassion and apparent personal integrity.

When the man took over power in 1966, federal revenue was in the region of N340 million. By 1974, two years before he was ousted from power, it was N5.5 billion, a miserable sum by today’s standard but at that time a princely amount, so princely that at one time the general could boast that money was not an object but how to spend it. That may have accounted for so much corruption many in his regime, including those who now strut around as elderly tribal champions, were accused of, with good reason.

It is a testimony to the man’s personal integrity that no one has ever accused him of personally benefitting from all that oil money.

Here’s many more returns of October 19 to an honest and compassionate general.

October 22, 2014