Category: Hardball

Presidential spokesman, Doyin Okupe, yesterday confirmed that presidential pardon had been granted former governor of Bayelsa State, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, and seven others. But the other seven, including the late Shehu Yar’Adua and Abdulkarim Adisa, and Oladipo Diya, et al, have not generated as much controversy as Alamieyeseigha has done. President Goodluck Jonathan was at a time Alamieyeseigha’s deputy. While the pardon came unexpectedly, it is, however, not too surprising that Alamieyeseigha is a beneficiary. First is the fact that the president is actually still close to the former governor, and both have sustained a good relationship.

Second is the fact that since reelection politics began to build up late last year, all sorts of calculations have suddenly cropped up, and Jonathan is not unmindful of emerging trends, in spite of announcing last year that 2015 was still far away. And third is the fact that the president perhaps feels that he must from now on begin to gather those who would help him wage the stiff political battles ahead. This is why he manoeuvred Alhaji Bamanga Tukur through the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) mill to emerge as chairman, forced Chief Tony Anenih down the throat of the party’s Board of Trustees, and apparently needs Alameiyeseigha to take care of political business back home where revulsion against the former governor is hardly perceptible.

The president followed the law in granting the pardon. It was done through the National Council of States, a rubber stamp body that finds it difficult to oppose the president of the day. Even though many commentators and civil society groups have expressed outrage, arguing that Alamieyeseigha’s pardon in particular subverted the fight against corruption, the fact is that the president has the right to do what he did, irrespective of the severity of the crime, and no matter how much the pardon affronts the country’s values. In fact the more severe the crime, the more important and meaningful the pardon. There is nothing that says the president should look for less severe crime to pardon. More importantly, Alamieyeseigha has served time and forfeited properties, and if the president felt the former governor deserves pardon, he has not overreached himself.

It must be emphasised that Jonathan has not broken any law in granting the pardon that seems to offend so many, and it would be presumptuous of anybody to determine for him what kind of crime or severity of crime he can pardon. The problem, however, is that while it is lawful to pardon Alamieyeseigha, it is unfortunately not expedient. It is on the grounds of expediency that Jonathan’s pardon grates on the senses. The president has been accused of being unserious in his fight against corruption; he ought to have been mindful of taking any step that would reinforce that impression. He has been accused of showing poor judgement and poor timing in too many things; alas, he did not inspire long-suffering Nigerians with the timing of this pardon. He has been accused of refusing to consider the affairs of the country holistically; with this pardon, he has shown limited vision, preferring to see only in part, and blinded by private interest, insufferable opportunism and short-sighted goals. Indeed, this is a delicate gambit that is expected to have far-reaching consequences for the 2015 polls.

Many activists may be tempted to compare Nigeria with China, wishing that corruption could attract capital punishment. But Nigeria is not China, and will probably never be, nor does the death penalty deter crime on the scale many angry people romanticise it, nor yet have the cathartic effect many imbue the drastic remedy with. The problem with the Alamieyeseigha pardon is the poor timing and poor judgement, both of which sadly indicate, far in excess of the inexpediency of the pardon itself, that Jonathan seems ill-suited for the lofty office he occupies.

It is not clear what Nigeria thinks it stands to gain by speedily congratulating Uhuru Kenyatta on his election as President of Kenya. But hours after the Kenyan Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) announced the result of last Monday’s presidential election, the Nigerian government rushed out a statement congratulating the winner and applauding the peaceful nature of the poll and the appeal for calm issued by Kenyatta’s main opponent, Raila Odinga. Waiting till today to issue a statement would not have hurt relations between Nigeria and Kenya. In the poll marred by equipment malfunction and slow and laborious counting procedures, Kenyatta won by 50.07 percent of the votes to Odinga’s 43.31 percent. Turnout was estimated at 86 percent, amounting to some 12,330,028 votes shared between Kenyatta and Odinga as follows: 6,173,433 and 5,340,546 respectively.

Nigeria was among the first few countries to congratulate Kenyatta. But even if it felt the sanctity of the poll had been upheld, and Odinga’s promised court action would not affect the final outcome, Nigeria still ought to have been mindful of the dilemma Kenyans will be facing in the coming months as their president-elect and his running mate, William Ruto, go on trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague next month. The two leaders had been indicted by the ICC for crimes against humanity following accusations they had either instigated or fuelled the ethnic violence that racked Kenya immediately after the 2007 elections. Kenyatta and Ruto had backed the outgoing president, Mwai Kibaki, against Odinga, while more than 1,000 people were believed killed in the mayhem.

Before last week’s election, Western nations had subtly hinted Kenyans would face a moral dilemma by voting Kenyatta as president in spite of knowing he would be facing charges at the ICC. Kenyatta and his supporters, however, felt the hints were an attempt to influence the course of the election. But whether there were attempts to influence the poll or not, there is absolutely no doubt that Kenyans failed to take into cognisance the embarrassment it would cause the country for their president to be put on trial in The Hague. That sort of humiliation had been exclusive to former presidents, top officials of governments, and private individuals. The trial of Kenyatta and Ruto may be the first time a president and his deputy will be facing the indignity of ICC trial.

After failing in their quest to influence Kenyans to vote appropriately, Western nations have acknowledged they will squirm even more in the coming months in their relations with the Kenyan government under Kenyatta. By yesterday, none of them had issued a definitive congratulatory message to Kenyatta. It is not certain how they would word their messages when they get round to issuing them. Much worse, it is not only Kenya that will be embarrassed when their president goes on trial, even friendly nations will also be embarrassed. Why Nigeria does not indicate it feels queasy about the outcome of the election is hard to say at the moment. But perhaps it imagines Western fuss is merely an indication of the rampaging and seemingly inextinguishable forces of neo-imperialism. Or perhaps it considers that Kenyatta would probably be freed of all charges at the ICC trial, the sort of fait accompli the president-elect hopes his presidency would present to the court.

It speaks volumes about the integrity of many African countries, Nigeria and Kenya in particular, that they are not discomfited by the kind of moral questions and moral dilemma the Kenyan presidential election has thrown up. More worrisomely, Kenya’s moral dilemma may in fact be a reflection of Nigeria’s sickening romance with postelection violence and the sanguinary indifference with which its leaders accommodate it. Kenya may have had a fairly peaceful election, but the election is not free of moral blemish. Indeed, the election is deeply and humiliatingly compromised by the upcoming ICC trial. By hastily congratulating Kenyatta, Nigeria once again shows how unprepared it is for African leadership; for leadership is not just a function of population or economic size, it is more importantly a function of the ennobling values a country projects.

Chief Tony Anenih is not known to be flippant. When he responds to reporters’ questions, he is seldom expansive, preferring instead to be straight-faced and laconic. On Wednesday, when cheeky reporters asked him what role he expected the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Board of Trustees (BoT) to play in resolving the multifaceted crises afflicting the party, he spoke and behaved true to type. “Prayers, prayers, prayers,” he intoned. “This is what we need.” He wasn’t, of course, saying the BoT would do the praying, nor was he suggesting that our self-satisfied rulers lumbering about in the corridors of power knew how to pray. All he was telling reporters shortly after emerging from a meeting with the party chairman, Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, was that in the general sense those who knew how to pray should feel free to render that service copiously to the party. If we didn’t know better, we would think that in the PDP, whether under Chief Olusegun Obasanjo or under any other leader, politics and prayer were compatible.

But just as Anenih was advocating prayer to resolve self-inflicted tragedies – a typical indulgence in these parts – his party was also busy enacting bigger and more pernicious unfairness and parochialism. First, President Goodluck Jonathan, exercising the powers conferred on him by the party’s constitution, directed that six governors be inducted into the party caucus. The six, grumbled some PDP governors, were the arrowheads of the president’s campaign to fracture the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF). And two of the six, the grumblers moaned further, came from the president’s geopolitical zone, almost as if he had forgotten how to be president of Nigeria or even leader of the entire PDP. Second, other grumblers chafed at the president for causing three ministers to be invited into the same caucus without any consideration of spread or federal character, with the Minister of Petroleum, Mrs Diezani Alison-Madueke, top on the list of their complaints. (She was listed among the three ministers, thereby bringing the number of those admitted into the caucus from the president’s zone to three in one fell swoop). Surely, the grumblers wailed, there must be a better and less offensive way of stacking the cards against the enemies within.

However, Jonathan’s caucus manoeuvres are simply a manifestation of the president’s and his party’s inattentiveness to details and to the cause of fairness. The party has an unenviable history of bitter infighting, oppression of the weak, and promotion of injustice at regional and national levels. These vices are what Anenih quaintly believes prayers could help exterminate. Alas, someday, we will understand what naïve doctrines and philosophies motivate the BoT chairman. But for now, it is unnecessary to analyse his theology or to question the beliefs of members of the BoT. We already know that prayer represents for them a charming perfunctoriness. They will advocate it half-asleep or half-awake, notwithstanding the severity of the unfairness they are meting out to their victims.

But if the PDP and Anenih can manage to view God less as a commercial device for the satisfaction of party ambition and more as an avenger of injustice and unfairness, perhaps they would be more guarded in their actions and more balanced in their worldview. Perhaps, too, they would run a more efficient party bureaucracy and offer the country the visionary leadership Nigerians desire, but which the ruling party lacks the discipline and ethical soundness to actualise. We cannot tell whether sometime in the future the PDP will embrace prayer more reverentially and move God into hearing them. But for now, let the party try embracing truth and justice in order to restore peace within its fold. This latter option is even less costly, less demanding, and does not addle the wit of the party’s Brahmins nor tax their knowledge of God as much as the complicated theology of prayer.

Of all the subjects Chief Olusegun Obasanjo normally speaks on, leadership is rarely one of them. The reason is not strange. Though he presided over the affairs of Nigeria twice, from 1976-1979, and 1999-2007, and has accumulated more than 11 years’ experience in leadership, it is a topic that makes him extremely uncomfortable. But finally, last Saturday, he has broken the ice and spoken zestfully on the subject, and even applied it to the Nigerian case. Speaking during the African Regional Inter-Collegiate Debate on Human Security held last Saturday at the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL), the former president pontificated on the interconnectedness between poor leadership and underdevelopment, and argued that it was necessary to arrest the situation if Nigeria’s and Africa’s development was to be assured. As he put it, “In Nigeria, with due respect, there are not many good leaders; we have many Nigerians and not good leaders, which can be extended to Africa; and leadership problem is something we have to correct because we cannot continue the way it is.”

The former president did not expatiate on how the problem of poor leadership could be remedied, perhaps because the forum was inappropriate for such deep discourses. More realistically, however, he probably realised he was not best placed to declaim on the topic, no matter how grandly he regularly postures as a former president. Nigerians remember him as sometimes playing the role of a critic, his words often wounding his victims, many of them his successors. He lampooned Alhaji Shehu Shagari, skewered Ibrahim Babangida, excoriated Sani Abacha, needled Umaru Yar’Adua, and disemboweled Goodluck Jonathan. Hardly anyone escapes his ill-humoured attention. And he sometimes ladles out his criticisms with tons of bucolic humour and wisecracks. It hardly matters to him that his criticisms are full of contradictions or even completely misplaced. Nor does it ever bother him when his panaceas are exposed for their puerility. But on the whole he wisely sticks to criticising only rather than proffering solutions.

In his Saturday bombast, there was nothing to indicate the exact time he realised poor leadership had become the bane of Nigeria’s development, or at what point he felt alarmed that the situation could not be allowed to continue. Only in 2007, and through the instrumentality of the worst election ever conducted in Africa, he foisted the Umaru Yar’Adua presidency on Nigeria, knowing full well the late president was hobbled by terminal disease. For someone concerned about poor leadership, it was passing strange that at the same time, he threw in Jonathan as Yar’Adua’s sidekick, even when he recognised that the former Bayelsa State governor suffered from poor judgement. Indeed, it would have been interesting for reporters to ask the sanctimonious Obasanjo whether he included himself in the categorisation of incompetent leaders that brought Nigeria low. For after all, in spite of his pretensions to the contrary, foisting inept successors on the country is a reflection of his own unflattering limitations.

But notwithstanding the reactions of Nigerians to his pontification on leadership, Obasanjo is unlikely to be fazed. He will keep doing what he does best – inundating his victims with self-righteous rage. He is satisfied he is head and shoulders above his peers, and no opinion or unassailable fact to the contrary can ruffle his feathers. And if you were to bring Einstein himself to prove to him with mathematical exactitude that any object travelling near the speed of light would increase in mass, he would pooh-pooh the notion on the excuse that the image he carved for himself was not only immutable, but that it defied both the principles of logic and the laws of science.