The Nation Newspaper

Category: Hardball

  • Superstitions Republic of Superstitions

    Superstitions Republic of Superstitions

    For nearly eight weeks, local government workers under the aegis of the Ekiti State chapter of the National Union of Local Government Employees (NULGE) have been on strike over wage disagreements with the state government. The workers are asking for the payment of the new minimum wage of N19,300 and the implementation of the Consolidated Health Salary Scale (CONHESS)/Consolidated Medical Salary Scale (CONMESS), which they said other civil servants had been enjoying since April. After much bickering, the Commissioner for Labour, Mr Wole Adewumi, eventually announced on Saturday that the workers had called off the strike and were expected to resume work on Monday. But the workers countered by announcing through their spokesman, Mr Oludare Famoofo, that the strike was not called off. It was this stalemate that led to the startling discovery of how still deeply attached Nigerians are to their embroidered and even entertaining past.

    On Monday morning, according to newspaper reports, the public, including some few returning LG workers, discovered charms and fetish objects (juju) of all sorts hung on the gates of the local government secretariats. Some reports said all the 16 LGs in the state had the fetish objects hung on their gates. The juju objects were apparently placed at the secretariat entrances to frighten and discourage workers who might be disposed to returning to their duty posts. The gambit worked far beyond expectation. Workers who resumed work were reported to have fled back to their homes, and others who heard about the juju story never bothered to show up. It is not clear whether the newspapers exaggerated; but at least workers were, by Monday, still staying away from work.

    It is entirely up to the state and its LG workers to find an accommodation on the wage matter. But it must come as a huge surprise to many Nigerians that in the 21st Century, a group of people, let alone educated workers, could resort to using juju to scare their compatriots. Ekiti is rated as probably the most educated state in the country, with more graduates per capita than any other state. It is also said of the state that there is hardly any family in those hilly redoubts which does not boast of a graduate. So, it can be safely speculated that among those who hung fetish objects on LG secretariat gates were graduates, perhaps of philosophy, biology, sociology and religious studies, among other disciplines. Could it be that the juju enthusiasts didn’t believe in juju but trusted that it would scare others?

    But let’s cut the sophistry. The fact is that more Nigerians than not believe in juju and continue to be deeply superstitious. They have encountered enough science in their studies to disprove the nonsense about charms and fetish, but they have stuck to the anthropomorphism of their youthful fancies, and like soldiers of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda, would as soon wear charms to repel bullets as rely on the efficacy of magun to secure the connubial rectitude of their wives. Many a man had been killed by bullets in spite of wearing the so-called local bulletproof, and many a husband had been made a cuckold notwithstanding the elaborate placement of magun on their wives, but they’ll continue nonetheless to place their boyish fate and dreams, like Asterix, in the hands of local druids.

    If it is true, as newspapers reported, that charms were hung on the gates of all the 16 local government headquarters in Ekiti, then we must begin to doubt just how efficacious modern education really is. Perhaps we should all give up on the proven powers of science and return to our atavistic past. And it would of course not matter that juju did not stop white men from defeating our forefathers and colonising us; nor that every time science met juju, the latter was defeated. We were still grappling with being described as the Federal Republic of Lynchers on account of the recent murder of four University of Port Harcourt students by a mob; now we must also contend with transiting regressively into the Federal Republic of Superstitions, alas, without the amenity of a time machine.

     

     

  • Boko Haram’s clarifications

    Boko Haram’s clarifications

    Last week, the Islamic sect, Boko Haram, unexpectedly called for dialogue with the Goodluck Jonathan government to resolve the insurgency that has led to the killing of hundreds of people and large-scale destruction of public and private properties in the Northeast. The Federal Government had all along been amenable to dialogue; it will now get its wish. But the sect, until now, had been ambivalent. If grey areas in the proposal could be ironed out, however, both groups would be prepared to enter into more valuable discussions expected to lead to a truce and possibly a peace deal. Last Thursday, the sect had through teleconference with newsmen in Maiduguri named its terms for peace and offered two lists of negotiators to represent both the sect and the government. On the side of the sect were Abu Abdulazeez, who claimed to be the deputy leader of Boko Haram and head negotiator, Abu Abbas, Sheikh Ibrahim Yusuf, Sheikh Kontagora and Mamman Nur.

    Either because the sect’s ad hoc spokesman was imprecise in language use or he was misunderstood by reporters, the impression he created last Thursday was that the six eminent gentlemen listed as mediators were actually the audacious suggestions of the Boko Haram leadership on behalf of the government. The audacious team was to be led by a former head of state, Gen Muhammadu Buhari. On Sunday, however, the sect clarified that the so-called Federal Government team was actually meant to serve as witnesses, not negotiators, during the anticipated dialogue. The reason they needed witnesses, argued Boko Haram leaders, was that the government was too duplicitous to be trusted. In other words, apart from naming its terms, the sect was also pertinently concerned with the composition of its negotiating team and witnesses. The government is expected to come up with its own list of negotiators.

    It seems quite clear already that the Federal Government has passed the stage of grappling with its conscience over whether it is proper to negotiate with Boko Haram, an organisation it has inscrutably refused to designate as terrorist, or to fight it to the bitter end, assuming an end is really foreseeable in this seemingly interminable and increasingly complex insurgency. On its own part, the sect has said little about why it suddenly appeared interested in dialogue. Perhaps it had to do with pressures from well-meaning people in the North. It, however, warned that though it found it agreeable to enter into dialogue, it still retained enough ordnance and fighting spirit to sustain the insurgency. It is unlikely the Federal Government, which already has its back to the wall, will scorn the sect’s adamantine resolve. Indeed, how the Jonathan government will balance its frenzied desire for peace – with all the ethical minefield of compensating aggrieved Boko Haram members – with the equally more important moral necessity of compensating innocent victims of Boko Haram violence remains to be seen.

    Boko Haram leaders may have clarified their demands and proposals; yet, if the dialogue begins, the negotiators will still find it extremely laborious to set the parameters for negotiation, let alone adhere to them. Much worse will be how, after coming to some form of agreement, both the government and the sect will tackle the uncontrollable freelance gunmen roaming the Northeast with small but potent grudges and causing upheavals far more disproportionate to their sizes.

     

     

  • Endorsing Barack Obama

    Endorsing Barack Obama

    Just for the fun of it, Hardball is taking the unusual step of endorsing President Barack Obama for a second term in tomorrow’s United States presidential election. The endorsement is superfluous, and not even nearly as important as the endorsements many US publications would give. But whether US or Nigerian endorsements, what really matters is how voters view the candidature of the Democratic Party standard-bearer, Mr Obama, and the credibility of his Republican Party challenger, Mr Mitt Romney. According to most news reports, the two candidates are in a dead heat at the moment, though Obama has a slight advantage in the nine key swing states of Ohio, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, Nevada, Wisconsin, Iowa and New Hampshire.

    According to the latest estimate by RealClearPolitics, “Obama has 201 Electoral College Votes, while Romney has 191 so far. The two candidates are fighting it out for as many as 146 Electoral College Votes in 10 battle ground States.” The Wall Street Journal also surmised: “President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney enter the final sprint before Election Day essentially deadlocked nationally in what looks set to be one of the closest presidential elections in US history.” The Washington Post on its own said this of tomorrow’s election: “On the final weekend of a fiercely fought presidential campaign, President Obama holds a narrow advantage over Mitt Romney in the crucial contest for the electoral votes needed to win the White House, even as national polls continue to show the candidates in a virtual tie for the popular vote.” What is obvious from the news coverage of the election is that the poll will produce a narrow winner. That winner should be Mr Obama.

    Hardball recognises that the election has been about the economy much more than any other issue, including the fairly successful foreign policy records of the incumbent. But even as far as the economy is concerned, and with a little help from Hurricane Sandy which cast the president in good light, the figures have been favourable. Not only has employment figure continued to rise, with Obama claiming that more than four million jobs had been created since 2009, unemployment figure, which is more crucial, has continued to fall, indeed dipping well below the dangerous eight percent level that would have made his re-election less certain.

    As a foreign observer in the US election, Hardball takes the extraordinarily inessential step of endorsing Obama for two reasons. First, most Africans, including of course Hardball, are Democratic Party-leaning. The columnist sees no need to break a long-standing mould. Second, and much more importantly, Obama has begun to win back for the US most of its friends all over the world, including traditional allies alienated by the harmful policies of previous governments. It has suddenly become less dangerous for many of these friends to describe themselves as either US allies or just plain friends. By virtue of the direction Obama has steered the US, many of his country’s traditional enemies now look somewhat irrational and extremist. Judging from Romney’s stance, at least as gleaned from his campaign speeches and extempore gaffes, there is the danger that a Republican presidency could once again alienate many of these friends.

    If the US cares for its power and the global influence it still commands, and though these may not significantly affect tomorrow’s poll, Obama deserves to be re-elected. He’ll probably win anyway.

  • A wave of legislative and oratorical nostalgia

    A wave of legislative and oratorical nostalgia

    Most readers of The Nation newspaper probably missed a short letter to the editor written by Mr Ehimare Godfrey from Benin City and published on Page 20 of this newspaper’s October 31 edition. In it, the writer complained that since his representative, the excitable and bombastic Hon Patrick Obahiagbon, left the House of Representatives, neither the Oredo Federal Constituency, which he used to represent, nor the entire National Assembly had come up to scratch in excitement and boisterousness again. He regretted that fact, he said, and wished that the man of purple prose could find his way back into the House of Representatives to liven things up a bit, relieve the somnolent chamber of its depressing staleness, and return Oredo constituency to some renown.

    Hardball had once had to refer to Hon Obahiagbon in this place and even quoted him at length. His philippics, when he was in the Reps, were doubtless not too remarkable, and his words were stringed together clumsily and ponderously, but he kept lawmakers awake in a chamber where everyone struggled not to doze. His speeches might be riveting for their sheer ability to exorcise dullness and depression from vulnerable minds, and they often ended without anyone making sense of what he meant to say or where he feigned to go, but there was always activity when he got on his feet. Mr Godfrey probably remembered all of Obahiagbon’s glorious moments and the fact that he kept the name of Oredo constituency alive, and he wished to relive them. This columnist can assure him he is not alone. In fact, Hardball himself, being an aficionado of the delectable art of parliamentary oratory, had long given up on the National Assembly, a place he considers so barren of both oratory and great debates that the Sahara desert looked like lush greenery.

    Both Hardball and Mr Godfrey are also not alone. In a 2008 piece by one Andrew Roberts in the London Daily Telegraph, the poor quality of modern parliamentary oratory was also denounced. Roberts described the debates in the British House of Commons as dull company reports rather than “life-enhancing literature.” He quotes Sir Winston Churchill talking to someone and saying, “‘I was never a bird on the unpinioned wing. You see, my boy, when I got up to speak, I always knew precisely where every noun and adjective would go and how every piece of punctuation would bed into my speech. By contrast, the best parliamentary orators, like Lloyd George, FE Smith, Timothy Healy the Irishman, or even that s— Aneurin Bevan, their phrases were dictated by some inner God within.” Then Roberts asked in his piece, “Why is the ‘inner God within’ so absent from today’s parliamentary debates? Why is reading Hansard akin to ingesting a company’s report and accounts, when in earlier periods of our (British) history it read like life-enhancing literature?”

    Judging from Obahiagbon’s sometimes unique dress sense, it was the same parliamentary boredom and mediocrity referred to by Roberts in his Daily Telegraph article that the Nigerian lawmaker tried to relieve us of. He didn’t succeed because though he stirred emotions and warmed the cockles of our hearts, and had an inimitable, vibrant and joyous style, he never really achieved anything – not one fantastic legislation sponsored by him and passed by his colleagues, and not one piece of legislation overthrown either by the force of his words or the encompassing wit and logic of his arguments. He might have failed, but that failure does not detract from the fact that in the National Assembly of today there is not one example of the brilliance demonstrated by Demosthenes when, by his oratory, he stirred the Greeks against Philip of Macedon. Ah, yes, there was Mallam Farouk Lawan with his mellifluous voice and unbroken flow of persuasive grammar and beguiling cadence. But he neither rose to the rarified height of matchless oratory nor eased into the solid bedrock where character and passion become the bulwark for oratory.

    If you could, imagine that Nigeria operated a parliamentary system instead of a presidential system. Could you visualise a Goodluck Jonathan summoning the temperament and the disarming wit to checkmate the opposition or rebellious backbenchers during Prime Minister’s Question Time? That’ll be the day. Hardball has Mr Godfrey writing from Benin City to thank for reminding us how sterile our National Assembly is, and indeed has always been. Is there any hope of redemption anytime soon? Hardly, for Nigerian politics is shaped in such a way that brilliance and oratory amount to nothing. Family affair rules, and it’s OK. Maybe, too, money rules, and it’s even more OK.

  • Something worse than imagined is happening in the North

    Something worse than imagined is happening in the North

    On Monday night, 18 people were reported to have been shot dead by robbers at Kabaru village in the Dansadau emirate, Maru local government area of Zamfara State. Since last year, more than 60 people have lost their lives in robbery attacks in that emirate alone. Each attack costs dozens of lives rather than a few. In October 2011, about 19 people were reported killed by armed men at Lingyado village. And at Dangulbi, 27 people lost their lives as robbers moved from house to house shooting and maiming, and with plenty of time to spare. It will also be recalled that last month, at Dogon Dawa village in Kaduna State, armed men believed to be robbers killed about 24 people. Some Fulani herdsmen later claimed that the Dogon Dawa attack was a revenge mission against villagers who robbed and murdered nomads returning from annual grazing expeditions. Sadly, everyone is becoming beastly.

    In May, robbers also reportedly shot dead 34 traders at the Potiskum cattle market in Yobe State. The traders had earlier in the day foiled a robbery attack and caught one of the assailants whom they quickly lynched. To avenge the dead robber and to punish the traders’ effrontery in foiling the robbery, scores of attackers using explosives and dangerous weapons staged a raid on the market killing 34 people, though unofficial estimates put the figure at more than 50 victims. In addition, in a feat of brazenness, the robbers razed the market.

    A pattern is beginning to emerge from these daring robbery raids. One is the ease with which the robbers operate; and two is the viciousness of the raids and the large-scale killings that accompany them. This worrisome pattern, which no other part of the country seems able to match, probably indicates deeper fissures in the North than previously imagined. In the first instance, it is possible that the police are understaffed and poorly equipped to counter the attacks; or that, as a few reports show, they are probably compromised. Second, as the Boko Haram terrorist phenomenon also shows, the scale of alienation in the North may in fact have reached an extreme level, such that criminals really can’t be bothered anymore if the society goes to seed or not. Third, it is also likely that, like the rest of the country, proliferation of small arms and light weapons has reached crisis point.

    Whatever the situation, the federal and state governments must appreciate that the problem, as indicated by the creeping anomie in the North, has gone beyond what mere deployment of policemen and logistics can address. We have a major crisis in our hands, as increasingly larger swathes of the country are becoming more and more ungovernable.

    This column has warned repeatedly that notwithstanding the platitudes issuing from the National Assembly and the presidency, the country is manifesting the early stages of deep structural decay. If the decay is not checked soon, and if a restructuring of the country is not undertaken urgently and honestly, it is a question of time before the country slips into something much worse, something intractable. Now is the time to discuss; now is the time to do something concrete about the reigning paradigm that has proved impotent in the face of mounting and complex challenges.

  • Omoruyi’s second journey

    Omoruyi’s second journey

    No one should ever again have to cry so plaintively for help as the former Director-General, Centre for Democratic Studies, Prof. Omo Omoruyi, did two days ago before he was flown abroad a second time to treat his recurring cancer. For someone who served his country well at a fairly high level, it was heartrending to see him bemoan his state of utter abandonment. He singled out his former boss and ex-head of state, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, and some of his friends for being indifferent to his plight. They didn’t contribute to his first journey to the United States to treat the cancer that ravaged his body, he said, and they were again uninterested in assuaging his misery as he embarked on what he described as the second journey. Speaking in Benin City shortly before his departure, he also revealed that he had unsuccessfully asked President Goodluck Jonathan for help through Chief Edwin Clark.

    Hear the professor in his own words: “I have been used and dumped, especially by Babangida. Some politicians who don’t like me were also preventing the President from giving me assistance, after I sent a message about my health predicament to him. My cancer is back and I don’t know how it will end. Governor Adams Oshiomhole has graciously come to my aid again. He is the one making it possible for me to commence my second journey. In my book, My journey Back To Life, that is journey number one. It will appear I am starting a second journey, and how this second journey will end, I don’t know. I am going to hospital in the United States to commence a new treatment plan and that treatment plan, how it will end, I do not know… I am going back to the hospital. President Goodluck Jonathan should help me. I cried to him through Chief Edwin Clark. There is vindictiveness in the land. I have paid my dues to this country and the country is unfair to me. What did I not do?”

    There are yet many people who appreciate the erudite professor’s contributions to nation-building, and who hope he would make it back alive and still enjoy life for many more years. But if he does not return, his parting words should haunt Nigeria for some time. In a tone heavy with anguish and despair, Professor Omoruyi had asked this rhetorical question: “What did I not do?” The problem is not what he didn’t do, or what anyone else needed to do. The problem is that it rarely matters what anyone does in Nigeria. After all, he would not be the first top Nigerian to be abandoned to his fate. Many sportsmen, artists and intellectuals have also suffered untold privations, sometimes directly at the hands of the government and its agents, and at other times indirectly as a result of unavailability of facilities. The shocking truth about living in Nigeria is that every citizen is on his own. Professor Omoruyi does not need more education to know how alone the Nigerian is. What worried him instead was the undependability of his friends, which his very desperate circumstances made him to appreciate anew.

    It is possible the friends the professor said gave him cold shoulder would have something to say in their defence. But even if he exaggerated a little, he should be forgiven, for the parting words of this distraughtly sick patriot described such pathos that only someone with a heart of stone could fail to yield to.

     

     

  • Mark and creation of more states

    Mark and creation of more states

    Senate President David Mark has announced his readiness to join hands with those campaigning for the creation of additional states in Nigeria. He reiterated his view on the subject at the Ojude-Oba annual cultural festival of the Ijebu people where he was a special guest on Sunday. There he argued that, contrary to what many thought, the demand for more states had nothing to do with separatist or isolationist tendencies of Nigerians. The desire for more states, he added, was simply a device to move governance closer to the people. As he put it: “I support the creation of (more) states in this country. And the National Assembly must work towards that. When we create states, it is not because we cannot live together, but because we want to bring governance closer to the people. A lot of people desire and deserve to feel a sense of governance in this country, and when we create states, that is what would happen.” If he offered any other rationalisation for the exercise, the media did not report it.

    In his remarks, Senator Mark also indicated that the National Assembly was in support of additional states, and was already working on the matter. If he had any other reason for the creation of more states, the Ijebu-Ode festival was most suitable for him to educate the people. His hosts asked for Ijebu State, to which Mark was well disposed, but his rationalisation for more states was rightly a general one. However, his statement was more notable for the questions it did not answer than the questions it answered. Governance needed to be moved closer to the people, Mark admitted, but at what point would such a movement become unrealistic and indefensibly atomistic? When would creation of states reach its equilibrium point and anything outside that become unreasonable and impracticable? In fact, as far as practicality goes, why would an 18-state structure be better, not more burdensome, than a 12-state structure, or a 36-state structure bring government closer to the people than a 21-state structure?

    Judging from past experiences, the agitation for the creation of more states will never end, even as the reasons for the campaign will more likely become less and less plausible. It is also unlikely that the states campaigners and their legislative supporters will ever offer truly convincing arguments regarding the optimum point where governance could be said to have achieved the goal of nearness to the people. The argument, indeed, will always boil down to a struggle between spatial nearness and efficiency nearness. Some larger polities, such as India (Pop, 1.2bn) with 28 states, have fewer states than Nigeria. One state in India, Andhra Pradesh, has a population of 84 million people. The third largest country in the world, the United States (Pop, 312m), has just 50 states, a numerical feat Nigeria seems bent on equaling at the rate it is going.

    Senator Mark and the National Assembly should not just be preoccupied with satisfying the yearnings of the people for more states, or of doing justice to all in the exercise, or even of bringing governance closer to the people, with all the dubieties involved. They must convince themselves of the economic wisdom of replicating the cost of governance in increasing number of states, which new administrative units entail, at a time of shrinking revenue vis-à-vis population growth, and seemingly interminable global economic crisis. The times, it seems, call for more prudence in management of economic resources, not careless dissipation.

     

     

  • Rethinking Anambra’s demolition strategy

    Rethinking Anambra’s demolition strategy

    ANAMBRA State Governor Peter Obi is right to view the menace of kidnapping as a serious affront to our civilisation and humanity. Reports indeed indicate that Anambra is one of the states seriously threatened by the activities of kidnappers. This may be why on Wednesday the governor led a team of policemen to demolish two buildings belonging to a suspected kidnap kingpin, Emeka Ezekude, in Uli, Ihiala Local Government Area. Ezekude’s buildings were not the first to come under the sledgehammer. Earlier, two other kidnap suspects, Olisa Ifedike, aka Ofeakwu, and Okechukwu Amasiatu, aka Okey Nnewi, had had their buildings acquired by the state government and pulled down. Obi describes the exercise as government’s policy to ruthlessly tackle the menace of kidnapping, a crime that nearly brought business activities and social life to a halt in the state and in nearby Abia State with the exploits of one Obioma Nwankwo, aka Osisikankwu. It is not a surprise that Obi’s policy has received huge support from the state and beyond.

    However, though the kidnap kingpins are described as suspects, and though the law empowering the government to acquire kidnappers’ assets and destroy them were passed a few months ago, no one seems to remember how the prosecution of the suspects has fared. It is important that in spite of the gravity of the crime of kidnapping, there must still be considerable openness in the trial of the suspects. And it does not matter whether, like Ezekude, the suspects were caught in flagrant delicto. The law against kidnapping not only empowers the government to acquire and destroy properties of kidnap suspects, it also provides for the death penalty. The governor on Wednesday reminded the public that he intended to implement the law to the letter. This, therefore, imposes the obligation on him to diligently prosecute the suspects before any punishment is carried out, whether the punishment involves the death penalty or the acquisition and destruction of properties.

    Neither Anambra nor any other state afflicted by the curse of kidnapping – and it is a cancer spreading rapidly all over the country – must surrender to hysteria or extra-judicial tactics. Even if the law against kidnapping is draconian, its provisions must still be openly and scrupulously adhered to. The government and people of the states implementing such tough laws must also not mind however slow the processes of delivering justice on kidnapping are. It is sometimes that slowness and painstakingness that define us civilised human beings. It is hoped that the rule of law would be always fully respected before Anambra State government decides to acquire and destroy kidnap suspects’ properties.

    Though the law against kidnapping was passed a few months back and is already being implemented, it would seem wasteful that after acquiring the properties of kidnap suspects, they are then pulled down. Could the buildings not be turned over to orphanages or even be refitted to serve as police posts and units of state agencies and departments? The earnestness with which Anambra State fights kidnapping is commendable, and even enviable, but it has an obligation to ensure that the law is neither subverted nor compromised for any reason. Something noble must set the ways of the state apart from the ignoble tactics of the kidnappers; and that something must be related to the style and principles that ennoble our humanity.

     

  • Boko Haram, senators and turmoil in the Northeast

    Boko Haram, senators and turmoil in the Northeast

    It is an understatement to say the war on terror in Nigeria is not going too well for Borno State and the Joint Task Force (JTF). In spite of the deployment of considerable ordnance in the Northeast, the sect is no nearer to being subdued today than it was at the beginning of its revolt some three years ago. Worse, the war is getting messier, with highly placed public officials and legislators dragged into the war in very unedifying ways. The latest example is Senator Ahmad Khalifa Zanna (PDP-Borno Central), who is alleged by the JTF to have harboured at his Maiduguri home a wanted Boko Haram terror suspect, Shuaib Mohammed Bama. The senator, however, immediately denied the claims and instead explained that the suspect was in fact arrested at the home of former governor Ali Modu Sherrif. Sherrif has in turn denounced Zanna’s allegation as spurious and escapist.

    The Boko Haram problem has unfortunately graduated from an uncomplicated terror war to a much more complex revolt that seems to defy categorisation and rationalisation. In response to the invitation extended to him by the secret service, Zanna alleged that the JTF had by engaging in extra-judicial killings breached the military’s rules of engagement. He cited the instance of a group of 15 schoolboys shot in cold blood recently in Maiduguri by the JTF and the razing of a row of buildings in retaliation against the killing of an officer. He also claimed that the JTF tactics had been intimidatory and unfriendly. In addition, the JTF failed to consult with the people of Borno and wouldn’t take advice, he said. It will be recalled that in July last year, and again many times this year, Borno Elders criticised the JTF and called on the government to withdraw the military task force from Borno State on account of indiscriminate killings that are exacerbating the revolt.

    Though Zanna’s alleged links with Boko Haram are still being investigated, it is not too early for the army to examine the complaints of Borno Elders and the allegations of extra-judicial killings levelled by the senator against the JTF. If indeed the objective of the state and the JTF is to quell the revolt and restore peace in the northern part of the country, they must be amenable to suggestions that will help them gain the confidence of the people on whose behalf they claim to be fighting. Surely, going by the festering of the Boko Haram revolt, no one can claim that the affected northern states are enjoying more peace today than they did in 2009, when this problem first reared its practical head.

    The allegations against Senator Zanna are truly disturbing and should be investigated diligently. But his counterclaims against the JTF are also deeply unnerving. These too must be diligently investigated without cover-up. The consequence of ignoring these allegations, especially against the security agencies fighting Boko Haram, is to encourage the problem to fester the more until it becomes unmanageable and the sect’s leaders begin to nurse territorial ambitions as Northern Mali has shown. The Boko Haram menace is a potent enough problem; the government must not add the hostility of an alienated citizenry to its many headaches.

  • Justice Salami’s long-running ordeal

    Justice Salami’s long-running ordeal

    It has been more than one year since the National Judicial Council (NJC) under the leadership of former Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Aloysius Katsina-Alu, recommended to President Goodluck Jonathan the suspension of the President of the Court of Appeal (PCA), Justice Ayo Salami. The recommendation, it will be recalled, was swiftly endorsed. Salami was said to have lied against Katsina-Alu and refused to apologise to him and the NJC. Nine months after the suspension was endorsed, the next CJN, Justice Dahiru Musdapher, led the NJC to reverse itself in May 2012 by recommending the reinstatement of Salami. This time the Presidency baulked, citing court cases standing in the way of the president and disallowing him from riding roughshod over the courts. The nuisance was therefore passed on to the current CJN, Justice Maryam Aloma-Mukhtar, who was sworn in some three months ago, and who, like her predecessor, has sworn to remove the blot on the judiciary’s escutcheon, which the Salami case had become.

    No one is sure the current CJN will succeed in bringing a just and sensible closure to the unseemly affair. One of the new options being considered to settle the case is for Salami to withdraw the suits he filed against the Federal Government and the NJC, be reinstated, and then gracefully retire. This option, according to a report by The Nation a few days ago, would be discussed by the CJN with both the president in order to avoid a conflict with the Executive branch and with Salami after the Sallah break to secure an amicable resolution. Neither the apex court nor the NJC has confirmed the story. While it is feared that a few anti-Salami conspirators are poised to file fresh suits to stall the reinstatement bid until the PCA attains retirement age next year, it is not even certain that the presidency would buy into this option, nor is anyone sure the PCA himself would be amenable to the deal.

    What is however sure is that the stalemate has weighed heavily on the conscience of the CJNs and the NJC. Apart from Katsina-Alu who triggered the stalemate, and who couldn’t care less, the other CJNs have made strenuous efforts to bring closure to the case and restore the judiciary’s independence and reputation. There is probably some near unanimity in the NJC concerning the Salami case; but the Presidency has hardly disguised what it thought should be the only outcome of the rigmaroles: it wants Salami out, whether disgraced or with soft landing. As determined as the CJN and the NJC are, it is also obvious that they are reluctant to confront the government.

    Justice Salami must resist the temptation to make it easy for the troubled conscience of the president, the CJN and the NJC, which agreeing to the cheap and ignoble terms of disengagement will imply. While the altruism of the CJN and the NJC cannot be doubted, only one outcome appears depressingly inevitable in this sordid affair: reinstatement as a prelude to retirement. The Presidency has immobilised its own conscience. But every man of honour, except political partisans, knows that the odds are stacked against Salami in a country that has lost its moral compass and provoked its people into sundry rebellions and lawlessness. Given the disposition of the Presidency and the fanaticism of his enemies, Salami will be forced out one way or the other. Let him choose to depart in a blaze of glory by daring them to retire him themselves and completing the circle of infamy. No other honourable compromise exists.