The Nation Newspaper

Category: Mohammed Harunna

  • The manipulation of Boko Haram

    The manipulation of Boko Haram

    Even for a city that must have gotten used to terrorists’ attacks since the Boko Haram sect took up arms against Nigeria, last Friday’s multiple suicide bombing and machine gun attack on the worshippers at Kano’s famous Grand Mosque, next to the Emir’s Palace, must have come as a most devastating shock to many Nigerians.

    So far between 50 and over 100 people are said to have been killed in the attack. Many more have been injured, several of them critically.

    The Grand Mosque attack, which bears the hallmark of Boko Haram, was hardly the most daring. Certainly it was not as daring as the almost simultaneous terror attack on no less than 12 far-flung targets in the city, which occurred on January 20, 2012 and in which over 150 lives were reportedly lost.

    The Friday attack was even less daring than that by armed men riding motorcycles on the motorcade of the late Emir of Kano, Alhaji Ado Bayero, exactly a year to the month of the 2012 multiple attack on the city and which was apparently aimed at assassinating the then elderly emir. The attackers failed in their objective, but they succeeded in killing four people, including the Emir’s driver and two of his bodyguards, one of who tried to shield the emir from the gunshots. Several more were wounded.

    What has made the Friday attack shocking even if less daring than at least the two in question, was its vicinity, so sacred and close to the Emir’s palace, and its timing, so soon after the new Emir, Malam Muhammadu Sanusi, called on Muslims during a Friday sermon in the same mosque to rise up and defend themselves against terrorism in the face of the apparent failure of the security forces to deal with Boko Haram’s insurgency.

    “These people,” he reportedly said during the sermon earlier this month, “when they attack towns, they kill boys and enslave girls … People must stand resolute. They should acquire what they can to defend themselves. People must not wait for soldiers to protect them.”

    If the Emir was quoted correctly, it was an unwise thing for him to have said because, given Boko Haram’s past response to such threats, it was like waiving a red flag before a bull. Actually, worse; with a bull you knew what you were dealing with, whereas with the Boko Haram phenomenon, no one knows for sure, at least not anymore.

    No doubt Boko Haram terror is real. But then so also has been its manipulation by politicians and even religious leaders for selfish considerations and self aggrandisement. And, far-fetched as it may seem, it is not so outrageous to suspect our security outfits of being more interested in manipulating it for regime security than in helping to bring it to an end.

    The reader may recall that not long ago, our Department of State Security (DSS) stirred a minor media controversy when,  without any concrete evidence it seemed, its boss wrote a memo to President Goodluck Jonathan, accusing the outspoken Col. Dangiwa Umar, Rtd, of being a sponsor of Boko Haram. The retired colonel escaped censor only because he enjoyed the rare privilege of being close enough to the presidency to have an opportunity to defend himself, which he apparently did successfully. At least he was never detained, much less tried.

    When the Emir of Kano called on Muslims to rise and defend themselves against Boko Haram, it was not only like waiving a red flag before a bull. It was also like asking people to help themselves to justice.

    Last Friday, the worshippers at the Grand Mosque did just that when they overpowered the machine gun-wielding attackers and, instead of handing them over to the authorities, lynched them. That may have satisfied the public’s desire for instant justice, but it also foreclosed any hope that the attackers could have helped to unearth those behind the attack.

    Unhelpful as it was, however, the lynching was a manifestation of widespread public disenchantment at the capacity and the willingness of the authorities to end the Boko Haram insurgency. This disenchantment is bound to be reinforced by the way the case of Aminu Sadiq Ogwuche,  the alleged mastermind of the Nyanya motor park bombing in Abuja, was discharged by the Federal High Court in Abuja on November 24 for “lack of diligent prosecution.” Since then, the Nigeria Police and the SSS have engaged each other in an embarrassing blame game over the bungling.

    The authorities and their sympathisers have often argued that Boko Haram was, and remains, a manifestation of the statement by senior opposition elements that they would make the country ungovernable over their loss of the 2011 presidential election. However, logical as the argument sounds, it conveniently overlooks the fact that the sect’s violence predated the current administration. It also ignores the fact that members of the sect have absolutely no respect for anyone who does not share their ideology.

    More significantly, the argument ignores the fact that it is the prerogative of those in power to use all the resources at their disposal to expose and punish anyone who seeks to undermine the state and it is therefore a copout to blame the opposition for the failure of those in authority to do their job properly. So far they have woefully failed to do so in bringing an end to the Boko Haram insurgency.

    Instead, they and their sympathisers have resorted to blaming a section of this country’s leadership, both secular and cleric, of not speaking out loud enough in condemnation of the sect. This, to begin with, is of course not true. Long before the Emir of Kano spoke up against the Boko Haram terror, many leading secular and religious leaders had spoken up against it. Many, including the famous Sheikh Ja’afar, the benefactor of Boko Haram’s founder, Muhammadu Yusuf, who later fell out with his religious godson over what he said was his wayward philosophy, have paid with their lives.

    But even if it is true that some leaders have not spoken out loud enough against Boko Haram, of what use have all the loud condemnations of the sect been beyond creating a show of sympathy? At any rate, how can mere condemnations be a substitute for having a credible policy for dealing with the violence?

    When President Jonathan spoke in September at the High Level Meeting of the United Nations Security Council in New York on the issue of global terrorism, he highlighted the terrible cost Boko Harm has exacted from our country. “The costs,” he said, “are high: over 13,000 people have been killed, whole communities razed, and hundreds of persons kidnapped, the most prominent being the mindless kidnap of our innocent daughters from Chibok Secondary School, in Northeast Nigeria.”

    In his short and eloquent speech, he listed what his government had done to deal with the insurgency. These, he said, were his Presidential Initiative for the Northeast (PINE) aimed at providing immediate relief for victims of the insurgency and “fast-tracking infrastructural development in the region”, the $ 1 billion Victims Support Fund, which he said had already raised half the target sum, and his administration’s support for the Safe School Initiative, a project of Mr. Gordon Brown, a former British Prime Minister.

    Clearly missing from his list was any mention of his administration’s policy of engagement with the real Boko Haram to negotiate an end to the insurgency. He mentioned none because he had none since the man himself has repeatedly said the sect lacked the faces and names to engage with.

    Suddenly in October, the authorities announced to the world that they had discovered faces and names behind the sect to negotiate with and had indeed agreed to a truce. Coming at a time when the sect seemed to have progressed from guerrilla tactics to seizing and holding territory, the announcement looked like a bit of a stretch. Still most people were willing to believe it because it offered a huge relief to a public so hungry for peace and security in the land.

    Sadly the relief turned out to be short-lived when Boko Haram announced on November 1 that it never agreed to any ceasefire with anyone. So instead of relief, the announcement began to elicit widespread cynicism about its motive; the President, it seemed, needed a big “October Surprise” as he prepared to formally announce his worst kept secret – his decision all along to seek re-election next year.

    Since the failed October Surprise, Boko Haram has escalated its terror and hardly a week has passed without news of its bombings and seizing of territories. Last Friday’s Kano Grand Mosque attack was merely the most shocking in recent months.

    Predictably, the President has asked the National Assembly to renew his emergency powers for the third time since May 2013 to deal with the situation. The National Assembly seems reluctant to do so for the good reason that the state of emergency in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states has only made matters worse instead of better. Besides, the extension is bound to spill over into next year’s elections.

    Even then a renewal seems inevitable if only because, bad as things are at the moment, it is not difficult to imagine how they can get a lot worse without the state of emergency.

    As a friend of the Jonathan presidency, Col. Umar has been pleading with the National Assembly to oblige the president. In a recent interview in The Guardian (November 29), in which he made the plea, he said: “We cannot afford to politicise the problem.”

    The retired colonel couldn’t be more right. The problem with his plea, however, is that he seems to have directed it away from the greatest culprit – the Jonathan presidency – in the politicisation and manipulation of Boko Haram for narrow objectives.

     

  • Still on INEC’s abandoned new polling units

    Still on INEC’s abandoned new polling units

    After the announcement a fortnight ago by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), that it has suspended – abandoned, was more like it – its plan to create 30,000 additional polling units until after next year’s general election, it is obviously an academic exercise to still dwell on the subject. But then even academic exercises do have their uses; they do help at least to ensure the triumph of reason over sentiments, even if in the long run.

    And on this subject of new polling units, I have no doubt that what we have seen is a classic case of the triumph of propaganda over fact. This much should be obvious to the reader after a careful consideration of the first reaction reproduced below to my piece on the subject last week. Hakeem Kazeem’s is one of the several I received.

    Kazeem’s, to me, is symptomatic of how statistics can be so easily deployed to bamboozle the credulous. Like so many who have spoken and written about the now abandoned new polling units because of the propaganda that its distribution was meant to favour the North which Professor Attahiru Jega, its chairman, comes from, Kazeem clearly assumes the existing ratio is just, fair and equitable to all sections of the country.

    Even the most casual consideration of the figures in contention shows nothing could be further from the truth. The North, including Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory, has slightly over 40.5 million voters. Its existing polling units (PUs) are 63,368 or roughly 52% of the existing 121,348. The South with 29,856,650 registered voters has 57,981 PUs, roughly 48% of the existing figure. This clearly does injustice to the ratio of the voting population of the North which is 57.5% against the South’s 42.5% of the total of 70,383,428 registered voters.

    This difference between the two regions hides the even more important detail of the distribution of the PUs among the states. In the South only Lagos and Edo have over 600 voters per PU. Delta, Rivers, Ogun, Ebonyi, Akwa Ibom, Abia, Oyo and Cross River less than 600 with Ebonyi, the highest, at 571. The rest have far less than proposed minimum of 450. Indeed, Ekiti (313), Bayelsa (327) and Anambra (387), have less than 400 each.

    The North is a study in contrast. The lowest number per PU is 512 for Kogi, with Jigawa a close second (515) and Gombe a not-so-distant third (545). Kano and Katsina have between 550 and 600. The rest have well over 600, with Plateau clinching the top prize at 791 and Niger not too far behind with 762. However, the platinum medal goes to Abuja which has 1,588!

    What all this meant was that the much ballyhooed increase of about 20,000 for the North as against 8,400 or so for the South would have only altered the current ratio of 52:48 in favour of the North to a new ratio of roughly 55.7:44.3. This would have been more in accord with the spread of the country’s registered voters even though it still not fair and equitable enough. In absolute figures these would have been 83,600 PUs in the North as against 66,440 in the South.

    Clearly the focus on the ratio of 3 to 1 increase in favour of the North, rather on the whole picture, was a deliberate statistical sleight of hand by those afraid of a free and fair election to frighten the unwary into believing there is a plan afoot by INEC to rig the election in favour of any presidential candidate from the North.

    Well, commission has made its decision but it was clearly a decision based on sentiments rather than the facts, as a close reading of some of the reactions to my piece last week reproduced below should convince the reader.

    Sir,

    Your piece dated 19th of November portraying (Professor Attahiru) Jega as a victim of blackmail is jaundiced and misplaced. Granted that the North has a higher population than the South by as much as 5% as claimed by you, does that justify the huge disparity in the additional polling units awarded by Jega to the North as much as ratio 1-3 (over 33%)! Haba Mallam! As a true Muslim where is your sense of justice, equity and fairness?

    +2348023036314

    Hakeem Kazeem,

    Sir,

    Jega may keep promising credible, free and fair elections based on his personal integrity and not that of the institution he is ‘driving’. The surest way to embarrass a professional driver is to hand over a malfunctioning car to him and block all possibilities of the car’s repairs. Let Jega prove otherwise come 2015 elections.

    +2347034483605

    Wankar Daniel.

    Sir,

    I honestly think Jega should resign. The job has done an irreparable damage to his reputation. I used to trust his person and principles. But after what happened in Kaduna, Katsina and Bauchi in the 2011 elections I don’t feel the same about him. The abusive song that appeared after the 2011 elections, though I don’t subscribe to its contents, I share the frustration and anger of the singers.

    +2348033111000

    Dr. M. L. Yahuza.

    Sir,

    You speak as though you do not know the sensitivity of this matter. How many times has the South been short-changed just for peace to reign? You probably got your university education because a higher scouring Southerner was dropped to accommodate your state quota. The list goes on. The North cannot continue to trample roughshod on the South and the Middle-Belt under any guise. Even in states and local government creation it’s either equal or no distribution of new polling units.

    +2347032170069

    Endee Anozie,

    Sir,

    I am a pioneer staff of INEC, now retired. Since the first voter registration was conducted in 1988 or thereabouts, all subsequent voter registration exercises have amounted to simply splitting and spreading the existing polling stations. I am surprised Jega has succumbed to the pranks of Southern ethnic irredentists and chickened out of conducting a routine electoral exercise.

    +2348036177178

    John Tyav,

    Sir,

    I think Jega should have been resolute in creating the additional polling units albeit for a different reason. While Nigerian population figures remain in valid dispute, the large mass of the North is indisputable. The idea of a half empty North suggests some sort of dispersal of the population. So even on the basis of convenient access, if we say we want a polling unit within a comfortable walking distance of every Nigerian, then the North may well have more than tenfold more polling units than the South.

    What is key is finding a way (electronic voting) to ensure VALID voting.

    +2348098050590

    Dr. Ogbuagu,

    Sir,

    It was the late Dr. Abel Goubadia that conducted the 2003 (elections) not Prof. Maurice Iwu as you mentioned in your column.

    +2348036466756

    Muhammad Auta.

    The error was corrected in the last copy I sent to the editors but it apparently failed to meet their deadline. The online editions contained the corrected paragraph which read:

    Obasanjo’s lamentation then was in defence of the terrible record of Professor Maurice Iwu, Jega’s predecessor, in his conduct of the 2007 elections which was more or less universally condemned as hardly free, fair and credible. Obasanjo had replaced the late Mr Abel Goubadia, whose conduct of the 2003 election was adjudged even worse than that of 2007, with Iwu as INEC’s chairman in 2005.

    MH

    Sir,

    Your column is always a delight to read. (However), I only want to correct a point in the 19th November edition. Chief Sunday Afolabi was never an Afenifere member talk less of being a chieftain.

    +2348056119569

    Olalere Isola.

    Sir,

    The late Chief Sunday Afolabi was not an Afenifere chieftain. He fell out with Awo’s political camp in the build up to 1983 general elections. He never returned.

    +2348030490107

    Adebayo Salako.

     

    Re: As President Jonathan declares his 2015 bid…

    Sir,

    In fighting Boko Haram, you do not seem to have any role for Aliyu Gusau and Sambo Dasuki, the Defence Minister and NSA (National Security Adviser). Remember you pestered Owoeye Azazi until he died.  So these two have no questions to answer in this war against insurgency?

    +2348023243751

    Alabi Williams.

    Sir,

    My question to you as a true and sincere Muslim if President Jonathan is to be a Muslim will you ask him to resign?

    +23480328905863.

    Yes, I would. Twice, first, on September 20,2008 and second, December 2, 2009 I said the late President Umaru Yar’adua should resign from his job when it became obvious that he could not cope with the rigours of his office due to his failing health.

    MH

     

     

  • As Jega bows to political blackmail…

    As Jega bows to political blackmail…

    Four years ago or so, former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, lamented in far away America what he said was the thankless job of conducting Nigeria’s elections. “With due respect,” he said on a visit to “God’s own country” in April 2010, “if Jesus could come to the world and be the chairman of INEC (Independent National Electoral Commission), any election he conducts would be disputed.”

    The problem, however, he said, was not so much INEC itself as the Nigerian politician. So if anyone needed reform at all, he concluded, it was the Nigerian politician rather than INEC. “One thing that we need to reform in our society,” he said, “is the politician. We need to reform politicians.”

    I have a feeling that Professor Attahiru Jega, the INEC chairman, couldn’t have agreed more with Obasanjo about the frustrations of his job as he is forced to retreat from his announcement in August that his commission will increase the country’s 119,973 polling units created since 1996, by 30,000 – 21,615 of them in the North and the remaining 8,412 in the South.

    Obasanjo’s lamentation then was in defence of the terrible record of Professor Maurice Iwu, Jega’s predecessor, in his conduct of the 2003 and 2007 elections both of which were more or less universally condemned as hardly free, fair and credible. Obasanjo appointed Iwu and was himself a direct beneficiary of the first election and his political godsons the beneficiaries of the second, following his failure, mercifully, to actualize his infamous Third Term Agenda.

    Obasanjo’s remarks were widely condemned by the Christian clergy as blasphemous but I believed that the condemnations were based on a misunderstanding of his motive, which, as a Christian, could never have been to question Jesus Christ’s powers. However, whatever anyone would’ve said about his motive, there was no doubt that he was dead on target about the need for Nigerian politicians to reform their ways, if ever the country is to experience a universally adjudged free, fair and credible election.

    When Jega announced his plans for the additional 30,000 polling units, he said INEC was motivated by the need to make voting easy for everyone by ensuring no polling unit served more than 500 voters. As Professor Lai Olurode, a National Commissioner, explained to the audience of a media interactive organised in Osogbo, capital of Osun State, by the state’s chapter of Association of Veteran Journalists last month, many polling units in the country had served as many as 3,000 voters.

    It so happened that the vast majority of these overstretched polling units were in the North. In the 2011 elections for, example, millions of voters in the region, including this reporter, had to walk or drive at least one kilometre to vote. In perhaps what is possibly the most notorious case in the country, most voters in Rigasa, a sprawling suburb in Igabi Local Government, Kaduna State, with a population possibly bigger than that of Yenagoa, the capital of Bayelsa State, had to walk for more than two kilometres to vote. Rigasa had only 12 polling units for all its vast size and population.

    Hence INEC’s decision to create more of them in the North by a ratio of slightly two and a half to those in the South. The arithmetic was simple. You simply divided the existing voting population of each state by 500. Equity demanded the increase in the numbers allocated to the North be much higher than those for the South. However, big as they seemed, the allocation hardly changed the ratio of the adult population between the two regions which has been roughly 55% to 45 since censuses started in the country in early 20th century.

    But then with the Nigerian politician nothing is ever simple. No sooner did Jega announce INEC’s plan to increase the polling units and the ratio of the increase between the North and the South, than all hell was let loose by politicians who saw the decision not only as a grand conspiracy to rig next year’s presidential election against President Goodluck Jonathan as the candidate from the South. They also saw INEC’s decision as a repudiation of their cardinal belief that their region has always been more populous than the North.

    As is all too often the case in the country, where the politicians go, the media soon follow. Typical was the New Telegraph of September 26 which asked Jega to “Cancel the new polling units now!”

    The plan, the newspaper said, “would only create more political crisis in the country.” Why? Because, it said, “As of today, Nigeria’s exact population figure cannot be ascertained; it has been a matter of conjecture.”

    The newspaper said in one breath that the argument of which of the country’s two regions was more populous “can never be won or lost” but in the next breath went on to contradict itself by asking INEC to put its plan on hold till after next year’s election and “after the controversies surrounding the nation’s actual population has (sic) been properly addressed.” How it is possible to do so when the editors at the newspaper had made up their minds that the battle for a universally acceptable census is a futile one, it did not say.

    Still the editors have a point about the seeming futility of battling for a universally acceptable census in the country. During President Obasanjo’s battle to run for his second term against opposition from the North, Southern organisations like Afenifere and Ohaneze, and Alliance for Democracy as essentially a South-West party, told him they will support him only subject to his making the possession of a national identity card a condition for voting in 2003. Their motive was apparent; it would for once confirm their beliefs, in the words of the late Afenifere leader, Senator Abraham Adesanya, that the North had always made up its population by counting its sheep, cattle and goats.

    The demand was downright unconstitutional and illegal, as was later pointed out to Obasanjo by INEC. But he accepted it all the same and went ahead to conduct it, ahead of the elections. He even voted 25 billion Naira for it, as against 3 billion for Agriculture. However, even though he went through with it he had to drop its use as a condition for voting when it became obvious that only a small number of the ID cards could be issued to those registered before the elections.

    At the end of the exercise the figures suggested an even slightly wider margin of the population of the North over the South’s; whereas the 1991 census put the ratio between the regions at 53.23 for the North as against 46.77 for the South, the ID card exercise put the figures at 54.5 and 45.5 respectively.

    It is noteworthy that although the 1991 exercise had its sceptics, several notable Southerners, including Nobel Literature, Wole Soyinka, late former Chief Justice, Sir Adetokunbo Ademola who conducted the 1973 census under General Yakubu Gowon, and the late Professor Sam Aluko, the well-regarded and outspoken economist, all hailed the count as credible. It is also noteworthy that the ID card exercise was conducted by a president from the South, under a minister of Internal Affairs, the supervising ministry, Chief Sunday Afolabi, an Afenifere chieftain, and with the late Mr Deji Omotade, also a Southerner, in charge of the Department of National Civic Registration (DNCR),  the parastatal which conducted the exercise.

    If, in spite of the evidence of the compulsory National ID card registration exercise, some people chose to believe that the North is still a barren half-empty region, it’s hard, if not impossible, to see what else will shift them from their beliefs.

    In joining the chorus of those against the new polling units, the Vanguard which has been in the vanguard of a campaign of vitriol against Jega, said in its editorial of October 7 that INEC must stop its plan because it “has been rejected by the generality of Nigerians.” Really? Obviously among Vanguard’s “generality of Nigerians” must be South-East PDP, a creature strange to the constitution of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, Afenifere, Ohaneze, the Middle-Belt Forum, the Unity Party of Nigeria, the Senate leadership and even the security services which Sunday Vanguard (November 9), obviously acting on highly privileged information, claimed had written a letter to Jega warning him of the “potential dangers of his action.”

    As the newspaper knows all too well, none of these organisations, including the Senate leadership, truly represent the generality of Nigerians, as they are either self-selected, or had rigged themselves into power, or are more loyal to the powers that be than to the State.

    However, even though the combination of all those who have attacked Jega hardly represent the true generality of Nigerians, INEC’s decision on November 11 to postpone the creation of additional 30,000 polling units until after next year’s election, shows their power to blackmail and cow those they disagree with into submission is truly immense.

    It is a power that bodes ill for a free, fair and credible election next year – and probably long after.

     

    If Jega wants to go down in History as someone who was not prepared to let blind prejudice get in the way of doing his job diligently he should stick to his commission’s decision.

     

  • As President Jonathan declares his 2015 bid…

    As President Jonathan declares his 2015 bid…

    Three years ago this month, November 23, to be precise, I expressed fears on these pages that the country was waging a war against the insurrectionist Boko Haram that seemed to have no end in sight. The war, I said, seemed to be turning our politicians, soldiers, security agents and their contractor friends into agents of war rather than of peace.

    The title of the piece was “Boko Haram: ‘War’ with no end?’ It was a title, I pointed out, I’d borrowed from that of a 2007 collection of essays by left-wing writers of various nationalities, including Naomi Klein, whose common cause was an abhorrence of the way the West had imposed itself on the rest of the world as a violent global police.

    Klein was a journalist, writer, film maker and author. In her 2007 best seller, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, she argued that the neo-conservative forces that had taken over America and much of the West have used, in the words of the book’s blurb, “public disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, natural disasters – to push through highly unpopular economic shock therapy.”

    In her own contribution in the collection in question entitled “Building a Booming Economy Based on War with No End; The Lessons of Israel”, Klein provided what she believed was the answer to the puzzle of a booming Israeli economy in the midst of the chaos and carnage in its region.

    Israel’s economy, she argued, boomed because “perhaps more than any other country, (it) has learnt to build an economy based on never ending war”. That is, a war that fed on constant fear which, unlike oil, the main resource of its hostile Arab neighbours, was “the ultimate renewable source” because it created “a bottomless demand for devices that watch, listen, contain and target suspects.”

    I am tempted to reproduce the article in the light of the recent resurgence of Boko Haram’s insurgency, which is clearly a direct consequence of President Goodluck Jonathan’s apparent much greater concern with plotting his return to power in next year’s presidential election unopposed – at least within his party – than with securing the lives, limbs and property of his compatriots.

    Space, more than anything else, however, makes it impossible for me to succumb to the temptation. Suffice it to say the sentiments I expressed in that article – sentiments which, I believe, are shared by millions of Nigerians – seem, alas, to have been borne out by recent events running up to the President’s declaration yesterday that he would, after all, run for re-election next year, thus ending the make-believe that he had remained undecided all this while, which hardly anyone, possibly even himself, ever believed.

    If the Israelis, as Klein argued in her essay in question, have learnt to use the global war on terror as a strategy for building a thriving domestic economy in the midst of the chaos in the region, it seems our President has learnt to wink at his men and women as they used Boko Haram insurgency to divide Nigerians and whip up support for him in his bid to get re-elected next year. He seems to have even learnt to use the insurgency to get the National Assembly to do some of his biddings – witness, for example, the speed with which the federal legislators approved his dubious request for a $1 billion loan from abroad, ostensibly to fight the insurgency. Dubious, because this country never borrowed one kobo to fight its more devastating three-year civil war between 1967 and 1970.

    This divide and rule strategy, using mainly Boko Haram, has manifested in many forms, notably as claims by some of his spokesmen and those of his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) that the main opposition party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), is an Islamic party and a vote for one of the leading contenders for its presidential ticket, General Muhammadu Buhari, is a vote against Christianity. For those who make these claims, it obviously does not matter that, as the President himself has said occasionally in what were perhaps Freudian slips, more Muslims than Christians have been killed and attacked and their livelihoods destroyed by Boko Haram since 2009 when its insurrection took its present deadly turn.

    Of all such claims, however, the one that takes the prize for outrage and bigotry must be the most recent one by the controversial President of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and a member of President Jonathan’s innermost kitchen cabinet, Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor. Only last week he claimed that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has been scheming to disenfranchise Christians for next year’s elections. As he is wont to, the man did not offer one shred of evidence to support his claim.

    Recently, two other leading clerics, one Muslim, the other Christian, called on the President to sacrifice his presidential ambition in what they said was in the interest of the country’s security, peace and unity. The first, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, the well-known Kaduna-based Islamic preacher, said in an exclusive interview with Sunday Trust last month (October 19) that both the President and Buhari should sacrifice their ambitions because they have become highly divisive and a win by anyone of them next year will only lead to bloodshed worse than we saw following the 2011 presidential election.

    Last Monday, Reverend Chris Okotie, a leading Nigerian televangelist and pastor of the chic Household of God Church in Lagos, published what looked like an open letter to the President pleading with him to  emulate Lyndon B. Johnson. Jonathan, he said, like Johnson, became President after his principal died in office. Like Johnson, Okotie said, Jonathan also inherited a war. The two, he also said, mismanaged their wars. Jonathan, he argued, should therefore emulate Johnson by honourably declining to contest his party’s presidential ticket, just like Johnson did in 1968 as a result of his mismanagement of the Vietnam War.

    After he declared yesterday at Eagle Square that he had sought God’s face and consulted with his family and had therefore decided to seek re-election, it is obvious that the calls by the two clerics had fallen on Jonathan’s deaf ears.

    I have some reservations about calls on both Jonathan and Buhari, but even more so in Buhari’s case, not to contest next year’s presidential election. Both may have become divisive, but the divisions in this country will not end simply because they decide to sacrifice their ambitions. Buhari, I believe, is even less of a divisive figure than Jonathan because the negative emotion he triggers in people is more by default, thanks to the country’s generally anti-Islam media, than by choice as, I believe, is the case with the President.

    And now that it is, in any case, obviously too late to ask the President not to contest, one can only hope and pray that he will spend the rest of his current term focusing on bringing an end to the Boko Haram insurgency, rather than playing politics with it, even if only by proxy.

    Monday’s suicide bombing of a secondary school in Potiskum, Yobe State, in which no fewer than 47 young men lost their lives – this was just a day before his declaration jamboree – only underscores the need for the President to demonstrate that his heart and mind are in the fight against terrorism and insecurity in the country.

    The President should know that his vow on Monday to deal decisively with the insurgents can only ring hollow in the ears of most Nigerians, given his many previous broken vows, and given also the fact that he seemed so eager to convince the world he was winning the war against terror as he prepared to end his pretence at not making up his mind to get re-elected next year, that he allowed himself, as commander-in-chief, to be suckered into a false ceasefire.

    If the President sincerely wants to end the insurgency, the things he should do have always been obvious. First and foremost, he must end the long-running neglect of arming, training and providing for the care of our troops. He never needed the Americans to tell him, as they did recently, that all the billions that had been pumped into fighting the war since 2009 had ended largely in the pockets of the senior hierarchy of our military and he needed therefore to audit those expenditures in order to identify and bring the culprits to book.

    Last Monday, Nigeria’s ambassador in the US, Professor Ade Adefuye, ticked off the Americans while receiving a delegation of the US Council on Foreign Relations, for refusing to sell arms to Nigeria in its fight against terror. Nigeria is right to express its disappointment at America’s holier than thou attitude on the abuse of human rights by our soldiers. But then it’s not as if the Americans have a monopoly of the arms we need to fight terrorism. When the West, including America, initially denied Nigeria arms during our civil war, we turned elsewhere. We can do the same today if we manage our economy well and stop trying to buy arms under the table, using dubious proxies.

    Second, the President needs to reign in those key elements of his kitchen cabinet whose favourite pastime is to abuse and threaten anyone or any group that disagrees with him, no matter how slightly or genuinely.

    Not least of all, his next budget should demonstrate that he is ready to address the huge gap that exists between the socio-economies of the country’s geo-political zones. And it’s no use talking about such things as building schools for almajirai. Such talks only insult the intelligence of Northerners because those schools have made little or no impact, and are unlikely to ever do so, on the region’s poverty.

    As the President prepares to campaign for next year’s presidential election, he should know that nothing he does would earn him votes like bringing an end to the insecurity that has pervaded the country. The first step in achieving this is to end the politicisation – and commoditization – of Boko Haram, something that has been the stock-in-trade of many of his closest friends and aides – with, of course, more than a wink from the man himself.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Tambuwal’s defection

    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.

     

     

     

     

  • Crony capitalism at work?

    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.

  • Yakubu Gowon at 80

    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.

     

     

     

     

     

  • Yet another open letter to Lt-General T. Y. Danjuma

    Yet another open letter to Lt-General T. Y. Danjuma

    For the third time in almost eleven years to this month, I wish to write an open letter to you to plead for your intervention on the side of principle on an issue which is a matter of national concern. This, of course, is the serious constitutional crisis in your home state, Taraba, a crisis which has arisen as a result of the serious injuries the state’s governor, Mr Danbaba Danfulani Suntai, suffered when his private aircraft he was flying crashed.

    That constitutional crisis has been hanging fire for over three years now and a solution to it does not seem to be in sight, thanks basically to the jostling for the ruling Peoples Democratic Party’s ticket for the state’s governorship election next year

    The first time I wrote you an open letter on these pages was on November 19 2003. On that occasion I borrowed the title of an open letter my good friend and cerebral columnist of The Nation, Professor Adebayo Williams, had written to you in Tell newsmagazine (June 1,1998) In that letter he expressed his deep dismay at your silence over moves by General Sani Abacha to shed his khaki for mufti as the country’s leader, a move he almost succeeded in making but for his sudden and mysterious death.

    Your silence, Williams said, was eloquent but was certainly not golden as it was likely to have been interpreted as support for Abacha’s sit tight agenda which Williams believed, not without good cause, could lead to the kind of mass killings that had occurred in Rwanda. Hence his title for his open letter to you which I stole, i.e., “The road to Kigali”, Kigali being the capital of Rwanda.

    In my own letter, I alluded to William’s and said your long defence of, indeed participation in, President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration until the two of you fell apart, helped Obasanjo in no small measure to successfully carry out his strategy of using religion to further divide the North to rule Nigeria. I said then that by the time you came out late in 2003 and lambasted him for running a regime under what you described as the spell of a cult-like clique, it was too little, too late.

    My second open letter to you dated September 4, last year, was to urge you to learn the lesson of your initial support for Obasanjo and speak out and act on principle so that History will not judge you as looking the other way when a cabal was doing all it could to stop Suntai from being replaced by someone as acting governor essentially because of his religion.

    The Taraba crisis, I said, may not have been exactly like the crisis of President Goodluck Jonathan’s succession of a very sick President Umaru Yar’adua, but the two were similar; in both cases a clique tried its all to sustain the make-belief that a visibly very ill incumbent was well enough to govern.

    In Yar’adua’s case you stood up for principle and called on Yar’adua to resign or be declared unfit to govern. Nigerians applauded your stand even though at the time Yar’adua was in no state of mind to resign even if he was inclined to; such was the gravity of his illness. Some of us who had called on him to resign – I, for one, did so twice on these pages when the man was still in possession of his faculty, first on September 10, 2008 and second on December 2,2009 –joined in the public applause of your principled stand.

    “History,” I said in concluding the said open letter to you, “must not judge you to have maintained an eloquent but not golden silence when some power-hungry cabal seem determined to set the state ablaze against the spirit, if not the letter, of our Constitution.”

    It’s been over a year since that letter and matters in your home state seem to have only gotten worse not better, thanks to what many see, not merely as your silence but, indeed, as being in the forefront of those implacably opposed to Suntai being replaced by anyone other than a Christian.

    I, for one, do not want to believe you hate non-Christians that much because I know many of your closest friends, associates and admirers – the business mogul, Alhaji Ahmadu Chanchangi of Chanchangi Air fame, General Muhammadu Buhari, Malam Abba Kyari whom you put in charge of your billion-Naira donation to the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria foundation last year, and Malam Adamu Adamu, Trust’s ace columnist and our resident Ayatollah at the New Nigerian and the defunct Citizen newsmagazine, to name just a few – are Muslims. There are indeed many of your close Christian confidants who judge Buhari wrongly as a Muslim fundamentalist, in the worst sense of the word. Yet that has not stooped you from supporting his presidential ambition morally or otherwise.

    Initially you seemed to have supported Alhaji Garba Umar as Acting Governor. Sources close to you said you changed your mind when Suntai was flown back from his treatment abroad for the first time to resume office and Umar apparently not only refused to let go, but showed a desire for a complete term of his own from next year. From that point on you refused, like so many of those implacably opposed to him, notably Senator Emmanuel Bwacha, to even recognise him as acting governor and always referred to him as Deputy Governor.

    Your latter antipathy to Umar was said to have been based on his reneging on an understanding that he was merely to complete Suntai’s second term and give way to a governor from South Taraba which has never produced one and which is mainly Christian.

    Sir, I have always been against power rotation in principle but I completely agree with you that the word, even the mere understanding of a gentleman, should be his honour. If Umar gave his word or even merely understood that he was only to complete Suntai’s term, he is honour bound not to contest for the governorship next year.

    Problem, however, was that when President Jonathan gave his word in 2011 that he would serve only one term of his own but reneged on it, you did not, sir, speak out in moral outrage at the president’s change of mind. That would not justify Umar’s ambition. But it would make it difficult, if not impossible, for people not to accuse you of double standards.

    And now to complicate matters even more, you are said to have single-handedly anointed a successor to Suntai against the decision of the elders of Southern Taraba who in their own wisdom had picked one, Chief David Sabo Kente, out of a list of 13. Since then your alternative choice of Architect Darius Dickson Ishaku, the Minister of State for Niger Delta Affairs, has led to serious acrimony among your followers and admirers in the state.

    Worse still speculations are now rife that should the constitutional step the authorities in the state have taken in setting up a medical panel to confirm Suntai’s state of mind reach the almost certain conclusion that he is not in a fit mind to govern the state you are, to say the least, not averse to moves being made to impeach both Suntai and Umar to stop Umar from realizing his ambition.

    Such a move can only provide one more ammunition to those who think you are anti-Muslim, if not anti-Islam, to support their strongly held opinion of you.

    Sir, the central principle in all this is simple and clear. As I said in my last letter to you, even a one-eyed man can see that Suntai is not in a fit state of mind to govern his household, never mind a whole state, since his tragic plane crash. As a result many, including newspapers like The Nation (September 19) have called on him to “step aside.”

    Such calls are unfair to the man because it is as clear as daylight that he is not a man of his own mind. But then those who choose to pretend otherwise are equally not being fair to the man. Clearly they are merely manipulating his illness to pursue their political agenda to the detriment of his health and his family’s peace of mind.

    They say prophets are hardly honoured in their own land. You have been an exception to this axiom not only in Taraba but in the rest of the country. You must not, sir, in the twilight of your life allow the relatively petty politics of state soil your hard-earned reputation of someone who always spoke and stood up for principles no matter when or where.

    Yello! MTN

    One of the rudest corporate voice mails in this country must be that of the MTN which tells subscribers they have exhausted their vouchers. Given the vehemence and relish with which the harsh female voice announces that one’s call has been “terminated!” as a result, you’ll be forgiven the conclusion that the management of the company is only too glad to see the back of a subscriber foolish enough to have allowed his voucher to finish before reloading.

    I once drew the attention of their PR chap and a friend, Austin Iyashere, to this more than a year ago. He assured me he would get the management to act on it, and knowing him for the meticulous journalist he was before moving on to PR, I am certain he did. It’s past time MTN changed that grating and annoying voice.

     

  • A tale of two ladies

    A tale of two ladies

    If there is one clergyman in this country who is not afraid to speak truth to power, he is Anthony Cardinal Olubunmi Okogie, the long retired Catholic Archbishop of Lagos. In an interview in the September 27 edition of Saturday New Telegraph, the man lived up to his billing when he declared that President Goodluck Jonathan does not deserve a second term and that “CAN (Christian Association of Nigeria) leadership today is zero.” The association, he also said, has been turned by its current leadership into an “appendage of the PDP (the ruling Peoples Democratic Party)”.

    One of the most interesting aspects of the interview was his narration of the encounter he had with the president in the Aso Rock Villa during the run-up to the 2011 presidential election. After his audience with the president in the company of two other gentlemen, he said, the president asked him to pray for his success at the polls. To the president’s shock, the cardinal said, he declined because he believed even though the president was as good as having won the election, he was not going to rule.

    “You have won, that is no problem”, the cardinal said, “but you will not rule.”

    President: What? What do you mean, I will not rule?

    Cardinal: Yes sir, others will rule. Those around you will rule. They are the ones that will rule in your place.

    Many a Nigerian today, I suspect, will agree with me that the cardinal’s over three-year-old prophesy has come to pass; today, not quite a few of the president’s men – and women, these in particular – have curved little  private empires for themselves in which they presume to exercise their principal’s remit without his permit.

    Of these private empires within the president’s Big Empire, three, headed by women, should remind you of Chinweizu’s famous Anatomy of Female Power (1990), whose thesis is that man, not woman, is the weaker sex. Using the words of probably an apocryphal American housewife, he argues that the notion that we live in a man’s world is so much bunkum because a man may be the head of his house, but the woman of the house is the neck that turns the head.

    The number one private empire in the president’s Big Empire is, of course, that of the First Lady, Patience, about which a lot has been written by pundits, including yours sincerely. Then there is that of the Minister of Finance, who also doubles as the Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, making her, in effect, the country’s prime minister and the first to attain such a status since the return to civilian rule in 1999.

    The third is that of the Oil Minister, Mrs Diezani Alison-Madueke, without doubt the most powerful oil minister to date. It’s a toss-up whose empire, between the two powerful female ministers’, is the more powerful.

    In all three private empires stuff have happened, some benign, some not-so-benign. From the look of things, the seed of a fourth private female empire is being planted at a very important economic institution in the land, namely the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC), a parastatal of the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment saddled with attracting foreign investment in the country. Chances are, this seed, unlike the other three, will grow into anything but a benign tree. It will certainly be one private empire too many.

    As I once said on these pages, in spite of NIPC, Nigeria, like most developing countries, is a net exporter of capital, given the colossal amount of stolen money stashed abroad from the country. However, without NIPC even the relatively modest amount that has come in would probably never have done so. It is therefore important that the fairly impressive record of performance left behind by its last Executive Secretary and Chief Executive Officer (ES/CEO), Engineer Mustapha Bello, be sustained at the least, if not improved upon.

    However, from the look of things it seems Bello’s successor is a square peg in a round hole. To begin with, Mrs Saratu A. Umar seems to have come to the job with a baggage; over a year ago, she left as the Head of the Credit Insurance and Guaranty Department of the Nigerian Export-Import Bank rather unceremoniously.

    Since her appointment as the NIPC boss several months ago, it seems Mrs Umar is more interested in rubbishing the record of the leadership she took over from than in establishing her own. This, at least, is the impression one gets from reading a petition against her by the majority of the commission’s directors to its parent ministry.

    The new ES/CEO has good reason to be suspicious of some of the directors; they too competed for the job. A good manager would, however, have given her presumed rivals the benefit of doubt until they proved themselves unworthy of her trust.

    Instead, Mrs Umar, according to the petition, has, among other things, encouraged staff to write secret memos against each other, encouraged insubordination by publicly humiliating directors and wilfully ignoring procedure in treating files, removing the Legal Adviser and Secretary of the commission’s board without the board’s approval, employing staff into senior positions without budgetary approval and in violation of the Federal Character principle, and engaging contractors and employing consultants without due process, etc, etc.

    Mrs Umar has reportedly dropped hints that in carrying on the way she allegedly has, it is with the support of her minister, Mr Olusegun Aganga, and even that of the president.

    The minister owes himself to clear his name – and by extension, the president’s – from seemingly credible suspicions that he has turned a blind eye to Mrs Umar’s apparent manifest wrongs. He can only clear his name by investigating the allegations to establish whether they are true or false. Whichever party is wrong should get the sack because it is obvious there is now too much bad faith within the leadership of the commission for it to carry out its mandate with any success.

    Certainly no one should be allowed to build a mini-empire out of an institution whose remit is to attract the foreign investment we say is necessary to grow and develop our economy.

     

    …Then a sad one from NAN

    Last Wednesday, October 1, Nigeria lost one of its most accomplished journalists, Mrs Felicia Oluwaremilekun Oyo, the first, and so far the only, female president of the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE) and one of the most effective and transparent managing directors of the country’s news wholesaler, the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN). Remi died barely 11 days shy of her 62nd birthday.

    Apart from being the first female president of the NGE and the first female boss of NAN she was also the first female spokesperson of a Nigerian president. In all three jobs she proved she was there not just as a token to the “weaker” sex in a world thoroughly dominated by men. She proved she earned them on her own merit.

    Take, for instance, her job as the spokesperson of President Olusegun Obasanjo. It spoke volumes about her ability to handle a man whose capacity for leaning on his own advice is legendary that of all the three spokespersons he had during his eight years as president,  she was the longest serving by a wide margin. Not only was she able to retain his confidence longer than her predecessors she did so at the same time by being civil in her words and actions towards her professional colleagues even when she was defending such indefensible decisions by her boss, like his infamous Third Term Agenda which he never formally declared.

    As a onetime board member of NAN, I can attest to her concern for professionalism and her personal integrity. At least twice, first in February 2008 and then in September, there were attempts to damage the credibility of NAN under her, presumably by elements probably linked to the agency who were apparently unhappy with her determination to sweep out the financial rot she had inherited when she became managing director in 2007.

    One of her first acts as managing director was to write to then Minister of Information and Communication, expressing her concern about the financial misdeeds in the agency and her worry that the ICPC which she had invited to deal with the misdeeds has been rather too tardy in its handling about the matter.

    The first attempt at undermining NAN’s professional integrity under her was a story purporting to emanate from the agency, which claimed that a Federal Court of Appeal had dismissed President Umaru Musa Yar’adua’s election. Fortunately for Remi, someone from The Punch called to verify the story. NAN moved quickly to disown it.

    The second time she was not so lucky. This time, Channels, the well respected Lagos private television station, ran the story sent out from a bogus email address, newsagencynig@yahoo.com, which said President Yar’adua will resign after a cabinet reshuffle as a result of his well known ill health. Channels had attributed the story to AFP, the French news agency, which in turn had attributed it to NAN.

    That she survived the attempts to sabotage her was probably due to the confidence the authorities had in her professional and personal integrity.

    Her death is indeed a great loss to Nigerian journalism. May the Good Lord give her immediate family and members of her larger professional constituency the fortitude to bear her loss.

  • Again, Boko Haram; a war with no end

    Again, Boko Haram; a war with no end

    President Goodluck Jonathan may not have created Boko Haram (BH), but anyone who has doubted charges that he is apparently in no hurry to end the sect’s insurgency because it suits his ambition for another term needs look no further than three major events in the last one month to think again.

    First, of course, was the claim, late August, by an Australian Anglican clergy, Dr. Stephen Davis, that former army chief, Lt-General Azubuike Ihejirika, former Borno State governor, Senator Modu Sheriff, and an unnamed Central Bank of Nigerian official were major financial sponsors of BH. Second, was the shocking $9.3 million cash for arms scandal in South Africa that came to light on September 5, involving the Federal Government, the President of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and his controversial private jet. Third, was the Senate’s approval last Thursday of President Jonathan’s request in June for a $1 billion (roughly N170 billion) loan to buy weapons for the war against BH.

    To begin with the last, the president’s very request for the loan was proof positive that the orchestrated attacks by senior government officials on the governor of Borno State, Alhaji Kassim Shettima, for saying BH was better armed and better motivated than our military was sheer blackmail. For 30 months from mid-1967, Nigeria fought a terrible civil war, but under the prudent management of Chief Obafemi Awolowo as Finance minister and prime minister in all but the name, we did not borrow one kobo to arm and motivate our military to win the war. And the chief, who was not even a development economist but only a lawyer, albeit a big lawyer – and his boss, General Yakubu Gowon – did not have the benefit of the stupendous oil wealth that has accrued to this nation since 1999.

    The size of this oil wealth has been used as an excuse to put a huge amount of it aside for “rainy days” in the form of Sovereign Wealth Fund, foreign reserve and so on. Now, if the BH insurrection is not rainy days, I don’t know what is.

    To seek for a loan to fight BH obviously raises the questions, why borrow when you have put so much away for rainy days and what, in the first place, happened to all those huge amounts that had been budgeted for the fight against the insecurity in the land?

    Nothing exposes the use of this insecurity to hide the motive for letting the BH insurrection fester better than the excuse the rump of our senators, led by its leadership, gave for ramming the approval down our throats; the loan, claimed the leadership, had “security implications”, or some words to that effect. When opposition elements raised valid objections based on constitutional and legal requirements for acceding to the president’s request, they were simply rolled over by a voice vote.

    Here, it must be said in the senate leadership’s favour that they even allowed for some amount of debate; at the lower chamber, the leadership simply refused to allow any debate on the $9.3 million scandal because it said it was all “a matter of security”, or words to that effect.

    The questions about why we needed to borrow in the face of the huge votes for fighting insecurity in the land takes us to the first event, namely, the claim by Dr. Davis that Gen. Ihejirika, Alhaji Modu and an unnamed CBN official have been major financiers of BH. Serious questions can be raised about the Anglican priest’s claims in spite of the fact that he has worked for the federal authorities in the past and he seems to have inside knowledge of BH phenomenon.

    First, he provides no evidence for his claim beyond the say-so of the insurgents. And their say-so cannot be sufficient proof since they have good reason to tar the two gentlemen Davis cared to name: the general for at least ostensibly fighting them and the former governor for creating and using them and then dumping them. Second, why refuse to go the whole hog and name the third alleged culprit?

    In spite of these and other questions over Davis’s credibility, there can be no justification for the manner in which our Department of State Security, speaking through Ms. Ogar, dismissed Davis, especially in her overzealousness in defending the general and leaving the “bloody civilian” governor to fend for himself. As Ms Ogar knows all too well, in the murky world of state security, stuff happens, as Americans would say.

    If you need any evidence that stuff happens, consider the little publicised – at least in the Nigerian media – report Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued on July 21, in which it alleged that “The FBI ( Federal Bureau of Investigation, the American equivalent of our DSS)  encouraged and sometimes even paid Muslims to commit terrorist acts during numerous sting operations after the 9/11 attacks.”

    The report was based on HRW’s joint examination with Columbia University Law School’s Human Rights Institute of 27 cases and interviews with 215 people including those charged and convicted in terrorism cases, their relatives, defence and prosecution lawyers and judges.

    “In some cases,” the HRW report said, “the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by suggesting the idea of taking terrorist action or encouraging the target to act.”

    Now, remember we are tutored in these things principally by the Americans – along with the Israelis and the British, all three, masters of the dark art and science of warfare – and it would therefore not be surprising if, as good students, we have learnt a thing or two about dirty tricks from them in our fight against insecurity in the land.

    In the circumstance, the least our DSS could have done was pretend to investigate Davis’s allegations and not jump to the defence of only one of the two named accused and thus open itself to suspicions that it did so because the one is a Christian and the other a Muslim, especially given the widespread belief among Muslims in the country that its security apparatus is generally anti-Islam and anti-Muslims.

    The knee-jerk defence of Ihejirika has become all the more indefensible in the light of recent demands by the Americans, no less, that Ihejirika’s alleged stupendous wealth after serving as army chief needs to be investigated. For the Americans, it seems, there is correlation between the general’s sudden wealth and the ill-equipment and poor motivation of our army in the fight against insecurity in the land.

    Finally, the cash and carry arms(?) deal in South Africa that came to light on September 5. I put a question mark over “arms” because there is widespread suspicion that the whole thing was simply a long-running money laundering operation involving some influential rogue elements in government and the controversial CAN president and his controversial private jet gone awry, for once.

    The Federal Government has claimed ownership of, and responsibility for, the transfer of the $9.3 million cash involved in the CAN president’s private jet, ostensibly to buy arms apparently on the black market because, it says, the Americans have refused to allow it to buy arms in the white market. The Americans have since denied the charge.

    In any case, few people believe government’s defence; as the activist lawyer, Festus Keyamo, said in one of the first reactions to government’s story, it all sounded like “a cock-and-bull story.” In other words, the Federal Government’s story, as an attempt to help extricate the CAN president, is as water tight as a sieve; Oritsejafor has said he only leased his jet to a second company in which he admits he has shares but which in turn leased it to a third party that carried the cash to buy arms under the table for the fight against BH.

    But, as the retired Anthony Cardinal Okogie said in an interview in last Saturday’s New Telegraph, “The Head of State is a PDP man and he (Oritsejafor) is linked with this rubbish. So what other proof do you want that CAN has become an appendage of the PDP?”

    Boko Haram’s insurgency, it seems, has, as I once said on these pages, become a war with no end for the purpose of retaining power and wealth by some people.

    May the Good Lord by whose mercy these shenanigans have come to light bring an end to the insecurity of the long suffering Nigerians.

     

    The birthday of a septuagenarian…

    Professor Shehu Bida, Marafa Nupe, born in Okene, Kogi State, in 1934 is 80 today. He was the first veterinary doctor in the North when he graduated from Veterinary College, Tuskegee, Alabama, USA, in 1967. He received his Masters degree in the USA in 1969 and his PhD from the London University in 1973. He went on to teach the subject in Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, and became one of its early professors in the seventies.

    He eventually retired and went on to serve as one of the few highly educated chairmen of local governments in the North and his native Bida in the eighties. He has since retired from active paid public service and is today one of the most respected elders in Nupeland.

    Happy birthday Marafa Nupe and here’s wishes of many more happy returns.

     

    …and the death of a nonagenarian

    Last Thursday, my older friend, Alhaji Ahmad Abubakar Jarma, died at 94. All the tributes paid to him talked mostly about his role as a pioneer agriculturalist in the North, being one of the region’s first graduates in the disciple. There was hardly any mention of his role as a selfless community and religious leader who did a lot to popularise the Islamic calendar in the country. It was through his influence, for example, that the New Nigerian under my management in the late eighties started the publication of the lunar dates in its folio.

    Interestingly, he was married to Jummai, one of the famous Wusasa, Zaria, Miller twin-sisters who were Christians. Husband and wife lived a happy and harmonious life as a couple of different faiths. Readers of Weekly Trust will recall the sisters celebrated their 80th birthday last year.

    I will miss Jarma for the elderly advice he often called on the phone to give me. May Allah grant him aljanna firdaus.