The Nation Newspaper

Category: Mohammed Harunna

  • Jega and the lynch mob

    Jega and the lynch mob

    Poor Professor Attahiru Jega! The Independent National Electoral Commission’s chairman has become virtually everybody’s favourite punch bag since August 19 when INEC announced it would be increasing the roughly 120,000 polling units (PUs) that have existed in the country since 1996 to 150,000 ahead of next year’s general elections. The cause of what clearly looks like a lynch mob attack of the INEC boss has been over not so much the increase itself, as its nationwide distribution; of the roughly 30,000 proposed additional PUs, 21,615 (72 per cent or so) will be created in the North against 8,412, (28 per cent or so) for the South.

    As a respected professor of Political Science, a battle-tested former president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), a former vice-chancellor of Bayero University, Kano, a second generation university, and the INEC chairman since 2010, the man is obviously smart enough to know he would be the subject of attack for taking any decision that smacked of even the slightest bias in favour of the North, the region he comes from and which is the permanent underdog in the propaganda war for public opinion.

    Even then the man, I suspect, must be taken quite aback by the virulence of the attack he has come under personally and as INEC’s chairman from the leadership of some sections of the country and their commentariat over INEC’s decision.

    The first shot seems to have been fired by a little known but apparently well funded non-governmental organisation called Election Integrity Network (EIN). Barely two days after INEC made its decision public, the NGO published a full page advert in several newspapers, including Vanguard (August 21), signed by one Dr Ademola Babajide, in effect accusing Jega of planning a Northern hegemonic agenda. “EXPOSED” screamed the headline of the advert.

    “Prof. Jega,” the advert claimed in its second paragraph, “was said to have ignored and over ruled the observation of the lopsidedness made by his colleagues from the South, in furtherance of the long term political interest of the North they seek to protect.”

    The NGO then followed with another full page advert on August 26 which was essentially a rehash of the first. Then after several INEC officials defended its decision in the media, the NGO published a third full page advert on September 1 and dismissed all its explanations as untenable.

    Since EIN’s first advert, the barrage of media attacks on Jega has only increased in their virulence. Two of these stand out for the level of their virulence. The first was by another little known NGO, Middle-Belt Justice Forum for a Stable United Nigeria (MBJFSUN). In a full page advert signed by one Timothy Gomwalk, as its president, the NGO accused Jega and INEC of using a divide and rule tactic to pitch the Middle-Belt against the South in the two region’s newfangled solidarity.

    “It must be stated categorically”, MBJFSUN said, that the Middle Belt people, “while welcoming an increase in the number of polling units which may reduce the inconveniences of our people on Election Day, completely distances and dissociates itself from any such plot…” to impose a “Fulani” hegemony of Nigeria. Obviously the NGO wanted to eat its cake and still have it.

    “The Middle-Belt comprising most Northern minority ethnic groups who are more in number than the Fulani and their collaborators”, the advert claimed, “are predominantly Christians and animists and cannot find common cause (with)…religious fundamentalists and so-called ‘cattle-breeders’.”

    Virulent as this attack was on Jega and INEC, it hardly compares in its vehemence with the statement published in several newspapers on September 11 by leaders of the Southern Nigeria Peoples Assembly. INEC’s “voodoo and arbitrary allocation” of its PUs, the advert signed by Chief Edwin Clark for the Southsouth, Dr Alex Ekwueme for the Southeast and Senator Femi Okurounmu for the Southwest, said, was “shocking and indefensible.” The allocation, it further said, was “a script perfectly crafted for Prof. Jega to implement, in continuation of the well-known hegemonic agenda by the enemies of our hard won democracy.”

    The three elderly gentlemen didn’t say who crafted the script. Instead they seemed to have changed their mind about Jega being a puppet towards the end of their statement when they claimed that Jega himself was the puppeteer. He, they said, “deliberately crafted a ploy to serve his primordial interest”.

    Jega’s motive, the advert said, was “callous, insensitive, desperate, oppressive and in consonant decision to give the North a clear political advantage over the South contrary to the reality on the ground.” Jega, as such, “has lost the trust, confidence and respect of Nigerians” and based on what was clearly a presumptuous conclusion, Clark and Co. demanded that the INEC chairman must resign or be summarily sacked and INEC itself re-organised by the President, conveniently ignoring the fact that the President has no such powers under our Constitution.

    The three Southern leaders did not explain what their “reality on the ground” was, but it was clear that what they meant was the article of faith among most Southerners that their region has always been more populous than the North, contrary to every census since our colonial days under Britain. This much is obvious from Dr. Babajide’s similar advert on September 1 in which he said, “In Nigeria, any argument where the respondent hides under our census figures must be viewed from onset with suspicion.” This much is also obvious from the Gomwalk advert I’ve referred to in which he claimed, rather implausibly, that the ethnic minorities of the North are mostly Christian and animist and they are more than “Fulanis and their collaborators”,  the collaborators meaning, of course, anyone who is a Muslim in the region.

    I say implausibly, because except for Benue and Plateau states, the Northcentral is more Muslim than Christian, which is why many Christian politicians in the region have long tried to redefine Northcentral not by geography but by religion.

    So far, no less than five of the country’s leading newspapers have written editorials on the controversy, namely, The Nation (September 3), Thisday (September 7), Vanguard (September 8), Daily Trust (September 14) and  The Punch (September 19). All, except Trust have called on INEC, directly or by inference, to reconsider its decision. Vanguard and The Punch actually called on INEC to shelve its decision.

    For Vanguard, this is because the decision was, first, incongruent with the reduction of voters following the subjection of the voter register to Automated Fingerprint Identification System after the last general elections in 2011. Second, it says, the distribution “disproportionately” favoured one part of the country and, third, it would impose additional costs on all stakeholders.

    For Punch the bottom line was that “the criteria used in proposing the new polling platforms lack logic” and therefore the commission “should cancel the jumbled figures and keep to the existing polling units.”

    So far, none of those opposed to INEC’s decision have denied that there has been disproportionately more polling units in the South than in the North since 1996 when the existing ones were first created. Punch says INEC’s attempt at correcting this imbalance lacks logic. How using the simple arithmetic of dividing the country’s voters by 500 for each polling unit per state is illogical when the numbers of voters per state have not been in dispute, the newspaper did not say.Clark and Co. say that INEC has no basis for even creating additional polling units because AFIS reduced the country’s voting population from roughly 73.5 million in 2011 to 57. Clearly this is a figment of their own imagination. The figure came down alright, but it was down to 70.3 million, a far cry from their 57.

    Clearly the bottom line of all this hoopla over INEC’s decision is the thought that it is a sanctification of the population distribution of this country. After the controversial identity card registration of 2003 which President Olusegun Obasanjo had initially insisted upon as condition for voting in that year’s general election on the vehement demand of some Southern politicians had clearly established the numerical superiority of the North over the South, one would have thought that it was time those who believed the region was peopled by cattle and sheep re-examined their beliefs.

    Obviously this looks like asking too much of those like Clark and Co. who are clearly unprepared to allow the facts get in the way of their cherished beliefs.

    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.

  • For free, fair, credible elections in 2015

    For free, fair, credible elections in 2015

    For the last two days ASAA Pyramid Hotel, probably the biggest private hotel in Kaduna, hosted journalists from the seven states of the North West geo-political zone for a workshop on effective coverage of next year’s general elections organised by the Nigerian Press Council, the country’s regulator of the print media. It was the third in a series the press regulator, whose Acting Executive Director is Nnamdi Ejemanze, has been organising to help journalists build capacity for reporting the electoral process ahead of next year’s election.

    Three resource persons delivered papers on various aspects of the subject. I was one of them. The following is the edited version of my paper.

    The last time we had elections for choosing candidates for various posts or offices was over three and a half years ago and, as we all know, it wasn’t a happy story before, during and after. The violence that accompanied those elections, especially that for the presidency, was one of the worst in the country’s history. The question is, how do we avoid a repeat of 2011 and what role should the media play in doing so?

    The answers are at once simple and complex. Simple, in the sense that the only way to avoid violent elections is for politicians as the main actors in the electoral process to talk about issues and character and avoid whipping up emotions – ethnic, sectional or religious – and also allow elections to be free, fair and credible. The media, on their part, have the role of holding up politicians to their responsibilities for ensuring peace, harmony and progress in the society. It’s all as simple as that.

    However, it is also complex at the same time. Complex, in the sense that for both politicians and the media, the proper behaviour and conduct expected of them are easier said than done. But shying away from such proper behaviour and conduct is not an option, if we truly wish to establish genuine democracy in the country.

    In a way, the greater responsibility for ensuring free, fair and credible elections lies with the media than with politicians in the sense that most people learn about issues, events and people from the media, whether these media are newspapers and magazines, radio or television, or the so-called social media, the latest of them all. In other words, the media have immense power to set society’s agenda because they are arguably the most important sources of information and knowledge.

    Of course the media’s power to set society’s agenda is not unlimited and is often exaggerated. However, anyone who underestimates this power does so at his or her own peril.

    In talking about the media’s power to set society’s agenda, I would like to use the feline metaphors we as journalists are fond of. We all pride ourselves as society’s watchdogs. But we cannot deny that many at times we often allow ourselves to become someone’s or some group’s lapdogs or attack dogs. If we want to set society’s agenda in the best interest of society rather than only in the partisan interest of someone or some group, we must, obviously, never ever be anyone’s or any group’s lapdogs or attack dogs. Instead, we should even go beyond being society’s watchdog and be its guide dog.

    Playing the role of a guide dog or even the easier one of a watchdog entails being knowledgeable and well informed about the issues, events and personalities that we report about. It also entails keeping to the ethics and sensible laws governing our profession.

    As we approach next year’s general elections beginning in February, we as journalists must become well informed and knowledgeable about the variables whose interplay can foster or mar a free, fair and credible election, depending on how we handle them. These variables are structural, environmental and the resources available to the contestants.

    The structural variables include the Constitution and the laws of the land, especially on elections and media practice. What, for example, are the limits of free speech and freedom of association? These structural variables also include knowing the workings of the country’s political system which, since 1979, has been the presidential system, as opposed to the parliamentary system we inherited from our colonial masters in 1960 and practiced up to 1966 when the military staged its first coup.

    Not least of these structural variables, we must be well informed and knowledgeable about how our voting system works. What, for example, are the constitutional and legal requirements for being eligible to contest in and then win an election?

    The environmental variables we must inform ourselves well and be knowledgeable about are the big issues of the period. Right now these include insecurity, corruption, unemployment and poor infrastructure. As good journalists, we should not allow politicians to divert the public’s attention away from their records of performance on these and other issues relevant to the peace, harmony and progress of society.

    Finally, we must ask questions about the resources the political parties and their candidates possess that can enable them solve the country’s problems. Do they have competent leadership? How much internal democracy have they demonstrated? What is their level of integrity?

    These, of course, are not the only questions journalists must find answers to if they, in turn, are to inform and educate members of the public about the choices before them and this way effectively play their role as journalists of ensuring free, fair and credible elections next year. However, finding the answers to these questions is essential for the establishment of true democracy in the country. And so far, what we have had in this country since the end of military rule 15 years ago is civilian rule rather than true democracy.

    As I said in effect at the beginning of this short paper, finding the answers to the questions I have raised won’t be easy. But then, as the saying goes, nothing good comes easy. As the saying also goes, the price of democracy is eternal vigilance.

    Probably few of us here have heard of Paul Krugman. Well, he is an American professor of Economics and a celebrated columnist with The New York Times, Fortune magazine and Slate, an online journal. Six years ago he won the Nobel Prize in Economics. The author of several books on Economics, he reduced many of his columns on the subject into a book titled: The Great Unravelling: From Boom to Bust in Three Scandalous Years. The 2008 book was about how the economic and political policies of President George Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney, drove the boom economy they inherited from President Bill Clinton in 2000 into bust within three years.

    In his introduction to the book, Krugman enunciated what he as a self-styled “part time journalist” called “Rules of Reporting.” He listed five of them. He meant them to serve as guides in reporting the politics and economics of Bush and Cheney. I believe they are pretty much applicable to the kind of politics we have experienced in Nigeria the last 15 years. Certainly they will serve as useful guides for effectively reporting next year’s elections to ensure they are free, fair and credible.

    Krugman’s rules of reporting in my own paraphrase are:-

    1. Never assume the Nigerian politician means what he says or says what he means. Always maintain a healthy scepticism and crosscheck the credibility of his words.

    2. Always do some homework to find out what his real objectives are.

    3. Expect him to break the rules of the game whenever he finds them inconvenient even in the slightest way.

    4. Expect him to respond to even the slightest criticisms by all means, mostly more foul than fair.

    5. Remember most politicians are Oliver Twists; the more you try to appease them, the more they want.

    Obeying these rules is a tough call but disregarding them is not an option if we as journalists want to effectively report next year’s election and thus begin to lay a sound foundation for true democracy in Nigeria.

     

    RE: For a better Customs Service

     

    Sir, What I was anxious to read from you last Wednesday was a tribute to a veteran journalist and prominent northern elder, Malam Magaji Danbatta, and not a PR for the Customs CG. Why the sudden departure from tradition?

    Babangida Mamman, Bauchi. +2348039098744

     

    Sir, I have been reading your write ups since your days in the New Nigerian through the Citizen magazine and elsewhere. In all, I am very disappointed in the views you expressed in your “For a better Customs Service”.

    I have tried painfully to suppress the feelings that you were induced to stress the views expressed in the write up without success. With the findings that arms have been imported by CAN through the ports with the obvious connivance of the Customs under the supervision of your hero to kill and maim innocent Nigerians, mostly in the North, do you think he justifies his PR as the legendary Mohammed Ali?

    I never knew you could descend this low. As a younger brother, I wish to advise that you consider your integrity first.

    Sule Labbo, Abuja. +2348035271677

     

  • For a better Customs Service

    For a better Customs Service

    As a reporter I am always suspicious of any public officer who likes publicity. This may sound illogical because by definition the words and deeds of public servants should be public. But then there is a difference between publicity as a matter of course and public relations. The one focuses on the deeds, the other on the person.

    The public officers I am always suspicious of are those who like to worship at the altar of the gods of public relations. Such public officers are invariably more concerned about their image than about their performance. Needless to say, they abound everywhere, including of course, in Nigeria.

    Until I met the Comptroller-General of Customs, Alhaji Dikko Inde Abdullahi, about a couple of years ago, I thought he was one of those publicity seeking public officers who are more image than substance; hardly a week passed without one story or another in the press about him receiving one award or other for supposedly excelling in his job.

    Indeed my first meeting with him, which was accidental, was in the course of his receiving one of those seemingly interminable awards, this time in the UK. I happened to be visiting our High Commissioner in the country, Senator Sarki Tafida, an elder friend, in his office in London, when he told me of his invitation to attend the award ceremony and extended his invitation to me. I was reluctant at first but in the end agreed to accompany him essentially because I really had little doing the evening of that day.

    Since then I had kept a fairly close tab on the Comptroller-General (CG) and have since come to the conclusion that he may like his publicity so much but he reminds me of the bombastic Muhammad Ali, the living boxing legend; like Ali, the man justifies his PR.

    When he took over as CG five years ago on August 26, the service was generating a comparatively paltry sum of N27 billion a month. He nearly doubled that to 50 in his first year in office. Since then its revenue has grown to about 100 billion a month, making it a total of over a trillion annually.

    As a good manager he has ensured that the increased productivity of his men and officers has reflected in their welfare by doubling their salaries and allowances, renovating and upgrading their offices and staff quarters and by investing heavily in their training and re-training at home and abroad and giving them the requisite hard- and soft-ware to do their jobs well.

    Exactly a year ago last month, the man completed his first four years in office as CG. This led to speculations that he would be retired and replaced by one of his six deputies. Thanks perhaps to the confidence which he seems to enjoy from President Goodluck Jonathan, he survived the speculations.

    This survival was child’s play compared to the threat he overcame in his first year in office following allegations by one, Olajide Oyewole Ibrahim, through his lawyer, Mr. Festus Keyamo, that the CG entered the service with forged academic qualifications. President Jonathan, to whom Keyamo had addressed Ibrahim’s affidavit, seeking the CG’s sack, was said to have dismissed it as the malicious work of possibly disgruntled traducers.

    Apparently, the allegations did not distract the CG from getting on with his job as best as he could. So far he has more than proved his mettle. Indeed, all indications are that he could do even better, but for some problems he seems to have encountered from his parent ministry, the Ministry of Finance, under our super minister, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who doubles as the country’s co-ordinating minister.

    First, there is the scandal that has surrounded the duty waiver regime under the authority of the minister. Under this regime waivers of duties are supposed to provide incentives for investments in strategic and job creating sectors of the economy. Widespread suspicions that the waivers were instead being abused prompted the finance committee of the House of Representatives to ask the minister for figures and beneficiaries of such waivers between 2011 and 2013.

    She told the House in January that the figures came to 171 billion for the period. It turned out that they were 1.4 trillion!  At least those were the figures revealed by Customs and to date they have not been contradicted. What was more, over 60 per cent of the waivers were for items without any value added to the economy.

    Worse, so far no one has been brought to account for the criminal difference between the two figures. Worst of all, it seems the waiver abuse has only abated somewhat but is far from ended. As The Nation said in its editorial of two Mondays ago, “If Nigerians needed proof that the import duty racket was alive and well, the latest report showing the Federal Government as granting N25 billion in waivers over a five-month period this year should be proof enough.”

    Second, there is the issue of the Destination Inspection that had been under some private companies since government abolished pre-shipment inspection about eight years ago. Last December the contracts with the private companies were terminated and the job reverted back to Customs. Since then the service has faced a number of challenges in meeting expectations, not least of which is possible sabotage by elements outside the service who would be more than happy to see the new arrangement fail.

    However, in spite of such possible sabotage and the usual problems that go with changes from the old ways of doing things, Custom has managed to improve the clearing of goods from 24 hours to an average of six. And, of course, it has saved the nation the huge fees paid to the companies, heads or tails.

    Third, there is the delay the service has routinely encountered from its parent ministry in the release of seven per cent of the revenue it generates which it is authorised to retain as incentive for increased productivity.

    These are, of course, not the only obstacles standing in the way of the CG performing even better than he has so far in his five years in office. However, they are the biggest. With them out of the way, the service should be able to surpass even the N1.2 trillion it set for itself in January as its target for this year.

    And with such revenue from Customs alone, not to mention other revenue generating services of government, it is not difficult to see why the public was outraged by the presidency’s recent announcement that it would like to seek a loan of $1 billion dollars, or the equivalent of about one eighth of Custom’s annual revenue in Naira, to fight the Boko Haram insurgency.

     

    A most shocking death

     

    The death of Mr Dimgba Igwe, the vice-chairman of  The Sun Publishing Limited, came to me as a big shock. It came in the form of a text from Mr Raheem Adedoyin, the secretary of the Nigerian chapter of the International Press Institute of which Dimgba had been a very active member. I didn’t know when I screamed after reading Raheem’s text because Dimgba’s death was the last thing on my mind when we last met in Katsina penultimate weekend for this year’s annual conference of the country’s editors.

    He couldn’t look healthier and fitter than he was as we interacted throughout the conference in our hotel and at the venue of the conference. As usual, when I saw him alone I asked him where he had left his “twin brother,” as most of us call Mr Mike Awoyinfa with whom he had worked at both the defunct National Concord and Sun, turning both into two of the widest circulating newspapers in Nigeria.

    Mike, he said, couldn’t come because his son was graduating abroad, and he himself almost didn’t come because of fears based, of course, on media reports that the Boko Haram was all over the place in the North. In the end he came and he was, he said, glad that he did not miss the conference for the success it turned out to be and to see how Katsina had been transformed from the glorified village it was in 1991, when he first visited it, into a beautiful city, thanks in large measure to the current administration.

    You can then imagine my shock at realising that Dimgba, the affable gentleman, great reporter, editor, author and columnist, was no more.

    May God grant his wife, Oby, with whom he had always attended the IPI annual congress, his immediate family, his “twin brother” Mike, and his larger press family the fortitude to bear his great loss.

     

    RE: A professor’s lies with statistics

     

    Sir, It is very interesting and at the same time disheartening that a man of Professor Darah’s repute will be calling for a division (of this country). But I wish to inform you that he is a professor of oral literature and folklore not of mass communication.

    Okobi Colosus Philip,

    Federal Capital Territory, +2348122099757.

     

    I stand corrected. However, The Guardian, where he was a columnist for several years and whose editorial board he once chaired described him as “professor of communications” in the introduction of an interview with him it published on July 13.

    MH

    Sir, We know your style. Don’t demonize Darah/Chinweizu. You’ve been writing worse things about Southerners for a very long time. FOR EVERY MONSTER, THERE IS A MIRROR IMAGE.

    +2347018933332.

     

    Sir, I think the eggheads who decided that Darah deserved to be a professor‘ll be pinching themselves if he actually said those things you attributed to him. People like him also put the political future of minorities in jeopardy because he made it look like the size of your tribe also decides the size of your mind even as a professor!

    One other question is: what has Jona done for the Niger Delta apart from empowering ex-militants to steal more oil? All other projects are located in his small Otuoke. Most Nigerians know the (national) conference is nothing but ‘2015 @SURE-P’.

    Olu, +2348033013597.

     

     

     

     

    Sir, I read your write-up, “A professor’s lies with statistics.” Please, I want to ask, are you a professor?

    Osakwe E. O., Delta State,  +2348037032937.

     

    No, I am not a professor. I am not even a PhD.     MH

     

     

     

     

     

  • A professor’s lies with statistics

    A professor’s lies with statistics

    The reader will recall we parted company last week on the note that today I will examine the merit of Professor G. G. Darah’s position on the issues he raised in his version of the outcome of the just concluded national conference. The 3,293-word report, as I pointed out, was published in the August 25 edition of The Pointer, the newspaper of the Delta State.

    The professor discussed basically two issues, namely, the imperative for replacing the current three-tier federal system with two by abrogating local governments at the bottom, and the battle for “resource control”.

    Coming from a professor of mass communication – indeed coming from a professor of anything for that matter – his report was more sound and fury than factual and logical. Out of the 3,293 words it contained, he devoted barely half to the two subjects. Even then, these were more of a diatribe against a section of the country than an attempt to persuade with facts and logic. The remaining roughly 1,500 words were a propagandistic defence of President Goodluck Jonathan that should embarrass even the most incompetent public relations officer, never mind a professor of mass communication.

    Take, for example, his total disregard for facts in his attempt to malign a section of this country and blame it for all the country’s woes.

    “The population of Taraba,” he said in his attempt to justify the conference’s decision to abrogate local governments, “is less than one million. ..Ughelli North is bigger. Uvwie is bigger than Taraba population. It’s one local government, yet Taraba has 25.”

    If the professor had bothered to do his homework and had not allowed blind prejudice to take control of his mind, he would have discovered that nothing was further from the truth than the statistics he conjured in his head. First, Taraba’s population by the last 2006 headcount was not less than one million, as he claimed. It was 2,330,736. Second, the populations of both Ughelli North and Uvwie which he claimed were bigger than that of Taraba, were 321,028 and 191,472 respectively. Third, Taraba has 16 local governments not 25.

    This makes the average size of the local governments in Taraba 143,796 as against the average in Delta of 163,936; a difference no fair-minded person can criticise as unreasonable, especially as there is a local government in Delta, Patani, which had a population of 67,707.

    I am sure our dear professor will agree with me that playing as fast and loose with facts as he did with the populations of the local governments in Delta and Taraba just to make his point does no credit to even a primary school pupil, never mind the university professor he is and a veteran columnist that he was.

    Sadly, his report of the conference is riddled with many such ridiculous claims. Take for another example, his attempt to blame his much-hated North for hitches in the payment of allowances to the delegates.

    “We,” he said, “had spent six weeks no allowance. Somebody in the Ministry where Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is sitting on the voucher. And is doing it for purely sinister purpose. He does not want the conference to succeed.” That “someone” for Darah was obviously from the North.

    “The first two weeks,” he said, “the northerners wanted the conference to break down. So that they can accuse President Jonathan: ‘ah you can’t run a conference. How can you run Nigeria again’. It’s fafafa (with a large chorus of fowl from the audience).”

    Clearly our professor did not want to allow the inconvenient fact that the responsibility for paying the delegates allowances was jointly that of the finance minister and the secretary of the Federal Government – both of them Darah’s fellow southerners – get in the way of his wish to blame each and every failure of the authorities on the North.

    Not only that, he proceeded to accuse the region of being behind the current state of insecurity in the land without any shred of evidence, never mind one that the scholarship he should stand as a professor for demands.

    The region’s plan to embarrass the president by sabotaging the conference, he said, failed and so will its other plans. “It failed,” he said, “The next plan will also fail. The next plan is to embarrass him to a point by bombing many towns, simultaneously, causing havoc, disenchantment and abuse so that he cannot go for second tenure under PDP. This is the plan; it’s not hidden, it’s played out in the open.”

    Last week I agreed with the professor that in a true federation, local and municipal governments cannot exist as a third tier of government even though his position was obviously full of malicious intent. In his argument, he cited America, Germany, Canada and India as true federations where local governments were creatures of the constituent states and not those of the centre as has been the case in Nigeria.

    However, when it came to the issue of revenue allocation, the professor conveniently forgot that in all those countries, as in all true federations, all off-shore natural resources belonged to the countries as a whole and not to only the states abutting the oceans. This was clearly a classic case of one rule for “us” and another for “them.”

    The professor’s bare-faced lies with statistics and his double standards were not the only worrisome aspects of his diatribe against a section of the country. Equally worrisome were his strident call on the country’s media, which as he pointed out, were dominated by owners from the Delta region, to ignore the ethics of journalism and descend into the crudest form of propaganda by defending the president, right or wrong, simply because he is from the region.

    What the professor of mass communication said in this respect is worth quoting at length, if only because of the danger his words portend for the practice of journalism in the country. “I end up,” he said, “by challenging Delta people: We have not done enough in coming out to stand by Mr. President. We have not. Because the weapon being used at this point is verbal, intellectual weapon. It’s propaganda. And Delta State is the owner of those arsenals. The most important newspaper in the country in terms of integrity is The Guardian. It’s owned by Ibru, from Agbarha-Otor, Urhobo. The next one in terms of popularity is the Vanguard. It’s owned by Sam Amuka, Itsekiri/Urhobo. The next one is THISDAY, it’s owned by Nduka Obaigbena of Ika. He is also in the conference. Those three newspapers determine the mind of Nigerians. We need a programme that can join those forces and stand by Mr. President. (Clap of approval from the audience).

    “Go to the electronic media, the most respected is either Channels or AIT. Channels is owned by John Momoh from Edo State; AIT by Dr. Alogho Dokpesi from Agenebode, Edo State. Then there is ITV, owned by the Igbinedions. They are the most powerful. People don’t tune to NTA, they tune to those ones if they cannot tune to CNN. Get what I am saying now, we need a movement that conjoin those institutions and then stand by Mr. President.”

    What the president has done in three years, he said, as if firing the first shot of the crude propaganda war he is advocating, “are more than what Tafawa Balewa plus Shagari, plus Buhari, plus IBB, plus Abacha did in 30 years. Jonathan has done more than all of them.”

    “Finally, finally,” he concluded, “You no say person we de chop yoke of egg, when you want to take the egg from him, whatever weapon he has he will use it against you. What we have understood now is that because this northern segment has enjoyed the booty of the oil for 30 years they cannot even contemplate not having it. This is where we are now; it’s a ‘civil war’.”

    With professors like Darah doing their utmost to pitch one section of the country against the other, is it any wonder the future prospect of this country looks so bleak?

    The alert reader would have noticed I have not discussed the merit or otherwise of the major resolutions of the conference as I promised last week. This is due to space constraint. It will form the subject matter for another day in a not too distant future, God willing.

     

    Re: Again, the return of Chinweizu and all that

    Sir,

    Your write-up on “Again, the return of Chinweizu and all that” made some chilling revelations. Though one may not always agree with you but one will agree that facts are facts. This is your strong point.

    I have watched these men, Professor G.G. Darah and Mr. Yinka Odumakin on the Channels -TV. The presentations of the two men give an impression of the play-out of a written script. Painfully, people from Delta led by the old grand Papa (Edwin Clark) have been behaving as if the President is for the South–South only.

    I hope that the prediction of the break-up of this country by 2015 will not come to fulfillment.

    Sir Biyi Adesanya, Ibadan.

     

    Sir,

    (Your piece last week contained) very interesting yet disturbing dimensions in contemporary discourses of Nigerian politics on behalf of the so-called “Greater/New South vs. Shariyaland Geopolitical Divide”. But for now I simply wish to correct the misplacement of retired Col. Tony Nyiam as of Delta State origin like Professor G.G. Darah. Tony Nyiam is an indigene of Cross River State.

    I hope that the articulators and diviners of this Nigerian Geopolitical Divide are conscious of the present Nigerian open society for which they may unwittingly be coveting its enemies for upcoming generations of Nigeria, that is, if there is still Nigeria!

    Professor Sam Oyovbaire

     

    I stand corrected by my professor who taught me the importance of rigour in Political Science at Ahmadu Bello University in the early seventies.

     

     

  • Again, the return of Chinweizu and all that

    Again, the return of Chinweizu and all that

    A supposed email exchange between Chinweizu, veteran columnist and author (The West and the Rest of Us, Anatomy of Female Power) and Professor G.G. Darah, communications teacher and prominent Delta State delegate to the just concluded national conference, has been making the rounds on the internet. If the exchange is true – and the style and substance of the exchange suggests it is – then we are in an even deeper trouble in this country than we imagine because of the Boko Haram insurgency.

    The exchange, dated August 6, was copied to Mr Yinka Odumakin, an outspoken Afenifere spokesman, Col. Tony Nyiam, Rtd, who, like Darah, is also a Delta State delegate to the national conference and the arrowhead of the 1990 attempted coup against General Ibrahim Babangida, which purported to have excised much of the North from Nigeria, and to one Professor Chinedu Nwajimba.

    The chilling concluding paragraphs of the exchange is worth reproducing in full, if only because of the possibility, even probability, it raises that it may have been the motive in convening the conference, if not of the authorities themselves, at least of elements at the conference who are known to be very close to the powers that be.

    “The main point,” Chinweizu said in his email, “is that we can’t afford to prolong our agony under Caliphate Colonialism. Our Liberation requires that they leave Nigeria entirely, and the sooner the better. If they are allowed to remain on any terms, even by return to 1960 Federalism or even Aburi, we’ll still have them polluting our polity. (Please see the attachment). So the sooner we get them out completely the better for us.

    “And if we can defeat and expel them without recourse to shooting war, i.e. without bloodshed, that’s the best. So you guys should do it within the Confab walls. Excise them by talking and voting; don’t wait till you have to shoot and bleed. Political war is better than military war.”

    Earlier in the roughly 800-word email, Chinweizu had expressed his happiness at what he said was a new division in the country the so-called progressives at the conference have engineered, something he described as the new “Greater/New South vs. Shariyaland geopolitical divide.” He then said although they were to be congratulated for their achievement in creating this new fault line, they should know that the battle had just begun.

    “When the Confab returns to wind up,” he said,  “if you can’t get them to walk out or can’t pass a resolution excising Shariyaland, Orkar style, then engineer a breakdown, with a Greater South separate majority/minority report that creates the cleavage that would oblige the Prez to reconvene the Confab as Confab 2, ostensibly for reconciliation across the cleavage. But you’d seize the opportunity at Confab 2 to create a Peoples’ Constitution, without any compromises to accommodate Arewa/Shariyaland. And you can there excise them if they resist the new constitution, as they will surely do. Am sure you and Yinka (Odumakin) can get that going and accomplish it. If all fails, at least get a resolution passed by the Greater South majority, postponing the 2015 election till after a new Constitution is approved by referendum.”

    The reader will recall that in my column of January 15 on these pages, entitled: “The return of Chinweizu and all that,” I had cause to join issues with the gentleman when he wrote in The Guardian of December 12 and 19, 2013 to take on the radical politician and Kano State delegate to the national conference, Dr Junaid Muhammad, and President Olusegun Obasanjo, one over his criticisms of President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration in press interviews, and the other over his since famous open letter to our No 1 Citizen, which was even more critical of the president than Dr Muhammad’s interviews.

    Chinweizu entitled the first piece “To Junaid Mohammed and the Shariyalanders.” What he said in it was pretty much the same as what he repeated in his email to Darah. It was also pretty much the same as his December 19 criticism of Obasanjo’s letter, except he did not forget to dismiss the 1999 Constitution under which Obasanjo returned to power as “illegitimate” and “a self-interested creation of Northern generals for the parochial interest of Shariyaland”. This was in spite of the fact, as we all now know, that the 1979 Constitution promulgated by Obasanjo as military head of state, which is essentially the same with the 1999, was authored principally by people like Professor Ben Nwabueze, Chinweizu’s fellow Biafran traveller and critic of the 1999 Constitution – thanks, in part, to the professor’s self-confession in a recent interview in Sunday Vanguard (March 20).

    Chinweizu’s email began with thanks to Darah for his situation report on the national conference and a plea that Darah and perhaps those he copied would “get it widely published in the media for the enlightenment of the Greater/New South (i.e. South + Middle Belt) Public.” Specifically, he wanted Odumakin to get it published in the Nigerian Tribune.

    I am not aware than Odumakin has been able to do so but Darah’s report has been published in The Pointer (August 25), the newspaper of Delta State, at least in its online edition from where I was able to download the report. Darah’s triumphalism over his version of the outcome of the national conference betrayed a malicious intent towards a section of this country – a malicious intent probably shared among those in power – which nearly turned the conference’s final sitting into a fiasco.

    “There will be two layers of power. One federal, two states,” Darah said in his report rather cockily. “Local governments will exist as they are in section 7 of the section, but they will not be a tier of government. Get me correctly, they will not form a tier. There is no federation where councils are tiers. It’s only in Nigeria, and they did it to spoon feed those 419 local governments in the North.”

    States, he also said, will design their own constitutions to cater for local interests. “It is so in India, Germany, Canada, it is so in America,” he said.

    Darah is absolutely correct that in a true federation there can be only two tiers of government; the federal and the state. It would then be up to the latter to create any number of local and municipal governments it wants depending on its wherewithal and the wisdom of its politicians.

    Problem is, Nigeria ceased to be a true federation like all of Darah’s examples, from the day the military first seized power in January 1966. True federations come about by aggregation. The Nigerian federation since 1966 has been by disaggregation. In other words, instead of power being ceded to the centre from the component parts, it has flowed in the opposite direction, with all this implies for the autonomy of the component parts.

    Even then, I believe the conference took the right decision in abrogating local governments as a tier, if only because they have no legislative powers except for bye-laws, and even though the decision smacks of vendetta against a section of the country. The ill motive behind the decision was apparent from the conference’s confusion in its decision to still allocate 22.5 per cent of the federal revenue pool to the tier as against 42.5 per cent for the centre and 30 per cent for the states in its recommendation for revenue allocation.

    This brings me to Darah’s explanation for what he described in his situation report as the “climb down” by delegates from the Delta region on the controversy over the size of derivation as a principle of revenue allocation, a climb down he chose to blame essentially on the Yoruba, in particular one Yoruba delegate from Lagos.

    The merit of his position on this issue and on the major decisions of the conference will be the subject of this column next week, God willing. It will also examine Darah’s report as a wanton denigration of the North and as propaganda for President Jonathan.

     

  • In defence of NDF

    In defence of NDF

    THE last time we met on these pages two weeks ago, I predicted that the final meeting of the National Conference scheduled for August 11 was likely to end in a fiasco. This, I said, was essentially because, like virtually all our constitutional conferences since 1966, it was convened in bad faith. Alas, I was almost proved right.

    The proofs of bad faith were many, among which were the timing of the conference so close to next year’s general elections and the wilful and blatant imbalance in the regional and religious composition of its membership. As if these were not bad enough, some delegates close to the presidency, apparently working in cahoots with a section of the conference’s leadership, tried to sneak a document into it which contained provisions that were widely suspected to be the real object of the conference in the first place. This was towards the end of the conference.

    The 102-page document purporting to be the “Terms of Agreement of the Six Geo-Political Zones in Nigeria” contained such provisions dear to President Goodluck Jonathan and members of his kitchen cabinet like the six-year single-term tenure for the executive arm of government and 50 per cent of revenue allocation based on derivation, as opposed to the current 13 per cent.

    That this document was introduced in bad faith soon became evident when a motion by Is’haq Modibbo Kawu, a member representing the Nigerian Guild of Editors, and supported by former Senate President Ken Nnamani, a delegate from Enugu State, calling on the conference’s leadership to explain its appearance forced the leadership to repudiate it.

    “We,” said the Chairman, Justice Idris Legbo Kutigi, as reflected in the Conference Hansard of June 30, “know nothing about the paper in circulation…We have nothing to do with it. That matter should be closed!”

    When the conference resumed penultimate Monday for the final consideration of its decisions, it became obvious that those intent on imposing their principal’s hidden agenda on the conference were undeterred by the chairman’s categorical repudiation of their document; in place of “Terms of Agreement of the Six Geo-Political Zones in Nigeria”, another more daring document purporting to be “DRAFT CONSTITUTION OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA, 2014” was included among the documents circulated among the members.

    Predictably, the Northern Delegates Forum (NDF), which forced the rejection of the first document, rose against the second. “We,” said its leader, former Inspector-General of Police Ibrahim Commassie, Sardaunan Katsina, in the press statement it issued on August 12, “unequivocally disown it, and emphatically disassociate ourselves from it.”

    The Forum gave several reasons for its rejection, among which were (1) that being unelected members of the conference, they were not qualified to write any draft constitution; (2) their brief was to amend the 1999 Constitution not write a new one; and (3) making 2014 the effective date of a new constitution ahead of next year’s general elections was a camouflage to legitimise a third term for governors currently serving their second term under the 1999 Constitution and a way to evade the controversy that has dodged the legality of President Jonathan’s undeclared but apparent decision to contest next year’s presidential election.

    To buttress their suspicions, the delegates variously pointed out that several decisions were inserted in the so-called draft that were extraneous to the conference’s proceedings. For example, they said, Section 2A in the so-called draft, which approved state constitutions, as in America, was never sanctioned by the conference. Again, the conference, they said, did not approve referendum as a mechanism for adopting a new constitution because that, in itself, entailed amending the current constitution, which approves for referenda only for state creation or boundary adjustments. Also, the conference, they said, never approved that Section 305, on the continued validity of certain pre-existing laws, including the Land Use Act and NYSC, be deleted, as contained in the so-called draft. And so on.

    Not surprisingly, the Southern delegates, along with several from the Middle Belt, responded robustly the following day to the NDF’s rejection of the so-called draft. At a press conference addressed by the leadership of these delegates shortly after the conference adjourned from its final meeting that day, John Dara, a delegate from Kwara State and secretary of the Middle Belt Forum, which he claimed consisted of 14 of the 19 states in the North, said the delegates from the sub-region were “solidly in support of the outcome of this conference”.

    Nigeria, he said, “would be operated on a new improved constitution, based on the deliberation of the conference subject to the approval of the people of Nigeria”. Those who objected to the labelling of the conference’s report as a draft constitution, he said, were not controverting the accuracy of the report but were merely “not mentally prepared for the idea of a new constitution and that the reality was a bit shocking for some people”.

    Yinka Odumakin, the spokesman for Afenifere, the Yoruba cultural umbrella organisation, was even more scathing of the NDF than Dara in his reaction carried by Vanguard (August 13). Members of the NDF, he said, were only trying to blackmail the conference about the draft constitution. “What they are doing,” he said, “is just to blackmail the conference by saying that the draft constitution is Jonathan’s third term agenda. That is not the truth.”

    Blackmail or no blackmail, the chairman of the conference, Justice Kutigi, took the NDF’s objection to the so-called draft seriously enough to assure delegates in his closing remarks that if there were any errors in the conferences reports, they were not deliberate and that there was nothing like a draft constitution.

    “What were articulated to the delegates,” he said, “were all issues agreed at the plenary session and there is nothing like a draft constitution. What we have are proposed amendments to the 1999 Constitution. I repeat, there was nothing like a draft constitution.”

    With this, the conference somewhat surprised sceptics like me and avoided ending in a fiasco. Hopefully, the chair will submit a report to the president tomorrow afternoon, which has accurately captured its decisions.

    If it does so, many people may dismiss the NDF as a bunch of attack dogs that cried wolf where none existed simply because it wanted the status quo to remain. That would be grossly unfair.

    A Daily Trust story last week, which said the chairman claimed his brief in his letter of appointment from the president was to produce a new constitution, suggested bad faith on the president’s side, assuming the story was accurate. I have read and re-read the president’s speech when he inaugurated the conference on March 17. Nowhere in the 56-paragraph, 2,574-word speech did he explicitly ask the conference to give him a draft constitution.

    The closest he came to doing so was in paragraph 46, where he commended the National Assembly for proposing an amendment to the current constitution that would allow for referendum as a mechanism for adopting a new constitution, should the need arise.

    “Let me,” he said, “at this point thank the National Assembly for introducing the provision for a referendum in the proposed amendment of the Constitution. This should be relevant for this Conference, if, at the end of the deliberations, the need for a referendum arises. I, therefore, urge the National Assembly and the State Houses of Assembly to speed up the constitutional amendment process, especially with regard to the subject of referendum.”

    Surely it would be an act of bad faith for the president to even merely imply something in public only to explicitly declare it in private, assuming, that is, that was what happened. Sources close to the chairman said he has been critical of the Daily Trust story as a gross misrepresentation of what he had said, which was that the president had asked him in his letter to go well beyond merely making recommendations, as had been the case before, and propose ways and means by which its recommendations will be implemented.

    Assuming he was misrepresented by Daily Trust, it should be obvious to anyone with even only half an eye that someone somewhere was trying to exploit his belief in the sincerity of the president to make mischief with the conference reports. This much was clear from the way John Dara and Company have tried to defend the so-called draft constitution as quoted above.

    The man says the northern delegates did not controvert the content of the so-called draft when indeed they quoted chapter and verse where it contained gross misrepresentations of the conference’s decisions. Not only that, he went on to gloat about what he called “the reality” of a new constitution that those opposed to it would have to live this.

    Justice Kutigi has insisted that the conference reports were merely proposed amendments to the 1999 Constitution. That being so, to label anyone of them a draft constitution and even give the year in which it will take effect is a gross misrepresentation of what it is. After all there is everything in a name.

    In any case you don’t have to be an expert in English grammar to see that the difference between DRAFT CONSTITUTION OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA, 2004 and DRAFT PROPOSALS TO AMEND THE CONSTITUTIONOF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA, 1999 is not mere hair-splitting. Even an idiot can see that the second is, by far, a more accurate representation of the conference’s brief than the first, to the extent that the first is accurate at all.

    Isn’t it then strange that many of those, like Dara and Odumakin, who like to dismiss the 1999 Constitution as one not written by “we, the people” are the same ones who would vehemently support another drafted by hand-picked government nominees who have nowhere near as much legitimacy as the elected majority of those who drafted the 1979 Constitution which, really, is what the 1999 Constitution is, give or take a few amendments?

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • History and moral of constitution making in Nigeria

    History and moral of constitution making in Nigeria

    Next Monday, the National Conference will reconvene for the final consideration and signing of its report. The prospect that the conference will have a happy ending looks rather bleak. And the reason is the same old one that has marred virtually every constitutional conference in the country since 1966; a dubious hidden agenda of self-service by the conveners.

    When President Goodluck Jonathan made a U-turn from his long-held rejection of a constitutional conference and suddenly announced early this year that he would convene one, there were widespread scepticisms, even cynicism, about his decision. Many, including this reporter, concluded it was to divert public attention away from his dismal performance and, at the same time, execute a Machiavellian sectional and self-succession agenda against the foreground of next year’s presidential election.

    Once again, it seemed the lesson that no such hidden agenda has succeeded since 1966 when the country’s first military regime sought to perpetuate itself, has been lost on those in power.

    Back in 1966, the first military Head of State, Maj.-Gen. JTU Aguiyi-Ironsi, set up a Constitutional Study Group under the late Chief Rotimi “The Law” Williams barely a month after he came to power in January. However, even before the panel could settle down to study anything, the general took the unwise advice of a power-hungry cabal he had surrounded himself with and promulgated the Unification Decree in May, which turned the country into a unitary state under his jackboots. This led to his overthrow and assassination in July.

    Col. Yakubu Gowon, who took over, set up an Ad Hoc Conference on Constitutional Proposals, essentially to manage the crisis of his succession in the face of strong objections from Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the military governor of Eastern Nigeria, who was nominally his senior. The conference ended in a fiasco in Aburi, Ghana, with each side accusing the other of bad faith in implementing its decisions.

    The disagreement eventually led to a three-year civil war that ended in 1970. After that Gowon announced he would end military rule in 1976. He changed his mind in 1974 when he not only said in the year’s Independence Day broadcast on October 1 that 1976 was “unrealistic”. He also failed to give a new date that was realistic.

    This led to his overthrow in July 1975. In his first Independence Day broadcast on October 1, the new Head of State, Brig. Murtala Mohammed, announced a five-item, four-year transition programme, the central pillar of which was a new constitution for the country. In February 1976, some disgruntled elements in the Army tried to overthrow his regime but failed. However, they succeeded in assassinating him.

    Despite this assassination, the new regime headed by Lt.-Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo kept faith with Gen. Mohammed’s transition programme and ended 13 years of military rule by handing over power to civilians on October 1, 1979. However, this was not before it had executed its own agenda of changing the country’s constitution from the parliamentary model bequeathed to it by its British colonial masters to an American-type presidential model in which the centre became all-powerful.

    The wisdom of this change, intended to check the country’s old centrifugal tendencies, has since become debatable. As Prof. Ben Nwabueze, SAN, the country’s foremost constitutional lawyer, who also played  a central role in drafting the 1979 Constitution said in a recent interview in Sunday Vanguard (March 20), this change seems to have led to the exact opposite of the framers’ good intentions.

    “We took 50 per cent of the concurrent list of matters (in the old constitution) and merged them to the exclusive list,” he said. “We also went to the residual matters, took almost 50 per cent and put it in the exclusive list. We took so many other things…It turned out that putting so much power at the centre was an invitation to disunity…The struggle for control of the centre with all that power led to disunity.”

    Whether the change was wise or not, the new presidential system under President Shehu Shagari lasted only 51 months. His ruling National Party of Nigeria (NPN) boasted that there were only two parties in the country; NPN and the military. Meaning, it could never lose any election to its civilian opposition. It went on to gratuitously rig the 1983 election – chances then were that it could still have won fair and square – so massively the military felt compelled to pick up its gauntlet as the only opposition party and threw it out on December 31, 1983, barely three months into its second term.

    The regime of Maj.-Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, which took over from Shagari, said initially that a return to civil rule was not its priority. Less than two years after he came to power, he was overthrown by his army chief, Maj.-Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, in a bloodless palace coup in August 1985.

    Babangida, in turn, ran the longest transition programme in the country’s history and in the end was forced to “step aside” in August 1993, leaving behind his army chief, Gen. Sani Abacha, ostensibly to back up the interim government of Chief Ernest Shonekan he had cobbled together to remedy the huge constitutional crisis his inexplicable cancellation of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, apparently won by Chief MKO Abiola, had created.

    Instead of backing up Shonekan, Abacha obliged very convenient calls from several so-called progressives for the overthrow of what they dubbed Babangida’s “contraption”, and sent the former UAC mogul packing in November 1993. But rather than hand over power to Abiola, as the “progressives” foolishly believed he would, the man predictably kept the power to himself.

    Five years after he overthrew Shonekan, the man tried to perpetuate himself by swapping his khaki for mufti through a political sleight of hand in which all the five parties his electoral commission had registered in the course of his transition programme, nominated him as their presidential candidate. However, before any election could hold, the man died a mysterious death.

    He was succeeded by his Chief of Defence Staff, Lt.-Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, who, ironically, he had pencilled down for sack on the day he (Abubakar) became the head of state. Wisely, the new head of state refrained from stretching his luck and ran the shortest transition programme in the country’s history, lasting only 11 months; dutifully he handed over power on May 29, 1999 to a civilianised Gen. Obasanjo after he was pardoned for his conviction over a coup attempt against Abacha for which he served several years of a life sentence commuted from death sentence, and after he had won the presidential ticket of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which was essentially a two-horse race against Shagari’s deputy, Dr. Alex Ekwueme.

    Obasanjo served out his two terms of four years each, but soon forgot the lesson of his regime’s good faith during his first outing as the military head of state in 1976; he sought a third term half way through his second. Not only that, reminiscent of  NPN’s boast during the Second Republic, his party said it would rule Nigeria for the next 50 years, if not forever.

    Obasanjo’s third term agenda failed so miserably that today virtually all those who aided and abetted him have been denouncing him. Surprisingly (?) the loudest denunciation has come from his one-time Minister of Information and Political Adviser, Prof. Jerry Gana, a permanent resident in the country’s corridors of power.

    His former principal’s Constitutional Conference of 2005 came to grief, Gana said in an interview in Daily Sun (April 16), because the man was “greedy”! “I was,” he said, “the political adviser at the time and I happened to be one of the conveners…But just because of the issue of third term, which was not part of what we recommended, Obasanjo abandoned the whole thing. It was irresponsible, it was not proper, it was unfair…It was painful; it was an act of greed.”

    This, Gana said in the interview, which I am not aware he has repudiated, was something President Jonathan has assured Nigerians he would not contemplate with his own National Conference. “This president,” he said, “has said no Nigerian must come back and do this again. He told us…by the Grace of God this time round your recommendations will be implemented.”

    Gana is not alone among President Jonathan’s men who say they believe in his good faith. Senator Femi Okurounmu, hitherto a champion of Sovereign National Conference and chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee which recommended the shape and circumscribed terms of reference of the current National Conference, is another.

    “I think,” he said in an interview in the New Telegraph (March 17), “this administration, in all fairness, has tried to show it has no hidden agenda and I can say that as the chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee on National Conference that if the government has a hidden agenda, I would be privy to it.”

    As we all now know, the newspapers have since given the lie, a big, big lie, to repeated denials by the president’s men that he had no hidden agenda in convening his own National Conference.  A 102-page document with presidential imprimatur written all over it, has since surfaced at the conference purporting to be the “Terms of Agreement of the Six Geo-political Zones in Nigeria.” This was reminiscent of the document Obasanjo’s men tried unsuccessfully to sneak into his 2005 conference in order to give him a third term.

    As with Obasanjo’s document, this one too has come with malicious intent towards one section of the country. It also contained the six-year, single-term tenure we all know is so very dear to our president.

    If I have bored you with this longish recap of the history of constitution making in the country since 1966, I am terribly sorry. But I thought the recap was necessary to make its moral apparent; virtually every constitutional conference in this country has come with a hidden agenda by its convener and virtually all of them have come to grief.

    I have no doubt in my mind that as members of the current one reconvene next Monday, this too shall come to pass because it too was never convened in good faith.

     

  • Apo killings reprise?

    Apo killings reprise?

    If it’s true, as President Goodluck Jonathan’s henchmen never tire of peddling, that Boko Haram is a weapon fashioned by the opposition to destabilise their principal and stop him from contesting next year’s election, never mind winning it, then the cold blooded murder of nearly three dozen members of the Shi’a community in Zaria last week by soldiers is a clear testimony that his army has not learnt, and is probably unwilling to learn, the lesson of the transmutation of Boko Haram from a mere irritant into the greatest threat to the country’s unity, peace and security in under five years.

    By now we are all familiar with what happened last Friday in Zaria during the annual procession of the members of the sect in support of victims of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. This year’s procession coincided with the ongoing massive invasion of Gaza by the Israeli, ostensibly in retaliation for the kidnap and murder of three Israeli youths, which the Israeli hawkish Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, conveniently but wrongly, as it has since turned out, blamed on Hamas, the authority in Gaza.

    Several of those in the Zaria procession carried placards with unflattering inscriptions not only about the Israelis but also about our President, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, and his wife, Patience, accusing both of being the dark forces behind Boko Haram. Sources close to the Shi’a leadership believe this may have incensed the soldiers whose commander, like the president, is said to be Ijaw.

    The soldiers have since claimed that they shot at the procession in self defence. The number of casualties – 35 dead, including three sons of the Shi’a leader, Sheikh Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, and many more injured – suggests otherwise, a scepticism apparently shared by the presidency, which has ordered investigations.

    The soldiers’ claim sounds familiar but rings hollow in the light of the similar killings on September 20 last year of eight, and the injuring of 11 more, tricycle riders living in an uncompleted building in the Apo Legislative Quarters, Abuja. Then as now, the army said it killed the tricyclists in self-defence. Senate investigations of the case came to the self-contradictory conclusion that the squatters were unarmed and harmless, but cleared the security personnel, who said they had raided the building in search of a Boko Haram kingpin, of extra-judicial murder.

    An apparently more thorough investigation by the National Human Rights Commission (NHCR) reached the unequivocal conclusion that the security forces killed the squatters in cold blood and ordered the Federal Government to pay relatives of the victims N135million as compensation.

    What happened in Zaria last Friday shows that the lesson of NHRC’s embarrassing indictment of the security forces has not been learnt. But even more worrying is that the even more profound lesson of the genesis of Boko Haram as the greatest threat to the country’s unity, peace and security has also not been learnt, if not by the presidency itself at least by those in charge of its instruments of coercion.

    Until 2009, when the late President Umaru Musa Yar’adua sent in the troops to wipe out Boko Haram because of its repeated confrontations with security forces, it was essentially a mere irritant to the local authorities in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital. The soldiers seemed to have succeeded at first. Its headquarters was razed to the ground and hundreds of its members killed and its leader, Muhammadu Yusuf, captured alive and well and handed over to the police.

    Instead of trying him, he was murdered in cold blood in police custody. Following public outrage, President Yar’adua set up a panel to investigate the case. This was in August 2009. Nearly five years on, nothing has been heard of the investigation.

    In between, even more cold-blooded murder of members of the sect was carried out by the security forces. In one particularly gruesome footage of the killings that was aired by Aljazeera months after the murder of Yusuf, one apparently blood-thirsty policeman was heard telling a colleague not to shoot one victim in the chest because he wanted the victim’s heart!

    Again, public outrage at the Aljazeera footage forced government to set up another enquiry and promised swift prosecution of those implicated in the killings. Again, as with the killing of Yusuf, nothing more was heard of the case. There was an attempt to prosecute a few suspects, but it all seemed so half-hearted.

    If the authorities calculated that with time, everything will fizzle out as usual, they apparently calculated wrongly; a little over a year after these incidents, Boko Haram returned with a vengeance. Since then, it has transmogrified into a hideous monster that government seems incapable of eliminating.

    It should worry the authorities that, unlike Boko Haram, the Shi’a in Nigeria, or Muslim Brothers as they choose to call themselves, are huge in number and are much more organised and disciplined. It is therefore important that the Federal Government conducts a thorough and satisfactory investigation of what happened in Zaria last Friday.

    Failure to do so will only further confirm many Nigerians in their suspicion that the authorities have found Boko Haram a convenient cover to destabilise the North as the greatest opposition to President Jonathan’s apparent determination to remain on his seat in next year’s election come what may.

    It is gladdening that he has ordered an investigation of the incident, but the way some of his henchmen have carried on about the June 23 twin-suicide bomb, but happily unsuccessful, attacks on a former head of state and leading opposition leader, Maj.-Gen. Muhammadu Buhari and the Tijjaniya leader, Sheikh Dahiru Bauchi, one could be forgiven the conclusion that the president is only too glad to see the North stew in its own Boko Haram predicament.

    One such henchman, Alhaji Mujahid Asari-Dokubo, seemed to have surpassed even himself as the president’s self-chosen viral attack dog when he said the other day that Gen. Buhari staged the suicide bomb on his own convoy to draw public sympathy. Another, Mr. Olisa Metuh, the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) spokesman, was not as disingenuous as the ex-militant when he said the bombing was the act of the general’s rivals within the opposition. Still his theory was disingenuous enough to have prompted a rebuke from both the party and the presidency.

    From past events it would be surprising if the authorities distanced themselves from any of the two.

    However, whether they distance themselves or not, it is, I must say again, important that what happened in Zaria last Friday does not go unpunished. We have enough problems dealing with Boko Haram we do not want to create another, and probably worse, monster. Unless, of course, the authorities, as many Nigerians believe, do not give a damn about the many innocent blood that have been shed as a result of Boko Haram insurrection because it is “they” and not “us”.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Osun governorship election: Aregbesola’s big challenge

    Osun governorship election: Aregbesola’s big challenge

    If elections are won or lost on character and performance, as they should, Osun State’s governorship election coming up on August 9 should be a shoo-in for the incumbent, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola. But then, as we saw in the June 21 Ekiti State governorship election, the almost universally hailed character and performance of the incumbent, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, seemed to have counted for practically nothing when he suffered heavy defeat at the hands of Mr Ayo Fayose, the candidate of the country’s ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

    In Ekiti at least, what seemed to matter most was instant gratification for the people through the so-called “infrastructure of the stomach” and, even more importantly, the use of Federal Might (with capital F and capital M) to cow any opposition (It’s only a foolhardy man who would challenge the well-armed 30,000 security agents drafted into the state for the election who, as the governor said based on intelligence at his disposal as the state’s chief security officer, had instructions to “mow down” anyone who dared raise his figure in protest at their open  partisanship).

    As it was in Ekiti so would the PDP like it to be in Osun. One big difference, however, is that, unlike in Ekiti, a not-so-subtle religious propaganda weapon against the governor is being added to the other two.

    No less a person than the PDP governorship candidate himself, Senator Iyore Omisore, gave this game away. Asked in an interview in PUNCH (July 18) if he was sure he would win the election, he said: “Of course, yes. I mean the indices are there for all to see; the decaying infrastructure, the disrupted education system, THE RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY, infrastructural inconvenience, social malaise, impoverishment of our people.” (emphasis mine).

    Omisore went further to accuse the governor of wrongly “lumping students from Islam-based faith schools with students of Christianity-based faith schools together AND EXPECTING ONE RELIGION TO SUPERCEDE THE OTHER…” (Again emphasis mine). As a Christian, it is obvious Omisore is accusing the Muslim governor of favouring Islam.

    Since Aregbesola dared to declare a public holiday to celebrate an Islamic New Year in the state two years ago, many of his critics have worked overtime to cast him in the image of a Muslim extremist. For many of such critics, the absurdity of the logic that what is good for one religion is necessarily bad for the other has clearly escaped them.

    Not surprisingly, beneath Omisore’s apparently inadvertent betrayal of his religious animosity towards the governor, an even more insidious crude religious campaign is being waged where Christians in the state are being told that a vote for Omisore is 10 votes for Christ!

    In this manipulation of religion to gain power, Omisore is only in the excellent company of our president, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, for whom the Church had for a long time become his platform for issuing policy statements and indirectly denigrating Islam. Even then for anyone to equate Omisore with Christ is really the height of blasphemy. But then this is Nigeria where politicians think nothing of invoking the Good Lord’s name in vain.

    For someone who, at the least, is not averse to being compared to Christ, it was truly amazing how he could lie through his teeth about his relationship with the late Chief Bola Ige, whose murder several years ago he was implicated in and tried for and eventually acquitted.

    In the PUNCH interview I’ve referred to, the newspaper asked him point blank if he did not kill Ige. “I did not,” he replied, “kill Chief Bola Ige at all. I can’t kill anybody, anyway, not to talk of Chief Bola Ige. Chief Bola Ige was my leader. He was like an uncle in-law to me.” He did not, he also said, instigate the removal of Ige’s cap and glasses in the palace of the Ooni of Ife, a humiliation which presaged Ige’s brutal murder in his own residence in Ibadan.

    An amicable relationship between the two was definitely not what it looked like nearly 13 years ago when Omisore denigrated the chief in an interview in the rested TEMPO weekly newspaper (December 27, 2001). In that interview, he called Chief Bisi Akande, who he was deputy governor to and from whom he was estranged at the time, some of the foulest names imaginable and added Ige to the target of his diatribe.

    “Recently too,” he said in the interview, “Bola Ige came on radio here to insult me and my family. THAT IS THE LAST ONE. He was beaten yesterday, the people of Ife beat him up and he was crying like a baby as they removed his cap and his glasses…He was disgraced out of Ife, he had to be dressed like a woman to get out of town.”(Again, emphasis mine).

    Asked in effect if he approved Ige’s humiliation, he said yes in effect. “He has offended Ife people. If he insults me, he has insulted my people and they have the right to react.”

    Omisore concluded the interview by describing Ige as a Yoruba traitor. “Bola Ige,” he said, “is a traitor to Afenifere… He is the Akintola of our time. What Akintola did to Awolowo is what Bola Ige is doing to Adesanya and to the Yoruba people.”

    It is truly amazing how the man can now turn around to say he never held anything against Ige but, instead, had always regarded the chief as his leader and an “uncle in-law”, whatever that means.

    Omisore would not only tell a lie about his relationships to curry favour with Osun voters to the extent that his implication in the murder of Ige is an issue in the elections, it is also obvious he is afraid to engage Aregbesola in any debate over what each of them can offer the good people of their state. Challenged to a debate by the governor, first he said Aregbesola was mentally unfit. When that did not seem to wash with the public he changed his tune and said in effect that the governor is a thug-in-chief. “Going to participate in a debate with violent people with array of thugs will be too much of a risk to take for us,” he said in another interview in PUNCH (July 20).

    In an interview in The Guardian (July 10), Aregbesola said he was confident he would win any election in his state that was “credible, transparent, free and fair.” Therein lies the catch; an election can look credible, transparent, free and fair but the reality may be totally the opposite. An election in which a central government squeezes the opposition by slashing revenue allocation to states under the guise of falling revenue due to massive oil thefts and delays the release of even the little that is left in order to cause disaffection between opposition states and their civil servants, an election in which huge numbers of security agents are deployed to intimidate the opposition, etc, such election can hardly be described as credible, transparent, free and fair.

    Actually the rigging of elections can be even more cynical than financially squeezing opposition states and deploying massive force to intimidate. The other day, I received an email about the election which, on the surface, seemed too farfetched.

    “Do u ever thk along this line…” it said in the arcane language of texts. “200,000 ballot papers thumb printed in Abj, CBN abj convey to CBN Ado ekiti, CBN Ado to some selected commercial banks, some selected commercial banks to some party leaders in Ekiti land, party leaders to some ward leaders, ward leaders to 10 women per polling unit…Each woman with 10 already in their body, they pick one each and drop 11 in the box where they v bought agent.”

    My instinct was to dismiss this as an outlandish conspiracy theory. But then when I remembered the memorable words of Major-General IBM Haruna, a former minister of information, in one of the most interesting interviews published by the rested Citizen, which I headed, I said to myself this may not be as outrageous as it sounds. As the general said, any time anyone tells you something is impossible in Nigeria, consider it done.

    In spite of all these great odds against Aregbesola, I believe Ekiti is unlikely to be repeated in Osun on August 9. But then so many impossible things have happened in the country since 1999 that it will not surprise me if, in spite of Aregbesola’s character and performance, he loses the election.

    TWO OMISSIONS…

    In response to my column of last week, two readers, Chief Femi Alafe-Aluko and Olu Sangotikun, drew my attention to my omission of Aremo Segun Osoba among the country’s journalism icons who celebrated their birthdays this month. Segun, probably the country’s best reporter ever, celebrated his 75th birthday on July 15.

    Another journalism icon, Nduka Obaigbena, Chairman of Thisday and President of the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria (NPAN) celebrated his 55th birthday on July 14.

    Here’s wishing both Happy Birthdays and many more returns in arrears.

     

  • A season of “celebrity” birthdays

    A season of “celebrity” birthdays

    For the second time within a few weeks after I broke my rule not to publish responses to my column, which are more than 300 words, I feel obliged to break it again. I hope readers will understand and forgive me for the breach.

    The reason this time is a response from Malam Ya’u Shehu Darazo, the spokesman for a former head of state and now a chieftain of the leading opposition party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), Maj.-Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (Rtd); to my column last week, which was an orbit of Dr. Umaru Dikko, probably the most powerful minister during the short-lived Second Republic (October 1979 to December 1983) under President Shehu Shagari.

    Apparently Darazo felt obliged to defend his principal over the role I said the general played as the head of state in the so-called Dikko Affair, i.e. the attempt to kidnap Dikko in broad daylight in front of his home in London where he lived in self-exile and bring him to justice in Nigeria for sundry charges. Dikko had turned himself in self-exile as the most virulent critic of the military regime that threw out the Second Republic.

    Darazo is right to say I was wrong to claim that Dikko kept his vow that he would never return to Nigeria as long as the military were in power. As he pointed out, Dikko did return to Nigeria during the five-year rule of Gen. Sani Abacha between 1993 and 1998 and played an active part in Abacha’s transition politics. He is also right to say I was wrong to claim no one denied the claim by Major M. H. Jokolo, Buhari’s ADC, that the plan to kidnap Dikko was approved by his principal. As Darazo said, my memory clearly failed me in not remembering that his principal issued a widely-publicised denial of Jokolo’s claim.

    Even then, I am sure few people will believe that the denial amounted to much given the central role Jokolo played in the coup that brought Darazo’s boss to power and given the fact that ADCs of heads of state are like their clearing houses for virtually everything.

    Whatever the case, Darazo’s letter is reproduced below. Before then, however, I should note that readers must have observed that we seem to be in a season of birthdays of veteran journalists and literary giants this month, with no fewer than four of them celebrating their birthdays.

    First, we had Mr. Henry Odukomaiya, one of the most celebrated editors of the now rested Daily Times, one of Africa’s biggest success stories in newspaper publishing. The gentleman also holds the record for successfully establishing three newspapers in the country, most notably Concord, which, before it went down, once overtook Daily Times as the widest circulating newspaper in Nigeria. Odukomaiya turned an octogenarian on July 12.

    Next, Chief Ajibola Ogunsola, an actuarian by profession, whose revival of a comatose PUNCH in the late 80’s must rank among God’s little miracles in Nigeria. Ogunsola retired from the newspaper as the chairman when the ovation was still loud. While the chairman of PUNCH, he became the chairman of the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association of Nigeria (NPAN). It spoke volumes of the man’s character that as soon as he left PUNCH and he decided not to seek another term as NPAN’s chairman, he resigned his board membership of the News Agency of Nigeria, which he had occupied by virtue of his chairing the club of newspaper publishers.

    Ogunsola turned a septuagenarian on July 14.

    Tomorrow, one of Nigeria’s foremost columnists and among my top five all-time satirists in the country, Dr. Olatunji Dare, will turn 70. Dare has moved from the classroom to practice and back to the classroom as a journalist and in the process has left a huge mark on the profession that is hard to surpass.

    The biggest of the masquerades this month is, of course, Wole Soyinka, teacher, poet, political activist and Africa’s foremost playwright and black Africa’s first Literature Nobel laureate. Soyinka turned 80 on July 13 and, as is to be expected, the throbbing of the celebratory drums is yet to die down.

    Happy Birthday to the four foremost Nigeria’s literati. Here’s many more returns to you all.

    And now to Darazo.    

     

    Sir,

    Writing on a contemporary subject can be tasking in the sense that many who are either players or witnesses of the events may very much be around and can easily detect some obvious mistakes or misrepresentations. Mohammed Haruna’s piece, which was published on the cover of the Daily Trust of Wednesday, July 9, fell victim of three errors.

    Firstly, quoting Major Mustapha Jokolo’s paid advert in the now defunct Citizen in which he (Jokolo) claimed that General TY Danjuma, who had “scores to settle with Dikko for shutting down all private jetties in the country, including Danjuma’s because of the information he had as transport minister that many of them were being used for smuggling” was the reason behind General Danjuma’s role in the abduction saga of Umaru Dikko.

    According to Mohammed, one day, Jokolo said, “the former army chief rang him to book for an appointment to see Buhari. He made his proposals which sounded attractive. He said he could bring Umaru Dikko back, using his Israeli connections”. Mohammed Haruna mistakenly asserted that “none of the principal actors Jokolo mentioned EVER CONTESTED”(emphasis mine). Mohammed’s memory clearly failed him. A few weeks after Jokolo’s advert, General Buhari, in a widely circulated interview published by the now defunct Democrat debunked Jokolo’s claim, adding that Jokolo was too junior to understand the workings of the government.

    The second mistake Mohammed made was quoting a heresy to corroborate Jokolo’s claim. Quoting what he described as definitive 2012 biography of General Babangida, titled: IBRAHIM BABANGIDA: The Military, Politics and Power in Nigeria by veteran journalist Dan Agbese, Babangida, according to Mohammed, told Dan that the “initiative actually came from the Israelis, who sold it to a retired general, WHO DAN DID NOT NAME BUT WHO, OBVIOUSLY, WAS DANJUMA (emphasis mine), Danjuma, in turn sold it to Babangida, who in turn sold it to Buhari” The question is obvious to who? How can a definitive biography carry a faceless personality in an event that is very important to the subject. For as long as Babangida refuses to disclose the name of the “retired general” in his “definitive” biography, that aspect of information remains speculative and using it as referral or corroborative discourse is defective.

    The third error is where Mohammed Haruna said, as a result of the trauma of being crated alive in the bungled kidnap attempt, “Dikko vowed never to return to Nigeria as long as the military remained in power. He kept his vow even after some of his partners in self-exile like Chief Joseph Wayas, the Senate president, Alhaji Uba Ahmed, NPN’s general secretary, and Dr. Chuba Okadigbo, one of Shagari’s top aides, returned at various times to participate in Babangida’s long transition politics between 1985 and 1993.” This is also an error. We all know that Alhaji Umaru Dikko returned to the country during Gen. Sani Abacha’s regime, which was for sure, a military government. Dikko fully participated in  Abacha’s political programme, in which he (Dikko ) even formed his own political party.

    Ya’u Shehu Darazo

    darazo58@yahoo.com