The Nation Newspaper

Category: Mohammed Harunna

  • Umaru Dikko, the ultimate enforcer (1936 – 2014)

    Umaru Dikko, the ultimate enforcer (1936 – 2014)

    He was your quintessential Mr. Fix-It. And like all enforcers, he inspired fear more than love, a fact attested to by his inability, for example, to win the seat of northern Kaduna senatorial district in the old Kaduna State that included his native Zaria.

    He contested for the seat in 1978 on the platform of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN), the most conservative of the five parties approved by the regime of Generals Murtala Mohammed/ Olusegun Obasanjo for the transition programme between 1975 and 1979.

    Alhaji Umaru Dikko’s nemesis was a little known Alhaji Ibrahim Barau, a businessman, who contested on the platform of the radical Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) led by Malam Aminu Kano. At the time of the Mohammed/Obasanjo transition programme, Dikko had become a household name, having held several public offices, including commissionerships in the then North-Central State comprising Zaria and Katsina provinces. He was one of the most forceful and outspoken members of the 1977/78 Constituent Assembly (CA).

    It was this well-known Dikko, who died last Tuesday, that Barau, a Bazazzagi like himself, defeated for the seat of northern Kaduna senatorial district. Undeterred, he worked his way into becoming the campaign manager of Alhaji Shehu Shagari, the presidential candidate of the NPN.

    As New Nigerian’s reporter who covered Shagari’s presidential campaign, I could not but marvel at the energy and passion with which Dikko threw himself into the job, often sleeping on the carpeted floor of the campaign office on Victoria Island, Lagos, just to make sure he was always on hand to get things done. He thus became probably the closest confidant of Shagari, bar his friend, Alhaji Isiyaku Ibrahim, the campaign’s principal financier, by the time Shagari emerged the winner.

    It was not surprising therefore that Dikko became the most powerful minister in Shagari’s cabinet as transport minister, eclipsing even more prominent members of the party – at least nominally – like Malam Adamu Ciroma and Saraki, who were presidential aspirants and even party chairman, Chief Adisa Akinloye and Vice-President Alex Ekwueme, in his apparent proximity to Shagari.

    Power, as Dr. Henry Kissinger, America’s most famous Secretary of State in modern times, once reportedly said, is the ultimate aphrodisiac; it attracts as much envy from enemies as it does obsequiousness from admirers. Soon enough Dikko became the target of some of the most vicious attacks, especially in the press, by opposition elements, particularly from the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), whose presidential candidate, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, came a close second to Shagari and lost through a controversial Supreme Court interpretation of what 2/3rd of 19 states were from which a candidate had to score at least a quarter of votes cast before he could be declared winner.

    Shagari met the condition in 12 states whereas 2/3rd of 19 were 12.666 states, a statistical incongruity. UPN insisted the ratio meant 13 states which, in turn, meant there should be a second ballot between its candidate and Shagari. Chief Akinjide, NPN’s legal adviser, thought otherwise and asked the courts to declare Shagari the winner. They did, and thus set the context for the bitter politics of the Second Republic throughout the odd four years it lasted.

    As if Dikko was not powerful enough as transport minister and a Shagari confidant, the president appointed him to chair his committee on rice importation at a time of NPN’s suspicion, justified or otherwise, that the opposition had plans to frustrate its policy of food sufficiency through hoarding. It was as chair of the committee that he made a statement that was to prove a propaganda nightmare for him for the rest of the Second Republic.

    “As long as we are in government,” he had said in defence of the setting up of his committee, “we will leave no stone unturned to ensure that there is sufficient food in Nigeria and nobody will eat from dustbin.” For some not-so-inexplicable reason the opposition press turned the statement on its head and reported the man as saying there was no hunger in the land because no one as yet was eating from dustbins.

    Predictably, this attracted much public opprobrium to the minister and nothing he said thereafter ever convinced the public that he was not an arrogant and insensitive politician.

    It was NPN’s attempt to counter such bad press for itself and for its administration which eventually led to the rise of Chief M.K.O. Abiola as a chieftain of the party, whose foundation member he was. As Dikko himself told it in one of his most definitive interviews in the defunct Citizen (January 31, 1993) as an exile in the UK: “In the NPN, we realised that our greatest obstacle was that we were surrounded by a hostile press, because they did not belong to us at all. Nor were they ready to be objective…As a result of this predicament, people began to say the NPN must have its own paper.”

    It was then, he said in the interview, that Abiola offered to start a newspaper to counter the opposition press. All Abiola said he needed, Dikko said, was “necessary assistance to minimise bureaucracy,” which he got. Besides, Dikko said, even the name of the newspaper, National Concord, was Shagari’s suggestion. “This,” he said, “was something I know and Abiola knows that I know.”

    However, he said in effect, speculations that NPN funded the establishment of the newspaper were not true. “Everything was made easy for him. Where he got his money to start it, I don’t know. Only he knows.”

    Any observer of Nigeria’s political scene during the Second Republic would agree that the opposition press more than met their match in the Concord.  Staffed with some of the smartest and well motivated brains in Nigerian journalism, Abiola’s newspapers took the battle to the enemy’s territory, giving Nigerians exposes like the Maroko land scandal which implicated Chief Awolowo in damaging allegations of land grab from the poor.

    Apparently Concord’s success led Abiola to the conclusion that he deserved a seat in NPN’s inner sanctum. First, he sought to be its chairman, a job Akinloye was holding much, it seemed, to the satisfaction of the party establishment. Key members of this establishment, Dikko in particular, were apparently not amused by Abiola’s attempt to replace Akinloye. They did everything to frustrate Abiola’s bid and succeeded.

    Undeterred, Abiola next sought to vie for the party’s presidential ticket against the 1983 elections. Once again the party establishment blocked him. Worse, Dikko went on to deride the chief by making his now famous statement that the NPN’s presidential ticket was “not for sale to the highest bidder,” or some words to that effect.

    An angry Abiola left the party and not only took his newspaper with him. He joined it with the opposition press in their war which sought to portray NPN as bad for Nigeria and Dikko, specifically, as the chief villain of the Second Republic.

    It seems his image as the Bad Boy of the Second Republic left its mark even among his fellow party men. For, when he sought to replace Alhaji Shehu Ahmadu Musa as the highly respected Secretary of the Government of the Federation, probably as payback for engineering Shagari’s “landslide” victory in the 1983 presidential election, his principal demurred. Instead the president appointed him a Minister for Special Duties, which looked more or less like being shunted sideways from his previous powerful position.

    It was as Minister for Special Duties that he fled into self-exile in the UK when the soldiers overthrew the Second Republic on December 31, 1983, barely three months into Shagari’s second term. In exile, he quickly became the most outspoken critic of the new military regime under General Muhammadu Buhari.

    The regime soon returned Dikko’s compliment; short of exactly saying so, it declared him the most wanted politician among the exiles. It wanted him so badly it quickly bought a proposal by Lt-General T. Y. Danjuma, to date the most powerful army chief, to kidnap and return him to Nigeria for trial as allegedly one of the country’s most corrupt ministers, if not the most corrupt. This was according to Buhari’s Aide de Camp, Major Mustapha Jokolo, in a paid eight-page advert in Citizen (November 9, 1992) which none of the principal actors Jokolo mentioned ever contested.

    In the advert which he entitled “A soldier’s soldier or a soldier of fortune?”, Jokolo said Danjuma’s motivation was to settle scores with Dikko for shutting down all private jetties in the country, including Danjuma’s, because of information he had as transport minister that many of them were being used for smuggling.

    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.”

    Jokolo’s claim has since been corroborated by former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, in his definitive 2012 biography, IBRAHIM BABANGIDA: The Military, Politics and Power in Nigeria, by veteran journalist Dan Agbese. Babangida was Buhari’s army chief before he overthrew his boss in a bloodless palace coup in August 1985.

    According to Agbese, Babangida said the initiative actually came from the Israelis who sold it to a retired general who Dan did not name but who, obviously, was Danjuma. Danjuma, in turn sold it to Babangida who in turn sold it to Buhari but eventually took no part in its execution. The Israelis demanded $10 million for the job.

    It is not clear if the amount was paid but, as we all now know, their attempt to execute the job in broad daylight in front of Dikko’s house on the streets of London on July 4, 1984, failed and the Dikko Affair, as it was dubbed by the media, led to a break in diplomatic ties between Nigeria and Britain.

    Perhaps it was the trauma of being crated alive in the bungled kidnap attempt, but 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 aide, returned at various times to participate in Babangida’s long transition politics between 1985 and 1993.

    When he returned in the end and joined the political fray by eventually forming his own party, he made little impact. The long exile, it seemed, had taken the fire which made him perhaps the most powerful minister during the Second Republic out of his belly.

    For someone whose enemies liked to paint as one of Nigeria’s most corrupt politicians, Dikko died in relative poverty. The fact, however, was that even though he was a power freak, he never used it to amass wealth for himself, a fact which seemed apparent from his modest residence in Kaduna even during the height of his power.

    May Allah forgive his transgressions and reward his good deeds with aljanna firdaus.

     

     

     

     

  • The danger of the military tail wagging the civilian dog

    The danger of the military tail wagging the civilian dog

    In any civilian regime, which is what we’ve had since May 29, 1999, and certainly in a democracy, which our governments claim to be, the military, along with other security agencies, should be subordinate to the civilian authorities. The opposite, apparently, has increasingly become the case in our country; the military tail, it seems, has been the one wagging the civilian dog.

    Appearances can, of course, be deceptive. For the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Honourable Aminu Tambuwal, it seems, this appearance of the military dog wagging the civilian tail is deceptive. Welcoming members of the House on June 25 to the opening of its last legislative year before the next elections in 2015, he deplored what he referred to as the abuse of the military by the federal authorities to cow their perceived enemies in and out of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

    “When,” he said in his remarks, “the military becomes the preferred agency for clamping down on the media, for grounding aircraft and closure of airports and for forcibly restricting the freedoms of citizens, including elected officials…then there is a need for us to return to the drawing board of democratic governance.”

    Tambuwal has every reason to worry about this apparent abuse of the military – and, by extension, the other security services – by the federal authorities. Only two Monday’s ago he was, himself, a victim of such abuse when soldiers at a venue in Kaduna of a seminar on the conflict between Fulani herdsmen and farmers throughout the country, wantonly humiliated him by insisting on searching his convoy, including his vehicle, for arms! As speaker, Tambuwal has hardly endeared himself to the Executive arm for his independent mindedness.

    The speaker, as the country’s Number Four Citizen, may be the most prominent victim of this apparent use of the military by the authorities to harass and intimidate their enemies, real or perceived, but he is far from the only victim.

    Before him, as he observed in his remarks referred to, airports have been shut, aircraft grounded and governors’ movements curtailed by soldiers, “on orders from oga at the top,” in blatant and crude show of power against opposition elements.

    For sheer crudity in recent times, however, it’s difficult to tell among four episodes in the last two months and a fifth one last year, which would take the gold. The first was the recent crude attempt by the Federal Capital Territory Commissioner of Police, Joseph Mbu, to stop the “Bring back our Chibok girls” campaigners from their rallies in Abuja, citing the usual security concerns. In any decent society, his extra-judicial, if not downright illegal and unconstitutional ways at his previous command in Rivers State would have since earned him an ignominious sack, or at least a serious reprimand. Instead, he seems to enjoy the confidence of those in authority.

    To his eternal credit, his boss, Inspector-General of Police (IGP) Mohammed Abubakar quickly and bravely countermanded him through a press statement on June 3, which said the police never “issued any order banning peaceful assembly/protests anywhere in Nigeria.” It’s a miracle the IGP has not been sacked – yet. And, not surprisingly in a nation where officials know no shame from exposure for wrongdoing, the man is yet to resign over his well-deserved open rebuke by his boss.

    Early last month the soldiers exceeded themselves by taking on the press, making this the second candidate for the top prize for crude use of power. First on the night of June 5, they threw a cordon around the headquarters of Daily Trust in Jabi, Abuja. The following day they embarked on a nationwide seizure of newspapers, notably Trust itself, Leadership and The Nation, all three seen by the authorities as mouthpieces of enemies.

    As usual, the excuse again was national security. In a statement which read like your typical politician’s meaningless waffle, the army spokesman, Major-General Chris Olukolade, justified the raid and seizure of newspapers on the grounds that there had been “intelligence indicating movement of materials with grave implications across the country, using the channels of newsprint-related consignments.”

    In a more meaningful, but no more sensible, phraseology, Dr. Doyin Okupe, the President’s Senior Special Assistant on Public Affairs, said the security situation in the country demanded the soldiers did what they did. “If,” he told reporters in his office on June 7, “the collective security of a country is a risk, those charged with this responsibility have an onerous job of discharging it even if it is painful to some of us.”

    The government, he said in an act of living in blatant self-dial, would never engage or encourage any act “that will constitute an assault on any media organisation or infringe on Freedom of the Press.”

    From the look of things, what may have led to the attack on the press was the Daily Trust’s exclusive lead story of June 4, which exposed how the army shared some choice army land in Abuja among several of its top serving and retired top brass, their families and companies.

    Thirdly, last Saturday the soldiers barred 278 pilgrims for Umrah, the lesser Hajj, from boarding a chartered flight at the Maiduguri airport to Saudi Arabia. And in a separate incident on the same day, they also stopped Senator Mohammed Ali Ndume from taking a flight out of the airport.

    Both were for no apparent reason than a crude show of force. Not even the explanation of the charter company that it had proper prior authorisation, nor even the intervention of the Borno State Governor, Ibrahim Kashim Shettima, would make the soldiers budge from their instructions that the planes take off empty because they were, they said, acting on orders from above based on – no prize for guessing right – security reasons.

    The fourth episode this year was the arrest, late last month, of 486 Northerners in Abia State, reportedly on their way to Rivers State, by soldiers over suspicion that they were Boko Haram insurgents. The men, and a few women among them, were said to have been travelling in a convoy of over 30 buses.

    A convoy of even a dozen vehicles would be a scary sight even in peaceful times, let alone over 30 vehicles travelling at night in these perilous times. But we only have the army’s word that they were travelling in a convoy that long. This is an army whose leadership has, unfortunately, built itself a record of ethnic and religious profiling.

    Anyone who thinks it is unreasonable to be sceptical of this story should remember that hundreds of thousands of Nigerians travel in mini convoys daily across the North/South divide and it is not that difficult to detain enough of them at a spot over a short period to make it look like they are travelling in longer convoys. In any case, how does it make any sense that a group intent on invading a region would be so foolish to travel in a way that was bound to attract attention?

    At any rate, not a weapon was found in any of the vehicles and over 400 of the detainees have had to be released after nearly two weeks in detention following outcries from authorities in their states of origin.

    The last, but by no means the least, candidate in recent times for the top prize in the abuse of military power by the authorities was last September’s killings of civilians living in an uncompleted building in Apo, Abuja, by soldiers on the pretext that they were members of Boko Haram. A report last month by government’s own National Human Rights Commission, chaired by Prof. Chidi Odinkalu, following its public hearings on the case, has concluded that the eight civilians killed and the 11 injured were victims of extra-judicial murder and should be compensated.

    This appears to have overruled the earlier decision of the Senate investigation, which had absolved the army of extra-judicial killings even though the rather mealy-mouthed report of its joint National Security and Intelligence/Judicial, Human Rights and Legal Committee, upon which the Senate’s decision was based, described the dead and the injured as “victims of an hastily executed operation necessary to save Abuja from terrible attacks.” The joint committee was co-chaired by Senators Muhammadu Magoro and Umaru Dahiru.

    The army had claimed that it had only gone to the uncompleted building where the killings occurred to search and arrest a suspected Boko Haram kingpin who knew where in Apo cemetery arms to be used to attack some landmark places in Abuja had been buried. Unfortunately, it said, its troops were suddenly fired upon from the building and they had to return fire. Subsequent investigations belied this claim.

    Here it is instructive that the joint Senate committee did not table its report before the Senate weeks after it had completed its assignment. Speculations then were rife that it had failed to do so because of intense pressure from the presidency and the leadership of the Senate to absolve the army of any blame in order not to demoralise the troops.

    It is also instructive that the uncompleted building in question said to be the property of Mrs. Aduni Oluwole, the younger sister of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, was never destroyed, in keeping with the security agencies’ tradition of the wanton destruction of properties occupied by suspected terrorists, even when the owners have no idea who the occupants are or what they do.

    Nigerians should be worried, like the Speaker, Aminu Tambuwal, is, that the federal authorities seem too keen to use the military – and, by extension, other security forces – to harass and intimidate perceived enemies.

    We should all remember that it was such abuse about 50 years ago by politicians of the First Republic, which sucked the military into politics and a few years later made the tail stronger than the torso, with all the attendant dire consequences that we are still trying to overcome.

     

     

  • A president’s most embarrassing moment

    A president’s most embarrassing moment

    Last week, I promised that as soon as I am able to solve the problem of downloading texts from my phone into my laptop, I’ll reproduce some of the texts I’d received in reaction to my columns of the last several weeks, specifically those on the forthcoming governorship election in Ekiti State and my tribute to Dan Agbese, veteran journalist and co-founder of Newswatch, at 70.

    Today I am reproducing those texts, plus some on my obituary about the late Emir of Kano, Alhaji Ado Bayero, last week, even though I am unable to resolve my digital wahala. Instead I’ve had to type them from my phone. I felt compelled to produce the texts to quickly correct several rather egregious mistakes I made in the obituary.

    Before reproducing the texts, however, I thought I should devote at least half the column this morning to this not-so-small matter of a gentleman’s word being his honour.

    The reader will, I am sure, recall that two years ago, President Goodluck Jonathan gave us his word in a lengthy interview that made the cover of Tell newsmagazine (February 27, 2012) that by June, last year, no Nigerian would need the use of stand-by generators anymore. “I promise Nigerians,” he said in the interview, “we will stabilise power but if you ask me how many megawatts, I will not tell you.”

    However, even though he said he would not be drawn on specific targets, he assured Nigerians that electricity supply will be so stable those with generators will “dash” them to him.  “By the middle of next year,” he said, “you will ‘dash’ me your generator. I’ll send it out of this country because we won’t need it here anymore.”

    About a year and a half before the Tell interview, on August 26, 2010 to be exact, the president unfurled the roadmap of his power reform agenda. It targeted 14,000 megawatts by 2013 and 40,000 by 2020. At that time the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) was generating about 3,500, a far cry from the country’s demand in excess of 25,000 which itself fell far short of South Africa’s 40,000 with a population of 50 million, compared to ours which is more than triple.

    This month, it is one year since the president is supposed to have taken delivery of our supposedly superfluous standby generators and sent them out of the country. Yet it looks like, far from “dashing” him our generators, those who can afford them are indeed in need of more. And for those who can’t, there’s no light at the end of the dark tunnel they’ve been groping around in since the president unfurled his roadmap.

    Nothing could be more embarrassing to the president over his failure to deliver on his promise than what happened on this year’s Democracy Day on May 29 at the International Conference Centre, Abuja. The president had just climbed the podium to present a compendium of his achievements in the last one year to a select audience of youths at the night event when the lights went off. He stood waiting for nearly twenty minutes before the lights returned.

    Given the importance of adequate power supply for the growth of our economy, the president clearly has a lot of work to do to convince Nigerians that the recent rebasing of our GDP, which his administration would want Nigerians to celebrate, is nothing more than economic hallucination, to use the words reproduced below of one of my respondents.

    And now to the texts.

     

    As we crucify Nyako

     

    Sir, You will always defend anything NORTH, be it North Africa. It is now clear that you and your elites know these uncommon criminals. Be bold and courageous enough to present them for DIALOGUE. Note that I don’t like you but I love your grammar that’s why I read your article. Detach yourself from NORTHERN agenda and be nationalistic.

    +2348022740309.

     

    Sir, Why did you not ask your criminal brothers to accept the amnesty offered by the President? I am not surprised you supported  Nyako.

    +2348037168007.

     

    Sir, Please let’s join hands together and push this country ahead. Complains will never help us.

    +2347066583610.

     

    Sir, Why are you always rationalising things when it affects the  North? Stop being divisive and educate your brothers on how to live with others.

    +2348034059462.

     

    Sir, A dull president with crooks manning our security. What do you expect? We need new thinking, new blood.

    Zakka Mangut

    +2347018324878.

     

    Sir, Anytime I need an increase in my system of adrenalin or better still bile, I read your piece. Please go and negotiate with your brothers Boko Haram and leave our president alone. President Yar’adua never went to the creeks to negotiate with the criminal militants. It was the good people of Niger Delta who supported the president and called the boys to order. Call Nyako, go to Sambisa forest, talk to your murderous Shekau to end the killing. If not, he will finish all of you.

    +2348188515867.

     

    Sir, What Governor Nyako said about GEJ was true. The First Family is a circus. The security chiefs are jesters. The government is a comedy of idiotic errors. That’s what they are.

    Bashir I Wada.

    +2348080620712.

     

    Sir, Do help us tell Boko Haram that they are cowards. We the Niger Delta militants are, through this medium, challenging them to battle. We will not only kill them all, we will cook their flesh and eat every one of them like chicken.

    +2347054795500.

     

    Sir, The truth of the matter is that Muslims have been frightened into silence in this country. We all know that Nyako said the truth. See how Patience Jonathan was threatening Borno State governor.

    Alabi Tajudeen.

    +234 8055952747

     

    Rebasing our economy

    Sir, Excellent critique in your column of yesterday in The Nation on the maddening hallucination of our President and his so-called economic experts, first on the old debt relief of 2005 and now the laughable statistical “rebased GDP” which is part of the self-imposed image of a balloon nation.

    Professor Sam Oyovbaire.

     

    Dan Agbese at 70.

     

    Sir, I want to thank you for your beautiful piece on our Dan Agbese. I’ll always remember him for his article on the late Chief Awolowo prior to his last birthday in 1987. In that article Agbese eulogised the qualities and contributions of Chief Awolowo and wrote that he will be remembered as the best president Nigeria never had. The sage died a few weeks after the publication and the late Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu made the same statement thereafter. While Nigerians were crediting the statement to Chief Ojukwu, Dan Agbese was the author and originator of the statement.

    Adefemi Aribatise, Lagos.

    +2348028597775.

     

    Several of the respondents to my piece on Dan at 70 wanted to know where they could buy his books which I referred to. They should contact him on 08033218058 or through his email address, ochima44@yahoo.com.

     

    Ekiti governorship election

     

    Sir, You have just won the highest bid price for Project Kayode as contractor columnist. Please keep off paid job like this and do the real Haruna stuff you’re made of.

    +2348057716603

     

    Sir, What you describe as a formidable rigging machine is as much an APC thing. In case you don’t know, the growing perception in the Southwest today is that the APC is not exactly averse to the electoral infractions they are wont to charge the PDP with. This explains why the sympathy for Fayemi is not overwhelming.

    Kuteyi R. R. Ondo.

    +2348062549133.

     

    Sir, I am not from Ekiti but I am a strong advocate of the social policies imparting on lives of the people. Fayemi has just done that. May Almighty God never allow the likes of Fayose to ruin the good works. Ekiti should be ready to defend their votes bearing in mind that Fayose’s antics at rigging remains notorious.

    +2348036216991.

     

    The death of Ado Bayero

    Sir, Your Wednesday column of June 11 refers. 1. Sani Abacha Stadium in Kano is outside the city wall not inside as you stated. 2. Azare town is in Katagum Emirate not Bauchi and 3. You forgot to add that the emir was also Chancellor of UNIMAID at one time. Thank you.

    Prof. Yahaya Shehu.

     

    I stand corrected on all three counts. On the second count, Azare is indeed the capital of Katagum Emirate. In addition, Emir Muhammadu Inuwa, as many readers pointed out, was an uncle of Emir Muhammadu Sanusi and not his cousin, as I said.

    All the errors are regretted.

     

    Sir, In your Wednesday June 11, 2014, column you forgot to mention the Maitatsine saga in 1984.

    +2348058559098.

     

    Sir, With due respect, I wish to make this correction. Malam Ibrahim Shekarau’s father was a Chadian. He is Gwado-gwado not Babur as you mentioned in your piece.

    Habibu Hamisu Ibrahim

    +2348033262011.

     

     

  • The Emir is dead; long live The Emir

    The Emir is dead; long live The Emir

    I was a pupil in class seven in then Kukah Senior Primary School located between Sabon Gari, where we lived, and Fagge in Kano, when he became Emir of Kano on a beautiful clear day on October 22, 1963. The memory of his coronation at then Festival Stadium (now Sani Abacha Stadium) inside the city wall was etched in my mind because of the circumstances that surrounded his ascension to what, without doubt, was and probably remains the most powerful emirate in the North and one of the most powerful in Nigeria.

    Nominally, Kano Emirate has been number four in order of precedence after Sokoto, Borno and Gwandu. But with a population even back then of over 5.7 million, it was the most populous in the region. It was also easily the wealthiest, as reflected in its exports of ground nuts – remember its famous groundnut pyramids? – cotton and tobacco, worth nearly £18 million, according to Professor Alhaji Mahmud Yakubu in his 2006 book, Emirs and Politicians: Reform, Reactions and Recriminations in Northern Nigeria (1950-1966) . 

    The emirate’s wealth also reflected in the salary of its most powerful emir, Alhaji Muhammadu Sanusi, Alhaji Ado Bayero’s half brother and the grandfather of the new emir, Alhaji Sanusi Lamido Sanusi; Alhaji Muhammadu earned a then princely annual salary of £12,004, more than double the salary of the premier, Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardaunan Sokoto, at £4,800. He had succeeded his father, Alhaji Abdullahi, in January 1954, following the father’s death.

    The road leading to Alhaji Ado’s ascension in October 1963 began with the “abdication” of Alhaji Muhammadu on March 28 of the same year, following an administrative enquiry into the finances of the Native Authority (NA). As the most powerful emir in the region, the charismatic Alhaji Muhammadu, who also doubled as a leader of the Tijjaniya sect in West Africa, had a very close and cordial relationship with the premier. This, however, did not seem to have extended to the premier’s ministers and other subordinates who saw the emir as overbearing and arrogant.

    The opportunity for these disaffected subordinates of the premier itching to take the emir a peg down came when the salaries of the NA staff fell in arrears by a month early in 1963, something unheard of in those days. The NA applied for a loan from the regional government to tidy things over and was granted. But this led to tremendous pressure on the premier to probe the NA’s finances. Eventually he bowed and appointed Mr. David Joseph Mead Muffet, a Special Duties Officer in his office, to head the enquiry panel.

    Predictably, the panel found the emir guilty but he was allowed to “abdicate” on a pension to the sleepy town of Azare in Bauchi emirate. He eventually died on April 5, 1991 in Wudil, near Kano, where he had been allowed to relocate to by the first civilian governor of Kano State, the late radical politician, Alhaji Abubakar Rimi.

    Upon Alhaji Muhammadu’s abdication, he was succeeded by his cousin, Alhaji Muhammadu Inuwa, whom, in any case, the colonialists had preferred for the emirship when Alhaji Abdullahi died in 1954. The new emir reigned for only six short months. And so less than a year after we had gone as pupils of Kukah Primary School to witness the coronation of Alhaji Muhammadu Inuwa at the Festival Stadium, we trouped back again to witness that of Alhaji Ado.

    Before he became emir he had been elected a member of the Northern House of Assembly in 1954, one of the youngest. He resigned in 1957, the year I entered Tudun Wada Junior Primary School, and became Wakilin Doka, head of the Native Authority Police. At that time, two of my uncles, one of whom is still alive, were in the police. That, plus the frequent visits he often paid to a neighbourhood in Sabon Gari where he had friends, gave us a distant occasional glimpse of the dashing young prince destined to become one of the longest reigning traditional rulers in the country.

    As the story is often told, his ascension couldn’t have been more fortuitous; he had merely returned home from his station in Senegal as Nigeria’s ambassador on a condolence visit over the death of Alhaji Muhammadu Inuwa when he was reportedly told he had been chosen as the next emir.

    That ended his career as a diplomat and started one of the longest and most successful reigns of any traditional ruler in Nigeria. For, in the 51 odd years of his reign, Kano not only consolidated its status as the commercial capital of the North, it became the most cosmopolitan city in Nigeria, next to Lagos, the original capital of the country before the movement to Abuja. It could even be argued that under him Kano became even more cosmopolitan than Lagos because not even the country’s former political capital, and still its commercial capital, could boast of two civilian governors – Alhaji Sabo Bakin Zuwo, a Nupe, and Malam Ibrahim Shekarau, a Babur – and many more commissioners and senior public officers, who were first and second generation settlers in the city. Incidentally, Malam Ibrahim’s father, Shekarau, was a chief inspector in the NA police at the time Alhaji Ado became Wakilin Doka.

    Naturally, his reign was not without its moments of crises, the most serious of which was the mass killings of Igbos, which started in Kano and spread to other parts of the North in 1967, riots that eventually led to the country’s civil war which ended in 1970 after three years. It must have been a truly trying moment for the emir, some of whose closest friends were Igbos, most notably Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, then a brigade commander in the city.

    It took the uncommon courage of the emir, along with Colonel Muhammed Shuwa, who had led a group of officers, to confront the mutinous soldiers in the barracks to bring an end to the riots; initially the soldiers had refused to disarm after they had been rounded up from the township into the barracks and ordered by Shuwa to disarm. It is not hard to imagine the carnage that would have occurred if the soldiers had stuck to their guns.

    Again in 1981, a political confrontation with Governor Abubakar Rimi led to widespread riots as a result of which the governor restricted the traditional homage paid to the emir by his village and district heads for a long while. In 1984, the military regime of General Muhammadu Buhari imposed a travel ban on him and his close friend and confidant, the Ooni of Ife, Oba Okunade Sijuwade, for travelling to Israel at a time Nigeria had no diplomatic relations with the country.

    More recently the emir had faced at least three assassination attempts, the most serious of which almost succeeded but for one of his body guards who took the bullets in his attempt to shield his master. This was in the January 13, 2013, attack on his convoy by elements suspected to be members of Boko Haram, of whom he had been highly critical.

    The emir faced all the crises stoically and survived all the assassination attempts to live to the grand old age of 83.

    As one of the most powerful and longest reigning traditional rulers in Nigeria, he served the country in various capacities, among which were as chancellor, first, of University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and then of University of Ibadan.

    His death in the early hours of Friday June 6, came as a great shock to Nigerians, especially as he had just returned from a medical trip abroad and had held court shortly after to receive homage from his chiefs and well wishers. He has left behind a worthy legacy that will keep his name alive for a long, long time, if not for ever.

    May Allah forgive his mistakes, reward his exertions and grant him aljanna firdaus.

    And may his grand nephew, Alhaji Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, who has succeeded him, live long enough and be guided by Allah to take the tumbin giwa to even greater heights as one of the most accommodating cities not only in Nigeria but in the world.

     

  • Why Ekiti 2014 is important to Nigeria 2015

    Why Ekiti 2014 is important to Nigeria 2015

    Regular readers of this column may recall that several months ago I announced that reactions to this column should be no more than 300 words to have any chance of getting published in the column. I am sorry I am breaking the rule so soon, but I believe the significance of credible elections in Ekiti and Osun raised by the author and the clarity of his thinking justifies breaking the rule. I should, however, declare that the author, Chief Emenike, a veteran journalist, publisher and politician, is also a close friend.

    Next week, God willing, I will publish some of the other reactions to my article.       By Ikechi Emenike

    Ace columnist Mohammed Haruna’s piece on Governor Kayode Fayemi’s chances at this month’s polls in Ekiti State provokes a closer look at the man’s inner motivation for seeking another shot at the Government House. How does Dr Fayemi view the essence of his mandate? What does it mean to serve the people?

    Anyone in doubt about the meaning of “service to the people” should visit Ekiti State and engage any of the 25,000 beneficiaries of the social security scheme for the elderly. Every month, each senior citizen (over 65 years old) of this small South-western state receives a stipend of N5,000 from the state coffers to help cope with the ravages of old age.

    Token though it may appear, the stipend is a life-saver for many senior citizens cut off from the state-run pension scheme, having not been on the public sector’s payroll in their more productive years. They all have Dr Kayode Fayemi, who only received the keys to the governor’s office less than four years ago after a protracted, bitter fight to reclaim a stolen mandate, to thank. The social security scheme is only one of Fayemi’s practical demonstrations that governance is about touching people’s lives. “Remove service to the people from my mandate and I would humbly tell you that I have no business in politics” is one of his insightful statements.

    Now the man who eminent academic, Prof. Akin Oyebode, says has done virtually all he promised before the last election is asking for another term, to ring-fence, as it were, his people-driven programmes and make them the norm in Ekiti State. Any visitor to Ekiti today would attest that the people are eager to, with their votes, demand for four more years of Fayemi. The billion naira question, however, is: will Nigeria’s now thoroughly discredited electoral system redeem itself and allow the people’s will to prevail? I shall return to this vexed question shortly.

    A practised strategist, Fayemi has approached the House of Assembly to back up the social security scheme by ‘locking in’ the benefits for the people by law, much like the UK’s National Welfare Scheme which has remained untouchable since 1945 in spite of numerous efforts to scale it back or scrap it outright.

    He is a campaigner for the sustainability of sound projects. His administration has assiduously worked to clear the backlog of projects it met and in so doing, completed many road projects that were only 20 per cent done when Fayemi took the reins of power. He would be the first in the state’s 18 years of existence to treat government and governance as a continuum. “Government projects”, he says, “shouldn’t be considered personal projects”, which many an egotistical leader believe they are.

    Dr Fayemi’s solid record as a civil society activist and board member of such organisations as the Open Society, Justice Society and Baobab for Women’s Rights would not permit him to be less alive to the people’s cause. The scholar in him blended with the street activist in the troubled days of the Abacha dictatorship. Fighting on the side of the people, Dr Fayemi was instrumental to the success of the opposition’s soft weapons of communication, such as Radio Freedom/Radio Kudirat that exposed the junta for the callous power usurper that it was. His encounter with such pan-Africanist leaders as Ethiopia’s the late Meles Zenawi impressed in him the moral imperative of leadership of service and people-driven development agenda.

    When Dr Fayemi prioritised the upgrading of infrastructure, education, agriculture, gender sensitivity, the social sector and governance in his eight-point agenda for Ekiti’s development, he was merely building pro-people policies like his mentors did, the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo included. He is on record as the first governor to endorse the Freedom of Information Bill and the first to publicly declare his assets alongside his late deputy. All these he did while maintaining an open-door policy, meeting the people on their turfs and welcoming dissenting voices with his now familiar gap-toothed smile.

    Will the people of Ekiti remember Dr Fayemi come June 21 when they return to the polls?

    Methinks they will, just as they have imprinted in their minds, the N5,000 stipend for elders; the N10,000 allowance for the 5,000-strong Ekiti Volunteer Corps members; the Samsung Centre established to promote ICT in the state; the enhanced pay/allowances for teachers in rural areas and how this has helped to lift the state’s school certificate success rate from 22 to 70 per cent; the YCAD programme that engages some 20,000 youths in viable commercial farming…The list is endless. Even his main rivals agree that he has performed, just as they shamelessly think up other means to ensure the people’s will does not prevail.  One says that whatever Fayemi has achieved would not count in the elections, proclaiming that “we must remove him”.  He is relying on thuggery and rigging.   Another simply snapped: “So what?” But that one’s ship is sinking.

    Try as they may, it is hard to see how the people of the Land of Honour will not queue behind a man who has been so faithful to his promises, come June 21.  While Fayemi speaks of and works towards a future of transparency, good governance and prosperity, Ayo Fayose evokes retrogression, a fall-back to the bad old days of brigandagethe intelligent citizens of Ekiti would rather forget. In a sense, Ekiti 2014 may indeed turn out to be a contest between the past and the future.

    Regrettably, in these climes things are not as straight-forward as they should be. I now return to the question of the fairness of our electoral umpire.

    Last week, in devoting his popular column to the forthcoming Ekiti general election, Haruna posited that given his antecedent, Governor John Kayode Fayemi should ordinarily secure his second term quite easily.   Like earlier commentators, the veteran journalist is worried about the role of INEC. He joined several other previous commentators to urge INEC to use electronic card reader for the election both in Ekiti this June and Osun in August. None of the parties is objecting (at least publicly) to the use of this device that is meant to weed out ghost voters and ensure transparency and fairness in the elections. The commission stands to lose nothing if it bends to this consensual demand.  To say the least, INEC’s silence on this popular clamour is very worrisome.

    INEC Chairman Prof. Attahiru Jega needs the Ekiti and Osun elections more than he is willing to admit. He came to office with so much goodwill following the woeful performance of his predecessor, Prof. Maurice Iwu.  Four years into his tenure, he has virtually dissipated that goodwill on the platter of shoddy performance.  He wobbled during the 2011 general elections, fumbled with the Ondo general elections and failed in the Anambra polls.  At each turn, he presents bags of excuses even as he promises to umpire a better 2015 general elections.  But any discerning observer would note that Jega’s voice is no longer as firm as it once was.

    Fortunately, Ekiti provides a unique opportunity to begin a sorely needed redemption.  If the electronic card-reader, as all stakeholders demand will assist INEC, prudence demands that it should be adopted.

    It is also important for the INEC chairman to put aside his three-piece designer gowns for a workman’s gear and personally deliver on Ekiti.  That is called leadership by example. His mere presence would check some of his recalcitrant and venal officers and place him smack at the centre of the action.   Since 1999, INEC has been unable to deal with recurring complaints about shoddy distribution of electoral materials. The worst case was in the recent Anambra governorship election where materials meant for some local governments simply developed wings.

    Jega would be well-served to lead a team of his top 16 commissioners to Ekiti and assign to each a local government for the purpose of distributing materials while the chairman himself takes charge of the central distribution centre in Ado-Ekiti and does the hand-over to the electoral commissioners personally and publicly, starting from 6am prompt. The process of distributing these materials should be broadcast live to enhance the credibility of the process and secure authentic real-time documentation of events, which may aid future forensic analyses. That done, electoral officers across the country and other stakeholders in Nigeria’s election processes will watch and learn from the boss how sensitive electoral materials are to be handled.  Well executed, Ekiti 2014 will cause Nigerians to be less cynical about the conduct of the 2015 general elections.

     

  • Ekiti governorship election: a likely shoo-in for Fayemi

    Ekiti governorship election: a likely shoo-in for Fayemi

    Its motto is “Land of Honour.” It might as well have called itself “Land of Intellectuals” instead, and it would not have been amiss; it holds the record as the state that has produced the largest number of doctorates and professors in Nigeria, notably, Professors Jacob Festus Ade-Ajayi, Nigeria’s leading living Historian who celebrated his 85th birthday on Monday, Niyi Osundare, a literary giant and ace columnist, and the late Sam Aluko, the radical-conservative (never mind the oxymoron) economist who was the brain behind the economic policies of Chief Obafemi Awolowo as Premier of Western Nigeria.

    For a state which prides itself as the most bookish in Nigeria, it is an irony that one of the accusations the governor of the state, Dr John Kayode Fayemi, has had to fend off in his campaign for the forthcoming governorship election in the state on June 21 is that he is too bookish. Perhaps it is a reflection of the quality of the opposition candidates. Perhaps it is a reflection of their level of desperation, considering the almost certainty that Fayemi will retain his job in a free and fair election. The fact, however, is that the integrity and soundness of his academic background as a holder of a doctorate degree – unlike that of you-know-who – has been made to look like an albatross rather than the virtue that it is.

    “I am an academic,” he said somewhat defensively in a newspaper interview the other day, “but I am also a politician; I am not an Ivory Tower academic. I am on the streets.” (The Nation, May 19).

    Anyone who has been to Ekiti State since the man was sworn in as governor on October 16, 2010, following a three-and-half-year legal battle over the outcome of the April, 2007, governorship election in which Chief Segun Oni, the candidate of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, was declared winner, will testify to the fact that Fayemi has truly been on the streets changing the fortunes of the people of the state for the better.

    “I always,” he said in the interview in question, “ask anybody who raises this type of questions to do two things: read my inaugural speech on October 16, 2010 and mark paragraph by paragraph what I said I was going to do that I have not done in office.”

    Ekiti, created out of the old Ondo State by military head of state, General Sani Abacha, on October 1, 1996, is one of the smallest in the country by size (2,543 square metres and 31st  out of 36 states) and by population (2,737,186 million and 29th out of 36). In terms of the much depended upon revenue allocation to states from the centre, Ekiti is also near the bottom; it receives an average of N3 billion monthly compared to, say, Bayelsa which was created out of the old Rivers State in the same year and is bigger in size (8,158 square metres) but smaller in population (1,998,349) and collects 24 billion a month on average.

    For a state with such a meagre revenue allocation it is a miracle that Fayemi had been able to achieve most of what he promised nearly four years ago, especially in the areas of education, infrastructural development and social security. Part of his secret is that he is one of the most urbane and cosmopolitan politicians in the land, virtues he apparently cultivated during his self-exile under General Abacha’s five-year rule.

    As governor he seems to have used those virtues to attract sizeable grants from abroad to build the infrastructure that were so much lacking in the state before he took charge.

    The other half of his secret is that he has been able to raise money from the capital market to deliver on his promises. For opposition candidates, this is not a good thing and they could be right; only in this case they aren’t.

    The leading opposition candidate, Chief Peter Ayodele Fayose, for example, has condemned Fayemi for putting the state in debt, among his other alleged crimes against its good people. “Fayemi,” the New Telegraph (May 15) quoted him as saying, “has destroyed education, put Ekiti in debt, impoverished Ekiti people through capital flight. Nobody really wants to return APC (Fayemi’s All Progressives Congress) to power in this state. APC is like leprosy to the people.”

    Ekiti may be in debt but in making his charge against Fayemi, Fayose obviously conveniently ignored the purpose of the debts and to ask whether their costs have been more than their benefits. Debts, as the Peoples Democratic Party governorship candidate knows all too well, are bad only if, as is all too often the case in Nigeria, they are incurred only to be stolen or mismanaged rather than invested wisely and efficiently. So far, no opposition candidate, not even Fayose, has accused Fayemi of kleptomania.

    In any case Fayose is hardly in a position morally to accuse anyone of such a crime. After all, it was allegations of corruption against him which seemed credible that led to his impeachment by his state House of Assembly in which more than half the members belonged to his own party. This was the impeachment that led to the crisis which, in turn, provided President Olusegun Obasanjo with an excuse to impose his constitutionally dubious emergency rule on the state in October, 2006.

    It is doubtful that the good people of Ekiti State would want a return to those locust years under Fayose and his PDP, a party he himself had called some of the nastiest names and even left to contest unsuccessfully for a senate seat on the platform of the Labour Party in 2007, following his terrible encounter with Obasanjo. Here it is instructive that only two weeks ago or so, the majority leader of the Ekiti House of Assembly under his administration and the commissioner of land under Segun Oni’s subsequent PDP administration, Mr Kayode Babade, defected from the party to APC.

    Apart from Fayose, the only other credible opposition to Fayemi is his estranged friend and former APC compatriot and member of the House of Representatives, Chief Michael Opeyemi Bamidele. Bamidele eventually left after his apparent wish to take over from Fayemi after only one term was spurned in December, 2012, by his political bosses, including Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu whose government he had served in as a commissioner, the elderly Chief Bisi Akande, a former governor of Osun State and acting chairman of APC and, before then, chair of Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), and Chief Niyi Adebayo, a former governor of Ekiti. In reaction he rejected their pleas to remain in APC and instead left to join the Labour Party.

    Personal ambition is hardly a vice in itself. However, it is hardly enough to persuade an electorate to change horses even after crossing the stream, in a manner of speaking. As Fayemi asked rhetorically in an answer to a question by editors of Tell in an interview in its edition of November 11, 2013, concerning his estrangement from his friend and compatriot, “What is it that we promised that we are not doing? What is in the manifesto of our party that is not being implemented in Ekiti?”

    As with Fayose, it is also here instructive that when Bamidele left APC, not a single local government chairman of the party was known to have followed him to his new party.

    Clearly, the most serious obstacle to Fayemi retaining his job from June 21 is the PDP’s formidable rigging machine, which threw out Chief Adebayo from the Government House, Ado-Ekiti and installed Fayose there in 2003, and Oni in 2007. And in what sounded like the party’s willingness to crank up this machine, Vice-President Namadi Sambo, during a rally in Ekiti in support of its governorship candidate last month, equated Ekiti and the neighbouring Osun with “war fronts” which the PDP must “capture” in the governorship elections coming up in the two APC states in June and August respectively.

    Hopefully, the vice-president’s words were no more than the usual hyperbole of an over-excited politician on the stump. However, in case it is, the best, if not the only, way to avert a “war” in those states is for the Independent National Electoral Commission to use the Voters Card Reader machine as the best guarantee of free and fair elections. At any rate, it is safer not to take any chances.

    So far INEC seems reluctant to use the machines before the general elections next year. The vice-president’s unfortunate words which he probably never meant, given his mild nature, has now made it incumbent for INEC to use those machines. With the limited number that will be required, the commission has enough time to deploy them. Indeed, INEC should seize this as an opportunity to test run them.

    It is only if it does so that it will help remove any excuse for Fayemi and Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, the Osun governor, to cause havoc in their states should they lose their jobs in June and August because everybody would’ve seen that the elections had been free and fair.

     

  • An illustrious wordsmith at 70

    An illustrious wordsmith at 70

    Yesterday, one of Nigeria’s most accomplished journalists and wordsmiths, Daniel Ochima Agbese, clocked 70. He was born on May 20, 1944 into Agila royalty in Okpowu Local Government of Benue State. It speaks volumes of the man’s character that few of his acquaintances,  and proportionately fewer still of the millions of readers he must have gathered in his long and illustrious – but hardly materially rewarding – career as a columnist, journalist and author, ever knew he was a prince. All his life he’d always referred to himself as simply Mister, apparently because he did not suffer from the superiority complex of your typical Nigerian Big Man.

    Yet Dan, as those on a first name basis with him call him, had sufficient virtues to make him feel proud and superior to most Nigerians. To begin with, God gave him a good head and a way with words. This was obvious from his academic career which begun in earnest when he returned to the classroom in 1970 after a three-year teaching career followed by another year as a library assistant and ending with a four-year stint as a staff writer with the New Nigerian during its heydays in the late sixties.  Before all this he had attended Government Teachers Training College, Keffi, between 1960 and 1962.

    It was as a staff writer under the tutelage of Malam Adamu Ciroma, the first indigenous editor of the New Nigerian and the creator and principal author of the famous humour columnist, the anonymous Candido, that Dan left to pursue a degree in Journalism at the University of Lagos (UNILAG), the second university in the country after the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), to establish a degree course in the profession.

    At UNILAG, Dan became a prize winning student and, upon graduation in 1973, earned himself a second class upper division. That, in combination with a three-year stint as the chief sub-editor of the Nigeria Standard, then published by the then Benue-Plateau State, must have earned him a place in 1976/77 to do a Masters degree at probably the best Journalism school in the world and custodian of the most prestigious journalism awards world-wide (The Pulitzer) – the Graduate School of Journalism of Columbia University, New York City.

    As with UNILAG so it was with Columbia; there he became the best of the 16 international students in the class and among the best of its entire 160 students.

    Dan’s fascination with and love of the written word probably dated back to his days as a library assistance – possibly before. His move from there to the New Nigerian seemed then natural enough; after all, the written word is the principal commodity of both.

    Once he returned to class to read journalism it seemed he had made up his mind to stick with it as his life-time career and forget about being a librarian. However, as the man himself said in an interview with the newsmagazine Verbatim (October 21, 2013) which looks like an offshoot of the defunct (?) Newswatch he co-founded in 1985 with the late Dele Giwa, Ray Ekpu and Yakubu Mohammed – all three of them among the country’s best and brightest journalists and columnists – he developed second thoughts about remaining a journalist after graduation while still a student at Columbia.

    “Actually as far back as 1977, when I was in graduate school in the US,” he said, “I didn’t think I was returning to journalism, I thought I was going into book publishing. This was because I had had a long association with book publishing from the period of my youth service in 1973/1974. I was a reader for Heinemann educational books in Ibadan, and so I picked up a lot of interest in writing books. And I had hoped that if I returned I would set up a book publishing company, but it didn’t work out that way.”

    As things turned out, Dan stuck to Journalism. However, even though he did not become a book publisher, he wrote several of them. Indeed he wrote enough to make him the most prolific author among Nigerian journalists since time.

    So far the man has six books to his credit, three of them (The Reporter’s Companion, The Columnist’s CompanionandStyle: A Guide to Good Writing), practical guides to Journalism that should be compulsory reading in all our Journalism schools, one (Nigeria, Their Nigeria), a satirical dig at Nigerians and their country after the fashion of that famous evergreen, How to be a Nigerian, by Peter Enahoro, whose editorship of a national newspaper at 26 in the early sixties remains unbeaten, and two (Fellow Nigerians: Turning Points in the Political History of Nigeria and IBRAHIM BABANGIDA: The Military, Politics and Power in Nigeria, to date, the most authoritative and most definitive biography of General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, the man whose eight-year military rule has re-defined the country’s political economy like no other before and after him) on Nigeria’s politics.

    Dan has also edited three books, Newswatch Conversation With Babangida, The Energy Crisis in Nigeria andIn the Service of My Country: Selected Speeches of Abdullahi Adamu, the two-term civilian governor of Nasarawa State.

    All books are a reader’s delight for their readability, insight, humour and precision. Take, for instance, his virtue of readability. Dan began Chapter Two of the book with a quote from Jim Rohn, the late American entrepreneur, author and motivational speaker. “Learn to express, not to impress,” he quoted Rohn as saying. Dan kept faith with the motivational speaker in all his books and columns; he never wrote to impress anyone. Instead, he used everyday words, used concrete words instead of the abstract, used simple rather than convoluted sentence structure, etc. In short, the man was a stickler for all the rules in the manuals on how to write well.

    Five years after Newswatch came out, the company decided to compile its house style. “I was,” he said, “assigned the task. I still don’t know why.” This wasn’t false modesty; all his three colleagues were good to write the house style. But then even the most casual reader of the man could see why; of all the magazine’s four co-founders, he was the most experienced, and arguably the most expressive, writer.

    Take for another example, his virtue of humour, one of the several tools he listed in The Columnist’s Companion as useful, even necessary, for effective punditry. In  his preface to The Reporter’s Companion which he dedicated to his first daughter, Aje-Ori, who had paid the ultimate tribute to her father by going one better in taking a doctorate degree in Mass Communication and teaching it at a university abroad, he said he had intended it to be a guide for sound editorial judgement for editors. “More or less midstream,” he said, “I changed horses – for the love of reporters. This book is evidence that you can change horses midstream.”

    Obviously all those Peoples Democratic Party chieftains, most notably Chief Bode George and Dr Amadu Ali, who told Nigerians in the heat of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s Third Term campaign in 2005 that it would be disastrous for Nigerians to change horses midstream never read Dan’s book.

    Again in his introduction to Style, which took him ten years to write, he said he missed several deadlines which he could not explain. “Several deadlines,” he said, “were given for the completion of the style book. All of them were breached…Well, if you wait long enough for a miracle it always happens. So there.” It’s hard to beat such self-deprecating sense of humour as a tool for effective writing.

    Among Dan’s virtues were not only his good head and a way with the written word. The man also possessed the courage of his convictions and a diligence for accuracy, balance and fairness in pursuing news stories. I saw these and other virtues first hand as his deputy when he edited New Nigerian between 1982 and 1984.

    Before him I had acted as the editor for 11 eleven months. I was denied confirmation because the management and chieftains of the ruling National Party of Nigeria said I was too headstrong. Instead, Dan was brought in as editor at the time he was the Director of Information in Benue State, then also ruled by the NPN.

    Clearly there was politics in his appointment but it was an appointment no one, certainly not I, could quarrel with; Dan was older and much more experienced as a journalist than me by the time he was appointed.

    Four years after his appointment, if those in authority thought they had a lapdog for an editor it became obvious to them that they made a great misjudgement. Day in day out Dan published stories and ran editorials that they found uncomfortable. When he was not running such awkward stories he was rejecting stories the authorities tried to foist on him that were clearly more public relations than news.

     

     

  • Rebasing our GDP and the Paris Club debt relief

    Rebasing our GDP and the Paris Club debt relief

    When our economy was rebased on April 6 making it the largest in Africa, ahead of South Africa’s, the continent’s erstwhile Number One, there was celebration in Abuja, albeit not as loud as that nearly nine years ago over the Paris Club debt relief.

    Then, President Olusegun Obasanjo made a special national broadcast on June 30 in which he expressed “great joy” at the announcement by the Paris Club of an “offer in principle” of relief from the debts the country owed it. At that time we were said to owe the club $30.515 billion. It said it would forgive $18 billion provided we paid $12, half in July 2002, the rest by the year’s end. In addition we were also expected to fulfil the terms of a supposedly autonomous Policy Support Instrument (PSI) but which, for all practical purposes, was the World Bank’s infamous Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) in all but name.

    The next day all the national media hailed the announcement as one of the country’s greatest achievements, if not the greatest. Many Nigerians fell over themselves in congratulating the president for what they said was his historic achievement. Some even exceeded themselves by dubbing him the father of Nigeria’s new independence, after the first from our colonial masters in 1960. The president himself, apparently overjoyed by the deal, told representatives of the Organised Private Sector who went to the Presidential Villa to congratulate him that the relief “will remove the burden of debt on Nigerians today and in the future.”

    Those who were sceptical that the announcement was truly a cause for “great joy” were dismissed as inconsequential spoilsports, even killjoys. In a reply to critics of the onerous conditionalities of the relief in a widely published article in July, an apparently angry Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the minister of finance who was central to securing the relief, said it was a fact and whether the “tiny minority (of sceptics) likes it or not, Nigeria will make use of this change.”

    A less charitable Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the suspended governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, then the managing director of First Bank, writing in support of the minister said those unhappy with the terms of the relief were the much pilloried “Babangida Boys.” Nigeria, he said, should fulfil the terms of the relief “even it means emptying the reserve before the locusts return for a second helping.” His “locusts” were obviously the “Babangida Boys”.

    A more subdued Dr Mansur Mukhtar, then director-general of the Debt Management Office (DMO) and a key player in securing the relief, writing in Thisday (July 30, 2005) also in support of the finance minister, said it made good economic sense to use our reserves to “secure a permanent exit from the debt trap.”

    On October 25, 2005, President Obasanjo made another broadcast on the relief when it went from being a mere offer in principle to a virtual reality. His broadcast was against the background of the earlier loss of his wife, Stella, and an air crash which claimed many lives. Still, he said, Nigeria had cause to celebrate its freedom from its debt, even if the celebration was to be subdued.

    Nearly nine years on, it is now obvious that the heady official self-congratulations in 2005 over the Paris Club debt relief were not as justified as its enthusiasts tried to make it. Certainly the promise they said it held for the prospects of a brighter Nigerian economy has not been fulfilled. Instead we seem headed for another debt trap, possibly worse.

    That we are headed back into the debt trap is obvious from an interview with the director-general of the DMO, Dr. Abraham Nwankwo, published in the Nigerian Tribune of December 27, 2012. In that interview he said our debt stock as at September that year was $12.5 billion, $6.2 external, the rest internal. His projections for the external debts were $12.16 for 2013, $14.58 billion for 2014 and $17.76 billion for 2015. For the domestic debts he projected $7.12 for 2013, $7.79 for 2014 and $8.44 for 2015.

    Both Dr Nwankwo and his boss, the finance minister, say there is no cause for concern that we will return to the old debt trap, on present reckoning. Indeed, our chief debt manager last year told Leadership (October 6, 2013) that the country “is under-borrowing.”

    Perhaps so. But then this was precisely what we were told the first time we were dragged, kicking and screaming, into taking our first jumbo loan under General Obasanjo as military head of state in the late seventies. Look where it eventually landed us.

    More importantly, the lot of the vast majority Nigerians has only got progressively worse since 2005, not better. This much is obvious from the figures from our National Bureau of Statistics, which showed that the country’s poverty incidence worsened from 54.4% in 2004 to 71.5% in 2011. In absolute numbers, this was from 69 million to 120 million. More likely than not matters have only got worse since then, considering the pervasive insecurity in the land alone.

    The obvious big lesson in all this is that our government, like most governments the world over – but more so in our case – has become more concerned with public relations than with substance. In other words our government had become more concerned with pleasing and impressing outsiders and a charmed circle of a few insiders than in making the ordinary Nigerian happy and satisfied.

    The official response to the rebasing of our economy last month clearly shows that this lesson has not been learnt. From the president and the finance minister down to supporters of the administration, it seems to have been celebrations galore, albeit more subdued than those of the debt relief.

    In a short statement on his Facebook wall the day after the rebasing, our president, for example, called it a “feat” collectively achieved by Nigerians which should be celebrated. The revision of the size of our economy may not be mere trickery, as The Economist said in an editorial in its edition of April 12. But it truly beggars belief that our president, who holds a doctorate degree in a science subject, would call a mere statistical recalculation to get the true size of our economy an economic feat worth celebrating by Nigerians, if not by himself personally.

    “While this calls for celebration,” the president said on his Facebook wall, “I personally cannot celebrate until all Nigerians can feel the positive impact of our growth. There are still too many of our citizens living in poverty.”

    That his reason for personally abjuring any celebrations was not sincere soon became evident when he rejected the latest World Bank report which classified Nigeria as an extremely poor country, along with China, India, Bangladesh and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

    This was during his speech at this year’s Workers’ Day parade on May 1st at Eagle Square in Abuja. Nigeria, he said, was not poor because it has produced Alhaji Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, and it could also boast of the largest number of Africans with private jets! Clearly this was a sharp contradiction of his Facebook statement that there were too many poor Nigerians for him to celebrate the country’s new Number One status on the continent.

    Our finance minister, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, must have been thoroughly embarrassed by her boss’s incredible definition of poverty as a development economist. She had, indeed, agreed with her erstwhile employers – she’s been on sabbatical of sorts from her job as managing director of the World Bank – when she said “Most middle-income countries including Brazil have large numbers of poor people. That is the reality of today and Nigeria is no exception.”

    Even then she seemed to share in a not-so-obvious way the president’s belief that the rebasing of our economy is worth celebrating. The rebasing, she said at a workshop on “A Reflection of Nigeria GDP Rebasing: Issues, Facts and Fiction” organised by Kukah Centre in collaboration with her ministry in Abuja, “was neither done for optimism nor for pessimism nor cynicism and I find it quite astonishing that people are commenting on this.”

    Her full remarks left no one in doubt that she was unhappy with widespread cynicism about the exercise. Yet she should know that if many people read politics into the exercise, her boss, more than anyone, was to blame because of the not-too-subtle way he tried to make political mileage out of it.

    Nigeria may have overtaken South Africa as the continent’s Number One economy. But as The Economist editorial in question said, it still has a lot to do if it is not to remain a giant with feet of clay. Nigeria, the magazine said, has to, among other things, tackle corruption, produce more electricity, transform the country’s dilapidated infrastructure and, above all, tackle unemployment.

    The record of this administration on all these counts remains abysmal. So far it has not demonstrated any will to put that record behind it. Instead it seems determined to rely on ethnic and religious emotions to return to power in 2015.

    Rebasing the country’s Gross Domestic Production will not make any difference to the country’s status as a poor country if President Jonathan succeeds in returning to power by appealing to emotions rather than by proving to Nigerians that his transformation agenda is no longer the mere sloganeering that it has been since 2011.

     

  • As we crucify Nyako…

    As we crucify Nyako…

    Retired Admiral Murtala Nyako has been reaping the whirlwind for sowing the wind of controversy by his recent claim that President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration has been hiding under war against Boko Haram to commit genocide against the North. He made his claim in a letter dated April 16 to his 18 counterparts in the Northern States’ Governors’ Forum. The letter, entitled: “On-going full-scale genocide in Northern Nigeria,” sought the support of his counterparts to stop the alleged genocide.

    Instead of support, Nyako, a former Deputy Chief of Defence Staff, a former Navy chief, first military governor of Niger State and currently serving out his second term as a civilian governor of his native Adamawa State, has been suffering from splendid isolation – indeed, worse.

    The chairman of the NSGF, Dr Muazu Babangida Aliyu, has dismissed his claim as baseless. Another governor, Abia’s Theodore Orji, has said there was “unanimous condemnation of the memo” by the expanded security meeting of governors, service chiefs and other senior government officials summoned by the president last week. Not least of all, virtually all his colleagues have maintained an apparently embarrassed silence over his call for their support.

    Probably the harshest criticism of the governor, however, has been Senate President David Mark’s brief but strongly worded opening remarks at the resumption of the Upper Chambers on April 29. Mark, speaking against the background of the suspected Boko Haram Easter bombing of the Nyanya motor park on the outskirts of Abuja which claimed many lives and the kidnapping of over 200 secondary school girls from Chibok in Borno State, did not name names. But when he said speaking along partisan lines over the fight against Boko Haram is “condemnable and totally unacceptable” and that “We should not sell the truth to serve the hour,” it was pretty obvious who he had in mind.

    Outside government circles, there has been a near universal condemnation of the governor by the newspaper commentariat. For example, The Nation (April 24) condemned his letter as “divisive and opportunistic.” Sunday Trust (April 27) denounced his stance as “dangerous” while The Guardian (May 5) said his language “was indecorous and inappropriate” for his high office. It also dismissed his assertions as “wild and unguarded,” without the backing of any evidence.

    As for the country’s leading newspaper pundits, as far as I know, only Adamu Adamu, the must-read Friday columnist of Daily Trust, has so far written to unequivocally support the governor in a two-part piece on April 25 and  May 2.

    I completely share the sentiments of those who have condemned Nyako’s use of such gutter language as “bullshit” and strong words like “evil-minded” in his letter to describe the presidency, even if it fits the description. As The Guardian said, certain language usages are simply unbecoming of certain office holders.

    I also completely agree with the newspaper that, in so far as the governor’s frustration with the Federal Government’s  obvious mishandling of the Boko Haram insurgency is understandable, his letter should have been addressed to Nigerians instead of only to his “fellow Governors and Citizens of the North.” The theatre of Boko Haram’s terrorism may be the North, more specifically the North-East, but the scourge has since transmogrified into a Nigerian problem which has claimed the lives and limbs of Nigerians from all parts of the country.

    However, while we condemn the governor for his language, sensationalism and sectionalism, we must accept that his allegations are not completely baseless.

    First, there was this online interview Sunday Trust had with Jomo Gbomo, the spokesman of the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND) nearly five years ago and which the newspaper published in its edition of June 21, 2009. In the half-page interview, Gbomo threatened MEND would extend its war from the creeks to the North. “Due to the fact that the (Northern) elite,” he said, “are taking us for fools and the majority of soldiers (fighting us are) from the North, the time has come when brothers have to go to war. In the end there will be mutual respect and true federalism will be mutually beneficial to all of us.”

    In the end, Gbomo’s war against the North did not materialise because President Umaru Yar’adua, a Northern aristocrat if ever there was one, anticipated it through a policy of amnesty for the militants, most notably Government Ekpemupolo, a.k.a. Tompolo, and Mujahid Asari Dokubo.

    As fate would have it, Yar’adua died before he could implement his policy. He was succeeded by his Vice, Goodluck Jonathan, first as acting president and eventually on his own steam following the 2011 presidential elections. This was against stiff opposition from much of the North which felt cheated out of the period Yar’adua would have spent as president if he had not died.

    MEND is said to be no more, but some of its leaders today are part of the kitchen cabinet of President Jonathan. As such they have become powerful and rich beyond their wildest imagination through government patronage. And they are unlikely to have forgotten how things were before the amnesty.

    Naturally they, and other beneficiaries of the current dispensation, would hate to lose their new-found power and wealth. As such they are likely to do anything to retain it. It is obvious that the greatest threat to doing so is from sections of the North with more than enough votes to deny their patron another term in a free and fair election.

    These beneficiaries of the current dispensation obviously have the motive to take the battle for power to the “enemy” territory. More importantly, their stupendous wealth has given them the means. It therefore does not sound as outrageous as Nyako’s critics believe for the man to conclude that some people in authority or having its ears are hiding under the war against Boko Haram terrorism to “deal” with the “enemy.”

    If this sounds like stretching logic to an absurd conclusion, consider the president’s response to a question during his Media Chat of last Monday about the seeming ineffectiveness of his handling of the Boko Haram insurrection all these years. “Things,” he said dismissively, “are not getting worse. The situation is calming, for now there is a low vibe. We have been able to suppress it reasonably well”.

    Clearly, a president who will sound so complacent when over 1,500 people have been killed so far this year – more than all the casualties in the first four years of the war on Boko Haram – is either criminally negligent of his responsibility or, at the least, does not give a damn about the pain a section of the country is going through because he seems to think its leaders, if not its people, don’t like him.

    Worse still, consider his response to the April 15 mass kidnapping of secondary school girls from Chibok. Instead of taking responsibility for dealing with the incident, the president has allowed his rather overweening wife, Dame Patience, and several of his sidekicks, to create the impression that the authorities did not believe there was any kidnapping in the first place; that it was all the handiwork of the enemies of his administration hell bent on painting it as incompetent, heartless and indifferent.

    Second, if Governor Nyako went overboard in his allegations, he merely took his cue from the president. Two years or so ago the president claimed, without giving any shred of evidence, that his government was infiltrated with Boko Haram agents all the way to the presidency. Since then several of his close aides, including Reno Omokri, his special assistant on social media, and the director-general of the State Security Services, have attempted to frame several prominent Northerners, notably the former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria turned whistleblower, Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, and even more ridiculously retired Colonel Dangiwa Umar, one of his staunchest supporters in the country, as financiers of Boko Haram.

    None of these aides have received as much as a rap on the knuckles even though their attempts have been exposed for what they were – frame-ups. Predictably this has fuelled widespread belief that the president is more interested in making political mileage out of the Boko Haram insurgency than in ending it.

    Governor Nyako may have overdone himself in accusing the president of committing genocide against the North, but the best way to expose the governor’s claim for the hyperbole that it mostly was is to see it as a wake-up call to go beyond using essentially military means to solve a problem which requires sincere dialogue as well if it is to be overcome.

     

  • Why Governor Shettima was right (II)

    Why Governor Shettima was right (II)

    A little known event occurred in Maiduguri last year which suggests that the allegation against the authorities of the neglect of the welfare, safety and security of staff was probably truer of the army than of the police. This was an incident in which a senior officer reportedly slapped a regimental sergeant major (RSM) for asking too many awkward questions about the welfare of his troops. He again reportedly slapped a junior officer for remonstrating on the RSM’s behalf. The soldiers apparently could not stand this anymore and took matters into their own hands, resulting into the officer being admitted into the National Hospital for weeks.

    Fortunately, the affair did not degenerate into a far more serious breakdown of discipline.

    At the time of the incident the offending officer was shortly due for retirement. It is not certain whether he has since been retired or not. What is certain is that no one was ever court marshalled over the incident as they should have been because in the military one of the worst offenses a soldier can commit is to assault a fellow soldier, no matter the provocation.

    However even more telling about the poor morale of our troops in coping with the Boko Haram insurgency than this incidence and The Guardian’s story of November 21 last year which I referred to last week, was an online media report last April about how both then Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Admiral Ola Sa’ad Ibrahim, and then Chief of Army Staff, Lt.General Azubuike Ihejirika, separately threatened their civilian bosses for what the CDS described as a “pile of mess” he said the civilians had created in recent times in running the affairs of the Ministry of Defence. This was on the day they variously received Alhaji Aliyu Ismaila as then new permanent secretary of the ministry.

    Both military chiefs said they had lost patience with the way the procurement of arms and equipment were being presided over by civilians in the ministry without reference to the relevant service chiefs. Lt-General Ihejirika reportedly added that the Nigerian Army lacked adequate operations vehicles, accommodation, arms and ammunitions, amongst others, because of the existing bureaucratic bottlenecks.

    It is doubtful that those bottlenecks have been removed, given the legendary corruption and snail speed that has characterised our bureaucracy, both civilian and military.

    However, long before Admiral Ibrahim and Lt-Gen Ihejirika read their riot acts to their civilian bosses in April 2012, Ihejirika’s better regarded previous army chief, Lt-General Victor Malu, had complained bitterly in an interview in the Sunday Sun (July 31, 2005) that under him the army never procured even a pin as far as arms and equipment were concerned.

    “We did not,” he said in the interview, “procure anything…I served the army for 22 months as Chief of Army Staff. I did not get a kobo from the government for any project.”

    Malu had been fired in March 2002 for, among other things, his outspokenness against the decision by President Olusegun Obasanjo to embed American military officers and men in our barracks – a decision which was probably unprecedented anywhere in the world – ostensibly to train our troops for peacekeeping.

    Between Malu’s sack in 2002 and the appointment of Ihejirika as army chief, a special investigation panel of the army had, according to the report of the panel published on the Sahara reporters website several years ago, established that there had been a massive theft of arms and ammunition from the army’s armoury in Kaduna at the time one of Malu’s successors as army chief, the late Lt-General Andrew Owoye Azazi, was the General Officer Commanding of the 1st Division headquartered in Kaduna. Those arms and ammunition were reportedly sold to militants in the Niger Delta in a deal allegedly financed by some leading politicians from the region.

    It is doubtful if the gap created by that treasonable arms deal was ever sufficiently plugged in spite of the huge annual budgets for the military since 2006, given the fact alone that, consistent with our national budgets in the last 15 years or so, the ratio of the military’s recurrent expenditure to the capital has been in the region of 70 to 30 per cent.

    It would be grossly unfair and demoralising, even unpatriotic, to accuse our soldiers of not doing their best to end the Boko Haram insurgency when there is only so much a soldier can do in the face of the superior numbers and arms of the enemy, a superiority which is inexplicable in the face of the hundreds of billions of Naira voted annually for our country’s security and territorial integrity. As the late legendary Afrobeat musician, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, sang in one of his more memorable numbers, “uniform na cloth na tailor de sow am.” In other words, military uniform alone does not make its wearer any more special or superhuman than someone wearing mufti.

    Clearly, Governor Shettima’s frustration at the wanton killings in his state was not with the soldiers as such but with the fact that they appeared helpless to stop or contain the killings because they lacked sufficient arms and equipment and enough motivation to do so even though trillions of Naira have been spent in the fight against Boko Haram terror.

    Nothing better illustrates the lack of correlation between the huge spending on the military and its effectiveness than the fact that the immediate past army chief whose over three-year extended tenure was unprecedented, spent a lot more in building the most modern, expensive and expansive army barracks in the country for an arm of its language school which he hived off from its headquarters in Ilorin, Kwara State, to his native village of Ovim, Isuikwuato Local Government Area in Abia State, than he did in procuring arms and equipment for his troops fighting Boko Haram. In the process of building the barracks which is big enough to accommodate a battalion, he built himself one of the most grandiose country homes – one shocked colleague of his reportedly described it as “madness” – by any public officer anywhere in the country.

    It is also noteworthy that he wilfully abandoned the expansion of the country’s premier military hospital in Kaduna started by his predecessor, Lt-General Lawal Dambazau, which would’ve transformed it into a world class hospital for the treatment of our troops wounded in battles at home and abroad.

    Not least of all, it was under the erstwhile service chiefs that the military changed its policy of using relatively modest locally assembled Peugeot 407 saloons as official vehicles for its very senior officers to the use of imported top of the line BMWs and Toyota and Range Rover jeeps. The symbolism of such immodesty among senior army officers for the troops’ morale could hardly have been lost on its rank and file.

    In his assessment of the military operation against Boko Haram in The Guardian of London on January 3, 2013, Gwynne Dyer, the well regarded London-based independent journalist, said our military has been “corrupt, incompetent and brutal” in its conduct as a result of which, he said, the military had turned itself into Boko Haram’s “best recruiting sergeants”.

    You do not have to share this view to agree with him that in spite of the existence of some honest men and women among our civilian and military leaders, as a group, they have been “spectacularly cynical and self-serving” in their handling of their public trusts.

    In taking over the Ministry of Defence from Mr Labaran Maku as the supervising minister, its new boss, Lt-General Aliyu Mohammed, himself a former army chief and the longest serving intelligence czar in the country, said he will do his best to return the country to its more secure and stable past. “With the help of the Almighty Allah and our collective resolve and determination,” he said, “we will get to the destination that will give Nigerians the confidence that the country is a safe place for everyone.”

    Those cautious remarks, in sharp contrast to the past bombast of some of the erstwhile military chiefs, show his appreciation of the fact that relying on force alone, as has largely been the case so far, will never work.

    However, even the more judicious mix of sticks and carrots the minister’s caution suggests, will work only if it is accompanied by a determination of the new defence minister to end the cynicism and self-aggrandisement that has so far characterised our war against Boko Haram, and for that matter, against all other forms of terrorism, criminality and venality in the country.

    More specifically, his hope will only be realised if the military refrains from its past scorched earth response to Boko Haram attacks which has all too often resulted in more innocent civilians being killed than Boko Haram terrorists.

    Hopefully, President Jonathan will have a rethink of his view of Shettima’s lamentation and give his new defence minister all the support he needs to change the popular perception that the war on Boko Haram has been determined more by politics than by any concern for public safety and for the unity and territorial integrity of the country.

    On his part, the new army chief should know that if, along with the National Security Adviser to the president, Colonel Sambo Dasuki, a scion of the Sokoto Caliphate, he cannot solve the, admittedly complex, riddle of Boko Haram which has done so much damage to Nigeria generally but more specifically to the North and to Muslims and to the image of their religion, then the Muslim North will have no one else to blame but its leaders, both secular and religious.