The Nation Newspaper

Category: Mohammed Harunna

  • Nigerian censuses and their discontents (I)

    Nigerian censuses and their discontents (I)

    Last week when I reproduced my column of nine years ago on the composition by religion of delegates to President Olusegun Obasanjo’s 2005 National Conference as proof that President Goodluck Jonathan’s version, which opened last month, was merely a replication of Obasanjo’s strategy of political manipulation of religion, I promised that the controversial issue of the religious composition of this country will be a subject matter of this column another day.

    Against the background of the vehement protests and counter-protests, the huge gap in favour of Christians in the composition of the conference – 309 out of the 497 delegates as against 184 Muslims – had provoked from several religious organisations, notably the National Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs (NSCIA) and the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), I thought today was as good a day as any to deal with the subject.

    Bar the president’s action itself, the Secretary-General of Jama’atu Nasril Islam (JNI), Dr Khalid Abubakar, fired the first shot in this war at a press conference he addressed in Kaduna last month.

    “Christians, who by all acceptable records are not more than 40 per cent of the country’s population,” Khalid said, “…constitute 62 per cent of the total delegates.” In rapid response Dr. Musa Asake, the General Secretary of CAN, dismissed his JNI counterpart’s claim as an “unprovoked defamation of Nigerian Christians”.

    The JNI, he said, “should come out with the figures that make the Muslim population more than that of Christians as we in CAN will boycott future census in Nigeria beginning with the 2016 exercise if they do not include religion. Enough is enough!”

    It was like a replay all over again of Obasanjo’s national conference in 2005. Then, the NSCIA, in a petition to Obasanjo, claimed Muslims were over 60% of Nigeria’s population. Obasanjo cautioned the council against the reckless use of statistics but quickly countered with his own ratio of 50:50.

    On its part the Northern CAN, through its Secretary, Mr. Sa’idu Dogo, threatened to boycott the 2006 census unless religion and ethnicity featured in its questionnaire. “In view of these claims by the Muslim community,” Dogo said, “CAN insists that the National Population Commission should, without further delay, include ethnicity and religion in the forthcoming national headcount, so that Nigerians and the world over will know the true position of the adherents of different religions in Nigeria as it is done all over the world.”

    If this was not done, Dogo said, they would ask all Christians in Nigeria to boycott the census.

    As things turned out, Obasanjo did not include religion and ethnicity in his headcount, but no one boycotted it. Under Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, CAN’s more belligerent attitude these days suggests it would probably make good its threat this time.

    Headcounts in Nigeria started in the Lagos Colony in 1866 and were repeated in 1871, 1881 and 1901. The next one in 1911 covered the amalgamated Lagos colony and the Southern Protectorate as one entity. In the same year, there was a separate census in the Northern Protectorate. Following the amalgamation of the two protectorates in 1914, the colonial government passed the Census Ordinance in 1917 and thus paved the way for the first nationwide census in 1921.

    Thereafter, censuses became ten yearly affairs until Independence in 1960. However, there was none in 1941 because of the World War II fought between 1939 and 1945.

    The last census before independence in 1960 was held between 1951 and 1953. It put the North at 55.4% of Nigeria’s population and the South at 44.6. It was widely regarded as a watershed headcount because it became the basis for distributing parliamentary seats among the then three regions in the country, namely, North, East and West.

    The census put the Muslim population in the North at 73% and the Christian at 2.7. Christians in the East, it said, were 50.1, Muslims 0.3 and animists 49.6. In the West Muslims, it said, were 32.4%, Christians 36.2 and animists 31.4. For the putative Midwest, Muslims, it said, were 4.2%, Christians 22.8 and others 73. The headcount put the overall Muslim population of the country at 44% and that of Christians at 22.

    The first census after independence was conducted first in 1962. This was widely rejected and led to a recount in 1963. In his book, The 1963 Nigerian Census – A Critical Appraisal (1972, Ethiope Publishing Corporation, Benin City), I. I. Ekanem, compared the 1953 figures with those of 1963. The comparison showed that the overall Muslim population of the country increased from 44% in 1953 to 47.2 in 1963 while that of Christians increased even more during the period from 22% to 34.5, mostly at the expense of animists.

    The disaggregation of the 1963 figures by region showed that Muslims in the North suffered a marginal decrease from 73% to 71.7 whereas Christians more than trebled from 2.7% to 9.7. In the East the Muslim population remained at 0.3% whereas the Christian population increased from 50.1% to 77.2 and animists shrank from 49.6% to 22.5.

    In the West the Muslim population increased from 32.4% to 43.4 whereas Christians increased from 36.2% to 48.7 and animists shrank from 31.4% to 7.9. In the Midwest Muslims remained at 4.2%, Christians increased from 22.8% to 54.9 whereas animists decreased from 73.1% to 40.9.

    Mr. Mike Okpara, the Premier of the East, rejected the 1963 headcount as “worse than useless” and went to the courts to have it annulled. He lost because the courts said they had no jurisdiction to hear his case and the figures became official, flawed as probably they were.

    The next headcount in 1973 and the last to feature ethnicity and religion proved even worse. Members of the census board disagreed among themselves over its accuracy and its chairman, one time Chief Justice of Nigeria, Sir Adetokunbo Ademola, along with Chief Obafemi Awolowo, urged its cancellation. General Yakubu Gowon who conducted the headcount dithered in publishing it, apparently because of the ensuing controversy. He was overthrown in July 1976 and General Murtala Mohammed who took over promptly cancelled it.

    The next census should have held in 1983 under President Shehu Shagari but even though he appointed the late Alhaji Abdulrahman Okene to chair the census board in 1981, Shagari did not pay much attention to it until he was overthrown in a coup in December 1983.

    The next headcount was conducted in 1991, eight years after Shagari’s overthrow. This was under former military president General Ibrahim Babangida who appointed the late Alhaji Shehu Ahmadu Musa, one of the country’s most accomplished civil servants, to chair the census commission.

    The census gave the North a population of 47,369,237, roughly 53.23% of Nigeria’s population of 88,992,220, as against 46.77% for the South. This was more or less consistent with most headcounts before it.

    Not everyone was, of course, happy with the results. Individuals like the late Chief Bola Ige and institutions like The Guardian rejected it because they said it was rigged to favour the North, as usual.

    However, even among leading Southerners, there was widespread acceptance of the results. Such leaders from the South like the chairman of the failed 1973 census, Justice Ademola, Professor Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Literature laureate, Professor Sam Aluko, one-time economic adviser to Chief Awolowo as Western premier, and Chief Omololu Olunloyo, one-time governor of the old Oyo State, all of them praised the conduct of the exercise as the best since census started in Nigeria.

    Justice Ademola for example, said in The Guardian of March 2, 1992, that the 1991 results was a vindication of his rejection of the 1973 exercise. Similarly, Professor Aluko said in the Sunday Sketch of March 21, 1992 that the results tallied with what had always been his estimate of Nigeria’s population.

    The last census which should have held in 2001 under President Obasanjo was not conducted till 2006, with Chief Samuila Danko Makama, a former senior journalist and bureaucrat, as chair of the census commission. As with all previous ones not everyone was happy with its outcome, fairly thorough as the preparation for it was.

    Interestingly, one of its most severe critics was Makama’s successor, Chief Odumegwu. “No census,” he said shortly after assuming office last year, possibly to the consternation of even those who gave him the job, “has been credible in Nigeria since 1863. Even the one conducted in 2006 is not credible. I have the records and evidence produced by scholars and professors of repute. This is not my report. If the current laws are not amended, the planned 2016 census will not succeed.”

    The chief did not say how the extant laws on our headcounts were flawed but for many, especially in the South, this was their irrefutable proof that every census in this country had been rigged in favour of the predominantly Muslim North.

    But were they?

     

    Someone please call Metuh to order

    It’s hard to believe that at a time all Nigerians should sink their differences – political, religious or otherwise – and join the bereaved families of the victims of the devastating early Monday morning bombing in Nyanya, Abuja, in their grief and pray for the dead and injured, all anyone will be interested in is how to make political capital out of the terrible event. But this is precisely what Chief Olisa Metuh, the spokesman of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has done by his reckless attempt at blaming the bombing on the opposition.

    “We,” he said yesterday, even as Nigerians remained in shock and confusion over the bombing, “stand by our earlier statements that these attacks on our people are politically motivated by unpatriotic persons, especially those in the APC, who have been making utterances and comments, promoting violence and blood-letting as a means of achieving political control.”

    What kind of a heart – and mind – does Metuh have that he cannot wait for the bereaved to collect and bury their dead and treat their wounded before he indulges himself all over again in a useless blame game? If his bosses truly have the safety and security of Nigerians in mind, they should, for God’s sake, call him to order.

  • Muslims and the National Conference: the case of blaming the victim

    Muslims and the National Conference: the case of blaming the victim

    Almost exactly nine years ago this month, I wrote the article with the title above on these pages (precisely on March 16, 2005) in reaction to the composition by President Olusegun Obasanjo of his national conference. With President Goodluck Jonathan’s version, history – the manipulation of religion for power – seems, except for the change in personnel, to have merely repeated itself. Indeed only worse; the in-your-face brazenness of the student, compared to his now estranged master, in defending the indefensible margin of Christians (309 out of 497, i.e. about 62%) to Muslims (184, i.e. about 37%) in the composition of his conference in a country where, according to the 2014 usually reliable CIA Factbook, the ratio of Muslims to Christians to others is 50:40:10, truly boggles the mind.

    The controversial issue of the religious composition of this country is a subject matter for probably another day. For today the following is an abridged version of what I wrote nine years ago for its relevance to President Jonathan’s national conference:-

    The controversy surrounding the composition of the leadership and membership of the National Political Reform Conference has once again brought to the fore the importance of the mass media in shaping public opinion and in policy making and implementation.  When President Olusegun Obasanjo decided to make virtually the entire leadership of the NPRC Christian and also decided to give them a nearly two thirds majority edge over Muslims in its membership in a country he himself says is 50:50 Muslim/Christian, he knew he could count on the conspiratorial silence, if not the support, of most of the Nigerian mass media in his flagrant breach of the same Nigerian Constitution he has sworn to defend.  Clearly the president has not been disappointed.  Three weeks into the Conference, there has been a deafening silence from most of the Nigerian mass media over the president’s blatant act of injustice.

    Worse still, those of us who have dared to complain about this injustice are being portrayed as unreasonable.  The Secretary of the Conference, my good friend, Reverend Father Mathew Hassan Kukah, himself an object of the protest, albeit not over his person, has even dismissed the protesters as “irresponsible”.  To which another friend, but this time a scion of the Hausa-Fulani ruling family in Kano, Lamido Sanusi Lamido, has in effect said, Amen.  “Kukah”, he said in his trenchant defence of the reverend father in the Daily Trust of last Monday, “is absolutely correct.  It is irresponsible”.

    Sanusi said his intervention was to stop the debate over the composition of the NPRC from degenerating into a purely religious affair.  “An urgent Muslim intervention,” he said, “is required before the debate becomes one between Muslims and Christians.”

    Sam Ndah-Isaiah, the editor-in-chief of Leadership, was correct in his argument in his article last Monday, titled Seeing through the president’s mischief, that the president did what he did to divide and rule Nigeria, the North in particular.  Like Sanusi, Sam was, however, wrong to conclude that the proper response to the president’s mischief was to have kept quiet, lest he achieved his objective.  “Many of those talking today,” said Sam, “have made the president’s day.  They have helped him achieve his objective.  The people are now divided, helped by the legitimate anger of those protesting.”

    Both Sanusi and Sam seem to assume that national unity is an end in itself and so no amount of injustice can justify any act that undermines it.  The huge irony of this assumption, at least on Sanusi’s part as Father Kukah’s defence attorney, is that Kukah himself does not share it.  On the contrary he seems to detest it with a passion.  “God,” he said the other day in a paper he presented last year at the Conference on Peace organised by the Northern Governors’ Forum, “is a God of justice and therefore cannot let injustice into His Sanctuary.  We are under no obligation to promote peace, if that peace is not founded on justice…”

    Father Kukah went on in that paper to say whereas the duty of religious leaders is to point out the right way, that of politicians is to provide the vehicles to take us to our destination.  And if politicians provide rickety vehicles, religious leaders, he said, have a duty to raise hell against such a contraption.  No fair-minded person, not even Sanusi in spite of the passion of his intervention, can say that the architecture and structure of the vehicle Obasanjo has provided for the National Conference are sound.

    Sanusi questions the assumption that “there is something like a ‘Christian’ or ‘Muslim’ position in a national Conference…”  He questions the assumption on the grounds that there are divisions within the religions themselves.  Surely, however, Sanusi knows that divisions within people of the same faith, tribe or region, has never stopped them from having common positions on issues that are basic to their identities.  For example, no Muslim, whether he is Maliki, Shafi’i, Hannafi or Hambali, or whatever, will reject Sharia or subscribe to the doctrine of secularity.

    In case Sanusi is not aware, one of the hidden agenda of the convener of the conference is to finally banish so-called political Sharia from the Constitution, through some sleigh-of-hand.  For, among the amendments a committee under Professor Jerry Gana, the president’s political adviser, is proposing there is one which says “If any other law, customary or religious practice is inconsistent with the previsions of this constitution, this constitution shall prevail, and that other law shall, to the extent of the inconsistency, be void”.  This amendment is meant to replace section 1 (3) of the existing constitution.  The difference is the seemingly innocuous phrase “customary or religion practice”, a phrase that has been smuggled into the provision behind the back of the constitutional reform committee chaired by Deputy Senate President, Ibrahim Mantu.

    Even though a Muslim cannot reject Sharia as long as he believes in Islam, such a Muslim member of the Conference may or may not stand up for so-called political Sharia. But any Muslim member would be foolish to think that a non-Muslim member of the Conference will go out of his way to defend a Muslim’s cardinal belief in Sharia.

    “Many Muslim Northerners, the present writer included,” says Sanusi, “do not care about the religious identity of competent Nigerians appointed to an office whatsoever, so long as they consider their constituency to be the whole nation in the conduct of their official functions” (Emphasis mine).

    Sanusi is right that religion, or for that matter, region or tribe, ideally should not matter in such things.  But he himself has entered a sensible caveat about the behaviour of public officials.  He has also admitted that there is no such thing as an objective person.  Invariably we are objective only to the extent that we know we cannot get away with our prejudices.  The way the National Conference was composed, the majority can easily get away with their prejudices.

    This is why our Constitutions since 1979 have emphasised the importance of government reflecting the federal character of the nation in its conduct and composition.  The relevant section in all those constitutions obligates government to “(ensure) that there shall be no predominance of persons from a few states or from a few ethnic or other sectional groups in the government or any of its agencies.”

    It bears repeating that Obasanjo blatantly violated this provision as far as the religious character of this country is concerned and it amounts to adding insult to injury for anyone to say those who have complained about this injustice are being unreasonable or even irresponsible.

    Before now when the Christian leadership, specifically the then Archbishop, now Cardinal, Olubunmi Okogie and Primate Sunday Mbang, as former national presidents of the Christian Association of Nigeria, used to complain – sometimes justifiably, sometimes not, as we shall see next week when, God willing, I write on the issue of our next census – that Christians were being discriminated against, no one ever called them irresponsible.

    When The Guardian wrote an editorial on October 7, 1992, saying that the presidential primaries that year under General Ibrahim Babangida’s transition were unacceptable because “the two presidential candidates that will emerge at the end of the day are from the same part of the country – the Far North… This is disturbing given the national composition of the country,” no one said the newspaper was irresponsible.

    Last but by no means the least, when Father Kukah himself said the actions of Obasanjo in the wake of the Kaduna religious riots of 2000 and the Plateau crisis of last year were prejudicial to Christians in his article Plateau: State of Emergency as a metaphor in The Guardian of May 30, 2004, no one said he was irresponsible.  Needless to say he himself could not have seen his protest as irresponsible or even unreasonable.

    Similarly, when he said in the same article that Obasanjo was wrong to mix religion with politics – something which I have said elsewhere is not necessarily true depending on how you mix the two – no one said he was irresponsible.  “Had General Obasanjo declared himself a born-again Christian and gone back to the farm,” said Kukah, “that would have been no problem.  But to do so and then proceed to seek political power was bound to create a problem for religion and the country, especially within the Muslim population.”

    In the last six years, Obasanjo has mixed religion and politics in the most cynical and self-serving way, culminating in his blatantly lopsided composition of the leadership and membership of the National Conference.  In the last few days he has tried to redress one but has done nothing about the other.  It is unreasonable to blame those who feel aggrieved by such an insensitive act for complaining, simply because the unity and peace of the country must be maintained.

    But then, as Malcolm X once said, “If you are not careful, the media will have you hating the people who are oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

  • A president playing dangerous politics with Boko Haram

    A president playing dangerous politics with Boko Haram

    The last time we met on these pages two weeks ago, I concluded my piece that morning by putting the burden of solving the Boko Haram “riddle” (my own word) on the leadership of the Muslim North, specifically on the new Minister of Defence, Lt-General Aliyu Mohammed, (retired), a veteran spymaster and a former army chief, and on Col Mohammed Sambo Dasuki, retired, the current National Security Adviser to the President.

    “On his part,” I said, “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.”

    President Goodluck Jonathan’s angry reply over the weekend in Bauchi to Governor Murtala Nyako’s charge in far away America that the president is incapable and/or uninterested in solving the Boko Haram crisis – that is if, according to Nyako, the man is not himself outrightly complicit in complicating the crisis for political gain – has got me wondering if I have been fair and sensible in shifting even the immediate burden of solving the crisis from the president to his lieutenants, and through them, to the entire leadership of a region.

    Of course the ultimate burden of solving any national problem lies with the country’s president; the buck, as they say, always stops at the table of the boss. However, there is also a lot his underlings can do to help him solve a problem. It was to that extent that I put the burden of ending the Boko Haram scourge on his two security chiefs.

    But then the president’s angry remarks last Saturday, March 26, during the Peoples Democratic Party’s North-East rally in Bauchi strongly suggests a frame of mind that is more interested in playing politics with Boko Haram than in ending its terror. With such a frame of mind, it will not matter much what his subordinates do to help their boss do his job satisfactorily of securing the nation.

    No doubt Governor Nyako’s paper during the March 17-19 symposium in Washington DC, USA, on the Boko Haram insurgency in the North-East at the instance of the Unites States Institute for Peace, to which all the 19 governors of the Northern State were invited, was highly provocative. “The security situation we are facing,” he said in the course of delivering his paper, “…could be sponsored by evil minded and over-ambitious leaders of government and society for political gains.” Of course, he did not name names but it needed little or no imagination to guess those he was pointing his fingers at.

    As if to remove any doubts about those the governor presumably had in mind, the president chose the occasion of his party’s rally in the main theatre of the Boko Haram insurrection to reply him. I solved the terror problem in my home state, Bayelsa, when I was deputy governor and then governor, so Nyako and other Northern governors accusing me of incompetent leadership should go solve their own Boko Haram problem, the president said, in effect.

    “All what they put on their bodies,” the president reportedly said in his peculiar English and simplistic logic, apparently referring to the Boko Haram ragtag army, “is not worth N10, but they carry rifles and bullets worth more than N250,000. Somebody gives them food so that they can kill.

    “You ask how we build this army of unemployed and unemployable youth? The Federal Government does not control primary education; it does not control secondary school education, and a governor has been on seat for nearly eight years and we have people in that state that can’t go to secondary school. You say bad leadership? Who is the bad leader? Is it the Federal Government? I made sure that every state has a university. That is the responsibility of the Federal Government and I have done it.”

    The president is right, damn right, that governors – and I must say that includes himself when he was one, as can be seen from the poor primary and secondary enrolment figures of Bayelsa – have been almost criminally negligent of their responsibilities to provide primary (through Local Governments) and secondary education in their states.

    However, the president was wrong to blame the states alone for their negligence. Part of the blame must go to the Federal Government for cornering so much revenue for itself from the Federation Account (55% or so) that states seem to lack enough to attend to even their more basic responsibilities in such areas as education, health and basic infrastructure.

    The president was also wrong to think poor primary and secondary school enrolment is the main cause of Boko Haram. It is not. The Boko Haram army may be ragtag but its main recruits are not small kids who won’t go to Western schools. On the contrary, it recruits mainly from youths who have been to such schools but have become totally disillusioned with a system which they can clearly see is more interested in producing a few billionaires than in raising millions out of poverty. The president may not be essentially responsible for such a system but he has not helped matters by the wilful way he has, for all practical purposes, refused to do anything about so much waste, corruption and scandal that has surrounded his administration.

    The president was also wrong to claim he solved MEND’s terror problem in Bayelsa. He did not and could not. As governor, he had no control of the police and the security forces. As he knows all too well the credit for that goes mainly to his boss, the late President Umaru Yar’adua for his amnesty programme for Delta militants, and partly to himself as vice-president, who, as the son of the soil, helped to oversee the execution of the programme.

    The president’s apparent misdiagnosis of the Boko Haram problem clearly suggests he is more inclined to playing politics with it than in trying to solve it. There have been, at least, two evidence of recent to support this thesis. First, is the reckless manner in which his party’s spokesman, Mr Olisa Metuh, has been attacking the main opposition party, the All Progressives Congress, labelling it an Islamic party with a “janjaweed” ideology, as if it is a crime to be a Muslim in this country. Indeed, he has said worse by accusing the party without a shred of evidence of being the sponsor of Boko Haram and no one seems to want to call him to order. On the contrary, he seems to enjoy at least the tacit support of his party’s leadership.

    Even more telling than Metuh’s recklessness has been the president’s loud silence on the unmasking in February of his Senior Special Assistance on Social Media, Reno Omokri, as the brain behind a highly dubious attempt, through a Word document using a funny sounding alias, Wendell Simlin, that tried to link Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the suspended Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), to the recent increase in Boko Haram violence in Borno and Yobe states. The discovery that Omokri was the real author of the document has yet to earn the man even the mildest rebuke, never mind a sack.

    It all reminds one, doesn’t it, of the charge by Mr Henry Emomotimi Okah, since jailed in South Africa for his alleged role in the October 1, 2010 fatal bombing of Eagle Square during the Golden Jubilee of Nigeria’s Independence, in an affidavit he swore to in a court in that country, that he was contacted by the presidency to prevail on the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND) to withdraw its statement claiming responsibility for the bombing so that it can be blamed on some Northern politicians, notably General Ibrahim Babangida, former military president, who was initially in the running for the 2011 presidential election.

    Said Okah in his affidavit, “During the morning of 2 October, 2010, I received two SMS from Mr Tony Uranta…The SMS were sent from Mr Uranta’s number +2348075407801.

    The first of the two SMS stated; – “Ask J.G to withdraw statement.” (J.G being Jomo Gbomo the spokesperson for MEND). The final SMS sent at 10h28:32 am states; – “The government will blame on Northern elements.”

    Okah has since claimed that his refusal to co-operate with the presidency was why the Federal Government leaned heavily on the South Africans to secure his imprisonment.

    In that same affidavit Okah claimed that “On the day of the bombing of 1 October, 2010, I received a call from Mr Moses Jituboh, the Head of Personal Security to President Jonathan, who solicited my assistance and continued cooperation with President Goodluck Jonathan towards shifting blame for the bombings to the North of Nigeria. He assured me in this meeting that President Goodluck Jonathan was determined to ensure that political power never returned to the North which Mr Orubebe described as parasites. To achieve this, President Goodluck Jonathan would pretend to do only one term in office and once entrenched, he would insist on a second term.”

    Okah’s affidavit may sound like the desperate act of a dog in a manger, but his claims seemed to have been borne out by subsequent events, including former president Chief Olusegun Obasanjo’s now famous open letter to the president reminding him that he had promised to do only one term during his campaign for the 2011 presidential election.

    With a record like this, it is hardly unfair to suspect our president of being more interested in playing politics with the Boko Haram scourge than in bringing it to an end. In which case nothing his subordinates do will, in the end, make any difference in helping him secure the country and its citizens from terrorism.

  • 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.

     

     

     

  • Why Governor Shettima was right (I)

    Why Governor Shettima was right (I)

    In a preface to today’s piece last week I said I would examine this morning the lamentation by Governor Ibrahim Kashim Shettima about the military’s apparent incapability to end the Boko Haram insurgency in his North-East region and the harsh response his remarks provoked from its commander-in-chief, President Goodluck Jonathan, and from some of the president’s men.

    Governor Shettima had told the State House press corps shortly after his visit to the Villa on February 17 to brief the president about the upsurge of Boko Haram insurgency in his state since January, that the military seemed too ill-equipped, undermanned and insufficiently armed to defeat Boko Haram. Aminiya, the Hausa weekly newspaper in the stable of Media Trust Ltd, publishers of Daily Trust, provided perhaps the most graphic illustration of the background to the governor’s lamentation in a table it published of alleged Boko Haram killings since January in its edition of March 7.

    There were, the newspaper said, ten attacks against villages and communities in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states between January 28 against Waga Chekawa which left 30 people dead and against Jakana on March 4 in which the casualty was 11. In between were the attacks on Kauri (83 dead), Konduga (34), Izge (106), Bama (60), Buni Yadi (59 pupils of the unity school located in the town which is in Yobe State), Michika and Shuwa (28), Mainok and Maiduguri bombing (97) and Mafa (30), making a total of 538 dead within a period of less than two months. In all these killings, most notably that of the school children which took place AFTER the governor went to brief the president, the military arrived at the scenes long after the killers had taken their time to carry out their acts of barbarity.

    As the governor asked rhetorically on his second visit to brief the president again on the issue, “Have we ever succeeded in thwarting any of their (Boko Haram’s) plans? They went to Konduga and did what they wanted to do; they held sway for over four hours before they left. They were in Kauri, Izge…In a nutshell, what we are being confronted with is that we are in a state of war.”

    It was against this background of the civilian population’s total helplessness from alleged Boko Haram killings that Governor Shettima told the press that it was “absolutely impossible to defeat Boko Haram unless more military personnel and hardware are deployed.”

    At the same time, however, the governor went on to praise the army and the police for doing their best in the circumstance. “In fairness to the officers and men of the Nigerian army and the police,” he said, “they are doing their best given the circumstance they have found themselves. But honestly Boko Haram are better armed and better motivated than our own troops.”

    Quite understandably, our president and commander-in-chief of our armed forces ignored Shettima’s sympathy for the troops and took strong exception to his unfavourable comparison of the military with what is widely regarded as a ragtag army of Islamic ideologues which probably number no more than a few thousand and whose funding cannot begin to compare with the country’s nearly trillion Naira yearly armed forces and the police.

    The president displayed his anger at the governor’s remarks in his first media chat this year when he described them, in effect, as ill-informed and threatened to withdraw his troops to see if the ungrateful governor can cope without them. “If we pull out the military from Borno State,” the president said, “let us see if he will be able to stay in Government House.”

    For the president and commander-in-chief of the armed forces of Africa’s most populous and most influential country, Dr. Jonathan’s reaction was rather churlish, to say the least. No one, including Shettima, I am sure, says the military is underfunded. On the contrary, there are many who would argue that for a country that is at peace with its neighbours, its military is overfunded, notwithstanding the internal insurrection it is faced with.

    Obviously what Shettima was echoing was the undeniable fact that despite its huge budgets, our military has not been equipped, staffed and motivated enough to eliminate an insurrection in one, albeit vast corner, of the country. The proper reaction to Shettima’s remarks, therefore, was not to berate the messenger. Rather, it was to examine the veracity or otherwise of the message, especially since the messenger had built himself the reputation of speaking with the greatest restrain as the governor of the main theatre of the Boko Haram insurrection.

    In an attempt to be more Catholic than the pope, two of the president’s men, namely Dr Doyin Okupe, the president’s spokesman on public affairs and Mr Labaran Maku, the minister of information and, until last week, the supervising minister of defence, displaced even less restrain than their principal in attacking Shettima. The governor, said Okupe, was an illiterate in military affairs, as if as a medical doctor who has been long on sabbatical he was any better knowledgeable than anyone in such affairs.

    And as if to expose his own illiteracy in such matters Okupe could not even make up his mind whether what the country was faced with in the Northeast was war or not; “We are certainly not engaged in a conventional warfare,” he said on February 18 in his hastily convened press conference with the State House press corps in denunciation of Shettima, only to change his mind on February 28 and say “We are in a war and there is no gainsaying that fact. I am willing to admit that we are in a war situation.”

    If to Okupe Shettima was an ignoramus on military affairs, to Maku the governor committed “serious indiscretion” against the military by his remarks for which he presumed to forgive the governor. “I think,” he said in handing over the Ministry of Defence to the new minister, Lt-Gen Aliyu Mohammed, last week, “that was serious indiscretion. And I can forgive that because may be he did not know the deeper work that was going on and is still going on in the Northeast.”

    Obviously if government has been doing “deeper work” in the Northeast, the result has not been on the ground for anyone to see. Maku’s strange explanation of the resurgence of terror in the region was that the attacks were like the actions of a wounded and caged lion. Maku, his principal and others in government may choose to believe his simile but any sensible person knows that wounded and caged lions don’t have the luxury of taking their time and choosing which victims to attack. And the pattern of the attacks in the Northeast since January clearly suggests premeditation rather than desperation.

    As I’ve said, the president and his men should not have assumed, as they obviously did, that Shettima’s lamentation was in bad faith. If they had given him the benefit of their doubts they would have seen that the evidences that his remarks were true were right there under their very noses.

    One such evidence was contained in an advert in the Leadership of February 21, in which one, Hassan Mungono, attempted to defend the governor’s remark. The advert quoted the Commander of the 21 Armoured Brigade, Brigadier-General Mohammed Yusuf, at the time of an attack on Benisheikh by Boko Haram not too long ago, that the troops had to withdraw from the town in the face of the superior numbers and arms of the attackers. “They came in droves,” the advert quote the brigade commander as saying, “driving 20 pick-up vans followed by light armoured tanks , all wearing military colours. We had to retreat to our base after running out of ammunition.”

    Anyone thinking the brigade commander as a Muslim is a closet Boko Haram, should refer to the lead story of The Guardian of November 21 last year. “Yesterday,” said the newspaper in that story, “the Chief of Army Staff, Lt-Gen Azubuike, stressed the need for troops of the Seventh Division of the Nigerian Army in Borno to get more weapons to fight insurgents. The army, he said, has recorded some achievements but stressed the challenge of replacing ‘military arms and hardware’ lost to the insurgents in the last six months.”

    Now, if this is not an admission that the army, as the lynchpin of the war against Boko Haram, is under armed and under-equipped, I don’t know what is.

    Much earlier the same newspaper had carried a lead story in its July 2, 2012 edition which quoted some anonymous police officers of complaining about the neglect of staff welfare by the authorities. “We are in a war situation against faceless Boko Haram,” the newspaper quoted an unnamed police officer as saying, “but the government and police management are pretending as if nothing were happening. The force authorities are drafting Southerners to war zone without any welfare in terms of accommodation, allowances to cushion the hardship…Officers cluster in a cubicle, so-called officer’s mess, without amenities like water, accommodation, food, coupled with harsh weather. The world should know this.”

     

     

  • Why Governor Shettima is right; a preface

    Why Governor Shettima is right; a preface

    As the reader can see I have devoted virtually the whole of today’s column to reactions to my last two columns; the first on the need for the new opposition party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), to get its act together, if it is to have any chance of unseating the ruling PDP in next year’s election, and the second on the spat between President Goodluck Jonathan and the sacked governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, ostensibly on his alleged “reckless” management of the CBN, but in reality over Sanusi’s whistle blowing on the apparent grand thefts of the country’s oil and its revenues.

    The first article elicited only 18 text messages and a few emails while the second got 69 and a couple of emails. One of the texts on the second piece expressed great disappointment that I wrote on the GEJ/SLS spat when I should’ve done so on the blood curdling middle-of-the-night massacre of pupils of Federal Government College, Bunu Yadi, Yobe State, the day before, allegedly by elements of Boko Haram.

    “I,” the reader who texted from +2347067280114 but did not give his name said, “was expecting to read from you a lamentation on the killing of innocent students of so-called unity college. Haba mallam!”

    The reader’s disappointment, possibly even anger, is understandable. The problem, however, is that we’ve had too many lamentations and condemnations by just about everybody but little or no sign that President Jonathan, on whose table the buck stops, is sincerely willing and/or capable of dealing with the terrible insurgency.

    Of all the things that raise doubts about his commitment and capacity to end the insurgency none has been as revealing as his angry retort at the remark, no doubt dead on target, by a tearful Governor Ibrahim Kashim Shettima of Borno State, following Boko Haram’s sacking of Kauri, Idzge and Konduga villages in the state, that the insurgents “are better armed and better motivated” than our military and are therefore not about to be routed anytime soon by the military.

    Next week, God willing, Shettima’s remarks and the president’s reaction will be the subject of this column.

    For today I leave you with some of the mixed reactions to my last two pieces.

     

    FEEDBACK

    Re: “GEJ versus Sanusi, the whistleblower”

     

    Sir,

    One of my favourite topics in my O’ Level School Certificate Government, is the Principle of Collective Responsibility. The Central Bank governor cannot be a whistleblower in a government he is part of. The honourable thing to do is resign and blow the whistle from outside.

    When Eze Festus Odimegwu opened his mouth wide about goings-on at National Population Commission, as regards Census figures in Nigeria, Gov. Kwankwaso and company went to the Presidential Villa, and prevailed on President Jonathan to sack him. Odimegwu was eventually sacked and heaven did not fall.

    So Sanusi deserves his sack because no employee ever dictates the terms and conditions of his employment.

    Sanusi’s behaviour lately reminds me of late Chinua Achebe’s story of the bird, Nza, which dared his CHI (personal god) to a wrestling bout after enjoying a sumptuous meal. Of course, we have now seen the outcome of the wrestling match. Sanusi’s sack is good riddance!

    Chukwuma Dioka. +2348166933115

     

    Sir ,

    He who comes to equity must come with clean hands. Sanusi is guilty of what he accused Jonathan of. The kettle cannot call the pot black. They are all thieves.

    Ibegbu. +2348035410176

     

    Sir,

    Sanusi lives in glass house and was dropping stones in the president’s ATM machine, the NNPC.

    Patrick. +2348032571244

     

    Sir,

    If you were the president will you allow Sanusi to remain on seat fighting you directly?

    Engr. Anolue. +2348037114167

     

    Sir,

    In your write up you failed to take note of the fact that Sanusi said he saw the allegations against him on the day he was suspended. This is critical and touches on principles of fair hearing.

    +2348123464980

     

    Sir,

    Jonathan and his government have been a terrible disappointment, a ‘Badluck’ and a curse on Nigerians. The man is busy picking fights against his betters like Amaechi and now Sanusi while Boko Haram continues to slaughter innocent Nigerians right under his nose and he remains criminally clueless and helpless. This impunity, corruption, social injustices, security ineptitude and economic malversation characteristic of his government must stop.

    +2348096966605

     

    Sir,

    Police were on the trail of armed robbers, a prostitute informed of their whereabouts. Please let’s arrest the armed robbers first, collect our $20 billion then face the lesser offender. The government waited for months after Lamido’s request and realising that the man is determined, dusted up a report that will not stand in a law court but gain popularity in beer parlours in Bayelsa.

    Cardinal O.C. Arogundade. +2348055567777

     

    Sir,

    Please tell them, in case they don’t know, that even if they acquire the whole world they will leave everything behind on their deaths.

    +2348053263196.

     

    Sir,

    I agree with you that Sanusi has won the hearts of the poverty-stricken Nigerians, while the position of the president remains unenviable. What I want to add to your incisive piece is this: the eyes of the poor have opened. They now know that the present suffering did not fall from the sky but flows from corruption in high quarters.

    Amos Ejimonye, Kaduna. +2347085284103

    Sir,

    Under section 11 (1) (b) of the interpretation act, the power to hire includes the power to suspend.

    Abubakar Sani, Abuja/Kano. +2348034533892

     

    Sir,

    Whenever a father uses hammer to kill mosquito when a wild snake is left roaming around in the house, the child standing by is put in a state of confusion. May we see Nigerian army strike again to handle the mega thieves in the oil cartel.

    Ondas Nas. +2348032399800.

     

    Re: For APC, time is ticking

     

    The opposition APC using paid loyalists like you in their employ is engaging in subjective and destructive criticism against Africa’s biggest party. Cure yourself of deliberate blindness and discover that APC is too desperate, immature and unprepared to rule Nigeria. I wish you both good luck. You need it.

    Dr. Ifeanyi Nwaeboh. +2348163295663.

     

    Sir,

    I am an Igbo man and the problem with people of my tribe is lack of knowledge and blind sentiment. Each time I make comments about GEJ and his corrupt government both on radio and in our gathering they accuse me of being an agent of Boko Haram. By God’s grace PDP mis-rule will end come 2015.

    Collins, Abuja. +2348059876387

     

    Sir,

    The APC appears to rely so much on propaganda.  It is stretching the capabilities of its talented Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed.  But Lai alone cannot win the 2015 elections. The APC needs to encourage and nurture a formidable structure in all the 36 states of the federation to stand a good chance of occupying Aso Rock in 2015.

    For example, in most of the South East, apart from Imo State and to lesser degree Anambra state, the APC is in the hands of charlatans, who cannot even deliver their wards.  They are just after the crumbs they are expecting from the national secretariat or other APC controlled states.  And after the elections, they will drift back to their PDP pay-masters.  You will recall how the South East CPC disowned General Muhammadu Buhari after the 2011 elections.

    Azunna Nnamani, Enugu State.

     

    Sir,

    Your piece on For APC, Time is Ticking is a free consultancy for the APC which you should also extend to the PDP.  Perhaps, because of your interest in APC, you are too soft on their current leaders as to point out their incompetence.  Since the APC got five PDP governors to join them, they have not ceased celebrating to the extent that they appear to have forgotten that the main purpose of all the manoeuvring is the 2015 elections. Their congresses are supposed to be a few days or few weeks away and yet they have not come out with the modalities for the congresses.  This is where PDP is better.  Kindly give PDP some credits next time.

    James Onoriode, Sapele

     

    Sir,

    Usually it is not in my character to reply to publications like your article on the back page of The Nation of 18/02/2014 but I have to make an exemption to the rule for correction purpose only and only to set the record straight.

    The party, All Progressives Congress, came as a result of the merger between the now defunct Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), a group from All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) led by Governor Rochas Okorocha of Imo State and Senator Annie Okonkwo, and a group from the Democratic Peoples Party (DPP) led by late Senator Pius Ewherido and my humble self.

    I represented DPP throughout the process leading to the merger. Two positions, National Auditor and Deputy National Organising Secretary were allocated to the DPP. Today, I am the Interim National Auditor while the former state chairman of DPP in Imo State Chief Romanus Egbuladike is the Deputy National Organising Secretary.

    Sir Olisaemeka Akamukali.

  • GEJ vs Sanusi, the whistleblower

    GEJ vs Sanusi, the whistleblower

    Last Thursday’s sack of Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi as Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria by President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan was a bombshell even though it was hardly surprising. From the moment the former CBN boss was issued a query three or so years ago by then National Security Adviser to the president, late General Andrew Owoye Azazi – a query he rightly ignored because it did not come directly from the president himself – for a remark he made abroad linking Boko Haram insurgency with what he said was the financial neglect of the North by Abuja, it was obvious that if the authorities had their way, they would’ve fired him long ago.

    What apparently stood in their way was the CBN Act which said its governor and his four deputies cannot be fired without the support of two-thirds of members of the Senate the president needs to hire them in the first place, something he could not be sure of, given the uncertain political terrain that has lately confronted his ruling party. From his defensive answers in his media chat two days ago over his firing of the governor, it is obvious that the president must have been advised, more like misadvised, that he could go round this obstacle by announcing that he was merely suspending the governor.

    Trouble is, the law is completely silent on whether or not the president can, short of firing them, suspend those he’d hired. I am told by some of my legal expert friends that a cardinal principle of law is to give the benefit of doubt to an accused where a law says nothing or is ambiguous about the issue in contention.

    A more satisfactory solution for everyone in such cases is to resort to the courts for interpretation. Obviously, this would’ve taken more than the four months or so Sanusi had left to serve out his five-year tenure. It seems the way the man started running his mouth about corruption in high places in the oil business foreclosed the option of allowing him to end his tenure quietly since there was no telling how much more damage he could do if he continued talking with the authority of a governor of the CBN.

    The President claimed in his media chat that he has “absolute” powers to suspend the governor. Perhaps he does. However, it remains no more than his opinion until the courts agree with him. Happily, Sanusi, as irrepressible as ever, has said he will go to court to challenge his suspension and has already gone to court successfully to stop the authorities from unleashing their law enforcement and intelligence forces to arrest or detain him.

    Try as he may the President and his team are highly unlikely to ever win the propaganda war between himself and Sanusi. And it’s not just because the former CBN governor, in sharp contrast to our generally incoherent and bumbling president, is as eloquent in speech and in writing as they come from anywhere in the world. It’s also not because the President does not at all have a case against Sanusi. The President may have overstated it when he accused Sanusi’s CBN of being “characterised by various financial recklessness and misconduct” but it seems to me, at least, that in going to equity the former CBN governor did not do so with clean hands.

    In an interview with Metropole magazine after his sack which Daily Trust of last Monday reproduced, Sanusi rejected insinuations by the magazine’s editors that his latest accusations of corruption in the oil business against the authorities was like taking out an insurance against being fired for the charges of recklessness and mismanagement that had been levied against him. “You can never,” he said, “have any insurance in life. What is insurance? The only insurance you have in life is to try to do the right things.”

    As CBN governor, Sanusi did many right things. If nothing else, he, as I said on these page on August 26, 2009, barely a couple of months after taking over from Professor Charles Chukwuma Soludo, cleaned up the mess his predecessor created after he had done a good job of creating 25 mega-banks in place of the odd 80 that were in existence, most of them no better than glorified family automated teller machines. Soludo had virtually ruined his good job by becoming too chummy with the bosses of the banks he was supposed to supervise and regulate. The result was a financial crisis which led to a near-collapse of the economy, and certainly of the stock market where you and I bought and sold shares of companies, including those of banks.

    By putting a stop to the casino capitalism which the new big banks had fostered while Soludo kept assuring us that all was well when it wasn’t, Sanusi brought back stability and integrity to the financial market. If that was all he did, the man deserved praise as CBN governor for his courage and competence. But that wasn’t all. His exposure a few years ago of the magnitude of the huge remunerations the federal legislators decreed for themselves in violation of our Constitution, and his refusal to back down from his charge in the face of intimidation by the law makers, if nothing else, served to underscore the public’s concern about how we’ve spent more, much more, of our annual budgets on recurrent items than we have on capital goods since the return of civilian rule in 1999.

    There are even more right things he’s done as CBN governor than these two, but even these alone suffice to show that his tenure has, on balance, done more good than bad to our political-economy.

    The trouble with Sanusi, however, was that he did not measure up to what he had led the public to expect of him as someone who had consistently spoken truth to power before he became CBN governor, and which he continued to do even after.

    The report of the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) which the president has relied upon to suspend the governor has listed his many alleged transgressions including the award of no-bid contracts in billions of Naira, the spending of billions on his own and his management’s creature comforts, overpaying legal and public relations consultants and donating hundreds of millions of Naira to victims of natural and man-made disasters without board approval, etc.

    His defence has been that he has the president’s approval for some of the expenditures he’d incurred and that with things like donations he was not the first governor to do so. He also says he has constantly reduced operating management costs since he became governor.

    The governor’s self-defence may well be tenable. But this is beside the point, which is that as a long standing social critic he should’ve known better than to give those in authority sufficient ammunition to impugn his integrity and credibility. And this is exactly what the FRC report has done, even if only a fraction of its charges are true. The specific nature of the FRC report means it cannot be easily dismissed with the wave of a hand.

    That he built a one billion Naira car park at his official residence, as is common knowledge, and the fact that he was always accompanied by a huge and expensive retinue of bank staff, friends and hangers-on alike, to receive awards and honours abroad and here at home, were enough to suggest he did not act with the degree of prudence and integrity his crusade for good governance and transparency demanded of him.

    Sanusi’s alleged transgressions as CBN governor notwithstanding, he clearly has the upper hand against the president in the war for public sympathy and support. The reason is obvious; his alleged transgressions are small beer compared to what the oil thieves and their partners in government have been stealing with impunity.

    So long as the president is seen to be incapable and/or unwilling to take on these mega-thieves, so long will anyone who poses as a whistleblower against corruption in governance win public sympathy, whether his own alleged transgressions are true or not.

    It is, of course, not realistic or even sensible to expect the authorities to fight all cases of corruption or none at all. But when they are seen to ignore cases more deserving of their attention than those they are pursuing, they will find it hard, if not impossible, to convince the public that a case like Sanusi’s is a fight against corruption not a witch-hunt.

     

     

     

     

  • For APC, time is ticking

    For APC, time is ticking

    Among the reactions to my column, last week, on the diatribe by the Minister of Information, Labaran Maku, against defectors from his ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the new formidable opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) were a few who said I was biased. Some of them said I should’ve equally criticised the defectors from PDP to APC. Others said I should’ve considered the merit or otherwise of why the defectors from APC to PDP defected before condemning them.

    I plead guilty to both counts, but only partially. I plead partial guilt on the first count because my silence on the defections to APC can be easily and seemingly justifiably construed as a blind endorsement of the opposition party. It was an endorsement, alright. But it was not a blind one; no Nigerian who has witnessed and/or experienced PDP’s brutalising misrule of the country in the last 15 odd years – a misrule which has made Nigerians much poorer today than they were in 1999 and which has also made their country much more insecure today than it was since then – would not shudder at the prospects of four more years of same under the behemoth, never mind the 60 more years of same it has been threatening Nigerians with.

    The huge turnout in the membership registration of APC a couple of weeks ago which prompted the PDP to accuse the party of preparing the ground to rig next year’s election – a strange accusation coming from a ruling party which prides itself as being the largest on the continent – was a clear testimony of the desperation of Nigerians for something, anything, to rescue them from PDP’s misrule.

    However, as a journalist and political analyst, I have a responsibility to point out to the public that it is not just anything that can rescue them, obvious as this is. Obviously anything which lacks the virtues necessary for good and transparent leadership can only lead to a change of guards, so to speak, rather than to a change from the misfortune of the people.

    The way the APC has carried on since it emerged as an amalgamation of All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and a faction of All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), it stands the distinctive risk of becoming PDP, with all its ingrained “garrison democracy,” in all but name. For the sake of itself and of Nigeria, the APC must do everything it can to have internal democracy.

    In defecting to the PDP from APC, both Malam Ibrahim Shekarau, former Kano State governor, and Alhaji Attahiru Bafarawa, his former Sokoto State counterpart, accused it, in effect, of being no better than PDP which it wants to replace. This was precisely why I thought it was strange that the two would defect to the PDP, which is obviously too set in its undemocratic ways to transform itself and offer the genuine article.

    However, both governors were justified to have felt exasperated with the way the top party hierarchy at the centre simply asked them to subordinate themselves to the governors of their states. The right thing the party should have done was to have provided a plain level field for congress elections of its officials from the ward level to the national within at most six months of its emergence. If it had done so most of the internal crisis the party is currently facing in several states would have been avoided. Certainly, its defectors would have had to look for other excuses.

    I say excuse because, in my view at least, the defectors should not have given up so early in the fight for entrenching internal democracy in the party, especially when they are unlikely to make any serious difference in the way the party they have defected to is run.

    It is not too late for APC to avoid creating itself in the terrible image and character of the PDP. It can avoid this pitfall ideally by first of all dissolving its interim executive organs at the ward, local government and state levels before the congress elections. These interim executives have generally constituted themselves into obstacles in the way of internal democracy.

    However, if dissolving them sounds impractical, the least the interim leadership at the national level should do is to bar them from contesting in the congress elections. It should also bar its own members likewise. Not least of all, it should send large enough teams of members with high integrity to conduct the elections.

    For example, for Kano that has 44 Local Government Areas (LGAs), the APC should send a 46-man team of outsiders to Kano, made up of a chairman and secretary and one person per LGA to conduct the elections. And for a state like Bayelsa that has eight LGAs, they should send a 10-man team, also of outsiders, with a chairman and secretary to conduct the elections. If this looks unaffordable the party should send teams larger than those it sent for the membership registration, say at least one member per two LGAs.

    Of course, all this would cost a lot of money which APC is not as well endowed with as PDP. However, with proper organisation the party does not need the huge outlays the PDP has been using to keep itself in power.

    If the well-endowed and the comfortable members of the party sincerely wish to rescue Nigeria from the clutches of what looks like an unreformable PDP, they should selflessly give their all, including their money and time, to ensure they create and sustain internal democracy in their party. The time to do so is not on their side.

    RE: Makun and the defections from PDP

    Sir,

    I agree with you that politicians are looking for shelter from the typhoon called poverty. Blame the social system which protects big business at the expense of the people. The truth, however, is that the Alice in Wonderland world awaits the politicians the day their charming promises fail to send the hungry and the homeless to sleep.

    Amos Ejimonye, Kaduna. +2347085284103.

     

    Sir,

    Are you surprised at any politician or Nigerian politicians and their comments? They all cling together when ‘the goings are good’ AND vituperate when their ‘goings get sour’. Not only Maku, not only Bafarawa and not only Shekarau! They are spread across all the political parties.

    Lanre Oseni. +2347064181045.

     

    Sir,

    It is surprising how you condemned Shekarau’s and Bafarawa’s defection from APC to PDP, while keeping mute on the defections of many governors and legislators from PDP to APC! To you any defection from the PDP to any party is like a blessing to the nation (or north), while defections from any party to the PDP is a curse to the nation (or north). The truth is: APC treated Shekarau, Bafarawa and many other members just like the PDP treated the five defecting governors and other members too. Please always be objective in judging peoples actions and inactions.

    Habibu Hamisu Ibrahim. +2348033262011.

     

    Sir,

    Dr. Nnamdi Benjamin Azikiwe (God bless his gentle soul) was once asked, why he joined d then NPP, and not NPN, UPN, GNPP, PRP, or any of the parties, so called then) in Nigeria’s Second Republic. He retorted, among others: “…I reserve to myself, the prerogative to pick and choose, those who will travel with me, comfortably in d same ‘boat’ … and I will not complain (about) the ultimate fate of the ‘canoe’!”

    Defecting politicians (either in APC, LP, APGA, PPA, PDP, whatever called) in Nigeria today are enjoying this prerogative of jumping into any ship or canoe they feel comfortable with and/or may guarantee them electoral success. So it’s a question of time, for us to see the ultimate outcome of these defections. For now let us watch, pray and wish them well/bon voyage!

    Chukwuma Dioka. +2348142171487.

     

     

  • Maku and the defections from PDP

    Maku and the defections from PDP

    Last Wednesday, Information Minister, Labaran Makun, launched a blistering attack on members of his ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) who defected recently to the new opposition All Progressives Congress (APC), an amalgam of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and a faction of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA).

    The defectors, the minister said, were “like the Fulani nomads; they move from one party to another without shame. It shouldn’t be something we should cherish.”

    The minister launched his rather gratuitous offensive during a news briefing in Abuja, the federal capital, on the outcome of the day’s Federal Executive Council meeting.

    In launching his attack on the defectors he singled out the governors of Kano State, Dr Rabi’u Kwankwaso, and his Sokoto counterpart, Alhaji Aliyu Wamakko. They were, he said, undemocratic desperados who parachuted themselves into the APC and hijacked it from its founders.

    Their defections, he said, were however good for the party; akin to an obese person shedding undesirable fat to live a healthier and more robust life. (I am not so sure it would be wise for PDP to be so smug as the youthful minister; between Kano and Sokoto states there are relatively nearly as many voters – over seven million – as the entire Southsouth put together, with their nearly nine million).

    Maku’s unflattering comparison of the defections with the nomadic lifestyle of Fulanis has been rightly condemned by many as ethnicist. However, I agree completely with the underlying assumption of his diatribe which is that any defection based on ego or personal ambition rather than on a sublime principle is a thing to be condemned.

    The trouble with Maku’s angry words, however, was that they were not based on any principle. Rather they were simply meant to please his political godfathers. Otherwise, it would have occurred to him before he spoke that his harsh words would be truer of former governor of Kano State, Malam Ibrahim Shekarau, and his Sokoto State counterpart, Alhaji Attahiru Dalhatu Bafarawa, who subsequently traded places with their successors by defecting to the PDP. This realisation would have advised him to have been more careful in his choice of words against Kwankwaso and Wamakko.

    Take Bafarawa first. Nearly twelve years ago, on March 28, 2002 to be precise, the former Sokoto governor, as guest speaker at the second anniversary of the founding of the Arewa Consultative Forum, had only harsh words to describe what he said was the marginalisation of the North by the PDP under former president, General Olusegun Obasanjo. “Ogun and Oyo alone,” he said, in the course of his lecture to the applause of his large audience, “have benefitted from over N30 billion worth of road projects, more than what 12 states that make up Northwest and Northeast together enjoyed.”

    His answer to this marginalisation, he said, was Northern unity, pointing out that “While the West is AD 100%, the South-south and the South-east are PDP 100% … the North is 50% APP and 50% PDP.”

    He concluded that it was therefore “imperative that, at least for the sake of future presidential elections, we must all go one direction…United we stand, divided we fall.”

    Without prejudice to the merit or otherwise of his preference for the politics of regional monolithism, a preference which lacks any basis in our political history because opposition forces had always thrived in the old regions, one must ask what has changed between now and when Obasanjo left office seven years ago to justify Bafarawa’s defection to the PDP. The truth, as Bafarawa knows all too well, is that the North has been marginalised even more under President Goodluck Jonathan’s PDP than under Obasanjo’s.

    Exactly eight years to the day he was guest speaker at the ACF’s second anniversary, he said in a lengthy interview in The Nation (March 28, 2010) that he would never join PDP because being in opposition was the only way to deepen democracy in Nigeria. This was after he left ANPP in frustration, following his accusation that PDP had planted Chief Donald Etiebet as ANPP’s chairman to serve as a fifth columnist.

    Instead of joining PDP, he said, he decided to form his own Democratic Peoples Party (DPP) on whose platform he eventually contested the 2011 presidential election. Naming then PDP chair, Dr. Ahmadu Ali, and then acting president, Goodluck Jonathan, as his witnesses, he claimed Obasanjo offered him the control of Sokoto, Kebbi and Zamfara states by ceding the nomination of their governorship candidates to him, if he would join PDP. He said he rejected the offer.

    The Nation: What is in PDP that is making you run away from it?

    Bafarawa: I don’t believe in joining PDP because I want to help democracy grow…When there is challenge in democracy, then the government will move but if there is no opposition, there is no democracy.”

    Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what has changed about the PDP’s proverbial “garrison democracy” four years after the former Sokoto governor’s encounter with editors of The Nation that it has now suddenly become a beacon of democracy without the threat of a viable opposition party.

    Obviously, Bafarawa needs a better excuse than the ones he’s been giving us for his defection to a party that before now he had regarded as simply incapable of fostering democracy. And what is true of Bafarawa is even truer of the former Kano State governor, Malam Ibrahim Shekarau.

    Only late last year at a conference organised by the Movement for Better Future and Democratic Emancipation in Kaduna on September 7, 2013, he dismissed President Jonathan as a “total failure.”

    “My assessment,” he said then, “is that the government is a total failure… The only answer to this failure is to get the right people to do it.”

    Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, how within a short spell of five months the president has, in the former governor’s eyes, become the only right person to take Nigeria to now “do it.”

    For this intelligent and highly eloquent former teacher-turned-politician who, most Nigerians agreed, emerged the clear winner of the 2011 Presidential debate – what with, in the words of BBC News (April 5, 2011) “his eloquence, a calm disposition and an apparent grasp of policy issues” – to now sing praises of a president he thought unworthy of his office not too long ago, it speaks volumes about the courage and integrity of the self-declared convictions of our politicians.

    Of course, real elections are won not by debating skills alone. In free and fair elections that have defied this country, politicians win on the strength of their character and performance. The long history of carpet crossing between parties in this country and the manner in which our youthful minister of Information, Labaran Maku, heaped scorn on those who defected to the opposition party is proof positive that it would be a great miracle if next year’s election is, for once, won, not on the basis of propaganda, but on the basis of character and performance.

     

    Re: Babangida’s triumph of hope over reality

    Sir,

    So IBB does not as a Nigerian, a former president, war veteran, leader, elder statesman, etc, etc, have the right to say his mind and air his views on any national issue, without you attacking him.

    So Gen IBB is wrong and you are right. How selfish, self-centered and confused you are.

    Are you attacking IBB to please your pay masters or you have nothing to write or you want to be heard loud and clear because you attacked IBB?

    You (have) many issues to write about so why wait for IBB to speak, you then attack him? He has been very kind to you and your family. He does not deserve any attack from you on pages of newspapers, more so when you have direct access to him and can see him at any time you so wish.

    Who is sponsoring you against IBB? Who is afraid of IBB?

    Please have a re-think and kindly desist. IBB only said his mind, simple and clear and he has the right to.

    Hassan Muhammad Jallo.

     

    Sir,

    Does it matter if there are hitches in a society? And despite General Babangida’s optimism, yours was “pessimism” all through! Remember, you have benefitted from this same wobbled system and you are still benefitting. Give encouragement and support to our leaders rather than sanctions and ridicule!

    Lanre Oseni.

     

     

     

     

  • Babangida’s triumph of hope over reality

    Babangida’s triumph of hope over reality

    Last Monday, the New Telegraph, the latest “new kid on the block” in Nigeria’s newspaper world, led its maiden edition with an interview with former military president and a favourite whipping boy of the Nigerian media, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida.

    The interview was quintessential Babangida, the Maradona of Nigeria’s politics; the man artfully dribbled past virtually all the sensitive questions the newspaper’s reporters tried to pin him down with, to wit, such questions on his opinion about the performance of President Goodluck Jonathan and that of the governor of his Niger State, Dr. Muazu Babangida Aliyu, or about the latest, now famous, altercation between his “boss”, – his own word – General Olusegun Obasanjo, and the president, etc.

    However, the one question the man would not quibble about was on the unity and integrity of Nigeria. Nothing, he said, can ever shake his faith in the existence of Nigeria as one country – not the terrible Boko Haram insurgency and certainly not the National Conference, which critics of President Jonathan, including this reporter, say looks like a red herring the President hatched up to, at the least, divert attention from his dismal record, and at worst, lay the ground for rebellion by the oil-rich Delta region he comes from, should his presidential bid for another term, which he has not declared but which he is widely suspected of harbouring, fail.

    In his interview, General Babangida said he was not in the least disturbed by the reports at home and from abroad that the 2015 election could break Nigeria. “I am,” he said, “not disturbed by such reports. I am confident it (the election) would make us stronger. Two thousand and fifteen will make us stronger.”

    The general’s unshakable faith and hope in Nigeria’s unity and integrity is understandable. If nothing else, the man fought a war to keep Nigeria one as a young officer and he has a bullet still lodged in his body to show for it. However, with all due respect, his faith and hope are, I believe, the triumph of emotion over reality – the reality that the preponderance of those around President Jonathan have little or no faith in the country as a legitimate and united entity.

    When the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Senator Anyim Pius Anyim, unfolded the programme for the National Conference last Thursday, he declared that the one subject, which is non-negotiable at the conference is the “indivisibility and indissolubility” of Nigeria. In saying this, Senator Anyim merely reiterated the President’s well known stance that he will never allow the country to disintegrate under his watch. Certainly not, he said on one occasion, after its various peoples have lived together as one family, for better and for worse, for a 100 years since their colonisation by the British.

    Perhaps the President is sincere about his commitment to the unity and integrity of the country. But when, on the one hand, several of those close to the President threaten to break up the country unless he remains President beyond 2015 and nothing happens to them, and on the other hand, when those who say there will be violence if the President rigs the election are routinely harassed by the security forces, you cannot, in fairness, blame those who ask questions about the sincerity of the President’s commitment.

    Even more worrisome, in this respect, is the incredible fiscal irresponsibility of his government as exemplified by the fuel subsidy scandal, which has largely gone unpunished and by the over trillion naira waivers and exemptions it has given well-connected importers, not to mention budgets in which recurrent expenditures have consistently been more than double the capital expenditure. Such fiscal irresponsibility cannot but make any reasonable and sensible person wonder if those in authority believe there’s tomorrow for the country.

    Then, of course, there is the predictable grand oil theft that has gone on since the government handed over the security of the country’s oil regime to a few former Niger Delta militants about two years ago for huge sums that were sufficient to arm and equip our Navy and other relevant public security institutions to do a much better job. So grand is the oil theft that the big multinational oil companies and even our Finance minister, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, have expressed grave concerns about the country’s dwindling oil revenues.

    Government’s apparent indifference, to say the least, about this scale of oil theft alone, not to talk of the other reasons I have mentioned for concern about the President’s commitment to the country’s unity and integrity, reminds me of the Economics Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman’s five “rules of reporting” in his 2005 compilation of his columns titled: The Great Unravelling: From Boom to Bust in Three Scandalous Years to which I once drew the attention of readers of this column back in 2012. The book was about what Krugman called the “world-class mendacity” of the President George Bush and his vice, Dick Cheney, in covering up their phenomenal unravelling of the American political economy in three short years after coming to power.

    One of Krugman’s rules of reporting a government like Bush/Cheney’s which was similar to President Jonathan’s in its disregard for orthodoxy, was that a reporter must do his homework to discover the real, as opposed to the declared, goals of those in authority. What they did before they had power, he said, was a sure clue to their real intentions.

    Before the federal might went to the Delta region, more specifically to the Ijaw, it was an open secret that most of the region’s leading citizens in both public and private sectors funded, equipped and supported the region’s militancy. That militant attitude has been much apparent as the guiding principle of public policy in President Jonathan’s administration.

    This attitude is at the root of suspicions that there is a hidden agenda in the National Conference, especially given its timing so late in the President’s tenure. These suspicions have now been strengthened by the fact that the President alone will nominate about one quarter of the 492 delegates, none of whom will be elected. Worse still, is the rule that any division over an issue will be settled only by two thirds majority. Clearly this is a recipe for confusion and chaos.

    Over 21 years ago, The Economist (August 21, 1993) published an interesting survey on the country, titled: “Nigeria: Anybody seen a giant?” Among other things, the survey speculated about the prospects of the country breaking up. This was long before the more recent American scenario about Nigeria becoming a failed state.

    The self-styled newspaper gave five reasons for and against why the country could break up. The memory of Biafran civil war being too fresh may, it said, be an argument against a break up. But it quickly countered this argument with the point that this might not stop a slide into ungovernability, something the country has experienced long before the Boko Haram insurgency. Second, it said the argument about the country’s huge internal migration leading to more integration of its various people has, on the contrary, only led to resentment by “indigenes.”

    Third, it said, the argument that too many rich Nigerians have invested in the country to allow it to break up is no guarantee that the country would remain stable. Fourth, the argument that the rich world, led by an America hooked on cheap oil, cannot afford to allow the country fall apart, the magazine said, could be easily countered by the argument that should the country face any rebellion, the rich world would find it relatively easy to seal off the oil rich region and keep the oil wells pumping. Finally, the argument that the military was always on hand to intervene to stop the country sliding into chaos was, it said, undermined by the fact that the military itself had long become divided, politically and otherwise.

    Given what seems, at least to me, to be the greater weight of the counter arguments against the country’s break up, it seems Senator Anyim’s decree that the unity and integrity of Nigeria are off limits for the National Conference is no more than an expression of pious hope. The country may indeed not break up. But it would not be because of his, or for that matter, anybody’s mere say so.

    The conference itself was probably conceived in bad faith and is unlikely to lead to any good for the country. Delegates to the conference may disappoint sceptics like me and produce a useful report but the record of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party in dumping such documents into their trash cans makes it difficult, if not impossible, for any reasonable man to believe this time things will be any different.

    To be brutally frank about it, I do not understand the basis for General Babangida’s confidence that not only will all be well with Nigeria beyond 2015, the election that year will make it even stronger. Nigeria may be Africa’s and the Blackman’s giant in the sun but it is yet to have leaders that will turn its feet of clay into nimble ones that can stop it from tripping over itself.

     

     

     

     

     

     

    FEEDBACK

    My column of three weeks ago on the return of Chinweizu, the poet, author, essayist, literary critic, Pan Africanist and veteran newspaper columnist to the pages of Nigerian newspapers after a very long absence, received nearly sixty texts in response. Over a dozen of those responses offered to send me copies, original and photo, of his controversial book, The Anatomy of Female Power, which seemed to have gone out of circulation almost as soon as he’d published it. Perhaps the man himself did not read my piece in which I tried to take him up on his argument that our present constitution is an imposition of a Northern military cabal, but he did not respond to my request for a copy of the book.

    A friend has since delivered a copy to me in person. I wish to thank him and all those who offered to send it to me, mostly by mail.