The Nation Newspaper

Category: Mohammed Harunna

  • Playing dangerous politics with religion

    Playing dangerous politics with religion

    Last weekend, the Catholic Archbishop of Jos, Ignatius Kaigama, spoke out against what has since become President Goodluck Jonathan’s penchant for turning the church pulpit into a political platform for playing politics and making policy statements. Politicians should, he said, instead go to meet people in their villages where they live in abject poverty. The archbishop spoke this bitter truth to power in an interview with the online newspaper, Premium Times.

    The warning, coming from a senior cleric who is also the president of the influential Nigerian Bishops Conference, couldn’t have been deader on target and timelier as we begin preparations for the next elections starting in February next year.

    As if to underscore Archbishop Kaigama’s concern about the gravity of playing dangerous politics with religion, The Guardian published an editorial last Monday which condemned what it said was “the increasing recourse to religion by both the Presidency and the main opposition party…”

    “The conversion of churches and mosques into the new political battlefield”, the newspaper said, was “a dangerous adventure that must stop immediately.”

    The Guardian, like the archbishop, is right to be worried about the way some of our politicians have been using religion to divide and rule us. It was, however, wrong to say this phenomenon was new. It was also wrong to accuse the main opposition party of doing the same thing. For, while the president has been going about from one pulpit to another talking policy and politics, there has not been any report of the leadership of the main opposition party – The Guardian named no name but we all know it meant the All Progressives Congress – going openly from mosque to mosque or from church to church trying to harvest votes.

    In any case, even if the main opposition party is guilty of the misuse of religion for political gain, the greater blame must still go to the president; as The Guardian itself said, even if this allegation against the main opposition party is true, the buck must stop on the president’s table as he is “expected to run the country and not ruin it.”

    The way he has used religion to try and rule the country, going all the way back to even before the day in 2011 he knelt publicly before the highly influential Pastor Enoch Adeboye at the Redemption Camp, Ogun State, of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, for blessing in the run-up to the presidential election that year, the president may yet ruin this country.

    By now it should be obvious that the president and his ruling Peoples Democratic Party are determined to avoid a campaign based on the performance of his administration. This is obvious from the way his sidekicks, notably Professor Jerry Gana, who needs no introduction as, among other things, the country’s longest serving minister of information, through the militant Asari Dokubo to Senator Smart Adeyemi, have been defining the basis of support for the president in terms of ethnicity, region and religion.

    Professor Gana, for example, said recently that the Middle Belt where he comes from will vote for the President, apparently regardless of the man’s record of performance which, in spite of the statistics of economic growth government officials like to bandy around, has been dismal as is pretty obvious from the pervasive poverty in the land. For Gana the Middle Belt will vote for the president because, in his own estimation, it is mainly Christian and peopled by minority tribes.

    Similarly Dokubo has said the Southsouth region where he and the president come from will vote solidly for their man simply because he is their man, and it does not matter that nothing has changed in the dismal and brutish life of the common South-Southerner in spite of all the region’s oil wealth and for all these years that their man has been president.

    Again, Senator Adeyemi said in an interview in The Guardian of last Monday that the Yorubas in the North will support the president in spite of the alliance between the mainstream Southwest and Northwest politicians led by Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tinubu, former Lagos State governor, and General Muhammadu Buhari, former military head of state and a perennial presidential candidate since 2003. “The gang-up,” as the senator called it, “seems more or less dominated by a section of Muslims from the Southwest who are in collaboration with some Northerners, who are also predominantly Muslims.”

    In what was clearly a gross misrepresentation of the Tinubu/Buhari “amalgam”, he said in the interview that those touting it as a possible winner should remember that what he said was a similar alliance between Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola as Western premier and Sir Ahmadu Bello as Northern premier only led to the disastrous Western regional crisis which, in turn, eventually led to the 1966 military coup. Chief Akintola had rebelled against the leadership of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, whom he had succeeded as premier on the platform of the Action Group.

    Apparently the fact that Tinubu, unlike Akintola, represents mainstream politics in the South-West seems to have escaped the distinguished senator in his attempt to paint the opposition party in the false garb of an Islamic and Northern party.

    It is also obvious that the senator has ignored the fact that Tinubu’s wife is a staunch Christian and a pastor in her Church and that no one who knows the Asiwaju can accuse him of being a Muslim fundamentalist in the negative manner the West has portrayed such fundamentalism.

    Like Gana and Co., most of the president’s key supporters have strained themselves to create the impression that those opposed to their principal contesting next year’s election do so because he is a Christian and a minority and not because of his performance. And the president himself has hardly done anything to discourage this gross misrepresentation of the opposition.

    In this the president has merely been a good student of his erstwhile benefactor, former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. The reader may recall how the chief, with Gana as his minister of information, foisted the live telecast of the entire Sunday Service at the Villa Chapel on NTA’s audience, something which was unprecedented in our national live. It seems since then the student has surpassed his teacher in this cynical manipulation of religion for political gain.

    I believe it is naive to think religion should be separated from politics in so far as religion is about what is right and what is wrong in society. All religions tell us and basically agree on the right way and the wrong way to play politics and, for that matter, how to do almost anything. For me, therefore, what is wrong is not the mixing of politics and religion as such but using religion to cover up bad politics. And it is definitely bad politics to use religion – and for that matter ethnicity or region or anything else – to seek to manipulate and divide people, the easier to rule and exploit them.

    What Nigerians want are leaders prepared to serve the public interest regardless of where they come from or what deity they worship, not leaders too full of religiosity as our leaders have been.

    As president and commander-in-chief of our armed forces, Mr Goodluck Jonathan owes himself and his country the duty to take religiosity, in contradiction to religious ethics, out of our politics. Otherwise he may yet prove the prophets of doom right who say he is the last president Nigeria will have.

  • Tukur and the futility of impunity

    Tukur and the futility of impunity

    Even for a country always full of surprises, last week in Nigeria must have truly been a breath taker. First was the forced resignation, midweek, of Alhaji Bamanga Tukur as chairman of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party after a long and very unedifying brawl between himself and just about every other top shot in the party.

    Then President Jonathan defied his popular, but mistaken, image as a meek lamb and fired all his armed forces service chiefs, including the seemingly untouchable army boss, Lt-Gen Azubuike Ihejirika, on January 16, a day after this year’s Armed Forces Remembrance Day, apparently without the men having the slightest hint.

    Finally, as if to confirm that Media Trust Limited couldn’t have been more spot-on in its choice of the danger of incumbency and impunity to our fledgling democracy as the theme of this year’s Daily Trust Annual Dialogue which took place on January 16, the week ended on Sunday with a brazen invasion of a state sponsored rally of Save Rivers Movement in Bori, Khana Local Government Area of Rivers State, by masked hoodlums who wielded guns and other dangerous weapons, destroying government and other vehicles and maiming many of those at the rally, including some senior government officials. (There’s no prize for guessing who and who were behind the brash hoodlums).

    As Ms Ayo Obe, one of the three lead speakers at the dialogue and herself a leading human rights activist, said, Nigeria’s problem is not so much incumbency as the impunity with which not only incumbents but their officials and even relations and friends as well behave as if there will never be a day of reckoning. Most Nigerians would agree with Ms Obe, given the in-your-face breach of the laws of this country by the rich and powerful and the well-connected.

    As an example of such impunity, the Bori invasion was typical of how those in authority at all levels of government have abused the powers they have, and worse, all too often usurped even those they do not have. In his comment on the invasion, the spokesman of the state’s police command, Ahmed Mohammed, said the rally was unauthorised. “Nobody,” he said “notified the police that there would be a rally in Bori.”

    The Bori attack came exactly a week after the police itself dispersed another state sponsored rally in Port Harcourt during which a senior government official, Senator Magnus Abe, was reportedly shot with rubber bullets near his groin. Again the excuse was that it was unauthorised. That this was a ruse was obvious from the fact that a similar “unauthorised” rally by the opposition Grassroots Development Initiative whose patron is Mr Nyesom Wike, the Minister of Education and the local blue-eyed boy of President Goodluck Jonathan and his wife, Patience, was given police protection.

    The claim by the police that one needs police permit to hold rallies or other forms of congregations is a clear usurpation of the old Public Order Act, which itself has been rendered null and void and of no effect by the 1999 Constitution and the long standing Court of Appeal ruling that the police has no powers to deny anyone his inalienable right to congregate and associate.

    That act, to the extent that it existed, vested the power to give such permit or delegate it to any police officer of whatever rank not on the Inspector General of Police but on the governor of a state as its chief security officer. It is incongruous that Governor Rotimi Amaechi would ever have sent the police to disperse his own rally or that he would have looked the other way as hoodlums attacked a rally he sponsored.

    The long drawn saga of the demise, last week, of Alhaji Bamanga Tukur as chair of PDP offers lessons about the ultimate futility of the impunity going on in Rivers – or any type of impunity for that matter; no matter how long it takes the chickens will always come home to roost. The emergence of Alhaji Adamu Muazu, two-term former governor of Bauchi State with a corruption case pending at the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, as Alhaji Bamanga’s replacement, shows clearly that the lessons have not been learnt.

    Speaking to some sheikhs who went to commiserate with him and pray for him following his forced resignation, Alhaji Tukur said he did his best to “reform the party by promoting the principle of election instead of selection and the idea of consensus instead of imposition.” Clearly the irony that he himself as a child of selection and imposition back in March 2012, could not have promoted virtues he never possessed, was completely lost on him.

    In case the old man has forgotten, he needs to be reminded that he became chair of his party in spite of losing a preliminary shortlist by the North-East caucus of his party and because delegates at the mini-convention of dubious legality which followed were corralled by the authorities, kicking and screaming, into voting for him.

    From such an inauspicious start everything he did to turn his party into a garrison of zombies whose only role was to do the biddings of those who selected and imposed him on the party – from quarrelling with anyone who disagreed with his ways through setting up a disciplinary committee not known to his party’s constitution to defying court orders for re-instating “rebellious” party officials – was predictable.

    Equally predictable was his disgraceful “resignation”. Nothing underscores how disgraceful his forced departure was more than his own principal’s endorsement last Monday of Alhaji Adamu as his replacement, unwitting as those remarks seemed. The new chair, said President Jonathan, was the man the party needed now. “Somebody,” he said, “who can build the party, make friends and reach out.” PDP, he added, was now in need of people who would build bridges, not those who would only “fight, fight, fight.”

    Coming from the president, the obvious insinuation in these words that Alhaji Tukur was too quarrelsome in his ways to have been an effective chair was not only unkind. It was also grossly unfair to the man whose unspoken but obvious brief was to deliver his party’s presidential ticket and the country to his principal in 2015. It all looked like the man, as was the case with all the past seven chairmen of the party going back to the late Chief Solomon Lar in 1999, was merely used and dumped. He may shortly be compensated with appointment as the next defence minister, as is being speculated, but no compensation coming at the twilight of his life as a near-Septuagenarian can ever make up for the fact that he is ending what should have been a glorious close to a long political career as a carpetbagger of someone young enough to be his son, age wise and politically.

    Not surprisingly Alhaji Tukur has been blaming everyone but himself for his sad and tragic demise. In particular he has been blaming the media, the favourite whipping boy of everyone with lots of skeletons rattling away in their cupboards, for his failure. His enemies, he said, succeeded in the end in using the institution to bring him down. “Some members,” he told his visiting malams, “got so desperate that they turned to the media and funded all negative reports against me… They even attempted to use the media to get me in confrontation to with Mr. President.”

    As a reporter, I will be the last to say that the media in Nigeria, as elsewhere, do not often fabricate news. They do. However, in Alhaji Tukur’s case those skeletons in his cupboard whose exposure by the media finally ended his attempt to run the affairs of his party with impunity were not the inventions of reporters and editors. Rather, they were the manifestations of his actions that, as with your typical politician, all too often belied what he preached.

    In replacing Alhaji Tukur with someone with a question mark over his integrity it is obvious that the lesson that honesty of purpose is a higher value and is more likely to get results than mere loyalty has not been learnt by any of the parties in the long drawn saga of Tukur’s downfall.

    PDP, it seems, is yet to get out of the woods into which the ambitions of a few men and the greed of their willing tools had dragged it long before Dr Jonathan became president.

  • Return of Chinweizu and all that

    Return of Chinweizu and all that

    It’s good to know my good friend, poet, author, essayist, literary critic, Pan Africanist and, not least of all, newspaper columnist, Chinweizu Ibekwe, simply self-identified as Chinweizu, is alive and well(?). Not too long after his controversial 1990 book, The Anatomy of Female Power, provocatively subtitled A Masculinist Dissection of Matriarchy, the man simply vanished from the Nigerian radar.

    Appearing at a time when the late Mariam, wife of former military president, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, had elevated the state of First Ladyism in the country to an unprecedented height, Chinweizu’s Anatomy was as harsh a criticism of female power in or out of the corridors of power as you could get anywhere.

    Predictably the book provoked a huge protest from the female folk. Speculations were rife then that Mariam took its attack personal and vowed to obstruct its circulation. If this was true, the late First Lady was not alone; among others, the late celebrity journalist, May Ellen Ezekiel, vigorously campaigned in her popular column in the rested Clasique, that every woman owed it to herself and to the female gender to kill the book’s circulation.

    If MEE, as she was then popularly known, were alive today she would’ve been celebrating the success, beyond her wildest imagination, of her campaign. Today, when the book should be compulsory reading for all, given the way Patience, President Goodluck Jonathan’s wife, has transmogrified First Ladyism, it is almost impossible to find a copy. All the libraries in Kaduna, my city of residence, and all the bookstores that I have searched in Kaduna, Abuja, Lagos and Ibadan, Nigeria’s book publishing capital, have no copies. My requests for the book from mutual friends like the managing director of Guardian Newspapers limited where Chinweizu once plied his trade, Mr Emeka Izeze, drew blank. Another mutual friend, Chief Ikechi Emenike, also a journalist and magazine publisher, who had five copies lost all over time and couldn’t remember exactly to whom.

    Indeed most mutual friends didn’t know where to reach Chinweizu at to find out from him where to get a copy. Some said he was in far away America, feeling not so well and had chosen to remain somewhat incommunicado for personal reasons.

    You can then imagine my pleasant surprise the other day when I saw his half-page response in The Guardian (Thursday, December 12, 2013) to two newspaper interviews by my friend and primary school class mate, the radical Kano politician and medical doctor, Dr Junaid Mohammed – one in the Sunday Sun of December 1, 2013, the other in The PUNCH of December 6, 2013 – in which Junaid threatened bloodshed should President Jonathan run next year (Sun) and said supporters of a Sovereign National Conference (SNC) were only asking for civil war (PUNCH). Chinweizu’s article, entitled “To Junaid Mohammed and Shariyalanders”, was vintage him; pungent, precise, rigorous and highly readable, if also largely propagandistic.

    The following Thursday, December 19, the newspaper again carried another half-page article by the man, this time his intervention on the controversial 18-page letter to President Jonathan by former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo.

    His main thesis in both pieces was characteristically provocative but equally propagandistic; Nigeria’s current Constitution, he said, is “a self-interested creation of Northern generals, for the parochial interest of Shariyaland,” and, as such, it must be replaced by new Constitution created through the National Dialogue/Conference and approved by the people through a referendum before the next election. The Junaids and the Chief Obasanjos of this world who raise questions about the competence and integrity of President Jonathan and about his fidelity to the deals he makes and his fairness to all sections of the country, he said, are merely trying to divert attention away from what he obviously believes is the very urgent need to do away with the current “illegitimate” constitution.

    The current constitution should go, he says, not only because it is an illegitimate imposition of Northern generals. It should go also because, by the immunity it has granted the president and state governors and their deputies and by its ouster of Chapter II on the fundamental objectives of government as justiciable, it has become “the godfather of corruption” in Nigeria.

    Chinweizu is clearly in agreement with a group of his fellow Igbo elders, led by Professor Ben Nwabueze, which recently issued a statement after a meeting in Enugu rejecting any national conference which is not sovereign and whose outcome is not subjected to a referendum. Their belief that the current constitution is an imposition of Northern generals does extreme violence to the facts of constitution making in this country and their insistence on the sovereignty of the conference and subjecting it to a referendum is simply impractical, given the one year left before our next elections. On his part, Chinweizu’s argument that the Constitution is the godfather of corruption in the country simply stands logic on its head.

    Anyone who has taken time to study the current 1999 Constitution will agree that there are only minor differences between it and the 1979 Constitution. The latter was drafted by a committee of some of Nigeria’s best lawyers and social scientists led by late Chief Rotimi (Timi the Law) Williams, a leading Yoruba and one of the country’s first Queens Counsel and Senior Advocate.

    The draft was debated by a mainly elected Constituent Assembly under the chairmanship of the late Justice Udo Udoma, one of the most respected justices of the Supreme Court and a South-Southerner who was by means a lackey of Chinweizu’s Northern generals. The CA itself comprised some of the most astute Nigerian politicians and critics of military rule.

    General Olusegun Obasanjo, whose administration finally enacted the Constitution into law, is, as far as I know, Yoruba. True, his administration was under the watchful eyes of some Northern generals. However, these generals never had any Northerner’s mandate to take the decisions they took. In any case, these Northern generals rarely took any decisions without the consent of their fellow generals from other sections of the country.

    Except, of course, if Chinweizu is saying of all the Nigerians who made the 1979 Constitution only the Northern generals have a mind of their own it is untenable for anyone to say that the Constitution was an imposition by a cabal of Northern generals.

    Give or take a few minor amendments the 1999 Constitution is the same as that of 1979.

    As for the argument that we need a brand new Constitution, one can counter it with the American saying that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Yes, our Constitution, like everything human, isn’t perfect and as such needs fixing every once in a while. But our problem, one must never tire of repeating, is less our Constitution than our attitude. In other words, anyone who thinks, as Chinweizu and Professor Nwabueze do, that a brand new constitution will banish our problems must be suffering from a grand delusion. Constitutions don’t implement themselves. People do. And without the right attitude which, unfortunately, is in the end not a matter for legislation, no Constitution, no matter how near-perfect, can solve anyone’s problems.

    However, assuming for argument’s sake that we do need a brand new constitution, it is truly amazing how anyone can imagine that we can get it, with referendum and all that, before the elections due in a year’s time. Or, as Professor Nwabueze and other likeminded leaders insist, we can get it based on the ethnic groups of this country as building blocks.

    First, under our Constitution the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) will require a law by the National Assembly to conduct elections into a Constituent Assembly. For now Section 15 (a) of the Third Schedule gives it powers only to conduct elections into the presidency, governorship and national and state assemblies.

    Second, money is an object in these times when governments are finding it hard to pay even salaries, essentially due to government profligacy. Third, time itself is an object considering how the minimum time it takes to enact and implement laws is on the scale of months not days or even weeks. Fourth, no one knows for sure how many tribes we have in this country. Also the populations of the tribes we know have never been captured by any of our censuses to enable us decide what weight to give to each group in allocating the number of those to represent it since it makes no sense to give them equal representation in a democracy.

    In pursuing his thesis Chinweizu claimed believers of Sharia like Junaid have since been waging a war against Nigeria through Boko Haram. He also condemned Obasanjo for trying to hold President Jonathan to promises he said the president made in 2011 to serve only one term.

    As a Muslim who believes in Sharia and as someone who believes one’s word should be his honour, I can easily expose Chinweizu’s positions as mere propaganda. However, these are matters for possibly another time. For now one would only like to say welcome back Chinweizu, and if you happen to read this piece please let me know through a text to the phone number on top of this column how I can get a copy of your Anatomy of Female Power.

  • Letter to the President: “Third Term” as the Road to Anarchy

    Letter to the President: “Third Term” as the Road to Anarchy

    Two weeks ago I promised I will reproduce today an open letter I wrote to former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, a little over seven years ago which somewhat predicted the sad and tragic predicament he’s found himself in recently, following his own earthshaking letter to his estranged godson, President Goodluck Jonathan. Hopefully, President Jonathan, his praise mongers and attack dogs – and the rest of us – will learn the lessons of the letter, among which are that we should always at least try to practise what we preach and always remember that in the end what we sow is what we reap. Below is the letter edited for space:

    Dear Mr. President,

    Last week, I reproduced in these columns an open letter I wrote to you 17 years ago on the occasion of the publication of what was your magnum opus titled Constitution for National Integration and Development. In reproducing the letter as a reminder that our past will always catch up with us, if we refuse to learn from it, I said the letter was a prelude to another one I had decided to write to you. This is the letter.

    It will be my second since you returned to power on May 29, 1999, this time as elected president. The first letter was published on these pages on May 11, 2005, nearly a year ago. In that letter, I said that you should learn the lesson that power is ephemeral and you should therefore perish the thought of overstaying your welcome. The letter was titled “The lesson of Power” and it was about “rumours” at that time that you, or at least your henchmen were scheming for a third term, some would say a lifetime agenda. For a long while you yourself artfully dodged questions on the issue, most famously when the visiting President of the World Bank, Mr. Paul Wolfowitz, asked you point-blank whether or not you wanted to extend your tenure.

    Sir, if you were an artful dodger of questions about extending your stay in office, several of your henchmen were categorical in their denials of such a scheme. Notable among these deniers were Deputy Senate President, Alhaji Ibrahim Mantu, your erstwhile political adviser, Professor Jerry Gana, your inter-party affairs adviser, Alhaji Lawal Batagarawa, and Chief Onyeama Ugochukwu, who until recently was executive chairman of the well-endowed Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC.

    Most recently, Professor Julius Ihonvbere, who took over Gana’s job as your political adviser, dismissed all speculations about your third term agenda as political laziness. “They”, he said in an interview in the Sunday Independent of March 19, 2006, “are busy on TV and newspapers spreading stories about third term. That is political laziness”.

    Needless to say, in spite of your artful dodging and in spite of the categorical denials by some of your henchmen, the “rumours” of your third term agenda persisted. The reason, as I said in my first letter to you, was pretty obvious; there was a huge gap between what you and your henchmen said and what you all did.

    Just about two years ago, The Guardian advised you in an editorial that you should make a categorical statement denouncing rumours of your third term agenda. “Here is a case”, it said in its editorial of April 1, 2004, “where silence is not golden.” For whatever reason, you ignored the newspaper’s advice. Which was just as well. Because if you had not, and swore to it on a stack of the Holy Bible, few Nigerians would still have believed you because your denials would have been at great odds with the facts on the ground even then.

    Among those facts was your apparent determination to subvert the internal democracy of your party, the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party, by recreating it in your own imperial image. There was also your wilful interference in the choice of the leadership of the National Assembly from the word go. Again, there was, of course, your implacable hostility towards your deputy’s well-known wish to succeed you in 2007 and your none-too-subtle denigration of anyone, notably Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Muhammadu Buhari, who showed the slightest interest in your job.

    Sir, your recent hints that only you can save Nigeria from anarchy has an antecedent. Remember you dropped a similar hint in late 2002 at the height of the threats by the House of Representatives, under the leadership of Alhaji Umar Ghali Na’Abba, to impeach you. That hint prompted the Nigerian Tribune to write an editorial titled THE ALARM ON CIVIL WAR in its edition of September 24, 2002. In that editorial it said your alarm, more likely than not, “could very well be the hollow desperate cry to those base sentiments by a man who has leaned too heavily upon his own counselling and understanding in bungling a golden opportunity”.

    Your Excellency, on May 29, 1999, Nigerians gave you a platinum opportunity, if there is such an expression, to write your name in platinum in Nigeria’s history book. I am afraid, sir, you truly bungled and squandered that opportunity and this was essentially because you allowed vengeance – vengeance against all those you believed had wronged you by wanting to hang you for treason – to become the main driving force in formulating your policies and programmes.

    Sir, you betrayed this motive by the fact that you had barely settled down in your seat as president when you set up the Human Rights Violations Investigations Commission (HRVIC), a.k.a. Oputa Panel, initially to look into human rights violations between 1993, the year you were sentenced to the gallows, and May 1999, the year you emerged from death’s shadow to become Nigeria’s second elected president. It was only after the general uproar about the Oputa Panel’s narrow focus that you extended its period of coverage to include your years in office as military leader.

    Compare your haste, sir, to the well-measured steps South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, took to set up his own Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As you know very well Mandela had more cause to seek vengeance than yourself. After all, he spent 27 years in prison compared to your own five. And the prison conditions there were probably more appalling than ours, given the racist nature of the regime that locked him up.

    At the time the Oputa Panel started sitting late 2001, you may have read a letter written to you by Malam Abubakar Gimba, author and one-time President of the Association of Nigerian Authors. The letter was published in the Daily Trust of August 27, 2001. It is one of the most inspiring pieces of literature I have read in a long time and I wish I had space to reproduce it for you.

    Sir, if you read that letter at all, it is obvious that you did not heed its wise counsel. In that letter, Gimba quoted profusely from the Holy Bible to try and persuade you, as a self-proclaimed born-again Christian, to learn to forgive any past wrongs done to you and focus on reconciliation. “The Holy Bible,” Gimba said among other things, “fully endorses reconciliation when it says (Corinthians 5:19) ‘that God (the Most High) was in Christ (may Allah’s peace be on him) reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them and has committed to us the word reconciliation’ “ (emphasis, author’s). Gimba said only the tonic of forgiveness will bring about the needed reconciliation in the land and only you could start the process by injecting the antidote.

    He concluded his letter by quoting, again from the Holy Bible, the parable of the rejected cornerstone. You were, he said, destined by God to lead our national reconciliation. “Think about it,” he said. “In particular (think about) Psalm 118:22 ‘The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone’.

    “Your Excellency, Mr. President” Gimba finally said, “you were once rejected. Then the Lord restored you to His Grace. Now you are our chief cornerstone. You must do the Lord’s will.”

    Sir, instead of doing the Lord’s will, you chose to do your own will. You chose to avenge those you believed had wronged you either directly, by sending you to the gallows, or indirectly by not raising a finger to protest your ill-treatment. This vengefulness has been apparent from, among other things, the way you have formulated your annual budgets since 1999 and even more so from the highly selective manner you have implemented those budgets to reward groups and sections of the country in your good books and punish those you dislike.

    The vengefulness is also obvious from the way you have tried to divide and rule Nigerians by a most cynical manipulation of ethnicity and religion, mainly through thinly disguised sponsorships of sectional and sectarian associations, even as you yourself condemned such associations as reactionary and divisive.

    Sir, your vengefulness coupled with your apparent belief that you alone know best what is good for Nigeria is what has led the country into its current serious political crisis, a crisis that may lead to anarchy and even into a civil war if we are not careful. Already, there are ominous dark clouds hanging over the country, dark clouds created by your administration’s use of the security forces to harass and intimidate opposition elements pursuing their legitimate rights of free speech, free association and lawful assembly.

    These harassments and intimidation are camouflaged as the need to maintain law and order. The hypocrisy of it all, however, is laid bare by the fact that last week as your administration was prosecuting some members of the Atiku Vanguard for forming, managing and supporting what it called an illegal organisation working for the Vice-President, you yourself were busy setting up the Obasanjo Solidarity Forum.

    Sir, the only way to avoid the manifest danger facing the country is for you to sincerely and unequivocally denounce your third term agenda. Most Nigerian’s would probably not believe you even if you do but you can still convince them if your own actions and those of your henchmen begin to speak louder than your words.

    You know, or at least should know, very well that many of those now telling you that you are indispensable – the Colonel Ahmadu Alis with their crude and silly metarphours about not changing clothes when they are not dirty, the Navy Captain Olabode Georges of this world with their equally crude and silly metarphours of not changing pilots when the aircraft is yet to reach cruising level – all these characters said the same thing to leaders like military president General Ibrahim Babangida, and to your tormentor, General Sani Abacha. You can bet your last kobo they will say the same thing to whoever succeeds you.

    They say the time to quit is when the ovation is loudest. Regardless of what your courtiers tell you, right now probably more Nigerians are jeering your administration than cheering it. The fact is that in spite of your brave attempts at political and economic reforms there is more insecurity, sorrow and misery in the land than when you first returned. Your administration may peddle statistics of your achievements, but in the end it is the human effect that matters.

    The fact is that in spite of your brave effort, you have woefully failed to stop, much less reverse, the rot in our infrastructure like electricity, refineries, higher education and health. One area you seem to have achieved something was telecommunication, with the establishment of mobile phones. Even here the achievement is marred by the inefficiency of the system and its outrageous cost to the consumer, not to mention the terrible and scandalous mess which Pentascope made of Nitel, the nation’s fixed line carrier.

    In the light of all these signal failures it is tempting for you to want to extend your tenure. Sir, you must resist that temptation with every ounce of your strength. Mr. President, Sir, no one, and absolutely no one, is indispensable to his country or cause. As you know very well, the graveyard is full with bodies of many who thought or believed they were indispensable. You owe yourself and Nigeria not to be counted among those who suffered such grand delusions about themselves. If you persist you will only be leading Nigeria down the road to anarchy. At the end of it all, you would then have gone down in Nigeria’s history as its arch-villain instead of one of its heroes.

    May God Almighty give you the strength to avoid such a tragic end to a once glorious career.

  • Between OBJ and GEJ and others in-between (II)

    Between OBJ and GEJ and others in-between (II)

    Dr Iyabo Obasanjo’s intervention in the rift between her father and President Goodluck Jonathan through her terrible letter to the old man is sadly a testimony to how thoroughly dysfunctional the Obasanjo family is. It also shows how equally guilty – possibly even more so – she is of some of the vices she’s accused her father of; vengeful, hypocritical, opportunistic, ungrateful, and much else besides.

    “We, your family,” she wrote in her letter, “have borne the brunt of your direct cruelty and also suffered the consequences of your stupidity BUT GOT NONE OF THE BENEFITS OF YOUR SUCCESSES.” (Emphasis mine). As a vet doctor and a PhD in public health, Iyabo, no doubt, had the credentials to serve as a commissioner of health in her Ogun State and as senator. Surely, however, she should be the first to acknowledge that if she was not an Obasanjo her credentials alone would never have got her those jobs, especially since, as she herself said, she was away from the country from 1989 until the inauguration of her father as president in 1999, except for her brief visit in 1994.

    And she was not the only one from her mother, Olurenmi – her portrait of her husband in her 2008 book, Bitter-Sweet: My Life with Obasanjo, could hardly have been more unflattering – to have greatly benefitted from being an Obasanjo. Her brother, Gbenga, who had accused his father of sleeping with his wife, was also a great beneficiary of their father’s presidency. For example, he reportedly had an interest in an Indian company which snatched a multi-million dollar contract for the rehabilitation and expansion of the power plant of Ajaokuta Steel Company Ltd from Power Works Ltd.

    PWL partly belonged to the late Mrs Kathryn Hoomkwap from Plateau State, one of those who worked hard to get Obasanjo elected in 1999 and who helped him draw up a blueprint for the transformation of Nigeria, a blueprint he promptly discarded as soon as he took over power. Kate, a friend and classmate from our university days, worked so hard under then President-Elect Obasanjo’s team headed by late Chief Sunday Awoniyi that Obasanjo reportedly told Chief Awoniyi he may appoint her secretary of his putative government. But not only did he not do so. He was at least complicit in the robbery of PWL’s contract after it has invested heavily in it and giving the job to a company Gbenga had an interest in. Kate died with the burden of the bank loan her company took for the contract.

    So for Iyabo to claim that her estranged wing of the Obasanjo family did not benefit one jot from her father’s name was a bit too rich. Her claim may not be the height of ingratitude, but it is close.

    Obviously Iyabo’s bitterness with her old man is not because she did not derive any benefit from being an Obasanjo. It seems it is more because she did not get more, given her failed second term senatorial bid and the open secret that she wanted to be a minister. Her father, she must have believed, did not commit himself enough to make those ambitions possible.

    Her bitterness is not just with her old man. She seems also bitter with her country. “I tried to contribute my part to the development of my country,” she said in her letter, “but the country decided it didn’t need me.” Part of her bitterness with Nigeria was the scandal that surrounded the retreat in Ghana of the Senate committee on health she headed, a retreat which she herself said was paid for by the Ministry of Health and some international NGOs but which she and her colleagues still went ahead to collect estacodes for, something which was clearly wrong, if only because there is a conflict of interest in ministries paying for the oversight functions of legislators.

    Yet like her father who she blames for hypocrisy, she said she saw nothing wrong with what she did. “I did nothing wrong,” she said of the scandal. Instead, she saw everything wrong with a country which could not appreciate her sacrifice as someone who left the comfort of her residency abroad to return and serve her country.

    In thinking that the country did not appreciate her sacrifice, Iyabo is clearly one of those Nigerian technocrats in diaspora, genuine and fake alike, who think their expertise entitles them to special treatment in their country when in fact their record of performance has amply demonstrated that they have used their expertise more for self-aggrandisement than for the benefit of their country.

    Iyabo resembles her father too much for anyone to accuse her of being a bastard Obasanjo. But what she did to him and to her family is hard, if not impossible, to justify even for a bastard child. If, as she said, her father’s letter to President Jonathan was “vengeful”, hers to her father was worse, especially if, as is being speculated, she was put up to it for pecuniary considerations by the presidency. However, whatever motivated her letter, it is almost impossible to find a word awful enough to describe what she has done to herself, to her father and to her family.

    As for President Jonathan’s reply to Obasanjo, his nearly 5,000-word letter has done little, if anything, to belie his estranged benefactor’s charges. As far as compositions go, the president’s reply would probably score much higher than Obasanjo’s 8,000-word or so letter, even though neither of the combatants will win any award for style and grammar.

    Beyond its superior style and grammar, however, the president’s letter contains little to belie the substance of Obasanjo’s letter. The summary of the president’s reply was simply to say Obasanjo had done worse during his eight-year presidency than what he has accused the president of.

    This thesis is highly debatable. It is debatable, for example, that the country is today more secure, more united and less corrupt than it was during Obasanjo’s time. And certainly the one thing no one can ever accuse Obasanjo of is cluelessness and lack of control over his lieutenants, relations and friends, vices which the president is widely seen to suffer from.

    However, even if it is true that Obasanjo was no better than the president in the vices he has accused the president of – and in several ways this is true – this is beside the point, namely the point that leaders should be judged more by the standard they set themselves than by the records of those before.

    When President Jonathan took over on his own steam in 2011, he promised to bring in “a breath of fresh air” and transform the country’s political economy. More than half way through his current term the stench oozing out of our country has only got stronger and stronger to the point of almost choking its people.

    Take, for example, the country’s state of insecurity. It was not enough for the president to have countered Obasanjo’s charge with the answer that kidnapping for ransom, oil theft and the Boko Haram insurgency predated his presidency. The question, which he did not answer satisfactorily, was what has he done since then to stem these and other forms of insecurities in the land?

    One of his answers is that the presidency has poured in billions into building schools for almajirai (so-called child destitutes) to address ignorance and poor education as two of the factors he said are responsible for Boko Haram insurgency. He also said his government has established 12 more universities in the country, nine in the North and three in the South, as if the problems of our universities are their numbers rather than their quality.

    What this answer clearly betrays is a frame of mind which lacks a proper grasp of the complexity of almajirai and which thinks the solution to virtually every problem is simply to throw money at it when all that this has done in the past is to breed even more corruption.

    On corruption itself, to take another example, the president said he “will not shield any government official or private individual involved in corruption” but added the convenient caveat that he “must follow due process in all that I do.”

    Right now, the most glaring opportunity for the president to prove he will not shield any of his officials implicated in any corruption is the well publicised case of his Minister of Aviation, Ms Stella Oduah, whose sack has been widely demanded for, for importing armoured cars, presumably for personal use, that were never budgeted for at highly inflated prices.

    The president is right to insist he would not sack any of his officials without due process. But when a president sets up a panel to investigate an official and then refuses to disclose the outcome of the investigation – never mind acting on it – weeks after he publicly announces to the world that the report is on his table, as is the case with his minister of aviation, he can only blame himself if his vows of zero tolerance of corruption rings hollow in the public ear.

    Still on corruption, the president says he is “amazed” that with all of Obasanjo’s knowledge, he still believed the “spurious allegation” made by the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, that $49.8 billion of recent oil receipts had been unaccounted for by the NNPC, presumably stolen. Now that Sanusi has recanted, the president said, Obasanjo should find it in his “heart to apologise for misleading unwary Nigerians and impugning the integrity of my administration on that score.”

    With due respect to the president, he is merely being clever by half. True, Sanusi clearly got his arithmetic grossly wrong. However, his point that NNPC had not accounted for all oil proceeds remains valid; the Minister of Finance, Dr Okonjo-Iweala, has admitted that over $10 billion remains unaccounted for. This is only a fifth of Sanusi’s figure, but $10 billion is by no means peanuts by anyone’s standard.

    One can go on to show how the president did not satisfactorily debunk Obasanjo’s other charges – his handling of the economy, his anti-party activities and his use of ethnicity and religion to divide and rule this country, etc – but what is more important is that the president is seen to live by the standard he had set for himself.

    He has little time to make amends before the next presidential election which he is clearly determined to contest. He will spend this time more usefully trying to make these amends than in trying to divert the public’s attention to his erstwhile benefactor’s motives, whatever they are.

  • Between OBJ and GEJ and others in-between (I)

    Between OBJ and GEJ and others in-between (I)

    Last weekend, Leadership (December 21) published a story in which it quoted former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, (OBJ) as saying on his Facebook wall on December 20 that, following his controversial December 2 letter to President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ) which he ominously titled “Before it is too late”, it was time Nigerians turned on the heat in the polity so that only the best party should win the next general elections in 2015.

    “It is now time,” the newspaper quoted him as saying, “to turn up the heat. May the best party win.” In the light of his letter in which he admonished his estranged benefactor and godson to shape up or ship out, Obasanjo’s call for Nigerians to turn on the heat was clearly his coded way of asking Nigerians to throw out the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) at the next elections, the very party that gave him the platform to rule the country as its first elected president since 1985 and a party which he once boasted will rule Nigeria for a long, long time, if not forever.

    His call for Nigerians to turn up the heat also looked, at least to me, like a call on the select Nigerian leaders – Generals Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, Abdulsalami Abubakar and Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma and Dr Alex Ekwueme with whom he said he had shared the content of his letter and who he also said shared his concerns – to speak out in his support.

    So far none has and it’s highly unlikely that anyone of them will. Up till now the only one among them who has said anything about the letter is General Danjuma and he has categorically said he will not criticise GEJ in the open. “I have complete and unimpeded access to the president,” he said in a goodwill message to the 6th Abuja Festival of Praise on the night of December 20 in response to what he said have been repeated calls by the press for him to say something about the letter, “and if I have anything to say to him, I will do so face to face. These are difficult times and we must be careful, especially as leaders on what we say in public.”

    The general’s argument of unimpeded access to the president precluding his speaking out does not look quite tenable; in November 2003 he spoke out against Obasanjo as a president that he said he found out was under the spell of a cult-like clique. At that time he had just left Obasanjo’s administration as the defense minister and he had complete and unimpeded access to the Obasanjo.

    Five years later, he said even more terrible things about his former friend and boss. In an interview with The Guardian (February 17, 2008) marking his 70th birthday he condemned Obasanjo as “the most toxic leader that Nigeria has produced so far.” The country, he said, “took him out of jail and made him a president; he abused Nigeria, he deceived Nigeria and he deserves a second term in prison and we will make sure he ends up there.”

    By then Obasanjo was, of course, no longer president but, on General Danjuma’s own contention, his friend still ruled Nigeria by proxy “through Yar’Adua, his puppet.” At the time Danjuma still had complete and unimpeded access to his friend and to President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.

    So if the general has rejected calls for him to speak out on Obasanjo’s letter, it would not be because you speak truth to power only when you do not have complete and unimpeded access to those in power.

    In any case his attack on Obasanjo back in 2003 would not be the first time he’s spoken out against those in power even when they were completely accessible to him. There has to be other reasons for his reticence this time, probably foremost of which is his well publicised falling out with Obasanjo over the former president’s successful move to partially take away the oil well the general had been allocated by the late military head of state, General Sani Abacha, an oil well which has since proved one of the most lucrative in the country.

    As for Generals Babangida and Abubakar and Chief Ekwueme, they too, like General Danjuma, are more likely than not to maintain strategic silence, strategic because while they know much of what Obasanjo said in his letter is true, as we shall see next week, God willing, they do not want to offend or embarrass President Jonathan with whose government they’ve been doing good and brisk business in many sectors of the economy.

    Their strategic silence is also probably because they believe Obasanjo lacks the moral authority to condemn the president for all the offences he has charged the president with, not least of all the charges of bad faith and divisiveness. For, make no mistake about it, before Jonathan came along, Obasanjo was the most divisive president we’ve had in this country and someone whose word you took to your bank at your own peril, as I have tried to show in innumerable articles I have written about the man on these pages and elsewhere, one of which I shall reproduce on these pages in two weeks time, God willing, for its relevance to the ongoing controversy about his letter even though mine was written eleven years ago.

    The point of all this is that clearly Obasanjo is on his own in this letter writing business as a strategy of wrong footing President Jonathan. Worse for him, it seems the heat he wants President Jonathan and the PDP to be subjected to has been turned on him, first, from a quarter he – and probably most Nigerians, including this reporter – least expected and, second, from the reply to his letter by his erstwhile godson.

    Once upon a time, Mr. Femi Fani-Kayode, before he became arguably the most trenchant defender of President Obasanjo during his second term, described him as a Mr. Know-It-All and a stooge of not only the much maligned “Fulani caliphate.” Fani-Kayode said Obasanjo was also a stooge of “his Western European backers…and his friends at the IMF and the World Bank.” The man, he concluded, in that clearly malicious article in The Comet (March 18, 2001), since rested, “may end in utter disaster and shame.”

    At the time Fani-Kayode wrote those words not even he in his wildest thoughts could have imagined that the former president’s “disaster and shame” would come in the shape of a daughter who seemed to have benefitted most from being an Obasanjo, namely, Iyabo, a veterinary doctor and a PhD in public health.

    Iyabo is not the first to visit opprobrium upon her father; years ago Gbenga, her brother from the same mother, accused his old man of sleeping with his wife in a sworn affidavit. Being a man apparently with a crocodile skin, the accusation did not appear to “shake his coat”, as we say in local parlance.

    Iyabo’s charge against her father in a letter that was indeed a “red hot exclusive”, as the editors of Vanguard which published it on December 18 described it, must have rattled the man no end. Inspired, as she herself said, by her father’s 18-page letter to President Jonathan, she wrote her old man an 11-page letter dated December 16 in which she accused him of being “a liar, manipulator, a two-faced hypocrite” and a cruel and criminally negligent father and husband. Disaster and shame don’t come any worse than someone your own loins sired and who most people thought was your favourite, saying such unprintable things about you to the whole world, especially at a time you’d picked to fight a critical battle of your life.

    It was a sign of how much he was rattled that he called her while he was visiting in the US where she is now resident to confirm if she could indeed pen such blasphemy. Equally, it was a sign how much shame she must have known she has brought unto her family that she initially denied writing it.

     

     

    Feedback

     

    Re: The persecution of Governor Lamido

    Two weeks ago I promised to publish a very thoughtful reaction to my piece on the subject above last week but didn’t. My apologies. Below is a shortened and edited version of the reaction.

     

    Sir,

    I am yet to see people from the North call out their leaders to account. But instead what we have seen is people demonising Jonathan. I am not saying ‘don’t question Jonathan.’ All I’m saying is, let’s question from home first.

    I am a Muslim and from your name you seem to be one also. So let me use the religion angle.

    Tribal leaders in the desert and outside the Arabian Peninsula came to Prophet Muhammad (SAW) and gave their allegiance to Islam and the Prophet himself agreeing to be ruled by him. Many people say that Islam was spread by the sword. But it only happened because of the leadership of the Prophet and the justice that reigned in Islam. Today many in the West are beginning to understand how Islam was spread.

    If the Prophet was seeking justice outside his kingdom without firstly, trying to clean up his own house, do you think Islam as we know it would have existed? But of course if you are a Muslim you most likely already know all of these. I hope we can do what is right. May God make it easy (for us all).

    Abdul’Aziz ibn Ibrahim

     

    Sir,

    I’m neither your fan nor apologist because I can’t stand your ethno-religious irredentism. But those who attacked you because of Lamido’s article should, if they can read English, read where you said, “This does NOT, of course, mean Lamido’s sons should not be prosecuted & their father exposed as….a hypocrite…”

    Myk Aiyemo – Abuja

    +2348052355655

  • The ‘curse’ of a godfather

    The ‘curse’ of a godfather

    Of recent, President Goodluck Jonathan has been under siege like no other president in recent history. In quick succession, he has come under indirect attack from the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, and then directly from the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Waziri Tambuwal, and even more directly, from his erstwhile benefactor and estranged godfather, former president, General Olusegun Obasanjo.

    Not least of all, the man has come under renewed attack from the new opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) which has called for the president’s impeachment subsequent upon Obasanjo’s open letter to his erstwhile godson, a letter in which the godfather has accused his godson of sundry offences, including venality, incompetence and bad faith as leader of his party, as president of the country, as commander-in-chief of its armed forces, as its chief security officer and as its political leader.

    Last week, the press published a letter the CBN governor had written to the president months before accusing the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation of failing to remit $49.8 billion (about N8 trillion) from the sales of crude oil for 19 months ending last July. That letter can be interpreted as Malam Sanusi’s indirect way of saying the president was either clueless about the alleged mishandling of the oil business by NNPC or he was negligent or, worse still, complicit.

    The CBN governor would not be the first to raise doubts about the transparency of the NNPC and, by extension, that of the Federal Government on whose behalf NNPC handles the oily business. As far back as at least 2003, Engineer Hamman Tukur, former chairman of the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), had a running battle with both the NNPC and President Olusegun Obasanjo about money the corporation was supposed to have remitted to the Federation Account. At one time he even wrote the Senate Committees on Appropriations and Finance, accusing the NNPC of short-changing the country of over N300 billion, a charge that then managing director of the corporation, Mr Jackson Gaius-Obaseki, promptly denied.

    More recently, the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) warned in its 2011 report on the oil industry that there were revenue short falls of N3.2 trillion from NNPC. Similarly in its controversial report on fuel subsidy, a panel under Malam Nuhu Ribadu appointed by the Minister of Petroleum, Mrs Dizeani Allison-Madueke, to look into the subject said about $30 billion of oil money could not be accounted for.

    In all three cases, the public never got any satisfactory answers before the hullabaloos they generated fizzled out.

    The difference with the CBN letter is the scale of the alleged venality, which is the biggest so far. Another difference is that the NNPC seems to have a satisfactory answer this time to the charges of playing hanky-panky with oil revenue. Yes, it seems to say, the CBN governor may have got his sums correct but he was wrong not to have disaggregated the total oil revenue among the parastatals collectively responsible for remittances into the Federation Account, the others being the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) and the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR).

    However, even if the CBN governor has goofed – and in spite of NNPC’s seemingly satisfactory explanation, the jury is still out over the issue – no one can deny the fact that long before President Jonathan the presidency has never been in the frontline of the war against corruption in Nigeria’s oily business which has made it one of the most opaque in the world. The problem with the president is that, instead of the breath of fresh air he promised in the way the affairs of state have been conducted in his 2011 presidential campaigns, things have only grown worse exponentially.

    Thus, it is difficult, if not impossible, to deny Tambuwal’s charge that the president’s “body language” in the crusade against corruption does not suggest someone who is committed, willing and able to fight the scourge.

    However, of all the attacks the president has come under lately, none has apparently rattled him like that of his estranged godfather and benefactor. This should not surprise anyone if only because no true godson can ever be happy at being repudiated by his godfather, no matter the extent of disagreement between them.

    Add to this the mystique that this godfather’s repudiation has almost always led to the downfall of the object of his attack – the presidency of Alhaji Shehu Shagari whom he had handed over power to in1979 fell in 1983, the regime of Major-General Muhammadu Buhari which took over from Shagari fell in 1985 and General Ibrahim Babangida who ousted Buhari in a palace coup “steeped aside” in August 1993, not long after Obasanjo publicly chastised each of them – then it’s easy to see why President Jonathan should be worried by the tone and substance of General Obasanjo’s letter.

    General Sani Abacha, who threw out General Babangida’s interim civilian administration in November 1993, seemed to have punctured this mystique when, first, he sentenced Obasanjo to death but later commuted the sentence to life for his alleged complicity in a coup attempt against Abacha in 1995, due to pressure from the international community to which Obasanjo was well-connected. But then Abacha died mysteriously in office in 1998 and Obasanjo emerged straight from prison to the presidency in 1999, as if to reinforce his mystique of a man whose curse, for want of a better word, is never in vain.

    It is highly unlikely that President Jonathan would fall because of Obasanjo’s “curse”. Military coups have generally since become discredited as a means of regime change, never mind the recent cases of Mali, Egypt and the Central African Republic. Impeachment for “gross misconduct”, as the opposition APC called for over the weekend, is also not a viable option even though the president, like his godfather, has committed almost every impeachable offence you can imagine, not least of which is his highly selective and poor implementation of the country’s annual budgets; the opposition in the National Assembly does not have numbers but even if they do, our ethnic, religious and geo-political divisions and the power of cash coupled with the greed of the ruling elite generally, make it virtually impossible to depose anyone through impeachment.

    However, even though President Jonathan is unlikely to fall on account of Obasanjo’s curse, it has damaged the viability of his candidacy in the 2015 presidential election almost beyond repairs.

    As president, Obasanjo is, no doubt, one of Nigeria’s, indeed Africa’s, most competent and knowledgeable. Also he is, in spite of the presidency’s most recent retort to his letter that the man is a “spineless coward”, one of Nigeria’s most courageous; for example, only a man of courage will disregard warnings while he is abroad of his imminent arrest once he returns to his country and still go ahead not only to fly back but continue with his criticisms of the authorities, as Obasanjo did under Abacha in 1995.

    However, as almost everyone will agree, the man is the last who should preach the virtues of good governance, transparency and good faith to anyone, given the proverbial venality, insecurity, institutional instability and acts of bad faith that characterised his eight-year rule as civilian president.

    Even then, his propensity to preach what he does not practise should not detract from his courage to speak truth to power when he is virtually alone among our past leaders that are unhappy with President Jonathan’s dismal record of performance, who can speak out without the matter being turned into an ethnic, sectional or sectarian conflict. It’s hardly difficult to imagine how, for example, Mujahid Asari Dokubo, the outspoken Ijaw militant, would have since turned Obasanjo’s letter into an ethnic or sectional thing or how Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, the Christian Association of Nigeria’s president, would have since turned the letter into a religious war if it had been written by, say, Generals Buhari or Babangida.

    The only other past leader I can think of who could tick off the president without the matter being given an ethnic or religious colouration is General T. Y. Danjuma. Two Fridays ago, he reportedly lambasted the president in words and tone even more acerbic than Obasanjo’s letter over his incompetence and weak leadership at a private dinner of a very select few initiated by Chief Tony Anenih to solve the seemingly intractable PDP crisis. However, as a private takedown, Danjuma’s reported criticism of the president cannot obviously have the same effect as Obasanjo’s letter.

    If nothing else that letter has given the president plenty food to rethink his 2015 presidential ambition. It has also made it difficult, if not impossible for the president’s supporters, his war commanders and foot soldiers alike, to use ethnicity and religion as effective propaganda weapons like they did in the 2011 elections.

  • Madiba’s legacy

    Madiba’s legacy

    The name his father gave him at birth, he said in his engaging and inspiring 1995 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, was Rolihlahla. In Xhosa, his native language, he said, the word literally meant “pulling the branch of a tree” but its colloquial meaning more accurately was “trouble maker”.

    “I do not believe,” he said of this name in the opening paragraphs of his book, “that names are destiny or that my father somehow divined my future, but in later years friends and relatives would ascribe to my birth name storms I have both caused and weathered.”

    Names may not be destiny and his father may not have divined his future by naming him Rolihlahla at birth, but Nelson Mandela, aka Madiba, who died at 95 last Thursday, December 5, could not have been given a more apt but, at the same time, a more self-contradictory nickname; in the eyes of those who invented and perpetrated apartheid as one of the world’s most obnoxious and heinous ideologies, the man was probably their worst nightmare but in the eyes of the rest of the world he was certainly one of its greatest TROUBLESHOOTERS of all time. For, all his adult life he fought more than most leaders in the world – and paid a higher price – for the dignity and humanity of all men regardless of colour, creed, nationality or gender.

    Mandela, at any rate, seemed an unlikely trouble maker growing up in Mveso countryside in Qunu district of the Transkei where he was born on July 8, 1918. “All I wanted as a child of 9 (the year he lost his royal father and had to move out of the village),” he said in his book, “was to be a champion stick fighter.” However, the indignities he suffered and which he saw all around him growing up under the system of apartheid, simply because he was black, left him with no choice but to forget the “luxury” of his literal stick fighting and champion the much more difficult fight against not just racism but any form of discrimination.

    As the world testified to yesterday when over a hundred dignitaries, celebrities and world leaders, including American President Barack Obama and our own, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, and thousands of ordinary folks gathered at the FNB Stadium in Johannesburg, in defiance of heavy rains, to pay him their last respect, the man proved himself the greatest champion of the fight against apartheid. And he did so not with modern day “fighting stick”, or the gun, if you will, but primarily through eschewing bigotry, hatred and reverse racism.

    The walk to freedom for all races in South Africa was indeed a long one and, of course, it began long before Mandela was born. In its most popular modern day manifestation as the African National Congress, however, the walk to freedom for all in his country begun in 1912, six years before he was born. Its key objective when it was founded on January 12 that year was the creation of a united, non-racial, non-sexist and democratic South African society.

    Soon enough the younger elements in the organisation led by Anton Lembede, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and himself, among others, felt the organisation was not militant and mass-oriented enough and consequently in 1944 they formed its Youth League.

    Four years after that, apartheid, which until then was only de facto government policy became official, following the defeat of the ruling Unity Party of mostly British whites by the National Party of the Boer settlers widely known as Afrikaans.

    Predictably, the NP proceeded post-haste to enact all manner of obnoxious and racist laws which restricted the movements of blacks who formed nearly 80% of the population, of Indians (3%) and of so-called Coloured, i.e. those of mixed races, (8%) and also restricted where they could live, work, play and worship and do whatever. These obnoxious laws climaxed in the Bantustan policy in1959, a policy which gave whites who constituted fewer than 10% of South Africa’s population nearly 90% of the land!

    Predictably, the ANC rejected these laws and organised peaceful protests against them. The racist government responded with both force and the law. In 1956, it charged Mandela, along with 155 other members – 105 Africans, 21 Indians, 23 whites and seven Coloured – with treason. The trial proper began three years later and lasted for about two years. Meantime, the government imposed a ban on the movement and public speaking of several of the organisation’s leaders, including, of course, Mandela.

    On March 21 1961, two days before the court was to deliver its verdict on the treason trial, a massacre by the South African police took place in Sharpeville, a small township 56 kilometres south of Johannesburg, the country’s commercial capital, in which 69 unarmed Africans were killed, many of them shot in the back as they fled from the scene of the demonstration they had gathered for. Government then declared a state of emergency and subsequently banned the ANC.

    The whole world was horrified by the massacre. On its part, the ANC now felt obliged to drop its peaceful resistance. It formed an armed wing, the Umkhonto we Sizwe (the Spear of the Nation), with Mandela as its first leader and Chris Hani as its commander, and took up arms in 1961. Not even the dismissal by the courts of the case against the defendants following a week’s delay occasioned by the Sharpeville massacre could persuade Mandela and his fellow comrades that the racists had become open to reason.

    The ANC knew their acquittal was only a temporary relief. Soon enough it was proved right when 19 of its leaders, including Mandela, were detained and subsequently charged for sabotage and attempt to overthrow the government in what became known as the Rivonia Trial between 1963 and 1964.

    The majority of them were convicted and sentenced to live at the end of the trial. Mandela served 27 years of his sentence, the first 18 of them in solitary confinement on the forbidding Roben Island, off the South African coast, before he was released on February 11, 1990.

    That release was perhaps the most symbolic moment in the long fight against apartheid. It is hard, if not impossible, to articulate that moment more graphically and more coherently than President Bill Clinton did in his 2004 autobiography, My Life. On that day, he said, he “witnessed the ultimate testimonial in human endurance.” He, his wife, Hillary, and their daughter, Chelsea, whom they had pulled out of bed especially for that moment, he said, watched Mandela on television “take the last step of his long walk to freedom.” Mandela, Clinton said, “had endured and triumphed, to end apartheid, liberate his own mind and heart from hatred and inspire the world.”

    In Mandela’s own words, he walked out of his prison that day with bitterness and malice to none. “The oppressor and the oppressed alike,” he said in his book, “are robbed of their humanity. When I walked out of the prison that was my mission, to liberate the oppressor and the oppressed both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that this is not the case. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.”

    Mandela’s legacy, however, was not only of the need to love even thy enemy. He also left a legacy of knowing when to let go of power as the first black president of South Africa when he promised in 1994 to serve for only one tem and kept his word. He also left behind a legacy of living a simple life, in and out of power, which shunned primitive accumulation of wealth. You can hardly say the same of many leaders, in and out of power today, who have been falling over themselves in singing praises for the man.

    When his friend and comrade in the struggle against apartheid, Oliver Tambo, died in April 1993, he had this to say of Tambo: “In Plato’s allegory of the metals, the philosopher classifies men into groups of gold, silver and lead. Oliver was pure gold.”

    Borrowing from his tribute to his friend, it would be an understatement to say Mandela was Platinum, with a capital P.

     

     

    Feedback

    Last week’s column on what I said was the persecution of Governor Sule Lamido by President Goodluck Jonathan received a 1,200-word rejoinder from EFCC, a couple of emails one of which I will publish next week, God willing, for the power of its logic, and 38 texts, mostly critical of my piece. I have since forwarded the EFCC reaction to the editors of this newspaper for publication for my lack of space. Below are a few of the texts.

     

    Sir,

    How much did Lamido pay you to publish this back-page foolishness you call an article? You deftly and deliberately ignored the real issue: did Lamido’s sons steal?

    +2348096571185

     

    Sir,

    Are you saying Lamido’s sons were not caught in the act or that they should be left off the hook simply because their father is a performing governor? Be objective for once.

    +2348033553191

     

    Sir,

    Governor Lamido was/is my man on performance. However, I won’t support indiscipline, corruption and law-breaking by any family member or governor. Journalists, cleanse our society.

    +2347064181043

     

    Only irredeemable fools and born cowards call the prosecution of politicians who use their children as conduit pipe to siphon public funds persecution. I urge Mr. President to fight corruption without fear and favour.

    +2348076823815

     

    Sir,

    Instead of condemning Lamido for the ‘alleged’ looting of d state treasury through his children, you would rather be contented comparing who loots more than the other in the country. And, of course, in your own brand of patriotism a Nigerian governor or leader who performs better than his predecessor in office should be free to help himself with the state money. Very unfortunate.

    +2348037921541

     

    Sir,

    Imagine this scenario. Tinubu’s son or Murtala Nyako’s daughter commits an offence and the government must look the other way so as not to be accused of selective fight. Warped logic! Why hasn’t the govt picked any of Buhari’s relations for crimes? Let’s stop this elite nepotism. A thief is a thief, whether he steals N184b or N10b.

    +2348037055027

  • Lamido’s persecution

    Lamido’s persecution

    Last month, on November 15, to be specific, President Goodluck Jonathan took a direct shot across the bows of Governor Sule Lamido’s ship in an apparent warning to the governor to reconsider his long running confrontation with the president over the 2015 presidential elections in which both have staked their claims. On that day, two sons of the governor, Mustapha and Aminu, were picked up by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), for allegedly laundering over N10 billion through several banks in which the state holds major accounts.

    Officially, the EFFC does not take orders from the president – or from anyone else for that matter. But this is only in theory. In practice it soon became notorious under President Olusegun Obasanjo, President Jonathan’s seemingly estranged benefactor who created it ostensibly to fight corruption in high places, as his battle tank for squaring and squashing opposition elements in and out of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party.

    As a good student of his erstwhile godfather it seems President Jonathan has since learnt to put the commission to good use in self-service, all in the name of fighting corruption. Ask Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State and former governor, Timipre Sylva, of the president’s home state, Bayelsa, both of whom have attracted the president’s great disaffection. Governor Lamido is thus only the latest among several of those to have attracted EFCC’s attention more for their politics than for mis-governance.

    Lamido’s offence, it seems, is not only his expression of interest in the presidency. Recently, he suggested in an interview with an Abuja based radio station, Vision FM, that the president protected a corrupt minister by refusing to act on information he gave the president that the minister had collected a $250 million bribe from an oil firm. This provoked an angry retort from the president who, through his spokesman, Dr. Reuben Abati, said the governor’s allegation was “patently bogus” and “an unacceptable and callous attempt to unjustly impugn the integrity of President Jonathan and cast aspersions on the seriousness of his administration’s efforts to curb corruption.”

    EFCC’s picking up of the governor’s sons last month was clearly an attempt to demonstrate to the world that the governor was going to equity with very dirty hands.

    That EFCC’s action was triggered more by politics than by any concern of the president about corruption will be obvious presently. Before examining the facts, however, I should make it clear that this is not in defence of the governor against the allegation of using his sons to defraud his state.

    Jigawa, as we all know, was created in 1991. Between then and now it has had seven governors, four military and three civilians. Sandwiched between the first two military governors, one under General Ibrahim Babangida who created the state and the other under General Sani Abacha who threw out Babangida’s transition government of Chief Ernest Sonekan in November 1993, Governor Ali Sa’ad Birnin Kudu, its first civilian governor, did not enjoy much resources nor had much time nor much room for initiative to make a significant difference in the state.

    The next civilian governor, Ibrahim Saminu Turaki, did enjoy all three factors: less than two years into the fully-fledged civilian dispensation under President Obasanjo, oil money, which the country’s treasury has depended heavily upon for its revenue, became no longer an object, as oil price soared through the sky; the governor had eight years to transform the state with the state’s statutory allocation; and as civilian governor he was, at least in theory, a co-ordinate, rather than a subordinate, of the big man at the centre in the governance of the country.

    As we all know, Turaki, like so many of the governors during the first eight years of the current civilian dispensation, was a disaster. The man, as we all know, hardly sat at home to work. Instead, he spent so much time globetrotting he could not make any significant impact on his state. And, as he himself testified in the course of his yet to be concluded long running prosecution by the EFCC, he used a considerable portion of his revenue allocation, under duress he said, to help fund President Obasanjo’s infamous Third Term agenda.

    Enter Sule Lamido in 2007. Anyone who had been to the state since then, as I have, would agree that the difference between Jigawa before Turaki and Jigawa under Lamido is the difference between night and day. Dutse, the state’s sleepy capital, for example, has since become home to its civil servants who, before Lamido, used to go to work daily from Kano. And except, of course, they never meant what they said, all very important visitors to the state, including President Jonathan, have had only praise for the way the governor has vastly transformed its infrastructure in education, housing, health and road network, among others.

    So even if in the end it turns out that the governor used his sons to steal from his state, at least he has some mitigating circumstances for his alleged action. This much, I am afraid, cannot be said of many states in the country, including the president’s home state, Bayelsa, where incredibly huge gaps exist between the levels of development and the resources that have accrued to those states.

    This does not, of course, mean Lamido’s sons should not be prosecuted and their father exposed as someone who preaches what he does not practice. By all means prosecute them if you have a prima facie case against them and expose their father as a hypocrite if you can prove it.

    What, however, Lamido’s almost universally acclaimed performance means is that there are many, many, many more deserving cases for EFCC’s attention than the governor’s. Anyone with even the most casual acquaintance with Nigeria’s political-economy can reel off at least a dozen such cases before you can say the C word. But the three examples that follow are enough to prove the fact that Lamido’s case is by far more politics than about the president’s concern for good governance and transparency.

    Easily the most glaring of such cases is that of Malabu Oil and Gas, reportedly controlled by Chief Dan Etete, a former Oil minister under General Abacha. According to several newspapers, including The Economist (June 15) of London, two years ago, a consortium of Shell and Eni/Elf which had controversial stakes in the oil well, OPL 245, paid nearly $1.1 billion to Malabu, reportedly on orders of the president, as settlement over a long running dispute with Malabu on the ownership of the lucrative oil well.

    The payment was made to Malabu against the background of the fact that Etete had been a fugitive from France convicted in the country for money laundering in 2007 – a conviction upheld in 2009, following his appeal. The payment was also made against the background of the fact that EFCC was yet to conclude its investigation of an allegation that Etete had fraudulently acquired the company.

    According to Premium Times (September 30), an investigative online newspaper, the former minister, in turn shared the money paid to his company into several dubious accounts, some of them owned by close political associates of the president’s.

    Clearly this payment, which the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the Federation, Mohammed Bello Adoke, tried to rationalise away during a public hearing of a House committee investigating the deal, as voluntary with government acting only as an “obligor” and “facilitator”, reeked to high heavens of the worst form of cronyism, to put it mildly. Even more clearly Lamido’s N10 billion alleged corruption pales into insignificance compared to Malabu’s $1.1 billion, which comes to nearly N184 billion.

    Second, there was an earlier case of the president versus a publication called Spynet Magazine. In its maiden edition in August 2007, it accused him of perjury in declaring his assets and liabilities during his tenure as deputy governor and governor of Bayelsa, and eventually as vice-president under Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, as demanded by the Constitution. Days after the publication its premises were ransacked by the State Security Services and its editors detained. To date nothing more has been heard of the case. Not even after the president has angrily told the public, following persistent demands that he declares his assets and liabilities publicly as was done by his predecessor even though the Constitution does not demand such public declaration, that he doesn’t “give a damn” what the public thought of his refusal to do so.

    Finally, there is the case of the paradox of worsening insecurity in the land, especially from Boko Haram insurgency, in the face of the huge budgetary allocation to our security forces since 2009. One glaring illustration of this is the fact that the Army Chief, Lt-General Azubuike Ihejirika, has lately been complaining of an under armed and under equipped military confronting Boko Haram. The paradox is, however, not surprising, considering credible allegations that one security institution recently spent over N600 million to construct an artificial grass football pitch for the recreation of its staff!

    By all means let the EFCC go after each and every thieving government official and his relations and cronies, if the commission has good cases against them. However, since it has neither the time nor resources to do so, equity demands that it begins with the more glaring cases.

    Surely all three cases above are much more demanding of the EFCC’s attention than Lamido’s case. When the commission is seen clearly to pick and choose mostly cases of only those perceived as opposition elements, it can only open itself and the presidency it reports to through the minister of Justice and attorney general of the federation, to accusations that it is merely fighting a selective, and therefore futile, war against corruption.

  • A primer on how to make a constitution

    A primer on how to make a constitution

    How that it is pretty certain we shall begin a national conference, sovereign or otherwise, on the country’s constitution probably during the first quarter of next year, an examination of how they did it in the United States nearly two hundred and twenty five years ago should provide some useful insights on how to succeed.

    I have my doubts that it will for several reasons. First, I share the widespread public scepticism, even cynicism, about President Goodluck Jonathan’s conversion to the idea after resisting it all this long. Many people think it is essentially to divert public attention from his inability to solve the myriads of the problems he is faced with, some of them self-inflicted.

    The more cynical members of the public even think it is a weapon those around the president – if not the man himself – who don’t believe in Nigeria want to use to break it up. If you think this is far-fetched you only need to ponder over government’s lackadaisical attitude to what Sam Nda-Isaiah, the publisher and columnist of Leadership, had aptly described as “industrial scale” oil theft under the president’s watch, to have a rethink.

    As Governor John Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti said in his interview with Tell (November 11), “You don’t joke with your source of income, unless they know what we don’t know. Unless people carting away the resources – if indeed it is being stolen – are also people associated with the system.” This government, it seems, doesn’t give much damn about how the oil cabal is stealing the country blind.

    Third, it is doubtful that the government has the capacity to fund and manage the conference in the face of a costly general election coming up in less than 18 months. Already it is an open secret that the government has found it difficult to adequately fund Senator Femi Okurounmu’s 13-man agenda setting panel, relatively modest as its cost is.

    Last but by no means least, with Professor Ben Nwabueze, who seems to have this government’s full ears, lately offering to write a draft constitution for the conference, much to the surprise of only those who don’t know the man’s antecedents, it is obvious that the government has pretty much made up its mind what kind of constitution it wants to give this country.

    If you know the professor’s antecedents then you won’t be surprised if his proposed draft constitution is likely to create more problems for the country than it can solve. Those old enough to remember or curious enough to search would know how 47 years ago he played the anticipatory role he now wants to replay. This was in February 1966 when our first military head of state, Major-General J. T. U. Aguiyi-Ironsi, set up a Constitutional Study Group under Chief F. R. A. Williams to carry out a brief similar to Senator Okurounmu’s.

    However, even before Chief Williams could begin work in earnest, some members of the general’s kitchen cabinet, among who was our learned professor of law, persuaded him to promulgate the infamous Unification Decree 34 in May. Our professor reportedly had a hand in drafting it. The decree effectively put paid to Chief Rotimi’s assignment.

    However, whatever anyone’s scepticism or cynicism about the national conference it is now more or less a fait accompli. Regular readers of this column may recall that on February 8 last year, I reversed my long-held objection to a sovereign national conference and called for it. My objection has been on the ground that the problem of our country has been more the attitude of its leaders than of its constitution with all its flaws. After all the best rules are not worth even the paper they are written on if they are obeyed only in the breach. And this has, by and large, been the case with our country where impunity has since become the guiding principle of state policy.

    I changed my mind about the SNC not because the attitude of our leaders had changed, because it hadn’t – and still hasn’t. I changed my mind because, as I said then, “I simply do not see why any region should put up with the kind of insults and abuses the North has suffered because of a commodity from which the vast majority of its people have gained little or even nothing.”

    So by all means let’s have not just a national conference. Let’s have a sovereign national conference even if there are no guarantees against its being used to break up the country. As I said in my article in reference, it would be a sad day for Africa and for the Black race, and, of course, for Nigerians themselves the day their country, as the largest concentration of Africans and the Black race – and for that matter, the smartest ones – breaks up.

    Chances are it won’t but even if it does, the prospects that we can, in the end, sort out our differences and emerge stronger as a nation in spite of the best efforts of those who imagine opting out is their only hope of realising their full potential as a nation, is worth the risk of a break up.

    So let me attempt a summary of a primer on how the Americans, whose presidential democracy we replaced our colonial legacy of parliamentary democracy with, did it 224 odd years ago. The primer is a 1969 book, The Constitution of the United States: An Introduction by Floyd G. Cullop. Per chance, we may learn a lesson or two at the end of our two-and-a-quarter century journey on how the Americans got it right the second time.

    The first time was before 1777, a year after the original 13 states under the British declared their independence from colonial rule after winning their revolutionary war against the British crown. They then drew up The Articles of Confederation under which there was no central executive government or judiciary, only a national assembly, the Congress, which had no powers to raise taxes or raise an army and whose members were not even obliged to attend its sessions.

    It took four years, i.e. 1781, for the last state to ratify it. It lasted only eight years thereafter because it proved unworkable. Eighteenth century American is, of course, not 21st century Nigeria. But the brevity of the Article of Confederation is still food for thought for those who talk glibly about confederation as the solution for Nigeria’s constitutional problems.

    When the 1777 con-federal arrangement prove unworkable, the states called a convention in Philadelphia in 1787 to review it. All 13 states attended except Rhode Island. However, instead of merely revising the old constitution they embarked on a completely new one which replaced the confederation with a federation that had a central government with three arms that checked and balanced each other.

    Powers were shared between the central government and the states. Those held by Congress were on an Exclusive List. Those held by both the centre and the states were on the Concurrent List. Others were denied to both.

    The convention then decided to submit it to the people of the constituent states rather than to their legislative houses for ratification. It decided that before the new arrangement could become the supreme law of the land it had to be ratified by three quarters of the states or nine out of the 13.

    Because transport and communications were slow in those days, making direct referendum difficult, constitutional conventions were set up in each state to which people sent delegates. By July 1788 ten states had ratified it and it became the Constitution of the United States of America. It went into effect on March 4, 1789 and by 1790 all the 13 states had adopted it. The Bill of Rights containing ten amendments were added in 1791. Since then sixteen more have been added and the last one ratified on July 5, 1971. Since then also the number of the states in the union has increased by addition, rather than by division as is our own case, to 50.

    The American constitution is an excellent study in brevity, clarity and simplicity. As a study in contrast it couldn’t be more different from ours. But the really big difference is not so much the unwieldy size and complexity of ours. The big difference is that the Americans have respected theirs but we have not respected ours. Instead we keep quarrelling with it and, like the bad work men that we are, we keep trying to re-write it every so often.

    It’s very unlikely that we will get it right for once this time around given what looks like the bad faith in convoking it but, success or failure, the conference, it seems, has now become inevitable.