The Nation Newspaper

Category: Mohammed Harunna

  • Amnesty for Boko Haram: between Gumi and Kukah (I)

    Amnesty for Boko Haram: between Gumi and Kukah (I)

    Predictably, last month’s call for amnesty for Boko Haram by the Sultan of Sokoto and nominal head of Nigerian Muslims, Alhaji Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar, and its initial outright rejection by President Goodluck Jonathan have provoked strong avowals and disavowals. Of all these avowals and disavowals, three have stood out because of the prominence of the religious leaders that have made them and the way they seem to have traded places in their disparate positions.

    First was Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, son of the renowned late Sheikh Abubakar Gumi, and himself a leading light of the Izala sect founded by the father. In its lead story of three Wednesdays ago, the up and coming Abuja based Blueprint newspaper exclusively reported him to have dismissed the Sultan’s call as “hypocritical.” This was clearly against the grain of the apparent widespread support in the North and among Muslims for the Sultan’s call.

    Boko Haram, said Sheikh Gumi, is an ideology that respects no law, “not even the Qur’an or Hadith or scholarly fatwa.” There is, he said, therefore no basis for dialogue with its adherents, much less granting them any amnesty. “It is,” he avowed, “a creed that must be crushed.”

    Two weekends ago, Bishop Mathew Hassan Kukah, the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, issued an Easter message that couldn’t have disagreed more with Sheikh Gumi’s position. To reject amnesty for the sect, he said, was to operate at the same (disagreeable) level with its adherents. The offer itself, he said, may not solve all our problems, “but it will bring us closer to a new dawn.” Those who have rejected the amnesty, he also said, have focused more on how the issues involved “fit the survivalist instinct of the president and his ruling party.”

    The same weekend, Bishop Kukah’s highly respected senior in the Catholic hierarchy, Cardinal John Onaiyekan, the Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, spoke in the same vein in his own Easter message. “The call for amnesty,” he said, “would seem to me quite appropriate and even necessary.” Useful and necessary as the security response has been, he said, it has obviously not been enough on its own.

    Overall, the cardinal’s Easter message was more measured and more cautious than the bishop’s but it was the latter’s that received wider media publicity.

    This position of the two senior Catholic clergy is obviously at variance with that of the leadership of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) under Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, and possibly with that of the majority of Nigerian Christians. CAN, as we all know, has been vehemently opposed to any form of accommodation with Boko Haram which it has accused of committing genocide against Christians in the North, with at least tacit support of the country’s Muslim leadership.

    The position of the cardinal and the bishop, though consistent with the religious doctrine of forgiveness, clearly exposes them to a charge of appeasement. However, from the consistent manner they have stuck to that position in spite of the fact that the Catholic Church, probably more than any other, has borne the brunt of the alleged Boko Haram mass killings of Christians – alleged, because Boko Haram has apparently since become a franchise used by criminals and possibly rogue elements in the security services alike for their own ends – it is obvious that this is a cross that the two are prepared to bear.

    In his dissention from the popular Muslim and Northern support for the Sultan’s call for amnesty for Boko Haram, Sheikh Gumi seems to be in total agreement with the country’s authorities. For example, speaking at a seminar in Lagos last Tuesday on “Enhancing Military-Media Relations towards Improved Security” in support of his Commander-in-Chief’s initial rejection of the Sultan’s call, the rather bellicose army chief, Lt. General Azubuike Ihejirika, said in effect that force must remain the principal, if not the only, weapon for fighting Boko Haram.

    “There is no country where terrorism has been curbed,” he said, “that force was not applied. There is none in history…I talk so much about force because that is my own line of business. I am to destroy the terrorists, if I am able to find them.” (National Mirror, April 3).

    Sheikh Gumi and the authorities may agree on what they believe is the need to crush Boko Haram, but General Ihejirika’s position clearly defines the limit of that agreement. For, whereas both the general and his boss obviously believe they can destroy the sect militarily, the sheikh believes they simply can’t. Their government, he said, lacks the competence and, by killing and terrorising more people than Boko Haram through its Joint Task Force Operations, it also lacks the moral strength to succeed.

    His own solution? “A select Muslim high ranking officer, good intelligence, special strike squads (and) genuine cooperation of the civilian population,” he said.

    Of the four elements of the sheikh’s formula for the defeat of Boko Haram, most people, I guess, would agree with him on the last three, in so far as they are simple common sense. By the same token, however, hardly would anyone agree with him that “a select Muslim high ranking officer” is necessary for success in the war against Boko Haram.

    On the contrary, it is more likely to further divide an already divided military along religious lines and weaken it even more. Indeed with good intelligence and cooperation from the civilian population, it matters little, if at all, what the religious or ethnic affiliation of the field commander – and even of the commander-in-chief – is, so long as both are men of good faith.

    The fundamental problem with government’s apparent over-reliance on the use of force in tackling Boko Haram is that it cannot win hearts and minds. General Ihejirika may, as he has said, be in the business of using brute force to solve problems but as he has also acknowledged, albeit with little conviction apparently, brute force alone, or even as the principal weapon, has never solved anybody’s problems. If it did, all terrorists would have since been wiped off the face of the earth given the overwhelming force governments the world over – especially that of America, the world’s self-appointed global police and its only super-power – have deployed, and continue to deploy, against terror organisations.

    Every problem requires good intelligence and the cooperation of all and sundry for a viable solution. Above all, every problem requires good faith on the part of all parties involved, but especially on the part of those in authority. None of these three requirements can be secured by relying on brute force only or in the main, especially of the kind deployed in Borno and Yobe states since 2009, following the extrajudicial killings of several leaders, and even many more suspected members, of Boko Haram.

    This brute force was similar, perhaps even worse, than that used in the Delta against the region’s militants before they were granted amnesty in June 2009, more specifically the kind of brute force former president, General Olusegun Obasanjo, inflicted on the Odi community in Bayelsa State, President Jonathan’s home state, about 12 years ago; a brute force which Justice Lambo Akanbi strongly condemned in his judgment last month and for which he awarded the community N37.6 billion against the Federal Government as compensation.

    There may well have been some politics behind the size of compensation the court’s compensation. But politics or no, it is still legitimate to ask, as The Guardian did in its editorial of March 11 about the judgment, “Why would a government unleash violence on its defenceless citizens in the name of maintaining law and order? Why would such a horrendous havoc be wrecked on a community because of a few bad elements as though there is no single innocent and law abiding citizen in the community who deserves government’s protection?”

     

     

    Breath of fresh air indeed!

    When President Goodluck Jonathan promised during his campaign for the 2011 election that his administration would usher in a “breath of fresh air” into the country, I thought it was no more than one of those empty sloganeering politicians over-indulge in during campaigns. Nothing the administration has done – or not done – since then has proved my scepticism wrong. On the contrary, the degree of insecurity from arbitrary use of power by the authorities and the scale of corruption in the land alone have enveloped the land with so much stink you can barely breathe.

    Two days ago, the administration enhanced its reputation for doublespeak when it picked on Leadership newspaper over its exclusive story last week about an alleged presidential directive to its operatives to use all means, fair or foul, to frustrate the emergence of All Progressives Congress as a formidable opposition to the ruling Peoples Democratic Party.

    After four of the newspaper’s staff honoured a police invitation for questioning, it released two of them in the night but detained the other two reportedly with instructions from “the oga at the top” to keep them incommunicado until they reveal the source of their story and of the documentary proof which they published to back their story.

    This is outright Gestapo style out of the book of Hitler’s Germany. Some “breath of fresh air” indeed! The other two were released yesterday night.

     

  • Achebe: Africa’s best

    Achebe: Africa’s best

    Without doubt, Albert Chinualumogu Achebe (November 16, 1930 to March 22, 2013) was one of the world’s greatest novelists and essayists and, for me, Africa’s greatest literary figure. When I said so in my review last October of his There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra – his controversial story of Nigeria’s civil war which has now turned out as his last literary output – one angry, presumably Yoruba, reader condemned me as “a Yoruba hater,” apparently for daring to think Achebe was a greater literary figure than the Nobel Literature Laureate, Wole Soyinka.

    How this view made me a Yoruba hater I couldn’t understand because I thought Soyinka won his prize on his individual merit and not because he was Yoruba. Of course, his victory was bound to make not just every Yoruba proud. It was also bound to make every Nigerian, indeed every African, proud. I certainly felt proud that cold wet day in 1986 as part of the Nigerian official delegation that accompanied the man to the ceremony for the award. But then there was nothing contradictory between the pride I felt and my opinion of the relative merit of Nigeria’s two greatest contributions to the world of Literature.

    When Soyinka won the Nobel Literature prize in 1986, the first African to do so, not a few Literature buffs thought Achebe was the more deserving of that honour. As a layman, I thought so too. By the time Soyinka won the prize he had, of course, become a worldwide renowned playwright, poet, political activist, novelist and essayist. As a playwright he had produced over 13 plays, several of them classics – notably The Lion and the Jewel (of which I have fond memories as a play regularly staged by the drama club of my alma mater, Government College, Bida), Kongi’s Harvest and Death and the King’s Horseman. He had written two novels, The Interpreters and Season of Anomy, two autobiographies, the controversial The Man Died and Ake, and countless literary and political essays.

    None of Soyinka’s plays and novels had the impact of Achebe’s first, and by common consent, best novel, Things Fall Apart, which he wrote in 1958. By 1986, it had become Africa’s and one of the world’s best selling classics, translated into more than 30 other languages. By the same 1986, Achebe had written three other novels, No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964) and A Man of the People (1966). Each of them was a classic, written with his inimitable readability, simplicity, eloquence, coherence, rigour and insightfulness.

    A year after Soyinka won his Nobel prize, Achebe wrote his last novel, Anthills of the Savannah, which, like A Man of the People that presaged Nigeria’s first military coup, was a satirical dig at power drunk politicians, the difference being that whereas the first was about politicians in mufti, the second was about politicians in khaki. Anthills was a finalist in the prestigious Booker Prize but lost out to another novel by a British novelist. And just like A Man of the People presaged Nigeria’s first coup, Anthills, in a way, presaged the dubious but failed attempt by a leader, this time a soldier turned civilian, to sit tight in office. The Nobel Literature Prize, like all prestigious prizes, is, of course, not a popularity contest. It is also about intellectual depth and insight, among other qualities. But then Achebe, like Soyinka, never pandered to popular taste in his novels; all of them were profound narratives about the clash of cultures and the corruptive influence of power.

    Soyinka, no doubt, deserved his Nobel literature prize. Certainly he was a more eloquent speaker than Achebe. However, I had always thought Achebe was more eloquent, and certainly more readable, than Soyinka, with the written word. And the Nobel Literature prize was about the written word.

    Whatever anyone’s comparative rating of Soyinka and Achebe in the literary world, it was senseless, even mean, to begrudge Soyinka his good fortune of winning the ultimate prize in Literature because, as I just said, he deserved it. What never made sense to me, however, was the apparent belief of the Nobel judges that Achebe too never deserved the prize until he died, even though for many years he had become a perennial nominee for it.

    Since Soyinka in 1986, three other Africans – two South Africans, Nadine Gordimer (1991) and J. M. Coetze (2003) and an Egyptian, Naguib Mahfouz (2006) – have won the prize. It is not clear to me as a layman, and I suspect too, many Literature buffs, how any of the three deserved the prize more than Achebe. But then, Achebe would not be the first truly great writer to be refused admission into the very elite class – there have been only 109 members to date since 1901 when the first prize was awarded – of Nobel Literature Laureates. In this he was in the excellent company of George Orwell (Animal Farm, 1984) and Graham Green (The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American), etc.

    But Nobel Literature prize or not, Achebe was undeniably the man who pioneered and popularised modern African English Literature. His greatness, however, went well beyond his novels. Just like he was a superlative novelist he was also a first class essayist. Probably his best was The Trouble with Nigeria, written after his bitter-sweet experience in 1983 as a leading member of the leftish Peoples Redemption Party led by the radical politician, the late Malam Aminu Kano.

    As the blurb of the little book said, the essay was “both a savage indictment of the current system and a message of hope for the future.”

    “The trouble with Nigeria,” he said in the opening sentence of the essay, “is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.” There was, he said, nothing wrong with the Nigerian character, its land or climate or water or air or anything else. What was wrong, he said, was “the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.”

    His diagnosis of the Nigerian ailment was spot on – but only up to a limit. It’s hard to disagree with him that the ultimate responsibility for the virtual failure of the Nigerian state today is that of a leadership that preaches what it does not practise. But, as I have argued recently on these pages, the followership also has its own share of the blame. For, if leaders get away with saying one thing and doing the opposite, it is largely because followers do not regard their own roles in society, no matter how small or lowly, as positions of trust. In other words, if we all did our own bits we would never have found it so difficult to hold our leaders to their responsibilities.

    Like all human beings, Achebe as a writer and as an individual was, of course, not perfect. But of all his imperfections, I think the worst was that he seemed to share a by and large self-inflicted persecution complex of his Igbo kith and kin.

    No doubt the Igbo have suffered persecution in Nigeria, the worst manifestation of which was the 1966/67 pogrom against them mainly in the North, which eventually led to an even more devastating three-year civil war in the East.

    The cause of this Igbo persecution, the man said in Chapter 9 of The Trouble with Nigeria, a chapter he called “The Igbo Problem”, was envy by other Nigerians at their success in catching up and even surpassing the Yoruba that had had decades of head-start in the politics, bureaucracy and commerce of the country.

    This success, he said, carried a “deadly penalty: the danger of hubris, overweening pride and thoughtlessness which invites envy and hatred; or even worse, which can obsess with material success and dispose it to all kinds of crude showiness.”

    This character flaw apart, the real problem with the Igbo since Independence, he said, was “the absence of the kind of central leadership which their competitors presume for them.” This, he said, had left them to “self-seeking, opportunistic leaders who offered them no help at all in coping with a new Nigeria in which individual effort would no longer depend on the rules set by a fairly impartial colonial umpire.”

    After this diagnosis of what he called the Igbo problem, it was strange that he would proceed in his last autobiographical book, There was a Country, to accuse everyone else, including the “fairly impartial colonial umpire” of being united in their hatred of the Igbo without any reason, and go on to locate the Igbo problem squarely in this hatred.

    The goal of an African writer, Achebe said in his last book, is to challenge stereo-types, myths and false images of ourselves and retell the continent’s stories in ways that can foster the progress of our society. By and large, he conquered those challenges in his novels and essays but failed to so in his attempt at writing History.

    In what may be considered one of those twists of irony, it can be said that the man whose first shot at serious writing was his best gave his worst shot in the twilight of his life after he had had all the experience and wisdom to produce the very best.

    However, in spite of his last poor shot, the man remains for me Africa’s greatest literary figure and certainly one of the world’s best ever.

     

     

     

  • Still on Senator Enang’s lie with statistics

    Still on Senator Enang’s lie with statistics

    The power of propaganda, as an aphorism goes, lies less in its systematic and deceptive distortion of the truth than in the willingness of people, generally speaking, to be lied to. This willingness to be deceived is possibly the only, certainly the best, explanation of how many otherwise knowledgeable individuals, institutions and pundits in the country swallowed Senator Solomon Ita Enang’s recent mendacity on the sacred floor of the Senate that Northerners controlled 83% of the country’s oil wells, hook, line and sinker.

    Predictably, my column to that effect last week drew a lot of flack. Of the 47 texts and the odd email or two I received in reaction, the vast majority supported the senator. Several, including one from +2348183916532, warned me not to “insult our senator for revealing the truth to Nigerians.”

    Another from a reader, who simply called himself Godfrey (+2348076823815), quoting Thomas Carlyle’s words about every man having a coward and a hero in his soul, described the senator as “a man who has a hero in his soul.” He then proceeded to give me some words of advice on how one should “learn how to accept the truth, no matter how bitter.”

    Another reader, Ubong Joseph, texting from +2348023262979, was less charitable. “Mr. Mohammed Haruna,” he said, “l’ve just finished reading your piece on Senator lta Enang’s submission on ownership of 83% of Nigerian oil blocks by your brothers and your comments is yet an indication that as a typical Northerner the “Food is Ready” and “Share the Money” syndrome of the North must be maintain(ed) indefinitely by your Northern Cabal. For actions and comments like this, may the soul of Lord Lugard never, never Rest in Peace for that forceful Amalgamation in l9l4.”

    Elsewhere much of the reactions to the senator’s claim have been no less supportive than those of the three above. One of the most interesting, I believe, came from “General” Ateke Tom – yes, he of the war-lord fame from the Niger Delta. The reader, I am sure, can readily recall that only last August, the respected New York Wall Street Journal, published a damning article which exposed how he, along with four other former war-lords, received the princely sum of $40 million a year from the Presidency, ostensibly to stop oil theft in the region. Ateke Tom’s share of the fees, the newspaper said, was $3.8 million.

    The scandal, obviously, was not just that the payments were under the table. Worse, no services were ever delivered in return; oil experts have said there have been more oil thefts in recent years than at any time before these payments of what was clearly protection money to the ex war-lords.

    In a full page advert in Thisday of March 11, “General” Tom, writing as “Leader” of IZON IKEMI which he described as “a nascent group of concerned Nigerians drawn from the Ijaw speaking states of the Niger Delta,” praised Senator Enang for his “patriotism” in exposing the way the villainous Northerners have cornered the oil wealth that did not belong to them.

    IZON IKEMI, he said, “heartily commends the patriotism of Senator Ita Enang… for exposing the deceit in the oil sector of our nation.”

    Senator Enang may be a hero and a patriot for many in making his claim, but anyone who really cared for the truth would never have needed more than to merely scratch the surface to see that his claim was anything but the truth.

    The simplest way to get the most authentic facts is to get the oil authorities, specifically the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), to publish the list of all the oil wells we have in this country and their ownership. If I want to prove the senator wrong, one reader said quite sensibly, I should get my facts and publish it.

    Well, I tried ahead of today’s column and made little headway; Dr Omar Farouk, a spokesman of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) said his department didn’t have the figures and directed me to the DPR. I called the director, Mr Osten Olorunsola, several times on the 14th of this month and got no response. I then sent him a text identifying myself and requesting for the list. I was yet to hear from him as at the time of this writing. And I wasn’t really surprised; a mutual friend, who is an expert in the oil business, had asked for the same information and was refused.

    However, even without DPR publishing the list there has been sufficient information in the public domain for any sensible person to see through our senator’s mendacity. For example, back in 2007, Mr. Basil Ominyi, then Chief Executive Officer of Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria, by far the country’s biggest oil producer, told Corporate Nigeria, an annual guide for business, trade and investment in the country partly sponsored by NNPC, that his company produced over 40% of Nigeria’s oil and supplied 75% of its commercial gas. He also claimed that the company’s mining area of 31,000 square kilometres “contained more than half of Nigeria’s oil and gas reserves.”

    In the same interview, he pointed out that NNPC’s joint venture with his company, along with similar ventures with ExxonMobil,ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhillips – all three from the U.S. – Eni from Italy and Total SA from France, accounted for nearly 95% of Nigeria’s oil production. The ownership structure of all six joint ventures is between 55 and 60% in favour of NNPC. In terms of management control, Northern presence in all six is virtually nil, or at best marginal.

    Commonsense – which, alas, seems so uncommon in our essentially malicious politics – should instruct us that the dominance of our oil industry by the giant oil multinationals has left less than 10% for ownership by our local oil companies. Anyone who imagines that Northerners controlled 83% of this leftover from the Big Boys need only refer to the list of the indigenous oil companies and their owners which Olusegun Adeniyi, the authoritative and well-informed Thursday columnist of Thisday and the chairman of its editorial board, published last week, to see that his imagination is precise only that – imagination, and a wild one at that.

    Before Segun, Government, an in-depth investigative weekly publication in the stable of Leadership newspapers which looks like a cross between a Sunday newspaper and a newsmagazine, had published a three-page list of all the actors in the oil business, including the multinationals, the local companies, the service companies and the drillers, etc, in its edition of February 4. Even the most casual examination of the lists in the two newspapers will give the lie to our senator’s claim of the ownership structure of the country’s oil wells.

    The motive for that lie is obvious, or should be, to any reasonable observer of our politics; divert the public’s attention from the bigger culprits for the short, nasty and brutish lives of the hapless people of the oil producing Niger Delta. And the bigger culprits are no other than the leaders of the region themselves, including, of course, our distinguished senator and the ex war-lords of the region like Ateke Tom, who have been living it off in Abuja and other big cities of the country since the declaration of amnesty for the region’s militants several years ago.

    Few Nigerians have captured the level of culpability of the region’s elite for its woes than, first, Chief Edwin Clark, the self-declared leader of the region, and second, Chief James Ibori, the jailed ex-governor of Delta State.

    More than five years ago, Chief Clark told The Nation (August 11, 2007) that the governors of the region were the most corrupt in the country. “Nigerians,” he said, “are worried why the recent activities of EFFC resulting in the arrest and trial of certain governors in the country have not affected the former governors of the Niger Delta who were known all over the country and the world as the most corrupt and investigated governors by the EFFC.”

    Long before Chief Clark, the jailed Chief Ibori provided probably the biggest insight into the cause of the Niger Delta’s predicament of poverty in oil riches. Lamenting the self-exile in far-awayAustralia of Dr. Eric Opia as the fugitive boss of OMPADEC, the precursor of NDDC, the governor told the since rested Post Express (July 11, 2001) “Our son Opia is on the run today. Those that stole OMPADEC money are still walking the streets. Those that ate OMPADEC money are not from the Niger Delta. If Opia took money actually and embezzled it, yes he is our son. The money is still within the region.”

    Clearly, it is this inexplicable attitude among the likes of Chief Ibori that only those from the Niger Delta should be free to steal the region blind, and not any perceived control of the region’s oil wealth by outsiders, which is the principal source of the region’s predicament.

    Those who all too readily jumped at Senator Enang’s blatant mendacity to blame outsiders for the problems of the Niger Delta should be honest enough to accept that scapegoating others is no solution to those problems.

     

  • A senator’s lying with statistics

    A senator’s lying with statistics

    I do not know whether Senator Solomon Ita Enang was being Machiavellian or he simply intended to tell a “noble lie” when he claimed on the floor of the Senate last Wednesday in the course of his contribution to the debate on the controversial Petroleum Industry Bill, that Northerners controlled 83% of the oil wells in the Niger Delta.

    Whatever his purpose, his claim, I am sure, would be hard to beat as the crudest attempt yet by any Nigerian politician to lie with statistics. This, I must say, makes the way the Nigerian media has reported and commented on his claim as if it was the truth and nothing but the gospel truth, even worse.

    Among the elementary rules of reporting are balance, fairness and verification of all claims and allegations. But even without crosschecking the facts, simple logic alone would’ve exposed the senator’s claim as untenable; everyone knows that all sectors of the oil business in Nigeria are dominated through and through by the oil majors, all of them foreign.

    Of course facts sometimes defy logic. However, the oil business is not one of those exceptions that confirm the rule.

    In its edition of September 23, 1991, the rested Citizen newsmagazine I managed did a prize winning cover story on the move by the Federal Military Government under General Ibrahim Babangida to facilitate the indigenization of the upstream sector of the oil business.

    The 14 companies whose bids succeeded were owned by a judicious mix of the wealthy from all sections of the country, including Alfred James owned by the Ooni clan, Moncroief owned by Esama of Benin, Summit Oil owned by Chief M.K.O. Abiola and Queens Petroleum owned by the Ibru clan.

    Even more importantly in the light of Senator Enang’s claim, most of the oil blocks owed by Northerners were, as pointed out by Toyin Akinosho, the publisher of the well-regarded Africa Oil and Gas Report, in an article on Premium Times online newspaper of March 7, unproductive – and have remained so to date. Anyone interested in the truth about the ownership of Nigeria’s oil industry should search for and read the article.

    If the senator’s manipulation of statistics is worrisome, worse can be said of the media. In apparently swallowing the senator’s story hook, line and sinker, we failed the elementary test of verification, balance and fairness.

     

  • Feedback

    Feedback

    RE: OBJ at 76

     

    Sir,

    As usual, I have read your offering today and by now, I guess you must be tired of hearing how brilliant it is. But there is an error of fact which is rather strange with your column so I think you need to correct it. Mr John Dara did not, and so could not have said, he “managed the improbable success of Chief Otedola in beating Alhaji Lateef Jakande in the Lagos governorship elections conducted under General Babangida’s transition programme.” Because that is not true.

    If I recollect very well, it was actually Jakande who helped Sir Michael Otedola to power and this what how it happened: In the course of the 1991 governorship elections, Otedola was the candidate of the National Republican Convention (NRC), having defeated Mrs Oluremi Adikwu by a narrow margin at their primaries. But the Social Democratic Party (SDP) could not produce a candidate after an acrimonious primaries between Chief Dapo Sarumi (then heavily backed by the late Major General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua) and the late Prof. Dapo Agbalajobi, (sponsored by Jakande). At the end, the duo were disqualified by the Prof Humphrey Nwosu-led National Electoral Commission (NEC). In the new primaries that followed, Mr Yomi Edu, another protégé of the late Yar’Adua, won the SDP ticket.

    So the gubernatorial contest in Lagos State was then between Otedola of NRC and Edu of SDP. But following this development, Jakande called on his supporters to vote for Otedola against his party’s candidate and even though the NRC had only two members while SDP had 38 members in the State House of Assembly, Otedola won the election on the strength of support from Jakande. That was what happened.

    While I know Mr John Dara played a major role in Otedola’s campaign, especially with regards to the NRC primaries, as far as the election proper was concerned, I think it is necessary to set the record straight that Jakande actually helped to put Otedola in power.

    Olusegun Adeniyi

     

    Sir,

    My late father warned me never to open my mouth too wide when talking with journalists, but the urge to share some of my behind-the-scene political maneuvers sometimes make me forget this fatherly counsel.

    I’d sent you an SMS in reaction to your March 6, 2013 write-up on “OBJ at 76”, pointing out minor inaccuracies about my relationship with the late Dr. Saraki and the role of Alhaji Jakande in the election of Sir Michael Otedola in the 1991 Lagos State governorship elections. I now have to elaborate on the text message in reaction to the comments of Segun Adeniyi which you shared with me.

    I’m uncomfortable with the ‘thorn in the flesh of Saraki’ bit because it’s not relevant to the Obasanjo story. My conflict with the late Dr. Saraki started in 2002 when I ran for the office of the governor of Kwara State. I reconciled with the old man after the 2005 National Political Reform Conference in which we both played key roles not only as delegates, but especially as bridge builders between the northern and the Niger Delta delegates, proposing compromises and reaching out to elders and leaders to avoid stalemates. Although I politely turned down his subsequent invitation to become a Sarakite, I developed more respect and admiration for him and for his political acumen. We maintained a good personal relationship till his death.

    Segun’s comments on the Otedola-Jakande part of your write-up, which you shared with me, is essentially in agreement with my earlier text message to you in which I said Otedola won that election “ with the clandestine help of Jakande”. However, Segun’s impressive recollection of the events of that period inadvertently exaggerated the role of Jakande and demeaned the remarkable role of John Dara and the then Michael Otedola Campaign Organisation (MOCO).

    I have managed several political campaigns over the years, and as a Fellow of the Certified Institute of Marketing Communications in Nigeria, I consider the Otedola Campaign as one of the most daring and well-managed political campaigns in Nigeria’s political history. Many analysts had superficially explained Sir Otedola’s unusual victory as being a product of luck or the ‘mystic’ in his name (Otedola literarily means ‘conflicts and intrigues turn to wealth’).

    I was privileged to be the Director General of the Campaign Organisation. I wrote a formal Campaign Plan with a detailed Situation Analysis. We anticipated the crisis in Lagos SDP which was a localisation of the PSP vs. PF rivalry in SDP nationwide. We built on the ‘strength’ of Otedola as a ‘Christian from rural Lagos’. We ran an in-depth campaign in rural Lagos. We had a ward-by-ward, polling booth-by-polling booth, church-by-church and mosque-by-mosque campaign network. There was a great campaign theme “That Lagos May Now Excel”(which later earned Lagos the ‘State of Excellence’ appellation). The theme was backed with bold and colourful visuals.

    We also did a formal Influence Channel Analysis. We identified the then out-going Military Administration of Governor Raji Rasaki, the Church, the Press and any disgruntled faction of SDP(among others) as critical success factors. When Agbalajobi was initially declared winner, we were already having partnership discussions with Sarumi. When subsequently, Yomi Edu became SDP candidate, we mobilised MOCO members to join Agbalajobi ‘s supporters to protest the ‘injustice’ and to widen the schism in SDP. We kept to our script and offered to partner with the aggrieved Jakande group. John Dara and Sen. Tony Adefuye initiated the dialogue that resulted in the deal. The intricate negotiations took place at the V/I residence of the late Prince Dapo Sijuade.

    There were many heroes of the Otedola Campaign and victory: Late Chief Baruwa (Olori Eleyo) of NRC, Late Alh. Baruwa (then Chairman of SDP), Late Chief Babs Akerele, Dr. Charles Fadipe, Dr. Segun Ogundimu, Late Dr. Segun Oyefule, Alh. Umaru Shinkafi (who gave money and facilitated police support), church leaders who moved out the votes, pressmen like Sina Ogunbambo, Yetunde Arebi, Kunle Oyatomi and all MOCO members who saw the future with me. It was a well coordinated teamwork.

    We remain grateful to Alh. Lateef Jakande for his (mutually beneficial) assistance, and to Gen. Raji Rasaki who was arguably more critical to our success than anyone else (he nominated Otedola’s running-mate, blocked the SDP last-ditch rigging effort in the expansive Ojo LGA, and helped in several other ways. Above all, God made it happen.

    I’m not ready yet to write my memoirs, may be it will be titled “The Contributions of a small role player in Nigeria’s political development”. It will feature stories that may moderate public perception of some important political developments and players. For now, let’s wait, ‘make I reach where I dey go’. And by the way, Mohammed, leave me and my Baba alone o.

    John Dara

     

     

     

  • OBJ at 76

    OBJ at 76

    If  Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the first premier of Western Region and opposition leader in the First Republic, was, as the late rebel leader, Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu described him posthumously, the best leader Nigeria never had, former president, General Olusegun Obasanjo, who celebrated his 76th birthday yesterday, will probably go down in history as Awo’s anti-thesis of sorts; arguably the most endowed Nigerian leader who had the opportunity and luck Awo never had but blew his chance to be truly great.

    General Obasanjo is probably the most hard-working and energetic leader Nigeria has had. The story is often told of how, as chief of staff of the assassinated head of state, General Murtala Mohammed, he would work into ungodly hours after council meetings to prepare notes on what actions needed to be taken and by whom, and yet be the first on his desk the following morning. Today at 76 – probably older as his estranged son, Gbenga, has said – he has remained as hard working and energetic as ever.

    Not only is the young septuagenarian probably the most hard-working and energetic leader Nigeria has had. He is also one of the country’s most intelligent and knowledgeable, as anyone who has had even the most casual interaction with the man will testify. His intelligence and knowledge is also pretty evident in several of the books he has written and in his media interviews and public speeches, especially those delivered off the cuff.

    Again, the man has proved himself as effective and decisive a leader as any in the world. Issue after issue, the man took decisions quickly and pursued his goals with single minded determination.

    Not least of all, the man is probably Nigeria’s luckiest leader. From being the field commander on hand to first accept Biafra’s instrument of surrender after his predecessor, General Benjamin Adekunle had virtually finished all the dangerous fighting, through surviving the coup attempt of 1976 and succeeding his assassinated boss, General Mohammed, to returning to power in mufti after barely escaping the gallows at the hand of his near-nemesis, head of state, General Sani Abacha, Obasanjo seems to have the knack, or the luck, if you will, of being at the right place at the right time.

    The trouble with the man is, first, he was never really as disinterested in power as he or his friends and associates would like the world to believe. Second, it is pretty obvious to even someone with half an eye, that the man, at least in his second coming, put his virtues more in service of himself than in that of his country.

    As we all know the man became a world celebrity when he apparently kept the word of his boss and surrendered power in October 1979 to an elected government. The operative word here is “apparently.” Apparently, because, as I have pointed out on these pages more than once, there is evidence to suggest the man didn’t really want to leave back then. That he eventually did was partly because his putative attempt at getting the last summit of the then Organisation of African Unity he attended as head of state in Monrovia, Liberia, to include a statement in its communiqué that Nigeria was not ready for democracy, failed. He also left because three of his most powerful lieutenants, his second-in-command, General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, his army chief, General T.Y. Danjuma, and his police chief, Inspector General of Police M.D. Yusuf, insisted the men in khaki must return to the barracks where they belonged.

    Whether the man wanted to leave or not, the fact was that he was sensible enough not to risk being thrown out. To that extent he deserves credit for leaving. However, after tasting the forbidden fruit of power, in a manner of speaking, the man apparently developed a huge appetite for it. An evidence of this was his failed, perhaps at that time, unrealistic, ambition to become the Secretary General of the United Nations. Another was his initial acceptance of an offer by military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, to him to head an interim government after Babangida “stepped aside” in 1993, the interim government which was eventually headed by his fellow Egba, Chief Ernest Sonekan.

    Probably the most conclusive evidence that the man’s eventual return to power in 1999 was not mere accident but a thing he had deeply desired was a story my friend, Mr. John Dara, the presidential candidate of the National Transformation Party in the 2011 elections, once told me on a visit to his rather modest office in Abuja.

    Pretty early under General Sani Abacha’s regime in 1994, he said, Obasanjo once asked him through one of his brothers-in-law to become his presidential campaign manager. Apparently Dara came highly recommended to Obasanjo as a chieftain of the powerful Middle-Belt Forum and the man who managed the improbable success of Chief Otedola in beating Alhaji Lateef Jakande in the Lagos governorship elections conducted under General Babangida’s transition programme. Dara also had a reputation of being a big thorn in the flesh of the late Dr. Sola Saraki, the undisputed godfather of the politics of Kwara State where they both came from.

    At first, said Dara, he declined. Not long after that he was approached by a younger brother of General Sani Abacha through a friend to also manage the general’s plan to swap his khaki for mufti in spite of his promise that his regime will be brief. Again, said Dara, he declined.

    However, after persistent pressure from his friend, he relented somewhat and agreed to meet Abacha’s younger brother. Still the meeting, he said, did not produce the desired outcome for his host. His argument was that Abacha was likely to face at least two formidable, possibly insurmountable, obstacles – General Yar’Adua, whose presidential ambitions as a retired officer was an open secret, and General Obasanjo who had become a credible and effective moral voice at home and abroad against military rule.

    Following this observation, he said, his host revealed that in a matter of weeks these obstacles would be removed. Thus sufficiently alarmed, Dara said, he contacted Obasanjo’s in-law and told him he was now ready to meet with the general, not to handle his presidential campaign as such, but to warn him about the danger he faced. The meeting eventually held and he warned Obasanjo of the danger. The general never heeded the warning – not even after it was confirmed by his friend, former American president, Mr. Jimmy Carter, when he warned the general not to return home from a trip abroad.

    Obasanjo, never one to be accused of cowardice, returned home from his trip. The rest, as they say, is now history; he, along with Yar’Adua, were duly picked up by Abacha’s security men as coup planners and sentenced to death. International pressure on Abacha forced him to commute the sentences to life but only Obasanjo came out alive, following the mysterious death of Abacha in 1998.

    He was soon drafted, seemingly reluctantly, to become the president that would heal the deep wounds inflicted on the country by, among other things, the crisis of the cancellation of the presidential election of June 12, 1993 whose presumed winner was the late Chief M.K.O. Abiola.

    Sadly and tragically, instead of healing wounds, Obasanjo allowed himself to be consumed by vengeance for the wrongs he suffered. Instead of leaving vengeance to God, as a self-declared born-again Christian, he went after everything he apparently believed Abacha stood for. Presumably, as he approached the end of his second term in 2007, he came to the sudden realisation that he was leaving little of a legacy behind by which history would judge him kindly.

    Predictably he tried to secure a third, some would even say, an indefinite, term with its obvious implication of diverting resources, material or otherwise, from serving the public interest. Equally predictably – Nigeria has for long proved the political graveyard of anyone who thought he was indispensable – his bid failed.

    At the same time, the man who first left office in 1979 with a reputation of someone who did not abuse his office to amass great wealth, today has the sad reputation of a man living in soulless opulence. It was as if in his second coming, he’d concluded that his relatively Spartan conduct in his first coming was a mistake.

    All his recent efforts at revising the record of his public career notwithstanding, history will certainly not be as kind to him as a leader with his great qualities deserved. He had the opportunity to use those qualities in his country’s best interests like no Nigerian leader ever had, but he blew it.

     

     

     

  • OBJ at 76

    OBJ at 76

    If Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the first premier of Western Region and opposition leader in the First Republic, was, as the late rebel leader, Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu described him posthumously, the best leader Nigeria never had, former president, General Olusegun Obasanjo, who celebrated his 76th birthday yesterday, will probably go down in history as Awo’s anti-thesis of sorts; arguably the most endowed Nigerian leader who had the opportunity and luck Awo never had but blew his chance to be truly great.

    General Obasanjo is probably the most hard-working and energetic leader Nigeria has had. The story is often told of how, as chief of staff of the assassinated head of state, General Murtala Mohammed, he would work into ungodly hours after council meetings to prepare notes on what actions needed to be taken and by whom, and yet be the first on his desk the following morning. Today at 76 – probably older as his estranged son, Gbenga, has said – he has remained as hard working and energetic as ever.

    Not only is the young septuagenarian probably the most hard-working and energetic leader Nigeria has had. He is also one of the country’s most intelligent and knowledgeable, as anyone who has had even the most casual interaction with the man will testify. His intelligence and knowledge is also pretty evident in several of the books he has written and in his media interviews and public speeches, especially those delivered off the cuff.

    Again, the man has proved himself as effective and decisive a leader as any in the world. Issue after issue, the man took decisions quickly and pursued his goals with single minded determination.

    Not least of all, the man is probably Nigeria’s luckiest leader. From being the field commander on hand to first accept Biafra’s instrument of surrender after his predecessor, General Benjamin Adekunle had virtually finished all the dangerous fighting, through surviving the coup attempt of 1976 and succeeding his assassinated boss, General Mohammed, to returning to power in mufti after barely escaping the gallows at the hand of his near-nemesis, head of state, General Sani Abacha, Obasanjo seems to have the knack, or the luck, if you will, of being at the right place at the right time.

    The trouble with the man is, first, he was never really as disinterested in power as he or his friends and associates would like the world to believe. Second, it is pretty obvious to even someone with half an eye, that the man, at least in his second coming, put his virtues more in service of himself than in that of his country.

    As we all know the man became a world celebrity when he apparently kept the word of his boss and surrendered power in October 1979 to an elected government. The operative word here is “apparently.” Apparently, because, as I have pointed out on these pages more than once, there is evidence to suggest the man didn’t really want to leave back then. That he eventually did was partly because his putative attempt at getting the last summit of the then Organisation of African Unity he attended as head of state in Monrovia, Liberia, to include a statement in its communiqué that Nigeria was not ready for democracy, failed. He also left because three of his most powerful lieutenants, his second-in-command, General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, his army chief, General T.Y. Danjuma, and his police chief, Inspector General of Police M.D. Yusuf, insisted the men in khaki must return to the barracks where they belonged.

    Whether the man wanted to leave or not, the fact was that he was sensible enough not to risk being thrown out. To that extent he deserves credit for leaving. However, after tasting the forbidden fruit of power, in a manner of speaking, the man apparently developed a huge appetite for it. An evidence of this was his failed, perhaps at that time, unrealistic, ambition to become the Secretary General of the United Nations. Another was his initial acceptance of an offer by military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, to him to head an interim government after Babangida “stepped aside” in 1993, the interim government which was eventually headed by his fellow Egba, Chief Ernest Sonekan.

    Probably the most conclusive evidence that the man’s eventual return to power in 1999 was not mere accident but a thing he had deeply desired was a story my friend, Mr. John Dara, the presidential candidate of the National Transformation Party in the 2011 elections, once told me on a visit to his rather modest office in Abuja.

    Pretty early under General Sani Abacha’s regime in 1994, he said, Obasanjo once asked him through one of his brothers-in-law to become his presidential campaign manager. Apparently Dara came highly recommended to Obasanjo as a chieftain of the powerful Middle-Belt Forum and the man who managed the improbable success of Chief Otedola in beating Alhaji Lateef Jakande in the Lagos governorship elections conducted under General Babangida’s transition programme. Dara also had a reputation of being a big thorn in the flesh of the late Dr. Sola Saraki, the undisputed godfather of the politics of Kwara State where they both came from.

    At first, said Dara, he declined. Not long after that he was approached by a younger brother of General Sani Abacha through a friend to also manage the general’s plan to swap his khaki for mufti in spite of his promise that his regime will be brief. Again, said Dara, he declined.

    However, after persistent pressure from his friend, he relented somewhat and agreed to meet Abacha’s younger brother. Still the meeting, he said, did not produce the desired outcome for his host. His argument was that Abacha was likely to face at least two formidable, possibly insurmountable, obstacles – General Yar’Adua, whose presidential ambitions as a retired officer was an open secret, and General Obasanjo who had become a credible and effective moral voice at home and abroad against military rule.

    Following this observation, he said, his host revealed that in a matter of weeks these obstacles would be removed. Thus sufficiently alarmed, Dara said, he contacted Obasanjo’s in-law and told him he was now ready to meet with the general, not to handle his presidential campaign as such, but to warn him about the danger he faced. The meeting eventually held and he warned Obasanjo of the danger. The general never heeded the warning – not even after it was confirmed by his friend, former American president, Mr. Jimmy Carter, when he warned the general not to return home from a trip abroad.

    Obasanjo, never one to be accused of cowardice, returned home from his trip. The rest, as they say, is now history; he, along with Yar’Adua, were duly picked up by Abacha’s security men as coup planners and sentenced to death. International pressure on Abacha forced him to commute the sentences to life but only Obasanjo came out alive, following the mysterious death of Abacha in 1998.

    He was soon drafted, seemingly reluctantly, to become the president that would heal the deep wounds inflicted on the country by, among other things, the crisis of the cancellation of the presidential election of June 12, 1993 whose presumed winner was the late Chief M.K.O. Abiola.

    Sadly and tragically, instead of healing wounds, Obasanjo allowed himself to be consumed by vengeance for the wrongs he suffered. Instead of leaving vengeance to God, as a self-declared born-again Christian, he went after everything he apparently believed Abacha stood for. Presumably, as he approached the end of his second term in 2007, he came to the sudden realisation that he was leaving little of a legacy behind by which history would judge him kindly.

    Predictably he tried to secure a third, some would even say, an indefinite, term with its obvious implication of diverting resources, material or otherwise, from serving the public interest. Equally predictably – Nigeria has for long proved the political graveyard of anyone who thought he was indispensable – his bid failed.

    At the same time, the man who first left office in 1979 with a reputation of someone who did not abuse his office to amass great wealth, today has the sad reputation of a man living in soulless opulence. It was as if in his second coming, he’d concluded that his relatively Spartan conduct in his first coming was a mistake.

    All his recent efforts at revising the record of his public career notwithstanding, history will certainly not be as kind to him as a leader with his great qualities deserved. He had the opportunity to use those qualities in his country’s best interests like no Nigerian leader ever had, but he blew it.

     

     

     

  • Jonathan and 2015: Okupe’s pure wind

    Jonathan and 2015: Okupe’s pure wind

    Last Wednesday, the bellicose Senior Special Assistant to the President on Public Affairs, Dr Doyin Okupe, dismissed as “diversionary,” a declaration by the Niger State Governor, Dr Muazu Babangida Aliyu, that in the run up to the 2011 elections President Goodluck Jonathan “signed” an agreement with Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governors to serve for only one term.

    Governor Aliyu made the declaration the weekend before in a phone-in programme, ‘Guest of the Week’, on Liberty Radio, a Kaduna based private FM radio station. It is apparent that the governor made the declaration against the background of clear indications so far that the President will re-contest for his job in 2015, come rain or shine.

    “I recall that at the time he was going to declare for the 2011 election,” the governor said, “all the PDP governors were brought together to ensure that we were all in the same frame of mind. And I recall that some of us said given the circumstance of the death of President Umaru Yar’Adua and given the PDP zoning arrangement, it was expected that the North was to produce the president for a number of years.

    “I recall that at that discussion it was agreed that Jonathan would only serve for one term of four years and we all SIGNED the agreement…I think we are all gentlemen enough so when the time comes, we will all come together and see what is the right thing to do.” (Emphasis mine).

    These were the remarks Okupe has since dismissed as diversionary – and a diversion which he said his principal is determined to resist with every ounce of his strength. The president, he said, is simply too pre-occupied with his commitment to transform Nigeria into a land flowing with milk and honey to allow himself to be dragged into the campaigns for the next presidential election.

    “We,” Okupe said, “wish to state categorically that this is neither the time nor the season to begin electioneering campaign…and so President Goodluck Jonathan will not jump the gun. Mr President will stoutly resist any disguised or open attempt to drag him into any debates, arguments or political discussions relating to a presidential election in 2015. The President considers this an invidious attempt to sway him from his chosen pursuit of the set out constituents of the transformation agenda which form the basis upon which Nigerians overwhelmingly elected him to steer the ship of the nation in 2011.”

    When the celebrated journalist and novelist, George Orwell, said in his famous essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, published in 1946, that “Political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible,” he could not, of course, have had your typical Nigerian politician in mind, much less a 21st century Nigerian presidential spokesman. But if he did, he couldn’t have been more spot-on in his dismissal of political speech as a lot of bull. “Political language,” he said in the essay, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

    Anyone living in Nigerian in recent times, even if he were half blind – except, of course, if he is Okupe and his likes – can see that the presidential spokesman’s attempt to rebut Governor Aliyu couldn’t have been more disingenuous. Few statements, if any, could have been worded to make barefaced lies sound truthful, murder respectable and pure wind appear solid.

    To begin with, most disinterested Nigerians and close foreign observers of Nigeria know that President Jonathan was never “overwhelmingly elected” in April 2011. On the contrary, it is pretty obvious he was overwhelmingly rigged into office, beginning with the dubious PDP primaries, all the way through the manipulation of religion and ethnicity and the abuse of state’s fiscal power and its instruments of violence to square or squash dissent, to finally getting the courts to dismiss opposition rejection of the results on legal technicalities.

    Second, even Okupe knows that his principal has been anything but single-minded in his pursuit of his Transformation Agenda, which, in any case, was an unaffordable shopping list rather than a set of coherent and achievable objectives. If the President has been single-minded in the pursuit of his campaign promises, incoherent and unrealistic as they were, the country would have been a lot better today than it was in April 2011.

    The truth, assuming the likes of Okupe care for one, is that if anyone is guilty of diverting the president’s attention from his job, it is the man himself, certainly more than anyone else. This much is obvious from his single-minded determination last year to replace the “recalcitrant” Timipre Sylva with the loyal Seriake Dickson as the governor of his home state, Bayelsa, and hunt Sylva down into oblivion. It was also obvious from his single-minded determination to impose the loyal Alhaji Bamanga Tukur as chairman of the PDP, even after the gentleman had been roundly rejected by his immediate North-Eastern constituency to which the job had been zoned.

    No less diversionary is his self-inflicted current face-off with Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State whose crime, it seems, is that, like not a few two-term governors, he is suspected of harbouring presidential ambition. At least twice last week the President tried, but failed, to remove Amaechi as the chairman of the Nigerian Governors Forum. Before then his self-appointed godfather, Chief Edwin Clark, had taken out a two-part full page adverts in several newspapers to rant and rave at the Forum for its imagined antipathy towards his godson. Chances are those adverts did not cost the old man one kobo.

    What all this suggests is that the President is single-mindedly determined not to let anything or anyone whatsoever to get in the way of his second-term, some would say third-term, presidential ambition, having been sworn into the office twice already. If anything has been diverting his attention from doing his job, it is this single-minded focus on 2015.

    So it is really disingenuous for Okupe to accuse Governor Aliyu, or for that matter anyone else, of trying to divert the President from carrying out his transformation agenda. The governor apparently did not lie when he said the President signed a deal with the PDP governors to serve for only one term on his own steam. The proof that Aliyu spoke the truth, at least for once, given his reputation as a public officer who talks and equivocates too much, is crystal clear from the egregious response to his claim by friends of the president which in effect says, “So what if the President signed a deal?”

    Politicians everywhere do deals often with no intention to keep them. But only in Nigeria do they sign and seal deals with no intention whatsoever to honour them. Worse still, it is only in Nigeria that a politician can look you straight in the eyes and accuse you of diverting his attention from doing his job for simply reminding him that he has not kept his word.

    The surprise in all this, therefore, is not that the President signed a deal apparently with no intention to honour it. It is not even that his spokesman will attempt to make a lie look truthful or make murder look respectable or give pure wind the appearance of solidity.

    The surprise is that even after the President and his estranged benefactor, former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, categorically denied the zoning and power rotation deal in PDP, Governor Aliyu would still talk about the President’s word as a gentleman being his honour in spite of all the indications so far that the man would rather Nigeria breaks up than honour his word not to contest the next presidential election.

     

  • Ten years of Trust’s dialogues (III)

    Ten years of Trust’s dialogues (III)

    Finally, this year’s dialogue. The reader will recall that in the second part of my review of Trust’s annual dialogue last week, I concluded with a couple of examples of how the Nigerian media often allowed partisan politics to get the better of its professionalism. This was in illustration of the consensus of last year’s dialogue which was on “Politics and the Media.”

    The chair was former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida. The panellists were Senate President David Mark, represented by Senator Victor Ndoma-Egba, the minister of Information, Labaran Maku, represented by his Special Assistant on Media, Dr Kingsley Osadolor, and Dr. Abubakar Siddique Mohammed, the radical scholar and one-time head of Ahmadu Bello University’s Political Science department.

    In his opening remarks the chair, it seemed, could not resist having dig at the minister who, as a student union leader, led violent demonstrations against the general’s increase of petrol price in the eighties. Wasn’t it ironical, the general observed with a knowing grin on his face, that several years on the minister would transform into one of strongest defenders of President Goodluck Jonathan’s unwanted New Year “gift” to Nigerians on January 1, 2012 of more than double the hitherto subsisting price of the commodity?

    The reader will recall that I quoted Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, the Edo State governor and one of the most regular participants of the dialogue, of accusing the media of often writing fiction. On that occasion the comrade governor was angry with the media for publishing a story that five mosques had been burnt down in Benin, his state capital. This was at the peak of the sectarian violence that had engulfed the country. He said when he confronted the reporter of one of the newspapers that published the story, the reporter disowned it and said it was his editors in Lagos who rewrote it based on information they got from a foreign news agency.

    All three panellists shared Oshiomhole’s concern about the integrity and professionalism of the Nigerian media. And all four barely stopped short of accusing the media of lack of patriotism. Among the four, Dr Mohammed’s criticism was strongest. Over time, he said, the media “have subjected this country to a sustained barrage of attacks like no other country in the world that is not at war.”

    The Nigerian media, it seems, is a paradox of sorts; most Nigerians acknowledge that it’s been a bulwark against tyranny and misrule in the country, going all the way back to our colonial past, but at the same time it has been widely accused of being too negative about the country. It’s difficult to deny the existence of both virtue and vice in the character of our country’s media.

    For me, however, Nigerians themselves are more to blame than their media. The media may often malign people and distort events in society. They may often even fabricate events. But if our media appear to harp more on the vices of our country than its virtues it is simply because our vices outweigh our virtues. In other words, the fault is less in our media than in our selves.

    So if Nigeria is yet to become a nation that its entire citizens can be proud of almost a century after its amalgamation in 1914, we should blame ourselves more than we blame our media – all its shortcomings notwithstanding.

    For its dialogue this year Trust could not have chosen a more appropriate topic than that of the challenges of nation building. Likewise it was hard to pick a more formidable panel than that of Bishop Mathew Hassan Kukah, Mr. Femi Falana, Ms Ann Kio-Briggs and Dr Sule Bello, all of them accomplished figures in their various fields of religion, law, human rights and academia.

    All four expressed unhappiness with the state of the nation but Ms Briggs stood out of the lot for her pessimism about the country’s future. “There is nothing to celebrate (about the country’s centenary),” she said, and in effect added that it may yet break up if the part of the country she comes from which produces oil as the main source of public revenue is not allowed to continue to lead this country after 2015 even though she admitted that President Goodluck Jonathan has been a big letdown as leader from her neck of wood.

    If Ms Briggs stood out of the panel for her pessimism, Bishop Kukah stood out for his optimism. All the widespread talk about revolution coming to Nigeria, he said, were just that – talk. “No revolution,” he said, “will take place in Nigeria.” He also did not believe the country will break up.

    I do not share Bishop Kukah optimism about this country’s future, even though I pray all the time that it never breaks up but neither do I share Ms. Briggs pessimism. To say, as she did, that there is nothing to celebrate about Nigeria is certainly untenable. If nothing else there is something to celebrate about the country’s unity. Several countries like the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, and closer to home, Sudan and Somalia, which seemed more united and more stable than Nigeria at the time of our independence 50 years ago, have since collapsed.

    We also have a lot to celebrate about our resilience and liberty. Few countries in the world, including Britain the oldest democracy, enjoy the kind of freedom that we do. That we take such freedom for granted is itself a cause for celebration.

    However, for Nigeria to become truly a nation-state its citizens can be proud of we need more than the unity and the freedom that we enjoy and the resilience that is so much part of our character. Of all the other we need, for me the most important is individual introspection about our responsibilities to our communities and to society at large. And the time for that introspection is now, as we begin a year-long celebration of our centenary.

    All too often we blame our leaders for the mess we are in. We are, of course, right to do so. In doing so, however, most of us hardly stop to ask ourselves how much of our own bit we have contributed to help our leaders do what is right by our society and by our country.

    The reader will pardon me if I get rather preachy at this point. But in my own reflections about the ills of our society, I have never found a better solution than the words of Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him) about the concept of shepherd-hood which has its Christian equivalent.

    “Everyone of you,” he is quoted to have said by some of the greatest narrators of his tradition, including Bukhari, Muslim and Abu Dawud, “is a shepherd, and everyone of you is responsible for his flock. The Imam is a shepherd, and he is responsible for his congregation. A man is a shepherd among his family and he is responsible for his flock (his family). A woman is a shepherd in her husband’s home and children, and she is responsible for them. A servant is a shepherd over the wealth of his owner and he is responsible for it. Lo! Everyone is a shepherd and everyone is responsible for his flock.”

    Each time we blame our leaders for the mess in our society, have we ever stopped to ask ourselves if we have done our own little bit in our own little world we control? When we jump queues in traffic, for example, are we not violating the time honoured principle of first come, first served? When we dump refuse in our gutters instead of properly disposing it are we not violating our responsibilities as shepherds over our environment? And so on and so on.

    We cannot hope to transform our country into a land of peace and prosperity that we will all be proud to identify with if we do not think seriously about the saying that a country gets the leaders it deserves. This is staple food for our thoughts as we celebrate our centenary which comes up next year.

     

     

  • Ten years of Trust’s dialogues (II)

    Ten years of Trust’s dialogues (II)

    In my overview two weeks ago of Media Trust Limited’s 10 years of annual dialogue which started in 2004, I said the four most exciting – and should have added most interesting – for me were the third on the scourge of corruption in Nigeria, the seventh on African women in politics, the ninth on politics and the media and this year’s on nation building.

    The other six were, of course, exciting and interesting enough. The first, as the regular participants would know, was on the same theme of nation building as this year’s. The second, though on the dismal science, was made interesting by the panel of three of Nigeria’s leading economists, Professors Sam Aluko, now late, and Mike Kwanashie of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, and the prolific and ever controversial Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the Central Bank Governor, but at that time the risk manager of United Bank for Africa.

    In their subject matter alone, the fourth (2007) on how to conduct free and fair elections in the country, the fifth (2008) on the challenges of democracy on the continent and the sixth (2009) on how to restore public faith in the country’s politics, were also exciting. But their various panellists – Professor Maurice Iwu, probably the most discredited chairman of the country’s election commission, Alhaji Ahmadu Kurfi, its longest serving executive secretary and Chief Segun Osoba, one of the five Action Congress governors in the South-West President Olusegun Obasanjo knocked out for six in the 2003 governorship elections through sheer cunning (2007), Ghana’s President Jerry Rawlings (2008) and the trio of Anambra’s Governor Peter Obi, former House Speaker Bello Masari and Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, then still legally contesting his defeat at the Edo governorship elections in the 2007 elections (2009) – ensured there were no dull moments during those three dialogues.

    The eighth dialogue in 2011 on the challenges of good governance in Africa was also a natural crowd puller if only because of the prevalence of bad governance on the continent. It was the more interesting because one of the three billed to lead the dialogue, Dr. Mo Ibrahim, the telecommunication billionaire, had instituted a well-endowed prize for good governance on the continent which is Africa’s closest answer to the Nobel Peace prize, in the sense that much of the widespread conflict on the continent can be traced directly to bad governance by its leaders.

    As things turned out, the audience did not get the benefit of Mo Ibrahim’s rationale for instituting his prize, among other things the audience would have loved to hear from him, even though he turned up for the event. He could not speak because he fell ill on the night before the event. It was then left to the pair of Mr. Fola Adeola, a highly successful banker and reformer of the country’s pension scheme, and Ms Arunma Oteh, the boss of Nigeria’s Security Exchange Commission, to lead the dialogue. For me the most memorable remark to come out of that year’s dialogue was Adeola’s profound statement that Nigerians seem to have outsourced their problems to God, instead of taking responsibility for what they say or do, good or bad. Since then God, it seems, has remained the patient refuge of every scoundrel, probably even more so today.

    All of which brings me back to the four dialogues I said were the most exciting and interesting for me, i.e. those of 2006, 2010, 2012 and this year’s. The first of this lot was the subject of this column two weeks ago. The problem of this country, I said, was not corruption as such but the brazenness with which it is practiced and the fact that, far from punishing corruption, we indeed celebrate it from the top to the bottom of society.

    It is this attitude towards corruption which has made it all so easy for many of our leaders to “chop and clean mouth,” to use the peculiar Nigerian expression for the complete lack of shame among our leaders about their sordid past, even the immediate past.

    This, more than the topic of the 2010 dialogue about the African women in politics and the formidable panel of Winnie Mandela, Kofoworola Bucknor-Akerele, Naja’atu Mohammed and Ms Samira Nkrumah, was what I found interesting about the year’s dialogue. It was truly amazing, at least for me, how President Obasanjo, as the chairman of the occasion, could look Nigerians straight in the eyes and tell them he did not know Alhaji Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, then governor of Katsina State, was a sick person when he imposed him on his party as its presidential candidate and went on to impose him on Nigerians as their president in 2007.

    But then Obasanjo knew his Nigeria like the back of his hand, as they say. So he proceeded to wash his hands off his handiwork and ask Yar’Adua, who he knew was at that point not in charge of his faculties, to “take the path of honour” and resign as president. A few voices were raised against the immorality of his pretence but the overwhelming majority, as he must have reckoned, focused on the message rather than on the messenger. In any case, the following day, the message virtually drowned out the subject of that year’s dialogue.

    As a veteran journalist and political pundit, it is not surprising that I found the subject of the 2012 dialogue among the most exciting and interesting. Image, as America’s Abraham Lincoln once reportedly said, is everything, or almost. This explains, at least partly, why journalists and politicians have been in a love-hate incestuous relationship of use and dump for as long as anyone can remember. This was clearly demonstrated by the way Governor Adams Oshiomhole, as much a man of media image as he is of his actions, condemned the media during the dialogue as all too often a purveyor of fiction, not, I must say, without justification.

    Two telling examples lend support to Oshiomhole’s charges, one ancient, and the other recent. The ancient was reported by the late Alhaji Babatunde Jose, the doyen of Nigeria’s press, in his 1987 autobiography, Walking a Tight Rope: Power Play at Daily Times. This was in his account of the 1953 so-called Hausa/Igbo riots in Kano. At that time he was a senior reporter with the newspaper and was on a familiarisation tour of the North. “I,” he said in the book, “had quite correctly reported it in my copy as a riot between Hausas and Yorubas. Somehow it appeared in Daily Times as a riot between Hausas and Ibos, a very different matter and potentially a very dangerous error.”

    The edition was seized and pulped by the colonial authorities and another with the correct version printed for circulation but not, unfortunately, before the damage had been done. “We,” he said, “never found out how the mistake occurred. Was it an accident or was it a deliberate attempt to foment trouble?”

    Whatever the motive, the acorn of distrust that story planted in the geo-politics of this country has since grown into an oak tree, perhaps bigger.

    The recent example of the press malice comes from a 1996 book, NIGERIA: Guerrilla Journalism by Michele Maringuez, by no means an enemy of the Nigerian press. On the contrary she had a lot of positive things to say about the country’s press in her book. Even so she lamented that it was “often astonishingly negligent about checking and confirming its sources or even statistics. Errors and glitches abound and are seldom corrected in the next edition.”

    She gave an example of how AFP, the French news agency, and The Guardian, the self-styled flagship of the Nigerian press, published different statistics from an IMF press conference in Lagos about Nigeria’s economy. When the worried AFP correspondent cross-checked with the IMF it turned out the flagship was wrong.

    Maringuez’s second example was even more egregious. In December 1993, she pointed out, three of the country’s leading news magazines carried a sensational story that former self-styled military president, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida was on the run from the General Abacha regime. The News’ banner headline on its cover read “Babangida’s dramatic escape.” African Concord’s was “A dictator on the run.” Tell’s was even more dramatic. “Why IBB is on the run,” it said, with his picture along with his late wife, Maryam, getting off a plane.

    It turned out that, far from being on the run, the man and his wife had only gone for lesser Hajj in Saudi Arabia and for holiday abroad only to return a few weeks later. None of the magazines ever mentioned his return.