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Category: Mohammed Harunna

  • The Marafa I Know

    The Marafa I Know

    Still on Marafan Sokoto
    Last week I paid tribute to Alhaji Umaru Shinkafi, Marafan Sokoto and one of Nigeria’s foremost politicians and respected leaders, who died on July 6. Today I am giving up the page for another tribute by one of his closest confidants, Saidu Mohammed Dansadau, a two-term senator from Zamfara State, who served with distinction, dignity and integrity.
    Dansadau’s tribute is followed by some of the reactions to my own tribute.

    “Great men are the guideposts and landmarks in the State”

    Nearly everybody in my generation who grew up in the North had heard of Umaru Shinkafi, the Marafan Sokoto. He was the super spook who knew something about everybody.

    Military President, General Ibrahim Babangida, had just lifted the ban on party politics in 1989 and political associations were being formed. That was when my path first crossed that of Marafa when we formed the Sokoto Organisation (then Zamfara was part of Sokoto State).

    I was young and a firebrand.  Little did I know that I made a deep impression on him during our first meeting. After the meeting he sent for me and asked me to see him in Shinkafi. That was the beginning of a close and intimate relationship, a mentoring and close benevolent big brother relationship.

    When the military government decreed National Republican Convention (NRC) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP) into being, we joined the NRC whose manifesto we identified with and which we hoped to deepen. Marafa was running to be the presidential candidate of the NRC.

    Not being a product of the known political establishment of the time, his aspiration seemed rather audacious. And, as every intelligence operator knows, he had made some powerful political enemies who would go to great lengths to stop him. But they did not reckon with his discipline and solid organisational abilities.

    Soon, his campaign took off. He appointed me his Campaign Coordinator for Sokoto State. I think he liked how I organised the campaign, for, after six months he pulled me out to Kaduna and promoted me to coordinate his campaign  for the whole Northern states.

    It was a most tasking and exhaustive campaign. We threw everything into it and came close enough to the more fancied Malam Adamu Ciroma as the winner to demand a run-off. However, while we waited, Babangida announced the cancellation of the primaries and banned a crop of politicians, including Shinkafi and Malam Adamu.

    Babangida said he wanted new-breed politicians and despite the experience, resources, network, relationships built, and the draining mental and physical exertions, Shinkafi took it with equanimity and moved on. At the NRC convention in Port Harcourt under Option A4, Shinkafi supported the presidential candidature of Bashir Tofa and the National Chairmanship of the late Dr. Hameed Kusamotu.  Both won.

    When the dust settled, I told him I was returning to Sokoto to continue my life. But he had other plans. He convinced me to stay in Kaduna and bought a house for me.

    It’s been 27 years since then and I have found Marafa as constant as a Northern Star: solid, steady, calm and unflappable. He was an extra-ordinarily selfless, admirably humble, gentle, soft-spoken, self-effacing, diligent, circumspect, shrewd and generous man.

    But he was also a misunderstood man; he was not given to smiling easily, and people thought that this mien reflected his heart. However, even though he carried a serious mien, Marafa had a keen sense of humour.

    A lot of people thought Shinkafi was stupendously wealthy because of his generosity to people. His wealth, however, was not in material possessions but in the generosity of his heart.

    Marafa was the source of permanent shelter for so many of his household members, house helps, staff, classmates, neighbours, friends and the under-privileged. I can attest to that. In 2002, even as a senator, he offered me a house in Kaduna, valued at 30 Million Naira at the time, for the 1.6 million Naira he bought it many years earlier. There were many of such.

    His philanthropy went beyond individuals. He provided basic amenities, such as schools,  clinics and infrastructure to several communities. He also built mosques to cater for the spiritual needs of members of communities.

    When the Muslim Students Society leader of Usman Danfodio University, Sokoto, came to pay condolence to his family, he said the university authorities had informed them that it was Shinkafi who built, furnished and equipped the Juma’at Mosque in the university, some 30 years ago. This was to the surprise of family members because Marafa had never mentioned it to anyone.

    That was Marafa. He gave for Allah and there were many such examples.

    Marafa also had the capacity to forgive, to a fault. Even when he knew somebody had cheated him in a business relationship, he would still put up with the person. In the more obvious cases whenever he was advised to end the relationship, his standard answer was always: any person in a position of prominence in any society should know this came with the territory.

    Politically, Umaru Shinkafi was, among other things, an apostle of broad political affiliations. He believed that what united us was more than what divided us as a nation.

    To a large extent, the emergence of General Muhammadu Buhari as the presidential candidate of the APP in 2003 was substantially a product of sacrifice by Umaru Shinkafi. That year APP governors and the leadership of the APP in states not controlled by the party resolved to field him as the party’s presidential candidate.

    Former Sokoto State Governor, Attahiru Bafarawa, and former Kwara State Governor, the late Mohammed Lawal, were delegated to intimate Shinkafi of this resolution. This was in my presence. He thanked them and appreciated their offer. He, however, courteously declined and asked them to field General Buhari. He assured them he would give whatever support he could muster to ensure General Buhari won.

    There are, as one political sage once observed, some men who lift the age they inhabit till all men walk on higher ground in that lifetime. Umaru Shinkafi was such a man. He bestrode the security, political and humanitarian world and was acknowledged for his patriotism industry, depth of knowledge, discipline, empathy and competence.

    May Allah grant him peace in Aljanna Firdaus.

     

    Re: Exit of a spymaster

    Thank you for a wonderful epitaph in today’s The Nation back page on my biological father, Marafan Sokoto. It was concise and captured his politics and career.

    I would have liked a mention of the total number of states won by the APP/AD alliance as it was an excellent challenge to the military gang-up of money and might in the other party and that feat was never replicated till Buhari’s victory last year, which was also due to the partnership again with the Yoruba. The embryo of that relationship was the AD/APP alliance.

    • Fatima Shinkafi,

    +2348036009838.

     

    Shinkafi’s death was greatly felt in my home town, Ikirun, Osun State, where he used to humbly sit outside with the late mother of his late friend, Hammed Kusamotu, in their residence long after Kusamotu’s death. May ALLAH (SWT) grant him Aljanna Firdaus. Amen.

    • Alabi Tajudeen,

    +2348055952747.

     

    How could Shinkafi be a spymaster when all his life he had been involved in internal security? The Police, NSO & later DSS are in charge of internal security. I believe it is the NIA that deals with external security, where spymasters dwell. Shinkafi of blessed memory never served there. May Allah have mercy on his soul.

    • Barrister Buhari Bello,

    +2348037881004.

     

    I used the word in the broad sense of “someone who directs clandestine intelligence activities” as it is defined in my online Advanced English Dictionary.

    • MKH.

     

    The late Gen. Hassan Usman Katsina did not participate in Babangida’s transition. It was Major-General Shehu Musa Yar’adua, equally a formidable member of the establishment, who did.

    • Umaru Shuaibu,

    Suleja.

    +2348033110505.

     

    Umaru Shuaibu was one of several readers who wrote to say my mention of Major-General Hassan Usman Katsina among leading Northerners who stood up for “June 12” was in error. It wasn’t. General Hassan Usman was, of course, never a politician and I did not say he participated in Babangida’s transition programme. But as a leading Katsina royalty, the first and only military governor of Northern Region and a former army chief, his standing up for “June 12”, just like Malam Adamu Ciroma’s, belied the propaganda about a grand Northern conspiracy against Chief Abiola.

    • MKH.

     

    I wish to suggest that the motto/slogan of Niger State should be changed from the current “Power State” to “Home of Hydropower” in order not to miss its import and intent. This would not be the first time a state is changing its motto/slogan. Sokoto changed from “Cibiyar Daular Usumaniya” to “Seat of the Caliphate” and Kaduna from “Liberal State” to “Centre of Learning”, etc.

    • Abdulrahman M. Alfa,

    Kaduna.

    +2348058903377.

  • Exit of a spymaster

    Exit of a spymaster

    Among the most effective propaganda weapons the South has used all too often to denigrate the North has been the claim by its politicians that their northern counterparts have always believed they were “born to rule.” One of the most frequently cited evidence in support of the claim is the motto of Niger State, which is “Power State”, never mind the fact that the motto refers not to the status of the state as home of two former military heads of state, but rather to its status as home of all three hydroelectric power stations in the country.

    As is the case with all successful propaganda, the peddlers of the born to rule northern complex have never let any fact get in the way of their claim. Alhaji Umaru Maikaura Ali Shinkafi, CON, Marafan Sokoto, the Nigerian spymaster who died on July 6 in a London hospital at 79 after a long illness, was a great symbol of one of the facts that belied the “born to rule” propaganda.

    Over 18 years ago the man sacrificed what had been an excellent political career by agreeing to be the running mate of Chief Olu Falae in a merger of his political party, the then All Peoples Party (APP), with Falae’s much smaller Alliance for Democracy.

    The AD had failed to meet the criteria of national spread for registration as a political party during General Abdulsalami Abubakar’s 11-month transition programme into the current republic. This failure presented the authorities with a dilemma; register it as the party of the most vocal politicians in the country or face its formidable propaganda machine. The dilemma was solved by allowing AD to swallow the bigger APP. Apparently this paved the way for Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu who had emerged as the presidential candidate of the APP before the merger to be swapped with Shinkafi since a wholly southern ticket would have been a no-show for the new AD.

    Shinkafi’s acceptance of his role as second fiddle to Falae when he could have easily beaten the AD chieftain in a free and fair primaries following their merger, was in submission to a decision, which looked like an act of contrition, the Northern Establishment had apparently taken after “June 12”, to ensure that the next elected president of the country came from the South, preferably the Southwest, home of Chief MKO Abiola the putative winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election which was inexplicably annulled two weeks after by military president, General Ibrahim Babangida.

    It is a reflection of the measure of success of Southern propaganda against the Northern Establishment that people easily forgot that the road to “June 12” was paved with the unjustified crippling of the presidential ambitions by General Babangida of political stalwarts like the Marafa, himself a pillar of that Establishment. It is also a reflection of that same measure of success that the public also easily forgot that several northern leaders like the late General Hassan Usman Katsina and Malam Adamu Ciroma who, like Marafa, was banned by Babangida’s military presidency as a presidential aspirant in 1992, stood up publicly for “June 12.”

    For Shinkafi, the 1998 AD/APP merger must then have been a political anti-climax following his great political success story. That story started in 1991 after one of the most successful careers as policeman and spymaster. He was Commissioner of Police in the original Oyo State when he was appointed by military Head of State, General Olusegun Obasanjo, in 1975 as Minister of Internal Affairs, whose main brief was internal security.

    This put him in good stead to succeed Colonel Abdullahi Mohammed as the second Director General of the National Security Organisation (NSO), established by Obasanjo in the wake of the February 1976 coup attempt, which claimed the life of Obasanjo’s predecessor, General Murtala Mohammed. The NSO was a merger of the Special Branch of the Nigeria Police Force and the Research Department of the External Affairs Ministry.

    Shinkafi was DG for four years under President Shehu Shagari. He left in the second month of Shagari’s second term, reportedly because the president ignored his warning that the military was plotting a coup against him. A month later the military struck.

    In 1991 he threw his hat into the complex political arena of General Babangida’s transition programme. That decision brought him into political rivalry in 1992 with Malam Adamu Ciroma, hitherto a somewhat senior political ally.

    Both sought the presidential ticket of the National Republican Congress, one of only two parties which Babangida created and funded for his transition programme. The NRC was “a little to the right” and the other, the Social Democratic Party (SDP), “a little to the left.”

    The presidential primaries of the two parties, first in August and then in September, saw Ciroma emerge as winner with Shinkafi a close second from a crowded field of many contestants. This led to demand by Shinkafi’s supporters for a run-off.

    In the SDP, the late Major-General Shehu Musa Yar’adua emerged a clear winner, followed by Chief Falae, a distant second from a similarly crowded field of contestants.

    In both parties, but even more so in SDP, the losers cried fowl, albeit not without some justification. Justified or not, however, the soldiers soon obliged the huge demands for the cancellation of the primaries. First, the results of the primaries were cancelled. Then in October after two days of deliberations, the Armed Forces Ruling Council (AFRC) dissolved the executive councils of the two parties, the NRC under Chief Tom Ikimi and the SDP under Ambassador Babagana Kingibe. They were replaced by caretaker committees under Lateefat Okunnu (NRC) and retired AVM Ishaya Shekarau (SDP).

    As if to complicate matters even more for the disorganised and quarrelsome politicians, Babangida announced in a nationwide broadcast on November 17, that he has been forced by the disorderliness of the politicians to ban all contestants in the botched primaries in future elections and to move the original January 3, 1993 date for handing over to an elected president to August 27, exactly eight years after he ousted Major-General Muhammadu Buhari in a bloodless palace coup.

    That change shifted the balance of power within the NRC from Ciroma as the party’s disputed front-runner to Shinkafi whose presidential campaign organisation, “Choice ‘92″, had been one of the most formidable in the country. For, by the time new conventions were held for the two parties, the candidate backed by Choice ’92 for NRC’s presidential ticket, Alhaji Bashir Tofa, handily beat the one backed by Ciroma’s organisation, Alhaji Samaila Mamman. Choice ’92 candidates also swept five key positions in the party hierarchy, including the chairmanship.

    As we all know Babangida’s eight-year transition came to grief on November 17, 1993 when his Minister of Defence, the wily and reticent General Sani Abacha, overthrew the transition government Babangida had installed under Chief Ernest Shonekan because it became impossible to hold another presidential election before the military president stepped aside on August 27.

    Chief Abiola himself had, ironically, led the June 12fers in pleading with Abacha to throw out Shonekan in the mistaken belief he would hand over power back to Abiola. He obliged them all right, but kept the power to himself for five years and looked set to continue by swapping his khaki for mufti when he died mysteriously in June 1998, one month ahead of Abiola’s equally mysterious death.

    Abacha was succeeded by his Chief of Defence Staff, General Abubakar, under whose 11-month transition programme AD swallowed its much larger APP with Shinkafi as the running mate of Falae. AD, as we all know, lost the presidential election to the Peoples Democratic Party under General Obasanjo, a former commander-in-chief of Abdulsalami.

    It was in this state of political anti-climax for Shinkafi that he finally bowed out of active politics primarily due to a decline in his health. Even then he remained a keen observer and commentator of politics.

    As an active participant, observer and commentator of politics, he was consistently critical of the participation of retired generals in politics. Their participation, he always argued, was mainly responsible for the poverty of Nigeria’s politics because their military mentality would not allow them to appreciate the need to question orders before obeying them.

    In this he was in the good company of politicians like Alhaji Balarabe Musa, the radical one time governor of Kaduna State. There was a difference between the two, however; whereas Shinkafi argued that retired generals should voluntarily steer clear of politics, Musa was always for banning them by law.

    Clearly, the irony was lost on Shinkafi that as a top securocrat he was closer to the military than to civilians. That did not stop him from being a widely respected and successful politician whose skills would have made him a great president.

    May Allah grant the Marafa aljanna firdaus.

  • An end to Erdogan’s hubris?

    An end to Erdogan’s hubris?

    Every cloud, they say, has its own silver lining. This may yet prove true of the June 28 massive attack on Turkey’s Atartuk’s International Airport in Istanbul, the nation’s commercial capital, by armed elements suspected to be ISIS members. In what was probably the worst such incident in the country in recent times, the attackers killed 41 passengers and injured over 200 before blowing themselves up in the police counter-attack.

    Since that attack, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s ostensibly ceremonial president but effectively its dictator, seems to be having a rethink of his apparent neo-Ottoman imperial ambitions, a hubris which has been the main cause of Turkey’s recent economic and political woes.

    In a dramatic gesture last Sunday during iftar dinner at the end of the day’s Ramadan fast, he announced the restoration of normal relations with Israel and Russia, two neighbours he had fallen out with, 10 years ago in the case of Israel and only this year in Russia’s case.

    That announcement seems to signal the beginning of the transformation of a bellicose Erdogan into a dovish one, at least on the international scene. If the domestic front witnesses a similar transformation, the terrible June 28 attack on Istanbul airport may yet prove the point of Turkey’s return to its prosperity of recent years.

    The regular reader of this column may have noted that I have written about Turkey on these pages thrice since May last year. The latest was when Erdogan came visiting us in March in the course of his four-nation tour of Africa, which started with Cote d’Ivoire through Ghana and ended with Guinea.

    My interest in Turkey, as I’ve pointed out, is simple; it exemplifies my belief that Islam, my faith and the faith of at least 80 per cent of that country’s 79 million people, is compatible with democracy and modernity. Besides, Turkey has established considerable presence in Nigeria’s sectors of education, medicine, religion, commerce and industry.

    Bar probably Mustapha Kemal, the soldier-statesman who founded modern Turkey in 1923 out of the ashes of an Ottoman Empire vanquished by the West in WWII, no Turkish politician has done as much as Erdogan to democratise, modernise and develop the country. The big difference between the two has been Erdogan’s drive to restore to public life core Islamic values and symbolisms, such as the wearing of hijab and beards and the ban on alcohol, which Kemal had banned in his apparently wishful thinking that that was the only way to be accepted by his beloved West.

    Erdogan owed much of his political success first, to his transformation of Istanbul, as its mayor between 1994 to 1998, from a bankrupt and decrepit city into a prosperous cosmopolitan metropole, and second, to the decade of economic stability he brought to his country as its prime minister between 2003 and 2014. During that decade, Turkey chalked up an average annual growth of 4.5 per cent and developed into a manufacturing and export powerhouse in Eurasia.

    Among his other great achievements was his neutralisation of the military as the country’s most powerful power block which constantly interfered with the country’s politics under the guise of being its conscience.

    And even as he reintroduced Islamic values and symbolisms into public life, he acknowledged the plurality of his country by negotiating for peace with the Kurdish minorities who had fought for their own independence for decades. As part of the negotiations, his government lifted the ban on Kurdish language in the broadcast media and political campaigns and restored the Kurdish names to cities and town that had been given Turkish names under Kemal.

    His government also introduced legal reforms that allowed properties worth at least a couple of billion dollars belonging to Christian and Jewish minorities that had been seized in the ‘30s to be returned to them.

    All this he was able to achieve with more than a little help from the Hizmet movement led by the Muslim cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who has lived in self-exile in the US for many years. For over a decade after the “mildly Islamist” Justice and Development Party (AKP) Erdogan co-founded in 2001 with Abdullah Gul, another foremost Turkish politician, first won elections in 2002, the Hizmet movement underpinned AKP’s efforts to keep the politicised military at bay and deepen democracy at home. It also helped to strengthen the country’s ties abroad, especially in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

    Sadly things began to fall apart between the two allies from 2013 when Erdogan started exhibiting streaks of authoritarianism induced probably by his great success. As prime minister, Erdogan responded to the first public protest that year against early signs of his authoritarianism by sending in the police and AKP thugs. The crackdown led to 22 deaths and hundreds injured.

    His intolerance got even worse when some of his ministers and close associates were arrested and he himself and some of his relations were incriminated in a $100 billion corruption scandal, which he apparently believed was orchestrated by members of the Hismet movement in the police, prosecution and judiciary.

    In 2014, he stepped down after three terms as prime minister and became the country’s first directly elected president. He was succeeded by Ahmet Davutoglu, along time loyal sidekick.

    As president, his constitutional role was ceremonial. It soon turned out, however, that he had a totally different design for the office; that design was to make it an executive presidency with him, of course, as the first imperial occupant.

    His first opportunity came during the June 2015 general elections. He took it with both hands when, in flagrant violation of his constitutional imperative to stay neutral, he vigorously campaigned for his AKP to win the two-thirds majority it needed to amend the constitution into an executive presidency. His campaign failed. Worse, his party even lost its majority for the first time since 2002, even though it remained the single biggest party in parliament.

    As president, he had the option of stitching up a coalition government or gambling for better luck next time by scheduling another quick election. Predictably, he chose the latter and fixed November for the E-Day. This time he succeeded but only up to a limit; AKP regained its majority but still not the two-thirds it required for amending the constitution.

    Since then the man seems to have become more and more irascible and dictatorial. At home he has jailed opponents, reversed himself on his peace negotiations with the Kurds and cracked down hard on the media especially. Abroad he has shot down a Russian fighter jet and initially sided with the ISIS in its complicated bloody-minded attempt to curve out a caliphate out of Syria and Iraq. His change of sides in allowing the Americans the use of their airbase in Turkey to bombard ISIS troops may have been responsible for the devastating June 28 attack on the Istanbul airport allegedly by ISIS.

    Among the biggest victims of his crackdown at home has been the Hismet movement. Among other things he has purged the police and the judiciary of suspected members of the movement and seized its businesses and media, notably Zaman, the biggest newspaper in the country. Indeed, he has since declared the movement a terrorist organisation and has spared no effort to have its leader deported back to Turkey to face a charge of leading a “criminal” organisation.

    For Erdogan it seems loyalty is absolutely indivisible. Last May his loyal Prime Minister, Davotoglu, stepped aside, apparently pushed out because of his half-hearted support for the amendment of the constitution. A few weeks later he was replaced by the Transport Minister, Binali Yildrim, who promptly announced his unqualified support for the amendment; evidently the president couldn’t have picked a more loyal yes-man.

    This was the state of play whenAtaturk airport was attacked a few days ago. Erdogan’s response seems to have been a mellowing down of his bellicosity, at least against his perceived enemies abroad. Thus his rapprochement with Israel and Russia.

    “We will,” he said in an Eid-el-Fitri message on Monday,”make it through this process of global transformation and end up much stronger. We are improving our relations with Israel and Russia … We are mending the strained relations again and overcoming crises triggered by the Syrian issue, terror and artificial tensions.”

    One can only hope that the same June 28 bombing will touch his heart and trigger a change in his mind about his imperial ambition which has brought so much misery in recent years to a country he has laboured more than virtually any Turkish politician, dead or alive, to democratise, modernise and develop.

    Swallowing his hubris can, of course, only be the beginning of his country’s return to its recent peace and prosperity.Without it, however, things can only get worse.

  • A two-million-barrels-of-oil-a-day question

    A two-million-barrels-of-oil-a-day question

    I am not a conspiracy theory buff, but the more I think about the recent return of militancy in the Delta region with so much vengeance, the more I wonder if there isn’t something to the theory of a grand plan somewhere to dismember Nigeria as Africa’s most populous country and its biggest economy.

    The regular reader of this column may recall that about five and a half years ago, on December 11, 2011 to be precise, I expressed concern on these pages about what I said was the dangerous way President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration was playing politics with the Boko Haram insurgency, instead of sincerely trying to defeat it.

    I pointed out how on more than one occasion some well-known Christian leaders in the corridors of power secured the release of Muhammad Yusuf, the founder of the sect, from detention. I also pointed out the incongruity of President Goodluck Jonathan appointing a sister-in-law of Alhaji Modu Sherif as a minister, very much against strong opposition from the Borno State chapter of his own ruling party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). This was at a time the two-time senator, governor and chieftain of the leading opposition All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) was being fingered as the principal financier of the sect, at least in its early stage.

    These and other reasons led to popular speculations that the President and some of his confederates were complicit, if not willing players, in a grand conspiracy to dismember the country if they cannot remain in power.

    Among the propounders of this theory was one, Gordon Duff, a senior editor at Veterans Today and a self-proclaimed security expert on Nigeria with “close personal friends at the highest levels of government.” In an article in the magazine’s edition of November 14, 2011, he claimed Nigeria was being targeted for destruction by America because it was generally proving insufficiently pliant to Western designs on Africa’s natural resources, oil especially.

    “Nigeria,” he said, “is Africa, the most populace country, the most oil and gas wealth, the greatest economic potential, the biggest potential market. Thus, Nigeria is a target.”

    Christian Nigeria, he claimed, “is being set up, not just to fight a ‘terror group’ in the North, but to take on all of Islamic Africa, to draw them into a war that will bring more players, America, for one, into another endless cesspool.”

    It was, he said, a reflection of government’s unseriousness about its war against Boko Haram that it was paying some so-called security experts “for Rolls Royce but (getting) a VW Beatle instead!!”

    It is easy to dismiss Duff’s theory as fanciful. But as I said in my column in question, anyone inclined to do so should first consider three things at least.

    First, was an article in the New Nigerian of January 20, 2003 by its first expatriate managing director, Mr. Charles Sharp, titled “The story that got away.” I have had occasions to refer to that article  on these pages, but it bears repeating as a bit of history with lessons for us as a nation.

    In that article, Sharp revealed how the fabrication of news by the American CIA station chief in Kaduna in the 60s to the effect that the Igbo were killing the Hausa in Eastern Nigeria during the tense period that followed the Northern counter-coup of 1967 in reply to the Igbo coup of 1966, fueled riots against the Igbo in the North, which eventually led to our civil war. Sharp said he got to know the news was a CIA fabrication for sure because its author, John Thorpe, with whom he had been acquainted in his days at the New Nigerian, told him so. Sharp, who was British, had gone on a business trip to America as publisher in 1978 and had taken time off to his visit friend, then in retirement in Florida.

    “The man who created and used his skill and professional expertise to spread the rumour,” Sharp said, “told me so. ‘It was fiction, put out by us, nothing more.’”

    Sharp said to prove how accomplished his friend was at his job as a spook, he played back a tape for him in which he heard his own voice clearly speaking on the telephone to the late Alhaji Babatunde Jose, then executive chairman of Daily Times, on how he (Jose) intended to respond to the orders he had received from the military authorities in Lagos, then the nation’s capital, that his newspaper should not publish stories about the Igbo massacre out of fear that it could escalate tension. Jose had told him he had received the same orders as a result of which, he said, he had had to pulp 50,000 copies of the Sunday Times which had carried the “offending” story. Part of his job, Sharp said Thorne told him, was to bug the telephones of important figures in the country.

    Second, there was this piece titled “Is Nigeria the Next Iraq?” in the February 2007 edition of Vanity Fair, the glossy American lifestyle magazine, in which its contributing editor, Sebastian Junger, revealed how a group of “high ranking” American government officials met in the ballroom of the five-star Four Seasons Hotel in Washington DC, on October 23, 2003, to respond to a simulated crisis in oil supply to the global market from Africa.

    The gathering was presented with a scenario in which Boko Haram had infiltrated the Niger Delta with intent to disrupt Nigeria’s oil supply and the Nigerian military had failed to stop the sect. The group’s response was predictable; find ways to send in the boys to secure the Delta region even if it meant carving it out of Nigeria.

    Third, consider a 28-page bi-partisan report by the US Congress committee on Homeland Security and Counter-terrorism, which received wide publicity in our newspapers in December 2011. The report fingered Boko Haram as a potential danger to America’s access to the country’s oil and claimed that its members had sneaked into the Delta.  It noted that whereas the region’s militias had been “hesitant to inflict truly crippling damage against these facilities because they have some economic stake in them, Boko Haram, which is believed to have no financial interest in the plants, has no such reservations.”

    What is obvious from all this is that America, and by extension, the West, considers Nigeria’s oil of strategic interest and will do anything to secure it. The recent resurgence of homegrown militancy in the oil-producing region, however, shows the Americans grossly miscalculated in their assessment of the source of the threat to the continued free flow of the commodity. Instead of Boko Haram the Niger Delta militants in new guises, but notably as Niger Delta Avengers, have since turned out to be the problem. For, if during the tenure of their own Jonathan they were hesitant to seriously disrupt oil production mostly because they were too busy stealing it, it is now obvious that they no longer have any reservations.

    And what has removed those reservations is not only the defeat of their son at the polls over a year ago, something they never thought could happen and which, in any case, they did everything in and out of the books to avoid. Even more important than their son’s defeat it is apparent that they are greatly angered by the ongoing investigations and prosecutions of some of his confederates for their incredible alleged grand larceny under his watch in at least the last five years.

    One of the theories about this renewed militancy sees the targets of these investigations and prosecutions, notably former Minister of Petroleum, Mrs. Dizeani Alison-Madueke and former militant-in-chief, Government Ekpemupolo, aka Tompolo, and possibly even the former president himself, as its driving force. As conspiracy theories go, this one sounds as popular as it seems credible, considering the militants’ insistence that President Muhammadu Buhari must stop his war on corruption if he wants peace in the Delta.

    The two-million-barrels-of-oil-a-day questions are: would the President give in and if he doesn’t, as he is unlikely to, would the Americans and their Western allies feel obliged to carve out the Delta region just to secure the country’s oil?

  • Poor Aregbesola!

    Poor Aregbesola!

    Poor Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola! It seems the Osun State Governor can never put a foot right in the eyes of the powerful Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) whose control of the Nigerian media is hard, if not impossible, to match. His crime, as he himself aptly put it the other day in response to the gratuitous attacks he has been subjected to of recent, seems to be that he insists on being a good Muslim.

    Not too long ago he was called all manner of names for daring to declare the first day in the Islamic calendar a public holiday in his state whose Muslim population is probably the majority. For his critics it didn’t matter that the Solar calendar from which Christmas and New Year celebrations derived is not universal. It also did not seem to matter that the declaration deprived non-Muslims of nothing.

    Gratuitous as those attacks were, however, they were still understandable; as governor, the buck for any administrative order stopped on his table.

    The same cannot be said of the most recent attacks he has been subjected to over the ruling on June 3 by an Osun State High Court in Osogbo in favour allowing female Muslim students to wear Hijab in all public primary and secondary schools in the state.

    Justice Jide Falola’s ruling on Hijab was not the first. The first was nearly two years ago in October 2014 when Justice Modupe Onyeabor dismissed a similar suit filed in May 2013 against the Lagos State Government by two 12-year old girls under the aegis of the Muslim Students Society of Nigeria, Lagos State Area Unit, over the government’s ban on Hijab.

    In her judgment, Justice Onyeabor said the state’s prohibition of the wearing of Hijab over school uniforms within and outside the premises of public schools was not discriminatory. According to her, the ban did not violate sections 38 and 42 of the 1999 Constitution as claimed by the plaintiffs. They had contended that the ban violated the two sections which gave them the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

    Instead, the judge said, the right they sought violated Section 10 of the Constitution which said “The Government of the Federation or of a State shall not adopt any religion as State Religion.”

    In deference to the ruling by the judge the plaintiffs decided to respect the state’s dress code but appeal her judgment. The case has since pended before the Court of Appeal and is likely to go all the way to the Supreme Court.

    The contrast between the restrained reaction of the Muslim leadership in Lagos to its loss and the petulance of the Christian leadership at both the state and national level in the Osun case could hardly be sharper. And the extent to which the newspapers have indulged the Christian leadership in their petulance spoke volumes about their fairness, balance and objectivity.

    Since the June 3 ruling Aregbesola has been accused of trying to start a “war” – in the words of Vanguard of June 15 – over religious dressing in his state. Several newspapers have carried pictures of some students in their choir and Church attires to their schools when they reopened on June 14 following the “June 12” public holidays.

    The prophesy of this fabricated “war” may yet be fulfilled if it all depended on the CAN leadership – and the newspapers.

    As the chairman of the state’s chapter of CAN, Elisha Ogundiya, said in a statement on the court ruling, “Christian students in all public schools founded by Christians with the toil and sweat of our forefathers in the faith (will) have no choice but to start wearing garments and vestments as part of their school uniform for the propagation of our faith, given that Justice Saka Oyedije Falola declared the right of female Muslim students to do same, as what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander as well.”

    Reverend Musa Asake, CAN’s General Secretary, was even more unequivocal in blaming the governor for creating what he called a “religious crisis” between Muslims and Christians in the state.

    “Although they are talking about court judgment,” Asake said, “what I can say is that Aregbesola is responsible for whatever is happening in Osun State. We at the national level are in total support of the decision by the Osun State chapter of CAN that Christian pupils should attend classes in choir gowns, Girls Guide and Boys Scout apparels, including white garments, depending on whatever attire appeals to any Christian parent.”

    As Christian leaders, the partisan statements of Ogundiya and Asake are understandable, albeit untenable. Not so, the editorial of the Nigerian Pilot of June 17, which was both untenable and impossible to understand.  The governor, the newspaper said, “should not in his usual demeanour sound as one who shares in ignorance and pretense over a matter that is volatile like the looming religious crisis…It is wrong timing for the world to see him as a religious fundamentalist nursing a hidden agenda TO ISLAMIZE OSUN STATE.” (Emphasis mine).

    Any newspaper worth the name should know there is separation of powers between the Judiciary and the Executive arms of government. It should also know that recognising a manifestation of any religion is not the same as adopting it as state religion.

    This is what makes it truly baffling that the Osun State governor should be held, not just vicariously, but directly responsible for the ruling of a court. But then, as the man himself said, it seems his crime is that he insists on being a good Muslim.

    “Is it,” to use his own words, “a crime that I am a Muslim, is it because I struggle to be a good Muslim that everything I do is being misunderstood? I think I don’t deserve all these lies against me.”

    The man has challenged any one with evidence that he ordered the wearing of Hijab to bring it. Not a single one of those calling him names has done so. And it’s unlikely that they ever will.

    Aregbesola has done all he can to be a good Muslim, which means being fair to all religious persuasions in the state. Contrary to what his critics say, our Constitution never said Nigeria is a secular state. My Advance English Dictionary defines secular as “of or relating to the doctrine that rejects religion and religious considerations.” The very opening words of our Constitution say we are “…a Sovereign Nation under God.” This is clearly no rejection of religion.

    Even Section 10 of the Constitution that the Lagos State High Court Judge cited as her basis of banning Hijab in the state did not reject religion. It only says none should be adopted by the State.

    The section may look like a contradiction of Section 38 which gives us the freedom of religion and to manifest it. But it seems contradictory only if we assume recognising any manifestation of a religion amounts to adopting it. This assumption is clearly a fallacy. Otherwise it would mean, for example, the fact that we celebrate Christmas means the country has adopted Christianity as the State religion.

    Just like Christmas is a manifestation of Christianity so is Hijab a manifestation of Islam, albeit even more so, because an adult woman is considered naked without it. It is indeed an irony that the Christian leadership should object to a dress considered ideal for Christian women who dedicate themselves to serving God, as reverend sisters do.

    Section 38 of our Constitution says we are all entitled to our faiths and to the freedom to “manifest and propagate it…in worship, teaching, practice and observance.”

    I find it impossible to understand how my daughters or my wife wearing Hijab in public violates the right of a non-Muslim to manifest his or her own faith. I find it even more impossible to understand how doing so amounts to the country adopting Islam as State Religion.

    In any case if anyone felt threatened by female Muslim students wearing Hijab I would have thought the proper thing to do was to go to court and seek redress rather than defy a lawful order issued by a lawful authority.

    Aregbesola was not the one who said female students can wear Hijab to school as part of their uniform. It was the courts that did. Those who disagree should go there and test their presumptions of the rights of their children to dress to public schools as they deem fit instead of trying to make a straw man out of Aregbesola, the easier to destroy him.

     

  • Again, a wake-up call for tolerance

    Again, a wake-up call for tolerance

    In the last two and a half weeks at least three well publicised incident of people taking laws into their hands have occurred which can only worsen fears that Nigeria is fast degenerating into a land of jungle justice. There is a fourth incident which may yet prove a false flag but nonetheless gives cause for concern about increasing public disrespect for law and order.

    The first incident occurred on May 29 during which one, Mr. Methodus Emmanuel, a 24-year-old trader based in Pandogari, Niger State, was attacked and killed by a mob on an allegation that he posted a blasphemous statement about Prophet Muhammad on the social media. Three other persons, including a staff of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, NSCDC, were reported to have also lost their lives in the incidence.

    The following day some suspected hoodlums burnt a church, a house and a shop and looted several more. They also blocked the Lagos-Kaduna highway that passes through the town. It took a combined force of the nearby army unit, the police and civil defence corps to restore order in the town and clear the highway.

    The second incident occurred in Kano when one, Madam Bridget Patience Agbahime, a 74-year-old shop owner, was killed by a mob at Kofar Wambai market in Kano on June 3 for aledged blasphemy. Her husband, a pastor, who was with her, barely escaped her sad fate when some good Samaritans rescued him from the same mob.

    Initial reports said she was beheaded. Later her husband confirmed this was not true. But that couldn’t have made her murder less despicable, especially when her only offence turned out to have been that she objected to some people performing ablution in front of her shop, an objection she was perfectly entitled to.

    The third incident occurred in Zaria last Tuesday, June 7, when some thugs attacked some members of the Shi’ite sect distributing food to people for iftar, the breaking of the Ramadan fast, in Gyellesu, its headquarters, something which had become its tradition.

    In spite of the huge casualties and loss of landed property it suffered in December last year from its ill-advised confrontation with the army, the sect began its distribution of food penultimte Monday which was the start of Ramadan. Nothing untoward happened on that day. The following day, however, some people, apparently unhappy that its recent misfortune, which has included the detention of its leader, Sheikh Ibrahim Zak-Zaky, had not detered it from its annual iftar programme, decided to disrupt it.

    The sect has since accused the Kaduna State government of complicity in the disruption. The accusation may be wrong but the fact that the authorities did not react to the disruption with as much alacrity as they did to the fourth incident makes the Shi’ite’s accusation understandable. In any case, there has never been any love lost between the two.

    The fourth incident, which may yet prove a false flag, was the story that some Muslims in Kakuri, Kaduna South Local Government, attacked one, Francis Emmanuel, on June 7 because he did not observe the compulsory daylight abstinence from food and drink during the month of Ramadan we are in.

    The incident was worrisome enough as a threat to peace in the sectarian-violence prone state to have prompted the governor, Malam Nasiru el-Rufa’i, to lead his deputy, Architect Barnabas Bala, and some senior government officials, to go to St. Gerald Hospital, Kakuri, where Emmanuel had been taken to for treatment, for a sympathize visit.

    An apparently angry el-Rufa’i warned members of the public that his “government will not allow anyone to get away with any crime using his or her faith as an excuse. There is no compulsion in religion.”

    An unsigned press statement issued yesterday by a Kakuri Community Development Association making the rounds on the social media but attributed to one, Ahmed Rabi’u, Garkuwan Kakuri, has claimed that Emmanuel was not a victim of religious bigotry. He was, the statement said, instead a victim of quarrel between himself and his friends that had nothing to do with religion.

    “It is unfortunate,” the statement said, “that some people misguided the public on the real story as to what had happened.”

    The 578-word press statement belying the first version of the Emmanuel incident sounded credible. But credible or not, the incident underscored the need to do something fast about the season of madness which Nigeria seems to have descended into as people increasingly take laws into their hands.

    It may be sheer coincidence that all the four incidents of people taking laws into their hands since May 29 have involved only Muslims. But coincidence or not, they can only provide the enemies of Islam with further ammunition in their portrayal of it as a religion of violence and intolerance.

    As I wrote on two similar occasions in the past, these incident are as much an indictment of the ability of the authorities to enforce laws without fear or favour as they are of the capacity of the country’s Muslim leadership, secular and religious, and of Muslim parents, to teach their followers and wards tolerance and accommodation.

    In this respect, I am unable to resist the temptation of reproducing at some length what I wrote on both occasions, the first on March 1, 2006, following the bloody riots across Nigeria which were provoked by the publication of disrespective cartoons of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) by some Danish newspapers, and the second on April 4, 2007, following the shocking lynching of a teacher, Mrs. Oluwatoyin Olusesan, by her students in a Gombe State secondary school after they accused her of desecrating the Holy Qur’an.

    “There is,” as I said in the first article entitled ‘The cartoon riots and Muslim leadership,’ “no doubt that Muslims everywhere, including in Nigeria, are under siege and are out-gunned in almost every aspect of life – arms, the media, other professions, etc. Of all these areas, their underdog status in the media is arguably the most important because this is what allows the West which is the most militarized civilization in history – America alone spends more on arms than the top ten countries with the highest arms spending combined and is the only country to have gratuitously dropped the atom bomb – to portray Islam as a violent religion and Muslims as a violent people.

    “However, the answer to Western provocations and propaganda is not easy resort to violence. The answer is to live according to the traditions of Prophet Muhammad. It would seem to me as if the Muslim leadership in Nigeria has failed in its duty to spread the knowledge of the Prophet’s traditions to their Muslim flock.

    “This leadership is, of course, not the only one guilty of not propagating tolerance to its followers, but it cannot claim the moral high ground if it chooses not to be different.

    “Among the many virtues Prophet Muhammad taught and lived by was tolerance. According to one tradition, he once stopped his companions from harming an infidel who urinated inside a mosque. Another tradition has it that he once hosted a Christian delegation in the holy mosque in Medina and allowed them to even conduct their Sunday worship in the mosque.

    “When the Danish newspaper first published its offending cartoons and the local Muslim community could get neither the editors nor the authorities to assuage their feelings for over three months, the ambassadors of the Muslim countries to Denmark persuaded their countries to boycott Danish products and services. This peaceful method appeared to have worked wonders. Suddenly the editors found the voice to apologize, even if it was mealy-mouthed. Again the Danish prime minister who had no time for the ambassadors suddenly found he had all the time in the world to see them.

    “By then riots had broken out all over the globe. These riots then overshadowed the effectiveness of the economic boycott of the Danes by Muslims providing, as they did, the Western Media with the excuse they needed to reproduce the offending cartoons and provoke even more riots.

    “The lesson in all this for the Muslims leadership in Nigeria is obvious: it must wake up to its responsibility of teaching its followers tolerance at the same time that it educates them on the necessity of defending Islamic values. The secret lies in hikima (wisdom) and not in violence.”

    In the second article entitled ‘Olusesan’s murder as a failure of Muslim leadership’ I said “The inexcusable murder of the poor teacher by the adolescent secondary school kids in Gandu is one more wake-up call for the Muslim leadership and Muslim parents, especially in the predominantly Muslim North, to seriously take up their responsibility for the proper upbringing of their children and wards. For as Chapter 103 Verses two and three of the Qur’an say, ‘Most surely man is in loss; except those who believe and do good, and enjoin on each other truth, and enjoin on each other patience.’

    “The line between patience – or tolerance, if you will – and docility may at times be a thin one but certainly those of us who are Muslims have for a long time allowed ourselves to be too easily provoked into taking laws into our hands by those who are enemies of our religion.”

    As we observe this year’s Holy month of Ramadan we as Muslims must see the terrible potential consequences of people taking laws into their hands as a wake-up call to learn to live in accordance with the values of tolerance and accommodation that Prophet Muhammad taught us and lived by.

  • Atiku Abubakar’s formula for a ‘true federation’

    Atiku Abubakar’s formula for a ‘true federation’

    The long running strident calls for “restructuring” the country, aka “true federalism,” received a big boost last week from two sources, one predictable and the other perhaps inadvertent.

    The inadvertent one was President Muhammadu Buhari’s statement in his media dialogue last month that as far as he was concerned the report of the 2014 National Conference organised by his predecessor, President Goodluck Jonathan, is only good for the archives. He said this in response to a question about what he thought of renewed calls for the implementation of the report’s recommendations.To begin with, he said, he’d been against convening the conference because its motive was suspect and its timing wrong. Nothing, he said, has happened since then to make him change his mind.

    The regular reader of this column will not be surprised that I couldn’t agree more with the president. For four years President Jonathan rejected all calls for the conference. That he saw the light only when last year’s elections were around the corner and his prospects of re-election didn’t look so bright was bound to raise suspicions that the man was merely engaged in diverting attention from his record of poor performance. To make matters worse, there was gross imbalance in the religious and geo-political composition of the conference which he himself acknowledged and publicly promised to rectify. He never did.

    Worst of all, he himself in effect consigned the report to the dustbin when he rejected calls to implement even those recommendations that did not require any constitutional amendments, thus confirming suspicions about his motive in convening the conference.

    However, from the furore that Buhari’s dismissal of the conference report has generated, it is obvious that at least its ardent proponents consider it the only cure for all of Nigeria’s ills, not least of all the country’s presumed badly structured federalism.

    Penultimate Tuesday, former Vice-President, Atiku Abubakar added his weighty voice to those of proponents of “true federalism.”He was speaking as chairman at the occasion of the public presentation of the book, “We Are All Biafrans” by Chido Onumah. As he said, he had been a long-time advocate of restructuring Nigeria.

    “The call for restructuring,” he said at the beginning of his remarks,”is even more relevant today in light of the governance and economic challenges facing us.  And the rising tide of agitations, some militant and violent, require a reset in our relationships as a united nation.”

    Although he believed Nigeria “must remain a united country”, he said that unity must not be taken for granted lest we risk jeopardising it. He  then offered a six-point prescription for a healthy Nigerian federation.

    First, he said, Nigeria needs “a smaller, leaner federal government with reduced responsibilities.” The country, he said, should also be one “in which more resources and powers are devolved to states and local governments than is presently the case.”Few people would disagree with this. On the contrary most would probably say that the country needs a smaller, leaner government not only at the federal levelbut at all levels.

    As part of his first cure the former vice-president also said “a true federal system will allow the federating states to keep their resources while the federal government retains the power of taxation and regulatory authority over standards.” The problem here is that we lost our innocence as a “true federation” fifty years ago in 1966 when our first military head of state, Major-General JTU Aguiyi Ironsi, enacted the ill-advised and ill-fated Unification Decree.

    Its abrogation and subsequent replacement by the state creation decree in 1967 by the second military head of state, General Yakubu Gowon, was supposed to remove fears of domination that were created by the Unification Decree. It never did, as has been obvious from the fact that there has been no end to demands for even more states, demands that have been louder than the contradictory calls for collapsing the existing 36 states into six geo-political zones.

    It is because the centre created the current states instead of prior regions ceding powers to the centre as in a “true federation” that Vice-President Abubakar’s view that the federating states should keep all their resources is somewhat problematic. It is like saying Adam and Eve should revert to their innocent state after they have eaten the apple.

    At any rate, even when we had a true federation between Independence in 1960 and the first military intervention in 1966, revenue allocation was never based on 100% derivation. Events since then would seem to suggest the wisest way out is a formula that balances the equity of emphasis on derivation with the need for balanced economic growth in a nation of uneven natural endowment.

    Former Vice-President Abubakar’s second cure is that the component states and localities should be allowed to”determine their development priorities and wage structures.” Nothing in our constitution stops the states from doing so, except the dependence complex from our long military rule which our politicians seem to suffer from. By now we should all know states are coordinates, not subordinates, of the central government.

    Similarly, nothing in our constitution stops our governments at all levels from pursuing the former vice-president’s third, fourth and fifth cures, namely, “a tax-centred revenue base”, “enhanced (and) diversified economic activities and productivity to enlarge tax base”, and putting an end to the indigene/settler dichotomy. The only obstacles to pursuing all these worthy objectives seem to be our over-dependence on unworked for oil wealth and a mentality encouraged by our politicians of believing the other man’s gain is necessarily your loss.

    As for the vice-president’s sixth cure, it is true that state police to augment the federal police can improve security, including fighting terrorism, in the country. As he said, “posting a police officer from Ganye to Eket may help promote culture sharing and integration, but it does little to prevent or fight crime” since “crime is better fought by those who know the terrain and speak the local language.”

    But while in a “true federation” states should have their own police, the problem, one would never tire of pointing out, is that ours is not a true federation. Besides, we seem to have conveniently forgotten that it was the abuse of local police in the old regions which led to the clamour for replacing them with the Nigerian Police. Anyone who thinks that that fear is no more should imagine a state police in the hands of a Governor Fayose with his well-known penchant for arbitrary use of power.

    All in all, except for his suggestion of a state police and a small and lean government, former vice-president Abubakar’s formula for a “true federation” is not as radical as it sounds at first hearing. And because of that it is not likely to satisfy its ardent advocates most of who think the only true federation is one made of a country’s ethnic groups as its units, never mind the fact that nothing could be more reactionary than such a federation.

    A country’s greatness is a reflection of the strength of ties its leaders build across languages, cultures and faiths. As such, a country governed by ethnic and religious champions such as we have will never be great because, by definition and as we have seen in practice, such champions are incapable of seeing beyond the confines of their ethnicity and religion.

    I have said it before and would do so again and again: Nigeria’s main problem is not its structure with all its flaws. Its main problem is corrupt and decadent leadership. This is the main lesson of our journey from the federalism of the First Republic through the unitary state of the military era to the present statism and recent calls to revert back to a modified version of our old regionalism.

  • Buhari’s first year in office

    Buhari’s first year in office

    Last week for the second time within a month or so I received a rather bellicose article my friend Bitrus Gwada, Esq.occasionally circulates among his online network of friends.  This time the article was critical not only of Malam Nasiru el-Rufa’i, Kaduna State’s Executive Governor, but of President Muhammadu Buhari.

    The reader may recall that the first piece by Southern Kaduna in Diaspora (SOKAD), USA & Canada, had strongly objected to the governor’s decision to license religious preaching in his state. This time the article by one, John Danfulani, PhD, was his assessment of the first year of the administrations of el-Rufa’i and Buhari. It would be hard, if not impossible, to find a more unflattering assessment of both.

    “During PMB’s one year in office,” the Doctor of Philosophy, among other things, said of Buhari’s administration,”the Naira value nosedived, fuel subsidy was removed, power generation drastically dropped, GDP went to its lowest ebb in 25 years, herdsmen turned mindless killers, the budget was padded, and Nigeria was branded a fantastically corrupt nation.”

    To which most Nigerians, I suspect, would probably say yes. The problem, however, is that the assessment was a grossly distorted version of reality because, first, it conveniently avoided any reference to the mind-boggling corruption of previous administrations that led to all the ills he listed and, second, he refused to acknowledge that Buhari achieved anything at all during the year.

    Worse than turning a blind eye on the incredible venality of the previous administrations as the fundamental cause of the ills he accused Buhari of, Danfulani seemed to accuse the man himself of personally padding the current budget when everyone knew it was indeed his rejection of the padding that was partly responsible to its delay. Similarly Danfulani, who, as a PhD should know better, seemed to have swallowed the ethnic profiling of Fulani herdsmen hook, line and sinker. He also seemed to accuse Buhari of being personally responsible for the alleged transmogrification of his fellow Fulani from the peaceful neighbours of yesterday into the “mindless killers” of today.

    And the way he seemed to pin the recent description of Nigeria by the British Prime Minister, Mr. David Cameron, as “fantastically corrupt” on Buhari, you would never imagine the prime minister merely echoed the shock the president had expressed at the level of corruption in the country he discovered when he took over power a year ago.

    In his own somewhat sympathetic review of Buhari’s first year in office entitled “Pity the lion with clipped claws,” Mahmud Jega, Trust’s deputy editor-in-chief and Monday back page columnist, started with a quote from Alhaji Mamman Shata’s praise song for Mustafa Danraka in which the late Hausa songster said an orphaned lion cub is not to be pitied because it canalways be trusted to fend for itself.  Writing in his inimitable colloquialism, Buhari, Jega said, may be more than an orphaned lion cub but he should still be pitied because “he is a lion whose sharp claws and dagger-like canine teeth have been serially clipped by the 1999 Constitution.”

    In other words Buhari, the civilian president of today has not been free to do as he wished as did Buhari, the iron-fisted soldier head of state of the early eighties. For those like Danfulani who obviously do not like Buhari, if not outrightly loath him for what they think he symbolises, Jega’s review is mere rationalisation for what even the president’s most ardent supporters would agree was generally a lackluster first year in office.

    Even then no fair-minded person would disagree that, given the terrible legacy the president inherited and the constitutional constraints he faces – as he should – it was a small miracle he was able to achieve anything at all. If nothing else, his bringing an end to the long drawn Boko Haram insurrection was no mean achievement at a time when oil revenue, as the main source of public revenue, has been at its lowest in recent decades, and when troop morale had sunk to an all time low.

    And intangible as it may seem, the ongoing exposure beyond past mere conjectures of the impunity with which grand corruption took place in our country is bound to serve as a strong check against the propensity of public officials towards kleptomania. Nothing will discourage this propensity like the determination of the Buhari administration to implement its decision on Treasury Single Account (TSA), gauging from recent revelations about how incredible amounts of public revenue were never paid into the public treasury to start with. Little wonder then that almost every ministry, department and agency of government have made one case or the other for exemption from the decision.

    There may be some validity to Jega’s argument that Buhari is to be pitied for coming back to power at the wrong time just like he did the first time. However, within the constraints of the terrible legacy he inherited and his constitutional limitations there was a lot he could have done which he didn’t, at least in good time. He didn’t, for example, have to take as long as he did to appoint his cabinet.

    Another thing he was free to have confronted in spite of his constraints was the issue of energy which is central to his commitment to grow and diversify the Nigerian economy.

    As we all know, Nigeria had spent billions of dollars for power generationsince 1999, all to no avail. Part of the problem is that more of the allocations have been stolen or misapplied than invested wisely and efficiently. Part of the problem, however, is also that the country has focused on only two sources of power generation, namely, hydro with three plants at Kaiji, Jebba, and Shiroro, and, even more so, on gas with plants at Afam, Ajaokuta, Delta, Egbin, Geregu, Okpai, Omoku,Olorunsogo, Omotosho, Olorunsogo and Sapele.

    The neglect of a third source, namely, solar, has been inexplicable, especially since it is renewable and clean.

    As the chairman by law of National Agency for Science Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI) established in 1992, the president is in a position to free the agency, whose mandate includes making the country self-sufficient in energy, from the red tape of its presumed parent ministry of Science and Technology.

    The Chinese are said to have offered financial support to NASENI for the manufacture of solar cells locally from our abundant supply of silicon as the main raw material, and for the manufacture of transformers and a high voltage testing facility. The little time and attention the president has given NASENI as its chairman has served as a big obstacle to the proper functioning of the agency. It has also led to its inability to avail itself of the Chinese offer in question and such similar ones from abroad.

    It would, of course, be quite a while before solar energy can contribute as much to the country’s energy requirement as hydro and gas sources do. However, because it is the ultimate renewable agency, the sooner the president gave it the attention it deserved the better the prospect of the country’s energy supply.

    One year has now come and gone since Buhari’s historic return to power. As he himself acknowledged in his speech celebrating the occasion, he has a lot more to do than he already has, if he is to fulfill his promise of changing the country for good. With only three more years to go before the next general election the man, I am sure, knows more than anyone else that time has now become of essence.

     

  • ‘True federalism’ and all that…

    ‘True federalism’ and all that…

    Last week, legal luminary and founder of Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti (ABUAD), Aare Afe Babalola (SAN), made a case for confederation as a solution to Nigeria’s political and socio-economic problems. He made the case at the maiden edition of Diplomatic Dialougue, a programme organised by the university’s Department of International Relations and Diplomacy.

    He had, he said, participated in three constitutional conferences in Nigeria and each time he came away convinced that, given its ethnic and religious composition, what the country needed was “a confederation or a loose federation, where each region will be allowed to grow at its own pace and contribute to the centre.”

    This, he said, “has been the practice in the USA, Australia and Canada” whereas what we’ve had in Nigeria since the first military coup ended the First Republic and its regional arrangement in 1966, “is a central government where only one person determines what happens elsewhere.”

    Nigeria, he concluded, now has six geo-political zones. They should, he said be “allowed to function as component parts and Nigeria will be good for it.” If the country had continued with its old regionalism, he argued, it would have developed even better than Malaysia, whose ambassador in Nigeria, Mr. Lim Juay Jin, was the guest speaker on the occasion. Malaysia, which started out poorer than Nigeria in the 60s, is today a middle income country.

    Babalola’s advocacy of confederation is little, if at all, different from Dr. Arthur Nwankwo’s solution to Nigeria’s problems which, as I argued last week, was no solution at all in spite of the fact that structure, as I said, does matter in finding solutions to problems.

    Perhaps the difference between Babalola and Nwankwo is that the high chief is not motivated by malice against any section of the country. But malice or no, the chief’s advocacy is popular among sections of the country that consider themselves “progressive.”

    With due respect to the chief, there are at least three things wrong with his advocacy. First, it is not true, as he said, that the USA, Australia and Canada practise “loose federalism” or confederation. What they practise is federalism in which the component parts are autonomous but still defer to a strong centre whenever the two levels differ. The USA, which is the role model for the others, did start out as a confederation but it replaced it with the genuine article centuries ago after its experiment with the loose version collapsed.

    Second, all three became federations by the coming together of its hitherto separate components. By contrast, our own genuine First Republic federation increased by division beginning with the first state creation on May 27, 1967 by our second military Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon.

    Third, and related to the second, is historical revisionism, virtually all advocates of “true federalism,” which is the euphemism for confederation, are guilty of. The fact is that most of those asking us to return to the regionalism of the First Republic seem to have forgotten that they were either staunch advocates of breaking up the original three regions which became four in 1963 – so long, of course, as it was not their own region – or of the unification decree by our first military head of state, Maj-Gen. JTU Aguiyi-Ironsi, which abolished the regions.

    Gen. Gowon’s creation of 12 states in May 1967 has its root in Decree 8, 1967 which he promulgated in March as his answer to demands by Lt-Col Odumegwu Ojukwu for the implementation of the Aburi Accord, named after the venue in Ghana of the meeting held on January 4 and 5, 1967, at the initiative of the country’s military authorities to stem the drift towards the country’s disintegration which began with the first coup in January 1966.

    As a result of that decree, the title of the military head of state changed from Supreme Commander to Commander-in-Chief and his word seized to be law without the support of the regional governors on subjects like commerce, industry, transport, armed forces, police and higher education. In addition, military area commands were to be created as part of the accord.

    Apparently as military governor of the most aggrieved Eastern Region at the time,Lt-Col. Ojukwu did not think these and other concessions were good enough. Not even when the secretary of his government, Mr. N. U. Akpan said the said decree in his view”faithfully implemented the Aburi decisions,” as Professor Jonas Elaigwu quoted in his 2009 “Gowon: A Scholarly Biography of a Soldier-Statesman.”

    However, whereas Ojukwu did not accept Decree 8 ‘67 as good enough, virtually all the senior technocrats who were at theAburi talks condemned it as giving too much away against Nigeria’s interests. As the story is told by Mr. Eric Teniola, a Punch veteran, in his recent tribute to the late departed Oba of Benin, Omo N’oba N’Edo Uku Akpolokpolo Erediauwa (CFR), upon the return of the Nigerian team from Aburi, the Oba, then Prince Akenzua and Permanent Under –Secretary (Cabinet Office), discussed the accord with Gowon and told him that he and his colleagues objected to it as turning Nigeria into a confederation. These colleagues included Messrs. Yusuf Gobir, Phillip Asiodu, Eme Ebong, Allison Ayida and B. N. Okagbue.

    Anyone interested in the resolution of the country’s political differences should read Teniola’s tribute to the Oba entitled “The memo of Akenzua on Aburi” published by, among other newspapers, Vanguard (May 3), The Guardian (May 4) and The Nation (May 5). For, it provided a useful historical insight into how Aburi came to be rejected by the Federal authorities and how eventually it lead to the first creation of states in the country.

    According to Teniola, following the discussion between Gowon and Akenzua, the head of state asked him to write a memo on a way out of the Aburi predicament. That memo prompted Gowon to summon a meeting of secretaries of the military governments and other senior officials in Benin between February 16 and 18, 1967, chaired by Mr.H. A. Ejueyitchie, the secretary to the Federal Military Government.

    The outcome of that meeting was the contentious Decree 8 ‘67 which the technocrats believed was a compromise between too much they said Gowon had given away at Aburi and the total implementation of accord which Ojukwu insisted he stood on.

    In rejecting the decree, Ojukwu stood alone among his colleagues. And his rejection, along with other decisions he had taken like his seizure of some national assets in his region, led to the conclusion among the federal authorities that the man had made up his mind to crave his region into a sovereign nation.

    Gowon’s state creation was partly his preemptive strike aimed at isolating Ojukwu. Contrary to the revisionism we have been subjected to all these decades, that move was widely acclaimed as wise. For, up until then giving minorities in each region their sub-regions was widely considered a solution to their agitations that had started even before Independence in 1960.

    The North, in particular, was widely regarded as too big and too monolithic, vis-à-vis the other regions, for the country’s peace and stability. Its split into six states as against that of the West into two (Lagos and the rest of the West) and that of the East into Cross-River, Rivers and the rest of the East, leaving only Mid-West intact, was accepted as the answer to the long drawn agitation by minorities for their own sub-regions.

    Everything has unintended consequences. Gowon’s 1967 creation of 12 states has led eventually to Nigeria becoming a federation of 36 states where the centre has been the one ceding power to its constituents rather than the other way round. This had led to the perception that the centre has become too powerful for the good of the country with its many nationalities and religions.This, in turn, has led to a widespread obsession with structure when we should be more concerned about the character of those we entrust with power.

    Structures and systems, of course, do matter, as I’ve said last week on these pages. However, that the characters of leaders matter more should be obvious from the fact that the same long running dictatorships that produced prosperity in Malaysia and even more prosperity in neighbouring Singapore, produced only unimaginable poverty in many an African country. The difference was that one set of leaders was corrupt while the other possessed personal integrity.

    Certainly a structure of autonomous regions like the putative six we have presently looks healthier than 36 states whose overheads alone leave little for development. But regions created by fiat rather than through evolution are unlikely to endure. In any case, talking about collapsing our states into six regions when demands for even more states have hardly abated is more or less wishful thinking.

    Aare Babalola’s confederation has never worked anywhere. But even if Nigeria was to become the “true federalism” Nigeria’s self-styled “progressives’ talk so much about, it would take leaders with character to turn the country into Malaysia, never mind a United States.

    This should be the main lesson of recent events in the country since the end of Peoples Democratic Party’s 16-year misrule of this country in May last year.

  • Nwankwo’s wrong prescription

    Nwankwo’s wrong prescription

    As I said last week on this page, Dr. Arthur Nwankwo’s recent essay, “The National Grazing Reserve Bill And Islamisation Of Nigeria: Matters Arising” was a case of misdiagnosis, which was bound to lead to the wrong prescription. His principal allegation that President Muhammadu Buhari was on a mission to Islamise Nigeria through the enactment of a law that would establish grazing reserves throughout the country and that as a cattle-owning Fulani himself, he was also behind recent Fulani/farmers clashes in pursuit of the same goal was mere conjecture. It certainly stood logic on its head.

    It was mere conjecture because the President never presented any such bill before the National Assembly. True, there was a public hearing on the issue of herders/farmers violent clashes at the Senate by a joint committee on security and agriculture. This, however, was at the instance of the Senate itself against the background of the most recent clashes. In any case, if Nwankwo had any concrete evidence that it was all the President’s handiwork, he didn’t present it throughout his over 4000-word essay.

    That he stood logic on its head by his accusation should be obvious from the fact that until the man became President, it was an article of faith among President Goodluck Jonathan’s faithful, of course Nwankwo himself included, that Boko Haram was the northern elite’s battle tank for destabilising or even overthrowing Jonathan. Indeed for Nwankwo, it was enough evidence of Buhari’s complicity that Boko Haram once picked him to lead government’s negotiation with the sect for an end to their insurrection. “As a matter of fact, under the Goodluck Jonathan administration,” Nwankwo said,”Boko Haram specifically selected Muhammadu Buhari to lead its negotiations with the Government of Nigeria then.”

    For Nwankwo, it obviously made no difference that Buhari distanced himself from the sect or that an attempt, with all the hallmark of Boko Haram suicide bombing, was made on his life in broad daylight in Kaduna not long after he rejected their suggestion.

    Even more importantly, it seemed to make no difference to Nwankwo that it has since become abundantly clear that, regardless of its sponsors, Boko Haram would have been soundly defeated long ago if Jonathan’s military commanders, who no one can accuse of being Boko Haram fifth columnists, had not apparently stolen the resources for fighting the sect with so much impunity.

    Now that Buhari has become President and he has brought the sect to heel, the new theory is that Boko Haram has been transforming itself into Fulani herdsmen armed, some, including Nwankwo, believe, by the man himself! Personally I find it hard to understand the logic of why the President would want to destabilise his own administration. But then with people like Nwankwo, it is obvious that you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

    Having misdiagnosed Nigeria’s problem as one of a northern Muslim elite hell-bent on islamising Nigeria, he proceeds to prescribe a cure so nondescript that it’s as good as useless. The solution to Nigeria’s problem, he says, is not, as the late great Chinua Achebe once famously said, one of good leadership. “I am always amazed at arguments by even those one could describe as educated and enlightened suggesting that Nigeria’s problems can be solely located within the confines of good leadership.”

    Instead, Nwankwo says, Nigeria’s central problem is one of structure. “Structural imbalance,” he says,”is at the heart of the Nigerian problem.”

    And who else, according to him, are to blame but our former British colonial masters who banged and hammered “strange bed fellows” together into a country where one region alone was more than twice the size of the other regions combined?

    Nwankwo is, of course, not alone in believing Nigeria is a country of “strange bed-fellows.” Even wiser and more respected heads like the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, one of the country’s founding fathers, once said as much.

    However, as any serious study of the peoples of this country would show, we are no more stranger to ourselves than those of, say, Britain, America or India.  We may speak different languages, have different cultures and differ in our faiths, but then so also do almost all the countries of the world.

    And our history, as told by eminent historians like Professor Ade Ajayi, tells us that long before the British came to colonise us, we traded and fought amongst ourselves as empires and kingdoms – notably, Kwarrarafa, Borno, Nupe, Sokoto, Oyo, Benin, Ijaw, Ibibio, etc.,  – and as so-called stateless peoples like the Igbo, Tiv, Idoma, Beroms, etc., – that rose and fell along and around the four hydrological systems that served as their arteries, namely, Niger/Benue Rivers with their tributaries, Lake Chad, Cross River with its tributaries and the Atlantic.

    The difference between us and other nations like Britain, America and India, it seems, is essentially that they’ve had leaders determined to forge nations out of their disparate people, instead of stoking fears of others of different ethnicity, region and religion as their ladders to power.

    This fear-mongering is exactly what those who talk glibly about northern feudalism being the chief villain of Nigeria’s problems engage in, conveniently forgetting that there are also feudal systems in the South, some of them, like those of Benin and Ife, even more powerful than those in the North.

    In any case, the fact is that colonialism and its legacy have left our feudal systems, North or South, as relics of their pre-colonial times and replaced them with a political-economy which the modern day leadership, North and South, Muslim and Christian, have abused to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of the country. The fact is that no ethnic group, region or religion has a monopoly of virtues or vices both in their leadership and followership.

    In this respect, a discussion Mr. Femi Fani-Kayode, who is hard to beat for his anti-North and anti-Islam sentiments, said he had with his friend, Muktari Shagari, a former minister in ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo’s cabinet, on Fani-Kayode’s Facebook on May 2 and which he reproduced in his column in Sunday Telegraph of May 8, makes a most interesting and revealing reading.

    The conversation was about the herdsmen/farmers clashes, part of which went like this:-

    Femi: If the rubbish goes on, sooner or later, the South will rise up together with our brothers in the Middle-Belt and there will be a terrible reckoning.

    Muktari: If the division of Nigeria will bring peace, we wholeheartedly welcome the idea and the sooner the National Assembly begins deliberation, the better.

    Femi: We both know that the National Assembly will not do it because the northern legislators and those they represent are addicted to southern oil. We can do it without the National Assembly if we so wish and the way things are going now, we are getting to that final parting day.

    In his introduction to the conversation, Fani-Kayode boasted about how he and his friends truly lived it off in their younger days in the 80’s. “I spent most of my leisure time’” he said, “playing polo at the Lagos Polo Club or at the Guards Polo Club in the UK eating caviar and drinking champagne.”

    It is interesting and revealing that Fani-Kayode, who comes from Osun State that I am not aware has started producing oil, would talk about anyone else being addicted to “southern” oil with a sense of self-entitlement. It is equally interesting and revealing that even as a student with no job, the gentleman could afford the luxury of playing polo, the so-called Kings’ game, at home and abroad and eat expensive caviar and drink expensive champagne.

    Clearly the irony is lost on our voluble critic of the North and Islam that it is this free-loading lifestyle by a privileged and well-connected few which cuts right across our ethnic, regional and religious divides that goes to the root of Nigeria’s problem and not, as the Nwankwos of this world would have us believe, Nigeria’s structure.

    “The way out,” he said,”is not to introduce any nebulous bill like the National Grazing Reserves Commission Bill, but to gather round a table to renegotiate the existence of this country.”

    Of course, structures do matter. But attitudes matter even more, much more, because even with the best of structures we will never build a nation as long as we have elite in politics, academia, journalism, business, etc., whose stock in trade is fear mongering through stereotyping others as their ladder to wealth, power and glory.