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Category: Mohammed Harunna

Boko Haram: Why govt should listen to Amnesty

Last week, I promised the reader I will devote today’s column entirely to some of the reactions provoked by my piece of the week before on the controversial “personal” history of Biafra by Chinua Achebe which he titled There was a country.

However, man, it is said, merely proposes but it’s only God who disposes. God, apparently, disposed through two terrible events of last two weeks that my promise would have to keep for another week. The first was the gruesome suicide bombing of St Rita’s Catholic Church, Unguwan Yero, Kaduna, on October 28 in which at least 30 worshippers lost their lives and hundreds more lost their limbs or were maimed.

It was indeed a miracle that the casualties were not higher considering the number of worshippers who assembled that day and the suicide bomber’s (assuming he was alone in the vehicle) apparent desperation in ramming his way into the church yard through the perimeter fence that terrible Sunday morning.

It was my typical Sunday morning; rising late and taking eternity to have my bath. I was sitting on the toilet seat a little after 9 am when I heard a huge rumbling sound like I’ve never heard before. At the same time, I felt the house shake as if the roof and the wall were going to cave in.

Madam, who was in the bedroom, shouted “Baba, what is it?” Of course, I didn’t know what it was but somehow I restrained myself from rushing out, especially since the kaboom was not followed by any physical destruction. However, while still in the toilet I kept thinking what could have caused such a huge sound. In quick succession I dismissed the possibility of the rock breakers across the road from my house using dynamite and the other possibility that the transformer serving our neighbourhood had blown up.

In the end, I concluded it must have been a bomb, even as I prayed to God fervently that it shouldn’t. My prayers were answered in the negative when shortly after my bath one of my kids came to tell us that the online media had been reporting that it was the suicide bombing of a church at Unguwan Yero.

My heart sank just imagining what the casualty would be like; if my house which must be at least two kilometres away from the church as the crow flies, could be shaken to its foundation by the bomb I shuddered to think what could have been the fate of those in and around it.

Terrible as the number of those killed and injured was, it was, indeed, a miracle that the mayhem was not far worse by the time the rubbles had settled.

Predictably, the story grabbed the headlines of the media the following day. Equally predictably, virtually all fingers pointed at the usual suspect: Boko Haram.

This time, however, the security forces acted with unusual dispatch to avert any retaliatory attacks. But even more importantly, in my view at least, the Christian leadership in Kaduna, especially those of the Catholic fold – that of the affected church even more so – acted with greatest restrain in calling on their, no doubt, angry flock not to seek revenge.

As far as I know, Boko Haram has not claimed responsibility for the attack but it has remained the principal suspect.

All this was Sunday October 28.

Then last Friday came another shocker. I was about rounding up my lecture to my post graduate diploma students at the Samaru campus of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, when a call came through from a former very senior government official and a senior friend. During class I normally leave my phone on silent and pick up a call only when I think it might be important. This was one such call. So I excused myself and answered my phone.

I had not spoken to the gentleman since dropping a document for him a few days before. So I thought he was calling to confirm receipt. He did confirm receipt but his next words shocked me to the marrow.

“Sorry about Shuwa,” he said. “What has happened to him?”, I asked nonplussed. Didn’t I hear he had been killed that morning?, he asked.

That ended my class that evening. Apparently, my students too had not heard. They were all shocked when I told them the news, half of which they must’ve guessed from the way my voice and countenance changed. Their shock was not surprising because more than half the class were old enough to have heard some of the probably apocryphal exploits of the (79 year old) general during our civil war of 1967 to 1970. To think that such a person who had survived a war and served his country well would be killed like a chicken by assassins who were probably young enough to be his grandchildren right in front of his house!

If their shock at the manner of the man’s death did not surprise me, the way they all chorused that “dis one pass Boko Haram,” surprised, even shocked me, the more so because there were more Christians in the class than Muslims.

My students are certainly not a representative sample of this country’s population. But it sounds sensible to me that if only one Christian would begin to wonder if there is not more to the bombings of churches and the killings of Christians – never mind the bombings of public buildings and the killing of security agents, serving or retired – than Boko Haram insurrections, one can be forgiven the thought that the official mantra about Boko Haram being behind each and every one of these bombings and killings needs a fundamental re-thinking.

No doubt Boko Haram is real. And its methods are despicable and certainly counter-productive to its objective, to which it is entitled, of Islamising Nigeria. As it knows all too well the Qur’an makes it very clear that there is no force in religion.

However, it has been said again and again that Boko Haram has since become a franchise used by criminals, and for all we know, rogue elements in government and the security services for their own ends. This is one good reason why government must rethink its scorched earth strategy to bring an end to the insecurity that has pervaded this country.

The scorched earth policy has not worked and it will not work because it can only worsen the very vicious circle of violence which the extrajudicial killing of the Boko Haram leadership back in 2009 unleashed on the hapless citizens of our dear country.

If only because government has control over the official instruments of violence, it has the greater responsibility for ending this vicious circle. It can start by listening to what Amnesty International said last week about how the public, especially in the theatre of the Boko Haram insurrection, has come to fear and loath our security forces more than the Boko Haram insurgents.

Unless we have a strategy of more carrots and fewer sticks employed by government, the country could, God forbid, slide into an anarchy of bombings and counter-bombings and high profile killings along religious lines.

November 7, 2012
Between the Presidency and the National Assembly

Easily the most important and most controversial of all the assumptions for next year’s budget is its crude oil price benchmark. As we all know, for decades now King Crude has, far and away, become the biggest source of public revenue and has since become the central, some would even say virtually the only, pillar of our annual budgets.

Figures from a sampled history of its prices at the New York Mercantile Stock Exchange from December 31, 2005 to this month, shows that this year the prices opened on January 6 at $101.56/barrel, fell to $98.7 in the first week of February, rose to $103.77 third week of February, fell back again to $98.49 on May 4 and closed at $86.28 last week on October 26. This shows volatility in its price but with a trend towards decline.

This volatility and decline has become the source of a sharp dispute between the executive and legislative arms of our Federal Government; whereas the executive says the price should be benchmarked at $75 and the difference of a little over $11 from the current price put aside for the probable rainy day, the National Assembly wants it at $78 (Senate) and $80 (House of Representatives).

As usual, the executive has been on a media blitz in an attempt to convince the public that the federal legislators are either demonstrating economic illiteracy or are being unreasonable – or both. Leading the media onslaught is the Finance and Coordinating Minister herself, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, darling of the West as managing director of the World Bank on sabbatical to her country.

According to the super minister, there are at least five reasons why the benchmark must remain at $75/barrel, actually six reasons if you consider her argument that this price was itself a concession to the hawkish legislators. The more prudent benchmark, using what she called “oil-price based fiscal rule,” which is “a standard technique commonly used by commodity-dependent countries to protect them against the volatilities of oil,” was $71. This, she said, was rounded up to $72. However it was, she said, eventually pushed up to $75 after consultations with governors and the National Assembly.

A benchmark of $80, the minister said at a recent press conference would, first of all, lead to excess liquidity which would, in turn, lead to inflation and exchange rate depreciation. Second, the current relatively high oil price on which the legislators are basing their benchmark is, she said, “overly optimistic” because the price is not predicated on any economic fundamentals but is rather based on the current crisis in the Middle East, the world’s biggest source of cheap oil.

Third, the current prices, she said, are not sustainable because of decline in demand occasioned by the recession in Europe, slow growth in America and economic slowdown in China and India, coupled with an increase in supply from new discoveries in Africa and elsewhere and the end of hostilities in Libya.

Fourth, a benchmark of $80, she said, would lead to lower savings which would in turn remove the cushion the country would need should the current price crash, as it did in 2008 when it eventually bottomed out at $37.71 on December 26, from a peak of $145.29 on July 4.

Finally the higher legislators’ benchmark would, she said, send the wrong signal to foreign investors that we are imprudent and lead to the two international credit agencies that are soon expected in the country – Fitch and Standard & Poor – to downgrade our credit rating which in turn would discourage foreign investors and at the same time make it difficult, if not impossible, for our own local investors to borrow from abroad.

The minister has since been echoed in her criticism of the legislators by, among others, my friend and onetime colleague at the New Nigerian, Abba Dabo, a senior special assistant to the vice-president, and by a non-governmental organisation with the impressive title of Economic Advancement Advocacy Initiative (EAAI), but which is possibly of dubious existence.

Abba not only criticised the legislators on their rejection of the executive’s benchmark. He went on, in a widely published article last week, to severely reprimand the Speaker, Aminu Waziri Tambuwal, for seizing the occasion of his moving the National Assembly’s vote of thanks following President Goodluck Jonathan’s presentation of the 2013 budget to generally criticise the President for his style and substance of governance.

On its part, the EAAI not only rehashed several of Okonjo-Iweala’s arguments in a full page advert in several newspapers including Thisday (October 25). It also purported to show that, at $72 per barrel last year, Nigeria had the highest oil price benchmark among most members of OPEC and it also had the lowest foreign reserve ($41.30 billion) among a number of disparate African, Middle-East and Asian countries, including Malaysia ($134.50 billion), Saudi Arabia ($592.30 billion) and China ($3,240.00 billion).

No doubt the executive arm seems to have all the right arguments on its side. In any case it’s difficult, if not impossible, to quarrel with the dictum that one should always save for rainy days. The problem is that with this country the rainy days have always been with us, what with its terrible infrastructure and services in every sector of the economy – security, transport, energy, education, health; name it.

Yet we earn enough revenue from oil alone to make a huge difference in the quality of our infrastructure and services, and still have a little to spare for savings and investment in days stormier than the merely rainy ones. The trouble is that since oil took over our political-economy as king, the public has never had value for the money their leaders have claimed to have spent on their behalf. This, and not the size of our savings either as Excess Crude Account or the new-fangled Sovereign Wealth Fund, is the central issue.

Given the volatility of the price of crude oil alone, it makes more eminent sense to have a benchmark of $75 per barrel than of $80 for next year’s budget. The trouble is that experience has shown there has been little or no transparency in the management of the difference between the benchmark and the subsisting prices. Instead, it has become like a slush fund for the executive arm to spend as it likes, at times in cahoots with the leadership of the legislative arm, at other times in spite of it. As Tambuwal said in his vote of thanks which apparently did not go down well with the Presidency, the public has, for example, never known whether the figures of our foreign reserve we are told include the interests accrued or not.

We are also told little or nothing about the foreign banks that manage those reserves, the criteria used in choosing them and how they manage the reserves and how much we pay them as management fees.

In any case what kind of economics is that which keeps huge sums of its revenues in relatively idle savings and at the same time makes a virtue of borrowing heavily at home and abroad less to invest in profitable ventures than to squander on, among other things, the creature comforts of its leaders – their lavish residences, their frequent and expensive foreign junkets, etc – as is so apparent from the size of our recurrent expenditure?

President Goodluck Jonathan and his super minister of finance and economic coordination are right to push for an oil price benchmark of $75 per barrel for next year’s budget. But they can only seize the moral high ground from the legislators in their campaign for prudence and transparency in our political-economy if they are seen to make as much, if not even more, sacrifices in how they conduct themselves in and out of office as they demand from the rest of us.

Feedback

Last week’s piece on Chinua Achebe’s personal history of Biafra elicited well over 100 texts and several emails, as usual some of them sensible and profound, some downright silly and abusive. My original intention was to devote today’s column entirely to my selection of those responses. I changed my mind when I realised it was easier for me to write the piece above than edit the responses in time for my deadline. So I decided to publish only a couple of the texts today and the rest next week. Here they are:

Sir,

“The Igbo man will spoil a good case with a useless lie”, Achebe wrote in The Arrow of God. The child’s lie of how Igbo politicians were wonderfully lucky on coup day is still boldly told. A grievously wounded North returned! It’s been 40 years of destabilising response and ravage. We have all lost! Ironically, the North is the worst hit. The madness continues.

Ebelegi Kponam Newton. +2348092856001

Sir,

What led to the pogrom is neither here nor there. I was just going through the list of the majors who struck in January 1966 and only one, Ifeajuna, was Ibo. Nzeogwu you know is an Ika. The lie that it was an Ibo coup remains Nigeria’s albatross.

Tony Chigbo. +2348050494477

October 31, 2012
Achebe’s personal history of Biafra

A little over four years ago, precisely October 9, 2008, Chinua Achebe, one of the world’s greatest novelists and essayists and, for me, Africa’s greatest literary figure, delivered the keynote lecture on the occasion of the Silver Anniversary of The Guardian at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, Lagos. The lecture, entitled “What Nigeria is to me,” was vintage Achebe; simple, eloquent, coherent, rigorous and full of insight.

He delivered the lecture on tape but his physical absence did not make it any less riveting for the distinguished audience that gathered that beautiful morning to listen to him.

For me, the most memorable lines of that lecture were his concluding paragraphs. “Nigeria,” he said in reference to our first and second national anthems that have respectively described the country as ‘motherland’ and ‘fatherland’, “is neither my mother nor my father. Nigeria is a child, gifted, enormously talented, prodigiously endowed and incredibly wayward. Being a Nigerian is abysmally frustrating and unbelievably exciting. I have said somewhere that in my next re-incarnation, I want to come back as a Nigerian again. But I have also in a rather testy mood in a book called The trouble with Nigeria dismissed Nigerian travel advertisements with the suggestion that only a tourist with an addiction to self flagellation (will) pick Nigeria for a holiday. And I mean both. Nigeria needs help; Nigerians have their work cut out for them, to coax this unruly child along the path of useful creative development. We are the parents of Nigeria, not vice-versa. A generation will come if we do our work patiently and well and given luck; a generation will come that will call Nigeria Father or Mother, but not yet.”

Achebe’s logic was impeccable; a country is what its citizens make of it, not the other way round. And until a generation of those citizens emerge who can feel proud of what their progenitors have bequeathed to them, the country cannot rightfully lay claim to father- or mother-hood.

Few people, if any, would disagree with Achebe that Nigeria is yet to arrive at that happy milestone in its 52 years of independence from British colonial rule. The reason for the country’s failure to do so are many, not least of which is the failure of leadership which Achebe as essayist dwelt on extensively in his now famous little book, The trouble with Nigeria.

Of course, the failure of leadership has not been the only trouble with Nigeria, even though it’s arguably the biggest. Also up there with the failure of leadership are problems of ethnicity, corruption and selfishness, all three – and even more – of which seem pervasive not just among our leaders but also among their followers.

For Achebe, obviously, the work cut out for Nigerians, whatever their status or profession, is to conquer these and other vices, or contain them at the least. For the writer in Africa the “overall goal”, he says in his latest book, THERE WAS A COUNTRY: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF BIAFRA which has provoked a huge controversy, is “to challenge stereotypes, myths and the image of ourselves and our continent and to recast them through stories – prose, poetry, essays and books for our children.”

Reading through the book, it seems to me the great writer has failed his own test of challenging stereotypes and myths about, and images of, the various nationalities that make up our country. Instead, he seems to emerge at the end of the book as an Igbo supremacist at worst, or its apologist, at best.

Take for example the issue of the nationalist struggle. “The original idea of one Nigeria,” he claims matter-of-factly, “was pressed by leaders and intellectuals from the Eastern Region. With all their shortcomings they had this idea to build the country as one. The first to object were the Northerners, led by the Sardauna, who were followed closely by the Awolowo clique that had created the Action Group.”

This was clearly a blatant distortion of history because neither the Sardauna nor Awolowo objected to independence from colonial rule as one Nigeria. What Sardauna objected to was the timing for the simple and understandable reason that for historical reasons the South had a huge head-start over his region in producing the skills required for running the government, and he needed time to do something about the gap.

However, whereas the Sardauna objected only to the timing of the demand for independence, every school child knew it was Awolowo’s Action Group through its member, Chief Anthony Enahoro, and not Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe’s NCNC, that moved the original motion for our independence by 1959.

That AG’s Enahoro moved the motion did not, of course, necessarily mean the party spearheaded the independence struggle. As Achebe said, Zik was a pre-eminent figure in that struggle, even more preeminent than Awo. Surely, however, the writer knew that before Zik there were non-Igbo politicians like Herbert Macaulay, Sir Adeyemo Alakija, Chief Bode Thomas, Kitoye Ajasa, etc – the so-called Black Victorians on account of their English lifestyle and aspirations – who wanted the colonialist to leave.

Take again his position that other Nigerians, and even the British ex-colonialists, harboured a visceral hatred of the Igbo because of their successes in life. He does admit some flaws in what he says is the Igbo character which he blames somewhat as the source of this universal envy of the group, but quickly glosses over these in his attempt to blame others for the civil war that led to the deaths of millions of his countrymen in the Biafran enclave.

“The British dislike (for the Igbo),” he said in The Guardian silver anniversary lecture I mentioned above, “was demonstrated when they accused the Igbo of THREATENING to break up a nation state they had carefully and labouriously put together.” (Emphasis mine).

How anyone, least of all Achebe with all his respect for scholarly rigour, would describe Lt Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu’s declaration of a Republic of Biafra as a mere threat to break up Nigeria simply beggars belief.

In his defence of Achebe’s book in an interview in the new newsmagazine, Verbatim, Professor Fabian Osuji, a former minister of education and now the Director-General of the Ikemba Odumegwu-Ojukwu Centre, Owerri, said General Yakubu Gowon was wrong to blame the Igbo for seceding. Gowon, he said, “did say that if there was no secession, there would be no war. Alright, which means that secession led to the war? But he was not honest enough to say what led to the secession.” This, he said, quite rightly, was the pogrom against the Igbo, especially in the North, which made them feel completely insecure outside the East.

Osuji’s position merely echoed Achebe’s when he said in his book he believed that following the pogrom in the North which he claimed without stating any evidence was compounded by the involvement, even connivance of the Federal Government, “secession from Nigeria and the war that followed was inevitable.”

However, if Gowon, as Osuji says was not honest enough to say what led to the secession, Osuji himself was not honest enough to say what led to the pogrom.

In his Guardian silver anniversary lecture, Achebe does admit, albeit half-heartedly, that the first coup was a remote cause. “In the bitter suspicious atmosphere of the time,” he said, “a naively idealistic coup proved a terrible disaster. It was interpreted WITH PLAUSIBILITY as a plot by the ambitious Igbo of the East to take control of Nigeria from the Hausa-Fulani North.” (Emphasis mine).

In his book, however, he failed to admit even the plausibility that the coup was an Igbo coup. Instead, he sought to revive the rationalisation that the coup was meant to rid the country of the corrupt and inept politicians who led the First Republic. Nowhere in the book was there any mention of the fact that mostly senior Northern army officers who had no role in public policy were also targeted and murdered in cold blood.

Again nowhere in the book was there any mention of the role of Igbo triumphalism, as exemplified in the so-called unification decree and the manner it was declared without consultation by General J.U.T. Aguiyi-Ironsi, and also as exemplified in the widespread gloating over the manner the Sardauna was killed in his residence by the coup leader, Major Chukwuma Nzegwu Kaduna, played in provoking the pogrom.

One highly symbolic example of this triumphalism was recounted by the expatriate managing director of the New Nigerian, Charles Sharp, in an article I have had cause to refer to on these pages. “I,” he said in the article entitled “The story that got away” (New Nigerian, January 20, 2003), “had a personal experience of the arrogance stemming from the South when Cyprian Ekwensi and his committee arrived at the NNN and informed me they were taking over. He wasn’t precise about who ‘they’ were, but a team from Enugu would run the newspapers. I was ordered to terminate the contracts of the expatriate staff and offer my own resignation as managing director. My immediate reaction was one of disregard and silence, for I was in no position to protest or adopt postures.” (This article is highly recommended reading for anyone with any interest in the story of the collapse of the First Republic.)

What happened at the NNN, still then owned by the North, was enough to alarm the people of the region, especially their leaders, that their region was now regarded as conquered territory.

No doubt, Achebe is a great writer but with his latest serving, he has largely failed the biggest test of good writing which is not just to be highly readable, which THERE WAS A COUNTRY is, but to tell truth to your readers.

The truth of our civil war was that there were rights and wrong on both sides of the war. For once, it seems, Achebe chose to speak the truth, at times only half-truths, about one side and gloss over, or even deny, the truth about the other side – his side.

October 24, 2012
PHCN privatisation: Now that Nnaji is gone

When Prof Barth Nnaji left as Minister of Power in late August, it was not clear whether he jumped or was pushed. Most guesses including mine, however, was that he was pushed, if only because his departure was rather too sudden.

The terse two paragraph announcement of his departure by the spokesman for President Goodluck Jonathan, Dr. Reuben Abati, hardly suggested the minister left on his own. “President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan,” Abati said, “has accepted the resignation WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT of the Minister of Power, Prof. Barth Nnaji.

President Jonathan thanks Prof Nnaji for his services to the nation under the present administration and wishes him well in his future endeavours.” (Emphasis mine)

Presidents don’t go about accepting the resignations of their sidekicks with immediate effect and without saying why.

In this case, the President did say why eventually but his reason hardly suggested that Nnaji jumped. In any case, sudden resignations are very unusual ways to depart lucrative jobs like ministering to a country’s electricity power supply.

Nnaji left on August 28. It took the President two days to say why. This was on August 30 during a town hall meeting in Onitsha after he’d inaugurated the town’s inland river port complex. “Barth Nnaji,” he reportedly said, “has not committed any offence. He is a very competent and seasoned professional.”

However, before seemingly exonerating the minister, the president made an oblique reference to the issue of conflict of interest involving not just the minister but probably other senior government officials as well. “Before we started this privatisation,” Thisday (August 31) reported him as telling his distinguished guests, “some major stakeholders who had access to me, came to me and said, ‘Mr President, we heard all these privatisation of projects in the power sector had already been shared among the people and we want the president to assure us so that we do not waste our time.’ I said, ‘no you can keep faith in the process.’”

The minister, the President reportedly said, had willingly declared his interest in two companies that had bid for Afam Power Station and for Enugu Distribution Company. This, he said, was what gave rise to a conflict of interest that made the minister resign in order to safeguard the privatisation exercise. Obviously, it was contradictory for the President to say his minister did nothing wrong and yet point at the conflict between his private interest and his public duty as the reason why he “resigned.”

The President did not say when Nnaji declared his private interest in the privatisation of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN), but anyone familiar with the exercise knows the minister’s conflict of interest did not arise yesterday. It goes all the way back to the time of the President’s immediate predecessor, the late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, when the minister was his special adviser on energy. That conflict of interest had been a source of serious, and a times violent, conflict between Nnaji and both management and workers of the PHCN.

The minister could, therefore, not have resigned simply because the President suddenly discovered his private interest was in conflict with his public duty; the conflict had been there all along. From the President’s oblique talk about some VIP stakeholders’ worry about the integrity of the exercise, a more likely explanation could be that the private interest in the exercise of some officials more powerful than the minister simply trumped the minister’s.

In which case it should be obvious that Nnaji’s resignation alone has hardly solved the problem of the conflict of interest of government officials responsible for the exercise.

When the president announced on August 28 that he had accepted the “resignation” of his minister, he said he would replace him quickly and with another Igbo. It’s now mid-October and Nnaji is yet to be replaced at all, never mind with an Igbo compatriot. This undue delay suggests the politics of PHCN’s privatisation has complicated matters for the President.

If this is the case, the President has only himself to blame; he ought to have known that a policy of allocating portfolios by ethnicity – or for that matter, by state, as seems to be the case with the ministry of defence which has remained vacant since he sacked the last minister, who is from Kebbi State, months ago – is as wrongheaded as it is untenable in a world where competence has no tribe, creed or colour. Not that there are no other Igbos even more competent than Nnaji. There are. But to insist on an Igbo replacement was clearly restricting his choice.

In announcing Nnaji’s departure as minister, the President praised him for his competence and professionalism. Few would or can question the President’s judgement about the ex-minister’s credentials. However, it misses the main issue which is the integrity of the exercise. The fact is that competence and professionalism are no substitutes for integrity. And it is the dubious integrity of the exercise that has left the country as poorly served today by its power utility company as it was nearly 13 years ago when President Olusegun Obasanjo promised he will turn the sector around.

Nnaji did little to enhance the integrity of the exercise which, by the president’s own admission, was why the gentleman had to leave.

The question is would his departure make any difference? It is doubtful that it would, for the simple reason that Nnaji is probably not the only senior government official whose private interest ran counter to his public duty. The evidence is there in the history of privatisation in this country where the commonwealth has largely ended in the hands of senior government officials and their cronies and kins. It is also there in the fact that, as with previous exercises, perhaps the most notorious of which was that of NITEL, the country’s telecommunication company, the assets of PHCN have probably been grossly understated.

Government ownership of companies may have been discredited in this country but the record of the private ownership in sectors like banking and aviation has given little cause to believe that privatisation is the only solution.

Elsewhere, among the Asian Tigers – South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, etc – and in China the world’s emerging economic super power, there is ample evidence that efficiency and profitability is not the preserve of privately owned companies. The evidence is also right here on our continent, where the publicly owned Ethiopian Airline, for example, has shown that public ownership is not necessarily an obstacle to commercial success.

By all means let’s go ahead and privatise our public companies since they have proved unviable. However, as we do so we must remember that their problem was less the nature of their ownership than the lack of integrity with which they were run.

Unless the authorities do all they can to guarantee such integrity in the sale of the public companies, their privatised offsprings can only bring even more pain to consumers than was the case before.

October 17, 2012
Still on the Constitution and bad workmen

Among the usual mixed reactions this column gets, that from one, Mike Oyeleke, to last week’s piece on what I obviously considered our wrong-headed belief that the sure-fire solution to the country’s problems is to fix its Constitution, looked like a most logical rebuttal of my thesis.

For Oyeleke, whose reaction is reproduced below, I was obviously wrong to blame Nigerian politicians for quarrelling with our Constitution. They are, he says, right to do so because the country’s Constitution as the principal tool for its development is defective and in dire need of fixing.

The gentleman’s point of view is likely to resonate well with advocates of Sovereign National Conference; they seem to believe convoking an SNC to fix our Constitution is the panacea to our problems. It is hard, I believe, to find a more simplistic thinking on how to solve Nigeria’s problems.

True, our Constitution is defective and in need of fixing; it is a wrong reading of my piece last week to assume I did not think it is defective. After all, nothing man-made is, by definition, perfect because Man himself is imperfect.

My argument was simple; warts and all, if Nigerians had kept faith with their Constitution their country would never have been in the terrible mess in which it is. To quote one of the respondents to my article in question whose response I did not reproduce here, one, Ogbuba Gabriel who said he is an engineer, “A good worker can mend a crack with a bad tool to some extent.” I, for one, couldn’t agree more.

By the same token, even with the best tool available, no positive result can ever be achieved with the kind of bad faith Nigerian politicians have demonstrated in upholding the country’s Constitution in their politics.

The monumental corruption and waste that have been exposed in the country’s oil subsidy regime is, for example, not the fault of the country’s Constitution. Neither is the Constitution to blame for the monumental “mismanagement and misapplication” of the country’s ecological fund – to use the words of the Senate Public Accounts Committee which recently said it has discovered N400 billion of the fund had been used in the last 10 years to buy such creature comforts like presumably expensive vehicles for public officials rather than for protecting and improving our environment. No doubt if half, or even less, of this huge amount – and chances are the corruption and waste was understated – had been spent on dredging our rivers and streams and generally on safeguarding our environment, the flood disaster we have witnessed this year all over the country, which has claimed hundreds of lives and thousands of livelihoods, would have been avoided.

Again, it is not the fault of the Constitution that, as one of my respondents said, our presidential system has proved prohibitively expensive. The Constitution is not to blame, for instance, for the decision by our federal legislators to fix their own wages and allowances and keep us totally in the dark about the size of those wages and allowances. On the contrary, the Constitution couldn’t have been more explicit than it was about the conflict of interest in allowing public servants to fix their own remuneration.

In these and all other cases of corruption and waste, there are sufficient Constitutional guidelines to stop abuse. There are also sufficient guidelines on how to punish abuse – and reward compliance. The problem for our country is that these guidelines have mostly been observed only in the breach. The problem is also that hardly does anyone get punished when the guidelines are breached. Instead our reward and punishment system seems to put a high premium on wrong doing and on self-service, as has been glaringly demonstrated by the country’s thoroughly discredited National Honours awards.

By all means let us correct the flaws in our Constitution. But if we truly want our country to develop we must approach its amendment with the full knowledge of, and respect for, the fact that a rule is not worth the paper it is written on if, as is obviously the case in Nigeria, it can be disregarded with impunity, especially by those entrusted with the power and authority to ensure compliance with it.

Talking about the importance of our politicians leading by example as the way out of our national decay, I witnessed a small but symbolically mighty example of it last week in Ekiti State when, on a visit to its governor, the youthful John Kayode Fayemi with my publisher friend, Chief Ikechi Emenike, he asked us to join his convoy on a trip from Ado-Ekiti, the state capital, to Ekiti East Local Government for a town square meeting with its people on next year’s budget.

The first thing that struck me was that his convoy was a short five or six vehicle long, with himself and his commissioners and aides that accompanied him in a bus. That was a far cry from your typical governor’s convoy.

However, what struck me even more was that the convoy actually obeyed traffic lights within the town, had no siren and did not disrupt the traffic on the highway all the way to its destination.

It is small examples of leadership by example like this, much more than our proclivity in amending our Constitution at the drop of the hat, that will make the big difference in our struggle to become a peaceful, stable and prosperous nation.

FEEDBACK

Re Constitutional amendment: a bad workman…

Sir,

The tools the Nigerian politicians work with are not original tools. Rather they are working with corrupted tools. Whereas in America the senate president is the vice president, in Nigeria we have a vice president separate from the senate president. Since the tool is corrupted so will there be complaints by those who use the tools. Shouldn’t the office of the attorney general be separated from that of the minister of justice? Shouldn’t each federating state have its own constitution and its own police? Should the National Assembly members determine their pay? Bad workmen, bad tools.

Mike Oyeleke, +2348162441631

Sir,

Thank you for your very interesting article: Constitutional amendments: A bad workman… This is just to correct a small mistake. You stated that Major-General Aguiyi Ironsi abolished the Independence Constitution. That assertion is factually incorrect. The Independence Constitution is the 1960 constitution. But there was another constitution in 1963. It is called the Republican constitution. It was the one abolished by Major-General Ironsi.

Hon Samaila Mohammed, Jos

Sir,

I agree with you that the constitution do not constitute far greater problem in Nigerian affairs than the behaviour of our politicians. However, there is no doubting the fact that some sections of the present constitution need to be amended. And while the paramount condition for our national progress is change in attitude and behaviour, I also think that there is need to jettison this costly presidential system for a more cost effective parliamentary one. Unfortunately our legislators won’t support such move because they are only interested in feathering their nests with our collective wealth.

Kingley Aduga, 08133071697

Sir.

Amend the constitution of Nigeria one million times it will not solve our problems. This is because those who are to protect and enforce will be ones that will work against it.

Dr. John Ogbadu

Sir,

You will no doubt support that the present constitutional status quo be maintained given that your part of the world is unfairly favoured by the document. Yoruba speaking people of Kogi State, for instance, are treated like slaves by Igala colonialists who believe the state was a gift to them by (General) Ibrahim B. Babangida! Are you saying in all honesty and sincerity that they should continue to groan under such constitutional bondage? It is definitely going to be costlier in the long run to perpetuate such constitutional injustice, cheating and unfairness which may breed new militants and boko haramites.

Musa Bakare

+2348036351937

Sir,

As usual, you got your dates mixed up. Murtala was assassinated in 1976, not 1975.

S.K. Mustapha

+2348034235782

Maiduguri

I stand corrected. MKH

October 10, 2012
Constitutional amendments; a bad workman…

A bad workman, the English say, quarrels with his tools. Few people demonstrate the accuracy of this aphorism as Nigerians – certainly the politicians among them – do in their attempt, once again, to review the Constitution of their country as it clocks its 52nd year of its Independence from British colonial rule on October 1, 1960.

First, it took them all less than six years to throw away the parliamentary constitution they had inherited from their colonial master and, in effect, adopt a unitary constitution.

Not that ordinary Nigerians really had much choice in the matter when the soldiers overthrew the country’s unpopular civilian rulers on January 15, 1966. That first coup has since been blamed much for being the trigger of the country’s sharp decline since Independence. But this is only being wise after the fact; back then most Nigerians believed the coup was good riddance to bad rubbish.

Naturally, when Major-General J. T. Aguiyi-Ironsi took over power as our first military ruler he and his colleagues abolished the Independence Constitution. Then in February he set up a Constitutional Study Group under Chief F.R.A. Williams, aka “Timi the Law”, to work out a new constitution. However, even before the group could settle down to work, the new head of state enacted Decree 34, the unification decree which abolished the then four regions – North, West, East and Mid-West – and replaced them with the provinces in those regions as the units of administration.

That, as is well known, proved his nemesis; in July there was a bloody counter-coup in which the top casualty was the general himself, and following which the new kids on the block quickly abolished the decree. This was in September, barely two months after they came to power.

The counter-coup, in turn, led eventually to a three-year civil war which ended in 1970. By then General Yakubu Gowon who had taken over from Ironsi as military, ruler, had been in power for over four years. When the war ended he promised a return to civilian rule in four years i.e. by 1974. However, as the deadline approached the man changed his mind and it became apparent that he had allowed himself to be persuaded by those around him that, like several of his counterparts elsewhere, notably Egypt, he should swap his khaki for mufti and remain in power.

This, again as we all know, proved his undoing; he was overthrown in 1975 but unlike his hapless predecessor, he did not pay the ultimate price, reason being he was out of the country at the time of the coup.

Apparently the new set of military rulers learnt the lessons of the demise of their predecessors, which was that in the long run no good ever came out of wanting to cling on to power; they promised to return the country to civilian rule in three years and set about their commitment with a vigour unknown in most military dictatorships, certainly those in Africa.

Such was their commitment that even when some misguided elements in the army killed the head of state, General Murtala Mohammed, on February 13, 1976 in a failed attempt to overthrow his government, the new military rulers stuck to their transition programme to hand over to the civilians on October 1, 1979.

The lot of implementing the programme fell on General Olusegun Obasanjo, General Muhammed’s deputy. Top of the programme was the provision of a constitution for the country. Before his assassination, General Muhammed had inaugurated a Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC) under – who else? – “Timi the Law.”

Suspicions that there were strings attached to the CDC’s brief soon provoked a huge controversy. The suspicions were first aired by Malam Aminu Kano, the late radical politician who led the opposition to the ruling party in the North. During one of the conferences organised around the country to generate input for the CDC – this one was on the Congo Campus of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, in March 1977 – Malam Aminu claimed there was not only a “soft-subterranean influence” by the army to jettison the parliamentary democracy of the First Republic and replace it with American type of presidential democracy. He also said he had reason to believe the CDC had succumbed to the military’s influence.

This columnist had the privilege of reporting the story for the New Nigerian as a junior reporter.

That claim got Chief Williams’ dander up. Unless the radical malam withdrew his claim, the chief threatened in effect, he would sue him for slander. This threat got my bosses understandably worried, given the chief’s huge reputation of hardly ever losing his cases. So worried were my bosses they sent me to Kano to seek clarification on the issue from the malam.

I did and he stuck to his gun. “I must,” he said in a short written statement he gave me, “say that I have grown old enough in the politics of Nigeria and generally of Africa to avoid equivocation or sycophancy and to know the difference between political consistency which is hard to maintain and political acrobatism, simple to operate. The first I will continue to do, but the second I condemn and reject until death, suffering and ostracisation notwithstanding.”

The New Nigerian led with the story in its edition of April 4, 1977 under the headline, “Aminu Kano Unrepentant – stands by his words.” As far as I know, Chief Williams never sued the malam until his death.

More significantly when the CDC submitted its report to the authorities it opted for the American type presidential democracy as if in vindication of malam’s claims. As we all know this was adopted by the Constituent Assembly (CA) of 1978 that eventually wrote the 1979 Constitution that ushered in the Second Republic and a document which has remained the country’s constitutional framework, give or take not a few amendments by the various military regimes that have ruled this country up to 1999.

And so it was that the first opportunity Nigerians had of drafting their own constitution without supervision by any colonial master, they chose to throw away the one they had inherited, lock, stock and barrel.

It has since become conventional wisdom to say the military imposed the presidential system on the country. The truth is much more complex than that. True, the Obasanjo regime that midwifed the constitution not only held a veto over it. It exercised the veto by inserting a few important clauses in it and deleting a few, without subjecting the document to a referendum or to even reconsideration by its CA.

However, the fact was that the mostly elected 1978 CA agreed with the military in their choice of the presidential system over the parliamentary. It was also a fact that there was a popular support for the system. So it is simply historical revisionism to blame the soldiers alone for the country’s jettisoning of parliamentary democracy after the country had used it for less than six years.

In truth the greater blame for this “imposition” should go to our politicians who, it seems, have a penchant for quarrelling with their tools. This much should be obvious from the fact that most, if not all, of them blame our Constitution more – much more – than their own behaviour for the problems of this country.

According to The Punch (September 29), there are at the moment 264 proposals before our National Assembly for amendments in our Constitution which is barely 12 years old. Among these, the newspaper said, are 61 demands for the creation of states before the Senate and 27 for same before the House of Representatives, making a total of 88.

Neither the parliamentary constitution of the First Republic, nor the presidential one we have since replaced it with are perfect, being documents written by imperfect human beings.

It is also true that it makes no difference what type of tool a country chooses to solve its problems with. In the end, however, what is more important than the right choice is how a tool is used. Only a bad workman, which your typical Nigerian politician is, will contemplate amending a constitution he has used for barely 12 years in no less than 264 places.

Worse, only such a bad workman would demand for the creation of 88 more states in a country where we all agree, the existing 36 have proved too unwieldy and too costly.

October 3, 2012
The resource control furore: one more word

Three weeks or so ago today after my two-part piece on the onshore/offshore dichotomy on allocation of the country’s oil revenue, the issue seems to have returned to the front pages of our newspapers.

First it was President Goodluck Jonathan himself who, through his spokesperson, Dr. Reuben Abati, pronounced the 2004 Act abrogating the dichotomy a closed issue. Shortly thereafter, his Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Mr. Mohammed Adoke, followed suit. Then six days ago, the new president of the Nigerian Bar Association, Mr Okey Wali, announced that the NBA “fully endorses” the position of the Attorney-General. Wali, it may be recalled, was a one time attorney-general of Rivers State, a leading oil producing state.

“We,” he said, “agree with the AGF that this matter has been settled by the highest court of the land, the Supreme Court in AG Adamawa State and 22 others versus the AG Federation and eight others…we condemn any attempt by some politicians and their sympathisers to deliberately over-heat the polity by resurrecting the matter.”

With due respect, Wali, Adoke and his principal are guilty of, at best, playing politics with the law, and, at worse, downright lying with it, akin to the subterfuge of lying with statistics.

To begin with, as the three gentlemen know all too well, Supreme Court judgments are not cast in stone; all over the world apex courts have been known to reverse themselves when the need arises. Second, if the word of Supreme Courts is final and irreversible why did many of the most vociferous objectors of the re-opening of the 2004 Act even more vociferously reject our own apex court’s April 2002 judgment upholding the onshore/offshore dichotomy as untenable, to the extent that they even threatened to secede from the country? Why did they insist that beyond the court’s judgment there has to be a political solution?

However, the issue here is not only that Supreme Courts can reverse themselves. It is also not only that these latter-day the-word-of-supreme-courts-is-final advocates are being inconsistent. More importantly, the issue is also that the Supreme Court never dismissed the case of AG Adamawa State and 22 others versus the AG Federation and eight others on its own merit, as Wali would want the world to believe.

True, the court unanimously dismissed the case of the 22 states that sought the nullification of the 2004 Act which abrogated the onshore/offshore dichotomy for the purposes of revenue allocation among states. But the judges also differed among themselves on the merit of the case. For example, whereas Justice Oguntade said he did not see “anything intrinsic or extrinsic” in the law which was contrary to “the letter and spirit of the 1999 Constitution”, Justice Kutigi dismissed it only on the grounds that the plaintiffs went about their case the wrong way.

“It is,” he said, “doubtless that this action seeks to challenge the validity and effect of the 2004 Act. But the plaintiffs had chosen to go about it the wrong way…Unfortunately, the plaintiffs have not asked this court for any interpretation of the relevant provisions of the Constitution or of the 2004 Act itself. They therefore committed a blunder!”

Justice Oguntade might as well have been right. But then he was talking merely about the abstract principle of the letter and spirit of our supreme law of the land. The story might have been different if the principle were tested against some specific issues.

In any case, the fact that not all the Supreme Court judges agreed that the case lacked merit left enough room for a re-examination of the case.

So for our President to say the case should not be re-opened because it has been pronounced upon by the Supreme Court is simply untenable. Worse, it betrays an attitude that he is the President, not of all Nigerians, but of a section of it – specifically the section he comes from which seems implacably opposed to the re-opening of the issue.

Feedback

Newswatch: sad end to a great news magazine

My piece last on the sad putative demise of Newswatch elicited 41 texts and a couple of emails. Nearly a dozen of the reactions corrected the date I said Dele Giwa, one of its four founders, died on; October 19, 1986, not in 1985 as I said. The majority of them were angrier with the top management, led by Ray Ekpu, for apparently allowing themselves to be suckered by Chief Jimoh Ibrahim than with the chief for killing the magazine in effect.

One of the reactions also corrected the date I said Newbreed made its debut. This correction is published below along with some of the more interesting ones.

Sir,

I enjoy your column every week for the quality of efforts evident in it but do not always agree with your conclusions. Just a minor information: Newbreed came on stream in 1972 not 1976. I remember this clearly because myself and Chris Okolie were charged for seditious publication over my article “Rivers State as I see it” published in its April 1974 edition.

Joe Agbro. +2348051821777

Sir,

It is surprising that the founding editors of Newswatch will sell one per cent to Jimoh Ibrahim without checking his antecedent. This man is Nigeria’s Mitt Romney. He buys troubled companies not to revive them but to sell off the assets and make profits. I have no tears for them.

+2348023049640

Sir,

As usual your piece on Newswatch was a master piece. However, you should have mentioned the fat millions collected by the squad. They sold their rights of ownership of the magazine to a Smart Alec. Please advise them to use the millions to run for seats in the National Assembly where there is free money. No crocodile tears from them. Dele (RIP), whom I knew very well at Brooklyn College, (New York), would have done the same or worse.

Rest in Peace Newswatch.

D.M. Badamosi fmngs +2348037044586

Sir,

One is not surprised you remembered Obasanjo’s ban on Newbreed in the 70s but can’t remember that it was your Nupe brother, Ibrahim Babangida, who was responsible for the ban Newswatch suffered. By now your articles should reflect the views of a nationalist not a tribalist. It is too early to forget the deeds of Obasanjo and Babangida.

+2348038358461

Sir,

I agree with your commentary today on the rise and fall of Newswatch magazine. As a student, there was no week I did not buy Newswatch magazine at N1.50. Similar magazines now sell for N500 and this is a good measure of how much the Naira has crashed over the years.

It is very sad indeed because the magazine as an idea and now a brand should have been sustained, no matter the circumstance. Nigeria is also failing today because we do not know how to build institutions.

Kind regards.

Ehi Braimah

(08033017348)

Dear Sir,

I have read and followed your writings since my school days. I am in my late 40s now. So I have read you a long time.

What some people do and we call it business turnaround in Nigeria is simply hostile take-over and asset stripping. Your catalogue of our dear Chief’s escapades bears me witness.

Only a fool with means and connections will not have gone for those companies he went for. NICON with all those houses and what not was a sitting duck. Nigeria Airways had more landed property than planes. So if a Corporate Undertaker shows up? Hide the assets list.

Sir, I write today, not because I have qualifications in Literature, Entrepreneurship and Business turnaround but because Newswatch’s murder could have been prevented. We have this knack of taking our own counsel in this country. The tendency is to rate size, intelligence or connections over diligence.

I am saddened because these were men I respect so much, and who back then, wanted me to work with them before life took me on a different route. Their error of judgement and lack of care in signing the papers is at best infantile.

Who was their financial adviser? I am sure they had none.

•Otherwise there would be no need for these shares nonsense.

•How come they signed off the company without receiving the promised capital injection. At least they should have followed BPE’s Nitel saga.

•How did Chief succeed in opening an account in the name of a company he is yet to acquire and be the sole signatory?

Sir, I am sure you see the point now? Newswatch was acquired for nothing.

He opened the account, transferred money into it and is spending the money himself.

Let them talk to a good business lawyer who is versed in mergers and acquisitions. This is not a journalistic battle, it is a business war. You don’t carry a gun to fight a man in a tank; you stay far and shell him with anti-tank missiles.

Babafemi Oduyingbo

September 26, 2012