The Nation Newspaper

Category: Mohammed Harunna

  • Nwankwo’s misdiagnosis of Nigeria’s problems

    Nwankwo’s misdiagnosis of Nigeria’s problems

    Last week I reproduced a shortened version of the keynote address I delivered in July 2012 on the occasion of the 4thMedia Lecture Series of the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism, Lagos, under the title “Food for thought from 2012.” The address itself was headlined”Media and civil liberties when the cloud of fear gathers”.

    I reproduced it believing that it contained lessons for the media about the way it has been reporting – more like one-sided misreporting – the much-ballyhooed herdsmen/farmers clash. At least one reader, Aladetohun Moyosore, seemed to agree with me through his text, but offered one more food for thought which, he said, was from an inside story in The Nation, also of May 4, which quoted the Oloro of Oroland in Irepodun Local Government Area of Kwara State, Oba Abdul Rafiu Oyelara, as saying: ”The herdsmen boasted that they have people in government who will rescue them. These days herdsmen carry AK47 guns.”

    Moyosore’s question then was “Who arms them with AK47 and who are their sponsors in government?”

    Many a newspaper pundit and southern politician apparently believe there is a clear and simple answer; the northern elite is the chief, if not the sole, villain.

    Funke Egbemode, managing director ofTelegraph and an accomplished satirist, said as much in her back page column of Sunday Sun (May 1) entitled “The farmer and his Fulani herdsman”.

    Using the literary devise of dialogue, she had a fictitious farmer in the South ask his presumably marauding Fulani neighbour why his cows are no longer content to eat northern grass. “Does the southern grass have sugar?”, the farmer asked, obviously tongue-in-cheek.

    Fulani: The grass is greener here.

    Farmer: No. You just need to get out from under the thumbs of your slave owners who send you into the wilds so their children can ride brand new cars and eat chocolate on imported sofa in air-conditioned houses.”

    What Egbemode was clearly saying through the mouth of her fictitious farmer was that the problem with this country is the North’s feudal system. However, if hers was a satirical dig at the northern elite, Tatalo Alamu, the well-regarded columnist at The Nation on Sunday made the same point with a direct hit. “While the northern master-class send their children to the best school in the world and enjoy luxury of the latest western consumer goods,” he said in his column also of May 1,”the underclass are the herdsmen who are armed to roam the length and breadth of the nation tending their cows.”

    This theory of northern feudalism as the problem with Nigeria looks appealing given the region’s dominance of Nigeria’s politics since independence nearly 56 years ago. Certainly it is popular in the South. However, on closer examination, few explanations of Nigeria’s problems can be more simplistic and untenable.

    Worse, fewer still are more dangerous as a basis for finding solutions to these problems.Take, for example, the claim by Yinka Odumakin, the voluble spokesman for Afenifere, in an interview in Sunday Vanguard (May 1), that the attacks by alleged Fulani herdsmen have never taken place in the overwhelmingly Hausa/Fulani Northwest geo-political zone.

    He made this claim while condemning a press conference by the Chairman of the Northern Governors’ Forum and the Governor of Borno State, Alhaji Kassim Shettima, during which the governor cautioned Nigerians against profiling Fulani herdsmen and blaming all recent farmer/herdsman clashes on them. For simply stating the universally accepted truism that it is wrong to visit the crime of anyone on his entire ethnic group, religion or race, Odumakin said the governors should all “bury their heads in shame.”

    “If,” Odumakin added, “the attackers are not Fulani herdsmen, where have they struck in the Northwest? Why are their activities only in the Middle-Belt and in the South? That is the question these northern governors should answer.”

    Their answer would simply be that either the Afenifere spokesman had been away from Nigeria, at least since 2011, or he had chosen all this while not to be bothered about news, lots of news, in our media, old and new, about how cattle rustling and the wholesale sacking of communities had become endemic in the entire North all these years.

    However, if Odumakin’s claim is untenable and dangerous for the unity and harmony of this country, it is mere child’s play compared to a 4224-word article in saharareporters.com by the septuagenarian, Dr. Arthur Nwankwo, whose self-portrait on his own blog says he is “a publisher, award winning author, political scientist, historian and chairman of Fourth Dimension Publishing Company, the largest publishing company in sub-Saharan Africa with over 1,500 titles.”

    For a self-proclaimed political scientist and an historian it was truly amazing how he could take so much liberty with facts and stand logic on its head as he did in his article which he gave the rather sensational title: “The National Grazing Reserve Bill And Islamisation Of Nigeria: Matters Arising.”

    Against all evidence that there is no such bill before the National Assembly, Nwankwo went ahead full blast to try to make a straw man out of President Muhammadu Buhari the easier to destroy him. Of course, Nwankwo is only one of so many Nigerians who have come out to condemn the bill – and with it the president as its alleged sponsor – but the gentleman stands virtually alone as someone who has chosen to denounce both bill and its alleged sponsor with a pretence to the vigour scholarship requires.

    The bill, he claimed, was a deliberate attempt by Buhari,”to take our lands and hand them over to the Fulani cattlemen since it is only the Fulani that rear cattle in Nigeria.” Not only that, Buhari, he said, was also intent on Islamising Nigeria through the bill, presumably because all Fulani are Muslims.

    First, for someone who lays claim to scholarship you would expect him to respect the dictum that he who asserts must prove. He says there is a bill before the National Assembly and in spite of the denial by the spokesman for the Senate which he praised, he still refuses to let the fact get in the way of his decision to attack Buhari and his religion and region.

    Yet all he needed to do to save himself the embarrassment of looking like a Don Quixote attacking non-existent windmills was to go to the website of the National Assembly where he would have found out that the bill in question was initiated by Senator Zainab Kure who lost her seat in the last election and the bill, in any case, died after its second reading long before the end of the Seventh Senate.

    Second, for someone who claims to be a political scientist and a historian, it is truly amazing that he can assert that only the Fulani rear cattle in Nigeria and also assume that there are no Fulani Christians anywhere who would resist any attempt by anyone to Islamise Nigeria.

    Again, even for a layman it is truly incredible that anyone can claim with absolute certainty, as Nwankwo did in his article, that Boko Haram is a “Fulani-dominated insurgent group.” I’d thought every Nigerian knew Boko Haram was essentially a Kanuri phenomenon and that historically the older Borno Empire and the bigger Sokoto Caliphate have been rivals.

    Because he’d obviously made up his mind to attack Buhari and his religion and region regardless of the facts and of logic, it was not surprising Nwankwo would succeed only in making a laughing stock of himself before any intelligent and reasonable person.

    “The whole essence of Islam”, he said in his article,”is Jihad or simply put terrorism.” I would’ve thought such a piece of demagoguery was beneath anyone who lays claim to scholarship. For, Jihad, as any scholar of Islam and Arabic knows, simply means “struggle” and it has more to do with the struggle with one’s inner demons than converting people to Islam at sword point.

    After all, as the Qur’an says in Chapter 2 Verse 256, “There is no compulsion in religion…” The same Qur’an also makes it abundantly clear to Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him) in chapter after chapter, verse after verse, that what is incumbent on him, or on any prophet for that matter, is merely to deliver God’s message; that his is not guardianship over humanity.

    Of course the Holy Book, as Nwankwo said from several quotations, does enjoin Muslims to fight unbelievers. In doing so, however, it is merely in the good company of most other religions, especially those, like Christianity and Judaism, that lay claim to universality. Even then nowhere in the Qur’an, as Nwankwo claimed in quoting Chapter 4:89, did God say “Those who reject Islam must be killed”!

    It does say Muslims should fight and kill those who reject their religion, as he quotes from the verse. But then if he was honest with himself he would also have quoted from the very next verse which says a Muslim must desist from fighting a non-Muslim who does not persecute him and, instead, is willing to live with him in peace.

    What is true of Nwankwo’s quotation of Qur’an 4:89 was also true of all his other quotations from the Holy Book; he either misquoted them or did so deliberately out of context.

    Because, like so many other Nigerians, Nwankwo has misdiagnosed Nigeria’s problems, it is not surprising that he has come up with the wrong prescription for their cure.

    Next week, God willing, we shall examine his cure.

  • Food for thought from 2012

    Food for thought from 2012

    Nearly four years ago, July 13, 2012 to be specific, I delivered the key speech on a topic that couldn’t be more appropriate to the insecurity the country currently faces. The topic was “Media and civil liberties when the cloud of fear gathers”. The speech was 2242 words long and I delivered it on the occasion of the 4th Media Lecture Series of the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism. I’ve reproduced an edited version of it today for the lessons I believe it contains about the way our media have been reporting the so-called Herdsmen/Farmers clash in recent times.

    Two days ago (July 11, 2012), I received a short email from one Adesina Fagbenro-Byron who I don’t believe I have met. Its subject was “Thoughts on Boko Haram.” It reads:

    “Dear Mohammed

    • Is BH a foreign invasion on Nigeria in collusion with some Nigerian northern elites (NW and NE)?
    • Should we not shut down the northern borders until problem is contained?
    • What role are military intelligence and tactical air survey playing in helping to resolve the issue?
    • Is it not time to contain ‘Fulani’ herdsmen?

    Regards

    Sina”

    I believe most, if not all, the members of this distinguished audience will agree with me that Sina’s posers go to the heart of our subject this morning, to wit, how the country’s media reports conflicts at times of grave insecurity such as the country has faced since the Jama’atu Ahl-Sunnati Lil Da’awati wal Jihad, aka Boko Haram, started its terror campaign a few years ago, following the extra-judicial killing of its leader, Muhammad Yusuf, in the wake of its July 2009 battle with the army in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital.

    It should be obvious that Sina’s posers were rhetorical; they were asked to make a statement rather than obtain answers. Sina obviously believes the answers to his posers are all in the affirmative – or should be. In this I believe his rhetoric resonates well with a large number of Nigerians, almost certainly with the vast majority of Christians and southerners who are no doubt convinced by now that Boko Haram is an open Northern/Muslim agenda whose objective is to undermine, if not overthrow, the Goodluck Jonathan presidency for no worse crime than that he is a Southerner and a Christian.         No less than the president himself, along with two other prominent Nigerians, namely, the Senate president, David Mark, and the illustrious Nigerian after whom the media centre organising this lecture is named, appear to believe this theory.

    When Soyinka claimed in his The Butchers of Nigeria that Boko Haram has escalated its deadly attacks on Christians and government targets (and Mark and the president seemed to agree, at least by inference) he was right – but only up to a point. Boko Haram has indeed attacked Christians and government targets. But it has also attacked and killed Muslims. Indeed it has probably killed far more Muslims than Christians. Certainly it has led to far more innocent Muslims being killed and maimed as a result of the military’s scorched earth counter-insurgency against the sect in the mostly Muslim neighbourhoods from which its members seem to operate. Even more certainly its activities have slowly but surely been bleeding the Northern economy to death as non-indigenes and foreigners flee from the region in large numbers in fear for their lives.

    However, what seems to have caught the imagination of the Nigerian public is the victimhood of Christians and Southerners rather than the danger the Boko Haram terror poses to all Nigerians and to the country itself.

    The regional/religious mould of our politics is partly responsible for this distortion of the Boko Haram story. However, part of the blame must go to the Nigerian media for the way it has reported the story; the Southern and Christian dominance of the ownership and control of the Nigerian media has all too often led to an anti-Northern/Muslim bias in the coverage of not only the Boko Haram story, but also of most stories of ostensibly ethnic and religious conflicts in the country.

    A case in point was last Sunday’s shocking attack of mourners, allegedly by Fulani herders, at a burial ground in Jos which resulted in the death of Senator Gyang Datong and the Majority Leader of the Plateau State House of Assembly, Mr Gyang Fulani. Virtually all the newspapers accepted the state Government House’s more sensational version of the events at face value, namely that the two prominent legislators were shot to death, apparently because this version conformed to their stereotype of the evil, Christian hating Hausa/Fulani Muslim.

    The accurate version, it turned out, was that the two died as a result of shock following the unexpected attack which led to a stampede. Of course, this did not make the attack any less despicable and condemnable. However, the importance of accurately reporting what happened became apparent during a visit by the state’s governor, Da David Jang, to condole and commiserate with a member of the House of Representatives, Simon Mwadkon, who had survived the attack.

    During the visit, Jang reportedly said it was important that the world should know how Datong and Fulani died and asked Mwadkon, as an eyewitness and a lucky survivor of the attack, to describe what happened. “Everybody,” said Mwadkon, “was racing away, but the Senator slumped and there was a race to take him.” This version tallied with what members of the senator’s family had said about how the senator died. But it was the version most of the newspapers chose to downplay or even ignore.

    All media have their biases even during the best of times. In times of conflict these biases tend to become amplified. But then it is in times of conflict that the media ought to strive even harder for accuracy, balance, fairness and objectivity in their news coverage, if not in their commentary.

    The reason is simple. Only an adherence to these and other time-honoured tenets of professionalism can protect the media from being used by either side in a conflict for propaganda.

    The media must remember that when the clouds of fear gather, as they have in Nigeria since the rise of Boko Haram terror in the last three years, the civil rights of individuals and even their more basic civil liberties as guaranteed by the Constitution can be easily jeopardised by both insurrectionists and government alike through the use of fear.

    The other day the freedom of the press as a civil liberty came under serious attack when the premises of Thisday in Abuja and the building it shared with Sun in Kaduna were bombed, an act which Boko Haram claimed responsibility for. The attack, which left a few people dead and several more wounded, was roundly condemned as it should be.

    However, the fear of Boko Haram has allowed government to get away with violating the civil rights of many Nigerians because they are spouses of suspected members of the sect or because of mere suspicions that they are either members of the sect or its sympathisers. Many of such Nigerians are in detention without trial and neither the media nor civil society organisations have been speaking up against such violations.

    Now, Boko Haram is, of course, not the only source of the dark clouds hovering over our country. There is armed robbery. There is kidnapping. And in spite of the current amnesty for the Niger Delta militants there is the distinct danger that they may return to the region.

    Right now, however, Boko Haram tops the list and therefore deserves priority attention.

    The immediate solution to its menace is dialogue. Soyinka obviously would see this as “appeasement”. But it should be obvious by now that the use of force alone has not ended the vicious cycle of violence that the 2009 attempt at putting down the Boko Haram insurrection had started.

    Beyond dialogue, however, poverty, injustice and inequity, which are at the root of the violent conflicts in our society, must be tackled. The greatest responsibility for this belongs to the governors of the 19 northern states, as the poorest region in the country. And the greatest weapon the governors can use if they are to succeed in their responsibility is to invest massively in education, primary and secondary school education especially.

    In the old Northern Region of Sir Ahmadu Bello, its first and only premier, the region used to spend about 40 per cent of its budget on education, mostly secondary. The northern governors should learn from this.

    Still on the issue of tackling the poverty, injustice and inequities that are at the root of the violent conflicts in our country, the ongoing trillion-Naira scandal surrounding our petrol subsidy regime has, I believe, removed any doubt that corruption lies at the heart of the problems of this country. This disease of corruption has to be fought if we wish to bring an end to the endemic poverty that has become so pervasive in the land. A situation where a well-connected few in the public and private sectors live in soulless opulence at the expense of the vast majority of ordinary Nigerians is simply unacceptable.

    Fourth, a review of the revenue allocation formula between the Federal and the other levels of government has become an imperative. At more than half of the federation account, the current formula gives too much money to the centre, making it dabble into affairs like primary and secondary education and health-care that are best handled by the lower levels of government.

    The media on its part must play its watchdog role of holding our politicians and other public figures accountable to the people. They must never allow the clouds of fear that has hovered over the country these past few years to divert their attention from speaking out against any government’s subversion of the civil rights its citizens have been guaranteed by its constitution.

  • Still on regulating preaching in Kaduna State

    Still on regulating preaching in Kaduna State

    The subject of regulating religious preaching in Kaduna State is not about to go away, certainly not with the declaration by the governor, Malam Nasir el-Rufa’i, the other day that he will not back down from it in the face of stiff opposition to it from certain influential quarters.

    Besides, there are the shocking revelations of army heavy-handedness in the Army/Shi’ite face-off last December in Zaria at the ongoing public hearings of the judicial enquiry into the face-off. Many people have attributed the face-off itself ultimately to the absence of regulation of preaching in the state.

    Last week the issue was the subject of this column. My position was that even though I have reservations about government issuing licences to preachers, I believed the governor was right to seek to regulate preaching for the simple reason that no freedom anywhere is absolute.

    As usual, the article elicited mixed reactions. The most interesting and thought provoking of them came from my good friend, and a Kaduna-based senior lawyer, Mr. Bitrus Gwada.

    Actually his intervention was not in direct response to my piece. Rather it was to a piece he said he’d received in his email address from an organisation calling itself Southern Kaduna in Diaspora (SOKAD), USA & Canada. Gwada then circulated both SOKAD’s piece and his reaction to it among those on his mailing list, myself included. My assumption was that he sent me the two pieces because of my column last week.

    The SOKAD piece, signed by Messrs. Aminu Likita as President, Freeman Kamuro as Secretary and Ibrahim A. Maikori as Financial Secretary, was entitled: “The need for free exercise of religion in Kaduna State.” It was unequivocally opposed to regulating the preaching of religion in the state. The state’s House of Assembly, it said from the beginning, should “kill the bill if the Executive does not withdraw it.”

    In his reaction to the SOKAD piece, Gwada disagreed with its objection to regulating preaching. “The regulation of preaching in Kaduna (state),” he said, “was absolutely desirable.”

    Even then, he said, it was unnecessary to enact any new law on the subject. Instead, what was needed, he said, was a political will to enforce the existing 1984 edict as amended, along with relevant sections of the Penal Code applicable in the North since before the First Republic.

    He pointed out that contrary to SOKAD’s position that laws enacted by the military while in power are, by definition, null and void in a democracy, legally they remained “in force until properly repealed”, a position supported by another senior lawyer, Gaius Yaro, whose reaction to my column is published below.

    Gwada said the governor’s amendment of the 1984 law was not only gratuitous, it was also unconstitutional because it gave recognition to Islam and Christianity and the powers it gave Jama’atu Nasrul Islam (JNI) and Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) to pick and choose preachers was “not proper.”

    The amendment, he also said, was wrong to try offenders in Shari’a or Customary courts. All offenders, he said, should be tried in magistrates’ courts.

    Clearly while the senior lawyer disagreed with SOKAD on the big picture of regulating preaching in Kaduna State, he agreed with some of its positions on the details of the governor’s amendments.

    And in taking this position he drew attention to a 70-man committee, the Kaduna State Peace and Reconciliation Committee (KSPRC), Mr. Patrick Ibrahim Yakowa, the late governor of the state, set up in February 2012 under the joint leadership of Malam Abbas Dabo Sambo and AVM Ishaya Aboi Shekari (rtd), which recommended ways to keep the peace in the state. The key recommendations, Gwada said, were simply the enforcement of existing laws on religious activities and a ban on stereotypes and hate speeches. After all, no one, he pointed out, has ever been prosecuted over any of the violent religious crises the state had suffered.

    From all this, it seems Gwada and myself agree on at least two points; the need to regulate preaching in the state and to end the widespread impunity by preachers. Beyond these, however, we seem to disagree on how to go about the regulating.

    To begin with, I disagree with him that the governor’s amendment is gratuitous, if only because the existing 1984 law, with all its amendments, was enacted by soldiers without public input. Besides, the rise of the Internet alone since the last amendment of the law in 1996 has made some of its sections irrelevant.

    Secondly, I disagree with the argument by both himself and SOKAD that singling out Islam and Christianity for mention in the law amounts to their adoption by the state. The mention may amount to recognition but recognition is not the same as adoption.

    But even if recognising the two religions looks like discriminating against the other religions, there is the good reason that only the two claim to be universal and therefore actively seek to propagate themselves across race, ethnicity and nationalism. Therefore even if it looks discriminatory to single out the two religions for mention in the law, the argument, for all practical purposes, is academic. Indeed it can be counter-argued that the discrimination is AGAINST the two religions precisely because they seek for converts across all divides.

    Thirdly, on the truly difficult issue of who should chose and pick preachers, the three options seem to be: no one, government and self-regulation. We may add a fourth which is a combination of the second and third but with more of the third.

    In expressing his outright rejection of el-Rufa’i’s bill, – as opposed to the more measured opposition from his Chairman, Dr. George Dodo – the Secretary of Kaduna State CAN, Rev. Sunday Ibrahim, quoted the Book of Mark 16:15 as saying, “‘Go into the world and preach to every creature.’ That is a general call on everyone and as such everyone is a preacher.”

    Yet, as the reverend himself said in the same breathe, those called to be pastors, evangelicals and prophets do “undergo training with a particular denomination while they are licensed by and ordained by those churches.”(Daily Trust, Sunday March 20). This sounds to me like a sensible argument against a free-for-all.

    As I said last week, as a journalist whose calling is akin to that of a preacher, I have my reservation against government licensing. This is why journalists have fought against a government dominated Press Council since independence in 1960. Government licensing is clearly a slippery slope to government censorship.

    That leaves us with the third option of self-regulation by the religions themselves. Of course, like other options, it is not without its own problems, as can be seen from at least the last reaction to last week’s piece published below.

    Even then I consider it the least bad of the far-from-perfect options we have. To mitigate some of its inherent problems, there may be need to balance the religious composition of the committees to issue preaching licences with well respected secular community leaders and government officials, but with the last in minority.

    Like all other problems, there can be no perfect solution to the issue of religious preaching. But if we constantly talk to ourselves to understand and accept our differences in good faith and, of course, if we also faithfully enforce the laws we enact, the kinds and scale of religious violence we have seen in recent past will be a thing of memory.

  • RE: Preach and be damned?

    I agree with you in the piece with the rhetorical title: Preach and Be Damned? Why? This is because religion has become a leviathan and the state a Lilliputian before it. People can kill and maim in the name of religion. It is a sad, very sad situation. The governor will be the tallest man if he can clip the satanic wings of religion. But religion will not budge if the economy fails to eliminate penury and pain. Rather it will continue to exalt itself.

    Amos Ejimonye,

    Kaduna 

    +2348039727512.

    El-Rufa’i doesn’t have to amend the law. He should implement what is on ground strictly, and get evidence of its deficiencies, which he will cite, in convincing the House of Assembly and clerics that there is need for amendments.

    I am with him all along but “gani ya kori ji.” He has three years ahead. Let him test the law as it exists for six months, enough time to get credible and verifiable evidence of shortcomings or success. All the military edits have been validated by the 1999 Constitution and deemed to be laws of respective states where they exist.

    Governance is not speed; it is service to the good, the bad and the ugly.

    Gaius A. Yaro,

    +2348020505061. 

    This man el-Rufa’i is an anti-Christ. Use your column to tell him to stop that evil bill from the pit of hell or go to Hell if he does not repent.

    David,

    Lagos. 

    +2348128801999.

    I was initially in support of the Religious Preaching Regulation Bill after listening to Governor El-Rufa’i’s convincing points. However, after listening to the testimony on oath of Dr. Khaled (Abubakar Aliyu), the Secretary General of Jama’atuNasrul Islam, at the commission of enquiry on the Army-Shiites clash, that Shiites are not Muslims, I saw the need to further rework the proposed Bill.

    With power of regulation in the hands of predominantly Wahabi-Salafi JNI, financed largely by the government of Saudi Arabia, I don’t see other Muslim groups treated fairly under this bill as currently composed.

    JNI will do everything possible to deny the adherents of Tariqa and Shi’ites the right to propagate their doctrine of Islam.

    B.B. Dangora,

    babangidadangora@yahoo.com

  • Preach and be damned?

    Preach and be damned?

    As far as controversial issues go, the not-so-recent move by the equally controversial Malam Nasir el-Rufa’i, Governor of Kaduna State, to regulate preaching in his state probably ranks on top in the country in recent weeks. A man never afraid to take big decisions, the self-proclaimed “accidental public servant” sent a bill in October last year to amend a somewhat dormant 1984 law which regulated preaching in the state.

    Air-Commodore Usman Mu’azu, military governor of the state under the regime of President Muhammadu Buhari in his first coming as military head of state, enacted the law, titled Regulation of Religious Preaching Edict, 1984, in August that year following violent religious clashes in the state. It was subsequently amended twice, first in 1987 by Lt-Col Abubakar Dangiwa Umar, and then in 1996 by Lt-Col Hammed Ibrahim Ali, as military governors of the state.

    The 1984 law authorised the Jama’atu Nasrul Islam (JNI) for Muslims and the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) for Christians as the only two bodies that can approve preachers in the state.

    Among other things, it banned preaching without licence, the playing of religious cassettes in public places, uses of loudspeakers outside mosques or churches and their surrounding areas, abuses of religious books, carrying of weapons in places of worship or  preaching, and the use of the terms “infidel”, “non-Islamic”or “pagans.”

    It was this 1984 edict, as amended, that Malam el-Rufai sought to further amend by sending a bill to the House of Assembly in October last year. It’s not very clear why, but until last month few people outside the House heard anything about his bill. Then all hell broke lose when first, the state’s chapter of CAN, and subsequently the state’s chapter of Council of Imams and Ulama’as, raised serious objections to the bill.

    Perhaps the worst exemplification of the opposition to the bill was the headline and content of a story published by the Lagos- based Sunday Telegraph in its edition of March 6. “Religious war looms in Kaduna” it thundered and added the obviously inciting and unprofessional rider that el-Rufa’i “moves to stifle evangelism through the new bill.”

    The story described el-Rufa’i’s approach to the amendment as “subterranean.” It also said his amendment bill came into the open only because some Christian members of the House leaked it. Clearly if you depended on the newspaper’s story alone you would be forgiven for thinking the governor, being a Muslim, was on a warpath with Christianity!

    Not to be outdone was one fire-and-brimstone preacher from far away Auchi, Edo State, Apostle Johnson Sulaiman, who, during a Sunday sermon, told the congregation of his little known but aptly named Omega Fire Ministries that el-Rufa’i should “revoke the law or die”, reportedly to the applause of the congregation.

    A more restrained Chairman of Benue State CAN, Reverend Akpen Leva, said the bill was in conflict with our constitution over its provisions for freedom of religion, free speech and freedom of association. He also said although it did not favour any religion, it would have a “more damaging and long term lasting effect on the church.” (Daily Trust, Sunday April 3). His advice to the governor was that he should leave the original law as it was.

    Even more restrained was the Chairman of the Kaduna State chapter of CAN, Dr. George Dodo. They were not fighting the government in expressing reservations over the bill, he said. Instead they were only concerned about certain “grey areas” that needed to be ironed out and they were studying those areas.

    One of those grey areas apparently is the role of the state in licensing preaching. Rev. Father Evaristus Bassey, Director of Caritas International, a department of the Catholic Bishop’s Conference of Nigeria (CBCN), articulated the church’s fear about this area when he said: “Even if the proposed bill contains good aims, the proposed restrictions would play into the hands of officials of state who have hegemonic mentality and would allow them freedom to persecute one religion in favour of another.” In a state like Kaduna where Muslims constitute the overwhelming majority, it was obvious whom Bassey was referring to as hegemonists.

    However, it seems even the so-called hegemonists have been hardly exultant about the bill. For one, Senator Shehu Sani, representing Kaduna Central and someone who seems to be permanently at daggers drawn with the governor, has since denounced the bill as contrary to the freedom of speech guaranteed by our constitution. The state, he said, was “fragile” and those in authority owed it to the people to protect their right to worship.

    More telling than the senator’s objection is that of the state’s chapter of the Council of Imams and Ulama’a. Its Chairman, Sheikh Abubakar Suleiman Babantune, told Daily Trust (Sunday April 3) that it was wrong to ban preaching after 8pm as el-Rufa’i’s amendment intended to. Again the composition of the interfaith committee to license preachers, he said, was too skewed in favour of government officials and against the clerics. His association, he said, was studying these and other areas it was against.

    So far the only unqualified support for the bill has come from the state’s chapter of the JNI. Its Chairman, the elderly Malam Ja’afaru Makarfi, told Trust (April 3) “We are solidly behind the regulation of public preaching.” The JNI, he said, “had been regulating public preaching since the era of Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello,” the first and only Premier of Northern Nigeria, assassinated in the January 15, 1966 coup, which ended the First Republic.

    The problem with the JNI chairman’s position, however, is obvious; the law as it is has hardly worked. The state may not have witnessed sectarian violence on the scale seen in the 80s and early 90s, but this is no thanks to our clerics on both sides of the religious divide, many of whom have been unrestrained in their preaching on air and on the streets. Indeed one can even argue with some justification that the law’s lack of teeth was what probably led eventually to the recent Shi’ite/Army clash in Zaria in which the army seems to have grossly over-reacted.

    The state’s governor is therefore right to seek to further amend the law beyond the existing 1984 edict as amended, especially as the edicts were all enacted under military rule. The surprise is that his amendment has raised so much dust considering the fact, as he pointed out in a recent widely publicised media chat, that there are few provisions in his amendment that are not already in the old edict.

    Among these few are a ban on night preaching, the enlargement of the interfaith licensing committees at state and local government levels, and the amendment of the penalty for breaching the law from five years in prison with no option of fine to a fine of N250,000 or a maximum of two years in jail, or both.

    Opponents of el-Rufa’i’s amendment like Senator Sani say it is in conflict with the provisions of fundamental human rights enshrined in our constitution. The governor himself disagrees. “There is nothing in this law,” he said in the media chat in question, “that is not in conformity with the Constitution.” The governor is more in the right than his opponents.

    After all, no freedom anywhere is absolute; otherwise anarchy would be the result. The qualifications, however, must be reasonable and practicable.

    Both Islam and Christianity say we should do unto others as we want  them to do unto us whether those others belong to our religion and ethnicity or not. It therefore seems reasonable to me that there should be a ban on the use of loudspeakers outside mosques and churches beyond the call to prayers from mosques.

    It also seems reasonable to me that there should be a ban on the use of loudspeakers in vehicles plying our streets with religious materials. Certainly I am at one with the revision of the penalty for breaching the law, except that the years of imprisonment should not have been amended from five to two.

    However, my journalistic instincts, on one hand, make me wary of licensing preachers especially if government, as seems to be the case here, holds the veto about who gets licensed. On the other hand, no responsible authority can fold it arms and allow a free-for-all preaching.

    Obviously Nigeria, as a fragile nation-state, is not like America or the UK that can allow people to publish or preach and be damned only by civil laws, such as of libel, defamation, privacy, obscenity, etc. Nigeria’s fragility and religious sensibilities require prior censorship of sorts.

    However, such prior censorship should be vested in the religious communities themselves rather than in government.

    I believe these and other seeming conflicts between el-Rufa’i’s bill and our Constitution can be resolved by open hearings involving all stakeholders at the House of Assembly before the amendment becomes law.

    In the end, however, the problem really, as one will never tire of repeating, has never been so much our laws, as such. The problem has essentially been their application without fear or favour. Hopefully if and when el-Rufa’i succeeds in getting his amendment through, he will apply the law without being selective.

  • The passing away of a great journalist

    The passing away of a great journalist

    Two Saturdays ago Nigeria lost one of its most illustrious journalists. Malam Rufa’i Ibrahim was 66 on the very day – April 2 – he died, a victim of a rare form of leukaemia. As a close friend and professional colleague from the good old days of New Nigerian, I knew he was ill. Even then the news of his death, which first came to me from his brother-in-law and Sarkin Karshi in FCT, Alhaji Ismaila Mohammed, shocked me no end.

    Unsurprisingly, since then several tributes have been paid him, notably by two of his oldest and closest friends, Professor Mvendaga Jibo of Benue State University, and Malam Shehu Othman, formerly a teacher at Oxford University, UK. The tributes have all highlighted Rufa’i’s high intellect, his courage, simplicity, loyalty and integrity, among his many virtues.

    News of his death reminded me of an open letter I wrote to the late Major-General Tunde Idiagbon, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari’s second-in-command as military head of state, and the enforcer of the infamous Decree 4, which criminalised the embarrassment of government officials in the media even if what was said of them was true. As is well known, two journalists with The Guardian, Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor, were jailed under the law for their exclusive story on the politics of the appointment of a Nigerian High Commissioner to the UK.

    Rufa’i was detained without trial for nine months under the same law. My plea for his release, entered partly because he had just married his first wife, Amina, from whom he later separated, fell on deaf ears like all the others. He gained his freedom only following the palace coup against Buhari by his army chief, Major-General Ibrahim Babangida.

    My open letter was published in my New Nigerian column of Friday February 15, 1985. By way of paying tribute to a great colleague and friend, I am reproducing the letter here under, especially as it seems to hold lessons for Buhari in his second coming to power, albeit this time in mufti.

    May Allah grant Rufa’i’s friends, his relations and immediate family, especially A’isha, his wife of so many years with whom he had an only child, seven-year-old Adda’ullahi (Gift from God), the fortitude to bear the loss. May Allah also grant him aljanna firdaus.

    And now my 31-year-old letter to Idiagbon:

    Sir,

    Last week The Guardian and Concord, and this week the New Nigerian carried the story of a plea for Rufa’i Ibrahim’s release from detention. The plea had been entered by, among others, his brothers and his wife, Amina. I wish to join them to plead for his release too.

    Rufa’i Ibrahim, as you probably know, was the first editor of the Kano-based weekly Triumph when Haroun Adamu, also in detention, was its managing director. Rufa’i was abroad studying for a master’s in Journalism when the army took over. He ran out of cash before he could complete his studies, so he returned home to replenish. Poor Rufa’i, he came back only to lose his job (he was studying with pay) in the wake of a purge at Triumph.

    Whatever the justification for the purge, Rufa’i’s sack was certainly inexplicable. A first class analyst, he had helped nurture Triumph into one of the country’s best in both news and views. It was under his editorship that the paper, for example, scooped others on the Abuja contract scandal. It was also under him that the paper broke the news of the scandalous multi-million Naira debt owed Bank of the North by yesterday’s men of “timber and calibre” – a debt under which the bank is now groaning.

    Again, I recall hearing from the grapevine that Malam Adamu Ciroma thought the paper was excellent. When a former Managing Director of the New Nigerian Newspapers and one of the country’s best communicators says a paper he is ideological opposed to is excellent, you better believe it.

    You can see then, sir, that it is difficult to explain Rufa’i’s sack from Triumph. But the easy-going fellow that he is, he took it all in stride. He accepted that he could not finish his master’s anymore and started looking for a job. The Guardian quickly obliged him.

    The rest of the story, I believe, is familiar. He edited the Sunday edition of The Guardian for barely several months, before leaving for another editorial job in Jos. At The Guardian he wrote articles including his “Letter to Balarabe Musa”, which was rather unflattering of your government, and which is reportedly the reason for his detention.

    Sir, if I may state the reasons for my plea, there are two. First, he was still honeymooning with Amina, his wife, when he was taken away. This may sound trivial, but you will agree with me that it is a cruel thing to deprive husband and wife, not to talk of newlyweds, of the warmth of each other’s arms in this cold harmattan when no case of crime, treason or whatever, is established against either of them.

    Secondly, no less than the Head of State, General Muhammadu Buhari, has now in effect corroborated the thrust of Rufa’i’s ”Letter to Shagari.” In the letter he drew parallels between the state of the nation since the coup and George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” This comparison is what may have incurred the government’s displeasure. Rufa’i’s parallel may be “cheeky” but after the warning by General Buhari to soldiers and police during his tour of Lagos State last week, that “We can’t lock so many people and ourselves do what we detained them for,” the parallel can hardly be dismissed as a hyperbole.

    Sir, there is speculation abroad that Rufa’i has been taken in the spirit of federal character – that is, to balance the federal character of the victims of Decree No. 4, which, alas, you have just reiterated is here for good. I am inclined to believe this speculation is nonsense. Rufa’i’s detention may give (cold) comfort to the Tola Adeniyis who argue, tongue-in-cheek, that federal character must be stretched to such logical conclusions to make sense. However, the absurdity is so clear that the speculation simply cannot be true.

    While I am at it, may I, at the risk of sounding rapacious, also plead for Haroun Adamu and Tai Solarin to be brought to trial or freed, if there is nothing against them?

    The case against Haroun Adamu appears to be a simple one; he reportedly gave Punch newsprint and did not properly account for it. At least the governor of Kano State, Air Commodore Hamza Abdullahi, has said as much. Surely it does not take forever to gather evidence to prosecute him on those grounds. But then may be there is more to it than newsprints.  In which case, can there be a better way for your government to show Haroun for the villain that it thinks he is by simply making his crime public?

    As for Tai Solarin, the man ceased to be a hero for me since he degenerated into writing his slanderous series of “Letters to Shagari” (these infernal “Letters”!) in the Tribune during the last political era.

    The letters heaped abuses on Shagari, whose crime was mainly that he dared snatch Nigeria’s leadership crown from Solarin’s infallible idol, Awo. Worse, the letters also insulted whole sections of the country. So full of bile was Solarin that he would write thus: “Looking back today at the amount of sabotage that has been unleashed on this country by Hausa/Fulani oligarchy, incarnated in the NPC (1960-66) and NPN (1979-82) I REGRET BIAFRA BECAME A LOST CAUSE.” (Emphasis mine) (New Nigerian September 21, 1982).

    A Hausa/Fulani oligarchy there may very well be and its ways may be self-serving. Yet it is a distortion of history to blame only it for the sad fate of this country. The truth is that leaders, genuine or self-proclaimed, of every section of this country – certainly leaders of all the three major tribes – have not only participated in running this country, they have also participated in ruining it. What is more, it is arguable that the so-called Hausa/Fulani oligarchies, their political visibility notwithstanding, are the worst villains among the cast that has ruined the country.

    A man who can distort history as Solarin has done because he fails to get what he wants, does not deserve to be put on a pedestal or lionised the way the press has done. He certainly does not deserve the sympathy of anyone who belongs to the sections of the country he so loved to chastise unfairly.

    Still his continued incarceration is a hardly cause for joy. As far as the public knows his crime is that he defied the law and gathered people in order to call for return to civilian rule barely several months after the coup. His amazing faith in Awo as the country’s only redeemer may blind him to the foolishness of a hasty return to civilian rule, and he may be punished for defying the law, but I would have thought he was entitled to his views on return to civilian rule even under a military regime which, despite D4, has not abrogated the constitutional provision for free speech.

    These then, Sir, are my pleas and I suspect those of millions of other Nigerians. They are pleas made in good faith and I sincerely hope you will grant them.

     

  • Still on CCSG and its storm in a tea kettle

    Still on CCSG and its storm in a tea kettle

    In my column last week, I dismissed as a storm in tea kettle, the public outrage which followed President Muhammadu Buhari’s February sack of the councils and vice chancellors of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) and of the 12  federal universities ex-President Goodluck Jonathan established in the run-up to the 2011 general election.

    As if to prove me wrong, the following day, President Buhari was widely reported to have gone back on the sack and apologised for not going about it the right way in a remark at a meeting of his party’s National Executive Council at its headquarters.

    A civil society organisation, the Coalition of Civil Society Group (CCSG), which I dismissed as “dubious” because of its reputation of being available for hire, had led the attack on Buhari’s decision and even gone on to sue him. Its main focus, however, was the sack of the vice chancellor of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), Professor Vincent Tenebe, who had managed to get himself a two-year extension from its council last May, ahead of the expiry of his five-year term which ended last October.

    News report of Buhari’s reversal credited him with saying: “We gave a blanket order which we had to rescind when we said all boards are suspended or dissolved. We had to go back and lick our vomit in terms of universities’ councils because we found out that according to their laws, they cannot choose vice chancellors unless the councils sit and interview candidates who want to be VCs.

    “So, there is nothing wrong in saying sorry and going back on your decision. So, we said sorry and allow all the universities to continue with their councils. So, please, try to bear with us as we reflect on where we found ourselves.”

    Predictably, the CCSG has since seized the President’s apparent apology to sort of crow about how right it was to have criticised his decision. It praised the President for his courage in accepting he was wrong. As a result it has, it said, decided after an emergency meeting of its executive council members to withdraw its suit at the National Industrial Court (NIC/ABJ/64/2016) filed against the President and the Federal Ministry of Education.

    “Nigerians,” it concluded, “are watching and anxiously waiting to see this open apology made by you come into fruition because much is expected of this government.”

    However, before it rolls out its drums in celebration of its success, it should tarry a while because its victory may be more apparent than real, certainly as far as the case of the NOUN vice chancellor, its principal interest, is concerned.

    The day Buhari reportedly reversed himself, I received a call from Professor Auwalu Yadudu, a distinguished constitutional lawyer and academic at Bayero University Kano and an apparent beneficiary of the controversial sack, as the vice chancellor of the Birnin Kebbi University. I was in far away Doha, Qatar, attending this year’s annual congress of the International Press Institute, the global network of editors, publishers and leading journalists for media freedom based in Vienna, Austria.

    He had sent a text earlier on my text only number in reaction to my column to explain to me that he had had to decline his appointment because it had “fallen far short of due process” and was “of very questionable legal basis.” Knowing the professor as a man of integrity and knowing how twice he has lost the election for the vice-chancellorship of his university and did not bother to contest a third time even though he was searched for, it got me worried that he would decline an opportunity to become one, especially since the nomination came from our mutual friend, the Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu.

    I quickly returned Yadudu’s call from a local service provider and he explained to me for close to 15 minutes that, contrary to my position, there were indeed laws setting up the universities. True, he said, ex-President Jonathan’s 12 federal universitiesoperated for almost five years without laws, but he enacted them in the twilight of his administration, apparently to little or no publicity.

    As if to add more to my discomfiture, I received a text from Professor Taoheed Adedoja, the pro-chancellor of the Federal University Dutse, last Saturday, a day after my return from Doha, which agreed with Yadudu. Contrary to my assertion in my column, Adedoja said, he had in his possession the law establishing the Dutse university and he is willing to send me a copy. I’ve reproduced the text below.

    His text and the other reactions by text and email that I have reproduced below, suggest that I too, like the President, may have got some of my facts wrong even though it is not clear which of his decisions he was referring to in his remarks between the first decision in mid-July last year, which affected only the councils of all federal universities and which he had since reversed, and the second last month, which affected both the councils and vice chancellors of ex-President Jonathan’s 12 universities and NOUN.

    Whichever one the President is referring to, I owe my readers an unreserved apology for getting some of my facts wrong, especially regarding the state of origin of some of the new vice chancellors as attested to by some of the texts below. However, I owe no one any apology about my position on NOUN whose vice chancellor got himself a surreptitious two-year extension that has no basis in law, an action that clearly raised questions about the integrity of its council members.

    With its record of defending dubious causes as a civil society organisation, one cannot but question CCSG’s cries about wolves. Even then the President should listen to it and hasten to clarify the ambiguity surrounding his apparent apology so that the huge mess he inherited from his predecessor on the 13 universities in question can be properly sorted out.

    And now the reactions to last week’s piece:-

    I refer to your column of yesterday reacting to comments on the sack of 13 university VCs and their councils. I think it was a case of how not to defend the Buhari government. I am a die-hard admirer of Adamu Adamu the columnist and was HUGELY disappointed by that action.

    Surely, even if there is no law legalising the existence of the universities, there are conventions and there is precedence. To sack a VC by fiat after two years in office as the case of that of Kebbi and one other is simply unjust.

    To appoint FOUR (or three if you want to be technical) VCs from the same university-BUK- shows an unbelievable insensitivity. It is attitude like that (Nothing will happen) that erodes credibility and support faster than any other. And where is the JUSTICE?It will be sad if Adamu Adamu does not strive to live up to his writings.Your article, Sir, was a disservice to the government.

    Bala Muhammad Dalhatu

    Federal University of Technology

    Minna.

    bala_yaman@yahoo.com

     

    I am the Pro-Chancellor of Federal University, Dutse and I have a copy of our university law, contrary to your misinformation to the public in your article of today, March 23.

    Prof. Taoheed Adedoja

    +2348066405999.

     

    A little correction. In addition to Auwalu Yadudu, Profs Abdallah Uba and Fatima Batool are all from Kano.

    Abdullahi,

    Kaduna.

    +2348034420831.

     

    Professor Abdallah Uba Adamu, the VC of NOUN, is also from Kano. And, sir, even perception in matters of national importance should not be taken for granted. So use your relationship with the honourable minister and properly counsel him.

    Comrade Dauda Sabuwar Unguwa,

    Katsina.

    +2348165270879.

     

    I am always amused when I see or hear a group of people protest over issues. The reason is most members of the protesting group are uninformed of what are the real motives of the protest. But it baffles me when enlightened and “learned” persons join the group one way or the other. The reality is, social media addicts are given to believing anything that comes their way. It is bad that Nigerians do not think over and check anything these days especially when it has to do with “one of their own”.

    Such groups, be they defenders of democracy, conscience, justice, this or that, are a bunch of unregulated noise makers that should be ignored. Your record of this group’s past activities is good information.

    Gyaanyi Cher

    mbachermbanderakur@gmail.com

     

    Kindly lend your credible voice in favour of my humble request to the honourable minister of Education in your popular columns. I sent you a text message earlier today after reading your column in The Nation.

    NOUN has graduated three sets of Law graduates now and the authorities that be have refused to allow them go to law school. A lot of young promising Nigerians below the age of 30 have also graduated from NOUN in other areas and they have also refused to call them for NYSC. All these steps will kill NOUN which is one educational policy that can catapult Nigeria educationally.

    FabiyiAdebanji

    adebanjifabiyi@yahoo.com

     

    Thank you very much for throwing light on the “sacked VCs” and their “defenders”. It makes sense that the minister and indeed the government are being criticised and condemned by the same group that stoutly defended MAINA and ABBA MORO COALITION OF CRUDE SCUMBAGS GROUP! They’re nothing but a bunch of political jobbers and prostitutes!!

    SB Yakubu

    suraj@globalstraskills.com

  • CCSG and its storm in a tea kettle

    CCSG and its storm in a tea kettle

    The recent big fuss kicked up by a rather dubious Coalition of Civil Society Group(CCSG) last month over the sack of the councils and vice chancellors (VCs) of 13 federal universities, in particular the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), may have died down somewhat, but it provides one more evidence that in this day and age of the Internet perception seems to matter more than reality.

    The story itself is by now all too familiar. Early in February the Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu, announced the sack of the councils and VCs of the 12 universities President Goodluck Jonathan set up in the run-up to the 2011 general election. The minister also announced the sack of the council and vice chancellor of NOUN and replaced only the vice chancellors of all 13 universities but left their councils vacant

    Almost immediately the CCSG led a demonstration to the National Assembly and petitioned the legislature over the sack of the VCs, if not the councils. The Education minister’s action, the coalition said in its petition, was a gross violation of the Universities (Miscellaneous) Act No 11 as amended. It also claimed the minister violated the federal character principle of the Nigerian Constitution by his “hasty appointment of friends and cronies in place of those illegally removed from office,” four of them, the coalition said, from Kano State alone.

    Since then, just about everyone who has written about the issue, from pundits and editorial writers to legal experts, seem to agree with the coalition.

    Yakubu Mohammed, former deputy chief executive and respected columnist at the rested Newswatch – and himself not exactly an uninterested party as pro-chancellor of one of the affected universities – called the minister’s action in his new back page column in The Guardian(February 19) “an embarrassment” that was “guaranteed to snowball into a major crisis of confidence.”

    Mohammed was mild compared to his colleague and chief executive at Newswatch, Ray Ekpu. Ekpu said in a piece in the current edition of The Source newsmagazine that the minister’s action was “an assault on the university system” and it was strange that”a Minister of Education, who is a civilian…and had worked in a profession, journalism, where rights and the obedience of laws are championed, could commit this illegality and this arbitrariness.”

    Some of the editorial writers were even harsher than Ekpu. Those at the New Telegraph (March 3), for example, said in effect that the minister was an ignoramus. He was, they said, “bereft of ideas about the extant laws, rules and regulations, as well as procedures guiding the appointment of vice-chancellors to the university, or otherwise, and worse still the ideal of how the university system is governed.”

    Not to be outdone, those at The Guardian (March 11) said the minister’s action was”a powerful advertisement of anti-democratic policies, even as its appointment of new ones to replace them is an unabashed display of ignorance.”

    His action, the newspaper also said in somewhat fanciful language, “points to a baffling and scandalous situation which academics have called upon themselves; namely, that like the typical Nigerian position-seeker, even the respected academic, who should be a paladin of moral rectitude and the rule of law, is willing to trample the law for personal gains.”

    The legal luminary, Chief Afe Babalola, SAN – and himself the founder of a private university in his native Ekiti State – weighed in with his expertise in a two-part piece on his back page column in the Nigerian Tribune (February 18 and 25). Not even the president as visitor to the universities, much less his education minister, the chief said on February 18, but with more restrained language, has the power to sack their councils and vicechancellors.

    With due respect to all the respectable and not-so-respectable critics of the minister and, by extension, of his boss, President Muhammadu Buhari as visitor to all 13 universities, all the fuss they’ve kicked up is merely so much storm in tea kettle.

    My reason for saying so is simple; the President broke no law because there was no law for him to break. The simple fact, which virtually all the minister’s critics have found convenient not to see, was that the relevant laws they all referred to were never enacted by President Jonathan before he left office last May, five years after he had set up his 12 universities by fiat.

    So far the fairest criticism of the minister’s act seems to have come from the editorial writers of Thisday. In their editorial of February 25, they said they agreed with a statement issued by the Secretary General of the Committee of Vice Chancellors of Nigerian Universities, Professor Michael Faborode, in which the CVC criticised the sack of its 13 members. In doing so, however, the newspaper drew attention to the fact that it had consistently warned “against most of these federal universities that were established by presidential fiat with no enabling laws and primarily for political reasons.”

    Here the rhetorical question Chief Babalola asked in his February 18 intervention in NigerianTribune is instructive and underscores the importance of Thisday’s caveat. “The Question is,” the legal luminary asked, “Has the Visitor the power to dissolve the Council or appoint vice chancellor to the university particularly where a university has been established and a Council has been established by law?” The answer, he said unsurprisingly, was an “emphatic NO.”

    The alert reader would, however, have noticed his caveat, “…WHERE A UNIVERSITY HAS BEEN ESTABLISHED AND A COUNCIL HAS BEEN ESTABLISHED BY LAW.”  All critics of the minister assumed this was the case when indeed it wasn’t.

    The principal law on establishing public universities, the Universities(Miscellaneous) Amendment Act 2010, may have granted our public universities autonomy but the fact, it bears repeating, was that none of the 12 federal universities in question had its council and vice chancellor appointed by law as well.

    Therefore the worst thing the President can be accused of is breaking the spirit, rather than the letter, of the principal law. This, of course, is not a good thing for anyone to do, much less a President. But it is a lesser offence to commit than the legacy he inherited especially since, as visitor, he has, according to experts, the powers to appoint pioneer councils and vice chancellors of new public universities.

    The case of NOUN was, of course, different from those of the other because it’s been in existence since 1983. Perhaps it was for that reason that the CCSG focused on the sack of its VC.

    Still, even here the President committed no offence. Indeed he should be praised for trying to correct an illegality by doing what he did.

    By the law the 2010 principal law on public universities, the tenure of NOUN’s vice-chancellor, Professor Vincent Tenebe, expired on October 15, 2015. However, in May, ahead of the swearing in of Buhari as President, the council met in rather questionable circumstances and gave him a two-year extension. This was clearly illegal because the law permits all VCs only one term of five years and no extension.

    Yet because we are in an age where perception seems to matter more than reality, CCSG had the temerity to accuse government of breaking its own laws. But then given its dubious antecedents this was hardly surprising. For, the same CCSG it was that organised a rally and petitioned the National Assembly in support of Alhaji Abdulrashid Maina who was seriously implicated in the huge pension scandal back in early 2013. The same coalition organised a pro-Moro rally in March 2014 when the public asked for the prosecution of Abba Moro as Interior minister over the immigration staff recruitment stampedes of that year in which 17 people died and many more were injured. Moro has since been standing trial for alleged financial scandal over the debacle.

    More recently the coalition went to the defence of the top military brass sacked for allegedly diverting huge funds meant for arms purchase and welfare of their troops in the fight against Boko Haram by accusing Northern Muslim leaders of paying Amnesty International to expose the alleged shenanigans of the service chiefs.

    With a credibility like that of the CCSG it was not surprising that it would accuse the minister of Education of appointing four of the 13 new VCs from Kano State alone when indeed there was only one – Professor Awwalu Yadudu – who was more than qualified as a university don and a distinguished constitutional lawyer to serve as a VC.

    For all the fuss kicked up as a result of the recent sack of the councils and VCs of 13 federal universities, President Buhari breached no law. However, in this day and age when perception seems to matter more than reality, his administration should quickly sign the laws establishing the 12 universities and appoint their councils so that they can get on with the business of exercising their autonomy.

  • Still on the Yunusa/Ese saga

    Still on the Yunusa/Ese saga

    Today I am devoting virtually the entire column to 10 of the scores of responses to my piece last week on the Yunusa/Ese saga. Of the 10, the first is the most pertinent to the central point of my article; it’s wrong to blame a whole people, region or a religion for the apparent transgressions of their members.

    The professor is right about his Yoruba proverb, which says in effect that treating a symptom never really cures the illness. I am afraid, however, that it is the professor, not me, that is more concerned with the symptom rather than the illness. Religion, region and tribe are, of course, real. They are, however, not our problems in themselves. The problem is how we use them as a façade to cover up our shortcomings, especially as individuals. This much is obvious from the professor’s emphasis on Yunusa’s religion and that of his apparent victims, rather than on their humanity, or their lack thereof.

    If an Efik boy took away my teenage daughter from my Nupeland to Calabar, my instinct, of course, would be to blame everyone else but myself. But that would be dishonest. A more honest reaction would be to ask myself what I was doing – or not doing – as a father that an Efik boy from far away Calabar could come to my land and so easily steal my daughter, assuming that he indeed stole her, because it is not impossible that, as Ese first claimed before her story changed, my daughter may have followed the Efik boy of her own free will.

    However, whether the Efik boy stole my teenage daughter or not, it certainly would be dishonest of me to blame the Efik boy’s action on the entire Efik nationality. It would then also amount to double standards for me to NOT blame all Nupes were a Nupe man to steal an Efik teenager.

    The fact is that long before the Yunusa/Ese affair, there have been widely reported cases of so-called baby factories involving teenage abductions prevalent in certain sections of this country. In all these cases little or nothing was ever said about the ethnicity, region or religion of the suspected abductors even though their apparent intentions couldn’t be more dishonourable.

    All of which is to say in the end the disease, as our learned professor should know, lies more inside us as individuals rather than in the tribes or regions we are born into or the faiths we chose to adhere to.

     

    And now to the reactions:-

    Consider this scenario: Your 13-year-old daughter is taken away from Nupeland to Calabar by an Efik boy without your knowledge and you learn that the boy had married your daughter and got her converted from Islam to another faith and he has made her pregnant.

    Would you be pleased to read the type of stuff you wrote on the subject matter?

    Yoruba has a proverb for your article: you left leprosy untreated and started treating ringworm. Your article absolutely left out the salient issue and went on to defend your faith even when a Muslim boy has committed a heinous crime against Christians and against tradition and against the law of any and every civilised country.

    Prof Babajide Lucas  bajlucas@yahoo.co.uk

     

    I just read your column of March 9. I totally agree with the position that the media, civil society and other commentators have over sensationalised the issue. From my point of view however, the issue is neither religious, nor tribal, NOR CRIMINAL! At worst it is a MORAL case: the mistaken indulgence of two teenagers, the ENTIRE details of which the world may NEVER know.

    It has taken this dimension because Yunusa and Ese are from two (opposing) parts of the country and it involved an elopement. Otherwise, there are similar situations happening in many small communities (young girls moving in with young or older men) without parental approval all over the place.

    So when I see the police parading the misguided Yunusa as a kidnapper, I think they miss the point because an issue that would have been resolved through counselling and alternative dispute resolution tools is overblown into what it is not. And until we learn to respect the universal precept that true love knows neither Islam nor Christianity, neither tribe nor status, we shall continue to experience these and similar shocks that drive everyone insane.

    Julius Ogar

    Sniperj2002@yahoo.com

     

    Did the abductors of Steve Nwosu’s wife marry her? Did the abductors of the three girls in a missionary school marry them? Commercial kidnappers are not the same as Yunusa’s and his like who kidnap for marriage and wear them hijab. You still do not believe that Chibok is real. Just as you never believed Boko Haram was wrong?

    Alabi Williams, The Guardian

    +2348023243751

    Thank you for the article on the Yunusa/Ese saga! However, you should have commented on other cases of abducted Christian girls by Muslims reported by The Punch of March 6, 2016. As a Muslim I am embarrassed.

    Abdul-lateef Olabisi Port Harcourt

    +23438033095924

    You can’t be wrong by stating the obvious: Nigerians exhausted more of their strength on Yunusa/Ese saga than they have ever done to move this country forward. While some people are busy arguing with facts, some are taking their stands based on assumptions. Others are thinking that it is an opportunity to paint those they dislike in black paint.

    Personally, I was (and still is) against what Yunusa did because of some reasons. (1) Ese is a minor. (2) He took her away from home while she is not his sister, wife or relative. (3) His stubbornness in not listening to his father’s advice not to bring Ese to Kano, etc.

    The media on their part have really exhibited a great amount of hypocrisy by ignoring Ese’s side of the story. They hated spreading Ese’s statement that it was her decision and that she didn’t want to go back to Bayelsa.

    It is quite unfortunate if events as important as this will be discussed not on the rational basis, but on sentiments with the sole intention of undermining a section of this country.

    Cmr Muhammad Sambarka  Lagos.

    +2348186286015.

    The media feign tolerance towards the hundreds of bastard in their midst. It is a joking matter in the East for a man to kidnap a dozen mistresses and beget a dozen bastard children every year. Such lecherous creatures are proudly labelled as “BABY FACTORIES”. And the religion, tribe and section of the kidnappers are never questioned. Why do they make fish of one and fowl of the other?

    Mansur Kotorkoshi  +2347034629236

     

    I always see you as a great political analyst, but whenever it comes to religious matters, you always mess it up. That was how you tried to justify a criminal action against a Redeemed Pastor’s daughter at the Etsu Nupe’s palace a few years ago. What a shame! The social media will continue to expose people like you. Thank God, there is nothing you can do about it.

     

    Laide Balogun, Dutse, Abuja. +2348056346009

     

    I agree with you, religion and tribe should not come into the Ese and Yellow Affair. But unfortunately the bumpy road has come to stay.

    Some years ago, the bourgeois class used tribe to make a coup by soldiers to look like an Igbo affair. It worked splendidly. The problem is that religion and tribe will always be used by the satanic ruling class until neo-colonialism and imperialism are destroyed by the  oppressed and exploited.

    Amos Ejimonye,  Kaduna.

    +2348039727512

     

    The Ese/Yunusa saga exposes the hypocrisy of the Nigerian politician and the media and rights groups. Were Nigeria truly a democratic state, someone should have been punished for not sending Ese to school at 14 and at 24 Yunusa should be pursuing his PhD instead of riding a KEKE.

     

    Shame of a state of failing youths

    Osaiya Sedi Aminu

    +2348075467140

    I found your column quite instructive, especially when it happens that we have a media in this country that is polarised along religious sentiments. Every citizen deserves a hearing before conviction, but the media have already convicted Yunusa of abduction and forceful marriage.

    I pray our media would be more proactive in creating a united Nigeria. This is what we need in this country now.

    +2348062067613.

  • The Yunusa/Ese saga and media hypocrisy

    The Yunusa/Ese saga and media hypocrisy

    I may be wrong, but I can’t remember any story that has attracted such wide and intense newspaper coverage in the last five years or so as the so-called abduction of an underage Ese Oruru (14) from her native Bayelsa State by a teenage Yunusa Dahiru (18) to his native Kano State. Going through the country’s top seven newspapers – The Punch, Thisday, The Nation, Sun, Daily Trust, Vanguard and The Guardian, not necessarily in that order – I recorded no less than 70 pages of news, comments, interviews and editorials on the story between February 28 and last Monday.

    Not even the marriage of a not-so-young Senator Ahmed Sani, former Governor of Zamfara State and the pioneer of penal Sharia in the country, to an under-age Egyptian girl in Abuja over five years ago, indeed, not even the globally condemned abduction of over 100 girls from Chibok, Borno State, almost two years ago, allegedly by Boko Haram insurgents, has attracted this quantity of newspaper coverage.

    Unfortunately, as is invariably the case anytime we allow sentiments and mischief to get the better of our reasoning, the quantity of the newspaper coverage of the story couldn’t have stood in sharper contrast to its abysmal quality.

    Last Monday our Literature Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, and radical lawyer and Senior Advocate, Femi Falana, addressed a joint press conference on the story, apparently with the intention of  replacing the intense heat the media have generated by their awful coverage with much needed light. Both of them emphatically condemned attempts to characterise the issue as essentially religious. “The attempt to bring religion into the matter,” one newspaper quoted Falana as saying, “is sheer hypocrisy.”

    Soyinka was even more categorical and specific. “Let’s take religion out of this,” The Nation (March 7), said he said. “We are talking about pure criminality and it is my demand, and will always remain my demand, that unless you make an example of people like (Senator Ahmed Sani) Yarima, there would be thousands of Yunusa, the man who abducted Ese.”

    One couldn’t agree more with both Soyinka and Falana. Indeed one can go even further to say the two should have added the attempts to tribalise and regionalise the story while condemning the attempts to drag religion into it. However, while I completely agree with them that we should keep religion out of the matter, I must say it seems to me both of them have the wrong culprits in mind.

    In condemning the attempt at bringing religion into the matter, both of them specifically named Ishaq Akintola as their chief villain. “People like Akintola,” Falana said during the press conference in question, “are playing on the intelligence of the poor.”

    Akintola is a professor of Islamic Eschatology and Director of Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC), a Lagos-based civil society organisation. In an interview in Sunday PUNCH (March 6), the professor said Islam has no age barrier for marriage, implying support of the claim that Yunusa forcibly married Ese. “Non-Muslims,” he said, “should keep off Muslim affairs.”

    It is true that in Islam, as Akintola said, there is no age barrier in marriage. But I am sure the professor would be the first to agree with me that in a multi-religious and multi-ethnic country like Nigeria, it is difficult, if not impossible, not to mind your neighbour’s business. As he himself admitted, not all marriages in Nigeria are between two persons of the same faith. Even if his claim that only 0.1% of Muslims marry outside their faith is true – and I suspect it is grossly exaggerated – he would, I am sure, be the first to agree with me that the rights of the 0.1% non-Muslims they marry deserve protection.

    Even then I believe it is grossly unfair to accuse Akintola of bringing religion into the Yunusa/Ese controversy. On the contrary, a complete reading of his Sunday PUNCH interview shows he was totally against doing so. When the episode first broke out, MURIC, as he pointed out, issued a statement that Yunusa should be arrested and prosecuted for abduction because Ese was a minor and a Christian who required her parent’s consent, a condition Sharia says must be met for a marriage to a minor to be valid.

    In any case, the fact, as Akintola pointed out, was that no one in authority in Kano, not the Shari’a Council, not the Emir, not the putative groom’s father, nor others some newspapers have accused of forcing Ese to marry Yunusa, agreed to his request. On the contrary, they all did their bits to see Ese returned home to her parents, something the newspapers would not want to acknowledge because doing so would take the sensationalism out of their stories.

    So instead of attacking Akintola for pointing out the fact that Islam has no age barrier for marriage, Soyinka and Falana should be blaming the prominent politicians (for example, Senator Ben Murray Bruce), the Christian clergy (for example, Reverend Musa Asake, the Secretary-General of Christian Association of Nigeria) and sections of the media that framed the issue as one of a Muslim man stealing a Christian girl and forcing her to change her religion to marry her, instead of looking at it as the criminal matter that it is.

    Probably the chief villain among newspapers in their clearly biased reporting was The PUNCH. “Kano Man,” it trumpeted in the sensational headline of its lead story on February 28, “abducts 14-year old Bayelsa girl, forcefully marries her”! Not only did the newspaper, like many others, convict Yunusa of abduction even before he has had his day in court, they have all echoed the lie that he forced her into marriage when no such thing ever took place.

    It is apparent that what we have here is a case of one standard for Muslims and another for non-Muslims. And as if to expose the hypocrisy of those who first dressed the Yunusa/Ese case in religious and ethnic garbs, about the very day Ese was finally united with her parents, a daring gang of young men invaded a girl seminary in Lagos and allegedly abducted three girls. You would search all the newspapers in vain to know the religious, ethnic or regional identities of the gang members.

    Long before this case, there was that of the daring kidnapping of the wife of Steve Nwosu, the Deputy Managing Director of Sun and one of its ace columnists, from his Lagos residence last year. Throughout their wide coverage of the episode, there was not a word about the religion, region or ethnicity of the suspects. It is not surprising then that his column of March 2 is, at least in my opinion, one of the most sensible things anyone has written about the Yunusa/Ese case, even though I did not completely agree with it.

    “Nobody,” he said halfway through his article, “should go thinking that this malaise is an Islam thing alone. It is not! Many Christian clerics are also into it.”

    The biased framing of the Yunusa/Ese story  by newspapers implied by Nwosu’s accurate observation is not the only worrisome aspect of it. Equally worrisome is the attempt by the newspapers to paint a pattern of Muslims abducting little Christian girls and forcing them into marriage by dredging up cases of such abductions where none existed.

    In its lead story on page 5 of its March 7 edition, for example, The Guardian said a “15-year old Benue girl, Patience Paul, who was abducted since last year and taken to Sokoto, has re-united with her family after the intervention of Governor Aminu Tambuwal and other security agencies.”

    Reading this story you will never know that Patience and her parents have been resident in Sokoto for years instead of in their native Benue State. You will also never know that when she wanted to convert to Islam under the influence of a Muslim girl friend, and because she said she was a victim of child abuse at home, the religious authorities in Sokoto refused to oblige her because they said she did not have her parents’ consent.

    Instead some of the newspapers went as far as to recklessly accuse the urbane Sultan of Sokoto and head of Nigerian Muslims, Alhaji Sa’ad Abubakar, of hiding her in his palace.

    Soyinka and Falana are right to condemn any attempt to bring religion into the Yunusa/Ese saga. But they are wrong to accuse only one side of doing so.