The Nation Newspaper

Category: Mohammed Harunna

  • As Erdogan comes visiting…

    As Erdogan comes visiting…

    In its edition of February 6, The Economist published a 16-page pull-out on Turkey. The weekly newsmagazine headlined the pull-out “Erdogan’s new sultanate,” an obvious reference to the country’s historical past as the great Ottoman Empire when it ruled the Muslim world – and much more besides–between early 14th century and late 19th century from Istanbul, its capital.

    The pull-out’s headline was as much a tribute to, as it was a disapproval of, Recep Tayip Erdogan, the country’s president, who arrived Nigeria last night for a one-day official visit to the country as part of his four-nation quick African tour, which began with Cote d’Ivoire on Monday, through Ghana yesterday to end with Guinea tomorrow.

    As I had pointed out on the two occasions I’ve written about the country on these pages – on May 20, 2015 and October 14 – almost no Turkish leader in the country’s history has worked as hard to establish it as a plural democracy and a thriving economy as Erdogan, first as mayor of Istanbul between 1994 and 1998 and then thrice as the country’s prime minister between 2003 and 2014. Under his leadership, Turkey, which, in the words of The Economist, was “an inward-looking nation that exported little except labour”, has transformed into “a regional economic power-house, a tourist magnet as well as a haven for refugees, and an increasingly global hub for energy, trade and transport.”

    Alas, since he stepped aside from partisan politics in 2014 to become the country’s elected, but ostensibly ceremonial, president, he seems to have worked just as hard to undo his great legacy as a partisan politician. The problem seems to be his inexplicable ambition to turn himself into the country’s first elected imperial president.

    The Turkey Erdogan inherited in 2003 was a republic Mustafa Kemal, universally acknowledged as father of modern day Turkey (hence his Turkish sobriquet, Atatürk), had forged out of the Ottoman Empire defeated by Western Allied forces in World War I and which the Allies subsequently dismantled in 1918. Kemal was an active soldier-member of the Young Turks, a revolutionary group of intellectuals who eventually deposed the last sultan of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire in 1909, ahead of First World War. In time he became the country’s first president in 1923.

    Two key elements in Kemal’s attempt to forge a modern Turkey were his banishment of Islam from the public arena and the imposition of Turk as the national language. The first was symbolised by a ban on women wearing hijab in public and on men wearing long beards. This was in a country where nearly 80 per cent of the population was Sunni Muslim.

    The main target of the second element of Kemal’s modernisation of Turkey were the country’s largest minority group, the Kurds, who lived mostly in the Southeast border of the country and who, like the Turks, were Muslims, but who, unlike other minorities, refused to abandon their language and culture. Today the Turks number about 20 million.

    With time the military as the institution on whose back Kemal rode to power and to national and international fame, saw itself as the custodian of Kemal’s attempt to make Turkey a modern, secular nation. Several times it intervened in politics whenever it thought his legacy was under threat. The man died in 1938, but his legacy has survived him almost to date.

    Erdogan’s great achievement was to have proved that it is possible to keep his country modern and make it democratic and prosperous without banishing Islam from the public arena and without imposing language and cultural uniformity on it.

    His vehicle was the so-called “mildly Islamic” Justice and Development Party (AK, in Turkish), which he co-founded in 2001 after a short spell in prison for reciting a poem in public, which the authorities judged as “inciting hatred based on religious differences.”

    Barely a year after its founding, AK won the next general election in 2002 and he became prime minister. The party won the election with more than a little help from Hizmet Movement, founded by Fethullah Gulen, the 74-year-old Muslim cleric described by The Economist as “a charismatic prayer-leader, who preaches a mild, Sufism-inspired and public-service-oriented form of Islam.” Gulen has lived in self-exile in the US for decades.

    AK has remained in power since 2002, but under Erdogan’s firm grip even after he had stepped aside from partisan politics in 2014 to become a nominal president, the party seems to have fallen out with not just the Gulenists. It seems to have done so with just about every other group – the media, civil society organisations, Islamist modernisers, socially-conservative businessmen, secular reformists and even Kurds – that had supported it, especially in permanently neutralising the hitherto all-powerful, meddlesome Kemalist military and forcing it to retreat, for good, back to its barracks where it belonged.

    The sore point seems to have been the man’s ambition to recreate Turkey as a sultanate after his self-image as an imperial president. In June last year he took a gamble down this perilous path when, in spite of his putative role as a neutral head of state, he campaigned vigorously for AK to win enough seats in that year’s parliamentary elections – 400 out of 550 – to allow it amend the country’s 1982 Constitution to make him the country’s first executive president.

    The gamble failed. For the first time since 2002, AK lost its majority in the parliament although it remained the single biggest party in the legislature. He blamed everyone else but himself and his party for the failure. Since then hundreds of journalists, for example, have been fired or arrested for violating an obscure ill-defined law that penalises “insulting” the president, and business interests of opposition figures have similarly been attacked.

    When AK stumbled in last June’s election, Erdogan as president had a choice between inviting the leading opposition party to form a coalition government and forcing a rerun in November. Predictably, he chose the latter.

    This time his gamble paid off – somewhat; AK regained more than its old majority in the legislature but still did not get enough to allow it amend the constitution as it wished. Between June and November, events in the Middle East that had sucked in Europe, America, Iran and Russia, strengthened his hands enough locally and internationally to give him the victory he had wanted, albeit a limited victory.

    It is this triumphant Erdogan that has been our august visitor since yesterday. As president of one of the most important countries in the world, our guest must have come with a list of mutual interest for business discussions. Possibly top of the list is the Turkish presence in Nigeria, not all of which he may be happy with.

    Notable among those he may be unhappy with is the widespread presence in our educational, medical, business and religious sectors of Hismet Movement that he has come to regard as traitors and saboteurs at home and abroad. A wise Erdogan would eschew his unhappiness with his perceived enemies at home and not request his hosts to close them down because his hosts are not likely to see his enemies as necessarily their own too.

    Instead, a wise Erdogan would see his short visit as an opportunity to reduce his country’s almost complete dependence on Russia for its energy needs by striking a mutually-beneficial deal with Nigeria for the supply of gas and oil to his country, especially now that Russia has become hostile to his country over the Islamic State debacle in their region.

    As someone who has visited Turkey twice, first in 2007 during that year’s International Press Institute’s annual congress, and second, last year on a private visit, I can testify to the description of the country by The Economist’s pull-out as one “packed with cultural treasures, natural beauty, energy and talent.”

    Erdogan has done more than almost any other Turkish leader in its modern history to turn the country’s potentialities into realities. He owes himself not to allow his wish to recreate his country as a sultanate under his thumb to undo what should be his great legacy at home and abroad.

     

  • In defence of Senator Marafa

    In defence of Senator Marafa

    Mr. Alabi Tajudeen is an ardent reader of this column by his own say-so. So far we’ve met only on the screens of our handsets as he frequently texts me his opinion on various issues unsolicited. Occasionally he has alerted me to news items that have escaped my attention. I’ve found those alerts useful.

    He sent me one such alert over the weekend. “My dear brother,” he said in his text, “if you have any means of communicating with Senator Kabiru Marafa, tell him he is my MAN OF THE YEAR 2015 & MY MAN OF THE MOMENT.”

    I’ve known Senator Marafa from Zamfara State casually long before he first became one in 2011. I’ve also had his phone number since his return to the Red Chamber last year. However, I hardly got in touch with him since he led the failed campaign to elect Ahmed Lawan from Yobe State as Senate President against Dr. Bukola Saraki. Even then I promised Tajudeen, my “ardent” respondent, that I’ll find a way to deliver his message.

    I eventually did by forwarding his text to the senator after a phone call yesterday to confirm I still had the right number. Before then, however, I suspected something must have triggered Tajudeen’s text beyond his self-admitted dislike to me of Saraki over the former two-term Kwara State governor’s politics and Tajudeen’s commensurate admiration for Marafa for his determined opposition to the Senate President.

    I suspected that it might have had something to do with news of the Marafa’s defiance of the Senate over its threat to suspend him for his remarks in support of a recent letter former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, wrote to both the Speaker of House of Representative, and the Senate President, accusing the National Assembly of being out and out corrupt.

    Before news of the threat broke out, I’d as I do routinely, clipped pages of several newspapers for photocopying into A4 size for ease of my record keeping. One of the pages I’d clipped was a two-page interview Sunday PUNCH (February 7) had with Marafa. As I’d merely skimmed through it before folding it away for subsequent photocopying, I wondered if the senator said something outrageous in his interview to have provoked the Senate’s threat to suspend him, a thing that must’ve made him Tajudeen’s “Man of the Moment”,in addition to being his “Man of the Year 2015”.

    To confirm my suspicion, I went back to read the interview in full. I found nothing in it to warrant the accusation by his two colleagues who had petitioned the Senate against him, namely, Isa Hamman Misau from Bauchi, seconded by Mathew Urhoghide from Edo, that his Sunday PUNCH interview, had “demeaned” the Senate.

    Not so surprisingly, however, the interview turned out to be the object of the Senate’s great anger with Marafa. As you read this piece, the Senate may have already carried out its threat to suspend him based on the recommendation of its Committee on Ethics, Privileges and Public Petition, chaired by Senator Samuel Anyanwu.

    Alluding to President Obasanjo’s well-publicised letter to the leadership of the National Assembly, Urhoghide had, in seconding Misau, said he did not take the former president’s charge seriously until it was repeated by one of their very own.

    “I was not bordered (sic) about Obasanjo’s claim,” the senator said,”but on Feb 7, Sen. Marafa granted an interview and what he said are in tandem with the claims of Obasanjo. I don’t think the 8th Senate has expressed any element of greed or recklessness, these are not friendly terms, they are despicable. So, he (Marafa) should be called to explain how corrupt the Senate is. The committee should ask him why he colluded with Obasanjo to bring the reputation of the Senate down.”

    Any fair-minded reading of Marafa’s interview would find it hard to agree with the two petitioners that he “colluded” with the former president to sully the reputation of the Senate. Indeed it is hard to be more cautious than Marafa was in his choice of words in his newspaper interview.

    First, he was careful to point out that he did not think Obasanjo’s letter, which he said he had not seen in full, referred to the current Senate. “I remember I saw excerpts of the letter and he was talking about laying bare the budgets of 2000, 2005 and 2015. He was not particular about the 8th Senate, I think.”

    When the newspaper persisted in its believe that Obasanjo made no exception of the current Senate, Marafa was again careful to point out that the Senate President neither read out the letter on the floor of the Senate nor did he make it available to its members so he would not comment on its content. “I don’t like speculation,” he said.

    All the same, he said, he agreed with the well-publicised gist of Obasanjo’s letter that fiscal transparency has been lacking in the conduct of affairs of the National Assembly, something Marafa said even the Senate President himself agreed with.

    He said he objected not as much to the size of the National Assembly’s budgets as he did its lack of transparency. Anyone sincerely interested in the success of the current fight against corruption, he said, should key into the new zero-based budgeting system of President Muhammadu Buhari whereby expenditures are disaggregated item by item, line by line, to allow for transparency and accountability.

    Few people would disagree with that. Indeed it beggars belief that anyone would accuse Marafa of “demeaning” the Senate by calling for fiscal transparency and accountability the way he did.

    It seems then that the senator’s echoing of the gist of Obasanjo’s two unflattering letters to the leadership of the National Assembly was a mere camouflage to get at him as a relentless critic of what he says are the Senate leadership’s translucent conduct of the Upper Chamber.

    Among his list of criticisms of the Senate leadership is that it forged the current rules governing the conduct of the house and frequently breaks even those ones. The leadership does not seem to have found credible answers to the huge controversy those charges have raised.

    He has also accused the leadership of profligacy and patronage by, among other things, increasing the Senate committees from an already high 57 to an unsustainable 67 and also by voting over 4.5 billion Naira for cars for the senators in spite of their car loans. Few reasonable people would disagree with the senator that the Senate leadership has been less than prudent.

    Marafa has also accused the Senate leadership of upending the Senate’s time-honoured and universal rules of ranking senators by experience. It has done so, he said, to patronise the new senators, mostly from the Peoples Democratic Party, the new main opposition party, who supported its controversial election in May last year. As with the allegation of forging new Senate rules for the leadership’s convenience, it has also not been able to give satisfactory explanation for pushing aside seniority and party size in its allocation of committee leadership.

    However, in spite of the difficulty in faulting Marafa’s allegations, the Ethics Committee has apparently found no difficulty in recommending the senator for suspension. Its excuse, faithfully echoed by some media outfits, was that he refused to appear before it to defend himself.

    Since then he has said he did not appear before the committee, not because he had no respect for it, which he insisted he did as a member of the committee in the previous Senate and as someone who should respect law and order. He did not appear before the committee, he said, simply because he was not duly told of its new date after the first one was postponed because he had to attend the funeral of the mother of one of his colleagues, who died last week. The Senate Clerk had claimed he sent him a text on the new date.

    “I asked when he invited me to the meeting,” the senator said,”and he said he sent a text to me when he could not reach me. I went through all my phone messages and I did not see any text from him at all. I challenge the clerk to show me any evidence that he sent any text to me.”

    It’s not impossible, but it’s hard to believe the senator would fib about getting fair hearing. But even if he did, the Senate leadership owed itself to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it was not out to witch hunt him because of his unrelenting criticisms of its conduct. Relying on last minute texts for invitation to an important hearing is hardly anyone’s idea of fair hearing.

     

  • A lesson from Muhammed’s legacy

    A lesson from Muhammed’s legacy

    The last two months have been a season of memorials for four of Nigeria’s foremost leaders, three of them civilians (Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, our first and only Prime Minister, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the first and only Premier of Northern Nigeria and Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola, the second Premier of Western Nigeria), and one – General Murtala Ramat Muhammed, in his death, the country’s most lamented leader– obviously a soldier.

    The three civilians were murdered in cold blood on January 15, 1966 in the country’s first military coup, the aftermath of which we are still grappling with 50 years on last month. The soldier was also murdered in cold blood at a youthful age of 37 in our fourth, but mercifully unsuccessful, military coup on February 13, 1976.

    As is to be expected, the memorials of these great Nigerians have been characterised by recollections of their virtues and achievements. For General Muhammed as the closest Nigerians have had to a universal national hero, the accolades since the weekend have been particularly deafening.

    Among other things, he shunned the opulence of office by his “low profile” style, added seven more states by popular demand to the 12 that had been created by his predecessor, General Yakubu Gowon, and moved our political capital from an overstretched Lagos to an expansive Abuja “virgin land.”

    Even the naming of the new capital was genius in its simplicity; after a long, but in the end futile, search, Abuja, headquarters of the Niger State emirate from whose land three-quarters of the new capital was curved out, was simply appropriated as the name of our new capital. The name had been a contraction of that of its founding emir, Abubakar Ja (in Hausa, Abubakar the red skinned). The old town was then renamed Suleja, a contraction of Suleimanu Barau, the name of the town’s emir at the time, who, like his great grandfather, was also fair-skinned.

    As with all creatures human, even superhuman, the general was, however, not without his weaknesses. In one of those paradoxes of life, the same speed for which he was widely praised was also one of those weaknesses; after all, speed, as they say, kills.

    In this case perhaps his two greatest less-than-salutary decisions were, first, his mass purge of the civil service which created the insecurity that has since become the bane of our bureaucracy. The second was his appropriation in 1975 of 60 per cent of the shares of the Lagos-based Daily Times, the country’s most powerful and profitable newspaper under the great, late Alhaji Babatunde Jose, an appropriation balanced by his complete takeover of New Nigerian, the Kaduna-based Northern-states-owned newspaper, then the most literate and influential in the country.

    Both decisions were hasty, as they were on less than satisfactory crosschecking of facts about the individuals and the three institutions affected. Due process was also short circuited in dishing out punishment.

    The first decision was the root cause of the rot that has since eaten deep into our civil service such that it has become virtually useless as a vital tool for any meaningful change. The second decision was the beginning of the slow decline and the eventual death of two of the best newspapers in the country, even on the continent.

    After the ongoing debacle surrounding this year’s budget caused by its obviously malicious padding, allegedly by top civil servants, it should now be obvious to President Muhammadu Buhari that he couldn’t have been more mistaken in his remarks, mid last year, that politicians only made noises while civil servants did all the hard work of policy making and execution.

    The lesson here is obvious; he will rely on our civil service with its current content, shape and form to deliver his promised “change” at his own peril.

     

    FEEDBACK

    As we embark on yet another constitutional amendment (February 10)

     

    I can’t but agree with you when you said the National Assembly is embarking on “a useless round of constitutional amendment” of our battered constitution. I cannot think of any constitution that has gone through so many attempts or real amendment like our own. Our country is never short of exciting moments and this is one of them. A useless exercise indeed!

    Dr. Yahuza, +2348033111000.

     

    How do you amend a constitution that was not written by the people? What is needed is a sovereign national conference out of which a genuine document can emerge. The National Assembly is wasting its time.

    Benson Nnoli,  +2348053429696.

     

    In your column today where you said “…sighting corruption and inequity…” did you mean “citing”?

    Umar M Chafe,  Sokoto. +2348036237510.

     

    Yes, I meant “citing”. Sorry, I mis-spelt the word.

    MH

     

    The current regions you referred to as eight are actually six as you rightly indicated.

    Prof. Yahaya Shehu, +2348058540850.

     

    Indeed I did list six but said it was eight. Sorry, it was the printer’s devil at work!

    MH.

     

    The NCC/MTN imbroglio/Please stop this nonsense (February 3)

     

    Your piece titled “THE NCC/MTN IMBROGLIO” in today’s column was excellent, but for two important factual, if not legal, errors.

     

    1. In the first place, the Registration of Telephone Subscribers Regulations 2011 which you claimed justified NCC’s action against MTN, appears to be ultra vires NCC under Section 27(2) of the Interpretation Act. This statutory provision requires all subsidiary instruments – such as the said Regulations – to be ‘executed’ or signed by at least two members of the body in who’s name/on whose behalf it was purportedly issued. Contrary to this provision of the law, the said Regulations were executed/signed by only the immediate past Executive Vice-Chairman of NCC, Dr. Eugene Juwah.

     

    1. The other error, in my view, lies in the basis of assessment of the fine. NCC based it on the sum of N200,000 per subscriber, as provided by  the Regulations. I believe that the correct basis ought to be N100 per subscriber as provided for by Section 12 of the Interpretation Act. This particular point is, however, sub-judice before the Federal High Court, Abuja, so it will be inappropriate for me to say more on it.

     

    Barrister Abubakar Sani.  +2348034533892.

     

    I was surprised you kept “hitting the load, leaving the donkey”, (as the Hausa would say). If there is anyone or anything to attack or criticise in the saga, it’s the law which prescribed the apparent high figure of US$1,000/SIM penalty. MTN deserves to be punished for carelessness and impunity.

    Kassim Musa Bichi.  +2348033173818

     

    I totally agree with you on the need to stop political opportunism of the sponsors of “#IstandwithBuhari”. I have counted up to five large billboards across Abuja city by this anonymous group, each of which often takes above N5million to put up. More often than not, the funding for such political advertorial is usually traced to public pulse.

    Jimoh Salman, Kuje, Abuja.          +2348094609566.

     

    The Buhari Nigerians voted for will never approve that nine-million-man march, and should those billboards still stand on his return (from his foreign trip) then we will understand that what happened on May 29 was a mere change of guard.

    +2348033830914.

     

    We stand with Buhari, billboards and all. It’s not a repeat of history; it’s a new beginning. We will not allow anyone, I repeat, anyone, to truncate our rendezvous with destiny.

    Manjadda,  Sokoto, +2348055288889.

     

    The arms scandal and NPAN’s moral predicament (January 27)

     

    The arms deal scandal and the mudslinging it engendered speaks volumes about most Nigerians that are so vocal about our ill-structured Nigeria and the cluelessness of other people in power other than their own.

    Yet away from prying eyes they collect food from the soiled fingers of the same people they vilify. As we say in Igala, if the meat of a vulture is not fit for human consumption, its feathers should be less fit to decorate the cap.

    Ogacheko Opaluwa   Abuja.

    +2348067090900.

     

    A lesson for both NPAN and the Daily Trust was to have taken a cue from and heeded the fish’s admonishment to its offsprings, to “beware of the food that comes looking for you instead of the other way round.” This is more so because at the material time it was rightly being speculated that the war against the insurgency was unnecessarily being dragged because some people were benefiting from the slow pace of the war. It has now come to pass.

     

    Barr. Umar Mohammed Gummi.

    08060322272  Sokoto.

     

    On a final note

     

    Since the well publicised first formal presentation of a new multi-media magazine, SI (Search Inside) Magazine, on Monday, chaired by the Honourable Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, at my invitation, I have received phone calls and texts congratulating me for founding another magazine.

    For the records, I am only a nominal chairman of the board of the magazine’s company, with absolutely no shares in it. At over 64 and since the collapse of my own Citizen in 1994 after all of only four years, I no longer have the energy, resources or disposition to actively go into any newspaper publishing.

    The founding publisher and Editor-in-Chief of SI Magazine is the highly talented, entrepreneurial and hard working Khadija Abdullahi Iya, a lawyer and younger sister of my childhood friend, AVM MM Audu-Bida, rtd., and wife of Alhaji Haruna Abdullahi, Iya Nupe, a retired Central banker.

     

    MH.

  • As we embark on another constitutional amendment

    As we embark on another constitutional amendment

    A bad workman, the English say, always quarrels with his tools. So has it been with Nigerians since their first and most thoroughgoing 1960 Constitution, which was amended in 1963 to remove the British Queen as their head of state and create a fourth region, the Mid-West, out of the original three that had emerged from the 1914 amalgamation of the country by its British colonial masters.

    So unhappy were we with the 1960 Constitution, which took decades of public debates all over the country and constitutional conferences at home and in the UK to arrive at, that we threw it away lock, stock and barrel, at the first opportunity we had to reconsider it. This was beginning from October 1975 when the military that had truncated our politics in 1966, citing corruption and inequity by politicians, inaugurated a 49-man Constitution Drafting Committee under the late Chief FRA Williams, to give the country a new blueprint for its governance.

    Chief William’s CDC was embroiled in controversy from the word go when the late Malam Aminu Kano, the enfant terrible of Northern Nigerian politics, accused the man himself of bowing to the “soft subterranean influence” of the military’s dictation for a change from the British Parliamentary model of democracy to the American presidential system. This was at a national conference on the CDC’s draft constitution in March 1977 at the Kongo Campus of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.

    An incensed Chief Williams threatened to sue Malam Aminu Kano if he did not withdraw his accusation. The malam refused. Instead, he called the chief’s bluff and wrote a letter to the editors of New Nigerian, which had exclusively published the story, in which he repeated his charge and said he had “grown too old 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.” After the New Nigerian published the letter in a front-page story on April 4, 1977, the great, much celebrated lawyer never followed through with his threat.

    In the end, the malam’s charge was born out when the country replaced the First Republic’s Parliamentary politics with the Presidential for the Second Republic in 1979. Barely three months into the fifth year of the Second Republic, the military re-intervened in our politics when it overthrew President Shehu Shagari from office on December 31, 1983.

    This time the military ruled for 16 years; three years longer than was the case with the first intervention. During those 16 years we had four military governments. Except for the first one under General Muhammadu Buhari, which was short-lived, each initiated its own constitutional conference that, in turn, came up with a draft constitution. Only the last draft the administration of General Abdulsalami Abubakar bequeathed to the country in 1999 became the supreme law of the land. It was essentially the same as that of 1979.

    When General Olusegun Obasanjo, who gave us the 1979 Constitution, returned as elected President in 1999, he initially resisted all calls to have a new one. Critics of the old one had argued that its claim of being one by “We the People” was a fraud, if only because the unelected military exercised veto over its enactment.

    Eventually Obasanjo changed his mind and initiated a conference in 2005. His motive soon became obvious when he abandoned its report after the National Assembly rejected its amendment that would have removed the two-term limit for the executive arm of government.

    As it was with the godfather, so it turned out with the eventually estranged godson; President Goodluck Jonathan initially rejected all calls for a new genuine “We the People” Constitution, only to change his mind in the run-up to last year’s general election. That was enough to question his motive. Definitive proof soon emerged when, first, he blatantly rigged the composition of the conference against the sections of the country he apparently saw as his enemies and did nothing to right the wrong even after he publicly promised to do so, and, second, when, even more tellingly, he threw its report into the dustbin following its rejection of his oft-stated wish for a five- or seven-year one term limit for the executive arm of government.

     

    Of recent there has been loud calls to resurrect this report and implement its recommendations lock, stock and barrel. Some of its advocates even see it as the antibiotic against the myriads of Nigeria’s problems. For example, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, an old guard, dyed-in-the-wool “Awoist”, says the only way President Buhari can end the country’s various cries of marginalisation is to dust the report up and implement its recommendations, especially with regards to the much-bandied around phrase, “restructuring the country.” If only the president would be sensible enough to do so, he said in effect in an interview in the Sunday Vanguard of February 7, “The question of Boko Haram will be solved; the question of Biafra will be solved”! Just like that!

    Another, but not-so-dyed-in-the-wool, “Awoist”, Chief Olu Falae, seems to agree with Adebanjo that Jonathan’s Conference ’14 report is the panacea for Nigeria’s problems because of its provision for “restructuring” the country. In an earlier interview in Sunday PUNCH of January 24 in which he attempted to clear his name as Chairman of the Social Democratic Party for his role in the so-called Dasukigate, he said he collected money for his party in exchange for its support of Jonathan’s presidential bid only on five conditions, top of which was that the then ruling party “must be prepared to restructure Nigeria from this unity system, and the best way to do that is to fully implement the report of the National Conference 2014.”

    All such grand talks about “restructuring” Nigeria are, of course, not without some merit. Our Constitution gives too many things to the central government to do, and, with it, too much fiscal power. Similarly, the executive arms of government at all levels are in a position to cow – and often do so – the other two arms with not much difficulty.

    However, the problem of those who talk so much about restructuring Nigeria is that they are, at best, vague and, at worst, possibly, even probably, dishonest. Vague, in the sense that when you press them on how to restructure the country, they often talk only about reducing the country’s 36 states into its current eight putative regions of Northwest, Northeast, Northcentral, Southwest, Southeast and Southsouth, and conveniently overlook the latent but real resistance such a move is likely to provoke, never mind the loud, even if senseless, demands for even more states.

    As for the calls for restructuring being possibly, even probably, dishonest, the proof lies in the fact that at each and everyone of the constitutional conferences we have had since 1978, whenever it came to the emotionally charged issue of “Resource Control”, which is the heart of true federalism, the same advocates of restructuring always ran with the hare in the afternoon, only to hunt with the hounds in the night, in a manner of speaking.

    This fact was attested to unequivocally over 10 years ago by Professor Itse Sagay, the well-known constitutional lawyer, at the end of Obasanjo’s constitutional conference in 2005 when, in an interview in The Guardian (July 25, 2005), he said, “The Southwest betrayed the Southsouth. There is no question about that. It was a clear deliberate betrayal…We will agree – Southsouth, Southwest, Southeast and Middle-Belt. We had a forum chaired by a Southwesterner throughout.”

    Nothing changed between Obasanjo’s conference and Jonathan’s. Indeed, if anything changed at all it was for the worse because the godson’s conference was even more skewed in favour of the South than the estranged godfather’s. So an alliance of the South and the Middle-Belt could have given the Southsouth what it wanted if all the members of the coalition were sincere about their commitment.

    Let’s face it. The alliance was not sincere, and could not have been, because its members, like everyone else in the country, knew their regions’ lives almost literally depended on oil, most of which came from offshore. And as long as oil remains the source of more than 90 per cent of public revenue, the Southsouth would be unrealistic to expect honest support from its apparent friends in its quest for complete ownership of oil other than that produced onshore.

    Fortunately, there is enough oil revenue, even now that its price has almost totally collapsed, to bring about the balanced development a true federation needs to thrive, and still make allowance for the depredations its producers suffer from, if only we would all reign in our greed.

    As a manmade instrument, all constitutions can always be improved upon. However, the problem in our own case, as one has said again and again on these pages but would never tire of repeating, is far less our Constitution, with all its shortcomings, than our bad faith in using it as the framework of our politics.

    We must keep this in mind as our National Assembly embarks on yet another expensive, but perhaps useless, round of constitutional amendment, which started last month when the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Honourable Yakubu Dogara, inaugurated a 50-man committee for that purpose.

  • NCC/MTN imbroglio

    NCC/MTN imbroglio

    MTN Nigeria, the proverbial hen that has laid the equally proverbial golden egg for its local and foreign shareholders, is in deep trouble. And it’s no exaggeration to say the prospects of foreign investment in the country’s economy hang on how that trouble is resolved.

    MTN’s trouble is, of course, the unprecedented and extremely punitive penalty of US$ 5.2 billion (about I.5 Trillion Naira) that the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the country’s telecommunications industry regulator, imposed on the company in October last year. This was as a result of what the regulator said was MTN’s refusal to carry out its order for the deactivation of its improperly registered SIM (subscriber identity module) cards, the small cards in mobile phones used to store data about service providers and their subscribers.

    NCC’s penalty was based on sections 19-21 of its 2011 regulations on the country’s mobile telephony that provides for a fine of N200, 000 for each improperly registered SIM card that is active.

    Its instructions to all four big service providers in the country, i.e. MTN, Glo, Airtel and Etisalat, were based on the well-founded fears that improperly registered SIM cards have often been used for crimes, terrorism especially.

    At the time NCC gave the order it said it had identified over 38 million such cards, 18 for MTN, 7.4 for Airtel, 2.2 for Glo and 10.4 for Etisalat. All, it said, deactivated theirs except MTN.

    As at November last year, the four service providers had between them about 148.5 million subscribers, with MTN as No.1 with nearly 62.5 accounting for 42 per cent of the subscribers, Glo a distant No. 2 with 31.3 (21 per cent), Airtel a close No. 3 with 31.1 (21 per cent) and Etisalat bringing the rear with nearly 23.5 (16 per cent).

    Not long after NCC announced the penalty, MTN wrote the regulator admitting guilt and seeking reprieve. The letter was very much unlike MTN in the public eye; a telecommunications behemoth whose success – its brand value, for example, was recently valued at US$4.7 billion – had so much gone into its head that it cared little about what its subscribers thought of its services, which were often shoddy and relatively costly.

    The company’s success was truly phenomenal. It first got its licence in August 2001, almost literally to print money, along with Airtel, which started out as Econet, but which has changed its name at least five times, and the now moribund government owned M-Tel. At that time a SIM card cost as much as a princely 20,000 Naira and an average of 5,000! These were way below the cost of acquiring a fixed line from NITEL, the government telephone monopoly whose choking grip on the industry ended with its deregulation in the early 90s by military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, but those princely sums were still way beyond the reach of the poor.

    The dubious privatisation of NITEL itself under President Olusegun Obasanjo, however, soon killed M-Tel, aka Zoom, its mobile baby, almost at birth. Then, first Glo in August 2003 and then Etisalat in October 2008 entered the market and opened it up for competition against the duopoly of MTN and Airtel.

    That, of course, has since led to the crash of the cost of SIM cards to as little as 200 Naira, and of the rates of the services the four provide, making mobile phone affordable virtually to all but the poorest of the poor. However, since then all four companies have, as they say, been laughing all the way to their banks to the delight, of course, of their shareholders.

    The most profitable of the lot, as we all know, is MTN. It generates about 190 billion Naira profit after income tax of 80 billion annually and has a shareholders fund of about 260 billion. Americans own 20 per cent of those shares by virtue of owning a fifth of the parent company, MTN Group, based in South Africa.

    Little wonder then that last month Eric H. Holder, Jr., until recently America’s Attorney-General, came calling last month to discuss a review of NCC’s hefty penalty with the country’s authorities. Holder, Jr. came as a senior attorney in Covington & Burling LLP, an old and influential international law firm with offices in Beijing, Brussels, London, New York, San Francisco, Seoul, Shanghai, Silicon Valley, San Diego, and Washington, DC, with its headquarters in the American capital. Presumably he came with a brief to defend the interests of his country’s shareholders.

    Clearly what we have here is big league negotiation whose outcome can make or mar our drive for foreign investment.

    When MTN tendered its “unreserved apology” to NCC for its misconduct and pleaded for a review of the hefty penalty, the regulator obliged by reducing it by 25 per cent from 1.5 trillion Naira to 780 billion or US$3.9 billion. Still not satisfied, the company pleaded, early December, for even more reduction because the revised amount, it said among other things, was nearly four times its shareholders fund and would take between three to four years’ cash flow to offset. This, it said, was bound to have a negative impact on its network expansion.

    It also said the fine exceeded its net asset value of US$ 894 million, or about 268.2 billion Naira, which would amount to making the company technically insolvent. Not least of all, the penalty, it said, had no precedence anywhere in the world; the highest such fine, it pointed out was US$ 239 million levied in France in 2012 on Orange and Vivendi.

    MTN offered instead to pay NCC 99.85 billion Naira cash annually for five years, 49.93 billion cash to any charitable cause of government’s choice and free government access, worth about 69.90 billion Naira, to MTN’s extensive fibre network for the expansion of public e-projects, such as visa processing, identity card registration and networking of schools. The three offers added up to a total of 219.68 billion.

    NCC’s reply was swift and angry. It would no longer, it said, entertain any further explanation from the company. Instead it drew MTN’s attention to what it said was the fact that even the initial penalty of 1.5 trillion Naira was not arbitrary as it was based on the provisions of the Registration of Telephone Subscribers Regulations, 2011. It also said it objected to MTN’s comparison of its fine with similar ones elsewhere. Such comparisons, NCC said, was “totally irrelevant” to the case at hand.  MTN, it warned, must pay up by December 31 or…

    Predictably, an alarmed MTN responded to what it must have regarded as a threat to its solvency, if not to its very existence, by heading for the courts. It employed the services of seven Senior Advocates of Nigeria led by Chief Wole Olanipekun to take its case before a Lagos Federal High Court, praying for the penalty to be quashed.

    The ensuing stalemate is what must have brought the Americans into the fray concerned, as they always are, about their interests abroad. Since the former US Attorney-General’s intercession, MTN has accepted to make an unconditional down payment of 10 per cent of the revised penalty to NCC, without prejudice to the final outcome of the negotiations.

    MTN may have behaved arrogantly in the past, especially because its main Nigerian owners seemed to believe they had the past authorities locked under their armpits. Even then it is unwise to kill a company which, like it or not, has more or less become too big to fail, given its size and role in an industry – telecommunications – that is now the single biggest contributor to our public revenue, next only to oil and gas.

    Penalties are meaningful and sensible only if they serve as deterrence to the culprit and to others. They are useless, or worse still, they amount to cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face, if they serve only to kill the culprit and risk discouraging investors at home and abroad from betting on Nigeria’s future.

    MTN deserves greater punishment than its counter-offer, given its misdemeanour and past impunity. But surely even the revised fine is grossly disproportionate to its offence. Hopefully, the matter can be resolved quickly and amicably in the best interest of all concerned; the Nigerian government, its shareholders and the public alike.

    Please stop this nonsense

    Talking about betting on Nigeria’s future reminds me of a recent development in Abuja which can only remind one of the despicable political opportunism of some people in recent past that has done a lot to discredit our politics.

    I am talking about the huge billboards that have gone up at various strategic locations in our capital city sponsored by an organisation calling itself “I Stand With Buhari” in his fight against corruption. Its sponsors are threatening to shut down Abuja with a nine-million-man march in March, ostensibly in solidarity with President Muhammadu Buhari over his avowed crusade against corruption.

    It all reminds one of inglorious million-man march spearheaded by one, Daniel Kanu, back in the 90s in support of the late General Sani Abacha’s never stated but well-known agenda of shedding his khaki as military dictator for mufti as civilian president.

    There are many ways to identify with the president in his crusade against corruption. But erecting billboards with empty populist slogans all over the place, especially of the kind we saw under the last president, is certainly not one of them. On the contrary, it is crass business-as-usual political opportunism that the authorities must do everything they can to dissociate themselves from.

  • Arms scandal and NPAN’s moral predicament

    Arms scandal and NPAN’s moral predicament

    These are hardly the best of times for the Nigerian media in general. For newspapers in particular the times are indeed dire. The bahaviour of some of their leading lights during last year’s election campaigns – from broadcasting blatantly malicious adverts about then opposition politicians, through publishing wrap-around adverts masquerading as news, to carrying public opinion polls of dubious integrity – left such a putrid smell in its wake that the overall integrity of the institution was bound to come under a heavy cloud.

    Last month, matters became exceptionally bad for newspapers when the association of their publishers became mired in the so-called Dasukigate scandal in which a considerable amount of funds for arms to fight Boko Haram were allegedly diverted to other purposes, notably the re-election of President Goodluck Jonathan.

    The dreadful conduct of some of the broadcast media, notably the Africa Independent Television (AIT) and the Federal Government- owned NTA, did much to damage the integrity and credibility of broadcasting. But that damage was somewhat ameliorated by the exemplary conduct of television stations like Channels that resisted the temptation of joining the ruling PDP’s gravy train.

    In contrast to the broadcasters where it was individual stations that had misbehaved, it is the parent organisation of newspapers that has now been implicated in the arms scandal.

    Predictably this has triggered much soul searching by the newspapers themselves. In an editorial by The PUNCH on December 18, headlined: “NPAN and arms scandal”, for example, the newspaper said the revelation that the President of the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria, Mr. Nduka Obaigbena, publisher of Thisday, received N120 million on behalf of its members whose newspapers were seized by the army for several days, ostensibly for security reasons, has “sent shock waves through the nation and brought NPAN into disrepute.” The action, it said, “seems to confirm the long held belief that the Nigerian media is corrupt and cosy with government functionaries. “There is the need therefore for the media to do some soul searching,” the newspaper concluded.

    Five days later, The Nation wrote in the same vein. “Speak up, NPAN”, it thundered in the headline of its editorial of December 23. “When the watchdog becomes the dog to watch,” it said, “it is a sad reflection of a dire decline in professionalism.” The newspaper said Obaigbena’s explanation for the money he received on behalf of his association was far from satisfactory, if only because it was paid through a private company, General Hydrocarbons Limited, whose only relationship with NPAN was that he apparently owned it. The NPAN’s silence in the face of messy affair, The Nation concluded, was anything “but golden.”

    The following day the NPAN broke its uneasy silence; it published a full-page advert on the pages of its member-newspapers, which sought to explain to its “Esteemed Readers” what led to the messy affair.

    The advert followed a meeting of the association attended by 19 of its most prominent members, including its two Life Patrons, Mr. Sam Amuka and Malam Isma’ila Isa, and two past presidents, Chief Segun Osoba and Mr. Ray Ekpu.  The president was conspicuous by his absence. Malam Kabiru Yusuf, Chairman, Media Trust Limited, as Deputy President, and Dame Comfort Obi, publisher of The Source, as General Secretary, signed the ensuing advert.

    According to the NPAN, the genesis of the messy affair was the impounding of bundles of newspapers of several of its members by the army right across the country between June 6 and 11, 2014 because, the army said, it had intelligence that Boko Haram was using newspaper vans to ferry bomb making materials!

    Predictably, the various newspapers affected felt outraged enough by the act itself, which cost them much revenue, and by the army’s rather rich excuse – unsurprisingly, no bomb-making material was ever found on any van – to head for the courts for redress.

    Presumably, President Goodluck Jonathan felt alarmed enough by the negative prospects for his re-election of such litigations in the run-up to last year’s general election to seek for an amicable settlement through negotiation. According to NPAN, the president met with members in Lagos on June 12, apologised for the army’s bahaviour and pleaded for a settlement out of court. The members in attendance, the association said, graciously acceded to the president’s plea.

    Accordingly, almost all the affected members submitted claims “with some”, the association said, “as low as a few hundred thousand Naira and others running into hundred (sic) of millions.” Because the divergence of the claims would have been difficult to verify, NPAN said, it accepted government’s offer of a flat compensation of N10 million per each of its 12 affected members – hence the N120 million paid to its president .Most of the members duly collected their compensation less N1 million each for its running, the association said.

    “It is unfortunate,” the association concluded, “that some people not in possession of the full facts are seeking to link the NPAN with the alleged misdeeds of those who may have received large sums of money from the office of the NSA unlawfully. Nothing can be further from the truth.”

    About a week before the said PUNCH editorial, Daily Trust had issued a statement exonerating itself from the scandal and justifying its acceptance of the N9 million it received. It said in its edition of December 12, it had no way of knowing where the money came from.

    Now that it has emerged that the compensation had come from the arms purchase vote, at least two of the members that received it have returned it. Perhaps as a result, Malam Kabiru, who co-signed the advert in question, has been under tremendous pressure from his board to return the money, not least because of Media Trust’s well advertised reputation for shunning the so-called “brown envelop” journalism much of the Nigerian media is notorious for.

    There’s an irony in Media Trust’s ethical dilemma in all this because the real genesis of then whole sordid affair was its exclusive front-page story on June 4, 2014 which exposed a huge land scandal by the army top brass. The story, clearly meant to hold public officers accountable to the people, revealed how the army shared out part of a huge piece of land in Asokoro District of Abuja meant for its barracks to top military officers, their spouses, friends and associates.

    Top of the beneficiaries was former army chief, Lt-Gen. Ihejirika, who, between himself, Gift, his wife, Oke, presumably an offspring, and an oil company, Goodok Oil and Gas, in which his family had an apparent interest, got over 15,350 square metres of land. Other big beneficiaries included former chiefs of defence staff and former and serving service chiefs who got between an average of 2,000 and 4,000 square metres each. All told there were 439 beneficiaries of what was clearly a land heist.

    Two days after that story, the army laid siege on the headquarters of Media Trust Ltd. For several days after that, going in and out of its neighborhood became a nightmare, something I personally experienced when I had occasion during the siege to visit the newspaper.

    However, even though Trust was the principal target of the army’s seizure of newspapers during the period, it was only one of three principal targets, the other two being The Nation and Leadership. All three were regarded by PDP as pro-opposition.

    It is a cruel irony that Trust’s investigative story would eventually land it in the moral predicament that it, along with other newspapers, now face over the compensation they received for the army’s untoward act mid 2014.

    As with all predicaments, there is no easy way out for the newspapers that have so far kept their compensation. For me, however, the worse option is to return it and either head back to the courts or accept the loss they suffered over the unlawful and malicious seizure of their newspapers. After all there was nothing illegal about the compensation. And even morally the predicament is more apparent than real, if only because 9 million Naira is really too little to suborn any newspaper worth the name, which all the affected newspapers are.

    The case, however, is different for the association’s president who landed them in their predicament, to begin with, by routing the compensation through his private company and who, all along, may very well have known of the source of the huge compensation he said he had received over the bombing of his newspaper, apparently by Boko Haram, given his well known closeness to the authorities.

    The NPAN owes itself an obligation to hold him responsible for the mess in which it has found itself if it wishes to convince anyone that it means to clear itself of the mess.

    There is, however, a little lesson for NPAN in all this. It said in its explanatory advert that it accepted a flat amount for all its affected members because there was no easy way to verify their divergent claims. Actually, there is a fairly simple way to do so; institute an audit bureau of circulation (ABC) for its members.

    Unfortunately, this is something the association has refused to do since the first and only one in 1987. If it is truly serious about being accountable to its “esteemed readers”, it should seize this opportunity to create one this year.

     

  • Bishop Kukah’s attack on Islam, my conditional ceasefire

    Bishop Kukah’s attack on Islam, my conditional ceasefire

    I am dedicating today’s column to readers’ comments on my last four articles on these pages, but largely to those – about 200 texts and over a dozen emails – generated by what Dr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, Trust’s Friday back page columnist, says is the “quarrel” between me and Bishop Mathew Hassan Kukah over what I’ve said is his persistent attack against Islam and Muslims.

    Hopefully, this should answer the plea of the last two respondents on these pages for a “cessation of hostilities,” as Chief Loretta Aniagolu, a leading business consultant and an Enugu- based politician, put it. I do have my doubts though that the hostilities will cease, if only because the Bishop decided to up the ante only last Saturday by his open letter to the late Sardauna, whose cold-blooded murder as Premier of Northern Nigeria 50 years ago, was commemorated last week in Kaduna, where he was killed.

    In his open letter, published in Daily Trust of that day, the Bishop, as usual, attacked Muslims and made snide remarks about the great man himself not least by accusing him of laying the foundation of today’s sectarian divisions in the North by what he called the man’s “controversial conversion campaigns.”

    In spite of the provocations in that letter, I have resolved to observe a unilateral, but conditional, ceasefire; conditional upon the bishop not indulging in any further egregious misrepresentation of me or my religion.

    “Muslim Brothers” and the rest of us (Wednesday, December 16, 2015)

    As a retired military man, I do know that if a group refuses to stop when an armed soldier orders it to do so, the only option left is for the soldier to secure his life with any means available to him. In no civilised clime would Shi’ites behave foolishly as in Nigeria. It is unbelievable that the Chief of Army Staff staked his life by alighting from his vehicle. In some climes none of these bigots would be alive to explain their foolishness. If these Shi’ites can threaten the Chief of Army Staff, who then is safe in this country we call Nigeria?

    Alooma,

    +2348070449628. 

    A fair piece! And you were right about there being little sympathy from the rest of us, especially us Zaria residents who’ve been held to ransom by the Shi’ite processions one too many times. The processions used to be infrequent, before they became a constant feature of Zaria town. Granted, the Army was wrong in its choice of mode of response, but as the Bahaushe would say, “in bera da sata, daddawa ma da wari”.

    Hannatu Adamu,

    ABU Zaria.

    +2348036497147.

    It could be members of the sect thought (Dr. Goodluck) Jonathan was still the President of Nigeria.

    Etebong Akpan

    Uyo.

    +2348091087319.

    Bishop Kukah’s attack on Islam (Wednesday, December 30, 2015)

    It’s not in doubt to those who regularly follow his writings that Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah has made a sport of attacking Northern Muslims and Islam, invariably from behind the veil of scholarship. The “failings” he attributes to Northern Muslims derive from human nature rather than Islam to which he obliquely linked them. Region first, and religion later, have become veritable planks in the practice of politics in the country; their prominence not being wholly or exclusively the fault of Northern Muslims.

    Chief MKO Abiola’s choice of vice-presidential candidate was vigorously opposed on the grounds of it being “a Muslim-Muslim” ticket. Previously, region was the only factor. In the recent past, an intellectual gerrymandering produced a Middle Belt of 18 states -their sole link being religion.

    Neither religion nor ethnicity in themselves are Nigeria’s problems, but how politicians seeking advantage deploy them in the political arena. Here, it’s clear there are no saints.

    M T Usman,

    +2348033067825.

    Matthew Kukah did not demonise Islam as a religion. He only criticised the Muslim elite who manipulate Islam to stir trouble in the North. You should not misinterpret his assertion to feather your cap in being holier than Islam as a religion.

    As for your interpretation of the book of 2 Corinthians, in the Holy Bible, it did not say Muslims are unbelievers. And what has Christianity got to do with the rules of OBJ and GEJ? Was Islam responsible for Abacha’s misrule since he was a Muslim? Can Islam be held responsible for the shame perpetrated by even a scion of the caliphate? These are some of the things Matthew Kukah is referring to.

    Tanko Dabit,

    NIPSS, Kuru.

    tanquo@gmail.com

    On your Kukah on Islam, I had thought age has reformed you. Pity it has not. Flounder on.

    John Amodu,

    +2348055848952.

    Rev. Kukah lost all reverence when, flying against all human dignity and conventional wisdom, he tried to justify the shameful attempt at scuttling President Muhammadu Buhari’s anti corruption crusade.

    +2348062365532.

     

    Okonjo-Iweala and the limits of propaganda (Wednesday, January 6)

    Thank you for your critical and fair assessment of our former super Minister of Finance. While she was around, she made fantastic claims of her capacity and power. Most of us believed her, and even her boss almost submitted the leadership of this land to her.

    She made waves with stories of successes against corruption, development strides, and even ‘promoting’ Nigeria as the biggest economy in Africa. Our clueless president deferred to her to the amazement of many.

    One man she failed to mesmerise was Olusegun Obasanjo. But for all others she came, saw and conquered – benefitting herself and her ethnic groups. Thank you for a well-researched piece on the Queen of Breton Woods Conference.

    Deji Fasuan,

    Ado-Ekiti.

    What a lovely article you wrote today. More power to your elbow. You made my Wednesday, sir.

    Tunde Oso,

    The Guardian Newspapers,

    Lagos.

     

    Still on Bishop Kukah’s attack on Islam (Wednesday, January 13)

    Bishop Mathew Kukah’s open dislike for Islam is no longer news. He has used every opportunity to hit at Muslims, especially Northern Muslims or the so-called Hausa Fulani Muslims. Being someone born and raised in southern Kaduna, I know that the average man from that part of the state is courteous and accommodating. It is people like the bishop who are doing the best – or worst – they can to further raise emotions and cause disharmony, which from time to time erupts.

    His infamous and rather shameful homily at the late Patrick Yakowa’s burial will go down as a superlative act of irresponsibility by anyone at such a pensive gathering. The late Abubakar Gimba’s epic response to that homily titled “Et tu Monsignor Kukah?” is an enduring masterpiece worth archiving.

    But despite such unhelpful happenings, it is very heartening to see his own people still living peacefully with the Muslims. This is why whenever I have the chance when in Zangon Kataf, I go to those Kataf villages to visit my primary school teachers and classmates.

    For Kukah to claim that he is an advocate of peaceful interreligious co-existence, you have given him the best reply. What he does is giving with the right hand and taking even more with the left. Even at 63, his lack of restraint in using inappropriate language as well as resorting to untruth is fast becoming a trademark.

    I find his anger over Muslim hegemony laughable. The bishop’s very middle name is Hassan, a revered Muslim name used throughout the Muslim World in honour of the grandson of Prophet Muhammad (upon whom be peace). Why not change that hegemony first, since it is absolutely within his power?  I don’t know what loathing a people and still proudly bearing their name is called.

    Mustafa Adamu

    mmustafaadamu@yahoo.com

    It is not only you who Rev. Mathew Hassan Kukah is fond of calling names, but all and sundry who do not agree with him. Not long ago he referred to those who differed with him on his defence of President Goodluck Jonathan and his looters of the nation’s treasury as people who live in the gutters and speak with mud in their mouths, who move from one beer parlour to another and from one bus stop to another, conveniently forgetting that they were put in that situation by the misdeeds of the very people he was seeking to defend.

    Barr. Umar M. Gummi,

    +2348060322272.

    Just read your column of today. I didn’t read the previous to fully appreciate the build up to this point. However, as you claim to be misinterpreted by the Bishop, rightly or wrongly, there may be hoards of religious extremists on both sides that could react negatively in support of either of you.

    I therefore join Jada in appealing for the mutual secession of hostilities.

    Chief Loretta Aniagolu,

    +2348033105312.

    Let me join others calling for a ceasefire between you and Bishop Kukah. My plea is because both of you are important actors to preserve peace in our country.

    Was it (not) the late Sardauna of Sokoto who stated that we must respect our differences? As we are now in 2016, 50 years on from 1966, that statement remains good food for thought.

    Ambassador TI Aguiyi-Ironsi, CON.

    +2348075847081.

  • Still on Bishop Kukah’s attack on Islam

    Still on Bishop Kukah’s attack on Islam

    Likely as not, Abdulmalik Jada, who said he has been a regular reader of this column since 2007, will be disappointed this morning with this column. Of the over 80 texts and about ten emails I received in reaction to my column of two weeks ago on Bishop Mathew Hassan Kukah’s attack on Muslims and Islam, his email stood out as a plea for a ceasefire between me and the bishop.

    “Please sir,” he said,“even if Kukah did not mean well for Islam and Muslims in those his presentations of Osogbo and Kaduna as aptly captured in your piece, he has called for a truce in his today’s response. This is the context in which I understand his piece. Sir, engage him no further please, as doing so will further deepen the Muslim-Christian chasm. Both you and Kukah are with followers from your different religions. Nigeria is already a carcass of itself. It needs serious managing. Otherwise it will implode.”

    It is tempting to heed Jada’s plea because a shouting match between the bishop and me can hardly be helpful of the need for the country’s religious harmony and peace. The problem is that each time I have tried to engage the bishop in a debate – and this has happened more than once – he has replied with misrepresenting my arguments and, worse, calling me names. Indeed, this seems to have become his debating strategy, as I shall show in due course.

    I can ignore, and have always ignored, the names he has called me. But I will not be fair to myself and to my religion if, because I want religious harmony and peace in the country, I do not rebut his misrepresentations of my arguments.

    Over nine years ago when he reacted angrily to my column of July 12, 2006 in which I said Professor Jerry Gana would never be the president of this country, he did exactly the same thing. I said the professor would not be president in the run-up to the 2007 elections because he lacked credibility and convictions as someone who had defended every government in power since 1985 and because he misused religion for politics – something the bishop has always preached against.

    In his angry response on July 21 which he entitled “Mohammed Haruna: Limits of demagoguery,” he condemned me as an “ethnic, regional and religious bigot.” My column, he said, was “a manifestation of a dangerous trend of intolerance that must be arrested before it institutionalizes fascism.” I had no problem with his name-calling. But I could not let his deliberate misrepresentation of my argument pass without response; Gana, he said I said, would not be president simply because he was a Northern Minority Christian! Without replying in kind – you do not, in any case, call a man of God names – I pointed out in a two-part rejoinderto his rejoinder that he never even attempted to debunk any of the three reasons I gave for my position.

    Happily for me, a third party intervention from someone I never knew, who happened to be a Christian and who did not belong to my ethnic group or region, saw things my way. “If Mohammed is anti-Christian,” Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye, a columnist with the Daily Independent said in its edition of August 9, 2006, “he may have betrayed that in other essays, which I may have missed, since I am not his regular reader, but in this particular essay on Gana, I would be most glad if anyone can show me any portion that remotely suggests that he is against Gana’s presidential ambition because Gana worships the ‘wrong God’ (as Kukah put it.)” Ejinkeonye aptly titled his piece “Kukah’s Embarrassing Intervention.”

    Of course, there must have been others who saw things the bishop’s way.But no fair-minded reader of my column since it started over 38 years ago will say I have ever attacked anyone, or indeed defended anyone, simply for what he believes in, where he comes from or what ethnic group he belongs to.

    I am not so sure the same can be said for the bishop. And I should know because I have closely followed his writings since 1985 when, as managing director of New Nigerian Newspapers, I first offered him his first opportunity to write regularly on religion and politics from his Christian point of view.

    Certainly it will be hard, if not impossible, to defend the bishop’s well known aversion to any criticisms of Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan on grounds other than religion. The two most notorious instances were when he tried to defend the former’s Third Term agenda and when, more recently, he criticized President Muhammadu Buhari’s plan to wage war on corruption, especially under his predecessor.

    On Obasanjo’s Third Term agenda, many readers may recall how, in his widely publicized interview in the Weekly Trust of March 4, 2006, he dismissed the popular criticisms of the agenda as “a useless conversion, a waste of energies” that did not deserve the attention it got. Obasanjo, he said, had done well by Nigerians and all those critical of his wish to carry on beyond his two-term limit were “political eunuchs” who did nothing to stop General Sani Abacha from trying to replace his khaki as military head of state with mufti as civilian president back in the late nineties.

    “All these political eunuchs,” he said,“who were not able to do anything when General Abacha was around; suddenly everyone has cleaned his mouth and returned as a politician. Fine, but for God’s sake, after all was said and done, lets not forget where General Obasanjo was when he was picked up to become president. Nigerians don’t learn a lesson.”

    The bishop alluded to these words again when he rejoined a rejoinder by Dr. Ebenezer Obadare, a teacher at the University of Kansas, America, to an article he had written in The Guardian of May 13, 2010 on what the bishop called “The Patience of Jonathan.” Jonathan’s rise to power, he said, “has defied logic and anyone who attempts to explain it is tempting the gods.”

    Earlier in a lecture in Calabar as part of the yearlong celebration of the country’s Golden Jubilee, the bishop had said even stronger word in his attempt to deify Jonathan. This was less than a month after he was sworn in as president following the death of his predecessor, Umaru Yar’adua.

    “With the swearing in of Dr. Goodluck Jonathan,” he said, “something has happened in Nigeria that may not happen again in the next 200 years.” He also said our new president represented “a metaphor of what our future might be.”

    Dr. Obadare’s rejoinder in The Guardian of May 31, entitled “The impatience of Father Kukah” was to criticize the bishop, then the vicar-general of the Kaduna archdiocese, for trying to canonize Jonathan in both his Calabar speech and the newspaper article even before the man has settled down on his chair. Far from defying logic, Obadare said, Jonathan’s rise had a simple down to earth explanation. The new president, he said, was simply “the beneficiary of a swindle imposed on the generality of Nigerians by former President Obasanjo and the inner caucus of the Peoples Democratic Party.” The lecturer then proceeded to show how with facts and logic and in the most readable and most respectful language possible.

    Two days later the bishop replied Obadare in another rejoinder that dripped with so much bile. Obadare, he said, was a confused man who misrepresented his position on Jonathan and, like those before whose pastime was “Obasajo bashing,” obviously enjoyed pursuing red herrings.

    The bishop said he never set out to canonize Jonathan, as Obadare argued. All he said was that Jonathan was God’s miracle. But then, as any sensible person would ask himself, what are God’s miracles for if not to cure afflictions? And who did not know that Nigeria’s central affliction was poor leadership?

    Penultimate Tuesday (January 5) the bishop, once again, indulged in denying what he clearly infers, if not what he actually says. And in doing so he also resorted to name-calling. I was, he said, a calumniator, odious, rabble-rousing and a bigot for accusing him of attacking Muslims and Islam in my column of two weeks ago. After all, he said, who does not know what an indefatigable champion of religious dialogue he is at home and abroad?

    The problem with his argument is that you can give with your right hand but take even more away with the left. And there is also the question of how sincerely one’s commitment is to a cause.

    The bishop said I did not provide any evidence when I accused him of consistently attacking Muslims and Islam. Either he did not read the piece closely or he chose to deny the evidence right before his eyes. When you compare Islam with apartheid, as the bishop did in his piece, I would not know what to call that but an attack on the religion. And when you say the demand by Muslims to be governed under Shari’a without imposing it on none-Muslims is the source of Boko Haram, I don’t know what that is if not an attack on my religion and me as a Muslim.

    At any rate, if I provided no evidence in my article last time, the bishop himself provided plenty in his rejoinder, but one alone suffices. “My paper,” he said, “focused on how to protect religion (here Islam), from manipulation by politicians. I produced evidence to show how Muslim politicians had done this under democracy.” His assumption here is apparent; compared to Christianity, Islam is a weak vessel that requires protection. Indeed in his Osogbo lecture he said so categorically.“Islam,” he said,“must have an honest look at the mirror and have an internal discussion.”

    I agree with the bishop that Muslims should have an honest conversation among themselves about how they interpret and practice their religion and how some of their leaders misuse it for politics. But I completely disagree with him when he says only Muslims are the villains in so doing. The evidence against his thesis stares right into his eyes from the way the Ganas, Obasanjos and Jonathans of this world – not to talk of many clerics he knows all too well – have used religion to feather their political and clerical nests.

     

  • Okonjo-Iweala and limits of propaganda

    Okonjo-Iweala and limits of propaganda

    The News condemned her as “The Failed Minister” on the cover of its edition of May 25. On the other hand, Government, a monthly publication of Leadership Newspapers, praised her as the minister who “revamped the Nigerian economy” whatever her critics may say.

    Between the two publications, the vast majority of Nigerians are, I suspect, more likely to agree with the first. And it won’t be for any lack in self-promotion by the woman herself or of support from abroad as someone who, but for her stint as finance minister under two presidents, has worked mostly as a World Bank official at mid to senior levels.

    Most Nigerians are more likely to agree with The News than with Government for the simple reason that, for all her exertions, she left her country’s economy far worse than she met it. Whether it is the cost of borrowing, the rate of inflation, the rates of currency exchange or employment, government’s integrity, public debt, name it, the legacy she left behind on May 29, when Muhammadu Buhari took over fromGoodluck Jonathan as president, was worse than what she had inherited.

    Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala first served as finance minister under President Olusegun Obasanjo from July 2003, ostensibly on loan from the World Bank under a United Nation’s scheme in which Africans in diaspora returning to serve in their countries were paid their old salaries in dollars. Okonjo-Iweala’s at the World Bank was $240,000.00. Herself and her supporters were to make a song and dance of the great personal sacrifice her forfeiture of this princely salary for the Naira equivalent of a “paltry” $6,000 entailed, when the arrangement became a controversial court case and she, along with Ambassador Olu Adeniji then serving as our foreign minister, lost out.

    What, of course, she and her supporters never talked about was the net benefit she must have enjoyed as the finance minister of the most populous and one of the most prosperous countries in Africa.

    Three years after she first became finance minister, she gave an interview to The Independent of London, which the newspaper published on May 17, 2006. A more blatant exercise at self-promotion would be hard to find. “The woman who has power to change Africa,” as the newspaper described her in its headline to its story of the interview, was “a heroine not just of Nigeria where she is Finance Minister, but of the entire continent. Her crusade against corruption has put her life at risk.’

    In that interview she claimed credit for the jailing of just about every corrupt public official found guilty.”Some very, very powerful people including the inspector general of police,” she said, “have been brought to book. Two judges have been suspended, two sacked outright, three ministers sacked, two rear-admirals, a governor, top Customs officers. Did we get all the people? Not yet – but we’ve got enough to send a powerful signal and (generate) a powerful fear. People in power now know that they can’t act with impunity.”

    The powerful finance minister did not stop at that. Just talking in vague terms in the fight against corruption, she said, was not good enough. “You have to identify the sources of corruption and target them.” So she identified the oil industry and government contracts as top priorities, with the latter, she said, costing almost five times as much as those in neighbouring countries.

    So successful, she said, was her war against corruption that several other African countries had come to take lessons. “Tanzania has just approached us, Togo, Angola –even Egypt is sending a team to look at what we have done on corruption. Would you ever have believed that Nigeria would become a place where people would come to see how to tackle corruption?”

    Judging by The Independent’s enthusiasm for the minister, you would be forgiven the belief that she must’ve been the best thing to happen to Nigeria since independence in 1960. For, not only did the newspaper regurgitate her claim as the scourge of the corrupt Nigerian, it said in effect that hers was the very Midas touch that had already transformed the country’s economy. She, it said, was the one who privatised loss-making steel plants, removed restrictions on telecoms “which produced an increase from just 450,000 land lines to 16 million” mobile phones, reduced import tariffs, increased civil servants’ salaries while slashing their perks and introduced reforms in banking, insurance, pensions, income tax and foreign exchange!

    Reading all this you would find it hard not to wonder how this heroine of Africa did it all alone without help from anyone and without reporting to any boss.

    Four years after her boss unceremoniously removed her in 2007, not just as finance minister but also as head of his economic team, she returned as an even more powerful finance minister by taking over the quasi-official job of the Vice-President as the coordinator of the national economy. In serving as double minister, she apparently fell victim of her own propaganda as a super minister. The joke in many informed circles was that nothing important in any sector of the economy ever got done unless President Jonathan cleared it with her. This was, of course, an exaggeration, but it contained more than a grain of truth.

    Okonjo-Iweala’s total of seven years as a powerful finance minister was, of course, not all an empty barrel. Her boast of being the scourge of corruption may have been just that – a boast – but her innovation of monthly publication of the revenue allocations to the three tiers of government was a great blow for transparency. Again, the partial debt waiver for the country from the Paris Club she helped secure in 2006 may not have been the millennial achievement she and her boss had touted it as, but it certainly gave us a breather and an opportunity to mend our profligate ways.

    Sadly, that opportunity was squandered right under her very nose during her second tenure, when she looked away as the Big Boys – and the Big Girls – stole this country blind through so-called fuel subsidies, industrial scale oil theft, a dubious privatisation scheme, diversion of “Abacha loot”, etc., and, worse, when she herself arbitrarily approved duty waivers worth tens of billions of Naira to hardly deserving beneficiaries.

    The Independent’s “heroine of Africa” is, of course, not without her admirers and allies, many of them powerful outsiders, some of them probably genuine. Trouble is, it is well-nigh impossible for any of them to deny that her achievements have been more on paper than on the ground, as far as most Nigerians can see and feel.

    Here, it spoke volumes about how real her achievements were that she seemed very much on the defensive in a recent interview in London over lunch with the Africa Affairs correspondent of Financial Times, William Wallis.

    In that interview published in the newspaper’s edition of June 5 and reproduced by the Daily Trust on June 12, she could only speak in vague tones about the war against corruption.

    “I feel so alive in my country,” she said, “and I get so sad that the image people have is not of the 99.9 per cent, but this venal, kleptocratic, power-hungry elite that have colonised the country and refused to let go.”

    Reminded by the reporter that this same “industrial scale corruption” of the elite was a big factor in the defeat of her boss in the presidential election and that in the eyes of some Nigerians she was, at best, ineffectual in the fight against it and, at worst, had gone to “the dark side” herself, she resorted to name calling. “They are the ones,” she said on the dark side and I will frustrate them from morning till night…I am a simple person with the same simple taste.” With an apparent touch of sarcasm, the reporter pointed out that as she swore at her traducers, she “(tucked) into a simple chicken tagine.”

    And when he weighed in with the more specific case of former Central Bank governor, Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi’s, whistleblowing about the “missing $20 billion” from the federation account, she claimed she was at one with Sanusi but only disagreed with him on the size of the amount and his approach in exposing the amount without consulting her. “I was on top of this thing,” she said. “Months after months, we were recording the amounts…that fell short. We have the records. So we didn’t disagree that amounts were missing – not missing but unaccounted for.”

    Unfortunately for the finance minister, most Nigerians, I suspect, are not likely to recall the issue that way. Instead, they are more likely to remember that she took more than a year to release the report of the external auditors she had appointed to look into the matter. It is instructive that the report, conveniently released just before the presidential election and which initially faulted Sanusi’s claim, was quickly denounced by the auditors as soon as her boss lost his presidential bid.

    The lesson of all this for our president and his ministers should be obvious; at the end of the day, what people see and feel on the ground is what can redeem their image, not the say-so of even the best propagandists one can hire.

     

  • Bishop Kukah’s attack on Islam

    Bishop Kukah’s attack on Islam

    Bishop Mathew Hassan Kukah is no stranger to controversies. But the one the bishop of the Sokoto Catholic Diocese stirred last month with his keynote address during a conference at the Fountain University, Osogbo, Osun State, would rank as perhaps his most provocative to date. Certainly it would rank higher than the very controversial Homily he delivered three years ago on December 20 at the Burial Mass of Mr. Patrick Ibrahim Yakowa, the Governor of Kaduna State, who died in a tragic helicopter crash in the Delta.

    That Homily was more an attack on Muslims than it was a tribute to Governor Yakowa. The bishop used the opportunity to ride on his hobbyhorse of what he says is the use of Islam by the Northern Muslim elite to impose their hegemony not only on the North, but also on the rest of the country. In so doing he denounced those he described as “riff raff and scoundrels” who were alleged to have rejoiced at the death of the governor. Such scoundrels, he said quite rightly, did not represent Muslims or Islam.

    In denouncing the joyous riff raff and scoundrels, the bishop took pains to praise both secular and religious Muslim leaders who felt only sorrow at the death of Yakowa. Sultan Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar, he said, felt so despondent at the governor’s death it became his lot to cheer up His Eminence. General Muhammadu Buhari, then the country’s leading opposition leader, was also so “distraught” about Yakowa’s death he cancelled his 70th birthday celebration in mourning. Sheikh Yusuf Sambo Rigachikun, a national leader of Izala, also cancelled a huge congregation the movement had summoned in a show of respect for the deceased governor.

    The bishop also praised former Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, and former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Alhaji Gidado Idris, both of them Muslims, for respectively appointing Yakowa as the first minister and federal permanent secretary from Southern Kaduna, a claim which is not entirely accurate because, long before Yakowa, Alhaji Aliyu Mohammed, Wazirin Jama’a, had served not only as a federal permanent secretary, but had gone on to serve as one of the longest serving SGFs.

    Not only was the bishop full of praise for the Muslim leadership, he said even their followers behaved with compassion. “As we drove behind the ambulances from the airport to St Gerard’s Hospital, I personally saw young Muslims genuinely wailing and waiving in sorrow on the highway in Tudun Wada.” He also said he had received sympathetic text messages from Muslims, “high and low.”

    The problem I, for one, had with the bishop’s homily then, as now, was that after praising the rump of the North’s secular and religious Muslim leadership – and also praising much of their followership – as being compassionate, he would still go ahead to blame Muslims exclusively for the violent religious crisis which has engulfed our country for a long while now.

    In his concluding remarks in that homily, he thanked President Goodluck Jonathan and those who advised him for creating”the opportunity that enabled Mr. Yakowa to keep his appointment with destiny.” As the bishop knew all too well, religion was central to the decision of the President to pick Patrick’s boss, Namadi Sambo, as his deputy, when he became President, following the death of President Umaru Yar’adua. This was in a field with more experienced candidates for the President to choose from. As the bishop also knew, religion was central to the determination of the ruling party to retain Yakowa as governor in the 2011 elections, come rain, come shine, a decision which turned Kaduna State into the epicentre of the violent aftermath of that year’s elections.

    If the bishop chose only to attack faceless Northern Muslims in his homily three years ago, last month he chose to attack not only Muslims, but their religion as well. As before, he accused their leaders exclusively of manipulating religion for their selfish ends. Boko Haram, he said, was the dire consequence of such manipulation.

    Any attempt by any Muslim to distant the sect from Islam, he said, was hypocritical, if only because its adherents claim Islam is not only their religion but also the inspiration for their self-acclaimed goal of Islamising Nigeria.

    Yet the bishop says, quite rightly I must say, Christianity should never be held responsible for everything the West does, even though the former gave birth to the latter and even though many Western leaders claim many of the things they do, good or bad, are in the name of Christianity.

    But to say Islam must be held responsible for Boko Haram is to say Christianity, more specifically the bishop’s Catholicism, must be held responsible for, say, the terrible things the Lords Resistance Army led by Joseph Kony has done in Uganda. After all, his father was catechist in the Catholic Church and his mother an Anglican and he says his goal is to turn his country into a Christian country.

    As any scholar of religion knows, more terrible things have been done in the name of Christianity than in the name of Islam. For example, in a 2013 book titled WAR AND PEACE IN ISLAM –The Uses and Abuses of Jihad, edited by HRH Prince Gazhi bin Muhammad and Professors Ibrahim Kalin and Mohammad Hashim Kamali, the contributors showed how out of a median death toll of 577.29 million from violent conflicts between 0 and 2008 CE, Christianity topped the list with 178.04 million, while Islam came a distant 6th with 31.02 million.

    The same book also showed how in terms of the frequency of belligerence, the three most aggressive religions have been Christianity, Islam and Antitheist, in that order; out of a total of 318 belligerences during the same period, Christianity accounted for 166, i.e. over half of such incidence, whereas Islam accounted for 79 which is under 25 per cent, making it a distant second.

    In spite of all these figures, I believe it would be wrong to blame the religions themselves for what has been done in their names.

    By some curious logic, the bishop at some point in his speech, sought to make a distinction between what he calls Northern Islam and a Southern variety. The one, he said, is intolerant while the other is accommodating. To drive home his point, he used the sentimental subject of marriage. Here, permit me to quote him at some length because what he says is at the heart of his submission in Osogbo.

    “In your part of the country as in other parts of the world,” he says,”I hear about families with Christians and Muslims living together, marrying and intermarrying and so on. In the North, this is anathema. Every time I bring this up, I hear people say that this is what Islam teaches, that the religion allows Muslim men to marry Christian girls (and hopefully make them Muslims) while Christian men cannot marry Muslim women. If this is not apartheid in broad daylight, I do not know what it is.” He said worse but even this was bad enough.

    True, Islam does not permit Muslim women to marry non-Muslim men. But then so does Christianity forbid its women – and men – from marrying non-Christians. For, as the Bible says in the New Testament 2 Corinthians, a Christian, man or woman, should never be yoked together with any unbeliever. “Do not,” it says,”be yoked together with the unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?”

    As a scholar, it is disappointing that the respected bishop should resort to demagoguery in trying to frame Islam, more specifically what he calls Northern Islam, as suffering exclusively from superiority complex. If only he had searched enough, he would have found that the injunction against a Muslim woman not to marry a Christian is not to discriminate against Christianity, but to protect her rights as a Muslim woman in a way that Islam protects the rights of a Christian woman as a Christian. It says, for example, that the husband has an obligation to defend her identity as a Christian, including taking her to church to worship. Nothing like this exists for a Muslim woman married to a Christian, since the Bible says any other belief is like darkness.

    As we all know, injunctions are one thing, adhering to them, another. Marriages across religions may be more common in the Southwest, but the bishop surely knows that it is not inexistent in the North, even though it may be a taboo among Muslims in the region.

    The bishop is right to accuse the country’s elite of manipulating religion for power and wealth. But he is absolutely wrong to blame only Muslim elite, especially those from the North, as the only ones who do so.To see how wrong he is in blaming only Muslims, he needs only to examine the fate of Muslims wherever they are a minority in this country or to examine many of the decisions and policies of Presidents Jonathan and Olusegun Obasanjo.

    Yes, sir, the manipulation of religion is not, and has never been, the exclusive preserve of any religion.