The Nation Newspaper

Category: Mohammed Harunna

El-Rufa’i, PMB and our oil misfortune

Penultimate Monday July 13, the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ), Lagos, held the seventh in its series of annual lectures in honour of the Nigerian Nobel Literature laureate. The venue was Abuja Sheraton Hotel and Towers and the theme “Nigeria and the Oil Fortune.”

Not being an oil man himself, the reason for the centre’s choice of Malam Nasir Ahmad el-Rufa’i, the governor of Kaduna State, as guest speaker was not quite apparent. But then as a self-styled “accidental public servant”, the first class quantity surveyor has had an abiding interest in public policy and public finance for many years. So it was no accident that WSCIJ picked him to speak on what is probably the most topical issue facing an oil-rich country that has virtually bankrupted itself precisely because it is oil rich!

El-Rufa’i’s over 3,000-word lecture reminded me of the trademark one-inch column front page editorials New Nigerian was famous for in its halcyon days. Those editorials were compulsory readings if only for their style, syntax and substance. This particular one was published 41 years ago last month – on June 29, 1974, to be precise. At that time the late Malam Turi Muhammadu was editor and Malam Mamman Daura, nephew of, but older than, President Muhammadu Buhari, its managing director.

Entitled “Oil Money: Honey or Poison”, that editorial is to me the most prophetic any Nigerian newspaper has ever written in post-colonial Nigeria. For that reason alone – not to mention its precision, clarity and relevance even today – it is worth reproducing in all its roughly 460-word length.

“It is,” the editorial said, “commonplace to say that Nigeria is at the moment very lucky because of oil revenues. In a very real sense we have much more money than our system can absorb. Unofficial estimates put the figure added to our reserve this year at N2,000m. In many essential respects this bounty has been a blessing. It has enabled us to repay some of our outstanding foreign loans, liberalised commercial and industrial policies and has enabled increased revenue to be diverted to building of modern infrastructure commensurate with our executive capacity.

“But the reverse side of this coin is painful to contemplate. The nature and source of oil money put it in a class of its own. A few years ago, a disturbing international report was published arguing in stark terms the failure of all underdeveloped oil producing countries to make more than marginal use of their splendid fortune. No effort is involved on our part. It is the foreigners who employ their capital and skills to exploit this resource and we simply receive huge autonomous additions to our national income.

“Such un-worked for riches can land a country in trouble of a peculiar kind. There is soulless opulence of the few, in evil contrast to crushing poverty of the many. There is unimaginable corruption and disastrously wrong allocation of resources. Above all there is the absence of hard work without which the country cannot pull itself together. In that sense the oil money becomes poison rather than honey. How will an economic historian 50 years hence explain the relative expenditure on agriculture and on the various forms of so-called “culture”: All-African Games, Black Arts Festival and all the rest of it? He must conclude that we had taken leave of our collective senses.

“Happily, in the Nigerian case, the situation is by no means irretrievable. We could deploy considerable energies and resources in producing a commodity which is more important even than oil: food. We must at all costs get agriculture on the move again. There are millions of acres lying fallow when they could be used to grow food for our burgeoning population. The setting up of the two River Basin Commissions is a great step in this direction (although the staffing has ensured that the two schemes would not take off for some time.)

“Nor are we unmindful of individual state efforts. But fiddling about with N10-15m is just like one grain in a silo. We need a monumental plan. A N500m plan with the help of, say, Danish and Chinese experts under our direction, would do wonders for grain productivity in this country. We may or may not have oil in 50 years. But to survive we must have food. The ground work can be done now.”

The New Nigerian’s economic historian still has nine more years to go before he enters his verdict on how we have managed our oil fortune. Yet even today the historian would be dead right to conclude that we took leave of our collective senses long, long time ago.

In five years of Goodluck Jonathan’s presidency alone, for example, Nigeria, el-Rufa’i quoted United States Department of Energy as saying, earned nearly $500 billion from oil and gas trade, which comes to a stupendous N130 trillion! Yet today most human development indices say 40% of Nigerians, or about 70 million of them, live well below poverty line obviously because we’ve blown away all that good fortune in an orgy of incredible waste and venality.

It all reminds one, again, of a survey The Economist published about the state of Nigeria’s political-economy in its edition of May 3, 1986, a few months after our soldiers overthrew the fiscally reckless Second Republic under President Shehu Shagari and Muhammadu Buhari took over as military head of state.

“Nigeria,” the newsmagazine said in its abstract of the survey, “has had a stupendous party, but the wine merchants forgot to collect their money in advance. Now the debt collectors have arrived to find the winnings spent, the bottles and glasses mostly broken or stolen by the guests, and the soldiers who came in to keep order shooting each other.”

Twenty nine years on after The Economist’s survey it’s like we are back exactly where the Second Republic ended, only far worse and only also that instead of khaki, the same Buhari has returned in mufti to clean up the huge mess left by 16 years of PDP misrule.

Last time he hardly had enough time to start cleaning up the mess before he was thrown out in a bloodless palace coup. The question is, can he do the job this time, especially now that he cannot simply order people around? To rephrase this question using the words of the theme of el-Rufa’i’s speech, can a civilian President Buhari turn Nigeria’s oil misfortune into a fortune?

Like most ordinary Nigerians, el-Rufa’i believes the president can – provided he can slay what the governor has described as three “huge dragons” that stand in the way, namely “(1) a fixation with public ownership and control of every major oil asset, (2) the corruption and distortion that oil subsidy is inflicting on our economy, and (3) the NNPC in its current form…”

Put simply, el-Rufa’i’s solution is that the president should privatise our refineries, remove fuel subsidy and abolish the NNPC as it is, whereby, as he said, it has, at least since 2012, kept about 42% of its revenues meant for the federation, for its self-aggrandisement!

El-Rufa’i is, in a sense, right about fuel subsidy and NNPC in so far as they are creatures of the corruption that has eaten deep into the nation’s fabric. However, I am not so sure about his own fixation with privatisation. Public ownership of the means of production may have its downsides but then so also does private ownership. We have, for example, privatised our banks and our airlines but they have hardly been any more efficient or transparent than they were. Even the relatively successful privatisation of our telecommunications industry hasn’t made it as efficient as it can be, given its huge profits. The truth is, good governance and transparency, and even efficiency, is no preserve of any ideology.

As for the corruption that has eaten into the nation’s fabric, the problem is not so much corruption itself but the impunity with which it has been practised. After all, no society can be corrupt-free. What is important is to make sure people see that there will in the end always be a day of reckoning, no matter anyone’s station in life.

To succeed in this fight against impunity, the president, as el-Rufa’i said in his speech, needs every support he can get from the media and civil society organisations (CSOs), for no other institutions in the society have the power for advocacy, education and enlightenment that the media and CSOs possess.

Only time will tend how consistent the president will be in his war against impunity and how much support the media and CSOs will give him.

Re: Asiwaju and the National Assembly leadership crisis

Sir,

I refer to the above article of last week and wish to submit that Chief Akande should have used the phrase “Most Nigerian elite” instead of “Northern elite” and that the conspiracy was against APC as a party and Buhari’s anti corruption crusade and not against the Yoruba.

Secondly, you mistakenly wrote that APC has 69 senators. The correct number is 59.

Ademola Akande,

Port Harcourt. +2348057224608.

Sir,

The APC leadership should realise that the party is no longer ACN but a conglomerate of different political tendencies. Therefore, it should consult with all stakeholders and interests before rolling out decisions. Buhari’s government has had its task cut out for it, which is enormous. The crisis his party is witnessing at the moment is a distraction. Time is ticking and people are expecting action and not altercation.

Adewuyi Adegbite. +2347013065440

July 22, 2015
Asiwaju and National Assembly leadership crisis

Chief Bisi Akande, former governor of Osun State and interim national chairman of the now ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), is hardly your typical politician, who is easily given to demagoguery. As anyone familiar with the key role he played in how the APC evolved into the eventual nemesis of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) – the self-styled biggest party in Africa, which misruled us for the past 16 years – would testify, the elderly chief was a great voice of wisdom for restrain and the politics of give and take, all the way back to the genesis of the party before 2011.

Late last month, however, the chief gave in to the strong temptation to be your typical politician when he issued a statement in which he described the raging National Assembly leadership crisis, which has divided the APC right down the middle, as a conspiracy of the North against the Yoruba.

“Most Northern elite, the Nigerian oil subsidy barons and other business cartels who never liked Buhari’s anti-corruption political stance,” the chief said in his statement, “are quickly backing up the rebellion against the APC with strong support…A large section of the Southwest sees the rebellion as a conspiracy of the North against the Yoruba.” With due respect to the highly-esteemed chief, nothing could be further from the truth.

The frustration behind the chief’s statement is understandable. The political sleight of hand Dr. Bukola Saraki, incidentally himself a Yoruba, used to become Senate President on June 9, whereby 51 senators of APC out of 69 were denied their right to choose their leader, is a cause for great anger, especially given the gratuitous concession of the deputy Senate presidency to the PDP. Saraki is, of course from the North, even if a Yoruba minority in the region. But it should be obvious to even a political illiterate that the man did it for himself, not for the region; in making his bid, he neither sought for nor obtained anyone’s mandate.

As with Saraki so also it is with Honourable Yakubu Dogara as Speaker, even though there is a difference in his circumstance; in his own case, no members were deprived of their right to vote even though, like Saraki, he submitted himself for election and emerged victorious in defiance of his party’s wish.

Akande’s opposition to Saraki and Dogara clearly derives from the great anger of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu at the apparently successful defiance of the party by Saraki and Dogara. Without doubt, the Asiwaju is today the most pre-eminent Yoruba politician since the beginning of the current Republic in 1999, bar possibly President Olusegun Obasanjo.

And just like the failure of General Muhammadu Buhari to seal the deal for an alliance as leader of Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) with Tinubu as leader of Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) back in 2011 doomed his presidential bid to failure that year, their handshake last year was probably, more than any other factor, responsible for the general’s success this time around. So Tinubu is entitled more than most top shots of APC to call its shots.

This status, however, does not entitle him to think, as many believe he does, that he is the conscience of the party any more than other chieftains are entitled. In other words, his insistence on party supremacy in the choice of the National Assembly’s APC leadership, though seemingly in the interest of party discipline and cohesion, is hardly as selfless as he and his acolytes would like the world to believe. Tinubu, many believe with good reason, has insisted on party supremacy only because it serves his interest of having Honourable Femi Gbajabiamila, former minority leader and his crony, as the Speaker, instead of Dogara.

In principle, party supremacy is necessary for discipline and cohesion. However, any party which insists on handing down orders from above all the time in the name of party supremacy without first gauging the true feelings of its rank and file, as is clearly the case in the current APC crisis, only courts precisely the indiscipline and chaos it seeks to avoid by invoking the mantra of party supremacy.

As for Tinubu’s entitlement to call APC’s shots, surely he must be aware that there are widespread concerns even among some of his acolytes that, having singlehandedly nominated both the interim and the elected party chairmen and the vice-president, he has called more than enough of the party’s shots even as arguably its greatest architect. That this concern is not exclusively Northern can be seen from a full page news item in The Nation of June 14 as reported by one of its managing editors and ace investigative reporter, Yusuf Alli.

The story, entitled: “How oil barons, others hijacked Senate, House elections”, spoke about how an anti-Tinubu cabal met at various times in Port Harcourt, Lagos, Abeokuta, Abuja and Ilishan to plan how to “decimate APC national leader, Asiwaju Tinubu.” The plotters, according to the story, included four serving governors and seven ex-governors, two of each from Asiwaju’s South-west backyard.

The story also claimed an “influential emir” was also involved. The emir, according to the story, had unsuccessfully pleaded with Asiwaju to intercede with President Buhari in the cases of some oil barons who have been fearful of the president’s commitment to investigate the oil subsidy scam. The story did not identify the oil barons but chances are they came from all sections of the country.

What all this means is that the crisis of the National Assembly leadership election is not, as Chief Akande claims, any Northern conspiracy against the Yoruba. Neither Saraki nor Dogara, it bears repeating, sought for or obtained the region’s mandate to do what they did. And, to the extent that there is any conspiracy to clip Asiwaju’s wings, most likely the co-conspirators come not from one section of the country alone but from all over.

Besides, it is instructive that much of the public gloating about Asiwaju’s current predicament has come, not from the North, but from his own backyard. Predictably leading the gloating is Chief Bode George, the Lagos-born PDP chieftain who has blamed Tinubu for his jailing years back on corruption charges as chairman of the Nigerian Ports Authority. Asiwaju’s political influence, George said with apparent glee, first in THE PUNCH (June 10) “is coming to sunset” and then added in the July 6th edition of the same newspaper that Tinubu and his group “have now been given political circumcision.”

Quick on his heels was Dr. Frederick Fasehun, co-founder of the militant Oodu’a Peoples Congress. Fasehun said in a two-page advert in The Guardian of July 5 that the National Assembly leadership crisis had nothing to do with the Yoruba but instead was “the demystification of Goliath.” As such, he said, Akande’s call on the Yoruba to see it as a slight on their nationhood “should be ignored.”

Not left behind was the voluble Mr. Femi Olukayode (formerly Fani-Kayode), spokesman for ex-President Goodluck Jonathan’s campaign organisation, who, among other nasty things, said on his official Facebook page on July 9 that the crisis was “the destruction and demystification of Bola Tinubu and his Yoruba loyalists by his erstwhile northern allies in the APC.”

The Asiwaju should not bother himself about all those gloating over his predicament. In politics, no one, not even the most sagacious politician, can win all the time. He may have lost the battle for the leadership of the National Assembly, but winning the war of stemming the rot of 16 years of PDP’s misrule is far more important. And this war can still be won in spite of the new National Assembly leadership, should it constitute itself into an obstacle against Buhari’s declared war on corruption and of restitution.

Therefore the Asiwaju, as a key APC chieftain, should never regret the key role he played in the emergence of his party as PDP’s nemesis simply because he has lost one, albeit an important, battle, among the many he has fought to bring hope of a new dawn to Nigeria.

AN EXPLANATION AND AN APOLOGY

The attentive reader of this column in Daily Trust last week would have noticed that a few things were wrong with it. First, the article had no title. Second, it did not reach any conclusion. Third, the readers’ responses to the previous column were not edited to remove the sometimes annoying shorthand language of mobile phone texts.

What happened was that I did not realise I had not saved my final draft before sending it out until I cross-checked my out box. To my great dismay, it turned out that what I’d sent was the original draft which fell short of the final copy by about 500 words and contained the errors I’d corrected.

By then it was well past my deadline. So I called the editors of The Nation and Daily Trust, and later texted the editors of my online publishers, Gamji and Newsdiaryonline, to drop the article. Whereas the editors at The Nation used their discretion and reproduced an old piece, those at Trust still went ahead to run it because they said they misunderstood my instruction.

I am sorry for the mix-up.

July 15, 2015
Some thoughts on media and terrorism

This year’s world congress and general assembly of the International Press Institute (IPI), the 63-year global press freedom advocacy organisation, took place in Amman, capital of Jordan, between May 19 and 21. Few Nigerians may have heard of this organisation even though it partly funds the Nigerian Institute of Journalism, the country’s premier journalism trainer, and even though some of the most prominent Nigerian journalists and publishers including Alhaji Lateef Jakande who once presided over its affairs, Aremo Segun Osoba, Mr Sam Amuka, Mr Felix Adenaike, Malam Kabiru Yusuf and Alhaji Ismaila Isa, have been among its leading members.

Naturally the organisation believes that press freedom is “the right that protects all other rights.” Consequently it has tried to defend press freedom everywhere in the world in several ways, including through its annual congress and general assembly where leading journalists, editors and media executives gather to discuss major contemporary issues.

Among the variety of issues discussed this year were the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the terrible civil war in Syria, the safety of journalists reporting in conflict situations, the implications of internet regulation for democracy and press freedom and reporting on religion. This journalist was on a panel of three – the others were Steven Pollard, editor of the London based Jewish Chronicle and Monjuru Ahsan Bulbul, the CEO of a private television station in Dhaka, Bangladesh who was a last minute substitute for Jeffrey Sharlet, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine and faculty member of the Centre for Religion and Media, New York University, who failed to make it to Amman – which discussed the last subject. The moderator was Ms Maria-Paz Lopez, a senior religious writer with La Vanguardia, Spain, and chair of the International Association of Religious Journalists. A little bit more about this presently.

Meantime a bit of my impression of Jordan. For me a more classic study in contrast between the country and Nigeria will be hard to find. Here’s a country in the middle of a harsh desert with no oil, no water, with a population of little over two million and in the frontiers of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict which is at the heart of so-called clash between the West and Islam. Yet a visitor to Amman and several of the towns and villages a few hours’ drive from it which we visited would be forgiven if he mistook them for towns and villages in advanced Europe or America. All the highways we travelled along were tarred, all the towns and villages we visited had electricity and water and not once did the lights go out throughout our stay in Amman.

Of all the barren country’s advances in spite of an almost total lack of natural resources none fascinated me like its ability to provide water to all its inhabitants. According to Nasiru Aminu, a senior diplomat at our Amman embassy and a friend, in all his several years in Jordan the taps in his house have never gone dry. Yet, the country, he said, relies almost entirely on harvesting rain water.

However, for me even more interesting than the ability of the country to satisfy the water needs of its inhabitants in the middle of a desert was the pattern of water supply among the poor, middle and high income neighbourhoods of the towns; the poor are supplied daily, the middle thrice weekly and the rich only once, said Nasiru. Here in Nigeria the reverse would’ve been the case.

The secret of Jordan’s relative wealth, said Nasiru, is its investment in the education of its people. This is evident from the country being a leading destination of medical tourism in the world, raking in more than two billion dollars annually. It is also the Information Technology capital of the Arab Middle East.

Jordan is, of course, no El Dorado. As a kingdom, and for that matter one on the frontiers of the Middle East conflict, its citizens can do with a lot more freedom than they have. I am certain, however, that few Jordanians, if any, would want to exchange their relatively gilded cage for Nigeria, the majority of whose citizens have been left free to live in abject and grinding poverty, almost totally abandoned by a state whose officials are generally too venal, selfish, power-hungry and incompetent, etc, to give a damn about public opinion.

Back to the IPI congress and general assembly, the liveliest session for me was none of the eight that were held between the morning of May 20 and the evening of the following day. The liveliest for me was the pre-congress town hall meeting in the evening of Sunday May 19 moderated by the well known CNN International anchor and correspondent, Jim Clancy. The subject looked simple enough; “Who is a journalist?” However, not surprisingly, the answer proved elusive. The debate that followed the introductory remarks of the four panellists on the questions whether in today’s digital age where anyone with a computer or a mobile phone who can send pictures and stories to news outlets and bloggers can be called journalists was truly hot and in the end there was no single answer.

There was, however, one interesting remark from the floor which was that today’s so-called “citizen journalism” was making mainstream journalists lazy by giving them an excuse to abdicate their responsibility for cross-checking the accuracy of news items before publishing. This, said the gentleman who made the remark, bodes ill for the future of professional journalism. I couldn’t agree more.

Finally to the discussion on reporting religion of which I was a panellist. My submission was that the dominance of the Nigerian media by the private sector in spite of the heavy presence of government in the broadcast media – a private sector dominance which, for historical reasons, does not reflect the ethnic, regional and religious plurality of the country – has led to a reporting culture which is heavily biased against Muslims and Islam. This, I said, was in turn a reflection of the global media which has been essentially anti-Islam.

Nowhere is this bias as glaring as in the reporting of Boko Haram insurrection which has caught the attention of the world because, of course, Nigeria, with at least 160 million people, is one of the most populous in the world and the biggest in Africa, reportedly almost split in half between Muslims and Christians, and because, of course, Nigeria is a leading world oil producer. The evidence of this anti-Muslim and anti-Islam bias of the Nigerian media is pretty clear in the way it has grossly under reported the human rights abuses of ordinary law abiding Muslims by the military and security forces in their fight against Boko Haram.

Two recent reports by Adam Nossiter, the West African correspondent of The New York Times, have captured this journalistic blind eye like no other. The first in May entitled “Bodies Pour In as Nigeria Hunts for Islamists” and datelined Maiduguri, made very grim reading.

“A fresh load of battered corpses,” Nossiter said in his introduction, “arrived, 29 of them in a routine delivery by the Nigerian military to the hospital morgue here. Unexpectedly, three bodies started moving. ‘They were not properly shot,’ recalled a security official here. ‘I had to call the J.T.F.’ — the military’s joint task force — ‘and they gunned them down.’”

Nossiter’s second story this month in the wake of President Goodluck Jonathan’s declaration of emergency in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states makes as grim reading as the first, perhaps even more so. “The first independent accounts of the military offensive (since the emergency)”, said Nossiter, “spoke of indiscriminate bombing and shooting, unexplained civilian deaths, night time roundups of young men by security forces.”

You will search most of the Nigerian media in vain to see any expression of concern about this indiscriminate use of force by our security forces in their war against Boko Haram terrorism. Certainly you would not see the sort of vehemence with which the media rightly condemned the Odi and Zaki-Biam massacres of the Obasanjo’s era. Yet what has happened in the North-eastern strongholds of Boko Haram is worse than the two combined, if only because both were one-off military invasions.

In a recent well argued defence of President Jonathan’s state of emergency declaration in the region, the respected constitutional lawyer, Prof Ben Nwabueze, called it “a masterstroke indeed.” Without debating the merit of his position – this is a matter for possibly another occasion – it is obvious that the professor believes the consequential military operation against Boko Haram will bring a definite, if not quick, end to its terrorism, regardless of how the soldiers go about their operation.

The professor’s “masterstroke” only reminded me of what President George Bush Jnr said when he invaded Iraq. It was, he said, going to be a “cakewalk”. Today, we all know that it was anything but. Right here at home the late President Umaru Yar’adua said more or less the same thing when he sent the soldiers after the sect in 2009. This too has, sadly and tragically, proved anything but a cakewalk.

It seems to me the lesson of relying mainly on the use of indiscriminate force to solve a problem even as criminal as terrorism, whatever its variety, has not been learnt by our leaders and media pundits. Certainly the Nigerian media has not used its freedom as a shield that, to rephrase IPI’s principal objective, should be used to protect the rights of others.

•This article was first published on
June 12, 2013
•Mohammed Haruna returns next week

July 8, 2015
Why PMB is right to hasten slowly

Last week I promised to publish more of the responses to my column of June 17 on the controversy that has trailed Dr. Bukola Saraki election as Senate president, a controversy that does not seem about to go away or even subside so soon. Accordingly I have devoted about a third of today’s column to some of those responses.

Before then, however, some words about President Muhammadu Buhari’s seeming slow speed of decision making and his orders to the country’s service chiefs on June 12 to dismantle the military checkpoints that had riddled our highways and towns.

First, the military checkpoints. In the last four years, travelling on our highways and commuting within our towns had become a nightmare, especially in the North where the checkpoints had been more prevalent. They had, on average, nearly doubled travel time within and between towns, had become avenues for extortion of travellers and had occasionally led to the harassment, maiming and even killing of those who dared resist such extortions.

The trade off was supposed to be at least the curtailment of the movement of Boko Haram personnel and their arsenal. Their abduction of Chibok girls two years ago and their frequent bombings of soft targets – schools, churches, mosques, markets and the like – clearly exposed the ineffectiveness of these checkpoints. Indeed, far from securing society from such attacks, the checkpoints constituted potential killing fields; it was a miracle that it apparently never crossed the twisted minds of the insurgents to explode bombs in the massive traffic go-slows and hold-ups caused by the checkpoints. One shudders to imagine the level of human and material destruction that would’ve resulted therefrom.

However, for some inexplicable reasons, former President Goodluck Jonathan rejected all entreaties, including those from some ex-military heads of state who obviously knew a thing or two about national security, physical or otherwise, to dismantle the checkpoints. It was as if someone somewhere was intent on inflicting suffering and pain on Nigerians under the guise of keeping them safe from Boko Haram.

Some people have argued that without the military checkpoints things could’ve been much worse. This is not impossible but the argument is more speculative than factual, given the limited military capacity of Boko Haram, even compared with our hitherto seemingly out-gunned army.

President Buhari may have seemed slow in decision making, but on this issue of military checkpoints, his orders to dismantle them within a month of being sworn in could hardly have been prompter – and more right; if nothing else, it is bound to drastically reduce the cost doing business in the areas affected and lift the terrible trauma of siege mentality the checkpoints had inflicted on people.

All of which takes me back to the first issue of the president’s seemingly slow speed in decision making. Nothing captures this better than a caption story in The Guardian last Sunday. In what is potentially an award winning piece of photo journalism, the newspaper devoted half of its front page to a beautiful picture of a lone tortoise crawling across the huge, but at the time apparently empty, forecourt of the Aso Villa with the bold caption “Slow And Steady Wins The Race.”

Few readers would miss the newspaper’s sarcastic but subtle dig at the president. And as if to agree with it, on the same day, the Daily Trust on Sunday, whose stable no one can accuse of being an enemy of the president, published an editorial which clearly suggested it is unhappy with the speed of his governance.

“We urge President Muhammadu Buhari,” the newspaper said in concluding its editorial, “to immediately appoint an SGF (Secretary to the Federal Government), appoint a full complement of personal staff and nominate ministers without further delay.”

I agree with Trust that he should appoint the SGF and his full complement of personal staff without further delay. Indeed he should’ve done so from day one, especially as he has had close aides who possess the requisite skills, integrity and loyalty for the jobs and have done similar jobs for him long before he entered politics in 2003.

However, I disagree with the newspaper and those who share its sentiments that he ought to nominate members of his cabinet immediately. By implication, the president does need a cabinet to deliver on his promises. But nothing in the constitution says there is a deadline for constituting it. Of course, doing so should not take forever. At most it shouldn’t take more than his first hundred days in office.

In that case the man still has about two more months to go. If his current pace looks too slow to meet his 100-day covenant with Nigerians, I think it is because, as Nigerians, we seem too much given to drama. It is also because we underestimate the depth and scope of the mess which the hitherto ruling PDP had made of Nigeria in the last 16 years.

In the lead editorial of its June 20th edition, The Economist of London said Buhari’s coming to power is an opportunity for Nigeria as “Africa’s most important failure (to) at last come right.” In that same edition, the newsmagazine carried a 16-page special report with the president’s picture on its cover captioned “Opportunity knocks” on how to get it right this time.

Opportunities like this come only once in a long while in the life of a nation. It is therefore better and safer for the president to err on the side of caution than rush into judgement and risk getting it all wrong. One hundred, even 30 days may be too long to pick one’s closest aides, but it is certainly not too long to put together a team competent and sincerely committed enough to do the heavy lifting that should turn this country around from the mess it is in.

And now to the Saraki controversy

Sir,

Much as I share some aspects of your analysis on Saraki in The Nation of June 17, the last paragraph was off the track. In eight years, Saraki transformed Kwara in the areas of urban facelift, education, agriculture and roads.

Olatunde Ayodabo,

+2348033604983.

Sir,

You got it right when you said “Saraki served himself more than he served society.” You only forgot to add that he ruined Societe Generale Bank and the bank’s customers’ businesses. He has ruined so many things in Kwara. Now, who will deliver the 8th Senate from being ruined by him? Only time will tell.

Leke Adeyemo

Ilorin. +2348134616449.

Sir,

I don’t think it is fair to blame President Muhammadu Buhari on the recent election of Saraki and Dogara as President of the Senate and Speaker House of Representatives on the wrong assumption that he is the leader of the party. There is nowhere in the APC Constitution which says that the elected president or governor from the party shall be leaders of the party at national and state levels respectively. The constitution only says the president shall be a member of the National Executive committee and governors, members of state executive committee. Party chairmen are leaders of their party at all levels.

Secondly, APC senators and House members must learn to cooperate with PDP senators and House members for the smooth passage of their bills since they lack two third majorities in both chambers.

Hussaini Dangaladima,

Dan’iyan Zazzau Suleja

+2348163422383

Sir,

I read your piece of Wednesday, June 17, 2015 titled “Saraki as President of the 8th Senate.” President Muhammadu Buhari at 72 cannot be wrong when he said he was not interested in whoever emerged as the principal officers in the two legislative houses. He said and did the right thing and should have been fully backed and supported by the party.

Instead, the party chieftains decided to act in their own wisdom but with what result? DISGRACE! They have since learnt the hard way and have been crying over spilt milk. They forgot the Yoruba adage which says that “Oroagba bi o se laaro, a se lale,” which means “The saying of an old man, if it does not come to pass in the morning, will surely do in the evening”.

The strong man of Lagos politics should be told in plain language that this is politics at the national level and not at state or regional level. APC should wake up. PDP is prowling around and roaring like a hungry lion looking for whom to devour. Let them put the episode behind, reflect on the lesson learnt and bounce back stronger.

Ologun B. Freeman,

Utako, Abuja.

ologfreemania@hotmail.com

Sir,

There should be no soft landing for Bukola Saraki. The best option for him is to resign. The decisions of the party hierarchies remain sacrosanct. He must be told in clear terms that Nigeria Federation is not Kwara State that his family members see as their patrimonial estate.

+2348073344775.

July 1, 2015
The Gusau Institute: the new ‘kid’ on the block

All roads last Thursday led to No. 2 Dendo Road, off Ahmadu Bello Way, the commercial artery of Kaduna City. The address houses perhaps the newest think tank in Nigeria and potentially the most influential. This is the Gusau Institute, the brainchild of Lt-General Aliyu Gusau Mohammed, until last month our defence minister and easily Nigeria’s longest serving spymaster if only because he holds the unique record of serving as the country’s National Security Adviser thrice.

On the said Thursday the Institute formally opened shop with a seminar on how Africa will possibly shape out in the world’s political economy by the year 2040, and which of its countries will play the leading roles in helping it begin to realize its potential. As debuts go it was hard to identify a better topic and a better keynote speaker.

This piece, however, will not dwell much on the seminar itself, incisive and thought-provoking as the keynote paper and the responses it provoked from the main respondent and the large and distinguished audience were.

According to the keynote speaker, Dr Jakkie Cilliers, Executive Director of the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), a leading South African think tank, Africa may be rising, but by 2040 it is still unlikely to play more than a marginal role in the global political economy. Within the continent, however, the five biggest players, he said, would be Algeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, South Africa and, of course, Nigeria, its most populous country and biggest economy. “If,” he said in the summary of his paper, “Nigeria were to take the necessary steps that would see far-reaching changes to the governance issues and social challenges that currently beset the country, it could become Africa’s lone superpower.”

Without any doubt one of the big governance issues and social challenges facing the country, if not the biggest, is the Boko Haram terrorism which is widely regarded as a consequence of the bad governance that has bedevilled the country’s for almost all of its nearly 55 years of independence. It was hardly surprising therefore, that the chairman of the occasion and the country’s first Chief of Defence Staff and one of its finest officers and gentlemen, General Alani Akinrinade, contended in his opening remarks that perhaps the biggest task before the Gusau institute is to come up quickly with a military doctrine that can tackle the novel challenge of Boko Haram’s type of internal insurrection.

Of course there are other governance issues and social challenges besides Boko Haram. There’s corruption. There’s unemployment. There’s acute power and infrastructural deficits. There’s illiteracy, laziness and inequity, etc. None of these is amenable to quick fixes. All which means the Gusau Institute has its job cut out for it, namely, to research into how these problems can be tackled and seek to influence public policy accordingly.

With one of the richest private libraries in the land – possibly richer than that of Arewa House, Kaduna, a think tank affiliated to Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, and certainly richer than the Kaduna State Library – coupled with the fact that its founder has arguably the most extensive global network of intelligence gurus among the country’s spymasters, the institute should be able to live up to its promise of becoming one of the country’s topmost think tanks before long.

Already, its library which, according to its librarian, Mrs. Marlene Maritz, has over 17,000 titles and more than 25,000 books – many of the titles have more than one copy – is where post graduate students of most universities in Kaduna’s catchment area, notably the degree awarding Nigerian Defence Academy, the state’s own university and ABU, go to for up to date answers to issues in their research projects.

And since it started functioning quietly nearly two years ago, the library has, according to Mrs Maritz, donated thousands of books to universities, mostly to Kaduna State’s, and to secondary schools. Besides, the library has a rich trove of newspapers and magazines with plans to make them digital for easy reference. It also has an even richer e-library which can be accessed via wifi from the premises.

By all counts – the quality of the keynote paper, the quality and quantity of the audience, the clock-like efficiency of the organization, you name it – the institute’s inaugural lecture was a huge success. But, as the founder told this columnist in not exactly those words, you are only as good as your last outing. And so the institute is already planning to surpass, or at least match, Thursday’s seminar.

Next time the focus will reportedly be on domestic socio-political history, so to speak; the stories of the leading figures of the team without which Sir Ahmadu Bello, the first and only Premier of the North, would never have built a legacy which has remained unmatched and for which he has always been singularly praised. The moral of the seminar clearly would be that a tree does not make a forest, a thought that must surely be exercising the mind of our new president, Muhammadu Buhari, as he sets about bringing the “change” for which the nation, tired of so much barefaced venality and incompetence, elected him. One can only pray and hope that he is able to raise a team of such quality as Sir Ahmadu’s.

It is a measure of how great the great man’s legacy is that, as Professor Ango Abdullahi, vice-chancellor of ABU over 30 year ago and the emergency respondent to the paper – the scheduled respondent and current vice-chancellor, Professor Ibrahim Garba, was unavoidably absent – pointed out, Sir Ahmadu’s last budget for 1966, the year he was assassinated in our first military coup, was equivalent to that of Kaduna North Local Government which is only one of the over 400 local governments that exist today in the North!

The Gusau Institute is, of course, only one of a relatively large number of think tanks this country can boast of. According to a global rating of think tanks by the University of Pennsylvania, USA, Nigeria, with 46 think tanks, ranks second only to South Africa with 87, in the number of such institutes in each country. These are, of course, puny compared to, say, America’s which has over 1,800 out of a global total of over 6,300. But then America is centuries older than most African countries, is more populous than all of them and has a democracy with the richest economy in the world.

With 46 think tanks – and still counting – the Gusau Institute obviously has a lot to compete with. These come in various shapes and sizes. There are state sponsored ones like the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Lagos, our own equivalent of Chatham House, London, and the Nigerian Institute for Social and Economic Research (NISER), Ibadan. There are party sponsored ones like those of the erstwhile ruling PDP and private ones like the Centre for the Study of the Economies of Africa (CSEA), established in Abuja seven years ago by Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, until last month, our one and only Coordinating and Finance Minister.

Given its founder’s global connections, commitment and knowledge, the Gusau Institute should outclass most, if not all, of these in a not too distant future. Certainly it will be a key player in generating the ideas that should truly transform our country into the greatness destined for it by its size and resources, human and natural.

Re: Saraki as President of the 8th Senate

Sir,

Saraki needed not to have acted the way he did. He may have won even if the entire 109 senates participated in the election. Nobody would have cried foul. When God chooses a man, he makes him to endure; unlike when a man through desperate ambition chooses himself.

Funso Enoch,

Ilesa, Osun State, +2348033779630.

Sir,

Your piece in The Nation today (June 17) has revealed you as one of a very few writers and political commentators whose understanding of political science and its application to social reality is, to me, an embodiment of excellence. Majority of Bukola Saraki’s critics couldn’t even, perhaps because of bias and sentiments, fathom the principle of power separation. That was why some senators loyal to (Senator Ahmed) Lawal chose to attend a meeting arranged by APC when the President had even issued a proclamation which stipulated that sitting should commence at 10am.

+2348025498722.

Sir,

I had thought the election of Dogara as Speaker should have assuaged the fears of Christians in the North just like Akume if he had been elected Senate President. But you didn’t acknowledge this fact. For me you just set out to discredit Saraki and I am disappointed. +2348033315859.

Note: In the light of the controversy that this subject has continued to stir, I’ll publish more and longer reactions next week, God willing.

M.H.

June 24, 2015
Saraki as President of the 8th Senate

President Muhammadu Buhari called it “constitutional”, but Barnabas Gemade, the ranking senator from Benue and leader of “Unity Forum”, which was behind Ahmed Lawan’s bid for the leadership of the 8th Senate, said it wasn’t. Whoever was right between the president and the senator, it is now obvious that the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) failed to learn the lesson of the debacle of the erstwhile ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which produced Aminu Tambuwal, now governor of Sokoto State, as Speaker of the 7th House of Representatives in defiance of the decision of the PDP leadership four years ago.

The cloak and dagger drama, which has now produced Dr. Bukola Saraki as Senate President, against APC’s preference for Lawan, followed almost exactly the same plot as that of Tambuwal’s, with the two political parties merely swapping places as culprit and victim and the difference that, unlike his predecessor, the new president did not hesitate in accepting the decision of the legislators, even though he did express some reservations about Saraki’s tactics.

The first time I wrote about this political drama five weeks ago, my choice for Senate president was George Akume, a former Benue State governor and minority leader at the time. At that time the APC National Working Committee had reportedly zoned the job to the North-Central and it looked like the race was Saraki’s to lose to Akume, both of them from the same zone; Saraki had, by words and deeds, all this while made no secret of his ambition to head the Senate as a prelude to his bigger ambition of being president of the whole country.

My choice of Akume, as I said then, was essentially because I thought it would go a long way in healing the deep wounds of the decades-long nasty and bloody Christian/Muslim conflicts in the North, which had been a big source of the region’s economic retardation and, by extension, the whole country’s.

Even then I knew my choice was based more on hope than on Akume’s real prospects; long before the March/April elections, it was an open secret that Saraki had built a formidable network of support for the realisation of his ambitions not only within the ranks of the party leadership. He was also widely known to have built an even wider network of support among prospective senators across party lines.

The scales seemed to have turned against Saraki only when, in spite of the then President-elect Buhari’s oft-repeated declaration that he had no preferred candidate for the job, his body language seemed to suggest, at least to some party leaders, if not all, that his preference was for Lawan. For this reason, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, for one, shifted his formidable support for Akume to Lawan, having apparently calculated that this was the only way to achieve his goal of installing his protégé, Hon. Gbajabiamila, then House minority leader, as its speaker.

As things have now turned out, it seems everyone opposed to Saraki had underestimated the capacity for political subterfuge of this apparently worthy scion of the late undisputed godfather of Kwara State politics and leader of the Senate during the Second Republic, Dr. Olusola Saraki. For, constitutional or not, the younger Saraki’s successful coup of June 9 against the decision of the party leadership to support Lawan takes the gold in political gamesmanship.

It is a measure of his success that his strategy has left his adversaries fuming in great anger and frustration. “The purported election of Senator Saraki and Dogara as Senate President and Speaker respectively”, fumed Mr. Joe Igbokwe recently, “is a clear transgression of both the tenets of democracy and party politics.” Igbokwe is a spokesman for the Lagos State chapter of the APC and his anger merely echoed that of his boss, Tinubu, who had said he would not even recognise Saraki as Senate president, a sentiment re-echoed by Gemade when he told reporters after Saraki’s election that “this process, which remains unconstitutional, cannot confer legitimacy on the elected Senate president.”

As the Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to the president, Malam Garba Shehu, said on Channels Television during one of its flagship programmes, Sunrise Daily, on June 10, there was no doubt that Saraki employed underhand means to achieve his ambition. In what was clearly a grand conspiracy in cahoots with the PDP Senate caucus, he and his group in the Senate ignored the president’s invitation for a meeting to reconcile the APC federal legislators an hour ahead of its inauguration at 10am on June 9 and got himself nominated unopposed and elected by 57 senators, mostly PDP, while the other group numbering 51 waited for the meeting with the president at a different venue. Apparently he feared, admittedly with some justification, that the meeting would be used to make him submit to the outcome of the party’s straw poll the day before in which Lawal emerged as the party’s choice.

In the face of this political sleight of hand by Saraki, it is understandable that many an APC chieftain have been calling for him to be disciplined. The extremely angry ones have even called for his sack. Almost all of them have also blamed Buhari’s advertised indifference to the outcome of the election of the leadership of the National Assembly on the altar of non-interference with the other arms of government for Saraki’s successful coup.

Those who now blame Buhari for the APC debacle have, as I’ve said at the beginning of this piece, apparently not learnt from the same debacle that befell PDP four years ago. It also seems they lack an understanding of the workings of party politics in a presidential system when they lament the absence of party discipline in the country.

True in both the parliamentary model of democracy we once practised and the presidential democracy we now practise, all elected office holders hold their offices solely by the grace of political parties. But the notion of party discipline, i.e. the ability of members of parliamentary groups to get members to support party policies and decisions, is much weaker in the presidential system than in the parliamentary one, the simple reason being the lack of clear separation between the executive and legislative arms of government in the parliamentary system as is the case in the presidential.

This means legislators can defy party decisions in the presidential system without bringing down a government, which in turn means party whips don’t have the imperative to constantly crack their whips to get members into line that party whips do in the parliamentary system. In the American type of presidential system we have largely modelled ours after, party disciple is particularly weak because elected office holders feel more loyal to their constituencies, geographical or ideological, than they do to political parties.

At any rate, those who argue that if Buhari had intervened decisively in the choice of the National Assembly leadership, APC, as the new ruling party, would’ve saved itself the embarrassment of having a PDP senator as deputy Senate president, ignore the fact that Saraki might still have won, in which case APC could have suffered an even worse predicament than it is in.

So rather than cry over spilt milk, APC will serve Nigerians and itself better if it fosters the separation of powers among the three arms of government even as it ensures that the arms cooperate with each other in making policies and programmes that in the overall interest of the society rather than in the interests of only a few.

On his part, Saraki should know that there is widespread public perception that as governor of Kwara State and subsequently as one of its three senators, he seemed to have served himself more than he had served society, as is apparent from how little his state has made any progress under him. Much of the public’s concern about his emergence as Senate president stems from this perception. He should know that the public will be on the watch out to see if he will cooperate with the new president in enacting laws and making pro-people policies or as was the case under PDP they’ll watch to see whether he will preside over a Senate that is anti-people.

June 17, 2015
Still on Buhari and national conference

In my column last week, I promised I would go into the greater details of why I said President Muhammadu Buhari should ignore calls that he should complete the job of amending our constitution, which was started by his predecessor, former President Goodluck Jonathan, in the twilight of his administration. I said I would do so in a not too distant future.

Instead, I have decided to go into those details today in spite of the fact that the elections yesterday of a new leadership of the National Assembly in total defiance of the wishes of the new ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), is a more immediate, if not more compelling topic for discussion. Those elections bode ill for our democracy, at least in my view. Certainly they suggest fears that, except for Buhari, little has changed with APC as the ruling party from yesterday’s Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP’s) politics of self-aggrandisement and self-service.

This, however, is a topic for another day, possibly next week.

Today I’ll go into the details of why I believe Buhari should not waste his time heeding calls on him to finish the job of amending our constitution started by his predecessor. And these calls have come not only from Elder Chris Eluemuno, a chieftain of Ohaneze, whom I mentioned last week. Afenifere elders and militant Yoruba leaders like Dr. Frederick Fasehun in a two-page advert in The Guardian (May 31), and Otunba Gani Adams in an interview in Sunday Vanguard (May 10), have also made similar calls.

Perhaps even more importantly, the relatively restrained Guardian itself had made a similar call in its editorial of March 12. It argued that because, in its view, the content and conduct of the campaigns for Election ’15 were “disappointing”, the report of the National Conference “cannot but be factored into the process of governance by the next government.”

As the Americans say, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I will be the last person to argue that our Constitution is not without its flaws; it is manmade and nothing manmade is, or can be, perfect. If nothing else our constitution is fundamentally flawed in its revenue and legislative allocation among the three levels of government, to the extent that local governments can be regarded as a level of government. It is also fundamentally flawed in the way it has stood our true federation of the First Republic on its head by turning it into a centralised system in all but name.

There are, of course, other ways in which our constitution is flawed. Still, I dare say it is not as broke as its loudest critics say it is. Certainly it is not so broke that little or no good can be achieved without amending it or replacing it. I believe that in spite of its shortcomings Nigeria can be transformed into a prosperous nation under it if only we, leaders and led alike, strive to cultivate the right attitudes.

The definitive proof of this is America itself, whose constitution is universally adjudged as the most precise, eloquent and successful in the world because it has produced the most prosperous and freest democracy to date. Yet under the same constitution the country has in recent times deteriorated progressively into a gridlock between the executive and legislative arms of its central government, a gridlock that is already undermining its leadership of the world.

The difference has been a dramatic change in the attitude of its people, whereby its leaders have become increasingly self-aggrandising and self-serving while its common folks have been driven into indifference to politics as has manifested in their increasing low turnout during elections.

In other words, our problem as in today’s America is, in one word, much more a problem of attitude than of constitution. After all, no constitution in the world is, or can be, self-executing. Unfortunately it is difficult, if not impossible to legislate attitude. Ultimately, the solution to our problem therefore is to look inwards into ourselves and change our attitudes individually and collectively.

Meantime there are, needless to say, provisions in our constitutions that seem to need fixing, provisions like those of the size of our executive councils, especially at the centre, the financial and administrative “autonomy” of our local governments and the justiciability of the fundamental objectives of state, etc. However, most of these can be dealt with without having to amend or change our constitution.

For example, with the right perception the problem of the big size of our Federal Executive Council where Section 147 makes it mandatory for the president to appoint at least one minister from each state can be dealt with.

Here the problem, on reflection, is clearly more of lack of frugality in our expenditures on offices than of their numbers as is also clearly the case in our humongous and unsustainable expenditures on our legislators. After all, our federal cabinets have been more or less the same size since the First Republic if you count the junior ministers.

So far I have given two reasons why I think our new president should ignore the calls on him to complete his predecessor’s initiative of amending our constitution, namely our beggar-thy-neighbour attitude among leaders and followers alike, but more importantly among leaders, and our all too often wrong diagnosis of problems arising from wrong perceptions of the problems.

There are at least two more reasons. One is the self-contradictions of some of the recommendations. The other is the fact that the conference was convened in bad faith, composed in bad faith and was conducted in bad faith.

On the first reason, the same people, for example, who talk glibly about returning to the old autonomous regions of the First Republic, with, of course some modifications, also want at least 18 more states created out of the current ones. Similarly the same people who talk about the imperative of freedom of choice also simultaneously want power rotation and zoning entrenched into our constitution.

As for my second reason of the bad faith that surrounded the national conference, this much was obvious from its timing when the president knew he had only enough time and money to select its members rather than have them elected as should be the case, and from the way its membership was deliberately skewed heavily against Muslims and Northerners, in gross violation of the religious and regional composition of the country.

The bad faith was also obvious from the attempt by some key members to sneak in key provisions into its report that were never agreed upon by the conference and even title the reports Draft 2014 Constitution instead of amendments to the 1999 Constitution that they were.

Last, but by no means the least, the bad faith was obvious from a correspondence dated August 6, 2014 between Chinweizu, author and an unrepentant Biafran, and some key elements at the conference led by Professor G. G. Darah, an intellectual fountainhead of militants from the Delta region, in which Chinweizu urged them to regard the excision of a section of the country as their main objective at the conference.

“Excise them by talking and voting”, he said. And if excising what he called “Caliphate colonialists” from Nigeria failed, he said, “at least get a resolution passed by the Greater South majority postponing the 2015 election till after a new constitution is approved by referendum.”

That Darah and his co-travellers failed in achieving either objective was not for want of trying. In any case their attempts framed the conduct of the national conference which, above all, is why it is not worth any serious consideration.

A catalogue of yet greater errors

Last week I apologised for a catalogue of errors I made in my column the week before, only to commit even more egregious ones at the same time. It was as if, as one elder friend said to me over the phone, I needed strong coffee to keep alert when writing!

The more egregious ones last week were the years I gave of the enactment of the constitutions of Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha. The first was 1988 not 1996 – by then the man had “stepped aside” by three years – and the second was 1995, not 1998, the year in which Abacha died in office.

Then there was my mix-up of homophones; words that sound similar but have different spellings and different meanings. In this case I wrongly used the word “seized” instead of “ceased” in the phrase “Unfortunately, our own federation seized…” in the last but four paragraphs of the column.

Once again my apologies.

June 10, 2015
Why Buhari should ignore the national conference report

Since the military first intervened in our politics in January 1966, the presidential-type Constitution they replaced the old Parliamentary-type of the First Republic with in October 1979 has been a bone of contention, not least because many Nigerians, experts and laymen alike, consider the Constitution’s claim of speaking for “We the People,” as a fraud. This is simply because the military exercised its veto over the final document, something which, by definition, the military had no one’s mandate to do.

Since 1979, our Constitution has gone through some changes in 1996 under military president General Ibrahim Babangida and in 1998 under the late military head of state, General Sani Abacha, until it took its current form and substance in 1999 under military head of state, General Abdulsalami Abubakar. It is this military fatherhood of our Constitution that many, if not most, Nigerians find disagreeable; hence the persistent call for a constitution that can legitimately speak for “We the People.”

The first opportunity for a fully civilian siring of our constitution since the First Republic came under a civilian President Olusegun Obasanjo. Remember he was the military head of state, who gave us the 1979 Constitution a little over three years after his predecessor, General Murtala Mohammed, who had ended nine years of military rule under General Yakubu Gowon, was killed in an unsuccessful military coup in February 1976.

For almost his entire eight years as civilian president, Obasanjo balked at any idea of a national conference, sovereign or otherwise, for the amendment or change of our constitution. Towards the end of his second tenure, however, he suddenly saw the light and initiated one. But then it came under widespread suspicion that his change of mind was essentially motivated by a hidden agenda of securing a third, some even said a life, term for himself in violation of the constitution’s limit of two terms of four years each for the executive arm of government. That suspicion was born out when he consigned the conference’s report to the dustbin after the National Assembly voted against any change of the constitution’s term limit.

Fast forward to May 29, 2011 when Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, president until barely six days ago, secured the office on his own steam in that year’s presidential election after completing the term of his predecessor, Umaru Yar’adua, who died on May 5, 2010 after a long illness. Like Obasanjo, his since estranged political godfather, Jonathan persistently rejected calls for a national conference. Again, like father like son, the man saw the light only after he was more than half way through first full tenure.

Predictably, widespread suspicions trailed his announcement on October 1, 2013 of a “National Conversation” for possibly a new constitution. Many suspected, with good reason, that it was meant to divert attention from issues of insecurity, corruption, oil theft, lack of power, etc, that seem to have completely swamped him. Others thought he was persuaded to initiate it by a cabal so as to gain political advantage with some sections of the country in the general elections that were then fast approaching.

If you think the latter argument was so much rubbish, consider the claim the other by a chieftain of Ohaneze Ndigbo, the umbrella cultural organisation of the Igbo, that they, along with Afenifere, the Yoruba equivalent of Ohaneze, and the South-South region where the former president comes from, voted for him because it was the only way they could guarantee the implementation of the recommendations of the president’s national conference, which were in their favour.

According to the Newswatch Times (April 19), this claim was made by the president of the Anambra State chapter of the Ohaneze, Elder Chris Eluemuno. As such, the chieftain said, any failure by our new president, Muhammadu Buhari, to implement the said recommendations would risk dividing the country.

When President Jonathan inaugurated the conference on March 17, 2014 he reiterated his good faith in convening it. “Let me again repeat,” he said in the last but three paragraph of his 52-paragraph speech, “what I have been saying that Goodluck Jonathan has no personal agenda in convening this national conference.”

When he subsequently received the report of the conference on August 21, 2014 at the end of its deliberation, he said he believed it presented a platform for “genuine and sincere dialogue among Nigerians.” He also promised that the efforts of the delegates, whose hard work and commitment he praised to high heavens, “shall not be in vain.”

Given his reiteration of his good faith and of his commitment to implement the conference’s recommendations, you would think the man would’ve made the report a major issue in this year’s presidential election.

Well, as we all know, he never did. Instead, like his estranged godfather, Obasanjo, he too consigned the conference report to the cooler. Worse, his quarrel with the National Assembly over his signing its amendment bill in the dying days of his presidency showed quite clearly that giving Nigerians a genuinely civilian constitution was never really of much concern to him.

As we all know he vetoed the National Assembly bill on April 15. An incensed National Assembly then moved immediately to try and override his veto. An equally alarmed presidency countered that by going to the Supreme Court to stop the federal legislators in their tracks. The court obliged on May 7 and asked the legislators to tarry awhile until the substantive case was heard. It then fixed June 18 to hear the case, thus effectively stopping the legislators since their tenure would’ve ended by then. Initially the legislators said they were going to defy the court, but in the end sanity prevailed and they stopped their move.

However, if President Jonathan was inexplicably cool to the idea of amending or changing our constitution, our new president was no different. Indeed he and his party were worse than indifferent; they were hostile to it apparently because they suspected the ex-president’s motive in convening it, not without good reason.

Even then, as is clear from the new president’s inaugural speech whose precision, clarity and coherence has since become a trademark of his speeches, Buhari is concerned that there should be no conflicts of roles among the three arms of government.

In his speech, he expressed his concern about the almost universal abuse of the Local Government Joint Account especially by governors since the beginning of the current dispensation in 1999.

“Constitutionally,” he said, “there are limits to powers of each of the three tiers of government but that should not mean the Federal Government should fold its arms and close its eyes to what is going on in the states and local governments. Not least the operation of the Local Government Joint Account.”

I agree with our president that his government must be concerned about accountability and transparency at all levels of government. However, it is a misnomer in our constitution for it to have created the impression that in a true federation there are three tiers of government. As I’ve had cause to argue on these pages in a true federation there are only two levels of government: the federating units and the centre to which they cede certain powers. In such a federation local governments are no more than creatures of the federating units.

Unfortunately our own federation seized being a true one from 1966 when the military first intervened in our politics. Instead it stood our federation on its head when the centre became the creator of the federating units instead of the other way round. To add to the confusion, our constitution still vests the creation of local government with Houses of Assembly and not the National Assembly.

This was one of the key issues that were decided upon by Jonathan’s national conference and we should all be concerned that we sort all such issues out properly.

Even then I still believe President Buhari should ignore the report of the national conference for the simple reason that it was clearly convened in bad faith and also because it was riddled with too many contradictions.

This, however, is a matter for another day, possibly in a not too distant future.

June 3, 2015
Education as Buhari’s priority

Two days ago, Spectrum Broadcasting Company celebrated the tenth anniversary of its flagship, Hot FM, Abuja, one of the most popular radio stations in Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory, and in the country; its proprietor and host of the event, the delectable Senator Chris Anyawu, herself once a popular broadcaster, said in her welcome speech that her station is among the top three in the country.

The venue of the celebration was the recently constructed Nigeria Airforce Conference Centre and Suites, an architectural beauty and one of the most modern buildings in Abuja.

The top highlight of the event was the Special Awards to four prominent Nigerians – the Senate President, David Mark, for stabilising the Senate leadership after eight years of a scandalously high turnover of five presidents; Kano State Governor, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso for his exceptional service delivery in his state; Dr Oby Ezekwesili, for leading an enduring campaign for the rescue of Chibok Girls held in captivity by Boko Haram for over a year now; and the Nigerian Armed Forces for their gallantry, sacrifice and courage in the face of great odds in combating Boko Haram. The second highlight was a two-topic symposium, the first on “The Change Nigerians Expect” and the other, a panel discussion on how the media can foster that change.

Professor Pat Utomi, formerly of the Lagos Business School, and Ezekwesili, one of the awardees, spoke on the first topic, while AIT’s Raymond Dokpesi, represented by Odion Bello, one of his top managers, presented the paper for the panel discussion on the second topic. Femi Adesina, the Managing Director of Sun and president of the Nigerian Guild of Editors, and Bello who read Dokpesi’s paper, discussed it, moderated by this reporter. There were three interesting interventions from the audience by Senators Anthony Manzo, Adekola Babalola and Adegbenga Kaka, mostly on media’s role in bringing about the changes Nigerians expect from President-elect Muhammadu Buhari.

The chairman of the occasion, Professor Jerry Gana, our first minister of Information in the current 16-year old Republic, spoke at length in his opening remarks but he did not disappoint as a celebrated orator. Neither did the Master of Ceremony, Andy Gabriel, a former broadcaster with Radio Nigeria, Kaduna, who ensured the event proceeded at a brisk, time-saving pace.

Of all the speeches and remarks at the event, however, the most profound for me was Ezekwesili’s. If Nigeria wants to get out of its current mess, occasioned mainly by its over-reliance on oil, she said in effect, its governments must begin to invest massively in education. Like Utomi who spoke before her – each of them for roughly ten minutes as they were allotted – she was characteristically eloquent, albeit not as eloquent as our professor whose characterisation of Nigeria’s politics as one “by politicians, of politicians and for politicians,” – obviously drawing from American President Abraham Lincoln’s famous definition of democracy as government by the people, of the people and for the people – should clinch gold as a sound-bite for its wit and accuracy anywhere, anytime.

However, Ezekwesili made up for Utomi’s slightly superior eloquence by talking at some length about how to bring about the change, instead of merely dwelling, as Utomi did, on the things that needed changing.

In talking about education as the main weapon of change, Ezekwesili, who once served as education minister, reminded me of an article in the New York Times of March 10, 2012 by Thomas Friedman, one of its columnists and thrice winner of the Pulitzer Prize as a reporter. It’s an article I have had cause to refer to on these pages a few times before but which still bears referring to every now and again for its relevance to our situation.

Titled “Pass the Book. Hold the Oil,” the article drew attention to the report of a programme in 2012 conducted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Paris-based 34-member rich-country club, of the link between the performance of 15-year olds across 65 countries in Maths, Science and reading comprehension, on the one hand, and the natural endowment of those countries, on the other. The programme was called PISA, Programme for International Student Assessment.

Its report showed that, overall, the pupils of countries with little or no natural endowment like oil and other minerals, performed better than the pupils of countries with plenty natural resources. The report also showed that the exceptions to this pattern, notably Canada, Australia and Norway which had plenty of natural resources, had established deliberate policies of saving and investing earnings from their natural resources instead of consuming them.

“Oil and PISA,” Friedman concluded in his article, “don’t mix.”

Nigeria, as a naturally well-endowed country, especially with oil, the world’s primary source of energy, has for decades obviously been suffering from the so-called “Dutch Disease” whereby over-dependence on export of natural resources for public revenue leads to a soaring of the value of a country’s currency, which, in turn, leads to the collapse of its domestic manufacturing, as cheap imports flood in and exports become too expensive. The good thing about the OECD’s PISA report, however, was that this disease is not necessarily inevitable, as Canada, Australia and Norway showed.

Ezekwesili did not have time to expand on how Nigeria should go about investing in the education of its human resources but it was apparent from her talk that what she had in mind was a much more serious and sensible approach than the clearly politically motivated building of almajiri schools and of new universities that are little more than glorified secondary schools which was pursued by the out-going Jonathan administration.

However, whatever approach Ezekwesili had in mind, it is bound to beg the question of how to raise the money to invest in the nation’s human capital for a country like ours who’s leaders as a class have stolen the country blind and squandered so much of the revenues from our natural resources.

One short answer, of course, is to fight corruption, a fight which the in-coming Buhari administration says is one of its top priorities. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done, as we all know too well. Even then we can make a start by sanitising our contract system whereby it seems the cost of any contract in Nigeria is invariably the highest in the world.

Take, for example, the cost at which the 30-kilometer highway from central Abuja to Nnamdi Azikiwe Airport was constructed several years ago. Or even the new four-kilometer runway of the airport itself. The highway was constructed at a cost of about N7 billion per kilometre. Some experts say it should never have cost more than a small fraction of that, frills and all.

The runway was initially awarded at N60 billion. This was so ridiculously high that the boss of Julius Berger, the awardee, told a hearing of the Senate the figure contained an “arithmetical error” after which it was reduced to N42 billion. Even then some experts say it could have been built for N16 billion and yet guarantee sufficient returns to the company’s owners to last a lifetime.

The quality of JB’s constructions may meet, indeed beat, world standards, but their prices seem to typify the country’s contract system in their lack of cost-effectiveness by the same world standards.

There are, to be sure, no quick fixes for education. But there is no alternative to investing in it massively and efficiently if we want to end our over-dependence on oil, an over-dependence which has clearly landed us in the economic mess we are in, which, in turn, has made the lives of ordinary Nigerians nasty, brutish and generally shorter than they were before we discovered oil.

However, if there are no quick fixes for education, surely there are quick ways to find the money to invest in the sector, such quick ways as raising the efficiency of our contract systems to global best practices.

Because education takes long to fix, the sooner we begin fixing it in earnest the better our chances of ending our over-dependence on oil sooner than later. For, as Andreas Schleicher, who oversaw the PISA exams for the OECD said, “Knowledge and skills have become the global currency of 21st-century economies, but there is no central bank that prints this currency. Everyone has to decide on their own how much they will print.”

Re: The Eighth Senate rollercoaster (May 13)

Sir,

Zoning is not synonymous with mediocrity. In my view the PDP was right in popularising it. We tend to have forgotten the situation that gave birth to it 16 years ago. Every region of this country can boast of people with demonstrated personal integrity and commitment to public service.

Gbemiga Ogunleye +2348054235291.

Sir,

I totally agree with your position that (Senator George) Akume is the best choice for the post, given the massive support GMB enjoyed from the middle-belt despite the anti-Islam campaign by the PDP.

+2348123341481.

Sir,

Don’t you think it would be unfair on the part of APC’s leadership to sideline PDP defectors in the sharing of positions after APC’s electoral victory? CPC has the President-elect and ACN the vice president-elect. It remains ANPP and PDP that have not been ‘compensated’. I am sure the victory may have been a mirage without their support. In summation, I believe Dr Bukola Saraki should be supported to become the senate president as PDP’s share, and am happy that, according to your testimony, he is competent.

Adewuyi Adegbite +2347013065440.

Sir,

You are not fair to the Northeast. They produced the second highest votes for APC after Northwest. Why always Northcentral? Is Northeast not part of Nigeria?

+2348069663902.

May 27, 2015
Nigeria and Turkey’s forthcoming elections

It is election season in Turkey; in about eighteen days or so the Turks will go to the polls to elect a new prime minister – or retain the old one, Ahmet Davutoglu – for the next four years. They will also vote on an amendment to the country’s constitution which will transform it from a parliamentary democracy into a powerful presidential system. However, this transformation requires approval by 2/3rd of the country’s 550-member legislature, i.e. 367 members, to pass without a referendum or 330 with.

Leading the battle by the ruling party to retain power and change the constitution is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s ceremonial but powerful president and leader of the party, the so-called “mildly Islamist” Justice and Development Party (AKP). Erdogan has been in power since 2002 when AKP first came to power on a wave of popular disaffection with militant secularism championed by the military which had dominated the country’s politics since it first changed in 1924 from a Sultanate into a Republic under the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Erdogan has been campaigning for his AKP to win 400 of the legislative seats and, thus, to become its most powerful elected president in recent times.

The election in that country should interest Nigerians for a number of reasons. First, along with Iran, Turkey has, by some estimates, about the same Muslim population as Nigeria – around 75 million. The ratios of this number for the three countries differ – about 50% for Nigeria, 99.7 for Iran and 98.6 for Turkey – but the numbers are big making the three almost jointly sixth in the Muslim world, after Indonesia (about 205 million and a ratio of 88.1%), Pakistan (178.1m: 96.4%), India (177.29m:14.6%) Bangladesh (148.61m:90.4%) and Egypt (80.02m:94.7%).

Second, as a country that straddles Eastern Europe and western Asia in space, it is of strategic importance to the world both geographically and religious wise.

Third, for at least the last decade after AKP came to power in Turkey, the country has provided one more proof that Islam and democracy are not necessarily incompatible as some Westerners and secularists and even some radical Islamists would have the world believe. Under AKP the country has transformed into a thriving plural democracy and prospered economically into one of the most advanced in the world.

Last but by no means least of all, since at least 1998 Turkey has established its presence in Nigeria as one of the biggest outside forces for development in our education and health sectors. Today its 16 non-denominational Nigeria-Turkish international primary and secondary schools spread across Nigeria in Abuja, Kaduna, Lagos, Kano, Ogun and Yobe states – and with plans for more – are among the very best in the country. So also are its Nile University, which is part of a global network of 26 universities in America, Europe, Asia and Turkey, and its state of the art Nizamiye Hospital, both based in Abuja.

The inspiration behind these institutions is the Gulen Movement, after its founder, Fethullah Gulen, the world renowned 74-year old Turkish Islamic scholar, author and poet, who has lived in self-exile in Philadelphia, America, for decades to escape persecution from the secular civilian and military regimes that had dominated Turkish politics and society up until 2002.

The Gulen Movement, which has since renamed itself the Hismet Movement, after its founder’s pronouncement that it was rather presumptuous to have had it named after himself, has meant different things to different people. It sees itself as a social and spiritual movement which completely eschews politics but which lays emphasis on religious dialogue and even more so on education, inspired, it says, by Prophet Muhammad’s (Peace be upon him) saying that “The ink of a scholar is more sacred than the blood of a martyr” and the fact that the Arabic word “ilm” (education) is, according to experts, the second most used word in the Holy Qur’an, after Allah.

Others see the movement differently. Even though it has no formal leadership or sheikhs or structure and even though it has no ceremonies or procedures for initiation into its membership, many, including militant secularists in Turkey, see its members as closet radical Islamists who secretly want to establish an Islamic State of Turkey.

On the other hand, radical Islamists accuse it of being too open to Western ideas and creeds. It therefore, in their eyes, poses a grave danger to the Islamic renaissance in Turkey which has since trumped Ataturk’s century of secularism.

Whatever the movement is, its alliance with AKP in 2002 in their opposition to military dominance of the country’s politics and society was universally acknowledged as probably the single greatest factor in AKP’s triumph.

Sadly, that alliance has gone sour, at least since 2013, so sour that today Erdogan sees the Hismet Movement, whose members believe he has reneged on his commitment to consolidating plural democracy and transparency in Turkey and has, instead, become too self-serving, as the single biggest obstacle to his dream of becoming an imperial president.

Such is the bitterness with which he views the movement that he now calls its members terrorists and has embarked on a campaign of seeking the shutting down of their institutions wherever they exist, by labelling them as fronts for terrorism. The most recent was his call last week on the authorities on the neighbouring Muslim Albania during a visit there last week to close down the movement’s schools in the country, a call that was promptly rebuffed. Before then his country’s diplomats in our neighbouring Benin Republic had tried the same gambit with predictably the same result.

Hismet Movement is not the only one at the receiving end of Erdogan’s anger against any opposition to his dream. The media and opposition parties in the country also are. Yet, he and his party remain favourites to win the forthcoming election by a wide margin, if not by the margin he desires to turn his country into an imperial presidency under his leadership.

In the likely event that he does win, the Nigerian authorities should expect his diplomats to come calling sooner or later with pleas to shut down the Turkish-Nigerian institutions in our country because, of course, they are “fronts” for terrorism.

Good thing is, Nigerians and their leaders are simply too smart to fall for such a harebrained gambit.

May 20, 2015