The Nation Newspaper

Category: Mohammed Harunna

  • The Eighth Senate rollercoaster

    The Eighth Senate rollercoaster

    In any elected government there are three arms, one to make laws, the second to execute them and the third to adjudicate on the laws. By separating their functions and powers, each is supposed to serve as a check on the others.

    The fundamental difference between an elected government and a dictatorship of whatever kind is the separate and autonomous existence of the law making arm. In any elected government, no one can spend one kobo from government’s coffers without the legislature’s appropriation and no treaty with any country can become law without the legislature’s approval. For me, these alone make it the first among the equal but seperate three arms, even though it seems the executive arm is the most powerful probably because, by definition, it is the largest. (It is, I suppose, this power that makes its head any country’s No. 1 Citizen and his deputy the No. 2.)

    As, at least for me, the more equal of the three arms of our government, it is not surprising that the subject matter of those to head our two-chamber legislature, the National Assembly, has dominated our media headlines since the end of this year’s general elections in April.

    Of the two chambers, i.e., the Senate and the House of Representatives, the election of the head of the former as the senior chamber, namely its President and the country’s No. 3 Citizen, has attracted, by far, the greater public and media attention than that of the head of the latter, namely its Speaker and the country’s No. 4 Citizen.

    Since Independence in 1960, the Senate has had twelve Presidents, three (Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief Dennis Osadebe, and Dr. Nwafor Orizu) during the First Republic between 1960 and 1966, one (Dr. Joseph Wayas) during the Second Republic between 1979 and 1983, two (Dr Iyorchia Ayu and Mr Ameh Ebute) during the peculiar Third Republic – which was a diarchy in all but name under military president, General Ibrahim Babangida – during the last two years of his eight-year transition programme that ended in 1993, and six (Chief Evan Enwerem, Dr. Chuba Okadigbo, Chief Anyim Pius Anyim, Chief Adolphus Wabara, Chief Ken Nnamani and the incumbent, General David Mark) during the current Fourth Republic which began in 1999.

    The race for Mark’s successor has since turned into a rollercoaster with all its twists and turns that have left almost everyone in a tizzy. At the beginning, it all seemed a shoo-in for Senator Abubakar Bukola Saraki, the ranking senator representing Kwara Central, two-term governor of the state, one time chairman of the powerful Nigeria’s Governors’ Forum, and apparently the worthy successor of his late father and Senate Leader during the Second Republic, Dr Abubakar Olusola Saraki, as the godfather of Kwara politics.

    First, his geo-political zone, the North-Central, was bettered only by the North-West in delivering for the All Progressives Congress (APC) during the general elections and he played a key role in so doing. Second, he’d earned a somewhat controversial reputation for his capacity as a successful wheeler-dealer in politics and business.  Third, because of the first reason, his party’s National Working Committee (NWC) was reported to have initially zoned the Senate presidency to his zone and he looked like the sole beneficiary.

    This picture of a shoo-in for the godfather of Kwara politics has since given way to one of serious challenge to him from within his zone and from the North-East such that today the Senate presidency is a toss-up between him, Senator George Akume, the current minority leader and two-term governor of Benue State, and Senator Ahmed Ibrahim Lawan, who has been a federal legislator since 1999, twice as member of the House of Representatives and twice now as senator.

    Yesterday’s lead story of Thisday provides probably the best and possibly the most authoritative insight into the predicament the APC faces as these three battle for the Senate’s presidency for which the incumbent deserves credit for virtually single-handedly stabilising – whatever reservations anyone may have about his politics.

    In its first eight years, the Senate had a scandalous number of five presidents, giving an average of one and a half years per president, thanks mainly to meddling in its affairs by President Olusegun Obasanjo. Then Mark came along in 2007, following a controversial win of his seat in Benue State, got elected president after his party zoned it to North-Central, his geo-political zone, and remained president for eight years by managing to keep out external meddling and by beating all challenges to his leadership from within.

    Needless to say, the now stable Senate presidency has become a much more attractive political prize than it was before Mark and, not surprisingly, the fight for it has become highly intense. Thisday’s headline, “Intrigues, Horse Trading Trail Senate Presidency Race,” and its rider to the headline, “Lawan gets Buhari’s nod as Tinubu conditions support on Gbajabiamila as Speaker; Saraki, Akume intensify lobby; APC caucus may decide Wednesday,” were probably as accurate a gist of the fight as any news that have been published about it so far.

    Unfortunately this picture, to the extent that it is accurate – which I believe it is – shows that little has changed from the smoke and mirrors days of the ruling PDP where the main consideration was not how power could best be used for public service but who got what. Consequently, zoning trumped every other consideration for elective offices, and the final say always went to the president.

    Nigerians voted APC for change and not to carry on with the discredited ways of the PDP. This party introduced and popularised zoning in Nigeria’s politics. But 16 years on, the concept has only promoted mediocrity in politics as many of its critics, including this reporter, had predicted. Worse, it had also led to unnecessary acrimony and instability in the polity. APC should therefore discard it and allow a free-for-all in the elections for the National Assembly leadership, based on who its members think would lead them best and serve the public interest best.

    The most important consideration should never be where the contestants come from. Far more important are first, their demonstrated personal integrity and commitment to public service as opposed to self service and, second, their abhorrence of the old divide and rule ways of the PDP government leadership.

    There are, of course, other considerations like competence and a capacity to keep outsiders from meddling in the strictly internal affairs of the National Assembly. However, the overriding consideration must be the personal integrity of an aspirant and his commitment to public service such as would facilitate, rather than hinder, President-elect Muhammadu Buhari from bringing about at least the beginning of the change he has promised.

    It could be that none of the three current contenders fits this bill, given the fact that they are too steeped in the bad old attitude of the legislature to have the will to change things around. In that case, nothing, in theory at least, stops the federal legislators, most of whom are new, from looking beyond the lot on offer for the Senate leadership.

    However, since, in practice, time is now an object and as such has restricted the choice before the legislators to the three, they should be left alone by the APC to choose the least bad of a not-so-ideal lot.

    In my thinking that choice should be Senator George Akume. His choice could signal the beginning of an end to a badly divided North, especially religious wise, a division which, in turn, has been very bad for Nigeria’s peace, stability and progress. His choice is also likely to pose the least obstructive of the three to the Senate working hand-in-glove with the presidency to bring an end to the impunity that so much characterised the departing PDP government and made the lives of most Nigerians so nasty, brutish and short.

     

    Re: GMB’s ‘ban’ on AIT

    Sir,

    The proprietor of AIT ought to sit and reflect on a disgraceful season. Deliberate falsehood passed as news stories. Mr Dokpesi preferred money to decency. Freedom of speech is no licence to indecency.

    Mansur Kotorkoshi +2347034629236.

     

    Sir,

    While the President-elect has the option of resorting to the courts to seek redress for the irresponsibility and deprecating unprofessionalism, the remedy for NTA’s grand and ridiculous betrayal of public trust is a clean sweep of its top management as a harbinger to rescuing the organisation from the precipice on which it now hangs.

    Duncan Ibeabuchi +2349033424201.

     

    Sir,

    Whatever may be the decision of GMB, I had before the elections put AIT on total ban in my house and my decision was supported by my wife and children.

    Omotayo Owoseni +2348023002105.

     

    Sir,

    Is it the same Sola Omole, delightful NTA newscaster of those days, same as the current DG of NTA that has become such a nauseating megaphone of the outgoing government? I just hope they are different persons!!!

    +2348152849177.

     

    Still on Tamuno

    Sir,

    Izon, Nembe, Kalabari, Ibani, Okrika and some others make up the Ijaw nation. However, Professor Tekena N. Tamuno was Okrika, while Tamuno means God in Okrika, Kalabari and Ibani.

    +2348065221385

  • GMB’s ‘ban’ on AIT

    GMB’s ‘ban’ on AIT

    Penultimate Monday, all hell broke loose, following news of a ban on AIT from the coverage of the activities of the President-elect, General Muhammadu Buhari (GMB). Coming on the very day which was this year’s World Press Freedom Day, the widespread consternation at the decision was understandable. Certainly it couldn’t have been more ill-timed – and wrong-headed – even if, as the president-elect’s spokesman, Malam Garba Shehu, said, it was a gross misrepresentation of presidency-elect’s decision.

    AIT, Shehu said, was never really banned. The station, he said, was only asked to “step aside”, pending the resolution of some “security and ethical issues”. He did not spell out what those security and ethical issues were. He probably could not spell out the former, security not being under his purview, but he did not need to spell out the latter for anyone to know that there can be no love lost between the station and the president-elect, given the station’s media campaign against him, which is probably the most scurrilous in Nigeria’s history.

    Still it was wrong for anyone to have asked AIT to even “step aside,” never mind being banned. First, it was not AIT alone that maligned or was shamelessly one-sided against the president-elect. The Federal Government owned NTA, which claims a larger audience than the AIT, was no better. In a sense it was worse; as a publicly funded broadcaster it was not its prerogative to be partisan in any way. But as the Chair of the Commonwealth Observer Group, Dr. Bakili Maluzi, said in a statement on March 30, “the flagship nightly television news on the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) channel was completely dominated by reports of the incumbent party’s campaign rallies.”

    NTA apart, the News Agency of Nigeria, was also highly partisan. During the campaigns its managing director, Ima Niboro, issued instructions against running any positive stories about the general and his party, the All Progressives Congress. And when its editor-in-chief, Isaac Ighure, defied his boss and insisted on doing his job professionally, he was simply shunted sideways into the marketing department, where he is still languishing. Not surprisingly he has since been replaced by Lawal Ado Daura. Clearly, Daura got the job not simply because he was qualified, which he was; he got it more because he comes from the same town as the president-elect. Talk of shameless toadying-up to the new powers that be!

    The other two Federal Government owned media, FRCN (Radio Nigeria) and the Voice of Nigeria, behaved much better than NTA and NAN. But this was no thanks to the Federal authorities who put a lot of pressure on their managements to be just as partisan and malicious. By law VON does not carry adverts but the management of Radio Nigeria which does was able to reject the notorious hate documentary against the general carried by AIT and NTA and which came to define much of this year’s media election campaign.

    The independent press may have fared better than the broadcast media, but the conduct of the newspapers too was far from ideal, especially when it came to carrying adverts that were potentially, and in some cases, actually, defamatory. Again, to quote the chair of the Commonwealth Observer Group, “Many newspapers published ‘wrap advertisements’ which looked like normal front pages, but were in fact paid-for advertising masquerading as news.”

    Given the generally poor showing of the media in the coverage of this year’s election, asking AIT alone to “step aside,” no matter how briefly and for whatever reason, was clearly selective. However, there is an even more important reason than this selectivity for why the decision was wrong. And this is the need to respect our Constitution and our laws.

    As a veteran journalist, I have no doubt in my mind that AIT behaved in a most irresponsible and unprofessional manner in running its campaigns against General Buhari and I suspect most reasonable people will agree with my view. Certainly the general is highly unlikely to disagree. But in a democracy such as we aspire to, only the courts have the power to punish such irresponsible and unprofessional conduct as AIT’s, to the extent that the courts agree that the misconduct is defamatory.

    Not surprisingly, Raymond Dokpesi, the proprietor of the station, has said he does not see anything wrong with how his station has behaved. “Daar Communications,” he said in reaction to the purported ban of his station, “is a commercial entity and therefore, reserves the right to run anything it considers worthy of being televised…What is obviously clear is the fact that AIT believes that the historical information about the President-elect that was run was factually correct. Nothing was done to defame him or impinge on his character or integrity.”

    I believe most people who have watched AIT’s coverage of the elections, in particular its hate-filled documentary on the general which the station played again and again, would be shocked at the brazenness of Dokpesi’s defence of a documentary that was so riddled with half-truths and barefaced lies about the general’s person, his religious belief, his past, his late wife and daughter.

    Dokpesi is entitled to believe what he wants. But he should know that Daar being a commercial entity does not entitle him to defame anyone. And the only lawful way to teach him that lesson is not to bar him from doing his business anywhere but to take him to court.

    Happily, the president-elect has shown that he has put his old dictatorial ways well behind him; he said he was not aware of the ban and once he got to know about it, he instructed that AIT’s accreditation be restored immediately.

    The president-elect has clearly passed his first test as a born-again democrat. It is now up to him to decide whether or not to go to court to teach AIT the lesson that a democracy is no licence for defaming anyone.

     

    Re: Jega’s forbearance and Awo’s curse

    Sir,

    In as much I enjoyed the summary of Nigeria’s electoral history by you (April 22), you were not factual by claiming that people regarded the March 28 and April 11 elections as the most credible in Nigeria what with massive riggings in Kano, Katsina, Jigawa, Rivers, Akwa Ibom and Delta and written results!

    People just allowed ‘the sleeping dogs to lie.’ While we keep improving, the 1993 elections remain the most fair, free and CREDIBLE before the CABAL struck.

    Lanre Oseni, +2347064181043.

     

    Sir,

    The 2015 presidential elections were truly not free and fair. The votes turned out in Southsouth and Southeast were all bloated in favour of PDP. Without this electoral heist, APC’s margin of victory could have been about 10 million.

    Barr. Ngozi Ogbomor, +2348033397362.

     

    Sir,

    Your article on Jega’s forbearance and Awo’s curse refers. Please be informed that Awo did not place a curse on Nigeria. He only said that if Nigerians should continue to pervert democracy this generation might not know true democracy. That is a conditional statement not a curse.

    While I wish Nigeria well in her effort to consolidate democracy, it is no yet Eureka, for democracy is a journey not a destination.

    Dr. Ade Adebisi, Akure. +2348034703653.

     

    Re: Tamuno: the passing of a great historian

    Sir,

    Someone should say well done to you for your piece on Tamuno last week. For reasons I can’t quite understand, I haven’t enjoyed an article like this one in a very long time.

    Hector Collins Decker, +2348037172869.

     

    Sir,

    Professor Abdullahi Smith’s initial name was Henry Frederick Charles Smith not Robert as stated in your piece.

    +2348035067192.

     

    Sir,

    Your Wednesday’s column refers. It was not Joseph Smith who became Abdullahi Smith but H. F. C. Smith.

    +2348093468672.

     

    Sir,

    That was a wonderful piece on an extraordinary man. But late Professor Tamuno was from Okrika not Ijaw.

    +2348129146188.

     

    Sir,

    I thought Tamuno was a Kalabari name and not Ijaw. Please confirm.

    +2348035007010.

     

    You are right. He was Kalabari, not Ijaw. However, the two, along with Okrika, are kith and kin.

     

    Sir,

    Your piece, “Tamuno: the passing of a great historian,” was not only a tribute to the demised historian, but a concise account on development of historiography and the roles of selected historians in the evolution of African historiography. Factually, Tamuno deserves all the praises you showered on him for his service to humanity.

    However, my reservation was on the mix-up on the roles of the duo of Dike and Biobaku in the evolution of African historiography. As a matter of fact, I think there is a ploy to downplay the role of Biobaku. You refereed to Biobaku as one of the foot soldiers of Dike in Ibadan. This is far from the truth. Dike and Biobaku were contemporaries. Like Dike, he studied abroad and not at the University College, Ibadan, as you stated.  Biobaku studied at University of Exeter, England (1944-45), Trinity College, University of Cambridge (1945-47), and Institute of Historical Research, London (1951-52).

    As a matter of fact, Dike’s pioneering work on African historiography, Trade and Politics in Niger Delta was published a year ahead of Biobaku’s Egba and their Neighbours published in 1957. All others you mentioned built on the foundation laid by both Dike and Biobaku.

    I think Biobaku was a member of the Ibadan school not because he studied or lectured at UI, but because he aligned with the tradition of the school in his works. I think the only time he worked in UI was as a director of the Institute of African Studies. He was vice chancellor at O AU and Unilag at different times.

    Adewuyi Adegbite, +2347013065440.

  • Tamuno: The passing of a great historian

    Tamuno: The passing of a great historian

    As kids growing up in the fifties we were taught in primary schools that Mungo Park, a Scot, “discovered River Niger”. In Hausa, the main language of instruction in the two primary schools I attended in Kano between 1957 and 1964, our History teachers taught us that the Scot was “mabudin Kwara,” literally “the key that opened Kwara,” in English,  Kwara being the Hausa name for River Niger.

    History, it is often said, is the prerogative of the conqueror. This obviously explains the arrogance of our British colonial masters in attributing to one of their own adventurers the “discovery” of a river along whose valley many kingdoms and even empires had risen and fallen long before any European set foot on our shores.

    In the twilight of our colonial subjugation in the late fifties, a number of Nigerians led by Professor Kenneth Onwuka Dike took it upon themselves to decolonise this Eurocentric history of Africa which we had been taught not just in primary schools but all the way to our tertiary institutions.

    Dike was a pioneer in the reinterpretation of African history through the eyes of the natives. As the first African professor of History and head of history department at the University College of Ibadan he played a central role in founding the famous Ibadan School of African History. Among his foot soldiers was Tekena Tamuno, who joined the faculty in 1962 at a relatively youthful age of 30 after graduating from the university in 1958 and earning his PhD abroad.

    Others in that group included Saburi Biobaku, J. F. Ade-Ajayi, Adiele Afigbo, E. A. Ayandele, and Obaro Ikime. However, there were also British historians in the group, notably Michael Crowder and Robert Smith, who also believed there was an imperative for telling the Africa’s history from the African perspective. These two became professors of history at Ahmadu Bello University while the latter, who became Abdullahi Smith after he converted to Islam, founded what has since become the famous Arewa House for research into the history of the North.

    Each and every one of these foot soldiers of Dike became a notable professor of history. Three, Biobaku, Ade-Ajayi and Tamuno, went on to become vice-chancellors at the country’s first generation universities. However, only Tamuno had the privilege of being the first Old Boy of his alma mater to become its vice-chancellor; both Biobaku and Ade-Ajayi, who were his seniors in the university, became vice-chancellors of the University of Lagos (UNILAG), the first in 1965, the other in 1972.

    Tamuno became the VC of Ibadan University in 1975 and served for four years. It was a reflection of the man’s cosmopolitan outlook that he became vice-chancellor at a time the university’s faculty was heavily dominated by Igbo and Yoruba when he himself was a minority Ijaw. By the same token, it came as no surprise that he took a Yoruba lady, who eventually became the university’s Librarian, for his wife.

    His period as vice-chancellor was one of the most peaceful in the university’s history.

    I came to know how excellent a leader Tamuno was when I became the managing director of New Nigerian Newspapers, Kaduna, in 1985. At about the same time he was appointed Chairman of the Federal Government owned stable. Before the Federal Government took it over completely in 1976, it had been owned by the Northern Nigerian government. As such it was the region’s mouthpiece, just like Sketch was that of the West, Renaissance, later renamed Star, was East’s and Observer was Mid-West’s.

    The take-over of the NNN by the central government to balance its acquisition of 60 per cent of the independent Daily Times of Nigeria, Lagos, following an internally engineered crisis at the DTN which was then under the late great Alhaji Babatunde Jose, put the NNN in an awkward position of being a regional newspaper that at the same time had to learn to speak for all Nigerians.

    Under its first three indigenous managing directors, Malams Adamu Ciroma, Mamman Daura and the late Turi Muhammadu, the newspaper successfully walked that tight rope; it became the most respected newspaper in the country, bar possibly the Daily Times, even though it did not shy away from looking at issues from the perspective of its original owners.

    As chairman of NNN, Tamuno never interfered with this editorial policy at the same that he insisted its newspapers must never publish anything that will threaten the unity and integrity of the country.

    As managing director of the newspaper what struck me most about the man, however, was not his benign over-all guardianship of the company, excellent as it was. What struck me most about him was how he related to everyone as if he was one’s age mate. Never for once did I see him relate to or talk to anyone with a master/servant attitude.

    Tamuno was not only an excellent leader who, because of his congenial, and apparently congenital, warmth, inspired respect rather than fear, he was and remained a great and active historian till his death on April 11. Among the great historical books he wrote or edited were The Evolution of the Nigerian State: The Southern Phase – 1898 to 1914, Nigeria: Its People and Its Problems, The Police in Modern Nigeria -1861 to 1965 and Nigeria Since Independence: The First 25 Years.

    Of these four – and more – perhaps his greatest legacy was the last which was first published in 1989. It was a ten-volume encyclopaedic history of the country on subjects that ranged from society through culture, the economy and politics to international relations. The book was actually a composition of contributions from over 120 eminent scholars within and outside Nigeria on ten subject areas. Tamuno was the chair of a panel of 14, including Professors Afigbo, Bolaji Akinyemi, Peter Ekeh and the late radical Historian, Dr. Bala Usman, which worked on and edited the ten volumes from 1980.

    In between writing and editing great history books the man continued to teach history at various institutions, including the Nigerian Defence Academy, Kaduna, and the National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies, Kuru, near Jos. He also served as pro-chancellor of several universities, including at his native Rivers State’s University of Science and Technology.

    As an accolade to his erudition, he was a Fellow of Nigerian Academy of Letters as well as a Fellow of the American Rockefeller Foundation.

    His death and burial in Ibadan where he went to university, started his academic career and spent virtually all his life, was a fitting testimony to his exemplary outlook about life which regarded everywhere in Nigeria as home.

    May the Good Lord grant those he has left behind the fortitude to bear his great loss.

  • Jega’s forbearance and Awo’s curse

    Jega’s forbearance and Awo’s curse

    Four years ago, I almost gave up hope that the curse laid on this country by the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo that Nigeria will never experience any credible election in my life time will ever be lifted. The great man laid the curse in a newspaper interview after he lost his 1983 presidential bid to Alhaji Shehu Shagari for the second time, the first time being 1979 after 13 years of military rule, which followed the first coup on January 15, 1966.

    As if to prove the efficacy of the great man’s curse, the army struck against President Shagari on December 31 that year, barely three months into his second term. This time the soldiers held on to power for 15 years.

    During those 15 years, we had three military regimes and at least two failed coups in between. In the last of those military regimes which started in November 1993 and lasted five long, brutish years, the head of state, General Sani Abacha, had almost succeeded in transforming himself into a civilian president at the end of three years of a self-serving transition politics he initiated in 1995, when he died mysteriously in June 1998.

    His Chief of Defence Staff, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, who succeeded him promised to return power to civilians in 11 short months. He kept his word. Thus emerged the current Fourth Republic in May 1999 under a civilian General Olusegun Obasanjo, the man who, as military head of state, ushered in the Second Republic in 1979.

    The general election through which Obasanjo emerged was generally regarded as free, fair and credible even though there were suspicions that the authorities could not have been completely disinterested in the outcome of an election in which their former boss and military commander-in-chief (Obasanjo) was a candidate.

    However, even if the authorities favoured their former commander-in-chief, it could be argued that the 1999 elections were credible enough to make one hope that Awo’s curse was over for good.

    Unfortunately, President Obasanjo soon dashed that hope when he rejected calls from home and abroad to do a Mandela – i.e. serve for only one term and heal the wounds 15 years of military rule and its dubious transitions to civil rule had inflicted on the nation. Instead, an Obasanjo determined to serve a second term superintended over elections in 2003 which lacked credibility.

    His success apparently made the man even more daring as he soon plotted to amend the Constitution to remove its two-term limit. Mercifully, he failed. But then in an election in 2007 which himself said was a “do or die” affair, he succeeded in imposing on the country an ailing president and his clueless vice. The 2007 election was so bad that no less than President Umaru Yar’Adua, its highest beneficiary, admitted nearly as much in his inaugural speech and promised electoral reform as a priority.

    However, less than half-way through his presidency his deteriorating health led to a serious constitutional crisis of succession, when a protective cabal around him sought to stop the vice-president, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, from taking over, even though it had became obvious that the president was no longer in possession of his faculties.

    A “doctrine of necessity” invoked by the Senate, following massive civil society demonstrations against the president’s cabal finally resolved the crisis in favour of the vice-president and he took over in acting capacity. Shortly after that the president died and Jonathan became substantive president.

    The insistence by some Northern PDP chieftains that Jonathan should only serve out the remainder of Yar’Adua’s first term and make way for a Northern presidential candidate in the next election in 2011, based on the party’s power rotation arrangement, led to a serious rift with the ruling party. Predictably, Jonathan used his incumbency to prevail and win his party’s ticket.

    As president he promised to deliver on the promise of his predecessor to reform our electoral laws. And as if to prove he meant what he promised he replaced Professor Maurice Iwu, whose disastrous handling of the 2007 elections was almost universally condemned, with Professor Attahiru Jega on June 8, 2010, to universal acclaim, given Jega’s antecedents as an indefatigable and perpendicular president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in the late eighties.

    Less than a year after his appointment, he conducted his first general election on April 9, 2011. This was after the initial date of April 2 turned into a fiasco because of late arrival of materials from the printers abroad, so late that he had to make a national broadcast postponing the election. This rescheduling led to a week’s delay in conducting the presidential election which then held on April 16.

    The aftermath of that election has since gone down as probably the single bloodiest in Nigeria’s electoral history, with the dead put at 800, at the least. Depending on which side you are, the culprit was either provocative threats by leaders of the opposition party which lost the election or the widespread perception that it was rigged by the ruling party in cahoots with INEC.

    However, whoever was to blame for the post election violence of that year, it must have created a widespread concern that a free, fair and credible election was simply impossible in Nigeria. If someone with Jega’s fabled character, with all the public goodwill he enjoyed at the time of his appointment – not to mention the fact that the National Assembly made sure money was not his object in conducting the elections – couldn’t do it, most Nigerians must’ve wondered who else could.

    The answer, it has now turned out was Jega himself. The election he has just conducted has been widely acclaimed as the most credible in Nigeria’s history. Certainly, it is as much a final vindication of the public’s initial trust in him, in spite of the crisis of the 2011 election, as it is, hopefully, the end of Awo’s curse.

    Jega was, of course, helped tremendously by technology, mainly the use of Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) and Smart Card Readers (SCRs). The technology, however, was merely a tool and it would never have been deployed if the man did not resolutely stand up to the powerful forces that did all they could to discredit the PVCs and SCRs.

    Not only did the man stand up to those against the use of technology to check election rigging, his courage and forbearance in the face of all moves by the same powerful forces to impugn his personal integrity was difficult, if not impossible, to match. Certainly, without such courage and forbearance the last ditch plot by these same powerful forces to disrupt the announcement of the result of the presidential election when their defeat seemed imminent, as displayed by former Niger Delta Affairs minister, Elder Godsday Orubebe’s shameful tantrums against Jega on live television on March 31, would have succeeded.

    And had it succeeded, the story would have been totally different from its happy ending for a country that has longed for a universally adjudged free, fair and credible election since Independence in 1960.

     

    Re: Death of a quiet mystic

    Sir,

    A small oversight in your article of April 15. MD Yusufu was a grandchild of Muhammadu Dikko and not a great grandchild. His father, Yusufu Lamba, as he was popularly called, was the son of Dikko and the Magajin Garin Katsina at the time of Dikko’s death.

    +2348033498639.

    Sir,

    I beg to differ on MD Yusuf’s so-called heroics. It was clear that Abacha only used him as a kite or red herring to deceive the Western nations that there was some form of opposition, no more, no less.

    +2348024607919.

    Sir,

    You are a mischievous being. You tried to demean OBJ by attributing his handing over power to civilians (in 1979) to northerners around him. You are a tribal bigot!

    +2348037607722.

    Sir,

    M. D. Yusufu was a true democrat with a passion to serve the people not to serve his pocket.

    +2348055594567.

    Sir,

    You goofed last week when you wrote that OBJ was the first African military ruler to hand over power to a civilian regime. Contrary to the historical inaccuracy, it was General Akwasi Afrifa, a military ruler in Ghana, who handed over power to Dr. Kofi Busia in 1969. That was ten years before OBJ did so in Nigeria!

    Femi Falana, SAN.

    Sir,

    This is just to respectfully observe that the political party which MD Yusufu founded in the Abacha transition era was named Movement for Democracy and Justice (MDJ) and not the Grassroots Democratic Movement as your article recorded.

    Julius Ogar

    Sniperj2002@yahoo.com

     

    •MDJ was during OBJ’s Third Term bid between 2003 and 2007. MD Yusufu’s party during Abacha’s transition was GDM.

  • Death of a quiet mystic

    For someone born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, the man lived a lifestyle that was difficult, if not impossible, to beat for its simplicity and austerity. A plain, mostly white, three-piece babanriga with no embroidery and a simple cap to match, was his trademark wear. With a medium size carrier leather bag slung across his shoulders, probably containing just a few changes of clothes and his toiletries, he seemed permanently on the move within and outside Nigeria. And he seemed to prefer doing so unobtrusively.

    An encounter in Ibadan in 1966 between him and the late Alhaji Magaji Dambatta, one of the North’s most prominent journalists and public servants, as told by Dambatta himself in his 2010 autobiography, Pull of Fate, provided some insight into the essential character of the man, Alhaji Muhammadu Dikko Yusufu, a former Inspector-General of Police, who died two Wednesdays ago, on April 1.

    The encounter between the two was against the background of the events which led to the July 29, 1966 counter-coup in which the military Head of State, Major-General Aguiyi Ironsi, who had come to power following the country’s first military coup on January 15, 1966, and his host as Military Governor of Western Nigeria, Col Fajuyi, were kidnapped and eventually killed by Northern military officers.

    Ironsi’s apparent reluctance to deal with the perpetrators of the January mutiny and his promulgation of the Unification Decree 34 caused widespread disaffection in the North, which in turn led to bloody riots in the region in May and July. This prompted Ironsi to embark on a nationwide tour, beginning from the North, to be followed by those in the West and East, to reassure Nigerians that he only acted in good faith.

    During his tour of the North, there were fears that a counter-coup might be attempted by Northern military officers. The fears turned out to have been unfounded.

    A week after that the head of state embarked on the Western tour. During the tour, he was expected to address traditional rulers from all over the country, who had been invited to Ibadan for that purpose. At that time, however, rumours were rife of plans by Southern military officers to kill Ironsi along with Northern Emirs because they had all allegedly failed to deal decisively with perpetrators of the May and July riots in which thousands of mostly Igbo lost their lives. There were also counter-rumours of plans by Northern military officers to get rid of Ironsi, now that he had finished his tour of their region.

    Dambatta had arrived in Ibadan the day before Ironsi was to address the traditional rulers with directives from the Northern military governor, Lt. Col. Hassan Usman Katsina, “to observe and report on the meeting’s proceedings and other sideshows.” He was accommodated in the city’s Catering Rest House and soon discovered that MD Yusufu, then already in the top echelon of the police as an intelligence officer, was also a guest at the rest house.

    Dambatta discussed all these rumours with MD Yusufu in an attempt to establish the truth of the matter. He drew a complete blank, he said: “Typical of M. D. Yusuf,” “he was not forthcoming at all. A short while later, I saw (him) walking to the Rest House reception with his carrier bag on his shoulder. I immediately followed him, wondering what he was up to. Was he checking out or relocating to another accommodation? He tried to dodge the question, but finally said he was going to Lagos to return later in the night. I discovered later that (he) relocated from the hotel to a friend’s house somewhere in Ibadan.”

    Dambatta said from MD Yusufu’s dodgy reply to his enquiries and his hurried departure from the rest house, he put two and two together and came to the conclusion that there was indeed trouble ahead. He left Ibadan first thing the following day for Lagos and then on to Kaduna by flight. It turned out, as is now well known, that Magaji’s suspicions were borne out; Ironsi was killed on July 29, along with his host, the day after MD Yusufu disappeared from the rest house.

    Alhaji Muhammadu Dikko Yusufu (he spelt his own surname with a “u” at the end, and not Yusuf as is commonplace) was a great grandson of the legendary Emir Muhammadu Dikko, the founder of the ruling dynasty in Katsina. He was born into the family on November 10, 1931. Virtually all his adult life, however, he shunned aristocracy, beginning from his youth when he joined the radical Northern Elements Progressive Union of Malam Aminu Kano, which opposed the ruling conservative Northern Peoples Congress in the North. And until he died he never took any aristocratic title.

    Perhaps helped by his royal background, his radicalism was no hindrance to his joining the Nigeria Police Force in 1962 as an assistant commissioner in its intelligence arm. It was as a senior intelligence officer that he got wind of plans in 1975 of a coup against General Yakubu Gowon, who had been in power since the July 1966 counter-coup. As a loyal police officer, he alerted Gowon and, according to Professor J. Isawa Elaigwu, in his biography of Gowon, sought Gowon’s permission to confront Col. Joe Garba, the Commander of the Brigade of Guards and a spearhead of the plotters. Gowon, Elaigwu said, preferred to do so himself, which he reportedly did on the eve of his departure to Uganda for an OAU summit, a summit from which he never returned as head of state.

    One of the ironies of the coup against Gowon, which MD Yusufu was apparently against, was that he became one of the biggest beneficiaries of the General Murtala Muhammed regime that took over, as the country’s third indigenous Inspector-General of Police (IGP), after Louis Edet and Kam Salem. However, as IGP, not only did he preside over the affairs of the police, he also played a leading role in formulating what became the widely acclaimed “dynamic foreign policy” of the country, especially as it concerned black Africa’s liberation war against Portuguese colonialism in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau and apartheid in South Africa in the 70s.

    In his first coming as head of state in 1976, General Olusegun Obasanjo, who succeeded Murtala after his assassination in the unsuccessful coup of February 13 that year, was  universally acclaimed as the first military ruler in Africa to keep his regime’s promise of handing over power to a civilian regime. As head of state, the buck, of course, stopped on Obasanjo’s table, but the fact was that a four-some of the country’s service chiefs led by Lt-General T. Y. Danjuma as army chief, and MD Yusufu as IGP, gave Obasanjo no chance to have a change of mind as Gowon did in 1974.

    In retirement as IGP the man continued with his commitment to public service in various ways, the most prominent of which was perhaps that as the Chairman of Arewa Consultative Forum, the non-partisan, non-religious umbrella organisation of the North. He came to this position apparently recommended by, among others, the courageous role he played in establishing the Grassroots Democratic Movement as the sole credible opposition to the never declared plan by General Sani Abacha to succeed himself as civilian president in 1998 at the end of his five years as military head of state.

    His media and poster campaigns that year stand out even today as among the most creative and issue-based in the country’s politics. One such memorable poster was titled RIGHT to CHOOSE! “They say 2 million Nigerians were on the march in Abuja. Good for them!” This was in reference to what became the infamous 2 million-man march in Abuja in support of Abacha. The poster, however, went on to add that “our concern is the 98 million other Nigerians who were not in this Abuja march. We ask for their right to choose their right to decide who and what to march for. Their right to pick their leader.”

    Another one urged people not to reject whatever those in authority gave them as bribes. “If they give you rice take it…If they offer you television sets, soaps, or even money…take. After all, it is your money. But demand your right from them! Your right to terminate forced rule. Your right to determine who leads you. Your right to determine your own fate.”

    Yet another one asked “Continuity! Continuity of what?” and then followed with a long list of the shortages Nigerians were afflicted with, including those of petrol, electricity, potable water, and a surfeit of those they could do without, including poverty, hunger and insecurity. “What we need,” the posters concluded, “is CHANGE!” Obviously MD Yusufu preceded President-elect Muhammadu Buhari by 17 years.

    It is easy to take his courage for granted today but given the fate of several of those who opposed General Abacha’s self-succession plan in 1998, fates which included deaths and self-exile abroad, only someone with MD Yusufu’s deep commitment to public service at even the expense of his own life could have done what he did at the time he did it.

    May Allah grant him aljanna firdaus.

  • GEJ’s phone call to GMB: the dangers of hyperbole

    GEJ’s phone call to GMB: the dangers of hyperbole

    Whatever criticisms anyone may make of President Goodluck Jonathan’s six-year presidency which will end on May 29 – and God knows there’s a hell lot – he cannot be denied credit for his statesman-like March 31 phone call to his rival, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, in which he accepted defeat ahead of the formal declaration of the opposition All Progressive Congress’s (APC) presidential candidate as victor, the following day.

    That simple call was possibly, even probably, the most difficult decision of the president’s political life, considering the unprecedented bitterness that had characterised this year’s general elections, thanks mostly to the hawks the man surrounded himself with, several of whom had sworn, presumably with a wink from him, that Buhari will never be elected president of this country.

    However, while the president deserves the praise singing that has been heaped on him for that simple but, at the same time, difficult, phone call, it must be said that the country stands in the grave danger of over-exaggerating its significant, in the sense that it is being made to look as if it is enough to atone for the enormous sins the man, his lieutenants and his Peoples Democratic Party have committed against Nigeria and Nigerians the past 16 years.

    No doubt the phone call averted the descent into chaos which many a doomsday prophet – not least semi-official American institutions that had predicted Nigeria’s implosion this year – had prophesied for the country. Even then anyone who thinks that that phone call alone has completely dispersed the storm that had gathered over the nation before and during this year’s general election may be in for a great shocker.

    There are critics of the president who say his concession was forced. Perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn’t. However, a two-page statement issued on Monday by the Chairman of PDP’s Board of Trustee, Chief Tony Anenih, titled “Marching on with Hope” suggests that the phone call wasn’t so voluntary.

    “President Jonathan,” Anenih said in the statement, “has worked, selflessly, to deepen democracy in Nigeria. His consistent advocacy of the rights of the people to freely choose their leaders had earlier yielded free, fair and credible elections in some States of the Federation. Now, a peaceful transition is expected to follow after the general elections.” (Note his phrase, “in some states”, presumably PDP).

    Coming from a man who originated and popularised the notorious phrase, “No vacancy in Aso Villa,” the man must think Nigerians are idiots to believe his claim that anybody in PDP can deepen, or has indeed deepened, democracy in Nigeria; after all, advocacy is not practice, and no one resident in Nigeria the last 16 years will agree with “Mr Fix-it” that PDP chieftains ever practiced the principles of anything they preached.  In any case by apparently tagging the election as half-free, it is obvious that his party, and certainly the man himself as its presumed conscience, did not accept Buhari won it fair and square.

    Yet, in spite of Anenih’s dubious caveat about the credibility of the election, President Jonathan’s phone call may have been sincere. However, there are at least two tests by which the president can prove his sincerity beyond any reasonable doubt, one immediate, and the other during and after the transition.

    The immediate test is his willingness to call to order the governors of PDP states and Abuja-backed PDP elements in opposition states who made it almost impossible for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to use card readers in their states and generally made their states hell on earth for the opposition in the March 28 elections through the use of thugs, army and the police, notably Akwa-Ibom and Rivers, the First Lady’s home but opposition state. The president should charge these governors and PDP Abuja politicians to allow for free, fair and credible governorship and Houses of Assembly elections in their states this weekend.

    In addition, he should prevail on the PDP governors who lost their senatorial bids on March 28 – notably those of Niger and Benue states – not to resort to the Samson’s Option of bringing down the roof on everybody’s head they seem hell-bent upon adopting in the same election as punishment against voters in their states for their rejection.

    The second, and bigger, test is how willingly the president cooperates with the in-coming administration in personally accounting for his six-year rule and how far he succeeds in persuading all his lieutenants to do the same.

    General Buhari has assured that his administration will not “witch-hunt” anyone. This is as it should be. However, this cannot mean letting all bygones be bygones. To do so would be to teach the wrong lesson that all it takes for politicians and their sidekicks to get away with the kind of corruption and impunity we witnessed in this country in the past 16 years, the last six in particular, is simply for an incumbent to anticipate the formal announcement of his defeat.

    Re: “Buhari- Fourth time lucky”

    Sir,

    Let us join hands and thank God for Saturday March 28, 2015. We asked for it, and He graciously gave it to us.

    Chief Tony Chigbo,

    +23450494477.

    Sir,

    APC has won the elections. Let sleeping dogs lie.

    +2348057366302.

    Sir,

    Your piece today (April 1) is as usual solid but for the constant recourse to religion and ethnicity. It’ll be good if you could stop looking at the Nigerian crises from the prism of ethnicity and religion.

    Chijioke Uwasomba,

    OAU, Ife,

    +2348037058775.

    Sir,

    I don’t know the inner workings of our darling APC, but to ascribe the ‘poor outing’ in the South-South to Gov. Amaechi’s failings is disingenuous and cruel. Please we need to close our flanks.

    Mikefe Tanno

    +2348062322295.

    Sir,

    I hardly reply to articles but in your case of Wednesday April 1, I couldn’t hold myself. Please don’t set a dangerous agenda with your attack on Gov. Amaechi. The fact that GMB won is a testament to the good job he did as DG. You must appreciate the high risk he took in his fight with the presidency on behalf of GMB. Even some of us who were unknown supporters were nearly mobbed in several quarters.

    The point I am making is that it was not easy being a Buhari supporter down south. Therefore, your early attack on Amaechi’s style is unwarranted and uncalled for.

     +2348030784586.

    Sir,

    Your article, “Buhari: Fourth Time Lucky”, was another insightful piece.  However, permit me to strongly disagree that Governor Rotimi Amaechi, the Director-General of the Buhari campaign team, “came highly recommended”.  If truth is not to be turned on its head, Amaechi came to the position with more brawn than brain.  That was why he found it almost impossible to run a cohesive campaign where all the various tendencies could have been carried along.

    Yes, Amaechi may have been right in trying to check the over-bearing excesses of some leaders, but the limited presence of the other serving Governors and party leaders in the campaign, would have brought Buhari’s electoral bid to grief, but for God’s grace.  This is why, without doubt, many discerning minds rightly say the triumph of GMB was hardly due to the efforts of his party.

    Segun Adewale

    Sir,

    There you go again trying to cause schism among APC leaders and followers. Amaechi never alienated Tinubu and others. They worked together as a team. APC lost the S/E and S/S to money politics, the army and corrupt INEC officials.

    +2348075476140.

    Sir,

    Thanks for your usual great attempts at an equilibrated presentation. A word, however, on the perennial suspicion of GMB for Islamic fundamentalism.

    He is said to have made the application for the thorny membership of Nigeria with the OIC, which IBB later ratified. On the other hand, I read from factchecking.ng in GMB’s defence,  that the OIC Conference of Minister, the OIC organ responsible for treating application did not discuss Nigeria during GMB’s military rule, and therefore it was not he who applied for it; in fact, that he refused to sign to full membership of Nigeria because Nigeria was a secular state. In any case, since secrecy has surrounded the ratification of full membership, some of us are still unaware of the details.

    Be that as it may, could GMB add to his top restoration agenda the restoration of that secular status please?

    I believe this message can reach the president-elect through you.

    Sincerely,

    JOSEPH AKAA

    joeakaa@yahoo.com

     

    Sir,

    I have watched good writers of our time like you doing good job. But personally, I would like you people, using your influence and contact, to ensure that that patriotic and uncompromising army captain who leaked the rigging of Ekiti governorship election is reinstated in the army.

    This captain must not lose his job. He is the unsung hero of our time.

    Alhaji Abiodun Hussain,

    +2348023311676.

    Sir,

    FFK (Femi Fani-Kayode) is Publicity Director, not Director General of PGEJ’s (President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan) campaign organisation. The DG is (Col) Ahmadu Ali.

    +2348073647104.

     

    I stand corrected. The error was inadvertent. Another error was my reference to Buhari’s running mate as Professor Femi Osinbajo, instead of Yomi. Both errors are regretted.

  • Buhari: fourth time lucky

    Buhari: fourth time lucky

    They said he will never be elected president of this country and used every trick in and out of the book of politics to make sure. Three times he tried, beginning from 2003, and three times he failed. But the man simply refused to be deterred.

    Part of his problem seemed to be where he came from – the northern part of Nigeria whose leaders, in mufti and in Khaki (including himself), had ruled the country for  much of its existence as an independent country. Mr Femi Fani-Kayode, the director-general of President Goodluck Jonathan’s campaign organisation, once alluded to this at the time he had pressed himself into the service of President Olusegun Obasanjo, the estranged benefactor of his current political master. This was back in 2002.

    Because the North had ruled the country for so long, he said in an interview in Sunday Vanguard (July 21, 2002), “We also have to be able to rule for possibly close to 50 years.” By “We” he, of course, meant the South where Obasanjo and himself came from. But not only did the South deserve to rule for nearly half a century in compensation for the longevity of Northern rulership of the country, he also believed, he said, good governance was a preserve of Southerners.

    “I also believed,” he said in the same interview, “that their people, their ordinary people, are actually better-off being ruled by people from the South. Because the benefit of good governance trickle down.” That year General Muhammadu Buhari ignored Fani-Kayode’s empty theory, ran against President Olusegun Obasanjo and lost.

    Even without the benefit of any reliable opinion poll, it is obvious from the dismal lot of Nigerians since 1999 that the gentleman’s fanciful theory of good governance being a function of one’s geographical origin was exactly that – fanciful; in the last 16 years, a Northerner has ruled this country for barely two years, but no one in his right mind would say Nigerians have been better off all these years than they were in the First and Second Republic or even during the military interventions in between.

    Certainly no one can say the last six years under Fani-Kayode’s new political master has been a happy one for Nigerians, with, of course, the exception of those in the president’s charmed little circle. Yet this did not stop the president’s friends and supporters from trying to make the geographical origin of the major contenders in last Saturday’s presidential election an issue.

    General Buhari’s second problem stemmed from his faith. Not being someone who has a way with words, even his most innocent affirmation of his faith provided his enemies with weapons to paint him in the image of an Islamic extremist. It seemed to make little or no difference that, for example, his cabinet as military ruler between December 1983 and July 1985 had more Christians than Muslims or that he severely curtailed the number of Muslims that went on pilgrimage to Mecca in his time, to the great annoyance of Muslims in the country.

    Three times the man ran for the country’s presidency and three times the authorities used his origin and faith to defeat him. A less determined person would have given up after the third attempt since there is nothing he could do about his origin and, at well over sixty by 2003, he was highly unlikely to change his faith.

    Apparently the man was determined not to give up. So for the fourth time he entered the presidential fray last year. This time he grabbed the opportunity to forge a formidable opposition party with Asiwaju Bola Tinubu – one of the most astute and formidable politicians of this country since the Third Republic –  a couple of some opposition parties and a disaffected rump of chieftains of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party – an opportunity he had turned his back on in the run-up to the 2011 election, much to the joy of the PDP. Thus emerged the All Progressives Congress last year as the main opposition party which has now proved the nemesis of the PDP, the ruling party that had boasted that it will remain in power for at least 60 years.

    However, that Buhari has succeeded in his fourth attempt is due less to the organisation of his party than in the faith the ordinary Nigerian seems to have in the man’s personal integrity and credibility. For, if truth be told, the APC nearly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Saturday’s elections but for the fact that most Nigerians were simply fed up with the sheer incompetence, arrogance and impunity of the ruling party, plus also the fact that its campaign of undue personal denigration of the man seemed to have backfired and created more public sympathy for him than hatred.

    Part of the problem with the party was not so much its choice of the director-general of Buhari’s campaign organisation but his conduct once he took over the organisation. No doubt Mr. Rotimi Amaechi, the River’s State Governor, came highly recommended as a formidable opponent of the president and his overweening wife, Patience, who is from his state. Rivers is also one of the wealthiest states in the country. But for some inexplicable reason, no sooner did he take over the Buhari campaign organization than he alienated Tinubu and several serving governors in the party, including Dr Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, Kano’s governor who came second in the APC presidential primaries.

    Equally inexplicably, he also alienated several party chieftains from the South-South and the South-East like Mr Osita Okechukwu, Chief Ikechi Emenike and Temi Harriman who had helped in securing the general’s landslide victory in the party primaries and who would certainly have helped in narrowing the wide margins by which the president defeated the general in the two zones, wide margins which contributed in denying him the landslide victory he deserved in the elections as a candidate who eschewed hate language in all his campaigns in spite of all provocations but instead focussed, along with his running mate, Professor Femi Osinbajo, on issues.

    Clearly APC’s apparent writing-off of South-South and South-East as too hopelessly loyal to the president was a mistake. This should be obvious from the fact that the president, though admittedly under greater pressure than Buhari in the contest, never gave up seeking for votes in Buhari’s North-West, North-East and South-West strongholds. The president was, of course, more endowed than Buhari but what mattered more was getting value for money not just throwing it at people as PDP did, apparently to not much avail.

    In a back-page piece as a guest columnist of Thisday on Election Day, Chief Osita Chidoka, the youthful Minister of Aviation wrote about was he called  “The death of the African Big Man.” Even among Nigeria’s military rulers, he said, Buhari ranked lowly because he had no plans to hand over to civilians, isolated Nigeria diplomatically and passed laws retroactively.

    “The question We ask Nigerian watchers and voters,” he said, is “with a record of seizing power through force, of brutally oppressing the people, and of triggering economic turmoil – would you find him to be a suitable leader?”

    Presumably Nigerians pondered over Chidoka’s query and the majority of them obviously decided to take their chance with a persistent but honest 73 year-old than with a 57 year-old who had made such a hash job of their country in the last six years.

     

     

     

    Re: Yorubaland as battleground

    Sir,

    Let me humbly correct the wrong comparison in your article titled “Yorubaland as Battleground”, (March 18). You said the AIT has since transformed into the propaganda arm of the PDP alongside the NTA, and that the latter’s disposition is understandable being a medium of the PDP- run FG.

    I think that comparison is unfair to the NTA, which has been far more temperate and moderate in its political broadcasting in this election season than the AIT.

    I wonder how much of the AIT you have watched in the past one month. I have been a regular watcher of the station till I stopped a couple of days back to save my mind from burning anger and sheer nausea. No TV station, since Awolowo established WNTV in 1959, has spewed out – in the name of political advert – such bile as can lead this country into anarchy as the AIT has done and is still doing. I think Chief Raymond Dokpesi, its proprietor, has allowed short term gains to obfuscate his strategic, long-term calculations.

    I find myself today switching often to NTA as my next option after Channels TV in terms of local stations. It used to be Channels and AIT. Dokpesi is demolishing the edifice he has built like an inscrutable, if not insane, bird Ghanaians call eghagha, that in a matter of days, tears apart with its beak and legs a nest that it had painstakingly and artistically sewn together.

    Dr.Femi Olufunmilade

    femiology@gmail.com

    Sir,

    Please refer to your column of Wednesday March 18. Writing on “Yorubaland as battleground” kindly note the fixed expression: “have your cake and eat it” and NOT “eat your cake and have it.”

    Femi Melefa.

    +2348033141978.

  • Corporate Area Boys

    Today I publish below the last of the three articles I promised the reader on March 4 in my tribute to the late Malam Abubakar Gimba, a former president of the Association of Nigerian Authors, a great writer and, for me at least, one of the greatest personifications of humility and simplicity. The reader will recall that I promised to reproduce the three articles, including one by Gimba, which were my best in the last fifteen years, for their eloquence and continued relevance to our politics.

    The 2011 column by Eniola Bello, aka Eni-B, ace columnist and now managing director of Thisday, reflects on the shameful role so-called Corporate Nigeria has played in our politics – and economics – since at least 2003, culminating last month in a whopping 21 billion Naira plus fund raiser for President Goodluck Jonathan’s campaign war chest, and this in flagrant violation of our Constitution and Electoral law.

    Before Eni-B’s piece, however, a word about the almost full page advertorial that has been published by virtually all our national dailies since last weekend, claiming that a vote for General Muhammadu Buhari, the presidential candidate of the All Progressive Congress (APC),  on Saturday will be a disaster for Nigeria and Africa. The message was simply good old mendacious religious fear-mongering and both messenger and the vehicle which first published the claim are malicious neo-conservative demagogues.

    First, the vehicle. The Washington Times (WT) was founded in 1982 by the media arm of the controversial Unification Church whose founder is the even more controversial late South Korean, Sun Myung Moon. The church has been accused of brainwashing its members and its founder was convicted in 1982 for tax dodging in America. WT is arguably the most right-wing and the most Islamophobic newspaper in that God’s own country.

    Richard Grenell, the author of the article, is as right-wing as WT, possibly even more so, as the longest serving spokesman of the American Permanent Mission at the United Nations when the Republicans held sway in the White House. He became the first openly gay spokesman of a Republican presidential candidate when he was briefly hired by Mitt Romney in the 2012 American presidential election which Romney lost to President Barack Obama.

    As for Grenell’s message, the least said about his crude and clearly untenable attempt to link Buhari with Boko Haram and to the even more bloodthirsty ISIS in the Middle East, the better. Ostensibly sponsored by a “Move On Nigeria”, the message had the character of PDP and Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor’s CAN, as the religious wing of the party, stamped all over it.

    And now to Eni-B’s corporate area boys.

     

    Jonathan and the Corporate Area Boys

    By Eni-B Thisday 30 May 2011

     

    They came from all parts of the country, even if it wouldn’t be out of place to describe them as the Lagos business crowd. They were dropped one after the other in state of the art cars at the entrance of the State House, Marina Lagos. They turned out mostly in well tailored suits, with not a few in full national attire, particularly of the South-south variety. They milled round the expansive premises of the State House as early as 6.00pm, men and women ostensibly at the top of their game. They exchanged banters all around – a handshake here, backslapping there; a hug at one end, a peck on the cheek at another.

    In this select crowd were most of Nigeria’s biggest entrepreneurs, bank chiefs, captains of industry, CEOs of blue chip companies, top players in the oil and gas sector, and many other big employers of labour. All members of a group elegantly called Corporate Nigeria, those in this privileged crowd were at the State House, Marina Tuesday last week to honour the invitation of President Goodluck Jonathan, in what was described as a thank you pre-inauguration dinner.

    Jonathan had every cause to host Corporate Nigeria to dinner. For one, many members of the group dipped their hands into their deep pockets for hefty donations which Jonathan generously deployed to fund his presidential campaigns. For another, in other climes, such presidential dinner provides a good avenue for a serious head of government to socialize with the crème de la crème of the business community, put faces to names, drop one or two ideas on the administration’s economic direction, and get some feedback on business challenges from government action or inaction. What can be achieved in such an informal environment may be much more than days of tedious sessions at workshops and seminars.

    Unfortunately, neither the president nor Corporate Nigeria seized the opportunity to make any meaningful statement. Neither appeared to understand why the need for that kind of presidential dinner.

    Guests were supposed to be seated before 7.00pm when the president was scheduled to arrive. Jonathan did not arrive until 8.00pm. And there was no apology for arriving an hour behind schedule! Could that be an indication of the respect he has for the members of Corporate Nigeria? Even with Jonathan seated, it was a battle to keep the guests on their tables. There was a complete breakdown of order and discipline as many people moved from one table to another ostensibly to exchange greetings, but apparently to be noticed. Nobody listened to Compere Ali Baba’s repeated appeals that guests should keep to their tables and stop moving about. Was that the respect the president was deserving, even with envoys of other countries quietly seated? Or was it just a general lack of decorum and self-respect, an indication of the disorganization in the nation’s business community?

    The conduct of the business of the day was not any better. After the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Mallam Yayale Ahmed, had introduced the president with the usual time-wasting flurry of protocols, Chairman Stanbic/IBTC, Mr. Atedo Peterside, set the tone of what was to come in what were described as goodwill messages. First, he said Jonathan’s victory at the polls was not because of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) but in spite of the party. Then he said at his polling unit in Victoria Island Lagos, for instance, the same people who voted for the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) in the National Assembly polls voted for Jonathan in the presidential, before returning to vote ACN in the governorship and State Assembly elections. Concluding, Peterside said his wife and daughter not only assisted INEC officials in counting the ballots during the presidential elections, he added that it is members of Corporate Nigeria who should thank Jonathan for saving them from going on exile should some other candidate have won the election.

    Following Peterside’s speech, there appeared to be a competition among the other speakers to dress Jonathan in borrowed robes of undeserving praises. One speech after the other got worse in fawning adulation and praise singing. Chairperson of Emzor Pharmaceuticals, Mrs Stella Okoli, spoke about Jonathan’s wisdom, intelligence and humility in a gaseous effusion that was more emotional than meaningful. When Wakilin Adamawa Hassan Adamu said Jonathan is the only incumbent that has so far organized a credible election in Africa, I couldn’t help shouting in shock disbelief. Otunba Funso Lawal won the award for cringing servility. He not only gave the president a Yoruba name, ‘Oladipupo’, he called First Lady Patience Jonathan, ‘our beloved mummy’. Although I couldn’t see Lawal from where I was sitting in the hall, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he gave a deep bow while acknowledging Jonathan’s wife.

    Not one of these speakers who spoke for Corporate Nigeria mentioned, even in passing, the serious challenges Nigerian entrepreneurs face daily. Not one of them said anything on what they expect from the president to make the business environment friendlier. Not one cared to point out what could be done to make the economy better. There were no demands and of course, Jonathan made no promises. Only Bukola Saraki who represented the state governors reminded the president that those in the hall expect from government policies that would grow the economy, make their businesses thrive so there could be more billionaires.

    When it was about 10.30pm, close to four hours after the event started, and there was still no sign Jonathan was going to speak, I took my leave. I could not understand how a president who is concerned about the problems of the country could afford four hours at a dinner that should end in two hours, listening to meaningless speeches. I could not understand how serious CEOs would waste executive time patronizing the president with words they even do not believe.

    Listening to those speeches, the image that immediately came to my mind was that of Area Boys who ambush car owners in Lagos traffic, cringing and begging for money even while barking platitudes in that guttural voice, “Father! You will live long! Chairman, more blessings!”

    I now know how most members of Corporate Nigeria only thrive on waivers. They are no more than Corporate Area Boys.

     

    Re: “Impunity: like Nigeria, like Niger State”

    Sir,

    Reference your piece, “Impunity: like Nigeria, like Niger State” (February 25). Since you started your article with the Chinese proverb, you should have ended it with another one which says “Man proposes, God laughs” or better still, the African proverb, “A stubborn fly, follows the corpse to the grave.” Sir, you have spoken well.

    Tony Ogunbiyi.

    +2348037172645.

    Words of wisdom for those who think they can impose their will on Nigerians in the coming general elections by subterfuge or the use of ethnic militias or abuse of the security forces.

  • Yorubaland as battleground

    Last week I promised I will play truant for three weeks and only reproduce my choice of the best three articles in Nigerian newspapers from the last fifteen years for their currency, beginning with last week. This week, however, I decided against absenting myself without leave as I reproduce the second article on these pages, this time by Professor Femi Osofisan in his column, Sunday Note. The article, which was entitled “Yorubaland as a riddle,” first appeared in the rested Comet-on-Sunday of December 17, 2000.

    My apologies then for trying to eat my cake and still have it, that is, write today and still keep my promise of reproducing my choice pieces. This, however, has been made possible only by the grace of the editors at Daily Trust and The Nation who obliged my request for more space in their print editions.

    The background to my promise last week was my tribute to Malam Abubakar Gimba, a former president of the Association of Nigerian Authors, who died on February 25. His article which I published last week was, as I said, one of the best I have read in at least the last fifteen years. It was a passionate plea to President Olusegun Obasanjo in his second full year in office to imbibe the spirit of forgiveness so that he could begin to heal the deep wounds of divisions in the nation.

    Obasanjo did not heed Gimba’s plea and Nigeria became even more divided, especially along religious lines, than it was before 1999 when he returned to power as elected president. President Goodluck Jonathan, his since estranged protégé who he almost singlehandedly railroaded into power at the centre from an obscure position as deputy governor of Bayelsa, the country’s smallest state, has only made the wounds wider and deeper.

    Certainly no leader has tried to use religion – and ethnicity – to hold on to power as President Jonathan. In the eyes of most Nigerians and, I am sure, to the discomfiture of most ordinary Christians and many Christian leaders, he, in cahoots with Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor as its national president, has reduced the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), once the scourge of those in authority, into the religious wing of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Again, alone among all our leaders, he has transformed the Church as a platform for policy pronouncements.

    As for the use of ethnicity to hang onto power, it’s impossible, for its absurdity and inaccuracy, to beat the statement only last week by the First Lady, Patience, that whether Nigerians like it or not her husband will serve a second term because every leader before her husband had done so! Those saying her husband does not deserve a second term, she seems to say, are saying so because he is a minority Ijaw. Obviously the First Lady is completely blinded to the fact that apart from Obasanjo no elected Nigerian leader – neither Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa nor President Shehu Shagari nor President Umaru Yar’adua – had ever served two terms.

    For a cynical manipulation of ethnicity to hang on to power, however, last week’s promise by the president to implement the report of the somewhat inconclusive National Conference which he convened late last year, deserves a gold medal – along with his award of multi-billion Naira contracts to Otunba Gani Adams and Dr Frederick Fasehun, the leaders of the Yoruba militia group, the Odua Peoples Congress (OPC), for securing oil and gas pipelines in their region. Ditto the renewal at the same time of similar contracts to several Niger Delta ex-militants.

    To begin with, the President convened the national conference in bad faith as was apparent, first, from its timing so close to this year’s general elections especially considering his long-running rejection of calls for it and, second, from its composition deliberately to put the North and the Muslim population of the country at great disadvantage. And when the crudely skewed composition failed to secure the desired agenda, a strange 102-page document authored by Raymond Dokpesi, the Chairman of Africa Independent Television (AIT), and apparently the presidency’s cat’s-paw at the conference, surfaced purporting to be the “Terms of Agreement of Six Geopolitical Zones in Nigeria.” By the way, AIT seems to have since transformed itself into the propaganda arm of the PDP, along with the NTA, which however, is not altogether surprising, the station being Federal Government owned.

    Among the provisions in Dokpesi’s dubious document was the five-year, single term, presidency so dear to the president. It also contained the so-called fiscal federalism so dear to delegates from the South-West, a provision sound in principle but difficult, if not impossible, to practice in a federation like Nigeria where it is the centre that has created its constituents, at least since 1967, not the other way round as it should be.

    As we all know, the attempt to sneak this dubious document into the conference nearly marred it and led to lack of conclusion on several key issues including revenue allocation, which is fiscal federalism in another guise.

    It is this inconclusive report that the president has now promised to implement because he obviously thinks it is sweet music to the ears of the leadership of Afenifere, the umbrella Yoruba cultural organisation, even when he knows he lacks the capacity – on the strength of his past record of failing to honour many of his words – and the authority to do so, were he to win this month’s election.

    There is, of course, some logic to the president’s promise. Of the country’s six geo-political zones, only the South-West seems open for real contest between himself and his main rival, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC). The North-West and North-East seem safe for Buhari just like the South-East and South-South look safe for the president, leaving North-Central a likely 50/50 between the two; Plateau, Benue and Kogi for Jonathan, and Niger, Kwara and Nasarawa for Buhari. As Professor Femi Osofisan says in his article which follows this piece and the second of the three I’ve promised the reader, Yorubaland is truly a riddle.

    However, if it makes sense that the president should make his pitch for a zone, many of whose leading lights are in his support, it is the height of cynicism to promise what you know you cannot deliver. It is even more cynical to use public revenue to secure such support, as is the case with the no-bid award to OPC. This is especially so because all previous beneficiaries of such a contract had woefully failed to deliver on their side of the bargain, as is clear from the industrial scale thefts of oil and the sabotage of gas pipelines that have gone on in this country in recent years.

     

     

     

    Yorubaland as a riddle

     

    The Yoruba, affirm some people authoritative, are cowards. They cannot be counted upon to stand and fight.

    If, at first, they seem aggressive and tough, it is only because you have not found their price. But offer them the right amount of inducement, and you take the sting out of their bite.

    Cash-laden, they will be willing at once to sell their most intimate friends, agree to the readiest compromise, however humiliating, and retire to a life of miliki. Hence there is no principle, and no ideal, they can ever offer to die for.

    Those who hold this opinion assure us that one does not need to try very hard to find the proof. The events of our history, they say, offer abundant evidence.

    Almost at every point when their support has been crucial, they have chosen instead to recant their words, and betray their allies. The Biafran war, during which the Yoruba chose to side with the Federalists, is a case much cited by the Igbo.

    But this penchant for betrayal is not limited to their conflicts with outsiders. Even among themselves, cowardice and duplicity are so entrenched, that the people are incapable of forging a united front even for some mutually beneficial cause.

    The loss of Ilorin to the Hausa-Fulani by the Yoruba, as well as their repeated defeat each time they have attempted to recover the town, is a showcase both of this flaw for self-destructive intrigue, and of their readiness to scatter and run at the slightest shout of danger.

     

  • Letter to the President

    Letter to the President

    In the tribute I paid to the late Malam Abubakar Gimba last week, I said his open letter to President Olusegun Obasanjo on August 27, 2001 was one of the three best articles I have read in the last 15 years for their precision, eloquence and profoundness of insight. Several of the texts I have received from readers have requested me to send them the articles. I have decided to oblige by reproducing the articles because of the lessons they hold for our politics today. So I will like to crave the indulgence of readers to be absent without leave from these pages for the next three weeks and publish those three articles, beginning with that of the late Gimba today. I have the permission of Professor Femi Osofisan and Eniola Bello to reproduce their articles. I guarantee readers that the journey backwards to the beginning of the current Republic would be worthwhile.

    Dear Mr. President

    I am aware you run a very tight schedule. And you may not have read the front page comment (editorial) of the Daily Trust newspaper of Monday, August 6, 2001. The newspaper’s comment was on the Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission (HRVIC) headed by Justice Chukwudifu Oputa. The current goings-on at the commission’s sittings apparently caused the paper to express its fears and misgivings about the goals the Oputa-led body was set up to achieve.

    Most of us (have been made to) believe the HRVIC is for truth and reconciliation a la South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) under the chairmanship of the Nobel Peace Prize Winner Bishop Desmond Tutu. Daily Trust believes our HRVIC may at the end of the day neither arrive at the truth nor achieve any reconciliation. Indeed, the commission could be swarmed by distortions of truth, falsehoods, and produce new landmines of acrimony, hate and irreconcilable discord. I share the opinion of the paper, and strongly too. The Oputa panel, or its abbreviation, the HRVIC is becoming as frightening as the dreaded virus whose abbreviation it almost resemble, BIV/AIDS. And unless urgent measures are taken to redirect the modus operandi of the commission, the HRVIC will carry the same stigma and life-threatening consequences for our national body politic as HIV/AIDS. Given the orchestrated threatricals at the HRVIC public hearings, often staged with venomous deliberateness to the applause of a cultivated (and rented) jeering crowd reminiscent of the inquisitorial Roman Coliseum of yore, I don’t see how the commission can achieve anything but a modicum of short-lived reconciliation.

    Perhaps the commission was never intended to achieve any reconciliation. Nowhere in the panel’s terms of reference is there any mention of a deliberate effort at reconciliation as a main goal. The official name of the commission adequately sums up the commission’s terms o f reference: human rights investigation, at the end of which it is to “recommend measures which may be taken whether judicial, administrative, legislative or institutional to redress the injustices of the past…” Translate: who’s done it? Punish (from an agitated spirit full of vengeance)! And the fact that ab initio, the time period initially meant to be covered by the commission was 1993 to 1999, provided grounds for suspicion and concern that the HRVIC was a camouflaged battle-tank to get the Abacha men (principally), and Abdulsalami’s men. These are certainly no green lights for a reconciliation train.

    Truth and reconciliation that bind are not made in the disorderly noise of the marketplace, nor forged out of a playwright’s scripts for a grand theatre performance to an audience that knows little difference between reality and the make-belief world of virtual reality. Any meaningful reconciliation requires a proper understanding of the concept (or word) itself: the dictionary (Collins) defines reconciliation as “to cause to acquiesce in something unpleasant; to become friendly with someone after estrangement; to settle (a quarrel)…” And since you are not so secularly inclined (despite the insistent voices that have made you to hold our nation’s flag high as a foremost secular entity), the Holy Bible fully endorses reconciliation, when it says (2 Corinthians 5:19) “that God (the Most High) was in Christ (may Allah’s peace be on him) reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word reconciliation “ (italics mine).

    And between men, how do we achieve the true reconciliation outlined above? Again the Holy Bible offers some invaluable help: It says (Matthew 18:15.). “Moreover if your brother sins against you, go and tell him hit fault between you and him alone… “ (italics mine). The Alaba market atmosphere and the Hollywood syndrome of the dramatis personae hitherto at its sittings, have pushed our Oputa-led HRVIC far away from the ideal of a sanctified reconciliation. Sadly, you have not injected the most important energising tonic into the whole process. The tonic of forgiveness: only you can start the process of injecting this antidote into the rancour that has poisoned our body politic these past years. By word and action.

    If the South African TRC achieved any success at all, it must be because of the forgiveness factor. Dr. Nelson Mandela was very magnanimous in his forgiveness. He did not make frequent references to his torturers for 27 years when he was in jail. You, unfortunately, have not been able to kick the habit. I don’t blame you. You are just being human. But by proclamation and actions, I know you are a Born-Again Christian. And this has heightened one’s expectations of a high moral standard based on Christ-like principles and ethics. Yes, principles, ethics, and Christian morality. I believe these are what prompted you in the first place to set up the Oputa panel. Not the bug of an imitation syndrome to be like Mandela of South Africa. But even in the South African TRC’s case, morality and Christian values played no small role. For how else do you explain Bishop Desmond Tutu’s Chairmanship of the TRC?

    If you can forgive Abacha (I do not mean you should stop your efforts to recover anything he undeservedly took from our national wealth), forgive his family, forgive all those who tried you at the tribunal and got you incarcerated (escaping death by whiskers), forgive all, you would have laid a sound foundation for a proper reconciliation in the country. Again, remember the parable of a king and his servant in the Bible (Matthew 18:23-35). Those who benefit from divine grace must never refuse same to others. From the fertile grounds of your example, I believe, would sprout healthy olive plants of predisposition for forgiveness. The Abiola family, the Rewane family, the Dele Giwa family, the Ibru family, the Kaltho family, the Umaru Dikko family, and many, many more such families would want to follow the President’s noble footsteps. This would stem the rising wave of the rancorous showmanship at the Oputa sittings, the antithesis o f the reconciliation Nigeria needs. This would block the agenda of all those with sinister and personal agenda for vendetta, blackmail, humiliation and even scavengery.

    These do not enhance the course of reconciliation: they only deepen and aggravate acrimony.

    Over and above individual forgiveness and reconciliatory moves however, there is a great need for the reconciliation of institutions, groups and communities. Let’s remember that even the South African TRC was essentially an attempt to reconcile groups after the apartheid era, reconciling the blacks with the whites. It was not an attempt to settle personal scores per se; it was to assuage the psyche o f a people. We should borrow’ a leaf from the South Africans and keep that at the back o f our mind.

    No doubt individuals are important, but the interest of the society should be paramount. First and foremost, the military as an institution has wronged the rest of the population ever since the 1966 coup. Who needs any eyidence(s) of their culpability?

    The present military High Command should apologize to the nation (publicly). The National Assembly should accept or reject the apology, with or without sanctions (if accepted) .We, as a people then should stop blaming the military in our daily litany of songs of our sorrows, and get on with the business of nation building.

    Then, the reconciliation efforts should shift focus to the suspicions between the North and East, the North and the West, the East and the West, the minority tribes and the so-called major tribes, then communities and tribes, Muslims and Christians, et cetera, et cetera: And by this, I do not mean the highly tendentious Sovereign National Conference (SNC), which is a conference in the mould of the Berlin Conference of the 19th Century where the then European colonial powers balkanized the African continent into its present fractious units: Reconciliation holds our oneness sacred. SNC does not: for the most vociferous of the conference advocates, nothing is sacred.

    The problem, when all is said and done, is not with the Oputa panel. The problem is with the thinking and motive behind the setting up of the commission. Both are defective. And this is why HRVIC will not live up to our expectations. Hope is far from lost though. The situation can be retrieved. But only you, Mr. President, can make the difference. You can do it. I trust you can do it. And if you want this country to survive in greater peace and harmony than you found it in your second coming, you must do it. Re-evaluate the Oputa panel. Redefine and refocus its objective and procedures, if after the exercise we want to emerge as a stronger nation. Build our nation.

    You are destined to by God. Think about it: in particular Psalm 118:22, The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief  cornerstone.

    Your Excellency, Mr. President, you were once rejected.

    Then the Lord restored you to His grace. Now you are our chief cornerstone. You must do the Lord’s will. God bless. And long live the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

     

    Gimba is the president of Association of Nigeria Authors (ANA)