The Nation Newspaper

Category: Mohammed Harunna

  • Gimba: Honesty and humility personified

    Gimba: Honesty and humility personified

    For a self-styled “humble Muslim fundamentalist”, his use of the occasion of presenting his then three newly published books two years or so ago to honour a long-serving elderly Catholic priest in Minna, the Niger State capital, couldn’t have seemed more incongruous. But then Malam Abubakar Gimba, OFR, technocrat, best-selling author (Sunset for a Mandarin, Witness to Tears), banker, newspaper pundit, and essayist, was not your stereo-typical Muslim fundamentalist.

    The word fundamentalism has since assumed pejorative connotation, Islamic fundamentalism even more so. The fundamentalist is generally viewed as an irrational animal who wishes to return to or replicate the past, whereas the Islamic fundamentalist is invariably equated with political activism, fanaticism, terrorism and anti-Westernism, etc.

    Gimba, who passed on last Wednesday at age 63, was none of these. On the contrary, he was liberal-minded in the best sense of the word, a pacifist and honesty and humility personified.

    It was a mark of his liberal-mindedness that he chose the presentation on May 24, 2012 of his three books to celebrate the immeasurable contribution the Very Reverend Father Jeremiah Derry O’Connell had made to education in the state. O’Connell was an Irish Catholic priest who has lived virtually all his adult life in Niger State.

    For nearly 50 years the reverend father helped to establish schools in the state, notably Saint Fatima Secondary School in Minna and Saint Maryamu Secondary School in Bida, taught in them and administered them. Today, at 79, he remains the humble principal of Government Secondary School, Minna, the name which Saint Fatima was changed into when governments took over denominational schools in Nigeria in the late sixties.

    In his characteristic humility, Gimba chose the relatively bare Assembly Hall of O’Connell’s school when there were pushier venues in the state to celebrate the man who had arguably contributed to Western education in Niger State more than any other individual. It was a mark of the high regard citizens of the state, at home and in diaspora, had for Gimba as the inviter and O’Connell as the celebrant, that the large hall was packed to the brim and virtually the state’s Who’s Who, including former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, former head of state, General Abdulsalami Abubakar and Dr Muazu Babangida Aliyu, the state’s governor, were in attendance.

    In his tribute to O’Connell, Gimba likened the priest to Mary Slessor of Calabar and Mother Theresa of Calcutta, India. What he cherished most about him, he said, was “his quiet perseverance and wholehearted commitment to the education of our sons and daughters of every religious parentage and parental status, without any intrusion from the enthusiasm of his pastoral calling. This is the hallmark of an honest, great man. Father O’Connell is a symbol and an embodiment of the spirit of what should be.”

    What Gimba said of O’Connell was indeed true of the man himself; as a technocrat for 12 years at the end of which he retired in 1987 as permanent secretary in his state, as an executive director of Union Bank Plc for four years, as chairman of the alumni association of his alma mater, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, as member of its council, as president of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), and in every assignment he was given, Gimba practiced what he preached with dedication and honesty.

    In one of the tributes that have since been paid to the humble but great man, he was credited with being the pioneer chairman of the council of the Niger State owned Ibrahim Babangida University (IBBU), Lapai, his hometown. Actually, he was much more than that; he built the university.

    When Engineer Abdulkadir Kure, then governor of the state decided to found it, he entrusted its building solely to Gimba – and gave him a blank cheque to boot. Kure could not have found a better person than Gimba who preached and practiced the principle of leadership as enunciated by Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him), a principle he discussed in a chapter in A Matter of Faith, one of the three books he presented in honour of O’Connell, namely the principle that each and every one of us must exercise leadership responsibility whatever our station in life, whether as ruler, husband, wife, even slave.

    Few human beings would have carried out that assignment as Gimba did; not only did he carry out his brief diligently, he never enriched himself in doing so. Today, IBBU is one of the best state universities in the country, in spite of its relative neglect by the state’s current administration.

    In the last 15 years I have, as a reporter and columnist, read quite a lot of articles on innumerable subjects from our newspapers and magazines. Of the lot three have left the greatest impression on me for their precision, eloquence and the profoundness of their insight into Nigerian politics.

    These are “Yorubaland as a riddle” by Femi Osofisan, a professor of Drama and columnist at the defunct Comet (December 17, 2000), “Jonathan and the Corporate Area Boys” by Eniola Bello, aka Eni-B, the managing director of Thisday and a leading back-page columnist of the newspaper (Thisday, May 30 2011), and an open letter Gimba wrote to President Olusegun Obasanjo in the Daily Trust of August 27, 2001.

    How I wish I could reproduce each of them because of their relevance to our political-economy today. But since for want of space I can’t even summarise them without doing injustice to them, I can only plead with the reader to search for them and read them.

    Osofisan’s piece was an analysis of the abuse of ethnicity by our politicians in the struggle for power and how this has held us back as a nation. Eni-B’s was an account of the first dinner President Jonathan hosted in the State House, Marina, for the top echelon of Corporate Nigeria. The picture he painted of the obsequiousness of our business moguls in the presence of power would only make you feel sorry for Nigeria and it explains why our economy is in a terrible mess.

    If Osofisan’s and Eni-B’s articles provided us with insights on why our politics and economics are in such sorry state, Gimba’s open letter to Obasanjo possessed the greatest foresight to date of the huge mess we are in today.

    In that letter, written at the time the Oputa Panel Obasanjo had set up in 1999, ostensibly to heal the wounds of past wrongs in the country, started sitting in 2001, Gimba pleaded with Obasanjo as a self-proclaimed Born Again Christian, to forgive the wrongs that had been done him and focus instead on genuine reconciliation in the land.

    “The Holy Bible” Gimba said, “fully endorses reconciliation when it says (Corinthians 5:19) ‘God (the Most High) was in Christ…reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them and has committed to us the word reconciliation.’”

    He then concluded his open letter with the parable of the rejected cornerstone, again with a quotation from the Holy Bible. “Think about it,” he pleaded with Obasanjo. “In particular, (think about) 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.”

    No matter how hard he tries, Obasanjo cannot disclaim the main responsibility for the mess we are in today because, far from heeding Gimba’s call for him to do God’s will, he chose to do his own; throughout his eight years as president, settling scores for real and imagined wrongs was apparently his main guiding principle of state policy.

    Gimba must have died a sad man that his prophesy came to pass. May Allah grant him aljanna firdaus.

  • Impunity: Like Nigeria, like Niger State

    Impunity: Like Nigeria, like Niger State

    When the Chinese want to curse you they say “May you live in interesting times,” or some words to that effect. It is hard, if not impossible, to dispute the fact that these are indeed interesting times in Nigeria, as in much of the world, where impunity seems to have become the bye-word for politics.

    Politicians everywhere lie a lot and all too often try to cut corners. But in few countries, if any, do they do so with so much impunity as in Nigeria. Worse still, ours seems to be a country where not only does impunity, by definition, attract no punishment but, on the contrary, is even rewarded.

    Which explains why a top police officer would abuse his uniform, as Joseph Mbu did during his long tour as Commissioner of Police in Rivers State – there he once, for example, stopped the governor from driving into his residence through a particular route at the behest of the First Lady – and a short spell at the Federal Capital Territory where he once illegally tried to stop a demonstration for which he was rightly denounced by the Inspector General at the time, Mohammed Abubakar, and yet get promoted instead of getting sacked.

    This also explains why, now as Assistant Inspector General of Police based in Lagos, Mbu had the nerve to instruct his men to kill 20 civilians for every policeman killed in the event of a breakdown of law and order in the March and April general elections. Happily he has since been quickly denounced once again by his boss, this time Suleiman Abba. Sadly, however, he still remains in his post, and for all you know, may be the next Inspector General, given his purported intimacy with the powers that be in Abuja.

    This level of impunity in the country also explains how a governor-elect would invade the sacred chambers of a court room in his state with a mob, tear court papers and even rough up of a judge, all in a bid to stop the hearing of a petition against his election, and all you get from all three arms of government, the desecrated Judiciary in particular, is pin-drop silence.

    It is the same high level of impunity which explains why the authorities in Abuja would give conflicting and hardly tenable excuses for shifting of the dates of this year’s general elections. First they said the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was not ready because it had not distributed enough permanent voters’ cards (PVCs). But when it transpired that INEC had distributed more cards than the average turn-out at Nigeria’s elections since the very first one, they resorted to the bogey of insecurity even though the role of the armed forces has always been the secondary one of last resort in case of serious breakdown of law and order during elections.

    And now that all but few Nigerians have their PVCs, INEC is being told to allow the use of temporary voter cards in a situation where card readers, as a great check against impersonation and rigging, can only read PVCs. Clearly, someone, somewhere, is frightened that for once he would not be able to write results of elections as he has been used to.

    One can go on and on with even more telling examples about why these are indeed interesting times in Nigeria, but AIG Mbu, Governor Ayo Fayose of Ekiti State and the conflicting explanations by the authorities in Abuja for postponing our elections are sufficient evidence that the country has indeed been labouring under a curse.

    And what is true of the country seems to be perhaps even more so of one of its 36 constituent units – Niger State, my home state.

    Nearly one and a half years ago, on October 9, 2013 to be precise, I speculated on the outcome of this year’s governorship election in the state on these pages. My reference point was a full page advert in Daily Trust, which tried to promote the prospects of the deputy governor, Ahmed Musa Ibeto. I said then that Ibeto’s chances of even winning his ruling party’s governorship ticket were slim and his chances of winning the election itself even slimmer, in case he proved me wrong about his chances of clinching the PDP governorship ticket.

    “Chances are,” I concluded in the piece, “the next governor of Niger State may be Abubakar Sani Bello.”

    Since that piece, for which I was widely denounced by friends and foes alike, Bello, the son of Colonel Sani Bello, a former military governor of Kano State and a business mogul from Kontagora, has clinched the governorship ticket of the All Progressive Congress (APC) and, from all indications, the governorship of the state is his to lose.

    However, even in my wildest imagination I never thought Ibeto would lose his party’s ticket to someone who, until he was foisted on the party by Governor Muazu Babangida Aliyu, was virtually an unknown quantity in the politics of my state, except, of course, for the fact that he is the son of a prominent member of the so-called “Bida Mafia”  namely, the Class of ’62 of Government College, Bida, which has produced possibly the single largest number of army generals in Nigeria, including former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida and former head of state, General Abubakar Abdulsalami – incidentally, the father in law of Bello. Col Bello, the father, was also a member of the class.

    When I wrote my piece in question, I never, again in my wildest imagination, thought that the relationship between Aliyu and Ibeto would deteriorate to the extent that it has, with Ibeto decamping to APC in frustration and his boss ejecting him from executive council meeting last month and going over his head this month to appoint the Speaker of the state’s House of Assembly as acting governor for a period of 10 days while he was away on Umra, the lesser Hajj.

    Governor Aliyu has laboured hard to defend his moves against his deputy but, as is usual when people attempt to defend the indefensible, he and his men have been giving conflicting reasons. In any case, before he moved against his deputy, the governor had given his word that he would never allow his deputy’s defection affect their official relationship. This probably explains why his spirited denial of media reports that he recently said there is no morality in politics has met with widespread skepticism, even cynicism, from the public.

    When the governor announced Umaru Nasko, the son of Major-General Muhammadu Gado Nasko, a former military governor and minister of FCT, as his preferred successor, there was widespread consternation in the state, not least even among its elite. This was first, on account of Nasko Jr’s short-lived and mixed record of public service as a commissioner in the state, and second, on account of unflattering gossips about his rather exuberant lifestyle. Such was the depth of consternation in the state that even his father initially objected to the governor’s intentions of anointing his son as governor.

    However, in the end blood proved thicker than principle – the principle that merit rather than mere pedigree should be the overriding factor in determining who leads society. Here, it must be said that General Babangida deserves fulsome praise for firmly keeping his son, Mohammed, out of the race, essentially on account of the son’s perceived lack of experience in public service.

    What now remains to be seen is whether Governor Aliyu will realise his wish to be succeeded by someone whose main qualification is that he will ask few questions, if any, about the last eight years of virtual stagnation, if not decay, in the state, to put it nicely.

    Given the justly angry mood in the state against the incumbent, as in the entire country against the president – coupled with the fact that the courts on January 30 nullified the election of Dr Nuhu Zagbayi, the PDP candidate widely regarded as the governor’s proxy in the bye-election, which followed the death of Dahiru Awaisu as senator of the governor’s senatorial district, and awarded same to David Umaru, the governor’s APC rival in the March 28 election – it is highly unlikely that the governor will realise his wish.

    As I said nearly 18 months ago, chances are that Niger State’s governor on May 29 will be Abubakar Sani Bello – for better or for worse.

     

    Re:  Unlearn lesson of “June 12”

    Sir,

    With due respect to an eminent columnist, the title of your column (of February 18) should have been “The unlearned lesson of “June 12” not “unlearn.”

    +2348053215757.

    Sir,

    You had nothing to say today (February18) and even simple caption was “unlearnt” (not unlearn).

    +2348038720742.

    Both readers are right on account of the title. It was an inexcusable slip.

    Sir,

    In your column of today (February 18) you inadvertently referred to NRC as the National Republican Party instead of National Republican Convention.

    Sa’idu Liman,

    +2348036220413.

    Sir,

    Have you ever tasted alcohol or perhaps got drunk on it? Please go ahead and indulge yourself on a bottle of wine – you will discover why it is difficult for our leaders to learn from “June 12”.

    K. Banjo,

    +2348033192254.

    Sir,

    It is now evidently clear that Jonathan plans to use the army to rig the polls as in Ekitigate and damn the consequences. The recent attack on OBJ by DHQ points to that and Jonathan’s kinsman is COAS. The polls postponement is to perfect this strategy.

    +2348075476140.

  • Lesson from America

    Lesson from America

    Few Nigerians may have heard of Paul Krugman, the American professor of Economics at the Ivy League Princeton University, columnist with New York Times since 2000 and the 2008, Nobel Economics laureate. Fewer still may have heard of his 2003 book, The Great Unravelling: From Boom to Bust in Three Scandalous Years.

    The book, which I’ve had cause to refer to on these pages, is essentially a collection of his columns about the gross incompetence, fiscal irresponsibility and extreme right wing policies and religiosity of the administration of President George Bush and his deputy, Dick Cheney.

    What he has had to say in his introduction to the book bears an uncanny resemblance to what our dear country has experienced in at least the last five years of President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration. A paraphrase of the introductory chapter is therefore in order.

    Just before putting his book to bed, Krugman said, he came across a book published in 1957 by no other than Dr Henry Kissinger, “then a brilliant, iconoclastic young Harvard scholar, with his eventual career as a cynical political manipulator and, later, as crony capitalist still far in the future.”

    Kissinger’s book, A World Restored, based on his doctoral dissertation, was a study of the failure of Prince Klemens von Metternich, a leading Austrian politician and statesman, and Lord Castlereagh, an Irish and British statesman, in their diplomatic efforts to contain a resurgent France under Napoleon during the 19th century reconstruction of Europe following the battle of Waterloo.

    “One wouldn’t think that a book about the diplomatic efforts of Metternich and Castlereagh,” Krugman said, “is relevant to U.S. politics in the 21st century. But the first three pages of Kissinger’s book sent chills down my spine, because they seem all too relevant to current events.”

    In those first pages Kissinger, Krugman said, described the problems confronting a hitherto stable diplomatic system when it is faced with a “revolutionary power” – a power that does not accept that system’s legitimacy. The revolutionary power Kissinger had in mind was the “France of Robespierre and Napoleon,” said Krugman.

    “It seems clear to me,” the Economics Nobel laureate said, “that one should regard America’s right-wing movement – which now in effect controls the administration, both houses of Congress, much of the judiciary, and a good slice of the media – as a revolutionary power in Kissinger’s sense. That is a movement which does not accept the legitimacy of the current political system.”

    The Bush crowd, he pointed out, does not, for example, believe in merely scaling down the New Deal and Great Society programmes that have provided the country’s celebrated social safety net for the poor. Instead it believes in scrapping those programmes because, in its eyes, they violated the basic principles of free market.

    Again, the Bush crowd did not believe in the multilateralism that had hitherto guided American foreign policy. Rather it believed in the unilateral use of America’s military might to have its way as the world’s only super power, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. “We are a warlike people,” Krugman quoted Michael Ledeen, a prominent American neo-conservative thinker, as saying, “and we love war.”

    Little surprise then that, John Bolton, a leading official of the Bush administration told some Israeli officials that after the 2001 Iraqi invasion, they will unilaterally “deal with” Syria, Iran and South Korea.

    The Bush crowd did not also seem to believe in the separation of Church and State as a fundamental principle of America’s Constitution. This, Krugman said, was exemplified by Tom DeLay, the House majority leader who, for example, told the congregation at the First Baptist Church of Pearland, Texas, on April 12, 2002, that he was in office to promote a “biblical world view” and that his relentless pursuit of President Bill Clinton was motivated by Clinton’s failure to share that view.

    Not least of all, the Bush crowd, Krugman said, didn’t even seem to believe that legitimacy should flow through the democratic process, hence its sponsorship of the so-called “bourgeoisie riots” of Miami, Florida, in which violent protesters – they turned out to be a hired crowd – forced a shutdown of a vote recount in the city which would almost certainly have given the 2000 presidential election to the Democrats. Not to take any chances, the Bush crowd even used their control of the Supreme Court to pass an obscenely rushed judgement that disallowed the recount.

    By now you may be wondering how all these developments in far away America many years ago have anything to do with events in Nigeria in the last five years, just as many of Krugman’s readers must have wondered how his dredging up of Kissinger’s  1957 book on 19th century European diplomacy was of any relevance to 21st century America.

    The answer lies in Kissinger’s remarks in his book that “It is the essence of a revolutionary power that it possesses the courage of its convictions, that it is willing, indeed eager, to push its principles to their ultimate conclusion.” The problem is that most people don’t believe that a revolutionary power would push its convictions to their logical conclusion because of the extreme nature of those convictions. Instead most people believe its rhetoric is merely a negotiating posture until it is too late for anyone to stop the revolutionary power from carrying out its convictions.

    It was this public self-delusion that the Bush crowd never meant the extreme right-wing ideology it preached, Krugman said, that allowed it to get away with, among other things, going from Clinton’s budget surpluses to bust in three short years, and taking America into a senseless and indefensible invasion of Iraq that has since made the world much more insecure than it was.

    It is my considered opinion that what we have had in this country in the last five years is a revolutionary power akin to the Bush crowd in America. I believe most of members of the cabal which took President Jonathan hostage from his very first day in office, if not the man himself, have never believed in Nigeria. Certainly, they have never believed in playing the game of democracy by its basic rules and principles in so far as these rules and principles stand in their way of capturing and retaining power at the centre.

    If you think I am being over the top, consider the fact that this has been the most fiscally irresponsible government in the history of Nigeria, given the huge gap between the billions of dollars the country has earned from oil alone and the pervasive poverty in the land.

    Consider also the fact that the scale of oil theft in the country has gone industrial since the administration outsourced the securing of our oil pipelines from the Navy and handed it in no-bid contracts to ex-militants – a Chatham House report in September 2013 claimed we lose $3.65 billion a year through such theft – and yet the government has refused to revoke the contract. As the former Governor of Ekiti State, Dr Kayode Fayemi, said in an interview with Tell, it’s as if the authorities know something about this scale of theft from its primary source of revenue that the rest of us don’t.

    Consider again, the fact that the Federal Government would look on unconcerned as supporters of a governor-elect of a state, led by the man himself, invade a court and rough up its officials, including the judge, just to stop it from hearing a petition against his election.

    Again, consider how the government would brazenly defend money laundering along with illegal purchases of arms abroad, using the private jet of a man of God who is a confidant of the president.

    Not least of all, consider a government that will keep a deathly silence over the threat by ex-militants to break up this country if the incumbent loses the now postponed presidential election even if his loss was free and fair, and worse, do nothing and say nothing when a respected former army chief calls for their arrest, a call for which the ex-militants rain abuses and threats on the general.

    One can go on and on but these alone are sufficient grounds to conclude that we’ve had a revolutionary power on our hands in at least the last five years that truly does not give a damn if this country breaks up.

     

    Re: Between Soludo and Okonjo-Iweala

    Sir,

    I once had cause to ask a leading Economist and a regular critic of Okonjo-Iweala’s budgeting template if he knew exactly what they do at the World Bank. I asked because if this madam who was a top shot at the place reflects their best with her record in Nigeria, I think the place should be shut down.

    Apparently the interventionist role of the bank is why international financing is in perpetual turmoil. The man who brought her dumped her. Another one picked her up. That’s what you get when the man at the top knows only how to pick his nose.

    Olu,

    +2348033013597.

     

    Sir,

    World Bank’s salary/emolument is transparent unlike Madam’s “Consolidated salary.” God dey ooo.

    Ladipo O. David,

    +2348059096244.

    Sir,

    Please tell Okonjo-Iweala to shut up and stop boasting about how she left her job at World Bank to serve her country. We all know how lucrative it is being a minister of finance in Nigeria. In fact, I would rather be a local government chairman in Nigeria than take her position in World Bank.

    Alhaji Abu.

    +2348064990886.

     

  • Between Soludo and Okonjo-Iweala

    Between Soludo and Okonjo-Iweala

    Just when it looked like Nigerians were condemned to listening to barren debates on non-issues in the run-up to the February 14 presidential and federal legislative elections, former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Professor Chukwuma Charles Soludo, waded in on January 25 with a bombshell that ought to force those seeking our votes to debate the real issues that concern us.

    Soludo’s roughly 6,000-word article, “Buhari versus Jonathan: Beyond the Elections,” may yet fail in achieving his apparent objective but after his piece, which was essentially about President Goodluck Jonathan’s management – the former CBN Governor himself called it mismanagement – of our economy, no one can say there has been no attempt to put an end to the manipulation and exploitation of primordial sentiments by politicians to win our votes.

    In this respect, it was good that Soludo’s piece provoked a very rapid response the very next day from our Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, through her Special  Adviser, Paul Nwabuikwu. The very headline of Nwabuikwu’s roughly 3,220-word reply to Soludo which was a parody of sorts of the title of Soludo’s piece – “Beyond Belief: Soludo’s Self-Serving article on Economic Management is Deficit in Facts, Logic and Honour” – spoke volumes about the anger his article must have provoked in Abuja.

    First, Soludo said in his article, at the time of oil boom Nigeria had gone on a consumption spree “such that the budgets of the last five years can best be described as ‘consumption budgets.’” Second, he said, not one penny was added to the stock of foreign reserves at a period Nigeria earned hundreds of billions from oil.

    Third, the country, he said, went on a borrowing binge such that “the rate of public debt accumulation at a time of unprecedented boom had no parallel in the world…

    “In sum, the mismanagement of our economy has brought us once more to the brink.”

    Neither the government nor the opposition, he said, have so far come up with any credible economic policies on how to bring the country back from that brink.

    Not surprisingly, his harsh criticism of government greatly angered the Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Finance Minister.  “It is totally remarkable” she said in the rather uncharitable opening paragraphs of her reply through Nwabuikwu, “that Professor Charles Chukwuma Soludo, the man who presided over the worst mismanagement of Nigeria’s banking sector as Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria between May 2004 and May 2009, can write about the mismanagement of the economy.”

    Her concluding paragraph was even less charitable of the former CBN Governor.

    “It is a sad day for Nigeria and the economics profession,” she said, “that someone like Soludo, a former CBN governor, should write such an article. If Soludo wants to regain respect, he should return to the path of professionalism. He certainly needs something to improve his image from that of someone whose sojourn into National Economic Management ended in disaster for the banking sector, his sojourn in politics, ended in overwhelming rejection by the electorate, and more recently, his sojourn abroad, has put him out of touch with the reality of the Nigerian economy.”

    Soludo, obviously spoiling for a fight, fired back an even more damaging charge of economic mismanagement against the minister. “Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala And The Missing Trillions (1)” he entitled his roughly 6,500-word rejoinder to her rejoinder. This time he accused the minister, more or less, of criminal negligence in carrying out her brief as a double-minister.

    “My earlier article,” he said, “stated that the minimum forex reserves should have been at least $90 billion by now and you did not challenge it. Rather it is about $30 billion, meaning that gross mismanagement has denied the country some $60 billion or another N12.6 trillion.

    “Now add the ‘missing’ $20 billion from the NNPC. You promised a forensic audit report ‘soon’, and more than a year later the Report itself is still ‘missing’. This is over N4 trillion, and we don’t know how much more has ‘missed’ since Sanusi cried out.”

    Soludo then proceeded to challenge her to a three-way debate between the government and the leading opposition party, with himself as a third party on any economic topic of her choice. The debate, he suggested, should also include the way out of our economic mess and should take place by February 12.

    I doubt that the minister will pick up Soludo’s gauntlet. But even if she did, it is doubtful that a debate at this time will make any difference because, as Soludo himself said in his first article, most Nigerians have pretty much made up their minds who to vote for on considerations other than the record of performance and dispositions of the contestants.

    Even then I still believe Soludo deserves commendation for trying to pull us away from the useless debates on non-issues that have so far characterised the campaigns.

    Soludo’s articles may have been self-serving. Certainly his record as CBN Governor is hardly as glorious as he has tried to paint it. True, his creation of 25 mega-banks out of the hitherto existing 89 transformed Nigeria’s financial sector like no other reform before it, but it did not achieve its principal objectives. It did stop the banking sector, in which 11 banks were already seriously ailing, from an imminent collapse. However, the mergers did not stop some of them from remaining family piggybanks, nor did they improve transparency and good governance, a failure which forced his successor, Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, to do a massive cleaning up pretty early in his tenure. Nor still did the mega banks finance the so-called “real sector” – agriculture, manufacturing and even services – more than marginally better than the smaller banks.

    However, I believe it is rather disingenuous of our double-minister to try and isolate what she calls Soludo’s failure from what she says was the wonderful performance of the economy during her first sojourn as Finance Minister on leave from the World Bank. First, as she very well knew, if Soludo failed to supervise the new mega-banks closely it was because the chief executives of some of the banks had an even easier access to the top hierarchy of government than Soludo himself, arising from their unexplained shares and deposits in the banks. Soludo simply knew his limits and wisely refrained from crossing them.

    Second, she was merely the first among equals in President Olusegun Obasanjo’s Economic Management Team and several of its ideas came from others, not least of all from Soludo as, first, Obasanjo’s Economic Adviser, and then CBN Governor.

    The problem with our double-minister, I believe, is, first, that all too often she wants to eat her cake and still have it;  she likes to take credit for government’s achievements and distant herself from its failures. She has, for example, been quick to take credit for the country’s debt relief in 2005 and yet decline responsibility for the fact that the relief translated into little or no benefit for ordinary Nigerians.

    More recently she has been quick to take credit for the so-called rebasing of the country’s economy which has made it Africa’s number one, well ahead of the wealthier South African’s, the continent’s hitherto number one. But while quick in taking credit for Nigeria’s phantom economic growth she is reticent, to say the least, about the fact that the country’s human development index is worse today than it was before the rebasing. Worse, she has been even more reticent about the incredible degree of corruption in the land.

    Second, our double-minister likes to talk about the sacrifices she has made in leaving her job at the World Bank to come back home and serve. What you never hear from her is what benefits she has derived from coming home to serve, including her high profile projections abroad and enviable physical assets at home.

    This, of course, is natural. But it is also the very reason why she should spare us her sermons on her self-sacrifice.

    In an interview with Will Ross, BBC’s Lagos Correspondent, on March 12 last year, for example, she seemed angry when he asked her if Nigeria was serious about fighting corruption. He had pointed to her that there seemed to be a huge gap between government’s declaration of war on corruption and its actions, notably the unprecedented suspension of the CBN governor, Malam Sanusi, for raising  the alarm over huge sums missing from the Federation Account .

    Didn’t she think, Ross asked, her reputation was at stake?

    “I don’t think my reputation is under threat and to imply otherwise is distinctly wrong. I know what I’m doing. I know why I’m here. It would be very easy for me to sit at the World Bank and earn a nice salary and criticise. I gave up a comfortable career to come here and do my bit because I recognise that nobody but us Nigerians can clean it up.”

    Fine words, indeed. Trouble is, doing her own bit has not been any more glorious and more beneficial to ordinary Nigerians than that of Soludo, her new-found pet-hate. Nor has her doing her own bit been all sacrifices and no benefits.

  • ‘Peter Pan’ at 80

    ‘Peter Pan’ at 80

    He was not the youngest editor in the history of Nigerian journalism. His more politically famous elder brother, the late Chief Anthony Enahoro, set that yet unbroken record when he became the editor of the Ibadan-based Southern Nigerian Defender, one of the newspapers in Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe’s nationwide stable, at age 21 in 1944.

    Peter Enahoro, aka Peter Pan, however, came a close second when he became the editor of the better printed, more influential and more enduring Sunday Times at age 23 in 1958.

    As if to make up for coming only second best to his elder brother as the country’s youngest editor ever, he stuck to journalism as a career and eventually established himself as probably Nigeria’s best columnist ever and one of its best editors and newsmagazine publishers.

    Peter Osajele Aizegbeobor Enahoro was born exactly 80 years ago today in Uromi, Edo State, then part of Western Nigeria. He received his secondary school education from Government College, Ughelli, between 1948 and 1953. Thus, with no more than a secondary school certificate he launched himself into one of the most successful careers in Nigerian and African journalism.

    The long rested West Africa, at one time one of the most influential African newsmagazines published out of London, once described him as the “enfant terrible of Nigerian journalism for more than three decades.” This was in the introduction to a two-page interview with him, which it published in its edition of June 10, 1996.

    My Oxford English Dictionary defines “enfant terrible” as “a person whose controversial attitude shocks others.” This characterisation of Peter Pan couldn’t have been more spot-on. For, he seemed to have been an iconoclast as a young man from day one, judging from the way his journalism career at Daily Times almost came to grief even before it truly got going. This was at least the testimony of no less a journalism icon than the late Alhaji Babatunde Jose, easily the most successful journalist and newspaper publisher in post-independent Nigeria.

    The story of Jose’s rise from copy boy to the management of Daily Times of Nigeria Ltd and eventually his transformation of the company at one time into the biggest and possibly wealthiest in Africa – again, like Enahoro, with hardly more than secondary education to begin with – is the stuff of legends. It was from him than Enahoro took over as editor of Daily Times in 1962 after he (Enahoro) had successfully edited Sunday Times for four years from 1958.

    “Before I became the Editor (of Daily Times),” Jose said of his successorin his great 1987 autobiography, Walking a Tight Rope: Power Play in Daily Times, “Peter Enahoro and Nelson Ottah, both sub-editors, had been fired by Percy Roberts for being troublesome.” Roberts was then the British expatriate in charge of Daily Times before Jose.

    On taking over, he said, he pleaded with Roberts to reinstate the two and he acceded. “Both,” Jose said, “later proved excellent leader writers and columnists.” Enahoro, he said, went on to become not only an excellent columnist but “the best so far in the history of journalism in Nigeria.”

    To which one of Nigeria’s best columnists and humourists, the veteran Dan Agbese, concurred 25 years later. “Enahoro,” Agbese said in his excellent 2012 book, The Columnist’s Companion: The Art and Craft of Column Writing, “was a brilliant writer and columnist. His capacity for vivid verbal pictures remains unequalled by any writer or columnist in the country.”

    To back this appraisal, Agbese reproduced a column Enahoro wrote as Peter Pan, his pen name, in the Sunday Times of October 23, 1960. The title of the piece alone spoke volumes about Enahoro’s dexterity with the written word; “Take it Satch – That’s All There is in Armstrong.” Enahoro then went on to narrate the story of his close encounter in a Lagos hotel with Louis Satchmo Armstrong, the late legendary American jazz musician who was on a musical tour of Nigeria that year.

    “Even without his horn,” Peter Pan began in the opening sentences of the column, “he certainly was the loudest man for a quarter of a mile – at which distance one came to the Exhibition centre.” He then went on to describe in vivid but simple figures of speech what a charming and happy-go-lucky man Armstrong was.

    His concluding paragraphs couldn’t have been more rib-cracking in their humour. They could also not have been more graphic and creative in their description of the man. “I have,” he said, “been asked what my memory of Louis Armstrong is. First of course is his roaring thunder of a voice. Every time I drive on a gravel I will remember him.

    “Then is his jet-stream humour, much of which I will forget early. On account of I don’t dig that kinda hep talk ma sef. Cause ah never been down to New Orleans meebe.” This was obviously a humourous dig at the man’s Afro-American slang and a reference to his native city.

    Six years into his journalism career in Daily Times, Enahoro was forced to flee into exile. As Jose told it in his autobiography in question, it all started with the country’s first military coup on January 15, 1966. Enahoro, he said, appeared “very pleased” with the coup, as most of the new rulers were his friends and he reflected this pleasure in his column by often praising the coup makers.

    When the tables turned following the counter-coup of late July by Northern military officers, Enahoro, naturally, felt unsafe and after a while sought and was granted permission to move to London on a six-month leave without pay by the Times management. He never returned. Instead he resigned in August 1967 and eventually settled in Germany where he took up a job as an editor and producer at Deutsche Welle, the country’s equivalent of the BBC.

    It was from there that he moved in 1976 to Africa magazine published in London by the late Ralph Uwechue, as editor. From Africa he moved to New African, also published in London, as editor and director. Eventually he founded his own newsmagazine, Africa Now, in London.

    Of the three, only New African is still alive. But long before the death of his own magazine, he returned home from exile in the early 90s and at different times, chaired the National Broadcasting Commission and headed his alma mater, the Daily Times of Nigeria Ltd, as its sole administrator.

    With his active days as a journalist now completely behind him, it can still be safely said in agreement with both Jose and Agbese that Enahoro remains the greatest columnist in Nigerian journalism. And with only two slim books, You Gotta Cry to Laugh and How To Be A Nigerian, to his name, he can also be said to be one of Nigeria’s greatest writers.

    Both books are classic satires about Nigeria and its people and are as insightful about Nigeria’s sociology and politics even today as they were when he wrote them ages ago. They are also a study in simplicity and precision in language and style.

    Take, for example, his insight in the second book into the typical Nigerian’s penchant for noise making. “In the beginning,” he said in the opening paragraph of Chapter 6 on the subject which he entitled Noise from the Soul, “God created the universe; then He created the moon, the stars and the wild beasts of the forests. On the sixth day, he created the Nigerian and there was peace. But on the seventh day while God rested, the Nigerian invented noise.”

    Or take for another example, his guide to Nigerian oratory in Chapter 8. The Nigerian, he said, “begins his marathon address with a familiar apology: ‘…I do not intend to waste your time.’ Then he goes to do precisely what you expect him to do – waste your time.”

    Or take for a third example his own take on the subject of sex in Nigeria. “Marriage,” he said in the introductory paragraph of Chapter 16 on the subject, “they say is an institution, sex is incidental. In Nigeria, sex is an institution and marriage is an incidence.”

    You rarely get to read stuff like these anymore these days.

    Enahoro is, however, not only justly famous for his way with the written word – and with the spoken word as well, to which anyone who has met him will testify – he could also be too plain speaking as was the case in his interview with West Africa which I mentioned at the beginning of this piece.

    Asked, for example, what he thought of the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) led by his elder brother, Tony, he said: “Believe me, NADECO is a paper tiger.” The coalition, which was a thorn in the side of General Sani Abacha’s regime, he said, had after all, given the general one month to hand over power to Chief MKO Abiola, whose putative victory at the June 12, 1993 presidential election had been annulled by Abacha’s predecessor, General Ibrahim Babangida, but Abacha had called their bluff. “Two years later,” Enahoro said, “he is still in power and it is NADECO’s relevance that is in doubt.”

    He was, in the interview, also very unflattering about several of the coalition’s other leaders. There were people in it like Beko Ransome-Kuti, he said, whose sincerity he acknowledged. However, others like Chief Gani Fawehinmi, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi and Wole Soyinka, were, he said in effect, only dubious.

    “The trouble with Fawehinmi,” he said, “is that he is encouraged to take himself too seriously.” Akinyemi, he said, was only bitter with Abacha because the general had refused to accede to his request to be re-appointed foreign minister, whereas Soyinka was “given to staging melodramas.

    “Remember the toy pistol incident? The escalation from that prank is that, with the Nobel Prize in hand, he is playing out the fantasy of being a politician of weight in Nigeria. He is not.”

    It was, indeed, a “No holds barred” interview, as West Africa entitled it.

    Happy 80th birthday to the enfant terrible of Nigerian journalism and here’s many more returns.

  • PDP’s virulent campaign

    PDP’s virulent campaign

    It has become almost a cliché that since President Goodluck Jonathan and General Muhammadu Buhari, the two leading contenders in next month’s presidential election, launched their campaigns in earnest last week, they’ve spent more time attacking each other than in talking about issues. Last week I said I agreed candidates should be discussing issues alright, but added in effect that I saw nothing wrong with discussing personalities as well. Character, I said, was for me indeed more important than issues because the problem of this country is less the right diagnosis than the fact that we seldom practised what we preached.

    In other words, we can analyse issues to death, but it makes no difference if we lack the disposition to walk our talk. This was why I was sceptical when President Jonathan said in effect that his campaign will be without animosity during his New Year broadcast on January 1.

    “Let us,” he said, “not promote sectionalism, disunity, intolerance, hate, falsehood or the malicious abuse of political opponents… Let us put the nation and the people first. Let us all conduct our electoral campaigns with the highest possible decorum and civility towards political opponents.”

    Fine and noble words, no doubt. But no sooner did the president utter them than some of his men decided to practise exactly what he’d preached against. One of the first to fire the first shots was the National Secretary of the president’s party, Professor Adewale Oladipo. Buhari, he said, was a semi-literate jackboot.

    The next election, he said, “is going to be between light and darkness. It is going to be between a cosmopolitan highly focussed PhD holder and a semi-illiterate (sic) jackboot.” These words clearly failed the president’s tests of tolerance, love, truth and absence of malice.

    Since then, the president has appointed Mr. Femi Fani-Kayode as the director of publicity for his campaign organisation. That put paid to any hope that the president sincerely meant to heed his own call for a decent campaign. For, Fani-Kayode has never been one to shy away from using the foulest language against anyone he disagreed with, including, of course, the president himself who he once dismissed as clueless.

    This would not be the first time the gentleman will use the most abusive language against someone only to turn around to be his spokesman. Pretty early in General Olusegun Obasanjo’s first term as president, he condemned the man as sell-out to the so-called Hausa-Fulani and the international capital. He even said the man would end in disgrace. Yet he eventually turned round to serve the man as probably his most virulent spin doctor once Obasanjo invited him to come and chop, to use the local lingo.

    It then says more about the president’s character than about Fani-Kayode that he would employ him to publicise his campaign. Not surprisingly, the man has been doing his best to justify his boss’s new found confidence.

    As if the uncivil language of such president’s men like Professor Oladipo was not bad enough, he himself descended into abuse. On January 7, while receiving in audience some members of the Northern Elders Council led by the octogenarian, Alhaji Tanko Yakasai, famous for being a permanent fixture in the corridors of power since the Second Republic, the president must have entered the Guinness Book of Records in the use of foul language against an erstwhile benefactor, if such a category existed.

    He did not name any name, but even the blind could see through his mind’s eye that his attack that day on elders, who have become highly critical of his performance, was aimed at Obasanjo.

    “You are,” he said, “not a senior citizen you can never be. You are ordinary motor park tout because if you are a senior citizen, you will act like one.” Obasanjo is, of course, notorious for pulling no punches when it comes to criticising others. Even then I thought, and I am sure many people would agree with me, that to call a former leader of a country, and one old enough to be one’s father at that, a “motor park tout” was really the limit.

    Of course, Jonathan is not in contest with his erstwhile benefactor for the presidency. But the way the former president has persistently attacked the incumbent since their simmering cold war came out in the open late last year, the president might as well have been.

    Taking their cue from the president’s actions rather than his words, many of his supporters, especially conveniently anonymous ones like “CONCERNED NIGERIANS” have since been publishing adverts against Buhari which are anything but decent. These supporters of the president are so blinded by their dislike of Buhari that the irony that some of their adverts are indictments of many of the president’s men – and even of the president himself – seems lost on them.

    Take, for example, the one published in several newspapers last Monday casting doubts on Buhari’s reputation as an honest man. Titled “HYPOCRISY” with a cartoon picture of the general behind another cartoon picture of the late military ruler, carrying a handbag with PTF (the Petroleum Trust Fund which he served as chairman), it asked how an honest man could serve, as Buhari did, in the administration of General Sani Abacha which the advertisers claimed was “globally acclaimed to be Nigeria’s most corrupt government.”

    Obviously the irony was lost on the advertisers that if serving in Abacha’s administration was a failure of the test of one’s honesty, then the PDP leadership must be full of many dishonest men. For, among those who were either part and parcel of Abacha’s administration or were his henchmen are such PDP chieftains like its erstwhile chairman, Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, Alhaji Tanko Yakasai, Chief Ebenezer Babatope and, not least of all, Senate President David Mark.

    Of all the campaigns in support of the president, which have observed his fine appeal for civility only in the breech, none is more disturbing than the words of the Prelate of the Methodist Church of Nigeria, Archbishop Samuel Uche, last Sunday during the Armed Forces Remembrance Day Interdenominational Service at the National Christian Centre, Abuja. The Archbishop spoke in the presence of the president himself, the Senate president, top officers of the military and of other security agencies and other VIPs.

    “Let me,” he said, “reveal to you this evening and at this important service at this juncture that some of our soldiers, because you know we Bishops have impact in the society, we relate to soldiers and all manner of people. And some of the people in warfront have confided in us that apart from some mercenaries from Chad, Libya as well as Somalia, 95 per cent of those fighting our country are (sic) of Fulani and Kanuri origin.

    “They are aggrieved because they want power at all costs. They believe Nigeria belongs to them alone and that they are born to rule while others follow. It is a deceit. The second is that they want to Islamise Nigeria and build a parallel caliphate from the one in Sokoto.”

    Because the president broke his own standard of the quality of debate that he said should precede next month’s election, one is not surprised that some people in the opposition camp have responded in kind.

    The other day, for example, the All Progressive Congress (APC) leader, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, described those in power as “predators and scavengers.” Nigerians, he said, must utilise the power of their vote to take back their country “from the predators and scavengers in the corridors and bedrooms of power that currently hold her hostage.”

    So far, however, the party’s presidential candidate and his running mate, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, have admirably restrained themselves from using vile language even in their strongest attacks on the president.

    If this is reassuring, the same can hardly be said of the kind of campaigns from the ruling party. Certainly if the words of Archbishop Uche last Sunday is a reflection of the mindset of the leading figures among his distinguished audience after all the president preached about conducting a decent campaign for next month’s elections, one can only say God help this country!

  • Between President Jonathan and General Buhari

    Between President Jonathan and General Buhari

    Last Wednesday, this column ended with a promise that today, God willing, we’ll examine the question about whether the opposition leadership can deliver on its commitment of bringing an end to the nasty and brutish present the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has landed us in and would like us to continue with. Of course, PDP did not put it exactly this way when President Goodluck Jonathan read his acceptance speech as its candidate in next month’s presidential election during his recent coronation at Eagle Square in Abuja.

    “The choice before Nigerians in the coming election,” he said in the speech, “is simple: A choice between going forward or (sic) going backwards; between the new ways and the old ways; between freedom and repression; between a record of visible achievements and beneficial reforms and desperate power-seekers with empty promises.”

    Obviously for the president, a vote for the first options in his four dichotomies – forward/backward; new ways/old ways; freedom/repression; visible achievements and beneficial reforms/ desperate power seekers with empty promises – represents a vote for himself and PDP, while a vote for the second represents one for General Muhammadu Buhari and All Progressives Congress (APC).

    These dichotomies, to begin with, are based on certain false assumptions and some are indeed themselves false. It is, for example, not necessarily true that the future is always better than the past or that new ways are necessarily better than old ways. Certainly in the specific case of the president, his new ways have proved more disastrous than the old because, by almost every development index you can think of, it has, as I said last week, landed us in a present worse, far worse, than the past. Again, it is also not true that only those desperate to get power make empty promises; those desperate to retain power too can and do make empty promises.

    Today our economy has come to be defined not so much by its recently rebased size, which has earned it the dubious honour of being the largest in Africa. Rather our economy has come to be defined, even by the president himself, by the numbers of the new rich, who own private jets and guzzle huge quantities of expensive wines that it has created. In other words, Nigeria has come to exemplify a society with an unhealthy huge gap between the few obscenely rich and a huge number of the rest living in abject poverty.

    There can hardly be a better illustration of this new Nigeria than a seven-page article in TATLER (December 2013), the glossy British fashion magazine, headlined “THE NIGERIANS HAVE ARRIVED.” The article, which spoke about how Nigeria’s new rich fly from Lagos to London by private jets, love to live and shop in Belgravia, a wealthy neighbourhood of London, wear “bespoke suits” and play polo with princes, described the country as the second fastest growing champagne market after France. “Total consumption (of the drink),” it said, “reached 752,879 bottles in 2011 and the country is spending around N41.41bn  (£159m) on the drink annually.”

    Surely, this is not the kind of Nigeria we can all be proud to be citizens of, especially not when the inequality and inequity in the land is based, not on hard work and entrepreneurship, but mainly on cronyism. As that justly famous Justice of American Supreme Court, Louis D. Brandeis, once said of his country, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

    Second, the president’s dichotomies are based on the assumption that he is sincerely committed to his oft-repeated promise of allowing free, fair and credible elections. In spite of all appearances to the contrary, the man did not deliver on this promise four years ago and the stakes have become much higher since then as can be seen from the number and the character of the country’s new rich alone.

    Four years ago the man won on the power of incumbency coupled with the power of religious and ethnic propaganda. Then public policy, the treasury, chief executives of state and local governments, and even traditional rulers, were all held hostage to ensuring victory for the PDP at all levels of government. Similarly the party succeeded in dressing Buhari, as the leading rival candidate – of course with the active complicity of the mass media – in the robes of an ethnic jingoist and religious extremist.

    Even then the PDP did not take chances with the actual voting itself. Here, it was instructive that there were high voter turnouts in virtually all the states that were the party’s strongholds and corresponding low voter turnouts in opposition strongholds. Whereas, for example, the highest voter turnout in opposition strongholds was in Kano with 52.3 %, the lowest in PDP strongholds in South-South and South-East, except for Anambra (57.3), Ebonyi (47.3) and Edo (37.2), was 60%. Indeed, Bayelsa, the president’s home state, had an improbable 85.5% turnout in a country which, like most democracies in the world, has had an average of lower than 40% voter turnout since elections started in the country.

    It therefore came as no surprise that a programme on the Federal Government-owned Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), which started an analysis of the votes on April 17, was yanked off the air “on orders from above” barely five minutes into its continuation the following day when one of the discussants, Dr Jibrin Ibrahim, who was an election expert, started raising awkward questions about the credibility of the figures.

    Four years on, it now seems the power of ethnic and religious propaganda against Buhari as the leading opposition candidate, is no longer as portent as it was on the three occasions he lost, thanks essentially to his choice of a running mate, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, who is not only a senior pastor of arguably the most influential Pentecostal church in Africa, but comes highly recommended for his intellect and simplicity and as a man of high personal integrity.

    This obviously means the president would now have to rely more on his power of incumbency than he did four years ago if he is to be sure of winning the election. So far he has demonstrated a willingness to use it at the expense of the opposition, witness, for  example, how he sided with the minority faction of a divided Nigerian Governors Forum, how the Police recently tried to shut out the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon Aminu Tambuwal, from the House because he had defected to the opposition, how the Directorate of State Services invaded the Data Centre of the APC in Lagos, under the guise that the centre was forging a voters register, and from the way his administration has selectively fought its war against corruption.

    The omens are therefore not good that the elections this year will be free, fair and credible. Assuming, however, they are, and assuming the opposition wins the presidential elections, can it deliver on its promise to end the current rot?

    The answer, says conventional wisdom, lies in the parties focusing on debating issues rather than personalities of the contestants. I disagree somewhat. Issues are of course important but again as Justice Brandeis once said, “We are not won by arguments that we can analyse, but by tone and temper; by the manner, which is the man himself.” In other words what in the end makes us believe in someone is not his knowledge or competence as such. It is essentially his character.

    By all means let us discuss issues if only because therein can we tell whether someone has a grasp of the things at stake. But we must remember always that, in the end, talk is cheap and character more than even knowledge and competence, is what makes the difference.

    Clearly the leadership of the ruling party has demonstrated that it lacks the character to deliver this country from the problems of insecurity, industrial scale venality and poverty that has bedevilled it. The big question is, does the leadership of the opposition have the character to enable it turn the tide for a better future?

    As political parties I believe there isn’t much to choose between PDP and APC. But then even though a tree does not make a forest, small groups and even individuals can, as History has taught us, make a difference. I believe the combination of Buhari and Osinbajo can make a significant difference in the nation’s war against insecurity, corruption and the poverty in the land. This is because both of them possess what, to me, are the greatest virtues in fighting a successful war against any evil – personal integrity and a simple lifestyle, even if it is merely comparative.

    As a human being, Buhari, of course has his vices but many that are often attributed to him, like religious extremism and ethnic jingoism, as I’ve had occasions to point out on these pages, are simply not true. Some that are true, like his self-righteousness, rigidity and a tendency to over-delegate, he seems to have learnt to change or moderate since he entered politics more than a decade ago, as anyone familiar with the internal politics of the opposition parties he has been a member of will testify.

    Twelve years ago, on January 28, 2003 to be precise, I described the choice between President Olusegun Obasanjo as the candidate of PDP and Buhari as the candidate of the opposition ANPP in that year’s presidential election as a difficult one “between the rock and a hard place.”

    Twelve years on, the choice between President Goodluck Jonathan and Buhari couldn’t be easier, given the preponderance of the character of each of them, never mind the poor record of the incumbent in the last six years, a record which would be hard to surpass in its bankruptcy.

     

     

     

    A correction…

    Last week I referred to Major-General Ishola Williams in error as Alabi William. The error was inadvertent and is regretted.

    …and a notice

    Twenty years ago this month I was a guest speaker at an occasion during which General Muhammadu Buhari was honoured over his conferment with an honorary degree. It was a long speech but re-reading it I thought it has some relevance to the current cross-road we are in, especially given the roles some of the key players then are still playing in our politics today.

    The editors of Daily Trust, The Nation, Newsdiaryonline and Gamji have obliged my request to publish it between this Saturday and Sunday. You may wish to read it for all that it is worth.

  • Between GEJ’s today and GMB’s yesterday

    Between GEJ’s today and GMB’s yesterday

    In an interview with Channels TV three Mondays ago, Dr. Doyin Okupe, a senior spokesman for President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ), said the All Progressives Congress (APC), the country’s leading opposition party, made “a fatal error” by electing General Muhammadu Buhari (GMB), a former military head of state and serial loser in the country’s presidential elections since 2003, as its candidate for the February 14, 2015 presidential election.

    General Buhari won his party’s presidential primaries, held on December 10 in Lagos, by a landslide, much to the surprise of most pundits who had forecast a tight race between him and former Vice-President, Atiku Abubakar. Indeed, so confident was the Atiku camp of his victory that his able spokesman, Garba Shehu, boasted on the eve of the primary that his principal’s acceptance speech had already been written. Shehu, you may recall, had conducted the vice-president’s highly successful media war in 2007 against his estranged boss, former President Olusegun Obasanjo,

    “For you to know how confident we are,” Shehu said, “Oga’s acceptance speech has already been written. So we are winning.”

    In the event, Shehu and his oga couldn’t have been more disappointed; not only did he lose to Buhari, he also lost to a much less fancied Dr. Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, the Governor of Kano State, who came a very distant second. The scores were 3,430 for the winner, 974 for the governor, 954 for the former VP, 624 for Rochas Okorocha, the Governor of Imo State, and 10 for Sam Nda-Isaiah, the publisher of Leadership.

    The contrast between Buhari’s win and the coronation ceremony of President Jonathan as PDP’s candidate in Abuja on the same day couldn’t have been starker as a comparative study of the internal democracy of the two parties; the ruling party simply made it absolutely impossible for anyone to contest for its presidential ticket against the incumbent, inadvertently betraying a lack of confidence that the man can retain his ticket even in a rigged primary.

    When Okupe said he knew Buhari’s election was “a fatal error” he of course meant it for APC. Buhari, like Generals Ibrahim Babangida, Abdulsalami Abubakar and Obasanjo (whose spokesman he once was), he said, only reminded Nigerians of a past that was best forgotten. Well, contrary to Okupe’s wish, APC’s “error” may well turn out to be fatal, not for itself, but for PDP, which has ruled (misrule is more like it) this country since the start of the Fourth Republic in 1999 – and has threatened to rule us much longer for at least the next half century.

    Okupe’s remarks in the Channels interview merely echoed his master’s acceptance speech on his coronation as PDP’s candidate. “The choice before Nigerians in the coming election,” he said in the speech, “is simple: A choice between going forward or (sic) going backwards; between the new ways and the old ways; between freedom and repression; between a record of visible achievements and beneficial reforms and desperate power-seekers with empty promises.”

    I do not have any opinion poll to back my belief, but I have no doubt that if Nigerians were free today to choose between the immediate and distant past Okupe has denigrated, on the one hand, and his principal’s present, on the other, the vast majority of them will prefer the past. Whatever those like Okupe who prefer the status quo may choose to believe, the fact is that Nigerians have never had it as bad as it has been in the last five years under President Jonathan, the good people of the oil producing Niger Delta region he comes from not exempted.

    As Eric Teniola, a veteran reporter and now a frequent commentator, pointed out in a well researched piece, “Changing tide for the Niger Delta” in The Guardian (December 24), with the region blessed with a development commission (NDDC), a ministry and the Presidential Amnesty Programme, all being allocated princely sums that are the envy of most states in the country – not, above all, to mention a president who is a son of the soil – money has since ceased being an object for the region.

    Yet, today the ordinary people of the region have not in any way been better off than they were in the past. On the contrary, they are probably worse off today, as they wallow in abject poverty in sharp contrast to the mindless opulence of a few of them who the president seems ever so proud to say, as he repeated during his fundraiser two Saturdays ago, he has made millionaires and billionaires and, who knows, even trillionaires.

    Speaking on December 23 at the inauguration of the Enugu-Port Harcourt train service, the president repeated the statistical self-delusion, following the so-called rebasing of our Gross Domestic Product this year, that his administration has grown Nigeria’s economy into the biggest in Africa and one of the biggest in the world. “We have,” he said, “managed the economy such that it has risen to be the greatest economy in Africa and one of the biggest in the world.”

    Obviously the president, in repeating this mantra about Nigeria’s new economic status, chose to ignore a report, issued by the UK-based Legatum Institute, a research organisation that documents annual prosperity indicators around the world, which listed Nigeria as 125th in poverty out of 142 countries the institute surveyed.

    The report, issued on December 19, said: “Despite its latest status as Africa’s biggest economy, and its government’s claim of improved standard of living, Nigeria was not only one of the world’s least prosperous countries in 2014, but also one of Africa’s poorest, beaten by smaller nations like Niger, Benin, Mali and Cameroun… Remarkably, Nigeria failed to make the list of Africa’s top 10 most prosperous countries, a league dominated by Botswana and South Africa.”

    Obviously this is not a record any leader who cares for the welfare and the happiness of his people would be proud of. As The Punch said in the conclusion of its strongly worded front page comment, “Jonathan’s N21 bn donation: Impunity taken too far,” (December 23), “It is all evident that Jonathan has failed badly to build a credible, honest and minimally effective government for almost half a decade that he has been president. This is regrettable indeed.”

    Yet we are told that we should reject change and vote for the status quo next year when our yesterday seems all so much better than our today.

    Of all the things the president said in his acceptance speech as PDP’s candidate, the most profound for me was one of the shorted paragraphs in the speech. “Our mission,” he said, “is to secure Nigeria’s future.”

    On his current record of his abysmal failure to even secure our present, it seems highly doubtful that he can secure the country’s future – certainly not with the level of threat we have repeatedly been subjected to by several of his henchmen like Asari Dokubo, who have said his loss next year will mean the end of Nigeria. Given the widespread public concern about recent massive and illegal importation of arms as articulated only the other day by former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, in a letter to the President and to Buhari as the two leading presidential contenders, pleading with them to sign a memorandum of understanding that they will get their respective followers to eschew violence especially after the election, Dokubo’s threats cannot be dismissed as empty or idle.

    Predictably, threats from the likes of Dokubo have provoked counter-threats from Buhari’s camp, the most controversial of which has been the threat by Rivers State Governor and now the Director-General of the Buhari Campaign Organisation, Rotimi Amaechi, that the opposition will form a parallel government if PDP wins, his assumption being, of course, that PDP cannot win next year’s election if it is free and fair.

    Amaechi’s threat is to be condemned as much as Dokubo’s. However, whereas government officials have condemned Amaechi over his threat, they have maintained a deathly silence over those from the president’s men.

    Not only have government officials condemned threats of violence from opposition elements, they have now gone further to threaten them with arrest and imprisonment. Only two Mondays ago, the combative Minister of Police Affairs, Chief Jelili Adesiyan, said he has ordered the Inspector- General of Police and the Directorate of State Security to arrest anyone “making mutinous and inflammatory statements.”

    He named no names but it was obvious he was referring mostly to Amaechi, especially over another statement the governor made, condemning the death sentence passed recently on 54 soldiers for alleged mutiny in the war on Boko Haram terror in Borno State. “The soldiers,” the governor had reportedly said, “have a right to protest for the Federal Government’s failure to fully equip them.”

    If the rather liberal interpretation of Amaechi’s words by PDP and government officials is accurate, he was hardly alone in speaking them. In this he was clearly in the company of such human rights lawyers like Femi Falana, SAN, and the Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole  Soyinka, who have said the inability of government to arm and motivate the soldiers adequately are mitigating circumstances for their misconduct.

    More importantly Amaechi is in the good company of one of the most respected retired generals of the Nigerian military, Major-General Alabi Williams.

    “Those playing politics with the lives of these soldiers who were being sent to commit suicide in the name of fatherland and they refused, have to be ashamed,” the general, who retired as an officer and gentleman of the highest integrity and as the Chief of Defence Operations, Planning and Training in 1993, said recently. “The army’s top hierarchy is covering up its weaknesses by court-martialling these soldiers. Period.”

    As the February presidential election approaches, the question then is not whether our present is worth preserving, because obviously it is not. The question is, can the opposition deliver on its promise to bring an end to our nasty and brutish present? My answer will form the subject of this column next week, God willing.

     

    Happy New Year

    With every difficulty, says a dictum, there’s ease. As we enter the year 2015 tomorrow, may the Good Lord bring an end to our sufferings of recent years. Happy New Year.

  • For fair and balanced election reporting

    For fair and balanced election reporting

    For fair and balanced election reporting or two days, beginning Monday, December 15, the Conference Centre of the University of Ibadan played host to a gathering of reporters, media scholars and senior journalists for a training workshop on fair and balanced reporting of elections.

    The workshop was organised by an association of media scholars, the Media Scholars Network, in conjunction with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). This reporter was one of a team of nine media scholars and senior journalists, one of them from Ghana, who served as resource persons.

    As far as workshops go, this was as stimulating and educating as any. It opened, as is usual, with occasions like this, with a welcome address by the convener, Prof. Ayo Olukotun, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences of Lead City University, Ibadan, and himself a prize winning columnist with The Punch. Mr Chukwuemeka Ugboaja, the Chief Publicity Officer of INEC, spoke on behalf of the Chairman, Prof. Attahiru Jega.

    The first paper was delivered by the Ghanaian senior journalist and President of the Ghana Association of Writers, and also a member of the country’s Media Commission, Mr Kwasi Gyan-Apeteng. His paper gave an international perspective on the theme of the workshop. His was followed by a very thought-provoking paper from Prof. Lai Oso, Dean of the School of Communication, Lagos State University (LASU). Oso spoke on the subject of objectivity in reporting. The day’s session ended with my paper, which was about a columnist’s perspective on fair and balanced reporting.

    There was to have been a fourth paper on the malignant and widepread influence of the almighty “brown envelop” (the Nigerian euphemism for cash for news) syndrome on journalism by Prof. Wale Olaitan, a former Vice Chancellor of the Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye, Ogun State and a member of the Editorial Board of Nigerian Tribune, but he was unavoidably absent. Instead, his paper was moved to the following day.

    Tuesday started with Olaitan’s paper delivered on his behalf by Dr. Remi Aiyede, a senior lecturer in Political Science, University of Ibadan. This was followed by another paper from Lanre Idowu, Editor-in-Chief and Chief Executive Officer of Diamond Publications, publishers of Media Review, a media watchdog, and organisers of the Diamond Awards for Excellence in Journalism. The third, fourth and fifth papers were delivered in that order by Mr Dapo Olorunyomi, a veteran of The News magazine and now boss of Premium Times, probably the country’s premier online newspaper, Mr Yomi Olayinka, the boss of the Broadcasting Organisation of Oyo State (BCOS), and Mrs Tayo Agunbiade, the former chairman of the Editorial Board of the rested Nigerian Compass and now a media consultant.

    Idowu spoke on the legal and ethical dimension of fair and balanced reporting, Olorunyomi on the case of online media reporting, Olayinka on broadcast media and Agunbiade on the role of editorial gatekeepers in election reporting.

    The radical scholar and human rights activist, Prof. Jibrin Ibrahim, was to have spoken on the proprietorial influence on reporting, but he did not turn up, probably due to circumstances beyond his control. However, the gap his absence left was filled by a robust discussion on the widespread concern over what seems to be the ascendancy in the ownership of the media by frontline politicians. This ascendency, everyone seemed agreed, poses a serious challenge to the integrity and credibility of the media.

    All told, the workshop, as I said, was highly stimulating and educating. The tone was set by LASU’s Oso. Objectivity in reporting, he argued plausibly, may be desirable, but it is impossible to achieve because we all have our biases and prejudices. However, because it is desirable, it motivates us to be fair and balanced in our judgments. This, in turn, means we must strive to be factual and accurate and consider all sides to an issue in our reporting.

    This much all participants seemed agreed upon. Problem was that this, invariably, is easier said than practised.

    Many journalists may not be as knowledgeable as they should about, say, the laws of libel or copyright or invasion of privacy. They may also not be as knowledgeable as they should be about the ethics of journalism as codified by the Nigerian Press Organisation, the umbrella body of the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria, the Nigeria Guild of Editors, the Nigeria Union of Journalists and the Broadcasting Organisation of Nigeria. But no journalist can say he does not know that he must check out the accuracy of a story and talk to all sides of the story before he publishes it as news.

    Yet all too often, journalists pass off their biases and prejudices or those of their benefactors as news. Of course, journalists, like everyone else, are entitled to their views. That is why columns exist for them to pontificate on those views. But no one has any right to pass on his views as news. And even in pontificating on his views, the columnist owes himself and the profession a duty to base them on facts rather than on his fancy.

    Facts, of course, can also be problematic, if only because almost always they are meaningless outside the context in which they occur. Take, for example, the controversy stirred by INEC’s now abandoned plan to increase the country’s polling units ahead of next year’s elections to make voting as easy as possible for everyone. The source of the controversy was the highly skewed ratio of the increase for the North, where the commission’s Chairman, Jega, comes from, against the increase for the South – a ratio of roughly three to one.

    Politicians from the South seized on this fact to accuse the chairman of conspiring to rig the election for the presumed presidential candidate from his region. Yet the proportion of the increase between the two regions was meaningless outside the context of the ratio of the existing number of polling units, the ratio of the registered voters and the ratio of the land size between the two regions, where, for example, Niger State with 74,108.58 square kilometres of land, the second largest after Borno (75,480.91), and a population of nearly four million, is more than two and a half times the size of the five Southeastern states combined and has a population about one quarter that of those states. In spite of these figures, Niger State has only 3,185 polling units spread over its huge land, compared to 15,549 for the Southeast. Borno has only 3,933.

    Clearly the media reporting of the story of INEC’s aborted plan to increase the polling units in the country was anything but fair and balanced. On the contrary, it was simply orchestrated to blackmail the commission into dropping its plan and amply succeeded in doing so.

    Again, just like facts can be problematic, so also can ethics, if only because not all ethics are universal. Besides, they can sometimes clash and one is then faced with deciding which is higher. Then again, there is the challenge posed to journalism ethics by the emergence of the so-called New Media, aka, Social Media, as a result of the invention of the Internet at the turn of this century.

    “The medium”, as Herbert Marshall McLuhan, the late Canadian philosopher of communication theory and public intellectual, once said, “is the message.” In other words, the medium, whether print, radio or broadcast, determines the shape and character of the message it carries. An implication of this is that there should be different ethics for different medium.

    Olorunyomi, the Premium Times boss, disagrees with this relativism in journalism’s ethics in his paper and I completely agree with him. Speed may be of essence for the Social or New Media, but it cannot be an excuse for not checking out a story for its accuracy, balance and fairness before publishing it. The centrality of election as a measure of the quality of a democracy makes these values even more crucial in reporting elections whatever the medium.

    At least four things can get in the way of balanced and fair reporting not just of elections, but of everything else. These are a reporter’s conscience, the ownership of his medium, the statutory regulatory organs of his profession, like the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission (NBC), and, of course, government itself through its use or abuse of its security organs.

    A reporter with a conscience is not easily swayed by any consideration to write a jaundiced story, but when, as is widely the case in this country, he is relatively poorly paid by his employers, if at all, and when, as Olayinka, the boss of BCOS, points out in his presentation, a regulatory organ like the NBC is blatantly selective in the application of its regulations between, on the one hand, Federal Government owned media and those in its support, and  on the other hand, those owned privately or by opposition states, and when the Federal Government itself uses its security organs all too often to intimidate reporters, then the reporter’s job becomes very difficult, if not impossible.

    The stakes are obviously high in the next election. This makes it imperative for the media, print, broadcast and New, to report it with fairness and balance. The key to doing so is journalism with a conscience. The test of this is a positive answer to each and everyone of Idowu’s simple five questions about a news item, namely, is it factual, is it in the public interest, is it fair to all sides, is the language civil rather than abusive, and has it rejected being compromised by money or any other consideration?

    Since it is naive to think politicians, especially those in power, will allow journalists to do their jobs with conscience, the question is, how far can journalists resist outside pressures to compromise their consciences? The answer will determine how fair and balanced their reporting of next year’s election is.

  • Shema: do a Mellor

    Shema: do a Mellor

    Words”, Steven Poole, the British author and journalist, said in his 2006 book on the abuse of English Language, “are weapons.” This sentence was actually the subtitle of the book whose title was UNSPEAK.

    Poole defined “unspeak” as a way of naming and framing an issue such as to put the other side on the defensive and make its position look untenable. So, contrary to George Orwell’s well-known dictum that politicians’ words are not to be taken seriously because all too often they never mean what they say, Poole argues that it is precisely because they hardly ever mean what they say that their words should be taken very seriously.

    In his introduction to the book, he quotes one Language expert approvingly as saying “People are forever quoting Talleyrand that language is only there to hide the thought of a diplomat (or for that matter of any other shrewd and dubious person). But in fact the very opposite is true. Whatever it is that people are determined to hide, be it from others, or from themselves, even things they carry around unconsciously – language reveals all.”

    In other words, not even the most expert use of euphemism or any figure of speech can hide what one truly means, if only it is paid close enough attention.

    Whatever differences there are between Poole and Orwell on the English Language and Politics, they both agree on the fact that words are indeed weapons however you chose to use them. Which is why it is important that, politician or not, we mind our language, especially when, as in two recent cases that have stirred controversy, it is hard, if not impossible, for the speaker to deny that he meant what he said.

    The first was when a video first posted on the Internet on November 12 showed the otherwise gentle governor of the relatively peaceful Katsina State, Barrister Ibrahim Shema, likening opposition politicians to “cockroaches” whose lot, therefore, is only to be crushed.

    The governor’s words have since provoked criticisms from inside and outside the country. In turn, he has said he never meant to liken anyone to a cockroach much less urge his audience to crush them. His denial has been rather unconvincing given the fact that, though pictures can lie, this particular one did not seem to have done so.

    The second case happened in far away Britain. This time it was David Mellor, a lawyer like Shema, and a former British cabinet minister. In his case he called a black-cab driver a “sweaty, stupid little shit” during an argument about the route the taxi driver wanted to take after picking him and his partner, Lady Cobham, from her investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace.

    He told the cab driver: “You’ve been driving a cab for 10 years, I’ve been in the cabinet, I’m an award-winning broadcaster, I’m a Queen’s Counsel. You think that your experiences are anything compared to mine?”

    He then told the driver to “f..k off” and threatened to mention the incident in a popular radio talk show he hosts the following day. He kept his word.

    But rather than further disparage the cab driver, he surprised his audience when he apologised profusely for what he had done.

    “I can’t think what possessed me to lose it with that cabbie the way I did,” he said. “OK, I had a case, but I threw it away by the way I spoke and I’m really, really sorry about that, and I especially want to apologise to you, our listeners, for trying your patience and risking my own credibility with you by speaking the way I did.”

    In addition he pledged to make a donation to a charity sponsored by the taxi drivers’ union.

    Surprisingly, the public seemed unforgiving. Among the newspapers that carried the story was the London Guardian of November 29. There were over 400 reactions to the story. Less than a dozen said the former cabinet minister meant his apology. The overwhelming majority said he only apologised because he found out the cab driver had taped the incident.

    “I’m really, really, really, really sorry – I got caught,” said one apparently unforgiving reader who typified the reactions.

    Whether he was sincere in his apology or not, I thought this was how Shema should have reacted to what I believe he never meant to say, given his temperate nature. Clearly the man simply got carried away by the heat and emotions of those moments and spoke words that elsewhere would have derailed a political career, at the least.

    What the video caught him saying cannot be unsaid. The only way out therefore is to own up and tell the good people of Katsina State that he was really, really, sorry.

    Unlike with Mellor, I suspect the Katsinawa will believe him and forgive him. After all, whatever his shortcomings, he has done well by them in his eight years as governor. If nothing else he is almost unique as a governor who made sure he completed all the projects of his predecessor before he started his own, even though the two were not exactly the best of friends. Besides, the state has been one of the most peaceful and secure in the country.

    Your Excellency, the future, as a Hausa dictum says, is longer than the past. You should not let an inadvertent slip of tongue ruin the bright future your past suggests you have before you.

    Re: The manipulation of Boko Haram

    Sir,

    Your piece on the above subject last week was a masterpiece, and, as are most of your articles, well documented.

    My headache here, however, is, could  it  have been possible for this nonsense being visited on the North since 1999 under Obasanjo Presidency to date be sustained without the strong support of these powerful  so-called ‘Yan Arewa’? Why is it that all the so-called powerful institutions  and NGOs in the North like the Elders forums, the JNI, all these so-called powerful emirs and the so-called powerful retired generals,  politicians, academicians, the media guru etc, have never called for people’s action until the arrival of Emir Sanusi? Why is it that nobody is calling for northern people’s revolt? Can this nonsense be tolerated in any other part of the country for this long? Definitely not in the Southwest or any part of the Southern Nigeria.

    I am so embarrassed to think that a shoeless, classless and clueless guy can subject such a people coming from a rich historical background to such manipulations with their eyes open.

    Or is Allah actually punishing the North for the general malaise and the sins of some of their prominent rulers, leaders and citizens who have, overtime, allegedly indulged in unprintable anti-Allah practices like, shirk, zhinah and, wait for it, homosexuality/lesbianism?

    Muhammad ibn Umar.

    baayaru@gmail.com

    Sir,

    Emir Sanusi has called us to rise up to the challenge posed by Boko Haram. It is a wise decision coming from an intelligent person and when you look at the scenario properly, one is left with no other option than to conclude that it was a wise statement. After all, when the matador waves a red flag at the bull he more often than not ends up slaying it with his sword. In this case, the fear of a raging bull is overrated.

    Musa Audi,

    ABU, Zaria.

    +2348097831727.

     

    Sir,

    An ordinary man on the streets in Kano believes strongly that government has failed in its responsibility of protecting lives and property of its citizens. And that the government’s indifference stemmed from hatred, politics and religious differences.

    How can you explain the many checkpoints around town but still people are being killed everyday.

    Ibrahim Auwal Kano.

    +2348036785086.

    Sir,

    “…Lynch them to death”? Lynch them will suffice.

    +2348033010810.

    You are right, I committed a tautology by saying “…lynch them to death.” The common dictionary meaning of the word is “to seize somebody believed to have committed a crime and put him or her to death immediately and without trial, usually by hanging.”

    Sir,

    In paragraph 19 of last week’s column you wrote “Sadly… it never agreed to any SEIZE fire with anyone.” I think the correct word is CEASE fire, which refers to stopping, cessation or suspension of hostilities between the two warring parties. SEIZE refers more to taking hold of, control or even confiscating. The two words may be synonyms, but I think in the context of especially that paragraph, the word CEASE is more appropriate.

    Secondly, please I hope you will find time to enlighten us more so that we have clear perspectives about Vice President Namadi Sambo’s effort to exonerate northern Nigeria Muslims holding key positions in this government regarding their obviously ineffectual role in curbing the on-going decimation of their place of origin.

    Abubakar Jibrin,

    Bauchi. 

    abuji1968@yahoo.com

     

    Sir,

    You are a full member of Boko Haram.

    +2348063877187.