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Tag: Bishop Kukah

  • Bishop Kukah’s grandiloquence: A mere rearguard face-saving effort

    Bishop Kukah’s grandiloquence: A mere rearguard face-saving effort

    The Peace Committee having been denied the joy of playing a Job’s comforter to now President Muhammadu Buhari, is merely out on a fishing expedition, eager, always, to protect the object of its adulation as well as its raison d’etre.

    Tatalo scored the bull’s eye when in ‘The Trial Of Bishop Kukah’, (The Nation, 23 August, 2015) he wrote:  “Let it be bluntly and baldly stated that this committee, the Nigerian Peace Committee, that is, is not about peace at all. It materialised as a last ditch ruling class initiative to force General Buhari to accept dishonourable defeat and hence to stave off the revolutionary turmoil and anarchy that would have accompanied electoral miscarriage…’ Indeed, I make bold to say that it was, essentially, the apogee of the many schemes  put in place by the core Jonathanists and  their acolytes like  Afenifere  to hoodwink  Nigerians  into silence after gifting an undeserving President Jonathan a second term. Granted that it would be uncharitable to suggest that Afenifere is not serious about restructuring, they were well aware they sold the idea of a national conference to a most unwilling President Jonathan who would later show his utter revulsion for the event by failing to do anything about those aspects he could, very easily, have effected by a mere stroke of the pen.  Yet they wanted him to win and would do everything to secure that victory. For Afenifere therefore, the national conference was seen as a ‘deu ex machina’ to guarantee Southwest votes go to Jonathan.  That intended victory must also be sustainable because only then would Afenifere get out of its decades- old consignment to political Siberia in a region where they used to be the undisputed leaders; its most important reason for supporting Jonathan. In the certainty of that victory, to get which the PDP had other schemes to eventuate, and about which Afenifere may have been completely unaware, they had to help Jonathan prevent any post election conflagration as we saw in 2011. Because of the urgency of that victory, Afenifere raised no objection, whatever, to the president’s intent to inundate the country, especially the Southwest, with soldiers and masked members of the Niger-Delta Volunteer Force. Not even when Asari Dokubo threatened to level the entire Southwest did we hear a whimper from Afenifere. Jonathan’s victory, without a repeat of the 2011 post-election conflagration was uppermost in their calculations and for this reason, we would have some international diplomats come on a ‘salvage mission’.

     Aside Afenifere, PDP was, of course, certain of its candidate’s re-election. Many were the strategies, legal and otherwise, put in place to ensure it. Up until the eve of the election, when the respected Professor Chidi Odinkalu weighed in, supporting deployment of soldiers all over the country in a democratic election, the Ekiti model, which failed in Osun because we were fast in unravelling what happened at the Ekiti election, and the yeoman’s effort to frustrate them, was to be the template.  Nigerians have since come to know the details, courtesy Captain Koli’s Ekitigate tapes. For a confirmation of this claim, I quote from my article titled: “It Will Be Most Unlike PDP Not To Rig The 2015 Election,” of  4 January 2015 in which I  quoted Musiliu  Obanikoro ( a major player in  the Ekitigate saga) in an interview boasting as follows: ‘I can tell you that we are going to win. The president is going to win BIG; we are going to clear the Southwest. You can mark today’s date and quote me.” I invite the reader to note Obanikoro’s emphatic arrogance. As at that date, Nigerians have not known anything about the tapes.

    While the PDP was scheming, APC was working on much surer ground, a fact which enabled Dr. Femi Olufunmilade, a member of its Presidential Campaign Council to observe as follows in a recent interview: “The schisms within the PDP and the support of innumerable groups across the federation and the Diaspora were there to ensure victory. Many youth organisations, trade unions and so on lined up behind the Buhari-Osinbajo ticket. It was a rainbow coalition that cut across ethnicity, religion, region, class, professions etc. A unique feature of the ticket was that the talakawas, the lower class, the very poor in society gave their time, money, and intellect to it. It was unprecedented. I recall that when my campaign team of the Buhari-Osinbajo Support Organisation (BOSO) campaigned in the Ibarapa region of Oyo State and we offered to pay some local folks to paste the Buhari-Osinbajo posters we took along, they rejected our money and felt somehow insulted.”

    Incidentally, this widespread cult following was also being observed by some people in the other camp. Such persons knew that to rig the presidential election would be tantamount to inviting a conflagration far worse than we saw in 2011. This, I suspect, was how the former U.N Secretary-General, Kofie Anan and his former Commonwealth counterpart, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, suddenly emerged on the scene. It must be recalled, however, that this was soon after Prof Bolaji Akinyemi, with clear sympathies for Afenifere, proposed the signing of a MOU between the two leading presidential candidates. Integral to the proposed memorandum of understanding was the suggestion that the two candidates should sign that their supporters will, willy nilly, ACCEPT WHATEVER THE RESULT(caps mine) of the election.  Because I have never seen or heard anything like this before, I soon reacted to the suggestion. On these pages, Sunday, 18 January, 2015, I queried: “Is this diplomacy or duplicity? Nobody wants violence but how has PDP shown it won’t rig the election, being in power? Will the president deploy soldiers, policemen, militants in masks or not? Why didn’t the diplomats or Professor Akinyemi emphasise transparency and integrity of the electoral process? Left to me, this accord is a carte blanche to PDP to rig to their hearts’ content. I am sure something preposterous is afoot and APC had better wake up.” In my view, these were all attempts to mollify Nigerians into quietude after candidate Buhari would have been mindlessly rigged out and I believe this was when the Peace Committee was birthed; aimed at giving a victorious, re-elected President Jonathan, a safe landing, devoid of any of our usual post-election bloodletting.

    I could be wrong, anyway, but this is the logical deduction I can make from the extant circumstances.

    With Muhammadu Buhari’s victory having become obvious hours before the close of vote tabulation, wringing a congratulatory telephone call from the defeated candidate to the winner became about the only remarkable thing the peace people could do. And the success of that must, to a great extent, be attributed to the massive and totally uncompromising stance of the UK and the U.S whose ambassadors were on ground, literally, eye ball to eye ball. To this must be added Olusegun Obasanjo’s earlier, and very timely, warning to President Jonathan about the not too pleasant circumstances of President Laurent Gbagbo of Côte d’Ivoire.

    Given this background, it should not surprise Nigerians that Bishop Kukah has since experienced a reverse Pauline conversion which took him away from the Nigerian hoi polloi and dropped him, ‘dead’, on the side of the oppressors. But there is something more about this Peace committee. According to the inimitable Olatunji Dare in his article: “Between ‘national icon’ and iconographer” (The Nation, 11 August, 2015) the Peace committee Chairman, in a newspaper advert, recently congratulated Chief Tony Anenih as follows on his 82nd birthday: “A leader of uncommon achievement, keeper of the peace of the nation, a political heavyweight and mentor to the upcoming generation; an elder statesman and a leader of indomitable mien. No doubt yours has been a life of consistent hard work, total commitment to higher principles and unalloyed loyalty to the national cause.”  Conceding that all this is true of the elder statesman, and given what Nigerians know about the relationship between Chief Anenih  and former President Jonathan, I ask, is it likely  that the Peace Committee  could ever lend its  weight to a probe of  former President Jonathan? I doubt.

    Nigerians should, in the light of all these, take Bishop Kukah’s grandiloquent disavowals as nothing more than blowing an empty wind. The Peace Committee having been denied the joy of playing a Job’s comforter to now President Muhammadu Buhari, is merely out on a fishing expedition, eager, always, to protect the object of its adulation as well as its raison detre.

  • The trial of Bishop Kukah

    The trial of Bishop Kukah

    Poor Mathew Hassan Kukah! He has had it up to the nape of his cassocks. The torrents of abuse have now transformed into a tsunami of vilification. It was just as well that the week ended with the congregation of Catholic Bishops removing the ground from under Bishop Kukah by wholeheartedly supporting President Buhari’s anti-corruption hurricane.

    Never in Nigeria’s public history has a hitherto respected man of god tumbled so fast in public esteem. Never has a man so widely admired for his cutting intellect become a master of pompous equivocation and fatuous obfuscation. Never has the implacable Nigerian intellectual lynch mob been so fast and furious in dismembering and devouring its victim.

    It is a sad spectacle, and a consuming Nigerian tragedy to boot. Many of us who consider ourselves friends and admirers of the gutsy and cerebral Bishop of the Sokoto Catholic Diocese can only watch in pained silence as the man of god appears to unravel in a drama of self-demystification. But in revolutionary situations, everybody must answer their fathers’ name and one must be ready to drop a friend because of principles rather than drop principles because of a friend.

    These must be revolutionary times in Nigeria indeed. It is only in revolutionary times that people lose total respect for priestly cassocks and other symbols of traditional authority. It is only in revolutionary times that the sacred become desacralized in bitter profanity and people move from hero to zero. The man of the people becomes the enemy of the populace. The dark night does not recognize sacerdotal distinction.  As the mob brays in implacable distemper, the expiring ruling class that has held Nigeria hostage must note this development.

    Bishop Kukah’s superiors in the Nigerian Catholic nomenklatura  must be clicking their tongue in sagely relish. A child can have as many new clothes as an elder, but he can never have as many rags. Many of the superiors of the Sokoto Bishop must be rubbing their palms in smirking satisfaction. Only the barely discerning would not have noticed a certain froideur, a chilly discomfort among the Catholic hierarchs as Kukah rose to secular apotheosis as a liberating theologist and friend of the rich and powerful at the same time. As the Yoruba will put it, nobody must stop a youngster from climbing the hill of Langbodo.

    In retrospect, perhaps it will be said that the Sokoto bishop chose the wrong time to cross the Homeric frontline between the Nigerian powerful and the teeming powerless; and between whistle blowing against the powerful or becoming a loud and brash megaphone of its rearguard rally. Not even the most gifted and proficient trickster knows when the trick will fail, and in revolutionary situations one cannot be too careless in his choice of enemies.

    The last straw, it seems, is Kukah’s stirring at the behest of the controversial Peace Committee. Let it be bluntly and baldly stated that this committee is not about peace at all. It materialized as a last ditch ruling class initiative to force General Buhari to accept dishonorable defeat and hence to stave off the revolutionary turmoil and anarchy that would have accompanied electoral miscarriage. It is a wearisomely familiar Nigerian ploy to impose “peace” in the absence of social and political justice. But they misjudged the mood of the nation and the fact that Nigerians have had it with their ilk.

    Bar a few misguided ones who are glad to be dredged up from peat bog of political oblivion and the odd naïve do-gooders, most of our newly minted peaceniks are compromised scoundrels working for the old regime and traditional mischief-makers on a typical pay day. Available reports indicate that some of them were already privately gloating about the inevitability of a Jonathan victory. They came to bury Buhari and not to praise him. But it bombed spectacularly. Perhaps this is one of the “spectacular” things that Jonathan did which Kukah  referred to with deliberately oblique disingenuity.

    Having failed in their core mission, they have now transformed into a “peace” council to disturb the peace of the nation, and to stalemate the inevitable sanitization of the polity. They have gone about endlessly chattering about due process and the fact that this is a democracy and not a military order. One wonders how democracy and due process would have fared had they succeeded in suborning the sovereign electoral will of Nigerians.  Let this be the last time President Buhari will give them a decent hearing.

    Kukah’s attempt to defend the motive of the peace council has brought a gale of angry denunciations on the internet and social media with many of them charging the Catholic supremo with perfidy and betrayal. This columnist read about three hundred of these angry rebuttals and only a few were willing to stake their integrity on the integrity and honesty of the bishop. It was redolent of pent up fury and misgivings, as if they have been waiting for Kukah to cross the line.

    Kukah’s  attempt to correct a purportedly mischievous slant that gave the impression that the council went up to President Buhari to bargain for a soft landing for the disgraced and discredited Jonathan drew even more tempestuous  tirades. And then in the unkindest cut of all, a shadowy and hitherto unknown organization going by the name of CUPS came out to directly impugn Kukah’s integrity and claims to probity in a well-detailed allegation of sleaze and corruption.

    This column will refrain from publicizing the salacious and insalubrious details, but they go to show how far Bishop Kukah’s stock has fallen. It is a remarkable development and no matter his public grandstanding and defiance of the gravitational pull of seamy scandals, the plucky priest must be having some anxious private moments. Even if they remain at the level of mere allegations, that they are ever broached at all shows how public perception can be influenced by the power and putrescence of offensive associations. The bishop’s cup is full and it overflows indeed.

    It may well be too late to ask the august catholic prelate to return to base. For a man of such calm and deliberate mien, such choices are not lightly made in the first instance. As we have said, everybody must answer to his patronymic in these perilous times. Like a savage hawk remarkable for its hunting prowess and ferocious precision, the Nigerian ruling class knows the particular moment to home in on its intended prey and which foibles and personal peccadilloes to zero in upon.

    In a postcolonial society infamous for its political dysfunctionality , the transition from  civil society activist to state actor is a very precarious affair indeed. In Nigeria, only few people, if any at all, have been able to manage the transition without major scars. This is because inchoate and disadvantaged civil society feels abandoned and neglected by one of its own. Like vultures waiting for the ethically deceased, they bid their time waiting to take their pound of flesh or carrion and the quiet hysteria of private abandonment soon gives way to the public hullabaloo of angry and messy divorce.

    The Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese seems to have had it coming for quite some time. There might have come a time when a practical patriot like Kukah might have come to the conclusion that it might be better and more nation-rewarding to remonstrate with the Nigerian powers that be at close proximity than to demonstrate against them from a far distance.

    As a minority scion of the most minority of ethnic formations, Kukah might have concluded that he stood no chance raising hell among the hell-bound  majority monsters—as he himself once memorably dismissed Nigeria’s major ethnic formations. It may well turn out to be a bridge too far, but in the brutal power calculus of Nigeria’s political coliseum, innocence is not a virtue but a symptom of suicidal naivety.

    Who will then speak and speak up for the Nigerian minority ethnic subaltern? As a devoted watcher of Nigeria’s volatile and explosive political gymnasium, this columnist entered into a private correspondence with the father who art in Kaduna then over his seemingly seamless transition from civil society activist to state actor.  Yours sincerely wanted to know whether the transition was conscious or seemingly unconscious. It was a particularly illuminating exchange whose details must remain private and confidential.

    What did it for this columnist was Kukah’s out of proportion reaction to a Soyinka piece detailing the ills and ailments of the Nigerian postcolonial state. As usual with the implacably agonistic Nobel avatar, it was a merciless and astringent critique dripping with venom and vitriol. The old literary lion does not take hostages in these matters. But anybody who has watched Nigeria’s descent into political infamy over the decades would side with Soyinka’s angst about the fate of his beloved country.

    What seemed to have drawn Bishop Kukah’s particular ire was Soyinka’s damning conclusion that nothing good could come out of the Nigerian state as it was constituted. It is interesting and intriguing that Soyinka’s response to Kukah was a mixture of puckish humour and elderly irritation. Subsequent events seem to have proved the Nobel laureate right.

    Thereafter, certain changes in Kukah’s public personae became noticeable as he moved closer and closer to the sanctuary of state power. An imperious swagger seems to have been added to the bouncy gait even as a pompous and pomaded puffery became the order of the day. A moody irascible brio and prickly condescension became the sine qua non of Kukah’s public engagements. The bishop’s secular beatitude was in full progress.

    But such beatitudes do not beautify, and neither do they ennoble in the tumultuous and turbulent context of a postcolonial nation roiling in crisis and contradictions. In such circumstances and situations, it is the bounden duty of all men of god to speak truth to secular power and not to become carpetbaggers and reactionary rearguard rallying points for the retrogressive and anti-progress rump of a failed ruling class.

    The current pope is an outstanding exemplar of this sacred moral responsibility to the powerless of the earth; and so was the old much admired and revered Polish pope, the illustrious Cardinal Karol Wojtyla. We dare say that in the last decade and a half beginning with the Oputa Panel, Bishop Kukah has been rather remiss in that historic and sacred duty. If it is not too late, this gifted priest should find his route back to public restitution and redemption.

  • Why PDP was defeated in polls – Bishop Kukah

    Why PDP was defeated in polls – Bishop Kukah

    The Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, Rev. Mathew Hassan Kukah, on Friday blamed greed and arrogance as major reasons why the Peoples Democratic Party was defeated in the 2015 general election.

    He made this postulation in Abakaliki, Ebonyi, while delivering a convocation lecture at the Ebonyi State University.

    The title of the lecture was “Transition To Democracy: Can Nigeria Ride The Wave?”

    Kukah also identified lack of party cohesion, insensitivity to supporters and inability to control its stalwarts’ excesses as other reasons for the party’s failure.

    He, however, blamed these on the poor foundation of the party at its inception, maintaining that PDP “was really not a party and never worked hard to become a party.”

    He said: “Successful transitions are based on the typology of the transition. Was it negotiated as it was in South Africa or is it an emergency transition? I don’t believe we have a transition in Nigeria, because I followed the circumstances that brought in Gen.  Olusegun Obasanjo and I know the story pretty well.

    “But what we had was really an attempt at becoming a democracy. PDP has reaped the ill wind it sowed because clearly PDP was really not a party and it never worked hard to become a party. It became a distribution agency.

    “It is true that these elections could have swung either way. Many would argue that President Goodluck Jonathan and his PDP could have won the elections had they not succumbed to the hubris that has become the hallmark of the PDP. We all know the story of the peculiar circumstances that brought the party into being.

    “We also know that despite that, the party became an association of takers and buccaneers more than anything else. The party could not deal quickly with the issues of greed and arrogance of some of its men and women in power.

    “The party could not control the excesses of some of its ministers and henchmen/women. It simply saw itself as presiding over a distribution agency.”

  • God will choose Jonathan’s successor, says Kukah

    God will choose Jonathan’s successor, says Kukah

    The Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Dioceses, Rev Dr. Matthew Hassan Kukah ,has said the issue of who becomes the next President of the country in 2015 is in God’s hand  and cannot be manipulated against God’s will.
     
    He said the utterances of some politicians and religions leaders in the country are diminishing others whose lives are in danger especially on the issue of the release of abducted Chibok girls.
     
    He noted that Nigerians must unite on the issue Chibok girls adding that the release of the abducted girls should not be left alone for the Federal government.
    Bishop Kukah spoke on Saturday at the on-going synod organised by Evo Dioceses Anglican Communion in Port Harcourt, Rivers State capital, with the theme: Politics, Christians and Good Governance in Nigeria.   
     
    According to him, God who  knows who will see tomorrow  will determine who becomes the country’s next President and what Nigerians deserve.
     
     He called on the Christians  to ask themselves questions on what role they have  played in the release of the Chibok girls noting that Christians must exhibit certain  principles in whatever they do.      
     
    “The way we talk about issues affecting Nigeria is making everything to look as if we are at war with one another. We must mind what we say about the president and the country. Other African countries including develop countries are not happy with us yet we are not the worst country in the world.
     
    “As far as I am concerned, the ultimate is the peace of the country.  Some people said  the President is weak, they said  he is sponsoring impeachment against his enemies, that he is encouraging BokoHaram all these are not our problem but a lasting peace,” Kukah stated.