Tag: Ladoja

THE $2.1bn arms scandal, otherwise known as Dasukigate, is fast becoming an unending and spiraling eddy. If it maintains its present intensity, together with its numerous side bars, it is a question of time before it sucks in more victims, including religious leaders, journalists, bankers and even civil society organisations. In the final analysis, as far as this emotive issue is concerned, particularly regarding the manner President Muhammadu Buhari’s anti-graft war is being waged, few will be spared. For now, many political leaders have kept sepulchral silence, or are defecting to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), perhaps in the dubious understanding that the war largely targets leaders of the clumsy opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

Early this week, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) published additional names of political leaders believed to have illegally and unwholesomely collected sizable sums from the Office of the National Security Adviser. The EFCC warned that the only way the beneficiaries of these payments could avoid prosecution was for them to refund the money. Quite apart from the dilemma of the federal government determining whether to go ahead and prosecute, with all the attendant complications of high litigation costs, administrative bottlenecks, and time-wasting involved, or to collect the refund and set the receivers free, with the attendant conundrum of undermining the law and creating two judicial models for the rich and the poor, Nigerian politics will also have to contend with the demystification of many of its political leaders.

Among the beneficiaries of the arms fund, two stand out for the purpose of this piece — former Secretary to the Government of the Federation and one-time presidential contender, Olu Falae, and former Oyo State governor Rashidi Ladoja. Both Southwest political leaders were alleged to have unlawfully received N100m each from the controversial fund. But both have suggested they collected the money as leaders of their political parties, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and Accord Party (AP) respectively, after reaching an agreement with former president Goodluck Jonathan to back his reelection bid. They argue that it is legitimate to reach such a political deal and go ahead to receive financial empowerment to put it into effect. Neither leader has talked about the morality of receiving payments to back the deal, especially when their campaign organisations were not collapsed into the PDP’s presidential campaign, nor said anything about whether they actually campaigned for the PDP, nor yet gave incontrovertible evidence of how and when the money was shared among state chapters of their parties, some of which are snorting they received nothing from anybody.

On the strength of these lacunae, critics have suggested that in addition to the unlawfulness of receiving such funds, both SDP and AP party leaders knowingly participated in a deliberate bazaar of sleaze, very much in consonance with the culture and tradition of politics in these parts. But what is really happening is that the Buhari government is questioning the basis of Nigerian politics and attempting in the same breath to redefine and restructure its fundamentals, especially as it pertains to political financing. How far he can go will be determined by the quantum and intensity of his own self-effacement, how brutally indifferent he can be to his friends and backers, most of whom got him elected on the same principles and practices his government is now remonstrating against, and how confident he is that in less than four years he can restructure the fundamentals in such a way as not to affect his own reelection chances, or if he will not run in 2019, then the success of his party in the coming polls.

All things considered, what is at play today is simply that President Buhari is by his anti-graft war giving effect to his idiosyncratic politics, his unregulated and unmeasured moral and ethical eclecticism, rather than a systematised, structured and lasting campaign to rein in corruption. The war, in other words, reflects his worldview; but that worldview is not only terribly constricted, it runs on emotive appeal instead of the carefully calibrated jurisprudential mechanics that flows from a deep and extensive understanding of the political economy of corruption. The war is popular and will doubtless be fought brutally and ruthlessly, but its usefulness as a tool of reshaping political and societal behaviour, let alone its jurisprudential and constitutional impact, will be tenuous indeed.

Chiefs Falae and Ladoja, like many others, are merely symptomatic of the decay of Nigerian politics, a decay begun many decades ago and given fillip by visionless and spineless leaders. That decay will not be arrested until the fundaments of the Nigerian society, economy and politics have been restructured revolutionarily. The naming and shaming of the SDP and AP leaders, not to say their embarrassing dissembling over who they shared the money with, will have the effect of sobering the polity and a few political leaders only for a little time. There will be no lasting impact on the polity, and there will be no future incentive to substantially alter political behaviour, especially electoral financing, on a scale that will be beneficial to the country. Until President Buhari enunciates his vision of a just and equitable society imbued with lofty and globally relevant ambition, the ongoing war stands the risk of petering out into fatuity and exhibitionism.

President Buhari’s vista may be limited, and the range of his anti-graft war embarrassingly short and showy, however, the disclosure of who collected what from the security adviser’s office curiously exposes the weak mettle and poor judgement of Chiefs Falae and Ladoja. Chief Ladoja had never really been a political leader in the grand sense the Southwest was and is still used to, so it was not surprising that he was mentioned in the bazaar. He is a great grassroots politician, but only of the second rank when compared with the mobilising profundity and fecundity of Adegoke Adelabu, a.k.a, Penkelemesi, Busari Adelakun, alias Eruobodo, and Lamidi Adedibu, the cantankerous exponent of amala politics. His ability and political effectiveness were always both overstated and exaggerated, but he somehow managed repeatedly to transcend his poor dress sense, hesitant elocution, and colourlessness with unexpected political triumphs and sturdy relevance. It was, therefore, not surprising that he was named among the receivers, nor that, as the main financier of his party, he is alleged to have failed to disclose the payment to his party or those close to him in the party.

Where Chief Ladoja fell woefully short, Chief Falae was expected to stand and walk magnificently tall. In 1999, the highest peak of his political ascendancy, he captured the popular imagination of the Yoruba, and stood not only as the safest and surest rampart for constitutional democracy and freedom, he also exemplified the ethics, florid culture, and administrative acumen of both Awoism and the Southwest. The leitmotif of that culture, especially as typified by Obafemi Awolowo, former Premier of the Western Region, is sound judgement and a great ability to anticipate issues and see far into the future. By entering into a political arrangement with Dr. Jonathan, Chief Falae strangely saw only the moment. By anchoring the noxious deal with the former president on financial inducement, he also sadly repudiated the noble ethics undergirding Southwest politics. And by failing to publicise the deal or carry his party members along through a party convention, he gave his detractors reason to suspect that what drove him, and inspired the deal, was not really electoral expediency, but peer envy and political discord underscored by his resentment of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and later APC politics and leadership.

While the less popular and laid-back Chief Ladoja may shrug off the scandal and consider the embarrassment to his person as nothing more than a temporary and insignificant setback, it is hard to see Chief Falae recovering from the naming and shaming he has been subjected to. He rose to the peak of Yoruba politics, and nearly rose to the peak of national politics; but less than two decades after, he has tumbled from that peak, a little precipitously in the last few years it is clear, witnessed a great denudation of his popularity, suffered the loss of most of his support base, perched precariously on whatever is left of both his once sterling name and contribution to national affairs, and seems likely to pass ignominiously into nothingness and obscurity. Together with other Afenifere leaders, most of whose politics have been influenced by short-sighted and extraneous matters rather than great and exigent issues, he will ponder what legacy he will leave behind, and what name, ideas and moral contributions he will bequeath to posterity.

It needed the ascension to power of Gen. Sani Abacha to demystify many NADECO leaders, some of whom were shown to be unwise, venal and opportunistic. Now it is taking another northerner to expose many Southwest leaders as unprincipled, ideationally vacant, short-sighted and venal. More and more, many fallen Southwest leaders are drawing nostalgic attention to and reinforcing the profundity of Chief Awolowo, whose sound judgement, ability and resolve in the face of terrible privations and inducements showed him as a farsighted leader, a man far ahead of his time. A great politician with keen perception will interpret what is happening in Abuja today, in the light of President Buhari’s desultory anti-graft war and unsteady rule, as offering a politician of uncommon understanding opportunities for quiet and studious reflection on Nigerian politics, if not complete aloofness and detachment. Had Chief Falae seen the Jonathan government for what it was, he would probably have opted for the dignified detachment many critics thought without proof he was capable of.