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Tag: Murtala Muhammed

  • Murtala Muhammed and 500 years of Nigeria’s history ( I )

    Forty years after General Ramat Murtala Mohammed was assassinated on Friday 13th February 1976 has crept up on us with deadly stealth.

    Even if there was any chance that the horror, brutality and savagery which scarred our nation’s history would be quietly forgotten, a severe jolt was provided by the verdict delivered by his successor General OlusegunObasanjo :

    “Nigeria is a country where some governors have become sole administrators acting like emperors.  These governors have rendered public institutions irrelevant and useless.”

    We shall revert to the full text of the judgement delivered except that there was no “obiter dictum” (outside the word/said by the way) to the effect that General Murtala Mohammed must be turning in his grave.

    Former President of Nigeria, Chief OlusegunObasanjo, on Monday lambasted some state governors in Nigeria for living like emperors while demanding sacrifice from the citizens for Nigeria to survive the hard times.

    Obasanjo chided the governors while speaking as the chairman at the inaugural conference of the Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy, held at the University of Ibadan [ISGPP].

    Obasanjo said when he became Nigerian president in 1999; he recognised corruption as a major impediment to the Nigerian state, setting up structures like the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission to fight the rot. However, he said that after he left, corruption returned to Nigeria with a vengeance, draining billions of dollars from the nation’s economy that could hardly afford to lose even a million dollars.

    He said, “Leaders who call for sacrifice from the citizenry cannot be living in obscene opulence. We must address these foundational issues to make the economy work, to strengthen our institutions, build public confidence in government and deal with our peace and security challenges.

    We must address the issue of employment for our teeming population particularly for our youths. Leadership must mentor the young, and provide them with hope about their future as part of a process of inter-generational conversation.

    Nigeria is a country where some governors have become sole administrators, acting like emperors. These governors have rendered public institutions irrelevant and useless.

    Is there development work going on in the 774 constitutionally recognised local government councils, which have been merely appropriated as private estates of some governors?

    Some governors have hijacked the resources of the local governments and this has crippled the developments of the local government councils in the country. The National Assembly must also open its budgets to public scrutiny.”

    The former president said the drastic fall in the price of oil in the international market had exposed the weakness of governance in Nigeria, while also saying that Nigeria was racing towards becoming a nation of debt with its attendant burden on the citizens.

    “The drastic fall in the price of oil in the international market has unravelled the weakness of governance in Nigeria. The Minister of Finance has recently announced that the 2016 budget deficit may be increased from the current N2.2 trillion in the draft document before the National Assembly, to N3 trillion due to decline in the price of crude oil.

    If the current fiscal challenge is not creatively addressed, Nigeria may be on its way to another episode of debt overhang which may not be good for the country,” Obasanjo said.

    On the establishment of ISGPP in Ibadan, Obasanjo said there was clearly a need for schools of its kind that would focus research and teaching on implementing policy and making the government work well in Africa.

    “I hope it will generate ideas that will lead us from thinking to doing. It must not only generate ideas, it must foster a willingness to use those ideas within government and non-government sectors,” he said.

    At the two day-conference, themed, ‘Getting government to work for development and democracy in Nigeria: agenda for change’, Chairman, Board of Governors of the ISGPP, who is a former foreign Affairs Minister, Chief EmekaAnyaoku, and professor of international history and politics, John Evans, also delivered addresses among other speakers.

    Perhaps we should remind ourselves that on 29th July, 1975 General Yakubu Gowon was toppled in a bloodless coup d’etat while he was away in Kampala, East Africa attending an OAU summit.

    The coup leaders were a group of officers led by Colonel Joe NanvenGarba, but rather than grab power themselves, they ceded it to their superior officers.  BrigadierMurtala Mohammed was installed as the new Head of State with Brigadier OlusegunObasanjo as the Chief of Staff Supreme Headquarters (Vice-President) and Brigadier TheophilusYakubuDanjuma as the Chief of Army Staff.

    Thankfully, Lt.General T.Y. Danjuma in his typically robust manner has delivered his own verdict on a section of our beloved nation.

    Focus On Africa (CNN)

    and front page report of “ThisDay” newspaper of February 4, 2016.

    Headline:  DANJUMA: N2 TRILLION REQUIRED TO REBUILD NORTH EAST

    “The Chairman, Presidential Committee on North-East Initiative, Lt-Gen. TheophilusDanjuma (Rtd.) has estimated that over N2 trillion will be required in the short-term to rebuild the zone ravaged by the Boko Haram terrorists.

    Danjuma stated this yesterday during the opening of the two-day security seminar, organised by the Alumni Association of the National Defence College (AANDEC), in Abuja.

    He however, noted that the rebuilding of the region would require the cooperation of all stakeholders, saying that “the magnitude of destruction was beyond the means of the federal or state governments.”

    According to him, rebuilding the North-East would demand maximum cooperation and resources, especially in the most affected states of Adamawa, Borno and Yobe.

    He said: “Conservative estimates put the cost of short-term intervention of the reconstruction of the region at over N2trillion.

    “Rebuilding the North-East is one of the biggest and most complex challenges that Nigeria is facing today.  To hold government or any one agency alone responsible for this task is to underestimate the enormity of the problem.

    “The task would involve massive    reconstruction of physical infrastructure, much of which have been totally destroyed and, of course, the more challenging one, which is the rebuilding of peace and social cohesion.”

    Speaking further, Danjuma called on Nigerians and friends of Nigeria to support the initiative of the federal government to rebuild the region.

    He gave an assurance that the various platforms established by government for the reconstruction of the region would be carefully managed to check embezzlement of resources.

    The former Minister of Defence stressed that the various initiatives under his chairmanship would deploy the best strategies in ensuring that the expectations of the victims of the insurgency and donors were met.

    “The rebuilding of the North-East requires considerable planning and coordination.  It is largely in response to this that the president has set up the Presidential Committee on the North-East Initiative to, among other things, oversee and harmonise the functions of the various entities engaged in the North-East.

    This task, we must discharge transparently and accountably so that our country is not embarrassed by fresh allegations of corruption in the management of the North-East reconstruction,” he said.

    Danjuma, also warned that the war against Boko Haram was not yet over and urged that a lot was still required to prevent the spate of suicide bombings in the country.

    In the same vein, the Minister of Defence, Brig.-Gen. Muhammad Mansur Dan-Ali (Rtd), described the destruction caused by the insurgency as monumental and one that requires the attention and intervention of all Nigerians.

    Dan-Ali said the ministry was concerned about the plight of displaced persons as well as the conduct and welfare of troops in the area.

    He blamed the present state of the war against insurgency and the resulting effect on displaced persons on the endemic corruption that plagued the procurement of the necessary equipment to prosecute the war.

    He expressed hope that the present initiative of President MuhammaduBuhari, aimed at reconstructing the region, would yield the needed results.

    Also speaking, the President of the alumni association, Brig-Gen. Jonathan Temlong (Rtd), said the seminar was an attempt by the association to put into perspective the issue of rebuilding the North-East.

    Temlong described the rebuilding of the North-East as a complex process and the living condition of displaced persons as chaotic and dehumanising.

    He said Borno had the highest number of IDPs totalling over 1.6 million as at October 2015, with over one million others taking refuge in Cameroun, Chad and Niger Republic.

    The participants in the seminar were drawn from civil society organisation, traditional institution, development partners and security agencies.

     

    • To be continued next Sunday

  • Murtala Muhammed’s son considers Kano governorship

    The son of the late former military Head of State, Gen. Murtala Mohammed, Risqua, said yesterday in Kano that he was considering running for the governorship on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

    He said he has begun consultations with his family and political associates, following the pressure on him to contest.

    “If I eventually accept the offer, my focus will be on how to improve the standard of life of Kano State indigenes and residents and transform the state,” Risqua said.

  • Vote-harvesting, then and now

    Vote-harvesting, then and now

    Back in October 1991, a tantalising new delicacy was added to the already formidable menu of the nation’s political cuisine.

    It made a grand entry at the governorship primaries in Lagos State, a crucial benchmark in the stultifying and merry-go-round that self-anointed Military President Ibrahim Babangida called a transition to democratic rule.  Provisional, because the confection owes nothing to the great Murtala Muhammed, who must have been too busy tending his garden after-hours to have any time left for baking.

    The seductive delicacy was in fact the imaginative invention of one of Babangida’s newly-bred politicians, but my attorneys had warned that I would be dancing dangerously on the edge of defamation if I named the product for its inventor.  I was inconsolable because, when the product (sandwich) is prefixed with his name, the whole thing has a cadenced, alliterative ring.

    I can now reveal that its inventor was Dapo Sarumi, who failed in the election aforementioned, but went on to serve as Minister of Information during President Olusegun Obasanjo’s first term.  I can also now call it by its proper name – the Sarumi Sandwich.

    The recipe was simple.  Get a fresh-baked loaf of bread. Split it at the top with a sharp knife. Gently insert into the slit a crisp N20 note (that was the Murtala, or “Muri” connection), then put the loaf in a cellophane wrapping and seal.  It did not exactly come with an advisory that it was tastiest when served oven-fresh on Election Day, at the precincts of a polling centre, with the candidate looking out from a not-so discreet stance for those who “obtained” the sandwich but failed to deliver. But the message was clear.

    Detecting inconstancy was easy. That, remember, was the era of the Open Ballot System, in which voters lined up behind their candidate’s portrait and cast their ballot for the candidate in full public view. And many were the voters who paid dearly for their inconstancy.

    There were several variations to that theme.  As told me by my driver at the time, the landlord would on the eve of crucial elections summon all the voting-age residents of his sprawling tenement to a meeting in the courtyard, announce his candidate, and hint broadly that he expected them to vote for his choice.

    They were of course perfectly at liberty to vote the otherwise, he assured them solemnly, just as he too, a committed democrat, was perfectly at liberty to determine their tenancy if they ignored his preference.  For good measure, he positioned himself close to the polling booth well before voting started and remained there until voting closed, checking off each tenant on a master list as they did his bidding.

    To return to the Sarumi Sandwich:  shortly after the entry of that treacherous victual into the political scene, Prof. Humphrey Nwosu’s National Electoral Commission swiftly banned the sale, display, storage, distribution or consumption of bread in any guise or disguise, and by whatsoever name called, within a 200-metre radius of a polling centre. The same rule applied to biscuits and fruit, but apparently not to cake.

    Nwosu took no chances.  If the usual suspects had tried to evade the law by offering a Sarumi Cake in place of the eponymous sandwich, Nwosu would have moved the Federal Military Government to promulgate a decree forbidding its baking, display, sale, consumption or distribution in any form a full week before Election Day.

    Our sociologists may well assert, then, that what is now being called the “infrastructure of the stomach,” the cultivation of which turned the recent Ekiti governorship election for the populist challenger against the donnish incumbent and made the voters appear as if they cared more about their stomachs than their future and the future of their children, had as its antecedent the Sarumi Sandwich.

    Ekiti Governor-elect Ayo Fayose emerges from the foregoing as a serious student of the political sociology of Nigeria.  He had entered the 2003 governorship race with virtually no political assets – certainly no name recognition, and no godfathers.  But he had somehow edged out an incumbent who had all the right assets, even if not a sterling performance record.

    True, Fayose had pulled it off with help from a sitting president desperate to show that he was not without significant following in his geographical home base and an Arch-Fixer, whose specialty is turning victory into defeat and defeat into victory.

    But he also catered, even if indirectly, to the infrastructure of the stomach.  In parts of the state where water was scarce, he sent in tankers to distribute the precious commodity free.  He also supplied free kerosene at a time when its price had risen beyond what ordinary consumers could afford.

    In his latest outing, his approach was more sharply targeted, less nuanced.

    You showed up at his campaign headquarters, and were rewarded with 2.5kg parcel of parboiled long-grain rice in a package bearing his portrait and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) umbrella, plus cash that, by some accounts, ranged from N2, 500 to just N500.

    But there was a catch.  You had to present a current Voter Card, probably as an indication at the very least, of an intention to vote, though not necessarily for him.  He was not prepared to waste             the provisions bounteously furnished by Abuja on people who were not in a position to deliver even if they had the best will in the world.

    That was exactly what those starving polytechnic students discovered when they stormed Fayose’s campaign headquarters in expectation of free rice and some pocket change.  No current voter card, no free rice and no free money.

    It does not follow, I should add, that his sweeping election victory resulted directly from the freebies.  You could still obtain the freebies and vote against him or abstain from voting.  You could obtain and still exercise your democratic franchise freely.

    Perhaps that was why Prof. Attahiru Jega’s INEC had no problem with that approach.

    Say it for Ayo Fayose, that a person credited with few intellectual skills, is single-handedly rewriting the theory and practice of electioneering in Nigeria, and perhaps globally.

     

  • The Hurricane: In memory of the late Murtala Muhammed

    The Hurricane: In memory of the late Murtala Muhammed

    As the nation focuses on the centenary of its birth, it is pertinent to front view of Chesterfieldfront view of Chesterfieldfront view of Chesterfieldfront view of Chesterfieldfront view of Chesterfieldfront view of Chesterfieldfront view of Chesterfieldfront view of Chesterfieldfront view of Chesterfield highlight the personalities who played significant roles, some of them heroic, in shaping the destiny of the nation till date.

    A revised edition of The Hurricane is will soon be released worldwide through the Amazon publishing platform.

    The late General Murtala Muhammed is one of the few personalities, living or dead, widely regarded as real Nigerian heroes. He made a tremendous impression upon the minds of his countrymen. His life and activities in public office affected many lives and altered the course of history.

    His untimely death drew unprecedented outpouring of grief and stirred national outrage against those who brutally terminated his life. There was great anger against the act that sought to truncate a reinvigorated vision of a new Nigeria, which Murtala was generally believed to be pursuing with vigour and conviction.

    Like any human being, Murtala may have had his weaknesses. As a young military officer, he got embroiled in the cauldron that was Nigerian politics, in the fiery battle for sectional dominance. The resultant abortion of the republican democracy and the eventual outbreak of the civil war saw Murtala playing a leading role as a dogged warlord, with some of his actions being regarded as tactless and costly.

    After the war, Murtala did not just settle down into a quiet and routine military life, he made himself the conscience of the nation by constantly speaking out against societal ills and inept leadership. Even when he became a member of the ruling cabinet, he was relentless in his outspokenness against what he saw as the purposeless leadership.

    And when eventually the mantle of leadership was thrust on him as Head of State, he infused a new spirit of dynamism and patriotic fervour into governance. One commentator wrote about his tenure: “It will be remembered as the period of which Nigeria received a new lease of life. They were six months that gave a new orientation to national goals which revitalised public life and then set the nation on the path of true greatness.”

    His tragic assassination on the morning of February 13, 1976 made his era a painfully brief one. Like a fleeting hurricane, it nonetheless, left a sweeping impact on the psyche of the nation. His death was mourned far and wide and it generated copious media attention. And year after year afterwards, whenever Murtala’s assassination was commemorated, the media, especially the newspapers and magazines, usually devoted generous attention to this memory.

    In recent years, however, the attention seems to have declined considerably. The story of Murtala is increasingly appearing to be like a footnote in the annals of Nigeria’s history. The annual Murtala Muhammed lecture organised by a major newspaper house in the country is now a thing of the past.

    It seems that before long, if care is not taken, the annual commemoration of Murtala’s life and death will be reduced to a mere affair for his immediate family members. This now seems to be happening. And he does not deserve this.

    The late General can be cast in the same mould as President John F. Kennedy of the United States of America and the human rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr., both of whom suffered the same fate as Murtala by being cut down at their prime by assassins’ bullets.

    The mesmerising lives and the tragic death of these two icons have generated not only numerous books and biographies, but scores of movies. The endless literary fairs highlight different aspects of the lives of these prominent personalities. The story of General Muhammed’s life deserves no less.

    To date, most of the books that have been written by some of the major participant–observers on the military’s involvement in Nigeria’s governance have only made passing references to Murtala. The other ones that have been specifically written on his tenure focus largely on his administrative policies and pronouncements. None gave detailed human angle accounts of his life and death, until The Hurricane written by Taiwo Ogundipe, a journalist, came on the scene 13 years ago.

    The Hurricane, which received raved reviews, traces the roots of the General and his progenitors. It also focuses on his birth, his growing-up years, his schooling days, his life as a young man as well as his military training and career. The book also highlights his marriage and family life, his performance as a soldier; his involvement in the post-independence crisis that engulfed the nation, his emergence as a national leader, his role as head of state, his tragic death and the after-effects.

    A product of extensive research and interviews, the book paints a very intimate picture of General Muhammed. And because he is not alive to tell his own story, the author took the poetic license of living in the soul of the General and seeing most of the events through his eyes and those of the other major actors that are also dead.

    Murtala’s successor, General Olusegun Obasanjo wrote the foreword to the book and describes it as “a good research work on the person of the late General Murtala Muhammed. It is a well outlined piece of writing on the life and times of the late Head of State, who was indeed, a personal friend and a professional colleague in the Nigerian Army.”

    Obasanjo wrote further: “The Hurricane has effectively captured the historical perspectives of the work of the General, depicting his effort to bring about discipline and sanitisation of the military and the Nigerian civil society.”

    The late Major General J. J. Oluleye, a major participant during the military regime of Murtala, and the author of the book, Military Leadership in Nigeria: 1966 – 1979, wrote about The Hurricane thus: “I looked through the draft and concluded that you are dead on course.”

  • At a time like this

    At a time like this

    If any era in Nigeria’s history qualified as one of heady optimism, it was the time leading to the inauguration of the Second Republic.

    The wounds of the civil war had healed faster than most people expected. Petrodollars accrued to the national exchequer faster than the authorities could figure out what to do with the new wealth. Biafra had provided powerful intimations of what black humanity can achieve when pursuing common purpose; a re-united Nigeria, home of the largest aggregation of black humanity, was going to take its rightful place in the global community, propelled by the dynamic leadership of Murtala Muhammed and Olusegun Obasanjo.

    Nigerians everywhere walked tall. Those studying abroad, most of them on government scholarships, rushed back on completion of their programmes, believing not only that home was where they belonged but that it was where their future lay. The Naira was worth almost two U.S. dollars. The economy was expanding, and jobs were there for the taking.

    In short, a future that would be marked by prosperity at home and major influence abroad was splendidly visible and clearly attainable.

    The 1979 Constitution, the fundamental law of the Second Republic, reflected the big thinking of that era, the planning for and investing in future political greatness, what with the American-style presidency and other institutions of state, just as a sprawling bureaucracy had planned for and invested in the nation’s future economic greatness.

    Framed by a team boasting some of the nation’s best and brightest, the Constitution was as bold and innovative as the times demanded, and just as comprehensive. It left nothing to chance.

    One of its more notable innovations, which has been attributed in the main to the per-eminent legal scholar Ben Nwabueze, was encapsulated in a Council of State composed of the President and the Vice President, all former presidents or heads of state, all former federal chief justices, the president of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, all state governors, and the Federal Attorney-General.

    Its remit, re-stated in the 1999 Constitution, is to advise the President with respect to his duties on a wide range of subjects in general, and on issues relating to the maintenance of public order in particular “when asked to do so.”

    This latter qualification makes it clear that the Council is an advisory body, pure and simple, and that it meets at the pleasure or convenience of the nation’s President. But it does not render it otiose.

    The underlying assumption was that the ex-officio members of the Council would be men and women who, having given of their best to their country, would stay splendidly above the fray and would never again seek elective office nor descend into the pit of partisanship. Thus, their good faith would never be in doubt.

    In a proper setting, the Council would be the repository of the nation’s collective wisdom and experience, a fount of inspiration, a moral force. It would be the body to turn to when the country is buffeted by strife and uncertainty – the very kind of period Nigeria is going through now.

    The nation is paralysed on practically every front. The ruling PDP is in disarray and scheming desperately to hold on to power. The economy is reported to be growing by leaps and bounds, but the nation slips farther and farther down the international misery index. Power supply remains fitful, impervious to the magic wand of privatisation.

    Interstate highways remain dangerously cratered. Youth unemployment, already alarmingly high, is soaring. Fully one-fourth of the crude oil lifted from our shores is stolen, and record-keeping of what is not stolen is scandalously shoddy.

    The immediate future promises only more of the same.

    And at the top, diffidence reigns. Not even the most fervent chants of Transformation can drown out the din of the rank innocence, the utter bewilderment up there.

    It is precisely at a time like this that the Council of State should be deliberating and helping to chart a way forward. However, that very concept has turned out to be another instance in the nation’s life of how a beautiful theory was murdered by a gang of brutal facts.

    The higher echelon of the Council today is not composed of the kind of people the framers of the 1979 Constitution had in mind – elder statesmen whose moral force would flow from exemplary rectitude and distinguished service; persons who would stay splendidly above the fray and would never again seek elective office nor descend into the pit of partisanship.

    General Yakubu Gowon, forever radiating goodwill, would pray and pray but nothing would change. Former president Obasanjo could just take over the proceedings to deliver another blistring missive. Shehu Shagari would turn up more from habit than conviction. General Muhammadu Buhari, still chafing from the outcome of the last presidential election, will not attend a meeting called by a person he regards as a usurper.

    General Babangida says he has finally given up trying to return to power, but he is nothing if not calculating. What example or inspiration can anyone expect from Ernest Shonekan? General Abdulsalami Abubakar is preoccupied tending to the vast fortune he acquired in just one year in the saddle and shopping around for more.

    The state governors could turn the meeting into a forum for settling once and for all – by fisticuffs if necessary – the lingering puzzle of which number is bigger: 19 or 16?

    It is therefore understandable that President Goodluck Jonathan is in no hurry to convene a meeting of the Council, as some of its statutory members are urging him to do. He is not constitutionally obliged to do so. To convene the Council in the present charged atmosphere would be the closest thing to political suicide. I doubt whether a meeting would serve any useful purpose.

    But the drift cannot continue. Dr Jonathan must move quickly to arrest it by reaching out beyond his present inner circle to enlist help from disinterested men and women of undoubted goodwill and sound judgment, people who can tell him what he needs to know rather than what they think he would like to hear.

    Meanwhile, it would help enormously if he travelled less, listened more, and devoted more time to the serious reading that improves the mind and enlarges vision.

  • Yuletide: NAMA handled over 1,900 flights

    Yuletide: NAMA handled over 1,900 flights

    OVER 1,900 flights operated through the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos during the just- concluded festive season, the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) said yesterday.

    It said a total of 170,749 passengers flew in and out of the airport from December 23-31.

    NAMA’s General Manager, Public Affairs, Mr. Supo Atobatele, stated that the agency handled an average of 550 flights daily across the nation’s airports apart from the low-level flight operations in the Niger Delta area.

    Atobatele said traffic peaked on December 23 when the airport recorded 289 flights with 25,184 passengers while 262 flights flew 23,625 passengers on Christmas Eve.

    Exphe traffic trimmed to 105 flights flying only 10,772 passengers.

    In all, 80,850 passengers were recorded on the domestic route while 89,296 passengers made the international routes.

     

  • My priorities for civil aviation, by NCAA boss

    My priorities for civil aviation, by NCAA boss

    The new Director- General of Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority, Capt. Folayele Akinkuotu, said on Thursday that his immediate priorities would be to cause radical change in the regulation of civil aviation in the country.

    The director general spoke at a stakeholders’ forum for input gathering at the NCAA Annex, Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Ikeja, Lagos.

    Akinkuotu said that only radical changes in the way civil aviation is carried in Nigeria would bring about sustainable progress for the industry, affirming that the goal of safety and security for air travel would be pursued vigorously to whip operators in line.

    He said before the end of this month, the passengers’ bill of rights would be implemented to guarantee the protection of the rights of consumers.

    Akinkuotu said the passengers’ bill of rights has become imperative because of the need to protect the rights of passengers, whose patronage has kept airlines in business.

    He announced the introduction of a new directorate of General Aviation at the NCAA that would cater for the needs of corporate, charter, private jets as well as helicopters that is steadily growing in the industry.

    The director general said the new directorate has become imperative in view of the safety and compliance issues arising from that arm of the industry, requiring radical steps to move the industry forward.

     

  • Another country is possible

    Another country is possible

    (A Miracle at the Murtala Muhammed Airport)

    Like an aging crooner, snooper is in a very soapy and sentimental mood this morning. It may have to do with the onset of the Harmattan weather and its exhilarating haze which often leads to undue excitement and a loss of balance and sober perspective. Or it may be due to the approach of Christmas, the period of child-like gaiety, charity and goodwill. At a charity ball, the impossible and irascible Bernard Shaw was once asked by a society lady why she of all people was the object of his fawning affection and adulation. “It’s a Charity show, isn’t it?” the crusty curmudgeon shot back.

    But Bernard Shaw or no Bernard Shaw, there are times when you feel that with all its faults and dangerous fault lines, it is a great honour to be a Nigerian. With its mystique, its mysterious allure, its great personality and combustible mix of macho and masochism, Nigeria is a great country waiting for a great leader. Under existing configurations, we may have to wait till the end of time for that mirage, that is, if somebody does not pull the fatal plug. But there are moments when something happens to remind one of the great possibilities of this nation if we get it right. Biological clocks also tick for nations.

    Yes, another country is possible. But it will take a lot of incentives and disincentives. Incentives for good, civil and civilised behaviour, and disincentives in the form of harsh and swift retribution for uncivil and uncivilised conduct , particularly in the public arena. It is the human institutions that we have built and sustained that have helped humanity evolve away from the state of nature where everything is short, nasty and brutish. Take these man-made institutions away and we are not much better than our animal cousins. As a writer once put it, mankind first civilised on the plains of Africa, but he has not continued to do so there.

    The de-civilisation and dehumanisation of Nigeria, the regression into the stark ethos of the Stone Age society, did not begin in one day or in one era. It has been a slow excruciating process. With today’s eighty per-centers just imagine what the ten per-centers of the First Republic so famously and implacably excoriated by Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu would think of us as a people and a nation. Or just imagine how innocent in retrospect Admiral Augustus Akabue Aikhomu’s famous doctrine of the misapplication of funds seems in the light of current total evacuation of the Exchequer !

    Proverbially and symbolically, a fish starts rotting from the head. It is when the elite of a nation lose the cerebral capacity for a visionary conception of a better society and the capability for moral imagination that a society begins to nosedive. If we are not at the rock bottom yet, we cannot be that far away.

    With due respect to General Olusegun Obasanjo, what is starring us in the face is not imminent revolution. That revolution of his imagining ought to have come a long time ago. A revolutionary situation subsists when there is still some residual and rudimentary normative order to society, when an active and however tiny section of the ruling class miraculously escapes the general ethical paralysis. But when the unforeseeable is about to collide with the unknowable, it is called revolutionary anarchy. That apocalyptic meltdown is already upon us

    Yet despite this vision of Armageddon, there are moments when something to cheer crops up in the ethical fiasco of contemporary Nigeria. It is something to applaud when one notices a stirring in the right direction, when a fallen giant of a nation heaves and haws in the right direction as it tries to lift its great heft off the ground. These nuggets of hope may well be the last snapshots of derailed possibilities. Or they may be the seeds of regeneration and miraculous redemption.

    Last Monday yours sincerely arrived at the Murtala Muhammed Airport on a British Airways flight after a short trip abroad. Over the years, one had learnt to expect the worst from Nigerian airports. There were times in the past when the arrival hall often reminds one of an inner city asylum and its berserk denizens.

    But it has to be said that slowly and quite obviously some order and rationality have kept into the procedure. It still takes a long while to retrieve luggage from the gasping and epileptic conveyor belts. Pimping, touting and “les protocols” in the manner of Mobutu’s Zaire have been reduced to a minimum. The passage and the arrival halls are well-lit, but the cooling system is still grossly inadequate despite improvement over the years. The custom officials were stern but polite and unobtrusive. One of them even managed to crack a joke at snooper’s expense before waving one off with much gusto.

    Outside, particularly in the outer perimeter and outward margins of the airport, it was still a no-man’s land. Petty thieves, cut-purses, assassins on the prowl mix freely with well-wishers and other sympathetic undertakers. This is the tense and turbulent confluence of the people of the underworld and the denizens of the Nigerian underground, those who have been banished into the deep bowel of the society by misery and deprivation. You have a feeling that many of these callow criminals are driven to crime by the dire need to keep body and soul together.

    Far from the maddening crowd… as they say. It was a tired and drowsy snooper that jumped into the waiting car after making sure that all the contents of the wheel cart had been safely evacuated—or so it seemed. It was time to face squarely the next battle of how to get home safely. The fact that you are out of the airport precincts in one piece does not mean that you are going to get home in one piece if you are coming from the airport.

    That requires a different set of survival skills, which includes ability to dodge bullets or the limbs of a superior athlete if you have to make a dash for it. The armed robbers know their route and rote very well and this includes which vast stretches of the lonely road out of the airport remain unpoliced. In such circumstances, you just have to ride your luck hoping that your number does not come up on a particular night,

    Eighteen years earlier, on the evening of August 26th, 1994, snooper’s number had come up after arriving back in Nigeria on the same British Airways flight from London. In what looked like a state-inspired armed robbery, the car was suddenly hemmed in and pinned down around the Portland Cement exit on Ikorodu Road. In a textbook military operation, gun-toting hoodlums swiftly surrounded the car. Yours sincerely and other occupants were dragged out and ordered to lie on the main Ikorodu Road. Snooper refused. But in a flash, everything was gone including the car.

    Intriguingly, that was also the night that General Abacha’s reign of terror finally took on a life of its own. Across the same road and around the same time, the chambers of Gani Fawehinmi, the iconic lawyer, was being burgled and his guards maimed. Air Commodore Dan Suleiman’s residence around Yaba was also firebombed that same evening.

    It was Segun Odegbami who kindly took yours sincerely to a local tailor in Fadeyi to be kitted with a new pair of trousers and shirt. Ironically, it was the same Segun Odegbami who helped to retrieve snooper’s laptop from the overhead compartment of the aircraft last Monday evening after a bout of professorial amnesia. How some people remain a permanent fixture is a mystery.

    Luckily, snooper got home safely on Monday evening. Although the security situation has worsened in some national aspects, 1994 seems far away from 2012, and so is state gangsterism. On Tuesday morning, disaster struck as snooper was preparing for the day’s chore. The laptop was nowhere to be found. For a moment, snooper thought it was a nasty dream. But the laptop had truly disappeared. They have finished me! Snooper cried to himself.

    In a jumble of conspiracy theories, snooper’s mind immediately fixed on a tall gangling youth with a lupine visage who was begging to help with lifting the luggage from the cart. The Lucifer must have nicked the laptop. In their bid to hurriedly evacuate from the airport premises, the aides must have left the laptop in the cart for easy picking. Oh Lord, it is malarial mid day! For anybody who lives by the computer key board, losing your laptop is the equivalent of a death sentence. The computer is the bank vault of the engaged intellectual; or his armoury if you like. Losing it is like going to war with the sheath of your sword, or what the Igbo call an efulefu.

    In a fit of panic and disorientation, snooper ordered his derelict aides to go to the airport and come back with the laptop whatever it took. On paper, it was a foolish and forlorn mission. Even in civilised nations, the modern airport is not a place of charity. After waiting in vain for about four hours, it was a crestfallen and hesitant snooper that called one of the chaps. They were on their way back, came the glum reply. But what about the computer? Yes, it was found and safely deposited at the zonal office. After a letter of authorisation and proper documentation, the computer was released.. It was miracle day in Ikeja.

    Snooper wishes to thank the airport manager for the South Zone, his men and women and the security people at the airport for this Christmas gift. They were professional to boot. Not a penny was demanded or given. Snooper did not even show up. It is moments like this that one is proud to be a Nigerian despite all the problems. For a nation, it is of signal importance to cultivate a cult of heroic example.

    It is profoundly salutary and instructive that this miracle should take place in an airport named after the illustrious Murtala Ramat Muhammed, Nigeria’s iconic military leader. To his detractors, Murtala was everything a head of state ought not to have been: a tribalist in uniform, an ethnic irredentist, a war scoundrel and a bank robber. But in a feat of radical epiphany, Murtala first transformed himself before seeking to transform the nation. There can be no transformative agenda without self-transformation. You cannot be sovereign over others without being sovereign over yourself. If it is not too late, this is the lesson for our leaders. Another country is very possible..