The Nation Newspaper

Tag: postscript

  • Annals of obtainment: A postscript

    Annals of obtainment: A postscript

    As the running scandal that is now sure to go down in the annals of sleaze as Dasukigate seeps drip by tawdry drip into the fount of public discourse, one cannot but marvel at the casualness, the utter disregard for consequences with which vast sums of money earmarked for national security were handed out even to persons who had not set out to obtain.

    One veteran says he has never met Dasuki and never obtained from him.  He was minding his  own business when they brought him $230,000, a far cry from the N100 million they claim to have given him.

    They didn’t tell him the source.  They didn’t tell him what it was for.  He apparently assumed that it was for old times’ sake, or for business as usual, not knowing that it was stolen money.

    Pardon the digression, but it brings to mind Dominique Strauss-Kahn , the randy billionaire former president of the IMF who would have been elected president of France in 2012 if he had not sexually assaulted a maid in a swanky New York hotel the previous year.  On trial for participating in  prostitution ring in France, he pleaded that since the women were naked, he had no way of knowing that they were prostitutes.

    Maybe the women should have put on identifying apparel, just as the package delivered to the veteran, aforementioned, should have been stamped “Stolen Money.”

    One free-floating, crackerjack social scientist was busy in his book-lined study putting the finishing touches to his magnum opus, “The Unified Theory of Society,” when National Security came calling for help. Dutiful patriot that he is, he shoved aside the papers on his desk and went to work.

    As if  partial recompense for the Nobel Prize they thought he should have been awarded long ago if those doddering old men in Oslo had not been intellectually fossilised, National Security handed him N450 million for his labours.

    One expired political godfather to whom they said they handed N100 million says it was actually N500 million and that he simply passed it on, N100 million apiece, to the lesser godfathers in the zone, taking nothing for himself.

    Those who claim to know him well say they believe him.  They say he would rather donate than obtain, and that it is not for nothing that he is called “Donatus” — behind his back.

    Amidst the back and forth, one strand of Dasukigate risks getting lost.  As the story goes, on hearing that huge sums of money were being handed out without appropriation, one influential lawmaker went to the main depository and threatened to bring the matter before the appropriate oversight body of one of the legislative houses unless he was, shall we say, accommodated.

    Knowing that this was no idle threat and that the fellow was firmly resolved to obtain from   the colossal slush fund they were dispensing, they quickly handed him N250 million in hush money.  So the story goes, at any rate.

    Are the authorities investigating it?

    Then there is the story set in Akwa Ibom that may or may not be related to Dasukigate.  In a controversial raid on a wing of Government House Complex in the state capital, Uyo, security operatives searching for illegal arms reported stumbling upon “a stockpile of dollars, “not the stockpile of illegal arms they expected to find.

    What became of the stockpile?  Has its owner –or custodian – been identified? Where did it come from, and what purpose or purposes was it meant to serve?

     

    Jankara journalism

     

    After Bode George conned him into doing a stultifying white-wash job on the contract-splitting scam at the Nigerian Ports Authority, you would think that the self-certified chief of Area Boys  and leading practitioner of Jankara journalism has learned some lessons in real journalism and  humility.

    Fat chance.

    There he was again the other day, this media wayfarer, pontificating that the Nigerian print media establishment is made up of “the Zombie Press” and others, with apparently nothing in between.

    Irrespective of the issue at hand,” he has written (Vanguard, October 11, 2015), “all the reader needs to know is where the interest of the owner lies and he can virtually write all the columns, editorials, comments, letters to the editor that would appear,”  pro and contra, in the “Zombie Press, “ of which he names this newspaper as an exemplar.

    He cites as one of his two test cases Saraki’s “emergence” as Senate president.  All the “journalists” (inverted commas in the original) writing for the Zombie Press, he found as he  had confidently expected, took the same position, despite the fact that “some of these writers are Professors (including Emeritus Professors), and holders of advanced degrees.”

    This Emeritus Professor of Journalism holds and has stated at every opportunity that Saraki’s path to the presidency of the Senate was base and ignoble. That view is shared by tens of thousands,  perhaps millions of Nigerians who are not in any way connected with this newspaper.

    Anyone who sincerely believes that Saraki’s conduct in the matter is the quintessence of propriety and nobility should come out forthrightly and say so, instead of sniping at those who hold a contrary view or ascribing improper motives to them.

    The second test case in the Jankara study – such as it was — centres on perceptions of President Muhammadu Buhari’s performance in office.

    Those “Zombies” who called Yar’Adua  “Baba Go Slow” in 2007 are now unanimous in  asking Nigerians to allow Buhari to operate at his own pace, whereas the other Zombies who had supported Yar’Adua back in 2007 have been carpeting Buhari for being too slow.  In each case, the editors operate as if the only view that counts is that of those who agree with their publisher, the study asserts.

    I don’t know what happens at the paper where the researcher moonlights, but that is not how The Nation is run.  You have to wonder whether he really reads the newspaper. The views expressed on its pages are far more nuanced than a casual researcher can fathom.

    Plus, they don’t do nuance at Jankara, I gather.

    Then, this :  Those ‘Zombie” newspapers “are so predictable that one must ask: whatever happened to self-respect? Is it possible that 20 educated and intelligent adults could agree on every important issue – unless “none thinks very much”?

    Do the columnists and editorial writers and editors he is excoriating in fact agree on every important issue?  What is the evidence for this sweeping assertion on the basis of which the author gratuitously questions the education, intelligence and self-respect or persons, many of whom are not one whit less educated, less intelligent and less self-respecting than he is?

    Pity they also don’t do civility at Jankara.

     

    Worse than Jankara journalism

     

    Late this past Sunday, a friend called my attention to a longish piece in Nigerian Tribune purporting to be an interview with the eminent legal scholar and Senior Advocate,            Professor Itse Sagay.

    Three or four paragraphs into it, I was already doubting its authenticity.  By the time I was done, my doubts were confirmed. The statements credited to Professor Sagay lacked the clarity of thought and the elegance of exposition that are his hallmark.  In part fact-free and in part driven by bilious rage, the piece seemed to have been put together by an Olisa Metuh clone.

    It has since been confirmed that the “interview” was a forgery through and through.

  • Postscript of Buhari’s US visit

    President Buhari’s visit to the United States of America (US) has come and gone. And its outcome has meant different things to different people depending on the angle from which it is viewed.

    Broadly speaking however, there is no doubt the nation stands to gain from such engagements given the globalization of the world economy and the prime role of the US in its affairs. It was also significant in the sense that it represented a demonstration of confidence by that government in the capacity of our democracy to endure.

    Of course, his hosts gave assurances of assistance in the war against the Boko Haram insurgency; the repatriation of looted funds stashed in the vaults of other countries by marauding leaders and such other measures that will aid the nation’s economic development.

    But there were two issues in the course of the visit that should not and cannot be glossed over. This is because they seemed to have cast some slur on the overall success of that visit. The two saw the presidency issuing statements ostensibly to contextualize what was said in the course of the event. The first was the statement credited to the President while answering questions from journalists. He had said “going by the election results, constituencies that gave me 95 per cent cannot in all honesty be treated on the same issues with constituencies that gave me five per cent. I think these are political realities. While certainly there will be justice for everybody but the people who voted and made their votes count, they must feel the government has appreciated the efforts they put in putting the government in place”.

    The second came from his prepared speech at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). It read, “unwittingly and I dare say, unintentionally the application of the Leahy Law amendment by the US government has aided and abated the Boko Haram terrorist group in the prosecution of its extremist ideology and hate, the indiscriminate killings and maiming of civilians, raping of women and girls, and in other heinous crimes. I believe this is not the spirit of the Leahy Law”.

    On both scores, the Special Adviser to the president on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina was quick to issue statements either clarifying what the president actually meant or canvassing positions urging the public to be wary of misconstruing what was actually said. Curiously, in all these interventions, he did not say the president was misquoted but only sought to place the statements within the context he would want them to be understood.

    But in doing these, he inadvertently created two sets of problems. The first is the presumption that the larger public is incapable of properly contextualizing both statements and therefore needed to be helped out.  How he came about that conclusion remains largely curious. Second, the clarifications also created the impression that either the presidency was very uncomfortable with its position on the two issues after they went public or it was under pressure from some unseen quarters to defend them. There is also the third suggestion that the president only realized the full purport of the statements after they had gone public. The extent to which those seeming clarifications achieved the desired objective remains largely illusory.

    Before we go into the context of those statements, it will be helpful to bring into focus Adesina’s clarifications on them. The objective is to fathom if there are any differences between them and what the president actually said.

    On how the president will treat those who voted for him, Adesina admitted that what was attributed to the president actually came from him. But then, he contended that the president also said the constitution has guaranteed the rights of every part of the country. According to him, “what this means is that those who voted five per cent will get their due and will not get things commensurate with five per cent votes”. He accused unnamed persons of not balancing the entire statement. The first flaw here is with the concept of what is due to those who voted five per cent. It cannot definitely be the same with what is due to those who voted 95 per cent. There is problem because of the introduction of ratio or proportion. Having brought in this exogenous variable, the clear interpretation is that it will be the prime yardstick for the distributions of the spoils of office. There is absolutely no ambiguity in this. Buhari even went further to admit this consideration as political reality. There are thousand and one angles from which the president could have approached journalists’ question on the matter without bringing in the matter of ratios.

    The argument that the constitution guarantees the rights of every part of the country or that there will be fairness for everybody on that account, cannot mitigate the harm in that position. It could even be further developed to imply that but for such constitutional guarantees, the percentage of votes cast in the last elections would be the only determinant of the president’s relations with parts of the country.

    If you ask me whether the president should have gone into such comparisons, my answer will be capital No! He could have referred his audience to his much acclaimed inaugural statement that he belongs to nobody and belongs to everybody. That could have sufficed. It was therefore a huge contradiction and monumental error to be talking of percentages in the presence of that international audience. By extrapolation, the president succeeded in saying that he belongs to those who massively voted for him in that election. He has to live with that foreboding reality, attempts to clarify it notwithstanding.

    His aide also said in respect of the Leahy Law, the president’s statement was misconstrued. According to him, it should be seen as a passionate appeal to the US government to soften on the law to enable Nigeria intensify action and win the war against Boko Haram. The aspect of the written statement that is said to have been misconstrued and those who misconstrued it is hazy. What that portion of the written speech said is very clear.  Being a written speech, the president must have taken time to go through it and possibly agreed with its content before going public. It is a different ball game if the disputed section was not laced in diplomatic niceties; conveyed unintended meaning and thus inappropriate for that audience. The problem with the statement is in its sweeping assertion that the Leahy Law amendment by the US aids and abets the Boko Haram terrorists group.  The Leahy Law does not aid and abet the Boko Haram terrorists.  Boko Haram is propelled, reinforced and sustained by weird fundamentalist Islamist ideology and the army of their unseen sympathizers. The law only imposes some constraints in the prosecution of the insurgency war. That is the proper perspective. The blame for this vague presentation is still that of the presidency. It was at liberty to have expunged that section if it was sufficiently satisfied it would create doubts for the administration.

    Be that as it may, the discomfort of the government with that portion could possibly have arisen from fears from two quarters-one from the host government and the other from the home country. The US was bound to show discomfort with the statement given the wrong impression it created. On the other hand, the presidency is bound to be scarred by its likely interpretation at home. The second plank is more so given the politicization of the issue of human rights abuses in the war against Boko Haram. Before now, much of the reservations of the US government on that war had hinged on this singular issue. It is for the same reason it refused to sell categories of arms and ammunitions to the last regime. Discomfort could have been aided by the fear that the new regime was about to fall into the same trap.

    There is also the issue of local propaganda. Those who opposed the previous regime had made issues out of its purported human rights abuses. Amnesty International has also been notorious for levying copious allegations along this line without regard for the grave human rights abuses by the fundamentalist group. It would appear this dialectic is at the heart of the current discomfort.

  • 2015 elections: A postscript

    Somehow, we have been able to muddle through the 2015 general elections. Muddle through? Yes.

    They ran their full cycle penultimate Saturday with the reruns in the three states of Abia, Imo and Taraba.  Whether the current situation is thrust upon us by luck, contrivance or some other extenuating circumstances, the results of those contests have been announced and general peace is anticipated to reign supreme.

    With it, all predictions of cataclysm by doomsday prophets appear to have come to naught. Nigeria has again, been saved from itself given the charged atmosphere and intemperate campaign language deployed by the parties as they sought to take control of the minds of the electorate.

    There is relief that there is another opportunity for us to once again, give democracy a chance. There is another chance for the country to correct itself if democracy must survive as a development paradigm. That appears the pervading feeling given the shortcomings of the process that brought about our current situation.

    To borrow the euphemism within our sports circles, we have wobbled and fumbled and ultimately gotten to our final destination- the conduct of ‘successful’ elections. It is a different kettle of fish how we got there. The above allegory was popularized some years back when our Super Eagles serially disappointed Nigerian sports enthusiasts due to lacklustre performance but ultimately managed to qualify for semi-finals and finals in continental competitions.

    Though they managed to qualify for further engagements, it was obvious the nation’s football was doomed if wobbling and fumbling was the strategy of its handlers to give the nation a first rate football team. Soon, it dawned on us that our national football game could no longer survive by trials and errors as denoted by this catchphrase.

    The fate of our national football today is symptomatic of how deficient the absence of clear performance standards and non adherence to rules can be in institutionalizing a lazy football culture in this country. Today, the Super Eagles plays without many Nigerians bothering about the outcome. Such is the scenario that is about to re-enact at the political level in matters concerning elections unless clear steps are taken to ensure that the will of the people as expressed at the ballot box prevails. The way things stand much is still awry with our electoral process.

    A peep into those reruns depicts a galore of complaints by the runners-up. In Taraba State, the APC candidate, Aisha Alhassan rejected the result describing the entire process as “daylight robbery” She alleged that the election was marred by violence, massive rigging, ballot snatching and abuse of the card readers in substantial parts of the state. The APGA and PDP in Abia and Imo have respectively complained of sundry infractions that detract substantially from known standards of free, fair and credible elections. The parties alleged incidences of manipulation and changing of election results by INEC staff among other malpractices. In the days ahead, many of the complainants will be proceeding to the election petitions tribunals to seek justice. We hope justice will come their way.

    The case of the three states is symbolic in more ways than one. Being the three states where governorship reruns were held, they mirror very vividly all that went wrong during the general elections. Whatever assessment we have of their outcome can be used as a fair measure of the outcome of the elections preceding them. Moreover, given their limited number, the minimum expectation was that malpractices of any hue would not feature as the INEC will deploy its surplus human and material resources to ensure a more successful outcome. If they did so, it failed to achieve the desired result as attested to by these complaints.

    If such irregularities including connivance by INEC officials can manifest in the manner alleged in these supplementary elections, it then stands to be imagined what transpired during the general election when the commission’s resources were stretched to their fullest. That should give us an idea of how credible the outcome of the elections had been. It will also form the basis for any assessment of the performance of that electoral body.

    From all accounts, the elections were marred by large scale malpractices in many areas. Sundry killings, under age voting, manipulation and falsification of results, snatching of ballot boxes and collusion by INEC officials at all levels of the election were some of the unwholesome features recorded.

    The source of these shortcomings can be grouped into two broad categories – the ones committed by politicians and their supporters and those wrought on us by INEC officials.  But by far the most worrisome of them is the latter. These are people employed and paid by the government for this and other related functions. Instead of doing the work for which they are paid, INEC officials have become the greatest cog in the wheels of the successful conduct of elections. Many of them see elections as the ripe time to make quick money. They invent sundry subterfuge to manipulate election results to satisfy politicians and line their pockets.

    That is why you hear of fake or duplicate result sheets being supplied to the polling and collation centres while the authentic ones are given out to politicians in exchange for money. With such connivance, all a politician needed to do is to sit back at home and enter whatever results that suits him and return same to the unscrupulous INEC official who in turn, submits them as authentic results. That is the genesis of the phenomenon of falsification of election results. There was much of it in the last general elections.

    When you place this sabotage of the electoral process by those whose duty it is to conduct free and fair elections side by side the penchant by our politicians to win by fair or foul means, the prospects it paints for the survival of democracy is very gloomy. Yes, by whatever contrivance, we have managed to muddle through, we can as well beat our chests and say democracy has come to stay in this country.

    But that would amount to an oversimplification of extant realities given events of the last elections. Perhaps, the relative peace we are now savouring is because the presidential election went the way it did despite some of these lapses. Had there been some dispute as witnessed at other levels of elections, the story may have been another thing altogether.

    For now, there is no guarantee that in subsequent elections, there will be this ‘spirit of give peace a chance’ in the face of observed lapses. If the attitude of politicians and those of INEC officials as witnessed in these elections is anything to go by, there are still thorns sown on the path to our democracy. We can only secure its future when politicians are compelled to play by the rules and errant ones made to face the full weight of the law.

    INEC officials fingered in falsifying, manipulating and selling of authentic results sheets must be identified and punished. Such official have become the greatest threat to the successful conduct of elections. We have muddled through. But wobbling and fumbling will soon turn out a defective approach to institutionalizing democracy in this country. There is still serious work to do to restore the confidence of the people in the sanctity of the electoral process.

  • Baga: A postscript

    Baga: A postscript

    Just when the appeasement template described as amnesty for the Boko Haram seems given, the nation woke up to a dramatic escalation of hostilities in Baga, a fishing border town in the North-east between the men of the military Joint Task Force and the Boko Haram. At the end of the confrontation, the casualties were numbered in multiple scores depending on who did the counting. The military high command put out its own figures of the dead at 36. The leaders of the community also gave their version as between 185 and 200.

    But then, it is not only the number of casualties that is in dispute, even the day the hostilities broke out and the series of events that led to the skirmishes have since been contested. While most accounts gave the weekend of April 19 as the day the hostilities broke out, some accounts actually point at an earlier date of April 16. As if to further compound the puzzle, the military couldn’t be sure – days after – whether it was the multinational troops in the JTF that engaged the insurgents or exclusively Nigerian troops.

    Of course, the only area of broad agreement is that civilian lives were involved. The JTF said six civilians were killed – the rest 30 were alleged to be members of the Boko Haram.

    And as for those to be held responsible for the mayhem, again, it is a matter of who to believe. Whereas the commander of the multinational force, Brigadier General Austin Edokpaye, puts the blame squarely on the door-steps of the Boko Haram who he accused of using civilians as human shield while firing on soldiers, what the locals saw was the heavy hand of soldiers in the mission to avenge the death of one of their men. Some accounts actually blamed the extensive destruction which followed on the house-to-house search embarked on by the soldiers after which the residents were chased out and their abodes set on fire.

    It doesn’t help that attention has since deflected from the murderous activities of the Boko Haram sect to the role of the guardians drafted to keep the peace. Today, the military is the one on the spot – accused of deploying excessive force against the insurgents thereby causing heavy collateral damages. It seems a case of the military providing fresh ammunitions for those who see them as the problem and hence are pressing for the withdrawal of troops from the North-east.

    No doubt, the point cannot be sufficiently made that the death of one innocent soul to the raging insurgency is one too many. Whether it is one lone service man mauled in the course of national duty or the dozens of innocents caught in the middle of the raging fire between the security forces and the Boko Haram. However, just as the use of excessive force by the military must be deplored, and hence the need for thorough investigations to establish and bring to book those individuals found in breaches of relevant services rules, part of the problem isn’t just the tendency to jump into conclusions before the full facts are established but to see the servicemen as expendables.

    How many people died? We do not even know at this point. The one that we know for certain is that an officer of the JTF died. But then, does the number really matter? Are these fellows not Nigerians with dreams and aspirations? The point is that every life must be seen to count; whether we are dealing with one life or dozens, the difference must be seen only in terms of the multiples of avoidable tragedy.

    In all of these however, the greater tragedy must be the predictable, knee-jerk response to a foreseeable outcome. Most predictably, the response has been superficial – the same standard blame game: the military must be blamed for the multi-layered problem they didn’t create. I struggle to find the required due sensitivity accorded the task force in the rather difficult operating environment and the sacrifices they are called to make, more so in an environment where the next individual standing by may well be a terrorist waiting to lob yet another IED. I find none. More palpable also is the lack of resolve to confront a common threat by those who should assume the role of drum majors for peace.

    At this point, I do not want to delve into the argument as to whether or not the military by its well known record of brutality against unarmed civilians is not wholly responsible for the way the ordinary citizen perceives them. Neither do I want to venture into the debate as to whether the nation can afford to defang the military simply because a few serving personnel exceeded their brief. In the same vein, no one questions the right of citizens to demand acceptable standards of conduct from our servicemen whether in combat zones or among the civil populace.

    The issue is whether we are not looking in the wrong direction for solution to a general malaise. First, I do not think that anyone should misunderstand the job that the military is called to do; theirs is to find and fix the insurgents wherever they may be found using all available instruments including force. Secondly, I do not also think that anyone should suffer the illusion that the military is anything but a facilitator in the search for peace. Just as it seems inevitable that mistakes would be made in the course of duty, it is precisely the job of the civil society to call them to account. I do not think that the civil society has failed in this duty – whether it is Odi, Zaki Biam and now in Baga.

    The problem is the attempt to amplify the failings of the JTF, and to present it as the problem. They were not the problem in the Niger Delta any more than they will be the problem in Borno and Yobe. In both situations, they were drafted in to deal with the specific problem.

    Does anyone imagine that the only reason anyone is talking of amnesty today is because the Boko Haram has not succeeded in overrunning the vast territories of the North? How about imagining the North-east without the JTF in the current circumstances? Surely, the federal government does not seem to have exclusive monopoly of bad faith!

    I conclude by re-affirming an earlier thesis that there can be no such thing as an imposed solution to the Boko Haram problem. The problem is fundamentally for local authorities – working with the federal authorities – to solve. Even if the federal government succeeds in smashing the infrastructure of the insurgency, the issue of the fundamentalist ideology behind it would still have to be addressed. That, for me, is the only ground on which the proposed amnesty can stand – or make sense!