The Nation Newspaper

Tag: President Goodluck Jonathan

  • Jonathan embarks on phantom post-mortem

    Jonathan embarks on phantom post-mortem

    Like everything else about President Goodluck Jonathan’s approach to critical issues, his post-mortem of the general elections is as superficial as his shambolic reelection campaign. Last Thursday, while reacting to the post-election report presented to him by the head of his campaign organisation, Ahmadu Ali, a former minister and denizen of the PDP, the president attributed his defeat to anything but his failings and his party’s lack of great ideas and cohesion. “The PDP is still the dominant party,” the president boasted. “If you look at the results, the difference is just 2.5 million votes, and if you look at the areas where it is perceived that the PDP scored so low, the PDP couldn’t have got those kinds of scores. But the elections are over, so the country first.”

    By narrowing his defeat to just one area out of the many-sided beatings he took on both March 28 and April 11, he gave the impression of a politician who liked to clutch at straws. What is obvious to everyone who has taken the pains to analyse the results of the presidential and other polls is that, far beyond the about 2.5 million votes that separated the loser from the winner, and far beyond the fact that he was beaten virtually everywhere and on all fronts, the country could not wait to angrily repudiate Dr Jonathan as leader. He was no longer liked, and the electorate blamed him for all the things that had gone wrong with the country, be it insecurity, declining economy, Chibok schoolgirls abductions, bad external image, etc.

    Strangely, the president still manages to describe his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) as the dominant party. Dominant where? Did he take care to look at the statistics of his defeat at all? He and his party lost on all fronts, and their dominance has been taken away from them so comprehensively that no one is left in doubt which is the dominant party today. In addition, Dr Jonathan disputes the margins by which he and his party lost in many states. Yet, it is precisely in the states where he and his party won that voter turnout was implausibly high, far above the national and even world averages.

    The president was of course not done with deriving cold comfort from his quaint interpretation of the merciless beating he took. Said he while trying to encourage his demoralised party: “Our duty is to go back and identify areas of challenges so that the party will come up strong and play the role as a very strong party. The PDP is still the most organised party, is still the party that is not owned by anybody, is still the party that whatever you are, you can get to any level with your competencies and so on.” Here, the president again submits to very wild, unsubstantiated claims. There is no proof, in the face of the APC’s devastating electoral showing and tight organisation, that the PDP is the ‘most organised party.’ But the president makes the claim notwithstanding.

    Dr Jonathan follows up by describing the PDP as not owned by anybody. It is not clear what he had in mind, whether actually he thought he did not himself dominate the PDP so brutally that those who could not endure his suffocating hold had no choice but to disengage themselves from the party. He confuses dominant party philosophy, as exemplified by the APC, with personal, idiosyncratic dominance, as symbolised by what he and a few others did to the PDP. For a party that precluded many aspirants from even contesting the presidential primary, and one that enthroned a few vicious, uncouth and ruthless politicians in key positions at the federal and state levels — men and women who had become gods that could not be challenged — it is surprising that Dr Jonathan talks of his party as not having a glass ceiling.

    The president regrets his defeat, and is bitter at the manner he was humiliated and repudiated. He may not regret conceding defeat, for it saved him and his wife much trouble, local and international, but he has clearly not got over the March and April losses. His inability to reconcile himself to his new status has led him to vicious retribution against some of his appointees, including the Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Suleiman Abba, whom he recently fired. If he and his party will continue to live in denial and blame others for their defeat, they will be unable to do the clinical post-mortem required to understand why they failed and how to recover lost grounds. Judging from Dr Jonathan’s reaction and his party’s uncoordinated assessment of the debacle, the PDP will need new faces untainted by defeat, hearts and minds not shattered by the terrible electoral losses, and judgement not coloured by face-saving rationalisations. None among those who lead the PDP today has shown the kind of depth, dispassion and sobriety the party requires for the politics of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.

  • Ifeanyi Ubah: weeping for his sins

    Ifeanyi Ubah: weeping for his sins

    If only babies could talk’, that was the catchphrase of a popular advert in the country sometime ago. If only we could have access to Ifeanyi Ubah’s mind, then we would know the real reason he wept like a baby during the submission of the report of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Presidential Campaign Organisation to President Goodluck Jonathan, at the new banquet hall of the Presidential Villa on Thursday. According to Daily Sun in its Workers’ Day (May 1 edition) , Ubah started weeping after President Jonathan’s address, which drew a thunderous applause and standing ovation from the audience.

    The report added that he wept uncontrollably such that at a point, he had to excuse himself from the gathering, after some party chiefs had taken turns to console him, to no avail. Apparently, those party stalwarts must have understood the reason for his weeping. The report added that Ubah was sweating like a Christmas goat (please pardon my embellishment) at the occasion. When a billionaire weeps or sweats profusely in public, it is not a laughing matter.

    Chief Ubah is the founder and chief executive officer of Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN), the body that was at the vanguard of the president’s reelection campaign. That organisation meant nothing to most Nigerians and if it had any meaning at all, it was to those making money from it in the PDP and deceiving President Jonathan that the whole of Nigeria was behind him. As a matter of fact Ubah and Co. claimed they had 12 million signatures of Nigerians who wanted Jonathan to continue in office, after travelling all over the 36 states of the federation. In Nigeria, cooking figures is one of the easiest things to do.

    Ubah, lest we forget, is also the chief executive officer of Capital Oil. He and his firm have been in the centre of several messy deals, the most notorious being their involvement in the oil subsidy scandal. In 2012, Cosmas Maduka, President of Coscharis Group, accused him of duping him of N21bn in the course of some business transaction.

    In saner climes, the First Citizen would keep people like Ubah at an arm’s length. But, in a country of anything goes, and under a man like President Jonathan, the Ubahs called the shots. They are the president’s frontline allies. This is a man that we knew little or nothing about until he turned 40 a few years ago and celebrated his birthday in almost all the newspapers in the country; some of which gave out their front page for the vainglory.

    As a major player in the oil sector, Ubah must have been instrumental to the oil and gas sector’s donation of N5billion to the Jonathan campaign. Meanwhile, these are people, like the power sector owners, who are complaining that they have problems accessing funds for their operations and that banks are not granting them loans again. I wonder which responsible bank would give loans to such unserious characters who can only be successful business men in Nigeria because of our warped sense of doing business.

    So, contrary to the newspaper report that Ubah wept over President Jonathan’s loss in the election, it is possible that the man was weeping over his personal loss arising from the president’s defeat at the polls, and more importantly, over the questions he may, including others like him, have to answer regarding oil subsidy, which only a complicit government like President Jonathan’s could have treated with kid gloves. Add to his long list of woes, his ambition to become Governor of Anambra State is now gone with the winds.  It is possible that was one reason he was so close to the president.

    Otherwise, why would he be the one to weep over the president’s loss? What is his own? Why would he weep louder than the bereaved? Even President Jonathan who lost the election is not weeping; at least not publicly. Not even our own ‘Mama Peace’, his wife. Not even those close aides of the president.

    So, I must be dead right when in my piece immediately after President Jonathan conceded defeat, I wrote that he must have consulted no one or only a few persons before taking that decision. President Jonathan confirmed that much when receiving the campaign organisation’s report. “Yes, I did not consult anybody before I made that phone call (conceding defeat to Gen Buhari) but I made that phone call on behalf of all of you and on behalf of the PDP”, he said. You can imagine what would have happened if the president had sought the opinions of the likes of Ubah on the matter! So, the question again, what is Ifeanyi Ubah’s own? I won’t want to speculate far into why the emergency oil mogul wept, but I am sure President Jonathan is not deceived that he was weeping for him (Jonathan). The man must be weeping for himself. The newspaper got it wrong when it said Ubah wept because he “could not contain his emotions”.

    My people will say ‘owo jona’ (money goes down the drain!) If Ubah and his fellow money-miss-road who donated more than generously to the PDP campaign made their money through a dint of hard work alone, they would have been cautious in the way they gave cheerfully, even if subversively. There are thousands of their fellow Nigerians out there who cannot boast of where the next meal would come from, their own generosity does not extend to such people. Apparently, Ubah must have been thinking of where to recoup the investment he made into the president’s failed reelection bid. He must have been weeping internally for long only for him to weep in the open when he could no longer contain it. There are many like him who are in such tears now. And they will weep for long because it is the ordinary Nigerian that they are putting in pains to have their comfort. Some of them will soon start to visit hospitals abroad to have their blood pressure examined. Some of them will, like our Andrew, check out of the country to seek asylum abroad. And there is every cause for them to worry when a new government that is not likely to condone granting them access to the kind of easy money that they stumbled on is about coming to power.

    Ubah cannot imagine that he would now be an outcast at the Villa that he used to enter and exit at will because the day the incoming president is seen with people like Ubah, that is the end of Nigerians’ trust in him. And I am sure General Muhammadu Buhari knows that. “Show me your friends, and I will tell who you are”.

  • ‘Or am I dead?’

    News of Chief Edwin Clark’s self-exhibition to journalists in Abuja to make the point that he is bodily unaffected by President Goodluck Jonathan’s failure in the March 28 presidential election was interesting. From the look of things, Clark, Ijaw National Leader and a former Federal Commissioner for Information, is reaping the harvest of his sycophantic support for the Jonathan presidency.

    A weekend report said of Clark, who is in his 80s and a die-hard Jonathanian: “He said some people had been going round with rumours that he collapsed when he heard the outcome of the presidential election.” Clark was quoted as saying, “I am here today to tell you that I am not dead. Or am I dead? In every election, there would be winners and losers. The same thing happened during the last presidential election. I am alive. Today, I won’t talk about what happened before, during and after the election. That will come another day.”

    Clark continued: “I am talking to you now because I am travelling tomorrow and some people will go into the streets and say I was carried into air ambulance…Jonathan was the one who contested election, I didn’t. So, why should I die?”

    Perhaps more appropriately, Clark should have asked: Why did people think Jonathan’s defeat could kill me? In the period before the election, Clark was unapologetically visible as a pro-Jonathan campaigner and was even associated with extreme views that implied a national shutdown if Jonathan wasn’t reelected. The passion he brought to the Jonathan reelection project was often disturbing, if not terrifying, especially when considered against the backdrop of his advanced age.

    It needs to be said that Clark must be exceptionally physically strong to have received the stunning blow of Jonathan’s fall without falling. No one who had followed how Clark clung to Jonathan and what he stood for could have imagined that the blow of disappointment would fail to knock the old man down. So, it may be understandable that stories of Clark’s alleged collapse followed the collapse of Jonathan’s dream. He was considered too close to the subject and it was unthinkable that he would be unaffected by the death of dreams. In other words, to employ a Yoruba cultural metaphor, Clark gave the impression that he was Abobaku, a courtier fated to die with the king. Isn’t it thought-provoking that Clark asked the journalists: “Or am I dead?”  This may have been not just a rhetorical question. It suggests that Clark may be truly confused about the state of his existence. It is also possible that Clark is biologically alive but politically dead, meaning his pro-Jonathan performance was probably his swan song.

    Another interpretation: It could be that Clark has become a shadow of his former self, meaning something died in him when Jonathan lost the election. Or could it be that a source of easy wealth and influence dried up unexpectedly leaving the old man gasping for breath?

  • Last weeks of the Jonathan presidency

    Last weeks of the Jonathan presidency

    President Goodluck Jonathan may have easily conceded defeat to APC’s Muhammadu Buhari, but he is definitely still hurting from the ignominious loss he suffered in the last polls, particularly how almost irretrievably he led his party to a humiliating defenestration. Even before he cast his own ballot, he wore a cadaverous look on his face, as if he felt and exuded defeat. He had been interviewed in Otuoke where he was to vote eventually, and while responding to a question on live television, he was absentmindedly chewing on something. He was unpresidential on that occasion; but it was more a reflection of how bad he felt and how sunken he was in spirit before the ballots were cast.

    Had former Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Suleiman Abba, been a perceptive law enforcement officer, he would have known that for the next few weeks before handover, Dr Jonathan would act desperately like a scorched snake, eager to strike at anyone he thought contributed to his defeat, or anyone he thought ridiculed him. Mr Abba is a luckless police officer, the first victim of Dr Jonathan’s last malignant attacks. Since his appointment some nine months ago, he had not shown either guile or perceptiveness in carrying out his responsibilities as the nation’s top police officer. Because he lacked character, and knowing he still had a few years to go before retirement, he began to run with the hare and hunt with the hound. He was consequently spewed out of the president’s mouth.

    Dr Jonathan will do more spewing should anyone bait his anger. That he conceded defeat to Gen Buhari and acted, in the exaggerated estimation of many of his countrymen, as a statesman does not mean he had suddenly acquired the intellectual and philosophical depth required to place his loss in the right perspective, nor to look to the future with the calm maturity necessary to rehabilitate him in the eyes of the world. More and more, the presidency will look deserted in the weeks ahead, and the president himself will flash wan smiles at anyone, human or animal, who saunters into the presidential precincts. His hair will grey faster of course, and when he is alone he will fall into such abject lugubriousness commonly associated with men on death row that few would bear to look in his face.

    In retrospect, Dr Jonathan was right to suggest single term of seven years for the president. That way the president will have his cake and eat it; and when he is done gorging on the cake and wine after seven perhaps notorious and uneventful years, he will still leave with his head held high and his dignity unaffected by the scandals he had fomented. But Nigerians can’t say because the effect of his defeat is apocalyptic, the country must adopt that unwholesome and unsanitary one-term scheme. Dr Jonathan failed the country, and is leaving it humiliated and more divided than it had ever been. Let him in the next few weeks before the change of baton also partake of the pain and agony of the psychological defeat he has brought upon the country.

  • Economic diversification and non-oil export growth back on the front burner

    Economic diversification and non-oil export growth back on the front burner

    A peaceful outcome of the 2015 presidential election was the desire of the generality of Nigerians and the international community. Thankfully, we got it; and more.President Goodluck Jonathan converted his loss of the election to something remarkably positive for the country and for his legacy. His concession of defeat and early call to congratulate General MuhammaduBuhari, who emerged as President-elect, is surely an indelible mark in our strides to entrenching a democratic culture in Nigeria. It also serves as a needed point of reference for Africa, where a number of elections are lined up for this year.

    Structural Transformation

    The latest general election cycle coincided with a period of serious slump in the price of crude oil at the international market. From trading at well over $100 per barrel a year ago, the Nigerian grade Brent Crude now trades below $60 a barrel. This has translated to revenue shock for the government. The slump in the price of oil has also repressed foreign reserves. In line with its responsibility for financial stability, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has had to regularly draw down on the reserves to defend the local currency. It is therefore evident that, while we deservedly celebrate the peaceful outcome of the election, we are confronted with the harsh economic realities imposed by lower oil prices.However, this immediate challengeadvises on the path for long-term economic management.

    One area of policy consensus in the management of the Nigerian economy is the need to deepeneconomic diversification and accelerate on non-oil export growth. While we can no longer correctly describe the Nigerian economy as “monolithic” because the data from the rebased Gross Domestic Product (GDP) last year shows it is not, further gains in diversifying the economy is required; and widening the Nigerian export market beyond oil is crucial. Since Nigeria returned to civil rule in 1999, this prognosis has informed the thrust of economic policy. Areas where the government had previously invested exclusively, like telecommunication, was opened up for private investment in 2001. President Jonathan has now removed the policy bottlenecks to private investment in the power and agriculture sectors.

    With the policy path already charted, what is now needed is more depth and width in sectoral impacts. The Nigerian Export – Import Bank (NEXIM Bank), in playing its role as the official Trade Policy Bank of the Federal Government, holds out the Manufacturing, Agro-processing, Solid Minerals and Services (which we encapsulate by our MASS Agenda) as the sectors that will help the country make a lot of progress on the twin-objectives of economic diversification and non-oil export growth. With the imminent government transition, it is fitting to discuss how these sectors can help the agendafor structural transformation of the economy and widening the base of external trade. This I start in earnest with the manufacturing sector.

    Africa Exemplification

    According to United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the contribution of Africa’s manufacturing to GDP grew from 6.3 percent in 1970 to peak at 15.3 percent in 1990. Since then Africa’s manufacturing-to-GDP ratio has been on a decline; it fell to 10.5 percent in 2008. Africa’s premier manufacturing economy, South Africa, saw its industrial sector decline from 20.9 percent of GDP in 1994 to 12 percent in 2013. Even with recent advances in manufacturing in a few African countries including Nigeria, the contribution of manufacturing to total domestic production on the average has yet to match the pre-1990 peak.Nigeria’s manufacturing sector expanded to 6.8 percent of GDP in 2013, according to the revised data which Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS) released following the latest rebasing of the GDP.

    As Africa’s manufacturing sector was declining, industrial production in China and other emerging Asian economies was accelerating. Asia’s export-led industrialisation model basically stifled Africa’s domestic manufacturing ascheaper imports from China flooded the local markets and replaced locally manufactured products in Africa. The Nigerian textile industry virtually disappeared for this reason. As the substitution and replacement of Africa’s manufactured products with Chinese imports was intensifying, Africa’s commodity trade was expanding. This combination foisted the structural rigidity that has become the key feature of African economies.

    In effect, a pattern of trade emerged in which Africa began to trade its primary goods mainly outside the continent while also sourcing its consumer goods from outside. This is in contradistinction to the scenario in the 1970s when Nigeriaproduced a number of items including pharmaceutical drugs, cosmetic products, building materials, textiles, home tools and plastics for domestic consumption. A lot of the products were also exported to other West African countries. The anticipation of progression into processing ofseveral agricultural produce including groundnut, cocoa and cotton became the basis for brighter prospects of the Nigerian manufacturing sector. Unfortunately, this was not realised.

    Domestic Policy Support

    As inward trade affected the performance of Africa’s manufacturing sector after 1990, so will the return of manufacturingreshape how Africancountries will trade, going forward. The essential feature of that change would be increased intra-Africa trade. But the outset of this would be domestic import substitution. In Nigeria, manufacturers would have to be supported by the government more deliberately to serve the domestic market and also export. According to UNCTAD, the Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) model that grew the share of manufacturing to African GDP in the 1970s could not be sustained because most of the domestic firms failed to be globally competitive even as they also required high foreign exchange to import intermediate inputs and capital goods. These pitfalls can be avoided by increasing productivity of domestic firms and opening up of trade channels among African countries. But it is my view that government cannot provide too much of the support for increasing the productivity and hence competitiveness of the Nigerian manufacturing sector.

    In the period of our manufacturing hiatus, a lot of advancement has occurred in industrial production in the international environment. This poses uphill tasks for a beginner in the local environment today. Few of these challenges, among others are one, low-quality manufactures are giving way to high quality products in line with unification of consumer tastes. Two, global manufacturers have amassed a lot of capital which continues to provide them the advantages of scale and price. And, three, capital and innovation have become sesame twins; the combination is a challenge to nascent manufacturers.

    One can exemplify the likelihood of convergence of these risks in a single manufacturing operation. A few years ago, we celebrated the birth of a locally manufactured computer brand by one of Nigeria’s most dynamic entrepreneurs. But today, rapid changes in the global ICT industry and a fast rate of adoption of new innovative variants of computer devices, may have seen to the quick decline of the Nigerian brand.In this scenario, the option we have is for government to invest more in science and technologyeducation and also provide support for the private sector in investing in R&D.Going by the market experience of the little-elaborated case study,it becomes quite clear that government patronage of indigenous manufactured brands, important as it is, is not going to be enough to support locally manufactured products. Except the process of innovation is supported, all the other measures will prove inadequate.

    In terms of financing commercial operations, Nigerian manufacturers have often complained about their inability to access funding for their businesses. Very often, this is expressed with regard to financing restriction posed by high costs of credit offered by commercial banks. Implicit in this, however, is the absence of some varieties in available funding sources, and the lack of scale in theexisting ones. While a number of the options like private equity, venture capital and equity and debt capital are in the sphere of the private sector (local or international), the government can provide additional options through state-promoted development finance institutions. With specific regard to manufacturingfor export, NEXIM Bank functions by statute as one of the globally recognised Export Credit Agencies (ECAs) like US Exim. The difference would be scale of interventions. It is in this regard that current efforts to supply scale to the local development finance space is in the right direction and should be sustained.

    ECAs are important because, when they help local manufacturers to identify and/or access markets abroad, they strengthen domestic production;thereby preserving and growing local jobs. Export market exposure to local manufacturers can accelerate adoption of quality improvement and best practices that are critical to business success and continuity.

    It is facing reality to assert that government cannot single-handedly plug the financing gap and provide all the other forms of assistance that are needed to expand the manufacturing base. However, to attract commercial and development assistance from other quarters, government has an important role in providing a stable macroeconomic environment. The good news is that, again, this has been one other important target of government economic policies in Nigeria well over the last decade. In the most, Nigeria has provided the needed macroeconomic stability; and inflation has been in single digit. Except on two major occasions that external volatility in the price of oil had inducedthreats of financial instability(during the 2008 – 2009 global financial crisis and the current episode in which oversupply and slow demand growth has crashed the price of oil), the country has been a stable financial market.The basis of future macroeconomic stability of Nigeria is well-founded in the progress we have made overtime and the positive market performances it has engendered.

    NEXIM Bank AndTrade Infrastructure

    Since NEXIM Bank holds out the manufacturing sector as the key lever of improved Nigerian trade in non-oil merchandise, we have looked at how to help address non-tariff bottlenecks in West and Central African sub-regions. NEXIM Bank is currently facilitating the setting-up of a shipping line that will provide direct maritime links with countries of the two sub-regions that have been Nigeria’s traditional trading partners. Our innovative intervention in this area entails helping to organise private sector investors and operators in West and Central Africa, in collaboration with Federation of West African Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FEWACCI), Transimex S.A. of Cameroun and other institutional stakeholdersto pool resources to solve a common challenge in expanding intra/inter-regional trade. The soon-to-be-launched shipping company will provide direct maritime links to countries in the sub-regions which will drastically reduce freight and other logistical costs to shipping within the sub regions.

    Aside from this, there is a wider need for infrastructural development to support production and market access across NEXIM’s identified “MASS” sectors. From physical infrastructure and energy to soft infrastructure including R&D and policy innovations, there is a wide scope for support of government efforts by entities in the private and social spaces, and those outside of government’s core bureaucracy.

    Conclusion

    The benefit of sustainable job creation through investment in and support of the Nigerian manufacturing sector is immense. What might pose the biggest challenge is market access. But Nigeria has the numbers. With an estimated population of more than 170 million largely youthful population, there is a good basis for investment in manufacturing in Nigeria. It is not coincidental that Africa’s richest man, Nigeria’s Aliko Dangote, operates a manufacturing group. His phenomenal success serves as a validation of how the domestic consumer market can serve as the springboard for access to the wider African and global markets.

     

    Roberts Orya is Managing Director / Chief Executive Officer, Nigerian Export – Import Bank

     

  • The perils of columnism

    The perils of columnism

    If you went strictly by what the late William Safire of The New York Times once said about writing a newspaper column, you might think that it is a perilous undertaking only in a physical sense.

    It is like standing under windmill with your head dangerously close to its rotating blades, he wrote.  Relieved that you had ducked a blade, you looked up only to find another one coming down.

    Safire exaggerates, of course, but the analogy is on target.  You bask in the excitement of seeing your journalistic labour in print one day and while you are still digesting the reactions pro and contra, another deadline looms large.  So it is from one column to the next, and the next.

    As Frank Rich, another master of the form has pointed out, the relentless production of a newspaper column can push you to express stronger opinions than you actually have, or contrived opinions you may not care deeply about, or run roughshod over nuance to reach an unambiguous conclusion.  And if you stay long enough, Rich adds, you run the risk of turning bland or shrill.

    And of course, there are in this age of the instant, unexamined response, those who are forever standing by not merely to tell you that you are wrong, but that what you had written could only had issued from a mind that is at once diseased, demented and disoriented.

    It has been said of President Goodluck Jonathan that he maintained at the public expense an army of such cavillers to harass and excoriate commentators who were not particularly enamoured of his so-called transformative agenda.

    This past weekend was the grim anniversary of one of the darkest chapters in Nigeria’s history: Boko Haram’s abduction of some 250 female students from their school hostel in Chibok, in Borno State, and their forcible march to the bowels of Sambisa Forest and thereafter to places unknown.

    Perhaps still chafing from his electoral loss, Dr Jonathan allowed the occasion to pass without comment.  Not so President-elect Muhammadu Buhari, and the community of the grieving.

    What would Dr Jonathan have said anyway, given that his dilatoriness and his wife’s witch hunt of innocent officials had pre-empted hot pursuit and rescue?

    Still, his rented army of cavillers would have savaged those who had the presence of mind and the humane concern to draw attention to this festering sore on the nation’s conscience.

    But I digress.

    When you deliver yourself obliquely as this columnist frequently does, there is, on the one hand, the danger that some will see through the subterfuge and desire to get even, and on the other hand, the twin danger that some will not get it and will wonder aloud why a person so lacking in knowledge and insight should have been allowed to inflict his imbecilities on the public.

    Of those two groups, the first is the one to be feared.  For there is no knowing how far they might go to settle scores.

    In my Rutam House years, whenever someone accosts me at a gathering and asks, “So you are the Olatunji Dare?” I mentally reconnoitre the setting for the nearest exit, measure the distance separating us and figure out in nanoseconds how I would block, sidestep, deflect or otherwise obstruct a punch to the nose or a kick to the groin.

    It never came to that.  But even today, I still wonder what some people might do if they felt sorely aggrieved over my writing.  Fortunately, for the time being at least, I am safely beyond their reach.

    Pardon the conceit, but journalists are also writers.  Wittingly or unwittingly, they teach; they teach ways of expressing self, of viewing and experiencing the world.  They teach attitudes and habits.

    What they write has consequences.

    This thought struck me with particular force the day I received a text message from a young man complimenting me on my column that he had just read, and informing me without fuss that he always took his opinions from the column.  I had always sensed that writing a column carries some responsibility, but not on that scale

    What if the columnist was wrong?

    A columnist can indeed be wrong for any number of reasons – prejudice, arrogance, ambition, insufficient knowledge, carelessness, disingenuousness, venality, muddy-mindedness, and sheer charlatanism.  If  I was wrong – and it is guaranteed that I will be wrong from time to time and from issue to issue —  I would have misled the young  man and doubtless others who looked up to me for leadership and guidance on public issues even if the error resulted from the purest of motives.

    That is no easy burden.

    These reflections flow from the media commentary on the recent general elections, in which the leading columnists lined up subtly or militantly in support of the status quo or change.  Here, as on the really important issues, there was no neutral ground.  To be “neutral” is to harbor no objection to the status quo, and hence to endorse it implicitly, if not explicitly.

    Of all the columns on the elections, easily the least nuanced was that of Dr Femi Aribisala, the Oxford-educated international affairs expert -turned pastor and public affairs commentator.

    From the one pulpit, he subjected the Bible to the kind of criticism that peer reviewers for the most selective journals reserve for sloppy submissions.  From the other, he belted out the most slanderous invective week after week on Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and General Muhammadu Buhari, while heaping the most exorbitant praise on Goodluck Jonathan —the best president Nigeria ever had, far and away the most accomplished, the most cerebral.

    The general election would witness Tinubu’s demystification in Lagos State, and would lead ultimately to his disgrace and political death.   By naming General Muhammadu Buhari its presidential candidate, the APC had already lost the election.  Buhari was not in the least qualified for the position, and would never be president.

    Aribisala’s strictures on Tinubu and Buhari and everything they stand for were so hate-filled that they raise serious questions about his urbane antecedents and his claims to being a priest.

    In this, he bears out George Orwell’s remark that the worst advertisement for Christianity is  to be found in some of its adherents

    All scriptures teach that hatred even of the objectively hateful is subversive of that charity on which the just society must ultimately be founded.  When the hatred is deep, ingrained, reflexive and unremitting, when it impairs reason and distorts judgment, you have to wonder what has happened to Aribisala, not too long ago a person of much charm and exceptional promise.

    The elections have come and gone. Virtually every prediction he made with the certainty of an oracle failed.  Tinubu has emerged as the most influential and most accomplished figure on the Nigerian political scene; General Buhari is set to take office as President of the Republic

    In Lagos, the APC won the gubernatorial election and an absolute majority in the State Assembly.  It won comfortable majorities in the two houses of the National Assembly, and no fewer than 19 state governors won election on its platform.

    But Aribisala has not summoned the courage or humility to fess up to his monumental errors and apologise to the reading public.

    It is not simply that he was wrong:  He was irresponsibly wrong.  He betrayed the thousands who looked up to him for guidance and orientation.

    For a columnist, there is no greater sin.

  • Governors move to hijack PDP from Jonathan

    Governors move to hijack PDP from Jonathan

    •Rivers, Delta, Akwa Ibom, may now finance party

    Fresh woes may be on the way for President Goodluck Jonathan following his ill fated re-election bid.

    Most of the governors elected on the platform of his party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), are understood to be plotting to sideline him in their plan to rebuild the party.

    The governors, outgoing and surviving, want to chart a new course for the party with them in the driving seat.

    But they are also disposed to bringing in as many of those frustrated out by President Jonathan as possible, sources familiar with the development told The Nation in Abuja yesterday.

    Barring any alteration of their plan, the governors are expected to go full blast from May 29, hijacking the party’s affairs from President Jonathan whose tenure terminates on that day.

    One of those the governors have listed to bring back to the party under the reformation plan is former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who shredded his PDP membership card in the run up to the just concluded presidential election, and publicly campaigned against the President’s return to office for what he termed below par performance.

    Also likely to be brought in is the Second Republic Vice President Alex Ekwueme, who engineered the founding of the PDP during the late Gen Sani Abacha  regime.

    Sources said yesterday that Friday’s public castigation of President Jonathan by Governor Babangida Aliyu of Niger State for causing the fall of the PDP from power in the elections, was not a co-incidence.

    Aliyu who doubles as Chairman, Northern Governors Forum said in Minna that President Jonathan and PDP’s defeat in the elections was caused largely by his failure to keep to the alleged single term agreement he reached with the North on assumption of office.

    Besides, the reformation plan is believed to have informed a recent meeting in Dutse, Jigawa State attended by Governor Sule Lamido of Jigawa, ex-Governor Orji Uzor Kalu and others.

    “Some PDP governors, ex-governors and party leaders have started talking on how to revive the party and restore its glory as a democratic party,” said one source.

    “It might involve doing away with the present crop of leaders in the party to restore the PDP to its pre-1999 era. Some of the present leaders of the party have been rated as ‘mere usurpers’ because they have destroyed it.

    “One of the issues on the card is how to snatch the party from the grip of President Jonathan who brought in the present National Working Committee (NWC) which failed to sustain the party’s winning streak.

    “We will not allow any individual to own the party anymore. Even if you are a former president, you have equal right as any member of the party. This is what has made the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa to survive over the years, including the apartheid period.”

    Another source said: “The reformation of PDP might be pioneered by some of the founding fathers of the party like Chief Ekwueme and other members of the Board of Trustees of the party.

    “It might involve bringing in on board former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, former national chairmen of the party, ex-governors, past elected leaders and others who can help to revitalise the party.

    “It is going to be a total overhaul of the party from the grassroots because we realised that we have really lost our goodwill and focus as a national party.”

    Alhaji Atiku has repeatedly said he has no intention whatsoever to dump the All Progressives Congress (APC) for the PDP.

    He has turned down several overtures from the leadership of the PDP to jump ship including a recent personal visit to his Abuja residence by President Jonathan.

    The Nation also gathered that pro-Jonathan forces in the PDP are not prepared to give up.

    They are said to have drawn up a revival plan of their own with President Jonathan as the rallying point.

    They are looking up to the incoming governors of Akwa Ibom, Delta, Rivers states to bankroll the PDP revival project.

    Lagos State was in the original plan but that is no longer possible with the loss of the party’s governorship candidate, Mr. Jimi Agbaje to the APC candidate, Mr. Akinwumi Ambode .

    “Unless these rich states intervene in financing our party, we may not be able to fully recover,” a member of the NWC said.

    He added: “You know we have never been in opposition, it will be difficult to survive.”

     

  • ‘Statesman’ Jonathan in last-ditch manoeuvres

    ‘Statesman’ Jonathan in last-ditch manoeuvres

    Nigeria was awash with reports a day before the governorship and Houses of Assembly polls that President Goodluck Jonathan had visited Lagos on Thursday to confer with PDP leaders on how to win the state elections. He also conferred inexplicably with Gani Adams, a factional leader of the Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC), who has dedicated himself as an enforcement instrument in the hands of the president. After grieving for a week or more over the lost presidential poll, Dr Jonathan suddenly on Thursday bestirred himself, perhaps on advice from hawkish aides, and began to plot far-fetched schemes either to grab power in a few key states, such as Lagos and Rivers, or to engineer crisis of undetermined and far-reaching consequences.

    While it was not clear last week just how far he was willing to go — whether he would go for broke, or whether he would fail again — it is at least evident that his capitulation two Tuesdays ago was not due to any altruism on his part, as he said yesterday in Bayelsa State, or what was misconceived as his statesmanlike disposition. Given the president’s desperate and despairing manoeuvres moments before the state polls, it is believed that his capitulation was probably due more to international pressures, particularly from the United States.

    Dr Jonathan has never been truly and fully convinced about democracy or its indispensability for growth, peace and stability. In fact, in all his public discussions and speeches, he has offered nothing original on the topic. Those who ascribe to him noble deeds and democratic principles are, therefore, grossly exaggerating. He is also not a democrat by any interpretation of the concept, and had shown throughout his presidency that at bottom he was uncomfortable with the term. Given his dazed and vacant look on television moments after conceding defeat to the APC’s Muhammadu Buhari, Dr Jonathan gave the impression he wished a miracle could rejigger the result of the presidential poll, or even upturn the entire election and end his private nightmare. Until he hands over on May 29, the scorched Dr Jonathan remains unpredictable.

    At the time of writing this column, polling in some parts of Lagos was being marred by violence and irregularities. Sporadic shooting, ballot box snatching, wrong result sheets and other electoral malpractices were already reported in some parts of the state. Some of the disruptions were allegedly sponsored by uniformed security personnel, whether genuine or fake. Two days before the polls, the APC had alerted the country to alleged plans by the president’s men to subvert popular will through various forms of electoral shenanigans. The party’s spokesman had disclosed that the president met with some PDP state leaders and Mr Adams, the OPC factional leader who secured a multi-billion naira pipeline protection contract and openly swore to work for the victory of the PDP. The APC spokesman also disclosed that police, NYSC and military uniforms were being procured and distributed to thugs to engage in electoral violence.

    But Reuben Abati, presidential spokesman, suggested that there was nothing wrong with the president meeting anyone. Though he confirmed the APC spokesman’s disclosures, Dr Abati nonetheless argued that there was nothing unusual in the president’s Thursday meetings, including meeting Mr Adams. The president of course has the right to meet anyone, but it speaks volumes about Dr Jonathan’s sense of propriety and judgement that on the eve of a major election, he saw nothing wrong in meeting Mr Adams who a few weeks ago paraded the streets of Lagos with OPC militants destroying APC billboards and openly mocking the impotence of the security agencies.

    Dr Abati also tried to testify to the president’s fairness and impartiality by suggesting that because he conceded defeat, he could do nothing to jeopardise the polls. But what does the country make of the presidency’s interference in police postings? A few days before the poll, the Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Suleiman Abba, had shuffled the posting of some top police officers, perhaps in an effort to ensure peaceful polling. But both in Lagos and Rivers, the two states allegedly targetted by the presidency for the PDP, the IGP’s postings were overruled without notice. Obviously the presidency is engaged in desperate measures to accomplish certain goals. There is no explanation Dr Abati can offer to persuade the country of Dr Jonathan’s altruism. Clearly, the president regrets his defeat, and perhaps, too, is still shaken by his hasty concession. He is unable to reconcile himself with the political tragedy that visited him, and can’t seem to appreciate the value of what relief and reassurance that widely acclaimed concession of defeat has done to the country.

    As this column suggested last week, while Dr Jonathan did well in the particular instance of conceding defeat to Gen Buhari, that lone act does not compensate for his many malfeasances, poor judgement, bad policies, poor leadership, and considerable misdirection of the country. One act, no matter how weighty, does not make a statesman. As events are showing, including the president’s last-ditch effort to reverse or mitigate his loss and lessen the damage to his image, not to talk of his meeting with characters who do not ennoble his blighted presidency, there is nothing fundamentally statesmanlike about him.

  • Negative and positive triumphalism

    Negative and positive triumphalism

    Somehow, the inimitable President Goodluck Jonathan, the same man buried by political defeat in the March 28 presidential poll, but now canonised as a statesman by a grateful and relieved nation for conceding defeat to his opponent in the race, Muhammadu Buhari, a former military head of state and candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), has begun to wax philosophical. On Tuesday, the president was quoted, via his spokesman’s redaction, as expressing worry and displeasure at the attitude of some traditional rulers and politicians, whom he warned were exhibiting negative triumphalism.

    “President Jonathan is especially concerned about the negative triumphalism that has been put on display by certain elements since March 31 which flies in the face of his personal commitment to post-election peace, unity and national stability,” wrote presidential spokesman, Reuben Abati.  “The President calls on all those, who through their actions and utterances, have been promoting divisiveness, sectionalism and ethnic hatred in the country following the outcome of the March 28 elections to cease and desist from actions that detract from the true spirit and culture of democracy envisioned by patriotic men and women of goodwill in Nigeria.”

    Triumphalism, by every consideration, remains triumphalism, and it is always denotatively negative. But, well, in his closing weeks in power, the president may be permitted the luxury of juggling quaint words and evocative messages. However, does he believe himself? There is nothing to show he does. His rhetoric was triumphalist when he quashed the fuel protests of 2012, pouring scorn on Lagosians whose pampered children, he said, cruised around in their daddies’ numerous cars, guzzling petrol. In the years when security agents smashed opposition parties’ annex offices, and policemen overrode the directives of governors, and the military trampled on the media, the president sat serenely indifferent, his triumphalism displayed and voiced with regal, undisputable flavour.

    But quite apart from the triumphalism he plaintively complained about, the president also denounced what he described as the promotion of divisiveness, sectionalism and ethnic hatred. He should have added the exploitation and amplification of religious differences, something the president was quite adept at and encouraged with relish. When it comes to ethnic divisiveness, the president is a class act. During the 2011 campaigns, he promoted one ethnic group against another. And in the Niger Delta, he kept mum as former militants threatened bloodshed if their kinsman, to wit, the president, was denied a second term. Throughout his five years or so stay in office, the president made no significant contribution to the ‘true spirit and culture of democracy’ which he glibly spoke about in his triumphalism letter.

    Concerning the rule of law, he not only refused to denounce PDP governors who undermined the system, he even managed to lend muscle to the subversion of the law by sacking the President of the Court of Appeal, Ayo Salami, describing his action euphemistically as nothing but mere suspension of the eminent Justice. He always of course paid lip service to the culture and true spirit of democracy, but there was no single profound idea on the subject from him, and no extraordinary and sacrificial step to promote its principles.

    What is evident is that the president is humbled by the obscurity in which his electoral defeat has consigned him. His current position, going by the Nigerian culture of grovelling before office holders, is worse than lame duck. Most of his top supporters have deserted him and are jumping ship furiously. Security and law enforcement agents, who were once willing to ride roughshod over the constitution, and were even willing to break every unambiguous law in the land and intimidate the public with show of force, have openly or covertly begun to reach out to the government-in-waiting. President Jonathan is now willing to receive anyone interested in visiting him. In addition, he can now neither initiate nor implement any major state policy. Sapped of the will to govern by the unexpected defeat he suffered on March 28, President Jonathan broods around the corridors of power, enervated by the long two-month wait for the inauguration of the new government. He thus imagines his victorious opponents exhibiting triumphalism and displaying other vices which he reads to their every wink and smile.

  • GEJ’s phone call to GMB: the dangers of hyperbole

    GEJ’s phone call to GMB: the dangers of hyperbole

    Whatever criticisms anyone may make of President Goodluck Jonathan’s six-year presidency which will end on May 29 – and God knows there’s a hell lot – he cannot be denied credit for his statesman-like March 31 phone call to his rival, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, in which he accepted defeat ahead of the formal declaration of the opposition All Progressive Congress’s (APC) presidential candidate as victor, the following day.

    That simple call was possibly, even probably, the most difficult decision of the president’s political life, considering the unprecedented bitterness that had characterised this year’s general elections, thanks mostly to the hawks the man surrounded himself with, several of whom had sworn, presumably with a wink from him, that Buhari will never be elected president of this country.

    However, while the president deserves the praise singing that has been heaped on him for that simple but, at the same time, difficult, phone call, it must be said that the country stands in the grave danger of over-exaggerating its significant, in the sense that it is being made to look as if it is enough to atone for the enormous sins the man, his lieutenants and his Peoples Democratic Party have committed against Nigeria and Nigerians the past 16 years.

    No doubt the phone call averted the descent into chaos which many a doomsday prophet – not least semi-official American institutions that had predicted Nigeria’s implosion this year – had prophesied for the country. Even then anyone who thinks that that phone call alone has completely dispersed the storm that had gathered over the nation before and during this year’s general election may be in for a great shocker.

    There are critics of the president who say his concession was forced. Perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn’t. However, a two-page statement issued on Monday by the Chairman of PDP’s Board of Trustee, Chief Tony Anenih, titled “Marching on with Hope” suggests that the phone call wasn’t so voluntary.

    “President Jonathan,” Anenih said in the statement, “has worked, selflessly, to deepen democracy in Nigeria. His consistent advocacy of the rights of the people to freely choose their leaders had earlier yielded free, fair and credible elections in some States of the Federation. Now, a peaceful transition is expected to follow after the general elections.” (Note his phrase, “in some states”, presumably PDP).

    Coming from a man who originated and popularised the notorious phrase, “No vacancy in Aso Villa,” the man must think Nigerians are idiots to believe his claim that anybody in PDP can deepen, or has indeed deepened, democracy in Nigeria; after all, advocacy is not practice, and no one resident in Nigeria the last 16 years will agree with “Mr Fix-it” that PDP chieftains ever practiced the principles of anything they preached.  In any case by apparently tagging the election as half-free, it is obvious that his party, and certainly the man himself as its presumed conscience, did not accept Buhari won it fair and square.

    Yet, in spite of Anenih’s dubious caveat about the credibility of the election, President Jonathan’s phone call may have been sincere. However, there are at least two tests by which the president can prove his sincerity beyond any reasonable doubt, one immediate, and the other during and after the transition.

    The immediate test is his willingness to call to order the governors of PDP states and Abuja-backed PDP elements in opposition states who made it almost impossible for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to use card readers in their states and generally made their states hell on earth for the opposition in the March 28 elections through the use of thugs, army and the police, notably Akwa-Ibom and Rivers, the First Lady’s home but opposition state. The president should charge these governors and PDP Abuja politicians to allow for free, fair and credible governorship and Houses of Assembly elections in their states this weekend.

    In addition, he should prevail on the PDP governors who lost their senatorial bids on March 28 – notably those of Niger and Benue states – not to resort to the Samson’s Option of bringing down the roof on everybody’s head they seem hell-bent upon adopting in the same election as punishment against voters in their states for their rejection.

    The second, and bigger, test is how willingly the president cooperates with the in-coming administration in personally accounting for his six-year rule and how far he succeeds in persuading all his lieutenants to do the same.

    General Buhari has assured that his administration will not “witch-hunt” anyone. This is as it should be. However, this cannot mean letting all bygones be bygones. To do so would be to teach the wrong lesson that all it takes for politicians and their sidekicks to get away with the kind of corruption and impunity we witnessed in this country in the past 16 years, the last six in particular, is simply for an incumbent to anticipate the formal announcement of his defeat.

    Re: “Buhari- Fourth time lucky”

    Sir,

    Let us join hands and thank God for Saturday March 28, 2015. We asked for it, and He graciously gave it to us.

    Chief Tony Chigbo,

    +23450494477.

    Sir,

    APC has won the elections. Let sleeping dogs lie.

    +2348057366302.

    Sir,

    Your piece today (April 1) is as usual solid but for the constant recourse to religion and ethnicity. It’ll be good if you could stop looking at the Nigerian crises from the prism of ethnicity and religion.

    Chijioke Uwasomba,

    OAU, Ife,

    +2348037058775.

    Sir,

    I don’t know the inner workings of our darling APC, but to ascribe the ‘poor outing’ in the South-South to Gov. Amaechi’s failings is disingenuous and cruel. Please we need to close our flanks.

    Mikefe Tanno

    +2348062322295.

    Sir,

    I hardly reply to articles but in your case of Wednesday April 1, I couldn’t hold myself. Please don’t set a dangerous agenda with your attack on Gov. Amaechi. The fact that GMB won is a testament to the good job he did as DG. You must appreciate the high risk he took in his fight with the presidency on behalf of GMB. Even some of us who were unknown supporters were nearly mobbed in several quarters.

    The point I am making is that it was not easy being a Buhari supporter down south. Therefore, your early attack on Amaechi’s style is unwarranted and uncalled for.

     +2348030784586.

    Sir,

    Your article, “Buhari: Fourth Time Lucky”, was another insightful piece.  However, permit me to strongly disagree that Governor Rotimi Amaechi, the Director-General of the Buhari campaign team, “came highly recommended”.  If truth is not to be turned on its head, Amaechi came to the position with more brawn than brain.  That was why he found it almost impossible to run a cohesive campaign where all the various tendencies could have been carried along.

    Yes, Amaechi may have been right in trying to check the over-bearing excesses of some leaders, but the limited presence of the other serving Governors and party leaders in the campaign, would have brought Buhari’s electoral bid to grief, but for God’s grace.  This is why, without doubt, many discerning minds rightly say the triumph of GMB was hardly due to the efforts of his party.

    Segun Adewale

    Sir,

    There you go again trying to cause schism among APC leaders and followers. Amaechi never alienated Tinubu and others. They worked together as a team. APC lost the S/E and S/S to money politics, the army and corrupt INEC officials.

    +2348075476140.

    Sir,

    Thanks for your usual great attempts at an equilibrated presentation. A word, however, on the perennial suspicion of GMB for Islamic fundamentalism.

    He is said to have made the application for the thorny membership of Nigeria with the OIC, which IBB later ratified. On the other hand, I read from factchecking.ng in GMB’s defence,  that the OIC Conference of Minister, the OIC organ responsible for treating application did not discuss Nigeria during GMB’s military rule, and therefore it was not he who applied for it; in fact, that he refused to sign to full membership of Nigeria because Nigeria was a secular state. In any case, since secrecy has surrounded the ratification of full membership, some of us are still unaware of the details.

    Be that as it may, could GMB add to his top restoration agenda the restoration of that secular status please?

    I believe this message can reach the president-elect through you.

    Sincerely,

    JOSEPH AKAA

    joeakaa@yahoo.com

     

    Sir,

    I have watched good writers of our time like you doing good job. But personally, I would like you people, using your influence and contact, to ensure that that patriotic and uncompromising army captain who leaked the rigging of Ekiti governorship election is reinstated in the army.

    This captain must not lose his job. He is the unsung hero of our time.

    Alhaji Abiodun Hussain,

    +2348023311676.

    Sir,

    FFK (Femi Fani-Kayode) is Publicity Director, not Director General of PGEJ’s (President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan) campaign organisation. The DG is (Col) Ahmadu Ali.

    +2348073647104.

     

    I stand corrected. The error was inadvertent. Another error was my reference to Buhari’s running mate as Professor Femi Osinbajo, instead of Yomi. Both errors are regretted.