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Tag: Azu Ishiekwene

  • INEC server and other election day stories – By Azu Ishiekwene

    For the third time since 1999, I voted at a general election on February 25 and did so without much hassle. I knew my candidates would lose at the unit where I voted, but that didn’t matter. Voting mattered more.

    The Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) processed me so quickly it was almost like magic. I had no reason to suspect my experience would not be the norm that day.

    As I walked away from the booth a family friend who had just voted caught up with me.

    “Thank God that I have voted,” she said. “What gives me even greater joy is that my vote has gone directly to the INEC server, unlike the last time.”

    I was puzzled.

    “How do you mean?” I asked.

    She explained that the last time she voted in 2019, a manual register was used to accredit her. The process was so long and time-consuming, she said, it left her drained.

    “Yet, even as I was voting on that day,” she recalled, “I knew that my vote could be tampered with very easily. But it was different today. My thumbprint went straight to the INEC server, as I pressed the ballot paper.”

    I was even more puzzled now.

    Where did she get that from? The bimodal voting machine first used on a limited scale by Nigeria’s election management body (INEC) in a state election in 2021 is capable of fingerprint and facial identification. After capture, the information is then uploaded from the polling unit along with the result sheets to INEC’s server.

    Even with the bimodal machine, however, ballot papers will still have to be sorted, collated, counted and the results recorded manually, signed by agents and the polling unit officer, before the result sheet can be uploaded.

    This educated, middle-class female voter and friend had stretched INEC Chairman Professor Mahmood Yakubu’s promise of result upload and transmission to its elastic limits, confusing it with electronic or internet voting.

    The anger, frustration and disappointment from the February 25 election appear rooted not only in the feeling that INEC had betrayed its promise, but also in the betrayal of the personal fantasies which that promise had spawned in many.

    For the fourth time in 12 years, general elections have been postponed either mid-vote or just on the eve. This is the third time, however, when postponement on this scale would be as a result of unanticipated technical difficulties by the election management body. We had similar situations before in 2011 and 2019.

    Perhaps given the difficulty that INEC faced after the February 25 election, especially the multiple legal challenges by the political parties, postponing the governorship election earlier scheduled for March 11, was the most practical thing. It might have been suicidal not to do so.

    Yet the jury is out on how this devil’s alternative might affect the outcome of Saturday’s governorship and House of Assembly polls in 28 out of the country’s 36 states.

    Perhaps one of the biggest concerns is voter turnout, which reached a record low of 26.7 per cent on February 25. Will voters who turned out in their numbers in defiance of threats and violence in some places still brave the odds and turn out to vote again on Saturday? Or will they be so disappointed and frustrated with the outcome of the presidential and National Assembly polls that they won’t bother?

    There’s still a lot to play for. The suffocating hold of state governors over Nigeria’s politics, for example, appears to have been broken. For the first time in decades, the ruling party lost nine states, while seven sitting governors failed to make the Senate, their new retirement home.

    Also, 20 winning candidates emerged from political parties other than those of the incumbent governor in the February 25 poll, significantly redrawing Nigeria’s electoral map. These gains weaken the argument of widespread rigging by the opposition.

    Unfortunately, the trope has gained ground among the party faithful as flame-throwing by politicians has worsened. One unintended consequence of the prolonged grieving is further loss of faith among voters who braved the odds to vote on February 25. This is the last thing the opposition needs at a moment of promise and significant electoral gains.

    Voters have sacrificed a lot for this moment and it would be a shame if politicians mismanage it. Two voters who symbolise the February 25 historic vote were Jennifer Efidi Bina who defied beatings by thugs and knife stab wounds to vote at Surulere Local Government in Lagos; and Chiedu Francisca-Oye, mother of a three-month-old baby, who carried her baby on her shoulder and also dragged her husband around Abuja until she finally voted.

    These two voters and millions like them didn’t turn out for an electoral one-night stand. Francisca-Oye, in fact, told me after going to three different wards without finding her name, that whatever the difficulties she encountered on that day, she was determined to vote. Neither technical glitches nor thugs nor even the blazing noonday sun would prevent her.

    “I will not give up,” she said, with beads of sweat forming on her brow and her baby on her left shoulder swaddled in a white linen.

    If either she or Jennifer or anyone of the millions of voters who turned out to vote on February 25 are reluctant to come out again on Saturday, it would not only be because INEC’s server let them down. It would also be because politicians who ought to help them deepen faith in the process have been clutching at straws.

    They have a right to seek redress and INEC should respond forthrightly. Yet it’s fair to say that these politicians have looked for scapegoats everywhere except in the mirror where it would have been obvious that more than anything else their own poor choices, especially internal divisions, have landed them in this misery.

    A viral joke described how in 2015, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) formed an alliance of four main parties to defeat the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) at the time. In 2023, however, instead of using the APC’s playbook against it, the PDP waged a war against itself and splintered into four miserable parts, each part hoping to win.

    There have been challenges in this year’s election: Underperformance by the electoral management body; attacks by thugs and threats to life; bank note misery in the midst of an economy in chaos; severe petrol shortages; and on top of it, politicians who after causing their own defeat choose to look for catharsis in scapegoats!

    Yet, daunting as the odds may be, sometimes it’s useful to look back to remind ourselves how far we have come. In 19th century Britain, for example, politicians in cahoots with the church used to lock voters up in boroughs close to polling centres ahead of polls, after corning them, just to make sure they voted in a certain way.

    This election season gimmickry included a range of self-serving schemes intended to bend voters’ will. According to Susan C. Stokes and others in Brokers, Voters and Clientelism, politicians continued in this perversion for years until the material condition of voters began to improve.

    Nigerian voters may have left the 19th century voter detention camps, but our politicians are not significantly better than the brokers of that British era who will go to extremes to exact the electoral outcomes they to want to see. The worst thing voters can do on Saturday, is to surrender by staying away.

    The last straw that broke the camel’s back was not one stroke. It was, instead, a gradual accumulation of strokes, just before the final blow. Voting this Saturday, may well be one more strategic stroke that brings the back of this monstrous electoral camel near breaking point.

    It’s not a job to leave for politicians.

  • Osinbajo: A leader for all seasons – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Osinbajo: A leader for all seasons – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Trying to fit him into a mold can be sometimes problematic. I have always thought of him as a teacher and mentor. And later, only much later, as a friend. For over three decades he has been more than enough in each of these roles.

    My path with Dr. Yemi Osinbajo, as he then was, first crossed at the University of Lagos when he was a lecturer at the Faculty of Law and I was a student at the Department of Mass Communication at the same university. Just a busybody trying to indulge my fantasy of becoming a pocket lawyer, I met him out of curiosity.

    One of his students and good friend of mine who passed on many years ago, Sunday Okoli, fondly called Harry, gave the impression that the Law Faculty had four of the university’s biggest talisman – Jelili Omotola, Oyelowo Oyewo, Amos Utuama and Osinbajo.

    One day, I strayed into one of Osinbajo’s classes in what can only be described as ambulatory trespass. I was struck by his charm, ease of delivery and how his students connected with him. I thought to myself as I snuck out, with a lecturer like this, perhaps I should have studied law? I never returned to his class but that encounter stayed with me.

    I followed him through the many pleasant stories Harry told of him but our paths never crossed again until many years later when he was appointed Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice in Lagos by Governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

    In 1999, Lagos was a mess. A big mess.

    Although the city still retained its vibrancy and boisterousness as the country’s commercial capital, years of neglect and centralised government had robbed it of vital energy, threatening to bury it in crime and filth.

    To make matters worse for a new government at the time, a nasty turf war between the PDP-controlled central government and the six AD states in the South-West (including Lagos), meant that any serious attempt at clean-up which obviously required significant resources from the centre, would be a tug of war.

    President Olusegun Obasanjo, smarting from the humiliation of the 1999 election in which he was roundly rejected by his home base, the South-West, was not in any mood to do Lagos or any other states in the region any favours.

    The mission to clean up, rebuild and renew the city (among several other election promises made by Tinubu) would require tough, even brutal, political engagement; no less than it would also involve soft skills, especially prudent and robust use of the law, to clear landmines and claw back vast subnational territory long appropriated by the unitarist state, rendering the federating units mere appendages of the centre.

    It was in the pursuit of this latter part that Osinbajo, a member of Tinubu’s outstanding cabinet at the time, had to deploy his legal genius in public service for the first time outside the classroom.

    Leading human rights activist and senior advocate of Nigeria, Femi Falana, once told me that even though political activism will continue to be a major tool to restructure Nigeria, the progress made through legal activism has been largely understated.

    Before Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike made VAT a court issue, challenging the right of the federal government to collect the taxes from the state, Lagos had been there in its quest to expand its income and the relative autonomy of the constituent states by testing the law.

    Osinbajo led Lagos in a series of litigations to claw back swathes lost to federal meddling in areas such as creation of local governments, physical planning, title registration, registration and production of vehicle number plates and casino licensing. In the area of physical planning and title registration specifically, the court ruled that the federal government has no land. The Land Use Act vests ownership and control of land in state governments.

    In a ruling in 2019 in a case earlier originated by Lagos State when Osinbajo was AG, the state also secured a judgement that upheld its right to charge and collect consumption tax from hotels, restaurants and event centres within the state.

    The judgement is based on the principle that the power to impose consumption tax is on the Residual List. This judgement was also given against the FIRS that deemed that it had the right to collect those taxes.

    These battles on legal interpretations of the Constitution are not cut and dried. The dispute that arose over the right of control of inland waterways between the federal and state governments, for example, was fought in court for over 10 years, before a ceasefire was brokered between the National Inland Waterways Authority and Lagos State.

    Perhaps one of the most remarkable legal battles of all in Osinbajo’s time in Lagos was in the case of Attorney General of Lagos State v. Attorney General of the Federation 2004, a feisty and protracted legal tango in which Lagos sought to recover local government funds seized by Obasanjo after his futile attempt to crush and capture Tinubu’s government in an electoral heist which claimed five of the six states in the South-West region for the PDP.

    That recovery effort, in the words of Osinbajo, “made Lagos to start thinking like a sovereign.” It set the tone for raising the state’s Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) from around N600 million monthly in 1999 to N45 billion as of 2021.

    It also set the tone for Osinbajo’s performance on the bigger stage.

    Have you seen him lately? His hair has greyed not a little since he became Vice President eight years ago. Which is a little surprising considering that former President Goodluck Jonathan, himself a former Vice President, once said a Vee Pee’s job is essentially to read newspapers.

    Or to quote first US Vice President, John Adams, who described his office in a letter to his wife as, “the most insignificant contrivance” ever contrived by man.

    But that’s precisely the source of Osinbajo’s festering grey hair. In the last eight years, the job of Nigeria’s vice president has been anything but a spare. He has been acting President during which time he took a few of the most consequential decisions.

    His office has been at the heart of Nigeria’s first attempt to develop a social safety net programme. When COVID-19 hit with its depredations, the database from the safety net programme came in handy.

    Osinbajo has been the Buhari government’s face-of-the-youth, rallying them, speaking to and for them on all things – from crypto to ICT and innovations. Surely, in a country where people under 40 form about 65 percent of the population, these exertions are more than “insignificant contrivance.”

    I’m not so sure how meaningful his knowledge of the law and expertise in jurisprudence has been to this government. One thing he has been passionate about which the government has flaunted, however, is the Ease of Doing Business. It’s largely to his credit that Nigeria has improved from a ranking of 169 (out of 190 countries) in 2016 to 131 two years ago.

    I have sometimes wondered what is next for him, after he leaves office. Of course, he has a thriving law practice from which he was extricated to serve as Buhari’s running-mate one fateful morning in December 2014 after an appearance in a case at the Supreme Court, Abuja. If he returns to his Chambers in Lagos, it may well be a holding place.

    At 66, he remains a calm, thoughtful debater and fun to be around. He has inspired and challenged millions of people, especially the young and the young at heart across ethnic and party-lines, to believe. With an extraordinary sense of humour, a rock-solid wife and a heart of faith, his best years of service to God and country still lie ahead.

    He is not only a teacher, mentor and friend. He is, above all, a leader for all times.

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Looking back, facing forward as Nigeria decides – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Looking back, facing forward as Nigeria decides – By Azu Ishiekwene

    It’s hard to imagine that it’s nearly eight years since. This time in 2015, I was over the moon with the prospects of a general election that was certain to end the government of President Goodluck Jonathan, which had lost its way.

    Folks were so excited at the prospects of change that in the South-West, a Yoruba version of “February” the month of the general election, was improvised: “Fe-Buhari”; meaning, “Love Buhari”, thus investing him with the aura of Cupid, the Greek god of erotic love. That’s how over the moon we were. Not without a reason.

    Boko Haram’s violent extremism was at its worst. Life on the streets, schools, and home was insecure. Corruption was rife and audacious. Jonathan claimed he was doing his best, but wherever you went, it felt different. 

    His government had obviously been captured by forces beyond him. A sad fact that he publicly admitted more than once, but which did not acquit him. A president is elected to solve problems, not make excuses.

    When the wind finally got out of his sails, Jonathan invoked the consolation of failing leaders: the benevolence of history. History, he said, would remember him kindly.

    On the eve of another presidential election nearly eight years after those forlorn words, it does seem history may, after all, be kind to Jonathan the man famously called Nigeria’s most “incompetent and clueless” president. In a twist of fate, his successor, Muhammadu Buhari, thought to be the most capable to nail Jonathan’s political coffin, may well be the one who writes him into sainthood.

    As Nigerians go to the ballot on Saturday, February 25 to elect a new president, not a few voters think that the worst mistake would be to let Buhari happen again. 

    Not that he is on the ballot. He has exhausted his eight-year constitutionally permitted tenure of two terms. But as his broken promises on security, poverty alleviation and corruption stalk voters to the 176,606 polling centres across the country, the last thing they want is to cast a vote that repeats the error of 2015.

    Buhari solved a few old problems, of course. Boko Haram is in significant retreat. More supplies and equipment are reaching soldiers at the frontlines. Also, greater attempts have been made to provide infrastructure, stimulate agriculture and restructure the super-opaque oil and gas industry.

    But new problems have replaced old ones. The most debilitating being the calamitous absence of Buhari. Never a man to interfere with his subordinates once he has appointed them, in his last days in office, things have gotten worse. He is present only in name, going from delegation of authority to spectatorship and from spectatorship to surrender. Abdication next? The cat is away and the mice party was never so boisterous.

    If voters remember Jonathan as the president who always seemed too confused to get a grip on his government and too besieged to even recognise that he was in charge, they will remember Buhari as the president who loved his office so passionately, he forgot why he was voted in the first place.

    In Buhari’s eight years in office, nothing summarises his unfortunate isolation and aloofness from the common misery like the current crisis over the redesign of three of the country’s eight bank notes. Not many argue with the merit of the redesign or the powers of the Central Bank to carry it out, when necessary.

    There is reasonable suspicion that massive cash may be fueling corruption, and especially kidnapping and banditry – the new Boko Haram franchise. Although there have been cases of kidnappers and robbers dragging their victims to ATMs to extort cash, withdrawal limits and fear of exposure reduce the amounts of money that can be extorted.

    Apart from that, the Central Bank can hardly ensure stable monetary policy if the country is floating on cash.

    Also, politicians who may have stockpiled for distribution during the forthcoming elections are bound to find the current redesign and restrictions quite uncomfortable. 

    Yet, like every currency, this whole redesign business has two sides. Whatever the benefits in ease, convenience or philosophy, it has so far been implemented with a callousness that makes the ransoms demanded by kidnappers and bandits look like freewill offering. State governors called the supply crisis “currency confiscation.” It’s a grab, actually; a vengeful grab that makes India’s catastrophic example seven years ago, look like a child’s play. 

    According to Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), mopped up N2 trillion in old notes, but printed new notes of only N300 billion; that is, N1000 new notes for every N7000 old ones. 

    And yet in a country with a commercial bank ratio of one branch to 100,000 adults according to IMF 2021 data, the CBN expects that within an immutable period of three months, Nigerians should adjust to the incredible depletion in bank notes and make up the rest from their digital wallets, or perhaps use tissue paper?

    As of this week, a commercial bank with over 120 branches and 150 ATMs nationwide, for example, was allocated about N30 million new currency for the day. At the N20,000 withdrawal limit, that supply may not serve more than 10 customers or maybe slightly more per branch, for that day. That is the recipe for the chaos that has made bank tellers targets of violent attacks by angry customers.

    A statement by the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF) on Saturday after futile attempts to get Buhari to weigh in or even comply with the interim order of the Supreme Court, said the CBN’s data does not support the premise of the redesign, never mind the mad haste to implement it. 

    “According to the CBN,” the statement said, “the currency in circulation increased from N1.4 trillion in 2015 to N3.23 trillion in October 2022. The bank appears not to have taken into consideration the increase in the country’s nominal GDP over this period, the doubling of consumer prices, rising population, and the impact of the humongous Ways and Means advances to the federal government over this period.”

    And over this period, the governors might have added, the same central banker, Godwin Emefiele, has also been governor of the Central Bank.

    To be fair, when the governor announced the policy last October, he said the bank would not release more than 20 percent of the bank notes retrieved. But he didn’t say the bank will not print even notes not affected by the redesign to meet the shortfall.

    It’s not Emefiele’s fault that his okra tree has grown taller than the farmer. It’s Buhari’s style to let his appointees run amok. Sometimes, it produces geniuses like Works Minister, Babatunde Fashola or mavericks like Communications and Digital Economy Minister, Isa Pantami. But more often than not, it produces monsters that threaten the system.

    Was that not why voters nailed Jonathan lock, stock and barrel, to the electoral cross eight years ago after only one term? Why should voters who rescued Buhari from despair after four failed attempts at the presidency and, after accepting his promise of repentance and change, gave him two terms of eight years, be rewarded with preventable hardship? 

    Sure, Nigeria needs to stamp out distributive politics; but it’s not Buhari’s job or that of the Central Bank to fight vote-buying. The police, the election management body, the parties and other law enforcement agencies are mandated to do that.

    It’s regrettable that a president elected to make life at least bearable is rewarding the country with rations of basic things even at peace time: petrol, electricity – and even their own savings – while citizens line up outside the presidential villa watching TV footages of pointless meetings. If all of this is about our long-term salvation, at this rate, we’ll all be dead in the long run?

    If Buhari doesn’t care because unlike Jonathan, he won’t be on the ballot this time, and therefore he couldn’t be bothered what happens next and perhaps even who succeeds him, shouldn’t he at least care how he will be remembered?

    It’s amazing how in eight years things have come full circle from Fe-Buhari to Le-Buhari (‘chase Buhari’ in Yoruba; and in Igbo, a mocking variant, ‘see Buhari’). Even Jonathan’s fantasy of redemption couldn’t have scripted this ending.

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP 

  • Musings after 48 hours with Raila Odinga – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Musings after 48 hours with Raila Odinga – By Azu Ishiekwene

    At first, he appeared to be the most unlikely candidate for the task. After his fifth attempt at running for Kenya’s presidency, surely Raila Odinga is finished, done. The only thing left perhaps was how to update his memoirs. But who needs nuggets from a loser who couldn’t put them to use himself?

    These were the thoughts that weighed on our minds as we thought of inviting former Kenyan Prime Minister and freshly defeated candidate of the Orange Democratic Movement, Raila Odinga, to the 14th edition of the LEADERSHIP annual conference and awards.

    It’s also interesting that since he narrowly lost last year’s presidential election to William Ruto who framed the campaign as an epic battle of “hustler vs. dynasty”, Odinga has received several invitations to speak at major international forums in the US and Europe. There must be a lesson or two about his defeat that keeps the world wanting to hear from his experience.

    But the attraction for LEADERSHIP was even more. On the eve of Nigeria’s general election, with its attendant anxieties, tensions and concerns that violence could mar the outcome – or worse, upend it altogether – who else is more qualified to share valuable experience than a man who was a presidential candidate in the Kenyan general election in 2007, which claimed over 1,200 lives and another election in 2017 which left at least 37 dead, many more wounded and thousands fleeing their homes?

    Only last October, former two-term Kenyan President and also contestant in these two elections, Uhuru Kenyatta, was the guest of the Nigerian government at a ministerial performance retreat in Abuja.

    Unlike when he came on a state visit eight years ago, Kenyatta made no public statements this time, leaving a heavy cloud of cynicism in some circles that the man who betrayed Odinga and paved the way for Ruto’s victory, was perhaps delighted to sneak into Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, like a thief in the night.

    The press couldn’t get Kenyatta to clear the air. So, we thought it would be a good idea to invite Odinga, described as one of the most consequential Kenyan politicians in the last three decades by Professor Femi Badejo in his notable biography, “Raila Odinga: An Enigma in Kenyan Politics”, to shed some light on the cauldron of Kenyan elections.

    I’m glad we did. My two previous articles on Kenya after the October presidential elections leaned more towards Ruto, because I felt strongly that the Odinga and Kenyatta dynasties have run their course and that perhaps Kenyan politics deserved a breath of fresh air.

    But inviting Odinga carried its own risks, too. Just one day before he arrived in Abuja, he held a huge rally in Jacaranda, Nairobi, where he announced there would be a series of rallies against Ruto’s government.

    Odinga insisted that the government was illegitimate, vowed that he would not be silenced, and likened Ruto’s government to the biblical tax collector, Zacchaeus, notorious for inflicting punitive taxes on the people. And then the next day, he got on the plane and headed to Abuja, with a six-member delegation comprising a professor and a senator, to speak on “Credible Elections and an Economy in Transition”.

    If the topic sounded just right for Nigeria ahead of an election foreshadowed by deadly attacks on voting infrastructure, widespread displacement of populations as a result of banditry, and economic chaos; it presented different optics for Nigeria’s diplomatic relations with Kenya.

    Giving Odinga, the leader of the largest opposition party, a microphone after his Jacaranda rally, was like providing a foreign staging post for attacks on the new government in Nairobi, still struggling. It could be seen as lending the “enemy” a hand.

    But it doesn’t matter. Part of why Africa has experienced five unconstitutional changes in government in two years, with West Africa as the epicentre, has been because of shambolic management of elections and political transitions, among other things.

    The continent must grow beyond the rituals of holding periodic elections, which are increasingly trigger points for violent changes in governments. Africa has to find a way to make politics work for a far greater number of citizens who are currently either induced or indifferent spectators in their own game. A good place to start would be a robust opposition. That is why it made sense to hear Odinga out. And he didn’t disappoint.

    As we waited for him to join us at the welcome dinner in Transcorp Hilton on Monday night, I wondered what he was going to say. The Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Mr. Boss Mustapha, was present as were representatives of the Kenyan High Commission, and a crème of professionals and business people.

    Just a few days earlier a friend had shared a viral video of Odinga with me where the former prime minister ribbed his audiences with a bitter joke about Nigeria. It was about a Nigerian minister on a visit to Malaysia, who was told by his host that 10 percent of the money for the nice roads in Kuala Lumpur had been diverted to build the palatial house where the Nigerian minister was being hosted.

    On the Malays’ return visit, he wanted to know where his Nigerian counterpart got the money to build his own palatial house, especially since the roads he had seen were filled with potholes. The Nigerian minister took his guest to the window, smiled and said, “100 percent of what was supposed to have been used to build the roads was used here (pointing to his palace).”

    Yet, if you have read Michela Wrong’s “It’s Our Turn to Eat”, you might forgive Kenyans for making corruption in Nigeria the butt of their jokes. No matter, something told me that out of courtesy, Odinga, a politician who prefaces his speeches with jokes and wisecracks, will as a matter of courtesy, spare Nigeria this time.

    When the former prime minister and leader of the Kenyan Orange Democratic Movement finally showed up in the dinner room without airs, no fuss. He wore a simple blue-and-white long-sleeve kaftan top over a white pair of trousers and entered the room like the regular Joe.

    In my brief comments before he took the podium, I improvised his Malaysian joke saying that he would find Abuja’s main roads well paved. I added that while I wasn’t sure that a kobo of the money used for the roads found its way into the palatial hotel, I could assure him that his host, LEADERSHIP, can account for the cost of the dinner we were about to have.

    He later told guests that the last time he was in Nigeria was in 2007 as a member of the international observers for the general elections that year and recounted how a policeman who had flagged down his car insisted that he looked every inch a Nigerian and admonished him for flouting the restriction order.

    And then, he spoke about the Kenyan election. He said new evidence from the server which the Supreme Court had denied access during the post-election legal dispute, showed that over two million votes which could have given him a clear edge over Ruto were suppressed.

    “How can anyone live with such injustice?” he asked. At that moment I surveyed the room and locked eyes with the representative of the Kenyan ambassador. His face was expressionless.

    Odinga wasn’t done. He said he would not be silenced and that he didn’t think it was too much not just to ask for justice to be done, but for it to be seen to be done and for the will of the Kenya people to find true expression.

    The old war horse that he is, the next day, the main conference day, he deployed a tactical manoeuvre. Of course, he expressed concern about more elections and yet less credible outcomes, about state capture of election management bodies, and the use of voting machines to rig, Odinga left the heavy, pointed lifting to his cohort, Akau Mutua, a Kenyan American professor of Law based in New York.

    Speaking off tempore, Mutua hammered the Kenyan Supreme Court for obstructing access to vital evidence and for its complicity in perverting the course of justice. It’s only a matter of time, he said, before the shenanigans would unravel. As Mutua said that the hall erupted in applause and I spotted Odinga smiling.

    “So, what are you going to do about the newly discovered two million votes”, I asked him later that day in his hotel.

    “You wait and see”, he replied. “We’re building a movement that will hold the system to account for its injustice. How can there be another election until this matter is resolved?”

    At this point, I remembered what his father, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, might have said of Kenya: “It’s not yet uhuru!”

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • A leader like Jacinda Ardern – By Azu Ishiekwene

    A leader like Jacinda Ardern – By Azu Ishiekwene

    A leader like Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand doesn’t come in tens. Not even in twos. And so, it was such a bright day on October 26, 2017, when she took office as New Zealand’s Prime Minister.

    She was 37-years-old and also the youngest head of government at the time. What’s there not to love?

    But now, more than five years later, she has announced the withdrawal of that special light as she resigns the position, stating that she “no longer had enough in the tank” to carry on in office.

    “I’m leaving, because with such a privileged role comes responsibility – the responsibility to know when you are the right person to lead and also when you are not. I know what this job takes. And I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It’s that simple,” she said.

    Leaving office citing burnout is not what politicians do often, but leaving office at 42 when you are almost certain to win at the next general election definitely leaves many of us from the continent with a certain level of bewilderment.

    When Ms. Ardern said politicians are human and should therefore know when it’s time to quit, one was glad, for her sake, that her audience was far from Africa. A number of our leaders would have laughed her off.

    Home to the oldest and longest-serving presidents and heads of government, African leaders and even the followers will probably never be able to understand what Ms. Ardern meant by burnout.

    Burnout means, for example, that 89-year-old Cameroonian President, Paul Biya, should have been long gone and spared himself and his country that pathetic performance at last December’s US-Africa summit where after being towed on stage, and wired to speak, he was still asking himself where he was.

    “I didn’t ask to be here,” Biya told a bemused gathering, and then added drowsily as the boom mic was being fastened, “I’ve become a celebrity!”

    Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, reported as one of the first African leaders to ever resign voluntarily from office, stepped down only after 21 years, and he was about 63 years old. With that, Ms. Ardern would have done four terms and more.

    Another, of course, was Nelson Mandela, who without even the slightest pressure from any quarters declined to run for a second term. But then one can also argue that age was no longer on his side, and that the tank was inevitably empty.

    We can also mention one, two or even more scattered on the continent’s political landscape but the rarity of it all makes Ardern voluntary resignation our own modern-day unicorn.

    Nigeria’s former President and Mandela-wannabe, Olusegun Obasanjo, became military head of state at 39. Twenty-three years later, he ran for office as civilian president and won. He ran for a second term and won.

    And then after exhausting his constitutional two-term limit, deployed foot soldiers who splurged nearly $500m in a futile bid to secure a third term, according to the book by Chidi Odinkalu and Ayisha Osori, Too Good to Die.

    Of course, the world has also seen outliers like Winston Churchill who became British Prime Minister at 66 and was re-elected at 77. The Ardern message is not necessarily about age, else Liz Truss who became Prime Minister nearly 20 years younger than Churchill wouldn’t have been such a disaster. Nor is physical condition necessarily a barrier as the extraordinary record of US President and paralytic, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, showed.

    It’s about moments, about knowing when to say, enough, for the greater good.

    Ardern’s resignation caught many unawares, especially when all she has come to represent in the past five years is weighed in.

    In 2017, at a time when the United States of America’s 45th President, Donald Trump, was inspiring the rise of far-right leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, a different type of leadership sprung up in New Zealand.

    She joined the Labour Party at the age of 17. After graduating from the University of Waikato in 2001, Ms. Ardern worked as a researcher in the office of Prime Minister Helen Clark. She later worked in London as an adviser in the Cabinet Office during Tony Blair’s premiership.

    In 2008, Ms. Ardern was elected president of the International Union of Socialist Youth. She was first elected as an MP in the 2008 general election, when Labour lost power after nine years. She was later elected to represent the Mount Albert electorate in a by-election on 25 February 2017.

    As her tenure as prime minister ends on February 7, it appears that Ms. Ardern has become a victim of her own success.

    And, yes, she has had an amazing run as a leader in today’s world.

    But perhaps, her handling of the COVID-19 crisis will continue to separate her from many others. When the pandemic broke out, she listened to science and locked down early and strictly. And when vaccines became available, New Zealand’s vaccination drive was matched by only a few countries. These measures made New Zealand record one of the fewest transmission rates and COVID-related deaths.

    She left the hyped super powers gasping and trailing behind her and her country as they dealt with increasing body-bag numbers.

    But the world we live in is a strange one in that Ms. Ardern’s exemplary leadership during a global health crisis also earned her more than a few new enemies.

    Quoting data from Newhub, The Guardian wrote in June 2022 that threats against the outgoing prime minister almost tripled over three years. The data showed that she received 18 threats in 2019, 32 in 2020, and 50 in 2021.

    The threats, police records show, were mainly from conspiracy movements and anti-vax groups.

    These people went to the extent of occupying and attacking parliament and calling for Ms. Ardern’s public trial and execution. One fellow even posted on YouTube that he had a legal right and obligation to assassinate the prime minister!

    When she was confronted with the Christchurch Mosque attack, a mass shooting committed by a far-right extremist in March 2019, her deft and quietly revolutionary crisis management skills earned her global accolade.

    Her handling of the Christchurch shooting got noticed around the world, especially her ability to articulate a form of leadership that embodies strength and sanity while pushing an agenda of compassion and community which she herself termed “pragmatic idealism”.

    Ms. Ardern’s effort to regulate firearms since the Christchurch attack has been met with vehement, bitter and bigoted opposition by far-right rebels and their co-conspirators.

    Every of Ms. Ardern’s actions, including when she retreated to the back of the room to breastfeed her three-month-old child, has been dangerously blown out of proportion with unnecessary scrutiny by a section of the New Zealand media loyal to the extreme right wing.

    Understandably, her successor-in-waiting, Chris Hipkins, has vowed to protect his family from what he called the “abhorrent” abuse that his predecessor received while in office. He told Ardern’s bullies that, although he would become “public property” as prime minister, his family wouldn’t be.

    Ms. Ardern’s “sins” may never be forgiven by her adversaries and she may require a special type of security arrangement for herself and her family after February 7. The good news, however, is that New Zealand’s conspiracy theorists and their far-right anti-vax friends in the media would have to search for new prey.

    Ms. Ardern said she was looking forward to finally getting married to her partner, Clarke Gayford, and also to later this year when her daughter, Neve Te Aroha, starts school.

    Hopefully, her assailants and cyberbullies will allow her to enjoy her new life outside politics.

    But head or tails, her immediate family – partner Clarke Gayford and daughter Neve Te Aroha – appears to be the biggest gainers of Ms. Ardern’s decision to relinquish the reins.

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Why we love expensive rituals – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Why we love expensive rituals – By Azu Ishiekwene

    In over two decades since Nigeria’s return to constitutional democracy, this is the longest politicians have had to campaign before a general election. And that is a good and bad thing.

    It’s good because it is giving politicians a longer runway to meet more citizens and also for citizens to have more time to engage them on what they plan to do if elected. But as a number of politicians – especially those of the Nigerian variety will tell you – it’s also a bad thing because it will make them spend more and leave them near exhaustion at the finish line.

    But that’s not all. As far as electoral politics go, there’s no guarantee that longer time spent campaigning equals promises kept in the end. I have said it before that the only promises made by politicians are those they often do not intend to keep. 

    But Tim Marshall said it even more eloquently in his book, Divided: Why We’re Living In An Age Of Walls. “In politics”, he said, “the present is often more important than the future, especially when you want to be elected.”

    Put squarely, campaign promises are made to be broken, with barely any leftover pieces for voters the morning after. Ask the British what happened the morning after Brexit. Yet, in our love of rituals, we hardly remember that campaign promises and manifestos are produced and packaged in gloss and rendered in poetry. 

    Since campaigns for Nigeria’s general elections officially began in September, we have seen candidates of the 18 political parties flitting across the country, holding rallies, attending town halls and debates and meeting different groups and communities. 

    Three of the presidential flag bearers – candidates of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Ahmed Tinubu; Labour Party, Peter Obi; and the New Nigerian Peoples Party (NNPP), Rabiu Kwankwaso – have even gone beyond Nigeria, taking their campaigns to Britain’s Chatham House, a private political think tank.

    Virtually all candidates contesting at national, state or local levels have been promising to turn our night into day and retrieve the paradise lost. 

    Well, if you have been living in Nigeria or have known it in the last eight years at least, this is what the promises look like: taming widespread banditry and kidnapping which have made major roads and highways in some parts of the country unsafe, with rail lines as the new targets; curbing inflation which is currently over 20 percent and unemployment at over 30 percent; reversing the new “japa” wave draining the country of some of its best professionals and young people; tackling systemic corruption; and fixing a political system which increasingly serves fewer and fewer people.

    It’s a basketful. But politicians on the hustings all insist they have the magic wand. Does anyone really take them seriously? Do campaigns, manifestos and election promises affect electoral outcomes? An answer from a young member of the audience at a recent public lecture on campaign tracking hosted in Abuja by an online platform, NPO Reports, got me thinking.

    Campaign manifestos are fancy election tools, but in the end, they are irrelevant to the electoral outcomes. The young man didn’t use these exact words but gave a parable from the odyssey of the first term of former Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State to illustrate his point. 

    Even though Fayemi kept faith, delivering significantly on his election promises, he lost to Ayo Fayose who ran against him when he contested for a consecutive second term. Fayemi was accused of “speaking grammar” and dispensing “big, big English”, in comparison to Fayose whose prioritised “stomach infrastructure”, euphemism for distributive politics and hanging out to eat roast plantain by the roadside.

    In the end, it didn’t seem to matter what Fayemi’s election manifesto was or how far he actually went to keep it in his first term as governor. What mattered, it seemed, was that a perverse demand side (amply exploited by security agents working hand-in-gloves with vested interests) had yielded to the psychology of voter exploitation.  

    It’s not a peculiarly Nigerian thing. Whether it is Donald Trump, Boris Johnson or Jair Bolsonaro, we have seen political demagogues getting elected on what appears to be the most preposterous electoral promises, only for voters to bite their nails later.

    But we have also seen those who meant well come to grief, when the tyre of political campaigns meets the road of governance. Ghanaian President, Nana Akufo-Addo, for example, made lofty promises before election, including creating a “Ghana-beyond-aid”. He was the poster-boy, not only of Ghana’s politics, but also of a continent that appeared bereft of role models.

    But as a result of a combination of COVID-19 and the aftershocks, including wild swings in the commodity prices, Akufo-Addo is hanging by the skin of his teeth today, with the same voters who praised him to high heavens now pouring out onto the streets to demand his crucifixion. He is leaving Ghana worse off for aid and foreign loans!

    Yet, that is not a reason not to track campaigns and manifestos. Since the MIT media laboratory developed the Promise Tracker in 2014, there has been an increasing use of tools to track politicians in many parts of the world. The evolution of these apps, hardly able to tame politicians’ shenanigans or even voter complicity, which I’m sure were present even from ancient Greece, has also raised interest in whether campaign documents should be justiciable or not.

    That is, if APC candidate, Tinubu says he will rebuild our national security infrastructure, create jobs for youths and make Nigeria an exporting country; PDP flag bearer, Atiku Abubakar, is promising qualitative education, restructuring and prosperity; and LP candidate Obi is promising an industrial revolution and seven thematic areas of security; shouldn’t we be able to take them to court if any of them fails to keep their promises? 

    And why, in any case, are we so obsessed with the presidential candidates that we easily forget that candidates at the state and local council levels ought to come within the radar?

    Asking politicians to legislate campaign manifesto is like proposing to prosecute the goat for the yam kept in its care. It’s never going to work. The good news though, is that as a result of improved demand on service delivery by citizens and other stakeholders, governments in a few states are making conscious efforts to create self-tracking mechanisms, which include monitoring and evaluation units. 

    It’s good to blame politicians for not keeping campaign promises and I think we should keep beating them over the head until they learn that it’s not just the rituals of campaigns and the poetry of campaigns that interest us. 

    But if politicians are ever going to take their promises seriously, then voters will have to do better on the demand side. Voters cannot accept to be paid off during campaigns and then turn around to complain that politicians are not keeping their promises after they have been elected. The payoff is the promise kept. 

    And it’s not only about the money. Perhaps if voters focus less on the drama and aso-ebi of campaigns and spend a bit more time to reflect on the “why” and, especially, “how”, of promises made, a lot of post-election misery can be avoided. 

    How many times have we heard politicians promise to deliver the moon on a stick only to say after elections that they never really knew that the predecessor made such a mess of things? And that excuse becomes the trope for another few years before the incompetence shows up for what it really is!

    However well intended promises made, extenuating circumstances, like COVID-19, can upend even the best of intentions. Yet, even in such circumstances, there is always bandwidth for a turnaround. And we have seen, even from COVID-19 examples, that the choice of leaders that voters made was not only vital to recovery, but could also be an insurance against calamity.

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-in-Chief LEADERSHIP

  • Why they shoot friends and spare the enemy – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Why they shoot friends and spare the enemy – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Her funeral rites would have begun on Wednesday, January 11, but were postponed because her family, along with the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), is awaiting an autopsy report. As of the time of writing, the matter had faded from the headlines and a new date was yet to be announced.

    Obviously, the autopsy would serve the legal purpose of demanding justice for Bolanle Raheem, given that legal subterfuge can sometimes undermine evidence and change the strongest of cases in favour of injustice. 

    Hopefully, Bolanle’s assailant, Drambi Vandi, will have his day in court – a right and privilege he denied her. Otherwise, no autopsy is needed to ascertain that if a loaded gun is pointed at a woman and the trigger is pulled and a bullet is fired, the target will die or at the very least, be mortally wounded.

    The Nigeria Police would like Nigerians to accept the farce that they are friends. But their penchant for enforcing death on the next unlucky fellow has, for ages, given Nigerians proof to the contrary. 

    The Christmas Day misadventure, when for the umpteenth time, a policeman allegedly terminated the life of Bolanle Raheem in Lagos left our mouths dry and turned a festive day into a sombre, tragic one. 

    The N5billion the NBA is demanding as restitution for her family won’t change the fact that her life was avoidably snuffed out. Unfortunately, the amount won’t be extracted from the killer cop, but from the state – not a good price to pay for hiring, training and arming questionable characters as law enforcement agents.

    Let me be clear. I have met fine policemen and have been proud of the excellent achievements of a number of them deployed in other countries to serve. Sadly, they are in the minority. How did we come to be afflicted with an armed and murderous force that shoots first and thinks afterwards – if they think at all?

    Was #EndSARS of such limited value that it couldn’t dent the sordid history of years of police abuse? Or how else do we understand friends who keep their guns trained on us, spare the enemy, and shoot to kill on a murderous instinct?

    It’s too short an interlude to even contemplate: Just two months after the second anniversary of #EndSARS and yet another policeman lets loose another canon on a fellow citizen – confirming that, as was feared all along, nothing has really changed. Whether it’s SARS (Special Antirobbery Squad) or SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics Squad), the chameleon by another colour, is still a chameleon!

    The Nigerian Police seem to have a shorter memory than its notorious short fuse – a tendency and reputation for letting fly bullets at anyone gutsy or just merely disagreeing with a policeman holding a firearm. Otherwise, the national outrage from October 2020 was more than enough to have tamed the sadistic instinct to release the safety catch and pull the trigger on soft targets. 

    But why should members of the public be targets of police harassment, let alone murder, when the law – policemen are officers of the law and get a basic training to that effect – recognises even suspects as innocent and deserving of their rights and liberties until otherwise determined through a competent trial? 

    The police in Nigeria are seldom bothered about the law or its letters. They are empowered and enamoured by a uniform, which over time, has become a license for impunity, and a passport to get away with infractions privately and publicly. This appears to cut across all uniformed organisations in Nigeria.

    A good number of Nigerians have a story to tell about the police. Often, the accounts are unpleasant and a debit charge on the credibility of the force. They have in more cases than can be counted, been public enemies despite the pretences to the latter. 

    The general public perception towards them is that of scorn and disdain and they are deemed to be more in alliance with crime and malevolence than they pretend about morality or justice. Just travel by road or mill around busy places in town – or indeed, walk into a police station in the backstreets.  

    The public remonstration against the police anti robbery squad in October 2020 turned global attention on Africa’s largest economy and led to the scrapping of the squad – or more appropriately, its change of designation. 

    But the police haven’t been shy of letting the public know, that like they say in the streets, nothing dey happen! – a Nigerian parlance also used for expressing defiance or indifference.

    And because nothing dey happen with the police, something happened on Christmas Day. A mother and her unborn child became the victims of a “known gunman” – to remind the President that security agents armed with assault weapons and live cartridges either have poor training in weapons handling, or disregard caution altogether.

    The public outcry, once again, is because the tragedy happened in Lagos – a megacity with cameras, citizen journalists and media houses within hearing distance. 

    Callous murders and extortions by policemen have continued after EndSARS in far flung places across the country without media reportage and therefore remaining unknown and uncounted.

    Nigerians travelling by road, especially commercial drivers, are daily compelled to add settlement charges to the police on passenger fares – if passengers and drivers wish to get to their destinations with minimal molestation from officers of the law – trained and paid to protect citizens from harassment and molestation.

    As Nigeria struggles to raise its police-civilian population ratio from an abysmal 1:600, it’s fair to say that quantity alone does not guarantee fewer abuses, as we have seen from the US and, in fact, South Africa, just to name two countries with higher police numbers. 

    An important difference between these countries and Nigeria, however, is that while they are making deliberate efforts to improve the standards of police conduct by punishing infractions when they occur, we have specialised in sweeping police brutality under the rug, while keeping the door open for the worst police recruits. 

    A member of the Police Service Commission (PSC), which supervises staff recruitment, welfare and discipline, Austin Buraimoh, said last February, for example, that criminals were being recruited into the force. And the power play over who does what between the Commission and the top police hierarchy will ensure that this dangerous scandal continues.

    In the aftermath of Bolanle Raheem’s deadly shooting, a senior advocate of Nigeria, Adeyinka Olumide-Fusika, on a live TV programme was obliged to recommend the outsourcing of the force.

    While that may sound extreme, only few would argue that the quality and structure of the force is serving anyone other than a privileged few who pay for special police protection and their bosses who profit not just from this elite indulgence but also from other sordid purposes in which they deploy policemen.

    Until the police force is sufficiently decentralised to the point where states and local communities have significant control over recruitment, funding, training and deployment, quality and performance will continue to suffer. I’m often amused by the trope that states or local communities can’t be trusted to manage local police forces. 

    It’s an argument that ignores the evidence of our own history; it is, quite frankly, a hangover from the crooked unitarist thinking that while it is OK for the federal government to use the police as it pleases, the states and local communities cannot be trusted not to misuse the force. 

    This view conveniently ignores that even in unitarist countries, there are levels of control, inter-agency regulations and mechanisms that set boundaries and define areas of collaboration. Trusting the benevolence of an overwhelmed federal government to manage local policing and security has proved to be a disaster costing too many lives. 

    As long as Nigeria insists on the present broken system, rogue policemen and their bosses up the food chain will continue to fester with deadly consequences. And it doesn’t matter what President Muhammadu Buhari says about justice for Bolanle Raheem, if the system doesn’t change fundamentally, there would sadly be another Drambi Vandi. 

    The only question is, when.

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief LEADERSHIP

  • The trouble with Obasanjo’s wish – By Azu Ishiekwene

    The trouble with Obasanjo’s wish – By Azu Ishiekwene

    I’m sure he expected the firestorm. As is his custom, he primed and released it to explode at his own time and season. If the letter by former President Olusegun Obasanjo endorsing Labour Party’s Peter Obi had gone unnoticed, uncriticised, and un-replied, then it would not have been Obasanjo’s letter.

    The letter had barely landed when the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and, in fact, the Presidency all pounced, with the mildest of them all from the PDP.

    Whatever the misgivings of the affected parties, I’m sure most might agree on the central message: that young people who constitute 65 percent of Nigeria’s population and, according to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), 76.5 percent of nine million newly registered voters, would play a significant role in the forthcoming general elections.

    Those who were only eleven-years-old when President Muhammadu Buhari, who promised change, was voted in only to witness #Endsars six years later when the President was in the first year of his second term, are now of voting age. And those among them who are registered would be voting for the first time, if they have not joined the massive “japa wave” sweeping the country.

    It evokes memories of the “Andrew checking-out” era of the 1980s. Yet, if you have seen the lines at any of the embassies in Lagos or Abuja lately – lines spilling onto the pavements and main roads from behind huge iron gates and turnstiles manned by hefty private embassy security men, set against desperate young faces teeming with frustration – then you will know that what we have on our hands today is worse than the Andrews of the 1980s. 

    It is Andrew plus the mini-exodus of the post-1993 annulled elections, only more gifted and determined than both combined. These are the ones Obasanjo hopes would pour the anger, rage and frustration of #Endsars and the current economic hardship into an electoral tide that would sweep away the old order. 

    The affected parties also know that Obasanjo’s target – the registered remnant not yet on the “japa wave”, that curious, largely agnostic, adventurous and irreverent block – might play an important role in this election. 

    In addition to being the country’s largest vote banks, three regions – the North-West, the South-West, and the South South – currently hold the largest concentration of this youth population. According to records from the National Population Commission (NPC), five states – Kano (3.4m); Lagos (2.7m); Oyo (1.7m); Kaduna (2.1m); and Rivers States (1.8m) – have the highest overall youth population between the ages of 20 and 34 among Nigeria’s top 10.

    Another problem which Obasanjo identified correctly is the sheer scale, scope and complexity of the work required to retrieve Nigeria from the brink. With inflation at 23 percent; youth unemployment at 33 percent; foreign exchange scarcity; declining production and receipts from oil sales; and a looming debt crisis, even Obasanjo’s worst critics might agree that Buhari appears to have used up his successor’s honeymoon.

    What then, is the problem with Obasanjo’s letter? Surely, he is entitled to his choice and opinion which, however weighty, have not always been consequential in all elections. 

    Apart from 1979, when his military government foisted Shehu Shagari on the country, MKO Abiola won in 1993; and Buhari in 2019, both in spite of him. And even when he was a candidate, he lost resoundingly in his own state and his South-West backyard in 1999, only to wrest swathes of the region in a do-or-die subterfuge four years later.

    The hairsplitting this time is not so much over Obasanjo’s electoral value. What is left has been so depleted by his ego, his meddlesomeness and his lust for power that it is hardly enough to win him decisive votes in his Totoro/Soroki Ward 11, even if he were on the ballot today. 

    It does appear that what some folks are concerned about is not Obasanjo’s right of choice or advocacy, but what he might have done, early on, to make it much easier to pave the way for an Igbo presidency. 

    As president for eight years, Obasanjo vehemently rejected any suggestions to help restructure the country, which would have given the regions, especially the South-East, a fairer footing and created a more equitable and inclusive federal system. 

    An indispensable man, he wanted so much power for himself and spared no cost to acquire it, that Obasanjo invested at least $500 million in a phantom third term project, according to Chidi Odinkalu and Ayisha Osori in their book, Too Good to Die.

    It’s a measure of the complexity of the animal called man, that PDP, the party where Obasanjo was alpha and omega for eight years, was – and apparently remains – unable to provide a pathway for Igbo presidency. APC, the Siamese of the PDP, has fared even worse. Ironically, it is the Labour Party, the child of political necessity whose roots and forebears Obasanjo sought to crush, that has produced the cornerstone of his newfound affection. 

    During his presidency, the South-East suffered significant infrastructural decline, while he raised a small privileged class from there to manage his conjugal realm or stir up one political crisis after another. Not once, not twice, but three times, he instigated the removal of Igbo Senate presidents (including Chuba Okadigbo) who had a mind of their own. Yet, they were lucky. 

    The chairman of the Onitsha branch of the NBA, Barnabas Igwe and his wife, were killed in what was suspected to have been politically motivated murders – a bloody record, which littered not just the South-East, but up and down the country, claiming in its trail Obasanjo’s supposed friend and the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Bola Ige. The killers are still at large.

    If Obasanjo was less lustful of power, less controlling and less obsessed about becoming the only cock in the neighbourhood that must crow, the deadly ferment in Igboland today which is a product of decades of injustice might have been mitigated. Also, the region now locked in the politics of self-mutilation and fratricidal violence to air its grievances, might have had an easier pathway to power.

    Obi, first tapped by Obasanjo as Atiku Abubakar’s running mate in 2019, once again deserves Obasanjo’s support and should get it. But what Obasanjo offers is not support; it is nearly five and a half decades of overdue, self-interested atonement disguised as patriotism; it is worse than a Greek gift.

    It’s a gift with a history. And the youth to whom he addressed his letter might do well to remember, too. It’s true as he said in his letter that he became military head of state at 39 and General Yakubu Gowon at 33. If you want to know how much Obasanjo loved the youth in his heyday, ask those who witnessed the “Ali-Must-Go” students’ protest in 1978.

    That protest by students against increase in school fees at the time, remains one of the most violently repressed in student protest history, a foreshadow of #Endsars. But that was not all. 

    The year before Ali-Must-Go, “unknown soldiers” burnt down, well, a youth’s haven, Fela’s Kalakuta Republic, and beat residents with rifle butts and iron bars. Fela’s mother, Olufunmilayo, was dragged by the hair and thrown out the window. She survived the fall, but later died from its impact.

    And for those too blind to see the repression committed in plain sight, Obasanjo’s military regime shipped some offshore, to an Island 100 km off the coast of Lagos, called Ita-Oko, where critics of the military regime were imprisoned. It was an utterly squalid place which, interestingly, Buhari did not only retain, but also expanded when he seized power in a military coup four years after Obasanjo handed over to a civilian government.

    All of this hardly diminishes Obasanjo’s outstanding international record, his appetite for the limelight and, of course, his love of drama. Or indeed his right to suggest who he thinks is best to lead Nigeria. If the leading candidates didn’t think he still matters they would not be fawning over him and feeding his ego for support. They shouldn’t be throwing tantrums now. Obasanjo had them exactly where he wanted.

    The young may be fooled, but not the older ones who have seen Obasanjo as a leader, in and out of uniform, on his farm, on the podium, and in his home. If Obi knows Obasanjo as I think he should, my unsolicited advice is that he should read the former president’s letter of endorsement to the end. Somewhere there, in small print, he would find the words: “Buyer Beware!”

     

    Ishiekwene is the Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • What you might expect in 2023 – By Azu Ishiekwene

    What you might expect in 2023 – By Azu Ishiekwene

    The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) will be shaken to its foundations, but it will survive. The most problematic question for the party of course is who carries its presidential flag in the 2023 election, when President Muhammadu Buhari will step down…If Tinubu survives the ambush of the wolves in his party, the race is over – My precipitations, December 31, 2021

    In the last three years, I have formed the dangerous habit of forecasting what the new year might bring, roughly speaking. The quote above was extracted from the piece I wrote on New Year’s Eve of 2022, six months before the APC presidential primaries.

    Apart from my disastrous predictions that the Super Eagles would qualify for the World Cup and that Senegal and Algeria would be bankable bets, I was bang on the money from Tinubu’s emergence to Wike’s showdown with Atiku Abubakar and from the return of stolen Benin Bronzes to the resilience of insurgency and its franchises.

    Let me start this time with one of the most frequently asked questions: who will likely win the presidential election of February 25, 2023? My guess is that the APC presidential candidate, Ahmed Bola Tinubu, will win. I’ll explain later.

    Concerns have been expressed about whether the election will even hold, especially in light of the worsening violence in the South-East including the burning of INEC offices, insurgency in the North-East and some parts of Kaduna in the North-West. 

    I have witnessed and reported over half a dozen general elections in Nigeria and not a single one has been without the fear of actual or potential violence beforehand. Yet, virtually all held, however contentious the eventual outcome. The next one will not be different. It will hold.

    A closely related question is whether a winner will emerge on the first ballot. This is not a baseless concern. For the first time since 1979 when NPN’s Shehu Shagari and UPN’s Obafemi Awolowo could have potentially gone to a second ballot, the chances that a clear winner may not emerge in the first round of next year’s presidential election never looked more probable.

    Will a combination of the damage by Governor Nyesom Wike’s faction and Labour Party’s Peter Obi be enough to undermine the leading candidates – Tinubu and Abubakar, especially the latter – and force a re-run? I doubt it. 

    Even though this might be the first time in over 40 years that a presidential election would keep the two frontrunners looking over their shoulders to the finish line, my guess, again, is that a winner will emerge at first ballot.

    Tinubu will likely win, and the presidential election will not go to a re-run. Why? The South-East and South-South, two zones that were formerly PDP’s strongholds, have been severely undermined by the crisis in the party and the emergence of Obi. Otherwise, the APC would have had a far more difficult task at the polls, especially given President Muhammadu Buhari’s poor record on the economy, employment and security.

    Some may argue that the South-East recorded less than three percent of the total votes that brought the APC to power in the last two election cycles against the PDP’s 16.6 percent. With Obi’s emergence, however, the hold of the opposition party in that region has never been more precarious. The region may, once again, not vote for the APC’s candidate, Tinubu, but his loss will not be Abubakar’s gain. 

    And even though the PDP’s candidate may perform better in a few South-South states like Delta (where his running-mate is from) and perhaps Akwa Ibom, his performance in these places would be eroded in Cross River where Governor Benedict Ayade carefully thrashed PDP before defecting to the ruling party. 

    In Edo, where the showdown between Governor Godwin Obaseki and his estranged benefactors (Adams Oshiomhole and Wike) has entered the bareknuckle phase, the slugfest promises to leave the governor and the PDP hanging by the skin of their teeth not only in February, but well into the twilight of Obaseki’s remaining 18 months in office.

    Perhaps the biggest electoral blow to the PDP in the South-South will come from Rivers State, the largest PDP vote bank in the region, second in the entire South to Oyo. I forecast, based on what I have heard, that whereas there are less than five billboards of any presidential candidate in main town Port Harcourt as of today, before the end of January, Wike, the most influential of the G-5 governors, will openly declare his support for Tinubu. 

    He will be followed by another member of the group and Governor of Oyo State, Seyi Makinde. Depending on how they hedge their bet, the remnant – Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi (Enugu); Okezie Ikpeazu (Abia); and Samuel Ortom (Benue) – will be left fighting for their political lives.

    It would, of course, be a mistake to suggest that the next presidential election would be decided solely in the South, East or South-South. While events in these regions could significantly reduce the chances of a re-run and tip the scale in favour of the APC candidate, they might also instigate sympathy votes in many core Northern states for Abubakar who will be perceived a victim of a Southern gang-up.

    This sentiment, which will be reinforced by traditional rulers and clerics in the region, will spill to battleground states in the North-West, where Abubakar will perform better than had been forecast in Kano, Kebbi, Katsina, Jigawa and perhaps even Sokoto, largely at the expense of NNPP’s Rabiu Kwankwaso and Obi.

    On the whole, however, a number of moneybags and influential governors who have a manifest stake in the continuity of the ruling party at the centre, will ensure, by all means, that the APC candidate retains the edge over his rival in the North-West; while the North-East apart from Adamawa, Taraba and perhaps Bauchi, will be in significant play for the ruling party.

    The situation in the North-Central states that used to be the bellwether of Nigeria’s politics has been undermined by the toxicity of identity politics and farmer-herder conflicts, especially under Buhari’s government. The sweep of APC’s broom will be impeded in Niger, Kwara, Benue and perhaps Plateau States, where Atiku and Obi could make unexpected gains mainly in faith circles, but hardly enough to change the overall electoral map.

    Of the six South-West states, Lagos, Oyo and Osun will prove the most interesting. Because of the cosmopolitan nature of Lagos (especially the relatively large population of Southeasterners), I forecast that Obi would likely score more votes in Lagos than he would get from three of the five South Eastern states combined. 

    Osun has a record of wild voter swings. But the fence-mending between Rauf Aregbesola and his successor, Gboyega Oyetola, may be crucial to the outcome even though Governor Ademola Adeleke will see the presidential election as the first big test of his clout. 

    Abubakar’s performance in Lagos and Oyo will be severely impeded by the position of the party’s leaders in the region that the PDP has not been fair to the South, giving Tinubu a stronger edge not just in Lagos and Oyo, but also in other South-West states. 

    In spite of discussions in elite circles about issues-based politics, the virulence of the politics of money, tribe and religion will be such as has never been seen in Nigeria for decades. Also, the presidential election coming first, might weigh on the outcome of tight races in the governorship elections in a number of states two weeks later.

    While the general election is not the only tree in the forest of 2023, it is the tree that will define the forest in the year. Until the new president has been sworn in by May and the National Assembly inaugurated in June, expect nothing much. After the elections, it promises to be a six-month year. 

    There would be no honeymoon. The new president will descend into a perfect storm: inflation at nearly 22 percent; unemployment at 33 percent; foreign exchange scarcity and declining revenue from oil sales; looming debt crisis; a population surging ahead of GDP; an inefficient, lopsided and bloated public service; and broken confidence in government.

    It will get worse, at first, as the new president’s men struggle to displace the old, in a combustible lobby industry the kind of which we have not seen in the last eight years. 

    Subsidy on petrol will go, sparking initial higher prices and demand for higher public sector wages by union leaders who know the truth but prefer to play to the gallery. To tackle the scandalous difference between the official and black-market exchange rates, expect the new government to adjust the official rate from the current N430-450/$ to around N550/$ in the first instance.

    Also, expect a dialing back of the CBN’s current over-extended role, among other inevitable changes. The flip-flop over the new naira notes that started with the increase of withdrawal limits to N500,00 will not end there. The deadline for the full introduction of the new naira notes will also be extended from January ending.

    The official reason will be insufficiency of the new notes, but the untold reason will be that on the eve of an election when cash-in-hand is everything, politicians will unfailingly stage a self-interest coup that will confirm that the CBN, like the proverbial okra, never grows taller than the farmer.

    Where will the new government find money? More taxes, tolls and levies. And perhaps by providing a stimulus package for upstream production of oil and gas and the real sector. There’s a racket called “oil theft”, which is reportedly costing the country millions of dollars daily. 

    What is closer to the truth, however, is that the “theft” is largely a fiction created by smart creditors owing banks an excess of $6billion for downstream oil and gas assets they bought, but which they’re either unwilling or unprepared to repay. They have zero appetite for any new investments to renew the assets. 

    Has anyone asked why the wells should keep pumping, knowing full well that the products will get siphoned? Why is no one simply turning off the tap to mitigate loss? And why is this complaint not prevalent in assets managed by foreign oil firms? I expect the new government to tackle this demon and to insist on efficiency as a first step toward raising the country’s production quota and also increasing revenue.

    In nearly eight years, Buhari has used up his lucky charm and also those of politicians who look like him, whether or not they are his party members. Perhaps the year would also reveal that his greatest legacy is the gift of a dangerously divided, utterly cynical, hope-bereft country desperately in search of greatness.

    It’s a year when, to retain one’s sanity, common sense recommends cautious optimism.

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Western hypocrisy loses in epic Qatar match – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Western hypocrisy loses in epic Qatar match – By Azu Ishiekwene

    The shenanigans were always there, but until FIFA president, Infantino Giovanni, called them out in his down-to-earth press conference in Qatar, they remained the elephant in the room.

    The hint of displeasure goes back 12 years ago when Qatar won the bid, defeating Australia, Japan, South Korea and the United States. That outcome was unexpected.

    The Persian Gulf is good news for Western oil and gas supply and tales of mysticism and Arabian opulence, but an Arab World Cup was a different matter altogether.

    European interests pounced. They immediately insinuated that the process had been compromised and later expressed discomfort that the timing could also disrupt major European league schedules and leave players too exhausted to finish the season. Of course, they conveniently forgot that Arab money sustains some of the best European leagues!

    When the excuse of disruption didn’t stick, they expanded the field of resentment, taking care to deploy, from the reserve bench, thorny issues of migrant labour and LGBT rights. Explanations by the Qataris that they were doing everything possible to improve their migrant labour records and FIFA pressure on Qatar to do even more did not satisfy the large sections of the press, the British being perhaps the most notable antagonists.

    They carried the LGBT matter on their heads, leaving their own domestic turmoil unattended. Their attitude seemed to suggest that since football started in England 159 years ago Europeans also have the responsibility of not only setting but also insisting on the cultural rules under which fans can relate and watch the game, regardless of the sensibilities of local communities.

    If Giovanni sounded angry and unsparing in calling out the West over its hypocrisy, he had good reasons to do so. And he was absolutely right that another 3,000 years of atonement would be insufficient to right the wrongs.

    Yet, hypocrisy is a flaw embedded not just in the West’s historical relationship of exploitation, slavery and a sense of entitlement, it remains the hallmark of a number of its current engagements with other parts of the world, especially Africa and the Arab world.

    A number of fairly recent sporting and social events organised in a number of Western countries bear the same marks of abuses and significant social displacements, over which Qatar was threatened at gunpoint, but which the Western press was very pleased to turn a blind eye to in its own backyard.

    During the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996, for example, an estimated 30,000 people were displaced by Olympic-related demolitions, while at least 6,000 residents were evicted from their public housing.

    A number of these displaced persons, mostly blacks, uprooted from their homes and community, never had their lives back again. They deserved as much protection and dignity to life as migrant workers in Qatar.

    And they also deserved to have their voices heard by the global press. But that was obviously too much to ask. Or perhaps the rights of the socially displaced paled into insignificance in comparison with benefits expected from the Olympics?

    As you read this piece, there are reports that many undocumented migrant workers are being illegally used by the French authorities to construct venues for the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics. A powerful network of contractors has been using hundreds of migrants as cheap labour and deployed them, without shame, to build the Athletics Village in the Parisian suburb of St. Denis.

    I’m not sure the Western press or human rights campaigners there can find their way to St. Denis yet or other locations in the West where such abuses are still prevalent. Perhaps after Qatar, they will take interest in the scores of migrant workers, mainly of African descent, pining away at these sites?

    But this hypocrisy is not only limited to sports. London had a flavour of it before the burial of Queen Elizabeth in September. Hundreds of “rough sleepers”, a psychedelic phrase for the homeless, were cleared from around Westminster and many parts of London and herded to isolation camps on the fringes.

    They suffered the same fate of forceful removal, during the Queen’s diamond and platinum jubilees, to prevent the nuisance that their presence might have constituted to the pomp and circumstance of the celebrations! Since such weak and vulnerable people obviously had no rights, standing up for them was, understandably, hardly a matter of interest for the British press.

    Let me be clear. No government, Qatari or not, should exploit the weak and the vulnerable and get a soft pass. Yet, as Thomas Sowell eloquently argued in his book, Migrations and Cultures, it is a reality of economic history that, quite often, out of the pool of migrant workers who may have otherwise been squashed by poverty, would emerge a generation of future entrepreneurs and innovators.

    And by the way, for those who think that migrant labour only comprises the deadly crossings of the Mediterranean by Africans, it may be useful to keep in mind that Giovanni’s parents were Italian immigrants to Switzerland, in the search for greener pastures!

    It is funny that while the press found it quite easy and convenient to scapegoat the Qatari government on migrant labour, it has maintained a hypocritical silence on Western companies in Qatar that are the main employers and beneficiaries of migrant labour.

    From FTSE-quoted contractors to well-heeled New York-based consultants, the monster of migrant workers is the product of a seed planted by Western greed and nourished by Qatari desperation to stage an event that is one-of-a-kind. And beyond the red-herring of migrant labour, LGBT arm-band and moaning over the ban on booze, what an event it turned out to be!

    Favourites, like Brazil, got beaten by Cameroun; Morocco, Africa’s best performing team, crushed Belgium, Spain and Portugal in a dizzying dance to the semifinal; while Tunisia spanked defending champions France in the opening round robin matches.

    And did you notice how maliciously confused the British press was as the tournament progressed – first calling the Moroccans Africans and then Arabs and then everything in between!

    Argentina redeemed themselves after the shock 2-0 defeat by Saudi Arabia, by winning the trophy in one of the most dramatic finals in World Cup history; but there would be a lot more to remember about Qatar 2022.

    With FIFA reporting a revenue turnover of $7.5billion, Qatar 2022 has set a new benchmark, compared to $4.6billion generated in Russia 2018. A report by the organizing committee for Russia 2018 indicates that the tournament added $14billion, about 1.1 percent of GDP, and about 315,000 jobs to Russia’s economy between 2013 and 2018.

    The tournament was projected to add $17billion to the oil-rich kingdom (despite the ban on alcohol which affected profits) in the next few years and billions more in tourism. Most importantly, the success has positioned Qatar, which has had more than a passing interest in landmark sporting events, to bid for the Olympic games in the near future.

    It’s quite a paradox that the tournament whose hosting by Qatar former FIFA boss, Sepp Blatter, had considered a mistake has turned out to be reckoned as the best ever in the history of the game.

    And despite starting with controversy over migrant labour and sundry issues and ending with a tiff over the bisht put on Lionel Messi by the emir, the Qataris can look back with pride and say it was truly one World Cup that left the press – the Western press – eating the humble pie!

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP