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Tag: Azu Ishiekwene

  • Lessons about change from Ruto’s playbook – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Lessons about change from Ruto’s playbook – By Azu Ishiekwene

    In six African countries, the heads of government have been in power for 20 years or more. Attempts to replace them by ballot have either been stalled, frustrated or crushed.

    In a few, like South Africa where the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has been in power for 28 years, new heads of government have been produced more by incest than by the ballot.

    The ruling by Kenya’s Supreme Court on Monday validating the election of the presidential candidate of the Kenya Kwanza party, William Ruto, offers an example that it is indeed possible to remove incumbents and their parties from within – strategically and peacefully, too.

    Whether Somaliland — that perennially troubled spot in the horn of Africa — would find the Ruto route in the next presidential election due in November remains to be seen. But Kenya, its neighbour, is showing the light.

    Don’t be fooled by Ruto’s campaign, though. He was not an outsider or to use his phrase, a hustler, on a redemptive mission to uproot decades of dynastic reign. His career in politics dates back to his days as treasurer of the YK’92, a campaign group that lobbied for the re-election of President Arap Moi.

    He worked his way up from assistant minister under Moi to Director of Elections. After Moi’s exit, he was on the docket for different ministerial positions in the Kibaki-Odinga power-sharing government, always carefully reading the tea leaves of Kenya’s politics. Ruto remained active and involved even in the post-Kibaki era.

    And in the aftermath of the violent 2017 elections that claimed dozens of lives, he came on the international radar for prosecution by the International Criminal Court, but the matter was dropped.

    How, in spite of his 30-year involvement in the good, the bad and the ugly of Kenya’s politics, he still managed to spin a winning legend of “hustler vs. dynasty” is a matter of interest. Ruto is a pseudo-dynast with the heart of a hustler.

    But that’s frankly not important now. Anyone around the continent interested in his legend would be well served to remember that it was not an accidental story. He made it happen.

    Early signs of trouble appeared after the Kenyatta-Odinga handshake following the disputed 2017 elections. The rapprochement progressed from “the handshake” to the heart-hug, and from the heart-hug to the bromance.

    Ruto’s supporters, feeling betrayed that Kenyatta’s proposed constitutional amendment, called the Bridge Building Initiative, was a ruse to gift the Presidency to Odinga, began to break ranks. This, they said, was neither the Kenyatta they worked for nor the one who, in his moment of trial, vowed to back Ruto in exchange for his support for a two-term presidency.

    From that moment on, Ruto returned to his base – the youth, mostly in the Rift Valley region. In spite of his dalliance with the establishment, he never quite abandoned his roots – Lesson 101 in Kenya’s highly ethnically charged politics. Moi was prepping the same base for his son, Gideon, but Ruto was one step ahead. Another lesson that politicians elsewhere could use.

    Ruto also played the victim card to the hilt. He milked his contributions to the success of Kenyatta’s government, wondering why his supporters were being unfairly targeted in the anti-corruption war. It is a story that imitates the dramatic falling-out between Nigeria’s former President Olusegun Obasanjo and his deputy, Atiku Abubakar in 2003, except that both stories had different endings.

    As elections drew near, Ruto painted a David vs. Goliath picture. On one side were two goliaths – Kenyatta and Odinga – both heirs of a decadent dynastic legacy, and on the other was this vulnerable, tiny David with nothing in his hands but the sling of the common touch. The story resonated with millions of Kenyans, especially the young, who felt that the country’s broken politics was no longer working for them.

    According to a BBC report, the unemployment rate among people between ages 18 and 34 is nearly 40 per cent and the economy is not able to cope with nearly one million young people who enter the job market every year. The pity party played to Ruto’s advantage.

    There was something else that rocked the status quo. And that something else is the difference between Nigeria’s Atiku Abubakar’s inability to rout his boss Obasanjo 19 years ago, and Ruto’s success story: salesmanship.

    He was forward-looking and identified himself with the struggles of the people. Even though he was still inside the government, he managed to distance himself from Kenyatta’s faltering anti-corruption programme, posing as the face of an alternative, more prosperous future.

    There are not many African countries where deputies who fall out with their bosses with whom they had been in bed and still a) manage to distance themselves from the government or b) survive to tell the story.

    The 2013 example in South Sudan between President Salva Kiir and Vice President Riek Machar, who couldn’t be any more different from each other than night and day remains a classic. It took the UN’s creative intervention to save both men from themselves and the country in 2020.

    In Nigeria, it is a mark of how deep political grudge runs that Atiku Abubukar who is running for office for the fifth time in nearly two decades after he fell out with his boss, has still not been forgiven. But more important, it also highlights the difficulty in any redemptive rebranding campaign.

    Yet, Kenya’s August 9 presidential election success story, goes beyond Ruto’s playbook. On a continent that witnessed six unconstitutional changes in government between February 2021 and January 2022, it is a tribute to the resilience of a few important institutions in the East African country that it has overcome its sordid history of post-election bloodshed.

    In many countries on the continent, election management bodies are unable to guarantee free, fair and transparent elections. The judiciary that should serve as the bulwark against electoral fraud takes orders from the incumbent executive.

    The more you look, the less you see. In Nigeria, for example, even though the name of the current election management body starts with “independent”, the first time the word would prefix any election management body in 63 years of election management, there are still concerns about the body’s independence. Seven months to the next general election, a number of NGOs have expressed doubt that the body would live up to its prefix.

    Unlike what happened in Kenya, it’s improbable in Nigeria that four of seven election board commissioners, including the second most senior officer, would disagree with presidential election results and stand their ground till the end. Perhaps the only situation remotely resembling that in recent times was in 2015, when Professor Mahmud Jega’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) conducted elections that transferred power from an incumbent to an opposition party.

    As for the judiciary, the Bench has been accused, and not unfairly, of a growing appetite for political cases which often offer lucrative financial rewards brokered by, well, lawyers. The Kenyan example where the Supreme Court has ruled against an incumbent’s obvious interest twice in two straight election cycles in five years is remarkable. Not only because it is an outlier, but also because the quality of jurisprudence on each occasion has been applauded by eminent jurists across the continent and international observers, too.

    And lastly, perhaps, security agencies elsewhere need to learn a thing or two from Kenya. In many African countries, the security agencies are perceived as extensions of the incumbent’s rigging machine. But it’s not just a perception issue. The real problem is that the agencies second-guess the incumbent and go beyond and above the call of duty to protect the regime.

    Ahead of next year’s general election, for example, opposition candidates in Sierra Leone are already expressing fear of heavy-handedness by security agencies after police killed dozens of anti-government protesters in August. It is to the credit of Kenya’s security forces that after their ignoble roles in 2007, 2013 and 2017, they have raised the bar.

    In the end, however, beyond improved institutions and Ruto’s playbook, the election was a success because Kenyans wanted and worked for it to succeed.

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

     

     

     

     

     

  • Kukah’s Stories and Broken Truths – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Kukah’s Stories and Broken Truths – By Azu Ishiekwene

    If you haven’t had a good laugh, you have not been with him. And anyone who knows him knows I’m not joking. The Catholic Bishop of Sokoto, Matthew Hassan Kukah, has the rare gift of humour.

    Not the run-of-the-mill kind that forces a courteous half-smile. It’s the kind that extracts the prey while putting the cat completely at ease; it just cracks your rib.

    It works in good times and in bad. And just as he has done in the last nearly over two decades of being clergyman and public intellectual, Kukah deployed this gift again in a conversation about his new book also meant to mark his 70th birthday in Abuja.

    What gripped me was not his thoughts on the book that Monday night inside the cold bookstore where the organisers dug out an impressive space for the event. Or the searing questions gently delivered by the moderator, Chido Onumah, to which he responded with clarity and painful irony.

    It was Kukah’s sport, his use of anecdotes and stories to reinforce his answers. He took his examples from everyday life, occasionally deploying self-deprecation in ways that said more than the content of Broken Truths, which in itself is an extraordinary collection of lectures and reflections on the enigma called Nigeria.

    Here’s one story, for example. A certain distressed fellow got his phone number through only God knows how. The fellow had been trying to get a government contract. It turned out, as it always does in the Nigerian story, that he could never hope to get past stage one if he didn’t know any big man.

    Kukah, obviously after a siege of multiple calls from the distressed fellow, yielded and took the call. After hearing him out, the clergyman explained that he was not a big man and therefore couldn’t help. The distressed man persisted that all he wanted was to mention Kukah’s name as his “sponsor.” Nothing more.

    “That’s fine,” an exhausted Kukah replied. “Go ahead if you think that would help your case!” The man did. And it worked. He got the contract just by mentioning that Kukah was his “sponsor”.

    In a sense, the story of the distressed man who needed to drop Kukah’s name to find a way is at the heart of the brokenness of Nigeria eloquently captured in Kukah’s collection, his fifth book in 29 years.

    It’s ironic that even as he marks his 70th birthday he is still writing about the same Nigerian problems he wrote about as head of Communications of the Catholic Secretariat in Lagos decades ago; problems he also repeated in lectures, articles and public speeches as he advanced up the ecclesiastical ladder.

    To use one of his numerous painful metaphors on Monday night, things appear to have improved mostly in “regression”. It’s a conundrum famously called the “Writer’s Misery”. Sonala Olumhense, one of Nigeria’s most famous prose stylists, touched on this dilemma on his 60th birthday when he said one of his biggest frustrations was complaining about the same things that he complained about when he was 18.

    Another story Kukah shared on Monday night was how identity politics has been weaponised. As a faith leader, he has worked to build bridges and promote religious harmony with other outstanding faith leaders including the Sultan of Sokoto. Yet, if this election season proves anything, it’s that there’s still a long road to travel as politicians insist on defining their campaign, not by the issues, but tribe, religion and ethnicity.

    As to how he deals with his own identity crisis, he said he is pleased that his village, Anchuna, is not on the map of Nigeria. “When I’m in my state, Kaduna,” he said, “my state comes first and then my village, Anchuna. Of course, the situation changes when I’m out of the country. Then, I’m first a black man, a Nigerian and so on.”

    Then he told another story of how once when he went to visit a senior clergyman, his host was so engrossed in watching a boxing match that he hardly noticed his presence. “After the boxing match ended”, Kukah said, “I asked him who he was supporting. He looked up, puzzled and asked me, ‘What kind of question is that?’”

    “Isn’t it obvious to you that I’m supporting the black man?”

    Identity politics is not a crime. But its salience, especially in the developing countries, is worsened by superstition and the dangerous monopoly of opportunities by the ruling elite. Two books make this point eloquently: Francis Fukuyama’s Identity: Contemporary identity politics and the struggle for survival, and Yuval Noah Harari’s epic, 21 lessons for the 21st century.

    While the former explains why identity politics is the new nationalism in modern politics, the latter chides secular people who are at a loss for the grip of religion on politics.

    Of the three spheres of influence in human development – technical problems; policy problems; and identity problems – Harari wrote, while religion has receded in the first two, replaced largely by advances in research, science and rational thinking with more beneficial outcomes, it still dominates identity politics. Regrettably, however, this is the area where God serves man, the result has been more harm than good.

    Back to Broken Truths. Why broken truths? Onumah asked the question twice, though I was sure it was not the first time Kukah would be asked. After all, outside theology, there is no single version of the truth, a fact which Kukah also acknowledged.

    To illustrate the point, he cited the work of the National Human Rights Violation Investigation Commission set up by former President Olusegun Obasanjo and headed by Justice Chukwudifu Oputa to bury the ghost of the Abacha era, especially, and bring healing.

    Kukah, the secretary of that commission, said it appeared, on the face of it, that Obasanjo meant well. The world was, of course, excited by the South African model, copied from the earlier model in Chile. Obasanjo thought Nigeria could use these examples, too.

    He wanted truth, and possibly reconciliation and closure for the scores, if not hundreds, whose rights were abused under Abacha and even going back. But Nigeria, being Nigeria, many turned up at the commission with petitions unrelated to the committee’s work and demands beyond its brief.

    And Obasanjo, being Obasanjo, the former president also wanted his own truth, his own way! So, while he was eager to set up the committee and make a show of its work, he was far less enthusiastic to follow through with the committee’s recommendations. In the end, what was supposed to mend, still left behind brokenness from which we struggle to recover even today.

    Yet, Kukah said, the illusion that one acceptable version of truth can come from a commission is overrated. It is so, he said, in South Africa, which we love to hold up as the perfect model of truth and reconciliation, as it is in Nigeria, where the mismanagement of diversity remains a plague.

    “Apartheid did not end because truth happened and Whites suddenly realised it was important to discard the system” he said. “It ended because apartheid became unprofitable.” Whose truth? Story for another day, Kukah said.

    This 11-chapter, 259-page highly endorsed book covers a variety of subjects extensively. It sometimes reads, as Kukah himself admitted, like The Argumentative Indian, the book by the 2005 Nobel Prize winner and Indian, Amartya Sen. Broken Truth shows that given Nigeria’s complexity, its triumphs, travails and endless self-flagellation, however, the argumentative Indian could learn a thing or two from here.

    But where did the rain start to beat us? In essays from his thoughts on national cohesion to the existential crisis in the education sector and from human rights issues to the place of Nigeria, and especially its youths, in the future, Kukah insisted that the foundation of today’s crookedness was laid by the military.

    “If the military did not strike when it did and the politicians had been left to find their footing”, he said, “we would not be where we are today.”

    Is there hope of cohesion, any sign that the broken truths would mend someday? “Categorically, my conclusion is that a great future awaits our nation,” Kukah said. “But for that to happen, we need to create new myths, move away from the distorted pictures that have emerged from the writing (and works) of our respected artists who present only the worst of our nation.”

    Those who look at Kukah solely from the lens of his theological dialectics or his intellectual rigour as a thought leader might find his book a bit of a heavy lifting.

    But not to worry, after watching a viral video of him dancing to Kizz Daniel’s Buga challenge, his sequel might yet be from the repertoire of anecdotes and humour which he started writing during his work as secretary of the human rights violation commission.

    Surely, even broken truths presented as humour have their healing virtue.

    Long and well may you live, Your Lordship!

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Have the Hustlers Finally Ousted Kenya’s Dynasties? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Have the Hustlers Finally Ousted Kenya’s Dynasties? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    One of the ironies of politics is how easily fiction becomes reality, and reality, precedent. Before our eyes, the president-elect of Kenya, William Ruto, who has played all sides of Kenya’s politics for at least three decades, has just won an election by claiming to be an outsider.

    Ruto’s electoral epic of “hustler vs. dynasty” appears to have wiped off all memory of his 30-year involvement in the good and bad of Kenya’s politics. This legend won him a razor-thin victory over Raila Odinga in the August 9 presidential election.

    Legends still work. Ruto is proof. It’s a tribute to the epic of this latter-day, PhD-possessing hustler that in many parts of the continent where the support of the incumbent is vital to the electoral success of a successor, especially if both are in the same party, he won in spite of the sitting president whose deputy he has been for 10 years.

    This would be an improbable story in Nigeria. For example, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, also current flag bearer of the opposition People’s Democractic Party (PDP) is running for the fifth time. Twice his electoral misery was spectacularly complicated and eventually ruined by President Olusegun Obasanjo, who as president and later as ex, swore that his deputy Atiku would only become president over his dead body.

    In the case of Obasanjo’s eventual successor, Umaru Yar’Adua, even after he had been confirmed dead, his deputy Goodluck Jonathan was so afraid to step in that it required the combined effort of the National Assembly and CSOs to persuade him to take over.

    And in the recent party primaries of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), the failure of Vice President Yemi Osinbajo to emerge as the party’s flagbearer has been widely attributed to President Muhammadu Buhari’s embarrassing ambivalence.

    Even if Osinbajo could have done a Ruto, and perhaps in his quiet moments asked himself why not, it is unthinkable that he would have jumped off the Buhari wagon without ending up worse off than Humpty Dumpty.

    The boss is a small god. Even at state level where governors reign, not many deputies would dare challenge their governors to an open electoral contest and live to tell the story.

    That is what makes the Ruto story a Nigerian, if not an African, dream. Ruto, who apart from being VP is also Minister of Agriculture, did not only run in defiance of Kenyatta. He has also actively opposed Kenyatta’s policies, thumbing his nose against the president in March when the Supreme Court struck down the government’s “bridge building” constitutional amendment that would have reintroduced the 2013 power-sharing arrangement between president and prime minister.

    Ruto appears to have exceeded his own expectations by going into the race as an underdog and a first timer against a five-time veteran and serial loser, Raila Odinga, who ran in 1997, 2007, 2013, 2017 and now in 2022.

    Defeating the dynastic alliance of the son of the first president and son of the first vice president of the country after independence was remarkable.

    For Kenya, this year’s polls are also a great improvement on previous ones that were marred by violence, which left 1,200 dead in 2007 and at least 37 dead in 2017 with thousands more fleeing their homes.

    Along with Tanzania, Senegal, Zambia and a few others, Kenya is one of the African countries that has not experienced a military coup in its 59-year history since independence from Britain.

    It has retained a reasonable level of stability despite the onslaught from extremist al Shabab in next door Somalia, and the internal upheavals in neighbouring countries of Uganda, Rwanda and Sudan.

    But it had to wage a guerilla and bloody uprising to force the British into conceding independence in 1963, two years after outgoing President Uhuru Kenyatta was born.

    His father, Jomo Kenyatta, the first Prime Minister of Kenya named him Uhuru, which means “freedom” in anticipation of independence from Britain.

    This story, however, is not about Uhuru. It is about how a man raised on the bread and water of mainstream politics managed to position himself as an “outsider” and still caught the voter’s imagination. It is also, of course, about a leadership incubation process that has seen Kenya hold regular electoral contests and produce a more or less effective power transition system over the years.

    Odinga who entered the race as favourite has had another near miss, which could well be his last. His 48.8 percent showing on the result sheets is as close as it could ever get and better than the 43.4 per cent he polled against Kenyatta in 2017. At 77, that’s how close Odinga came behind his major challenger, who is 21 years younger.

    Kenya’s democratic journey is getting better, and hopefully, more resilient. It’s nearly out of the treacherous bend where incumbents in Africa cook up new constitutions anytime the end of their tenure is near.

    The independence of the court would be put to the test again. Four of the seven electoral commissioners have rejected the results of the presidential election, while Odinga is asking the court to nullify the results and declare him winner.

    He is saying that it was not Ruto’s hustler epic that was at play on August 9. Instead, he said, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) got in bed with Ruto, with testosterone supplied by the digital wizardry of three Venezuelan mercenaries named in Odinga’s suit. The result, the plaintiff said in his 15-point suit, is not a new Kenyan electoral prince, but a baby monster.

    According to him the IEBC sabotaged the elections by discarding significant numbers of valid votes and tampering with materials, including electronic documents, devices and equipment for the election.

    He wants the court to authorise the commencement of criminal investigations against the Chairman of the IEBC and, above all, to declare him and his running mate winners of the election.

    A civil society network, called Angaza Movement, that appears to be leaning toward Odinga, has also filed a petition at the Supreme Court. It argued, notably, that there had been systematic breaches in the electoral technology law and that the four-tier process of transmitting results from polling stations to the constituency tallying centres and then to the national tallying centre had been breached.

    The last time, in 2017, the courts ruled in Odinga’s favour by annulling the election. But he boycotted the re-run and conceded the presidency to Uhuru. With Kenya’s institutions increasingly asserting their authority with transparency, the outcome of the current judicial tussle might prove even more interesting than the elections.

    The result will test the remarkable public restraint since the announcement of the result of the election on August 15.

    Was there something else Ruto might also have done right so far, apart from his salesmanship? He is 21 years younger than his rival and pitched his campaign on the generational gear. He sold himself to the electorate as a progressive, the poster boy, not of Kenya’s past, but of its future.

    With a population of 48 million people and 22 million registered voters, about 40 percent of whom are young people, the general elections were very competitive with no clear leading contender after many days of vote counting.

    William Ruto’s marginal win is proof of how very competitive the process has been. But Kenyans are reaping the benefits of the 2010 amended constitution which limits presidential tenure to five years and two terms.

    Ruto appears to have beaten his masters at their own game. In his first post-election speech where he promised to lead for God and country, he also declared Odinga’s villain, the electoral commission chairman, a hero in the first round. But even Ruto knows that in Kenya’s 59-year history no single election has been won or lost without knife-edge drama.

    As the father of his rival and one of the dynastic patriarchs, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, might have said, “It is not yet uhuru.”

     

    Ishiekwene is the Editor-in-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Politicians and the jeopardy of trial by ordeal – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Politicians and the jeopardy of trial by ordeal – By Azu Ishiekwene

    “I’m going to waste my vote,” a friend told me recently. “And don’t argue with me,” he added. “It’s my right to do so.”

    I defied him. Regrettably, even though I also recruited help nearby to press home my point, my unsolicited advice fell on deaf ears.

    My friend’s mind was made up and nothing would stop him. What he intends to do, according to him, is to vote for a candidate in the 2023 presidential election that he knows would lose.

    He did not name names, though in the countdown to next year’s election, I have heard the suspect mentioned by many in this way. His main point was to let me know that he intends to express his civic duty as an act of defiance.

    He’s not alone. According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), even though the number of countries that hold elections have increased over the years, there has also been a continued decline in voter interest.

    In Nigeria it’s been around 50 percent in the last six election cycles. Still as the next election approaches, millions of Nigerians plan either to abstain or to vote for a potential loser.

    It doesn’t appear to make sense, but former Governor Donald Duke’s recent viral video calling such contrarians fools doesn’t explain their action either. What is it about the psychology of the Contrarian Voter that equates a simple civic task with electoral homicide?

    They say that choosing between any of the two leading presidential candidates for 2023 – Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) – is like choosing between death by drinking acid and death by drinking hemlock. Either act, like Hobson’s choice or Cornelia’s dilemma, would lead to the same predictable outcome.

    Isn’t that what we say of most, if not all, of our politicians – that they are mostly old and feeble and perennially corrupt, greedy and bereft? If that is the trope that politicians have canvassed of themselves and which the media has generously spread and reinforced over time who can blame my friend, the Contrarian, for preferring political homicide?

    And let no one pretend there’s a last saint standing. The rose among the thorns, if there were any left, has been crushed by politicians who outdo themselves in mudslinging before every election cycle. They call themselves crooks, bigots and incompetents all of which have been adequately published in the press or logged in the bowels of search engines.

    Pundits like me simply helped to finish off any virtue left, to the point where my Contrarian voter friend is now unwilling to touch politicians with a ten-foot pole. He would rather waste his vote than cast it for scoundrels, he insisted.

    There was no use asking him on whom he intended to waste it. Framing his choice as a wastebasket may be a shade more polite or comforting, but in a way, his wastebasket – whoever he is – is just a cousin of the perennially maligned lot.

    My friend’s position reminded me of an article by one of America’s most outstanding psychiatrist and political columnists, Charles Krauthammer, published in May 1984 and entitled, “The Appeal of Ordeal.”

    Krauthammer, contemplating the decline of trust in politics, asked why anyone should worry about poor voter turnout or indifference when the standard fare every campaign season is that politicians are crooked, corrupt and useless?

    Never mind that when the campaign is over and the day is done, the same politicians who dragged one another in the mud still get into office either in the executive or legislative branch. And yes, they still grant favours to their failed, maligned compatriots. They make the laws and enforce them and in-between even find time to banter and regale us on their follies.

    Only last week, for example, in a rare moment of candour, former APC Chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, told former President Goodluck Jonathan that all the name-calling and thrashing didn’t not come from his heart. “I fought you,” he said, “because of politics”.

    In what other vocation other than politics would subscribers still be expected to subscribe in large numbers after being warned over and over again that the only choices before them are between crooks and that voting either way would have disastrous consequences?

    To adapt Krauthammer, in spite of the troubling record of Dana Air, is it ever likely that rival airlines Ibom Air or Air Peace would cite the crashes of Dana in adverts to promote their own sales. Or that AIICO Insurance would mention by name the failures of any other leading insurance company to boost its own premium-honouring credentials? Not even in a blood sport as cruel as boxing is the fight promoter obsessed with the personal hubris of the contenders.

    Yet in politics, all bets are off. It is, in fact, expected of politicians in whose hands we entrust our lives each time we vote, that their closet should be ransacked, their darkest secrets found and exposed and every bit of their shenanigans brought to light as a rite of passage.

    It doesn’t stop there. Apart from stipulating that politicians must be fiddle-fit, we also insist that they must travel the 36 states, reach all local government areas, bow before every traditional ruler or local idol and dress like the locals.

    Which was why a) President Muhammadu Buhari was dressed in suit and a bow tie it seems for the first time in his life back in 2015 and b) Transport Minister Rotimi Amaechi ran round the Port Harcourt Stadium to prove his fitness for the APC presidential ticket, when families of those kidnapped in the Abuja-Kaduna train attack were drowning in despair. We have seen, haven’t we, that the circus always ends in tears!

    But it doesn’t matter. Being a very religious people, we also insist that politicians must be religious people too. Whatever they do at night, or when no one is looking, all we care about is that they must carry one sectarian label or the other, preferably, Christian or Muslim. But again, haven’t we seen it all – whether in the Oval Office of the Bill Clinton White House with Monica Lewinsky or in the nepotism of the Buhari years – that the hood doesn’t make the monk?

    I know I face the risk of being accused of giving politicians a soft pass and advocating the lowest common denominator. Nonsense. I’m simply saying that in the obsession to find politicians walking where angels fear to tread, we have failed to accept that humans will, be well, humans – foibles, warts and all.

    Those who insist that politics is a special sphere, unlike any other, say standards of conduct must be impeccably high. They prefer to apply the favourite Truman rejoinder that those who can’t stand the heat must get out of the political kitchen.

    We insist that only trial by ordeal can refine our politics. Fair enough. But also keep in mind that it was the frenzy of the Truman era that produced the red-baiting of McCathartysm, among other unenviable legacies of Truman’s broth.

    It doesn’t make sense that we are searching for saints to elect or hoping for high voter turn-out when we spend cycle after cycle of campaign demonising politics and politicians only to end up moaning about the hopelessly corrupt choices before voters.

    By all means let contenders be subject to the rules of the game that they have agreed to participate in. And sure, we also need to strengthen institutions as a safeguard. But in the end, they should be judged as humans and therefore as work in progress, like the rest of us. They should be judged on their record, not as irredeemable scoundrels or wastebaskets.

    For indeed who knew that the 20th century’s most indispensable politician, Winston Churchill, could attain such a remarkable height and life of service after once declaring with his own mouth that he was finished?

    Finished in politics, my Contrarian friend, is where the work starts.

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • On the Podium with Tobi Amusan – By Azu Ishiekwene

    On the Podium with Tobi Amusan – By Azu Ishiekwene

    When a proud Oluwatobiloba Ayomide Amusan climbed the podium in faraway Eugene, Oregon in the United States, as the World Champion in Women 100m Hurdles, not a few equally proud Nigerians mounted with her in spirit.

    She had just set a new World Record at 12.12s breaking Keni Kendra Harrison’s 27-year record and leaving legend Michael Johnson wondering how she did it.

    Whether from their living rooms in Canada, in the consulting rooms of UK hospitals, or even on the streets of Indonesia, where they have all migrated in search of the good life that had eluded them in Nigeria, in those few moments we were all Nigerians. We were there with her on the podium.

    In that brief moment when Nigeria’s National Anthem was played for the entire world, our Nigerian-ness was not in doubt.

    Then the Commonwealth Games started a few days later in Birmingham, UK and our star girl repeated the feat.

    Along with other Nigerian girls, she reminded the world of the greatness that is in and of Nigeria, despite the odds.

    Before the games started, the team found as it was in the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow eight years ago, and even in the Tokyo Olympics, too, that the officials had forgotten the team’s kits.

    The omens didn’t look good.

    Make no mistake about it, Nigeria has everything it takes to be great and occupy a front row seat among nations as a world leader.

    We all know it, even if it’s unfortunate that Tobi, just like many others before her, could only truly display that greatness in spite of, rather than because of Nigeria.

    Tobi Amusan was born and raised Ijebu Ode, Ogun State, Nigeria. Her parents, who are school teachers in a country where teachers are worth 10 for a penny, could never by any stretch of luck afford an education in the University of Texas, El Paso, where she met her current coach, Lacena Golding-Clarke.

    Listening to her during an interview she granted at UTEP in 2018, Amusan made it clear that she couldn’t have gone far without scholarships from the American university and her coach, who is also a three-time Olympian for Jamaica.

    Yes, it’s true that the President of the Nigeria Olympic Committee (NOC), Habu Gumel, has come out to say that Amusan is one of the Nigerian athletes on the sponsorship of the Olympic body with some annual stipends since 2018 till date.

    But that only came two years after her UTEP’s scholarship. As a matter of fact, she went Pro in 2018, which means that though she was still taking courses at the University toward her degree in Health Promotions, she was no longer competing for UTEP.

    It was between 2016 and 2018 that she got the greatest boost her career needed, and that didn’t come from the Nigerian government.

    Nevertheless, her win is for her, as well for Nigeria and Nigerians.

    But typical of Nigerians and our penchant for always searching for thorns even among de-thorned roses, we have managed to make Amusan’s glorious win another moment of national homicide.

    The tears that involuntarily ran down her face while the Nigerian National Anthem was on hadn’t even dried before the ugly divisive theories took over.

    On the one side are those who have obviously ruled out any goodwill towards this country and so the best they could do was to link her tears to everything that has gone wrong with Nigeria. You would think Amusan had written a speech and handed it over to them to disseminate. Yet, every single word came from their own already poisoned selves.

    Of course, it isn’t difficult to understand this almost suffocating bile and its roots. But how do despair and spreading apocalyptic theories make the country any better?

    Then, on the other side are the government apologists, career ostriches who have long unashamedly forgotten their heads in the sands of a clueless and rudderless leadership that has bedevilled this country for a while now. They think Amusan’s win is another reason to sneer at those they have labelled as this administration’s detractors.

    To them, Amusan’s win is another sign that Nigeria is doing well and would get even better if only the critics stopped calling out this government at every turn.

    They always wait for these blue moon appearances on the world stage to gloat about their pseudo-patriotism and the rest of the boloney, that even they themselves would ordinarily find hard to keep down, if their outlook hadn’t been so coloured by illogical self-preservative tendencies.

    The truth they know but prefer to overlook is that for every Amusan out there mounting world podiums in Nigeria’s name, there are countless other athletes who have since given up and would proudly wear the flags of other countries in their moments of glory.

    For instance, in 2016 about 10 Nigerian athletes were at the Rio Olympics for other countries. This was repeated during the last Olympics in Tokyo, Japan in 2021.

    During that Olympics, while only Blessing Oborodudu and Ese Brume were the only athletes that won medals for Team Nigeria, at least 10 Nigerian athletes played for other countries like Japan, USA, Italy and Norway during the games, with some of them winning medals for those countries.

    And, really, no one blames them because the Nigerian government’s poor treatment of Nigerian athletes – and its professionals in general – over the years isn’t some secret tucked away in hidden files; it’s always displayed at every opportunity.

    The unfortunate result is there for all to see.

    Just a few days ago it was disclosed that the UK’s General Medical Council had licensed at least 266 Nigerian doctors in June and July 2022.

    And that’s for a country that has long fallen short of the United Nations and the World Health Organisation’s recommendation of one medical doctor to 600 patients.

    According to a recent report by the ICIR, only four doctors are available for 10,000 patients as of 2022, and this is even said to be the best in the last four years. That’s the same country that has allowed itself to lose three doctors daily to the UK just between June and July.

    In August 2021, armed operatives of the State Security Service were reported to have gone to Sheraton Hotel in Abuja to disperse Nigerian doctors who were arriving for an interview for medical positions in Saudi Arabia.

    The current trend of brain-drain in Nigeria cuts across professions, especially among the younger population.

    That Amusan and some of her colleagues haven’t abandoned Nigeria isn’t because of Nigeria and we must never become so deluded as to think so.

    And that’s what we should celebrate; her win, her strength, her skills and her patriotism, which has proved real and true.

    The performance of our athletes in Birmingham should remind us of millions of Tobi Amusans pining away in the crannies of our country, the same country that produced and nurtured world class athletes from Emmanuel Ifeajuna to Richard Ihetu (Dick Tiger), and from Chidi Imoh to Sunday Bada and Falilat Ogunkoya, among others.

    Turning Tobi Amusan’s golden feat into another opportunity for needless propaganda or spreading bile all over an already fragile country would be a major disservice to this great Nigerian young woman.

    It would also be a great loss of a teachable moment for us all. When the official chest-thumping is over and hopefully some shame and modesty return, the government should decide to henceforth do all it can in the short time remaining to nurture and retain every Tobi Amusan out there, not just in sports, but also across all professions.

    That’s the harder part.

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • To solve a problem like Wike, fix Atiku – By Azu Ishiekwene

    To solve a problem like Wike, fix Atiku – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Seven weeks after the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar announced Delta State Governor Ifeanyi Okowa as his running mate, the man not chosen remains the talk of the town.

    I’m not sure Abubakar (fondly called Atiku) expected this amount of pushback when he chose Okowa over Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike. But just as it is with the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) too, the choice of running mate has become a national obsession, exposing Nigeria’s deepest religious and ethnic fault lines.

    On the eve of Atiku’s announcement of his running mate when the media was awash with news that it might go Wike’s way, a party insider described the Rivers State governor as a “caretaker”. He said, privately, that, “You people will be surprised. After Wike lost the party presidential primary, this is the final rite of passage. The caretaker (Wike) will hand the party over to its owners.”

    That didn’t make sense. Atiku who has the prerogative to choose his running mate delegated that responsibility to two different committees of the PDP. Both overwhelmingly favoured Wike and recommended him. It also emerged after the closely contested presidential primary of the PDP that Atiku reportedly told Wike that he would be pleased to offer him the position of running mate.

    It was not a favour as such. Or a caretaker’s token, as the party insider framed it. After seven years of being out of power at the centre, losing state elections and losing governors to defection, the PDP was broken and on the verge of bankruptcy. Without Wike picking up the pieces and rallying the party, Atiku, the new “landlord” who was on sabbatical to other parties, would not have had a property to return to.

    But that’s not the only reason why many thought that Wike’s choice as running mate was a no-brainer. While the South South remains the fourth largest vote bank, Rivers, more than any other state in the entire South, delivered the largest votes to the PDP in two of the last three presidential elections (1.8m, 2011; and 1.5m, 2015) followed by Delta (594k against River’s 474k in 2019).  Not even Oyo State, the South West’s largest PDP voter base, has matched Rivers in the last three election cycles.

    At the presidential primary in May also, Wike gave Atiku a scare from which the former vice president was saved only by Governor Aminu Waziri Tambuwal’s last-minute manoeuvre.

    Wike had earned his place. To treat him like a mere caretaker or the thought that he should have been offered the running mate ticket as a favour is quite frankly, ridiculous. Much more than any governor in the South South, Wike had something extra to bring to the ticket. That was why Atiku approached him.

    But whatever the qualities of any potential running mate, the prerogative was always Atiku’s. The PDP has found itself in the current mess not because anyone thought that the running mate tail should wag the dog, but because of the candidate’s disastrous handling of his prerogative. He started as a democrat but ended as a tyrant. It’s a big irony that the man who wants to unify Nigeria can’t seem to gather his wits when he needs them most to unify his own party.

    Tambuwal has been heavily criticised – deservedly – for turning his back on Wike. The party Chairman, Iyorchia Ayu, has been hammered for his triumphalism after the PDP presidential primary, and Okowa has also been criticised for breaking ranks with the Southern governors’ demand that the president must come from that region. The harshest criticism must, however, be reserved for the presidential candidate whose arrogance has complicated the party’s problems and damaged its momentum.

    It’s been said that it was not Atiku, but the real landlords and “owners” of the party that swayed him. Specifically, the redoubtable General Aliyu Gusau, Bamangar Tukur, associates of former military President Ibrahim Babangida, some traditional rulers and the old PDP network, including Sule Lamido and the Chairman of DAAR Communications, Engineer Raymond Dokpesi, have been mentioned as the anti-Wike ringleaders.

    A number of these people were said to have expressed the view that Wike’s brashness, his micromanaging style and combustible temper could harm the party’s chances, especially in the North.

    Whoever may have been opposed and whatever their reasons, the last word was with the candidate. He made the call when, after choosing Okowa, he read a statement that sounded more like Wike’s crime charge sheet than it was Okowa’s pre-nuptial affirmation. He must face up to the mess and deal with it, himself.

    Is Wike overplaying his hand? Why doesn’t he just take Lamido’s advice and emulate former governors Peter Odili, Rotimi Amaechi, and more recently, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, who took their own defeats in their strides and simply moved on? Apart from the settled fact that Wike can no longer be running mate and also the waiting game for him to show exactly how Atiku lied against him, no one is exactly sure what hand he is playing.

    The visitors’ parade to the Government House, Port Harcourt, since June which has recorded at least 13 high profile politicians across party lines, is a show of force that is difficult to ignore. But the fact that Wike’s allies have fielded themselves for the next general elections under the flag of the PDP and the BOT is meeting with both sides in attendance is a good place to start.

    How to solve a problem like Wike? It’s to admit that Atiku, not Wike, is the problem. It’s hypocritical for those who praised Wike when he was the “caretaker”, picking the party’s bills, sticking his head out for distressed governors and even sponsoring their presidential ambition to suddenly discover the downside of his brashness.

    He mismanaged the exit of former Chairman Uche Secondus and overreacted in his face-off with Governor Godwin Obaseki. At a point, he behaved as if the party was his farm and wouldn’t be appeased until he ate every first fruit. But who can deny that he filled a vacuum?

    His demand for balance in the party’s top positions is not unreasonable; it’s consistent with Section 7(3)(c) of the party’s constitution. Atiku cannot justify it by citing the Jonathan-Nwodo example, a breach at the time, which in today’s PDP is a monstrous travesty with the party’s candidate, chairman, deputy national chairman, BOT chairman and national treasurer, all from the North. Atiku and his party cannot continue to kick this lopsided can down the road.

    All other demands credited to Wike by the press from control of the National Assembly to a single-term Presidency by Atiku and which of the former vice president’s wife’s turn it should be every other night, are at worst speculations and at best matters for negotiation.

    Was the Osun State governorship result a bellwether of Wike’s limited political value? That insinuation has been made in some circles – that Osun proved the PDP does not need Wike to do well in 2023. Those who wish may agree on this convenient lie, but the facts are nuanced. More than any single factor, the internal divisions in the APC and the insatiable demands by party godfathers on Governor Gboyega Oyetola wrecked the party. The lessons from Osun and Ekiti states are parables of how a divided party can damage itself.

    Abubakar and Wike must realise that this is a dangerous moment to misjudge or mismanage. The ruling party never looked more vulnerable than at a time when not just the adversaries but President Muhammadu Buhari himself is saying that he is tired and cannot wait to leave office. We are not only tired of him, we’re tired for him, too. For the first time his adversaries and friends agree with one another and with him that he must go and go quickly.

    If the PDP misjudges this moment, as some of us desperately wish they would, the party faces the risk of a repeat of the crisis that led to a mass defection by PDP governors to APC in 2014. That was the final nail in the party’s coffin.

    If it mismanages it, the party faces the risk of extinction. PDP, as it is now, cannot survive another potential eight years out of power. And should that happen, Atiku would be a far bigger loser than many of his seducers or adversaries.

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Will machines replace journalists, too? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Will machines replace journalists, too? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    The advent of any significant changes in technology has often triggered concerns about the fate of journalism. Even at the infancy of social media, TIME covered one of its editions of February 5, 2009, with concern about the imminent death of journalism. To drive home the point, the graphic was illustrated with a copy of the New York Times wrapping a tilapia.

    The profession went through similar bouts of self-doubt and anxiety, after the introduction of the movable type and printing press. This same thing happened following the introduction of the telephone, radio and television. In hindsight, it would seem that journalism’s death was slightly exaggerated. 

    But can the survival of journalism as we know it today be taken for granted in the midst of the extraordinary changes in technology and ICT? In 5, 10 or 20 years, will there be any dots to connect between technology and journalism or would the profession be submerged in a sea change?

    In Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Stuart J Russell and Peter Norvig’s groundbreaking, expansive study on AI, first published in 1995 and released in its fourth edition in 2020, the computer scientists and scholars offer a sharp and comprehensive introduction to the foundations of artificial intelligence. The book covers a diverse range of fields from philosophy to mathematics, neuroscience and psychology, and linguistics. 

    In a particularly memorable passage, the authors said, “We don’t want machines that are intelligent in the sense of pursuing their objectives; we want them to pursue our objectives.”

    The extent to which this goal is achievable, and whether it should be desirable in the first place, has, of course, been a subject of vigorous and prolonged debate. 

    There are those rightfully concerned that the oncoming waves of automation would exacerbate existing inequalities between workers whose backgrounds have afforded them education and other social privileges that put them at the higher ends of well-paying tech jobs and those who depend on jobs that would most likely be phased out by automated systems. 

    The stats may not amplify these fears but they do not allay them either. A report from Mckinsey studying skill shifts in the workforce in Europe and the United States says that between 2016 and 2030 the demand for technological skills would increase significantly compared with the demand for manual and basic cognitive skills. The prospects may be slower in Africa, but they are creeping up.

    Mass media have long ceased to be the sole domain of professional journalists. That is, not only have established assumptions about the authority of the journalist to witness, record and disseminate news been severely undermined, established assumptions about audience’s expectations in journalists have also been challenged. 

    When I joined PUNCH in 1989 the dominant way of collecting the news from offices outside Lagos, the headquarters, was by radio. We had a few telephone lines alright, but they were congested and unreliable. Reporters filed in a few copies from the states by telex, but the bulk was by radio. The compugraphic machines, galleys and cow gum did the rest of the prepress job. That was over three decades ago. 

    We deployed reporters in Sheraton Hotels, Lagos, where they spun war stories from Baghdad by watching the TV at the reception over a bottle of coke taken for hours. Somehow, through improvisation and compelling designs, the paper became a hit. 

    What happened in PUNCH was emblematic of the crises that the industry faced after the prosperous seventies and eighties. 

    There were significant changes in the operating environment, partly as a result of ownership and politics, but fundamentally as a result of poor economics and the inability of the industry to forecast where changes in technology might lead and to leverage them.

    As production costs increased and infrastructure deteriorated, however, the response of the press, in particular, was not necessarily to find smarter, more efficient ways of distributing content. Instead, media owners embarked on a binge of buying fleets of distribution vans and producing multiple editions, with very little returns on inventory. 

    This massive investment in a blackhole worsened their already precarious financial positions after General Ibrahim Babangida’s controversial “structural adjustment programme”.

    With advertising naira shrinking, advertisers began to insist on data, forcing the opaque newspaper industry to begin to face its own demon. Adoption of new practices, improvements in internal methods to make them more efficient and customer-centric – including deployment of new technologies – became not a matter of choice, but of survival for the industry.

    Today, a number of media houses (print and broadcast) have strong social media platforms and even web-first news policies, while strictly online brands such as Sahara Reporters, Premium Times, The Cable and Peoples Gazette, to name a few, have become significant players, using extensive degree of new technologies to collect, process and share content and earn revenue. 

    However, of all these developments, the arrival of citizen journalists on the one hand and the AI-powered robots on the other, are perhaps the most significant occurrences in journalism.

    It seemed OK when technology led to mechanized farming, brought changes in the mode and speed of transportation and even transformed the textile and culinary industries. Journalists were happy to herald these changes. 

    As soon as technological changes arrived at the doorsteps of the profession, however, with the distinct possibilities that non-journalists could use and deploy them in everyday life, the alarm bells were set off, sounding like a tribal call against the invasion of aliens: AI was The Beast!

    Yet, by focusing on more routine and menial tasks, it is believed that automation frees journalists up for more comprehensive, in-depth reporting, significantly improving the quality of journalistic work. 

    Sharing examples of how journalism and robots are connecting and finding common grounds elsewhere raises the natural question: where does that leave the Nigerian journalist? 

    Incursions by bloggers, influencers and corporates using non-traditional news channels to share valuable content have challenged the mainstream media. Also, the increased entry into the profession of persons with non-formal-media background has improved the profession both in its diversity and deepened its adoption rate of new technologies. 

    Through hackathons, collaboration of media and non-media persons, for example, robotics have been deployed in sourcing data that shine the light on community problems on access to healthcare, education and job-creation.

    Media organisations either working collaboratively on independently also deploy drones in previously inaccessible communities, to gather content, especially in conflict situations. Although this practice is still not sufficiently widespread because of costs, inertia – and even grey regulatory areas sometimes – an increasing level of training and collaboration might see improvements in the years ahead. 

    It is true that the role of the journalist is changing, and I believe future developments in the field will give journalists more power and responsibility, not less. 

    Once, we suffered from not knowing nearly enough. Now, we may be entering an era in which we know too much. Even if we could guarantee responsible use of AI and similar technologies – which we can’t – we would still bear the heavy burden of knowledge in a world that has become more predictable but no less dangerous. 

    But what is also true is that there are more of us now than there have ever been, citizen and career journalists alike, with significant resources at our disposal, to decide not only what the news is, but what it should mean and what responsible actions it should spur. 

    A number of media houses in Nigeria are currently battling a range of problems from low, irregular pay to poor training, infrastructure and low trust rating as a result of poor ethics. My anecdotal experience does not suggest that displacement by bots is a serious concern in the face of these current existential crises.

    The media is still a long way from where AI may be regarded as a clear and present danger to jobs. Yet, globalisation, which has narrowed boundaries, made travels cheaper and increased connections, has also exposed consumers of media content in Nigeria and across the continent to higher standards. 

    With greater penetration of smartphones and other home devices (embedded with such bots as Siri, Bixby, Alexa) at lower costs and the expansion of Internet services, my guess is that the demand for more AI services amongst Nigeria’s media consumers would also increase.

    And hopefully journalists who are in this business for the long run would have little or no option but to raise their game. The question is not whether the dots are connecting, but how quickly, responsibly and efficiently journalists can connect them in the service of the craft of storytelling.

    The future belongs to man and machines.

     

    This is an abridged version of a paper on “Cybernetics, robotics and journalism: Connecting the dots”, by Ishiekwene presented at a seminar at the Department of Mass Communication, Bingham University, Abuja on July 14

  • Matawalle’s Guns – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Matawalle’s Guns – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Nigeria is awash with arms – guns, bullets, charms, drugs and local stuff. Not just Nigeria. The entire Sahelian and sub-Saharan African region is drowning in deadly small arms and light weapons – so-called because of their portability and ease of use and adaptation.

    The firearms may be out of the line of sight, but they are making the rounds in cars and motorcycles or as headloads and hand luggage, concealed in unimaginable places. Many are also believed to be siphoned from the armouries of security agencies, and are making their way into the hands of “unknown gunmen” with destructive motives and in ever increasing numbers.

    According to the 2019 SAS and African Union study, Weapons Compass: Mapping Illicit Small Arms Flows in Africa, “Civilians including rebel groups and militias hold more than 40 million small arms and light weapons, while government-related entities hold fewer than 11 million”.

    The 2020 SBM Intelligence Report on Nigeria said there were about six million illicit small arms in circulation in the country, up three-fold from the two million reported by Oxfam in 2016. The SBM report indicates that about 10 million small arms were on the loose in West Africa. Nigeria accounts for six out of every 10 illicit weapons in the region.

    Given that many such weapons are military grade, their description as “small arms” is grossly misleading considering the amount of violence and destruction they can be used to unleash. These weapons have “liberalised” and “democratised” conflicts. With them, every coward in the neighbourhood feels emboldened, invincible and hungry for a fight.

    The ISWAP and Boko Haram conflicts in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso; the ethnic wars of South Sudan, the unravelling of Libya; the banditry in North and Central Nigeria, and indeed all conflicts in diverse places, are the direct manifestations of ease of access to weapons by unauthorised persons.

    Unfortunately, the region is also awash with weak state actors. Military and civilian leaders in Nigeria, the region’s powerhouse, that should lead the charge against the insurgency, are confused, exhausted and afraid for their own lives. Nothing illustrates this dire situation more than the Wednesday night attack on President Muhammadu Buhari’s advance party to Katsina and the jailbreak in the Kuje Prisons, less than 44 kilometres from the Central Business Disrtict, Abuja.

    The jailbreak, claimed by ISWAP, was the ninth successful one in two years. The Katsina attack came on the heels of the several deadly attacks on communities in Kaduna and what appears to be coordinated kidnappings of Catholic priests.

    The affected states and Buhari’s government have tried everything from cutting deals with bandits in negotiations spearheaded by the Muslim clergy, to regional joint task forces and from local vigilantes to calls for divine intervention. So far, nothing seems to have worked. Modest gains are too often undermined by corruption in the top military hierarchy, poor intelligence and demoralised soldiers.

    Small groups, communities and individuals who formerly relied on traditional weapons for self-defence and survival have found force multipliers in firearms and taken to crime and violence. The weapons are cheap and have become an economic tool with guaranteed access to war booty with minimum effort.

    This desperate situation partly explains why Governor Bello Matawalle of Zamfara State called for citizens to arm and defend themselves, a call that has sparked significant resistance from the military top brass.

    Matawalle is not the first governor or prominent citizen to make a rallying cry for ordinary Nigerians to take up arms in self-defence. Deposed Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II, made a similar call in November 2014 at the height of Boko Haram’s callous and brutal reign of terror.

    Sanusi said he had to make the call because the state had become significantly weak – so weak that it lacked the initiative and appropriate response mechanisms to armed groups holding citizens and government to ransom.

    Cultists, bandits, terror groups and all manner of militias acquired the brazenness to take on the police and military forces in frontal attacks or ambushes and inflict serious casualties on them. Then they raid their armouries to harvest more weapons – adding legitimate stock to illegitimate ones.

    Governments of South West Nigeria have set up a regional militia, Amotekun, after the Federal Government refused support to the call for state police.

    Why Matawalle doesn’t seem to see his call for citizens to take up arms as an abdication of responsibility, is baffling. Quite credulously, he sounded as though he would order a shipload of Kalashnikovs and distribute them to all Zamfara citizens – who, instead of the police and the army, should now stand guard, fight and perhaps overcome the bandits.

    This is the same governor, who only in April, used state funds to buy 260 assorted Cadillac limousines each valued at about N50million for district heads and traditional rulers in Zamfara. It’s a telling indictment on the governor that he would indulge the exotic tastes and comfort of a few at the expense of the safety and security of the majority.

    Insecurity is not limited to Zamfara alone. In the last 23 years, however, that state has had more than its fair share of irresponsible governors from the one who gave them political sharia instead of food to the one who told scores of citizens dying from meningitis that the disease was punishment for their sins.

    Matawalle’s bizarre call to arms should be seen for what it is: another public acknowledgement from a ranking Nigerian politician in the ruling party that the current federally controlled, unitary command system of policing is not working.

    How long would it take for the National Assembly and Buhari’s executive branch to set up state police, which even a committee set up by the ruling party (with a parliamentary majority) has recommended?

    The army is overwhelmed dealing with both internal law and order issues which it has no business meddling in and fighting insurgency at the same time.

    The improvised, backdoor security outfits that many states, especially those in the South West have created, lack the legitimacy, authority and structure which state police could provide. These ad hoc arrangements should never be confused with a properly constituted state police force. They are desperate straws states are grasping at for survival.

    It’s interesting that while Matawalle would not press for state police, preferring instead to share arms to citizens. His suggestion is a short-cut that would only create more problems. It is the usual short circuit of our public officials – taking a plunge at every quick fix without well thought out plans for the aftermath and domino effects.

    The most prevalent argument against state police by the political class is that politicians – especially those in power – will use them to settle personal scores against their rivals, especially at elections. They find nothing wrong with the present broken system under which only the Federal Government can use the police for its own fancies, including carrying handbags for wives of government officials.

    Yet, if fear of abuse – an irrational fear as jurisdictions with state police systems also have inbuilt checks and balances – is the problem, consider the abuse that would ensue from Matawalle’s suggestion where everyone could have a gun!

    The call is not only a self-indictment, it’s also an indictment of the Federal Government that has substituted responsibility for meaningless statement after public statement of sympathy.

    Not only has Buhari’s government failed to secure the country as he promised, it has also failed spectacularly to provide jobs to keep idle minds out of deadly mischief.

    Ensconced in the bubble of government houses and watched over by different retinues of security aides, our public officials think security means guns and bullets. They have a blinkered vision of the Nigerian reality and cannot do better than prescribe poisonous pills with debilitating side effects to ailments for which there are herbal remedies.

    The state has left many with Hobson’s choice: a gun or your life.

     

    Ishiekwene is the Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Running Mate as Albatross: Tinubu’s Choice – By Azu Ishiekwene

    That the All Progressives Congress (APC) flag bearer, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is exactly where the party’s last presidential candidate President Muhammadu Buhari was when he got the ticket eight years ago, shows just how our politics has stagnated, if not regressed.

    After Buhari won the APC ticket in December 2014, the next major hurdle was getting a running mate. In what appeared to be a breach of the understanding he had with Tinubu to be his running mate before the election – and on the basis of which Tinubu moved heaven and earth to support him – Buhari changed his mind at the last minute.

    He broke his promise, even before the electoral contest. After pocketing the ticket, Buhari told Tinubu, with a heavy heart, that in spite of himself, he had been advised that a Muslim-Muslim ticket would be a disaster for the pair and the party.

    Tinubu didn’t agree, but the rest, as they say, is history.

    That history is in replay not because it was inevitable, but largely because Buhari is leaving a legacy of division, intolerance and identity politics, the kind of which has only few comparisons in Nigeria’s recent history.

    Let me be clear. Buhari did not introduce identity politics into the country. Nor is identity politics a peculiarly Nigerian thing. On his watch in the last seven years, however, ethnic and religious politics have taken on a salience and frequency hardly experienced before or even thought likely.

    It’s true that the redefinition of apostasy by Boko Haram has infused a deadlier strain in religious attacks. But it’s just as probable that Buhari’s tentativeness has been unhelpful.

    Religiously motivated violence has grown from a handful of perfunctory incidents into a state of permanent siege, claiming dozens of lives, especially in Kaduna, and sundering once peaceful neighbourhoods and communities. Christians, Muslims and those who are neither are hurting because all have been caught in the crossfire. The recent atrocity at Saint Francis Catholic Church, Owo, Ondo State, which claimed at least 40 lives and left many more injured, has further bruised already delicate religious sensitivities.

    It is in this fraught climate, more complicated and fragile than it was when Buhari rejected Tinubu as running mate on religious grounds, that Tinubu would have to decide whether he maintains his position of eight years ago that a Muslim-Muslim ticket after an outgoing Muslim president, still doesn’t matter. On top of that, Tinubu is running against a Northern Muslim who, in spite of his shortcomings, would be vigorously promoted in conservative circles up country as “our own Muslim”. It’s a serious matter.

    I laugh at those who say it’s a simple choice or that concerns about it are irrational. To justify this position, they even go on a tour of Europe and the US for apples to compare with Nigeria’s oranges.

    I think it’s fair to say that Nigeria is not what it was in 1979 when Obafemi Awolowo, a lawyer, chose another lawyer and Southerner, Philip Umeadi, as his running mate. Or in 1993 when MKO Abiola, a Muslim, picked Babagana Kingibe, a Muslim, as his running mate, and still won the presidential election, later cancelled by the military government of General Ibrahim Babangida.

    Yet, this current predicament could also be a turning-point, an opportunity for Tinubu to show that out of the ashes of this moment, it is possible to build a future in which citizens would be safe and secure, and in which they would all have a fair shot irrespective of their religious, ethnic or political identities.

    To do this, however, he has to win the election first. And to win the election, Tinubu might find himself arguing, like Deng Xiaoping, that white cat or black cat, he needs a cat that can catch mice. But it’s an argument that can – and should – be made with a sensitivity that resists hubris.

    The hard truth, from Nigeria’s current political maths, is that that Deng cat – one that can give the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, Atiku Abubakar, a run for the Presidency – is hardly in the Christian lair, North or South.

    I honestly wish that in a country plagued by very serious problems of insecurity, poverty, brain drain, unemployment and broken infrastructure inflicted on us largely by persons who wear religion on their sleeves, that we can look for competence, capacity and character; that the question would be, who’s the best person for the job, and not if he or she is wearing faith on a car bumper. We’re in trouble.

    A document from a research firm, RMP for Dubai Expo 2020, showed that whereas Nigeria was one of the 10 top destinations in Africa for investment in 2014, second only to South Africa, Nigeria disappeared from that list in 2021. Egypt, the new tourist destination of the political elite, has moved from sixth to first spot. Key metrics of well-being and development have deteriorated sharply.

    Yet, we’ll have to play the cards we’re dealt. Emotions, experience and a raft of Nigeria’s notoriously expedient conventions make a Muslim-Muslim ticket hard to contemplate at this time. But the voting data suggests that it would be nothing short of political suicide for APC to choose a Christian as Tinubu’s running mate.

    Tinubu didn’t come all the way, so close to “his turn”, only to hang himself on a sectarian pole. If he gets it wrong – as he’s almost certain to do by choosing a Christian running mate – the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and others urging that choice on him today would be among the first to blame him. They would even mock him that he made others president, but himself he could not make.

    Of course, this does not also mean that just about any Muslim would guarantee APC victory. Three serving governors – Nasir El-Rufai (Kaduna), the habitual polariser who maneuvered the 10 Northern governors to go South for a presidential candidate; Abdullahi Ganduje (Kano), one of earliest Tinubu cheerleaders; and Atiku Bagudu (Kebbi), who has been praised for his role in organising the APC primary – have been tipped as front runners.

    But so, too, has former Borno State Governor, Kashim Shettima, whose recent extraordinary defence of Tinubu has made him a man to watch on the national stage. As of Wednesday, party insiders were indicating that Shettima is a sure bet, though he is from the North-East. Choosing him would divide the vote in Atiku’s North-East base and shift the battle to the North-West. Here, former Kano State Governor Rabiu Kwankwaso’s party, the NNPP, could be a disrupter, but the voting pool is larger.

    APC governors, especially those from the zone, are pressing for one of their own – a sitting governor. With the mutual acrimony and backstabbing among this clan, however, not to mention their individual K-leg, controversial reputation and mixed record of performance, Tinubu would find a choice among North-West governors a mountain to climb.

    Let’s return to data. In Nigeria’s complex statutory electoral system, to win, a candidate not only requires a quarter of the total votes in 24 states, he also has to get the highest number of votes countrywide, making states with large voter bases the crucial deciders.

    The Muslim-dominated North-West, with 20 million registered voters or 24 percent of the total voting population as of 2019, is the country’s largest vote bank. According to Researchgate.net, Kano, Katsina and Jigawa (three of its leading vote banks), have over 80 percent Muslim population, the exception being Kaduna.

    In the last six general election cycles, going back to 1999, the best performance of a Southern candidate in the North was 23 years ago, when two Southerners – Olusegun Obasanjo and Olu Falae – were on the main ballot. Yet, Northern sympathy for the winner, Obasanjo, at the time was largely because the region was the candidate’s political orphanage.

    From 2003 when Buhari entered the presidential race and ran until he won the election on his fourth attempt in 2015, no Southern candidate had more Northern votes than he did; not even when he lost the election in his three previous attempts.

    In the current vice-presidential race in the APC, apart from Shettima who is from the North-East, the other contenders – El-Rufai, Ganduje, Bagudu and even late entrants, Abubakar Malami and Hadi Sirika – are Muslims from the North-West.

    True, it’s not the vice president, but the president that is on the ballot. In fact, in a lamentation to his wife, the first US Vice President, John Adams, described the position as “the most insignificant office ever the invention of man contrived.” But in a race as tight as the next one promises to be, the choice of a running mate could make a difference.

    And for Tinubu, just out of a bitter and fractious primary, what he does and how, will significantly affect the APC’s cohesion, especially with a long list of entitled heavyweights waiting to complicate the party’s misery, if they lose out.

    Yet, it’s only if he makes a winning choice that he can make a room in the tent for everyone, including the aggrieved.

     

    Ishiekwene is the Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Southern Hypocrisy Will Help Atiku To Succeed Buhari – By Azu Ishiekwene

    After last weekend’s primary by the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP) which produced former Vice President Atiku Abubakar as the party’s candidate for next year’s presidential election, political leaders in the South have been hurling abuses at the North for betrayal.

    According to pro-zoning interest groups in the South, it’s not supposed to be this way. After over two decades of an internal zoning arrangement in the PDP that has produced presidents from two other zones and sprung Atiku as candidate in the last general election, the groups are upset that the system is once again rigged to produce a Northern candidate who could potentially succeed President Muhammadu Buhari.

    “The scale was skewed,” the Pan-Niger Delta Forum (PANDEF) said, reacting to how delegates for the primary were chosen. “They had one delegate from each of the 774 local government areas of the country. And, of course, we know that there are more local governments in the North than in the South.”

    In a similar tone, the Middle Belt Forum, which also had one aspirant in the race, said, “We have made it clear that we will not support any party that fields a Northerner as its presidential candidate during the 2023 election. The PDP has lost our support by fielding former Vice President Atiku Abubakar as its flag bearer.”

    It’s hard to figure out what the support of any of these groups is really worth or if their tantrum amounts to anything beyond taking up acres of newspaper space. How can PANDEF, hardly taken seriously outside the South-South – not to mention its declining influence even in matters affecting the region – hope to get anyone to pay attention to it? Or how can the Middle Belt Forum ever so confused and polarised about its own identity pretend to have suddenly found its voice now?

    Let’s be clear about something: I’m opposed to a system that despises its constituent parts as despicably as Nigeria has despised the South East. I have said, without mincing my words, that the sudden awakening among anti-zoning elements that there is no better time than now for merit to prevail – as if any section of the country has a monopoly of it – is nothing but sheer hypocrisy.

    For the sake of fairness and equity, the arrangement within the political parties that produced Obasanjo, Yar’Adua and Buhari ought to have applied not just to the South, but particularly to the South East, the epicentre of Nigeria’s political crime scene.

    However, instead of directing their anger at Governor Aminu Tambuwal or the North, PANDEF, the Middle Belt Forum and other political groups that are aggrieved by the outcome of last weekend’s PDP presidential primary should face the traitors in their own midst – the governors and party leaders in the South, who rather than put their money where their mouth is, decided to settle, yet again, for the crumbs from the North’s table.

    We saw that in 2007. After the Southern Forum, led by Governors Peter Odili, Chimaraoke Nnamani and Victor Attah, swore publicly, tongues sticking out, that it was time for Southern governors to close ranks for a Southern candidate to succeed Obasanjo, Odili wrote in his book, “Conscience and history”, that it was indeed Southern governors that worked the hardest to frustrate that aspiration, paving the way for Umaru Yar’Adua’s presidency.

    It happened back then as comedy, but now it’s playing out again as farce. At least twice in the last one year, governors under the auspices of the Southern Governors’ Forum, which comprises the two major political parties and APGA, held meetings from Asaba in Delta to Enugu in Enugu State, at which they pledged to ensure that the Presidency returns to the South.

    In what amounted to the military equivalent of a mutiny, the Chairman of the Forum, Governor Rotimi Akeredolu, said after a meeting in Enugu in September, that, “The next president of Nigeria must come from the Southern part of Nigeria in line with the politics of equity, justice and fairness.”

    He added, for good measure and in spite of significant opposition from Northern governors at the time, that the Forum would not back down on its demand and praised his colleagues who were already implementing regional security outfits and anti-grazing laws, all tokens of a Southern resurgence.

    On Saturday, the South – specifically the South South – which has the largest number and concentration of PDP governors, had the opportunity to show that it could, at least, stand up for what it believes in. Sadly, it was, yet again, the South’s meltdown moment. Even if the party’s decision to select one delegate per local government area meant that the South had 357 delegates to the North’s 419, the treacherous attitude of Southern governors and political leaders guaranteed a Northern victory.

    I don’t understand why Southern groups are crying a river, attacking Tambuwal and making empty threats to block Atiku. If their own governors could not shelve their personal ambitions and come together to back the region’s strongest candidate, why did they expect that Tambuwal, a serial political philanderer, will do it for them? Governor Nyesom Wike has complained that Tambuwal broke the party’s guidelines by speaking twice and campaigning after the campaign had closed. But that was not where the treachery started.

    It began with the hypocrisy of Southern governors and political leaders who talk an elephant knowing full well they won’t deliver a cricket. While Atiku was busy mobilising traditional rulers and religious leaders, calling in favours and laying mines to trip even candidates from the region who might stand in his way, with the full backing of Northern elders, political groups in the South were waging their campaign for the presidency through press statements on social media. The chickens have come home to roost.

    It’s true that Nigeria’s abhorrent political maths leaves the South East with the fewest states and fewest local governments as well. But see how the region which has justifiably felt cheated out of the country’s top job treated its own aspirants, sharing a miserable 15 votes out of 91, between two of them, and leaving the third aspirant with zero votes. The remaining votes were obviously invested in currency trafficking.

    I laugh at the suggestion that what is left of the South’s misery would be saved by the presidential primary of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) next week. There is an anecdote that helps to explain why that will not happen.

    In the wee hours of Monday after the PDP primary, I got an unusual message. It was from a confidante who though not a politician, has exceptional instincts from his training as a mathematician and over six decades of observation and experience of Nigeria’s politics. “2023”, he wrote: “The jigsaw puzzle is falling in place.”

    He was referring to an earlier conversation we had after the two major parties scrapped zoning – a convenient political arrangement that served and seduced them – and declared they had finally discovered political orgasm in merit. Once the pretence collapsed and President Muhammadu Buhari said tongue-in-cheek that the party chairman’s zone need not deter any presidential aspirants, my confidante said it was very likely that the two major parties would field Northern candidates.

    Atiku Abubakar is the first piece of that puzzle. It’s not outside the realm of probability that as the APC conducts its primary next week that Senate President, Ahmed Lawan, could be the second, final piece that completes the shame of Southern hypocrisy. And it would be justified, by Southerners no less, that the North East and the North Central are just as marginalised as the South East!

    Like Deng Xiaoping said in his famous parable of white cat and black cat, APC insiders have said the party’s main preoccupation now, is how to stop Atiku; that that is the reason why they attempted to drag former President Goodluck Jonathan into the race, to secure the South South/South East, and pair him with Justice Minister and Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, to corner the country’s largest vote bank in the North West. The additional unspoken attraction, of course, was Jonathan’s single four-year term.

    Let’s wait and see. If I were a betting man, I would wager that as things stand today, whoever emerges as APC’s candidate would hardly be a match for Atiku Abubakar in next year’s presidential election. And Buhari, who would then be obliged to pretend that he is handing over with a heavy heart, would have nothing to lose. Like it was in 2015, it would be yet another gift from the South.

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP