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Tag: Azu Ishiekwene

  • Where’s the Coup next? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Where’s the Coup next? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    By Azu Ishiekwene

    There’s a severe, earth-baking drought in the Horn of Africa. About 13 million people in Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Djibouti are in the grip of acute hunger. The rains have failed in three consecutive years, prompting the driest conditions experienced in the region in 41 years.

    This ought to be one of the heaviest burdens on the minds of African leaders: how the continent can rally support and assistance for people in that region. At the moment, it is not.

    It’s just another item on the news left for the World Food Programme under the United Nations and the international press to worry about.

    But seriously, what can the current class of AU do? How can a good number of them who are almost overwhelmed by domestic problems care about what is happening next door?

    The continent is struggling. Many countries are in need of food aid themselves, so how could they possibly be in a position to provide food relief for brothers and sisters on the horn?

    There was a vision of Africa envisioned by its founding fathers and pioneer leaders. That vision has, to a large extent, remained a mirage. Every projection has failed and only the trade in guns and with it, and the attendant violence, appears to be booming.

    Almost entirely, every surviving revolutionary metamorphosed into a beast or spawned a system that challenges even the moral conscience of hardened criminals.

    In January 1976, Nigeria’s head of state at the time, Gen Murtala Mohammed, delivered a famous and revolutionary speech at the extraordinary summit of the Organisation of African Unity OAU (now African Union) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Aptly entitled: Africa Has Come Of Age, Murtala excoriated the neocolonial powers over their exploitative tendencies and, in effect, warned that enough was enough.

    Specifically, the theme of his speech was a rebuke of the support of the United States and other western allies for the apartheid system in South Africa which was trying to suppress the popular rebel movement in Angola in favour of a puppet regime.

    Barely a month after this audacious proclamation, Murtala was brutally assassinated in a bloody coup on the streets of Lagos on February 13, 1976. Not a few, including yours sincerely, were convinced that Dimka’s aimless coup was a western conspiracy to get another revolutionary African leader out of the way.

    Many leaders of Murtala’s temperament fell to the bullets of assassins in Africa – Thomas Sankara, Patrice Lumumba and Samora Machel, among others. As radical as they came, so were the reactionary bullets that flew in their directions. With few exceptions and the hands of fate, many kissed the dust and were out of the way.

    Forty-six years after Murtala, Africa has not come of age. Apart from the crises of under-development, it is returning full cycle to the era of military coups and instability. And while some adventurous soldiers are taking over seats of power and state houses, bandits and terrorists are taking over villages, throwing people into refugee camps and even collecting taxes and ransom.

    Back in the 60s and 70s, Africa had inspiring leaders who could stand their grounds, look some colonial chauvinists in the face and call their bluff. Countries like Nigeria became frontline states in the Non-aligned Movement challenging the evil system of apartheid in South Africa and supporting resistance movements against colonial authorities in Namibia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Algeria among others.

    The OAU and ECOWAS were rallying points of authority to exert regional and continental pressure towards defined and definite outcomes. Back in those days, there would have been a continental push to bring relief and help to the countries and people on the verge of dying in their beds from the scourge of heat, hunger, and thirst.

    It was with that spirit of confidence and self-assurance that President Olusegun Obasanjo, in 2004, warned and stopped in their tracks, foreign mercenaries who attempted to take over the government of Equatorial Guinea.

    Obasanjo was even more dramatic in the case of São Tomé and Principe when the civilian government was overthrown while President Fradrique de Menezes was attending a meeting of world and African leaders in Abuja in 2003.

    Immediately after the meeting, Obasanjo escorted de Menezes back to São Tomé and asked the coup makers to return power to the president, which they did in exchange for amnesty like wayward school children.

    Alas, gone are the days. It does seem all the AU and ECOWAS can muster as a response to the crises of governance or any other crises on the continent is a mere shrug. The mutual collaboration which had African states uniting for the independence of Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa and even the liberation of Uganda from the vice grip of Idi Amin has all but floundered.

    This lack of unity and collaboration explains the half-hearted statements of both the AU and ECOWAS regarding the military takeovers in some of the countries in the West African Sahel.

    Beginning with the military overthrow in Sudan in 2020, the silence or half measures/after-thoughts from the continent’s leadership allows anyone who’s daring enough to take their chances at anything.

    And of course, international politics is too preoccupied with tensions in the global North and the fallouts of the COVID-19 pandemic to care about coups in Africa.

    France has enough internal problems of its own, and under Emmanuel Macron, it has shown an increasingly diminished appetite for its protégées in Africa. It has cut down its troops and other European allies and the US who are not prepared to weep more than the bereaved, have followed suit.

    It’s quite interesting how the coups have progressed. Sudan and Chad have common borders; Mali shares borders with Burkina Faso to the south and Guinea to the south-west. Guinea in turn has common boundaries with Guinea Bissau, where the coup attempt of February 1st, 2022 failed. It is also interesting that apart from Sudan, all the countries affected by military takeovers so far, are Francophone.

    In Mali, the new government has gone all out for France – severing diplomatic ties, with Prime Minister Choguel Kokala Maiga blaming France for Mali’s economic problems and security situation in an interview he granted Anadolu, the Turkish news agency.

    Reading that interview indeed leaves so much to worry about. Mali is saying, without mincing words, that France is teleguiding affairs at the African Union and ECOWAS. In the same breath, it is saying that France is responsible for all the insecurity – if not just in Mali, then across the entire Sahelian Africa.

    The sentiment among local troops, partly obvious from the post-coup speeches, is that the soldiers can defend their countries against the onslaught of the Islamists without much foreign help. And that France, rather than being a solution, has become a part of the problem.

    Whether the troubled former French colonies can stand on their own remains to be seen. But the Islamists are spreading like cancer, taking territories even beyond the French sphere of influence and increasingly infecting local populations.

    Banditry in Nigeria’s north-west region has escalated from the moment artisanal mining of gold in Zamfara State became an open affair. And the bandits, many locals have confirmed, are mostly not locals by body structure, behaviour and accent (language).

    In Southern Africa, Mozambique is fighting Islamic insurgents, while in the East, Uganda and Kenya have been locked in decades-long battle against Al-Shabab. The continent is in a fragile place, significantly worsened in the last few years by unstable commodity prices and COVID-19.

    Cheap Chinese money is also drying up and the continent must now reckon with a largely corrupt elite and incompetent political leadership.

    And so the coups are back! And they will fester as long as there are sit-tight rulers, bad governance, insecurity and just about anything that makes the people think any change is better than the status quo.

    Wahala dey!

  • Mountain Facing Yahaya Bello – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Mountain Facing Yahaya Bello – By Azu Ishiekwene

    By Azu Ishiekwene

    Even though the All Progressives Congress (APC) has repeatedly denied zoning the position of chairman to the North Central, there’s hardly any credible analysis which does not feature candidates from the zone in the first three spots.

    Days to the party’s first national convention in four years, there is growing public interest in the outcome of the convention, because how it ends may not only indicate if the party is over, it might also provide an indication of who the party’s flag bearer would be for next year’s presidential election.

    The opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has been a bit more open in dealing with this demon. The mood in the party is to throw the thing open. After decades of treating zoning as sacrosanct, stalwarts in the opposition appear to have seen the light, declaring that irrespective of where the party’s chairman may come from, the presidential ticket would go to the best candidate, sparking a rash of interests across the six zones.

    Despite mixed reactions about zoning in the ruling party, no one can say for sure that it would follow the opposition’s example. If the APC plays the zoning card on February 26, as is widely expected, and concedes the chairmanship to the North Central, that could significantly complicate the presidential ambition of the most visible contender from the zone – Governor Yahaya Bello – even before he has formally and publicly declared his intention to run.

    One of the earliest candidates to show interest in the race, Bello stuck his head out when those considered to be heavyweights – or ‘owners of Nigeria’, to borrow Dele Momodu’s remix of Oliver De Coque (Ana Enwe Obodo), were still lying low.

    For many who thought his ambition was an insolent joke – and that includes me – it would be interesting to see how he rallies after the party’s convention, especially if a candidate from his zone, the North Central, gets the party chair.

    But he thinks he can get it – and will – irrespective of where the party fetches its chairman. In its nearly eight years of existence, neither the APC nor the legacy parties that formed it, has chosen both its chairman and presidential candidate from the same zone.

    In the last 23 years, in fact, the only major party that has bucked the trend is the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) in 2003, when the party presented Odumegwu Ojukwu as its presidential candidate, even though Chekwas Okorie was chairman. But that was understandable: APGA is a regional party.

    The APC has, in fact, treated zoning with the same fetishism with which it has religion, insisting that its flag bearer and his deputy, for example, cannot be of the same faith. Yet, Bello insists that neither zoning nor faith is a mountain too high to climb. When the issue came up at a recent meeting, he said that whichever way the party sliced it, it would still fall to him, something which one of those present described as audacious, if not dangerous optimism, but a view he disagreed with.

    “You know what they say about two dogs fighting over a bone,” Bello said. “The third simply picks it up without much effort. That is what is going to happen with the APC presidential ticket. Watch.”

    Perhaps, and that, with a capital P. Anyone familiar with the wheeling and dealing, the horse trading, the incredible cash outlay (some have estimated it at nearly N10 billion), and the sheer jiggery pokery involved in selecting the presidential flag bearer of a major political party in Nigeria, might agree that it’s not a boy’s playground.

    So far, in the APC alone, the heavyweights range from Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu to Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and from Governor Kayode Fayemi to Governor David Umahi, Senator Orji Uzo Kalu and Rochas Okorocha. Even the Transport Minister, Rotimi Amaechi, has been mentioned. And in the last few days, there has been a renewed buzz that the APC is paving the way for former President Goodluck Jonathan to decamp from the PDP and potentially carry the party’s flag.

    It is against this line-up of veterans, hardened by the tempestuous and treacherous waters of Nigerian politics that Rookie Bello would now go to war and hope to succeed. If he is banking on luck, the cousin of hope, perhaps he has a reason to do so.

    Seven years ago, during the APC governorship primary, Bello came a distant second to the late Abubakar Audu before two crucial events changed the course of Kogi politics. Luck played a major role, which he is hoping might repeat itself.

    The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared the state’s governorship election inconclusive and then Audu, who was already declared winner in majority of local government areas, died on November 22, 2015, before a scheduled date for a rerun.

    Audu’s party, the APC, had two choices before it: to replace Audu with his running mate, James Faleke, or with the runner-up to Audu during its primary, Bello. APC went for the latter, and the dynamics of Kogi politics have not remained the same. Although Faleke protested the decision and challenged it in court, his grievances fell on deaf ears at party level and his legal action was unsuccessful.

    This time, Bello insists he is banking on much more than hope or luck. Age, he says, is also on his side and would be a serious issue in the next election, at which his backers respond with thunderous chants of, “It’s youth o’clock! It’s youth o’clock!!”

    Bello, the youngest governor in Nigeria and the only governor to be born after the Nigerian civil war, has since completed his first term and was reelected in November 2019 for a second term, which he must now juggle with his presidential ambition.

    Yet, age is neither a measure of folly nor is it a guarantee of performance. Bello insists that, against the odds, he has performed. The first governor from Ebira, a minority within minority ethnic groups, he said he has exorcised ghost workers from the payroll, which cost the state N213 billion in 13 years of leakages, cleared outstanding backlog of salaries which amounted to about N18 billion, smashed criminal gangs and made the state safer, and established a reputation of publishing the monthly accounts on the state’s website.

    And on top of this, he prides himself on being a party man to the core, with inside track to the king and also the kingmakers (except, of course, a notable one located to the North of his state, whom he said is a sworn enemy).

    While he thinks his record qualifies him to run for a higher office, his opponents think that it is largely because of the same record that he is unfit to run. His face-off with EFCC over the alleged diversion of N20 billion bailout state funds, his bizarre and unpopular posture on vaccines and cattle grazing routes, and his exuberant, almost gangster-like political style, cultivated in his early days in office, are often cited as proof that he is unsuitable for higher office.

    Bello insists this baggage is an invention of his enemies, “especially powerful vested interests” who are afraid that his candidacy would end the era of business as usual. “They know I’m not beholden to any special interests, they know that they have nothing on me because I’m a child of destiny; I’m focused on serving the mass of the people,” he said. “You call it baggage; I call it a panic attack.”

    Those for or against Bello won’t have to wait for too long before they find out whether there is any reserve left in the tank of his luck. By the time the party’s convention is over in about two weeks, it would be clearer if the governor has remade his own luck after six years or if, like lightning, his luck only struck once.

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Police Recruitment: Behind the Figures – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Police Recruitment: Behind the Figures – By Azu Ishiekwene

    By Azu Ishiekwene

    A small news item from a police statement tucked inside the print edition of PUNCH on Wednesday stirred more interest than usual. In the statement, the police had asked those who applied for the position of constables to resume at the state commands between February 1 and 20.

    But that’s not the story. While the police needed only 10,000 constables, about 130,000 candidates applied; that is, for every single successful applicant, 12 will not be considered, all things being equal. It evoked sad memories of the 2014 tragedy, when six million applied for 4,000 vacancies at the Nigeria Immigration Service, and thousands were locked in a stampede at one interview venue, leaving dozens dead; only this time the potential for such a deadly outcome seemed remote.

    But that’s not even the main story. In a country as ethnically charged as Nigeria, numbers are not just numbers, they also have tribal marks and ethnic roots. And the story took its headline from these roots. Even though it was inside in print, it got 1.3k comments and over 240 shares in four days on the PUNCH Facebook page.

    According to the report taken from police records, out of the nearly 130,000 candidates who applied for the position of constables, 104,403 are northerners, while 23,088 are southerners; which means that one of every four applicants is a northerner. To drive the point home, for example, while Lagos (pop. 20m) has 562 applicants, Kano (pop. 21m) has 7,557 applicants.

    That raised more than a few eyebrows. How can the lopsidedness be explained? Is it that in spite of the rampant insecurity in the country, applicants in some parts are not interested in or do not see the need to apply to the force? Is it the nature of the position advertised? Or are there systemic issues that limit applicants from sections of the country?

    To start, recruitment into the police force itself has been – and remains – a subject of dispute for the past three or four years. The Police Service Commission (PSC) and the management of the force have been locked in a dispute over who has the authority to recruit. Two years ago, the court ruled in favour of the PSC but the hiring pipeline had already been congested as a result of a backlog.

    To save the force from collapsing irretrievably under the weight of understaffing, among its many miseries, the PSC and the management decided to bury the hatchet, and suspended the implementation of the court ruling to allow management handle recruitment for 2020.

    But the police management has extended the period of its own grace and in spite of the court ruling to the contrary, gone ahead to conduct the recruitment for 2021 without reference to the PSC, an action which may not have a direct bearing on the matter at hand, but is perhaps an indication of a deeper underlying problem with the force.

    To understand the possible reasons for the lopsidedness in the applications for this year – which has in fact been the trend in the last two years, at least – we’ll need to go beyond the infighting between the police management and the PSC.

    Why, despite the high level of insecurity in the southeast, are able and qualified young people in the region not interested in enrolling in the force to secure their communities? Why do the two regions with Nigeria’s highest rate of unemployment (south-south at 37 percent and southeast 29.1 percent, according to the NBS) have the lowest applicants for the police jobs?

    Even though the aggregate number of applicants across the country this year far outstrips the available vacancies, why have applications dropped by 35 percent (from over 200,000 two years ago), with the police now having to make special appeals for applicants to come forward?

    The answer, in shorthand, is that the police force is no longer fit for purpose. Yet the nature and impact of its obsolescence can hardly be captured in shorthand.

    Once the military hijacked the decentralised and regionalised police force after the 1966 coup, it ensured that everything was brought under a central command, without regard to the needs of states and local communities. Whatever survived that deadly raid was finished off in the 1980s after the overthrow of President Shehu Shagari’s government. The army not only purged the force, it raided its armoury and squeezed the life out of any wiggle room left of police independence, even though the services had different and clearly separate constitutional roles.

    The net effect of this power grab was that the police force lost its way. It changed from a regional service attuned, responsive and accountable to the needs of local communities to one where a central command in the Force Headquarters decides everything from the cost of stationery to suppliers and from the cost of fueling patrol vans to awards of contracts for uniforms, recruitment, promotion and discipline across the 774 local governments in Nigeria.

    As the police-civilian ratio plummeted reaching 1:541, the force became overwhelmed. While officers turned a blind eye, the rank-and-file improvised methods for their own survival. These methods included but were not limited to extortions at roadblocks and hiring out of weapons in their care, the proceeds of which sometimes were demanded by and reached the very top.

    Until the elite themselves became targets and victims of the upsurge in crimes as a result of the near total collapse of the police force, they didn’t bother. They were happy to pay for and be assigned policemen for their personal protection and for those of their family members, while the rest of the population was left to look out for themselves. Skyrocketing crimes, especially banditry and kidnappings, changed that. Today, the military has been forced, in many instances, to become the first line of defence even in the forte of the police: internal maintenance of law and order and crime prevention.

    The system cannot cope any longer.

    Why would the All Progressives Congress (APC), a party that promised change and reform and which currently controls the majority at the National Assembly, refuse to implement the recommendations of its own governors, up and down the country, about the need to restructure the system and emplace state and community police?

    Why isn’t it obvious to the Federal Government that, on the whole, apart from lending itself for use in private errands and election rigging, the police force is hardly serviceable for anything else? Yet the same states that Abuja is unwilling to relinquish control to are the ones funding the force without the benefit of holding them to account.

    I watched the comical video of the House constitution review committee voting down the proposal for state police by a vote 14 – 11, and couldn’t for the life of me understand if the committee chairman was counting hands for those for state police and counting hands and legs for those against it. The vote would have made nice comedy, if it wasn’t a serious matter.

    Advertising for a larger pool for the Nigeria police is not the answer. The lukewarm response from sections of the country should make the message loud and clear.

    The current system where recruitment into the police is done on the basis of local government quotas, will naturally, tilt the numbers in favour of states with more local governments. And in this instance, recruitment at the level of constables which requires lower certification, may attract a larger pool from areas where such applicants are in significantly larger numbers.

    But what really is the sense in maintaining the current recruitment/operational structure of the police that is based on quotas that completely and willfully ignore the peculiar security needs and challenges of communities? Whose interest does this system serve?

    The flawed recruitment system, which is prevalent in the security services, neither enhances the image of the services nor inspires confidence in them. And worse, the bulk of the recruits end up in communities from which they feel alienated and, which in turn, do not feel obliged to share confidence vital to get the job done. Large sections of the country can’t see a future for themselves in the Nigeria police. That’s why the applications are falling.

    It’s instructive that while the Eastern Security Network, IPOB, Amotekun and even the hisbah continue to attract droves of talented and enthusiastic young people, a number of who are happy to serve on voluntary basis, the Nigeria police is at its wit’s end to find competent recruits for the service.

    The force has passed its sell by date. What the Federal government needs is a relatively small, highly resourced Federal police, whose powers and functions, by law, need not conflict with those in regional and state forces, especially in areas of federal and cross-border crimes.

    Of the 54 commonwealth countries – including those with spectacularly unitary systems of government – Nigeria has the reputation, closely followed by Uganda and Sierra Leone, of having one of the most notoriously centralised police forces. Yet, Nigeria is a federal state.

    The system is not working. The force must reform or face extinction.

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

     

  • A defeat foretold? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    A defeat foretold? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    By Azu Ishiekwene

    Loving Nigeria’s national soccer team, the Super Eagles, is like being in a bad marriage. Your heart is broken many times, yet it’s hard to walk away. There’s a lingering, almost redemptive feeling that just one more try, and it’s going to be alright. But it never is – or has not been for nearly a decade.

    It happened again. Hearts were broken on Sunday and millions of fans are still trying to pick up the pieces after Nigeria was beaten 1-0 by Tunisia in the ongoing African Cup of Nations (AFCON) in Cameroun.

    It was an unlikely outcome. Nigeria had started on a very good footing, winning all three-group stage matches and posting perhaps one of the best overall performances among the 24 countries, which included Algeria and Senegal, the continent’s best FIFA-rated countries.

    Nigeria’s opening games were so good, and a few of its players like Moses Simon, Joe Aribo and Wilfred Nididi, so outstanding that political campaign-minded strategists of Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, improvised a skit from the performance in which Osinbajo sounded like Peter Drury rendering the English Premier League.

    Before Sunday’s match, over-the-moon Super Eagles fans had, in fact, started forecasting that the team would not only reach the finals, it could potentially win the cup. The catastrophic exit of perennial rivals, the Black Stars of Ghana, at the group stage, sweetened the triumph of the Super Eagles, provoking disparaging memes and beggar-thy-neighbour comparisons.

    After nine years, it seems, the Nations Cup would return to Nigeria for the fourth time, not only improving the country’s FIFA ranking, but also cementing its hopes for a place in the World Cup in Qatar in November.

    Now, all of that is up in smoke and like forlorn lovers, millions of fans who decided to believe again, to give the Super Eagles another chance, are nursing broken hearts. Not only are the Super Eagles out of the Nations Cup, the chances that they would defeat Ghana in March to secure the World Cup ticket, are even in doubt.

    And typical of what happens when love sours, angry fans are throwing everything, including the kitchen sink, at the grounded Super Eagles. Some are blaming President Muhammadu Buhari’s pep talk with the team on Sunday before their Tunisia game for the defeat.

    In Buhari’s seven years in office (his first incarnation 1985 being an exception of course when Nigeria won the FIFA under 16 soccer championship), Nigeria has not won a soccer medal of any description — gold, silver, bronze or wood. He has no business, they say, calling the team before a crucial game and spreading bad luck.

    The more charitable among the unhappy fans, especially the religious minded, have quickly modified their position, inventing a moral lesson about the Super Eagles defeat. Comparing them with the Tunisians who started poorly but have advanced to the knockout stages, these fans have reminded us that starting well is not as important as finishing well and strong – a lesson they conveniently forgot when the Super Eagles won all first three group stage matches.

    There’s a version of the explanation for the Super Eagles’ defeat that I find irresistible: it’s the political economy of soccer which activist lawyer, Chidi Odinkalu, extracted from a book and shared like an olive branch to soothe combatants and broken-hearted soccer fans alike.

    The book, by Franklin Foer, is entitled, “How soccer explains the world: An unlikely theory of globalisation.”

    In its afterword, the book says, “If a nation heavily exports oil – Nigeria, Russia, Mexico, Norway, the Gulf States, Iran – it is doomed to underachieve. When an economy can generate wealth so easily, even if that wealth only flows to a small oligarchy, a country can get lazy, thinking that riches will forever flow naturally to it.

    “Political scientists call this the ‘paradox of plenty.’ And on the pitch these countries lack a winning temperament and an innovative mind-set. No oil-rich state has made it to the semifinals.”

    You can quarrel with Foer all day, but the 92-year-old history of the World Cup is on his side as is the history, to a large extent, of the African Nations Cup. The top two record winners are Egypt (seven times) and Cameroon (five times).

    Ghana is next with four wins – and then, oil happened. In fact, as if in a homage to Foer about oil’s debilitating effect on the brain, out of the 14 previous AFCON winners only two – Nigeria and Algeria – are major oil exporting countries.

    While the superstitious are blaming Buhari’s call for the Super Eagles defeat and the religious minded are improvising moral lessons from it and a large tribe of fans are simply angry at a missed opportunity to escape their current economic misery, this might just be a good time to begin to ask for and do what needs to be done if we want a different outcome in future.

    The Cameroun outing was a defeat foretold, but Nigeria does not have to be an eternal hostage to the paradox of plenty. And Brazil, a major producer, resource-rich and record five times winner of the World Cup (though not a heavy oil exporter), has demonstrated it is possible to beat the paradox of plenty.

    A good place to start remaking the story would be to revamp the domestic league. Nations that do well in soccer – and indeed in other competitive sports – tend to have a fairly well organised and managed domestic league, which attracts talents from home and abroad. In its current form, Nigeria’s domestic league is a confluence of government’s inefficiency and a playground for desperate, raw talents.

    Seventeen out of the 20 clubs in Nigeria’s Premier League, for example, are owned by state governments. This is a reversal of the trend in the heyday of soccer when leading clubs such as Stationery Stores, Bendel Insurance, IICC Shooting Stars, Abiola Babes, Ranchers Bees, BCC Lions, Mighty Jets, were private concerns, with Rangers International of Enugu being the notable exception.

    Over the years, the corrupt hands of government and politics have infiltrated the game, creating a cesspool of patronage and corruption. It’s time to free the space.

    The national team has benefited from the infusion of talents playing in foreign leagues, especially in Europe, staving off what could have been a more rapid decline of the game. But without a largely privately managed and truly professional domestic league, the pipeline for talent supply would continue to shrivel and the growth of the game stunted.

    Soccer is a tribal game, but even tribes bend to market rules. As things are today, local conditions are not only hostile to these rules, entrenched state interests abhor them.

    Unless something is done immediately, Cameroun won’t be the last heartbreak story.

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief LEADERSHIP

  • Sly: Why We Can’t Walk Away from This Crime Scene – Azu Ishiekwene

    The Lagos State Commissioner of Police, Hakeem Odumosu, would like to close the case of the suspicious death of Sylvester Omoroni Jr., and simply move on to something else. He’s surprised there’s pushback and can’t understand why.

    Odumosu said the state Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) had advised that the evidence provided was insufficient to charge the suspects for murder. Why hang suspects merely on public sentiments when five weeks of police investigations, arrests and detention of the suspects, and autopsies in two different states have not established a prima facie case against them?

    On the face of it, Odumosu appears to have a point. Suspicion cannot replace evidence.

    The circumstances surrounding the death of 12-year-old Sylvester, a boarding student of Dowen College, Lagos, in November were so tragic and painful that public outrage entertained no possibilities other than that the boy had been tortured, neglected and brutally murdered.

    The viral video was hard to watch. Seeing Sylvester blistered, anguished and struggling in tears as he narrated his ordeal at the hands of his alleged abusers, and then to hear he had died a few days later, is a parent’s nightmare. The memory of that video and of his family defiantly sharing a cake on his 12th posthumous birthday, still haunts me. Sylvester’s dream of becoming a pilot died in his second year in secondary school.

    The school’s explanations that he had been injured in a football game seemed shabby and incredulous for a private school where parents pay N3 million, or a hundred times the national minimum wage, as fees. From the house master to teachers and nurses, no one seemed to care in spite of warning signs that Sylvester had complained, just weeks earlier, of being tormented and bullied.

    And beyond the school, questions were also asked about what Sylvester’s parents did when he complained to them of being taunted with off-colour jokes about his older sister in the same school, who had been withdrawn on suspicion of bullying.

    Dowen is not an isolated case. Four months before Dowen, 14-year-old Karen-Happuch Akagher of Premier Academy, Abuja, was retrieved sick from school only for her mother to say three days later, after Karen died, that a condom was stuffed in her private part. Although the school denied, this tragic incident raised concerns that what in the past may have been low grade, underreported cruelty may have festered over time and transformed into travesties of the worst kind.

    One year before Premier Academy, a parent in Deeper Life High School, Uyo, southern Nigeria, shared the grief of her 11-year-old son’s abuse on social media, with pictures of how the boy had been sexually molested and brutalised by his schoolmates for bed wetting

    While a 2019 study by the US National Centre for Education Statistics showed that one out of five children of ages 12 to 18 is prone to bullying, a similar study in Nigeria in 2007 by Elizabeth Egbochukwu in the Journal of Social Sciences showed that four out of five children are at risk from this epidemic.

    The video of Sylvester dying, his distraught family by his bedside, riveted the country in a fit of outrage. The public is still too shocked and too disgusted to accept that anything less than hanging the suspects on the next pole makes sense.

    But there are also deeper reasons than anger and emotional bandwagon to explain why the authorities can’t easily get the closure they so desperately need. Lawyer to Sylvester’s parents and a senior advocate, Femi Falana, has accused the police of improvising a no-prima-facie advisory from a non-existent officer.

    According to him, on January 7 when Odumosu said the DPP advised that there was insufficient evidence from the police investigations to file any charges, never mind a charge for murder, there was, in fact, no DPP in Lagos. On what basis and on whose advice did the police decide not to file, if there was no DPP as alleged?

    Nigeria’s police force is notoriously overworked and underpaid, but in recent times, it appears to be adding self-destruction to its list of woes.

    That is not to suggest that the police should invent evidence to prosecute suspects (which they do, anyway) or that public outrage should be gratified irrespective of the facts. But the so-called advice of the DPP does not help to repair the feeling of suspicion of a cover up.

    A DPP typically does one of three things with police investigations of this nature: advise that evidence is sufficient to sustain the charges; request that more investigation should be done where necessary to sustain the charges; or advise that the charges should be dropped where the results of the investigations are insufficient.

    In this particular case, we’re told that the DPP has advised the police to use the third option. That would be acceptable if it was any crime other than suspicious death. What the law in Lagos provides in the case of suspicious death – as is Sylvester’s case – is that the DPP should refer the matter to a coroner for an inquest. It is the job of the coroner to invite all the parties and, with the benefit of the evidence and testimonies, determine the cause of death.

    It’s unacceptable and clearly prejudicial for the so-called DPP to assume the role of a judge in her own case. That is a matter for the coroner. If the police/DPP care about being believed, they can’t swindle the coroner’s job. Until the facts are established in court, it is just as futile to believe that Sylvester could have died from injuries sustained at a football game as it is to believe that he may have died from bullying or the substances that he said he was forced to drink.

    The room for doubt is so much that it is disgraceful for the police to say on the one hand that the toxicology report, one of the useful elements in the search for a cause, is not ready, and yet on the other, rush head-on to close the case file.

    Two autopsies have been conducted – one by the parents in a private hospital in Warri, Delta State, after Sylvester’s death; and the second in Lagos, at which even though his parents were not present the pathologist from Delta – four pathologists representing four of the five suspects and a pathologist representing the Lagos state government – were all present.

    If the authorities have gone to this length to demonstrate a commitment to justice and transparency, why is it difficult now to follow through the requirement of the law by subjecting available evidence to a coroner, as is required for all suspicious deaths? And if the police/DPP failed to do what the law provided and left the family’s counsel with no option but to call for the inquest, why the hurried and contemptuous press conference by the police?

    The shabby handling of this matter, especially since that press conference, has further damaged public confidence, and reinforced the suspicion that the authorities would take sides with the top dogs and the well-connected wherever the evidence may lead.

    This is neither good for the authorities nor for the school whose reputation is at stake. The academic plans of hundreds of innocent students have also been disrupted, parents left confused and the suspects scarred. It’s in the interest of all parties to have a fair and transparent closure to this matter.

    There is still a window of redemption, which the prosecuting authorities must use. They should pursue the completion of the toxicology and turn in the report, along with other available forensic evidence, to the coroner to do its job. Only when the cause of death has been determined by an open, transparent process, can healing and closure begin.

    The police are probably banking on fatigue, believing that in a country where as a result of cultural and religious factors people are largely uninterested or reluctant to disclose the cause of death, the matter will fade away, sooner than later. Maybe it will. But it would also further erode the depleted confidence in the force, while the vicious cycle returns sooner than later.

    Perhaps the only thing worse than Sylvester’s death is for justice to be taken hostage, either by public sentiments or by police incompetence and complicity. We can’t walk away from this crime scene.

  • My Precipitations – Azu Ishiekwene

    Azu Ishiekwene

    No, it’s not what you think. I have read Bisi Akande’s feather-ruffler, entitled, “My Participations.” Perhaps the only connection between the memoir and what you’re about to read is a borrowed inspiration to re-purpose the title. So, relax.

    I laughed my way through the book. If you knew Akande, you would probably guess why. He writes not only the way he talks; he writes just the way he is: direct, ruthlessly guileless and almost without a sense of danger.

    For the past two years, or so, I have taken on the hazardous job of popping my head around the incoming year and trying to make sense of what I suspect might happen down the road, based on information from valuable sources cultivated over the years, some desk research and a gut feeling.

    I have not always used a regular title for this exercise. But considering the interest generated by Akande’s book, his gift to my yearly muse from now on might well be, “My Precipitations”, which is a variant of his book title.

    On January 3, 2019, I published this yearly forecast under a different title: “2019: Facts, fiction, myths…and what matters.” In the article, I forecast, among other things, that Atiku Abubakar would lose, Fintechs would get stronger, telcos would get super-agent/banking licenses, and Manchester City, despite falling hugely behind, would win the English Premier League. I was bang on the money.

    2020 was a bad year for seers worldwide, with the wreckage of many a reputation buried in the mire of COVID-19. Perhaps to the last man, futurologists missed the single most significant event that shaped 2020, and also continues to dominate the headlines to this day.

     

    Yet, whatever the blow one’s reputation as a seer may have taken, my forecast for 2021, entitled, “Place where angels fear to tread,” published on January 8, carries some redeeming, even prophetic, value.

    I recall, among other things, saying in that article: “2021 will be under the shadow of 2020, well beyond the second quarter. COVID-19, that wrecking ball which evaded the world’s telescope last year, will continue to dominate the headlines…concerns will remain about the possibilities of mutations, the prospects of a third wave and the safety and viability of the new vaccines. The history of pandemics suggests that they don’t die easily.”

    Ghanaian police have stolen the thunder from doomsday preachers. They have been warned to see no evil, hear no evil and say no evil. For safety, I forecast a boom in the adoption of sign language, sociolinguistics and neurobiology in that neighbouring country. As for Nigeria, my precipitations for 2022 begin, not where angels fear to tread, but where, in spite of the gathering storm, devils are building mansions: politics.

    The opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP), appears resurgent. But it would face its own demons soon, as the Turks headed by Governors Nyesom Wike and Aminu Tambuwal, and even Senator Bukola Saraki, will, once again, confront the party’s aging talisman, Atiku Abubakar.

    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.

    Some influential members of the party, especially from the North, have been looking for an emissary to go and tell the former Lagos State governor and national leader of the APC, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, not to run. Just like they did the last time, they are looking for someone to repeat the trope that a Muslim-Muslim ticket, compounded by old age, will not work.

    Well, unless they find someone to deliver their message before the end of January, Tinubu will declare his intention and run. There will be other contenders, but former President Goodluck Jonathan will not be one of them. Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, constrained by loyalty and a deep sense of approach-avoidance conflict, remains a very strong contender.

     

    Insiders have also hinted at the possibility of a Kayode Fayemi-Babagana Zulum ticket. Yet, if Tinubu survives the ambush of the wolves in his party, the race is over.

    The only reason why the ruling party has shifted its convention three times and refused to relinquish its temporary, ramshackle structure, is because it is afraid that Tinubu, easily the most prepared and invested candidate, may seize the party and pave a much easier way to the ticket for himself. But for how long will they hold out?

    Currently, there are three or four main blocks fighting for the soul of the APC: One is the remnant of the hardcore CPC wing of the party, comprising the acting Chairman and Governor of Yobe State, Mai Mala Buni; the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami; and the Personal Assistant and Private Secretary to the President, Sabiu ‘Tunde’ Yusuf. A few Southern quislings are milling about them, hoping in vain for an opening.

    After the passing of Abba Kyari, the ascendant wing wrested power from such TBO originals as Sule Hamma, Buba Galadima, Sam Nda-Isaiah and co. Adamu Adamu is still in it, but his health and temperament have turned his attention elsewhere.

    In spite of the fissures among the major factions – the Buni-Malami-Tunde group; the Tinubu-Ganduje group; the exiles from PDP, mostly former governors; and governors/political appointees who are serving out their term – the first group will fight tooth and nail, to block Tinubu from emerging. If they have to, they will break up the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) camp by inciting alternative candidates against him.

    Suggestions that the intra-party combat in the APC will lead to the emergence of a new party will fail. Some will leave, of course, as a result of bitter ticket-sharing disagreements, illusions of a so-called Third Force and the fallouts of the Electoral Amendment Bill. But in the end, the combatants know that it is their enlightened collective interest not to sink the boat however violently they may be rocking it now.

    Already the party is taking steps to ensure that it not only prevails, but that the APC would retain power at all costs, and for its own benefit. Some of these steps are already known. For example, delaying the party’s convention for as long as possible and keeping an ad hoc executive on the pretext that the party is updating its register.

     

    Or resisting public pressure to use electronic transmission of results on the excuse of poor nationwide network coverage, only to ambush the public again by inserting the provision in the current Electoral Amendment Bill, which we are now told President Muhammadu Buhari will not sign.

    But the fate of the Electoral Bill will not be the joker. The real joker this year would be the ongoing effort by the political elite within the ruling party to hijack the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

    The process, which started after the 2019 election, has shifted gears with a recruitment system that prioritises loyalty to the ruling party. Insiders told me, for example, that at least two national commissioners were denied tenure renewal – AVM Ahmed Muazu and Okechukwu Ibeano – on account of their sterling performances: the former for the outcome of the Bauchi elections; and the latter for the outcome of the just-concluded Anambra elections, which didn’t go the way of the APC.

    By August when the tenure of the 27 resident electoral commissioners will be completed, INEC would be a largely inexperienced and beholden electoral management body, waiting to repay IOUs to politicians who nominated most of them for the job. RECs whose tenures have been outstanding and who could have been retained to strengthen the system will be flushed out. The ruling party will capture INEC this year and the courts will be very, very busy.

    It’s okay to debate the Electoral Bill, and we should. But like it happened in 2007, even after INEC Chairman, Maurice Iwu, dragged everyone, including ambassadors all across the country, showing off his VSAT systems in the 774 local government areas, Nigeria still had its most shambolic elections ever because the process was left in crooked hands. That scenario will play itself out again.

    There will be relief on the COVID-19 front after the winter period. With the availability of treatment at early stages, the impact of the virus on the world economy will abate, easing supply chain problems and bringing significant recovery to the global economy – and of course, to Nigeria.

    The Presidency has said all terrorists in the North East will be wiped out this year. That’s a prayer, not a plan. If morning shows the day, a terrorist group that has advanced from slings to scrap weapons and then on to automatic weapons and rocket launchers does not look like Boy Scouts waiting for disbandment on presidential orders from Aso Rock. The terrorists have not only planted flags and seized territory in some parts of the North East (and the North West, too), they’re collecting levies and taxes!

    On the eve of a major election in Nigeria, the ISWAP/ISIS terrorists will try to extend their reach, buoyed by increasing insecurity and instability in the subregion. Foreign governments that could have helped are tired of trying. With Buhari in his lame duck phase, they’ll be looking to the next government.

    There will be some bright spots though. Not in the African Cup of Nations where shabby preparations are guaranteed to cause Nigeria another heartbreak (bookies will do well to bet on Senegal or Algeria), but from Robin Hood country, England.

     

    In the Queen’s Platinum Year, the 70th year of ascension to the throne, the New York Times is reporting that the UK could follow Germany’s lead by returning some of the country’s stolen artifacts, especially the Benin Bronzes. After three centuries, one of the world’s longest running heists could be entering its final chapter in 2022.

    But it would also be the beginning of a new chapter for the World Cup which would be held for the first time in the Middle East. Qatar, the hosts, and 12 other countries have qualified as of the end of 2021. Nigeria will qualify in the final playoffs in March, but again the two African countries bet-worthy when the games begin in November in Qatar are Senegal and Algeria.

    By the way, it’s the Metaverse year, which means, thanks to Mark Zuckerberg, if you don’t like where you’re at, you can make your own future with the help of an avatar!

    Ishiekwene is the Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

     

  • Stolen Crown, Failed Coronation and the Other Sultan – Azu Ishiekwene

    Azu Ishiekwene

    Last week, while the eyes of the world were on Afghanistan, a fellow in one of Nigeria’s most tradition-bound states attempted the royal equivalent of a military coup.

    The leader of the Shua Arab in Edo, Idris Adanno, in a curious, latter-day rediscovery of his linguistic and cultural identity, arranged for his own coronation as the “Sultan” of the Shua Arab in Edo. It was a sign of displeasure, if not rebellion, against the current practice of lumping together all leaders of Hausa communities as “Sarkin.”

    When the epistemology of northern traditional institutions would be written, however, it will be recorded that while Sanusi Lamido Sanusi II, the deposed emir of Kano, thought it more profound and reverential to be called and addressed simply as “Sarkin Kano”, a certain Adanno thought the title had become too debased and common that he needed a higher, more exclusive order of preferment. He wanted to be called sultan instead.

    Meanwhile, at about the same time, Adanno’s distant cousins in Warri, in an extraordinary display of villainous audacity, stole the crown of the Olu, perhaps preferring to have their own coronation in Rogue Island.

    That’s a matter for another day.

    Adanno’s coup failed, but what he lost from his failed attempt, he gained in equal measure of fame and notoriety. Since the matter has been laid to rest, at least for now, my intention is not to prolong his misadventure but to share the story of another sultan whose life should inspire not only sultan wannabes, but also others who aspire to a throne.

    The other Sultan, Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III, didn’t ascend the throne by subterfuge. And for nearly 15 years, he has kept his place without resorting to guile.

    Our paths first crossed when I was Executive Director of Publications in PUNCH. He had just been appointed Sultan after the tragic death of his brother, Muhammadu Maccido, in the 2006 ADC air crash in which 93 persons were killed.

    Apart from his brother, Brigadier Abubakar (as he then was) also lost his nephew, Senator Gbadamasi Maccido, in that crash. It seemed that tragedy had not only struck without notice, it had also come with its own chair and shelter.

    It was under this cloud of misery that Abubakar became the 20th Sultan of Sokoto. His friend, poet and current Chairman of the Editorial Board of The Nation, Sam Omatseye, told me at the time that the new Sultan, Abubakar III, wanted to meet with a few journalists in Lagos and had personally asked if I could attend.

    I was confused and unsettled. As of then, I had been a journalist for 18 years, travelled and interviewed fairly extensively, but maintained a somewhat self-imposed prejudice for traditional institutions, royalty and monarchs. I thought them too conservative, backward and even anachronistic.

    Out of curiosity, however, I suspended my prejudice and attended the meeting, somewhere in Ikoyi. Without his layers of robes, scarves, sashes and other sartorial accoutrements, the Sultan looked very ordinary, almost like the guy next door.

    But it was not only seeing this Sultan without the hood that struck me. He was direct and without airs. He called many of the guests by first names and cracked jokes about their newspapers or their recent columns.

    He shared his personal phone numbers with all those who asked and took their numbers in turn, paying attention to his guests in such a personal way as if nothing else mattered. I left the place wondering if I had been mistaken or if the evening’s meeting was only a performance, a charm offensive.

    It’s close to 20 years now and Abubakar III has barely changed from the Sultan I met that solitary evening in Lagos. He still keeps his old phone number, answers his calls in person and returns his messages.

    And he is still very direct and unambiguous about the matters of the day, too. You would think that religion would be one of his weakest points.

    The Sultan, direct descendant of Uthman dan Fodio, pre-eminent traditional ruler in Northern Nigeria, head of the council of traditional rulers, and spiritual head of all Muslims in the country might, ordinarily, be expected to dissemble in matters of religion.

    When mad men under the franchise of Boko Haram or their affiliates maim, murder, rape and destroy in the name of Allah, claiming that if they die, a bevy of brides awaits them at the entrance of paradise, you might expect the spiritual curator of the religion to either keep quiet or admonish such fanatics behind closed doors. At least in the religious cauldron that Nigeria has turned out to be.

    But that’s not the Sultan that Abubakar III is – or has been. He tells the mad men in plain language, which he repeated in a recent meeting I had with him, that, “They’ll go straight to hell!” And he says so publicly, too. That no one can kill in Allah’s name and hope to find shelter in paradise.

    Abubakar III has done more for inter-faith unity and understanding than any Muslim spiritual leader I’ve known for a long, long time. In his capacity as co-chairman of the Nigeria Inter-Religious Council, he has worked tirelessly, drawing on his extensive network with other faith councils across the world, to repair, heal and bind broken bonds and also roll back religious intolerance and extremism.

    Even in the current mayhem in Jos in which scores have been murdered in attacks and reprisal attacks while the original cause of the madness is completely lost and the line between antagonist and protagonist blurred beyond recognition, the Sultan’s voice of restraint can still be heard.

    He’s not a closet moderniser which, come to think of it, I find somewhat ironic given the antecedents of his ancestry and the conservative bastion of his throne.

    When, sounding like Peter Tosh, he said to me recently that “justice is a precondition for peace”, he could possibly have been speaking about the tragic mismanagement of the country’s diversity by the government of President Muhammadu Buhari.

    In light of the current flare up of ethnic and religious tensions in the country, it’s hard to imagine a more appropriate aphorism than Peter Tosh’s.

    He has spoken out for education for the child – girl or boy – reminding fools who despise education in the name of Islam and their enablers in high places that the caliphate itself was founded on education and enlightenment.

    Two years ago, when the government was sleepwalking on court orders, including an order for the release from detention of publisher and activist, Omoyele Sowore, the Sultan said, publicly, that disobedience of court orders was “a recipe for chaos and disaster.” And he said so when the inter-religious council visited Buhari in Aso Rock.

    In the aftermath of the targeting of warehouses where government crooks across the country had wickedly stored COVID-19 palliatives, the Sultan reminded the government of the familiar inscription on the back of many lorries in the day: “A hungry man is an angry man!” He challenged the government to tackle the rising inflation and the high cost of living and to stop making excuses.

    I don’t know if it bothers him that the government is tone deaf or whether the government thinks, in fact, that he is a sufferable nuisance, in a manner of speaking.

    But the world is not only listening, it’s also paying attention. Five years ago, the Sultan and his brother in the business of inter-faith engineering, John Onaiyekan Cardinal, were jointly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

    The nomination was as good as winning, because it sent a clear message that the extraordinary work that both men are doing has not gone unnoticed – or unrewarded. A few years earlier, both had jointly shared the prize for the LEADERSHIP Person of the Year, proof that these prophets are worthy, home and abroad.

    As the Sultan turned 65 on Tuesday, I struggled to figure out what might be responsible for his enigmatic path. Yes, he was a member of the 18th Regular Combatant Course of the Nigerian Defence Academy (the class of the former Chief of Army Staff Lt. General Azubuike Ihejirika), but he is not the first soldier to ascend a throne.

    Perhaps, his extensive tour of duty in combatant and non-combatant positions, especially his deployment as defence adviser to Pakistan, with concurrent accreditation to Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, might have shaped his worldview also.

    I can only guess. One thing I’m sure of, though, is that Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III, the 20th Sultan of Sokoto, has raised the bar so high that sultan wannabes will have to do more than think that buying a crown and improvising a coronation will fool the community. Neither a royal coup nor a royal heist would work.

    Abubakar III has shown that it takes something fundamentally different. And long may he live!

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Message from the dead Borno farmers – Azu Ishiekwene

    Message from the dead Borno farmers – Azu Ishiekwene

    Azu Ishiekwene

    That the slain Borno farmers did not get military clearance is an inconvenient truth, but the real error of judgement was taking the government at its word.

    In his inaugural speech on May 29, 2015, President Muhammadu Buhari ordered the military chiefs – the same military chiefs there today – to relocate to the Northeast, the main theatre in the war on Boko Haram.

    The previous government had done poorly on security and Buhari said the only way to take the country back from the terrorists and military authorities who deployed troops to fight with bare hands while diverting money and weapons, was to send the new military chiefs to the frontline. They were supposed to report, effective immediately, and stay there until the battle is won.

    I think the chiefs heard the commander-in-chief on that day. According to a BBC report on June 2, 2015, the military actually started moving its headquarters to Maiduguri, the epicentre of the insurgency, “to add impetus and renewed vigour to the fight against terrorism.”

    The military issued a statement saying the new centre in Maiduguri would serve as “a forward command base for the chief of army staff and other service chiefs…without creating another layer of command structure.” They were taking the war to Boko Haram and at last, bringing hope to distraught citizens.

    So, where were the military chiefs when Boko Haram struck on Saturday, beheading dozens of farmers and taking an unknown number, including women, away hostage? Were they directing operations from a virtual base station in Abuja and therefore had no need to be on ground as the President had ordered? Or did they receive clearance from him to dismantle their frontline camp in Maiduguri since they have repeatedly told the public that Boko Haram has been technically defeated?

    It may well be that the dead farmers needed clearance to go to their farms on that day, but from who? From the military high command that was on a clear instruction to move to the frontline and stay there till the battle is won, but which has nonetheless been overcome by the comforts of Abuja and the indulgence of the commander-in-chief? Or from Boko Haram, which accepts only the sacrifice of human blood?

    As they left their homes that fateful Saturday, it’s unlikely that the farmers were so crazy to think they could fight Boko Haram with their sickles and plows. If they thought for a moment that it was safe to go to their farms, there must have been a good reason. For example, in October, the Commandant General of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), Abdullahi Gana Muhammadu, assured farmers in the North East that they could return to their farms “to enhance the country’s food security.”

    Muhammadu, who said he was following up on a 2018 presidential directive, said about 5,000 NSCDC marshals had been deployed in schools and farms in the Northeast, as part of an Agro-ranger squad supposed to assist provide basic security for farmers and students.

    With a microphone good for speeches but useless for action, Muhammadu said in October that part of the brief of the Agro-ranger squad, “is to accompany farmers to their farms and accompany them back in the evenings. They also provide security on some of the roads to the farms.”

    After making this heart-warming, hope-inspiring speech, Muhammadu delegated his microphone to accompany the farmers to their farms. And the sad, heart-breaking result was what happened on Saturday.

    Not one of the 5,000 Agro-rangers was in Jere Local Government, quite famous for producing Maryam Abacha and also for being a major farming hub, among other things. The Agro-rangers were apparently on a holiday from Zabarmari where the farmers were murdered and others taken hostage in daylight.

    But bloodletting has always gone on, it was just that the number of the victims on Saturday reached a horrific new high. According to a BBC report 22 farmers were killed in separate attacks while working in irrigation farms in September. Over 20,000 have been killed and two million displaced since the insurgency started over a decade ago.

    As the number of victims has mounted, so has the scale of excuses. I believe our soldiers are doing the best they can in extremely difficult and dangerous circumstances. Yet, up the chain of command, excuses are armed, fortified and deployed in the field, where competence and leadership should be provided.

    After the Zabarmari killings on Saturday, the military high command said it was doing its best and blamed communities for not providing information. In other words, communities hate themselves so much they would rather die at the hands of Boko Haram, than volunteer information to save their own lives.

    If the service chiefs under Jonathan had told the country that they were failing in the fight against Boko Haram because communities were failing to provide information – and God knows they would have been right – we would still have strung them with live cables and hung them out to dry.

    It has obviously taken five years for the military high command to find out that the average Nigerian – whether a Zabarmawa or an Ijebu man – doesn’t trust the man in uniform? And we should be clapping for this exceptional sociological discovery after what happened on Saturday?

    Sources in the Northeast told me on Wednesday that while Boko Haram may have been indeed responsible for the tragic murders as it claimed, shrinking arable land linked to climate change and compounded by insurgency, may also have exacerbated the deadly power struggle among ethnic groups, especially among the Zabarmawa mostly farmers and fishermen (originally from Sokoto/Kebbi/Zamfara) and the Kanuri. In a COVID-19 year, when hunger and poverty are writ large, the scale of conflict over land rights, is better imagined.

    How this deadly struggle for land, worsened by the increasing siege around Maiduguri, may be feeding insurgency around the Northeast should be a matter of concern for military intelligence, as it seeks to rebuild trust.

    Sure, Abuja and environs are not what they used to be pre-2015. They’re safer and more secure. But Abuja is not Nigeria, however much politicians like to pretend otherwise. As long as any part of this country is beset by insurgency, as long as people cannot travel the highways or stay in their schools or homes without been afraid that they would be kidnapped or go to their farms without fear of being murdered, then the battle is far, very far, from being won.

    Government officials have exhausted the lame excuses that terrorism is a global problem or that angry Martians are not helping to supply arms and equipment to our troops. Yes, terrorism is a global problem, and yes, the politics of arms supply can be nasty and frustratingly difficult. But the only countries losing citizens in the numbers and horrific ways we’re losing them and are still making excuses are failed or failing countries. Make your list.

    If out of the five major roads leading in and out of Borno State – Konduga-Barma-Gwoza-Yola; Dambua-Biu-Gombe; Baga-Niger; Dikwa-Chad; and Damaturu-Potiskum-Yobe-Kano-Bauchi roads – only the last one is accessible, and even so, you have to be mad to risk it, then we have a very serious problem.

    If, as the Shehu of Borno said in August, citizens cannot travel 10km outside Maiduguri; if despite trying prayer warriors from Saudi Arabia, and putting his own life on the line several times, Governor Babagana Zulum is now forced to ask for help from mercenaries to tackle Boko Haram, then surely citizens may soon find themselves not only needing clearance to go to farm; they may also need it to stay at home.

    The condolence register is full. Buhari must meet the challenge, now.

    Ishiekwene is the MD/Editor-In-Chief of The Interview

  • Eight Decades Of Quests And Conquests – Azu Ishiekwene

    Azu Ishiekwene

     

    The headline of the article in that edition of Sunday Times seemed audacious: It was all caps and entitled, “Youth with the world at his feet,” published 53 years ago, when I was two.

     

    It was not about me, of course. It was about Prince Julius Adelusi-Adeluyi, who at 27, was already Secretary General of the International Students Organisation (ISO), a body comparable in its prime and transcendence to the Internet of Things, the modern-day religion of Mark Zuckerberg.

     

    Outside the context of that time (August 13, 1967) the Sunday Times headline may not only appear audacious, it would even seem exaggerated. In context, however, it was not.

     

    The 1950s when ISO was formed and the 1960s were times of ferment and great social turbulence across the world. For Prince Adelusi-Adeluyi, a black student, an African and a Nigerian to occupy a ranking position in a global student body at that time – a body which gave him the platform to visit over 60 other countries, speaking on the big stage and setting up branches – his position was not just a big deal, it was also significant conquest.

     

    It was a parable, too. A parable of what the young and daring can do today, without waiting to be told that they are the leaders of tomorrow.

     

    Prince Adelusi-Adeluyi’s has been more than just a life of daring. It has also been a parable of how a life that almost never was later became a life of quests, grace and extra-ordinary impact.

     

    Juli Pharmacy, or Prince Juli, as he is fondly known, might not have been born. After five, his parents thought they had given up child-bearing, but he came anyway, exactly 80 years ago on Sunday, fair-complexioned like “oyinbo.”

     

    His mother fell into labour on July 31, but he was not born until August 2 – two days later, almost confirming his parents’ worst fear that his conception had been a “mistake”.

     

    After he survived the mistake of his birth, young Julius was taken to the Catholic mission at age five where he lived with missionaries for the next 20 years. It was while he was there that he learnt lessons that would guide him through his teenage years and well into adult life.

     

    “I learnt orderliness, simplicity and discipline,” he said in a recent interview. “I was taught to pay attention to details and to realise that whatever is worth doing is worth doing well. I learnt that to be a person of character and service is better than to be a person of material wealth.”

     

    The lessons lit his path, whether as Secretary General of ISO where he helped to set up branches in over 60 countries, rallying students from Holland to Yugoslavia and Kenya to take a stand and make their voices heard in their countries, or later in business where his pioneering effort as chairman of the indigenous business group of the Nigerian Stock Exchange tested his mettle to the limits.

     

    Business of the Nigerian variety was nothing like what he had experienced in his exertions in student unionism at the then University of Ile-Ife, where he studied Pharmacy and even edited an irreverent magazine, Spitfire. It was nothing like what he had seen in his stint in broadcasting either. Or even what he would later learn from his remarkable years of service at Rotary International.

     

    As Chairman of Juli Pharmacy, his pioneering role as chair of the indigenous business group of the NSE, was as much a test of his acumen and faith in the country as it was emblematic of why Nigeria remains a perpetual story of a potential in the making; ever aspiring, but never quite there.

     

    Like most idealists, Prince Juli thought he could bring some of the lessons he had learnt on the global stage to bear on business in Nigeria. So, he took his company, Juli Pharmacy, to the NSE as the first indigenous business to go public.

     

    To further deepen the indigenisation decree, which had been enacted over a decade and a half earlier, the military regime of General Ibrahim Babangida promised to restructure the Stock Exchange and expand the scope, impact and reach of indigenous companies.

     

    Juli Pharmacy took the Babangida regime by its word. The company had over 22 branches, far more than many indigenous businesses at the time could boast of. It went public and raised over N100million (roughly N6billion by today’s value).

     

    The shares were oversubscribed by five times its value and Juli Pharmacy ended up spending about N20m to return N400milion, leaving the company effectively with N80million to start.

     

    Peter Olafioye, the Sunday Times reporter who wrote that young Julius had the world at his feet in 1967 should have been at the Exchange in 1986 when Chairman Juli rang the opening bell. It seemed that after his conquests in student unionism and philanthropy, in Pharmacy and even his stint as a privately licensed pilot, Prince Juli would also take the business world by the scruff of the neck.

     

    The military Vice President and second-in-command at the time, Vice Admiral Augustus Aikhomu, vowed that the regime would do whatever it took to support indigenous businesses. He urged Juli Pharmacy to keep dancing, never to look back, promising that Babangida’s drumbeat would never stop.

     

    But the beat stopped even before it started, and without warning. Three months after Juli Pharmacy went public, the regime introduced the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), making business hell for listed indigenous companies and wiping off Juli Pharmacy’s stock value by nearly 70 per cent overnight.

     

    The man who had the world at his feet suddenly needed a leg to stand on, a prospect which even today’s elite business schools would find difficult to unravel as a case study.

     

    Prince Juli has extra-ordinary gifts. I have been magnetised by his warmth since he first embraced me in a heart-hug after I gave a lecture at a Rotary event at the Airport Hotel, Lagos, 15 years ago.

     

    He has looks that make his peers, and even younger ones, struggle to come to terms with his age; a flair for public speaking; a deep sense of humour; and a sense of fashion that leaves this rag-loving generation in shreds.

     

    Until he turned his library over to the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU, Ile-Ife), his alma mater, that personal treasure trove was one of the most resourced personal libraries I had ever seen. His quest for knowledge drove him to study law even after he had become a successful and well-known pharmacist. He finished Law School as the best graduating student, drawing both admiration and envy almost in equal measure.

     

    He speaks Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and French, a talent which has helped him build and maintain a vast network of contacts and drawn many, old and young, to his well-spring of wisdom. In conversation, he pays attention to each person with complete presence, as if nobody else but that person matters the most.

     

    In his column in The Nation on Monday, Poet, Sam Omatseye, described Prince Juli as “the renaissance man”; and on Tuesday, master prose stylist, Dr. Reuben Abati, paid tribute to his humanity and prodigious gifts. The story continues.

     

    He has been student activist, thought leader, mobiliser, bridge builder, businessman and minister of health, receiving accolades from past Nigerian leaders, including General Yakubu Gowon and twice from current President, Muhammadu Buhari.

     

    Yet there appears to be one thing that he has struggled to understand, in spite of his prodigious gifts: how to crack the conundrum of poor policy implementation in Nigeria’s public life. How can a country so abundantly gifted with glimpses of talent in the public sector and a vibrant and innovative private sector and civil society, fall so disastrously short in execution every time?

     

    Prince Juli tried to tackle this problem in his thesis at the National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS) Course 12, entitled, “Constraints of policy formulation and implementation in Nigeria”. But 10 years on, the answer is still blowing in the wind.

     

    Why is that nearly half a century after he became a student leader on the global stage, no Nigerian student has attained that height?

     

    Why is it that in spite of repeated promises by Nigerian governments, in spite of papers, seminars and conferences with tomes of recommendations and volumes of stirring speeches, Nigerian businesses are still struggling to find a footing, just as it was when Juli Pharmacy enlisted on the Stock Exchange 34 years ago?

     

    What is the consequential contribution of pharmacists in Nigeria – the apple of Juli Pharmacy’s eye – in finding solutions to the raging COVID-19 pandemic? In one word, why can’t we get implementation right?

     

    As Prince Juli marks 80 on Sunday, perhaps one of his great wishes would be a lasting answer to the conundrum of implementation. That may well be one conquest that could bring the world to our collective feet. Happy birthday, sir!

     

    Ishiekwene is the MD/Editor-In-Chief of The Interview

  • Saving Charity From Scandal, By Azu Ishiekwene

    Saving Charity From Scandal, By Azu Ishiekwene

    Azu Ishiekwene

    In the nearly two weeks of lockdown so far in most Nigerian cities, we have seen great acts of charity by individuals, groups and institutions. Many have gone the extra mile to share what little they have with friends, neighbours, and even strangers, who have little or nothing.

    And in one inspiring example, Bamidele Ademola-Olateju, a US-based Nigerian author and creative writer, entered a challenge only to share the entire prize money of N330,000 she won from it among her followers and needy strangers she never met.

    In the midst of the heartening news of extraordinary sharing, however, a few concerning videos have gone viral.

    One particularly striking one showed the hand of a young man holding a small plastic bag of what looked like steamed white rice, which the Alfa who made the video said his family had received from an unnamed government.

    In the two-minute-seven-seconds video, the Alfa rained curses on government in stinging sarcasm, yet without the slightest hint of bitterness or anger in his tone. It’s an uncommon gift, mostly endowed in the South west.

    He told the story of how the same government that had asked everyone to stay at home with a promise to provide essential supplies had left citizens with the short end of the stick, with only a few grains of rice to survive on.

    According to him, that same day, he had seen large trucks carrying bags of rice and other staples in the neighbourhood, only for each family head to be invited and handed packets of rice that could hardly fill a N500 bread nylon.

    It was for this singular act of extraordinary charity that he decided to make this special video to thank the government on behalf of himself and his entire family, for the great, incredible act of kindness in this time of desperate need. He then prayed that the suppliers and their children would receive just this kind of help in their hour of need.

    It was invitation to hell delivered with an affection that will make those responsible for that supply stew in quiet rage at how their kindness had stuck in their own craw.

    Elsewhere, the strategy was different, far less nuanced, but with the same catastrophic effect. A prominent politician in Lagos had his name branded on bread loaves and distributed randomly.

    Recipients who were not particularly pleased with the amount of loaves they got and who couldn’t muster faith to multiply the loaves as in biblical times, went mad. Incensed that apartment buildings with scores of people had been forced to share four loaves each, they tossed the bread on the road and kicked the thing around like football.

    The rage against backhanded charity was not on the streets alone. Inside sources said the week before the lockdown, the Central Bank of Nigeria had to save the banks from killing themselves with charity.

    After one bank chairman announced millions of dollars to match the status of his bank as a global African bank, others joined the bandwagon, announcing billions of naira donation in the fight against Coronavirus as well.

    The problem was not only that the CBN was concerned that most of it (apart from the one directly tied to the construction of an isolation centre) would eventually turn out to be 419 donations, there was also genuine concern about the adverse knock-on effect.

    Banks that were making pledges to hotspot states could soon find themselves under pressure to extend the same gesture to other states where they also have branches or risk losing goodwill! How far would they go?

    In any case, where else in the world – even in the global epicentres of this virus – are banks directly and publicly involved in announcing donations of billions to fight COVID-19?

    Deploying help of any kind was always going to be problematic for predatory reasons, poor planning and weak control. More than once in recent times, we have given charity a bloody nose.

    In a scandal that the world is yet to recover from, 200 tonnes of dates donated to Nigeria by Saudi Arabia three years ago, were diverted and sold in the open market.

    The dates, valued at nearly N20million, were supplied to help millions of poor people who had been internally displaced by Boko Haram to break their fast during the Ramadan. But the dates vanished and that was that.

    To be sure, such scandals occur even in better organised systems: the difference – which is fundamentally important – is that the chances of getting caught and punished are much higher in a number of these other places.

    In our present circumstances, I’m not even sure that the millions at the receiving end of predatory charity are ever going to ask for retribution.

    They know they are being taken advantage of. They have met the politicians among these folks before. They have met them on voting lines before elections when the politicians put a few crumpled naira notes inside slices of bread. They have been swindled in different ways before but too weak and too poor to say no, they have grown to accept their fate, and laugh them off in skits.

    What is the point pursuing retribution anyway? The IDPs cheated of their dates have since moved on. Who will ask the banks if they redeemed their dubious pledges? The folks who got only miserable loaves of bread have kicked the loaves down the road. And the Alfa with only a few grains of rice for himself and his family has buried his discontent in a two-minute video. That is that.

    Can we put the experience this time to good use? I know how difficult it can be for politicians to resist the urge of playing politics with everything, as some of them are already doing with COVID-19. Even when they try to do right, godfathers up the food chain can sometimes make it hard. And predatory poverty makes it even harder for ordinary folks to ask questions even where public funds are involved.

    I know, too, that ego and PR would often not let some individuals and corporates do the right thing, even when it beats them over the head. But if the few angry videos have taught us anything about charity this season, it’s that we need not just do it, but to do it in ways that make both the giver and the receiver feel valued.

    Charity tends to be more effective when impact is measurable and giving is narrow and targeted. The scale of the despair may suggest otherwise and the urge would always be to do more than we can chew. But the improving science of charity, which depends heavily on data, can help us do a better job.

    Why stir up anger – and even potentially cause a stampede – by distributing a few packets of rice when government can simply decide to make direct, one-off cash transfers to a certain category of civil servants through their bank accounts and leave them to decide what they want to do with the money?

    And if the plan is to reach a wider target outside white collar, why not use resources by the World Food Programme or other established charities, online and off?

    As for banks falling over each other to announce phantom donations, why can’t they simply use their data bases to credit a pre-determined number/class of customers and perhaps, also, work with the major IT companies and agents to reach the e-wallets of customers in remote areas?

    The point is not to try to reach 190million Nigerians, but to choose your charity with clear thinking, respect and openness, especially when other people’s money is involved.

    There’s no need for a rat race. Just one bad video can do a lot of damage to the most well-intentioned effort. Charity and scandal need not go hand-in-hand.

    Ishiekwene is the MD/Editor-In-Chief The Interview