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Tag: Azu Ishiekwene

  • The Okuama Dead: Story Behind the Grief – By Azu Ishiekwene

    The Okuama Dead: Story Behind the Grief – By Azu Ishiekwene

    When Lt. Colonel Abdullahi Hassan Ali, 49, assumed duties as Commanding Officer of the 181 Amphibious Battalion of the Nigerian Army, all his mother, Hassana, could do was pray.

    Three years ago, Ali’s younger brother, Jamilu, a captain, had been killed in action by bandits in Katsina State. As an officer in the North-east, Ali himself had escaped death a number of times in battles against Boko Haram insurgents.

    His father had died after retirement from the Army. After his death, Ali’s ageing mother has been nursing her loss, in addition to coping with the death of her son in Katsina, and later, the deaths of her daughter and son-in-law in a road accident.

    But Ali, a soldier’s soldier promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel in November 2020, knew better than to demur when he was moved from commander of the 63 Brigade Garrison in Asaba to head the amphibious battalion. The battalion was part of efforts by the military to restructure the Joint Task Force (JTF) in 2016, following widespread oil theft in the region which, according to the Financial Times, had reached $1billion monthly.

    Task force dilemma              

    In a statement at the time, the military said the restructuring of the JTF was to “tackle the emerging security challenges in the Niger Delta region such as piracy, bunkering, vandalism and other criminal activities prevalent in the area.” 

    The task force comprising other services, but led by the military, as expedient as it was, was also an official admission that the Police could no longer cope with the situation. Oil money, mixed with militancy and violent local politics in the area, has created and nurtured private armies with money, weapons and political clout comparable to rogue states.

    The relationship between the state and some of these private armies is complicated, even incestuous. With revenues in billions of naira monthly, for example, a few are better equipped than the military. 

    But politicians don’t mind. In their desperate search for solutions to the problem of oil theft and also to consolidate their political hold, they have indulged the private armies. Officers deployed in the area are left to invent their own ways of serving two masters – the state and the communities on the one hand, and the powerful private armies on the other.

    With a population of about 31 million and over 40 ethnic groups, the Niger Delta is a cauldron, radicalised by decades of poverty, agitation, militancy and violent politics. A quarrel between a husband and wife could spill into an intra-communal dispute; an intra-communal dispute could engulf the community. 

    On March 14, a lingering spark of dispute between Okuama and Okoloba (one Urhobo and the other Ijaw, two of the largest ethnic groups in Delta State) over a fish farm, erupted in violence. 

    More questions…

    How did the officer from the amphibious battalion who led a team to Okuama on March 14 on what was supposed to be a peace mission understand and define his mandate? Was the mission to Okuama over the alleged kidnap of one Anthony Aboh from neighbouring Okoloba (in retaliation for an Okuama youth allegedly killed by persons suspected to be from Okoloba), his job as a soldier or that of a first responder, say, the police? Was the officer like many others, too embedded in the local politics to draw the line? Or did he anticipate that after the failure of the peace accord facilitated by the Delta State government, military mediation was necessary to quench the fire? 

    Media reports suggested that leaders in Okuama broke kola nuts with the officer (some accounts say he was a major) and his team when they arrived. At what point did murderous violence erupt? If people in the community were opposed to the officer taking their leader away for statements at the army base in Bomadi, as was reported, was murdering him and his team and seizing their weapons the answer?  

    Meanwhile, back at the base on the same day, Lt. Col. Ali did not know what was happening in Okuama. He was in Kano only two weeks earlier to visit his ailing mother, his wife, Hauwa, and six children, and may have visited again at Sallah, if he got a pass. Okuama was the last thing on his mind. 

    And then, it happened. Soldiers who had been waiting in a boat at the Okuama creek escaped after the peace team was attacked and reported to Ali what had befallen the major and the three other soldiers believed to have followed him into the town.

    Hindsight 

    Hindsight is 20/20. There has been no shortage of opinions about what might have been. Given the enormity of what happened to the major and his men, couldn’t Ali have done a recce, and possibly mobilised other services before going in? Did the alleged use by the military of boats belonging to a private security company perceived to have a vested interest in the conflict further endanger this mission? 

    In a conflict zone where the private armies have gunboats, specially fitted crafts, and relatively modern arms, while the military depends largely on improvisations, how is a commanding officer supposed to respond to an emergency like the one in Okuama, where his men had been murdered and their weapons seized?

    Perhaps, out of a sense of holy rage, Ali took the plunge. He gathered his men and went to Okuama. Sadly, that was his last journey. He and his men were ambushed and brutally killed by people they had sworn to protect. 

    The savagery has called to question the humanity of the perpetrators. Okuama has been compared with Odi in Bayelsa State in 1999, and Zaki Biam in Benue State, two years later where military operations killed hundreds of people extrajudicially.

    “Those who make such comparisons are mistaken,” a retired top military officer told me over the weekend. “In Odi and Zaki-Biam the communities were harbouring persons believed to have committed crimes against the state. Okuama was savage militancy.”

    Perhaps one thing common to the three, however, is the increasing mismanagement, if not weaponisation of conflicts by politicians, a posture that has further damaged and compromised an undertrained, undermanned, underfunded and under-equipped military. Command and control is fuzzy. 

    In a crime scene like Okuama, for example, a commanding officer has to worry about what his chief would say and where Abuja stands with the private armies and local strongmen. Being in good standing with the host states, and of course, the morale of his troops, are also not far from his mind. The art of serving many masters, itself an enemy of a single-minded mission, complicates the terrain.

    Tail wags dog

    It’s hard to say at what point the tail of a savage few started wagging the dog of what by several accounts had been a largely peaceful community. It’s improbable that the major and his men who went first would have done so if the community had a reputation for collective savagery. Now, the entire community has a bad name and a difficult future.

    The memory of the dead deserves justice and it’s just as well that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has made this clear. Perhaps, also, it is time to review the role of the military in domestic conflicts. 

    Sadly, the harvest of heart-wrenching violence in many parts of the country today, and in this instance, the Niger Delta, was largely seeded during Nigeria’s civil war. During the war, swathes of the region were ruined and radicalised by the extrajudicial killings of thousands of innocent civilians. We can’t afford to let the mission to Okuama haunt us 57 years from now.

    If two wrongs don’t make a right, we’ll do well to avoid a third, not just for the sake of the dead and their grieving families, but also to break this cycle of violence and grief.

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Photoshopping Princess and the perils of manipulation – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Photoshopping Princess and the perils of manipulation – By Azu Ishiekwene

    The press has been unkind to Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales. I find it hard to understand why, of all the problems at this time, from the cost-of-living crisis to the war in Ukraine, and from the war in Gaza to the near total loss of trust in politicians, it is Kate’s unguarded photoshop moment on Mother’s Day, of all days, that is the obsession.

    And there’s no better time to catch the British press swooning with testosterone than when a member of the royal family trips. They go all out. Nothing smells like the scent of royal blood and the hounds spare no stone. 

    And so, it was last week that a number of newswire services recalled or stripped photoshopped images of Princess Kate and her three children from their dispatches. The kinder ones among the newspapers nailed every single offending spot on the photo with a red flag, labelling and listing the photographic infractions one by one.

    Daily Mail circled 10 spots, with lengthy captions on what it described as Kate’s “pic scandal.” My heart bled for the Princess of Wales, but something deep inside kept saying, if this had been Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex and famous Witch of Windsor, it would have been worse. I can imagine that the most generous description from the Daily Mail stable, for example, would have been something like, “Meghan in epic scandal!” 

    But what’s the point of it, really? Since the outbreak of the so-called Kate pic scandal, I have been brooding over images that I see very often as DPs and also on some WhatsApp Status. I’m keeping myself to that microblogging site and the mainstream press. There’s no need to bother with Insta, probably the worst photographic crime scene since Joseph Niepce invented the camera.

    Who is this?

    I have seen DP posts not remotely resembling folks that I know in real life. In a number of these meticulously airbrushed DPs, these same less than averagely endowed folks look so fine, faces nicely chiseled, neckties in place, or necklines plunging, and every strand of hair in place with poses like something out of Vanity Fair. You cannot sometimes help but zoom in and look again. 

    My anecdotal experience suggests that normal people, especially normal young girls and women, have fabricated more Kate Middleton moments than they can count. I have seen folks who are fat – that word has been banned by the language police – looking incredibly slim on their profiles or those who are black or brown looking all fair and incredibly white. 

    I have also seen folks with ageing-borne wrinkles, birth marks or even a few blemishes or dimples in real life look breathtakingly flawless on their DPs. I have never stopped wondering what this digital filter is really all about.

    If the Daily Mails of this world have to spotlight every single photoshopped celebrity image – never mind the millions of celebrity wannabes – God knows how many would be out of circulation or perhaps be standing trial in the court of public opinion along with the Princess of Wales.  

    I have shied away from digital makeover, not out of self-righteousness, but because I have accepted my flaws and physiological shortcomings as part of the gifts of an imperfect earth life. Why do people go to extra lengths to make over and then portray themselves in images that are not remotely who they are?

    Of course, photo airbrushing didn’t start with the Princess of Wales or the folk in that DP who’s probably the aspirational version of the image you’re looking at right now. 

    Fakery industry

    Joseph Stalin erased enemies like Nikolai Yezhov, who played a significant role in the Great Purge out of photographs because he thought doing so would wipe away the man’s memory from history. He didn’t quite succeed.

    In the 2004 presidential campaign, opponents of John Kerry spliced his photograph and that of actress and anti-war activist Jane Fonda to discredit his war record. And, come to think of it, this same Daily and Sunday Mail that have been unforgiving of the Princess of Wales fell flat for the epic Kerry photo forgery!

    Seven years later, an ultra-Jewish newspaper suspected of religious influence erased Hilary Clinton and Audrey Tomason from a Situation Room picture taken moments before President Barack Obama authorised the strike on Osama bin Laden. Here again, as in the Kerry pic scandal, the press was duped.

    Of course, it’s not every time that something bad comes out of an awkward photo moment. In 2016, for example, King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia caused a minor sensation when he and his brother, Crown Prince Sultan, were photographed with women without their faces covered. 

    They would have been pleased to pay a million riyal to plug a leak or scrub it if they had known beforehand. The ticking photo-bomb was released only for a government official to defuse it the next day by simply saying the photo showed that, “It was OK to work with women!” 

    Does it matter?

    Back to the question: why do people manipulate photos? Studies have suggested a number of reasons. A study by BMC Psychology last April suggested that reasons for image-manipulation or photoshopping are rooted in self-objectification where individuals involved are keenly aware of, even sometimes obsessed by, their physical looks, which tends to affect everything, including their sense of self-esteem.

    The higher the investment in social media, the higher the tendency to use tools, including photoshop and other image-filtering apps, to look incredibly, yet quite often, deceptively, good. But that’s the modern playground, the place where billions work and move and define their being. 

    The domain is not limited to royalty. Obsession to twist, scrub and bend things from their essence as sacrifice on the altar of the post-modern self is just as widespread in royalty as it is in fashion, journalism, marketing and politics. And the realm is getting larger and larger because increasingly the only thing that matters, that is rewarded and celebrated, is success. Everything else is judged harshly.

    The art of it

    There is of course also the ethical question of boundaries. While there are those who argue that image-alteration is a form of art which has produced such geniuses as Erik Johansson or Rosie Hardy, for example, there are others who take the view – and I agree – that unethical retouching can contribute to body image issues, especially among young people, fostering feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. 

    To encourage authenticity and hopefully slowly create a society where people are not ashamed – or afraid – to be who they are, perhaps we need to be less severe and more forgiving and transparent when we scrub those images. And yes, we must also learn to take ourselves a lot less seriously.

    We may not yet look like the Madonna we wanted to be, but at least we can go to bed satisfied that we have paid our two cents to create a healthier, more responsible visual landscape. 

     

    Ishiekwene is the Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • The Famished Road to Kuriga – By Azu Ishiekwene

    The Famished Road to Kuriga – By Azu Ishiekwene

    The journey to Kuriga in southern Kaduna, North-west Nigeria, did not start with the kidnap of 287 students last week. In the early 1990s a neighbouring town, Zango Kataf, was the boiling point. 

    About a decade later, the beast of sectarian violence, which had reared its head in Kaduna, surfaced several hundreds of miles away in two major places that have become the epicentres of insurgency: Borno and Yobe States, both in the North-east.

    Even though misery travelled southwards aided by Mohammed Yusuf, the itinerant extremist Muslim preacher in Yobe whose activities heightened the rise of extremism in the early 2000s, Yusuf did not entirely pave the way for the mass kidnap in Kuriga last week. 

    The incompetence of the security services mixed with rampant poverty in parts of the North and the opportunism of the elite in the region helped in no small way to recruit the bands of misguided and rogue elements that have become a national plague.

    That band, mixed with insurgents drifting southward from the Sahel, has been showing up as banditry in some areas, cattle rustling in other areas, and violent extremism elsewhere. In the process, hundreds have been killed, while Borno and Yobe have become Africa’s largest camps of internally displaced persons.

    Kidnapping is the latest franchise. It shocked the world when over 200 girls were kidnapped from their school in Chibok and 58 boys killed inside their school dormitory in Buni Yadi, Yobe State. But since then, Amnesty International has documented 13 abductions in Nigerian schools. 

    Within 10 days last week, over 500 persons, mostly children, were taken hostage in different states and in separate attacks on IDP camps and schools. 

    Days after 200 persons were kidnapped from an IDP camp in Borno State, a school in Kaduna State was the next hunting ground. Two-hundred and eighty-seven students and pupils, with some staff, from the Local Government Education Authority (LGEA) Primary School, Kuriga in Chikun Local Government Area of Kaduna State were kidnapped during the school’s morning assembly. 

    Politicians, who shed crocodile tears for a living, visit crime scenes like Kuriga twice in their lifetime. They visit unfailingly during election campaigns and then grudgingly – more for the camera – at a time of grief, like this. Kaduna State Governor, Uba Sani, for example, was in Kuriga on Thursday, shortly after the students were kidnapped. 

    It was not a normal visit, like you would visit folks in your neigbourhood who had just suffered a loss. Kuriga or Birnin Gwari, another dangerous neighbouring town, has not been a normal place for years. Four years ago, for example, an NGO, WANEP, reported that 140 persons were abducted and 84 killed by bandits in Birnin Gwari. 

    Governor Sani’s visit

    Eyewitnesses said on his visit to Kuriga, Governor Sani was prepared as if he was going to a warfront. Only one print journalist and a few others from broadcast stations, chosen by the Government House, were embedded in the governor’s convoy on that trip. Which means with telecommunications cut off, reports from there are second- third- or perhaps, fourth-hand accounts.

    Residents of Chikun Local Government, with an estimated population of 550,000, have tried to get used to living under terror. Left largely on their own without government or security, they have accepted the authority of bandits and terrorists. These criminal gangs extort money from residents from N70,000 to N100,000 to have access to their farms. Those in Kidandan, Galadimawa Kerawa, Sabon Layi, Sabon Birni and Ruma whose names may not show on your Google map, are also affected.

    Yet, these folks might even consider themselves lucky, if luck means paying through your nose to reach your farm. According to news reports, those in other local governments such as Igabi and Giwa, have abandoned their farms to terrorists. Other communities in Kaduna currently under siege are Kaura, Kajuru, and Zango Kataf.

    Toll gates of Kuriga

    Apart from tolling the farms for cash, illegal miners, using small fry, have also deployed their billing machines. They squeeze farm owners to give up their lands for peanuts, which they then mine for minerals. It’s a criminal enterprise that has been on for years. Like most criminal gangs, the ones in Kuriga have developed their own codes, fees, levies and commissions. 

    The decision of these syndicates to turn from extorting farmers and stripping their lands of mineral deposits to kidnapping students for ransom is an indication that kidnapping is paying more. That’s not a surprise. The Africa Report quoted SBM Intelligence that gunmen kidnapped at least 3,620 people across Nigeria between July 2022 and June 2023, with a ransom demand totalling over N5billion. 

    What is the government doing about it? And I’m not talking about the state alone; I’m also talking about politicians in Kaduna and Abuja elected to represent these communities. Where, for example, is Jesse David, who represents this distressed community in the State House of Assembly? 

    And where is Shehu Balarabe, who represents Birnin Gwari/Gwari Federal Constituency in the House of Representatives? How did they find their way to their constituency during the election campaign but have lost their way back when their people need them most?

    Where is the Federal Government, which controls the army, the air force, the police and the state services? How are kidnappers or bandits or terrorists able to mobilise and seize 287 students and teachers from their school in daylight in Kuriga, about 20 minutes’ drive from Birnin Gwari that is supposed to have a military base? 

    Imagine, for a moment, the logistics involved in moving 287 persons, most of them children. From infographics published by LEADERSHIP the day after, it would take 144 motorcycles or 57 cars or 21 buses or five 4.8 Embraer-145 planes, to move that number of people. 

    Yet, for the umpteenth time since 2014, children were kidnapped in their numbers by bandits who still managed to plan, coordinate and execute this evil in an area supposedly cut-off from communications. How, for Christ’s sake, did that happen?

    A trillion-naira industry?

    Just as shocking for me has been the near total absence of outrage outside Kuriga. It’s this kind of eye-rolling, not-our-business kind of attitude that has brought us where we are: where what shocked the world 10 years ago in Chibok even spawning demonstrations and hashtags, appears incapable of moving the dial today, in spite of its scale and audacity.

    Apart the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Central African Republic (CAR), and South Sudan, where the savagery of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), led to 100,000 deaths, and the abductions of 60,000 to 100,000 children and the displacement of millions, only few countries have witnessed the scale of criminality that Nigeria has witnessed in what is supposed to be peace time.    

    It reminds me of Mexico in 2014. That year, also the year of the Chibok Girls, 43 students were kidnapped by a drug cartel and years of agonising search yielded no clues. Until last year, when long after the students had been murdered, investigations revealed that government officials were employees of the cartel. 

    According to the New York Times, text messages exchanged between the cartel and government officials even found that first responders on the crime scene were on the cartel’s payroll! Which partly explains why it took so long to unravel the crime.

    It’s heart-wrenching to think that even though we’re told that Kuriga and other affected parts have been cut off from communications, we still hear of the criminals asking for ransom and issuing threats! 

    It may be far-fetched to assume official complicity in Kuriga. It’s foolish, however, to think that kidnapping became a trillion-naira industry without support from outside the gangs. Until we thoroughly investigate the kidnappers’ support system and expose and punish the kingpins, we’re wasting time. 

    Who knows where this is going to happen next?

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Rolling blackouts, heatwave and tales from dead bulbs – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Rolling blackouts, heatwave and tales from dead bulbs – By Azu Ishiekwene

    I don’t know how it is in your part of town. But it’s been a nightmare in mine, a supposedly middle-class residential area in Abuja, Nigeria’s federal capital. Rolling blackouts do not begin to explain the depth of the misery. It’s been a dreadful time of rolling and erratic blackouts. Like surfing an angry wave, if you understand what I mean.

    Generators and other alternative sources of power, mostly inverters, solar panels and repurposed domestic gas, have replaced public power supply. Private power supply has become the main source; while public supply, if you ever get it, has become the back up.

    At 144 kwh per hour annually, Nigeria is grossly underpowered. It is 80 percent below expectations, with Ghana consuming twice as much, Tunisia over 10 times and South Africa, over 30 times as much power. 

    The epileptic power supply has flooded my mind with memories of what I used to think of folks at the public power company (we used to call it NEPA) in my younger days. 

    I still think the demons there do what they used to do – just messing around with light switches as if it was a game of tumbo, tumbo, bas kalaba... Out of shame, however, or perhaps incredulity, I’m not inclined to express my layman’s view of these malicious spoilsports at public power substations as openly as I used to in my younger days.

     What I have witnessed in the last two or three weeks with public power supply has however exhumed the scarecrow from my past. I’ve been around a bit and visited such African countries as Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Mozambique, among others. 

    I cannot remember anywhere with the sort of maddening erratic supply that I have seen in my neighbourhood and workplace recently. I’m tempted to think that, like a number of things Nigerian, there is a peculiarity about the rolling blackouts that make them nearly impossible to replicate elsewhere. 

    Dead bulbs tell tales

    One day in the last week of February, for example, the light went off and came back, surging each time at different frequencies, four times in less than 10 minutes. It was as if someone somewhere was testing the supply or that in my confused state, I never quite saw the light come on before it went off again. That was late evening, after work. I’m not counting how many other times this erratic supply may have occurred after I went to bed that night. But the evidence was waiting the next day. 

    By morning, I was left with the remains of five dead bulbs and a damaged changeover switch which was barely one year old. It will cost me more than twice the minimum wage of N30,000 to replace the switch alone. These are the only more recent casualties of erratic power supply in my house. I’m not counting the electric kettle or the power stabilisers. On top of that, I have bought more UPSs than I can count. I even use a few of the remnants damaged by erratic power supply as domestic props!

    Neighbour from hell

    I’m not going to discuss the trauma that comes from generator pollution and noise. I was so distraught by the noise from the generator on one side of my flat that I tinkered with the idea of buying a replacement for the owner, not out of love or abundance, but to preserve my sanity. 

     Poor fellow! He can’t seem to wait for the light-switch flippers at the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC) to turn off the lights before he powers on his contraption. And even when the alarm sounds that light is back, he still leaves the damn thing chugging! 

    If you live around my neighbourhood or even elsewhere around many parts of the country from where I have also received similar complaints of insurgent blackouts, you may consider noise, the loss of five bulbs in one day or a few UPSs small potatoes. 

    I imagine that folks may have lost more valuable appliances or suffered more severe emotional and material setbacks. There was a report last week that Nigeria’s Senate stood down proceedings and adjourned indefinitely amidst the power crisis. 

    But Discos, being Discos, no one can file any legal claims.

    Heatwave troubles

    The current heatwave has further highlighted our collective misery. With diesel and petrol at over 106 percent higher than their prices one year ago, only those who have solar panels can hope to enjoy a measure of relief for now. 

    Fossil-fuel powered generators are costlier to run as are inverters, which also depend on primary sources of power to charge. So, those who wish to use some form of cooling at home – especially at night – to keep their heads for the next day, have a difficult choice: spend more on alternative energy or just suffer and smile.  

    I had a particularly interesting night the day before I wrote this article. I had gone to bed at about 11pm with the generator humming and left an instruction that it should be left on for another two hours. Apparently, less than one hour after I slept, the public power supply was restored and the generator turned off. But as usual, that didn’t last. This was on a day when daytime temperature was about 40 degrees. 

    Somewhere, in the depths of slumber, I began to feel as if my mattress had been replaced with a cauldron and that the sheets were thermal fabrics. I was in that place between sleeping and waking up, where your spirit is dying to sleep but your body is wracked by discomfort. 

    The body prevailed and I soon noticed I was sweating like a labourer! I crawled out of my bed and on this hot, airless night, I had to decide between opening only a few windows or opening all the windows with the mosquito nets drawn back. Who, for heaven’s sake, is toying with the lights at AEDC that I cannot even have two straight hours of electricity?

    Misery source

    Is it all inevitable? Is it all down to poor gas supply at the power stations; compromised grids and transmission lines. Is it, as some have suggested, a lack of competence among the Discos that have also been accused of feeding off the assets they inherited during the privatisation without investing one naira since? 

    I called my cousin who works at an electricity company for possible answers. I’m still trying to digest his response. Erratic supply – the kind that imitates trafficators – he said, can be caused by several factors. He called the problem, “feeder tripping.” According to him, anything from a bird perching on the wire to a colony of ants at the feeder base or even an adventurous tree branch, can cause a feeder trip.

    He said even though staff at the substation are supposed to pick up such signals and act on them, it’s hardly the case and therefore distressed customers like me are advised to call and complain. 

    Customer service by phone in Nigeria when it’s not a bank teller calling you to ask why your account is inactive is hell. I hardly bother, and I’m unlikely going to start with electricity companies. I’m still trying to figure out how or why we cannot enjoy a minimum X-hour of electricity supply a day, at least under a load-shedding plan that allows consumers to keep their sanity. This story of stray birds, angry ants and stray tree branches don’t make sense to me. 

    All I can think of, right now, especially in the furnace of our current existence, is to assume that there are some switch-trigger-happy fellows at that substation delighted to ruin as much of my domestic appliances as they can and keep me miserably uncomfortable night and day, just because they can!

    I’m counting days until this heatwave is over and hopefully, I’ll once again get some deserved respite, especially at night, with or without “NEPA”!

  • Will the Humble Pie Heal ECOWAS? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Will the Humble Pie Heal ECOWAS? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    The resolutions following the Extraordinary Summit of the Heads of Government of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), at the recently concluded summit of Heads of State and Government in Abuja, were truly extraordinary.

    Seven months after threatening to deploy force in Niger, one of the four delinquent states – the others being Mali, Guinea, and Burkina Faso – and three months after wide-ranging economic sanctions were imposed on all four, the regional body backed down spectacularly last week.

    If the Afrobeat icon, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, had rendered a welcome tune for the embattled regional leaders as they met in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, it would have been his famous “Confusion Break Bone (CBB).” Misery never had a better company than the current state of affairs in the 50-year-old regional body, which apart from SADC, was perhaps Africa’s most exemplary model of regional co-operation.

    While ECOWAS said it offered amnesty to its delinquent members on “humanitarian grounds”, the response from the military leaders in Bamako, Conakry, Ouagadougou and Niamey, has been mockingly indifferent. Yet the truth about how this 15-member regional block with annual trade valued at $150 billion came to this sorry pass is deeper and more nuanced than it appears.

    Wrong turn

    The Lomé Declaration of July 2000 recognised the continent was drifting and needed urgent course correction. An earlier era of democratic consolidation was being eroded by the return of military coups and the AU needed to create mechanisms to roll back the trend. 

    But that’s precisely where the problem was misdiagnosed. While continental leaders were rightly concerned that unconstitutional changes of government were once again becoming a clear and present danger, the emphasis has been big on response but often, too little too late, on prevention.

    Nowhere has the situation played out more regrettably than in the delinquent Sahelian states of Mali, Guinea Burkina Faso and Niger. Whereas ECOWAS played a lead role in managing the crisis in Liberia and Sierra Leone; and forced Yahaya Jammeh to back down when he tried to play games in The Gambia after his final term, the problems in Francophone west Africa are more complicated. They speak French, which translated, means the continent should have prioritised prevention, instead of response.

    The French question

    The delinquent military leaders have accused ECOWAS of keeping silent while their countries have been ripped off by France for decades. This largely true, but partly self-serving sentiment has found a place in the hearts and minds of citizens in these countries.

    France has accumulated a notoriously poor record on the continent that it can hardly be proud of. In Niger, for example, Tom Burgis writes in his book, The Looting Machine, that French state-owned atomic energy group Areva’s profit from uranium is twice Niger’s GDP. The footprint is the same everywhere in the region.

    Fourteen Francophone countries, including the four troubled ones, store 50 percent of their reserves in the French Treasury, an arrangement which has been widely criticised. Even French President Emmanuel Macron, born after colonial rule, acknowledged this injustice with a heavy heart, but then turned around to say later it was a part of the “civilising” obligations of France. If civilisation means robbing a country at gunpoint and having the victims pay interest for the crime, I wonder what primitiveness would look like.

    While France may be the most obvious, and perhaps the most perniciously complicit, it is not the only source of Francophone west Africa’s misery. As I wrote in an earlier article on this subject entitled, “Again, A Bizarre Joke in Niger Speaks French,” China, and lately, Russia, also have their hands in it for their own strategic interests. Yet, not a single one of these foreign powers have gotten away with murder without the complicity of the political elite in these countries – politicians and military alike.

    It is convenient for the delinquent military leaders in the Sahelian states to look for scapegoats elsewhere, exploiting widespread insecurity, rampant poverty, identity politics and foreign meddling to gain legitimacy. 

    The point is, military leaders have no greater claim to patriotism than do the rest of us. We have seen in dozens of military coups on the continent that those who came claiming to be messiahs left their countries worse off.

    Blaming Tinubu?

    Where does the flip-flop and mollycoddling leave ECOWAS, a regional body obviously anxious to prove under the leadership of Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, that it is as good as its word that coups would have no place on his watch?

    It’s hard to blame Tinubu for pressing ECOWAS to act tough as military coups piled on themselves. As the leader of a country that had witnessed nearly half a dozen successful coups, he had to do what he did as a matter of self-preservation and enlightened interest. 

    The problem, however, was that there were so many artisans involved in making this broth, it turned out to be a chef’s nightmare. Strategy should never have been sacrificed for expediency.

    The Delinquent Four have seen that the regional powerhouses have been considerably weakened and distracted internally by insurgency, political strife, economic crisis, and poor governance. Add that to a global system pre-occupied with the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, then it becomes clearer why the Delinquent Four have adopted defiance as strategy.

    The Chairman of the ECOWAS Commission, Omar Toure, expressed the hope that eating the humble pie is worth the price of losing four members. I’m not sure the Delinquent Four will withdraw their threat of leaving, U-turn or not. They’ve got ECOWAS exactly where they wanted and won’t be in a hurry to climb down. Sanctions hurt and studies have shown that they could have statistically significant immediate and long-term effects on the targets. 

    But that, of course, is assuming that the countries imposing sanctions have the capacity and will to enforce them. Even though the four countries targeted by ECOWAS are landlocked and therefore could ordinarily have felt the impact more, boundaries in the subregion are so porous and informal trade so deeply entrenched – about 30 percent of regional trade actually – a successful implementation of economic sanctions was always going to be quite problematic. 

    Then, there is the potential threat that if these countries harden beyond redemption, it would not only further weaken the multinational framework for containing insurgency in the region, these states may themselves become epicentres of regional destablisation. 

    As things are, ECOWAS will have to swallow its pride and set up credible negotiating teams with the Delinquent Four that take into account their grievances. The artisans have done enough harm. It’s unlikely that these military leaders would honour any transition guidelines but that must remain the minimum basis for any future agreements. 

    Tacky Macky Sall

    There is, of course, the case of Senegal where President Macky Sall is also waiting to go rogue. Before ECOWAS is caught on the backfoot again, this would be a good time to start meaningful negotiations to ensure that Sall doesn’t endanger himself, his country and the subregion by extending his tenure too far beyond his already exhausted expiry date. 

    In light of the fragile situation in the continent, the AU must now pay far greater attention to prevention, focusing on triggers and early warning signs such as flawed elections, poor governance, and systemic corruption, instead of making a virtue of chasing the horses after they have bolted the stable. 

    That’s why the launch this week of the Regional Citizen’s Dialogue Programme (RCDP) in Abuja by a consortium of NIPSS, Kuru; the Dantiye Centre, Kano; the Sierra Leone-based regional centre (RCGSPI); and KAICIID, to mobilise civil society and complement institutional effort at prioritising prevention deserves serious attention. 

    Who would have thought that three landlocked countries with a combined eight percent contribution to the $761billion GDP of ECOWAS, according to the World Bank, could hold the community to ransom, forcing it to swallow more than a trayful of humble pie?

  • APC digging its own grave in Edo – By Azu Ishiekwene

    APC digging its own grave in Edo – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Nigeria’s politicians have perfected the art of burying themselves with one foot sticking out. And it appears that the All Progressives Congress (APC) will, once again, stage this rite of self-destruction in the forthcoming governorship election in Edo State.

    The party’s primaries on Saturday was such a shambles, it has now been forced to conduct it again, with no guarantee of a sensible outcome for an exercise involving perhaps less than 500,000 members (parties routinely inflate their roll). If Governor Godwin Obaseki’s ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP), had paid to put a spell on APC, the outcome would not have been more potentially devastating.    

    Yet, this is a governor whose bet to install a successor from his own party is not necessarily based on his own record, but on the gift of an opposition in disarray.

    After the turbulent last four years at Osadebey House between Obaseki and his deputy, Philip Shaibu, it looked all but certain that the divided house of PDP would collapse when elections hold again in September.

    And this was not wishful thinking. Not only has the common political front that paved the way for Obaseki’s ascension to power in his first term eroded; in his second term, he has been fighting both internal and external political enemies, severely limiting his attention and performance.

    If his first term was uneventful, it was precisely because that was when the seed of the state’s future political crisis was sown. Even though his benefactor, former Governor Adams Oshiomhole, had installed him in office in the hope of replicating the Tinubu-Fashola model in Lagos, Obaseki had other plans. 

    The new “tuke-tuke”

    Once he was ensconced in office, he made a point of telling the remnant of the Oshiomhole crowd still hanging around the corridors of power, that power had changed hands. No longer, he reportedly said, were the days of “tuke-tuke” politics, a carryover from the era of Tony Anenih, which former Edo State Commissioner for Information and presidential aide, Louis Odion, once described in Louis-pedia as a political variant that empowered touts and prioritised rent for politicians for doing little or no work. 

    Obaseki, the blue-eyed Lagos Boy and financial consultant, advertised as the answer to Edo State’s private sector woes, should know. He was a core member of Oshiomhole’s cabinet, now determined to carve his own path.

    When after taking power, however, he began to cut off the supply line to the trough, starving the APC’s political structure in the state of nutrition, the battle line with Oshiomhole was drawn. The former governor who had also become the Chairman of the APC at the time, used his position to block Obaseki from getting the party’s ticket for a second term. 

    Obaseki of course milked public sympathy and later decamped to the PDP where he contested and won re-election. As a result of his defection, he governed with a hostile, hobbled parliament. Fourteen – and later 10 – out of the 24 members of the State House of Assembly were in the opposition and they operated mostly from a hideout provided in Abuja by Oshiomhole. 

    Significantly damaged in legitimacy, there was very little Obaseki could do. He has spent a greater part of the last four years watching his back for a deputy who, were he in the opposition, could not have plunged more daggers in the government’s back.

    Residents have borne the brunt. Not only has Obaseki replaced the old cult of “tuke-tuke” with the new cult of “yes-men,” reports from the state also indicate that there are few paved roads and other social infrastructure such as water, hospitals, and schools, especially in areas outside the capital, Benin City.

    The more you look…

    Not unlike a good number of the states, the doubling of the state’s internally generated revenue from N1.8billion monthly in 2016 has barely been felt in rural areas where homes are still without water and school buildings are still largely without roofs and students without teachers. 

    Although Edo is currently ranked above its peers in the South-South poverty league with 1.4m (out of the state’s 3.9m population) living in multidimensional poverty, a government determined to make its mark could have done far more to lift the people.

    Obaseki has done well in cultivating an elite in smart suits, while keeping up a façade of performance, especially with high-profile media events like Edo Best, Alaghodaro Summit, and the renovation of the Secretariat. But as surely as the ball of pounded yam never fails to press into the straying fish crumb in the soup, these projects have been criticised, particularly by the opposition, as the government’s conduit pipes. 

    Edo could not have been riper for the taking than in its present state, but Oshiomhole’s ambition may well be the wrecking ball. In my forecast entitled, “What you might expect in 2024,” published last December 28, I said, “The biggest danger to APC’s victory is Oshiomhole…except the APC finds an overwhelmingly appealing candidate, the party could be in for a surprise.”

    The result of the party’s “inconclusive” primaries on Saturday, showed that the surprise came early. From reports, Oshiomhole, APC’s certified nemesis in Edo, managed to suborn forces in the Presidency to hand over the party’s flag to Dennis Idahosa – a candidate that Oshiomhole’s government had once described as “untrustworthy,” the most flattering of the government’s description at that time.  

    But suspects have their moments of redemption. Except that in this case reports on the conduct of the primaries on Saturday showed that even the redeemer seemed so far gone in his waywardness, he suborned not only Abuja, but also one of the most notorious political conductors to supervise the primaries. 

    A crime scene

    The result, of course, was parallel primaries. One with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) officers present – as it should be – that produced Monday Okpebholo; and the other, which invariably produced Idahosa, became a crime scene. 

    The outcome was neither organised, even from the point of a common heist, which it was; nor was it politically strategic. Idahosa, the beneficiary of that crime scene, is from Edo South, where Obaseki, who is backing Asue Ighodalo, a candidate from Edo Central, could significantly undermine APC’s votes. A third candidate, Anamero Dekeri, even emerged from the woodwork, to claim victory!

    It’s true that whether a political party holds its primaries in the motor park or at a brothel, it is not the business of non-party members. The point, unfortunately, is that we have seen that in the end, voters pay for the travesty, corruption and incompetence in the parties. 

    APC should have learnt that lesson in Zamfara four years ago when a court ruling invalidated the entire state election over shambolic party primaries, never mind a recent Supreme Court ruling that has further muddied the waters.

    At elections, voters often have uninspiring choices – Tweedle-dee and Tweedledum – inflicted on them by party primaries that were anything but primaries. The crimes committed by politicians behind closed doors soon become public bastards, often leading to voter apathy, bitter wranglings or needless court disputes. It’s incredible that parties that can’t even manage their own affairs want a chance on the bigger stage.

    PDP may laugh – and indeed it should, as it appears that the APC has already handed it the shovel to finish off the burial rites. But with Obaseki’s deputy, Shaibu, threatening to bring down the roof, it would be interesting to see how the PDP and the Labour Party, which is also having its own troubles, organise their own primaries. 

    If Nigeria’s elections – party, local council, state or federal – has taught anything, it is that as surely as a stumble precedes a fall, shambolic primaries lay the foundation for turbulent electoral outcomes and unstable governments. 

    Once again, Edo is proving that the story is not about to change. 

     

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

  • Cost of living crisis: A personal story – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Cost of living crisis: A personal story – By Azu Ishiekwene

    I was going through some old files in my closet the other day when I saw some documents and receipts that absolutely cracked me up. Among the browning, time-worn papers was the receipt from a private primary school for the payment of my first daughter’s fees.

    It was a middle-class school that charged N5,000 naira per term. Attached to the fading receipt was a thank you note by the bursar. I rocked with laughter. This was in 1995 when, after nearly seven years of working, my monthly salary was around 60k or so. I will not forget how my mother reacted when she found out how much I was paying for her granddaughter’s termly fees. “Did your university tuition cost that much?”, she asked despairingly.

    Of course, it did, but not by a lot. As I held that rusty receipt in my hand on that day, the shock and despair in my mother’s face about how prices had gone up and how things had changed, for the worse, flooded my mind.

    Yet, within three decades of my mother showing concern, the joke was on me. By this time, it was no longer a laughing matter.

    “Ilu le o…!” 

    I had somehow managed to find out how much my daughter was paying for my granddaughter’s school fees in a school certainly more upscale than the one she attended, but by my reckoning, unlikely to be among the A-List schools in her part of town.

    What she was paying for my granddaughter’s kindergarten per term was roughly ten times my salary after seven years of working. I couldn’t help wondering what my mother would have said or done if she had lived to see the school fees of her great-granddaughter, a kid enrolled barely out of her diapers! And this was only three years ago.

    Many things in the old files in my closet reminded me of how the times are changing. When I think of Victor Olaiya’s famous highlife song, “Ilu le o!” (literally meaning, Country hard!) released over 40 years ago which was supposed to have captured the misery of men and women complaining about the hard times, I wonder exactly what the moaning was about. 

     Nuts for the rich

    A few days ago, I had a conversation with my local cashew nut seller. I had been buying cashew nuts from her since when a bottle cost N800, which was not up to four years ago. Slowly, but steadily, the price climbed to N1,000, then N1,200, then N1,500 and before you could say, “cashew,” it became N4,000 per bottle – roughly the cost of my daughter’s one-term school fee in the late 1990s.

    How do you buy a bottle of nuts for N4,000? Perhaps because I drive a big car – which is a Tokunbo, by the way – the nut seller thought she had me hooked; that I should be able to afford the nut, whatever the price. Well, she was mistaken and I told her so. Of course, she pleaded that it was not her fault that it was – you guessed right – the exchange rate! Dollar or not, I won’t buy cashew nuts now priced as luxury items. 

    Of course, I know about the fiber, protein and healthy fats that come from cashew nuts, not to mention blood sugar control, heart health and weight loss. But at 72.5kg, and with the gift of a stature that can eat both pounded yam and mortar without them showing, why should I lose sleep over weight? Whatever cashew nut offers, especially in fiber, I will get from sweet potatoes.

    But cashew nuts are not the whole story of this cost-of-living crisis. Even potatoes have doubled in price. According to a BBC report, prices in Nigeria are rising at their fastest rates ever in the last 30 years.

    This was how the BBC report described it: “A standard 50kg bag of rice, which could help feed a household of between eight and 10 for about a month, now costs N77,000,” that is, about double the price last December. The prices of other staples such as beans, garri, maize and millet have also gone up, costing the average worker two months’ minimum wage for a bag.

     Portion control 

    Portion control was a frequent point of argument in my house. It’s a problem with men, of course, but it’s worse with African women brought up to believe that the proof of spousal care is in the size of the husband’s weight, measured by the amount of food on his plate. It’s considered taboo in many places, especially in the South of Nigeria, for example, for a man’s plate of soup to have only one piece of meat or fish. Or for his dough, famously called swallow, to appear miserly.

    This well-intended culture of culinary excess is captured in Chinua Achebe’s Things fall apart, where the story is told of a wealthy man who gave a feast at which guests on one side of the table did not see those on the other side from morning until night when they managed to level the mountain of food set before them during the new yam festival. 

    If, however, Okonkwo’s guests were living in today’s Nigeria, where a sachet of water in a 50cl plastic bag costs N20, more than twice the price last year, they would be lucky to find enough water to drink after a meal of afafata, chaff of rice grain, which is now a staple in parts of Northern Nigeria.

    My point about portion control is that after years of struggling to convince my wife, and often the female domestic staff, that measurements and smaller food portions, including far fewer pieces of protein in my meals don’t mean lack of care, the cost-of-living crisis is finally driving the point home!

    As for other things such as the cost of petrol and other energy costs, which increased by 216 percent from N195 per litre after the removal of subsidy last May, I threatened to buy a bicycle to augment my transportation cost before a concerned staff warned me of the risk of cycling nearly 15 kilometres to work across two major highways.

    There is, however, one area of adjustment, which after futilely struggling to contain without luck, I have decided to seek “divine intervention”, as we say: my BP medication. In a country where less than five percent of the population have health insurance and the rest pay out-of-pocket for treatment, persons with underlying medical conditions have been badly hit by the current inflation rate of 28.9 percent.

    It’s not a laughing matter. Last year, for example, a packet of Co-Diovan 80/12.5mgs, my recommended BP management medicine, cost about N8,000. Now, it is N24,000 and still rising for the same packet which lasts 28 days.

    Trouble in the world 

    Of course, it’s not a uniquely Nigerian problem. From New Zealand to Nepal, countries around the world have been battling with a serious cost-of-living crisis. This crisis is a combination of factors ranging from COVID-19 and the supply chain problems that followed, to the war in Ukraine and extreme climate changes across the world. 

    In fact, Nigeria is not listed among the 10 African countries with the highest cost of living, a list that features Senegal at the top, with others such as Cote d’Ivoire, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Cameroon and Kenya, among others. 

    Just like economic problems imitate physical diseases, countries with underlying structural problems have been the worst hit. The difference from place to place, however, has been in how leaders repaired trust and mobilised resources in response.

    President Bola Ahmed Tinubu campaigned for his current job knowing full well there won’t be a honeymoon from day one. I’ll need to file something urgently in my closet that my granddaughter might see someday to show that my vote for him was not a mistake.

  • Sall taking ECOWAS from frying pan to fire – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Sall taking ECOWAS from frying pan to fire – By Azu Ishiekwene

    As the troubled Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) convenes its Ministerial Council meeting in Abuja on February 8 to discuss the quit notice served by three of its members – Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger – the situation in Senegal might well be the elephant in the room.

    Three weeks to the presidential election earlier scheduled to hold in that country on February 25, President Macky Sall announced that the election had been postponed, without immediately giving a new date or any believable reasons. After a wave of protests, he instigated the Senegalese Parliament to announce December 15 as a possible new date.

    It’s not the postponement that will worry ECOWAS leaders as ministers meet in Nigeria, where presidential elections have been postponed twice in the last 10 years even on the eve of voting; it’s Sall’s recent shifty habit – first eying a third-term and then denying it, followed by his government’s crackdown on opposition candidates.

    The problem in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger — three delinquent countries that have accused the community of complicity and negligence in its obligations and signalled an intention to quit — is bad enough.

    That threat alone has not only put trade in the community estimated at $208.1 billion at risk, minus informal trade amongst citizens which constitutes about 30 percent of the transactions; it also threatens to complicate the security situation in the subregion that is already facing serious problems from violent extremism and banditry.

    Hypocritical oath

    A politically unstable Senegal is the last thing that the community needs at this time. Of course, it’s unlikely that the situation in Senegal will feature at the ECOWAS meeting, where an allegiance of hypocrisy, elegantly called the principle of “non-interference”, forbids members from telling one another the truth.

    The point, however, is that the resurgence of military rule in a number of African countries today, particularly in Mali and Burkina Faso, is partly traceable to blatant disregard for constitutionalism, the rule of law, and rigged transitions – the sort of bad habit that Sall is showing in his old age.

    Sall looked like the most unlikely candidate for this nonsense. In some ways, he reminded me of Senegal’s founding president, Leopold Senghor – urbane, intellectual and sensible. A geologist and widely travelled man, Sall built his way up from the bottom of the political ladder. Although he started his journey as a minister under former president Abdoulaye Wade, he soon returned to his base where he took up position as mayor of his hometown.

    He took up other ministerial positions later on and also became the president of the country’s parliament. He fell out with his mentor, Wade, after he dragged Wade’s son to parliament to answer corruption charges. But his quarrel was not personal.

    Sall seduced 

    Senegal was drifting, the cost of living was rising and infrastructure collapsing. Wade’s answer, if he had any, was to attempt to bend the constitution to extend his rule. Sall rallied the opposition. At a stage, the Parti Democratique Senegalais (PDS), where Sall had risen to become prime minister, could no longer contain Wade and Sall. He broke off to form his own Hope Alliance on which platform he challenged Wade in the 2012 presidential election and defeated him, with the assistance of a coalition, after a run-off.

    This same Sall, who is losing his way and dragging his country along with him, set a high mark when he assumed office. He cut the size of his cabinet as he had promised, ploughed funds into the renewal of infrastructure and even made a proposal to parliament that would have reduced his term from seven to five-year two-term limit!

    Strong arm tactics 

    All of that now appears to have been in the former life of a fairytale. As Sall’s reset two terms of 12 years neared its end, he slowly became the worst possible version of Wade, toying with an extended tenure and hounding the opposition with a number of his strongest opponents, including Ousmane Sonkoh, who has now been bumped off the trail on contrived charges. Sall, in short, has been seduced by what he hates.

    ECOWAS will not be bothered if Sall changed his mind by December and sought an illegal third term. In the last four years, two regional leaders wangled illegal tenure extensions – Alpha Conde of Guinea and Alassane Ouattara of Cote d’Ivoire. The first didn’t quite get away with it after soldiers struck and removed him from office, setting off the region’s coup spiral; while the second is the current host of the African Cup of Nations (AFCON).

    Perhaps if there’s one person left in the community on whom the burden falls to whisper to Sall that this is not the Senegal that we used to know, it’s Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. As surely as a stumble imitates a fall, the signs from Dakar are those that presage what could become a full-blown political crisis for the region if left unattended.

    Tinubu, who promised to promote a coup-free region when he assumed office as chair of ECOWAS last year, cannot afford another country added to the regional coup belt. The same way he requested regional leaders at a meeting in Abuja to give George Weah a standing applause for the exemplary transition in that country, he needs to pull Sall’s ear, behind closed doors, and ask him to stop playing games.

    For ECOWAS to achieve the African Union (AU) objective to Silence the Guns in Africa by 2030, the community must pay attention to the underlying factors that breed resort to guns violence, a few of the obvious ones being rigged elections, suppression of dissent, and the rule of strongmen. When regional leaders like those in the delinquent states complain that the community is insensitive to problems caused by Western or foreign meddling, it’s the elite, like Sall, that open the door enabling such meddling.

    Oasis in jeopardy

    An oasis of stability and a shining light in a highly politically volatile region, Senegal was one of the few countries on the continent that others looked up to. According to Martin Meredith in his book entitled, The Fortunes of Africa, “Over the course of 150 elections held in 29 countries between 1960 and 1989, opposition parties were never allowed a single seat. Only three countries – Senegal, Botswana and the tiny state of the Gambia – sustained multi-party politics, holding elections on a regular basis that were considered reasonably free and fair.”

    That’s the reputation that Sall threatens to drag in the mud. Tinubu needs to remind Sall that it was he, Sall, and Nigeria’s former President, Muhammadu Buhari, who led the regional response to flush out Yahaya Jammeh in neigbouring The Gambia when Jammeh was on the verge of disrupting the outcome of the elections there because they did not favour him.

    By railroading a 10-month postponement of elections through Parliament, Sall is obviously hoping to succeed where Wade and Jammeh failed. And he doesn’t care the cost. But ECOWAS should. The community cannot afford to wait until Senegal becomes another basket case before weighing in.

  • ECOWAS: Is This the Beginning of The End? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    ECOWAS: Is This the Beginning of The End? – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Mali and Burkina Faso obviously have a lot more in common than squaring off in a game of football like they just did in the Round of 16 knockout stage of the African Nations Cup (AFCON), in Cote d’Ivoire. 

    Along with Niger, these countries have been a great source of misery for the continent in the last four years, with rogue military leaders there playing a game far more deadly with the lives of their countries than anything football can ever hope to imitate.

    They announced to the continent’s shock and surprise last week, that they were pulling out of the 15-member regional trading block, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). 

    There are rules for entry and exit. But the military governments that seized power in these countries are invoking the name of citizens whose mandate they trampled upon in the first place, to break the rules. They don’t care.

    Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger are neighbours with artificial borders created for the convenience of the colonial powers. They occupy nearly half of West Africa’s landmass. They are also landlocked and among the poorest countries by many global indexes. They have other sociological similarities besides.

    Burkina Faso has a GDP per capita of $1,510 (2020); Mali, $2,640 (2023); and Niger, ranked by worldatlas.com as the second poorest country in Africa, has a GDP of $1,410 (2020). 

    With their humongous acreage straddling the Sahara Desert and its southern fringes, these countries manage an estimated 72 million population combined. As though in agreement, the three have had a checkered history of military coups and are currently under military rule against the prevailing tide of multiparty democracy: Mali since 2021; Burkina Faso in 2022; and Niger, 2023.

    Alliance of delinquents

    The trio are members of a new “Alliance of Sahel States”, a mutual defence pact they entered into in September 2023. Like delinquents plotting to evade the consequence of mischief, they formed this alliance to ward off possible military invasion by the regional intervention force following the coup in Niger.

    Their latest bluff to quit ECOWAS has elevated their plight to Siamese status. Trapped as they are in the Sahel, they may now need lifesaving surgery should ECOWAS decide to squeeze in a bit more than sanctions. 

    Who will bell the cat? The region is a different place today than it was in the mid-1990s when the Commonwealth punished Nigeria for the bad behaviour of the military government of General Sani Abacha that executed Ken Saro-Wiwa in defiance of global appeals. Or even under the more recent example of The Gambia’s Yahaya Jammeh who was forced to back down in 2017, after Nigeria rallied regional leaders to chase him out of office. 

    Root of the matter

    At least three events have shaped the intransigence of the so-called “Alliance of Sahel States.” The first is the significant infiltration of the region by ISIS and ISWAP elements after the US-led military action in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan and the killing of Muammar Ghaddafi in Libya. 

    Arms from Syria, Iraq and Libya have flooded the Sahel, destablising the region and emboldening insurgency. Mali and Niger in particular have never quite overcome the impact of that destabilisation. Even countries farther South, like Nigeria, are still grappling with the fallout of the proliferation of light weapons, mostly through the Sahel.

    The complicity of France is the second reason. It’s not just complicity in the sense of meddling, which most states do routinely. It’s the more egregious kind – pregnant complicity that straps a child on its back. 

    A number of Francophone countries in West and Central Africa, at least 14 of them, that are part of the rigged CFA franc zone still maintain 50 per cent of their reserves in the French treasury in Paris. Also, the profit of French state-owned atomic energy group and uranium monopoly, Areva, based in Niger, is twice the GDP of that country. 

    The story of ruthless exploitation, often in connivance with the elite, is pretty much the same in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and other Francophone countries. Citizens have, of course, borne the brunt and the political elite who are complicit and have used the exploitation as excuse for coups and counter-coups.

    The third reason for the stubbornness of the military regimes in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger is the expansionist ambitions of China, but more importantly, Russia, under its current President Vladimir Putin. In other to spite the West, especially since the war in Ukraine, Putin sets up a play station wherever the enemies of the West can be found, with the deadly private army, Wagner Group, as his avatar. 

    The Russian president has made no pretence of his support for the rogue military governments in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Apart from military and strategic support, he has also offered free grains to six African countries, including Mali and Burkina Faso, to hedge supply shortfalls caused by the war with Ukraine. The new military leaders in these countries believe that trading off membership of ECOWAS for the Trojan horses of Beijing and Moscow is a better bargain.

    How far is too far?

    But how far can they go? As far as they believe they can continue to exploit the obvious indecision of regional leaders, the most distracted of which is Nigeria. The last time a member country – Mauritania – left (although for different reasons), the regional group ECOWAS was in a much stronger, more united place. 

    It’s now a shambles of its old self. Members already weakened by internal crisis and political wranglings are not sure whether to use force or not even though they can see clearly that negotiations are heading nowhere.

    Unfortunately, Nigeria, the regional powerhouse which should have provided leadership as it did in the past in Sao Tome, Benin, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire, is facing its own Gulliver moment. It has been pinned to the ground by a string of Lilliputian problems ranging from internal insecurity to the relatively new and fragile mandate of its president and ECOWAS leader Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who faces the unpleasant task of being the leader on whose watch the community could fall apart.

    Other ECOWAS countries beset by serious economic and political problems, including flawed elections which have also significantly limited the legitimacy of many current civilian leaders, are not faring better. Yet, even in the best of times, Nigeria picks about 70 percent of the community’s bills.

    The rogue military leaders in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger know that the community is in a difficult place, compounded by the decline in the influence of France, elections this year in the US and the UK, and the wars in Europe and the Middle East. They will milk these distractions.

    They are betting big on Russian support and also stirring up nationalistic fervour among the local populations. It remains to be seen, however, if rhetoric will prevail over geography. Being landlocked is problematic and is a major reason 16 out of 31 landlocked developing countries, including Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, are among the world’s poorest. 

    Catch-22

    For ECOWAS it is a catch-22 situation. While it is hoping that existing sanctions on the rogue governments, which range from the freezing of assets to the suspension of trade and the cut off of electricity supply would force the leaders to negotiate more sensibly and prevent a further contagion of coups, the community is also mindful that informal cross-border trade, largely in food, make up about 30 percent of regional trade.

    To kill the precariously perched tsetse fly without hurting its own scrotum, ECOWAS needs to strengthen citizens’ voices in these countries. It needs to cut through the posturing and partisan noise and engage citizens through more trusted, independent channels. The community could also use the experience of eminent persons, led by former Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Thabo Mbeki, and possibly joined by George Uppong Weah, to reset negotiations.

    The longer the process takes the greater the risk of normalisation – and even worse, the danger of contagion.

  • Miyetti Allah vigilante mocks elite hypocrisy – By Azu Ishiekwene

    Miyetti Allah vigilante mocks elite hypocrisy – By Azu Ishiekwene

    The report was treated like a footnote in the main press, but social media and online news platforms gave it a wider play. It’s the story of the launch of a nomadic vigilante service by Miyetti Allah, a group of herders turned political pressure group, comprising mostly Fulani.

    The national president, Bello Bodejo, said in Lafia, Nasarawa State, where the launch took place, that the vigilante service, which had already recruited 1,144 Fulani youths, would assist security agencies in the state to combat criminal activities.

    Four years ago, the Nnamdi Kanu-led separatist group, IPOB, made similar doubtful claims when the group set up the Eastern Security Network (ESN), for the South-east states. But federal security agencies crushed it. Yet, in a move that seemed to suggest that one vigilante group is greater than the other, the Nasarawa State Police Commissioner was a special guest at the Miyetti Allah vigilante service launch last week.

    There was a report on Wednesday that Bodejo had been arrested by the DSS, but the DSS has since denied. While no one is sure of the whereabouts of Bodejo, he appears to have launched a vigilante service that, regardless of the pretence of confusion surrounding it, bears the mark of official approval.

    It would be a mistake, however, to think that this once mostly feared and despised association of herdsmen and the police are in bed after only one evening of flirting. Of course, Miyetti Allah may have been motivated more by group self-interest, relevance and survival. But the dalliance with the police, the indifference of the main press, and the muted public response, are not an accident.

    Epidemic of desperation

    They are a reflection of the despair and desperation over the growing insecurity in the country, especially its latest franchise in form of widespread kidnappings, even in places once thought to be safe havens.

    As a result of multiple internal security challenges from banditry and insurgencies in the North-east, North-west and North-central, the unrest and violence by separatist groups in the South-east, not to mention pipeline vandalism in the South-south, the police have almost been reduced to Boys Scouts, while the military is doing more for less.

    A recent report by The Economist, citing ACLED, a global monitor of conflict, said more than 3,600 people were kidnapped in 2023, with the sharpest rise in May – the most ever – while almost about 9,000 Nigerians were killed in conflict last year.

    In a horror story that spooked memories of the Chibok girls, the family of Mansoor Al-Kadriyar was attacked in their home in Bwari, Abuja on January 2, and six of the girls were abducted. The eldest was killed and the other five released after 19 days in captivity and N55million reportedly paid in ransom.

    It’s in light of this widespread misery and what appears to be a general state of helplessness that Miyetti Allah, a symbol of Fulani hegemony, launched its nomadic vigilante service in a region fraught with a variety of deadly clashes, the latest of which has been the murderous rampage of ethnic violence in Plateau State that has, so far, claimed nearly 200 lives in less than two months.

    Ostrich game

    Thanks to elite hypocrisy, after years of playing the ostrich, we are back where we started: a realisation that the current policing model is not working. With broken noses, bleeding hearts, and a variety of poor imitations, we’re dragging ourselves back to the very thing that we have always tried to run away from: state police. State police is not a silver bullet, of course. But in the last 25 years, we have seen improvisations that have barely dented the monster.

    The Oodua People’s Congress (OPC), for example, founded by Fredrick Faseun and Gani Adams was a citizen vigilante-led attempt to curb insecurity in the South-west. It’s still active in many parts of the region. But former President Olusegun Obasanjo with those close to him who feared it was a South-west agenda towards state police, kept OPC in check, often deploying an iron fist.

    In a watered-down attempt to devolve more policing powers from the centre, we’ve seen attempts by the Federal Government at so-called community policing end up with greater Federal control, with the notorious pay-as-you-go police protection being enjoyed by the rich, especially politicians, who can afford them. It was only when the farmer-herder clashes threatened to ruin some states in the South-west that governors in the region, led by late Rotimi Akeredolu, rallied to form Amotekun.

    The South-east followed this lead with Ebubeagu, and a number of states in the North-west, especially, also set up their own vigilante services. In August 2022, then Benue State Governor, Samuel Ortom, launched the Community Volunteer Guard.

    In spite of states drifting towards it, in spite of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) including state police in its manifesto, and in spite of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu being one of the most notable champions of it, the idea is still something of anathema.

    Constitutional Conference report

    Ten years ago, state police was one of the most hotly debated issues at the Goodluck Jonathan-brokered National Conference, a conference whose report, unlike those of a number in the past, has proved quite durable.

    A summary of the 2014 conference report presented at the Second Chris Ogunbanjo Lecture Series in 2017 by a member of the conference and Chairman Emeritus of PUNCH, Chief Ajibola Ogunshola, said, “Any state that requires it, can establish a State Police for that state, which should operate in accordance with the provisions of the law setting it up, to be passed by the State House of Assembly.

    “Its powers or functions will be determined by such legislation and should not be in conflict with the duties and powers of the Federal Police.”

    The conference also made suggestions about changes in nomenclature and structure of the police and also in the relevant sections of the constitution. Of course, nothing significant has been done since, which is not a surprise. Former President Muhammadu Buhari whose lot it was to get it off the ground, told me during an interview nearly two years after he took office that he had not read the report and was not interested.

    If Buhari preferred treading the beaten path, Tinubu cannot pretend that we can continue the same way, or that he is unfamiliar with the merits of state police.

    There’s a familiar trope against it, and I have heard it over and over again: that state police in the hands of the states would be used by governors against their opponents. That’s a genuine concern, especially in a country where governors behave as if the states were their fiefdoms. But isn’t it warped to argue that it’s OK for the Federal Government to use the Federal police against its own opponents in the centre and in the states while we’re all held hostage by the fear that the states would abuse it?

    Bull by the horns

    In the case of Miyetti Allah’s nomadic service, which potentially is worse for regulation than Amotekun which is at least under the control of the states, whose weapon would the vigilante be? The Federal Government’s, the states’ or the battering ram of an unrepentant ethnic militia called Miyetti Allah?

    Ethnic militias are festering because the elite, especially members of the National Assembly, that are supposed to take the bull by the horns have refused to do what they should do to emplace structure and regulation by amending the constitution to allow the states play a more active role in policing.

    Tinubu cannot afford to allow the drift to continue. He cannot manage the country’s security the same way that Buhari did for eight years and expect a different result.

    Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP.