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Tag: Chidi Amuta

Chidi Amuta

  • Dr Amuta, Profs Okigbo, Musa, Ladi Adamu; Alim Abubakre, others join TheNewsGuru Board

    Dr Amuta, Profs Okigbo, Musa, Ladi Adamu; Alim Abubakre, others join TheNewsGuru Board

    Renonwed scholar and media guru, Dr Chidi Amuta, along with Professors Charles Okigbo, Muhammed Musa, Ladi Sandra Adamu, are among 10 eminent Nigerians who have joined the Board of TheNewsGuru.com, (TNG).

    The United Kingdom based erudite scholar and entrepreneur, Dr Alim Abubakre; the suave Matt Aikhionbare, who was private secretary to Presidents Obasanjo, Umaru Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan who was also a Secretary to the Government of Edo state under Chief Lucky Igbinedion, are among the new members.

    Others include topnotch Dublin, Ireland based legal practitioner, Waheed Mudah brings his wealth of legal knowledge to the board as Secretary while Mrs Judith Ufford and Cordelia Onu, two of the most decorated female journalists in NIgeria are bringing their diverse experiences.

    While Judith who is a keen activist on Human and Gender Rights, Reproductive Health and Rights, etc., brings her expertise for advocacy, networking, training, investigation and reporting to the Board.

    Mrs Cordelia Onu, on the other hand, is a trainer in media usage and mass mobilisation techniques. She is a permanent fellow of World Press Institute and a visiting Media Fellow at Dewitt Wallace Centre for Communication and Journalism.

    The Board is chaired by Dr Chidi Amuta a well known author, academic, celebrated columnist and media mogul. He is a visiting Fellow at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Boston and at Cambridge University. He is one of Nigeria’s most respected public intellectuals and media commentators. He combines an active media career with engagement in serious scholarship while also running the multi-billion naira firm: Wilson & Weizmann Associates.

    Professor Sandra Ladi Adamu is the first professor of broadcasting in Northern NIgeria and is currently a lecturer at the Ahmadu Bello University. She was at various times Deputy Editor of the Democrat newspapers, and News Editor at NTA Jos.

    Dr Abubakre who is also on the advisory board of London Business School Africa Club is the founder and non-executive chair of These Executive Minds. TEXEM, which has trained thousand of A-List Nigerians in some of the world’s leading and best universities.

    Professor Charles Okigbo, is a Professor of Professors with wide academic belts across the globe before becoming a Professor Emeritus of Strategic Communication at North Dakota University. He was a former Registrar of APCON and Coordinator of ACCE.

    Professor Muhammed Musa is a Professor of Communication at the Department of Media and Creative Industries, United Arab Emirates University, Dubai. He is a serially published author whose teaching and research interests are in the political economy of the media, journalism studies, new media and social change.

    Other members of the Board include Jewell Dafinone, Group Managing Editor of TheNewsGuru, TNG and Mideno Bayagbon, Publisher of TheNewsGuru TNG, and TNG Investigations.

  • What if Putin Flips? – By Chidi Amuta

    Before our very eyes and at an unexpected moment, a horror movie may be unfolding. Last Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, warned that a Third World War between Russia and NATO is possible and that it would be a nuclear war. On the same day, Russian artillery fire set off a blaze at a Ukrainian nuclear facility, the largest in Europe. Luckily, before dawn on Friday, Ukrainian fire fighters had put out the fire. Still on the same day, French President Emmanuel Macron after a telephone conversation with Putin cautioned that : ”the worst is yet to come.” Later in the day, it was a visibly jittery and troubled Putin that addressed Russians and the world to affirm that the invasion of Ukraine was going well according to his plan. Instructively, the broadcast was interrupted twice as Putin stood up in front of global television to adjust his ill-fitting jacket, all the time shying from eye contact with the audience in spite of a teleprompter ahead of him.

    The fog of the Ukrainian war could produce a more frightening outcome than the familiar tragedies of war. Vladimir Putin may mutate into a real dangerous foe not only for Ukraine but for the rest of humanity. Russia is being incrementally isolated. Crippling sanctions on all fronts threaten to strangulate Russia’s enclave economy. More directly, for the first time, Putin’s personal wealth and those of his support cast of oligarchs spread all over the world has been targeted by sanctions by Europe and the United States.

    Under the impact of the volley of sanctions, Russia’s economy is likely to begin to tank in less than 90 days. Financial services are beginning to feel the impact. The Russian Central Bank has adjusted interest rates up from 9% to over 20%. Key Russian banks have been excluded from the strategic international SWIFT network. That literally locks them out of the international banking and transactional super market. Putin has prohibited Russians from making international transfers. It is predicted that life could become quite hard for ordinary Russians in the next couple of weeks.

    Already anti war protests in Russia have been on the increase since the beginning of hostilities with Ukraine, leading to the arrest and detention of over 6000 Russians. If you add this number to the multitude being held in various detention centres for previous protests, it becomes hard to fathom how much repressive capacity Vladimir Putin possesses. Meanwhile, elite dissent is growing as a large group of Russian intellectuals last week issued a forceful statement against the Ukraine invasion. From anti war protests, Russia’s already bulging political opposition could swell into hardship riots as product shortages hit shop shelves. The pressure on Putin’s hold on power could swell to breaking point. Unfortunately, Russia’s democratic institutions are fragile and revolve around Mr. Putin’s stranglehold on power. In the event of increased popular domestic pressure, the threat on Putin’s hold on power could unravel and plunge Russia into something too frightening to name.

    Meanwhile, the advance of Russian columns into the Ukrainian capital and other cities is being frustrated and stalled by the patriotic resistance of ordinary Ukrainians. After over one week of an invasion originally programmed to last no more than a few days, the world ought to be concerned about the cumulative effects of these frustrations on the psychology of Mr. Putin, an unrepentant autocrat and repressive tyrant. Intelligence investigations into the state of Mr. Putin’s present state of mind may be closer to what the moment demands.

    There are enough reasons why Mr. Putin could become more dangerous to us all. An unpredictable autocrat presiding over a nuclear super power is not exactly a pleasant playmate. An autocrat who is easily the richest man in the world can acquire the mindset of a God figure with the power of life and death over the rest of humanity. An ex- KGB officer with an inscrutable face and shadowy family life may not worry much about the familiar moral qualms of regular mortals about human lives and ultimate tragedy. Worse still, a man with a permanent nostalgia for the defunct great USSR and the days of Cold War sabre rattling can pursue his obsession at the expense of others if events keep pushing him to the brinks of sanity.

    When such a man is encircled, his country isolated, his military rendered ineffectual and his private fortunes threatened, it is uncertain how far he can go in seeking revenge against those he sees as his traducers. Throughout history, the mind of a typical autocratic demagogue has been an area of darkness, full of uncanny possibilities. On hindsight, I shudder to think of what could have become of the world if Hitler had access to the codes of a nuclear weapons system. In the isolated seclusion of his bunker, he ordered some of the most massive military assaults that humanity has known during the Second World War. The body count meant nothing to him.

    But here we are today with Mr. Putin, a real autocrat with a record of serial murders of his opponents. He is in control of the world’s second largest arsenal of lethal and nuclear weapons. How far could he go to hurt the rest of the world just to assuage his injured ego? How far will Putin go just to prove to the world that he is not necessarily weak and will not go down in humiliation? Could Vladimir become demented by frustrations of his territorial ambitions in Ukraine and beyond as to do the kind of irrational things that similar figures have done in history?

    Russia as an isolated rogue state is not the best prospect in a world dominated by aspiring democracies. Over 85% of the nations of the world are now democracies or aspiring democracies. In that world, an illiberal democracy or fringe autocracy such as Russia is not your favourite next door neighbor. Worse still, a nuclear super power presided over by an unstable dictator with an injured ego and threatened financial fortunes is a nightmare that could blow up in our faces. Already, Mr. Putin has placed his most strategic military units including his nuclear command, at alert and in an active disposition. Lethal weapons banned by the Geneva Convention have already been reportedly put to use in only a few days of the Ukraine invasion.

    The best way out of this possible nightmare is to show Mr. Putin clearly marked exit points to escape from the consequences of his disastrous judgment. Clearly, he miscalculated his chances in the Ukraine mission. He probably underestimated the extent to which Ukrainians detest and even hate the Russians. You cannot sustain a massive military campaign in a terrain where the occupying force is so despised. Also, Mr. Putin never estimated the groundswell of international opposition that his invasion of Ukraine would attract. More tragically, he probably did not calculate the character of Russia’s post war relations with the European states and former Soviet republics that Russia has to live with in perpetuaity.

    Every war ends in peace. The best prosecutors of wars are also the most creative seekers of peace. Peace talks between Russia and Ukraine are an encouraging sign. But Mr. Putin would rather negotiate with Ukraine as a conqueror hence his armoured columns are proceeding into central Ukraine just as his peace delegation meets with Ukrainian officials. It is doubtful if the two parallel lines will meet somewhere in a bombed out Ukraine. Putin would probably find more satisfaction if the West is an open guarantor of the dubious peace he is seeking through the backdoor.

    The West can help Mr.Putin find a convenient exit point out of the cage he has built around himself. But the interest of a more enduring world peace is not served by the present attitude and rhetoric of the US and the West. It is a good thing to marshal a global coalition against a menacing adversary of the international rule- based order. It is also in order to contain a belligerent autocrat who tramples on the sovereignty of less powerful nations. It is quite understandable to pile up crushing sanctions to bend such a determined aggressor. Adversarial propaganda and guided lies such as we are witnessing from both sides on all media platforms is a legitimate part of the tradition of warfare. The Ukrainians who are at the receiving end of this assault know where the truth of this war really lies.

    But the premature triumphalism of Washington and the West is wrongheaded and could produce a more dangerous Putin. We must not forget; the object of this war is not the humiliation of Russia or Putin even though Mr. Putin provoked it. The object of the war is the protection of the sovereign integrity of independent states from the aggression and deliberate belligerence of more powerful nations. It is of course in the enlightened self -interest of the US and the West to contain Russian influence and Putin’s territorial ambitions. But in the end, the world still needs a powerful stable Russia as a bulwark against the excesses of the West just as much as we need a wealthy Europe and the US to demonstrate the relative advantages of liberal democracy and the power of the free market.

    For those who are desirous or anxious about how this war will end, there are a few certainties. First, Russia can neither crush nor annihilate Ukraine. Second, Russia will not be able to prevail against a coalition of the US, NATO and the rest of the free world. Third, the coalition of pro-Ukrainian forces will not be able to defeat Russia and exclude it from the international system. A humiliated Russia is an unlikely historical oddity.

    The risk that Mr. Putin could flip on the side of ultimate evil and catastrophe is not the only unintended consequence of this war. Other more foreseen and anticipated outcomes of war have come out in full display in less than a week of the invasion. Civilian deaths have topped 700 and still counting. Russian combatant deaths are climbing by the day. Infrastructure is being systematically destroyed. Psychologically, Ukrainians have become united more than ever under a banner of patriotic national resistance and defense. Russia is the unsavoury aggressor while Putin is the irredeemable villain.

    An unplanned refugee crisis and humanitarian disaster is in the making. Close to a million Ukrainians and others have streamed across the borders into neighbouring states. Foreign nationals resident in Ukraine have also been affected too.

    Between Putin and Zelensky, a familiar paradigm of good versus evil has emerged. A former comedy star who once acted a comic president and then became an actual president has in his heroic stance against Russian aggression turned out a real national hero and war time president. Irrespective of how this war ends, president Zelensky has secured his place in world history as a Ukrainian hero and wartime leader of global stature.

    Making a villain out of Putin requires little effort. Mr. Putin has not surprised anyone. A fierce autocrat with an insensitive bearing and inscrutable visage is the material out of which history moulds villains. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolin etc. But in acting out his predictable role, Mr. Putin may be on the way to destroying whatever legacy he may have created in three decades of power and leadership over Russia.

    On the diplomatic front, the world has united against Russia’s aggression. A barrage of United Nations resolutions in condemnation of Russia has lined up two thirds of the member states behind Ukraine. It is significant that votes against Russia’s role in Ukraine have cut across familiar boundaries. All Third World countries especially African countries that used to take a more sympathetic view of Russia have voted to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Communist era ideological solidarity is dead; long live the ideology of the market place and liberal democracy. Hungary and Turkey, known allies of Russia, have also broken ranks. The prospects of a more isolated Russia have become real, clear and present.

    Worse still, Europe and the United States have slammed a quick avalanche of punishing and crushing sanctions on Russia, Putin and his support cast of oligarchs both at home and in diaspora. An estimated $650 billion in Russia’s external reserves has been sterilized. The Moscow Stock Exchange was closed for most of last week. For the first time, sanctions have targeted Mr. Putin and his top Kremlin crew. Cash, choice real estate, luxury private jets, yachts and other assets of Russian oligarchs, friends and associates of Mr. Putin are being confiscated all over the West.

    Before we are all carried away in the nasty exchange of sanctions and reprisals, we must not forget the cardinal rules of international relations that lie at the root of this conflict. They are the principles of the sanctity of the sovereign territorial integrity of nations no matter how weak or strong, big or small. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a flagrant violation of this principle. Its deliberate carving up of Ukrainian territory by recognizing the breakaway regions as sovereign republics is a deepening of this annoying original violation.

    On the other hand, there is the countervailing principle of Spheres of Influence. Under that convention, Russia has a right to see Ukraine as part of its sphere of influence for historical and strategic reeasons. Recognotion of that sphere of influence does not permit Russia to invade Ukraine; it only allows it to act in a manner to protect that sphere. While Ukraine may have a sovereign right to join or associate with the European Union, its right to join NATO, which is a military alliance, is hindered by the convention of spheres of influence. Everything in the history of Russia and the independence of Ukraine dictates that matters of military alliance and security between the two states ought to be negotiated and agreed upon without the necessity of war. Russia’s recourse to invasion and a shooting war is a reckless endangerment of both principles. The full consequences are Russia’s to bear ultimately.

    Vladimir Putin must be ready to carry those consequences which now include international isolation, crushing sanctions and Ruussia’s inevitable encirclement by states that are bound to be hostile and perennially suspicious neighbours and at best uneasy allies. No rational leader can wish his nation such catastrophe.

  • The PDP at Crossroads – By Chidi Amuta

    The PDP at Crossroads – By Chidi Amuta

    By Chidi Amuta

    Nigeria’s main opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party(PDP), is currently hanging on an existential cross of its own. After nearly eight years in the power wilderness, the party faces the 2023 election season with an uncertain fate and a quirky future. Will it resurrect from its present state of deprived animation or descend into permanent disrepair and ultimate extinction?

    Quite remarkably, the party has persisted commendably even in a power deprived state. In 2019, it put up an impressive showing of strength that rattled the incumbent APC. That impressive performance was a testimonial to the party’s institutional memeory and widespread membership spread across the country. While few people with knowledge of Nigeria’s political landscape expected the PDP to defeat the incumbent APC in 2019, the fairly impressive showing of the party was a strong confirmation of the logic that like all major world democracies, Nigeria is ultimately in a better place as a two party democracy. Binary choices tend to make democracies more participatory with simplified options.

    Nonetheless, the PDP is currently not in the best of shapes as a party. It may not be as fractious as the ruling APC but the party is in desperate disrepair. It is hard to tell now what the original enablers and activators of the party think of its current state. Ibrahim Babangida, Olusegun Obasanjo and Aliyu Gusau must all be in utter consternation and even embarrassment at what they intended as a grand scheme for national political survival. After four decades of a military dictatorship in which they all had a hand, the PDP was their mechanism for continued relevance in the task of national redemption. Dr. Alex Ekwueme, the civilian pillar of that effort, if he was alive today, would have shared the current disquiet among the generals. The dream has almost turned into a nightmare of amputated wishes.

    The original template was that of a unifying political umbrella for all shades of interests and opinions across the nation. It was designed to forge a sense of oneness in the nation after many decades under military rule. Its founding membership was first informed by a need to reverse the effects of decades of autocratic rule and regimental psychology in the nation. A broad spectrum of political luminaries from across all our divides gave the PDP its initial appeal and strength. It was a mechanism for a mature and liberal national consensus among political equals. They pooled their strengths to rebuild the foundations of a free democratic Nigeria.

    The PDP was above all designed as an instrument of national stability through the restoration of the supremacy of civil authority and bring back international respectability after a pariah status under Mr. Abacha’s bloody tyranny.

    At this critical run up season to 2023, the survival of the PDP and its prospects of a rebound lie in reconnecting its grassroots support base with a credible party leadership. Of the two major political parties, the PDP still has the longer institutional memory on how to be a party as party, a party in government and a party in power. Founded at the historic moment of an end to military rule, it was a mechanism for the recovery of the instinct for freedom and democracy among a populace that had become inured to the prolonged loss of instinctual freedom. The party’s hour of birth was a traumatic moment in national history, one that called for great national healing after a string of tragedies.

    The June 12 annulment had taken place and hurt the nation deeply. Abiola had died in government custody, an unnecessary death that set the nation against itself. Sani Abacha’s bloody autocracy had crashed with his befitting lowly expiration. Military rule had exhausted both its legitimacy and validity. But the democratic inevitability was itself riddled with minefields of uncertainty. The civil populace was too traumatized to believe in any new set of leaders irrespective of their costume after decades of debilitating autocracy. The populace was even more frightened by the string of national tragedies and misfortunes. This is the effective backdrop to the birth of the PDP.

    As an emerging political idea it needed to become a brand quickly. And every political brand prepping to contest for power needs a mascot. The founders saw Mr. Obasanjo, newly released from Abacha’s Gulag, as that mascot. He was a retired soldier who had tasted civilian life. He had acquired reasonable international stature and respectability. He had been jailed and framed by the Abacha dictatorship and so understood the value of freedom and the cost of living under a dictatorship.

    As the head of state who presided over an earlier transition in 1989, Obasanjo had bowed to the democratic verdict of the electorate which gave the presidency to Alhaji Shehu Shagari instead of his kinsman, Chief Obafemi Awolowo. He had received the surrender documents of the defunct Biafra at the end of the civil war in 1970 without cleansing the Igbos. So, he had earned the respect and confidence of all major sections of the country and could therefore be entrusted with the task of leading the new charge of national healing and return to reasonable civility.

    In 1999, Obasanjo was for the PDP what Buhari became for the APC by 2014, a galvanizing force and a brand ambassador. In the 1999 elections, Obasanjo was the logical choice against the other major contenders. General Muhammadu Buhari, Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu and Mr. Olu Falae had more ethnic and provincial appeals than the more nationalist and broad based Obasanjo.

    Ideologically, the PDP was and founded as a right wing all inclusive nationalist platform. Although an all comers amorphous platform, it was business friendly and liberal in its inclusiveness of all shades of opinion in the nation. Its founders and leading lights were unabashed military industrial capitalists supported by major captains of business and industry. At best, their models for Nigeria’s development under the party were South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and possibly Singapore. Obasanjo was enamored of these models.

    As a party in power, the PDP was personified by Mr. Obasanjo’s ebullient approach to democracy. He respected party supremacy for as long as the party leadership was willing to do his bidding. Otherwise, he changed the leadership of the party at will, leaving no one in doubt about his Medieval conception of the party and the state. The president was the party and the state all rolled into one. He plotted to take out party chairmen and Senate presidents with a regularity that assured his hold on apex power while leaving the party and the National Assembly in a state of constant instability and flux. In this crude concept of power and supremacy, Obasanjo was the only constant.

    As the party in government, the PDP under Obasanjo ensured a reasonable level of security of lives and property. Armed challenges to the authority of the state were beginning to be evident but where they occurred, they were ferociously beaten back. In Odi, Shagamu and Zaki Biam, the authority of the state was decisive and ferocious in a manner that may have put the human rights reputation of the new government in question. But insurgents knew exactly who was in charge and where the red line was drawn. Where state governments allowed national security to suffer in favour of local political convenience, President Obasanjo was equally decisive in pressing the powers of the constitution into effect. He declared states of emergency in Plateau and Ekiti states respectively.

    In spite if his personal bullish octogenarian exuberance and frequent authoritarian flights, President Obasanjo was an effective leader and led the PDP to rise to a remarkably high level of control of the polity and the economy. He had a clear focus on national policies. He secured a near debt free status for the country by seriously engaging the international merchants of debt.

    He was anxious to integrate Nigeria into the international financial system by consolidating its banks, digitalizing our payment system and extending banking services and the benefits of the stock market to the previously excluded. Obasanjo tasked Nigeria’s corporate captains to rise to the challenge of international competitiveness by aiming to take over the commanding heights of the economy.

    He set his eyes on South Korea as a development model. He wanted to empower a few big corporations, like South Korea’s cherbols , by granting them monopolies on hospitality, telecommunications, cement manufacturing and banking. The Transcorp Group came into existence. To a great extent, Mr. Obasanjo facilitated the rise of Nigeria’s present generation of corporate oligarchs. Under him, there were clearly identifiable growth sectors: telecommunications, oil and gas, banking and finance sectors witnessed phenomenal growth.

    The PDP’s handling of the politics of transition of power to the next elected successor was made problematic by Mr. Obasanjo’s personalization of the party, and the presidency. He tried to succeed himself through the infamous Third Term plot which was mercilessly beaten back by vigilant Nigerian political hawks. His choice of late Umaru MusaYar’dua and his pairing with Goodluck Jonathan from the Niger Delta was a mix of personal and strategic considerations. The best way for a strong leader to retain a towering stature and grand legacy is to be succeeded by weaker leaders. The fortunes of the PDP were to be decisively altered by Mr. Yar’adua’s infirmity and early death. Jonathan’s effete presidency further weakened the party and culminated in the breakaway of a faction to form the New PDP. On the way out of the Villa, Obasanjo re-wrote the party constitution, giving himself a lifelong role as perennial Board of Trustees chairman and ‘father of the party’. All that unraveled as soon as he left Aso Villa.

    As an opposition party in the last nearly eight years, the PDP has been woeful. It has mistaken opposition for political waywardness. It has mistaken abuse for criticism, name calling for dissent, and policy emptiness and guesswork for informed alternatives. As a political party, its rhetoric has been a steady descent into a free hurling of motor park insults at the ruling party instead of serious engagements on core national issues.

    Ordinarily, the informed public expects more from a serious opposition party. As a habitual opposition leader, Chief Obafemi Awolowo led parties that were known for proffering credible and informed alternative policy positions than the governments in power. His opposition parties had more credible statistics on aspect of national life than the governments in power. For every shortfall that an Awolowo opposition party criticized, they had a ready alternative position.

    But in almost eight years as an opposition party, the PDP has not come up with any informed alternative positions on anything be it the national budgets, defense and security spending, the costing of railway and road contracts or even the national debt. Worse still, the PDP group in the National Assembly has not been known to vote in a manner that has compelled the ruling APC legislators or the executive branch to seriously seek a bipartisan consensus on any legislation. Instead, key PDP members and legislators have routinely decamped from their party to the ruling APC.

    Today, the national consensus that birthed the PDP as a national platform has dissipated. The broad concept of horizontal leadership that gave it initial stability has been replaced by something dangerous. The PDP has been effectively hijacked by a handful of autocratic adolescent governors. The driving fuel of the party has shifted from a consensus of a respected broad based leadership to a ‘cash and carry’ syndrome.

    Largely, the party leadership selection process has become an open Arab street bazaar in which the preferred candidate of the highest bidder governor assumes leadership only to be tossed aside if and when his leadership threatens the interests of the paymaster. The biggest spender takes it all. The entire purpose and mission of the party has been reduced to a relentless haggling over which ethnic faction or position on the political compass will be allocated the presidential ticket for 2023. In this atmosphere, it has become necessary, to pose an existential question on the plight of the PDP. Simply put, can the PDP in its present degraded shape survive the shock of a possible defeat in 2023?

    The current rating of the party even in the estimation of its founders was captured recently in Abeokuta. The new leadership of the party led by my good friend Dr. Iyiorcha Ayu. The new executive had gone to impress upon former president Obasanjo the need for him to identify with the party after years of public disassociation. It was an unrelenting Obasanjo who looked the delegates in the face and reiterated his final exit from partisan politics. This has left the party at the mercy of its new masters and the uncertainties of a vastly altered national political terrain.

    Today, the PDP is at an existential crossroads with its fate hanging from a noose. It is now virtually a political joint stock company with majority shares held by one or two moneyed governors. Its power lever is being controlled by a triumvirate of gubernatorial oligarchs led by Mr. Wike of Rivers State, Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto State and perhaps Mr. Makinde of Oyo State. The perpetual presidential aspiration of Mr. Atiku Abubakar and some upstart governors of northern states is tempting the party into stormy waters by jettisoning the zoning principle in its founding DNA. At a time when the incumbent APC has ceded its 2023presidency to the south, the PDP is tinkering with a dying hegemonic obsession. It is bound to backfire. How well the party navigates this delicate balance will determine its plight in 2023.

    The PDP has a huge political asset in the abysmal performance of the APC incumbent. For a serious opposition party, defeating such an incompetent incumbent should be a cake walk. But money remains the fuel of politics. Locked out of power and patronage for the last 7 years plus, the PDP needs to find the money to unseat the APC in the 2023 elections. Beyond cash, the PDP needs to fix the present disconnect between its large followership and the burden of gubernatorial absolutism threatening its leadership.

  • The APC After Buhari – By Chidi Amuta

    The APC After Buhari – By Chidi Amuta

    By Chidi Amuta

    The APC was birthed out of Mr. Buhari’s resilient appetite for presidential power. Its victory in the 2015 presidential election was a product of both his regional cultic followership and a nationwide rejection of Mr. Jonathan’s bumbling presidency. Seven years afterwards, Buhari’s appetite for apex power has been fulfilled and arguably squandered. His pet nativist hegemonic project has come full cycle and overreached itself. And as he begins to gather his belongings to return to the pastoral anonymity of Daura, his APC vehicle now has an existential challenge: how does it survive in and of itself as a political party? How will it persist as a strategic national institution of democratic stability?

    The 2023 presidential election holds the key to these questions. If the party prevails in the 2023 presidential election, it will become perhaps Mr. Buhari’s most enduring and consequential political legacy. If, on the contrary, it splinters in defeat as the general retreats home, it will be an addition to his already sagging luggage of deficit legacies. But even in a possible victory, the party is more likely to produce a president whose policies and methods will mostly depart markedly from Mr. Buhari’s conservative stop and slow ways. That also will be a polite repudiation of Mr. Buhari’s political legacy. So, between Mr. Buhari’s political legacy and the future of the APC, there is an umbilical link.

    Even now on the eve of the party’s crucial pre- election convention, there is a palpable fear that it is headed into turbulent clouds. It could somehow tinker its way through the convention in spite its many nasty headaches and troubles. But in whichever direction we look, the party is threatened by internal contradictions and gaping cracks that are difficult to paper over. But it definitely will ride through even more bumpy skies when it comes to selecting an electable presidential candidate. The processes leading up to 2023 will be the defining tests. And the reasons are many and lie embedded in the very origins of the party and the way it has managed itself as a party in itself, as a party in government and as a party in power since 2015.

    Looking back, the coalition of parties that gave birth to the APC was an inconvenient marriage of political convenience. There was nothing in common between a pseudo social democratic ACN, an ultra conservative CPC, a nationalist right wing ANPP, an ethno nationalist APGA and a renegade opportunistic centrist NPDP. The cardinal objective was to cobble together a workable coalition to wrest power from the PDP after 16 monotonous years. The idea of a multiparty coalition eventually gave way to the even better idea of a single opposition party.

    Mr. Buhari facilitated and galvanized the marriage. He provided the amalgamation with a presidential mascot albeit one with a national name recognition. He also came dressed in an untested mythic garb of leadership prowess, governance prudence, barrack discipline and a reasonable level of personal integrity. Above all, he had managed over the years to build up a huge cultic following among the northern mob of rough uneducated and unemployed youth and regional power fanatics. Part of the motor park fable around Mr. Buhari was the infantile notion that once elected president, he would jail all the corrupt former government officials, recover the ill- gotten wealth and redistribute same among the poor masses.

    Thus was born a party tailored more towards wresting power from an effete incumbent than for the effective governance of a country in desperate need for responsible leadership. Given the tenacity of African power incumbents, the APC was more honed for the task of contesting the outcome of the 2015 presidential election possibly up to the Supreme Court. But when the results tumbled in mostly in its favour and Mr. Jonathan conceded defeat to Mr. Buhari, it was an overrated and unprepared APC that had to set up a government and ascend the pinnacle of national power. Victory came as a rude surprise with power as an unanticipated burden. Time has passed. Buhari has fulfilled his long standing ambition of wearing the toga of President. It is now time for the party to take stock of its stewardship and contemplate its future.

    With the benefit of hindsight, the emergence of the APC reinforced Nigeria’s historic tendency towards a credible two party architecture. To that extent, it was a positive political outcome, one which promised a great dividend for Nigeria’s democracy. The new party came to power on the wave of expectations greater than its capacity and preparedness.

    Even then, having successfully hounded the PDP out of power at the national level, the APC had two tasks. First, it had to develop into a party with a national membership, credible internal democratic structure and a definable ideology to anchor its policies on. It had a mandate to rule and to govern more creditably than the party it ousted.

    Regrettably, however, the APC has not grown beyond the logic of its incoherent origins. It has turned out to be just merely a ballot paper alternative to the PDP. It has no ideological identity, no policy coherence, no record of sensible governance at the federal level and state levels. Admittedly, an isolated number of APC ruled states (Kaduna and Lagos especially) have managed to show signs of some progressive policy direction and a bit of good governance. But the party has hardly tried to galvanize an effective grassroots membership to consolidate seven years of power dominance at the center.

    From the very top, the APC is an embarrassing ideological proposition. I doubt that from Mr. Buhari to the most mundane foot soldiers out there, that the word ideology ever comes up even in casual conversations. But as a political organization, we need to dress up the APC and its leading lights in some ideological garb in order to make sense of their quarrels or at least give the party a reason to exist. As my friend George F. Will would insist, “We can dignify …disputes among small persons of little learning by connecting them with great debates about fundamental things.”

    Let us therefore confront the ideological curiosity of the APC. Here is a so- called ‘progressive’ party led by an unabashed arch conservative in the person of president Buhari. This is one of the greatest ironies of recent political theory and history. Ordinarily, progressivism indicates a bias for social democracy in its dynamic context. It should signal a commitment to continuous social and economic democracy and change along progressive lines. Progressivism is decidedly partisan on the side of the masses while acknowledging the entrepreneurial class as an engine of growth and wealth creation. Instead, Nigeria’s “progressives” are a loose collection of free wheeling brief case capitalists, commission agents and primitive accumulators.

    The party is led by the diehard conservative Buhari. He may be sympathetic towards the plight of the masses who in any case constitute his electoral base but it ends there. He is an advocate of Medieval economics of controls and over regulation of nearly everything from domiciliation of government bank accounts to the distribution of fertilizers to peasants. Here is a president in the 21st century who is still passionately enamored of cattle colonies, ancient grazing routes, groundnut and rice pyramids, pastoral and subsistence agriculture. He remains compulsively nervous about information technology and the predominance of the social media.

    For him, the youth are merely a tolerable multitude of irritating subjects who are lazy, want money for doing nothing and indulge in some phantom pastime called cyber consciousness. In his worldview, the state does not owe the teeming multitude of youth graduating from our institutions any jobs because he cannot manage to see the jobs in the huge work of national development. In an age of globalization and a borderless world, this conservative leader of Nigeria’s ‘progressive’ party believes in sporadically shutting the borders to pursue self- sufficiency instead of submitting the country’s huge productive capacities to the power of global competition.

    For Buhari, the liberal democratic values of rule of law and equality before the law are tolerable irritations only made necessary by the dictates of democracy. Otherwise, he would clamp those perceived as corrupt into jail and throw away the keys. For this leader, the nation spans outwards from his native Daura to the former Northern Nigeria and out towards the rest of the country in measured trickles of patronage depending on how much vote each zone gave him!

    Yet in the same party with Mr. Buhari, we have a smattering of some genuine social democrats, left leaning populists as well as some pragmatic idealists and radical anarchists. In Buhari’s party, we encounter the likes of Vice President Yemi Osinbajo who consistently and consciously strikes a progressive pragmatic note. There is Nasir El- Rufai, a progressive radical reformist, Rotimi Amaechi, a radical leftish social democrat. There is Bola Tinubu, a friend of the left who is at best a left of center liberal democrat and voracious capitalist. Of course there are rhetorical leftists like Adams Oshiomole, Festus Keyamo and a few others. The APC also contains quaint specimens of ideological homelessness and comic fringe elements like Rochas Okorocha, Yahaya Bello and numerous upstarts of no specific nomenclature. Otherwise, there is no distinction between the APC and the PDP or indeed any other political gang up that exists in the nation today.

    In spite of its nationalist pretensions, there is a sense in which the APC has not outgrown the limitations of its fractious and factional origins. Its soul is still tormented by the pangs of its difficult birth. In good times, the factions wear a semblance of national unity and cohesion. In times of crisis like now, they scamper homewards towards the comfort of their respective ethnic and regional birth places.

    The APC as the party in government elicits mixed reactions from Nigerians. There are too many Nigerians who have concluded that the APC federal government under Mr. Buhari has been an epic disaster. They are likely to point to the unacceptable level of insecurity, mounting corruption, the decay and collapse of major institutions of state and the near wholesale collapse of the state itself. For a political party to preside over such monumental ruin and call it the architecture of progress is one of the greatest abuses of political language in recent Nigerian history.

    Of course, it is not all negative for Buhari and the APC. The economy has just been reported as having grown by a surprising 3.4% in the last few months against a background of unprecedented poverty and misery among the majority of our people. Diehard Buhari devotees are likely to regale us with rhetorical flourishes and lavish Power Point presentations and holograms on the progress made under Buhari. But the negative statistics are too stark: the abysmal exchange rate, the frightening crime rate, the mass misery, and the democratization of despair as the commonest commodity in free distribution. Not to talk of the health of our polity. Not even in the time of the civil war has the nation been this sharply divided.

    No one can deny the kilometers of new railroads and that lead between major centres of our population including to far away Maradi in Niger Republic! Others will point to the Second Niger Bridge at Onitsha, initizted by previous regimes and still uncompleted but already named after Mr. Buhari! There are highways in different parts of the country being rehabilitated.

    It is accountability hour. Ordinarily, a democracy should call an incumbent government to account at election time. The APC now has to defend its incumbency and also survive as a party. Above its bad internal conflicts, the party has to struggle to produce an electable presidential candidate from among its rowdy school of rampaging equals. It has to unshackle itself from being just Mr. Buhari’s creaky vehicle of sectional hegemony to become a mechanism for national recovery through the successor president it chooses.

    In its present state, leadership in the APC remains along a vertical top- to- bottom axis. Power and authority are still flowing down from Buhari and his overbearing surrogates. This will only hold for as long as Buhari’s incumbency remains in tact. But from the middle of this year when the president becomes a de facto lame duck, I doubt that anyone in the APC will bother with his leadership in party matters, including his suggestions on who succeeds him.

    Presidential aspirants who are placing so much value on Buhari’s support may be in for a rude shock. There is nothing in the president’s political method that assures anyone that he will champion any cause other than his own. He has never gone out of his way to stoutly defend the interests of his party or supporters in places and moments when it mattered most. Under his watch, in the run up to the 2019 elections, factions of the APC litigated the party out of the ballot in both Rivers and Zamfara states.

    Once he unleashes his political lieutenants to quit government and go into the field to contest elections by mid year, a horde of political hounds will escape from the cage. Power and leadership will be dispersed along a horizontal plane into a vicious contest among political equals. The APC presidential ticket scramble is going to be a scramble among politicians with almost equal stature and mutually cancelling weaknesses and advantages. But whoever emerges will carry the burden of an unimpressive record of achievements.

    Core party insiders like Bola Tinubu, Yemi Osinbajo and Rotimi Amaechi, will each have to compete for supremacy without the demographic advantages tof a Buhari in 2015. If Buhari succumbs to the current pressure from his courtiers to recruit outsiders like CBN’s Emefiele. AFDB’s Adesina or former president Jonathan to fly the party’s presidential flag in 2023, the party will not only unravel but will be roundly defeated.

    Therefore, the most consequential factor in the future of the APC both during and after the 2023 presidential race the absence of the demographic pull of a Buhari factor. His prospective successors had better get ready to scramble for their own followership. Political followership is not a transferable asset. Incidentally, the rival PDP will also be shopping for followership in the same supermarket.

    The APC was born and prevailed for 8 years because it won the presidency in 2015. It can only survive if it repeats that feat in 2023 in spite of the loss of the Buhari factor. If it loses, it is likely to splinter and die from the pull of ambitious equals and for want of a towering and unifying mascot.

  • Politicians, ASUU and Dangerous Universities – By Chidi Amuta

    Politicians, ASUU and Dangerous Universities – By Chidi Amuta

    By Chidi Amuta

    Between the Federal Government and the organized trade union of Nigerian university teachers, ASUU, a familiar dance is about to resume. Few adult Nigerians can remember any length of time in the recent past when ASUU was not on strike. The last stretch coincided with the Covid-19 lockdown, making it harder to know what exactly kept the students marooned at home for so long. If news is the definition of momentous happenings worthy of public attention, I am not sure that anyone will call an ASUU strike or threats thereof news in any serious sense.

    If the tradition of irrational obstinacy on both sides prevails as usual, the teachers may resume their paid vacation in the name of strike any time from now. I am not aware that they have lost even a single month’s pay during each of the many decades of their serial strikes. The pattern has become familiar. With each threat of strike, ASUU reactivates a litany of unfulfilled promises and violated agreements on the part of government. As employers of university teachers in federal and state service, our governments have been less than responsible guarantors of public trust. By any known rules of employer-employee contracts, our public university teachers should have been fired en masse several times over and made to refund salaries received for work not done. Our governments play to the gallery about the arguably unreasonable demands of ASUU without admitting that the government side has been in the habit of reneging on nearly every agreement entered into with ASUU. Responsible governments do not trifle with agreements. But ASUU is dealing with governments led by Nigerian politicians, a unique breed of cavalier creatures.

    The persistent blame tossing between the federal government and ASUU is not likely to end soon. It is an unwinnable war for many reasons. The governments may never find enough money to satisfy the ever expanding demands and entitlements of ASUU. Quite disturbingly, ASUU leadership has become something of a perpetual ‘profession’ in itself. Some otherwise brilliant scholars have found it more profitable to be perpetual ASUU unionists than committed teachers and researchers. Ironically, between the politicians at the ministries of Labour and Education respectively and professional ASUU trade unionist professors, endless televised negotiation sessions have become national theatre. A curious reversal of roles has taken place in the process. The perennial ASUU chieftains in their opportunistic appeals to public sentiments have been playing politics with the future careers of our students. On their part, the negotiating government officials seem to enjoy the photo opportunities and endless negotiations with ASUU so much that they are beginning to look more like the actual trade unionists themselves.

    There is enough luggage of faults and blames on both sides. But government bears the greater burden. Being the employer of academics comes with extra requirements of candor and civility. Asking university teachers to literally queue up for their pay while the federal ministry of finance completes a centralized digitized centralized pay platform is an insult. It undermines the legal autonomy of individual universities. Ordinarily, it is the bursary department of each university that should administer their respective staff salaries. Holding back arrears of sundry allowances due teachers for whatever reason is autocratic and insensitive. Moreover, habitually reneging on agreements reached with ASUU is reckless and irresponsible.

    However, in the process of the perpetual ego ping pong between politicians and ASUU chieftains over the years, certain fundamental questions about our university sector have been raked up. It is only by asking these questions and seeking serious answers to them that we can hope to salvage our university system from the present rot.

    Is a university a social service or a business enterprise? Or, better still, is a university teacher an executive in a business venture or a civil servant in a state charity or parastatal? What university tradition, of all existing models, is Nigeria following? Should university education be cost free to parents and students?

    Deservedly, academics like all other skilled professionals and workers need to be adequately remunerated. This is even more imperative in a system that limits their options of employment to mostly the universities. Governments that insist on maintaining a regulatory and proprietorship stranglehold on public universities should match their monopolistic clutch by paying the teachers well. Politicians and parents who desire uninterrupted academic calendars and tranquility on the campuses should pocket their ego and stop treating intellectuals like mundane civil servants and glorified houseboys.

    The long struggle between ASUU and our governments is rooted in a bit of confusion on both sides about precisely what university tradition Nigeria is following. The assumptions that inform ASUU’s endless labour struggles are rooted in an old Soviet style unitary university model. In that model, the universities belong to the government as public institutions. Higher education is an entitlement of all citizens who qualify. Hardly any fees are charged. University teachers are public servants and are equal irrespective of the depth of their research and the currency of their findings. They progress according to a unified pecking order, not necessarily according to research relevance or significant breakthroughs. A rigid government approved pay structure unites all academics irrespective of the profundity of their scholarship.

    Politically, the public is indoctrinated into a certain sense of entitlement that tertiary education is the right of every citizen whether or not they can afford it. The whole approach of ASUU to issues of university funding and tuition fees is founded on this communist model. ASUU trade unionism is an offshoot of the communist era labour internationalism, an ideological remnant of the Cold War.

    In this struggle for a utopian communist egalitarianism, ASUU teachers want to compete with politicians for lavish perks but insist on insulating the students from paying sensible fees that would make the public universities sustainable. ASUU unionist teachers and the more naïve students and their parents are stuck in a dead entitlement society culture.

    New realities have emerged. Governments have run out of cash to fund higher education and pay the teachers. But government remains reluctant to cede ownership and control. It hands out appointments to university councils to all comers as political patronage. The office of Vice Chancellor has become another chieftaincy title in which extant selection criteria are often subordinated to the whims of powerful political influencers. External influence on the universities from Abuja and the state capitals stretches to contract awards, admissions, promotions, employment and staff tenure.

    We are now in a sad place. Infrastructure in public universities have crumbled under the weight of student population explosion. The quality of available teaching manpower has been eroded and diluted by an unplanned expansion in the size of public universities. Dire economic conditions have forced an exodus of high caliber academic staff either abroad or lately to the many new private universities.

    Tragically, the low fees and dilapidation in our public universities are yielding vast dividends of wrath. We are confronted with youth armed with cudgels, machetes and even AK 47s at every street corner or highway bend. Sophisticated campus cyber criminals, Yahoo Boys, ritual murderers, an epidemic of rape and suicides, cultists and a flowering of superstition on nearly all our public university campuses. The privileged children that we have sent abroad in the hope that they will return to form a new elite, born in Nigeria but bred and tutored abroad now return home to face the monsters that the hypocrisy and neglect of our elite have bred. On the average, most of Nigeria’s youngest and brightest are staying put in the West, adding to their bank of genius while deepening our development deficits.

    Our lip service to modernity now finds a huge mocking bird at the gates of our public universities where there are endless festivals of the cultural traits of the Dark ages. It is not only the government that has to be blamed on the descent into hell on our public university campuses. ASUU’s prolonged absence from its primary duty posts is a grave disservice to our youth in particular and the nation at large.

    There is a way out. As against the persisting Soviet model university system, we are confronted with an alternative system. Since 1985/86, Nigeria has migrated into an imperfect free market system. This reality dictates a different university model which lies somewhere between the United States and the British models. The American model boasts of both private and public institutions. The classic private model is at its best in places like Harvard. For purposes of teaching, learning and research, Harvard boasts of some of the best faculty and facilities. This solid base is supported by a sound business model which ensures the sustainability of the infrastructure and resources required to keep the tradition of excellence running. But those who want to go to Harvard or send their children to study there must ensure that in addition to solid academic credentials, they can afford the hefty tuition and boarding costs.

    Today, Harvard has an endowment surplus fund in excess of $34 billion dollars, slightly more than our total external reserves as a nation. That fund is managed by a crop of some of the best Wall Street class investment experts. They do what they know how to do best in order to grow the wealth of the university while the academic leadership get on with the work of research, learning and teaching to sustain the tradition of excellence.

    Some of America’s most successful public universities thrive on charging modest but sensible fees to ensure sustainability of systems and affordability of access. Their eyes are set on the models of academic excellence set by the Ivy League universities while conscious of their responsibility to a wider catchment population of students. In both private and public institutions, the US university system lays emphasis on both academic excellence and system sustainability. The university teacher remains a disciple of the long established tradition of pursuit of learning and enlightenment. They are not perpetual trade unionists locked in relentless pitch battles against politicians and government bureaucrats.

    Let us face it, the current regime of token fees charged in Nigeria’s public universities is laughable. At today’s rates, it costs more to keep a kid in a private urban kindergarten in a term than it costs to keep an undergraduate in a Nigerian public university for a whole year. Similarly, it costs more to keep a teenager in a modest private secondary school in a year than it costs to pay for four years of public university education. We cannot expect to make the top ranks of universities in the world while no one wants to pay for the facilities and personnel required to compete in a world that is surging ahead.

    We all appreciate the value of sound uninterrupted education for our children. That is why for the last 25 years, most of us -politicians, ASUU chieftains, senior government officials, big journalists etc. -have sent our university age children to some of the best institutions in the world while closing our eyes to the funding needs and the crying necessity for reform in our public universities at home.

    We have been ready to pay an average of $50,000-$75,000 a year for undergraduate courses abroad to keep our children in choice American and European universities. Yet we advocate the retention of paltry token fees sometimes as low as N100,000 per student per annum for undergraduate studies in Nigerian public universities. These schools are now reserved for the children of the less privileged.

    Only recently has a middle of the road option emerged. There are now a spiraling number of private universities. The rise of private universities in Nigeria is driven solely and exclusively by a profit motive. Nigerian entrepreneurs have seen the billions of dollars Nigerian parents are spending to send their children abroad and concluded that even a fraction of that amount would support a profitable sector. Nigeria now has a total of 79 private universities as against 43 federal and 48 state universities. Average tuition and accommodation costs in Nigerian private universities are between N1m and N1.5m, far much lower than the $50,000 average in American universities.

    There is a disconnect between the current two penny public university and the practical realities of an open market economy and society. The free market means that the labour force being trained by our Soviet style university system will service the needs of a free market where labour and manpower are commodities with price tags. Profit and competition are the key words in this jungle.

    Unfortunately, therefore, our public universities need to charge sensible fees to remain competitive and sustainable. Infrastructure needs to be maintained and expanded. Libraries and laboratories need new current stock of books and equipment. Staff need to be motivated to go out and compare notes with their colleagues in the rest of the world so that they can compete and excel. Admittedly, competitive fees and charges will strain the social fabric where poverty remains a limitation to high educational aspirations. The politics of inequality will stroll into education where it should not. But we need to initiate a series of innovations:

    • Indigent students can be helped. Bursaries, scholarships and grants from local, state and federal governments as we had in the 1970s and 80s would come in handy. For federal institutions, grants on the basis of student enrolment would be a more advisable option.
    • The defunct students loans scheme should not be revived to advance loans tied to bonds of service after graduation. Students that study with loans from government should serve the NYSC longer than others. The differential between their NYSC allowance and their market value as young graduates should be calculated as repayments for their students loans.
    • Universities should be encouraged to offer both real time and online degree programmes. The online option should be at a lower cost to ensure that the benefits of higher education reach the highest number of citizens.
    • Nationwide trade unionism among teachers in all public universities should be prohibited by a National Assembly legislation. The work of university teachers in public universities should be re-categorized as strategic national service on the same level as the armed and security services who cannot engage in trade unionism or collective bargaining.
    • Up to 50% of municipal and junior staff jobs in the public universities should be reserved for students who opt to participate in a work/study programme as janitors, cafeteria servers, part time cooks, gardeners, horticulturists, electricians, plumbers and drivers of campus buses.
    • University teachers salary scales should be partially deregulated. Teachers with more relevant research and whose work attract external grants, endowments and funding should earn more than those who do more routine teaching and research.

    As a former university teacher and ASUU branch chairman, I have had time to reflect on the crisis in our university system. I have come up with an inconvenient conclusion: both ASUU and the government have been wrong all along.

  • Burkina Faso: Nonsense in the Neighbourhood – By Chidi Amuta

    Burkina Faso: Nonsense in the Neighbourhood – By Chidi Amuta

    By Chidi Amuta

    At the height of his revolutionary fervor, Captain Thomas Sankara, embodied the youthful allure of the African coup maker as messiah and hero. Sankara had the additional assets of a fiery Marxist rhetoric and youthful good looks. His dashing ‘can do all things’ charisma contrasted with the dour, calculating mien of his trusted friend and deputy, Blaise Compaore.

    A journalist reportedly once asked Sankara at a public event if he was afraid he could be toppled in a counter coup by his military colleagues. He cast a glance to his right hand side where Compaore was seated and replied: “If it is led by Blaise, I don’t stand a chance…” A few weeks later, Sankara was assassinated on the streets of the capital on his way to visit his mother in a common neighbourhood. He was driving himself in a simple tiny Renault 5. The coup and assassination was led by Blaise Compaore who later transformed into a civilian politician and ruled Burkina Faso for the next 27 years. He was later ousted by a popular uprising and chased into exile in Cote d’Ivoire from where he still influences the politics of Burkina Faso.

    With a capital whose name sounds more like a staccato of frenzied African witch drum beats, the Sahelian nation of Burkina Faso, formerly Upper Volta before being renamed by Sankara, has just hosted yet another military coup. This ended two days of speculation about the security uncertainty in the country. The military had earlier admitted arresting and detaining the President, Roch Kabore. This followed an earlier eruption of sporadic gunfire in the vicinity of the President’s residence. The soldiers had also neutralized the military formations in and around the capital Ouagadougou. The coup followed days of unrest and popular protests in major urban centres around the country.

    These protests had continued frequently in the streets of the capital Ouagadougou and major urban centres following worsening economic and living conditions. In addition, the populace and the political opposition had long voiced open dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of both the economy and the Islamic jihadist insurgency and terrorism in parts of the country. It would be recalled that jihadist terrorists had staged a bloody bomb attack on the cappuccino restaurant at the Splendid Hotel in the heart of Ouagdougou on 15th January, 2016. Again on 4th October, 2019, jihadist terrorists bombed a bus conveying Canadian miners in Madouji, killing over 37 miners. This is the effective backdrop to the latest of West Africa’s resurgence of the culture of military coups.

    The formal announcement on Monday night of a military coup in Burkina Faso has not quite come as a surprise to keen watchers. Both the recent internal political wrangling in the country and similar developments in neighboring countries were enough signals that the democratic government in Burkina Faso was creaking under severe pressure and could cave in any time. The country shared the ailments of its recently fallen neighbor in Mali, Chad and Guinea.

    As part of the build up of political pressure before the coup, there was an ongoing trial of the former president, Blaise Compaore and his associates over their role in the 1987 assassination of Thomas Sankara. This had heightened political disaffection in the country. Some observers believe that pro-Compaore elements in the military did not take kindly to his trial in absentia and may have signed on to the anti Kabore political movement. Opposition politicians in the country had also allegedly rekindled the Sankara trials in order to douse the mounting pressure by former president Compaore’s supporters to bring him back from exile into power. These extant political motivations could only have added to the current atmosphere of unrest over worsening conditions as well as the fierce urgency of the jihadist insurgency ravaging parts of the country.

    On closer look, the Burkina Faso coup is only another episode in what looks more like a viral resurgence of West Africa’s coup culture. As it is, this coup once again places West Africa and the entire Sahel literally under the gun sights of military adventurists. In an earlier clime, coups had swept through Ghana, Nigeria, Benin, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in a tidal wave of infectious instability. No one is certain what the current Sahelian sweep portends for the rest of the sub region.

    Instructively, the putsch in Burkina Faso is coming on the heels of similar recent ones in Mali, Guinea, Chad and even Sudan. In all these countries, the developments that toppled the democratic governments are virtually the same. Popular uprising fuelled by increasingly harsh economic conditions have been exacerbated by partisan squabbles among rival ambitious politicians and factions. In all the countries, these developments have played into the hands of ambitious and politicized military officers waiting in the wings.

    In all the cases, intense civil unrest has reflected worsening economic and general living conditions. This has put intense pressure on political disagreements among parties in democracies that are already made fragile by lack of institutional stability and consolidation. Politicians predictably take advantage of current popular disquiet to unsettle their opponents who are in power.

    In each of these cases also, the military coup makers have tended to be professional descendants of earlier military adventurers. In much of West Africa, a tradition of politicized military officers and establishments has left generations of officers who see the presidential palace and its incipient luxury as a ready and available alternative habitat to the Spartan bareness of life in the barracks. In other words, West Africa has a latent military oligarchy in the barracks with a lingering appetite for power, privilege and authority.

    Countries without entrenched civil democratic traditions and institutions and in which the institutions of national security have been ‘privatized’ to serve successive political regimes lend themselves to frequent upheavals of power. National security becomes regime security and normal political disagreements become veritable threats to national security.

    It is however quite significant and frightening that a constant new feature of these recent coups is the recurrence of Jihadist insurgency as a factor in the political instability in the various countries. In Mali, Guinea, Chad and now Burkina Faso, the toppled government’s handling of the jihadist insurgency has been prominent among the reasons cited by popular protesters and coup authors. Except perhaps in Sudan where the coup was mostly the result of long standing internal political quarrels, the jihadist threat to West African countries has featured as a reason for the military takeover. Jihadist elements have mounted unrelenting military pressure on the governments of all these countries and in some cases infiltrated the armed and security forces where they could not defeat them. In some cases, jihadist affiliation has become a short cut to political relevance as prominent jihadist leaders have formed or joined political parties or aggressive factions.

    Quite consequentially, the jihadist rampage of terror and insurgency throughout the Sahel has caused severe economic hardship. In that case, they have also become a factor in the economic and social pressures that produce and feature n the civil protests in the most affected countries. It has constricted agricultural land space and forced the rural population of farmers and herders to migrate to more arable and fertile spaces southwards. Humanitarian disasters have become endemic with the attendant hunger, displacements and other vulnerabilities. These have been exacerbated by climate change and the southward expansion of the Sahara desert.

    In a sense, therefore, the recent rapid unconstitutional changes of government in West Africa may appear like indirect ‘victories’ for the jihadist forces bent on destabilizing the sub region. It is uncertain if the military juntas that are coming to power in these countries share the sectarian fundamentalist inspiration of the jihadists. It is unclear also if the political elite of most West African states understand the larger strategic meaning of jihadist expansion in the region.

    A further disturbing feature of the recent epidemic of coups in West Africa is a clear indication that in most African countries, democracy is still a fragile force. A good number of African countries tend to limit their understanding of democracy to the formation of multiple parties, the conduct of periodic elections and the freedom to form governments and appropriate state power. Scant attention is paid to the entrenchment of the institutions of democracy such as a security force that is doctrinally subordinate to civilian authority, an independent judiciary led by honest judges, a free press and the guarantee of basic freedoms to citizens.

    Thus, partisan disagreements among politicians tend to spiral into wild protests in streets inhabited by economically vulnerable populations. These ‘people of the streets’ and their economic travails become ready tinder for ambitious political opponents of the incumbent party. Popular unrest over bad governance and worsening conditions graduates into political capital for ambitious opposition politicians and over politicized military officers. The rest is predictable.

    The developments in West Africa ought to concern the United Nations and the international community. The critical point is that democracy as a system of rule based governance is under serious threat in a whole continental sub-region. In a world where populist autocrats have recently come to power to trample on normal democratic rights and norms, this is a dangerous trend. Democracy and global stability are clearly under clear and present threat and danger in West Africa.

    We cannot underestimate the threat which regional upheaval and anarchy pose to world peace and global order. The rise of Islamic jihadism in parts of the Middle East in the period after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States led to the emergence of terrorism and instability in most parts of the Middle East. Wars have since broken out in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen. Arms proliferation, humanitarian disasters and the further spread of violent doctrines and theologies have yielded the spread of illegal weapons to unguarded places of the world. There has followed a mass export of jihadism to the Sahel and other vulnerable zones of the world.

    The possibility of West Africa becoming the breeding ground of a new wave of military regimes in Africa is now imminent. The world can ill afford an over populated lawless Africa ruled by military despots with rule books that they write themselves. With the world’s largest population of youth and an epidemic of poverty, authoritarian rule is the least desirable option for Africa. The spread of jihadist terror in Africa is already enough strategic headache for those concerned about global peace.

    ECOWAS is even more severely tasked by these coups. Reflexive closures of land and air corridors can no longer deter determined autocrats. Rogue regimes have a habit of surviving better in adversity and under sanctions. ECOWAS itself consists of countries that lack the muscle and mechanism to enforce embargoes and sanctions. Determined military despots can only laugh off the reflex diplomatic theatre of bans, border closures, threats, sanctions and routine exclusions. The region has a long established network of cross border black market rackets and semi official channels.

    These illegitimate channels serve the needs of gangster regimes that are intent on clinging to power at all costs. Defiance of regional diplomatic initiatives and sanctions becomes expected routine. The military regimes dig in and entrench themselves. They have mastered the language of the current international mood. They will pledge respect for human rights, commitment to constitutional rule, plans to restore democracy and constitutional order etc. etc. But in order to be able to stem the tide of undemocratic regime changes, ECOWAS will need to acquire teeth. But who will pay for a new set of military and economic strangulation teeth?

    For Nigeria, the recent epidemic of coups in West Africa ought to be a matter of strategic concern. First, they are direct assaults on our extant leadership responsibility as a stabilizing influence in the ECOWAS region. Beyond sending peace envoys to places with no prospects of peace and trying to cajole determined autocrats to cede power to those they just overthrew, Nigeria’s current leadership role in the troubled spots of West Africa has been rather tepid and effete. Our previous military capacity to compel our desired outcomes in this neighbourhood as in Liberia and Sierra Leone has been dulled by insecurity at home and economic distress. More worrisome is the fact that all the factors that West Africa’s nascent coupists have invoked to justify their adventurism are abundant here as well. In particular, the nuisance of jihadist terror and insurgency has become an endemic headache for Nigeria. Beyond being a strategic diplomatic challenge, therefore, the new wave of coups in West Africa should be a wake up call for a country whose internal security challenges have placed soldiers on the streets of all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory.

    Clearly, the coup in Burkina Faso is both unnecessary and unfortunate. A parched land -locked nation of 20.3 million of some of the world’s poorest citizens hardly needs to regress into authoritarianism to settle political differences. Months after the military adventurists have settled into the pomp and privilege of state power, the protesters and opposition politicians will discover that jihadist insecurity, hunger and poverty do not just disappear simply because a new set of uniformed sheriffs stormed into town.

    Ultimately, as in all such disruptions, democracy suffers deadly setbacks and national development takes steps backwards. If this trend takes root in West Africa and spreads further afield again, Africa will once again retreat on all indices of global development. We might as well excuse Africa from the march of human civilization as the rest of the world moves on, indifferent to our self inflicted wounds. Like the rest of West Africa’s recent coup countries, Burkina Faso is not alone. It is ultimately about global peace and stability.

  • Land of a Million Presidents – By Chidi Amuta

    Land of a Million Presidents – By Chidi Amuta

    By Chidi Amuta

    At the height of the hysteria about who would succeed the military administration of General Ibrahim Babangida, the elaborate but controlled transition programme encouraged members of the political elite to openly express their aspiration for the presidency. But the politicians were somewhat wary. After all, successive military administrations had promised and failed to hand over power to anyone but themselves. Moreover, this particular administration had decimated the political class through a deliberate series of bans and exclusions.

    You were either a new breed or old breed politician. You were either part of the problem or ready to queue up behind those who said they were solving the problem. Having survived a series of purges, bans, re-categorizations and white- washing, the politicians who survived Nigeria’s years of political long knives felt confident enough to step forward to desire the plum job. Trust Nigerian political animals, those eternal and incurable optimists. Each one of them felt it would be most expedient to be seen as an anointed choice of the military.

    Babangida, ever the friendly foe with a decorated sword, was the friend of nearly every political actor in the field. Each presidential aspirant felt a hidden obligation to bounce their ambition off the military president. Each felt that declaring their interest to the emperor was a prerequisite to their otherwise legitimate democratic right. So, they took turns to visit Aso Villa to whisper their intentions to the boss. In separate private audiences with the President, I suspect that each ambitious political aspirant received an assurance that he would be the chosen one. Before long, the entire political landscape was swarming with an assortment of self -confident presidential aspirants. Check out the long list of present day presidential aspirants trooping to Minna for ‘consultations’ and each emerging with words of encouragement!

    Each one of the IBB era politicians kept the source of their confidence to their chest. Thus, we had the likes of Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu, Patrick Dele Cole, Babagana Kingibe, Tom Ikimi and Olu Falae stepping forward to declare presidential intentions. Some even mounted elaborate early campaigns. But only two of these – Babagana Kingibe and Tom Ikimi-were lucky to be rewarded with the chairmanship of the two government approved political parties. The rest is history.

    It is another presidential season in a different clime. A different set of politicians, mostly of the All Progressive Congress (APC) clan, are trooping to the Presidential Villa to seek the tacit endorsement of the incumbent on their presidential aspiration. Former Lagos Governor, Bola Tinubu led the pack. He was closely followed by Ebonyi Governor Dave Umahi. Former Abia State Governor, Orji Kalu who has not declared anything has also visited Buhari mostly for a timely photo opportunity. No one knows what the usually taciturn and quiescent Buhari told them.

    From every indication, we are right in the midst of an emerging national circus. As my friend Segun Adeniyi insightfully pointed out in his column in this newspaper earlier in the week, the national circus is gathering traction. The public is fast losing track of the number of those who have declared to be our president in 2023. The declarations are however merely the prep stage of the circus. We will soon enter the travelling stage which is the roadshow itself.

    My late grand father used to tell me that madness is not such a calamity for as long as one can cope with the malingering part of the ailment!

    On a more serious note, however, the recent spate of presidential declarations represent so many things that are good and bad with our polity. It is a good thing for so many citizens to aspire to lead the nation. A democracy should never set a limit to how many citizens aspire to lead or say so with neither fear nor reservations. Freedom is the first condition of democracy; citizens should be free to follow, free to want to lead and free to dissent when those who rule run counter to their best wishes and interests.

    The sheer number of those stepping forward to declare their presidential bids also indicates the magnitude of problems facing the country. There is a sense in which the mushrooming of presidential aspirants is also symptomatic of the variety of perspectives and solutions to the problems assailing the nation. It is only natural for a nation beset with such a cocktail of existential problems to excite such a barrage of alternative leadership options. On a normal day, Nigeria is a land of a million presidents, a laboratory of conflicting perspectives on leadership and solutions to national problems at any point in time.

    Above everything else, the spate of presidential aspirants is an open verdict from a long standing referendum on Mr. Buhari’s bumbling presidency. Over a year to his official exit, the public has since lowered the gavel on Buhari’s divisive and crassly incompetent presidency. Among political pundits, the jury is out as to the political gravity of a Buhari endorsement or lack of it. From the experience of the last seven years, even Mr. Buhari’s most ardent political disciples know that the only candidate Buhari supports to the hilt is Buhari himself. The only seat worth fighting for, defending and possibly dying for is the throne on which he sits in Aso Rock. It is indeed however a strange ‘Village Head’ democracy in which full fledged citizens and leading party members have to inform an incumbent president that they want to take over his job come the next election. What is wrong with following party procedures and guidelines to seek endorsement through the mechanism of internal democracy?

    Predictably, Buhari has been receiving in audience all the leading APC members with presidential intent who have been dropping by his office for photo opportunities to enhance their visibility. My former state governor and friend Orji Kalu has visited Buhari in the office in the wave of these PR stunts. It is indeed a strange variety of village head democracy in which legitimate aspirants to the presidency of the country feel that they have to obtain the televised permission of the incumbent president to vie for what is ordinarily their right as citizens.

    Yet we cannot discount the import of Mr. Buhari’s presence in creating the enabling environment for the full emergence of presidential ambitions and aspirations especially in his party. Specifically, Mr. Buhari still needs to unshackle those in his administration who have political ambition to resign and face their political programmes. In this regard, there are quite a number of consequential presidential material still quarantined in Buhari’s administration.

    Beyond the APC collection of aspirants, however, there are others in the other parties whose presidential ambitions have since become household words. They do not need the permission or seal of presidential approval to forge ahead with their campaigns. The likes of Atiku Abubakar and Kingsley Moghalu have been presidential aspirants and candidates for long enough. They hardly need any new formal declarations. We know them and where they stand on critical national issues. All they need is to secure the ticket of their respective parties and hit the road to market their agenda to Nigerians.

    Those familiar with Nigeria’s viral enterprise culture will have noticed the hand of our entrepreneurial spirit in an emerging presidential declaration industry. The other day, a good friend and former influential senator came visiting after a long spell. His phone kept ringing repeatedly until he courteously put it in silent mode. He told me the calls were mostly from groups from different parts of the country who were pressuring him to declare for president! Each group told him he was among the very best of candidates. To beat each other to the bargain, some of the pressure groups gave him an idea of how much it would cost to make his declaration the most impactful! Some of the support groups even had the costs of the trending declarations in case he wanted to place himself comfortably in the forefront. In the end, my guest gave me an elaborate lecture on the new industry of presidential declarations and the impending market prospects of presidential campaigns.

    The declarations and statements of intent that we have seen so far are instructive. They are indicative of various categories of aspirants and levels of seriousness. There are those who are tried and tested politicians, known state governors, federal appointees, legislative leaders and a few former corporate leaders.

    There are genuine regionally and geo politically representative candidates whose intent and aspiration is informed mostly by the “turn by turn” mentality of Nigerian political leadership: ‘it is the turn of my geo political zone and so why not me?’ These are typically the zoning champions like Ebonyi Governor Dave Umahi and, perhaps, Orji Kalu who has not quite directly declared an aspiration.

    There are also youthful idealists and utopian leadership theorists, barbing salon and beer parlor presidents. These are people who just want to break the national noise barrier by making enough noise to sprout from the anonymity of the Nigerian crowd. There are still others for whom the presidential aspiration is a further rung on the ladder of political leadership. These are people who have a track record of service and vast experience in the management of public expectations in relevant roles. These include the likes of Pius Anyim, Atiku Abubakar and Bola Tinubu for whom the presidential desk would be a natural political progression to something higher in the ladder of political ascent.

    There are other very outstanding aspirants like my friend Prof. Kingsley Moghalu in a class of genuine patriots and experienced technocrats. He is in the unique category of people who combine sound leadership ideas with relevant technocratic and practical experience and whose aspiration is fired by a genuine desire to make a difference in a nation that desperately needs to break the tradition of clueless leadership. Professor Moghalu has authored two full length books on his vision of a new Nigeria and how to deal with different national issues and problems. Such commitment and dedication is indeed rare in the history of Nigerian political leadership quests. An aspirant like this rises above visionary idealism and a narrow bookish conception of the work of president.

    There are also youthful idealists and leadership theorists. Most of these people have no experience in public or organized private affairs. Their entire vision and life experience is in their laptop. Just ask them and they snap open their power point presentations with graphs, holograms, prediction tables etc. Some of them have never even run a corner shop in all their life or opened a kiosk to sell peanuts. In other climes, these are people who should start their political careers from being community volunteers, vying for local government councillorship, state house of assembly seats, federal legislature or some other more modest tutelage pedestal.

    But the Nigerian in us will not buy such a gradualist progression approach in climbing up the political ladder. By our nature, every Nigerian who goes to a church wants to meet the Bishop or General Overseer on first visit. If he is rebuffed, he goes home, starts his own church and anoints himself pastor first and bishop shortly afterwards. When the Nigerian is accosted at a police checkpoint, he does not want to be interrogated by the sergeant or Inspector on duty. He asks menacingly and authoritatively: “who is the most senior officer here?”

    In the parade of presidential declarations and ambitions that have so far been on display, there are a few worrisome trends. In some of the prominent cases, people who the public only recognize as known miscreants and criminal suspects for public asset stealing are among the aspirants. There is of course the technical requirement that no man is a criminal before he is convicted of a crime by a competent court of law. But there is a misalignment between personal moral stature and the rigorous requirements of public morality. A patented criminal with copious court appearances and even outright convictions who either serves their term or manages to engineer an expensive legal reprieve can live freely in society with his family and friends. But for such a person to openly aspire to lead the nation in a credible political process would amount to insensitivity to the dictates of pubic morality. It is even a derogation and devaluation of the moral credential of the entire country. We become more of ‘’any how” and “anything goes” nation in the process. This is why our Senate has degenerated into an oligarchy of the tainted.

    On the contrary, Nigeria is a serious enterprise. Its leadership ought to be an even more demanding role and compelling test of competence and knowledge. Therefore, those who aspire to its presidency must be persons who by experience, stature and seriousness are ‘fit and proper persons’. It is of course the prerogative of the political parties as clearing houses for leadership selection to make determinations about the appropriateness of individual aspirants for elective public office. But the parties can spare the nation the comic burden of reducing the presidential race to a roving circus and parade of clowns. When unserious persons step forward to contest for our highest office, it says so much about our set of values. Political parties cannot be indifferent to the value question even if they choose to be indifferent to ideological commitment. But the parade of triviality in the ongoing presidential declarations indicates an underlying lack of respect for the nation and its highest office. The democratic right to freely aspire to the highest office in the land should not entitle political miscreants and upstarts to reduce the nation to a playground of the cavalier and the pedestrian.

    Despite the large turnout of aspirants that have so far declared their intentions to be our president, the field remains open for more serious aspirants. The Nigerian public is still expecting some of our most illustrious citizens especially those who have distinguished themselves in the service of the nation at home and abroad to step forward and signal their intention to rule us. The challenge of the moment for Nigeria is to use 2023 to come up with a leadership that befits our global estimation and the legitimate expectations of our proud people.

  • Whose oil is it, anyway? – By Chidi Amuta

    Whose oil is it, anyway? – By Chidi Amuta

    By Chidi Amuta

    Former President Olusegun Obasanjo and Chief E.K Clark are unrepentant but useful fossils. Both suffer a common affliction: they like to hear their own voices. In their constant refrains on major national issues, they never tire of tormenting us with ancient interpretations of the country we all know. Both men share a common expired conception of Nigeria. While citizens see a good country rendered unhappy for individual fulfillment by a succession of gang rulers, these men see an amalgamation of clashing regions, tribes, factions and zones. In their worldview, each region is the home of specific resources with which they come to the national arena to negotiate political supremacy with other regions and factions. For them and their acolytes, exclusive regional and sectional resource ownership seems to be a common currency of political exchange.

    Their most recent encounter is on the matter of who really owns Nigeria’s strategic oil and gas resources. Obasanjo angered Clark by repeating the worn out line that the oil and gas resources located in the Niger Delta belong primarily to the federal government as the constitution states. Predictably, an enraged Clark rose in defense of his region, countering the Ota farmer with a more assertive ownership claim on these resources by his Niger Delta kith and kin. Between the constitutional state and the patrimonial heritage state, a line is drawn. Clark needs to enter this battle most energetically; otherwise his residual political relevance will evaporate.

    Not to be left out of this familiar regional scramble for ownership of national wealth and resources, spokesman of the Northern Elders Forum, Mr. Hakeem Baba -Ahmed joined issues with both men. Let us have some ‘Federal Character’! Mr. Baba- Ahmed entered the adolescent contention that all the food eaten by Nigerians is produced in and belongs to the North. In his curious logic, Nigeria needs to show gratitude to the custodians of the nation’s food basket. Furthermore, Baba-Ahmed contends that the whole of Abuja belongs to the North which has magnanimously yielded it to the Federal government as part of its benevolent endowment to the idea of Nigeria. He then laments how most of the Abuja real estate space now belongs to ‘Southerners’.

    In this politics of regional resource compartmentalization and ownership tussles, political leaders have found a convenient berthing foothold for their many combats. In the process, they have deepened our divisions and widened our misconceptions. Politicians have a right to mine fault lines in an effort to advance their interests. But to proceed therefrom to reduce the nation to a collection of extractive colonies is intellectual fraud. It is also an insult to ordinary Nigerians who seek no more than a respectable country they can call home. To this extent, Obasanjo, Clark and Ahmed are political dinosaurs from the ancestral depths of a better forgotten version of Nigeria. Their level of discourse cannot advance democratic debate. Their relapse into an ancient political discourse of regional ownership and supremacist muscle flexing cannot lead us to a free and truly democratic Nigeria. It has nothing to do with the right of Nigerians as individual citizens to produce and distribute goods and service throughout a national common market driven by supply and demand across the nation space.

    These positions demonstrate once again the lingering attachment of Nigeria’s political leaders to a partition template. The nation becomes a collection of extractive enclaves, territories and extractive colonies, fenced off from each other by walls of political protectionism and even hate. We are held together by a political elite who have made it their life business to remind us of the resources each region is bringing to the national sharing table. Political contest among the rival elite becomes first a vicious contest over control of these resources through control of federal power. Justice and fairness in the nation is now defined in terms of which faction is getting the most benefits from its hegemonic control of power and resources. Political discourse and language becomes a clashing rhetoric of “my region is more important than yours”! “See, we have oil and you don’t! We have cattle and you don’t!. We sell spare parts and pharmaceuticals and you don’t! We just found gold in my backyard; where is yours?” etc.

    The international dollar price of whatever lies beneath your soil or grows in your backyard becomes a measure of your region’s political importance in the national order of precedence. Unconsciously, our politics has become a perennial contest over which region or zone hosts or brings the most strategic resources to the national equation.

    This is how oil and gas were alienated from resources for the improvement of people’s lives into objects of vicious political football. Communities in oil bearing areas have been weaponized against an unjust state and its military presence. Whole communities have been razed in these vicious encounters. Thousands of innocent lives have been lost. Livelihoods have been erased. Limited undeclared wars have been fought just as whole armed movements have risen with militias armed with frightening weapons of war. These have been recognized as permanent features of our armed landscape. The category ‘militant’ has emerged as a distinct class of citizens who have earned the right to be heard by their ability to aim and shoot agents of the state and other innocent citizens. “I shoot, therefore, I am” has emerged as the defining dictum of this new dangerous type of Nigerian citizen.

    Elsewhere, the politics of resource nationalism has produced another unfortunate version of the Nigerian citizen. In an attempt to elevate cattle into a strategic national resource with a political meaning, the armed herdsman and his variants of bandit, insurgent and terrorist has shaken Nigeria’s sense of security to its core. Violent trouble making has graduated into an occupation and lucrative business. The gunman (known and unknown) has come into the fore as a fact of daily life, redefining reality as we have come to know it. The elevation of senseless blood letting and violence into creeds of social existence is one of the clearest markers of the ascendancy of the type of resource politics that Mr. Muhammadu Buhari has authored. The daily news as a casualty headcount is the journalistic legacy of this season of anomie. In the process, the already hard to shock Nigerians have become inured to blood letting and a daily industrial scale loss of human lives. The rest of the world gets shocked each time they feel that too many Nigerians have died in one day. An entire school population can be carted off by transactional zealots and sectarian slave dealers in one night only for government secueity to arrive half a day later in ‘hot pursuit’.

    Obasanjo’s position is a rehash of the standard old constitutionalist argument. It simply states that by the various constitutional provisions, all mineral resources that lie under the surface of the earth belong to the federal government. The individual only has rights to property on the surface of the earth. If the state finds oil under your farmland or hut, too bad. You have to move your miserable belongings as well as the gravesites of your ancestors and the shrines that make your life meaningful. Compensation will be paid you!

    The federal government collects all the oil, gas and royalties in addition to those on other minerals under the earth. In turn, it redistributes all such national revenue to the various tiers of government in line with the applicable revenue allocation formula. Implicit in this arrangement are certain standard assumptions that go along with the classic theories of national sovereignty and the social contract between the citizen and the Leviathan. The barrage of obligations and responsibilities are familiar. Government has the responsibility to protect lives, to protect people from the environmental impacts of mineral prospecting and extraction, to provide means of livelihood for those who may be adversely affected by mineral extraction and prospection etc.

    Underlying these basic assumptions is an abstract supposition that government is bound to be just to all citizens in the provision of essential amenities; that it will protect all citizens from the possible environmental and occupational hazards of mineral exploitation and extraction. Add all the other fancy rhetorical guarantees that define the obligations of the nation state to its citizens.

    Over time, these assumptions have turned out utopian and deceptive. People in oil and gas communities have gotten poorer, pushed to the precarious edges of the existential precipice. They live in a supposedly rich country but mostly as spectators of the train of modernization and development in centres far away from the brackish backwaters of nasty resource exploitation. The political power brokers have in the past been embarrassed by the failure of this constitutional absolutism. They have tended to amend the rules. The revenue allocation formula has been tinkered with several times. Oil and gas producing states have been allowed an additional 13% revenue share. Intervention agencies like OMPADEC and NDDC have been quickly established. We have even established a separate Ministry of the Niger Delta to focus attention on the direct needs of the Niger Delta region.

    The net effect of these arrangements and interventions has been to funnel a huge quantum of resources and cash to the region. Regrettably, very little has changed in he lives and circumstances of the people. The mood of restiveness and agitation has persisted, hence the venom in the Obasanjo/Clark exchange. The politics of resource agitation has become even more weaponized and fiery.

    One offshoot of the political jostling for oil and gas resource control is the rise of the community as an active stakeholder. Both politicians and governments in power have of late come to accommodate community leaders as convenient middlemen in engagements with the people. In advancement of this angle, a coterie of community leaders consisting of chiefs, kings, dodgy intellectuals and diverse business men of no particular nomenclature has risen. The umbrella of ‘community leaders’ has been expanded to embrace all those who cannot fit comfortably as partisan political actors, militants or rights activists find shelter as community leaders. It is the collective of communities rather than the states in which they live that are asserting the strongest ownership stake of oil and gas resources. The federal state is therefore compelled by the grassroots origins of the resource control agitation to recognize and deal with community leaders as legitimate stakeholders.

    This situation poses the legal burden of establishing the legal status of communities in the property rights relationship between the federal government and individual owners of the land underneath which oil and gas exploitation takes place. We must quickly concede that the community makes cultural sense mostly in understanding the national identity of indigenous peoples. In many parts of the country, land still belongs to communities without prejudice to the provisions of the Land Use Decree and other relevant laws of the state. Therefore, the community may have a residual cultural right to press its claims on behalf of its members when ancestral land is threatened.

    But in a strict definition of citizenship in a constitutional democracy, the community hardly exists as a legal entity. In the context of the democratic bond between the citizen and the state, the community has tangential relevance. The social contract that binds every Nigerian citizen to the federal Leviathan is the essence of the Nigerian nation state. Neither ethnic group, region, zone nor community has a place in that social contract. Traditional rulers may have a cosmetic constitutional role but they must leave their communities outside the gates of power. Therefore, fairness, equity and justice in the context of the Nigerian nation state can only be defined and measured in terms of how well the state treats each citizen.

    Strictly speaking, communities have no bloc voting rights at election time. The community has no international passport, drivers license, biometric identification or voters card. Only individual citizens meet these requirements. To that extent, therefore, the oil that is under a man’s hut or farmland should belong to him as an individual with the state collecting taxes from both the land owner and the oil and gas prospecting company in proportions that may be stipulated by law and recognized by the constitution. Therefore, the persistence of injustice in the mineral producing areas especially oil and gas in the Niger Delta is the result of the failure of the state to recognize and respect individual property rights as the basis of resource appropriation.

    It is individual citizens whose farmlands are blighted and whose fishing ponds are polluted by oil spillage. It is they who suffer avoidable diseases as a consequence. It is they who end up in abject penury while the community leaders and political elite live in opulence from oil royalty compensatory funds and intervention agency contract scams. A community’s rivers may be poisoned; its farmlands may be rendered unproductive while its marine ecosystem may be wiped out. But it is at the individual level that the pain of loss and the anguish of deprivation are felt most. It is individuals who vote at elections, whose heads are counted at census and who are enumerated for compensation by oil companies. It is they whose children will not go to school or come home as heroes with wealth or positions.

    Ordinarily, then, the reluctance to recognize the individual’s property rights remains the bane of our politics of resource appropriation especially as it concerns oil and gas resources. But there is a way out. The effective partnership ought to be between first, the individuals whose property rights are infringed on by the extractive processes of oil and gas exploitation. Second would be the federal government which provides sovereign protection, guarantees and ambience for everything in the Nigerian space. The third strategic partner would be the oil companies that provides the technology and capital for the realization of the resources. In this relationship, the primary beneficiary ought to be the individual land owner. The oil and gas companies should pay royalties to the property owner while the federal government should in turn levy appropriate taxes on the individual property owners on their mineral incomes. For instance, a federal mineral tax of say 60% on individuals on whose property oil and gas are produced would be nearly fair in ensuring a reasonable degree of fairness and equity to those who bear the brunt of oil and gas exploitation. A net income of 40% of oil and gas royalties that goes directly to individual land owners should ensure some equity. The same formula should apply to other minerals. It would matter less to individual land owners in these areas what the federal, state, local governments and their numerous racket agencies do with their 60% revenue.

    Most importantly, a shift of emphasis to individual rights in designating our national wealth will rid our politics of the blackmail of regionalism. Politicians can at least get off resources that accrue to individual labour or natural endowments. This will shift the focus of our discourse to issues rather than regional entitlements. Politicians should find serious national issues to wage their fights over and get their fangs off the resources that belong to individual Nigerian citizens.

  • The Staying Power of Mrs. Jonathan – By Chidi Amuta

    The Staying Power of Mrs. Jonathan – By Chidi Amuta

    Very few Nigerians remember any quotable utterances by ex-president Goodluck Jonathan. A self confessed introvert, the man was more preoccupied with finding enough confidence to fill a job whose scope clearly overwhelmed him. A man who hardly found shoes to wear till rather late in life found himself struggling to fit into the oversized shoes of Africa’s most powerful presidency. Some think he was merely in office but not in power. A minority think he was in both but was perennially lost as to where exactly he found himself. The consensus is that he had neither an agenda of power nor a mission in office.

    Mr. Jonathan’s and his handlers were content with him saying ordinary things in too many pedestrian words. His speeches read more like apprentice campus seminar papers than lofty presidential pronouncements. Power without rhetoric or memorable elocution is the tragedy of accidental leadership and unplanned ascendancy.

    On the contrary, Mrs. Jonathan has endured in the minds of Nigerians in unforgettable words. Somehow, the ‘patience’ in her first name complemented the ‘good luck’ in her husband’s name and rather fortuitous emergence. She has emerged, seven years after leaving Aso Rock, as a very memorable voice that appeals to the people on the streets and boardrooms out of the seat of power. Her words still resonate in the streets of Nigeria. Her unvarnished and unwashed witticism spices up light conversation among the high and mighty as well as the lowly and common.

    In a strange way, I have heard many ordinary non -political Nigerians express a hunger for the ‘return’ of Patience Jonathan in some format but not necessarily as First Lady of any enclave known to geography. Not even the delectable glamour of a Mrs. Buhari has lessened this nostalgia and lingering appeal of Patience Jonathan, a First Lady who has retained the uncanny and uncommon ability to make us all laugh at ourselves as a society. A return to Goodluck Jonathan beyond the ritual of professional peace missionary or envoy of the incumbent president does not look like an object of much interest. It is a dream path littered with fields of mines and shrapnel.

    In her Aso Rock days, Mrs. Jonathan was stubbornly natural in her tenacious clutching to very simple convictions. She left her audience of more polished men and women to worry about the niceties of grammar and syntax. She blasted her grammar as natural cannons and cobbled her syntax with the natural ease of an Aba mobile tailor: little measurement, ready made to fit all sizes and shapes and fit for all occasions. The result was a tapestry of expression with an uneasy seduction that was hard to ignore but could fit either beast or beauty. The remarkable point in her natural spontaneity was that she was confident in her natural convictions. This is an innocent Ijaw woman “on whose nature, nurture cannot stick”.

    Because she came across in her authentic natural hew, she has managed to remain more memorable than most of her predecessors. No one remembers Flora Azikiwefor anything she said except for her beauty, ladylike carriage and fashion flourish. Few recall Lady AguiyiIronsi as her tenure was too short lived. Similarly, hardly any one can recall anything that Maryam Abacha, Stella Obasanjo or Turai Yar’dua said while their spouses held sway. The only other memorable First Lady we have had was perhaps Maryam Babangida, not for anything memorable she said but for the topicality of her pet Better Life for Rural Women Programme because it touched the lives and realities of a forgotten segment of our society. Her natural beauty earned her the silent admiration of the menfolk as well her fellow middle class women.

    Otherwise, within the over decorated pageant of Nigeria’s First Ladies, Mrs. Jonathan occupies a pride of place and has become the most memorable occupant of that office on account of her linguistic freshness and unintended comic ingenuity. She was not exactly a ‘lady’ in the sense of the refinement and elegance that sophisticated high education and classy social exposure would confer. Let us not forget that she too was a graduate of one of our universities. Some media have even conferred a “Ph.D” on this naturally gifted and unusual Nigerian woman. Wole Soyinka was rather unfair to her when he insisted that one needs to be a ‘lady’ before you expect the accolades of a First Lady! Not even the professor’s elastic poetic license can excuse such uncharitable treatment of a natural African woman.

    In the last seven years or more, comic skits and sundry comedy strips in Nigeria’s prolific social media scene have been profusely garnished with Mrs. Jonathan’s memorable interjections. Her authoritative matronly voice, her scant attention to the niceties of grammar, syntax or lexicon have produced a language and an idiom that belong neither to the street nor the high station of stately elegance. Sometimes, it is a fluid amalgam of pidgin and tolerable English. At other times, it is a series of direct transliterations from some Nigerian native tongue into a tolerably strenuous dialect of English.

    Mrs. Jonathan’s interjections in comedy skits serve as irresistible adornments. Now and again, bits and pieces from her many well meaning but simplistic interjections are inserted as moral rectifiers. She is available to hectorthe numerous foibles and serial foolishness of a half literate society of street urchins, roadside pundits. All manner of bus stop and street market pundits of diverse theologies fall back on her moralistic entreaties in thatunmistakable matronly voice. Comedy skit makers quickly invoke and incorporate the kindred interjections of comedians like the late Sam Loco Efe, ChinweteluAgu, ‘Akin and Paw Paw’ to beef up the comic spice with the authoritarian finality of a Patience Jonathan in amazement: “Chai:… Na so una be?”

    In societies with a fairer sense of intellectual propriety and property rights, Mrs. Jonathan should by now be laughing to the bank with bulging royalty accounts. More accomplished comedy script writers should have officially invited her to act major roles. But instead, all manner of comic scavengers and intellectual vultures have been busy cannibalizing her originality. Her iconic statements, utterances and unforgettable interjections are being voraciously plagiarized, misshapen or mischievously trivialized for commercial purposes. But those who have made fortunes from her originality and altruistic sense of plain unintended humour are yet to render their accounts to this authentic market place genius. I think the time has come for Mr. Lai Mohammed to descend on these comic skit plagiarists to pay up or justifiably proceed to jail on the orders of Mr. AbubakarMalami. The grounds are simple: intellectual property infringements and sundry violations. Intellectual propertythieves will definitely look better in prison uniform than in their current robes of affluence funded with the proceeds of victims like Mrs. Jonathan. I think Mr. Lai Mohammed and Attorney General Malami will fair much better hounding intellectual property scavengers and comedy skit thieves than innocent journalists and social media influencers and youth right advocates whom Mr. Buhari’s media Hisbah are so fond of terrorizing. Jokes apart, the Nigerian social media industry, especially the skit comedians, owe Mrs. Jonathan troves of cash in arrears for their prolific abuses and massive thievery of her originality.

    We need to understand the profitability of comedy in our society today. In fact, a casual stroll in places like Lekkior even Banana Island in Lagos will compel a new enlightenment on the matter. I hear some of the most breathtaking and eye popping architectural marvels in these places belong to comedians. The profitability of comedy in today’s Nigeria remains a controversial matter. Some say that our society today is like English Restoration society (from 1660-1700), a patently unserious era. It is an era in which clowns became heroes and gossip was the major preoccupation of the entire society. Trivia replaced substance in the conduct of state. The media was awash with gossip. The gossip tabloid became the most popular staple of an indolent and cavalier society. People were better entertained by caricaturing the foibles of the high and mighty. It was the clandestine prostitution, the endless concupiscence, the casual swapping of wives and mistresses and the petty gossips that went with them which fed common conversation in pubs and clubs. Society’s hunger for entertainment was fed on this constant diet of scandals and small talk. The comedians had a field day. Restoration comedy emerged as a distinct genre of English literature.

    In Nigeria, a case is being made for comedy from another angle. Some insist that the battles of daily living are too gruesome that something needs to lighten our mood. A constant dose of comic relief is what is keeping many Nigerians alive. The horror and terror in our daily lives have created a market and a social necessity for comedy. People prefer to watch comedy or play comic skits on their phones than listen to yet another presidential drawl or gubernatorial gibberish.

    It is only fair that those who have made it their business to make us laugh in these bad times should be richly rewarded. It is demand, supply and profit, the standard fare of a free racket (market?) economy. A good comic skit can make you forget that you are broke until the landlord comes calling for arrears of rent or the school calls you to say that junior’s school fees are still in arrears!

    So, let us give unto our comedians their due. And in that fold, Mrs. Jonathan has by default become a voice of endless social relief. She is variously quoted, often mangled and distorted but hard to ignore. Her spontaneous outbursts of simplistic innocence touch the depths of humour of ordinary folk in the markets, bus stations and vegetable markets. Her expressions of concern for the excesses of politicians as well as concern for the welfare of her fellow womenfolk. Yet no one can ignore the timeless hilarity of her statements.

    The strength of Mrs. Jonathan’s verbal legacy lies in the fact that she intended her hilarious outbursts as serious commentaries on contemporary matters. But to ordinary folk, they came across as the unschooled verbal assaults of a common woman in an uncommonly high place of power. In a sense, ordinary women came to see Patience Jonathan as their ambassador in Aso Rock. She spoke to them and for them in a language that was authentically theirs. But to the elite, she was a demeaning departure from the common run of schooled elegance and cultural sophistication. Somehow, her utterances acquired a gravity of humour that lightened the weight of social and political disquiet unleashed by her husband’s rather rudderless prefecture.

    With the benefit of hindsight and as a matter of important public observation, Mrs. Jonathan’s abiding legacy is in drawing our attention to the deficit of communication in our official language. Our leaders speak to us like textbooks. They present the facts that concern us in a format that communicates only to an esoteric cult of the highly educated. They speak above our heads about the things that concern us. They do not speak to us directly; a sad distinction between our politicians and those of the older democracies of the United States and the United Kingdom. In Mrs. Jonathan, therefore, we find a rough hewn mediator of this divide between government and people, an attempt to remedy the broken bridge of political communication and social language.

    She has therefore given to the Nigerian public a rhetoric that reconnects the high and the low, the official and the informal, the street and the boardroom. It is of course our pompous pretension to high education and cultural sophistication that has made us laugh off the likes of Mrs. Jonathan as cranks and comic prodigals. In reality, she is a realist with a pragmatic sense of social and political language.

    Somehow, Mrs. Jonathan has acquired a certain permanent contemporary relevance. She can become ourcollective voice in the grueling and often gruesome realities of our present days. When we sense that too many people are being killed by bandits in Zamfara and Kaduna, we have reason to take helpless solace in Mrs. Jonathan’s spontaneous outburst of our helplessness: “Chai! Chai!! Chai!!! If Mr. Lai Mohammed becomestoo loquacious in his often groundless defenses of Mr. Buhari’s bad job approval rating, we can summon Mrs. Jonathan to intervene and caution the Minister: “Will you keep quiet?!”

    When our present reality of insecurity becomes too sordid and bloody for the ordinary person to understand how Nigeria became so lawless and bloody, we have a right to invoke Mrs. Jonathan to openly exclaim our helplessness in unison: “Chai! Chai!!”

    When the girls of Chibok high school were abducted, Boko Haram was in its infancy. The blood letting by the terrorists and insurgents was still minimal. Yet Mrs. Jonathan was able to see a future of more blood letting to exclaim in protest to the terrorists and their influencers: “The blood you are ‘sharing’ (shedding!) in Borno …will come to touch all of us o!”. At that time, it was strange to Mrs. Jonathan that the local government officials and other government officials from Borno state should be so indifferent as to turn out in such low numbers during their visit to the Villa to report the Chibok incident to her. In outrage and desperate unbelief, Mrs. Jonathan asked the Borno officials in attendance: “Na only you follow come?”

    The comic side to her outbursts was often the product of her audience’s imagination. She took herself quite seriously. For one thing, she saw her audiences with women’s groups as her contribution to her husband’s political work. Thus, when it was time for Mr. Jonathan to seek re-election in 2015, Mrs. Jonathan had the candorand equanimity to tacitly admit that the president had not done too well in his first term. She came up with the ingenious analogy that when a child does not do too well in an examination, he should at least get a chance to repeat the class and re-sit the examination! The occasion was, I believe, an address to an assembly of widows somewhere in Akwa Ibom State. By a morbid irony, she opened her address with the rather ironic and fortuitous greeting: “My fellow widows!” I understand that when the video was played back to Mr. Jonathan in Aso Rock, the man collapsed in self deprecating laughter. But the unfortunate slip was a figurative forecast of the political ‘death’ of the Jonathan presidency! Jonathan re-sat the political contest and lost to Mr. Buhari. Patience Jonathan became a ‘widow’ of political power.

    By a curious irony, Mrs. Jonathan is still reigning in our hearts, on our television screens but mostly in a series of comic skits in the social media platforms on every phone in every hand. To those who owe her royalties for massively stealing her intellectual property, we can only enter a plea to heaven on her behalf in her own words and voice: “There is God ooo!…God ooo!..,God ooo…!

  • Unhappy New Year – By Chidi Amuta

    Unhappy New Year – By Chidi Amuta

    By Chidi Amuta

    ‘Happy New Year!’ is a reflexive outburst of thoughtless and unconditional optimism. At the back of it all lies humanity’s compulsive superstitious wish that the things that determine good tidings will obey our good wishes. Just wish it and it could happen. The expectation is that the unseen hands of divine providence will make our wishes come true. We have a way of assuring ourselves that in the torrent of exchanges of good wishes among us as friends and neighbours a flood of good fortune will sweep through the world and make everything new and happy in the New Year. In the euphoria of heralding the New Year, there is an implicit condemnation of the Old Year. The ingratitude is palpable especially for miscreants and outright criminals whose life defining heist was executed in the Old Year.

    The superstition can be even worse. There is a preposterous assumption that things will turn out well simply because everybody wishes everybody well. But it never does. It is more a social convention, a manner of speaking and a ritual of daily living. Behind it all is a naïve belief and an infantile expectation that a flip of the calendar from one day to the next will suddenly chase away the bandits of Zamfara and Kaduna or make politicians in Abuja slightly more honest and sensible. Not quite likely and not so quickly.

    In all religions and cultures, a certain superstitious wish for good things in the New Year unites humanity. Old things have passed away! Everything is made new! The mascot of the New Year is the energetic young warrior prince on a white horse. Some throw away old utensils, thrash old apparels or dump their refuse at the road junction at midnight on the last day of the old year. Leftover food is not left out. Some pour ashes on their own heads in an act of expiation for sins committed in the old year. But alas, that wish for a better New Year does not stop your dog from dying tomorrow or your enemy from hitting it rich in spite of his treachery and wickedness. But it is in our nature that we speak good tidings to each other at the turn of the New Year, expecting the best and fearing the worst. At the back of our minds, we know and live with the frightful foreboding that ugly things will happen to good people in the New Year in spite of our best wishes.

    But more often than not, the things that determine what we wish for are far beyond our individual control. We wish each other happiness. But our happiness is often more a function of whether the bank balance is showing black or red. The decisions that determine those bank balances are made not by the gods or the God we pray to on Fridays or Sundays but by a special breed of creatures called politicians. They decide who will become poor or rich, who will become broke in the year or take a vacation to the Virgin Islands. Politicians decide whose wife will run away because of a sudden onset of an infection of adversity. In a way, the politicians in Abuja hold the power to decide whether you as the head of your household will retain your position in dignity or wear your title and badge of honour in blind obedience to tradition and a manner of speaking.

    In the New Year, Nigerians may be shocked how early in the new year their superstitious wishes for prosperity and happiness will turn into ashes or simply evaporate into thin air. In this place, even the best intentions of divine beneficence are soon thwarted by the machinations of bad or incompetent people. Early in the New Year, president Buhari is likely to sign into law a senseless volume of silly figures and statistics called a budget. The volume, compiled by lazy bureaucrats, padded up by greedy legislators and delivered to a bemused nation by semi literate politicians is all the empowerment the executive branch needs to proceed on a spending binge. That is the national budget which sensible citizens hardly spare a moment to read. The other 36 state governors and the Minister of the FCT follow suit in this futile annual ritual of public fraud. The public does not bother to take a look at the figures since they know the politicians will follow neither their own words or implement the content of the silly documents. The budget process in Nigeria is part of an elaborate ritual of collective deceit and mass hypnosis that goes in the name of governance in these parts.

    Nonetheless, the politicians in Abuja are waiting to herald the New Year by resuming their patriotic services to the nation. They are waiting to endorse a long conceived presidential decision to remove the ‘subsidy’ on petrol. The myth is that the pump prices of petroleum products are subsidized by government because the cost at which these products are imported are too high for the ordinary consumer to pay at the pump. Government subsidizes the landed cost instead of fixing the refineries that would have made the products cheaper and more affordable in the first place. But every year for over thirty years now, government pays to fix or turn around the refineries which never refine even a gallon of petrol year on year. The ways of government are mysterious!

    The importers of petroleum products are licensed agents of the same politicians and bureaucrats. So, the subsidy payments calculated by government, the profit on the importation of refined products and the cost of the dubious refinery maintenance rituals all go to the same commission agents of government. Now government wants the people to pay directly for the fraud because the cost has become scandalous. Government itself is getting broke under the weight of its own profligacy and relentless borrowing binge.

    The first reversal of our New Year wishes is that the gas station will soon cease to be a centre of economic and political power in Nigeria. Once the new petrol prices come into effect, only very few will find the courage to go near there. In return, urban Nigerians will rediscover the power and limitations of their legs since bus fares will no longer be for the poor! Others who still dare to take public transport will have to decide whether the cost of going to work is worth the starvation wage they earn. Some may no longer find a place of work to go to as every other honest Nigerian will probably be out of work when petrol prices hit the sky soon.

    Those who dare question this ‘patriotic’ and ‘courageous’ decision through protests are enemies of the nation. They may have to return home in police Black Maria or worse with broken heads and fractured ribs. Labour leaders, youth enthusiasts and student activists who dare speak out or lead protests against the new prices of gasoline may be prosecuted for unlawful assembly and criminal incitement of mobs. Social media platforms that disseminate messages about fuel price protests may get the Twitter treatment!

    While the impending petrol price clampdown lasts, the long awaited upward adjustment in electricity tariffs will roll into place. After all, the luxury of electricity on demand is not for all Tom, Dick and Harry. International energy prices demand that Nigerians pay the equivalent of what other civilized countries are paying for a unit of electricity. A delegation of electricity distributors and power company executives will likely visit the state house to press home the need for appropriate pricing of power and its products. No nation develops by handing out free electricity 24/7 to citizens who in any case will use the power to commit internet fraud or watch pornography!

    Happy New Year and welcome to the year of many new taxes. This is the year of the tax man as king. There is already a foretaste. The cooking gas tax is already here! Common folk are paying through their noses for cooking gas. The international prices of energy and gas have gone up and Nigerian importers of cooking gas (LPG) are importing at the same international prices in addition to paying duties to government. Government needs the money badly to pay $200 million for the importation of mosquito nets so that more people do not die of malaria. Since people can no longer afford cooking gas, they are reverting to fire wood. Soon, a new rural-urban trade in firewood is likely to blossom. Forget all the international protocols on climate change and environmental protection.

    Ordinarily, happy New Year should have meant some relief from the existing gamut of explicit taxes on Nigerians. The implicit taxes are assumed. We provide our own security at home, in offices and even when we venture out of town to visit the places of our ancestry. Private fees for private security guards, rented police escorts, rented military escorts and private military companies are things that Nigerians pay for even though they have already been taxed by government for the same services. Add all that to your private water supply, generators and first aid and primary healthcare.

    At New Year, we wish each other safety and protection. In a place where every urchin positioned at every hundred meters on the highway is wielding an AK 47 ready to do you harm or worse, the wish that our protection and security are in the hands of the divine is a bit unfair to God. God oversees the safety of all in a rather invisible unscientific way but government makes us pay it to keep us safe. It arms and clothes the police, those rich and fat army generals and all the other officially armed guards to keep us safe. No one knows who arms the bandits, ‘unknown gunmen’, the rogue policemen, insurgents, terrorists and separatist thugs to vitiate the work of God and render divine protection of the people a bit more problematic.

    There is an even more curious and unkind aspect to our ritual of New Year greetings and wishes. We the elite mock the less privileged by wishing each other ‘prosperity’ in the New Year. I am part of this conspiracy of the privileged. To wish a man who is already a multi billionaire in every currency ‘prosperity’ is an atrocious infamy and the height of capitalist insensitivity. It is the height of bourgeois class arrogance and a travesty of natural justice to insist that the affluent and super rich deserve even more ‘prosperity’ in a place like this. Not even the slightest modicum of natural justice or decent sense of proportion can justify this infamy and yet we keep flaunting it year after year. So far, I have never seen any of my rich friends throw back the wish at me by insisting that I should wish myself what I keep wishing them rather unfairly year after year. I am srill waiting for any of my rich friends to send me a wish that they pray for me to join their ranks in this New Year!

    A bleak economic outlook should not ordinarily be the entitlement of a willing and hard working citizenry. It can be relieved by the promise of democratic renewal as elections approach. A free people can endure adversity in the hope that the acts of a few good men and women to be placed in political power can reverse adversity through better governance and wiser leadership. An obedient and law abiding people deserve an expectation of good things each New Year. A wish for a happy New Year is therefore not too much to expect in a democracy. The essence of democratic accountability is the expectation that elected leaders will be more sensitive to the yearnings of the people and bring them some smiles each New Year. In fairness, Nigerians have placed their confidence in democracy to bring about the good things that they wish each other every New Year.

    These days, the popularity of democracy can be measured by the percentage of Nigerians who are waiting for the next election to bring about some positive changes in their lives. Yet somehow and repeatedly, our lives never get batter. More and more of our children cannot find work for their able hands. Our urban alleys get more dangerous while our highways have become the abode of robbers, kidnappers and an assortment of casual criminals. Those who dream are afraid to wake up because the reality of waking experience is more nightmarish than our worst nightmares. Those who have been around for long enough testify that our lives have descended into greater bitterness and brutishness as the New Years have rolled in. The older generation find happiness only in nostalgic reminiscences of times past while the present frightens even the most courageous with its bloody fearsomeness.

    Democracy does have inbuilt reassurances of some sweetness. A free society, free and fair elections, transparent political processes and systems and accountable leaders can hold a hope that the New Year will be a better place for all. But as 2022 gathered steam to roll in, Nigeria’s democracy had one hopeful expectation. A bill to amend our electoral system and allow for open direct primaries was gathering dust on the president’s desk. The consensus was that the president would break the backbone of a fledgling political oligarchy and autocracy by signing the bill into law. Open direct primaries would level the playing field by giving party members universal equal say in who gets put forward for elective office. This would end the cultic control of leadership selection by party oligarchs who thwart the will of the people by unilaterally handpicking party candidates. But just on the eve of New Year, the president, consistent with his conservative creed and instinctive anti democratic inclinations, withheld accent to the law. The only door open for a happy New Year seems to have been shut by a man who is easily the greatest beneficiary of Nigerian democracy, magnanimity and optimism.

    In the young New Year, there is abundant ground for more pessimism in Nigeria than ever before. A clear and present economic doom looms in the horizon. And now, a virtual political autocracy presided over by party oligarchs has been slammed into place by presidential fiat. Those who wished each other Happy New Year a few days ago may be at a loss. As sual, all that may be left of our New Year wishes is the hope that God and Allah will intervene to bring us some sweetness after all.