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Tag: Chidi Amuta

Chidi Amuta

  • Museveni then and Now – By Chidi Amuta

    Museveni then and Now – By Chidi Amuta

    Within the diverse pantheon of African rulership, something curious is emerging.  In many ways, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda is fast emerging as a model of the transformation of democracy into authoritarianism in Africa. While Museveni has retained his nationalist streak in the fight against the global LGBTQ epidemic as well as his isolated battles against Western multinational exploitation and blackmail, his practice of democracy and adherence to the rule of law would disappoint pundits of African democratic enlightenment.

    He has repressed basic freedoms, violated the rights of his political opponents, bludgeoned opposition political figures and jailed those who disagree with him. He has enthroned what is easily a personality cult of leadership that is easily a combination of draconian military dictatorship and crass authoritarianism. That is not strange in a continent that has produced the likes of Nguema, the Bongos and Paul Biya.

    In addition, Museveni  now displays some of the worst excesses of Africa’s famed authoritarianism, dictatorial indulgence and the dizzy materialism of its leadership. For instance, the president is reported to travel around with an interminable motorcade that includes a luxury airconditioned toilet.  Worse for Uganda’s democracy are the recent stories of  Museveni’s manouvres towards self succession. Specifically, he has appointed his son as Chief of the army, a move which many observers of Uganda see as a pointer to his succession plan.

    For me,  the unfolding Museveni  authoritarianism is a classic instance of the transformation of African leaders from revolutionary nationalists  to authoritarian emperors. I once met and spoke with the early Museveni. He had emerged from a bush war as a liberator and valiant popular soldier that was heralded into Kampala as a liberators. He came to mend a broken nation from the locust ears of Idi Amin and Milton Obote.

    The Museveni that I sat and conversed with in the early 1990s  was a committed socialist. He was an African nationalist. He was a social democratic politician  with a strong social science background. His primary constituency was the people most of whom fired his liberation movement in the countryside. We exchanged ideas freely on the thoughts of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels,  Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney and Amilcar Cabral among others.

    As the Chairman of the Editorial Board of the new Daily Times under Yemi Ogunbiyi, I initiated and conducted a one on one interview with Yoweri Museveni in his early days after the overthrow of Obote with the backdrop of the Idi Amin carnage. What follows is both a travelogue and a reminiscence of the Museveni before now. Is it the same Museveni or are there two Musevenis?

    **********

    In 1991, I scheduled a trip was to Kampala to interview Yoweri Museveni. I travelled alone through Addis Ababa and Nairobi. In those days, inter African flight connections were a nightmare of stops and delayed connections. I arrived Kampala and found my long standing friend, Dr. Manfred Nwogwugwu,  a demographer who was based in Kampala as head of the United Nations Population Commission. We had been together at Ife where he and his lovely wife, Ngozi, hosted me for the weeks it took me to find my own accommodation as an apprentice academic at Ife.  He took me on a tourist trip around Kampala. The city was broken and bore fresh bullet holes and bomb craters, the marks of war. From Biafra, I knew this ugly face well enough. Kampala had just been liberated by Museveni’s forces after ousting Milton Obote and remnants of Idi Amin.

    I knew as a background that Mr. Museveni had been helped in his guerilla campaign by both M.K.O Abiola and General Ibrahim Babangida, then president of Nigeria. He therefore had a very favourable disposition towards Nigeria. He was also quite influential with African leaders from whom Nigeria was seeking support as General Obasanjo was lobbying to become United Nations Secretary General when it was deemed to be the turn of Africa. As a matter of fact, I was joined at the Museveni interview by Obasanjo’s media point man, Mr. Ad Obe Obe, who had come to interview Museveni as part of the Obasanjo campaign.

    Museveni’s Press Secretary, a pleasant but tough woman called Hope Kakwenzire, kept in touch while I waited in Kampala for my appointment. She was sure the interview would hold but wanted to secure a free slot on the President’s choked schedule. She promised to call me at short notice to head for the venue.

    When she eventually called, it turned out that the interview venue had just been switched from the Kampala State House to a government guest house in Entebbe, close to the airport and by the banks of Lake Victoria. Entebbe brought back memories of the famous Mossad raid to free hostages of a Palestinian hijack of an Israaeli plane. At the appointed time, I was picked up from my friend’s residence. As we headed for Entebbe, memories of the dramatic Israeli commando rescue of airline hostages at Entebbe during the Amin days kept flashing through my mind. When I arrived Entebbe airport on my way in, I was shown the warehouse where the hostages were kept ahead of their dramatic rescue. The rescue had made world headlines in those days. It reinforced Israel’s military prowess and the intelligence dexterity and detailed planning  of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) but the operational dexterity and intelligence excellence of Mossad in particular.

    We arrived a nondescript white bungalow tucked amidst trees and vegetation. It was a colonial type sprawling white bungalow.  The entrance gate was a long drive from the building itself. When your car is cleared through the first gate, you drive along a bushy drive way towards the building. The first gate has normal military sentry who already know you are expected. As you drive along the bushy driveway, some surprise awaits you. Suddenly some small figures in full combat gear dart onto the drive way and wave your vehicle to a sudden stop at gun point. They are too young and too small to be regular  soldiers. But their moves are rather professional and smart. They are ‘child soldiers’ or rather ‘baby soldiers’ who had fought alongside Museveni’s liberation forces in the bush war that led to the freedom of Uganda. No emotions, No niceties. They screen the vehicle scrupulously for explosives. These small men  have apparently been trained to trust no one. They ignore the escort and Press Secretary both of whom are familiar faces. They insist I answer their questions for myself. I explain I have an interview appointment with the President. They briefly return to their tent at the wayside and briefly confer by radio communication.

    They wave us through to the building.  I am taken through a rather unassuming hallway and a colonial looking living room and dining areas that opens into a simple sit out at the back of the building. The sit out at the back of the building opens into a vast courtyard with well manicured green gardens. The extreme end of the green is Lake Victoria. At its banks, there are tents with simple garden chairs. The serenity of the location is striking. Even more chilling is the eerie silence of the location except for the flapping of the wings of flamingos and pelicans playing by the lakeside. I quickly framed it in my mind: “Conversations by Lake Victoria!”

    Seated alone in one of the tents is President Yoweri Museveni, the new strongman of Uganda. His simplicity beleis hthe mystique of courage and valour that now define his reputation. He was a leading figure in Africa’s then latest  mode of political ascension: the strong man who wages a guerilla movement in the countryside and marches from the forest into the city center of the capital after toppling an unpopular sitting dictator and his government with its demoralized army . After him, Joseph Kabilla of the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) and Charles Taylor of Liberia followed the same pathway of political ascension but with differing outcomes.

    The man in the tent was dressed in a simple black suit. He welcomed me very casually and warmly. “Nigeria is a long way from here, I imagine!”, he said jovially as he ushered me to take a seat. As we settled down to exchange views, it turned out that our exchange would be more than an interview. It was more of a radical social science conversation.

    We compared notes on the class struggle in Africa, the burden of the political elite far removed from the masses, the alienation of the rural masses, the working class in Africa’s imperialist inspired industrialization. Museveni was very knowledgeable and sharp. His intellectual exposure was impeccable. He knew a lot about  Nigeria, about our cities and the structure and general disposition of our elite. He had very kind words about M.K.O Abiola and his commitment to African unity and liberation which he was supporting with his vast resources. In particular, he supported Abiola’s ongoing campaign for reparations from the West to Africa for the decades of pillage during the slave trade and the subsequent colonial expropriation and haemorrhage of resources.

    I still managed to pierce through his armour of social science and dialectical materialist analysis to ask him a few worrying questions about Uganda and Africa’s political future. He was generally optimistic about the turnaround of Uganda after the devastation of war and the rampaging carnage of dictators.

    He added that he was facing the tasks of reconciliation among Ugandans after decades of division and distrust just like Nigeria did after our own civil war. He invited me to return to Kampala a few months hence to witness what the will of a determined people can do towards post war reconstruction. He told me he was out to fix not only the broken landscape of the city but more importantly the destroyed lives of many poor Ugandans. When I mentioned what I had seen of the devastation of AIDS in the countryside, he nearly shed tears but sternly reassured me that he would contain the scourge of the epidemic by all means.

    I left Museveni on a note of optimism on the prospects of Africa’s comeback after the days of the Mobutus, Amins, Obotes and Bokasas. Given my own left leaning ideas, I found Museveni a kindred spirit and an unusually enlightened and progressive African statesman. He questioned everything: African traditions, beliefs, the assumptions of African history, the political legacy of the colonialists and the neo colonial state. He discussed pathways to Africa’s future economic development  and the urgent need to question and possibly jettison old development models being peddled by the West through the World Bank and the IMF.

    That was Museveni back in 1990-91.

  • Beyond the Delta bloodbath – By Chidi Amuta

    Beyond the Delta bloodbath – By Chidi Amuta

    Nigeria’s endemic insecurity took a different turn last week. Sixteen active duty soldiers were ambushed and killed by presumed youth militants in the Okuama area of Delta State. Not only were the soldiers killed, their remains were reportedly treated with barbaric disrespect and indignity. The most significant symbolism of the bloodbath is not that soldiers died. Soldiers signed up if necessary to die fighting in defence of the nation. In this instance, the soldiers did not die in any combat situation. Thes deceased were men of war who had gone in search of inter communal peace in their theatre of operation. They were slaughtered instead by  a faction of the very people among whom they had gone to make peace. 

    The feversih hunt for the real perpetrators and effective background to what happened in Okuama has since commenced. The free use of illicit weapons as well as military gear by rival youth militia is self evident.  The flamboyant presence of state enabled warlords asnon state wielders of illegal arms is also obvious. A long standing proliferation of military grade weapons in the entire area has been taken for granted for far too long.  From the heydays of the Niger Delta militancy, all manner of criminality has become endemic. The Nigerian state itself cannot totally be exonerated from culpability in the militarization of consciousness in parts of riverine Delta. 

    When government recognizes certain warlords to the extent of ceding aspects of national security to them, the background for autorised criminality has been laid. It is common knowledge that the federal government has in recent times paid billions of Naira to companies owned by militant warlords to perform functions ordinarily reserved for the state or its agencies. But the precise immediate cause of this unwarranted bloodbath of the soldiers is what now constitutes a clear and present national security threat. 

    Understandable outrage and palpable fear has swept across the nation. There is outrage at the  barbarity of what has happened. There is a clear sense of collective humiliation that our soldiers should be humiliated this way. But there is also fear as to what might result. Our history of the relationship between the military and the civilian populace is not too edifying. When civilians and soldiers clash, mayhem usually ensues. More people get killed than when the trouble started. Houses get burnt. Property gets destroyed. In all such aftermath, the victims are usually innocent others who happen to be in the vicinity of the affected neighbourhood. 

    Beyond predictable nationwide condemnations of the killing of the soldiers, something of a national consensus seems to have quickly emerged. It is on how not to treat our men and women under arms who are in harm’s way for the sake of the security of the rest of us all. The men and women who wear the nation’s uniforms in the pursuit of peace and security of the nation deserve to be treated with dignity. The choice to dedicate one’s life in the pursuit of the peace and security of the nation is the highest dedication to nation and fellow citizens. 

    Above everything else, the armed forces remain the highest expression of our national sovereignty. To assault men and women under arms and in uniform is a direct assault on national sovereignty. To assault and even kill personnel of the armed forces except in war is an outrageous affront on the supreme authority of the state. Those who bear illicit arms and use them to challenge the state ought to be fully aware of the consequences. 

    In encounters between armed forces personnel and even the most irate civilian factions, there is a clear Red line. Civilians in possession of unauthorized arms ought to know that attacking and killing active duty soldiers is crossing that Red line. Therefore, those who expected the worst outcome in retaliatory actions over the Delta incident may not have been too far off the mark. 

    Fear of frightening reprisals in all such situations is not just peculiarly Nigerian. It is inherent in the training and professional instincts of every military. For the military mindset, humanity resolves into two categories of people: Enemy or Friend. A Friend is to be protected. An Enemy is to be vanquished. Therefore, when a civilian populace that is entitled to the protection of soldiers crosses the Red lie to relate to soldiers as enemies, it sets itself up to be treated as an enemy force. The risk that we run in the Delta bloodbath is therefore a consequence of this breach of the psychological make up of every soldier. The challenge of military and political leadership in the present situation is one of management of violence to serve the ends of democratic civility and orderly coexistence. That obligation happens to be above the limited confines of the military’s professional mindset.

    The situation requires a deft management of force to prevent unstructured reprisals and flagrant violations of the rights of innocent citizens. Reports from the affected area indicate that there have been increased hostile activity as well as suspected reprisals by the military and other opportunistic beneficiaries from the crisis. Clearly, the blazes that have been caught on video look more like reprisals by a determined adversary. The challenge to the military authorities in the situation is one of restraint to prevent reprisal attacks on the affected communities. For the political leaders, th challenge is to avoid incendiary rhetoric that could incite further aggravation of a bad situation. Even with the heat of anger on both sides and the avoidable actions that have taken place, the supreme national challenge remains that of maintaining peace, law and order in the affected areas.

    Those who have equated the casualty count in the Delta incident to what has been happening to our troops in the North East miss the whole point. In the North East, there is an ongoing insurgency war. Casualties in a war situation are understandably considerable. It does not include the cold blooded massacre of service personnel on peace keeping operations. It is lazy analysis to lump the Delta bloodbath with other losses of lives of soldiers in different other parts of the country and term it the human costs of ‘insecurity’. A deliberate mass murder of military personnel whose only crime is that they happen to be soldiers by criminal gangs belongs in a different place. It must be punished for the reckless criminality that it is. 

    The incident in the Delta is ugly. But it is not new. We have had nasty confrontation between civilians and the armed forces previously. There was the famous Odi incident in Bayelsa State. In the early days of the Obasanjo civilian administration, a contingent of policemen deployed to keep the peace in Odi was attacked and most of them killed. Soldiers were sent in to investigate and bring perpetrators to book. Some of them were also killed. Clearly, the will of the state and the armed supremacy of the sovereignty of the state was under effective assault. The state responded by literally obliterating the Odi community. My late friend and then Senate President,  Chuba Okadigbo, later retold me the story of Odi. He took a Senate team to see what could be saved of Odi. When they got there, they were greeted by an eerie silence: charred homesteads, a field of carnage and not a single living being. His rhetorical question was forever unanswered: “Where is Odi?” Silence and emptiness were the answer that has lingered till today.

    Similarly, inter communal clashes in the Zaki Biam area of Benue state assumed political dimensions during Obasanjo’s first term as civilian president. Civil peace was severely threatened. The will of the state was under severe threat as one of the community leaders happened to be a former Chief of Army Staff, General Victor Malu, whose politics ran at cross purposes with those of Mr. Obasanjo. Mr. Obasanjo ordered an armed invasion of Zaki Biam. Houses were razed. Many died. The community fled to neighbouring places. 

    Taken together, Odi and Zaki Biam become a gruesome short hand for a doctrine on the use of force in the preservation of the Nigerian state.  It is neither new nor original. It goes back to Hobbes, Locke and Weber. Even Machiavelli had words of caution for those who must affront the Prince with force. 

    Let us give it a Nigerian name  and call it the Obasanjo doctrine. In its simplest formulation, it clearly indicates that democracy should not mean reckless endangerment of the state by armed factions of the populace. At the back of this doctrine is the ancient stipulation that in order for individuals and groups to enjoy full freedoms and rights, the state must exist in the first place. In other words, the existence of the state is the first condition for the existence of rights. There are no rights in an anarchic vacuum.  But the existence of the state is a function of the prevalence of a superior force over other forms of force, especially those that challenge the state’s monopoly of violence and force.  

    In the Obasanjo doctrine, therefore, once any section of the Nigerian community takes up arms to challenge or threaten the pre-eminence of the federal government, it becomes imperative for the federal sovereign to overwhelm that insurrection with terminal precision and decisive finality. That is the only way to discourage future random challenges to national sovereignty. According to Max Weber, “a state is a legitimate monopoly of force over a definite territory. The territorial legitimacy of a state corresponds to the area occupied by the group of individuals who signed on to the social contract.” 

    For a battle tested combatant, the Obasanjo doctrine is a derivative of the civil war dictum of “to keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done!”. It served the national purpose of reuniting the country in 1970. When the military quit the stage in 1999 and enthroned civil democratic rule, it hoisted the doctrine of superiority of force as a cornerstone of national security. 

    Beyond Odi and Zaki Biam, the rise of militant ethno national and regional challenges to national sovereignty became more frequent. Easily the most pronounced and strategically significant was the Niger Delta militancy. It became fierce soon after Obasanjo completed his two term presidency in 2007. His successor, President Umaru  Yar’dua had to contend with a fierce insurgency in the Niger Delta. His peace gestures were mistaken for weakness. Yar’dua invoked the Obasanjo doctrine. He mobilized the armed forces for a full scale assault on the worst parts of the Niger Delta. A full scale aerial bombardment of the areas controlled by the worst militant leaders was followed by ground assaults and take downs of militant camps and bastions. The overwhelming force of the federal forces secured a pax Nigeriana. The region was offered the human face of the Amnesty programme as an alternative to total military occupation. The Obasanjo doctrine would once again seem to have worked to the benefit of the Nigerian state. 

    Beyond the gruesome symbolism of assaulting the sovereignty of the nation, the killing of the soldiers in Delta is only one aspect of the spiraling insecurity in the nation. Other forms of our insecurity undermine other dimensions of our life as a nation. Kidnappings and abductions  constrain the freedom of citizens to move freely in pursuit of their daily lives. Banditry in rural areas affect the nation’s food secueity by endangering the right of farmers to plant and harvest their crops freely. Separatist  violence and militancy sffevt political freedoms of people in the affected areas for fear that a free expression of their political views could lead to threats to their lives. In the areas subject to jihadist violence, terrorism and fundamentalist insurgency, the secular essence of the Nigerian state is constantly called to question by militant zealots who seek territory, tribute to advance their bad ideology. Arguably, no aspect of the effects of our insecurity is  more injurious that the other. But perpetrators of acts of insecurity  whose actions endanger the existence of the very state undermine the very foundations of our corporate existence as a nation.

    The Okuama killings have happened at a time when the need for national reassertion is highest. Therefore, the fallen heroes of Okuama waterside must  be laid to rest in a most befitting manner. Adequate compensation and lifelong support must be extended to their families and dependents. The President as Commander –in- Chief must attend their funeral, preferably in full military regalia. He has taken a good step in conferring national honours on them. He must say something memorable about the sanctity of our national sovereignty and the special place of heroes who wear our nation’s uniforms and get into harm’s way in order to keep us all safe. It is the hour to serve notice to all trouble- makers and criminals that the hour of the walk over Nigerian state is over.

  • Forget State Police; Perhaps a National Guard Instead – By Chidi Amuta

    Forget State Police; Perhaps a National Guard Instead – By Chidi Amuta

    Nigeria’s now perennial insecurity has been damaged by political laziness. Every two- penny politician has developed a habit of weaponizing insecurity as political language. In the process, very little effort or rigour is devoted to the reality of what we are dealing with. Even those who are paid to keep us safe tend to resort to simplistic solutions to what is clearly a complex problem. Everyone seems to be mimicking politicians, talking frequently about insecurity as if the problem will go away the more we talk about it.

    National insecurity as we have come to know it has grown in dimension and scope over the last twelve years or so. When factions of jihadist terrorists invade local governments in parts of Borno or Yobe state, we are dealing with threats to Nigeria’s sovereignty by an adversary that may indeed be ‘external’ with inputs from ignorant local zealots. They take and hold territory, convert citizens into dissidents and collect taxes and levies  and in the process extract loyalties that ordinarily belong to a sovereign authority. This level of national insecurity belongs in the realm of external aggression by a concerted foreign adversary. It does not matter whether it recruits and arms our citizens to do its bidding or draws inspiration from an external multinational ideology such as fanatical Islamist fundamentalism. We must call it its real name and design and deploy containment instruments and strategies that befit an external aggression.

    With the onset of the Boko Haram insurgency in parts of the North East, Nigeria can be said to have been involved in a counter insurgency war for the better part of the past twelve years. In the process, Boko Haram has sometimes been degraded, reinforced, splintered or been acquired by ISWAP and other franchises  born and bred in the Middle East and nurtured in the turbulent Sahel. Have we been winning or losing that war? Yes and no. We have at least retaken most of the local governments that the terrorists  initially acquired as part of an evil caliphate in the hot days of  Al Queda and ISIS. But the fact that twelve years after the inauguration of Boko Haram, factions of this movement are still taking huge numbers of hostages and razing buildings is an indictment of whatever effort we have exerted so far.

    In the immediate neighbouring precincts of the insurgency war- Katsina, Kaduna, Zamfara- hybrid forms of insurgent insecurity have taken shape. Banditry, quantum abductions and kidnapping for ransom are now recognized forms of national insecurity. Initially, these hybrid forms acted as retail arms of the larger jihadist insurgency. They used to  supply them with hostages, sha ransoms and collected revenue and hide under their ideological umbrella for greater political relevance. Over time, however, the bandits and other downstream criminal gangs have come unto their own. They mostly now operate as independent criminal enterprises with a purely commercial purpose. This form of insecurity has graduated into a criminal enterprise. They carry out daring raids, collect huge ransoms which is reinvested in more arms for further raids. The industry grows.

    In this form, agents of insecurity have sometimes reached for recognition by state governments and agencies of  national security. Some local bandit squads have in the recent past reached understandings with individual state governments and even posed for photo opportunities with them after these meetings. Implicit in such unholy alliances is a certain illicit power sharing arrangement. Under these arrangements, embattled state governments are known to have ceded parts of their territory to bandit squads, allowing them  to collect revenue from locals and to wield authority over some local governments literally unchallenged.

    This form of national insecurity is inherently dangerous because it cedes parts of the national sovereign space and authority to non -state actors and in the process accords them space and scope to disturb the peace, make lots of money and whittle down the capacity of security agencies to exercise total control over  the national sovereign space. More dangerously, illicit non -state actors partake of national resources to make the nation even more  ungovernable while also compromising segments and aspects of national  security structures and personnel.

    The atmosphere of insecurity created by the proliferation and free reign of bandit squads and roving armed cartels has led to a spread in the supply of small to medium scale arms. Retail editions of trouble makers like armed robbers, small time kidnappers and urban cults have found an atmosphere of general insecurity that is both lucrative and in vogue. An industry of sorts has been born. Herdsmen that were originally engaged in herding and the livestock trade have since found kidnapping, armed robbery and abductions more lucrative than escorting scraggy herds around the nation.

    We cannot fail to add to this picture the thriving political industry and its inherent criminal offshoots. Political thugs, licensed state militias and all manner of private armies have in the last twenty four years of democracy  come into being. Political supremacy in most parts of the country has come with the help of armed thugs generously supplied with weapons, narcotics and other dangerous substances. In post election periods, these political agents of violence tend to find work for their hands anduse for their weapons in sundry criminal undertakings. In an atmosphere where employment is scarce and easy money quickly runs dry, the political industry has perhaps inadvertently been fueling the atmosphere of national insecurity  which the same politicians return to convert into campaign issues in the next election cycle.

    The fierce competition for political vantage placement has also led to the growth of ethnic, regional and other separatist movements. They generally start out by shouting for recognition and relevance in a national space that deliberately ignores extant disquiet. When no one seems to be listening, the rhetoricof separatist agitators assumes an incendiary tone. Soon enough, the more determined ones set up armed militias since the authorities tend to listen more when their monopoly of violence is challenged by an equally fierce contender for power and political space. Armed separatist movements have in the last ten years therefore added their voice and muscle to the spread of violence as a means of political expression in the country. IPOB, ESN and the various Niger Delta militias belong in this sphere.

    This is the effective backdrop to the current situation in which governments at nearly every level seem to have been held to ransom by all these forms of insecurity all over the country. The sheer expanse of the insecurity landscape is more vast than the entire security asset base of the country can deal with. Therefore, bandits and all sorts of criminals are fairly certain that the security agencies cannot easily interrupt their operations let alone effectively trail or arrest them.

    There is no lack of response from government. Endless meetings have taken place between politicians and service chiefs. The two chambers of the National Assembly have met severally with the service chief. State governors have met repeatedly with the president with the matter of insecurity topping the agenda of every meeting. The Federal government has gone to considerable length to acquire weapons of war  from all corners of the globe to combat what has become a systemic insecurity. It has become systemic because it has become self- regenerating, having become an economic sub sector which requires  self sustainability to drive itself as a series of economic activities.

    Last month, however, an emergency meeting of the president and state governors was prompted by an increase in incidents of insecurity in and around the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja. The most consequential decision of that meeting was a decision to begin the implementation of the long canvassed introduction of State Police as a silver bullet to end insecurity in the country.

    One of the strongest arguments advanced by advocates of a State Police system is local knowledge and proximity to the community origins of criminality around the country. This argument is not new. Nor are we just being introduced to perspectives about  how to solve insecurity in the country.

    Given the picture of the multi dimensional nature of our insecurity,  no single item agenda can deal with the problem. State Police is fraught with many weaknesses. It is likely to be commandeered by ambitious state governors into private political weapons. The operatives could become terror squads who use their new found power and uniforms to torment innocent people. State Police can further divide the country,  terrorize the people they are supposed to protect and reduce the effectiveness of the existing national police force.  Misuse of the powers of the State Police can further divide the country. After all, before the civil war, we had regional police formations. They became part of the divisive forces that had to be neutralized to reunify the country in 1970.

    It is undeniable that one of the benefits of over four decades of military rule and the civil war is the emergence of a unified police and military command. That benefit cannot be wiped away by the present anxiety over insecurity. Nothing has so far happened in our national security situation that invalidates or overrides the advantages of national integration in matters of police or military command and national security control. On the contrary, what our situation requires is a serious interrogation of the overall internal security situation in the country to determine why the existing structure has not quite served us well enough.

    We are under policed. The police has been overwhelmed for years in terms of personnel and equipment. Equipment and recruitment in the police has not matched our population growth and the rate of sophistication of the criminal enterprise. Similarly, the military has in the post civil war era found itself in roles that have degraded its operational capability and professional advancement. The involvement of the military and entire gamut of national security apparatus in internal security has militated against real professional development of the various services.  Our military is today involved in civil security operations in all of our 36 states and Abuja.

    As indicated earlier, the profile of our internal security challenges presents a complex picture that may not have fully dawned on the present state. At the end of the civil war, the enemy was either  an external aggressor or internal criminals. The civil populace wanted to be at peace after the trauma of war. While a war -tested military was adequate for the former role, the police was more than adequate for the latter task of keeping the peace.  The military is defined in its role. Its rules of engagement are self -defining: defend or be conquered. The police is a civil force with rules of engagement circumscribed by democracy and the civil rights of free citizens.

    Towards the end of the Babangida regime, a different internal security picture began to emerge. A different type of civil unrest became more manifest. Inter communal  violence began to feature among groups that had coexisted for years. Between the Jukun and their neighbours, in the Zango Kataf area of Southern Kaduna, in parts of the Niger Delta etc. Sections of the country began to witness problems of ethno national integration. Even within the newly created states, issues of inter communal co -existence began to show up. There was a perception then than the task of nation building was largely uncompleted and still needed to be fine -tuned. A different type of trouble maker was emerging. Armed militants intent on challenging the federal might were in the horizon.

    The new forms of violent self -assertion were more than the police could deal with but a little less ferocious than what a full military engagement was required to deal with.  The necessity was therefore for an intermediate force; something not as tame and civil as the police and also not as ferocious and terminal as the military. Thus was born the idea of the National Guard. Unfortunately, this idea came too late in Babangida’s troubled political transition programme. Opposition to the possibility of a Babangida self- perpetuation ploy also became part of the opposition to the idea of a National Guard. For the political class, no good or disinterested idea could come from the beleaguered military administration. Both were thrown away  with the same birth water.

    Here we are once again with an insecurity challenge that literally re-writes the challenge that was envisioned by the authors of the National Guard over 30 years ago.  The idea of the National Guard was to have a uniform national organization but with substantial state government control on deployment. It should be a mid intensity force that is civil enough to realize that the criminals and trouble makers in each state are first and foremost Nigerians with full civic rights. It however needs to be taken more seriously than the police at the local government office who separates domestic fights and settles quarrels among siblings.

    The National Guard should be under the ultimate control of the president as commander in chief without whose endorsement no state governor has the power to deploy the National Guard. But the National Guard needs to be composed of state contingents who are familiar with the local terrain.

    In the United States, the National Guard is an offshoot of the army. It is made up of army reservists who are called up for specific tours of duty for specific lengths of time annually. In times of national emergency above the call of the police but less intense than requiring the military, the army can advise the president to call in the National Guard. The desirable Nigerian National Guard should be a variant of this format.

    On no account must we establish and equip a separate state police force and place it under the control of our emergent crop of imperial governors. That would be an invitation to quick anarchy.

  • Land of unfinished business – By Chidi Amuta

    Land of unfinished business – By Chidi Amuta

    Among the pantheon of today’s political godlings, perhaps Senate President Mr. Godswill Akpabio is the epitome of the spirit of the times. An embodiment of power and delusion, Akpabio’s pronouncements on the state of the nation resonate with echoes of emptiness and grand hallucinations. The impression is that of a man who is either deliberately out to misinform or is so thoroughly intoxicated by the aroma of supreme power that he mistakes his own delusions for portrayals of reality.  For some reason, he probably thinks that his elevated office and the grand toga of Senate President will glorify whatever nonsense he mouths on national affairs. A typical man for all seasons as characterized by my friend Segun Adeniyi a few weeks back, Akpabio will stop at nothing in his serial adulations of Tinubu and his government. After over six months in office, most people would expect that the nation’s number three citizen should have fulfilled his gratitude obligations to President Tinubu for elevating him to dizzying heights. But not Akpabio. He is intent on usurping the role of the Minister of Information or the nabobs that are crawling around the corridors of Aso Rock Villa to natter endlessly and be paid for it.

    A few weeks ago, Akpabio was variously quoted as claiming that the Federal Government has doled out a frightening N30 billion a piece to each of our 36 governors and the Minister of the FCT. He was forced to disown the naked falsehood by some sensible governors. Just last Thursday, Mr. Akpabio was at it again. He was quoted as waxing lyrical on how insecurity has receded and declined under the Tinubu administration. Meanwhile, he was in attendance barely a fortnight ago when insecurity forced his principal to summon a meeting of all governors and security chiefs to initiate moves towards  the introduction of state police. The terrorists and bandits heard Akpabio this time. On the same day, they struck in Kaduna State. They attacked a school and carted away over 287 children and their teachers including the head teacher of the school. The world has heard it.

    A day earlier, Boko Haram or ISWAP or both struck an IDP in Borno state. They took away over 100 inmates mostly women and destroyed some of the new buildings erected by humanitarian agencies to house the displaced persons. On the same day as the Borno attack, inter militia violence in Benue state claimed 30 lives. Just last Friday, the terrorists struck again in Kaduna state. Gunmen attacked a mosque during Friday prayers and killed a number of worshippers. No one knows what further acts of brazen insecurity will be visited on our hapless people any time. So much for Akpabio’s delusionary and self- ingratiating propaganda.

    But this piece is not about the Akpabios of this world. It is about a much more fundamental trouble with government and governance in Nigeria. From the forests of our recurrent troubles, an unsettling reality has unfolded. It is a simple observable problem. Hardly does our successive governments achieve closure on any national problem. Be it insecurity, economic disaster or the scourge of ever increasing poverty or terrorism, no job ever seems to get completed by government in Nigeria. Everything remains an unfinished business which is carried over to subsequent years or handed over to the next adminstration. Isolated troubles even graduate into permanent features of public life as to acquire separate charges and allocations in our annual budgets. We now make annual budgetary provisions for insecurity,  poverty alleviation, cybercrimes, new forms of corruption and even for combating self inflicted economic disasters .

    Year in, year out, our troubles regenerate , multiply and assume lives of their own. Nothing ever gets resolved nor does any task get completed. The Nigerian state never puts anything behind it in order to face new challenges. Nothing bad comes here and ever goes away again. Everything that afflicts us becomes an endemic ailment and we add it to our ever expanding basket of troubles and vocabulary of abnormality. We budget for bad things and assume them as part of a new normal that grows by the day. The pile heaps on the heads of our helpless and hapless citizenry.

    Our economy hardly ever improves. Our GDP growth rate never remains on a rise for more than two quarters. Our exchange rate has steadily worsened for over two decades. Our poverty index rises every year as more and more people enroll in the poverty republic. Even more people exit the miserable middle class as they lose jobs and living standards. Familiar places become more dangerous with the years as rail rolling stock and passenger coaches are routinely stopped by bandits and ransacked for captives to be held for ransom. In this place, nothing ever improves neither does a government declared emergency been known to end. Every Nigerian public business remains forever unfinished.

    Soon enough, new government positions are created, even new ministries spring up and an industry of sorts is born in honour of the unfinished businesses of state. Take poverty alleviation and the empowerment of the under privileged. Nigeria as the new Poverty Capital of the World has necessitated a whole gamut of government actions to address poverty. From the onset of the Buhari government, a department sprang up first in the office of the Vice president with varying nomenclature. Then it was yanked out of the VP’s office and granted independent full ministerial status. Humanitarian Affairs. National Emergency Relief Agency. Poverty Alleviation, any group of names.

    Soon enough, new ways of dispensing government money in pursuit of these maladies emerged. Cash transfers to the poor. N-Power. Palliatives. Helicopter Money. In a nation of too many illiterate people, it is easy to come up with target figures of people whose lives will be made better by these new phantom schemes- cash transfers relief for 15 million, 20 million, 25 million families of individuals. Just name a figure. No questions asked about the relationship of these arbitrary numbers to the mass of impoverished humanity.  Some agencies of government speak of households, others prefer individuals and yet  others opt in other wild directions. Some want to assist traders with Trader Money, Artisan Money, Vulcanizer Support etc. In spite of these diverse epithets, nothing changes. Poverty as the poet said, “stands there like an elephant, huge and unmoved”.

    In one recent instance, a new Minister was placed in charge of one of these schemes for which a ministry had been created. Before our very eyes, the elegant new Minister had ordered over half a billion Naira of government cash to be paid into her friend’s private bank account. Her friend had become a government ATM through whom beneficiaries  of government poverty alleviation in a number of states would be paid! Her patrons and principals were embarrassed that she did not spend enough time to learn the trade before swooping! She lost her job within weeks of being sworn in. Investigations are still ongoing and may be completed on the eve of the 2027 elections, just in time for her to rejoin the re-election campaign trail!

    Similarly, a Buhari era Minister of Humanitarian Affairs has reportedly been called in to explain how N37 billion of the poverty alleviation money entrusted in her care developed wings. Reports indicate that a few billions of the unaccounted funds have been returned to the EFCC. Again, investigations are said to be ongoing. In a situation where the reality of poverty has also become a business, government is not likely to be in a hurry to either scrub the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs or take it off the budget. Poverty alleviation is likely to remain an unfinished business for a long time.

    Insecurity is easily the most entrenched area of our culture of unfinished national business. For more than 12 years, insecurity has come to occupy a central place in the language of our social and political discourse as a nation. Our insecurity has created its own industrial momentum of unfinished business. In the absence of a formal war, our entire security and military apparatus has become embroiled in the last ten years or more in combating forms of insecurity in all of our 36 states and the FCT.  Countless prison breaks have taken place all over the country. No one knows how many children have been adducted from school dormitories and hurled into slavery or sadistic ‘marriages’ to jihadists and nasty zealots. Many have died unnecessary death either in the hands of sundry gunmen or badly trained security personnel. Yet many more have been abducted, kidnapped and ransoms totalling billions of Naira paid. Children have lost their parents to enemies they cannot recognize just as parents and husbands have watched their children or wives abused before their very eyes.

    The world has come to brand Nigeria as a permanently unsafe and insecure place. In furtherance of this brand identity, our citizens have been branded, our passport held in permanent disdainful suspicion with our citizens subjected to all manner of indignities at airports and land borders across the world. Of course the global arms business has benefitted from our permanent insecurity status. The United States, Turkey, China and all manner of black market arms dealers around the world have benefitted from our institutionalized insecurity. We have , for the past decade or more, been buying  all manner of instruments of war to combat what is widely regarded as an internal security problem. We now need sophisticated fighter jets, helicopter gunships and all classes of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (drones) to suppress bandits, terrorists and community based common criminals. No one cares to ask about the human rights implications of using disproportionate force to discourage common criminals from disturbing the peace. “War is war. All is fair in war”, I can hear the arms merchants and their Nigerian agents chant in unison.

    The recent spate of insecurity incidents has come at a time when most Nigerians thought that the critical emergency of the hour is the epidemic of hunger and government inflicted hardship  ravaging the country. That in itself is manifesting in hitherto unimagined ways. In the various theatres of the hardship war, new forms of anarchic trends are being witnessed. Destitutes and children have taken to way -laying and looting trucks in transit especially those loaded with food items. Private and government warehouses are being breached and ransacked. In Abia state, a hungry man has reportedly shot dead his teenage son for ‘eating the only food left in the house’. In Lagos, two children have reportedly been sold in exchange for some bags of rice.

    There needs to be a way out of these multiple crises. The upshot of all this is to challenge our government to call this anomaly of multiple crises its rightful  name. Are we in a war or at peace? Does any of our troubles have an end in sight?  Why must we consecrate transient problems that other nations put out in months into permanent conditions?

    Government needs to summon up the courage to become pragmatic and unconventional. Government must attach a deadline to its exertions in the various areas of the troubles that afflict us. Our security forces now need to give all bandits, terrorists, armed agents,  non- state actors and trouble makers a deadline to surrender beyond which deadline they qualify as enemy combatants with full consequences. On the economy, I guess it is time that the government of the day gathers the nation’s best economic brains in one room with a simple task: come up with workable solutions to rescue our economy within a 12 month window.

    It is also time to dissolve the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and other related poverty enabled government efforts. They are enriching a few opportunists and deepening the poverty of the majority. Poverty was not created by any ministry. It was created and widened by a succession of bad inhumane governments presided over by politicians. Our poverty and economic calamity are the products of the politics of bad table manners: eating too much when the majority are starving! Therefore, all those who have held executive political positions from local government to federal level since 1999 should voluntarily let us know how much they are willing to “lend” to the Central Bank in both Naira and foreign exchange within  the next three months to help us revamp the economy. That is probably all the money we need to revamp the economy. No need for World Bank or IMF loans. No need to go camp in hand to Qatar, Saudi Arabia or UAE. We shall repay our politicians the ‘soft loan’ within an agreed time frame for as long as the loan amount can be justified as legitimate income in their period of public service.

  • Tinubu and the scarcity of optimism – By Chidi Amuta

    Tinubu and the scarcity of optimism – By Chidi Amuta

    In more sensible places, President Tinubu’s job approval rating is so woeful that he should have been job hunting by now. In the United Kingdom, the opposition would have called for snap elections to test his popularity and probably throw him out of 10 Downing. In the United States, his party faithful would have been so embarrassed as to defect to the other side of the aisle with their votes. An engineered congressional revolt would either make him sit up or show him the exit door through an impeachment process. These consequences are very remote in Nigeria’s brand of democracy because we are Nigerians.

    In a classic twist of irony  and mass mockery, this presidency is riding on a political slogan –“Renewed Hope”- that literally laughs at the people and deprecates its very authors and vendors. Yet the mockery of that slogan lies at the very heart of our experience now. At a time when an administration is supposed to be renewing our hope in the future, we are experiencing the most drastic erosion of the basis of all hope. At a time when a government is supposed to be renewing our hope in government, the machinery of government has been turned into a cult of deceit. At a time when the political class is supposed to be reinforcing  our hope in the nation, the very foundations of our nationhood are being eroded by a combination of incompetence and self delusion. As a result, optimism, the very intangible glue that holds nations together with each democratic transition is in dire scarcity among most Nigerians. Show me a collection of Nigerians at home or abroad, in the city or in villages and the shortage of optimism becomes the standard greeting. It is a series of rhetorical  questions thrown by everybody at everybody: Where are we going? Where is this country headed? What is the agenda of this administration? What will happen to us? So, what next?

    Among Nigerians of nearly every class, tongue or faith,  it would be a hard search to find too many people who are still optimistic about anything, both about the prospects this government, their own personal lives or those of their businesses  or indeed the very future of the country. The youth are either petrified or are fleeing in droves to other lands. The elderly look back at better earlier days and sometimes break down in tears about promises broken, good times gone by and a sweetness turned into bitter bile. Paradise in peril! Traditional rulers have turned into prophets of doom or professional counselors on the dangers of allowing the population of the poor to overwhelm those who can still find the next meal. The other day, the Chief of Defense Staff had cause to caution fellow Nigerians against the growing habit of raining curses at our fatherland. When people are hungry, frustrated and angry, they can curse even their parents and even mouth abominable heresy!

    On the sad faces of their parents, even our children confront the bleakness of the present and are speechless when it comes to asking about the future.  There is hardly anyone left to run to for reassurance. Irrespective of their position and the direction of their prayer compass, our clergy are getting tired of urging patience and perseverance among their faithful. A nation of inconsolable pessimists. That describes Tinubu’s Nigeria at the moment.

    But democracy feeds on optimism. When a democratic outcome dims the prospects of optimism and blurs the horizon of hope, democracy itself becomes bedeviled and imperiled. When elections approach, the electorate is fed on one key diet by campaigning politicians: optimism and hope in a better future. People are told that the coming election is an opportunity to replace declining hope with a new optimism. Incumbency retreats, satisfied that it has done its best. Aspirants mount the rostrum to preach grounds for new optimism. It is optimism about the nation and about the prospective leadership of the nation. The campaign mobs echo the anthem of optimism and the democracy wagon rolls on.

    In the dying days of the Buhari administration, the campaigns were fed by an unusual hunger for renewal and perhaps some optimism for a reprieve from the Buhari heist. Anything would be better than Buhari. After eight years of Mr. Buhari’s  virtual locust invasion in the name of governance, people expected and fervently hoped that whatever replaced the clueless Daura general would be better.

    No one dreamt of higher poverty figures. No one expected a rudderless economic environment. No one expected a higher rate of insecurity. No one expected the continuation of an economy bedeviled by debts and lacking enlightened management. Indeed, no one expected a nation literally overrun by enpowered killer herdsmen of doubtful nationality. Worse still, no one expected a totally indifferent national leadership inured to all feeling and compassion for the sufferings of the people. Of all things, no one expected that in our life time, so many Nigerians will become hungry and very angry as to die on queues for rice!

    A prevalent note of some optimism pervaded the 2023 presidential campaigns. People looked at the three major political gladiators and concluded that even the worst of the bunch would be better than the incompetent Buhari. The mood of the electorate was to guide Mr. Buhari out of the China shop and hopefully fix the broken parts after his untidy exit.

    Democratic succession is a ceremony of optimism. People hail the winner and minimally hope that a better leadership will inspire confidence in a better government and a better nation.

    Afterall, Tinubu had run a tolerably progressive and effective government as Lagos state governor. He had improved revenue collection, patched the worst roads, summoned the courage to confront and reduce Lagos’ refuse heaps and generally deployed propaganda to market his efforts. His administration fed on a large diet of populist propaganda sustained by the political loyalty of ancient lineages and cells of vicious thugs and urban cult squads.

    Even if Mr. Atiku became the winner, there was something to refer back to. Mr. Atiku Abubakar had mostly one asset in his resume: he had been the deputy to the bullish Obasanjo who ran a tolerably enlightened federal government. Obasanjo had drastically reduced our nation debts internal and external, reformed the banking system, introduced a modern payment system and digitalized telecommunications. He had fired up the optimism of Nigerians and their faith in the future of the nation because individuals could make some money for themselves. A man who had been in the room where these decisions were taken deserved a second look and a chance to try his hands at the wheels. That was Atiku’s flag and appeal.

    Mr. Peter Obi of the fledgling Labour Party came in from a cold anonymity. An Onitsha Market trader who had been a successful two term governor of Anambra state, Obi  came with a decent moral pedigree that is rare in Nigeria’s brackish political culture. A strange new kid on the political block, his appeal to the youth to ‘take back your country’ resonated with Nigeria’s bulging youth population. Obi reached out to the youth and urban poor with a trenchant new message. On election day, the nation showed they had heard him and his results upset the apple cart of national ‘politics as usual’. The echoes are still reverberating.

    Then the system anointed Mr. Tinubu. Irrespective of the divergence of popular opinion that greeted Bola Tinubu’s emergence as President of Nigeria, the minimum irreducible expectation by February last year was that come May 29th, we would herald a new more hopeful Nigeria since nothing in anyone’s imagination contemplated a worse nightmare than the Buhari interregnum. No one could fairly deny Nigerians their democratic entitlement to optimism then.

    From the entrance gate of power at Eagle Square, the man set out to inaugurate key policy measures aimed ostensibly at reversing the toxic trends of his clueless predecessor. But ironically, each bold policy move by Mr. Tinubu has produced the direct opposite of its intended objective. He has taken off a troublesome petroleum subsidy and inaugurated sporadic fuel scarcity and unaffordable gasoline pump prices. He has unified the Naira exchange rate and driven the Naira to its lowest exchange rate since it was introduced on 1st January ,1973. He has initiated a food security initiative but hunger has emerged as a national security threat of epidemic proportions for the first time in our national history.

    The virus is not in the very policies themselves. It is instead in the methodology and embarrassing lack of method in the man’s policy madness. Key policies were announced ahead of the setting up of a functional government. Major initiatives have been announced and bandied ever before any systematic thought  was given to their consequences by any group of enlightened minds. A president that set out as a swashbuckling conquistador had no horsemen to back up his charge.

    He announced his signal reforms ever before he chose a cabinet. And when the cabinet came into place, it was an over bloated rough and tumble assembly of (48?), an inchoate assemblage of odd men and anonymous women most of them with neither background, tested skills nor pedigree. A cabinet of political debt collectors was the first let down of the Tinubu government for a nation full of optimistic expectations.

    Tragically, Mr. Tinubu has allowed the impression to grow in the streets that he is less than competent and prepared for the office of President. Contrary to this growing street perception, however, President Tinubu has been quite busy. The man has been working for Nigeria at least in his estimation and those of his devotees and acolytes. In all fairness, he has periodically unleashed a hailstorm of uncoordinated policies, actions and responses in all directions to qualify as a busy chief executive. The uncoordinated things he has said about our national problems is even more copious than what he has done. And yet, the nation seems stuck in a swamp, neither making progress nor retreating to past safer shores. Even worse, Tinubu’s job approval rating seems constantly in the red. A shrinking percentage of Nigerians appreciates his exertions.

    None can deny that Tinubu has taken some positive actions and indicated positive directions. He plans a students loans scheme to assist indigent university students. He has dished out money to state governments to buy and distribute rice palliatives to hungry and poor Nigerians. He has called state governors to support the setting up of state police formations to help tackle insecurity. He has found money to reduce the Central Bank’s foreign exchange exposures to foreign airlines and the banks. He has unleashed EFCC, police, army and DSS goons to chase after Bureau de Change operators in the streets of Abuja and other major centres as if to physically chase down the rampaging exchange rate with little effect. He has suspended an errant thieving minister, sacked and began prosecuting a former Central Bank governor and sent sniffer dogs after other major thieves. The main bastion of corruption, the NNPCL, remains largely untouched and hardly even mentioned. He has approved the construction of some major highways and rehabilitation of others.

    In this avalanche of executive actions, there is clear evidence of a president who wants to work for the nation. And Tinubu likes to be praised and appreciated. But that accolade is not quite as readily forthcoming as he would have liked. Lagos is a small constituency  and his impact then could be felt and seen at a glance. Nigeria is a diverse behemoth with large problems and elephantine appetites and expectations. Mr. Tinubu’s efforts may not meet the desires of the Nigerian public square. No one can say also that Tinubu has shown the mental grasp of the Nigerian situation that the office of president requires. His solutions are too eclectic and peripheral. His choice of key personnel is too pedestrian and xenophobic. Outside his Yoruba home base, Mr. Tinubu seems to be devoid of friends of substance outside the charmed circle of political merchants. In these respects, he compares rather miserably with either an M.K.O Abiola or an Olusegun Obasanjo.

    Worsening social and economic conditions have shredded Tinubu’s best efforts so far. People are very hungry and angry too. Most are watching themselves slide into unbudgeted poverty. The miserable semblance of a middle class that used to decorate our urban landscape has vastly evaporated. People who used to drive cars now commute to work in buses. The well heeled who used to own multiple cars as a show of their affluence, have shrunk to one or two functional fuel -efficient boxes. A crushing exchange rate has forced people with children studying abroad to begin bringing them home in trickles.  Holiday schedules are being watered down.

    With these problems ravaging the nation, Mr. Tinubu is unlikely to find enough cheer leaders at the ringside. And somehow, the national epidemic of hunger and hardship is beginning to eat away his solid Yoruba South West support base. If that persists and grows, he may have difficulty aspiring to a second term in office. More consequentially, the Northern mob support that helped him on to power is badly hit by the present hunger and hardship epidemic. They are not likely to chant “Sai Baba” at his future rallies unless he can find food for the hungry and cash for the impoverished and more pork for their politicians.

    It ought to worry Mr. Tinubu and his handlers that in spite of his best exertions, the critical mass of the Nigerian nation  is yet to either fall in love with him or see him as a symbol of hope and national cohesiveness. He is still seen by the social media mob as an embodiment of the ‘trouble with Nigeria’, a power usurper and illegitimate occupant of the Villa. Worse still, he still continues to carry the moral burden of his untidy resume and grisly background.

    The only way to improve his job approval rating and mass appeal would be to erase the multiple problems currently threatening the livelihood of most Nigerians. To begin to do this, Tinubu must use his first anniversary in power to push the re-start button: a new cabinet of problem solvers, a think tank of non-political experts, inauguration of a target-driven administration and a more nationalistic outlook.

  • Power, vision and a new Aba – By Chidi Amuta

    Power, vision and a new Aba – By Chidi Amuta

    It is time to pay homage to the place of my beginnings. I was born and grew up mostly in Aba. Something in me still looks nostalgically back to and draws inspiration from those beginnings. It is the beauty of every yard as a shop in front and a small factory at the rear. Literally, every yard had a cottage industry at the rear and a ‘mum and pop’ shop in front to sell some of the things made at the backyard. Making and selling things, industry and commerce have remained the defining essence of Aba Ngwa, the proud indomitable Enyimba City. It was a place of perennial hope and promise in the power of human creativity, industry and  restless enterprise. 

    We grew up infused with the belief that wealth was only possible if you make things people need or sell stuff to people who want them. Hard work in industry and commerce livened by education were the keys we were handed by adult society. It was an early mastery of the power of supply and demand. The original spirit of Aba still lives though battered, bruised  and buffeted by decades of neglect, governmental indifference and reckless abuse. 

    Many things have of course changed on the face of Aba. Land speculators and authorized scavengers have spoilt the landscape that onece was beautiful and planned.  But there are constants that remain and defy the corrosive decades that have since passed. Two things principally are constant and make the Aba spirit indestructible. The famous Enyimba City has survived the decades as a centre of industry and commerce. I grew up in a city where almost everyone sells something or makes something. In Aba, what you make or sell defines you. In fact, I recall that as children, we were identified by the trades of our parents. You were “son of tailor” or “daughter of weaver”. 

    Over the years, Aba has struggled with how to transform its defining essence into a modern potential. It has lived on its original reputation of manufacturing and commerce by perfecting its craft and refining its standards in spite of difficulties. But over these difficult years, Aba has been haunted by a few simple questions: How do you transform from a small town of artisanal cottage manufacturing to a modern medium to large scale industrial hub? How do you migrate from petty trading and periodic importation of finished products to the distribution of home made goods to places far and near to compete with products in the wider world? How do you deploy modern logistics tools to sell your wares to places far and wide? Most importantly, how do you enable the huge potentials of this home of enterprise and skill with the infrastructure that will guarantee uninterrupted productivity and growth? How do you power and modernize the ancient potentials of a place where business is second nature? These questions have  troubled both the Aba business community and indeed successive governments of Abia state for decades.

    Tomorrow, the 26th of February, 2024, the promise of Aba will literally spring to life through the the commissioning of the first of two key private sector driven projects. Tomorrow, the power of private initiative and the support of enlightened government policy will say to the people of Aba and its environs: “Let there be light!”. And Aba and its environs will be lit up  never again to return to the darkness of the past. The President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu. will commission the Geometric’s Aba Integrated Independent Power Project which has been in the works for a number of years. 

    The plant is designed to supply uninterrupted power to metropolitan Aba and a total of seven adjoining local governments in Abia state. Through a maze of political, legislative and technical obstacles, the project has finally come to fruition.

    Brainchild of leading robotics engineer, entrepreneur and former Minister of Power, Prof. Barth Nnaji, the Geometrics Aba Integrated Power Project (AIPP) is a 188 MW gas powered project that ring-fences Aba commercial city with seven adjoining local governments. It is integrated to cover the entire gamut of the power value chain; it encompasses generation, distribution and marketing of power in its area of coverage. What it brings to the table is the provision of 24/7 power in the affected areas. 

    The second and perhaps even more consequential project is the new Enyimba Economic City project whose construction is due to be launched by the second quarter of 2024. By design and conception, it would seem that the Geometric Aba Integrated Power Project was intended to serve the power needs of the new Enyimba Economic City. The new City is conceived as a new adjunct modern city to the old Aba. Its purpose is to actualize all the modernization needs of Aba as a centre of economic development, industry and commerce,  serving the entire South East and South South zones of the country.

    The new Enyimba Economic City is the brainchild of yet anther private sector giant, Mr. Darlington Uzu, frontline real estate mega entrepreneur whose footprints in the industry are unmistakable. He is the owner and driver of Crown Realties with vast billion dollar estates in Lagos and Abuja. The new Enyimba Economic City is financed, like the Geometric Power project, by the AfreximBank . To demonstrate the strategic linkage between these two signature projects, the Enyimba Economic City has signed a 90 MW Power Purchase Agreement(PPA) with Geometrics Aba Independent Power Project to service the first phase of Enyimba Economic City due to be flagged off in the second quarter of 2024. 

    The new city is located on 1,499 hectares of land. The initial cost of the first phase of the real estate is put at $288.7 million. The new city is located in three local governments of Abia state adjoining Aba commercial city, namely, Ukwa East, Ukwa West and Ugwunagbo. The city is designed to cover the main strategic areas of modern economic city life in an integrated whole. Its main sectors include manufacturing, entertainment, tourism/hospitality, aviation, education, technology, innovation, lifestyle and a logistics park plus a residential park with all the major modern amenities for modern convenient living. Ahead of its take off,  some major global brands in the various areas of its coverage have already signed up to have a presence in the new city. Therefore, for those who will make a living in the new Enyimba Economic City, the best of leisure, entertainment, relaxation and healthcare will complement  the challenges of manufacturing, logistics and daily office work.

    The new Enyimba Economic City is Nigeria’s first industrial township with full Origin and Destination (O&D) status. For access to major national centres of social and economic activity, the city includes an Inland Port connected by rail to both the Port Harcourt and Onne seaports. For highway access, Enyimba Economic City is linked to two major highway links. These are the Enugu-Port Harcourt highway(200 Km) and the Onitsha-Owerri- Aba (161km) highway. Access of the new cit to these highways have received federal government concessionary approvals. 

    Most importantly, the new city project enjoys a robust international financing support. In addition to robust Federal and Abia state government buy-ins, on November 14, 2023, the Board of AfreximBank approved  a $201.7 million syndicated credit facility for the project, with Afreximbank underwriting $150 million of the total loan portfolio. 

    Taken together, both the Geometrics Aba Integrated Power Project and the new Enyimba Economic City signal a new hope for the realization of the vast economic potentials of the commercial city of Aba which have remained locked away for several decades.  What is significant about both projects is that they indicate a new direction in development thinking and planning in Nigeria. 

    First, this new direction is led by the private sector with the support of private international capital. This new approach has many positive implications for the new face of Nigerian development. The overwhelming advantage of projects like the new Enyimba Economic City as private sector driven initiatives is that they have inbuilt sustainability components and shock absorbers. This is unlike past projects that were driven by government and tended to die off once the administration that envisioned them left office. On the contrary, the actualization of either a major power plant or indeed the building of a new city are undertakings that must transcend the limitations and constraints of specific government tenures. New governments come and go. The priorities of successive incumbents change and alter. 

    On the other hand, what major development projects such as these need from successive government is the creation of the enabling environment to thrive and succeed. This is in the form of statutory approvals, endorsements and facilitations of the enabling environment for project implementation. Governments have the role of regulating practices and standards of construction, right of way and general city bye-laws. Governments can even invest in aspects of new cities of buy equity in power plants or rail likns and other infrastructure. But they should not own or initiate these development projects beyond the provision of enabling infrastructure. 

    Government present and roles in vital areas of governance control are inevitable. Contractors need to proceed  with their work without hindrance, work sites and personnel require security. Contractors require protection from unnecessary harassment and distracting litigations and the nuisance of community trouble makers as well as the distractions of land speculators.

    More importantly, the involvement of international financial support and sponsorship in these major projects insulates them from the vagaries of fluctuating government revenues and financial fortunes. In many instances, flfutuating government revenue have delayed or frustrated many good development projects and consigned them into the vast heap of “abandoned projects” that litter our national landscape.

    Therse new breed of private sector driven projects indicate a more serious and strategic approach to development of infrastructure in the country. For the South East region in particular, both Geometrics Power and Enyimba Economic City represent a departure in the direction of a concerted and multiplier development template of development and modernization of the South East Zone.

    Majorly, it is an approach that places premium on the strategic preconditions for meaningful economic development. The enabling infrastructure  must be part of the preconditions for the initiation of theseprjects. Power supply, road network, access to ports, airports  and major highway networks  as well as rail links are being prioritized over and above embarking on isolated white elephant projects located in relation to nothing in particular which end up as mere landscape decoration.  The Enyimba Economic City in particular has had to secure government approval for access to the relevant infrastructure before sourcing the finance to power the project.

    An additional refreshing aspect of these new developments is their emphasis on regional integration instead of isolated state focus. This indicates an increasing awareness that the future development of the country will have to be based on regional markets and demographics. The political and cultural map of the country indicates a clear regional concentration in the demand and supply of goods and services. This is in preference to emphasizing individual isolated state markets. These two new projects have set a new example of setting their focus on the regional galvanization of the factors of production in the South East and South South  zones. Except for states like Lagos and Kano, it remains doubtful if single state based major projects have much prospects of success in Nigeria. A regional approach therefore has become imperative.

    As political and industry leaders gather in Aba tomorrow to witness the commissioning of the Geometric Power plant in Aba, it is the dawn of a new era of development and fulfillment of long held dreams not only for Aba and Abia State but for the entire South East zone of the country, an area that has for too long been dogged by stories of marginalization and violent eruptions of primordial hurt. 

    A new horizon is about to open in the South East zone courtesy of the courage and vision of private sector titans like Prof. Barth Nnaji and Mr. Darl Uzu with the active support and encouragement of leaders like Dr. Alex Otti, the futuristic governor of the new Abia state that is happening before our very eyes. Soon, the pride of Nigeria will not just be in “Made in Aba” products but in a whole new generation of young Nigerian technocrats and entrepreneurs who will step forward to proudly say: “I live in Aba and I am proud to be Nigerian!”

  • Rehearsing the Anarchy – By Chidi Amuta

    Rehearsing the Anarchy – By Chidi Amuta

    Nigeria’s litany of troubles has finally anchored on two basic existential matters. Insecurity and hunger. We are all very unsafe and now the vast majority of our people are very hungry and angry. Of the two urgencies, the rise of mass hunger is indeed a novel addition to our familiar tale of serial calamities. Mass hunger and the anger and protests it can breed is a clear and urgent threat to our national security.

    The signs are already everywhere. Mass protests have held dress rehearsals in places as far flung as Minna, Kano, Suleja, Osogbo, Abeokuta and other isolated pockets around the country. The intensity of the protests has been somewhat tepid and mellow but the message is clear and unmistakable. The population of hungry Nigerians is building up into a critical mass that can make us all uncomfortable. The fear is now palpable that if the scourge of hunger is allowed to spread with the attendant protests, the business of governing Nigeria could turn into a nationwide crowd control and mob anger management operation.

    The danger in these hunger protests is in the very nature of hunger itself. Hunger is indeed an unfamiliar addition to our familiar cocktail of Nigeria’s usual calamities. Hunger in the sense of absolute lack of food of any kind in addition to the lack of the money to buy what is available and necessary, has not quite been the Nigerian thing. The poor may not feast on delicacies every day but they have always managed to find the bowl of eba, fufu, tuwo and basic grains to fill the stomach and resume praying for tomorrow as a better day.  Never before has plain simple hunger been the lot of so many Nigerians at once. But we are in a new and different place. Democracy has yielded us the unexpected dividend of universal poverty and the reality of mass starvation.

    In response to the unfolding signs of imminent mass hunger, the government has been stumbling from one gamble to another. Initially it was some palliative of sharing bags of rice to poor people in the states and the FCT. The budgeted N5 billion per state has largely been lost in a haystack of corruption allegations. Claims and counter claims over who got rice or noodles  have featured from across the country. There was a follow up pledge by some states to offer government employees cash incentives of anywhere between N10,000 and N100,000. From most states, the feedback is mostly one of serial default and unfulfilled promises.

    While this parade of guesswork has gone on, the cost of living especially food inflation has continued to gallop. Food inflation has shot up from under 30% in May to over 40% now. General inflation has similarly skyrocketed from 33% to over 39% in the same period. More frightening, the exchange rate of the Naira to major world currencies has seen the national currency dip in value from less than N500 to the dollar in May to over N1,600 to the dollar at the time of this writing. Neither the government nor the general populace have any idea of what concrete informed economic actions are being taken to alleviate a worsening economic condition. Nearly every measure or statement of solution by the Central Bank has been greeted by a worsening exchange rate scenario the day after.

    One interesting   aspect of the onset of the hunger protests is that they began while President Tinubu was away in Paris on a “private visit”. The message did get to him. He probably cared as a man with the mandate of the people to help them overcome mundane matters like hunger and cashless poverty. But he preferred dignified silence on the matter till he returned home. Since his return, the president has resumed the affairs of state as usual. He has, for instance, urged citizens to recite the national pledge after each rendition of the National Anthem. He has instructed  that limitless amounts of grains be released from the national reserves to assuage the raging hunger.

    No one has said exactly where the grains reserves are located and how much the silos hold in total. Even worse, no one has told us how hungry people who are also abjectly poor will pay for the grains. It turns out, as an afterthought, that the grains will be distributed free of charge. But the modalities are yet in the works. The promise of grains has raised other troubling questions. Without reference to any concrete evidence of concrete food production effort to support his optimism, the president has insisted that Nigeria will soon become a net exporter of food as he can envision a period of plenty in the horizon.

    As with most things in political Nigeria, the onset of mass hunger and the rising costs of living in the country have been the subject of either political football or predictable populist doublespeak among the elite. Predictably, the Nigerian elite has jumped on the hunger wagon to preach their familiar lines. The more politically minded have opted to play political football   with the hunger crisis.

    Former Emir of Kani, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi has preferred shifting the blame for the current hardships from Tinubu to Mr. Buhari. This is political bad manners. Every new government is elected to solve the problems they find on the ground, not to blame the predecessor government indefinitely. That is the most elementary lesson of democratic succession. New governments that spend most of their time looking for aspects of mistakes in what they inherited end up badly as a general rule. When Barrack Obama took over from George Bush Jr., some Democrats wanted him to blame the Bush administration for the global economic meltdown of 2007-8. Obama preferred to face and solve the economic problem instead of surrendering the global economy to a litany of blames. He succeeded.

    In furtherance of the Nigerian political football about hunger and high cost of living, political megaphones of the ruling APC have blamed the governors of the rival PDP as being responsible for the hardship in the land. They did not distribute the palliatives released to them  nor have they lived up to their obligations in paying the promised allowance of N30,000 to workers in the service of their states. No one has reminded them that the same thing applies to the APC governors.

    The Nigerian Labour Congress President has questioned the efficacy of grains as an antidote to universal hunger, arguing that Nigerians are not birds that feed mostly on grains. Implicit in that cynical interrogation of governmental good intention is the common knowledge that food consists of more than grains: proteins, vegetables, fats and various other carbohydrates etc. Meanwhile even the little that is promised remains invisible.

    The Sultan of Sokoto has been closer to his  trenchant self. He has said Nigerians are now deeply frustrated, extremely hungry and very resentful. He spoilt his courageous message by insisting that it was time for Nigerians to seek repentance as our present adversities were a repercussion for our past sins.

    In similar vein, the incumbent Emir of Kano has sent the message of mass hunger and frustration more directly to the centre of power. Receiving First Lady, Oluremi Tinubu in Kano, the Emir topped up is lavish hospitality with a message through her to her husband. It was clear and direct: “please tell your husband that the people are hungry and angry”.

    The clergy is not to be left out. Pastor Enoch Adeboye has shifted the blame for our intractable insecurity and hardship to the realm of the supernatural. In his view, the leaders are doing their best but the insecurity and current hardship require divine intervention. The answer is perhaps in more prayers and supplication while patiently awaiting God’s appointed time for relief of our economic burdens. Meanwhile the scourge of hunger rages and the fire of anger consumes the land as wealthy priests ready to jet out of hell in their private jets.

    Having failed to wish away the hunger troubles through political and public opinion manipulation, the Presidency has at last managed to find the courage to confront the matter as a government. President Bola Tinubu held a very consequential meeting last Thursday with the Governors of a 36 states and Minister of the FCT. The meeting was the first tacit admission by their excellencies that the Nigerian state is now reduced to a machinery for confronting the original necessity of the nation state. The business of government is to guarantee the security of lives and property or limbs in the absence of property and to ensure the livelihood (food) of all citizens. In its classical sense, the necessity of government is the need to save humanity from the physical danger of hurt and death by his fellows while guaranteeing food and livelihood for those alive. In short, the essence of the state and government can be reduced to these two elements.

    Quite wisely, the President and the governors winded up addressing the biting urgency of security and food security. The consensus on these two is not far fetched. Prior to the last one month, insecurity in the form of banditry, kidnappings, abductions sense killings and violence was the dominant concern of most Nigerians. The idea of state police is being debated to combat bandits and kidnappers.  Meanwhile, rhetorical poverty has graduated into mass abject penury and mass hunger. While sensible normal people can take measures to avoid being kidnapped or abducted, there is no armour against unavoidable hunger.

    But when people are hungry, they become irritable and very angry. In every sense, hunger is  an instant unifier of mankind. A mass of hungry people is undifferentiated by the things that divide people in a polity. Hunger has no religion, ethnicity or region. All those whom poverty throws into the hellish pit of hunger find fellowship in the commonality of their condition.

    When a critical mass of the citizenry is reduced to an angry mob in protests about basic necessities and hunger, we have the makings of anarchy. An anarchic mob can only produce a revolution for good if the mob is infused with guiding ideas and a populist political leadership. The French were lucky that the mobs that stormed the Bastille in 1789 were armed with a slogan of ‘Equality, Freedom and Egalitarianism’. They were helped along by the arrogance of a monarchy whose queen, on learning that the people were marching to protest scarcity of bread, urged them “to go and eat cakes”! There was of course an underlying political leadership that took over the revolution and converted it into a republic after an intervening period of anarchy.

    On the contrary, a series of hunger protests over a wide area such as Nigeria can get out of hand. It could degenerate into mere anarchy if it overwhelms the state. I cannot see an informing idea nor a political leadership that can own or galvanize Nigeria’s hunger protests into a political movement. Therefore, what we may be seeing is a series of rehearsals in anarchy. The possible ensuing mayhem may fall into the hands of a cocktail of power adventurers: military despots, ethnic bigots, religious fundamentalists,  narcotics warlords and treasure- seeking gangster collectives. What began as hunger protests could lead straight into anarchy and total state meltdown.

    Perhaps it is much easier to import, mass produce or borrow food to assuage these hunger protests and mobs than allow them to consume the fragile Nigerian state and plunge us all into a 100 years of anarchy.

  • Vladimir Trump resurgent – By Chidi Amuta

    Vladimir Trump resurgent – By Chidi Amuta

    The United States presidential election in November is looking more like a referendum. Though intended as a democratic ritual, it could end up as a choice between democracy and authoritarianism. That at least is what the rhetoric and track record of the two most likely  contenders now suggests. With his resounding victory in both the Iowa and New Hampshire caucus primaries, Mr. Donald Trump is galloping towards clinching the Republican nomination. Both Wall Street and Main Street America have in recent times been gripped by the trepidation that a return to the Trump nightmare is well within the realm of possibility come November.

    On the other hand, an unchallenged Mr. Joe Biden is the undisputed choice of the Democrats. It is not just a disparity in partisan alignments that is tilting the election towards a referendum. It is the untidy manners and track record of Mr. Trump that is upsetting democracy’s apple cart in the place where it matters most. In the process, democracy in America seems to be on trial with the menacing silhouette of a home grown autocrat in the morror.

    Mr. Biden has consistently presented as the candidate out to defend and protect classical American democracy. Somehow, the aggressive comeback campaign of Donald Trump has projected democracy and its very survival as the central issue of this campaign season. Ordinarily, Biden and Trump should have been dueling over abortion, the crisis at the border, unemployment figures, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the like. Biden should have been busy defending his policies and programmes in the last three years. But the re-emergence of a bullish Donald Trump has more or less made Mr. Biden the candidate of Democracy and no more. In the last campaign season, Trump gave Mr. Biden Covid-19 as a campaign gift and invariably lost the election to mostly on that account. Against a rampaging bull of a belligerent and autocratic Trump, Biden has no choice than to dig into the trenches as the mortal defender of democracy and the liberal heritage.

    As things look now, Biden  wants to protect and preserve American democracy as we have come to know it. The rule of law, respect for individual rights, diversity driven by the understanding of America as a nation of immigrants, belief in the sanctity of the ballot as the determinant of who rules America, the requirement for decency as the unwritten code of conduct of those who must rule the free world and, above all, the projection of American democracy as a beacon to the rest of the democratic world. Implicit in the ritual of America’s democratic election every four years is the understanding that each election renews hope in democracy and strengthens democracy as a universal aspiration that holds out a promise for the free world. Somehow, Joe Biden has come to be the personification of these values and aspirations as well as an inspiration to all those who hold America tacitly responsible for the survival of global democracy and the enlargement of the coast of freedom all over the world.

    Mr. Biden’s strengths as a symbol of democracy are ironically embedded in his perceived weaknesses as a person. He is not a demagogue. He is not necessarily a charismatic orator nor an electrifying presence. But he is a reassuring grandpa figure, the adult in the room as he was indeed in the Obama White House. His calming composure and attention to details is compounded by his long familiarity and multiple roles in the history of American democracy and the highpoints of America’s exploits on behalf of democracy around the world. If indeed America needed am embodiment of information and experience on the challenges and triumphs of democracy around the world, Mr. Joe Biden provides a ready historical centerpiece.

    However, many fear that Mr. Biden has not been sufficiently reassuring as a defender of democracy in terms of his performance on the job. The essence of democracy is ultimately in the ability of an elected sovereign to deliver on the expectations of a specific electorate. Mr. Biden is sometimes accused of the weakness that Mr. Trump frequently accuses him of. This can only be in the sense that his confrontation of autocrats has not been quite surefooted. He has largely ignored the baby tyrant in North Korea, been less than bullish in his psychological duels with Mr. Putin and has not quite campaigned openly against Mr. Trump’s anti democratic trail in America itself. He has allowed Mr. Trump to monopolize the use of fear rhetoric frighten ordinary Americans. In addition,  a good deal of the economic recovery under Mr. Biden in the last three years has been rather tepid and reversible.

    On the contrary, Mr. Donald Trump has become etched in the imagination of Americans and the democratic world as something of an enfant terrible of deviant democracy. Mr. Trump’s initial emergence was greeted with some excitement as a refreshing departure. A Manhattan business man was heading for Washington to infuse the can do ethos of American capitalism into the boring rigidity of Washington’s politics of  same old correctness. At that point, Trump was an embodiment of the American dream and dictum of “In Gold We Trust” was emerging as president. The assumption was that the pursuit of happiness through hard work and the building of wealth would lead to the spread of prosperity for all hard working Americans through the example of a different type of President. After all, Trump was reputed to have built his humongous wealth and prosperity through hard work and entrepreneurial bravado. No one knew what a Manhattan real estate entrepreneur would make of the White House. But the risk fitted into the adventure prone American mass psychology. “Sure, why not?, was the refrain in bars, restaurants and subways.

    Mr. Trump looked at Washington and saw mostly a political swamp that needed to be drained. And he assigned himself the task. Between the White House and the Capitol in Washington, there is a cultural assumption that the politics of American democracy is a cultural ecosystem in and of itself. Washington has its meta language, its traditions, its conventions, codes and manners. Mr. Trump was aware of the outlines of this political ecosystem but said he was determine d to replace same old Washinglton with a new spirit. But he had no name for his new system nor had he thought it through in any systematic way. He was later to come face to face with it in a historic collision that left a political and physical carnage. By the end of his turbulent and chaotic first term,  America was a junk yard of its former self and no where near the threshold of a new republic.

    His first catastrophic tenure ended up enthroning  an American version of illiberal democracy. To a large extent, he came to embody the antithesis and corollary of classical American democracy. Mr. Donald Trump was stubbornly recalcitrant, unrepentantly rebellious and unrelentingly bullish in his affront of the best traditions of democracy. He constantly sought to bulldoze his views through Congress, adopted abuse and insult as his standard political language. He posited the demagogue and thug as the archetypal leader, a model from the authoritarian play book.

    In his choice of leadership models around the world, Mr. Trump consistently showed a clear preference and open admiration for the worst autocrats and dictators. His chosen models have been Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jiping of China, Kim Jung Un of North Korea, Viktor Orban of Hungary and Tayeb Erdogan of Turkey. Against these authoritarian models, he has excoriated the past leaders of his own country like Barrack Obama, George Bush Jr. and the Clintons. He cherished and admired the traditions and habits of dictators including reckless abuses of human rights. He openly admired elaborate parades and open displays of military power like those in Moscow’s Red Square and imperial France.

    Most leaders who crave a second shot at power usually show signs of some repentance or maturation in their intervening period outside power. Not for Donald Trump. It would instead seem that the last three years have only served to reveal, through the American judicial system, the real tragic essence of the identity of Donald J. Trump. He has faced investigations for storing classified official documents in the bathrooms of his Florida Maralago mansion. He has faced countless judicial indictments over his role in the January 6th iob invasion of the Capitol. He has been indicted for lying abut the net worth of is businesses. He has been variously indicred for abusines campaign funds  in payments for the services of porn artists and for defaming and harassing numerous women. His serial indictments for electoral offences in a number of states are on record just as some states supreme courts have ruled him out of the ballot in their states.  The vast majority of lawyers who staked their reoutatrion ad professional careers to defend or associate with Trump have ended up in jail themselves. Only Trump, courtesy of the elastic immunity of his office as a former President is still walking free but vastly injured and deformed. Yet, America’s rule of law provisions and strict judicial codes have not yet established anything that could possibly stop Donald Trump from standing in the November elections as the candidate of the Republic party.  The man remains fit to run for as long as he is not yet in prison uniform.

    Yet there is an undeniable level of populism that has trailed Donald Trump ever since his chaotic first tenure ended. For a president who was impeached twice by the House of Representatives and only saved by the Republican Senate majority, his political base remains strong. It is a base of the vast majority who propbably never went to college, work long days in factories, live mostly in rural America and are predominantly white, cocooned in the illusion that America was once the exclusive homeland of white middle America. They dream of a land with little immigrants, that abhors persons of colour and those who do not look like them. But that is an illusion, a myth spurned by Trump and his mobs of rought thugs and supremacist bands.

    In pursuit of his bigoted image of America, he has set up and inspired any number of white supremacist militias and street terror gangs. He has promoted any number of toxic conspiracy theories and pioneered countless divisive  loyalties. The Proud Boys, QAnon, Make America Great Again (MAGA) Brigade etc. In response, other groups like African Americans and Hispanics have set up self defense outfits and groups (Black Lives Matter etc), creating a very divided nation out of what used to be a multicultural and integrated  nation of diversity. Even in his Republican party, Trump has splintered the  GOP, alienated the mainstream Republic party elite and driven them to fringes of silence. The mainstream of the  party is now occupied by Donald Trump and his attack dogs and racist thugs.

    Trump’s belief in electoral democracy begins and ends with elections if they end up re-anointing him as ‘winner’. For him, ‘winning’ in a democracy is triumphing over opponents and vanquishing political “enemies”. This is why he stopped at no excess in meddling with the presidential elections of November 2020. He endorsed all manner of conspiracies, election meddling antics, and open attempts at rigging which led to the fiasco of an attempted ‘coup’ of the Capitol invasion and storming of January 6th 2021.

    What is remarkable about Donald Trump’s career to date and which has converted the next election into a virtual referendum is that he has hardly changed in his rhetoric, beliefs, defining warfare concept of power and overall  style. He has remained insolent, abusive, uncouth and thuggish as ever. More dangerously, Trump has remained unrepentant in his divisive views of the American nation. He wants to shut the borders, preside over the largest immigrant repatriation and deportation in American history. He has branded immigrants from Africa, Latin America and nearly everywhere else as toxic presences who are ‘poisoning the blood’ of his phantom pure idyllic America. The implicit racism, bigotry and decadent nationalism are right in your face.

    The implications of a relapse into Trumpism in the United States for the rest of the world are too stark and frightening to contemplate. Trump will throw Ukraine under the bus and celebrate the triumph of Putin’s “Mother” Russia even if only to annul the emergence of Zelensky as a global super star and hero. The Palestinians had better forget their lifelong dream of an independent homeland. He will return to North Korea with a more elaborate utopian computer animation of what the Hermit kingdom will look like in return for dining with America. The hope of African countries (“S…hole countries”) for greater economic leverage in a new world of free enterprise and democracy would end up in the thrash can. An endless trade war with China will rage and bring world trade to a standstill. Europe will pretty much be on its own on world affairs, deprived of America’s historic trans Atlantic solidarity and support with which Europe stopped Nazism, Fascism and communism on their tracks for the decades after World War II. NATO would be deprived of American money if only to strengthen Putin as a counterweight to European strength and expansion.

    China, Russia and their allies in the emergent axis of evil are waiting with optimism for the return of Vladimir Trump to the White House. That would give authoritarianism a major leverage in the the coming world contest between liberal democracy and authoritarianism.

    But the statistical reality both globally and in the United States is hugely in favour of the triumph of democracy and freedom. The inevitable defeat of Trump in America’s November elections will herald a setback for the advance of authoritarianism as a counter force to the global wave of democracy.

  • Where is the President? – By Chidi Amuta

    Where is the President? – By Chidi Amuta

    President Bola Tinubu has just jetted out to France on a ‘private visit’. He is not back in the country till sometime in the first week of February. We are not told when precisely to expect him back in the country. That is the much information that his official handlers have made available to us. Here we are, a nation of over 200 million people whose democratic mandate gave Mr. Tinubu a job with a four year tenure left guessing as to what manner of private endeavor would take our president away suddenly and for that long. No details of the friends or family he wishes to visit in France, or the nature of the “private” engagements scheduled for him. To the best of our knowledge, the president is not on vacation. If he decided to take a few days rest from his crowded schedule, that would be understandable and well in the tradition of busy executives. To the best of my knowledge, Tinubu has no kinship affiliations to France even though he has visited that country more than three times in the last one year. As far as we know from the information made available, he is not on medical vacation. He is just on a “private visit”. Period.

    As a Nigerian citizen, Mr. Tinubu is free to go wherever he chooses for whatever reasons that suits his fancy. That is his share of our democratic dividend. Democracy confers on him a basic individual freedom as indeed on all other citizens. But then Mr. Bola Tinubu is no ordinary citizen. He is today Nigeria’s president. To that extent, he is no longer an ordinary citizen. His office poses certain constraints on his basic freedom. He cannot just take off on a so-called “private visit” without reasonable  disclosure to the Nigerian public.

    He cannot freely go wherever he chooses and whenever and for whatever convenient reasons.  He has become a public asset, a prisoner of the power he consciously sought and captured. His every move is now a matter of public interest and concern. We must know where he goes for work, leisure or even family duties. We must know what pains or ails him. We must know if he has a toothache, running stomach or bad cold. If the president is indisposed, we must know. Ill health is not a crime in any human. When a leader in a democracy takes ill, it is a matter of public concern. Democracy demands and makes it mandatory for the people to be told what ails their leader. Every democracy implies an open society, a milieu of open full disclosure on all matters around the leader. Public accountability in a democracy is not just accounting for Naira and dollars in the treasury. It is more of a compelling sense of responsibility to a larger public testament and covenant. The code of open disclosure and accountability implicitly says to the public that voted (or did not vote for you), “I belong to you in every way. No hidden corners!”

    A more overarching consideration of this mythology of “private visit” comes down to Naira and kobo or dollars. When a president is on an undisclosed “private visit”, who picks the tally? Who pays the bills? When you are President, it is easy and convenient to casually scramble the presidential jet and instruct the pilot to fly you to anywhere you chose to go on ‘official’ business. But there is a question begging for answers on this Tinubu ‘private visit’. Should a president undertake a “private visit” at public expense? When a President is on a “private visit”,  should the public be insulated from knowledge about his circumstances and activities wherever he is beyond those issues that may be considered strictly private?

    Sometimes, Presidents and dignitaries could embark on frivolous things that were not intended to hurt their public role but which end up making the public uncomfortable or detracting from their lofty positions. In 1993, a newspaper report alleged that former President Bill Clinton held up the entire air traffic at Los Angeles Airport while he got a haircut from his celebrity hair stylist. No other planes could take off or land till the hairdo was done! American public opinion went wild. So much for private engagements and the public interest.

    On a more serious note, where dignitaries and leaders have to be absent from duty on health grounds, it is a different matter. Ill health is an inevitability of nature. No culture that I know about criminalizes ill health either in a leader or among common folk.  The dictates of democratic accountability and the imperatives of an open society require and indeed dictate that as much of  the health conditions of an indisposed leader as possible should be made public. A leader in a democracy holds a public trust and embodies the common sovereign will. The people are entitled to as much information about the health of a leader as possible. It is not so much for reasons of public empathy as of the democratic norm of openness and general accountability.

    There have been a few instances in recent times involving the health status of dignitaries and leaders. United State Defense Secretary General Lloyd Austen is still recovering from a prostate cancer procedure. While he was off duty after checking himself into a hospital for the procedure, all hell was let loose in American public discourse. It was held against him that he did not adequately disclosure his hospitalization both to his staff at the Pentagon and to the White House and therefore to the American public. It took a firefight public relations fire brigade operation to douse the flame even when it turned out that the information gap on General Austen’s hospital absence was more the result of his quiet and self -effacing nature. The Pentagon has since offered a full disclosure on his diagnosis, hospitalization and prognosis. Austen has since apologized.

    Similarly, it was announced a few days ago that England’s King Charles III would soon be hospitalized for a prostate related procedure. A few other members of the British Royal Family have recently been diagnosed with different conditions requiring serious medical intervention and these were brought to the knowledge of the open global audience. These disclosures have not in any way diminished the status or estimation of these dignitaries. It has only merely underlined their mortality and humanity.

    On 29th March 2023, Pope Francis was admitted to hospital in Rome with a respiratory condition associated with difficulties in breathing. For the limited period that he was receiving hospital attention, the Vatican and the hospital in Rome were issuing daily medical bulletins on the Pope’s progress. Of course congregants gathered daily in prayer both outside the hospital and at St. Peter’s Square to offer daily prayers for his quick recovery. He recovered and resumed his duties. But at least the world was kept abreast of his medical condition. It did not make him any less the Pope that he has remained.

    In 2004, my friend Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Liberation Organization was critically ill. He was rushed to a Paris hospital. For the over two weeks of his hospitalization, the hospital collaborated with the PLO to issue a daily medical bulletin on his health status. When he passed on after a battery of medical interventions, there was a detailed bulletin on the precise causes of his death.

    Nearer home, in 1985 soon after coming to power, President Ibrahim Babangida took ill with a relapse of his war time leg injury and nerve condition. He was rushed to the military hospital in Paris. Even under a military regime, Dodan Barracks issued a detailed statement disclosing the president’s health situation. The diagnosis was a nerve condition called “radiculopathy”. That strange word entered Nigeria’s public vocabulary. Even people at the bus stop and at Jankara market now knew something called radiculopathy! The people felt for the President and wished him quick recovery. There was no secrecy. In fact, all manner of Nigerian neuro surgeons entered the fray by proffering all manner of analyses, pocket book diagnoses and prognoses on the president’s condition and chances. Babangida recovered, returned home to the warm embrace of a people who did not even vote him into power.

    Fast forward to the tenure of Umaru Yar’dua. The president was in and out of hospital  for much of his short tenure. When he was in hospital in Saudi Arabia, Aso Rock made no secret of it. The nation was kept abreast of his condition. Every Nigerian knew that the ailing president had issues with his kidneys. Nigerians –both Moslems and Christians- prayed for him and wished him speedy recovery. That he died in office was an act of nature, not because his ailment and hospital destination were disclosed to the public.

    President Buhari came into office with a cocktail of pre-existing health issues. He was more secretive about his health situation mostly for reasons of personal idiosyncrasy. But when he had to proceed to England on medical vacation, there was considerable disclosure from Aso Rock. We were at least told that his doctors are in London and he was going there to seek medical attention. They may not have told us what exactly the president was suffering from, but they did not hide the fact that he was in hospital for weeks at a each stretch. In Buhari’s case, the battle shifted to the political terrain. Because of the extended durations of these ‘medical’ vacations, the issue shifted to whether he should transmit power to the Vice President  each time he had to travel out for medical attention. Politicians quickly converted London to a political Mecca as politicians trooped to London to visit the ailing President until the deluge of politicians became a health hazard.

    Between occasional adherence to the constitutional requirement and convenient oversights, Buhari and his handlers and cabal waded through the anxious moments. The mystery and secrecy about his precise health status still produced public confusion and diverse myths about his precise health condition. That is how come the fertile imagination of Nigerians produced the myth about a body double called “Jibril” from Sudan which emerged and gained wild currency among Nigerians mostly those in diaspora. Till he left office, a lot of ordinary Nigerians still believed that the real Buhari never returned from the London hospital. We were being ruled by “Jibril” of Sudan!

    As for Tinubu’s current absence, there is no indication from Aso Rock that our President is away on medical grounds. In the heat of the campaigns for the presidential elections, he had had cause to spend a few days in hospitals in both London and Paris. He was not president then but even then, his campaign directorate was sufficiently generous to occasionally admit that the APC presidential candidate needed rest and care away from the hustle of crowded campaign schedules.

    We are in a different moment now. Mr. Tinubu is president of Nigeria. We all wish him well as a compatriot. But his handlers are not doing him any good when they fail to reasonably disclose his true whereabouts and the precise reasons why he has to be off duty even for a day. In case his handlers do not know, Mr. Tinubu is as much their immediate boss as he is indeed the father and guardian of the Nigerian nation. We are, to that extent, entitled to know his whereabouts, the reasons for his absence as well as his general well being on a moment by moment basis.

    A presidential communication team that has become famous for serial gaffes and unpardonable errors of judgment and expression cannot be trusted to handle a sudden presidential disappearance such as the present one. The same people had recently said two credible public officers were ‘dismissed’ when they were simply relieved of their positions. The same  squad allowed the fallacy to gain ground that the government was in the process of relocating the federal capital to Lagos and leaving Abuja before they lazily woke up.

    On Tinubu’s current absence, all Nigerians feel entitled to is exact information as to the nature of the president’s’ “private visit”, its exact duration and the public cost implications of this “private visit”.

  • The kidnapped nation – By Chidi Amuta

    The kidnapped nation – By Chidi Amuta

    Two weeks ago, this column in a piece entitled “Neither at War Nor in Peace” lamented that Nigeria has entered a new normal. We are neither a nation at peace or in a declared war. Instead, we are perennially in a state of psychological and physical siege. Even in that state, our government continues to live in perennial denial, behaving as if they are presiding over a normal democratic state. That hybrid status puts us in a unique category among troubled nations of the world.

    Side by side with a count of Nigerians who have recently been killed, abducted, kidnapped or just missing, we have entered a new category of a nation with more hostages than those at war.  When Hamas militants and hotheads attacked Israel on 7th October, 2023, they took a little less than 250 hostages. That led Israel to the ongoing Israel-Hama war whose end we do not yet know. Today in Nigeria, kidnappers and bandits are holding any number of Nigerians as hostages as we speak. No one, not even the police, knows exactly Nigeria’s total hostage population, where exactly they are being held, who is holding them and for what reasons beyond ransom. We have hostages of bandits and terrorists dating back to the president Jonathan days and stretching to the present. When Buhari handed over to Presdient Tinubu, I amnot so sure he handed over the precise number of hostages held by different criminal groups allover the country!

    Those Nigerians kidnapped or abducted are hostages of an adversary without a face and without a name. Worse still, those that are killed by these criminals arevictims of a nameless evil. An enemy without a clear identity has entered the fray of Nigerian’s insecurity. They invade, fiercely assault, collect hostages, execute innocent people in cold blood and disappear into thin air. They then make contact with the families of their hostages to demand huge sums as ransom. The negotiations are mostly between the affected families and the bandits, hoodlums and terrorists all wearing interchangeable badges. The final onus is on government to take over from there. But the government seems to be in quandary. It does not know exactly the identity and character of whom to negotiate with in these many instances of serial and viral kidnapping. With each new instance of kidnapping or abduction, the faceless enemy shows a different colour. Government is comfortable in the thinking that it is dealing with crime control. I am not so sure.

    One question that has not been addressed is whether we are dealing with random bands of criminals and killers or a concerted force with a larger political purpose. The instances of kidnapping and abductions are many and widespread. They seem to wear differential regional badges. The ones in the North East tend to be inspired by ISWAP, Boko Haram and retail versions of Sahelian jihadism. In the North West, they tend to be sundry opportunistic criminals originally bred by residues of geo -ethnic  and religious animosities but now fired by poverty and economic desperation. Further south, in the mid section of the nation, the crisis of killings and kidnappings takes on a more sectarian and occupational character. Angry migrant herders, mostly Moslem,  against equally angry impoverished settlers farmers wo are presumably Christian.

    In the South East, what began as separatist anger has blossomed into an enterprise of criminality powered and controlled by political and business moguls. In the cities of the South West and Lagos, urban criminal gangs and cults carry out opportunistic attacks to kidnap for quick cash or in quest for victims for the more gruesome harvest of body parts to fuel a thriving trade in rituals for money.

    This national canvas of internal warfare has been with us for the better part of the last eight years. We have just entered a new phase in both the magnitude and geographical location of kidnapping and abductions. In the past one month, many incidents have occurred in and around the Abuja area. Families have been thrown into tragic mourning and anxiety as bandits have routinely abducted many members of families and executed some without even waiting for the requested ransom. In the Abuja kidnappings, the quantum of ransom sought has tended to be so huge as to befit the reputation of the capital city as the home of huge free cash.

    In one celebrated instance, a friend of an affected family said to be a minister in the immediate past Buhari government disclosed that he had to come up with a princely N50 million to free remaining members of a family even after the innocent girl, Nabeeha, was executed by her captors.  As families and concerned citizens try to grapple with existing cases, the criminals are at work with new exploits, new abductions and more dastardly killings especially in the Abuja area.

    While the ring of kidnappings closes more on Abuja, the time has come to ask whether there is a larger political purpose to the latest onslaught of bandits and criminals on Abuja. Yes, Abuja is attractive to all manner of criminal enterprises. Some see it as the centre of a criminal tradition of government in which there is a disproportionate relationship between work and reward. Politicians and their hangers on enter Abuja literally as destitutes only to emerge a few months down the road as mega billionaires. Some who came to Abuja by night bus have been known to fly home a few months later in their personal private jets. Such gold rush reputation can attract mega criminals who convert vulnerable innocent people into merchandise and hostages of greed in order to get a share of the city of gold. Beyond the economic ecosystem of Abuja, there remains a perennial political question mark about the city in the geo ethnic and sectarian calculus of those interested in Nigeria’s future. To this extent, I want to insist that the latest spate of kidnappings, abductions and killings in and around Abuja constitute a clear and urgent to Nigerian politicians.

    At the highpoint of the fundamentalist assault on Nigeria, Abuja was the scene of some of the most severe terrorist attacks. The United Nations offices, the Police Headquarters, churches in neighbouring areas, the facilities of Thisday Newspapers and sundry other places were hit by a gale of terrorist bombings. The terrorists took direct responsibility for the attacks. Therefore, the interest of forces seeking to destabilize Nigeria through attacks on Abuja has never been hidden.

    In the later parts of the Buhari administration, criminals and armed zealots became intensely interested in Abuja.  Followers of then imprisoned Shiite leader, El Zakzakky, carried their war for his freedom into Abuja city center. They engaged security forces in days of sporadic episodes of gunfire right in the centre of Abuja. Further down the line, a horde of ISWAP and Boko Haram foot soldiers invaded the precincts of an Abuja maximum security correctional facility and freed nearly every inmate including numerous dangerous terrorists. Still further the road of tragedy, fanatic terrorists mounted an assault against the centre of power, engaging soldiers of the presidential Guards Brigade in a fire fight that led to the death of a number of officers. At some point, schools and major institutions in the outskirts of the city had to be shut or evacuated for fear of terrorist invasion. So, Abuja has been a place of interest to a competing avalanche of criminals and armed factions with diverse interests and motives.

    But for the rest of us, the city is our national capital. It is the seat of the federal government. It is home to all major diplomatic missions in the country.  In response to the repeated instances of security threats on Abuja, nearly every major diplomatic mission in Abuja has issued frightening travel advisories  warning their citizens against unnecessary travels to nearly all parts of the country. In the latest one in later 2023, the United Nations warmed all its staff in Nigeria to avoid nearly every state in Nigeria for fear of being kidnapped or abducted. The Nigerian government itself has repeatedly tacitly admitted the state of universal siege around the country by agreeing that combined military and police security operations are ongoing in all of our 36 states.

    Ironically, until the last one week, the new Tinubu government had feigned indifference to the threat of massive insecurity in and around Abuja. Understandably, it is hard to pay attention to personal security when you are surrounded by armed goons of state security and elite wings of the armed forces. So, both the presidency and the FCT administration had feigned indifference until a week ago. While the spate of kidnappings, abductions and killings raged, Mr. Nyesom Wike, Federal Minister of the FCT, was to be found more in Port Harcourt, capital of his home state of Rivers where he is waging an endless war of political attrition against the state governor, Mr. Fubara, his now rebel surrogate. At last, both Mr. Wike and his boss the President have finally thought it necessary to summon meetings with security chiefs on the bad situation in Abuja. If tough talking and grand standing could end insecurity, we probably would not have any more kidnappers and bandits left in Nigeria by now.

    There is now an urgent need to interrogate the existing approach and machinery of internal security in the country. The existing system has not worked. Nothing indicates that Mr. Tinubu’s approach to the problem is in any way different from that of his predecessor. The popular myth was that Mr. Buhari as a former soldier with combat experience would end insecurity as he himself publicly undertook to do. But instead, after his eight years in office, the insecurity around Nigeria has graduated into a nightmare emergency situation. There is therefore little hope that Mr. Tinubu who literally does not know the difference between a rifle and a pistol will fare any better.

    He has appointed new service chiefs and decorated them with new ranks and many shiny medals. He has appointed a familiar ex -police man as NSA.  But the problem is not that of appointments and fancy titles. It is one of resources and strategy. The old strategy of throwing money and armed men in Hilux vans allover the palce has not quite worked.

    The government has recently bought a few helicopters from Turkey and the United States in addition to a consignment of Super Tucano jets from the United States. Many experts argue however that you do not wage a low intensity internal security war among your own citizens with the instruments of an all out war as if you were out to conquer an external adversary.  Unintended collateral casualties and human rights violations are bound to result, thereby deepening the internal bitterness among the populace and making resolution harder. We already have had quite a few of these, regrettably.

    Budgetting for an increase in defense and security spending in a season of galloping inflation is futile. It leaves less money for actual security spending. In addition, much has been said about leakages  and corruption in the administration of Nigeria’s security business. Our insecurity has been around for so long that it has bred an industry of its own corruption enterprise in a country where government is seen as a criminal enterprise.

    More importantly, in all the instances of kidnapping, abductions, terrorist attacks and other security breaches around the country,  the staging theatres have been the ungoverned spaces. Our vast forests, bushes, savannahs and farmlands have been the favourite hiding places for bandits and criminals. The criminals strike the governed and inhabited areas and take their hostage into the ungoverned spaces from where they demand and negotiate ransom. Admittedly, the manpower available to the armed and security forces is inadequate to man these ungoverned spaces.

    That creates the imperative of employing available technologies to ensure effective coverage of the entire national space. This calls for increased investment in areas like satellite surveillance and coverage of the entire Nigerian space including night vision scoping. The use of drones needs to be guided by proven know how to avoid the kind of ‘accident’ that led to avoidable loss of innocent lives in Kaduna State recently.

    In all of this, we cannot diminish the overwhelming place of social factors associated with poverty in the epidemic of new crime froms that we are witnessing. The ultimate long term situation is for government to ammeliarate the prevailing poverty while taking effective active security measures  to make crime and criminality  unattractive for citizens.