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"Nigerian soldiers, like most of the country’s workforce, are poorly paid. In contrast, many military officers earn handsome packages..."
27 betrayed soldiers
By Okey Ndibe
On April 27, the Nigerian state committed a grievous act of betrayal of 27 brave soldiers who simply stood up to demand their right.
That day, a military tribunal condemned the soldiers – among them, three women – to spend the rest of their lives in jail. It is nothing short of a scandalous miscarriage of justice that the court found the soldiers guilty of mutiny.
The scandal lies in the details of the case. The soldiers’ so-called crime was to protest the non-payment of allowances that accrued to them from their participation in United Nations peacekeeping operations in Liberia. Each of the protesting soldiers had earned as much as $25,000. Yet, long after the UN had remitted the funds, some corrupt military officers sat on the funds.
After months of seeking payment, the exasperated soldiers staged a mild protest in Akure, Ondo State. No doubt, they sought to draw attention to their plight – and to shame the military authorities into releasing their overdue entitlements.
Instead of doing the right thing by these long-suffering soldiers, the military brass ordered their arrest and prosecution. Their lawyer, Femi Falana, has said that they were detained for several months under abominable conditions. And then the tribunal compounded this bizarre injustice by herding these innocents off to life imprisonment.
This is one more instance – and a particularly unforgivable one – of a highly criminalized state presuming to be the custodian of law and order.
Let’s be clear: mutiny is a grave matter, with a potential for undermining the security of a state. But the convicted soldiers, properly understood, are not mutineers so much as they are victims of a state that rewards real criminals.
Nobody has denied that some corrupt officers illicitly withheld the soldiers’ stipends. In fact, in January the same tribunal had convicted five officers of stealing $68,000 belonging to the hapless soldiers. And what kind of punishment did the quick-fingered officers receive? Mere demotion. Not one of them lost his job. Not one was slammed with a life sentence.
Yet, the twenty-seven soldiers they disinherited and drove to the edge of desperation are found fit to languish in jail unto death. Falana has described the life sentences as “a charade that cannot stand.” Charade is too mild a word.
Nigerian students, labor groups, academics and other professional organizations ought to rise and protest the cruelty to these poor soldiers who’ve been betrayed by their officers, and are in danger of being made living corpses for asking to be paid what they had more than earned.
Nigerian soldiers, like most of the country’s workforce, are poorly paid. In contrast, many military officers earn handsome packages. Besides, many officers enjoy one form or other of patronage from politicians. There’s neither rhyme nor reason, then, for an officer to steal a soldier’s allowance.
Yet, for years Nigerian soldiers drafted to peacekeeping tasks whispered woeful stories of officers who took huge slices of their payments, or even engaged in wholesale embezzlement.
Despite the appellation of “peacekeeping,” it’s no secret that these operations are highly hazardous. Soldiers whose job is to keep the peace are often shot at. Sometimes, they are sitting ducks, targeted by the armed groups they try to keep from armed engagement. Many Nigerian soldiers have lost their lives in such peacekeeping assignments as Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Congo. Many more have been maimed, condemned to carry for life scars that are grotesque reminders of the sacrifices they made to hold hell at bay for besieged civilian populations in such addresses as Bosnia, Rwanda and Liberia.
The least a nation owes these men and women who risk life and limbs is to ensure that they are paid their due at the completion of their assignments. In the lawless space that’s Nigeria, where greed is boundless, this simple expectation is often too much to ask.
What are soldiers to do when a few of their rogue officers decide to pocket their peacekeeping allowances? Crawl into their barrack cocoons and become mute victims? Fall to their knees, raise hands to heaven, and leave the case in God’s hands? Should they pen petitions to politicians in Abuja who all too often are too busy chasing after lucre to pause and listen to anybody’s entreaties?
This is a portrait of the predicament these soldiers had to deal with. They were aware of past instances when grubby officers made away with soldiers’ peacekeeping allowances. They knew that Nigeria is a space where crime pays, provided the criminal has the preferment of rank or access to the powers-that-be.
They made a decision – absolutely sensible in the circumstances – to dramatize their woes. They deserve apologies from the officers who stole from them. Should these men and women be made to spend even a day in jail, the Nigerian state would have made another investment in its demise.
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"A president worthy of the name would have recognized the grave danger of Bankole’s perverse speech. He would have immediately stepped forward, asked for the microphone, and publicly rebuked the speaker for telling the world that the PDP’s idea of an election was to stage a coup d’etat against the wishes of the electorate..."
Ekiti and rumors of electoral reform
by Okey Ndibe
A few weeks ago – April 10, to be exact – I wrote on this page that the then forthcoming electoral debacle in Ekiti State foretold the sham that will take the place of the general elections of 2011. In the opening paragraph of a column titled “Ekiti as a preview of 2011,” I warned: “Those who persist in seeing Umaru Musa Yar'Adua as a democrat at heart had better pay attention to the macabre show the man took to Ekiti State.” Yar’Adua, I continued, “comes across as a man who wants power at all cost and for its own sake.”
I wrote those words in the context of Yar’Adua’s bizarre campaign stump in the hotly contested state. First, the resident of Aso Rock manufactured alleged achievements for Mr. Segun Oni, the party’s governorship candidate and impostor who was justly removed by an appellate court. Then he stood by, a confounded and tragic figure, as Speaker Dimeji Bankole tried to galvanize a smattering of party faithful with a fully treasonous campaign speech.
Dimeji told his audience that the PDP had pocketed Ekiti in the elections of April 2007 with the use of police power. A speaker who habitually misspeaks, Bankole then reminded his listeners that their (ruling) party boasts the “commander-in-chief” of the Nigerian Armed Forces. Not one to settle for a coded message, Bankole was not shy to spell out what he meant. This time around, he assured, the party would deploy the intimidating force of the military to capture Ekiti.
A president worthy of the name would have recognized the grave danger of Bankole’s perverse speech. He would have immediately stepped forward, asked for the microphone, and publicly rebuked the speaker for telling the world that the PDP’s idea of an election was to stage a coup d’etat against the wishes of the electorate. Yar’Adua glumly listened to statements that amounted to a threat to subvert democratic ideals.
If Bankole’s martial rhetoric was disturbing, things got even more ludicrous before the April 25 date of the rerun polls. Next and a few Nigerian websites posted the taped voice of Governor Olagunsoye Oyinlola of Osun State doing his treasonous best to rally PDP partisans. Oyinlola, a former military officer, is heard rehearsing an armed strategy to intimidate and suppress opposition sympathizers. He pledges to equip PDP operatives with military uniforms and weapons to enable them to “capture” Ekiti.
In a country where the rule of law is more than a cynical fad, Oyinlola’s taped plan to sabotage democracy would have elicited universal condemnation. The man would have been flushed out of his gubernatorial seat and led away in handcuffs, a disgraced figure.
Not in Yar’Adua’s Nigeria. Oyinlola remains in the office he has tainted by his odoriferous speech, among other unbecoming acts.
It’s painful to gloat that one’s dire prediction about Ekiti and 2011 is being vindicated. Yet, when a character like former President Olusegun Obasanjo takes to mocking the man he imposed as Nigeria’s sleeper-in-chief, Nigerians had better take notice. It’s a sign that things are truly bleak.
Reporters recently asked Obasanjo to weigh in on Umaru Yar’Adua’s avowed reform of Nigeria’s electoral laws. The former president blithely retorted that he wasn’t aware that any polling reforms were in the offing.
In its terseness and wicked indirection, the response was typical Obasanjo. Of course, the former president is smarting from a sharp decline in his fortunes within the ruling party. At a recent gathering in Abuja that it styled a convention, the ruling party pretty much whittled down Obasanjo’s powers.
It was only three years ago that the PDP tagged Obasanjo “father of modern Nigeria.” The same party seems on a mission to deflate the expired emperor’s ego. Its convention stripped Obasanjo of his dream to hold a monopoly on the chairmanship of the party’s board of trustees unto death.
Increasingly vilified, even ostracized, by many of the men and women he smuggled into power at various levels, Obasanjo’s legendary vindictiveness appears aroused. His revenge? To tell the truth – at least on occasion – about the bunch he hoisted into illegitimate power.
Some tell the truth as a way to set themselves, and others, free. Not Obasanjo. For him, it seems, the motivation for speaking truth is merely to get even. However untoward his motivation, what matters is that we now have Obasanjo’s confession that Yar’Adua’s vaunted electoral reform is a yarn, another jiggery pokery.
Nobody who’s watched the sordid events in Ekiti can retain confidence in Yar’Adua, the PDP or the national electoral commission to husband democratic ideals. Even as the drama in Ekiti fostered fears of a military putsch, the PDP hunkered down, determined to snatch the state by unfair and foul means. Maurice Iwu, a man with neither an ounce of integrity nor sense of shame, worked feverishly behind the scenes to gratify the ruling party’s plot. What was this “independent electoral umpire” doing at a meeting that featured such PDP stalwarts as Yar’Adua, Bankole Dimeji and David Mark, but with not a single participant from the opposing AC?
Ekiti was Yar’Adua’s opportunity to silence skeptics by demonstrating his seriousness about ethical and electoral reforms. Alas, the man (and his party as well as INEC) chose to reveal the fake product they’ve been marketing as electoral reforms.
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"Many Nigerians already suspect that their judiciary teems with too many men and women with a profound deficit of shame and integrity..."
Andy Uba and an indulgent Supreme Court
by Okey Ndibe
Hand it to Andy Uba, a domestic aide to former President Olusegun Obasanjo: the man has a certain viral persistence, a refusal to take no for an answer.
On June 14, 2007, the Supreme Court removed Uba from his ill-gotten perch as governor of Anambra. In a ruling that drew nation-wide cheer, the court roundly rebuked the electoral commission for conducting gubernatorial elections in Anambra when the tenure of incumbent Governor Peter Obi had not ended.
Allergic to being told no, Uba hired a new set of lawyers and approached the same court. He asked a seven-member panel of the nation’s high court to recant its earlier judgment and return him as governor in Awka. In another unanimous verdict, the justices told him, hell no.
Emerging from the court, Uba’s lawyers vowed that the last had not been heard. They soon made good on this improbable boast by asking a court of appeal to find that Uba’s so-called mandate was secured in a legitimate election. In one of the bizarre twists in the country’s recent judicial history, the appellate justices gave a muddled judgment that Uba’s camp then held aloft as proof that their man was “a governor-in-waiting.” In the face of fierce legal criticism, the panel that allegedly gave that verdict beat an untidy retreat.
Even so, Uba was far from done. Late last year, he set out on another adventure to the Supreme Court. His singular wish list is for a court that twice turned him back to contrive some legal contortions to impose him as governor of Anambra.
In entertaining this case at all, the Supreme Court is in danger of leaving its reputation in tatters. Mr. Uba seems to have served notice that he plans to harangue the court until he gets an indulgent panel willing to do his bidding.
Many Nigerians already suspect that their judiciary teems with too many men and women with a profound deficit of shame and integrity. The nation’s highest court cannot afford to leave the impression that its hallowed chambers are permanently open to the fancies of any client with a huge treasury of inexplicable wealth.
It’s doubtful that Mr. Uba’s persistent wheedling has anything to do with respect for the rule of law. He comes across, instead, as a cynical man determined to make relays to the high court until he’s handed a panel of sympathetic justices. It’s an ill-disguised belief in the rule of money.
Mr. Uba’s judicial round-tripping should trouble any Nigerian who wishes to see the enthronement of a fiercely independent judiciary, at once incorruptible and committed to the highest ideals of judicial ethics.
Of course, whenever justice is transparently miscarried, it’s the duty of a court to redress it. But in the case of Uba, it is hard to picture how he’s been ill served by the apex court. Uba’s latest judicial adventure has everything to do with political calculations. One of the closest confidantes of Obasanjo, Uba was eased into place as the PDP’s governorship candidate. He was subsequently declared “winner” of a gubernatorial contest that Human Rights Watch categorized as illustrative of electoral fraud. Here’s how ludicrous Uba’s so-called election was: the electoral commission initially awarded him more votes than there were registered voters in the state.
When the Supreme Court removed Uba on June 14, 2007 – a mere two weeks after he usurped office – their decision elicited widespread celebration. A man rang me from Kaduna to say that it was not just a victory for the people of Anambra but a triumph for all Nigerians.
There was good reason for the celebratory air. Uba epitomizes the worst tendencies in many Nigerians who occupy elective or appointive office. A man who has not been able to authenticate that he earned a first academic degree, Uba’s campaign website misled people with the information that he holds a PhD. When The News, a Nigerian weekly magazine, published a cover on his academic fraud, virtually the publication’s entire print mysteriously disappeared.
Prior to joining Obasanjo’s administration, Uba ran a middling “healthcare” services operation in California. Yet, in 2004 U.S. officials seized cash of $170,000 that Uba had taken into New York City. The cash, concealed from U.S. authorities, was then handed over to a Loretta Mabinton. She used most of it to buy a Mercedes Benz car for Uba, and $45,000 to buy equipment for Obasanjo’s farm in Otta.
Confronted on the smuggled funds, Obasanjo blithely stated that Uba was a wealthy man prior to working for the presidency. It was – let’s be blunt – a blatant lie.
There’s little question that Uba is in possession of a stupendous amount of cash, the source of it a question that Nigerians must raise. It’s a mark of the monumental dysfunction that’s Nigeria that this man is in court asking to be crowned governor rather than in the dock explaining how he accumulated all that wealth.
Uba’s imposition on Anambra would amount to a war on the people’s will – to say nothing of the taint on the name of justice.
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