skip to main |
skip to sidebar
"But Al Jazeera’s videos show soldiers and police sweeping through charred and still smoldering cities to arbitrarily round up targets. These “suspects,” some of them deformed men on crutches, were then ordered to lie face down and shot at close range. "
"Murder most foul"
by Okey Ndibe
Horror, that’s the word that came to mind as I watched Al Jazeera’s video documentation of Nigerian soldiers and police executing innocent civilians last year in the name of fighting Boko Haram. Last July and August, hundreds of Nigerians died in a fierce battle between the militant group, which denounced all western influences as corrupting, and Nigerian government forces. But Al Jazeera’s videos show soldiers and police sweeping through charred and still smoldering cities to arbitrarily round up targets. These “suspects,” some of them deformed men on crutches, were then ordered to lie face down and shot at close range.
Those who made a gruesome sport of killing their fellows should be identified and prosecuted. Any nation that would treat its citizens as if they were lower than cattle sows the seeds of its own destruction. Those who excuse the bestial extra-judicial execution on the grounds that the victims were rabid Boko Haram attack dogs are off the mark. For one, the soldiers and police had no way of proving who was Boko Haram or who wasn’t. Besides, a state that authorizes summary execution has cast itself as a jungle, not a community of humans.
At any rate, if Nigeria must adopt executions without trial, why not start with the politicians whose mindless looting creates hopelessness and fertilizes groups like Boko Haram?
Read full post
"There’s no question that many – I dare say, most – of those who answer to the name of leader in Africa are in the mold that Frantz Fanon categorizes as “contemptible fools.” But there’s also, we must not forget, the issue of the hypocrisy of the world’s economic powers – the nations whose banks facilitate the thefts in Africa, and keep the proceeds. "
"The art of throwing money away"
by Okey Ndibe (okeyndibe@gmail.com)
It’s always deeply painful when Africa achieves another distinction in the wrong sector. This time, it’s in the foolish art of throwing money away!
Last month, the Global Financial Integrity, a Washington-based research group, released a sobering report on the illicit outflow of cash from African nations. The report concluded that, in the four decades between 1970 and 2008, African nations lost $854 billion through illegal transfers of funds. And GFI suggests that it’s a conservative estimate. Actual outflows, the report states, may be as high as $1.8 trillion.
In case Nigerians are wondering – yes, our country (once again) topped the list. With $240.7 billion, Nigeria clinched a claim as the outstanding star in the league of exporters of cash. Nigeria’s closest competitor, Egypt, lost $131.3 billion. The other countries in the top five are South Africa ($76.4 billion), Morocco ($41 billion), and Algeria ($35.1 billion).
There’s little surprise about Nigeria’s stellar showing in this dubious league. It’s estimated, after all, that Sani Abacha alone pocketed more than $3 billion. Last year, a Swiss judge ordered the freezing of $350 million in assets “belonging” to Abba Abacha, one of the dictator’s sons.
The picture is dismal. Much of these stolen funds end up in European, Asian, and North American banks. And then comes the paradox: the same public officials responsible for frittering away the continent’s resources are quick to haunt the capitals of Europe and North America, bowl in hand, to beg – shamelessly! – for alms.
The GFI report illustrates the anomaly: what Africa has exported in illicit cash is at least double the official development aid that’s come to the continent. That’s one way of saying – forgive the cliché – penny wise, pound-foolish. Here’s the diagram of events. First, our rulers wire good money to the so-called big donor nations. Then they travel to the Western capitals to debase themselves begging for handouts. Often, they return, like triumphant fools, clutching the pittance they received – at best, half of the loot they “donated” to Western banks. And then they promptly privatize much of the aid – and wire it back to their Western sponsors.
What’s worse, foreign aid – unlike the cool cash we idiotically transfer – comes with strings attached. Often, it’s aid only in name, but in reality part of the scheme by donors to further impoverish African peoples. All too frequently, foreign aid is abracadabra, pure and simple. It’s often packaged as “technical” assistance that destitute African nations are coaxed to pay for – often at hideously inflated prices.
It’s a financial magician’s dream trick. One day, no questions asked, African rulers enrich the banks and economies of the West with looted funds. The next day, these same rulers show up in Western capitals on perennial begging missions. They look like miscast mendicants in their designer suits and handcrafted pairs of shoes. They mope, listening – with little or no sense of shame or irony – to Western “donors” give them long, stiff and humiliating lectures on the virtues of wise investment, sound economic planning, and financial discipline.
I invoke the words of Ayi Kwei Armah: Why are we so blest?
There’s no question that many – I dare say, most – of those who answer to the name of leader in Africa are in the mold that Frantz Fanon categorizes as “contemptible fools.” But there’s also, we must not forget, the issue of the hypocrisy of the world’s economic powers – the nations whose banks facilitate the thefts in Africa, and keep the proceeds. When the right crop of African leaders reclaim their nations from the depraved hands of those who steal for a living, then the issue of the West’s role in impoverishing Africa must be raised.
It would be comforting if we could say that the GFI report focused on a habit that African leaders have since been dropped. Sadly, that’s far from being the case.
Take Nigeria. Despite some modest gains made over the last eleven years against the scourge of corruption and money laundering, the culture of stealing public funds remains alive.
Last week, the president of the Nigerian Bar Association reminded the world that his country has not lifted a finger about the Halliburton bribe scandal. This, despite the fact that there’s no doubt that officials of Halliburton handed hefty bribes to high-ranking Nigerian public officials. And despite the fact that Mr. Umaru Yar’Adua promised that he would not shield any implicated officials, and made a “show” of setting up an investigation panel. Chances are that, had Yar’Adua not been hobbled by sickness, he would have bestowed national honors on some of the Nigerian recipients of Halliburton bribes.
Nigerians pay a steep price for a culture that garlands corrupt people with pompous chieftaincy titles and hollow honors. That price is that corruption has become as familiar as staple food; the stealing of public funds is so normalized, in fact, that those who reject the temptation to steal are often viewed as fools – or worse.
Nigerian officials are specialists in squandermania, the disease of throwing money away. Nigerians throw away money on power generators, neglecting to fix their country’s power supply. Too many government officials splash huge fortunes on high-priced cars, but won’t invest in road construction and maintenance. They dole out stupendous sums to foreign hospitals and doctors, but won’t provide a healthcare system worthy of human beings for their hapless fellows who are stuck in Nigeria.
Today, Nigerians are riveted by the scandal of the N64 billion-runway at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in Abuja. How did Julius Berger win a contract to construct a runway whose price tag surpasses the cost of building an entire airport? Nigeria has a Bureau of Public Procurement whose statutory job includes the carrying out of due diligence before signing off on contracts. Did the officials of that bureau go to sleep when it came time to vet this contract? How in the world did the bureau give a thumbs-up to a project whose cost – from all appearances – is so scandalously inflated?
The aviation committee of the House of Representatives has been holding hearings, but I doubt that its members are less puzzled than the rest of us. Numerous officials have appeared before the committee in Abuja, but none has given a coherent explanation. The runway saga is, I fear, one of those bizarre narratives that point up how Nigeria’s cash takes wings and flies away to foreign vaults.
Here’s a textbook case deserving Nigerians’ attention. The bar association, labor unions, student activists, the media and other civic organizations ought to use this case to advance the cause of accountability in Nigeria. Acting President Goodluck Jonathan ought to ask for briefing on this scandal. At the very least, he should send away the leadership of the Bureau of Public Procurement and demand that Julius Berger renegotiate the contract.
GFI’s director, Raymond Baker, stated that stemming the “devastating outflow of much-needed capital is essential to achieving economic development and poverty alleviation goals in these [African] countries.” It’s questionable that Mr. Jonathan has the will to play spoiler to those who profit by throwing away Nigeria’s cash. But he has a rare opportunity to rise above the limitations of his political career, and the forces that contend for his loyalty. If he acts to freeze the runway contract until the disturbing questions are resolved, and to dismiss procurement officials who seem to doze while Nigeria is being fleeced, he’d send a signal that the era of irresponsible fiddling with public funds is nearing the end of its run.
Read full post
"Atiku, Ojukwu, Iwu, and the culture of expediency"
By Okey Ndibe
The time has never been riper for the emergence of a formidable opposition force to dislodge the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) from power. Yet, there are disturbing signs, once again, that Nigeria’s opposition parties are looking for every means or opportunity to surrender to the PDP – or to sell their prospects for a mess of porridge.
Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar is, from several accounts, on the cusp of returning to the PDP. That would not be so bad, for Atiku’s natural habitat is within the moral jungle of the PDP.
Atiku was part of an initiative to form a so-called “mega party.” With his looming exit, that bad idea appears decidedly stillborn. For one, the potential constituents of the opposition behemoth never seemed able to offer a comprehensive critique of the PDP. Nor did they seek to define their vision, or to tell Nigerians where they intend to take the country if given power, and how.
There’s also the fact that many of the ambivalent founders of the “mega party” were once, like Atiku, in the sanctuary of the PDP. Like him, many of them still belong, in mind and spirit, to the PDP.
Atiku represents the kind of unprincipled, me-first-and-last politics that has kept Nigeria in the doldrums. Last Sunday, Thisday quoted one of Atiku’s lieutenants as saying that “even with the mega party being formed, even if the electoral reforms are concluded on time before the next elections, it will be difficult to oust PDP from power. That is a fact. I say this with all sense of responsibility, because with their rigging machines all out, with people like Iwu still in office, and with all the money they have, I think we will have a battle on our hands.”
So what does Atiku do? Jump ship – and enlist with those determined to employ their rigging machines to sabotage Nigeria’s democracy. Perhaps, Atiku is at home precisely in that company.
The original impulse to form a mega opposition party represented a fundamental misconception. The PDP was deemed a party – to adapt a Nigerian saying – of “no shaking.” Consequently, the party’s opponents concluded that they must create an equally gargantuan force in order to have a shot at wresting power.
To be true, the PDP is a giant, but one whose feet are made of clay. There’s no denying that the PDP’s roster boasts the largest collection of the kind of men and women known in Nigeria as “stakeholders” or venerated as “prominent Nigerians,” but who, in reality, are criminal raiders of the public treasury.
The PDP may be the most bloated “sumo” party in the country, but it’s far from strong in real terms. Its chairman, Vincent Ogbulafor, has served notice that the party plans to rule (translate that word as “ruin”) Nigeria for sixty years. It’s the party’s plan, and one not shared by Nigerians. In order to realize the plan, the party must thwart the democratic will of the Nigerian people through a logistics called electoral fraud.
Since 1999, the PDP has established itself as a master rigger. It goes without saying – but we’ll say it – that a party in power resorts to rigging principally because it recognizes that there’s no clean way to win.
My point, then, is that it does not require a mega party to rout the PDP in an election. No, it takes two things. One is a party with disciplined organization, a commitment to a set of laudable socio-economic goals, and the focused ability to communicate its message to the Nigerian people. The other is a culture of credible elections, a transparent polling system that, above all, demonstrates that the wishes of the electorate are paramount.
Elections are as credible as the system that produces them, and the men and women who run that system.
The wishy-washy effort to form a mega party rests on diseased reasoning. It’s sad to see those who want to unseat the PDP waste their energy trying to acquire the ruling party’s pathologies. What they should do – assuming that they’re up to it – is to push the case for sound electoral reform and the appointment of men and women of unimpeachable moral mettle to oversee the country’s elections. Once these are in place, the opposition should then offer Nigerians a clear-eyed dissection of how the PDP has mortgaged, and still pawns off, Nigeria’s best interests.
(okeyndibe@gmail.com)
Read full post
"My intervention earned the officers’ ire. They decreed that I alight from the bus. When my two colleagues tried to reason with the officers, they, too, were dragged down..."
">"Police brutality and Onovo’s challenge "
by Okey Ndibe (okeyndibe@gmail.com)
When Nigerians think about the disappointments of their perpetually infantile nation, they often focus narrowly on rigged elections and the abuses of their gluttonous public officials. These are, without question, serious symptoms of dysfunction.
Even so, I fear that we neglect to zero in on the way that police (and often military) brutality serves to remind Nigerians that they are serfs in their own country.
Any Nigerian who has had an unwelcome encounter with the Nigerian police – and that, I suspect, is most of us – can tell you that the experience is akin to being besieged by a horde of rabid hyena.
I know. More than twenty years ago, I was arrested in Onitsha (along with two of my journalist friends) just because we stood up for a young man who was slapped by a police officer – and then ordered to sit down on the wet ground (it had rained heavily). What was the young man’s offense?
We were all in the same bus (headed for Awka) when the police flagged it down and asked the driver to come down. The young man leaned out of the window and beckoned to one of the officers. “My father died,” he explained to the officers, “and I’m coming from Kano to go and make arrangements for his burial.” He then begged the officer to let us go.
“Shut up!” barked the officer, smacking him on the face.
“Why do you have to slap me?” the passenger asked.
“You want to know why?” the officer fumed. “Oya, come down!” As soon as the man got down, the officer pointed to the wet earth. “Quick, quick, sit down!” the officer instructed.
Outraged by this senseless humiliation of an innocent citizen, I asked the passenger not to sit in the wetness.
My intervention earned the officers’ ire. They decreed that I alight from the bus. When my two colleagues tried to reason with the officers, they, too, were dragged down. One of my colleagues began to scribble the name of one of the officers on a piece of paper. Another officer ran from behind and, with the butt of his gun, dealt a blow at my colleague’s hand, knocking down his pen and paper. With his boot, the officer then smashed both the pen and paper into the soggy earth.
At this point, the officers were so infuriated that they ordered other passengers in the vehicle to get down and look for other buses. Then they herded my two colleagues, the smacked man and me onto the bus. Three officers hopped in as well, and the driver was commanded to turn around and head for a police camp in a remote part of Onitsha. As we drove there, the three officers cursed and threatened us. He promised that, once at their camp, we’d be so beaten up that our mothers would not recognize us.
In the end, we had a lucky – “narrow” – escape. We were marched before a senior officer who sat on a stump in the early afternoon heat, his eyes bloodshot, attending to a large bottle of Guinness Stout. Our captors then proceeded to tell him a series of lies. They said they’d stopped our vehicle for a simple routine check, but that we then boasted that we were journalists, that we knew all the big men in the country, and that no police officer dared question our driver.
“Bastards!” screamed the senior officer, fixing his fiery eyes on us. But the officer must have sensed a calm in us, and so asked us to tell our own side of things. After we did, he asked if we were really journalists. We produced our ID cards – we were all members of the editorial board of National Concord. Shaken, the senior officer scolded his subordinates. He told them that we could write all of them, himself included, out of their jobs. He apologized to us, asked our hitherto exuberant arresters to apologize, and sent us on our way.
For us, it was an ambivalent moment. What if we were not journalists? What if we had not been “arraigned” before an officer who had a fear of the written word?
Since then, I’ve had many more run-ins with the police. In 2002, five police officers held me up at Oshodi for close to two hours. I was driving to a meeting at a newspaper house where I then wrote a weekly column – and ran into a terrible traffic snag at Oshodi. I was already on edge, trying to navigate between hordes of pedestrians crossing the highway, a colony of “okada” motorcyclists who respect no traffic rules, and other motorists when, suddenly, an officer stepped in front of my car and demanded that I pull up to the curb. After inspecting the documents of the Honda, he then told me he suspected the car was stolen. The car belonged to my father-in-law, and I knew he was not a thief. But the officer was not impressed. He accused me of being a thief – “since you’re operating a stolen vehicle.”
I asked to be taken to a police station if he believed I’d stolen the car. Instead of doing so, he and his four colleagues took turns painting the most dreadful portrait of what would happen to me if they took me to the station. I remained unrepentant: “If you think I stole this car,” I told them, “you have a duty to arrest me and take me to your station.”
The officers had a different game and outcome in mind. After detaining me at Oshodi for an hour and forty minutes, the most senior officer made his proposal. “Oya,” he said to me, “give us some money and go.” In a voice that tried to belie my anger, I told him that I would not part with a kobo of my money. “You accuse me of stealing a car, and you think I’d reward you with a bribe?”
The officer looked me up and down, his contempt raw and on the surface. Turning to his colleagues, he pointed to his head and said in a mocking tone, “Dis one dey craze. Make we leave am.”
Many – perhaps, most – other Nigerians have their own versions of horror stories with rogue police officers.
A headline in a Next edition of April 30 read: “Policemen brutalize Tribune reporter in Ondo”. The report is harrowing: “The Ondo State correspondent of the Nigerian Tribune, Yinka Oladoyinbo was Wednesday evening assaulted by men of the Okuta Elerinla Police Station, Akure, Ondo State, who thoroughly beat him up and detained him at the police station for four hours.” The fifteen officers who took part in the operation “dragged Mr. Oladoyinbo from his car and forcefully handcuffed him.” They also “dragged [him] on the floor before he was bundled into a police Hilux van.”
The Next report disclosed that the policemen “acted in a commando manner.” As they mauled the reporter, the officers “threatened to shoot any person who intervened”. Why was this citizen subjected to vigilante-like beating? The policemen, Next reported, “claimed that their Station Officer, Ayodeji Oyeyemi, was molested in the area.”
Current police Inspector General Ogbonna Onovo must serve notice to his subordinates that their job specification does not include assaulting Nigerian citizens at will. He should dismiss the officers who took part in beating Mr. Oladoyinbo.
Nigerians are daily beset by criminals – corrupt government officials who grow fat on public funds, armed robbers and scam gurus. There’s a lot of work for a well-trained, professionally sound police force to do. Unfortunately, the Nigerian police have established a reputation for incompetence, for harassing law-abiding citizens whilst letting criminals thrive, and for sheer brutality.
Mr. Onovo should outline measures to weed trigger-happy men from the police, to make service conditions more attractive, and to radically retrain officers to give them a deep sense of what’s meant by law enforcement.
Read full post
"Who will execute condemned governors?"
by Okey Ndibe (okeyndibe@gmail.com)
Last week, whilst reading an essay and half-listening to the AIT’s news broadcast on my computer, I was so startled by an item in the broadcast that I dropped the essay and focused on the news. The startling news that compelled my attention was this: that, as a means of decongesting the prisons, Nigerian governors wanted to expedite the execution of condemned criminals.
I looked up in time to see Governor Theodore Orji of Abia speaking to reporters on the issue.
I wanted to write down Mr. Orji’s exact words, but couldn’t find a pen quickly enough. But the next day, the Tribune reported on the matter. In the words of the paper, “The National Economic Council (NEC), presided over by the Acting President, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, on Monday, resolved that all condemned criminals should be executed, as the government explored ways to decongest the nation’s prisons.” It continued: “Briefing State House correspondents on the decision of the council after the meeting, Governor Theodore Orji of Abia State revealed that the council was faced with the problem of those who had been condemned to death but were still kept in jail because the authorities had not mustered the courage to execute them. He said even though the state governors were not the ones to initiate the execution process, they were willing to obey the order by actually executing those found guilty of serious offences.”
Then the paper quoted the governor’s exact words: “The council was faced with the problem of those who committed capital offences and have been condemned to death, but are still living because perhaps the authorities have not mustered the courage to execute them and in considering that the governors were seen as not been very responsible for that, because the thing has to be initiated from the prison itself. It is when the recommendation comes to the governor that it can be implemented.” Mr. Orji then affirmed that “the governors are willing to obey this order by actually executing those who have been found guilty of crimes of murder, kidnapping and armed robbery, among others.”
The council, Governor Orji revealed, also “considered the people who are in detention.” He disclosed that “80 per cent of those who were in detention were awaiting trials and it was decided that efforts should be made to ensure that the prisons were decongested by looking into the cases of those people who are awaiting trials.” In a rare display of humane concern, the governor stated that “there is no basis for somebody who has not been convicted to be in prison for 10 years. So, the proper thing is to decongest the prison by looking at these cases and leaving them to go.”
Put quite simply, the governors’ prescription on executions struck me as crude, coarse and hypocritical. It amazed me that Nigerian governors would, without a sense of irony or shame, push for quickening the pace of executions of any criminals. For, truth be told, many serving and former governors as well as other government officials, are the nation’s biggest criminals. So, if governors must visit the subject of hastened executions, why didn’t they spend some time to create a protocol for executing those of their number who act as criminals-in-chief in their respective states?
Why not, indeed?
Two weeks ago, I commented on a sobering report by the Washington, DC-based Global Financial Integrity (GFI) on the phenomenon of illicit fund transfers by African leaders. The report revealed that African nations, led by Nigeria, illegally exported – and this was a conservative estimate – close to one trillion dollars between 1970 and 2008. Nigerians – those who are defined as “stakeholders” – led the way with $240.7 billion.
My question to Nigerian governors and other government officials: Who will execute you when you steal your people blind? Who will tie you to the stakes for exporting Nigeria’s cash to foreign banks and importing misery to your land? Pray, where’s your own executioner?
The timing of the governors’ statement on executions was intriguing. As I write, former Governor James Ibori of Delta is in hiding – perhaps in the deltaic creeks or even in a foreign country. Mr. Ibori is dead set against submitting himself to the EFCC. Ibori is once again being investigated for alleged acts of corruption and money laundering during the eight years he presided as governor.
How about the Halliburton bribe scandal that the Nigerian government appears determined to keep concealed? Several online and print media have reported that the names of four or five former presidents are on the list of Nigerians who took bribes to funnel contracts to Halliburton. Why didn’t the governors demand that the government prosecute these economic saboteurs and herd them off to jail for the rest of their lives – or execute them? Too many Nigerian public officials – presidents, governors, ministers, and local government councilors – are guilty of setting the tone of misery in their homeland. They gut the public treasury and cart away billions of dollars in looted funds to foreign banks. These official thieves create grave economic hopelessness, low wages, and serious unemployment. Their actions generate and fertilize such crimes as armed robbery and 419 scams.
That Nigeria has a prison congestion crisis is well known. Prisoners and detainees are kept in overcrowded prisons, whose conditions are fetid. There are, of course, many men and women who have been properly convicted. Sadly, there’s a scandal as well – that many detainees and convicts are innocent of any crimes. There are, simply, too many victims of a corrupt system tailored to perpetually incarcerate indigent suspects or to convict those who cannot afford to bribe law enforcement or to hire good lawyers.
Governor Orji and his fellow governors must know about this horrible fact of Nigeria’s penal system. They must know that many convicts, including those on death row, are absolutely innocent.
The answer to prison congestion, then, is not to go on a spree of execution. Instead, Nigeria should – in the short term – embark on an audit of its prison population to separate those who are there for provable crimes from those pulled in by corrupt police officers as well as serious lapses in the judicial system. In the long run, the nation should get serious about cracking down on the real villains – public officials, including governors – whose thieving expertise breeds other crimes. Until governors, serving and former, as well as other top officials are held to account for their unconscionable crimes, until their crimes are properly defined as capital in nature, Nigeria should not be in a hurry to start an execution bonanza.
Read full post
"Ibori, Peter Odili, and Justice Buba"
by Okey Ndibe (okeyndibe@gmail.com)
A week ago today, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission said it sought former Governor James Ibori (of Delta) to answer questions related to the alleged mismanagement of over N44 billion during his governorship tenure.
A day later, several newspapers and online forums reported that Justice I.N. Buba of the Federal High Court in Asaba had issued an injunction prohibiting Ibori’s arrest. In a report last Friday, NEXT stated that Buba had granted an “injunction restraining the EFCC and any other anti-crime agency ‘from arresting, harassing, intimidating, or attempting to arrest, harass, and/or intimidate the applicants (Mr. Ibori) in any manner whatsoever and howsoever.’”
My first reaction was one of incredulity. How could a judge – even if he earned his bench in Mars and practiced there – seek to permanently cuff the hands of law enforcement agents in order to detain them from doing their work? Would that not be a recipe for anarchy? Then my doubt gave way to recognition: Mr. Buba, I realized, had done it before.
He’s the man – lest we forget – who ordered that neither the EFCC nor other agents of the government should ever disturb the peace of Peter Odili, the former governor of Rivers State. At the time of this improbable reprieve, Odili – a medical doctor by training whose wife is a justice of the Court of Appeal – was the target of an ongoing investigation for corruption.
Today, Mr. Odili basks in the splendor of retirement in Abuja. A year ago or so, he treated himself to a lavish birthday party. His servile coterie flatters him with the title of “golden governor”; yet, Odili has been in no hurry to return and reside in the state where he allegedly gave surpassing leadership. In fact, since leaving office, he has been reluctant to make frequent trips to his home state.
Perhaps – just perhaps – Mr. Odili’s record as governor was clean, beyond reproach. Perhaps, he can easily account for every naira and asset that he owns. If so, why did he seek to be shielded from answering questions from investigators? Why did he go to extraordinary lengths to acquire immunity from investigation?
I am neither a lawyer nor a legal scholar, but my hunch is that few serious lawyers and students of the law would be proud of Justice Buba’s injunction prohibiting the questioning of Odili. The ruling, quite simply, doesn’t stand up to reason. It’s the kind of judgment that inspires cynical statements about the law and those who practice it.
This isn’t a case of Buba reviewing investigators’ evidence and concluding that it is too weak to warrant an ex-governor’s trial. Nor is it a case where a judge determined that investigators used illegal methods to incriminate an accused. No, Buba simply ruled that the very idea of investigating an ex-governor – one accused of fiddling with state funds – was not to be countenanced.
A nation that fosters the idea that some people are above the law cannot long hope to ward off the debilitating effect of pervasive lawlessness. Justice Buba’s gift of a permanent protective blanket to Odili represents such a grave threat to the notion of the rule of law that the Nigerian Bar Association should have strongly decried it. One wonders why Mrs. Waziri Farida, the current leader of the EFCC, did not retain lawyers to mount a vigorous appeal against Buba’s blunder of a verdict?
Taken to its logical conclusion, Buba’s verdict could only result in an absurdity. Imagine a situation where the leader of a feared armed robbery gang obtains a permanent injunction barring the police from ever arresting, detaining or questioning him – or other members of his group. What, then? Or where a serial rapist is granted a shield from interrogators. If an ex-governor, alleged to have betrayed the trust by corruptly enriching himself, must never be called to account, why should an accused armed robber or rapist be denied the same prerogatives?
Read full post
"Half of Obama’s heart may be Kenyan, but he is, when all is said and done, a quintessential American original. Given his cosmopolitan outlook, Obama is unquestionably more informed than his recent predecessors, about the poor places of the world, and more sympathetic to the plight of the world’s poor… "
"Goodluck Jonathan calls on Barack Obama"
By Okey Ndibe (okeyndibe@gmail.com)
Goodluck Jonathan gets his first strutting experience as “president” next week when he visits the U.S. at the invitation of President Barack Obama. How Jonathan handles himself, and the image he projects, will determine how seriously his American host takes him and the country he runs.
Umaru Yar’Adua set a poor tone when, during a visit at the White House in 2007, he acted like a child let loose in a candy shop. Eyes glimmering, he gushed to President George W. Bush that coming to America was the best day of his life.
It would serve Jonathan to avoid such callow exuberance. He better come properly briefed, and fully prepared, to articulate Nigeria’s take on the topics of discussion.
The two men, and their respective countries, have a large menu of bilateral issues to bite into. There are such issues as oil, terrorism, democracy, trade relations, anti-corruption measures, and Nigeria’s tense – and, it appears, worsening – sectarian divide.
It’s easy, in talking with Obama, to misread his ties to Africa – as the son of a Kenyan father – as an indication of deep sympathy for African causes. Half of Obama’s heart may be Kenyan, but he is, when all is said and done, a quintessential American original. Given his cosmopolitan outlook, Obama is unquestionably more informed than his recent predecessors, about the poor places of the world, and more sympathetic to the plight of the world’s poor.
Even so, his deepest loyalties lie – as they should – with America, and especially with America’s corporate giants, many of them with tentacles in Nigeria. It’s Jonathan’s place to recognize this fact, and to do his best to champion Nigeria’s economic interests as strongly as Obama pushes America’s interests.
Oil is at the center of America’s interest in Nigeria’s vicissitudes. With the rise of anti-American sentiments in the Middle East and Persian Gulf, U.S. authorities have made no secret of wishing to buy more of their crude oil from Nigeria.
That prospect means that the U.S. is attentive to Nigeria’s domestic stresses. There’s little doubt that Washington closely monitors both the deepening militarization of the oil-rich Niger Delta and the incessant outbreaks of religious violence in such places as Jos, Maiduguri, and Bauchi.
America is, in short, invested in easing the pressures that have caused sharp declines in Nigeria’s daily oil output. But Jonathan, who happens to hail from the Niger Delta, ought to convey to Obama that economic justice is key to reducing militancy. The Nigerian state and the oil companies have exploited the resources of the oil-producing delta.
It would be a mistake to imagine that Obama is less than enthusiastic about George Bush’s plan to establish an African Command. Should Obama try to sell the idea, Jonathan ought to unambiguously register Nigeria’s continuing opposition. At the very least, such a command would further undermine the sovereign will of African nations. At worst, it is likely to subordinate African nations, willy-nilly, to American control. Put bluntly, it is a recipe for re-colonization.
Read full post
The late Lamido and my father
By Okey Ndibe
With the death on March 13 of Aliyu Musdafa, the 11th Lamido of Adamawa, Nigeria strikes me as a slightly dimmer space. The death of this extraordinary Nigerian touched me – and my mother as well as four siblings – in a deeply personal way. We – on behalf of my late father – owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to this unusual traditional and religious leader. For us, his memory will remain a richly treasured and profoundly admirable one.
It was in Yola that my parents, Christopher Chidebe and Elizabeth Ofuchinyelu Ndibe, began their lives as a young couple. Father worked as a postal clerk in Jimeta, Yola, whilst Mother taught at Saint Theresa’s, a Catholic elementary school in the same town. Three of my four siblings as well as I were born in Yola.
My earliest memories are rooted in that quiescent town. We lived in a small brown-brick building called “Clerical Quarters,” a whispering distance from the post office where Father toiled. Looking back, I remember an oddly charmed life. There’s the tree in front of our flat under whose shade we played childhood games. I recall a bearded Hausa friend of my father’s. He was a lanky man who, in my recollection, always sported long flowing robes. Fascinated by his grey beard, I would perch on his lap whenever he came to visit and occupy myself by tugging at those lush, spongy tufts.
I remember, too, days when our father fetched his double-barrel gun and went out to the banks of River Benue to hunt. He would return, his hunting bag sagged with the weight of several guinea fowls. I recall days when our parents walked us to the courts where Father played tennis, his spare athlete’s body accentuated by his white sports outfit. Then there were sightseeing excursions to the banks of the river, or to clearings in the savanna where, with the sun irradiating the sky in the distance, bare-bodied young beat each other’s chests with sturdy sticks in a test of fitness for initiation into manhood.
It was for me – speaking from the perspective of a child – a beautiful, even magical time. Doubtless, my parents must have encountered some hard and harsh facts of daily life, but I was, like many children, oblivious to them. Life, for me, was idyllic.
Then things changed quickly. Snarls replaced the portraits of smiling faces. Anger usurped the bonhomie we were accustomed to. There were violent rumblings in streets where we once played with innocent abandon. Suddenly, our parents became wary when we wanted to play out in front of our flat. Gaiety disappeared from our lives. I was too young to put a name to my parents’ awkward silences and strange whispers, or the inexplicable absences of the adults and children who used to frequent our home – and who once welcomed us warmly to theirs. Unbeknown to me, the fetus of war was being nurtured in the womb of Nigeria’s history.
As the rumbles grew, my father decided that Mother and we, the children, should return to the safety of Amawbia – my paternal hometown which was then, in many ways, a strange address to me. I was then more a Yola boy; I had a richer grasp of Hausa than Igbo.
Despite our mother’s pleas, Father couldn’t flee Yola with the rest of his family. He was a conscientious employee, and the Federal Government had warned that civil servants who absconded would forfeit their posts. He stayed back in a Yola that convulsed with hate, a town where violence simmered, waiting for a trigger to explode and spew its murderous lava.
One day, Father and other postal workers – most of them Christians – were hard at work when a mob besieged them. Fear-stricken, he and his embattled colleagues barricaded themselves in. but their hiding place was far from an impregnable fortress. The mob, armed with cudgels, machetes, hammers and other tools, began to hack at the locked doors of the post office. It was a matter of time before the mob had the better of their quarry.
At the nick, when things looked gloomiest for my father and his cornered fellow workers, providence intervened on their side. Or, to be more accurate, the Lamido happened to be passing by. Spying the mob, he ordered his convoy to stop. After ascertaining the mob’s mission, the Lamido chastised and ordered them to disperse. He then conveyed my father and other postal clerks – men, mind you, who were mere moments away from certain death – to his palace. There, he gave them shelter and food for several weeks until the wave of orgiastic violence abated. He then arranged for Father and others to be boarded on the last ships to leave Yola for the south east.
When my father finally arrived in Amawbia, a scrawny shadow of his former vibrant self, it was as if he’d risen from the dead. Our mother had for months been in an inconsolable state, a woman paralyzed with the fear (verging on certainty) that some mindless merchants of death had killed her husband. Gunshots boomed and reverberated all over Amawbia as the town celebrated Father’s improbable return.
As I matured and learned this history, it struck me that – but for the Lamido’s vote for sanity and his insistence on the sanctity of life – my father would have been dead that distant afternoon in 1967. Instead, the Lamido – himself a relatively young man at the time – stepped into a grim situation and made a choice that was courageous and deeply heroic.
What moved the Lamido to be an agent of life and decency in a season ruled by death and unreason?
In July of 2008, I traveled to Yola to meet Mr. Musdafa in order to, one, express my family’s abiding gratitude for his uncommon act of kindness and, two, to satisfy my curiosity. It was my first visit to Yola since our flight in 1966 when I was hardly six. The town had changed significantly, but not so fundamentally as to nullify all my childhood memories.
I found the flat where we lived – and that tree in front of it, now twisted with age and much smaller than I remembered. Visiting the banks of the Benue where Father used to hunt, I saw kids diving in and out of the river and fishermen lounging in makeshift sheds, their boats abandoned in the languorous blaze of the noon heat. I visited Saint Theresa’s Church where our parents used to take us to mass. Inside, the old church was dim and derelict, a small forgotten structure now dominated by an imposing cathedral built nearby. I then went to see the now dilapidated school where Mother once taught.
The highlight was, of course, that meeting with the late Lamido. He ushered me into his sparse, clean reception room moments after my arrival was announced. He was a very tall, lean man with cropped white beards and lively eyes. There was not about him that fussy insistence on grandeur cultivated by many who occupy traditional offices. He seemed to project a moral gravitas much more than he exuded royal pomp. He was a man of quiet dignity whose carriage proclaimed the effortlessness of his deep humanity.
He insisted that he did nothing special in saving my father and other Christians. “As a true Muslim, I could not let allow the spilling of innocent blood.” He remembered that my parents had written a letter to thank him – but he was adamant that his action was a simple one.
A Nigeria beset by rising sectarian violence stands in need of citizens, Christians and Muslims, possessed of the late Lamido’s moral clarity, commitment to humanistic values, and deep nobility and conscience. My mother, siblings and I will ever treasure the colossus that was Alhaji Aliyu Musdafa who died a month shy of his 88th birthday. His legacy is rare, and will endure.
Read full post
"Nigeria chalked up another dubious record in infamy with the recent pre-dawn massacre of innocent men, women and children near Jos."
"Chronicle of innocence murdered"
by Okey Ndibe
Nigeria chalked up another dubious record in infamy with the recent pre-dawn massacre of innocent men, women and children near Jos. Reports of the bloodbath became a staple on radio and cable news broadcasts around the world, complete with macabre pictures of bloodied corpses, gaping mass graves, and disconsolate wailing women. These reports were also splashed on the front page of major international newspapers, including the New York Times.
Haiti and Chile are still reeling from the aftermath of devastating earthquakes, a natural disaster. Nigeria continues to be beset by man-manufactured crises and disasters.
In the age of the Internet, accounts and photos of the savage attack – which, in its use of machetes to dismember targets and bonfires to immolate many, came across as a mini version of the Rwandan genocide – seemed to be everywhere one turned. Scores of photos were forwarded to my e-mail addresses and posted to my facebook account.
Where I could, I deleted the photos. For there is, after all, something that’s deeply wounding to the psyche in peering at the monstrous work of the depraved and – one inescapably concluded – the deranged. To glimpse the pictures – and glimpse was all one managed, it being impossible to look – was to confront barbarity on a scale that caused one to shudder at the human capacity for evil.
I was not only appalled and horrified by the wantonness of the nocturnal attackers; my sensibility also recoiled from what, in my suspicion, is a growing appetite for gore and horror. This appetite is daily facilitated and fed by the Internet. Thanks to the communicative ease offered by the Internet, anybody can sit before a computer anywhere in the world and widely disseminate any information, complete with (often gory) photographs.
It’s true that, in many cases, these photographs serve to corroborate or lend dimensionality to written accounts of events. Yet, the raw, stark manner in which some grotesque photos are distributed leaves me worrying that we are in danger of losing our ability to flinch. I worry, besides, that our seeming fascination with gazing at extremely sickening photographs of callous acts – in this case, the Jos massacres – is bound to accelerate the erosion of our sense of the sacredness of human life.
That fear is real enough for me – which was why, once I heard and read about the latest episode of sectarian bloodbath in Jos, I tried my best not to linger over the pictures of victims. I’m not one to seek photographic authentication of dastardly acts. Yet, as I already hinted, it’s often impossible to avoid all the images thrown at you from multiple sources, known and unknown. In the case of the carnage in Jos, several well-meaning “facebook” friends must have thought they were doing me a favor by bombarding me with the horrific images. In order to delete them, one had, perforce, to glance at them.
In the process, two images from that photographic gallery of evil branded themselves on my mind. One photograph is of a mother and a baby – in all likelihood her child – lying side by side, both bodies burnt. It was as if their assailants wished to make them into human barbecues.
The other picture was just as haunting. It’s of a child, at most three years old, its skull gashed open to expose a reddened brain. Perhaps the deadly blow was struck with a machete or some other sharp instrument. The dead child has a thumb in its mouth; he or she must have been in deep sleep when the terrible blow was struck. That child’s posture – with a thumb frozen in the mouth – tells its own disturbing story. It spoke to me of the murder of innocence.
The immediate murderer is, of course, the man (or woman, perhaps?) who was so crazed as to take an axe to the skull of a sleeping, absolutely harmless and defenseless child. The perpetrator, whatever his or her grievance, cannot possibly produce any justification for snatching that child’s life.
But there’s also a sense – a deep sense at that – in which the thumb-sucking child as well as the charred mother and child indict the Nigerian state – a state run by vampires who “eat” the citizens’ flesh and “drink” their blood.
Truth be told, the recurrent spate of so-called religious violence in Nigeria is but a symptom of a nation that’s sabotaged every opportunity to achieve itself. Nigeria remains a discounted dream, a space run (and ruined) by (in)human parasites who suck the life out of their quarry, leaving the nation-space feeble and wobbly.
Those who sneaked upon the sleeping victims in a town near Jos and executed their murderous designs were – to some degree – proxies for a Nigeria that devalues its citizens’ lives. For despite the religious coating that served as ostensible motive, the attack was, at bottom, evidence of colossal dehumanization wrought by pervasive economic misery.
Nigeria might have nurtured that thumb-sucking child to grow up into a productive citizen. Perhaps the burnt woman was a suckling mother, a small trader who rose up daily and did what it took to provide food for her family, or a farmer whose produce gave her a means of sustenance and a way of meeting the world. But a Nigeria whose resources are looted by a few, whose police are too busy collecting bribes at roadside blocks to pay attention to the real task of law enforcement, whose bureaucrats spend their waking hours inventing novel ways to make the lives of their fellows harsher – that Nigeria betrayed the victims of our latest man-made disaster.
It is up to citizens to reclaim their lives by taking back their nation. The first step is to insist that their so-called nascent democracy learn to respect the wishes of the people in next year’s general elections. It should surprise no one that Nigerian “leaders” who usurp office and get away with it treat Nigerians as cattle or worse. It is only when the people establish their sovereign power that they can compel the state to respond to them as citizens – not fodder for senseless death.
(okeyndibe@gmail.com)
Read full post
"Jonathan and the end of a honeymoon"
By Okey Ndibe
Those handling Goodluck Jonathan better tell him that this week marks the end of the honeymoon phase of his “acting presidency.”
This week, Mr. Jonathan must demonstrate his awareness, first of his personal burden, and then of the Nigerian crisis. If he can’t find the spine to begin to serve the Nigerian people, then he should ask his speechwriters to compose one heck of a resignation letter for him. He should then submit it and get out of the way.
Jonathan, to be sure, is a creature of a difficult historical circumstance. In 2007, he and his principal, Umaru Yar’Adua, were imposed on Nigeria. Far from earning the electoral mandate of Nigerians, they – Yar’Adua and he – were foisted on Nigeria by former President Olusegun Obasanjo and other elements.
Their chief sponsor, Obasanjo, could not have intended that the duo would deliver magnificent leadership. If anything, both Yar’Adua and Jonathan had exemplified gubernatorial mediocrity. In choosing them, then, a vindictive Obasanjo perhaps sought to punish Nigerians for daring to deny him his illicit desire for a third term.
Yar’Adua and Jonathan inspired low expectations, and performed worse. They could not transcend the crooked circumstances that tossed them into power.
With Yar’Adua hobbled by sickness, his “presidency” became little more than a residency in Aso Rock. Even at the best of health, the man merely occupied space, but remained incapable of making his presence felt in any positive manner.
Today, Turai Yar’Adua’s delusions notwithstanding, Umaru Yar’Adua is physically (and, in all likelihood, mentally) incapacitated to carry on the pretence of running Nigeria.
That circumstance has thrown up the prospect of Jonathan’s “acting presidency.” Nigerians have a right to wonder if Jonathan has what it takes to step into the role.
It is a measure of how desperate Nigerians are that some expect Jonathan to perform impressively. There’s nothing in the man’s political resume that suggests that he’s cut out for excellent leadership. Even so, history is replete with examples of men and women who managed, in defiance of the odds, to rise to momentous challenges. Nigerians are hoping – praying – that Jonathan would be one such accidental success story.
But let’s be fair: if Jonathan’s political skills are mediocre or average, he’s entitled to them. But he should, in that event, be fair to Nigerians by confessing that he doesn’t have what they expect – and that he wishes to de-commission himself as “acting president.”
This week is decisive.
Nigerians have watched with growing impatience and irritation as Jonathan appeared barely capable of chairing the weekly meetings of the cabinet. Last December, as Nigerian commuters were crippled by fuel shortage, Jonathan “ordered” that the ministers in the oil sector should not travel out of town on vacation. Mr. Rilwanu Lukman, who holds the main oil portfolio, skipped out of town, ignoring Jonathan’s directive. Why has Lukman not been fired?
Jonathan gives the impression of incessantly looking over his shoulder, afraid that the “forces” loyal to Turai and Umaru are out to get him. He runs the risk of allowing the fear of Turai to paralyze him. If he can’t overcome that fear, Jonathan might as well admit to his wimpy disposition, surrender what power he has, and leave the arena. If he stands pat, doing nothing, it will be a question of when, not if, the enemies he fears will pick him apart.
There’s work to do, and Jonathan’s best bet is to get cracking. For one, he ought to shape up the federal cabinet. There are too many ministers who don’t appear to understand the most elementary thing about their ministry – but who relish the sound of the pompous title of “honorable minister.” Given the shortness of his “tenure” – a year – Jonathan ought to fish for the most outstanding technocrats to help think up and implement solutions for Nigeria’s perennial infrastructural crises.
Nigerian roads are in a shambles. Nigerian schools are poorly funded and ill equipped. Nigeria’s healthcare is in a grim state. Erratic power supply remains a pervasive feature of Nigeria’s reality. Violent crime, especially armed robbery, festers. These problems did not crop up overnight, and they won’t be solved by the wave of a magic wand. But any focused leader, once who sets out to work instead of to steal, could make enough of a difference for Nigerians to notice. And Nigerians, long beset by disastrous leadership, deserve a break.
Jonathan must look into himself and discern if he has it in him. He’s never been known for stellar leadership, but the historical circumstances of his emergence as “acting president” are ripe for courageous performance.
A product of a shameful election, Jonathan has a unique opportunity to make a lasting impact by pushing credible electoral reform, not the half-baked, ineffectual brand that a hypocritical and self-serving Yar’Adua supported. He should indicate his readiness to champion passage of the key elements of the recommendations made by the Justice Muhammadu Uwais panel.
Before Jonathan can get to these substantive issues, he must, at minimum, steer the federal executive council to do the right thing by declaring Yar’Adua incapacitated. That should happen this week. Every Okoye, Musa and Adebayo knows that Mr. Yar’Adua is too gravely sick to be of help even to himself, much less to 150 million Nigerians.
This, I restate, is the week that Jonathan’s free pass will end. Henceforth, he must work to earn any goodwill. My hunch is that a Jonathan who can’t lead his colleagues to reach and express a commonsensical conclusion on Yar’Adua’s status is not worthy of being entrusted with running the complex organism called Nigeria – even in an acting capacity.
Read full post
"After the disingenuous maneuver that made him “acting president,” Goodluck Jonathan appears in danger of wasting his opportunity to lead – and also wasting Nigerians’ time."
"Jonathan’s burden"
by Okey Ndibe
After the disingenuous maneuver that made him “acting president,” Goodluck Jonathan appears in danger of wasting his opportunity to lead – and also wasting Nigerians’ time.
Since his investiture, Jonathan’s calendar has been taken up with courtesy visits by former heads of state as well various delegations, including so-called traditional rulers.
One hopes that he understands the gravity of the burden he must discharge, if he is to be worth his hire. If he fancies that he and Nigerians have time for some ceremonial interlude, then he hardly grasps the depths of Nigeria’s desperation.
Jonathan had better make a polite but firm statement asking those who wish to pay a visit to hold off. He ought to tell the horde of professional well-wishers that he has a job to do for long-suffering Nigerians, and that he needs to get to it with alacrity.
Nigerians did not agitate all over the world these past two months against Umaru Yar’Adua’s facile idea of offshore governance so that Jonathan could take over and host an endless stream of “royal fathers” pledging their loyalty and support. No, Nigerians wanted somebody to take up the full-time job of fixing their rutted roads, improving power supply, solving the problem of fuel shortage, combating sectarian violence and its concomitant high casualty, and sending bills to the National Assembly to address a plethora of issues, from electoral reform through job creation to adequate funding for education and health.
Nigerians know as much as Jonathan that the hangers-on who profited from Yar’Adua’s moribund “presidency” do not wish him well. They are, it is safe to assume, regrouping even now to torpedo his “acting presidency.” But Jonathan’s handlers must tell him that the way to silence these foes is not by looking over his shoulder or even by garnering a long register of big-name supporters. His safest bet is to set to roll up his sleeves and apply himself to the task of working to change the lot of the generality of Nigerians.
In doing so, he must recognize his own limitations. One, he doesn’t have a lot of time; better, then, to get cracking immediately. Two, it’s unrealistic, even counterproductive, to take on a long menu of challenges at once. He should focus on a few critical sectors that are likely to have widespread impact. His wife’s arrests several years ago on corruption charges are already serious deficits. He should both rein in his wife’s materialistic impulses and steer clear of any impeachable conduct himself.
Above all, Jonathan ought to take a hard, honest look at himself. If he doesn’t have the mettle to work for Nigerians, he should avert a looming personal and national disaster by relinquishing the crown of “acting president.”
Read full post
"One hopes that the Obama who went to Accra and spoke eloquently about Nigeria’s leadership crisis has not permitted himself to be led into the contradiction of prescribing IBB as the answer. Or even as a factor in finding the answer to Nigeria’s quagmire."
Is Obama romancing Babangida?
By Okey Ndibe
Last Wednesday, February 10, the Barack Obama administration made a move that’s likely to hurt its credibility among Nigerians. Johnnie Carson, the United States Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, and Robin Sanders, the US Ambassador to Nigeria, traveled to Minna to confer with former Nigerian dictator, Ibrahim Babangida, at his hilltop mansion.
That visit was, I suggest, a serious diplomatic gaffe – and one unworthy of the Obama administration.
That neither the American diplomats nor Babangida disclosed the subject of the meeting compounded the gravity of the misstep. For one, it raised speculation that the US government wanted to signal its tacit support for Babangida’s run for the presidency in next year’s elections. At the very least, the parley suggested that Obama’s team regards the retired general as an instrument for solving Nigeria’s myriad, and deep, political crises.
Either goal represents a serious lapse in judgment on the part of the Obama administration.
It would appear that Babangida covets the Nigerian presidency. Four years ago, he and his cohorts orchestrated what was tagged Project 007, implying that the former military head of state considered himself a shoo-in as President Olusegun Obasanjo’s successor. Nigerians, for understandable reasons, were disquieted by the prospect of another IBB presidency. Many heaved a sigh of relief when Obasanjo, for reasons hard to fathom, foiled Babangida’s ambition.
There’s no question: Babangida is one of the most enigmatic figures to have emerged in Nigerian politics. I have always found the man intriguing, but in a sad, even tragic sort of way. In 1986, on the first anniversary of the man’s rule, I wrote a column in the (now defunct) African Guardian in which I likened Babangida’s political style to the dribbling wizardry of Argentine soccer star Diego Maradona. That name, Maradona, stuck on Babangida and has become one of his more famous monikers. Evil genius, I understand, is a tag Babangida adopted. My argument, in baptizing IBB with Maradona in 1986, was that, while the soccer player dribbles in order to create scoring opportunities, Babangida dribbled as an end in itself. There was little or no sense of purpose to his statecraft.
In 1993, Babangida lost power in one of his costly, purposeless gambles. His annulment of the June 12 election, an act of supreme perfidy, precipitated his own political downfall. In characteristic fashion, he euphemized his fall from power as a decision to “step aside.”
Babangida introduced a structural adjustment program (SAP). The economy policy, as the propaganda went, was meant to endow Nigerians with the benefits of a free market economy. When Nigerians complained that the ostensible gains were elusive, Babangida counseled patience. But he and his cohorts were far from willing to be patient. As SAP sapped Nigeria’s poor and widened the blanket of misery, Babangida and his closest friends acquired mansions, private jets, and fat bank accounts. When he was done, IBB boasted a 50-room mansion and dizzying wealth.
Such a man has no business seeking to return to his country’s seat of power. Some of his acolytes have said that Babangida’s mission is to correct the mistakes he made the first time. Remediation is a nice concept, but he need not become president to make amends.
One hopes that the Obama who went to Accra and spoke eloquently about Nigeria’s leadership crisis has not permitted himself to be led into the contradiction of prescribing IBB as the answer. Or even as a factor in finding the answer to Nigeria’s quagmire.
Obama must guard against the Bill Clinton error. Even though former President Clinton is popular in Nigeria, many Nigerians are still appalled by his bizarre statement, in the heydays of Sani Abacha’s self-succession plan, that the US was open to recognizing the bespectacled dictator if he won an election. That statement came at a time when any neophyte knew that Abacha didn’t plan to hold a credible election.
In making such a public show of coddling Babangida, the Obama administration risked being perceived as wishing to forestall the ongoing mobilization of a progressive force to serve as a viable alternative to the grubby, visionless elements who have steered Nigeria to perilous waters.
If Washington doesn’t want to see a cataclysm befall Nigeria, with horrible consequences for Nigerians and the international community, then it must rethink its seeming courtship of the Babangidas of Nigeria.
Read full post
"Anambra put itself forward, in my view, as a pivot for the democratic renewal that Nigeria so sorely needs."
"Anambra’s “Verdict 2010” as lesson and revenge "
By Okey Ndibe
Last Saturday, voters in Anambra State came out in impressive numbers to elect a governor. The stakes were extremely high, and the obstacles formidable, but the people of Anambra did themselves great credit. After it was all over, incumbent Governor Peter Obi made history as the first two-term occupant of the Government House. And Anambra put itself forward, in my view, as a pivot for the democratic renewal that Nigeria so sorely needs.
It was a fitting and welcome transformation – a kind of revenge, in fact.
Anambra has been a victim of some of the most tragic and traumatizing schemes in Nigeria’s political history. It’s been a turf for the depraved antics of so-called political godfathers who exploited their connections to the seat of power in Abuja to make the state virtually ungovernable. It’s been run, and ruined, by the human disaster called Chinwoke Mbadinuju. This man, a genius at quoting scripture but less than adept at living it, holds the unflattering distinction of presiding over a year in which the state’s children didn’t go to school – because their striking teachers were not paid.
There was more: the brazen kidnap of former Governor Chris Ngige, a man smuggled into office by the ruling party and then hounded when he refused to surrender the treasury to his sponsors; the three-day spree of arson against public property carried out by thugs who may have been empowered by the highest authority; and the short-lived imposition of Andy Uba as governor.
With this history as background, and Nigeria’s current climate of uncertainty, so much rode on the Anambra election. Local and international pundits, deeply troubled by Nigeria’s penchant for fraudulent elections, tagged Anambra’s Verdict 2010 a veritable window into the shape of general elections to come in 2011. At a December 11, 2009 colloquium convened at Brown University by Professor Chinua Achebe, speaker after speaker was at pains to underscore the point that, as Anambra went last Saturday, so would Nigeria go next year. These speakers, Nigerians and foreigners alike, also warned that the country could ill afford the manipulation of the Anambra election, and may not survive another of the kind of electoral farce we got in 2007.
Bearing this onerous burden, Anambra made Nigerians proud. Anambra, the erstwhile headquarters of anarchy, has become a beacon of democratic hope for all Nigerians.
Last week’s election was, I stress, a truly Nigerian affair. By the same token, it was a triumph for all Nigerians, not just the residents of Anambra. I had never seen a state election that generated as much interest across the spectrum of Nigerians as that of Anambra. It was clear that Nigerians, and in some ways the world, paid attention to the election. It called up the best – the deeply patriotic – in many.
Let me illustrate. I signed up to participate in a project called Anambra Election iReporters. Initiated by Okwy Okeke, an energetic and passionate patriot, the project entailed monitoring the progress of last week’s election by phoning observers right there in the field – and then posting our findings on numerous websites. Mr. Okeke, who holds an MBA and works for a large American corporation, saw the project as one way that we could invest in the cause of credible elections.
Several of us, including Okeke, are from Anambra, but volunteers came from other parts of Nigeria. I rose at the crack of dawn on Saturday and immediately began to make calls to our contacts in Anambra – some of them lawyers sent by the Nigerian Bar Association to observe. What struck me was the number of participants in the exercise, in Anambra as well as abroad, who are not from Anambra. If you ever wondered whether pan-Nigerian collaboration was still viable, perish your doubt. From my small corner, I beheld the cooperative spirit that’s alive among Nigerians when the challenge is to reclaim their badly battered lives and commence the task of mending.
Given Nigeria’s long habituation to scams dressed in the garb of elections, it’s understandable if some are in a hurry to declare the days of rigged elections over. Nothing is farther from the reality. At any rate, to mistake what happened in Anambra as spelling the demise of electoral hanky panky is to both underestimate how impermeable our politicians can be and to risk slipping into complacency.
Complacency is a virus that Nigerians can’t afford now. Vigilance and a state of heightened alert, not a slackening off, are called for. This is a time to consolidate the gains from the Anambra election – and to think about how to vastly improve on them in 2011 and beyond.
We’d do well to remember that as many things went well in the Anambra election as went wrong. Two or three persons called or wrote to me waxing ecstatic about the electoral commission’s conduction. One trumpeted Maurice Iwu, the commission’s chairman, as a born-again champion of credible polls.
Not so fast, I retorted. What transpired in Anambra should not really be regarded as epitomizing superior performance by INEC. Nor should Nigerians hasten to canonize Iwu for overseeing an election in which the voice of the voters was permitted to prevail. Transparently free and fair elections are the right of Nigerians, not a privilege that Iwu may – according to his mood or whims – dole out to us or withhold.
There were indeed heroes in last week’s elections, but Iwu doesn’t make my list of them. In the 21st century, his electoral body failed to produce serialized ballots. Then its voter registers were, for the most part, an anthology of missing names.
The foremost heroes were the voters who, undeterred by past experiences of stolen mandates, came out in droves to vote. The images of determined voters, many of them waiting for hours in the sweltering heat before voting materials were produced, reflected a widening quest by Nigerians to reclaim their country from the calloused hands of its destroyers.
Then there were the troop of monitors, their eyes set on the proceedings, determined to keep everybody – police officers, polling officials, party partisans – honest. And then there were the officials who must have decided not to lend themselves as instruments for would-be riggers.
Some of the governorship candidates ran vibrant campaigns that managed to touch on such urgent matters as security, educational collapse, and festering joblessness. Those of them who agreed to take part and spar in a televised debate also deserve commendation for taking Nigerian politics in a salutary direction.
Read full post
"This is the way that a book review is supposed to be written."
Dear friends,
On the link below is a very concise review of the great Chinua Achebe's brandnew work called The Education of a British-Protected Child
I remember, back in the mid-Nineties, about a book review that I had written. the response by Dr. Ndibe who at the time was the Editor-inchief for the, unfortunately, now-defunct African World, an international magazine that was the literary descendant of Chinua Achebe's groundbreaking publication series called Pan-African Commentary. Ndibe commented, "This is the way that a review is supposed to be written." I now must reciprocate. Enjoy!
G Djata Bumpus
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/7664f670-06e0-11df-b058-00144feabdc0.html
Read full post
"If the Anambra election can be manipulated with little or no resistance, then 2011 will similarly be a rigger’s bonanza."
Anambra and Nigeria’s burden
By Okey Ndibe
(okeyndibe@gmail.com)
In eleven days – February 6 – Anambra voters will go to the polls to (attempt to) elect the state’s governor for the next four years. They have a full field of candidates to choose from, and they certainly have a hard task discerning the wheat from the chaff.
The election, by every measure, is a profoundly significant contest. There’s no question in my mind that Nigeria’s deeply entrenched anti-democratic forces will seek, yet again, to thwart the popular will. Will they succeed in their sick mission? Will Nigerians awake on February 7 to realize that the hijackers of power had plied their trade once again, and imposed a candidate the people did not elect? And if so, what are the likely consequences?
My opening sentence speaks, advisedly, about the electorate “attempting” to elect a new governor. Nigeria’s electoral history has been marked by such honest attempts marred by massive rigging abetted by the police, security agents and electoral officials. That practice has brought Nigeria’s by-name-only democracy to the brink of utter collapse. Time and time again, voters’ efforts to hold up their part of the bargain by going – under rain or shine – to cast votes have been sabotaged by those who prefer stealing power to licitly earning it.
Are there any grounds, speaking objectively, to expect that things would be different in Anambra this time around?
The answer is yes and no.
Let’s dwell, first, on the yes. Umaru Yar’Adua’s apparent incapacitation and likely absence from the country strike me as holding out hope for a credible election in Anambra. Despite his posturing as an agent of electoral reform, Mr. Yar’Adua has earned a reputation as a ruthless, shameless apostle of hijacked elections.
His record as far as electoral probity is concerned is, to be sure, a wretched one. Yes, he’s talked electoral reform, as he’s talked “rule of law,” but he’s been a hypocrite on both issues. In fact, it’s impossible to reconcile his words and his actions on the two fronts.
A comatose steward at Aso Rock, Mr. Yar’Adua has been content to slumber at moments of national crises that called for stellar leadership. But he’s woken up and risen to every partisan occasion when his party sought to re-steal a governorship election – in such places as Kogi, Adamawa, and Ekiti.
It is no secret that Mr. Yar’Adua and his wife, Turai, played key roles in the still questionable decision to hand the PDP’s governorship ticket to Charles Chukwuma Soludo, the immediate past governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria. Were Yar’Adua in operation, there’s no question he’d try to put pressure on the malleable leadership of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to call the election for Mr. Soludo, regardless of how the people of Anambra think about the matter.
The subtraction of the Yar’Adua factor and threat bodes well for the Anambra election. Goodluck Jonathan, Yar’Adua’s deputy, is in a too precarious position to mount decisive on the electoral body. And without strong covert pressure being brought to bear on INEC, it’s unlikely that the Nigerian police as well as other security agents and the military would be marshaled to choreograph the election for the PDP candidate.
In effect, Mr. Soludo must strive to win on his own steam.
Nigerians are aware, as never before, of the cost of letting politicians (and especially mediocre, unscrupulous ones) to usurp power. Since Anambra will give us the best preview of the shape of elections to come in 2011, one foresees less tolerance of rigged elections.
Incidentally, the fear is that – precisely because the stakes are so high, not only for Anambra but also for Nigeria as a whole – the merchants of stolen mandates will make heavy investments in Anambra. If the Anambra election can be manipulated with little or no resistance, then 2011 will similarly be a rigger’s bonanza.
Read full post
"In a move that did great credit to its revolutionary credentials, Haiti became the first nation in the world to recognize the legitimacy of the Biafran cause – and to extend diplomatic recognition to the embattled Biafrans. "
"Haiti’s tragedy, Biafran memories"
by Okey Ndibe
Exactly a week ago, Haiti was struck by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake that reduced much of that misfortunate nation to a colossal ruin. The quake’s epicenter was a mere 16 miles offshore on the western side of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s heavily populated capital.
Earthquakes are hardly ever innocuous; but this one was particularly catastrophic. Its proximity to the capital – home to more than three million people – proved disastrous. As I write, Haitian authorities were estimating that 140,000 had perished from the devastating quake. That toll is, as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rightly stated, is of biblical proportions. The prognosis is even more dreadful. Some experts predict that many of the tens of thousands officially listed as missing, as well as many of the critically wounded, will explode the casualty figures.
To see the horror of Haiti is to come to terms to a modern-day apocalypse. For me, it was especially harrowing to look at images of children and the elderly with mangled limbs, gashed heads and swollen faces.
When a natural tragedy strikes on this scale, it’s almost as if the living, in their forlorn despair, begrudge the dead the joys of a grave. Except that most of the Haitian dead were not buried, but abandoned on the streets. I was brought to tears when television cameras panned streets strewn with decomposing bodies. Nigerians have fashioned a unique obituary style where each deceased person is “called to heavenly glory.” Glory was not a word that came to mind when one saw the cadavers that littered the streets of Port-au-Prince.
And yet, Haitians, who in 1804 became the first black-run nation ever to achieve independence, have a lot of glory in their past. Two figures from their revolutionary history, Toussaint l’Ouverture and Jean Jacques Dessalines, are venerable heroes not only for Haitians but also for all people of African descent. These two warriors took on and ultimately vanquished the better-armed forces of Napoleonic France. Though Toussaint was tricked by the French, captured, and transported to France where he died in 1803, his collaborator, Jacque Dessalines, lived to become Haiti’s first leader.
Thanks in large part to meddling by France and, more recently, the US, Haiti has fallen short of its revolutionary aspirations. The American media habitually announce, with something approaching glee, that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Haitians are a much-beleaguered people. Eighty percent of the populace lives on less than $2 a day. In recent times, the island nation has been buffeted by hurricanes and widespread hunger that forced desperate people to eat mud.
That specter will become worse in the aftermath of the earthquake. About ten percent of the homes in Port-au-Prince, a hilly city with wide swathes of ghettoes, were destroyed by the quake and its aftershocks. That means that more than 300,000 inhabitants face the grim certainty of prolonged homelessness in a city whose infrastructure, rudimentary to begin with, is now decimated.
It’s in the nature of natural disasters to be blind in their fury and destruction. This earthquake did not discriminate between rich and poor, old and young, the powerful and the feeble. It shook the Presidential palace to its foundations and leveled the Parliament. The offices of the United Nations were wrecked, more than twenty members of the organization’s staff were confirmed dead, and (at the time of this writing) scores more were still trapped in a pile of rubble. Hotels, churches, and hospitals were also laid to ruin.
With a calamity that touched every sector, the task of providing medical care to the legions of the wounded and getting food to the displaced, drifting masses was bound to be difficult. Even though the US, China, Canada and a plethora of relief agencies responded quickly with shipment of food, water and medicines, Haiti’s battered roads frustrated efforts to immediately reach the victims of the earthquake. Four days after the quake, the vast majority of Haitians were yet to receive succor. Doubtless, many of the dead would have survived had help got to them sooner.
A tragic occurrence like an earthquake offers a measure both of our human fickleness and vulnerability as well as our heroism, staying power, and resilience. The Haitian people, great in the past, will – there’s no question – find a way to rise from their current nightmare.
The earthquake is an opportunity for other peoples and nations to demonstrate the depth of their fellow feeling and generosity – and to offer a hand to their besieged Haitian brethren. Many nations and individuals rose, admirably, to the challenge.
Sadly, to one’s profound shame, the Nigerian government failed to stir much less show continental leadership in the face of Haiti’s peril. Nigeria’s invisibility during the darkest time for the people of Haiti betrays a monumental lack of a sense of history among those running (that is to say, more aptly, ruining) the country.
Last week, author Chinua Achebe issued a statement that must have been a veiled rebuke as well as a cry from the heart. He pleaded with Nigeria and South Africa “to more vigorously join the international community – particularly the remarkable and admirable example of the United States and the European Union – and provide much needed funds and other forms of aid to the people of Haiti for disaster relief.”
Achebe’s plea has a particular resonance at this time, the 40th anniversary of the formal end of the Biafran war. In a move that did great credit to its revolutionary credentials, Haiti became the first nation in the world to recognize the legitimacy of the Biafran cause – and to extend diplomatic recognition to the embattled Biafrans.
With the Nigerian idea in disarray, that Haitian position strikes one today as highly discerned. A Nigerian that doesn’t respond to the travail of the Haitian people is a construct of fundamental questioning.
Read full post
"The title of this column, which sets out to make a subtle differentiation between Nigeria and Nigerians, is carefully chosen..."
"Obama wrong on Nigerians"
By Okey Ndibe
The title of this column, which sets out to make a subtle differentiation between Nigeria and Nigerians, is carefully chosen.
President Barack Obama has every reason to be dismayed with the Nigerian state, and specifically with the misbegotten lot who pass for the country’s leadership. Nobody is more ashamed of the mediocrities presiding over Nigeria’s affairs than enlightened Nigerians. The absence of even a credible pretence to a legitimate leadership in Abuja is a source of embarrassment and great pain for Nigerians. The Nigerian daily, Next, scooped last week that Umaru Yar’Adua, who has occupied space in Aso Rock since May, 2007, was brain dead. A brain dead “leader” pretty much sums up Nigeria’s tragic story.
Nigeria’s leadership gap must gall the first person of African descent to occupy the US presidency. And especially at a time when the US just managed, by sheer luck verging on a miracle, to escape a heinous plot orchestrated to inflict maximum psychological damage on Americans and the world. Had Farouk Abdulmuttalab and his al Qaeda sponsors realized their dastardly designs, they would have sent tremors down the spine of America and its allies around the world.
President Obama stood to pay a huge political price if the Delta flight had exploded over Detroit, as the foiled bomber had planned. A calamity on that colossal scale would have poured fuel into extreme rightwing charges – anchored by former Vice President Dick Cheney – that Obama was not only unserious about combating terrorism, but was, in fact, cozying up to rabid groups out to destroy America.
To his credit, Obama recognizes that the war against terrorists is far more complex than the George W. Bush crowd allowed. Obama has steered the war away from the Bush mindset that often came close to pillorying Islam – and which emphasized extravagant displays of firepower.
For all its pyrotechnic moments, the Bush approach made little progress in its mission to cripple terrorists. In some ways, in fact, Bush’s anti-terrorism doctrine, with its binary focus, its us-versus-them template may well have fertilized al Qaeda’s radicalization and recruitment of otherwise moderate, educated and liberal Muslims.
Obama was right to chart a different course. Far from abandoning the option of force, he merely rejected the abuse of that response. He reckoned that force ought not to be deployed where diplomacy had better prospects to promote dialogue and establish a sense of shared values or common interests.
My fear is that, in the wake of the aborted bombing by Abdulmuttalab, the Obama administration has moved too hastily to tar Nigerians. If there was an occasion when the sins of one depraved young Nigerian should not be visited on other Nigerians, this was it.
One point has been made again and again, but it bears belaboring. Abdulmuttalab’s odyssey as a terrorist had very little, if anything, to do with Nigeria. By all accounts, he fell under al Qaeda’s spell in the UK and was trained and equipped for his deadly mission in Yemen. Nigeria came into the picture of his plot at all only because he passed through a Nigerian airport en route.
And here’s another fact to consider: the moment the young terrorist’s father got an inkling that his son had fallen among zealots intent on wreaking havoc on the US, the man told US authorities what he knew. That the young man was able to board a US-bound flight sporting his lethal underwear bespeaks a profound failure on the part of an extensive network of US intelligence.
Obama has admitted that American intelligence did worse than fumble the ball; it did not even come close to having its eye on the ball. Even so, President Obama has balked at suggestions that he fire one or more custodians of intelligence. His argument is that the failure was a systemic one, not a matter of personnel laxity.
Perhaps that’s the right call. But it’s baffling that an Obama who has chosen to be magnanimous towards inept officers and intelligence agencies has signed off on a policy that amounts to grave injustice to Nigerians. Everything considered, there’s neither logic nor justice in portraying Nigeria as an address to watch for terrorists when Britain and Saudi Arabia are not on the list.
Shock, disgust and disbelief defined Nigerians’ collective reaction on learning that Farouk Abdulmuttalab, the would-be Christmas day bomber, was a Nigerian. Until the enterprising saharareporters.com produced the first photo of Farouk, and identified his father, many Nigerians were certain that he was an impostor who had somehow traveled under the cover of a Nigerian passport.
Nigeria has had a long and ugly history of outbreaks of religious violence – on the domestic front. Adherents of some extremist or fringe Islamic group often trigger these sprees of sectarian bloodletting by launching unprovoked attacks on Christians and other perceived “infidels.”
On the whole, the Nigerian state has a shameful record of confronting these homegrown zealots. It has often deployed mere words of warning, even exhortations of moderation, to these bloodhounds. It’s hardly come down hard on these killers in God’s name, nor has it mounted serious prosecution of arrested fanatical thugs. Official apathy to episodes of religious mayhem has served to encourage their recurrence.
In fact, the frequency and gruesomeness of such attacks seemed to wane only when the victims, figuring out that the Nigerian government lacked the will and muscle to protect them, learned to arm themselves and repel their assailants.
If Nigerians pose any serious threat to Americans, it’s likely to be Americans visiting Nigeria. A Nigerian transporting mass violence to America is extremely rare.
That’s why Nigerians regard Abdulmuttalab, rightly, as both a fluke and a “non-Nigerian” threat. He’s Nigerian by birth, sure. But he is, fundamentally, a hired-in-Britain, trained-in-Yemen al Qaeda operative. Nigeria had little or no role in his logistical preparation for the mission of death he undertook. He does not in any way represent an emerging trend in Nigeria. One concurs with the conclusion of a friend who speculated that, had Farouk lived in Nigeria, he might have menaced Nigerian “unbelievers,” but he would never have taken up explosives against the US.
Perhaps, as some Nigerians suspect, the Obama administration has chosen to exploit the terrifying circumstances of December 25 as an opportunity to further underscore Nigeria’s pariah status. If that’s the idea, it’s a sad mistake and the timing is atrocious.
Nigerians would welcome it if Obama toughened his administration’s stance against the imposed government of Mr. Umaru Yar’Adua. It’s a different matter when the US imposes strictures that compound the travails of innocent Nigerians.
The designation of Nigeria as a garden of terror could not have come at a worse moment. Nigeria is in the midst of a crisis never seen in its history – the absolute disappearance of a man who presumes to be the country’s “president.” And then there’s his cohorts’ insistence on using his name to hijack and monopolize.
As the power game plays out, nobody has bothered to address a nation-wide fuel scarcity that’s crippled the country. Nobody is doing a thing about ever worsening power failures. The parasites exploiting Nigeria are too comfortable to care.
Obama’s policy is ill-advised. It consigns Nigerians to the undeserved category of terrorists, and places the onus on every Nigerian to prove otherwise. He would do better to review that policy in a manner that recognizes that there’s a veritable chasm between Nigeria’s “leaders” and its people.
By all means, America should officially declare those who are running Nigeria aground as terrorists, but it should spare the vast majority of Nigerians who have nothing in common with Abdulmuttalab.
Read full post
