From tragedy to farce

The recent defection of five PDP governors to the mega-opposition APC has certainly raised the ante. APC now controls 16 of the 36 states and, according to some reports, more seats than the ruling party in the House of Representatives. But let the statisticians quibble over the figures. It is enough for our purposes that, after 14 years of ‘demonstration of craze’, as the late Fela put it, we have a possible alternative to a sleaze-ridden party which once vowed to rule for 60 years (why not a thousand?) and is now panicking all over the place at the prospect of possibly losing out in 2015. Well and good. This is doubtless healthy for pluralism, as many commentators have been quick to note, or at least it would be if APC really did represent some sort of alternative, what Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, one of its shakers and movers, called ‘a good rescue mission for our fledgling democracy. It is a must for the country, is very necessary and we are happy about that.’

 

I should begin by saying that I had my doubts about the APC alliance from the outset. Leaving aside ANPP, by far the most junior member and the one with the most questionable credentials (it was once known, under its previous incarnation, as Abacha People’s Party on account of the many late dictator’s cronies within its ranks), I wondered what ACN, a ‘progressive’ party which traces its antecedents to Awolowo, could possibly have in common with CPC, a party founded – and owned? – by Buhari, whose demeanour and utterances (or lack thereof) have led some to justifiably consider him a closet Boko Haram supporter. Indeed, that some believe Buhari a democrat would seem to stretch the meaning of the concept out of all recognition, but then much the same can be said of Tinubu for reasons to do with the way and manner he foisted his wife on the nation and his daughter on the Lagos State market women.

 

My doubts were further strengthened by the recent speculation that the Kano State governor, Rabiu Kwankwaso, himself one of the defectors, might emerge the APC presidential candidate come 2015, with the Lagos State governor, Babatunde Fashola, as his running mate. Fashola, of course, would be a popular choice for reasons known only too well, although it ought to be said that his high visibility as a consequence of the so-called Lagos-Ibadan press axis has always worked heavily in his favour. Should it come to pass, Professor Itse Sagay summed it up thus: ‘Concerning the Northern governors decamping to the APC, I really don’t think it is a loss to the PDP. If you look at these rebel governors, with the exclusion of Rotimi Amaechi, you will find out that their agenda is a very narrow agenda, a very personal one. And that agenda is for the North to produce the president so that a Northerner can control the Niger Delta oil and Lagos State VAT and so on.’ I think the good professor is entirely correct in his analysis and ought to provide a warning to the more excitable amongst us who appear to believe that defeating PDP at the polls, irrespective of the beast which replaces it, will somehow prove the panacea to our myriad problems.

 

In light of this, my attention was caught by a recent newspaper report: ‘Police enforcing Islamic law in the city of Kano publicly destroyed some 240,000 bottles of beer on Wednesday, the latest move in a wider crackdown on behaviour deemed “immoral” in the area. The banned booze had been confiscated from trucks coming into the city in recent weeks, said officials from the Hisbah, the patrol tasked with enforcing the strict Islamic law, known as sharia.’ Nor was this a one-off: according to the same report, since September this year the 9000-strong ‘moral police force’ has made ‘hundreds of arrests...following a state-government directive to cleanse the commercial hub’ of said ‘immoral’ practices, including prostitution and homosexuality (but ignoring, conveniently enough, the widespread practise of defiling under-age girls in the name of this same Islamic law).

 

So there we are: a choice between a clearly ineffectual Christian southerner who should never have attained the exalted office he currently occupies but for the twin accidents of religion and geography, and a fundamentalist Islamic northerner whose proposed occupancy of that same office is based on an opposite but equal configuration. This is politics at its most primitive and the reason why we are doomed to keep repeating history, first as tragedy and then as farce, as a philosopher once famously put it. The fact that Fashola, a southerner, also happens to be a Moslem – but assuredly not a fundamentalist one – only serves to underscore ‘the buffoonery and horseplay’, ‘the crude characterisation and ludicrously improbable situations’ that are the stock-in-trade of farce; and one can already see the mischief-makers, looking for handouts from an increasingly jittery (not to say desperate) President Jonathan, make a meal out of it all. And why not? In the absence of more serious considerations, for instance the fitness of the person for the job, what else is there?

 

But one can hardly blame the politicians. As the English essayist William Hazlitt put it, ‘the march of power is one. Its means, its tools, its pretexts are various, and borrowed like the hues of the chameleon from any object that happens to be at hand; its object is ever the same, and deadly as the serpent’s fang.’ It was ever thus and ever will be, but the question is: What are Nigerians going to do about it as we approach what many agree will be a decisive moment in the short history of this awkward entity? Alas, not much given the wishful thinking surrounding the emergence of APC as an apparent alternative to the ‘buffoonery and horseplay’ which have brought us to this pretty pass.

 

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers: New Nigerian Stories.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU

 

Danse Macabre

            Emperor, your sword won’t help you out
            Sceptre and crown are worthless here
            I've taken you by the hand
            For you must come to my dance.

Those who perpetrated the idea that President Jonathan was weak - myself included - were not wrong but culpable nonetheless in encouraging him to be strong, or at least give the semblance of same, which was all that was left to him. This has now become a problem, for him no less than for us.

 

Take the case of Sule Lamido, one of the seven PDP governors opposed to Jonathan’s 2015 transition programme (if we may dub it thus). Lamido is generally considered among the better performing governors. Indeed, he has been compared to Fashola in Lagos and is a self-declared disciple of the late Aminu Kano and his philosophy of service to the downtrodden. To that end, he instituted the first social security bill in the country, under which every physically-challenged person in the state – there are about 4000 – is paid N7000 monthly to stay off the streets; in the governor’s own words: ‘We, therefore, feel fulfilled that...the most deprived layer of the poor...no longer go to bed hungry on account of lack of money...’

 

Lamido has also flayed the culture of impunity whereby ‘a corrupt office holder was arraigned before a court of law for corrupt practices and even pleaded guilty’ but was set free and allowed to contest for public office again in order ‘to be promulgating laws to punish an ordinary thief of a goat or a pick-pocket’. He called this ‘a shame and disgrace’ and advocated scrapping the immunity clause from the constitution. Now, it seems, he is himself guilty of corrupt enrichment, at least if the charges levelled against him and his two sons by the EFCC are to be believed, totalling over N10 billion since he became governor in 2007.

 

Whether the charges are true is impossible to say. Everyone knows that the EFCC is simply a stick with which to flay the president’s perceived enemies. Moreover, being Nigeria, one assumes that all public office holders are corrupt, whatever they claim to the contrary. This is a melancholy fact but there you are. Worse again, those widely perceived to be corrupt but close to Oga at the top are not only not persecuted by the EFCC but actively shielded by him even against his own political interests, as in the continuing case with the ‘embattled’ aviation minister, Princess Stella Oduah.

 

The facts of Oduahgate, as we have come to call it (we love mimicking the nomenclature of our betters, being unoriginal in everything we do except stealing), are well known and needn’t delay us. She is not the first minister to be caught with her pants down, as it were, and she certainly won’t be the last (alas!), but for whatever reason her case galvanised public opinion, with calls from all quarters for Jonathan to sack her. Pigs might fly. Not only has he refused to do so but he eschewed the EFCC in favour of a commission whose subsequent findings – assuming it reached any - he refused to disclose. Meanwhile, the Senate, which made much noise about getting to the bottom of the matter (pigs might indeed fly), made a sudden U-turn and unanimously decided not to grill her. That she will get away with (or perhaps in) her expensive bulletproof cars is not in doubt, itself evidence of the culture of impunity Lamido railed against.

 

As for Lamido, he is not alone in his travails. All the so-called G-7 governors have, in one way or another, felt the wrath of the presidency for their impertinence. One of the most flagrant abuses of executive power occurred a few weeks ago when the police ‘stormed’ (their preferred mode of operation) the Kano State governor’s lodge in Abuja where the disaffected governors were meeting on the grounds that a residential building was being used as an office. One of the ‘outraged’ governors expressed alarm ‘at the way and manner the Nigeria Police treats elected representatives of Nigerians,’ and noted that, ‘if the rights and privileges of these governors and members of the National Assembly can be so threatened, then an ordinary man in Nigeria has no hope and confidence in the Nigerian Police Force,’ a conclusion he might have drawn by simply opening a newspaper.

 

Using the EFCC to prosecute only those who disagree with you, and the police as storm troopers to disrupt meetings held in a private residence, give the illusion of strength but in fact demonstrate its opposite, and underlined by the refusal to use either in the case of a minister you happen to be close to but whose reputation is more odious than most. No doubt this Dance of Death will be the style of a president desperate to renew his tenure at Aso Rock as we move ever closer to the 2015 deadline; and it is unfortunate that his many advisers cannot tell him that all it does is make him look petty and, worse, foolish, but then that is not what he hired them for. The EFCC can’t go after Lamido directly because he has immunity so they target his sons; the police disrupt a meeting of disaffected governors of the ruling party only for the Inspector-General to deny knowledge of any such operation.

 

In the midst of all this, one was almost forgetting that the ASUU strike is now in its sixth month, that one of the largest exporters of crude is still one of the largest importers of refined, that we continue to wait for the electricity long since promised... But the list is a long one, so much so, indeed, that there are those who doubt there will even be a country called Nigeria come 2015, much less an Aso Rock to occupy.

 

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers: New Nigerian Stories.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU

 

'A day with Jesus for Nigeria in Israel'

Once upon a time, Nigeria prided itself on its ‘radical’ foreign policy, which essentially meant supporting the Palestinians against the Israelis and the blacks against the whites. South Africa has since moved on, as the Palestinians must now be ruing following President Jonathan’s four-day visit to the Holy Land. The occasion, the first by a sitting Nigerian head of state, was apparently both spiritual and political - the Wailing Wall on the one hand, the Knesset on the other - hence the 3000-strong delegation of honourables and pastors (often one and the same) who accompanied him thither. Whether we ought to conflate the secular with the profane is questionable but then we never tire of telling ourselves that we are a religious people, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

 

As one might have expected, some of our Moslem brothers had a problem. Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, the ‘outspoken Islamic scholar and Grand Khadi of the Northern Region of Nigeria’, called the visit ‘a big political blunder’ and opined on his Facebook page that, ‘Nigeria along with many other African and world countries has sided with the plight of the Palestinians that were forced out of their homeland, killed and scattered,’ but then proceeded to spoil his case by indulging his anti-Semitism. Claiming that ‘the Jews...are traditionally known to be misers’, and that, ‘Charity is not in there [sic] lexicon’, he wasn’t above quoting Matthew 23:33: ‘Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?’ He should have stayed with his Koran. The Messiah was referring specifically to the Pharisees and scribes (themselves outspoken scholars in their day) who might be more fruitfully likened to our jet-setting pastors: ‘For you cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of extortion and self-indulgence.’

 

Significantly enough, our Sheikh was silent on the myriad pilgrimages made by our past heads of state-but-one to Mecca. He might also have mentioned the N4.3bn spent annually by the federal government extending this facility to every street-corner Mallam – ‘And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers’ – against the N1.35bn for Christians intent on Jerusalem, itself just one of the disparities that might be expected to harden Pharaoh’s heart, as indeed his disciples have loudly articulated, for instance Asari-Dokubo: ‘Whether they contest or they don’t. If they say the blood of the dogs and the baboons will be soaked in the streets, or salt water in the streets, we will help them in blood in the streets.’ And this from the erstwhile militant who is now said to be building a university in neighbouring Benin Republic, having bemoaned the lack of facilities back home, the reason for his militancy in the first place, but it is now ‘our’ turn to chop and God (or Allah) help Nigeria.

 

As to why ‘My people them go dey follow Bishop/ Them go follow Pope/ Them go follow Imam...’, as the late Fela put it, might be a question our Grand Khadi should ask himself. And whatever one’s views of Israel – whether one believes, for instance, that it has inherited South Africa’s mantle, as Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of separate but equal, claimed: ‘they took Israel away from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state’ – we know at least that the country works. So much so, in fact, that we once imported orange juice from there before it was banned even as oranges rotted by the roadside in Nigeria (and continue to do so), and now we are hearing about the $40mn contract awarded to an Israeli arms manufacturer – Elbit Systems – to monitor all internet activity in Nigeria, including, presumably, the traffic emanating to and from Aso Rock – but they were doing that already.

 

In fact, Jonathan’s trip had less to do with the photo-ops at the Mount of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Sea of Galilee and all points in between and everything to do with the War on Terror, which his Israeli counterpart assured him was a matter of mutual concern: ‘This is important for us Mr. President, but I believe it’s important for Nigeria, I believe it’s important for Africa, for the countries of the Middle East, and for the world’. Jonathan concurred: ‘Combating the menace of terrorism is a challenge that we must address in partnership with all peace loving countries and peoples of the world. I seek the cooperation of your country to confront the security threat from terrorist groups that my country is now facing.’

 

There’s no denying that we are deeply embedded in our very own, very self-inflicted war on terror – lower case - but the two can hardly be conflated. Israel’s war is not ours and it is difficult to know what we gain by identifying so closely with a country which flaunts its double standards, currently being played out over Iran’s rapprochement with ‘the West’. Israel assures us that Iran has ‘systemically defied’ UN Security Council Resolutions but remains silent on the many resolutions which it has itself systematically defied. Israel points out that Iran signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty and so cannot be allowed to develop the nuclear weapons which Israel, widely believed to be a nuclear power, has itself not signed. Israel argues that Iran now possesses the ability ‘to produce nuclear weapons’ but omits to mention that so do Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands.

 

There was a reason why Gowon, a Christian like Jonathan, severed diplomatic links following the 1973 Yom Kippur War (and restored, ironically, by Babangida, a Muslim, in 1992). But why we should tie ourselves so closely to its apron strings is something of a mystery. Bringing Jesus into the matter, as Jonathan insisted on baptising his pilgrimage in the quote which heads this blog, only underlines his muddle-headedness. As for me, I'm a Rastafarian and I want the federal government to pay for me to go to Jamaica.

 

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU

Caesar's wife

I never much liked the recently suspended aviation minister. I feel about her much as I do about her ‘sister’ in the petroleum ministry. This is a pity given the dearth of women in public positions and the president’s much-touted intentions to make amends. Tunji Lardner wrote of her ‘condescending imperial haughtiness’ but then much the same can be said of her male counterparts but for the fact that she is a woman. This means, for one thing, that she – along with her sister – is pictured in the newspapers almost as much as the president himself in order that we might admire their respective attributes while we ponder the precise nature of their relationship with Oga. ‘Is Jonathan Dating Stella Oduah?’ was the headline in an online newspaper. As for her sister, Dr (Mrs) Patience Jonathan was once reported to have implored Mama Diezani at a public function to ‘tell your daughter to leave my husband alone. She is married and I’m married. What kind of thing is this?’ Levels dey, as we say. Sadly, this is ours.

 

The petroleum minister especially has made clear her disdain for the danfo-packed masses. During the 2012 fuel crisis, when the price at the pump doubled so we could pay the marketers who import the refined of the crude we export, she cautioned Nigerians against ‘pointing to corruption, if we are not prepared to bear some of the hardship’. It later transpired that she was blowing N1bn annually on private, foreign-leased aircraft, foregoing even the over-bloated presidential fleet. She is also widely alleged to be free and easy with lucrative oil blocks to young men with no previous form, at least in that particular sector. But everything gets mixed up in Nigeria, which is why the oil minister’s aviation counterpart, who is also deep into the oil business, was once accused of swindling Niger delta militants of their N3.2bn bounty to keep this precious oil-we-don’t-refine flowing, and now we are hearing about the two bulletproof cars she purchased for N255mn. Perhaps she has reason to be in fear of her life given the many aircraft that have dropped from her skies, which is presumably why her sister would rather give our money to foreigners, who would at least service the damn thing.

 

Oduahgate, as the affair has been dubbed, galvanised public opinion, with civil society organisations threatening mass action if the president didn’t sack her forthwith - ‘We discussed, argued on it and we decided that we are fighting these people to a standstill. We are not keeping quiet on this’ - but why all the fuss? She did no worse than her sister, whose own travelling arrangements were equally well publicised at the time. Moreover, both are from the same ‘tribe’ so we can discount the ‘ethnic factor’ that bedevils so much of our national discourse by the politicians who profit from the wheeze known as ‘federal character’. Then again, perhaps the aviation minister was simply the easier target. She could hardly match her sister, whose ministry released N90bn in a single day to ensure Jonathan’s victory at the 2011 party primaries, a task which Mama Diezani’s daughter will no doubt repeat come 2015, which is all that matters. Whether, as before, her aviation sister will double as Jonathan’s campaign treasurer, as she did in 2011, remains to be seen.

 

Given the furore over the matter of the armoured cars, it would have been difficult for the president to do nothing so he promptly did nothing.  She is on ‘tactical suspension’, we were informed, as if she was an unruly schoolchild caught out in some misdemeanour, in the process treating us the same way as we await the report of the ‘administrative panel of enquiry’ appointed by Mr President to delve into the matter. As others have pointed out, why a commission to do the work of the police? But we already know the answer to that and have at least been spared – or have merely postponed - the police and assorted thugs paid from the same purse beating protestors in the street, as happened during an earlier, one-man rally to protest the aviation minister’s latest affront to ‘justice and equity’. There is nothing like appointing a commission to avoid moving the country forward, as the recent fracas in Edo State confirmed over the other commission the president also appointed, although the sovereign national conference we ceaselessly demand is a matter for the people and not the government, the people being sovereign by definition.

 

The law the aviation minister is alleged to have transgressed – Section 58 (5) of the Public Procurement Act, for what it matters - stipulates five years’ imprisonment without the option of a fine but that will be the day. For justice and equity we must turn instead to our former colonial master, a melancholy observation so many years after our ‘independence’. Worse yet, any culprit who manages to evade said mother country’s long arm can expect a pardon back home, as the president granted his former benefactor, the so-called ‘general of the oil fields’ who once vanquished the British Empire disguised as a woman.

 

In any case, we can be sure that the panel will find a way to exonerate her so that she might be welcomed back to school. By then, of course, public outrage would have swung to the latest billion naira story by yet another of the public servants they sometimes claim to be in rare moments of self-irony. The more cynical among us will put this down to the short attention span of the average Nigerian but this is not so at all. Nigerians are no different from people elsewhere caught up in the daily struggle to earn a living, only that people elsewhere can rest assured that the powers that be will discharge their responsibilities while the rest of us go about trying to earn that living, but made that much harder in Nigeria by the antics of those same public servants.

 

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU