Counting pointless votes

I was going to get all worked up about Saturday’s gubernatorial election in Ekiti State. As I write – 9 p.m. on the day – it seems that Fayose might have succeeded in unseating Fayemi, who had to wait three years for his earlier victory to be validated by the courts after the mayhem visited on the state by a PDP desperate to retain its ascendancy in the famous ‘do or die’ 2007 elections. Like everyone else, I read about how the V-P declared Ekiti a ‘war zone’ in the ruling party’s determination to regain its ‘stolen mandate’. Perhaps he was impugning the majesty of the law he had sworn to uphold, or perhaps, more likely, he just wasn’t thinking, which would be par for the course. That said, preliminary reports from the 28 local and international observers consider the exercise fair enough, at least by our ‘Third World’ standards.

 

And so it was, indeed, that Fayose won - and convincingly so. The troubling aspect about the exercise, and the one which has been much remarked upon, was the role of the military. Ekiti was swamped by soldiers who might have been better employed in Borno, where #BringBackOurGirls are still languishing more than two months after they were abducted from their school by our wayward Islamic brothers. Perhaps their salvation will come next February, when the general elections are scheduled to hold. On the other hand, there are already fears that no elections will take place, either there or in the other states still labouring under emergency rule.

 

The question is: Does any of it matter? Does it matter whether APC lost out to PDP, or even whether elections do or do not take place in certain designated states come next year? The fact of the matter is that the country has fallen apart – apologies to Achebe – and it seems pointless agonising over the nomenclature of its architects, even when they consider themselves ‘progressives’, the heirs to Awolowo’s legacy (but which, bizzarely, a now ‘older and wiser’  Fayose is claiming: ‘I want to be the Awolowo here...’). We needn’t labour the point. Consider one of their ‘stalwarts’, Chief Tom Ikini, the former foreign minister in the bad old days of Abacha who chased our only Nobel laureate into an ignominious exile, and who was himself outraged by Saturday’s election. ‘What happened in Ekiti was a violation of the constitution and those who are responsible should be exposed and, where necessary, punished’, our wordsmith opined, as who should know? Plus ca change, as Aristotle said.

 

It was Ikimi’s emergence as a significant force in the new mega-opposition that should have alerted us to the true nature of the party that parades itself as the radical alternative to the present incumbents. In a normal country he would be wandering about in sack cloth and ashes imploring the forgiveness of those he sinned against, but then a normal country would hardly have produced the likes of the master he served so diligently. Hear him:

 

My first achievement in that Government was to initiate the creation of the highly successful Petroleum Trust Fund [which] General Muhamadu Buhari headed...successfully... Those who are still deaf and have not heard the true situation regarding my tenure as Foreign Minister as it does not in any way relate to the unfortunate occurrences regarding Ken Saro-Wiwa are advised to watch my 70th birthday documentary still being run on the AIT television. I am prepared to donate free copies.

 

The idea that anyone would want to watch, much less acquire (even for free), the self-glorification of a man who dragged this country’s name through the mud and then turned around to distance himself from that ghastly episode could only occur to the architect himself. Well, we are used to such obscene levels of hubris among those who lord it over us. We see the same with Ikimi’s brother-in-arms, the man he once helped into the defunct PTF and who now revels in the adulation of the great unwashed he did not help out of poverty when he was passing his with-immediate-effect decrees. But these are easy targets and Tinubu’s newspaper has lately gone to town over Ikimi’s sins now that he and the ‘lion of Bourdillon’ have fallen out, as was perhaps inevitable. But this doesn’t mean that Ikimi’s assessment of the immediate past Lagos State governor is wrong: ‘I am informed that Asiwaju Bola Tinubu is not comfortable with my independent-mindedness and he holds the view that I cannot be controlled. He prefers someone that he believes will do his bidding...’

 

In other words, there is no difference between the two contending parties. As regards Ekiti specifically, it is true that Fayose is not the kind of man anyone would want to represent them (he still has case pending over N1.2bn gone walk-about in his first incarnation as governor), and by all accounts Fayemi is a gentleman (as he demonstrated in the aftermath of his defeat), but that is not what concerns us here. In any case, the people voted and we are bound to respect their wishes. The point is not this or that party or person but the system itself which tends to nepotism and corruption by the nature of the case. It cannot be helped. And this is so because the end is not service but plunder, however otherwise well-meaning the candidate, who would never have gotten there in the first place anyway.

 

So what would make it better? Alas, one has to keep coming back to this: true federalism. The fact is that too few Nigerians believe in Nigeria, which is why they can steal public funds with impunity and their fellow citizens cheer them on, praying only for their own chance to do the same. It is no accident that those currently arguing at the national conference for more of the same also happen to come from those parts which have the most need to steal.

 

©Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

A slightly different version of this piece first appeared in Hallmark newspaper, June 24.

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. The House My Father Built, a memoir, will be

published later this year.

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

Militarising Nigeria

The former MD of Nigerian Breweries recently called for the return of the military. Festus Odimegwu doesn’t seem to be a man much given to hyperbole so we must take him at his word, as indeed those various others voicing the same opinion. It should be said at the outset that his reasons are cogent enough. ‘Our leaders don’t understand what leadership is all about,’ he opines and few would disagree. As I write, the president and the newly appointed Kano State emir are forgiving one another their kleptomania; meanwhile, the vice-president, whose reputation for avarice is second to few, has descended on Ekiti State to beef up the ‘war front’ in the ruling party’s determination to ‘bring back our stolen mandate’.

 

This is what happened in Ekiti State during the infamous 2007 elections that made the courts finally overturn the results in favour of Dr Kayode Fayemi, the incumbent now hoping for a second term:

 

This writer was in Ekiti State during the re-run elections and I saw how dangerous and desperate they were. The entire state resources were deployed in order to keep the loot. The Nigerian press had a bitter lesson to tell and the documentation of raw deal newsmen suffered in Ekiti State. I saw Oni’s men and women going berserk and mad just to remain in power. Senators Ayo Arise and Omisore took the fight personal because they know that if Oni loses their position will be on [the] line. Senator Ayo Arise and Omisore...physically mobilized thugs to main and kill innocent people with impunity. The delegation from Abuja led by the Dimeji Bankole, the Speaker of the House of Representatives provided a shield for the Oni’s army to unleash violence on the people of Ekiti without caring a hoot.

With the new gubernatorial election just two days away, Fayemi has already expressed fears for his life following the death of a supporter from a police bullet during an otherwise peaceful rally. He also alleged police complicity following an altercation between OC Mobile and his own police detail that is the preserve of state governors but not schoolgirls. Meanwhile, we are now hearing that several turncoat governors have been denied entry to the state by soldiers at checkpoints. Given all this, it is hardly surprising that Mr Odimegwu should claim that Nigeria is ‘not ripe for democracy’, but calling on the military to stage a coup is both infantile and mischievous.

 

Mr Odimegwu has evidently forgotten the trauma we all went through during the long years of Buhari, Babangida and Abacha but he misses the central point, which is that military rule never really ended with the so-called enthronement of democracy in 1999. The military-civilian oligarchy which has governed this nation since 1960 simply swopped khaki for agbada and continued business as usual. The only difference between then and now is the veneer of freedom without the ‘with immediate effect’ decrees which, for instance, banned newspapers, yet a president who now feels threatened by the same press which fought the longest and the hardest to bring about our so-called democracy sends soldiers to impound newspapers and arrest vendors. That this is being done under the guise of that catch-all, national security, only underlines the sinking feeling of déjà vu.

 

At bottom, Mr Odimegwu fails to understand that the problem with Nigeria is structural. It isn’t a matter of the head of state’s dress code, hence the clamour at the on-going national conference for the true federalism we attempted to practice for the first six years of our independence until it was truncated by the very military he would now invite back. Mr Odimegwu himself knows that Nigeria is a failed state - ‘Nigeria as a state has failed already. We cannot be saying it may fail,’ he opines – but fails to understand that this is so because it is designed to fail given the politics we play.

 

Or, more accurately, the politics we are allowed to play by the military-inspired Constitution we have been labouring under since 1979, as amended. According to this Constitution, ordinary citizens like you and me, i.e. the common man and woman, are forbidden from contesting for any elective post from local councillor to president unless we belong to a ‘national’ party duly registered by the misnamed Independent National Electoral Commission. The reasoning, if it can be so called, is to foster unity in a diverse nation but we all know that the real reason is to enable those already in possession of the money – the money-bags – to continue to perpetuate themselves in power in order to acquire yet more money.

 

No one doubts Nigeria’s diversity. Indeed, a case could probably be made for calling it the most patchwork country in the world which would never have become a nation in the first place but for the European imperial adventure. The many religions, languages and ethnicities had lived cheek by jowl for centuries without seeing any need to come together in any formal way. Well, we got our independence and those who were privileged to decide these things thought it best we remain as one. Since then, they have been reiterating our indivisibility like a mantra, even declaring it a ‘no-go area’ whenever they get up yet another conference to map our future.

 

In fact, the only way Nigeria can cohere is by celebrating the very differences that we have turned into our biggest problem. And this will only happen when each of its component parts – however large or small – is able to control its own affairs (including its own resources) within the larger context of a federation they have freely agreed to be part of. Under this arrangement, any citizen anywhere in the country would be able to stand up and decide to vie for any position without recourse to one or other of the permitted behemoths currently parading themselves as political parties.

 

Until that day, looking for Mr Odimegwu’s strong man will only guarantee that the country remains the ‘war front’ that is currently being enacted in Ekiti ahead of the greater conflagration awaiting us next year.

 

©Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

This piece first appeared in a slightly different version in Hallmark, 17 June 2014

 

 

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. The House My Father Built, a memoir, will be

published later this year.

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

The arrogant North

I was reading with amusement a communiqué from the Northern Elders Forum. Nothing new, alas. It begins by saying that the ‘majority of the northerners...are far more politically conscious of the two broad regions that make up Nigeria’, and laments the ‘dangerous trend’ by the Jonathan administration ‘aimed at weakening the determination of the North to reclaim its traditional position of providing leadership for the Nigerian polity’. After taking a swipe at the traitors among them who have fallen for Jonathan’s divide and rule tactics, it reiterates its long-held belief that the North has a divine right to rule – ‘it is the almighty that has destined it so’ – which alone has kept the country ‘stable and secure’.  All said and done, ‘The North is only asking for what it does best in Nigeria: leadership.’

 

The contempt for the lesser breed is hardly to be credited. Dismissing the current ‘aberration’ with an ‘interloper’ going by ‘the name of a Jonathan Southern presidency’, they recall the only previous occasion when they were caught ‘unawares’, which was when ‘Aguiyi Ironsi and his Eastern cohorts’ jumped the gun. Other than that, they once ‘even denied themselves’ by allowing Obasanjo two terms, although he ‘nearly abused this privilege’ by latterly trying for a third ‘after he begged and pleaded with the North that brought him to power in the first place’. Although he ‘made amends’ of sorts by installing ‘his friend’s younger brother,’ he nevertheless oversaw ‘the most rigged election of 2007’ which cheated Gen. Muhammadu Buhari of his deserved prize.

 

The communiqué is clear that Buhari is ‘currently the undisputed of the North’, given that ‘there is no other person whom the masses in the North are willing to vote or even die for’. It then praises Tinubu, who ‘has seen the light’ by joining forces with him, unlike the inflexible Awolowo, who didn’t understand ‘the strategic wisdom in working with the North for a just and sustainable Nigeria’. According to their calculations, the North and the South-West between them have the numbers, unlike the current zone, ‘which arrogantly believes that it is entitled to [power] by virtue of [its] natural resources’, not minding the fact that ‘all mineral resources belong to the federal government’, as has been the case ‘since the colonial period’.  Once in office come 2015, they will ensure that derivation is reduced from 13 per cent to 5 per cent for on-shore oil only, and adds: ‘If the North stands together with its allies in the South-West we can ensure that local governments get 35% of federal allocations, while states get 39 percent. Let those who want 50% derivation get it only from those resources that were not located naturally.’

 

Whether Tinubu himself is prepared to be the willing stooge of a contemptuous North; or whether, more importantly, the people of the South-West see themselves as collaborators in the theft of other people’s resources, will undoubtedly be one of the lessons of the coming elections (assuming that they actually take place), but this is in many ways the story of Nigeria, and in that sense will merely be a continuation of the same. The entire communiqué reeks of power for its own sake for the purpose of plunder as a God-given right.  And in insisting that only the North has delivered a ‘stable and secure’ country when all the evidence tells us otherwise, they also threaten – if only by implication – the mayhem they are currently witnessing in their own domain, a clear enough case of the chickens coming home to roost: If you govern by divine right, you just might suffer divine retribution.

 

The communiqué was signed by Dr Yusuf Jubril (President) and Sani Mohammed (Secretary). Nothing much seems to be known about either of them and perhaps they are misrepresenting another group by the same name, which has been more measured in its tone, if not in its demands. In an address delivered to Jonathan two years ago, they professed themselves distressed by the activities of Boko Haram while blaming the government for its ‘misjudgement’, which led to ‘the poor handling of the sect’s activities’. But they were also distressed over the disparity in revenue allocation, ‘which appears to ignore the constitutional injunction of promoting even development’; and the dearth of federal appointments, currently standing at about 18 per cent.

 

In a way, it’s unfair to blame the ‘arrogant’ North when one is talking about a severe minority of the self-interested, as contemptuous of their own people as they are of others. This includes the Middle Belt, Jonathan’s only apparent ally outside his own zone, whose inmates are distinguished by their ‘treachery right from the days of Joseph Tarka and his likes’, but which nevertheless couldn’t prevent ‘the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) from winning in the past’. Their ‘political naivety and narrow mindedness’ will deliver them into the hands of the North this time around, ‘if only the APC selects a Northern presidential candidate’.

 

‘If only the APC selects a Northern presidential candidate.’ So there you have it. Once you get past the grandstanding, the veiled threats, the extended sulk, they must openly beg those who nearly abused the privilege after they begged and pleaded to be allowed power in the first place. But the game is up and they know it.  More importantly, so does everyone else. They themselves call Jonathan and his people ‘arrogant’ without any sense of irony but they are right nonetheless. And why not? Why shouldn’t Jonathan and his merry men do the same with the same resources, and which they happen to own whether you like it or not.

 

Meanwhile, Nigeria, the country of however many million square kilometres with abundant land and rain and people – and, yes, oil - seems all but forgotten. We don’t deserve it and for that reason we are going to lose it. This may or may not be a bad thing, but it is what we are doing.

 

©Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

An earlier version of this piece first appeared in Hallmark, 10 June 2014.

 

 

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. The House My Father Built, a memoir, will be

published later this year.

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

Defending the nation

It seems that the military was upset by an International New York Times article of 23 May alleging that it was hampering the hunt for the abducted schoolgirls. According to one Colonel Onyema Nwachuckwu, signing on behalf of the Director of Defence Information, the paper’s bureau chief for West and Central Africa, Adam Nossiter, wrote a ‘reckless and unprofessional’ article which claimed that the military was ‘poorly trained and armed’ and was also ‘riddled with corruption’. According to the Colonel, this was typical of the bias ‘adopted by a section of foreign media organizations which have continued to feed on insinuations aimed at casting aspersion (sic) on the Nigerian Military’. He further noted that Mr Nossiter was already ‘well known’ as someone ‘committed to reporting Nigeria in bad (sic) light’, as witness ‘his previous articles on the country in the same medium’. He ended by challenging his employers ‘to note the racist disposition of this writer and always take his writings on Nigeria and Africa with a pinch of salt’.

 

I should admit at once that I am not only a contributing writer to this same newspaper but that I also count the journalist in question a friend. That said, it would be unseemly to ‘defend’ him against the unfortunate charge of racism, which is only a measure of our good colonel’s desperation, but which in any case he declines to substantiate in the course of his response. Indeed, ‘response’ is too elevated a word for what are simply assertions. The stories we have all heard this past month concerning the abducted schoolgirls – and by no means exclusive to the INYT - would seem to bear out the claim that the Nigerian military is both ‘poorly trained and armed’, as well as ‘riddled with corruption’, but which hardly goes far enough if we are to believe what we have been reading in the Nigerian press about Generals selling weaponry to Boko Haram, which was why soldiers at the Maimalari Barracks in Maiduguri shot at their commanding officer.

 

Defending the indefensible is always a tricky matter, which was why our good Colonel failed to mention that the views of the article in question were not those of Mr Nossiter. The full sentence of the original article reads as follows: ‘There is a view among diplomats here and with their governments at home that the military is so poorly trained and armed, and so riddled with corruption, that not only is it incapable of finding the girls, it is also losing the broader fight against Boko Haram.’ Clear enough, and borne out by other stories reaching us that those same ‘governments at home’ which have ridden to our rescue are unwilling to exchange information with the Nigerian military because they do not trust them. This is the real indictment, and never mind what our brave boys did or didn’t do in the past, which the colonel uses to clinch his ‘argument’, to wit:

 

Describing as a weak reed, a military that fought and sacrificed so much to extricate Liberia, a vital and longstanding ally of United States of America from the brinks of total collapse on two occasions, reveals the viciousness of the bias being displayed by Nossiter. This same Nigerian military which Nossiter tried fruitlessly to ridicule fought valiantly and successfully to bring to an end, the civil war in Sierra Leone, a former British colony and ally. What about the successes in Darfur and Somalia? Has he also forgotten or is he so unaware of the gallantry of Nigerian Soldiers when American troops were being mauled by rebels in Somalia in 1994? Has he quickly forgotten the contribution of the Nigerian military to the current peace being savoured in Mali?

 

It may be that our military distinguished itself in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and that they were prepared to go into areas where the Americans and the British cried off. That was in those days. In these days, yet other reports – not written by Nossiter and not published in the INYT – have suggested that all was not well with the contingent we sent to Mali:

 

Malian top military officer said he had no confidence in Nigerian soldiers and called them undisciplined and incompetent, he further stressed out in a press interview that Nigeria would only do minimal military jobs as manning checkpoints and loading trucks as they were not capable of fighting the Islamist extremist and jihadist in the battle front. The military officer said though their military was not much better it was well trained by the EU and could harness the menace.

 

But this will not be the first time that an individual representing the ‘western’ press has been singled out for the sins of the others, although this was usually the provenance of military rule in the bad old days, when it wasn’t even necessary to write two-page letters to that end. Alas, democracy (if that us what we are practising) is trickier, what with all this ‘western’ talk of transparency and accountability.

 

The pity of it is that no one is really surprised by the continuing revelations concerning the unfitness of our military to protect the citizens. No institution can be exempt from the corruption we see all around us, so much so that we are beginning to read more and more stories in the media – both local and international – of our failing state as we approach elections which look less and less like happening. And what would be the point? Like the militants before them, Boko Haram is merely demonstrating that there is no government in Nigeria, just a bunch of hooligans who are even worse than the colonial masters they succeeded.

 

©Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

An earlier version on this piece first appeared in Hallmark, 3 June 2014

 

 

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. The House My Father Built, a memoir, will be

published later this year.

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