WHY GOODLUCK JONATHAN DOES NOT BELONG IN OUR FUTURE

No, dear reader, you are not seeing double.  The title is correct and it is not a reprise of an earlier piece bearing a similar title on Muhammadu Buhari.  And, no, this artitle has not been prompted by any need I felt to balance my take and pretend to be even-handed in my approach to what seem like the principal candidates for the office of president of Nigeria in 2015.  Should I find that one candidate is superior to another in my considered judgment, I would not fail to point that out.  Neither have I been motivated nor goaded into writing by the hackneyed responses of some Buhari supporters who barely or inattentively read the earlier piece which made clear that the royal road to a second term for Goodluck Jonathan would be a Buhari or even an Atiku candidacy in the presidential elections next year.

I would like to start with a declaration.  Jonathan will get a second term as president not because he deserves one but because the All Progressives Congress (APC) is so politically inept and morally bankrupt, not to talk of its being devoid of a vision, that it is proving incapable of offering Nigerians a real alternative to both Jonathan and his party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).

To locate the case that I wish to make, we need to go back to 2010.  The then Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) was about to settle on Nuhu Ribadu for its presidential ticket.  My worries then about Ribadu will be articulated in a future piece on him and his so-called defection.  I shared with friends back then that I thought that the 2011 elections were going to be a watershed event in Nigeria’s political history, especially at the federal level.  I said then that the 2011 presidential election was an open one with absolutely no favourite candidate.  It was an election that the CAN could win with Ribadu atop its ticket given his pedigree, at that time, despite what I considered his lack of principles demonstrated after his initial removal as head of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).

What was crucial was that he was clean, had what we would call extremely high favourableness and extremely low negativity ratings across the country.  What is more, he would be running against a twice-accidental public servant—first as state governor and, later, as president—with no personality and barely in control of his party machinery.  Of course, there was an important caveat.  Of greater importance was whether or not the sponsoring party and its powers that be were willing to fun and execute a full-fledged presidential campaign.  As all who follow politics in Nigeria know too well, not only did the CAN not run a decent campaign; it did not run a campaign at all! 

It beggared its candidate and was busy negotiating an ugly power-sharing pact with another party.  It ended up with an unprincipled directive to its supporters to split their ticket voting ACN locally and a different party at the presidential level.  Thus was lost the possibility of a campaign and a candidacy that would, at least on paper, have rattled the cages of the PDP and positioned the ACN as a genuine government-in-waiting.  The party lost that opportunity and the same mentality or maybe I should say that its realization that that opportunity once lost has entirely escaped its group led it to the sterile merger with the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and the remnants of a handful of no-name parties to form the APC.

Let us get back to Jonathan.  Here was an accidental president who first had to do battle as Vice President with the cabal around his terminally ill boss and to require the support of nonpartisan others to step into his constitutionally-sanctioned role as successor to his principal.  He became president by default.  He has been there now for six years having won his own mandate for the last four in 2011.  Although the latter-day Youths Earnestly Ask for Goodluck Jonathan [Remember Abacha?] otherwise known as Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) as well as hacks like Chika Okpala now are a ubiquitous presence on Channels Television joyfully trying to sell us on the out-of-this-world transformation wrought in the country by Jonathan’s administration, I think it is fair to say that the evidence may not be there for nonpartisan observers like me to see. 

When he took over, power was the problem in Nigeria.  Six years later, power—its generation and distribution—is still the problem in Nigeria.  Maybe the signal transformation that Jonathan has wrought is the undeniable fact that we are a certified “stand-by power” economy!  By contrast, whatever people hated about Olusegun Obasanjo, everybody talks about his signal achievement in the telecommunications sector.  Even if he had needed to do a selling when he was in office, no amount of shilling by any number of spokesperson and “transformation ambassadors” would have succeeded in pulling wool over Nigerians’ eyes seven years on had it been a false transformation.  I am not sure but it appears that the reason Jonathan needs so many snake-oil salespersons around him is precisely that the so-called transformation agenda is a certified dud!

Yet, I do not think that the failure of the “transformation agenda” is enough to say that Jonathan does not belong in our future.  Obasanjo wasted his first term ensconced in the suffocating embrace of some of the dregs of Nigerian politics.  His second was his term of redemption.  Jonathan’s people, I am sure, would want to argue that he needs his second term to secure his legacy and correct the mistakes of his first term.  I am even willing to go along with the position that finishing Umar Yar’Adua’s term should not count given some of the opposition to his accession to office within his own party.

No doubt, Jonathan would not be the first in the annals of the presidential system borrowed from the United States to ask for second term after a not-so-distinguished first term.  That is the nature of the beast.  If I may use a boxing analogy, however poorly a champion fights in a title defence, the challenger must beat him comprehensively, preferably, knock him out, in order to come out as the new champion.  In the present case, Jonathan must have chalked up some failure or failures that literally make him unfit to continue in office.  It is this signal failure that, I argue, must disqualify Jonathan from being a part of Nigeria’s future in the office of president.

Here is the case.  When all is said and done, whatever the form of the state, in all of civilized history, no state has or deserves to have legitimacy that is not able to protect its subjects or citizens.  In other words, the ultimate function of government, the very reason for its institution is to guarantee the governed a reasonable expectation that their lives, poor, rich or merely okay, would unfold under reasonably secure conditions procured by their governors, the basis of their legitimacy, without the governed having to revert to self-help and its attendant limitations and conundrums.  When a government fails spectacularly at this most basic duty, its legitimacy fount dries up quickly and if it does not voluntarily leave office, it usually does not want for challenges to its tenure.

Jonathan’s signal failure lies in its absolutely horrendous record when it comes to securing Nigerians in the leading of their lives, howsoever miserable those lives are for the teeming majority of Nigerians.  The undisputable monument to shame for the Jonathan administration in this regard is its utter ineptitude in its handling of the Boko Haram insurgency.  When Jonathan took over from Yar’Adua, the insurgency did not have a single square kilometre of territory under its control.  Six years later, almost the entire northeast region of Nigeria is under occupation by forces that are not those of the Nigerian state.

Unfortunately, ours is not a decent society.  Were we a decent society, the government that has presided over such loss of territory would be put on its back heels and scrambling to justify its continuation in office.  What makes our situation worse is that the worst impact of the insurgency is being borne by those who cannot even resort to self-help, e.g., forming vigilante groups: children.  The kidnap of the Chibok girls is much more than a symbol: it is the ultimate indictment of a government that has absolutely no sense of its responsibility or is too thick to know when it has failed woefully. 

Given that the president is the head of the political arm as well as the head of the military arm—he is not called the Commander-in-Chief for nothing—if there is any meaning to those titles, it must include taking responsibility.  It is not enough for the president to keep changing his national security team as if its members were diapers.  If he keeps picking the wrong people to run his national security team, he is responsible.  If he appoints the right people but does not inspire them to perform or under-equips them, he is responsible.  The funny thing about being responsible is that it sometimes requires leaving office when the failure is repeated in a pattern or is particularly catastrophic.  Both conditions are met in the saga of the Chibok girls. 

As I said earlier, the Chibok girls’ case is the ultimate monument to the shame of a government that is simply incapable of protecting its citizens, especially its most vulnerable citizens—its children—who, by the way, must be nurtured and protected at all costs if the polity is going to have a future at all.  And the girls are not alone.  As I write this, news just broke of another attack on a high school in Potiskum, Yobe State, involving the deaths of another 49 young lives and scores injured.  Meanwhile, the PDP candidate for office of governor of Zamfara State, Ibrahim Gusau, and his supporters are dancing shameless on Channels Television at the launch of his campaign at the same time that the world is being fed news of the carnage in Potiskum!  Why bother about a slaughter of kids in school when the important task of launching a campaign for office is on queue!

No, the girls are not alone.  Before them, 43 boys were murdered in their sleep at another school and the president, just like his party representative in Zamfara State at the moment, and the time-servers that wait on him hand and foot did not see anything wrong with hosting a party in celebration of a dubious centenary of the fleecing of our agency as a people in the constitution of our de-formed polity.  There have been other kidnaps of other children and women since Chibok.  None of these matters to our president who is preoccupied with securing a second-term that, I dare say, he has not earned.

Notice that I have not dwelt on other security failures—bombings across the entire northern Nigeria region; pipeline vandalisation and oil bunkering and the privatisation of security in these sphere to erstwhile bandits of the Niger delta region; the fact that not even the Nigerian government dare operate in the public square of its own capital for fear of a repetition of a previous Independence Day bombing a few years back.  National day is now celebrated in the President’s living room.  No matter, just let me have a second term, says the president and his verandah boys and girls.  I don’t need to remind Nigerians of the government’s failures and their gory details.

All that matters is the second term.  It is almost as if the president’s minions know their s has been a disastrous term, almost mirroring Obasanjo’s first term in its sterility in the area of notable achievements.  Their obsession as well as that of their principal with a second term puts the lie to their claim of transformation effected by this government.  Were this president secure in his much-trumpeted achievements, his place in our history should be more than assured.  I am convinced that his handlers know that there is not much legacy to bequeath.  That explains their maniacal determination to wring a second term out of the Nigerian electorate.

One of the verandah boys came out the other day to say that no president resigns in the midst of a war.  Really?  A proper education would have told him that Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) quit while the Vietnam War was still raging.  He could have soldiered on believing, as I think our president probably does, that he had a divine mandate to continue the war and win it in his second term.  His greatness consisted in part in his realisation  that if did not already have a legacy at home, given what it would take for him to continue in office in a second term, even if could win one, he threw in the towel and refused to present himself for re-election.

The latter issue is where the historical similarities between Johnson and Jonathan are most instructive.  Nigeria, right now, is a country riven by severe divisions.  Ironically, that division is Jonathan’s ticket to a second term and he is busy stoking it, especially the religious one.  What with a ‘pilgrimmage’ to Jerusalem prior to declaring his second-term ambition and his resident “chaplain” in the person of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) president trying to pass him off as the elect of God and defender of Christians against Boko Haram!

Why would Jonathan not think of resigning or not seeking a second term?  Ordinarily, in addition to the self-serving lies and proclamations about service to the people that are standard fare for politicians, we may think of ego as a justification for clinging to office.  But, and this is the rub, Jonathan, like other public office holders in our country, has no ego worthy of the name.  I am positive that Jonathan does not wake up any morning and worry about his place in history, his contributions to humanity, how the world was before he came into it and how it would, pace his own contributions, when will have left it.  In short, as I have written elsewhere, I do not see any evidence of a sense of self, of an individuality that would be hurt by failure and discomfited by the fate, unknown but most likely horrific, of 217 Chibok girls, or the fate of the other school children that have been killed, maimed—physically and psychologically—for life, or displaced by the Boko Haram insurgency in northeast Nigeria while this sad presidency has lasted.

No it is not him or his personality that is at stake.  After all, he is not in office as Goodluck Jonathan, simpliciter.  He is in office rather as “the minority areas president”, “the south-south-in-chief”, “the first Ijaw-at-the-head-of-the-trough”, and any thought of resigning would not be in terms of Goodluck Jonathan the person but of removing the retinue of hangers-on in whose name he claims the presidency.  This is the ultimate tragedy of an unthinking collectivist ethos and primordial even if antiquarian communalism that is the bane of our political discourse and practice today.

To admit that he has failed is not a personal thing: it is a collective failure tarnishing all respective collectivities just iterated.  Additionally, the direct presence of the feeding trough, at the head of the table on which sits the “national cake”, will all be in jeopardy for those who feel entitled.  Such is the mess that we call Nigerian politics today that even nonpartisans like me are not doing due diligence by putting on the table the question of the president’ current tenure and his worthiness for another term.

Is Jonathan going to get a second term?  No thanks to the peculiarities of Nigerian politics and the criminal incompetence of his main opposition, Yes.  Does he deserve one?  Hell, NO!  Here is a man who has no ideas, stands for nothing, has no vision and, yet, he is and will be president of what supposedly is the most important country of peoples of African descent on earth.  What a people!

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A REPLY TO CRITICS

1.            I would like to thank those who read and, even more, those who have commented upon, given feedback to, tweeted, and liked or disliked on Facebook, my recent “Why Muhammadu Buhari Does Not Belong in Nigeria’s Future”, published on the pages of this journal.  I am glad and grateful to be asked by the editors to provide some response.

2.            “Aṣápẹ́ fún wèrè jó àti wèrè, ọgbọọgba ni wọ́n.” [The one who claps for a lunatic to perform becomes one with the lunatic.]  So, in light of this Yorùbá-derived wisdom, I shall not become one with those who have substituted abuse, name-calling, and accusations, for engagement with the kernel of the piece regardless of whether its core claim is right or wrong.  I dare say that the lack of thinking and of the capacity for making a case that, we can all recall, used to make some of our peers, when we were young, always to respond to jests, or being shown the illogicality of their thinking, by throwing punches is reflected in those who have resorted to name-calling.  It is what I see in those who think abuse is the response to reasoned positions.  It is indicative of a dire lack.  It is not worthy of a response.  What is more, I have no interest in a shouting match!

3.            To those who insist that Buhari is the best of the worst, I grant you your solitude.  But here is an anecdote that might help you situate where I am coming from.  In 1978, in the run-up to the transitional elections to civilian rule back then, one of my teachers, when all other entreaties had failed to persuade me to go with his party preference, granted that it was a choice between two evils and he wanted me to join him and others in opting for the lesser evil.  I rejoined that there is a third option: not choosing any evil at all.

4.            If your best rejoinder to my case against Buhari’s intellectual, political, and temperamental qualification for president of Nigeria, or lack thereof, is that he is the least bad of the choices available for the next election, it just confirms my position that we have been so beaten down by military rule and the chicaneries of politicians that we are now satisfied with being treated as mules and donkeys.  Fela must be turning in his grave!  It matters little that many who subscribe to this position are academics and other leaders of thought.  It is a terrible augury for our future as a people.  I have no doubt, given this acquiescence, that if Buhari were to turn into an autocratic president, such people would rationalize it in the name of Nigerians needing a “firm hand”, the same mentality that made British colonialists led by Frederick Lugard to believe that the only logic that Africans understand is that of the cattle prod!  Is it any wonder that we honoured him with a Centenary Medal?  Buhari’s equivalents in South Korea are cooling their heels in jail.  But that is a discourse for another day.

5.            Additionally, if you are looking for an intellectually vacuous, administratively inept but keen politician, we already have one in the incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan.  And, while we are at it, he is a known quantity in the democratic process.  Buhari is not. 

6.            So far, no one has shown that I am wrong in asking that the All Progressives Congress show how exactly it expects to be regarded as a change party when it is offering recycled politicians.  My conclusion is that the powers that be in the party have no confidence in any of their young governors, including those who have done well, or they believe that the old formula of ethnic zoning is the only path to the presidency of Nigeria.  Why not pick a clean, dynamic, forward-looking and accomplished candidate with a sense of how the world is now and how to position Nigeria for the future in it and proceed to run a proper campaign—the sort that the ACN never mounted for their 2011 candidate—to sell the candidate to the country?  Nigerians are not stupid; of that, I am in no doubt.

6.            To those who think that because I live abroad, I no longer have a mouth to speak on Nigerian matters, I have a simple response.  You are damn wrong!  First, as the saying goes, distance makes the heart grow fonder.  The reason that many of us emigrants from our homeland send those remittances that are now so important to our respective countries’ economies is that we are never-say-die Nigerians and we do not become as jaded about Nigeria’s prospects as living close to the reality of Nigeria might induce one to become.  It is why the inability of the Nigerian government to take care of our interests outside has never made us bid bye-bye to Nigeria.

7.            Second, I always like to point out that the only citizenship you may second-guess yourself about is citizenship by naturalization.  It is in the very nature of birthright citizenship that it lends itself to being taken for granted, used, and abused, if you will.  Even if I never set foot in Nigeria again, as long as I have not renounced my Nigerian citizenship—and, by the way, no one can take it away from me—as long as I live, it is my prerogative to keep putting my smelly mouth in Nigeria’s affairs.  As the saying goes, Nigeria is my mother’s water-pot and my smelly mouth will always be welcome at its rim.  Period.

8              Finally, as my Guinean friend never tires of reminding me and other African associates of ours, “Nigeria is too big to fail”.  The business of Nigeria, given its putative place in the world were it ever to redeem its promise and historical significance, is too important to leave to Nigerians alone to conduct, especially when they insist, as some have who responded to my piece, that their choice for president, come 2015, is between “dumb and dumber”.  Any more reason needed to show that some of us may not be the best judge of what is right for Nigeria, after all?

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ON SELF-RESPECT AND HOLDING PUBLIC OFFICE

In Yorùbá, we pray that we do not become an object lesson for others on how not to conduct oneself in the world.  The importance of this prayer has been brought home to me by the recent firing by the Nigerian Football Federation (NFF) of Stephen Keshi as the Head Coach of Nigeria’s national football team, the Super Eagles.  I know that Keshi has denied that he was fired but that is not of moment here.  What matters is that he did not leave of his own accord; he was let go.

I would like to argue that Keshi’s firing, however it transpired, is symptomatic of a trend amongst public office-holders in Nigeria regarding how not to become an object lesson in how not to conduct oneself in office.  He embodies all that is wrong with the temperament of public office-holders, and their attitude towards the idea of responsibility for both success and failure attached to such offices.  That is, Keshi is an embodiment of the good, the bad, and the ugly of public office-holding in our country.

In modern society, the idea is that all offices are open to talent, not state of origin, national and ethnic affiliation, religious adherence, circumstances of birth, and other similar accidents.  In other words, the primary qualification for holding office is merit, not ascription.  I doubt that many would deny that ours, as at present constituted, is not a modern society.  Let me explain.

When Keshi won the job as the head coach, he was picked on merit, I believe.  At least, that was the word out on the appointment.  Yet, there is little doubt that he came into a milieu in which there is no serious commitment to merit given the shenanigans of NFF officials which could only frustrate the best laid plans of genius coaches.  But he soldiered on, almost convinced, I guess, that his results would reinforce his authority and help him build the team that he and we dream of: the best in the world.  This was a solid assumption.  One cannot, after all, argue with results.

The problem is that in Nigeria, results matter little, the cash-and-carry mentality that dominates our public life means that, as we would say in Yorùbá, we only reckon with what is momentarily between our jaws.  Any time his team won, he was the best coach in the world; when they lost, he was the worst coach imaginable.  When his team had a slow start to their African Nations Cup campaign in 2013, there were calls for his sack.  When he managed to right the ship, he was hailed.  The same thing happened when he took the team to Brazil for the 2014 World Cup.

The problem is that the management of the NFF never thought that he was good enough.  All the time he was running the team, his employers were busy undermining him, convinced that, as a Nigerian, he could not do the job without the ‘godly’ hand of a white technical director, given that we are convinced that white people have been anointed by Providence to ‘think’ for the world.  Why does all this matter?

Were Keshi possessed of a robust sense of self and enough confidence in his own merit and, therefore, his sellability outside the borders of Nigeria—remember he had been a coach of Togo and Mali—he would have reacted differently to the continuing affront to his professionalism and persistent offence to his personal integrity.  How about calling the bluff of both the NFF and Nigerians by resigning?  In fact, given his repeated assertion that he was being courted by other countries interested in his services, he ought to have demonstrated his market value by taking one of those offers and forcing Nigeria and its criminally inept football administrators to compete for his services.

No, and this is where having a sense of self becomes important.  Someone with a well-formed sense of self does not own its successes and orphan its failures.  As much as a self trumpets and expects to be celebrated for its successes, it also takes responsibility and expects to be vilified for its failures.  And, on occasion, certain singular failures require the discerning, even proud, self to say, I failed, I do not deserve to continue in this position.  This is where the absence of a worthy self becomes noticeable in Keshi’s profile and conduct.  It is here that, I submit, Keshi is emblematic of what I take to be the dominant mentality of public office-holders in Nigeria: the refusal to take responsibility for failures and quit.

Yes, quit!  Again, here is the critical juncture at which Keshi is an excellent exemplar.  As I said above, he ought to have pushed back against no-good administrators.  He didn’t.  Then history put him on the spot in Sudan.  When his Super Eagles lost to Sudan earlier this month in Khartoum in a Cup of Nations qualifier, it was a historic loss for Nigeria and a historic victory for Sudan.  It was reported that it was the first time in forty-plus years that the Nigerian national football team would lose a match to Sudan.  That is historic, however one looks at it.  That ought to have been the ultimate affront to anyone’s professional dignity.  In other societies, the sense of self of the coach would have made him or her decide that, as the coach, the ultimate responsibility lies with him or her.  The dignified, graceful response would be resignation.

But not in Nigeria.  Outside of Tai Solarin, in the eighties of the last century, who resigned his office on account of an appearance of impropriety—he was not even directly accused—I can’t recall any public office-holder in Nigeria resigning his or her portfolio on account of historic, spectacular failures on their watch.  What did Keshi do after the disaster in Khartoum: he begged for patience and understanding; he accused unknown others of seeking to sabotage his efforts; and so on.  At no time did he have the guts to say the only thing that would show that he had any self-respect as a person and as a professional: “Dear Nigerians, I am sorry.  For whatever reason the debacle in Khartoum happened, as the coach, I am responsible for the failure.  I quit.”

Not only would that have been the right thing to do, it would also have been the classy thing to do.  Contrary to his thinking, owning your failure does not diminish your worth.  To the discerning mind, one who is able to recognize when she has fallen short is more likely a better manager of talent and matériel than one who forever disclaims responsibility.

Unfortunately, this is not how we behave in Nigeria.  Back in 2009, after the elections and the subsequent attack against the opposition in Iran, the Police Minister there resigned after the police invaded the students’ hostel at Tehran University and one student was killed.  He took responsibility.  The South Korean minister in charge of maritime safety resigned in the wake of the ferry disaster that claimed the lives of so many school children earlier this year.

Our Interior Minister presided over the loss of multiple young lives in an exercise that he concocted for which he charged the candidates exorbitant fees to participate and he is still in office.  He did say that he took responsibility but, in his warped mind, that did not include the shame of failure making him to hand in his resignation.  It is obvious that neither he nor we, in whose name he holds office, really, truly, understand what responsibility means in the modern setting. 

Of course, he and we can always deploy the canard: “Nothing spoil if we do not understand what responsibility means; English is not our mother-tongue.”  I guess no mother-tongue in Nigeria has the equivalent concepts of shame, failure, and responsibility to make us be alert to their meanings and entailments.  It is why a Vice Chancellor at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, would have eight students lose their lives to mindless, on-campus, violence under his watch and would have to be removed by the appointing authorities.  It never occurred to him to say: “I do not deserve to continue in office after this catastrophe.”  And, horror of horrors, he has now metamorphosed into a so-called leader of Yorùbá people.  If being led by people of that ilk is part of what it is to be Yorùbá, please let me off that train right now!  I am sure that becoming a governor or a senator is in Abba Moro’s future.

The list is endless.  It does not matter how many air disasters occur, the aviation minister took responsibility but did not feel the need to resign till she was reshuffled out of office.  What if the same road—the Lagos-Benin Expressway-had been built over and over again, and the roads have become killing fields on account of poor management, the minister of works can sleep well at night; he is responsible but there is no need to vacate office.  Our eminent professors of science and technology are content with presiding over nonfunctioning electricity generation and distribution systems as long as they are V.I.P.s.  Whatever failures may attend their tenure cannot be their responsibility. 

The appointing authorities, too—the president, state governors, university governing councils, etc.—share the same mentality: the minister has already taken responsibility.  Obviously, for them, saying so is enough!  Why fire her, again?  The problem is much deeper, though.  Just as office holders have no discernible selves that could be held to account, the conditions of appointment and the expectations that attach to office-holding are cut from the same cloth.

It may appear on the surface that these appointments are on merit.  What could demonstrate merit more than a professorship!  A closer look at the conduct of the appointee and appointer as well as their respective expectations regarding performance will show that merit is barely a consideration.  Ministers and directors are not selves, they are ciphers.  They are personifications of their states of origin, their respective sponsoring factions of their parties, their national group, and so on.  When they perform and when they don’t, it does not much matter. 

If you are the appointer, how can you fire an ethnic group personified in your minister; if you are a minister, how can you resign a position that you are not occupying in your own meritorious self but as a representative of your people?  Resigning is an irresponsible course that leaves your people without a place at the relevant feeding trough.  So, it does not matter how many insults to your personality and professionalism—à la Keshi—the latter are not under attack because it is not you in the office; it is your people.  Your professional integrity could not be under attack because it was not the principal reason that you were picked to be a minister, director, or coach in the first place.

To round up.  In modern society, public office is open to talent and merit.  Although it does not always work the way it is intended to, this is the standard.  We are not there yet, as a people.  Central to getting there is developing robust selves that would consider certain acts to be beneath their dignity and would equally own their successes as well as their failures.  That robust self is built on self-respect and self-respect is what will make you not to continue in a position in which you have recorded a spectacular failure, even if the appointing authority wants you to stay on.

On a final note, having failed to advance the cause of peace in Vietnam and witnessing the divisions in American society occasioned by this foreign misadventure, the then president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson, took responsibility and placed country before ambition.  With an eye on any American equivalent of the dubious Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria, Johnson declared to his nation in an address that our president might do well to watch and study: “I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”  Wish that Goodluck Jonathan had enough self-respect to be an LBJ! 

In a decent society, the debacle of the Chibok kidnapping and other atrocities committed by Boko Haram in areas the security of which is superintended by the federal government of Nigeria should have been enough for a president to be hounded out of office.  But, remember, for Jonathan to concede this way would be for the forces for which he is the embodiment to be dismissed from their seat at the top of the power totem pole. 

By the way, no one doubts LBJ’s high standing in the annals of the American presidency, in spite of his taking responsibility and resigning to save his polity from further damage from his continuation in office.  Given all the accomplishments that have been touted by the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria or is it Youths Earnestly Ask for Goodluck Jonathan! In his name, why not leave the stage when the ovation is loudest?  If, indeed, he has achieved those things, his place in Nigeria’s presidential annals is already assured.

POSTCRIPT: I wrote this piece before the latest shenanigans by Stephen Keshi and his Nigerian Football Federation employers.  The latest events confirm everything that I wrote above.  But that is beside the point.  I have merely used the Keshi saga—that is what it has become—to make a point about our public life.  What I have applies with equal force to our commissioned officers in the armed forces who take no responsibility for defeats, however humiliating; to governors who think that being out of office and becoming ordinary citizens are beneath their dignity; and so on.  I am sure that we can do better and a place to start is for those of us who see things differently to open conversations with our fellow citizens on how not to assess or embrace our public officeholders.

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https://blogs.premiumtimesng.com/?p=166007

WHY MUHAMMADU BUHARI DOES NOT BELONG IN OUR FUTURE

I recently had a phone conversation with a dear compatriot who just shared with me a desire to support Muhammadu Buhari for president, come 2015 elections.  The conversation we had convinced me to put down these thoughts that have been with me for quite some time now.

Let me start by saying that it is a sign of how much military rule destroyed our sense of what is right and our relationship to history that dictators like Buhari and Ibrahim Babangida are still respected figures in our public life.  But that is a topic for another day.

Here are my reasons why no one who is exercised by Nigeria’s and, by extension, Africa’s future, as well as that of African-descended peoples everywhere, must actively campaign against the likes of Buhari and, while we are at it, Abubakar Atiku, when it comes to our future.

Buhari is an unrepentant, unapologetic, unreconstructed dictator in whom I am yet to see the requisite democratic temperament beyond persistently presenting himself for elections.  In case Nigerians need any reminder—that we do is itself a scandal—this was the man who, with Tunde Idiagbon, presided over a military regime that dehumanized Nigerians in the name of some spurious “War Against Indiscipline”.  It was a regime under whose jackboots the dignity of many Nigerian women was assaulted at airports and other points of entry with humiliating body cavity searches in the name of some crazy war on drug trafficking.  It is interesting that while the country that manufactured the original war on drugs is beating itself up on its stupidity, we are about to honour the man who led a regime that perpetrated indignities on Nigerians in the name of that same war!  Is it any wonder that we don’t get any respect from the rest of the world?

As if the indignities were not enough by themselves, this was a man who signed execution warrants for three young Nigerians convicted of drug trafficking under a law that also recognized their right to appeal their conviction to a higher court.  They were executed while their appeal had not, repeat not concluded.  I do not recall that under military rule, the suspension of the constitution included the suspension of the doctrine of the presumption of innocence of the accused until such a person is convicted.  Might I add that that conviction is not final until all appeals have been concluded.  In other words, Buhari and the goons he led murdered three young Nigerians who were still presumed innocent according to our legal system, even under military rule.  In a decent society—and ours is not a decent society—Buhari will be in the dock answering charges for his shameful and illegal behavior.  But we are such amnesiacs; we think he could and should be president.

Meanwhile, his so-called war on corruption for which everyone pretends to celebrate him was not a model of consistency.  Neither was the ethnicity-inflected justice that his tribunals meted out to erring politicians.   For me, the matter of the emir’s suitcases pales into insignificance against the ethnically-modulated pattern of (in)justice in the trials of so-called corrupt public officials of the Second Republic.  I am sure that not many Nigerians now recall the first public office-holder jailed for corruption by the Buhari\Idiagbon regime.  That would be Olabisi Onabanjo, the first civilian governor of Ogun State.  I recall telling people then that there was something wrong with that picture; I still think there is.  It probably was one reason why Fela wondered why Shehu Shagari was not put on trial but governors and other office-holders were.  In his inimitable parlance: “Driver get accident; na conductor you charge to court”.  The Niger State governor who was found with six million naira overseas did not quickly come up for trial; neither did the Kano State governor for whom there was no trouble with banking government money in government house.  Their trials would all come later.

More noteworthy was the fact that no, repeat, no Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) governor, not Ambrose Alli, not Bola Ige, not Onabanjo, was convicted of personal enrichment; they were guilty of using government funds to enrich their parties.  Yet, they were the first to be sent to jail!  The irony is completely lost on Buhari’s apologists when they proclaim his personal incorruptibility; a similar claim could be made of the UPN governors he was eager to imprison for presiding over a corrupt system.

Please don’t tell me about his stewardship of the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF).  First, anyone who was associated with the Abacha regime does not deserve any place in Nigeria’s public life and, definitely, in Nigeria’s future.  In the second place, PTF, EFCC, ICPC, and the innumerable extra-judicial organs that litter the Nigerian political landscape are relics of failure rather than icons of administrative genius.  Saudi Arabia, Mexico, the Gulf States did not need a PTF to put their oil windfall into proper financial institutions to ensure that their oil was turned from income into wealth.  Does PTF have such a record?  When did it become a sign of good economic management that you sit on accumulated money while your economy contracts?  So, if part of what recommends Buhari for president is his stewardship of the PTF as an organ of development, it must be that amnesia is even less a problem than economic illiteracy that borders on collective idiocy.

Beyond his military service, I do not see any evidence that Buhari is interested in the project called Nigeria beyond the insistence of the dominant elite in the northern part of the country that their sons must be at Nigeria’s helm.  I do not say this lightly and I say it in spite of the risk of being labelled.  I am not worried about being labelled.  He has never publicly opposed Sharia and that is one of the most toxic features of contemporary Nigerian polity and politics.  No politician who is ambivalent about Sharia can be part of a salubrious future for a country like Nigeria.  Incidentally, he could borrow a leaf from Mahathir Mohammed on this score.  But Nigerian Islam and contemporary Christianity are not about Reason or ideas.  His Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) definitely did not acquit itself well after the last presidential elections and his ominous wait to condemn the violence still rankles.  Where is the evidence of any change on his part on this score?

Finally, it is a matter for great pity that the All Progressive Congress (APC) has proven itself to be more interested in power than in making a country that we all can be proud of.  No thanks to its unthinking addiction to winning power and its even greater thoughtlessness in believing that it can do so by gathering the rejects of the ruling party, the APC can only deepen the cynicism and apathy of the electorate.  It is a disgrace that the best the party that styles itself ‘progressive’ can do is to tout two retreads as its change agents  when what the country needs are spanking new treads!  If the permutation is to win in the north, I wish them luck.  But it is the surest path to giving Goodluck Jonathan a second-term he does not deserve but will get because the other party has not shown itself to be any different from the PDP.  Jonathan did not win the north that last time around; neither does he need it this time.  APC can still withdraw from this path to self-destruction.  Buhari is part of a past well let alone.  Only the future should matter and nothing about him speaks to this future.

Published in http://www.pmnewsnigeria.com/2014/10/22/why-muhammadu-buhari-does-not-belong-in-our-future/
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https://blogs.premiumtimesng.com/?p=165911

MAY THEY NOT REST IN PEACE

I hope that Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ won’t mind my citing his recent “Give Them a Dose of Pain!” in PM News, September 16, 2013, as my inspiration for this article.  In that piece, angered and frustrated by the repeated losses and exasperations foisted on humanity by our Bible-thumping televangelist hustlers and their physical emporia planted on what are supposed to be thoroughfares, forget expressway, Adeeko had invoked the same Bible-derived imprecations that our modern-day zealots love to direct at their enemies, seen and unseen, witches and wizards, and so on, and asked that they be the recipients of unabated evil and suffering.

As my title indicates, this article, too, wishes to invoke imprecations.  The difference, this time, is that I do not take my cue from Christianity or even from that other domesticated religion of alien origins, Islam.  I shall spell out the difference presently.  First, let me outline what set me off on this occasion.

For us Nigerians, wherever we are in the world, cannot be indifferent to news of fresh atrocities committed by that band of Muslim fanatics, Boko Haram.  Simultaneously, it is difficult to deny that the routinisation of death and mayhem in Nigerian life makes it extremely difficult for one not to become blasé about yet another Boko Haram massacre.  It is one orientation one must stoutly resist.  First, it was the attack on high school students with at least 40 young lives prematurely ended that grabbed the headlines.  Then came the massacre of 95 at the School of Agriculture in a night raid.  While I grieved, I was also mindful of the Nigerian government’s basic inability to secure the lives of its citizens, even in their poverty.

The carnage at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi was particularly devastating for me.  Its singularity—compared to the routinisation I just alluded to—on one hand, and the that-could-have-been-me characteristic of its many victims, on the other, make it particularly harrowing.  That it claimed the life, too, of one of the world’s top poets, scholar, and statesman, Kofi Awoonor, who was in Nairobi for another celebration of the life of the mind supplied an added personal dimension; magnified by the fact that many of us, denizens of the life of the mind, could well have been any of those victims.

I was still reeling from that when news broke that more than 300 African migrants headed for Lampedusa were missing and feared dead when their barely seaworthy vessel capsized in the treacherous waters of the Mediterranean.  Again, this is not an isolated incident but its frequency should not render us impervious to the tragedy that it represents.  And the numbers are simply chilling.

Then came the news of the crash in Lagos shortly after take-off of a plane that was carrying the remains of the former governor of Ondo State to Akure for burial in his hometown.  It got personal when it was confirmed that one of the casualties was Deji Falae, the Ondo State Commissioner for Tourism.  He was one of the principal hosts for a conference we recently held in Akure to commemorate D.O. Fagunwa who, I hope, needs no introduction.  That the late Deji Falae was present for the entire duration of the conference, not out of a sense of duty, but as one deeply interested in the life of the mind that was being marked endeared him to all of us and that first impression—it was my only time ever meeting him—is one that will now remain with me.  The Yorùbá are right: Igi tó tọ́ kìí pẹ́ nígbó.

Needless to say, as I wrote to my friends in Kenya during the massacre, it is my hope that all who are affected by the losses that I have been recounting are comforted and that their memories shall remain evergreen in the hearts of those they left behind.

Notice that I have not prayed that their souls should rest in peace.  The idea that departed souls should rest in peace and our repeated, almost mindless, invocation of that prayer is a part of received wisdom derived from Christianity and Islam.  The idea that “the labourer’s task is o’er” and she has earned eternal repose flows from the theology that sees our earthly existence in a negative light and death, any death, however procured, is to be viewed as a welcome release into the eternal peace of in the Lord’s or Allah’s domain.

The recent deaths have forced me to take another look at this comforting wish.  All of them are needless, yes, needless deaths.  It may be easier to persuade people of the needlessness of the deaths caused by religious zealotry and political brigandage.  But the same is not true of the deaths in the Mediterranean or the untimely death of the able commissioner and other casualties of the plane crash.  Certainly, some might argue that the migrants took the risk that they did and it is too bad that it ended badly.  After all, life gives no guarantees to anyone.  And, for the victims of the plane crash, accidents are a fact of life.  Unfortunate though it is, we cannot put them on the same pedestal as those cut down just for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

This is where the wisdom of Òrìsà, Yorùbá religion properly understood, becomes compelling and incredibly insightful.  In Yorùbá metaphysics there is a distinction between good death and bad death.  We cannot go into any detailed explication of this distinction here.  One key difference should suffice: a good death is celebrated, worthy of emulation, and is what all desire to be privileged to undergo when their time comes to exit the world.  A bad death, on the other hand, is dreaded, to be shunned, and those who exit by it barely rate a mention in subsequent remembrances. 

But this is what is most significant about this view of death native to Yorùbá religion: the departed are not supposed to nor are they expected to enter into eternal repose, however their death may have come about.  The dear departed who exit through good death are asked to make a return to their families and even if they do not return, they are tasked never to sleep in the world beyond.  Rather they are charged to keep looking back at and out for those they have left behind to ensure that no evil befalls the latter and that their lives do prosper.  Nowhere is there any suggestion that they work of the departed on earth is concluded by their passing or that their passing in the best of circumstances is a ticket to eternal peace.

Those who exit by way of bad death are even more put upon after their deaths.  If their bad death had been caused by their own acts of commission or omission, they are banished from the memory of their survivors and every effort is made to knock their GPS out of order to ensure that their spirits do not, repeat, do not, find their way back to their families.  But if there is reason to believe that the death is needless, that it has been brought about by malevolent forces or by the hands some enemy or ill-wisher, the charge to the departed is more drastic and stark.  Their task is spelt out: “do not rest until you have avenged your death,” seems to be the charge to the dead.  On occasion, the burial is delayed in order to perform some rituals designed to fortify the corpse to execute the revenge mission on those who may have had a hand in her death.  The remains are interred only after this mission is accomplished.

One does not have to subscribe to the beliefs just iterated.  What they tell us, and this is why they are important, is that we have here a different attitude to death and its aftermath.  I am saying that there is something to be said for re-engaging a piece of indigenous wisdom derived from Yorùbá religion and metaphysics.  On that score, it is out of place to ask that the victims of the bad deaths we have been considering rest in peace.  Quite the contrary, our demand\prayer, if it be that, should be: May they not rest in peace!

It may indeed be the case that the quietude that has been urged on our dear but needlessly departed in the aftermath of their demise is the worst legacy of our embrace of Christianity and Islam.  What if, instead of resting in peace, the ghosts of all the slaves who were tossed into the Atlantic Ocean during the Middle Passage were to continue to haunt the descendants of all humans involved in the perpetration of and profit from that crime against humanity?  What if our leaders were haunted by the angry spirits of all our children who died needlessly in infancy for want of appropriate and accessible medical care and adequate nutrition?  Or those of victims of fake drugs?  Poorly maintained road networks?  Importation and distribution of fake automobile parts?  Of badly maintained airlines and dubious owners and operators?  Of incompetent and corrupt government regulators whose lapses in their oversight functions lead to aircraft that are disguised flying coffins?  Or governments that run their countries into the ground and make attractive, if not inevitable, for their young to brave the desert or the seas for better prospects anywhere but the lands of their births?

It is time that we had our collective peace profoundly disturbed by those we have dispatched to early and needless deaths by our lack of heed.  May the souls of the departed not rest in peace; may we not find peace from their torment.

See published version at http://www.pmnewsnigeria.com/2013/10/09/may-they-not-rest-in-peace/