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Zuckerberg, Facebook and the Y-Generation – By Dr. Jideofor Adibe

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By Dr. Jideofor Adibe | London, UK | June 4, 2012 - There is something about Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder – or more appropriately the main founder of Facebook – the eponymous social networking website- which I find very fascinating. Zuckerberg is both an affirmation and a negation of the debate in some Western countries on whether college (university) education really matters. An embodiment of the generation Y, a portraiture of Zuckerberg immediately beams a searchlight on the Nigerian youths and the impediments that militate against the emergence of such prodigies in our dear country.

Born on May 14 1984, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was brought up in Dobbs Ferry, New York, USA, and raised Jewish. His father was a dentist who ran his practice from home while his mother was a psychiatrist. At Ardley High School, Zuckerberg excelled in the classics before transferring to Phillips Exeter Academy where he also won prizes in mathematics, astronomy and physics.  In college, he was known for reciting lines from epic poems such as The Iliad.  In addition to English he could read and write French, Hebrew, Latin and ancient Greek.

Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software as a child. In the 1990s, his father, noticing that he had a passion for computers,  taught him Atari Basic Programming and later hired a developer to tutor him privately. So much was his passion for computers that while still in High school, he took a graduate course in programming at Mercy College near his home. One of the early programmes he built was software he called ‘ZuckNet’ which allowed the computers in their home to communicate with the ones in the part of their home that served as his father’s dental practice.  ZuckNet was considered a primitive version of AOL’s Instant Messaging Service, which came out the following year. While still in High school, he also built a music player called Synapse Media Player, which used artificial intelligence to learn the user’s listening habits. AOL tried to buy Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg but he declined the offers and chose to enrol at Harvard University in September 2002.

By the time he began classes at Harvard – in psychology and computer science – he had already achieved a reputation as a programming prodigy. While a freshman he created a programme known Facemash, – just to have fun with his fellow students. The site had books called ‘Face Books’, which included the names and pictures of everyone who lived in the student dorms.  Here Zuckerberg would place two pictures or pictures of two males and two females and urged visitors to the site to choose who was “hotter”. Though several students complained that their photos were used without permission, the site proved so popular that students began requesting that the university should develop an internal website that would include similar photos and contact details. It was said that when Zuckerberg learnt of the demand by some students, he decided that if the university would not accede to the students’ request, he would build a site that would be even better than what the university could offer.

Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dormitory room on February 4, 2004. Though it started off as just a “Harvard thing”, Zuckerberg later decided, with the help of his roommate Dustin Moskovitz, to spread it to other schools, starting with other Ivy League Universities – Stanford, Dartmouth, Columbia, New York University, Cornell, Pennsylvania, Brown and Yale. Zuckerberg later moved to Palo Alto, California – headquarters to a number of Silicon Valley high-technology companies – with Moskovitz and some friends.  There they leased a small house that served as an office. Over the summer, Zuckerberg met Peter Thiel, the German-born American entrepreneur and co-founder of the online payment system Paypal who invested in the company.

Despite the controversies that dogged Facebook’s recent IPO, there are several important lessons from the story of Zuckerberg.

One, Zuckerberg typifies those known in the West as the ‘Generation Y’ (also variously called the Millennial Generation, Millennials, Generation Next, the Net Generation or the Echo Boomers). Though there is no unanimity about when Generation Y starts and ends, most definitions of the concept include at least those born between 1981 and 1989.  Members of Generation Y are believed to be incredibly sophisticated and technology- wise, having been born and grown up in the era of Cable TV channels, satellite, the Internet and e-zines.  The generation is also more racially diverse and more tolerant of diversities. Though they believe in success and education, it is not exactly in the same way the preceding Generation X did. Though Generation X is often said to be the best educated generation, it is equally said to exude unacceptably high levels of scepticisms with ‘what is in it for me’ attitudes. 

What can we say of the Nigerian youths who fall within the age-bracket of the Y Generation? My personal opinion is that while many can use mobile phones better than their elders, they also seem to suffer the sort of existential crisis their elders at home and peers abroad are largely immune from. With  most of them being unemployed or under-employed amid generalised insecurity and identity issues in the country, most Nigerians in the age bracket of the Generation Y are still at the level of struggling to ‘liberate their stomachs’, and therefore are unable to manifest the traits that produce the likes of Mark Zuckerberg.

Two, Zuckerberg, who dropped out of Harvard without earning a degree, has through his Facebook impacted on the world more than most people with a chain of degrees. By joining the seemingly endless list of people who have ‘changed the world’ without a college (university) degree, Zuckerberg immediately re-opens the debate about the value of college (university) education. The list of people who ‘changed’ the world without formal qualifications include: Bill Gates of Microsoft (who dropped out of Harvard); Amadeo Peter Giannini, founder of  Bank of America (dropped out of high school);  Andrew Carnegie, famous industrialist and philanthropist and one of the first mega-billionaires in the US (dropped out of primary school); George Eastman, founder of Kodak (dropped out of high school);  Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motors (did not attend college), John D Rockefeller, billionaire founder of Standard Oil (dropped out of high school just two months to graduation), Michael Dell, founder of Dell Computers (dropped out of College)  Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s  (dropped out of high school), Walt Disney, founder of the Walt Disney (dropped out of high school), Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic and more (dropped out of high school), Steve Wozniak, co-founder of  Apple (did not complete college) and Simon Cowell, TV producer and  music judge of  American Idol, the X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent (dropped of out of High school).

The point of the above is not to encourage people to drop out of school but a statement that we all have different talents and not everyone may be cut out for university education. This will help temper the current situation in Nigeria where people believe that they need degrees – even though they could more meaningfully have used the time in trying to discover or polishing their God-given talents. If Zuckerberg had been a Nigerian, he would most likely have been derided for dropping out of school, banks and potential investors will stick it to his face that he couldn’t even complete a University education and his parents would have done ‘whatever it takes’ to make sure he gets a degree or even a master’s degree, preferably in prestige disciplines like law and medicine, even if his talents and aptitude lie somewhere else. I have come across many postgraduate students I honestly believe have no business ‘wasting’ their time in something that they are obviously not cut out for. Yet, such students believe they will ‘somehow’ pass. To find out one’s true talent is often a tough undertaking and many never manage to do so before returning to their maker. Zuckerberg was given a good foundation, including private education. That quality education was the foundation of his genius. But he was also allowed to be himself – as Bill Gates- was when he realized the University had become a waste of his time.

Three, how would Nigerians of Zuckerberg’s age have handled the prodigy’s initial successes, including offers to buy out his Synapse Media Player by AOL? My suspicion is that most Nigerians would have sold the company and used the money to take titles or run for political offices. Zuckerberg held on to his dream. Today Zuckerberg is the largest individual shareholder in Facebook Inc, with 28.4 percent of the ordinary shares and 56.9 percent of the voting power. His personal wealth is estimated at more than $19.1 billion, making him one of the world’s youngest billionaires and one of the 30 richest people on Earth. In 2010 Zuckerberg was named as Time magazine’s Person of the Year, in 2011 he was also named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.


The ‘Failed State Index’ as a Tool of Imperialism – By Dr. Jideofor Adibe

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By Dr. Jideofor Adibe | London, UK | July 21, 2012 - The 2012 edition of the Failed State Index published by Funds for Peace, an independent research and educational organisation based in Washington DC, United States of America and promoted by the conservative Foreign Policy journal, has been generating debates and angst in some quarters. The Index, which is published alongside the so-called Postcards from Hell – a gallery of some of the world’s most troubled states- makes a depressing reading and often raises more questions than the answers it proffers. Published since 2005, regrettably, some of the very brilliant answers it proffers seem to be addressed to the wrong questions. I will come back to this later.

Many Nigerians have been angry that the country is ranked in the category of failed states. It should be recalled that Nigeria first moved into the league of the worst 20 cases in 2007 – when it was ranked 17th.  The following year the country’s ranking improved marginally to 19th position before deteriorating in 2009 to 15th. Since 2010, the country has maintained its 14th spot on the Index. This means in essence that the exceptionally huge security challenges the country faced from Boko Haram last year and this year appear not to have affected the country’s ranking in the Index. It is also important to underline that the country had already entered the ‘league of infamy’ in the Index before Boko Haram began its terrorist activities in January 2010, meaning that the country would still have been in the Index even without BH.  The first 20 countries in the Index are regarded as ‘failed’ states. For the fifth consecutive year, Somalia topped the ranking.

There are several issues with the Failed State Index.

One, indices are notoriously difficult to construct and even harder to perfect amid competing methodologies and data sources. The Failed State Index uses several parameters, most of them subjectively determined – population pressures, the number of refugees in a country,  how factionalised the elites of a country are, a state’s capacity to provide public services,  extent of uneven development and of course a state’s ability to enforce its statutory monopoly of legitimate instruments of coercion in its domain. Overall, the Index’s headline indicators are weighted summaries from more than 100 sub- indicators. Like most indices of this nature, conclusions you reach will often depend on your initial assumptions on each parameter. It is really on the underlying assumptions that value judgments get loaded, triggering controversies in the process. For instance just by relying on a different set of  assumptions, Noam Chomsky, the American linguist, historian and activist, in his famous book, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (2006) argues that the US itself was becoming a ‘failed state’ and therefore a danger to its people.  The obvious methodological weaknesses in the compilation of the Failed State Index also make it unable to capture the important differences between state collapse, state failure and state fragility, leading to an unhelpful ossification of the three into the unhelpful binary of failed or not failed states.

Obviously because the Failed State Index – like most other indices – try to capture the variables on which it is measuring and ranking states in statistical forms, it comes out looking impressive. However as the American writer Darrel Huff tells us in his very influential book How to Lie With Statistics (1954), you can use figures, graphs and tables to hoodwink and blackmail or to make yourself appear cleverer than you really are. The Failed State Index – intentionally or unintentionally has been able to do just this for eight years running – and getting away with it.

Two, it may not be out of place to interrogate the motive of the sponsors of the Failed State Index. If the aim is to provide early warning systems, then there are already several institutions and programmes devoted to studying potentially vulnerable spots such as the Crisis State Research Centre at the London School of Economics. There is a suspicion among some development scholars that the Index may not be unlinked with a desire to rejuvenate the ‘help industry’ in the West. Obviously as the traditional areas of ‘help’ – fighting famine in the Horn of Africa, AIDS in Africa,  landmines, child soldiers from Africa  etc begin to lose their allure,  the ‘help industry’ that creates lucrative jobs for consultants appears to have  come under pressure to justify the need for its continued existence or why it should be given new money. Is the Failed State Index one such creative way of ensuring that the ‘help industry’ continues to retain its significance because if states are designated as failing there will obviously be a need to do something to build their capacity so that they do not fail and overwhelm the West with refugees? Remarkably in April 2010, a group calling itself the G7+ was formed. It was supposed to be a group of seven ‘of the world’s most fragile states’. The membership of the group is said to have grown to 17 and the countries in the group claimed they came together to “share experiences” and “lobby international actors to engage more effectively in fragile and conflict-affected countries and regions”. Cynics obviously want to know at whose instance the group was formed.

Three, the Failed State Index reinforces the essentialist construction of Africa and the narratives and innuendos that go with it. Over 99 percent of the worst performing countries in the index are from Africa and other parts of the developing world. Agreed, many of the countries in Africa and the developing world are underperforming economically. But a fundamental reason why they underperform is the condition of underdevelopment which has several economic and non-economic symptoms or manifestations such as inability to provide public services and factionalised elites which engage in anarchic struggle for power because state power is often the most effective means of material accumulation in these countries. Several of the symptoms of this fundamental problem of underdevelopment are already captured in a pick-and- choose manner by other indices such as the United Nations Human Development Index, the Ease of Doing Business Index among countries, the Sustainable Governance Index etc. The condition of being underdeveloped economies naturally means that Africa’s rankings in these indices will be low, explaining why African and other developing countries are the worst performers in all available global indices. It is like four different indices each ranking people according to how healthy they look, their physical strength, how briskly they work and how fast they can run. A man who is severely ill with malaria and has suffered loss of appetite as a result will be poorly captured by each of the four indices even though his only problem is that he is suffering from malaria.  Being poorly captured by each of the four indices will lead into a self-fulfilling prophecy – the man is no good and there are ‘facts and figures’ to back it up.

Africa and other underdeveloped countries are ranked low in several global indices because these indices are abstracting the symptoms of our fundamental problem of underdevelopment and elevating them to a defining characteristic of who we are. This is both essentialist and reductionist. There is nothing genetic, geographic or pigmentational about the African condition – contrary to the impression these indices give.

Four, there is also an impression that these Indices are being mischievously used by some Western countries to promote nationalism and internal cohesion by subtly letting their citizens know that as much as things may be difficult for them, they are infinitely better off than people in several countries and they can easily draw attention to the relative ranking of their countries in these indices.  This ‘feel good’ factor is however created at the expense of others who may then become unwitting victims of institutionalised discrimination. For many in the West, the indices and their higher rankings in them are a confirmation of their inherent superiority.  Will you then blame employers who, after reading several of such indices refuse to employ people from certain parts of the world? Have statistics not shown those people are not good enough?

Five, a critique of the Failed State Index is not to deny that several countries in Africa, including Nigeria, face serious challenges. I believe that Nigeria has a severe crisis in its nation-building project.  I do not believe that as a country we can make much progress, no matter what our purported growth figures tell us, without first resolving the crisis we face in the construction of a viable nation-state.  However, despite this severe challenge, my belief is that if we move away from a focus on the political arena – which is inherently conflictual anyway -  one encounters several seeds of hope, not just in the  resilient way people confront their daily challenges but even  more importantly in a feeling that a putative ‘imagined community’ may be taking shape.

Ethnicity, Hate Speech & Nation Building – By Dr. Jideofor Adibe

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Dr. Jideofor Adibe | London, UK | August 31, 2012 - Am I alone in noticing how
Nigerians seem to enjoy profiling and pouring invectives on one another
whenever they congregate in their in-group to discuss the Nigerian condition?
And if you think this is only a past-time of the uneducated and those who
believe the world revolves around their ethnic enclave, you may be
disappointed. Just read the ‘comments’ that follow most articles online – whether
in newspapers, blogs or on the numerous online news-and features aggregator
sites on the country, and you will marvel at the capacity of educated Nigerians,
including Diaspora-based ones who are presumably living in ‘civilized’
countries, to write from their base animal instincts. Hate speech is so
pervasive in Nigeria that it is doubtful if there are many Nigerians that are
completely free from the vice.  The irony
is that people who usually complain of being insulted by other ethnic groups
often use even more hateful words in describing the groups they feel have
insulted them. Net effect: the widening of the social distance among the
different ethnicities that make up the country and an exacerbation of the
crisis in the country’s nation-building.

Several
observations could be made about the interplay between ethnicity, hate speech
and the crisis in the country’s nation-building project:

One,
hate speech employs discriminatory epithets to insult and stigmatize others on
the basis of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or other forms
of group membership.  It is any speech,
gesture, conduct, writing or display which could incite people to violence or
prejudicial action. There are individuals and groups in this country who openly
relish the freedom to rain insults and profile others by appropriating to
themselves the role of ethnic and religious champions. The problem is that hate
speech is often the gateway to discrimination, harassment and violence as well
as a precursor to serious harmful criminal acts. It is doubtful if there will
be hate-motivated violent attacks on any group without hate speech and the
hatred it purveys.

Two,
there is nothing wrong in people celebrating pride in their ethnic and other
cultural identities. It is not always a manifestation of ethnicity when someone
proclaims, ‘I am a proud Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba or Efik’. Most ethnic groups across the world feel that their way of life – their
foods, dress, habits, beliefs, values, and so forth, are superior to those of
other groups. There is nothing wrong with this.

The boundary between this love for one’s ethnic
identity (ethnocentrism) and ethnicity (which is conflictual in character)
could however be thin. When our love for our ethnic identity results in seeing
other groups as competitors or the reasons why we are not getting what we
believe we deserve to get, then there is often recourse to hate speech to vent
our frustrations on the out-group. At that point, the love for one’s ethnic
identity has become conflictual in form and thus crossed the boundary to
ethnicity. It is important to underline that
although ethnicity is rooted in the struggle for the scarce societal values –
political positions, jobs, contracts, scholarships etc – by the various ethnic
factions of the Nigerian elite, it has overtime acquired an objective character
such that it now exists independent of the original causative factors. Not
surprisingly therefore we have a group of ‘ethnic watchers’ whose only vocation
appears to be working the arithmetic of which ethnic group gets what, when and
how in the proverbial sharing of the ‘national cake’.

Three,
there is an urgent need to do something about hate speech because of its
tendency to exacerbate ethnicity and the crisis in our nation building. For instance
though the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)
- a multilateral treaty adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on
December 16, 1966 and which came into force from March 23, 1976 –  encourages countries to prohibit any advocacy
of national, racial, ethnic or religious hatred, in practice hate speech
is  difficult to prohibit. In the US for
instance, hate speech is protected as a civil right (aside from usual
exceptions to free speech such as defamation, incitement to riot, and fighting
words). In fact laws prohibiting hate speech are unconstitutional in the United
States as most often fail legal challenges based on the First Amendment of the
Country’s Constitution which prohibited the restriction of free speech. In the
US law courts, even ‘fighting words’ – which are categorically excluded from
the protection of the First Amendment – are not that easy to separate from hate
speech.

An insight into how the American jurisprudence
protects hate speech is in the   way the
law treats the Ku Klux Klan – one of the worst purveyors of racial hatred in
that country. In a landmark case, Brandenburg
v. Ohio (1969), the arrest of an Ohio Klansman named Clarence
Brandenburg on criminal syndicalism charges, based on a KKK speech that
recommended overthrowing the government, was overturned in a ruling that has
protected rascals of all political persuasions ever since. In a unanimous
judgment, Justice William Brennan argued that “the constitutional
guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or
proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such
advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is
likely to incite or produce such action.” In another important case, Snyder v. Phelps (2011), Westboro
Baptist Church, which has achieved some notoriety for celebrating the 9/11
attacks and picketing military funerals, was sued by the family of Lance
Corporal Matthew Snyder who was killed in Iraq in 2006 for intentional
infliction of emotional distress after it picketed during the Corporal’s
funeral. In an 8-1 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Westboro’s right to
picket.

There
are at least four key arguments for justifying free speech in American jurisprudence–
the importance of discovering the truth by allowing ideas to compete freely in
the marketplace of ideas, free speech is regarded as an aspect of self-fulfillment,
it is also seen as indispensable for a citizen to participate in a democracy
and there is the deep suspicion of government and a belief that only free
speech can restrain the government from trampling on the rights of the citizens.

Away
from American free speech jurisprudence, hate speech is prohibited in several
jurisdictions such as Canada where advocating genocide or inciting hatred
against any ‘identifiable group’ is an indictable offence under the country’s Criminal
Code with maximum prison terms of two to fourteen years. In the United Kingdom,
several statutes criminalize hate speech against several categories of persons.
In South Africa, hate speech (along with incitement to violence and propaganda
for war) is specifically excluded from protection of free speech in the
Constitution. The Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination
Act, 2000 in fact contains the following clause: “[N]o person may publish,
propagate, advocate or communicate words based on one or more of the prohibited
grounds, against any person, that could reasonably be construed to demonstrate
a clear intention to― (a) be hurtful;(b) be harmful or (c) to incite harm and
(d) promote or propagate hatred”.

Four,
how should the government tackle the menace of hate speech- should it follow
the American model and believe that  the
ability to live with speeches that shock or awe should be a small price to pay
for safeguarding free speech and that Nigerians should see it as part of the
process of nurturing the culture of tolerance? Or should it follow the European
and South African model that explicitly prohibit hate speech? My personal
opinion is that the government should go for a cross between the two. For
instance using the law to prohibit free speech could sometimes be
counterproductive. A good example of this is what happened in the Australian
state of Victoria where a law banning incitement to religious hatred has led to
Christians and Muslims accusing each other of inciting hatred and bringing
legal actions against each other that only served to further inflame community
relations.

I
will recommend the following measures: There is an urgent need to develop, in
conjunction with critical organs of the society such as media owners and
practitioners, taxonomy of what constitutes hate speech. Media houses through
their unions should incorporate these as part of good journalism practice and
impose sanctions on erring members who publish or broadcast hate speech-laden
materials. The National Orientation Agency, in concert with civil society
groups and community leaders, should also embark on a campaign against the use
of hate speech. In the same vein, Internet Service providers should be
encouraged to bring down blogs and websites they host which publish, promote or
give unfettered space for the expression of free speech. Above all  it should be impressed upon the political
leadership at all levels that a deep distrust of the government is at the heart
of the sort of free speech jurisprudence you have in the United States and that
Nigerians have the same level of distrust of their governments.

 

The Re-invention of Goodluck Jonathan (2) – By Dr. Jideofor Adibe

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By Dr. Jideofor Adibe | London, UK | Sept. 19, 2012 - When I published the ‘Re-invention of Goodluck Jonathan’ in this column on December 1 2011, I did not plan to write a sequel to it. Let me give a brief summary of this re-invention as captured in what is now the first instalment of this piece.

Shortly after President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ) assembled a new cabinet following the April 2011 general elections, there appeared to be a gradual but deliberate abandonment of the public persona which had helped to galvanize public sympathy and support for him when a cabal in the late Yaradua presidency sought to prevent him from being sworn in as the Acting President following Yaradua’s terminal illness. GEJ’s pre-April 2011 persona was that of a gentle, if diffident man, who would readily give a sympathetic ear to any argument and does not mind changing his mind several times on the same issue. During the last presidential elections this persona made it very difficult for his opponents to demonize him or turn him into a hate figure.  GEJ’s rather touching story of how he grew up and went to school without shoes helped to solidify this persona in the popular imagination.

The efforts to re-invent GEJ as a man of conviction became very perceptible during the Justice Ayo Salami and Justice Katsina Alu saga following the suspension of the former by the Nigerian Judicial Council in August 2011. The NJC had recommended the compulsory retirement of Justice Salami for misconduct. Despite the hoopla in the media against the NJC’s decision, the ‘normally’ indecisive GEJ acted decisively, quickly accepted the recommendation of the NJC and refused to bulge despite the media campaign.

The government’s proposal for the removal of subsidies on petroleum products followed the same trend. Rather than recoil from a fight as people felt the pre-April 2011 GEJ would do, he stuck to his gun, and eventually ambushed Nigerians on January 1with the announcement that subsidies had been removed. 

Perhaps the clearest indication that the presidency wanted to re-invent GEJ as a man of cool exterior but granite interior was in the disqualification of former Governor Sylva Timipre from contesting the last gubernatorial election in Bayelsa State. The President was suspected of having a hand in the disqualification. The significant thing here however is not that the President  was opposed to Timipre’s candidacy but that he remained adamant in his opposition despite the reported interventions of  the South-south Governors, the Governors’ Forum and other eminent Nigerians that reportedly included former President Shehu Shagari and former Head of State Yakubu Gowon.

In what is now the first instalment of this piece, I noted that the re-invention of GEJ could have both positive and negative sides. One of the negatives, I underlined, is  the risk that “in a bid to show that a new tough guy has emerged, the President may fail to realise when his decisions or policy options are truly contrary to popular will.”

 Latest events may seem to suggest we may be getting close to this threshold. Let me explain:

It is true that leadership is not a popularity contest and that leaders necessarily have to make tough decisions. However the difference between a dictator and a visionary leader in a democracy is the manner in which they make such tough decisions and their timing. Many leaders that take tough decisions in a democracy often do so by trying to win the argument or at least bidding their time until opinions seem to be evenly divided on the issue. For the handlers of the President it would seem that they prefer to do very little at the argumentation stage only to strike after opinions seem to be coalescing towards a consensus against the presidential preference. It is immaterial whether this consensus is driven by rabble rousers or opponents of the President. The issue is that if you want to stop the rabble rousers, you meet them argument for argument and prevent them from mobilising popular opinion behind their own preference. If you lose it at this stage and then use presidential fiat to take a decision that will appear to be against the popular will you unwittingly enlarge the army of your critics. Instances of the presidency doing very little at to be competitive at the argumentation stage only to wield the presidential hammer are legion:

 There was first the issue of removing subsidies on premium petroleum products. Though recent events would indicate the presidency was probably right in its decision to completely remove the subsidies (the fuel subsidy cabal seems to be far more powerful than ordinary Nigerians realized), the manner in which this was done left a sour taste in the mouth. The decision was taken when the anti-desubsidisation lobby was clearly winning the debate and the presidency had given an impression that it had not made up its mind on the issue and was still consulting. But just on the first day of the year, it struck like a viper.

There was also the manner in which Arunmah Oteh, the Director General of the Securities and Exchange who was suspended by the Board of the SEC was recalled by the Government even when the House of Representatives’ ad hoc committee on the near collapse of the Capital Markets had concluded that she was not qualified to be appointed the DG of SEC. The Committee claimed that the Act setting up SEC states that the DG must have at least 15 years cognate experience in capital market operations and that Ms. Oteh did not meet this demand at the time she was appointed.

The way the regime quickly approved the proposal by the CBN to introduce a N5000 note when the opposition to the initiative was at its peak also seemed to be daring the public to do its worst. The issue is not whether the regime is right or wrong in its decision but that it could have done far more at the argumentation stage before weighing in on the side of the CBN.  It could at least have set up a committee (its favourite pastime) to examine the proposal –  to give the impression that it had broadened consultations before embracing its preferred course of action.

Having a Presidential Rottweiler is never a substitute to being competitive at the argumentation stage. In fact such an attack dog could complicate matters as Dr Doyin Okupe, the Senior Special Adviser to the President on Public Affairs appeared to have done recently, when, in response to Obasanjo’s  reported opposition  to the  proposed N5000 bill  he was quoted as retorting that “Obasanjo is an ordinary citizen”  and that his “views are not sacrosanct.”  While it is possible that Dr Okupe misspoke (after all English is not our mother tongue), the way his response came out seemed like an affront. And as everyone knows, Obasanjo neither overlooks a slight nor ducks a fight.  For someone who has made a career of helping to pull down several governments, including the ones he helped to engineer by being their acerbic critic, wisdom would have cautioned that if you cannot have  him as a friend of the regime at least try not to push him to the camp of the regime’s opponents.

The emerging new political machismo in a re-invented GEJ could lead to other costly mistakes. One such may be the recent sacking of the Power Minister, Professor Barth Nnaji for alleged ‘conflict of interest’ – at a time many Nigerians are beginning to say there have been improvements in power supply in the country. I am not by this condoning ‘conflict of interest’ by public officials – though when stretched virtually all top political officials are guilty of the same charge because ‘conflict of interest’ also includes favouring one’s community and cronies in the authoritative allocation of societal privileges. Is there really any top political office holder in this country who is not guilty of this?

I would have thought that for a man who seems to be succeeding where all his predecessors have failed, a public rebuke of any malfeasance would have been sufficient so that whatever achievement that is being recorded in this highly technical area is not frittered away. In football, some of the most talented players often have behaviour deficits which are often accommodated or managed because of their perceived critical role in their team’s success.

 In his novel Things Fall Apart (1958), Chinua Achebe told of the Okonkwo character, a man whose palm kernels were cracked by benevolent spirits but who, for fear of being thought weak, self-destructs through some reckless decisions. I really hope that the handlers of GEJ will avoid the ‘Okonkwo complex’.

The new GEJ means that if the President wants to contest in 2015 – as his body language seems to suggest he will do – the persona of a gentle, unassuming and humble man which has been a tremendous asset in his political career will come under intense scrutiny and contestation. 

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The Re-invention of Goodluck Jonathan (III) – By Dr. Jideofor Adibe

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By Dr. Jideofor Adibe | NNP | October 4, 2012 - The first instalment in these series was published on 1December 2011 while the second instalment was on 13 September 2011. In these series, which will not run consecutively, I will try to monitor the putative re-inventions of Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ) and the consequent transformations in his style and public persona.

In the first instalment I noted the effort to re-invent him as a man who could take tough decisions and stick to his guns. This was against his pre-April 2011 public persona, which was of a gentle, if diffident guy, who gives sympathetic ears to all arguments and does not mind changing his mind several times on an issue. This persona of the guy next door has been a great asset in GEJ’s meteoric political rise. I will call the effort to re-invent him as a man of conviction who can take tough decisions as the First Wave of his re-invention.

In the second instalment I observed that the re-invented GEJ seemed to be enjoying the new image of a ‘tough guy’ and with time appeared to revel in taking contrarian decisions when opinions seem to have coalesced in a different direction on a probable belief that such would enhance his new image.  I will call this the Second Wave of his re-invention. The persona in this Second Wave inevitably attracted an army of critics forcing the President to hyperbolically declare himself as the most criticised President in the world. With the House of Representatives dangling the impeachment axe and the Senate indicating it might concur with the Lower Chamber, the President knew something must give in. These seem to have spurred the Third Wave of his re-invention. I will explain.

In the Third Wave we see GEJ soft-pedalling on some ‘tough’ decisions – in a manner reminiscent of GEJ before the First Wave of re-invention. First, his tough stance on the single term tenure proposal, which he insisted there was no going back on, was surreptitiously leaked as having been shelved. Then came the backing down on the proposed N5, 000 bill apparently without first informing its author  Sanusi– after the Presidency had thrown its backing behind the proposal at the crest of popular opposition to it. Though I find most of the arguments against the N5000 bill unconvincing (I have never by the way been a supporter of Sanusi’s methods), the timing of the presidency’s support was symptomatic of GEJ’s way of doing things in the Second Wave of his re-invention. In what can be regarded as a reinforcement of this putative Third Wave of re-invention, the ThisDay of 24 September 2012 reported that President GEJ may give in to pressure from the National Assembly for the sack of the Director General, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Ms. Arunma Oteh, and the Chairman of the Pensions Task Team, Mr. Abdulrasheed Maina.

It will be recalled that the Presidency had recalled Arunmah Oteh as DG of SEC after being  suspended by its Board and had even unethically allowed her to attend meetings of the Economic Management Team while in suspension. She was also recalled despite a resolution by the House of Representatives on 19 July 2012 requesting Jonathan to remove her from office.   The point here is not whether the House was right in asking for her sack but the ‘I don’t give a damn’ manner in which the presidency handled the issue, which was reminiscent of GEJ in the Second Wave of his re-invention.

Several observations could be made about the various efforts to re-invent GEJ:

One, GEJ’s pre April 2011 persona of a humble, diffident and unassuming guy– which I suspect to be closer to the real GEJ – had been an asset in his political career only because he started with being the Deputy Governor of Bayelsa State and later Vice President of the country. It is the sort of a ‘weak’ persona politicians in frontline positions normally want as their deputies. However while such personas could be good in playing second fiddles, they cannot survive in political frontline positions where tough decisions necessarily have to be taken. In other words, a re-invention of GEJ was inevitable and would have been done anyway if he had stayed long enough as the Governor of Bayelsa State. My suspicion is that we will still see more efforts at re-inventing GEJ as he seeks to find a comfort zone between his pre-April 2011persona and the persona of a President who has to take tough decisions.

Two, when President GEJ declared that “I am not David….I am not a General….I am not a lion….” my reading of that statement was that he was indicating a resolve to succeed despite his simplicity and unassuming  persona.  GEJ had also promised to be a ‘breath of fresh air’. Essentially, my reading of a combination of both declarations was that like the musician Frank Sinatra, the President was declaring that he would do it his own way. However rather than  being loyal to these declarations, the impression one gets is that he has been doing it the way of others or has not really found a political persona that he is  truly comfortable with.

Take the proposal about the N5000 bill for example. The impression one gets is that President GEJ seems to have been carried away by the CBN Governor’s undoubted facility with English language. In both the fuel subsidy issue and the Arunma Oteh saga, one suspects the ‘stubborn’ persona of Dr Ngozi Iweala, the Co-ordinating Minister of the Economy, as the invisible hand of Esau.  A key challenge in the re-invention of GEJ therefore is how to ‘own’ certain tough decisions and ‘domesticate’ their marketing to fit into his own persona. ‘Owning’ policies means becoming truly convinced about such policies – and not to embrace them simply because they are propounded by Cabinet members who speak eloquent English language or have ‘intimidating’ résumés.   Because some policies that flow from the presidency do not seem to be sufficiently owned by GEJ, they are often marketed using the personas of their authors rather than that of the President who should give political covers to his Ministers and aides. Consequently when such policies are pilloried, they become vulnerable to reversals because the President simply does not strongly and passionately believe in them. Under Obasanjo for instance, no one is in doubt who is in charge  because the impression is that he ‘owns’ approved policies from his Ministers and aides and then uses his rambunctious persona to market them. Under GEJ, where a few in his Cabinet behave like philosopher kings, it is sometimes difficult to know who is in charge, making it difficult for GEJ to use his own persona to market his political options.

Three, it is possible for GEJ to put to good effect his declaration that “I am not David….I am not a general…..I am not a lion……I will defeat the Goliaths in our land” and succeed. He has already done so with INEC simply by being himself and by apparently not interfering. Much of the credit for the improvement in the conduct of our elections should actually go to GEJ because the body language of the President of the country will always determine how independent INEC or any other body in the country can be. Though GEJ is not sufficiently credited with the successes in this area, the fact is that the success came because he seems to believe in INEC’s neutrality and therefore does not need to prove any toughness. You do not need to beat the drumbeat of toughness to be seen as tough. It is tough to see your party routed in an election and still congratulate the person who mauled the candidate you openly supported. This is the sort of toughness that the handlers of GEJ may want to reflect on rather than the toughness exhibited in some decisions in the Second wave of his re-invention. It is also the sort of toughness that may seem to be more in tune with the pre-April 2011 persona of GEJ.

Four, as GEJ continues to evolve politically as President, one obvious urgent area is patching his soured relationship with the National Assembly. Owing to tendencies in the Second Wave of his re-invention, the House of Representatives has threatened him with impeachment and it is ominous that in the Senate it was Senator Uche Chukwumerije, from Aba, who volunteered to lead the impeachment move in the Upper Chamber – if need be – against him. Apart from the South-south, the South-east was GEJ’s strongest base of support in the last presidential elections.  

Five, a key question is the motive in the putative Third Wave re-invention of GEJ: Is it because of fear of impeachment or because GEJ has become truly worried about the avalanche of criticisms that now trail his political options in the Second Wave of his re-invention?  Could it be a desire to return to his pre-April 2011 persona, which had served him well in his political career – as 2015 approaches?

Nigeria Diaspora Alumni Network (NIDAN) meets Sunday 18 November 2012 in Abuja

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Nigeria Diaspora Alumni Network (NIDAN) meets Sunday 18 November 2012 in Abuja

Were you a Diaspora Nigerian, now back home in either private or public sector?. The Nigeria Diaspora Alumni Network (NiDAN), a network of Nigerians, who having spent at least one year outside the country, have
returned home (or are planning to do so) to contribute to national
development, holds its next monthly meeting on Sunday 18 November 2012 from 5.30pm. The venue is Dullion House, No.4 Ikogosi Spring Close, off Katsina Ala, Maitama, Abuja. For more details about the meeting, kindly call 08100330330. For more details about NIDAN, please visit: http://www.nidangroup.org/. Qualified new members are welcome to attend.

Jideofor Adibe,

Chairman, Publicity Committee, NiDAN

Sanusi Has Raised a Very Important Question But…By Dr. Jideofor Adibe

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By Dr. Jideofor Adibe / London, Uk / Jan. 5, 2013 – Whenever Lamido Sanusi Lamido says anything, be it an ordinary ‘good morning’, then it has to be like Sanusi Lamido Sanusi – dramatic, colourful, controversial and ‘roforofo’. The most controversial Central Bank Governor in the country’s history is very adept in raising very critical questions but not always successful in providing the right answers. And it is not because he is not brilliant. He is exceptionally one.

In late November 2012, at the Second Annual Capital Market Committee Retreat in Warri, Delta State, Sanusi lamented the high cost of servicing the nation’s civil service and called on the Federal Government to fire at least 50 per cent of its entire workforce, arguing that it is unsustainable for the country to continue to spend some 70 per cent of its earnings on salaries and entitlements of civil servants. Understandably labour leaders and many others lampooned him, with some even calling for his sack. The Nigeria Labour Congress specifically said Sanusi must be sacked before he destroyed the Nigerian economy. I will return to this later.

Why has controversy dogged Mallam Sanusi ever since he became the CBN Governor? Does he court it? Or does it run after him? Sanusi’s ‘problem’ in my opinion stems from two sources: The first is that I feel he is a radical in a job that is decidedly conservative in nature. The second is his fascination with the English Language, which he writes with remarkable authority and even speaks better. On the positive side this could make one appear cleverer than one really is. On the flip side, too much ‘grammar’ (turenci) could lead to an undue love for the podium and limelight and a fascination with the echo and musicality of one’s words – with the attendant risks of gaffes in moments of rhetorical flourishes. I do not for a moment believe the crap that Sanusi is driven by any hidden agenda. But this is a different thing altogether.

At an event in London in 2009 to talk about the reforms in the banking sector, I asked Sanusi, if professionally speaking, he saw a tension between where he found himself, and where in his heart he felt he ought to be. Sanusi denied being a radical but admitted that when he was in merchant banking, he did feel that tension. I have read a few of Sanusi’s writings on Gamji.com and never ceased to admire his brilliance. I always felt his ‘natural’ calling would be as a radical academic – in the mould of the late Bala Usman or as the life Chairman of a brief case political party that will provide him a platform for slinging shots at the establishment – as the likes of Femi Falana and Balarabe Musa do.

Despite Sanusi’s protestations, I am inclined to see him as a ‘radical’ or ‘revolutionist’ – in the sense of someone who favours extreme or fundamental changes in the way the society is organised. Remarkably, while I regard Sanusi as a radical in criticisms of the system, as a banker, I see him as a conservative, a traditional regulator who is excessively concerned with risk management at a time Nigerian banks seem to have become more competitive and entrepreneurial. There is therefore in my opinion a tension between Sanusi the banker and Sanusi the system critic.

As with most system critics or revolutionists, Sanusi’s approaches to complex issues tend to be simplistic and as the contradictions in his chosen options become obvious, the proffered solutions tend to appear contradictory or hastily taken. A clear case in point was his recommendation that the bank executives he sacked for fiddling with depositors’ money who were then standing trial at various courts in the country deserved to die by firing squad for eroding public confidence and raping the institutions that were entrusted to their care through reckless credit and loan administration processes. Sanusi was later to recant, perhaps after he realised the enormity of the statement, saying that Nigerian bankers are honest, hardworking professionals and not the crooks he had made them to appear.

There have been several of such apparently hastily thought-out recommendations from the Mallam Sanusi, including the recent issue of N5000 bill. The typical mind-frame of a revolutionist is: we reject the institutions that govern us, let’s pull them down and erect brand new ones that will serve us better. This dictum is fine on a philosophical plane but creates enormous challenges at the level of implementation. This is another way of saying that it is OK for such recommendations to come from theorists and social critics but not from policy-makers. The problem on the ground is that if you pull down your house because you want to erect a brand new one that will be more befitting, you risk making yourself homeless while the new building is being put up with the attendant dangers from the elements – unless you have made alternative arrangements. The less radically inclined will embark on an incremental renovation of the same house, moving their belongings from one part of the house to the other as the work progresses.

It is within the above premise that we should try to locate Sanusi’s recent recommendation about sacking 50 per cent of the civil servants to save cost.

On face value, Sanusi is right because there is no doubt that the public service, in particular the civil service is bloated. Just visit any PHCN office and you will see several of their staff loitering outside their buildings like touts – largely because there seems not enough for them to do, which also explains why ten staff should visit one household to do ‘metre reading’. But Sanusi was wrong that firing 50 percent of the civil servants will lead to cost saving. It will not. Rather it will actually increase the cost of governance. There are three options here: The first is t reduce the staff strength without trying to professionalize the service. Under this scenario, there will be an increase in red-tape and corruption within the service as the fewer staff will increase their asking price to move your file from table A to table B. Here the civil service will end up being even more inefficient than it is now, leading probably to an increased use of outside consultants to get things done. The second option is to completely professionalize the civil service. This will include re-organising the recruitment modes of staff such that the service can attract the best talents available. But this also means paying competitive salaries and other emoluments commensurate with what they would get in private international firms in the country. This scenario means that having a 50 percent reduction in the size of the civil service will not necessarily mean a reduction in its wage bill. The third option is to do nothing – which shouldn’t really be an option at all.

The service Sanusi has done for the country by his recent call for the firing of 50 percent of civil servants is to indirectly draw attention to the need to reform our civil service while boldly re-igniting the debate about the huge cost of governance in the country.

Let me return to my earlier assertion that Sanusi is a radical system critic in a job that is decidedly for conservatives and pro-establishment people.

Central Bank Governors are thought to possess so much crucial information about their country’s economy that investors and analysts closely monitor their utterances even after they have left office. For instance when Alan Greenspan, who retired as chairman of the US Federal Reserve on January 31, 2006, predicted on February 26, 2007 that the US would enter into recession before or in early 2008, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by 416 points (or 3.3 percent of its value) the following day. At that time, it was the worst one-day loss since September 17, 2001, when it lost 684 points (7.1 percent) after reopening in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

It is perhaps because of the ‘oracular’ nature of being the boss of a country’s central bank that many expect them to be rather taciturn. Willem “Wim” Frederik Duisenberg, first president of the European Central Bank (1998-2003) was noted for his bluntness and apparent inability to keep his mouth shut. In a special report on February 8, 2002, captioned, “The Wrong Man for an Impossible Mission”, the Financial Times (London) summed up the angst against the late Dutch economist and financier: “The biggest criticism of Mr Duisenberg is not over the substance of his decisions, but over his presentation. His willingness to talk off the cuff and his often vivid turn of phrase has frequently raised eyebrows among other policy-makers.” No, the Financial Times did not have Lamido Sanusi in mind, who is eminently intellectually qualified to be the CBN Governor, when it wrote that piece. But one sometimes wonders if he deliberately courts controversy by his choice of words – as system critics are wont to do.

Press Release: New Fiction series for ‘Generation Y’

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New Fiction series for ‘Generation Y’

We are happy to announce the launch of a new fiction series for young adults for the Nigerian market. To be called ‘G-Y ’, the series is targeted at the ‘Generation Y’ – young adults who grew up in the era of flat screen TVs, Internet, Blackberry and Facebook. A key aim of the series is to help bring back the lost culture of reading books among young adults by exploring themes, in slim novellas, that will be of interest to them. Older people who are ‘young at heart’ will also find the series compelling.
In the 1980s and 1990s, McMillan’s Pacesetters and Longman’s Drumbeat series did their best to help inculcate pride in reading books by engendering a sort of competition among young adults on who has read what among the series. Our aim is to continue from where these highly respected publishers stopped.

Authors welcome

Interested authors who want to publish in the series should send a synopsis of their work (maximum word count: 1000) and a sample chapter. Each completed work must be between 20,000 and 30,000 words. For enquiries, email: editor@adonis-abbey.com

About Adonis & Abbey Publishers

Adonis & Abbey Publishers was set up in the United Kingdom in 2003 and has since become a respected imprint, with over 100 published books, mostly non-fiction. In 2004, it entered the world of journal publishing and today publishes several peer-reviewed and indexed journals. It has three in-house peer-reviewed and indexed journals – African Renaissance (published continuously since 2004), African Journal of Business and Economic Research (published since 2006) and Journal of African Union Studies (published since 2012). In addition to its in-house journals, it also incubates academic journals for a number of highly respected Universities and institutions.

Adonis & Abbey Publishers has distributions in Europe, North America and Australia. Recently it set up an office in Abuja, Nigeria, where in addition to non-fiction works, it plans to publish novellas for young adults and other books of general interest.

For more information about Adonis & Abbey Publishers, please visit our website: www.adonis-abbey.com (click on books or journals for more details on each category).

Jideofor Adibe, PhD, LLM
Publisher


APC: Determination or Desperation? -By Dr. Jideofor Adibe

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By Dr. Jideofor Adibe / London, UK / March 4, 2013 – The recent announcement by the leading opposing parties that they were dissolving their parties in favour of a mega party, the All Progressive Congress (APC) took Nigerians by surprise. True, Nigerians were not unaware of its coming but very few expected that it would emerge that fast. In the country’s political history, talks of opposition parties uniting have been a perennial dream concocted often on the eve of elections but which usually turn out to be malaria-induced, coming to nothing in the end. During the last presidential election for instance some two years ago, the media were abuzz with stories of an impending merger between Buhari’s CPC and the Tinubu-driven ACN. The talks however collapsed on the eve of the election largely due to irreconcilable differences amongst the leadership of the two parties.

The fact that both the CPC and the ACN remained locked in merger talks after the 2011 elections despite the failure of their first planned merger could mean that both parties strongly believe they need each other. That ANPP, on whose platform Buhari sought the presidency twice and allegedly was stabbed on the back on each occasion was part of the merger plan speaks volume of the level of determination – or desperation – depending on where you stand on the issue. Also the fact that most of the non-PDP Governors have endorsed the merger cannot simply be dismissed with a wave of the hand. In this country, Governors are like the sea monsters, Leviathans. They play very crucial roles in the outcome of any presidential election, including the rigging of such elections. In essence, even if for some other reasons APC atrophies or unravels before 2015, it has already recorded a milestone as it is probably the first time that major political parties are announcing a merger in the country’s political history.

Several observations could be made about the new mega party:

One, for supporters of a two party dominant system such as in the USA– where only two parties are electorally viable while others are not precluded from contesting by law if they met certain conditions – the emergence of APC, if it endures till the 2015 election, will be a dream come true. It will, among other advantages, simplify the electoral process and reduce the cost of conducting elections. The flipside however is that the voices of certain cause groups – groups that are in the race not necessarily to win power but to highlight certain issues during the campaign such as environmental concerns or local peculiarities – will often get muffled.

Two, is the crucial question of whether APC can live up to its media hype? From all indications, the overriding concern of the people behind the new party is how to dislodge the PDP – or more correctly President Goodluck Jonathan – from power. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that, especially for a regime that is generally believed to have performed far below expectation. The trouble is how to convince the populace that they will be a better alternative and how to manage the submerged contradictions that will flare up once this task is accomplished or fails to be accomplished. For instance shed of all rhetoric and grandstanding, is the APC any different from PDP – ideologically and otherwise? I honestly don’t think so. I see no material difference between PDP-controlled states and those controlled by the opposition. However in the sea of mediocrity, you have a few Governors across the party lines striving to do their best.

Three, can the APC survive till 2015? This is a legitimate question, given the strong characters that are driving the new party. My take on this is that if the glue that holds the new party is desperation, then it will likely seriously atrophy or even unravel before 2015. Former President Shehu Shagari is not a philosopher king by any stretch of the imagination. But after the 1979 elections, when the opposition groups started talking about mergers and alliances to stop him from being sworn in, he did say that ‘anything done out of desperation is bound to fail’. And he was right. The effort crumbled. If on the other hand the parties that merged were genuinely determined to change the lot of Nigerians from what they like to call PDP misrule, then they need to do far more to show us how the new party will be ideologically different from PDP. Grandiloquent phrases or appropriating the word ‘progressive’ cannot be a substitute for genuine ideological conviction. In this wise, Nigerians await, not just the manifesto of the new party but will be on the watch out for its likely key drivers.

Four, if APC enters the 2015 elections as a major force, can it unseat the PDP? While the next presidential election is still more than two years away – more than more than a life time in politics – if the current political arithmetic holds, APC will be in control of 11 States while PDP will be in control of 23. In reality however the fate of APC will be tied to a number of variables including the choice of its presidential candidate and whether President Jonathan decides to run or not. Since the party is most likely to present a Northerner as a presidential candidate – the Southwest will be constrained from doing so because of Obasanjo’s eight-year presidency which only ended in 2007 – Buhari will appear to be the most popular choice. Buhari’s cultic following in the region however will cut both ways: while it could help mobilize and energize the voters in the North, it may have the opposite effect in other parts of the country. This is because historically individuals with cultic following in one region such as the late Awolowo in the South West and the late Ojukwu in the Southeast tend to be deeply distrusted by others. The crucial question here is whether Tinubu’s famed organisational skills will be sufficient to convince voters in the Southwest to vote for parties rather than individuals during the presidential election.

Five, the APC has to work hard to get beyond the current thinking that it is an alliance of the North and South-west. This could be one of the party’s vulnerable spots, to be used by the PDP. Despite the PDP’s failures and shortcomings, it is still perceived as a national party with strong presence in all parts of the country. It is not tied to the charisma of any individual. With the power of incumbency, it remains the party to beat. In fact the current joke in town is that since the major opposition parties are fusing into APC to unseat the PDP, the latter may be pushed into a merger or alliance with such critical organs of the state as the Nigeria Police Force, NPF, the Directorate of State Service, DSS, as well as the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, to scuttle their dream.

Six, states, religion and regions are false analytical categories. For instance does senate president David Mark, whose hometown is quite close to Enugu State really have more in common with a Sokoto farmer than with other non-Northerners simply because they belong to the same accident of geography called ‘North?’ Does a Professor from Anambra State have more in common with an Abakiliki mechanic he can hardly understand his language than with other Nigerians simply because they both belong to the same accident of geography called the ‘East’? Despite being false analytical categories, ethnicity, religion and region have been turned into ideologies, meaning that they have now acquired independent existence and are therefore real. The crucial question here is how will ethnicity and our religious parochialism conflate with the political arithmetic that largely informed the formation of APC? Already APGA, which is factionalized claims that the Igbos were not invited as stakeholders in the new party. How will APC contain the ethnic/religious watchers?

How will the PDP counterattack? What will be the mobilizational instruments for both the APC and PDP? Will the PDP resort to the use of agencies like EFCC to intimidate and emasculate the opposition pretty much the way Obasanjo did under Ribadu? In the last election, supporters of President Jonathan were able to mobilize regional and religious sentiments on the argument that the North has ruled the longest and ‘should not see it as their birth right’. Can such a strategy work this time around especially in the face of the President’s lacklustre performance and quarrel with critical political tacticians such as Obasanjo? If APC holds till 2015 and Jonathan decides to contest, what is certain is that it is going to be a slugfest.

Alamieyeseigha’s Pardon: would you have acted differently? – Dr. Jideofor Adibe

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By Dr. Jideofor Adibe | London, UK | March 27, 2013 - The recent presidential pardon of Diepreye Solomon Peter Alamieyeseigha, Governor of Bayelsa State, from 29 May 1999 to 9 December 2005, has generated an understandable sense of outrage across the country. Alamieyeseigha is credited with plucking President Jonathan from total political obscurity and making him his Deputy throughout the duration of his Governorship. From that happenstance, fate took over and the rest, as they say, is now history.

In my opinion what could be considered as ‘sustainable’ outrage against Jonathan’s action was the obvious filial connection between the two – Alamieyeseigha was his political benefactor and his fellow Ijaw. The argument that the pardon is a setback against the fight against corruption is however neither here nor there because the presidential prerogative of mercy is bestowed on people who are accused of committing crimes or have been convicted of committing crimes – not on innocent people. It is not a prize award or national honour for distinguished service to the nation but a show of mercy on the beneficiaries. It is like arguing that because US Presidents routinely pardon drug barons such a show of mercy constitutes a setback in the global fight against illicit drugs.

Largely because of the lack of any scientific method of determining who will benefit from presidential pardons, most of such acts of mercy are inherently controversial. In the US Article II Section 2 of the country’s Constitution, empowers the President to “grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.” While a reprieve reduces the severity of a punishment but retains the guilty pronouncement of a court, a pardon removes both punishment and guilt. This heightens a pardon’s controversial nature.

Historically US Presidents have used the power of pardon to heal rifts in their national psyche as George Washington did when he pardoned leaders of the Whiskey Rebellion. James Madison similarly pardoned Lafitte’s pirates after the War of 1812; Andrew Johnson pardoned Confederate soldiers after the Civil War; Harry Truman pardoned those who violated World War II’s Selective Service laws; and Jimmy Carter pardoned Vietnam War draft dodgers. In Nigeria those who fought on the Biafran side during the Civil War (1967-1970) were granted pardon just as Niger Delta Militants received amnesty from the late President Yaradua. You do not necessarily need to have been ‘convicted’ of a crime by a court of law to be granted pardon as these instances clearly illustrate.

Apart from the above type of pardon, virtually every other form of pardon evokes controversy. For instance there was a sense of outrage across the world in 1992 when President George Bush (Snr) pardoned six Reagan administration officials involved in the Iran-Contra Affair. George Bush (Snr) was considered a close associate of one of the beneficiaries, Caspar Weinberger, who served as Secretary of Defence while Bush served as Vice President under Reagan. Weinberger and others had all been convicted for illegally conducting arms sales with Iran, which was using the profits to fund the Contra rebel guerilla army in Nicaragua. Richard Nixon who resigned as President of the US in 1974 in the face of an almost certain impeachment following the Watergate scandal was pardoned by Gerald Ford, who served as his Vice President and who also succeeded him as President after his resignation. Bill Clinton also came under fire for several of his pardons, including the pardon of tax evader Marc Rich.

There was also the case of Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. In 1974 Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the then-unknown radical group, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). That same year she assisted the SLA in bank robberies and other crimes until the urban guerilla group’s location was discovered by police. At her trial, Hearst claimed she participated in the criminal activities under psychological and physical duress but was sentenced to seven years in prison. She served two years of her sentence before it was commuted by President Jimmy Carter. Clinton pardoned her in 2001. Recently in South Korea, some pardons granted by the then outgoing President Lee Myung-bak in January 2013, generated national outrage because included in the list were the President’s close friend Chun Shin-il and a close political ally, Choi See-joong, both of whom had been sentenced for bribery, as well as the former speaker of the national assembly Park Hee-tae and a former aide to Mr Lee, Kim Hyo-jae, who were both jailed over a vote-buying scandal.

Pardons are controversial partly because there is no scientific formula anywhere for selecting those to be pardoned. Presidents, being humans, often bring their own emotional and filial considerations in the exercise of this prerogative. This is why it is rather surprising that the American Embassy should openly condemn the pardoning of Alamieyeseigha – when the country routinely pardons drug barons, fraudsters and other criminals and the Embassy ought to be conversant with the controversies that often dog presidential pardons. This is more especially as they have a channel of privately making their feelings about the pardon known to the powers that be in Abuja.

The above is not necessarily an endorsement of the pardon of Alamieyeseigha but to put that exercise in its proper historical and global contexts. In our own type of society, where heroes and villains are defined by ethnic and religious boundaries, a hero in one enclave could be perceived as a villain in others. Alamieyeseigha may be seen as a villain by other Nigerians but may not necessarily be seen as such by his Ijaw brethren. And if he is seen as a hero in his region and President Jonathan is from that region, it is obvious the sort of pressure he will be under to grant him pardon. Being the President’s benefactor will make that pressure even more overwhelming – unless we want to pretend that in this country our leaders are not influenced in their decisions by filial, ethnic and regional considerations. It is not the right thing to do but part of the diseases that constitute system dynamics in our country.

Otherwise why will most Governors locate new Universities and industries in their villages? Why will political leaders play the ethnic and religious cards if not so that they will be in the good books of ‘their people’? During the Second Republic top Igbo politicians were apparently under pressure to push for President Shagari to grant Ojukwu pardon. Not long ago, some top military leaders from the North converged and declared that Abacha was not corrupt – even though the rest of the country sees him as the poster-boy of corruption. It is therefore part of the character of the Nigerian State that since national political leaders often ‘retire’ to become regional and ethnic champions, their actions while in office are partly influenced by the way they want their ‘people’ to perceive them. In this sense, rather than blame Jonathan for pardoning Alamieyeseigha, we should blame it on the nature of the Nigerian State.

There is, in my opinion, at least one justifiable ground for pardoning Alamieyeseigha: while his corruption – alleged and confessed- in office is condemnable, the way he was removed from office smacked of impunity and vendetta – something that has often turned the fight against corruption in this country into a charade. You cannot rig the legal processes to achieve a desired outcome – even if you caught the thief with his fingers in the cookie jar. Gestapo methods were used to remove from office both Alamieyeseigha and the former Governor of Plateau State Joshua Dariye. The establishment of a rule of law must necessarily precede confidence-building in the justice system. I believe victims of such Kangaroo justice – whatever their crimes – deserve some form of reprieve, if not complete amnesty. And have we really forgotten the attempted abduction of Ngige in Anambra State? Why has nothing been done to fish out those behind such jungle justice as a way of sending clear message that impunity cannot be tolerated in a decent society?

The outcry over the pardon of Alamieyeseigha is good in so far as it shows that citizens are closely monitoring the actions of their leaders. But it also shows us to be a nation of hypocrites and people who like to play the Ostrich. Suddenly everyone is showing strong distaste for corruption. From a lecturer who demands ‘sorting’ to pass an undeserving student to the student leader who embezzles student union funds to the law enforcement officer who gladly looks the other way at a little inducement to the journalist who wants to be ‘induced’ before he can give a certain slant to his story to even the mechanic who will quickly exchange the new battery in your car for an old one, there is an outpouring of alarm and rage that a ‘corrupt’ man has secured a Presidential pardon. The outrage is in my opinion meaningful only if it offers us an opportunity for introspection: if I were in Jonathan’s shoes, would I really have acted differently?
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Achebe & the ‘Innocence’ of Mortuary Narratives – By Dr. Jideofor Adibe

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By Dr. Jideofor Adibe | London, UK | May 15, 2013 - The recent transition of literary giant Albert Chinualumogu Achebe has led to an uncommon outpouring of encomiums. Achebe’s transition came less than a year after his last major work, There was a country: A Personal History of Biafra (2012) has stirred controversy in the country. His critics argued that the work diminished him from being Nigeria’s gift to the literary world to an ‘Igbo-phile’.

This piece is not so much a tribute to Achebe as an interrogation of the mortuary respect that followed his transition with a focus on the contrarian perspectives of Professor Ibrahim Bello-Kano whose intervention was couched in elegant academic aesthetics and published by several print and online media.
Why do the dead, even those we have reservations about when they lived always attract adulation? There are two key explanations – one based on myth and the other on rationality. The rational explanation is that the dead cannot defend themselves while the myth is that if you say evil against the dead their spirit will continue to haunt you until you join them in the hereafter.

Contrary to the belief in some quarters that respect to the dead is a specific African tradition, it is actually a universal practice, dating to antiquity. For instance the phrase ‘mortuary respect’ dates from the 4th century and is often attributed to Diogenes Laërtius’ work ‘Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers’ (ca. AD 300) where a Greek aphorism, ‘Don’t badmouth a dead man’ was attributed to Chilon of Sparta, one of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece. There is also the Latin phrase ‘De mortuis nihil nisi bonum,’ which roughly translates to “Of the dead, nothing unless good”. In English language there are several aphoristic phrases like: “Speak no ill of the dead”, “Of the dead, speak no evil”, and “Do not speak ill of the dead”. The 18th century English writer and poet Samuel Johnson was famously quoted as saying: “He that has too much feeling to speak ill of the dead…will not hesitate…to destroy…the reputation…of the living.”

Should a public intellectual necessarily be bound by the custom of mortuary respect? I do not think so. I believe a public intellectual owes it to his craft (excuse my apparent lack of gender sensitivity here but it is all to make things easier), to detach himself from mass hysteria, outrage or encomium and search for and expand on anything he feels has been missed out in the flourish of emotionally-driven mass euphoria. If a public intellectual’s reasoning and choice of analytical categories lead him to a conclusion contrary to what is regarded as the popular position, then duty calls to take and defend that position. It takes courage to stand alone.

It is in the above respect that the contrarian intervention of Professor Ibrahim Bello-Kano receives my maximum respect. In that intervention, which is written in a compelling language that leaned here and there on the obscurantist literary form, he questioned the literary merits in Achebe’s novels. I agree with most of his comments, including some of his comments on Anthills of Savannah, Achebe’s last novel, generally thought to have been written when Achebe had either lost interest in writing novels or his skills in the craft had gone into terminal decline.

Despite agreeing with most of Professor Bello-Kano’s critical comments on Achebe’s works, I must quickly add that none of those comments is original. As a matter of fact in 2006, my publishing firm, Adonis & Abbey Publishers (www.adonis-abbey.com) – a publisher of academic books and journals since March 2003 – published an even more critical work on Achebe’s writings entitled Achebe: The Man and His Works by Rose Mezu, a Professor of English, Women studies and Comparative Literature at Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Between 2007 and 2010, the same company incubated and published the academic journal, African Performance Review for the African Theatre Association, where on every issue, I read with relish scholars ‘tearing apart’ the works of such great literary giants as Achebe, Soyinka, Osofisan and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

Professor Bello-Kano’s critique of Achebe’s Trouble With Nigeria (1983) for neglecting the influence of system dynamics when Achebe claimed that the ‘trouble with Nigeria is squarely that of leadership’, is spot on. But it is also not original. In fact the structure-agency debate in the social sciences (the capacity of individuals to act independently and make free choices contra a patterned set of arrangements which influence or limit available choices and opportunities) has been ongoing since 1903 when the German non-positivist sociologist Georg Simmel published his seminal essay, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’. The younger Achebe had in fact in No Longer At Ease (1960), through the character Obi Okonkwo, identified the trouble with Nigeria as being systemic.

In that novel, Obi Okonkwo was such an independently minded character that when his community sent him to England to study law – at a time the voice of the elders approximated the voices of the gods – he disobeyed them, followed his heart and read English. Obi Okonkwo also had the courage to stand alone on several fronts, to the disappointment of his community: He married an ‘osu’- which was an abomination among his people, he refused to use his position in the civil service to favour ‘his people’ in employment and he hated to his marrows the deeply entrenched corruption in public life.

However, despite Obi Okonkwo’s moral Puritanism, he was forced by certain societal pressures to take his own bribe and was caught. In this work therefore Achebe demonstrated that the problem with Nigeria, at least in terms of corruption, was systemic and not that of moral lapse or leadership.

The type of contradiction between what Achebe saw as the ‘trouble with Nigeria’ in No Longer At Ease (1960) and in his booklet of the same title is not uncommon among great thinkers and writers. Karl Marx, generally regarded as one of the greatest political, social and economic thinkers of all time, grappled with such contradictions in his works. For instance in his ‘materialist conception of history’, Marx gave the impression that socialism would succeed capitalism independent of men’s will because capitalism, following the ‘immutable law of history’, would sow the seeds of its own destruction. By the time Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto in 1848, Marx had shifted his position and had come to believe that the socialist era would only come about through proletarian revolution.

In the structure-agency debate (on which of the two is the key propellant of history), it could be argued that while the younger Marx, just like the younger Achebe favoured ‘structure’, the older Marx, just like the older Achebe, favoured ‘agency’.

Several of Professor Bello-Kano’s critical comments on Achebe’s last work, There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, are legitimate. Certainly the book has flaws – on interpretation, generalizations and even proofreading. However one senses a desire by Professor Bello-Kano to hide behind academic aesthetics to soldier for the North. For instance I find his efforts to smell out any hint of the inferiorization of the North in Anthills of Savannah, quite stretched. The impression one gets is that the whole contrarian piece was inspired and animated by this desire to soldier for ‘his people’. Given the brilliance that shone in the Professor’s piece, this is most disappointing as it is an appropriation of the day-job of ‘area boys’, internet warriors, ethnic-watchers, one-dimensional journalists and such ethnic/regional contraptions as the Arewa Consultative Forum, the Ohaneze, the OPC and others.

In advanced countries, Professors of Bello- Kano’s standing try to find new frameworks and theoretical constructs that will raise the level of the conversation and discourse such that bigoted ideas are marginalized. This is why in several such countries, racist organizations like the KKK or British National Party are never banned but the ideas they purvey are equally never mainstreamed because the acceptable analytical categories and frameworks ensure that they will remain marginalized.

By electing to soldier for a piece of geography using the same ethnic and regional pedestals he inveighed against as his tools of counter narratives, Professor Bello-Kano becomes guilty of the same reductionism, of seeing issues mostly in terms of the static binary of ‘we versus them’ which he accused Achebe of. The irony is that most of those who soldier for pieces of geography in every part of the country dare not go to stay for a longer period in their village, and will, in private conversations, frankly tell you that ‘my people are terrible’.

Since the ‘withering away’ of the Nigerian left, there has been a yawning dearth of efforts to develop an alternative vision of society and new analytical constructs away from this essentialist constructions of ethnicity and religion. And when public intellectuals, who ought to know, join the rat race of ethnic and regional finger-pointing, it becomes unfortunate.

Achebe’s last book is flawed but it has already done a great service to the country. War propaganda on both sides of the conflict meant that each side has its own story, including of heroes and villains. Achebe’s book by generating counter narratives, has forced many of us to revise what we thought we knew about the war, which was led mostly by young radicals and rascals in their 20s and early 30s.

Ike Ibeabuchi: The Greatest Who Never Was – By Dr. Jideofor Adibe

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Ike_IbeabuchiBy Dr. Jideofor Adibe | london, UK | August 19, 2013 - He was billed to be one of the greatest heavy weight boxers of his generation. He said he took to boxing after watching journeyman James Douglas knock out the then invincible Mike Tyson in Tokyo in 1990. Before leaving Nigeria for the United States of America in 1993, he had in the amateur ranks twice defeated Duncan Dokiwari who would later win a bronze medal for Nigeria in the 1996 Olympics.

Ike Ibeabuchi, born September 21 1973, quickly took to boxing in the USA, where his mother, Patricia, had moved to in 1990, and was working as a registered nurse. He came under the tutelage and guidance of former world welterweight champion Curtis Cokes, who said of the young talent: “He was raw when he walked in my door, but each day you would have to teach him something new because he improved so fast. It was tough to keep up with him.”  In 1994, just one year after arriving in the US, Ike won the Texas State Golden Gloves. He turned professional the same year with a second round knock-out of one Ismael Garcia on October 13.

After winning 16 straight fights against carefully selected opponents, mostly club fighters and journeymen, Ike got an opportunity to prove himself in the big league when he was squared against the Samoan hit-man David Tua, for the WBC International Heavy weight title on June 7, 1997. At that time, Tua who had a record of 27-O, was considered the ‘next big thing’ in boxing and a massive favourite to win the fight. The fight was nothing short of spectacular, with both men throwing bombs at each other without either taking a backward step throughout the duration of the fight. They ended up setting a world record of the highest number of punches thrown in a heavyweight fight after exchanging a combined 1,730 punches through the 12-rounds that the fight lasted. Ike also set an individual record of the highest number of punches thrown by a heavyweight: he threw 975 punches throughout the fight, averaging over 81 punches per round, against the average of 50 punches per round for heavyweights. The 6ft 2inches strongly built, extremely quick and power-punching Ike Ibeabuchi was declared the winner of the fight by a unanimous decision of 117-111, 116-113 and 115-114. Boxing enthusiasts can watch the highlights of the fight on Youtube (visit www.youtube.com, and search for Ike Ibeabuchi v David Tua). It is a fight that needs to be watched to appreciate Ibeabuchi’s potentials.

 

Ironically Ibeabuchi’s troubles started or deepened after the David Tua fight. Though Ike complained of a terrible headache after the fight, several tests in the hospital, including an MRI scan, found nothing wrong with him. But from then it was alleged that he began nursing feelings of being plagued by demons and occasionally acting it out. For instance it was reported that a couple of months after the Tua fight, he became depressed over a perceived snub in the WBC rankings. He was alleged to have abducted the 15-year old son of his former girl friend and slammed his car into a concrete pillar on Interstate 35 north of Austin, Texas. According to the criminal complaint, the boy suffered “numerous injuries” from the accident “and will never walk normally again.” Ike was charged with kidnapping and attempted murder, but the courts concluded he was perhaps trying to commit suicide and sentenced him to 120 days in jail after he had pleaded guilty to false imprisonment. He also paid $500,000 in civil settlement. Several other instances of bad behaviour were reported against him, reminding one of Tyson at the height of his fame.

Ibeabuchi returned to the ring after thirteen months of inactivity and of reportedly exhibiting other weird behaviours to score a first round knockout over journeyman Tim Ray in July 1998. Two months later, he stopped another journeyman Everton Davis in nine rounds. Ike’s next fight would be against Chris Byrd in March 1999. Byrd, a highly elusive southpaw with an awkward style, won the silver medal in the 1992 Barcelona summer Olympics as a middleweight.  At the time of the fight with Ike, Byrd, who would later become both the IBF and WBO champion, was undefeated in 26 fights and was touted as ‘knock-out proof’. But with only 48 seconds left in the fifth round, a left-handed boo punch from Ike followed with a right hook sent Byrd to the canvas, face first. He was knocked down once more before the referee stopped the fight after being severely punished with power punches when he got trapped between the ropes.  With the victory over Byrd, no one in the boxing world could afford to ignore Ike or doubt that he had truly become a top contender for the World heavyweight title. He turned down an offer of $700,000 to fight fringe contender Jeremy Williams and $1m for a showdown with the undefeated Michael Grant.

The fight with Chris Byrd however turned out to be Ike’s last fight.

In July 1999, it was alleged that Ibeabuchi who was staying at The Mirage Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas had called a local escort service for a prostitute. The 21-year old woman claimed the deal was only for her to be there to strip for him and nothing more but that Ike wanted to get physical and attacked her in a walk-in closet after she demanded to be paid up-front. The Police was called in but Ike barricaded himself in the bathroom and the police had to discharge pepper spray under the door to coax his surrender. Following the incident, the police re-opened a similar sexual assault allegation from eight months earlier that took place next door to the Mirage hotel. Ike, who was alleged to exhibit symptoms of a bipolar disorder, was deemed incompetent to stand trial and was sent to a state facility for the mentally ill where a judge granted permission to force-medicate him. Eight months later and some two-and-half years after his arrest, he was ruled cogent enough to plea.

He entered an Alford plea (also known as Kennedy plea in the state of Virginia), where a defendant concedes that the prosecution had enough evidence to convict him while not admitting guilt. Had he gone to trial and been found guilty of rape, he could have received 10 years to life in prison, but instead he got two to 10 years for battery with intent to commit a crime and three to 20 years for attempted sexual assault, to be served concurrently.

Ibeabuchi was paroled on the first charge in 2001 and has been denied parole on the second charge four times. He was denied parole in August 2004, in August 2007, in February 2009 and on May 1, 2012. He is believed to have gone for another parole hearing in May 2013 but the details are not yet made public. At the end of his time in Jail, Ike who has obtained two college degrees while behind bars also faces a likely deportation to Nigeria.

No one can excuse the crimes Ike was accused of committing. But there are also issues of whether his punishment is proportionate to his alleged crimes. He has been behind bars for 14 years for ‘attempted sexual assault’ while Mike Tyson who was actually convicted of rape served only three and half years in jail.

Opinions also differ on whether he was really nuts or just had a hard time adjusting to life in the USA and to instant fame and wealth. For instance Chris Byrd, whom he knocked out in fifth round, believed he was nuts and his evidence was: “Before our fight he spent time just walking around the parking lot of the hotel. Sort of acting like he was in a military march. I thought it was some type of game then I realized, this guy is just nuts.” Ike’s former trainer Curtis Cokes however disagreed: “It wasn’t that he was nuts, he just had a hard time adjusting to life in the US compared to Nigeria. Things he would do there were ok, and here they weren’t. He just didn’t get that.”

I have a strong feeling that both Ike and his mother who resigned from her nursing job to work fulltime with his son, made mistakes in managing their instant fame and affluence, which probably got them on the wrong side of boxing politics. What is important here however is whether  depriving Ike of his freedom and  the opportunity to earn a living from his craft for over ten years is not enough punishment for his crime of ‘attempted sexual assault’ and other shortcomings?

Sadly missing in the Ike Ibeabuchi saga is the voice and legs of the Nigerian government. Despite his shortcomings, Ike fought as a Nigerian and brought glory to the country with his victories in the ring. But where is the Nigerian government in Ike’s greatest hour of need? What would fire the Nigerian patriotism in him if he is eventually released? 

In a country that truly value its citizens, the government  would have been  very  actively involved in the diplomacy of ensuring that while Ike paid for his alleged crimes, it would be in such a manner that would correct rather than destroy and in such a way that his punishment would not be disproportionate to his alleged crimes.

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The author can be reached at: pcjadibe@yahoo.com

 

Oyerinde’s Murder: Time to Start Appreciating the Police? – By Dr. Jideofor Adibe

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By Dr. Jideofor Adibe | London, UK | March 09, 2014 - One of news that dominated the media early last year was the alleged shoddy investigation by the police of the murder of Comrade Olaitan Oyerinde, who was until his cruel assassination on May 4 2012 the Principal Private Secretary to the Edo State Governor, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole.  The highly vocal governor, who believed that Oyerinde’s murder was politically motivated, swore that he would see to it that his murderers were fished out.  So much was the bad blood generated by Oyerinde’s murder that Oshiomhole and the Minister of Justice Muhammad Bello Adoke reportedly nearly got into a physical fight on March 12 2013 – just before the National Executive Council meeting that day – over the alleged procedural flaws in police investigations of the murder.

One of the contentious issues in the investigation was that both the police and the Department of State Security (DSS) had different suspects who allegedly confessed to the crime. And since it is almost impossible for two sets of suspects to have killed the deceased same day, there was justified cynicism that the public was not being told the whole truth. And given the police’s poor rating in the public perception index, accusing fingers were widely pointed in their direction for a possible cover up.

In November 2012, the Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in Edo State, possibly miffed by the arrest and detention of one of their own as a suspect, Reverend David Ugolor, a bosom friend of the deceased and also the Executive Director of African Network for Environment and Economic Justice (ANEEJ), petitioned the House of Representatives’ Public Petitions Committee. They queried why the Police kept Rev Ugolor in detention despite the fact that, in their opinion, there was no credible evidence implicating him in the murder of Olaitan. They also wondered why the Police was reluctant to accept the investigations carried out by the Department of State Service. They further claimed that   while the DSS were able to find the items stolen in the robbery and the guns used by the killer of Oyerinde, the police presented a gun which the DPP (Edo State) had identified as the one used by one Garba Usman Maisanari and his gang on different occasions, which took place in April while Oyerinde was murdered in May.

I followed the controversy in the media on the investigation of the murder of Oyerinde with interest. In an article in my column on 14 March 2013, I argued that given the comparative public perception of the police and the DSS, the Police had almost zero chance of winning the media war between it on the one hand and the Edo State Government, the DSS and civil society organizations on the other hand. I also noted that “given the image of the Police, I was rather surprised at the systematic way in which they structured their written presentation [to the Committee] – with virtually no grammatical error or typos, over several pages, structured almost like a mini dissertation and with some intellectual sophistication to it.”

“They started by defining the allegation, then the highlights of the allegation, mode of presentation, their methodologies of investigations and how they arrived at their conclusions.” I further noted that the Police even had an additional six-page report entitled ‘Additional comments arising from the brief submitted by Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations on 13 February 2013’ in which they did a point-by-point rebuttal of the arguments of both the Civil Society Organization, which was accusing them of shoddy investigation and of the DSS, which believed that its set of suspects represented the true killers of Comrade Oyerinde.  The DSS had structured its written brief differently, with emphasis on the profiling of the suspects rather than on the methods of its investigations.  My suspicion at that time was that the DSS relied on the negative public perception of the police in making a case for its investigation, derisively accusing the police of using analogue methods in its investigations. Despite what I considered to be a very professional presentation by the police to the Committee, few in the media, it appeared, were ready to give them the benefits of the doubt.

It is instructive that Governor Oshiomhole had called for the dismissal of some key officers who carried out the investigation of the murder of Olaitan – allegedly for shoddy investigation.

As it turned out however, the police version of events appears to have been vindicated by the findings of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Public Petitions, which submitted its report to the House in June 2013. The Committee concluded that the investigating agencies – the Police and the DSS were “methodological, painstaking and professional using available investigative techniques within their capacities, including forensic analysis to arrive at their respective positions”. It devoted several pages in praising the professional manner in which the police conducted the investigation.

In one instance the Committee wrote: “There were other findings by the Police, which though not subject of this report, reinforced the uncompromising posture, seriousness, transparency and diligence upon which the police conducted its investigation. Arising from the above findings and observations, it is evidently clear that the alleged complicity and shoddiness of the police report could not be substantiated”.

On the arrest and detention of David Ugolor by the police, the Committee maintained that “there is nothing unprofessional on the police action. The law allows the police to interrogate anybody it suspects in the course of investigation. Thus the police was not just out for an escape goat but did it in the course of its investigation”.

On the issue of DSS and the Police having two sets of suspects who had confessed for the same murder, at the prompting of the Committee, DSS eventually handed its case file to the police which re-investigated the suspects and concluded that they had nothing to do with Olaitain’s murder. The Committee however blamed the officers of Esigie Police Station Benin for “palpable inconsistencies in dates and entry of crimes in the station”. The inconsistency in the recordings by Esigie Police Station helped to undermine the police investigation of the murder in the eyes of the public and consequently served as ammunition to the critics of the police in the controversy that ensued over the investigation of the murder of Comrade Olaitan.

Though the House approved most of the Committee’s findings a few weeks ago, I was rather surprised that this did not receive sufficient media attention, given the furore the investigation had generated and its subsequent politicisation. 

What the Public Petitions Committee’s investigation of the matter seemed to have done however is to remind us that we may be under-appreciating our police.  True, our police is a reflection of our society, with plentiful of bad eggs, the suspicion is that the brickbats we throw at our police, even when they do their best – as appears to be the case in the investigation of the murder of Comrade Oyerinde – will sure be very demoralizing to the officers in the force who are genuinely committed to professionalism in their work and who are putting in their optimum. In essence the sordid image that the police have today is our collective fault, including the police themselves. Until we recognize that talking down our police or not appreciating them when they have done something really remarkable makes it difficult for them to put in their best or even secure the cooperation of the public to do so, our police will remain what they are today – a whipping boy of virtually everyone, including rag tag vigilante groups. 

Some of the findings of the Committee have implications for the current debate on the desirability or otherwise of State Police. In one instance the Committee noted:

 “As a result of this state of belligerence between the Governor and the Police, the natural reaction of other institutions, be they governmental or non-governmental which share common ideology or political leaning with the chief Executive, is to cue (sic) behind. The assumption in a scenario like this is that the police are doing somebody’s bidding instead of working for the interest of the government and people of Edo State. Otherwise the issue of the Police alleged complicity would not have arisen as there is no iota of evidence in that direction”.

Given Oshiomhole’s strongly held belief that the murder of Olaitan was politically motivated (and of course all the agencies of the Edo State government and others who share the same political leaning with him adopting the same stance), it will be tempting to speculate on what would have happened if Edo State Government had its own police and were asked by the Governor to investigate the murder of Olaitain. I have been a long-time supporter of State Police but the Committee’s findings highlight an important danger of state police. For a Governor who had already concluded that the murder of Oyerinde was politically motivated, such State Police will most likely rubber stamp the Governor’s belief.

 

 

Governor Aliyu’s Challenge – By Dr. Jideofor Adibe

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By Dr. Jidoeofor Adibe | London, UK | April 18, 2014 - Politics is in the air and jostling for 2015 has simply begun in earnest. Anyone telling you otherwise is either living in another planet, trying to undercut the competition or simply being dishonest.

We saw another evidence of this when Governor Babangida Aliyu of Niger State, who is also the Chairman of the Northern Governors’ Forum declared recently that President Goodluck Jonathan reached an agreement in 2011 with leaders of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Governors elected on the platform of the party to serve only a single term. He was quoted by several media houses as saying: “I recall that at that discussion, it was agreed that Jonathan would serve only one term of four years and we all signed the agreement. Even when Jonathan went to Kampala, in Uganda, he also said he was going to serve a single term.”  The key word here is ‘signed’. Did President Jonathan actually ‘sign’ any pact with the leadership of the PDP and the Governors elected on the platform of the party? The Presidency, speaking through Alhaji Ahmed Gulak, Special Adviser to the President on Political Matters, denied the existence of any such pact and challenged anyone who thought otherwise to produce evidence.

I believe the ‘salvo’ from the Chief Servant of Niger State is merely adding a moral dimension to the numerous angles through which the key contending forces are fighting over 2015. There is already a legal challenge from sources suspected to be testing the waters on behalf of the presidency on Jonathan’s eligibility to contest in 2015 just as the opposing sides have also sponsored contrary legal opinions on why he is legally barred from running.  There is nothing really wrong in this because the contest for power is usually fought from various dimensions, including psychological mind games.  But the categorical nature of Governor Aliyu’s allegation put’s the credibility of both the Niger State Governor and the President on the line. The onus of proof is however on Governor Aliyu to produce a signed pact between the Governors and PDP leadership and President Jonathan.

If it is proven that President Jonathan indeed ‘signed’ a pact to run for only one term and then is contemplating to jettison it, then the moral burden will be quite heavy. It will be one reneging of an agreement too many. It should be recalled that in 2011 President Jonathan chose to contest the presidency even though he was the 34th signatory to the expanded PDP caucus meeting in December 2002 which allegedly endorsed zoning and power rotation for the party.  Proving the existence of another ‘signed’ deal that is about to be disrespected will be just too damaging – coming on top of whispers of ingratitude in the current face-off between Jonathan and Olusegun Obasanjo who literally made him Governor of Bayelsa State, Vice President and President of the country.

My personal opinion is that given the furore Jonathan’s candidacy generated in the run-up to the 20011 elections, there must have been an  ‘agreement’ of sorts between President Jonathan and the PDP leadership and Governors. In fact the Governors were at that time seen to be exceedingly powerful and were openly playing hide and seek with President Jonathan, who was then seen as weak and diffident. An apparently frustrated Jonathan was once quoted as telling the Governors and the leadership of his party: “Everything I have asked for, you have refused to give me. No President anywhere has been treated by his party the way you are treating me. I am the captain of this boat. I am not going down alone. I am going to sink this (political) boat and go down with all that are in it.” (Weekly Trust, 19 December 2010). Again former President Obasanjo, who was a staunch supporter of Jonathan’s candidacy in 2011 and who was then the Chairman of the Party’s Board of Trustees alluded to the President’s one-term decision at the PDP convention/presidential primary of January 15, 2011 at the Eagle Square, Abuja: ‘’We are impressed with the report that Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan has already taken a unique and unprecedented step of declaring that he would only want to be a one-term President. If so, whether he knows it or not, that is a sacrifice and it is statesmanly [sic]. Rather than vilify him and pull him down, we, as a party, should applaud and commend him and Nigerians should reward and venerate him” (ThisDay Live, 23 February 2013).  In the same vein the Vanguard of 22 February 2013 reported that the PDP’s NEC meeting which held on December 16, 2010 (allegedly after the Governors had tried to frustrate it) reached a number of agreements embodied in a communiqué which was read by Governor Ibrahim Shema of Katsina State. The paper quoted part of the communiqué as reading: “The Governors also recognize the Yar’Adua/Jonathan ticket and therefore hereby support President Goodluck Jonathan (GCFR) to contest the 2011 election as the PDP presidential candidate for a period of four years only.”

Anecdotal evidence therefore suggests the existence of an ‘agreement’. What is not clear is the nature of the agreement, what it was supposed to achieve and whether Jonathan signed or not. Nigerian politicians often say things they don’t mean. Virtually all the major presidential candidates in 2011 – Buhari, Babangida and Atiku – promised to do only one term even though most people took such with a pinch of salt.  Buhari, regarded by many as the most ‘straight forward’ politician in the country, even reversed himself on his public pledge not to seek the presidency again.  Similarly Governor Peter Obi of Anambra State, who has a public persona of a ‘saint’ among some Nigerians, also promised to do one term in office but ended up going for a second term. Being double-faced is therefore in the gene of Nigerian politicians, not just in that of one politician.

Nigerian politicians simply cannot be trusted and the government cannot be trusted. The pervading distrust percolates into inter-ethnic and inter-religious relations. Did Nigerians not rally behind then Vice President Jonathan when a cabal tried to prevent him from becoming Acting President by lying about the true health conditions of Yaradua? And did the presidency under Jonathan not do exactly the same when Dame Patience Jonathan became ill and recently revealed she had nine surgeries? From Taraba State to Enugu state, sick Governors lie on their conditions in order to cling onto power – the same thing we all found reprehensible about the cabal around the late Yaradua who held the nation hostage.

It is possible that the concession ‘extracted’ from President Jonathan to run for only one term in 2011 was part of political double-talk,  only meant to pacify the public anger in some parts of the North. Despite the apparent street opposition to Jonathan’s candidacy in the North, I believe that many of the Governors would still have been inclined to support him – purely from a perspective of self-preservation. At that time most of the Governors were to run for a second term and would not want an angry President who had threatened to do a Samson (pull down the structures so everyone goes down) setting the EFCC after them. There was also an apparent dread of a Buhari presidency that could amend the constitution to remove the Governors’ immunity and herd as many of them as possible into long jail terms on corruption charges. Atiku, some Governors might have calculated, would have been too ‘politically smart’ for the sort of games they were playing with the then malleable Jonathan.

If I were Jonathan I would try not to run in 2015 – not just because of the general perception that he has  underperformed –  but even more importantly to make a bold statement about sacrifice and  integrity and that there should be life after power. Handled properly such a bold step could help in healing a highly divided nation and rebuild trust. My fear however is that even if  Jonathan  does not want to run and assuming he has the will to resist pressures from those benefitting from his presidency, the politics of the opposition, with its embedded intimidation, can actually force him to run and ‘let the heavens break loose’. There is also the often overlooked vendetta by power incumbents, especially against their predecessors in office. Just look at some of the States where the Governors lost in the last elections.

Nigerians rightly condemned Obasanjo for seeking tenure elongation. Given the nature of our politicians, I am not sure any future President of the country would not contrive ways to elongate his tenure.  Obasanjo accepted defeat when his pet project of tenure elongation was defeated. We never really know how others will handle challenge to their attempts to elongate themselves in office.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jonathan and Buhari: Mismanaging the Fragile Peace – By Dr. Jideofor Adibe

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By Jideofor Adibe | London, UK | May 10, 2015 – I have been dismayed by three recent developments, which I believe pose very serious threat to the prevailing ‘fragile’ peace in the country. I use the word ‘fragile peace’ deliberately because even though the Armageddon predicted to follow the presidential elections of March 28 failed to happen and everyone is relieved, the prevailing peace is still only skin deep. Beneath the peace façade are bottled up frustrations, garrulous triumphalism and a certain longing for revenge.

The three developments are reports that Jonathan questioned APC’s victory, the banning and unbanning of AIT from covering the president elect General Buhari’s events and reports that Buhari would probe the alleged missing $20 billion oil money. Let me elaborate.

Jonathan questioning APC’s victory

Several media outlets reported that Jonathan picked holes in the results of the March 28 presidential election, which Buhari won. The president was said to have made the remarks after receiving the report of the Senator Ahmadu Ali-led PDP Presidential Campaign Organisation at the Presidential Villa, Abuja on Thursday, April 30. The Punch of May 1 2015 quoted the President as saying that “the People’s Democratic Party couldn’t have got those kinds of scores” the INEC announced for it.

I have consistently maintained that the last elections were marred by widespread irregularities and that the President’s concession of defeat was what legitimated them. Having said this, there is a world of difference between the opinion of an ordinary columnist like me and the opinion of the President uttered in public. One, is that by that statement the President could embolden the hardliners in his party who blame the President for the PDP’s loss of power because he failed to do the ‘needful’ (read: use state machinery more forcefully to obtain the desired result) and by ‘hastily’ conceding defeat. Two, once the PDP’s hardliners are emboldened, it could concomitantly equally awake in APC’s hardliners a certain raw triumphalism that was only restrained by the President elect’s restraints in victory. Here Ekiti state under Fayose is a good template. When Dr Kayode Fayemi, one of the true gentlemen politicians of our time, conceded defeat in the last Ekiti state gubernatorial elections, the normally ebullient Fayose was restrained for a while. However when certain elements in APC began questioning his victory, he took his gloves off and subsequently mismanaged the whole concession. One of the consequences is that the peace dividend that should have arisen from that concession in Ekiti was lost. Three, by publicly questioning the outcome of the presidential elections, the President unwittingly set in motion processes that could dilute the huge goodwill and political mileage he gained by his decision to concede defeat. Every political leader usually gets a defining moment. That concession speech was Jonathan’s defining moment in public life and he has to ensure that he manages it well – in and out of office. Four, though I strongly believe that the elections were seriously marred by irregularities and that both the APC and the PDP rigged the elections in their strongholds while playing the ostrich by accusing the other of rigging, I do not believe the outcome of the presidential elections would have been different even without those irregularities. In several articles and broadcast interviews in the run up to the election (including interviews with such international media as Reuters, Bloomberg, CNBCA Africa), I hypothesized that Buhari would do better in the north and south than he had ever done since 2003 while Jonathan would do worse in both north and south than he did in 2011. The imponderables, I speculated, was the role the incumbency factor, money and the ability to play up the fear factor – areas the PDP clearly enjoyed advantage – would play in the elections. In this sense, Buhari’s emergence as the APC presidential candidate, (which offered him a much broader platform than he had ever had and more money to fund his campaign), Jonathan’s extreme unpopularity in the highly populated Northwest and Northeast and feelings of alienation in the equally populous southwest coupled with Buhari’s highly successful re-branding (which in my opinion was probably the most important reason for his victory) meant the odds were already stacked against the PDP.

The banning and unbanning of AIT

Several media outlets reported that the Buhari Campaign Organisation on April 27 barred the AIT from covering his activities “until certain issues on ethics and standards were sorted out.” It should be recalled that in the run-up to the March 28 presidential election, the AIT had aired a series of sponsored documentaries, considered to be anti-Buhari and the national leader of the APC, Bola Tinubu. Though the AIT ban was later ‘unbanned’ by the APC, that the ban happened at all was a serious error of judgment that stokes the apprehensions of those concerned about the President elect’s authoritarian past, including the muzzling of the press via Decree number 4 during his First Coming. Buhari’s handlers had assured Nigerians that he was a born again democrat and his successful rebranding helped to allay those fears. Now the blunder with the banning and unbanning of AIT from the president elect’s events means his subsequent actions, no matter how well intentioned, could be viewed through the mirror of his military past.

Related to the error of judgment in the banning and unbanning of AIT, is also the manner of the damage control. The President elect said he read about the purported ban on AIT in the newspapers like others and warned his aides to confine themselves to their designated areas of responsibility. While the President elect should be congratulated for the humility that informed that public renunciation of that ill-advised ban (or ‘stepping aside’), however telling us he read about it in the newspapers – like the rest of us – gave the wrong impression that he was not in full control of his aides. One of the criticisms of President Jonathan was that he was not fully in charge of his government or that he outsourced its running to others. I also believe the President-elect should have sent a stronger signal to his aides by at least re-assigning the aides responsible for the AIT ban – rather than telling them that going forward everyone should operate in their defined areas of responsibility. There is a big lesson to learn from those who overzealously tried to appropriate President Jonathan or appointed themselves his guardian angels or attack dogs but unwittingly contributed in making several groups feel alienated from his government.

Probing the NNPC

I was disappointed when I read the following in the Vanguard of April 27 2015: “Investigations into the circumstances of an alleged $20 billion missing from the coffers of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, will be a priority for the incoming administration, the President-elect, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (retd), said yesterday”.

I am by no means against probing any government agency or even the entire administration of Goodluck Jonathan or any other administration. But I am not sure it is a wise move to announce such a measure before the new government is inaugurated on May 29. I am also not sure it is a wise move to announce that probing just one parastatal will be a priority of the government – even though the NNPC has long been suspected of being a cesspool of corruption. My fear is that announcing beforehand plans for such a probe could open the President elect up to charges of selectivity and perhaps awake the ethnic entrepreneurs who would begin competitive calls for other government bodies or even previous regimes to be probed. In the end managing the politics of the probe could be so time-consuming that it could derail the regime from achieving its set objectives in the crucial first 100 days in office. No one needs to remind the President elect that though he won the election, more than 40 per cent of those who voted in the presidential election did not vote for him. That is a huge constituency that he needs to cultivate because their alienation from his regime could mean legitimacy crisis. The retired general should know this from his First Coming. His coup was so popular that one columnist said it could have been anyone’s coup. But the goodwill that heralded the regime to office was not well managed and the subsequent legitimacy crisis paved the way for the Babangida coup.

Additionally, in Nigeria, the word ‘probe’ conjures vendetta. I would love to see the President elect prioritize uniting a fractious nation over any other issue. This means being especially mindful of the politics of any action he intends to take in a highly polarized environment like ours. The President elect should also bear in mind that the way the Jonathan regime is treated will not only have implications for the whole effort to prevent the return of militancy in the Niger Delta but also on whether future governments that lose elections will be willing to concede defeat. Research has shown that many African leaders sit tight in office because they fear they will be ‘victimized’ for their actions or inactions out of office.

Rather than indicate that NNPC or any other government agency would be probed, I would have preferred that the President elect should, after settling down in office, find an opportune time to set up technical committees that will review the operations of some government bodies with a view to punishing any offender and repositioning such bodies for better performance.

The author can be reached at: pcjadibe@yahoo.com


South Africa: Beyond Xenophobia and ‘Market Dominant Minorities’ – By Dr. Jideofor Adibe

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By Dr. Jideofor Adibe | London, UK | May 11, 2015 - The wave of attacks against foreigners in South Africa, mostly migrants from other African countries, has attracted justified condemnation from around the world. Seven lives have been lost in the orgy of violence, with soldiers now (rather belatedly) deployed to some of the key flashpoints to help contain the mayhem. In 2008 a similar anti-foreigner violence left 62 people dead with over 100,000 displaced. The Economist of 25 April 2015 quotes one Jean Pierre Misago, a researcher at the African Centre for Migration and Society in Johannesburg as estimating that at least 350 foreigners have been killed in xenophobic violence in South Africa since 2008. But Mr Misago told The Economist he only heard of one conviction for murder.

Xenophobia or Afrophobia?

How can one characterize the episodic anti-foreigner violence in South Africa, which some call Xenophobia and others Afrophobia? A starting point is to understand that in South Africa, the term ‘foreigner’ has a pejorative meaning and usually refers to African and Asian nationals. Other foreigners, especially Whites from America and Europe are usually seen and treated as “tourists” or “expats”.

Some have called the attacks ‘Afrophobia’ (hatred of Africans) because they target essentially enterprising African immigrants from Somalia, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique and Malawi who often own shops and other businesses in the country’s informal economy. But this is not quite the full picture since nationals from Bangladesh and Pakistan are equally profiled and targeted. Certainly hatred of Africans is pervasive as are also hatred of Asians.

To call the violence ‘xenophobia’ in the sense in which the word is usually defined as “the unreasoned fear of that which is perceived to be foreign or strange”, will also not be quite correct since White people from Europe and America are usually exempt from such attacks. Perhaps a more apt term will be ‘Afro-Asiaphobia’.

‘Market Dominant Minority’

In her very important first book, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2003), Amy Chua, Professor of Law at Yale Law School explores the ethnic conflict caused in many societies by disproportionate economic or political influence wielded by “market dominant minorities”. She notes for instance that though the Chinese Filipino community is 1% of the population of the country, it controls 60 percent of the economy, with the result being envy and bitterness on the part of the majority against the minority. Again in Indonesia, while the Chinese Indonesian community makes up only 3% of the population, it controls 70 % of the economy.

Other examples of ‘market-dominant minorities’ given by Chua include overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia; whites in Latin America and South Africa; Israeli Jews in Israel and the Middle East; Croats in the former Yugoslavia; Yoruba, Igbos, Kikuyus, Tutsis, Indians and Lebanese, among others, in Sub-Saharan Africa
For Chua tension and conflicts are often inherent in the relationship between the ‘the economic dominant minority’ and the poor majority in the context of liberal democracy. For her, when “free market democracy is pursued in the presence of a market-dominant minority, the almost invariable result is backlash” because “overnight democracy will empower the poor, indigenous majority. What happens is that under those circumstances, democracy doesn’t do what we expect it to do – that is, reinforce markets.

“Instead,] democracy leads to the emergence of manipulative politicians and demagogues who find that the best way to get votes is by scapegoating the minorities.” She further notes: “As markets enrich the market-dominant minority, democratization increases the political voice and power of the frustrated majority.” (p 124).

In essence what we call xenophobia or Afrophobia in South Africa, as condemnable as it may be is actually part of the problems of globalizing the markets in an era in which liberal democracy has become triumphant. South may be different only for not having done enough, early enough, to prevent the deep-seated anti-foreigner sentiments from flaring into uncontrolled violence.

In South Africa, the latest violence flared up in the Durban area earlier this month after King Goodwill Zwelithini, the traditional leader of the Zulus, reportedly compared foreigners to lice and said that they should pack up and leave. And the environment for the majority poor is very fertile for such messages. According to The Economist of 25 April 2015, unemployment in South Africa runs at 24%, though the real figure could be much higher, with more than half of under-25-year-olds out of work. South Africa’s last census, in 2011, found that 2.3 million foreign-born people were living in the country, with some estimating the figure to be as high as between 5 million and 6 million in a country which has a population of only 54 million people.

While we strongly condemn the anti-foreign violence in South Africa, we should also bear in mind that xenophobia exists in virtually all parts of the world in different degrees and that this has only been accentuated under the twin conditions of the globalization of markets and the triumphalism of liberal democracy.

In 1969 for instance Ghana’s Aliens Compliance Order, led to hundreds and thousands of Nigerian immigrants being forced to leave the country. Nigeria ‘retaliated’ on a much bigger scale with the Expulsion Order of 1983 (reordered in 1985) which resulted in more than 700,000 Ghanaian immigrants being expelled from Nigeria in a very short space of time, with some of their businesses inhumanely confiscated.

We certainly live in a world of contradictions: while globalization is making the world a global village, countries are resisting the ‘impurification’ of their environments by foreigners and the fear and envy of the ‘market dominant minorities’. While countries spend huge sums of money on globetrotting and PR to attract foreign direct investment, they end up resisting foreigners who jump to seize the economic opportunities in their countries.

In Nigeria the indigene-settler issue – not too different from the problem of xenophobia elsewhere – remains unsatisfactorily resolved, both for the ‘host communities’ and the ‘immigrants’, including the ‘market dominant minorities’ segment of it. Indigenes resent the foreigners not just because they could be ‘market dominant minorities’ but also because the ‘immigrants’ citizenship and residence rights confer on them almost equal rights as the host majorities. The fears of both the ‘host communities’ and the ‘immigrants’ should be acknowledged and properly addressed and not be masked by political correctness – as has been the practice.

What has been lacking in the debate on xenophobia – found in different degrees in all countries across the world – is a realistic strategy of how, in this era of globalization of markets and liberal democracy, we can come with strategies for both the ‘dominant economic minorities’ and the host communities to engage each other.

Nigerian Political scientists mull the future of their discipline
On April 23 2015, 44 political scientists from across the country and generations gathered at the National Defence College (NDC), Abuja, to discuss the future of their discipline. Among those who attended the stakeholders’ meeting were Professors Bola Akinterinwa, Director General, Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA); Oshita Oshita, Director General , Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution (IPCR); Tijani Bande, Director General, National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS); Nuhu Yakubu, former Vice Chancellor, University of Abuja; Shuaib Ibrahim, former Dean of Social Sciences, Nasarawa State University, Keffi and Hassan Saliu of the University of Ilorin who convened the meeting.
Participants also reviewed the state of their umbrella association, the Nigerian Political Science Association and bemoaned the body’s long period of inactivity. They pledged to re-activate and reinvigorate NPSA to enable it engage actively in critical issues of our time.

It should be borne in mind that the idea of disciplines doing soul-searching is not uncommon and certainly not peculiar to NPSA. For instance political scientists in the USA found themselves in a similar situation in October 2009 when Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, proposed prohibiting the National Science Foundation from “wasting any federal research funding on political science projects”. One of the projects financed by the National Science Foundation that Senator Coburn attacked was the American National Election Studies. Senator Coburn maintained that commentators on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and other news media outlets “provide a myriad of viewpoints to answer the same questions.” He argued that the $91.3 million that the foundation spent on social science projects over the last 10 years should have gone to biology, chemistry or pharmaceutical science.

Though political scientists rallied in opposition to the Coburn proposal, even some of the most vehement defenders of the discipline acknowledged that they themselves vigorously debated the field’s direction, what sort of questions it should pursue and even how to increase the policy relevance of their research. In fact as a mark of the intense debate among American political scientists themselves on the direction of the discipline, a movement, known as the Perestroika Movement, had arisen in 2000 criticizing what it called the ‘mathematicization’ of the discipline in political science’s first academic journal, the American Political Science Review.

Seen in the above light, the idea of political scientists questioning the future of their discipline should be welcome It is hoped, that in conjunction with the National Universities Commission they will constantly review the discipline’s curriculum at the universities to ensure it remains relevant to the needs of the society and employers of labour. Above all, we look forward to the NPSA helping to shape political discourses – pretty much as the Nigerian Bar Association- does in matters of the law.

The author can be reached at: pcjadibe@yahoo.com

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Issues in Nigeria’s Foreign Policy – By Dr. Jideofor Adibe

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By Dr. Jideofor Adibe | London, UK | June 7, 2015 - In my column last week on corruption, I mentioned that I was a discussant on the foreign policy segment of the recent 2-day Policy Dialogue – ‘Implementing Change – from Vision to Reality’ organised by the Directorate of Policy, Research and Strategy of APC’s Presidential Campaign Organisation. My interventions borrowed heavily from my published criticisms of aspects of Nigeria’s foreign policy under the Jonathan administration, viz: ‘NEC Was Wrong on New Foreign Policy Proposal’ (published November 3, 2010) and ‘How Not to Formulate Foreign Policy’ (published on August 20, 2011). It equally borrowed from my article on ‘Debating Diaspora Voting’, (published 28 August 2014).

In late 2010 the National Executive Council (NEC) took a decision that Nigeria would no longer play ‘big brother’ to countries in trouble “without getting anything in return”, and that going forward the nation’s foreign interventions and assistance would be guided by the ‘national interest’. Briefing journalists after the Council’s meeting at Abuja, Babangida Aliyu, who was at that time the Governor of Niger State was quoted as saying: “…we are going to shed that belief that we are big brother where we go to help other people and we never get something in return…So, wherever we go or whoever we relate with, must be because it will help us develop, rather than, as we normally say, that we have gone to help these or that people without getting anything in return.” At a seminar to ‘review Nigeria’s foreign policy’ organised by the Presidential Advisory Council on International Relations (PAC-IR) in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Abuja from August 1- 4 2011, this point was re-emphasised.

While it is true that ‘national interest’ is at the heart of foreign policy, (in fact the French word ‘raison d’état’ – meaning ‘reason of the state’ -vividly captures this), rarely is a country so rude as to stick it to the face of other international actors that its primary concern in its relations with them is the advancement of its ‘national interest’. For instance though the colonisation of Africa was in the main undertaken because of the interest of the colonists to find raw materials, it was couched on the morally acceptable ideology of the ‘need to civilise the natives’. In the same vein, former US President George W Bush justified the Iraq war on the moralistic need to find Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. Even the Opium Wars (1839-1842, 1856-1860), one of the most mercantilist projections of ‘national interest’ in history was still given a morally acceptable justification. Though the wars were caused by the smuggling of opium by merchants from British India into China in defiance of Chinese prohibition laws, Britain’s formal justification for the war was a need to stem China’s balance of payment deficits. Those calling for a more explicit embedment of immediate economic gratification in our foreign policy are therefore not only throwing diplomatese to the winds but also advertising the country’s weakness to the world. As Wole Soyinka would tell us, “a tiger does not need to proclaim its tigeritude.”

I was also very uncomfortable with the idea of announcing to the whole world that Nigeria was reviewing its foreign policy. Not only did this re-echo policy reversals and instabilities for which we have become infamous, my personal opinion is that you don’t really need to have a Presidential Committee on Review of Nigeria’s Foreign Policy to do this. How many times have we read about the US, Britain or Germany announcing a panel to review its foreign policy? My personal opinion is that this is the day job of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and think-tanks such as the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs and similar institutions. Given the dynamic nature of international relations, a country through its Ministry of Foreign affairs, independent think-tanks and consultants is constantly reviewing its relations with different countries and institutions depending on changes in power configurations that create new opportunities or threats. I have a feeling that people who grandstand about trade and economic-driven foreign policy or immediate financial gratification from any international engagement, are mixing up the role of the economic/trade missions found in the country’s various embassies with foreign policy.

I also feel that there is a little confusion about the meaning of ‘national interest’ – the totality of a country’s goals and ambitions whether economic, cultural, military or otherwise. Contrary to the impression that ‘national interest’ is projected only when financial gains are expressly and immediately extracted from an interaction with other state and non-state actors, sometimes states invest in enhancing its influence in a country or region because of the leverage such influence could give it in the future (such as being allowed to station a military base in the country/region in the future or to avoid the influx of refugees that could overwhelm its social services). This too is projecting ‘national interest’. I believe that contrary to popular belief, we have actually benefitted from the countries we helped in the past – South Africa, Liberia, Sierra Leone etc. I believe that we derived the intangible benefit of our international prestige rising as we ‘helped’ them. If we were not able to leverage on such intangible assets, it was more because of the failure of leadership or poor economic circumstances at home, not foreign policy. Usually forgotten in the discussion of how ‘ungrateful’ countries we have helped in the past have become is that we often ‘unleash’ our human capital on them after ‘helping’ them. It certainly seems that the population of Nigerians in countries we ‘helped’ increased astronomically after our ‘help’.  It seems that the role of such Nigerians in the remittance economy is overlooked.  It is therefore misleading to assume that playing ‘big brother’ to other African countries means that the country’s ‘national interest’ is not being projected. This is the whole notion of ‘soft power’ – winning over the minds of the people in the countries we play ‘big brother’ to. Converting this soft power to economic benefits will depend on the character of the country’s political leadership, the cohesiveness of its elite and the level of development of its productive forces.

Related to this is that a nation’s respectability in international relations is not wholly contingent upon its past benevolence but often more on the current leverages it can bring to the table. Even in domestic politics, past benevolence seems to count for little as we have seen in the face-offs between political god-fathers and almost all the Governors that they installed in office. The bottom line therefore is that if Nigeria wants to command influence and respect, it must improve and sustain its ability to bring leverages to the table. This is obviously where the interplay between domestic politics and foreign policy comes into play. As the street urchins would say in Pidgin English, “I get am before no be property”.

I was miffed at suggestions in 2010 that Africa would no longer be the centre-piece of our foreign policy.  Part of my critique of that proposal was that Africa being the centre piece of our foreign policy does not mean that we would always take Afrocentric position on issues – but that we should strive to be a leader in the continent.  It is not unusual for a country to once in a while have a more compelling national interest which would require taking positions that is contrary to the position of most of its immediate allies. For instance during the Thirty Years’ War in Europe (1618-1648) – a largely religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics – France chose to intervene on the side of the Protestants despite its overwhelming Catholicism because the regime was apparently more interested at that time in blocking the growing power of the Holy Roman Emperor than in protecting its religious faith. Similarly though Europe could be called the centre-piece of British foreign policy, Britain sometimes disagrees with other European countries (such as during the Iraq War) but would often return to rebuild burnt bridges after such disagreements in other not to undermine its leadership role in the continent.

I am not suggesting that all is well with our foreign policies. But the problem, as I see it, is not in trying to find one sexy phrase to encapsulate our foreign policies – Africa as the centrepiece of our foreign policy, the notion of concentric circle, citizen diplomacy etc. The problems in our foreign policy are largely symptomatic of the crisis of underdevelopment weighing down the country and which in turn feeds on our stalled nation-building project.

A key solution is re-starting the stalled nation building process (given the interplay between domestic circumstances and the vibrancy of a country’s foreign policy), pursuing policies of inclusion, (including voting rights for our Diaspora, that in 2013 alone, according to the World Bank, brought into the country a whopping $21bn through remittances) and continuing and improving upon those economic policies that led to the country being included in the Next 11 emergent economies in 2005 and in MINT countries (Mexico, India, Nigeria and Turkey) that were predicted to become break-out economies. The global interest in Nigeria in the last five years has been unprecedented, leading to a huge inflow of foreign direct investments. We must sustain and improve on policies that helped to power such optimisms in the country – before the collapse of oil prices. The bottom line here is that we must not, for political expediency, throw away the good in Goodluck Jonathan.

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The author can be reached at: pcjadibe@yahoo.com

Twitter: @JideoforAdibe

The Role of Nigerian Media in Nation-Building (I) – By Dr. Jideofor Adibe

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By Dr. Jideofor Adibe | London, UK | June 19, 2015 - It is fairly axiomatic that in any democracy, the media plays an indispensable role in creating, moulding and reflecting public opinion. Edmund Burke, the Irish-born philosopher and politician was said to have referred to the media as the Fourth Estate of the Realm in a parliamentary debate in 1787 on the opening up of press reporting of the British House of Commons. Over time the media, in particular, the print media, has come to be regarded as one of the foundational structures of democracy, leading Thomas Jefferson, the Third US President (1801-1809) to declare: “…were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.” India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru also reportedly said: “I would rather have a completely free press with all the danger involved in the wrong use of that freedom, than a suppressed or regulated press.”

From the above, the role of the media in a democracy seems fairly self- evident. But what about its role in nation-building, especially in those states variously referred to as ‘fragile’, ‘weak’, ‘emergent’ or ‘new nations’?

It may be germane to start by clarifying our concepts.

Media or Mass Media can be loosely defined as a collective means of communication by which the general public or populace is kept informed about the day to day happenings in the society. It is essentially an aggregation of all communication channels that use techniques that aim at reaching a mass audience.

Nation-building is a process of constructing or structuring a national identity using the power of the state to create what the Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson (1983) called ‘imagined communities.’ It is, so to say, a deliberate process, through which citizens and even inhabitants of a given territory, regardless of their primordial identities and affiliations are made to identify with the symbols and institutions of the state and share a common sense of destiny with others.

How the media negatively impacts on the nation-building process

The media, in going about their duties, sometimes intentionally or unintentionally impact negatively on the nation-building process in Nigeria.

Cultivation Theory and Social Distance

Cultivation theory was propounded by the Hungarian-American professor of Communication George Gerbner (1919-2005). Gerbner tells us that media exposure, especially to television, shapes our social reality. Drawing on cultivation as it is practised in farming, Gerbner explained that just as a farmer plants seeds that he or she cultivates over time to produce a crop, the media plants seeds in our minds and then cultivates them until they grow into our shared social reality. This is another way of saying that what we see on TV or hear on radio or read in newspapers could shape our social reality.

We can extrapolate from this to argue that media reports are slanted or tailored to reflect local realities in order to appeal to a target audience, meaning that the media play roles to reinforce or protect people’s uniqueness. If our extrapolation from the cultivation theory is correct, then we can argue that by tailoring their programmes and reports to appeal to local audience, the media also contribute in widening the social distance among members of the Nigerian federation. For instance although the media in the First Republic espoused national goals in their operational statements, in reality the dominant tone was very much sectional and partisan. This trend has continued to this day, with several media, both print and broadcast – having parts of the country as their ‘catchment areas’.

Ownership structure of the media

One of the key determinants of the way the media report events is their ownership structure because as the saying goes, “he who pays the piper dictates the tunes”. In fact a study of media ownership and its impact on elections in Nigeria by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in 2012 found that most of the broadcast media in Nigeria were owned by the federal and state governments and that for the most part the owners determined the contents. The Commonwealth Observer Group said in its report on the 2007 elections that ‘significant state ownership of the broadcast media negatively impacted on and influenced the coverage in favour of incumbents’ parties.”

Poor and Delayed Remuneration

It was found that poor remuneration of journalists, even by the few private owners, leads to self-censorship since the ‘thank you’ they get from politicians and people they write about is often a major source of making ends meet. Quite often, even the meagre salaries they are paid are not paid on time and there are instances where journalists are owed upwards of one year’s salary in arrears. Extrapolating from these, it could be inferred that because of survival imperatives, most of the media are the megaphones of their respective state governments and individual owners.

The nature of the media – bad news is good news

The nature of the media is such that bad news sells. If a dog bites a man, well it is not really news unless a special slant could be found to it. However, if a man bites a dog, the story is a candidate for the headlines. Following from this, the media’s focus on the negativities in the country – corruption, nepotism, and ethnicity – feeds into a certain pessimism out there making people feel the country is no good. This could be one of the explanations for the current wave of ‘de-Nigerianization’, as a feeling of alienation from the Nigerian state forces people to delink from the state into primordial identities where they seek meaning for their lives.

Poor Training

Nigerian journalism is increasingly becoming all-comers’ affairs, with anyone who can string words together – verbally or in writing – feeling he or she can become a journalist. Nigerian journalism is consequently not very professionalized. In addition to poor training, many work with primitive implements in an era of sophisticated gadgetry. One of the consequences is the inability of the media practitioner to discern the national interest or even to know how to report or write with sensitivity to such interests. For instance it has been alleged that during Nigeria’s case with Cameroun over Bakassi at ICJ, classified documents that were to be used for the defence of the country’s claims were published with reckless abandonment by some Nigerian media. Also in times of ethno-religious conflicts, sections of the media cast their headlines in ways that suggest incitement.

Appropriating the role of the judiciary through media trial

Some media practitioners erroneously interpret their watchdog role as including appropriating the role of the courts. In several societies, even if you are caught with your fingers in the cookie jar, you remain a suspect until convicted by a court of law. Not in Nigeria. Nothing fires the public fury and sells newspapers more than sensational reports, especially reports of politicians or public officials embezzling huge sums of money. Quite often, the media, rather than report such as allegations, in media trial and conviction of the suspect even before enough evidence has been gathered against the suspect. This often has the unintended consequence of undermining confidence in the judiciary and by extension the state – especially if the suspect is eventually charged to court and acquitted.

Hate Speech in the Media

One of the key concerns about the role of the media in nation-building is in the area of hate speech. Hate-filled profiling seems to have reached a new high in the current democratic dispensation with Nigerians apparently revelling in pouring invectives on one another whenever they discuss the Nigerian condition. The triggers for such warring with words are often predictable: if it has to do with the Civil War, Igbo nationalists will square with the rest of the country; if it is about Boko Haram and its alleged sponsors, self-appointed defenders of the North will be up in arms with equally self-appointed defenders of the South; if it has to do with resource control and oil politics, the North squares it with the South-south. The Igbos and the Yorubas frequently pick on each other as we saw recently with the alleged deportation of Igbo destitute from Lagos. In these exchanges, religion, region and even town union politics are all sucked into them.

Hate speech employs discriminatory epithets to insult and stigmatize others on the basis of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or other forms of group membership. It is any speech, gesture, conduct, writing or display which could incite people to violence or prejudicial action. The problem is that hate speech is often the gateway to discrimination, harassment and violence as well as a precursor to serious harmful criminal acts. It is doubtful if there will be hate-motivated violent attacks on any group without hate speech and the hatred it purveys.

Though hate speech is often condemned – and rightly so- there is an inherent problem in trying to contain hate speech in an environment in which the protection, defence and sustenance of the country’s democracy rests mainly on free speech – including speeches that offend, shock and awe – being protected.

Do the above mean that the Nigerian media, in the performance of their roles are fated to undermine the country’s nation-building processes? No at all. (To be continued)

 

Adapted from a paper presented at a training workshop on ‘Objective and Sensitive Reportage of Conflicts’ held at the Institute of Governance and Social Research, Jos, June 8-10, 2015.

The author can be reached on: pcjadibe@yahoo.com

Follow me on Twitter @JideoforAdibe

Emerging Perspectives on Buhari – By Dr. Jideofor Adibe

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Buhari

By Dr. Jideofor Adibe | London, UK | June 27, 2015 - It is now over three weeks since Buhari was sworn in as President. Given the euphoria that trailed his election, what are the general impressions of him and his regime so far?

Slow take-off of the government

Buhari is the first President of the country to have really hungered for the job. Alhaji Shehu Shagari, Nigeria’s President in the Second Republic, said he only wanted to be a Senator. Similarly, Obasanjo was in prison in apparently contrived charges that he co-plotted to overthrow the regime of General Abacha when he was brought out from the gulag and made the President of the country at the beginning of this democratic dispensation.

In the same vein, Umaru Yaradua who succeeded Obasanjo after the failure of the latter’s tenure elongation project was gravely ill but was selected and foisted on the PDP as its presidential candidate by Obasanjo. He subsequently became the President via a massively rigged election, with Goodluck Jonathan, who was also equally handpicked by Obasanjo as the Vice President. Yaradua’s death in 2010 led to the emergence of Goodluck Jonathan as the President.

In essence we can argue that all our previous presidents had been unprepared for the job. Buhari is the exception – to the extent that he has been a perennial presidential candidate since 2003. He became lucky on his fourth attempt and was sworn in on May 29 as the President and Commander in chief of the Armed Forces. Given this situation, many expected that he would come to office with a template to hit the ground running. In fact, the high expectations of the citizens were captured in what could well be sarcasm by a blogger: “It is now 30 minutes since Buhari was sworn in as President and yet nothing has changed”.

The online medium Sahara Reporters, which leaned heavily towards the Buhari candidacy during the election, recently had the cartoon of a snail with Buhari’s head – to indicate how slowly it felt the regime was moving. More than three weeks after being sworn in, the President has only three key functionaries – two media aides and the Accountant-General of the Federation. It still has no Secretary to the Federal Government, no Ministers and the names of the 15 advisers approved for him by the Senate remain wrapped in secrecy.

How has the pace at which the regime has been moving been interpreted?

There are four perspectives on this:

One perspective is that he is being excessively cautious, partly because this often comes with age and partly because he is conscious of his dictatorial military antecedents. According to this view, because of the lingering suspicion on whether Buhari has truly cultivated a democratic temperament and has learnt to be a team player, he needed to take his time to prove his critics wrong.

Another perspective being promoted by PDP apparatchiks is that his sluggish pace conclusively proves that he, rather than Jonathan, is really the clueless one. According to this view, Buhari has no clue what to do with the power he now has and has apparently been running for the office for its sake – with only vague promises to fight corruption.

Another view on this is that President Buhari is deliberately slow in order to enable the key gladiators in his party to fight and weaken one another and themselves. This tactic, it is argued, will strengthen his hands when dealing with the various power groups in the party.

A fourth perspective is that the President is deliberately slow as a way of reducing the high expectations of his regime. According to this view, given that many believe he would fix all the ills of the country over night or jail all corrupt people in the country once he came to power, Buhari is tactically trying to lower public expectations to enable him govern on his own terms.

Emergence of Saraki and Dogara as Senate President and Speaker of HOR respectively

There are also various perspectives on whether Buhari played any role in the emergence of Bukoloa Saraki as Senate President and Yakubu Dogara as Speaker of the House of Representatives on June 9 – against the directives of their party, the APC, and when most of the elected members were reportedly waiting at the International Conference Centre Abuja, to be addressed by the President.

One viewpoint is that Buhari really did not want to get involved in the election of officers of the National Assembly as a way of burnishing his credentials as a new born democrat.

Another perspective believes that Buhari was actually involved or on the know about the plot and that the agenda was not just to whittle Tinubu’s alleged overbearing influence but also to ensure that the North controls both the executive and the National Assembly. In a widely circulated article on Opinion.com entitled ‘Fulani Solidarity And The Betrayal Of Bola Tinubu’, Remi Oyeyemi strongly canvassed this view. Segun Senbanjo in an article ‘Three Peas in a Pod” (ThisDay, June 21), supported this view and asked rhetorically: “Is it a mere coincidence that President Muhammadu Buhari is from the North-West Geo-Political Zone, Senate President Abubakar Bukola Saraki from the North-Central Geo-Political Zone and the Speaker of the House of Representatives Honourable Yakubu Dogara from the North-East Geo-Political Zone? I have my doubts.”

A third major viewpoint on this holds that even though the President had publicly said he would work together with the new leadership of the National Assembly that emerged through a ‘coup’, behind the public glare, he is actually livid that they disrespected the party and the office he occupies. Those who argue from this viewpoint note that Buhari’s refusal to meet the new leadership of the National Assembly is the first time since the advent of the Fourth Republic that the president of the country has not met physically with the leaders of the National Assembly at the commencement of a presidential cycle

A fourth major view here is that Saraki emerged the Senate President because he is more sagacious and understands the political terrain more than his party and his rivals. This view, advanced strongly by Senator Ben Obi in an interview with the Vanguard (June 21, 2015), more or less exonerates the President from any complicity in the plot that led to the emergence of Bukola Saraki as Senate President and Yakubu Dogara as Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Does the country need ministers anyway?

Given that Buhari has been ruling the country for well over three weeks with three advisers, and within that period, electricity supply is generally believed to have improved (even before he reported formally for work in the Villa), many people are beginning to ask, rather cynically, if we really need ministers?

One perspective on this is that like what happened in Somalia (where the collapse of the Somali state actually led to improved economic performances in some parts of the country), some are arguing that if the country could run successfully on ‘autopilot’ it means we really have no need for Ministers and Advisers.

A contrary viewpoint is that if things (power supply and access to fuel at petrol stations) appear to have improved when the country is more or less on auto-pilot, much more could be accomplished if the President can select competent ministers and advisers to help him translate his visions for the country into reality.

Buhari to Replace Dame Patience Jonathan?

President Buhari is increasingly becoming the butt of jokes in the social and mainstream media for a number of his recent gaffes – the way Dame Patience Jonathan was.

In a very hilarious piece in the Leadership newspaper of June 16, 2015 entitled ‘Conversations with Baba’, Jaafar Jaafar articulated these gaffes – calling Vice President Osinbajo ‘Osubande’, ‘Germany’ ‘West Germany’ and ‘German Chancellor Angela Merkel’, ‘German President Angella Michelle’. Jaafar contrived other ‘Buhari-speaks’ that would certainly enrage Buhari’s cultic supporters but provide political entertainment as parodies are meant to do.

Several of Buhari’s cultic supporters see any attempt to make jokes out of Buhari’s gaffes as an insult to Buhari – or even a manifestation of ethnic prejudice if the person dishing out the joke is not from the North.

Another view on this – very popular with PDP sympathizers – is that it is a clear evidence that Buhari is too old to govern.

A third perspective argues that as we age, we become prone to temporary loss of memory – or what Americans would call a ‘senior moment’ – and that no one should be ashamed of it. In a very important contribution on the topic entitled ‘Criticising Buhari over “President Michelle of West Germany” gaffe is ignorant’ (Weekly Trust, June 20 2015), Farooq Kperogi argued that even though President Reagan, who became president of the US at 69, had record breaking ‘senior moments’, it did not prevent him from being regarded as one of the greatest American Presidents of all times. He noted that Reagan often joked about his ‘senior moments’ and called on Buhari’s ardent supporters to learn to laugh off such.

Nigerian political scientists converge at Keffi

Nigerian political scientists under the auspices of the Nigerian Political Science Association are holding their 20th Annual Conference on the timely theme of ‘Governance, Economy and National Security in Nigeria’. The conference, which holds from June 29 to July 2, 2015, is hosted by the Department of Political Science, Nasarawa State University, Keffi.

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Email: pcjadibe@yahoo.com

Twitter: @JideoforAdibe

APC Crisis and the Myth of Party Supremacy – By Dr. Jideofor Adibe

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By Dr. Jideofor Adibe | London, UK |July 20, 2015 – Much has been written about the current crisis rocking the All Progressives Congress (APC), with some people expressing concerns about a possible disintegration of the party. The crisis, as serious as it may appear, is normal and expected – even if the party had lost the presidential election.

The truth is that the APC was never a political party in a classical sense of the word. It was and remains a fragile coalition of disparate groups and groupings united by a common ambition to defeat President Jonathan and the former ruling party, the PDP. It was to that extent merely a multipurpose vehicle for capturing power. With that objective achieved, it is normal that the secondary contradictions that were papered over during the ‘struggle’ would come to the fore.

As the APC re-engineers to become a true political party rather than a coalition of disparate interests, it will not be abnormal for many of the founders to leave the party or be pushed out. This is what is meant by the dictum that every revolution, like Saturn, devours its children. History bears this out: the Cultural Revolution in China, the Night of Long Knives in Nazi Germany, Stalin’s purge in Russia or the case of Imre Nagy, the highly respected former Hungarian head of state, who was the symbol of the country’s uprising against Soviet rule in 1956 but who ended up being hanged for treachery by his country’s communist leaders. Though the APC was more of a mass movement, parallels can be drawn between it and revolutionary movements that often aggregate different tendencies to win power first before dealing with the contradictions within the movement. The PDP itself is unlikely to remain the same. I expect the party to be captured by new forces who will re-engineer it according to their image.

Amid its crisis, I was surprised that the APC failed to realize that the 2015 presidential election was fought on the shadows of the PDP’s zoning controversy of 2010/2011 which it benefitted immensely from. Consequently one had expected the party to take the issue of zoning very seriously by, for instance, zoning its offices shortly after the election rather than dithering on the issue and allowing powerful interests to coalesce and go after their own interests. No matter how romantic we want to be, ‘federal character principle’, ‘zoning’ and ‘power rotation’ arrangements have become key organizing principles of our political economy and important periscopes for assessing any regime. Romantics or opponents of these organizing principles often fail to realize that what they call ‘merit’ and ‘competence’, in a polarized society like ours, are socially constructed and do not exist outside the framework of the markers through which people filter realities. This is another way of saying that these are subjectively determined in a polarized society like ours and will always depend on where one stands in the fault lines and the active controversies of the day.

There is a very important lesson to be drawn from the APC’s electoral victory at the national level and the crisis that followed the party’s victory:

Largely because the party was the first opposition political party in the country to defeat a ruling party at the national level, its template for that success will for sometime be a reference manual. The general perception is that APC was an alliance between the dominant elites in the South West and a charismatic leader capable of galvanizing huge support in the North West and North East (what some people call the ‘core north’). It is expected therefore that in future, parties aiming for electoral success at the national level will now have to look for broad alliances among other geopolitical zones. This may seriously dilute the notion of any region having a permanent ally and even the tyranny of the majority ethnic groups such as through a successful coalition of different ethnic minority groups. If the APC’s victory leads to the pattern of inter-ethnic and inter-regional alliances among the elites becoming more dynamic than hitherto, it will not only advance the cause of nation-building but will also infuse integrity into the political process because groups without history of treachery will be highly courted.

But how does the APC resolve its festering crisis?

The President reportedly called on the feuding politicians to “sheath their ambitions.” With all due respect, I am not sure this will be an effective way of resolving the dispute because it assumes, not correctly in my opinion, that politicians are primarily driven by a sense of altruism and patriotism. In my opinion, any serious analysis of the political behaviour of Nigerian politicians must start from their enlightened self interest. Politicians do not “sheath their ambitions”. They retreat if the structural constraints do not permit the realization of such ambitions or the cost of pursuing that ambition has become unbearable. This is what the 19th century Prussian General Von Clausewitz would call the ‘rational calculus of war’ (matching the means against the objectives of war). For politicians, politics, just like war, is an instrument for achieving an objective. Since politicians are not in politics for the heck of it, you cannot sermonize to them to forget their ambitions (especially when you have achieved yours and you are not offering any compensation to those who “sheath” their own ambitions) and expect them to obey you.

It is true that Buhari’s charisma among the northern voters drove the process of the APC becoming a mass movement (despite making more money available to candidate Buhari and providing a more national platform, the new party added a mere three million votes to what Buhari had consistently achieved on his own since 2003). Despite this, other groupings and tendencies in the party – the Tinubu group, the ‘New PDP’ Governors that defected to the party and energized its base etc- could also claim that without their contributions, the party would perhaps not have succeeded and are therefore entitled to the ‘sinecures of war’.

 

Party supremacy

A battle cry in the current crisis in the APC is the doctrine of ‘party supremacy’. But what does this really mean? Does party supremacy for instance mean that the APC should select ministers and advisers and foist them on President Buhari?

There are two main perspectives when Nigerians brandish the phrase ‘party supremacy’: There are those who believe that before an election, the supremacy of the party over its candidates for offices should be unquestionable but that once the candidates win elections, they should be allowed to be guided by the national interest – meaning that such people should be allowed to follow their conscience. There are however others who believe that the decision of a political party must be abided by its members before and after elections because the party provided the platform on which its elected members ascended to power.

Both perspectives represent only partial views of reality. For instance, in parliamentary system where the notion of the supremacy of the party is strongest, there is what is called ‘conscience’ or ‘free’ vote where parliamentarians are allowed to follow their conscience in voting. In the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003 for instance, several Tory and Labour MPs in the UK defied their parties and voted against the war.

For those who believe that the party should be supreme at all times, this is often based on an erroneous assumption that in our type of societies parties are structured and institutionalized around core beliefs or that they are neutral arbiters in the intra-elite competitions for power, glory and lucre. Thus while many people know what the Labour and Conservative parties stand for in the UK or what the Republicans and the Democrats stand for in the USA, the same cannot be said of our parties. Like the general society where the absence of strong institutions means that organizations are often controlled by the ‘strong man’ or a cabal, Nigerian parties are also controlled by strong individuals and oligarchs. In essence what people call ‘party supremacy’ is merely the projection of the interests of the ‘Big man’ oligarchic group that controls the party structures at any point in time. Let me give an example:

Shortly after Jonathan became the President following the death of Umaru Yaradua, Vincent Ogbulafor, who was then Chairman of the ruling PDP was shoved aside after declaring that going by the party’s zoning and power rotation arrangements, it would be the turn of the north to produce the president in 2011. Not long after Jonathan entrenched himself in power, the entire leadership of the PDP favoured his running for President in 2011- despite the reported earlier party arrangement which ceded to the north the right to produce the president in 2011. So which of these two contradictory stands of the PDP could be taken as the party’s doctrine on which its supremacy should be enforced?

The point in the above is that it is wrong to have a romantic notion of any Nigerian political party as an impartial arbiter in the intra elite struggles and feuds over power and lucre. The truth is that ‘party supremacy’ is a projection of the wishes of the Big Man or oligarchic group that funds and controls the party. This is largely why powerful individuals and groups who have the confidence and resources often ‘rebel’ against the use of such veneer by their rivals to gain advantage.

 

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Email: pcjadibe@yahoo.com,

Twitter: @JideoforAdibe
 

 

 

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