| By Tonnie Iredia The appointment of Joshua- my childhood friend and classmate-to the position of high court judge several years ago presented an interesting experience that has refused to elude me. On the day the appointment was made, we — all his friends— trooped to his residence in celebration to congratulate him. He was, in fact, the first to be so honoured among us. But, then, although everyone of us looked happy over the development, the environment was rather too serene for a supposedly joyous occasion. As we took turns to shake hands with the man of the moment, his demeanour and the disposition of his immediate family portrayed an uneasy calm. At the end of the visit, we were able to gather that because of his new appointment, Joshua may no longer find it easy to interact with us. He would no longer be part of our ‘Table Tennis Recreation Group’ in the neighbourhood. In fact, he would no longer attend any social function and would indeed, no longer eat, drink or laugh outside the confines of his residence. The only person among us who everyone envisaged might still be able to flow with him in his new position was Felix who had become a Roman Catholic Priest. It was clear to us all that Joshua was into a new but rather strange life. On my part, I inwardly thanked God for not getting into such a job that was capable of translating me into a spirit. Yes, judges in those days were like ghosts; they related with no one, let alone to be quoted as having said anything. But why should that be so? One of us, Ajayi- then a law student in the adult education scheme tried to explain it all. According to him, it is to ensure the neutrality of the judiciary for all times that judges are admonished to avoid local pressures by not interacting with the larger society. They were not to deal with cases involving their families, relations and friends or any matter in which they themselves could have any interest whatsoever. In addition, even if there was no proof that a judge could be influenced in a particular case, parties in the case were not to be allowed to even imagine the likelihood of his being biased. Why would a professional group allow such supernatural traits to be the criteria for assessing its members? For me, I knew it would not last long at least in a country like Nigeria where most people in authority speak from both sides of the mouth. Thanks to Justices Katsina-Alu, Salami and their colleagues in the National Judicial Council,NJC, we now know that Nigerian judges are not ghosts — they live among us; they oppress themselves; they pay lip-service to the rule of law and its due process; they do not abide by the simple principles of natural justice; they do not just tell lies — they do so on oath; they over-interact with the larger society- eating, drinking and laughing at social functions which they often chair and of recent, they are not only seen but loudly heard making it obvious that they are neither better nor worse than the rest of us. For example, if the story that only eight of the 23 members of NJC made the decision on Salami, then there is no difference between them and the touts in our legislatures. It will be recalled that only nine legislators of Ogun State House of Assembly met under the watchful eyes of no less than 10 policemen, to remove their speaker and suspend 15 other members. In Plateau State, only eight of 24 legislators forcibly impeached Governor Joshua Dariye. In Oyo State, only 18 of the 32 legislators impeached Governor Rssheed Ladoja. Comparatively, therefore, Salami was not suspended; he was impeached-quorum or no quorum. If so, what is special about judges- are they above board? This is a question that many people are not likely to answer in the affirmative, especially in election matters. Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Professor Attahiru Jega, is likely to be one such persons going by his reaction to the over 150 pre-election cases filed nationwide by aggrieved politicians just before the last set of elections. Many of the cases were ex-parte orders restraining INEC from accepting and recognising some candidates nominated for elections by their political parties. Jega, at the time, wrote to the Chief Justice to draw attention to what he called an “emerging trend in the political process where ex-parte orders are granted at the top of a hat by judges.” For the Transition Monitoring Group,TMG, “ NJC suspension in the first instance is very ridiculous, a clear coup d’état against the rule of law, coming at a time that the integrity ratings of the judiciary is going below credible level.” Honestly, from the recent activities of NJC, there ought to be a limit to how much we admire judges. To start with, we cannot blame anyone who becomes confused over the term ’judicial precedent’ bearing in mind the inability of NJC to follow the established rule that once a case is before a court, none of the parties involved should take further steps on it. The hierarchy of courts is another area of concern because it was junior judges that were consecutively constituted to review the decisions of their seniors. Can an administrative panel penalise crime? It appears so in view of the conclusion of NJC that Salami committed perjury. As it is now, perjury has a new punishment — apology. Accordingly, any false affidavit expert should not get a greater punishment than that except, of course, he, like Salami refuses to apologise. In that case, he exposes himself to being punished twice as in Salami’s case where the suspended President of the Court of Appeal, was sanctioned twice, first-suspension for refusing to apologise to the Chief Justice and the other- a recommendation for his retirement may be for not apologising to NJC. We also imagine that many people must be skeptical now about their clamour for an independent body to appoint INEC Chairman. From what NJC has just taken the nation through, it is hard to suggest that we can find a Nigerian body that can be independent. As for Justices Katsina- Alu and Salami, we cannot prove that they are card-carrying members of any of the political parties but it is easy to know which political party supports who and why. On the one hand, are those who see nothing wrong with the pace of approval of NJC’s recommendation of Salami’s suspension while on the other hand are those to whom ‘peaceful’ demonstrators are busy handing over their letters of protests for onward delivery to the Federal Government. The pain in all of this is that we, the commoners, can see that we have lost our hitherto acclaimed saviour-the judiciary – a body that is now seen as more partisan than the executive committees of political parties. |
Monday, 5 December 2011
| By Mohammed Adamu It all began with a ‘dutiful’, uncharacteristically impatient Goodluck Ebele Jonathan; then only a harmless Vice-President of necessity; his terminally-ill principal, President Umaru Yar’Adua, bedded in far-away Saudi Arabia, a subject of needless ethno-regional controversy; and himself Ebele ‘luck-dependent’ as ever, and now virtually at the apogee of his most valuable political ‘manna’ yet from heaven, was –quite pardonably you might say- ‘covetously’ beside himself: enthusiasm-filled and waiting to grab the chisel to hew the very hedgy polity that he was, by the way, constitutionally heir to and about which Yar’Adua was raring to depart intestate! And, yes, almost chisel in hand, about to hew Nigeria! And, virtually every pro-Jonathan visionary or every anti-zoning agitant suddenly saw the urgent need to ‘move Nigeria Forward’; presupposing, by the way, that Nigeria was stagnant, or maybe even regressing! And, so even when we knew Jonathan needed no ‘Crown’ at all to play the ‘king, we still insisted that the VP must be coroneted to act the ‘King’; because suddenly it had become necessary to add the lexical adjunct ‘acting’ to a political adjutant before the power of his anointing would be unleashed, to ‘move Nigeria forward’. And even spiritual men of God like Pastor Bakare and many other genuinely apolitical progressives had beaten the streets of Lagos and Abuja to get the temporal ‘crown’ of ‘Acting Vice-President’ added to the spiritual ‘hallow’ of divine anointing that already adorned Jonathan’s un-giddy ‘lucky’ head of providence that many forewarned had received one too many ‘manna’ from heaven but had remained of divine-action weak-willed and of the power of performance lacking in true sprit! But they argued that “God’s Providence” is not only “on the side of clear heads” like Henry Beecher argued! It can also be on the side of ‘cloudy’, ‘lucky’ ones. Like Jonathan’s. Nor would they accept that like Edward Gibbon wrote, that “The winds and the waves are on the side of the ablest navigator”! In Jonathan, many Nigerians were ready to elevate ‘faith’ above ‘knowledge’! The Shagaris and the Gowons were scurried to NASS by a torrent of media-induced public display of hyper-patriotism to beg lawmakers to agree to device any legislative device –even in circumvention of the letter and spirit of an explicit Constitution in order to give a co-pilot full command to rudder the ship in the absence of his chief pilot! Mohammed, what have you got against aeronautical due process? Nothing! Nor do I have anything even against administrative ‘divine due diligence’. We had said it before and we had said it even after the Civil War, that ‘to move Nigeria forward is a task that must be done!’ And now even in less rambunctious –although ethno-regionally frostier- political war of the familiar ethnic belligerents of North and South, we are no less apt in repeating the lie of old, namely: ‘moving Nigeria forward’! And which has always provided us good reasons to persist in our wrong ways! And so like I wrote in a previous piece predating the fragile convalescence of Yar’Adua and his controversial return from Saudi Arabia, we had made the case for Jonathan’s ‘acting capacity’ ‘as though that was the long-awaited socio-economic and political elixir for the many sickness of our nation. And to make matters worse, ‘Jonathan himself was heralded (by us the media) in the fable of a Daniel coming to judgment. He was cast so much in the glowing epic of an avenging angel cruising on a chariot of fire, brandishing the proverbial Sword of Damocles and poised to right the many wrongs of Nigeria.’ In fact, many of us moved by motives of different kinds, naively pontificated about Nigeria’s rare, divine good luck in having for the first time, a rustic and innocent Ebele Jonathan, who seemed alone of all those whoever made it this far politically, not only to know the drudgery of a shoeless childhood and the insipid taste of kindergarten poverty, but to now have the enviable fortune to ‘move this great country forward’ -or at least beyond its present ‘shoeless existence’! Many of my colleagues threw caution to the wind and without blush celebrated the advent of what I once lightly cockatoo-ed as the ‘the renaissance of Jonathan ideas’, or the sudden apparition unto the Nigeria’s barren fields, of a stallion-Jonathan filled with the regenerative oomph of life and more than ready to fecundate the land, to make it grow forth, and bear fruit once again!. Nor was anyone listening when some of us noted what I once described as ‘the apparent off-key-note in the personality of Jonathan that seemed to naturally jar the hymn of all vaunted praise..! that Jonathan was nothing more than a political somnambulist that appeared to remain trapped in the amazement and amusement of the chain of political ‘good lucks’ his rustic legs-of-destiny have been fated to stumble upon and that… he did not appear to the rational eye to be capable of playing ‘the avenging angel, or like the biblical Moses, to re-enact the parting of the Red Sea! None-the-less, now that we have ‘moved forward’, Or have we…? |
| By Douglas Anele If there is still any lingering unbelief that Nigeria has been very unlucky to be saddled with third-rate minds as leaders, the verbal scud missiles (some call it mutual pinging) which former military dictator, Ibrahim Babangida, and military dictator-turned civilian President, Olusegun Obasanjo, launched at each other must dispel such doubt. The brickbat between the two “eminent” Nigerians offers us another opportunity to bemoan persistent degeneration in the quality of political leadership. On that basis, one can understand why Nigeria is steadily manifesting unmistakable symptoms of a failing state, especially since 1985. Obasanjo ruled Nigeria for 11 and half years whereas Babangida was at the helm for eight years. Therefore, cumulatively both men presided over the affairs of our country for almost 20 years. With the arguable exception of avaricious parasites that benefited immensely (and are still benefiting) from the two former heads of state, Nigerians unanimously agree that on the whole both men performed below average while in power, although opinion is sharply divided on whose administration was worse than the other. Before we present our stand on the issue because in such matters one must be forthright, it is pertinent to observe that Babangida ignited the present quarrel penultimate week on the occasion of his 70th birthday celebration when he scathingly criticised Obasanjo. Obasanjo’s administration, he alleged, lacked foresight and imagination. According to media reports, the former military President lambasted Obasanjo for wasting the impressive oil revenue that accrued to Nigeria from 1999 to 2007. Babangida, as usual, praised himself: “If I had been lucky like those in the recent past, I would have done more than we did. In my eight years in office, I was able to manage poverty and achieve success while somebody for eight years managed affluence and achieved failure.” He added that if he had the $16 billion which Obasanjo squandered on failed power projects he would have provided Nigeria with stable electricity and nuclear plant. Babangida gloated about the calibre of Nigerians that worked in his administration, and declared that he was satisfied to remain an “elder statesman”: “Politics? Forget it. I will sit in Minna here and people will come and seek my advice.” Now, Obasanjo has a reputation of not letting aspersions on himself go unchallenged. Quoting selected verses from the Book of Proverbs in The Holy Bible, he responded by calling Babangida “a fool at 70”. After some negative pithy remarks about Babangida, he enumerated developmental projects completed by his administration. Expectedly, so-called eminent Nigerians, including religious leaders, have “weighed in” on the issue, some expressing hypocritical shock about the quarrel while others have called on both men to sheathe their swords. Babangida’s factotums have joined their benefactor to insult Obasanjo; they say that the Ota farmer is a bigger fool and an ingrate. The illusion of grandeur created by these lackeys around their master is clearly evident in the irritating claim by one Ademola Ayoade, chieftain of the comatose National Democratic Party, that without Babangida Obasanjo would never have emerged as Nigeria’s leader in 1976 and 1999. Top members of the cabals in control of critical sectors of our national life generally behave as if they are tin-gods, as if Nigeria is their personal property. That is why Ayoade and other bootlickers entertain the silly belief that a single individual can singlehandedly determine the political fortune of a fellow citizen in a country of over 150 million people. From our discussion thus far, blame for the dispute must be placed squarely on Babangida’s feet because he deliberately started the verbal war with his former boss. But, why did he start what he cannot finish? Well, it appears Babangida intended to use his birthday celebration to ventilate pent-up anger over Obasanjo’s masterful connivance with chieftains of the Peoples’ Democratic Party to truncate his presidential ambition in 2007 and 2011. As a self-assured chameleon, supported by bands of loyal oti mkpus who have sold their synteresis for 30 pieces of silver, so to speak, Babangida is terribly disappointed that a man he allegedly helped to become President could outwit him twice in the political chess game, thereby demystifying him and denting his image as a Maradona. Hence, instead of using the opportunity of his 70th birthday celebration to reflect on his grievous mistakes as a military president, sincerely apologise to Nigerians, and dedicate himself to selfless service as a form of penance, he decided to sermonise on Obasanjo’s failures. Come to think of it, who benefited from Babangida’s management “of poverty to achieve success”, as he claimed in his polemic against Obasanjo? The answer is – indigenous and multi-national companies that mastered the art of using kickbacks to corner juicy contracts of all kinds, as well as spouses, siblings, friends and cronies of members of dominant military, political and business cabals. Babangida manifested serious ignorance of elementary parameters and technicalities for scientific comparative economic analysis. For instance, he ignored the fact that although more petrodollars flowed in during Obasanjo’s administration, other critical variables such as the status of the world economy (and Nigeria’s economy in particular), exchange rate of the naira vis-à-vis other international currencies, demographic changes and inflation etc. must be taken into account when comparing Obasanjo’s economic scorecard and his own. Moreover, the negative consequences of official corruption between 1985 and 1993, “misapplication” of the $12 million Gulf War oil windfall, costly and ultimately futile shambolic transition to civil rule, failed social programmes, and serious damages caused by annulment of the June 12 presidential election results were detrimental to the economy and constituted part of the problems successive administrations inherited from Babangida’s government after he “stepped aside” in August 1993. Babangida’s lackeys and morally-twisted “experts” who argue that the Structural Adjustment Programme was good for Nigeria’s economy should study Eskor Toyo’s in-depth analysis of the subject in Economics of Structural Adjustment (2002). Toyo’s damning verdict is that “SAP is a set of dogmas that are superficial and blind to many things” (p.522). Of course, the telling negative effects of Babangida’s abortion of the democratisation process in 1993, one of the cruelest injustices meted out by the ruling elite to Nigerians since independence, are still with us today. The visionless and corrupt dictatorships of the late Sani Abacha and Abdulsalami Abubakar were direct offshoots of the annulment. At any rate, Babangida’s criticisms of Obasanjo seem more plausible because of forgetfulness which the passage of time usually imposes on subsequent recollections of human activities. |
A New War Must Start Today Simon Kolawole Live!: Email: simonkolawole@thisdayonline.com In our discussion last week, I proposed that the time has come for us to begin to isolate and treat religious extremists as a different breed of human beings who are a threat to both Christians and Muslims. The war against extremists will be difficult to fight as long as we lump all Muslims together and refuse to acknowledge that many, if not most, of them are genuinely embarrassed by the activities of terrorists who are tarnishing the image of their religion. I argued that every religion has its own “lunatic fringe”—and although Christians are successfully dealing with their own lunatics, making them virtually irrelevant, the words of the Bible are nonetheless subject to manipulation the same way a few Muslims are twisting the Qur’an to justify suicide-bombing and mass murder. Predictably, while many Muslims said they agreed with my analysis and expressed their disgust at the activities of the extremists, some Christians accused me of trying to play a “balancing game” by not “calling a spade a spade”. Someone wrote: “I seriously thought you needed to read some books from Muslim converts, ‘Unveiling Islam’ by Ergun Mchmet Caner and Emir Fethi Caner, ‘The Unseen face of Islam’ by Bill Musk, ‘Islamic Banking System’ by Shomer Ishmol.” He then added a cheeky parting shot: “It is a pity that we so-called Christians lack wisdom. Well, it is written that ‘my people die of lack of knowledge’.” Another accused me of trying to be “a true Nigerian” by “compromising”, adding: “The instances you gave of the different acts carried out by some Christians are acts they submitted themselves to willingly; not by force, but by the choices they made as to what they believe in. But not with any intent to hurt or harm people who do not share their beliefs. The Norwegian who took the lives of about 77 people is sick. I say so because if his grudge is or was against Islam and the Islamisation of Europe as he alleges, he ought to have taken his war to the Arab nations. For Jesu Oyingbo, whatever each member or members passed through at the ‘supposed’ church was definitely what they believed in and did out of their own volition. That brings us to the beauty of Christianity—the fact that Christians are able to take criticisms openly from one another and even from non-Christians without the heavens falling down.” Nevertheless, I was a bit disappointed by some respondents who are unable to rise above certain sentiments. For instance, if anyone argues that followers of Jesu Oyingbo did so voluntarily, are people being forced to join Boko Haram? Of the estimated 60-70 million Muslims in Nigeria, how many are members of Boko Haram or Al Qaeda? On what ground can we conclude that every single Muslim subscribes to the philosophy of terrorism? On what ground can we conclude that because it is very rare to see Christians take to terrorism, then all Christians are “good guys” and do not contribute in any form to fuelling ethno-religious crises in Nigeria? I don’t think name-calling, stereo-typing and blame-trading can ever resolve any conflict. By far the most touching and encouraging response I got to my article last week was from a Muslim journalist, whom I will simply call Jummai, who works with an international radio station. She wrote: “I read your article on ‘We are all victims of terrorism’. I wish everybody, whereever they are, would read this article. Do you know my most trusted friend is a Christian? She has a praying mat for me in her house. If we know that God created all of us, black, white, Christians, Moslems, Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Fulani, Kanuri, Nupe etc etc [then] we can understand our differences and live in harmony with one another.” As we mark the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks today, I want to expand three critical aspects of Jummai’s email, in the interest of love and harmony. The first is the fact that we all believe we were all created by the same God. This is very key. Muslims and Christians have different beliefs that can never align. Christians say Jesus is the only begotten son of God; Muslims say God does not beget and therefore does not have a son. We can never come to an agreement on that. Christians say Jesus is the only way to God; Muslims say Islam is the true way to God. On this, again, we can never agree. However, even the most extremist Christian and the most fanatical Muslim agree that all human beings were created by the same God, no matter your religion or colour or race. That is a very important fact in this discourse. We were all created by the same God. Even extremists cannot deny it. The second message from Jummai’s letter is “accommodation” or “tolerance”. Her most trusted friend is a Christian! Extremists will not like this. A Muslim extremist will even quote the Qur’an: “O you who believe, take not the Jew and Christian as friends” (Surah 5:51). But what of several verses from the Qu’ran where Christians and Jews (“people of the book”) are called believers and Muslims are urged to love them? A Christian fanatic will also open the Bible to 2 Corinthians 6:14: “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers… What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever?” But what of Bible passages that say we should love our neighbours as ourselves and that we should live in peace with all men? That is what I mean when I say you can quote the Bible or the Qur’an to justify anything. All you need to do is quote verses out of context—simply ignore the circumstances, ignore the audience, ignore the intent and ignore the historical background. That is how extremism works. Extremism thrives on proclaiming differences above similarities, hate above love, war above peace and destruction above salvation. Extremists conveniently avoid scriptures that preach that say we were all created by the same God, that we are all brothers and sisters irrespective of our differences. And, sadly, the extremists always have the upper hand. So if 1.2 billion Muslims are ready to live in peace with Christians, it is the one or two million who engage in terrorism that get heard. And it is this tiny minority causing havoc that gets all the publicity. The third message from Jummai’s email, which is the crux of the matter, is: we can understand our differences and live in harmony with one another! That is the philosophy that drives me in life. We cannot all be Christians; we cannot all be Igbo; we cannot all be white; we cannot all be women; we cannot all be PDP. The diversity we have in the world today was created by God himself. So having differences is not the problem. The real question is: how may we live in peace and harmony in spite of our differences? I’m not interested in being a Muslim; you’re not interested in being a Christian. Should that be the end of the world? Why don’t you stick to your Islam and allow me to stick to my Christianity? Why should we be preaching and promoting bigotry and hate in the name of religion and ethnicity? Someone told me recently that Muslims are violent by nature. I replied: “But my Muslim cousins are not violent! My Muslim in-laws are not violent!” He replied in a similar manner, saying his own Muslim cousins are not violent too. So if he knew that, why make such a sweeping statement? I was reflecting on the issue of integration recently and it dawned on me that my inner circle of friends is made up of people from different religions and ethnic groups. There are millions of Nigerians with a similar story. I know Muslims who are married to Christians, Igbos married to Yorubas, and so on. How come then that it is the divisive agents that control the public sphere? Are we not yielding too much space to the bigots and ethic chauvinists such that they now appear to be more in number? We who believe in living peace and harmony must begin to speak out now. We must begin to raise our voices to condemn extremism in any form. We must hijack the airwaves from the bigots. Now is the time for us to start our own war—what I call the “war for peace”—by pushing these lunatic bigots to where they belong: history. And FourOther Things...They Jos Love Bloodshed I always try to refrain from commenting on the Jos crises because I realised long ago that it is an emotional issue we are trying to solve with logic. No matter what you suggest, there are people waiting to tear you apart for “taking sides” or for “playing safe”. It’s a different world out there. The indigene/settler, Berom/Fulani, Christian/Muslim wars will continue until their leaders come to their senses and say enough is enough. The latest round of killings was sparked off by a dispute over whether or not Muslims could say their eid-el-fitri prayers at Rukuba. In a matter of days, over 70 lives had been lost, with two families completely wiped out. As soon as the dispute erupted over the Rukuba praying ground, anyone with half a sense knew that trouble was in the making. Yet nothing was done to prevent it. Nigeria has again let down its defenceless citizens. Jos and Justice There is a lot of buck-passing over the Jos killings. There always is. Plateau State Governor David Jang said he got reports before he went on a medical trip abroad that there was going to be trouble and he alerted the security agencies. He said his warning was ignored. The National Security Adviser, Gen. Owoye Azazi, has hit back, saying it was Jang who ignored security advice. He asked Jang to behave like a leader and take responsibility. Jang too has blamed the Federal Government for the recurring crises because of failure to bring the culprits to book. While the blame game continues, the blood of thousands who have been slain in the last three years continues to cry for justice. When, indeed, will enough be enough? A Lasting Peace Finally on the Jos crises: are we saying there is no solution? The only thing I’ve seen the government do so far is put soldiers on the streets. But for how long? Will the soldiers be there till eternity? I agree that soldiers must be deployed—at least to curtail the blood-letting. In spite of that, however, the blood continues to flow. There is also the cry for justice, since many panels have indicted people in the past. Again, I agree with that. But what about genuine reconciliation? What about getting the traditional, religious and political leaders of the warring communities to sit together and mutually work out the terms for peace? If the communities don’t trust the state or federal government to broker the talks, there is nothing wrong with involving international mediators and conflict managers. Soldiers will only offer temporary relief; only the people can work out a lasting solution by themselves. Wiki-ness People talk about Wikileaks as if it is a form of revelation from God. As a newspaper editor, I’m always in a fix over the cables. Is everything therein true? If the principal characters decide to go to court, can we successfully defend ourselves against libel? Much of the gist is low-level gossip, hearsay and conjectures which should be put in context: what is the motive of saying those things to the American ambassador? If the ambassador asks any member of President Goodluck Jonathan’s government to speak on Gen. Muhammadu Buhari today, you can guess what they would say. Ask any Buhari supporter to talk on Jonathan and hear what he would say. Then the cables would be sent to Washington DC. Does that mean it is the truth and nothing but the truth? The thing I like most about Wikileaks, however, is the way our people are being embarrassed. We talk too much to foreigners. It is because of colonial mentality. |
The road to MogadishuBy  •The wreckage of the UN building after the bomb blast Events unfolding in Nigeria ought to concentrate the mind of the most sanguine patriots. It seems that once again, we have started slouching towards disaster like a disoriented bear. The loss of popular sovereignty and legitimacy may not matter to the anti-democratic political class. But the collapse of statehood it invites ought to. Even political smugglers need safe borders, otherwise there is nothing to smuggle. When a National Security Adviser goes on record to affirm that terrorism will be with us for some time to come, there ought to be an immediate price to pay for such abrasive candour. This column has nothing but guarded affection for General Owoye Azazi who reached the pinnacle of his profession against all human odds. Azazi remains one of the finest products of the Nigeria military within its limits and limitations. In other climes, the General’s tacit admission of helplessness in the face of sophisticated and internationalised terrorism facing the nation ought to have been accompanied by his letter of resignation. It bespeaks a terrorised state ensnared by a terrorist cabal. But that will be the day. The real reason why Azazi is vital and remains crucially in place is to provide a balance of terror in the covert struggle between those who are determined to see off Jonathan as an executive aberration and those who are determined to teach them a lesson, no matter what it takes or costs that Nigeria belongs to all. But let it be noted that the preoccupation with the personal security of state actors against the overarching imperative of national security is a tell-tale sign of looming state failure. Azazi’s appearance on television in an ill-judged interview has done nothing to assuage the fear that Nigeria is gradually turning into another Somalia or Pakistan. In Somalia, there has been no functioning state in the last twenty years since Siad Barre was forced to relocate to Abuja. In Pakistan despite periodic elections, the preferred mode of regime change is assassination and coup d’etat. Before our very eyes, Nigeria is turning into another political jungle, and the first law of the jungle is that there is no law in the jungle. This is because the rule of law is replaced by the law of the ruler. The absolute autocrat, as history has taught us, is invariably a naked emperor among half-naked subjects. Society itself reverts to the Hobbesian state of nature where everything is short, nasty and brutish. If the reports of outlandish cruelties, vicious kidnapping, primitive extortion and savage disregard for human life emanating from contemporary Nigeria are anything to go by, we are already there. For significant sections of the Nigerian political society who have waged an unrelenting and bloody struggle against feudal terror and military absolutism in the past fifty years and who have in the process become socialised and acculturated to certain standards of political civilisation, their efforts are about to become naught in the unremitting rot of modern Nigeria. Paradise cannot be surrounded by hell for a long time. It is either they resume the struggle to renegotiate the basis of contemporary Nigeria or they join other forces to effect a revolutionary reconstruction of the entire political jungle. There is no easy way out of this conundrum, but it hurts so badly. As sovereignty ebbs from the Nigerian post-military state, as a combination of vicious adversities drains it of its legitimacy and authority, we must now begin to think the unthinkable and mention the unmentionable. Is this the end of the state as we know it, or are we at the threshold of something like a non-sovereign state? A non-sovereign state which does not derive its authority or raison d’etre from either man or god is a contradiction in terms, but then something new always comes out of Africa. If the current outlandish revelations of Wikileaks are anything to go by, if the harebrained idiocies of those who purport to rule us are to be believed, then one conclusion is inescapable. Nigeria is not ruled by Nigerians or for Nigerians but by a national cartel fronting for an international commodity board or metropolitan charter, the type that was in place at the onset of colonisation and the slave trade. Never in the history of modern civilisation have rulers shown so much contempt and disregard for people trapped in a territorial space, like captives stranded in an occupied zone. If this international contumely is combined with the internal emergencies facing Nigeria, we have a nation totally at the mercy of inclement forces. From the executive through the legislature to the judiciary and helmsmen of special national agencies, they have headed for the American viceroy singing like drugged canaries. America appears like a big maternal and benign canine sorting out rowdy and delinquent puppies. The puppy state is finally here with us. A non-sovereign state because it does not derive its authority or rationale from either god or man is prone to human and divine adversities. Since it superintends a godless society despite the profusion of religious charlatans of all hues, those who genuinely believe that the state should derive its authority from god are up in arms against it. Meanwhile because it does not protect them or cater for their needs and aspirations even while stealing their resources blind, many of those trapped within its jurisdiction engage in acts of political, economic and cultural hostilities towards it. But since sovereign respect flows from sovereign integrity, a non-sovereign state has nothing to advertise but the thieving incompetence of its medieval barons. Due to its lack of internal sovereignty, it cannot flaunt its external sovereignty in the face of determined onslaught by international powers that make it their duty to protect the global order even where this concern is merely fronting for their national interests. Harsh historical lessons learnt in Indo-China, Afghanistan and Cuba taught France, America and Great Britain not to treat organic nations with levity and frivolity. A non-sovereign state is an unviable national space waiting for euthanasia. A non-sovereign state, then, is a failed state ab initio and in vitrio. But because it has already fallen, it does not collapse. The farce can be kept going for a long time, at great human toll and biblical misery. This is the greatest tragedy of contemporary Nigeria. At least a collapsed building can have the rubble removed, but a building waiting to collapse without the benefit of summary demolition can keep the world guessing for a long time. It remains a source of morbid fascination for those who enjoy watching structures that have become a public hazard. To be sure, Nigeria’s journey to state perdition began long before the advent of Goodluck Jonathan. Unlike his mentor and benefactor, General Obasanjo, a celebrated anti-democratic dinosaur with absolute contempt for popular sovereignty, and quite unlike his predecessor, Umaru Yar’Adua, who was essentially a feudal prince in denial, Jonathan initially came across as an untutored democrat willing to learn the rope despite his unflattering lineage. But Jonathan has since added his own firm imprimatur to the despoliation of state authority and legitimacy. If many people were willing to give him the benefit of doubt despite his covert endorsement of the constitutional gangsterism of the last days of Gbenga Daniel, his barely veiled collusion and complicity in the ouster of Justice Salami seems to have been the last straw. The flippant and frivolous disregard of the rule of law is a milestone in Nigeria’s slide into ungovernability and state infamy. Yet, in an awkward and profoundly ironic sense, Salami is a loyal and dependable ally of the Nigerian state and one of the best poster boys for the electoral integrity on which modern state legitimacy and authority rests. By plumping for justice over technical judgement at a critical moment, it was Salami and his much-maligned colleagues who helped to douse the creeping political anarchy and resort to insurrectionary self-help in a vital and volcanic section of the country. But by endorsing and actively encouraging his professional defenestration, Jonathan has undermined his own electoral victory and the legitimacy of his government. If Uwais’ traumatised revelations are to be believed, the Nigerian executive has done its very best to desecrate the judiciary and reduce it to a level of abject self-abasement hitherto unknown even by the standards of its unflattering history. What Obasanjo began by stark bullying and Yar’Adua cemented by furtive bribery, Jonathan has now capped with frantic intimidation. When the President of an Appellate Court begins his tour of duty by disbanding and dispersing electoral tribunals legally empanelled by his predecessor, he has already wittingly or unwittingly undermined the legitimacy and authority of any verdict emanating from such black market electoral panels. One needs not speculate as to whether the judicial outcome will be acceptable to the sullen and implacable Mohammadu Buhari who is terrifyingly coiled like an affronted cobra. The post-military elite consensus on which Nigeria’s Fourth Republic is founded has all but collapsed. The Boko Haram scourge, the arguments about zoning and rotation of power, the strident demand for fiscal federalism, and the increasing assertion of regional sovereignty by the old West, are all nothing but sub-texts of a more fundamental unease at the state of the union. Whether Goodluck Jonathan recognises the tell-tale signs of the looming collapse of the post-military state is immaterial. The heaven does not fall on a single person. What is important from the point of his own survival is for him to wake up to the reality that he has been handed a poisoned chalice by his benefactors. But he can turn the table against them by thinking out of the box for once. The alternative starring us in the face is the road to Mogadishu. |
Is London burning?By  •Sony warehouse burning during the recent London riot (The Decline of the West) All good parties end in hangover. There is nothing that has a beginning that does not have an ending. In the ebb and flow of history, civilizations and empires rise and fall with unfailing rigour, leaving only their monuments as benchmarks. Could it be that what Noam Chomsky, the MIT maverick, dissident intellectual and linguistic genius, famously dismissed as the “five hundred year empire” has truly reached the end of its tether? Late evening on Monday, the 8th of August, Snooper received three frantic text messages from the Metropolitan war zone of London. “London is burning”, they all announced with apocalyptic deadpan. Snooper ignored the first and the second texts. It was probably the work of an idle prankster with plenty of time and free texts to spare, the columnist hastily concluded. But when the third arrived with the same urgency and frantic panic, there was an unmistakably eerie dimension to its S.O.S. London was truly burning. An irate multi-ethnic underclass had set the great city ablaze. From the television came scenes out of the apocalypse and Dante’s inferno combined. Hordes of rampaging hoodlums were looting and torching everything in sight. The police appeared helpless and overwhelmed. No, this was not downtown Kinshasa with its feral slums and human zoos. It was not the riot-happy equal opportunity mob of inner-city Islamabad. It was not Mogadishu and its aggravated denizens. This was happening right in the heart of the metropolitan imperium, in the very city where modern capitalism first took off. Before you could blink in utter disbelief, the mayhem had spread to other cities in England as if the wretched of Albion were waiting for their historic cue. It was a bleary-eyed and obviously distressed Prime Minister who surveyed the chaotic landscape the following morning. Having been forced by events at home to cancel an overseas engagement, David Cameron was hopping mad and was spewing fire and brimstone, promising the full weight of the law on the offenders. This was the second time in three weeks Mr Cameron has been forced by emergency at home to cut short a trip abroad. It doesn’t get more frustrating than that. How can this be happening in the country of good manners and refined taste where the proverbial gentleman is expected to wear his famous hat and opinion lightly? Now if gold does rust, what happens to baser metals? Three weeks earlier, Norway had its own baptism of fire. The land of enigmatic trolls, with its alluring rolling hills and verdant lush valleys, perhaps the nearest thing to an Eden garden on earth, has had to confront the monster within. A crackpot ideologue from the lunatic Christian fundamentalist fringes of the Norwegian society had shot and bombed his way through Oslo leaving scores of the quick and the dead in his sorry wake. But if you were expecting to find a ragged kat-crazed refugee from Somali behind the carnage, you are profoundly mistaken. Anders Behrin Breivik is every inch a Norwegian original. Handsome and physically prepossessing like an Aryan god and those fabled Norsemen straight out of the Icelandic sagas, he is blond and blue-eyed to boot. Yet if ever there is an enemy of his people, here was one. Henrik Ibsen would be turning in his grave. With their customary icy imperturbability and cultured sangfroid, the good people of Norway have taken it in the chin, hoping that this is just a nasty one-off. It is a remarkable tribute to their stolid commonsense and the level of civilization and refinement of these Nordic islanders that a hate-filled mob has not descended on the streets of Norway braying for the blood of immigrants and minority cultural refuseniks. The strong political cohesion, the deep bonds of humane liberalism and the core national values that have stood this exemplary human community in good stead have held. Once again, the Scandinavian societies have shown by their example what it takes to confront the demon within. Yet by a profound irony, what the Norwegian crackpot thought he was trying to prevent in Norway by his extreme ideology and misanthropic genuflections is precisely what has stolen upon good old England. Railing and raving against immigration and the multicultural society, the madman of Oslo believed that his society has gone to the dogs from sheer permissiveness. But in his lunatic raving, Breivik has mistaken the symptom for the disease. A genuine multicultural society cannot be founded on poverty and unequal opportunity. It is like taking away with the left hand what you have given with the right. For a long time, astute social observers have noted that despite the advances of human freedom and liberal democracy, despite great strides in the provision of basic welfare particularly for the needy, Western countries, particularly England, are still marked by institutionalized racism, entrenched class discrimination and a medieval Caste-like snobbery. There is no point in pretending to welcome immigrants and their children when you have already placed a glass ceiling on how far they could rise. There is no point in proclaiming equal opportunity for all when you mean equalized inopportunity for the radically disempowered. There is no point in trumpeting open access for all when there is a Forbidden City within the forbidding city. If their fathers and forefathers could take it, grateful to be spared the concrete horrors of the post-colonial hell they had left behind in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, if the suborned natives could oblige dazzled by the Macmillan razzmatazz that they had never had it so good, their children are unlikely to so meekly cooperate. One day, the baklava must arrive at the supermarket, and the falcon will no longer hearken to the falconer. But if history is such a nagging neighbour, we need to understand its shrill complaints. We must go back to history in order to understand its ironic poignancy and complexities. Almost four hundred years earlier, Toussaint l’Ouverture, the great Haitian revolutionary of Africa descent, had famously pleaded with his French tormentors not to substitute the aristocracy of class they had just overthrown in France with an aristocracy of race. His plaintive pleas fell on deaf ears. In a fit of colonizing messianism, it was all well and good to try and turn the colonized to Frenchmen. But obstacles and complications abound on the path of the colonizing messiah. As later events were to prove, there are Frenchmen and there are Frenchmen. The aristocracy of race and of class is truly alive and well in Europe despite revolutions and serial regicides. The more things change, the more they remain the same. This year, in a stunning and sorry capitulation to the rampaging forces of uni-culturalism, the French authorities banned the wearing of the female burka in public places. Earlier, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, had also pooh-poohed the very idea of a multi-cultural society, dismissing the whole venture as a dismal failure in Germany. But as we have argued, it is not the multi-cultural society that has failed. It is multi-culturalism founded on poverty and discrimination. To cut through the Orwellian foliage, that is not multiculturalism but mono-culturalism parading as one. Some animals are famously more equal than other animals, or to put it with the African pungency of a Congolese proverb, a tree trunk does not become a crocodile simply because it has spent some time in water. This is where the Norwegian crackpot got his facts and mission so murderously mixed up. He was actually asking his country to renounce its multi-cultural spirit and revert to an overt racism and religious intolerance which is alien to the stellar culture of the Scandinavian society. The Scandinavians are actually historically fortunate. With no history of the colonization of “inferior” people, they have been spared the psychological trauma of the victorious colonizers. Colonization breeds racism and the endemic instability of racist societies. You cannot dehumanize others without dehumanizing yourself in the process. In the event, every Rome has its own barbarians, just as the virus of failure is embedded in the corpus of success. Modern capitalism took off on the cusp of the brutal despoliation of Africa, Latin America and Asia. To be sure, slavery and wholesale enslavement of other people, like poverty and want, have been part of the human condition since the beginning of history. But the globalization and industrialization of slavery led to an ideological need to justify it in an intellectual and systematic manner. Thus was born the spin of the savage other, and thus racialism became internalized and interiorized. Now, half a millennium later, the older empires have struck back. What we are witnessing in the west may well be a process of reverse globalization whereby the road that leads to the conquered world also leads back to the conquering metropole. If the west were to suffer a terminal decline and eventual fall as a result of the final working out of the contradictions unfurled by that historic subjugation, it is a small price to pay for first empire to dominate the entire world. |
The Post-Election Agenda By Ayo Obe By Ayo Obe My original topic for this meeting had as its title "The challenges of democratisation in Nigeria". My thoughts on that subject had begun with the observation that "the trouble with that kind of topic is that one is tempted to dwell only on problems". But having since been advised that I should address "The Post-Election Agenda", I am still - in the actual situation in which Nigeria finds itself - obliged to start by accessing some of the problems that confront the nation. The most urgent of these is the problem of security, or rather, insecurity. You probably all know what this means: terrorism of the kind that kills indiscriminately in pursuit of the goals of Boko Haram following hard on the heels of terrorism that claimed to have been undertaken to protest the injustices suffered by the people of the Niger Delta since ... well, since before Independence. A murderous sectarian war in Plateau State, in and around Jos. Kidnapping on such an industrialised scale that it reduced a major commercial town in the Eastern part of the country to a ghost town. Nigerians have seen the kidnapping phenomenon move from political protest with posturing by kidnappers for CNN and virtual rest cure complete with "man no be wood" provision for the kidnapped and everything eventually resolved from the bottomless pockets of the oil industry, to a vicious business in which the victims, if they emerge alive at all, are subjected to beatings and near starvation in captivity while frantic relatives sell everything, including cars and even houses, to meet the demands of the kidnappers, all the while in fear of the law enforcement agencies to whom they ought to be able to turn for succour. The national conviction - reinforced by the failure of the Christmas Day bomber to detonate his underpants - that "Nigerians can never be stupid enough to engage in suicide bombing" has been rudely shattered by the bombing of Force Headquarters in Abuja, the head office of the Nigeria Police Force, and the bombing of the United Nations building. Although there are still some diehards who are trying to prove that the bombers in both those incidents were not really suicide bombers, but were just delayed ... taken unawares and had probably planned to escape before detonation, the majority of the population considers itself put on notice by the boast of Boko Haram that it has trained 100 suicide bombers who will launch a wave of similar attacks now that Ramadan is over. As terrifying as these new threats to security are for Nigerians who are also no longer confident that they are peculiar to specific areas, be it Maiduguri, Jos or Aba, and of course, Abuja (where the only half unserious complaint is that the wrong people - ordinary Nigerians - are being targeted instead of the looters and freeloaders whose depredations have created the army of jobless young men who make up the cannon fodder for those behind the increased security threats) the country already faced huge challenges which the nation can hardly afford to put on hold while it deals with the security challenges. After all, while the indignation that met the Atlas Cove bombing in Lagos at the hands of Niger Delta militants (again, wrong target!) is now replaced with "they better not try it here" bluster from Lagosians, the fact is that not only must life go on, but that the development agenda must be pursued, and pursued vigorously for that matter in Lagos and the many other parts of the country - the majority - which have not suffered the kind of indiscriminate killing attacks of Boko Haram and indeed, in those parts which have. The issues remain the same: electricity, jobs, agriculture, education, health, roads and the whole transport infrastructure. In the words of one commentator on the occasion of President Jonathan's 100 days in office (it being understood that this refers to the post-inauguration period, not the 500+ days that he has actually been in power as President): "The president is at the head of perhaps the world’s most expensive bureaucracy. Elsewhere, governments are downsizing and pruning down costs; but in this country, the reverse is the case. The President must take a stand on reducing the cost of governance. Unfortunately, perhaps in an attempt to please everyone, he is creating additional structures of government, and he is being imitated by governors in the 36 states. The impression is also rife that the president is not rigorously tackling the key problems of Nigeria. The fire ignited by the introduction of the new minimum wage is still smoldering, with organised labour spoiling for a fight. And now, the judiciary – the last hope of the common man – is in crisis. Agriculture, which should create employment and reduce the cost of living, is not receiving sufficient attention. For an agrarian society, what is our agricultural policy? Almost all federal roads are in bad state, and the prospect of a modern railway system, which would have created employment for thousands of Nigerians, is still a dream. Nigerian education is degrading, with massive failures at public examinations. Health care delivery has not shown much improvement. No one expects quick solutions to these problems, but 100 days is long enough time to signal the direction of connective policies.". (Editorial comment in The Punch, 6th September 2011) Others who commented on the President's 100 days also mentioned the issue of corruption, but here too, Nigerians have become tired of 'fights' against corruption which not only fail to defeat corruption, but also bring every other aspect of the nation's agenda to a stuttering halt. Before I proceed further, I should make it clear that I am not a member of Goodluck Jonathan's inner circle. He marked his 100 post inauguration days in office with a statement which emphasised that he had promised less but, according to his spokesperson, "delivered more". The content of that delivery however, won little applause from the Nigerian people. Yes, it included matters like slight improvements in the public electricity supply, but on the whole, the President has been congratulating himself for matters that cannot, as another commentator* put it, by any stretch of the imagination constitute "achievements". Since Mr. President has hardly set himself any benchmarks, it is difficult to really say what his agenda is. The list of issues referred to above are hardly new in Nigeria, indeed, they crop up with depressing regularity. But what to do about them? Yet such training remains vitally important if the myriad security threats to the country and its citizens are to be contained. It is all very well to invite the FBI to assist in the investigation of the UN bombing, but the FBI is here, in the United States. If the first responders in Nigeria have no knowledge of how to preserve a crime scene because they are not trained to do so, the FBI may be ineffective. Perhaps we can still remember the embarrassment of the NPF in 2006 when Scotland Yard was called in to investigate the assassination of Funso Williams (a contender for the PDP Lagos gubernatorial ticket), and had to wait outside while the family member who had locked up the room was sought. Our own policemen had not even taken control of the crime scene, through which the whole world and his wife had traipsed for a goggle. Naturally, the detectives from London pronounced the eventually opened crime scene "hopelessly compromised". A series of political murders including that of Federal Attorney-General Bola Ige remain unsolved, with barely even the pretence at investigation. But even more than crime detection, the NPF needs urgent training in the prevention of crime, and to find means of doing this that neither breach human rights nor bring normal life to a halt. For example, last Saturday, President Jonathan was in Lagos with his National Security Adviser Patrick Aziza for the wedding of one of the latter's children. Major roads in Lagos were closed down in the name of security, with mini-trucks full of soldiers careering up and down the place. Lagosians should perhaps be grateful that this time, the disruption was on a Saturday; previous presidential trips to the commercial capital have left the whole place grounded with the working population resentful and convinced that to our rulers, only their own safety is important (yes I know that that is probably what they do think, but they should have the decency to pretend otherwise,) On Sunday my daughter and I were stopped in the name of 'stop and search'. Well, it is possible that Boko Haram is using women in trousers and tee shirts to carry out their nefarious activities, but I can't quite shake the feeling that the inspector just wanted to ogle my daughter who is young and beautiful. In short, a much more sophisticated approach is needed, and any post-election agenda must address the gross deficiency of police training. We have only to see the trajectory of how the Boko Haram group was converted into the terrorist outfit that it now presents as by the inability of the NPF to make out a forensic case that will lead to convictions in court, to understand that Nigeria simply can not continue with the half-trained police force that is now possesses. Yes, Nigerian police may win plaudits when sent on overseas missions (at least, that is what they tell us and that is what we hear about them) but on such missions they are possibly less involved with the kind of policing that is required for their home country right now. The post-election agenda cannot be only that of the President and the Federal government. In education it is true that or universities have lost a lot of ground and that the quality of the graduates produced is unreliable without further testing, but the figures for literacy rates across the country showed an alarmingly high proportion of children in the northern states who are unable to read or write in any language. The blame for this must be laid squarely at the feet of the Governors of those states. Which is not to say that at only 60% literacy, the figures for the southern states are anything to write home about, while the federal government also needs to explain its shameful inaction over the wholesale looting of the funds for nomadic education. But even though the army of unemployed graduates presents not only its twin tragedies of wasted lives and possible security challenges, an even bigger army of uneducated children growing up into adulthood only multiplies and projects those tragedies into an already uncertain future, and any Governor with eyes in his head ought to be making it a priority to immediately arrest and reverse that situation. They have more than sufficient means to do so. I will mention agriculture, not because of the obvious issues about fertiliser, but because a government that is alive to the projected population growth for the country cannot afford to play ducks and drakes with its agricultural policy, talking sentimental whatnot about groundnut pyramids and regrets about how Malaysians came to collect palm oil nut seedlings from Nigeria in the 1960s, and instead to start - like yesterday - to create the structures necessary for those who are willing to invest their time and talents in increasing the agricultural yield for the country, from the top and the whole approach to agricultural finance to the bottom and the kind of training that that huge army of unemployed young people, boys and girls but most especially the boys, need to make them employable in a genuinely revamped agricultural sector, not just a pretend agriculture on the top of which a few Zimbabwean farmers are plumped like cherries on a yet-to-be-baked cake. The other item that ought to be on the post-election Agenda is the Constitutional issue. By this, I do not mean the six year term that Jonathan so unwisely introduced into the national discourse at such an inopportune time, but the question of what happens in Nigeria after him. Will he, like those who have ruled Nigeria before him, do so as though there's no tomorrow, in an "après moi le deluge" fashion? Or will his goal be the devising of a formula that will be fair to all when he is gone? It was certainly part of what he wooed ethnic groups such as Afenifere and Ohaneze with before the elections. Because it will involve reducing the power of the presidency, this might require a strength of character that President Jonathan's admirers and supporters, and even the rest of us, his hapless subjects, are only left hoping that he possesses. A brief 100 days has shown us that the few promises that were made during the election season are meaningless to the President. Yet if the issue is not tackled when, as he eventually must, Jonathan leaves power, the condition of the South-South and for that matter, the rest of the ordinary people of Nigeria, will be as bad as it ever was, or worse. Of course, the four areas that I have concentrated on are not the alpha and omega of what needs to be done. The economy and infrastructure are too obviously cases needing attention to require further mention and in any case, I can say little about either save perhaps that the government's ambition of becoming one of the 20 leading economies in the world (which frankly, with our population is really a very modest ambition in any case) is in danger of being meaningless to most of the Nigerian people, and that a more people-oriented government should be thinking more along the lines, as they are in countries like Zambia or Kenya, of joining the ranks of middle-income countries and - admittedly against the grain of trends in most countries - really tackling income disparities. I have said before that our 'big men' have a tendency to measure their height by the distance between themselves and those at the bottom, rather than their closeness to the ceiling. 'Trickle down' economic policies have barely worked in the West. They certainly won't work in a Nigeria where an uneducated majority is in no position to catch the drips which in any case, are not falling on them. Nigeria's growth must be specifically skewed towards boosting the lowest in our society precisely because we have no genuine social security or welfare safety net. Of course, there are other issues that must be tackled. But we have seen multi-point agendas before and we know what happened (or rather, did not happen) to them. This is enough to be going on with, and the right place for me too, to stop talking. Thank you for your attention. |
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