How Oshiomhole frustrated CPC, ACN at the April presidential poll, by CPC chairman.

Comrade Godwin Erhahon is a veteran journalist, a former chairman of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) Edo State council. He is presently the state chairman of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC). In this interview he speaks on a variety of issues concerning the performance of his party in the recently concluded April 2011 general elections, the administration of Governor Adams Oshiomhole in the state, the Boko Haram onslaught in Nigeria and several other burning issues. CAJETAN MMUTA met with him.

 

 

The opposition parties in Edo State have been very silent since after the April 2011 general elections and there is this belief that their voices have been overwhelmed by the ruling Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) in the state. What actually is the situation?

So far I wouldn’t agree that the opposition has not been speaking. My fear was that most of our correspondents refuse to really carry the news of the opposition because of perhaps their relationship with the governor of the state and I have told them that as far I am concerned

I am their elder. In this state now if you talk about the former NUJ I think I am the eldest that is still living in Benin. I have two or three others who are outside this state and outside this country and they also know that I was the chairman of the Correspondents chapel. And so when you talk about criticism of government and personalities and all of that, nobody would claim to have done it much better than I did in my time and so when I issue statements or grant interviews, people try to water it down because they believe that the ruling Comrade is close to their editors and their publishers.

So they are not serious; the only way to help the Comrade is to tell him the truth and the only way you can market your paper is to be objective. And so I tell you that we have always spoken, the problem has been on the side of the media. We also cannot compete financially with the ruling parties.

Your party the CPC lost dismally during the April general elections in the state. What in your own view are the reasons for that?

Well you call it dismally, you were in the state and you saw what happened. A situation where the ACN conspired with the PDP against us and there was the fact that the governor Comrade Adams Oshiomhole who has been a major beneficiary of the North went to Edo North and assembled all the traditional rulers in the area in his house two days to the presidential elections and told them to vote for Jonathan because Jonathan is our own and that the North should not be allowed to come in and he said a lot of funny things about the North and one of the traditional rulers who was also close to General Buhari was quick to tell him, say look we cannot be part of this.

He said a lot of things about the North and when I heard it I was disappointed, because, first, I know when Oshiomhole arrived Kaduna as a young man who just left secondary school in 1973, he was homeless. He told me when we were very close how he suffered and how he was able to find his feet in Kaduna. If the Northerners were as bad as he portrayed them he wouldn’t have been able to survive and become who he was before he became governor now. And I also know that Nuhu Ribadu who was the presidential candidate of his party, ACN, whom he now betrayed along with Buhari, was very magnanimous to him even as the chairman of EFCC. As we speak all the allegations against him when he was the president of the Nigeria Labour Congress, the petitions against him never saw the light of the day and I was also with him in 2006 when we started this race and we were broke, Ribadu came in and offered financial assistance to him and for such person to have betrayed Ribadu, betrayed Buhari and tried to run down the North it didn’t make sense and so those were some of the reasons that worked against us.

But at the end of the day if you look at the score we came third in the state and our former party, ANPP, from which we moved to CPC, they were far below us and that was the party that had the former governor of this state as the presidential running mate.

So I won’t say we lost abysmally, we did our best, coupled with the fact that the immigration department were also very, very unfair to us. After the elections people tried to pressurise me not to bother, but to forgive them; I had wanted to make a case out of it. A situation where they mounted most of the polling booths in the urban city of Benin driving away Hausa people to say they are not Nigeria, it was too much and we weren’t happy about it. When they did it during the National Assembly election I sent a delegation there, they met them but they said yes; one of them after they had interrogated him he confessed that he was not actually a Nigerian that his grandfather came from Niger and so his father was born in Nigeria in Kebbi State before his father gave birth to him. I said what kind of stupid statement is that? What do you talk about citizenship law and citizenship rights?

How do you define a citizen of a country if somebody whose father was born in this country and then the father also had him here then that one is not a Nigerian, who is a Nigerian? Is there any tribe in this country that originated from Nigeria and they did not come from somewhere? It is not possible. God didn’t come here and create any tribe and said you are Nigeria. One way or the other we migrated from somewhere. And so the citizenship law anywhere in the country affects any child that is born in the country as an indigene first and foremost. And so those were some of the things that worked against us, but at the end of the day I think we are proud. A party that came in, we are here for less than a year and yet we were able to come third, that was good enough.

The year 2012 is another election year, particularly in the state because the governorship election will be coming around and it is expected that the existing registered political parties will participate in that election and Oshiomhole has indicated his interest to go for second term with his posters all over the state. How much rating would you give to his administration within the past two years and eight months?

Well, I will tell you that surely if you want me to score him actually he has done above 40 percent. That’s my rating which is not a failure and is not an excellent pass as people would want to say and all that because if you look at some of the projects he has been handling and he is still handling you get marveled. For example, look at the airport road. As we speak now who knows the contractor, but if I tell you the contractor and you publish it, Benin people will revolt.

They said ooh he is carrying one Captain as a front, but the person who ruined this state for eight years is the actual contractor.

Very soon we will come out with details to really confront him. So you have him two or three times say he was going to revoke the contract. Could he dare it? He couldn’t because his godfather is the one handling the project and as we speak that contract has been reviewed several times. The whole of that road is less than nine kilometers and so if you have spent over eight billion naira on less than nine kilometers that is not a new road; expansion of an existing road you will agree that that road even with two billion a good government ought to have been able to handle it properly and then finish it on time. I can tell you that they have spent more than eight billion on that road.

But the government says it believes in the rule of law and transparency, going by what you have seen so far how much can you rate the state government on that basis?

Where is the rule of law when he unilaterally and arbitrarily and illegally dissolved elected local government councils two or three months to the end of their tenure and then he has continued to replace one caretaker committee with another in local government councils, whereas section 7 of the constitution is very clear, it has a declaration that the system of local government by democratically elected local government councils is under this constitution guaranteed and so he believes in rule of law where did he find his power to begin to establish caretaker committees and then all the contracts that have been awarded how many of them have you seen published as advert for bidding.

How many of these projects can Edo people say they know the contractors? So to say that the government is shrouded in secrecy is to be polite. It is not only shrouded in secrecy it is also bedeviled with fraud and intrigues. And then the level of hypocrisy in the system is very, very painful. You have been here and you should be able to assess some of these things.

Look at what the governor said last year and what he is saying now on so many issues and then you look at last year when doctors have to go on strike agitating for their right. He tried to show power with them, you know he is so egoistic even when you knew they were right. That one cost the lives of hundreds if not thousands of patients which caused commotion in the state before he finally bowed to their demands. If he knew that their demand was right, why were you being egoistic, why were you struggling with them? Some of these things are terrible and I just wish that our people are not too carried away with rhetoric and so on, because if you were in this state for the one and half years Professor Osunbor ruled this state; you look at the achievements of Osunbor compared to what is happening now, it is enough to say the regime was illegal and all of that. Yes I agree that that regime was faulted, it has been rubbished by the tribunal, but that does not in any way remove from the achievements that were made.

Go to Akpakpava Road and see all the adjoining streets to Akpakpava, they were tarred by Osunbor, go to Igun, Saint Saviour in Upper Sakponba it was deserted by people, but Osunbor opened up the whole of the areas and several other places without making too much noise about it. And like Akpakpava it took him less than six months to do it, why is it that airport road is taking over two years and is going to the third year even. As far as I am concerned he is making too much talk and raking, not just raking, but ranting.

Politics is about the rules of the game but you portrayed the state governor as having appropriated the state to himself in your recent advertorial. What actually is the matter you have against the government?

That was our second advertorial on the government. At least even without legal education it should be clear to anybody that the government or a governor ought not to inscribe the campaign slogan of his own party “vote ACN” on the bus that is purchased with public fund, that is unfair and then behind the bus you now put the picture of himself, the Comrade Governor over the whole comrade bus. It is not personal. Governor Oyegun in his time in 1992 bought several buses, I think he released over 30 at the first instance and those buses were inter and intra city buses, but people were calling it Oyegun buses because Oyegun brought them but it was not that Oyegun wrote his name there. Oyegun was not that egoistic as to be writing his name, putting his photograph and writing his party, it is unfair. And so he is taking other parties for a ride and he is also taking the tax payers of this state for granted.

The post election violence and emergence of a sect called the Boko Haram has been a source of concern to many, what is your position on the issue with respect to the level of lives and properties that have been lost since the onslaught?

No sane human being will support bloodletting, the kind of reckless killings the Boko Haram is carrying out in the North, but you see Nigerians are not able to stem all these wave of violence because of funny emotions and misdirection of self. I said this because in some areas they said CPC was responsible, they are killing people, and it is Buhari and all of that which is unfair. Book Haram crisis started during Yar’Adua’s regime in 2009. They are trying policemen who killed their leaders. When did policemen kill their leaders, was it not in 2009. That is a long time ago and how many of them were arrested before those leaders were killed. They were many I have some of the pictures in the newspapers. They were very many. They have not rested.

Nigerian judges are not ghosts: They live among us On August 28, 2011

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.

Now that we have ‘moved forward’ (i)

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…?

Folly as a criterion of leadership: Nigeria as an exemplar (1)

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 Mogadishu By Tatalo Alamu  •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 Tatalo Alamu  •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.